Katherine Boyle - Investing for America

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:44)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:09)
My guest today is Katherine Boyle, a general partner and Andreessen Horowitz.
Katherine started her career as a reporter for The Washington Post before moving into VC at General Catalyst. She now leads a practice at A16Z called American Dynamism, investing in companies that are solving critical issues in areas like defense, housing and education. In the past year, I've spoken to Marc Andreessen, Josh Wolf and a number of founders about this need to build societally important businesses. So I was excited to explore the topic in even more detail today. Please enjoy my conversation with Katherine Boyle.
Katherine, I've been really excited to talk to you about this theme of what you're calling American Dynamism. I've actually explored in our other podcasts, a couple of companies, Hadrian and Anderl that I know you've been really involved with. And I just think this theme is on everyone's mind. Politics and geopolitics have become incredibly important again for the first time in a long time. And maybe to begin our conversation, you can just sort of outline for us the overall idea here. And maybe the origin of the idea itself and why to devote an investing practice to it and why to devote your career to it. What does American Dynamism mean and what is it about it that motivates you?

**Katherine Boyle** (3:14)
There's a tipping point that I think happened where it became essential that we started investing in these categories. And it was definitely started with Mark's It's Time to Build essay. Why are things not working? Why is it that we live in the best country in the world and we can't find PPE during COVID in New York City?
For me personally, it started a little bit before that and that I spent 10 years in Washington. My early career as a reporter at The Washington Post, when I was leaving media to understand what this technology thing was, I moved out to Silicon Valley and just became sort of shocked by the disconnect between the two ecosystems. And I think there's a number of reasons why there's no connection between Silicon Valley and Washington and why we're trying to bridge that gap. The shocking point of it was most of the technology story in America starts with Washington working together with technologists, government initiatives, government investing. And I think it's only recently in the last, say, 15, 20 years where that story really became divided and where you have technologists that don't necessarily sort of became taboo to even say I would sell to government or I would work closely with certain government agencies on hard tech or deep tech or these sorts of things. So the way that we define American dynamism is we're actively investing in companies that support the national interest. So that's everything from your classical government companies, aerospace, defense, national security, where there are procurement requirements, requirements from the government that are put out to work with various private companies. But it's also things that aren't working directly with government. It's housing, education, highly regulated industries where these are important civic goods that touch all Americans. And most of the, I would say, progress that is going to come in these sectors are going to come from technological improvements, not from policy improvements, in our opinion.