Welcome to Resilience Media

Co-founders Dr Tobias Stone and Leslie Hitchcock share their vision for startups, security, and defence coverage

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Nov 25, 2024

At Resilience Conference in September of this year we brought together top investors and startups in defence and security with leadership from the military and national security community. The conference featured panels and breakout sessions moderated by some of the leading journalists in this sector. At the conference we announced Resilience Media, with the goal to become the publication of record for the emerging defence and security technology sector. This is our first post on Resilience Media.

We have launched Resilience Media because we believe we are at the beginning of a new era that will see more conflicts, and a greater role of technology in fighting and winning wars. While the war in Ukraine has shown that warfare still involves trenches and tanks, it also now includes rapidly evolving tech innovation. Resilience Media will cover the emergence of this new era of technology and warfare. Our aim is to help coordinate the information to support the sector as it grows.

We are aware that this sector is different. Technology in defence, security, and resilience is not just about investor returns, exits, and exciting disruption; it is about addressing an existential threat. Outcomes are different in this sector. Some technologies will be crucial for our security but may not deliver venture returns, so we need to explore other methods to measure success. We will celebrate technologies that save or protect lives, but we will also need to become comfortable with technologies designed to increase lethality on a battlefield. Defence and Security is also unique because many of the people we will write about are building technology out of necessity, not out of choice. We will have different heroes in this sector.

We have done this before. Our team spent over a decade in Silicon Valley building TechCrunch, which has become the publication of record for the tech sector and runs the leading startup and technology conference, Disrupt. We saw how convening information and people in this way can support the growth of a tech ecosystem. We are bringing that experience to the defence, security, and resilience technology ecosystem. This is a unique tech sector, and a unique moment in the history of the technology sector. We believe it needs a dedicated media platform.

What to expect

Resilience Media will publish news about startups and funding, communicating the growth of the sector and the people leading it. We will also publish thought leadership around technology and innovation in defence and national security, resilience, and on the ecosystem as it develops. Expect essays by experts, interviews with the people shaping this ecosystem, and a focus on the human stories behind the technology and the sector.

Resilience Media will start as a weekly newsletter on the Substack platform and develop from there. We want to serve the community of people working to protect our democracies; the military and national security agencies, the governments, the investors and founders, academics, and the wider community of people using their skills, ideas, and expertise to keep our countries safe in an increasingly unsafe world. We will have our own writers and editorial team and will feature work by contributing and guest writers. We will also cover events and run an events calendar.

Why Resilience?

We chose the name ‘Resilience’ because this narrative is far broader than just defence and security. Conflicts in this era involve attacks on energy and food supplies, cyber-attacks, dark sky events, and disinformation as much as they involve kinetic warfare.

Resilience looks at how we protect our energy infrastructure, our food supplies, and how we defend the information that underpins our democratic systems. It looks at winning wars and overcoming disruption but also at sustaining peace and maintaining stability.

Our approach and ethos

Resilience Conference organises the people whilst Resilience Media organises the information, and together this supports better use of technology in defence, security, and resilience.

We believe it is fundamental for the public sector to work more closely and effectively with the tech sector, and for the tech sector to become more involved in defence, security, and resilience. An independent conference and media platform can convene these people, and can communicate the narrative more widely out into the tech sector.

This is a complicated sector in which to run events and a media company. It generates a lot of strong opinions and is genuinely challenging. We are creating a platform on which these debates can be explored in a sensible and constructive way. Whilst we will welcome open debate and balanced opinions, we will do this within a framework of facts, truth, and analysis built on a foundational belief in democracy, freedom, and the rule of law.

We will maintain a clear separation between our business and editorial decisions. Nobody paid to be on the stage at Resilience Conference, and we will continue to keep sponsorship separate from content both on the stage and in the publication.

We are deeply mission-driven. This means we are running Resilience Media and Conference to be useful and impactful to support an ecosystem that is there to protect us. We are very collaborative and will continue to work closely with for-profit and non-profit organisations in the private and public sector that are aligned with our aims.

We are a business seeking to be profitable so we can maintain our editorial independence, grow, and be sustainable into the future. Our business model is designed to allow us to support non-profit activity from our commercial activity. This approach allowed us to invite over 100 people from the military and government agencies to our conference so we could ensure everyone who needed to be in the room could attend. We will continue to use our convening power to support the ecosystem as it develops.