Investing in Defense with Alex Moore

Alex Moore (@AustinGiraffe), investor at 8VC and board member at Palantir, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:

- Alex was one of the original team members at Palantir. He says that helping build the company helps him pattern match today to find the best founders.

- Defense investing is not like normal VC investing. The usual model of investing $2M, then $10M, then $30M to give a company momentum doesn’t work when you have to deal with budget cycles, lobbying, and politics.

- It typically requires $1B to get a defense company to IPO.

- Alex would like to see procurement officers in the US government be allowed to be more entrepreneurial and for the government itself to move away from rigid line item budgeting, so that it wouldn’t take 2-3 years for high priority items to make it into the budget.

- He would like to radically expand the SBIR program so that more contracts go to startups.

- Governments should be picking winners, in his opinion. The best tech should win the whole market and the government should invest in the one big startup that will deliver massive scaled solutions.

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