Navigating Innovation in Silicon Valley

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 conversation

American 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 produced

You 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