YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Steckman

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2026-03-23
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2026-03-23
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  1. “There's a lot of answers to this question, but maybe from my lens, it is how few and far between the large winds are and how hard it is in between those periods of time. If you look at our business, this year, we'll do a couple billion in revenue. We'll do 600 separate contracts this year. Only 20 of those are probably of material revenue size. And so the hardest thing is like, what happens in between the 20? And what are you doing to position yourself for the 21st? And because it's so concentrated, every single one of those deals is considered risk to the business, right? If it goes right, if it goes wrong.”

    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

  2. “They weren't buying software, they were literally buying a service that obligated us to defend certain sites from certain types of threats. And as long as we were meeting the KPIs on the contract, we were fulfilling the obligations of the agreement. So quite novel in that contract has since gone in a lot of different directions, and we do a lot of different things on it, not just that. But we have been jogged in our approach to this, basically realizing that the more ways we give our customers to get at us, the better it's going to go.”

    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

  3. “I think one of the things we've done maybe uniquely is we've given our customers a lot of ways to access our company. What I mean by that is we've been very creative in, okay, a customer wants a piece of software, but it's difficult in government to contract for software. And so we can wrap it in a hardware appliance, right? Or they want a piece of hardware, but they know the software is the sophisticated piece of it. And so they're willing to pay more for it because of that sophistication. Or in government, you get these weird things where money, it's called the color of money. So money is obligated to certain types of spend. So maybe a customer only has money that they can spend on services. Well, okay, can I do an as-a-service product? And actually, one of our first major contracts was with US Special Forces for all of their counter UAS systems. That started as an as-a service contract where they weren't buying hardware.”

    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

  4. “So Lockheed, I think, is in the $100 billion revenue a year. I think we'll do a couple billion in revenue this year. So we're still small in the grand scheme of things.”

    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

  5. “It basically means that we have enough business with the federal government to justify putting together what is a fairly sophisticated contracting vehicle. So yeah, the short version of it is like, yeah, the government thinks that we can deliver some pretty major stuff now and in the future. It took a lot of work by a lot of people on the government side to actually make this thing happen. They are not going to do that unless they think that it's worth 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

  6. “will obligate the dollars as the products, which is hardware and software are actually materialized. So delivery is revenue to us in our world. So when I deliver something, I recognize the revenue, same thing in government. When we deliver something, they actually, then the actual procurement orders and dollars flow.”

    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

  7. “Yeah, yeah. So let's actually define it because the stuff I saw posted about it was all over the place. It was like a rainbow of interpretations. So this is, think about this as like a credit card limit. So the government has said up to $20 billion, they can spend on a class of Andorl's commercial technology. There's no obligated money, but it basically creates a process that reduces a ton of friction that you would ordinarily see in defense procurement, where each individual office would have to go through financing and contracting and evaluation. And all of these repeatable things now only have to happen once. And they did, and they just did. And so maybe a fast track is probably the wrong word. It's more like in the arduous process to actually get something contracted, we've cut a lot of the first steps.”

    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

  8. “Yeah, I mean, you basically can't have a defense company if you don't have a large U.S. business, right? So 50% of defense spending is in the U.S. and 50% is in the rest of the world. And so if you are cutting off half of your market from the get-go, that's probably a big problem. The challenge in Europe is it's not like a European Union in defense spend, right? Each country has its own sovereign companies and has its own sovereign agenda. And so you keep getting winnowed and winnowed and winnowed and you're like, oh, well, Europe is my market. Well, if you're a French company, it kind of isn't. France is your market. And so you have to be really careful around how you're actually analyzing who your ultimate customers can 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

  9. “Dresswell market. There's many cases and overestimation of addressable market where like actually what ultimately they're going after is a very small sliver of a problem which might materialize in a single large contract, but a single large contract is not an enduring 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

  10. “Basically, two things. It's not realizing that what they are doing already exists. There's too much Ubris in the technology market as high-tech people, we can do everything better than everybody else. That causes some companies to think they have an idea that isn't actually an idea because it already exists. And that's pretty common. I'll give you an example. Years and years ago, looking at a pitch, or I forgot, maybe I was advising someone. And here's my idea. And I said, well, the thing you don't know is in the 1960s, we invented that. And so there's kind of a hubris to thinking like the technology sector has all the answers when like actually since the 50s we've had the most brilliant people in the world working on these problems and a heck of a lot already exists. And this is sort of the point of like if you don't actually have the inside knowledge, you don't know what mistakes you're making. So that's one. The second, which will be more familiar to you, is a”

    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

  11. “I think it does. I advise a lot of companies, and if I notice the founding team at least a portion of it or a person on it hasn't kind of been there done that, the first thing I recommend is that they have to find someone who represents that piece of the puzzle that's missing to their team.”

    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

  12. “It's multidisciplinary, right? So the challenge becomes in defense that if you're missing any of the 12 different types of disciplines it takes to really capture a large program, you will fail. And so one of the things that we've done is over the years, we've built up a pretty sophisticated apparatus to kind of round out these teams with all of the various skills in acquisition and budgeting and technology, mission and operational analysis.”

    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

  13. “Of inside knowledge. One of the things we got right and keep getting right is that blend of the outside inside process. Who can think differently and bring in sort of commercial perspective, high-tech perspective, add kind of entropy into the system, and then who can really deeply represent our customers, how they think, how does that come together uniquely, that that becomes super important to having any success in the defense world.”

    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

  14. “There's kind of some magic in the fact that it's the same leadership team today as it was when we started the company. That implies a whole lot of things. I think mainly it's that we're all friends. So I think that's actually pretty critical. There's a bond there that basically can't be separated by business or stress or life. We all know each other really well. But then on top of that, we all come at the industry from really different backgrounds and lenses, especially in defense, which is, it's like everything works against you to get into the defense market. It's like every headwind you could possibly imagine. If you don't have a lot of perspective and knowledge about what's about to come, it's hard to think around corners and you get yourself kind of mixed up and gummed up a lot. And so when you meet founding teams, one of the most important things in defense is some of them can be outsiders and brilliant technologists and thinkers. It does take 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

  15. “Well, Trey and I were classmates, met freshman year, played Ultimate Frisbee together, so went on a lot of road trips with one another. I don't think Trey has changed at all. You ever seen the movie Hot Tub Time Machine? Yeah. Yeah, great movie. Yeah, there's a line in it that's like every group of friends has an asshole, but Trey is our asshole. You know what I'm saying?”

    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

  16. “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. 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,”

    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