Funding returned as cultural barriers to national defense faded.
@KTmBoyle The critical change was when there started to be a path for startups to build very serious hardware -- not just consumer electronics, but things like supersonic planes and fusion reactors. Once you have that, defense tech is just a question of who you sell to.
Users welcome hard tech startups now seriously targeting the US military as a beachhead market because it lets them build advanced hardware like supersonic planes and fusion reactors.
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@KTmBoyle And indeed, any serious hardware startup will naturally tend to blur that line. It would be very surprising if e.g. Boom Supersonic or Stoke Space *didn't* sell to military customers.
@paulg @KTmBoyle Is there an example of a hardware startup that has successfully sold to commercial AND military buyers in the last 10 years?
Startups may pitch dual use tech as part of their fundraising, but successfully selling to both is much harder and I’m not aware that anyone has done it.
@paulg @KTmBoyle with the right holdco you can develop both consumer electronics and defense products. there is obvious overlap in engineering talent. the hard part is of course selling this narrative to investors and/or keeping founder freedom to pursue both.
@paulg @KTmBoyle Well the pool of capital also needed to be there, you can argue that the next spaceX will take less time to raise similar amounts of $ because we now have precedent
Hardware investing was a bad buzzword even in 2018-2020 people looked at it as if it was PE
Just as example - Planet Labs was founded in 2010 and were definitely selling to military by 2015-2016. It went public in 2021. SV backed companies like CyPhy Works (Lux, GC, BVP funded), AirMap (Lux, GC, Temasek funded), Orbital Insight (Sequoia, GV, Lux funded), Desktop Metal (Lux, NEA, KPCB funded) and many others were selling to defense by 2016.
Problem was that military wasn’t buying much from startups outside SBIRs.
@paulg @KTmBoyle Not until recently can hard tech startups choose the US military as their beachhead market, and be taken seriously
@paulg @jesslivingston @KTmBoyle Water infra is the next gatekeeper to data centers, energy & manufacturing growth, without clean water nothing moves forward.
Advanced water treatment is one of the hardest hardware / deeptech challenges due to complexity & engineering required.
@paulg @KTmBoyle at what point are you going to start looking for the next "hardware" ? you started that in what 2014... there's additional innovation you're missing.
@paulg Respectfully, the path to serious hardware, supersonic planes, fusion, real systems etc, matters a ton.
But that’s only half the story.
Defense tech got deliberately fragmented and pushed to the margins for years because of the cultural and capital chokehold: ESG mandates, climate bullshit, woke pressure, and that quiet fear of America actually getting strong again.
There were plenty of VCs and LPs that wouldn’t touch anything that smelled like defense or national interest.
And if you look back now you can see it wasn’t just “hardware is hard.” It was also “this is radioactive and you’ll get smeared for it.”
The real unlock wasn’t just technical feasibility. It was the permission and call to action to stop apologizing and start building again.
I remember the exact moment it crystallized - on my birthday in 2023. Nov 19th. The speech attached below was one of the clearest, hardest calls to action I’ve heard: America was on the cusp of a badly needed course correction.
Away from the weakness, the control, the fear and back toward hard-charging the hard problems, embracing technology, and being proud to be a patriot who can actually build strength and be proud and seek support.
American Dynamism is going to be spoken about in history for exactly that reason. It wasn’t just one speech. It was that speech landing at the same time guys like @PalmerLuckey and Dr. Karp refused to flinch under the media smear campaigns and kept standing tall anyway and still do even now as they are well deservedly thriving.
They showed it was okay again to want America to win.
That’s the shift. Not just who you sell the hardware to, but whether you’re even “allowed” to build it and without shame.
There is no doubt that Katherine Boyle and @davidu and the American Dynamism team led the charge to where we are today with defense tech.
I highly recommend everyone in tech that loves our nation, listen to this and bookmark it and revisit it from time to time and you will clearly see the massive strides we have made since.
God Bless America and American Dynamism.
@josephjconnor @paulg @KTmBoyle I mean…SpaceX is the canonical example…
@paulg @KTmBoyle Idk if this is my european bias but building a datacenter 16-18’ meant bootstrap or PE back when i did it
(i thank crypto’s PoW segment and bitcointalk’s compute marketplace for my survival)
@paulg @KTmBoyle more predictable consumer tech revenue can bootstrap/smooth out the defense world's feast-or-famine grant funding cycles.
@paulg @KTmBoyle $12.3B YTD into defense tech already beats last year's total — PG’s point is playing out in real time. Does this mean traditional primes are now just incumbents waiting to be disrupted?
@paulg @KTmBoyle Exactly. Boom’s $60M Air Force STRATFI and Stoke joining NSSL show dual-use isn’t optional for frontier hardware. Question is whether startups can stay commercially viable while chasing defense contracts, or does it force them to become defense primes earlier than expected?
