Katherine Boyle

So you're not as weirded out by defense culture.

It's part of daily life.

Silicon Valley, they don't see anything.

And a lot of these people, many people are new to America.

They have very different views, right?

So his view was we have to go out.

To Silicon Valley and actually have an outpost there.

So we started DIU as an experiment.

It's now much bigger.

Defense Innovation Unit.

So it was the DOD initiative of we have to make, again, it was as much a relationship initiative.

Now it's a contracting initiative.

They actually have real budget.

and the third iteration of how it's structured.

But in the beginning, it was like, we just gotta go out and introduce ourselves to these people and show them who we are, show them what we care about.

These are the things we understand.

Again, people on the ground understand the technologies that are being built, really create a kind of real communication.

And so you had the DoD really focused on this, then you had winners in Silicon Valley,

people who had been at SpaceX for 10 years leaving and saying, well, maybe I'll start a company in deep tech or hard tech or physical world.

And what should I do?