In 2023, defense technology recruiter Peterson Conway VIII pulled up to the offices of fusion startup Hughes in his black Suburban, wearing his signature cowboy hat. He picked up a recent hire at Hughes and began regaling her with stories from his old days as a new employee. In one story, prostitutes attended a recruiting event (“not for sex,” Conway clarified to TechCrunch).
The new employee was not satisfied. “I thought that was a funny thing to say,” Conway said with a sigh, admitting that he was “a hell of a person.”
Fuse founder JC Btaiche overheard the conversation, agreed, and immediately fired Conway. But Btaiche told TechCrunch that talking about prostitution wasn't the only inappropriate thing Conway did.
But Mr. Conway, who has become one of the defense technology industry's biggest behind-the-scenes power brokers, did not give up on Hughes. Mr. Conway has spent the past decade recruiting for some of Silicon Valley's hottest defense and hard technology companies, including Palantir and Mach Industries. He spent nearly five years recruiting talent for Joe Lonsdale's venture firm 8VC and its portfolio companies, and since last year has been head of talent at venture firm A*.
So even after he was fired, Mr. Conway continued to pitch candidates to Mr. Butaish, luring them with offers to fly in private planes and “go blowing things up in the desert,” Mr. Conway said. Several months later, Hughes reinstated Conway. He has now hired more than seven people at Fuse, including Laura Thomas, Fuse's chief strategy officer and former CIA official.
In many ways, Conway is a stand-in for the entire industry. Wealthy, decisive, prone to incredible stories, and by all accounts brilliant. According to more than a dozen people TC interviewed for this article, Conway has been very successful in luring the best talent out of stable jobs and into the startup world. “There's a line between madness and genius,” Butaish said. “And I think he’s right on that line.”
With funding for defense technology soaring to about $3 billion last year, Conway is ready to persuade them to help build the next generation of nuclear reactors and AI-powered weapons.
“There's a whole community of young people in the Valley, often working in the defense sector, national security, or very ambitious and difficult jobs,” says the recent Princeton graduate, entrepreneur and A* partner. said Gregory Dorman, who worked with Kevin Hertz. Thanks to Conway's introduction, we talked about his new security startup Sauron. “And they’re there because of Peterson.”
Image credit: Peterson Conway
Not “compliant'' with safety regulations
Mr. Conway's signature move is to put candidates on small planes. “I like to joke that I make them feel bad until they accept our terms of trade,” he said.
I first met him at the San Carlos, California, airport just before boarding his small two-seater plane, which he had purchased with a loan from Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. A small sign in the cockpit warned: “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 shimmering San Francisco Bay as Conway told us his fable-like life story. His father, Peterson Conway VII, avoided the draft, sold LSD in Tokyo, and eventually immigrated 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 younger brother, but ultimately divorced.
“My dad threw himself down there,” Conway said casually as he jumped over the Golden Gate Bridge. He later explained that his suicide attempt had failed. Although his father was caught in the net, he is still alive and well selling antiques at a store in Carmel.
Conway rebelled against his father and briefly sought normalcy, attending Dartmouth to study economics. But after graduating from 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 as a cowboy in search of office space. He found a warehouse with a ramp, got on it, and continued toward Hearts. 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 her if she had any skills. “Nothing,” Conway replied. “But you can bring your lunch. I'm a decent writer. I had an Airstream trailer, so I felt like I could go surfing.”
When I asked about this story, Hartz laughed and said, “That's completely false.” Hertz said Conway simply rented office space in the same building and began hiring Xoom and then broader staff for PayPal.
When PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel launched Palantir in 2003, Conway was in the right place at the right time to start recruiting for the company. Conway apparently didn't have a formal title at the defense company, but was “just Peterson,” a defense engineer who looked like “an anonymous artist in the style of Prince or Madonna,” says a man who worked alongside Conway at Palantir. 8VC resident humanities scholar Gabe Rosen joked. .
Palantir sent Conway around the world to build an international team. Conway said the company was looking for employees with “inner compass and conviction,” people who have aligned themselves with the values they were raised with and forged their own path.
For example, Ms Conway claimed she received letters saying things like, “Looking for a Jew from the Australian Outback who married a gay Christian.” Palantir had no comment.
Conway was known for attracting the attention of recruits by sending handwritten letters with wax stickers. His methods were successful, attracting talent like former National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Reiter and many of Palantir's international hires.
unconventional method
Last summer, Conway and his father flew to the Mojave Desert on a rented Hertz plane for the purpose. In some sort of mirage of American dynamism, I could see young people loading drones into the back of trucks.
It was a test session for Mach Industries, the weapons company Ethan Thornton founded when he was 19 years old. Mach is one of the few defense and hardware companies that has hired Mr. Conway as an A* head of talent. Mach has since raised more than $80 million from investors including Bedrock and Sequoia Capital.
While they were setting up orange cones and explosive devices for technical testing, Conway took people on trips in Hertz planes. “He hit the ground so hard over and over again that he landed in the Mojave River,” Hertz said with a sigh. “Everything fell off.” Mr. Conway denied Mr. Hertz's explanation, saying the plane was simply “pretty dirty” and that the window covering was missing.
Conway said the company has hired Gabriela Hobe, a SpaceX alumnus, and Facil Mulatu Kello, Mach's vice president of manufacturing and former Tesla employee. “Ethan probably pays me over $1 million for what I do for him,” Conway said, though he later denied that amount.
It seems like everyone in the defense technology industry has an eye-opening story about Conway. At one point, Mr. Conway ordered an Uber and, after hitting it off with the driver, surprised the company's founder by arranging a ride for him and telling the driver to interview for the job.
Another time, Mr. Butaish, the Hughes founder, said Mr. Conway left his Porsche at an airport with the keys in it and had a recruit, then a government contractor, drive it when he landed. The company later clarified that the car was a four-seater Porsche loaned to the candidate to save on Uber costs.
The candidate took a Porsche to the meeting, and the day ended at his home in Conway. The house, a vast estate in the wealthy California coastal town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, was filled with her father's antiques and animal parts from his hunting expeditions. Conway regularly hosts dinners there for candidates (his father is the cook) and has also hosted parties ranging from Joe Lonsdale's birthday celebration to Sankar's wedding.
But Butaish said Conway's real superpower is not his stunts, but rather his ability to “talk about candidates in a more human way, rather than just looking at resumes and credentials.”
When hiring Hughes, Conway asked Butaish to brainstorm what kind of education would potentially produce someone who could lead a team and bring new ideas to the engineers. As a result, we have scouted people from rural areas, people who grew up as athletes, and people who are passionate about the game.
When it comes to persuading candidates, Butaish said Conway sells people on his mission to protect America. “If you're doing something that's truly mission-driven, I think Peterson can tell that story,” he said.
Dorman, one of those with the Conway Experience, was a philosophy major at Princeton University and was debating a career in the Valley or New York when he met the famous recruiter. Conway convinced him to choose volleyball. “Peterson convinces people that there's actually a lot of adventure out there,” he said.
Conway has been playing something of a Valley cowboy for years, and now other tech companies may finally be catching up. He praises the current interest in American dynamism, a term coined by Andreessen Horowitz to refer to corporations adjacent to government. “It's just perfect. It's bordering on fanaticism,” Conway said. “It has become a religion in itself.”
Image credit: Peterson Conway
hero's energy
There is a common theme in the way people describe Conway. It's about being a genius, an influential player in defense technology, and sometimes a liability.
For example, a few days after I got on his plane, he called me and asked, “Did you watch the news?”
The day before, Conway took a 6 a.m. flight from the Carmel area to Silicon Valley. In the early morning darkness, Conway failed to take out his flashlight when checking the fuel gauge, resulting in a misreading of the fuel gauge. “What I thought was complete pilot error,” he said. During the flight, you realize you don't have enough fuel in your tank to reach the nearest airport.
Conway told me a mythical story of a fork in the road, a choice between good and evil. According to his account, he initially thought his best chance of survival was to land on a nearby school playground. “I started to worry that propellers were no match for kids,” he says.
So he opted to land the plane on Highway 85 and face oncoming traffic, hoping it would be safer for drivers. Miraculously, Conway's two-seater vehicle skidded onto the concrete, leaving him and the surrounding cars unharmed.
Conway then warned me that I was about to suffer a similar fate. “If we had flown any further, we would have run out of gas,” he said.
That wasn't true at all. He later told me that he had been on a plane at least once after our flight. But he painted our journey in an existential light and made it unforgettable. After spending a day with him (and spending the next two months fact-checking his many exaggerations), I learned that Conway is extraordinary in his epic storytelling skills. That's why he gets hired by so many great companies. And then I was fired. And then re-employed.
As Dorman says, “He's a very unconventional recruiter.” Yet he's also “better than most recruiters.”