The Prosperity Engine
How military investment built the world you live in —and why patient capital is the most misunderstood force in finance.
BY DAVID DWEK · CEO, EDEN
I have spent my career advising companies that most people thought were too early, too unconventional, or too risky to touch. Uber when it was still a black car app fighting taxi commissions. Moderna when mRNA was a curiosity no pharma major would fund. Palantir when it had no sales team and was largely run by people in jean shorts who could do one thing amazingly well: deliver results.
What I have learned, over and over, is that the biggest returns in history do not come from backing what the market already values. They come from understanding what the market cannot yet see.
And, in my experience, the single clearest guide to what the market cannot yet see is this: follow the military. That sounds counterintuitive in rooms full of people chasing software multiples. But the evidence is overwhelming. GPS, the internet, mRNA, the modern space industry, the foundations of cybersecurity.
Almost every transformative platform technology of the past eighty years traces back to a defenseinvestment made long before any commercial case existed.
The Pentagon does not need a business model. It needs a solution. That difference in incentive structure is worth hundreds of trillions of dollars in retrospect.
I recently had a conversation with Former US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at the Milken Institute that sharpened something I had believed for years but never quite articulated. He made two points that stayed with me. First: those who win space will win the wars. Second: capital is needed at scale, with patience, without demanding immediate return, if we are to maintain military advantage. I would say the same is true in the commercial world. The market is structurally biased toward short horizons. Quarterly results. Fund cycles. LP liquidity. The biggest opportunities do not fit those windows. They never have.
What follows are the cases that prove it. Some I watched from the outside. Several I was in the room for.
01 | 1983
GPS
A Soviet missile created the technology that guides your Uber
On September 1, 1983, a Soviet Su-15 shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan. All 269 people aboard were killed. The aircraft had drifted badly off course, relying on navigation equipment that simply was not good enough.
Two weeks later, Reagan announced that a classified satellite navigation system, developed over a decade to guide nuclear warheads to within meters of their targets, would be opened to the entire world. For free. So that no civilian aircraft would ever drift again.
That system was GPS.
It now enables rideshares, precision agriculture, and the timestamps that underpin financial compliance. None of that was the point when Reagan made the announcement. The point was that 269 people had just died.
That is not a metaphor. It is a precise description of causality, and the first of many such sentences in the history of human progress.
02 | 1969
The Internet
The first message was two letters, and then it crashed
It was 10:30 pm on October 29, 1969. A 22-year-old UCLA student named Charley Kline typed “L” on a terminal connected to Stanford. It appeared. He typed “O.” It appeared. He typed “G,” and the system crashed.
We sent two letters. That was the first message on the internet.
ARPANET was DARPA’s engineering solution for surviving nuclear war. Its protocols were published openly to meet military objectives, not commercial ones. That single decision, made for strategic reasons with no thought of profit, seeded the entire internet economy.
The Big Bang of the modern economy sounded like a system error.
03 | 2010S | Personal Account
Uber
The older generation thought it was useless. One refused to leave her BlackBerry.
I was working at Morgan Stanley when I was Uber banker and as such convinced the firm’s management that we should become Uber’s first commercial client. The idea was straightforward: replace the black cars that sat outside our New York headquarters waiting for employees with on-demand rides. No more wasted time, no more guessing when a car would arrive.
The internal resistance was something I will never forget. The older generation thought it was a passing novelty. One colleague was particularly dismissive. She said it was useless, that she was refusing to move from her BlackBerry to a smartphone just so she could get a ride home. That was the barrier. Not the product. Not the economics. A keyboard preference.
That woman was not unusual. She was the market. And the market was wrong.
Within a few years, Uber had restructured urban transportation on every continent. The GPS that Reagan opened in 1983, the smartphone that emerged from decades of miniaturized electronics, the internet that DARPA built to survive nuclear war: Uber was not a technology company. It was the intersection of three military-funded platforms arriving at the same moment.
I financed Uber across multiple rounds and through to their eventual IPO. The bet was never really about replacing taxis. It was about what happens when infrastructure built for one purpose gets repurposed by someone with the patience to wait for the moment.
04 | 2012-2021 | Personal Account
Moderna
DARPA funded it when no pharma company would. We funded the scale-up.
In 2012, DARPA program manager Dan Wattendorf read a paper on mRNA technology that every major pharmaceutical company had passed on. No existing market. No trial pathway. No commercial justification. DARPA funded it anyway, because DARPA was not looking for a product. It was looking for a way to protect soldiers.
The pharmaceutical industry looked at mRNA and saw no product. DARPA looked at it and saw a soldier.
On January 10, 2020, scientists posted the COVID-19 genome sequence online. Within 48 hours, Moderna’s team had designed a vaccine candidate using the platform DARPA had funded. The design took two days. I have the memory seared in my brain of the phone call from the exceptionally talented CEO, Stephane Bancel, telling me “we have the vaccine.” Remember this was unknown territory, and living in NYC, we had morgues being built in Central Park. It was a frightening time.
Moderna at that point was a research organization. Brilliant science, no manufacturing infrastructure at the scale the world rapidly needed. We helped raise over a billion dollars to finance the scale of production. It was the first real-world proof that mRNA technology worked, and it happened because someone was willing to back it before the market understood what it was.
05 | | 2004 – Present | Personal Account
Palantir
No salespeople. No steak dinners. Just people in jean shorts solving real problems.
In 2004, a data analytics startup in Palo Alto was short on cash. It was perceived as too niche, too complex, and too early to invest in. Then In-Q-Tel called, the CIA’s venture capital arm, funding the technology the intelligence community needs before markets do.
I worked closely with Palantir as their investment banker and evangelist through their direct listing. What struck me was not the technology, though the technology was extraordinary. What struck me was the culture. This was the first generation of neo-prime contractors, going head-to-head with the traditional primes, old men in Brooks Brothers suits who had spent decades winning government contracts by flying clients to golf courses and buying them steak dinners.
Palantir’s people were in Birkenstocks, jean shorts, and Iron Maiden T-shirts. They were winning because they were in theater, identifying the problem, building the solution on site. They invented the notion of the “forward deployed engineer.”
The product sold itself because it worked, and it worked because the people building it cared more about solving the problem than about closing the contract.
Palantir tracked terrorist financing and insurgent movements. The work contributed to the effort that found Osama bin Laden.
Dr. Karp and his partner, the exceptionally talented Kevin Kawasaki, had a practice I found quietly brilliant. When meeting prospective investors, they would say plainly: Palantir will likely never go public. It was not a disclaimer. It was a filter. The investors who walked away were chasing momentum. The ones who stayed understood something different.
Palantir is now valued at over $300 billion. That is not the point. The point is what it does.
06 | Ongoing
Israel • Unit 8200
The world’s most selective tech bootcamp does not have a website
Israel spends roughly 5% of GDP on defense, nearly twice the US rate. Conventional wisdom calls this a burden. Yet Israel has more tech startups and NASDAQ listings per capita than any country except the United States, and for a decade, per-capita venture investment has ranked first among nations of comparable size, with no oil, no navigable rivers, and almost consistently being at war with its adversaries.
The explanation fits in two words: Unit 8200.
Israel’s signals intelligence unit sends the country’s top technical minds to solve frontier problems under real operational pressure. They graduate with a network, clearance, and ten years of experience that no MBA program can replicate.
Check Point. CyberArk. Wiz, the fastest-growing enterprise software company in history. Mobileye. Hundreds more across AI, cybersecurity, and medical devices. All Unit 8200 alumni.
The Israeli Defence Force did not set out to build Israel’s tech economy. Its aim was, and continues to be, survival. Military superiority is not a cost. It is a compounding asset, and its dividends appear in forms no balance sheet was designed to measure.
07 | 2026 | Personal Account
Isar Aerospace
The rocket was invented to kill people. Now it is the bottleneck between humanity and its own future.
The V-2 was called Vergeltungswaffe, Vengeance Weapon. The world’s first ballistic missile, built to destroy London and Antwerp. After the war, von Braun continued his work as a US government contractor. Most of America’s earliest space flights were made on modified V-2s. The weapon that terrorized civilians became the vehicle that took humanity to the moon.
Now those same descendants are the bottleneck between us and survival. Satellites already predict wildfires before the first flame appears, track hurricanes days before landfall, and relay communications when every other infrastructure has failed. The constraint is not satellites. It is getting them to space.
I have worked closely with Isar Aerospace for years. They are building rockets affectionately known as Spectrum, targeting the first orbital launch from European soil by any privately developed vehicle. Europe’s most well-funded launch startup, with over €550 million raised. Their CEO Daniel Metzler says it plainly: “We are building the capability for nations to access and sustain space on their own terms.”
The V-2 was designed to destroy cities. Its descendants are our early warning system for when the planet tries to destroy itself.
08 | The Not So Distant Future
Nuclear Fusion
Unchaining the shackles of dependence on hydrocarbons
The end of the hydrocarbon world order
Nuclear fusion has the potential to be one of the most transformative technologies in human history and to eliminate the geopolitical risks posed by our dependence on oil and gas. If fusion delivers on its promise, the manipulation by hydrocarbon nations, built over a century, dissolves. The entire world order that has been shaped by who controls oil and gas production resets.
There are fusion companies out there today that are getting closer to making unlimited, commercial, clean energy a reality. Once thought of as a science fiction dream perpetually 30 years down the road, the industry’s leaders are now targeting demonstrations of commercially viable fusion technologies within the next few years. Using Nobel-prize-winning science, advancements have made high field magnets strong enough to transform the tokamak, the world’s most studied and proven fusion architecture, into a potentially commercially viable solution.
Fusion research did not begin in a university lab chasing clean energy. It grew out of military thermonuclear weapons programs in the late 1940s. The physics insights needed to understand how hydrogen isotopes fuse, and how to confine plasma long enough to sustain that reaction, were first worked out by physicists like Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam in service of designing the hydrogen bomb. Project Sherwood, launched in 1951, was the direct spinoff — the same scientists, the same institutions, now tasked with asking whether controlled fusion was possible.
NIF at Lawrence Livermore was built and operated by the National Nuclear Security Administration, a weapons science agency, because its primary mission is maintaining the US nuclear stockpile without live testing. In December 2022, it achieved fusion ignition: more energy out than laser energy in. That milestone, celebrated as a breakthrough for clean energy, happened in a weapons laboratory funded by the defense budget. The private fusion sector immediately pointed to it as validation of their own approaches.
Private fusion companies today are not starting from scratch. They and their investors are, in a real sense, the beneficiaries of decades of investments made by these military-led initiatives. For these companies and their backers, this is not a financial thesis built around a 3x return in a few years. This is a bet that the biggest shift in the global energy order since the discovery of oil is going to happen within a decade, and that the people building it deserve patient capital behind them.
I Have Also Been Wrong
Early in my career, I supported a company called Better Place. Shai Agassi was one of the most compelling founders I had encountered, genuinely visionary, genuinely right about where the world was going on electric vehicles. But the model was broken. Battery-swap infrastructure required car manufacturers, governments, and consumers to all change behavior at the same moment. It collapsed under the weight of its own coordination requirement.
I backed the founder when I should have backed the model. Charisma is not a moat. It was one of my first misses, and I have not forgotten it.
The patient capital thesis only works if you are honest about what you are backing. Vision is necessary. Structure is not optional.
The Pattern
Name a transformative technology from the past seventy years and trace it back. GPS. The internet. mRNA. Space infrastructure. Cybersecurity. Fusion. Almost all of them are rooted in investment made long before commercial viability was imaginable, usually by institutions that answered none of the clocks the market runs on.
The market is structurally brilliant at allocating capital to things it already understands. It is structurally blind to things that require a decade of patience before the first dollar of revenue. That blindness is not a flaw in the market. It is a feature of how incentives work. Fund managers have LPs. LPs have beneficiaries. Investors need a return on a timeline.
The Pentagon has a different mandate. So does a founder who genuinely believes they are changing the world. So does an investor who has learned, through enough cycles, that the biggest returns come from backing what the market cannot yet see and then waiting.
I evangelized mRNA before anyone called it a vaccine platform. I backed engineers in jean shorts before anyone called them the future of defense contracting. The pattern is the same. The market is not wrong about the risk. It is wrong about the timeline.
The package on your doorstep is the result of eighty years of investments made by people who had no idea what they were building. They were just solving the problem in front of them.
That is still how it works.
DAVID DWEK
CEO, Eden — Twenty-five years at the intersection of innovation and patient capital.
Informed by a conversation with Former US Secretary of Defense LloydAustin at the Milken Institute’s 28th Annual Global Conference.Prosperity Engine