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- [00:03]
Podcast Host
Today on the A16Z podcast, we're sharing Kathryn Boyle's recent interview on TVPN. Katherine, a general partner at A16Z and a driving force behind the American Dynamism thesis, joins the show to discuss the state of the movement, from the Department of Defense's latest reform efforts to the growing role of startups in national security and beyond. Catherine breaks down how far American dynamism has come and why the work is just getting started. As a reminder, 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. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.
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Ben
And next up, we have Kathryn Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz, the pioneer of American.
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Catherine
Dynamism, one of the top coinages of the last few years.
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Ben
Yeah, for sure. And more relevant than ever in some ways. Mission accomplished. I mean, last week in D.C. it was American dynamism on display, right?
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Catherine
That's right.
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Ben
Everyone is a believer and the question is, where do we go from here? And that's what I'm excited to dig in with her today. Catherine, welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
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Kathryn Boyle
Thanks for having me. It's about time. I'm so happy to be here.
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Catherine
Great to have you.
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Kathryn Boyle
Long time listener, first time caller.
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Catherine
Great to have you. With the flag in the background.
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Ben
Yes, fantastic. Where should we start? I'm curious about state of affairs with the American dynamism movement. The project feels like it's maybe time to rest on our laurels.
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Kathryn Boyle
What do you think we've achieved? American dynamism.
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Ben
It feels like it. Yeah.
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Catherine
But I mean, seriously, it feels like.
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Ben
Like it's broken through.
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Catherine
It's mainstream cultural victory, maybe coming before actual victory.
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Ben
Sure, sure, sure.
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Catherine
And that American dynamism is almost mainstream now, at least in the venture world. Yes, but job's not finished.
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Ben
Job's not finished. So what are the key asks in D.C. from Silicon Valley right now? What are the top projects? Where should tech be focused in terms of the American dynamism project?
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Kathryn Boyle
Broadly right now, totally. So it's nowhere near finished. I mean, this is like three or four years into a 30 year project, which is always good when you have those sorts of aims. And I'd say it's even longer than that when you think of Defense 1.0. It started around 2015, 2016. It sort of has become this very large movement. But I'll tell you, like, last week was a huge, huge week for American dynamism inside of the dod, and the news sort of got buried in Techland. But it was just. It's probably one of the biggest things to happen in the first hundred days of the Trump administration. The army announced what they're calling their Army Transformation Initiative. It was with Secretary Driscoll, General George. They actually went on Fox and Friends, which was like a huge deal, that they actually went public with it, and they said, it's been way too long. We have so many platforms. We want to modernize. We want to divest from technologies that are no longer useful. We want to modernize the force. We want to make sure that we get rid of civilian jobs that are not important anymore. We want to make sure we are not having wasteful spending. It was sort of like, you know what I had read in NBC after it came out, they said, like, the army is doing itself. Yeah. I think the real story of what the army is doing and kudos to them because they truly are the first mover, is there are people inside of the DOD who have been saying these things for years, pounding their head against the wall, saying they want acquisition reform, saying they want to work with startups, saying they have to have new platforms that come in and actually support the needs of the war fighter. And they've been pounding their head against the wall with little results. And so when you have a doge effort going on in Washington and an administration that really wants to see the waste disappear, it allows for those people who are really forward thinking, like General George and like Secretary Driscoll, to come forward and say, hey, we're gonna do this ourselves. We're gonna pick out the new technologies that we need. We're gonna get rid of things like Humvees that we haven't needed in 20 years. We're going to figure out what is actually useful for the army, and. And we're going to do it ourselves. So it was a huge week. I think it was probably one of the most it was reported, but it didn't get sort of the praise from technology that it should have. Like, this is an extraordinary movement that I think has really been a long time coming, and it's something that a lot of the early American dynamism companies have been pushing for, for a long, long time. So congratulations to the Army.
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Ben
Yeah. So can you give me a little bit?
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Catherine
It's better to Doge yourself than get than get.
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Ben
Doge Always dose yourself.
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Catherine
Doge yourself.
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Ben
Yeah. Can you give me a little bit of a tour of the market map of the beneficiaries of this transformation? Obviously, everyone knows the palantirs and the andurils, but I imagine that there are tons of pockets of value and projects that need to be overhauled. Is it mostly drones, weapon systems, vehicles first, or are there other areas that companies that you talk to are focused on in this transformation process?
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Kathryn Boyle
In the early days, that's what's been called out. So it's early UAVs that were developed 20 years ago. They're not relevant post Ukraine war. It's actually sort of, I don't want to say comical because it's not funny, but when you think about the fact that the Humvee was developed in 1980, it went into production in 1985, and that the army said in 2004, this actually isn't useful for us anymore because there's this new type of warfare called IEDs and we're not going to use it. And these are still in production in 2025. So that's a perfect example. And I think they're showing certain programs that are so long overdue that there to be changed. But I think it's also smaller things like, you know, the program of record was developed when you had to build out these very platforms and you had to plan years and decades in advance. And when someone won a program, it was understood that they were going to run that program for decades. And now the army has ways to acquire things where technology is changing at a pace and at a speed that really needs to have a genuine competition every year, every couple years. And so that really benefits all startups, that benefits all, you know, incoming emerging technologies that are going to serve sort of the fight of the future. They have specific call outs that they're pointing to now. But definitely this is great news for startups because what it's showing is that there is actually the will inside the dod.
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Ben
Is there any movement on procurement reform? I remember I watched this hilarious movie, Pentagon wars, all about the development of the Bradley fighting vehicle. And it's a very funny movie. You know, everyone has a different requirement. They all get put together and becomes this kind of platypus of a vehicle that is part tank, part troop transport, all these different problems. Part of the benefit of modern technology is that we do develop platforms and things like Anduril's Ghost can do ISR and also do munitions and a whole bunch of things. There are projects that do need flexibility, but is there a cultural shift around moving away from exquisite systems, or just when folks in defense tech say we need procurement reform, what are they really talking about in 2025?
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Kathryn Boyle
Yeah, well, I think they're talking about different things, because I think what this initiative is going to do is it's going to allow the army, and I think there'll be a lot of replicas of this as well. I think other branches will look at this and say, this is a great idea. Instead of being locked into a program for decades, they're going to be able to say, actually, we would love to use that capital for something new. We would love to recompete that program. We would like to be able to be better capital allocators, because now their hands are tied. And I think when you talk to people who are just in normal business, not in defense world, and you say, hey, if you had to make a decision about a purchase that's going to last for 10 years and get no updates and you would not be allowed to change it, what would you do? We would say, that's insane. Like, how is a CEO going to say they're going to acquire technology for their company that they're going to use for 10 years and there's going to be no software and updates, no nothing? And if it's not working, you can't get rid of it because you're told you can't get rid of it. I mean, that is literally what the DoD has to deal with. And so I think what's great about this initiative, again, it's one, the fact that the army is going public says that they mean business and that they have air cover to do this. But I think that the meta story that we're going to tell ourselves is DOGE has been very public in the last week of what they're doing. There's been some pushback on, you know, why are you working on IT systems? You know, everyone has sort of their favorite Doge meme of why it's not working. But the story of Doge, I think, when we look back, even in a year, is going to be that it gave extraordinary air cover to reform in every department. And the first example inside the DoD, this is the biggest example in the last hundred days, to see General George out there saying, like, this is what we need to do and we are committed and we're going public because we are so committed, which doesn't usually happen. I just think it speaks volumes. And tech should be celebrating. This is a Big, big day for everyone in the American dynamism ecosystem. For every defense company that's been fighting for this for a long time.
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Catherine
Yeah, yeah. And for all of this to actually achieve those sort of 30 year goals or execute against that 30 year plan, things need to be bipartisan. People need to realize we want efficiency and innovation across every branch. Yeah. I'm curious on the investing side, I'm sure you have this painful experience all the time where you meet companies that probably are going to be great businesses, are good for America, but maybe aren't a fit for venture. What's your sort of updated thinking on understanding if something can be a great, important business versus something that can truly be, you know, a generational outcome?
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Kathryn Boyle
Yeah. Well, one of the biggest mistakes I see investors make is trying to predict tam. So early, early days of Anduril, a lot of people, you know, didn't want to look at Anduril because of ethical reasons or because they were worried about being involved in defense. But there was another meme that was going around which is almost comical now, which is, well, it's kind of a small town, right? Like a border security company, like, oh, they're selling to dhs, Department of Homeland Security doesn't really have that big of a. But like these were real things that people said that are hilarious now you guys can imagine. So I think it is very difficult to predict a growing market eventually what some of these incredibly important technologies are going to be worth. But I agree with you. There are some examples of companies that might not be, you know, standalone businesses, but will ultimately, you know, Enduril's done a very good job of acquiring businesses that aren't going to be these venture outcomes but work, you know, very well within their platform. But I think in some ways there's always surprises with companies that were initially passed on or people were very skeptical of their TAM in the early days. And then you look back and you see just how much they've grown or how much the product has shifted or how important the platform actually is?
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Ben
Yeah.
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Catherine
How have you been ignoring the politics of it all but reacting to the trade war? In many ways, when you have these big geopolitical events playing out, that doesn't necessarily mean start to make a lot of venture investments because venture investments take a long time to play out and it's very hard to predict the future. Are you seeing new opportunities related, you know, to the events of the last month? Are you still just, you know, continuing like I imagine when you guys invested in Hadrian, you weren't like betting on a trade war in two years or something like that. Right. But how do you think about timelines? And is the benefit of sort of thinking in that 30 year timeline that you're kind of able to broadly, you know, ignore or not place too much focus on the headlines of today and just think about what America needs in the long run?
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Kathryn Boyle
I would say my bias as a very early stage investor is to not think about the immediate timeframes. These are very long cycles. You can sort of see trend lines, but it's hard to know what actual events are going to happen, obviously. So I think even when we made the investment in Hadrian, as you called out, there was a movement towards re industrialization and towards investing in manufacturing that was early and nascent. But if you were hearing the signs or spending a lot of time in dc, both sides were very focused in Washington on how do we think about investing in America, Reindustrialization, how do we bring back manufacturing? So, you know, it felt like it was a message that was being heard then. It's just of course been accelerated. And I think truly if you think about the next 10, 20 years, re industrialization is going to be a very important theme.
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Catherine
Yeah.
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Kathryn Boyle
So, you know, it can feel like everything is hot right now or feel like we're in the middle of something, but ultimately I think we're again in this like very, very early, you know, three or four years into a 30 year journey. You know, it took decades for globalization to really hit its peak and now we're sort of seeing the pendulum swing again. And so you're going to see a lot of companies that are built in the next few years that become generational companies.
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Ben
Yeah. How do you think about the kind of broader market map of American dynamism? Obviously Anduril is like a just a great case study in the American dynamism thesis. But at the same time, as you go through the American Dynamism website, you can go back to like the moon landing and the development of the iPhone as like examples. At the same time there's this question about like the Android of X is and roll potentially. But then that doesn't always come true if you're talking about something that's truly outside of their purview in consumer or in, you know, Flock Safety or Hadrian. These companies are not competitive, but maybe fit in the thesis. How are you seeing the investing landscape of American dynamism kind of evolve as more people come into the to the category, but then think outside the box and address the different issues? I Mean, I've seen even like some education stuff kind of fit the broader thesis. So how has that evolved over the last couple of years?
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Kathryn Boyle
Yeah, we define it as companies that are actively supporting the national interest. So it is a very simple definition and founders have, you know, different interpretations of what it means, but there's common themes. And actually this goes into why we decided to have a separate fund, why we decided to build out the platform, is because these companies need something entirely different than a true enterprise or a true consumer company. And when we looked back at our early portfolio of shield, AI, Anduril, Astranas, these companies that were sort of what I would call space and Defense 1.0, we'd sort of like put them in the enterprise category as though they're like no different than a company that's selling business software to the Fortune 500. Right. It doesn't make any sense. They have totally different needs. You know, Andurils famously said that they had a lobbyist on staff on week one. There's things that companies need that our view is that we could build a platform to help support these companies, namely in Washington, understanding who their buyers are on the BD side, which is a very difficult kind of role to hire for inside of early stage startups. But then also understanding the Washington game, which is very important for companies to understand if they're going to be selling directly to the federal government. Now you mentioned education and there's a lot of companies in our portfolio too that are selling to state and local and that is totally different sales motion. You know, that's, that is something where, you know, company like Flock Safety has sort of rewritten the rules of how you sell directly to a police force or how you even follow what I would call kind of like a second city strategy of not going to the biggest cities but going to these smaller municipalities and getting a lot of, you know, almost circling a big city with the suburbs around it and kind of getting a lot of momentum from the citizens. But all these companies have very similar needs and sort of things that they have to think about early rather than later. And we've now seen enough of sort of the early success stories in public safety and you know, aerospace, defense, like sort of these generational companies that came up in the last several years that the boom that's happening in these categories, many of them want to replicate those playbooks and have, I think with a lot of success.
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Ben
Yeah, can you talk a little bit about almost like lobbying as value add for venture capital? I remember I was running an Andreessen back company a decade ago and I met the CEO of McDonald's through Andreessen at some happy hour and there were trainings on B2B sales and PR and all this stuff, but there was no concept of regulatory or lobbying. But I imagine that's a piece of it. But it's at the same time you need to eventually staff your own government affairs team. How are you working with early stage founders to get them up and running in Washington?
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Kathryn Boyle
Yeah, I would say a lot of the founders that we backed are very, I would say, sophisticated in their knowledge of who they need to be meeting with or the types of people they should be meeting with in the DoD. But the thing that I think we're actually, I would say even more successful in doing that's really important, is making all that knowledge public. You know, we make our playbooks public. My partner Layla, who runs our Go to market in dc, she wrote this incredible glossary of things you need to know if you're eating even going to approach a venture capital firm, you know about a defense tech company. Like, these are the acronyms. These are all the acronyms you could possibly hear in a conversation with the dod. And it's things like that where we do want to make that public and we want to help educate the ecosystem. And I can tell you like, you know, five or six years ago, the number of venture capitalists who understood the different types of contracting vehicles, that understood the names of, you know, of different people on the Appropriations Committee. I mean, these things that are now sort of, I'd say, taken for granted were not well known. And so I think that's a huge part of it too, is really helping the ecosystem get up to speed, helping companies sort of speed run that early stage process of like, you can ask any dumb question and we're going to help you with it. But then there is also something to be said of it is much easier to get a meeting with certain people if you are at a dinner that's sponsored by a group of people who are always in Washington. I mean, we have a Washington office now. We are fully staffed in terms of both Republicans and Democrats and people who work on both sides of the aisle, people who specialize in DODs, people who specialize in certain types of the DOD. And I think that is like a very important thing to be able to say, okay, you need to meet with X, Y and Z people or you need to understand the glossary before you can even begin to have those conversations.
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Ben
Do you think defense tech is now mature? It's oversaturated. I was joking with Jordi that I think world peace is like maybe six months away and then I'm going to start poaching top defense tech talent to build the next generation of advertising optimization. Because I think that we just got to get him back in, get him back next company.
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Kathryn Boyle
You know it.
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Ben
Yeah, yeah, but I mean, seriously, like it does.
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Catherine
That would be the most, you know, the open air, you know, AGI is always six months away.
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Ben
World peace is always defense tech.
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Catherine
Founders need to just go like, yeah, just 2 billion more and like then world peace.
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Ben
World peace, yeah. But I mean, there is a serious question here. Like, I know some people who are like, just so excited that they're jumping into things, but, you know, I'm not even in the industry, but I'm a little bit more tapped in and I'm like, there are already seven companies working on that exact thing. I don't know if this is the best time. Is it worthwhile to steer, you know, these incredible hackers, these great entrepreneurs, like, maybe towards the more tangential hard tech problems? Like, what I see with like, what base power is doing is like, it's hard tech, it has defense roots, but it's not directly something that's on Anduril's roadmap. What advice are you giving to kind of the entrepreneurs that are like, in between things, thinking about serving the national interest, but not necessarily putting themselves on a collision course with a, you know, multibillion dollar founder mode company?
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Kathryn Boyle
So I'll say deterrence is the constant project. Right. So like your whole like the meme of maybe six months away from world peace.
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Catherine
Yeah, of course.
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Kathryn Boyle
I actually think that was part of the problem in the 90s. Right. Like, like, seriously, that was, yeah, democracy.
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Catherine
Will the end of history.
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Ben
End of history, End of history.
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Kathryn Boyle
We flourished and we don't need to be working on these things. So it is very important that we've gone back almost to the roots of the DoD saying like, hey, actually we remember what it's like to be a country at war and we need to be constantly focused on the next technologies. We need to be focused on deterrence, thinking about as deterrence because we want to prevent war, but we have to be continuously building. So from that perspective, I think again, we're only a few years into this real movement of Silicon Valley caring about working with the DOD and I hope that it's a 30 year project. I think that's what we all really should be focused on is making sure it's a 30 year project and even longer than that. But to your point, what I think is so interesting about companies that, you know, are founded out of Anduril or out of SpaceX. You know, we've done an analysis where we looked at all of the founders who've left SpaceX in the last 10 years and there's hundreds of companies that have been formed in just wildly different sectors, whether it's, you know, radiant nuclear, working on nuclear energy, you know, Castellan, which is in our portfolio, and they're building hypersonic weapons. I mean, some of the best founders are trained, I always say they go to the school of Elon Musk. They learn manufacturing, they learn production, and then they want to take that to something that, you know, is pretty low hanging fruit. Like they want to make sure that they're competing against the incumbents of yesterday who have not modernized their production, who've not modernized a lot of the technology that they're working on. And so, you know, I think you see that with a lot of the, you know, yes, there are some extremely crowded fields, but then there are also areas of defense that are really just boring and completely untouched. And you're seeing founders realize that too, that it's, it's not something that, that's, you know, interesting to any of the existing companies and it's low hanging fruit. It'd be interesting to work on that. Or they're interested in being a tier one supplier. We have a number of companies that are really focused on the supply chain aspect of defense and they're partners to Anduril and they're partners to SpaceX and other companies in the ecosystem. So you really are seeing founders like understand that question in a very sophisticated way and saying, okay, we're going to go after the parts of the supply chain or the things that the DoD needs that no one is focusing on. And that's been exciting to see too.
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Catherine
Can you talk about M and A in defense tech broadly? Natal's done this very well. Sironic announced a deal last week acquiring Gulfcraft. That feels super significant. I'm curious, you know, how you advise founders kind of broadly when thinking about that. We actually had Augustus on from Rainmaker earlier who had acquired a company in his space. But when's the right time to be, you know, thinking about that as somebody in defense tech and. Yeah. What kind of opportunities do you think make the most sense?
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Kathryn Boyle
Totally. Well, I think, I mean, both Anduril and Sranik, they have incredibly unique stories in terms of where they're operating and sort of what they need to do in order to grow and scale. And they've done it at a speed that is just incredible. Right. Like they have very sophisticated teams that know a lot about acquisition. I'd say for earlier stage companies, we're seeing more companies that are potentially interested in doing that. And it can speed up innovation, it can speed up being able to work with certain customers, that's for sure. If you're acquiring a certain capability so that you can sell to a major prime, that's something we've seen more of too, which is interesting and exciting. Like, I don't think we were seeing that several years ago, and now we're certainly seeing companies experiment with that. But when you said actually M and A, I actually thought you were going towards something that I think is actually more likely to happen in the future that hasn't happened in a long time. When you look at these existing prime companies, the big five say they've really only acquired companies that have not raised any venture dollars. Right. Like they don't acquire companies that are kind of seen as these bleeding edge companies to shore up their capabilities. And my instinct, you know, we're talking about Army Transformation Initiative, we're talking about a government that's becoming far more sophisticated and a DOD that's becoming far more competitive. Right. It hasn't been competitive for decades. And now you're seeing all of these startups come in. My prediction, if we're looking five, 10 years out, is that the companies that have not been acquisitive for the best engineers and the best technologists and these capabilities that they need are going to find that as their only solution. And I think we could potentially even see another last supper situation, which of course in the 90s was the famous case where the government came to all these primes and said, you have to merge. You have to have kind of forced mergers and acquisitions because the budget's going to decrease. And of course that was probably the wrong strategy given sort of the results that came out of that. But I do think it is something that I would not be surprised if in five or 10 years you're seeing the existing primes that have been around in many cases for 100 years saying, we have to work with these startups in a much more tangible way. And you could see a highly acquisitive ecosystem that people don't necessarily kind of write into their kind of thesis today.
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Catherine
How do you think about leadership at the individual primes? And you know, people over the last few years mean Boeing has been dragged through the dirt by pretty Much everyone. But I think of it as a great. In the fullness of time.
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Ben
It's a great Boeing. I ain't going.
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Catherine
Yeah, John is. John's so loyal. He'll never fly on excitement. He'll never fly.
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Ben
He's a white collar worker. You know, you don't risk your life very often. When I go on a business trip and I step on a 737 Max, I'm lost.
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Kathryn Boyle
No.
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Catherine
And I mean, I just look at it as China would love to have a company that was actually competitive with Boeing. Right. It's hugely strategic asset. But I'm curious, do you think that you know any of the Primes, you know, and every now and then you'll see a Prime release a video that's like, clearly they hired a marketing agency and said like, make us like an Anderil movie, you know, and then they put it out. But do you see that the leadership at the Primes.
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Ben
Well, Lockheed Martin invented artificial intelligence, remember?
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Catherine
Yeah, they came out last week and claimed that they invented artificial intelligence.
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Ben
They basically just said, you're welcome, you're welcome.
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Catherine
Yeah, by the way, you're welcome. But, yeah, but I'm curious, any hope for transformation? Yeah. Do you have conversations with them or is it, is it.
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Ben
Because, I mean, even though it's not an opportunity for, you know, venture capitalists necessarily, like it would be great if they were highly functioning in the American interest, like as Americans.
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Catherine
And then you have the, you have the program that was spun out of, you know, was it Microsoft? Microsoft?
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Ben
Oh, yeah, yeah, the Hololens.
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Catherine
Yeah.
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Ben
Sorry.
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Catherine
So I think there's probably more kind of even spin out opportunities where new companies, collaboration, totally, you know, value on top of, of existing programs.
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Kathryn Boyle
Yeah. I think, you know, Palmer and actually Brian Schimpf has done an incredible podcast on this where he talks about sort of what happened at these Primes and why things sort of went by the wayside. And it's partially because they really stopped focusing on research and development. They started, they didn't really need to. There was no real competition and they kind of recognized that they would always get paid by the government to do new things. You know, again, like it's sort of this confluence of factors that led us to be, I don't know, really complacent. And I went back actually last night and was reading the first few pages of the Kill Chain by Christian Broze, which again reading it, it was written, I believe in 2019 things changed so dramatically in terms of the conversation. But it's like going back in A time warp and saying, wow, like in 2019, people really didn't care that Boeing was collapsing or that there were these private or these public companies that were doing no research and development because it didn't matter. Right. That was pre war in Ukraine. It was sort of, you know, in some ways it was security theater. Right. Like, we don't actually have to remain secure. We just have to pretend we're secure. And so I think there is this new sort of wake up call where a lot of these companies are going to say, one, if we can't recruit the engineers and do the research and development in house, we're going to have to acquire it. So again, that's why I think you're going to see a lot more acquisitions over the next several years, because I think a lot of these companies are really going to have to change. But two, like these initiatives inside the DoD that are now getting real steam, that is going to force incredible competition that has not existed even in the last 10 years when we've all been investing in American dynamism. So I'm, I'm actually much more, like, hopeful and excited about where I think the world is going because I genuinely believe that a lot of these players have sort of woken up and are looking for solutions because now they know they have to.
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Catherine
Yeah, yeah.
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Ben
A while ago I was talking to Trey about just the lack of the deeper supply chain, specifically in drone motors. Like, there are no small drone motor manufacturers in the United States. They're almost all made in China. And that feels like, oh, there's almost a startup idea there, but I don't know if it's a venture idea. There's actually a drone motor company in Washington. They outsourced some of their supply chain recently. That feels like almost like we need an American dynamism private equity fund to just turn those companies around. They're not going to be These power law $100 billion companies, but they might produce 20% returns more reliably and there's maybe no venture style, zero loss of capital risk. Do you think we need a American dynamism for private equity? Is that something Andreessen would do at some point? I mean, you're kind of in every asset class now, so anything's possible. But is there a flip side to the vent model within investing in the national interest?
- [26:59]
Kathryn Boyle
Well, I certainly think we've invested in some companies that are focused on component parts. You know, we're invested in amca. I know that Jay was on recently. So, like, there are more and more companies that are figuring out to do this. And again, those are the examples of companies that are, that are, you know, much more focused on how do we acquire companies, how do we make them. I would say tech forward, but also think about like how quickly we can get into the supply chain, some of these larger primes. But I think you're seeing a lot of innovation around the edges on this and you're probably going to see more and more founders who recognize that if that's where the real problem is, they're going to build there and they're going to build in the best way that suits them.
- [27:32]
Ben
So yeah, it does seem like there's almost like a way to turn something like MP materials we were talking about. Like you wouldn't think like, oh yeah, venture is suitable for like mining at all. But like now there's a couple of mining companies that are figuring out how to inject enough technology to make it potentially a venture scale opportunity, which is interesting. Do you have anything else? I have a couple more.
- [27:51]
Catherine
I got a totally switching gears. But you had a post recently that I liked. It was, I'm committed to doing whatever the opposite of gentle parenting is. And I wanted to ask you if you found any Lindy books on parenting, anything that sort of resonated that you're implementing. John and I both have similar aged children and I always have this, you know, sort of concern around, you know, you want to experiment, you know, with parenting and try new things and maybe not just take exactly what the mainstream media says is the right way to do parenting. But then, you know, your children have one life. You're not trying to run a B tests, you know, on there.
- [28:29]
Ben
I have three boys, so I employ what I call the snake pit strategy, which is you lock them all in a room and then it's just a snake pit and they just like wrestle and you know, if there's damage, they'll heal and that's fine.
- [28:40]
Kathryn Boyle
That's the right way to do it. Well, I followed up that tweet with the tried and true Irish strategy, which is the hay method. Hey, Increasingly loud. Yeah. Hey, hey, hey. You know it works like there's something about every day where your sons actually turn around and listen to you. But sadly, you know, there aren't like any books like old timey books that I found that actually teach, I would say the best way to train children or to child rear. But you know, it's interesting. I always think that grandmothers kind of know best. So if there's a grandmother in your life anywhere, they remember how it used to be done and how effective it was. And it was, you know, probably harder in the olden days too. So it's like basically just ask grandma.
- [29:19]
Ben
Like grandma plug free range kids all about, like our society has moved towards, like, don't let the kids just run around in the neighborhood. They could get kidnapped. There's so many bad things that could happen. There's been a lot of fear mongering from the media. And so that's kind of led to kids turning in, in inside, becoming inside kids, staying on the iPads or whatever. But there's this movement in the free range kids to just be like, yeah, actually like you're six, you can ride a bike, like ride your bike to the park. Like that will enforce the society to maintain safety.
- [29:47]
Catherine
I need to find the repeat of parenting. That's the next alpha. Yeah. My problem with the grandma method is that my mother and mother in law just want to let the kids do exactly what they want to do. You want two cookies? You want three cookies? So maybe they're. Maybe they're right.
- [30:01]
Ben
Maybe that is Lindy. Who knows?
- [30:02]
Catherine
Maybe it is Lindy.
- [30:03]
Kathryn Boyle
I'm the great grandmother, right? Like the one who remembers how tough it was.
- [30:07]
Catherine
Yeah, that's right.
- [30:08]
Ben
I want to get your reaction to Warren Buffett. Obviously he stepped down or announced his transition at Berkshire Hathaway this weekend. What do you take away from Buffett's legacy as an investor? It's obviously a very different type of investing, but there's so many interesting lessons there from company building to investing to everything else. What was your reaction?
- [30:28]
Kathryn Boyle
Yeah, you know, I'll take a little bit of a different take because I was watching, you know, the annual meeting last year, and there was this moment that happened and I actually wrote about it in a piece on friendship and founder friendship where he was doing his usual, you know, going through company analysis and then he just kind of forgets where he is and says Charlie. And everyone stopped. It was like, you know, I think, I think I teared up seeing it because it was like he was so in his zone after so many years of working together. He had forgotten that Charlie had passed and he's almost embarrassed about it. But I thought it was the most beautiful moment because one of the things I don't think we talk enough about in venture world is founder friendship. And I mean like deep, deep friendship. Not like, oh, we went to college together and we were friends or whatever, we're gonna start a startup together. I mean, those people who work together decades and decades out. I Actually think this is why family businesses often work better. Where even if you look at like the Collison brothers, it's like they've sharing resources, you know, since childhood, since they can remember. And like there's something about going through life with someone, suffering with someone, understanding how to like, you know, end someone's sentences that leads to these just incredibly rich and beautiful companies. And I think if, you know, if we did an analysis in Andreessen Horowitz and just looked at the companies that were true outliers, I think there would be stories of these people are like brothers and sisters. And Andrew's certainly this. Right. Like it's, you know, the founders there were DARPA challenged together like their first day of college. Right. In some ways there's something about just having these deep relationships that span the test of time, where you're on a journey with someone and it's real, like Aristotelian friendship, not like faux friendship, but true love. And clearly you saw that with them. It's just a remarkable thing how they were able to kind of be true brothers and kind of, you know, each other's better half throughout their business career for as long as they were.
- [32:10]
Ben
It's amazing. Last question. What should we do with Alcatraz?
- [32:14]
Kathryn Boyle
Oh, you know, I love all the ideas of turning it into a casino, but I do.
- [32:18]
Ben
I haven't seen that one.
- [32:19]
Catherine
I like that. I was saying tax haven and general solicitation rules. So you can like go out there.
- [32:25]
Ben
Go quiet period, sell your angel, lock up periods. Just unfettered libertarian capitalism out there.
- [32:32]
Kathryn Boyle
That sounds good, but there is something about bringing it back in its original form. You know, it's like there is something about these buildings that the President likes to restore into their former glory. And so with Alcatraz is the case, like keep the historical details accurate.
- [32:45]
Ben
Sure.
- [32:45]
Kathryn Boyle
You can kind of see where it's coming from. He's definitely a historicist in that. In that regard.
- [32:50]
Ben
Okay, well, thank you so much for joining us. This was.
- [32:52]
Catherine
Yeah, this was great. Come back on again soon.
- [32:54]
Kathryn Boyle
Thanks for having me. Have a good one.
- [32:56]
Catherine
Talk soon.
- [32:59]
Podcast Host
Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review@ratethispodcast.com a16z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.