Founder's Story - The Future of War, Space, and Startups: Where Smart Investors Are Betting Next | Ep 319 with Jake Chapman Managing Director of Marque Ventures

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Daniel Robbins interviews Jake Chapman about how Marque Ventures invests in early stage companies advancing U.S. national security and Western values. Jake shares how his work moved from private investing into rethinking venture activity inside the Department of War and back out again into building a private firm designed to fund the future of defense, dual use, and strategic technologies. Key Discussion Points:Jake explains that national security investing requires founders and investors to think like futurists and “skate to where the puck is going,” not just fund what is being used in today’s conflicts. He shares why the U.S. acquisition system is more predictable than many people assume, making defense spending and future capability needs easier to map than consumer behavior. He also breaks down why defense founders need someone on the team with direct military or procurement experience and why talking to the end user early is critical. The conversation expands into space, where Jake argues that space infrastructure is becoming economically and strategically essential, with the long term possibility of a true in space economy and even the need to defend assets beyond Earth. Takeaways:A major takeaway from the episode is that great defense founders are usually mission driven and deeply engaged with the real world problems they want to solve. Jake makes clear that VCs are not only evaluating the business, but the founder’s passion, thoughtfulness, and ability to answer hard questions under pressure. He also highlights that some of the biggest mistakes in pitching come from dismissing competitors, lacking energy, or building a product without understanding how the actual customer will use it. More broadly, the episode shows that national security innovation is no longer a government only game, but a rapidly evolving startup space where private builders, veterans, and frontier tech founders can shape the future. Closing Thoughts:This Founder’s Story episode captures just how wide the lens has become for modern venture capital, stretching from defense procurement and battlefield tools to space commerce and even questions about aliens. Jake Chapman leaves listeners with a strong sense that the future will belong to founders who understand both technology and the geopolitical environment their products will enter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So Jake, I know at Mark Ventures, you are dealing with a lot of people that might have to do with national security. And obviously right now, there's a lot going on geopolitically. How are you looking at this as yourself, as an organization, with everything that's happening right now since there could be impacts to your business? Yeah, great question. I mean, I think anyone who gets, any founder who's building a company in Defense Stacker for national security. It's probably a geopolitics nerd because, you know, why are they in that space? They're in the space for a reason, right? They care about it. I think it's the same thing with our team. Like, we all think a lot about what's going on in the world. From a personal perspective,

it's just interesting. But from a business perspective, it's also quite important, right? So if you think about the old Wayne Bretzky quote, like you have to escape to where the puck is going, not where it is, you have to think about that in when you're investing in national security. You have to think about how the world is changing and like where your your tools that you're investing in or your companies you're investing in might fit into the future right so like if you think about ukraine i think is a good example and what's being used in ukraine the technology that's being used there it's sort of high leverage it's small drones it's fiber optic connections it's electronic warfare but then you think about what the u.s is actually preparing for which is to deter a war with china in

the Indo-Pacific, probably over Taiwan, maybe over some other islands. The tools are very different. And so if you are only investing in the things that are being used today in a particular conflict, then you would be missing a lot of the stuff that's important for the future, right? Venture is all about trying to predict the future with as much clarity as you can and then investing behind that future vision. Do you have a system or a way that you can evaluate things? because you bring up a great point.

You're trying to predict the future. And as we know, things move like a million times a second right now. So I could see the challenge with trying to predict. But I imagine that you have some way in order to do that. Yeah, I mean, we certainly try, right? We don't know about crystal ball. I actually think national security, it's a little bit easier to predict the future needs than it is in any other sector I've invested in in the past.

I mean, I started my career. I invested in consumer package goods, right, the stuff you buy in the grocery store and all sorts of stuff. I think consumer behavior is the hardest thing to predict. In national security, especially in the U.S., like, we actually run an acquisition system that is fairly communist. I mean, we have essentially five-year plans. And those plans, to some degree, are classified. Like, you can get access to some information to all information. And you can see where Congress's priority.

are in their budget and that again unfolds over multiple years and so you actually can if you know where to look pretty good visibility into where the spending is going to go and then we can then take a step back and say all right if this is where the spending is going to go for the next five years where should we be investing today to meet them where they're at and so it's it's a more predictable space actually than anything else i've ever invested in geopolitics aside no that that is fast I didn't even think, I mean, yeah, consumers, you love something one day and you hated the next day. Something happens and it changes. We've had a lot of people on who've also talked about this. When you look at the funding space, so you came from the government and now you're starting your own thing and you have your own venture capital fund.

What were the differences in the two? Yeah, and so taking a step back, I was running another fund, and I was investing more and more in what was called Deep Tech or Frontier Tech. So think energy, autonomy, aerospace, stuff like that, and moving my career more and more towards national security over time. All the companies were building in aerospace have a national security application. And so I ended up falling in love with the mission. I loved working with active duty folks and thought it was a really important place to be investing. as well, you know, lucrative, but also I think important for the mission. And so I left the firm I co-founded to go start a new farm.

I was going to go start a private farm focused on national security. And when I did that, a friend of mine asked if instead I would consider going and trying to fix what was called the Army Venture Capital Corporation. So in 1999, Congress CIA created Incutel, which was the venture arm of the intelligence community. So CIA, but then also sort of more broadly. And the reason they did that is they realized that the best technology was being developed in the private sector, not in government labs anymore. Back in the 40s and 50s, it was all government labs. Now it's private sector R&D. And so they needed a tool to access that technology. And then in 2002, Congress realized that the Department of Defense

at the time, now Department of War, had a similar set of challenges. And so they created the Army venture capital initiative, what we became under us, the corporation, to help the department find the best technology and get it to the warfighter as quickly as possible. So it ran for about 10 years from 2002 to 2012 under other leadership. And then it kind of sat fallow for 10 years. A lot of mistakes were made along the way. I would say the government is not a great venture capitalist. But then they asked if we'd come in and fix it. And so we spent two years working with Congress and the services, so Army Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force, trying to figure out how you run a venture arm hand in hand with the department. And at the end of that process,

like one of the realizations was you would run it as a private firm because the sort of congressional budgeting cycles and just the bureaucracy of being a quasi-governmental organization made it almost impossible to run a successful firm. So we took the plan we had put together and the team we had built inside that organization and then left and started Mark Ventures. So that's kind of the origin story for our firm. So if you're talking to a founder who's like, you know what, I see some problems. I never thought about getting into this industry or industries impacted, but now I want to. What advice do you give to them maybe because they want to do a startup or maybe they just started

something and they want to grow it to the point where they could look for funding? Yeah. So I mean, I'll give me advice specific to next. national security because that's that's what we do. I think it's a it's a very unique space to break into. So one, I think if you're interested in the space, maybe you've been watching the news and you see that the world is sort of a more dangerous place today than it was, you know, 10 years ago or 20 years ago, you want to do something about it. That's great. Like, would love to have you building in the space. Find someone on your team that if you weren't active duty that was, that serves and has like

firsthand experience dealing with the bureaucracy. at the Department of War, like how they acquire things, what they need, understand that process, have that person on your team. If they're not a co-founder, they need to be like a first hire. Because otherwise you might build something that's awesome and never find that customer. It's a really hard space to break into if you don't have some connectivity and some understanding of how it works. So super important. That's number one. I think number two is talk to the customer. I mean, this is true in every space, but know who your end user is and get like really early feedback on the thing you're building. There are so many founders who've built really cool widgets, but they're, you know, solutions in search of a problem.

Or there's like something about it that they wouldn't think about that the end user would. That makes it unusable. It's like an example in like the national security spaces. You know, if you're building something for the individual soldier, you know, you know, It might be like a one pound thing, like relatively light. You would never think about the weight in your day-to-day life. But they're already carrying 80 pounds in a sack, rucksack. They've got 100 things attached to their bodies.

It's all wired up. Maybe you have a wire now. And so there's like a new wire. They have to have attached to their body that's going to tangle with things. And they'll just never use it. So what happens is you build it. It gets shipped to them overseas. And then it sits in a pelican case in a box back at the base, never gets used.

And then doesn't get bought again. And you would never know. things unless you talk to the end users. Like, oh, yeah, you know, I'd never carry that. It's got to be half the weight. Or if I'm going to carry it, it's not going to be attached to my rifle. It's got to be like on my hip or whatever it is. Like you need that feedback. Yeah, I could see you need the firsthand experience in order to really solve the problems. Like myself, I wasn't in the military. So the problem I think that they would have, how would I even know where they would know the exact problem? What do you see is the biggest mistake when founders are pitching you? Because I think

I don't see a lot of VCs talking specifically about like this is what I want to see. But I would imagine though that there are a lot of mistakes or bad pitches or things like that that you would see on an ongoing basis. So what do you see that you're like this totally is the wrong thing to do when you're pitching a VC? I mean, there's a bunch of things that can go wrong. So first of all, when VCs say no to founders, like every founder should know this, like 99% of the time it has nothing to do with the company that's in front of them. It's like they just did a deal last week. And so their partner, because of internal front politics, is probably going to be the one that gets to do the next deal.

Or they've invested in a company like yours and they don't want to invest in a competitive business or they just don't like your space. Like whatever it is, there's like 99% of the time it has nothing to do with the company. It's like an exogenous thing. That said, there's like lots of things that make it easy for VCs to say no. Like if I'm going to look at 1,000 deals this year, 1,500 deals or whatever the number is, then I'm going to do four. I'm basically looking for reasons to say no

because I need to be able to move on and then look at the next company, talk to the next founder. So one, we all have bad days or days where we're low energy, but if we're on a call or I'm meeting you and you are not like oozing excitement for the thing you're building,

like how am I going to be excited about it? Like you have to be very passionate about it. Part of the reason I want you to be super passionate about it is if you're a great founder, you can go, get a job at Meta and make, you know, $600,000 a year or whatever with like very low downside risk. And you are going to face as a founder, especially in defense that's so hard, an existential risk, like every six months or every year in your business.

And you're going to be confronted with the decision, A or B, A, keep building this building that, like, is giving me an ulcer and is really hard. And like, maybe we'll never mount anything. Or B, go take the job at Meta for $600,000. or name your major magnificent seven startup or a tech company. And I need you to keep picking the company, right? So you have to really love the thing you're building or the problem you're solving. So that's number one, like passion on the call in the meeting, super important.

And the other one is, and the thing I would say really impresses our team the most is if we ask you a question and you have an extremely thoughtful answer. So it's clear that you've thought about it. and whether we agree with your answer or not is sort of irrelevant. Like what we care most about is the fact that you have thought about the challenge and, like thought deeply about it and can respond. If you don't have an answer and you say, let me think about that and get back to you. And then you send me a follow-up email with a well-thigh-out written answer.

Oh, incredible. Like that's what we want. We want founders who have answers for all the tough questions. Whether we agree with their answers or not, it's sort of irrelevant. It's like, I want to know that you've thought about it. you probably know the space better than I do, right? So, like, your answer is probably right, even if I don't think it's the right one.

I think those are, like, the two biggest things. Oh, number three, if I ask you who your competitors are and you say I don't have competitors or you, like, quickly dismiss the other people that I know are building in the space. Like, I have probably taught to those people. There's a reason they're building what they're building. Like, you shouldn't be so dismissive of your competitors.

Like, understand what it is that they're building and how you're different. So don't just say, we don't have competitors or like those guys will never get it off the ground like tell me why to be thoughtful can you imagine blockbuster and Netflix like blockbuster probably said in meetings like Netflix is not our competitor they'll never get it off the ground I heard a story from Netflix founder that I guess blockbuster had a streaming but a new CEO came in and squashed in said like they want to focus on the in store and the DVDs and because I guess the Netflix founders were

really afraid that if this if they went in that they were going to be destroyed because their theirs was much smaller than blockbusters at the time and then that's it now we know what happened which is fascinating how something can be so far ahead yet someone else like you said smaller can totally disrupt everything and then just propel past yeah i i love the blockbuster netflix example i use it all the time when i'm talking about modern portfolio theory um with folks which is that you you know, you can, venture is inherently risky, but you can de-risk an investment portfolio when you invest in venture. And the reason is because venture has low correlation to the rest of your portfolio. So even though it's risky as a standalone, it's a counterbalance to everything else.

Sort of like investing in national security, actually. Like in good times for the world, national security very slowly goes up. When times are bad, national security investments go quite a lot, but everything else kind of comes down, right? So it's a hedge on a portfolio. And the example I always used for how to hedge your portfolio is the blockbuster Netflix example, which was there was a blockbuster on every street corner. Netflix seemed absolutely crazy. What was the smart investment? Well, the smart investment turns out was to have invested in both, really.

And you would have done great. So what are you thinking about space and when it comes to national security? I've been doing a lot of this like deep dive into space technology just because I thought it was fake. someone was like, oh no, we're building like a hotel in space and we're going to need like everyone who's doing things on Earth, we're going to need in space. And I really thought this was a joke. And as I did more research, I'm like, oh, my gosh, like people are really building things in space. And they're like building things on the moon.

And I can't even believe we're even living in a time where this is real. How are you looking at that? Or is that even a thing yet when it comes to national security? Yeah. No, I mean, space is like hugely important in our sector. or industry. I mean, it used to not be a dedicated service, right? But now we have the Space Force.

So we have an organization in the Department of War dedicated to space dominance. It's important for a whole bunch of reasons. So it's important economically, right? And like if you think about what the Navy does, the Navy's main job, actually, is to ensure like free trade or like the free flow of goods. It's like to support the U.S. economy for, commerce. Like, that's actually what the Navy was originally designed to do, and still largely what it does today. Space has the same sort of characteristics now as the oceans, right? Like Starlink

is, like, vitally important in a lot of different businesses now. I mean, it's only a few years old, right? So imagine whatever it will be like 10 years from now. And Starlink is only one piece of space infrastructure that really supports commerce and national security terrestrially. So defending that is super important. But yeah, a ton of businesses are going to get built in space. Most of them,

I think with customers, terrestrial customers and not like a real true in space economy yet. But it does seem like that's coming at some point. I know that like the asteroid belt has something like,

you know, a hundred sextillion dollars worth of like mineral wealth in that, in asteroid. Some insane number. And like single asteroids have like,

you know, more gold than all the gold that's ever been mined on the earth. Not that you want to mine all that gold because then gold doesn't have any value. But the resources themselves are valuable for things we need to build or do. Right. So all that's coming. And if that's coming, then like someday there might be space pirates. And so you need the ability to defend your assets in space.

So yes, like I think it's real. There's like tons of economic value being created today, mostly for terrestrial businesses. but then eventually there will be like true in space in space economy stuff we'll see if the aliens come or maybe they're already there oh they're big debate right like they're they're gonna release the files of alien if aliens or i don't know what do you think about aliens well okay so i think uh statistically they're almost certainly intelligent life somewhere else in the universe there's a clip of dan driscoll secretary driscoll who's now he's secretary of the army from maybe six months ago where he's he's talking to someone about um talking to like a news anchor and he's like yeah

i was just like talking to some of our astronauts like in space and he said that he was talking to a soldier on the moon and then like there was no follow-up question and like nothing nothing came of that um and i was like he just said there's a soldier on the moon and like i think maybe he was he it was like a he didn't mean to say that like he meant to say something else and that just like sort of slipped out. Like, I don't think we actually have soldiers on the moon. But he said it, you can find the, you can find the video clip. So, I don't know.

Why would we have soldiers on the moon, if not to fight aliens? No, but, like, to your question, do I think aliens exist? I think there's a decent chance. So if you look at UFOs from, like, the 1940s to today, if you believe that, like, we've witnessed certain things, like, we've witnessed things that, like, accelerate faster than any known object could possibly accelerate or make turns faster than anything could turn and still survive. So there's like alien tech out there. There's like lots of explanations for that. But I think actually the most compelling is that it's alien because if it were an adversary, right?

So if it's like Russia or China building this stuff or even if it was the US, the thing that you're seeing from 1940 would not look like the thing that you're seeing in 2025, right? Like we would expect to have seen a tech curve, some advancement in that technology. It wouldn't just be like, wow, we have this amazing thing and now it's frozen in time. It's always going to be the same thing. And the other thing is if it had been Chinese tech or Russian tech, like we would be speaking Mandarin or Russian probably and not English right now. So, you know, there's like other explanations, right?

Swamp gas, weather balloons, like it's, you know, sensor problems. But like the stuff that's come out in the last couple years is like, it's like a very some of it is verified by multiple sensor types, right? So you have like a pilot in an F-35 who sees it. The radar picks it up. The ship-borne radar down below picks it up and like the IOR sensors see it. It's like I can imagine a scenario where like one sensor doesn't see it. But when you have all this like overlapping, corroborating sensor information,

the chance that it's a totally made up sort of figment of their imagination is like infinitesimally small. So I don't know, man. I think maybe it's aliens. I mean, like you said, we might even, I might, I'm been thinking about this. I think we might even have become, like we might be from aliens, like, you know, like Prometheus style. Like they came down and they put something in the water. I don't know. I mean, it depends on like the religion that you believe and what people believe.

But I have been thinking about things around aliens lately. I was in Joshua Tree once and I looked up in the sky because there's no light pollution, like in the middle of the desert and Joshua Tree camping. And I saw something going in like a. diagonal really cross like fast across the sky like diagonal like like zooming like this and i told my wife like do you see that and she saw it and i was like what the heck is that and interestingly enough i found out too that joshua tree is right next to like one of the largest military bases in the u.s in 99 palms and i was like this is i don't know what i don't know if they're related but i was

fascinated and i was like i'm not going to tell anyone about that because people are going to think i'm crazy. I don't know what it was, but this is the first time I've ever publicly said it, but I thought it was very strange. They do a lot of like experimental aircraft testing out there. So it could have been that. But it's also true that there are, there are more UFO sightings around military sites and nuclear sites, which may or may not be related to the military doing testing of things. It could also be that those sites just attract the attention of whatever the UFOs are. I used to live in New Mexico. And so, you know, go to Roswell.

It's an interesting town. Like, I tell people, go there one time in your life for like 10 minutes, but don't stay longer than 10 minutes. But it's an interesting place to live, by the way. But this has been great. Jake, I'm very interested about what's going to be coming in the future and the fact that founders have different industries that they can go into. And, you know, military people can, when they get out of the military, they can become

entrepreneurs. I feel like I've known a lot. of people that did that transition and they became amazing entrepreneurs and they can partner with other people too. I think it's such a great way for them to be able to, you know, advance themselves and to go into a totally new industry, but leveraging all the knowledge and experience they had. So if people want to get in touch with you and they want to, maybe they want to pitch you or maybe they want to find out more information, how can they do so? Yeah. Well, you email me. My email is Jake at Mark, M-A-R-Q-U-E.

dot vc or you can find me on twitter at vc um it's a pretty pretty easy twitter handle to find how did you get that yeah uh i wish it was a cooler story but i had a um maybe i don't know eight years ago now i had an early twitter employee reach out who had like a bunch of two and three litter twitter handles he was like hey man i love the stuff that you tweet um i think you're super interesting would you like the at vc twitter handle and i was like you know I'm not rich. Like I'm like I can't give you like a million dollars for this Twitter handle. But like sure I'd love it.

And he was like, oh, don't worry about it. Like, um, we'll just, I'll just make sure you can have it. Um, that's amazing.

Like, that's like getting one of those like URLs like two, two letter URL and, and that's, that's incredible. But at VC, I mean, totally,

you can't forget that one. But Jake, this has been great. What a conversation. And we even led into aliens. Like, I don't know if I've had this conversation than anyone before. So I'm glad that I was able to talk to you.

today and that all you do you know to help entrepreneurs like you said you could go get a job at meta and make a bunch of money but instead there's the old saying i work 80 hours a week so i can not work 40 hours a week at the at a job but we know if we didn't have those entrepreneurs how many things would we not have in the world there'd be so less advancements for those people you know they they make those sacrifices to to build and to create and thank you so much for all that you do yeah absolutely man you're right like veterans make phenomenal entrepreneurs We love working with veterans.