David Ulevitch: The world "is getting incredibly spicy"
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Conflicts, confrontation and change in Eastern Europe, the greater Middle East and China's backyard make for a world that "is getting incredibly spicy," according to David Ulevitch, a general partner at venture capital juggernaut Andreessen Horowitz.
Why he matters: Ulevitch leads the firm's American Dynamism fund, involved in, among others, the aerospace, energy and national security sectors. He's also invested in the public safety space.
- The American Dynamism Summit in Washington is set for March 18.
Q: When you hear "future of defense," what comes to mind?
A: The platforms, the systems that we've had in the past — having large carrier battle groups, they move into a region and we pick what day we fight — are not going to be representative of how we fight in the future, where there's large numbers of attritable weapons that are low cost.
- We're also seeing a new era of electronic warfare, where both offensive electronic warfare capabilities are being deployed on the battlefield, as well as new techniques to evade them.
Q: When will wars be waged solely by robots?
A: We're a ways away from the robot war that we envisioned in the movie "Terminator."
- That's for a number of reasons, actually. I think there's going to be regulatory, policy reasons why we're not going to have a fully autonomous robot warrior.
- In the next major conflict the U.S. is engaged in, we're going to see autonomy and computer vision play incredibly strong roles.
Q: What's the biggest challenge the defense industry faces at the moment? What can be done to alleviate it?
A: There's tremendous supply chain risk to basically restocking the — to use the term that Anduril uses — arsenal of democracy.
- For far too long we've been offshoring a lot of our manufacturing capabilities that are critical in the event of a conflict.
- There are lots of other challenges we have, but they're often being talked about. I think the supply chain is probably the biggest issue we don't spend enough time talking about.
- It's hard to fight the robot war people envision if we have no batteries, actuators or motors because China refuses to ship them to us.
Q: How many emails do you get a day, and how do you deal with them?
A: I get many, many hundreds of emails per day. I have a pretty aggressive filtering setup.
- If somebody were to chart the histogram of my email response rate, I would guess that about 15-25% get responded to within three or four minutes. Another 25-50% get responded to within the next 24 hours. And then there's, unfortunately, a huge chunk that I either forward to other people or probably don't get a response.
Q: What's a piece of gear or tech you can't go without?
A: It would have to be my phone. I'm one of those people that will sit on my phone doing emails while sitting right in front of my laptop.
- I could probably do without most other technologies.
- I'm actually a pretty late adopter to most new gadgets and gizmos. I am a fan of my stretching bands, especially as I get older, and you can bring them with you easily.
Q: What advice would you give your younger self?
A: I won't give you a pithy answer like, "Buy Bitcoin."
- My advice to my younger self would be to focus on the "life" part of "work-life balance" probably a little bit earlier than I did.
