First principles
These are the commitments we hold Varn to. We are publishing them so we can be measured against them.
- 01
We build for democracies.
We will sell to and work with democratic states, their armed forces, and their allies. We will not sell to anyone outside that circle, under any framing, at any price. This is not a marketing position. It is the only position that lets the engineers who work here look themselves in the mirror at the end of the day.
- 02
Hardware and software, built by the same people, in the same building.
The companies that ship the best autonomous systems treat hardware and software as a single discipline. We will do the same. The people writing the autonomy stack will eat lunch with the people machining the airframes. Decisions about what the platform does and what the software does will be made together or they will not be made.
- 03
We manufacture in Europe.
We assemble in Europe. We source from Europe wherever we practically can. Where we cannot, we will say so openly, and we will work on closing the gap. A defence industrial base that cannot make its own things is not a defence industrial base.
- 04
We do not promise what we have not delivered.
Our public claims will be limited to what we have actually built, tested, and shown to a customer. If we have a working prototype, we will say so. If we have a concept, we will say it is a concept. If something does not exist yet, we will not pretend that it does, including to ourselves.
- 05
We tell our customers the truth.
About what works, what does not, what we are not sure of, and what we will not know until we test it in the field. The defence industry has a long history of telling buyers what they want to hear. We will not do that. It is bad for them and it is bad for us.
- 06
We treat the engineering of weapons as a moral undertaking.
The systems we build will be used in life-and-death situations by people in uniform. That is the work. We will do it with the seriousness it deserves. We will train the people who use our products. We will listen to them when they tell us something is wrong. We will not optimise for theatre.
- 07
We hire people who could work anywhere.
Building this kind of company is a privilege and we will treat it that way. The engineers and operators we hire will be people who had other options and chose this one because they wanted to work on it specifically. We will pay them properly, give them work that matters, and protect their time from anything that is not the work.
- 08
We measure ourselves on capability delivered.
Not capability promised, not capability funded, not capability that looks good in a slide. The metric is whether the people who fielded what we shipped are better off than they were before. Everything else is downstream of that.
These principles are not a marketing document. They are how we will run the company. If we are not living up to them, we want to hear about it.