Why Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, & David Ulevitch Launched American Dynamism

David Ulevitch, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), who co-leads the firm’s American Dynamism practice with Katherine Boyle joins Sourcery to break down America’s comeback. With the encouragement of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the $600M fund was founded around 2020 to invest in companies that support the national interest: aerospace, defense, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, industrials, and manufacturing. David shares how American Dynamism evolved from a meme to a movement within a16z, inspired by Marc and Ben’s early conviction at Netscape that the next wave of great technology companies would serve the national interest. From early investments like Anduril, Flock Safety, and Hadrian, to a16z’s growing policy arm in Washington D. C., David reveals how the firm is bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and the national mission, and why he believes private capital must lead the next American resurgence. We discuss: ​The story behind American Dynamism’s rise​The private capital boom powering national resilience​JP Morgan’s $1.5T “Security & Resiliency” initiative​AI’s role across defense, logistics, and manufacturing​Why venture capital must “fund freedom like our lives depend on it.” Key Points ​Why Marc & Ben backed David & Katherine for a national mission. American Dynamism was born from the belief that Silicon Valley’s greatest founders should again build for the public good, across defense, energy, manufacturing, & more.​From meme to $600M fund. What began as a thesis between David Ulevitch and Katherine Boyle became a $600M dedicated fund and a defining pillar of a16z’s vision for national resilience.​Private capital is America’s new resource. a16z’s model funds R&D independently while enabling the government to buy finished products, accelerating innovation & cutting red tape.​AI is reshaping the foundations. From Anduril’s Eagle Eye headset to swarm drones and AI-powered logistics, technology is redefining how America powers, protects, and scales.​The reindustrialization flywheel is spinning. With JP Morgan’s $1.5T initiative and growing investor conviction, national resilience is no longer niche, it’s a generational investment frontier. David Ulevitch: https://x.com/davidu Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea%E2%81%A0 Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc https://x.com/sourceryvc%E2%81%A0 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 ​Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery ​Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery ​Carta https://carta.com/sourcery—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by 65,000+ companies in 160+ countries, Carta’s platform of software & services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. https://carta.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) David Ulevitch (01:54) The origin story of American Dynamism (05:23) Why Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz backed the idea early (03:30) Partnering with Katherine Boyle, from rivals to co-leads (06:14) From meme to movement (07:00) Why venture returns exist in defense, energy, & infrastructure (07:11) The new supply-and-demand moment for American industry (11:00) Building a policy bridge between D. C. & Silicon Valley (15:29) Fixing defense procurement, the “bake-off” model (17:15) Private capital as America’s innovation engine (20:02) JP Morgan’s $1.5T commitment & what it signals (20:30) China, supply chains, & the race for energy independence (22:12) The new late-stage capital environment for defense tech (24:05) How AI is transforming defense, logistics, and public safety (27:42) Closing reflections, why Marc, Ben, & David see this as a generational project

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The pitch for Mark and Ben was if I came to Anderson Horowitz, I could do whatever I wanted. A year after I joined, Mark asked me if I wanted to meet Palmer. And Anduril even then was very unapologetic that they were a defense company. They were trying to build the next great defense prime. Mark and Ben have always been super supportive of supporting the government and the national interest. People don't know this, but back at Netscape, they helped pioneer SSL, like the little encryption icon in your web browser to do secure encrypted communications. In 2018, Google had bailed out of Project Maven, and there was a big protest inside of Google, and people decided they wanted to participate.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  We believe in the romance of technology, of industry, the romance. The arrows of the train, the car, the electrical light, the skyscraper, the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom. We believe in adventure, undertaking the hero's journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons and bringing home the spoils for our community. We believe that we have been and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. This is a really key point today.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Beginning of 2022, we launched the American Dynamism Practice. It was like a meme that was becoming a movement. We were just like borrowing venture dollars for it. Very shortly after that, we raised the first American Dynamism Fund.

• 1:06Molly O'Shea?

  Private capital is now flowing in massively. JP Morgan is going to commit $1.5 trillion towards the category.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  The one and a half trillion is a huge amount of money. And I think they went out of their way not to use the words dynamism, even though it's obviously American dynamism. And I think what you see with the JP Morgan announcement is just now broad scale recognition that we need to be invested in these areas. And I think there's going to be incredible returns for the investors.

• 1:40Molly O'Shea?

  David Yulovich, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Thanks, Molly.

• 1:44Molly O'Shea?

  Long time coming.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we've known each other a long time. But I generally don't do podcasts.

• 1:50Molly O'Shea?

  Well, thank you for joining this one.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:52Molly O'Shea?

  We've got a lot to talk about.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:54Molly O'Shea?

  We have American Dynamism, we have this new JP Morgan deal. I want to go deeper into Anduril, and then we can also talk about your founding of Open DNS.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 2:04Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  A lot to cover.

• 2:05Molly O'Shea?

  A lot to cover. So to start, let's break down the American Dynamism Fund, when this started, how you got Mark involved, how you got even the buy-in to start this.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Sure. There's a bunch of different answers and they're all true as to how the American dynamism practiced and now fun started. The original, I would say I joined the firm in 2018. In 2019, you have to remember that era of 2018. This is when, in 2018, Google had bailed out of Project Maven, which was a government partnership to support advanced computing and advanced software like AI in the Department of Defense. And there was a big protest inside of Google and people decided they didn't want to participate and Google bailed out of it. And this is after Silicon Valley had had basically its original founding story and origin of like helping the government with the best technology. And now you had a company like Google basically bailing out of supporting the government.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Palmer Lucky, a few years earlier, had left Meta, had been accused of like being some like major right wing financier. It turned out it was $9,000 for one billboard once. And none of it was true, but like it was a big scandal and he was sort of treated like a pariah and not as like this genius founder of Oculus. So that was like the circumstances of 2018. I joined Andreessen Horowitz. The pitch from Mark and Ben was if I came to Andreessen Horowitz, I could do whatever I wanted. That was a very good pitch. And a year after I joined, Mark asked me if I wanted to meet Palmer and Brian and the team at Anduril. And I won't, I won't speak for Mark, but I think he was skeptical that the firm would get excited about a defense deal. And Anduril even then was very unapologetic that they were a defense company and they

• 3:45Speaker 00

  were trying to build the next great defense prime. So I went down to Anduril's offices. I'd already decided I wanted to do the deal and this was their Series B. And when I went down there, I met Katherine Boyle, who was at a rival firm, at General Catalyst. And she thought she was going to do the Series B. And so the way we met was we ended up having to split the Series B, which Anduril sort of like brokered. They're like, okay, well you both should just do half. I think she was very unhappy with that outcome. So like our first meeting was not, we didn't get off on the best foot. She has like a funny version of that story. I won't, I won't tell it. I'll save, I'll save it for another time. You can interview her.

• 4:24Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  And anyway, but that was the beginning and because Andrew was a good investment, as you know, in venture, if you make a good first investment in a category, that can kind of give you the leash to go make other investments. And so then, fast forward to 2021, and I invested in a company called Flock Safety. And this is another one where I know Catherine was like around the hoop and was interested. And I think Garrett, the CEO of Flock Safety, called her the night before she was supposed to have Flock pitch to the General Catalyst team. And it was like, oh, the deal got done. Like, I'm going with Yulovich and Andreessen Horowitz and David George on the growth team. And she was like, you know, like, damn, that's terrible. Like, foiled again, twice. But Garrett's like, hey, maybe you should talk to Yulovich, and maybe the two of you should join forces. So

• 5:10Speaker 00

  actually, Garrett Langley at Flock Safety sort of reconnected Catherine and I. I reached out to her and I said, hey, look, Mark and Ben have always been super supportive of supporting the government, the national interest. They, Mark has been super involved, even from back in the Netscape days. Like, people don't know this, but back at Netscape, they helped pioneer SSL, like the little encryption icon in your web browser, to do secure encrypted communications. And so like, Ben is a product manager, Mark is the founder of Netscape. Like, even back then, they were building technology that was really important for our government to have secure communications. They've always been supportive of that general philosophy. And so, at the end of 2021, I reached out to Catherine and said, hey,

• 5:53Speaker 00

  I think we should join forces rather than be competitors. Let's make this a full-throated effort. And Mark was like, at that point, fully fired up on it. Really, like, we had, there was a lunch we did at Mark's house with Catherine, me, and Mark. And Mark was just like, everything that I said that I promised Catherine, like, Mark was like, yes, and, you know, and more. And so she joined at the end of 2021. And the beginning of 2022, we launched the American Dynamism Practice. It wasn't a fun then. You know, as Catherine would say, it was like a meme that was becoming a movement. And we announced that we had committed all this money to it, but we actually had no fun. We were just like borrowing venture dollars for it. But it's turned out that our timing was excellent because the world is getting spicier.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  You know, the firm at that point was fully bought in, like Androl was doing great, Flock was doing great.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  And so Catherine had joined and very shortly after that, we decided we wanted to raise a fund. We'd raise, we raised the first American Dynamism Fund, it was six hundred and sixty million dollars. And then we're now actually getting ready to go do our second fund.

• 7:00Molly O'Shea?

  So you have a background in software and cybersecurity. This is not a traditional venture capital category. How did you get the conviction to go after this to get venture returns? How does that work?

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you have to look at when there's these moments, like I always think of things as supply and demand. And you have to look at when there's these moments when there's technological shifts. So obviously, the defense industry has existed for a long time. But we're now entering an era where you have much more advanced technologies. So AI, things that drive that, like computer vision, autonomy, much lower cost of hardware, commodity hardware. So motors, manufacturing, production costs, all these things that can now be put into these legacy categories that previously had not been disrupted by advanced technology. And where software can have a demonstrable impact on not just production time and margins, but even on the quality of the outcome.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  And so Androl fully appreciated that and understood that, that you could take essentially commodity hardware, even though they're making, you know, their own solutions, they're using commodity hardware for most of the things. Now, now they're making, using much more advanced hardware and bespoke hardware. But originally, it was largely commodity hardware. Their first Sentry Tower was essentially off the shelf parts that they put together with very advanced software. They built a coordination layer called Lattice. And they said that we can do something to provide perimeter security that never existed before. And so, yeah, when you have these moments where you're at a technology transformation moment, that really changes the supply side, where you have a lot more capability in technology. And we'll talk about the founders and talent side of the supply side of the equation in a second.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  But that really meant that we could change the way that we were providing solutions. To the government. And then on the demand side, the government was at this watershed moment where they just recognized. And now it's a foregone conclusion, but even, you know, four or five years ago, the government was starting to wake up and realize like, wait a minute, we cannot do things the way we've done things in the past. And you had COVID that highlighted all these supply chain issues where we all of a sudden realized like, wait a minute. It whether it's caused by a pandemic or caused by economic sanctions or other tariff issues or trade issues. We cannot rely on either adversaries or allies that are an ocean away supplying us with our critical raw ingredients we need to make things.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  And our adversaries are getting much more capable, much stronger. And so we need to be able to like buy things in a different way. We need to buy different things. And so the demand side changed as well. And we're now seeing that play out in a bunch of categories. So defense is a huge one. Space is another one. Obviously, we've been in space for a long time, but not in the way we are now. It is absolutely a new battle space. It's key for communications. It's key for observability. It's key for full awareness of what's happening around the globe and what's happening in space. And now as you and then public safety is another example of a category where, you know, obviously policing has been done in many of the same ways for decades and decades and decades. But now you have AI that can dramatically change the way you do investigations,

• 10:04Speaker 00

  change the way you catch criminals, change, change, change the way that so many things happen that really improve police objectivity, improve the public safety. And so the demand side has just exploded in a need for new solutions. And then on the supply side, in addition to having all these new technologies and new capabilities, you actually have a base of talent that didn't exist before. All these people coming out of companies that sort of paved the way like Talenteer, Tesla, SpaceX are now having all these alumni that are leaving and starting great companies. I mean, the founders of Anduril came from Talenteer, came from Oculus. And so it's really just we are at a unique moment in time where

• 10:46Speaker 00

  the the demands are high, the supply is there, and we can put them together with private capital.

• 10:51Molly O'Shea?

  Constructing this fund is also a little bit more complicated than a normal fund because of how close it is to regulatory environment and all the different kinds of policies and going closer to DC. We've seen in the last years, uh, last couple of years, especially with the new administration, this like really great connectivity between Silicon Valley and DC. But I'm curious from more of a structural standpoint, like how did you set up the fund? And how do you help these companies with policy?

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, look, we, I love working with entrepreneurs. Catherine loves working with entrepreneurs. Having a fund that is sized appropriately for the size of the opportunity has always been important to us. We think our opportunity set is actually just getting bigger. Uh, and there's more categories that we want to make sure we can make investments in. But a part of that is also making sure that we have the resources to support our companies. And Washington is a really important place to do that. The firm has always been founded on this practice of how do we build the firm that we wish we had when we were entrepreneurs? And most of the leadership and Andreessen Horowitz, we're either founders of companies, ran companies, have technical backgrounds, um, from Ben and Mark all the, all the way across the board.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Uh, and so we know, and like I raised money for my own company, Ben and Mark raised money a couple of different times, uh, Martin Casado raised money, Alex, you know, et cetera. And so we know what it's like to have a venture firm that's just treated, treats you like a financier, like they just give you the money and then you're off on your own. We think there's a better way. And so one of the things we've done in the American Dynamism Fund without, you know, being too much of a shell, but obviously I want to sell my own book, I think it's a very good book, um, is we've built out a policy team in DC. And there's work that we're really trying to advance that will benefit not just our companies, but all companies that are trying to build for the national interest. And ultimately, we think will benefit America. Um, and I'm of the belief that anything that benefits America benefits our allies and,

• 12:41Speaker 00

  and you know, uh, democracy in the whole, the whole world. Um, I'm sure that'll get like memed as a quote that will make fun of me later, like, oh, venture capital is saving the world.

• 12:50Molly O'Shea?

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• 13:35Molly O'Shea?

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• 14:19Molly O'Shea?

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• 15:02Molly O'Shea?

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• 15:13Speaker 00

  But the the idea of doing work in Washington is that there are structural problems, whether it's in defense procurement, whether it's in how the selection process goes, how the appropriations process goes, and there's work that we can do. How, I mean, you see this with some of the DOGE effort, like, how do you make sure you have the right people in the right jobs and not have the wrong people in the wrong jobs? There's just a lot of work that structurally has to change in Washington. And so we have a policy team that is really helping to understand the issues and then advance changes from a legislative standpoint or from an education standpoint to drive those changes. So defense procurement, I would say, is the biggest issue for the AD fund.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  There's a ton of work happening in AI and in crypto elsewhere in the firm, and they all work together hand in hand to try to have a unified view to advance, you know, not just the interests of our firm, but what we think are the interests of all startups across the country.

• 16:10Molly O'Shea?

  How do the capital commitments from the government then bleed into this or like collaborate with these kinds of investments? Because there have been really big commitments.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think, you know, people, so the government wants to create a, like, a culture of accountability, and that comes with a lot of challenges, actually. And those challenges are better solved with private capital. So an example is if the government gives you $50 million for an R and D project to go try to create a prototype of something, they want to make sure you're spending the money wisely. So that $50 million comes with a ton of overhead of auditing, accounting, tons of oversight. And as a taxpayer, that feels totally appropriate, but it's so burdensome for a small company, it's almost impossible for these small companies to cope with that level of oversight. And so that's why, most of the time, these big contracts just go to the primes, and the

• 17:02Speaker 00

  primes have all this structural kind of systems built up to deal with that. So they love the system, they love the oversight, they love, and by the way, they just charge more for the contracts because they have all this overhead and accounting and auditing that happens, and then ultimately results in a poor experience for the taxpayer because we don't get the best products, we don't get them quickly, and we don't get them on budget. Where private capital instead is, I think, a much better alternative, is we say, look, If you don't pay for the R and D, you just buy the finished product. All you have to do is commit to buying the finished product. We'll fund the R and D and you can get rid of all the auditing and accounting and constant oversight that you provide because that's our job is private capital. We'll make sure that we're good stewards of our capital and our investors' capital.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  But you can save the government so much money and we are better pickers of who's going to deliver great technology than the government is. And that's because we've been doing it a lot longer. We know the founders, we're able to evaluate them. That's like our entire existence as investors. And so I think private capital is just a much better model. And all we need from the government is we don't need them to fund R and D. We need them to commit to buying outcomes and buying solutions. And so what like one of the defense reforms we're pushing is that it's very common in defense procurement to say, or even any kind of government procurement to say, what have you delivered in the past is an important criteria for deciding if you get awarded a contract for the future. But a lot of startups haven't delivered anything in the past.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  And so then it really benefits the legacy incumbents and doesn't give a chance for a startup to deliver. And so we were pushing for changes and say, hey, look, why don't you do bake offs? Why don't you do competitions? And if a startup shows up with the best product, just pick that one. That's one example. Another example is the government often says, we're going to appropriate money for this specific product. When what they should really say is we're going to appropriate money for something that solves this problem and then let the actual customer, whether it's SOCOM or Indopaycom or the intelligence community, whatever it is, let them decide what the right solution is. And then again, hold a bake off, hold a competition, hold an RFP and get the right solution.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  But don't appropriate specific, exact, precise products from a specific vendor. But instead just focus on what are the solutions and let the customer at the time that they need to actually buy it, decide what the right solution is. Because those things change. If you look at the war in the Ukraine, you'll see that like the the evolution of drone warfare on the battlefield has changed dramatically. If you look at the government's appropriations from five years ago, there was nothing about like a very little about like attributable drones. And electronic warfare to deal with the massive influx of drones that are being sent at soldiers. But that's what the people on the battlefield need today, and they want solutions for that today. And so you need to have an appropriations process that actually is geared toward being able to produce those kinds of solutions.

• 19:54Molly O'Shea?

  Private capital is now flowing in massively. There is just like a swath coming in now that.

• 20:02Molly O'Shea?

  A pretty big deal, but JP Morgan just committed or is going to commit 1.5 trillion dollars towards the category.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  The one and a half trillion is like a huge amount of capital. It's a huge amount of money. And I think that what we're seeing is an American, and I think they went out of their way not to use the words dynamism. People sometimes don't want to call it American dynamism, even though it's obviously American dynamism. But I think that this movement is really taking hold. And I think that it's taken hold for a bunch of reasons. One is that there's just increasing realization, whether you look at what's happening in the Ukraine, or you look at what's happening from across the Pacific Ocean and China. Their ability to build ships is much, much faster than ours. A lot of the raw materials we need for our own ship building comes from China, the steel and many of the metals. A lot of the things we need for batteries, for motors, for a lot of the, a lot of the ingredients we need to actually make the drones we want to make and

• 20:55Speaker 00

  autonomous vehicles we want to make. They all come from China. And so it's not just about defense procurement, but as we like looked, if we look a little bit to the left, what we see is like, oh, wait a minute, we need batteries. We need batteries for lots of things. We have like this insatiable thirst to electrify our world, whether it's AI compute, electric vehicles, home, home energy resilience. It doesn't matter. We need batteries. And if they all come from China and we ever get into a real conflict with China, whether it's an economic conflict or an actual kinetic conflict, like they're going to cut us off. And so we need to have resilience for those things. And I think what you see with the J P Morgan announcement is just now broad scale recognition that we need to be investing in these areas. And in fact, private capital is one of the best ways to do that.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  And I think there's going to be incredible returns for the investors who do that, whether it's mining, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics and production components, robotics, autonomy, you name it, plus all the categories we already invest in, defense, space, public safety, energy, et cetera.

• 21:59Molly O'Shea?

  One of the biggest bottlenecks for these types of companies was always late-stage capital. Does this now give your LPs and your different investors more security or at least confidence in playing the long game with this?

• 22:12Speaker 00

  It certainly should. I think that, you know, the LPs often bring up like, what is the exit going to look like for these companies? And I think it's a good question to ask and it's one that we take seriously. What we're already seeing in the market is, A, these companies are ramping their revenue faster than companies have in these categories ever before. The opportunity size keeps getting larger and larger and larger. And while it's like, and we're also seeing companies going public. And so I think that we're at a moment now where I worry less every day about the exit outcomes for these companies. I mean, obviously, it's something we care about. We make investments to ultimately get liquidity. But when you look at a company like SpaceX that's still private, I think now investors recognize, and they, you know, they just had an incredible launch yesterday.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Like, I think now investors recognize this is one of the transformative companies in this country, and a dollar invested in SpaceX is a dollar put to a good place. And I think the same is true for many of these other categories and many of these other companies. So I hope that LPs see it that way. I hope that they see that it's not just a good investment, but it's also, like, for me, it's not just a good investment, but and it's not even just that it's good for America. But if you actually don't have these foundational components that are rock solid here in this country, everything else falls apart. Like, all the B two B SaaS falls apart, all the ad click optimization tools fall apart. Like, if you don't have a strong democracy, if you don't have a strong economy and a strong country, like, all the stuff on top falls apart.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  You need to have public safety, you need to have defense, you need to have energy reliability. And so I think all these things are actually critical, even for all the stuff that just sits on top that we all benefit from.

• 23:51Molly O'Shea?

  How has AI impacted this category? Karta has some incredible data on this that forty-one percent of companies seen in Serie A, Series A are all AI. Quote-unquote AI companies.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:03Molly O'Shea?

  But how does this impact this category? Since that's like such a large driver of, let's say, investments and then also like new teams.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  So I think you can look from any dimension and recognize that AI is transforming all of these categories as it should. So if you started at the most fundamental level, like energy, we just have an insatiable thirst for energy in this country and AI compute is driving a huge amount of it. Part of the shift to electric vehicles, obviously we have EVs today, but as we shift to more autonomous vehicles, all those vehicles are going to be electric as well. And so that drives it as well. People now recognize, you see that natural disasters are getting worse and people want more resilience in the grid. So they want to have home battery systems so that when the grid is either too expensive or offline, their home can stay online.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  And so you see more and more people deploying batteries. So like, energy need, like AI is driving this massive energy boom in this country. And I think I've seen a chart where commercial real estate construction is like petered off and dropping, but like data center construction is like just asymptoting, you know, and going through the roof. And that's all being driven by AI compute. And that AI compute will then power lots of, lots of things. It's not just going to power ChatGPT. But it's going to power autonomy systems, all kinds of other language models and all other kinds of use cases. Then if you look at defense, computer vision transforming the battlefield. Andorall had an announcement yesterday, something called Eagle Eye, which is their new body worn headset. That is like, like, I don't know if it's commodity optics or specialized optics, but

• 25:35Speaker 00

  it's definitely very advanced AI software in a way that the warfighter has never been able to utilize in the past. And this will save lives for the men and women who serve. It will also make us the most, most, you know, I would say, like you, you want our forces to be the most like capable forces out on the battlefield so that they can win decisive victories. And so having AI to augment the warfighter will help them tremendously. You see this in drones. For one pilot to control like their little like hobbyist DJI drone if they want. They shouldn't use a DJI drone, but like we know, we know they do. But as we start moving to swarms of drones, thousands of drones, you're going to need AI to coordinate all those things. So it's transforming the way we think of drone warfare.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Whether it's from a kinetic standpoint, or even just like an ISR, like search and reconnaissance standpoint. Autonomy is going to transform all of that. Then you see AI transforming even just logistics. One thing that, like, we have a company called Aerospace Intelligence. And you read about how like the FAA needs rapid modernization. Well, Aerospace Intelligence does flight operations and planning using AIs. You can have the most efficient flight planning, save the most amount of fuel, make sure that the least amount of flights get canceled. And right now, a lot of that kind of work for airlines happens in spreadsheets. But Aerospace Intelligence uses AI to do it all programmatically and automatically. And so there's just, there's all these categories where AI is just transformative. I'll give you one more example, in public safety.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  We've had license plate reading cameras for a long time in public safety, but they've never been very good. Flock Safety uses AI to be able to do like free form search. You can say, instead of saying, you know, like, you, you might know that a, a car robbed a ga- like a car pulled up and robbed a gas station. But the camera of the gas station is so crappy, you can't read the license plate because they have like bad cameras. But instead you can say, oh, that's like a silver Camry with aftermarket rims and a spoiler. Well, that AI can take that text and then go through it to a full image search and find the right silver Camry. That helps police, they don't pull over the wrong silver Camry. It obviously helps communities because it gets criminals off the street. And so AI is just transforming all of these industries dramatically, and you know, we're all the beneficiaries.

• 27:42Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc. Where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.