Anduril Industries CEO and co-founder Brian Schimpf told Yahoo Finance at the annual Invest conference that the way for the US Department of Defense (DoD) to get the best tech is to "show the entrepreneurs that if you build technology that actually works, that solves a real problem, [the DoD] will actually buy it and you have a chance to actually succeed."

"Unit X" co-author Christopher Kirchhoff, who founded the Pentagon's Silicon Valley office, joins Asking for a Trend Host Josh Lipton to discuss the dynamic between the Pentagon and defense tech startups, just after President-elect Donald Trump picked Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense as part of his upcoming administration.

"We're in an amazing pivot point in this country. We still have two systems for producing technology. We have the military-industrial complex, which is burdened by quite complex regulations that make innovation in that system more difficult and then we have the consumer system for producing technology, which essentially makes everything else," Kirchhoff says.

He says that a major challenge facing the DoD is getting on the same page with legislators. "The Secretary of Defense can control thousands of nuclear warheads and be next in the chain of command to the president of the United States. But if he or she wants to move more than I think about $10 million from one line of the budget to another, Congress has to approve it. So if you look at the amount of authority that a [Secratary of Defense] has, it's actually very small ... It takes more than just the Secretary to move the department."

For more of Kirchhoff's analysis of how the DoD will interact with the defense tech industry under Trump, the role of Elon Musk, and more, watch the video above.

Watch the full interview with Anduril Industries CEO Brian Schimpf here.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.

This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.