GO WEST, YOUNG JOURNALIST.
The spring of 2014 was a season of change at the Washington Post. One of the world’s richest men, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had just purchased the paper from the Graham family, which had owned and published it for generations. It was also a season of change for a young writer on the style desk, who had been covering D.C.’s museums, subway singers, and other cultural minutiae. That was the year she quit her job, packed her bags, and made a big move to Silicon Valley, to study for an MBA at Stanford. That writer was Katherine Boyle.
A lot can happen in a decade in America. Today, Boyle is a General Partner at the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, where she helps lead the “American Dynamism” practice (which, in April, got a fresh $600 million to invest). American Dynamism means, per a16z, investing in “aerospace, defense, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, industrials, and manufacturing… companies that transcend verticals and business models in their quest to solve important national problems.” American Dynamism is not just an investment thesis. Since Boyle coined “American Dynamism” in 2021, the phrase has become a rallying cry in Silicon Valley and for people who think that the tech world ignored its obligations to Americans, and its people, for too long. And it’s become a meme: both an Internet joke that comes in many forms, and an idea to be copied and propagated throughout the broader culture. Boyle, like her boss Marc Andreessen, trades in memes. Andreessen’s most famous meme, “Software is Eating the World,” remains the calling card of the firm bearing his name. More recently he declared “It’s Time to Build” — and eighteen months later his firm hired Katherine Boyle to help invest in builders.
Some might say she is an unlikely candidate to lead such a serious movement, let alone such a massive investment vehicle; unlike most of her peers in venture capital, Boyle cut her teeth as a writer, not an engineer or entrepreneur. But at a time when American enterprise is on shaky cultural ground, under siege on all sides, it doesn’t surprise me at all. If engineers build, then culture determines what gets built. After just a few years of Katherine Boyle at work, the meme of “American Dynamism” can be heard from coast to coast: in California factories and offices, in the biggest publications, in the halls of Congress.
This is the unlikely — no, likely — story of how Katherine Boyle, a former journalist with an eye for stories and a grasp of ideas, made it to the front lines of a high-dollar cultural battle for America. This is Boyle’s War.
Walk in the Front Door
Boyle is a daughter of Florida — born, raised, and now lives. In her precocious teenage years, she did not always appreciate the place. She dreamed of getting to Washington. “I watched All the President’s Men, I read all the books about Washington,” she told me. “I was going to get out of Florida and live in Washington.” She wanted to go to Georgetown University ever since she was six years old. And she got in.
After graduating from Georgetown with a degree in government in 2010, Boyle got her first job at the Washington Post. She has an abiding affection for the Post and her “perch” at the Style desk there, as she calls it. “If you’re someone who really cares about the character of D.C., and cares about what’s going on in American culture, the Style Desk was a perfect place,” she told me. (Another person who got his start at that particular desk at that particular paper was Tom Wolfe, who loved the job precisely because of his disinterest in politics.)
At the Washington Post, reporters had an assigned beat. In Boyle’s case, it was museums, operas, and concerts, but “after doing your beat, you could write whatever you want.” And her byline was… eclectic. She profiled Vanna White, the longtime hostess of Wheel of Fortune, wrote regular stories on the twists and turns of museum finance in America, chronicled shock performance art alongside quaint cultural events. “I had a reputation at the Post that I was always in the newsroom,” she told me. “I went in every Sunday, even though no one was there, because I thought it was a quiet place to write.” The old Washington Post building on 15th Street, which was torn down in April 2016, holds special memories for Boyle. “There was a side door that was closer to the Metro that everyone else walked in if they were coming from the Metro,” she remembers. “But I always made it a point when I was at the Washington Post to walk in the front of the building.”
For Boyle, “seriousness” is a theme, and walking in the front door a symbol. “Nobody ever looked at a junior reporter on the Style desk and thought, ‘you’re a serious person,’” she said. “But I took the job very seriously.” One of Boyle’s favorite pieces from her time on the Post was about a busker (a street performer, for the unfamiliar) who was trying to make a living singing Italian arias in concrete Metro hallways, while working at Target and going to school on a scholarship. He ended up being invited to perform at Carnegie Hall. In the piece, she recalls another story, in which a famous violinist tried busking in D.C.’s busy L’Enfant Plaza station with a $3.5M Stradivarius violin. The star went bust. In the piece, Boyle makes a non-intuitive point, one that a music critic might have missed: the world-renowned violinist suffered from “inexperience” at the thing he was doing, which was not a concert performance, but subway performance.
“Busking is a skill in itself,” she wrote. And if you don’t take that task seriously, the most expensive violin on the planet won’t save you.
“There was something so magical about the fact that I got to go into the office and write 5,000 word pieces for the print newspaper on anything that was interesting to me. And it was a small group of people who would flip to the third section of the Washington Post and read something in the style section that has nothing to do with the news of the day. But the people who did — I used to save their emails they’d send to me, because it meant something to them. I loved the idea that I wasn’t writing for everyone, but that I was writing for a very small group of people who would laugh if I used a turn of phrase in a way that they were in on the joke. Those were the little joys that made the job just extraordinary.”
In 2012, she wrote a story for the 50th anniversary of Walmart, Kohl’s, Target, and Kmart, all of which were founded in 1962. The story has a few of those turns-of-phrase she mentioned:
“Four stores and 50 years ago, in a coincidence that looks prophetic only in hindsight, Pax Americana gave birth to discount shopping, with Target, Wal-Mart, Kmart and Kohl’s all sprouting up in America’s heartland. The economy was booming and the concept ingenious: Replace seasonal sales by selling discounted goods year-round. The retail revolution came before the civic one, with a growing middle class lapping up toasters and Tide for cheap, cheap, cheap. Discounters catered to the haves and have-mores, anticipating — and cultivating — the have-it-now culture that characterizes modern consumerism.”
One notable word was missing from the article about the past and future of retail competition: “Amazon.” Boyle joked to me, “how did I write that story and not even mention Amazon? If that isn’t indicative of just how divorced the Washington culture is from tech…”
As fate would have it, less than a year later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. He took over from the Graham family, who had owned and operated the paper for four generations, including the Watergate years. The last months at the paper before the purchase were a fugue state. “Everyone kind of knew it was falling apart; it was all we talked about then,” she recounts. Another salient memory of that old world: “It was pre-Twitter… everyone in the newsroom made fun of people who were on Twitter!”
Just before Bezos bought the Post, Boyle had a heart-to-heart with a friend whose husband, a Naval officer, had been accepted to the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She was confused why someone with no background in business had been able to get into the most selective MBA program in the country. But he explained that the Stanford MBA program let in all sorts of people. So she decided to apply, studying at night to sharpen her geometry and calculus skills for the GMAT. To the surprise of her colleagues, she was accepted to Stanford. “Not many Washington Post journalists go to business school,” she reports. (even fewer go on to be venture capitalists)
Her last piece in the Post appeared in May 2014. Then, she was off to California.
God and Country
As a former journalist, Boyle was low in the Silicon Valley status hierarchy. But she took advantage of a unique dynamic there: that practically anyone had time to meet with a curious, earnest person trying to find his or her way. After graduating with her MBA in 2016, Boyle became an Associate at General Catalyst, the venture capital firm. The next year, she was promoted to Principal, and in 2020, was promoted to Partner. Six years from the style desk to being a Partner at a leading firm was a rapid ascent.
“There was nothing about who I was as a reporter in Washington that translated that much to Silicon Valley — except the fact that I loved ideas”
While at General Catalyst, Boyle developed an affinity for a certain kind of business: one a bit more tangible, and practical, than the standard scalable software businesses that had done so well for so many investors. She invested in defense companies like Anduril and Vannevar Labs, as well as Hallow, a Catholic prayer app now worth $300M. She recounts a visitor to General Catalyst asking what she was focused on. “I joked at the time, I think my thesis is ‘God and Country’!”
“God and Country” never caught on. But American Dynamism did. Boyle describes “American Dynamism” as the answer to a number of questions she’d been asking herself. What am I investing in? What are the things I care about? So, she put it in her Twitter bio. “I wish I could say that there was a super conscious decision, or that we hired consultants or had some sort of meeting of the minds where we came up with the term American Dynamism,” she said. “But of course, that’s not how memes work. I just started saying it!”
In May 2021, the phrase first appeared in an official document, a General Catalyst blog post about their new “Civic Vertical,” the subtitle for which was “Towards a New American Dynamism.”
In November 2021, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it was hiring Boyle as a general partner. By this point, Boyle had a name in Silicon Valley. a16z’s David Ulevitch, her co-founder on the American Dynamism practice and the person who recruited Boyle to a16z, wrote that in interactions with founders, “we were always asked if we knew Katherine Boyle.”
She got to work quickly propagating the American Dynamism meme from her new perch at one of the Valley’s biggest and most successful venture capital firms. Shortly after joining, in January 2022, Andreessen Horowitz officially launched American Dynamism as a thesis and investment practice. The idea for a dedicated American Dynamism practice at Andreessen Horowitz, Boyle says, came after they realized that they had mis-categorized a key section of their portfolio. “We looked back through our portfolio and realized that we had been categorizing businesses as either enterprise or consumer. But actually, in many cases they’re not either — they’re government! The common thread is government. They are things for the citizens and the public. They are things that Americans care about.”
“A Party Doesn’t Hurt”
Nearly ten years after she went West, in February 2024, Katherine Boyle returned to Washington and to an old haunt, the National Portrait Gallery. This time, however, she was not here to write a story: she was here to throw a party. It was the a16z American Dynamism Summit and a who’s-who of investors, founders, policymakers, and military brass were here for the evening. Neon-lights illuminated the museum’s atrium, and bartenders poured espresso martinis dusted in cocoa––with the logos of defense startups.
Over lunch the next day, I asked her who had come up with the ideas for the defense-logo martinis. She laughed, telling me “No, no, no. I cannot take credit for that.” She credits instead, an enterprising bartender. What happened was, she said, that a founder had asked whether he could get his company logo on his drink. The bartender said it could be done, “and it started this amazing cascade of every founder wanting an espresso martini with their company’s logo on it.”
“It was brilliant, it caught on, but it wasn’t me,” she insists on the martinis. “But what I love about your question is that it reveals what most people assume about memes and ideas. I am of the belief that ideas belong to no one, and that memes in particular belong to no one; there is no author; they have a life of their own.”
And to be certain, “American Dynamism” has a life of its own.
A few weeks later, Boyle threw a more spontaneous party of the same flavor. A student committee at the Stanford Graduate School of Business had recently denied an application for a new club — specifically, a Defense Technology Club. The committee cited a lack of “potential contribution to GSB culture.” (The Epicurean club and a dozen others like it had made the cut) Boyle chimed in on X: “You don’t need a club to build something important, but a party doesn’t hurt.” At that moment, the “Unofficial [Redacted] Defense Tech Club Kickoff Party” was born. Boyle hosted a few weeks later at Andreessen Horowitz’s Menlo Park offices, just a stone’s throw from the [Redacted] campus. The event drew a busload of young defense entrepreneurs from SoCal, defense-curious Bay Area denizens, and Boyle’s boss, Marc Andreessen himself.
“A party doesn’t hurt” is right — serious ideas, serious businesses, and serious movements need serious backup, and that can’t come from whitepapers and books alone. Ideas need to be articulable. Ideas that are fun, the ideas you can throw a party for… those are ideas that can win. To Boyle, seriousness doesn’t mean being stale; quite the contrary. Serious ideas can and should have great culture attached to them. So, turn up the lights and get the espresso machine going.
It’s Boyle’s belief that the only way to topple America is to topple it from within by destroying its culture of building. At a speech in Washington last year, Boyle elaborated on that point, quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, who said, of the United States: “Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness.” One founder tweeted in real time: “Bearing witness to one of the greatest speeches ever publicly given by a venture capitalist.”
“Katherine makes me want to wave an American flag, salute, and shout ‘hell yeah’ all at the same time.”
– Marc Andreessen
Boyle went on about Tocqueville to me: “He identified the American culture as saying that you should continue to pick yourself up after you fail. It’s an enterprising culture, and his use of that word — ‘enterprise’ — is so important, because businesses are a huge part of how people think. Americans like the exchange of goods and services. We like hustling and building things. And we should remember that whether it’s business or families, creation is the most important thing that humans do.”
The Gospel of Seriousness
Over the course of talking to Katherine Boyle or reading her writings going back a decade and a half, it becomes clear that in the Gospel of Katherine, there is one supreme value: seriousness. All other memes are derivatives of seriousness. “[S]eriousness is the maniacal belief in a project greater than oneself,” Boyle once wrote. It’s treating the mission like it matters more than you do. Serious people don’t worry about little things or little critics.
She says it of the place where she grew up and now lives: Florida, writing in a 2021 blog post:
“[Miami] is unapologetically zealous, serious, misunderstood. Built by people who know what it feels like to have the rug pulled out from under their legs…
Growth. Movement. Sun and cranes. A rising city built for people who choose not to cower, but to run towards the neon lights, and even aid those who can’t get there on their own… a city that’s still bringing people in, that still has its arms extended to those who need a lift because it believes —with all the earnestness we attribute to children and immigrants— that the promise of America is real.”
Over lunch in Miami Beach, Boyle told me, “the people who come here are escaping something,” she said. “So, Miami is not a place where people are jaded by minor things in life. They’re just happy to be living. They cannot believe their good fortune that they managed to escape.”
The “serious” word comes up in other contexts. Being the only former museum reporter I know, I wanted to ask Boyle about some of the 21st century’s other meme-warriors: the soup throwers, the twenty-something Just Stop Oil activists prophesying doom and destruction in front of great works by Da Vinci and Van Gogh. “I mean, I think it’s ridiculous and we roll our eyes at it,” she said. “Yes, they are absurd, but they are serious. Greta Thunberg is a serious person. She believes what she’s saying. She thinks that she’s been sent on a mission by whatever deity she believes in. She takes herself seriously, and she’s serious, and that is why she attracts people who follow her. We have to take them very seriously, because they do.”
One perk of Boyle’s legacy-media background is that it has given her a broader appreciation for the full arc of history than most; the Bay area’s single-minded focus on the future can, in practice, keep its denizens trapped in a perpetual present, always worried about the next thing, and therefore, the now. “Before I moved to Silicon Valley, I was living deeply in the past, covering all these museums. And one thing I’ve learned well is that every era has this war of memes. Every era has these doom-mongers. It’s not new to us today. It comes in different forms, but the good news is that calling it out, being public about and frankly, fighting back—it works. It matters.”
In 2023, Boyle wrote a triad of articles for The Free Press imploring young people to “get serious” about their time, about suffering, and about their purpose in life. If “Live, Laugh, Love” was the bland life-maxim of Gen-X, then Boyle’s reply is “Time, Purpose, Suffering.” The times call for it––because, as Boyle puts it, “we are at war with destructive memes.”
What are those destructive memes? “That your twenties and your early life don’t matter. So, take your time. Use your twenties to ‘experience’ things.” Another: “That life isn’t about achievements or purpose. That life is about enjoyment, or dabbling in things. Don’t worry about having a purpose.” Or, “Don’t worry about having a family. Don’t worry about doing the things that matter, because you’ll have time for all that later.” And one of the biggest of all, in her view: “that life is not about suffering, that you shouldn’t suffer, that there is no pain, that there are no setbacks.”
In trying to minimize all suffering in life, Boyle notes, we have incidentally increased all of the incidental suffering of everyday life. “Speech is suffering. Debate is suffering. Being embarrassed in a work meeting is suffering. If you want to know why young people are not resilient in the way of our grandparents, who fought in World War II, there you have it. There is a shocking number of things that are considered suffering, because of this lie that suffering doesn’t matter.”
Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told an audience of Stanford students that “resilience matters in success. I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you… To this day, I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ inside our company with great glee.”
Katherine Boyle shares his glee. “You see it in his eyes,” she tells me, that “Jensen has suffered deeply for years, and that he attributes all of his success today to that deep suffering. And you see it in Elon’s eyes, too, when he talks about his childhood, when he talks about the torment of being a founder of these important companies. These are things that no normal person can handle.”
In the war of bad memes and good memes, Katherine Boyle has taken a side. She wants you to walk in the front door. Go in early. Go in on Sundays, even if nobody else does. Go is because nobody else does. Go in, and get your own work done. Create, create, create. The future belongs to those who take themselves seriously.
