The New Defense Playbook

Andy spent years at Apple, working under Steve Jobs, before helping launch Nest and watching it get acquired by Google. He eventually found his way into Ukraine, first through philanthropy, then through building Tiberius: low-cost, long-range missile systems designed to be manufactured locally across allied nations. Matt is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer and Harvard Kennedy School graduate who has spent the last five years building Perimeter Systems, a biodefense platform built to detect the next pandemic, or bioweapon, before it spreads.

Together, they make the case that the West’s entire defense model is broken, and they have real ideas about what replaces it.

Key Takeaways from the Conversation

• Tiberius is shipping its first 1,000 missile rounds to Ukraine this year, designed in the US but manufactured across allied nations to keep costs low and capability distributed
• Open architecture, not lock-in, is the only way to move at the pace modern conflict demands. Capabilities in Ukraine are being defeated and rebuilt within eight weeks
• Perimeter’s platform pulls wastewater samples from airplanes landing at airports, sequencing what’s onboard to catch outbreaks before they spread globally
• The COVID pandemic could have been detected months earlier with the kind of continuous bio-threat monitoring Perimeter is building today
• Both guests are pushing NATO and the US government to formally name biology a domain of military operations, the same way cyber became one a decade ago
• Their shared vision for Defense 3.0: allied nations sharing R&D risk on next-generation capabilities, unlocking faster development and more private capital

Why This Conversation Matters

Most conversations about defense innovation focus on drones, AI, or cyber. This one goes somewhere most people aren’t looking: the gap between what adversaries are capable of and what the West is actually prepared for, in both conventional weapons and biological threats. Andy and Matt aren’t theorizing. They’re under contract, shipping product, and briefing NATO. Their argument: the old defense model, slow, expensive, single-purpose, and locked to one country, cannot keep pace with how fast capability is evolving and being defeated on real battlefields. If the West wants to stay ahead, the fix looks less like traditional defense procurement and more like the speed and openness of the tech industry both of these founders came from.

About the Guests

Andy Baynes is co-founder of Tiberius, a defense technology company building low-cost, long-range missile systems for allied nations. Before Tiberius, Andy spent over a decade at Apple, where he worked closely with Steve Jobs during the company’s growth into a global technology leader. He went on to help launch Nest, which was acquired by Google in 2014. His path into defense began with philanthropic investment in Ukraine, which led him to identify a critical capability gap in modern weapons systems, and ultimately to found Tiberius alongside co-founder Chad.

Matt McKnight is the CEO and founder of Perimeter, a biodefense technology company focused on detecting and characterizing biological threats before they become global crises. A former Marine Corps intelligence officer and graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Matt has spent the last five years building Perimeter’s platform, which performs continuous bio-threat monitoring through wastewater surveillance and metagenomic sequencing. Perimeter has raised $60 million to date and works with the Department of War, the Department of State, HHS, the CDC, and sovereign governments around the world.