Matt Grimm

speaker

244 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Matt Grimm’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 20VC: Anduril Co-Founder on How a Trump Administration Changes the Defence Industry | What Happens Between China vs Taiwan, Israel vs Palestine, Russia vs Ukraine | How Software Changes War & Why TikTok Should Be Banned with Matt Grimm · 11 Nov 2024 podcast

individual soldiers, from individual planes, from satellites, from submarines, from missiles, from every kind of sensor that you might have out there in a battle space, fuse that into one picture so that the soldiers and the commanders who are ultimately controlling the battle space have a live real-time view of what's happening out there.

I think there's a tremendous amount of impact that this is going to have. So when we think about new products, we look at what is currently existing, what the five-year kind of program needs are. And like these documents are public. You can go find these documents, these kind of five-year vision documents with each of the services put together.

And you could say like, okay, well, what's currently there? What do we see as the missing gap? What do we think we can have that's kind of unique to the market here? And then let's go invent, let's go create.

So I think there's a whole world of innovation that's going to come from really bringing these kind of software-first, AI-driven kind of principles into the defense sector that's traditionally lagged, especially on software.

Yeah. So I think a couple of things. I think, first of all, it's a slight misnomer and a slight misunderstanding that the whole personnel changes over every four years. That's just fundamentally untrue. The political leaders at the top and some of the political appointees at the top, yes, those do tend to change with administrations. And sometimes they change more often.

I mean, there's like an average tenure of something like two and a half years for a lot of these positions. We had a prime minister that didn't last longer than a cabbage. Yeah, pretty famously on a Twitter feed, right? Yeah. See, if you use these lights with the cabbage, it ages faster, right? So does she.

Good joke. Yeah. So I think there's like a slight misunderstanding that like, oh, the entirety of the Pentagon turns over every four years. It's just fundamentally not true. And same here in MOD Maine on Whitehall. It doesn't turn over with every administration end to end.

So I think that these longer term vision documents written by military officers and civil servants within these organizations like largely do hold for where they want to see the capabilities of the Navy or the Air Force go in the next five years, the next 10 years, the next decade. But to your point,

Yeah, we consistently, even in the technology sector, we consistently underestimate the pace of innovation and we consistently underestimate the pace at which software especially is going to continue to rapidly kind of develop and accelerate.

So I think that there is a middle ground because if we invent and have an idea for some sort of crazy out of the box left field construct, and then we come to the Pentagon and say, hey, we think you should do X. And if X completely and totally doesn't align even at all with where they want to take the capability, it can be kind of a hard sell.

So that's one angle is that we can just kind of go pitch something, convince them and go that way. The other angle we can take is we can just do it. And I think that this is part of our strength where we've raised a pretty good amount of venture capital money. We have incredible broad freedom on what we can do with that money.

So if we have an idea of a new capability, a new type of missile, a new type of drone, a new type of submarine, we can just go do that. And then show them. Yeah.

and say beyond just like, oh, hey, here's a PowerPoint slide, which is what they've been pitched for the last 40 years of how this new potential thing, if you fund me, if you give me that money on a cost plus basis, surely I can hire enough engineers and I can design this for you. Here's my PowerPoint slide of what it would look like.

We can shortcut all of that and just say like, hey, so we've built a couple and I can come out to my test range. I'll be glad to show you how they work. Here's how they talk to the other systems you have. Here's how they talk to the planes you already have. Here's how they talk to the drones you already have. We think this is pretty compelling. It's what's called a con op in our business.

Here's a pretty kind of compelling con op how you'd use this technology.

No, I don't think it's totally fair. I think there's a worldview piece here that we as Silicon Valley kind of entrepreneurs tend to underestimate where it is our jobs. Literally, it is your job literally to go meet the most brilliant, adventurous, entrepreneurial, creative folks on the planet. That's your job.

And then pick which ones of them you want to invest in, which ones of them you think have the best opportunity to go make their vision a reality. Of course, that is not the job of a DOD bureaucrat and a procurement officer. That's fundamentally not the job. And you also have to think about a kind of a risk reward kind of incentive system that they're operating under.

There's a perception and an understanding problem that has to happen here. So from the perspective of a procurement officer, if they take a flyer, they take a bet like you do on a prospective new company, and then that company totally implodes, for you as a venture capitalist, do you think like, ah, yeah, well, that's like 80% of my companies that are probably going to fail.

And I'm hoping for the other 10% to return my money. And I'm hoping for 10% of them to be big home runs and return the fund. That's your business of a power law business. That's not the business of a procurement official. They have to put... technology and tools and weapons and bullets in the hands of soldiers in harm's way every day.

So when someone comes along and is like, I have a genius idea about AI. For them, they're thinking, yeah, okay, maybe that sounds pretty crazy, but I've kind of got to just put bullets in the hands of my soldiers. So do we need to change the incentive mechanism? 100% we do. We absolutely do. So there's just like... How do you do that?

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