YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Steckman

lines on the record: 66
first: 2026-03-23
most recent: 2026-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This was great. Honestly, it was great to meet you. I do listen to the pod most episodes. I love listening to it. So thanks for having me on. It was cool.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do unequivocally. In defense, anything highly regulated, right? Every single thing is a headwind. The main thing you do to cut through a headwind is you try and establish trust relationships with people who matter. Palmer is an N of one when it comes to establishing trust relationships with people who matter.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm not choosing. Don't make me choose. You know, I live in Washington, DC. I'm very good at not answering questions. Maybe it's Bobik just because the contrast of his baldness in my hair would make us a pretty formidable duo.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't take them all. Well, it's a trick questioning because there's no way that I'm starting another company after Andrew. I don't know if you know this, but starting companies is really tiring.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies, you should pick and you should change your mind when you need to. And I think oftentimes there's a hesitance to change your mind, right? And I don't think that's actually true. It doesn't need to be true.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mostly say a couple of things. I think it's about the community that you surround yourself with. That's a reflection on sort of my own personal story. I mean, everything that I've done in my career has been the community of people around me that have helped me, have gotten me jobs, have afforded me responsibility. You know, it's not like some big machine or process. It's really just the people you surround yourself with. And I like to think I made some pretty good choices early on that helped. And then the other piece would be people tend to overthink a lot of their steps and don't appreciate how much you just can learn along the way. You know, I talk to a lot of military folks that are transitioning out into the commercial world. I would say for the most part, they kind of like him and ha over what company they should go to. My main advice is I actually think you just need to start. You're actually a really smart person. If you don't like it, you can leave. If you like it, you got lucky. You should talk to a lot.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really companies that there is only one large program to capture. That's like fundamentally what it is. In defense, you have to be wide by the very nature of how acquisitions occur. And so I think anything is a risk where it's like, nope, there's kind of one program. And if you don't win it, you're not a good company.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of my beliefs and our beliefs that we started the company on are now becoming a bit more commonplace. You know, when we started the company, maybe we were a bit out of on a limb of like, could I replace every single mission that the current set of technology provides us with an autonomous system? I believe that that is true in the long run. I also believe that we're not even close to where a lot of people think we are on it. They think we're still in the early days on tons of this tech. But as time goes to infinity, like absolutely every single mission can be replaced with this new way of thinking. In 2017, when we started the company, not only was that not widely held, that was a headwind for us. I think that's changed pretty dramatically.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but I'm kind of weird that way. I don't know. Like, I have trouble separating indecision and failed decisions from the current success that we're actually seeing as a company. I just do. People talk a lot about, I think, like these overblown sort of ideas around like, oh, you have to learn from failure and fail fast. Like, yes, all that's true. Most people suck at actually doing that. So for me, it's, I deeply learn from indecision and from bad decisions, but it doesn't haunt me and it doesn't, I'm not going to like kill myself over it, right? I'm going to, I'm going to move on and I'm going to make the next best decision.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a new way, which obviously has been quite successful for us in recent history. And so if you look at a lot of these failed things that we've done, it's hard to separate that from what came after it.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. Way early, I mean, we got into some tech that we weren't ready for. We got into some markets that we weren't ready for. We tried to early on build a pretty sophisticated aerial system. We didn't have the core building blocks. We didn't have the core team. I think we were 20 million or 40 million in before we kind of realized that it was a scrap. We didn't have the sophistication with the customer. We didn't know how the customer was going to buy a vehicle of that sophistication. The kind of crazy part about all of this is like, well, okay, given all of that and given that that was not a good business decision, clearly by most metrics, do we even get to build the autonomous jet fighter if we had never made that mistake? I don't think so. Part of that failure was a stepping stone to getting to success. Yeah, we probably spent too much money on it and could have gotten out quicker, but I think we had to learn that lesson in order to then reapproach the aviation market.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's a lot of investment, right? So you really have to believe that they're going to come up the curve. And then to your other question about like when you swack a product, the better way to think about it is like don't even enter the curve if you don't have faith that it's going to come through the other end. And so we kill a lot of developmental products well before they ever get into high spend because once you get into that curve, you're 10, 20, 50, 100 million dollar plus in.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Roadrunner is a moderately sized air defense kinetic intercept system, and that's you're over 100 million easily before you're generating revenue.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in defense in a traditional sort of product curve, it's seven to ten years, we're doing it in three to five, which is kind of part of the magic of the company and the thing we become known for with our customers is like you're effectively having the traditional path to rate production. Roadrunner is a good example. Roadrunner was, I think, 24 months from like a back of a napkin drawing to a fielded system.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentioned we have 20 products and only about a quarter of those are in any kind of rate production and throwing money back to the business. Everything else is in low rate or development, meaning they're losing money. It's kind of your standard product J curve. So we need more of those 20 core products to come up the curve to throw money back to the business and then you trigger the pulp event.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're like close enough. We're already spending an insane amount of money trying to do all the internal system stuff and all that kind of stuff.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a pedigree to it in the work that we do. And ultimately, if you are a part of the National Security Apparatus in the United States, I wouldn't say it's like an expectation and no one would ever say it out loud. But when you are a public company, there is an additional level of trust that is afforded to you that you don't have one of your private company.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The company we want to run, we want to create an enduring public company. And so we're running it like that. We're running it like that right now, even though we're pre-public. Protecting the valuation is important, not getting over our skis is important. The work is still hard. We will get knocked back if we make mistake. We don't have the luxury of making mistakes. You know, a lot of our competitors, the really big ones, if they make a mistake, they get paid to fix it. I think if we make a mistake, we lose money and we lose contract. There is a bit of conservatism on the team, but I think it's warranted in terms of the market and overall, right? It's like, we want to be a company in 2050 and 2060. And we're already thinking like that.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I respect everybody as a competitor. I think the worst thing you can do in this business again, at the start of the conversation, I mentioned hubris, I think it's like the second you think you're better than everybody else, you're going to get knocked in your ass. And so I think I in particular on our leadership team, hopefully people would agree, I provide a check against the Ubris. You have to respect.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This interesting thing happening in space domain where you've got the legacy primes on the military side that have these very large contracts, but they perform sort of traditionally, right? So it's going to be very, very high performance, but it'll come at a cost and it'll probably take a while to get there. And then you have SpaceX, which is just dominating on the commercial side. And when their commercial tech applies, you know, they do a bunch of government business as well. There's a weird kind of gap in between those two types of companies where the government wants to move really fast, but it's not necessarily commercially adjacent to what SpaceX is doing. And so there's a kind of a dearth of providers, and it's certainly something that we want to run at right now. We do a bunch of partnerships. We build a bunch of our own stuff. We integrate a bunch of really interesting technologies, but it's a huge open hole, I think.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's a tough one for me to answer. I probably either compliment or offend people that I don't want to compliment or offend. But I'll give you like the classes of technology. Super interested in space. Both ground segment and on orbit.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. He's our asshole. His point was like, we don't know, but it might be a while before we can actually buy these companies. And so I don't know. There's still a lot of investment in defense tech, multiples are still very high. I actually think our multiple is quite low compared to most of them.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, Trey, I will always remember when he said this never be surprised around how long a company can continue to exist, meaning like, you know, I think we were sitting around a table being like, oh, like it's going to come to the point where the multiples will decrease and all this stuff and Trace Point was Trey has this annoying tendency to mostly be right. I don't know if you know that about him.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their valuations are just too high for us to justify the buy. We've bought, I think, almost a dozen companies, maybe more, but for the most part, they've been more traditional style defense companies with what you would command in the commercial market for that type of company. There are lots of VC companies I would love to buy. An unlimited checkbook, but right now the multiples today are, they put it out of reach for us.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I'll give you a funny answer. I think there are some venture capitalists-backed defense companies that are making some really, really awesome technology, and they are entirely unaffordable to us today because of”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't speak to specific weapon systems used in specific situations, but we are, for the most part, defensive company in the Middle East, as in we are defending against incoming threats. So if you've read about the Shaheed drone as an example, we're one of the principal systems to defend against that threat in the Middle East. Other than that, it's hard to get into specifics.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were still a baby company when the conflict started. Just as a reminder, we were zero people in 2017 when we started the company. We're about 8,000 people today. We were quite small, a couple hundred people when the war in Ukraine started. And just sort of as a reminder, and now this is kind of lived experience for me and my colleagues, you go to war with what you have. That saying is very, very true. You do not invent new stuff along the way. You take what you have and you see if it works and then you adjust. And so we had some stuff in Ukraine, but we were just too small. I think if you play that forward to today, we're heavy participants in the current conflict in the Middle East, mainly on the defensive side. We build some pretty sophisticated air defense systems that are widely deployed. So it's a wholly different experience because we're a wholly different company.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's the wrong view. Again, if you look at things that span multiple decades, which is probably the right horizon to think through, everything kind of nets out. And so, yes, you'll have spikes in conflict, but like as an example, there are many companies that are profiting off of the war in Ukraine. I would posit that for the most part, if those companies are myopically focused on that conflict, they will not have a business coming out the other end. You have to be very careful around over rotating on the problems of today because it can really mess up your strategic thinking.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you work in defense, and if you start a defense company, your moral compass tends to be pretty clear on this question, which is we have a democratically elected set of governments that represent the US, the alliance, NATO, all of the countries participating. They set the rules. And we abide by those rules. And if you start to mess around with anything within that framework, you create a pretty dramatic set of slippery slopes that if you play the actual thought experiment to its end, end up in a pretty messy situation. The key here is people that live in the world that I live in, we tend to think a little bit differently than a person not connected to the national security community on this front. We tend to think a bit more long term as well, where I'm building missile systems that might only field in 2035. And so if you fundamentally lack a trust in democratic institutions, this is not the game.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It mostly comes down to customer expectation for what these things should cost over time and then your ability to gain back margin by cost saving in the long run. Yes, you can close a firm fixed price contract. It doesn't necessarily mean that you can fix that cost forever. And again, it's just like another weird aspect of government business.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a business, we run sort of 40% plus gross margin across the board, by the way, in hardware and defense is quite good. But every product kind of lives along a spectrum, as you can imagine. The best way to think about this is things that you make more of, like missiles, where you're selling thousands and thousands tend to be a little bit lower gross margin and things that you make less of, you can tend to get a decent price for it”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the original theory was we have to get low cost, we have to get more ubiquitous, we have to have a mix of exquisite systems and mass, like all of these kind of major theories of warfare are kind of all converging at the same time. We have to be able to build something that takes advantage of commercial supply and commercial manufacturing techniques as opposed to aerospace and defense supply and technique. This kind of like crazy crystallization of a lot of things at the same time. And now there's a war in Iran, we fire a lot of our arsenal. Now there's public reporting that large percentages of our offensive and defensive missile systems have been expended and they're really hard to replace. They take a really long time and they're very expensive because they take advantage of parts of the market that are kind of strange and”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so it's like, okay, so we got into this market years ago with a certain set of theses and geopolitics now has dramatically changed what those theses are to the upside.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most surprising cases to the upside right now is in our missiles portfolio. So we started our missiles business a couple of years ago. The best example we call the barracuda family of systems. So it's basically a set of cruise missile systems, different sizes, different shapes, things like that. We basically got into the missiles business looking mainly at sort of this, the actual like military warfare lens. Like there is clearly a gap in capability. We clearly believe that we can be ahead of everybody else if we've already developed it. And when the customer asks for it, we'll have it. And that turned out to be quite prescient. Now, I don't know if you've seen, but there's like a war going on with Iran.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We run like basically an investment committee internally where these tiger teams ultimately have to present, here's what we did, here's what we discovered, here's what we want to do next, here are the gates, here's what it'll cost. And very similarly to how most financial institutions do it, the investment committee says go. And I think maybe uniquely when we say go, we have the ability to do it faster and at a higher level of spend than most of our peers, which is a huge advantage. And so when we actually develop conviction in something, we pretty much believe we can get there faster than everybody else because of it.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of ways to look at our business, but one way I think you hit on it is we've been very good at allocating capital. We basically guess right most of the time. If you do this correctly, you have enough data to develop conviction to open the tab, right? And so I think in the beginning, we were working in areas where if we made a mistake, it wasn't, we weren't like too far in on spend that if we pulled back, it wasn't like a disaster for the company. I think a lot of the stuff we're building now is quite sizable and expensive. And so you're looking for certain proof points along the way. And that can be formal feedback from a customer. That can be informal. That can be successful operator feedback. That can be successful engagements with the legislative branch, like remember in the US, like your funder is the Congress, right? And so they have a say in all of this. What actually it is, it's all of those things pieced together. And so”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relationship. That's always how we kind of identify that we're on to something. I would say all of these things can be characterized by like a singular champion on the other side of the table that gets it, that believes it, that wants to shepherd it. Actually, you mentioned Sham. He talks a lot about this, kind of like heroism. Like, it actually comes down to a single person in government a lot of times. Same experience for us. If you do it right, it kind of tracks similarly. You know, the first year's low dollar spend, but there's a lot of learning and you sort of jump from, I tend to use this like lily pad example, you kind of jump from pad to pad. And this is what I mean by the 600 contracts in between the 20 that matter. You're basically jumping from contract to contract trying to figure out, do I have it right? Is the customer excited? Are they telling me things? Do we keep going? Do we keep spending? And ultimately, the thing you're trying to jump at is something very large.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the way that we do this is when we have a new idea, we basically start a really small Tiger team that we generally piece together from various parts of the business. We kind of match our own internal motivation and spend our own IRAD to what the market is whispering to us. So in government, what this generally looks like is you piece together some tech really, really quickly so that you have a demonstrator or at least a dart to throw. And then you start to pulse the market and you see how close was that dart throw to what the customer actually cares about, how they think about the problem. Do you modify it? Were you totally off and you just need to scrap it and start over again? Government, uniquely, you know you have something when the customer's excitement starts to match your own and all of a sudden you're kind of walking down a path together as opposed to this weird like vendor customer.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There'll be one that wins, right? It's going to be really hard to pick it, I think, is the problem. But there will definitely be one winner. I think the challenge for investors is actually figuring out which one it is.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lattice is a software platform. Exactly. Like, I can talk about software platforms with you, it's hard to actually talk about software platforms with a lot of people because it's like if you don't actually understand what we're talking about, it gets a bit weird. But yeah, Lattice is basically just a software platform that we can branch from. And it's led us into all of these interesting places. So like as a really crazy example, the first”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data makes sense of it and then manipulate robots, basically. Like that's what it is. And so those technologies apply to tons of different things. And so we have 20 different P&Ls at the company, all that are going after different parts of the defense apparatus that take a lot of these fundamental technologies that we build and kind of piece them together in different ways.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's talk about just our strategy as a whole. So when we started the company, we knew we had to go really wide, really quickly. Because to the point of like, what do other defense companies or newer founders getting wrong? It's that addressable market question. In every technology class in defense, there's probably one, sometimes two actual programs that if you capture them, you have a business and if you don't, you have no business. Take small drones as an example. There are very few drone programs for small drones that would create a material enough amount of revenue to actually create a real business, right? You're basically shooting the moon. You have to create a monopoly. We knew that. And so what we did is we created a bunch of fundamental technologies that are applicable to a lot of different types of problems. If you read about us, this is called lattice in a lot of our published literature. It's fundamental tech that allows you to consume data.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, but even now, though, on the battlefield, it's a foreign adversary impacting our military systems such that we can either not mount an offense or we can not successfully defend ourselves.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We care about protecting, or what do we care about affecting? Yeah, well, protecting, right? So probably the main one is like the list of critical industries, the military is included on that list. But think about infrastructure, think about power, think about energy, think about all these things, right?”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physicians because of just how sort of unexplored offensive cyber is. And then on the flip side, right, it's like, do we have the ability to amass cyber effects on our own? Because what you would want to do is you would want to do tip for tat. You wouldn't want to do it for the most part a set of like escalatory decisions. You would want to match force with force. Do we have the ability to amass the same kind of force non-kinetically? So all of these are super important questions that, in my opinion, to date have not been debated publicly and absolutely need to be.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drone Warfare is an asymmetric battlefield tactic, exactly. And cyber being not only asymmetric, but you'll often hear the term non-kinetic associated with it. So I'm asymmetric as in I'm cheaper and more nimble and I can get a large effect, but I'm also non-kinetic. And why is that so dangerous? Well, when something explodes, we react to it and we react to it with the full force of the military. When things are kind of simmering beneath the surface in sort of a cold warish type of a way, it actually becomes really hard to react. And so in cyber warfare in particular, if assets are affected that we care about, can we do attribution? Do we know where it came from? How do we respond? Do you respond with a non-kinetic attack by going kinetic? Is that an escalation of force? How is that perceived by the global community, right? So you get into all of these really challenging doctrinal.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one version to think about this is just cost for a very low cost. They can create an effect that has major implications for us, NATO and our allies. That's asymmetric. So often people refer to terrorism as an asymmetric tactic.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a lot of things. So it's both what are our adversaries doing and do we understand it? And are they asymmetrically influencing battlefield tactics? And the answer is yes, they are. And then it's, okay, well, if our capability.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been a couple of areas that have kind of emerged that maybe we were a bit slow in that we would have accelerated. I'll give you an example. There's a huge movement in, not just in the US, but NATO and the rest of the allies into offensive cyber warfare. And you're seeing this now becoming public for the first time, which is really, really interesting to date, this has been one of the spookiest of all spooky things, right? Like something that just no one ever talks about. And now you're literally seeing public officials talking about it for the first time. We should have moved into that seven years ago and been the first, the first in it. We weren't big enough probably to really even understand it seven years ago, but like in hindsight, it was kind of obvious. We'll probably try and play some catch up here and get into the game, but there's a couple of examples like that where you see these things kind of thematically in hindsight and you're like, well, obviously five years ago I should have done it, right? And you only realize that today.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The government can sometimes tell you where they want you to go, but oftentimes they don't. And so a lot of this is trying to predict an unpredictable system, right? So how many lenses can you look at at sort of the next couple of years? I can look at it through what the government is saying, through their rhetoric, and through their budgeting. I can look at it through a warfighting lens and what general officers are saying and what military theorists are saying. I can look at it through a technology lens, like what technologies do I think are going to influence the battlefield in the future. And I need to kind of blend all of that together today to make decisions on what I want to build that will be available, you know, five to seven years from now. No one is saying today, this is what I need five to seven years from now. It's all sort of an educated guessing game over time.”
2026-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source