American Dynamism (with Katherine Boyle)

1. 0:00 – 1:42

   Hotel-room recording setup and episode preview

   1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

      I think this is our first time doing video in hotel rooms.

   2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:04

      I know, I know. It'll be funny. [chuckles]

   3. BGBen Gilbert0:06

      And the funniest thing is David and I are in hotel rooms down the hall, recording in different rooms so we get better audio quality. [laughing]

   4. DRDavid Rosenthal0:14

      Man, doing live in-person events again is awesome, but yields a whole new level of complexity.

   5. BGBen Gilbert0:22

      A whole new level. All right, let's do it.

   6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:24

      All right.

   7. SPSpeaker0:25

      Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way. Who got the truth?

   8. BGBen Gilbert0:42

      Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

   9. DRDavid Rosenthal0:56

      And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

   10. BGBen Gilbert1:01

       And we are your hosts. David, this should be a very fun- I should... It's funny I say, "should be." We, we recorded this already. I know it was a fascinating conversation.

   11. DRDavid Rosenthal1:12

       We are speaking to you from the future. We had a great, great, fun conversation here with my good friend, Katherine Boyle, who is, uh, just a wonderful investor. She's a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads their American Dynamism practice. We dive all into what that means, why this is an important vertical, both for venture investing and technology and the world and for America, but also for Andreessen, why they decided to do this. Her

2. 1:42 – 6:52

   Sponsor segment: Solana Foundation + Metaplex and the Solana NFT ecosystem

   1. DRDavid Rosenthal1:42

      background, her story is fascinating. She was a reporter at The Washington Post in the pre-Bezos era, and then came out to Silicon Valley, went to GSB, that's where we intersected, and then became a venture capitalist. She just has an amazing story, and we were pumped to get to do it with her. Now, before we dive in, for our presenting sponsor for this special episode, we have, as always, the Solana Foundation. And Solana, as you all know by now, is a global state machine and the world's most performant blockchain. That means that developers can build applications on it with super, super low transaction fees compared to other Web3 infrastructure, and all with very low latency and without compromising composability.

   2. BGBen Gilbert2:27

      It's like a real modern computer, but distributed.

   3. DRDavid Rosenthal2:30

      It's amazing. It is indeed a technical marvel. And today, we are talking with Stephen Hess, the CEO of Metaplex. Stephen, welcome to Acquired.

   4. SPSpeaker2:43

      GM, David.

   5. DRDavid Rosenthal2:44

      GM, indeed. Well, that is the perfect greeting to lead into my first question, which is, can you tell us all a little bit about what Metaplex is?

   6. SPSpeaker2:55

      Absolutely. Metaplex is a protocol and framework for building NFT applications, games, and experiences on the Solana protocol. Less than a year ago, there were no Solana NFTs, and now we have an exploding ecosystem of over, actually, this morning, one point nine million collectors that are holding a Solana NFT that uses the Metaplex standard. That's twelve million NFTs minted to date, and there is no slowing down. I know there's a lot of talk of bear markets, but I can tell you that the NFT creators are not stopping, and there's a lot of green field in front of us for sure.

   7. DRDavid Rosenthal3:38

      Wow!

   8. SPSpeaker3:39

      The other thing for Metaplex is that it's also a program library that provides open source programs for developers to launch these apps. We're known for a program called Candy Machine, uh, which has been used to launch the major generative profile photo collections in the Solana ecosystem. It's done a staggering nine hundred million dollars in primary sales revenue, most of which has gone back to independent artists and creators and small game studios that are using it as a form of crowdfunding. One of the most exciting qualities of the Solana NFT ecosystem is that it's mostly made of independent artists, creators, garage band teams that are using the open source tools that Metaplex provides to launch new businesses and creative projects. And so when we look at the data here, we see over a hundred thousand deployments of the Candy Machine program on chain. We see a hundred and forty-seven, I believe, projects with over a million dollars in market cap. And so you don't just have a few large IP holders or sports leagues that are driving the economy. You have this vibrant, meshed ecosystem of independent artists that are showing us the future in real time. And one of the privileges of our work is that we get to listen to those creators, be part of that process, and use that inspiration to then build this next generation of tools and technology.

   9. DRDavid Rosenthal5:14

      For folks out there who are considering NFT projects, working on them, what are the big benefits to using Solana versus, say, Ethereum or another blockchain?

   10. SPSpeaker5:25

       There will be applications that we expect will live cross-chain, and we expect greater specialization over time. So we do view the metaverse as a multi-chain world. But with Solana, you have just a fundamentally different economic structure that is radically changing what creators, builders, and game developers can make with this technology. With a one dollar mint and with sub one cent transaction fees, it's just a completely different world. And the energy of the Solana community from day one has been: What can we bring to the table that's unique, that was only possible when those types of economics-... have been provided to the community. That's just opening up an entirely new world for these types of immersive metaverse experiences. And you're competing with economics ultimately. Like, many of us that work in crypto have a fundamental and philosophical belief that greater degrees of decentralization will be important to society over time. But practically, consumers are making decisions based on the load time of the application that they're interfacing with and how quickly they can get to their end destination.

   11. DRDavid Rosenthal6:37

       That's awesome. Thanks, Stephen. And of course, our thanks to Solana. If you are considering developing on Solana, head on over to solana.com/developers or click the link in the show notes.

3. 6:52 – 7:18

   Community notes, disclaimers, and transition to the main interview

   1. BGBen Gilbert6:52

      Yeah, and, uh, listeners, you know the drill by now. Come join us in the Slack. We are 12,000 strong. We would love to have you there if you are not there already. And with that, none of this is investment advice. David and I and any of our guests may hold interests in things discussed on the show, and make sure you do your own research. All right, now on to our interview with Katherine Boyle, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

4. 7:18 – 10:34

   Defining 'American Dynamism' and the sectors it covers

   1. DRDavid Rosenthal7:18

      Katherine, welcome to Acquired. It is so great to have you here.

   2. KBKatherine Boyle7:23

      Thanks so much for having me. We've known each other for a long time, but I'm a huge fan, so it's so great to be here.

   3. DRDavid Rosenthal7:28

      I think we met just after you graduated from GSB, right?

   4. KBKatherine Boyle7:31

      Yeah. It's been a, a journey. [laughing]

   5. DRDavid Rosenthal7:34

      It totally has. Oh, my gosh! Well, we'll get all into that later. But let's start off with the most important, most interesting things going on right now, which for you and, and in the whole technology landscape, which is what you and Andreessen call this the thesis of American dynamism. It brings me back to, like, our Berkshire Hathaway episodes and, you know, like, believe in America, believe in the power to, like, make things better.

   6. KBKatherine Boyle7:59

      Yeah.

   7. DRDavid Rosenthal8:00

      And there's a lot of the opposite side [chuckles] out there right now. So maybe to start, could you tell us what the American dynamism thesis means to you and to Andreessen?

   8. KBKatherine Boyle8:09

      Sure. So the most simple definition is it's companies that support the national interest. So it's everything from companies that sell directly to government, like aerospace and defense, these classic industrial sectors that have been supporting government since the, you know, mid-20th century, but then also things that every citizen cares about and takes part of, so education, housing, transportation, infrastructure. These really big categories that we, when we look back through kind of the history of technology, there's been so much technological innovation, but at the same time, the last thirty years of software really hasn't touched a lot of these physical spaces. And so what we noticed through our portfolio is that some of the most important companies, some of the largest companies, actually fall into this category that's outside of consumer technology, and it's outside of enterprise technology. It's outside of these categories that sort of venture capital has found themselves sort of creating, but these become big companies that affect most people in the country. So the kind of broadest definition is these are companies that support the national interest. Oftentimes, they sell to government, sometimes they compete with government, other times they're just heavily regulated by government, but they touch everyone. And so we're excited to build a practice around this thesis, but also because we feel like the tailwinds are unique for this moment that we're in, especially coming out of COVID.

   9. BGBen Gilbert9:24

      And Katherine, does that include things that support the national interest that aren't necessarily sort of defense or foreign policy related? I'm thinking healthcare, I'm thinking education, big swaths of the American economy and American time spent domestically.

   10. KBKatherine Boyle9:39

       Definitely, yeah. So I mean, education and housing are, you know, two areas that I think venture capital hasn't touched as much as, say, healthcare. Like, if you look at, like, the last ten years, digital health has just grown tremendously, and we have, you know, we have a separate bio and health fund, but the same can't be said for education and housing. And education is one of these things that I think coming out of COVID, people really realize that we are still operating on a 19th century model, and that when the kind of world had to shut down, there were not that many good solutions for the vast majority of Americans to educate their children, whether it be K through 12 or things like higher education. One of the things we are noticing coming out of COVID is that there's just a tremendous founder appetite for innovating on a model that's really a 21st century model of how we're gonna educate people. I know that that's going deeper into the thesis now, but we really do see these big categories that can be transformative, that are oftentimes funded by government as needing the help of technologists and private sector in order to transform some of these categories.

5. 10:34 – 13:31

   Why this thesis is contrarian: hard sectors, deeper J-curves, and 'holding company' dynamics

   1. BGBen Gilbert10:34

      So everything you're saying in some ways sounds a little bit like, how could you possibly argue with that? This all seems obvious. Of course, we want prosperity and at least those of us in America, the American way to be as prosperous as possible, and for as many people around the world who want that sort of lifestyle to have that sort of lifestyle, freedom, democracy, that those sorts of things, free markets. What are the counterarguments? Why is this not a no-brainer, and why are you a little bit out on a limb in our industry, being a person who is beating this drum?

   2. KBKatherine Boyle11:03

      ... Yeah, 'cause I think these are hard sectors. The counterargument to investing in the physical world is that it's not pure software. You know, I think the argument against investing in defense, the argument against investing in a lot of these physical sectors is, one, they've been around for a long time, and so there's usually a lot of regulatory capture. We can get into kind of what the defense sector looks like and why it's so difficult to innovate in defense or in, you know, in cases of transportation. Like, these are important, large swaths of the economy, but there's entrenched interests, there's large players, so it's always been harder. The kind of history of Silicon Valley, as you all know, in, in many of the episodes that you've done, it's like a lot of people innovate on the things where there's not an existing sector. Sometimes it's a lot easier to innovate in the virtual world than the physical. So I think there's sort of been a focus on how do we build some of these big sectors of the economy where there aren't entrenched interests, where software plugs in perfectly, where the economics look perfect, and I think these companies are just harder to build. As we like to say, like, these companies go deeper down the J curve. They often don't look that good at Series A.

   3. DRDavid Rosenthal12:00

      The J curve, of course, being an initial investment in venture capital. You know, it's gonna look bad. You're gonna-- your IRR is gonna go negative as you're investing period before the returns come. But yeah, so I love that, deeper on the J curve. [chuckles]

   4. KBKatherine Boyle12:12

      Yeah. I mean, you look at SpaceX, and SpaceX is one of the most important companies, one of the largest private venture-backed companies, and yet, for the first ten years of SpaceX, there was a lot of fear and a lot of worry that investors wouldn't necessarily [chuckles] see a return. You know, it was often talked about. It's like you destroy three rockets before the fourth actually works, and there was a ton of sort of questions, even until very recently, around the business model of SpaceX. And so I think for a lot of these companies, they take extraordinary founders. Sometimes they have some technical risk, sometimes they require more capital up front, sometimes they have longer periods of how they'll have to stay private or how they'll be venture-backed, but ultimately, they are such broad swaths of the American economy, as you've said. And also, they become holding companies earlier. Like, this is something we can get into about, like, why these companies are a little unique, but a lot of times, if you're looking at companies in consumer enterprise, you'll see three or four different competitors going after a similar market, and they're all competing. And oftentimes, you see one or two companies that look alike, that are able to go public, and that's fine. These companies usually become holding companies pretty quickly and attract all of the talent. There's finite talent around things like aerospace, there's finite talent around things like defense, so you don't see as many competitors, and as I said, they are harder to build in the beginning, but towards, like, the middle part of these companies' trajectory, they're really just competing against themselves and really trying to compete against legacy incumbents.

   5. DRDavid Rosenthal13:30

      [chuckles]

6. 13:31 – 17:36

   How a16z built the practice: 'It’s Time to Build' and re-engaging with government

   1. DRDavid Rosenthal13:31

      Well, this is good. So maybe before we dive into some example companies or the specifics of the thesis itself, I'm curious, what was the intellectual process, maybe for you personally, but also I'm curious, like, within a16z, you have these, as a firm, these vertical practices now, which has been done in venture before, but not nearly to the degree that you all are, are doing it now. How did this vertical kind of originate? Did it start with Marc's, uh, Time to Build blog post, uh, you know, at the beginning of COVID? Like, what does it look like within the firm of like: "Hey, I think we should create a vertical"?

   2. KBKatherine Boyle14:09

      Yeah, it certainly starts with It's Time to Build. I mean, that was, I think, the impetus for everyone realizing that the story of Silicon Valley pre-COVID is very different than the story that is about to come. But I think we all very much believe that, that the world fundamentally changed. Anyone who doesn't believe that from a historical context or a technology context isn't paying attention. The world fundamentally changed with COVID, and we'll be reaping those, both the positive aspects of it and the negative aspects of it, for generations to come. So I think there was that understanding, but then I also think one of the observations that I had is that Silicon Valley is very good at understanding kind of consumer businesses. They're very good at understanding how to make businesses more efficient, but Silicon Valley has never touched government. The kind of narrative around how Silicon Valley works with government has always been, like, try to stay as far away as possible.

   3. DRDavid Rosenthal14:53

      [chuckles] Which is so ironic given... You know, we covered so much of the origins of Silicon Valley on, on this show, and, like, you know, Don Valentine was selling to the [chuckles] Department of Defense back in the day, right?

   4. KBKatherine Boyle15:05

      Yeah. That's something that is just not understood in the modern history of, of Silicon Valley. And, and of course, you know, Silicon Valley was built on defense investment, but this sort of view that software could actually ever work with government or the DoD, I mean, it's just viewed as the procurement of these types of technologies is almost impossible. And so there has been sort of, I think, this sort of twenty, thirty-year, sort of, do not engage, kind of, modern wisdom from venture capital firms has been: "It's just too hard. There's so much other stuff to do. There's so much other stuff to build. Let's make sure that we don't tick off the regulators in some way." And in some ways, like, when you look at the geography of Washington versus Silicon Valley, I think that is part of the magic of Silicon Valley, is that it emerged so far away from Washington. It emerged in a totally different part of the country with a totally different history, and it's sort of outside of the East Coast establishment or the Acela Corridor that, like, very much understands how the world works. And so there is a reason why Silicon Valley has emerged in a way that it has, but I think my background, I, I had spent ten years in Washington. It was sort of the center of my universe until I came out to Silicon Valley, and I was stunned by the fact that there was sort of very little overlap between what people in Northern California, this sort of haven we're talking about, and people in Washington cared about. But, of course, when you look at it from a DC perspective, these markets are so large, they're the most important markets. That's why they're regulated. And because they touch everyone, why are we so afraid of working with them? And so I think that was always just a question, an intellectual question in my mind, of is it possible for some of these companies to actually do the work of government? And then I started doing these sorts of kind of research. I, I wrote a piece for The Washington Post in 2018 about how actually it seemed like Silicon Valley was actually doing a lot of the work of government. They just didn't want anyone to know about it-

   5. DRDavid Rosenthal16:42

      [chuckles]

   6. KBKatherine Boyle16:42

      ... or talk about it. They didn't think of it in those terms.

   7. DRDavid Rosenthal16:44

      [chuckles]

   8. KBKatherine Boyle16:44

      It's everything from SpaceX and Palantir, which, you know, are companies that really were helping intelligence agencies or NASA, you know, the kind of classical realm, but also things like Lyft and Uber that were completely transforming public transportation in cities across America.

   9. DRDavid Rosenthal17:00

      Not to mention the, the cloud providers. You know, there was the big JEDI contract.

   10. KBKatherine Boyle17:04

       Oh, absolutely. That's a whole other story because that was a, a good example of, say, Google pulling out of working with government because they had employees who didn't necessarily want to work with the DoD. So yeah, there was a lot of just, I think, events happening that made people realize that Silicon Valley is actually a lot closer to working with government than people realized, and that whether you think it's good or bad or, you know, there's a value judgment, I think, on it from a lot of sides, but whether you think it's good or bad, it's happening.

   11. DRDavid Rosenthal17:28

       It was already happening, yeah.

   12. KBKatherine Boyle17:30

       ... Yeah, and it happens in a very organic way, and it's definitely not going away for a lot of factors I'm sure we'll get into.

7. 17:36 – 22:41

   Government as the 'last holdout' for modern software and the cost of not adopting tech

   1. SPSpeaker17:36

      Well, it's funny, even not thinking about the company serving government as a customer, you know, take Palantir, for example. Let's say you run an experiment where you have a bunch of people doing and building very innovative things, and then over the course of seventy years, that compounding at a high rate. Well, at some point, that goes from being garage projects to creating a lot of the value and infrastructure in a society. And so at some point, these things have to come to a head because here we are, a- and I'm thinking about the timeframe from 1950-ish to 2020-ish, a lot of the infrastructure that everyone outside the tech community uses in their day-to-day lives now are born of the tech community in Silicon Valley, and it's just, it's just the math. You're gonna keep compounding that capital, that talent, those innovations, and our way of life is now based on the things built in this community.

   2. KBKatherine Boyle18:30

      Yes. This is also a function of-- and this is one of the things that I think has actually kind of forced the government to say, "Okay, we're going to have to work with the private sector in a way that's probably a lot deeper than what we used to do in terms of a defense industrial base." Software is a revolution that is completely touching every aspect of society, but the people who are building the best forms of software are not going into government. And that is actually a radical change from how government used to work. It used to love to build internally. That was sort of the thesis is we need tanks and battleships, and we can get those from the private sector, uh, but we actually like to build our own internal tools. And so anyone who's a student of history, of company building, that sort of thing, is like, that is not what's happening in the best companies. You can choose to build or buy, but, like, the vast majority of companies that are getting off the ground are using external tools.

   3. SPSpeaker19:16

      Mm.

   4. KBKatherine Boyle19:16

      There's sort of a outsourcing, there's sort of a decentralization that's happening even in company building that we can get into, but, like, the government has not [chuckles] realized that in terms of how it procures software. And so if you talk to people who are in the bureaucracy of government, it's like their private life of catching the Uber to go home, the DoorDash, so they can get food delivered. They have this complete, normal consumer internet private life that all of us share, and then they go into government, and it takes thirty minutes to start their computer.

   5. SPSpeaker19:42

      [laughing]

   6. KBKatherine Boyle19:43

      It's like being back in the 1980s. And it's one of the biggest frustrations because there's a lot of great, I would say, especially in the, you know, the DOD, I think, is the best example of the most forward-thinking part of the government that actually understands technology. I mean, this is the most frustrating thing for people to say, "I'm living in a time warp when I go to work." And we can't understand that as people who are, you know, kind of in this modern tech ecosystem of... You know, we have these modern tools when we go to work. We're conversing right now, and it feels great, and it's easy, and it's simple. Like, that is just not how the government works, and so it's one of the last holdouts.

   7. SPSpeaker20:15

      To your point, we have this, like, mega theme on Acquired of "Don't do stuff that doesn't make your beer taste better." [chuckles] The origin of that quote was with Bezos when he was launching AWS at Y Combinator, you know, fifteen years ago. But probably seventy percent of our sponsors here, you know, Vanta, Modern Treasury, Vouch, it's just in the water now that, like, of course, the way you succeed, the way you build great products is you be really, really great at one thing, and then you use the whole suite of other products that are built in this ecosystem that are really, really great at everything else you need. [chuckles]

   8. KBKatherine Boyle20:47

      Yeah, even when we think about, like, okay, why is the cost of starting a startup gone down tremendously? I mean, that is the case. It's like you don't have to build everything from scratch anymore, you can buy. But the one place that still does that is government. It's actually incredible. And, of course, like, how are they doing that? Well, they're using taxpayer dollars to build internally. So when we talk about the sort of why have defense budgets bloated, you know, even if we're looking at education and sort of the kind of major changes that are gonna come from, like, why are these things that are civic goods so expensive now? It's because it is very difficult to use the technology that would actually [chuckles] make them cheaper. And you look at... I think there was that famous AEI graph on, like, everything has come down the cost curve, like, televisions are less expensive, everything is less expensive in consumer land, except for healthcare, except for housing, and except for education, and it's really because technology has not touched those sectors and will not touch those sectors unless we do something about it.

   9. SPSpeaker21:37

      And there's mostly regulatory capture in those sectors.

   10. KBKatherine Boyle21:40

       Yeah, I do think it is. We can talk about classic regulatory capture, but it is also this idea that, like, none of those sectors use technology yet. And so going back to sort of, like, what is the thesis, if we truly believe software is eating the world, which we do, this is, like, the last holdout, and it's such a massive holdout, but it's something where it's, like, it is deeply tied to the physical world. It is not something that you can do just through the virtual world alone.

   11. SPSpeaker22:04

       So one of the core mega themes that I think we have on Acquired, that anybody who's a longtime listener is, is probably asking themselves right now, is there's, you know, sort of three components of being right in a big way to an investment thesis. [chuckles] There's being correct, [chuckles] there's being-

   12. KBKatherine Boyle22:25

       [chuckles]

   13. SPSpeaker22:25

       ... non-consensus and correct, but then there's also getting the timing right, the why now? And I think that's the natural question, right, for you and for a16z in launching this vertical. You know, was it COVID that created this moment? Why is now the right time that this is finally gonna change?

8. 22:41 – 29:05

   Why now: COVID tailwinds, changing founder archetypes, and the 'culture meets counterculture' shift

   1. KBKatherine Boyle22:41

      Yeah, it's a fantastic question, and I think, especially when you put all of these sectors together, I mean, these are disparate sectors. The reasons for why education is compelling right now are very different than the reasons why manufacturing is compelling right now. So I do think broadly it has a lot to do with COVID, but I also think there's a couple other things that make it a really interesting time. One is that the talent is very different in Silicon Valley, and that it's not just an outpost. And I use the term Silicon Valley broadly. I should say, I'm in Miami, like-

   2. SPSpeaker23:09

      [chuckles]

   3. KBKatherine Boyle23:09

      ... Silicon Valley is an idea, not a place.

   4. SPSpeaker23:12

      State of mind.

   5. KBKatherine Boyle23:12

      But when I say Silicon Valley, I mean the people who are leaving the culture and going to the counterculture to build, and they're building with technology because they want to solve real problems. And that used to be, like, a bunch of nerds. That used to be people who would major in computer science, and they were, you know, they were in the engineering department, and they were really interested in infrastructure, like technology infrastructure, not the infrastructure that I'm talking about. And I think what happened, and I've written about this, is I think the myth of Silicon Valley hit everyone really hard to where, like, the culture and the counterculture merged. And now people who would have gone into government, people who would have gone into very different careers, say, "I have this problem, and I want to solve it. And, oh, and by the way," going back to our whole you can take things off the shelf and build a company without necessarily knowing how to build your own infrastructure for the company, like-... They can build companies, too. And so you see a lot of founders who are not your typical profile. They're not engineers. I've talked to founders recently who are former teachers. I've talked to founders recently who, you know, have worked in the Department of Defense as procurement officers, and it's like they're not the normal people we would say are the founders of ten years ago. I think there's a lot of reasons for that, and what that leads to is people are going into vastly different sectors than the sectors that they went into most recently.

   6. DRDavid Rosenthal24:24

      You've talked about this before elsewhere, but The Social Network coming out now eleven years ago, [chuckles] I think it was, which is wild! Yeah, that really, like, started this moment, right, of being a founder, uh, like you say, the merging of the culture and the counterculture, even though the movie might have been intended as a cautionary tale. If you want to build, you can do this.

   7. KBKatherine Boyle24:46

      When you look at any good movies about industries and that sort of thing, it's like they're always-- yeah, they're cautionary tales, but then it leads to just a flood of young people saying, "I wanna do that." I mean, that's certainly the kind of-

   8. DRDavid Rosenthal24:55

      Yeah

   9. KBKatherine Boyle24:55

      ... the eighties Gordon Gekko, sort of, why did so many people look at a villain and say, "Wow, he's a superhero. I wanna go do that"? But it's true. Like, a lot of these movies, there's always a question of do they create the myth or are they responding to the myth? But I do think The Social Network came out at just the right time, where young people said, "Wow, this technology thing is really interesting, and maybe I wanna be a part of it, and maybe I wanna make it my own. Maybe I don't wanna necessarily create a social network, but, wow, it's a real thing, and I wanna be part of it." And I do think that that what set off sort of the, "Okay, it doesn't have to be the nerds." Now, it's become the thing that every kid who goes to a university and says, "Hey, I can go work in a kind of traditional job, or I can work with a bunch of my friends to do this. Oh, and by the way, there's a glut of capital," and, of course, we can talk about kind of the macro now, but, like, for a very long time, we were at the bull market, where it was a glut of capital. Any kid with an engineering degree who had a bunch of friends could come out to Silicon Valley and raise some money. So it was actually, like-

   10. DRDavid Rosenthal25:47

       Ooh

   11. KBKatherine Boyle25:47

       ... a very, I shouldn't say an easy way, but it, it was a simpler way to solve problems, and probably the only way that young people could actually do something where they felt they were having an impact. You know, I talk a lot about, like, if you wanted to be someone in Washington to have an impact, you would go work for, like, the ranking member of Congress, and you would get that person coffee. So it's like, does that really ambitious person who wants to change the world wanna be delivering coffee to senators, or do they wanna come out to Silicon Valley and, like, work on an education product, work on a housing product? And so I think you saw ten years of young people saying: "Hey, I don't wanna be a glorified intern anymore. Like, I actually wanna solve some things, and actually, I'll have the title of CEO, a founder." So I do think it is sort of a young people's revolution and that we're gonna continue seeing that.

   12. BGBen Gilbert26:32

       Do you think that Silicon Valley went from being counterculture to perhaps too much infrastructure on how to be a startup? And let me frame this question with a little bit more context. If you think about lots of institutions throughout history, they went from becoming an exciting frontier to becoming a bogged-down institution that perhaps brought people in who weren't looking for the frontier, and NASA's probably a phenomenal example. You could look at the space race. Lots of people who would have started companies today were going to work at NASA because, oh, my God, we have a ten-year mission or an eight-year mission to go land on the Moon. And then you look at NASA, I actually think we should draw a hard line in the early 2000s 'cause there's been a really big switch that we can talk about later, but let's say in the late nineties. It's a lot of, like, bureaucrats, process people, people who want to polish something for seven years to accomplish what used to take one because we now have all this process in place. Do you think Silicon Valley has so much infrastructure now that it is attracting the nineties NASA people instead of the sixties NASA people?

   13. KBKatherine Boyle27:38

       Maybe three weeks ago, we could've had that conversation, or three months ago, we could've had that conversation, I've been a little more worried about it. I do think markets are self-correcting in that respect. So you can talk to people who've been through downturns before. I haven't. I mean, I'm, you know, not someone who was working in Silicon Valley in two thousand and one, but, like-

   14. BGBen Gilbert27:53

       You have some partners who were. [chuckles]

   15. KBKatherine Boyle27:54

       Yes, yeah. These sort of natural corrections that happen, tourists often leave, and, and sort of people realize that they have to think differently. There's, you know, the kind of famous Ben Horowitz, uh, peacetime CEO versus wartime CEO. There's sort of, like, peacetime in Silicon Valley versus wartime in Silicon Valley, and I do think there is sort of this question of: Are we entering that now? And that leads to a lot of innovation, especially for early-stage companies. I mean, the companies that are built... historically, companies that have been built in downturns become tremendous successes because they sort of have to rethink the playbook. I mean, you could make the argument that a lot of people are going to have to be going through that and that the most innovative thinkers will win coming up through what we're seeing.

   16. DRDavid Rosenthal28:31

       I think this is the perfect place to switch gears a little bit, but building off The Social Network, you know, that period, that time between, I think it was twenty eleven when it came out and today, somewhere along that time, you know, everything you were saying about young people wanting to go build, realizing old institutions, you know, weren't necessarily the place to have the impact, that was also kind of your personal story.

   17. KBKatherine Boyle28:55

       [chuckles] Yeah.

   18. DRDavid Rosenthal28:56

       Could you tell us, uh, you know, about your background before coming to Silicon Valley and that personal story of why you did, because I think it's super relevant here.

9. 29:05 – 37:29

   Katherine’s journey: from The Washington Post to Silicon Valley culture shock

   1. KBKatherine Boyle29:05

      Certainly, and it's gonna sound a lot more forward-thinking in retrospect than it was. The actual answer of why I left Washington and why I left The Washington Post was that I was convinced I was going to be fired, and it was a terrible, terrible time to be in journalism. I was there from twenty ten to early twenty fourteen. I actually left right as Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, which people look at the institution now, and they think, "Oh, wow, it's really chugging along. It's incredible." But when I was there, I mean, there was a fear that it would go into bankruptcy, and that was kind of the fear that a lot of media companies were going through before the sort of great reshuffling.

   2. DRDavid Rosenthal29:37

      Man, I was working at The Wall Street Journal a few years before, and, like, we were like, "Thank God we're owned by News Corp [chuckles] " You know, like, otherwise, if Dow Jones were still independent, like the Post was at that point in time, there was no surviving as an independent entity.

   3. KBKatherine Boyle29:53

      Totally. It's interesting to look back on hindsight, but when I was there, I think the big thing that I was noticing is, you know, I was not a technology reporter, but every story I was writing had something to do with technology touching old institutions.... How do we deal with this modernization? How do we bring tech into these various institutions in Washington that have never had to deal with, you know, a tech-savvy consumer? And it was one of these things where I said, "Okay, like, if I'm going to figure out what..." You know, I'm, I'm covering these stories, and this is the biggest story of our time, why not be part of it? So it really did feel like I was fortunate to be able to come out to the Valley and actually kind of studied it as a student of history. What is happening here? What is my own view of, of what's going on with all of these movements? And it was, I think, the biggest culture shock I had ever experienced. I sort of lived around the world at that point, and when I came out to Silicon Valley, I said it in some ways it didn't even feel like the country I knew. People were so heads down, they didn't read the news. That was another thing I was stunned about. Like, no one talked about what was happening on, in the day-to-day news of the world. People were just focusing on their own passions and projects, and that was new to me. The other thing that was really new to me is in Washington, and, and I'd say broadly everywhere else in the world, there is sort of this wait-your-turn mentality, this sort of, you can email someone, but if they're the CEO of a company, they're not gonna really pay that much attention to a young student or to a young person. And when I got out to Silicon Valley, I was, like, stunned. Like, people just wanna talk, and I was like, "Well, why do people wanna talk?" And it's like, "Well, because the incentives are aligned." They don't wanna miss the next big thing. And so it was incredible, as a former journalist, coming out and being able to email anyone and realizing that, like, people would answer my email. It was, like, sort of a [laughs] another shock of a different kind. Like, people will actually let you in their office, you know?

   4. BGBen Gilbert31:30

      It should be the opposite, right? When a Washington Post journalist emails me, like, that's much more interesting than a cold email from someone with a Gmail address in most scenarios. But perhaps you were feeling, as a journalist, that people were nervous to answer your emails for fear of being on the record.

   5. KBKatherine Boyle31:48

      Yeah, no, and I, and I also just think this is a different conversation about media that I think was evolving at the time when I moved. There's no upside to talking to the media in the minds of people who are heads-down building, but there's a lot of upside to talking to someone who might be your next employee. There's a ton of upside if you're an investor to talking to a young person who might build a new company. But, like, talking to someone who is only going to get information about what's happening and derail your plan... So that was something where I think, had I thought more about it, I wouldn't have been as surprised, but I was just, wow, like, people want to talk to a student? Like, you know. [laughs]

   6. BGBen Gilbert32:20

      [laughs]

   7. KBKatherine Boyle32:20

      This is why Silicon Valley is the most peculiar place in the world, because it's the only place where incentives are aligned with that sort of positive-sum mentality. Whereas in places like DC, no one ever turns down talking to the press because it's information trading. It's a consulting class. It's a group of people who very much see a zero-sum mindset, and, like, the press has a lot of power there because of that. So the incentives of the ecosystems are so diametrically opposed, and I actually think, coming back to the thesis, that's one of the reasons why we haven't seen that much innovation in Washington. I mean, they are so different as ecosystems.

   8. DRDavid Rosenthal32:53

      So, you know, when you made the choice to make that transition out to Silicon Valley, the choice to have the reaction to, like, "Well, shoot, things are not going so well here, I'm gonna go see what it's like on the other side," versus, "I'm gonna complain about it and, you know, bet on hope as a strategy and stay here," what did all of your networks in Washington say? Like, I mean, that must have been a really very non-consensus choice to make.

   9. KBKatherine Boyle33:21

      It's interesting 'cause I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of myself a, a very long time ago, [chuckles] and what I'll say is, like, most people in Silicon Valley have not experienced what it is like to be in a dying industry. For one, I think people were happy that there were young people choosing to leave because it's like... Uh, it was a constraining environment. [chuckles] It was like, "Okay, great," like, "we don't have to fire this person now," you know? It's like- [laughs] But it was really, really bad. I can't stress... I mean, there were these things called cakings. Uh, we even had a name for it, and it's any time that someone was forced to take a buyout or forced to leave, they would bring in a cake. They would wheel in cakes, and sometimes, like, on Fridays, there would be, like, just cakes going across the newsroom and people crying and, like, people celebrating all these great colleagues who, some of them were, like, you know, winners of the Pulitzer Prize. These are not people who should be fired, but it was such a bad ecosystem. So no one really said anything. They were just like, "Okay, at least you got out," you know? It's like, "You found a life raft. That's great," you know? I will say, like, six months before I left, my editor took me to lunch. This is, like, great management. She's like, "It'll be painful for you to leave." Like, "It'll be painful to have someone who..." You know, I was one of the younger people on the team. I worked seven days a week. You know, sometimes I would write three stories in the section, and they were just bleeding people. She's like: "It will be painful, but you are young enough to do something new with your life." And I'm forever grateful to her for, like, saying, "It wasn't you're bad at your job." It's actually, I was reflecting on this recently, that maybe three years ago, we went out to drinks. I visited the new improved newsroom, and it was this, you know, now it's marble columns and Jeff Bezos. [chuckles]

   10. DRDavid Rosenthal34:48

       The Amazon-funded [chuckles] newsroom.

   11. KBKatherine Boyle34:50

       Yeah, Amazon-funded newsroom. And we went out for drinks, and she's like, "You were good, but you could have been great," and it, like, sort of brought me to tears. I was like, wow, like, she actually told me I should leave because she saw what was happening, probably before I actually realized it. You know, it's like young journalists always think they're gonna be, like, the next Bob Woodward. But I think, why did I go? It's like, well, if you're gonna start over from scratch... I mean, in some ways, it's like, you're gonna start over from scratch, why not go to California? It's like, that's always been sort of the, the American dream is move west and find something new. But it really was, it's like, okay, like, I need to understand this tech thing, and I hadn't been exposed to the culture, but I didn't have a reaction that it was a bad thing. I had a reaction more that it was the future, uh, and the biggest story of our time.

   12. BGBen Gilbert35:29

       What were you covering at the Post?

   13. KBKatherine Boyle35:32

       So it's interesting, I was a style section reporter.

   14. DRDavid Rosenthal35:34

       At the Post, that's a big deal. [chuckles]

   15. KBKatherine Boyle35:37

       It's interesting. The style section has a very storied history of being where writers write.... So there's always this question of, are you a writer or are you a reporter? And I think the number of people at the style section who would say that they are writers first and reporters second is actually quite high. So- and that was when I was there. It's changed a lot since I've left. But for people who really enjoyed language and enjoyed doing three thousand, five thousand word stories about just random things. One of the famous pieces the style section published when I was there was the difference between Sheetz and Wawa, and it was a ten thousand word piece- [laughing] ... on just, like, convenience stores on the interstate.

   16. DRDavid Rosenthal36:11

       Oh, Wawa, the best! [chuckles]

   17. KBKatherine Boyle36:12

       But you would read these like, you know, great Tom Wolfe sort of meditations on just American culture. You know, as a young reporter there, it's like that's what you aspire to do. You aspire to write these ridiculous pieces about random things, but it was more like the joy of language and the joy of culture than even the kind of reporting aspect of it. So I was a general assignment reporter. I wrote about culture, and it's interesting 'cause people often ask me, they're like: "What's the connection between venture capital and journalism?" And I think people often think about, like, oh, you know, the hard-nosed journalist who's doing diligence.

   18. DRDavid Rosenthal36:44

       The Mike Moritz style.

   19. KBKatherine Boyle36:45

       Yeah. Yeah.

   20. DRDavid Rosenthal36:47

       I think Don Valentine said Mike Moritz and Steve Jobs were the two best question askers I ever met. [chuckles]

   21. KBKatherine Boyle36:52

       Yeah, and I believe it. I mean, that's one of the aspects where they're similar, but I also think the sort of similarity of what I saw in my colleagues and what I did is it's like trying to get at the forefront of cultural shifts, even if you don't know what they mean. Just trying to see, okay, are these, like, these weird movements that are happening in society, and, like, maybe you should be the first person there to talk to these weirdos and these random people, and that was sort of the, like, what's the weird, interesting thing that's happening? And now most of that happens on the internet. That, I think, is the real shift, is that, like, all the weird, interesting movements in the world now come as internet-born movements, and that's oftentimes what venture capitalists are looking for as well.

10. 37:29 – 48:30

    Media’s transformation: from institutional neutrality to identity-driven activism and creator brands

    1. DRDavid Rosenthal37:29

       Clearly, you still have such love and reverence for that world and for the Post. The world we're in today, especially, you know, [chuckles] with Andreessen Horowitz, it does feel like in some ways they're on the other side and that there's, like, a battle going on now. A specifically battle between the old world media and technology. [chuckles]

    2. KBKatherine Boyle37:51

       The world of media has completely changed since I was a journalist. There wasn't a sense that you were at war when I was a journalist, and I think that, of course, changed with a number of things, like everything from Trump being elected to the types of people that are going into journalism, even the idea of what journalism means. I mean, a lot of the people that I worked with when I was a journalist had this very old-school view, and it's talked about a lot. It's the: are you reporting the facts or are you an activist? And there are a lot of people who will point-blank say now they are going into journalism to change the culture, to change the world. They are activists, and they will use that word. They will say, "I am an activist." You know, I was part of a generation of people who would have bristled at that. There were people when I was at The Washington Post that wouldn't vote in elections because they didn't believe that they should be voting in elections if they were covering certain stories.

    3. DRDavid Rosenthal38:42

       Wow!

    4. KBKatherine Boyle38:42

       And I had such admiration for that, that if you are going to be the person who is on the sidelines of the culture, reporting on the culture, that you should really do your best to take a neutral stand, and I took a lot of pride in that as well, covering things that were uncomfortable for me. That was something that I actually revered about sort of a old-style view of journalism that I think has completely transformed and changed in terms of the people who are now at the forefront. I think there's reasons for that. Like, I think a lot of it is Twitter. I was pre-Twitter actually becoming what it is when I was at The Washington Post, and there was still a view that social media should be second to our actual reporting, and I think that is ... If you read the recent reports from The New York Times about how they're trying to kind of curtail their Twitter use because they've realized that it's completely changed how they report. I think the, the kind of biggest trend in media, and I can talk about another one of our investments, Substack, which I think has sort of benefited from this trend, is that people are now brands. They are identities, and the individual journalist is ultimately more powerful than the institution. And I think, you know, that's just one of many trends where institutions are collapsing and, and kind of individuals... I mean, you all know this. Look at what you've built. But individuals will capture an audience and be more important than an institution now. So when I talk about being a former journalist, I'm really talking about, like, the Stone Age. You know, it was ten years ago, but that type of journalism does not exist anymore.

    5. DRDavid Rosenthal40:03

       It's so funny, I feel the same way thinking back on my time at The Wall Street Journal. Even though I was on the business side, not writing, like, I know exactly what you're talking about with that style of journalists. Like, the people who were the managing editors, the deputy managing editors, the section editors at the Journal at the time, like, they were those people. [chuckles] And it is, yes, it's so different than today.

    6. KBKatherine Boyle40:26

       I was only there for a few years. You know, I've been investing twice as long as I've been a, a journalist at this point. [chuckles] You know, it's something that captures people's imagination, and it's sort of like, how did it affect you? And it really is. It's like, I think the greatest way that it affected me was I think starting your career off in a dying industry gives you a different perspective than if you start your career off in a company that is just filled with abundance. You understand what [chuckles] death looks like versus momentum, and that was probably very formative for me, coming out to the Valley and then seeing what good looks like.

    7. BGBen Gilbert40:58

       It's the same thing as those child psychology studies of people that always not necessarily grew up with a tremendous amount of wealth, but who did not come from scarcity, and so there's a general underlying belief in every subsequent decision that gets made that, "I'll always be okay."

    8. KBKatherine Boyle41:15

       Totally.

    9. BGBen Gilbert41:16

       And I think the same sort of translates to career decisions and people being willing to take risks and believe that there is a growing pie, rather than, "I need to fight for my corner of it."

    10. KBKatherine Boyle41:27

        And also just understanding culture. I don't think people understand the difference between a culture of scarcity and a culture of abundance unless they've experienced both, and I do think I've been really fortunate. Now I'm definitely part of a culture of abundance, and an abundance culture leads to yes. It leads to, "Oh, yeah, try that." The idea of building an American dynamism practice can only come out of a place that has movement and that has growth.... Those types of things cannot be built in a culture of scarcity, and I do think Washington is a culture of scarcity just by its nature, that the incentives are every two years there's an election, and half the people who are in charge will leave, and the other half will come in, and the people who are kicked out will go to think tanks, and it is very zero-sum. And it's every two to four years. It is not a long-term cycle because that's just not how we structured our democracy.

    11. BGBen Gilbert42:15

        Okay, here's a snarky response, though. How is it a culture of scarcity when every decade since 1913, the government has a bigger budget and significantly more employees than it ever had before?

    12. KBKatherine Boyle42:26

        So that is very true. I mean, we could very much talk about the bloat of government, the fact that it doesn't feel like a culture of scarcity when, when we look at it as taxpayers. But in terms of who gets power, and remember, the currency of Washington is not money, it is power. Power is scarce, and it is extremely hierarchical. There can't be multiple winners. Someone wins the news cycle every day. That's another part. Like, we have to remember that news is part of the Washington establishment. There's a reason why it's called the Fourth Estate. It is part of the anchor of government. So all of those things are very scarce. Only one story can be the front-page story, only one person can hold the most power, and that is anathema to Silicon Valley, and the culture of Silicon Valley is equity. It is money. It is success. It is building bigger businesses faster, and there can be as many of those as possible. Yes, you could argue that in certain sectors there will only be one winner, but this is why you see founders helping other founders. Venture capitalists can have a portfolio of winners. There is a culture of abundance. It changes the incentive structures, and it changes how people think about solving problems.

    13. BGBen Gilbert43:30

        It's quite interesting thinking about that. There's this idea of if everybody in a sector is paying attention to the same thing, call it whatever Politico's reporting on or whoever has the most airtime on cable news that day, that means that no matter how large headcounts and budgets get, there is a fixed supply of the thing people want, which is attention and power. But when the thing people want is money, and we can say it in nicer terms than that, but financial success-

    14. DRDavid Rosenthal44:00

        Oh, that's totally what it is

    15. BGBen Gilbert44:01

        ... That is not a finite supply.

    16. KBKatherine Boyle44:03

        We're not hedge fund managers. This is something that I think oftentimes is misconstrued in Washington, is like, oh, well... You know, I remember talking to some reporters I used to work with, and they're like, "All you people who think you're changing the world," like, "at least the hedge fund guys didn't think they were changing the world." [laughing]

    17. DRDavid Rosenthal44:17

        [laughing]

    18. KBKatherine Boyle44:18

        And, and my response was, "Do you not see the difference?"

    19. DRDavid Rosenthal44:21

        [laughing]

    20. KBKatherine Boyle44:21

        You know, and I actually think one of the biggest, biggest problems with how we've been lumped in with other asset classes-- I remember when I first moved to the Valley, and it was private equity and venture capital. Private equity and venture capital as a category could not be more different from what they are doing.

    21. DRDavid Rosenthal44:36

        [laughing]

    22. KBKatherine Boyle44:37

        Venture capital is creating new things from nothing, and it is creating more jobs. It is pouring money into companies so that they can grow, expand, and solve new problems with the most modern technology possible. And private equity is the death of old companies, and it's consolidating them, firing people, and ensuring that they're gonna be able to create value from things that have already existed.

    23. DRDavid Rosenthal44:55

        Man, the hedge fund people sound pretty good now. [laughing] At least they're neutral.

    24. KBKatherine Boyle45:01

        [laughing] Yeah, you could probably make that argument. When you look at those, everything is lumped together in the minds of Washington. It's like you're all just making money. So when I say, like, equity is the currency, what I mean is, like, people come here, and they actually build things, and the incentives driving how things are built, it's a system that actually works and encourages growth and encourages creation. I think we have to be very honest about that, which is very different than East Coast private equity, and it's very different than hedge funds, and which that is not what people are focused on. And I think one of the greatest tragedies is that we're all lumped together.

    25. DRDavid Rosenthal45:33

        I think so much of our audience is, like, a complete outsider to Washington. Like, is it gauche to talk about, like, making money, starting things, building-- like, is that, like, looked down upon?

    26. KBKatherine Boyle45:45

        You know, I recently moved to Miami. Um, one of the things that I love about Miami is that there's no shame.

    27. DRDavid Rosenthal45:52

        [laughing] Yeah.

    28. KBKatherine Boyle45:52

        And I actually think this is one of the big problems of Silicon Valley. Like, Miami, it's like it doesn't matter what you are doing, everyone is dressed to the nines. It doesn't matter if you're, you know, someone who works an hourly job or if you're someone who is, you know, a real estate mogul, who, like, who knows who people are. Before all the tech people came in, it's like there were all these kind of weird things that people were doing in Miami. But everyone took pride. It's like it is a culture of being proud of what you have earned, and I do think that comes from... It is the city in the US with the largest foreign-born population. A lot of the people who come to Miami have come from countries that have collapsed. They're proud of capitalism. I mean, because of the Cuban population, they're extremely anti-communist, and there's just this view that, like, if you work hard, and it's like a culture of hard work, and it's a culture of hustle, you should celebrate that. And I actually think Silicon Valley has the hardest problem with that.

    29. DRDavid Rosenthal46:41

        Hmm, interesting.

    30. KBKatherine Boyle46:43

        That was always stunning to me in Silicon Valley. It's like you don't see the same displays of, "We're proud of what we have built." In fact, like, there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who build something and then apologize for it, and it's like they're ashamed.
11. 48:30 – 51:53

    Sponsor segment: Mystery and reinventing team events/engagement

    1. DRDavid Rosenthal48:30

       All right. For our second sponsor of the episode, we have, once again, just one of the most fun things we get to do on Acquired, we get to tell you about Mystery. So Mystery today takes over one hundred percent of the planning, organizing, and running the literally most dreaded experience in just about every company, which is employee engagement, happy hours, [chuckles] and especially virtual happy hours over Zoom. Which, let me tell you, having been part of many of them, companies, you know, you know the drill. When you do it yourself, it's just impossible for it to be fun. Mystery makes it fun.

    2. BGBen Gilbert49:15

       When Mystery first started, I was thinking, "Oh," like when they first started doing this, "Oh, I see. Like, they're making the Zoom happy hours more fun." But actually, I think in practice, the way it's manifested is, I remember when we were first out of college working at Microsoft, it was really fun doing stuff with my team in person, and now that everyone is in some sort of hybrid, either splitting your time in person and not, or some people are actually in the same city, people are not, that, like, legitimately needs to be completely reinvented, and that's what they're doing.

    3. DRDavid Rosenthal49:41

       And not only do they manage, run, take over, schedule everything to execute these events, they also track employee engagement and the outcomes of the events. So this whole massive budget within companies of all sizes that previously was just a black hole that spend went into, now with Mystery and their platform, you can actually track whether it's accomplishing your goals, whether that's employee retention or if you're doing external events with customers, with partners, their satisfaction. It's really awesome, and, you know, look, we've been telling you all season about this, but, like, don't take our word for it. Here is their customer list: Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, McKinsey, Uber, Twitter, Autodesk. The list goes on and on and on, and it's not just big companies. It's startups, it's Modern Treasury, it's Convoy, it's so many other friends of the show. It's so many folks that we know have heard about them on the show, both on the episodes we did with them and now the reads.

    4. BGBen Gilbert50:33

       It's also, I think, a super approachable price point. It's, like, twenty-five dollars per employee per event, which is about to make the deal that you're gonna tell everyone even better.

    5. DRDavid Rosenthal50:43

       Yes, indeed, it is. For the Acquired community, they are offering not a two-for-one, but a three-for-one. So if you do one event with Mystery, [chuckles] Ben, on video, his lip is flashing three, you're like a gang sign, holding it up to the- [laughing]

    6. BGBen Gilbert50:59

       [laughing]

    7. DRDavid Rosenthal50:59

       ... the camera. That's great. The Mystery gang sign, I love it. If you go to trymystery.com/acquired, you can sign up for your first event, Ben, as you mentioned, at twenty-five dollars per employee, per person, per event, which is very, very reasonable. Not only will you get one event, you will get three events for that same single twenty-five dollars. That's not twenty-five dollars each time, twenty-five dollars per employee once for three events. It's freaking awesome.

    8. BGBen Gilbert51:29

       And they're gonna tailor it for you. So they'll learn from the first event, much like with every sort of Mystery program, and then the second event will be even better, and the third will feel even more of what your team's looking for. They take you on a journey. So, um, I'd say don't take our word for it, take everyone else's word for it, but, like, you can take our word for it, too. They're an awesome team. It's an awesome company. Check them out. Trymystery.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes.

12. 51:53 – 56:46

    Decentralizing Silicon Valley: building major companies anywhere (Miami, Atlanta)

    1. DRDavid Rosenthal51:53

       Yeah, so let's talk about what I think is probably now another huge mega trend to come for the decades ahead, the exporting of Silicon Valley [chuckles] to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. You've been talking about it. You're there in Miami. You're not, you know, here in California anymore, or Seattle, or the West Coast. How has your personal experience been [chuckles] over the past two years with that?

    2. KBKatherine Boyle52:16

       This is a core part of the American dynamism thesis. Maybe talking through a couple companies that explain this trend will make it clear, because I think we, you know, we've talked about kind of your atypical founder, someone who came from different industries, who felt like they weren't able to build a company. You know, that's happened, and a lot of those people felt like they were forced to move to Silicon Valley or, or maybe in some cases, New York. What I'm now seeing and what we're seeing in our own portfolio is that those people can build from anywhere. And what that means for the country, it is an extraordinary thing that Silicon Valley could be exported to the rest of the country. I mean, that will be game-changing when you think of just post-war, how there was sort of this myth that if you were someone who was high-achieving, someone who wanted to have a career, you had to go to certain universities, you had to leave your state, and then you had to go to one of a handful of cities, and the impact that has had on the country has been very detrimental, that there is brain drain from certain states that has benefited places like San Francisco and New York. And if we're telling this story fifty years from now, and we're looking back on what happened, the thing that it will come out of COVID is that people have now said, "I do not need to be in San Francisco. I can be anywhere in the world and anywhere in the country, and I can be in my hometown building something, and there's enough talent there to do it, or there's enough talent around the country that can do it remotely." And so I'm incredibly bullish that American dynamism will not only be companies that are built around the country, but it will also be just different types of problems, because founders who wouldn't have gone to San Francisco are now building for their hometowns.... I'll give a perfect example of this, 'cause I think this is one of my favorite examples in our portfolio. So there's a company called Flock Safety that was a YC company built in Atlanta by second-time founders, Garrett Langley, extraordinary founder, and he had just built a small company before and said, "I want to go after one of the biggest problems. What do I wanna do?" And he's like: Well, why is it so hard to eliminate crime? Like, most crimes are done with a car, whether we're talking about petty crimes or things like Amber Alerts, child kidnap. He's like, "Why is it so hard in an era of software and of cameras around the world? [chuckles] Like, why is it so hard to solve crime?" And so he built a very small camera license plate reader, realizing that so many of the license plate readers around the country were very expensive, built by legacy systems and in some ways public safety contractors, and started selling them to homeowners associations, so selling them to neighborhoods, saying, "Put up this camera, and we'll be able to track cars," not people, which was very important to him. "And with a network of cameras, like, maybe we can solve crime." And what started happening around Atlanta is they didn't do any press, but these cameras started actually solving very dangerous crimes, things like child kidnappings, and they were covered on the nightly news, and then more homeowners associations would buy them. And then, after a while, police chiefs across the country just started contacting them inbound, "Can you give us some of these cameras?" And so now they're in thirty states. They've grown tremendously over the last few years, but it was something that was built so that they could solve one of the biggest problems that they saw in their community. And so that's where I think they're a perfect example of an American dynamism company, of a company that is solving civic needs, selling to government, but didn't actually start out selling to government, but ultimately built for their community. And it's incredible. You know, this is an Atlanta-based company, which I think five years ago people would've said, "Can you build an, a very large company in Atlanta?"

    3. DRDavid Rosenthal55:32

       Oh, my gosh. I'm thinking as you're saying this, like, I used to live this as a venture capitalist. I was the bad guy on the other side of the equation of, like, company in an interesting market gets traction in a XYZ city, Atlanta, you know, wherever. You know, they're interesting enough that, you know, Silicon Valley venture capital writ large is interested. Probably the, in the second meeting that you have with your VC before the term sheet, they're like: "So you're based in Atlanta. [chuckles] Do you really wanna build something big? You gotta move here."

    4. KBKatherine Boyle56:02

       Yeah, and, and I think for a long time, that was the view, and what COVID has changed is everyone realizes that's not the case. By the way, people want to move to places like Atlanta. It's a great city. Same thing with Miami and Austin and Provo, Utah, Salt Lake City. Like, there's so many places that people want to live but didn't feel like they could do it because the myth was, you have to be in Silicon Valley, you have to be in New York if you're a serious person, and I think that completely changed after COVID. And so the number of new companies we are going to see sprout up in second and third cities across America... I don't even think it has to be really big cities. I think it can be smaller towns. The remote work movement, I think, will spur so many of these great companies and really just lead to a democratization of tech around the country.

13. 56:46 – 58:41

    Online-first relationship building and how fundraising/boards work in a remote era

    1. DRDavid Rosenthal56:46

       Do you feel that now that, like, you personally, a16z generally, your geography is the internet at this point, like, you know, versus anything else?

    2. KBKatherine Boyle56:57

       I think COVID made that inevitable. All of us were keeping our relationships online. It's so funny, a couple years before COVID, people would mock people who spent too much time on Twitter. They would mock people who were in their Signal chats, like: "Why aren't you going to cocktail parties? Like, how you really meet people is building relationships in person." And I very much disagree with that view. I mean, when you think of sort of like the early internet, people were hanging out in chat rooms. You know, they were all weird avatars. It was all pseudo-anonymous. And you see that more in the crypto world now, but it's like COVID led to this sort of rebirth of, actually, you could build relationships online. And actually Gen Z, like, that's how they build their relationships. They make friends not with their neighbors or not with the kids that are in their class. Like, they're all over the country, and, like, that's a great thing, is that people can find community online. And so the idea that investors aren't going to find community online or, or founders aren't going to find their next hire online, like, the internet is not this thing that's not part of our lives. I mean, I'd say in some ways, like, the physical world is definitely downstream of the internet, and culture is downstream of the internet, but we clearly need both. And, of course, I'm invested in the physical world, but it's like what we're doing right now is through the enablement of the virtual.

    3. DRDavid Rosenthal58:07

       So what's the path now... Pre-COVID, the path for a company that was, you know, in the, of the caliber that Andreessen Horowitz could lead its series A or series B, the path for that company was book a one-way ticket to [chuckles] SFO and stay on the peninsula as long as you need, driving up and down Sand Hill, meeting with firms, you know, until you get a term sheet. What's the path now, as an example? Like, how did you meet them? How did they present? How does the relationship happen? How do board meetings happen? What does it look like?

14. 58:41 – 1:03:43

    Case study: Hadrian and the manufacturing renaissance (automation + workforce upskilling)

    1. KBKatherine Boyle58:41

       I'll share the story of how I met Hadrian, which was my first investment since being at Andreessen Horowitz, and sort of how that relationship blossomed, 'cause that's another Los Angeles-based company, typically not a place where VCs spent much time, but, of course, with the emergence of the just extraordinary new space movement, there's a lot of people spending a lot more time, uh, for different reasons, in Los Angeles. And I know my, uh, partners are certainly spending time there in games and other areas, too. But Hadrian's a company where it was our first formal investment out of the American Dynamism practice, and it's a company that is building automated machine shops for aerospace and defense manufacturing. So talk about a sector that technology just did not go to. We just mentioned the private equity world, and it's like private equity had been buying up machine shops for a long time, seeing that as a, a great place to do roll-ups and to cut people. But in terms of, like, building jobs and creating new machine shops to actually service the needs of these large aerospace companies, that was not something that Silicon Valley was interested in or that technologists were really interested in.... And the origin story of that company, the founder, Chris Power, is this extraordinary founder who moved from Australia a few years ago, was very devoted to this idea that he wanted to do something in manufacturing and then wanted to build something new, but actually started out with, "Hey, maybe the only way is to raise a small private equity fund." So he raised a small private equity fund and talked to a bunch of different shops, machine shops, where people were retiring. I mean, the nature of this field is that a lot of the machine shops are owned by people who are baby boomers, and they're trying to get out, and their kids don't have the capacity to either lead the shops or want to. And he realized, he's like, "This is a nightmare of what is about to happen. Like, this is an impending nightmare," 'cause even if you are to try to bring software into these existing shops, it's almost impossible from a technical perspective. Like, there's not much that can be done unless you build something from scratch. So he actually returned capital to his investors and said, "This is not feasible from a private equity standpoint or with existing shops, and we have to build new machine shops with automation, and then we have to upskill American workers so that they can do this type of work. Like, we need to bring in a new generation of machinists who are technically competent, but can also... where it doesn't require some sort of special artisan [chuckles] knowledge." And so he built his first factory, he's now onto his second, and is serving a lot of large aerospace and defense companies in a lot of the new space sector. And it's one of these things where, when you talk about how we met, we met through a number of people in the ecosystem. It's like, it's one of these things, and I, I always joke about anytime you hear this about a founder, like, you should always, like, pick your head up. It's like every third call I was having about aerospace, about, like, what's happening in defense, his name would come up, this company would come up as this is one of these things where if it doesn't succeed, like, we will be in a bind. [laughs] Like, we will be in a bind if we can't get parts delivered as a hardware company or if we have to fly out to a random machine shop in the middle of the country and, like, find out why things are delayed. And so it was one of these things where, yeah, like, you hear people talking about it on the internet, but you also hear it just in your entire network, that everyone is rooting for a founder to succeed. And that's also just, like, what's so cool about a lot of these companies is they don't have real competition. Everyone is excited about their success because if they don't create this world of abundance in a lot of these categories, we'll all suffer, and particularly things like aerospace and defense will suffer. So that's one of the companies I point to because, one, it's an immigrant founder solving one of America's biggest problems. It's being built in Los Angeles at the heart of our defense and aerospace industry. It's right next to the customer. It's being able to interface with the customer every day, and then it also has this really, really important mission that I think is... People see it as secondary to what's actually happening, but it will be the legacy of this company, which is that you are upskilling a generation of people who were told that working with their hands was embarrassing, who were told that they had to go to college, and they had to read Kant.

    2. BGBen Gilbert1:02:33

       [laughing] You're describing David's college experience.

    3. KBKatherine Boyle1:02:37

       [laughing]

    4. DRDavid Rosenthal1:02:37

       Oh, yeah.

    5. KBKatherine Boyle1:02:38

       Probably mine, too. [laughing]

    6. DRDavid Rosenthal1:02:39

       Yeah, right. [laughing] We can joke about it.

    7. KBKatherine Boyle1:02:42

       But, like, we were told if you have an interest in doing something, that your value comes from going to college, your value comes from having one of these jobs.

    8. DRDavid Rosenthal1:02:52

       And we were told, you know, "Don't worry, it'll all work out."

    9. KBKatherine Boyle1:02:55

       Oh, yeah.

    10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:02:55

        We've been lucky it has for us, but for so many people, it hasn't.

    11. KBKatherine Boyle1:02:59

        For a lot of people who graduated right at the Great Recession, it was like, okay, the myth and the lie has been exposed. And so we need companies that are saying, "Actually, you can be part of the startup revolution. You can work hand in hand with the people who are aerospace engineers as a machinist, and we're gonna solve these problems together." And that looks a lot more like what Silicon Valley looked like in the '40s and the '50s. This is what the innovation with the Department of Defense looked like, and as Silicon Valley was coming up in the '60s and the '70s, I mean, it was a very different type of community of people. And so I'm excited for that because I do think that, like, we are going to see that renaissance of people working together, and it's just- it's great that Hadrian is sort of emblematic of sort of the innovation we think is gonna happen with the practice.

15. 1:03:43 – 1:08:17

    Small tech, the creator-driven middle class, and what American Dynamism is (and isn’t)

    1. DRDavid Rosenthal1:03:43

       You mentioned, um, Substack earlier. You know, thinking about, like... I think one of the greatest problems facing America, Western society broadly right now, is just, like, all these people that need jobs, that, you know, read Kant in college [laughing]

    2. KBKatherine Boyle1:03:59

       [laughing]

    3. DRDavid Rosenthal1:03:59

       ... or didn't, but, like, you know, w- what to do, how to, like... How are people gonna make money in this new society? And, you know, how is the middle class gonna thrive? You've talked about, lots of people have talked about, you know, the surveys now that, like, for the first time in generations, most Americans believe their kids are gonna be worse off than they are and feel that they're worse off than their parents. At the same time as all this, you know, we're talking about these companies that a16z funds, that are power law dynamics, create these huge, huge outcomes. At the same time, there is this new middle class on the internet. We're kind of, like, doing it right now [laughing] -

    4. KBKatherine Boyle1:04:34

       Yeah

    5. DRDavid Rosenthal1:04:34

       ... in this conversation, you know, and lots of Substack writers are, too. Is that part of the American dynamism thesis, too?

    6. KBKatherine Boyle1:04:40

       We're a little bit more tailored in terms of, like, a lot of the companies that we are investing in now have a physical component. They don't necessarily need to, and I do think they touch government. But I do think you're pointing out a trend that is so important that I think a lot of people [chuckles] are, are missing, which is that these companies are leading to a revolution for people who want to be individual creators. Like, the creator economy thing is, you know, it- people have their theories on it, but it's like you do see people are building new types of businesses through this enabling technology, and it is a small business revolution. The thing that I get upset with when Washington talks about tech is that it's this monolithic thing. Everyone points to big tech, and everything falls into big tech. But small tech is actually the thing that gets me excited.... It's the fact that I invest in early-stage companies. I invest in companies from the napkin stage, and those are small companies. Those are small businesses. Of course, they aim to become large businesses because the incentive structure of venture capital and the incentive structure means that we want to see things grow, and that's good. We should not be afraid of that. But these are, like, wonderful small businesses, and now people across the country can use the tools that have been built to enable these businesses. And so whether you're talking about, like, as you said, Substack or Shopify, where people are building incredible businesses on the platform, or whether it's, hey, like, there's a lot of capital available, and now I'm a founder in Miami, and I wanna build a company here, and I want to employ people in Miami, and it's fantastic, but we're talking about small businesses. That's what's really exciting, is, like, we can talk about companies that are too big or things that get the focus of Washington and get people riled up on both sides. I mean, it's like the only thing Washington can [chuckles] actually agree on is that they hate big tech.

    7. DRDavid Rosenthal1:06:17

       [chuckles] Right.

    8. KBKatherine Boyle1:06:18

       But, like, not enough credence is given to small tech, and, like, where I'm focused on American dynamism, these are small tech companies that are trying to solve the country's big problems, and so we should support that. That's exciting. And it's also, like, this method of company-building that I don't think people have realized... I think our generation has. I don't think older generations that are outside of technology have realized it yet, that this is the new way of company-building. Whether you're in Middle America or whether you're in Silicon Valley, like, this is how companies are going to be built in perpetuity, and so we need to be excited about that. Like, nothing is not a tech business anymore.

    9. DRDavid Rosenthal1:06:51

       Mm-hmm. It's funny, I mean, even, you know, for me and us being in Silicon Valley, m- myself, like, when I transitioned to making Acquired my full-time thing, I didn't know how to talk about it. Even here in, you know, the capital of Silicon Valley, like, the thing that I landed on after a couple months of trying to explain what the heck it was [chuckles] I and we were doing that seemed to resonate the best was I was like, "Well, we're building a small business on the internet. [chuckles] And because of the internet, it can actually be a pretty big small business, but, like, [chuckles] but that's what we're doing."

    10. KBKatherine Boyle1:07:22

        Yeah, and we should celebrate that. We are a country of small businesses, and the worst thing that can happen is when all of the talent goes to certain hubs and abandons the rest of the country. And so I do think the centralization that we saw in tech, maybe over the last, say, decade, we're now experiencing this decentralization, and, you know, the fact that I am investing from Florida, of all places, which, you know, I grew up in Florida, and, like, did I ever think before COVID that I would be returning to Florida at any point in my life? No, I, I didn't think it was possible. I loved Florida, but, like, I certainly did not think that, you know, the world would change to where everything could become decentralized and people could dissociate where they live from where they work. But if we're all working online, and if we're all online, this is actually a really good thing for the rest of the country. So I'm hugely excited about that trend, and I think we'll look back and say, "Wow, like, the post-war movement to New York City and to San Francisco didn't have to be the end-all, be-all of the American experience."

16. 1:08:17 – 1:11:11

    Sponsor segment: Modern Treasury and API-driven money movement

    1. DRDavid Rosenthal1:08:17

       All right, and for our final sponsor of the episode, we have, as always, our good friends over at Modern Treasury. Modern Treasury is by far the best way to manage your company's payment operations. Their platform allows you to move money within your product using code and not manual finance operations. This is huge. With their APIs, you can move money within your product, which is pretty important for just about anything you would wanna do these days. [chuckles] And, gosh, having worked with so many companies, so many marketplaces, especially over the years, this was a nightmare [chuckles] on the back end for marketplace teams of having to manage ledgers, bank accounts, moving money, keeping custody. It was very, very, very difficult. Modern Treasury abstracts all of that, all of that away and enables you, just by integrating their API and managing everything through their best-in-class web apps, you can take all of that complexity of banking rails off of your team's hands and let them do it, probably far better than you ever could, honestly. It's just an incredible company, and it's so cool. They're such a part of the Acquired community. We did our reverse interview LP show with them a few years ago, back when they were a tiny, tiny little company doing $10 million per month in money that they were moving on the platform. Well, fast-forward to last fall when we first started talking about working with them as a sponsor, they were moving $100 million a month on the platform, and now they are moving billions of dollars every month on the platform.

    2. BGBen Gilbert1:10:00

       It is one of these, like, maturity of the internet things, where first you can move bits, then you can move text, then you can move images, then you can move videos, then you could programmatically do things like place calls with people like Twilio using APIs, and now you can use Modern Treasury's APIs and user interfaces for non-technical folks to literally move money around. And they're so deeply integrated with all these banks that, like, it just works. It's pretty cool.

    3. DRDavid Rosenthal1:10:24

       It's super cool. So customers like Gusto, Marqeta, Revolut, Pipe, TripActions, ClassPass, BlockFi, LedgerX, Gusto, [chuckles] all the way through to Web3 companies and crypto all use Modern Treasury and their banking rails to move money around within the apps. So if you're building a fintech app, we used to say, "You definitely need Modern Treasury." The odds are it's impossible that you don't already know about Modern Treasury if you're building a fintech app. But even if you're not building a fintech app, the ability to integrate money and money movement into pretty much anything these days is mission-critical. So go check them out. You can learn more at moderntreasury.com/acquired, and when you get in touch, just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

17. 1:11:11 – 1:16:42

    Patriotism, defense investing, and 'America as the greatest experiment' (Anduril and Ukraine context)

    1. BGBen Gilbert1:11:11

       Thanks, Modern Treasury. Katherine, I have a question for you that is somewhere on the border of moral philosophy and politics, and I know that's a dangerous tee-up.

    2. KBKatherine Boyle1:11:21

       Oh, good one. [chuckles]

    3. BGBen Gilbert1:11:22

       But in investing in-... American infrastructure projects, both to improve our footing domestically, but also to ensure continued prosperity in the international community, defense projects, things like that. There's a implied assumption that the continuation and breadth of the American way is a good thing, and I think there are lots of good answers as to why that's a great assumption. But why is that to you? When you are going to bed at night and you're like, "I'm funding this mission," what is it about the American way where you're like, "This is a very good thing that I'm investing in this?"

    4. KBKatherine Boyle1:12:05

       This question is so interesting 'cause I used to get this question a lot more, say, five years ago. So I've worked with a company called Anduril for a very long time, actually, since their seed round, and this was one of the more contrarian- it's kind to say it's contrarian, but I can also say it was unpopular when the investment first happened. I was excited about the mission of the company, but I think I had... Because I came from Washington, I kind of knew what would happen in a way that I think a lot of other people didn't, which was defense was something that was deeply unpopular in San Francisco. And now when you talk to people about Anduril, all they can talk about is Ukraine. It's like people are watching on a world stage, like, what happens when a country invades another sovereign country? Like, we haven't seen a war like this since World War II, and people are now realizing, actually, like, we need strong defense. It is not something that anyone wants to be right about, honestly. Like, it is painful, and it is horrible to watch. But what I think was so clear about that investment was, like, time would tell why we need new defense contractors, especially ones that are built with modern technology. And so going back to the journalism point, like, I've always understood what conviction looks like, and sort of like when other people see something as deeply unpopular, you say, "I'm totally fine standing up and saying that history will serve us right, or defending why I believe something is so important." But it was so clear to me. It's, like, one of the clearest investments I think I've ever made, where it was so clear that people were going to change their minds about the company, and it's just extraordinary to see. It has grown tremendously over the last five years, multiple offices now working with Australia, the UK. It is a company that I think everyone is just so happy exists and realizes that, hey, we need modern defense contractors, not ones that were built in the 1920s.

    5. BGBen Gilbert1:13:53

       So what is it about the American way that fires you up and says, "We should have a lot more of this for a lot longer time?"

    6. KBKatherine Boyle1:14:00

       I think America is the greatest experiment in human history. The vast majority of Americans come from somewhere else. My grandfather drove a truck, didn't have an eighth-grade education. The fact that I'm sitting here is a miracle, and the fact that I get to do this job is a miracle. And the thing that has always motivated me and the thing that's very clear is that something like fifty percent of unicorn founders in this country are foreign-born, and they are sometimes the greatest testament, I think, to what it means to live the American dream. It's the same thing of why I'm so excited to live in Miami, because it's like people are enthused about what this country stands for, about what you're able to achieve here, what you're able to build. If you go to any other country as a venture capitalist or as a founder, and you talk to people, whether it's, uh, elected officials, or you talk to people who are also working on civic technology, the question you get is like: How do we become like you? Like, how do we do this? How do we create this unique thing? I do think the founder's experience in this country looks a lot like what the founders did in this country, where it is just like a rejection of everything they have known to build something new, and usually it's these people who are misfits, contrarians, doing something that say, like, no one else can do. It is an American experience, and it's an American type of investing. I mean, it's like even the model for venture capital is something that is deeply part of the Silicon Valley story. And so it's like there's just something so part of the history of this country, of what we're doing. And so I think when you look at other countries and other ecosystems that are emerging, using this model, which is exciting and extraordinary and something I think we're all excited about, it's following a story that was created here.

    7. DRDavid Rosenthal1:15:37

       Totally. I mean, we tell it on Acquired almost every episode, right? Like, if thinking of Jensen and NVIDIA, you know, where else could somebody come from? His, his dad was a, you know, air conditioner engineer [chuckles] and, uh, not in this country. And then Jensen ended up going to reform school, and now he's Jensen, [laughing] you know?

    8. KBKatherine Boyle1:15:53

       Yeah. Yeah.

    9. DRDavid Rosenthal1:15:54

       That is a pretty uniquely American story.

    10. KBKatherine Boyle1:15:56

        Totally. A country of misfits where people come to escape and build something new. It's like, that is the Silicon Valley story. I mean, it's like I was escaping my reality as a about-to-be-fired journalist. That is, like, the kind of motivating factor of, I have nothing to lose. And y- you all know this, and you talk to so many founders, and it's like they're coming from a place of we have nothing to lose, and that is such a motivating force. And then you add all of the, you know, incentive alignment of everyone trying to see that there's more innovation in the ecosystem. The thing that I'm most hopeful about, and I think if we do our jobs right over the next ten years, this will be the case, I want to see that incentive alignment across the country, so that it's not just this unique thing that's in Northern California and that a certain class people are privy to, that it's like it is everywhere.

18. 1:16:42 – 1:22:00

    Closing vision: making American Dynamism a standard VC category + how to reach Katherine

    1. BGBen Gilbert1:16:42

       I love that. Well, Katherine, as we wind to a close here, any parting thoughts or anything you want to leave listeners with?

    2. KBKatherine Boyle1:16:48

       Going back to your original question of, like, as a venture firm, how do you create a new practice? I think if we do our jobs right, and we invest in the companies that we're intending to invest in, and we tell the story right, I think every venture capital firm will have an American Dynamism practice. And while, like, selfishly, as an investor, like, I don't necessarily want that, but as an American, I want that. I want every firm to say: "Actually, this is the best place to be investing. Can't believe we weren't looking at it," and the just extraordinary opportunity. And it's not impact investing, it's not ESG, it's not just like, oh, well, we're gonna see incremental returns. Like, it is going to be the source of American innovation, and it is a great place for the top venture firms to be investing. And so I think if we do our jobs right, we will see this new category, and it'll be just like enterprise, it'll be just like consumer, and I'm excited for that to happen, truly, and I think that's sort of the story of the next ten, twenty years of Silicon Valley.

    3. DRDavid Rosenthal1:17:43

       ... Well, what's cool is you, you can see it starting. Like, space is the first piece of this, I think. It went from deeply un-consensus in Silicon Valley to now pretty consensus.

    4. KBKatherine Boyle1:17:53

       Yeah. One of the things that I think has made this easier is, like, we see these companies in our portfolio before we had this practice. Like, I mean, they are soaring. So it is not something where it's like, "Oh, we're creating something completely new from nothing." It's like there are a lot of success cases, but the idea that it's just going to be these one-offs, like, no, this is going to be a category of innovation that becomes almost like y- you have to be investing actively in this category. In the same way that, you know, SaaS wasn't a thing, and then now it's like, who would say, "Oh, we don't invest in SaaS"? That is what I think is going to happen, that it's not just gonna be this one-off, so maybe we're an investor in this weird thing. It's just gonna be, "No, this is a category of innovation that's gonna be driving this country for the next 10, 20, 30 years."

    5. BGBen Gilbert1:18:34

       And it wasn't the first thing that people attacked because it didn't have the highest gross margins the way that, you know, these software as a service businesses did. But as technology permeates everything else in the world, it turns out that you can build some really big businesses by attacking these broad swaths of the American economy. And so I think we're gonna continue to see lots and lots of entrepreneurs do that, and we're all better off for it.

    6. KBKatherine Boyle1:18:57

       Absolutely.

    7. DRDavid Rosenthal1:18:59

       Well, Katherine, last thing before we wrap up here, we've been talking this whole episode [chuckles] about all these trends, you know, the internet, you can build companies anywhere, American dynamism. But, you know, you and Andreessen are the... You were the first ones. You were planting your flag officially. How can founders who are listening, who this, like, totally resonates with, who are already building companies that fit with the American dynamism thesis, how can they get in touch with you and Andreessen?

    8. KBKatherine Boyle1:19:27

       Yeah. Yeah, so you can find me on the internet. [laughs]

    9. DRDavid Rosenthal1:19:30

       I'm shocked. I'm shocked. [laughing]

    10. KBKatherine Boyle1:19:33

        On Twitter, I'm ktboyle. Uh, I'm pretty responsive there, but we're pretty easy to get in touch with, so definitely come find us.

    11. DRDavid Rosenthal1:19:40

        And you have a great Substack, too. The Rambler, right?

    12. KBKatherine Boyle1:19:43

        Yeah, yeah. No, and I haven't been as active. I, I need to get back into it, but it's boyle.substack.com.

    13. DRDavid Rosenthal1:19:48

        Love it.

    14. BGBen Gilbert1:19:49

        Katherine, thank you so much.

    15. KBKatherine Boyle1:19:52

        Thanks so much for having me. This has, this has been awesome.

    16. BGBen Gilbert1:19:55

        All right, listeners, thank you for going on the journey with us and Katherine. She's, uh, I don't know, really dynamic, and I think what they're... Dynamic, dynamism. See what I did there accidentally?

    17. DRDavid Rosenthal1:20:06

        [laughs] I like that. I like what you did there.

    18. BGBen Gilbert1:20:07

        I don't know. It's an inspiring big swing that Andreessen Horowitz is taking, and it's very cool that she is on the forefront of it. If you wanna join us in the Slack, you should: acquired.fm/slack. If you want to listen to more Acquired between now and when the next show comes out, you can search Acquired LP Show in any podcast player, and you can get more episodes of the LP show. The back catalog is now completely open and free, so you can go listen to the old classics like VC Fundamentals or How to Invest in Consumer Businesses with Sarah Tavel from Benchmark. There's just a lot of, lot of good old gems in there that I, I think a lot of people didn't get to experience because, uh, you know, it was behind a paywall. And as folks know, if you wanna get access to those episodes early, two weeks early, before anyone else, you can sign up at acquired.fm/lp. We've got a job board, acquired.fm/jobs. We appreciate any ratings, reviews, anything like that you give us on any platform, but more than that, we just appreciate it when you tell one friend. Because as we deeply believe, organic growth is the best growth, and we deeply, deeply want to keep our community as a great group of people who love getting together, and so screaming it from the hilltops can spike numbers, but, like, bring other people into the Acquired fold that you wanna hang out with, 'cause we probably will, too. With that, thank you to the Solana Foundation, to Mystery, and to Modern Treasury, and we'll see you next time.

    19. DRDavid Rosenthal1:21:39

        We'll see you next time.

    20. SPSpeaker1:21:41

        Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Huh. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 1:22:00