\u2018This is existential\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n At a Hacking for Defense information session on a rainy February afternoon, about 20 students filed into Room C106 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Joe Felter, director of the Gordian Knot Center and former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, launched into a well-practiced spiel. \u201cIt\u2019s a dangerous world out there, so we need our best and brightest,\u201d he told the group. \u201cIf you want to stay in your dorm room, this is not the class for you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Felter and his teaching team emphasized that national security is more meaningful than ordinary tech work: Unlike other startup courses, Felter explained, Hacking for Defense teams are optimized for \u201cmission achievement,\u201d not for profit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Several students said they were interested in \u201clittle-d defense,\u201d not in building advanced weapons systems. One master\u2019s student in computer science, who asked not to be named, explained that he has a \u201cmoral aversion\u201d to building weapons like drones and missiles but hopes to work at a company that focuses on intelligence operations, such as Vannevar Labs. Like Felter, he described national security work as \u201cmission-driven,\u201d unlike the \u201cempty pursuit\u201d of consumer software.<\/p>\n For collegiate defense enthusiasts, the work feels urgent. \u201cThe U.S. has had decades of dominance and peace. We could fight any country we wanted \u2014 nobody could touch us, right? But now China is multiplying itself, and it\u2019s pretty obvious that we could lose. This is existential,\u201d said Fang.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ganesan points to Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine as a turning point. \u201cIt was like the 9\/11 of our generation,\u201d she said. After the war started, her national security group for Stanford women saw \u201ca huge uptick in student interest.\u201d Compared to her consulting internship at a consulting firm, she felt far \u201cmore valuable\u201d in her internship at the federal government.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Renewed interest in government work coincides with a slowing job market for Big Tech \u2014 the default employer of choice for computer science graduates over the past decade. Several undergrads said this is one reason students are looking beyond Silicon Valley. Stanford\u2019s first defense tech career fair last fall attracted 300 students.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u2018If you\u2019re a brilliant technology expert, you can contribute to this new warrior class.\u2019<\/p>\n Ernestine Fu<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n The national security establishment, in turn, is giving love back to Stanford. Since 1969, the university\u2019s conservative-leaning Hoover Institution has hosted National Security Affairs Fellows to pursue independent research. In 2015, former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter started the Defense Innovation Unit to bridge the technology gap between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. In 2022, Eric Volmar, now associate director of the Gordian Knot Center, established the Pentagon\u2019s Office of Strategic Capital to help VCs fund advanced manufacturing and AI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ernestine Fu, a Stanford alum and defense tech investor at Brave Capital, described efforts like these as a response to the U.S. lagging behind China. Civil-military fusion has long been a cornerstone of Beijing\u2019s military strategy, and Silicon Valley is only now catching up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re a brilliant technology expert, you can contribute to this new warrior class. There\u2019s a renewed sense of responsibility to make sure advanced technologies support democratic values,\u201d Fu explained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Others are more skeptical of the stated altruism. Professor emeritus Terry Winograd, former president of the 1980s anti-nuclear group Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility, expressed concern about students rushing into military contracting. \u201cIt\u2019s a culture that has no connection to people\u2019s lives. Building more effective weaponry is just,\u00a0<\/em>\u2018Can we make a profit with this?\u2019\u201d Winograd said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s become profitable to exaggerate the security threats that the U.S. currently faces,\u201d said Tianyu Fang, a technology and democracy fellow at New America and Stanford alum. He referenced\u00a0recent comments<\/a>\u00a0by Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey that China has ambitions to take over the Philippines, the Korean Peninsula, and most of Japan \u2014 \u201can unsubstantiated opinion shared by few, if any, credible China experts.\u201d<\/p>\n By tying corporate revenue so closely to war, defense-tech \u201ccould make the U.S. and the world less secure,\u201d Fang said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The funding elephant in the room<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The rising student interest in defense tech has coincided with a surge of investor interest. The social media, gig economy, and direct-to-consumer startups that fueled the 2010s froth among tech investors often featured fast-growth but weak unit economics, meaning it was hard for the companies to turn a profit even when they had lots of customers. On the contrary, companies that win government contracts can access hefty sums of stable, recurring revenue. In 2024, venture capitalists poured $3 billion into defense tech startups, versus $0.3 billion in 2019, according to\u00a0Crunchbase<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cPeople are betting that if anything goes hot in the Pacific, money will flood in, like it did in Iraq and Afghanistan,\u201d said Stanford business student Andrew Paulmeno, a Marine Corps veteran who was chief product officer for Project Maven at the Pentagon. Stanford \u201cfollows very closely where venture dollars are growing.\u201d He called Google employees\u2019 protests against Project Maven \u201cmoronic \u2014 two years later, they tried to come back, and we wouldn\u2019t take them.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet Paulmeno isn\u2019t interested in working in defense tech \u2014 he says most defense work is slow, challenging, and underpaid, despite the hype. \u201cThe government acquisition cycle outlives the fundraising cycle for a company. Everything has to be signed off six different ways,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/img_0106.webp\")
When Divya Ganesan, a senior studying political science, started at Stanford in 2021, she didn\u2019t dream of one day working in national security. Back then, defense intelligence companies that contract with the government, like Palantir, were \u201csuper looked down upon\u201d on campus, she said. \u201cThey were seen as the evil guys.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Now, the vibes have shifted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
After taking the popular class \u201cSpies, Lies, and Algorithms\u201d in 2022, Ganesan became hooked on defense tech. She cofounded the student group\u00a0Stanford Women in National Security<\/a>, or WINS, which now has more than 150 members, and completed summer internships at the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMy most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir,\u201d Ganesan says. The company, cofounded by Peter Thiel, a supporter of President Donald Trump, contracts with the military on surveillance and targeting systems. Its stock has surged to an all-time high since Trump took office.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At Stanford, building tech for the U.S. government is cool again. Students are dropping out to form defense tech startups and compete for coveted internships at government security agencies or major private contractors. Undergraduates, business school students, recent alumni now working in defense tech, and faculty show a booming interest in building war machines for the United States.<\/p>\n Though she was once conflicted about working on defense, Ganesan no longer has as many qualms. \u201cIn great power politics, people die. Often more impulsive, less pragmatic men make those decisions, and as a well-educated woman, I\u2019d rather be in the room,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This is a striking change in sentiment from just seven years ago. In 2018, Stanford student activists and community members marched in front of Palantir\u2019s Palo Alto headquarters to\u00a0protest<\/a>\u00a0the company\u2019s contracts with U.S. Immigration and\u00a0 Customs Enforcement, and several thousand Google employees signed a petition to end\u00a0\u201cProject Maven,\u201d<\/a> a Pentagon contract that could apply AI to target drone strikes.<\/p>\n \u2018During Biden, things were more liberal. Now the pendulum is swinging back, and Silicon Valley is a big part of that. \u2026 There\u2019s a lot of excitement.\u2019<\/p>\n anonymous Stanford student<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n These days, enrollment in \u201cHacking for Defense<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a class in which student teams partner with U.S. military sponsors to work on national security problems \u2014 has skyrocketed. To handle the growing interest, Stanford in 2021 opened the\u00a0Gordian Knot Center<\/a>, funded initially with $1.28 million from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, as a hub for defense tech programs. (The center took its name from ancient Greece, referring to a knot that, if untangled, would destine Alexander the Great to rule over Asia. The knot has become \u201ca metaphor for an intractable problem,\u201d\u00a0cofounder Steve Blank wrote<\/a>. \u201cToday, the United States is facing several seemingly intractable national security problems simultaneously.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Over the last three years, the Gordian Knot Center sponsored WINS, the National Security Innovation Scholars fellowship, and the Stanford DEFCON conference, which had more than 1,000 attendees last year. The center\u2019s faculty also launched two courses \u2014 \u201cTechnology Innovation and Great Power Competition\u201d in 2020 and \u201cEntrepreneurship Inside Government\u201d this year \u2014 to address surging undergraduate interest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Meanwhile, Palantir, Anduril, Vannevar Labs, and Shield AI have become high-profile employers for Stanford graduates, and more students are founding startups in the security field.<\/p>\n Max Susman, a former Navy SEAL and electrical engineer, started the drone company Revere Technologies while he was an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The school and, in particular, the Gordian Knot Center have proved\u00a0 \u201cinvaluable\u201d as his company brokers deals with the government, he said. While many defense companies have to hire D.C.-based lobbyists to meet with government leaders, Susman hasn\u2019t needed boots on the ground in the nation\u2019s capital. \u201cI haven\u2019t had to fly to D.C. Senior Pentagon officials make a stop at Stanford or the Gordian Knot, and I get an audience,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When computer science major Andrew Fang interned at Anduril in 2020, at a time when the autonomous systems unicorn had fewer than 200 employees, most of his peers did not share his interest in weapons technology. But energized by his experience at the company, he took two years off from Stanford to cofound a defense tech startup that raised $1.04 million from the Air Force before shutting down in 2022. At the time, he said, \u201cthe industry was very niche.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When Fang re-enrolled in 2022, other Stanford students admired what he\u2019d built. They approached him to compliment his Anduril-branded swag and pitch him their own ideas on defense tech. Fang was surprised. \u201cThese are kinetic, lethal systems \u2014 that\u2019s serious shit. There\u2019s definitely far more interest than there was in the past,\u201d he said. Fang has since pivoted to building AI for local governments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI have a lot of friends working at space or defense companies: Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX,\u201d said one Stanford senior studying computer science who asked not to be named. He identified the Trump administration as one factor in the change. \u201cDuring Biden, things were more liberal. Now the pendulum is swinging back, and Silicon Valley is a big part of that. You\u2019d hope that the government is moving faster now \u2014 there\u2019s a lot of excitement.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/dsc0445-1-1024x683.webp\")