Venture capital operates on the premise that technology is the enabler of transformation. It’s an industry ruled by the “power law” of investing, where investors fund high-risk investments, generating high-reward returns to outweigh the losses. What if some industries need a different approach to drive transformation? What if technology itself isn’t enough to deliver impact and an entirely new business model is needed to transform certain markets?

General Catalyst has been investing in defense tech for two decades. We've had successes, but we've also watched a predictable pattern unfold: startups build exceptional technology, then stall navigating government sales. Nearly every company hits the same wall—not engineering limitations, but procurement complexity. They chase elusive Program of Record contracts promising venture-scale returns that rarely materialize. The recent capital influx has been crucial for modernizing our defense industrial base, but it hasn't solved the structural problem. 

Transforming the Defense Tech Business Model

I co-founded Valinor on a contrarian thesis: transforming defense requires reinventing the business model first, not the technology.

Valinor isn’t a single company; it’s a company of companies. We centralize what's traditionally fragmented (government expertise, compliance, sales infrastructure) and decentralize what matters the most: engineering. We partnered with operators who understand this market at the highest level—Trae Stephens at Founders Fund, Grant Verstandig at Red Cell, and leaders from Palantir, Anduril, and Helsing. The critical ingredient is our CEO. Julie Bush has spent decades in the trenches, from antitrust law to Capitol Hill procurement to scaling Palantir's government business. She's one of a handful of people who have navigated, deployed, and modernized government tech at scale. Venture capital obsesses over unicorn companies, but the real edge is finding unicorn CEOs. That’s Julie. 

The team that Julie has assembled at every level—whether product engineering, business development, mission operations, talent, finance and legal, growth or marketing—have all operated at scale in defense tech. All of them came to Valinor to deliver on our mission to solve the problems others don't.

‍Our Conversation with Julie

 For more on what Julie and Valinor are building, we spoke to her about the motivation to co-found Valinor and how she’s working to modernize defense. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 What does Valinor do?

Valinor builds what government needs, and we believe we are faster and better than anyone else. Our hub-and-spoke model inverts traditional defense procurement: centralized go-to-market expertise, decentralized engineering. This gives us the flexibility to enter markets, solve problems, and build or acquire products without the overhead that kills velocity.

Each product operates as a lean subsidiary: a Product Company. Signal to deployment to impact, at speed. In just over a year, we’ve launched ten Product Companies, partnered with Anduril, and built Valinor Streamline, the first third-party application installable in Palantir Foundry.

‍When did you first realize this was the problem you needed to solve?

The insight came from three vantage points. At Palantir, I learned that navigating government sales is as much about relationships as paperwork. On the Hill, I watched commercial companies repeatedly fail at procurement, security, and compliance—even with superior solutions.

The result: thousands of critical problems remain unsolved. Not because they're technically impossible, but because they fall outside traditional models of scale, funding, and attention. We exist to lower those barriers.

What’s surprised you most about building in this space?

 When I explain our model, the consistent response is: “Why hasn’t this been done before?”

The concept appears obvious. The execution is not. We're building operational infrastructure and the go to market team to support dozens of products simultaneously, and essentially constructing a conglomerate in real-time for the nation's most critical missions.

What does meaningful partnership—with the government, industry, and your engineers—look like to you at this stage?

We align incentives across all three stakeholders.

For government: we solve mission-critical problems the market has deemed "too small." For industry: we build products and components that accelerate their platforms. For our engineers: we eliminate bureaucratic friction so they can focus on building exceptional products.

From a technical standpoint, what’s novel or fresh about how you’re building?

In our view, no one has yet created a model for building mission-critical infrastructure “picks and shovels” for government that can scale solutions across departments and agencies. Our hub-and-spoke architecture is new to defense, but we borrowed from industries like biotech where similar models have proven successful.

Our Product Companies tackle problems others overlook. Moonshots attract capital and headlines, but warfighters and public servants tell us the same thing: those platforms are meaningless without the unglamorous components that make them functional.

What’s your main focus for the next year?

Two priorities: accelerating impact for our existing Product Companies and scaling our infrastructure to support more than a dozen products within the Valinor ecosystem.