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The Tech Bros Powering Silicon Valley’s Military Fever Dream With Energy Drinks, God And Nicotine
Illustration by Philip Smith for Forbes
Venture investors like Andreessen Horowitz are swooning over the so-called “Gundo Bros,” who are building American hardware and software companies near LAX airport.
By
David Jeans and Sarah Emerson, Forbes Staff
InFebruary, hundreds of people converged on Sand Hill Road for a party thrown by Andreessen Horowitz and the defense contractor Anduril to send a loud message: America is under threat and now is the time to build.
Many attendees were tracking the arrival of a group of mostly male twenty-something entrepreneurs who call themselves the “Gundo Bros.” They were posting live updates of their journey on a party bus from El Segundo, the neighborhood adjacent to LAX airport and home to major defense contractors. Sporting mullets, chewing on nicotine pouches, and crushing energy drinks, the group sang patriotic songs while charging up the Pacific 101 Highway. At one point, they stopped on the side of the road to pray — and to launch a drone. Tracking their antics from afar on X, A16z founder Marc Andreessen spurred them on: “Drive faster, the party’s starting!”
The “Unofficial Stanford Defense Tech Kickoff Party” was advertised as a public rebuke to the university, where, weeks earlier, a student panel at the Stanford Graduate School of Business had denied an application to form a defense tech club.
In the years since an employee revolt at Google prompted the tech giant to drop a major Pentagon contract in 2016, venture capital firms have responded by pouring more than $100 billion into defense tech companies, giving rise to a new generation of military-facing startups led by colorful, patriotic founders like Palmer Luckey, the billionaire founder of Anduril known for donning aloha shirts, a mullet and signature goatee.
In Luckey’s mold, the “Gundo” delegation has emerged as the face of this trend, loudly promoting their new flavor of Silicon Valley hustle. They pump iron while they code, host weekly bonfires on the beach, and shotgun energy drinks. They’re calling for a return to America’s hardware-building roots in El Segundo, where pioneers like Jack Northrop and Allan Lockheed built the pillars of America’s arsenal. And they embrace
Effective Accelerationism, a philosophy that calls for technology to advance no matter the cost (and which counts Andreessen as its poster endorser).
Entrepreneur Isaiah Taylor, who started his nuclear reactor company, Valar Atomics, in El Segundo last summer, described the “Gundo founder” zeitgeist as, essentially, a 1950’s cigarette ad.
“The vibe is that America is back, dudes rock, nicotine is good actually, we’re going to the moon again (and Mars), we’re tired of only software companies coming out of America,” he wrote in a message to Forbes. “It’s good and awesome to defend our country and to build weapon systems that do that.”
3:30 AM AND THE ENERGY IS UP AMERICA HAS NEVER BEEN SO BACK
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It helps that the vibe is also endorsed by a $500 million fund launched by Andreessen last year in support of “
American Dynamism,” the belief that American companies should be building America’s future. General partner Katherine Boyle debuted the term two years ago in a manifesto arguingthat the American superpower was in decline, kneecapped by special interest groups, regulatory capture and “perverse structural incentives.” (Last year, lobbyists for the venture firm spent more than $1 million targeting lawmakers, and Andreessen employees separately donatedmore than $20 million to recent political campaigns.) Led by Boyle and fellow partner David Ulevitch, the fund has pledged to invest in sectors like defense, aerospace and public safety, and has become a powerful credo for young founders hoping their creations will shape the future of war.
(Andreessen Horowitz and Boyle declined to comment.)
Got a tip? Contact reporters David Jeans at djeans@forbes.com or 347-559-5443 on Signal, and Sarah Emerson at semerson@forbes.com or 510-473-8820 on Signal.
While Andreessen Horowitz is perhaps the most devout supporter of the Gundo bros —
“I love you all!”Andreessen recently enthused — other investors like Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia who has backed multiple defense tech companies like Mach Industries, have cheered the movement as well. “Just tell me where to wire,” Maguire postedon X remarking on the party bus scenes. John Coogan, entrepreneur-in-residence at Founders Fund, made a video tourwith founders of the neighborhood: “American innovation in hardware is making a comeback, and it’s happening in El Segundo.” This month, some El Segundo founders were even praised in a Tucker Carlson segmentfor having rejected “the lies of liberal modernity.”
“Not everyone is going to be attracted to our unapologetic style.”
Not everyone has been so enthusiastic. Online commentators
have wonderedabout the movement’s glaring gender disparity. One source familiar with the El Segundo defense tech scene estimated that at one event there were just two women in a scrum of 150 hackers.
Another noted the same issue, but claimed the Gundo bros are not representative of the larger landscape.
Taylor acknowledged there have been few women at their hackathons but dismissed this as simple self-selection.“Anybody literally in the world can show up to our bonfires, and talk about defense tech,” he said. “Its opt in, right? Not everyone is going to be attracted to our unapologetic style of saying like, ‘you should build missiles or rockets because this country is great or worth defending.’”
This batch of young startups wasn’t first to El Segundo, a 5.5 square mile lot abutting LAX airport with a long history of powering American industry. Standard Oil, now Chevron,
credits itselfwith founding the town where, on a plot of land in 1911, it established its second (or “segundo”) oil refinery after outgrowing its Bay Area facilities. The refinery still occupies more than half of the neighborhood, which became an aircraft manufacturing hub during World War II. Today, some of its largest employers are Boeing, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.
But the neighborhood’s counter-Silicon Valley culture has been bubbling away since the arrival of SpaceX in 2002 and Anduril in 2017, both overseen by leaders — Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey — who now reject many of Silicon Valley’s conventions.
Though he did not found Tesla, Musk
has claimedthe idea for an electric car company came to him while at a fish restaurant in El Segundo, and the city ishappy to be a part of these origin stories. “You had SpaceX move here and all these bright people in the industry have gone on to do these incredible things, it’s a resurgence,” El Segundo’s mayor Drew Boyles told Forbes. “What’s real is people are literally packing up and moving here.”
Doricko is a prototypical “Gundo” founder: religious, patriotic and swole. His X bio reads, “DM to discuss deadlifts #beastmode.”
One recent arrival is Augustus Doricko, a muscled, mulleted 23-year-old who dropped out of college to launch Rainmaker, a startup building drones and software that aim to change weather patterns by making clouds rain. Doricko, who has raised $1.5 million for his company, is a prototypical “Gundo” founder: religious, patriotic and swole. His X bio reads, “DM to discuss deadlifts
#beastmode.”
At a local cafe frequented by El Segundo entrepreneurs, Doricko said, over three sides of bacon, that the current Gundo psyche really coalesced after Andreessen Horowitz announced its American Dynamism fund last May, to invest in new hardware and software companies that serve America’s national security interests.
“They planted the seeds of the idea for which Im grateful,” he said. “But the narrative is totally beyond their control, and weve taken it and its ours now.” He described the ideal Gundo founder as “extremely intense. And cool, unlike the sort of hunchback quiet software founders notorious in San Francisco.”
At Doricko’s Rainmaker factory, nearly a dozen college-age entrepreneurs recently held a week-long event to draw up pitch decks for their companies. Jakob Diepenbrock, a student at Northeastern University who organized the gathering, packed a fridge with 50 pounds of ground beef and racks of Monster energy drinks to feed the group. “Fuel of legends,” the 20-year-old Diepenbrock told Forbes.
Among the attendees was Ulys Sorok, a University of Waterloo dropout who did a stint at Sam Altman’s crypto venture WorldCoin. He’s building a company he hopes will someday make “self-replicating machines.” “This is the type of vision that changes the literal trajectory of humanity,” Sorok said. “And Im excited to be on the forefront of what were doing.”
Some engineers in the area aren’t quite sure what to make of all this. “Whats on Twitter is not based in reality,” Chris Power, founder of Hadrian, which has raised more than $100 million and automates the manufacture of components for military hardware, told Forbes.
“Like all great momentum waves and venture capital, you gotta turn hype into reality,” he said. “And its mostly determined by how many of the founders are serious versus those that cant transition from a running start.”
Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Founders Fund who has
raised more than $180 millionfor his space drug-testing company Varda, recently said it more forcefully, dismissing a group of El Segundo-based entrepreneurs as “unserious people,” he wrote on X.“Go do something meaningful with your life before throwing stones.” (Asparouhov didn’t respond to a comment request.)
Just a few years ago, university campuses were protesting the recruiting efforts of defense contractors like Palantir. But conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and rising tensions with China, have made the idea of El Segundo a dog whistle for patriotic college students looking to build tech for the battlefield. Talking about defense in the classroom was a taboo, said Rasmus Dey Meyer, a Georgetown University student who hosted a hackathon in El Segundo earlier this year. Youd get eyes if you were seen as an advocate of the defense tech industry.
The hackathon was led by Dey Meyer’s company Apollo Defense, which he cofounded with Catarina Buchatskiy, Nathaniel Salander and Tommy Tietjen.
There, engineers toiled late into the night working on systems for the frontlines in Ukraine to be considered by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. Buchatskiy, an international relations student at Stanford who, last summer, trained alongside soldiers in Kyiv to become a licensed drone pilot, said the goal of the event was “to be mission oriented, which differentiated it from many of the hackathons we’re seeing,” she told Forbes. “In defense tech, you have to be building for something.”
In other words, there’s a sense of collective purpose. I think thats emblematic of the same American Dynamism-like, McCarthy-esque, nuclear family, supportive and integrated community thats representative of El Segundo at large,” Dey Meyer said.
But then there’s the spectacle of it all. The party bus, the beef-stuffed fridge, the bicep curls. To more seasoned entrepreneurs, its a potential distraction from the real business building at hand. Bryon Hargis, a former top SpaceX engineer who started a hypersonic missile company called Castelion last year, said he set up the company in El Segundo because of access to manufacturing talent. Hargis, who’s raised $14 million from Andreessen and last month oversaw the company’s
first weapons test, said he loves the energy of the scene, but he could do without the bluster.
“Having an excited new generation interested in American values is phenomenal,” Hargis said. Though “from our perspective, getting caught up in meme culture doesnt necessarily help us reach our super, super conservative customer. But God bless them.”
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Im a senior writer at Forbes covering AI, defense and national security. Im also the co-author of
WONDER BOY: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley, published by Henry Holt & Company. Contact me on Twitter at @davidjeans2 or email me at djeans@forbes.com. You can also send tips on Signal +1 347 559 5443.
Im an Oakland-based technology reporter and Senior Writer at Forbes. Contact me at semerson@forbes.com or securely on Signal at 510-473-8820.
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