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In 2023, defense technology recruiter Peterson Conway VIII pulled up to the offices of nuclear fusion startup Fuse in a black Suburban, donning his signature cowboy hat. He picked up a recent Fuse hire and proceeded to regale her with stories from his old recruiting days. One story involved prostitutes attending a recruitment event (“not for sex,” Conway explained to TechCrunch).
The new hire was not happy. “I thought I said it in a funny way,” Conway sighed, admitting it was “a bummer.”
Fuse founder JC Btaiche caught wind of the conversation and agreed, immediately firing Conway — though Btaiche told TechCrunch that telling the prostitution story wasn’t the only inappropriate thing Conway had done.
But Conway, who has become one of the defense technology industry’s biggest power brokers, hasn’t given up on Fuse. Conway has recruited for some of the toughest defense and tech companies in Silicon Valley over the past decade, such as Palantir and Mach Industries. He has spent nearly half a decade recruiting for Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC and its portfolio companies, and since last year, has been the head of talent at the A* venture firm.
So even after being fired, Conway continued to introduce candidates to Btaiche and lure prospects with flights on his private plane or offers to “go into the desert,” Conway said. After a few months, 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 the dozen people TC interviewed for this story, Conway has been wildly successful at pulling very talented people out of steady jobs and into startup life. “There’s a line between crazy and genius,” Btaiche said. “And I think he’s right on that line.”
As defense technology funding has grown nearly $3 billion last year, Conway is ready to convince the next generation to help make new-age nuclear reactors or AI-powered weapons.
“There’s a whole community of young people in the Valley, often working in the defense sector or national security or very ambitious and difficult things,” said Gregory Dorman, a recent Princeton graduate who worked with the entrepreneur. and fellow A* Kevin Hartz. on his new security startup Sauron, thanks to Conway’s introduction. “And I’m here because of Peterson.”
“Does not comply” with safety regulations
Conway’s signature move is to take 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 met him for the first time at an airport in San Carlos, California, shortly before I boarded his small two-seater airplane, purchased with a loan from Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. A small sign in the cockpit warned me: “This airplane is an experimental light sport airplane and does not meet federal safety regulations for standard airplanes.”
A few minutes later, we were flying over the sparkling San Francisco Bay as Conway recounted his fairytale-like life story. His father, Peterson Conway VII, dodged the draft, sold LSD in Tokyo, and eventually moved to Afghanistan in the ’70s with Conway’s mother, a Mormon schoolteacher. After a series of escapades in the Middle East and Africa, he moved to Carmel to raise Conway and his brother, but eventually divorced.
“My dad jumped out of there,” Conway said matter-of-factly as he flew over the Golden Gate Bridge. He later explained that the suicide attempt was unsuccessful. His father was caught in the nets and is alive and well today, selling antiques in his shop in Carmel.
Conway rebelled against his father by briefly pursuing normalcy, attending Dartmouth to study economics. But after university, 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 saw a warehouse with a ramp, rode on it, and ran straight into Hartz. At the time, Hartz was in the early stages of building Xoom, a fintech service for international money transfers that was eventually bought by PayPal.
Conway said Hartz asked him if he had any skills. “No one,” Conway replied. “But I can bring lunches. I’m a decent writer. I had an Airstream trailer — I’m like, we can go surfing.”
Hartz laughed when I asked him about the story, saying, “It’s all false.” According to Hartz, Conway simply rented office space in the same building and that’s how he started recruiting for Xoom and, later, the wider PayPal crowd.
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 firm. Conway apparently didn’t have an official title at the defense company, but was “just Peterson,” as a “mononymous defense technology artist in the style of Prince or Madonna,” joked Gabe Rosen, a scholar of 8VC’s resident humanist who worked with Conway at Palantir.
Palantir sent Conway around the world to build its international teams. According to Conway, the company wanted employees with an “internal compass and conviction”, people who had faced with the values that were raised and paved their way.
For example, Conway stated that he would receive missives such as “find me a Jew who married a Christian from outback Australia 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 have been successful, landing 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 a kind of mirage of American Dynamism, they saw a group of young people mounting a drone on the back of a truck.
It was a test 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 that Conway has recruited as head of talent at A*. Mach has since risen $80 million from investors like Bedrock and Sequoia Capital.
While those men set up orange cones and explosive devices for their engineering tests, Conway took people for rides in Hartz’s plane. “He hit the ground so hard, so many times, he landed in the Mojave,” Hartz sighed. “Everything went away.” Conway denied Hartz’s account, saying the plane simply “got pretty dirty” and lost a window.
According to Conway, he recruited SpaceX alumna Gabriela Hobe and Fasil Mulatu Kero, Mach’s vice president of manufacturing and former Tesla employee. “Ethan probably paid over a million dollars to do what I do for him,” Conway said, though he later denied that figure.
It seems everyone in the defense technology industry has an interesting story about Conway. Once, after Conway ordered an Uber and hit it off with the driver, he surprised a founder by giving him a ride 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 recruit, who was then a government contractor, to drive when he touched down. The company later explained that it was a four-seater Porsche, loaned to the applicant so the company could save money on Ubers.
The candidate took the Porsche to his meetings and ended the day at Conway’s home, a sprawling compound in the wealthy California coastal town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, filled with his father’s antiques and parts of animals from hunting expeditions. Conway hosts regular dinners for candidates there (her father cooks), as well as, according to Conway, parties ranging from a birthday party for Joe Lonsdale to a wedding for Sankar.
But Btaiche said Conway’s real superpower isn’t her stunts, but rather her ability to talk about “candidates in a more human way, rather than just looking at resumes and credentials.”
For the hiring of Fuse, Conway had Btaiche brainstorm what education could create someone who can lead a team, or bring new ideas to engineers; As a result, they discovered people from rural areas, people who grew up as athletes, and people who are obsessed with gaming.
In terms of winning over candidates, 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 bring that story.”
Dorman, one of the people who had the Conway Experience, was a philosophy teacher at Princeton who was debating between careers in the Valley or in New York when he met the famous recruiter. Conway persuaded him to choose the valley. “Peterson convinces people that there really is a lot of adventure here,” he said.
Conway has been modeling himself as something of a cowboy in the Valley for years, and now the rest of the technology may have finally caught up. I applaud the current interest in American Dynamism, the term coined by Andreessen Horowitz for government-adjacent businesses. “It’s just perfect. It’s right on the border of fanaticism,” Conway said. “It’s become its own religion.”
Main character energy
There is 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 me, “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 a flashlight when checking his fuel gauge and, as a result, misplaced the gauge. “I made an assumption that it was entirely pilot error,” he said. While flying, he realized he didn’t have enough in the tank to go to the nearest airport.
Conway gave me the story in mythic proportions: a fork in his road, a choice between good and evil. As he described it, he initially thought his best chance of survival was to land on a sports field at a nearby school. “I began to fear that a child was no match for a propeller,” he said.
So he chose to land his plane on Highway 85, facing oncoming traffic in the hope that it would be safer for drivers. Miraculously, his two-seater skidded onto the concrete, leaving Conway and the surrounding cars unharmed.
Then Conway warned me that I had been a hair’s breadth away from a similar fate. “If we had flown further, we would have run out of gas,” he said.
That was not true; he told me later 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 the day with him (and the next two months checking his many exaggerations), I learned that Conway is singular in his epic narrative ability. This is why he is hired by so many wonderful companies. And shot. And then summarize once more.
As Dorman said, “He’s a super unconventional recruiter.” However, it is still “better than any other recruiter”.
