Chris Bollinger

National Security technology innovation | Palantir | U.S. Marine | Military Veterans Advocate

[Chris Bollinger @cjhbollinger]

#SlavaUkraïni #NAFO #Fellas #OFAN

[Rocketmen 로켓맨 @iamrocketmen]

$PLTR Akash Jain, The President of Palantir USG deserves more attention in Palantir community.
This guy is another genius along with Sham and Alex.

The article written in 2020 by Akash Jain is worth reading 👇:
Forget the AI Race. Let's Invest in a Data Grid for AI. https://t.co/00LLeHeOWb

[Shyam Sankar @ssankar]

From @AcquiredFM's episode on Lockheed Martin:

Ben: How do you let the government put out a contract to bid on that's structured a certain way, when the way that you've decided to structure your company where you do R&D upfront, you're willing to take on some of the risk, and then you want to sell something and amortize your R&D across all of your customers the way that every tech company does, and the way that you get operating leverage on your company, that doesn't fit in these gigantic cost plus contracts.

In fact, what it insures is you cannot get operating leverage on your company. No matter how large you scale, you will never have big fat gross margins that outrun your fixed costs. It's like the opposite of what every tech company is trying to do.

David: This is the great irony in the government together with Lockheed really seated Silicon Valley. The modern Silicon Valley and the modern defense industry are, in many ways, incompatible from a business model perspective.

https://t.co/TOjsKfY39x

[Tom Shugart @tshugart3]

Holy cow, former ONI commander RADM(Ret.) Mike Studeman not mincing words in his first outing in @WarOnTheRocks In Brief newsletter. 👀

[Shyam Sankar @ssankar]

Your software IS the Weapon System

https://t.co/9mCyvdpguH

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

We generated $634 million in revenue in Q1 2024, a result that surpassed the upper end of our guidance by a significant amount.

Over the same period, we earned $106 million in profit — the largest quarterly profit in our company’s twenty-year history.

See our full results: https://t.co/UpWIS0neyC

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Maiden launch of Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket on Earth, with the first dual rocket landing

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Artificial Intelligence is the next American birthright.

Wielding AI to increase readiness and mobilize the industrial base requires building solutions that scale to meet the context of the mission.

Join us live for @ssankar's keynote at #SCSPAIExpo2024: https://t.co/ihzVQ84c7g

[Uprooted @uprootedoakland]

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OAKLAND?? SIX STRAIGHT WINS. 🔥🔥🔥 #Athletics

[Harrison Ford @HarrisonFordLA]

May the fourth be with you

[Pirate Wires @PirateWires]

Much like the e-commerce space 20 years ago, or the recent crypto boom, artificial intelligence is at the center of a hype cycle in venture capital today. But the truth is, a hype cycle only exists after the winning company in that space has already succeeded.

Take @anduriltech — when founded in 2017, defense technology wasn’t a popular industry. But now the company is valued at more than $10 billion, and investors everywhere are trying to replicate that success as defense tech enjoys a hype cycle of its own.

Special today for Pirate Wires, Anduril co-founder @traestephens explains how successful VCs invest in companies that are category-creating — not hype-following.

Read it today on our site.

[Chowdah Hill @ChowdahHill]

Who said ‘tactics are for amateurs, logistics are professionals’? Here is one of several ways we get our ‘stuff.’ RAS (replenishment at sea). @USNavy #ThisIsTheWay

[Ian Ellis @ianellisjones]

“Over my last 3 years, the security environment has changed drastically — & not in a good way.”

Adm. Aquilino, in his final public interview in uniform after a 40-year career 👇

⑴ “The main theme that’s really concerning — & that everyone has to see — is it links authoritarian nations [China, Russia, DPRK] in ways that we haven’t seen in our history in a long time.”

⑵ China has “expanded their military capability, their verbalization is more aggressive, & their actions are more aggressive. & they’ve now accelerated to dangerous. Perhaps most dangerous in the Philippines.”

⑶ Beijing “clearly made a risk determination that taking aggressive actions is within their interest & to the benefit of their strategic objectives. More aggressive rhetoric & certainly more aggressive actions.”

Admiral (soon to be retired) John Aquilino most recently served as Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Quick thread with a few more clips & quotes:

[Palantir Privacy and Ethics @PalantirPrivacy]

Join #Palantir's PCL team at the #SCSPAIExpo2024 on May 7th at 10amET for a demo on "Civilian Harm Mitigation: From Policy to Product" to learn about our efforts in bringing responsible #AI to military planning and operations.

Register at: https://t.co/Q5ghDiBfOK

[Jash Dholani @oldbooksguy]

C.S Lewis almost died in the trench warfare of WW-I

Became best friends with Tolkien. Sold 100 million books...

On the cusp of WW-II, he gave an iconic lecture at Oxford University (1939)

His question: Does beauty matter when bombs start falling?

THIS is his profound answer👇🏻

[The Money Cruncher, CPA @money_cruncher]

I went through 256 pages of Biden's new tax proposal.

Here is all you need to know:

[Travis Sawchik @Travis_Sawchik]

The A's are 2.5 games out of first place with the game's best closer and an owner trying to run them out of town. We've seen this movie before.

[Billy Oppenheimer @bpoppenheimer]

In 1993, Jensen Huang pitched a startup idea to his former boss, Wilf Corrigan.

After Jensen's pitch, Wilf said,

“I have no idea what you just said. That was one of the worst pitches I've ever heard.”

Wilf then called the renowned venture capitalist Don Valentine, and said,

“Don, I'm going to send a kid over to you. He's one of the best employees I've ever had. I'm not sure what he's doing, but I think you should give him money.”

As the founder of Sequoia Capital, Valentine had made early investments in companies like Apple, Atari, and Wilf's LSI Logic (which had generated a $150 million return through its 1983 IPO).

So, walking in to pitch to Valentine, Jensen (then 29 years old) was nervous, and therefore, “I did a horrible job with the pitch.”

“Well, that wasn’t very good,” Valentine said. “But Wilf says to give you money, so against my better judgment, I’m going to give you money.”

With funding from Sequoia, Jensen and his co-founders, Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky, started Nvidia—initially, a company focused on creating graphics processing units (GPUs) to improve the quality of video game graphics.

Over time, Nvidia's GPUs and other computing technologies would spread beyond gaming to a deep, broad list of industries, including self-driving cars, AI, medical imaging, weather forecasting, and on and on. As a result, Nvidia (at the time of this writing) is the 3rd most valuable company in the world, worth around $2.2 trillion.

Takeaway 1:

Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull talks about how great ideas often fail the “elevator pitch” test—the ability to deliver a compelling description of an idea in 20 or 30 seconds, about the length of a short elevator ride.

“The way to pass the elevator pitch test,” Catmull says, “is to pick an idea that other people are already familiar with. So if you pick something that hasn't been done before, you will fail the elevator pitch test.”

After hearing Jensen's pitch, both Wilf Corrigan and Don Valentine said Jensen's idea sounded terrible. Jensen’s idea repeatedly failed the elevator pitch test, but it went on to birth one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Takeaway 2:

The director Tommy Kail (Hamilton, In The Heights, Freestyle Love Supreme, and more) likes to say of his approach to casting actors, hiring for his production company, and choosing collaborators:

“Humanity over talent ... Humanity is more important to me than talent. If there’s a choice to make, I’ll go humanity over talent, every time.”

Despite being terrible at pitching, because of his humanity, because he had been a good employee, because he had left LSI Logic on good terms, because he had maintained his relationship with his former boss—Jensen got the endorsement then the money that ultimately launched Nvidia.

“The thing I learned from that,” Jensen said, “is your past is more important than your ability to pitch, interview, or anything like that. You can’t run away from your past. So have a good past. Try to have a good past.”

- - -

“Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character.” — Jensen Huang

Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

[Mambo Italiano @mamboitaliano__]

The hour has come for me to explore the darkest, most redemptive and monumental work of all time by the greatest poet in history:
Dante Alighieri - Divine Comedy 🔥

(To enhance readability, I shall employ copious numerical figures).
A Thread 🧵👇

[Andrew Erickson 艾立信 @AndrewSErickson]

New from Office of #Naval #Intelligence (#ONI)!

2024 Recognition & Identification Guides for 1) #China People’s Liberation Army #Navy (PLAN) & 2) China #CoastGuard & Government #Maritime Forces

https://t.co/sxk5BXaGqD

Attention, Attention, Attention—This is not a drill! Don’t miss the #PRC government naval/maritime #ship recognition Order of #Battle (OOB) guides that ONI just released! It’s the first time this unparalleled resource has been publicly updated in 15.5 months… And, for the first time ever, ONI has divided its exquisitely-detailed visual OOB into 2 separate subcomponents:

1) China People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Recognition & Identification Guide
2) China Coast Guard & Government Maritime Forces Recognition & Identification Guide

Bottom line: Unparalleled resource, worth waiting for, must examine now! PRC Navy, Coast Guard, & #MaritimeMilitia forces, etc., all documented authoritatively as *nowhere* else.

Even a quick glance reveals the sheer scope & scale of Beijing’s 3 Sea Forces. The only downside to digesting this #OpenSource/#OSINT cornucopia is that you may need to strengthen your eyeglass prescription to discern the dozens of hull forms & hundreds of pennant numbers…

Citations:
— China People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Recognition & Identification Guide (Suitland, MD: U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, 29 April 2024).
— China Coast Guard & Government Maritime Forces Recognition & Identification Guide (Suitland, MD: U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, 29 April 2024).

[Special Competitive Studies Project @scsp_ai]

Hear from tech pioneer and leader Dr. Alex Karp, CEO and Co-Founder of @PalantirTech, at the #CarterExchange24!

Visit https://t.co/LtCKUHq1xs for more info

#CarterExchange24 #SCSPTech #EmergingTech