American Dynamism
Leveraging innovation, resilience, and economic agility to perpetuate prosperity
American Dynamism embodies the spirit of innovation, progress, and resilience that drives the United States forward. This powerful force is exemplified by groundbreaking achievements in technology and innovation, shaping both our nation and the global landscape. It reflects the American commitment to pushing boundaries, embracing challenges, and always striving for a brighter, more prosperous future. Investing in visionary founders and teams tackling the world’s most pressing problems is essential to fueling this dynamic spirit and ensuring continued progress for generations to come.
-a16z, American Dynamism.
Last weeks write up was dedicated to the current state of the World System and fragility of the Westphalian nation state. If you missed that article you can check it out → here.
Tl;dr the Westphalian nation state system led by the United States is stagnating as the federal bureaucracy continues to be hamstring by “political debt”, plagued by ideological misalignment, and is fragmenting under a lack of shared history.
But there is a bull case for the United States and by extension, the Westphalian Nation State system: American Dynamism.
Affordable childcare. Reusable rockets. Unsnarled supply chains. Sustainable farming. Clean energy. Accessible housing. The companies linked here are tackling some of the nation’s stickiest, most pressing challenges — and pioneering new technologies in the process.
Their founders hail from government offices, classrooms, farmland, factories, research labs, and space stations. And they chose to establish their businesses in every corner of the country, from Carson City, Nevada to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Pittsburgh to Atlanta. Their backstories are as varied as their visions. One thing unites them: a quest to take on our country’s most pressing issues to support the national interest.
Katherine Boyle, a GP at Andreesen Horowitz, is leading the charge. Her investment thesis is centered around the idea that big, difficult problems in society can be solved with bold, innovative solutions. Rather than accepting the status quo or making small changes, we need to think outside the box and come up with radical, disruptive solutions which can truly transform our society for the better.
Introduce competition into systems plagued by regulatory capture 👏
- Defense: We need innovative defense technologies that keep up with the changing nature of modern warfare, including the use of AI, robotics, and cybersecurity. Examples include Anduril, Epirus, and Flock Safety.
- Education: Remediate the challenges facing our education system, including the need to personalize learning and provide more equitable access to high-quality education for all. Examples include Alpha School, Guild, and Wonderschool.
- Housing: Addressing the urgent issue of affordable housing in America and finding new ways to make housing more affordable and accessible for everyone. Examples include Cover, and Divvy Homes.
The goal is to introduce competition into industries that have consistently been mired in political debt. These industries have been steadily rising in price, even while other industries and commodities, which have a more robust market, have been falling.
And its not just about the companies or the prices. It’s about the ethos.
Katherine, who is now based in Miami, argues that Silicon Valley’s meritocratic culture is state of mind. Success should be based on your ideas and execution, rather than your connections or political influence. This stands in stark contrast to the environment of D.C., or the streets of Hollywood.
It shouldn’t be about who you know or what political party you support. It should be about the quality of your ideas and your ability to execute on those ideas.
In short, American Dynamism is about creating a deterministically optimistic future, rather than an indefinitely optimistic future through clever arbitrage and deriving value from companies that were created long ago.
Real World Change, Today
Anyone can come up with lofty goals and marketing collateral. What about real life change, today? David Ulevitch is another GP at Andreesen looking to solve real world problems.
One of his recent investments caught my attention:
Imagine a clean, carbon-free energy source that’s portable. It’s about the size of a shipping container, and can reliably produce power for 20 years.
The benefit isn’t just clean, reliable power. It would allow us to retire a global reliance on diesel generators and the extraordinarily expensive, dangerous, and complex network of logistics that keeps those diesel generators around the world fueled and operational.
This is what the team at Radiant Industries is doing by building their portable, 1-megawatt nuclear reactors.
The implications for this technology are staggering.
First, the defense use case:
Current American military bases run on diesel fuel bladders separated from their base camp. Engineers keep them operational, but you’re basically as sitting duck next to a collection of highly volatile fuel. Countless servicemen die in logistics runs to get more fuel to refill these bladders.
A Radiant shipping container sized reactor could be buried underground with enough fuel to provide power to that base for 20 years. And their use of TRISO fuel cores and helium cooling ensures the reactors are safe and resilient.
But the implications don’t stop at just power. What about nearly limitless fresh water? Desalination is easy in practice, it just takes a ton of energy.
But if you have a source of clean energy you can drop anywhere, then in the future, you can have a source of clean water as a result.
Not just military implications but also natural disaster relief
Think about what we could have done during Hurricane Katrina or the 2010 Haitian earthquake, if we could just air lift two shipping containers. One for clean energy and one for desalination. We could provide disaster relief for an entire area, as well as the energy and water network they would need until they could rebuild their infrastructure.
Conclusion:
American Dynamism promises a return to an age of innovation which defined American Exceptionalism. It harkens back to a time when a US president once challenged American industry to put a man on the moon within a decade, and they did.
There is no shortage of smart people operating in this field and working to solve these problems.
In his weekly dose of optimism,
tracked this trend a few weeks ago in his write up the Techno-Industrial Revolution.We can’t afford to be hamstring by political debt. We need to return to the brass tacks which made America dynamic and exceptional in the first place:
Make it easy to attract the best talent in the world while maintaining a secure border.
Align on a meritocratic culture based on ideas and execution, rather than connections, political influence, or factors beyond an individual’s control.
Agree on a shared history of innovation, and resolve to perpetuate those values to increase opportunity and prosperity for all. Living in the past will never create a brighter future.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.
And my fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do, for the freedom of man.