Katherine Boyle

Anduril changed this for defense where in the early days it was controversial, but the minute that Anduril just started just getting all of the great engineers, really just crushing it on the contracting side and just building really cool products, Silicon Valley just loves to be around cool things.

And the thing that I think Elon did for the rest of the ecosystem is he made hardware manufacturing, he made space, he made these really difficult things cool again in a way that no one had ever.

I mean, aerospace before him was just like a backwater.

No one was majoring in aerospace engineering in colleges.

No one wanted to work at those companies.

The first 10 years of SpaceX were hard, but by 2015, 2016, they were re-landing rockets.

They were doing some really cool stuff.

In 2019, they were about to start Starlink, which was this crazy idea that no one thought was going to work and look at it now.

Silicon Valley likes winners.

The minute that they started seeing winners, it's like, okay, you can make money doing this.

And so that kind of brought along, I'd say, the rest of the ecosystem, people who maybe weren't as interested in DOD, but they started seeing, you know, things change.

And then on the DOD side, I mean, I would actually say that this movement was really created by the DOD.

Like, former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in 2015 launched DIU.

And he was the first person, I think, inside—it was during the Obama administration—he said,

you have all these incredible engineers in Silicon Valley.

None of them know anything about the military.

Like they don't see anyone in the military.

We're not out there, right?

Like in Washington, DC, if you live in DC, you go on the Metro, you see people in uniform, they're headed to the Pentagon.

It's part of your life.