Military success rewards coordination and consensus, selecting for and training individuals to align with the group. This is antithetical to the startup ethos, which requires being "non-consensus and right" to win, potentially explaining the relative scarcity of veteran-founded unicorns.
Unlike enterprise decisions that cash out in revenue, military plans lack a single, agreed-upon terminal value. This makes them incredibly difficult to evaluate and is why large-scale simulation is crucial for assessing potential outcomes against a host of metrics.
The future of military strategy involves merging planning software with wargaming simulations. AI agents will generate a course of action, play it out in a physics-based simulation against an AI adversary, analyze the results, and automatically improve the plan, creating "superhuman" strategies.
Grant Demaree estimates that achieving "perfect" military decisions through AI software—affecting everything from kill chains to logistics and planning—would multiply U.S. combat power by eightfold. This massive leverage makes it the most critical area for ensuring national security and global stability.
Paul Graham's "founder mode" (direct control) becomes impractical at scale. However, founders must recognize moments—like major pivots or acquisitions—where their unique combination of motivation, decision power, and market intuition is required to take actions that a delegated leader is not empowered to do.
Debates over military budgets are often implicitly debates about the discount rate of combat power. In an era of rapid AI-driven change, power delivered in 10 years is heavily discounted. This framework favors immediate software and autonomy investments over long-term hardware programs.
The defense tech market may seem overvalued based on peacetime spending. However, modeling in a ~12% annual probability of great power conflict—which would dramatically increase government willingness to pay—can multiply a startup's expected value by 3x, justifying current valuations for diversified funds.
Despite conventional wisdom, One Brief had a 0% success rate with large, department-wide sales organizations. Their growth came from selling directly to individual military commands who would use their own funds after seeing a hands-on product demonstration, proving a bottom-up GTM is viable in defense.