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• Eva Brückner is a recruiter at Heinrich & Coll., a German HR consultancy.
• She finds skilled workers to fill key roles within defense companies.
• She told Insider how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed recruitment in the industry.

This is an edited, translated version of an article that originally appeared on January 23, 2023. 

In her role as a recruiter at the German HR consultancy Heinrich & Coll., Eva Brückner looks for potential middle- and upper-level managers in the defense industry.  

She told Insider that the firm often only reveals companies’ names to candidates when they get through to the interview stage because of moral concerns about working for weapons manufacturers. 

If she were recruiting for a particularly specialized role, she would sometimes only tell the candidate the company’s name when they’re due to meet with the hiring company, she said. 

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed this, she said. “There has been a notable removal of taboos in the defense sector,” Brückner said.  

“Armaments are no longer seen as purely evil or as solely used for attack. Now people see they can be used for protection as well,” she said, adding that she had seen more interested applicants coming to her about open positions because they wanted to contribute to the defense effort. 

The German government also vowed to increase military spending in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the creation of a special 100 billion-euro fund to support and modernize the country’s armed forces. 

The manufacturers Brückner works with are primarily looking for engineers, business economists, and program managers, she told Insider. 

She gets applications from people already working in the security, defense, automotive, or mechanical-engineering industries, she continued. 

She added that certain manufacturers are also targeting female managers in their hiring drives, adding that, in her experience, “women very rarely apply for our normal job postings.”  

And that’s despite salaries in the industry being in the six-figure range, depending on the position. 

A business-development role in the industry in Germany would normally earn between 80,000 and 110,000 euros, or between around $87,000 and $120,000, Brückner continued.

As a department head, you could earn up to 250,000 euros, or about $272,000, a year, she added. 

Brückner said she was not seeing many women apply for the roles because, she thought, they were less likely than men to “believe they can learn those skills on the job.” 

To recruit more women to defense, Brückner said her company was “flipping the search” and starting by finding good candidates before seeking positions they could be suitable for, rather than only looking for candidates for existing open positions. 

For upper- and middle-management roles, Brückner said she primarily looked at women who had already taken their first steps in management and were working in fields like engineering, sales, strategy, and business-development. 

“They don’t have to have worked in the defense industry for a long time. But they should be stable, able to stand up to challenges, and show leadership and empathy,” Brückner said. 

Female candidates should understand before they apply that men still dominate many defense companies at the executive level, Brückner added. 

Whatever peoples’ prevailing attitudes toward defense are, Brückner said, all candidates should still consider the moral implications of the work and whether they would feel comfortable sharing what they do. 

“We prepare our candidates for these challenges in the defense industry,” Brückner said, adding that she asks potential applicants, “How do you deal with it when you have to explain to other parents from kindergarten or your children where you work?”

• Elon Musk said Google had a “standing interest in buying Tesla” in testimony in the securities fraud trial.
• The Tesla CEO said this helped encourage him to try to secure funds to take the EV maker private.
• According to a 2015 book, Musk and former Google CEO Larry Page had an $11 billion deal in place for Tesla.  

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told a court Tuesday that Google had a “standing interest” in buying the electric-vehicle maker, which encouraged him to try taking the company private with Saudi funds.

The billionaire pointed to the interest from Google’s parent Alphabet laid down in an earlier deposition,  Marketwatch reported, as he defended his 2018 “funding secured” tweet in an ongoing civil trial.

Musk told his lawyer Alex Spiro in a cross-examination that this factored into his decision to try and take Tesla private.

The San Francisco trial is the result of a class-action shareholder lawsuit that alleges Musk committed securities fraud with the tweet. The investors have accused Musk of illegally manipulating Tesla’s stock price by saying he had funding in place to take the carmaker private at $420 a share.

Musk said that in planning to take Tesla private, he entered into negotiations with the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which he said “unequivocally” supported his plan, per Bloomberg.

But he described the sovereign wealth fund’s governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan as “backpedaling” on verbal assurances of commitment made to Musk in Tesla’s factory. The CEO said Al-Rumayyan was “ass covering” in later texts.

Saudis are the second largest investors in Musk’s social platform company Twitter, which he acquired for $44 billion in October. 

Musk also said he would have sold SpaceX stock to take Tesla private.

According to a 2015 book on Musk, the Tesla CEO had an $11 billion deal in place to sell the company to Google in 2013, but it fell through when Musk and former Google CEO Larry Page started arguing over specifics of the deal, during which time Google began to turn a profit. 

He has since had a more distinct cooling in relations with Google. Co-founder Sergey Brin was set to cash in his shares in the automaker — which he bought before it went public in 2010 — last year amid a report in the Wall Street Journal that Musk had an affair with his wife. 

Musk’s trial rests on his assertion that he did not mislead investors when he tweeted that he had secured finances to take Tesla private at $420, because he did indeed have funding for the deal. Shares in Tesla have jumped more than 14% in the last five days as the trial continues.

• The billionaire Tim Draper is part of a lineage often lauded as Silicon Valley’s premier VC family.
• His grandfather founded the VC firm Draper, Gaither, and Anderson.
• Tim’s children, three of whom carry on the VC torch, could be deemed tech’s ultimate nepo babies.

Celebrities bristling about being called “nepo babies” could learn from William Henry Draper III, one of Silicon Valley’s premier venture capitalists who has recognized his family’s close ties and their influence on the family’s successes.

“Networks are critical to the successful venture capitalist,” Draper, who cofounded elite investment projects like Sutter Hill Ventures, wrote in his 2012 semi-autobiographical book, “The Startup Game.”

In other words, the adage: It’s all about who you know. Anyone who has hustled and pounded the pavement to break into a competitive field understands there’s an elusive alchemy to how connections can form and the doors they open.

As far as powerful professional networks go, it’s hard to top the Draper family tree. 

Draper’s venture-capital career began in the 1950s at his father’s own trailblazing firm, Draper, Gaither, and Anderson, an early entrant in a new field. He wrote that he joined it, in part, for the “unique opportunity to learn from a master.” Striking out with his peers in the next decade, he went on to invest in early IT-infrastructure companies including Kasper Instruments.

He paid it forward to his son, Tim Draper, who made his own early VC investments in the ’80s using a family vehicle that was then called Draper Associates, according to “The Startup Game.”

During the dot-com era, the father and son would hold court at the Stanford-adjacent social haunts where the elder Draper connected Tim — a Stanford alumnus — with people like Yahoo’s cofounder Jerry Yang. (Draper wrote that he even attended the Yahoo pitch meeting “on the chance that I could be of help to Tim,” though the deal eventually went to Sequoia.)

With his own ventures, Tim went on to back the likes of Hotmail, Skype, Coinbase, and, less fortuitously, Theranos, the blood-testing startup founded by his family friend Elizabeth Holmes.

“Meet the Drapers,” the game show that Tim cocreated and launched in 2017, positions the family as enduring industry power players. On the show, Draper, Tim, and Draper’s daughter Polly Draper, along with other family members who drop by as “guest judges,” field pitches from founders competing for Tim’s $1 million investment check. The show ran internationally on channels including Sony Entertainment Television.

As evidenced on the series, the family’s scions tend to wear their legacy as a badge of honor. Tim’s children Jesse Draper, who leads Halogen VC, and Adam Draper, who is behind Boost VC, are even identified as “4th generation venture capitalists” in their public bios.

And the Draper empire extends beyond tech investing. Tim and his children were also in the actor-producer Polly’s Nickelodeon show, “The Naked Brothers Band.” Polly’s son Alex Wolff is a Hollywood rising star you might know from hits like the 2018 horror film “Hereditary.”

All of this is to say that the Drapers have benefited from their last name and fall into the category of “nepo babies,” a term made popular by a New York Magazine story about nepotism in the insular world of Hollywood. 

Family can play just as big a role in the tech world. Even in a book promoting grind, tenacity, and savvy risk-taking as elements of successful investing, Draper acknowledged it: “I was lucky to have been born to a great father.”

Meet the Draper family, the ultimate tech nepo babies and Silicon Valley royalty.

Tim Draper 

Pedro Fiúza/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Tim, who followed in his father’s footsteps as a young adult after getting in some early practice with his family investing firm, cofounded the blockbuster venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1985, when he was in his early 20s. DFJ had more than 900 investments, according to PitchBook, including in companies such as Tesla and Baidu. DFJ’s founding partners have all left, and the firm became known as Threshold Ventures in 2019, Axios reported at the time.

A gregarious presence on his show, “Meet the Drapers,” Tim has an easy laugh and sports his signature tie polka-dotted with the bitcoin symbol.

With a $1.2 billion net worth, according to Forbes’ estimate, his reach is far — he bought an island in Tanzania, where he’s invested in a hotel — and sometimes personal. In addition to creating and hosting a show featuring members of his family, he’s credited as an advisor for his daughter Jesse’s firm, Halogen Ventures, and as a producer on his sister’s Nickelodeon show, in which he played the character Principal Schmoke. 

Jesse Draper 

Jesse Draper

Jesse announced herself on the tech scene in the late 2000s with her web series, “The Valley Girl Show,” which featured quirky interviews with entrepreneurs in Tim’s circle. Some notable guests included then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who wrote the foreword for her grandfather’s book), Elon Musk, and Stephen Jurvetson, who cofounded DFJ with Jesse’s father. 

Tim helped arrange some early interviews, according to a Fast Company feature on the family in 2012.

Jesse’s firm, Halogen Ventures, which she launched in 2015 in her late 20s, was the culmination of what she described as an indirect path to VC-hood.

“I’m the weirdest VC story, I think, of all time,” she said in a March episode of the “Startup Renegades” podcast.

Jesse attended film school at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also took business courses and focused first on her acting career. She was eventually put off by the objectification she observed at auditions, she said on the podcast episode, and switched gears to do “Valley Girl,” which went on to become a TV show carried by a CBS-linked station. 

That put her on a path to investing, she said, because as the show’s host, she was hearing more from new founders looking to get noticed. She’d alert investors in her circle to those who showed potential, she said on “Startup Renegades.”

“Sometimes, I’d write them a tiny check, and some of those deals did really well for me,” she added.

That helped lay the foundation for what later became Halogen, she said. Halogen has invested in dozens of brands targeted at women like the Instagram beauty darling Live Tinted and the investment company Ellevest. It lists her father as an advisor.

Adam Draper

Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Adam’s LinkedIn bio indicates that as a college undergrad, he cofounded Xpert Financial in 2009.

The Fast Company feature said Tim facilitated Adam’s inclusion into the company’s founding “in a single afternoon” when Tim helped Jesse’s old classmate Thomas Foley fine-tune the idea. Xpert Financial, a digital marketplace to connect private companies with investors, is no longer in business, according to PitchBook.     

In 2012, Adam founded Boost VC, which has made over 400 investments in a variety of tech and crypto companies, according to PitchBook. Like his father, Adam has invested in the crypto exchange Coinbase, according to the Boost VC website.

Billy Draper

In 2016, Billy Draper was on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list as a 26-year-old in the venture-capital category. In his Forbes write-up, he was credited with being a “full-time investor since June 2014.”

He worked at firms like Meta and his father’s Draper Associates (a separate investing firm that evolved alongside Draper Fisher Jurvetson) after studying film at UCLA like his sister, according to his LinkedIn bio. 

He’s gone on to found his own firm, Path VC, which invests in very-early-stage companies, according to the firm’s bio. He’s invested alongside his father in companies like Robinhood, according to Draper Associate’s website. 

Eleanor Draper

Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Eleanor Draper has the smallest visible online presence out of her siblings. Her LinkedIn bio indicates she received training at institutions including Draper University, an “entrepreneurship program” founded by Tim, according to its website. The more than monthlong program costs $12,000 to attend, according to its website.

She used that training in 2018 to launch a scrunchie company called Lemonelle, according to her LinkedIn.