Katherine Boyle: prediction

Transcript context

…Well, it's funny. Even not thinking about the companies serving the government as a customer. Take Palantir, for example, let's say you run an experiment where you have a bunch of people doing and building very innovative things. Over the course of 70 years, that compounding at a high rate. At some point, that goes from being garage projects to creating a lot of the value and infrastructure in a society. At some point, these things have to come to a head because here we are, I'm thinking about the timeframe from 1950-ish to 2020-ish. A lot of the infrastructure that everyone outside the tech community uses in their day-to-day lives now is born of the tech community in Silicon Valley. It's just the math. You're going to keep compounding that capital, that talent, those innovations, and our way of life is now based on the things built in this community. Yes, this is also a function of and this is one of the things that I think is actually forced the government to say, okay, we're going to have to work with the private sector in a way that's probably a lot deeper than what we used to do in terms of a defense industrial base. Software is a revolution that is completely touching every aspect of society. But the people who are building the best forms of software are not going into government. That is actually a radical change from how government used to work. It used to love to build internally. That was sort of the thesis. We need tanks and battleships, and we can get those from the private sector. We actually like to build our own internal tools. Anyone who's a student of history of company building, that sort of thing, is that it’s not what's happening in the best companies. You can choose to build or buy, but the vast majority of companies that are getting off the ground are using external tools. Their outsourcing is a decentralization that's happening, even in company building that we can get into, but the government has not realized that in terms of how it procures software. If you talk to people who are in the bureaucracy of government, it's like their private life of catching the Uber to go home, the DoorDash so they can get food delivered. They have this completely normal consumer, internet private life that all of us share. Then they go into the government and take 30 minutes to start their computer. It's like being back in the 1980s. It's one of the biggest frustrations because there's a lot of great, I would say, especially in the DOD I think is the best example of the most forward-thinking part of the government that actually understands technology. This is the most frustrating thing for people to say I'm living in a time warp when I go to work. We can understand that as people who are in this modern tech ecosystem. We have these modern tools when we go to work. We're conversing right now. It feels great and it's easy and simple. That is just not how the government works. It's one of the last holdouts. To your point, we have this mega theme on Acquired of, “Don't do stuff that doesn't make your beer taste better.” The origin of that quote was with Bezos, when he was launching AWS at Y Combinator 15 years ago, but probably 70% of our sponsors here—Phantom, Modern Treasury, Vouch—just sit in the water now, that of course, the way you succeed, the way you build great products is you'd be really, really great at one thing, and then you use the whole suite of other products that are built in this ecosystem that are really, really great at everything else you need.…

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