Brian Schimpf has been quietly running Anduril since its earliest days. And once he’s talking, he has a lot to say |
Brian Schimpf has been quietly running Anduril since its earliest days. And once he’s talking, he has a lot to say
In 2017, Brian Schimpf was in the California desert with an engineering problem to solve.
The place was Apple Valley, expansive, sandy, and surreal. Schimpf—CEO and cofounder of Anduril, then a startup in the truest sense of the word—had been there for a while, building the defense tech company’s first product: autonomous, solar-powered surveillance towers, called Sentry towers. And things got Coen brothers-movie weird.
“We were operating out of this mobile office trailer,” Schimpf remembers. “It was really in the middle of the desert. You’d find abandoned boats out there. Once, there was this dude who showed up with a backhoe. We asked what he was up to, and he told us ‘oh, I’m just moving some dirt.’ He just moved some dirt around, and then he left.”
You have to imagine it was a time warp for Schimpf: Just a few months before, after all, he’d been director of engineering at Palantir. And here’s the thing—Schimpf and I talked for hours as I wrote the profile of him that’s now the cover story of our latest digital issue (and that will be in Fortune’s next print issue). By my count, we were easily in double-digit time, and he was uniformly dry-humored and even-keeled. We covered everything from his college days, to criticisms of how Anduril drones have performed in Ukraine, to his views on AI. But talking about Apple Valley, he was downright gleeful. Perhaps, deep down, there’s always part of him solving engineering problems in the middle of nowhere.
“It was a 45-minute round trip to get to the nearest Jersey Mike’s,” he laughs. “So much Jersey Mike’s.”
Anduril’s come very far since those days, the company........