Bio

Adam Bry is cofounder and CEO at Skydio, the leading US drone company, and the world leader in autonomous flight. He has two decades of experience with small UAS, starting as a national champion R/C airplane aerobatics pilot. As a grad student at MIT, he did award winning research – largely funded by the DoD – that pioneered autonomous flight for drones. After graduating from MIT, Adam cofounded Google[x]’s Project Wing. He has coauthored numerous technical papers and patents, and was also recognized on MIT’s TR35 list for young innovators. In 2021, Adam was appointed to the FAA’s Advanced Aviation Advisory Committee.

Skydio’s customers range from athletes and creators to critical infrastructure operators to law enforcement and the military, including hundreds of drones now deployed by Ukraine as part of their national defense against Russia. Skydio is the first US drone company to reach unicorn status and is backed by a16z, IVP, Next47, Accel, institutions (NVIDIA, Lockheed Martin), and angel investors (Elad Gil, Naval Ravikant, Kevin Durant).

Bio

Adena Hefets is the cofounder and CEO of Divvy Homes, a proptech company on a mission to make homeownership accessible to everyone. Today, Adena is one of the few female founders to reach double unicorn status and to be valued at approximately $2 billion. Prior to founding Divvy, Adena joined Square in 2013 and was responsible for building out Square Capital, a merchant cash advance platform with billions in loans outstanding. Prior to joining Square, she was part of the large-cap buyout team at TPG, a private equity firm, where she helped purchase companies in the real estate sector. She started her career as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch.

Bio

Bari Weiss is the founder and publisher of Common Sense and the host of the podcast Honestly. She is also the author of “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” which won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award. From 2017 to 2020 Weiss was an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. Before that, she was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine.

In 2021, the LA Press Club awarded Bari with the 2021 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. She is also the winner of the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize, which honors writing that “best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.” In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the Times’s “star opinion writer.”

Bari is a proud Pittsburgh native and a graduate of Columbia University. She lives in LA with her wife and daughter.

Bio

Brandon Tseng is Shield AI’s cofounder, President, and Chief Growth Officer. Prior to founding Shield AI, Brandon proudly served in the US Navy for seven years. As a Navy SEAL, he served two deployments to Afghanistan and one to the Pacific Theater. Previously, he was the Assistant Chief Engineer aboard the USS Pearl Harbor (LSD-52) and deployed to the Persian Gulf. Brandon earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the United States Naval Academy and his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Bio

Brian Schimpf is cofounder and CEO of Anduril Industries where he drives the strategic direction and product roadmap of the defense technology company. Prior to Anduril, Brian was Director of Engineering at Palantir Technologies, where he led a large engineering organization developing and deploying data integration and analysis products. He served numerous domestic and international government organizations across the intelligence, defense and law enforcement sectors.

Previously, Brian was the founder and Lead of Cornell University’s autonomous vehicle research program where his teams competed in DARPA’s Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge. Brian graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Science in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering.

Bio

Chris Bennett is the CEO and cofounder of Wonderschool, a leading provider of childcare solutions that enable families to access affordable child care within five minutes of their home. Prior to Wonderschool, Bennett led commercial real estate investment at Heitman Investment Management. Bennett graduated with a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bio

Chris Best is cofounder and CEO of Substack, a subscription publishing platform for independent writers and podcasters. Founded in 2017, Substack creates a better future for writing by letting writers and podcasters own their work and their relationship with their audience.

Before Substack, Chris was the cofounder and CTO of the mobile messenger app, Kik. From 2009–2017, Chris helped scale Kik and build a product used by over 300 million users. Chris graduated from the University of Waterloo and is based in San Francisco.

Bio

Christian Brose is the Chief Strategy Officer at Anduril Industries, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High Tech Warfare.

Brose joined Anduril in 2018 from Capitol Hill where he served as staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee for three years, managing the Committee’s staff and overseeing all programs, policies, and resources of the Department of Defense. From 2009-2014, he served as senior policy advisor to Senator John McCain (R-AZ), supporting his work on the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Prior to that, he served as policy adviser and chief speechwriter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2005-2008, working as a member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff and supporting the Secretary on regular foreign travel. He began his career in public service as a speechwriter for Secretary of State Colin Powell. He studied political science at Kenyon College and international economics at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and a former editor of Foreign Policy Magazine.

Bio

Chris Power is founder and CEO of Hadrian, a manufacturing technology company focused on building the most efficient precision component factories in America. Chris believes deeply in enabling Space & Defense manufacturers to iterate faster at a fraction of the cost, creating meaningful employment in manufacturing and ensuring democracy prevails by combining the best of Silicon Valley technology with the country’s manufacturing experts to rebuild and automate the defense industrial base.

Bio

David Ulevitch is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on enterprise and SaaS investments. He was previously the founder and CEO of OpenDNS, a cloud-delivered security service that was acquired by Cisco in 2015. His vision and leadership were responsible for creating a cloud-delivered security service that today protects over 85 million people worldwide across more than 10,000 enterprise customers. While at Cisco, David was a senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Security — a $2.4 billion annual revenue business — where he oversaw the company’s global security strategy, portfolio, and architecture.

Prior to OpenDNS, David founded EveryDNS, an authoritative DNS service, and grew it into the world’s largest free DNS service, which he sold to Dyn (now Oracle) in 2010.

David holds a BA in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, which turned out to be way more useful than he expected.

David serves on the board of AnyRoad, Charthop, Orderful, Skydio, Superhuman, Tandem, and WorkBoard.

Bio

Congresswoman Doris Matsui has represented the city of Sacramento and its surrounding areas since 2005. As a leader on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Congresswoman Matsui serves on the Health and Energy subcommittees and is the Vice Chair of the Communications and Technology subcommittee. She also serves as co-chair of the Congressional High-Tech and Spectrum Caucuses.

As a coauthor of the Creating Helpful Incentives for the Production of Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act, she has been a vocal leader on strengthening our supply chain and reasserting American leadership in the semiconductor industry. Her work securing billions of dollars of investments in the CHIPS And Science Act will help keep America the global leader for science and technology for generations to come.

Bio

Garrett is a technology entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in early stage companies across Banking, Automotive, Live Events, and Sports. Prior to Flock Safety, Garrett helped launch Clutch, a monthly car subscription service, and Experience, a live events mobile technology company. Leading the engineering, design, product, data science, and customer support groups at Experience, Garrett led the sale of the company to Cox Enterprises for $200 million in 2014. Outside of work, Garrett works to inspire future engineers to create technology that can make a positive impact on society.

He serves on the Advisory Board for the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and as a Board Member for the Georgia Tech Athletic Association Alexander Tharpe Board, the primary fundraising organization for Georgia Tech student athletes. Garrett lives in Atlanta with his wife, Megan, his son, Sumner, daughter, Maren, and his dog, Olive.

Bio

Jacob Helberg is a venture capital investor and best-selling author of The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power (Simon & Schuster, October 2021). Helberg is also a Senior Advisor at the Stanford University Center on Geopolitics and Technology and an Adjunct Senior Fellow for the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. From 2016 to 2020, Helberg was Google’s global lead for the company’s internal global product policy efforts to combat foreign interference. Prior to joining Google, Helberg was a member of the founding team of GeoQuant, a geopolitical risk forecasting technology company backed by Swiss Re’s venture capital arm and acquired by Fitch Ratings.

Bio

Jimmy Chen is the founder and CEO of Propel, creators of the award-winning Providers app, used by over 5 million low-income households to manage their government benefits and money. A for-profit technology company that holds its social mission at its core, Propel’s investors and supporters include Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, the Robin Hood Foundation, Financial Health Network, Kevin Durant, and Serena Williams. Propel has been featured in the New York Times, Wall St Journal, and WIRED Magazine. 

In addition to his work at Propel, Jimmy serves on the Board of Directors of Share Our Strength, a national anti-hunger nonprofit, and he serves as the Vice Chair of Technology for the eGovernment Payments Council, an industry trade group focused on government payments. Jimmy holds a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where he was an inaugural winner of the President’s Award for the Advancement of the Common Good.

Bio

Jim VandeHei is the cofounder and CEO of Axios, a media company focused on breaking news and invaluable insights across business, politics, technology and the world. Axios helps readers and viewers get smarter, faster across the consequential topics reshaping our country and lives. As CEO, VandeHei has steered Axios into becoming one of the most celebrated digital media success stories of the past decade. VandeHei was also an executive producer of the Emmy Award-winning docu-news series, “Axios on HBO” and coauthor of Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less.   

Before Axios, VandeHei cofounded and was CEO of Politico, the media company that upended and revolutionized political and policy journalism in Washington, New York, and Europe. Overseeing both the editorial and business teams, VandeHei was the leading strategist behind its highly scalable and successful business model. Prior to this, VandeHei spent more than a decade as a reporter, covering the Presidency and Congress for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. He was named National Editor of the Year in 2016. VandeHei is from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

Bio

John Gedmark is CEO and cofounder of Astranis. Astranis builds and operates small, low-cost telecommunications satellites with the mission to bring the world online. The company has raised over $350 million to date, and has a team of over 250 based out of their San Francisco headquarters.

John cofounded and served as Executive Director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, the industry association for commercial space companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic. As Executive Director, John reported to a CEO-level board of directors and led the commercial space industry’s efforts to privatize flights of NASA’s astronauts to low Earth orbit — in February 2010 President Obama announced the historic decision to use commercial space transportation, a landmark change worth more than $10 billion to the commercial space industry. Prior to that, John served as the Director of Rocket Flight Operations for the X Prize Foundation, responsible for operations of rocket launches in front of a crowd of 20,000 people, including the first-ever public flight of a Vertical Take-off Vertical Landing (VTVL) rocket. John holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Purdue University and a Master of Science degree from Stanford University, both in Aerospace Engineering, with a focus on rocket propulsion.

Bio

Katherine Boyle is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she invests in companies that promote American dynamism, including national security, aerospace and defense, public safety, housing, education, and industrials.

She was previously a partner at General Catalyst. Prior to GC, she was a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post. Katherine holds a BA in Government from Georgetown University, an MBA from Stanford, and a Masters of Public Advocacy from the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Bio

Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies.

Marc cocreated the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also cofounded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018.

Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Dialpad, Honor, OpenGov, and Samsara. He is also on the board of Facebook.

Bio

Congressman Mike Gallagher represents Wisconsin’s 8th District in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he is the Ranking Member of the Military Personnel Subcommittee on the House Armed Services Committee, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Chairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, and a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Prior to taking office, Mike served for seven years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps, including two deployments to Iraq. Mike earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, a master’s degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University, a master’s degree in Strategic Intelligence from National Intelligence University, and a PhD in International Relations from Georgetown.

Bio

Congressman Michael T. McCaul is currently serving his ninth term representing Texas’ 10th District in the United States Congress. The 10th Congressional District of Texas stretches from the city of Austin to the Houston suburbs and includes Austin, Bastrop, Colorado, Fayette, Harris, Lee, Travis, Washington and Waller Counties.

Republican Leader of the Foreign Affairs Committee

At the start of the 116th Congress, Congressman McCaul became the Republican Leader of the Foreign Affairs Committee. This committee considers legislation that impacts the diplomatic community, which includes the Department of State, the Agency for International Development (USAID), the Peace Corps, the United Nations, and the enforcement of the Arms Export Control Act. In his capacity as the committee’s Republican Leader, McCaul is committed to ensuring we promote America’s leadership on the global stage. In his view, it is essential that the United States bolsters international engagement with our allies, counters the aggressive policies of our adversaries, and advances the common interests of nations in defense of stability and democracy around the globe. He will continue to use his national security expertise to work to counter threats facing the United States, especially the increasing threat we face from nation state actors such as China, Iran, Russia, North Korea, among others.

Former Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security

Prior to being term-limited, Congressman McCaul served as the Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security during the 113th, 115th, and 116th Congresses. As Chairman, McCaul introduced numerous bills to ensure the Department of Homeland Security has the best policies and resources to carry out its vital mission of protecting the American people.

High Tech Leadership

With many NASA employees, universities, and high tech companies in the 10th District, Congressman McCaul’s leadership as co-founder and co-chair of the Congressional High Tech Caucus and the Cybersecurity Caucus provides him the ability to enhance Texas’ role as a global leader in technology.

Personal

Prior to Congress, Michael McCaul served as Chief of Counter Terrorism and National Security in the U.S. Attorney’s office, Western District of Texas, and led the Joint Terrorism Task Force charged with detecting, deterring, and preventing terrorist activity. McCaul also served as Texas Deputy Attorney General under current U.S. Senator John Cornyn, and served as a federal prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, DC.

A fourth generation Texan, Congressman McCaul earned a B.A. in Business and History from Trinity University and holds a J.D. from St. Mary’s University School of Law. In 2009 Congressman McCaul was honored with St. Mary’s Distinguished Graduate award. He is also a graduate of the Senior Executive Fellows Program of the School of Government, Harvard University. Congressman McCaul is married to his wife, Linda. They are proud parents of five children: Caroline, Jewell, and the triplets Lauren, Michael, and Avery.

Bio

Palmer Luckey is an American inventor, innovator, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of defense technology company Anduril Industries, designer of the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display, and the founder of Oculus VR, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2.3b.

Palmer founded Anduril Industries in 2017 to radically transform the defense capabilities of the United States and its allies by fusing artificial intelligence with the latest hardware advancements. At Anduril, Palmer integrates a consumer technology business model with mission-driven objectives, enabling rapid product development and deployment, setting the company apart from other players in the defense industry.

His deep interest in defense technology was driven by his time at the USC ICT MxR lab, where he built hardware used to research immersive PTSD treatment for US veterans. He continued to support various military applications of VR during his time at Oculus, informing his belief that radical modernization of US military technology is a prerequisite for preserving our way of life.

Palmer began attending Golden West College and Long Beach City College at the age of 14, and studied at California State University, Long Beach before dropping out to build Oculus VR.

Bio

Qasar Younis is the cofounder and CEO of Applied Intuition. Before founding Applied Intuition, Younis was a Partner and COO of Y Combinator, a prominent venture accelerator in Silicon Valley. Prior to Y Combinator, Younis founded a technology firm, which was later acquired by Google, and worked as an automotive engineer at General Motors and Bosch. Younis has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Kettering University (formerly known as General Motors Institute) and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Bio

Rick Smith is the CEO of Axon Enterprise. He founded the company in a Tucson garage in 1993 after two of his friends were shot and killed. Originally known as TASER International, Axon’s mission is to protect life — which includes making bullets obsolete. Rick’s family bet everything they had to get the company off the ground, nearly driving his parents to financial insolvency, and were saved only through TASER’s initial public offering in 2001. Rick has dedicated his life to helping public safety serve the communities they are sworn to protect. Under his leadership, Axon pioneered TASER energy weapons, made the body camera industry what it is today, and built the world’s leading digital evidence management platform, Evidence.com. In 2019, Rick published, “The End of Killing,” which challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that killing is a technology problem and offering a roadmap to solve it. He is a dynamic, inspirational, and visionary leader who challenges Axon and society to rethink deeply entrenched problems and to drive toward life-saving outcomes. Rick holds a B.S. Cum Laude in Neuroscience from Harvard University, a Master’s in International Finance from the University of Leuven in Belgium, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Bio

Prior to his appointment at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, Mr. Zakheim practiced law at Covington & Burling LLP in the firm’s Public Policy and Government Affairs practice group, where he served as co-chair.  Before joining the firm, he was General Counsel and Deputy Staff Director of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee. In this role, Mr. Zakheim managed the passage of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA is the annual defense policy bill which authorizes the Defense Department’s $600 billion budget.  Mr. Zakheim previously served as a Congressionally appointed Commissioner on the Commission on the National Defense Strategy of the United States. He currently serves on the National Defense Industrial Association’s Board of Directors, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ Advisory Council, and the Alexander Hamilton Society’s Board of Advisors. 

Mr. Zakheim’s previous experience includes serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, where he managed the department’s policies and programs related to the Iraq and Afghanistan coalition affairs.

Mr. Zakheim frequently speaks and writes on national security and defense issues. His views have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Politico, National Public Radio, Fox News, CNN, BBC, The Weekly Standard, National Review, among other media outlets.

Bio

Ronnie Chatterji, Ph.D., White House CHIPS coordinator 

Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji, Ph.D. is the White House CHIPS coordinator and on leave from his position as the Mark Burgess & Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor of Business and Public Policy at Duke University. Ronnie works at the intersection of academia, public policy and business, investigating the most important forces shaping our economy and society. He was previously the Chief Economist of the Department of Commerce, serving as the principal economic adviser to the Secretary of Commerce and responsible for policy development related to U.S. competitiveness, innovation, trade and economic growth. He also worked for President Obama as a Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).

Ronnie’s primary academic appointment is in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke, from where he has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles in the top journals in strategic management, economics, finance and organizational studies. His most recent book, co-authored with Michael Lenox, is “Can Business Save the Earth?” (Stanford University Press).

He has received several awards for his research, including the Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in entrepreneurship, the Rising Star award from the Aspen Institute, and the Strategic Management Society Emerging Scholar award. Chatterji has authored several op-ed pieces in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, including influential essays introducing the concept of CEO activism with co-author Michael Toffel. He writes widely for management and policy audiences with several recent pieces in Harvard Business Review and for the Brooking Institution.

Ronnie was previously a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and worked as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs. He received his Ph.D. from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and his B.A. in Economics from Cornell University.

Bio

Ryan Petersen is the founder and Executive Chairman of Flexport, the platform for global logistics. Companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—used Flexport’s technology to move more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries in 2021. Under Ryan’s leadership, Flexport has grown to over 2,000 employees across 18 global offices, with more than $3B in revenue in 2021. Prior to starting Flexport, Ryan was the founder and CEO of ImportGenius, a premiere provider of transaction data for the global trade industry. He has also invested in more than 100 high growth technology companies including SpaceX, Robinhood, Anduril, Verkada, Checkr, Rippling, Lambda School, Newfront, Padlet, and Expanse. He earned a BA from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Columbia Business School.