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But Apple has pledged to put $275 billion as one company into Chinese manufacturing. You have one company putting in more than five times as much money into manufacturing advanced technology as what is supposed to be a landmark piece of U.S. legislation.
all the people at Apple who are working on an iPhone that can be sold to the U.S. Air Force, that same iPhone is also being sold to Russian intelligence. That same iPhone is being sold to the Chinese Navy.
The nice thing about this is that when we go to customers we're not going to them with a white paper saying hey let the taxpayers pay for us to try this out for years and years We say we've already proven that this works It will not be a boondoggle for you It will work We go to them with a working system with a full technical
So we use our own money to decide what to build how to build it when it's done we're building our own products and when we're going to the customer we're not going to them First of all I can't just build whatever I want I can't build a Batmobile and then try to sell it to the army but we talk to them about their problems they understand their problems
So I mean we just won a billion dollar contract with US SOCOM Special Operations Command to do counter drone work
And so at Andrel, one of the ways that we've been able to get around this is just being very clear. Like, you are signing up to work with the Department of Defense. That is the mission that you're signing up for. And I mean, we're about a third U.S. service veterans at Andrel, which is higher than any company that I'm aware of. And we're about 1,000 people now.
I think that building, working in national security has been a great filter where people aren't going to come work for you unless they're okay working in a bit of a controversial field. I'm actually somewhat concerned about the Ukraine conflict in that regard in that in the making, in making defense mainstream, it makes it possible for people to potentially say, oh, that isn't controversial now. I'm going to go to this place and then I'm going to potentially attack people for their views. But I
I was able to create Andrel because a small group of people were willing to give me a second chance to let me build something great in an important but controversial industry that was being constantly berated by people who thought we lived at the end of history. They invested in me while Jason was trying to poison my career and keep me on the ground. Thank God he failed. Thank God for investors who ignore him and people like him.
as a tiny defense company making a handful of purely defensive base security systems that committed the crime of building technology for the military, Anderl was the one that claimed the belt for the world's most controversial technology company.
There was a really interesting cover story in Bloomberg in 2019 that called us tech's most controversial startup.
when I started Andrel, I had already sold the company for billions of dollars and investors still didn't want to invest. I still had a tough time in a lot of meetings with venture capitalists and none of the conversations with VCs that I had were about my ability to hire or execute or build products. Everyone believed that I could do those things, even the ones who didn't like me much. The vast majority of conversations that we had were about whether or not it was even ethically okay to ever bui