Nick Beim

like and roll and they're going to be others that are able to make great businesses around doing that really really well and it's interesting if you look at how much we spend on defense i think we could spend you know half of that and have it be more effective because so much the money is wasted in these huge exquisite contracts that have lots and lots of maintenance costs and

You know, it's interesting if you look as a subset of that and how software is developed in the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, it's often by companies that aren't really software companies and they throw lots of bodies at the problem.

And you get this custom code by people who aren't, you know, the kind of software talent that Silicon Valley runs on.

And I don't think our country is best served by that.

Absolutely.

And if you look at the major systems that have been driven by cost plus, their cost keeps going up and up and up and up.

There's a joke in the military that eventually all military spending will go into one airplane.

I don't know if it's the F-94, but just the cost of aircraft, the F-35 was so incredibly over budget.

And we can't afford to have that type of

development drive our spending going forward.

We need to be smarter about where we spend money and make sure it has the biggest impact.

defense companies they've done something very intelligent which is not try to compete with existing primes on their core territory but carve out some new territory in particular autonomous systems and get really really good at that and autonomous systems are such an important area for all parts of the military is really one big dimension of where warfare is going that they've been able to grow rapidly and i don't think

The prime, the traditional primes are going to be very effective in competing with them because it's a low cost game and that's not what they do.

And I think that's not what they can really afford.

And I think the technology, you know, AI development is not currently really what they're good at.

Whereas Android, I think has a lot of, you know, highly trained AI engineers that really are good at it.

It's something I think about a lot.

And for the kind of investing that I do, early-stage venture capital investing, it's very intuitive.

It's very people-driven.

And the most valuable tools that I have found are really two.