Katherine Boyle: evaluation

Transcript context

…One of the core mega themes that (I think) we have on Acquired that anybody who's a longtime listener is probably asking themselves right now, is there are three components of being right in a big way to an investment thesis. There's being correct. There's being non-consensus and correct. But then there's also getting the timing right, and the why now. I think that's the natural question for you and for a16z in launching this vertical. Either was it COVID that created this moment? Why is now the right time that this is finally going to change? It's a fantastic question. I think, especially when you put all of these sectors together. These are disparate sectors. The reasons for why education is compelling right now are very different from the reasons why manufacturing is compelling right now. I do think broadly, it has a lot to do with COVID. I also think there are a couple of other things that make it a really interesting time. One is that the talent is very different in Silicon Valley. It's not just an outpost. I use the term ‘Silicon Valley’ broadly, I should say. I'm in Miami. Silicon Valley is an idea, not a place. But when I say Silicon Valley, I mean the people who are leaving the culture and going to the counterculture to build, and they're building with technology because they want to solve real problems. That used to be like a bunch of nerds that used to be people who would major in computer science. They were in the engineering department and they were really interested in infrastructure, like technology infrastructure, not the infrastructure that I'm talking about. I think what happened—I've written about this—is I think the myth of Silicon Valley hit everyone really hard to where the culture and the counterculture merged. And now, people who would have gone into government, people who would have gone into very different careers, say, I have this problem and I want to solve it. By the way, going back to our whole ‘you can take things off the shelf and build a company without necessarily knowing how to build your own infrastructure for the company,’ they can build companies, too. You see a lot of founders who are not your typical profile. They're not engineers. I've talked to founders, recently, who are former teachers. I've talked to founders, recently, who have worked in the Department of Defense as procurement officers. They're not the normal people, we would say, are the founders of 10 years ago. There are a lot of reasons for that. What that leads to is people are going into vastly different sectors than the sectors that they went into most recently. You've talked about this before elsewhere, but The Social Network—coming out now 11 years ago, I think it was, which is wild—really started this moment of being a founder, like you said, the merging of the culture and the counterculture, even though the movie might have been intended as a cautionary tale. If you want to build, you can do this.…

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