Throughout almost twenty years in government, I worked at the intersection of defense, intelligence and emerging technologies, often coordinating across the public and private sectors. In leadership roles at the National Security Agency and the White House, I saw firsthand how quickly technology evolved into one of the central pillars of geopolitical influence, industrial capacity, and national security.
Today, I’m excited to join Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner and Head of Global Affairs, as a next chapter in the mission of securing America at home and ensuring technological innovations are adopted to keep us safe, working together with our allies to build a more secure and prosperous future.
The new technological mandate
At this moment, the intersection of national security and technology is being redefined. To understand the present, we must look at how the geopolitical landscape has evolved over the last forty years.
During the Cold War, technology was a closed, state-driven enterprise, defined by the binary competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Innovation, such as GPS and early satellite communications, was largely incubated within the defense industrial base, with limited commercial spillover. The goal was containment and technological superiority through centralized control.
The 2000s saw the rapid, borderless spread of American tech. From the global dominance of Wintel (Windows/Intel) architecture to the rise of the mobile internet, innovation was primarily commercial. Global stability was bolstered by a world order where American tech was the universal standard, and the integration of supply chains was seen as a mechanism for peace.
Today, as the U.S. and China compete for primacy on the global stage, the spread of technology is tinged with geopolitics and more fragmented. Security now requires a focus on digital sovereignty, supply chain resiliency, and the trustworthiness of the infrastructure underpinning our economies and our national security.
Technology is national security
As I talk with government colleagues around the world, they describe their national approach. Our allies are rearming, rebuilding, and rethinking how they provide for their citizens and compete. They want more than to simply buy American technology. They want to build with us – joint ventures, shared capability, co-production.
This presents a strategic imperative for the United States. First, ensuring we and our allies build on a common technology foundation. From the Pacific to the Atlantic, our allies face the most significant threats in a generation. To maintain stability, we must ensure these partners can access, integrate, and leverage American innovation with approaches that address their domestic needs.
Second, scaling adoption of AI and new technologies globally. It’s hard to know the exact percentage for global open-source AI because it depends on how you measure it: infrastructure adoption vs. actual token traffic. But it’s clear that people are increasingly adopting open source Chinese models. We want to ensure our AI infrastructure and applications are adopted broadly. The most innovative players revolutionizing defense, aerospace, and cybersecurity—require a global footprint to succeed. They are navigating an increasingly complex environment of geopolitical headwinds and fragmented regulatory regimes.
Our allies are no longer interested in a simple buyer-seller relationship; they want to build with us. Our recent visit to Japan where we met with Prime Minister Takaichi, Minister of Economy Akazawa, national security leaders and Japanese CEOs, underscored this shift, as we explored partnerships in maritime autonomy, AI, and cybersecurity to support Japan’s economic growth and military modernization goals.
There is a lot of work ahead of us, as we work with our allies to secure a safe and prosperous future. As we like to say at Andreessen Horowitz, it’s time to build; together.
