Does a defense startup's founding team need insider customer and procurement experience?

Trae Stephens · Apr 3, 2024

In defense, building a great product is not enough — you need a holistic capability in government relations, lobbying and narrative-telling to agency heads, decision makers and field users.

It's not a field of dreams: the government will not show up to buy just because you built something cool that solves a problem.

Scope: specific to selling into the defense/government sector

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Trae Stephens · Apr 3, 2024

The most non-obvious driver of Anduril's success was building government-sales capability from day one — hiring a lobbyist in the first week and building relationships needed for authorization and appropriation of funds.

You either know how to sell to government from the beginning or you need enough money to survive being bad at it for a long time; most startups lack both the background to understand this and the capital to do it.

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Harry Stebbings · Mar 23, 2026

Go-to-market experience is the thing he most looks for when evaluating a defense team

Scope: from an investor's perspective

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Harry Stebbings · Mar 23, 2026

Among the many defense companies that pitch him, the founding team is always lacking

5:21 Defense founding teams are consistently deficient in the market

Matthew Steckman · Mar 23, 2026

Success in defense requires a founding team that blends outsider technologists with genuine insider knowledge of the customer

Everything in the defense market works against you, so without deep inside knowledge you can't think around corners and you get gummed up

5:47 Blend outsider technologists with genuine customer insiders

Matthew Steckman · Mar 23, 2026

If a defense founding team lacks procurement and go-to-market experience, it must recruit someone who fills that gap

He advises many companies and this is the first recommendation he makes when he notices the gap

8:09 Recruit the procurement gap in if founders lack it

Matthew Steckman · Mar 23, 2026

The most common red flag in emerging defense startups is failing to realize that what they are building already exists

Technology-sector hubris; the most brilliant people have been working on these problems since the 1950s, so a great deal already exists, and without inside knowledge you don't know what mistakes you're making

8:44 Outsiders rebuild capabilities that already exist