In 2017, Brian Schimpf was in the California desert with an engineering problem to solve.
The place was Apple Valley, expansive, sandy, and surreal. Schimpf—CEO and cofounder of Anduril, then a startup in the truest sense of the word—had been there for a while, building the defense tech company’s first product: autonomous, solar-powered surveillance towers, called Sentry towers. And things got Coen brothers-movie weird.
“We were operating out of this mobile office trailer,” Schimpf remembers. “It was really in the middle of the desert. You’d find abandoned boats out there. Once, there was this dude who showed up with a backhoe. We asked what he was up to, and he told us ‘oh, I’m just moving some dirt.’ He just moved some dirt around, and then he left.”
You have to imagine it was a time warp for Schimpf: Just a few months before, after all, he’d been director of engineering at Palantir. And here’s the thing—Schimpf and I talked for hours as I wrote the profile of him that’s now the cover story of our latest digital issue (and that will be in Fortune’s next print issue). By my count, we were easily in double-digit time, and he was uniformly dry-humored and even-keeled. We covered everything from his college days, to criticisms of how Anduril drones have performed in Ukraine, to his views on AI. But talking about Apple Valley, he was downright gleeful. Perhaps, deep down, there’s always part of him solving engineering problems in the middle of nowhere.
“It was a 45-minute round trip to get to the nearest Jersey Mike’s,” he laughs. “So much Jersey Mike’s.”
Anduril’s come very far since those days, the company valued at $30.5 billion and counting, with increasing traction at the Pentagon (albeit with a long way to go on many fronts). Though Palmer Luckey has been most publicly associated with Anduril’s ascension, there’s a colorful team of cofounders, including Schimpf, who’s been the CEO from the jump.
The stakes are only getting higher for Anduril and Schimpf from here, says Philip Clark, partner at Anduril-backer Thrive.
“The world is theirs to lose,” Clark tells Fortune. “What’s the world in which Anduril doesn’t do well? Where they’re asked to do something well and they don’t execute. The most important thing from here is that Anduril shows it can deliver results in tests and in combat. They’ve shown this in small ways, and it’s about the big swings from here.”
There are lots of reasons this story had to be written now. There’s Anduril’s reported raise that will effectively double the company’s valuation. There’s the war in Iran, which has revealed pressures (to say the least) on American munitions. There’s the relentless sense that these are not normal geopolitical times, and that true global stability is not a future we can bank on.
It’s also the first profile of Schimpf of this ilk, looking through his eyes at the cusp of evolving warfare and what a new kind of war might mean for us all.
See you Monday,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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