Katherine Boyle

And if it takes two, three, four extra years because you have a different request or you say, actually, we want it built this way, we're happy to accommodate you.

But that is going to mean that you're not getting the products in time.

And Silicon Valley operates in the opposite way, and particularly venture capital.

you give a company more capital in many cases than it even needs to speed up the process of production, to speed up the R&D, to speed up the number of products they can build at one time, and the company is always going to zero.

What I always say about venture capital is it's so different than any other type of business where you take out a bank loan and you say, I'm gonna build a business, and then you wanna make more money than you spend.

Silicon Valley is the opposite.

You wanna spend more money knowing that you're gonna go to zero in 18 months if you don't raise another round of capital.

But what that allows you to do is to bring on the best engineers to produce the product as fast as possible.

And when you compare that methodology of we're going to build hypersonic weapons or we're going to build satellite buses to the companies that have been around for 100 years, they don't know how to operate like that.

It's not their incentives, but it's also, it's not the type of talent that they have on the team that wants to operate in that 20 hour day environment of knowing they're gonna go to zero.

So it's a very different incentive structure, but the last 25 years in America, this is how companies have been built.

Venture capital is the dynamism engine of all innovation in America.

It's the envy of the world.

And so we have to make sure that this system is not just operating for the Facebooks of the world and the TikToks of the world, the consumer technology that we use.

We have to make sure that we bring this urgency and this capital and the speed to the things that matter most, which is, of course, building our defense industrial base.

I don't think so.

I think they're waking up.

My view is probably the best thing that can happen for the DoD, and this is me speaking as someone who would like to see the DoD encourage competition, is to go back to that pre-Last Supper 1990s model where we had 50,000 companies working in defense, a lot more primes.

Now I think something like 40% of the major programs go to five primes.

It was not like that in the 90s.