No sensationalism, just facts and context. 
More Stanford grads are finding jobs and purpose in defense tech
Stanford University has long been a feeder for the neighboring tech industry with graduates often heading to a brand name of Silicon Valley.
But the times, they are a-changin’, according to writer Jasmine Sun. She reported recently for the San Francisco Standard that building tech for the military has become cool on campus. One student, Divya, said her “most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir.”
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Sun about how this shift compares to when she attended Stanford in the late 2010s.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Jasmine Sun: 2017 to 2019 was during [President Donald] Trump’s first administration, and so there was a movement called #NoTechForIce that was sort of an alliance between a lot of campus activists, at Stanford and elsewhere, and an advocacy group called Mijente that worked on immigrant issues, and they were working with student activists on campus to do things like flyer career fairs, telling people not to work for Palantir because of their contracts with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], not to work for Salesforce, because of their contracts with the [Customs and Border Patrol Agency.] And even when I talked to Divya, you know, like she acknowledged very much, like even in her few years at Stanford, sort of the vibe had shifted around how folks talked about Palantir. And this is something that I’ve actually noticed from early career folk who I know, two students I know who, when they were undergrads, would never work for Palantir. Now that they’re a few years out of their careers, they’re considering that.
Meghan McCarty Carino: Yeah, tell me more about the shift that you reported on at Stanford. Is this kind of a small group of students? How would you sort of quantify how big of a shift this is, and what did you find?
Sun: It’s always hard to quantify cultural trends. And I wouldn’t say this is the majority of students, right, but among students who are interested in startups and technology or in political and geopolitical issues, I think it’s a lot. So a few numbers to give are, when I was on campus, there was no defense-focused career fair. Literally, the defense companies at the normal career fairs would get protested. Now there is a exclusively defense-focused career fair that just started last year, and 300 students showed up. There’s a new conference called DEFCON that comes out of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. This is for students who are interested in defense and technology, and they, I believe, got 1,000 students and folks around the campus community showing up last year. So that’s a pretty substantial portion of the populace. It’s definitely a big increase in what I see.
McCarty Carino: And what do you think accounts for this shift in attitudes?
Sun: I would say there’s a few factors. So one is that the geopolitical situation has changed a lot, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as China’s rise and the perception of China’s rise as a near-peer competitor to the United States. These were two forces that I think students started to pay more attention to that gave them a greater sense of mission. I remember one interesting thing that a student told me was like, before, you might see defense as a more right-coded thing, but after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that was something that motivated even more liberal-leaning students to think, well, sovereignty is sovereignty, like we should help the little guys, and that’s a really important role that a Stanford student might have.
There has been more venture capital money that’s flowing into the defense sector. And you know, Stanford has a really vibrant startup ecosystem and always has. And so a16z [Andreessen Horowitz], for example, which is one of the biggest VC firms, they had an American Dynamism fund that was started in the last few years. They’ve been pouring in several hundred million dollars every year focused just on national security. And then the final thing that I’ll say is that the job market for both Big Tech like Google, Meta, etc, as well as for these consumer companies like the Ubers and Airbnbs has slowed down quite a bit. And so there are not as many new-grad junior software engineers [openings] for things like that. And so folks are just looking elsewhere. People want to get jobs. And at least one student told me, for example, that she did not want to work in a military tech role, but she hadn’t gotten any other job offers, and she was trying to decide, yeah, how to reconcile that for herself.
McCarty Carino: So what defense tech companies are students going to work for? And what do these companies do?
Sun: I would say that the big three are Anduril, Palantir and SpaceX. These are the unicorns that we have, the biggest in the sector. Anduril builds autonomous weapon systems. Palantir, primarily, they do a lot of like surveillance, data fusion and some targeting work for the government as well as nongovernment entities. And then SpaceX is Elon Musk’s space company. But there are a lot of new startups now as well. I believe Vannevar Labs is a intelligence startup. Shield AI, which I believe is also an autonomous weapons startup, was one I’ve heard mentioned, and I think there are a lot of new startups in the drone space as well.
McCarty Carino: Several students you spoke with kind of described defense tech work as more meaningful, more mission driven, than working in consumer tech. What did you make of that?
Sun: So when I was on campus, it started in 2017, this was sort of peak techlash, right? And so it’s the moment when a lot of people around the technology industry, from Stanford campus to Silicon Valley, are realizing, “Oh, shoot, maybe it’s not so good that we’re sending a lot of our best and brightest students to make this ad algorithm a tiny bit better.” And so after, I would say, like a decade of people feeling really disappointed with the technologies that we’re sending people to go work on, whether that’s ads or gambling or whatever, I think a lot of folks just want to work on something that seems harder and more important and more critical to the well-being of many people around the world. Obviously, I think there are a lot of differing beliefs and values that people hold about, like what role does the U.S. military play in global well-being? But, you know, you gotta say that it’s true, that it’s a harder and a more important problem than optimizing another ad.
As Jasmine Sun mentioned, defense startups are seeing a surge of private investment. Crunchbase reports that companies like Eprius, which designs tech to counter drones, and Shield AI, a developer of autonomous systems for the defense and aerospace sectors, received hundreds of millions of dollars earlier this month, making them some of the biggest winners in the venture space in recent weeks.
Pitchbook estimates defense tech companies have sucked up about $1.5 billion in investments just this year and about $9 billion last year.
As The Washington Post pointed out in a piece last year, it may be a reversal from the past few decades of tech culture, but it’s a return to Silicon Valley’s roots, which are deeply entwined with defense. The military was the major investor in early electronics, radar, computing and the internet, often spinning off from research conducted at Stanford.
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