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.

— BW

There’s a common question in Silicon Valley about what makes an extraordinary entrepreneur. Experienced investors point to various traits. Perseverance. Grit. Overcoming adversity. Hustle. Innate genius. A good childhood. A bad childhood. Luck.

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