Black Flag

500+ founders. 1,500+ nominations. 100 companies. The Black Flag 100 is back 🏴‍☠️ No VC votes. No fund picks. Just pirates chasing storms over certainty. The 2026 list 🧵🏴‍☠️

Watch this episode and more here: blackflag.vc/pirates-only

Building in defense is a whole other breed of startup. The hardware is different, the timelines are different, and the customer is certainly different. Each requires its own special case of crazy. And no area in defense has been more widely discussed than drones. Drones are everywhere. In fact, it's one of the single most common ideas we see come through the Black Flag program. Be it drone manufacturing, drone deterrence, or somewhere in between, the battlefield has evolved dramatically over recent years because of these incredibly dynamic devices. And there are few people on the planet who think more about drones than @DanMagy (CEO and Co-founder of @Firestorm_Labs) and @LaFrogman (CEO and Co-founder of @aureliuslasers). We are grateful to have them on this week's episode of Pirates Only to dive deep into the world of drones, what it means for the future of warfare, and advice for the founders building for it (and across all of defense tech). If you're a defense tech founder, this is a must-listen. Watch the full episode here on X.

"If you beam this founder back a thousand years before startups exist, are they conquering a city? Are they the type of person leading a group of men into battle, scaling a wall, taking over a town or a country? Because that's what it takes." That's how @SantiagoPliego evaluates founders at @VashonCompany , and on the latest episode of Fun Raising that's one of the topics we dive in to. What does it take to build a generational company? How do investors try to identify these founder traits to pattern match the winners? We also get in to: - Why Vashon models itself after 16th-century merchant banks, not modern software VC - How Vashon actually operates alongside founders in the field, not from behind a screen - Why sometimes a one-page memo beats a pitch deck - The one thing your pitch needs to show (and why TAM usually isn't it) - The cold DM mistake that wastes your one shot at getting a response - Why the best FOMO closes rounds in private group chats, not on Twitter - And so much more You won't want to miss this. Full episode right here on X 🎧

It joins a growing stack of free resources we've built for founders: 💸 The Black Flag Investor Database (100+ active deep tech investors) 🚀 The Deep Tech Job Board (Pirates seeking pirates) - 💫 Pitch Deck Feedback (Used by 100s of founders every month) 🏴‍☠️ Pirates Only Podcast (Interviews with early-stage deep tech founders) 💰 Fun Raising Podcast (Interviews with early-stage deep tech investors on the fundraising process) Is it perfect? No. Will it guarantee a meeting? Also no. But it will help, and in fundraising, every edge counts. Give it a try: blurb.vc

Simple on the surface, but trained on hundreds of resources from the sharpest minds in venture and fundraising. Essays, videos, frameworks, and thousands of inputs from people who have seen what works (and what doesn't). How it works: Upload your deck and you'll get three things back: a one-liner, a short blurb, and a forwardable summary. All written to get read.

The first thing investors read isn't the deck. It's the blurb. That's what gets you aboard. A few sentences describing your business can decide if your deck ever sees the light of day. It's certainly the first thing we see when reviewing applications for Black Flag. The good ones get their application opened, the bad ones are skipped. The problem is that writing a good one is deceptively hard: Steer too deep into detail and you sink the story, too shallow and there's nothing to hold onto. That's why we created Blurb.vc ⚡

You can also watch this episode and others here: blackflag.vc/pirates-only

Fact: @ChEMcShane is one-of-one. One of the kindest, most determined founders you'll ever meet. He's also on a mission to change the way we think about batteries in the US, and we're going to need it. Other quick facts: 😮 99% of the world's most important battery materials is made in one country (Can you guess? It's not us...) 🔋 Battery capacity needs to grow 20-40x in the US over the coming decades to meet the demand (humanoid robots, anyone?) ⚡ And Electroflow is determined to flip the script. In this episode we get in to: - What is LFP? Why is it so important? - How Electroflow's unique process process replaces a 10-step supply chain and targets 50% lower production cost than the current Chinese market price - Why 99% of LFP is made in China - Why global battery capacity needs to grow 40X by 2040 and which industries are driving it - The case for humanoid robots as the largest long-term battery demand signal - What hard tech founders get wrong when pitching to VCs, and how to fix it And so much more! Watch the full episode here on X ⚡

Watch this episode and others here: blackflag.vc/episode/galady…

Definitely a theme this week from the latest @BlackFlagVC Pirates Only episodes: Both @_chandlerl and Brian Taylor (from Lux Aeterna) are ex @SpaceX , and both are taking the learnings of scale into their new ventures. In the latest episode, Chandler dives in to how first-principles thinking can be applied to the American missile shortage, and how re-thinking everything from the engineering to the scaling is required to solve this problem. Watch the full episode here on X 🏴‍☠️

Listen to this episode and others here: blackflag.vc/episode/galady…

"When I started digging in to publicly available information, I realized we don't have that many. Period. We can't make that many to replenish if we were to go exhaust of significant piece of the stock. And they're all super expensive. Three things that are completely antithetic to how SpaceX solves problems. So that's what initially got me very frustrated..." Was very excited to sit down with @_chandlerl , founder and CEO of @_galadyne to discuss the American missile crisis. Sometimes founders are compelled to start businesses because of a single stat line or chart, and this one had Chandler ready to jump in: "If we were to enter a broad scale combat situation today, it's estimated that we have three to eight days, single digit days worth of critical munitions." But what makes it worse is the cost and time it would take to replenish. This is the motivation being Chandler and Galadyne: How can we make more missiles, at scale, for less money. A problem that requires first-principles thinking across the entire stack. We also dive in to: - His time and learnings at Space X and Saronic - The way he thinks about scale and priority within the business - Other defense-related companies and technologies he's excited about - Fundraising and company building advice for early-stage hard tech founders. - And so much more! Watch the full episode right here on X 🏴‍☠️

Watch this episode and more on our website: blackflag.vc/pirates-only

"If you need to make a decision that is based on data that is less than two years old, or you wanna bring a technology into orbit that is less than two years old, you can't do it and it's not really a thing that you think about. Now, if that lead time was, six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks...That's a massive difference in what you would think about taking to space." We were happy to host Brian Taylor, founder and CEO of Lux Aeterna, on our latest episode of Pirates Only. Brian spent 15 years in aerospace, including building the first Starlink satellites at SpaceX Watch the full episode here on X! 🧵👇

HOW AM I TODAY DAYS OLD for finding @BlackFlagVC

Our CEO sat down to talk scale manufacturing with @BlackFlagVC Give it a listen.

Listen to the full episode here: blackflag.vc/episode/volund… Definitely a must listen for any hard tech founders 🏴‍☠️

Other things we cover include: - Eric's background in mass-scale consumer goods (for companies like Vans, Oakley and Fox Racing and Beats by Dre) to being early at Anduril - The founding story of Volund and why the time is now for US defense manufacturing - High-level overview of the current state of the U.S. defense industrial base - Testing infrastructure gaps and where founders go to blow things up (legally, of course) - Tips and tricks for hard tech founders, both in scaling product but also fundraising And so much more!

One thing we spoke about was how important it is for hard tech founders to think about scale from day one. It can't just be about making the most beautiful or technically advanced product out the gate. We see so many startups that go this route, only to realize they can't produce a handful of products at their final design, let along at the scale needed to meet market demand.

"I've watched a number of companies build what a lot of people call technical debt. When you want to be actually producing this at scale, like shipping the things in the boxes with UPS labels. How do you actually do that and have plans to do that early on I think is massively important." We sat down with Eric Hostetler, co-founder and CEO of @VolundMfg on this week's episode of Pirates Only. Link to full episode below! 🧵👇