From forced landings to stuffed animal heads, headhunter Peterson Conway is defense tech’s wildest power broker

In 2023, defense tech 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 of his old recruiting days. One story involved prostitutes attending a recruiting event (“not for sex,” Conway clarified to TechCrunch). 

The new hire was not happy. “I thought I told it in a funny way,” Conway sighed, admitting he was being “an a–hole.”

Fuse founder JC Btaiche caught wind of the conversation and agreed, promptly firing Conway – although Btaiche told TechCrunch that telling the prostitution story wasn’t the only inappropriate thing that Conway had done.  

But Conway, who has become one of the defense tech industry’s biggest behind-the-scenes power brokers, didn’t give up on Fuse. Conway has recruited for some of the buzziest defense and hard tech firms in Silicon Valley over the last decade, like Palantir and Mach Industries. He spent nearly half a decade doing recruitment at Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC for the firm and its portfolio companies, and since last year, as the head of talent at venture firm A* Capital.  

So even after being dismissed, Conway continued to pitch candidates to Btaiche and woo prospects with flights in his private plane or offers to “go blow s— up out in the desert,” Conway said. After a few months, Fuse reinstated Conway. He’s 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 whole industry: rich, determined, prone to telling unbelievable stories and, by all accounts, brilliant. According to the dozen people TC interviewed for this story, Conway is wildly successful at luring very talented people away from stable jobs and into startup life. “There’s a line between crazy and genius,” Btaiche said. “And I think he’s just on that line.” 

As defense tech funding soared to almost $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 jobs in the defense sector or in national security or on very ambitious, difficult things,” said Gregory Dorman, a recent Princeton graduate who worked with entrepreneur and A* partner Kevin Hartz on his new security startup Sauron, thanks to Conway’s introduction. “And they’re there because of Peterson.”

‘Does not comply’ with safety regulations

Conway’s signature move is to take candidates up in his tiny plane. “I like to joke that I make them sick until they accept the terms of our deals,” he said.

I first met him at an airport in San Carlos, California, shortly before I climbed into his tiny two-seater plane, purchased with a loan from Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. A small sign in the cockpit warned me: “This aircraft is an experimental light-sport aircraft and does not comply with federal safety regulations for standard aircraft.” 

A few minutes later, we were soaring over the shimmering San Francisco Bay as Conway recounted his fablelike 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 school teacher. After a series of escapades across the Middle East and Africa, they moved to Carmel to raise Conway and his brother, but eventually divorced. 

“My dad threw himself off there,” Conway said nonchalantly as we soared over the Golden Gate Bridge. He then explained that the attempted suicide was unsuccessful. His father was caught by the nets and is alive and well today, selling antiques in his Carmel shop.

Conway rebelled against his father by briefly pursuing normalcy, attending Dartmouth to study economics. But after college, in the early 2000s, he found himself becoming a recruiter. 

In Conway’s version of events, he was riding his motorcycle around San Francisco, a cowboy in search of office space. He spotted a warehouse with a ramp, rode onto 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. “None,” Conway answered. “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, “That is all entirely 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 broader PayPal crowd. 

When PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel launched Palantir in 2003, Conway was in the right place at the right time and began recruiting for the firm. Conway apparently had no official title at the defense company, ”but was ‘just Peterson,’” like a defense tech “mononymous artist in the style of Prince or Madonna,” joked Gabe Rosen, 8VC’s resident humanities scholar who worked with Conway at Palantir.

Palantir sent Conway across the world to build out its international teams. According to Conway, the company wanted employees with an “internal compass and conviction,” people who had grappled with the values they were raised with and paved their own path. 

For example, Conway claimed he would get missives like “find me a Jew that married a Christian from the outback of Australia that was gay.” Palantir had no comment. 

Conway was known for getting recruits’ attention by sending handwritten letters with wax seals. His methods were successful, landing people like Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and many of Palantir’s international hires.  

Unconventional methods 

Last summer, Conway and his father flew to the Mojave desert in Hartz’s plane, borrowed for the occasion. Like some kind of American Dynamism mirage, they saw a gaggle of young men mounting a drone to the back of a truck. 

It was a testing session for Mach Industries, a weapons company founded by Ethan Thornton when he was 19 years old. Mach is one of the handful of defense and hardware companies that has Conway recruited for as head of talent at A*. Mach has since raised over $80 million from investors like Bedrock and Sequoia Capital. 

While those men set up orange cones and explosive equipment for their engineering tests, Conway took people for trips in Hartz’s plane. “He hit the ground so hard, so many times, landing in the Mojave,” Hartz sighed. “Everything came loose.” Conway denied Hartz’s account, saying the plane simply “got pretty dirty” and he lost a window covering. 

According to Conway, he recruited SpaceX alum Gabriela Hobe and Fasil Mulatu Kero, Mach’s vice president of manufacturing and former Tesla employee. “Ethan has probably paid me over a million dollars to do what I do for him,” Conway said, although he later denied that figure.  

It seems like everyone in the defense tech industry has an eye-popping story about Conway. One time, after Conway ordered an Uber and hit it off with the driver, he surprised a founder by setting him up with 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 in it at the airport for a recruit, who was then a government contractor, to drive when he touched down. The company later clarified that it was a four-seater Porsche, loaned to the candidate so the company could save money on Ubers. 

The candidate took the Porsche for their meetings and ended the day at Conway’s home, a sprawling compound in the wealthy California coastal town Carmel-by-the-Sea, stuffed with his father’s antiques and animal parts from hunting expeditions. Conway hosts regular dinners for candidates there (his father cooks), as well as, according to Conway, parties ranging from a birthday bash for Joe Lonsdale to a wedding for Sankar.

But Btaiche said Conway’s real superpower isn’t his stunts, but rather his ability to talk about “candidates in a more human way, rather than just looking at resumes and credentials.” 

For Fuse hiring, Conway had Btaiche brainstorm what upbringing might create someone who can lead a team, or bring new ideas to the engineers; as a result, they’ve scouted people from rural areas, people who grew up as athletes, and people who are obsessed with gaming. 

As for winning candidates over, Btaiche said that Conway sells people on the imperative of defending America. “If you’re working on something that is truly mission-driven,” he said. “I think Peterson can deliver that story.” 

Dorman, one of the people who had the Conway Experience, was a philosophy major at Princeton debating between careers in the Valley or New York when he met the famed recruiter. Conway persuaded him to choose the Valley. “Peterson convinces people that there’s actually a lot of adventure there,” he said.  

Conway has fashioned himself as something of a cowboy in the Valley for years, and now the rest of tech might have finally caught up. He applauds the current interest in American Dynamism, the term coined by Andreessen Horowitz for government-adjacent companies. “It is just perfect. It is right on the border of fanaticism,” Conway said. “It’s become its own religion.”  

Main character energy

There’s a common theme in how people describe Conway: a genius, an influential player in defense tech, and, at times, a liability. 

For instance, a few days after I flew in his plane, he called me and asked, “Did you see the news?” 

The day before, Conway had taken a 6 am flight from the Carmel area to Silicon Valley. In the early morning darkness, Conway failed to pull out a flashlight when he was checking his fuel gauge and, as a result, misread the gauge. “I made an assumption that was entirely pilot error,” he said. As he was flying, he realized he didn’t have enough in the tank to make it to the nearest airport. 

Conway regaled the story to me in mythical proportions: a fork in his path, a choice between good and evil. As he described it, he initially thought his best chance at living was to land on a sports field at a nearby school. “I started freaking out that a kid was no match for a propeller,” he said. 

So he opted to land his plane on Highway 85, touching down towards oncoming traffic in hopes that it would be safer for drivers. Miraculously, his two-seater glided onto the concrete, leaving Conway and the surrounding cars unharmed.  

Conway then warned me that I had been a hair’s breath away from a similar fate. “If we had flown any further, we would’ve run out of gas,” he said.

That wasn’t quite true; he told me later that had flown the plane at least one time after our flight. But he painted our journey together in an existential light, making it unforgettable. After spending the day with him (and a subsequent two months fact checking his many exaggerations), I learned that Conway is singular in his epic storytelling skills. That’s why he gets hired by so many amazing companies. And fired. And then rehired once again. 

As Dorman put it, “he’s a super unconventional recruiter.” Yet, he’s also “better than any other recruiter.”