No Priors Ep. 19 | With Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf

Welcome to No Priors. Today, we're speaking with Brian Schimpf, the co-founder and CEO of Anduril, a next generation defense technology company. Anduril made early use of AI in its creation of low-cost drones, sensor networks, machine vision, and other systems. We're excited to explore what AI means for the future of defense. Brian, it's great to have you on the show.

Hey, thank you very much for having me on.

Well, I- I would love to start with your personal story and background, how you got interested in technology, how you got interested in defense tech. I know you worked on a variety of robotics and other things. It'd just be great to hear about your... You know, what led you to, to start this great company.

Absolutely. So I've been someone who's been coding since I was 12. Um, you know, loved doing it forever. You know, if I could just have spare time, I'd actually just be coding. I love it. It's great. Um, in college, I ended up working on self-driving cars when that was just getting started, so I worked on DARPA Grand Challenge, Urban Challenge. Um, we had, you know, kind of a small but mighty team at Cornell that was mostly undergrads, just a handful of us, and it was a pretty amazing time to see how fast robotics technology could progress. It went from literally nothing working in, like, you know, what was it, 2004, to multiple teams being able to drive through cities in 2007. So, just the pace at this technology can move was, was really impressive to see. Uh, after that, I went out to Silicon Valley. I joined Palantir. I started out as, like, a forward-deployed engineer, so I was working with customers all the time. And that's where I ended up working a lot with the government and national security space, and the thing that was really amazing to me was the degree to which people in that space really cared about the mission, what they were doing and the sense of purpose that they had around the problems they were trying to solve and how important they were, and that's just an incredibly motivating aspect of working in this area. Um, combined with it being some of the most technically challenging and hard problems that you can get your hands on, it's- it's a really interesting and unique space to work on. Uh, at Palantir, I ended up, uh, running product and engineering towards the end, built some really cool products, uh, particularly in the data space, around how do you do analytics, how do you make this stuff work at scale, and how do you build modern software in an intelligent way while also doing this in the government space? So I got a lot of experience there. Uh, and then ended up founding Anduril with some really good friends, uh, inclusive of, uh, Trey Stevens, Matt Grimm. Uh, we had met up with Palmer Luckey who, you know, started Oculus. A totally interesting guy, like, incredible character, like, an incredible human, and he was incredibly passionate about the defense space as well. And so, you know, when he was getting out of Facebook or, you know, as he would insist I say, when he was fired from Facebook, we decided it was time to do this. Uh, so we got together and started Anduril around 2017.