$635M Exit → $600M Fund: David Ulevitch on Building a16z’s Hottest New Fund

a16z General Partner David Ulevitch joins Sourcery to break down the real state of American Dynamism, their $600M fund, across defense, energy, mining, robotics, manufacturing, public safety, and national security. We discuss America’s supply-chain exposure to China, why deterrence—not parity—defines the future of U. S. defense, and how new companies are rebuilding core capabilities in nuclear, missiles, autonomy, grid reliability, materials, mining, and industrial operations. David highlights key a16z portfolio companies including Anduril, Radiant Nuclear, Base Power, Exowatt, Apex, Skydio, Flock, Long Eye, and Mariana Minerals, and shares why the best founders are magnetic attractors of capital and talent. We also dive into Anduril’s authenticity-first marketing philosophy (“no renders” - Palmer Luckey), the “Don’t Work at Anduril” campaign led by Snap Alumn Jeff Miller, the importance of real test footage, and why mission-driven cultures are fueling the next generation of frontier companies. A broad, detailed look at the future of American reindustrialization and the companies shaping it. Select Portfolio Companies & Areas: • AI: Applied Intuition, Ambient AI • Defense: Anduril, Saronic, Shield AI, Castelion, • Energy: Radiant, Base Power, Exowatt, RigUp • Aerospace: SpaceX, Apex, Northwood, Aerodome, Air Space Intelligence (ASI), Astro Mechanica, Astranis • Manufacturing: Hadrian, Senra • Public Safety: Flock Safety, Long Eye, Skydio • Supply Chain: Zipline, Flexport, • Minerals: Mariana Materials, KoBold Metals 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/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=20250923-amer-carta_sourcery_data_insights https://carta.com/sourcery/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=20250923-amer-carta_sourcery_data_insights Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) America’s supply-chain vulnerability (03:28) Most investable wedges: robotics, automation & lights-out factories (04:11) Rebuilding U. S. minerals & mining capacity (lithium, copper, steel) (04:29) Applying software to legacy sectors (lumber, metals, production) (05:20) Energy: Radiant’s microreactor & first new U. S. design in 50+ years (06:23) Grid resiliency & storage: Base Power, Exowatt (07:12) Defense innovation: Anduril, Saronic, Castelion (08:28) Public safety tech: Flock Safety, Long Eye & Skydio (13:30) Anduril’s “no renders” rule & authentic product culture (14:27) Inside the “Don’t Work at Anduril” campaign (19:11) Talent density: references, hiring, firing & magnetic teams (20:45) Lessons from building OpenDNS: reinvention, team rebuilds & decade-long “overnight success” (26:00) Kalshi’s growth & future of prediction markets

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Nothing matters more than the talent at the top, the founders of the company. Can they magnetically attract capital? Can they magnetically attract talent?

• 0:06Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think the biggest difference is between cultures and software and in American dynamism?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Nap pods.

• 0:13Molly O'Shea?

  Nap pods?

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:15Molly O'Shea?

  You had an amazing career beforehand, enough so that Marc Andreessen said, "Build whatever you want, invest in whatever you want."

• 0:22Speaker 00

  When you visit the Andorl office, like literally you can feel your heart rate increase as you walk around and see all the stuff being built. If you don't come out of the Andorl factory tour feeling fired up and excited, you need to check your pulse, you might not be alive.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Palmer has always said, "We will never ship renders." So when you see an explosion in a video, that's a real explosion, they're not doing special effects. So when you see the Eagle Eye announcement yesterday and you see the camera and the objects like that, it's all real because they will never fake it.

• 0:59Molly O'Shea?

  You mentioned a bit on China and DJI. So what kind of vulnerability do you think that we have against their manufacturing, their supply chain?

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, it's funny, I read, I think we're extremely vulnerable today to supply chain disruption if China decides to cut us off. Now, there's other arguments that they're incredibly economically dependent on us. So I think that there's a very careful dance that gets orchestrated where like, they don't want to just cut us off because we also buy so much from China that it could collapse their entire economy. That said, you know, we do know that there are capabilities in manufacturing. If you've ever been to Shenzhen, which I went to, even before I joined Andreessen Horowitz and saw the manufacturing capabilities of advanced, advanced manufacturing, robotics manufacturing. You know, and then now we see the defense like shipbuilding manufacturing. They're just far more advanced in terms of capability than we are.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  We could be that advanced. I'm not sure that the right strategy for America is to say, oh, they can build 100 ships a year. So we need to be able to build 100 ships a year. Like what I would say a better strategy is if China is able to build 100 ships a year. What if we just had a missile that could knock out 100 ships a year that they couldn't defeat? Like, let's just have better missiles. That might be better than having, because like then it doesn't matter how many ships a year they can build. If we have capabilities that can just go, can like pierce whatever defenses they have. And so I think we always have to lean on American ingenuity. But we have to recognize that we are today supply chain dependent on them. And so a lot of the work that I think a lot of people, not just us in American dynamism, but a lot of people, whether they're in the government, in the Department of War,

• 2:38Speaker 00

  or across the administration, and in the private sector are looking at is like, what are the raw materials we need to be independent of China? I think it's a real concern. I think it's a concern from a cybersecurity standpoint. I think it's a concern from a supply chain disruption standpoint. But I also believe in America and our ability to counteract it. Again, I read, I read these essays of like, yeah, like China's building this many ships per day. How come we can't build this many? I'm like, I'm not sure we need to build that many ships per day. We just need to be able to destroy that many ships per day from our side, right? Like, if we can just blow up their ships, it's just much better. And it's a strong deterrent. Like, I hope we never get into a kinetic fight. But I want to make sure that we just have unquestionable superiority if we, if we do.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  I don't want people to ever wonder whether America is just like the global superpower that we've been for the last, you know, X number of decades.

• 3:28Molly O'Shea?

  What's the most investable wedge for US founders against this China situation?

• 3:34Speaker 00

  I think we're seeing now that there's a huge opportunity to drive manufacturing transformation in this country. I think we're on the precipice of a robotics revolution. And robotics doesn't have to be like the humanoid robots we see in like videos on X. Although I think those are coming, that will be cool. But even just like automation and robotics that are general purpose robotics that can do assembling. I think we're gonna have lights out factories the way they do in China. So I think manufacturing is one, and that's everything from like motors to metalwork, to all kinds of production capabilities. And then I think if you look even left of that,

• 4:15Speaker 00

  you're gonna see minerals and mining, whether it's lithium, whether it's copper, whether it's steel, like we don't have very many steel smelters in this country anymore. We used to have a lot. We have almost none now. That's a huge opportunity. Lumber and wood is another one. There's a company called, I'm gonna mess it up, The Lumber Manufactory. It's transforming the way we produce wood in this country, and the way we produce lumber in this country is really important. We can't just have it all come from Canada. We can't have it come from other places. And we need to have much more lumber in this country than we currently have because we want to build much more, we want to build much more housing, we want to build lots more things that all need lumber. And so these are places where advanced software is being applied and founders that have sort of a software mindset

• 4:58Speaker 00

  and an advanced technology mindset are going into these legacy categories, which I promise you, advanced software has never gone into like the lumber milling world. But now it is, and it's gonna be transformative in all of the best ways.

• 5:11Molly O'Shea?

  Given those categories across energy, ships and manufacturing, what are some of the portfolio companies that American dynamism has?

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, look, we today are investing very actively, obviously defense, space, public safety, energy. And now we're increasingly looking at mining, manufacturing. And of course, we make like the one-off investments in other areas too when we find an iconic, great founder. Some of those companies in energy, I think of energy as like generation, transmission and storage as like the three big buckets of energy. And so for energy generation, we have an investment in Radiant Nuclear. I'm very excited about that company. It's been a long time since this country's had a new nuclear power company. I think Radiant is gonna turn on the first fuel nuclear reactor of a new design in like fifty plus years. I think they're gonna do it next year. I'm very excited about them.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Amazing team, amazing pace of execution, their productivity is just extraordinary. And they're building a reactor that fits in a shipping container and can be transportable. So that's awesome for natural disasters, it's awesome for remote locations. It's basically a diesel generator anywhere that gives you five years of clean energy when you flip it on. In terms of resiliency and storage, we have an investment in base energy. So base energy is, they're starting in Texas, but they'll expand from there. This was started by Zach Dell and Justin Lopez. Zach Dell worked at Thrive and Justin Lopez worked at Anduril. They got together to say, hey, how can we transform both resiliency in the grid? And also start to smooth out the power curves that are happening as energy costs are increasing and fluctuating.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  As you get more and more natural disasters and things that interrupt the grid. So whether it's really hot summers or bad weather in the winter, they're doing excellent. We have a company called Exowatt that is using solar energy and thermal energy to create basically batteries that are used at grid scale and industrial scale. So we're excited about the energy space. In defense, we've invested obviously in Anduril. I think, I think, I don't know, but I think we have more cash in Anduril than any other investor. Amazing company, really sets a bar on talent, on execution speed. Whenever I go to their offices and they tell me about all the things that they're working on, I go to the board meetings. It's just like, I'm blown away at their pace of productivity.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Incredible CEO, incredible founding team, just really, really amazing company. We've invested in Sironic that is doing unmanned surface vessels and executing very, very fast. Great CEO, great leadership team there. Castellian that's making missiles, good example of, again, I read these like stupid articles. It's like, you know, China's making X number of ships per year. We need to make X number of ships per year or we're going to totally die in a war. Well, that could be true, but I think an alternative is like if they're making X number of ships per year. We just need to have low cost, highly capable, very hard to shoot down missiles that can take out a hundred or X number of ships per year. Like that's better, that's what Castellian's doing. They are building the next generation hypersonic missiles at scale, at cost,

• 8:16Speaker 00

  that will help protect America and our allies. So I think that covers defense. There's other companies that are all wonderful. In space, we're investors in Apex Space, it's building satellite buses. We're invested in Northwood, it's improving ground station communications, which is critically important.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  I'm sure I'm forgetting others. In public safety, Flock Safety is a major investment. We also have an investment in a company called Long Eye that's helping police do investigations. We have an investment in Skydio that is a leader in drone first response. So that when you call the police, a drone can respond first and quickly and provide you with real eyes in the sky and sort of situational awareness, and that will ultimately save lives. Like, this is not funny, but like, one anecdote I often use is that people don't realize, people will call 911 and say like, "There's a guy in the alleyway with a shotgun." And if you're a police officer responding, like, you're gonna be responding like guns drawn. But what if a drone can get there first and be like, "That's not like a guy in the alleyway with a shotgun, that's like the janitor with a broom."

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Like, that's just, the police response is just totally different, and it's ultimately gonna save lives, it will keep police officers safer, it will keep community members safer, and it makes, again, it makes policing more objective. So, companies like Flock Safety, Skydio, Long Eye are all working to reduce crime, make policing safer, better stewards of the community, which is what all cops want, and make policing more objective. And so, it's a big category that we're very excited about. So let's say I covered space, I covered defense, I covered energy, I covered public safety. We have a mining company called Mariana Minerals, awesome company. We have a great portfolio, I love our portfolio. I wake up every day, super fired up about what they're doing, I get constant email updates from our founders.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  The best founders send like, basically like these email updates about all the things they got done, very like Elon style, and like, I read them, and I'm just like, "Wow, this is amazing." Like, these people are really gonna transform the arc of history in a positive direction for America, and it's just, it's very exciting.

• 10:18Molly O'Shea?

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• 11:00Molly O'Shea?

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• 11:44Molly O'Shea?

  With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit turing.com/sorcery, spelt S O U R C E R Y. That's turing.com/sorcery. Sorcery is proudly sponsored by Carta. Carta is transforming the private marketplace, connecting founders, investors and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by more than 65,000 companies in over 160 countries. Carta's platform of software and services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest and scale with confidence. Carta's fund administration platform supports over 9,000 funds and SPVs,

• 12:25Molly O'Shea?

  representing nearly $185 billion in assets under management, with tools designed to enhance the strategic impact of fund CFOs. For more information, visit carta.com/sorcery. That's C A R T A dot com slash S O U R C E R Y. We talked a little bit about this before. It's crazy. It's an amazing portfolio of which I'm. Very proud to say that I've covered a good handful of them.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 12:52Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, so thank you for providing that.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  And they're fun companies to cover. Like when you, when you visit the Andorol office, like literally you can feel your heart rate increase as you walk around and see all the stuff being built. And it's like, I, it's like I made the joke last time, I was like, if you don't come out of the Andorol factory tour, like feeling fired up and excited, like you need to check your pulse, like you might not be alive.

• 13:14Molly O'Shea?

  Well, we were also talking about this. It's like, they're not only exceptional at products, manufacturing, making really beautifully designed things, but like their comms and marketing strategy is insane. Their Don't Work at Anduril campaign was amazing.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was incredible. So the first thing I would say is that that comes from the founders, right? They have a great new marketing leader, Jeff Miller, who actually came from Snap, of all places. Like you would not expect a defense company to hire their head of marketing or CMO to come from Snap. But he did. He's a really, really smart guy. But the real like marketing philosophy comes from the top. Palmer has always said things like, we will never ship renders, like we will ship, ship actual videos of our, of our products. So when you see an explosion that like an Anduril like ammunition, but like explodes in a video, that's a real explosion. They're not doing special effects.

• 14:11Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Like they will, they will never do basically like vaporware video announcements. So when you see the Eagle Eye announcement yesterday, and you see the camera and the optics like that is all real because they don't, they will never fake it. And so that authenticity, I think, just permeates as a part of the culture of the company. And when they did this Don't Work at Anduril campaign, like it was brilliant because it was actually, it was evocative. And I've talked to Jeff Miller about this. It was evocative of a campaign done like a decade earlier from Netflix. When Netflix wanted to create this line of comedy that they were coming out with, and they had all these comedians signing up for Netflix, they put up billboards that said like Netflix is a joke. And people didn't know who put up the billboards. Like, was somebody really angry with Netflix? Like Netflix is a joke, can't take them seriously?

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Or was it like Netflix is a joke because they're launching this huge comedy thing? And it's like really funny and it got more people talking. And this is like before Netflix was huge. Got more people talking about Netflix. So with Anduril, they said, hey, wait a minute. Like Matt Grimm, the COO, who's an amazing guy, was like, look, we can just enumerate all the reasons why somebody who just wants to like not work that hard should not work at Anduril. Like, we're in the office. It's long hours. You might have to travel and you might have to travel to like not the best places because that's sometimes where our forward operating bases are. And, you know, you're gonna have to do work that is really mission driven and it's gonna be difficult and you're gonna be on a factory floor sometimes. Like, it's not a cushy office. We don't have nap pods. You know, like, that's a very Matt Grimm thing to say. Like, we don't have nap pods here.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Um, and so like you put those things together and it's like, look, you should not work at Anduril. But if on the other hand, you get super fired up about building the future of defense technology, if you wanna go to like, you know, some of these countries that are like less fun to hang out in and some of these forward operating bases and help the men and women who serve and protect our country, well then like you do, you should work at Anduril. So they launched this campaign. They actually had both domains. Don'tworkatAnduril.com, workatAnduril.com. Um, it was an amazing campaign. Applications skyrocketed. They got tons of coverage for it. And you can now see other companies, um, sort of trying to emulate that marketing ethos. And I think that unless it's sort of core to the company's culture of authenticity, it kinda, it can like fall flat.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Like, you know, you have to be authentic about it and it has to really resonate at a, at a, um, at a, like at a true level inside of like what is the DNA and the heartbeat of the company? And then the marketing can flow from that. And I think Anduril just nails it over and over again. Um, I think Base Power had an awesome campaign recently where they're like, they were trying to recruit in Austin. And they're like, look, you can like change the way energy is delivered and stored and increase people's reliability, or you can work on like B2B SaaS.

• 16:46Molly O'Shea?

  So what is the point of these marketing campaigns? This is something I talked to Eric Christman from Ultimater about because they're also investors in Andorl, but it's like you have a defense company primarily selling to the government. It's enterprise. Why are you creating like this brand halo around it? And it's almost become like a consumer brand, which is, by the way, is like entirely effective and very, very good. Like, why?

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's important, like, look, Andorl never loses sight of who their customer is. And they have a ton, like, you know, there's tons of like collateral and white papers and documentation for their customers. But at the same time, they're hugely dependent on support from Washington for the work they're doing. And if you want people to believe in transforming the way defense production works in this country, you need the public to come along with you. You need the policymakers to come along with you. And that requires basically a full-fledged, you know, marketing effort. And people, also it gets people fired up. It like makes people feel patriotic. And so I think they do it for a bunch of reasons. One is they're unashamed of who they are. They want to make it very clear to their own employees and the public who they are. They are a defense company.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  That includes making weapons and making systems like that. They want to make sure that policymakers know who they are. They want to attract the best talent. So they create a magnet for talent. And so I think for all those reasons, it's important that they have this public face and not just be like a shadowy defense company. And I think one of the things that they get away with is like, you know, people might say like, I don't want to work at a defense company. That's fine, they can opt out. But like, nobody can critique Andorl saying they don't know what Andorl does. Everyone knows what Andorl does because they're very open about it.

• 18:24Molly O'Shea?

  Kind of crazy, especially for such like a national security-based company.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Yep. We have to assume that there's capabilities in their systems they don't add, they don't talk about.

• 18:33Molly O'Shea?

  Of course, yeah, yeah. But it is really cool to see those videos not being altered and go out. And like, that is, that is actually American defense.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 18:43Molly O'Shea?

  So we got here because you had an amazing career beforehand, enough so that Marc Andreessen said, "Build whatever you want, invest in whatever you want." So that career is coming from founding Open DNS, which you sold to Cisco for 635 million?

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Something like that.

• 19:02Molly O'Shea?

  Something like that.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:03Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so I'm curious from your standpoint, and this leads into a Brex question on performance. So Brex is all about spending smarter, moving faster, performance. What lessons did you learn as a founder, as an operator, that drive your investment decisions into these companies?

• 19:20Speaker 00

  I think the first thing is it starts with team and talent. The best companies in our portfolio have the best performing teams. And, you know, it's very easy in venture to fall in love with an idea. But what really matters is like, is there a team there that can execute? Can that team magnetically attract the best talent in the world and get people to come work for them? People love working for Brian Shemfett and Anurul. They love working for Palmer Lucky. They love working for Matt Grimm. Like, they just, they love that team and they're able to magnetically attract the absolute best talent. Chris Bros is probably the most in-demand person in like the defense space today, and he's worked at Anurul since the very beginning. And so, like, the best, you have to be able to magnetically attract the best talent. And every company we look at,

• 20:04Speaker 00

  whether it's Base Power, whether it's Sironic, it doesn't matter, Radiant Nuclear, they just become magnetic attractors of talent. The second thing is, these companies are expensive. And, you know, we've learned that they have to be able to magnetically attract capital. And it always, sometimes it sounds dumb to say because like, we're investing in these companies, so obviously they got capital. But they need to be able to attract capital from other people as well. And we've found that these companies are so capital-intensive, and sometimes the curve to revenue takes a little bit longer because you're doing manufacturing, doing all those other things. And so, it just doesn't, nothing matters more than the talent at the top, the founders of the company. Can they magnetically attract capital? Can they magnetically attract talent? Those two things matter the most. And then...

• 20:46Speaker 00

  I think what I've learned, and I learned that in my own experiences, and you know, it took me 10 years to basically have my overnight success. And if I think about the years that were not that last night before we sold the company, like the lessons I learned were like every time I had to change the way the company was operating, it always started with talent. I had to change out the executive team, change out the leadership team that we had. At one point, we were a consumer company. We pivoted to enterprise halfway through, five years in, and totally rebuilt the team. Because the kind of people that were building a consumer company were totally different than building an enterprise cybersecurity company. I think the last thing I learned that was really important, especially to help me set me up for the American dynamism practice, is at Cisco, at that point, I was running one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  And I recognized at Cisco that like when you sell to the government, you need to have the people that know how to interface with the government, know how to sell the government. These are very, very strategic sales processes. You're not, they're not transactional. Oftentimes, the customer on the other side of the table is sometimes betting their career on picking your solution. The same thing is true now with government. When somebody who's a procurement officer or a program officer is betting on a defense startup to provide some solution, they're really betting on their career in many cases to say like, I hope that Andrel or Saronik or whoever, Castellian, can deliver this solution for me. And so I think you need to recognize and appreciate, and this is what I learned at Cisco, that these partnerships are just not transactional. They're deep relationships.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  You're going to work with these people for years on these complex, large, you know, $10 million plus deals. And I learned that on the enterprise side at Cisco. I see it now over and over in the AD space. I think those were some of the biggest lessons that I learned. Talent and then really partnership with your customers.

• 22:29Molly O'Shea?

  On the talent side, do you believe in hire, slow, fire, fast? What's your opinion on that? I think it's different, especially now in this environment, it's like increased competition. There's a clear like bifurcation between like AI native or like non-AI native people and like just this increased competition that is like making it even harder.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  I don't think you can hire slow. You definitely need to fire fast when someone's not working. I think you can do it compassionately and generously. But you have to fire people quickly. What I would say is the most important thing when it comes to hiring talent is doing references. And it's the thing that I find that most founders and most hiring managers forget to do. I would often say, and I've joked about this in the past, that sometimes I don't even need to meet a candidate. All I have to do is do the references and I can tell you if you should hire this person or not. The absolute best people get just these extraordinarily positive references. Like the kind of references where it's like, hey, would you want to work for this person again? And they're like, oh, yeah, I literally would do anything to go work for this person again. I would quit my amazing job I have currently to go work for this person again. They were the best manager I ever had. Brian Schimpf at Andorl gets those kinds of references.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  People would stop what they're doing, their cushy job at Palantir and come to go work for him. And so people also don't know how to do references properly. And they often hear things like, oh, yeah, I loved working with, you know, I'll just use Molly. I love working with Molly. She's terrific. And it's like, okay, well, that's fine. But like you would say that about a lot of people. But it's like, would you stop what you're doing, your cushy job? Would you move across the country to go work for Molly again? And it's like, oh, yeah, absolutely. She was the best boss I ever had. Well, that's the person you want to hire. Then I want to hire Molly. And so A, doing references and then B, knowing what a good reference sounds like. That's way more important than like hire slow, fire fast. I do think you need to hire fast. And I always tell founders, they should probably spend at least, you know, thirty percent of their time on recruiting.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  And you should always have a pipeline of talent because people do leave. You know, it's a free market. And, you know, I'll have a founder call me and say, oh, so and so told me they're leaving. And like, I have no backfill, I have no bench. And it's like, no, you should always be recruiting.

• 24:28Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think the biggest difference is between cultures and software and in American dynamism?

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Nap pods.

• 24:35Molly O'Shea?

  Nap pods?

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  I think in American dynamism, we're now at a point where two things are happening. One is we're attracting more and more people that are very mission driven and mission oriented. The second thing is that there's more and more successful American dynamism companies. And especially if you include people like SpaceX and Tesla. That the alumni and Palantir and like the alumni coming out of these companies is just growing and so extraordinary. That there's now just more and more talent. We're getting this sort of very, very nice flywheel effect. We're getting more and more talent entering the categories and more and more founders in the categories and more capital in the categories and the momentum is just really growing. I think we're still in the early innings of American dynamism,

• 25:22Speaker 00

  but it's much, much easier to start an American dynamism company today. And then I would even say like the customers are also getting more and more open to working with startups. So like, everything is really going in a positive direction. And that doesn't even count the fact that like, you know, the world continues to be spicy. So like, and I don't think it's going to get less spicy anytime soon.

• 25:39Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  So obviously feel very bullish about American dynamism and especially because the supply of talents just keeps growing.

• 25:47Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so as we close out, I like to end on future predictions. A60Z actually was participating in Kalsi's recent round. So they just raised 300 million out of $5 billion, which probably is outdated at this point. Because they're, I think they reached over 50 billion in volume, which is crazy. Any thoughts on Kalsi?

• 26:06Speaker 00

  I think it's awesome.

• 26:07Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  I, that was a growth team did the deal. I think the prediction markets are absolutely fascinating. I know that the founder of Kalsi also references just extraordinarily well. So I'm excited to see where it goes.

• 26:19Molly O'Shea?

  And what are you looking, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  In the next 12 months, what am I looking forward to?

• 26:29Speaker 00

  We're going to have our third annual American Dynamism Summit in DC. Last year, our headliner was JD Vance. Hard to top that.

• 26:37Molly O'Shea?

  Hard.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  But I think we will. It's also the America 250th Birthday Celebration. And so we're going to tie that in and that's going to be really, really exciting. And so I'm looking forward to that. The companies we've invested in are all hitting various inflection points. That's super exciting to watch. A lot of these products that we've been building for years across our portfolio are now making it into the hands of the customers. And that's just awesome to see. Lots of things that are flying in the air, lots of things that go boom, lots of things that store energy and store power and generate power. We might have the first nuclear reactor fueled up of a new design in like 50 plus years. That is just beyond exciting.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  This really, it's hard to really fully count. And then, you know, I think we're on the precipice of a robotics transformation. And so I'm excited to see that. It's really, there's just a lot to be excited about.

• 27:27Molly O'Shea?

  A lot to be optimistic for.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  I'm very optimistic.

• 27:30Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Well, David, thank you so much.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Thanks, Molly.

• 27:33Molly 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.