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In 2023, Peterson Conway, a defense technology expert VIII pulled up to the offices of nuclear fusion startup Fuse in a black Suburban, wearing his signature cowboy hat. He picked up the recently recruited Fuse and proceeded to regale her with stories of his old recruiting days. One story involved prostitutes attending a recruiting event (“it’s not for sex,” Conway explained to TechCrunch).
The new employee was not happy. “I thought I told it in a funny way,” sighed Conway, admitting he was “an asshole.”
Fuse founder JC Btaiche overheard 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, who has become one of the biggest behind-the-scenes powerhouses in the defense technology industry, hasn’t given up on Fuse. Conway has recruited for some of Silicon Valley’s hottest defense and technology companies over the past decade, including Palantir and Mach Industries. He has spent nearly half a decade working in recruitment for Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC and its portfolio companies, and has been head of talent at venture firm A* since last year.
So even after he was fired, Conway continued to pitch candidates to Btaiche and lure potential clients with flights on his private jet or offers to “go blow off steam in the desert,” Conway said. After a few months, Fuse brought Conway back. 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, inclined to tell incredible stories and, by all accounts, brilliant. According to a dozen people TC interviewed for this story, Conway is very successful at luring highly talented people away from stable jobs and into startup life. “There is a line between insanity and genius,” Btaiche said. “And I think he’s right on that line.”
As Defense Technology Funding Soared to almost 3 billion dollars last year, Conway is poised to convince the next generation to help build new-age nuclear reactors or AI-powered weapons.
“There’s a whole community of young people in the Valley, often working in defense or national security or very ambitious, difficult things,” said Gregory Dorman, a recent Princeton graduate who worked with entrepreneur and A* partner Kevin Hartz on to his new security startup Sauron, thanks to Conway’s introduction. “And they’re there because of Peterson.”
“Not in compliance” with safety regulations
Conway’s signature move is to take candidates around in his tiny plane. “I like to joke that they will be sick until they accept the terms of our contracts,” he said.
I met him for the first time at the airport in San Carlos, California, shortly before I climbed into his tiny two-seater plane, bought with a loan from Palantir 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 floating over the glittering San Francisco Bay as Conway recounted his fairytale-like life story. His father, Peterson Conway VII, evaded the draft, sold LSD in Tokyo and eventually moved to Afghanistan in the 1970s with Conway’s mother, a Mormon teacher. After a series of escapades in the Middle East and Africa, they moved to Carmel to raise Conway and his brother, but eventually divorced.
“My dad threw himself over there,” Conway said nonchalantly as we soared over the Golden Gate Bridge. He then explained that the suicide attempt was unsuccessful. His father was caught in the nets and is alive and well today, selling antiques in his Carmel shop.
Conway rebelled against his father by briefly seeking a normal life, attending Dartmouth to study economics. But after college, in the early 2000s, he found himself becoming a recruiter.
In Conway’s version of events, he was riding a motorcycle around San Francisco, a cowboy looking for office space. He spotted a warehouse with a ramp, mounted it, and ran right into 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. “Nothing,” Conway replied. “But I can bring lunches. I’m a decent writer. I had an Airstream trailer — I mean, we can go surfing.”
Hartz laughed when I asked him about the story, saying, “It’s all completely false.” According to Hartz, Conway simply rented office space in the same building and began recruiting for Xoom and later PayPal’s wider 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, “he was ‘just Peterson,'” like a defense tech “Prince or Madonna-style mononymous artist,” joked Gabe Rosen, 8VC’s resident humanities scholar who worked with Conway in Palantir.
Palantir has sent Conway around the world to build its international teams. According to Conway, the company wanted employees with “an inner compass and conviction,” people who had come to grips with the values they grew up with and forged their own path.
For example, Conway claimed he would get letters like “find me a Jewish woman who married a Christian woman from outback Australia who is gay”. 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, winning over people like Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and many of Palantir’s international employees.
Unconventional methods
Last summer, Conway and his father flew to the Mojave Desert in Hartz’s plane, borrowed for the occasion. Like some kind of mirage of American dynamism, they saw a group of young men placing a drone on the back of a truck.
It was testing for Mach Industries, a weapons manufacturing company founded by Ethan Thornton when he was 19 years old. Mach is one of a handful of defense and hardware companies that have recruited Conway as head of talent at A*. Mach has since raised over 80 million dollars from investors like Bedrock and Sequoia Capital.
While these men were setting up orange cones and explosive devices for their engineering tests, Conway was taking people on trips in Hartz’s plane. “He hit the ground so hard, so many times, landing in the Mojave,” Hartz sighed. “Everything fell apart.” Conway denied Hartz’s account, saying the plane simply got “pretty dirty” and lost a window cover.
According to Conway, he recruited SpaceX student Gabriela Hoba and Fasil Mulata Kero, Mach’s vice president of manufacturing and a former Tesla employee. “Ethan probably paid me over a million dollars to do what I do for him,” Conway said, though he later denied that figure.
Everyone in the defense technology industry seems to have an amazing Conway story. Once, after Conway ordered an Uber and got into an argument with the driver, he surprised the founder by arranging a ride for him and telling the founder to interview the driver for a job.
Another time, Fuse founder Btaiche said Conway left a Porsche with the keys at the airport for a recruiter, then a government contract, to drive when he landed. The company later clarified that it was a four-seater Porsche, borrowed from the contender so the company could save money on Ubers.
The candidate took the Porsche to their meetings and ended the day at Conway’s house, a sprawling compound in the affluent California coastal town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, crammed with his father’s antiques and animal parts from hunting expeditions. Conway hosts regular candidate dinners there (his father cooks) as well as, according to Conway, parties ranging from Joe Lonsdale’s birthday bash to Sankar’s wedding.
But Btaiche said Conway’s real superpower isn’t his stunts, but his ability to talk about candidates in a “more human way, rather than just looking at resumes and credentials.”
To hire Fuse, Conway had Btaiche think about what kind of upbringing could create someone who could 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 are obsessed with games.
As for the candidate’s wooing, Btaiche said Conway is selling people on the imperative to defend America. “If you’re working on something that’s really mission-driven,” he said, “I think Peterson can deliver that story.”
Dorman, one of the people who had Conway’s experience, was a philosophy major at Princeton and debating between a career in the Valley or New York when he met the celebrity recruiter. Conway talked him into choosing the Valley. “Peterson is convincing people that there’s actually a lot of adventure out there,” he said.
Conway has been shaping up as a Valley cowboy for years, and now the rest of technology may have finally caught up to him. He applauds the current interest in American dynamism, a term coined by Andreessen Horowitz for companies next door to government. “It’s just perfect. 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: a genius, an influential player in defense technology and, at times, a liability.
For example, a few days after I flew on his plane, he called me and asked, “Did you see the news?”
The day before, Conway had taken a 6 a.m. flight from the Carmel area to Silicon Valley. In the early morning darkness, Conway failed to take out his flashlight while checking the fuel gauge and, as a result, misread the gauge. “I made an assumption that was entirely pilot error,” he said. While flying, he realized he didn’t have enough in the tank to get to the nearest airport.
Conway presented the story to me on a mythic scale: a fork in his path, a choice between good and evil. As he described it, at first he thought his best chance in life was to land on the sports field at a nearby school. “I started screaming that the child was no match for the propeller,” he said.
So he decided to land his plane on the 85 freeway, descending toward oncoming traffic in the hopes that it would make it safer for motorists. Miraculously, his two-seater skidded onto the concrete, leaving Conway and the surrounding cars unharmed.
Conway then warned me that I was close to a similar fate. “If we had flown any higher, we would have run out of fuel,” he said.
That was not entirely true; he later 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 the next two months of fact-checking his many exaggerations), I learned that Conway is unique in his epic storytelling skills. That’s why so many amazing companies hire him. And fired. And then re-employed.
As Dorman said, “He’s a super unconventional recruit.” However, he is also “better than any other recruit.”
