In early 2022, the investor Katherine Boyle looked out and saw a nation in malaise. Birthrates were declining. The military was overspending and underdelivering, in her estimation. Public trust in institutions had sunk to historic lows. And the American government, she believed, was too hamstrung by bureaucracy and special interests to fix any of it.
She also spotted an unlikely silver lining: The pandemic had been a disruptive “black swan” event that she believed could finally crack open the status quo. In an essay titled “Building American Dynamism,” she declared, “I believe the only way to reverse the course of stagnation and kick-start nationwide renewal post-Covid is through technologists building companies that support the national interest.”
The post, published on the website of Andreessen Horowitz, where Ms. Boyle is a general partner, marked the launch of that venture capital firm’s $600 million “American Dynamism” fund. Targeting early-stage companies in industries like defense, energy, education and manufacturing, the fund has already helped produce billion-dollar start-ups. It also opened a new chapter in Ms. Boyle’s bid to exert influence in both Silicon Valley and Washington.
For most of her career, Ms. Boyle — religious, Republican and not unlike a 21st-century Phyllis Schlafly — was an outlier in the tech world. But today, as Silicon Valley undergoes a generational shift to the right, many of her once-contrarian views are making their way into the mainstream. Thanks in part to her longstanding friendship with Vice President JD Vance, she has also become one of the tech world’s most reliable conduits to the Trump administration.
Her impact is visible in the venture capital industry’s newfound embrace of defense tech, in its open support for Donald J. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and in the government’s deepening ties with the tech industry, from the Department of Government Efficiency to the Department of Defense.
Since 2022, Ms. Boyle’s investing thesis has snowballed into a new language of “patriotic investing,” a crop of copycat funds across the industry and a rising class of politically conservative hard-tech founders who talk a lot about what America represents.
Many of the ideas that Ms. Boyle, 39, has promoted have nothing ostensibly to do with her investing portfolio. In a keynote speech at the American Enterprise Institute last winter, Ms. Boyle told the audience: “We are living in an age of memetic power and memetic war. Meme it and we will be it.” As one of X’s most influential posters, she has declared that we are entering “an era of the martyr” after the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk and endorsed the Trump administration’s military strikes on drug cartels. (“Destroy them all.”)
“I think there should be a chief marketing officer of America,” Ms. Boyle told a podcaster in March. “That would be a dream job.”
These remarks have also helped shape the conservative conversation outside the tech industry. Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News and a founder of The Free Press, where Ms. Boyle is a board member, has called her “one of the most important voices of this pivotal moment.”
Like Ms. Weiss, Ms. Boyle counts Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and right-wing power broker, as someone who played a key role in her career.
“She has managed to build on what Peter Thiel was doing, but without as much of the baggage,” said Max Chafkin, the author of a 2021 biography of Mr. Thiel, “The Contrarian.” “Right now, what’s Thiel doing? He’s giving a lecture on the Antichrist.” Ms. Boyle, on the other hand, is “able to take some of that energy and present it in a way that is less controversial.” (A representative for Mr. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.)
For the Americans who feel that something in our culture is fundamentally broken, Ms. Boyle offers a compelling diagnosis — borrowing the author Walker Percy’s line that we “live in a deranged age.”
Some critics, however, are concerned that she is distorting the current state of affairs to her own benefit. “‘American Dynamism’ cloaks itself as a moral crusade, but it’s an idolatry of wealth, nationalism and weaponry,” said Gil Duran, a journalist and the author of a forthcoming book, “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.” He compared Ms. Boyle’s movement to “a Silicon Valley pitch-deck version of Christian nationalism.”
A National ‘Spiritual Crisis’
I met Ms. Boyle for lunch over the summer at a beige-washed hotel in Palm Beach, Fla., 15 minutes down the road from Mar-a-Lago. She wore diamond earrings and a white blazer, the brunette roots peeking out beneath her blond blowout the only hint that she is a working mother constantly on the road. Her thoughts emerged fully formed, many of them familiar from her previous interviews on podcasts and her online writings. (Her theories on what the TV show “Mad Men” can tell us about modernity and its discontents have gotten a particular workout lately.)
Ms. Boyle works from her wood-paneled home office, decorated with an American flag and an antique typewriter, in a suburb of Miami. (She has called work-from-home benefits for mothers of young children “more important than fertility benefits, maternity benefits, child care benefits.”)
She was sporting a second-trimester bump — her third child. She believes the low U.S. birthrate is a symptom of a “spiritual crisis” in America, though she rejects the idea that economic causes are to blame and instead attributes it to “a decades-long attack on the family.”
Her “spiritual crisis” diagnosis explains many of the problems she sees in our country: Our young boys are overmedicated. Millennials are stuck in a prolonged adolescence. Irony has helped kill American innovation. For many of these problems, she blames the leftist ideologies that she claims dominated the last decade. She believes most would be helped by a return to the nation’s Western, Judeo-Christian roots.
Like so many powerful conservative women before her, Ms. Boyle has a life that’s a tangle of contradictions. She laments the rising age of motherhood in the United States but didn’t have her first child until she was 34. She has criticized no-fault divorce but comes from a happy family of half-siblings. She rails against the overeducation of millennials, yet possesses two advanced degrees. She decries the impacts of feminism, yet enjoys them herself as one of the most successful female investors in Silicon Valley.
Still, her approach has been “really appealing to MAGA land,” and a bridge to the tech world for that crowd, said Ben Freeman, a director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that advocates military restraint in U.S. foreign policy.
And the tech right has increasingly recognized Ms. Boyle as a powerful communicator for its cause — in private and in public. During the pandemic, she became a fixture on the Clubhouse audio platform and in Signal group chats where conservatives in tech exchanged then-subversive ideas about the political direction of the country. She also began attending events for Mr. Vance’s secretive donor group, the Rockbridge Network, where Trump-world politicians connect to talk political and economic strategy with big-money donors.
God, Country and a Pink Power Suit
Ms. Boyle tends to view history as a chain of pivotal moments. There was the day the Nixon administration announced the end of the draft in 1973, which she believes severed Americans from patriotism and purpose. There was July 13, 2024, the day Mr. Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., after which Ms. Boyle wrote on X: “The game is over. You can say what you’re thinking now.”
There was also the day in the 1970s when Ms. Boyle’s father, a would-be Jesuit priest, decided to drop out of seminary to go to medical school, allowing him to marry and have children. And so Ms. Boyle was born, the youngest of six siblings and half-siblings in Gainesville, Fla., where, she said, she developed a deep reverence for armed service members, God and country.
She arrived at Georgetown University with, as she once put it, “the intention of blazing my own trail down Pennsylvania Avenue in a pink power suit.” She wound up in a reporting job at The Washington Post, where, she said, she often found herself out of step with colleagues she perceived as more liberal.
In 2014, as her 20s wound down, she moved to California to start a degree at Stanford Business School. There, she encountered Mr. Thiel’s “Zero to One,” a book that combines political philosophy with business advice. The book details a need for “definite optimists”: people with a positive vision of the future and a clearly defined path to get there.
“It was the only thing that really made sense to me,” Ms. Boyle said.
She cold-emailed Mr. Thiel, who didn’t respond but did forward her note to Trae Stephens, one of his partners at the venture capital firm Founders Fund. After some haranguing, Mr. Stephens invited her to intern at Founders Fund in San Francisco and help him expand the firm’s national-security-focused portfolio.
As Ms. Boyle sat in on meetings with defense tech founders, two things became clear. First, she determined, the government was a nightmare customer, hampered by regulatory hurdles and impenetrable bureaucracies. Second, for those who cracked the code, the rewards — hundreds of billions of annual spending by the federal government — would be enormous.
In 2016, Ms. Boyle joined another firm, General Catalyst, where she began to develop an investment strategy for “civic tech,” a category that included space travel, education, infrastructure and defense. That year, she published an article in Tech Crunch arguing that Mr. Trump’s election should be a wake-up call for the tech world to escape its echo chamber and start to serve the “massive market of voters” who supported his candidacy.
She also found camaraderie with Mr. Vance, then a principal at one of Mr. Thiel’s investing outfits. In 2016, she hosted a book party for Mr. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” in her San Francisco apartment.
Ms. Boyle and Mr. Vance — a graduate of Yale Law School — both fit an archetype “that Thiel tends to elevate,” Mr. Chafkin, the biographer, said. In Mr. Thiel’s world, he said, turning your back on the culture of the elite institutions you were part of “is probably the single best thing you can do for your career.”
The next year, Ms. Boyle ran into Mr. Stephens at a conference, where he told her about Anduril, a company he had co-founded with the hope of transforming the future of high-tech warfare. Fund-raising was difficult, he told her: Meta had recently fired one of his co-founders, Palmer Luckey, for donating to a pro-Trump organization, and the company was already drawing public blowback for its work building surveillance towers for the Customs and Border Protection agency. Ms. Boyle wanted in.
When it came time to pitch Anduril to her bosses, Ms. Boyle stayed up all night drafting a 16-page memo on just war theory, a centuries-old theological framework for determining when violence is morally justified. General Catalyst agreed to cut a $2 million check for Anduril’s seed round — its first such investment, in a moment when military applications were considered radioactive in most of Silicon Valley. Anduril was valued at $88.12 million. Today it’s worth $30.5 billion.
Soon, Ms. Boyle joined Andreessen Horowitz, where her portfolio now includes Hadrian (which makes precision parts for aerospace and defense), Apex Space (transport systems for satellites) and Castelion (hypersonic weapons).
Ms. Boyle is one of three general partners leading the “American Dynamism” fund, alongside David Ulevitch and Erin Price-Wright. They all don’t always align politically, Mr. Ulevitch said, “but Katherine and I have the same belief that we want America to be the place that people want to build their dreams in.”
While her partners lean into product and business fundamentals, “Katherine really focuses on the storytelling of it,” Ms. Price-Wright said, and whether a founder has what it takes to “basically build their cult.”
Sometimes this commitment to ideological aura defies rationality. In February, the “American Dynamism” fund announced that it was hiring Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran best known for restraining a New York City busker named Jordan Neely in a chokehold until he died, as a deal partner.
When asked about Mr. Penny’s lack of business experience, Ms. Boyle simply told me: “He’s wonderful. He’s a gentleman.” She added that the firm was making an effort to hire more veterans. “You learn on the job.”
A Profitable Political Future
In July last year, Andreessen Horowitz’s founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, endorsed Mr. Trump’s run for president, a significant departure from Silicon Valley norms at the time. (Mr. Horowitz would later support Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, but celebrated his victory in November nonetheless.)
Since Mr. Trump’s re-election, the firm has embedded itself in his administration, sending several of its top executives to either unofficially advise or take roles at federal agencies. Last winter, Ms. Boyle informally consulted on the formation of the Department of Government Efficiency. At the American Dynamism Summit in March, Mr. Vance gave the closing keynote. “It’s time to align the interests of our technology firms with the interests of the United States of America writ large,” he said.
In September, Andreessen Horowitz launched its Dynamic Tech Defense Reform Initiative to lobby for a series of congressional bills designed to level the playing field for disruptive defense start-ups.
Already, the shifting norms in Washington have begun to help Ms. Boyle’s investments. In July, the passage of Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy bill was a boon to the defense industry, earmarking $300 billion to modernize the military and homeland security, including carve-outs for autonomous surveillance towers that only Anduril can supply, as well as drone system and naval technology contracts that are well suited to Ms. Boyle’s portfolio. Some industry analysts, however, have questioned the sharp valuation increases of certain “American Dynamism” companies, including Saronic and Hadrian, noting that defense budget volatility and high capital demands could make the projected profitability difficult to achieve.
Others are concerned that the defense contracting process is at risk of becoming too efficient. The Defense Department’s acquisitions process has historically been slow “because these are weapons that can and do kill people — you need to have a little more or a lot more oversight,” Mr. Freeman of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft pointed out.
I asked Ms. Boyle whether she might have political ambitions herself, perhaps even to play a key role if her friend Mr. Vance runs in 2028, something I had heard floated by two founders in Mr. Thiel’s social circle. She laughed, and reminded me of the earlier chunk of our conversation when she had waxed poetic about the benefits of working from home to be with her family.
“Politics is a blood sport. I don’t want to bring them into that,” she said.
Instead, her vision was more abstract. “If I have my dream, the idea that any of this was controversial or scary or that we were in a deep rut because we didn’t have these capabilities, it’ll sort of be memory-holed,” she said. “And if that happens by 2030, what a win.”
The post The Tech Right Gets Its Own Phyllis Schlafly appeared first on New York Times.
