American Dynamism (with Katherine Boyle)

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 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.

12. BGBen Gilbert2:27

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

13. 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.

14. SPSpeaker2:43

    GM, David.

15. 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?

16. 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.

17. DRDavid Rosenthal3:38

    Wow!

18. 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.

19. 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?

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. DRDavid Rosenthal7:18

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

24. 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.

25. DRDavid Rosenthal7:28

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

26. KBKatherine Boyle7:31

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

27. 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.

28. KBKatherine Boyle7:59

    Yeah.

29. 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?

30. 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.

Episode duration: 1:22:00