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Anduril pitched Marines at Quantico
Anduril's early days
Anduril was in its first year and still in semi-stealth. Its website gave conspiracy theories plenty to feed on and no real answers about what Palmer Luckey was building.
The odds against it
The company had less going for it than the firms it was up against. Its team was smaller than Boeing's or Raytheon's. Silicon Valley considered working with the government uncool, at a time when Google employees were walking out over Project Maven and the Department of Defense. And the media despised Luckey, who had been pushed out of Facebook over his support for Trump.
Going straight to buyers
Calling a mainstream reporter to ask for a fair hearing for him almost never worked, since only a small number of reporters were fair at the time. So there was no TechCrunch route and no startup award at a conference. The team went directly to the Marines at Quantico and to Camp Pendleton, and Luckey spoke at the National Defense University and to the CIA, literally walking into their buildings, talking to them, and then showing them the product.
Why did Google staff protest Project Maven?
Project Maven was a Pentagon program that used machine learning to analyze drone video footage. In 2018, thousands of Google employees signed a letter asking the company to stay out of the business of war, and some resigned. Google then said it would not renew its Maven contract when it ended, and it published its AI principles in June of that year.
Why do a few contractors dominate defense?
In 1993, Pentagon officials gathered defense executives for a dinner that came to be called the Last Supper and told them the budget could not support so many firms. Mergers followed, and the major prime contractors shrank from dozens to a handful by the late 1990s. Programs for aircraft, ships, and missiles then became so large and specialized that few newcomers could bid on them.
How did the Pentagon court startups?
In 2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened an office in Silicon Valley, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, to bring commercial technology into the military faster than the usual acquisition process. The office was later renamed the Defense Innovation Unit. It uses contracts called other transaction agreements, which skip some standard procurement rules.
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