a16z Podcast - Startups & Defense: Katherine Boyle on TBPN

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

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

Today on the A16Z podcast, we're sharing Catherine Boyle's recent interview on TBPN. Catherine, a general partner at A16Z and a driving force behind the American dynamism thesis, joins the show to discuss the state of the movement. From the Department of Defense's latest reform efforts to the growing role of startups in national security and beyond, Catherine breaks down how far American dynamism has come and why the work is just getting started. As a reminder, the content here is for information. informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential

investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures. And next up, we have Catherine Boyle from Andresen Horowitz, the pioneer of American dynamism. One of the top coinages of the last few years. Yeah, for sure. And more relevant than ever. In some ways, mission accomplished.

I mean, last week in D.C., it was American dynamism on display, right? That's right. Everyone is a believer. And the question is, where do we go from here? And that's what I'm excited to dig in with her today. Catherine, welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Thanks for having me. It's about time. I'm so happy to be here. You should have you. Long-time listener, first-time caller.

Great to have you. With the flag in the background. Yes, fantastic. I love it. Where should we start? I'm curious about state of affairs with the American dynamism movement. The project feels like it's maybe time to rest on our laurels. What do you think? We've achieved American dynamism. It feels like it. Yeah. No, it feels like it's broken through.

It's mainstream. Cultural victory may be coming before actual victory. Sure, sure, sure. And that American dynamism is almost mainstream now, at least in the venture world. Yes. But jobs not finished. Jobs not finished. So what are the key asks in D.C. from Silicon Valley right now?

What are the top projects? Where should tech be focused in terms of the American Dynamism Project broadly right now? Totally. So it's nowhere near finished. I mean, this is like three. three or four years into a 30-year project, which is always good when you have those sorts of aims. And I'd say it's even longer than that. When you think of Defense 1.0, it started around 2015, 2016. It sort of has become this very large movement. But I'll tell you, like, last week was a

huge, huge week for American dynamism inside of the DOD. And the news sort of got buried in Techland, but it was just, it's probably one of the biggest things to happen in the first hundred days of the Trump administration. The Army announced what they're calling their Army Transformation initiative. It was with Secretary Driscoll, General George. They actually went on Fox and Friends, which was like a huge deal that they actually went public with it. And they said it's been way too long. We have so many platforms we want to modernize. We want to divest from technologies that are no longer useful. We want to modernize the force. We want to make sure that we get rid of civilian jobs that are not important anymore. We want to make sure we are not having wasteful spending.

It was sort of like, you know, what I had read in NBC after it came out, they said like the Army is doging itself. Yeah. I think the real story of what the army is doing, and kudos to them because they truly are the first mover, is there are people inside of the DOD who have been saying these things for years, pounding their head against the wall, saying they want acquisition reform, saying they want to work with startups, saying they have to have new platforms that come in and actually support the needs of the warfighter, and they've been pounding their head against

the wall with little results. And so when you have a doge effort going on in Washington and an administration that really wants to see the waste disappear, it allows for those people who are really forward-thinking like General George and like Secretary Driscoll to come forward and say, hey, we're going to do this ourselves. We're going to pick out the new technologies that we need. We're going to get rid of things like Humvees that we haven't needed in 20 years. We're going to figure out what is actually useful for the Army, and we're going to do it ourselves. So it was a huge week. I think it was probably one of the most, it was reported, but it didn't get sort of the praise from technology

that it should have. Like, this is an extraordinary movement that I think has really been a long time coming, and it's something that a lot of the early American dynamism companies have been pushing forth for a long, long time. So congratulations to the Army. Yeah, so can you give me a little to doge yourself than get doge? Always doge yourself. Doge yourself. Yeah, can you give me a little bit of a tour of the market map of the beneficiaries of this transformation? Obviously, everyone knows the Palantiers and the Anderals, but I imagine that there are tons of pockets of value and projects that need to be overhauled. Is it mostly drones, weapon systems, vehicles? first? Or are there other areas that companies that you talk to are focused on in this

transformation process? In the early days, that's what's been called out. So it's early UAVs that were developed 20 years ago. They're not relevant post-Ukraine war. It's actually sort of, I don't want to say comical, because it's not funny. But when you think about the fact that the Humvee was developed in 1980, it went into production in 1985, and that the Army said in 2004, this actually isn't useful for us anymore because there's this new type of warfare called IEDs and we're not going to use it. And these, are still in production in 2025. So that's a perfect example. And I think they're showing certain programs that are so long overdue that they're going to be changed. But I think it's also

smaller things like, you know, the program of record was developed when you had to build out these very, very large platforms. And you had to plan years and decades in advance. And when someone went a program, it was understood that they were going to run that program for decades. And now the Army has ways to acquire things where technology is changing at a pace and at a speed that really needs to have a genuine competition every year, every couple years. And so that really benefits all startups. That benefits all, you know, incoming emerging technologies that are going to serve sort of the fight of the future. They have specific callouts that they're pointing to now. Yeah. But definitely, this is great news for startups because what it's showing is that there is

actually the will inside the DoD. Is there any movement on procurement reform? I remember I watched this hilarious movie, Pentagon Wars, all about the development of the Bradley fighting vehicle. And it's a very funny movie. You know, everyone has a different requirement. They all get put together and becomes this kind of platypus of a vehicle that is part tank, part troop transport, all these different problems. Part of the benefit of modern technology is that we do develop platforms and things like Anderil's Ghost can do ISR and also do munitions and a whole bunch of things. There are projects that do need flexibility, but is there a cultural shift around moving away from exquisite systems or just when, folks in defense tech say we need procurement reform? What are they really talking about in 2025?

Yeah. Well, I think they're talking about different things because I think what this initiative is going to do is it's going to allow the Army, and I think there'll be a lot of replicas of this as well. I think other branches will look at this and say this is a great idea. Instead of being locked into a program for decades, they're going to be able to say, actually, we would love to use that capital for something new. We would love to recompete that program. We would like to be able to be better capital allocators because now their hands are tied. And I think when you talk to people who are just a normal business, not in defense world, and you say, hey, if you had to make a decision about a purchase that's going to last for 10 years and get no updates and you would not be allowed to change it,

what would you do? We would say that's insane. Like, how is a CEO going to say they're going to acquire a technology for their company that they're going to use for 10 years and there's going to be no software and updates, no nothing? And if it's not working, you can't get rid of it. You're told you can't get rid of it. I mean, that is literally what the DOD has to deal with. And so I think what's great about this initiative, again, it's one, the fact that the Army is going public says that they mean business and that they have air cover to do this. But I think that the meta story that we're going to tell ourselves is Doge has been very public in the last week of what they're doing. There's been some pushback on, you know, why are you

working on IT systems? Everyone has sort of their favorite Doge meme of why it's not working. But the story of Doge, I think when we look back even in a year, is going to be that it gave extraordinary air cover to reform in every department. And the first example inside the DOD, this is the biggest example in the last 100 days to see General George out there saying, like, this is what we need to do and we are committed and we're going public because we are so committed, which doesn't usually happen. I just think it speaks volumes and tech should be celebrating. This is a big, big day for everyone in the American dynamism ecosystem, for every defense

company that's been fighting for this for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, and for all of this to actually achieve those sort of 30-year goals or execute against that 30-year plan, things need to be bipartisan. People need to realize we want efficiency and innovation across every branch. I'm curious, on the investing side, I'm sure you have this painful experience all the time where you meet companies that probably are going to be great businesses, are good for America, but maybe aren't a fit for venture. What's your sort of updated thinking on understanding if something can be a great, important business versus something that

can truly be, you know, a generational outcome. Yeah. One of the biggest mistakes I see investors make is trying to predict Tam. So early, early days of Anderl, a lot of people, you know, didn't want to look at Anderil because of ethical reasons or because they were worried about being involved in defense. But there was another meme that was going around, which is almost comical now, which is, well, it's kind of a small town, right?

Like a border security company, like, oh, they're selling to DHS, Department of Homeland Security doesn't really have that big of a, but like, these were real things that. people said that are hilarious now, you guys can imagine. So I think it is very difficult to predict a growing market, eventually what some of these incredibly important technologies are going to be worth. But I agree with you. There are some examples of companies that might not be, you know, standalone businesses, but will ultimately, you know, Enderl's done a very good job of acquiring businesses that aren't going to be these venture outcomes, but work, you know, very well within their platform. But I think in some ways, there's always surprises with companies that were

initially passed on or people were very skeptical of their TAM in the early days. And then you look back and you see just how much they've grown or how much the product is shifted or how important the platform actually is. Yeah. How have you been, you know, ignoring the politics of it all, but reacting to, you know, the trade war in many ways, like when you have these like big geopolitical, you know, events playing out, that doesn't necessarily mean start to make a lot of venture investments because venture investments take a long time to play out. And it's very hard to predict the future, are you seeing new opportunities related, you know, to the events of the last month? Are you still just, you know, continuing? Like, I imagine when you guys invested in Hadrian,

you weren't like betting on a trade war in two years or something like that, right? But how do you think about timelines? And is the benefit of sort of thinking in that 30-year timeline that you're kind of able to broadly, you know, ignore or not place too much focus on the headlines of today and just think about what America needs in the long run? I would say my bias is a very early stage investor is to not think about the immediate timeframes. These are very long cycles. You can sort of see trend lines, but it's hard to know what actual events are going to happen, obviously. So I think even when we made the investment in Hadrian, as you called out, there was a movement towards re-industrialization

and towards investing in manufacturing that was early and nascent. But if you were hearing the signs or spending a lot of time in D.C., both sides were very focused in Washington on how do we think about investing in America, reindustrialization, how do we bring back manufacturing? So, you know, it felt like it was a message that was being heard then. It's just, of course, been accelerated. And I think truly, if you think about the next 10, 20 years, reindustrialization is going to be a very important theme. So, you know, it can feel like everything is hot right now or feel like we're in the middle of something. But ultimately, I think we're, again, in this like very, very early, you know, three or four years into a 30-year journey. You know, it took decades for globalization to really

hit its peak. And now we're sort of seeing the pendulum swing again. And so you're going to see a lot of companies that are built in the next few years that become generational companies. Yeah. How do you think about the kind of broader market map of American dynamism? Obviously, Anderil is like a, just a great case study in the American Dynamism thesis. But at the same time, as you go through the American Dynamism website, you can go back to like the moon landing and the development of the iPhone as like examples. At the same time, there's this question about like the anderil of X is anderol potentially, but then that doesn't always come true if you're talking about something that's truly outside of their purview in consumer or in, you know, flock safety or Hadrian,

these companies are not competitive but maybe fit in the thesis. How are you seeing the investing landscape of American dynamism kind of evolve as more people come into the category, but then think outside the box and address different issues. I mean, I've seen even like some education stuff kind of fit the broader thesis. So how has that evolved over the last couple of years? Yeah, we define it as companies that are actively supporting the national interest. Sure. So it is a very simple definition and founders have, you know, different interpretations of what it means, but there's common themes. And actually, this goes into why we decided to have a separate fund, why we decided to build out the platform, is because these companies

need something entirely different than a true enterprise or a true consumer company. And when we look back at our early portfolio of Shield AI, Anderl, Estronis, these companies that were sort of what I would call space and defense 1.0, we'd sort of like put them in the enterprise category as though they're like no different than a company that's selling business software to the Fortune 500, right? It doesn't make any sense. They have totally different needs. You know, Andrews famously said that they had a lobbyist on staff on week one. There's things that companies need that our view is that we could build a platform to help support these companies, namely in Washington, understanding who their buyers are on the BD side, which is a very difficult kind of

role to hire for inside of early stage startups, but then also understanding the Washington game, which is very important for companies to understand if they're going to be selling directly to the federal government. Now, you mentioned education, and there's a lot of companies in our portfolio, too, that are selling to state and local. And that is an totally different sales motion. You know, that is something where, you know, company like Flock Safety has sort of rewritten the rules of how you sell directly to a police force or how you even follow what I would call kind of like a second city strategy of not going to the biggest cities, but going to these smaller municipalities and getting a lot of, you know, almost circling a big city with

the suburbs around it and kind of getting a lot of momentum from the citizens. But all these companies have very similar needs and sort of things that they have to think about early rather than later. And we've now seen enough of sort of the early success stories and public safety and, you know, aerospace defense, like sort of these generational companies. that came up in the last several years, that the boom that's happening in these categories, many of them want to replicate those playbooks

and have, I think, with a lot of success. Can you talk a little bit about almost like lobbying as value ad for venture capital? I remember I was running an Andreessen back company a decade ago, and I met the CEO of McDonald's through Andreessen at some happy hour, and there were trainings on B2B sales and PR and all this stuff, but there was no concept of regulatory or lobbyists. being. But I imagine that's a piece of it, but at the same time, you need to eventually

staff your own government affairs team. How are you working with early stage founders to get them up and running in Washington? Yeah, I would say a lot of the founders that we backed are very, I would say, sophisticated in their knowledge of who they need to be meeting with or the types of people they should be meeting with in the DOD. But the thing that I think we're actually, I would say, even more successful in doing that's really important, is making all that knowledge public. You know, we make our playbooks public. My partner Layla, who runs our go-to-market in D.C., she wrote this incredible glossary of things you need to know if you're even going to approach a venture capital firm, you know,

about a defense tech company. Like, these are the acronyms. These are all the acronyms you could possibly hear in a conversation with the DOD. And it's things like that where we do want to make that public and we want to help educate the ecosystem. And I can tell you, like, you know, five or six years ago, the number of venture capitalists who understood the different types of contracting vehicles that understood the names of of different people on the Appropriations Committee.

These things that are now sort of, I'd say, taken for granted, were not well known. And so I think that's a huge part of it too is really helping the ecosystem get up to speed, helping companies sort of speed run that early stage process of like you can ask any dumb question and we're going to help you with it. But then there is also something to be said of

it is much easier to get a meeting with certain people if you are at a dinner that's sponsored by a group of people who are always in Washington. I mean, we have a Washington office now. We are fully staffed in terms of both Republicans and Democrats and people who work on both sides of the aisle, people who specialize in DODs, people who specialize in certain types of the DOD. And I think that is like a very important thing to be able to say, okay, you need to meet with X, Y, and Z people, or you need

to understand the glossary before you can even begin to have those conversations. Do you think defense tech is now mature, it's oversaturated? I was joking with Jordy that I think world peace is like maybe six months away. And then I'm going to start poaching top defense tech talent to build the next generation of advertising optimization. Because I think that we just got to get them back in the ad. Get them back. Get them back. The next company. You know it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, seriously, like, it does seem like... That would be the most, you know, the open AI, you know, AGI is always six months away.

World peace is always six months. Defense tech founders need to just go like, yeah, just two billion more and like world peace. World peace, yeah. But I mean, there is a serious question here. Like, I know some people who are like just so excited that they're jumping into things, but, you know, I'm not even in the industry, but I'm a little bit more tapped in. And I'm like, there are already seven companies working on that exact thing. I don't know if this is the best time. Is it worthwhile to steer, you know, these incredible hackers, these great entrepreneurs, like, maybe towards the more tangential hard tech problems, like what I see with like, but base power is doing is like, it's hard tech. It has defense roots, but it's not directly something that's on Anderil's roadmap.

What advice are you giving to kind of the entrepreneurs that are like in between things, thinking. about serving the national interest, but not necessarily putting themselves on a collision course with a, you know, multi-billion-dollar founder-mode company. So I'll say deterrence is the constant project, right? So like your whole, like the meme of maybe six months away from World Peace. Yeah, of course. I actually think that was part of the problem in the 90s, right? Like, seriously, that was a big problem.

Yeah, democracy. The end of history. End of history. We flourished and we don't need to be working on these things. So it is very important that we've gone back almost to the roots of the DOD saying like, hey, actually, we remember what it's like to be a country at war, and we need to be constantly focused on the next technologies. We need to be focused on deterrence, thinking of it as deterrence because we want to prevent war, but we have to be continuously building. So from that

perspective, I think, again, we're only a few years into this real movement of Silicon Valley caring about working with the DoD, and I hope that it's a 30-year project. I think that's what we all really should be focused on, is making sure it's a 30-year project, and even longer than that. But to your point, what I think is so interesting about companies that, you know, are founded out of Anderl or out of SpaceX, you know, we've done an analysis where we looked at all of the founders who've left SpaceX in the last, like, 10 years. And there's hundreds of companies that have been formed in just wildly different sectors, whether it's, you know, radiant nuclear working on nuclear energy. You know, Castellian, which is in our portfolio when they're building

hypersonic weapons. I mean, some of the best founders are trained. I always say they go to the school of Elon Musk. They learn manufacturing. They learn production. And then they want to take that to something that, you know, is pretty low-hanging fruit. Like, they want to make sure that they're competing against the incumbents of yesterday, who have not modernized their production, who have not modernized a lot of the technology that they're working on. And so, you know, I think you see that with a lot of the, you know, yes, there are some extremely crowded fields, but then there are also areas of defense that are really just boring and completely untouched. And you're seeing founders realize that, too, that it's, it's not something that that's,

you know, interesting to any of the existing companies and it's low-hanging fruit. It'd be interesting to work on that or they're interested in being a tier one supplier. We have a number of companies that are really focused on the supply chain aspect of defense and that they're partners to Anderil and their partners to SpaceX and other companies in the ecosystem. So you really are seeing founders like understand that question in a very sophisticated way and say, okay, we're going to go after the parts of the supply chain or the things that DOD needs that no one is focusing on. And that's been exciting to see too. Can you talk about M&A in defense tech broadly? Anderil's done this very well. Serenic announced a deal last week acquiring Gulfcraft. That feels

super significant. I'm curious, you know, how you advise founders kind of broadly when thinking about that. We actually had Augustus on from Rainmaker earlier who had acquired a company in his space, but when's the right time to be, you know, thinking about that as somebody in defense tech and, yeah, what kind of opportunities do you think make the most sense? Totally. Well, I think, I mean, Both Anderol and Serana, they have incredibly unique stories in terms of where they're operating and sort of what they need to do in order to grow and scale. And they've done it at a speed that is just incredible, right? Like they have very sophisticated teams that know a lot about acquisition. I'd say for earlier stage companies, we're seeing more companies that are potentially interested in doing that.

And it can speed up innovation. I can speed up being able to work with certain customers. That's for sure. If you're acquiring a certain capability so that you can sell to a major prime, that's something we've seen more of too, which is interesting. exciting. Like, I don't think we were seeing that several years ago, and now we're certainly seeing companies experiment with that. But when you said, actually, Emini, I actually thought you were going towards something that I think is actually more likely to happen in the future that hasn't happened in a long time. When you look at these existing prime companies,

the Big Five, say, they've really only acquired companies that have not raised any venture dollars, right? Like, they don't acquire companies that are kind of seen as these bleeding edge companies to shore up their capabilities. And my instinct, you know, we're talking about Army Transformation Initiative, or talking about a government that's becoming far more sophisticated and a DOD that's becoming far more competitive, right? It hasn't been competitive for decades, and now you're seeing all of these startups come in. My prediction, if we're looking five, ten years out, is that the companies that have not been acquisitive for the best engineers and the best technologists and these capabilities that they need are going to find that

as their only solution. And I think we could potentially even see another Last Supper situation, which, of course, in the 90s was the famous case where the government came to all these primes and said, you have to merge. You have to have kind of force mergers and acquisitions because the budget's going to decrease. And of course, that was probably the wrong strategy given sort of the results that came out of that. But I do think it is something that I would not be surprised if in five or ten years, you're seeing the existing primes that have been around in many cases for a hundred years saying, we have to work with these startups in a much more tangible way. And you could see a highly acquisitive ecosystem that people don't necessarily kind of

right into their kind of thesis today. How do you think about leadership at the individual primes? And, you know, people over the last few years, I mean Boeing has been dragged through the dirt by pretty much everyone. But I think of it as a great, in the fullness of time, it's a great company. It ain't Bowen. I ain't going. Yeah, John is so loyal. I think he'll never fly on a excitement.

He'll never fly on a white-collar worker. You know, you don't risk your life very often. When I go on a business trip and I step on a 737 max, I'm locked. And I mean, I just look at it as China would love to have a company that was actually competitive with Boeing. Totally. It's a hugely strategic asset. But I'm curious, do you think that, you know, any of the primes, you know, and every now and then you'll see a prime release of video that's like, clearly they hired a marketing agency and said like, make us like an Anderol movie, you know, and then they put it out. But do you see that the leadership at the primes?

Well, Lockheed Martin invented artificial intelligence, remember? Yeah, they came out last week and claimed that they invented. Artificial intelligence. They basically just said, you're welcome. You're welcome. Yeah. By the way, you're welcome. But I'm curious, do you have, do you have conversations with them or is it, is it?

Because, I mean, even though it's not an opportunity for, you know, venture capitalist necessarily, like, it would be great if they were highly functioning in the American interests. Like as Americans, you have the, you have the program that was spun out of, you know, was it Microsoft? Microsoft to Andrew. Oh, yeah, yeah, the HoloLens. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there's probably more kind of even spin out opportunities. where new companies can create value on top of existing programs.

Yeah, I think, you know, Homer and actually Brian Schimp has done an incredible podcast on this where he talks about sort of what happened at these primes and why things sort of went by the wayside. And it's partially because they really stopped focusing on research and development. They didn't really need to. There was no real competition. And they kind of recognized that, you know, they would always get paid by the government to do new things. You know, again, like it's sort of this confluence of factors that led us to be, I don't really complacent.

But I went back actually last night and was reading the first few pages of the kill chain by Christian Brose, which again, reading it, it was written, I believe, in 2019, things changed so dramatically in terms of the conversation, but it's like going back in a time warp and saying, wow, like in 2019, people really didn't care that Boeing was collapsing or that there were these private or these public companies that were doing no research and development because it didn't matter, right? That was pre-war in Ukraine. It was sort of, you know, in some ways it was security theater, right? Like, we don't actually have to remain secure. We just have to pretend we're secure. And so I think there, is this new sort of wake-up call where a lot of these companies are going to say, one, if we can't recruit the engineers and do the research and development in-house, we're going to have to acquire it. So, again, that's why I think you're going to see a lot more acquisitions over the next several years, because I think a lot of these companies are really going to have to change. But two, these initiatives inside the DoD that are now getting real steam, that is going to force incredible competition that has not existed, even in the last 10 years when we've all been investing in American Dynamism. So I'm actually much more, like, hopeful and excited.

about where I think the world is going because I genuinely believe that a lot of these players have sort of woken up but are looking for solutions because now they know they have to. Yeah. A while ago I was talking to Trey about just the lack of the deeper supply chain, specifically in drone motors. Like there are no small drone motor manufacturers in the United States. They're almost all made in China. And that feels like, oh, there's almost a startup idea there.

But I don't know if it's a venture idea. There's actually a drone motor company in Washington. They outsourced some of their supply chain recently. that feels like almost like we need an American dynamism private equity fund to just turn those companies around. They're not going to be these power law, $100 billion companies, but they might produce 20% returns more reliably and there's maybe no venture style zero loss of capital risk. Do you think we need a American dynamism for private equity? Is that something Andreessen would do at some point? I mean, you're kind of in every asset class now, so anything's possible. But is there a flip side to

the venture model within investing in the national interest? Well, I certainly think we've invested in some companies that are focused on component parts. Sure. You know, we're invested in AMCA. I know that Jay is on recently. So, like, there are more and more companies that are figuring out to do this. And again, those are the examples of companies that are, you know, much more focused on how do we acquire companies? How do we make them, I would say, tech forward, but also think about like how quickly we can get into the supply chain and some of these larger primes. But I think you're seeing a lot of innovation around the edges on this. and you're probably going to see more and more founders who recognize that if that's where the real problem is,

they're going to build there and they're going to build in the best way that suits them. Yeah, it does seem like there's almost like a way to turn something. Like MP materials we were talking about, like, you wouldn't think like, oh, yeah, venture is suitable for like mining at all. But like now there's a couple mining companies that are figuring out how to inject enough technology to make it potentially a venture scale opportunity, which is interesting. Do you have anything else? I have a couple more. I got a totally switching gears, but you had to post.

recently that I liked. It was, I'm committed to doing whatever the opposite of gentle parenting is. And I wanted to ask you if you found any Lindy books on parenting, anything that's sort of resonated that you're implementing, John and I both have similar aged children. And I always have this sort of concern around, you know, you want to experiment, you know, with parenting and try new things and maybe not just take exactly what the mainstream media says is the right way to do parenting, but then, you know, your children have one life. You're not trying to run A-B tests, you know, on there. I have three boys, so I employ what I call the snake pit strategy, which is you lock them all in a room, and then it's just a snake pit. And they just, like, wrestle and, you know,

if there's damage, they'll heal, and that's fine. That's the right way to do it. Well, I followed up that tweet with the tried and true Irish strategy, which is the hay method. You just show hay. Hey. Hey. Hey. Yeah, hey, hey, you know, it works. Like, there's something about the third day where your sons actually turn around and listen to you. But sadly, you know, there aren't like any books, like old-timey books that I found that actually teach, I would say, the best way to train children or to child rear. But, you know, it's interesting. I always think that grandmother's kind of no best. So if there's a grandmother in your life anywhere, they remember how it used to be done and how effective it was.

And it was, you know, probably harder in the olden days, too. So it's like basically just ask grandma. Like, grandma. I would plug free range kids all. about like our society has moved towards like don't let the kids just run around in the neighborhood they could get kidnapped there's so many bad things that could happen there's been a lot of fearmongering from the media and so that's kind of led to kids turning in in inside be becoming inside kids staying on the iPads or whatever but there's this movement in the free range kids to just be like

yeah actually like you're six you can ride a bike like ride your bike to the park like and that will enforce the society to maintain safety i need to find the repeat of parenting yeah that's the next Alpha. Yeah, my problem with the grandma method is that my mother and mother-in-law just want to let the kids do exactly what they want to do. You want two cookies? Yeah, you want three cookies, so maybe they're right. Maybe that is Lindy. Maybe it is Lindy. I'm the great grandmother, right? Like the one who remembers how tough it was. Yeah, that's right. I want to get your reaction to Warren Buffett. Obviously, he stepped down or announced his transition at Berkshire Hathaway this weekend. What do you take away from Buffett's legacy as an investor? It's obviously

a very different type of investing, but there's so many interesting lessons there from company building to investing to everything else. What was your reaction? Yeah, you know, I'll take a little bit of a different take because I was watching, you know, the annual meeting last year. And there was this moment that happened. I actually wrote about it and a piece on friendship and founder friendship where he was doing his usual, you know, going through company analysis. And then he just kind of forgets where he is and says, Charlie. And everyone stopped. It was like, you know, I think I think I teared up seeing it because he had. He was so in his zone after so many years of working together, he had forgotten that Charlie had passed.

And he was almost embarrassed about it. But I thought it was the most beautiful moment because one of the things I don't think we talk enough about in Venture World is founder friendship. And I mean like deep, deep friendship, not like, oh, we went to college together and we were friends or whatever. We're going to start a startup together. I mean, those people who like work together decades and decades out, I actually think this is why family businesses often work better, where even if you look like the Collison brothers, it's like they've sharing resources, you know, since childhood, since they can remember. And, like, there's something about going through life with someone, suffering with someone, understanding how to, like, you know, end someone's sentences that leads to these just incredibly rich and beautiful companies. And I think if, you know, if we did

an analysis in Andreessen Horowitz and just looked at the companies that were true outliers, I think there would be stories of these people are like brothers and sisters. And Anderl's certainly this, right? Like, it's, you know, the founders there were DARPA challenged together, like their first day of college, right? In some ways, there's something. about just having these deep relationships that span the test of time where you're on a journey with someone and it's real like Aristotelian friendship, not like faux friendship, but true love. And clearly you saw that with them. It's just a remarkable thing how they were able to kind of be true brothers and kind of, you know, each other's better half throughout their business career

for as long as they were. It's amazing. Last question. What should we do with Alcatraz? Oh, you know, I love all the ideas of turning it into a casino. But I haven't seen that one. I was saying, I was saying tax haven and no general solicitation rules. You can like go out there and sell your angel. Lockup periods. Just unfettered libertarian capitalism out there. That sounds good. But there is something about bringing it back in its original form.

You know, it's like there is something about these buildings that the president likes to restore into their former glory. And so if Alcatraz is the case, like to keep the historical deotails accurate, you can kind of see where it's coming from. He's definitely a historicist in that regard. Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was fantastic. Yeah, this was great. Come back on again soon. Thanks for having me. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoy the episode, let us know by leaving a review at rate thispodcast.com slash a 16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. Thank you.