Podcasts about american dynamism

Tickets for AIEi Miami and AIE Europe are live, with first wave speakers announced!From pioneering software-defined networking to backing many of the most aggressive AI model companies of this cycle, Martin Casado and Sarah Wang sit at the center of the capital, compute, and talent arms race reshaping the tech industry. As partners at a16z investing across infrastructure and growth, they've watched venture and growth blur, model labs turn dollars into capability at unprecedented speed, and startups raise nine-figure rounds before monetization.Martin and Sarah join us to unpack the new financing playbook for AI: why today's rounds are really compute contracts in disguise, how the “raise → train → ship → raise bigger” flywheel works, and whether foundation model companies can outspend the entire app ecosystem built on top of them. They also share what's underhyped (boring enterprise software), what's overheated (talent wars and compensation spirals), and the two radically different futures they see for AI's market structure.We discuss:* Martin's “two futures” fork: infinite fragmentation and new software categories vs. a small oligopoly of general models that consume everything above them* The capital flywheel: how model labs translate funding directly into capability gains, then into revenue growth measured in weeks, not years* Why venture and growth have merged: $100M–$1B hybrid rounds, strategic investors, compute negotiations, and complex deal structures* The AGI vs. product tension: allocating scarce GPUs between long-term research and near-term revenue flywheels* Whether frontier labs can out-raise and outspend the entire app ecosystem built on top of their APIs* Why today's talent wars ($10M+ comp packages, $B acqui-hires) are breaking early-stage founder math* Cursor as a case study: building up from the app layer while training down into your own models* Why “boring” enterprise software may be the most underinvested opportunity in the AI mania* Hardware and robotics: why the ChatGPT moment hasn't yet arrived for robots and what would need to change* World Labs and generative 3D: bringing the marginal cost of 3D scene creation down by orders of magnitude* Why public AI discourse is often wildly disconnected from boardroom reality and how founders should navigate the noiseShow Notes:* “Where Value Will Accrue in AI: Martin Casado & Sarah Wang” - a16z show* “Jack Altman & Martin Casado on the Future of Venture Capital”* World Labs—Martin Casado• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martincasado/• X: https://x.com/martin_casadoSarah Wang• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-wang-59b96a7• X: https://x.com/sarahdingwanga16z• https://a16z.com/Timestamps00:00:00 – Intro: Live from a16z00:01:20 – The New AI Funding Model: Venture + Growth Collide00:03:19 – Circular Funding, Demand & “No Dark GPUs”00:05:24 – Infrastructure vs Apps: The Lines Blur00:06:24 – The Capital Flywheel: Raise → Train → Ship → Raise Bigger00:09:39 – Can Frontier Labs Outspend the Entire App Ecosystem?00:11:24 – Character AI & The AGI vs Product Dilemma00:14:39 – Talent Wars, $10M Engineers & Founder Anxiety00:17:33 – What's Underinvested? The Case for “Boring” Software00:19:29 – Robotics, Hardware & Why It's Hard to Win00:22:42 – Custom ASICs & The $1B Training Run Economics00:24:23 – American Dynamism, Geography & AI Power Centers00:26:48 – How AI Is Changing the Investor Workflow (Claude Cowork)00:29:12 – Two Futures of AI: Infinite Expansion or Oligopoly?00:32:48 – If You Can Raise More Than Your Ecosystem, You Win00:34:27 – Are All Tasks AGI-Complete? Coding as the Test Case00:38:55 – Cursor & The Power of the App Layer00:44:05 – World Labs, Spatial Intelligence & 3D Foundation Models00:47:20 – Thinking Machines, Founder Drama & Media Narratives00:52:30 – Where Long-Term Power Accrues in the AI StackTranscriptLatent.Space - Inside AI's $10B+ Capital Flywheel — Martin Casado & Sarah Wang of a16z[00:00:00] Welcome to Latent Space (Live from a16z) + Meet the Guests[00:00:00] Alessio: Hey everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space podcast, live from a 16 z. Uh, this is Alessio founder Kernel Lance, and I'm joined by Twix, editor of Latent Space.[00:00:08] swyx: Hey, hey, hey. Uh, and we're so glad to be on with you guys. Also a top AI podcast, uh, Martin Cado and Sarah Wang. Welcome, very[00:00:16] Martin Casado: happy to be here and welcome.[00:00:17] swyx: Yes, uh, we love this office. We love what you've done with the place. Uh, the new logo is everywhere now. It's, it's still getting, takes a while to get used to, but it reminds me of like sort of a callback to a more ambitious age, which I think is kind of[00:00:31] Martin Casado: definitely makes a statement.[00:00:33] swyx: Yeah.[00:00:34] Martin Casado: Not quite sure what that statement is, but it makes a statement.[00:00:37] swyx: Uh, Martin, I go back with you to Netlify.[00:00:40] Martin Casado: Yep.[00:00:40] swyx: Uh, and, uh, you know, you create a software defined networking and all, all that stuff people can read up on your background. Yep. Sarah, I'm newer to you. Uh, you, you sort of started working together on AI infrastructure stuff.[00:00:51] Sarah Wang: That's right. Yeah. Seven, seven years ago now.[00:00:53] Martin Casado: Best growth investor in the entire industry.[00:00:55] swyx: Oh, say[00:00:56] Martin Casado: more hands down there is, there is. [00:01:00] I mean, when it comes to AI companies, Sarah, I think has done the most kind of aggressive, um, investment thesis around AI models, right? So, worked for Nom Ja, Mira Ia, FEI Fey, and so just these frontier, kind of like large AI models.[00:01:15] I think, you know, Sarah's been the, the broadest investor. Is that fair?[00:01:20] Venture vs. Growth in the Frontier Model Era[00:01:20] Sarah Wang: No, I, well, I was gonna say, I think it's been a really interesting tag, tag team actually just ‘cause the, a lot of these big C deals, not only are they raising a lot of money, um, it's still a tech founder bet, which obviously is inherently early stage.[00:01:33] But the resources,[00:01:36] Martin Casado: so many, I[00:01:36] Sarah Wang: was gonna say the resources one, they just grow really quickly. But then two, the resources that they need day one are kind of growth scale. So I, the hybrid tag team that we have is. Quite effective, I think,[00:01:46] Martin Casado: what is growth these days? You know, you don't wake up if it's less than a billion or like, it's, it's actually, it's actually very like, like no, it's a very interesting time in investing because like, you know, take like the character around, right?[00:01:59] These tend to [00:02:00] be like pre monetization, but the dollars are large enough that you need to have a larger fund and the analysis. You know, because you've got lots of users. ‘cause this stuff has such high demand requires, you know, more of a number sophistication. And so most of these deals, whether it's US or other firms on these large model companies, are like this hybrid between venture growth.[00:02:18] Sarah Wang: Yeah. Total. And I think, you know, stuff like BD for example, you wouldn't usually need BD when you were seed stage trying to get market biz Devrel. Biz Devrel, exactly. Okay. But like now, sorry, I'm,[00:02:27] swyx: I'm not familiar. What, what, what does biz Devrel mean for a venture fund? Because I know what biz Devrel means for a company.[00:02:31] Sarah Wang: Yeah.[00:02:32] Compute Deals, Strategics, and the ‘Circular Funding' Question[00:02:32] Sarah Wang: You know, so a, a good example is, I mean, we talk about buying compute, but there's a huge negotiation involved there in terms of, okay, do you get equity for the compute? What, what sort of partner are you looking at? Is there a go-to market arm to that? Um, and these are just things on this scale, hundreds of millions, you know, maybe.[00:02:50] Six months into the inception of a company, you just wouldn't have to negotiate these deals before.[00:02:54] Martin Casado: Yeah. These large rounds are very complex now. Like in the past, if you did a series A [00:03:00] or a series B, like whatever, you're writing a 20 to a $60 million check and you call it a day. Now you normally have financial investors and strategic investors, and then the strategic portion always still goes with like these kind of large compute contracts, which can take months to do.[00:03:13] And so it's, it's very different ties. I've been doing this for 10 years. It's the, I've never seen anything like this.[00:03:19] swyx: Yeah. Do you have worries about the circular funding from so disease strategics?[00:03:24] Martin Casado: I mean, listen, as long as the demand is there, like the demand is there. Like the problem with the internet is the demand wasn't there.[00:03:29] swyx: Exactly. All right. This, this is like the, the whole pyramid scheme bubble thing, where like, as long as you mark to market on like the notional value of like, these deals, fine, but like once it starts to chip away, it really Well[00:03:41] Martin Casado: no, like as, as, as, as long as there's demand. I mean, you know, this, this is like a lot of these sound bites have already become kind of cliches, but they're worth saying it.[00:03:47] Right? Like during the internet days, like we were. Um, raising money to put fiber in the ground that wasn't used. And that's a problem, right? Because now you actually have a supply overhang.[00:03:58] swyx: Mm-hmm.[00:03:59] Martin Casado: And even in the, [00:04:00] the time of the, the internet, like the supply and, and bandwidth overhang, even as massive as it was in, as massive as the crash was only lasted about four years.[00:04:09] But we don't have a supply overhang. Like there's no dark GPUs, right? I mean, and so, you know, circular or not, I mean, you know, if, if someone invests in a company that, um. You know, they'll actually use the GPUs. And on the other side of it is the, is the ask for customer. So I I, I think it's a different time.[00:04:25] Sarah Wang: I think the other piece, maybe just to add onto this, and I'm gonna quote Martine in front of him, but this is probably also a unique time in that. For the first time, you can actually trace dollars to outcomes. Yeah, right. Provided that scaling laws are, are holding, um, and capabilities are actually moving forward.[00:04:40] Because if you can put translate dollars into capabilities, uh, a capability improvement, there's demand there to martine's point. But if that somehow breaks, you know, obviously that's an important assumption in this whole thing to make it work. But you know, instead of investing dollars into sales and marketing, you're, you're investing into r and d to get to the capability, um, you know, increase.[00:04:59] And [00:05:00] that's sort of been the demand driver because. Once there's an unlock there, people are willing to pay for it.[00:05:05] Alessio: Yeah.[00:05:06] Blurring Lines: Models as Infra + Apps, and the New Fundraising Flywheel[00:05:06] Alessio: Is there any difference in how you built the portfolio now that some of your growth companies are, like the infrastructure of the early stage companies, like, you know, OpenAI is now the same size as some of the cloud providers were early on.[00:05:16] Like what does that look like? Like how much information can you feed off each other between the, the two?[00:05:24] Martin Casado: There's so many lines that are being crossed right now, or blurred. Right. So we already talked about venture and growth. Another one that's being blurred is between infrastructure and apps, right? So like what is a model company?[00:05:35] Mm-hmm. Like, it's clearly infrastructure, right? Because it's like, you know, it's doing kind of core r and d. It's a horizontal platform, but it's also an app because it's um, uh, touches the users directly. And then of course. You know, the, the, the growth of these is just so high. And so I actually think you're just starting to see a, a, a new financing strategy emerge and, you know, we've had to adapt as a result of that.[00:05:59] And [00:06:00] so there's been a lot of changes. Um, you're right that these companies become platform companies very quickly. You've got ecosystem build out. So none of this is necessarily new, but the timescales of which it's happened is pretty phenomenal. And the way we'd normally cut lines before is blurred a little bit, but.[00:06:16] But that, that, that said, I mean, a lot of it also just does feel like things that we've seen in the past, like cloud build out the internet build out as well.[00:06:24] Sarah Wang: Yeah. Um, yeah, I think it's interesting, uh, I don't know if you guys would agree with this, but it feels like the emerging strategy is, and this builds off of your other question, um.[00:06:33] You raise money for compute, you pour that or you, you pour the money into compute, you get some sort of breakthrough. You funnel the breakthrough into your vertically integrated application. That could be chat GBT, that could be cloud code, you know, whatever it is. You massively gain share and get users.[00:06:49] Maybe you're even subsidizing at that point. Um, depending on your strategy. You raise money at the peak momentum and then you repeat, rinse and repeat. Um, and so. And that wasn't [00:07:00] true even two years ago, I think. Mm-hmm. And so it's sort of to your, just tying it to fundraising strategy, right? There's a, and hiring strategy.[00:07:07] All of these are tied, I think the lines are blurring even more today where everyone is, and they, but of course these companies all have API businesses and so they're these, these frenemy lines that are getting blurred in that a lot of, I mean, they have billions of dollars of API revenue, right? And so there are customers there.[00:07:23] But they're competing on the app layer.[00:07:24] Martin Casado: Yeah. So this is a really, really important point. So I, I would say for sure, venture and growth, that line is blurry app and infrastructure. That line is blurry. Um, but I don't think that that changes our practice so much. But like where the very open questions are like, does this layer in the same way.[00:07:43] Compute traditionally has like during the cloud is like, you know, like whatever, somebody wins one layer, but then another whole set of companies wins another layer. But that might not, might not be the case here. It may be the case that you actually can't verticalize on the token string. Like you can't build an app like it, it necessarily goes down just because there are no [00:08:00] abstractions.[00:08:00] So those are kinda the bigger existential questions we ask. Another thing that is very different this time than in the history of computer sciences is. In the past, if you raised money, then you basically had to wait for engineering to catch up. Which famously doesn't scale like the mythical mammoth. It take a very long time.[00:08:18] But like that's not the case here. Like a model company can raise money and drop a model in a, in a year, and it's better, right? And, and it does it with a team of 20 people or 10 people. So this type of like money entering a company and then producing something that has demand and growth right away and using that to raise more money is a very different capital flywheel than we've ever seen before.[00:08:39] And I think everybody's trying to understand what the consequences are. So I think it's less about like. Big companies and growth and this, and more about these more systemic questions that we actually don't have answers to.[00:08:49] Alessio: Yeah, like at Kernel Labs, one of our ideas is like if you had unlimited money to spend productively to turn tokens into products, like the whole early stage [00:09:00] market is very different because today you're investing X amount of capital to win a deal because of price structure and whatnot, and you're kind of pot committing.[00:09:07] Yeah. To a certain strategy for a certain amount of time. Yeah. But if you could like iteratively spin out companies and products and just throw, I, I wanna spend a million dollar of inference today and get a product out tomorrow.[00:09:18] swyx: Yeah.[00:09:19] Alessio: Like, we should get to the point where like the friction of like token to product is so low that you can do this and then you can change the Right, the early stage venture model to be much more iterative.[00:09:30] And then every round is like either 100 k of inference or like a hundred million from a 16 Z. There's no, there's no like $8 million C round anymore. Right.[00:09:38] When Frontier Labs Outspend the Entire App Ecosystem[00:09:38] Martin Casado: But, but, but, but there's a, there's a, the, an industry structural question that we don't know the answer to, which involves the frontier models, which is, let's take.[00:09:48] Anthropic it. Let's say Anthropic has a state-of-the-art model that has some large percentage of market share. And let's say that, uh, uh, uh, you know, uh, a company's building smaller models [00:10:00] that, you know, use the bigger model in the background, open 4.5, but they add value on top of that. Now, if Anthropic can raise three times more.[00:10:10] Every subsequent round, they probably can raise more money than the entire app ecosystem that's built on top of it. And if that's the case, they can expand beyond everything built on top of it. It's like imagine like a star that's just kind of expanding, so there could be a systemic. There could be a, a systemic situation where the soda models can raise so much money that they can out pay anybody that bills on top of ‘em, which would be something I don't think we've ever seen before just because we were so bottlenecked in engineering, and this is a very open question.[00:10:41] swyx: Yeah. It's, it is almost like bitter lesson applied to the startup industry.[00:10:45] Martin Casado: Yeah, a hundred percent. It literally becomes an issue of like raise capital, turn that directly into growth. Use that to raise three times more. Exactly. And if you can keep doing that, you literally can outspend any company that's built the, not any company.[00:10:57] You can outspend the aggregate of companies on top of [00:11:00] you and therefore you'll necessarily take their share, which is crazy.[00:11:02] swyx: Would you say that kind of happens in character? Is that the, the sort of postmortem on. What happened?[00:11:10] Sarah Wang: Um,[00:11:10] Martin Casado: no.[00:11:12] Sarah Wang: Yeah, because I think so,[00:11:13] swyx: I mean the actual postmortem is, he wanted to go back to Google.[00:11:15] Exactly. But like[00:11:18] Martin Casado: that's another difference that[00:11:19] Sarah Wang: you said[00:11:21] Martin Casado: it. We should talk, we should actually talk about that.[00:11:22] swyx: Yeah,[00:11:22] Sarah Wang: that's[00:11:23] swyx: Go for it. Take it. Take,[00:11:23] Sarah Wang: yeah.[00:11:24] Character.AI, Founder Goals (AGI vs Product), and GPU Allocation Tradeoffs[00:11:24] Sarah Wang: I was gonna say, I think, um. The, the, the character thing raises actually a different issue, which actually the Frontier Labs will face as well. So we'll see how they handle it.[00:11:34] But, um, so we invest in character in January, 2023, which feels like eons ago, I mean, three years ago. Feels like lifetimes ago. But, um, and then they, uh, did the IP licensing deal with Google in August, 2020. Uh, four. And so, um, you know, at the time, no, you know, he's talked publicly about this, right? He wanted to Google wouldn't let him put out products in the world.[00:11:56] That's obviously changed drastically. But, um, he went to go do [00:12:00] that. Um, but he had a product attached. The goal was, I mean, it's Nome Shair, he wanted to get to a GI. That was always his personal goal. But, you know, I think through collecting data, right, and this sort of very human use case, that the character product.[00:12:13] Originally was and still is, um, was one of the vehicles to do that. Um, I think the real reason that, you know. I if you think about the, the stress that any company feels before, um, you ultimately going one way or the other is sort of this a GI versus product. Um, and I think a lot of the big, I think, you know, opening eyes, feeling that, um, anthropic if they haven't started, you know, felt it, certainly given the success of their products, they may start to feel that soon.[00:12:39] And the real. I think there's real trade-offs, right? It's like how many, when you think about GPUs, that's a limited resource. Where do you allocate the GPUs? Is it toward the product? Is it toward new re research? Right? Is it, or long-term research, is it toward, um, n you know, near to midterm research? And so, um, in a case where you're resource constrained, um, [00:13:00] of course there's this fundraising game you can play, right?[00:13:01] But the fund, the market was very different back in 2023 too. Um. I think the best researchers in the world have this dilemma of, okay, I wanna go all in on a GI, but it's the product usage revenue flywheel that keeps the revenue in the house to power all the GPUs to get to a GI. And so it does make, um, you know, I think it sets up an interesting dilemma for any startup that has trouble raising up until that level, right?[00:13:27] And certainly if you don't have that progress, you can't continue this fly, you know, fundraising flywheel.[00:13:32] Martin Casado: I would say that because, ‘cause we're keeping track of all of the things that are different, right? Like, you know, venture growth and uh, app infra and one of the ones is definitely the personalities of the founders.[00:13:45] It's just very different this time I've been. Been doing this for a decade and I've been doing startups for 20 years. And so, um, I mean a lot of people start this to do a GI and we've never had like a unified North star that I recall in the same [00:14:00] way. Like people built companies to start companies in the past.[00:14:02] Like that was what it was. Like I would create an internet company, I would create infrastructure company, like it's kind of more engineering builders and this is kind of a different. You know, mentality. And some companies have harnessed that incredibly well because their direction is so obviously on the path to what somebody would consider a GI, but others have not.[00:14:20] And so like there is always this tension with personnel. And so I think we're seeing more kind of founder movement.[00:14:27] Sarah Wang: Yeah.[00:14:27] Martin Casado: You know, as a fraction of founders than we've ever seen. I mean, maybe since like, I don't know the time of like Shockly and the trade DUR aid or something like that. Way back in the beginning of the industry, I, it's a very, very.[00:14:38] Unusual time of personnel.[00:14:39] Sarah Wang: Totally.[00:14:40] Talent Wars, Mega-Comp, and the Rise of Acquihire M&A[00:14:40] Sarah Wang: And it, I think it's exacerbated by the fact that talent wars, I mean, every industry has talent wars, but not at this magnitude, right? No. Yeah. Very rarely can you see someone get poached for $5 billion. That's hard to compete with. And then secondly, if you're a founder in ai, you could fart and it would be on the front page of, you know, the information these days.[00:14:59] And so there's [00:15:00] sort of this fishbowl effect that I think adds to the deep anxiety that, that these AI founders are feeling.[00:15:06] Martin Casado: Hmm.[00:15:06] swyx: Uh, yes. I mean, just on, uh, briefly comment on the founder, uh, the sort of. Talent wars thing. I feel like 2025 was just like a blip. Like I, I don't know if we'll see that again.[00:15:17] ‘cause meta built the team. Like, I don't know if, I think, I think they're kind of done and like, who's gonna pay more than meta? I, I don't know.[00:15:23] Martin Casado: I, I agree. So it feels so, it feel, it feels this way to me too. It's like, it is like, basically Zuckerberg kind of came out swinging and then now he's kind of back to building.[00:15:30] Yeah,[00:15:31] swyx: yeah. You know, you gotta like pay up to like assemble team to rush the job, whatever. But then now, now you like you, you made your choices and now they got a ship.[00:15:38] Martin Casado: I mean, the, the o other side of that is like, you know, like we're, we're actually in the job hiring market. We've got 600 people here. I hire all the time.[00:15:44] I've got three open recs if anybody's interested, that's listening to this for investor. Yeah, on, on the team, like on the investing side of the team, like, and, um, a lot of the people we talk to have acting, you know, active, um, offers for 10 million a year or something like that. And like, you know, and we pay really, [00:16:00] really well.[00:16:00] And just to see what's out on the market is really, is really remarkable. And so I would just say it's actually, so you're right, like the really flashy one, like I will get someone for, you know, a billion dollars, but like the inflated, um, uh, trickles down. Yeah, it is still very active today. I mean,[00:16:18] Sarah Wang: yeah, you could be an L five and get an offer in the tens of millions.[00:16:22] Okay. Yeah. Easily. Yeah. It's so I think you're right that it felt like a blip. I hope you're right. Um, but I think it's been, the steady state is now, I think got pulled up. Yeah. Yeah. I'll pull up for[00:16:31] Martin Casado: sure. Yeah.[00:16:32] Alessio: Yeah. And I think that's breaking the early stage founder math too. I think before a lot of people would be like, well, maybe I should just go be a founder instead of like getting paid.[00:16:39] Yeah. 800 KA million at Google. But if I'm getting paid. Five, 6 million. That's different but[00:16:45] Martin Casado: on. But on the other hand, there's more strategic money than we've ever seen historically, right? Mm-hmm. And so, yep. The economics, the, the, the, the calculus on the economics is very different in a number of ways. And, uh, it's crazy.[00:16:58] It's cra it's causing like a, [00:17:00] a, a, a ton of change in confusion in the market. Some very positive, sub negative, like, so for example, the other side of the, um. The co-founder, like, um, acquisition, you know, mark Zuckerberg poaching someone for a lot of money is like, we were actually seeing historic amount of m and a for basically acquihires, right?[00:17:20] That you like, you know, really good outcomes from a venture perspective that are effective acquihires, right? So I would say it's probably net positive from the investment standpoint, even though it seems from the headlines to be very disruptive in a negative way.[00:17:33] Alessio: Yeah.[00:17:33] What's Underfunded: Boring Software, Robotics Skepticism, and Custom Silicon Economics[00:17:33] Alessio: Um, let's talk maybe about what's not being invested in, like maybe some interesting ideas that you would see more people build or it, it seems in a way, you know, as ycs getting more popular, it's like access getting more popular.[00:17:47] There's a startup school path that a lot of founders take and they know what's hot in the VC circles and they know what gets funded. Uh, and there's maybe not as much risk appetite for. Things outside of that. Um, I'm curious if you feel [00:18:00] like that's true and what are maybe, uh, some of the areas, uh, that you think are under discussed?[00:18:06] Martin Casado: I mean, I actually think that we've taken our eye off the ball in a lot of like, just traditional, you know, software companies. Um, so like, I mean. You know, I think right now there's almost a barbell, like you're like the hot thing on X, you're deep tech.[00:18:21] swyx: Mm-hmm.[00:18:22] Martin Casado: Right. But I, you know, I feel like there's just kind of a long, you know, list of like good.[00:18:28] Good companies that will be around for a long time in very large markets. Say you're building a database, you know, say you're building, um, you know, kind of monitoring or logging or tooling or whatever. There's some good companies out there right now, but like, they have a really hard time getting, um, the attention of investors.[00:18:43] And it's almost become a meme, right? Which is like, if you're not basically growing from zero to a hundred in a year, you're not interesting, which is just, is the silliest thing to say. I mean, think of yourself as like an introvert person, like, like your personal money, right? Mm-hmm. So. Your personal money, will you put it in the stock market at 7% or you put it in this company growing five x in a very large [00:19:00] market?[00:19:00] Of course you can put it in the company five x. So it's just like we say these stupid things, like if you're not going from zero to a hundred, but like those, like who knows what the margins of those are mean. Clearly these are good investments. True for anybody, right? True. Like our LPs want whatever.[00:19:12] Three x net over, you know, the life cycle of a fund, right? So a, a company in a big market growing five X is a great investment. We'd, everybody would be happy with these returns, but we've got this kind of mania on these, these strong growths. And so I would say that that's probably the most underinvested sector.[00:19:28] Right now.[00:19:29] swyx: Boring software, boring enterprise software.[00:19:31] Martin Casado: Traditional. Really good company.[00:19:33] swyx: No, no AI here.[00:19:34] Martin Casado: No. Like boring. Well, well, the AI of course is pulling them into use cases. Yeah, but that's not what they're, they're not on the token path, right? Yeah. Let's just say that like they're software, but they're not on the token path.[00:19:41] Like these are like they're great investments from any definition except for like random VC on Twitter saying VC on x, saying like, it's not growing fast enough. What do you[00:19:52] Sarah Wang: think? Yeah, maybe I'll answer a slightly different. Question, but adjacent to what you asked, um, which is maybe an area that we're not, uh, investing [00:20:00] right now that I think is a question and we're spending a lot of time in regardless of whether we pull the trigger or not.[00:20:05] Um, and it would probably be on the hardware side, actually. Robotics, right? And the robotics side. Robotics. Right. Which is, it's, I don't wanna say that it's not getting funding ‘cause it's clearly, uh, it's, it's sort of non-consensus to almost not invest in robotics at this point. But, um, we spent a lot of time in that space and I think for us, we just haven't seen the chat GPT moment.[00:20:22] Happen on the hardware side. Um, and the funding going into it feels like it's already. Taking that for granted.[00:20:30] Martin Casado: Yeah. Yeah. But we also went through the drone, you know, um, there's a zip line right, right out there. What's that? Oh yeah, there's a zip line. Yeah. What the drone, what the av And like one of the takeaways is when it comes to hardware, um, most companies will end up verticalizing.[00:20:46] Like if you're. If you're investing in a robot company for an A for agriculture, you're investing in an ag company. ‘cause that's the competition and that's surprising. And that's supply chain. And if you're doing it for mining, that's mining. And so the ad team does a lot of that type of stuff ‘cause they actually set up to [00:21:00] diligence that type of work.[00:21:01] But for like horizontal technology investing, there's very little when it comes to robots just because it's so fit for, for purpose. And so we kinda like to look at software. Solutions or horizontal solutions like applied intuition. Clearly from the AV wave deep map, clearly from the AV wave, I would say scale AI was actually a horizontal one for That's fair, you know, for robotics early on.[00:21:23] And so that sort of thing we're very, very interested. But the actual like robot interacting with the world is probably better for different team. Agree.[00:21:30] Alessio: Yeah, I'm curious who these teams are supposed to be that invest in them. I feel like everybody's like, yeah, robotics, it's important and like people should invest in it.[00:21:38] But then when you look at like the numbers, like the capital requirements early on versus like the moment of, okay, this is actually gonna work. Let's keep investing. That seems really hard to predict in a way that is not,[00:21:49] Martin Casado: I think co, CO two, kla, gc, I mean these are all invested in in Harvard companies. He just, you know, and [00:22:00] listen, I mean, it could work this time for sure.[00:22:01] Right? I mean if Elon's doing it, he's like, right. Just, just the fact that Elon's doing it means that there's gonna be a lot of capital and a lot of attempts for a long period of time. So that alone maybe suggests that we should just be investing in robotics just ‘cause you have this North star who's Elon with a humanoid and that's gonna like basically willing into being an industry.[00:22:17] Um, but we've just historically found like. We're a huge believer that this is gonna happen. We just don't feel like we're in a good position to diligence these things. ‘cause again, robotics companies tend to be vertical. You really have to understand the market they're being sold into. Like that's like that competitive equilibrium with a human being is what's important.[00:22:34] It's not like the core tech and like we're kind of more horizontal core tech type investors. And this is Sarah and I. Yeah, the ad team is different. They can actually do these types of things.[00:22:42] swyx: Uh, just to clarify, AD stands for[00:22:44] Martin Casado: American Dynamism.[00:22:45] swyx: Alright. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, I actually, I do have a related question that, first of all, I wanna acknowledge also just on the, on the chip side.[00:22:51] Yeah. I, I recall a podcast that where you were on, i, I, I think it was the a CC podcast, uh, about two or three years ago where you, where you suddenly said [00:23:00] something, which really stuck in my head about how at some point, at some point kind of scale it makes sense to. Build a custom aic Yes. For per run.[00:23:07] Martin Casado: Yes.[00:23:07] It's crazy. Yeah.[00:23:09] swyx: We're here and I think you, you estimated 500 billion, uh, something.[00:23:12] Martin Casado: No, no, no. A billion, a billion dollar training run of $1 billion training run. It makes sense to actually do a custom meic if you can do it in time. The question now is timelines. Yeah, but not money because just, just, just rough math.[00:23:22] If it's a billion dollar training. Then the inference for that model has to be over a billion, otherwise it won't be solvent. So let's assume it's, if you could save 20%, which you could save much more than that with an ASIC 20%, that's $200 million. You can tape out a chip for $200 million. Right? So now you can literally like justify economically, not timeline wise.[00:23:41] That's a different issue. An ASIC per model, which[00:23:44] swyx: is because that, that's how much we leave on the table every single time. We, we, we do like generic Nvidia.[00:23:48] Martin Casado: Exactly. Exactly. No, it, it is actually much more than that. You could probably get, you know, a factor of two, which would be 500 million.[00:23:54] swyx: Typical MFU would be like 50.[00:23:55] Yeah, yeah. And that's good.[00:23:57] Martin Casado: Exactly. Yeah. Hundred[00:23:57] swyx: percent. Um, so, so, yeah, and I mean, and I [00:24:00] just wanna acknowledge like, here we are in, in, in 2025 and opening eyes confirming like Broadcom and all the other like custom silicon deals, which is incredible. I, I think that, uh, you know, speaking about ad there's, there's a really like interesting tie in that obviously you guys are hit on, which is like these sort, this sort of like America first movement or like sort of re industrialized here.[00:24:17] Yeah. Uh, move TSMC here, if that's possible. Um, how much overlap is there from ad[00:24:23] Martin Casado: Yeah.[00:24:23] swyx: To, I guess, growth and, uh, investing in particularly like, you know, US AI companies that are strongly bounded by their compute.[00:24:32] Martin Casado: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I, I would view, I would view AD as more as a market segmentation than like a mission, right?[00:24:37] So the market segmentation is, it has kind of regulatory compliance issues or government, you know, sale or it deals with like hardware. I mean, they're just set up to, to, to, to, to. To diligence those types of companies. So it's a more of a market segmentation thing. I would say the entire firm. You know, which has been since it is been intercepted, you know, has geographical biases, right?[00:24:58] I mean, for the longest time we're like, you [00:25:00] know, bay Area is gonna be like, great, where the majority of the dollars go. Yeah. And, and listen, there, there's actually a lot of compounding effects for having a geographic bias. Right. You know, everybody's in the same place. You've got an ecosystem, you're there, you've got presence, you've got a network.[00:25:12] Um, and, uh, I mean, I would say the Bay area's very much back. You know, like I, I remember during pre COVID, like it was like almost Crypto had kind of. Pulled startups away. Miami from the Bay Area. Miami, yeah. Yeah. New York was, you know, because it's so close to finance, came up like Los Angeles had a moment ‘cause it was so close to consumer, but now it's kind of come back here.[00:25:29] And so I would say, you know, we tend to be very Bay area focused historically, even though of course we've asked all over the world. And then I would say like, if you take the ring out, you know, one more, it's gonna be the US of course, because we know it very well. And then one more is gonna be getting us and its allies and Yeah.[00:25:44] And it goes from there.[00:25:45] Sarah Wang: Yeah,[00:25:45] Martin Casado: sorry.[00:25:46] Sarah Wang: No, no. I agree. I think from a, but I think from the intern that that's sort of like where the companies are headquartered. Maybe your questions on supply chain and customer base. Uh, I, I would say our customers are, are, our companies are fairly international from that perspective.[00:25:59] Like they're selling [00:26:00] globally, right? They have global supply chains in some cases.[00:26:03] Martin Casado: I would say also the stickiness is very different.[00:26:05] Sarah Wang: Yeah.[00:26:05] Martin Casado: Historically between venture and growth, like there's so much company building in venture, so much so like hiring the next PM. Introducing the customer, like all of that stuff.[00:26:15] Like of course we're just gonna be stronger where we have our network and we've been doing business for 20 years. I've been in the Bay Area for 25 years, so clearly I'm just more effective here than I would be somewhere else. Um, where I think, I think for some of the later stage rounds, the companies don't need that much help.[00:26:30] They're already kind of pretty mature historically, so like they can kind of be everywhere. So there's kind of less of that stickiness. This is different in the AI time. I mean, Sarah is now the, uh, chief of staff of like half the AI companies in, uh, in the Bay Area right now. She's like, ops Ninja Biz, Devrel, BizOps.[00:26:48] swyx: Are, are you, are you finding much AI automation in your work? Like what, what is your stack.[00:26:53] Sarah Wang: Oh my, in my personal stack.[00:26:54] swyx: I mean, because like, uh, by the way, it's the, the, the reason for this is it is triggering, uh, yeah. We, like, I'm hiring [00:27:00] ops, ops people. Um, a lot of ponders I know are also hiring ops people and I'm just, you know, it's opportunity Since you're, you're also like basically helping out with ops with a lot of companies.[00:27:09] What are people doing these days? Because it's still very manual as far as I can tell.[00:27:13] Sarah Wang: Hmm. Yeah. I think the things that we help with are pretty network based, um, in that. It's sort of like, Hey, how do do I shortcut this process? Well, let's connect you to the right person. So there's not quite an AI workflow for that.[00:27:26] I will say as a growth investor, Claude Cowork is pretty interesting. Yeah. Like for the first time, you can actually get one shot data analysis. Right. Which, you know, if you're gonna do a customer database, analyze a cohort retention, right? That's just stuff that you had to do by hand before. And our team, the other, it was like midnight and the three of us were playing with Claude Cowork.[00:27:47] We gave it a raw file. Boom. Perfectly accurate. We checked the numbers. It was amazing. That was my like, aha moment. That sounds so boring. But you know, that's, that's the kind of thing that a growth investor is like, [00:28:00] you know, slaving away on late at night. Um, done in a few seconds.[00:28:03] swyx: Yeah. You gotta wonder what the whole, like, philanthropic labs, which is like their new sort of products studio.[00:28:10] Yeah. What would that be worth as an independent, uh, startup? You know, like a[00:28:14] Martin Casado: lot.[00:28:14] Sarah Wang: Yeah, true.[00:28:16] swyx: Yeah. You[00:28:16] Martin Casado: gotta hand it to them. They've been executing incredibly well.[00:28:19] swyx: Yeah. I, I mean, to me, like, you know, philanthropic, like building on cloud code, I think, uh, it makes sense to me the, the real. Um, pedal to the metal, whatever the, the, the phrase is, is when they start coming after consumer with, uh, against OpenAI and like that is like red alert at Open ai.[00:28:35] Oh, I[00:28:35] Martin Casado: think they've been pretty clear. They're enterprise focused.[00:28:37] swyx: They have been, but like they've been free. Here's[00:28:40] Martin Casado: care publicly,[00:28:40] swyx: it's enterprise focused. It's coding. Right. Yeah.[00:28:43] AI Labs vs Startups: Disruption, Undercutting & the Innovator's Dilemma[00:28:43] swyx: And then, and, but here's cloud, cloud, cowork, and, and here's like, well, we, uh, they, apparently they're running Instagram ads for Claudia.[00:28:50] I, on, you know, for, for people on, I get them all the time. Right. And so, like,[00:28:54] Martin Casado: uh,[00:28:54] swyx: it, it's kind of like this, the disruption thing of, uh, you know. Mo Open has been doing, [00:29:00] consumer been doing the, just pursuing general intelligence in every mo modality, and here's a topic that only focus on this thing, but now they're sort of undercutting and doing the whole innovator's dilemma thing on like everything else.[00:29:11] Martin Casado: It's very[00:29:11] swyx: interesting.[00:29:12] Martin Casado: Yeah, I mean there's, there's a very open que so for me there's like, do you know that meme where there's like the guy in the path and there's like a path this way? There's a path this way. Like one which way Western man. Yeah. Yeah.[00:29:23] Two Futures for AI: Infinite Market vs AGI Oligopoly[00:29:23] Martin Casado: And for me, like, like all the entire industry kind of like hinges on like two potential futures.[00:29:29] So in, in one potential future, um, the market is infinitely large. There's perverse economies of scale. ‘cause as soon as you put a model out there, like it kind of sublimates and all the other models catch up and like, it's just like software's being rewritten and fractured all over the place and there's tons of upside and it just grows.[00:29:48] And then there's another path which is like, well. Maybe these models actually generalize really well, and all you have to do is train them with three times more money. That's all you have to [00:30:00] do, and it'll just consume everything beyond it. And if that's the case, like you end up with basically an oligopoly for everything, like, you know mm-hmm.[00:30:06] Because they're perfectly general and like, so this would be like the, the a GI path would be like, these are perfectly general. They can do everything. And this one is like, this is actually normal software. The universe is complicated. You've got, and nobody knows the answer.[00:30:18] The Economics Reality Check: Gross Margins, Training Costs & Borrowing Against the Future[00:30:18] Martin Casado: My belief is if you actually look at the numbers of these companies, so generally if you look at the numbers of these companies, if you look at like the amount they're making and how much they, they spent training the last model, they're gross margin positive.[00:30:30] You're like, oh, that's really working. But if you look at like. The current training that they're doing for the next model, their gross margin negative. So part of me thinks that a lot of ‘em are kind of borrowing against the future and that's gonna have to slow down. It's gonna catch up to them at some point in time, but we don't really know.[00:30:47] Sarah Wang: Yeah.[00:30:47] Martin Casado: Does that make sense? Like, I mean, it could be, it could be the case that the only reason this is working is ‘cause they can raise that next round and they can train that next model. ‘cause these models have such a short. Life. And so at some point in time, like, you know, they won't be able to [00:31:00] raise that next round for the next model and then things will kind of converge and fragment again.[00:31:03] But right now it's not.[00:31:04] Sarah Wang: Totally. I think the other, by the way, just, um, a meta point. I think the other lesson from the last three years is, and we talk about this all the time ‘cause we're on this. Twitter X bubble. Um, cool. But, you know, if you go back to, let's say March, 2024, that period, it felt like a, I think an open source model with an, like a, you know, benchmark leading capability was sort of launching on a daily basis at that point.[00:31:27] And, um, and so that, you know, that's one period. Suddenly it's sort of like open source takes over the world. There's gonna be a plethora. It's not an oligopoly, you know, if you fast, you know, if you, if you rewind time even before that GPT-4 was number one for. Nine months, 10 months. It's a long time. Right.[00:31:44] Um, and of course now we're in this era where it feels like an oligopoly, um, maybe some very steady state shifts and, and you know, it could look like this in the future too, but it just, it's so hard to call. And I think the thing that keeps, you know, us up at [00:32:00] night in, in a good way and bad way, is that the capability progress is actually not slowing down.[00:32:06] And so until that happens, right, like you don't know what's gonna look like.[00:32:09] Martin Casado: But I, I would, I would say for sure it's not converged, like for sure, like the systemic capital flows have not converged, meaning right now it's still borrowing against the future to subsidize growth currently, which you can do that for a period of time.[00:32:23] But, but you know, at the end, at some point the market will rationalize that and just nobody knows what that will look like.[00:32:29] Alessio: Yeah.[00:32:29] Martin Casado: Or, or like the drop in price of compute will, will, will save them. Who knows?[00:32:34] Alessio: Yeah. Yeah. I think the models need to ask them to, to specific tasks. You know? It's like, okay, now Opus 4.5 might be a GI at some specific task, and now you can like depreciate the model over a longer time.[00:32:45] I think now, now, right now there's like no old model.[00:32:47] Martin Casado: No, but let, but lemme just change that mental, that's, that used to be my mental model. Lemme just change it a little bit.[00:32:53] Capital as a Weapon vs Task Saturation: Where Real Enterprise Value Gets Built[00:32:53] Martin Casado: If you can raise three times, if you can raise more than the aggregate of anybody that uses your models, that doesn't even matter.[00:32:59] It doesn't [00:33:00] even matter. See what I'm saying? Like, yeah. Yeah. So, so I have an API Business. My API business is 60% margin, or 70% margin, or 80% margin is a high margin business. So I know what everybody is using. If I can raise more money than the aggregate of everybody that's using it, I will consume them whether I'm a GI or not.[00:33:14] And I will know if they're using it ‘cause they're using it. And like, unlike in the past where engineering stops me from doing that.[00:33:21] Alessio: Mm-hmm.[00:33:21] Martin Casado: It is very straightforward. You just train. So I also thought it was kind of like, you must ask the code a GI, general, general, general. But I think there's also just a possibility that the, that the capital markets will just give them the, the, the ammunition to just go after everybody on top of ‘em.[00:33:36] Sarah Wang: I, I do wonder though, to your point, um, if there's a certain task that. Getting marginally better isn't actually that much better. Like we've asked them to it, to, you know, we can call it a GI or whatever, you know, actually, Ali Goi talks about this, like we're already at a GI for a lot of functions in the enterprise.[00:33:50] Um. That's probably those for those tasks, you probably could build very specific companies that focus on just getting as much value out of that task that isn't [00:34:00] coming from the model itself. There's probably a rich enterprise business to be built there. I mean, could be wrong on that, but there's a lot of interesting examples.[00:34:08] So, right, if you're looking the legal profession or, or whatnot, and maybe that's not a great one ‘cause the models are getting better on that front too, but just something where it's a bit saturated, then the value comes from. Services. It comes from implementation, right? It comes from all these things that actually make it useful to the end customer.[00:34:24] Martin Casado: Sorry, what am I, one more thing I think is, is underused in all of this is like, to what extent every task is a GI complete.[00:34:31] Sarah Wang: Mm-hmm.[00:34:32] Martin Casado: Yeah. I code every day. It's so fun.[00:34:35] Sarah Wang: That's a core question. Yeah.[00:34:36] Martin Casado: And like. When I'm talking to these models, it's not just code. I mean, it's everything, right? Like I, you know, like it's,[00:34:43] swyx: it's healthcare.[00:34:44] It's,[00:34:44] Martin Casado: I mean, it's[00:34:44] swyx: Mele,[00:34:45] Martin Casado: but it's every, it is exactly that. Like, yeah, that's[00:34:47] Sarah Wang: great support. Yeah.[00:34:48] Martin Casado: It's everything. Like I'm asking these models to, yeah, to understand compliance. I'm asking these models to go search the web. I'm asking these models to talk about things I know in the history, like it's having a full conversation with me while I, I engineer, and so it could be [00:35:00] the case that like, mm-hmm.[00:35:01] The most a, you know, a GI complete, like I'm not an a GI guy. Like I think that's, you know, but like the most a GI complete model will is win independent of the task. And we don't know the answer to that one either.[00:35:11] swyx: Yeah.[00:35:12] Martin Casado: But it seems to me that like, listen, codex in my experience is for sure better than Opus 4.5 for coding.[00:35:18] Like it finds the hardest bugs that I work in with. Like, it is, you know. The smartest developers. I don't work on it. It's great. Um, but I think Opus 4.5 is actually very, it's got a great bedside manner and it really, and it, it really matters if you're building something very complex because like, it really, you know, like you're, you're, you're a partner and a brainstorming partner for somebody.[00:35:38] And I think we don't discuss enough how every task kind of has that quality.[00:35:42] swyx: Mm-hmm.[00:35:43] Martin Casado: And what does that mean to like capital investment and like frontier models and Submodels? Yeah.[00:35:47] Why “Coding Models” Keep Collapsing into Generalists (Reasoning vs Taste)[00:35:47] Martin Casado: Like what happened to all the special coding models? Like, none of ‘em worked right. So[00:35:51] Alessio: some of them, they didn't even get released.[00:35:53] Magical[00:35:54] Martin Casado: Devrel. There's a whole, there's a whole host. We saw a bunch of them and like there's this whole theory that like, there could be, and [00:36:00] I think one of the conclusions is, is like there's no such thing as a coding model,[00:36:04] Alessio: you know?[00:36:04] Martin Casado: Like, that's not a thing. Like you're talking to another human being and it's, it's good at coding, but like it's gotta be good at everything.[00:36:10] swyx: Uh, minor disagree only because I, I'm pretty like, have pretty high confidence that basically open eye will always release a GPT five and a GT five codex. Like that's the code's. Yeah. The way I call it is one for raisin, one for Tiz. Um, and, and then like someone internal open, it was like, yeah, that's a good way to frame it.[00:36:32] Martin Casado: That's so funny.[00:36:33] swyx: Uh, but maybe it, maybe it collapses down to reason and that's it. It's not like a hundred dimensions doesn't life. Yeah. It's two dimensions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like and exactly. Beside manner versus coding. Yeah.[00:36:43] Martin Casado: Yeah.[00:36:44] swyx: It's, yeah.[00:36:46] Martin Casado: I, I think for, for any, it's hilarious. For any, for anybody listening to this for, for, for, I mean, for you, like when, when you're like coding or using these models for something like that.[00:36:52] Like actually just like be aware of how much of the interaction has nothing to do with coding and it just turns out to be a large portion of it. And so like, you're, I [00:37:00] think like, like the best Soto ish model. You know, it is going to remain very important no matter what the task is.[00:37:06] swyx: Yeah.[00:37:07] What He's Actually Coding: Gaussian Splats, Spark.js & 3D Scene Rendering Demos[00:37:07] swyx: Uh, speaking of coding, uh, I, I'm gonna be cheeky and ask like, what actually are you coding?[00:37:11] Because obviously you, you could code anything and you are obviously a busy investor and a manager of the good. Giant team. Um, what are you calling?[00:37:18] Martin Casado: I help, um, uh, FEFA at World Labs. Uh, it's one of the investments and um, and they're building a foundation model that creates 3D scenes.[00:37:27] swyx: Yeah, we had it on the pod.[00:37:28] Yeah. Yeah,[00:37:28] Martin Casado: yeah. And so these 3D scenes are Gaussian splats, just by the way that kind of AI works. And so like, you can reconstruct a scene better with, with, with radiance feels than with meshes. ‘cause like they don't really have topology. So, so they, they, they produce each. Beautiful, you know, 3D rendered scenes that are Gaussian splats, but the actual industry support for Gaussian splats isn't great.[00:37:50] It's just never, you know, it's always been meshes and like, things like unreal use meshes. And so I work on a open source library called Spark js, which is a. Uh, [00:38:00] a JavaScript rendering layer ready for Gaussian splats. And it's just because, you know, um, you, you, you need that support and, and right now there's kind of a three js moment that's all meshes and so like, it's become kind of the default in three Js ecosystem.[00:38:13] As part of that to kind of exercise the library, I just build a whole bunch of cool demos. So if you see me on X, you see like all my demos and all the world building, but all of that is just to exercise this, this library that I work on. ‘cause it's actually a very tough algorithmics problem to actually scale a library that much.[00:38:29] And just so you know, this is ancient history now, but 30 years ago I paid for undergrad, you know, working on game engines in college in the late nineties. So I've got actually a back and it's very old background, but I actually have a background in this and so a lot of it's fun. You know, but, but the, the, the, the whole goal is just for this rendering library to, to,[00:38:47] Sarah Wang: are you one of the most active contributors?[00:38:49] The, their GitHub[00:38:50] Martin Casado: spark? Yes.[00:38:51] Sarah Wang: Yeah, yeah.[00:38:51] Martin Casado: There's only two of us there, so, yes. No, so by the way, so the, the pri The pri, yeah. Yeah. So the primary developer is a [00:39:00] guy named Andres Quist, who's an absolute genius. He and I did our, our PhDs together. And so like, um, we studied for constant Quas together. It was almost like hanging out with an old friend, you know?[00:39:09] And so like. So he, he's the core, core guy. I did mostly kind of, you know, the side I run venture fund.[00:39:14] swyx: It's amazing. Like five years ago you would not have done any of this. And it brought you back[00:39:19] Martin Casado: the act, the Activ energy, you're still back. Energy was so high because you had to learn all the framework b******t.[00:39:23] Man, I f*****g used to hate that. And so like, now I don't have to deal with that. I can like focus on the algorithmics so I can focus on the scaling and I,[00:39:29] swyx: yeah. Yeah.[00:39:29] LLMs vs Spatial Intelligence + How to Value World Labs' 3D Foundation Model[00:39:29] swyx: And then, uh, I'll observe one irony and then I'll ask a serious investor question, uh, which is like, the irony is FFE actually doesn't believe that LMS can lead us to spatial intelligence.[00:39:37] And here you are using LMS to like help like achieve spatial intelligence. I just see, I see some like disconnect in there.[00:39:45] Martin Casado: Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I think, you know, I think, I think what she would say is LLMs are great to help with coding.[00:39:51] swyx: Yes.[00:39:51] Martin Casado: But like, that's very different than a model that actually like provides, they, they'll never have the[00:39:56] swyx: spatial inte[00:39:56] Martin Casado: issues.[00:39:56] And listen, our brains clearly listen, our brains, brains clearly have [00:40:00] both our, our brains clearly have a language reasoning section and they clearly have a spatial reasoning section. I mean, it's just, you know, these are two pretty independent problems.[00:40:07] swyx: Okay. And you, you, like, I, I would say that the, the one data point I recently had, uh, against it is the DeepMind, uh, IMO Gold, where, so, uh, typically the, the typical answer is that this is where you start going down the neuros symbolic path, right?[00:40:21] Like one, uh, sort of very sort of abstract reasoning thing and one form, formal thing. Um, and that's what. DeepMind had in 2024 with alpha proof, alpha geometry, and now they just use deep think and just extended thinking tokens. And it's one model and it's, and it's in LM.[00:40:36] Martin Casado: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.[00:40:37] swyx: And so that, that was my indication of like, maybe you don't need a separate system.[00:40:42] Martin Casado: Yeah. So, so let me step back. I mean, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, these things are like nodes in a graph with weights on them. Right. You know, like it can be modeled like if you, if you distill it down. But let me just talk about the two different substrates. Let's, let me put you in a dark room.[00:40:56] Like totally black room. And then let me just [00:41:00] describe how you exit it. Like to your left, there's a table like duck below this thing, right? I mean like the chances that you're gonna like not run into something are very low. Now let me like turn on the light and you actually see, and you can do distance and you know how far something away is and like where it is or whatever.[00:41:17] Then you can do it, right? Like language is not the right primitives to describe. The universe because it's not exact enough. So that's all Faye, Faye is talking about. When it comes to like spatial reasoning, it's like you actually have to know that this is three feet far, like that far away. It is curved.[00:41:37] You have to understand, you know, the, like the actual movement through space.[00:41:40] swyx: Yeah.[00:41:40] Martin Casado: So I do, I listen, I do think at the end of these models are definitely converging as far as models, but there's, there's, there's different representations of problems you're solving. One is language. Which, you know, that would be like describing to somebody like what to do.[00:41:51] And the other one is actually just showing them and the space reasoning is just showing them.[00:41:55] swyx: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Got it, got it. Uh, the, in the investor question was on, on, well labs [00:42:00] is, well, like, how do I value something like this? What, what, what work does the, do you do? I'm just like, Fefe is awesome.[00:42:07] Justin's awesome. And you know, the other two co-founder, co-founders, but like the, the, the tech, everyone's building cool tech. But like, what's the value of the tech? And this is the fundamental question[00:42:16] Martin Casado: of, well, let, let, just like these, let me just maybe give you a rough sketch on the diffusion models. I actually love to hear Sarah because I'm a venture for, you know, so like, ventures always, always like kind of wild west type[00:42:24] swyx: stuff.[00:42:24] You, you, you, you paid a dream and she has to like, actually[00:42:28] Martin Casado: I'm gonna say I'm gonna mar to reality, so I'm gonna say the venture for you. And she can be like, okay, you a little kid. Yeah. So like, so, so these diffusion models literally. Create something for, for almost nothing. And something that the, the world has found to be very valuable in the past, in our real markets, right?[00:42:45] Like, like a 2D image. I mean, that's been an entire market. People value them. It takes a human being a long time to create it, right? I mean, to create a, you know, a, to turn me into a whatever, like an image would cost a hundred bucks in an hour. The inference cost [00:43:00] us a hundredth of a penny, right? So we've seen this with speech in very successful companies.[00:43:03] We've seen this with 2D image. We've seen this with movies. Right? Now, think about 3D scene. I mean, I mean, when's Grand Theft Auto coming out? It's been six, what? It's been 10 years. I mean, how, how like, but hasn't been 10 years.[00:43:14] Alessio: Yeah.[00:43:15] Martin Casado: How much would it cost to like, to reproduce this room in 3D? Right. If you, if you, if you hired somebody on fiber, like in, in any sort of quality, probably 4,000 to $10,000.[00:43:24] And then if you had a professional, probably $30,000. So if you could generate the exact same thing from a 2D image, and we know that these are used and they're using Unreal and they're using Blend, or they're using movies and they're using video games and they're using all. So if you could do that for.[00:43:36] You know, less than a dollar, that's four or five orders of magnitude cheaper. So you're bringing the marginal cost of something that's useful down by three orders of magnitude, which historically have created very large companies. So that would be like the venture kind of strategic dreaming map.[00:43:49] swyx: Yeah.[00:43:50] And, and for listeners, uh, you can do this yourself on your, on your own phone with like. Uh, the marble.[00:43:55] Martin Casado: Yeah. Marble.[00:43:55] swyx: Uh, or but also there's many Nerf apps where you just go on your iPhone and, and do this.[00:43:59] Martin Casado: Yeah. Yeah. [00:44:00] Yeah. And, and in the case of marble though, it would, what you do is you literally give it in.[00:44:03] So most Nerf apps you like kind of run around and take a whole bunch of pictures and then you kind of reconstruct it.[00:44:08] swyx: Yeah.[00:44:08] Martin Casado: Um, things like marble, just that the whole generative 3D space will just take a 2D image and it'll reconstruct all the like, like[00:44:16] swyx: meaning it has to fill in. Uh,[00:44:18] Martin Casado: stuff at the back of the table, under the table, the back, like, like the images, it doesn't see.[00:44:22] So the generator stuff is very different than reconstruction that it fills in the things that you can't see.[00:44:26] swyx: Yeah. Okay.[00:44:26] Sarah Wang: So,[00:44:27] Martin Casado: all right. So now the,[00:44:28] Sarah Wang: no, no. I mean I love that[00:44:29] Martin Casado: the adult[00:44:29] Sarah Wang: perspective. Um, well, no, I was gonna say these are very much a tag team. So we, we started this pod with that, um, premise. And I think this is a perfect question to even build on that further.[00:44:36] ‘cause it truly is, I mean, we're tag teaming all of these together.[00:44:39] Investing in Model Labs, Media Rumors, and the Cursor Playbook (Margins & Going Down-Stack)[00:44:39] Sarah Wang: Um, but I think every investment fundamentally starts with the same. Maybe the same two premises. One is, at this point in time, we actually believe that there are. And of one founders for their particular craft, and they have to be demonstrated in their prior careers, right?[00:44:56] So, uh, we're not investing in every, you know, now the term is NEO [00:45:00] lab, but every foundation model, uh, any, any company, any founder trying to build a foundation model, we're not, um, contrary to popular opinion, we're

In this episode from WSJ Invest Live, Andy Serwer speaks with Katherine Boyle, general partner at a16z, about the American Dynamism practice she helped launch four years ago. They discuss why saying "America" out loud stunned Silicon Valley in 2022, how Russia's invasion of Ukraine changed everything, and what it means to invest in companies that support the national interest.   Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

My guest today is David George. David is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm's growth investing business. His team has backed many of the defining companies of this era – including Databricks, Figma, Stripe, SpaceX, Anduril, and OpenAI – and is now investing behind a new generation of AI startups like Cursor, Harvey, and Abridge. This conversation is a detailed look at how David built and runs the a16z growth practice. He shares how he recruits and builds his team a “Yankees-level” culture, how his team makes investment decisions without traditional committees, and how they work with founders years before investing to win the most competitive deals. Much of our conversation centers on AI and how his team is investing across the stack, from foundational models to applications. David draws parallels to past platform shifts – from SaaS to mobile – and explains why he believes this period will produce some of the largest companies ever built. David also outlines the models that guide his approach – why markets often misprice consistent growth, what makes “pull” businesses so powerful, and why most great tech markets end up winner-take-all. David reflects on what he's learned from studying exceptional founders and why he's drawn to a particular type, the “technical terminator.” Please enjoy my conversation with David George. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ----- This episode is brought to you by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Ramp's mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. ----- This episode is brought to you by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Ridgeline⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgelineapps.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about the platform. ----- This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AlphaSense⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Alpha-Sense.com/Invest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best (00:04:00) Meet David George (00:03:04) Understanding the Impact of AI on Consumers and Enterprises (00:05:56) Monetizing AI: What is AI's Business Model (00:11:04) Investing in Robotics and American Dynamism (00:13:31) Lessons from Investing in Waymo (00:15:55) Investment Philosophy and Strategy (00:17:15) Investing in Technical Terminators (00:20:18) Market Leaders Capture All of the Value Creation (00:24:56) The Maturation of VC and Competitive Landscape (00:28:18) What a16z Does to Win Deals (00:33:06) David's Daily Routine: Meetings Structure and Blocking Time to Think (00:36:34) Why David Invests: Curiosity and Competition (00:40:12) The Unique Culture at Andreessen Horowitz (00:42:46) The Perfect Conditions for Growth Investing (00:47:04) Push v. Pull Businesses (00:49:19) The Three Metrics a16z Uses to Evaluate AI Companies (00:52:15) Unique Products and Unique Distribution (00:54:55) Tradeoffs of the a16z Firm Structure (00:59:04) a16z's Semi-Algorithmic Approach to Selling (01:00:54) Three Ways Startups can Beat Incumbents in AI (01:03:44) The Kindest Thing

Palmer Luckey got fired from Meta for backing the wrong candidate—now he's the hero saving American defense, and that shift tells you everything about how fast the ground moved beneath Silicon Valley's feet. For decades, tech and defense were allies, then came 15 years of hostility so visceral that Google employees revolted over a Pentagon AI contract, and when leadership caved, only three people showed up to hear what border security actually involves. But something broke: COVID exposed our inability to make things, Ukraine revealed wars now iterate in days not decades, and suddenly the Harvard dorm room generation realized the people building satellites and drones weren't just necessary—they were the future, while legacy defense contractors still operate on Soviet-style five-year plans that guarantee cost overruns and obsolescence. Now the question isn't whether Silicon Valley returns to its Cold War roots, but whether America wins by becoming more like China's centralized system or doubles down on the chaotic creativity that built nine of the world's ten most valuable companies in 25 years—and the founders flooding into defense, energy, mining, and manufacturing suggest the second American century is just getting started.Resources:Follow Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitzFollow Marc on X: https://x.com/pmarcaFollow Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyleFollow David on X: https://x.com/daviduFollow Erik on X: https://x.com/eriktorenbergStay Updated:If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.  Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Podcast on SpotifyListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Emiliano Mellino joins us in the middle of a riff about how we should be able to kinetically engage swans with lethal force to talk about how the employment tribunal system in the U.K. is fundamentally broken. Before that, we review the death of Neom and a16z's newest innovation in the field of American Dynamism: more addictive gambling! Check out Emiliano's work here! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Announcing our new show, Monitoring the Situation, hosted by a16z General Partners Erik Torenberg and Katherine Boyle, with guest Eddie Lazzarin, CTO of a16z crypto. In this first episode, we ask how American Dynamism, consumer, games, and crypto all fit together, from Palmer/Oculus to Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto, while also exploring crypto × AD values, parenting in the AI era, and how internet subcultures shape the news. Timecodes: 0:00 Introduction1:25  Tech Coherence: American Dynamism & Consumer Crypto4:55 The Hero's Journey in Tech5:59 Games, Toys, and Defense Innovation6:38 Crypto & American Values11:25 Decentralization, Federalism, and Tech13:08 AI, China, and Competing Values14:18 Medicine, Parenting, and the Wisdom of Crowds20:47 ADHD, Diagnosis Incentives, and Education27:31 Alternative Schooling & AI Tutors35:46 Parenting, Family, and Modern Support Systems42:24 Zoomer Culture, Internet Fragmentation, and X54:38 Media, Social Networks, and Cultural Shifts Resources: Find Eddy on X: https://x.com/eddylazzarinFind Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyleFind Erik on X: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Podcast on SpotifyListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Venture capital has powered companies like Facebook and TikTok—but what if that same urgency fueled America's defense and industrial base? Katherine Boyle, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and cofounder of the firm's American Dynamism practice, argues this is the biggest business opportunity of our time.In this conversation from The Shawn Ryan Show, Boyle discusses the rise of defense tech startups, why optimism drives her work, and how a new generation of engineers and founders is rethinking innovation and patriotism in America. Timecodes: 0:00 Introduction 0:41 Patriotism, Optimism, and American Innovation4:27 Startups vs. Legacy Primes in Defense10:08 Venture Capital's Unique Incentives17:21 Katherine's Backstory: Family & Upbringing21:07 The Decline of Community & Family Pillars23:23 Polarization, Religion, and Social Fabric26:16 America's Birth Rate Crisis29:46 Cultural Shifts and the Family Structure42:01 Katherine's Path: Journalism to Venture Capital1:06:06 Breaking into Silicon Valley1:18:06 Investing in Defense: The Anduril Story1:37:37 The American Dynamism Movement2:04:27 Manufacturing, Space, and the Future of Defense2:14:06 Espionage, China, and National Security2:37:38 The Attack on the American Family2:48:29 Cultural Change, Suffering, and Purpose2:55:30 Closing Thoughts Resources: Find Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyleShawn Ryan Show Links YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkoujZQZatbqy4KGcgjpVxQ/joinListen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shawn-ryan-show/id1492492083Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5eodRZd3qR9VT1ip1wI7xQ?si=7abec4d61c324b24 Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Katherine Boyle and Erin Price-Wright are General Partners at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), leading the firm's American Dynamism practice. This episode explores how their team invests in companies tackling national imperatives—ranging from defense and manufacturing to energy and critical infrastructure. Katherine shares how American Dynamism emerged from portfolio patterns at a16z, while Erin describes how her background at Palantir informs her investment lens. Together, they unpack why the U.S. must reindustrialize, how software is now eating the physical world, and what they look for in high-capex startups. This conversation also highlights the evolving U.S.-China industrial competition, the role of government in innovation, and why talent is moving from Big Tech into “hard tech.”In this episode, we cover: ⁠[02:30]⁠ An overview of a16z⁠[04:59]⁠ Its thesis shift from defense to energy and industry⁠[07:49]⁠ How AI is transforming heavy industries[8:24] Tech stack for US vs. China[12:23]⁠ Role of government versus private capital⁠[16:14]⁠ Why software is still the core of industrial innovation[16:55]⁠ Base Power as a software-led grid infrastructure play⁠[20:42]⁠ When vertical AI-native startups beat incumbents⁠[21:48]⁠ How a16z helps startups navigate Washington⁠[27:51]⁠ Why energy problems require system-level solutions⁠[31:57]⁠ Moats in energy and manufacturing[37:51] a16z's American Dynamism 50 list⁠[40:16]⁠ Battery supply chains and the China dependency⁠[46:44]⁠ Why capital stack strategy matters for hard tech founders⁠[48:52]⁠ Looking 10 years aheadEpisode recorded on May 21, 2025 (Published on July 29, 2025) Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.Connect with MCJ:Cody Simms on LinkedInVisit mcj.vcSubscribe to the MCJ Newsletter*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant

It can take more than 15 years to permit and build a new mine in the United States - yet nearly every modern technology we rely on, from smartphones to fighter jets to AI data centers, depends on a steady supply of critical minerals.In this episode, Erik Torenberg is joined in the studio by Turner Caldwell, founder of Mariana Minerals, along with American Dynamism general partner Erin Price-Wright and partner Ryan McEntush.Turner spent nearly a decade at Tesla, working his way upstream from factory design to battery materials and mining. Now, he's building a new kind of mining and refining company - vertically integrated and software-first- designed to meet the demands of our industrial future.We get into why the industry is so broken, what it actually takes to turn rocks into usable materials, and how the U.S. can rebuild its capacity to mine, refine, and manufacture the things that matter most. Timecodes: 00:00 Introduction to Critical Minerals00:45 The Importance of Mining in Modern Technology00:58 Meet Turner Caldwell and Marianna Minerals03:02 The Mining and Refining Process05:10 Challenges in the Mining Industry07:11 Turner's Journey from Tesla to Marianna15:31 The Role of AI and ML in Mining22:00 Geopolitical and Talent Pool Dynamics23:46 Challenges in Junior Mining Exploration25:30 Mariana's Product and Approach25:47 Leveraging Technology in Mining and Construction28:29 Optimizing Refining Processes with AI37:31 The Importance of Critical Minerals41:18 Permitting and Regulatory Challenges46:08 Future Strategies and International Expansion46:53 Conclusion and Future Outlook Resources: Find Turner on X :https://x.com/tbc415Find Erin on X: https://x.com/espricewrightFind Ryan on X: https://x.com/rmcentush Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

U.S. per capita energy usage peaked in 1973. Since then? Flat. Meanwhile, China's per capita energy use has grown 9x.Today, AI, EVs, manufacturing, and data centers are driving demand for more electricity than ever—and our grid can't keep up.In this episode, a16z general partners David Ulevitch and Erin Price-Wright, along with investing partner Ryan McEntush from the American Dynamism team, join us to unpack:– How America's grid fell behind– Why we "forgot how to build" power infrastructure– The role of batteries, solar, nuclear, and software in reshaping the grid– How AI is both stressing and helping the system– What it'll take to build a more resilient, decentralized, and dynamic energy futureWhether you're a founder, policymaker, or just someone who wants their lights to stay on, this conversation covers what's broken—and how to fix it.Resources: Find David on X: https://x.com/daviduFind Erin on X: https://x.com/espricewrightFind Ryan on X: https://x.com/rmcentushTimestamps: 00:00 Introduction01:05 Challenges and Solutions for Modernizing the Grid 01:56 Decentralized Energy and Technological Innovations 02:34 Grid Capacity and Transformer Issues 04:10 The Role of AI and Software in Energy Management 04:55 Policy and Workforce Challenges 08:44 Texas vs. New York: A Tale of Two Grids 10:31 The Importance of Battery Technology 13:11 Balancing Energy Sources: Solar, Nuclear, and More 14:54 The Future of Energy Consumption and Grid Management 19:45 Wind Power: The Forgotten Energy Source 20:53 Challenges in Grid Monitoring and Communication 22:19 Load Forecasting and Weather Impact 23:49 Nuclear Energy: Current State and Future Prospects 26:44 Small Modular Reactors and Micro Reactors 30:55 Technological Innovations in Grid Management 35:41 The Role of AI in Regulatory Processes 41:39 National Security and the Electrical GridStay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Katherine Boyle is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and cofounder of its American Dynamism practice, investing in sectors such as defense, aerospace, manufacturing, and infrastructure. She serves on the boards of Apex Space and Hadrian Automation, and is a board observer for Saronic Technologies and Castelion. Previously, she was a partner at General Catalyst, where she co-led the seed practice and backed companies like Anduril Industries and Vannevar Labs. She was also a reporter at The Washington Post. Katherine holds a BA from Georgetown, an MBA from Stanford, and a Master's from the National University of Ireland, Galway. She sits on the boards of The Free Press and the Mercatus Center. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://americanfinancing.net/srs NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://tryarmra.com/srs https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://shawnlikesgold.com https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://masachips.com/srs – USE CODE SRS https://paladinpower.com/srs – USE CODE SRS https://patriotmobile.com/srs https://rocketmoney.com/srs https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS https://trueclassic.com/srs https://USCCA.com/srs https://blackbuffalo.com Katherine Boyle Links: Website - https://a16z.com/author/katherine-boyle X - https://x.com/KTmBoyle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.Timecodes: 0:00 - Intro4:48 The Decline in Public Service7:47 Making Government Cool Again10:07 Silicon Valley's Aversion to National Security13:15 Positive Sum vs Zero Sum Cultures16:27 China, Authoritarianism, and Doing Hard Things19:27 What Makes America Special?23:03 Silicon Valley and the “Real Economy”26:28 Investing in Mature Markets29:08 Vanna White and The Wheel of Fortune30:27 Journalism and Loneliness32:52 - Time and Suffering38:10 - Seriousness and Purpose41:11 - Is Culture Downstream of Technology?42:48 - Propaganda and Coolness as a Strategic Asset44:40 - Florida, Texas, and Regulatory Arbitrage47:51 - DC, Silicon Valley, and Florida50:20 - What Should More People Be Thinking AboutResources: Find Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyleFind Alex on X: https://x.com/adlabossiereListen to more from The LaBossiere Podcast:YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/3QDLQFt⁠Apple: ⁠https://apple.co/478Be6M⁠Spotify: ⁠https://spoti.fi/3sfiFiE⁠Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Paris Marx is joined by Sam Biddle to discuss how Silicon Valley is shamelessly courting government military contracts, using tactics to silence employee dissent and normalize the situation to the public, and what it all means for the future of military geopolitics.Sam Biddle is a senior technology reporter at The Intercept.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.Also mentioned in this episode:Sam wrote about how defense tech companies sought to capitalize on Trump's return to office and OpenAI's embrace of nationalism.Trae Stephens was interviewed by Wired last year, where he made his comments about the military industrial complex.Meta and Anduril teamed up to provide VR and AR devices to the US military.Trump's US Army appointee won't give up his Anduril stock.Palantir's CEO wrote the Defense Reformation report and Andreessen Horowitz launched an American Dynamism division.Support the show

Recorded live at the 2025 a16z LP Summit, this episode is a candid conversation between a16z cofounders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz—hosted by general partner Erik Torenberg.They cover the evolution of a16z from startup firm to multi-practice platform, how the media landscape is shaped by meme-speed narratives, why reorgs—not just returns—determine who wins, and what it takes to build an enduring venture franchise.They also share thoughts on the changing policy landscape for AI and crypto, the firm's bipartisan approach to Washington—and why Marc personally screens social media profiles before anyone joins the team. Resources: Find Marc on X: https://x.com/pmarcaFind Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

In this episode of th a16z Podcast, we're sharing Katherine Boyle's recent interview on TBPN.Katherine—General Partner at a16z and the architect of the American Dynamism thesis—joins hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays to discuss the state of the movement today. They cover the Department of Defense's sweeping reform efforts, the role of startups in national security, and why American Dynamism is just getting started.From procurement reform to reindustrialization, this wide-ranging conversation explores how founders and investors are reshaping the future in service of the national interest.Resources:Watch more from TBPN: https://www.tbpn.com/Find TBPN on X: https://x.com/tbpnFind Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyleStay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Today on the Giant Ideas podcast we are joined by Katherine Boyle, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In 2022 Katherine unveiled her thesis - ‘Building American Dynamism' - which has both inspired the tech landscape and provided a central philosophical plank of Trump's America. American Dynamism is defined as “embodying the spirit of innovation, progress, and resilience that drives the United States forward”. Putting her money where her mouth is, Katherine Boyle co-founded Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund, investing in companies supporting the American national interest across aerospace, defence, manufacturing, energy, and critical infrastructure. She has backed the wildly successful defence tech startup Anduril, Elon Musk's SpaceX and many more. Katherine is one of America's most powerful investors. She previously led seed investing at another top firm, General Catalyst. She's also a big advocate of free speech: she started her career as a reporter on the Washington Post and is now on the board of The Free Press.Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING. Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

In this episode, Erik Torenberg and Byrne Hobart discuss the economic consequences of Trump's tariffs, OpenAI's recent innovations, and their implications for white collar work. They also explore the potential market shifts, the resilience of the US dollar as a reserve currency, and the state of elite higher education institutions like Harvard in the current geopolitical climate. —

In this week's episode of The Dynamist, guest host Jon Askonas is joined by Katherine Boyle, (General Partner at a16z), and Neil Chilson, (AI Policy at the Abundance Institute), to tackle a critical yet often overlooked question: How is technology reshaping the American family? As tech giants like TikTok and Instagram come under scrutiny for their effects on children's mental health, and remote work continues to redefine domestic life, the conversation around technology's role in family dynamics has never been more urgent.Katherine shares insights from her recent keynote at the American Enterprise Institute, highlighting how the core objective of technological innovation, which she calls "American Dynamism," should be empowering the family rather than centralizing state control. Neil provides a fresh perspective on how decentralized systems and emergent technologies can enhance—not hinder—family autonomy and resilience. Amid rising debates about homeschooling, screen time, and the shift toward a remote-first lifestyle, the guests discuss whether tech-driven changes ultimately strengthen or undermine families as society's fundamental institution.Together, they explore the possibility of a new era in which technology revitalizes family autonomy, reshapes education, and reignites productive home economies.

Cush is the founder of Odisea Labs, an accelerator for Latin American frontier tech (crypto, AI). Cush is inspired by effective accelerationism (e/acc) and consequently coined the memes “latam/acc” and “Latin American Dynamism” in reference to their US-based counterpart.In this episode, we learn all about why Latam is awesome for tech. Financial innovation and crypto have a fertile ground here and are widely adopted due the lack of banking access for large populations, regulatory capture and government mismanagement.Odisea Labs has been a major partner to the past March Startup Residency Month, and is now announcing another partnership with Infinita City for the following:Crypto Cities Theme MonthThis is a one-month program for builders to deploy crypto-native projects, not just online, but in a functioning city with enabling legislation, crypto taxes, and a supportive community.

When people think about startups working with the government, the phrase “black box” often comes up. But what if that box is finally being pried open?In this episode—recorded live at the American Dynamism Summit in DC—we talk with two Chief Technology Officers at the heart of American defense: Alex Miller, CTO for the Chief of Staff of the Army, and Justin Fanelli, CTO at the Department of the Navy. Along with a16z partner Leila Hay, they break down how the Department of Defense is shifting from decades-old processes to software-speed execution, why the real bottlenecks are cultural, not technical, and how startups can actually navigate and scale within this massive system.From replacing outdated procurement with faster pathways, to getting tech into the hands of warfighters faster, this is a rare look inside the government's most ambitious efforts to modernize—and what it means for builders on the outside.Is it time to rip up the system and start fresh? Or are the seeds of change already in the ground?Resources: DoD Contracts for Startups 101: https://a16z.com/dod-contracting-for-startups-101/Find Justin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinfanelli/Find Leila on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leilahay/Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Silicon Valley's bet that a Trump administration would be friendly to tech has a big payoff: Vice President JD Vance. At the American Dynamism Summit this week, Vance spoke at length about bolstering U.S. innovation and manufacturing, and bridging the divide between so-called “populists” and “techno-optimists.” The summit was hosted by venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, which became the tech-for-Trump poster child during the election. On POLITICO Tech, host Steven Overly sits down with Katherine Boyle, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For over a century, the United States has been the birthplace of world-changing innovation – from the Wright brothers' first flight to the invention of the transistor, the moon landing, and the birth of the internet. But in recent years, belief in American progress has wavered.Three years ago, a16z General Partner Katherine Boyle wrote a bold thesis called Building American Dynamism, challenging this apathy and calling for startups to tackle the country's biggest problems. The idea spread fast – first as a meme, then as a movement, and today as a $600M dedicated fund.In this episode, Katherine and fellow a16z General Partner David Ulevitch discuss:The origins of American Dynamism—and why it was controversial at firstHow Washington and Silicon Valley can come togetherAmerica's competitiveness in today's great power competitionThe latest American Dynamism 50 list focused on the Indo-Pacific, showcasing the top startups building for the national interestIf you're curious about the future of America, this is a conversation you won't want to miss.Check out this year's full AD50 list at a16z.com/AD50. Resources: Find David on X: https://x.com/daviduFind Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyleFind last year's' American Dynamism 50 AI Addition' here: https://a16z.com/american-dynamism-50-ai/Read Katherine's article ‘Building American Dynamism': https://a16z.com/building-american-dynamism/ Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Katherine Boyle is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and cofounder of the firm's American Dynamism practice, which invests in companies supporting the national interest across aerospace, defense, manufacturing, energy, logistics, and critical infrastructure. She sits on the boards of Apex Space and Hadrian Automation and is a board observer for Saronic Technologies and Castelion.She was previously a partner at General Catalyst, where she co-led the firm's seed practice and invested in the inception rounds of defense technology companies including Anduril Industries and Vannevar Labs. Prior to General Catalyst, she was a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post. Katherine holds a BA in Government from Georgetown University, an MBA from Stanford and a Masters of Public Advocacy from the National University of Ireland, Galway.Katherine believes that free speech is essential to promoting American Dynamism. She is a proud champion of new media companies and academic centers that promote free speech and free thought. She serves on the boards of The Free Press and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.0:00 - Intro4:48 - The Decline in Public Service7:47 - Making Government Cool Again10:07 - Silicon Valley's Aversion to National Security13:15 - Positive Sum vs Zero Sum Cultures16:27 - China, Authoritarianism, and Doing Hard Things19:27 - What Makes America Special?23:03 - Silicon Valley and the “Real Economy”26:28 - Investing in Mature Markets29:08 - Vanna White and The Wheel of Fortune30:27 - Journalism and Loneliness32:52 - Time and Suffering38:10 - Seriousness and Purpose41:11 - Is Culture Downstream of Technology?42:48 - Propaganda and Coolness as a Strategic Asset44:40 - Florida, Texas, and Regulatory Arbitrage47:51 - DC, Silicon Valley, and Florida50:20 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

My guest today is Marc Andreessen. Marc is a co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most influential figures. He combines deep technical knowledge from his engineering background with broad historical understanding and strategic thinking about societal patterns. He last joined me on Invest Like the Best in 2021, and the playing field looks a lot different today. Marc goes deep on the seismic shifts reshaping technology and geopolitics. We discuss DeepSeek's open-source AI and what it means for the technological rivalry between America and China, his perspective on the evolution of power structures, and the transformation of the venture capital industry as a whole. Please enjoy my conversation with Marc Andreessen. Subscribe to Colossus Review. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp's mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Ramp is the fastest-growing FinTech company in history, and it's backed by more of my favorite past guests (at least 16 of them!) than probably any other company I'm aware of. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. – This episode is brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. I think this platform will become the standard for investment managers, and if you run an investing firm, I highly recommend you find time to speak with them. Head to ridgelineapps.com to learn more about the platform. – This episode is brought to you by Alphasense. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Imagine completing your research five to ten times faster with search that delivers the most relevant results, helping you make high-conviction decisions with confidence. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at Alpha-Sense.com/Invest and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Learn about Ramp, Ridgeline, & Alphasense (00:06:00) Introduction to DeepSeek's R1 (00:07:24) DeepSeek's Global Impact (00:09:25) AI's Ubiquity and Future (00:10:36) Winners and Losers in the AI Race (00:14:22) The New AI Cold War (00:16:34) China's Technological Ambitions (00:21:31) Open Source and Intellectual Property (00:27:48) The Role of Open Source in AI Development (00:30:02) National Interests vs. Global Competition (00:37:25) The Future of Capital Allocation (00:45:41) Challenges of Sustaining Private Partnerships (00:46:34) Building a Franchise Business (00:48:27) The Role of Political Operations (00:50:51) The Dynamics of Power and Elites (01:01:44) Technological Change and Its Implications (01:13:37) The Future of Robotics and Supply Chains (01:21:09) American Dynamism and Defense Technology

Humanoid robotics company Figure raised eyebrows this week when it announced it would be stepping away from a partnership with OpenAI in favor of building its own in-house AI models. Figure CEO Brett Adcock alluded to a “major breakthrough” in their own process and plans to unveil “something no one has ever seen on a humanoid” in the coming month.  Figure isn't the only company experimenting with non-OpenAI solutions either. Just last week, researchers from Stanford and the University of Washington demonstrated that it's possible to train a highly capable “reasoning” model for under $50 in cloud compute credits, a stark contrast to the costs often associated with OpenAI's models. TechCrunch's Kirsten Korosec, Margaux MacColl, and Max Zeff are diving into the biggest news on today's episode of Equity, including how the tide could be changing for OpenAI.  Listen to the full episode to hear about: Notable new hires in startups and venture, from Stripe's new lead for ‘startup and VC partnerships' to Andreessen Horowitz's controversial pick for its American Dynamism team lead. Two space startups teaming up to build the next generation of telescopes.  Elon Musk's latest play, and how Silicon Valley is reacting to the tech bros taking over the federal government. Equity will be back next week, so don't miss it! Equity is TechCrunch's flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.

Welcome back to The Aubservation! We are discussing America's Golden Age & Dynamism. We cover: - State of 2025 - Inauguration Fashion - Bitcoin Policy - Ross Ulbricht's Pardon Thank you Ledger & Cake Wallet for sponsoring this episode!

As 2025 begins, industries are evolving at unprecedented speed: robots are revolutionizing manufacturing, terabytes of earth observation data are driving new possibilities, and gaming technology is transforming how we design, train, and innovate across sectors.In this episode, a16z General Partner Erin Price-Wright, Engineering Fellow Millen Anand, and Partner Troy Kirwin discuss the trends reshaping the future of hardware, software, and beyond.We explore:How robots and full-stack engineers are driving the next industrial renaissance.The explosion of Earth observation data and its potential to revolutionize industries.How gaming technology is moving beyond entertainment to reshape training, design, and more.This is just the beginning of our four-part series on 50 Big Ideas for 2025—don't miss the full list at a16z.com/bigideas.Resources: Find Erin on X: https://x.com/espricewrightFind Millen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/millen-anand/Find Troy on X: https://x.com/tkexpress11Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Defense tech has gone mainstream with a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors working in the incoming Trump administration. Katherine Boyle, a general partner at a16z, was dubbed an early investor to this trend, co-founding the VC firm's American Dynamism practice in January 2020. Boyle joins Morgan Brennan from the Reagan Defense Forum to discuss Trump 2.0, the technologies she's most excited about right now, and the outlook for her investment thesis.

Defense tech has gone mainstream with a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors working in the incoming Trump administration. Katherine Boyle, a general partner at a16z, was dubbed an early investor to this trend, co-founding the VC firm's American Dynamism practice in January 2020. Boyle joins Morgan Brennan from the Reagan Defense Forum to discuss Trump 2.0, the technologies she's most excited about right now, and the outlook for her investment thesis.

In this episode, a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz dive into the latest AI policy updates, emphasizing the need for informed debate on AI's risks and benefits, and the policies needed for AI startups to thrive and collaborate. This conversation follows a16z's recent joint statement with Microsoft's Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella and Brad Smith, Vice-Chair and President: https://a16z.com/ai-for-startups/ Ben and Marc also discuss the geopolitical implications of U.S. tech policies, the growing internal conflicts within the AI safety community regarding censorship, and the challenges of regulating powerful tech companies while ensuring entrepreneurial freedom for Little Tech. It's time to find common ground.  Enjoy! Watch the Full Video: https://youtu.be/hookUj3vkE4 Truth Terminal's Andy Ayrey 1st podcast appearance (on blocmates.): https://bit.ly/4hvJYKf  Book mentioned on this episode: “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrum https://amzn.to/3Ch94wj  Resources: Marc on X: https://twitter.com/pmarca Marc's Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com/ Ben on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz  Stay Updated: Find us on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z  The views expressed here are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any a16z funds. PLEASE SEE MORE HERE: https://a16z.com/disclosures/

We do a deep dive into Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism Strategy and Little Tech Agenda, which together lay out a clear ideology of how tech startups are integral to the American empire. All this venture capital firm asks for is your belief in a16z as a conduit for the spirit of innovation, your trust in America as a vessel for the progressive spirit, and your optimism in a future led by a16z's vision. Oh yeah, and also billions of dollars to invest in bringing about “the glory of a Second American Century.” ••• Blackstone set to acquire Australian data centre business AirTrunk https://www.ft.com/content/d7399891-15a4-47fb-b8f3-47970e156956 ••• American Dynamism https://a16z.com/american-dynamism ••• Building American Dynamism https://a16z.com/building-american-dynamism/ ••• The Little Tech Agenda https://a16z.com Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.x.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.x.com/braunestahl)

American global leadership is due in great part to its innovators — visionaries who drive society beyond the preconceived limits. Historically, government-led initiatives like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project pushed boundaries. Today, too often, government lags behind technologically.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Katherine Boyle about American Dynamism, the spirit of pro-progress innovation, and how a new generation of Silicon Valley startups is spurring government to break out of its old habits.Boyle is a general partner at VC giant Andreessen Horowitz, having previously been a partner at General Catalyst and a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post. She primarily invests in national security, aerospace and defense, and public safety companies, among others.In This Episode* American Dynamism (1:25)* From software to the physical world (7:23)* Government collaboration: challenges & opportunities (11:29)* Playing the long-game in Washington (21:16)* Building the American Dream (24:35)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationAmerican Dynamism (1:25)Let's just start with a little bit of definition about American Dynamism. Broadly, what challenges or problems is this effort directed toward?It's a bit of a long story as to what American Dynamism is, how it arrived to be a category of innovation, but the short definition is American Dynamism is built for companies that support the national interest. So a very broad category of companies, everything from aerospace, defense, national security, companies that sell directly to the US government and to our allies, but also things like housing, education, transportation, infrastructure, things that are built in the physical world where Washington or states usually like to regulate those things.So one of the things that we saw in our own portfolio is that there are a lot of companies that we used to be classifying as “enterprise” or “consumer,” and really what they were were government companies because they had to interface with a regulator much earlier in their trajectory, or they saw government as a potential buyer of the product. So in cases of things like aerospace and defense, those are very obvious government buyers, but things like public safety, where we have companies like Flock Safety, for example, that started out selling to homeowners associations thinking they were a consumer company, but ultimately got extraordinary pull from local governments and from public safety officials because of how good the technology was. So the companies, in some ways, they were these N-of-One companies, really solving really important civic problems, but over time it became very clear that this was a growing category of technology.But the broader underlying thesis, I'd say, of where the movement came from, and when we really started seeing this as an area where founders, in particular, were excited to build, I think it did come out of “It's Time to Build,” my partner Mark Andreessen's canonical post where he basically said during Covid that we have to be able to build things in the physical world. And there was sort of this realization that technology has solved many, many problems in the digital realm that I think, in some ways, the last 15 years of the Silicon Valley technology story has really been about changes in consumer technology or changes in the workplace, but now we're finally seeing the need for changes in government and civic goods, and there's just an extraordinary amount of momentum from young founders who really want to build for their country, build for the needs of the citizenry.Does it change what you do, or maybe the kinds of expertise that are needed, to think about these things as a category, rather than different companies scattered in these other kinds of categories. Thinking of them as like, “Oh, there's some sort of commonality,” how is that helpful for you?The thing that's interesting is that there's sort of a “yes” and “no” part to that question. The yes is that the founders are coming from different places. So the companies that have led to this sort of, I would say, extraordinary wealth of engineering talent where people are not afraid to tackle these problems, there's a handful of the companies that have scaled: it's companies like SpaceX, companies like Palantir, where, 20 years ago, they were banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out, “How do we sell to government?” In many cases, they had to sue the government in order to be able to sell and compete against the larger incumbents that have been around for, in many cases, 50, 70 years. But now you have these talented engineers who've sort of seen those playbooks, both in terms of, they understand what good engineering looks like, they understand the pace of innovation, how quickly you have to bring new products to market, and they also understand that you have to be in touch with your customer, constantly iterating.And so you now have companies that have scaled in these categories where there is this nice thing that happens in Silicon Valley, and I always say it's a mark of a really successful company when three, four, five years into the journey, you start seeing the early people at that company say, “Well, I want to solve this problem,” or “I want to go be a founder, myself,” and they start building more companies. So I think that, in some ways, the natural order of how Silicon Valley progresses, in terms of, do you need to have different expertise, or are there different talent pools? Yes, they're coming from different companies, but it's the same story of Silicon Valley Dynamism, which is, someone comes in, I always joke, they go to the University of Elon Musk and they learn how to manufacture, and then they say, “Well, actually, I don't want to just work on rockets anymore, I'd like to work on nuclear.” And so then you have companies like Radiant Nuclear that have spun out of SpaceX several years ago that are building in a totally different category for the built world, but have that sort of manufacturing expertise, that engineering expertise, and also know what it's like to work in a highly regulated environment.Does it require a different expertise, then, to advise these companies because of that government interface?I think in some ways it does, yes, the types of people who are investing in this category, maybe there's a number of investors where they got their start at Palantir, for example, or they understand the early journey of SpaceX. But at the same time, the thing that I think has been most surprising to us is just how quickly this movement caught on among the broader Silicon Valley ecosystem. And I think that's a very good thing, because, at its core, these are software companies in many cases. Yes, they're building hardware, but software is the lever that's allowing these companies to scale. So you are seeing the traditional venture capital firms that used to say, “Oh, I would never touch anything that is operating in the physical world,” or the meme you had five years ago, which is, “You'll never be able to sell anything to the US government, I'm not wasting my money there.” You've seen a complete 180 in the Silicon Valley ecosystem in terms of venture firms where they're now willing to take bets on these types of companies.And you're also seeing, there's a number of founders where their first company, for example, might've done very well, and it might've just been pure software, or in a consumer enterprise, sort of a more classical Silicon Valley domain, and now you're seeing those founders say, “Actually, I want to build for the civic need. I want to build for the national interests. These are issues I care about.” And so you're seeing those founders actually decide to build in the category and team up with founders who maybe have a little bit more experience in government, or maybe have a little more experience in terms of how they're building in the physical world.From software to the physical world (7:23)That period you referred to, which seems like a lot of what Silicon Valley was doing with the first 15 years or so of this century: they're doing internet, social media, very consumer-facing. How valuable was that period? Because that is a period that, here in Washington, is much criticized as trivial, “Why wasn't Silicon Valley solving these huge problems like we did in the '60s?” Again, there were some critics who just looked at it as a waste of brainpower. To what extent is that a fair criticism, and do you think, is that unfair? That stuff was valuable, people valued the kinds of products that were producedYou would actually be better able to speak to this than me, but I'll say, the graph or the chart that's going viral today, as we speak, is the comparison of 2009 US GDP versus Eurozone GDP, which were roughly equal in 2009, coming right off the Great Recession, to today, which I actually think it was tweeted something like, I think it's. . .  the US is 77 percent greater in terms of GDP than the Eurozone countries, which means that, for some reason, the Silicon Valley ecosystem — and it is largely attributed to Silicon Valley. When I first wrote the thesis on American Dynamism, I looked actually at 1996, because it was 25 years when I published it, but 1996, if you looked at the top US companies by market cap, all six of them were outside of technology as an ecosystem. They were energy companies, I would say almost archaic industries that had grown over a long period of time, but if you look at those six companies today, they are all tech companies. And so something has happened in the 21st century. You could say the new American Century is actually built off the back of software. It's built off of these large tech companies that were built in California, in many cases. And so the 15-year period that you're talking about, which is this sort of, it was a zero-interest-rate environment, cost of capital was very low, there was a lot of experimentation going on, it was, in many ways, the canonical example of American Dynamism broadly, that you had risk capital going after many new ideas in many different areas, but they were particularly really focused on the areas that government was not interested in regulating.And that's always been the theme of innovation in Silicon Valley is, “Let's go where they're not necessarily paying attention.” Maybe you had some one-offs in terms of, you'll always have to meet with your regulator at some point—in the case of Uber or Airbnb—but these companies were really born of the needs that founders understood. They were built off the back of a platform shift in terms of, 2007, 2008, the iPhone becomes the thing that everyone wants to build on, it becomes the mobile era. And so you really did have this focus of software, and enterprise software, and consumer, and companies were able to grow to extraordinary heights. And if you just look at what it has done for US GDP in comparison to even something like Europe, it is really extraordinary. So that is a story that I think we should be celebrating and telling.But what has happened, I think, since Covid is this new shift, which is, we've explored many of the digital frontiers that we can. And of course there's always a new digital frontier. Every time we think it's over, we get hit with a new one — in the case of AI. But the thing that I think has really changed is that entrepreneurs now are not afraid of the physical world, and they are realizing — and I hate to use the word “inevitable,” but in some ways this is an inevitability — that you are going to have to interface with government at a certain point if you are going to build in the physical world. And there are so many opportunities, there are so many different places where founders can build, that that really did take on new meeting post- this slew of black swan events, in the case of Covid, and then of course Russia invaded Ukraine, where I think it did wake up a lot of founders who said, “I want to work on these really hard problems.” And thankfully we have companies that have scaled during that time, that have trained these manufacturing capabilities, they've trained engineers how to do these things. So it is our view that that 15-year period was extraordinary for software, but the next 10 years are going to be extraordinary for these American Dynamism companies, as well.Government collaboration: challenges & opportunities (11:29)When you talk about interfacing with government, what popped into my head was a bit of video of a congressional hearing, and they were trying to decide, do we want to bring the private sector and SpaceX into the space program, and so not just have it be a government effort by NASA? And I just remember these senators just lambasting the idea. And I think they might've brought in some astronauts, too. And if I was interested in interfacing with government and I had seen that video, I'm like, “Boy, oh boy, I hope the attitude of government has changed since then, because it seems like that's a wall.” What is the attitude on the other side? You said the attitude of the entrepreneurs has changed, of funders, but what about on the other side? What is the openness to the kinds of solutions that your companies are presenting?I think it's changed because it has to, and I always point to the late former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who in 2015 started DIUx [Defense Innovation Unit Experimental] as an innovation unit for the DoD [Department of Defense], recognizing that there's a talent problem that US government has had; and it didn't start in the last 10 years. When I was exploring this talent problem, I actually realized that there had been a commission on the lack of talent going into the bureaucracy at the federal level.In the 1990s, Paul Volcker actually chaired the commission, it was called a “Quiet Crisis.” Basically that young people today, unlike in the '50s and the '60s where government was seen as this extraordinary job that you could have or that you could go into one of these companies and work in a company for 30 years and then draw a pension, that young people today want to go work in the private sector, and the growth and dynamism of the private sector has actually been an issue for government, and that is not a new issue. It was explored in the late '80s, early '90s, and it has gotten precipitously worse because of tech. I would say that the technological innovation risk capital going to Silicon Valley and saying, “We're going to fund young people as they come out of college because they understand this new type of engineering.” You're seeing some of the best and brightest young people decide not to go to traditional companies, which has been a huge issue for the prime contractors that supply 40 percent of the government programs for the DoD, but what has happened is you're seeing this extraordinary engineering talent go to startups. And so I think what even — this is 10 years ago now — DIU saw, if all of our best and brightest software talent is avoiding government, or much of it is avoiding government, they're avoiding traditional companies that we work with, we have to meet them where they are.And so the DoD I actually think was the first government organization to really recognize this crisis and to decide, we're going to need to have new interfaces. Now, whether that means new procurement, that's always going to be a debate, and that's a Washington issue that I think we've been fighting for several years now in order to change how these companies are able to work with the DoD on these big programs, but I think even just recognizing that this was an issue 10 years ago was a huge step for government.And over time now, we've seen a handful of what we would call “defense 1.0” companies, in terms of startups, many of them kind of built off the back of a company like SpaceX, now realizing that you can build for USG [US Government], you can build hardware-software hybrid that you can then sell into production contracts, and it's companies like Anduril that were started in 2017 when people said, “This is impossible to do. You're never going to be able to sell to USG,” and this year was chosen for a massive program, the CCA [Collaborative Combat Aircraft] program with the Air Force, over many prime contractors.And so I think that is the story now that Silicon Valley has seen, and I always joke that, particularly investors and founders, they really only need to see a handful of winners to know that something is a category, and so you're going to see more and more of these companies being founded, scaling, and I think that circuitous cycle and that virtuous cycle actually leads more to the DoD saying, “Okay, this is a real ecosystem now.” It's not as risky to take a chance on a startup, which is what government is always worried about, if we take a chance on anything innovative, are we going to look foolish? And so I think, in some ways, you are seeing the government respond to what's happened in the private sector, but this is not something that's a year old, two years old, or three years old, this is something that's been talked about for almost 10 years now, and of course SpaceX now is an over-20-year-old company.Is this still primarily a Defense Department-focused effort? Are there other areas of government who are looking at what's happening with DoD and they're drawing lessons? How diverse of an effort has this become?We see this across every sector that government cares about. So it's not just defense, it's aerospace, it's energy, it's logistics, it's transportation. We always joke, if there is a department in Washington that exists to regulate a sector, that is American Dynamism, and you are seeing innovation in those sectors. But it's happening at different rates. I'd say the DoD is one of the largest spenders. The largest private US company right now is SpaceX, so there's success in those categories, so you're seeing a lot of interest in it now, but then there's companies in public safety. That's an area where I think there's just been an extraordinary explosion of innovation in the last few years, largely driven by the fact that there is a labor crisis happening in public safety across America, but it is a different sale, it's not selling to federal government, selling to state and local.One of our companies, Flock Safety, which I mentioned at the beginning of our chat, they now are involved in solving 10 percent of vehicular crimes in America.What do they do?So, it's a great story about a company that was founded in Atlanta in 2017, and they built a very small modular license plate reader that only tracks cars, not people, and started building for homeowners associations with the recognition that most crimes in America are committed with a car, and so if you can put these in areas of high traffic, areas to augment the work of law enforcement, crime will go down. And they started selling to homeowners associations and immediately got pull around Atlanta and suburban Atlanta from police chiefs who said, “I need 10 of these in areas where we don't have enough people who can look at different areas.”So now this company is operating across America, they're in all 50 states, and what's extraordinary about what they've been able to do as a technology company, just putting up cameras in different sectors and following cars, is one of the hardest problems for law enforcement is when a car that has committed at theft or — one of the most extraordinary stories they've told us recently was there was a young girl kidnapped, a young child kidnapped in Atlanta, and the car went into a different county. And so when that happens, for law enforcement it's often one of the most difficult things, if a car goes into a different county, to do data sharing across these places. But if you have a network of cameras that can track the car, you find that kidnapped child, or you find that stolen vehicle much, much faster. In many ways, catching the cars at the moment where they've moved from county to county has actually solved one of the bigger data issues that law enforcement has.What's interesting about this example — and it provides a nice lead-in to my next question — is, in that situation, the solution wasn't to help the various databases communicate better, it was a completely different sort of solution. So, are what these companies doing — it seems like what they're not doing is taking existing operations and improving efficiency, but providing a new way to approach the problem that they're trying to tackle.Yes. And what's incredible about that story is it was not started as a company that was supposed to support law enforcement. It was started for homeowners associations, it was a consumerization of a civic problem. And I think that's what's really interesting is, one of the biggest issues, and this is why I think you're now seeing really interesting technology companies enter government at all levels is, you have a population that has grown up with consumer technology now. So as the boomers retire, the boomers remember what it was like to be in government, or to be in office places without Zoom, without the consumer internet, and without the things that make life much easier and tangible, as those people retire, you have young people demanding, “We have to use better technology.”And so the solutions are not, “Okay, let's iterate on the existing systems that we've used for the last 10 or 20 years,” it's, “Why can't my experience when I walk into my job in government feel exactly the same way that it does when I walk into my home and I experience the consumerization of everything around me?”So I think that is part of it, that you have this millennial generation that's now coming into leadership. In many cases, you have people who don't necessarily remember the world before the internet or didn't have formative experiences in the workplace or in government before the internet. And that is shaping and reshaping all of how government functions, and likely will for the next 20 years. The thing that, especially when we talk about the Department of Defense and the warfighter, the thing that has always been tragic is that you have more technology in your phone than you do when you go onto the battlefield. And so I think there's this understanding that young people are demanding to have the same level of technology and the same ease-of-use in all aspects of governance, in all aspects of civic goods.Playing the long-game in Washington (21:16)You seem like a very upbeat, positive person. My experience as people from Silicon Valley — or now, in your case, from Miami, a new startup hotbed — they come through Washington, they bring that optimism with them, then after a few days of dealing with people on Capitol Hill, the optimism is drained out of them, they go back shells of their former selves, because if you've dealt with a lot of people on Capitol Hill and staffers, what they're really good at saying is, “That will never pass . . . that will take 20 years . . . three of my predecessors worked on it, it didn't work . . .” How have you been able to maintain a fairly upbeat attitude, given that this is the world that your companies have to deal with?I agree with you that one of the biggest problems that we see, and which we joke about, is that the only reason why people in Silicon Valley 10 years ago were going to Washington was to apologize for the things that they did. They would get hauled in front of Congress, say they're sorry, and so I think what we've seen in these sectors, in particular, is it's a specific type of founder and person who knows that this is very mission-driven. They are called to build these companies. They care about these companies. They're passionate about the national interest. And so they know they have to go to Washington repeatedly, and I think some of the mistakes that, say, founders who had no exposure to Washington, or have no exposure to regulated industries, when they would go to Washington, they'd say, okay, maybe I go once a year, shake some hands, it's kind of fun, and then I go back and I build, and they would be surprised when they got nowhere. And of course, I think that the most sophisticated companies recognize that they have to learn to play the game that Washington cares about. And there is a totally different culture in Washington, there's a totally different set of incentives. I say it's really the difference between, Silicon Valley is a positive-sum culture: Everyone helps everyone, knowing that the pie can always get bigger, and you always want a piece of that bigger pie as it's growing, and so the more things that you're doing, the better. It's why we have this beautiful angel investing network. It's why we have all of these things that make no sense to people in Washington where it's elections, where 10,000 votes in a state could decide the election, and it's a zero-sum game, and that is what decides who is in office and who is in think tanks. And so it's a very different way of thinking about things.The thing that I think has changed the most about Silicon Valley is recognizing, we might not be good at zero-sum games and zero-sum thinking, but that is the people that we are interfacing with, and we need to understand their incentive systems when they decide to make a purchasing decision, when they decide whether they're going to vote on a bill in a certain way, when they think about, what do their constituents care about back home in a place that has nothing to do with Silicon Valley or California. So I think that level of empathy for what Washington does, which is very different than what Silicon Valley does, is important.Is it hard to stay optimistic? There are times where you're banging your head against the wall, we're on very short time horizons, Washington can go in perpetuity doing what it does without necessarily seeing much change. But having those points of connection, and constantly having the conversation, and recognizing that it is a long game and not a short game, I think has been very beneficial, and now there are success stories: Palantir, Anduril, Shield AI, these companies that have been around for 10 years now, that have really shown that it is possible to do good work and to support the needs of the DoD, and to speak the language of the DoD, as well, I think has really led to this next generation of founders understanding what they need to do to be successful as well.Building the American Dream (24:35)What kind of world are you trying to create? I'm sure it's intellectually challenging, I'm sure it's well-paying, but, fundamentally, why are you doing this? And I would think it's to create some world that is better than the one we're currently living. What is the world you're trying to create?I think there is a recognition post-Covid, in particular, for a lot of young people, a lot of engineers, that things were broken, things are broken in this country. The physical world has not kept up with the digital world, and there's been extraordinary changes, technology is moving as fast as it possibly can, and a lot of the things that people care the most about have been left out of that story: Education, which is something we haven't necessarily talked about yet, but education needs to be completely transformed in an era where technology is at our fingertips and where people who are good at learning learn faster than they ever possibly could, and people who are not good at learning don't, and so you have a disparity between those people.But there's an extraordinary amount of change that has happened in the last 25 years where the things that American citizens care most about have not changed in the way that they need to keep up with, again, the changes in the consumer internet and what we've seen in the enterprise.And so the story of, how do we make America strong? How do we continue to be the most dynamic country in the world? How do we make sure that all American citizens and the things they care about most in terms of the American Dream are part of that story? I think that is something that the founders who work in American Dynamism care deeply about. They recognize, and I always point this out, but there are so many founders now who are working at companies like Anduril, like Saronic, where they don't necessarily even remember September 11th — they weren't old enough — but they care deeply about the idea that America needs to be a strong country, and that we need to have a mode of deterrence, and we need to have a strong national defense that keeps America the most dynamic country so that people can build inside of it. The same thing with recognizing that there needs to be changes in housing, needs to be changes in education, these are things that were part of the American Dream when our parents were growing up and feel a little bit distant for a lot of other young people growing up today. So I think there is a recognition that technology has to be a part of those big sectors in order to support the American Dream that many of us grew up with and that many of us aspire to.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

A reminder for new readers. That Was The Week includes a collection of my selected readings on critical issues in tech, startups, and venture capital. I selected the articles because they are of interest to me. The selections often include things I entirely disagree with. But they express common opinions, or they provoke me to think. The articles are snippets sized to convey why they are of interest. Click on the headline, contents link, or the ‘More' link at the bottom of each piece to go to the original. I express my point of view in the editorial and the weekly video below.Hat Tip to this week's creators: @reidhoffman, @dougleone, , @credistick, @rex_woodbury, @NathanLands, @ItsUrBoyEvan, @berber_jin1, @cityofthetown, @keachhagey, @pmarca, @bhorowitz, , @signalrank, @steph_palazzolo, @julipuli, @MTemkin, @geneteare, @lorakolodny, @jasminewsun, @JBFlint, @asharma, @thesimonetti, @lessinContents* Editorial: * Essays of the Week* Crossing The Series A Chasm* The Consumer Renaissance* The Creator Economy on AI Steroids* AI Is Transforming the Nature of the Firm* The Opaque Investment Empire Making OpenAI's Sam Altman Rich* Video of the Week* The American Dream - Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz* AI of the Week* SignalRank Version 3 Improves Performance Again* How Long Can OpenAI's First-Mover Advantage Last?* OpenAI Employees Warn of Advanced AI Dangers* A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence* Nvidia hits $3tn and surpasses Apple as world's second-most valuable company* VCs are selling shares of hot AI companies like Anthropic and xAI to small investors in a wild SPV market* News Of the Week* Crunchbase Monthly Recap May 2024: AI Leads Alongside An Uptick In Billion-Dollar Rounds* Elon Musk ordered Nvidia to ship thousands of AI chips reserved for Tesla to X and xAI* Introducing video to Substack Chat* Instagram's Testing Video Ads That Stop You From Scrolling Further* Startup of the Week* NBA Nears $76 Billion TV Deal, a Defining Moment for Media and Sports* X of the Week* Doug Leone - I am supporting Trump. * Reid Hoffman - I am supporting BidenEditorialI woke on Tuesday to Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital on X saying:I have become increasingly concerned about the general direction of our country, the state of our broken immigration system, the ballooning deficit, and the foreign policy missteps, among other issues. Therefore, I am supporting former President Trump in this coming election.Doug has the right to support Trump. It is also clear that the immigration system is broken, the deficit is ballooning, many things are wrong with foreign policy, and there are “other issues.” Trump as the solution is less obvious. But there it is—hot on the tails of Chamath Palihipitaya and David Sacks announcing a fund-raiser for Trump on the All-In podcast (they said they would do the same for Biden).Reid Hoffman followed up a day later with:On one level, this is a straightforward choice, but any literate attempt to analyze Leone's issues might arrive at the following conclusions:* Like many Western nations, the USA is aging rapidly and has a shrinking working-age population across all skill sets. Immigrants are needed, and pro-immigration leadership is needed, creating a path to entry for large numbers of skilled and unskilled workers to fill empty jobs as we get close to full employment.* The deficit is large, and there are many palliatives available. Selling more to China would help, but both party leaders are protectionist. Taxes to reduce the divide between the 1% and the rest would help a bit. However, what would help the most is economic growth, which requires investment in technology and productivity. Neither leader seems too focused on innovation and investment.* Foreign Policy - well, sheesh, it's a big issue. However, saber-rattling about Taiwan and provoking China seems to be a hobby shared by both parties and does not seem smart. Ukraine and the future of Europe are better in Biden's hands, but not by a lot. Europe looks very shaky. The US is increasingly isolationist. The appetite for world leadership is on the decline. Again, the solution would focus on economic growth, which seems absent.Voting for Trump is a big no-no for me. But voting for Biden is, at best, a lesser evil instinct, not a belief system. The election will not be where the future is built, but it is important. Politicians are collectively disappointing.This week's video of the week from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz is called “The American Dream” and champions their view about American Dynamism. And I must confess that this comes closer to a vision of the future than either political outfit. Their vision requires political support, massive government financial commitment, and private capital investment. I see no evidence of those happening.The real winning effort seems to be happening on the ground. This week, Nvidia hit $3 trillion, eclipsing Apple as the world's second-most valuable company. This is even though Apple has 7 times the revenue of Nvidia.This week's first essays also focus on prospects for boom time. Rex Woodbury's ‘The Consumer Renaissance' examines the impact of consumer spending on our lives. In ‘The Creator Economy on AI Steroids, ' Nathan Lands focuses on how emerging tools will transform creativity. But in ‘AI Is Transforming the Nature of the Firm, ' Evan Armstrong gets closest to a future vision.”AI is the first universally flexible technology. It can interact with our digital environments in similar ways to humans, so it can have all the flexibility that we do. In that way, it may be the last technology we ever need.This seems to be the crux of hope in a world where dreams and nightmares are strangely devoid of detail. What the world needs (not only America) is hope. And hope is born from optimism. Optimism is born from success. The most likely success of the next decades will result from specific uses of AI that improve human life.I know and like Doug Leone. I know and like Reid Hoffman. Doug's bar for success needs to be higher. Voting for Trump is not right, and even if it were, it would not be sufficient.Reid also needs a higher bar. Voting for Biden will not be sufficient even if it is right.Let's focus on where success can be found, grow optimism, and breed hope. There is a need for a broad technical revolution and the social rebirth it enables. Silicon Valley and its friends globally need to invent the next version of human existence to the benefit of all. The social rebirth requires a conscious effort; technology will not magically bring it about. More in this week's video.Essays of the WeekCrossing The Series A ChasmDan GrayDan Gray, a frequent guest author for Crunchbase News, is the head of insights at Equidam, a startup valuation platform, and a venture partner at Social Impact Capital.June 5, 2024As we get deeper into 2024, there is increasing concern about the state of Series A fundraising. The bar for investment appears much higher, and fewer startups are reaching it.This is a problem for founders, and investors like Jenny Fielding, managing partner of Everywhere Ventures, who said, “Every Seed investor's dilemma: All my Series A buddies want to meet my companies early! All my companies are too early for my Series A buddies.”To attach some data to this, we can see that the median step-up in valuation from seed to Series A has gone from $19.5 million in Q1 2022 to $28.7 million in Q1 2024. Series A firms seem to be looking for much stronger revenue performance, with targets of $2 million to $3 million in ARR, compared to $1 million to $2 million just a few years ago.The outcome is that while 31.8% of Q1 2020 seed startups closed their Series A within two years, that fell to just 12% for Q1 2022 — which should worry everyone.Why are Series A investors so much more demanding?Today's Series A investors are looking at startups that raised their seed between 2021 and 2023, which identifies the root of the problem: it spans the Q2 2022 high-tide mark for venture capital.For example, there were 1,695 seed rounds of more than $5 million in 2021, rising to 2,248 in 2022, then falling to 1,521 in 2023. As a comparison, there have been just 137 so far in 2024.The result is two categories of startups that are looking to raise their Series A today:* Pre-crunch startups that raised generous seed rounds and stretched the capital out as far as they could, to grow into inflated valuations.* Post-crunch startups that raised modest seed rounds on more reasonable terms, with shorter runways and less demonstrable growth.Strictly speaking, neither is more appealing than the other; the first group has less risk, the second offers more upside, and both are adapted to current market realities. It shouldn't cause a problem for investors, provided they can distinguish between the two.The cost of market inefficiencyVenture investors have a market-based lens on investment decisions, which means looking fairly broadly at trends in revenue performance and round pricing to determine terms, e.g. a typical Series A is within certain bounds of revenue performance and valuation. While that approach may be serviceable and efficient under ideal conditions, the past few years have been far from ideal.Without distinguishing between the two cohorts, investors are now looking at the performance of Series A candidates that spent more than $5 million on a war chest for two to three years of growth alongside the valuations of candidates that raised around $2 million to prove scalability. It just doesn't work as an average, and thus the unreasonable expectations...MoreThe Consumer RenaissanceFrom Predicting Consumer AI Applications to Analyzing Consumer SpendREX WOODBURY, JUN 05, 2024“Consumer” has become something of a bad word in venture capital circles.We see this reflected in the early-stage markets: recent data from Carta showed that just 7.1% of Seed capital raised last year went to consumer startups. That's less than half the share from 2019 (14.3%).But I think consumer is actually a great place to be building and investing. Whenever something is out of favor, that's a sign it's probably a good place to spend time: this is an industry built on being contrarian, not built on following the herd. We're entering a compelling few years for consumer entrepreneurship.First, I'd argue that consumer is too narrowly defined. When people think consumer, they often think consumer social (a tough category) or consumer brands (a tough fit for venture compared to internet and software businesses, with typically lower return profiles). But consumer is broader. Consumer encompasses businesses that sell to consumers and those that rely on consumer spending. This means the obvious names—apps on our phones like Uber, Instacart, Spotify—and the enablers: Shopify, for instance, powers online retail; Faire powers offline retail; Unity powers game development. Each of the latter three is B2B2C, in its own way, but I would categorize each is also a consumer technology business.The wins in consumer can be massive. The biggest technology businesses in history began as consumer businesses—Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon. The original companies comprising FAANG—with Microsoft conspicuously absent—were allconsumer.And some of the best returns of the last five years have stemmed from consumer tech IPOs. At Daybreak, we invest ~$1M at Pre-Seed and Seed. Here's how much a $1M investment in the Seed round of five recent consumer IPOs would yield:Big consumer wins compare favorably to big enterprise wins—relative to Snowflake's market cap, Uber is ~3x in size, Airbnb is ~2x in size, and DoorDash is roughly equal. (Snowflake is the biggest enterprise IPO of the last decade.) The last few years produced a windfall of consumer outcomes, yet investors today almost write off the category.At Daybreak, we don't focus exclusively on consumer; my view is that you need to balance more binary consumer outcomes with B2B SaaS and B2B marketplaces. But we do approach investing through the lens of the consumer—how people make decisions. The buyers of products like Figma and Ramp, after all, are people, and software companies are increasingly selling bottom-up into organizations. The line between consumer and enterprise has been blurring for years.This week's Digital Native makes the argument that consumer tech is a compelling place to build and invest. We'll look at the data to back up this argument, then delve into three categories of consumer that I'm particularly interested in right now:* Checking in on Consumer Spend* Consumer Tech: The Data Doesn't Lie* What to Watch: AI Applications* What to Watch: Shopping* What to Watch: Consumer Health* Rule of Thumb: Follow the SpendThis week we'll cover #1-3, and next week in Part II we'll tackle #4-6.Let's dive in

Senator Todd Young (R-IN) speaks with a16z General Partner Martin Casado about the importance of open innovation and American leadership in AI, and why we need to support AI research at all levels — from the classroom to the war room.In this episode, we distinguish science fiction from science reality in the ever-evolving AI landscape. Resources:Find Senator Todd Young on Twitter: https://twitter.com/toddyounginFind Martin Casado on Twitter: https://twitter.com/martin_casadoWatch the American Dynamism stage talks on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3IqWn1WTo learn more about the American Dynamism Summit, visit our website: a16z.com/ad-summit Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

What is worth $11 billion and wants to go to Mars to collect rocks? NASA's mission to Mars to collect rocks that was expected to cost $11 billion and take ages. So, the U.S. space agency is throwing the doors open to get more input, and that means that startups are looking at an opportunity that is truly out of this world.But that's not the only thing going on. Today's Equity episode is focused on all things startups, which means we also got to chat through Two Chairs' recent and massive Series C, Quilt's heat pump work and fundraise, and several IPO updates. Here's hoping that after Ibotta and Rubrik get out the door, more IPOs follow.Also on the show today was a grip of venture capital news. Bay Bridge Ventures is raising a $200 million climate fund — it has lots of good company there, given rising LP interest in climatetech more generally — and a SpaceX alum is building a new VC firm that we covered.To close, the massive, gobsmackingly big $7.2 billion worth of new funds from a16z. We dug into their breakdown on the podcast, but the short version is that it appears that the venture slowdown has not managed to impede the venture firm's golden touch when it comes to fundraising. Hit play, let's have some fun!Equity is TechCrunch's flagship podcast and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.For the full interview transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, read on, or check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. Credits: Equity is hosted by TechCrunch's Alex Wilhelm and Mary Ann Azevedo. We are produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.

Leo shares the origin story of why storied VC firm Susa Ventures decided to launch new fund, Humba Ventures, to invest at the intersection of deep tech and American Dynamism, details what differences are required to evaluate companies with that level of focus on deep tech, defends Humba's thesis that deep tech is the best place to invest and build right now by dispelling 4 key misconceptions of this category, and brings us home sharing a “What's Hot and What's Hype” outlook.  

Subscribe to The Realignment to access our exclusive Q&A episodes and support the show: https://realignment.supercast.com/a16z Podcast: a16z Podcast | Andreessen HorowitzWhat is American Dynamism? REALIGNMENT NEWSLETTER: https://therealignment.substack.com/PURCHASE BOOKS AT OUR BOOKSHOP: https://bookshop.org/shop/therealignmentEmail Us: realignmentpod@gmail.comFoundation for American Innovation: https://www.thefai.org/posts/lincoln-becomes-faiFrank H. McCourt, Jr., founder of Project Liberty and author of Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Frank discuss his belief that the internet as we know it is broken, why reimagining the internet's architecture could address growing social strife, the limits of the past decade's regulatory and status-quo market approach, and the promise a "third-generation internet" premised on digital property rights, autonomy, and ownership.

American Dynamism. A term coined by a16z General Partner, Katherine Boyle, two years ago, when she and David Ulevitch founded the firm's American Dynamism investing practice.Beyond a sector or movement, American Dynamism embodies innovation, community, and a unique philosophy touching every facet of American life.In this episode, we hear from 10 voices, including policymakers, founders, and funders, as they share what American Dynamism means to them. They discuss the critical technologies shaping the future and the challenges on the path to the next decade of dynamism. Stay tuned for more exclusive conversations from a16z's second annual American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. Resources: Find Dr. Kathryn Huff on Twitter: https://twitter.com/katyhuffFind Nand Mulchandani on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nandmulchandaniFind Doug Beck and the DIU on Twitter: https://twitter.com/diu_xFind Mitch Lee on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dontmitchFind Ian Cinnamon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IanCinnamonFind Doug Bernauer and Radiant on Twitter: https://twitter.com/radiantnuclearFind Chris Bennett on Twitter: https://twitter.com/8ennettFind Mike Slagh on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MikeSlaghFind Rahul Sidhu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rahoolsidooFind Wyatt Smith on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wyatt_h_smithLearn more about American Dynamism: https://a16z.com/american-dynamism Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

- Support this show and join the Kingpilled Discord: https://subscribestar.com/kingpilled - Subscribe to Matt on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kingpilled - Follow Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/realkingpilled - Follow Cooper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cooperbrooks

In this episode, host David Paul interviews Rahul Sidhu, the founder and CEO of Aerodome, a drone company for the public safety sector. They discuss the concept of Aerodome and its ability to send drones to 911 calls in an average of 98 seconds. They also delve into the regulatory challenges and waivers required for operating drones in the public safety space. Rahul shares his experience raising funding, including a seed round with 2048 Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. They explore the intersection of American dynamism and lagging industries, as well as the importance of hardware sourcing in the United States. Rahul also discusses the progress of Aerodome and his excitement for the future of AI and robotics. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the impact of the 2024 election. You can watch/listen to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.TakeawaysAerodome is a drone company that sends drones to 911 calls in an average of 98 seconds, providing air support for public safety personnel.Regulatory challenges and waivers are necessary for operating drones in the public safety sector, and there is a need for innovation in this space.Raising funding for a startup like Aerodome can involve securing investments from venture capital firms like 2048 Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.The intersection of American dynamism and lagging industries presents opportunities for innovation and growth.Hardware sourcing and supply chain regulation are important considerations for companies like Aerodome.Exciting developments in technology include advancements in AI, robotics, and the integration of AI into everyday life.The 2024 election is expected to have a significant impact on various industries and the country as a whole.Chapters03:00 - The Concept of Aerodome08:00 - Regulatory Challenges and Waivers11:00 - Raising Funding and Investors17:00 - The Intersection of American Dynamism and Lagging Industries23:00 - Supply Chain Regulation and Hardware Sourcing28:00 - Company Progress and Future Plans30:00 - Exciting Developments in Technology31:00 - The Impact of the 2024 Election

In this episode of This Week in NoCode, hosts J.J. Englert and David Powell discuss the current state and future of the NoCode industry, alongside intriguing topics like AI integration into platforms like Notion and how no code is being recognized with Product Hunt's Golden Kitty Awards. There is also a fascinating conversation with Andres, the co-founder of Total, a front-end no-code platform about the challenges of code exportation in no-code platforms and how they plan to enhance their own user interface.00:00 Introduction and Welcome01:12 No Code News: Product Hunt Golden Kitty Awards01:52 Discussion on AI and No Code Tools04:10 Notion's Calendar: A Review06:24 American Dynamism 50 AI Edition Report11:27 The Future of Work: Microsoft's Report16:50 Interview with Co-founder of Tottle28:52 The Journey to No-Code Development29:35 Addressing the Critics of No-Code30:23 The Evolution of No-Code Tools32:36 The Challenges of Scaling with No-Code36:44 The Future of No-Code and Traditional Coding44:04 The Role of Open Source in No-Code45:50 Addressing the Fear of Platform Lock-In52:38 The Future of TOTL and No-Code Platforms57:21 Final Thoughts on the No-Code Industry --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/this-week-in-nocode/message

There's increasing concern that as scary as this period feels—between Russia's two-year war in Ukraine and Hamas's ongoing war with Israel—that all of this will come to be seen as the calm before the storm. Should China decide to move against Taiwan in some way, then we'll have war in three regions, and U.S. involvement in all three. Or perhaps by then it will not seem like separate wars, but a single global one.  Most Americans in the last fifty years, and certainly since the end of the Cold War, have lived in the luxury of safety. We live in a place where peace and security—crime and riots aside—are generally taken for granted. But a lot of Americans had a serious wake-up call after October 7, when a country with a high-tech security fortress was overwhelmed by terrorists on motorcycles and trucks and paragliders. Could this happen here? Who is actually coming over our border? If we had to fight for our country, who would actually show up? Today's Honestly guests had that wake-up call long before the wars in Ukraine or Gaza. They're investing their time, money, and resources into building a better American defense. And in the past few months especially, their work has come to be seen as prescient. Palmer Luckey is a 31-year-old software engineer and entrepreneur. At the age of 19, Palmer founded the virtual reality company Oculus, which was originally supposed to be sold on Kickstarter as a virtual reality prototype for VR nerds and enthusiasts. Instead, it was acquired by Facebook for more than $2 billion. Then, when he was 25, he founded Anduril Industries, an $8.5 billion company that develops drones, autonomous vehicles, submarines, rockets, and software for military use. Katherine Boyle is a Washington Post reporter turned venture capitalist; she is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the co-founder of the firm's American Dynamism arm, which invests in companies that build to support the national interest.  Joe Lonsdale is a co-founder of Palantir (along with Peter Thiel and others) and founder and general partner of the firm 8VC, which backed Anduril in its early days.  They are each attempting to disrupt the defense marketplace, bring Silicon Valley's speed, creativity, and innovation to defense, advance our national security, and, you know. . . save America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patriotism is cool again in the tech world, but venture capitalists are on the hunt for the next promising space & defense name to develop tech for the U.S. government. Andreessen Horowitz's new thesis is American Dynamism, or investing in companies advancing U.S. interests including national security and space. General Partner David Ulevitch joins Morgan Brennan to discuss where he's seeing opportunity in the space economy...and where he's not.

Patriotism is cool again in the tech world, but venture capitalists are on the hunt for the next promising space & defense name to develop tech for the U.S. government. Andreessen Horowitz's new thesis is American Dynamism, or investing in companies advancing U.S. interests including national security and space. General Partner David Ulevitch joins Morgan Brennan to discuss where he's seeing opportunity in the space economy...and where he's not.

Andy talks with Silicon Valley venture capitalist and software engineer Marc Andreessen about how the American tech sector can innovate for the national interest and how new technologies like AI can improve warfare and defense.  Send us your feedback at intelligencematterspod@gmail.com.

In this episode of Turpentine VC, Erik Torenberg speaks to Katherine Boyle, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading the firm's American Dynamism fund. They discuss why Katherine and a16z started the American Dynamism practice and what they hope to accomplish. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite:http://netsuite.com/turpentine --- Check out Erik's new show Request for Startups featuring a rotating cast of founders and investors (including Dan) sharing their requests for startups they want to exist in the world, and also their stories of navigating the idea maze in different sectors so founders don't have to reinvent the wheel anymore. The first episode is out now - we over better dating apps, references as a service, and WeWork for productivity Watch and Subscribe on Substack: https://requestforstartups.substack.com/p/receipt-based-dating-reference-checks Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/request-for-startups-with-erik-torenberg/id1728659822 Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/739L1LR32QI2XyoZlRh5nv --- We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com. --- SPONSOR: NETSUITE NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform head to NetSuite http://netsuite.com/turpentine and download your own customized KPI checklist. --- Join our free newsletter to get Erik's top 3 insights from each episode: https://turpentinevc.substack.com/ --- RELATED SHOWS: The Limited Partner If you like Turpentine VC, check out our show The Limited Partner with David Weisburd, where David talks to the investors behind the investors: https://link.chtbl.com/thelimitedpartner --- X / TWITTER: @Ktmboyle (Katherine) @eriktorenberg (Erik) @Turpentinemedia --- TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (01:13) Understanding American Dynamism (02:23) The Disconnect Between Silicon Valley and Washington (04:10) The Importance of Investing in America and the Role of Venture Capital (05:34) The Role of Tech in Solving Civic Problems (16:27) Sponsor: NetSuite (24:03) The Influence of Military Service on American Society (33:21) The Importance of Family in American Life and History (39:14) The Shift from Honor Culture to Dignity Culture (42:49) The Impact of Capitalism and Individualism (43:43) The Power of Memes and the Struggle of Young Men (47:58) The Role of Family and Motherhood in Society (54:23) The Power of Seriousness (57:19) The Dilemma of Choice and the Value of Commitment (01:08:30) The Role of Technology in Society and Politics (01:14:31) The Importance of Public Service and the Challenges of Running for Office (01:16:54) American Values and Opportunities

David Ulevitch is an entrepreneur and investor. As a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he leads the firm's American Dynamism practice, which focuses on investing in companies advancing American interests.

Let's dive into the world of advanced nuclear startups—where founders are playing entrepreneurship on hard-mode, and navigating how to build new reactor designs, sell to new markets, and forge new regulatory pathways. This episode is the second focused on nuclear fission startup founders—while last week Packy and Julia spoke with entrepreneurs who laser-focused on the problem of manufacturing ready-made designs at scale, this new crop of founders featured are tackling a seemingly even more difficult task of creating new forms of nuclear reactors from scratch. As a16z American Dynamism partner Katherine Boyle says, "to build a successful energy startup, you have to excel at math, deep technology, storytelling, recruiting, and regulatory." Tune in as Packy and Julia spotlight five founders taking radically different paths to bringing more nuclear online—from radioisotopes on the literal moon to the novel production of hydrocarbons. Thank you to this episode's guests: Katherine Boyle, Albert Wenger, Jake DeWitte, Isaiah Taylor, Matt Loszak, Tyler Bernstein, Jordan Bramble, Josh Wolfe, and David Ulevitch. Huge thank you to our sponsors: Secureframe: the only compliance automation platform with AI capabilities that help customers speed up cloud remediation and security questionnaires. Get 10% off your first year of Secureframe: https://secureframe.com/packy Pilot.com: accounting, CFO, and tax services that are designed with flexibility and scalability in mind. To get 20% off your accounting bill for the first 6 months, go to https://pilot.com/packy Clean Air Task Force For the full list of resources referenced in this show: https://ageofmiracles.co/  Subscribe to Not Boring to get weekly doses of tech and business strategy, straight to your inbox: https://www.notboring.co/ Follow our hosts: Packy McCormick on Twitter and LinkedIn Julia DeWahl on Twitter and LinkedIn Timestamps: (00:00) What are advanced reactors? (11:58) Introducing the startup founders (14:01) Oklo (17:55) Valar Atomics (25:27) Aalo (26:41) Zeno Power (30:07) Antares (37:18) Why we need a new playbook for nuclear (48:53) Selling to new markets and customers (1:07:00) On regulation (1:30:18) Nuclear startup operations (1:46:40) The importance of design (1:52:24) The advanced nuclear startup playbook This show is produced and distributed by Turpentine, a network of shows and other media properties, where experts talk to experts about tech, business, culture, and more.  Credits: Nancy Xu produced this season of Age of Miracles. Audio editor: Justin Golden. Video editor: Jake Salyers. Executive producers: Amelia Salyers, Packy McCormick, and Erik Torenberg. 

A16z Podcast Key Takeaways  Capitalism and free markets are the machine that has lifted people out of poverty for the last 500 yearsIt is best to embrace, support, and accelerate technology as much as possible, and then deal with the issues as they arise“I think the single biggest policy mistake of my lifetime was the decision in the 70s and 80s to essentially ban civilian nuclear power throughout the U.S. and throughout Europe as well.” – Marc AndreessenIt can take decades for the consequences of certain decisions to materialize The digital technologies that most people worry about are actually the mostegalitarian technology that has ever been produced, even more so than running water and electricityIncumbents frame new technologies as dangerous so that governments step in and effectively create sanctioned barriers to competition A society built on the idea that love scales becomes an incredibly dark, dystopian, murderous place; when you take away the carrot, all you have is a stickHumans are the ultimate resource: By having more of us, we will find better ways to solve existing problems If the education industry were primarily market-based, competitive pressures would force universities to be good and to meet the needs of society better Humility is key; technologists must not “cross the line” and do societal engineering in their spare timePeople who are hyper verbal and “work in ideas” tend to get arbitrarily unhinged over time and become more disconnected from the real world Throughout history, the inventors of the new technology have not been great at speculating on how it is to be regulated  Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgSubscribe to The Ben & Marc Show on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3SdsfNtSubscribe to The Ben & Marc Show on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3SclPOrRead the full manifesto: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ This past week, Marc released his new vision for the future – “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”.In an article that has sparked widespread conversation across traditional and social media, Marc challenges the pessimistic narrative surrounding technology today, and instead celebrates it as a liberating force that can lead to growth, progress and abundance for all. In this one-on-one conversation based on YOUR questions from X (formerly Twitter), Ben and Marc discuss how technological advancements can improve the quality of human life, uplift marginalized communities, and even encourage us to answer the bigger questions of the universe.We hope you'll be inspired to join us in this Techno-Optimist movement. Enjoy! Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

A16z Podcast Key Takeaways  Capitalism and free markets are the machine that has lifted people out of poverty for the last 500 yearsIt is best to embrace, support, and accelerate technology as much as possible, and then deal with the issues as they arise“I think the single biggest policy mistake of my lifetime was the decision in the 70s and 80s to essentially ban civilian nuclear power throughout the U.S. and throughout Europe as well.” – Marc AndreessenIt can take decades for the consequences of certain decisions to materialize The digital technologies that most people worry about are actually the mostegalitarian technology that has ever been produced, even more so than running water and electricityIncumbents frame new technologies as dangerous so that governments step in and effectively create sanctioned barriers to competition A society built on the idea that love scales becomes an incredibly dark, dystopian, murderous place; when you take away the carrot, all you have is a stickHumans are the ultimate resource: By having more of us, we will find better ways to solve existing problems If the education industry were primarily market-based, competitive pressures would force universities to be good and to meet the needs of society better Humility is key; technologists must not “cross the line” and do societal engineering in their spare timePeople who are hyper verbal and “work in ideas” tend to get arbitrarily unhinged over time and become more disconnected from the real world Throughout history, the inventors of the new technology have not been great at speculating on how it is to be regulated  Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgSubscribe to The Ben & Marc Show on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3SdsfNtSubscribe to The Ben & Marc Show on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3SclPOrRead the full manifesto: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ This past week, Marc released his new vision for the future – “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”.In an article that has sparked widespread conversation across traditional and social media, Marc challenges the pessimistic narrative surrounding technology today, and instead celebrates it as a liberating force that can lead to growth, progress and abundance for all. In this one-on-one conversation based on YOUR questions from X (formerly Twitter), Ben and Marc discuss how technological advancements can improve the quality of human life, uplift marginalized communities, and even encourage us to answer the bigger questions of the universe.We hope you'll be inspired to join us in this Techno-Optimist movement. Enjoy! Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Subscribe to The Ben & Marc Show on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3SdsfNtSubscribe to The Ben & Marc Show on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3SclPOrRead the full manifesto: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ This past week, Marc released his new vision for the future – “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”.In an article that has sparked widespread conversation across traditional and social media, Marc challenges the pessimistic narrative surrounding technology today, and instead celebrates it as a liberating force that can lead to growth, progress and abundance for all. In this one-on-one conversation based on YOUR questions from X (formerly Twitter), Ben and Marc discuss how technological advancements can improve the quality of human life, uplift marginalized communities, and even encourage us to answer the bigger questions of the universe.We hope you'll be inspired to join us in this Techno-Optimist movement. Enjoy! Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Erik Torenberg sits down with Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she invests in companies that promote American dynamism. Erik and Katherine discuss the private sector versus the public sector, the American dream in conflict with the rise of therapeutic culture, and how to reinstill a love of public service. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/UPSTREAM If you enjoyed this podcast you listen to Katherine's recent Moment of Zen episode next, where she discusses founder mentality, Twitter, SpaceX, and more ( https://link.chtbl.com/moz) -- We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com. TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Episode preview (03:21) What is American Dynamism? (05:49) How should VC's view China? (08:03) We aren't seeing China as an ally anymore (10:19) Private vs public sector (13:23) Why the public sector won't build the next SpaceX (16:35) Sponsors: Secureframe | Marketerhire (20:00) Tradeoffs with privatization (26:20) How to reinstill a love for public service (31:02) Where Katherine differs from Balaji (33:39) What can we learn from China (36:13) Building is a political philosophy (35:56) Katherine's family background (38:47) America is where you can escape your past (40:29) We are a nation of families moreso than individuals (42:40) What Katherine learned from being an au pair (44:48) The rise of therapeutic culture (50:38) What to do about struggling men (59:32) The problems of delaying adulthood (1:07:42) The problems of optionality (1:11:07)How religion informs her work and life TWITTER: Katherine's Twitter: @KTmBoyle A16z's Twitter: @a16z Erik's Twitter: @eriktorenberg Upstream : @upstream__pod LINKS: American Dynamism: https://a16z.com/american-dynamism/ Please support our sponsors: Shopify | Secureframe  -Shopify: https://shopify.com/torenberg for a $1/month trial period Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of all ecommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries. From their all-in-one ecommerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/torenberg. - Secureframe: https://secureframe.com/ Secureframe is the leading all-in-one platform for security and privacy compliance. Get SOC-2 audit ready in weeks, not months. I believe in Secureframe so much that I invested in it, and I recommend it to all my portfolio companies. Sign up for a free demo and mention UPSTREAM during your demo to get 20% off your first year. Secureframe has just released Secureframe Trust, a new product that lets you showcase your organization's security posture to build customer trust.

Dow closed lower today, dragged down by Disney. The S&P 500 also fell while the Nasdaq ended in the green. 248 Ventures' Lindsey Bell and Annandale Capital's George Seay talk today's market action. CFPB Director Rohit Chopra, who sits on the FDIC Board, discusses the FDIC's proposal to replenish its $16B hole in deposit insurance after a string of bank failures. He also talks the CFPB's new guidelines for personal financial data. Unity Software popped after a strong quarterly report; CEO John Riccitiello discusses what's next. Andreessen Horowitz's Katherine Boyle joins on the firm's new investing in “American Dynamism” fund and why founders are excited to invest in companies that move America's institutions forward. Plus, MoffettNathanson's Michael Nathanson talks the Disney bull case after its worst day in six months.

Katherine joins Erik, Antonio, and Dan to discuss the hidden forces that shape founders, major divides in tech, and whether she should join our show as a cohost. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/zen  RECOMMENDED PODCAST: The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind of leadership-level strategy that often happens behind closed doors. Check out the first episode with the architect of Netflix's culture deck Patty McCord. https://link.chtbl.com/hrheretics TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (5:00) Fatherhood and founders (10:00) What is “Seriousness” (13:39) Sponsors: Secureframe | MarketerHire (16:00) Elon (20:30) Software and hardware (26:30) Are founders psychologically off? (35:00) SpaceX and Starship (43:00) Where would Steve Jobs be today? (48:00) Twitter and Substack (1:07:00) Florida is a COVID phenomenon, not a ZIRP phenomenon (1:17:00) Can we pressure Katherine join Moment of Zen as the fourth cohost? (1:18:00) Sending kids to Catholic school TWITTER: @MOZ_Podcast @KTmBoyle @eriktorenberg @dwr @antoniogm *Please support our sponsors: NetSuite | Secureframe | MarketerHire* -NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/zen  NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. More than thirty-six thousand companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/zen and defer payments of a FULL NetSuite implementation for six months. - Secureframe: https://secureframe.com/ Secureframe is the leading all-in-one platform for security and privacy compliance. Get SOC-2 audit ready in weeks, not months. I believe in Secureframe so much that I invested in it, and I recommend it to all my portfolio companies. Sign up for a free demo and mention MOZ during your demo to get 20% off your first year. - MarketerHire: https://marketerhire.com/moz MarketerHire is one of my favorite resources for growing startups looking to hire marketers. With 1000s of pre-vetted marketers across a dozen roles, whether you need help with growth, marketing, SEO, lifecycle, content, or any other aspect of growth marketing strategy. Over 5,000 companies already use MarketerHire to hire expert marketers on demand, ranging from top venture-backed startups to the most well-known Fortune 500s. Go to marketerhire.com/moz and use code MOZ to get your $1,000 credit for your first hire. Thank you Graham Bessellieu for production.

Today's episode is with a16z's American Dynamism team: Katherine Boyle and David Ulevitch. Katherine is a general partner focused on national security, aerospace and defense, public safety, housing, education, and industrials. David is a general partner focused on companies promoting American dynamism, as well as enterprise and SaaS companies. They are joined by a16z Bio + Health general partner Vijay Pande, and editorial lead Olivia Webb.Together, we talk about the idea behind American Dynamism, how the American Dynamism team thinks about building within highly regulated industries, how trust is key to the procurement process, and how the team thinks about the regulation of AI.

Starting in the 1960s, technology companies, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, were essential for creating the processors that would eventually launch satellites and guide missiles. Half a century later, today's tech companies can — and need — to move even faster and smarter, as international adversaries scale up their aggressions. In this episode, Anduril Industries Founder Palmer Luckey will discuss how Silicon Valley is using new technologies to build new tools, systems, and companies to defend our nation and its interests. Resources:American Dynamism Summit: https://a16z.com/AD-summit/Anduril's website: https://www.anduril.com/Find Palmer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Back in August, after a16z announced our investment into Adam Neumann's new company, Flow, it felt like almost everyone – whether it was other VCs, founders, or journalists – had something to say.But the one person that you didn't hear from was Adam himself.In this never-before shared footage from a16z's American Dynamism Summit in Washington DC, Adam Neumann sits down with Marc Andreessen and David Ulevitch, to discuss the opportunities that have emerged from post-pandemic shifts in both work and home, and what Flow is doing to capitalize.Find the full library of American Dynamism Summit recordings at a16z.com/ad-summit.Timestamps:00:00 - Introduction01:40 - Getting back in the arena 09:03 - The opportunity in housing 16:19 - Lessons from WeWork 19:13 - Work & home post-pandemic 27:34 - Moving to the cloud 34:23 - Office serendipity 37:51 - Building Flow 43:51 - Cities as startupsResources:Flow's website: https://www.flow.life/American Dynamism recordings: https://a16z.com/ad-summit Stay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

A16z Podcast Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Social platforms will become a natural place for product discovery as platforms will ease the friction between inspiration, purchase intent, and completed purchases China is mobile-only, compared to the U.S. which is mobile-first, so China tends to iterate on mobile features much faster than the U.S. In 2019, two-thirds of Americans said they had a favorite local place they went to regularly. Four years later, that two-thirds has decreased to one-half. Gaming bots have historically been scripted procedures but are increasingly becoming network-based AIs that are more convincing to humansMultiplayer games of the future may consist of perfectly catered AIs specifically designed for each gamerBrands will lean into the platforms that enable interoperability across platformsOf the group of digital natives, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha, 2 in 5 already believe that self-expression via fashion is more important in the digital world than the physicalGenerative AI will advance beyond “text to image” to more complex workflows, such as “text to SQL queries” or, eventually, “text to excel modeling” and more Much of the truly useful data is actually proprietary enterprise data and is not widely available on the internet for AIs to train on “If your company does not have an AI strategy, it should really be thinking about one yesterday.” – Sarah Wang  Fintech companies will need to strike a delicate balance between building with new technology rails while maintaining customer trust Regardless of the platform shift, distribution is always keyRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgAt the end of 2022, our team at a16z asked dozens of partners across the firm to spotlight one big idea that startups in their fields could tackle in 2023.Emerging from this exercise came 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for the year, ranging from entertainment franchise games to precision delivery of medicine to small modular reactors, and of course loads of AI applications.In our 2-part series, we'll be covering 12 of these big ideas with the partners that shared them.Here in part 1, we'll cover Consumer, Games, and Enterprise, with a little Fintech sprinkled in. Listen in as we chat with Connie Chan, Anne Lee Skates, Jack Soslow, Doug McCracken, Sarah Wang, and Sumeet Singh.And look out for part 2 dropping soon, covering Fintech, American Dynamism, and Bio & Health!For the full list of 40+ ideas, check out the full article: https://a16z.com/2022/12/15/big-ideas-in-tech-2023/Topics Covered:(1:30) Breakthroughs in Buying (Finally!) - Connie Chan(16:40) Unlocking the “Third Place” - Anne Lee Skates(30:14) Games as a Neverending Turing Test - Jack Soslow(46:09) The Metaverse Goes Fashion Forward - Doug McCracken(59:24) Generative AI Advances Beyond “Text to Image” to Complex Workflows - Sarah Wang(1:12:23) Embracing Large Language Models and Maintaining Trust - Sumeet SinghStay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

A16z Podcast Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Social platforms will become a natural place for product discovery as platforms will ease the friction between inspiration, purchase intent, and completed purchases China is mobile-only, compared to the U.S. which is mobile-first, so China tends to iterate on mobile features much faster than the U.S. In 2019, two-thirds of Americans said they had a favorite local place they went to regularly. Four years later, that two-thirds has decreased to one-half. Gaming bots have historically been scripted procedures but are increasingly becoming network-based AIs that are more convincing to humansMultiplayer games of the future may consist of perfectly catered AIs specifically designed for each gamerBrands will lean into the platforms that enable interoperability across platformsOf the group of digital natives, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha, 2 in 5 already believe that self-expression via fashion is more important in the digital world than the physicalGenerative AI will advance beyond “text to image” to more complex workflows, such as “text to SQL queries” or, eventually, “text to excel modeling” and more Much of the truly useful data is actually proprietary enterprise data and is not widely available on the internet for AIs to train on “If your company does not have an AI strategy, it should really be thinking about one yesterday.” – Sarah Wang  Fintech companies will need to strike a delicate balance between building with new technology rails while maintaining customer trust Regardless of the platform shift, distribution is always keyRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgAt the end of 2022, our team at a16z asked dozens of partners across the firm to spotlight one big idea that startups in their fields could tackle in 2023.Emerging from this exercise came 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for the year, ranging from entertainment franchise games to precision delivery of medicine to small modular reactors, and of course loads of AI applications.In our 2-part series, we'll be covering 12 of these big ideas with the partners that shared them.Here in part 1, we'll cover Consumer, Games, and Enterprise, with a little Fintech sprinkled in. Listen in as we chat with Connie Chan, Anne Lee Skates, Jack Soslow, Doug McCracken, Sarah Wang, and Sumeet Singh.And look out for part 2 dropping soon, covering Fintech, American Dynamism, and Bio & Health!For the full list of 40+ ideas, check out the full article: https://a16z.com/2022/12/15/big-ideas-in-tech-2023/Topics Covered:(1:30) Breakthroughs in Buying (Finally!) - Connie Chan(16:40) Unlocking the “Third Place” - Anne Lee Skates(30:14) Games as a Neverending Turing Test - Jack Soslow(46:09) The Metaverse Goes Fashion Forward - Doug McCracken(59:24) Generative AI Advances Beyond “Text to Image” to Complex Workflows - Sarah Wang(1:12:23) Embracing Large Language Models and Maintaining Trust - Sumeet SinghStay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

At the end of 2022, our team at a16z asked dozens of partners across the firm to spotlight one big idea that startups in their fields could tackle in 2023.Emerging from this exercise came 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for the year, ranging from entertainment franchise games to precision delivery of medicine to small modular reactors, and of course loads of AI applications.In our 2-part series, we'll be covering 12 of these big ideas with the partners that shared them.Here in part 2, we'll cover Fintech, American Dynamism, and Bio & Health. Listen in as we chat with Anish Acharya, Angela Strange, Michelle Volz, Ryan McEntush, Vijay Pande, and Julie Yoo.And for the full list of 40+ ideas, check out the full article: https://a16z.com/2022/12/15/big-ideas-in-tech-2023/Topics Covered:(0:59) GPT Unlocks Credit Counseling - Anish Acharya(9:53) Compliance as a Competitive Advantage - Angela Strange(23:31) Small Modular Reactors Advance the Nuclear Renaissance - Michelle Volz(33:48) Overhauling the Space Supply Chain - Ryan McEntush(44:40) The Biggest Company in the World - Vijay Pande(51:17) The Value-Based Care Stack - Julie YooResources:https://a16z.com/2022/11/02/america-space-age/https://a16z.com/2022/11/11/the-biggest-company-in-the-world/https://a16z.com/2021/01/08/the-new-tech-stack-for-virtual-first-care/ Stay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

At the end of 2022, our team at a16z asked dozens of partners across the firm to spotlight one big idea that startups in their fields could tackle in 2023.Emerging from this exercise came 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for the year, ranging from entertainment franchise games to precision delivery of medicine to small modular reactors, and of course loads of AI applications.In our 2-part series, we'll be covering 12 of these big ideas with the partners that shared them.Here in part 1, we'll cover Consumer, Games, and Enterprise, with a little Fintech sprinkled in. Listen in as we chat with Connie Chan, Anne Lee Skates, Jack Soslow, Doug McCracken, Sarah Wang, and Sumeet Singh.And look out for part 2 dropping soon, covering Fintech, American Dynamism, and Bio & Health!For the full list of 40+ ideas, check out the full article: https://a16z.com/2022/12/15/big-ideas-in-tech-2023/Topics Covered:(1:30) Breakthroughs in Buying (Finally!) - Connie Chan(16:40) Unlocking the “Third Place” - Anne Lee Skates(30:14) Games as a Neverending Turing Test - Jack Soslow(46:09) The Metaverse Goes Fashion Forward - Doug McCracken(59:24) Generative AI Advances Beyond “Text to Image” to Complex Workflows - Sarah Wang(1:12:23) Embracing Large Language Models and Maintaining Trust - Sumeet SinghStay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Subscribe to The Realignment to access our exclusive Q&A episodes and support the show: https://realignment.supercast.com/.JOIN MARSHALL & SAAGAR AT OUR LIVE CONFERENCE IN DC ON 1/25/2023: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/realignment-live-tickets-443348436107?aff=erelexpmltCSIS Taiwan Wargame Results: The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of TaiwanEIG's American Dynamism ReportREALIGNMENT NEWSLETTER: https://therealignment.substack.com/PURCHASE BOOKS AT OUR BOOKSHOP: https://bookshop.org/shop/therealignmentEmail us at: realignmentpod@gmail.comSaagar and Marshall discuss Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the new Republican House majority, the lessons of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg's tenure, and the results of a wargame focused on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Afterward, Marshall interviews Economic Innovation Group President and Chief Executive Officer John Lettieri about the FTC's proposed rule banning non-competes in the workplace and EIG's approach to restoring dynamism in the American economy.

Katherine shares with us the why & how the a16z American Dynamism practice was founded to build for America and the national interest (USA!), what it takes to scale a company within these legacy industries whether private or public end markets, a deep dive example into the ~3,000 foundational machine shops infrastructure underpinning the American economy and our national security, and finally a “What's Hot and What's Hype” outlook on where things are headed in 2023.

Episode 1: A Star is Born! After too many excuses, the Merge newsletter's Mike Benitez launches the inaugural Merge podcast! Co-hosting duties are shared with Jake Chapman (@VC) and Tim Nolan (@NatSecTim). In this episode, we talk about 3 things the newsletter has never covered in its 2-year existence: venture capital, TikTok, and American Dynamism.Show Notes:(00:30) – the world's most okayist defense podcast(1:02) – Co-host intros(3:58) – What is venture capital(20:49) – Jake and the Army Venture Capital Corporation(26:20 ) – TikTok and national security(39:16) – WTH is ‘American Dynamisn'Subscribe to the newsletter:https://www.themerge.co/Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/the_merge

Aarthi and Sriram's Good Time Show ✓ Claim Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Virtual Reality (VR) is the final platform because the only step after VR is mind-melding into the Borg; fully-formed VR makes technologies like phones, televisions, and desktop PCs obsoletePalmer Luckey started a national security company because he thought it was the most important problem that he could work on, and one that his peers were not working onBig Tech companies were refusing to work with the military because they were beholden to the US's strategic adversariesThere is a vocal minority in tech who are anti-military, and the tech executives at these companies use this vocal minority as a smoke-screen reason to not do meaningful work with the US military when in reality the executives are just trying to appease China Most defense companies operate on a cost-plus basis: they are paid for time and materials, and then a fixed percentage of profit on top Cost-plus contracts warp incentives; defense contractors can make more money by taking longer, designing a more expensive system, and running over on costs because the percentage they make on top is just a percentage of those costsAnduril uses its own money to build the products it sells to the US military and its alliesMany countries “Stand with Ukraine” and “Reject Russian Violence” while simultaneously giving Russia billions of dollars to fund its war machine in exchange for oil and natural gasThey stand with Ukraine up until the point it inconveniences themThe best time to wave the magic wand to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict was years or decades agoPalmer Luckey believes China is more likely to launch a blockade around Taiwan than a full-scale invasion The worst-case scenario for the United States is the CCP gains control over Taiwan's semiconductor industry and only allows semiconductors to be sent to ChinaPalmer Luckey believes that the next-generation category of power projection technologies (AI, hypersonics, etc.) will make the traditional category (aircraft carriers, Top Gun stuff) obsolete There is a cultural fetishization of being “the founder”, that is healthy in some ways, but it downplays the importance of other roles at startups like the chief technical officer, lead hardware engineer, etc.Do not start a technology company if you really love technology and programming Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgIn this episode, Aarthi and Sriram talked to Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and now the founder and CEO of Anduril. We talked about Palmer's unique childhood, how he started Oculus and essentially made re-ignited the VR movement, sold to Meta, got fired, and then went on to start another challenging company called Anduril which focuses on building defense technology. We talked about Palmer's recent trip to Ukraine, the current state of the Ukraine/Russia, China/Taiwan and the threat of nuclear war. We also talked about John Carmack, Elon Musk, dealing with haters, working on hard problems and what drives incredibly productive people and his advice for founders.

Aarthi and Sriram's Good Time Show ✓ Claim Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Virtual Reality (VR) is the final platform because the only step after VR is mind-melding into the Borg; fully-formed VR makes technologies like phones, televisions, and desktop PCs obsoletePalmer Luckey started a national security company because he thought it was the most important problem that he could work on, and one that his peers were not working onBig Tech companies were refusing to work with the military because they were beholden to the US's strategic adversariesThere is a vocal minority in tech who are anti-military, and the tech executives at these companies use this vocal minority as a smoke-screen reason to not do meaningful work with the US military when in reality the executives are just trying to appease China Most defense companies operate on a cost-plus basis: they are paid for time and materials, and then a fixed percentage of profit on top Cost-plus contracts warp incentives; defense contractors can make more money by taking longer, designing a more expensive system, and running over on costs because the percentage they make on top is just a percentage of those costsAnduril uses its own money to build the products it sells to the US military and its alliesMany countries “Stand with Ukraine” and “Reject Russian Violence” while simultaneously giving Russia billions of dollars to fund its war machine in exchange for oil and natural gasThey stand with Ukraine up until the point it inconveniences themThe best time to wave the magic wand to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict was years or decades agoPalmer Luckey believes China is more likely to launch a blockade around Taiwan than a full-scale invasion The worst-case scenario for the United States is the CCP gains control over Taiwan's semiconductor industry and only allows semiconductors to be sent to ChinaPalmer Luckey believes that the next-generation category of power projection technologies (AI, hypersonics, etc.) will make the traditional category (aircraft carriers, Top Gun stuff) obsolete There is a cultural fetishization of being “the founder”, that is healthy in some ways, but it downplays the importance of other roles at startups like the chief technical officer, lead hardware engineer, etc.Do not start a technology company if you really love technology and programming Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgIn this episode, Aarthi and Sriram talked to Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and now the founder and CEO of Anduril. We talked about Palmer's unique childhood, how he started Oculus and essentially made re-ignited the VR movement, sold to Meta, got fired, and then went on to start another challenging company called Anduril which focuses on building defense technology. We talked about Palmer's recent trip to Ukraine, the current state of the Ukraine/Russia, China/Taiwan and the threat of nuclear war. We also talked about John Carmack, Elon Musk, dealing with haters, working on hard problems and what drives incredibly productive people and his advice for founders.

Aarthi and Sriram's Good Time Show ✓ Claim Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Virtual Reality (VR) is the final platform because the only step after VR is mind-melding into the Borg; fully-formed VR makes technologies like phones, televisions, and desktop PCs obsoletePalmer Luckey started a national security company because he thought it was the most important problem that he could work on, and one that his peers were not working onBig Tech companies were refusing to work with the military because they were beholden to the US's strategic adversariesThere is a vocal minority in tech who are anti-military, and the tech executives at these companies use this vocal minority as a smoke-screen reason to not do meaningful work with the US military when in reality the executives are just trying to appease China Most defense companies operate on a cost-plus basis: they are paid for time and materials, and then a fixed percentage of profit on top Cost-plus contracts warp incentives; defense contractors can make more money by taking longer, designing a more expensive system, and running over on costs because the percentage they make on top is just a percentage of those costsAnduril uses its own money to build the products it sells to the US military and its alliesMany countries “Stand with Ukraine” and “Reject Russian Violence” while simultaneously giving Russia billions of dollars to fund its war machine in exchange for oil and natural gasThey stand with Ukraine up until the point it inconveniences themThe best time to wave the magic wand to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict was years or decades agoPalmer Luckey believes China is more likely to launch a blockade around Taiwan than a full-scale invasion The worst-case scenario for the United States is the CCP gains control over Taiwan's semiconductor industry and only allows semiconductors to be sent to ChinaPalmer Luckey believes that the next-generation category of power projection technologies (AI, hypersonics, etc.) will make the traditional category (aircraft carriers, Top Gun stuff) obsolete There is a cultural fetishization of being “the founder”, that is healthy in some ways, but it downplays the importance of other roles at startups like the chief technical officer, lead hardware engineer, etc.Do not start a technology company if you really love technology and programming Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgIn this episode, Aarthi and Sriram talked to Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and now the founder and CEO of Anduril. We talked about Palmer's unique childhood, how he started Oculus and essentially made re-ignited the VR movement, sold to Meta, got fired, and then went on to start another challenging company called Anduril which focuses on building defense technology. We talked about Palmer's recent trip to Ukraine, the current state of the Ukraine/Russia, China/Taiwan and the threat of nuclear war. We also talked about John Carmack, Elon Musk, dealing with haters, working on hard problems and what drives incredibly productive people and his advice for founders.

In this episode, Aarthi and Sriram talked to Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and now the founder and CEO of Anduril. We talked about Palmer's unique childhood, how he started Oculus and essentially made re-ignited the VR movement, sold to Meta, got fired, and then went on to start another challenging company called Anduril which focuses on building defense technology. We talked about Palmer's recent trip to Ukraine, the current state of the Ukraine/Russia, China/Taiwan and the threat of nuclear war. We also talked about John Carmack, Elon Musk, dealing with haters, working on hard problems and what drives incredibly productive people and his advice for founders.

WANT TO LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE? SUBSCRIBE TO OUR SUPERCAST: https://realignment.supercast.com/Marshall and Saagar answer Realignment Supercast subscriber Q&A from our ask-me-anything page.Subscribers to The Realignment's Supercast help us monetize the show, submit questions for Q&A episodes, listen to exclusive content, and more. 

Invest Like the Best Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Improvements in the highly regulated American Dynamism sectors like defense, housing, education, and healthcare will come from technological improvements, not policy improvementsThese are the most regulated, most subsidized, and lowest-competition sectorsAmerican Dynamism is an initiative to repair and strengthen the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington to solve issues facing all Americans Washington has a zero-sum culture that operates on short time horizons, while Silicon Valley has a positive-sum culture that operates on long time horizonsAuthoritarianism gives Russia and China certain advantages over the U.S. because they can order their best technologists to build what the country needs, whereas the best technologists in the U.S. are left free to create better ad-optimizing tech for Snapchat American Dynamism founders must be great storytellers;the technology is important, but the founder must be able to convince investors, customers, employees, and potential future employees that they are a paradigm-shifting company The government must turn to other sources than its defense-industrial base to solve its shortcomings in software, the Department of Defense's realization of this has marked a paradigm shift in Washington The playbook for defense tech startups: Start competing for the smaller pockets of money that don't touch the five defense primes (that receive 40% of the defense budget), and then move up the categories of spend and compete for contracts in areas that have been around for awhile People opting out of a system oftentimes improves the underlying systemCOVID forced parents to adopt a new model of educating their children, and like remote work, many parents were pleasantly surprised by the efficacy of the home-schooling and micro-schooling method If all you need for work is an internet connection, people will move to states that are more aligned with their values and preferred policies, thus placing positive pressure on states to improve Prices in regulated, subsidized, low-competition industries like defense, healthcare, and education don't come down because they don't need to come downInvestors must be mission-aligned with the company or they shouldn't be working with them  Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgMy guest today is Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Katherine started her career as a reporter for The Washington Post before moving into VC at General Catalyst. She now leads a practice at a16z called American Dynamism, investing in companies that are solving critical issues in areas like defense, housing, and education. In the past year, I've spoken to Marc Andreessen, Josh Wolfe, and a number of founders about this need to build societally important businesses so I was excited to explore the topic in even more detail today. Please enjoy my conversation with Katherine Boyle.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.   The content here is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard-to-get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC, and helps you set up customized expert calls. It's all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. And until 2023 every Tegus license comes with complimentary access to BamSec by Tegus.   -----   Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. Brex is the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest-growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high-limit corporate cards, payments, venture debt, and spend management software all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best.   -----   Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.    Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:02:42] - [First question] - The origin and overview of the term American Dynamism  [00:05:01] - Why the shift to a move slow and make sure nothing breaks mentality [00:07:31] - What about the American system today feels broken and stale  [00:09:48] - Becoming a journalist at The Washington Post  [00:11:35] - Describing the power landscape of media as it exists today   [00:12:28] - Major categories of American Dynamism that matter most   [00:14:29] - What matters more or less to her as an investor in  these categories  [00:17:31] - Whether or not there's anything fundamentally broken about our government [00:19:36] - The Systems Bible; What excites her about aerospace and defense and what creates opportunity and demand in these sectors [00:22:44] - Explanation of what it means when the factory is the product  [00:23:47] - How much is flowing into aerospace and defense currently  [00:26:01] - An overview of how lobbying works and who does it and why [00:29:07] - Whether or not she considers these sectors from a bottom up perspective as in investor    [00:30:32] - What other categories she feels pulled towards  [00:33:09] - The biggest problems that currently exist in the K-12 school system  [00:35:34] - Thoughts on how states are competing citizens and how it plays into American Dynamism [00:37:34] - The role immigration will play in range of outcomes in these main categories  [00:39:32] - Key takeaways about housing in light of American Dynamism   [00:42:09] - Her interpretation of the chart that shows inflation in categories over time [00:44:40] - How different the investing dynamics are in all of these categories and thoughts on valuation in this world  [00:47:56] - Whether or not expected returns and risk profiles are different in this area  [00:48:36] - The importance of effective a founder's storytelling, knowledge and customer empathy [00:49:55] - Overview of the anatomy of a great story   [00:51:30] - The story she tells founders at this stage so establish a partnership  [00:52:46] - The kindest thing that anyone has ever done for her

Invest Like the Best: Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- My guest today is Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Katherine started her career as a reporter for The Washington Post before moving into VC at General Catalyst. She now leads a practice at a16z called American Dynamism, investing in companies that are solving critical issues in areas like defense, housing, and education. In the past year, I've spoken to Marc Andreessen, Josh Wolfe, and a number of founders about this need to build societally important businesses so I was excited to explore the topic in even more detail today. Please enjoy my conversation with Katherine Boyle.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.   The content here is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard-to-get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC, and helps you set up customized expert calls. It's all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. And until 2023 every Tegus license comes with complimentary access to BamSec by Tegus.   -----   Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. Brex is the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest-growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high-limit corporate cards, payments, venture debt, and spend management software all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best.   -----   Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.    Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:02:42] - [First question] - The origin and overview of the term American Dynamism  [00:05:01] - Why the shift to a move slow and make sure nothing breaks mentality [00:07:31] - What about the American system today feels broken and stale  [00:09:48] - Becoming a journalist at The Washington Post  [00:11:35] - Describing the power landscape of media as it exists today   [00:12:28] - Major categories of American Dynamism that matter most   [00:14:29] - What matters more or less to her as an investor in  these categories  [00:17:31] - Whether or not there's anything fundamentally broken about our government [00:19:36] - The Systems Bible; What excites her about aerospace and defense and what creates opportunity and demand in these sectors [00:22:44] - Explanation of what it means when the factory is the product  [00:23:47] - How much is flowing into aerospace and defense currently  [00:26:01] - An overview of how lobbying works and who does it and why [00:29:07] - Whether or not she considers these sectors from a bottom up perspective as in investor    [00:30:32] - What other categories she feels pulled towards  [00:33:09] - The biggest problems that currently exist in the K-12 school system  [00:35:34] - Thoughts on how states are competing citizens and how it plays into American Dynamism [00:37:34] - The role immigration will play in range of outcomes in these main categories  [00:39:32] - Key takeaways about housing in light of American Dynamism   [00:42:09] - Her interpretation of the chart that shows inflation in categories over time [00:44:40] - How different the investing dynamics are in all of these categories and thoughts on valuation in this world  [00:47:56] - Whether or not expected returns and risk profiles are different in this area  [00:48:36] - The importance of effective a founder's storytelling, knowledge and customer empathy [00:49:55] - Overview of the anatomy of a great story   [00:51:30] - The story she tells founders at this stage so establish a partnership  [00:52:46] - The kindest thing that anyone has ever done for her

My guest today is Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Katherine started her career as a reporter for The Washington Post before moving into VC at General Catalyst. She now leads a practice at a16z called American Dynamism, investing in companies that are solving critical issues in areas like defense, housing, and education. In the past year, I've spoken to Marc Andreessen, Josh Wolfe, and a number of founders about this need to build societally important businesses so I was excited to explore the topic in even more detail today. Please enjoy my conversation with Katherine Boyle.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.   The content here is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard-to-get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC, and helps you set up customized expert calls. It's all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. And until 2023 every Tegus license comes with complimentary access to BamSec by Tegus.   -----   Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. Brex is the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest-growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high-limit corporate cards, payments, venture debt, and spend management software all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best.   -----   Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.    Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:02:42] - [First question] - The origin and overview of the term American Dynamism  [00:05:01] - Why the shift to a move slow and make sure nothing breaks mentality [00:07:31] - What about the American system today feels broken and stale  [00:09:48] - Becoming a journalist at The Washington Post  [00:11:35] - Describing the power landscape of media as it exists today   [00:12:28] - Major categories of American Dynamism that matter most   [00:14:29] - What matters more or less to her as an investor in  these categories  [00:17:31] - Whether or not there's anything fundamentally broken about our government [00:19:36] - The Systems Bible; What excites her about aerospace and defense and what creates opportunity and demand in these sectors [00:22:44] - Explanation of what it means when the factory is the product  [00:23:47] - How much is flowing into aerospace and defense currently  [00:26:01] - An overview of how lobbying works and who does it and why [00:29:07] - Whether or not she considers these sectors from a bottom up perspective as in investor    [00:30:32] - What other categories she feels pulled towards  [00:33:09] - The biggest problems that currently exist in the K-12 school system  [00:35:34] - Thoughts on how states are competing citizens and how it plays into American Dynamism [00:37:34] - The role immigration will play in range of outcomes in these main categories  [00:39:32] - Key takeaways about housing in light of American Dynamism   [00:42:09] - Her interpretation of the chart that shows inflation in categories over time [00:44:40] - How different the investing dynamics are in all of these categories and thoughts on valuation in this world  [00:47:56] - Whether or not expected returns and risk profiles are different in this area  [00:48:36] - The importance of effective a founder's storytelling, knowledge and customer empathy [00:49:55] - Overview of the anatomy of a great story   [00:51:30] - The story she tells founders at this stage so establish a partnership  [00:52:46] - The kindest thing that anyone has ever done for her

Subscribe to The Realignment on Supercast to support the show and access all of our bonus content: https://realignment.supercast.com/.REALIGNMENT NEWSLETTER: https://therealignment.substack.com/BOOKSHOP: https://bookshop.org/shop/therealignmentEmail us at: realignmentpod@gmail.comThis episode and our expanded coverage are made possible thanks to our Supercast subscribers. If you can, please support the show above.Katherine Boyle, general partner at a16z and co-lead of the firm's American Dynamism practice, joins The Realignment to discuss how the frame of American Dynamism as a response to technological and societal stagnation, her optimism about the United States, and why the ability to "build," hold oneself accountable, and deliver results will be increasingly prized in founders and politicians alike. 

Welcome to the fourth episode of Pathfinder, a weekly show where Payload managing editor and host Ryan Duffy sits down with the top shot-callers in space. Pathfinder is brought to you by SpiderOak Mission Systems — www.spideroak-ms.com — an industry leader in space cybersecurity. Check out their space cybersecurity white paper at www.spacecyber.com On Pathfinder 0004, Ryan sits down with Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (or a16z, for short). Katherine heads up a16z's American Dynamism practice, where she invests in companies involved in national security, aerospace and defense, public safety, housing, education, and industrials. Katherine recently led the firm's investment in Hadrian, a software-defined precision machining startup serving the aerospace and defense sectors. Prior to a16z, Katherine was a partner at General Catalyst, and before that, cut her VC teeth at Founders Fund. She was also a general assignment reporter for the Washington Post before moving out to Silicon Valley and started her investing career. Katherine is a prolific writer and deep thinker on aerospace and defense, the US national interest, dual-use technology, and the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington. As you can see below, we had a wide-ranging conversation on Pathfinder 0004. Disclaimer, via a16z: "The content here is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund." Pathfinder is powered by Payload, a modern space media brand. Subscribe to our industry-leading daily newsletter at payloadspace.com. Thanks again to SpiderOak Mission Systems for supporting Pathfinder.

We sit down with a16z General Partner Katherine Boyle to discuss investing in “American Dynamism”, why it's so important and why now is the right time to pursue it. Katherine has a fascinating background, beginning her career as a reporter at The Washington Post before entering the VC world first at Founders Fund, then General Catalyst and now a16z. Her perspectives don't fit neatly in any box — political, economic or otherwise — and we have a great conversation exploring them. Tune in! This episode has video! You can watch it on Spotify (right in the main podcast interface) or on YouTube. Links: Katherine's post on Building American Dynamism Marc Andreessen's It's Time to Build Katherine's Substack Sponsors: Thanks to the Solana Foundation for being our presenting sponsor for this special episode. Solana is the world's most performant blockchain, the BEST place for developers to build Web3 applications, and of course very near & dear to the Acquired community's heart. You get in touch with them here, and learn more about Metaplex here. Just tell them them at Ben and David sent you! Thank you as well to Modern Treasury and to Mystery. ‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

We sit down with a16z General Partner Katherine Boyle to discuss investing in “American Dynamism”, why it's so important and why now is the right time to pursue it. Katherine has a fascinating background, beginning her career as a reporter at The Washington Post before entering the VC world first at Founders Fund, then General Catalyst and now a16z. Her perspectives don't fit neatly in any box — political, economic or otherwise — and we have a great conversation exploring them. Tune in!Sponsor: https://acquired.fm/zoominfoThis episode has video! You can watch it on YouTube.Links: Katherine's post on Building American Dynamism Marc Andreessen's It's Time to Build Katherine's Substack ‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

a16z Live Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Check out a16z Podcast Episode Page & Show NotesRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgKatherine Boyle, General Partner at a16z is joined by Hadrian founder and CEO Chris Power, Packy McCormick, founder of Not Boring, and a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen to discuss the opportunity to automate and upskill in the precision parts industry and shore up U.S. manufacturing with new technology.

a16z Live Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Check out a16z Podcast Episode Page & Show NotesRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgKatherine Boyle, General Partner at a16z is joined by Hadrian founder and CEO Chris Power, Packy McCormick, founder of Not Boring, and a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen to discuss the opportunity to automate and upskill in the precision parts industry and shore up U.S. manufacturing with new technology.

a16z Live Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Check out a16z Podcast Episode Page & Show NotesRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgKatherine Boyle, General Partner at a16z is joined by Hadrian founder and CEO Chris Power, Packy McCormick, founder of Not Boring, and a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen to discuss the opportunity to automate and upskill in the precision parts industry and shore up U.S. manufacturing with new technology.

Katherine Boyle, General Partner at a16z is joined by Hadrian founder and CEO Chris Power, Packy McCormick, founder of Not Boring, and a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen to discuss the opportunity to automate and upskill in the precision parts industry and shore up U.S. manufacturing with new technology.

Venture capitalists know what it feels like when a company is firing on all cylinders. But it's been a while since the whole country had that feeling of dynamism—so why not focus on companies that help the cause by supporting the national interest, solving critical problems, and doing fundamentally new things? Rob and Jackie sat down with Ben Horowitz and Katherine Boyle of the leading VC firm Andreessen Horowitz to talk about investing in American dynamism.MentionedBen Horowitz, The Hard Things About Hard Things (Harper Business, 2014). Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture (Harper Business, 2019). Rob Atkinson, The Past and Future of America's Economy: Long Waves of Innovation that Drive Cycles of Growth (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005). Related“Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy,” ITIF event, January 2014.Luke Dascoli, “AI Start-Ups Attracted Over 21 Percent of The World's Venture Capital in 2020” (ITIF, January 2022).John Wu, “A Small Business Innovation Research Grant Doubles an Energy-Technology Company's Chances of Later Receiving Venture Capital” (ITIF, May 2017).