Katherine Boyle: How Tech Can Rebuild America

Why does seriousness feel radical today? a16z General Partner Katherine Boyle joins The LaBossiere Podcast to explore what it means to build for the national interest—and why that starts with purpose. Katherine, part of the American Dynamism team at a16z, shares how we got to a place where public service became uncool, how tech can help rebuild trust in government, and why suffering, friction, and responsibility are essential ingredients for growth. From the collapse of civic duty to the rise of meme-driven politics, they dig into the cultural forces shaping America—and the opportunity to reclaim a sense of mission. They also discuss why Silicon Valley is more idea than place, what journalists and investors have in common, and why being laughed at might be the clearest sign you’re on the right path.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today's episode is a feature from the Le Boisier podcast and features A16Z general partner Katherine Boyle. She's a part of our American Dynamism Practice investing in companies that support the national interest across defense, manufacturing, education, and more. In this conversation Catherine shares why she believes seriousness and purpose are underrated in today's culture, how tech can help rebuild trust in our institutions, and what it means to make government cool again. Let's get into it.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.

• 0:58Katherine Boyle?

  I think a society that completely tries to remove suffering from every part of our existence, and this is, I think, something tech has to deal with too, where the whole point of creating tech is to remove friction. And we're trying to create this sort of frictionless society, and suffering is innate. It's what gives us character, it's what gives us resilience. If you have a childhood and an adolescence trying to remove any aspect of suffering and human nature from your experience, you not grow up. You remain a child. It leads to people just fumbling around in their twenties, acting as though they're still children, and it leads to a society in which we still treat 30-year-olds as though they're kids.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  That is Katherine Boyle. She's a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of the firm's American Dynamism Practice, which invests in companies supporting the national interest across aerospace, defense, manufacturing, energy, logistics, and critical infrastructure. To me, Catherine is a visionary. She was investing in defense technology before it was socially acceptable, let alone a consensus category. And more importantly, saw Silicon Valley, particularly post-COVID, for what it had become. Not a place, but an idea. And that the next generation of great companies would be built outside the physical and ideological confines of the Bay Area.

• 2:25Katherine Boyle?

  I knew something like Anduril was going to be an extraordinary company. And Silicon Valley, friends, colleagues, you know, people at other venture firms were telling me, one, I was an idiot, or worse, I was a fascist. But I do think it just took a long time. One, if there's greenfield places to build, that's always where people, I think, choose to build. But I think it took a long time for people to say, wow, like, there's the capital that can build these categories. There's examples of success. And I think now people are just realizing that actually there's really unique attributes of the moat that you can build in these companies that allow you to scale to extraordinary sizes.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Unsurprisingly, her ability to stand by her most unconventional ideas as an investor comes from an unconventional background. Before becoming an investor in San Francisco, Catherine was a reporter at The Washington Post, bringing with her a deep understanding of DC and the fundamental differences between the two coasts, making her a rare bridge between Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley. Perhaps most importantly, she highlights that over the last number of decades, we've seen a decline in public service that's led to a huge talent drain in government and a decay of many of our public institutions that's only now beginning to be addressed by the private sector and broadly making government cool again.

• 3:42Katherine Boyle?

  I think it changed in 1973, and it was one of the most favorable things that Nixon did, which was he ended the draft. Heralded by the left and the right as something that was good. But I think symbolically, what it said is, you no longer need to serve your country. Like, this is a real crisis for America that the best and brightest no longer want to serve in government and that we have a crisis of the bureaucracy. But it has been a multi-decade problem that is finally being addressed.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  And maybe above anything, Catherine vouches for seriousness, the maniacal belief in a purpose greater than oneself, and being earnest in pursuing that. In a culture that's been so permeated by irony and critique and snark, it's important to remind ourselves that it's cool to try, that it's important to work hard at things that are important to you, and to feel some duty outside yourself, to a cause or mission, a god, a country, something bigger than just you.

• 4:40Katherine Boyle?

  The sort of American term seriousness, you know, when we use it in that context, people think of, oh, well, like, why do you take yourself so seriously? And what they mean by that is like, you should have a sense of humor. You should laugh. You should enjoy life. And I 100% agree with those things. But the opposite of seriousness is not laughter and humor. The opposite is irony. David Foster Wallace, I think, has the best definition of irony, where he says it's just this pulling apart of anything that is sacred. And it's just you pick at it and you nod it and you pull it apart and you tear it down until there's absolutely nothing left of it.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  We spoke about making government cool again, lessons from journalism, authoritarianism and innovation, propaganda, irony and seriousness, and Vanna White, hostess of the Wheel of Fortune. This is the La Basque Air Podcast.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  We choose to go to the We deliver right to the desktop. We're going to reinvent the phone.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Well, thank you so much for doing it.

• 5:48Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah, it's such a pleasure to be here. It's so good to see you.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Likewise, I just wanted to start with something that I think would frame a lot of the discussion we're going to have today pretty well, which is the sort of talent shift that we've seen across society over the last number of decades. So to start off, in 1989, you talk about this a lot. Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, referred to the decline in public service as a quiet crisis. American elites no longer felt this duty and social pressure to serve their country. And it seems that, you know, Over decades, different industries become the most attractive, right? And soak up a lot of the talent across society. It was government once, and it was Wall Street. And for the last decade or so, a lot of it's been tech. But what that means is the US government of the 1940s, 50s and 60s is sort of a far cry from what we see today.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  We went to the moon, never went back, right? People point to sometime around 1970, when something deeper broke. But what happened here? Like, what caused these shifts in the first place?

• 6:46Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah, so I actually point to a very specific time, which I get a lot of pushback on. Everyone says something changed in 1971. There's that famous website WTF happened in 1971. I think it changed in 1973, and it was a bipartisan, one of the most favorable things that Nixon did, which was he ended the draft. And I think it was a very symbolic thing. Obviously, it was coming after, you know, a very unpopular war, Vietnam. You know, it was heralded by the left and the right as something that was good. But I think symbolically, what it said is, you no longer need to serve your country. Only the volunteers need to serve their country. And that actually led to a bifurcation in society, where it used to be that the elites of our society, like, you didn't have honor, you didn't have dignity if you did not serve your country.

• 7:31Katherine Boyle?

  And so everyone served. And, you know, that could be through various means. It could be through serving in the military or serving in government. But it was understood that that sort of nobleness comes from serving and duty. And that marks the moment where that changed. And then you had the sort of ripping and roaring of the 80s, where it led a lot of people to say, okay, I want to work in finance, a lot of that sort of elite class. And you have sort of this movement away from, okay, we don't have to work in the government. We don't have to kind of serve in the way that historically, you know, generations before had. And that is something that, you know, I had sort of observed it, but I didn't realize that that was actually a bipartisan commission of Democrats and Republicans that, you know, did a multi-year-long study and said in the 90s, when it was published, like, this is

• 8:13Katherine Boyle?

  a real crisis for America, that the best and brightest no longer want to serve in government, and that we have a crisis of the bureaucracy. And what is interesting is when I talked about that as sort of a huge impetus for starting the American dynamism practice, who could have predicted we'd be sitting here now talking about Doge, talking about sort of the flip side of that, which is now the best and brightest in Silicon Valley want to go work in government and fix government because they see a pathway to do that. So I think we have really come full circle on this conversation about it. But it has been a multi-decade problem that is finally being addressed.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, let's get into a little bit more of how you fix that root problem. And if, I mean, it seems like we're on a good trajectory here, but what the actual levers are, right? Like, we'll get into how the private sector's been picking up a lot of the slack here and how you're sort of approaching things on that front. But I mean, how do you fix the root of the problem ultimately? Like, government, it seems like it's changing now, but for the longest time, just wasn't the choice of America's best and brightest. So what are the levers by which you change that, in your opinion?

• 9:13Katherine Boyle?

  Well, I think we've changed it for, I wrote this piece maybe four or five years ago called "Make Government Cool Again."

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:19Katherine Boyle?

  And it was very much about the fact that everything that someone like Elon Musk touches, and particularly, I think Elon Singular in this way, turns to gold, it turns cool. And, you know, building rockets was seen as the most unsexy thing you could have possibly done when he started SpaceX. You know, I often say in 2000, it was right after September 11th when he started SpaceX. So the world was not looking up to the stars. We were looking at, you know, a completely different trajectory for America. We just had the largest terrorist attack in American history on our soil. And then two years later, almost exactly two years later, you had the Spatial Columbia disaster. So no one was thinking of doing that. And yet, he was able to attract people like Tom Yule or some of the best talent.

• 9:59Katherine Boyle?

  You know, he created this extraordinary company. And I think that's because he's sort of the Singular recruiter of talent and capital. And I think in some ways, what you're seeing now that he's interested in government is, and we're certainly even seeing it at a very practical level, some of the smartest people in our ecosystems and our firm, people want to go work and serve their country. And so in some ways, We often make problems really dramatic, like, you know, the commission, how are we going to attract great people? Well, it's like, well, maybe you just need cool people to want to do it. Young people want to work with their friends. They want to work with people who they admire. And if you make it an attractive proposition of, hey, you're going to go get to work in the government, you're going to get to fix things, you're not going to be bogged down by bureaucracy. And it's going to be the same way that Elon's talking about Doge now,

• 10:43Katherine Boyle?

  which is 20 hour days of working with some of the smartest people you've ever met. That's exciting for the best talent. So I don't think it's necessarily, you know, there's been so many ideas bandied about of, oh, well, it's a crisis of how much we pay people, which I do think is a problem. But I don't think it's the underlying issue. I think the underlying issue is it's not seen as an elite profession. And I think that's changing now in a way that I couldn't have predicted five years ago when I wrote that.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Another big part of this broader, you know, cultural shift and drain from the public sector led to a lot of apathy toward defense and national security in particular, which you talk a lot about in the context of some of your investments in defense tech earlier on. But what, you know, actually caused that broader cultural aversion to defense in particular? I mean, you point to Project Maven at Google as being a wake up moment for you. But is that coolness? I mean, like, what changed in defense?

• 11:32Katherine Boyle?

  Well, I think there's a variety of reasons why Silicon Valley, and there are historic reasons, but I think it's deeper than what I've talked about in the past. One is that, you know, people always used to say, well, you can't, you can't really understand what you don't see. And when I lived in Washington, I know you're originally from Washington. You go on the metro, you see people in their uniforms going to the Pentagon. Like, you are constantly around people who serve their country. You're constantly around the military. It is a normal pattern of life. So one of the problems of Silicon Valley is that it is not a normal pattern of life. It is very rare to see someone who, you know, is in their military uniform, going to work for, work in defense. So that's one part of it is that it was just so abstract for a lot of the people who are there. But I also think there's a broader issue that's come up in, you know, recent moments

• 12:15Katherine Boyle?

  where Silicon Valley has this sort of cloistered city-state ecosystem into itself, where sometimes people don't even feel connected to the broader issues of the country. And I do think that's a real problem we don't talk enough about in Silicon Valley. It's kind of coming to a head is why is this ecosystem, which has allowed it to become America's dynamism engine, right? Like, it is where, we are the envy of the world in the fact that we can take young people who are just really good at math and engineering, and we can build these extraordinary companies with risk capital. No one else has that. It's an extraordinary feature of America. But in some ways, the reason why it can do that is because it's so divorced from New York, it's so divorced from DC, it's so divorced from the other kind of cultural centers of America. And part of that is it's divorced from the issues that Washington cares about.

• 12:59Katherine Boyle?

  And that has been a feature for a long time, but let that sort of fester for decades. And what you see is an ecosystem that has kind of no relationship to the issues of most Americans. And that's been, I would say that was kind of where Silicon Valley was headed in 2010, 2011, 2012, where it's, you know, we're only going to focus on sort of the digital world, we're not going to focus on the physical. We certainly aren't going to work in defense because there's this whole other problem where, again, Silicon Valley became elite and a lot of the young people who were going there were out of the top universities and defense was a no-no issue, like no one would ever want to touch that. If you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Stanford, these are not the places that you're going to focus on defense. And so there was just this, like, this defense was seen as an issue that no one would touch. Again, it's like, it's low status.

• 13:44Katherine Boyle?

  And like, the low-status aspect of working in government, working in the military, the things that sort of shifted over the last couple of decades, I think you're finally seeing that shift back, like, the pendulum swinging back even harder, where people recognize how important these industries are, how American defense is so essential. But again, it took people like Elon and Palmer making it cool, and it also took sort of the wake-up realization of watching a land war in Europe, which many of these young people had never even considered was a possibility.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Another thing you sort of talk about in this context is that the fundamental differences between Silicon Valley and Washington DC, and that the biggest difference is often cultural, right? That Silicon Valley is this fundamentally positive-sum, long-term timed horizon place because anyone around you can create the next big thing, right? Whereas DC is zero-sum with short-time horizons because you're either in power or out of a job.

• 14:35Katherine Boyle?

  Yes.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  This is a bit more abstract, but, you know, do you think government can be made positive-sum in any way? And if not, how do you reconcile those two coasts?

• 14:45Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah, I don't think you can change the games people are playing. Fundamentally, I think the incentives are driven by the game. And there's things you can do around the edges, but, you know, just even hearing you say that, I was reflecting, I was just in Washington DC, and the hierarchy is so visible in DC and the way that it is not visible in Silicon Valley. So what I mean by that is, you know, you can go to the dish, you know, you can go to somewhere in Menlo Park and you can see... The, the, the, some of the most successful people in Silicon Valley just walking around having coffee with young entrepreneurs. Uh huh. And, and when I was back in Washington DC today, there were traffic stops because of, you know, different cabinet officials with their motorcades, or the VP was going somewhere, and there's 10 different cars, you know, the president doesn't go anywhere without an entire entourage, right?

• 15:27Katherine Boyle?

  Like, the, the status and the hierarchy of where you are in the pecking order is so ingrained in how Washington works. I mean, and it has to be. Like, that's, it's, we, we have to have a clear order of functioning government and know who's in charge. Uh, you know, it, it, it's become more apparent than ever than why that is so important and why we need that security. But it's, there, there is something about, if you go to, if you were in Washington, you know where you are in the pecking order. Right. Constantly. Right. Uh, the staff sits back, right? Like, you, you know who's important, the, the, everyone who's in Congress wears a pin, because they are important in Washington. So it's, that does not exist in Silicon Valley. In fact, it's the opposite. It's like, everyone wears the exact same outfit. You know, everyone sort of dresses down, wants to blend in, there's sort, there's sort

• 16:08Katherine Boyle?

  of this view of, yes, we, we kind of can read between the lines of who's really important, but no one's ever gonna throw that in your face, because the next big thing could be just around the horizon, and we're all playing for the next big thing. So, I, I don't know that we can ever change those systems, but what I, what I do think is like, Washington can learn a lot more about how Silicon Valley functions, and Silicon Valley can learn a lot more about how Washington functions. And this is the first time where, you know, you're, you're seeing so many venture firms, so many executives, really kind of taking the time to understand how Washington functions. I mean, the inauguration, just seeing sort of all of the CEOs of America's most important tech companies sort of lined up there. Yeah. I think it shows that there has been this coming together of Silicon Valley and DC. Again, that I, it's funny, we're going back into sort of my archive, because when I was

• 16:53Katherine Boyle?

  writing about these things, I would have never foreseen that this would have ever happened. Like, to me, this is just, I'm like, shell shocked that you saw all of the CEOs at church. Right? Like, they're sitting in St. John's, you know, behind the president at the inauguration. I'm just like, is, is this, is this real? Yeah. So, there's, there's something that I think has happened, where the merging of Washington and, and our tech ecosystem, I don't even wanna say Silicon Valley, it's like, America's tech ecosystem is finally working together with the government, and that is such a good thing for this country.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Maybe it's Silicon Valley, the idea, rather than Silicon Valley, the place.

• 17:24Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Right, in a lot of ways.

• 17:25Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Okay, to go from maybe nationally to more broadly geopolitical, this is sort of a high-level, big question. But on the topic of China, it seems like there's basically two camps with respect to them in technology. On one hand, you have a pretty valid criticism of China, which isn't necessarily a shocker, that a big chunk of our relationship with them, without infantilizing them in any way, or their ability to take anything from zero to one, is essentially through the act of their IP theft against the US.

• 17:50Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  You might argue that an authoritarian system actually chokes a society, like individual agency necessary for doing anything hard or pulling off anything new. But on the other hand, things like the Apollo or Manhattan projects or any of these huge engineering feats were these top-down mandates. So, to be crystal clear, I'm pro-democracy to the alternative, but is an authoritarian system actually net better if your only goal is to build hard things? And how do you think about that trade-off within the system that we thrive in and do well in, but has those intrinsic trade-offs?

• 18:22Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah, well, I think the counter to your narrative there would be if SpaceX hadn't exist. Right? But I think your point on, does an authoritarian sort of top-down focus, is that necessary to do hard things? Yes, but we can now build it in a company with a singular founder like Elon Musk. So I do think there is a third path there, and it's shown by the fact that SpaceX is the most valuable company in America, but it does take a once-in-a-generation leader. And that leadership, whether it's political leadership, whether it's leadership in a company, it takes someone who actually is that maniacally focused on the details and does have sort of what, I mean, you could call it authoritarian control.

• 19:06Katherine Boyle?

  I mean, the way that Elon runs his companies, he is in the weeds of every engineering decision. And that is not a typical, that's not a HBS sort of, this is how we run companies sort of CEO. This is someone who is very, very in the weeds and understands that he is the leader of that company. But Palmer has actually talked a lot about what you just said, which is that we are, in some ways, behind because of the CCP can control all of its best talent and direct them. You have to be working on this. And that actually puts us on the back foot when America can't recruit the right engineers to work on important companies. But again, Palmer was saying that in 2017 when there was one defense company, or there was one or two, you know, it was Shield AI, Andorall. There were a handful of companies that were actually working on this.

• 19:51Katherine Boyle?

  Yes, SpaceX, but SpaceX hadn't gone as deeply into into defense or or working on on sort of some of the things that they're working on now. So it's like, I actually think it's extraordinary, the the kind of path that that America has taken, and that these companies have taken, where eight years later, you now have a whole Silicon Valley ecosystem dedicated to national security and defense that didn't exist before. So in some ways, I think that's actually a favorable showing of capitalism, where if you make things cool, if you make them interesting, if you if you have great leaders, you know, make the category sexy. A lot of young talent will flock there without being told by a dictator, you have to go work on this issue.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Right. I think this is actually a really good segue to talking about the country as a whole. I think the most brilliant part of what you've done with the American dynamism practice is that instead of underwriting a category like you might at a regular venture fund, you decided to underwrite a nation. And if nothing else, it's clear that for its entire existence, America has been a pretty bad bet, a pretty bad thing to bet against.

• 20:49Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  I think sometimes you reference, what is it? Alexis de Tocqueville, this 19th century French sociologist and political scientist here, who says boldness of the enterprise is the key to the country's success. But, you know, culturally, geopolitically, spiritually, even structurally, what do you think makes this place so special?

• 21:06Katherine Boyle?

  Oh, gosh. You know, what what makes America so special? One, I, you know, I, I think if we go back to even this election, what I, and and sort of the conversations that are happening now between tech and sort of the the mandate that the government has. Like, there, there is this sort of important thing that J.D. Vance, who I think understands the fusion between tech and and in government better than anyone. He says, America is a nation. Like, like, we are not just an idea. And I very much believe that as well. Like, this is a place, this has a history, it has a culture, and it's a fusion of some of the most extraordinary ideas that have ever existed in terms of liberal democracy, but also understanding that there is a culture to what makes America great,

• 21:49Katherine Boyle?

  while also coupling it with a extraordinary Freedom, liberalism and capitalism that just does not exist anywhere else. And I think you have the fusion. You know, I would argue that we are a Judeo-Christian nation. That is our history. There is so much about sort of the ideas of helping thy neighbor, the family as an institution being part. You know, family as an institution being in many ways and throughout our era until very recently, I would say, just as important as the state. The federalist model where we have states competing against each other, where there's this federal, you know, authority, but there's also this, the state authority that manages a lot of sort of the local issues. Like, we are such a unique political country, like in terms of our politics and in terms of the, um, the way that the country is structured.

• 22:34Katherine Boyle?

  It is so unique and different than any other country. But add to that the fact that we have this sort of extreme drive that has existed. And I do think, uh, you know, uh, Tocqueville writes about it better than anyone. This extreme drive to constantly improve and constantly tame the land, make things more abundant, that is unlike any other people in the world.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:55Katherine Boyle?

  And so what I just said, none of it actually makes sense. It's all dichotomies, right? Like, just say, okay, like, we're, we're an idea in terms of all these ideas that were fused together at the founding of our country, but we're also a nation of people. We also have, you know, a Judeo-Christian ethos, but at the same time, we have this sort of ruthless capitalism that sort of leads to the flourishing of companies. I mean, it's like, these are all contradictions. But yet they are contradictions that make this country extremely beautiful. So, I mean, I, I feel in some ways I could write a book about like, what makes this country so extraordinary? But the reason why, to your point, why is American dynamism underwriting a country, which I love that you said that, and underwriting the ethos of America and not underwriting a type of software?

• 23:37Katherine Boyle?

  It's because the problems that matter to most people in America change over time. And if you set up a practice that is constantly focused on, what are the biggest issues that technology can serve the American people on? They're going to change. They're going to change because of who's in power. They're going to change because of what the country deems to be its most important issues. But I also think there's always going to be problems to fix and the technology can always serve those efforts.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Totally. I think something really interesting you've sort of tapped into through the American dynamism practice is that there's been this larger movement. I mean, we were just talking about Silicon Valley as becoming an idea rather than a place, maybe accelerated by COVID, I don't know. But out of this sort of B2B SaaS bubble of Silicon Valley and into the rest of the country, this is sort of reflected in the industries you're investing in, things like education and public safety and advanced manufacturing, as well as the actual geographies these companies are being built on. I think as of 18 months after launching the practice, I don't know where you're at now, but you hadn't invested in anything in San Francisco at that point.

• 24:37Katherine Boyle?

  We have now, by the way. We have, or at least I personally have two investments in San Francisco now, so it's not totally over.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  There's like sort of a more consensus understanding now that most of our technological progress has sort of happened in software over the last couple of decades. But what kicked off this movement into the quote unquote "real" economy and the rest of the country? Like, what was the catalyst there for that explosion?

• 25:01Katherine Boyle?

  So yeah, so it's interesting. I don't take as hard of a line as some people who invest in this category that, you know, SaaS is bad or that software isn't interesting. I mean, in some ways, it's like the best companies are in our portfolio are fusion of hardware and software and like software is, you know, to use Marc Andreessen's term, it is, you know, it is magic. It is eating the world. It is everywhere. And so the big thing that I think has changed is that software is also now supporting government. And I think part of the reason why it took so long is because you can't, to use the very trite term that, or phrase, you can't be what you can't see, right? It's like, if you haven't seen any success stories, I mean, in some ways, venture capitalists are the most memetic people. If you haven't seen success stories, why would you invest

• 25:45Katherine Boyle?

  in categories where there haven't been success? So it took a long time for, you know, Palantir. It took a very, very long time for Palantir to show that it was worth working with government. It took a very, very long time for SpaceX to get to the point where, you know, reusability, you know, I would say actually even excited investors. I mean, I was, I remember when SpaceX went out for a round and they were talking about Starlink. And this was 28 or 2019. And the number of investors that were like, Starlink is like, they're pitching something that's never going to happen, or it's going to take forever. And they think it's going to happen so fast. And like, look at where we are now. It's like, I think, you know, the story of Silicon Valley is people doubting Elon. And it's like, never doubt Elon. Like, he always says what he's, he always does what he's, says he's going to do.

• 26:29Katherine Boyle?

  But I do think it just took a long time. One, it's if you're, if there's white, if there's, you know, if there's white space and if there's greenfield places to build, that's always where people, I think, choose to build. But I think it took a long time for people to say, wow, like, there's the capital that can build these categories. There's, there's examples of success in SpaceX, Tesla, you know, Anduril. There's examples of people who can get through the defense valley of death, to use your term, the real economy. It is hard to compete with incumbents. And I think now people are just realizing that actually there's really unique attributes of the moats that you can build in these companies that allow you to scale to extraordinary sizes. That is, I think, fueling this moment where particularly limited partners and investors are saying, actually, like, this is a, this is a real category of innovation.

• 27:14Katherine Boyle?

  And it's going to be with us for a long time. And we've done all the things in the digital world, or there's less white space in the digital world, because we've been working on that for 15, 20 years. Now let's go bring this sort of fusion of hardware, software together to a lot of categories that have been ignored.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Let's dig into that a little bit. I mean, you know, something interesting about the kind of investing that you do here is that a lot of what you're doing is sort of a retrofitting, rebuilding, or supercharging of a lot of legacy industries. But the industries themselves aren't set to like 100x over the next 10 years. And maybe you'd classify it differently, but the usual VC calculus, to me, seems like, you know, if you're investing early in social networking, or e-commerce, or mobile, or something, those markets themselves are going to 100x over the next, you know, 10 years. How do you think about, you know, you spoke a little bit about the size of outcomes here, but how long it actually takes for these types of companies to reach scale and compound?

• 28:01Katherine Boyle?

  This is going to sound like such a cop out answer, but I think venture capitalists are very bad at predicting TAM. Like, we are so bad at it, we shouldn't even, we shouldn't even have the TAM conversation when we talk about companies. And maybe, and maybe it's like, early-stage investor privilege that I get to say that, but I think it's almost comical how bad we are at this. I have a theory of why we're so bad at this, so I'll go on this tangent. Like, I actually don't think the Harvard Business School case study method of, you know, building a spreadsheet, going to work at Goldman Sachs, looking at comps of other companies that existed 20 years ago to predict TAM. Is it all an exercise we should be doing if we're trying to predict the future? Right? Like if you if you actually believe that technology and software is this magical thing that can create new markets, how does a company that was built in 1980 that has

• 28:45Katherine Boyle?

  reached a certain, you know, terminal value, whatever year it is, how is that going to predict what's going to happen in the next 20 years? And we use that methodology. It's stolen from banking, right? Like, this is what investment bankers do, right? We use that methodology and we sort of say, well, this is this is sort of the practice. This is the best proxy we can do. We look at financial models and we say, okay, like, this is how big a company is going to get, knowing full well that it is not at all going to predict the future. It's a tool, you know, and when people like sit down and actually talk about it, it's like, it's a tool, but it's actually not, you know, it's, no, I think, I think it leads us astray from our actual instincts about where things are going. So I don't really try to predict them. I'm not going to say, okay, like, you know, I know better than an Elon Musk or Palmer Lucky.

• 29:27Katherine Boyle?

  I mean, when people were looking at, you know, Anduril and the early rounds, the terminal values or the expected size of what Anduril could become was almost, it was comical, the conversations that people were having back in the day and where the company is now. So I think if I've learned anything, and it's been humbling, right? Because I, you know, I, this is my industry, but if I've learned anything in the last 10 years of investing, it's never to think that something is just going to stop growing, never to think that a company, you know, that it's a small market and therefore like we shouldn't invest in it because it is so obvious to me now that this is the thing that we are the worst at as investors, is predicting how big something can be in the future.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  I want to shift gears totally for a second and talk a little bit about your background. Before becoming an investor, you worked as a writer at the Washington Post and left right after Bezos bought the paper in 2014. And you wrote such eclectic stories. I mean, you wrote everything from from museum finance to performance art and the longtime hostess of Wheel of Fortune, great profile.

• 30:27Katherine Boyle?

  That was a good profile, actually. That was a really fun one to do. I did it, actually, can we go, can we go on tangent there? I took, this is so funny, I took a guy who had spent many, many years covering the war in Iraq with me as my photographer for three days to Las Vegas to cover Vanna White, the hostess of Wheel of Fortune. And he said to me, maybe halfway through this, he goes, you know, This is the weirdest, one of the strangest. He's like, I don't want to say it was the hardest. He's like, but this is, this is like weirder to me than being dropped in a war zone. I'm like, yeah, it's kooky, right? Like, it's, it was a strange, strange moment to go back into time of like, there's these, these obsessives who, who love this game show. I love the game show. I grew up watching it with my, with my grandparents. So, but anyway, Wheel of Fortune, it's still on the air.

• 31:10Katherine Boyle?

  It's, you know, Vanna White's still kicking, like, she's still doing it. She's like, the only job she's ever had. And yet, no one had really ever talked to her. So I did this story on her, but it was just like the, the memories of actually reporting out that story and going with someone who had kind of, they've spent a long time in a war zone was really, really funny. It was a good one.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  It's funny. I've heard you get asked this question a lot of like, you know, what, you know, did journalism teach you about investing? But I am really curious, is there anything that journalism taught you that you think is difficult or impossible to learn otherwise that transfers really well to investing?

• 31:41Katherine Boyle?

  Ah, gosh, that's a good question. Um, I mean, what it taught me that I, that I think, as I reflect on why it wasn't a hard transition for me, it like, journalism is an innately lonely profession. Like, it is a very lonely profession, in the same way that investing is profession, is lonely. And even though you're on a team, like, I was on, I'm on a great team at the Washington Post, and, you know, I'm on a great team now at Andreessen Horowitz. At the end of the day, it is your name on that investment. It is your byline on that story. And if you are wrong, it is very public failure. And you have to stand, and, and the thing that I think it taught me at a young age, because I started reporting when I was like 24, like, it taught me, you have to wake up every day, put your name on something, and you have to deal with the consequences of

• 32:25Katherine Boyle?

  putting your name very publicly on something. And, you know, that was as Twitter was really emerging. I mean, there was a point in my career where I had a lot of people, you know, completely tearing down my stories. Every time I would publish a story, I would just kind of, okay, like, now, now the trolls are going to come after me, right? And it was one of these things where it's like, you just get very, um, you have to build a very thick skin, but you also have to be very, feel very strongly about your convictions and where the world is headed. And that, I think, is what makes great investors. And if you haven't learned how to kind of stand out in the crowd, or stand out from the crowd alone, and really stand by something that you believe in, and be torn down publicly for it, it is very difficult to do that when we're talking, when we're attaching big numbers to it. So in some ways, I'm like very grateful that I started in journalism because in some ways

• 33:08Katherine Boyle?

  it's small stakes, right? Like if I'm wrong about a story, or if I get a fact wrong, or if a source is upset at me and they're yelling at me or screaming at me or something, it's like it builds this sort of thick skin to where it was not hard for me to make a transition where when I knew something like Anduril was going to be extraordinary company and Silicon Valley, friends, colleagues, you know, people at other venture firms were telling me, one, I was an idiot, or worse, I was a fascist, right? Like that didn't hit as hard as I think it would have hit had I never, had I worked at an investment bank and always had air cover, had I, you know, gone sort of the traditional route, I think I would have backed off of my beliefs a lot quicker if I hadn't had built that muscle at the Washington Post.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Okay, shifting gears one more time. There's this really, really great quote from a profile Max Mayer did of you in Arena Magazine that goes, "If live, laugh, love was the bland life maxim of Gen X, then Boyle's reply is time, purpose, suffering." I want to dig into some of the belief system you held long before it was, you know, politically correct or consensus. So why don't we start with the first and that for you, which is time?

• 34:17Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  We often forget it, but the most famous of America's founding fathers were in their early twenties and thirties at the founding of this country. Today, it seems like the average age of accomplishment has gone up. The hallmarks of adulthood, when you get your first job, when you move out of your parents' place, when you get married, buy a house, have kids, let alone found a country. These have all gone up drastically, particularly if you're more educated. Why did this happen?

• 34:40Katherine Boyle?

  So I think there's a lot of reasons why it happened, but I can talk to you why I think time is so important and why it's always been something that's on my mind. So a very personal story. My father was 55 years old when I was born, and he was in the hospital when I was born. He was in heart failure. And so I was always, as a kid, just kind of like obsessed with the fact, like I think in some ways, the earlier you're exposed to death, the more you realize how precious life is and how fast it goes. And so thankfully, you know, he, you know, survived and he died almost 20 years ago now, but like I had a lot of extra time with him, but I was always aware that every moment counted. And I don't think, I think, you know, it's related to sort of the third one that you said, which is suffering. I think a society that completely tries to remove suffering from every part of our

• 35:25Katherine Boyle?

  existence, you know, and this is, I think, something tech has to deal with too, where the whole point of creating tech is to remove friction. And we're trying to create this sort of frictionless society. Our legal system is trying to remove any kind of suffering from society, and suffering is innate. It's what gives us character, it's what gives us resilience. And so, the huge part of time that I think is related to that is, if you have a childhood and an adolescence where the parenting model and the schooling model, the education system, is trying to remove any aspect of suffering and human kind of nature from your experience, you do not grow up. You remain a child. And, and, you know, you can talk to anyone who's been in business for a long time, any

• 36:08Katherine Boyle?

  industry, this is something that, you know, when I, when I talk to government agencies, everyone is dealing with the exact same thing, which is that the, the young people coming out of universities, they, in many cases, have not grown up, they haven't had friction in their lives, they haven't had suffering, they've had an entire system around them that has told them that suffering is weird. And so, they, they are, they act younger than the 22-year-olds that, that, you know, had, had, had served their country in some way, or that they just, they, they, they do not have the resilience to cope with the modern world. And, and I, I do think there is an importance of suffering that we, you know, it's like we've tried to eradicate suffering from, from all of, you know, daily life, and when we've done that, it has led to this lack of resilience, which, when, you know, when

• 36:53Katherine Boyle?

  you're talking about the importance of time, it leads to people just fumbling around in their twenties, acting as though they're still children, and it leads to a society in which we still treat 30-year-olds as though they're kids, versus the, you know, people who should be getting married, having families, and, and becoming, you know, fully functioning members of society.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Okay, let's skip ahead to suffering for a second, because this is super interesting. You talk about friction in the context of technology. I mean, it seems like... To go to, I guess, a little bit earlier in our conversation, it seems like these sort of common hardships, like the draft and even childbirth, were what used to bond society. And removing them can sort of exacerbate this broader crisis of meaning, right? Like, probably have synthetic wombs in some amount of time. The question is this: if technology is by definition something that reduces suffering, and maybe you disagree with that definition, unless suffering makes us less resilient, doesn't technology necessarily make us less resilient as individuals? And if so, can we supplement that at all?

• 37:49Katherine Boyle?

  Not necessarily, because I think the thing that... So, technology should make life more abundant. It should give us more resources. It should make life easier in many ways. But then you can kind of contrast: what is the most important technology company in America? It is SpaceX. And what does Elon talk about? He talks about grinding 20 hours, sleeping on the factory floor, pushing so that we can bring humanity to Mars. So, there are two sides of the same coin. We can remove friction from certain parts of our lives, but we have to have a culture. We have to have a culture that demands that we continue to reach our purpose and that demands that we continue to work, that demands that we continue to build. And I think that's actually the real problem. It's not technology in and of itself.

• 38:34Katherine Boyle?

  It's that when you remove all friction from life, when you tell people that suffering is bad, when you tell people that there's no meaning to life, which is a whole other portion of this, is that we have this sort of ironic culture, which is, you know, why are we even here? What are we doing? Like, why does it even matter? Which I think has really been driving American culture, elite culture, since that moment in the 70s. Like, I think that is the huge problem. You can have abundance, and you can have purpose, and you can have drive, but you have to have a culture that celebrates that. And you have to have leaders and celebrate leaders like the Palmers and like the Elons, who are constantly pushing humanity forward.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Okay, we moved from time to suffering, but to come back to purpose for a quick second. There's a belief that you hold that seriousness, this maniacal belief in a project greater than oneself. It's a quote, as you put it, is something we've lost admiration for, right? And I think you're a pretty serious person. I mean, there's this cool anecdote that when you were at The Post, you insisted on using the front door, even though the side door was closer to the metro. You went to the newsroom every Sunday because, even though nobody else was there, because you thought it was a quiet place to write. Why have we lost our admiration of seriousness? And maybe it gets back toward that sort of topic of irony we're talking about.

• 39:46Katherine Boyle?

  Yeah, yeah, so I'm glad you pointed that out because when the sort of American term seriousness, you know, when we use it in that context, people think of, oh, well, like, why do you take yourself so seriously? And what they mean by that is like, you should have a sense of humor, you should laugh, you should enjoy life. And I 100% agree with those things, but the opposite of seriousness is not laughter and humor. The opposite is irony. And it is this very irony, and you know, I don't have the quote fully in front of me. I should perhaps look it up, but it's, David Foster Wallace, I think, has the best definition of irony, where he says it's just this pulling apart of anything that is sacred. And it's just, you pick at it and you nod it and you pull it apart and you tear it down until there's absolutely nothing left of it.

• 40:28Katherine Boyle?

  And it's, that I think is, you know, it's, when you think of like, I always get this image of like art critics, right? Where it's like, someone puts forward this great beautiful piece of something and it's like, and then you just pick a nit, and you just gnaw, and it just completely deconstructs everything good about the thing. And like, to me, that is, that is irony. Like, and that is sort of the, the sort of driving voice in many cases. Like, when I, when I look at sort of like, what is the dominant force of the internet? What is the dominant voice on the internet? Like, it's not earnestness. I think it's coming back to earnestness, thankfully, and, you know, we're seeing changes with X, but for a long time, it was snark. It was this snarky, like, I'm too cool for school sort of vibe. And like, that is not how you achieve great things.

• 41:11Katherine Boyle?

  Like, how you achieve great things is earnestness, it is seriousness, it is understanding your purpose, it is believing so much in this thing that you were put on this earth to do. And I've talked about how you know that you're headed towards seriousness of purpose when people are laughing at you. When your entire ecosystem, who's bathed in this snark and bathed in this irony, is just saying like, "That's absurd." It's like you should feel like you're sort of Pollyanna-ish and too optimistic, and you should feel sort of that tension. And if you feel that tension, you know that you've stumbled upon this purpose and the seriousness that I think is important to do any sort of great thing. And founders are sort of a microcosm of that, where if you talk to any great founder, you hear how they were laughed at in the earliest of stages. They're not laughed at in the end, sometimes they are actually, but they're not laughed

• 41:56Katherine Boyle?

  at when they've become successful, because we admire successful people. But in those early days, people will ruthlessly gnaw apart a founder. And I think that is because the people on the outside are deeply ironic, and the founder is sort of this serious archetype.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Okay, well, let's talk about media for a second. In interviews you've given, I always notice you referring to movies and TV shows a lot when answering questions. I mean, you talk about Mad Men a lot.

• 42:20Katherine Boyle?

  Do you talk about Mad Men a lot?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  You talk about The Departed, 1917. Do you think culture is downstream of technology? Is technology downstream of culture, or is it sort of self-referential?

• 42:33Katherine Boyle?

  So I think, for a very long time, America's exporting city was Los Angeles. I actually think when I was watching the fires in this visceral way, I was thinking like, "This is America's cultural city." But I do think we're now seeing that a lot of American culture, particularly meme culture, which I think is driving more of the universe, is downstream of technology. And particularly the tech industry, which is, again, why is tech being so demonized? It is partially because of that, right? Because it's, you know, tech is now controlling a lot of the films we watch. Do people go to the theater anymore? No, they go to Netflix. So there is sort of this, now all of our sort of cultural elements are downstream of sort of what the algorithm and what tech tells us we should be doing.

• 43:17Katherine Boyle?

  So there is sort of this concentration of power that's interesting. But I do think, what we see, the art we create, is the best representation of who we are. It is somewhat circular, but I also think it can deeply, deeply impact a generation. And so we have to be very careful about the art we ingest into ourselves. And be very careful about how we question memes, how we question the messages that are given to us, because if we imbibe in too much of them, I think it does sort of kind of lead the culture astray.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  This is sort of an interesting, I guess, follow through here. I mean, it seems like a basic truth that we're getting at, as funny as it seems, is that something being cool can play a really big role in something being successful, attracting talent. You know, companies and funds play into this. It helps, you know, attract talent, get access to investment or capital. If coolness is a strategic asset, should the government do marketing? I mean, like, is propaganda, if we can use that word neutrally, actually in the national interest?

• 44:18Katherine Boyle?

  Well, certainly. I think there should be a chief marketing officer of America. Like, that would be a dream job. I would, like, that would be so much fun. But I think we also have that in our leaders, right? Like, I think you can point to the, you know, recent election of President Trump. So much of it is that he understands meme culture. So much of it is that he is a meme himself and that he is a vibe. And this was, you know, there's a lot of people who've talked about the vibe shift, the vibe election, the meme election. Like, you know, like, these are things that are, in some ways, now obvious. But it's, I think, to, to really sort of, you know, do anything, whether it's found a company, whether it's run for office, you know, kind of start a business, and anything that you want to do, you really have to understand vibes, memes, culture,

• 45:03Katherine Boyle?

  and how they play through the digital world. Like, they're, this sort of universe of, you know, touch grass, or the, the internet is not real life, or, you know, people used to say X is not real life, Twitter is not real life. It's like, yes, it is. Yes, it is. They are, they are now merging, and you have to understand, you know, all of the aspects of how aesthetics and vibes are going to affect the message that you bring. And so, 100%, I think, you know, countries do do propaganda, obviously, but I think, I think it would be really fun to have an office of memes, which I would, would love to. I'd love, that would be an amazing job. That would be so much fun.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  As a closing thought here, it seems like this resurgence of federalism you were talking about before, and state-by-state competition for residents post-COVID is real, right? In a way, the, the product of geography, if you want to think of it in that way, is sort of becoming higher variance. And you were a part of that movement, right? Like, you left California for Florida. But what do you think has made Florida and Texas so successful in that shift? Like, if you were governor, what would you be doing to compete right now?

• 46:08Katherine Boyle?

  So that's a good question. So I think you've rightly pointed out that Florida is a political project. It's not, I think, you know, some in the industry have said, you know, it's going to be, it's going to be the tech ecosystem to compete. I think they're, you know, these are 30-year projects, not three-year projects. But I think Florida is inherently a political experiment, and that a lot of the reasons why people have moved are policy reasons, not necessarily, you know, related to industries here, or, and I think there's a geographical reason also why people moved to Florida. But I, but there's, there's a political sort of focus. That's really interesting. And if I'm being honest about like, why I moved to Florida, one, I'm from here, so I love it. I love the culture of Florida. It's a

• 46:50Katherine Boyle?

  very different state. I mean, we're, we're in South Florida, but go north of Orlando, and it is a completely different culture. It's an agricultural state. I mean, there's so many interesting things about sort of, even the fact, like, I pointed out, like, part of the reason why Florida is so politically powerful right now is because when Jeb Bush was governor in the 90s, he started this program called Bright Futures Scholarships. And he encouraged any top student in Florida to actually get paid to go to any university, state university they wanted to go to in Florida. So, you know, a lot of the brightest students in my graduating class didn't leave the state. They took money from, from, you know, not only full scholarship, but they literally made money going to school. They got paid thousands of dollars every semester to do whatever they wanted to. And that meant

• 47:34Katherine Boyle?

  that a lot of great talent decided to stay in the state. And what's very interesting about the top universities in Florida as well, is that a lot of the, the wealth and industry is in South Florida, but the best universities are in the northern part of the state. And that's the agricultural part of the state. And so you have this really interesting kind of meshing of cultures, where if you're a person who grew up in Miami, you know, maybe, maybe you come from a family of, you know, of Cuban immigrants, and you go to University of Florida, you're now interfacing with people who live on farms, right? So there's this really interesting sort of, then you go back to Miami, and you have sort of this understanding of, of the, the culture that I don't think you get. If you're in different states in the same way. So I think that is in some ways why we're seeing now, you know, it's like how many people in this administration are coming from Florida. It's a very politically powerful state.

• 48:18Katherine Boyle?

  Texas has a similar sort of energy where a lot of people stay in the state. And I think you're you're just seeing that there's a lot more reasons to move to a state that has enterprise, but also has really favorable policies to business. And it's also sort of, and this is, you know, probably more on the fringe, like it's sort of opted out of the elite system. And I think people who moved to Florida in the last few years, people who moved to Texas, they have inherently opted themselves and their families out of a system that they don't necessarily want to be a part of anymore.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  And I mean, you you've sort of seen all sides of this, right? Like granted, this is home for you, but you left Florida for DC. You left DC for Silicon Valley and you saw both of those places for what they were. But you decided to come back. And so a lot of people ask you, you know, what can DC learn from Silicon Valley or vice versa? But what do you think Silicon Valley and DC can learn from from from Florida?

• 49:12Katherine Boyle?

  That's such a great question. So I left Florida for the great reason that I think a lot of young people leave, which is just, I I don't want to say I had a boring childhood. I had a wonderful childhood, but it's like I I wanted to spread my wings. And I think it's very natural for young people to get an obsession. My obsession was politics. I mean, my I I was obsessed with politics. I was going to go to Washington. So it's like if you were going to to work in, you know, if you're going to work in politics, you you sort of needed to go to DC. And then I think I got a little bit disillusioned. And and kind of saw that a lot of the things that I would have loved to see and enacted couldn't exist inside of how Washington functions. And that led me to Silicon Valley, right? So there there is this sort of story of disillusionment and sort of waking up and becoming an adult.

• 49:57Katherine Boyle?

  But I think what what DC and Silicon Valley can learn from Florida is like Florida is such a diverse state. And I don't mean that in the terms of the sort of DEI way that we talk about it. It is there there's so many different ecosystems of people who actually have a lot in common. Like, like, I I think South Florida is like one of the most family friendly places that you can build, you know, build a life, build a home. But but it is like, you know, Miami is, I think there's more foreign born people in Miami than any other city in America. You know, you have people who've moved from New York. I always joke that like just north of Miami is the sixth borough of New York. But then you get to Orlando, which used to be Orange Groves, and now it's Disney World. And it's like the, the kind of, you know, the, the cultural center for, for children. Right?

• 50:40Katherine Boyle?

  And then you get just north of that and you get to like this incredible farm, Southern history. And it's all in one place. And again, because people have to interact with each other because of how the university systems work, or if you want to stay in Florida, you, you kind of have to interact with all of America in Florida. In a way that like, if you're living in San Francisco, if you're living in New York City, you don't necessarily have to. So I think that there's a lot we can learn from just the, the sort of that interaction. You learn from your neighbors, you learn from your people. But also Florida still has this incredible optimism. It's still the frontier and it feels new in a way that a lot of other places don't. And I think that's what excites me most about it.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Amazing. I know we're coming up on time. I have one more question for you. It's the same one I ask at the end of every interview, which is what should more people be thinking about?

• 51:26Katherine Boyle?

  More people should be thinking about their calling. And it, and it goes back to this question of purpose. It is something that I do think we have to spend a lot of time reflecting on, praying on, meditating on, whatever it is. Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? It is such a limited amount of time that we have to, to, you know, the time is the most important asset. And, and I do think that that reflection on why you have been sent here, this unique reason why you are on this earth. It's, you know, it's not to consume our phones. It's not to, it's clearly not all of those things, but what it is, is something that I think takes deep reflection. And the earlier you start reflecting on it, I, I think the, the sort of more fulfillment in life that you will have.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Catherine, that's all I got for you.

• 52:13Katherine Boyle?

  Thank you so much.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 52:15Katherine Boyle?

  It's so good seeing you.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to the A16Z Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com/a16z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.