Guest
The Defense Startup That’s Quietly Disrupting China and Russia Emergent Aug 1, 2025 In this episode, we sit down with Brett Granberg, co-founder and CEO of Vannevar Labs, a defense technology company developing advanced software and hardware systems for the U.S. national security community. With a background at In-Q-Tel and McKinsey, Brett shares his path from the corporate world to building one of the most successful emerging defense startups in recent years. We dive into how Vannevar is bridging the gap between Silicon Valley engineering and national security missions, starting with data collection from adversary nations and scaling to $80M in revenue. Brett shares lessons from their earliest failed product attempts, why speed is the key advantage for startups over defense primes, and how they think about non-kinetic warfare, generative AI, and building a multi-product roadmap for the future of U.S. defense. If you’ve ever wondered what building a defense tech company from scratch really takes, how DOD’s acquisition ecosystem actually works, or what distinguishes Vannevar from Palantir and Anduril, this episode is for you. Website: — In this episode, we cover: 0:00:42 - Introduction 0:04:41 - Vannevar Labs’ founding thesis and approach to building defense technology 0:06:46 - The intelligence collection gap and how Vannevar closes it 0:08:45 - Non-kinetic warfare and its rising strategic importance 0:13:11 - Why the U.S. government needs vendors to move faster than primes 0:16:42 - Brett’s path from McKinsey to In-Q-Tel and founding Vannevar at Stanford 0:22:09 - Early product failures and the pivot that led to Decrypt 0:35:01 - Crossing the classified divide with forward-deployed engineers 0:39:28 - Scaling from a $15K pilot to over $80M in revenue 0:43:13 - Securing DIU contracts and funding through unfunded requirements 1:02:25 - Integrating LLM agents to enhance search and product usability 1:08:13 - Where to find Brett and Vannevar Labs — For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast or becoming a guest, email adam@. — Note from Quad Romb: Wow, it turns out that Russian trolls are already receiving tens of millions of dollars to fulfill U.S. DoD contracts to counter China’s construction of infrastructure in a Sub-Saharian Africa? 0:11:00 - “I always joke with people they’re like what does counterbalancing China actually mean and if you’re a defense person or national security person you know that on some days it might be something really simplistic like we’re paving a new road in a rural town in a Sub-Saharian African country and we’re paving it near a road that the Chinese paved. And now we’re doing it to curry favor with the local government but we’re not actually bombing anybody. We’re not patrolling. We’re not detaining anybody. We’re not taking those sort of kinetic actions. Now, you guys are a little bit more on the information side of it though, right?“ Original from here:
