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Peterson Conway, a defense technology recruiter in 2023 Wearing his signature cowboy hat, VIII pulled up to the offices of fusion startup Fuse in a black Suburban. He recently rented a Fuse and continues to regale him with stories of his old recruiting days. One story involved prostitutes attending a recruitment event (“not for sex,” Conway clarified to TechCrunch).
The new recruits were not happy. “I thought I said it in a funny way,” Conway said, admitting he 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 did.
But Conway, which has become one of the biggest behind-the-scenes power brokers in the defense technology industry, hasn’t given up on Fuse. Conway has recruited for some of the most high-profile defense and hard-line tech firms in Silicon Valley over the past decade, including Palantir and Mach Industries. He spent nearly half a decade doing recruiting for Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC and its portfolio companies, and since last year has been head of talent at venture firm A*.
Even after his firing, Conway continued to nominate candidates for Btaiche and lure prospects by offering flights in his private jet or “go blasting in the desert.” A few months later, Fuse reinstated Conway. Now he’s brought more than 7 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 incredible stories and, by all accounts, brilliant. According to dozens of people TC interviewed for this story, Conway is wildly successful at luring highly talented people away from steady 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 increases about $3 billion Last year, Conway was willing to convince the next generation to help build a new generation of nuclear reactors or AI-powered weapons.
“There’s a whole community of young people in the Valley who often work in the defense sector or national security or very ambitious, challenging jobs,” said Gregory Dorman, a Princeton graduate who worked with entrepreneur and A* partner Kevin Hartz. About the new security startup Sauron, thanks to Conway’s introduction. “And they’re there because of Peterson.”
“Does not comply” with safety regulations
Conway’s signature move is to pick up candidates in his small plane. “I like to joke that I make them sick until they accept the terms of our deals,” he said.
I met him for the first time at the airport in San Carlos, California, shortly before boarding his small two-seater airplane that I had borrowed from him. Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. A small sign in the cockpit warned me: “This aircraft is an experimental light sport aircraft and does not meet federal safety regulations for standard aircraft.”
A few minutes later we were flying over the sparkling San Francisco Bay, Conway telling the story of his life like a fairy tale. His father, Peterson Conway, evaded Project VII, sold LSD in Tokyo, and eventually moved to Afghanistan with Conway’s mother, a Mormon schoolteacher, in the 1970s. After a series of escapades in the Middle East and Africa, they moved to Carmel to raise Conway and her brother, but eventually divorced.
“Dad threw himself out there,” Conway said nonchalantly as he flew over the Golden Gate Bridge. Later, he explained that the suicide attempt was unsuccessful. His father was caught in nets and is alive and well today, selling antiques in a Carmel store.
Conway rebelled against his father by living a normal life for a short time at Dartmouth to study economics. But after college, in the early 2000s, he became a recruiter.
In Conway’s version of events, he was riding a motorcycle around San Francisco, a cowboy in search of 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 him if he had any skills. “No,” Conway replied. “But I can bring lunch. I am a decent writer. I had an Airstream trailer—I could go surfing.”
When I asked him about the story, Hartz laughed and said, “They’re completely false.” According to Hartz, Conway simply rented office space in the same building, and he began recruiting for Xoom and later the broader 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 had no official name at the defense company but was “just Peterson,” joked Gabe Rosen, who worked with Conway at Palantir as a “Princess or Madonna-style mononymous artist” in defense technology. .
Palantir sent Conway around the world to build its international teams. According to Conway, the company wanted employees with an “internal compass and confidence,” people who fought the values they grew up with and forged their own path.
For example, Conway claimed to receive messages such as, “Find me a Jew married to a gay Christian in outback Australia.” Palantir had no comment.
Conway was known for attracting the attention of recruits by sending handwritten letters with wax seals. His methods have been successful, landing people like Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and many of Palantir’s international recruiters.
Unconventional methods
Last summer, Conway flew Hartz’s plane to the Mojave Desert with his father. As a kind of mirror of American dynamism, they saw young men installing 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 several defense and equipment companies to hire Conway as head of talent at A*. Mach has since gone up 80 million dollars From investors like Bedrock and Sequoia Capital.
While those men were building orange cones and explosive devices for engineering experiments, Conway was taking people for a ride in Hartz’s plane. “It hit the ground so hard it landed in the Mojave,” Hartz sighed. “It’s all gone.” Conway disputed Hartz’s account, saying the plane was just “pretty dirty” and missing a window covering.
Conway said he hired Gabriela Hobe, a SpaceX alum, 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, though he later denied the figure.
It seems like everyone in the defense technology industry has an eye-catching story about Conway. Once, after Conway booked an Uber and hit it off with a driver, he surprised a founder by giving him a ride and telling the founder to interview the driver for a job.
On another occasion, Fuse founder Btaiche said, Conway left a Porsche with keys at the airport for a recruiter, then a government contractor, to drive when he landed. 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 meetings and ended the day at Conway’s home in the affluent California coastal town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, a sprawling compound filled with her father’s antiques and animal parts from his hunting expeditions. Conway hosts regular dinners there for the candidates (her father cooks) and also hosts parties, Conway says, from a birthday party for Joe Lonsdale to Sankar’s wedding.
But Btaiche said Conway’s real superpower isn’t her gimmicks, but rather her ability to “talk about candidates in a more human way than just looking at resumes and credentials.”
To hire Fuse, Conway Btaiche brainstormed what kind of upbringing would create someone who could lead a team or bring new ideas to engineers; As a result, they discovered people from rural areas, people who grew up as athletes, and people who were addicted to the game.
As for winning candidates, Btaiche said Conway is selling people on the imperative to defend America. “If you’re working on something really mission-driven,” he said, “I think Peterson can deliver that story.”
Dorman, one of the people with the Conway Experience, was a philosophy major at Princeton debating between careers in the Valley or New York when he met a famous recruiter. Conway convinced him to choose the Valley. “Peterson convinces people that there really is a lot of adventure out there,” he said.
Conway had been establishing himself as a cowboy in the Valley for years, and now the rest of the technology could finally catch up. He welcomes the current interest in American Dynamism, as used by Andreessen Horowitz for government-affiliated companies. “It’s just perfect. It really borders on bigotry,” Conway said. “It became its own religion.”
Basic character energy
There’s a common thread 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 boarded his plane, he called me and said, “Did you see the news?” he asked.
The day before, Conway had taken a 6 a.m. flight from the Carmel area to Silicon Valley. While checking the fuel gauge in the early morning darkness, Conway failed to remove his flashlight, resulting in a misreading of the gauge. “I made an assumption that was completely pilot error,” he said. During the flight, he realized that he did not have enough in the tank to reach the nearest airport.
Conway explained the story to me in mythic proportions: A fork in the road, a choice between good and bad. As he describes it, he initially thought his best chance for survival was to land on the sports field at a nearby school. “I began to fear that the child did not fit the propeller,” he said.
So he opted to land his plane on Highway 85 by descending into oncoming traffic, hoping it would be safer for motorists. Miraculously, his two-seater skidded onto the concrete, leaving Conway and surrounding cars unharmed.
Conway later warned me that I was a hair’s breadth away from a similar fate. “If we flew any further, we would run out of gas,” he said.
This was not entirely true; then he told me 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 a day with him (and checking out his many exaggerations for the next two months), I learned that Conway is unique in his ability to tell epic stories. That’s why he’s hired by so many great companies. And he fired. And then he was hired again.
As Dorman says, “He’s a super unconventional employer.” However, it is also “better than other recruiters”.
