This article features first-ever photos taken from inside Anduril’s R&D facilities in Costa Mesa, California. All photos by Ryan Young.
On a Saturday afternoon in April 2024, I was on the rooftop pool deck of a Marriott hotel, setting up radar equipment aimed above the Hollywood Hills in Burbank, California. My five-year-old son, still damp from swimming, darted around as I calibrated the system.
“What are you doing?” he asked, touching the electronics with wet hands.
“Tracking … flying objects,” I said, carefully moving his hands away from the sensitive equipment. “It’s a special radar that will help our drones find targets better.”
Working on a thousand-dollar radar that could potentially transform a landmark missile platform during a father-son weekend was fairly typical in those days. The technology that my son wanted to touch, and which other poolside guests gawked at, was a throwback to the AGM-114 Hellfire missile system from the 1960s—a simple direction finder that could be guided by a ground system that paints targets with radio frequency (RF) instead of lasers. If we could get this to work, we could reduce the cost of our Roadrunner system—a reusable, twin-turbojet, vertical-takeoff-and-landing microfighter—by 30x.
Between trips to the pool and Chick-fil-A, I eventually managed to collect enough data to prove the concept worked: We could detect aircraft at 10 kilometers with a thousand-dollar sensor. It was the kind of breakthrough that could change how we approached reusable weapons and low-cost solutions for air defense—an ongoing R&D project I remain consumed by.
It wasn’t company-sanctioned work. I was officially on family time, having left Anduril as SVP of Engineering the month before to start a robotics company, Physical Intelligence (PI). Yet Anduril was never just a job; it was part of my identity. My badge still worked, I continued on in an emeritus role, and I still spent around 15 hours a week working with the engineering team I’d helped build.
When I joined Anduril in the fall of 2018, I was employee #20, the company was valued at $250 million, and we had lofty, but hypothetical, ambitions of reinventing the defense ecosystem. Less than six years later, the 4,000-person, $28 billion company has deployed 30-plus products with thousands of fielded systems, and changed the arc of American defense technology. It’s worth looking back now at those years of explosive growth, in order to give other founders, engineers, investors, operators, and everyone else a glimpse of what zero-to-one at Anduril was actually like.
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