Stanford students used to chase jobs at Meta and Google. Now they want to work on defense

When Divya Ganesan, a senior studying political science, started at Stanford in 2021, she didn’t dream of one day working in national security. Back then, defense intelligence companies that contract with the government, like Palantir, were “super looked down upon” on campus, she said. “They were seen as the evil guys.”

Now, the vibes have shifted. 

After taking the popular class “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms” in 2022, Ganesan became hooked on defense tech. She cofounded the student group Stanford Women in National Security, or WINS, which now has more than 150 members, and completed summer internships at the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

“My most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir,” Ganesan says. The company, cofounded by Peter Thiel, a supporter of President Donald Trump, contracts with the military on surveillance and targeting systems. Its stock has surged to an all-time high since Trump took office. 

At Stanford, building tech for the U.S. government is cool again. Students are dropping out to form defense tech startups and compete for coveted internships at government security agencies or major private contractors. Undergraduates, business school students, recent alumni now working in defense tech, and faculty show a booming interest in building war machines for the United States.

Though she was once conflicted about working on defense, Ganesan no longer has as many qualms. “In great power politics, people die. Often more impulsive, less pragmatic men make those decisions, and as a well-educated woman, I’d rather be in the room,” she said. 

This is a striking change in sentiment from just seven years ago. In 2018, Stanford student activists and community members marched in front of Palantir’s Palo Alto headquarters to protest the company’s contracts with U.S. Immigration and  Customs Enforcement, and several thousand Google employees signed a petition to end “Project Maven,” a Pentagon contract that could apply AI to target drone strikes. 

These days, enrollment in “Hacking for Defense” — a class in which student teams partner with U.S. military sponsors to work on national security problems — has skyrocketed. To handle the growing interest, Stanford in 2021 opened the Gordian Knot Center, funded initially with $1.28 million from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, as a hub for defense tech programs. (The center took its name from ancient Greece, referring to a knot that, if untangled, would destine Alexander the Great to rule over Asia. The knot has become “a metaphor for an intractable problem,” cofounder Steve Blank wrote. “Today, the United States is facing several seemingly intractable national security problems simultaneously.”)   

Over the last three years, the Gordian Knot Center sponsored WINS, the National Security Innovation Scholars fellowship, and the Stanford DEFCON conference, which had more than 1,000 attendees last year. The center’s faculty also launched two courses — “Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition” in 2020 and “Entrepreneurship Inside Government” this year — to address surging undergraduate interest. 

Meanwhile, Palantir, Anduril, Vannevar Labs, and Shield AI have become high-profile employers for Stanford graduates, and more students are founding startups in the security field.

Max Susman, a former Navy SEAL and electrical engineer, started the drone company Revere Technologies while he was an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The school and, in particular, the Gordian Knot Center have proved  “invaluable” as his company brokers deals with the government, he said. While many defense companies have to hire D.C.-based lobbyists to meet with government leaders, Susman hasn’t needed boots on the ground in the nation’s capital. “I haven’t had to fly to D.C. Senior Pentagon officials make a stop at Stanford or the Gordian Knot, and I get an audience,” he said.

When computer science major Andrew Fang interned at Anduril in 2020, at a time when the autonomous systems unicorn had fewer than 200 employees, most of his peers did not share his interest in weapons technology. But energized by his experience at the company, he took two years off from Stanford to cofound a defense tech startup that raised $1.04 million from the Air Force before shutting down in 2022. At the time, he said, “the industry was very niche.”

When Fang re-enrolled in 2022, other Stanford students admired what he’d built. They approached him to compliment his Anduril-branded swag and pitch him their own ideas on defense tech. Fang was surprised. “These are kinetic, lethal systems — that’s serious shit. There’s definitely far more interest than there was in the past,” he said. Fang has since pivoted to building AI for local governments. 

“I have a lot of friends working at space or defense companies: Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX,” said one Stanford senior studying computer science who asked not to be named. He identified the Trump administration as one factor in the change. “During Biden, things were more liberal. Now the pendulum is swinging back, and Silicon Valley is a big part of that. You’d hope that the government is moving faster now — there’s a lot of excitement.”

At a Hacking for Defense information session on a rainy February afternoon, about 20 students filed into Room C106 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Joe Felter, director of the Gordian Knot Center and former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, launched into a well-practiced spiel. “It’s a dangerous world out there, so we need our best and brightest,” he told the group. “If you want to stay in your dorm room, this is not the class for you.”

Felter and his teaching team emphasized that national security is more meaningful than ordinary tech work: Unlike other startup courses, Felter explained, Hacking for Defense teams are optimized for “mission achievement,” not for profit. 

Several students said they were interested in “little-d defense,” not in building advanced weapons systems. One master’s student in computer science, who asked not to be named, explained that he has a “moral aversion” to building weapons like drones and missiles but hopes to work at a company that focuses on intelligence operations, such as Vannevar Labs. Like Felter, he described national security work as “mission-driven,” unlike the “empty pursuit” of consumer software. 

For collegiate defense enthusiasts, the work feels urgent. “The U.S. has had decades of dominance and peace. We could fight any country we wanted — nobody could touch us, right? But now China is multiplying itself, and it’s pretty obvious that we could lose. This is existential,” said Fang.

Ganesan points to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a turning point. “It was like the 9/11 of our generation,” she said. After the war started, her national security group for Stanford women saw “a huge uptick in student interest.” Compared to her consulting internship at a consulting firm, she felt far “more valuable” in her internship at the federal government.

Renewed interest in government work coincides with a slowing job market for Big Tech — the default employer of choice for computer science graduates over the past decade. Several undergrads said this is one reason students are looking beyond Silicon Valley. Stanford’s first defense tech career fair last fall attracted 300 students.

The national security establishment, in turn, is giving love back to Stanford. Since 1969, the university’s conservative-leaning Hoover Institution has hosted National Security Affairs Fellows to pursue independent research. In 2015, former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter started the Defense Innovation Unit to bridge the technology gap between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. In 2022, Eric Volmar, now associate director of the Gordian Knot Center, established the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital to help VCs fund advanced manufacturing and AI. 

Ernestine Fu, a Stanford alum and defense tech investor at Brave Capital, described efforts like these as a response to the U.S. lagging behind China. Civil-military fusion has long been a cornerstone of Beijing’s military strategy, and Silicon Valley is only now catching up. 

“If you’re a brilliant technology expert, you can contribute to this new warrior class. There’s a renewed sense of responsibility to make sure advanced technologies support democratic values,” Fu explained.

Others are more skeptical of the stated altruism. Professor emeritus Terry Winograd, former president of the 1980s anti-nuclear group Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility, expressed concern about students rushing into military contracting. “It’s a culture that has no connection to people’s lives. Building more effective weaponry is just, ‘Can we make a profit with this?’” Winograd said.

“It’s become profitable to exaggerate the security threats that the U.S. currently faces,” said Tianyu Fang, a technology and democracy fellow at New America and Stanford alum. He referenced recent comments by Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey that China has ambitions to take over the Philippines, the Korean Peninsula, and most of Japan — “an unsubstantiated opinion shared by few, if any, credible China experts.” 

By tying corporate revenue so closely to war, defense-tech “could make the U.S. and the world less secure,” Fang said.

The rising student interest in defense tech has coincided with a surge of investor interest. The social media, gig economy, and direct-to-consumer startups that fueled the 2010s froth among tech investors often featured fast-growth but weak unit economics, meaning it was hard for the companies to turn a profit even when they had lots of customers. On the contrary, companies that win government contracts can access hefty sums of stable, recurring revenue. In 2024, venture capitalists poured $3 billion into defense tech startups, versus $0.3 billion in 2019, according to Crunchbase.

“People are betting that if anything goes hot in the Pacific, money will flood in, like it did in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Stanford business student Andrew Paulmeno, a Marine Corps veteran who was chief product officer for Project Maven at the Pentagon. Stanford “follows very closely where venture dollars are growing.” He called Google employees’ protests against Project Maven “moronic — two years later, they tried to come back, and we wouldn’t take them.”

Yet Paulmeno isn’t interested in working in defense tech — he says most defense work is slow, challenging, and underpaid, despite the hype. “The government acquisition cycle outlives the fundraising cycle for a company. Everything has to be signed off six different ways,” he said.

Susman, the former Navy Seal, echoed the precarious nature of government funding. He cites as an example the DoD’s Replicator Initiative: When it was announced in 2023, venture money flooded into companies making low-cost autonomous drones. But it remains to be seen whether the government wants to buy what’s on offer from that swarm of startups. “The DoD needs to start buying products from the little guys. If not, it’s pretty bleak,” Susman said. “You’re gonna see a bunch of companies die.”

“We’re at this pivotal moment,” he added. “I’m hopeful that partisan politics won’t get in the way.”

If there’s one person who isn’t surprised by the defense tech revival at Stanford, it’s Blank. The Vietnam veteran, serial entrepreneur, and creator of the “lean startup” methodology cofounded Hacking for Defense and teaches the course as an adjunct lecturer.

Blank is proud to see Stanford returning to its Cold War roots as the prime provider of talent, policy, and technology for the U.S. military. “National security includes the toughest and the most exciting problems that the country has to offer. And Facebook is basically fentanyl for your head. Why would I want students to go there?”