Investing in the Freedom Stack with Larsen Jensen of Harpoon Ventures

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Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech, you know we got it.

Hey, foreign.

Welcome back to the Tacos and Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I'm so thrilled to have on here Mr. Larson Jensen, GP and founder of Harpoon Ventures. Hey, Larson, thanks for being on the pod.

What's up, Neil? Good to see you, man. Thanks for having me.

It is a pleasure to see you too. I know we're both running around doing our thing helping founders change the world and it's just great to spend a little time with you here.

Totally is, man. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on the show. And obviously you're doing a great amount of work here for the local San Diego community and the founders here. So hats off to you for putting things like this together. Really appreciate it.

Ah, thank you as well for, you know, you guys are waving a flag downtown right in the ballpark there, waving it in front of everyone of San Diego saying we are funding the, you know, the future of technology. So thank you as well. And why don't you give us a quick overview of what Harpoon is.

Awesome. Happy to do it. Well, as you mentioned, my name is Larson Jensen, founder and GP here at Harpoon Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm. Really focus on seed stage investing. We're located here in San Diego, California, but travel all over the country and frankly the world looking to support the next great founders. And I think there's a great ecosystem that's up and coming here in San Diego and that's part of the reason why we're here. We with our firm thesis. We started Harpoon under the thesis that geopolitics was going to intersect with venture capital and startups more than probably it ever has in our lifetimes. We think the modern era of technology is more consequential and more impactful than the space race and the Manhattan Project combined. That's something that not everybody believed. When we started the firm back in 2018, it was very contrarian to say the least in Silicon Valley when we launched it because. Because the only real comparable for us and the only real precedence for us was a group called In Q Tel which I'm sure you and your listeners are very familiar with. They're dubbed as the CIA's venture capital firm. That's the snapshot that's sort of accurate, but not entirely accurate as things go. But they're a great mission aligned firm that works hand in glove with the United States intelligence community and other nations, intelligence communities and armed forces to help identify and invest in emerging capability and technology that could benefit Western sovereignty and security over the long term. And our mission is very comparable to that, if not identical. We want to invest in these founders of the future that are building with a mission that's bigger than themselves and bigger than purely servicing the enterprise or commercial market. We want them to service and support the United States of America and her allies to the best ability possible. And that's why we started our firm. And we think there's never been a better time to invest in that, in that trend. So I think we're in a fortunate position.

Well, like you said, you start early, way early, because really you represent the voice of the customer in a lot of this, in your background and the companies then that you then went and turned them back. So why don't we take it all the way back? Like, where does this all begin? When little Larson get inspired to, to do the, the hard work you're doing today?

Sure, I, I guess you know, my background has always been in service to our nation. I had the opportunity when I was younger, in my late teens, early 20s, to represent our country on the, on the Olympic playing field, first at the 04 Olympic Games, then subsequently in the 08 Olympic Games. I had the, I was very proud of that and very fortunate to wear Team USA on my back, on my sleeve, on my cap, and on my swimming suit. So that spirit of service, I think is something that's always been ingrained in me. And then taking a level further to sign up for the United States Navy and to be a proud member of the United States Navy SEAL teams for six years was another amazing dream career and a dream opportunity. So really, when you add on those two things and factor in the fact that now we're doing a venture capital firm that's Americana inspired, it's really not that, not that surprising to see. But ultimately, when I moved to Silicon Valley, I had the opportunity to work at some great firms and have some tremendous mentors that had the opportunity to shape me into the investor that we now are. Great folks at Andreessen Horowitz, great folks over at Lightspeed, and also many professors of mine at Business school, who founded Floodgate and Benchmark and other firms like that, that I had the opportunity to be a sponge around and to learn from. And, you know, pairing that learning with my observation from a lot of my friends who are still in service and still in the military, gearing up for a potentially adversarial relationship with China, saying things about how China was eating our lunch in AI and in cyber security and frankly in pharmaceuticals, a lot of manufacturing there, a reliance on them for rare earths, so on and so forth, what they're doing in robotics, how they're embracing automation at a really remarkable scale. It became clear to me that the United States was reorienting its sort of like national security and prosperity posture to be higher tech, because we have other countries around the world, primarily China, that are doing it, frankly, better than us at the time. And so there was no venture firm that was explicitly operating at that intersection. And I said, well, I think there's an overlooked thesis here. I don't think the company selection is necessarily all that different. We're already investing in some of these bleeding edge AI companies or automation companies, or robotics or autonomy companies at some of the firms I was working at. But the open secret was that Uncle Sam needed this desperately and they needed it yesterday. And venture capital firms at the time did not, were not aware of that. And so that's why we planted the flag to go out and launch Harpoon with that mission driven orientation that we felt intersected with a very unique point in time where the technology industry in which we're investing is intersecting with a customer pool that was about to become insatiable. And so we think we thought all the right conditions existed for us to go launch a successful firm. And I think by and large, we've been right. We raised three funds so far since we launched in 2018. We currently manage $300 million of assets under management. And it's been a wild ride working with some of the most brilliant founders and brilliant people and hard working people, people of the highest integrity. It feels like a true blessing to me. And I feel so, so fortunate to be in this job every single day to have the opportunity to be. You have. I'm not driving the car, I'm in the backseat. And I get the opportunity to see what these, the decisions these founders make and sometimes help them find some directions, but it's really, truly a blessing.

Well, you've done great work in so much that you started early, which is when investors have to get in, right? And believe in people way before the trends kind of see.

Absolutely right, absolutely.

Version of a lighthouse of some sort of. Of saying connecting customer to the future in that regard. What do you think have been some of the learnings since then? Obviously the industry caught up, the world caught up to your guys thesis, which is great and lucky. What have been some other. Obviously we're not going to not talk about AI, so that has caught up. But where are the other areas that have caught up that you originally thought in starting this, this is where technology was headed?

Well, I think that we're also wrong in a lot of ways. I think we're wrong in the sense that I thought this is going to be a 10, 20 year journey. And turning an aircraft carrier as they say, is rather slow. So turning the aircraft carrier of Uncle Sam is extremely slow. And so I didn't expect it to go as fast as it is. And you're right on the point that you need to be early, you need to be somewhat contrarian, but you not only need to be contrarian, you need to be right. And it's really hard to know if you're going to be right or wrong. And so we bet the franchise on this, this tailwind coming. We just didn't expect it to happen as quickly as it is. And it's something that one of my mentors who's one of the founding partners of Lightspeed, I caught up with him at a summit not too long ago and he's like, it's not too often that the market moves to you. And I think in our case we're fortunate the market has moved to us. I don't think that's to say anything to undercut the hard work the broader Harpoon team has done. The team is rolling up their sleeves every single day and doing a lot of hard work to not only identify the next great company and founder that we want to support, but also more importantly how we support them post investment and helping them navigate the labyrinth of government contracting, acquisitions and finding the right early adopter customers for them inside of Uncle Sam, that's a really hard thing to do. And so I think that fortunately our job has become easier because now the demand signal is clearer than it was then. But at the end of the day, I truly believe that the founders deserve all the credit for all of this. I think all of these folks that we've worked with would have been successful with or without us. I think every successful founder is successful based on their own inertia, not based on who backs them necessarily. But if we could help to be the essentially the Alfred to Batman, that's sort of what we want to be. Batman's out there fighting crime and doing hard work and we're just prepping the Batmobile and making sure his cape is all ready and all his widgets work well so that he's ready to do his job effectively.

Amazing. Well, you. Over the time, I think what I've seen is it was originally a government like a focus on helping you connect to US government. Did it at some point hyper focus on defense? Or is it generally just about the.

U.S. yeah, it's, it's, it's not. It is a little bit of a misnomer. And people, I don't fault people for the stereotype. I'm a former Navy seal. Many of the people on my team that we were talking about before the show are formal special operations folks that came from San Diego and that I worked with previously. So this isn't a national security or defense focused firm that is part of what we do. It is a core pillar of what we do. But we have multiple pillars which we dub internally as the Freedom Stack because we want to illustrate that it's much broader than that. It is compute and AI sovereignty, it's rarers and materials, it's manufacturing, it's cybersecurity, it's next gen computing, it is aerospace and defense, it's energy production, all of these things. I think if you look at those sectors and ask the question, are these sectors important to the future of our nation? I think everybody would say categorically, yes. And so we view ourselves as investing for the national interest. One aspect of the national interest is certainly national security and national defense.

Something you spun up recently and saw was the Black Flag incubator. Can you tell us about kind of where that came from?

I'm happy to. And it comes from a combination of our heritage, having supporting founders and navigating again, the labyrinth of working with Uncle Sam, whether that be the Department of Energy, NIH, DoD, Homeland Security, so on and so forth. We've learned a lot of the things that you should do and more importantly, a lot of the things that are going to waste time and the things you shouldn't do or that you should wait to do at some point in the future. And maybe you're not ready for as a seed stage company, but you might be ready for as a series baby or series C stage company. But paired with the inertia that we're seeing out of the founder community right now, we're seeing a lot of founders leave a SpaceX and, Anduril or you choose the big tech company out there, OpenAI Nvidia, you know, Apple, who are more now than ever opting in to build for national level priorities. And that's super inspiring to me and I think it should be inspiring to, to everybody in the country to be honest. But we're also seeing with that is most oftentimes they're brilliant technologists but they've never walked a mile in the shoes of get, you know, working with Uncle Sam. So we saw a groundswell and we currently see a groundswell of founders who are opting in to build for the mission and to build for our country. But they don't have the right people around the table to help them understand how to navigate that. And so that's what Black Flag is built, purpose built for. It's for those founders that are building for the national interest across the freedom stack domain areas. But maybe they have never operated in this space before. And so we want to provide that level of resources, curriculum, who to talk to, which peos to talk to, which lobbyists to talk to, which proposal writers to talk to, how to manage a capture pipeline, how to recruit appropriately to really bolster these founders who are brilliant technologists but maybe have some things to learn on the go to market side and success in breaking into Uncle Sam as a customer, amazing.

And maybe we can get them to even take up a temporary space in San Diego to be a part of the largest military cluster around to learn a little bit about the customer, right?

No, no kidding man. And I think that's one of the things about San Diego that most people don't realize is, you know, outside of the D.C. area the largest flow of government business on the west coast is, is comes through San Diego. And I think that customer centricity, that customer feedback is part of the reason why we're here. And plus we get a little bit of a cheat code from a thesis or what to look for in the future. If we have our ear to the ground voice of the customer and we understand there's a hair on fire problem that could scale massively, then that gives us an advantage in terms of what we look for when we're sourcing and the questions that we ask. But I also think the same thing applies to founders who are building broadly speaking, you know, in the national interest. This is a very attractive place to be. The weather is fantastic. It allows for year round test ranges. If you are building something in the hard tech space you can test your products, you know, without interference of weather like you would have in the majority of the other areas of the country you have the proximity to the customer. You got early stage capital backers like us or like you guys or others in the ecosystem. I think there's a lot that's going on here and I definitely think it's, it's probably one of the best kept secrets that we see out there right now.

Yeah, it's really interesting when I look around and see I did a list of like The Hard Tech 50 San Diego companies and I was like, wow, there's actually, I would have thought there actually would have been more defense tech startups locally because there's so much customer here, right?

Yeah.

And then you look at who are not local but have local presence like Saronic and, and World now, who are now announcing their physical spaces. You know, those people who live here, by the way, are never going to leave San Diego, which means they will go to benefit the next San Diego defense tech company. And I think you have to weave.

In academia as well. I mean there's, you know, tremendous academic institutions here. I think you have all the aspects of what you'd want to have a great ecosystem built more so than other ecosystems that maybe are a little bit earlier. I think there's more to offer here than Austin has personally. But you know, some people might disagree with me, which is fine. But I think over the next handful of years we are going to see San Diego become an Austin like ecosystem which is obviously done, done great in the past number of years.

I feel the same, I feel I asked the same thing about El Segundo a little bit like where's the military there? They're here. So we should have either a duality together. Right. That says have an office in both, but. So we'll see and we'll keep building.

We'll see, we'll keep building.

Yeah, 100%. Where else are you, you know, take us through like going forward, you know, you're getting ready obviously for more investment down the line. What does that look like going forward into the future for you?

Totally. I think right now one of the things I learned in my swimming days, you can't always, you know, control the outputs, but you can control the inputs. I can't control necessarily specifically how fast I'm going to be at the end of the season at the national championships, the world championships or the Olympics. But I can't control if I'm showing up every day, putting in the work and staying relentlessly focused on the process. And that's how we think about it here at Harpoon. We can't control when we're going to see the next deal that we're going to do and how excited we're going to be about it and if that's going to be the right opportunity for us. But if we put in the work, put one foot in front of the other and we show up with ruthless focus on the little details every single day, we think the long term will take care of itself. So as we think about it right now, we think that we're seeing a lot of deals. The summertime is oftentimes a little bit slower from a deal standpoint. Most founders sort of don't go out and raise around July 4th, but we're seeing a significant uptick right now as we've gotten into August, where people are really coming back out, coming back to market. So I think the next quarter is likely going to be busy for us. If I'm reading the tea leaves a little bit, and typically in the venture industry as well, there's sort of a winter post Thanksgiving slowdown into Christmas and so on and so forth. So I think it's probably going to be a pretty active rest of the year for us. And also I have to say that it seems like almost by the day we have a new, you know, executive order or policy initiative put out by the Trump administration that I think is actually hugely advantageous to all of the freedom Stack areas that we invest in. Whether it be, you know, whether it be something for drones, whether it be something for nuclear energy, whether that be something for AI, whether it be something for biotech. I think there's a lot coming out right now and I'd be surprised if there's not more inertia that comes in over the next 12 months into 26. So I think this is a very unique time for folks like us to be in the space. And one of the things that I was actually talking about with another fellow GP at another firm, one of the interesting things that we're seeing in the market is some of the more traditional LPs are sort of like full up on venture and they intel probably right now haven't really had much liquidity. The Figma IPO helps. There's more. I think the IPO window is helping, but I think this is going to be a generational vintage. When you think about 25, 26, what's happening not only in the deep tech, defense, tech, freedom stack space, but what's happening in AI. I don't think that frankly anybody should be out of the game at this point in time. Because I think we are in the midst of huge tectonic shifts that are reshape nearly every industry. And as if you believe what Andreessen Horowitz said years ago, that software was eating the world, I think AI is going to redefine it across every sector and across our entire society. And so I think if you're an investor looking for an opportunity to invest in a category defining time and a generational shift, this is a really unique opportunity. And I think that's what I would, you know, recommend anybody who's in the technology industry really lean into this because this is very different from any other time that we've been in the business.

100 and especially if, if you heard the remarks out of the Hill and Valley conference just a few weeks ago, they were literally signing orders there about AI that show improve how much technology is a national security imperative. Right?

It is.

You mentioned. So literally anything you're working on as a technology founder literally could be, you know, of a matter of importance as we go forward, which I think is great to founders ears, right. To hear the sense of urgency of what this stuff is needed for. And I think relatable.

I might be a little overly nostalgic, but if you look back towards like the national unity we had towards like the brilliant people building towards the Manhattan Project and the abundant free energy that that can create for us as a byproduct or even the space race, like I think that we are, you know, coming into another era of that where the most brilliant technologists are working hand in glove with national level priorities to accomplish something special for our citizens. And that's inspiring to me, you know, and it makes me, I already loved my job. It makes me love it even more. It's one of the things with any job, if you have something that's bigger than yourself, you put your faith in a greater calling and a greater cause. And I think for me that's the red, white and blue. And I think for our firm it is as well. I think it makes it just even more easy to get up and do some of the hard things.

100%. Yeah. And I think some of that is as you invest in more companies, you have more founders to help and connect with. How do you do that? How do you grow, support the founders while continuing to invest in, you know, the next class of founders in technology?

I mean, it's definitely hard as you grow, you know, in terms of portfolio count, you know, that's more portfolio companies that you theoretically need to work with. There's a couple things. I think there's a natural selection bias where the ones that are ultimately successful just need less help because they've scaled the headcount. If you invest in a company at a seed stage and you invest maybe a million bucks or something like that, and it's two founders, well at some point they're going to have five, at some point they're going to HAVE 10 people on the team. At some point, 20, 30, 100, so on and so forth. So our goal is to never be a crutch for anybody. We just want to help people get started. And the goal for any business should be a self sustaining, profitable, large scale company over time. And so I think a lot of that, you know, naturally comes off of our plate and allows us to refocus on the net new companies. But to your point, there's, you know, any venture firm or any sort of asset manager or Investor gets this 30,000 foot view across the ecosystem. So there's been many times inside of the portfolio very recently where we have a company in the AI chip design space that has really made a breakthrough that I actually think is cross pollinatable over to another one of our companies in a unique way. And so just having that insight is something that oftentimes a CEO doesn't have the time to pop his head up and do a canvas of the ecosystem. And so if we're smart about that, we can provide that insight and cross pollinate that insight without wasting founders times. And so I think that's something that's extremely important as well. And also there's a lot of times where you see the opportunity to cross sell or partner inside of the portfolio. And so that that makes it much more organic and natural. But we also, I mean you're the king of events here, down here locally, but we try to do a couple as well, whether it be locally or in other places where we get the founders together so that they can have those collisions and shared learning, whether that be, you know, in terms of thinking about how to go to market, product design, hiring, so on and so forth. In many cases it's extremely synergistic and we get great feedback that from that, as I'm sure you do as well.

Putting founders together in a room always brings always one plus one equals three. Right. So doing that at a bare minimum with a curated fashion, which founders always trust that that's what you're going to do, right. If you're inviting them to. So I remember, and I remember when you started that I think a Year ago, a little bit of a defense tech series in San Diego, which we'll get going again because it was, it was so popular.

We'll get it, we'll get it going again. Yeah. And it's something that, you know, it's, we got great, you know, great excitement from that. And I think it's not just the founders together. It's like, who, who could they potentially work with, who's a prospective customer, who's a prospective new hire, who's a prospective allocator, so on and so forth and like that. That's, that's one of the unique things about the tech industry that I don't see in traditional investment industries is frankly the, the lack of, of sharp elbows in many cases. Don't get me wrong, they exist and sometimes you need to have them to win and do all this stuff. Everybody's competitive, but the pay it forward nature has allowed me to be where I'm at today. There's zero chance I'd be here today, you know, managing our own firm and doing what I think is, you know, my life's calling at this point. Had I not had people just pay it forward asking nothing in, you know, nothing back. It's very rare. It's very different. Maybe it's a West coast mentality versus an east coast mentality. You know, I think that's probably part of it, but it's, it's very unique and I think very beneficial to the ecosystem.

I think there is a lot of give, get, give before you get kind of mentality, at least I've noticed it even more specifically in San Diego when I was in la. Comparatively I found more of it more friendly and approachable because I think a lot of the San Diegans are actually from the Midwest originally. It's like these Midwestern ethos that has transpired, at least locally. But I think in venture, especially on the investment side, there's so few of us to do the job that a lot of us just, you know, know that it's going to take someone else to help us get forward, so.

Totally.

Yeah. Well, if a founder is building something interesting, what's the best way for them to in contact, get on your radar?

Totally. Well, depending on the stage at which you're building, if you're building at the precede or seed stage and you're building something in the, in the freedom stack verticals for critical technology that is in the national interest, I think Black Flag is the best place. Everybody on our team is going to see it. So are folks at Our partners at In Q Tel and others. So it's a great place to come in there and get some good exposure. So I recommend to go to blackflag VC as in Victor Charlie and submit an application and I guarantee you the entire team's going to see it. So that's a great place to be. Otherwise, I encourage you to visit our website and you can find our contact information on that, which is Harpoon vc, Victor Charlie again. And we'd love to meet anybody who's building something special.

Amazing. Well, I know you spend a lot of time on the road, but when you are in town in San Diego, downtown, right, Literally in, in the outfield of Petco park, there are. Are the best stadium I think on the planet.

I agree. I'm with you.

Where do you go for tacos?

Puesto. Puesto is my go to and I think it's great because when I do go to a ball game, I have the puesto in the ballpark so I don't have to go to a different location. Although we do have one downtown. So presto. Tacos are my go to. If you haven't had them, you're missing out. I think if you're a San Diego native, you know exactly what they are. But when you come to town and you go to a ball game, go to Puesto.

Big time friend of the pod. Alex Adler, founder of.

Have Alex listen to this and maybe I'll get a little coupon for 10 tacos free or something like that. Especially at the ballpark, you know, that'd be good.

See if we can get Puesta. Take something even closer to your office right there. Maybe the next office over would be a little, little takeout or down below. Replace the blind burrow with puesto right there.

Oh please. I do like the blind burrow too, so I can't talk too much. I go there enough. But, but like, yeah, Puesta is really special.

It is pretty special. It's a good spot. It's probably, I think it's the number three most mentioned on this podcast.

What's number one and two?

The taco stand and which you can tell from the line out the door and Tacos El Gordo and Puesta. So I'd say between those three you have actually a really good swath of the ecosystem of tacos here, you know?

I agree.

So not bad at all. Larson, thanks so much for not just be on the pod but what you're doing in, you know, building and protect and protecting what we love and do every day through the technology that is being advanced by the founders that you back.

I appreciate it Neil, means a lot man. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me and letting me share a little bit more. This has been a total blast. I love it and I I can't wait to see you again soon. Let's go to Puesto next week or something like that. That'd be fun down.

We will make that happen. Thanks again Larson and we'll see you soon.

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