In 2023, defense technology recruiter Peterson Conway VIII pulled into the offices of nuclear fusion startup Fuse in a black suburb, donning his so-called cowboy hat. He got a recent hire at Fuse and proceeded to regal him with stories of his old recruiting days. One story involved prostitutes attending a recruiting event (“not for sex,” Conway clarified to TechCrunch).
The new hire was not happy. “I thought I said it in a funny way,” sighed Conway, admitting it was “an a-hole.”
Fuse founder JC Btaiche caught wind of the conversation and agreed, immediately firing Conway — though Btaiche told TechCrunch that telling the prostitution story wasn’t the only inappropriate thing Conway had done.
But Conway, who has become one of the defense technology industry’s biggest behind-the-scenes power brokers, didn’t give up on Fuse. Conway has recruited for some of Silicon Valley’s buzziest defense and technology firms over the past decade, such as Palantir and Mach Industries. He spent nearly half a decade recruiting 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 pitch candidates to Btaiche and win over prospects with flights on his private plane or offers to “go to the desert,” Conway said. After a few months, Fuse reinstated 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 place of support for the entire industry: wealthy, established, inclined to tell incredible stories and, by all accounts, brilliant. According to dozens of people TC interviewed for this story, Conway is remarkably successful at luring highly talented people out of stable jobs and into startup life. “There’s a line between crazy and genius,” Btaiche said. “And I think he’s just on that line.”
As defense technology funding soared to almost $3 billion last year, Conway is poised to convince the next generation to help build new-age nuclear reactors or AI weapons.
“There’s a whole community of young people in the Valley, often working jobs in defense or national security or very ambitious and difficult things,” said Gregory Dorman, a recent Princeton graduate who has worked with the entrepreneur and A* partner Kevin Hartz. at his new security startup Sauron, thanks to Conway’s introduction. “And they’re there because of Peterson.”
‘Does not comply’ with security rules
Conway’s signature move is to pick up candidates in his little plane. “I like to joke that I’m sick until they accept the terms of our agreements,” he said.
I met him for the first time at an airport in San Carlos, California, just before boarding his small two-seater plane, bought with a loan from Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. A small sign in the cockpit warned 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 were flying over the glittering San Francisco Bay as Conway told his life story like a fairy tale. His father, Peterson Conway VII, evaded the draft, sold LSD in Tokyo and eventually moved to Afghanistan in the 1970s with Conway’s mother, a Mormon schoolteacher. After a series of escapades through the Middle East and Africa, they moved to Carmel to raise Conway and his brother, but eventually divorced.
“My dad jumped in there,” Conway said wistfully as we climbed over the Golden Gate Bridge. He then explained that the suicide attempt was unsuccessful. His father was caught in the nets and is alive and well today, selling antiques in his Carmel shop.
Conway rebelled against his father by briefly pursuing normality, attending Dartmouth to study economics. But after college, in the early 2000s, he found himself becoming a recruiter.
In Conway’s version of events, he was riding his motorcycle around San Francisco, a cowboy looking for office space. He spotted 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 him if he had any skills. “None,” Conway replied. “But I can bring lunches. I am a decent writer. I had an Airstream trailer – I think we can surf.”
Hartz laughed when I asked him about the story, saying, “That’s completely false.” According to Hartz, Conway simply rented office space in the same building and thus began recruiting for Xoom and later, the wider PayPal crowd.
When PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel launched Palantir in 2003, Conway was in the right place at the right time and began recruiting for the firm. Conway apparently had no official title at the defense company, “but was “just Peterson,” as a “Prince or Madonna-style monoonymous defense technology artist,” joked Gabe Rosen, resident humanities scholar. at 8VC, who worked with Conway at Palantir.
Palantir sent Conway around the world to build its international teams. According to Conway, the company wanted employees with an “inner compass and conviction,” people who had struggled with the values they grew up with and forged their own path.
For example, Conway claimed to receive messages such as “find me a Jew who married a Christian from suburban Australia who was gay”. Palantir had no comment.
Conway was known for attracting the attention of recruits by sending handwritten letters with wax seals. His methods were successful, landing people like Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and many of Palantir’s international employees.
Unconventional methods
Last summer, Conway and his father flew to the Mojave Desert in Hartz’s plane, borrowed for the occasion. As a kind of mirage of American dynamism, they saw a group of young people mounting a drone on the back of a truck.
It was a test session for Mach Industries, a weapons company founded by Ethan Thornton when he was 19 years old. Mach is one of the few defense and equipment companies that Conway has recruited as an A* talent manager. Mach has since raised over $80 million from investors such as Bedrock and Sequoia Capital.
While those men set up orange cones and explosive devices for their engineering tests, Conway took the men for rides in Hartz’s plane. “He hit the ground so hard, so many times, going down in the Mojave,” Hartz sighed. “All was released.” Conway denied Hartz’s account, saying the plane just “got pretty dirty” and he lost a window covering.
According to Conway, he recruited SpaceX alum Gabriela Hobe and Fasil Mulatu Kero, Mach’s vice president of manufacturing and former Tesla employee. “Ethan probably paid me over a million dollars to do what I do for him,” Conway said, though he later denied that figure.
It seems like everyone in the defense technology industry has a compelling story about Conway. Once, after Conway ordered an Uber and hit it off with the driver, he surprised a founder by setting him up with a ride and telling the founder to interview the driver for a job.
Another time, Fuse founder Btaiche said Conway left a Porsche with the keys in it at the airport for a recruit, who was then a government contractor, to drive when he crashed. The company later clarified that it was a four-seater Porsche loaned to the candidate so the company could save money on Ubers.
The candidate took the Porsche to their meetings and ended the day at Conway’s home, a large compound in the affluent California seaside town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, filled with his father’s antiques and animal parts from his expeditions. hunting. Conway hosts regular dinners for candidates there (his father cooks), as well as, according to Conway, parties ranging from a birthday 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 the Fuse hire, Conway asked Btaiche to think about what education could create someone who could lead a team, or bring new ideas to engineers; as a result, they have observed people from rural areas, people who grew up as athletes, and people who are obsessed with games.
As for winning candidates, Btaiche said Conway sells people with the imperative to protect America. “If you’re working on something that’s really mission-driven,” he said. “I think Peterson can deliver that story.”
Dorman, one of the people who had Conway’s experience, was a philosophy major at Princeton debating between a career in the Valley or New York when he met the famous recruiter. Conway convinced him to choose the Valley. “Peterson convinces people that there is actually a lot of adventure out there,” he said.
Conway has been modeling himself as a Valley cowboy for years, and now the rest of the tech may have finally caught up. He hails the current interest in American Dynamism, the term coined by Andreessen Horowitz for government-friendly companies. “It’s just perfect. It’s right on the edge of bigotry,” Conway said. “It has become its own religion.”
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The energy of the main character
There’s a common theme in the way people describe Conway: a genius, an impact player in defense technology and, at times, a liability.
For example, a few days after I flew on his 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. In the early morning darkness, Conway failed to pull out a flashlight when checking his fuel gauge and, as a result, misread the gauge. “I made an assumption that was completely pilot error,” he said. While flying, he realized he didn’t have enough in the tank to get to the nearest airport.
Conway conveyed the story to me in mythic proportions: a fork in his path, a choice between good and evil. As he described it, he initially thought his best chance of survival was to land on a sports field at a nearby school. “I began to worry that a child was no match for a propeller,” he said.
So he chose to land his plane on Highway 85, landing toward oncoming traffic in the hopes it would be safer for motorists. Miraculously, his two-seater skidded onto the concrete, leaving Conway and the surrounding cars unscathed.
Conway then warned me that I had been a hair’s breadth away from a similar fate. “If we had flown further, we would have run out of gas,” he said.
This was not entirely true; he told me later that he had flown the plane at least once after our flight. But he painted our journey together in an existential light, making it unforgettable. After spending the day with him (and fact-checking his many exaggerations after two months), I learned that Conway is special in his epic storytelling skills. This is why he is hired by so many amazing companies. And shot. And then he was rehired once more.
As Dorman put it, “he’s a super unconventional recruiter.” However, he is also “better than any other recruiter”.