Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan

Sean Ryan: Venture capital is the dynamism engine of all innovation in America. It's the envy of the world. And so we have to make sure that this system is not just operating for the Facebooks of the world and the TikToks of the world, the consumer technology that we use. We have to make sure that we bring this urgency and this capital and the speed to the things that matter most, which is, of course, building our defense industrial base.

Katherine Boyle: I care a lot about my country. That's why I'm doing it. And I think there's a business opportunity here, right? It's not just I'm a patriotic capitalist and I'm throwing money away. I think this is the biggest business opportunity of our time, and it's sitting right in front of my face and no one's looking at it. And so I'm going to invest in it.

Sean Ryan: Today, we're sharing a conversation from the Sean Ryan Show with A16Z General Partner, Catherine Boyle. Catherine co-founded our American Dynamism Practice, which invests in companies building in defense, aerospace, manufacturing, energy, and critical infrastructure. In this conversation, she talks with Sean about the rise of defense tech startups, why optimism is central to her work, and how new generations of engineers and founders are rethinking patriotism, innovation, and the future of American industry. Let's get into it. Catherine Boyle, welcome to the show.

Katherine Boyle: Thanks so much for having me.

Sean Ryan: Thanks for being here. Thanks for being here. So you came on my radar, what, about a couple of weeks ago from a mutual friend. And so I looked into you and you're invested in all of the companies that just fascinate me every day. And I'm brand new to, kind of diving into the tech space. And man, what a this has been mind-blowing for me just to be able to talk to these people who are just on a whole nother operating field as everybody else and learning about some of the innovations and just talking to American innovators. Which, to be honest, in the past couple years I haven't had a lot of hope in our country. But since diving into the tech space and seeing, I mean, we really do have the world's best innovators.

Katherine Boyle: We do.

Sean Ryan: And we attract that. These people come from all over the world to come here and live the American dream. And I personally needed that to restore some hope in this country. And so like I said, you invested in a lot of those companies and a lot more than I even know about. And so it's just an honor to have you here today. And I've been looking forward to this.

Katherine Boyle: It's an honor to be here. And I always say I come bearing good news. Usually after people talk to me, they are very optimistic. And I always have to warn people, I am in the business of optimism, right? Like I'm an early stage investor. I'm always thinking that a company, I only invest if I think a company is going to become some extraordinary movement. But I agree with you. I mean, the last few years, what we have seen as investors in the American dynamism ecosystem, the companies that are building for defense tech, it did not exist five years ago. It just did not. There was not the enthusiasm or the excitement. DOD wasn't excited about buying from startups. It's a complete 180. And so I always like when people say they meet these founders and they have hope for America. It's like, yeah, every day I get to meet them. And I think that's why I'm such an optimist, too, is because I get to see on the ground floor these young engineers who are just incredibly patriotic. Their patriotism, I always say, I was patriotic because we were the generation that remembers 9-11. We were coming of age in 9-11. It changed our lives. These kids weren't even born. They have no recollection of some of the things that we understand. And I think because of that, they have this youthful optimism of loving their country and wanting to build for the next generation of defense. So it kind of keeps me going, too.

Sean Ryan: I think I'm like you where it's tempting to black pill. It's just, it's good to see. I haven't seen that in Americans in a long time. I'm not just talking about the past four years. I'm talking a long time. I've not seen that. And even, I mean, we were chatting at breakfast a little bit about, was it, I don't know how many years ago, it didn't seem long ago that Silicon Valley almost seemed anti-American and zero patriotism. And in the past, man, I would say in the past, what, year and a half maybe. And that's just from, I haven't been looking into this very long, but maybe in the past year and a half, it seems like it's doing a 180.

Katherine Boyle: It really has.

Sean Ryan: And very concentrated on defense tech and in a lot of areas where we've been weak compared to a lot of our adversaries. So that'll be really, I know you have a huge part in that, so I can't wait to get to that. But I like to do a life story on you and that kind of my specialty here. And so how you got into all this, which is also fascinating me because you're not a tech person. I'm not a tech person, but I'm just infatuated with everything that's going on. So do a life story and then get to, I'd like to talk about some mistakes you've made and some of the big wins and what it's like getting in on the ground level at some of these companies.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. A lot of mistakes we can talk about.

Sean Ryan: Perfect.

Katherine Boyle: But everybody starts out with an introduction. So here we go. Catherine Boyle, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of the firm's American Dynamism Practice, coined the term American Dynamism in 2021 to refer to companies supporting the national interests across aerospace, defense, manufacturing, energy, logistics, and critical infrastructure. Wrote the original American Dynamism Manifesto to encourage founders, veterans, and engineers to build companies for America. Since then, Andreessen Horowitz has invested billions of dollars in iconic defense tech companies, including SpaceX, Anduril Industries, Shield AI, Saronic Technologies, Castilian Corp, Apex Space, CAPE, and many others. Prior to becoming a VC, you were a reporter at the Washington Post and are a rabid defender of free speech and free thought. BA in government from Georgetown University, an MBA from Stanford, and a master's of public advocacy from the National University of Ireland, Galloway. A mother and a practicing Catholic, you often write about the importance of building technology that strengthens the most important institution in America, the family. And probably a lot more, but I think that's most of the important stuff.

Sean Ryan: So then before we get through in the weeds, I have a Patreon account. And that's our subscription account. They've been with us since the beginning here, and we've turned it into quite the community and very engaged. And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question before we get rolling here. So this is from Ian Lane. Given your work with the American Dynamism Initiative, what role do you see startups playing in revitalizing U.S. military industrial capacity, especially as peer adversaries like China scale up defense innovation through state efforts?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, I mean, the startup community has to fix this problem because it's not going to come from the traditional primes. It's not going to come from family-owned machine shops. The new technology needed, particularly on the industrial-based side, is so important. You need hardware, you need software, but most importantly, you need people who understand how to build for production. So I think that startups are integral. That's the whole thesis of American Dynamism, which we'll get into. But the real thing we need to be focusing on, and I think a lot of people don't recognize that, they know Anduril, they know SpaceX, those are companies that sell directly to the government. There's a whole other category of company that's building for the legacy primes. It's building satellite buses or building automated machine shops so that you can build more critical parts for aerospace and defense. So there's this whole category of tier one suppliers that are building up the defense industrial base, working with the primes and working with the new primes like SpaceX and Palantir and Anduril. So it is incumbent upon these young founders, these very technical founders, to be able to build as quickly as possible, but really to focus on production. My focus as an investor, there's a lot of companies that are focused on just building software. I'm really focused on the SpaceX-like companies that are building for mass production, that understand that, as Elon says, the best part is no part. Simple design for manufacturing so that we can go from one to 10 to 10,000 to 100,000 of something that's critical. And that is going to come from startups. It's a new methodology of how you build.

Sean Ryan: Why don't you think the primes are reengineering how they do business?

Katherine Boyle: Oh, for so many reasons. One is they are based on a set of requirements. They have been building for a set of requirements for many, many years. Oftentimes they're getting paid per hour. They charge per hour, right? They're not on fixed price contracts. They're on cost plus contracts where it's the amount of engineering hours that you do on a product plus a fixed margin, which is a terrible incentive for any company. If I'm saying, okay, I'm going to paint your house or mow your lawn and you're going to pay me per hour, I'm going to take all day. But if I actually judge the project and say it's going to cost however many dollars it does to paint this room, I'm going to want to make sure that I budget it right, that I get the cheapest paint. So it's the way that capitalism works outside of every other system except the DoD is that you have fixed price, fixed firm, fixed price contracts, where you know what something's going to cost you. And if it goes over budget, the risk is on the company, not on the government. But the primes have been engineered so that they can always say, well, we went over budget. So you're going to have to give us more money. We're going to get our 7% margin no matter what. And if it takes two, three, four extra years because you have a different request, or you say, actually, we want to build this way, we're happy to accommodate you. But that is going to mean that you're not getting the products in time. And Silicon Valley operates in the opposite way, and particularly venture capital, you give a company more capital in many cases than it even needs to speed up the process of production, to speed up the R&D, to speed up the number of products they can build at one time. And the company is always going to zero. What I always say about venture capital is it's so different than any other type of business where you take out a bank loan and you say, I'm going to build a business and then you want to make more money than you spend. Silicon Valley is the opposite. You want to spend more money knowing that you're going to go to zero in 18 months if you don't raise another round of capital. What that allows you to do is to bring on the best engineers to produce the product as fast as possible. And when you compare that methodology of we're going to build hypersonic weapons or we're going to build satellite buses to the companies that have been around for 100 years, they don't know how to operate like that. It's not their incentives, but it's also not the type of talent that they have on the team that wants to operate in that 20-hour day environment of knowing they're going to go to zero. So it's a very different incentive structure. But the last 25 years in America, this is how companies have been built. Venture capital is the dynamism engine of all innovation in America. It's the envy of the world. And so we have to make sure that this system is not just operating for the Facebooks of the world and the TikToks of the world, the consumer technology that we use. We have to make sure that we bring this urgency and this capital and the speed to the things that matter most, which is, of course, building our defense industrial base.

Sean Ryan: I mean, what do you think is going to happen to the primes? Are they going to just get phased out?

Katherine Boyle: So I don't think so. I think they're waking up. My view is probably the best thing that can happen for the DOD, and this is me speaking as someone who would like to see the DoD encourage competition, is to go back to that pre-1990s model where we had 50 companies working in defense, a lot more primes. Right? I think something like 40% of the major programs go to five primes. It was not like that in the 90s. Post the Last Supper when the DOD came to all these companies and said that there's going to be massive budget cuts post-Soviet Union, you're going to have to merge. That led to a merging of these companies where there was just no competition. And I think the DoD thought by merging them that you'd save the companies, that they'd become more efficient. The opposite happened. It just meant that they didn't have to innovate and they didn't have to work hard because there was no competition. So I think the best thing that can happen is we'll probably see those primes lose a stranglehold on programs. They're good at building some things, right? They're good at building very exquisite systems. We were talking about the B2 and how we only have 19. The startups that we are investing in now, they want to build thousands of something. And that's how they're building their product design is to build attributable systems versus these sort of legacy exquisite systems. So I think you'll see primes that are focused on the things that they know how to build that take a little bit longer. I think they'll lose their stranglehold on getting these new programs of records. I think that would be the best thing that could possibly happen. And then startups can focus on the things that have to be made fast. And particularly the software defined, attributable systems that operate in the battlefield that have to be upgraded, that have to be changed based on the technology that's changing the battlefield. I don't think the primes are capable of doing that.

Sean Ryan: How were they, I mean, when you say they're waking up, what do you mean by that?

Katherine Boyle: They're waking up. It used to be when I would go, so I was a very early investor in Anduril. And in Silicon Valley, a billion dollar company is like a big deal. It's not a big deal. A billion dollars in Washington, it's not a big deal, which tells you how screwed up our incentive systems are. But when I would go to talk to people inside the DOD or talk to across administrations from 2017, 2018, 2019, companies like Anduril, they'd be like, that's cute. That's really cute. What Palmer and those guys are doing over there, right? It was almost like laughing at them. And Elon had this same experience with ULA and Boeing. They used to make fun of the fact that their place in Cape Canaveral was a tent, right? It wasn't like this fancy launch pad. It was homegrown, homespun. And they make fun of them like, these guys that have everything under a tent are going to be able to launch a rocket? Yeah, right. And then look at where we are now where SpaceX is responsible for 85% of launch across the country or across the world, actually. So they are our path to space. And that only took, SpaceX was started in 2002. It's 2025. They really gained market share very quickly. And so you kind of see it happening with Anduril now, where people are picking their heads up. Anduril is an eight-year-old company, and they're kind of like, huh. Like they're down selected for some major programs now. They're not just building, in the beginning, I'm sure you spent some time with Palmer. He talked about how they were building sentry towers and really focused on border control. They were selling to DHS. So DOD just thought they were a cute little company that was never going to get in the way of any of these primes. And now they're winning major contracts. And so I think it's irresponsible if the primes are saying, well, those guys are never going to win. Or we'll beat them at the law fair, right? Like, oh, well, we'll take them to court and make sure that they can't get access to these big contracts because these are ours. I just think that the world has fundamentally shifted. There's too many people who recognize that you need the best and brightest engineers in America and the people of Silicon Valley. You need the talent and the AI labs across the country. You need them working on defense. And those guys aren't at Lockheed Martin.

Sean Ryan: Yeah. It's really interesting. It's like a whole new wave of innovations coming in. And I mean, like I said, I don't know much, but it doesn't, you don't hear a lot of innovation coming out of the big primes like Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing. I think it's 2% of their budget is spent on R&D. I see a lot of Boeings falling out of the sky lately, but not much innovation. A lot of witnesses are being killed. Seriously. But anyways, yeah, well, we'll get into a lot more of that. And one more thing before we get going, everybody gets a gift. Thank you so much.

Katherine Boyle: Perfect. Thank you.

Sean Ryan: Vigilance League gummy bears. Wanting to try these. So thanks so much.

Katherine Boyle: You're welcome. They're amazing.

Sean Ryan: So let's get into your backstory a little bit here. Sure. Where did you grow up?

Katherine Boyle: So I grew up in Northern Florida in Gainesville, university town, football town. You had our guy Tebow on recently. And he's sort of the...

Sean Ryan: Amazing human.

Katherine Boyle: He still the pride of the city. It like those are the glory days. He still our guy. But I grew up, I always say, had like the most normal 90s Florida childhood. And in some ways, that's what I feel like I want to give my children is that same sort of normal 90s childhood. But my story really starts with, I always say it starts with my dad. I came from a family of priests. My father was born during the depression, 1931. And as happens in big Irish Catholic families at that time, poor Irish Catholic families, the smartest kid was always sent off to the priesthood. So at 17, he joined the Jesuits and his dream was he wanted to be a missionary doctor. He wanted to go to the poorest parts of America across the world, but he also wanted to be a physician. So he wanted to practice medicine, heal the body, heal the soul. I sometimes think he would have been very aligned with some of the Maha stuff that's happening today. But 10 years into the seminary, and this is why it's so important for my life. The seminary in Chicago told him, sorry, we don't have the money to send you to medical school. Sorry, you're just going to have to be a normal priest. And he had sort of this life crisis. What am I going to do? And he decided to leave. And I always say, that's why I'm sitting here. If he had stayed, he would have been a very good priest, but I wouldn't be here. So I'm very grateful he had that crisis of self and decided that his calling for medicine was more important than his calling for God. But the reason that happen. And the other person I'm really grateful to who just passed away is my uncle Pat. My uncle Pat is like a hero to me. He's a hero to a lot of people, but he was my father's Irish twin, who was nine months younger, and he was in the Jesuits with him, following him. And the reason my family was okay with my dad leaving was because my uncle Pat's like, well, I'm going to stay. And of course, my uncle Pat was sort of a rebel. He got kicked out of the Jesuits three times for language, beating people up, not respecting authority. He was not a good priest, probably like some of the priests you've had on your show. He's more like that. He's a tough guy.

Sean Ryan: I love those kind of priests.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. No, there were more of them back in the day. There's not enough of them anymore. But he stayed in the priesthood, became a Jesuit, and then Vietnam happened and he joined the army. So he joined 82nd Airborne Division. And the reason he joined is he's like, I'm a tough guy. I'm physically fit. I look around at all these other priests, like who else is going to go to Vietnam? So he was an army chaplain. He was one of the first Catholic chaplains in Vietnam did four tours.

Sean Ryan: No kidding.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, it's an incredible story, the stuff you saw. He never talked about it, of course. I only really started learning a lot about it at the very end of his life. But he came back, four tours, came back radically anti-war, but also radically pro-life. Like, we have to protect life at all costs. And I grew up in this family where he was the hero of the family. He was what we aspire to be, God and country. So I grew up in this very Irish Catholic family. My dad started medical practice in the 60s in northern Florida. Integrated practice was sort of radical at the time. Very poor practice. His view was you take care of the working people. So all the images of me growing up, I just have all these memories of my dad having all the cops come into our house at like 9 or 10 o'clock at night and giving them a shot. Like the old, what is it, the image of the old-timey doctors who like pull your pants down, give you a shot, and plant it on the name of the Norman Rockwell. In the white coat with the stethoscope. But that was my dad. He was just like a, wanted to be a priest, ended up a doctor, and took care of the people in our community. And I always say, pillars of the community used to be a thing. We don't have, like, our generation doesn't have as many of those people that stay in their community that say, I want to take care of everyone where you're just known as the person that the first responders could go to or that the cops can go to or the people, that you're going to help out the people who are really supporting your community.

Sean Ryan: Why do you think that's changed?

Katherine Boyle: I think it's changed for a lot of reasons. I think people didn't used to move around in the same way, right? It's the kind of push for college, I think, has destroyed so much of the social fabric of the country. But it's like now if you're, it's like he was the smartest in his family. He got sent to the priesthood. Now if you're the smartest in your family, you get sent to Harvard, right? You get sent to a school. You get pulled out of your family. You get pulled out of your church. You get pulled out of your community. And then you're told you have to chase the job. You have to chase the dream. You have to keep making more money. You have to keep doing more things. And it's rare for people who are sort of treated as the success stories to stay in their community. And I think that's a huge problem. It's a huge problem that people don't put down roots and live somewhere for 50 years in a town where they can truly be that pillar and that beacon.

Sean Ryan: Interesting. Do you think it has anything to do with the political climate, polarization of America?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, I mean you and I were talking about this. I actually think the politicization of America might actually be a good thing after COVID, right? A lot of people like me in Florida now, I used to be in San Francisco. A lot of people are waking up that where you live, the city you live in, it actually matters. It matters for how your kids are educated. It matters for a lot of the things you don't think about until it's too late. It matters for crime. It matters for the sort of ideologies you want your family exposed to. And so I think there is a bit of a return. Talk about optimistic things. There's a bit of a return to people recognizing, I don't need to live in New York City or San Francisco. Where I really want to be is in a place where I know I'm raising my family and raising my kids with the values that I had. I mean, I always say I moved back to Florida because I wanted my kids to have the 90s childhood that I did. And I think they can get it there in a way that they're certainly not going to get it in San Francisco.

Sean Ryan: Yeah, yeah. I don't know. It's like we just keep seem to be moving farther and farther apart every four years for the past, what, I don't know, 12 years.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah.

Sean Ryan: Seems like at least 12 years. And it's like, man, it's just I catch myself doing it. It's like not much. But a lot of people are just scared to share just a simple opinion because they don't want to be blasted or judged, even in like a small town environment like this.

Katherine Boyle: Totally.

Sean Ryan: It seems like.

Katherine Boyle: I think a huge part of the problem is we've replaced, America has always been a religious country. And then you saw this decline starting around, 1970s, this real decline in religion. It's coming back up again. We'll talk about a lot of optimistic things, but that's one thing I'm optimistic about is the religious revival. But five, ten years ago, it was really bad, right, where just the continued decline of people not believing in God, not going to church. But it leaves this hole for some other sort of ideology. And I think Americans have replaced their love of God, their love of country with their love of politics. And so now we sort by ideological preference politics. It's like, the way that people in previous civilizations used to feel about religious outsiders is how we feel about political outsiders. And so I do think we're more polarized. But I think the root of that is that we don't have anything in common anymore. And we used to have this Christian ideology or even just understanding that America has certain values. And for a very long time that was under attack. Decades that was under attack. And it's only now that we're sort of moving back to people saying okay, maybe maybe I should go to church. Maybe going to church is a good thing. I mean you even have the New York Times. People on the op-ed pages, I always think they're a good beacon of sort of liberal thought. The op-ed page is saying, well, maybe we should return to religion.

Sean Ryan: Are you serious? The New York Times is putting this out?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. I mean, they've been putting out some stuff recently where it's like, the funniest one, the op-ed page from last week had three different stories about the declining birth rate. Three different stories about what is wrong that we are not having enough children. And that used to be a conservative, social conservative, religious person talking point about having more babies. And now the New York Times is worried. And they're saying, there was another article that was so funny. I wish I had the actual headline. It was like, we don't see men anymore. Like, where did the men go? The men need to come back. Come back to us. It's a woman talking about how there's a gulf between men and women. And I'm just thinking at least they see there's a problem. They don't know the reason for the problem. That's a whole back story. Well, hopefully they'll learn at some point, but they see there's a problem. And so I think I'm at least optimistic that we seem to be kind of turning the corner on, okay, it's good to have families. It's good to think about where you want to live, how you want to raise your children. And hopefully that will lead to asking bigger questions about what does it mean to have a good family and what does it mean to be a good person.

Sean Ryan: Wow. I had no idea the New York Times was putting pieces out like that.

Katherine Boyle: It's fun to read just for opposition research. It's a fun thing to read just to see, okay, you might not agree with what they're saying, but it's like, wow, they wouldn't have published that five years ago.

Sean Ryan: Yeah. When did you notice, by the way? Like when did you notice that men have?

Sean Ryan: Men have disappeared from the society. Or that they have no interest in relationships with women or that they have no interest in marriage. It was interesting because the article sort of blamed men for everything. And it's like, well, yeah, next week they need to have the men saying why did the women disappear? Why did the women change?

Katherine Boyle: Right. And I think that is a huge problem of why we have this birth collapse. There's been a full-on assault on the family for the last 30, 40 years. So it makes sense why you see fewer and fewer people having children.

Sean Ryan: How bad is our birth decline?

Katherine Boyle: Oh, it is shockingly bad. We are now at 1.6 per woman. Our replacement rate is 2.1. I thought we were at 2. It's been about eight years that we passed the 2. Then there was a mild uptick in COVID, so people were hopeful, thinking maybe it was just an anomaly. But then there was a steep decline since COVID as well. So, yeah, we're at 1.6. For the millennials, I think it's something like 58% of us have children. That's the lowest in history. So it is going to be a huge shock when our generation ages and there's no one there to do important services. There are a lot of economic reasons, but also just the social fabric of what's about to happen from not having children. This is how civilizations die.

Sean Ryan: Let's go into it. How is it going to affect us?

Katherine Boyle: One, the economic situation is going to get very bad. The boomers are the largest generational cohort. They're living longer than ever, but they're getting to ages where they need care. Who takes care of boomers when they're in their 80s and 90s? They're in nursing homes. You need service workers to take care of these aging people. It used to be that you were taken care of in the family. We don't do that anymore. We have nursing homes. It's very rare that someone moves in with their children when they're at a certain age. So those jobs, which used to be filled by service workers, there's no one who's going to be able to fill that.

On every economic dimension, if you do not have a generation of workers paying into the system—social security is a huge issue—but if you don't have people paying into the system, doing the labor, being able to do the things for the elder generation, society starts crumbling. Then there are the social ramifications of not having family. I'm a firm believer that the most important institution in America is the family. The family used to exist to take care of the people who were weakest. You used to have these big families and sometimes the weakest child would still be living with mom and dad at home, and that was okay. You had empathy for them, but it was the family's responsibility to take care of these people.

We quickly moved that to now it's the state's responsibility to take care of these people who may be sick, unable to provide for themselves, or might have psychological issues. Now the state has to take care of them, which is why you see a lot of these people on the street now, because the state does a terrible job. As fewer and fewer children exist, you're not going to have a society that can provide for itself, that can continue into perpetuity. The exponential decline of this too—it sounds like, "Oh, we went from 2.1 to 1.6, that can't be that bad." In a couple of generations, that means our population has shrunk by half.

Sean Ryan: In a couple of generations?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. The best example of this is South Korea. Their birth rate is the lowest of any industrialized country. I think it's 0.9. When you have fewer and fewer people, no one's doing the jobs. Japan is also heading this way. The only argument people make as the bright side that could potentially make up for the labor loss and the civilizational collapse is robotics. You could have robots do a lot of these jobs. But I think it is a very dangerous thing to say we're going to depend on automation and robotics to make up for the fact that humans are disappearing.

Even China's dealing with this. They had the one-child policy and then they aborted all the girls. Extremely short-sighted. We're always talking about how dangerous China is, how China is growing in power and importance. The most short-sighted thing they have ever done to their society that will eventually catch up with them is the demographic collapse because of one child. They're trying everything now. They're trying to end divorce. There's now a policy in China where you have to have a 90-day cool-down period so that you don't divorce. They're trying to encourage young women to have children. Young women don't want to have children. They're bringing in women from other countries. They're sending them out to go find wives in the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, everywhere. They recognize it's a massive problem, and probably recognized it before even we did.

In some ways, the conversation hopped from the social conservative church movement of "this is a huge problem" to the techno-optimist Elon Musk talking about the birth rate as a big deal. It's now become an issue that's okay for polite society and the liberal New York Times to be talking about. First step is acknowledging it, but 1.6 is a long way to come back from, especially with a millennial generation that waited way too long to have children.

I think there are a couple underlying factors that we don't talk enough about that have caused this. When you look at our parents' generation, a lot of people didn't go to college. They started adulthood at 18. The fertile window for women was between 18 and 40. That was the nominal window of when you could have children and it was socially acceptable. Then we had this incredible push against fertility and against having a family young that the millennials really caught wind of. Everyone needs to go to college, extended adolescence, use your 20s to experiment and enjoy life. You don't really need to be focused on having a family.

What happened is the average age now of a first-time mother in America is 28. So 10 years after that 18. You've cut the window in half. The average age of a first-time father in America is 31. That's for both college educated and not college educated. If you add college on top of that, it's even higher. The average age of a first-time mother is 30. So you can understand how the birth rate's being cut in half if the entire window of when you can have children is cut in half. People are so focused on career and finding themselves and extended adolescence rather than focusing on building a family earlier. You're just going to have fewer children. When you have fewer marriages, that also cuts it. Fewer people getting married means fewer people are going to decide to have children. For millennials, to have 58% of people only having kids—that's compared to 89% of our parents' generation.

Sean Ryan: Wow. Do you know if the baby boomer generation are still the biggest?

Katherine Boyle: I believe they're still the biggest, yeah.

Sean Ryan: This has always been a question I've had. You see all these 55-plus communities being built. You live in Florida. I came from Florida. They're everywhere. The Villages is crazy. What is going to happen to all these 55-plus communities when that massive generation dies off?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. I think it'll be a housing crisis. Fewer people. Are millennials and Gen X going to want to move into those places? Definitely not. In some ways, the bigger question is also about longevity. People are living a lot longer, which means they're going to have to work a lot longer, which means they have to be healthier for a lot longer. If you have people living a lot longer and fewer and fewer people being born, society inverts on itself. You have a very top-heavy society of people who are older who can't do the work that needs to be done to actually protect a country.

Sean Ryan: Has any nation reversed this?

Katherine Boyle: Not successfully. There have been some attempts. Some people have pointed to countries like Hungary that are now paying—there's a policy in Hungary where if you have more than four children, you don't have to pay taxes. So there are some extreme policies. The one anomaly in the industrialized world where they are well above birth rate replacement is Israel. There are questions about whether it's because it's a religious society. They have a pretty large religious orthodox community that kind of makes up for the rest of the secular society that doesn't have children. If you have a family of eight, nine, and ten, that's 10% of your population, and you can make up for some who are not having any. But we don't have that in America.

Sean Ryan: We have more than Europe, which is really on the decline.

Katherine Boyle: Really on the decline. The Islamic population is reproducing massively. But even counting immigrant and Islamic population in Europe, they're still at—I think Italy is 1.2, France is 1.5. Everyone always looks at the Nordic nations as the beacon of how we should be doing policy in the U.S. because they pay for free healthcare for mothers, free IVF, different things that people say we should experiment with. Their population decline is worse than ours. They're at 1.1. What's fascinating to me about this is that this isn't a country-specific problem or a cultural-specific problem. It really is all industrialized nations.

There are probably healthcare reasons for it. Men have a fertility rate that's 70% less than it was roughly a hundred years ago. Sperm counts are down. The fertile window for women is cut in half. There's something about the medical side of this and the health side of this that's also happening. But you can't ignore the memes and the cultural destruction that happened since the 1970s, in my opinion, which is "family bad, individual good." You shouldn't have to sacrifice yourself for the needs of your family. The minute that people across the Western world started believing in that sort of individualism, that's where you see the family completely destroyed. Fewer and fewer families means fewer and fewer children.

We're finally waking up to the consequences of that, which is a society that can't grow its GDP. The economist version is it's a society that can't grow its GDP and can't remain successful. But the human part is it's a dying society. It's a frail society.

Sean Ryan: How do we fix it?

Katherine Boyle: I think you have to change the culture. You cannot change a spiritual and a cultural problem with economic policies. The easy answers that a lot of economists say are, "We need to make healthcare free, make birth free, make women feel that they have more benefits, maybe pay women to stay at home." Our healthcare system is expensive. It is expensive to have a baby in America. Making that cheaper on the margins might affect a mother who says, "I have two children, maybe I want to have a third." But I actually think the bigger problem is cultural and spiritual.

Sean Ryan: I think it's the culture too. It stemmed from the feminist movement where it was "get out, get a job, provide for yourself, you can do everything." Which, yes, but it detoured women from having children. Women that do have children—me and my wife talk about this all the time. If you say you're a stay-at-home mom, it's frowned upon in a lot of areas in the country. What the fuck are you talking about? Frowning upon a stay-at-home mom? What's more important than raising your kids?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah.

Sean Ryan: I don't even know how single mothers do it. It's the hardest job in the world. You have to make it okay. You have to take care of the single moms out there. It's terrifying. I don't know how they make ends meet. But yeah, I think the culture change is paramount for that.

Katherine Boyle: A lot of the research—it's always fascinating to me, the things you can't talk about. We can talk about the problem, but there are certain things we can't talk about that add to it. Economics is always a thing people want to talk about because it's like, "If we could just fix it with an economic policy." But no one ever talks about what you said, which is that feminism did change the memes and the culture. At the same time, no one talks about when you introduce birth control into a society until women can control their own destiny. That is a huge part of it. All of these declines in the industrial world started at the exact same time that the pill was introduced. We're not going to go back to a world that is pre-pill. That's just never going to happen across Western society and the industrial world. But I think you actually have to acknowledge all the factors. The fact that a lot of the people doing this research won't even acknowledge that something magical changed in the 60s and the 70s related to healthcare, related to how abortion was made legal in 1973, other nations followed. When you look at those as inputs into the story as well, there's a reason why the birth rate is so low in these countries. It's not just an American phenomenon, it's a global phenomenon. You have to take into account all of those things.

I just keep coming back to the culture changed. There was something about what we prized and what we made high status in America where most people chose to have only one to two children, whereas their grandparents' generation and their parents' generation had three and four. A society that changes that dramatically in one generation or two generations is unstable. It's completely unstable.

Sean Ryan: Let's get back to your story. Son of a priest who left, who talked about your uncle.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah.

Sean Ryan: What were you into as a kid?

Katherine Boyle: Gosh, I was a very precocious kid. Again, my dad was much older. I was the youngest. So I was really into the news. I read a lot of books. I was extremely precocious. I loved watching things with my parents. I got really into movies growing up. But I was always this very inquisitive kid. My dad, coming from the Jesuits, taught our family around the kitchen table the Socratic method. You need to ask questions that you can't be afraid of the truth. He was sort of this philosopher king.

Sean Ryan: I love that. I think that's a huge problem nowadays. Nobody will ask questions.

Katherine Boyle: No, yes. And not being afraid to be disagreeable. We're a family of disagreeable people, but it was really inculcated in me from an early age. So I was always just interested in whatever was happening on the news, whatever was happening in the world. I was a very good student. My parents didn't really push me. It was sort of a self-driven thing.

I always tell the story of when I was in third grade, I got one B in my entire life and it was in penmanship. My very hard-ass, amazing saint of a mother sat me down and she was like, "It's okay if you get a B in math, it's okay if you get a B in reading, but penmanship means you're lazy. You are lazy." It's funny, I have the worst handwriting today. My dad had terrible handwriting. Some doctor would probably say I have a genetic thing. But she said, "Anyone can write. You're going to sit down and you're going to practice writing penmanship an hour a day." Within three months, I had the best penmanship of anyone in the class. I was celebrated for it. It was moments like that where my parents were just so involved and so good. They never needed to tell me again not to work hard or that I was lazy. I just learned the lesson very quick.

My mom actually ran my dad's medical practice. Our typical life was they would take us to the office. We saw the patients with my dad. We worked in the office from a very young age. They opened the office on Saturdays because people have to work and they wanted to be there for the patients. We had this really, really tight-knit family of work matters. Work is a virtue. Everyone works hard and the kids work hard too. It's not just mom and dad work hard and the kids get to play. It's, "We're going to work as a family." Then on Saturday nights, we're going to go to church, the whole family, go out to dinner after with my grandparents who lived down the street. It was a very simple life, but it was very focused on working hard.

There were always these stories in my family where my dad would always say, "You're not going to be the smartest in the room. You're not going to be the best at everything. But no one is going to outwork a Boyle. No one is going to outwork you." I think that was just inculcated in me from an early age. So I did a lot of things. I did piano. I was really into piano as a kid. I played sports. I wasn't naturally gifted, but I worked hard at it. I just had this seriousness of, "Okay, we're Boyles and we work hard."

Sean Ryan: How many siblings?

Katherine Boyle: My dad had six kids. It was sort of a Brady Bunch family. I was the youngest of his six, and they were much older because he was 55 when I was born. My mother and I had two. So they were older and out of the house, but very much part of the family, half brothers and half sisters. I always think part of the reason why I was so precocious is because I was a millennial, but I was around all these Gen Xers. I was around all these older babysitters and kids who would come through the house who were in their 20s. Now they're in their 60s. It was definitely this—I was the baby absorbing all of this stuff. So I grew up really fast. I was joking about movies I watched when I was a kid. My parents took me to see True Lies in 1994. I was eight years old in the theater. Seeing these Arnold Schwarzenegger action movies with a seven or eight-year-old kid, it was like, "Oh, she's a baby, whatever. She'll be fine." So I was an adult by the time I was a teenager.

Sean Ryan: Nice. So you go to college. I know you had interest in becoming, joining the CIA.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. I was very interested in politics, foreign affairs. That was my love growing up. The big thing that happened before I went to college was my father got very sick. He was chronically ill. Around when I was 12 years old, he had to retire. When you're a kid that grows up with a chronically ill parent, you grow up really fast. I'm seeing it happen with my friends now whose parents are getting older in their 60s and 70s. The caregiver-caretaker relationship and the provider relationship sort of flips. When you're in your mid-40s, you start taking care of elderly parents. But I had that when I was 12. He had a severe heart attack and then had a chronic condition that made it hard for him to get out of bed. My mother was an absolute saint.

Sean Ryan: At 12?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, which is why I also think kids are resilient. My mother, again an absolute saint, didn't try to keep it from me. She was like, "Your father's sick. The doctor thinks he's probably going to die. But this is suffering. And he's going to suffer through it." He was such a saint of a man too. He refused to take pain pills. He refused to succumb to what was happening. He actually lived for a while. He lived until I was in college, but he died when I was in college. When you've had to take care of a parent for a while, you're of course sad when they're gone. But the other thing that happens is you have this moment of just relief. That was the real emotion that I felt. I was like, "Wow, my mother had been taking care of him for eight years. When it happened, I was like, okay, this is the beginning of my life." Because when that's all you've known is, "I have to take care of my family," that's when I really had this moment of, "Okay, maybe I can go do something big now. Maybe I can go do the thing and not have to worry about family or think about anyone but myself. I can be super selfish about what I want."

A lot of my friends were thinking about joining the agency. I actually had a really interesting thing happen. I worked all through college and I started walking a lady's dog, this older lady who lived in Georgetown. She was afraid to walk around the neighborhood at 10:30 at night. So every night at 10:30, I would leave the library, go to her house, and walk her dog. Over time, I learned that she was the first female station chief at the CIA.

Sean Ryan: No kidding.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. I'd go into her house and she had, in some ways it looks like a room like yours, just mementos of a life well lived. She'd been everywhere. She'd been all over Asia. She had the most incredible stories. She was this very demure, quiet lady. You would never know. She's beautiful, just lovely, very well-mannered, but a polyglot. She could speak many languages. You would never suspect her. I think it was partially spending so much time with her and looking at her life and thinking, "Wow, this is really cool." But also, I grew up during September 11th too. It changed everyone's mind about, "Okay, what are you going to do?" That's why I wanted to go to Washington and work in foreign affairs in some capacity. After my dad died, I said, "I want to do that. I can finally do that."

Going back to, I hadn't ever failed at anything. I was one of these kids. I don't want to say I was a trophy kid, but I just worked hard at everything I did. It was always a view that if you work hard enough in life, you can get what you want. So I just assumed going into that recruitment, "Oh, I'm a shoo-in. I'm a top grad out of Georgetown. I have all these great references. I have these mentors who've done it. I'll be fine." It's not to say I didn't take it seriously, I did. But I was not prepared for the response I got in 2009, which was after a year and a half in, "Sorry, you just get a letter back from the recruitment and retention center that says, 'We do not need your services. You can apply three years from now.'" That was the first time in my life where I was like, "Oh, I don't have a plan B. I don't know what I'm going to do."

Sean Ryan: I can't believe they didn't pick you up. What did you want to do over there?

Katherine Boyle: I wanted to do ops. I wanted to just—because I was so young.

Sean Ryan: Base officer?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. But the 22, 23-year-olds, they had a training program. It was like you do two or three years. It wasn't an analyst program, but they kind of put you in this sort of path. It's the kids who know how to do nothing. The kids who are just out of college, they have a training path for them, and then they figure out where they want to go.

Sean Ryan: So you were in the training path?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. I had done multiple interviews. I look back on it. It's so funny. I know exactly why they didn't pick me. I am not an easy person. I am a disagreeable person. After eight interviews where they're really trying to get to know you, there are times where I know exactly what I said wrong. You're supposed to answer the question of "Why are you wanting to do this?" The right answer is you want to serve your country, which is the right answer. I said it multiple times, but by the fifth time they ask it in a different way, I said something that was probably the through line of my life: "I just can't stand not knowing. I just can't stand not knowing." Of course, that's the wrong answer. To the lady who was interviewing me, as credit, she was like, "Honey, you think you're going to know in here? You think you're going to come in here and you're going to know anything?" Again, it's like, "Okay, you 23-year-old little girl who's never been told—get out of here. What a joke."

Sean Ryan: Damn.

Katherine Boyle: So it's on me. They're right. Even today, my colleagues are like, "It's amazing you can actually work at a company."

Katherine Boyle: You are such a disagreeable person — and they mean that lovingly — but I am not someone who doesn't say what I think. I'm not someone who takes orders very well. So I think they probably looked at my character after, you know, it's like spikes in certain areas. Probably very good at getting information and meeting people, talking to people, doing the things that you need to do, but also probably not going to be able to deal with the culture.

Sean Ryan: Probably for the best.

Katherine Boyle: Probably for the best. I mean, things always work out the way they work.

Sean Ryan: In the short amount of time I've known you, a lot of things over there would have driven you insane.

Katherine Boyle: I think she did me a favor. But it was definitely like coming out of college, 24, no idea what I was going to do with my life. It was sort of serendipitous how I ended up at the Washington Post because I had taken a job and I had friends who were already sort of in. And they're like, "You've got to be in D.C. Just take a job. Take any job you can get."

So I got this kind of ridiculous copy editor job, but it was at a newspaper called The Express. If you've ever been in D.C. and gone on the Metro, it's the free Metro paper that the Washington Post hands out. Everyone who's ever been on the Metro remembers this paper, loves this paper. It's this snarky, free newsletter thing. They needed someone who was just good at writing, but un-byline, so you don't have a record that you worked there. I was like, that sounds great. I can just write during the day for three to six hours, and then do what I need to do for my real career, my real job. I was so convinced that was going to happen.

When I got the letter, I was like, wait, I'm just a copywriter at the lowest person on the totem pole inside the Washington Post without a byline, without anything. I'm not even a real reporter. What am I going to do? I should probably figure out if I can actually make this a real career.

I sort of convinced myself that intelligence isn't that different than reporting. You have sources, you have to have a network of nodes and people who are telling you information about whatever you're covering. You have to be really good at asking questions. You have to be good at listening, reading people, knowing what's true, knowing what's false, making decisions very quickly. Part of me was like, okay, if I can't do that at the agency, I could do that at the Washington Post. I just have to convince them to let me do it.

Sean Ryan: And it turned out to be the most opportune time to be in media for a young person?

Katherine Boyle: Really? Yeah, because I was cheap. I was making $30,000 a year and I would write as much as they wanted me to. I had no obligations. I could come in on Sundays. I could do whatever story you want me to do. I found an editor inside the Washington Post, and she said, "You can write as many stories as you want. We just need people to fill the actual physical paper," because they were slashing well-known reporters left and right because the business was going under.

Sean Ryan: Why was it going under?

Katherine Boyle: Just the business of media with the Internet. Everyone thinks the media really started declining around 2014, 2015, 2016. But the first wave of real layoffs were 2008, 2009, where there was just an understanding that Google and then Facebook — but Google really — was just eating the lunch of these companies. The business models of every major newspaper up until that point were classifieds, subscriptions, and syndication. Syndication — sending out the story, people paying to reprint it — that was Google. Google completely took that. All the stories would go on the internet for free. No one was paying for the digital copy. The Wall Street Journal figured it out, but none of the other papers did. They were just hemorrhaging subscribers.

Then the advertising — if people are advertising online, why am I going to advertise my store in your newspaper? No one's reading the physical paper anymore. But they still had it, and they still had subscribers that were reading it. So it was actually a great time to go in and just say, okay, I work for very little and I work a lot and I fill your paper.

After about a year of that, they brought me on full time as a staff writer because I was breaking stories as someone who really wasn't affiliated with the paper. But it was not what I wanted to do. It was not my dream to be a reporter. But there was something about being in that place at the right time where I was like, okay, I can make something out of this major setback. I can learn a new trade, even if it's not the thing I thought I would be doing.

Sean Ryan: So did you develop your own sources and all that network?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah.

Sean Ryan: How'd you do it? Where'd you start?

Katherine Boyle: It's a good question because it's also what venture capitalists do. How do you get dropped into a culture you know nothing about — which was the case with VC — and start meeting people and building up relationships? The interesting thing about doing it as a reporter is they give you a beat. My beat in the beginning was retail and the business of arts and culture. Then it moved on to nonprofit investigations. I started researching the Smithsonian Institution and all the government-funded agencies in Washington, D.C., and art agencies, following the money in the nonprofit areas.

But it started out as: you get your assignment and you just start calling people. The thing I know you know better than anyone else is people just love to talk. People will tell you anything if you sit there and listen. When you're a 24, 25 year old who knows nothing and you call someone and say, "Hey, I'm this reporter from the Washington Post. Can we get coffee? I'd love to hear more about what you know. Can you show me what I should know about this beat?" You do that over and over again. People will tell you what you need to know. Then they start seeing your name in the paper, and they know you're the person who's going to write the story about something.

I also think some people are really good at listening, and it's a gift. Growing up in a big, loud Irish family, I learned how to listen. I'm always amazed at the stories I would break. Someone would come up to me at a cocktail party or a book party, not even knowing I was a Washington Post reporter, find out, and then just share something — just getting it off their chest. I'd say, "That's actually a really important story. Can I write it?" People are desperate to talk and desperate to get that type of attention.

In some ways, the reporting thing was easier than when I got to Silicon Valley and was nobody. I was the Washington Post in Washington, D.C. You'd already built a network at that point.

Sean Ryan: But not a network in Silicon Valley. But you had the fundamentals down.

Katherine Boyle: I think you can get dropped into any culture and learn it very quickly if you know the types of people that are going to talk to you and if you're actually willing to listen.

Sean Ryan: What got you — so you're at the Washington Post. What ended it?

Katherine Boyle: I kind of knew it was going to be a temporary thing just because of how bad the business was. This was before Jeff Bezos bought the paper. I actually decided to leave right as he was buying it. A lot of people said that was the saving grace of the paper — one of the richest men in the world buying it, putting money into it so it wouldn't go down the drain.

What happened was my best friend at the Washington Post, she was the religion reporter. Her husband was in the Navy and he had just left the Navy and was going to Stanford Business School. I knew nothing about business school. I was stunned he got in. I said, "I didn't know your husband knew anything about business. I thought he was in the Navy." She said, "No, the business schools take about 5% of their class every year. They call them non-traditional candidates. A lot of them are veterans. They'll take people who know nothing about business to create an interesting group of people for the class. You're not there because they think you're going to be great at business. They want to create a diverse class of experiences."

She told me how he did it — he spent hours every day learning the GMAT. I said, "I've never had any interest in business until working at the Washington Post, where I see this grand paper completely collapsing in on itself." The most important lesson to me at the Washington Post was watching the leadership. It was the phrase "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic." Everyone who worked there was in complete denial that the internet was changing their business.

Sean Ryan: Are you serious?

Katherine Boyle: It was shocking to me.

Sean Ryan: What is it? Is it ego?

Katherine Boyle: Ego. Desperation. "I don't want to lose my job. We're bigger than this. We're the Washington Post. We're the brand. Everyone needs us." But I think this is true of humans in these grand institutions. They can recognize when something is crumbling. You see it happening with universities today — they're in major crisis because of what the students are doing, and they just can't ever see that things need to be reformed. The federal government too can't see that things need to be reformed.

That was certainly a learning for me because I saw it. I wasn't wedded to it. I hadn't been there during the heyday where everyone was getting to fly wherever they wanted, be bureau chief of any country they wanted. We had shuttered all of our international bureaus by the time I got there. It was a paper clearly in decline. For me, it was just a job. I could learn something. The original dream didn't work out. But I knew I had to leave.

When she told me her husband got in, I thought, "I'm different. I know nothing about business. If you just have to get a decent score on a test and write a good essay — I know I can write an essay. That's probably one of the few things I can do."

I got really, really lucky. I got off the wait list last minute. I found out I was on the wait list on a reporting trip to Beirut. I was on the plane checking my phone, supposed to get a phone call from the dean of the school, and no one's ringing. As I'm taking off from D.C. to Beirut, I'm thinking, "I'm not getting in. I'm just going to be a reporter forever." I land and see the email: "You're on the wait list." I thought, "That's not a no. It doesn't mean they want me, but it's not a no."

I sent a letter pretty much every day. "I'm in Beirut. This is the story I'm working on. I think it's relevant to the class because of this." After enough annoying emails — and this is a really important life learning — if you're the most annoying person to any admissions group, or any company, if you're constantly pounding down the table, people just finally give in. People will not say no 25 times.

So I got in last minute. It was like, okay, I'm going to Silicon Valley. I'm just going to figure it out.

Sean Ryan: Wow. So you just — why didn't you look at any of the other intelligence agencies, just out of curiosity?

Katherine Boyle: The woman who was my mentor who had been at CIA, she was like, "Do not go to CIA. Go to State." I was like, "That sounds boring. I don't want to go to the State Department." There were certain things where I was like, that's not going to be interesting.

When I look back at my career, everything I've done has been information trading, but it's been very human-centric. I wasn't interested in NSA. I like the human connection. Even in my business career, I was never interested in things that didn't have negotiating with people, which is a lot of what VC is. There's something about the human component where I think that's what I wanted to do.

I was probably so dejected. I didn't have that many mentors. I didn't have people who were like, "You should go this path, you should do this, talk to this person." It was more like, "Okay, they rejected me. There must be a reason. Maybe I'm supposed to be doing something else."

Sean Ryan: So we'll get — how'd you, out of all the different business avenues you could have done, why Silicon Valley?

Katherine Boyle: Silicon Valley was more of — the biggest story I was writing about, you see patterns in the stories you write. I was a culture writer too. I had a really broad swath of things I could write about. But a lot of things I was writing about were how technology is impacting this industry or how technology is destroying another industry. The conversation at the Washington Post day in, day out was, "We're all going to lose our jobs because Facebook is gaining momentum and everyone wants to read their news on Facebook. There's no business model."

There was something — to me, this is the biggest story of my life. Tech is the biggest story. I don't understand it. A lot of the Washington Post people I worked with hated tech. Tech is what's destroying their livelihood, and they have every right to hate it. But me, I was like, "I want to understand it. I want to go out here and understand this culture. I don't know nothing about it. I've never met anyone who's worked in tech or Silicon Valley. But it's clearly having an impact. This is the biggest story of our time. I'm a reporter. I should go out and figure out what's going on out there."

Sean Ryan: What year is this?

Katherine Boyle: This was 2014. It's funny — when I arrived, people always say about Silicon Valley, "You always feel like you're too late. You missed the big ones." I had missed Facebook. I had missed Airbnb. It felt like I had missed Palantir in 2014, which is comical because even last year you couldn't have missed Palantir. That company is a rocket ship. So in some ways, you always feel like you've missed the boat.

But when I got out there, not knowing anything was really helpful. I was just this former reporter emailing people, trying to figure out what's going on. You and I talked about this earlier — Silicon Valley, for all of its weirdness, the best part is everyone is afraid they're going to miss the next thing. So a young person with no experience with a Stanford email, emailing you saying, "Hey, I'm a former reporter and I'm really interested in your job or your company. Can I sit down with you for 30 minutes or get coffee and hear about what you do?" People will pick up that call.

That's kind of what I did. I was so confused. It was the worst culture shock of my life. I had been around the world, but I had not experienced that insular culture of how tech companies are built. I'm always impressed with how many people picked up that call.

Sean Ryan: So hold on. So you were 100% out of the Washington Post by this time, right?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, I quit my job.

Sean Ryan: So you quit your job and just inserted yourself in the middle of Silicon Valley and started emailing people?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah.

Sean Ryan: Did you have any idea what your business was going to be, what you were going to be doing?

Katherine Boyle: No.

Sean Ryan: You just immersed yourself in it to figure it out?

Katherine Boyle: No. It's interesting because I know Dino has been on your show and he talked about what it was like as a veteran going to business school. You go to business school and think, "I've got two years to figure it out." You get to business school and recruiting starts immediately for jobs. I had no idea. I was like, "What do you mean? I have no idea what I'm going to do. I'm a former reporter." So there was this feeling of being on really shaky ground. But my personality is I do very well in those situations. I do very well when I have no idea what I'm going to do and I have to make a next move.

Crazy story of how I ended up in venture capital. It was 2014 in the fall. No one in business school reads books. They have a library at the business school that has only business books, but they don't have real books. I'm a reader. I walked into the library one day and there's this new book called *Zero to One* on the shelf by this guy named Peter Thiel. I had heard of Peter Thiel because I was a reporter and had read about the Facebook IPO and things. I knew who he was, but I didn't know he was as big of a deal as he has now become in Silicon Valley.

I reached out to Peter Thiel. I wasn't expecting a response. I was very good at reaching out to people, but not everyone would respond. I didn't get a response from him, but he had forwarded my email to one of his junior partners, a principal at his firm Founders Fund named Trey Stevens. Trey and I had overlapped in school. He had actually been at one of the agencies. Whatever I said in my email, Peter thought we would hit it off.

I started talking to Trey, who was brand new in venture capital. Peter had brought him on from Palantir to really look at national security and defense. I told Trey my story. I was a former reporter. It turns out he had at one point wanted to be a reporter in his life. We really hit it off talking. I said, "I'm really bored in business school. I need to do something this summer, but I'd also love to work for you guys. Can I just intern with you?"

Again, to the point of people will not say no more than five or six times. He said no probably five or six times. "We don't have a job for you. What are you going to do here? You don't know anything about technology. You literally just showed up. It's nice. We can talk, I can try to help you, but you really should work at a company. We can't have you in our firm." I just kept emailing. "I don't really want to work in any of these companies. Can I please work for you?" After about four or five no's, he finally said, "Okay, fine. You can come work at Founders Fund."

Founders Fund is a pretty iconic venture firm. I didn't know it at the time. They've invested in SpaceX. Trey would go on to be the chairman of Anduril. He would go on to incubate that company with Palmer. But this was a year and a half before that happened.

Sean Ryan: So what do they have somebody with no tech background doing in a tech firm?

Katherine Boyle: I helped Trey just look at companies. I sat in on every pitch. We were surveying the landscape of which companies are operating in the defense space. Are there any government companies that are actually interesting? We met the Shield AI team. There were a handful of people in and around the space, but not very many.

I always say it was like a gift. It wasn't like I was giving them anything. They would tell me, "Hey, maybe look for some companies or whatever," and I would try to find things that could be relevant for the national security mission. But it was really a gift. That's how all of tech works. Someone gives you a break. If you show up early, you're the first person there, you work your ass off, you do any job they want you to do. That's often what it's like to be in a startup.

I coach a lot of veterans because I have so much empathy. You're coming from a culture that is so different. Veterans will email me and say "Ms. Boyle." I'm like, "Do not call me Ms. Boyle. Call me Katherine. You call a 70-year-old famous venture capitalist by their first name." You have to shed whatever you learned in your previous life and realize you're going into a totally new culture. You have to blend in. You have to learn the culture. That's what your first year in Silicon Valley should be. You should go to a crazy early stage startup or a venture firm that's totally different than anything you've seen. You should just listen. Once you learn the culture and once you learn the language, then you can be an operator. But you have to learn the culture and you have to respect it.

First day at Founders Fund, one of the EAs came over to me. I was wearing heels. I can dress like this now because I'm a Florida lady, but I was in San Francisco. I was wearing heels and nice clothes like I was going to a nice internship. She said, "You need to take that off. I'm going to get you a SpaceX hoodie. You need to wear jeans. You need to blend in here. This is not going to work if you can't blend in." I'm very grateful for that because she was right. You're learning a new culture. You're learning how to operate inside an ecosystem that's nothing like what you've experienced before. When you understand it, then you can start being yourself, a little more flamboyant when you're accepted. But when you're learning the culture, you're there to listen and you're there to work your ass off.

It was an incredible gift to be able to see how companies that are so iconic — no one believed in them. Even in 2015, SpaceX was still seen as, "Oh, how big can that company become?" It wasn't what it is today. To see how people make bets on the future and the philosophy of how they take bets on the future — that completely transformed me and catapulted me into venture capital.

Sean Ryan: Wow. What's one of the first companies that you found interesting that you presented?

Katherine Boyle: When I left business school, I ended up working at another venture capital firm. That was right when Palmer and Trey and Brian and the guys were founding Anduril. I had the luxury of spending a year with these people, really understanding how well they understood the mission, understanding how valuable Palantir talent is to people who've actually worked with the government and that model.

I was probably six months into the job at this new fund. Again, lowest on the totem pole. You come out of school and you're the junior associate who's there to take notes, write memos. You're there to learn the trade. It's an apprentice job. You can ask questions, but you're there to source too. You're there to find companies and be the first person to touch a company and bring it in.

It's a funny story. I was with Trey at In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA's investment arm. They have a big conference every year. We were at that conference, and he said, "We're starting the company." It wasn't even named Anduril yet. He said, "Palmer has just been fired from Facebook. He cares a lot about defense. I think we can convince the head of engineering at Palantir. I think we can convince some of these guys to join, and we're going to start it."

I just said, "I don't care." Of course, I didn't have the authority to say this, but I said, "I don't care whatever you're doing. I want to be an investor in it. I want our firm to be an investor in it. I'm going to get it done." Of course, I can't make that promise because I'm nobody. But I immediately drove home, called the partners and said, "Palmer Luckey is starting this company and we need to be a part of it."

Usually in Silicon Valley, they'd be like, "That's great. This famous founder who sold a company to Facebook for $3 billion is starting a new company. We want in on the second-time founder who knows how to do it." But it was like, "Palmer Luckey? The guy who just got fired for the Hillary billboard? The fascist in Silicon Valley? And what's his company do? They're building a border security company to help ICE?"

I was sort of outed in my firm as, "All right, Katherine's kind of insane." They said, "We're not going to do that." I pushed a bunch and finally we got a tiny little check in. The conversation wasn't even about the company. It was, "If it's this small of a check, we'll see what happens." It kind of skirted in a small check into the seed round. But that gave me entree.

Sean Ryan: What's a small check?

Katherine Boyle: Like a couple million dollars. They had raised what was at the time a very big seed round. It was a $17 million round. People thought that was insane. Now you're seeing seed rounds of hundreds of millions of dollars. But this was because Palmer was extraordinary. He was an extraordinary founder, had an extraordinary exit. But there was definite concern, particularly among the early investors, about whether this was a company that was even going to be able to raise capital.

Katherine Boyle: Because no one actually believes that you can sell into the Department of Defense. Maybe the border security thing can happen, but this is so crazy. Everyone felt like they were kind of throwing away their money. It was a huge crapshoot.

Then it was about a year and a half of really working with them. I was young, enthusiastic. You know Joe Lonsdale, who had already sold multiple companies, he was involved. There were a handful of other people involved. But for the first big round they were doing about a year and a half later, I said, "I want to lead this round. I want our firm to do the big investment into your company."

It took six months of diligence, meeting with as many different types of customers and operators, anyone who could talk about what their tech was doing, to really showcase it to our firm. The crazy thing was, in 2019 when they went out to raise, Palmer pitches what they've done. They already have towers on the border that are actually working. They're already selling to the Department of Defense. They've moved exceptionally fast.

He goes into the room after I've done all this work to show this is an incredible investment. One of the partners raises his hand at the very end and says, "Are you ever going to build missiles? Are you ever going to build weapons?" Palmer says, "Of course. We're going to build what the DOD wants us to build to protect the warfighter." Great answer. He leaves the room and people are like, "We cannot invest in this company anymore."

Sean Ryan: Oh, shit.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. That was how they were viewed across a lot of Silicon Valley. Too much headline risk, too much fear that Palmer's a little bit of a wild card. But also it was, "We're not going to support the Trump administration. We can't do that. We're Silicon Valley. We'll lose our shirt, our LPs will be upset."

To the credit of the firm I was at, it took maybe three days where I said, "No, no, no. These guys understand ethics. They understand just war theory." I ended up writing a 16-page memo in addition to the investment memo that talks about the numbers and how big this company can get, on just war theory, on why this is an ethical product, how the DOD thinks about ethical products. Trey got on the call with all the partners, and he has a theology background as well, talking about why they see this as an ethical company.

Things you shouldn't have to do. If you're in Washington, DC, if you're in a place that understands defense, you should not have to explain why supporting the DOD is good. But this was right after Project Maven, right after the Google employees walked out and said, "We are not supporting the Trump administration and the DOD."

I haven't told this story before, but I had this moment where they were debating the ethics and I was asked to leave the room because I wasn't one of the managing partners. The partnership was going to make a decision. I walked across the street to this church, St. Dominic's in San Francisco. I kneeled down and I prayed to God. I said, "Okay, there's a reason why I've spent a year and a half on this company. This is the most important thing I've ever done, trying to get capital into this company. If it doesn't happen, I'm going to walk in there tomorrow and I'm going to quit my job because you don't want me in venture capital. This is not where you want me to be. I'll figure out something else. I've changed my career before. But if this goes through and we end up leading this investment, this will be my mission. Investing in America. This is it. This is all I care about. These are the companies I want to invest in. This is what America needs more than anything. Silicon Valley doesn't get it yet, but they're going to."

The minute I leave that church, walking back home, five minutes later I get a call from one of the managing partners. He says, "You have the green light. Go give Palmer a term sheet."

Sean Ryan: Wow. That's incredible.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. So it was a crazy story, but that was my first big investment in defense.

Sean Ryan: How long did it take you to get that kind of insight to know that this was the company?

Katherine Boyle: A lot of it comes from the people. I don't know much about technology. I've never built anything in technology. I'm not a technologist by nature. I've learned a lot having been in the industry for 10 years, but that's not how I make decisions.

Venture capitalists have three different dimensions they judge. They judge the market—how big is the market size. DOD has a very big market, $800 billion and growing every year. The product. A lot of technologists who worked at Facebook or Google become VCs and always want to talk about the technology. How does it work? How does it operate? Those people are often genius level. We have a lot of them on our team. But they just know how technology works and have a theory of where technology is going.

I don't care about any of that. All I care about is the people. I'm almost maniacally focused on it. I want to know their story. I want to know who they know. I want to map their network because I want to know who their first 10 hires are. I want them to tell me who their first 10 hires are so I can verify those people are probably going to join them. I want to understand the network node of who these people are and how it's going to expand.

I always say the best early stage investors are building relationships with someone who's going to build a company before that person even realizes they're going to build a company.

Sean Ryan: Say that again.

Katherine Boyle: The best thing you can do as an early stage investor is to build relationships with people who are a director of technology or a very good engineer at a company where, in two or three years, they're probably going to leave and start a company. But they don't know that yet. They have no idea that's on their horizon. But they're going to be a great founder. So you start building a relationship with them so that when they do leave, you're their first call.

There's a lot in common with intelligence operations where you know if someone's going to flip after spending years or months of time with them. You know if someone is going to give you good information even before they know. Same thing with sourcing and reporting. You can spend a lot of time with a source and get nothing, then six months into building the relationship they have a story they want to give you. The best reporters are like that. Same is true of venture capitalists. It's figuring out who are the people who matter and making sure they call you first.

After Anduril, it became clear that Katherine's going to invest in this stuff. This is what she cares about. I started writing very publicly about it. A lot of people weren't even talking about it. People were still afraid of it. There were firms that couldn't invest in it because their limited partner agreement said they can't touch weapons. There were firms in Silicon Valley that could not invest in Anduril because their limited partners wouldn't let them.

Even after that investment in 2019, the number of founders who said, "You're an idiot. That's a dumb investment. They're never going to make it." That was common. But there was another class of people who said, "Wow, you're a fascist too. You're a bad person. You must really be on that MAGA train." The horrible things people would say. And it's like, I care a lot about my country. That's why I'm doing it. And I think there's a business opportunity here. It's not just, "I'm a patriotic capitalist and I'm throwing money away." I think this is the biggest business opportunity of our time, and it's sitting right in front of my face and no one's looking at it. So I'm going to invest in it, and I'm going to be the first call of these people who want to work here.

Sean Ryan: That's some serious insight. At that time, there was a strike at Google. Very anti-Trump, but it seemed anti-US. Nobody wanted to upgrade our defense tech. You're on the precipice of that change. What was it that changed? It seems like Silicon Valley's done a complete 180 now.

Katherine Boyle: Yes, a lot has changed. Multiple things changed at the same time.

The first thing is Silicon Valley likes winners. We're very memetic. VCs will feel very strongly, "I don't want to work with a defense company" in 2017, and those same VCs will be begging to get in a round three or four years later. Things move very fast in Silicon Valley. People completely update their knowledge.

SpaceX became an extraordinary company. Palantir went public. People started realizing there are examples of companies that have really taken off. Anduril changed this for defense. In the early days it was controversial, but the minute Anduril started getting all the great engineers, crushing it on the contracting side, building really cool products, Silicon Valley loves to be around cool things.

The thing Elon did for the rest of the ecosystem is he made hardware manufacturing, he made space, he made these really difficult things cool again in a way no one had ever done. Aerospace before him was a backwater. No one was majoring in aerospace engineering. No one wanted to work at those companies. The first 10 years of SpaceX were hard, but by 2015, 2016, they were re-landing rockets. In 2019, they were about to start Starlink, this crazy idea no one thought would work. Look at it now.

Silicon Valley likes winners. The minute they started seeing winners, it was like, "Okay, you can make money doing this." That brought along the rest of the ecosystem.

On the DOD side, this movement was really created by the DOD. Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in 2015 launched DIU. He was the first person inside—during the Obama administration—who said, "You have all these incredible engineers in Silicon Valley. None of them know anything about the military. They don't see anyone in the military. We're not out there." In Washington, DC, if you go on the Metro, you see people in uniform headed to the Pentagon. It's part of your life. You're not as weirded out by defense culture. Silicon Valley doesn't see anything. A lot of these people are new to America. They have very different views. His view was, "We have to go out to Silicon Valley and actually have an outpost there."

Sean Ryan: What is DIU?

Katherine Boyle: Defense Innovation Unit. It was the DOD initiative of "we have to make"—again, it was as much a relationship initiative. Now it's a contracting initiative. They actually have real budget and it's the third iteration of how it's structured. But in the beginning, it was, "We just got to go out and introduce ourselves to these people, show them who we are, show them what we care about. People on the ground understand the technologies being built. Really create real communication."

So you had the DOD focused on this. Then you had winners in Silicon Valley—people who had been at SpaceX for 10 years leaving and saying, "Maybe I'll start a company in deep tech or hard tech or the physical world. Maybe defense is where I want to do it. Maybe I want to do another aerospace company. Maybe I want to build a nuclear company." You had this exodus of extraordinary talent who had all been trained by Elon. Now it's happening with Anduril too, all been trained by Palmer, where they just know how to manufacture things. It's been extraordinary to watch the number of young people who spend a couple years at a great company. Palantir has this tradition as well—it mints founders of new companies that operate in the government space.

So one, you have winners. Two, the customers changed their view. The last thing that really changed was COVID happened. People lifted their head and said, "Something is wrong with America." People started really thinking about how to solve real problems. Right after that, the Russian invasion in Ukraine changed everything for a young generation of engineers who had never seen war. They're 20 years old. They have no memory of September 11th. They maybe had no exposure to the military. But they're watching how FPV drones are being used on the Ukrainian battlefield, and that is inspiring them. "Okay, we need to build for this mission."

Sean Ryan: Interesting. We talked a little bit about the culture in Silicon Valley, but I don't think we got too into it. I'm curious what it was five years ago. A lot has changed about how Silicon Valley views American interest, the business opportunity, and the mission. You talked about how Ukraine changed everything for these young engineers. But there was this longstanding culture from 2000 all the way up until Anduril existed where there was a belief you could not sell into the Department of Defense. Because of the procurement process, it would be impossible for startups working on 18-month timelines who take capital and need to get big as quickly as possible. They would hit the valley of death of the DOD and it would be impossible to break through. So you had a financial class and a founder class that just didn't think about the DOD.

Katherine Boyle: It was an interesting time in Silicon Valley. A lot of people look at the old school Silicon Valley—Bob Noyce, Fairchild Semiconductor, one of the earliest venture-backed big companies, then Intel. That type of engineer, he was an Iowa farm boy. Those were the people who put a man on the moon. That was old school Silicon Valley.

I think something really shifted. Sometimes people point to the early 2000s. I think Silicon Valley really shifted post-Facebook. Facebook started in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room. A bunch of kids went out, then a bunch of Stanford kids joined. But what Facebook did alongside Google was make tech sexy for a certain type of worker who is not technical, who goes to a fancy school. It used to be if you went to Harvard or Yale, you'd go work on Wall Street, investment banking. Around 2008, 2009, you started seeing these really talented, really bright, but sort of indoctrinated Ivy League types come out to Silicon Valley. They brought with them the same thing journalists have—the same activism, the same set of beliefs about how the world works, and they brought that into the company culture.

Google encouraged it. "Bring your whole self to work." We have laundry here, free gyms, all sorts of perks for you to stay here constantly and work. But it was a "bring your whole self to work" identity thing. A lot of the radical activism we're seeing on campuses now, but have seen for the last 10 years, got imported into Silicon Valley with Facebook, with Google, with these app companies—web 2.0, the big companies of the last generation.

Sean Ryan: Twitter.

Katherine Boyle: Twitter, yeah. These people who were working there weren't—I mean, yes, they had the cracked engineers. But then you also had this keyboard class, this keyboard warrior class, where it was really sexy to work in tech. It became the dominant thing coming out of prestigious schools. I think they brought a lot of liberal trends, liberal fads into the companies that looked very different than what tech was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Before, it was hardware engineers, guys who just really wanted to build things. When you get into post-Internet and the app culture, it became something totally different.

At the same time, Silicon Valley is about 40 minutes south of San Francisco. The hubs for Facebook and Google are down in what's known as the South Bay. But San Francisco really wasn't a tech city until 2009, 2010. Twitter headquartered itself in San Francisco in 2009. You saw a lot of tech workers moving to the city. San Francisco was one of the most radical, most open, iconoclastic cultural cities in the world. It's its own weird culture. Anything goes. You get these radical cult-like experiences.

There's a great book about San Francisco called *Season of the Witch*. It talks about how the spirit of San Francisco has always been people joining cults, the hippie movement. These are the most radical people in the world. You meld that with the tech people who are also iconoclastic, who go to schools like Berkeley or Harvard, and they get these radical ideas. It's like, "Okay, we're going to bring that into the company."

Twitter became the iconic example of this. They became so radicalized about certain ideas and viewpoints that they would start completely deplatforming people who misgendered someone, or deplatforming the president of the United States after the 2020 election. The radicalization of Silicon Valley was happening at the same time as this other shift.

Things are going radical. A lot of people have their extremist liberal beliefs. But then you have a backlash to it. Anduril in many cases was a huge backlash. "Hey, we just want to build stuff for our country. We're not Democrats. We're not Republicans. We're just a bunch of engineers who want to build hard things and put our heads down and work."

I think that's the underpinning of the American Dynamism movement. People got sick of the culture wars, particularly the culture wars being fought in all of big tech. Even big tech has gotten sick of it. You see Mark Zuckerberg has completely changed his tune on a lot of things. He said the culture became too feminized at Facebook. What he's really saying is, "We became way too radical. We became way too hall monitor in our views of social media and free speech."

Sean Ryan: How much time was wasted on that kind of stuff?

Katherine Boyle: So much.

Sean Ryan: And how much more innovation would have happened had they not been so wrapped up in their own ideologies and cultures?

Katherine Boyle: Totally. That's why when Elon bought Twitter, he said, "We could fire 75% of the people at Twitter and the service still ran perfectly." What were these people doing? They were de-platforming people or they were the trust and safety team making sure things on Twitter were fine. There were still massive problems at Twitter—ridiculous amounts of porn and child pornography that they didn't deal with when they were there. Elon got in and saw, "This is completely backwards. We need one fourth of the people who are here. We need great engineers and we need to solve the real problems at this platform. And we need to have free speech."

In some ways, a lot of these companies got really fat. The business models were good, they were really bloated, but people weren't working. What were they doing? They were becoming activists. It's not just tech. It was happening at the tail end of my time at the Washington Post. A lot of these young people get out of college, they think they're activists, they go work at a company and they want to be activists. They don't want to do the work of the company—to build an app or to write a story. They want to go there and shake up the company. They want to be activists inside the company.

What really changed in Silicon Valley that led people to say, "Okay, we can build hard things"? That's why there's a lot of people focusing on building things that are so hard that you don't get these activists into your company.

There was another company called Coinbase. The founder, Brian Armstrong, wrote a letter in 2020 called the Coinbase Memo. He said, "If you want to be an activist"—it was during BLM and just after Me Too—"you can go somewhere else. Our mission is to focus on crypto. It's to focus on ensuring that we have the best customer support and that we serve our customers who are interested in crypto and expand that customer base. If you care about anything else at this company, you can walk out the door." He lost 6% of his company that day.

Sean Ryan: No kidding.

Katherine Boyle: He'll say it publicly. That's the best thing he's ever done. Those were the 6% of people who were causing a lot of problems. The same can be said about Google and Project Maven. It's only a tiny portion of people inside a massive company. I think it was like 2%, 1%, less than 1% of people signed the Project Maven letter and walked out saying, "We're not going to work with the DOD." But that can cause so much damage to a company if the company allows the activist class to control them.

I think the thing people learned from watching Elon completely remake Twitter, and Brian at Coinbase really say, "Hey, see the door," is a lot of founders are now saying, "Hey, we can work on these hard problems. We also don't have to be beholden to an activist class. We have free speech now. We can say what we want on X."

Katherine Boyle: Like we're not going to get in trouble if you could get reported to HR if you say the wrong name of someone or some wrong word. And I think that was happening at the same time, sort of the backlash against all of the wokeism and sort of rigid orthodoxy of how you have to act. And that kind of opened up the way for American dynamism. Because I really think that the companies that are building these hard things in the physical world, they just want to put their head down and build. They don't want to talk politics. They don't want to know who you voted for. They really just want to build hard things and they care about the country. And it's like they care about the mission they are working on.

Sean Ryan: How long was this process? Because like I said, from an outsider it looks like it was about a year. Like it's like a light switch to get rid of that rot. Was it a lot longer than that?

Katherine Boyle: It was a lot longer. I mean, for someone so I can say, there were a handful of us. You've had Joe on, you've had Palmer on, you've had people on who, you know, Sean at Palantir. There's a handful of people who I think have been sort of saying the same things over and over and over again about like, it is okay to build for government, it's okay.

My own sort of experience of where I saw just a huge change is I was having lots of conversations with Marc Andreessen, the founder of our firm, about a lot of the issues that were happening in Silicon Valley. And I kind of told him, I said, I think that this category of investment is not just one-off companies. It's not just going to be SpaceX and Anduril, but there's going to be an explosion of these companies. And this was during COVID. So I wrote this memo for him.

I ended up joining the firm. My partner David Ulevitch and I, we always joked we were sort of competing for the same companies. But there was such a small group of people who were competing to get on the same deals. He called me one day after we had dinner with Marc and he was like, "Do you just want to come do it here? Just come here and build. Let's build a practice together around these ideas." So I always give major credit to Marc and David for having the foresight of saying, hey, this is a real thing. Because a lot of people didn't think it was real.

A lot of people thought, okay, yeah, you'll have an Anduril, but there's only going to be one Anduril. You'll have a SpaceX, there's only going to be one SpaceX. But all of these other young companies, the Dinos of the world, the Shield AIs, they're only going to be one of each. And our view was like, no, this is the next 10, 20, 30 years of American innovation. If the first 25 years of the second American century, 2000 to 2025, if that was investing in apps, investing in software, software eating the world, the next 25 years are taking all of that software and building for the physical world. So it's critical minerals, it's aerospace, it's defense, it's infrastructure, logistics, all the things that touch the physical world.

So it was actually January 2022. It was three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. I just joined the firm. I put out this manifesto called American Dynamism. And I wrote about how the next 25 years are going to be these categories. I named companies like Anduril, we'd already invested in those companies, knew them very well. But I said, you're already seeing so many extraordinary engineers leaving these companies and wanting to build new versions of Anduril, new versions of SpaceX. Like building the next generation of aerospace and defense, public safety. The entire public safety field has been completely transformed by technology. And we have great companies that are operating with police forces across the country doing really important work using machine learning and AI. And we were seeing this, but it was sort of this kind of secret. People hadn't been talking about it publicly.

So we announced the thesis and I've never seen such an explosion. To me, this was probably the biggest moment in my career of seeing the number of people emailing me, retweeting it, saying, "This is where Silicon Valley is going." And within six months, the term American dynamism had become this kind of hilarious internet meme. It was everywhere. People were using it as a joke. People were using it as, "Hey, I'm an American dynamism company." Investors were raising funds off of it saying we want an American dynamism practice. We ended up raising a very large fund to invest in the category.

The thing I think I'm most proud of, because it was a huge shock. It wasn't a shock to the engineers. It wasn't a shock to the veterans, but it was a huge shock to the investor class when we said the word America.

Sean Ryan: No kidding.

Katherine Boyle: I had been saying American dynamism for a long time, but I said, this practice has to be named American dynamism. And when people ask us what it is, it is a very clear meme. We're investing in companies that are supporting the national interest, full stop. And we're not going to be ashamed about it. Again, it was 2022. It was before Russia invaded Ukraine. We're not going to be ashamed of it. But by their nature, these companies have to sell to the DOD. They sell to the DOD before they sell to other countries. They're not global companies. They are American companies. They are very different than the software that sells all over the world that can operate on the internet. These are physical, different things. And we have to be very clear with our language that these are American companies.

And the investor class, I think, was stunned, mainly because a lot of our rival firms were still investing in China. They had still made so much money in China, and this is a whole other story. But when we said America, it was like we planted the flag of our own country and said, yeah, we're going to build for this country. And it was probably the most refreshing thing to founders because they had never heard an investor. They had never heard—and again, having Marc Andreessen say it. I'm just a little old me, right? But when Marc Andreessen, the founder of the internet, basically, the godfather of Silicon Valley, comes out and he says, "We're investing in America," people perk up and they listen. And so it completely changed the game.

Later it became a meme. Other people started raising funds off of it. But the thing I think I'm most proud of is within a year, a lot of peer funds, firms of our size or other famous firms that operate in the Valley, almost all of them had decoupled from their China practices.

Sean Ryan: No kidding.

Katherine Boyle: At the same time, Mike Gallagher and the China Special Committee that was happening in Congress, a bunch of people in the DC side, they kind of woke up about this. Like, okay, Silicon Valley is actually saying, "Hey, we need to invest in America too." Important people in Silicon Valley are saying that. And so they started putting a little bit of pressure. The TikTok wars were happening. People were really starting to say, "Okay, how is TikTok being weaponized against American kids?" And it just became too much for a lot of these firms who had been investing for 15 years in China to be able to make a good faith argument that it's fine, that we're sending American money, American know-how, and that we're making tons of money off of technology that's being used as a weapon against the United States.

And so pretty much all of these firms had to divest, decouple themselves. They turned into separate funds where there was no sharing of information, no sharing of carry or the economics among the partners. But I think five years ago, I wouldn't have believed that would have happened. It was just too much money. It was too big business. People had way too many interests in China. And if anything, what it taught me is if you speak truth, if you say, "I'm not afraid to say I love this country and that I don't care about making money in China because I love this country," and if you say that, people will get in line. Most people believe that in Silicon Valley. They just never heard it before.

Sean Ryan: That's great. Man, kudos to you. That's incredible. I mean, in some ways, it shows the power of memes because it really only takes one Joe, one Mark, one of these guys, one Sean, one Palmer to stand up and say the hard thing. And if you say it enough, like Palmer had been saying since 2017, "The CCP is our enemy. The CCP is our enemy. We should not be supporting anything to do with China. We should not be supporting them. We should not be investing there." And in some ways, it wears people down if people hear the meme long enough. And in some ways, I feel like the meme of American dynamism is even more powerful than the investing practice. It's not just an investing practice. It's a true philosophy that if we are going to build hard things in this country and go back to an era of the moon landing and the Manhattan Project, we have to be clear about what we are investing in and we are investing in American interest.

How did you meet Mark?

Katherine Boyle: So it's a funny story. I'd say there were a handful of people during COVID who kind of saw the craziness that was happening in Silicon Valley, saw the craziness of the culture war. This has been reported before, but Mark's very big on the group chats. So I met him through—actually, this is very funny—I met him through an app in COVID called Clubhouse, where it was sort of like Twitter spaces. But I was very bored. I was also pregnant with my first child. I was kind of locked up in my house. And I always joke my husband was like, "After the first month of COVID, it was great that you had Clubhouse because you could talk to other people and you could stop annoying me."

So I was up in the middle of the night talking on Clubhouse. And of course, there were a handful of people there and Mark was one of them. So I got to know Mark through Clubhouse and through a lot of these chats of people who I think were really interested in these ideas of where is Silicon Valley going? What does it mean? Again, this was sort of the height of the culture war. And I do think it was forbidden. People were getting left and right kicked off of Twitter. And so there were these underground—it's kind of funny to say now because all of the things that were being said are being said publicly now. It's not like there were some crazy conversations happening, but you were so forced to falsify your preferences publicly if you didn't want to get canceled that you really couldn't talk about things. And you could on Clubhouse in some ways, and you could in the group chats.

And so I got to know Mark and David and a bunch of people at Andreessen Horowitz. And I'd say a lot of these ideas were really sort of talked about and debated on an app that was sort of this ephemeral thing that was really important during COVID because no one had a way to connect. But I also tell people a lot, especially young people, you'd be surprised who you can meet on the internet. You'd be surprised the people you can connect with and have deep relationships with, even if you haven't had lunch with them. You don't have to go to someone's house or office and have coffee with them. You can have deep connections with people just by writing and thinking online. And I spend a lot of time on the internet. And I live in the middle of nowhere, so I need to spend a lot of time on the internet. But that's how I got acquainted with Mark and with a lot of people in Silicon Valley and with a lot of people at my current firm too.

Sean Ryan: It's just really incredible that you come from zero tech background until where you are today. I think that's just really fascinating.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. But I do think, I look at someone like Dino, who I think your conversation with him is extraordinary. In some ways, he's even the example of speed running that process even more. Because he's building, he's the CEO of a massive company and he had no tech relationships. He knew a little bit about tech, but he's not a cracked engineer himself. He went from being a Navy SEAL to now running one of the most important companies for the Navy in three years. He went to business school, yes. He went to private equity. But the things he was doing in private equity are not at all like what he's doing here.

And so I think it says something about the culture of tech, which is—and I always tell veterans this because I get so many people saying, "How do you transition?" It is a very open culture by its nature. People are open about meeting people, talking to people.

Sean Ryan: Yes. Yes.

Katherine Boyle: It's kind of monolithic. But if you have an idea that's different, there are people who will take a bet on you. If you seem to know what you're talking about, if you know the right people, if you have a talented team surrounding you. And so I do think it's probably one of the few places that misfits can go in America. You couldn't go to New York City and crack your way into different parts of finance. There's too many places in New York where they care who your daddy is, or what school you went to, what high school you went to. There's too much of that kind of elite culture in Washington and New York. But something about Silicon Valley is, you can just be loud on the internet and get people's attention and have everyone important in Silicon Valley talking about you, making fun of you, mocking you. But you can become the center of attention very quickly.

Sean Ryan: Interesting.

Katherine Boyle: And so I really encourage young people to do that, especially if they're a talented engineer. You don't have to know anyone.

Sean Ryan: How does venture capital work? It seems to me like venture capital runs Silicon Valley. I've had a number of these guys in here. It's insanely smart, but the trend seems to be go to Silicon Valley, start talking about your idea, start working on it, and somebody is going to invest in it.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. I mean, it's not guaranteed someone's going to invest in it. But what's interesting is Silicon Valley used to be like the Florentine Five Families. You have like five venture firms. They all sit on Sand Hill Road, which is the classic place where all these firms were built. And companies would go by and they'd pitch. And then a firm would pick one company. It's not like that anymore. It is ruthlessly competitive. There is more capital than there has ever been in the asset class. I think there's something like $300 billion of dry powder just raised now, which dry powder is the amount of capital on the sidelines that's going to come into companies. Something like $1.25 trillion AUM. It is not a—they used to call it a cottage industry. People used to ignore it. It's not. It is how we've built companies over the last 25 years.

Now, I always point to this graph. I wish I had the graphic. If you looked at the Fortune 100, and then if you even went further down and you said, what are the 10 most valuable companies in the world in 2000? Four of them were American companies. I think two of them were tech companies. If you do that same experiment in 2025, nine of them are American companies. Eight of them are tech companies. And the only company that's not a tech company that's the most valuable company in the world in America is Berkshire Hathaway, which owns a massive chunk of Apple. So tech is the story of the 21st century. It's how we've built companies.

A lot of the companies that are now in that most valuable 10 weren't even founded in 2000. Facebook wasn't around. Google had just gone public in 2004. It is extraordinary that we have been able to build companies that big that surpass all of industry across the world in 25 years. But part of that is because of the venture capital industry, which is not this cottage industry of a couple people sitting around doling out money anymore. It is billions of dollars given by what's known as institutional limited partners. So what they are is they're the big pension funds, every state has massive pension funds, nonprofits, university endowments, sovereign wealth funds across the world. Every country has sovereign wealth money that they want to put into various things, and now they all want to put money into technology.

And so when you add all of that up, everyone recognizes that they need exposure to high venture capital companies that are going to go public and that are going to be the next Uber, the next Stripe, the next Facebook, the next Google. It's just so much bigger than it was even 10 years ago. And it's become really competitive because any talented engineer now that has a group of people with a good idea, it's never been—I don't want to say it's easy. It's easier to get seed capital. It's easier to get someone to bet on you because there's more capital in the industry.

And what was a problem five years ago is that because American dynamism didn't exist, because this category of innovation didn't exist, you couldn't go into a venture capital firm and say, "I'm going to build a hypersonics company." People would be like, "What?" There's no ecosystem of people who are going to invest in that. There's no downstream capital of people in the later rounds. And the way venture capital is structured, every 18 to 24 months, a company will raise an additional round of capital. And if they're successful, it makes their valuation go up. It makes the amount the company's worth go up. And it allows them to expand. It allows them to grow the number of engineers, the number of people working there, the number of products they're offering. And the goal is don't go out of business, but grow as fast as possible. And each new layer of investor will come in with a bigger check to fund the research and development, to fund the growth of the company until you go public.

It sounds completely different to any other way that we build businesses, but the speed at which you're supposed to grow is, the faster you grow, the better. And so there's a view that that is the best way to build companies, but that did not exist five years ago for this category of building the physical world. There was no way that you're going to be able to get through the valley of death, get later investors to put hundreds of millions of dollars into a satellite bus company.

And I think the biggest thing that's changed is all of those partners that I talk about, the people who are investing in the funds, the sovereign wealth funds, the pension funds, all of those people in the ecosystem now believe that you can make money off of defense companies and they want exposure to it. They want to invest in the next Anduril. And so to me, whenever I go to the DOD, I'm like, "This is the biggest boon for you. This is going to save us because you have capital from all over the country, every endowment, all over the world, frankly, that wants to invest in American innovation, American dynamism, and you don't have to use taxpayer money to do the R&D."

There are hundreds of companies in El Segundo right now that are all doing the R&D, that are all raising outside capital from people who know that they might lose their money. But that's the business model. You lose your money in some cases. You win in some, you lose in others. And that didn't used to be directed at America. It did not used to be directed at the Department of Defense. It's never been directed at these categories in the way it is today. So it does on the outside look easy, like everyone can just come in and raise capital, but you do have to have a great idea. You have to know the right people. You have to network with the right people. Which is not impossible. That's what I love about Dino's story. He didn't know anybody. He didn't know who Joe Lonsdale was when he took him out to do a workout. He just wanted to do a defense company. And so there's so many stories of just being young and hungry and determined and have a good idea and the right people will find you.

Sean Ryan: When you're looking for these companies, we had talked about it. You look at their network and you look at who they are as a person and their values. But what about the idea?

Katherine Boyle: The idea matters a lot. I mean, there's examples where I've invested in people pre-idea.

Sean Ryan: Pre-idea?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah.

Sean Ryan: How do you invest somebody pre-idea? What are you investing in? Where do they put the money?

Katherine Boyle: Well, in John's case, who's the founder of Cape, I waited until he had the entity formed and then we gave him the company. So when I say we invest before the company even exists, there is a company. It's just sometimes he doesn't know what he's going to do. There are some founders where you don't know. I even say Anduril is a great example of this. Yes, they started off with Century Tower, but products three, four, and five, they had no idea what those products were going to be. And some of those have just been extraordinarily successful. And so a lot of founders learn on the job. They're talking to new customers every day. And it's like, "Actually, maybe we should do this instead." They call it the pivot. In the Valley, it's infamous. "Oh, the company is pivoting into a different direction." But a pivot isn't seen as a bad thing. It's seen as, "Oh, they learned something new and they're taking that knowledge and they're building something with it."

It's much more common to invest in a company post-idea, post-team. The pitch deck oftentimes explains the problem and the solution. Oftentimes there's a product built. But for early, early stage investing, which is where I like to invest, sometimes you don't need it. Sometimes it's just about a credible team coming together and you having belief that that team can actually pull it off based on their history. A lot of the teams that I've invested in, the head of manufacturing was doing something at SpaceX, which makes me know that they know how to do manufacturing. Or the CTO was at another company where it's very clear that you can reference them and know what they actually built. So their reputation sort of precedes them. They wrote this paper. Or they built this product at Palantir. Brian Schimpf, the CEO of Anduril, he's sort of legendary as one of the best engineers, best coders that's ever come out of Palantir. And so when you hear that about someone and it's like, okay, now they're going to come be CEO of Anduril, you don't worry that much about whether they're going to be able to build just an incredible product.

Sean Ryan: Gotcha. What are some of the companies that you're most excited about that you guys have invested in?

Katherine Boyle: The thing that's happened that surprised me the most, everyone kind of knows the Andurils, the Ceronics, the companies that are selling directly to the DoD. The thing that surprised me the most is how many companies want to build the tier one supplier, basically rebuild the defense industrial base and not sell directly to the Department of Defense, but sell to those Raytheons, the Lockheed Martins, and the Andurils. They'll work with anyone, but really build out the supply chain. And that's where I've been investing a lot.

We have a great company called Apex Space that's building modular satellite buses. The view in the space industry—space, to me, is going to be the next theater. It's going to be the next space warfare. We really have to think a lot about it. But you can't be good at space warfare if you don't have enough stuff. If you don't have the actual platforms to send payloads up to space on.

Sean Ryan: Logistics.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. SpaceX can get things to space, but the biggest problem that the DOD has, and it's a problem that China's really focused on as well, is it can take three years to get a satellite bus. Which is just the thing that has the energy, the comms equipment. Every satellite can operate with the same bus. The way that the primes do work is the government will say, "We're sending up this payload and this is how we want it designed." So they'll design a brand new bus every time they do new non-recurring engineering for the product. And then they'll send the payload up. And it can take three years to get a satellite bus. So this company is building satellite buses in 30 days.

Sean Ryan: In 30 days? From three years to 30 days?

Katherine Boyle: They went from clean sheet design to their first mission in 13 months. First working mission with payloads in space and low Earth orbit. A brand new company that at that time had only 30 employees and had raised tens of millions of dollars, but wasn't SpaceX. But if a brand new company can go from forming a company to putting something in space with important primes in 13 months, you should be able to do the Henry Ford manufacturing line of satellite buses and be able to build thousands and thousands of satellite buses a year for the DOD.

And that's what China's doing. China is maniacally focused on space and they are maniacally focused on how to build as many buses as possible so that they can own the satellite infrastructure in low Earth orbit. It's something we're going to have to worry about because right now we're in the lead in space. I actually think that's the theater where we should feel the most confidence because Elon and SpaceX have done an incredible service for this country with what they're doing with StarShield and StarLink.

But the other companies coming up want to be able to build as quickly and as fast as possible. The big fear I have is that the government's going to say, "We've written the requirements so that we need this thing on this bus." It's like, no, we just need the bus that can do 90% of the job. Just get it up as fast as possible and make them as fast as possible. We need to produce as quickly as we can.

So this company just builds a bus. It brings things to space. They can take any payload to space. They have three models: one for LEO, one for GEO, one for a different orbit. For 90% of payloads, that bus is going to be perfect. Because they're only designing something three times versus designing a brand new thing every time they need to send something up, you take out all the design work, you crunch all the R&D, and then you build a system that is designed for manufacturing. You manufacture as quickly as possible.

That methodology of manufacturing—I think people underestimate the impact Elon Musk has had on the country. He's had an incredible impact on a bunch of companies. But the thing he taught people is that the best part is no part. You have to make the product as simple as possible so that you can manufacture it as quickly as possible. If you make it simple and modular, something that can just be churned out, where you don't have to design something new and change your manufacturing process every single time, you'll have fewer problems with quality control. You'll have fewer problems with something blowing up or malfunctioning. If you're only designing a system where you don't change it and you keep it simple, it's going to be far more successful in space. It's going to be far more successful on the road.

That process has now graduated tens of thousands of people out of Tesla and SpaceX—engineers who understand how to design for manufacturing and how to link engineering and manufacturing. For a very long time, that is not how people viewed how you build. Vice President J.D. Vance actually talked about this. He came and spoke at our summit. He said the biggest lie America was ever told about manufacturing was that you could divorce the design from the manufacturing.

Of course, we did that. Apple's the best example. If you open up an iPhone, it says "Designed in California." There's this belief that all the premium jobs are the design jobs and the manufacturing jobs are the cheap jobs, and you can outsource that anywhere. But linking them is the most important thing. Design for manufacturing, where you link those roles in a company, is how you manufacture things that are simple, good, and do it as quickly as possible.

That's the philosophy of Elon Musk. That's why everything he has done has been successful and a lot of other people who do manufacturing are not. But now there are thousands of founders who have come out of his ethos and the gospel of Elon. They know how to build like that. They get on the factory floor and that's what they do. The DOD can just pick winners. They can say, "This is what we need. This one works the best. You have 100 of them? We'll take them." That didn't exist even five years ago, and it's only going to grow.

Sean Ryan: Now Apple's a wildly successful company as well, so it did work for them, or is it not working for them?

Katherine Boyle: It worked for them in that it saved them a lot of money. But this is what's interesting. We were talking earlier about this Apple in China book that came out. I think it's rewriting the narrative of what Apple did. It wasn't like Apple went to China and said, "These guys know how to manufacture, we're going to give them our goals." Apple trained all of the people in China to do manufacturing. It was something like $28 million over the last 10 years that they've been there training, which is the workforce of California.

The interesting stat that this writer notes is that Apple invested something like $58 billion per year into China so that they could invest in these manufacturing hubs and factories. When you compare it to the Marshall Plan, it's something like 2x the entire Marshall Plan that Apple has invested in China over the last 10 years. The shocking thing about divorcing manufacturing and moving it out of America is that it wasn't like they had the people and the systems and the know-how and they were helping us. Apple made an active choice to train those people and to give them the knowledge of how to build.

Until this book came out, I don't think people really recognized just how much capital American companies were putting into China to train them on things we know how to do. The point of the Vice President's speech was more about bringing this design-for-manufacturing view back, where you design where you manufacture. That is Elon's view, but it's really the view of a lot in defense tech today.

Sean Ryan: How quickly has that shifted back to the U.S. on the manufacturing side?

Katherine Boyle: When we talk about what keeps me up at night, it is really, really hard to build factories that compete with the manufacturing and production capabilities of China. This started 10, 15 years ago with Apple, but there are many good examples of companies that were invested in by American venture capital firms in China that are way ahead in terms of production.

I always say the biggest scandal—Apple is a good example of us taking our knowledge and know-how into China and teaching them something that was an American secret in many cases. But the biggest scandal of Silicon Valley is that Silicon Valley did that too. In 2008, 2009, venture capital firms that are very large and very successful went into China and taught them how to do early stage investing. The simple overview I gave of how venture capital works—they went in there and trained people as though they were training their own associates in Silicon Valley. They told them how to build these companies.

The venture capital ecosystem is American dynamism. It is the thing that allows America to be dominant in the global economy. It's how we build tech companies. And we just went over there as venture capitalists—I shouldn't say "we" because it wasn't my firm, it wasn't me—but VCs went over there and shared information, shared limited partners, shared all the aspects and functions of how you build an incredible, legacy-defining venture firm. Over 20 years, China has a true ecosystem of tech companies now. They all work with the CCP. They figured out how to build in the confines of how China expects them to build.

This is scandalous. Apple and China is scandalous—that we invested that much money into another country's manufacturing regime and not into our own. Why didn't we do that for the state of Ohio? Why didn't we do that in the state of Florida? What was it about America that Apple didn't want to invest in our own manufacturing capabilities 15 years ago so that they could make 500,000 iPhones in a day? That is the thing that's going to be hard to overcome. Now, it's happening on the defense side because you have to manufacture in the U.S. and there is this "manufacture where you are" ethos. But it's the thing that keeps me up at night: the production gap.

Sean Ryan: We talked a little bit about Chinese espionage in Silicon Valley at breakfast this morning. How prevalent is that over there?

Katherine Boyle: It's pretty prevalent. From what I've heard from people I know inside the DOD and various agencies, there are more spies in Washington D.C. than any other city in America, and number two is Silicon Valley. It's mostly Chinese spies. There have been a lot of stories recently about things that happened where it's clearly espionage. There are spies that are in big companies stealing—the last 30 years of Silicon Valley, how is China caught up so quickly? A lot of these people are stealing the secrets out of the companies and taking the intellectual property back. That's a known story.

I think areas that are even more shocking are how the universities play into this. There was a story in the Stanford Review, a student paper at Stanford, saying there are known agents on Stanford campus—basically spies—that are either professors or working with professors, stealing AI secrets from Stanford. That's happening across all of our great university systems. Anyone that has serious knowledge—the Chinese have been very good at infiltrating those systems.

I also think the thing that's sort of misunderstood about Silicon Valley is that because it's such an open culture, anyone can come and have a coffee and learn about things and infiltrate the culture. In 2015, 2016, when I was more open about investing in deep tech, I would always get emails from random Chinese venture capitalists. It happens less now, but Chinese venture capitalists who had a small firm—you didn't know where the money was from—they were really interested in your companies and wanted to learn more. The DOD was very worried about that because of CFIUS concerns, Chinese capital getting on the cap tables of important companies. But the bigger danger was just completely infiltrating the culture, which is what's happened in Silicon Valley. You can't really divorce a lot of tech culture from that. They understand tech culture. They're there. They're completely part of it.

We need much, much better security around a lot of these AI projects in particular, a lot of these AI companies. It's clear that they're being targeted for espionage purposes. How did the Chinese catch up so quickly? This is a whole-of-society project for them. Silicon Valley has this Pollyanna view: "We're this open ecosystem, anyone can come here and build." It's part of the reason why it works—you have an open society where anyone takes a phone call. But if you're working on behalf of a foreign government, it's not easy for nobody to infiltrate it with no resources. How easy is it for someone who's been trained to infiltrate a society, a company, or an ecosystem to capture the intelligence they need? It is a very easy target.

Sean Ryan: Let's talk about the hypersonic company.

Katherine Boyle: Castellan. It's another great story, a company I met very early in its trajectory. It explains why it's so important to invest in people that have seen it before. The team was working at SpaceX. A lot of the team was on the government sales side. They were part of Starshield, selling to the government, working on classified projects. The founder will tell the story that every time he would talk to people inside the DOD, they would say the biggest issue for America is we have no hypersonic weapons. Our missiles will be depleted. I think Palmer talked about this—if we were in a potential hot war with China, our missiles would be depleted within eight days in some scenario running. This has been top of mind for DOD for a very long time.

The founder consistently talked about this inside of SpaceX, but SpaceX is maniacally focused on going to Mars. The sorts of projects that get done at SpaceX—they have many projects and many types of things they're building—but hypersonics was not on the menu. So he and a number of his colleagues left in 2023 to start this company really focused from day one on hypersonic missiles, long-range hypersonic strike missiles.

The thing I found so interesting is going back to 2019 where Palmer said the M word. He said "missiles" in a pitch to a bunch of investors, and they freaked out. Missiles? You're going to invest in missiles and hypersonic weapons and things that are kinetic? No, no, no. That was crossing the line. This was 2023. I brought them in to the entire firm at Andreessen Horowitz for the pitch. I remember saying to my partner David, "I didn't ask, but do you think anyone's going to care that we're investing in missiles? The first slide is 'Deterrence Matters.' This is such a serious team. They built things before. They studied under Elon. But do you think anyone's going to worry about the M word?" He said, "I don't know. We'll see."

The pitch was beautiful. It ends. There are people on the consumer team, the games team, all the teams—not everyone is American Dynamism. Afterwards, it was silence. I said, "Does anyone want to say anything? Everyone think this is cool?" Literally everyone was like, "Yeah, it's great." It shocked me because I've been so used to always having one person who's uncomfortable or doesn't know how to tell their friends at a cocktail party that we're investing in missiles. But there was something about this team. They're pros. They clearly care about the mission. They talked about it from a deterrence perspective. This is the only way we're going to deter wars. You have to build up your defense industrial base. You have to build up your missile capabilities to stop wars, not start them. It was such a compelling pitch and an honest pitch about the state of play. We are not prepared. If we don't do it, no one's going to do it.

The amazing thing for me was how far we've come in just five years, from headline risk—"we can't touch that"—to "okay, we're all in on this."

Sean Ryan: Wow. And you're a big part of that. How do you feel about that? Just being such a big part of that shift? I know you've talked about signs and callings, and I think you believe deeply in that.

Katherine Boyle: I do too. I look at my uncle who everyone made fun of and kicked out of the Jesuits. It's like, "If not me, then who?" I do think there's something about God giving you your calling and your mission. It doesn't make sense. It makes absolutely no sense that someone who is just good with words—I'm a good writer, I know what I'm good at, but I'm not a technologist. I'm not going to explain to you how Castellan's missiles work. I'm not going to sit here and be able to answer any of those questions. But I do think I have been given a mission. Why me? I don't know, but I'm not going to question it. It's someone else's will and not mine.

When Thibaut was on your show, he had the greatest interview. He had that 316 moment where he was just so happy that he couldn't believe he'd been able to do what he'd done. And then he just remembers, "Oh, yeah, it's not about me." What a beautiful reminder. It's really not about any of us.

Sean Ryan: With the VC firm, would you invest in competitors? Would you invest in Anduril's competitor, or do you put your bet all in one?

Katherine Boyle: It's a good question. Sometimes you invest in a company and they have no plans to build something, and then they end up competing with various companies. We have a strong rule about it, actually from my partner Chris Dixon who leads our crypto practice. He basically says every company gets to tell you who their one competitor is, but at a certain point, some companies get so large that they're going to do everything or think they're going to do everything. You can't honestly make the argument that SpaceX is somehow competitive with a small company building satellite buses or a company building ground stations, because they have a ground station product that works with Starlink.

We try to make it so we would never invest in companies that are competing directly head-on doing the same product. We don't do that. But sometimes you invest in a company that starts out as one thing and pivots into something else, and then they're competing against each other. Whenever that happens, we always try to silo the information so different partners are working on different things. It does happen. There are definitely examples of two companies getting so big and so great. It's always good when you see two companies winning, but then they realize they can each acquire the same company and do something new, so they compete on acquisitions. It's normal in business that companies will compete. But if we knowingly knew that companies were competing against each other, we would pick the winner. We put our eggs in one basket.

Sean Ryan: What gaps in the defense tech sector do you see that you think innovators should be looking at?

Katherine Boyle: I'm spending a lot of time on the future of space and space warfare. I think there needs to be a lot more built for the next war being in space. That means building things on the software side for tracking. There needs to be a lot more on the production side, on the propulsion side, to make sure that things can be kinetic in space. There's a lot happening in what the future of space warfare looks like.

But everything for me comes back to this production issue. I recently was with some operators on the ground on the border of Ukraine. I went with a group to learn about where investors should be investing, where the major gaps are in that war. The takeaway that I don't think I fully understood until I was there is that Russia has built up their defense industrial base over three years in an extraordinary way. They were kind of weak when they first started. Now they've built up their production capacity to be able to have this war against the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainians, to their credit, have built just-in-time manufacturing facilities where they can build drones very, very quickly. They get information off the battlefield that allows them to innovate on how the drones work. They're doing that on the ground. They have distributed manufacturing capabilities that are tailor-made for this war. In some ways, they've built up a defense industrial base as well.

The other player in this is China, who is supplying both sides of the war. They're greatly supplying the Russians with the dumb parts and the things they need to build the drones, or with drones themselves. They're also supplying the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians are in a desperate situation. They're building things in the trenches. They'll take whatever they can get, and they'll take Chinese infrastructure as well.

The only group of people and the only country that really hasn't benefited from the war—and I say "benefit" loosely—but really hasn't been able to build up the industrial capacity in the same way that those three countries have is America. The thing that keeps me up at night, the place where we invest, is how do we increase the speed of production? It can be on satellite buses, ground stations, modular things, modular forms of energy like SMRs, small modular reactors for nuclear. How do we build those as quickly as possible? It's just the modularization and the production thing. I'm less interested in software or design. I'm much more interested in how we just rebuild the manufacturing powerhouse that America once was. I think we can do it, but there are a lot of gaps.

Sean Ryan: Where would that fit in? Would that be a manufacturing company that attaches itself to an Anduril or a Saronic? Because when I talk to Dino, it sounds like all of Saronic is from conception of the idea to the end product.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, they vertically integrate to where they're building everything. They have an in-house machine shop. We have another company that I work very closely with called Hadrian that's building these automated machine shops where they build parts for every company you've ever heard of in defense and aerospace—critical parts that have to be built in the U.S. It used to be that if you needed a critical part, you'd go to one of these massive machine shops. The machine shops are run by someone who's older, usually in their 50s or 60s. They have apprentices who study them. It can take two to three years to learn how to manufacture these critical parts.

If you bring software into the factory, as Hadrian has done, they can teach a former bus driver, a high school dropout—their goal is they want to take baristas and train them to make these critical parts in 30 days. It's because you automate 80 to 90% of the process—the quality control, the design aspects—you automate it with software. Then the last 10% you can teach a human to do. That leads to extraordinary output.

The more factories we can have that are software-defined factories, where the software is actually making it easier for humans to produce more in the factory—whether it's critical machined parts, casting, the tier two to three suppliers, the joysticks or the things inside anything defense-related—you just need to be able to produce 10x more of all of those things. Munitions, there's a lot of talk now about how to turbocharge how quickly we can build munitions because we don't have enough. All of the fears I have about defense come down to production. It's all how quickly can you build. Yes, Saronic is vertically integrated, but there are a lot of companies that would attach one of those software-defined factories to them and say, "Just build us as many as you can of this one part."

Sean Ryan: What are you excited about in space?

Katherine Boyle: Anything to do with offensive space. SpaceX is the most incredible company in the world. They've done extraordinary work with government. They now have a direct-to-sell platform. They have Starlink, which has completely revolutionized internet. But there are still more things that need to be done. I'm invested in a company focused on ground stations, Northwood Space. They're building modular ground stations for every other company that needs to get data back to the ground. Our ground station infrastructure is extremely old. It takes forever to send comms. If you can just have more modular ground stations across the world to get that data back from low Earth orbit, that's game changing. They're working with USG.

Again, it all comes back to just more. These things are in some ways—I don't want to say simple—but a lot of the things I'm investing in are not science fair experiments. They're not things that get you riled up about "that sounds like the future." It's just, "Okay, we're going to produce more of the things we need because the infrastructure is so lagging or so old."

Sean Ryan: I'm just curious, have you looked at Steve Koss's company, Spacebuilt?

Sean Ryan: No, no. So he's basically doing logistics where you just build these things in space. That way it's not such a heavy payload. The satellite parts don't need to be protected with Kevlar and bulletproof vests or whatever the hell. He's talking about bringing things up in sections and actually assembling in space so the payload's a lot less leaving Earth.

Katherine Boyle: I'd love to chat with him. I'll connect you.

Sean Ryan: Thanks. But yeah, fascinating guy. We're going to shift here and talk about the attack on the American family. So your mother had two sons. Third on the way.

Katherine Boyle: Third on the way. I didn't know if I was supposed to say that or not. I think it's obvious at this point. I'd rather people know.

Sean Ryan: What do you mean by that, the attack on the American family?

Katherine Boyle: I wrote a speech a couple months ago where I started talking about how I see all of history as a war between the family and the state. These two big institutions. It goes back to Plato, the Republic, the Greeks, where the entire philosophy of the republic is that perhaps the state can take better care of a society than these institutional families.

When you look back through history, you see that especially authoritarian regimes, the first thing they do when they want to take over a society is ruthlessly destroy the family. You mentioned the one child policy in China. That was a deliberate attack on the family from an authoritarian regime. The purpose was for national interest. They talked about not being able to supply enough people with food. But what it really was, was to weaken the only institution that can ever combat the state, which is the family.

I'm a pretty conspiratorial person. I think there's been a concerted attack on the family to strengthen the state, particularly for the last 50 years. It's been done in very specific and legal ways through the education system, through the medical system, and it has deliberately destroyed the family. You see it through the birth rate like we talked about in the beginning. Fewer and fewer people want to have families because of this deliberate attack.

I wrote this piece called The War on Suffering where I've been very vocal about the fact that I think everything in America changed in 1973. Everyone points to this website called WTF Happened in 1971, pointing to when we came off the gold standard, when regulation started exploding. What happened in that year where everything bad in America started? I've always said that might have been the economic change where financialization started, where housing became so expensive, where it became ridiculously expensive to afford healthcare or education.

But in 1973, there were two things that radically changed how Americans view themselves, how men and women view themselves, and ultimately what I think is the impetus and start of this unraveling of the family. I've said this a lot publicly about what changed for men. In January 1973, Nixon did the most profound and most popular thing he ever did during his presidency: he ended the draft. It was unanimous coming off Vietnam. Everyone loved it. Everyone knew what needed to happen. He said we're going to be an all-volunteer force and allow people to choose to serve their country.

Even today, our military celebrates the fact that we don't have a draft, that this is part of American culture. But I think what it fundamentally said to young people is that it is a choice to serve. Only the people who want to. They might do it for economic reasons or love of country. But it is not something everyone has to do to serve and defend their country. Throughout human history, that is the first time a country has said to young men that your purpose on this earth is not to defend where you live. It was codified. That is not the purpose of manhood.

Then 10 days later—it was only in 2023 when I was writing this piece that I even realized this—10 days later, the female equivalent happened. Roe v. Wade passed from the Supreme Court. That had a similar impact on women. For all of human history, your purpose on this earth was to have children, to have a family. This was the first time in Western society—a lot of nations copied us after it—that this was the moment that really changed. Ten days after men were told your purpose is not to serve, women were told your purpose is not to have a family. It's your choice.

It completely changes the view of how men view themselves and how women view themselves, all in 1973, January, 10 days apart. A lot of people would say these are all good things. It's good that there's choice in America. Not everyone should have to serve their country. Men and women shouldn't have to go to war, and women shouldn't have to become mothers. But what we didn't do in that moment is we didn't provide anyone an alternative purpose. We didn't provide men and women anything that says, actually, the purpose of manhood is this, or the purpose of womanhood is this. We just said, go figure it out yourself. Maybe there is no purpose.

The 70s had this very clear, almost nihilistic culture of nothing really matters anymore. You can do whatever you want. That has permeated so much of society where we don't even believe suffering should exist anymore. Suffering for your country? Why would anyone do that? Suffering for your family? Why would you do that?

The minute we destroyed the unique purpose of woman—which for millennia was to bear children and have family—and the unique purpose of man—which is to fight—the minute we destroyed those purposes, men and women stopped relating to each other. They didn't know who they were. They didn't know what their purpose was. They didn't know how they could relate. When you look at it from that framework, the family was destined to fail from that moment.

Sean Ryan: Damn. You think every man should have to serve the country?

Katherine Boyle: No. I don't know that every man needs to go to war. But I think there is something that happens when you say we once were a country where everyone was treated this way. Everyone knew their purpose. Everyone woke up in the morning and knew at 18, there is a chance I will have to serve my country. Just understanding that is your purpose changes the way you walk. It changes the way you think about your life.

The same thing for women. I don't think every woman should have to be a mother. Nine out of ten people would say these are good things, popular things. But when we didn't replace that purpose with something else, and we didn't have a way of saying this is how society should be organized...

Sean Ryan: You're saying it changed the consciousness of the country.

Katherine Boyle: Yes. The thing we did instead was inward focus. Serving your country is outward focused. It's focused on other people, on someone other than you. The same thing with being a mother. The minute you become a mother, you stop worrying about yourself. You don't have time to make yourself the most important thing. You have to worry about your children.

In both cases, those purposes were outwardly focused. This is how we organize society. Women care about the institution of family. Men care about the institution of their country. But what we did instead was turn inward. We started focusing on our own mind. This is the moment we really start thinking about psychology. Who am I? What is my purpose on this earth?

There's a great book by Philip Rieff written in the 60s called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which is that man really started turning inward in the 60s and early 70s and thinking about, do I have purpose on this earth? The minute you stop focusing outward and become very contemplative—which is really what American culture has become—you become very individualistic, very obsessed with yourself.

Our generation is the trophy generation, the me generation. Everything about me is interesting. I am an individual. I can achieve anything I want. There are no barriers, no limitations. But it completely rips out all the underpinnings of what makes a society function.

In some ways, those were the moments where you saw the unraveling. There shouldn't be any kind of suffering. Around the same time, no-fault divorce happened. You shouldn't be told who you are. You shouldn't be judged. Similarly in the medical arena, this is around the time where ADHD started, the late 80s, SSRIs started coming about. We have to start medicating because we're thinking too much about ourselves and we have too much depression.

The focus on the self was a very deliberate action. The crisis of the family comes from the fact that if you're focused on yourself, you really can't be focused on a family. You hear this all the time from young people. "I haven't achieved what I wanted. I can barely take care of myself in my mid-twenties. I don't know who I am. How am I going to be able to take care of a kid?" We've forgotten that previous generations didn't have that luxury. They didn't have the extended adolescence where they could say, "I don't know myself. How am I going to go to war if I don't know myself?" The Greatest Generation wasn't able to say that. They just had to do it.

You can definitely make the argument that things are better now. In many ways, people are living longer. You can make the argument that these things were not necessarily good for society, but at least there was a societal purpose and organization. The thing that has really been corrupted over the last 50 years is that we do not know what our American purpose is. Particularly as it comes to the family, it has become an option. It's no longer the default institution you build your life in. Without that default institution, people just flail. You have the loneliness epidemic. You have young women and men with depression.

Sean Ryan: For any men out there wondering what your purpose is, it's to provide for your fucking family and protect them. But I didn't realize there was that much confusion about it. But then you look around and where are all the men?

Katherine Boyle: They're both in the New York Times.

Sean Ryan: Right, right. I wish I would have known you were a conspiratorial person because otherwise we'd be talking about aliens and the pyramids and Machu Picchu and all kinds of other shit. But the question is, you mentioned the draft ended and Roe v. Wade, 10 days apart. Is this just the result of shitty decision-making? I'm not weighing in on those subjects, but it sounds like you think that's where it started. Then we see all the stuff with gender nowadays. Washington State will come and take your kid if you don't do the gender-affirming care. Is this stemming from somewhere or is this just a result of decisions?

Katherine Boyle: I think it's a result of both legal and medical decisions. The medical community has a huge part of this as well. But I think it comes down to the war on suffering has been won. We've defeated suffering, and life is not about suffering. That is what our legal system thinks. That's what our medical system thinks.

When you think of the opioid epidemic, what started it in the 90s? It was the belief in the medical community that suffering from back pain is one of the worst things that can happen and there's a magical pill you can take to get rid of it. Pill mills across America handed out opioids because people couldn't deal with suffering. That was seen as a good thing. Don't you want to eradicate suffering?

Same thing with ADHD. Young boys can't focus in school. Here's a magical pill and you're not going to suffer anymore. Your family's not going to suffer. Your teacher's not going to suffer. You're going to feel great. Now 23% of boys at 17 years old are on ADHD medication in America. It's because we just do not believe that anyone should have to suffer. We don't believe in resilience. We don't believe that anyone should have to make a choice that has something to do with society or duty versus what they want to do. It's all individualistic.

The best example of the war on suffering is what hasn't happened fully in the US, but it's happening in the UK and already happened in Canada. If you now suffer from mental illness, you have the right to die. If you're over 18, you can go to a doctor who will sign off on it and you can end your life.

Sean Ryan: Suicide machines.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. That was not the America we lived in before.

Sean Ryan: So the question is, why are we so opposed to suffering? I get a lot of pushback on this. "Why are you pro-suffering?" I'm a practicing Catholic. The entire story of Catholicism is about Jesus' suffering for something noble, for something good, for us. It is a story of suffering. The movement to try to pull suffering out of human life is removing human nature. It's removing the entire Christian story out of how we live and saying you are not expected to suffer. What happens then? You have an entire generation of young people who are no longer resilient.

Katherine Boyle: I think it takes drive away too.

Sean Ryan: Oh, 100%. It takes personal drive away. Which creates less innovators.

Katherine Boyle: Totally. Which is why I think a lot of these young people, the reason they go to Silicon Valley and they sleep on the factory floor and they work hard and they're building hard things is because they know that suffering is inherently good for a purpose greater than yourself. But I do think people are confused about how to find that. How do you find that outside of a society that tells you you don't need to get married, you don't need to have kids, you don't need to serve your country, you don't need to do something greater than yourself for your community? You don't need to be a pillar of the community anymore. You can move wherever you want. Total freedom. Without those guardrails or guides or people who can help you navigate life, people just get lost.

Sean Ryan: Man, we covered a lot of ground there.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, we did.

Sean Ryan: We covered a lot of ground. I wish we had more time, but I know you got a flight to catch. Last question. Three people you want to see on the show?

Katherine Boyle: Oh, my goodness. Well, I won't volunteer our mutual friend, but I'd like to see him on the show as we talked about in the car. But Elon. I think I'd love to see you chat with Elon. We didn't get a chance to talk about DOGE, but I think he's learned a lot about government. I haven't heard him do a long-form interview about what it's like to try to reform government. I think that'd be a really interesting story.

Sean Ryan: Do you think... Sorry, I lied. Not last question. Do you think DOGE worked?

Katherine Boyle: I do, but for different reasons than most people. I think it worked as a cultural change. It changed the culture in Washington, but also across the country. Twitter was sort of the early experiment in DOGE-ing. He proved you can cut 75% of people. Then he went to government and DOGE-d different departments. There was a lot of backlash, but I think it made people realize we don't need as many people. We can work harder. We need to be more fiscally responsible. We need to understand where the money is going. A lot of people woke up and realized we're spending ridiculous amounts of money on things we don't need.

I think that cultural change is going to permeate all industries. It's happening in the Army now. The Army DOGE-d itself with the Army Transformation Initiative. General George and Secretary Driscoll came out and said we're not going to wait for DOGE to come to us. We want to cut our budget by 8%. We want to get rid of all these old products we don't need anymore. They call it the Humvee. They say, why do we have Humvees in production that were built pre-Desert Storm that we haven't used in 20 years? Why do we need that? There's another vehicle we could actually use built for modern warfare. They've been very forthright about wanting to DOGE themselves.

Sean Ryan: Wow. Are you upset that it didn't stick? It's not going to stick, correct? My understanding is that this is for one year. The House never got on with it and now goes right back to the same old shit.

Katherine Boyle: I would have liked to see the DOGE cuts codified. It still could happen in a separate bill. There are still tremendous young people working in DOGE doing important work and modernizing the systems. I'm hopeful that entity will stay. But as a cultural movement, it's certainly changed how companies think about how many people they need. I also think AI is going to change how many people people think they need. There are other factors that will impact that. But I think it will prove to have been successful.

Sean Ryan: I hope so, man. I feel like our institutions are in shambles and it's going to take this younger generation to really step it up and fix that. All right, last one more. One more person.

Katherine Boyle: I'm trying to think which founder you should have on. You should definitely have on Elon. The hypersonics guy.

Sean Ryan: Yeah.

Katherine Boyle: Brian Hargis at Castellan would be a good interview. Maybe you can connect me.

Sean Ryan: I can definitely connect you. Perfect. Well, Katherine, what an awesome conversation. I'd love to chat with you again sometime if you'd come back.

Katherine Boyle: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. This has been great.

Sean Ryan: It's my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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