In 2023, defense tech recruiter Peterson Conway VIII walks into the offices of nuclear fusion startup Fuse in a black suburb, wearing his distinctive cowboy hat. He picked up a new recruit Fuse and proceeded to regale her with stories from the old recruiting days. One story involved a prostitute attending a recruitment event (“not for sex,” Conway explained to TechCrunch). Newbies don’t like it. “I think it’s telling in a funny way,” Conway said, admitting that he was an “a-hole”. Fuse founder JC Btaiche caught the conversation and agreed, immediately firing Conway – although Btaiche told TechCrunch that telling the story of prostitution was not the only thing Conway had done. But Conway, who has become one of the biggest power brokers in the defense technology industry, isn’t giving up on Fuse. Conway has recruited for some of Silicon Valley’s busiest defense and hard tech companies over the last decade, such as Palantir and Mach Industries. He spent almost half a decade doing recruitment at Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC for the firm and its portfolio companies, and since last year, as head of talent at venture firm A* Capital. So, even after he was fired, Conway continued to promote candidates to Btaiche and woo prospects with flights on his private jet or offers to “take a ride in the desert,” Conway said. After a few months, Fuse returned Conway. He has now recruited more than seven people to 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, inclined to tell unbelievable stories and, by all accounts, brilliant. According to the dozen people TC interviewed for this story, Conway has been very successful at luring talented people away from stable jobs and into startups. “There’s a line between insanity and genius,” Btaiche said. “And I think he’s the only one in that line.” As defense technology funding soared to nearly $3 billion last year, Conway is poised to convince the next generation to build new-age nuclear reactors or AI-powered weapons. “There’s a community of young people in the Valley, often working in the defense or national security sectors or on very ambitious and difficult issues,” says Gregory Dorman, a recent Princeton graduate who works with entrepreneur and A* partner Kevin Hartz. at the beginning of Sauron’s new security, thanks to Conway’s introduction. “And he’s there because of Peterson.” Source: Peterson conway ‘Not in compliance’ with safety regulations. “I like to joke that I was sick until he accepted the terms of the deal,” he said. I first met him at the airport in San Carlos, California, shortly before I boarded a small two-seater plane, bought with a loan from Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. A small sign in the cockpit reminded me: “This aircraft is an experimental light sport aircraft and does not comply with federal safety regulations for standard aircraft.” A few minutes later, we are soaring over the shimmering San Francisco Bay while Conway tells the story of his fablelike life. His father, Peterson Conway VII, evaded the draft, sold LSD in Tokyo, and eventually moved to Afghanistan in the 70s with Conway’s mother, a Mormon schoolteacher. After several escapades across the Middle East and Africa, he moved to Carmel to raise Conway and his brother, but eventually divorced. “My dad threw himself in there,” Conway said casually as we climbed the Golden Gate Bridge. He later explained that his suicide attempt was unsuccessful. His father was caught in the net and is still alive today, selling antiques in a Carmel store. Conway rebelled against his father by trying to be normal, attending Dartmouth to study economics. But after college, in the early 2000s, he became a recruiter. In Conway’s version of the show, he rides his motorcycle around San Francisco, a cowboy looking for office space. He saw a warehouse with a ramp, got on it and ran straight to Hartz. At the time, Hartz was in the early stages of building Xoom, a fintech service for international money transfers that was eventually acquired by PayPal. Conway said Hartz asked if he had the skills. “Nothing,” Conway replied. “But I can bring lunch. I’m a decent writer. I have an Airstream trailer — I’m like, we can surf. Hartz laughed when I asked about the story, saying, “It’s all fake.” According to Hartz, Conway just rented office space. in the same building and so he started recruiting Xoom and later, many more When PayPal founder Peter Thiel launched Palantir in 2003, Conway was in the right place at the right time and began recruiting for the company have an official title at the defense company, “but ‘just Peterson,'” like a defense tech “mononymous artist in the style of Prince or Madonna,” joked Gabe Rosen, 8VC’s resident humanities scholar who works with Conway at Palantir to build an international team. According to Conway, companies want employees with “internal compass and confidence,” people who have struggled with the values they raised and made their own way. For example, Conway claimed that he would get missives like “find me a Jew married to a Christian from the gay Australian outback.” Palantir has no comment. Conway is known for attracting recruits by sending handwritten letters with a wax seal. His method was successful, landing people like Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and many of Palantir’s international employees. Unconventional way last summer, Conway and his father flew to the Mojave desert in Hartz’s plane, borrowed for the occasion. Like some kind of mirage of American Dynamism, he sees a young man with a drone attached to the back of a truck. It was a trial session for Mach Industries, the weapons company founded by Ethan Thornton when he was 19 years old. Mach is one of the defense and hardware companies Conway has hired as head of talent at A*. Mach has since raised more than $80 million from investors like Bedrock and Sequoia Capital. While the men set up the orange cones and explosive devices for the engineering test, Conway takes them for a ride in Hartz’s plane. “He hit the ground hard, multiple times, landing in the Mojave,” Hartz laughed. “Everything is gone.” Conway rejected Hartz’s account, saying the plane was “very dirty” and that he was missing a window covering. According to Conway, they recruited SpaceX alum Gabriela Hobe and Fasil Mulatu Kero, Mach’s vice president of manufacturing and a former Tesla employee. “Ethan probably paid me over a million dollars to do what I did for him,” Conway said, although he later denied that figure. It seems like everyone in the defense technology industry has a fun story to tell about Conway. One time, after Conway ordered an Uber and hit it off with a driver, he surprised the founder by setting him up for a ride and telling the founder to interview the driver for a job. Another time, Fuse founder Btaiche said Conway left a Porsche with keys at the airport for a recruit, who later became a government contractor, to drive when he got down. The company later explained that it was a four-seater Porsche, loaned to candidates so the company could save money on Ubers. The candidate took the Porsche to meetings and finished the day in front of Conway’s, a sprawling compound in the rich California coastal town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, stuffed with antiques of his father and part of the animals from the hunting expedition. Conway hosts a regular dinner for candidates there (his father cooks), as well as, according to Conway, parties ranging from a birthday bash for Joe Lonsdale to a wedding for Sankar. But Btaiche said Conway’s real superpower isn’t his stunts, but his ability to talk about “candidates in a more human way, rather than just looking at resumes and credentials.” For Fuse hiring, Conway has Btaiche brainstorming whether upbringing can make someone who can lead a team, or bring new ideas to engineers; as a result, they have scouted people from the countryside, people who grew up as athletes, and people who are obsessed with the game. As for winning the candidate over, Btaiche said that Conway sold him on the command to defend America. “If you’re working on something that’s really mission-driven,” he said. “I think Peterson can deliver that story.” Dorman, one of Conway’s Experiencers, was a philosophy major at Princeton who was debating between a career in the Valley or New York when he met a prominent recruiter. Conway persuaded him to vote for the Valley. “Peterson convinced us that there was a lot of adventure out there,” he said. Conway has been the Valley’s cowboy for years, and now other tech may have caught up. He applauds the current interest in American Dynamism, a term coined by Andreessen Horowitz for corporate-government-adjacent. “It’s just perfect. Right on the border of fanaticism,” Conway said. “It has become a religion in itself.” Source: Peterson Conway Main character energy There is a common theme in how people describe Conway: a genius, an influential player in defense technology, and, at times, a liability. For example, a few days after I got on the plane, he called me and asked, “Did you see the news?” The day before, Conway had taken a 6 a.m. flight from the Carmel area to Silicon Valley. On a dark morning, Conway failed to remove his flashlight while checking the fuel gauge and, as a result, misread the gauge. “I made the assumption that it was all pilot error,” he said. When he took off, he realized he didn’t have enough in the tank to make it to the nearest airport. Conway regaled the story to me in mythic proportions: a fork in his path, a choice between good and evil. When it was explained, he first thought that his best chance for survival was to enter the sports field at a nearby school. “I began to fear that the child was no match for the propeller,” he said. So they chose to land the plane on Highway 85, tapping down into oncoming traffic in hopes of making it safer for drivers. Miraculously, the two chairs bounced off the concrete, leaving Conway and the surrounding cars stranded. Conway then reminded me that I was a hair’s breadth away from the same fate. “If we had flown further, we would have run out of gas,” he said. That is not true; he told me later that he had flown the plane at least one time after our flight. But he paints our journey in such an existential light, it’s unforgettable. After spending a day with him (and two months later fact checking his many exaggerations), I learned that Conway is unique in his epic storytelling skills. That is why he is employed by many amazing companies. And fired. And then rehired once again. As Dorman puts it, “he’s an unconventional recruiter.” However, they are also “better than other recruiters.”
