Podcast: Investing in American Dynamism, With Ben Horowitz and Katherine Boyle

Venture capitalists know what it feels like when a company is firing on all cylinders. But it’s been a while since the whole country had that feeling of dynamism—so why not focus on companies that help the cause by supporting the national interest, solving critical problems, and doing fundamentally new things? Rob and Jackie sat down with Ben Horowitz and Katherine Boyle of the leading VC firm Andreessen Horowitz to talk about investing in American dynamism.

Mentioned

• Ben Horowitz, The Hard Things About Hard Things (Harper Business, 2014).
• Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture (Harper Business, 2019).
• Rob Atkinson, The Past and Future of America’s Economy: Long Waves of Innovation that Drive Cycles of Growth (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005).

Related

• “Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy,” ITIF event, January 2014.
• Luke Dascoli, “AI Start-Ups Attracted Over 21 Percent of The World’s Venture Capital in 2020” (ITIF, January 2022).
• John Wu, “A Small Business Innovation Research Grant Doubles an Energy-Technology Company's Chances of Later Receiving Venture Capital” (ITIF, May 2017).

Auto-Transcript

Rob Atkinson: Welcome to Innovation Files. I’m Rob Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. We’re a DC based think tank that works on technology policy.

Jackie Whisman: And I’m Jackie Whisman. I head development at ITIF, which I’m proud to say is the world’s top ranked think tank for science and technology policy.

Rob Atkinson: This podcast is about the kinds of issues we cover at ITIF from the broad economics of innovation, it’s a specific policy and regulatory questions about new technologies. Today, we’re going to talk about venture capital investment in what’s called American dynamism. The practice of building companies that support the national interest, solve critical problems for the country, and do something fundamentally new.

Jackie Whisman: Our guests today are Ben Horowitz and Katherine Boyle. Ben is a co-founder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He’s the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and What You Do Is Who You Are. Katherine’s also a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she invests in companies that promote American dynamism, including national security, aerospace and defense, public safety, housing, education, and industrials. For those of you who don’t know Andreessen Horowitz is a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, that backs entrepreneurs building the future through technology. We’re really thrilled to have both of you here. Thanks for doing this.

Katherine Boyle: Thanks for having us.

Ben Horowitz: Yes. Thank you.

Jackie Whisman: You’ve both written and spoken a lot about the importance of dynamism to America’s future. I’d like to start with Katherine here. How do you define dynamism?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, so it’s a really great question, because I think there’s a lot of very definitions for what it is, but we describe it as it’s a feeling. It’s a feeling of movement, progress, growth. I think both Ben and I have seen it at a small scale in our companies where when a company is just soaring, when they’re hiring like crazy, when they’ve built a machine, when they have customers just pulling out them from every direction, wanting to work with them, there is this feeling of being directionally all moving in the same direction and just hyper scale, hyper growth. What’s interesting is that feeling of dynamism used to exist in countries. I think it does exist in countries in very large scales.

The question that we’ve been thinking through is, since the 1970s, since post war, there has been this question of is America stagnating in terms of its growth, its progress, its movement, its ability to build? I think people, one of the examples that we often look at is something like when the Empire State building was built in the 1930. It took a year and 45 days. It was one of the most extraordinary physical feats that could have happened. When you look at things that are being built now in both the physical realm, when you look at sort of the time that it will take, I think one of the great examples in San Francisco recently was they’ve reopened a restroom outside the Metro and it had been closed for 20 years. It’s not that we don’t know how to build restrooms or public restrooms. It’s not that we don’t know how to build infrastructure, it’s that it takes a very long time to do things that we know how to do.

Rob Atkinson: They actually had a ribbon cutting Katherine too, I saw.

Katherine Boyle: They did. They did with the face [crosstalk 00:03:06] their fingers. But I think for us, dynamism, we see it in our companies and we see it in that founders often are solving the hardest problems for America. They’re looking at problems that are of great importance to the national interest, whether it’s aerospace and defense, public safety, or these questions like housing and education, where they’re the ones solving these problems that often take the government decades to solve and they’re solving them in years. We’re hopeful that American dynamism is actually coming from the people who are working in technology and solving America’s most critical problems.

Ben Horowitz: One of the big misunderstandings that a lot of the general [inaudible 00:03:47] assets, they feel that we’re behind China technologically. We’re not actually behind China technologically. If you look at most technical fields, U.S private companies are far ahead of China and American universities are ahead. But when it comes to deployment in the government and particularly the department of defense, we are far behind and the lack of ability to convert what we’re doing for the good of the country is the thing that we’re really focused on.

Rob Atkinson: Katherine, your point about have we lost something, we also built the atomic bomb quite quickly too. We used to do things in fact, I think Mark Andrew talked about, I think it was what we need to build again. My very first book, which was like 20 years ago was called The Past and Future of America’s Economy: Long Waves of Innovation that Power Cycles of Growth. But anyway, I wrote in that book that the U.S seems to have lost its prior commitment to dynamism. I ran across a song actually, because somehow, it was on my son’s school play and it was a song by a guy named Walter Arret in the 1950s.

It was called our country [inaudible 00:05:01] and we would never have this song in our schools today. It had lines in there. Like there was no stopping a nation of tinkerers and whittlers. Not long accustomed to making, repairing, improving, and changing. When you’re spelling the word America, don’t forget the I for inventors and progress, the word that made the century turn. We seem to have lost some of that. Now, you hear that AI is going to kill all the jobs and we should be afraid. What happened?

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. It’s an amazing misperception, isn’t it? AI kind of turned the corner in 2012 and we’ve had nothing but job growth in those fields since then. The other thing is I think people originally predicted that it would kill all the manual labor jobs first. Those will definitely be to the extent AI replaces jobs. Those will probably be the last jobs to kind of get automated. It’s a weird, it is sentiment. These things aren’t based in reality. One of the most amazing things to watch in the Russia Ukrainian war has been Starlink, Elon Musk company, basically keeping communications on for Ukraine in a kind of military operation, essentially that’s been far more impactful than anything that the U.S government has actually done. All the while he’s getting attacked by senators and the president for random, ridiculous things for having too much money. Giving him the no credit for lecture cars, which is just like, for all the citizens. It’s just like, wow, that’s ridiculous. I don’t know how our most productive, private citizens and our best investors somehow became villains instead of heroes over the years. But that certainly has happened.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the challenges is there’s a very good book, which I’m blanking on the name now and I’ll think of the name in a moment, but it was basically, oh, Bill Janeway, Bill wonderful man.

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. A very smart guy.

Rob Atkinson: He wrote a book that, and what he argued was that we seemed to have lost a national mission. If you go back in history, we had all these national missions after the revolution. We had a Hamiltonian mission. Hamilton and even Jefferson signed onto that after the war of 1812. We could not be dependent upon Europe. We need to build our own industries. You had the national mission of Lincoln build the transcontinental railroad, create land grant universities. You had one after the Sputnik, but now what’s the national mission. It seems like we’ve lost that. The only thing I can think of that we have is climate, which is an important mission, but it can’t be the only mission.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, no. It’s interesting because I think we do believe that building is that national mission and purpose and actually is a political philosophy. It’s not red, it’s not blue. We see it every day in the founders that we support, people who have their purpose. Oftentimes these are national purposes. We see founders who are trying to solve the opioid crisis. We see founders who are building new launch vehicles or aerospace. We see defense contractors, NextGen defense contractors, where young people who were children at the time of September 11th are impassioned about solving national security with 21st century technology. We see these founders come with these problems that they very much want to solve. I do think that building is actually that philosophy that we’re looking for.

Of course, Mark’s written about it very much so after COVID happened and there’s sort of been a understanding that post COVID like actually our tech companies did come and solve our biggest problems. We did have therapeutics that were built in vaccines that were built. Zoom came to our aid as it’s doing right now in terms of allowing people from all over the world to be able to connect and continue working. I think we believe that what we see every day is that we are seeingyoung peoplewho have a sense of mission and purpose and truly will to improve their country. That’s why we were inspired to build this practice.

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. Actually Katherine’s point is really... There’s an important underlying point on that, which is the CBC didn’t deliver the mRNA vaccines, and had we relied on them to come up with an mRNA vaccine it would’ve been a catastrophe. The FCC didn’t build Zoom. One of the things that we know from building companies is that if you’re inventing things, a newer, smaller companies is usually going to be way more effective than an older. Newer meaning run by its founder than an older company. I think what’s happened is the U.S government has gotten old over the years. The federal government was very new circuit at the Manhattan project in that, it really began in earnest after FDR. But now being nearly 100 years old and hugely bloated and very bureaucratic and so forth.

The ability for the government itself to pursue the mission without a private partnership. It’s just not there. It takes us 20 years to build a bathroom. It took 10 years to build a bus lane in San Francisco. These things are happening all the time. These companies, SpaceX can build a rocket ship that works and can land. We would never expect, we wouldn’t even think about the U.S government being able to do that any longer. They once could, but not any longer. The partnership becomes so much more important as we’re in this mature state as government. That’s a big thing that we’re focused on and Katherine’s focused on at the firm.

Rob Atkinson: Interesting that the government under the Obama administration, they, I think recognize that brilliant DOD and they created, what’s called DIUX, the Defense Innovation Unit X. Now it’s just DIU with Mike Brown. How do you see these kind of experimental things like that? You have In-Q-Tel. There’s actually now a discussion, I don’t want to say with who, but there’s folks who are thinking, maybe we could broaden that out a little bit more. How do you see those kinds of things? Are those promising or they’re just too small?

Katherine Boyle: I think Mike Brown at DIU is an excellent job, and we’ve been fortunate to work with them with a number of our companies. One of the things that I cautioned though is, I think in some ways it was started as a needed experiment. It started a conversation between Silicon Valley and Washington, but it has led to what we refer to as a lot of innovation theater where you have the DOD say and you so happy that we’ve been able to invest in 2,500 startups. I hear 2,500 startups and I think, oh my gosh, there aren’t 2,500 companies worth even talking to in terms of let alone investing in. The reason is that for us we see companies very quickly, especially if they’re excellent companies. They scale fast. They aggregate talent.

They’re able to building compounds building, and it leads to companies becoming dominant startups very quickly. The thing that I think we’ve worried about with a lot of these initiatives across the DOD is that they’re directionally right and they’re talking about why we need to work with startups, but they haven’t necessarily made big bets on the right startups to work with. The thing that we’ve been trying to help the DOD understand about how venture capital works is that there’s going to be a handful of winners that come out of venture backed defense companies. We are investors in some of those and others are investors and others, but there’s only going to be a handful. There’s not going to be 2500. The DOD needs to be working with the best startups. We’ll ultimately have to give real production contracts, not just OTAs and not just [inaudible 00:12:42], but real production contracts to new entrants that aren’t Lockheed Barton aren’t Raytheon. That will be a cultural shift that the DOD has to make. We’ve certainly been chatting with them a lot about that.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah. To be fair, they know that.

Katherine Boyle: Yes.

Rob Atkinson: What the question is, can they do it? I was on a panel with some former DOD leaders and they will readily acknowledge that DOD just is way too slow, but how do you turn that ocean liner around? It’s a tough thing. Washington, none help with the budget insecurity that they have?

Ben Horowitz: Well, I think a lot of it started with headline reaction to headline 60 Minutes at the famous episode, they did where a toilet seed cost $10,000. I remember talking to Ash Carter about that when he was defense secretary. He said, look, we’ve got one person accounting for everybody to something at the DOD right now. Just that level of bureaucracy and ridiculous oversight, we’re much better off wasting a little money than wasting a ton of money and costing ourselves competitive advantage at a time that’s really critical. I think that it’s going to require a reinvention. One of the things Katherine’s been pushing on is, look, it starts with procurement.

If we can fix procurement, we can build all this stuff. You don’t have to build all the new technology to be hyper competitive globally because we can do that 100%. No problem. We’re still the best in the world at that. It’s very hard to get entrepreneurs to go that way, because there is no path. There is no procurement path for a new company right now. In a way, the problem is smaller than it sounds because if we could just fix procurement, we could make massive progress. We don’t need the DOD to be able to build things. We just need them to be able to buy things.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah, right when the Trump administration took off, as they created this, I think it was Office of American Innovation within the White House. We wrote a report. We gave to them and we listed whole think 15 things. One of them was to really start doing much more deep experiments into procurement to allow alternative kinds of companies to be able to get in there, not so much about from an RFP, but saying we’re looking to solve a problem who could help us solve this problem. To be fair that Trump folks did some of that, but it’s such a hard thing and Congress hasn’t really taken the reins on that to push it. I think that’s maybe where the next big step has to go. Let me ask you a question, I guess maybe a little bit different and that’s Katherine, I liked your point about public purpose, but I guess I would define public purpose be quite broad. We were talking earlier about a company in Portland that’s doing 3D printed housing. To me, that’s a huge public purpose.

Ben Horowitz: Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve seen the numbers on housing builds this year in the U.S versus last year. I think it’s like 20% of the number of houses got built in 2021 then did in 2020 or something like that, which is...

Rob Atkinson: Yeah, we can’t build houses. Productivity in the construction industry is down.

Ben Horowitz: Clear housing pricing problem.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah. Geez, this is an area we have to have innovation and yet you go into that space and you’re going to have a lot of barriers put up at local governments and other. My question to both of you Ben, and Katherine. Maybe Katherine, you can start with how much of these barriers or challenges is that the kinds of companies you are both investing in, how much of the barriers come from just sclerotic regulations or procurement policies or all these other things versus active opposition by the incumbents who don’t want to be displaced. If I was an incumbent, I wouldn’t want to be displaced. I understand it. I don’t agree with it, but how do you see that all playing out?

Katherine Boyle: I think it’s definitely both and it’s different for every sector. For American dynamism, we’re not just focused on federal procurement, we’re focused on state and local. I’ll give you a great example in our portfolio of a company that we think is just figured out state and local needs better than probably any company is a company called Flock Safety. There are public safety company that’s operating across America. They were started in Atlanta, Georgia about four years ago. The founder said I want to solve an important mission for my community. I want to solve vehicular crime. 70% of crimes in America are committed with a car. I want to make sure that these crimes are not happening so how would I do that? Well, at the same time, the cost of cameras, which we all have in our phone were coming down.

He built a very cheap camera with a license plate reader using AI and put it up in a neighborhood in HOA and turns out it can actually follow cars that are committing crimes. He started putting them up around different HOAs across America, first in Atlanta then in Texas, then in California. What he noticed is that police chiefs across the country, which have police officer shortages in various communities, we’re reaching out to him saying, we want to use these cameras. They’re cheap. They’re effective. We can put them in places that are spots where we see repeated crime happening. The great thing about it too, is that it’s tracking cars. It’s not tracking people. We would love to use these in our communities. He actually got pulled into procurement from the people who needed his solution.

He wasn’t thinking about becoming a government company. He wasn’t thinking about having to go through onerous procurement processes, but he built a product that was so easy to use, that was cheap, that was delightful. Now it’s in 30 states across America and growing really rapidly and becoming what we would call a best in class government company. Is there pushback from procurement? Procurement at any level is difficult. Of course, he had to learn the ropes for that. Are there large incumbents that are always scared of startups?

That sort of the story that Ben and I always have to worry about is like, there’s always is going to be big companies that don’t like to see little companies succeed, but if you build something delightful and you build the right team and you have a strong mission and purpose, people will join your mission. This company is so impressive. They’re solving Amber alerts in Atlanta and getting covered on the nightly news is like, we wouldn’t have found a stolen child with if not for Flock Safety cameras. I think it’s companies like that in inspire us where, they didn’t set out to be contractors. They set out to solve a real problem for their community.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah. It’s interesting because we’ve done, particularly my colleague Daniel Castro has done enormous amount of work on facial recognition, including in law enforcement. I cannot tell you how much misinformation there is about that technology, demonization of that technology. We did an event with two or three law enforcement officials on this and they were just describing all of the procedures, all of the safety measures, all of the rules to keep it in bounds. I don’t want that technology tracking where I go and it’s not being used for that. It’s being used to catch bad people. That to me is one of those issues. Ben, we talked about earlier about this loss of faith that 50 years ago, wow, this is great. We can catch criminals. We can catch people who are abducting children. Now it’s like, well wait a minute, we don’t want to do this kind of thing.

Ben Horowitz: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. So much of it is cultural and the kind of loss of trust in the government and the view of events through a very skewed lens I would just say. It’s funny in working with police departments as we do with Flock Safety and you know, some of our other companies like Skydio the number of successful kind of apprehensions that the police have versus things that make the news is tens of thousands to one.

If you think of the danger of a traffic stop or apprehending an armed person and so forth, it’s a pretty difficult problem. The fact that the entire perception of the country and pushed by politicians is that nobody can trust of the police it is problematic. To jump to these very, very extreme conclusions, not that the police do everything right, not that there aren’t real incidents that need to be addressed, but to go from that to demonizing an entire job category, it’s just wacky. This is where we just need, I think better leadership, better political leadership in particular.

Jackie Whisman: For years, there’s been this Silicon Valley is from Mars, Washington is from Venus view with neither side, really understanding each other. In the case of Washington, they often dismiss the challenges and opportunities from the Valley when it comes to innovation. On the flip side, the Valley can dismiss the role of government in supporting innovation, including investment in stem education, generous R&D tax credit. What’s your take on this?

Ben Horowitz: It’s a little surreal, I would say on our side in that when we travel to other country... I’ve met with so many prime ministers, princes, kings, and all they ever want to talk about is like, how do we replicate what you have in America here in terms of your ability to build technology. We just can’t do it. How do you do it? What’s the formula? What’s the secret way that we can have Silicon Valley in wherever from the UK to Berlin, to Jordan, to anywhere in the world. Here, the main reaction we get from Washington or the press is like, you guys are bad people. You’re bad culturally. You’re whatever.

It’s just a kind of a weird situation to be on this end. The other way I do think if you look at the companies we’re in, the biggest help would just be understanding what we’re doing and either avoiding unnecessary regulation or getting the regulation correct, would be such a huge help. Kind of unlocking procurement in the government in a way that the defense department can just acquire the best technology. If they could do that, that would be transformational.

Katherine Boyle: One of the biggest things when I move from Washington, so I spend almost a decade in Washington and one of the biggest surprises to me was that I actually think the incentives in Silicon Valley are very different than the incentives in Washington. As we say, in Silicon Valley, we’re playing positive some games. We can have multiple winners. Founders support each other because if they win in category, a founder can win another and you’re creating a positive sum environment, whereas Washington by its nature, because we have elections every two years is a zero sum environment. There are winners, there are losers and it’s on a fixed time horizon where you’re playing for another chance to play for another two years, if you’re in Congress or another six, if you’re in Senate and that’s just the way things are.

One of the things that I always like to point out is that people are driven by their incentive structure in their community. I think Silicon Valley needs to understand that better from Washington, that there is a reason in the method to the madness, which is that this is a zero sum fixed pie game and they need to understand that for us, we see positive some outcomes all the time. We’re with very long term horizons of 10, 20 years and in many cases for these companies. We’re looking at the world very differently too. The more we can understand how each other operate, I think the better we can come to working together.

Rob Atkinson: I agree with that. But at the same time, I think people who aren’t at Washington oftentimes can under appreciate where Congress does come together on a bicameral and bipartisan basis, because frankly that’s like dog bites man stories. I think a really good example of that now is a bill in the Senate called USICA, the U.S Innovation and Competition Act. It had 70 votes. The only reason some more Republicans didn’t sign on is they thought it wasn’t quite tough enough on China. But for example, it has a significant expansion of the National Science Foundation. Significant expand, the biggest expansion ever.

A lot of it oriented a really important science and technology areas that are going to be critical to the countries future. It has a proposal in there that was actually our proposal, which we were pleased to see, to fund a set of a competitive grant program to support 10 or so technology hubs in the Heartland. There are places in the Heartland that are pretty close to almost there, but not quite. If the federal government could come in and help industry and universities and local governments to really ramp up their game, that to us would be game changing. There are some things that are happening. I actually think one of the reasons why that tech hub idea is so important is it will create more stakeholders in the innovation economy in Washington.

Ben Horowitz: That’s a good point.

Rob Atkinson: If you have a member from Columbus, Ohio who works... Columbus now is this tech hub or Indianapolis or Pittsburgh or wherever, they’re going to want to align with sort of the Silicon Valley view, at least that’s my hope.

Katherine Boyle: Yeah. I also think that’s happening naturally, like Columbus is actually a tech hub like that... Ohio has a great insurance industry and there’s a number of insurance companies that were built in Columbus, Ohio recently that are scaling, and I think it’s also just the what’s great about COVID is you did see this move to remote where a lot of people who felt like they had to live in New York or San Francisco 10 years ago are now moving back to great second cities like Columbus or Miami or Austin.

They’re moving back to states and spreading out that innovation and it’s happening organically in many ways. We’re responding. We’re investing across America, especially the American dynamism practice. One of the things that we’re so excited about is so many of these companies are actually not based in the Bay Area, they’re based all over. I think that’s something that Washington should be very excited about is that a lot of great second cities across America are going to benefit from this 10, 20 year trend.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah. I think it may be one of those things where Washington is leaning into the wind and giving it a little impetus because it’s already happening as you point out Katherine. I think of one of the key things of this for example, would be to beef up their research universities for 10 years, instead of maybe getting 600 million from the feds, maybe they’re getting 800 or a billion and that’ll help create these kinds of ecosystems. We’re super hopeful that Bill’s going to pass. There’s a similar bill in the house and has to go to conference, but potentially Congress could pass a pretty groundbreaking bill around this in the next three, four months and the president is definitely committed to signing it. We’ll see where that goes. Maybe we have time for one last question then Jackie?

Jackie Whisman: Katherine, you’ve written dynamism is also a feeling and you said this at the start so maybe it’s good to close on it. The feeling of growth, movement, momentum, and opportunity that makes America the country people want to be from, to immigrate to, and to build a life career or company in. We couldn’t agree more. Any last thoughts on how to start to turn around the country to get back to that feeling and that commitment?

Katherine Boyle: Yeah, no. I’ll echo something that Ben just said, which is there’s been recent studies that something like 50% of unicorn startups have a foreign born co-founder or an immigrant co-founder. I think that’s the best advertisement for America that the best and brightest from all over the world do see Silicon Valley as the place that they want to build. It’s Silicon Valley as an idea, not a regions anymore, but it’s people want to come to America and they want to build, and they want to build groundbreaking generational companies in various problems that are often do support the national interest. There’s a number of immigrant founders who are very focused even within our own portfolio on some of these issues like manufacturing for aerospace and defense. I think that what we’re seeing is people vote with their feet, they want to build in this country. That’s why I think we do have a lot of hope that this trend of American dynamism is going to be one of the biggest trends in technology over the coming decades.

Rob Atkinson: Ben, any last thoughts?

Ben Horowitz: That was a great closing.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah.

Ben Horowitz: Katherine, I don’t think I can do any better than that, but I really agree with that. We’re really hopeful about the future because we think that in our world, the country is extremely strong. It’s not a matter of building the strength. It’s just a matter of applying it in all the places that can help everybody. We’re looking forward to that journey.

Rob Atkinson: Well, first of all, it’s great what you all are doing. When we get in these debates, I always think when some folks on the progressive left worry about too much money, I’m like, I always say, well, you should be looking at hedge fund managers in New York that’s where the money is. There’s a little stat that we used one time somebody had done a study on there. They found that there were more dentists in the top 1% than there are software engineers. There’s notion somehow that Silicon Valley and tech and all is contributing to problems to me, so 180 degrees or wrong. It’s contributing to solutions. You said that earlier, Ben, with regard to Musk. I never liked Elon’s Musk comment about AI because I thought it was, we had that comment about summoning the demon. I’m like, I love it, AI. I want more of it, but you look at what Musk -

Ben Horowitz: Well, he’s building a lot of AI. I think he was just afraid of Larry Page when he said that.

Rob Atkinson: Maybe that was it.

Ben Horowitz: I think it was it.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah. But when you look at what he’s done, as opposed to what he said it’s pretty amazing. There’s lots of people like him in the country and Katherine you’re right. That’s a huge advantage we have. We did a study a few years ago. We looked at the who got triatic patents in the U.S, which is the most important patent class and then what country were they from? Something like 45% were first or second generation immigrants, way more representative than their share in the population. U.S has an amazing strengths and I just hope we can continue to build on it and the kinds of portfolio companies you have are a way to do that so thank you so much.

Katherine Boyle: Thank you.

Ben Horowitz: Thank you.

Jackie Whisman: That’s it for this week. If you liked it, please be sure to rate us and subscribe. Feel free to email, show ideas or questions to [email protected]. You can find the show notes and sign up for our weekly email letter on our website. itif.org and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn @ITIFdc.

Rob Atkinson: We have more episodes and great guests lined up. New episodes drop every other Monday so we hope you continue to tune in.