Episode #65, Fireside with a VC speaking with Alex Moore, 1st employee of Palantir ($14.5bn market cap), cofounder of Backplane (one of my investments), cofounder of Nodeprime (one of my investments), Partner at 8VC with $6bn+ of AUM discussing:

• Early days of Palantir up to today where he is a board member

• Focusing on defense related tech startups when most of Silicon Valley did not or does not want to support the U.S. defense industry

• Creating startups with a dual defense + commercial revenue / customer model

• Selling into government / intelligence / military

• Culture of recruiting engineers and founders to focus on military / defense tech

• Startups leveraging data in vertical models

• Venture Studio / incubation models that work within the VC machine, ownership models, founder equity, engineering equity / ESOP pool, attracting follow on funding from classic VCs

• Vesting schedules for founders and employees

• How to retain high value engineers and employees

• Valuations in today’s current market for funding and exits

• How many months runway should startups raise for in today’s uncertain market

• How real is the conflict between the West and Russia & China

• Working with Joe Lonsdale & Peter Thiel

• Opportunity to build software for most of the economy that is not leveraging technology yet, but must

• How the demise of crypto is good for real tech startups

• What makes a great entrepreneur and what makes a fundable founding team

• Succeeding in the current economic environment and growing individual careers

Video on Spotify and YouTube https://youtu.be/SScCtPD_awE.

Audio on all podcast platforms - https://anchor.fm/FiresideVC.

Special thanks to Mark diTargiani & the Venture Debt & Startup Banking team at Pacific Western Bank for sponsoring this episode. https://www.linkedin.com/in/markditargiani/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/romans/

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