Ben Horowitz & Marc Andreessen: Why Silicon Valley Turned Against Defense (And How We’re Fixing It)
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What sparked the creation of the “American Dynamism” category?
The capitalist approach is messy, but you have you have dynamism on your side. Just come back to the big picture thing. Is America an aggregate a force for good in the world? Is it important for the world that America succeed? Is it important that American values, Western values are preeminent in the world? Is it important that the world not devolve into a complete Soviet communism
everywhere? The other direction is literally fighting everything about our culture, everything about our history, everything about our system. And the fact that it has appeal is like a weird psychological defect some people have. They just always want central control. They always think it's better.
By the way, it routinely doesn't work. Like it like routinely fails because the world is too dynamic and it that's not nearly a fast enough iteration cycle.
The thing that people want is exactly what we named the category. How do we build American dynamism? How do we build Silicon Valley in our own country?
Geopolitically,
we entered a new era. We're in this exciting moment in time where both the need and the demand for new technologies is greater than it's ever been.
The creator of the concept of the five year plan was, of course, uh Joseph Stalin. Like it was it was literally it was literally the Soviet Union run as five year plans. I'll teach Ben a little bit, he comes from the People's Republic of Berkeley. Um the old model of World War Two era, mass machinery and mass men to win wars like those days are long over. This should play greatly to America's benefit if we unleash our strength with flexibility, innovation, creativity, dynamism, uh and apply that into the battlefield of the future. Like we we really ought to win if we're really able to do that.
For decades, Silicon Valley and Washington lived in different worlds. Tech companies built consumer apps, defense contractors built weapon systems, and the two rarely spoke. But something shifted. Ukraine proved that cheap drones could take out hundred million dollar tanks. China spent 20 years building a manufacturing base while America exported its factories. And suddenly, the companies defining the future, AI, robotics, autonomy, realized they couldn't ignore the physical world anymore. Mark and Ben saw this coming. They'd sold to the Pentagon back in the 90s, when Netscape was building the early internet. They watched Silicon Valley turn hostile to defense work in the 2010s, and in 2020, when Catherine pitched them on creating a new category called American Dynamism, they knew the moment had arrived.
I'm joined today by A sixteen Z co-founders Mark Andriessen and Ben Horowitz, along with American Dynamism GPs Kather Boyle and David Yulevich to discuss not just defense tech, but the entire industrial base, energy, manufacturing, mining, and physical infrastructure that makes a country powerful. This is the story of how Silicon Valley remembered what it was built for, and why the race to rebuild America's industrial base might be the most important investment thesis of our time.
I thought we'd start with a bit of a opener. I wanna ask Ben and Mark to tell us about the moment when we got conviction that this was worth creating its own category fund around.
Yeah, well I would say that, you know, Mark and I kind of always were of the view in an abstract sense that we had to integrate the American business and American defense back together because we were falling behind. We kind of knew the companies that we were investing in and we knew the companies that we were buying missiles and aircraft carriers from and they weren't of the same caliber in terms of where they were on the technology curve. And so we knew it was a kind of a national security problem for the country, but we didn't have a plan. And then as I recall David said, There's this woman, Catherine Boyle who I want to recruit and she has this very, very good idea. Can you guys talk to her about it?
And that's when she said, Look, we should call it American dynamism and we should build this thing and
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What sparked the creation of the “American Dynamism” category?
0:00–8:54
2
Why did Silicon Valley become hostile to defense work in the 2010s?
8:54–17:36
3
How did COVID‑19 and the Ukraine war change the tech‑defense relationship?
17:36–25:12
4
What are the main investment themes of the American Dynamism fund?
25:12–35:00
5
Why is energy (solar, nuclear, storage) a priority for national security?
35:00–44:48
6
How is the new wave of aerospace startups reshaping the industry?
44:48–55:31
7
What role does modern manufacturing play in rebuilding America’s industrial base?
55:31–1:04:35
8
What does the future look like for American Dynamism and its global impact?
1:04:35–1:16:03
Speakers
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