Defense tech investing is cool again, but can it stay that way?

Who are you? Who is Alpha Partners, and how did you get interested, involved in the industry?

Super.

Thanks, Ross.

I super appreciate, uh, being invited to the pod.

This is excellent, um, and kind of epic times.

We're living in, like, biblical times in many ways, um, not just geopolitically, um, but from a business and technology-centric, uh, arena.

This is probably...

This is not the time to retire.

[laughs] Uh, it's like living in Rome in Roman times.

This is pretty, pretty unusual and, you know, I was just talking to my team, um, earlier today, um, and, um, I've been doing venture for almost, uh, well, for over twenty-five years, almost thirty years.

Most of my career, companies would take a decade to get to a hundred million in revenue.

AI companies are getting there between two and four years, and that's not just inflation.

So it's just a truly remarkable time to be an investor, to be a technologist, to be an entrepreneur.

Truly wonderful.

So my name's Steve Brotman.

I'm the managing partner, um, at Alpha Partners.

Um, after I spent some time as an entrepreneur in the early nineties competing against Elon Musk when he was at Zip2, convinced me that maybe my skills were better applied in another way, [laughs] mainly backing other entrepreneurs.

And so we focused on B2B SaaS, uh, software as a service companies, or it's just software today, for the first sort of ten to fifteen years of my career as an early stage VC.

The first investment I made went public after eighteen months, and I thought I was brilliant, and it took me about fifteen years to figure out that I wasn't so brilliant.

Uh, but our track record was, was still pretty good, top five percent, and, uh, we invested in a couple other companies that went public, was, uh...

And the name of that firm was Silicon Alley Venture Partners.

The, the upshot of that was, um, I was asked one day by one of my limited partners, "When are you gonna invest in the next Facebook?" At the time, in, uh, in those ought days, that was the benchmark.

It'd be sort of like SpaceX or Anthropic or maybe OpenAI today.

And, um, I was like, "You know, that's a really good question." If I was being truthful myself, you have twenty-five investments or shots on goal as an early stage VC, and you have a one in ten thousand chance of hitting a SpaceX or an Anthropic.

And I was like, "The answer is probably, probably pretty good chance of 0% chance of getting the next Facebook." I mean, one would be generous.