Stanford Seminar - Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government: Vannevar Lab's Brett Granberg

02 Apr 2024 (9 months ago)

McKinsey & Company

The speaker started their career at McKinsey & Company after graduating from the University of Georgia.
Despite lacking a business or finance background, they were recruited for their intelligence and potential.
They found the work unfulfilling and uninteresting, leading them to seek opportunities in national security.

The speaker joined In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm funded by the CIA, after three years at McKinsey.
They focused on computer vision and NLP, working closely with the counterterrorism mission center at the CIA.
They emphasized the importance of understanding customer mission problems to make informed investment decisions.
They observed that separating product people and engineers from mission end users can lead to worse results.

The speaker describes their experience working at Allview, a company that invests in dual-use technologies for the CIA and other government agencies.
They found that the dual-use model was not always effective and that the government was spending money on ineffective systems.
They realized the need for a company that could bring together product people, engineers, and domain experts to build fundamentally different things in the defense space.
They started Allview to build a platform for analyzing and translating text in different languages, initially focusing on counterterrorism but later pivoting to focus on Russia and China.

The founders of Vanu Labs took two years to raise enough funding to start their company.
They identified a top-three mission problem in the Department of Defense (DoD) and developed a product that solved that problem.
They relied on friends and veterans to connect them with the right people to access military bases and understand user needs.
They focused on demonstrating their product's value to the mission rather than simply describing its features when pitching.
Their first product collected data to answer useful and urgent mission questions, requiring the development of secure data collection and processing technology.
It took 40 pitches and numerous diligence meetings to secure one offer for the seed round, which came from Katherine Bole at NGC.
The fundraising process was stressful, involving rejections, leadership team issues, and personal challenges.
The company's strong sense of purpose and mission in defense attracted talent and resulted in a low attrition rate.

Direct sales to the government require a different approach compared to B2B or consumer sales.
The most successful defense sales teams include a salesperson, an engineer, and a product person.
Program offices and program managers are crucial in defense sales as they control the budget and write the requirements for technology purchases.
The budgeting process for defense is a three-year cycle, making it challenging to sell products that address future problems.
The EUER process (unfunded requirements process) is a way to obtain a portion of the 20% of the budget that is not allocated to specific programs.
Building domain expertise and understanding the unique challenges of selling to the government are essential for success in defense sales.

The speaker expresses admiration for companies like Anduril that challenge traditional defense primes and bring value to the system.
They emphasize the importance of more companies like Anduril succeeding to compete and prevail in the current technological landscape.