We actually ran a similar analysis last year on TBB with European defence tech founders. Solo founders are rare and usually it’s a team of founders. And within this team, we found a recurring pattern: founders bring a triad of skills. Some bring technical knowledge/skills while others bring this military/defence experience through operations and procurement knowledge. For having talked with VC investors, this triad is kind of essential to have a successful defence tech company (Helsing is a great example).
Maggie, this is very interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing. Given the power law among the NatSec100 list, it would be interesting to see the breakout among the top quartile vs the bottom quartile to see if there's a notable difference. The academic researchers surprised me the most.
Agreed, that would be interesting to look at! I’ll see how hard that analysis would be to do. To be fair, SVDG NatSec100 list includes both Databricks and OpenAI who each have a lot of academic / researcher cofounders which may be skewing the results. I did a similar analysis w Pitchbook data (companies labeled “A&D” or “space” founded since 2015 that have raised at least $20M), and the % of PhD founders was closer to 16% vs 23%. There’s also a lot of missing educational data — ppl w PhDs may just be more likely to have public educational data which may have also skewed results
We actually ran a similar analysis last year on TBB with European defence tech founders. Solo founders are rare and usually it’s a team of founders. And within this team, we found a recurring pattern: founders bring a triad of skills. Some bring technical knowledge/skills while others bring this military/defence experience through operations and procurement knowledge. For having talked with VC investors, this triad is kind of essential to have a successful defence tech company (Helsing is a great example).
Agreed, the best founding teams have a portfolio of complementary skills across tech + USG expertise!
really intriguing data and useful
Maggie, this is very interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing. Given the power law among the NatSec100 list, it would be interesting to see the breakout among the top quartile vs the bottom quartile to see if there's a notable difference. The academic researchers surprised me the most.
Agreed, that would be interesting to look at! I’ll see how hard that analysis would be to do. To be fair, SVDG NatSec100 list includes both Databricks and OpenAI who each have a lot of academic / researcher cofounders which may be skewing the results. I did a similar analysis w Pitchbook data (companies labeled “A&D” or “space” founded since 2015 that have raised at least $20M), and the % of PhD founders was closer to 16% vs 23%. There’s also a lot of missing educational data — ppl w PhDs may just be more likely to have public educational data which may have also skewed results
Got to admit out of curiosity I'd be interested to know how many are immigrants versus not and what percentage are women.