00:39:43 · Trae Stephens
[00:39:43] S0: Yeah. So, you know, the the five big defense primes are all household names. It's like Boeing, which actually does a lot of commercial as well, so their market cap is not entirely tied to defense. But Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and RTX, which used to be called Raytheon. These are huge companies, and they don't build a single thing. They build a bunch of things. In fact, they build general aviation aircraft. Like, they're they're building, you know, private jets. Private jets. Yeah. They're they're building elevators in the case of RTX. I mean, these are, you know, thousands of SKUs at every company. And so when we talk about building a modern defense prime, it's actually very different than how startups have been talking about this in the defense tech community. Because if you come in with, like, an idea where you're like, I'm gonna build, an unmanned surface vessel, or I'm going to build an electronic warfare platform, or something like that, that is a product, or it's a category of products. You don't get to $100 plus billion market cap with the Department of Defense building in a single category. And that was something that we had a lot of conviction around early on at Anduril is that we knew we needed to be multi domain, just like Lockheed is, just like Northrop is. And so the... I think the reality for a lot of defense tech companies that they haven't quite figured out yet is that all paths converge at Anduril. Even if the thing that you're building at first is not competitive with Anduril, you are going to end up competing with Anduril if you want your company to be worth a lot of money. And I'm not saying that I'm not okay with that. I'm totally fine with having competition. I'm just saying, like, if you believe that you're operating in free space
00:41:23 · Aditya Agarwal, Trae Stephens
[00:41:23] S1: Mhmm. [00:41:24] S0: It's just not true. There is no free space left in defense. Every major contract that we go after, we compete with Lockheed. We compete with Northrop. We compete with RTX. We compete with General Dynamics. We also have to work... We have to work with them in some cases. You know, we just announced a few weeks ago that we're building a massive submarine shipyard to build super modules for Virginia class submarines. We have to work with General Dynamics Electric Boat to make that happen. Did... When we started the company, did we think we're gonna build nuclear submarines? No. But in order to play in this ecosystem, you're gonna have to do all of this stuff over time. And so there's no such thing as like a niche domain defense tech company if your plan is to be a next generation prime. And and I think you just have to, like, really think about the implications of that. [00:42:10] S1: That's a pretty good answer. I will call it here. Trae, thank you for showing up with authenticity and kind of, like, relaying us with a bunch of your stories. You're always welcome back at SPC. Thank you so much. [00:42:20] S0: Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.