Editor at Large Rick Reiff reports that one of America’s best-known soldiers is now a part-time OC resident.
Retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a commander in the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and Donald Trump’s national security adviser for 13 months, said he bought a Newport Beach home in February.
McMaster said it’s a family getaway from the Bay Area, where he serves as a Hoover Institution senior fellow, Stanford B-school lecturer and a director of Zoom.
“Palo Alto made Newport Beach look like a bargain,” McMaster quipped following a stem-winding speech on geopolitics at the Pacific Club earlier this month.
McMaster is doing some business in OC, too: He’s an adviser to Corona del Mar-based Mischler Financial Group, a broker-dealer owned and operated by military veterans.
Reiff said he broke the ice with McMaster by mentioning his younger brother, retired Lt. Col. Jack Reiff, like McMaster commanded an armored company in the epic 73 Easting tank battle of Desert Storm.
Anduril Industries is looking to equip the current and next generation of U.S. soldiers with the best technology available. Judging by their rapid expansion over the past year, they’re succeeding at shaking up the ways the defense industry operates.
When asked how things are going at the 4-year-old startup, founder Palmer Luckey said he is “having fun and I’m making money so I can’t really complain, right?”
“Things are going well,” the 29-year-old told Business Journal reporters Audrey Kemp and Kevin Costelloe before the Nov. 18 General Counsel Awards event.
He said Anduril has been doing more work for the U.S. Air Force lately, and also with the Marine Corps—the company often tests its products near Camp Pendleton.
Luckey and Matt Grim, fellow Anduril co-founder and its COO, were among many Anduril employees on hand at the Irvine Marriott, located just down the street from the company’s current HQ, to see colleague Babak Siavoshy win a GC Award in the private company category.
Siavoshy this year helped the firm negotiate its nearly 650,000-square-foot lease for Costa Mesa’s Press development, one of the largest office deals in OC’s history.
Luckey said Anduril’s move to the new offices in Costa Mesa is scheduled to start in December, and could wrap up by the early part of 2022.
Luckey, who studied journalism at California State University, Long Beach before leaving school to create Oculus VR, noted that in addition to taking the existing, retrofitted space at the former LA Times printing press building in Costa Mesa, “we’re building another 200,000 [square] feet there.”
For more on Siavoshy and the four other GC Award winners, see the features throughout this week’s edition.
Anduril isn’t the only OC tech firm landing military work, see page 12 for the news on the area’s growing base of satellite makers.
