From recruiting for Palantir to landing a plane on Highway 85: meet defense tech’s wildest power broker

In 2023, defense technology recruiter Peterson Conway VIII pulled into the offices of nuclear fusion startup Fuse in a black suburb, wearing his signature cowboy hat. He hired a recent fuse and proceeded to regale him with stories of his old recruiting days. In one story prostitutes attended a recruitment event (“not for sex,” Conway clarified to TechCrunch).

The new hire was not happy. “I thought I said it in a funny way,” Conway sighed, admitting that she was “an a-hole.”

Fuse founder JC Btaiche caught wind of the conversation and agreed, immediately firing Conway — though Btaiche told TechCrunch that telling the prostitution story wasn’t the only inappropriate thing Conway had done.

But Conway, who has become one of the defense technology industry’s behind-the-scenes power brokers, hasn’t let go of the fuse. Conway has recruited for some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent defense and hard tech firms over the past decade, such as Palantir and Mach Industries. He spent nearly half a decade recruiting for Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC and its portfolio companies, and since last year, has been head of talent at venture firm A*.

So even after being fired, Conway offered to pitch candidates and take flights in his private jet to prospects or “fly them into the desert,” Conway said. A few months later, Fuse reinstated Conway. He now employs more than seven people at Fuse, including Fuse’s chief strategy officer, Laura Thomas, a former CIA officer.

In many ways, Conway is a stand-in for the entire industry: rich, determined, prone to incredible storytelling and, by all accounts, brilliant. According to dozens of people TC interviewed for this story, Conway has been extremely successful at luring extremely talented people away from stable jobs and into startup life. “There’s a line between crazy and genius,” Btaiche said. “And I think he’s right on that line.”

As defense technology funding increased About $3 billion Last year, Conway set out to convince the next generation to help build new-age nuclear reactors, or AI-powered weapons.

“There’s a whole community of young people in the Valley, often working in the defense sector or national security or very ambitious, difficult things,” says Gregory Dorman, a recent Princeton graduate who worked with entrepreneur and A* partner Kevin Hartz on his new security startup Sauron. Thanks for the introduction Conway. “And they’re there because of Peterson.”

“Does not comply” with safety regulations

Conway’s signature move is to fly candidates in his small plane. “I like to joke that I make them sick until they accept the terms of our contract,” he said.

I first met him at an airport in San Carlos, California, shortly before I boarded his small two-seater airplane that had been purchased on loan. Palantir’s CTO Shyam Shankar A small sign in the cockpit warned me: “This airplane is an experimental light-sport airplane and does not comply with federal safety regulations for standard airplanes.”

A few minutes later, we were soaring over the shimmering San Francisco Bay as Conway recounted her fictional life story. Her father, Peterson Conway, avoided the seventh draft, sold LSD in Tokyo, and eventually moved to Afghanistan in the 70s with Conway’s mother, a Mormon school teacher. After a series of escapades across the Middle East and Africa, they moved to Carmel to raise Conway and her brother, but eventually divorced.

“My dad threw himself over there,” Conway said quietly as we climbed over the Golden Gate Bridge. He then explained that the suicide attempt had failed. His father was caught in the net and is alive and well today, selling antiques in his Carmel shop.

Conway rebelled against his father and briefly pursued normalcy, attending Dartmouth to study economics. But after college, in the early 2000s, he found himself a recruiter.

In Conway’s version of events, he was riding his motorcycle around San Francisco, a cowboy looking for office space. He found a warehouse with a ramp, rode it straight to Hertz. At the time, Hertz was in the early stages of building Xoom, a fintech service for international money transfers that was eventually bought by PayPal.

Conway said Hertz asked him if he had any skills. “Nothing,” Conway replied. “But I can bring lunch. I am a decent writer. I had an Airstream trailer — I thought, we could go surfing.”

“It’s completely false,” Hertz laughed when I asked him about the story. According to Hertz, Conway rented office space in the same building, and that’s how he began recruiting for Xoom and later PayPal’s larger crowd.

When PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel launched Palantir in 2003, Conway was in the right place at the right time and began recruiting for the firm. Conway apparently had no official title at the defense agency, “but ‘just Peterson,'” as a defense tech “recognized artist in the style of Prince or Madonna,” joked Gabe Rosen, 8VC’s resident humanities scholar who worked with Conway at Palantir. . .

Palantir sent Conway around the world to build his international team. According to Conway, the company wanted employees with an “inner compass and conviction,” who followed the values ​​they grew up with and forged their own path.

For example, Conway claimed to receive messages such as “Find me a Jew who married a Christian out of Australia who happened to be gay”. Palantir had no comment.

Conway was known to get the attention of employers by sending handwritten letters with wax seals. His approach was successful, landing people like Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and many of Palantir’s international recruits.

Unconventional method

Last summer, Conway and her father flew to the Mojave Desert in a Hertz airplane borrowed for the event. Like some kind of American dynamism mirage, they saw a swarm of young men mounting a drone on the back of a truck.

It was a test session for Mack Industries, an arms company founded by Ethan Thornton at the age of 19. Mach is one of a handful of defense and hardware companies that have hired Conway as head of talent at A*. Mach has been raised ever since $80 million from investors such as Bedrock and Sequoia Capital.

While those men set up orange cones and explosive devices for their engineering experiments, Conway took the men on a tour of Hertz’s plane. “He hit the ground so hard, so many times, landed in the Mojave,” Hertz sighed. “Everything came loose.” Conway denied Hertz’s account, saying the plane was just “pretty dirty” and that he was missing a window covering.

According to Conway, he hired SpaceX alum Gabriela Hobe and Fasil Mulatu Kero, Mac’s vice president of manufacturing and a former Tesla employee. “Ethan probably paid me over a million dollars to do what I do for him,” Conway said, though he later denied the figure.

It seems everyone in the defense technology industry has an eye-opening story about Conway. Once, after Conway ordered an Uber and hit it off with the driver, he surprised a founder by setting him up with a ride and asking the founder to interview for a job.

Another time, Fuse founder Bitaiche said Conway left a Porsche at the airport with the keys for a recruiter, then a government contractor, to drive when he touched down. The company later clarified that it was a four-seater Porsche, loaned to the candidate so the company could save money on Ubers.

The candidate drove to their meeting in the Porsche and ended the day at Conway’s home, a sprawling compound in the wealthy California coastal town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, which housed his father’s antiques and animals from his hunting expeditions. Conway hosts regular dinners for candidates there (her father cooks), as well as parties, from Joe Lonsdale’s birthday bash to Shankar’s wedding, according to Conway.

But Btaiche says Conway’s real superpower isn’t her stunts, but rather her ability to “talk about candidates in a more human way than just looking at resumes and credentials.”

To hire Fuse, Conway Bitaiche thought that nurturing could create someone who could lead a team, or bring new ideas to engineers; As a result, they sought out people from rural areas, raised as athletes and those who are obsessed with gaming.

As for the winning candidates, Btaiche said Conway sold people out on protecting America. “If you’re working on something that’s really mission-driven,” he said, “I think Peterson can deliver that story.”

Dorman, one of those who had the Conway experience, was a philosophy major at Princeton debating between a career in the Valley or New York when he met the famous recruiter. Conway convinced him to choose the Valley. “Peterson convinces people that there is actually a lot of adventure out there,” he said.

Conway has styled himself as a cowboy in the Valley for years, and now the rest of the tech may have finally caught up. He applauds the current interest in American dynamism, a term coined by Andreessen Horowitz for government-linked companies. “It’s just perfect. It’s right on the border of fanaticism,” Conway said. “It’s become its own religion.”

Power of the main character

There’s a common theme to how people describe Conway: a genius, a dominant player in defense technology and an occasional liability.

For example, a few days after I flew on his plane, he called me and asked, “Did you see the news?”

Earlier in the day, Conway took a 6 a.m. flight from the Carmel area to Silicon Valley. In the predawn darkness, Conway failed to take out a flashlight while checking his fuel gauge and, as a result, misread the gauge. “I made a guess that was purely pilot error,” he said. As he was flying, he realized he didn’t have enough in the tank to get to the nearest airport.

Conway frames the story to me in mythic proportions: a fork in his path, a choice between good and evil. As he recounts it, he initially thought his best chance of survival was to land on the sports field at a nearby school. “I was afraid that a kid was no match for a propeller,” he said.

So he chose to land his plane on Highway 85, hoping it would be safer for drivers. Miraculously, his two-seater skidded onto the concrete, leaving Conway and surrounding cars unharmed.

Conway then warned me that I was a hair’s breadth from a similar fate. “If we had flown any further, we would have run out of gas,” he said.

It wasn’t quite true; He told me later that he flew the plane at least once after our flight. But he paints our journey in an existential light, making it unforgettable. After spending days with him (and the next two months verifying many of his exaggerations), I learned that Conway is unique in his epic storytelling skills. This is why he gets hired by so many amazing companies. and shot. And then reassigned again.

As Dorman puts it, “He’s a super unorthodox recruiter.” Still, he is “better than any other recruiter”.