CForbes just dropped a story that sounds like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie: Colossal Biosciences and Anduril are teaming up on a startup that genetically engineers dogs for the military.
MGenetically engineered war dogs. That's... a sentence.
CWarhound. That's the company name. Out of stealth at one point two billion dollars.
MA billion-dollar valuation for making dogs that can run longer and sniff better?
CAnd, according to the pitch, detect explosives and survive conditions that a regular military dog can't. Colossal brings the gene editing. Anduril brings the defense contracts.
MI'm not saying it's not smart. I'm saying it's deeply weird. And the Forbes piece frames it exactly that way — the pairing of these two founders is provocative.
CProvocative is one word. I think it's brilliant. Working dogs save lives on the battlefield already. If you can make them faster, stronger, less prone to injury — that's a force multiplier.
MForce multiplier is doing a lot of work there. What about the ethics? You're talking about engineering a living creature for combat.
CWe already breed dogs for police work, for search and rescue. This is just pushing that much further.
MNo, no— traditional breeding is not the same as targeted genetic modification for traits a defense contractor wants. Come on.
COh, so it's fine when it's slow, but not when it works?
MIt's not about speed! It's about who's making the call. A breeder isn't optimizing for battlefield stamina and threat detection. A defense startup is.
CAnd that's a bad thing? Military working dogs have saved more lives than I can count.
MI'm not arguing against working dogs. I'm arguing against treating them like hardware you can spec out.
CThey named it Warhound. Hardly hiding the ball.
MMy point exactly. This is a product. A living, breathing product. And we're supposed to just nod along because both founders are famous?
CPalmer Luckey has built real defense tech. Ben Lamm brought back the woolly mammoth project. They're serious people.
MSerious people do serious things. That doesn't make every serious thing okay. But fine, I'll grant you this: the tech is going to happen anyway. Someone will do it.
CBetter it's people who know what they're doing, instead of some garage lab.
MThat's probably true. I just want to see real oversight. Not just a slick valuation and a dramatic name.
CForbes says there's no formal statement from Warhound beyond the report. We'll see how much they actually want to talk about the science.
MAnd how much they want to talk about the dogs themselves. That's the part everyone's going to ask about.
CI'm already imagining the product demos. 'And here, our enhanced Malinois can find a hidden object in a hundred-acre field, in the rain, at night.'
MAnd then the follow-up question nobody wants to answer: what happens to the ones that don't pass the test?
COkay, that got dark fast.
MIt's a dark topic! We're engineering animals for war. What do you want, a puppy photo op?
CSpeaking of animal startups... someone on Bluesky posted a one-liner: 'I'm imagining an incubator program for startup cults.'
MHonestly, given the last story, that lands harder than it should.
CRight? We've got mammoths, war dogs, robots, AI agents. Half of venture capital is just people with money chasing the strangest idea in the room.
MAnd the founders get treated like prophets. The cult comparison isn't even entirely a joke.
CWhich brings us to a related fight happening on Bluesky. Someone quoted a founder saying 'It is the opposite of Lean Startup.'
MOpposite of lean startup? So... just building stuff and hoping somebody wants it?
CAdolfo Neto, who's an Elixir developer, pointed out the irony. Lean startup is about building only what people actually want.
MAnd this founder is bragging about building without knowing if anyone wants it. That's not innovation, that's ego with a burn rate.
CHold on. Some of the biggest products ever were built before the market knew it wanted them. Nobody asked for an iPhone.
MThat's the classic counterexample, and it's older than most startup founders. But for every iPhone, there are ten thousand dead startups that built in secret and never shipped anything anyone wanted.
CSo you'd rather everyone just do customer interviews and build tiny features? That's how we get ten thousand identical SaaS dashboards.
MAnd building the opposite way gets us Warhound and cult incubators and billion-dollar stealth companies that might be vapor. There's a middle ground, Chris.
CAgreed. But when a founder says 'opposite of lean,' I hear someone who wants to think big. And I respect that.
MI hear someone who doesn't want feedback. And that usually ends badly.
CMeanwhile, Cornell Tech has a perfectly sane program: an incubator for PhD graduates turning their research into startups.
MThat's the opposite of the opposite of lean. It's the unsexy, actually-works path.
CNikhil Garg posted the link. You take serious research, you help the researchers actually sell it. No cult, no stealth, no war dogs.
MAnd they're looking for people. So if you have a PhD and a prototype, or know someone who does, the program's real.
CFinally, a whole corner of the startup world that doesn't need a one-liner about cults.
MJust labs, patents, and the slow grind of making something people want.