Katherine Boyle

I ended up joining the firm.

My partner, David Ulovich, and I, we always joked, we were sort of competing for the same companies, but there was such a small group of people who were competing to get on the same deals.

He called me one day after we had dinner with Mark, and he was like, do you just want to come do it here?

Like, just come here, come here and build, help, like, let's build a practice together around these ideas.

And so, you know, I always give major credit to Mark and David for having the foresight of saying, hey, like, this is a real thing.

Because a lot of people didn't think it was real.

A lot of people thought, okay, yeah, you'll have an Anduril, but there's only going to be one Anduril.

You'll have a SpaceX, there's only going to be one SpaceX.

But all of these other young companies, you know, the Dinos of the world, the Shield AIs, like these companies, they're, you know, we only need one of each.

And our view was like, you know, this is the next 10, 20, 30 years of American innovation.

If the first 25 years of the second American century, right, 2000 to 2025, if that was investing in apps, investing in software, software eating the world, the next 25 years are taking all of that software and building for the physical world.

So it's critical minerals, it's aerospace, it's defense, it's infrastructure, logistics, all the things that touch the physical world.

And so it was actually January 2022.

It was three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.

I had just joined the firm.

I put out this manifesto called American Dynamism, and I wrote about how the next 25 years are going to be these categories and named companies like Anduril.

We had already invested in those companies, knew them very well, but I said,

you're already seeing so many extraordinary engineers leaving these companies and wanting to build new versions of Anduril, new versions of SpaceX, right?

Like building the next generation of aerospace and defense, public safety, like the entire public safety field has been completely transformed by technology.

And we have great companies that are operating with police forces across the country doing really important work using machine learning and AI.