Katherine Boyle

Functionally, because of the procurement process, it would be impossible for startups, again, that are working on these 18-month timelines, that they take capital, they're supposed to get big as quickly as possible, and hire more people and grow, that they would hit the valley of death of the DoD, and it would be impossible for them to break through.

You had a financial class, but also a founder class that just really didn't think about the DoD.

It was also this interesting time in Silicon Valley.

I think a lot of people look at the old school Silicon Valley.

Bob Noyce, the Fairchild Semiconductor, which was one of the earliest venture-backed big companies, and then Intel.

You know, that type of engineer, you know, he was an Iowa farm boy.

It was sort of the people who put a man on the moon.

Those types of engineers were sort of the old school Silicon Valley.

And I always think something really shift.

Sometimes people point to like the early 2000s.

I think Silicon Valley really shifted for a couple of reasons.

The first reason I think it shifted was kind of post Facebook.

So, Facebook started in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room.

A bunch of kids went out, then a bunch of Stanford kids joined it.

But what I think Facebook did, it was sort of the first company alongside of Google, was they made tech sexy for a certain type of worker that is not technical, that goes to fancy school.

It used to be if you went to a Harvard or Yale, you'd go work on Wall Street.

You would go work in investment banking or something.

And around like 2008, 2009, that's when you started seeing a lot of these really talented, really bright, but sort of indoctrinated like Ivy League types come out to Silicon Valley.

And they brought with them sort of this

the same thing that the journalists have, the same sort of activism, the same sort of, I have a certain set of beliefs about how the world works and I'm going to bring that into the company culture.