Palmer LuckeyFounder

Anduril is a defense product company that spends its own money designing, developing, and shipping tools that will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens of billions of dollars a year, someday.

Our culture is built around effectiveness. We orient our operations around competence and delivering tools that actually work on timelines that matter to our customers, even if it requires surging our own resources.

We have been highly effective in theaters like the Middle East, Ukraine, Taiwan, and the United States. We have also built a factory in Australia for our Ghost Shark robotic submarine program.

We move quickly and invest our own private capital rather than relying on cost-plus contracts. This allows our programs to survive political breaks and budget delays that would normally kill traditional government-funded programs.

We maintain regular meetings and direct calls with senior officials. Their communication is very direct, often focusing on where we need to fix specific issues early enough to course correct.

Being open and honest about performance prevents issues from being hidden in slow program reviews. Getting feedback early allows companies to adapt, which is appreciated by both us and our colleagues at primes like Raytheon.

No, many successful defense firms are run by straight-laced, competent operators. Larger characters might get more retweets, but what makes a defense company successful is building tools that work.

For sales, the best marketing is customer word-of-mouth about product performance. The public marketing you see on social media functions primarily as a recruiting engine to attract top-tier engineering talent.

You must respect different cultural norms. While my direct style works in the U.S., it can appear cartoonish in Japan, so I adjust my meetings and handshakes to match their context.

Our autonomous fighter jet, Fury, which was selected by the Air Force. Going toe-to-toe with the major primes for their core business and winning was highly gratifying for our entire team.

We continuously speak to investors to raise private capital to build factories and capacity. We will eventually get our financials in the right shape to become a publicly-traded company.

Our first million-square-foot production building in Ohio is coming online in a matter of weeks. We expect the facility to reach full production scale by the second quarter of next year.

The United States leads in model quality, but the gap is small. China has a strong top-down will to distill our models and push AI capabilities into their military and surveillance state much faster.

With advancements in unmanned autonomy, we can build low-risk, low-cost subterranean systems. The Earth's crust will become a battle space, allowing us to move logistics and effects similarly to submarines in the ocean.

Giving private corporations the unilateral power to turn off software keys based on their own changing regulations takes control away from elected civilian leaders and threatens military chain of command.

We lack a continuum of force between shouting at people and shooting them. Non-lethal chemical agents like tactical pepper spray provide that continuum. However, we oppose biological weapons and strategic-level chemical weapons.

We lack the political will for a boots-on-the-ground campaign, meaning the U.S. must transition to being a supplier of tools. However, preemptively disrupting Iran's rapidly scaling missile infrastructure was strategically justified to prevent a nuclear North Korea scenario.

The bill proposed making it illegal to build AI products that cause physical harm. This would have prohibited using AI in military systems, crippling Anduril's ability to deploy critical software updates to protect bases.