Katherine Boyle: evaluation

Transcript context

…Which is so ironic, given we covered so much of the origins of Silicon Valley on this show. Don Valentine was selling to the Department of Defense back in the day. Yeah, that's something that is just not understood in the modern history of Silicon Valley. Of course, Silicon Valley was built on defense investment. But this sort of view that software could actually ever work with the government or the DOD, I mean, it's just viewed as the procurement of these types of technologies is almost impossible. There has been sort of (I think) this 20-, 30-year of, do not engage modern wisdom from venture capital firms. It's just too hard. There's so much other stuff to do. There's so much other stuff to build. Let's make sure that we don't take off the regulators in some way. And in some ways, like when you look at the geography of Washington versus Silicon Valley, I think that part of the magic of Silicon Valley emerged so far away from Washington and emerged in a totally different part of the country with a totally different history. It’s sort of outside of the East Coast establishment or the corridor that very much understands how the world works. There is a reason why Silicon Valley has emerged in a way that has, but I think my background, it's been 10 years in Washington, they were sort of the center of my universe until I came out to Silicon Valley. I was stunned by the fact that there was very little overlap between what people in Northern California—this sort of haven we’re talking about—and people in Washington cared about. But of course, when you look at it from a DC perspective, these markets are so large. They're the most important markets, that's why they're regulated. Because they touch everyone, why are we so afraid of working with them? I think that was always just a question, an intellectual question in my mind of, is it possible for some of these companies to actually do the work of government? Then I started doing this research. I wrote a piece for The Washington Post in 2018, about how actually, it seems like Silicon Valley was actually doing a lot of the work of the government. They just didn't want anyone to know about it or talk about it. They didn't think of it in those terms. It's everything from SpaceX and Palantir, which are companies that really were helping intelligence agencies or NASA, the classical realm, but also things like Lyft and Uber that were completely transforming public transportation in cities across America. Not to mention the cloud providers, there was a big Jedi contract.…

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