28-Year-Old College Dropout Left Silicon Valley to Fix This Problem

After dropping out of college in his native Austria, Peter Goldsborough became emblematic of a particular Silicon Valley dream: At age 19, he landed a job on Facebook’s AI research team and later became a chief engineer at defense unicorn Anduril.

But less than a decade into his career, he decided to risk it all on a problem most people in his Big Tech bubble had never thought about: how to keep troops, vehicles and weapons supplied with enough fuel, water and ammunition when everything is chaotic.

Goldsborough is now the co-founder and CTO of Rune Technologies, a defense tech startup that raised a $24 million Series A round last year. “We’re a company focused on military logistics technology,” he tells Entrepreneur. “Logistics wins wars. Rune wins logistics.” The company fills a gap he noticed during years of working on cutting-edge defense programs that ignored the supply chain behind the fight.

Dropping out of college

Goldsborough’s story starts in Austria. He taught himself to program as a teenager and briefly attended the Technical University of Munich before deciding he would learn more by building real systems than by sitting in lectures. 

“I’m really self-taught,” he explains. “So when I got to college, there were a couple of useful things I learned, but I felt like I could already build a lot of things on my own.”

After one year of college, at age 19, Facebook offered him a role on its AI research team in Silicon Valley. He treated college and industry as two comparable options and chose the place where he could learn the most. “I ultimately decided to take that leap of faith and dive in and build things at Facebook,” he says. 

Working at Anduril and finding a gap

After Facebook, Goldsborough joined Anduril, where he worked on machine learning infrastructure. He was an engineer, building and deploying software side-by-side with warfighters in the field. The experience gave him a front-row seat to how the Pentagon spends its technology attention — and what it overlooks. 

“While I worked at Anduril, I worked on a number of really exciting defense programs and technologies, but eventually realized that none of them were focused on logistics,” he says.

Autonomy, drones, intelligence, command and control — everyone wanted to work on things that “go boom or fly on their own,” he says. Almost no one wanted to work on fuel, food or spare parts. 

Goldsborough came to see that omission as both a strategic vulnerability and a personal calling. In modern planning and software, “nobody was thinking about the logistics tail,” he explains, or the unglamorous but decisive question of how fast missiles, fuel and equipment get replenished once they’re used.

Co-founding Rune and defining its mission

Goldsborough co-founded Rune on July 4, 2024. The company’s core product, TyrOS, is a logistics and sustainment platform designed for the realities of military operations. Goldsborough defines logistics as “making sure that troops or weapons systems in the military have enough fuel, water, ammunition and food to do their job.” 

Rune’s software helps “supercharge” logisticians by knowing what they have on hand in terms of supplies, “what vehicles, what personnel, what medical equipment,” he explains. The technology then forecasts what they will have in the future based on consumption. TyrOS doesn’t just display data; it combines it to answer questions like the fastest way to resupply a hilltop unit low on ammunition or bring spare parts to a grounded drone. 

The company takes a human-centered approach in a space often dominated by automation hype. Goldsborough insists that he designed Rune’s systems to keep people in charge rather than replace them. “We are all about humans being on the loop,” he says. The goal is “to support humans and give them the material they need to make decisions with their expert human judgments,” he explains. 

That philosophy shows up in TyrOS’s defining feature: its deep understanding of real-world workflows and its predictive intelligence. TyrOS “helps them see the future before it happens,” he says, by combining data on supplies, vehicles, routes and personnel into a single picture.

Validating the idea in pilot programs

From the outset, Goldsborough treated validation with warfighters as non-negotiable. Before writing too much code, he immersed himself in the lives of logisticians. “The number one thing I started with was an incredible amount of customer interviews,” he says.

He asked early contacts to introduce him to logisticians and spent months on the phone, often “dozens of times a day,” asking what their days looked like and what problems they would solve if they could wave a magic wand. 

Rune’s first major proving ground came with the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division. The company started a pilot program in early 2025. At first, Rune’s team just observed exercises and demonstrated the software. Finally, TyrOS became a “critical linchpin” in a National Training Center rotation in Fort Irwin, California. At that event, army logisticians used TyrOS to capture inventories and forecast fuel, water and ammunition needs. They also tapped into the technology to plan the distribution of supplies across a simulated battlefield. 

Within six months of building TyrOS, more than 50 logisticians were using it under real pressure, in an environment where commanders can lose their jobs if units fail certification. “If at any point it had been too cumbersome and gotten in their way, they would have had no problem throwing it away,” Goldsborough notes, but says that instead, many became champions of the technology. 

The company’s technology now underpins prototypes in the Army’s flagship Next Generation Command and Control modernization program, including deployments with the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii and continued work with the 4th Infantry Division in Colorado Springs. 

The military also uses Rune’s software to quickly detect casualty events from soldier-worn sensors and to coordinate ambulances or helicopters that clear the battlefield and rush wounded troops to care.

Why he started Rune

Goldsborough calls the journey of starting Rune “a moral imperative.” “I feel it’s my duty to use my skills to build technology to support America and defend its values,” he says.

When he realized that no one was focused on what he believes is “the most critical aspect of any war that hopefully never happens,” the logistics side, he decided to take action. 

That sense of duty, coupled with his engineering background, explains why Goldsborough chose to leave Anduril and start his own business. 

Goldsborough advises founders to get “real” with customers early. When Rune put its software in front of logisticians, they rejected some interfaces “after 3 seconds” with comments like “you have to change that, or I’m never gonna use this again,” leading to immediate changes.

Goldsborough advises running hard, real-world experiments. He says that if Rune hadn’t gone through “really difficult” real-world pilots early on with customers, the software might have “looked good,” but it wouldn’t have actually been useful. 

Finally, he says not to “live in Narnia” about human behavior. He criticizes the tendency to build based on imagined user behavior instead of observed behavior. “The longer you stay in that fairytale land, the further away you are from actually building something valuable,” he says. 

After dropping out of college in his native Austria, Peter Goldsborough became emblematic of a particular Silicon Valley dream: At age 19, he landed a job on Facebook’s AI research team and later became a chief engineer at defense unicorn Anduril.

But less than a decade into his career, he decided to risk it all on a problem most people in his Big Tech bubble had never thought about: how to keep troops, vehicles and weapons supplied with enough fuel, water and ammunition when everything is chaotic.

Goldsborough is now the co-founder and CTO of Rune Technologies, a defense tech startup that raised a $24 million Series A round last year. “We’re a company focused on military logistics technology,” he tells Entrepreneur. “Logistics wins wars. Rune wins logistics.” The company fills a gap he noticed during years of working on cutting-edge defense programs that ignored the supply chain behind the fight.