OSD 320: Startups we want to see
Requests for civilian defense startups.
People often ask what kinds of companies we want to invest in. The intuitive guess is usually “guns and gun accessories”. But there are two issues that can affect those kinds of companies.
First, it’s rare for them to really scale up. The math on early-stage investing only works if a company’s value can grow by something like 25x or more. The higher the risk, the higher the growth ceiling needs to be. A startup whose ceiling is 5-10x growth might well be an awesome company, but just not a viable target for outside investment.
Second, civilian defense is about much more than guns and gun accessories. It applies to anything that increases individuals’ capacity for self-determination. It also applies to any advance that civilian defense builders could build on top of. That is a lot of surface area, and we’d miss most of it if we focused exclusively on any one technology. Like, for example, if we focused “just” on firearms.
Here is a list of things we’d like to fund. This is not an exhaustive list. If you’re working on other applicable things, please do reach out. This list is just meant to say that if you are working on something on the list and you have an excellent team, we are particularly likely to want to work with you.
Fire control unit as platform. This was the promise of the P320, but it hasn’t come to fruition. Imagine an FCU that was managed like an operating system, with transparent versioning and an ecosystem of companies innovating on top of it. That’s a compelling product both for the platform owner (even with an open-source platform) and for the developers on the platform.
Fire-by-wire. This would be the biggest innovation in firearms since John Browning. That’s because it would make a big chunk of the operation of a gun controllable from software, not hardware. We see from every other field that when control moves from hardware to software, innovation takes off. That take-off can be dramatic. For a long time in areas governed by Moore’s law, the acceleration was itself accelerating. This would be transformative for firearms, which have functioned basically the same for more than 100 years.
Guns without gunpowder. Fire-by-wire is a start. This takes things the rest of the way, moving almost the entire gun from hardware to software. This is exciting for the same reasons as fire-by-wire, but even more so. The physics problems here are harder, too.
Next-gen suppressor technology. Pew Science is to the suppressor industry as the UFC was to traditional martial arts. When a field gets tested for real, you find out quickly what actually works. There are a few problems we’re excited to see solved:
Cost. Three pounds of Inconel 718 costs around $120. By the time that’s machined down into a one-pound suppressor, the retail price is 10x higher. There’s a lot of room for improvement there. We’re looking for design, manufacturing, and supply chain improvements that bring prices down dramatically for top-quality cans.
New designs. CAT came out of nowhere with a low-back-pressure can that had minimal tradeoffs. Reflex cans, integral cans, and other old ideas have mostly not yet been revisited by modern suppressor startups. Additive manufacturing, computational fluid dynamics, and AI-aided design are still in their relative infancy in the field. And this is all happening against a backdrop where silencer sales increased 80% last year and consumers have never been more interested. There are likely large performance gains still undiscovered.
Mounts. The HUB system has improved things a bit, but a layperson still cannot reliably mount a suppressor, let alone do so without specialized tools.
Augmented reality and smart optics. There’s something swirling at the intersection of augmented reality headsets, AI, and gun optics. That gets particularly exciting when you combine it with fire-by-wire. We don’t know what this will look like yet, but we’d be very surprised if it’s not a key aspect of using guns within 20 years.
Digital night vision. It’s not going to be better than analog in the next few years, but that may not matter. Tech that starts out as a toy often has insurmountable cost advantages, and as it gets better, it relegates the legacy tech to fewer and fewer niche use cases.
The layers of home defense before the gun. Think of a layered home defense system. Moving outward from the center, each layer gets used an order of magnitude more often. There’s the gun at the center. One layer out from that is what happens if someone kicks in your door. Another layer out is a suspicious person at the door. One more layer out is an innocuous person at the door. One more layer, a car entering the driveway. One more layer, a car driving past. And so on. There’s a lot you can do across these layers with drones, AI, and/or better home automation software. Ditto with coordinating efforts across a neighborhood or geographic area.
De-institutionalized medical equipment. AEDs should be cheap enough that there’s one in every car, home, and workplace. But instead, they cost $1000 and work like they were designed in the early ‘90s. Generally, any medical equipment involving electronics is stuck in the past. This has started to change with things like fitness trackers that have ECGs and headphones that can double as hearing aids. But there’s much further to go, especially in emergency medicine.
Comms and coordination. How can you communicate with your neighbors and coordinate efforts? Think disaster situations, but also think about day-to-day scenarios, like a near future where your drones might want to autonomously coordinate. We’re interested in things that make group chats spill into the real world.
Are you working on any of the above? Reach out.
This week’s links
”Gun Rights as Deontic Constraints”
From the always-interesting Michael Huemer. He wrote a great paper in 2003 called “Is There a Right to Own a Gun?”
“Applying Combatant Status Under the International Law of Armed Conflict to the Domestic Militia System of the United States”
Interesting piece from a 2017 edition of the Military Law Review. Thanks to @Hoffnung on Discord for the link.
“Periodicals of the Modern US Militia”
Speaking of @Hoffnung, here’s the latest from his fiction series Dreams of the Future 2nd Amendment.
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As a Coloradoan, who's getting bent over and raped twice a year by new oppressive firearm laws, I've been hoping to hear something good come out of Trump or Bondi or Patel, or the Supreme Court. But engaging rationality, you've convinced me that we shouldn't expect them to come save us.
So, given that culture is upstream of these laws I wonder what it would be like if there were a national-scale outreach program digging in to anti-2A enclaves and finding people to take to the range. A counter narrative to the relentless FUD people in cities like Denver get from the news, educators, and politicians.
You know, what the NRA should have been years and years ago.
I have no idea what the financial model would be, but the program would look like a partnership between area ranges and this org, in order to get people used to the idea of a firearm as a tool that can be completely controlled by them, and used safely. And above all, fun.
One of the long term goals would be to get involved with schools, with a message somehow tailored towards safety, showing kids how to responsibly handle firearms, and building a culture against firearm misuse.
I don't know if this would ever be a "profit center" for investment, more like a "cost center". What do you think? Does this align at all with investment goals? Do you see anyone doing something like this on a small scale?
Whether or not there's an investment opportunity, the cultural payoff could be enormous.