In 2023, Peterson Conway, a defense technology recruiter VIII arrived at the offices of nuclear fusion startup Fuse in a black Suburban, wearing his signature cowboy hat. He had recently taken Fuse’s job and proceeded to regale her with stories about his old recruiting days. One story involved prostitutes attending a recruiting event (“not for the sex,” Conway explained to TechCrunch).
The new tenant was not happy. “I thought I said that in a funny way,” Conway sighed, admitting he was an “a-hole.”
Fuse founder JC Bteish caught wind of the conversation and agreed, promptly firing Conway — though Bteish told TechCrunch that telling the prostitution story wasn’t the only inappropriate thing Conway did.
But Conway, who has become one of the defense technology industry’s biggest behind-the-scenes power brokers, has not given up on Fuse. Conway has hired some of Silicon Valley’s most well-known defense and hard technology companies over the past decade, such as Palantir and Mach Industries. He has spent nearly half a decade doing recruiting at Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC and at its portfolio companies, and since last year, he has been head of talent at venture firm A*.
So, even after his firing, Conway continued to pitch candidates to Battish and lure potential candidates with fly-ins on his private plane or offers to “go into the desert,” Conway said. A few months later, 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 stand-in for the entire industry: rich, determined, prone to telling incredible stories, and, by all accounts, brilliant. According to dozens of people interviewed by TC for this story, Conway has been largely successful in luring talented people away from stable jobs and into startup life. “There is a line between madness and genius,” Bteish said. “And I think it’s just on that line.”
With defense technology funding rising to nearly $3 billion last year, Conway is poised to convince the next generation to help create new-age nuclear reactors or AI-powered weapons.
“There’s a whole community of young people in the valley, often working in jobs in the defense or national security sector or in things that are very ambitious and challenging,” said Gregory Dorman, a recent Princeton graduate who worked with entrepreneur and super-partner Kevin Hartz. on his new security startup Sauron, thanks to Conway’s introduction. “And they are there because of Peterson.”
“Does not comply” with safety regulations
Conway’s signature move is to fly the 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 first met him at an airport in San Carlos, California, shortly before I boarded his small two-seat plane, purchased with a loan from Palantir’s 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 sparkling San Francisco Bay as Conway told his legendary life story. His father, Peterson Conway VII, dodged the draft, sold LSD in Tokyo, and eventually moved to Afghanistan in the 1970s with Conway’s mother, a Mormon school teacher. After a series of adventures across the Middle East and Africa, they moved to Carmel to raise Conway and his brother, but eventually separated.
“My father threw himself there,” Conway said nonchalantly as we flew over the Golden Gate Bridge. Then he explained that the suicide attempt had failed. 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 pursuing a normal life, going to 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, a cowboy looking for office space. He spotted a warehouse with a ramp, mounted it and ran straight to Hartz. At the time, Hartz was in the early stages of building Xoom, an international money transfer fintech service that was eventually purchased by PayPal.
Conway said Hartz asked him if he had any skills. “Nothing,” Conway replied. “But I can bring lunches. I’m a decent writer. I had an Airstream trailer—I think we could go surfing.”
Hartz laughed when I asked him about the story, saying: “This is all completely false.” According to Hartz, Conway simply rented office space in the same building, and so began recruiting Xoom customers, and later PayPal’s broader audience.
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 company. Conway apparently didn’t have an official title at the defense company, “but he was just a Peterson,” like a defense technician, “a nameless artist in the style of Prince or Madonna,” said Gabe Rosen, a humanities scholar-in-residence at 8VC who worked with Conway at Palantir. , he joked. .
Palantir sent Conway across the world to build its international teams. According to Conway, the company wanted employees with an “inner compass and conviction,” people who wrestled with the values they were raised with and paved their own path.
For example, Conway claimed he would receive letters such as “Find me a Jew who married a Christian woman from the Australian outback who was gay.” Palantir had no comment.
Conway was known to attract the attention of recruits by sending handwritten letters with wax seals. His methods were successful, bringing in people like Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and several international employees at Palantir.
Unconventional methods
Last summer, Conway and his father traveled to the Mojave Desert on a Hartz plane, which he had borrowed for the occasion. Like some kind of mirage of American dynamism, they saw a group of young men riding a drone in the back of a truck.
It was a testing 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 hardware companies to have hired Conway as chief talent officer at A*. Mach has since raised more than $80 million from investors such as Bedrock and Sequoia Capital.
While these men prepared orange cones and explosive equipment for their engineering tests, Conway took people on flights on Hartz’s plane. “He hit the ground hard, too many times, and landed in the Mojave,” Hartz sighed. “Everything came loose.” Conway denied Hartz’s account, saying the plane had simply “become very dirty” and the window cover was missing.
According to Conway, he has hired SpaceX alumna Gabriella Hope and Vasil Mulatu Kiru, vice president of manufacturing at Mach and a former Tesla employee. “Ethan probably paid me over a million dollars to do what I do for him,” Conway said, although he later denied that amount.
It seems like everyone in the defense technology industry has an interesting story about Conway. Once, after Conway ordered an Uber and bumped into the driver, he surprised one of the founders by setting up a ride for him and asking the founder to interview the driver for a job.
Another time, Bteish, the Fuse founder, said Conway left a Porsche with the keys at the airport for a recruit, then a government contractor, to drive when he landed the plane. The company later explained that it was a four-seater Porsche, which had been loaned to the candidate so that the company could save money on Uber.
The candidate took a Porsche to their meetings, and ended the day at Conway’s home, a sprawling compound in the affluent California coastal town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, filled with his father’s antiques and animal parts from hunting trips. Conway hosts regular dinners for candidates there (his father cooks) as well as, according to Conway, parties ranging from Joe Lonsdale’s birthday party to Sancar’s wedding.
But Bteish said Conway’s real superpower lies not in his stunts, but in his ability to talk about “candidates in a more human way, rather than just looking at resumes and credentials.”
For the hiring at Fuse, Conway asked Bteish to brainstorm ideas about what an upbringing can create in someone who can lead a team, or bring new ideas to engineers; As a result, they scouted people from rural areas, people who grew up as athletes, and people who were obsessed with gaming.
As for winning over candidates, Bteish said that Conway is selling people the imperative to defend America. “If you’re working on something that’s really mission-oriented, I think Peterson can provide that story,” he said.
Dorman, one of Conway’s subjects, was a philosophy major at Princeton and was debating between careers in the Valley or New York when he met the 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 has portrayed himself as a Valley cowboy for years, and now the rest of the tech companies may finally be catching up. He pays tribute to the current interest in American dynamism, a term coined by Andreessen Horowitz for government-adjacent businesses. “It’s just idealistic. It borders on fanaticism,” Conway said. “It’s become its own religion.”
The energy of the main character
There’s a common theme in how people describe Conway: genius, impact player in defensive technology and, at times, responsibility.
For example, a few days after I flew on his plane, he called me and asked, “Have you seen the news?”
The day before, Conway took a 6 a.m. flight from Carmel to Silicon Valley. In the darkness of the early morning, Conway failed to pull out a flashlight when he was checking the fuel gauge and, as a result, misread the gauge. “I assumed it was entirely pilot error,” he said. As he was flying, he realized he didn’t have enough in the tank to get to the nearest airport.
Conway regaled me with a story of epic proportions: a crossroads in his path, a choice between good and evil. As he described it, he initially thought his best chance at survival was to land on a sports field at a nearby school. “I was starting to freak out that the baby was no match for the fan,” he said.
So he chose to land his plane on Interstate 85, heading into oncoming traffic in hopes it would be safer for drivers. Miraculously, his seat slid onto the concrete, leaving Conway and the surrounding cars unharmed.
Then Conway warned me that I was just a hair away from a similar fate. “If we had flown further, we would have run out of fuel,” he said.
That wasn’t entirely true. He later told me that he had flown the plane at least once after our trip. But he painted our journey together in an existential light, making it unforgettable. After spending the day with him (and the next two months probing his many exaggerations), I learned that Conway is unique in his epic storytelling skills. That’s why he’s been hired by so many great companies. And fired. Then he was rehired again.
“He’s a very unconventional recruiter,” Dorman said. However, he is also “better than any other recruiter.”