Babak Siavoshy (General Counsel at Anduril, ex Legal Counsel at Palantir)

Hey everyone, this is Erik Torenberg and you're listening to Execs by On Deck. Execs is a show for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading technology companies today have used to achieve scale. Our guests are experienced, non-founding tech executives in key roles at top companies with firsthand experience solving hard and rare problems for fast-growing business. Babak Siavashi is Vice President and General Counsel at Anduril Industries. His legal background combined with his deep operating experience in tech is rare and precious combination. In this episode, we discuss how to build legal teams from scratch, how to grow data protection teams, and much more at the intersection of legal and ops. Babak's team at Anduril is bringing a new era of tech to the military. Check them out at anduril.com, A-N-D-U-R-I-L.com. Babak, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

By way of background, when you look back at your career, what is sort of the thread that ties it together? Or what is sort of inspiring you in terms of the role that you do at Angela at the moment?

If there was a through line to my career is I always wanted to work on kind of big picture macro issues. But I never had the, like, qualifications to do that straight on. So, you know, like, I would have loved to be— in a younger age, I would have probably thought that I would have loved to be one of the, like, 7 people who argues before the Supreme Court. But, you know, I went to a good law school, but not the best. I got great grades, but not good enough to be one of those people. And so that kind of ship sailed. And I started focusing on other ways to have the impact. And as kind of time went on, I think this happens to many of us where we find a niche and then that niche becomes like a way to make that broader impact. Now, for me, it's always been about these kind of geopolitical issues and the issue of what makes the US and Western democracy special has always been something that's fascinated me. I was a philosophy major in undergraduate and obviously law school. worked a lot on these issues. And so over time, I started with kind of privacy and privacy law, and especially privacy impact of emerging technologies was an area where I was very active early in my legal career. And when I joined Palantir, it was my first kind of big startup job. That was the area where I focused then, and then shifted gradually to national security because That became an area where emerging technology started really shifting the boundaries of what's, uh, how these geopolitical issues kind of develop over time. And my work at Ondero taps into that passion, uh, in a way that's very, very kind of fulfilling and satisfying.

This podcast is for founders and CEOs who are starting to build out their exec teams and, and want to get really tactical. about how to do that. A lot of founders don't have legal backgrounds. They haven't hired lawyers before and they're finding themselves having to do that for the first time. So maybe you could talk about, maybe just to zoom out, what is the role of general counsel at a startup and when should one hire their first and what should they look for? Maybe you could unpack.

I have a few thoughts on this. I think it's very industry-specific. Generally, there is an increase in the number of startups that are in highly regulated spaces. You look at crypto, you look at fintech, these areas where pushing, like solving the regulatory questions actually goes hand in hand with growth, which is like the main goal of a startup early stage is just growth, right? I think if you're going to be reductionist, that's it. Like if you don't grow, there's there's no point in anything else, including doing well legally. But there's certain kind of markets where the legal piece just goes hand in hand with the growth piece. And it's just, you can't— it's both a necessary and almost in some cases sufficient condition to growth. Like, you even look at a company like Uber and it's just like solving the regulatory issues early on was very critical for them. And then everyone free rode kind of behind them, right? And every time they enter a new market, they have to solve it from scratch. And that's kind of a consumer version of that. But I think in the enterprise space, and especially in the government space, highly regulated, you just can't grow unless you can navigate the acquisition frameworks in the US government and the Department of Defense. And then also, if you're selling internationally, the US's allies, it just gets very, very big very, very quickly. And being able to be creative in those areas becomes very important to the company's success. So if you're in that kind of industry, it probably does make sense to hire an attorney early who's going to be an owner. Look, it's all very dependent on facts, but personally, I would not hire a general counsel early. I would just hire an attorney that you think can grow into a general counsel, and, you know, test them out. I think that a lot of startups in these spaces, their reflexive reaction is, oh, we're in a scary regulatory space. We're going to go hire like a partner who does this at a law firm for 30 years, bring them in to be our kind of face, right? To show that we're responsible, et cetera. And Without dismissing that approach, I think that's not always the right approach. You actually, like, that helps with the risk reduction side and risk control side, but actually there's a growth story around legal where, like, lawyers can help you get more business very quickly by understanding the field and help you navigate. And especially lawyers who kind of grow with the company and are experimenting with you in these highly regulated spaces where we're really at the frontiers of kind of what you can and can't do, and the rules really don't define it. In those areas, I think it's very valuable to bring in someone mid-career, kind of early, who's creative, smart, maybe doesn't have all the subject matter knowledge, but has enough and can kind of grow with the company. And you can always put someone above them later if it doesn't work out, right?

Yeah.

You can bring in the gray hair partner, et cetera, and later. But if you get lucky, you get someone who can just be very dynamic and grow with you and become that leader. And I think that's That's the model that I've seen work quite well and that I would recommend founders look at.

And I'm not sure if the founders of Palantir or Anderle had legal backgrounds, but often a lot of founders don't. And so then there's a question of like, how do you even evaluate if your first legal hire is doing a great job, i.e., could grow into that, into the general counsel? What advice do you have there?

We deal with this all the time because you're always balancing these 2 things where you're in a highly regulated space. The most knowledgeable people on the laws of that space are going to be people who self-selected into a long legal career doing those things. In most cases, those people are going to suck at being startup lawyers. They're just like, it's just not their thing. So you're always balancing between knowledge and kind of horsepower or dynamism or resourcefulness or whatever you think that qualities are of a startup lawyer, which are not any different from the qualities of a startup employee, right? It's going to be the same quality. So it should be very familiar to a founder what it looks like. Oh, this lawyer could be a great startup employee. And then they happen to be a lawyer. They happen to be passionate about kind of the regulatory side. They happen to be able to figure new things out, which again is something you would want startup employees to do. So I think you're always looking for that balance. If you have to choose, if you have to trade off between good startup fit versus deep subject matter knowledge, I would go with good startup fit. Like, I would always make that trade because, look, lawyers are very full of themselves, but none of this stuff is rocket science. If you're motivated, you can figure it out. And then lawyers have legal budgets. In an efficient market, literally the best paid and the most competent specialists are always going to be at law firms and at consulting firms doing the same thing over and over again for many clients. In an inefficient market, good generalists end up in-house at startups, etc. And so you don't want to kind of force to bring in-house something that you can get very efficiently on an outsourced basis and probably better. Right? You have venture money, you can spend it on specialists. That's what they want you to do to get the best guidance possible. So like, just get the best startup lawyer you can, empower them to get the best specialist on their team or on their outsourced team, consulting team, et cetera. And then like, trust them to get the outcomes. The most important thing is that they're focused on what's important to the company and to the founders. Like, they should get the same endorphin bump They should get an endorphin bump when the founder gets an endorphin bump and not like when they give some cool legal advice. It should be like literally the same. Like they want to win, they want to grow. That's it. That's the employee you want. That's also the lawyer you want. And if they have like subject matter knowledge, et cetera, et cetera, it's bonus. But if you have to make a trade, you always trade, in my view, you always make the trade in favor of a good startup employee.

And you mentioned that If you have a good lawyer who grows with you, that they don't just protect you, they bring in business or they create business opportunities. What are— what's an example of that? What does that look like?

For us, I can give examples at Ondero, but I think there's different variations on this theme depending on the industry you're in. Really, it's navigating, and in a sense, it's hacking the defense procurement rules to get us to contracts faster. To get us more favorable terms for us, which we think are also beneficial to the government actually, uh, on those contracts, to make follow-on contracts faster, and then to preserve kind of our business model, which is really to build things, uh, using our own funds and our, our kind of venture-raised funds under IRAD, and then to deliver those things to the government very efficiently. And quickly. And that model depends on selling that model to the government, selling the pricing assumptions that come with that model, the IP assumptions that come with that model, etc., really depends on kind of setting everything up from the capture stage to the contract stage to delivery stage correctly. And the legal team's like heavily involved in that. But really, the, the ultimate outcome is you get more contracts that are worth more and that transition to bigger contracts more quickly. And by an order of magnitude, like you might cut something from 5 years to, you know, 5 months using these kinds of, in our industry, right? If you're properly hacking the, these, and I use hacking in the like non-pejorative sense of like, actually there's 25 years of procurement rules that Congress has layered on top of each other to encourage businesses like ours to do work with the DOD.

Mm-hmm.

But very few businesses are able to actually leverage those rules. And so we go and we do it. And I can give some very concrete examples if you want to get kind of super tactical, but like, that's an example of the types of things we do. Even on the compliance side, right? Like pure sounds defensive. You take a topic like export control, which is a set of rules that determine what you can ship outside of the United States, what you need a license for, who can buy it. how quickly those things happen. There's a lot of things you can do in terms of that go into how you design your products, how you modularize them, which components you use, which suppliers you use, etc., that can really cut the time to deliver things internationally and open up markets that wouldn't be available to you otherwise without doing these things right. So those are some examples of how kind of your legal team can align itself with growth.

Yeah.

The legal piece is to always be in service of the growth thing, at least early stages in the startup. Later stage in the startup, yeah, I think the test is you should be doing the thing that's most important to the company for everyone, but especially for the legal team. They're smart and expensive people. So like, why waste that talent, right? And so early stage, that's growth. Maybe the year before IPO, it's other things, right? But like, I think that should be the orientation.

Instead of getting specific, I want to actually generalize it to— well, let me ask a version of this, which is what advice do you have in partnering and selling to more bureaucratic orgs that have a lot of bloat to them? Whether it's the DOD or whether other industries like healthcare, I don't know, you experience that too. What's important for teams to get right or evolve their mindset a bit?

In all these industries, I think The kind of common theme is there's going to be a tension between being a good high-growth technology startup and being a person who can sell to this entity. So being a good government contractor and being a good tech startup are like severely in tension because they require very different skill sets. They optimize on very different things. I think there's a version of that also in healthcare. And kind of other industries. So there's a bunch of different lenses on this. I think one is aligning on goals. One is hiring the right people. You have to hire from both of those worlds and mesh them together. And that is not just the legal thing. It cuts across BD, whatever you're calling your capture team, engineering. etc. I'll use an example in defense. In defense, because the timelines are very long, you're often building things and selling things kind of very early in the process relative to when they'll be delivered. And anyone who's worked with engineers know that they don't like that, right? Even Silicon Valley software engineers who are used to iterating on stuff quickly, like Like, you're pitching what? And so on. Like, those conversations happen a lot. So I think having that glue between those 2 goals that are constantly in tension is basically the theme. And then how that exhibits itself tactically, specifically depends. I think part of it's hiring, part of it's just doing both things, like hiring software engineers that are working for startups and also hiring government relations people that are working For attorneys who are familiar with kind of the defense space. And then like finding the unicorns in each of those, but more in the latter one. You're more unicorn hunting when you're looking for the traditional people who can do startup than the other way around. But like finding the unicorns in those, like the unicorn lawyers who can do the startup thing, the unicorn government relations person or healthcare salesperson or whatever. who can also do the startup thing, it ends up being a big chunk of the, of the work. And it's really hard. It's just extremely challenging. I just don't think there's a shortcut. I think just hiring is hard. And this is another way that hiring is hard.

That makes sense. Can you trace a little bit about Palantir and Ondero? You talked about that first hire, you know, optimizing for good startup fit. How did both of those legal orgs grow and scale? Like, what did the org charts look like, or what was the experience like in those orgs as the company scaled?

And I'll speak more to Ondero because it's like I had more agency here building the team and so on. I learned a lot from my previous role. I think that you— there's some kind of questions that you have to ask yourself, thematic questions when you're building these organizations. Like, one is senior or junior kind of thing. You know, that's one kind of question that comes up. And the answer I've come up with is like, if you find someone who can own things, you always hire them. Because it's just like, there are very few decisions that are higher leverage than hiring an owner, like a true owner, someone you can trust their judgment to do stuff. And then you don't have to do those things anymore or worry about them because it becomes their problem. And then they like actually deliver on those promises. It's just incredibly huge. So I think finding just very talented owners, this is trite and not helpful advice, like hire good people, whatever. But like—

How do you interview for owners or how do you assess, hey, is this person going to be an owner or not?

I honestly don't know. It's just been trial and error. And the only kind of actionable thing I can say is if you have to make a trade-off between knowledge And startup fit. Pick startup fit and just teach them. That's the only bias I can kind of say that I, in my view, that's always the right trade. When you get bigger, it stops mattering and then your job's kind of done. But I think early stage where every hire matters, that's the real trade. And that conflicts directly with what I just told you before, which is you have to hire those traditional people. But I think like, It's a balance, but if you have to make a trade, I think you trade for fit.

Yeah.

And it just sucks because you got to train them for 6 months, right? They got to just hang out with you for 6 months until they're going to be useless. So the other thing is hire earlier than you think you need these roles because it's basically like you don't have a person for 6 months. I think that's about the right timeline. And 6 months, they're super useful. It's huge. But like, It's like, it's a pain for the first 6 months.

When you were at Berkeley, you supervised work regarding digital civil liberties and IP. For founders who are experimenting in novel intersections of law and technology, how should they think about moral and ethical questions sensibly? Any frameworks you have for being thoughtful about net new policy and regulation?

Look, I think that I can make some generalizations based on my experience, which may not apply to others, but I'll make 2 generalizations. One is you should actually take them seriously. The second is that for a business, taking something seriously just means resourcing it. That's all it means. You put heads on it, you put money in the form of heads and resources on it and time on it. And I will make a third generalization, which is there are ways to engage with the kind of rights communities that are more productive than others. And the ways that I found productive in my kind of career is to engage very intellectually, very substantively on details rather than to make broad pronouncements on policy and ethics. The reasons for that are several folds, but I'll— I think one, as technology companies, we are usually very credible on the art of the possible, on what do the technologies make possible? And what are the— in light of the concerns that exist, what are some of the controls that could be built into those technologies to kind of mitigate those concerns? We are a lot less credible, I think, on broad— on saying what's ethical and what's not, right? Like, we have an opinion, but it's like, it's an opinion amongst others. But when it comes to the tech, right, we're at the forefront of the tech. Someone picked us, gave us a bunch of money to develop this tech. We actually have a credible viewpoint. On this. And what I found is the people who are in the rights communities who are concerned about technologies actually appreciate that engagement. And a second reason I'll mention, and I'll stop, is that there's actually a very small number of people who work on these things. And once you start joining the same conferences, the same academic debates and papers and so on that, that they work in, they just know you. And the next time they have a concern Chances are they'll call you, right? And if they're going to criticize you, that's fine, that's their right, but at least they should criticize you for something that's actually happening and not kind of something they made up. And I think having those relationships helps force those interactions kind of within those constraints, which makes it a lot easier to kind of engage with the issues.

That makes a lot of sense. I want to transition a little bit. Basically, Well, a few areas. One is, how do companies make sure they stay compliant as policy evolves? GDPR compliance at Palantir.

I think it's— this part actually isn't that hard. Like, compliance is easy. You just follow the rules and then the rules change. This is an entire reason that lawyers get paid like hundreds of dollars an hour is to help you navigate those things. So I guess the advice is like, don't skimp on the outside counsel stuff. Like, if you're going to be serious, like, don't do an amateurish job on the legal side. Like, it's going to cost money. Your investors know it's going to cost money. No one's going to be surprised if you're trying to build a real thing that you're going to use kind of like the cutting edge of these things. And then don't do illegal things. And then when there's a gray area, Well, you got to find— this is a normal part of any lawyer's playbook. It's like, if there's a— if it's black and white, it's easy. Yes or no. If it's a gray area, if it's more than 90% of things that require some brains and it's a gray area, then you have to optimize on something. And you should optimize on the thing that's most important to the business, always. So if you're going to take a risk and there's a trade-off, When do you take the risk? How much do you weigh the thing that you're taking the risk for? Well, what's important to the business? Once you answer that, it becomes very clear. And I think that's kind of how you deal with the gray areas. But changing laws, changing policy, that's not actually that interesting. That's basically what lawyers do already, and good lawyers should be able to do it.

Segue a bit to comms and brand and PR. Because when you're working in regulated spaces, obviously you need to make sure that the narrative is tight and you're communicating what you want to be communicating. How do you think about that in your capacity at Andreessen Horowitz?

So this is somewhat outside of my kind of area of expertise. I think as an executive team, we all work together on comms, PR, etc. issues, but it's not my area of ownership. My general philosophy has been to do what works, basically. And the problem in our space is that people have very different approaches to do this stuff. So, you know, you look at SpaceX, kind of very heavy comms, great brand, very public. You look at Lockheeds and the Raytheons, a little more understated, but they do a lot of marketing, etc. And we are still figuring out where we're going to be in this in, in kind of that spectrum. I think the thing that we're confident in is that we believe there is white space for next-generation defense companies in the United States and for the US and its allies. And we think we are one of the best representatives of what that might look like. And we have many levers at our disposal to push that, from enough thought leadership on acquisitions issues, on Speeding up the kind of acquisition process and the procurement process in DOD to export control reform to just what it looks like. You know, like, I think setting an example for what it looks like to be a successful VC-backed defense company that develops tech and delivers it quickly is hugely important because just success is actually the most powerful policy lever you have. Because if we can launch 10, 15 new startups who look at us and are inspired, then we feel like we've actually made a huge impact. And that's not exactly a comm strategy, but I think it implies a comm strategy.

Say more about how you guys have been able to work with the DOD so much faster and better than anybody else, or in the same space at least. Why, why is that What have you guys figured out?

So I think just a step back, I think we are— there's a couple things that we don't get credit for. So one is we're in a historical moment where the Department of Defense is focused on emerging technologies, is getting pressure from geopolitical rivals on these technologies, where, you know, countries such as China, Russia, etc., have been able to make progress relative to the US on these technologies, on AI, machine learning, et cetera, in a way that's really put the DOD kind of on guard and has like led it to reevaluate some of its kind of the things that have gotten in the way of us growing at the same, progressing at the same speed as these rivals. So the historical moment is very important. And I don't think our success, if you want to call it that, because we haven't finished yet, but our success, I think, would not make sense without that historical context. Second, we're riding on the coattails of SpaceX, Palantir, these companies that really kind of pushed the limit and had to sue their customers and did all kinds of things, successfully went public, or in SpaceX's case, are just doing amazing things. And they set a lot of precedent that we're able to benefit from because there's a model for this. Just not being first is very important, but I think there are many things we've done right. I think one is being willing, relative to many kind of commercial-flavored companies that try to do DoD work, to actually look more like a DoD contractor. And that means hiring people who look like they work at DoD contractors. By look like, I mean they have the experiential background and so on. That means doing things more traditionally. I think in the context of IP rights, we are much more flexible. We're much more willing, I think, to cede to the government the types of IP rights that they expect from a Lockheed or a Raytheon than many commercial companies. Because actually, the government has a point. If you're going to make software that's going to control a military system, maybe they should have some protection against lock-in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are contexts where we're willing to kind of play ball that have benefited us because we're really empathizing with the government. And I think you see that this question of like playing a little, playing ball a little more, playing a little more on the government's terms than kind of the prototypical defense, not defense, but the prototypical kind of commercial company that's dipping its toes in defense has benefited us quite a bit. And The flip side of that coin is, if you're going to get— there's a good reason commercial companies are worried about these things like giving up IP, etc. So you also have to catch the mitigation side of that and have a real plan for like, okay, now we gave up some IP, what's our mitigation? Well, maybe it means that we negotiate a longer kind of contract performance period, or maybe there's a gate to the IP rights being transitioned over, or maybe there's some other mechanisms through which, you know, we protect our ability to leverage this technology that we spent 3, 4 years building. So being able to do that, I think, has been important to our success as well.

You've written a few posts on the blog. Talk a little bit about the thought leadership that you've produced, just tactically, because there's a lot of people who want to be doing it. How operationally have you been able to do that? And what would you advise others who are looking to to produce similar output?

So we have a deep bench of experts in the executive team that can speak to a lot of these areas. I mean, honestly, I believe I'm biased, but I believe we have one of the strongest exec teams out there, certainly in our specific space, but even across the startup world. And so we've tapped into those experts. me less than others actually to kind of produce thought leadership on the areas where we believe we are credible in, which is how do you create an environment where next generation of defense primes can thrive? Look, there's a version of this story of OnWorld that's really bad for the US, which is the only way to win, the only way for a company like ours to exist is if we're venture-backed have a billionaire co-founder, have an incredible executive team, and then we win, but no one else does, right? It's actually good for OnRobot, but it's bad for the US because you don't want to be special and weird to have good defense companies. You want to create an environment where you have a lot of good defense companies. And that's our goal, right? That we want there to be an environment where there's a lot of good defense companies. So we think we're credible.

Yeah.

on those topics. And I also think like, we're only going to achieve our big goals, like is to be the next generation defense prime, if some of the rules and policies and so on change. And this is all to say that we're not just doing thought leadership because we like, like hearing ourselves speak. It's also instrumental to our big picture goal in a very direct way, which I think our most ambitious goals are only achievable if we also change the rules and then the culture in DOD. And so, you know, we've done this, I've done some, the founders of the company have done some, other executives have done some. And because of the historical moment we're in, we've seen many of the things we've said be echoed and adopted by government officials, by others in the space, you know, in forums like the the Reagan National Defense Conference, which is like, I think, the marquee conference for defense. We hear a lot of what we think of as kind of idea seeds that we planted kind of flourishing, and it's very gratifying. But more important than being gratifying, I think it's instrumental both to our mission to have kind of fertile grounds for defense startups, but also to our own ambitions of being the next generation Talk about how startups can lobby effectively, especially when competing with legacy companies with footholds in legislative bodies. I think you just have to play the game is the bottom line. And then beyond that, there is not that much more to say from my perspective. Now, I don't run our government affairs side. I work very closely with our head of government affairs, but My lens on this is that there are a very small number of people in the federal government who actually make decisions. They get lobbied by everyone. And then there's a larger group of people in the federal government who can kind of run interference and block things. And they also get lobbied by like a smaller group of people. And you need to play that game. Right? You can't be absent from one or the other. And I think there's then nuances that I will not be well positioned to answer regarding how to craft your message in ways that are appealing to specific interests, congressional districts, et cetera. But the game has to be played. There's a playbook for playing it. You can be creative, but it's not There's, there's too many constraints to kind of be super creative there, in my view.

Right now there's this big debate, of course, in terms of, you know, remote versus in-person versus hybrid. Underhill has offices in DC, Seattle, London, Boston, Orange County. Talk about why that is and how you think about it.

Significantly hardware-focused company, and you just can't build hardware remotely, or at least we can't, not the kind of things we do. And of course, we work on government contracts, so we need to do a lot of work in secure facilities. And so for us, the decision was kind of made almost by default that we had— we could never do a kind of full remote thing. But aside from that, I think our philosophy is that a lot of the benefits of in-person work are at this stage in the company are critical. And so I think we bias in favor of that. There's some variations depending on teams, roles, et cetera. Obviously during the height of the pandemic, it was slightly different and so on. But I think our bias has been towards in-person for all the normal reasons. But aside from the normal reasons, we have abnormal reasons that we build hardware, we work in secure spaces, we need offices to do that work.

Maybe zooming into you now, what is your philosophy on time management and how you find yourself most effective in terms of how you spend your time and what you don't spend time doing?

I think the big picture, I want to work on what's important to the company. I think an interesting lesson I've learned is that for a company like ours, and I think some of this ends up being true across startups, one of the key questions at the executive level ends up being what projects you actually dive deep in that are quote unquote below your rank. So I think that, you know, for us, like our CEO, a CEO generally doesn't review or draft proposals, certainly not a CEO of a bigger billion startup. But which proposals you do actually draft and review and go deep on as a CEO of this company ends up being a very critical decision point because you can't do all of them. You have to do a few, and those set precedent and they set tone, et cetera. And so for me, I think that's been the only interesting time management I have as a GC. Like, what contracts, what efforts do I go super deep on, super tactical on? To the level where it's like, I know in 5 years if I'm still here and we're successful, I would never touch that because I would have kind of like different verticals to focus on. But like right now, going very deep on this tactical thing is actually the most valuable thing I could be doing. Is like, that's the only interesting nugget I have there. And which those are is hard to say, but they end up being high leverage things that have Like significant precedential value where like they set a model for, it's almost like a new start thing where they set a model for kind of future people. And then the next time one comes up, you just point to that one. It's like run that playbook or improve on that playbook. That's what we did before. So I don't have too much to add here except that there are times you gotta do super tactical things. And I think some executives who self-selected the kind of executive roles, like maybe don't have that instinct.

I want to head towards closing here by, by pointing to a piece that you wrote, How the Government Can Use the SBIR Program to Scale Innovation. Why don't you unpack that piece? What is the SBIR program? What should people know about it? How does that pertain to startups?

Yeah, so, uh, the SBIR program is a program established by the Department of Defense. Money is earmarked for kind of new starts, relatively small dollar contracts that are issued very rapidly and that come with certain baked-in rights for the contractor who wins. So look, the program isn't perfect, and I think we talked through some of the issues on the blog post. You can find it on Ondero's Medium of the things that are, you know, can be improved on the program and the things that are good about the program. I think the SBIR program is one of several tools the federal government has used that are somewhat awkward for the need, but are better than nothing to kind of supercharge this, like creating a fertile ground for next generation defense startups to at least gain access to government problems. So the thing the SBIR program does well is it's fast. There's a little bit of money, at There's very interesting kind of rights, like once you get an SBIR contract, you can very quickly parlay that into a larger contract potentially. It really expands the base of people who get— who can participate, and also the base of people who get access, who can like look at the list of companies and the offerings of the companies participating in the program. In all those ways, it's great. In some ways, it's not so great. I think I'll just highlight one, which is that the program works great as seed funding. But you know, in the startup world, seed funding doesn't get you very far unless someone doubles down on you. I mean, you got to get you got to have that light at the end of the tunnel to to get to the next level to supercharge the industry. And the SBI program really doesn't answer that question from a funding perspective. It's It's capped at like $700 grand, I think, for Phase 2 contracts. And the future contracts and funding, there has to be someone, some other impetus for those to happen. But generally, it's like one tool in the DOD's toolbox that it's used correctly. Over the next few weeks and months, we're expecting to kind of keep writing about different tools the DOD can use to do these things, to achieve the same goals.

Makes sense. Well, for people who want to learn more about Anduril or learn more about your work, where could you point them?

Go to our website and in particular go to our careers page because we're growing fast and we're looking for talent in this space. I think that there is a lot of interest in the technology sector to work with the Department of Defense. And the myth that there isn't is wrong. And I know you guys are out there. You all played video games growing up. Yeah, you're all interested in military history. You all want to make tech, you want to make the next generation fighter, you want to make the next generation kind of technology for the country. And like, we are the place where you can get that done. So definitely encourage people to reach out and join us in our mission.

Awesome. Well, we at On Deck are really inspired by that mission. And we'll echo that to the fellows looking to, looking to do their next thing. So, Buck, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks, Erik.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Execs is produced by On Deck, where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, and invest in their careers. If you're looking to start a company uplevel your career, or navigate a career transition, I encourage you to visit beyonddeck.com. See you next time. See you next time.