Once relegated to the shadows of Silicon Valley, defense tech is going mainstream.

And with a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors from the sector working with the incoming Trump administration,

the momentum could be poised to continue.

It's a stark shift from just six years ago when Google employees protested U.S. military work and defense

companies were classified by funds as sin stocks. Catherine Boyle was early to this trend.

A general partner at A16Z. She co-founded the venture firm's American dynamism practice in January

of 2020. And she says this has been a long time coming.

So 10 years ago, former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter put out the call with Defense Innovation

Unit saying we have to bring Washington to Silicon Valley.

And I think planting that flag from the DOD was really important because it showed that

there was a seriousness of there are people inside the department that want to see change.

But there's a lot of things that I think happened.

It was the success of SpaceX, the success of Palantir.

I always joke, people looked back at SpaceX in 2019 when they were talking about Starlink,

and investors said, how is that ever going to work?

And I'll look at SpaceX today.

So I think there's a lot of things on the success side of the companies that were being built,

the enthusiasm from the DoD, Ukraine changed everything, because when I think these young engineers watched a real land war happening in Europe, they looked and said, okay, we actually need to build defense technology. This is real now. It's not just theoretical. It's something we actually have to focus on. And so when you put all that together, there was just this explosion of new founders, new financing, people putting real capital behind these businesses, and then success stories.

Boyle, who joined me exclusively from the Reagan National Defense Forum, notes some of the hottest

defense startups, and real industries and Shield AI. Both Andres and Horowitz's investments are

nearly a decade old now. And they, plus

Palantir and SpaceX, have already helped mint a new generation of entrepreneurs building new

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