How he picks defense companies, and meeting Perseus at YC

Yeah, it's, it's very interesting. So, like I said, I, I've been helping to lead this course on entrepreneurship for 10 years. And, and what I, what I see is there's such a, there's such a history at this institution and we are sharing a lot of knowledge and intelligence, but you know, when you, when you launch a company, when you're starting a company, It is fundamentally a right brain creative endeavor. It is the intelligent is computer scientists working. is machine learning and it's trying to solve problems. And when you're in that space where you're building at certain points in time, it's important to begin moving left brain or operational functions into that. domain because you want to think about at some point, KPIs, how do we measure performance? How do we grow the company? But the fundamental idea of imposing academic structures on startups is a very awkward, and brittle concept. And in something that is rapidly changing in dynamic, sometimes it can, it can have an adverse effect. So. I try to work with my colleague, we try to work with people to think about how to oscillate and move between the creative and, for lack of a phrase, the academic or the more structured elements that try to operationalize or impose financial structures into these creative endeavors.

Okay, that makes perfect sense. Thank you.

Mm-hmm.

I'll ask Mario who has a question related to your investing in the defense sector The question that he had, which was repeated a few times among some of the colleagues that have joined the chat was, how do you decide which companies are worth backing in such a strategic and sensitive sector? and what you expand on that.

Yeah. So again, thematically what, what has gone on that's very interesting right now is that you have this military industrial complex that's been around for years and years and years. And these large companies that grew out of various war time structures have provided great defense for the United States and for other countries as well. But where, where we are right now is. we're moving through a period of time where the nature of ⁓ warfare and defense has changed dramatically. And as a result of that, we need to make different decisions about how we're allocating capital, how we're funding technology, and how we're innovating. And the current administration has been very aggressive about trying to bring forth new forms of innovation through things like the Golden Dome. ⁓ initiative, which is an underlying set of resources that are helping ⁓ new innovators move into the marketplace. And whether that's missile defense or it's AI or it's intelligence, or now as we look at things like ⁓ the genius mission or Genesis mission, rather, they are trying to put resources again behind quantum computing. And I think it's we're also going to be looking at areas such as ⁓ ransomware protection, cybersecurity and so forth. So there's a whole new world of companies that back in the old days, people would say, well, you know, the government's very slow and lumbering in terms of providing resources. And that's no longer the case. There is a lot of funding that's coming forward to build dynamic, flexible, ⁓ very resource driven ⁓ resource effective ⁓ platforms ⁓ in innovation in those spaces. So some of the companies that I've looked at around missile defense, ⁓ EPRS is one and ⁓ another one, Perseus was a company that I had a chance to meet with the founders at Y Combinator and what they were doing in terms of providing missile defense really made a lot of sense. creating flexible, dynamic, mobile tools that could be used to take down attack and doing so with a very clear mind's eye on bringing down the economic cost and the versatility of these tools, which really made a lot of sense. So that's an example of one of the companies that I was really drawn to. They had great technology, ⁓ a great group of people around them and just fantastic people.