Last Week's Defense Ventures Summit
Three important takeaways
Good morning!
Last week, Shift hosted its second annual Defense Ventures Summit.
With more than 700 attendees representing 100+ PE/VC firms, 100+ defense tech and dual-use startups, and 100+ government organizations, this summit was more than twice as large as the inaugural event last year.
I want to capture a few highlights that stood out to me.
Kick off and Keynote - Reactions to Katherine Boyle’s keynote have ranged from “it was a rousing call to action,” to “it was eerily reminiscent of a fascist rallying cry.” (Yes, that was an actual statement made to me by a founder… of course, fascism is the exact opposite of what Katherine advocates). In my opinion, Katherine did a great job of succinctly highlighting the reality of today’s world and outlining both the role that tech plays in protecting our national interest and the risks of failing to do so. At the heart of her speech lies the need to inspire a culture of production vs a culture of consumption.
Shyam Sankar - Shyam highlighted several really great points. Perhaps at the top of that list for me was the inherent and systemic risks around defense industrial base consolidation, and that it is possible we are already too late to fully mobilize in the face of the existential threats that are now showing themselves.
Innovation OG Panel - During this panel, Joshua Steinman and Ben Kohlmann discussed their experiences with the Chief of Naval Operations Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC) that ultimately failed because the CRIC failed to build the right relationships. The fact that the CNO was involved was insufficient without relationships that penetrated deeper into the critical stakeholders (at a minimum that’s Congress, senior military leaders that define requirements, and end users).
I’m capping it at three to prevent this edition from being too lengthy. Mike Slagh and his team at Shift will be releasing videos of some of the sessions (like the video of Katherine up above). If you didn’t make it this year, go watch those videos. Heck, even if you did make it, go re-watch Katherine’s speech.
This is how we win:
Keep building,
Andrew
P.S. for those of you here in America, hoping you have a fantastic Thanksgiving this week and remember that we have much for which to be grateful.