American Dynamism (with Katherine Boyle)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I think this is our first time doing video in hotel rooms.

**David Rosenthal** (0:03)
I know, I know, it'll be funny.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:06)
And the funniest thing is David and I are in hotel rooms down the hall recording in different rooms so we get better audio quality.

**David Rosenthal** (0:14)
Man, doing live in-person events again is awesome, but yields a whole new level of complexity.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:21)
A whole new level. All right, let's do it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:24)
All right.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:42)
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:55)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:01)
And we are your hosts. David, this should be a very fun, it's funny I say should be, we recorded this already. I know it was a fascinating conversation.

**David Rosenthal** (1:12)
We are speaking to you from the future. We had a great, great fun conversation here with my good friend Katherine Boyle, who is just a wonderful investor. She's a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads their American Dynamism practice. We dive all into what that means, why this is an important vertical, both for venture investing and technology, and the world and for America, but also for Andreessen, why they decided to do this. Her background, her story is fascinating. She was a reporter at The Washington Post in the pre Bezos era, and then came out to Silicon Valley, went to GSB, that's where we intersected, and then became a venture capitalist. She just has an amazing story, and we were pumped to get to do it with her.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:59)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:04)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider, specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners, and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:29)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:35)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:53)
Yep. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:09)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS, Google and Azure who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the Internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:26)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired, that's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. Listeners, you know the drill by now. Come join us in the Slack. We are 12,000 strong. We would love to have you there if you are not there already. And with that, none of this is investment advice. David and I and any of our guests may hold interests in things discussed on the show and make sure you do your own research. All right. Now onto our interview with Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

**David Rosenthal** (4:07)
Katherine, welcome to Acquired. It is so great to have you here.

**Katherine Boyle** (4:12)
Thanks so much for having me. We've known each other for a long time, but I'm a huge fan, so it's so great to be here.

**David Rosenthal** (4:17)
I think we met just after you graduated from GSB, right?

**Katherine Boyle** (4:20)
Yeah. It's been a journey.

**David Rosenthal** (4:23)
It totally has. Oh my gosh. Well, we'll get all into that later, but let's start off with the most important, most interesting things going on right now, which for you and in the whole technology landscape, which is what you and Andreessen call this a thesis of American dynamism. It brings me back to our Brickshire Hathaway episodes, and believe in America, believe in the power to make things better. There's a lot of the opposite side out there right now. Maybe to start, could you tell us what the American dynamism thesis means to you and to Andreessen?