Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
In 2023, Peterson Conway who wrote technical works VIII pulled up to the offices of the nuclear fusion reactor Fuse in the dark town, wearing his cowboy hat. He took on Fuse’s latest hire and began retelling him stories from his old recruiting days. One story was about prostitutes attending a recruitment event (“not sex,” Conway explained to TechCrunch).
The new hire was not happy. “I thought I said that jokingly,” Conway sighed, admitting that he was “an a-hole.”
Fuse founder JC Btaiche was intrigued by the conversation and agreed, firing Conway — though Btaiche told TechCrunch that reporting on prostitution wasn’t the only inappropriate thing Conway had done.
But Conway, who has become one of the world’s most successful defense attorneys, has not given up on Fuse. Conway has also written for some of Silicon Valley’s biggest defense and security companies over the past decade, such as Palantir and Mach Industries. He spent nearly half a decade recruiting at Joe Lonsdale’s venture 8VC for the company and his companies, and since last year, as head of talent at investment firm A* Capital.
So even after he was fired, Conway continued to invite candidates to Btaiche and offer prospects a flight in his private jet or he wanted to “go to the desert,” Conway said. A few months later, Fuse reinstated Conway. He has now recruited more than seven people to join Fuse, including the head of Fuse, Laura Thomas, a former CIA director.
In many ways, Conway is the epitome of the business as a whole: rich, determined, eloquent and, of all things, smart. According to a dozen people TC interviewed for the story, Conway is very successful at luring the most talented people out of regular jobs and into the startup life. “There’s a line between crazy and sane,” Btaiche said. “And I think he’s on that line.”
As defense technology costs increased about $3 billion last year, Conway is ready to convince the next generation to help develop new nuclear weapons or AI weapons.
“There’s a whole group of young people in the Valley, often working in the defense industry or national security or very ambitious, challenging things,” said Gregory Dorman, a recent Princeton graduate who works with entrepreneur and fellow A* Kevin Hartz. . in his new introduction of defense Sauron, thanks to the initiation of Conway. “And they’re there because of Peterson.”
It doesn’t ‘comply’ with security rules
Conway’s signature is to lift candidates into his small plane. “I like to joke that I make them sick until they accept what we do,” he said.
I first met him at the airport in San Carlos, California, just before boarding his small two-seater plane, bought on loan from Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. A small sign in the passenger compartment warned me: “This aircraft is an experimental aircraft and does not comply with the government’s safety regulations for standard aircraft.”
A few minutes later, we were soaring over the sparkling San Francisco Bay as Conway told the story of his legendary life. His father, Peterson Conway VII, absconded, sold LSD in Tokyo, and eventually moved to Afghanistan in the 1970s with Conway’s mother, a Mormon school teacher. After fleeing through the Middle East and Africa, she moved to Carmel to raise Conway and her brother, but eventually divorced.
“My dad threw himself over there,” Conway said nonchalantly as we climbed over the Golden Gate Bridge. He then explained that the suicide attempt was unsuccessful. His father was caught in the net and is alive and well today, selling antiques in his shop in Carmel.
Conway rebelled against his father by briefly following suit, going to Dartmouth to study economics. But after college, in the early 2000s, he found himself a recruiter.
In Conway’s case, he rode a motorcycle around San Francisco, a cowboy looking for office space. He saw a warehouse with a ramp, climbed it and ran to Hartz. At the time, Hartz was in the early stages of building Xoom, a fintech global money transfer service that was acquired by PayPal.
Conway said Hartz asked him if he had any skills. “Nothing,” Conway replied. But I can bring lunch. I am a good writer. I had an Airstream trailer — I’m like, we can go swimming.”
Hartz laughed when I asked him about the story, saying, “It’s all a lie. According to Hartz, Conway just rented offices in the same building and that’s how he started writing Xoom and later, the main PayPal team.
When PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel founded Palantir in 2003, Conway was in the right place at the right time and began recruiting for the company. Apparently, Conway didn’t have a position at a security company, “but he was ‘just Peterson,'” as a technologist “a famous artist in the style of Prince or Madonna,” joked Gabe Rosen, an 8VC anthropologist who works with Conway at Palantir. .
Palantir sent Conway around the world to build its global teams. According to Conway, the company wanted employees with “an inner compass and conviction,” people who challenged their upbringing and made their own way.
For example, Conway said that he would find errors such as “find me a Jew who married a Christian from rural Australia who was gay.” Palantir had no comment.
Conway was known for attracting the attention of recruits by sending handwritten letters with tar. His tactics were successful, bringing in people like Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and many of Palantir’s international operations.
Unconventional methods
Last summer, Conway and his father flew to the Mojave Desert in a Hartz plane, leased for the event. Like some kind of mirage of American Dynamism, he saw a group of boys riding a drone on the back of a car.
It was an experimental unit of Mach Industries, a hardware company founded by Ethan Thornton at the age of 19. Mach is one of the defense and hardware companies that Conway recruited to be the talent manager at A*. Mach has been growing $80 million from investors such as Bedrock and Sequoia Capital.
While the men planted orange cones and explosives to test the engineering, Conway took people on a ride in Hartz’s plane. “They hit the ground hard, most of the time, reaching the Mojave,” Hartz complained. “It’s all over.” Conway rejected Hartz’s story, saying that the plane was “very dirty” and that he had lost a window covering.
According to Conway, they also recruited SpaceX alum Gabriela Hobe and Fasil Mulatu Kero, Mach’s vice president of manufacturing and a former Tesla employee. Conway said: “Ethan probably paid me a million dollars to do what I did for him, although he later denied the amount.”
It seems everyone in the security industry has a familiar Conway story. On one occasion, when Conway ordered an Uber and was hit by a driver, he surprised the startup by setting him up with a ride and telling the startup to ask the driver questions.
At one point, Fuse founder Btaiche said Conway left a Porsche with the keys in it at an airport to hire a man, then a government contractor, to drive it when he touched down. The company later revealed that it was a four-seater Porsche, which it lent out to candidates 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 sprawling estate in the affluent Californian town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, filled with her father’s antiques and wild animals. Conway hosts regular dinners for those who want to be there (her father cooks), and, according to Conway, parties from Joe Lonsdale’s birthday to Sankar’s wedding.
But Btaiche said Conway’s real strength isn’t what he does, but his ability to talk about “candidates on a personal basis, rather than just looking at the basics and information.”
In the hiring of Fuse, Conway had Btaiche to think about what parenting can do for someone who can lead a team, or bring new ideas to professionals; Because of this, they have searched for people from rural areas, people who grew up in sports, and people who love sports.
As for the winners, Btaiche said Conway is selling people to protect America. “If you’re doing a mission-driven job,” he said. “I think Peterson can tell the story.”
Dorman, one of the people who had the Conway Experience, was a philosopher at Princeton torn between work in the Valley or New York when he met a famous writer. Conway persuaded him to choose the Valley. “Peterson assures people that there is a lot of fun out there,” he said.
Conway has established himself as a rancher in the valley for years, and now all other technologies are gone. He praises the interest in American Dynamism, a term coined by Andreessen Horowitz for companies close to the government. “It’s just perfect. It’s bordering on fanatical,” Conway said. “It’s become its own religion.”
Main character strength
There is a common theme in how people describe Conway: an expert, a power player in defense technology, and, in some cases, a position.
For example, a few days after I boarded his plane, he called me and asked, “Have you seen this story?”
The day before, Conway left at 6 in the morning from the Carmel area to Silicon Valley. At dawn, Conway failed to get out his flashlight while checking his fuel gauge, and the result was wrong. “I came up with an idea that was a pilot problem,” he said. As he was flying, he realized he didn’t have enough in the tank to go to the nearest airport.
Conway brought the story back to me in terms of myth: a fork in the road, a choice between good and evil. As he explained, at first he thought his best chance for survival was to make it to the playground at the local school. He said: “I began to wonder that a child cannot be compared to a pilot.
So he decided to land his plane on Highway 85, heading for the oncoming traffic thinking it would be better for drivers. Miraculously, the two occupants jumped off the concrete, leaving Conway and the neighboring vehicles unharmed.
Conway then warned me that I was about to face a similar fate. He said: “If we had traveled a long way, we would have run out of fuel.”
That wasn’t really true; he told me later that he flew the plane at the same time we took off. But he painted our journey together in an existential light, making it unforgettable. After spending a day with him (and the next two months and witnessing his exaggeration), I learned that Conway is unique in his storytelling skills. That’s why they are hired by so many amazing companies. And he was fired. And then he resumed work.
As Mr. Dorman put it, “I’m an unofficial recruiter.” However, he is also “better than any other hired hand.”
