YouSaid · the spoken record

Katherine Boyle

lines on the record: 214
first: 2025-08-30
most recent: 2025-08-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I would have liked to see the Doge cuts codified. It still could happen, right? Like it could happen a separate bill. Then there's still tremendous young people. We know a lot of them who are working in Doge and doing important work and modernizing the systems. So I'm hopeful that at least that entity will stay. But I think as a cultural movement, I mean, it's certainly changed how companies think about how many people they need. I also think AI is going to change how many people people think they need, right? Like there's other factors that are going to impact that. But I think it will prove to have been successful.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Desert storm that we haven't used in 20 years, like why do we need that? There's another vehicle that we could actually use that's built for modern warfare. And so they've been very forthright about like, we want to doge ourselves. So I think it's caused this sort of cultural change.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, he proved you can cut 75% of people. And then he went to government and he doge different departments. And there was a lot of, I think backlash, but I think it made people realize we don't need as many people. We can work harder. We need to be more fiscally responsible. We need to be able to understand where the money's going. I think a lot of people woke up and realized we're spending ridiculous amounts of money on things we don't need. And I do think that that sort of cultural change is going to permeate all industries, all places. I mean, it's happening in the Army now. Like the Army doged itself with the Army Transformation Initiative. So General George and Secretary Driscoll came out and they said, like, we're not going to wait for Doge to come to us. We want to cut our budget by 8%. We want to get all of these old, you know, old products we don't need anymore, all these defense things that we don't need. They call it the Humvee. They say, why do we have Humvees in production that were built for, you know, pre-”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do, but for different reasons than most people. I think it worked as a cultural, I think it changed the culture in Washington, but also across the country where, you know, Twitter was sort of the early experiment in Dojing.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My goodness. Well, I won't volunteer our mutual friend, but I'd like to see him on the show as we talked about in the car. But Elon, I think I'd love to see you chat with Elon. I think he's, you know, we didn't get a chance to talk about Doge, but I think he's learned a lot about government. And I haven't heard him do a long form interview of kind of what it's like to try to reform government. I think that'd be really interesting.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is why I do think a lot of these young people, the reason they go to Silicon Valley and they sleep on the factory floor and they work hard and they're building hard things is because they know that suffering is inherently like there is something good about suffering for a purpose greater than yourself. But I do think there people are confused about how to find that. Like how do you find that outside of a society that tells you you don't need to get married, you don't need to have kids, you don't need to serve your country. You don't need to do something greater than yourself or your community. You don't need to be a pillar of the community anymore. You can move wherever you want. Just total freedom. And I think without those guardrails or those guides or people who can help you navigate life, like people just get lost.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was not the America we lived in before. So, the question is why are we so opposed to suffering? And I get a lot of pushback from people on this, well, why are you pro suffering? And, you know, I'm practicing Catholic. The entire story of Catholicism is about Jesus suffering for something noble, for something good for us, right? But it is a story of suffering. The movement to try to pull the story of suffering out of human life, that's removing human nature. That's removing the entire Christian story out of how we live. Which, what happens then? You have an entire generation of young people who are no longer resilient. So I think one of the biggest lies is.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's because we just do not believe that anyone should have to suffer. We don't believe in resilience. We don't believe that anyone should have to make a choice that has nothing, that has something to do with society or something that is duty versus what they want to do. It's all individualistic. And I think, you know, the best example of the war on suffering is what hasn't happened fully in the US, but it's happening in the UK. It already happened in Canada, which is if you now suffer from mental illness, you can you have the right to die. If you're over 18, you are welcome to go to a doctor who will sign off of it, and you can end your life.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a result of both legal and medical decisions because I think the medical community has a huge part of this as well. But I think it comes down to the war on suffering has been won. We've defeated suffering and life is not about suffering. That is what I think our legal system thinks. That's what our medical system thinks. I mean, when you think of the opioid epidemic, what started the opioid epidemic in the 90s? It was the belief in the medical community that suffering from back pain is one of the worst things that can happen and that there's a magical pill that you can take that's going to get you off of back pain. And then there were pill mills across America handing out opioids because people couldn't deal with suffering. And that was seen as a good thing. Like, don't you want to eradicate suffering? Same thing with ADHD. Young boys, you know, it's like they can't focus in school. Here's a magical pill and you're not going to suffer anymore. Your family's not going to suffer. Your teacher's not going to suffer. You're going to feel great. And now 23% of boys at 17 years old or on ADHD medication in America.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, I mean, I wish I would have known you were a conspiratorial person, because otherwise we'd be talking about aliens and the pyramids and macha picchu and all kinds of other shit. But I mean, so the question is, you had mentioned, you know, those were draft-ended. Pro choice or Roe v. Wade, you know, 10 days apart. I mean, so is this just the result of shitty decision making? You know, the list goes, I'm not weighing in on those subjects, but what I'm saying is, you know, it sounds like you think that's where it started. Then we see, you know, all the stuff with the gender stuff nowadays. And Washington State, the state, will come and take your kid if you don't do the gender affirming care. There's just a whole number of things. And so is it stemming from somewhere or is this just a result of decisions?”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For any men out there that are wondering what your purpose is, it's to provide for your fucking family and protect them. That's it. But I didn't realize there was that much confusion out there about it. But then, you know, you look around and where are all the men? Did”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just had to do it. And in some ways, it's like, you know, we can definitely make the argument that things are better now in many ways. Like, you know, people, you know, are living longer, like you can definitely make the argument that these things were not necessarily good for society, but at least there was a societal purpose and organization. And I think the thing that has really been corrupted over the last 50 years is that we do not know what our American purpose is. Just went, and particularly as it comes to the family, its family has become an option, it's no longer the default institution that you build your life in. And without that default institution, you build your life in, people just flail. You have the loneliness epidemic. You know, you have young women and men who. Depression exactly”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that the crisis of the family comes from the fact that if you're focused on yourself, you really can't be focused on a family. And you hear this all the time from young people. It's like, I haven't achieved what I wanted. I can barely take care of myself at mid 20s. You know, I don't know who I am. How am I going to be able to take care of a kid? And we've forgotten that previous generations, they didn't have that luxury. They didn't have the extended adolescence where they could say, oh, well, I don't know myself. Like, how am I going to go to war if I don't know myself? Like the greatest generation wasn't able to say that.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No barriers, there's no limitations, but it completely rips out all of the sort of underpinnings of what makes a society function. And I think in some ways that those were sort of the moments where it's like then you saw the unraveling of, well, there shouldn't be any kind of suffering. Like, you know, it's around the same time that no fault divorce happened, around the same time that, you know, like you shouldn't be told who you are, you shouldn't be judged. Similarly, in the medical arena, this is around the time where ADHD sort of, you know, the late 80s, SSRI started really coming about where it's like we have to start medicating us because we're thinking too much about ourselves and we have too much depression. Of course, depression, you know, SSRIs, I think we're seen as kind of a niche thing. And now they're, you know, what is the number of Americans that are on them, the sort of focus on the move to focus on the self was a very deliberate action.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in both of those cases, those purposes, they were outwardly focused, they were things where this is how we organize society and you care about the institution of family and the men care about the institution of their country. But what we did instead was we turned inward. We started focused on our own mind. And this is like the moment that we really start thinking about psychology, like who am I? What is my purpose on this earth? There's a great book by Philip Reith that was written in the 60s actually called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which is that man really started turning inward in the 60s and early 70s and really thinking about like, do I have purpose on this earth and what is this? And the minute that you stop focusing outward and you become very contemplative, which is really what American culture has become, you become very individualistic, become very obsessed with yourself. Our generation is, you know, the trophy generation, the me generation of like everything about me is interesting and I'm an individual and I can achieve anything I want.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And the only thing that we did instead was instead of serving your country is an outward focus thing. It's focused on other people. It's focused on someone other than you. The same thing with being a mother. The minute you become a mother, you stop worrying about yourself, right? Like you don't have time to make yourself the most important thing. Like you have to worry about your children”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that I think is the, I don't know that every man needs to go to war, right? But I think there is something that happens when you say we once were a country where everyone was treated this way. Everyone knew their purpose. Everyone woke up in the morning anew. And that just understanding that that is your purpose changes the way you walk, it changes the way that you think about your life. And the same thing for I don't think every woman should have to be a mother. If I talk to 10 people, nine out of ten people would say, of course, like these are good things, right? These are popular things. At the same time, when we didn't replace that purpose with something else, when we didn't have a way of saying, this is how society should be organized.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is why would anyone do that? Suffering for your family, why would you do that? But I think the minute that we destroyed the unique purpose of woman, which for you can't debate that for millennial, that was the purpose of women was to bear children to have family. And then the unique purpose of man, which is to fight. The minute that we destroyed those purposes, men and women stopped relating to each other. Know how to know who they were. They didn't know what their purpose was, they didn't know how they could relate. And when you look at it from that framework, the family was destined to fail from that moment.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it completely changes the view of how men view themselves and how women view themselves all in 1973, January, 10 days. And it's like, you know, I would say there's, you know, a lot of people who would say, well, these are all good things. It's really good that there's choice in America. Not everyone should have to serve their country. Like not everyone, men and women shouldn't have to go to war or women shouldn't have to become mothers. But what we didn't do in that moment is we didn't provide anyone an alternative purpose. We didn't provide men and women anything that says actually the purpose of manhood is this. Or actually the purpose of womanhood is this. We just said, go figure it out yourself. Actually, maybe there is no purpose. And the 70s, like there was this very clear, you know, kind of, I would say almost like nihilistic culture of, well, nothing really matters anymore. Like you can do whatever you want. And like that, that I think has permeated so much of society where we don't even believe suffering should exist anymore. It's, you know, it's like the suffering for your country.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was codified. It was like that is not the purpose of manhood. And then 10 days later, it was only in 2023 when I was writing this piece that I actually even realized this. Ten days later, the female equivalent happened where Roe v. Wade passed from the Supreme Court. And that had a similar impact on women, where it used to be for all of human history, your purpose on this earth is to have children, is to have a family. And this was the first time. And Western society, too, a lot of nations copied us after it, but this was like, this was the moment that really changed. Where 10 days after men were told your purpose is not to serve, women were told your purpose is not to have a family. It's your choice.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True. And of course, this is something that even today people, you know, our military celebrates the fact that we don't have a draft, that this is part of American culture. But I think what it fundamentally said to young people is that it has a choice to serve. It is a choice. Not everyone does it. Only the people who want to, they might want to do it for economic reasons. They might want to do it for love of country. But it is not something that everyone has to do to serve and defend their country. And if you think about it throughout human history, that is the first time that a country has said to young men, your purpose on this earth is not to defend where you live.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like from this moment where you just see just complete change in a lot of things around America. And I've always said that that might have been the economic change that happened in America where financialization started and where housing became so expensive, where it became ridiculously expensive to afford health care or education. But in 1973, there were two things that radically changed how Americans view themselves, how men and women view themselves. And ultimately what I think is sort of the impetus and start of this sort of unraveling of the family. And I've said this a lot publicly on what I think changed for men, which was 1973 and January, Nixon did the most profound and most popular thing that he ever did during his presidency, which was that he ended the draft. It was unanimous. It was coming off of Vietnam. It was like a unanimous thing that everyone loved. Everyone knew what needed to happen where he said, we're going to be an all-volunteer force and we're going to allow people to choose to serve their country.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can ever combat the state, which is the family. And so I'm a pretty conspiratorial person. I think there's been a concerted attack on the family to strengthen the state, particularly for the last 50 years. But it's been done in very specific ways, in legal ways through the education system, through the medical system, and it is deliberately destroyed. And you see it through the birth rate like we talked about in the beginning. Fewer and fewer people want to have families. And it's because of this deliberate attack on the family. I wrote this piece called The War on Suffering, where I've been very vocal about the fact that I think everything in America changed in 1973. Everyone always pointed, there's this website called WTF Happened in 1971. And it points to, that's when we came off the gold standard. That's when regulations started exploding in America. What happened in this year where everything bad in America started.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, it's, I wrote a speech that I gave a couple months ago where I really started talking about how I see kind of all of history as a war between the family and the state. These two big institutions. One is, you know, and it goes back to Plato. It goes back to like the Republic, the Greeks, right? Where the entire philosophy of the Republic is that perhaps the state can take better care of a society than these institutional families. And so when you look at sort of, you go back through history and you see that especially authoritarian regimes, the first thing that an authoritarian regime does when it wants to take over society is it ruthlessly destroys the family. So you mentioned the one-child policy in China. That was an attack, a deliberate attack on the family from an authoritarian regime. And the purpose of it was, you know, it was for national interest. They talk about, oh, we couldn't, you know, we wouldn't be able to supply enough people with food. But what it really was was to weaken the only...”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're basically doing logistics to where they just build these things in space that way. It's not such a heavy payload. The satellite parts don't need to be protected with Kevlar and bulletproof fists or whatever the hell. He's talking about bringing things up in sections and actually assembling in space so that so that the payload's a lot less come and leaving Earth.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like these things are, in some ways, I don't want to say simple, but a lot of the things that I'm investing in are not science fair experiments. They're not things that are kind of going to get you riled up about, wow, like that sounds like the future. But it's just, okay, we're just going to produce more of the things that we need because the infrastructure is just so lagging or so old.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in space, it really is anything to do with offensive space. I think SpaceX is the most incredible company in the world. They've done extraordinary work. They do extraordinary work with government. They now have a direct to sell platform. They have Starlink, which I think is completely revolutionized internet. But there's still more things that need to be done. I'm invested in a company that's focused on ground stations, Northwood Space. They're building modular ground stations for every other company that needs to get data back to the ground. Our ground station infrastructure extremely old. It takes forever to, you know.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you build? And yes, Sharonic is vertically integrated, but there's a lot of companies that would attach one of those software defined factories to them and say, hey, just build us as many as you can of this one part.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You automate it with software, and then the last 10% you can teach a human to do. But that leads to just extraordinary output. So the more factories we can have that are software-defined factories where the software is actually making it easier for humans to produce more in the factory, whether it's critical machined parts, whether it's casting, whether it's sort of the tier kind of two to three suppliers where it's the kind of the joysticks or the things that are inside, you know, it's like there's so many critical parts that are actually inside of planes of anything defense related where you just need to be able to produce 10x more of all of those things. Munitions, I mean, there's a lot of talk now about how do we just turbocharge how quickly we can build munitions because we don't have enough. But it really is like all of, I think all of the fears that I have about defense come down to production. It's all how...”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, I mean, they vertically integrate to where they're building everything like they have an in-house machine shop. We have another company that I work very closely with called Hadrian that's building these automated machine shops where they build parts for every company you've ever heard of and defense and aerospace. Critical parts that have to be built in the US. And it used to be that if you needed a critical part, you'd go to one of these massive machine shops. The machine shops are run by someone who's older usually in their 60s, you know, 50s, 60s. They have apprentices who study them. It can take two to three years to learn how to manufacture these critical parts. If you bring software into the factory, as Hadrian has done, they can teach a former bus driver, a high school dropout, their goal is they want to take baristas and train them to make these critical parts in 30 days. And it's because you automate 80, 90% of the process, the quality control, the design aspect.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would that fit in? Where would that fit in? Would that be a manufacturing company that attaches itself to anandural or a saronic? Because when I talked to Dino, it sounds like all of Saronic is from conception of the idea to the end product. Yeah.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so the only group of people and the only country that really hasn't benefited from the war, and I say benefit loosely, but really hasn't been able to build up the industrial capacity in the same way that those three countries have, is America. And so the thing that keeps me up at night, the place where we invest is how do we increase the speed of production? And it can be on satellite buses, ground stations, modular things, you know, modular forms of energy, you know, SMRs, small modular reactors for nuclear. How do we build those as quickly as possible? But it's just the modularization and the production thing that, you know, I'm less interested in software or design. I'm much more interested in like how do we just rebuild the manufacturing powerhouse that America once was. And I think we can do it, but there's a lot of gaps in there.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an extraordinary way, right? Like they were kind of weak when they first started. Now they've built up their production capacity to really greatly be able to be able to have this war against the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians, to their credit, have built just-in-time manufacturing facilities where they can build drones very, very quickly. They get the information off the battlefield that allows them to innovate on how the drones work. They're doing that on the ground. They have distributed manufacturing capabilities that are tailor-made for this war. So in some ways, they've built up a defense industrial base as well. So it's Ukraine and Russia have done a great job of building that capacity up and that production capacity. The other player in this is China, who is supplying both sides of the war. So they're greatly supplying the Russians. with the dumb parts and the things that they need to build the drones or with drones themselves and they're also supplying the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians are in a desperate situation they're building things in the trenches they'll take whatever they can get and they'll take Chinese infrastructures”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I'm spending a lot of time on future of space and space warfare. Like, I think there needs to be a lot more built for the next war being in space. So that means like building things on the software side for tracking. Like there needs to be a lot more on the production side, on the propulsion side to make sure that things can be kinetic in space. So there's a lot, I think, happening in sort of what is the future of space warfare look like, but everything for me comes back to this production issue. Like I recently was with some operators on the ground on the border of Ukraine. And the sort of, it went with a group to kind of learn about how where investors should be investing, where are sort of the major gaps in that war. And the kind of takeaway that I took from it that I don't think I really fully kind of understood until I was there was Russia has built up their defense industrial base over three years.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That companies will compete. But if we knowingly knew that companies were competing against each other, we would pick the winner. We put our eggs in one basket.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like you can't honestly make the argument that say SpaceX is somehow competitive with a small company that's building satellite buses or a company that's building ground stations, right? Because they have a ground station product that works with Starlink. So we try to make it like, you know, it's like we would never invest in companies that are competing directly head on, that are doing the same product. Like, we don't do that. But it's more like sometimes you invest in a company that starts out as one thing. And again, it pivots into something else and then they're competing against each other. And whenever that happens, we always try to make sure that we sort of, you know, silo the information that different partners are working on different things. And it does happen. There's definitely, you know, examples of two companies just getting so big and so great. And it's always good when you see two companies winning, but it's like then they realize, oh, like we can each acquire the same company and do something new. And so they compete on acquisitions. It's like, it's normal in business.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, it's a good question because one thing is sometimes you invest in a company and, you know, they have no plans to build something and then they end up competing with various companies or whatever. We kind of have a strong rule about it. It actually comes from my partner, Chris Dixixon, who leads our crypto practice where he basically says like, you know, every company gets to tell you who their one competitor is. But like at a certain point, like there are some companies that get so large where they're going to do everything or they think they're going to do everything. And so you can't say, oh, you know, a company.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like. I know you've talked about signs and callings, and I think you believe deeply in that. I do too, where I'm like. I look at my uncle who everyone made fun of and kicked out of the Jesuits. And it's like, if not me, then who. And I do think that like there's something about God gives you your calling and your mission. And it doesn't make sense, right? Like you say, like it makes absolutely no sense that like someone who is just good with words, right? Like I'm a good writer. I know what I'm good at, but I'm not a technologist. I'm not going to explain to you how Castellian's missiles work. Like I'm not going to sit here and like be able to answer any of those questions. But I do think that I've been given a mission. And why me? I don't know, but I'm not going to question it. And that is, it's someone else's will and not mine. So it makes me, you know, when Tibo is on, like, I think Tibo had the greatest, your interview with him was incredible, but where he had the 316 moment where he was just so happy for like, I can't believe I've been able to do what I've done. And then he just remembers, oh, it's like not about me.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of uncomfortable, you know, or like I don't know that I. How am I going to tell my friends, you know, at a cocktail party that we're investing in missiles? But there was something about like this team, like one, their pros, you know, they clearly care about the mission. They talked about it from a deterrence perspective, right? Like this is the only way we're going to deter wars. You have to build up your defense industrial base. You have to build up your missile capabilities to stop wars, not start them. And I think it was such a compelling pitch and just an honest pitch about like this is the state of play. Like we are not prepared. And if we don't do it, no one's going to do it. But I mean, the thing that was amazing for me was like, gosh, like how far we've come. Like in just five years to go from, you know, headline risk, like we can't touch that to, okay, we're all in on this.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this was 2023. And I, you know, I brought them in to the entire firm and Andreessen Horowitz sat down for this pitch. And I just remember saying to my partner David, I was like, you know, I didn't ask, but like, you think anyone's going to care that we're investing in missiles? Like really the first slide is deterrence matters. This is such a serious team. This is a team that knows what they're doing. Like they build things before they've studied under Elon. But I'm like, do you think anyone's going to worry about the M word? And he's like, I don't know, we'll see. And the pitch, I mean, the beautiful pitch that ends or whatever. And, you know, there's people on the consumer team, the games team, all the teams. Like, not everyone is American dynamism. And, you know, afterwards, it was sort of like silence. And, you know, I was like, does anyone want to say everyone think this is cool? And literally everyone was like, yeah, it's great. And it was like, it shocked me because I'm like, I've been so used to like, okay, there's always one person who's like, oof, I'm like kind of.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very long time. And the founder said, you know, he consistently talked about this inside of SpaceX, but SpaceX is, you know, maniacally focused on going to Mars. The sorts of projects that could get done at SpaceX, they have many projects and many types of things that they're building. But hypersonics was not on the menu. And so he and his number of his colleagues, they left in 2023 to start this company really focused. I mean, just from day one, focused on hypersonic missiles, long range hypersonic strike, you know, strike missiles. And the thing that I found so interesting about this is, again, like going back to 2019, where, you know, Palmer said the M word. He said missiles in a pitch, you know, in a pitch of investors. And they freaked out, right? Like missiles, you're going to invest in missiles and hypersonic weapons and things that are kinetic. Like, no, no, no, right? Like that, that was crossing the line.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Castellian. So it's another great story. A company I met very early in its trajectory, but it kind of, again, explains why it's so important to meet people that you, or to invest in people that have seen it before. So the team was working at SpaceX. So a lot of the team was on the government sales. They were part of Starshield, which was selling to the government, working with government on classified projects and different things. And this team, the founder will tell the story that like every time he would talk to people inside the DOD, they would say the biggest issue for America is we have no hypersonic weapons. Our missiles will be depleted. I think Palmer talked about this. If we were in a potential hot war with China, like our missiles would be depleted within eight days or some crazy scenario in terms of the scenario running. And so this has been top of mind for DOD.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behalf of a foreign government, it's that easy for nobody to infiltrate it with no resources, right? How easy is it for someone who's been trained? Infiltrate a company or infiltrate an ecosystem to be able to capture the intelligence they need. It is a very easy target.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is what's happened in Silicon Valley, where you can't really divorce a lot of tech culture from that sort of, they understand tech culture. They're there. They're completely part of it. And so it's something where I think we need much, much better security around a lot of these AI projects in particular. A lot of these AI companies, it's clear that they're being targeted for espionage purposes. It's clear that how did the Chinese catch up so quickly, you know, it's like this is, again, a whole-of-society sort of project for them. And Silicon Valley, like I'd say it's sort of a Pollyanna view, sort of this, well, we're sort of this open, you know, we're this open ecosystem and, you know, anyone can come here and build. And again, it's part of the reason why it works is like you have an open society where anyone takes a phone call and you get people like me who know nothing about it and they can infiltrate it. But if you're working on”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, it's mostly Chinese spies, but there's been a lot of stories recently. There's things that happen where it's like, it's clear, you know, it's clear espionage, right? It's like clearly there's spies that are in big companies stealing the last 30 years of Silicon Valley. How is China caught up so quickly? It's, of course, a lot of these people are stealing the secrets out of the companies and stealing the intellectual property and taking it back. So like, that's a known story. I think the areas that are even more shocking are how the universities play into this, how there's, you know, there was a story actually in the Stanford Review, which is a student paper at Stanford that was saying like.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's pretty prevalent from what I've heard from people I know inside the DoD and various agencies, there are more spies in Washington, D.C. than any other city in America. And number two is Silicon Valley.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I think it's, you know, Apple and China is scandalous that we invested that much money into another country's manufacturing regime and not into our own. Like, why didn't we do that for the state of Ohio? Why didn't we do that in the state of Florida? What was it about America that Apple didn't want to invest in our own manufacturing capabilities 15 years ago so that they could make $500,000 iPhones in a day? And so that, I think, is the thing that's going to be hard to overcome. Now, what's happening on the defense side because you have to manufacture in the US and there is this manufacture where you are, but I think it's the thing that keeps me up at night is the production gap.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overview I gave of how venture capital works. They went in there and they trained people and they trained them as though they were training their own associates in Silicon Valley and they told them how you build these companies. And so I always say that the sort of venture capital ecosystem, it is American dynamism. It is the thing that allows America to be dominant in the global economy. It's how we build tech companies. And we just went over there as venture capitalists. And I shouldn't say we because it wasn't my firm. It wasn't me. But VCs went over there and shared information, shared limited partners, shared all of the aspects and the functions of how you build an incredible legacy-defined venture firm. And over 20 years, like, you know, Silicon Valley or China has a true ecosystem of tech companies now. And they all work with the CCP, right? Like they figured out, you know, how to build in the kind of confines of how China expects them to build. But this is scandalous.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturing side, I mean, when we talk about like what keeps me up at night, it is really, really hard to build factories that compete with the manufacturing and production capabilities of China. And again, this started 10, 15 years ago with Apple, but there's many good examples of companies that were invested in by American venture capital firms in China that are way ahead in terms of production. I always say like the biggest scandal Apple is a good example of us taking our knowledge and our know-how into China and teaching them something that was an American secret in many cases. But the biggest scandal of Silicon Valley is that Silicon Valley did that too. In 2008, 2009, you know, venture capital firms that are very large and very successful went into China and they taught them how to do early stage investing. Like the overview that simple.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you compare it to the Marshall Plan, it's something like 2x, the entire Marshall Plan that Apple has invested in China over the last 10 years. And the thing that is shocking about sort of this divorcing the manufacturing and moving manufacturing out of America into a country is like it wasn't like they had the people and the systems and the know-how where they were helping us. It was like we made an active choice, right? I should say Apple made an active choice to train those people and to give them the knowledge, to give them the know-how of this is how you are going to build. And until this book came out, I don't think people really recognized just how much capital that American companies were putting into China to train them on things we know how to do. And so, you know, I think the kind of point of the vice president's speech was more about like we have to bring this design for manufacturing view back where it's like you design where you manufacture like and that is Elon's view, but it's really the”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source