Garry Tan

The Pentagon's 300-page RFP "was designed for a lawyer and a lobbyist and a prime contractor to know how to fill out." That's Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research & Engineering, saying it out loud to a room full of founders at our Startup Industrial Base event in DC today. A 10-person startup reads 300 pages, gets one thing wrong, gets kicked out. Or survives and grinds through 3, 6, 9, 12 month rounds until it's two years in. Meanwhile the prime has a team whose whole job is filling out every page perfectly. Emil’s fix? Write a one pager not 300. "I need to fly a missile 500 miles in this kind of environment." If your payload won't work, you hear that fast. Target is 90 days. Drone Dominance runs the same way. Apply, top 20 go to a fly-off, objective metrics, cuts every round, and he says half a billion dollars of orders at the end. "I'd rather know if I lose and why." Miss round one and there are more rounds coming, and "it'll be 2 or 3" winners, not one. Cost per intercept is the game now. Shoot down a $50k drone with a Patriot missile and "the math doesn't math." He's funding directed energy and high power microwave that cost thousands, not millions. The tech was never what kept startups out. The 300 pages were. Two pages and a fly-off means the best product can actually win, and the prime has to compete like everyone else.