Full Interview: Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf on $1B+ Revenue & Still Doubling

Full Interview: Brian Schimpf, Co-Founder and CEO of Anduril, joins Sourcery to discuss the company’s scale, strategy, and position in the defense market. He outlines Anduril’s growth to roughly 7,000 employees, $1B+ in revenue with continued YoY doubling, and a reported $30.5B valuation (too low?), while addressing IPO speculation & these wild “fake SPVs.” The conversation covers geopolitical instability, production constraints in the U. S. defense industrial base, and how the nearly $1 trillion defense budget is actually allocated to personnel, infrastructure, and sustainment, rather than new procurement. Schimpf draws on leadership lessons from Palantir, highlighting creativity, high agency (“Artisty & Meritocracy’), and long-term alignment with military needs. Schimpf also explains Anduril’s expansion from early autonomous systems into a portfolio spanning autonomous aircraft, cruise missiles, electronic warfare, and networked sensing and command platforms, enabled by a shared software and hardware foundation built around Lattice. Emphasizing the company’s focus on a distributed, autonomous battlefield and the ability to rapidly field new capabilities. FWIW: Spending time on Anduril’s campus ahead of the final interview of the day offered such a strong view into the scale and complexity of the organization Brian is leading. Walking through the facility and meeting with the founding team made the scope of Anduril’s operations very real, but also highlighted just how complementary their skill sets are and how that translates into execution at scale. And with that, I have concluded that given the company’s growth, momentum, & market position.. Anduril may still be undervalued. Brian Schimpf: https://x.com/SchimpfBrian Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠⁠https://x.com/sourceryy⁠ https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 YouTube : https://youtu.be/P5dsb28UVec 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • Carta https://carta.com/sourcery—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by 65,000+ companies in 160+ countries, Carta’s platform of software & services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. https://carta.com/sourcery/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=20250923-amer-carta_sourcery_data_insights https://carta.com/sourcery/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=20250923-amer-carta_sourcery_data_insights • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  What is the growth of Anduril?

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Recent funding valuing the company at more than $30 billion. Anduril is helping to build the military of the future.

• 0:07Speaker 02

  We're eight years-ish in. We're at about 7,000 employees. We have consistently doubled revenue like every year. Over a billion, we're still doubling revenue. Nearly everything we're doing is around this future of a more disconnected, more autonomous battlefield. That's like a core part of the thesis we have. We've been able to build up a software platform, all the components you would need from sensors, from compute, from networking systems, like communications, all this stuff. It enables us to go really fast. Worldwide, we're in a period where things are just geopolitically more unstable. People like to talk about this, that we're in this time of peace, but it doesn't seem all that peaceful to me. We set up this company to have an impact on the world to change deterrence, to change the trajectory of where defense was going.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  It feels like it is really happening now. Like, it feels like we're at the scale and size that this is really moving the needle.

• 0:57Molly O'Shea?

  And you're creating a lot of financial momentum around it, too, with rumors of IPOs and fake SPVs?

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, the fake SPVs are great. Everyone is slinging Anduril stock that they don't have. There are just a handful of these growth-stage companies that are doing very well in an outrageously large market with incredible momentum and track record of success. We are one of those few companies. If the world is going to need more of what we're doing, we are undervalued.

• 1:32Molly O'Shea?

  Ryan, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:34Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks for having me at Anduril.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a pretty cool campus. It's like tons of energy, old LA Times printing press. It's like, it's a very awesome space.

• 1:42Molly O'Shea?

  I've had so much fun interviewing each of the founders today. And I've asked, I think, most of them, if not all of them, what their favorite product is. So let's start with that. What's your favorite product?

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Right now, I am probably most excited about the autonomous fighter jet because it is pretty wild, pretty first-of-its-class. And it's just like a big plane. Like, airplanes are cool. But my opinion will probably change in about like four weeks because we've got a lot of really cool stuff going on.

• 2:10Molly O'Shea?

  And so I want to talk about the current state of Anduril's business. You've scaled a lot, so could we put some numbers behind that? What is, what is the growth of Anduril?

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're eight years-ish in. We're at about 7,000 employees. We have consistently doubled revenue like every year, right? So even like over a billion, we're still doubling revenue. And so we, we have just massively ramped on the top line, number of employees, and then the number of products we've been able to field is just pretty unsurpassed. I mean, I think we're in just dozens of different fielded products, depending on how you count it, configurations, whatever else. But we've just been able to like show the ability to like rapidly get new capability out to the field quickly and that there's demand for it and we can make it go quick. And so it's, it's just really grown a lot faster than I anticipated.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Like I thought we'd be, you know, five, six years from now at this point, but just the pace that the customers have been excited about what we're doing, the uptake, like all of that has gone a lot faster than I would have thought. I think there's like macro reasons for that. There's, you know, execution reasons is a huge part of it. I think we built the right things at the right time. But just that somehow it continues to accelerate even beyond where we're at today.

• 3:30Molly O'Shea?

  How has the product line expanded and how do you? How, how does that get shaped? Like what is the form there? Cause you have land, airspace, arsenal one.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Yep. C, electronic warfare, so all the jamming, all of those pieces. We're thinking about cyber things, like it's all sorts of crazy stuff. The, the way we think about it is a couple of different things. So one, just natural progression of the company. We're going to move up in the complexity and scale of what we can work on. So if early on we were working on smaller drones, made sense for where we're at. You know, the capital to actually get there, the expertise you need to have, it's a solvable problem quite quickly. We've moved up into just much more sophisticated capabilities. We're making low-cost cruise missiles that fly hundreds of miles. We're making autonomous fighter jets. You know, like three years ago, we weren't believable to make autonomous fighter jets. Now we're doing it and we're going to have them be produced in a production facility

• 4:24Speaker 02

  in like months from now. So just the physical scale, the complexity, everything we're doing, we're able to mount harder and harder things. You know, it reminds me of like, you know, the Tesla progression through, you know, like a hand-built Roadster that was limited edition, you know, through to increasing sophistication on production, design, all these pieces. So you kind of have that angle. Then the other piece of this is what is believably going to be a good, big enough business to justify us being into. That bar has raised over time, like the scale of the business we need to go after has gone up. But the parts that have held true are, you know, we've got to be able to see real adoption within like three to five years, right? We're not working on things that are 10 years out.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  It's just not where we're at. We've got to see the ability to get real traction in the next few years. We've got to have like a technical edge of like, why would we be able to do this better? Either on production, on software, on hardware, what is the insight we have? And the government's got to want to buy it, right? At the end of the day, we don't have that many customers and they've got to be at a point in their life cycle where they're investing in this type of capability now. So you could have made small drones 10 years ago and tried to sell them to the government. A lot of people did. Not that many of those businesses are around anymore because the government was not ready to move out at any meaningful scale at that time. And so really getting that market timing right is probably the most important part for us, where we have conviction this can actually go because we've got the business

• 5:53Speaker 02

  intuition, the technology, you know, the customer's ready that this is going to pay out in like next three to five years. So that's kind of how we always assess it. The other through line with this is we're not going to work on stuff that we don't believe is relevant for the future of where the military is going. You can chase kind of nonsensical, you know, products that don't have longevity to it, that aren't actually fit for purpose. Maybe you can make some money off of it for like a few years, but if you're not actually aligned to where the government's going to be, where the military's going to be 10 years from now, it's not going to work out. So everything we're doing, we are constantly validating this is something that would actually be dominant in the long term.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  This actually makes sense to integrate into the military. And if you're right on that, it tends to work out in the long run, right? It may not work out immediately, but over the long run, you will be successful.

• 6:47Molly O'Shea?

  And you're also doing it with very competitive efficiencies against competitors and primes.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean... I often think we're, you know, it's like, are we as good as we would like to be in terms of like beating the best commercial companies and getting things out to market? You know, not always, but you know what? Defense is a very unique world where you're going to build a lot of different products at relatively low volumes. Like, that's actually a very strange world to live in. Compare it with like, you know, a Tesla or an Apple where they're going to build an outrageously high rate of these products and like saving two seconds off your production time can, you know, mean significant amounts of savings or the, you know, you can get out much more of the system. Whereas in a very different world, when we've thought about manufacturing with production, with all these things, this idea of how do we have, you know, the ability to sustain

• 7:38Speaker 02

  very high mix of products, relatively low rate and be extremely flexible, that crosscuts everything we're thinking about. And then the other side of this is we've had this through line of nearly everything we're doing is around this future of a more disconnected, more autonomous battlefield, right? That's like a core part of the thesis we have. So we've been able to build up a software platform, all the components you would need from sensors, from compute, from networking systems, like communications, all this stuff that is, enables us to go really fast when we get on to a new capability. So we're not inventing all the software from scratch, we're not inventing all the hardware from scratch. We've got this toolkit and baseline that we refine and build on over time. So this enables us, again, if you live in this world where you're going to have a lot

• 8:23Speaker 02

  of products and you're going to have to field them fast and you're going to have to mature them fast, it's the only strategy that's going to work. You've got to keep this sort of recipe, this toolkit of components that you can bring to bear very, very fast. And then you need the software to tie them all together. And that's Lattice for us, that core software that makes everything smart and work together. So we've taken a strategy that's quite different than what a lot of the traditional players have done, right? That's expensive, that's hard, it takes a lot of conviction that you're building the right things, you've got to get it right. There's no like short-term feedback on it. You've just got to have a belief of where this is going to go and invest in it.

• 8:55Molly O'Shea?

  How do you price the products?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so highest level, our view should be, these should be cheaper, right? Like, if we're working on something, we should be coming in at a fraction of the cost of the alternative approaches. We can get there through, you know, the fact that we're using commercial off-the-shelf components or things we've invested in, cheaper production processes, and really just design it with cost in mind. Like, so that, that's kind of a baseline we start with. But yeah, pricing with the government is a mess. Like, it's incredibly complicated, there's a huge art to it. Sometimes they want to see your cost and your price reasonable. Sometimes they'll just use other price justification. It really is all over the place how you actually sort of allowed to price these things intelligently.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  But our view of this is it should get to a rational place that every other industry has gotten to, which is we would prefer to work on things where we charge a fixed price. And there's a, you know, kind of a sustaining fee to this, right? Like I'm paying year over year for upgrades and everything else. And that's how the software gets better, is how your systems get better. It's a very rational win-win outcome. And we also like models where if it doesn't work, we don't get paid. It's a controversial position in the government. But we really prefer models that hold us accountable to delivery. It just makes us a better company and the government gets a better outcome. So we always try to find these ways to take more of the risk, to be more accountable. That works really well for us.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  And I think it's a win-win scenario versus the traditional approach where it's like the government took all the risk and you get a fixed profit fee. That's a disaster. Like everything just gets more complex and more expensive. It doesn't work out.

• 10:30Molly O'Shea?

  Secretary Hegseth was just here, had a big visit.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:34Molly O'Shea?

  And he was also just at the Reagan National Defense Forum. I'm curious, from the visit and then also his remarks at the forum, how do you now view this kind of like new world of war? And do you think it's being embraced in a way that it wasn't before?

• 10:50Speaker 02

  The main change he's driving at is when you look at the industrial base, the ability to produce and the ability to get new capabilities out quickly is one of the most determinative aspects you can have as a defense department, right? It's a war department. And that's not where we're at, right? We've had a strategy for generations, which has been The decades-long technological edge is how we win, right? And the US invested more, had better engineers, and capitalized it more efficiently to like get to that massive technological edge. And there is still a dimension of that, for sure.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  But increasingly, the ability to produce at scale in a way you can afford, the ability to innovate fast on the software, to rapidly adapt these capabilities, that's going to be the determinative characteristic, right? We see this in Ukraine, we kind of see this across the board. So everything he's trying to align around is this idea of how do we get capabilities out faster to the force in a way that is affordable and effective, right? And companies that can work in that world, great. Companies that can't, you're going to die. And I think that's a healthy view. What he's not saying, and I think, because the reality is, is there is a mix, is some of this stuff is going to look like autonomous systems, but it's not all going to be, right? There's still going to be a place for, you know, aircraft carriers and all these things,

• 12:19Speaker 02

  but the balance is going to shift. And there's these new class of capabilities that are really relevant, that can be more cost-effective, that you can produce at scale. And that's going to be a key aspect of what we do in the future. And so the focus is really on industry that can perform, setting up incentives for performance, and setting up the whole acquisition system around speed. Where prior, it was entirely set up around we just need the most expensive capabilities at any time at any cost. And that's not the world we're in anymore.

• 12:47Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think the nearly trillion-dollar budget is reasonable or unreasonable given the amount of efficiencies and technological advancements that we have? And maybe for people that don't understand how it's being allocated, could you also share that?

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's borderline trillion-dollar defense budget, and everyone thinks it's like we're buying a billion dollars of kit every year. Well, that's not true, right? I forget the actual percentages, but it's, you know, more than half goes to personnel costs, to facilities, to military construction. So you just have an outrageous percentage going to these, you know, kind of fixed costs that you have that are not next-generation technology. And then... There's an outrageous cost as well then to sustaining the legacy technologies you have bought. So maintaining aircraft, maintaining ships. These are huge bills, right? That is significantly higher than the amount that's spent on procurement.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And when you look at this in terms of historic terms, the procurement budget as a percentage of GDP, for example, is, I think, the lowest it's ever been. And so we're not spending money on the new technology. We're spending money on sustaining the old technology. We're spending money on all the infrastructure that we have to have a global military. And that is very expensive. So now you're really talking about how do I get efficiency out of, you know, call it the 30% of the budget that you're actually maneuvering around. And in that world, you know, there's a good argument which is, we could be spending that money a lot more efficiently. I think that is true. It's hard to argue we couldn't. How much more efficiently? I don't know.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  But, you know, I tend to think we can get a lot more bang for our buck on weapons, on aircraft, you know, probably 2X from where we are. By just looking at a different mix of these things. But the hard part is we've got to transition to that world, right? So we can't just jump to that and say, you know, all of a sudden we're going to abandon all of our, you know, manned surface combatants and move to this autonomous future or something like that. Like, that's just not believable. So we're going to have to go through this transition, which is sort of always true of, how do we responsibly cycle out the old? Think about what's still fit for a purpose or not? And then get the new systems in place. That will cost more for a period of time, right? And that is a hard world to live in.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  And so I don't see a world where like the defense budgets could magically shrink and we still have the military that we need to have. But I do think these things can be done wildly more efficiently than they ever have in the past.

• 15:30Molly O'Shea?

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• 16:59Molly O'Shea?

  To learn more, visit turing.com/sorcery. Spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's turing.com/sorcery. I want to talk about Anduril's expansion. You have a global expansion, whether it's the facility in Australia or the new deal with Edge and the UAE.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:19Molly O'Shea?

  Let's maybe start with Australia and building out Ghost Shark there.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:24Molly O'Shea?

  What was that process like?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Australia's a great example. So set in the context maybe a little broadly. Worldwide, we are in a period where things are just geopolitically more unstable.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  People like to talk about this, that we're in this time of peace, but it doesn't seem all that peaceful to me. We've got a land war in Europe, the Red Sea's still intermittently shut down, Israel and Iran going at it, you've got China doing constant aggression on the Philippines and the South China Sea, Cambodia and Thailand are sparring all the time right now, India, Pakistan doing air wars and doing, you know, air combat. I'm probably forgetting several of these going on right now. And so, we're not in a time of peace, right? Like, this is not a stable time. And so, something has changed, right? Like, there's a sense that a lot of the historic grievances, the political opportunism to use violence to

• 18:17Speaker 02

  get to your ends, that has changed. And every nation's reflecting it, where they're increasing defense spending, they're ramping up their own defense. And I think the view of what the US is going to do or not do on everyone's behalf has shifted. I think the US reasonably is saying, "We're not going to go fight everyone else's wars. We're going to expect every nation to provide for their own defense." But that also does not imply the US is backing away as the sort of security guarantor for the world, right? Like, we still have the only blue water navy in, at scale, that is able to project force anywhere in sort of multiple parts of the globe all the time, can guarantee international shipping and stability of the seas. There's all these things we're still going to do as America that are very aligned

• 19:00Speaker 02

  to our interests and aligned to the system that we have. So, that's the whole backdrop that's going on. There's a whole lot of other pieces to this. Nations are increasing their budgets, the security situation's deteriorating, and, you know, the US's role is shifting in a lot of this. And on top of it, the backlogs on like, you want to order Patriot missiles. I'm hearing right now, the latest number, someone told me over the weekend, was 15 years to get a new Patriot system. Like, what does that even mean? Like, I have no idea what that means, right? But it's like, call it even five to seven for a backlog. You're like, this is crazy. So, the US isn't even a dependable producer anymore. Can't get the weapons in time.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  This has resulted in basically every country looking a little bit differently in how they're going to think about when they are ramping spending, what does that mean and what do they want to be true. They're all going to look at a question of if we're going to spend a lot of money, we should get some economic benefit, but probably more importantly, we need to have assured supply. We need to know that if we order this, this shows up and that we want to shape our military for what we need it to be for our regional challenges. Australia's a great example of this. They shut down their French submarine program. They're going all in on the US nuclear submarine programs. That's not going to show up until 2035.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  So this major gap of about a decade where their old technology was phasing out and they were waiting on this next generation capability to come in. We went and pitched them on this idea of you could build these extra large autonomous underwater vehicles. You can build them fast and we did this model of splitting the development 50/50. They had skin in the game, we did too, and we ended up executing that program incredibly quickly. And to their credit, they saw the opportunity and said yes, basically immediately. They said yes in just a couple of months and we were signed in under contract. And we were able to deliver at pace. We built out an Australian engineering team. We built out an Australian production facility. We have our first production GoShark already came off the production line, then I think 30 days of signing the production contract.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  So just an incredibly fast pace that shows what you can actually do if you just hit go on this. And we want to replicate that model in a number of other countries. It's not going to look all the same, right? There's not that many places that will do fully ground up capabilities, but this idea of integrating into their military, helping them think about ways they can use technology to modernize, do warfare differently. And Understanding a more nuanced approach to how they're going to get local engineering and local production that fits while still being aligned with the US, which is still, again, the backstop of world security. Everyone needs that US alliance.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  And so this is just a very nuanced, complicated thing to actually solve for. But the numbers are pretty clear. Europe is going to spend something like four times the amount of procurement that the US is over the next five years. Like, it's a massive buildup. Japan's going to substantially increase their budget. Taiwan's increasing their budget. Australia. Like, everyone is ramping. So that problem I talked about with the US having so much in sustainment and keeping the legacy going, so the countries won't have that problem as much. They have an opportunity to build new and build efficiently, and something we very much want to help them with.

• 22:30Molly O'Shea?

  How do we increase manufacturing capacity?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Inside the US?

• 22:35Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Manufacturing capacity in the US is, I think, actually quite solvable. So there's things that... We have a lot of capacity, right? Like, there is a lot of automotive production. There is a lot of industrial production. What I think has gone wrong on defense production is we viewed it as this Galapagos Island of industry, where we said, "Cutting you off from everything else, all the learnings in the commercial world, and you're going to evolve on your own." And that was a disaster, right? It was its own requirements, its own industrial base. It's quite separate. But that was... Didn't have to be true, right? In World War II, we didn't design airplanes we wished could be produced. We designed airplanes that could be produced. We designed Jeeps and tanks that could be produced in the processes, in the industrial capacity that we had.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  And designing with that in mind, when you know from the beginning, "You're going to have to design this for rate, you're going to have to design this to scale," well, you start with the question of, "How would I manufacture it?" That is a lens you take. What we asked industry to do for nearly the last 40 years was, "How could you design the most high-end Swiss watch of a weapon or an airplane?" We just had capability at any price. And we're shocked to find out that you can't mass produce Swiss watches. It's like crazy. It's just not how this works, right? Like, you have to tie it to the scaled industrial capacity that exists. It's always going to be defense exotic stuff. Like, there isn't a lot of commercial market for solid rocket motors and explosive warheads. But those are then, now you're down to a solvable set of problems.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  So we've really looked at this question of how do you design this first and foremost to tap into scale? Once you're there, then, okay, is there enough composites capacity or printed circuit board capacity in the US? Or CNC shops? The answer is absolutely yes. There is definitely enough capacity. But then you get to the problems that defense can't solve. And this is the rare earth, the germaniums, the, you know, the high, you know, the magnets. All these different issues. And then you get to semiconductors. These are national policy issues. You have to solve this at a commercially viable level, not at a defense-specific level. It will always then be too expensive and unproducible if you just have a defense exquisite magnet factory. Like, that doesn't work. You need a commercially viable magnet factory that defense uses, that is in US or allied territory that you have faith in.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  And these are industrial policy things that now, for the first time in decades, we've, you know, taken honestly the fact that China wasn't playing the free trade game that we were playing, that they were using their state power to create dependence on their supply chains. And that this is a problem, that we do not have the resilience we actually need for defense, but even just trade negotiations. We saw how it played out. Now, imagine we wanted to put economic sanctions on them if they were doing something nefarious. No one would get iPhones, no one would get cars. Like, it completely hamstrings our ability to act independently as a nation to just basically penalize bad behavior. We just lose all that leverage.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  So this has to be a lens that, as a country, we take. And it's a different world. It will make people uncomfortable, it will take time to figure out how to do it. But that is a critical national policy issue that has to be addressed.

• 25:41Molly O'Shea?

  So you started off as an engineer at Palantir, and now you're the CEO of Anduril. What is the biggest lesson that you learned? And how has that shaped your leadership?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  The biggest lesson from Palantir was really this focus on talent, which often can be, everyone says it, in practice is a lot more annoying than you would think. And because often the talented people are just super opinionated, they're kind of aggressive, they tell you you're dumb. Like, it doesn't always feel good. And it just feels a little chaotic and high entropy. But this was like the beauty that I think Karp really recognized and drove at Palantir, which was this notion of, let's just have really brilliant people that are highly empowered to own problems. Probably the number one lesson in like how we run things here, or, you know, what I've seen really work is,

• 26:38Speaker 02

  often middle management and like these companies that scale, they get so locked into the system and stability that they, they think they're getting talent, but they're not getting creative talent. They're getting talent that is good at optimizing the system as it exists. But the world changes, things get hard, you got to adapt, and you just crush out all of that talent in your organization. With Anduril, we are constantly inventing new products. We're moving into like totally gnarly, hard, political and geopolitical questions. And like, how do we thread these, you know, different strategies? We're working on new forms of warfighting. That just requires constant creativity. If you don't have these just brilliant people and give them space to actually do what they need to do and have the right ideas, it doesn't really work.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  And so that's the number one thing that I think I really learned along the way. That's probably one of the more non-obvious pieces that I think most people get wrong.

• 27:31Molly O'Shea?

  Artistry and meritocracy.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Artistry and meritocracy. There you go.

• 27:35Molly O'Shea?

  So as we wrap up, what are you most looking forward to with Anduril?

• 27:39Speaker 02

  The next few years are gonna see us, somehow it's just gonna continue to accelerate. I didn't think it was possible, but because we've been successful, we're getting pulled into bigger and harder and crazier problems. And so over the next few years, we are going to become...

• 27:58Speaker 02

  So involved in nearly every aspect of US and international defense in a way that I think is going to be very positive for us, very positive for the world. But just your scale and breadth that we will be operating at, that is extremely exciting for me. I just think we set up this company to have an impact on the world, to change deterrence, to change the trajectory of where defense was going. It feels like it is really happening now. Like, it feels like we're at the scale and size that this is really moving the needle. And that is very exciting for me.

• 28:29Speaker 03

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• 30:14Molly O'Shea?

  And you're creating a lot of financial momentum around it, too, with rumors of IPOs and fake SPVs?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, the fake SPVs are great.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Everyone is slinging Andorl stock that they don't have. My take on this is there are just a handful of these growth stage companies that are doing very well in an outrageously large market with incredible momentum and track record of success. We are one of those few companies that are still private, right? And that creates a ton of demand and interest. And it's a good problem. Means we just have unlimited capital to go grow as fast as we need to. It's a great spot to be.

• 30:56Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know if it's the AI hype bubble, but all these massive valuations make me believe that Anduril is incredibly undervalued. What do you think?

• 31:07Speaker 02

  I always think we're undervalued. There's another lesson I learned from Karp, you're always undervalued. But it really just boils down to if you think we're going to continue to grow and the world is going to need more of what we're doing, we are undervalued. If somehow you think the world is going to say, no, we're stopping and we're going back to the old world, then we're probably overvalued. But I'd put my money and most of our investors would put their money on the world needs more Anduril, not less. And that seems very likely to be true.

• 31:36Molly O'Shea?

  Lovely place to end. Thank you so much, Brian.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thank you.

• 31:41Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.