Connor Love joins Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism team as GP with $1.2B fresh fund

Speaker 1: Yeah. Great to meet you.

Speaker 2: Nice to you today.

Speaker 1: Really really impressive. Thank you. And come back on soon.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 7: Appreciate it.

Speaker 1: Cheers, Danny.

Speaker 2: Me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. We have our next guest already in the waiting room. It's Andreessen Horowitz now. Connor Love, welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new gig. How are you doing? Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. First question. How many cups of coffee a day do you drink?

Speaker 4: Oh, Four. Oh, you're you got room to run.

Speaker 1: You got

Speaker 2: room because there's to new report I'm I'm

Speaker 4: a zero celsius guy, two zero Red Bull. Back when I was in the military, I would pound Red Bull and then, you know, the stomach gets all messed up so I gotta declanse. So I'm on a journey. I'll come back to it.

Speaker 2: Well, the American Heart Association says you're well within the limits. You're healthy. Congratulations. You're doing it right.

Speaker 1: The other question It's so funny. I had seen a study showing that you could basically eat coffee max as of like two years ago. I've been on that I've been basically on that on that program

Speaker 2: Okay. Well

Speaker 1: for a while.

Speaker 2: Connor, you were early too.

Speaker 1: The other thing I gotta just say since we're on the topic of caffeine, I found out Austria has like, glass. You can get Red Bull in a glass bottle just at gas stations.

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. It's from there. Right? That's where I had I almost went to headquarters when I was there.

Speaker 1: I was like, I gotta import I gotta import this stuff.

Speaker 2: Maybe. Maybe.

Speaker 1: Anyways, we're not here to talk about glass bottle of Red Bull. We're here to talk about you.

Speaker 2: Caffeinating the capital markets with new Exactly. American dynamism investments. Talk to me about the journey. Talk to me about what you're excited about to be doing Yeah. Yourselves now.

Speaker 4: I mean, look. I've known the folks at AD for a while. You know, we all know four years ago, they didn't just, you know, point to a category and think it was cool. I mean, they they helped create the category. Yeah. Both branding it, also but back in some of the earliest, most interesting companies in this ecosystem. So it's been a relationship that I've had for a long time. And when I got approached to the opportunity to join the team and help lead the team here, in a lot of ways, it's one of these things where our job as VCs is to sit behind entrepreneurs and put them in the best position to succeed. And this platform offers you a really good place to do that. And it's kind of one of these things where it's a good fit for me, let's just say that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think so. So take us through the structure of the team now because you're you're saying your help leading it. It seems like you're in a GP role. Yeah. Does this mean Katherine's running? Is she is she on the way out?

Speaker 4: No. Katherine's part of the team. She's kicking it. She's she's doing amazing things. I think the beauty is when like we all know when you grow the fund, then there's more opportunities to invest. It means you need to kind of push it to the next version. And so we got $1,200,000,000 of fresh capital to deploy into a category and kind of supercharge in a way. So So it's kind of us four GPs operating as a team. And this is the beauty of venture is there's individuals that have good backgrounds and good beliefs and good views of the world. But I think in the end, venture should be a team sport. And, yeah, you got to put one individual ahead of the other every now and then. But look, I mean, when you look at the platform and you see kind of what's been built so far Mhmm. I mean, I'm excited to to help take it to the next step in the future.

Speaker 2: And the structure of the fund, I mean, I imagine you're still going to be focused on, like, the earlier stage. You obviously have enough capital to lead follow on rounds. But sweet spot series a b Yeah. I'm interested in like the health of that category because it feels like there are many category defining companies in all Yeah. Like when I look at a market map, I'm like, are we good on AB? And then I find like the whole next turn of like, oh, we didn't think about this whole section of the economy.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Alright. I'll give you two perspectives here. The first is in any new category that is going through a tectonic shift like this category it is, you are 99% wrong about the size of the category when you start investing. Like, just go back and look at anything. I mean, the nature is this category is gonna be far bigger than we all think it

Speaker 2: is. Sure.

Speaker 4: With that being said, I do think you're right. There have been a, let's call it a, you know, neo primes in the defense space or kind of neo manufacturers, whatever you wanna call them elsewhere that have clearly pushed themselves into, hey. We are a real player. We've raised real capital. We have real customers. The question is, you know, how many people are gonna be at the table? And, you know, I'll answer that question two ways, which is not all of them, number one. And the second one is, as I said before, it's going be a bigger category than we all think. So what I love doing and maybe this is a little bit controversial here, but it's like my favorite type of investing is really at that inflection stage where you're potentially writing a growth check or a growth size like check, but the company is still early in terms of the product market fit. And in my view, especially in AD where these companies take a lot of capital to grow, that's how you return funds. I mean, that is the exciting place to invest in my opinion.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Jordy, I wanna give you a second if you have something where I can go.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Update on I want I want the update on the deals you did while at Lightspeed that you're most proud of. Because I'm assuming you're gonna, you know, first day on the job, got the new email, you you hit them up. How how would you like another 100,000,000?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean I mean, look, this is another thing about venture is when when these when these companies raise a lot of capital, there's a lot of the same people around the table over multiple stages. So, I've yeah, had the privilege of investing in a lot of businesses, everything from Castilian to Andral to K2 Space to Amca, a lot of other things. And the beauty is Andreessen has actually been an investor in a lot of those businesses already. So it's a relationship I get to kind of carry over now from a different side of the seat. But I think you're right. I mean, look, there's going to be many new entrants. I am very happy with those investments that I've made, have a great relationship with Ravi Matre and the rest of the folks at Widespeed. I mean, they're going keep doing amazing things and investing in this category. But, yes, I just think it's still early. I mean, again, like nine times out of 10, you were wrong about the size of this market. The space market is going to be massive. Defense market is definitely not spoken for yet. The industrial base of manufacturing, we haven't even really talked about and touched. Like, we're talking trillions of dollars of industries. And we, you know, look at great companies like Hadrian or Amkai, we think, oh, the market's been solved. No. Like, it's there there's there's a ton of room left left to run-in my opinion.

Speaker 1: On the on the financing side, we just talked to the CEO of I m eight, which is doing a new sort of billion dollar financing with Yeah. GC, I think, through their customer value fund. Is there anything like that emerging in in defense? I'm I'm assuming a lot of your portcos are using Yeah. Venture debt or maybe getting financing against some of these bigger contracts. But what are you seeing?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, think, first of all, if you look at what the federal government is doing, the federal government is stepping up in a real way. I mean, there's been a long office called the Office of Strategic Capital that has SBA, Small Business Administration, money that can put towards these companies and their growth. There's also a new unit formed called the EDU, the I believe it's the Economic Development Unit within the Department of War. The idea is that if you can look at these industries that either have a supply chain problem or some misimbalance with China, there's not free debt, but close to free debt of capital that you can receive from the federal government. And in the end, it's like when there's such a misimbalance for, know, in this case, like the Chinese supply chain versus ours, It is only in America's best interest in order to do this. And in the end, there's equity capital sitting behind it. What I will say though is like debt is not an answer to your problems when you're a company. I mean, you need to obviously create real value and have real kind of, in my view, some type of technology uplift of what you're doing. But in the end, I do think that if you look at opportunistic capital, like I said, if you even look at what private equity is starting to do in this ecosystem, they're entering an ecosystem and saying, Hey, I don't need to control a company. I don't need to flip the entire management team. It's just a different type of risk asset and they need to enter at the right time. But again, I think the capital markets are super rich here. The world, I won't break anyone's mind here, but the future of returning venture funds is investing in AI and it's investing in American dynamism. And, you know, again, the beautiful thing in Andreessen, we have both of those things and now I get to, you know, do it in a in a different way.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Aren't they going to collide really soon if not already? I'm just thinking about like there's a bunch of great defense companies. A lot of them have already been started. The defense budget is growing but a few percent a year run rate. And then you have like AI CapEx which is like tripling every year. And so a lot of the same motions of like we have a machine that makes a product that does a thing. It feels American dynamism y, but then it plays in the AI boom. Is that going be I bigger

Speaker 4: mean, again, I think you're right. They are colliding far quicker than you think they will collide.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: I think to some extent, though, that is a good thing. I Of mean, again, if we look at what's happening and how AI is transforming other software industries, it's going look different in hardware for sure. I mean, there are different barriers that you need to overcome with, you know, again, let's talk about putting a fully autonomous robot with the weapon in the hands of the military. There are layers of kind of integration and policy and all these other things that need to happen. So it's not going to happen overnight, but I will say it will happen. The competition piece, which is a slightly different answer to your question is, again, I think you're right. There's a small percent of the budget that has gone historically to these neoprimes. If you look at what this administration has done, that those numbers are changing on an order of magnitude. And if we also want to take a step back and look at Europe, look at Asia, look at other places, I mean, literally, are being created overnight. So I do not think the problem is, hey, is there a budget or is there ability to capture? I actually think the problem is, and this is what not enough people are talking about is, will these companies actually deliver on the massive solutions that they're all you need to build. I mean, I'm serious. Like, need to we do need to have 40 Tesla factories. We need to build thousands of these things. I mean, it's not just defense, but it's like the folks at Base Power you know, kind of everyone in the manufacturing ecosystem. We have companies that can produce not thousands of things, but tens of thousands or hundreds? Like, that is the question. And if that doesn't happen, it doesn't matter how big your market is. It doesn't matter how much AI Pixie Dust you throw on top of it. If you can't build real hard stuff, you're not going to have lasting value over time in my opinion.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I saw a video last week of a of a drone that was designed so that the entire body of the drone spins and it makes the whole almost invisible. It was very very scary looking and and the person posting it was saying that drones are currently like in their sort of World War one era of of warfare. Is that how does that track with what you're seeing?

Speaker 4: I I first of all, I love this comparison. I always use the World War one comparison when talking about what's gonna happen in space, but I actually think that the drone comparison is better. And don't quote me exactly on these numbers, but if you go look at the amount of manned airplanes that we in the West had in World War I, it is roughly the amount of satellites that we as a nation had up in space, call it three or four years ago. And now if you flash forward and see the order of magnitude amount of more manned airplanes we have, I mean, you literally have like it's a hockey stick like growth. So to your point, we have what, thousands of tens of thousands of drones that exist in the DoD today. I mean, we're literally buying millions of them. And yes, they're tradable, so like they will kind of decline and go away. But I just think people have not wrapped their head around the sheer number of these systems. And I think drones specifically to your point is like it's always going to be this cat and mouse game. So just because you've built a million of these things that are tradable, it can do these things, The the enemy is gonna adapt and then all of sudden you're gonna have to build a new version that's EW resistant that can go further that can do so it's not a one problem, you know, one time you just solve the problem and you buy a million of them. I mean, this is decades long that's gonna be happening from our from our federal government.

Speaker 2: Very cool. Well, on the new gig. Look forward to talking again soon, chopping it up. Looking great in the suit. Look fantastic.

Speaker 1: Looking great in the suit.

Speaker 4: Well, I always like to wear a suit just for you guys. And anything that gets me on the pod to talk with Deli and more, I'm I'm always about that. I'm just trying to elevate my media game just so, know, Deli and I can can riff with each other some more.

Speaker 2: I love it.

Speaker 4: That's what I'm

Speaker 1: here for

Speaker 2: you guys. Elevated.

Speaker 1: Great to see you Connor and congrats on the move.

Speaker 2: Congratulations. Love to see you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB, don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Before we bring in our next guest, we got to talk about the Aston Martin SUV. Is this really a collab with Call of Duty? You got to pull up this image. You think this thing is a little ridiculous? You think this isn't

Speaker 1: Oh, I I love the

Speaker 2: way I see this is like the new model y. I think like this will be the car that's on like, you're just seeing so many of them make

Speaker 1: it And this is what you've been asking for because it is a v 12.

Speaker 2: It's a v 12.

Speaker 1: So first of all, let's go with what's amazing.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: The name. Is it called?

Speaker 2: Is it called? The That's

Speaker 6: a good name.

Speaker 1: And so I yes. Digital only.

Speaker 2: What do you mean?

Speaker 1: A digitally own a digital only military spec vehicle designed exclusively for the new Call of Duty Modern Warfare.

Speaker 2: So they will not be making this Which is like well, that's the latest part about there's no v 12 if it's digital. That doesn't make any sense. I thought this was Yeah. A real car. They're not even making this?

Speaker 1: Lot of like, it it spread so quickly around that I think a lot of people thought it was real. I think they should have made at least a few of these one off.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Make like a developer.

Speaker 1: Know about the Call of Duty partnership in general.

Speaker 5: I just

Speaker 1: feel like I feel like cheapens the brand and I feel like Aston is trying to appeal to a younger audience, but having a made up car, I don't know if it really does that. This

Speaker 2: is yeah. This is a very weird partnership. No. You imagine you you're you this is what you have to tow your Valkyrie to the track. Like that Exactly.