You can’t be a successful investor if you look at the world with ironic detachment. If you are a naysayer. Or a cynic. Skeptical, yes, of course. But fundamentally you have to believe that individuals with tremendous willpower can do things. Great, shocking, inconceivable things. Like find your husband on your phone. Or build a spaceship to go to another planet. Or create a new currency.
In many ways this attitude—adventurous, optimistic and forward-thinking—is deeply at odds with our current moment. From one corner, people insist that the individual stands no chance against structural and systemic maladies. From the other, people say that we are in inexorable decline as a civilization and that decadence is everywhere we turn. Both wind up arguing against risk-taking, against the possibility of creating new things and new worlds.
Today, the venture capitalist Katherine Boyle makes the powerful case that the spirit of building is very much alive in America—just not in the places that we once assumed we’d find it. “When the projects that we believed were Teflon strong are fraying like the history they toppled, the only thing to do is to make something new again.” In the essay below she explains the qualities of mind and character that making such new things requires.
There are a lot of tech reporters who try to get into the investment game. But there aren’t many who succeed. Katherine Boyle is a unicorn among the unicorn-hunters. Once a reporter at the Washington Post, Boyle is currently a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she runs the American Dynamism project. I’m thrilled to publish her.
– Bari Weiss
Here then is Ms. Boyle’s plea, but even as I don’t agree with all of her points, I admire her grit and optimism.
But the trait that is most meaningful is the hardest to describe. It is the fire in the eyes, the ferocity of speech and action that is the physical manifestation of seriousness. It is the belief that God or the universe has bestowed upon you an immense task that no one else can accomplish but you. It is a holy war waged against the laws of physics. It is the burden of having to upend sometimes hundreds of years of entrenched interests to accomplish a noble goal.
When you see that kind of seriousness in a founder, the common response is to laugh or mock it. Who is he to believe he can colonize Mars? Who are they to think people will hop in cars with strangers? But investors like myself run toward such serious people because this rare quality—a potent combination of capability and will—inspires others to reach beyond what seems conceivable.
Gen. H.R. McMaster, the former National Security Advisor, recently described the equation “capability times will” as something else: deterrence. That when nation-states see a dominant country’s technological prowess coupled with the will to defend its way of life, they will not act in a way that hurts the country’s interests.
For 80 years, beginning with the end of World War II, this was mostly the case. American deterrence and seriousness were in some ways synonymous—an undeniable force for growth and prosperity in business, in technology and in culture, making this country’s achievements the envy of the world. But as the century began, the loss of American seriousness accelerated just as our adversaries, Russia and China, became more serious about their own alternative projects.
Shannon linked last night to a Liel Liebovitz essay, Hope Among the Ruins, in First Things, about the negativity that has subsumed the conversation in the American Public Square. Liebowitz correctly attributes this malaise to the the lack of genuine hope due to a broad failure of religious embrace in this nation.
Akiva was no stranger to hope. He was born impoverished and illiterate, and spent much of his life as a shepherd, tending the flocks of a rich man. Akiva fell in love with his employer’s daughter, Rachel. With little to offer this princess of privilege, he took off, promising to return when he’d made something of himself. It took him a few years, but when he marched back into town he was flanked by thousands of adoring followers. The shepherd who couldn’t read or write had transformed himself into the mightiest Torah scholar around.
This tale of rustic rube becoming rabbinic royalty gives us a lot to feel hopeful about, and discredits those sinister nabobs who argue that our destiny is sealed by our race, sex, socioeconomic status, or other accidents of our birth. But Akiva’s theology of hope is far more intricate—and far more relevant to us today.
Which brings us back to the fox.
with this thought as well,
There are plenty of seeds sprouting, if we will but look. From random anecdotes to poll numbers and election results, evidence suggest that an American Golden Age, a return to the fundamental values that make this nation great—the values of the Hebrew Bible and its teachings about a nation chosen by God to spread his light and love in the world—is just around the corner. But first you have to believe, which these days means having faith that, though foxes are scavenging in the ruins and things seem dark, it’s simply because it’s very early morning in America.
I’m a believer.
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