20VC: Inside Anduril's $20BN Army Contract & Why Anduril Must Go Public | Why 99% of Drone Companies Will Die | Why There is Never an Ethical Question of How Anduril Products are Used with Matthew Steckman, President @ Anduril
episode
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
53 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 6 months ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Yeah, I mean, you basically can't have a defense company if you don't have a large U.S. business. The government thinks that we can deliver some pretty major stuff now and in the future.
What does Anduril's $20BN Army contract entail?
There are very few drone programs that would create a material enough amount of revenue to actually create a real business. There are lots of VC companies I would love to buy if I had an unlimited checkbook.
Is there other like an ethical question of like, do we agree with sending thousands of missiles to Iran?
What do most defense founders get completely wrong?
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today I'm so excited for one of the most current shows we could do. We've got Matthew Steckman, President and CBO, Chief Business Officer for Angeril. Just last week, they announced a monster $20 billion contract with the US military, one of the largest ever.
Can a billion-dollar defense company thrive without US contracts?
We could not have a more apt or pertinent guest as he takes us behind the scenes of both the contract and of Angeril. But before we dive into the show today... Over 80% of Fortune 100 companies are running their businesses with Airtable.
Why are government contracts considered brutal?
Airtable combines AI with the scale of an award-winning, infinitely flexible no-code system, a platform where you can see all of your data in one place and use it to make really big picture decisions. Think of it like mission control for your company. Airtable goes beyond organization and automating repetitive tasks.
How does Anduril predict wars 5-10 years in advance?
It lets you use your data to inform strategy, monitor progress, and take action. Every cell is capable of performing hundreds of AI-powered tasks like web research or localization. and using those results to inform and update hundreds or thousands of other sales and workflows in real time.
Why is cyber warfare the most dangerous battlefield?
Unlock the true scale of your workflows at www.airtable.com forward slash 20 VC, Airtable, the infrastructure of innovation. And just like Airtable organizes your workflow data, MetaView organizes your conversation insights. This episode is brought to you by MetaView. Who says hiring has to be fair? Every founder, VC, and exec I speak with knows this. Your ability to hire is the biggest constraint on your company's growth. But recruiting is slow, it's subjective, and only getting more competitive. And that's why teams like Eleven Labs, Brex, Replit, Deal, and 5,000 other organizations use MetaView, the AI company giving high-performance teams a real unfair advantage in hiring. MetaView's built a suite of AI agents that behave like recruiting coworkers.
They proactively find candidates, they take interview notes automatically, and they help you surface the best candidates in process.
What criteria does Anduril use for $100M+ product bets?
For the first time, AI handles the recruiting toil and gives you a single source of truth. That means hours saved per hire and a team focused on what matters most, winning the right candidates as fast as possible. Don't let your competitors out hire you. MetaView customers close roles 30% faster. Try MetaView today and get a free month of sourcing at metaview.ai forward slash 20VC. After MetaView captures what was said, Turing helps you build with the people who can deliver after it. Frontier labs keep facing the same limitation. Models perform well on benchmarks, but they fall short once they enter real coding tasks, real tools, and real workflows. That disconnect between synthetic evaluation and actual system behavior is now a core blocker for agentic models.
That's why NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce, Gemini, and other leading lab partners partners with Turing. Turing is the research accelerator focused on post-training reliability. They build realistic RL environments, next-generation data quality systems built from real-world operational traces, and coding datasets that stress models under conditions where failures matter, state changes, workflow branching, brittle tool calls, and the coding errors that break RL agents but never appear in benchmark reports. In reality, a model may demonstrate correct reasoning in your evaluation setup, yet still select the wrong parameter or mishandle a code update in a realistic interface. Turing makes that failure visible and gives teams the signal they need to fix it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:08
2
What does Anduril's $20BN Army contract entail?
0:08–0:26
3
What do most defense founders get completely wrong?
0:26–0:45
4
Can a billion-dollar defense company thrive without US contracts?
0:45–1:00
5
Why are government contracts considered brutal?
1:00–1:19
6
How does Anduril predict wars 5-10 years in advance?
1:19–1:38
7
Why is cyber warfare the most dangerous battlefield?
1:38–2:32
8
What criteria does Anduril use for $100M+ product bets?
2:32–53:49
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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