Katherine Boyle: belief

Transcript context

…Well, this is good. Maybe before we dive into some example companies, specifics of the thesis itself, I'm curious, what was the intellectual process? Maybe for you personally, but also, I'm curious. Within a16z, you have these as a firm, these vertical practices now, which has been done in venture before, but not nearly to the degree that you all are doing it now. How did this vertical originate? Did it start with Marc’s It’s Time to Build blog posts at the beginning of COVID? What does it look like within the firm of hey, I think we should create a vertical. It certainly starts with It's Time to Build. That was (I think) the impetus for everyone realizing that the story of Silicon Valley pre-COVID is very different from the story that is about to come. But I think we all very much believed that the world fundamentally changed. Anyone who doesn't believe that from a historical context or technology context isn't paying attention. The world fundamentally changed with COVID and will be reaping those, both the positive aspects of it and the negative aspects of it for generations to come. I think there was that understanding, but then I also think one of the observations that I had is that Silicon Valley is very good at understanding consumer businesses. They're very good at understanding how to make businesses more efficient. Silicon Valley has never touched government. That narrative around how Silicon Valley works with government has always been to try to stay as far away as possible. 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.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.