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

“Well, I mean, it worked for them in that it saved them a lot of money. But this is what's interesting. We were talking earlier about this Apple and China book that came out where I think it's rewriting the narrative of what Apple did. So it wasn't like Apple went to China. And I'm blanking on the writer's name, but he was the financial times reporter that covered Apple for like 20 years. And it's like it wasn't like they went to China and they said, oh, these guys know how to manufacture. We're going to give them, you know, like they're going to help us manufacture and achieve our goals. Apple trained all of the people in China to do manufacturing. It was something like 28 million over the course of the last 10 years that they've been there that they've trained, which is the workforce of California. The interesting stat that this writer notes is that Apple invested, I think, something like $58 billion per year into China so that they could invest in these manufacturing hubs and invest in these factories.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are simple, good, and you can do it as quickly as possible. And so that is the philosophy of Elon Musk. That's why everything he has done has been successful. And a lot of other people who do manufacturing are not. But now there's thousands of founders who have come out of his ethos and his, you know, kind of the gospel of Elon, right? And they know how to build like that. And so they get on the factory floor and that's what they do. And the DoD can just, you know, they can just pick winners. They can say, this is what we need. This one works the best. You have a hundred of them. We'll take them. And there's something about that didn't exist even five years ago. And it's only going to grow.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tens, tens, 20, thousands of people out of Tesla and SpaceX, like these engineers who understand how to design for manufacturing and how to engineer and that engineering and manufacturing have to be linked. And for a very long time, that is not how people viewed how you build. I mean, actually, Vice President JD Bance actually talked about this, came and spoke at our summit. And he said, the biggest lie that America was ever told about manufacturing was that you could divorce the design from the manufacturing. And of course, we did that. Apple's the best example of this, where if you open up an iPhone, it says designed in California. And there's this belief that you can, you can, all of the premium jobs are the design jobs and the manufacturing jobs are the cheap jobs and you can outsource that anywhere. But it's like actually linking them is the most important, you know, that is the most important thing. The design for manufacturing where you link those roles in a company is how you manufacture things.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you make it simple, and if you make it modular, something that can just be churned out where it doesn't have to be every single time something happens, you have to design something new and you have to change your manufacturing process. You'll have fewer problems with the quality control. You'll have fewer problems with”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they can take any payload to space. They have three, like in some ways it's like it looks a lot more like consumer technology. It's like we have three models. We have one for Leo. We have one for Geo. We have one for the different orbit that you're going to. But for 90% of payloads, that bus is going to be perfect. And because they're only designing something three times versus designing a brand new thing every time they need to send something up, you take out all the design work, you crunch, you know, you crunch all the R&D, and then you build a system that allows you, it's designed for manufacturing. You manufacture as quickly as possible. And that methodology of manufacturing, again, this is, I think people underestimate the impact that Elon Musk has had on the country. He's had an incredible impact on a bunch of companies. But the thing that he taught people, again, is the best part is no part. It's you have to make the product as simple as possible so that you can manufacture it as quickly as possible.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Confidence because Elon and SpaceX have done incredible service for this country in terms of what they're doing with Star Shield and Star Link. But the other companies coming up, like they want to be able to build as quickly as possible and as fast as possible. And the big fear that I have is that government's going to say, oh, well, you know, we've written the requirements so that we need this thing on this bus. And it's like, no, like we just need the bus that can do 90% of the job and just get it up as fast as possible and make them as fast as possible. We need to produce as quickly as we can.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They went from clean sheet design to their first mission in 13 months, like first working mission with payloads in space and low Earth orbit. And it's like if a brand new company that at that time had only 30 employees and had raised tens of millions of dollars but isn't SpaceX, right? But if a brand new company can go from forming a company to putting something in space with important primes in 13 months, you should be able to do the Henry Ford manufacturing line of satellite buses and be able to build thousands and thousands of satellite buses a year for the DoD. And that's what China's doing. I mean, China is maniacally focused on space. And they are maniacally focused on how do we build as many buses as possible so that we can own the satellite infrastructure in low Earth orbit. And it's something that we're going to have to very much worry about because right now we're in the lead in space. I actually think that's the theater where we should feel the most.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's like we have, you know, SpaceX can get things to space. But the biggest problem that the DoD has, and it's a problem that China's really focused on as well, is it can take three years to get a satellite bus, which is just, you know, it's not the payload. It's not the thing that you're sending to space. It's the thing that, you know, has the energy. It has the comms equipment. And really every satellite can operate with the same bus. Like you don't need the way that, again, going back to how the primes do work is the government will say, well, we're sending up this payload and this is how we want it designed. And so they'll design a brand new bus every time they do new, you know, non-recurring engineering for the product. And then they'll send the payload up. And it's like it can take three years to get a satellite bus. So this company is building satellite buses in 30 days. Like, why should it take so long to build the same bus over and over again? And so it's called.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd say the thing that's happened that surprised me the most everyone kind of knows the andros, the Saronics, the companies that are selling directly to the DoD. The thing that surprised me the most is how many companies want to build the tier one supplier like basically rebuild the defense industrial base and not sell directly to the Department of Defense, but sell to those Raytheons, the Lockheed Martins and the Andreals, right? Like they'll work with anyone, but really build out the supply chain. And that's where I've been investing a lot. Like we have a company, a great company called Apex Space that's building modular satellite buses. And the view in the space industry and space, I mean, space is to me space is going to be the next theater. It's going to be the next, you know, space warfare is something we really have to think a lot about. But you can't be good at space warfare if you don't have enough stuff. Like if you don't have the actual platforms to send payloads up to space on.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's like when you hear that about someone, and it's like, okay, now they're going to come be CEO of Andrew, you don't worry that much about whether they're going to be able to build just an incredible product.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Post idea, post team, you know, the pitch deck oftentimes explains the problem and the solution. Oftentimes there's a product built. But for early, early stage investing, which is where I like to invest, sometimes you don't need it. Sometimes it's just about a credible team coming together and you having belief that that team can actually pull it off based on their history. A lot of the teams that I've invested in, it's like, you know, the head of manufacturing was doing something at SpaceX, which makes me know that they know how to do manufacturing. Or, you know, the CTO was another company where it's very clear that you can reference them and know what they actually built. So there's reputation sort of precedes them. It's like, oh, they wrote this paper or they did this product at Palantir or Brian Schimpf, who's the CEO of Anderrol. I mean, he sort of legendary as one of the best engineers, best coders that's ever come out of Palantir.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, they in John's case, who's the founder of CAPE, I waited until he had the entity formed. And then we gave him the company. So when I say we invest before the company even exists, there's a company. It's just sometimes he doesn't know what he's going to do, right? Like there are some founders where you don't know what, I even say Andrew is a great example of this, where like, yes, they started off with Sentry Tower, but like, you know, products three and four and five, they had no idea what those products were going to be. And some of those have just been extraordinarily successful. And so a lot of founders kind of, you know, they learn on the job, right? Like they're talking to new customers every day. And it's like, actually, maybe we should do this instead. They call it the pivot. It's Silicon Valley. It's like it's infamous. It's like, oh, companies pivoted into a different direction. But a pivot isn't seen as a bad thing. It's seen as, oh, they learned something new and they're taking that knowledge and they're building something with it. It's much more common to invest in a company.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parts of the DoD to make it possible to basically be on your cell phone and to not be found. That's sort of like the holy grail if you're an operator, if you're part of the DoD, or if you're a high net worth individual who's worried about privacy, to be able to travel around the world.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the idea matters a lot. I mean, there's examples where I've invested in people pre idea. Yeah, yeah. Like I have a great company called Cape that's building a MVNO, a mobile network for privacy. And the founder, I knew the founder from another company that I invested in called Manabar Labs. It's working with a lot of the agencies in DOD. He was on the board. And he was the head of government sales agency sales at Palantir for a very long time. And so he just knows government sales better than anyone. You know, he had been in the army and then went to Palantir. And I always just said like, hey, if you're ever leaving Palantir, please, please let me know. And, you know, one day I got the call and it was like, I don't care what you're doing. And, you know, I just want to back you. And within a couple weeks, he told me what he was doing. And I'm like, oh, you're building a new mobile carrier for privacy. That's going to be like the hardest thing I've ever heard. Like you were building the hardest company. But it's been, it's, he's done an excellent job and is working with a number of different.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All over the world, frankly, that wants to invest in American innovation, American dynamism, and you don't have to use taxpayer money to do the R&D. There's hundreds of companies in El Segundo right now that are all doing the R&D, that are all raising outside capital from people who know that they might lose their money. But that's the business model. You lose your money in some cases. You win in some, you lose in others. And it's like, that didn't used to be directed at America. Like it did not used to be directed at the Department of Defense. It's never been directed at these categories in the way it is today. So it does on the outside look easy. Like everyone can just come in and raise capital, but you do have to have a great idea. You have to know the right people. You have to network with the right people, right? Which is not impossible. Like that's what I love about Dino's story is like, you didn't know anybody. He didn't know who Joe Lonsdale was when he took him out to do a workout, right? He just wanted to do a defense company. And so there's so many stories of just being young and hungry and determined.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To any other way that we build businesses, but the kind of speed at which you're supposed to grow is, you know, the faster you grow the better. And so there's sort of a view that that is the best way to build companies, but that did not exist, I'd say, five years ago for this category of building the physical world. There's no way that you're going to be able to get through the valley of death, get later investors to put hundreds of millions of dollars into a satellite bus company. And I think the biggest thing that's changed is all of those partners that I talk about, the people who are investing in the funds, the sovereign wealth funds, the pension funds, all of those people in the ecosystem now believe that you can make money off of defense companies and they want exposure to it. They want to invest in the next Androil. And so to me, whenever I go to the DOD, I'm like, this is the biggest boon for you. This is going to save us because you have capital from all over the country, every endowment.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five years ago, is that because American dynamism didn't exist, because this category of innovation didn't exist, you couldn't go into a venture capital firm and say, I'm going to build a hypersonics company. People would be like, what? Like, there's no ecosystem of people who are going to invest in that. There's no downstream capital of people in the later rounds. And the way venture capital structured is every 18 months, 18 to 24 months, a company will raise an additional round of capital. And if they're successful, makes their valuation go up. It makes the amount the company's worth go up. And it allows them to expand. It allows them to grow the number of engineers, the number of people working there, number of products they're offering. And the goal is don't go out of business, but grow as fast as possible. And each new layer of investor will come in with a bigger check to fund the research and development, to fund the growth of the company until you go public. And the sort of it sounds completely, again, it sounds completely different.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're the big pension funds, the big, you know, every state has massive pension funds, nonprofits, university endowments, sovereign wealth funds across the world. So like, you know, every country has sovereign wealth money that they want to put into various things. And now they all want to put money into technology. And so when you add all of that up and you say like everyone recognizes that they need exposure to high growth venture capital company backed companies that are going to go public and that are going to be the next Uber, the next stripe, the next, you know, the next Facebook, the next Google. It's just so much bigger than it was even 10 years ago. And it's become, I'd say it's become really competitive because any really talented engineer now that has a group of people with a good idea, like it's never been, I don't want to say it's easy, it's easier to get seed capital. It's easier to get someone to bet on you because there's more capital in the industry. And what was a problem.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies. I think two of them were tech companies. If you do that same experiment in 2025, nine of them are American companies. Eight of them are tech companies. And the only company that's on a tech company that's the most valuable company in the world in America is Brookshire Hathaway, which owns a massive chunk of Apple. So tech is the story of the 21st century. It's how we've built companies. A lot of the companies that, you know, are now in that most valuable 10 weren't even founded in 2000, right? Like Facebook wasn't around. Google had just gone public in 2004. It is extraordinary that we have been able to build companies that big that surpass all of industry across the world in 25 years. But part of that is because of the venture capital industry, which is not this cottage industry of a couple people sitting around doing out money anymore. It is billions of dollars given by what's known as institutional limited partners. So what they are is they're”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you'll learn a lot. It's not guaranteed someone's going to invest in it. But. What's interesting is Silicon Valley used to be, it used to be like it's like the Florentine five families, right? You have like five venture firms. They all sit on Sandhill Road, which is like the classic place where all these firms were built and companies would go by and they'd pitch and then, you know, a firm would pick one company. It's not like that anymore. It is ruthlessly competitive. There is more capital than there has ever been in the asset class. I think there's something like 300 billion dollars of dry powder just raised now, which dry powder is the amount of capital on the sidelines that's going to come into companies. Something like 1.25 trillion AUM. I mean, it is not, they used to call it sort of a cottage industry. People used to ignore it. It's not. It is how we've built companies over the last 25 years. Now, I always point to this graph. I wish I had the graphic, where if you looked at the Fortune 100 and then if you even went further down and you said, what are the 10 most valuable companies in the world in 2000? Four of them were American.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does venture capital work? It seems to me like venture capital runs Silicon Valley and I've had a number of these guys and you're all like just It's insanely smart. But the trend seems to be. To Silicon Valley, Start talking about your idea, start working on it, and somebody is going to invest in it.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work, but something about Silicon Valley is you know you can just be loud on the internet and get people's attention and have everyone important in Silicon Valley talking about you, making fun of you, mocking you, right? But like you can become the center of attention very quickly. And so I really encourage young people to do that, especially if they're a talented engineer. Like, you don't have to know anyone.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I mean, he went to business school. Yes, he went to private equity, but the things he was doing in private equity are not at all what he's doing here. And so I think it says something about the culture of tech, which is, and I always tell veterans this because I get, you know, so many people saying, how do you transition? It's like, it is a very open culture. By its nature, people are open about meeting people, talking to people. Yes, yes, it's kind of monolithic. But if you have an idea that's different, there are people who will take a bet on you if you seem to know what you're talking about. If you know the right people, if you're a talented team surrounding you. And so I do think it's probably one of the few places that misfits can go in America. You know, it's like you couldn't go to New York City and kind of crack your way into different parts of finance. You know, it's like there's too many places in New York where they care who your daddy is or what school you went to, what high school you went to, right? Like there's too much of that kind of elite culture in Washington.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think I look at someone like Dino, who I think your conversation with him is extraordinary, right? Like in some ways, he's even, he's the example of speedrunning that process even more, right? Because it's like he's building, he's the CEO of a massive company. And he had no tech relationships. You know, it's like he knew a little bit about tech, but he's not a, you know, cracked engineer himself, right? Like, he went from being a Navy SEAL to now running one of the most important companies for the Navy in three years.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'd be surprised the people you can connect with and have deep relationships with, even if you haven't had lunch with them. Like, you don't have to go to someone's house or office and have coffee with them. Like you can have deep connections with people just by writing and thinking online. And I spent a lot of time on the internet. And I live in the middle of nowhere. So it's like I need to spend a lot of time on the internet. But that's how I got acquainted with Mark and with a lot of people in Silicon Valley and with a lot of people at my current firm too.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happening, but it really was sort of this you were so forced to sort of falsify your preferences publicly if you didn't want to get canceled that you really couldn't talk about things and you could unclubhouse in some ways and you could in the group chats and so I got to know Mark and David and a bunch of people at Ben and Dries and Horowitz and you know I'd say a lot of these ideas were were really sort of you know talked about and sort of debated on an app that you know was sort of this ephemeral thing that was really important during COVID because no one had a way to connect But I also tell people a lot, like especially young people, like you'd be surprised you can meet on the internet.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sort of like Twitter spaces But I was very bored. I was also pregnant with my first child. You know, I was kind of locked up in my house. And I always joke. My husband was like, you know, after like the first month of COVID, it was great that you had clubhouse because you could talk to other people. You could stop at a way of me. So I was like, you know, I was like, you know, up at the middle of the night talking on clubhouse. And of course, there were a handful of people there. And Mark was one of them. So I got to know Mark through Clubhouse and through, you know, a lot of these, I'd say, these kind of, you know, chats of people who I think were really interested in these ideas of where is Silicon Valley going? What does it mean? You know, again, like this was sort of the height of the culture war. And I do think it was forbidden. It was like, you know, people were getting left and right kicked off of Twitter. And so there were sort of these, you know, underground. It's kind of funny to say now because all of the things that were being said are being said publicly now. It's not like there was sort of some crazy, you know, conversation.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a funny story. I'd say there were a handful of people, I think, during COVID who kind of saw the craziness that was happening in Silicon Valley. Saw the craziness of the Culture War. This has been reported before, but Mark's very big on the group chats. So I met him through, actually, actually, this is very funny. I met him through, there was an app in COVID called Clubhouse, where it was sort of like a...”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in some ways, it shows the power of memes because it really only takes one Joe, one Mark, right? One of these guys, right? One sham, you know, one Palmer to stand up and say the hard thing. And if you say it enough, like Palmer had been saying since 2017, like the CCP is our enemy, right? Like the CCP is our enemy. We should not be supporting anything to do with China. We should not be supporting them. We should not be investing there. And it just, in some ways, it's like, it wears people down. If people hear the meme large, like long enough. And in some ways, I feel like the sort of meme of American dynamism is even more powerful than the investing practice. It's not just an investing practice. It's a true philosophy that like if we're going to build hard things in this country and go back to an era of the moon landing in the Manhattan project, like we have to be clear about what we are investing in and we are investing in American interest.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Carrie, of sort of the economics among the partners. But I think five years ago, I wouldn't have believed that would have happened. It was just, it was too much money. It was too big business. People had way too many entrenched interests in China. And if anything, what it taught me is if you speak truth, like if you say, I'm not afraid to say I love this country and that I don't care about making money in China because I love this country. And if you say that, people will get in line. Like most people believe that in Silicon Valley. They just never heard it before.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No kidding. At the same time, you know, like Mike Gallagher and the China Special Special Committee that was happening in Congress and a bunch of people in the DC side, they kind of woke up about this. It's like, okay, Silicon Valley is actually saying, hey, we need to invest America too. Important people in Silicon Valley are saying that. And so they started putting, I think, a little bit of pressure. The TikTok wars were happening, right? Like people were really starting to say, okay, like how is TikTok being weaponized against American kids? And it just became too much for a lot of these firms who have been investing for 15 years in China to be able to make a good faith argument that it's fine that we're sending American money, American know-how, and that we're making tons of money off of technology that's being used as a weapon against the United States. And so pretty much all of these firms had to divest or decouple themselves. They turned into separate funds where there was no sharing of information, no sharing of”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The flag of our own country and said, Yeah, we're going to build for this country. And it was probably the most refreshing thing to founders because they had never heard an investor. They'd never heard. And again, having Mark Andreessen say it, you know, it's like I'm just a little old me, right? You know, but what Mark Andreessen, the founder of the internet, basically, right? Like the godfather of Silicon Valley comes out and he says, we're investing in America. People perk up and they listen. And so it completely changed the game, you know, later it became a meme. Other people started raising funds off of it. But the thing I think I'm most proud of is within a year.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I have been saying American dynamism for a long time, but I said this practice has to be named American Dynamism. And when people ask us what it is, it is a very clear meme. We're investing in companies that are supporting the national interest. Full stop. And we're not going to be ashamed about it. Again, it was, you know, it was 2022. It was before Russia invaded Ukraine. We're not going to be ashamed of it. But by their nature, these companies have to sell to the DOD. They sell to the DoD before they sell to other countries. They're not global companies. They are American companies. They are very different than the software that sells all over the world that can operate on the internet. These are physical different things. And we have to be very clear with our language that these are American companies. And the investor class, I think, was stunned, mainly because a lot of our rival firms were still investing in China. They had still made so much money in China, and this is a whole other story. But when we said America, it was like we planted.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About it publicly. So we announced the thesis, and I've never seen such an explosion. Like to me, this was probably the biggest moment in my career of seeing like the number of people emailing me, retweeting it, saying like, this is where Silicon Valley is going. And within six months, the term American dynamism had become this kind of hilarious internet meme. It was everywhere. People were using it as a joke. People were using it as, hey, I'm an American dynamism company. Investors were raising funds off of it saying we want an American dynamism practice. We ended up raising a very large fund to invest in the category. And it really like the thing I think I'm most proud of because it was a huge shock. It wasn't a shock to engineers. It wasn't a shock to the veterans, but it was a huge shock to the investor class when we said the word America.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And building for the physical world. So it's critical minerals, it's aerospace, it's defense, it's infrastructure, logistics, all of the things that touch the physical world. And so it was actually January 2022. It was three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. I just joined the firm. I put out this manifesto called American Dynamism. And I wrote about how the next 25 years are going to be these categories. And named companies like Andrew, you know, we'd already invested in those companies, knew them very well, but I said you're already seeing so many extraordinary engineers leaving these companies and wanting to build new versions of Andrew, new versions of SpaceX, right? Like building the next generation of aerospace and defense, public safety, like the entire public safety field has been completely transformed by technology. And we have great companies that are operating with police forces across the country doing really important work using machine learning and AI. And it's, you know, we were seeing this, but it was sort of this kind of secret. People hadn't been talking.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was such a small group of people who were competing to get on the same deals. He called me one day after we had dinner with Mark, and he was like, do you just want to come do it here? Like, just come here. Come here and build, help build, like let's build a practice together around these ideas. And so, you know, I always give major credit to Mark and David for having the foresight of saying, hey, like, this is a real thing. Because a lot of people didn't think it was real. A lot of people thought, okay, yeah, you'll have an androil, but there's only going to be one andural. You'll have a SpaceX. There's only going to be one SpaceX. But all of these other young companies, you know, the Dinos of the world, the Shield AIs, like these companies, they're, you know, we only need one of each. And our view is like, no, this is the next 10, 20, 30 years of American innovation. If the first 25 years of the second American century, right, 2,000 to 2025, if that was investing in apps, investing in software, software eating the world, the next 25 years are taking all of that software.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lot longer. I mean, for someone, so I can say there were a handful of us, you've had Joe on, you've had Pomeran, you've had people on who, you know, Sham at Palantir, like, right, there's a handful of people who I think have been sort of saying the same things over and over and over again about like it is okay to build for government. It's okay. My own sort of kind of experience of where I saw just a huge change is I, you know, I was having lots of conversations with Mark Andreessen, who's the founder of our firm about a lot of the issues that were happening in Silicon Valley. And I kind of told him, I said, I think that this category of investment is not just, you know, it's not just one-off companies. It's not just going to be SpaceX and Andrew, but there's going to be an explosion of these companies. And this was during COVID. So I wrote this memo for him. I ended up joining the firm. My partner, David Ulovich and I, we always joked, we were sort of competing for the same companies.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Against all of the wokeism and sort of rigid orthodoxy of how you have to act. And that kind of opened up the way for American dynamism. Because I really think that the companies that are building these hard things in the physical world, like they just want to put their head down and build. They don't want to talk politics. They don't want to know who you voted for. They really just want to build hard things and they care about the country. And it's like they care about the mission they are working on.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he's like, he'll say it publicly. That's the best thing he's ever done because those are the 6% of people who were causing a lot of problems. And the same can be said about Google and Project Maven. It's only a tiny portion of people inside of a massive company. You know, I think it was like 2% or 1%, less than 1% of people signed the Project Maven letter and walk out. We're not going to work with the DoD. But that can cause so much damage to a company. If a company allows the activist class to control them. So I think the thing that people learn from watching Elon just completely remake Twitter. And now that, and Brian, Brian at Coinbase really say like, hey, see the door, is I think a lot of founders are now saying, hey, we can work on these hard problems. We also don't have to be beholden to an activist class. We have free speech now. We can say what we want on X, right? Like, we're not going to get in trouble if you're not going to get reported to HR if you say the wrong name of someone or something wrong word. And I think that was happening at the same time, sort of the backlash.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, get out of college, they think they're activists, they go work at a company and they want to be activists. They don't want to do the work of the company, which is to build an app or to write a story. They want to go there and they want to shake up the company. They want to be activists inside the company. And what really changed. If you want to be an activist, and it was during BLM and just after Me Too, and he said, if you're going to be an activist, you can go somewhere else. Our mission is to focus on crypto. It's to focus on ensuring that we have the best customer support and that we serve our customers who are interested in crypto and we expand that customer base. And if you care about anything else at this company, you can walk out the door. And he lost, I think, 6% of his company that day.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. I mean, like, that's why when Elon bought Twitter, I mean, he was saying we could fire 75% of the people at Twitter and the service still ran. Still ran perfectly, right? What were these people doing? Well, they were deplatforming people or they were the trust and safety team, making sure that things on Twitter were fine, right? Like still massive problems at Twitter. I mean, like, like there were still ridiculous amounts of porn and child pornography on Twitter that they didn't deal with when they were there, right? It was, but Elon got in and saw, he's like, this is completely backwards. We need one-fourth of the people who are here. We need great engineers and we need to solve the real problems at this platform. And we need to have free speech. So in some ways, it's like a lot of these companies got really fat. The business models were good. They were really bloated. But people weren't working. And what were they doing? They were becoming activists. And I do think there's, you know, across, it's not just tech. It certainly was happening at the tail end of my time at the Washington Post. But, you know, a lot of these young people go.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly the culture wars that were being fought all of big tech. Even big tech has gotten sick of it. You know, it's like you kind of see Mark Zuckerberg has completely changed his tune on a lot of things. He's kind of gone, you know, he said the culture became too feminized at Facebook. I mean, what he's really saying is we became way too radical. We became way too hall monitor in our views of social media and free speech. And so I think...”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, they became so radicalized about certain ideas and viewpoints that they would start completely deplatforming people who misgendered someone or deplatforming the president of the United States after 2020 election. So it's like the sort of radicalization of Silicon Valley, I think, was happening at the same time that you had this other shift happening, which was, you know, things are going radical. A lot of people, you know, have their sort of extremist, I would say, liberal beliefs. But then you have sort of a backlash to it. And I would say like Andrew in many cases was a huge backlash to it where it's like, hey, we just want to build stuff for our country. We're not Democrats. We're not Republicans. We're just a bunch of engineers who want to build hard things and we want to put our heads down and work. And I actually think that's kind of the underpinning of the American dynamism movement. It's like people got sick of the culture wars.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twitter headquartered itself in San Francisco in 2009. And you saw a lot of tech workers sort of moving to the city. And San Francisco was one of the most radical, most open sort of kind of iconoclastic cultural cities in the world. It's its own weird culture. Anything goes, you know, you kind of get these radical sort of cult-like experiences. There's a great book about San Francisco called Season of the Witch, and it talks about how like the spirit of San Francisco has always been sort of this people joining cults, the hippie movement. Like these are the most radical people in the world. And you meld that with the tech people who are also sort of iconoclastic and they're also sort of, you know, like, again, like they go to schools like Berkeley or, you know, Harvard or places and they get these sort of radical ideas and it's like, okay, we're going to bring that into the company. And Twitter actually, I think, became kind of the iconic example of this where.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The big companies of the last generation. Twitter, yeah, the people who are working there weren't sort of the Yes, they had sort of the cracked engineers, right? But then you also had sort of this keyboard class, this sort of keyboard warrior where it was really, really sexy to work in tech. It became sort of the sexy dominant thing coming out of these sort of prestigious schools. And I think they brought a lot of sort of the kind of liberal sort of liberal trends, liberal fads into the companies that looked very different than what tech was in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. And it was really before it was these hardware engineers, these guys who just really wanted to build things, right? And then when you kind of get into post-internet and the app culture, it really became something totally different. At the same time, what was also happening in Silicon Valley is, you know, Silicon Valley is about 40 minutes south of San Francisco. So the kind of hubs for Facebook and different places and Google, they're down in what's known as the South Bay. But San Francisco is, you know, it really wasn't a tech city until like 2009, 2010.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started seeing a lot of these really talented, really bright, but sort of indoctrinated, like Ivy League types come out to Silicon Valley. And they brought with them sort of this same thing that the journalists have, the same sort of activism, the same sort of, I have a certain set of beliefs about how the world works. And I'm going to bring that into the company culture. Google was really the kind of, you know, they encouraged it. They were sort of bring your whole self to work. Like, you know, it's like we have laundry here and we have, you know, free gyms, all sorts of free perks for you to stay here constantly and work. But it was really like a bring your wholesome self to work kind of identity thing. And a lot of sort of the kind of, I think, kind of radical activism were seen on campuses now, but really have seen for like the last 10 years got imported into Silicon Valley with Facebook, with Google, and with these sort of what we call app companies, sort of the kind of Web 2.0, you know, the.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Venture backed big companies and then Intel that type of engineer he was an Iowa farm boy. It was sort of the people who put a man on the moon. Those types of engineers were sort of the old school Silicon Valley. And I always think something really shift. Sometimes people point to like the early 2000s. I think Silicon Valley really shifted for a couple of reasons. The first reason I think it shifted was kind of post Facebook. So Facebook started in 2004 and Harvard dorm room. A bunch of kids went out, then a bunch of Stanford kids joined it. But what I think Facebook did, it was sort of the first company alongside of Google, was they made tech sexy for a certain type of worker that is not technical, that goes to fancy school. It used to be if you went to a Harvard or Yale, you'd go work on Wall Street. You would go work in investment banking or something. And around like 2008, 2009, that's when.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, five years, I think a lot of things have changed about how Silicon Valley not only views America. How people view Business opportunity, but also the mission. So I think talked about how Ukraine really did change everything for these young engineers, but there was this culture, and this is a longstanding culture, you know, say from 2000 all the way up until Andrew even existed, where there was a belief that you could not sell into the Department of Defense. Like functionally because of the procurement process, it would be impossible for startups, again, that are working on these 18-month timelines, if they take capital, they're supposed to get big as quickly as possible, and hire more people and grow, that they would hit the valley of death of the DoD and it would be impossible for them to break through. So you had a kind of a financial class, but also founder class that just really didn't think about the DOD. And then it was also sort of this interesting time in Silicon Valley. And I think a lot of people look at kind of the old school Silicon Valley. Bob Noyce sort of the Fairchild Semiconductor, which was one of the earliest kind of”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By Palmer, where they just know how to manufacture things. And it's been extraordinary to watch the number of young people who spend a couple years at a great company. Palantir has this tradition as well where it's like it just mints founders of new companies that operate in the government space. So it's like one, you have winners, two, you have the customers changed his view. And then the last thing that I think really changed was COVID happened. I think people sort of lifted their head and said, okay, like something is wrong with America. And people started really thinking about how do you, how do you solve real problems? And then right after that, the Russian invasion, Ukraine, that changed everything for a young generation of engineers who had never seen war, right? Like they, again, they're like 20 years old. They'd have no memory of September 11th. They maybe had no exposure to military, but like they're watching how FPB drones are being used on the Ukrainian battlefield.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Defense Innovation Unit. So it was the DOD initiative of we have to make, again, it was as much a relationship initiative. Now it's a contracting initiative. They actually have real budget and the third iteration of how it's structured. But in the beginning, it was like, we just got to go out and like introduce ourselves to these people and show them who we are, show them what we care about. These are the things we understand, again, people on the ground, understand the technologies that are being built, really create a kind of real communication. And so, you know, you had the DoD really focused on this. Then you had winners in Silicon Valley, people who had been at SpaceX for 10 years leaving and saying, well, maybe I'll start a company in Deep Tech or Hard Tech or physical world and what should I do? Well, maybe defense is where I want to do it. Maybe I want to do another aerospace company. Maybe I want to build a nuclear company. And so you just had this exodus of extraordinary talent who had all been trained by Elon. And now it's happening with Anderil too, all been trained.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source