This trend to try to make war more like startups is pretty disgusting. You notice this with the a16z "American Dynamism" war making arm, "move fast and break things" now means create weapons to terrorize people all over the planet for cash. There needs to be resistance to this movement from everyone in the industry.
In the UK a useful route is via initiatives such as the Defence Accelerator [0]. This will help you bring a product into use but isn't a VC equivalent. It will often be necessary to team with a traditional Defence player, e.g. to get access to subject matter experts. Compared with normal defence procurements (whose timescales can be decadal) these research frameworks are positively speedy.<p>Often the desired output is to raise the perceived Technology Readiness Level of a product or technology, which in turn translates to reduced risk if the product is used in a mainstream project.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/defence-and-security-accelerator" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/defence-and-secu...</a>
In the U.S., the best way to go to market as a defense startup is the SBIR program (or similar small business R&D set aside). The second best option is to subcontract to friends at larger defense contractors. Both are excellent pathways.
No mention of the cost of regulation? Getting compliance with federal and DoD standards can take a small team and months of work, even if you hire a consultant to walk you through it. The investment just to get to the table is high, although you can try to walk the dangerous line of paying lip service and hoping nobody calls you on your shit
This was very interesting.<p>> For example — we at SensusQ are building a piece of software that can ingest a large amount of disparate information pieces, be that drone images, satellite pictures, social media posts or text documents.<p>Congrats!<p>Do you have an article about how you got into it?<p>What are some startups in your area that are software?<p>What newsletters do you subscribe?<p>I would love to get more in the loop.
If you’re solely in the defense contracting space for the money, there are easier paths to take.<p>1. Get job at a defense contractor, get a high level clearance<p>2. Be invaluable to your government client. Tech skills are good but also having a good relationship with the client and having an eye for business needs is even better. The bar is low here.<p>3. Once you’re invaluable become an independent sub-contractor. Can flip your job or find another gig and collect most of the bill rate. If you make 150k you could bill between between 120 and 180 per hour likely.<p>4. Get your prime contractor to sponsor your company for a facility clearance.<p>5. As vacancies on the contract come up, hire people in your network. On a straight time and material contract you can probably make around $40k-$60k per person.<p>6. When you have a big enough company you can bid on smaller contracts and become a prime.<p>If you’re interested I wrote a book on the first phase of this plan (becoming an independent contractor). Currently have 6 employees and a business partner. Working on growing it so I don’t have to billable work anymore.<p>1099fedhub.com
Just curious. "Defense" in this article and in "DoD" is a euphemism for military, isn't it?<p>I mean: these technologies (and the DoD) are perfectly capable of offense (attack). All while they prefer to call themselves "defense". This is just PR-speak right? A way to look good in the eyes of those who do not understand new speak?
It doesn’t mention anything about the limited talent pool you’ll be pulling from to build war tech. I for example would <i>never</i> use my skills to enable or empower the military and I’m sure I’m not alone. As an industry we should resist building weapons and spy tech, even if it pays.