Daniel P. Driscoll

I think for defense companies, again, kind of other than Palantir and Enderol from a while ago, it was really, really hard.

And they had to survive some pretty bad ecosystem environments.

And what I'm hopeful for is that both they will start to pull others up.

The primes will start to look around and say the best way to innovate is to partner.

And then we, with our big purse strings, will say, we're going to bring in experts who can help you grow.

We're going to deploy our dollars.

We're going to monitor you from

formation, through your seed funding through Series A, all the way up through that scaling, because this may seem esoteric, I think, to some listeners, but fundamentally, this is how we will do it, and this is how we will create the pathway to success for the decades to come, because all back to everything we talked about with what future war is going to look like, it is not just going to be big, beefy ranger soldiers kicking down doors.

But it is going to be computer developers who are up all night in their garage innovating on the next thing to give to those soldiers to take out to the fight.

And we as a nation have got to figure out how to do both.

Is that good for us or is that bad for us?

I think what you're referencing is that we might take a stake in some of the primes.

I don't know the particulars of – because I saw the same thing.

I think these are complicated questions and complicated problems, meaning if we took a stake in a prime, as an example, I think we then may be incentivized as a government to reward that prime longer than we otherwise would have.

It would be a stickier relationship with that prime, which could be valuable for that prime and could block out other innovators.

And so you could both convince me that that's a good idea and we should have a 10% stake of all the primes,

Because of the bad acting and the number of dollars we put into their R&D and this idea that the American taxpayer deserves a return on all of those dollars, you could just as equally convince me that once we've done that, we are going to act in ways that continue to perpetuate inefficiencies in the system, block out the small and growing companies, and will lead to worse outcomes for soldiers.

And so I don't know that we are moving down actively a path of doing that.

But I think either direction, we could make work.