SVRGN Weekly Digest #52 💫
Longer writing, happy days
Good news everyone! I’ve officially recovered from and caught up with most things since postponing virtually every call for “after the Hackathon”. For those into metrics, check out the health indication of my HRV below…
Either way, now that the dust has settled, we can look back at the hackathon with pride. In the last year, we’ve built a tech-driven “do tank” for European defense. It feels more relevant today than ever before. Coming in as outsiders to the defense industry, we’ve been warmly welcomed and received such encouragement that it’s impossible not to continue. Is this what product-market fit feels like?
During my opening speech at the Munich defense tech hackathon we ran in parallel to the Munich Security Conference (no endorsement or affiliation either direction to be clear), I wanted to drive home three reasons “Why” and one ask for “How” hackers and members should participate.
The “Why” is a very clear story made up of long-lasting trends reinforced by headlines I pulled from 24h before the talk:
1/ We are already at war (whether we’ve realized or not) and it’s likely to continue
2/ The numbers are not on our side - Russia outspends and outmans non-Ukraine Europe any day and are replenishing the arsenals
3/ We can not count on the US to save us - in fact, as highlighted this past week, relying on the US is a liability
The “How” is a request and an imperative. Nothing else will work. We can only use our technological superiority and adoption thereof - we can not control much else. And for this innovation to matter, it must be built at a monumental scale. In fact I refer to a local Monument in Munich - Bavaria, lady of the state. She watches of the place of the Oktoberfest, wearing a bear skin from a bear she killed, she’s carrying a sword, next to her is a pet lion and she’s triumphantly waving a wreath. Pretty bad ass. It was built to remind the people of Bavaria of the bravery and achievements. To unite them against a potential enemy.
Our modern monuments will need to look differently. Symbolism and memes will matter, but achievements of what it represents will matter more. Hence, we need to create the achievements to be proud of, and create that memetic matter, the genetic code from which pride is built. This can only arise from insanely ambitious endeavors.
That was my plead to the 400 participants in Munich, and to you.
If you decide to take this up, and build a monumental idea with tech. Let me know and I will do everything in my power to make it come true.
As guests to the event we had the CTO of Helsing - Robert Fink, who’s been supporting the mission in action since the beginning, members of the Ukrainian parliament, representation from 3rd Assault Brigade of the AFU, veterans from other European militaries, Florian Seibel, founder of Quantum Systems, and literally hundreds of other extremely talented people. We have more work to do, much more, but I am extremely proud of what we’ve achieved. Thanks to Benjamin Wolba and the EDTH team, as well as our partners who make it possible.
Sifted wrote about the event here, and Anne quoted me here on something i said during the event.
🤼 People
Ifa Reist - Venture Partner at Protego Ventures
Ifa has been running business and investing into them for the last decade and currently acts as venture partner with Protego Ventures, a new VC in Israel investing mainly in defense tech. She and I spoke about the recent Munich Security Conference, as well as developments in Israel within the tech and VC community.
🚀 Companies
Check out the winners of the hackathon and their brief explanations here → they’re all cool for obvious reasons. But there were also 39 other teams who were cool for other reasons. We’ll try and support the ones who wish to continue post-hackathon and get them in contact with talent, customers, users.
💡 Ideas & Science
A terrifying, easy to read, entertaining story of the next world war. It’s written by former Admiral of the US Navy, James G. Stavridis and Elliott Ackerman so has the appropriate level of military jargon if you’re into that. Thanks Claudio Flores for the recommendation! I’ve started 2054, the sequel already!
Nathan Mintz runs a great blog, go read his piece on hiring veterans. Here’s a quote from this piece on Technology Readiness Levels and why the concept doesn’t work that well in implementation.
“There are several reasons why the TRL scale no longer make sense. Building hardware today, thanks to technical innovations like reprogrammable ICs (FPGAs, GPUs), 3D printers, rapid simulation tools and CAD/CAM techniques, has never been easier. It’s about as hard to build hardware today as it was to write software when I started my career 20 years ago. Software is even easier: nowadays there are so many libraries, open source tools and APIs, not to mention AI copilots that are just starting to see widespread adoption, that your average software engineer is 10x more productive than they were then”
The Gigabit Wall: No More Need for Speed
Spicy take: we don’t need faster than 1Gbps mobile internet!