Karen Moscow

The conflict with Iran.

While it's highlighting a concern, some investors and many others have been flagging for a while.

Expensive, hard-to-replace weapons are being used to counter cheap Iranian missiles and drones.

Now today, Michelle Volz is joining us, who's a former member of the American dynamism team over at Andreessen Horowitz.

investing in startups looking to address the costly, the slow, the sometimes missing parts of the U.S.

industrial supply chain.

And Michelle, you've just launched a new firm, Pax VC.

You've raised $50 million.

You're looking at early stage.

But I'm really interested in just this moment that we're in of geopolitical tension, of conflict.

And you as an investor in defense tech, but more broadly in supply chain and American dynamism, what do you make of this moment?

Yeah, I think the conflict has really highlighted the gaps that we have in our industrial base.

We've outsourced a lot of our manufacturing overseas to China.

And now we're realizing we need to be able to resupply our weapons systems, our components.

We need to manufacture these things domestically in-house.

We need to shore up our critical mineral supply chain.

And so many of the companies that I'm investing at and looking at, whether back at Andreessen Horowitz or now, are really focused on this industrial base and making sure that we can, in any sort of future conflict, have the capabilities domestically to be able to fight back.

I mean, the name says it all because Pax, we think of Pax Britannica or Romana or Pax Americana of like sort of the dominance of one particular global force and the stability that brings.

But you've talked about how in this competitive area that we're currently in, maybe Pax Americana isn't so solid, but you're looking at Pax Technica.

So where in particular are you excited about?