Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome to our 210th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Today is the 25th anniversary of September 11th. I still remember exactly where I was, in my first week of high school on my way to the school chapel, when the news hit. It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed.

I’m sending at exactly 8:46am, 25 years to the minute when the first plane hit the North Tower.

I’m not going to outwrite Colston Whitehead on this one, so instead, I’m going to share the essay he wrote two months after the attacks: Lost and Found. I read it every year on September 11th, and it’s the best thing I’ve read on what it means to be a New Yorker. This short ESPN documentary on Welles Crowther, who sacrificed himself to save 12 lives, is a sober reminder of the real people who died in, and survived, the attack.

The world changed forever 25 years ago. In some ways, it’s gotten worse, and in many, the world in 2026 is better. We focus on those. But never forget.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) OpenAI Publishes Its Navier–Stokes Proof

OpenAI

Navier-Stokes is no Navier-Joke.

While some frontier lab employees were telling us that there’s a good chance they’ll kill us all, OpenAI announced that a group of roughly 10,000 AI agents had produced a proposed solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. The agents worked for about 88 hours using an unreleased model more capable than GPT-6 Astra. Formalizing and verifying the result in Lean, a math programming language and theorem prover, took another 17 hours.

The question is whether the equations describing a smooth, three-dimensional fluid can develop a singularity: a point where the math blows up. OpenAI’s construction starts with fluid at rest, applies a smooth external force, and produces unbounded velocity while keeping total energy finite. It addresses the forced version of the problem. You can read the 166-page proof and inspect the Lean code yourself, if you are incredibly bored this weekend.

Of course, there was controversy. Anthropic was working on its own Navier-Stokes solution with a mathematician, and they accused OpenAI of using the logs from their Codex conversations to come to their own solution. Sam Altman denied the charge but said that rumors that Anthropic was close did spur OpenAI to give it the ol’ college try themselves.

Whatever happened, this is a glimpse into the future: AIs doing all of our work for us while we spend time doing more human things, like arguing for credit.

(2) Google DeepMind Maps Nine Billion Possible DNA Changes

Pushmeet Kohli and Žiga Avsec for Google DeepMind

It’s safe to say that Google DeepMind is getting its butt kicked on the frontier LLM side, but it’s still doing some of the coolest work in science AI.

On Tuesday, it released AlphaGenome Atlas, a one-petabyte database of predicted molecular effects across the human genome. It includes the 98% of our DNA that doesn’t directly encode proteins, where changes can still affect when, where, and how genes get used. Researchers can look up variants through a website and use a combined impact score to figure out where to look more closely.

Basically, the human genome contains about three billion letters. At each position, you could swap the existing letter for one of three others. That gives you roughly nine billion possible single-letter changes. GDM predicted what all of the changes might do.

Like at the Broad Institute, the Atlas helped researchers identify a DNA change predicted to disrupt RNA splicing, providing supporting evidence in an unresolved rare-disease case.

To be clear, it’s not a replacement for actual experiments, but those take a lot of time and money and Atlas gives researchers a better sense of where to spend their limited resources.

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” now extends to life’s … alphabet.

Speaking of cool stuff GDM has done, check out all of the things that people have been doing with its complete map of fruit fly neurons:

(3) Hermeus Uses Fast Planes to Go Faster

Hermeus

As we covered way back in our Deep Dive on Astro Mechanica, the challenge with ramjets is that they need to be moving very fast before they start working. Forward motion compresses the incoming air, which means you need some other way to get the engine up to speed in the first place.

Luckily, Hermeus has a really fast plane, the Quarterhorse.

On Wednesday, the company unveiled Ramjet-X, an expendable test vehicle designed to launch from its reusable Quarterhorse aircraft. Quarterhorse gets it to the necessary speed and altitude, releases it, and returns for another mission, then Ramjet-X keeps flying under its own power.

The company plans to sell access to this setup as Flight Test as a Service. Customers could test sensors, materials, autonomy software, communications equipment, and propulsion technology in sustained high-speed flight without having to build an entire test program themselves. Engine testing is underway in Florida, with integrated vehicle testing planned for 2027.

Hermeus is special because of its fast development of fast planes. Now, it’s using one of those planes to light up a ramjet platform that will let others develop faster, too.

(4) Michael Levin Publishes Ingressing Minds Paper

Michael Levin

We don’t include every Michael Levin paper in the Dose. Man is far too prolific. But we include a bunch, and this might be the most important of them all.

On Wednesday, Levin published the revised, peer-reviewed version of Ingressing Minds. He proposes that minds are patterns in a structured, nonphysical space, and that bodies provide interfaces through which those patterns enter the physical world. He argues that many things beyond humans and animals can be interfaces, including computers, which is the most compelling argument I’ve heard that AI might be able to become “conscious” or “alive.”

Platonic space is a little tricky to understand, but it’s simpler if you start with triangles. If you know two angles of a triangle, you get a third “for free.” In the paper, Levin asks whether that idea extends to much richer patterns, including patterns with agency. In his framework, some of the things inhabiting this “Platonic space” are minds, and biological or engineered systems let them become embodied.

Levin himself came to the idea from the biology side: cells can assemble into unfamiliar living constructs with capabilities that weren’t explicitly designed into them, before any replication or evolution happens. He’s now systematically investigating where those capabilities come from and how to access more of them.

In his announcement, Levin describes the pushback Ingressing Minds has attracted, then adds: “if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait.”

I can’t. I can’t wait. I think Michael Levin will go down as the most important scientist of this era, and this may be his most important paper. Worth a read.

(5) Neko Health Launches in New York City

On Tuesday, I got invited to a preview of the new Neko Health location in Soho.

Neko is a preventative health company founded by Hjalmar Nilsonne and Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek. I’d seen a bunch of tweets about the experience in the UK and Stockholm, where it launched in 2023, and I’ve been wanting to try it. As soon as I stepped through the front door, it delivered.

I don’t want to spoil it, but it feels like walking into the future, from the stairs to the waiting area to the screening room that felt like what it would feel like if friendly aliens invited you onto their spaceship and offered to make you right. There’s a full-body scan, some bloodwork, cuffs, and a bunch of lasers and lights designed to understand your heart, blood pressure, body composition, a bunch of markers, and more. The people were friendly, calm, and professional, and the screens kept you posted on the progress. The whole thing flew by, and as soon as it finished, they took me into a room to share and explain the results.

Luckily, everything was clear - there’s some inflammation to fix and I could do to lose a few pounds / points of BMI, but it was a relief to know my heart and cholesterol are in good shape. I haven’t been to a traditional doctor in a very long time.

The reason this is Dose-worthy is that they do it for $499, with a goal of squeezing as much into that price as they can over time. It combines people, design, and technology to pull it off. And with a medical system that’s focused on fixing things once they’re broken, a delightful, accessible network of preventative health locations will help catch things before they break, when it’s easier and cheaper to fix. Plus, it’s nice peace of mind.

It’s great to see people who’ve had success in tech like Daniel and Shak put their resources towards fixing one of humanity’s biggest problem in a way that serves a lot of people instead of just a few who could afford something more successful.

Big thanks to Shak and Sarah for the invite. They’re not a sponsor and I’m not an investor, but you can move up in the line using my link here.

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Boring Company, UAPs, Woods & Johnson

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Thursday! We dropped a new notboring.com website this week, and this is our second essay of the week. Lock-in season.

This one is a continuation of the series arguing that strategy is important and moats matter. It’s still popular for startups to say that they don’t need them, that they’re just faster and better at product, that it’s too much to ask such young companies to have Network Effects or Scale Economies in place.

But startups don't get a pass on strategy because they're young. Luckily, there’s one moat that they can use to buy time. This is an ode to that one.

Let’s get to it.

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An Ode To Counter-Positioning

There are 7 Powers, but if you made me choose a favorite, I’d pick counter-positioning.

In his primer on Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, Mind the Moat, Lindy CEO Flo Crivello defines it as “the practice of developing your business model such that incumbents have conflicting incentives preventing them to compete effectively.”

The definition contains the reason I enjoy it so much: before they’re old enough to access the other 6 powers, it’s the moat with which startups are able to attack incumbents. Incumbents have bigger businesses and more resources, and it is those advantages startups use to attack them. Their business is too good to mess with.

When I wrote about Ramp for the first time back in December 2020, I compared counter-positioning to the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique from Kill Bill. When a startup hits them with counter-positioning, the incumbent might not realize they’re dead; take a step in the startup’s direction, though, and they topple over.

If incumbent corporate cards incentivized customers to spend more by giving them points, Ramp built its business on helping customers spend less. Incumbents couldn’t match that for a number of reasons, including the fact that they were nowhere as good at software, but mainly because if customers spent less, they made less, which their shareholders would not appreciate. Other startups like Divvy and Brex played the same game incumbents did, offering rewards and points for spend. They both had good outcomes: Bill.com bought Divvy for $2.5B and Capital One bought Brex for $5.15B. Today, Ramp is valued at $44 billion and launching a flotilla of products that help customers save time and money, including a model router.

If you come at the king, you best not [play their own game but with better technology].

I am thinking about counter-positioning today because of Base Power Company CEO Zach Dell’s conversation with David Senra on David Senra. At 16:18, discussing how he and Justin came to their business model, he gives a sermon on counter-positioning.

“If you’re going to take on an incumbent,” he says, “my view is the best way to do it is to have a counter-positioned business model.”

If I showed up and said, ‘I have... the best home battery on the market... and I’m going to sell it to you for 10% below the big guys,’ your margin is my opportunity, right? Like these big guys are going to compete on price. First they’re going to copy my product, then they’re going to drop their price and they’re going to run me out of business.

But if I show up and say, ‘I don’t sell batteries. I sell electricity,’ and we’re going to install this battery on your home, and because of our different business model, you pay 1/20th or even 1/40th of what you’d pay to own it outright, then I can win.

And if you want to compete with me and you’re one of the incumbents, you’ve got to completely change your business model, which as you know for a public company is very hard, right?

Base won’t be able to use counter-positioning forever. The moats it digs to protect its margins from competitors will come from the other powers: Scale Economies, Cornered Resources, Switching Costs, Brand, and perhaps even Network Effects and Process Power. But as Zach points out, there is no better way to start taking on an incumbent than by counter-positioning.

This is a theme that Ben and David bring up again and again on the Acquired podcast: “As Hamilton [Helmer] would put it, counter-positioning is usually a take-off phase power.” Helmer himself went on the pod and explained why: “It’s the only one that’s a partial source of power. If you want real durability… you want to have another source of power.”

Counter-positioning is here for a good time, not a long time. Which is part of what makes it so fun. It’s the trickster power. Counter-positioning buys you time against the incumbent — which is positioned in some way against which you can counter-position — but it doesn’t necessarily protect you against another startup. You need other moats for that.

Poetically, Helmer chooses Dell to make the point. Dell was counter-positioned against Compaq because Compaq’s dealer channel made direct sales painful. Eventually, though, everyone could adopt direct sales, and Dell’s counter-positioning power disappeared. By then, Dell had used the window to build Scale Economies around its direct, just-in-time model.

The Acquired canon is chock full of examples.

When Google launched Android, it could afford to give it away for free because the mothership made its money on search. It could afford to just subsidize the losses completely, but it also didn’t have to, because more mobile search on Google meant more revenue. Nokia, on the other hand, had to make money from the mobile stack itself; giving it away for free would have killed the business.

This is one good way to think about counter-positioning: can Challenger A do X because it makes its money somewhere completely different from Incumbent B?

It, to be clear, is easier to do if you have Google’s cash machine behind you, but it’s always worth thinking about how you can fuck with the way that your incumbent competitor makes its money.

Amazon, born on the internet, was built around direct-to-consumer fulfillment. Barnes & Noble was optimized around stores. For B&N to go all-in on Amazon’s model would have meant reallocating capital, executive attention, and distribution infrastructure, and tolerating lower near-term profitability from its existing stores. The Amazon model “would be less profitable for them… versus the hugely profitable stores,” Ben said. Amazon “counter-positioned against everyone whose cost structure was set up” for physical retail, David added.

This is another way to think about counter-positioning: the more an incumbent has invested in building out its infrastructure, the less able it is to adapt.

Startups with less money than Google can certainly use this form. My favorite example is Somos Internet. As I explained in Cable Caballero, Somos designed a new network architecture and built its own hardware to run it, and incumbent telcos can’t respond because doing so would require ripping up the billions of dollars of CapEx they’ve spent buying and upgrading third-party hardware in the old network configuration. You can see their stuckness. Plus, given their reliance on vendors, most don’t have the technical wherewithal or nimbleness with which to re-architect the whole thing anyway. Plus plus, they’ve used so much debt to finance the network buildouts that they can’t really lower prices to hurt Somos, let alone fund an uncertain new network buildout.

There’s the flip side of both of the above, too, which is familiar to anyone who’s watched a movie where a bad guy gets leverage on a good guy by kidnapping their family: having nothing to protect is freeing.

When Microsoft took on the company nobody got fired for buying, IBM, “Microsoft basically had no baggage,” Ben explained. IBM sold integrated computer systems - software, hardware, everything - through the greatest enterprise salesforce in the business. To launch its PC, urgently, Big Blue broke with its normal model, used off-the-shelf components, an Intel processor, and even an operating system supplied by Microsoft. But Microsoft didn’t license exclusively to IBM; it licensed DOS non-exclusively, and was incentivized to make PCs as cheap and abundant as possible in order to get its software onto as many desks as possible. Per Ben & David, they could say: “We don’t need to make any money on hardware. We don’t need to even make hardware.”

Microsoft didn’t win because it wrote better software than IBM. IBM wrote software that was just fine eventually. But IBM needed its software to sell high-margin machines, whereas Microsoft benefited when the hardware layer got commoditized. As hardware commoditized, the software layer became the one with which all of the hardware providers had to be compatible. Or as Ben put it, Microsoft was “free to become the whole point of integration for the entire ecosystem just by shipping bits.”

This is a vicious form of counter-positioning: an entrant can be counter-positioned not just because it is willing to cannibalize a profit pool, but because it actively benefits from the destruction of the incumbent’s profit pool.

Then there’s Facebook, which faced off against MySpace and its 1 million users when it launched in 2004. MySpace is a joke now, but was a rocketship then. It launched in 2003, got to 1 million users in February 2004, passed Friendster the next month, and quintupled to five million users by November.

Facebook counter-positioned by saying that mashing a lot of users in one network to start was bad, actually, and that it was better to start small, to seed a network with the gentlemen and ladies of Harvard and to grow in little circles.

If you’re MySpace, and growth is good, and these nerds are building a little thing for their nerd friends, what are you going to do? Stop growing?

But it turned out that it was better to start small, to seed a network with the gentlemen and ladies of Harvard and to grow in little circles. Not forever, of course, but in the beginning. Facebook used the counter-positioning period to build a ravenously passionate network of people talking to their new college friends and poking each other and made the product so appealing to those on the outside, younger and older, that when they opened the floodgates, it FLOODED, and they moved on to Network Effects.

People haven’t learned.

Earlier this week, a16z partner Josh Elman tweeted, “The new moats are the same as the old moats. Every few years, we fall in love with shiny new tech and forget the basic physics of consumer software.” I’d expand it to say that we forget the basic physics of business strategy, but we’re on Facebook, so let’s stick with consumer.

Assistants are the buzzy product du jour, and Instinct the buzziest of those. It’s a wonderful experience, a better product than the assistants that came before it.

But as Ben says, “Being better is not counter positioning.” The Strategy Don, Michael Porter, writes that “Operational effectiveness means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them. Competitive strategy is about being different.”

Better is a benefit; Power requires a barrier. Counter-positioning exists when the incumbent sees that you’re better but cannot copy what makes you better without damaging the business it already has.

(For the avoidance of doubt: you can’t just pick a model that’s so bad that anyone, including you, would be damaged by pursuing it.)

Who would be damaged by releasing helpful agents? The Labs have kind of done it in their desktop apps, Grok Bot has done it, other new startups are doing it (and it is definitionally impossible to counter-position against new startups), and still Instinct is better. Because it’s better, it raised a $350 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation in late August, and one of the theories was that they raised so much so they could continue to offer it for free and drown competitors on the way to new business models (i.e. transaction fees).

Better, though, is not a moat, and good luck drowning Meta’s cash machine.

Meta (née Facebook) released their Assistant this week, too. Its name is Muse.

Some early reviews say that it’s better than Instinct. I still need to try it; better is not the point.

The point is that not only is it not painful for Meta to copy Instinct’s model and product, it’s great! Meta knows more about you than anyone and can recommend things you didn’t know you needed, solving the cold-start problem. They can, as Ben Thompson wrote, give each user “a VM with 8GB of RAM and 8GB” which is “a real-deal computer, and Meta is offering that to everyone in the United States, and eventually the world. It’s pretty extraordinary!” They can integrate it directly into WhatsApp, their enormous but undermonitized messaging app, they can integrate it with FB Marketplace so you can get what you want for cheap, they can put it in Meta Ray Bans so you can just tell your own face what to do, and they can train it in their gigantic data centers. They can give it away for free until the heat death of the universe (or until Anthropic hits on its >10% chance of killing us all). They can bring Network Effects and Scale Economies and Brand and whatever moat is necessary to bear, because they counter-positioned early and then dug all of those.

Now, Zuck has tried to copy or create new products before and failed, or failed to kill his target. Threads hasn’t cured my Twitter addiction. But Twitter had Network Effects. It was moated.

There are, to Josh’s point, too many startups out there that think that the new technology is so incredible that they no longer need moats. They just need speed and taste or whatever and focus and nimbleness and the special je ne sais quoi that comes with being a startup.

And there are plenty of startups who will do just fine with that approach. The big moated companies are willing to pay a lot of money to bring some of that je ne sais quoi inside their castles and to keep it out of their competitors’.

I couldn’t point to Cursor’s moat, but it was an excellent product and it was worth $60 billion to SpaceX. Nvidia paid $12,930,300,000 for Hugging Face, which I actually used as an example of an AI company that used a Complexity Uncertainty Window to develop early Network Effects in When to Dig a Moat. I talked to a founder not long ago and asked about moats, and he said something like “We don’t care about moats we want to build a great product” and so I passed and the company is valued at like 50x what it was then, so what do I know.

It’s rumored that Meta (and others) even offered 10 figures for Instinct!

But when Instinct turned them down, Meta said, “Fine, we’ll build it ourselves,” because it cost them nothing but money and they have plenty of that. Of course, it’s probably easier than ever to copy unmoated products now that AI can write the code, but that’s besides the point, because without moats, any good company will get copied, even if the humans have to do it themselves.

We are in a period in which AI is so shiny and new that incumbents are willing to pay a lot of money for products that are better than anyone else’s, but acquisition hope is not a strategy and better is not a moat.

I hope that Instinct wins, as I hope that many startups take down their industries’ Goliaths. They are fighting. Just yesterday, they introduced a Trusted Person network, to let people’s assistants talk to those of their significant others, family, and friends.

It is an attempt to create Network Effects, and they’re going for it. Respect. The question will be whether they’ve given themselves enough time to build a real Network Effect before people start using Muse, and Muses inevitably work with each other, too.

Time is why counter-positioning is such a powerful weapon to the otherwise unshielded.

It makes it painful, suicidal, even, for someone to copy your better product. You need to use that time to sprint like hell until you can establish your long-term moats.

That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with another Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Thanks for reading,

Packy

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Tuesday and welcome back from the long weekend!

It’s beautiful out in NYC and it’s time to get back to work. So here’s a short and fun one about why everyone is reading the same old book that I am.

Let’s get to it.

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Everyone is Reading Lonesome Dove

There is a phenomenon called Baader-Meinhof where when you discover something, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s not that the thing is suddenly everywhere; it’s just that you notice it now.

So maybe it is because I’m reading Lonesome Dove that I’ve noticed that everyone is reading Lonesome Dove.

I mentioned the book in a Slack I have with eight friends. One wrote back that he’s reading it now:

Another shared that his mom is reading and loving it:

And three, including the one whose mom is reading it, said that they are going to read it, which makes five people in a group of nine.

This is heartening, because they say that no one is reading anymore. It turns out that people are, just they’re only reading Lonesome Dove.

Let me be clear: Lonesome Dove deserves to be read. It is a Pulitzer Prize winner. If you haven’t, you should go read it right now. But it is also weird that everyone is reading it! It was published in 1985 and won the Pulitzer in 1986.

So Why Is Everyone Reading ‘Lonesome Dove,’ an 858-page Western From 1985? That’s the question that Esquire asked and attempted to answer on March 20th, 2025.

The author, Michael Sebastian, had seen a post on a friend’s Instagram about the book and decided like a year later, driving past a bookstore, that he had to buy it. He tried to figure out why it seemed like everyone was now, like him, reading the book and traced it to a few things:

⁠McMurtry died in September 2023, the same month that a biography about the author and a big story in The New Yorker about him came out. This confluence of factors was likely the spark. The kindling is that all things western are in the Zeitgeist: the Taylor Sheridan universe (Yellowstone, 1923, Landman), the new Netflix show American Primeval, Kevin Costner’s epic Horizon: An American Saga, Pharrell’s western-wear fashion show for Louis Vuitton in January 2024.

Then he asked why it resonated so much and concluded that it was something to do with the fact that it deals with something a lot of men are feeling, which is that we’re never going to be the man we want to be. And maybe! That hasn’t been my experience; I’ve enjoyed the characters and the simplicity of the prose and the unvarnished look at life on the frontier in the 19th century.

But there are a lot of books that might resonate. Why this one? The McMurtry profiles / death timing and Yellowstone / Landman popularity felt like they would have been enough to get a few people to read it, but while I loved both shows, I didn’t know that McMurtry had died (Esquire was wrong, btw; he died in 2021). I didn’t even know that there was a Larry McMurtry.

No, I found Lonesome Dove because I asked Claude to give me a book I wouldn’t be able to put down, and it recommended The Mountain in the Sea, which I’d already read, and Lonesome Dove.

I went back to the source this week to ask Claude to help me understand whether it was responsible for the Doveaissance, and it said kind of but not really, so I asked it to give me a timeline, which it did, but it felt incomplete, so I asked ChatGPT Astra 6, and it delivered a plinko ride through how things spread today.

Basically, the whole thing kicks off with The Ringer. Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald spent COVID Summer (2020) discussing LD on The Watch, culminating in a 2.5 hour megapod.

Then McMurtry, like so many of his characters, died. He left us on March 25, 2021. That summer, Stephen King went on Stephen Colbert’s “What Ya’ Readin?” and said that his favorite book was probably Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. When it later went viral on BookTok (the part of TikTok where people talk about books), a bunch of people said that King’s rec was the reason they picked it up.

I, mind you, didn’t know about any of this, and I suspect you didn’t either. Media is a fragmented thing.

We pick the trail back up in November 2023, when the From the Front Porch podcast picked it as its 2024 “Conquer a Classic” for another group read-along. One participant described reading it alongside “thousands of other readers,” which is more copies than most books sell total.

In June 2024, popular writer Jia Tolentino put Lonesome Dove in The New Yorker’s “What To Read This Summer” list, after having been recommended the book by a friend in 2023. She wrote:

I gasped and sobbed and clutched the book when it was over. I was so thankful for the reminder that reading can still be like this, that the realm of the unread always holds, somewhere, the exact thing I’m looking for, whatever it is.

The next month, in July, Defector’s Tom Ley wrote, It’s Time For You to Read Lonesome Dove, just gushing about the reading experience.

In February 2025, undoubtedly due to the book’s growing popularity and that of the aforementioned Taylor Sheridan Universe, Teton Ridge Entertainment – “THE LEADER IN WESTERN SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT” – acquired the adaptation rights.

On March 6, 2025, another Substacker, Bart Schaneman, wrote Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is the darling of BookTok. It deserves the hype., and wrote:

It seems like every guy with a BookTok or Instagram account about books has either read or is reading Lonesome Dove, and most of them are in agreement that it’s one of the best books that they’ve ever read. Writers I admire like Elisa Gabbert said it was one of her favorites of last year. Kevin Morby has cited it as an influence. Adam Gnade references it. A couple of weeks ago it was announced that someone had bought the rights to all of Larry McMurtry’s novels that include these characters, so expect a streaming series or movies or both.

Later that month, we got the Esquire piece, a cap, it would seem, on the breakout-again success.

I still had not heard about any of this, and none of it is that weird yet. Event-driven word-of-mouth mixed with some genre resurgence and influence from influencers.

In April, the BookTokkers kept coming. This guy, Booksaresick, got 41k likes on a “Books for dudes” video that featured Lonesome Dove.

Maybe this would have happened anyway given that you can’t change time, but in mid-to-late 2025, Simon & Schuster released a 40th-anniversary paperback edition with a Taylor Sheridan foreword, creating a direct bridge between Lonesome Dove and the modern Yellowstone audience. On September 23rd, it released an entirely new 35h 49m audiobook narrated by Will Patton.

In October, S&S said that the book had sold more copies in 2025 - 56,000 - than in any year since the TV miniseries, Return to Lonesome Dove, aired in 1993-94, the year that the Knicks were last in the Finals and OJ Simpson raced the police in his Ford Bronco. All while reading was reportedly getting scalped by the internet!

That brings us to 2026.

Early this year, Robert Duvall, the actor who played the protagonist Gus McCrae on the show, passed away at 95. He had said Gus had been his favorite role, and that Lonesome Dove was “The Godfather of Westerns,” and obituaries foregrounded it. RFD-TV re-aired the entire four-part miniseries in his honor. There was a big spike on Google Trends around this time.

In March, Sonny Bunch wrote Why Lonesome Dove Continues to Resonate on The Bulwark as part of the press tour for another McMurtry biography, Western Star: The Life of a Legend by David Streitfeld. When I tweeted about Lonesome Dove on Monday as I started writing this, my friend Cristin Culver replied recommending the book.

In May, The Art of Manliness kicked off another read-along, with weekly posts and discussion prompts on the book.

Finally, in August, Rachel Monroe and LD-stan Jia Tolentino wrote a whole New Yorker piece titled What To Read After “Lonesome Dove”.

In Texas, where I live, someone always seems to be reading “Lonesome Dove,” Larry McMurtry’s thrilling, ambivalent Western, first published in 1985. The rest of the country is catching on: the novel sold more copies in 2025 than it had in thirty years, and earlier this year it spiked on Google Trends. And I’m not surprised—“Lonesome Dove” is the kind of romantic, immersive story that gets BookTok going, but McMurtry shades his epic with just the right amount of regret. There’s never a bad time to hunker down with Gus, Call, and the other members of the Hat Creek outfit as they drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana, but summer is ideal. Nearly the whole novel takes place outdoors, through a series of vast landscapes that are at once brutal and beautiful. I guarantee you’ll cry at the end.

What is interesting to me is that, again, I didn’t see any of this! There was this whole Lonesome Dove movement happening right under my nose, on BookTok, in The New Yorker, on Instagram, on TV, across Substack, in read-along communities, and I missed it all.

But Claude didn’t.

The internet fragmented the media landscape into a billion pieces, like cable TV smashed it into hundreds before it. So much so that despite all of the time I spend on my computer and phone, despite how much I love to read, and despite the fact that I ripped through Yellowstone and Landman and Dutton Ranch and was hungry for more in the category, I didn’t catch a whiff of it.

Then I asked Claude for a book rec, and it told me to read Lonesome Dove. Which is maybe a coincidence! Maybe it just knows me well and thought I’d like it.

But I asked ChatGPT, too, on two separate occasions, and all three times, it recommended… Lonesome Dove. The second time was influenced by the first, but it re-recommended it when I asked for books to read in France. It was the only non-France-themed book on the list.

Two LLMs both recommended the same 850+ page book, a book that starts out pretty slow, when I asked for page-turners. I asked friends who read the book how they came to it, and many of them said Claude or ChatGPT recommended it to them, too. D.A. Wallach pointed out that LLMs keep recommending the book to his book club, which is a patient zero-to-superspreader scenario.

Claude loves Lonesome Dove so much that one guy, jj.books.and.beats, made an Instagram video in which Claude keeps pushing him to read it while he’s trying to work.

There’s a way to read this that’s something like “Ugh the flattening of culture!” Remakes are bad enough, now we’re so out of new ideas that the LLMs are just pushing us to the originals.

That’s not how I read it.

Two of the bigger challenges seem to me to be that 1) people are reading less and 2) things are so fragmented that we’re never all watching the same thing. There’s no TGIF or new Harry Potter book release at midnight.

If the internet fragmented discovery, LLMs might be the right tool to put the pieces back together. I don’t read Jia Tolentino or watch Colbert, but they do. They read and watch everything.

It’s been very fun to be reading something old and great at the same time as so many people on the internet seem to be, and finding those people and wondering how the hell they’re just coming to Lonesome Dove now, too.

The fact that it seems to be a bunch of traditional triggers that might have otherwise fizzled but have been given staying power and reach by LLMs - pretty much the one thing that we’re all using - is pretty cool. LLMs may be a new distribution channel for the back catalog of human culture.

Search is good at finding what you’re looking for when you know what you’re looking for. Social media is good at showing you what people are talking about right this second. LLMs are good at figuring out what you, specifically, might think is great, which is often what many other people think is great. Both search and social media have historically advantaged newness, and it’s interesting to think about what happens when LLMs advantage “best” or “best for me” or “lindyness.”

Our new distribution technology might turn out to be real good for old things.

I guess that’s life on the frontier.

That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with another Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Thanks for reading,

Packy

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday, Happy Labor Day Weekend to my fellow Americans, and welcome to our 209th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Right on cue, we have a week so full of celebration-worthy labor from the good guys that I don’t even know where to fit it all. We have a couple extra stories above the fold and a whole heaping for not boring world subscribers below.

If this is what acceleration feels like in the summer, hold onto your butts in the fall.

Let’s get to it.

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(Early Bonus) Any Human Ever

h/t Gina Gorlin

I’ve been saying for a while that the best thing the pro-progress people could build is a Counterfactual Machine. Run a simulation in which you remove certain technologies from humanity’s toolkit and let people experience that world in VR.

This isn’t quite that, but it’s pretty darn close. Someone built a site that lets you draw a life at random from any of the over 100 billion people who have ever lived. As they wrote, “most lives ever lived were Asian, poor, and brief,” and indeed, the life that I pulled was an Asian woman who lived in the 11th century and lost four of her six kids before age 5.

Try it for yourself.

In a 2016 speech, President Barack Obama said, “If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you'd be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you'd be born into — you wouldn't choose 100 years ago. You wouldn't choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You'd choose right now.” He was drawing on John Rawls concept of the Veil of Ignorance (and if you haven’t, stop what you’re doing and read Scott Alexander’s Being John Rawls).

People love to talk about the challenges of modern life, and there certainly are some, but there’s also never been a better time to be alive in human history. The only better times, I suspect, all lie in the future, thanks to the types of stories we’ll cover today.

What a time to be alive.

(1) World Model Week: Runway Solaris & GWM 2 and World Labs Atlas

World Model enjoyers stand up!

In March, General Intuition founder & CEO Pim DeWitte and I co-wrote an essay on World Models. “World models,” we wrote, “these systems that learn from watching the world and the actions taken in it — are a fundamentally new kind of foundation model. They can compute what was previously uncomputable.”

There are a bunch of different kinds of models that are called World Models, and in the essay we wrote that Runway’s were Video Models and World Labs’ were 3D Reconstruction and Generation Models, but both took a step closer to our definition with these releases (Runway a little more than World Labs), but whatever you call them… holy shit are these releases cool.

On Monday, Runway dropped Solaris, which it calls an “Interface World Model.” Instead of an LLM writing code that a browser renders into an app, Solaris generates the app itself, frame by frame, in real time, and when you click or drag something it generates the next frame. There is no code. “The image is the application.” This is a picture is worth 1,000 words situation, so just watch the video. Software is going to get so cool.

Not to be outdone, on Tuesday, Fei-Fei Li and the World Labs team showed off Atlas, an “omni world model” trained from scratch on text, images, video, camera poses, depth maps, and 3D all at once. It generates up to a minute of 1440p video with what they call pixel-perfect camera control, meaning you hand it real camera geometry instead of typing “pan left,” it will invent a coherent hallway between two unrelated photos if you tell it they’re in the same building, and it reconstructs real scenes into 3D from anywhere between one photo and a hundred. Ehhh.. you know what? Just watch this one, too:

And then, yesterday, Runway dropped another model - GWM World 2 - “a world model for real time environment simulation.” Instead of an interface or a scene, this one “generates full, interactive, real-time video simulations in one continuous 720p stream at 24 fps and audio at 48000 Hz, responding to your inputs as you explore.”

What a … world.

(1a) OpenAI Drops Astra 6

The launch video nails it. While I haven’t gotten to play with it yet, the demos from those who have seem unreal. Like this one, from Matt Shumer, who built a simulated world full of Astra-powered agents and watched them coordinate. (He also used Unreal to build a realistic Manhattan world.)

A lot of people are saying AGI is here, and I don’t know exactly what that means, but it does seem as if humans are going to be able to use these new models to do a lot of things for us that we shouldn’t be doing ourselves, and that it will let us be creative in entirely new ways. It’s the most excited I’ve felt to play with a new model.

(2) Fervo Signs Its Largest Geothermal Deal Ever with Google

Jennifer Hiller for WSJ

All of these models - World Models, Astras, whatever comes next - are going to need a lot of power.

On Tuesday, Fervo announced a 396 MW power purchase agreement with Google, the biggest enhanced geothermal PPA any company has ever signed, to power a potential Google data center in Utah with 24/7 carbon-free electricity from its Cape Station project in Beaver County starting in 2028. Google also gets an option to take roughly 600 MW more by June 2030, which would bring the total to a full GW, from just one customer.

We’ve covered Fervo a few times here, most recently in #190 & #193 related to its IPO, but if you’re new, enhanced geothermal uses shale drilling rigs to hit hot rock. You don’t need a hot spring or a geyser, just heat within reach of a drill bit, which is a lot more places.

This isn't the first Fervo-Google deal. Project Red in Nevada has been powering Google's data centers there since 2023, and the two signed a 115 MW deal with NV Energy in 2024 that invented the Clean Transition Tariff (Google pays extra for more expensive clean energy so neighbors don’t have to).

Fervo says this new deal “unlocks new, around-the-clock electricity capacity at no cost to existing ratepayers,” and under a Utah law called SB132, it may be able to sell straight to Google’s load.

Thank God for data centers.

(Speaking of which, this WSJ article, See the New Building Techniques Turbocharging the Data-Center Boom, is short, sweet, and mostly visual, and its subtitle makes the case for DCs: “Hyperscalers’ need for speed is spawning timesaving products and building techniques.”)

(3) Tesla Launches Cybercab in Austin

The future of transport is safer, more enjoyable & gives you more time back

Yesterday in Austin, Texas, Tesla launched the Cybercab, and starting at 5pm today, anyone in the Austin geofence can hail one from the Robotaxi app.

The interior was designed for self-driving: it has two seats, butterfly doors, no steering wheel, no pedals, and no controls of any kind. The future should look like the future. It has nine cameras, a 48 kWh battery pack good for roughly 290 miles, one 219 horsepower motor, weighs 3,113 pounds, comes with Starlink in the roof, and, per Elon, is “basically a super comfortable lounge on wheels with a great TV and epic sound.”

Back in Dose #204, when Zoox got the first US approval for a vehicle without a steering wheel, I wrote that cars would start being designed like moving rooms. That was seven weeks ago. Now we have another one, designed explicitly to be an entertainment room.

Cybercab is starting small of course. Waymo does 500,000 paid rides a week across 14 cities with 4,000+ retrofitted Jaguars and Ojais. There are only 45 Cybercabs in the Texas fleet next to 269 Model Ys (one way they want to scale is by letting people sign up to purchase fleets of them).

But this is the first vehicle designed from a blank sheet to be autonomous and cheap and mass produced, by a company that has mass-produced impossible things before, and real people are riding in them. The Zoox is a $250,000-ish minivan-shaped thing. Waymo pays Zeekr and Jaguar and then bolts on $100K of sensors. Elon says the Cybercab costs under $30,000 to build and about 20 cents a mile to operate at scale, with 10 cities by the end of the year and positive unit economics by mid-2027.

As friend of Not Boring Sam D’Amico tweeted, “Cars are robots now.”

There may be tens of millions of these robocars on the streets one day. I still can’t wait to read about the horrendous things people do in them, as they’re whisked very safely from Point A to Point B.

(4) Humanity’s First Robotically Harvested Head of Iceberg Lettuce

Danny Bernstein and Pascal Labrecque

As fund theses go, Reservoir VC’s might be the most specific: “Reservoir VC invests in rugged AI startups that solve one high-value task in ag and then compound to adjacent industries.” Their answer to “let me know how I can be helpful” is unique, too. GP Danny Bernstein has a 40 acre farm / agricultural robotics playground in Salinas where the robots can get real-world practice.

There, this week, a Canadian startup called Sami Robotics had a robot cut and pick a head of iceberg lettuce, which seems pretty cool but is apparently a bigger deal than it looks. Danny called it "an AgTech moon landing moment."

NZ robotics company Sentinel Robotics added: “I don't think people understand how monumental this kind of thing is. Harvest has always been the hardest part of agricultural automation and leafy greens are the hardest of the hard.” Every head is a different size, you have to cut in exactly the right spot without bruising it, and a good crew of humans with knives is really fast as it is.

If I ever see a Sami iceberg salad on the menu, I’ll say to my friends, “Lettuce try that.”

(5) NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Launches Nine Months Early

NASA (h/t Matt Gialich)

Last Sunday at 7:26am, a Falcon Heavy took off from Pad 39A with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on top, the start of its three month journey to Sun-Earth L2, almost a million miles away.

It’s going to hunt for exoplanets.

Roman’s mirror is the same 2.4 meters as Hubble’s (it’s actually a spy satellite mirror the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA in 2012), but its Wide Field Instrument sees a chunk of sky at least 100 times bigger than Hubble’s infrared view at the same sharpness. Over five years, it’ll survey more than two billion galaxies, measure how dark energy has stretched everything out over time, and do a microlensing census of planets toward the center of the Milky Way.

This is Dose-worthy on its own because we love a good space telescope here. We shared the first images from James Webb way back in Dose #3!

But it’s even more Dose-worthy, because as AstroForge founder Matt Gialich noted, it’s… “9 months ahead of schedule. That is unheard of for a billion-dollar-plus mission.”

Casey Handmer, who’s been hilariously critical of his former employer NASA (please read NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage), QT’d Gialich proposing that we “Promote the people responsible and give them another worthy project with performance-linked bonuses and lots of authority and responsibility!”

If Administrator Isaacson’s NASA keeps this up, we may get to Mars after all.

(6) Physical Superintelligence Raises $58M to for Physics Takeoff

Matthew Pines

For most of human history, genius was the rarest thing on Earth.

The last time I heard from Matthew Pines, it was when he was the guest on a 4+ hour American Alchemy episode a year ago titled UFO Physics & Disclosure Under Trump. Now, he and his team at PSI (which stands for Physical Superintelligence, but is also a nod to psi abilities) have $58 million to bring our physics up to the 21st century.

Pines is doing it with Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, whose Eon Systems fruit fly brain we covered in Dose #184, and who graduated top of his class at MIT in 2003 as the last student to complete a triple major under the institution’s historical policy, and Alex Klokus, who created the Gravity Blanket and co-founded the UAP / psionic research group, Skywatcher.

Which is to say, we have a bunch of wide open minded geniuses with tens of millions of dollars to save physics from whatever path it went down decades ago. Hell yeah.

Yesterday, Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston announced a non-profit called The Fermi Explorer, which plans to launch “a minimum viable spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, leaving in 3 years and arriving in around 80,000 years. We hope it will be both the first spacecraft to leave Earth for another star, and the last to arrive.” AstroForge’s Matt Gialich, who you might remember from the story right above, is an advisor.

I bring this up because the mission was designed by… PSI.

We’d spent three months and one billion tokens on it [the mission],” Johnston said. “In a week, they [PSI] spent 10 billion tokens on it, and it came up with this ingenious perihelion-pump maneuver that we then validated with the NASA guys.

And speaking of AI models doing crazy physics, our friends at Arena Physica, who you might remember from Electromagnetism Secretly Runs the World, which I co-wrote with its founder Pratap Ranade, released its new model, Heaviside-1 this week. Heaviside-1 is its second generation foundation model for electromagnetism, and can run sims like this in milliseconds instead of today’s simulators’ hours.

You can play with it yourself in the Fields Simulator here. Look at me. Look at me. I’m the [physicist] now.

Read more

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 208th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

While there was a ton of good news this week, the videos of the floods in Nepal and Tibet are some of the most heartbreaking I’ve ever seen. We’re going to cover the good stuff, but if you’d like to donate to the relief efforts, I’m giving to DirectRelief’s Nepal Flood Relief 2026, where 100% of donations support Nepal response activities.

Now, August rules: you should be outside as much as possible while you can, so we will just quickly tell you to check out “Matthew’s” Field Notes from China, and then…

Let’s get to it.

Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Create

Dan and Sienna rolled out what looks like the most delicious creatine ever made, the Lemonade Collection. To celebrate, they agreed to give not boring readers 50% off through the weekend. Go get your Lemonade Creatine + Electrolytes and code notboring50 at checkout.

(1) FDA Approves Targeted Therapy for Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer

Xavier Martinez for WSJ

Pancreatic cancer has long been one of the deadliest and hardest to treat forms of the disease thanks to a mutation that sticks the RAS protein on and causes runaway cell growth.

In terrible news for cancer and great news for people, the FDA has approved a drug, Revolution Medicines’ Rasonque, that targets the mutation and helped subjects in a late-stage study live for more than 13 months instead of around 6.7 months for those who receive chemotherapy alone.

The drug does have side effects, and 13 months isn’t forever, both issues personified by “Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who went public in the spring with what he described as a significant reduction in his tumors while in a clinical trial of the drug, appeared on television with his face covered in red blotches.” Sasse lived longer than expected, but he still expects to pass away, as discussed in his incredible conversation with Leopold’s wedding officiant Ross Douthat, titled “How Ben Sasse is Living Now That He is Dying.”

Still, this is a massive win, one that drew a standing ovation at a cancer conference last spring when Revolution announced the results.

As one patient, former Disney exec Jay Williams, told WSJ, “What it does is buy you time, and that’s one thing you don’t always have with pancreatic cancer.”

And speaking of time, good on the FDA for approving this so quickly. Per the Agency, “The FDA granted Rasonque Breakthrough Therapy and Orphan Drug designations. Rasonque received Priority Review for this indication. The application was also reviewed under the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher pilot program, which is intended to help accelerate the review of therapies that address national public health priorities.” As a result, it was approved about 6.5 months faster than the standard PDUFA timeline, which means means it went through in roughly half the usual already-accelerated window for a priority oncology drug.

Patients, oncologists, all of us, and regulators are saying the same thing: get fucked, cancer.

(2) Airbound Announces $37M Raise and Drops Manifesto

Naman Pushp for Airbound

Last year, I invested in a company called Airbound founded by a young guy from India who taught himself physics and engineering on YouTube during COVID and used that knowledge to build better drones.

After we got introduced but before we met, I didn’t really think I’d invest - drones are a fairly crowded space and Zipline is awesome. Then I met Naman, and decided to invest immediately.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had the chance to work with him on his Manifesto for Airbound, in which he did a great job laying out the future where all movement is in the air that got me so excited in our first conversation.

He published it this week, along with the news that he raised $37M from Greenoaks, Lachy Groom, and others.

Read it - and stay tuned for more.

(3) Radiant and Antares Selected for US Army Janus Program

U.S. Army Communication and Outreach Office

We love to see friends get contracts from the US Army to make a lot of nuclear reactors and hopefully save a lot of lives in the process, so we were very happy to see the Army choose Radiant Nuclear, who we wrote about in 2024, and Antares Nuclear, whose co-founder Julia DeWahl was my Age of Miracles co-host, sign deals as two of five companies selected for the $2.2B Janus program.

Radiant is getting $750M to make 15 Kaleidos microreactors, and while Antares didn’t reveal specifics on this contract, they tweeted that they “now have a contract value on the order of $1B that is growing rapidly.”

While the business side is awesome, the most important piece is what this might mean for warfighters. As Doug said in the deep dive, “Over 55% of US soldier casualties in the two Iraqi conflicts are from ambushed convoys. And convoys move ammo, water, and fuel. So if you could put a reactor in one of these locations, you completely remove all those fuel shipments, you save tens of thousands of lives.”

As a bonus, our portfolio company Standard Nuclear has signed a binding agreement to supply Antares with TRISO fuel through 2035 for microreactors built for defense and space missions, which means it’s now supplying both Janus-winning startups.

(3a) Actinide Becomes First Startup to Enrich Uranium to HALEU

And speaking of nuclear fuel, Actinide became the first startup to enrich uranium and produce HALEU (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium), the fuel that many advanced reactors use (it goes inside the TRISO pellets).

They did it using their particle accelerator, Endurance, designed and built in Texas, which had been producing “enriched Yb-176, a precursor for cancer therapies worth roughly $30,000 per gram,” just last month.

HALEU will be one of many isotopes the company makes in its attempt to “address humanity's greatest unsolved problem: control of the atom.”

(4) Anthropic Kicks Off Preview for Model Hardware Standard

MHS enables AI agents to operate multiple lab and manufacturing instruments, such as microscopes, liquid handlers, and robotic arms, in parallel, and perform intricate tasks ranging from routine drug discovery experiments to laser calibration on a quantum computer.

Ruxandra Teslo has some good quick thoughts here, which you should read, but which are basically: this is aiming to automate boring stuff, like laser alignment, so humans can do science, which is core to the human spirit.

David Hansen has some, too, on what humans at US manufacturing companies can already do with Claude and Codex.

Read more here.

(5) Hugging Face Quacks into Robotics with Microduck (and sells to Nvidia for $12.9B)

Two days ago, rumors swirled that Nvidia would be buying Hugging Face, the open source model repository, for $12.9 billion. Open source makes sense for Nvidia - commoditize your complements!

So when Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf tweeted on Thursday morning, he tweeted what was on everyone’s mind: “We have a huge news to share today!”

The news, though, was that Pollen Robotics, which the company acquired in 2025, was “unveiling the first truly accessible RL robot - welcome Microduck.”

The thing is cute, costs $399, and you can train it yourself with reinforcement learning. Before you do, it can do a bunch of stuff out of the box, like “walk, sit, crouch, roller-skate, pick up objects with its articulated beak, and recover on its own.”

Asked to comment on Hugging Face’s big week, Billy Madison said, “That’s quacktastic!”

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Stony Brook Quantum, Figma Podcast, Anthropic Model Hardware Standard, Dyna ROI, Alex Colville

Read more

Happy Tuesday!

A few weeks ago, a longtime not boring reader and one of my smartest friends, someone I go to with questions on everything from energy to robotics, told me that he was going to China. Over the next few months, he planned to meet with energy, AI, and hardware companies and develop his China Fingerspitzengefühl.

Would I be interested in sharing what he learns in real-time with not boring’s readers? Incredibly easy yes.

If you are interested in the types of companies and technologies we write about in not boring, you probably need to understand China better. I need to understand China better. It currently dominates the Electric Stack, for one thing, and the next few decades will see Western companies compete with Chinese ones to bring the best products to the world market, to say nothing of geopolitics.

There are a number of great China-focused blogs for western audiences out there - I like Sinocism, China Talk, Tech Buzz China, and Hello China Tech, not to mention Dan Wang’s great book, Breakneck, but there are many more - but I think there’s something particularly interesting about riding along with someone sharp, curious, and motivated as they land in China with a bunch of imported questions, try to answer them, realize they were probably the wrong ones, ask new ones, and seek those answers. The process is often more illuminating than the output.

We decided to share his field notes as a series for paid not boring world subscribers for a few reasons:

1. This is exactly the kind of thing I want to publish for paid subs in not boring world: an operator sharing raw information with a little intelligent interpretation through his own earned lens.

2. So that he can be more open with his discoveries and analyses, and move freely.

For that same reason, he’s writing under a pseudonym: “Matthew.”

Over the past couple of weeks, as we’ve chatted from across the globe, I’ve been amazed by how fast “Matthew” went from American outsider to someone in the right WhatsApp chats to conversations with increasingly heavy hitters. You can see that evolution already in today’s piece - from wide-eyed tourist to factory tours. In just the few days since the ones we cover here, he’s gone deeper still.

Today, for our first installment, we’re including some of his initial impressions of Hong Kong and the mainland above the paywall as an introduction, but most of the good stuff today and going forward for the next couple of months will be for not boring world subscribers. Subscribers can also ask any questions on China you have — specifically around hardware, energy, AI, and manufacturing, but really, just throw anything at us. Send them over to me and he’ll dig, as he’s generally quite curious about China beyond his immediate interests.

Understanding China as more than a cartoonish adversary is critical for anyone who wishes to compete with its companies, and for those who simply want to better understand the world. I hope that Matthew’s adventure will give you a specific and increasingly nuanced view of how they do what they do, and why, and what they might do next, and what it all means for American technology companies, through the eyes of an American engineer.

Let’s get to it.

An American Engineer in China

Field Notes #1: The First 11 Days

Introduction

This piece will cover my first 11 days in China. The purpose of my extended trip is to learn about and meet with Chinese energy equipment companies and factories, but I’m also curious about China’s culture and financial ecosystem.

In the first section, I was an outsider getting a feel for China and getting invited to the right WeChat group chats. As I did, I began getting invited to factories and having discussions with more and more “mainlanders” who helped fill my knowledge gaps about the country. Throughout the piece, I’ll share a mix of my experiences and key takeaways.

Three Biggest Takeaways:

1. The China of 2036 will be vastly different than the China of 2026. Companies that used to manufacture luxury handbags are now becoming the brands themselves. Investors who used to copy American VCs are now running their own state-backed deeptech playbooks. Battery cell companies are becoming grid, datacenter, and asset-owning companies. If you aren’t heavily updating your mental model of China after this piece, then you will get blindsided.

2. China is heterogeneous. China has so many different dialects, dresses, jobs, climates, educational attainments, and personalities that I feel as though I could spend centuries in China learning new things. Beware of anyone who makes reductive stereotypes about the country, positive or negative.

3. China is big. Yes, this is “obvious,” but you don’t viscerally feel it until you casually see hundreds of skyscrapers in a row and single companies outproducing the industries of entire countries. Everything else just seems so…puny.

Section 1: Initial Thoughts

When I first arrived in China (or rather, Hong Kong, before heading into mainland Shenzhenbei the second day), I was incredibly shocked by the scale. The airport seems innocuous enough, although larger than most American international airports, but the moment you take a taxi into the city, everything becomes mind-bogglingly dense. In New York City, America’s densest city, there are around 900 buildings above 100 meters. In Hong Kong, there are 4000, filled to the brim with people in and around them. Frankly, it surprises me when people say that China is lying about the size of its population. You can feel the sheer size of everything here. Even the “suburbs” here can be millions of people large, with towering high-rises

stretching on and on and on.

Being guided by my friend in Hong Kong, I could find anything anywhere. Hong Kong is a financial and trading hub (import/export businesses have created many wealthy individuals), and in 10 minutes I saw three separate stores selling professional-grade cellos. But things really got nuts when I walked into the malls and high-rise buildings. You could have an IKEA on floor 5, an ice skating rink on floor 10, and then a wave pool on floor 11. I truly never quite knew what to expect every time we entered a new building. For example, Toys “R” Us was a staple of my American childhood, and it went bankrupt around a decade ago. However, the Chinese arm of Toys “R” Us was always financially healthy, so it still exists in China. Similarly, many famous US brands in China are owned by the Chinese version of the company, despite sharing superficial similarities. The 5090 GPU I found in an electronics market here, though, was very much the same Nvidia as the US one.

Hong Kong is also interesting because many mainlanders refer to it more as an “antique of the British Empire.” Hong Kong used to be China’s dominant financial hub, partly because of its advantageous tax structure and lax rules compared to the mainland (changes in both during COVID led foreigners to flee to Singapore). However, Shanghai, Beijing, and even Shenzhen have grown rapidly since the 90s, giving Hong Kong competitors.

That said, Hong Kong has an abundance of great universities, many of them highly technical and sending out thousands of students. This is one of the city’s more lasting draws for mainlanders, along with Hong Kong’s nature. Near one of these universities, while taking the subway (which arrived every 2 minutes, had perfect AC, and moved millions of people a day), I first saw Hong Kong’s low-rises and was surprised by the size of its beaches and archipelagos. I took a speedboat to tour and visit some of the beaches, and was even more shocked by the number of wakeboarders and superyachts corralling around. It felt more like Monaco than the urban metropolis I expected.

Heading back, although the locals will just drive up, you can hike up Hong Kong’s mountains to get a breathtaking view of the city. Hong Kong’s densest region is roughly 3x the size of Manhattan in terms of population, and from the tallest mountains you can even see Shenzhen. One of the buildings, around 500 meters tall, was covered in OLEDs gleaming pink, a cyberpunk obelisk staring at you from across the border.

The next day I headed into Shenzhen, the famous “tech-bro” city, and I should’ve allowed a lot more time for immigration. It was my first time getting a lot of particular paperwork and processes done, like giving them all of my fingerprints while being watched by quite literally over a hundred cameras. So, by the time I got on the high-speed rail into the city (which, likely because it was in an urban area, only went 160 km/h), I was in Shenzhenbei, a train stop about 10km north of where I wanted to go. I should’ve gone to the Futianbei train stop because a lot of the urban scene, my hotel, and seemingly everything fun is more on the south side of the city, but it was still useful. Shenzhen, I’ve been told, is much more friendly to foreigners in terms of its infrastructure than other mainland cities (some of which have just straight-up zero English anywhere), but it was still quite a difference. Uber no longer really worked; you needed to have WeChat Pay or DiDi. Most signs had little to no English; the rate of foreigners dropped dramatically, and cigarettes and cameras watching you took their place.

Most people who drive are in EVs; I saw very few gas-powered cars.

The McDonald’s that I scrambled to grab food at had a slightly different menu, but honestly wasn’t too different from an American one (besides some folks eating with plastic gloves, although most were just eating with their hands/utensils), before I headed into the core part of the city. I dropped my stuff off at my hotel, which, despite being super nice/multi-floor, was around $50 USD, where I met a friend who had moved to Shenzhen a year ago.

There, he introduced me to a ton of folks on WeChat (WeChat is where everyone does business; if some low-tier Alibaba factory responds to your email, then you know they’re going to be bad), and gave me a bunch of advice summarized in this italicized paragraph.

“Shenzhen is massive, it’s new (Deng Xiaoping’s SEZ 40 years ago), so nobody is “from there” the way they are from Beijing/Shanghai, culture is fairly welcoming, 100k people every day make something new so it changes all the time, even if you were here for a decade or two decades you would know so so so so so so little about the whole of it all, tier-1 manufacturing can be found in many parts of the world not just china but density of suppliers and supply chain make Shenzhen unmatched. APEC 2026, normally held in Beijing/Shanghai, is being held here for the first time because Xi likes the city and the government wants to show it off. It helps to be specific about who you want to meet because hardware specialists exist in every subfield you can imagine, and many universities offer 4-year/master’s degrees in manufacturing that are actually really good. No foreigner will ever get government subsidies (you may be well liked, and even a permanent resident in Hong Kong, but you will forever be a foreigner. Never forget that.) and that’s why you see so few here; they just get brutally outcompeted, but you can and should work with folks on suppliers/supply chain. Be careful about IP; people are super competitive here. If you want to cut costs and figure out expansions, don’t just think about input/output; you’ll get scammed. You need full process knowledge to figure out the limiting factors and how cheap things really are. He’s seen suppliers charge companies $200k for a machine that should have cost $20k. The food delivery guys can make a living here because the cost of living is so low, but they were often just scrolling e-girls on their phones while we were driving. However, if Meituan tried replacing them all with drone delivery, there would be so many riots in the streets.”

I then (after being guided by a friend who said “just come here, trust me”) entered an unexpectedly massive anime/cosplayer facility underground, with every possible character/combination you could imagine. There were blatant ripoffs of many characters (I know a Minion when I see one), but it was interesting to see the variety of genres. While I didn’t snap pictures of the cosplayers for fear of being rude, many elaborate anime cosplays in thick makeup, wigs, and costumes walked around Shenzhen.

Afterward, I walked upstairs and spent a few hours around Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen’s famed electronics market. To be honest, it moderately blew my mind, and I say moderately only because the initial Hong Kong skyscrapers had completely shattered my worldview the prior day.

If you are a hardware nerd, you would’ve loved this place. Massive billboards advertised MOSFETs and spare motorcycle parts. I walked into a McDonald’s looking for a bathroom and ended up in a random 5-story electronics market. I saw every type of phone (Huawei stores included), drone, robot form factor- you name it; here, there was technicality (and the smell of solder wafting around) in the air. Plenty of small kids came up to me yelling “nihao nihao”, which was cute, although the 7-11 shockingly not taking international payment was not cute, as were the waves and waves of blisteringly fast scooters that threaten to run you over if you don’t dodge and weave around them.

I went to the original Bambu Labs store in Shenzhen, where they proudly displayed that their 3D printers could make guns. That was probably one of the bigger culture shocks of the day, given the paranoia in the United States about ghost guns.

An interesting takeaway from the first few days is that we are not at the center of their universe.

America is certainly important and interesting to China, but China has the Greater Bay Area (which has more skyscrapers than all of North America and Europe combined, compared to our puny American Bay Area) and will come to dominate over the next 10, 20, 65 years. They’re going to spend over a trillion dollars on new infrastructure through the next decade, which goes so far here, and try to return to where they once were: the capital C greatest Civilization in the world.

Section 2: No More Foreigners

By the fourth day in China, I had begun to internalize a very important lesson: foreigners won’t be helpful here. This might be an exaggeration, but I see it as directionally correct. Even if you speak the language and have been in the country for decades, there is naturally a wariness that exists if you are not a Han Chinese person who was born in mainland China. That’s a big reason there are essentially no foreigner-run ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) in Shenzhen.

Of course, even though China is a country pretty explicitly for Chinese people, it is not a homogeneous place. In a couple of hours, you can go from the center of a Tier-1 gleaming coastal city to see literal rice paddy farmers working in the fields. Some companies are almost entirely subsidized, while others take zero government money. There are people dressed in streetwear covered in tattoos, piercings, and dyed haircuts, while others are so straight-laced they would never even breathe incorrectly. Over 80% of people in China do not hold a college degree. Many buildings were in shoddy condition, yet they were surrounded by marvelous, glowing OLED obelisks.

Shenzhen’s scenery is a visceral example of China’s heterogeneity. Show of hands: how many of you knew that Shenzhen, world capital of the hardware nerds, had palm trees? I certainly didn’t, although I suppose that it makes sense that there would be palm trees in Shenzhen and beach archipelagos near Hong Kong. It’s right near the Tropic of Cancer line of latitude, similar to where Cabo is. Of course, Shenzhen is a lot more mercantile and only mildly less alcoholic (debatable) than Cabo is.

Similarly, how many people talk about Shenzhen’s creative district, which would not be out of place in a standard American or European coastal city? Just like in these countries, they also have nice little patios where you can order pastries and public art, which I will describe simply as “somewhat odd.”

On my fourth day, I visited a UPS and PCBA factory in Shenzhen.

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Hey friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome to our 207th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

It’s Puja’s birthday — happy birthday Puj! — and I’m taking the day off, so today is both late and light on commentary. Thankfully, the good guys didn’t take the day off - lots to report.

Let’s get to it.

In lieu of a sponsor, some of my favorites…

Matic Robots - a home cleaning robot you can talk to (right link this time!).

Quince - high quality … everything at affordable prices. half my wardrobe.

Notion - not boring’s everything hub.

Ramp - Time is money. Save both.

Create - you should be taking creatine (and supporting Dan) - 30% off brother discount.

(1) Merck-Moderna mRNA Cancer Vaccine Successful in Phase III

Over here at the Weekly Dose, we are half-Irish, we hate cancer, we love mRNA, so imagine our excitement when we saw the news that Merck and Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine prevented melanoma (skin cancer) from recurring.

Given with Keytruda after surgery in high‑risk melanoma patients, the vaccine significantly reduced the risk that cancer would return or spread compared with Keytruda alone. It’s the first successful late‑stage trial for a personalized mRNA cancer therapy and could lead to approval and launch around 2027.

Melanoma is just one kind of cancer, we’d rather no one get it in the first place, and the vaccine is still expensive and complicated, but cmon. We have promising personalized cancer vaccines.

Say it with us… get fucked, Cancer.

(2) Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans

Nofar Mizrachi, Menachem Rottem & Liron Rozenkrantz in Nature Human Behavior

In Means and Meaning, I argued that attention is the thing we are, and where we deliberately direct it is how we create meaning for ourselves. Apparently, it’s also how we regulate immune function. From the study:

These results establish attention as a cognitive mechanism capable of regulating immune function in vivo. Situated within predictive and allostatic models of brain–body control, our results reframe perception as biologically consequential rather than merely experiential.

Attention really is all you need.

(3) Generalist… Generalizes?

The holy grail in robotics are robots who you can train on a bunch of specific data, then ask them to do something that’s not in the training data and they just do it.

According to robotics company Generalist, their GEN-1.5 is a one-shot learner: show it a few seconds of data, and it figures it out. It can learn from simulation, from watching humans, and even by chaining together smaller tasks. The thread has a number of good examples.

Robotics is really hard, and there are certainly a lot of things to figure out between this demonstration and billions of useful robots, but this is genuinely impressive and it seems like robots are going to happen sooner than later.

(4) Big Week for Routers

Stripe and Ramp and Merge

Routers help companies and developers … route their work to the right AI models for the job. Sometimes, you need frontier capabilities and are willing to pay for them. Others, cheap and fast is perfect. Ben Thompson has a characteristically good breakdown in Stratechery.

In early June, Markie Wagner told us that companies were going to start caring about Return on Tokens (ROT), and she was right. Routers are one way to do that, and they have been ripping.

On Wednesday, leading router provider OpenRouter confirmed it’s being acquired by Stripe. The NYT reports they paid $7.5 billion. OpenRouter was founded by the founder of NFT marketplace OpenSea, Alex Atallah.

In the very same week, two of our not boring capital portfolio companies announced routers of their own. On Tuesday, Merge launched Merge for Workforce, which lets companies spend 75x fewer tokens for better results. The next day, Ramp announced that it purchased the domain router.com and to house its own Router product, intended, of course, to save companies time and money, this time on intelligence.

Figuring out how to get the right intelligence at the lowest price automatically is going to be a huge market if the pace of AI adoption keeps up (and giving people better value may accelerate adoption further), so there will be a bunch of winners. What will be fascinating from a strategy nerd perspective is to see which of these companies’, and others’, set of assets lend themselves best to, and benefit the most from, routing.

(5) Big Week for Drones

Zipline x Uber and Amazon

On Monday, Zipline and Uber announced a partnership through which Uber will invest in the drone company and together make 1 million deliveries a day by 2019.

On Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that Amazon is expanding its Prime Air delivery service to reach 500 cities by the end of the year.

These announcements come on the heels of DoorDash launching its DoorDash Air in-house drone program.

And yesterday, a Texas woman shared a video of Amazon Prime Air dropping her package in the pool.

I am incredibly bullish on flight and think these bits of news are just the beginning.

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Dog Cancer, TRISO, Dan & José

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 206th Weekly Dose of Optimism!

This is a few minutes late because I thought it was a pretty slow week and had it all set and then new stuff just kept coming out, including Anduril announcing that they’ve launched a satellite, and I had to re-jigger things, which goes to show that the good guys and gals won’t even take one week off.

There are lots of goodies in main and in the Extra Doses, but if you have some extra time this weekend, get yourself a nice big iced coffee and read the third chapter in the Base Power Company story.

For now…

Let’s get to it.

Today’s Weekly Dose is brought to you by… Matic

It’s not actually brought to you by Matic. They’re not paying me and they didn’t ask me to do this, although they did give me a free Matic when it first came out. They don’t even know I’m doing it.

It’s just… we didn’t have a sponsor this week, and as I was playing with the Matic’s new voice control last night, I realized that it’s one of the most delightful things I own and I wanted to share it with you.

Anyway, you should do yourself a favor and buy a Matic for your home.

(1) Avidrone wins DARPA Heavy Lift Challenge

This week, DARPA held its Heavy Lift Challenge, a competition to see whether a drone could complete a course while lifting 4 times its own weight. Hunter Weiss has been going viral all week posting the videos.

A Canadian company called Avidrone won with its Katana uncrewed aircraft. The 29.3 lb drone completed the course in 19:17, while carrying a payload of 112.4 lbs… just shy of the 4x mark at 3.84:1, but better than anyone else. They tried to hit 4:1 one final time and crashed hard. In any case, they won 1.25x.

There are military reasons for wanting heavy-lift drones or DARPA wouldn’t have done this, but the reason it’s leading off the Dose is that getting drones to be able to carry more weight, further, for less money will reshape the world like nothing since the car.

Katana isn’t what that future will look like, but it’s a fun little preview. Stay tuned.

(2) Josh Kushner, Bob Iger to Buy Lakers for $12.5 Billion

When Thrive Capital announced Thrive Eternal in April, it prompted me to write an essay on Scarce Assets. I wrote:

Last Friday, Josh Kushner announced Thrive Eternal, the firm’s permanent capital holding company that will concentrate in a small handful of “Iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition, identity, and shared experience,” starting with the San Francisco Giants.

And look, the Giants are fine. Not having a great season, but a solid baseball franchise. A nice starter purchase for Eternal.

The Lakers, though? Iconic. Rare. The scarcest of the scarce.

Imagine agreeing to terms courtside at the Lakers, one of the places to be seen. A founder pic courtside with Josh could send a company’s valuation up a billy.

Per Sportico, the $12.5B transaction set a new record price for an NBA team, surpassing… Mark Walter’s purchase of the Lakers last year.

That chart should look comfortably familiar to a venture capitalist, and it shows no signs of slowing. While there’s a new $10 billion big lab spinout neolab every week (see: Jeff Dean’s Disco Loop is in talks to raise $1B at $10B), they aren’t making any new Los Angeles Lakers. As Matthew McConaughey might say in a Dazed and Confused remake, “You know what I love about these Scarce Assets man? People keep getting richer, but they stay the same amount.” Or whatever.

In related news, Thrive Holdings, the firm’s fund that owns and operates accounting and IT services businesses, raised a fresh $2 billion yesterday, too. Chapeau.

(3) Recast Comes Out of Stealth to Give Humans Agency Over Weather

We now live in a world in which there are two American startups run by young geniuses attempting to help humans direct the weather, which is awesome. Doing so might mitigate disasters, like droughts and floods, and allow us to take a more proactive approach to things like energy and terraforming.

Recast Systems, “a weather company,” has been busy while it’s been quiet:

In the past 6 months we’ve produced a cheaper, more efficient seeding material, trained a hyper-resolution AI weather model, and operated 100+ cloud seeding flights for the governments of Texas and New Mexico.

We’ve covered Rainmaker a bunch of times in the Dose, and in The Great Differentiation, in which I wrote that they’d earned their differentiation by doing something incredibly cool in the physical world (flying drones into clouds).

What I think is great about Recast’s launch is that they’re carving their own distinct, differentiated brand in the space. It’s more science-forward, more handmade. You can see it in founder Olivia Li’s behind the scenes here, and in the images they chose for the unstealthing thread. This is the first one:

This is the next:

The sky is a really big place, and beyond cloud seeding, “the weather” is even bigger. There will be multiple winners, and the addition of a second credible startup, with a totally different vibe, adds credibility to the whole space. I think both Rainmaker and Recast will do great things, and I hope they do them ASAP.

To summarize: a few years ago, we had no weather startups. Now, we have two. I guess… when it rains, it pours.

(4) Fuse’s Faeton-X Hits 1.27×10¹² Neutron Yield

Compared to every other fusion company, the thing I love about our portfolio company Fuse Energy (aside from the founder, JC Btaiche) is that it generates revenue by selling radiation on the way to generating power from fusion.

When I wrote about the company in May 2024, I described a couple of paths. The TITAN path - from TITAN to Z STAR to APEIRON, is what will ultimately deliver fusion power to the grid.

The FAETON path, while not the path to fusion directly, produces valuable neutron shots: “In the near-term, Fuse actually expects to make more money from FAETON II shots than it does from TITAN II shots, because the value of FAETON II’s neutron-producing shots are twice as valuable as TITAN II’s.” Defense contractors and satellite makers pay tens of thousands of dollars a shot to blast their electronics with neutrons to find out whether they could survive a nuclear detonation or a decade of radiation in orbit.

FAETON also uses some of the same components, namely the Brick, “the high-voltage capacitor and gas switch that is the fundamental building block of its pulsed power generators”

All of which is a long way of introducing the importance of this breakthrough. This week, Fuse published results from FAETON-X, showing that it generated 1.27×10¹² fusion neutrons in one shot, making them the first fusion company to publicly document a yield in the 10¹² range.

Importantly, though, they did it with a higher current efficiency than the labs: 4.5 MA/MJ, highest current efficiency ever for a MJ-class plasma focus, against 2.35–3.25 for all published peers including government machines. It took Livermore’s MJOLNIR 1.3 MJ to produce 1.2×10¹² neutrons, where it only took Fuse 1 MJ to produce its 1.27×10¹².

That is important, because yield in pulsed-power z-pinch devices scales as the fourth power of drive current. Current efficiency is the compounding variable of which yield is the derivative. 40% more current per MJ gets you 4x more fusion, not just 40% more.

This is maybe the most important curve for Fuse: neutrons per megajoule of capacitor bank. On Faeton, it means delivering those valuable neutron shots more efficiently. On the TITAN path, it means that everything gets smaller and cheaper for the same current, which could mean getting to fusion power, and making it cheaper, sooner.

This is the Fuse thesis, too. Instead of straight-shotting fusion like competitors, get out in the field and start selling. Iterate. Improve the brick on FAETON, and bring it to TITAN. Move fast. They went from design to first shot on FAETON-X in nine months, and from first shot to record in another nine. Keep interacting with the messiness of the real world, keep iterating, and maybe one day the iterative approach gets you to the end goal faster.

If not, there’s a lot of very useful stuff you can do with all that radiation at Q<1.

(5) Matic Now Lets You Talk to Your Robot

I love our Matic. It reliably vacuums and mops. It’s proof of the saying that something is called a robot until it works. The Matic robot works, so we just call it the Matic.

Yesterday, the Matic reintroduced the magic. You can (and last night, I did) talk to it, and tell it where to clean. From the company’s tweet:

1. Say "Hey Matic" - it locates your voice, turns, and looks at you
2. Say "Hey Matic, follow me" and start walking. Matic will follow behind
3. Say "Hey Matic, go clean the living room". Since it knows your house map, it navigates and just does it

People think the path to robots doing useful things in our home will look like a person. Matic’s bet has been that it’ll just be really useful at one thing, and then get useful at more things. So far, it seems like the right bet.

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Anduril’s Satellite, Ilia Delio on Intelligence, Rubin on Greatness, AI’s First Really Good Thing

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Hi friends 👋 ,

There are only two companies on which I’ve written multiple Deep Dives.

The first is Ramp, which I first wrote about when it was valued at $300 million, then again when it was valued at $1 (and $1.6) billion, and then multiple times since. Today, it is valued at $44 billion.

The second is Base Power Company, which I first wrote about when it was valued at $300 million (Chapter 1), then again when it was valued at $1 billion (Chapter 2). Today, the company is announcing that it has raised $1 billion at a $12 billion pre-money valuation, bringing its valuation to $13 billion.

In the intro to the last Ramp piece, Ramp at $1 Billion, I wrote that “One of my goals for this newsletter (and Not Boring Capital) is to find a handful of generational companies as early as possible, write their story in chapters over time, and then publish the whole thing as a book when they IPO.”

That is certainly my aim with Base Power Company, which I’ve both invested in and plan to keep writing about through and beyond IPO.

This is the third chapter in the Book of Base. There will be many more to come.

If you want to help write the Base Story, and I think you should, because I think it’s going to be one of the most important of our generation, my advice is to get yourself on the next flight down to Austin and join them.

Let’s get to it.

One Friday night earlier this summer, Base Power Company CEO Zach Dell and Ribbit Capital founder Micky Malka agreed to terms on a $1 billion Series D at a $13 billion post-money valuation. By Saturday, the round, co-led by Ribbit, Valor Equity Partners, Addition, and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, was fully subscribed. By Sunday, it was multiples oversubscribed.

$13 billion is, to be sure, a hefty price tag for a toddler, no matter how precocious. Base is less than three years old, and it is now the second most valuable energy startup in the world, behind Helion, and the most valuable that is selling a product today.

It is a bet, I think, that Base can become the largest energy company in the world.

That seems crazy, I know, but it’s been my working thesis for a while - that Base has the opportunity to do to energy what SpaceX did to space, what Anduril is doing to defense - namely, win a large, old, incumbent-dominated market.

It’s also the company’s ambition.

Last November, before Base had decided to expand to Chicago, before it had produced its first Base Core, Zach came to New York to do a fireside at Thrive Capital’s office.

After the conversation, we were chatting with a small group and someone asked whether there was still upside in going to work at Base, to which Zach replied, “Base can become a $400 billion company.”

It was offhand and automatic, but what struck me was that Base had just closed a $1 billion round the month before that valued the company at $4 billion. As the valuation grew, the ambition did too, at exactly a 100:1 ratio. I suspect no matter how highly valued Base becomes, the goal will always be 100x higher.

When we caught up last week, I asked Zach about that conversation at Thrive, and whether now that investors had valued the company at $13 billion, in his mind, Base was now a $1.3 trillion company in the limit.

He didn’t remember saying $400 billion at Thrive, and said that he doesn’t necessarily think about it that way… before laying out exactly how it could happen:

I think about it more in terms of the scope, the size, the total opportunity, and how big a part of the energy market we can be.

A trillion dollar company is pretty big today. I don’t think it’ll be that big in 10 years.

So I mean if you believe that energy is going to remain one of the world’s largest industries, or even get bigger as a percentage of total GDP, and you look at all the largest energy companies in the market, you stack rank them by market cap and you stare at it and you say, ‘Which one of these can be trillion dollar market caps? And you think okay there might be one or two in here.’

And then you look at that list and you’re like, ‘Do we think Base is going to crack this list? And where on it do we think they will be?’ I think we will crack that list and I think we can be near the top over time. I think we will be at the top.

So. Biggest industry in the world. We want to win it. You tell me how big that would be.

Energy is an enormous industry, and arguably the world’s most important. It sits at the base of everything. The world’s largest energy company today, Saudi Aramco, is worth $1.7 trillion. Exxon Mobil is second at $650 billion, a cool trillion dollars less. What is remarkable about the energy industry, though, is that there are 18 energy companies worth more than $100 billion, and 55 worth more than $50 billion. At its current $13 billion valuation, Base would rank 182nd among publicly traded energy companies, between China’s COSCO Shipping Energy and Norway’s Vår Energi.

This is a top-down view of the situation, basically just confirming that it is indeed very possible to build a very large energy company. What’s notable about the list, though, is just how old the companies on it are. These companies were largely built around the winning assets of the previous energy system: oil fields, refineries, pipelines, tankers, centralized generation, poles, and wires.

The energy transition that’s been underway has already created new bottlenecks – the grid struggles matching variable supply with unpredictable demand, for example – and therefore new valuable positions.

Then the most ravenous consumer of electrons in history entered the market in the form of data centers. If a new energy winner is going to be born, now would seem to be the time.

The question is: how? In an industry dominated by well-established and literally well-resourced companies, how might a new entrant break into the top group, or even take the top spot?

This is the question I tackled in Power in the Age of Intelligence in February. My hypothesis was that a company needs to identify the constraint holding its industry back and focus everything on breaking it in order to win the High Ground with a scarce, defensible asset. Then, use that position and its capabilities to integrate outward.

This is what Standard Oil did, and Ford Motor Company, Carnegie Steel, and Swift Meats. The case study I used to show this idea in motion was, of course, Base Power Company.

Base picked the right energy bottleneck - the grid - and the right technology to unblock it - batteries. They picked the right place to put the batteries, right next to homes, in the right starting state, Texas. They vertically integrated, assembled the right team to own each chunk it bit off, and got to work.

“In 2023,” Zach told me, “we had this very opinionated view that batteries were this unique unlock to scaling energy consumption. And we thought that in a commodity business where cost is everything, to win, you had to vertically integrate and you had to leverage technology, because you needed to combine those things to get a structural advantage.”

With Base Core, Base has won the High Ground: the ability to make the cheapest residential battery and deploy a growing network of them in the most valuable place on the grid, next to homes, starting in Texas, the state where batteries currently make the most sense.

Owning the High Ground doesn’t mean Base has won, of course. Not even close. The High Ground is simply a strategically advantageous position from which to attack (“Job’s nowhere near finished,” Zach confirmed).

What it means, though, is that it will be a lot harder for any new entrant, or even any incumbent, to try to attack the bottleneck in the way that Base has, or to try to beat Base at its own game. Their customers will be harder to acquire, their electrons more expensive, and their ability to impact the grid less sophisticated.

As important as the position itself is what Base has learned capturing it.

“Our first three years were basically learning a bunch of hard lessons about how to scale, build a brand, build a team, raise capital, manufacture and design products, optimize the supply chain, and the output of all of that is Base Core,” Zach said.

Base’s young life has been a process of figuring out how to do a really hard thing, earning the right to make it a company capability, using it and other capabilities to do the next really hard thing, and turning that into a capability, too.

Collectively, Zach calls all the things Base has learned to do its “Capability Cannon”: the deployments and engineering and electrical services and manufacturing and brand and balance sheet and policy chops that Base has earned along the way.

The Capability Cannon is the most important thing Base builds, more important than any single product, as long as the opportunity ahead remains larger than its past accomplishments, which it should for a long time. Base can point its Cannon at the next opportunities it attacks.

It is already pointing it at new geographies and new customer types.

When we last saw Base, in Chapter 2, they operated in one state. Now they’re in two, having launched Illinois in June. Back then, fifteen months ago, its regulated utility business existed as one pilot. Last month, more than 50% of its installs were on regulated utility customers’ homes for the first time.

It learns lessons from these expansions, too, and it will apply them to the next state and the next utility, and the ones after that, until there’s a Base Core on homes in every state, every neighborhood, and maybe even in foreign countries, too.

It can also point the Cannon at new products, and at the AI infrastructure buildout.

The way Zach sees it, there are four things you can do with power: you can make it, move it, store it, and sell it. Make, Move, Store, Sell.

“There are massive opportunities across the whole stack,” he explained to me. “You think about the stack and power, it’s really four things: you have to make it (generation), you have to move it (transmission and distribution), you have to store it (batteries) and you have to sell it (retail and wholesale markets).”

A couple of the other people on the team mentioned it too, as in, “Has Zach talked to you about his Make, Move, Store, Sell framework yet?” It seems to be an animating framework.

And he shared it with Ribbit, too, which used MMSS as an organizing concept in the Power Letter it published last week.

Ribbit took it a step further, actually, applying MMSS to both electrons and intelligence, and grouping “Dam Breakers” by which of those functions they did to which commodity.

This is “capture the High Ground and integrate outward” in a picture, and the question is: which squares give you the best starting point from which to expand, and how far? This is why we get out of bed in the morning here at not boring HQ!

Maybe they move left and start to Make or Move electrons.

That would clearly fit the mission of fixing the grid, and of delivering affordable and reliable power to customers. Zach has hinted at owning generation since the beginning, and both Jared Greene, Base’s Head of Software, and Justin Lopas, its co-founder and COO, have talked about how you can start to integrate backwards into the grid once you own the Base Layer with batteries and software.

Maybe, just maybe, they even move down into intelligence to capture some of those blue squares.

“There’s a tendency for a company of our scale now to be like, ‘Oh, well we’ve got 500 people now so we can go and do more things,’” Justin told me, when I asked what they might do next, “But I still think - Zach and I talk about this all the time - that focus is extremely key.”

Justin Lopas (l) and Zach Dell (r) in Focus

Focus on what, though?

If what Base sells is batteries next to Texan homes, then any deviation from that - selling batteries outside of Texas when there are so many Texans left, or selling something besides batteries or electrons altogether - might count as a lack of focus.

But that’s not what Base sells, what it is building, or where its ambition ends.

Base exists to fix the grid and sell affordable, reliable power to those who consume it, and it is building a set of capabilities that it can deploy at the best opportunities to do that.

Three years ago, it had a very opinionated view that batteries were the best way to do that, and they nailed it. They nailed the strategy, and they’ve nailed the execution. No one brings batteries online faster, and no one makes batteries that deliver cheaper electrons.

“Now,” Zach told me, “it’s time to scale the fuck out of that.”

Along the way, they’ve learned a ton about how the industry works, and they’ve earned the knowledge that there are way more opportunities beyond making batteries to store and sell electrons.

“And so we’re going to do all of that,” Zach said… “And then we’re going to take that massive Capability Cannon and we’re going to point it at AI.”

And we’ll get there, I promise, but all of Base’s best laid plans, up to and including becoming the world’s largest energy company, rely on its ability to build its capabilities, to build the Core and then build outward from there.

Which is one of the reasons that Base started manufacturing its own batteries.

Manufacturing the Core

The plan, when I spoke to Base’s Head of Hardware Dino Sasaridis for Chapter 2, was to not manufacture batteries for a little while. Crawl, then walk, then run.

The Gen 1 battery, the one Base has been installing on customers’ homes, was a basically off-the-shelf battery system.

Gen 2, he told me, was being designed to Base’s requirements and manufactured by partners (one battery partner, and two inverter partners). That was the focus at the time of writing.

Then, once they’d worked out the kinks, they’d make the battery they really wanted to make, Gen 3, the vertically integrated, Made in Texas, absolute best battery in the world.

Gen 3 is why Dino joined Base, after thirteen years at Tesla, where he led mechanical engineering on Powerwall 3.

“I decided that whatever I did there I can do it again,” he told me, “and I can do it better here, and then Base Power Company can have the absolute best residential battery in the world. And I think we’re going to easily achieve that, honestly.”

“That best residential battery is Base’s Gen 3, which it’s planning for now. Gen 2 is up next, later this year,” is what I wrote then, in April 2025…

“Actually, the first time I recommended we cancel Gen 2 was right after I joined [in May 2024],” Dino admitted when we caught up a couple of weeks ago. “And I was like, these suppliers do not care about our success as much as we do. We should not do this.”

He actually looked into canceling the contracts then, but for a number of reasons, including the fact that the $15 million in cancellation penalties would eat a big chunk of the money Base had raised, they couldn’t get out. So he turned his focus to making Gen 2 as good as it could be.

The idea of just canceling it kept nagging at Dino, though, “Because at the end of the day it was still just buying a product from someone else, money transacted at day zero. And the reason that ends up being a problem – I’m sure I’m the 50th person to tell you this today – is that if you don’t own the stack of the technology, you’re absolutely not empowered to fix it when it breaks.”

“So I took a hard look at the design, mechanically and electrically, and asked, ‘Is this thing going to break?’ And I was like, ‘Yep, it’s probably going to break.’ It was in a lot of ways more complicated than our Gen 1 product.”

Worse, Dino suspected that Base wouldn’t actually learn anything new from Gen 2, which is why you’d ever waste time walking before you run in the first place. Focus means focusing on things that grow your capabilities, and Gen 2 just wouldn’t.

Everything was pointing in the same direction: Dino had gotten himself to about 80% confident that Base would move faster if it just cut Gen 2.

Then he went to Zach Dell, Base’s CEO and suggested that “Hey, crazy idea, I’ve looked into it for almost a year and I really do think we should cut Gen 2 and just do it ourselves,” to which Zach responded something like, “Woah, that’s big, I need to think about this.”

He did, and when they spoke two or three days later, they’d both walked it back a little, and they kind of nervously laughed, like “That was crazy, right?”

But you know how this works. You’ve felt it. Once you get that feeling in your gut, whatever the details, the only thing that will resolve it is just cutting bait? That’s where Dino was.

Which is why, even though they’d put the cancellation on pause, Dino kept talking to people about what if.

In a one-on-one, he mentioned to Jared, that “Yeah, I was talking to Zach about how we should probably just cancel Gen 2, but never mind, that’s crazy.”

“And Jared looked at me and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re right. We need to cancel Gen 2.’ And I was like, wait, am I right?”

And whether he was actually right or not, it ping-ponged from that conversation to a leadership team meeting within the week, right around April 2025, right when the Liberation Day tariffs made it that much more attractive to make as much as possible in the US anyway, at which point Base’s leaders decided, “Okay, fuck, we need to do this. Let’s rip the Band-Aid off.”

On May 1, right on schedule as always, two weeks after I’d published Chapter 2 with a few hundred words on the merits of Gen 2, Zach sent out the monthly investor update.

Everything had moved in the right direction in April. Monthly installs crossed 400, with a new high day of 26. Closed customers grew 30% MoM. Austin Energy had selected Base to move on to the next stage of its RFP process.

And one more thing…

We made the decision to cancel our Gen 2 program and accelerate Gen 3, a lower cost, Base designed and manufactured (in Texas) home energy system. We’ve re-allocated all internal engineering resources from Gen 2 to Gen 3, worked with our Gen 2 suppliers to wind down all work with them, and focus 100% of our hardware & supply chain efforts on accelerating Gen 3 development.

“It might have changed the game,” Dino tells me. “It might have pivoted the success of the business, honestly.”

“We had dozens of people immediately stop working on it and start focusing on Gen 3. There was a bunch of throwaway work we avoided. And the number of meetings per week talking about the day-by-day slip of one inverter supplier versus the other… all that shit just turned off.”

“Then, because we had all the resources freed up, we did a big architecture week,” he continued. “The power electronics team is in San Carlos, so I invited them here. We gathered the desks in a big circle and sprinted toward a concept for Gen 3. Then we got Zach and Justin and Jared, the whole team, together and looked at it. And we were like, ‘Oh man, we can make this so much better than it was going to be.’ I think at that point we all felt like we’d dodged a bullet. And then we went and made it.”

“And then we went and made it” sounds so simple, but making batteries was not something Base actually knew how to do back then. So they called Andy.

After eight years at Tesla, where he left as the Director of Battery Manufacturing Engineering, Andy Ross decided to take his talents to General Motors as Director of Manufacturing Optimization. General Motors is a very large company and there is a lot to optimize.

Just one week into his new role, in August 2024, Justin and Dino reached out to Andy to talk about Base. At the time, Base wasn’t manufacturing its own batteries, and wasn’t planning to for another generation.

“The timing isn’t great for me,” Andy told them, “and you don’t need anybody who does what I do either. But feel free to use me as a resource.”

Andy joined Base in March 2025.

Has it been more fun than GM? I asked.

“Oh my God, so much more fun.”

Base people have their own definition of fun. In Andy’s case, “fun” meant:

• He joined in March,

• They decided to cancel Gen 2 and manufacture Base Core in-house in April,

• They signed a lease in the old Austin American Statesman building in June,

• They got the keys in September, and

• By March 2026, his one year anniversary, he and the team had landed two production lines and begun putting Base batteries in the field.

The company refers to this level of speed as Base Pace, and it runs on a mix of process and elbow grease.

When I asked Andy to describe the culture of the factory team today, now that it’s grown from four to one-hundred-and-thirty-four, he said, “We want people that can solve tough problems but don’t really care where that problem is, people that don’t care what the nature of the problem is they just want to be a part of fixing it.” That comes from the top.

As soon as Base took possession of the old building, they wanted to get to work. But it was late summer in Texas, very hot, and there was technically cooling tower infrastructure in place but it hadn’t been cycled in seven years and they weren’t going to be able to get it recommissioned in time, and they’d quoted some retrofits to be temporarily installed but they were outrageously expensive, like $1 million, and they wouldn’t be ready for seven months, and the plan, at the time, was to only stay in Base Factory 1 (BF1) for thirteen months anyway, so that wasn’t going to work.

“So I just started fielding local rental companies,” Andy recounts, the way you recount war stories from the good ol’ days, when there were just four engineers on the team and no maintenance leader and so you just figured it out yourself, “to just start landing some chillers outside the building. Good, bad, or otherwise, the door-opening mechanisms on the dock overhead doors were broken, and they’d be outrageously expensive to repair too, so I was like, ‘All right, we’re just gonna land them in front of the dock doors’ and me and one of my NPI guys were just sawzalling holes in the dock doors to get ducting into this place because it was late summer so it was like 95 degrees in the building and we wanted to get to work.”

“The first night they showed up, I was here until about midnight on a Friday with the rental HVAC company just trying to get this building less hot,” he remembers, with that glint. “I never thought I’d be sawzalling dock doors to duct tape and chewing gum some air conditioning into a building, but everybody was very happy when they weren’t dying of sweat on Monday.”

He applied that same elbow grease to the facility’s compressed air system. When Andy realized that he wasn’t going to be able to get the leftover 1980s-level factory compressor system working himself, he “went on Tractor Supply and bought the largest, but also 120V, compressors that I could find, and I was in the ceiling making up a makeshift pneumatic system for all of our pilot systems, so running pipe and dropping lines and everything.”

Andy calls these his “hacky redneck” fixes. They’ve largely been replaced at this point, now that Andy has a team. But because he’s done many of the hard jobs himself, when he asks his team to do the same, he can tell them with a straight face: “Sorry it sucks, but it isn’t going to exist otherwise.”

“When I was at Tesla,” he told me, “it was a passion of mine to personally operate every station on every line on every continent that my team deployed things to, because a good solution to an engineer might not be a good solution to the person that has to use it.”

Which is probably why, as Andy grew the team from those initial four engineers to the one-hundred-and-thirty-four people that make it up today, 80% of the salaried team members are people that Andy has worked with before, which I suggested must feel pretty darn good.

“The thing that’s been special about manufacturing in particular is the amount of great people that have been,” he searches for the right combination of words, “bold enough, hopefully not foolish enough, but ambitious enough to pick up my call and hear me say, ‘You want to go do something crazy?’ and they say, ‘Yeah.’”

“Bold enough, foolish enough, ambitious enough… doesn’t matter. They want to go solve big problems and we had big problems.”

“We had no factory, we solved that problem, we got a factory. We had no team, we were solving that along the way. And we had no concept of a manufacturing strategy yet, then it was all just philosophical, on the computer, and then we went out there and found new machines, new vendors, new equipment from all over the world to go achieve it.”

When Base started sourcing the equipment for BF1, it was just Andy and one other manufacturing engineer. By the time they were ready to start placing purchase orders, a few others had started to trickle in. Andy would tell them, “Welcome, this is the thing we’re going to buy tomorrow, you’re going to be in charge of executing this project now.”

Those early days in BF1 might not have been pretty, and will certainly look downright primitive compared to BF2, BF3, BF…X. That’s great. At Base, you figure something out, and then you turn it into a capability. Your best laid plan needs to face harsh reality, so you can learn, improve, and try again.

Plus, whatever the Manufacturing team had to do, it worked. Fast.

In Austin, Texas, right down the street from Base HQ, “We landed two battery module manufacturing lines and one inverter manufacturing line (the ratio is because there are four battery modules per inverter).”

By January, a little over one business quarter after taking possession of the space, Base’s pilot battery module line was up and running and the team started pre-production builds.

All told, over the course of the last fifteen months, Base got out of Gen 2 contracts with only $1 million in penalties, built out a manufacturing team, opened a factory in the old Austin American-Statesman press building, figured out how to add a generator hookup to the battery, stood up a supply chain, built the first Gen 3 batteries, tested them in as much as three feet of water, rewrote software and firmware to match their new capabilities, built more Gen 3 batteries, began installing them on employees’ homes, then friends’ homes, and then all sorts of Texans’ homes, and renamed the battery system Base Core.

All that done, Base now offers what Dino is “quite confident is by far the cheapest residential battery on the market.”

By February, it had its first Base Core system ready to install.

The Day The Team Installed the First Base Core

Manufacturing is a scale story. You certainly don’t set up a whole factory to make one battery. But you don’t scale up a whole business without stopping to appreciate one battery every once in a while, either, especially when it’s an important one.

That first Base Core, which people from almost every Base team gathered to install on a teammate’s house in February, was an important one.

Dana Paz, the Anduril alum who is Base’s Head of Deployments, responsible for the multi-state logistics and installation network that Base is growing, told me that it was the highlight of this chapter in the Base story.

“That first Gen 3 install – sorry, Base Core, don’t tell Cole [Jones, Base’s Head of Growth] I said Gen 3 – truly was super epic,” she said. “There were so many people in a tiny packed side alley and the vibes were so high.

For those, like Dana, who had been there from the beginning, it was an opportunity to reflect, briefly, on how far they’d come. “The first Gen 1 install was me and Cole with the Craigslist electrician. It took over two days to hack the thing together and it was just pure chaos,” Dana remembered. “And then this one was chaos but in a much better way”:

We now have an entire support system, so you have the engineers on-site, the hardware, the firmware, the electricians were there, the deployments people were there. We were finishing stuff in the factory, off the line, functional tests, like throw it in the back of a person’s car, drive it over to the same house to do the install. We had a blackstone out, we were cooking tacos. It was just way better vibes on Gen 3 than Gen 1, which was cool.

“It set the stage well for us to then go out and do something hard,” Dana said. “We had a bunch of pilots that we had to go rework a bunch of times, because we would try something new out and it wouldn’t work, so people would be going back to the same house like six times. So you’re like, ‘Is it really working?’ I don’t know, you have your doubts. But being able to anchor on that super epic first install… yeah, that was the highlight for me over the past year.”

Something is working.

This month, only fifteen months after it decided to make the thing in the first place, Base will install more Base Core systems than Gen 1 systems.

How to Build Your First Battery Factory

There’s been a lot of learning in between that first Base Core install and the thousandth, naturally and on purpose.

Base likes to make a thing, get it out in the field, hook it up, and learn from it as quickly as possible, so that it can tweak its design, maybe supply chain, and manufacturing lines as quickly as possible, so that it can keep compounding as quickly as possible.

For the Hardware and Deployments teams, that meant getting the first one out and hooked up to a house, to see where it broke and tweak the design accordingly.

For Andy and the Manufacturing team, that early iteration loop meant that they needed to keep the pilot facility, BF1, as manual and flexible as possible.

“What bites you in manufacturing is you design a thing that you think is going to be the thing you launch on and then you launch with a mildly different, sometimes radically different, product architecture and you’re scrambling from a manufacturing engineering and equipment standpoint to try to recover the machine to match the thing you need to go build,” he explained. “And the thing that Tesla taught me was to try to limit the amount of one way doors, or the inflexibility, as long as you can from a manufacturing line standpoint.”

This is why automation comes last in Elon Musk’s five-step algorithm. Automation is inflexible.

“That’s one reason that we kept it pretty manual to start out at this factory, was to enable a higher amount of flexibility in both process and in design as long as we could,” Andy said.

Another reason was that Base’s systems weren’t set up to handle much more than manual.

The Manufacturing Execution System (MES) - the software that tracks, monitors, documents, and controls the manufacturing process - that Base had been using was “originally built to do retail clothing inventory tracking. It was something you would use in a job shop where you’re making 50 of a thing and then you’re making a new thing, not where you’re making 1,000 of a thing per day.” It was a low-volume tool where Base needed a high-volume one.

At first, the team tried to redneck hack it by building an architecture in which the original software system might work. Maybe at the first level it didn’t look good, but at the second…

“No, when we dug into it, it still wasn’t very good.”

They presented their findings to Justin, and told him they felt confident they should go build their own MES, a significant undertaking that would require going slow for a while to go fast later.

“One of the things I appreciate about Justin is that he values and appreciates the experience the members of my team bring,” Andy said. “And when we presented the idea of making our own MES to him, he looked at the team and said, ‘Yep, make it so.’”

So they did. They released the first version of the system in January, right as the line got up and running. By April, it was the system of record at every station. By June, the manufacturing software team was integrating live controls for the factory’s 21 robots. (Being smart about when to automate doesn’t mean no automation, as Justin describes to Molly O’Shea during their BF1 walkthrough.)

Then they built Whimsy, which stands for “Where the heck is my stuff y’all,” to track inventory from the moment it arrives at BF1 until it leaves for one of Base’s six-plus warehouses around the country, and they built a bespoke Quality Management System, to handle supplier quality, production approvals, and non-conforming parts.

In each case, from the first install to the flexible manufacturing line to the internal tools, what Base is becoming excellent at is the process of going from “We’ll figure it out” to encoding the solution in process or software as quickly as possible.

Figure It The Fuck Out

I first discussed writing this piece with Gabriel Federman at Base a couple weeks ago. Three days after that, on a Monday, he’d packed my calendar with meetings with about ten team members. And that same day, I got an email from two Base interns, Prithika Devarajan and Richa Pandya, subject line: “At Base Today?”

Turns out, they’d each seen my meetings with their respective bosses on their calendars and decided to take the initiative and reach out. Also turns out that taking initiative is a big part of the culture at Base, and when we spoke the next day, Richa and Prithika each had stories.

Richa, a University of Toronto electrical engineering student working on Dino’s Hardware team during her eight-month co-op, has mostly been focused on the inverter, on field returns, and on new designs for the battery management system.

But as soon as she got to Base, she started looking through the Google Drive, where she found [REDACTED UPCOMING BASE PRODUCT] and thought, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” She told Dino she wanted to work on [REDACTED UPCOMING BASE PRODUCT] and he said, “Great, write me a proposal,” and he meant like a proposal of what she’d work on, but Richa came back with a 10-page report on what the commercial version of [REDACTED UPCOMING BASE PRODUCT] could possibly look like, and Dino said, “This is really cool, you should keep pressing,” and so now Richa is working on that, too.

Prithika, a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student (there really is talent everywhere I guess), is working on Gabe’s marketing team, on some SEO stuff, and on the vision and design for a commercial energy product that’s launching soon, and even spent two weeks boots-on-the-ground in El Paso, on which more in a second.

But she was also fascinated by the company’s utility partnerships, and noticed that Base didn’t have a map of all the batteries in Texas and whether they were charging or discharging, like Powerwall does, and so she made a quick MVP and brought it to Lauren Thomas on the Utility Partnerships team. Lauren looked at it and said, “Actually, this is fricking sick. I don’t really care that you’re an intern, I want you to go figure this out and make it better and come back to me as soon as possible with it.” Which she did.

This kind of openness and cross-pollination is part of the culture, too. There are fifty-five (55!) interns at Base this summer, and they all work on different teams and hang out all the time, which means they all have visibility into all the different areas of the business.

It sounds like a ton of fun, but when duty calls, the interns are expected to do their core jobs, whatever it takes. For example…

Base recently launched a utility partnership with El Paso Electric that Tim Pianta, Base’s Head of Utility Partnerships, was telling me about the day before I talked to Richa and Prithika. What made the partnership unique, he said, was that its goal was deploying in specific, particularly constrained parts of their grid to defer capacity upgrades.

What that required was installing 10MW behind a particular substation, which meant getting roughly 10% of all the homes behind that substation installed, all before a September deadline. It was a higher penetration rate, and a more targeted one, than Base had ever attempted.

Prithika was tasked with helping make that happen.

“In El Paso, we had to deploy 10MW of batteries,” she told me. “So they sent me and Olive, another marketing intern, to El Paso.”

While Base has signed up thousands of Texans, many through utility partners, the level of geographic precision needed in El Paso was new.

“Tim was like, ‘You need to figure it out,’” Prithika said, “And so we did. It was 104 degrees, we were there for two weeks, we knocked on doors, we hosted happy hours at coffee shops, we showed up at farmers markets, and we were able to pull it off and end up two weeks ahead of schedule.”

In the end, one-third of the neighborhood signed up and 10% got installed (many didn’t qualify). Cole, who has overseen every customer acquisition effort in Base’s history, confirmed that those numbers are “freaking crazy.”

Part of the lesson, she said, was that “we will figure it the fuck out no matter what,” but the other part is that you need to turn that into learning how to do a process well. “The next utility will be such smooth sailing now that we’ve figured it out.”

“A lot of how we think about things here,” Richa added, “is as a factory. The focus from the beginning of anything is how we’ll be able to standardize it and turn it into a factory, which influences how you design the product in the first place.”

Then she said something that describes Base in 2026 as well as anything I’ve heard, how it’s able to maintain its culture and grow really fast and not stagnate but not descend into chaos, how it can compound on the core and hold the High Ground and expand out.

“Imagine Base sort of like a web. It’s expanding outwards, and all of our new ideas are at the edge, and all the scrappiness is at the edge, and in the center, we’re trying to take in new things once they’ve been processed at the edge and standardize them into processes and software and make them more efficient.”

To synchronize our metaphors, the Cannon is the result of the Web.

Learn something, then turn it into a process or encode it in software, and as a result, the team is experimenting with new tools every day, they told me. Where the factory has its MES and logistics has Whimsy, for example, the Software team has been working on building out Base OS, which takes customers from top of funnel down to getting their install scheduled.

Historically, this has been a bajillion tools tied together through APIs and now they want to do it through one homegrown system.

“So it’s constantly failing, but it’s also constantly getting better,” which is a beautiful metaphor, too.

Build, fail, get better, own that capability, build on it, fail, get better, outward until the web envelops the industry.

That is what Andy and team are doing in BF1, too.

By the end of the year, they’ll need to be pumping out about 1,300 Base Core systems, consisting of four 10-kWh modules each, every week. That’s roughly 5x from today, with those gains to come from adding a night shift, and from “attacking all of the uptime problems, the cycle time opportunities, and standardizing a lot of the workflows.” Take some scrappy redneck process, figure it out at the edge, and standardize.

The year after that, they’ll need to 3x, and then they’ll need to 2x again, at least on the current trajectory. That means that in 2028, they’ll be producing 30x more batteries each day than they do today, from the comfort of the bigger, more automated Base Factory 2.

From 2028, today’s production numbers will look tiny, but today, they’re cause for (brief) celebration.

“You should see an all-hands,” Richa and Prithika told me.

“It’s literally just Justin and Zach saying some KPI and everyone starts shouting and clapping, everyone, every time there’s a win. Recently, in the factory, they’ve been hitting records on how many modules and inverters they produce. Every time we hit some kind of record, everyone is just so, so into it and excited.”

Last month, the factory made 295 10-kWh modules in a single day. The crowd went wild.

Unbelievably Fast

The thing about constraints is that they move.

Figure out the factory, and something else becomes the thing standing between Base and flawless execution.

When I asked Justin which team currently had the Turtle, the stuffed animal turtle that sits on the desk of the person most responsible for clearing the critical path, he didn’t hesitate: “Squarely on the Supply Chain. Basically, we’ve been able to ramp our factory faster than four or five of the key suppliers we’re sole sourced to right now.”

Because Andy and his team ramped up the factory so fast, the Turtle now falls to the team whose job it is to fill it with parts.

Colby Jarrett is working on it.

Colby came over from Tesla, too, where he worked on the Vehicle program, unlike a lot of the Tesla refugees at Base, who worked on Energy there before working on Energy here. But Colby did work on batteries for vehicles, most recently as the Senior Manager on Technical Programs for Cell Manufacturing Engineering, and on every factory launch other than Fremont, which predated his 2017 start date. During his eight years there, Tesla got bigger, and more bureaucratic, and he got tired of that, so he looked for something smaller, spent a bit of time at Form Energy in Pittsburgh, and then jumped to Base.

Colby joined to work for Dino in Hardware, working on program management, compliance, and sourcing. When he joined in July 2025, there was no factory; there was a program and an early design for Gen 3 and that was about it.

“And we’ve been kind of push-pull-flipping it up the hill ever since.”

When Colby started at Base, one of the first problems he was tasked with was “picking a supply chain, so roughly 20 vendors to make 40 parts.” I figured he was the right person to ask about the challenges Justin brought up about vendors not working at Base speed, and how you solve those.

He gave me some technical reasons.

Like, Base has something about its design that’s hard that they didn’t realize would be hard and now the vendor is having yield issues. As we speak, Base is ramping more than ten supplier lines alongside its own, sending engineers to supplier floors to develop processes, install hard tooling, and project-manage the move from bridge suppliers to production suppliers.

Or, Colby adds, at the “commercial interface, at the speed that Base moves, it’s pretty much impossible for us to tell them exactly how this thing’s going to be made in high volume. By the time we need them to start, they’ve got to start with quite a bit of ambiguity still in the product design and in the program, and removing that ambiguity without losing commercial leverage on price or schedule is a very hard problem with vendors.”

This kind of stuff is new for the company, and the people who started it. Justin admitted that he had kind of a blind spot, because high volume manufacturing is very different from low volume manufacturing, and at SpaceX and Anduril, he “had done mostly low volume manufacturing.”

“And in low volume, you can kind of brute force almost anything. ‘Oh, we didn’t get the part done Friday? We’ll just work this weekend to finish the machine part for Falcon or Starship or whatever.” But, he said, in high volume, “you plan production once in advance, you sign long-term contracts, you reserve long-term capacity. All of these are concepts that are intellectually obvious but when you actually go do them in practice, it’s a bit different.”

But you do it, you make contact with reality and you learn and you earn the right to get to scale and to hire even more great people like Colby, and then you continue to figure it out.

You can figure out all of the hard technical stuff, but maybe the biggest thing you have to solve, Colby told me, is something softer.

“I speculate that some of our bigger vendors just didn’t expect us to execute,” he told me.

“We showed them a timeline and they said, ‘Yeah we work with a bunch of startups, we’ve seen this movie before, you’re going to come back and push the schedule on us.’ But plus or minus a month or two, we’re on the same schedule we published 18 months ago.”

“Some of them have had their little ‘Oh Shit’ moment, that this is really happening at the rate that we said it was going to, and are trying to play catch up because they didn’t really start out of the blocks.”

So you have to prove to them that you’re going to do what you say, which you can only do with time, and which Base has now done, and you have to sell them on a vision of what happens when you continue to do what you say.

“Base as a customer maybe isn’t a big deal now,” Colby said, “but they’ve got to understand the opportunity and the ambitions of Base as a whole and of the Base Core battery so that they’re incentivized to grow with us.”

In short, Base needs to get its suppliers even half as excited about Base Core as its employees are.

The Platonic Ideal of a Battery

Just as Dino wasn’t excited about Gen 2 from an engineering perspective, “Dana wasn’t excited about it from an operations perspective, I wasn’t excited about it from our members’ perspective,” Cole told me.

“We’re like, ‘Wait, what are we doing? This doesn’t make nearly as much sense as it would if we were to build the platonic ideal of a battery.’”

Cole is very excited about Base Core.

“Base Core has been the company’s big bet, to make it real. And now it is very real,” he said. “It’s the biggest, best thing for the energy world, ever maybe. In my opinion, it is the key to energy abundance.”

In terms of its specs, Base Core is the best battery on the market.

Base Core is the highest-capacity battery on the market, with 39.2 kWh of energy capacity, compared to 25 kWh for Gen 1 and 13.5 kWh for Tesla Powerwall 3. Many customers get two Base Cores, for nearly 80 kWh of capacity, which gives Base more ability to balance the grid, and room to add energy-consuming products to the offering.

It has a 20 kW inverter, which is crazy powerful and means that Base can push out a lot of power very quickly to support the grid. Justin tweeted that they believe the inverter is one of the most American-made on the market, which is particularly important now that the FCC has added foreign-made inverters to the Covered List since they’re vulnerable to being shut off remotely.

Base Core operates in temperatures as low as -22°F, much colder than Gen 1’s 14°F, which will come in handy (necessary) in Illinois and other cold-weather markets. It is physically smaller, and its volumetric energy density is nearly 2x that of Gen 1, meaning it packs more energy in a smaller package. Its transfer time - how long it takes to turn on when needed - is 10x faster than Gen 1, at 50ms instead of 500ms, the difference between noticing a flicker when the power goes out and not noticing it at all.

Not only is it the best battery on the market generally, it is custom-built to do what Base needs it to do.

Dino told me that the priority ranking when designing the battery was: 1. Safety → 2. Function → 3. Reliability (All Must-Haves) → 4. Cost (why we’re going to win) → 5. Install (why we’re going to win) → 6. Serviceability → 7. Beauty → 8. Delight.

Base optimized for landing a lot of relatively inexpensive energy capacity at each home in order to spread inverter, customer-acquisition, and installation costs over many more kilowatt-hours (kWh). Accomplishing that means it’s the cheapest residential battery on the market, and is ideal for long backup duration, and for buying, storing and trading more grid energy.

The more kWh (and MWh and GWh) Base controls, the more money it can make. Base aims to roughly breakeven on the batteries themselves - it charges members a few hundred dollars upfront, to cover the install costs, and $19 monthly fee in some areas. It makes most of its money today by storing power when it’s cheap and selling it back to the grid when it is expensive. Every battery is a time machine.

Increasingly, Base makes money by helping utilities put more storage capacity online, as well, in order to better balance and get more out of their grids in order to delay capital investments.

In both cases, more capacity directly translates to more revenue. And given that customer acquisition and install costs are roughly the same whether you’re installing 39.2 kWh or 20 kWh, the more you can pack in each system, the better the unit economics.

This is one of the benefits of vertical integration: you can design your hardware to do exactly what both your customers and your business need it to do. Base Core has a little something for everyone.

For Dana and Deployments, this is a battery that was designed to be installed.

“The hardware was designed to install with ease,” Colby told me, “because we knew emotionally that we were going to have to be the ones to install it and didn’t want the pain and complexity of a hard battery install. I think if Base weren’t as vertically integrated as it is across the whole business, not just the hardware stack, those dependencies are less obvious to optimize for.”

The biggest change is to Disco, so named because it’s an internal disconnect that sits between the grid, the home’s main panel, and Base Core. It allows Base to split the install into two stages: electricians do the detailed electrical work when they disconnect the home from the grid with Disco, and installers come to plug in the module the next day.

“Install basically goes from three steps down to two steps,” Dana told me, and importantly, it decreases how much scarce electrician time Base needs to use.

Designing for install does mean making trade-offs. For example, Dino told me, they could have squeezed in more energy per module, “but it would have been a trade: now every single time we lift the battery, it would have to be done by a piece of equipment and it can never be lifted by a person.”

Vertical integration allows you to control that trade-off. One of the things I’ve appreciated about Base from the very beginning is that it optimizes for the whole deployment instead of any one spec. They call it the Deployment Factory, and the more Base controls, the better a factory it can design.

Base Core comes with features that help the Software team, too. The same Disco has new telemetry on it, which helps them get to base truth on any issue very quickly.

“For Gen 1, sometimes people would call us and say ‘my lights are flickering’ and we’d try to diagnose it based on information you give us and our one-hertz telemetry,” Jared told me, referring to the fact that it ran 1 time per second, a huge upgrade from the every five minutes utilities are used to but still too slow for the precision Base wants. “Now, we implemented new telemetry on the Disco, which at seven kilohertz (7,000 times a second) is running analysis on the actual waveform.” With that, the team can diagnose, and then fix, most issues remotely and near-instantly.

The new battery is flash-flood tested and can be submerged in three feet of water, too. Dino mentioned that they “welded the lid on like a submarine. We hardened the crap out of it because we wanted them to be able to work underwater. And then we tested it, with water all the way up to the top of the inverter, and it just works. Full submarine mode unlocked.” This sounds like it’s a cool-to-have, but it also expands where Base can operate to include low-lying flood zones.

Then there was the big one for Cole, the feature that answered the most common customer question: “How long is this thing going to last?”

So Dino and his team added a generator port, and now Cole and his team can honestly tell customers, “We have this generator port, so it lasts as long as you need. Obviously, you can use the battery as your first line of defense, but in the event of a winter storm, you’ve got this thing included, and it’s only a few hundred bucks to add a generator to it.”

Think of it like adding a gas tank to a Tesla to eliminate range anxiety. Most of the time, you’re golden with the battery, but if you can’t find a charging station and you just need to fill ‘er up quickly, you can. “I think it’s the best feature, honestly.”

As Dino pointed out when deciding to kill Gen 2, though, this thing is going to break. The thing I heard from multiple people that makes making Base Core in-house so great is how fast you can fix it, which Dana said means that “The iteration loop is much faster.”

That is the biggest benefit to vertical integration: the speed of the feedback and iteration loop.

On an early install she went to, “One of the installers, the electrician, was like, ‘Why did we do this thing that way?’ And I turned to the designer and was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know, designer, why did you do that thing that way?’ And the designer was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ And so all that stuff just makes the feedback loop much tighter, which just makes it a little bit better.”

“Because we’re so vertically integrated, if something’s broken in another org, I can go fix it” Colby agreed. “I don’t have to argue with people outside my organization and work through a commercial interface. That’s a speed enabler, which I think is huge.”

Put all of it together, and you have what the team is quite certain is the best and cheapest residential battery on the market, a killer combination that, once installed, will protect you from outages and save you money on your electricity bill, and it keeps getting better as the team learns from contact with reality.

Which is why everyone seems to want a Base battery.

More Demand Than We Can Meet

At the end of each of my conversations, I asked people what they would title this chapter in the Base story.

Zach asked to come back to me with a title, but said “The subheader of mine is: commercial validation, just rip-roaring product-market fit, more demand than we can meet.”

Base’s demand has come from what Cole calls the three-headed monster: homebuilders, utilities, and direct deregulated customers. Each has been humming, with utility surging to become the largest source of demand over the past few months.

In July, Base signed over 6,000 new Battery members, roughly 40% more than in June, while installing a record of more than 2,000 systems. For every battery it installed, more than three new Battery members signed up.

Despite the manufacturing ramp, Base is still supply constrained, which is why Andy is so focused on increasing production 5x and why the Supply Chain team has the Turtle. As many Base Cores as the team makes, there will be demand.

But recently, for the first time, being a Base Member doesn’t necessarily mean installing a battery. In April, the company launched Base Energy, “an energy plan with guaranteed below-market rates,” for renters, apartments, and other Texans “who might not be ready for a battery just yet.”

Base Energy is another early bet beginning to pay off. In Chapter 1, we discussed why Base operates as a Retail Electric Provider (REP), or more specifically, a “gentailer,” a retailer who owns their own generation. I wrote:

The battery means that Base can offer customers a lower price on their electricity. The reason is counterintuitive.

Selling electricity in a deregulated market is a low-margin, high-risk business. It’s low margin because it’s competitive, and REPs have to buy from generators and sell to price-sensitive consumers. It’s high risk because prices can fluctuate wildly. For most REPs, that makes selling electricity even lower margin, because they need to hedge their risk with financial instruments for which they pay a premium.

“The hedge is a financial battery,” as Jared described it. “The battery is a technical hedge.”

Since Base can hedge with technology instead of options, it can pass the savings it would have otherwise spent on premiums back to customers.

Base Energy shows that that’s true on a network-level, not just member-by-member. With its fleet of batteries, Base is long power: when electricity is valuable, it has stored electricity it can dispatch. A retailer, like Base Energy, is short power: it has promised to serve customers and must procure that power. Combining the two can reduce risk and improve economics, and can also serve as top-of-funnel, a way to build member trust, and a word-of-mouth engine. “How is it that you’re paying 10% less than me for the same electricity?”

Three months after launch, Base Energy had reached more than 14,000 members, bringing Base’s total membership across both offerings above 30,000.

The direct business - with or without Battery - is growing, as is the homebuilder business. Lennar accounted for roughly 2,500 homes, or 30% of Base’s 2025 installations, and by March 2026, Base was available in 77 Lennar communities with a take rate above 65%.

The biggest growth engine, however, has been utility partnerships.

Providing Utility to Utilities

Fifteen months ago, we focused the entire “Expansion” section on regulated utility partnerships, of which Base had just signed its first, with Bandera Electric Cooperative.

When asked how Base might fail to become what it could become, one of its investors told me, “If Base doesn’t work outside of deregulated markets, if it can’t break into utilities, it becomes a less good business. The size of the prize is smaller, and it’s more competitive.”

The good news is: Base has been able to break into utilities.

Tim Pianta, Base’s Head of Utility Partnerships, told me back then that while Base had the best battery technology, and believed it offered the fastest speed to capacity and highest reliability compared to grid-scale batteries and Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), the whole game was to “chop wood, carry water,” to take the time required to prove to utilities that it could do what it said it could.

Since then, Base has been proving itself. That initial Bandera pilot has turned into five larger utility partnerships, totaling 220 MW:

“When I last talked to you,” Tim remembered, “I think the regulated part of our business was quite small. In 2025, I think we were on the order of a couple percent of the business. This month and through the end of the year, about 50% of the installs that are happening are regulated utilities installed. So we’ve kind of caught up with the deregulated side to some extent.”

In fact, a full 58% of Base’s July installs were in regulated utilities’ territories.

This makes Cole’s job easier, at least from a customer acquisition standpoint. “From a go to market motion, the utility world is quite simple,” he told me. “You get like 5% of the addressable market signed up just by the utility sending an email. It’s a free CAC. I love it.”

It’s “free,” of course, only after the months or even years of work that Tim and his team put in to sign a utility partnership, which is a long sales cycle in its own right. But as Base continues to prove that it can get capacity online faster than centralized solutions, even utility partnerships are becoming lower cost to acquire.

When I spoke with Zach, he was on his way out for a road trip to three of the largest investor-owned utilities (IOUs) in the west.

“All the big utilities are calling us and they’re saying, ‘Please help us,’ basically,” Zach told me. “That was just not true fifteen months ago.”

There are different types of utilities, each of which might want something different from Base, which means that while Base manufactures one battery, it can monetize it in a number of ways.

In a deregulated market like Texas, it owns the battery, sells electricity to members as a REP, and monetizes the fleet. With co-ops and municipal utilities, Base deploys a contracted fleet that the utility can use. With investor-owned utilities, the IOU might buy the assets through a build-transfer contract, because they can place the batteries in rate base and earn an allowed return on the approved investment, and pay Base for software and services.

Base’s innovation, from its initial decision to own the batteries instead of selling them to retail customers, has always been a business model as much as a technical one.

It has been able to meet customers, whether retail or utility, where they are, and as a result, Base is well on its way in Texas.

Its batteries backup early adopters’ homes in Dallas-Fort Worth, Greater Houston, and parts of the Austin metro. It has partnered with the state’s forward-thinking utilities, including recently signing its home utility, Austin Energy, through which it signed up more than 1,000 of its neighbors in the first month.

There is an argument to be made that Texas is perfect for Base, and that it should continue to focus on pressing its home court advantage.

Base, however, does not want to simply become Texas’ largest REP. It wants to be America’s Next-Generation Power Company, and America is bigger than Texas.

So in June, for the first time, Base pointed the Capability Cannon north and fired.

Daaaaaaaaa Batteries

On February 1, 2026, right on schedule as always, Zach and Justin sent the monthly update to its investors. In it, they shared that Base had decided on its second market: Illinois.

Illinois is large, with roughly 4 million single-family homes, deregulated like Texas, and has become one of the most battery-friendly states in the country. The same month Base decided to launch in Illinois, Governor Pritzker signed the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act (CRGA, or SB 25). Base is so key to the state’s energy plans that Governor Pritzker cited Base’s decision to launch in Illinois as evidence that the Act was working.

Tactically, CRGA establishes a 3 GW battery storage target by 2030 and gives residential batteries access to the PJM wholesale capacity market.

PJM is the Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) that covers parts of Illinois, including Chicago, and the Mid Atlantic. PJM’s high capacity prices make stored power particularly valuable, while Illinois’ aging infrastructure and time-varying distribution rates create the opportunity to get paid for relieving stress on the local wires, a value stream Base cannot currently monetize in deregulated Texas.

Illinois is also well-positioned as a potential … base … of expansion to the northeast and midwest.

These are all specific reasons to choose Illinois once Base decided it was time to expand, but not reasons to expand in the first place.

I asked Justin how they decided the time was right to make the Lone Star State less lonely.

His answer was that the process was “perhaps too scientific,” but basically, they look at the penetration rate of eligible single-family homes in a given metro, and how expensive it would be to increase the slope of expansion within that metro. It gets expensive at a certain point, near where they’re at in Texas.

“So we think the economic optimum is to expose ourselves to more TAM over time,” or in English, to enter new markets.

Less scientifically, while everything is bigger in Texas, Base’s ambitions are even bigger than that. The only way to prove that it can expand outside of its home state is to expand.

Base can take the capabilities it has built in Texas, and turn them on the next best market, where it can, as with the battery itself, see what breaks in the new context, fix those things, and apply them to the next market, and the next one, so that it iterates on go-to-market and deployment faster than everybody else, too.

All of which means tweaking and testing.

On the Growth side, Cole said that a lot of the early marketing was very Texas-focused, but, “We’re shifting to becoming America’s Power Company, which requires you to kind of localize your approach.”

“So if you look at our Illinois website,” he continued, “it has a classic Midwestern brick home with a kid playing baseball in the backyard. The approach and how we think about photography, how we think about design is expanding.”

“What we learned in Texas is that you need to earn trust and you need to humanize energy,” he said, “but the way you humanize it is obviously going to change region-by-region. You’re seeing this with the Illinois launch, and you’ll see this with a few other launches we’re cooking up over the next few months, as well.”

The value prop people care about in each region differs slightly, too.

Base’s core offering, everywhere, is “affordable, reliable power,” but, Cole said, “some will veer more affordable, for example Chicago, and others will veer more reliable, for example Texas.”

This makes sense - Texas has been rocked by outages, and PJM wholesale power has gotten dramatically more expensive recently. ComEd, the utility that covers Chicago, has seen its all-in residential rate jump to 17.07¢/kWh, up roughly 90% from ~9¢/kWh in 2021. Brian Potter talks about why PJM and others have gotten relatively more expensive compared to ERCOT here.

What is true across all of Base’s customers is that they would like to pay less money to receive more reliable power.

Another thing that seems to be true among Base’s customers is that they trust local news. “Our target audience watches the local news at 5pm, and so getting Zach on TV with a reputable local TV station is a good strategy,” Cole said.

Local newspapers work, too.

Base launched in Chicagoland, the greater Chicago metro area, on June 24th, on the heels of “recent severe storms which left more than 400,000 without power.” It signed up more than 1,000 members and did 26 installs almost immediately.

Then on July 27th, storms knocked out power to more than 530,000 ComEd customers. The next morning, the Chicago Tribune ran a favorable feature on Base: Base Power launches backyard battery backup system for ComEd customers.

That day, 1,437 leads came in in Chicagoland, five times the previous best day, and 172 of them signed that day, nearly double the previous daily record of 90 and almost a quarter of the new Chicagoland members signed up in all of June.

In Illinois, too, it seems that Base will have more demand than it can meet, which means it falls to Dana to meet it.

Deploying a New Market

It should be easier to launch a second market than it was to launch the first. Base knows what it’s doing now. It knows how to talk to potential members and how to walk them from top of funnel through signup with BaseOS. It knows how to make batteries, how to get them to warehouses, and how to get them from warehouse to house. It knows how to install them, now with less electrician time. It knows the type of people it needs to hire, and roughly how many. In many ways, a new market is just doing those things in a new place.

To be sure, there are differences, too, new problems to be solved, or old problems, already solved in Texas, to be solved anew.

Take permitting. In Chapter 2, we talked about the fact that each Authority-Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) in Texas could supersede the National Electric Code (NEC) with its own rules, which meant that each new neighborhood was a new adventure, and whether Base was able to install smoothly or not often came down to the whims of each particular inspector.

It was Kafkaesque and annoying, but Dana and her team figured it out case-by-case, and it was another source of advantage “if you think about Base as a machine that eats complexity and turns it into moats.”

Then, Base ate complexity and turned it into law. In August 2025, thanks in large part to work by Base’s policy team, Texas passed SB1252, a standardized code framework that said, “a municipality may not adopt or enforce an amendment to the National Electrical Code, or adopt or enforce an ordinance, rule, or other measure, that would regulate the installation or inspection of a residential energy backup system.” The framework said that the rules had to be the same throughout the state.

That made Deployments’ job much more predictable, if not easy, and it was one of a million little things they figured out to make Texas go more smoothly.

But Illinois is not Texas, and its municipalities are not subject to SB1252. Chicagoland has more than 500 permitting jurisdictions. Base is back to negotiating with individual inspectors in each about small differences. There are different labor and union dynamics there, too.

In each state Base enters, it will have to push for policies that make permitting easier to navigate, and that generally support affordable, reliable energy, unless it can make the National Electric Code… national.

“As of 2025, Texas is the only state where the state itself controls permitting, because of SB1252,” Justin told me. “We’re trying to do that elsewhere, but there’s a federal permitting bill very slowly making its way through Congress, and we’re trying to get language on that bill that is basically supportive of a similar path to what we did here in Texas.”

Justin is very serious about this, because it slows Base down, hurts the grid, and hurts Base’s customers. Plus, it’s an unnecessary headache when there are so many other hard things to worry about. When we saw each other at Reindustrialize in June, we were talking Illinois permitting within 60 seconds. Last week, he wrote an op-ed for Utility Dive titled America’s permitting crisis lives at City Hall making the case that local permitting discrepancies are slowing the transition to clean, cheap, reliable energy and calling for federal or state-level action to standardize the process.

To that end, in November 2025, Base hired Zina Bash as Chief Legal Officer. Bash is a huge get and a perfect fit, having clerked for Justice Samuel Alito, served as a Special Assistant to the President for Regulatory Reform, and as Senior Counsel to the Texas Attorney General before going into private practice.

Bash’s hiring is a sign of how important the company expects policy to be going forward, and another example of figuring something out at the edge of the web (SB1252) and turning it into a core capability.

There are a lot of new things to figure out in Illinois, but this time, Base is doing it with more resources, a more experienced team, and stronger brand awareness.

“When we were trying to hire people in Dallas with no warehouse and no footprint, people were like ‘You’re a scam for sure, like this is not a real company,’” Dana recalled. That made hiring tough. Now, people know that it’s a real company. They may have read about it in the Chicago Tribune, the WSJ, or Not Boring, which seems to be making hiring easier, even in new markets.

A couple of weeks ago, Dana flew into Chicago on one of her frequent trips up to launch the market. Her plane diverted to Indianapolis to refuel, and by the time she got to Chicago, she’d missed the rental car window and they canceled her car. So Dana goes to the rental car window and tells them, politely, that it’s not like she chose for her flight to be delayed…

So we’re chatting with the guy, and I’m like, ‘It’s midnight, I really just need you to give me a car. If you tell me I need to take an Uber an hour to my hotel I’m gonna be very sad.’ And he was like, ‘Okay, I don’t like that, let me see what we can do.’

And then he asked, ‘OK, what’s your email?’ and I told him, ‘Oh it’s whatever at basepowercompany.com’ and the other guy goes, ‘Oh my gosh, I just applied to get a battery, they’re reviewing my site survey!” and I’m like, ‘No way!’ and the other guy says, ‘I install solar when I’m not doing this,’ and I was like, ‘Do you want to work at Base?’ I gave him the recruiter’s email, and he emailed and he’s applying to be an installer.

It was pretty electric and it made my day.

Base plans to hire about 50 people in Chicagoland by year-end. Hiring electricians used to be a huge bottleneck, but Base has great recruiters for that now. “The recruiters honestly shocked me with how quickly they can hire great people at this point,” she said, and noted that the challenge is now staying competitive with data centers who are willing to pay top dollar for electricians for short-term projects.

Base will have to figure out ways to compete without simply upping the dollars - things like benefits, 401k, and equity that come with working for a company long-term, to the extent that potential hires value them - but if paying up is what they have to do, they’ll figure it the fuck out. “The answer can’t be, well we won’t install batteries because we don’t have electricians,” she said.

They’ll figure out hiring, and how to adapt warm weather Texas uniforms to Chicago’s cold, and warehouses, and vans, and all of the millions of little pieces of complexity that turn into Base’s moats. Some will be Chicago-specific, and some will be a level up: how do you adapt something that works well in one place and make it work well in many?

Chicago is the edge of the web; they’ll do something scrappy there, then turn it into a capability and move it to the core. They’ll use what they learn to launch the next market, then the next, each with its own hiccups, each a little more smoothly than the last.

Then…

The Mission is to Fix the Grid

“The way I think about where we are is that this is really Chapter 1, Part 3: scale up Solution Number One [the battery] and spread that to the country,” Jared said, when I asked him to name this chapter in the Base Story.

Base made a bet that, over time, batteries will be the foundation of the modern energy system, and that the best way to own as much of that foundation as possible is to sell residential batteries to consumers and utilities to provide them with affordable, reliable power. There is a long way to go to prove that out at the scale Base is aiming for, but it has built the product with which it plans to expand, and has begun the expansion.

I started this chapter talking about the end game, about what happens at the end of all of that, and how Base might build the world’s largest energy company. And then, I spent more than 10,000 words in the weeds talking about all of the very hard, specific, and often hacky things the company has had to do to just get to this point.

That was by design. Winning the High Ground is hard, and holding it now that they have it will be hard, too.

“Seeing it in action, I have a feeling I know the answer to this, but why has no one done this before?” new Base investor JJ Watt asked Zach in his new video.

“The truth is,” Zach answered, “it’s just really freaking hard. It’s difficult. There’s no new physics. There’s no secret magic potion. It’s just a bunch of really smart people working their butts off to solve really hard problems, day in and day out.”

Those smart people are still working their butts off putting Base Core on as many homes as possible. At one point in Base’s life, one install seemed impossible. In Chapter 2, they’d hit a high mark of 22 in a day. Now, the record is 113. The next time we talk, it may be in the thousands. In July, Base installed twice as many batteries as it had installed in total in April 2025. It’s now deployed 585 MWh of storage, and aims to pass 1 GWh by the end of the year.

The more batteries they have in the field, the more they learn, the more they improve. Dino said that what excites him isn’t making the next shiny thing, but making Base Core into the Toyota Corolla, a supremely reliable machine that you can print at volume. Justin, Andy, Colby and their teams will fix the supply chain bottlenecks, and figure out how to increase production of Base Core by 30x, in BF1 and BF2. Dana and her team will continue to tighten the Deployment playbook, and then unleash it on a number of new markets, while Cole and Tim continue to earn the trust of their consumer and utility customers.

Utilities, already a much bigger part of the business than they were in April 2025, will be a bigger part still by Chapter 4. They are the guardians of the grid, and Base keeps figuring out new ways to help them guard it.

“We spend a ton of time with utilities, and as we’ve done that, we’ve learned that most of the problems that utilities face are coordination problems. It’s about blocking and tackling and solving problems across the stack, not just in Make, Move, Store, and Sell individually, but when you combine all them together,” Zach told me. “We’re pretty good at coordination problems and we have visibility into the entire stack, and so there’s a lot of stuff we can do in partnership with utilities.”

If there’s one person in charge of coordination problems and grid topology, it’s Jared.

His team’s firmware and software stitches the network together, pulls telemetry data from the batteries Base has deployed to over 17,400 customers’ homes, and understands the grid on a hyperlocal level in a way that not even utilities themselves do.

“Now, we’re starting to work on Solution Number Two, as well,” Jared said.

What’s next? I asked. Any hints?

“The mission is to fix the grid,” he said. “And what is the power grid for? Increasingly, it’s for driving compute.”

“And so if we want to do a good job at fixing the grid, well, it doesn’t work to fix the part of the grid that is going to be a shrinking portion of the pie. If you look forward a few years out at what are the factors that have the potential to make the grid unhealthy? Compute is a major part of that.”

When Base first started, it was clear that batteries were going to play a role in the future of the grid, at least among supergeniuses. In Chapter 1, I linked to a 2023 essay by Casey Handmer called Grid Storage: Batteries Will Win.

What wasn’t clear was that those batteries would be next to homes. One of Base’s insights was to say, “Grid-scale batteries are great, but residential batteries are even better. They’re just harder. Let’s figure it out.”

Today, it is clear that compute will play a major role in the future of the economy, and become an increasingly large consumer of electrons, whether from the grid or behind the meter. Like batteries, idea number one is to put all the compute in big, centralized data centers wherever hyperscalers and neoclouds can find powered land, or land they can power themselves in a reasonable timeframe.

“One thing that’s hard with large, centralized grid-scale loads in general is that it’s sort of like…,” Jared searched for the right analogy.

“Here, imagine if you have a rock and you’re trying to suspend it in a spider’s web. Wow, totally crazy one,” he said, not realizing that he was not the only Base employee to use a spider’s web as an analogy…

If you have like one big rock, it’s really hard to find a part of the web to put it where it’s not going to break the whole thing. But if you have a lot of sand, it’s much easier to distribute that across the web so that you don’t have so much load on any individual point that it causes the thing to collapse, so the spiderweb can hold a lot more sand. Wow.

If you can put the sand specifically in places where the grid has headroom and you don’t have any particular spot where you’re trying to connect hundreds of megawatts, and instead you’re able to connect hundreds of megawatts but across the whole network, you end up being able to connect more compute more quickly. Especially because you have the battery there where you can help with power conditioning and you can do it at a very high rate, because we control the hardware. You can make sure that you don’t have some bad effect on the power grid.

I think we should be able to bring a lot of compute online while keeping the grid healthy.

Base is not the first company to think about doing decentralized compute, just as it was not the first company to put batteries next to homes. Tesla, no slouch, did it earlier, and Base has grown like wildfire anyway, by vertically integrating to deliver the best product on the market.

But the capabilities Base has developed on batteries might give it an even better starting point for what it does next. Its ability to manufacture hardware and install it on homes seems important, as does its ability to make a distributed network of batteries operate as one.

As Base was building out all of the capabilities and culture it needed to do that well, “This new thing showed up in the past three years,” Zach said, “that is the fastest-growing consumer of electricity ever: AI.”

It’s always possible for a startup to build a better mousetrap and use it to topple incumbents. My whole thesis is that it’s possible. Joseph Schumpeter called this the kind of competition “which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.”

Man, though, do times of great change help. Base made an early bet that electrification was such a time, that the growth of solar on one side and EVs on the other would demand batteries, and they were right. Then a second, even bigger, moment comes along, a faster and more violent shift in power, and Base finds itself in the right place at the right time and with the right capabilities to seize it.

This is how a small battery startup in Texas might, one day, become the largest energy company in the world, even as energy companies get larger.

While it’s a bit too early to share specifics, what Zach was willing to say was this: “So now, we’re taking this Capability Cannon and we’re pointing it at the infrastructure buildout, and we’re going to do it in two broad ways: one is bringing the power to the compute, and two is bringing the compute to the power.”

We’re going to take that massive capability machine and we’re going to point it at AI. And we’re going to orient the company kind of entirely around this thing that is going to totally transform our industry. As a result we should be able to build the largest energy technology company ever.

Because if we are the best energy technology company, and energy is going through this kind of once in a generation demand inflection as the result of AI, the company who does this should become the world’s largest energy company and perhaps the world’s largest company.

But we’ll see.

“The thing that feels most true if you were hanging out here and walking around or having lunch or dinner or sitting in our all-hands meetings is that it still feels so unbelievably early,” he concluded.

“We’re just firing up the stoves and buying the groceries. We haven’t even started cooking yet.”

If you’ve made it this far, I think you should seriously consider joining Base. If I were younger and smarter, I’d work at Base. Job’s not finished. Job’s just getting started.

Thanks to Gabe, Zach, Justin, Cole, Jared, Dana, Tim, Dino, Andy, Colby, Richa, Prithika, and the whole Base team for your time, insights, and for letting me help tell the Base story.

That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with a Weekly Dose.

Thanks for reading,

Packy

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome to the 205th Weekly Dose of Optimism!

Yesterday was my daughter Maya’s 4th birthday and we took the kids to the beach to spend time with family and celebrate, so I’m going short on the writeups.

That said… MASSIVE week. Lots to cover, with lots more in the Extras, including cancer-fighting psychedelics? and vertiports?

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Terraform Industries Converts Sunlight Into Hydrogen at $2/kg

I’m not going to do a better job explaining what Terraform pulled off than Casey did, as both CEO and the best hard tech writer on the internet. So read his.

The gist is that Terraform is getting closer to turning sunlight into hydrocarbons cheaply, which would give humanity the power to basically print refined oil, make all sorts of things that require fuel, not just batteries, cheaper and cleaner, and make one of the people I’d most like to see become a multibillionaire a multibillionaire.

(2) Billion Dollar Rounds for Base Power, Hadrian, and Valar

Base Power Company Raises $1B at $13B Post, Launches Base Core

Base is a not boring portfolio company and one of two companies (with Ramp) that I’ve written multiple Deep Dives on. To understand what I think makes the company so special, check out Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, and get ready for Chapter 3 next week.

Hadrian Raises $1.37B at $7.87B Post

“We can’t forget the world of atoms is 100x bigger than the world of bits,” CEO Chris Power told NYSE. Amen.

Hadrian is another not boring portfolio company and favorite, and a company on which I wrote a Deep Dive, way back in April 2022: Hadrian: Ex Machina Ad Lunam. Writing about Hadrian one of the reasons I got so interested in hard tech, and Hadrian’s leadership is one of the reasons so many companies have gotten into the space. Happy to see Chris with $1.37 billion more to build with.

Valar Atomics Raises $1B from Sequoia & $200B in Debt

Valar is, sadly, not a not boring capital portfolio company, but I’ve been a big fan of Isaiah’s since we met in 2023 and he came on Age of Miracles. The guy has been doubted the whole way - you can’t start a nuclear company without a PhD in nuclear physics! - and he continues to prove the doubters wrong.

Valar is going to pump out so many nuclear reactors.

(3) Oklo Goes Critical

Speaking of nuclear… I’m a simple man. A nuclear company goes critical for the first time, it makes the Dose.

Unlike a lot of the newfangled advanced reactor companies, Oklo had to fight through the old NRC regulatory regime to get here, submitting the first-ever custom combined license application for an advanced reactor in March 2020, for a ~1.5 MWe Aurora fast reactor at Idaho National Laboratory, before getting turned down for incompleteness, as Jake shared with us on Age of Miracles.

Congrats Jake and the Oklo team!

(4) ChatGPT Astra Solves 10 Big Math & CS Problems

You’ve likely seen this story, which has caused a lot of people to freak out and update their timelines and claim that we are in the Singularity and that all the charts are up from here, which… maybe! It is very cool that the models can do math problems. Much cooler than doing cybercrimes for sure.

The fun thing is, you might get to play with it yourself as early as next week, if you believe leo, one of the best AI leakers out there. This may be GPT-6 instead of another GPT-5.x.

So prepare yourself. The world will never again be the same after next week, once again.

(5) Tesla Picks Terafab Location

Tesla’s Terafab - “the largest chip manufacturing facility ever, with the goal of producing over 1 terawatt of compute per year” - in Grimes County, Texas. Tesla and SpaceX will invest $16.8 billion for the initial buildout, which is money it might have spent in California if former State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez hadn’t told Elon to go f*ck himself a few years back.

The coolest part of this is a detail that Josh Steinman caught in the video: it looks like they’re building a particle accelerator under Terafab to generate short wavelength photons for the lithography process.

When Extropic’s Beff Jezos (on whom more below), tweeted that it looked like Elon was going to build a free electron laser (FEL) based EUV machine, Elon replied, “FEL FTW.”

One synchotron could provide ultra-bright, clean EUV light to several scanners at once “with way more photons and less mess than today’s tin-plasma sources,” per Phil Beisel.

All of which means that Elon seems to be going after ASML and TSMC at the same time by building a particle accelerator.

Now that’s vertical integration.

Extra Doses: Science Breakthroughs, Ribbit Power Letter, Leopold Post-Mortem, Extropic, Jeff Dean, Atoms x Joby

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 204th Weekly Dose of Optimism!

The pace of all of this good stuff continues to blow my mind. We sent the Dose last Friday morning. It was jam-packed. “How can things get any better than this?” I asked myself.

And then the big tech companies came out in favor of open-weight models out of pure self-interest, which I wrote about in AI is Oil, Not God.

And then… the Sixers signed Lebron James!

I guess the real lesson, no matter which particular stories we cover each week, is to Trust the Process.

This week’s theme is physical AI - robots, robot brains, drones, and AVs, with a little robot regulation in the Extra Doses.

Let’s get to it.

(1) Enigma Comes Out of Stealth with $71M & 100 Robot Online Control

A company called Enigma is a little less enigmatic after emerging from stealth on Monday with a $71 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, plus its decision to open up more than 100 real AI-powered robots available online for anyone to control in real-time. You can go play with them right now, and tell them what to paint, how to lightsaber, to please defuse that bomb, or even which experiments to run.

The cute little robot arms you’re controlling are actual physical machines in facilities in Israel and California, taking your instructions through the browser.

Enigma is building robot-agnostic software, foundation models for robotics, and user interfaces that make robots easier to command across different hardware and tasks. Its bet is that studying how humans engage with robots produces both better interfaces and possibly a different kind of robotic brain.

The public robots.online experiment lets users try text, audio, demonstrations, and other interaction patterns while the company observes how people naturally attempt to get machines to do things. If the race in robotics is about accumulating real training data fast and cost-efficiently, this is a novel and orthogonal approach to that which doubles as a unique marketing stunt.

Part of the reason the company is able to do something so different is that its founders aren’t robotics people. Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv met in teenage hacking competitions and served together in Israel’s Unit 8200. Neither is a roboticist. That might be a good thing - in deep tech, people can often get stuck in whichever path they focused on for their PhD. No PhD, no stuck.

Will it work? Who knows, I’m not a robotics PhD. But it looks fun and different.

(2) Gemini Robotics 2 Brings Whole-Body Intelligence to Robots

BAH GOD THAT’S GOOGLE DEEPMIND’S MUSIC!

The frontier lab exploring the most frontiers, and the one that has done by far the most to advance the state of robots and world models, is back with Gemini Robotics 2, its next-generation robotics model family for controlling robots across whole-body movement, dexterous manipulation, embodied reasoning, and multi-robot collaboration.

The release includes three models: Gemini Robotics 2, a vision-language-action (VLA) model that maps vision and language into motor control; Gemini Robotics ER 2, an embodied reasoning (ER) model for planning longer tasks and coordinating robots; and Gemini Robotics On-Device 2, a local model that can adapt to new robot bodies with a few hours of data, typically fewer than 200 examples.

With these models, GDM is moving beyond tabletop manipulation into full-body control. The model can control Apptronik’s Apollo humanoid as it walks, crouches, reaches, and manipulates objects in cluttered environments. It can also operate different end effectors, including five-fingered hands and two-finger grippers, across tasks like tying a knot, sealing a ziplock bag, packing tools, and placing objects. DeepMind says the same model checkpoint controlled multiple embodiments, including Apollo variants and a Franka Duo setup.

Humanoid robots haven’t been solved yet. Travis Kalanick is still right, for now. GDM notes that movement speed still needs work, and the benchmarks show uneven performance on multi-finger dexterity. But it is a meaningful shift in the robotics stack, with one model family handling perception, planning, control, adaptation, safety, and collaboration across different bodies.

Ironically, after the team by the name got subsumed into Google DeepMind, robots are finally getting a … Google Brain.

(3) DoorDash Announces DoorDash Air Drones

So we have robots that anyone with a computer can control, and models that can control any robot that walks, and now DoorDash is making its own flying robots, aka drones.

DoorDash announced on Wednesday that DoorDash Labs earned FAA Part 135 air carrier certification and launched DoorDash Air, its in-house drone delivery program. Part 135 lets DoorDash operate as an air carrier, and the company says it is only the eighth drone operator to earn it.

In its tweet, DoorDash said, “Drones are just one delivery option DoorDash Labs built to scale delivery for merchants, alongside Dashers, Dot, and our autonomous delivery partners. Everything from the aircraft to the merchant handoff system have been designed to get your orders to you quickly and safely.”

The company’s strategy and bet is clear here: they believer that it already owns the most important part of the delivery ecosystem - the network of customers and merchants and the technology to coordinate it all - and that it can commoditize the ways that it gets things from one party to the other. Whatever is at the right spot on the cheap/fast Pareto Frontier, they can choose.

Someone smarter on drones than I am said they’re making their drones less as a standalone drone play and more as a template to build standards and encourage competition in the space. Like Nvidia and Microsoft signing the letter, DoorDash is trying to commoditize its complements.

It’s a super interesting bet, like Uber trying to make its own self-driving cars. It’s interesting to note that Uber is no longer doing that, but that it is providing a demand cannon to dedicated AV makers. In any case, I want drone delivery ASAP, and I’m glad DoorDash is making the push to speed the whole thing up.

And look, I think it’s cool, but the most-liked reply to DoorDash’ tweet is:

So we have a little ways to go before people get used to a burrito landing in their yard.

(4) Zoox Wins 1st US Approval for Robotaxis w/o Steering Wheels

Everyone is super excited about computer AI and I get it but I continue to think that the way cooler and way more underappreciated thing is what’s going to happen in the physical world, and in particular the way that we move people and things.

While DoorDash is flying our burritos overhead, Amazon’s Zoox will be zooking passengers around the streets sans human driver, sans, even, the potential for a human driver.

Per Reuters, “Zoox unit won ​U.S. approval on Wednesday for limited commercial deployment of its novel steering-wheel-free robotaxis, a first for the autonomous ride industry, ‌the U.S. auto safety agency said Thursday.”

This isn’t the first self-driving car, obviously. Waymo and Tesla are operational in a number of American markets, and they are incredibly cool. But it’s the first vehicle designed from the ground-up for a self-driving world that will be commercially available in the US, the Adam or Eve of future generations of vehicles that never even contemplated that a human might drive it.

In Zoox’s case, that means no driver’s seat or steering wheel, and “two rows of inward-facing ​seats” so passengers can spend their ride hanging out more easily. I would imagine that in the future, cars will be designed more and more like moving rooms. Hop in, work or enjoy a movie or get a spa treatment or whatever, and get out at your destination.

I can’t wait to see the horrendous things people do to and in these cars.

(5) OpenAI Gives 10k Researchers Free Access to Frontier Models

There’s almost nothing I’ve found as fascinating this year as Sam Altman / OpenAI’s comms transformation, and there’s nothing that’s captivated me over the past week as much as market incentives aligning almost everyone against the market leader, Anthropic, and towards things that are great for everyone else.

I tweeted about the former after Sam’s Invest Like the Best appearance, and wrote about the latter after the open letter here.

This latest announcement by OpenAI, and Sam’s commentary, combines both.

Basically, OpenAI’s new message since bringing the TBPN guys on (correlation or causation, who knows) has been that they’re building tools to empower people to do amazing things. Replacing people is weird. Trying to do everything themselves is weird. Thinking they can predict the future is weird. Just make tools, give them to people, and see what happens.

This is both a response to how little people want the AI labs to tell them what their future is going to be, and to Anthropic’s more opinionated views. I’m not passing a value judgment here - I believe that Dario fully believes what he’s saying, and that he’s doing a principled thing by speaking out about what he sees to be the risks to his product even if it hurts him or the company. I just happen to strongly disagree with that view (he’s a million times smarter than me and in the center of this, so grain of salt) and it also gives OpenAI a wide-open lane for counterpositioning.

The ILTB conversation was a great example of the comms side of this - Sam was very on-message about AI being a tool. I especially liked the point that it’s not even that out of line with historical trends in progress, that everyone always just wants to feel that they’re in a special role in the special part of history. The whole thing is designed to deflate fears that AI will replace us and to make Anthropic look weird.

But those are words, as is signing the open letter, and at the same time, OpenAI is likely lobbying behind the scenes for regulatory capture, too.

What’s amazed me most this week, and made me appreciate capitalism, is that even if you don’t trust Sam or OpenAI or big tech, companies are incentivized to do things that are good for the public, too.

In this case, counter-positioning against Anthropic trying to go more vertical in certain categories like biotech means that OpenAI is giving free frontier models to tens of thousands of researchers because “the best way to do this is for us to empower scientists, not to try to figure out everything ourselves.”

A jab, to be sure, but if the result is that more researchers get more powerful tools with which to benefit us all, jab away.

EXTRA DOSES: HT Conversation, FCC Covers Foreign Robots, Wall-Penetrating Camera, Pangram, No Science Breakthroughs This Week

(Extra 1) My Conversation with General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja

Throwing this one above the paywall as an extra little tweet. There is a ton going on in the private markets, a ton of it driven by AI, and there are very few firms deploying more capital in more different ways to AI in the private markets than General Catalyst. In conjunction with the release of his Q2 Letter, I sat down with GC’s CEO Hemant Taneja for a conversation on the markets and AI generally, how GC is approaching it specifically — including owning a healthcare system and making Anthropic its biggest position — and what the role of a venture capitalist is today.

This was a fun one because there are definitely some things we disagree on, and we went into them, but we are both fundamentally optimistic about technology.

You can also find the conversation on Spotify here.

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Happy Saturday! The past couple of days have been a technology business strategy nerd’s Super Bowl plus a Pro-Progress Person’s Super Bowl. Whenever you combine commoditizing complements with fighting the precautionary principle, I’m not going to be able to stop myself from writing something.

This is lightly edited and is just my quick thoughts, so I’m throwing a bunch of it behind the paywall for the real ones (not boring world subscribers).

Tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!

Let’s get to it.

Yesterday, Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang, among other leaders in tech, signed and shared a letter in support of open-weight models. Jensen even set up a twitter account to share it.

I loved it, and tweeted that this was Capitalism at its best.

From a business perspective, this is classic tech strategy stuff.

“Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.”

– Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V

All of the signatories either make open-weight models models or are complementary to them. Models run on Nvidia chips. They power Microsoft products. a16z and Y Combinator back companies that support, use, and compete with models. Palantir’s Alex Karp has been banging this drum because he wants to disintermediate models in the enterprise. Meta is more open source than the other similar American labs. Hugging Face is where open models live. Dell sells the machines they run on. CrowdStrike benefits if defenders have access to the same intelligence as attackers. Box, ServiceNow, Replit and Perplexity all get better when capable models become cheaper, more plentiful and easier to customize. Google, a new signatory, got off of its slow, bureaucratic ass and signed because Google will be fine either way, and maybe open source models will allow it to serve search ads more cheaply at some point. Mariana Minerals needs to give its comms person a raise, or send a big thank you to a16z.

The more competition there is at the model layer, the less Anthropic and OpenAI are able to run away with the frontier and build a duopoly, the more each of the signatories benefits.

Signing this letter is a selfish act that also happens to align with the interests of consumers and millions of businesses.

And that’s great! That’s capitalism, baby!

Their self-interests are aligned with our interests as consumers and businesses using these models and living in a world in which these models (and the leaders of the labs that create them) exist.

Not everyone agrees with me or the signatories. There are people who believe that it’s better to lock these models down because they might be dangerous.

I think it comes down to whether you think AI is more Oil or God, more “an economically useful commodity that can be scaled and refined to act as a multiplier on everything we do” or “supremely intelligent and powerful being that’s going to wake up and make humanity subservient (if we're lucky).”

I am strongly on the Oil side, as I wrote in The Goldilocks Zone in June 2024. My belief is unchanged since.

In fact, I think it’s super interesting that Satya and Jensen, both of whom are at the very bleeding edge of this technology, wrote in support of open-weight models. Surely, if they saw something that made them believe that these models were going to become conscious and take over the world, they wouldn’t be as openly pro-diffusion, even if they were short-term incentivized to be. I think they know that AI is Oil, too.

But aren’t they going to be dangerous?

My friend Matt Kaufman at Collaborative Fund, who is a lot smarter than me, emailed me after seeing my tweet with just that concern:

Just saw your tweet on the Jensen note and I’ve seen a few others supporting open-weight model proliferation. I’m on the fence here and if you have 2 min to type out a quick reply, I’d be very curious how you’re thinking about it.

I’d definitely prefer a more open ecosystem were it not for risks like models being fine-tuned to remove bio / cyber safeguards, and then resulting in harm. This seems trivially easy and perhaps isn’t a big issue now, but likely will be once 1) the open ones are much more powerful and 2) dangerous actors outside our tech bubble catch on to the capabilities here.

I think there are many domains where LLMs more favor offense rather than defense so this feels like a scary reality and I therefore sympathize with arguments that they should be tightly regulated like weapons.

I quickly banged out a response and I wanted to share it with you, even though it was dashed off in a few minutes and a little messy, because I’ve been meaning to write something and this is close. I’ll add some footnotes on things I’ve thought more about since hitting send.

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome to the 203rd Weekly Dose of Optimism.

At least here in New York City, the weather is 10/10, it’s a summer Friday, and you probably want to spend some time outside. So let’s cut this intro short and here’s an audio version (my AI voice, so please excuse the pronunciation of “a16z”) if you want to pop it in your ears and walk around.

Peep the Extra Doses for some wild science, an excellent essay on the Frontier, and an absolutely stellar 50-year land art project.

Let’s get to it.

(1) Travis is Back (with $1.7B from a16z)

In Dose #185 in March, we talked about Travis Kalanick’s emergence from the stealthiest stealth in startup history with his new/old company, Atoms, which plans to do everything.

Well Travis is back again.

On Wednesday, Atoms announced a $1.7 billion equity investment led by a16z, with Ben Horowitz joining the board, which is a very rare occurrence these days, to make up for past mistakes on both sides, per Travis:

I’ve known Marc and Ben for a long time, and we got oh-so-close to partnering up at Uber in 2011. I blame Marc, Ben blames himself but let’s just say it was on all of us and in 2017 Uber suffered the consequences of not having Marc on the board - iykyk.

Notably, Uber is also participating. Benchmark is not.

“On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business,” Kalanick wrote. In 2011, a16z came very close to leading Uber’s Series B before the deal fell apart and Menlo Ventures led the $32 million round instead. a16z, which is assembling the mid-2010 founder Infinity Stones with Kalanick and Adam Neumann, doesn’t make the same mistake twice.

Not that it really matters when it’s Travis Kalanick, but what is a16z investing in?

After leaving Uber heartbroken in 2017, Kalanick bought City Storage Systems, turned CloudKitchens into its best-known business, and spent eight years building in near-total silence. Employees couldn’t put the company on their LinkedIn, for example.

Meanwhile, the company hired thousands of people, expanded across 30 countries, bought and developed real estate, wrote restaurant software, built robots, and learned what it takes to operate complicated physical systems every day. As part of this round, those businesses have been merged into one Atoms equity structure.

Atoms looks less like a startup than a conglomerate: food, mining, and transport all under one corporate umbrella.

Kalanick’s unifying idea for Atoms (and Uber before it) is that physical industries can be built like computers. In Kalanick’s model, manufacturing is the CPU that transforms atoms, real estate is the storage layer, and transportation is the network that moves atoms from one place to another.

Food is the furthest along version of Kalanick’s computer today:

• CloudKitchens supplies delivery-first real estate.

• Otter is the restaurant OS.

• ProFood builds large-scale food infrastructure.

• Picnic handles office lunch delivery.

• Lab37 builds the robots.

Lab37’s Bowl Builder takes an order from a restaurant’s point-of-sale system, dispenses and weighs the ingredients, applies sauce, lids the bowl, labels it, puts it in a bag with utensils, and closes the bag. The machine can assemble up to 300 bowls per hour (200 if it has to bag them, which Kalanick said on TBPN is surprisingly hard), and Lab37 says it can reduce assembly labor by more than 40%. It is already operating in restaurants.

On the Mining side, Atoms acquired Pronto, the autonomous-haulage company founded by former Uber and Google autonomy pioneer Anthony Levandowski, and made it the technology engine of Atoms Mining.

Pronto retrofits existing Caterpillar, Komatsu, and other haul trucks instead of requiring a mine to buy an entirely new fleet. At Heidelberg Materials’ Lake Bridgeport quarry in Texas, a mixed fleet running Pronto’s system autonomously hauled more than two million tons of limestone in under eight months. Pronto now has an agreement to deploy on more than 100 trucks across over a dozen Heidelberg sites, is expanding to two more quarries this year, and signed a partnership with Hitachi Construction Machinery last week. In his latest TBPN interview, Kalanick says autonomy can improve mine productivity by 30% to 40%.

Transport, the third Atoms division, is still mostly hidden. Kalanick describes it as a wheelbase for robots. TBD.

In total, Atoms has assembled seven operating companies and shown credible proofs in food and mining. It is yet to be seen whether he can turn all of those pieces into one really big computer, if he ends up with a disconnected menagerie of good businesses, or if the whole thing crumbles under its own weight.

But this Travis Kalanick waging war on some of civilizations’s biggest challenges, all at once, with potentially the biggest chip on any billionaire’s shoulder and a desire to make Benchmark miss out on trillions of dollars in returns. If you want to bet against him, that’s on you. I’m happy cheering on The Return of the King.

(2) Claude (and Levent Alpöge) Disprove the Jacobian Conjecture

During the World Cup final on Sunday night, Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge posted the finale of one of algebraic geometry’s most famous open problems: ‘hello there the jacobian conjecture is false.’ He thanked his friend Akhil for asking about it and his other ‘close friend,’ Claude Fable 5, for working on it during the game.

The Jacobian conjecture goes like this. Take a polynomial map from n-dimensional complex space back to itself. If its Jacobian determinant (the local measure of how the map stretches and squishes space) is always the same nonzero number, the map is locally reversible everywhere. The conjecture, generalized by Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939, says that it must therefore be globally reversible, with a polynomial inverse.

Alpöge’s three-variable map has a Jacobian determinant that is always -2, satisfying the conjecture’s premise. But it sends three different points—(0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2)—to the exact same point, (-1/4, 0, 0). A map that turns three inputs into one output cannot have an inverse.

Look… I don’t know what I’m talking about here. Better to play with Simon Rezchikov’s visualization and explainer here if you’re really curious.

The bigger point is that these models, pointed by human mathematicians, are going on a conjecture disproving SPREE, to the point that Joscha Bach (jokingly?) proposed a moratorium on disproving until they’re good enough to prove.

That comment was in the replies to another disproval:

Adios Dinitz-Garg-Goemans! It looks like the Jacobian disproval was the 4-minute mile of disproving longstanding conjectures. Now everyone knows it’s possible, and they’re burning tokens on disproving their favorites. They’ll probably all fall soon (unless Anthropic keeps throttling (which I reproduced)).

At which point: 1) we’ll see how that translates into applications, and 2) neti neti.

(3) India’s First Private Rocket - Skyroot Vikram-1 - Reaches Orbit

Gopika Gopakumar and Nivedita Bhattacharjee for Reuters

Indian space startup Skyroot has reached orbit with Vikram-1, the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket.

My friend Christian Keil at a16z described Skyroot’s Vikram-1 like this: “Think of it as the Indian Electron. Roughly equivalent in size to the RocketLab rocket, also non-reusable.” I want to be clear that he described it that way. Apparently a lot of his “new Indian haters” didn’t like him comparing it to the “workhorse rocket for a $40 billion company (RocketLab).”

So just the facts: Vikram-1 is 22 meters tall and carries up to 350 kilograms. It has three solid stages and a liquid orbital-adjustment module powered by a 3D-printed engine. On its maiden flight, it delivered customer payloads to a 450-kilometer orbit. The whole trip took about fifteen minutes.

Skyroot’s speed is impressive. India opened its space sector to private companies in 2020. Six years later, a startup founded by former Indian Space Research Organization engineers (ISRO is India’s NASA) has joined the very small club of private companies that have built a rocket and put useful payloads into orbit.

India joins an even smaller club: countries whose private companies have achieved orbit. The other members are the United States, China, and kind of New Zealand. Rocket Lab is Kiwi by birth but was headquartered in the US by the time Electron first reached orbit from New Zealand in 2018. I say we count it.

Russia, amazingly, hasn’t joined the club, despite its decorated state space program. The Soviet Union put Sputnik into orbit in 1957, but seventy years later, no private Russian company has done the same. Communism fall hard.

Most of the world is happy for India, aside from a few MAGA anon accounts who totally would have launched a rocket to orbit if the Indians hadn’t taken the job.

Chak De, India! 🇮🇳

(4) Science: A New Golden Age

Director Michael Kratsios

On Tuesday, White House science advisor Michael Kratsios released Science: A New Golden Age, a 123-page attempt to do for American science in 2026 what Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier did in 1945.

Bush’s report established the federal government’s role in supporting basic research, helped lead to the creation of the National Science Foundation, and designed the system that has funded American science for the past eighty years.

Kratsios’ argument is that Bush’s system has worked!… so well that it calcified.

The federal government distributes roughly $200 billion in research and development funding every year, largely through a model in which scientists submit detailed project proposals to panels of other scientists, who attempt to reach consensus on which proposals deserve funding. It is pretty good at separating plausible science from nonsense. It is less good at distinguishing potentially revolutionary science from merely solid science, because potentially revolutionary science often looks like nonsense before it works. It is not good at Taking Weird Ideas Seriously.

The process has also become suffocatingly slow. Researchers spend nearly half of their time on administrative work. From 1991 through January 2025, the federal government added at least 270 new requirements to research grants. Some grants take as long as twenty months to move from submission to award, which the report helpfully points out is almost as long as it took Boeing to move the 747 from the drawing board into production.

Science: A New Golden Age proposes treating that $200 billion more like a portfolio, with different funding mechanisms designed for different kinds of scientific work.

Some researchers would receive long-horizon funding based on their talent and track record instead of being forced to invent a new project every three years. Howard Hughes Medical Institute provides its investigators with roughly $10 million over seven years, with minimal reporting requirements and tolerance for early failure. Research cited in the report found that those scientists produced high-impact work at nearly twice the rate of similarly accomplished federally funded peers. So why not do that at the Federal level?

Smaller, exploratory projects could receive “fast grants,” a la the Collisons during Covid, based on applications just a few pages long, with decisions made in under a month instead of six to nine (nice). Reviewers could receive “golden tickets” that allow each of them to champion one unconventional proposal that the rest of the committee dislikes. Agencies could use more prizes, advance market commitments, and ambitious challenges that pay for results instead of reimbursing inputs.

The report proposes regranting programs that give scientists close to a field small pools of money to distribute to promising people and projects before consensus forms around them. It calls for more DARPA-like program managers who can construct a thesis, recruit teams, and make a coordinated portfolio of bets. And it wants every major science agency to create a metascience unit that runs controlled experiments on the funding process itself, testing whether fast grants, golden tickets, partial lotteries, or other mechanisms actually produce better science. I love all of that.

If you have followed the Progress Studies world for the past few years, the report reads like a greatest-hits album. It cites Heidi Williams on rebuilding the NIH, Patrick Collison’s Fast Grants, Sam Rodriques and Adam Marblestone on Focused Research Organizations, Caleb Watney on X-Labs, Ben Reinhardt on unbundling the university, the Vesuvius Challenge, ARPA-E, HHMI, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

The report is not an executive order and does not immediately change how NIH or NSF awards grants. But it was released alongside an FY2028 R&D Priorities Memorandum directing federal agencies to incorporate the recommendations into their next budget proposals and submit implementation plans within ninety days.

There is a big risk here, too. The report argues that federal science funding needs to be more “politically accountable.” In the constitutional sense—that elected governments decide how public money is spent—that is obviously true. In practice, giving political appointees more discretion over scientific grants creates an obvious path from “fund high-risk work that consensus panels overlook” to “Eric Trump receives $17 billion to disprove string theory once and for all.”

A separate proposed OMB rule would give political appointees the power to block grants before they are issued and terminate existing awards that no longer align with administration priorities. That is not the same thing as golden tickets, fast grants, or empowered technical program managers, and it would be a mistake to smuggle political control in under the banner of metascience.

The best version of this plan would create more independent sources of scientific judgment, not replace one centralized consensus with another. It would combine traditional peer review, long-term bets on individual scientists, fast grants, prizes, lotteries, regranting, and DARPA-style portfolios, then publicly measure which approaches work for which kinds of problems. Program managers should have more freedom to make unusual bets, but their selections, conflicts, milestones, and long-term track records should be legible.

There is a ton of great stuff in here, stuff I would have fallen over if you’d told me was coming from the White House just a few years ago. Now, the challenge will be turning those ideas into practice for the benefit of all mankind.

(5) Anduril and Archer Bring the Thunder

A reader commented last week that they were unsubscribing because they thought I was celebrating war by highlighting autonomous boat startup Saronic’s Very Big Week.

To be very clear, I don’t celebrate war and I think very few people building for the DoW do either. It’s a dumb, blunt way to resolve conflicts that we couldn’t figure out how to resolve in a better way. Every life lost during a war is a tragedy.

But war is unfortunately a fact of life, and if that’s the case, I want America to have a strong enough arsenal to deter it, and ideally an autonomous enough one to put fewer human lives at risk. As Anduril put it, “The modern battlefield is a robotic kill zone.”

To that end, Anduril and Archer’s announcement of Thunder, “a Group 5 autonomous attack rotorcraft,” is a welcome one. The idea is that these are wingmen for human-flown Apache helicopters, pushing out ahead to scout, eliminate threats, and take fire otherwise intended for the people if necessary.

In the anime launch video (see: The Great Differentiation), Anduril shows the autonomous Thunder flying ahead and wiping out drones and missiles that threatened the human pilots’ helicopters. Turns out, they’re father and son, and they’re able to reunite after the mission that might otherwise have killed them.

It’s a bit on the nose, but I think that points to the way that Anduril views the program, as a way to put autonomous mass in harms way instead of humans.

Hopefully, one day, war will just be autonomous machines fighting autonomous machines, wasting both sides’ money but keeping the people out of it until it becomes too much of a simulacrum and we just call the whole thing off. This is another small step in that direction.

In nearer-term optimistic news, Archer is introducing the same platform for commercial use as Archer Halo.

It will focus on “uncrewed commercial missions across search & rescue, logistics, offshore energy, humanitarian & medical cargo, maritime operations and more.”

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs (including a potential aging breakthrough in mice, Doudna CRISPR work, and a pancreatic cancer vaccine), Chris Paik on the Frontier, Star Axis

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Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Friday and welcome to our 202nd Weekly Dose of Optimism!

As always, a big week here at the Dose. This week, we had a lot of good news come in pairs: two Saronic stories, two Austin stories, two robotics stories, and two open-weight model stories. So I cheated and combined them to squeeze a little extra optimism into your Dose.

Let’s get to it.

Today’s Weekly Dose is brought to you by… Not Boring

At the bottom of this and every Weekly Dose, we share some extra goodies, including Science Breakthroughs from Ulkar Aghayeva, who I first found through her work with collaborators ranking 2025’s papers and breakthroughs for their potential impact. Now, you get those glimpses into the future as they happen each week.

That’s one of many goodies we’re bringing to paid not boring subscribers, from the full version of Riding the Leopard to co-written essays with founders on the cutting edge of robotics, AI, manufacturing, and more. We’ll keep bringing you more, and I hope you’ll join us.

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(1) Saronic’s Very Big Week

We last covered Saronic, the Austin-based autonomous shipbuilding startup, in Dose #197, when its Corsair drone boats rescued a downed Apache crew near the Strait of Hormuz. A little over a month later, the company has had an even more absurd week.

On Monday, three of its 24-foot Corsair autonomous boats were used in combat (not rescue) for the first time, striking an Iranian submarine and ship-maintenance facility at Bandar Abbas. The military has not publicly assessed the damage. A system built by a four-year-old startup went from prototype to a live combat mission, a month after another Corsair performed the first known rescue of downed pilots by an autonomous boat. Seems to be working.

Then yesterday, Saronic announced that it had chosen Brownsville, Texas, for Port Alpha, a more than $3 billion greenfield shipyard. The first phase will cover 835 acres, with room to expand to nearly 4,400. Construction is supposed to begin this year, operations in 2028, and the company expects to create as many as 10,000 direct jobs over the next decade.

The initial yard will be able to build ships up to 850 feet long. Fully built out, Saronic says it could reach roughly 2 million gross tons of annual shipbuilding capacity. The plan is to build crewed and uncrewed military ships, container ships, roll-on/roll-off vessels, tankers, and icebreakers, using the same autonomy and advanced-manufacturing stack as the drone boats.

Proving that a startup can build autonomous boats that are useful in combat is huge, but proving that they can build a great American shipyard again might be even bigger.

If you’ve been reading the Dose for a while, you might be thinking … wait, wasn’t that shipyard supposed to be a part of California Forever? Good memory. It was. California fumbled it, because local and state government failed to pass legislation around a proposed permitting framework in time.

“We hope this missed opportunity serves as a wake-up call that inaction and political gridlock have real costs for all Californians,” the California Forever-led labor and business coalition that pushed for the legislation wrote. Until then, in the words of Tim Riggins, it’s Texas Forever.

(2) Big Week for Austin, Actually: Base Launches in Austin + TerraFirma

Speaking of Austin companies doing big things… IT’S COMING HOME.

No, not the World Cup. Jude Bellingham shit-talked Messi, so Messi decided to end England’s run in the semis.

I’m talking about Base Power Company, which after more than two years operating out of Austin, TX is finally operating in Austin, TX.

Base is beginning to serve homeowners inside Austin Energy territory as part of a 40-megawatt residential battery agreement with the city-owned utility. Base will install and maintain the batteries. Austin Energy will be able to dispatch the fleet when demand and wholesale power prices spike. Homeowners get whole-home backup when the grid goes down. Win-Win-Win.

In the very same week, another Austin company, TerraFirma, which is “Building giant robots to build a brighter future,” announced a $100M Kleiner Perkins-led Series A to make construction robots. In the SpaceX-vets’ words, “We’re a new type of company, a robotic construction company that builds the full technology stack needed to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in one of the world’s oldest, largest, most important, but least efficient industries.”

It seems like the TerraFirma guys also got every great vertical integrator co-founder/exec on the cap table, including Anduril’s Matt Grimm, Hadrian’s Chris Power, and their Austin neighbor, Base’s Justin Lopas.

It’s time to build. Hook ‘em. Texas Forever.

(3) Don’t Forget About the Humanoids: Walden and Sunday

Regular-sized robots can raise money, too, and it seems like they can do more than that.

On Wednesday, Walden Robotics came out of stealth with $300 million in seed funding at a $1.1 billion valuation co-led by Deviation Capital and a trio of Toyota investors (Toyota Motor Corp, Toyota Invention Partners, and Toyota Ventures). Its robots are already doing useful work in a North American Toyota factory, too.

The Toyota connection makes sense, because Walden spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January. CEO Russ Tedrake, an MIT professor who led TRI’s robotics and machine learning team for nearly a decade, brought over many of the people behind Diffusion Policy, Large Behavior Models, OpenVLA, and the Drake robotics simulator. By February, the new company had robots in production - on the factory floor in two months!

The robots are built as a full stack: hardware, software, models, and an application layer for deploying them into real workflows, a la Standard Bots. They learn tasks through demonstrations, then improve through practice, starting with the annoying jobs in manufacturing and logistics that have remained hard to automate because they change too often or require a little too much judgment for traditional fixed automation.

Most of us don’t live in factories, though, we live in homes. And there seems to be good news for us home-dwellers, too.

Yesterday, Sunday Robotics introduced ACT-2 Preview, its new robotics model for Memo, the company’s home robot. Sunday says ACT-2 can learn a new behavior from a single fine-tuning example, generalize it zero-shot to real homes it has never seen, and perform with a 99% success rate.

It’s still a preview, but they got ahead of the slick demo criticism by introducing something called Solves. “Progress in robotics is difficult to measure because demos vary by setup. Demo ≠ Solved,” CEO Tony Zhao tweeted. “A Solve declares two boundaries: scope and adaptation cost. Without both, 99% has no context.”

They found a “general recipe for Solves: scale pretraining, then hill-climb with minimal in-house data. For the first time, one fine-tuning example can teach a new behavior that generalizes.”

Blah blah blah that’s a lot of robot words. What can it actually do for me?

And now for your Moment of Zen (3 hours of Memo folding laundry)…

(4) FDA Approves New Merck Pill to Slash Cholesterol Levels

Sorry the picture for this one isn’t that exciting. Merck doesn’t do fancy pictures for their FDA-approval announcements. What they do do is make drugs that save lives, which, if you have to choose, is what you want.

Yesterday, the FDA approved Merck’s Lipfendra, the first oral PCSK9 inhibitor. It’s a once-daily pill that lowers LDL cholesterol about as much as the injectable PCSK9 drugs: a placebo-adjusted 56% in a broad hypercholesterolemia trial and 59% in patients with the inherited form.

It’s a bad time to be LDL Cholesterol. In Dose #195, we talked about Eli Lily’s new PCSK9-targeting gene therapy. Which means it’s a good time to be a heart. LDL cholesterol is one of the leading causes of heart attacks. PCSK9 is a protein that destroys LDL receptors on liver cells. If you can block it, more receptors survive to pull bad cholesterol out of the blood.

This isn’t the first PCSK9-targeting drug. There’s the upcoming gene therapy, and there are injected antibodies like Repatha and Praluent that do this very well. They are also injections, which turns out to be a meaningful barrier when you are asking millions of people to take something for years.

Luckily, the other thing they do uniquely ahead of the curve is macrocyclic peptides. They signed a $220M biobucks deal with not boring capital portfolio company Unnatural Products in 2024 to work on macrocyclic peptide, which it describes as “the next wave of drug discovery.”

What macrocyclic peptides allow you to do is to take larger molecules that normally require injections (they generally get chewed up in the gut) and deliver them orally. Lipfendra is a macrocyclic peptide, folded into a shape that helps it make the journey from mouth to target intact.

This isn’t a new capability, but it’s a new delivery mechanism: heart attacks can now be attacked back with antibody-like potency in a $10.50 daily pill. Eat your heart out.

(5) Kimi and Thinky Open Up the Frontier

Thinking Machines and Moonshot AI

It feels like just weeks ago that the US Government shut down Anthropic’s Fable 5 for being too dangerous while the USMNT squashed its opponent in a World Cup Match. Oh how things change.

In bad news for people who think that AI models are super super dangerous and might even kill us all on behalf of their owners like the Genie in Aladdin when Jafar has the lamp, and good news for normal people, a Chinese open source model has basically caught up to Fable 5 (and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol).

Yesterday, Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, the first open model in the 3-trillion-parameter class. K3 has 2.8 trillion total parameters, a one-million-token context window, and native vision. It is live now in Kimi’s apps and API, with the full weights scheduled for release by July 27th.

The big model is sparse, activating just 16 of 896 experts at a time. Moonshot says its new Kimi Delta Attention makes decoding up to 6.3x faster in million-token contexts, while a second architectural change called Attention Residuals delivers roughly 25% higher training efficiency at less than 2% additional cost. Taken together with the larger mixture of experts and new training recipes, the company claims about a 2.5x improvement in scaling efficiency over Kimi K2.

Moonshot says K3 still trails Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol overall. But on its published evaluations, it is in the same band and wins individual agentic and coding tests: 91.2 on BrowseComp versus Fable’s 88.0 and GPT-5.6 Sol’s 90.4, for example, and 88.3 on Terminal Bench 2.1 versus Fable and Opus 4.8 at 84.6. Those are company-run results and will need independent replication, but it looks like an open model is competing with the big boys.

This comes on the heels of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab releasing its first model, Inkling, on Wednesday, with the weights available to download under an Apache 2.0 license. Inkling is a 975-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 41 billion active at a time. It accepts text, images, and audio, has a context window up to one million tokens, and can be fine-tuned through Thinking Machines’ Tinker platform.

Inkling is not the best model in the world, either, by Thinking Machines’ own admission. Its bet is that it is a strong, broad model that other people can turn into the best model for one particular thing.

To make the point, the team had Inkling write and run its own fine-tuning job, evaluate the new weights, and switch itself over to a version that never uses the letter “e.” Then, they opened it up to everyone, in the hopes that someone has an even better idea than that, which is how free markets work.

Open models competing is great because competition is great, because it means that more value will accrue to the many companies that make up the economy versus a handful of closed labs, because it lessens the odds that Dario is in charge of the world, and because open models, theoretically, compound on each other.

This seems to be happening here. Inkling’s architecture draws on China’s DeepSeek-V3, and Thinking Machines used data generated by Moonshot’s Kimi K2.5 during post-training.

Open-weight is not the same thing as fully open source. Neither lab is handing over every piece of training data and code, and almost nobody is going to run a multi-trillion-parameter model on a gaming PC. But weights are the valuable part if you want to inspect a model, customize it, improve it, or build on it permissionlessly.

Plus, it’ll give Ramp’s new AI Token Spend Management tool more ammo in the fight against bad ROT.

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Space Tissues, Senra

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Thursday!

Just about three years ago, I was having coffee with another VC, someone whose portfolio I really like, and I asked him which one he was most excited about. He asked, “Do you know what wire harnesses are?” and I said something like “like bundles of wires?” and he said “kinda” and then told me about Jordan Black and Senra Systems.

Ever since then, it’s been a company that I’ve wanted to understand better, and as robotics has begun to take off and reindustrialization is underway and aerospace and defense are booming and the future looks more and more electric, it’s become even more relevant. I keep hearing about it from people I respect, too.

The reason wire harnesses are interesting, aside from the fact that they’re in everything electronic, from toys to Jeeps to satellites to F-35s, is that it’s devilishly hard to automate their manufacture. They’re high-mix, low volume, 3D, bendy, and floppy, among other tricky attributes. They’re often the component holding up the production of our most advanced machines, because you need them to turn everything else on, and once they’re in, a faulty harness can precipitate recalls or worse.

And because skilled assembly, and especially skilled assembly of wire harnesses, is one of the most challenging parts of the manufacturing process to automate, figuring out how to help workers build more of them, faster and more reliably, even as many of the skilled workers who know how to make them retire, may set the pace of American manufacturing.

Plus, I’m a sucker for giving humans superpowers instead of replacing them, and Jordan argues that “the more the easy stuff gets automated, the more valuable skilled humans will become.”

When Alexa Liautaud at GC introduced me to Jordan, I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn everything I can about wire harnesses and skilled assembly and what the future of manufacturing in America looks like from him, Senra’s Head of Strategic Finance Greg Brainard, and one of their investors, Sam Rohr at JAWS. And of course, to write something with them to share what I learned with you.

So to celebrate Senra’s $65M Series B from Lowercarbon & Interlagos with Sequoia, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Dylan Field, CIV, 8VC, The Friedkin Group, JAWS, Sozo Ventures, and Alumni Ventures…

Let’s get to it.

Senra Systems: Harnessing Human Skill

A Co-Written Essay with Senra Systems CEO Jordan Black

One of the most notable things about Senra Systems is that so many people who don’t have to work another day in their lives are choosing to work there. What makes that even stranger, to the casual observer, is what they’re choosing to work on: wire harnesses.

Some of you will know what a wire harness is. It is the nervous system of a machine, hundreds of wires, bundled and crimped by hand, routing power and signal to every component that needs to turn on in any modern electrical system, from a satellite to a coffee maker to your car. But many of you won’t, which is fine, and even many of those of you who do won’t understand what makes them important or challenging, and an even smaller number of you will understand why so many people who have made tens of millions of dollars, or more, building reusable rockets in order to make life multiplanetary have decided to dedicate their next chapter to building them instead of angel investing from a beach.

One difference between them and the rest of us is that they have been bottlenecked by wire harnesses. They’ve done the ridiculously hard work of, say, building chopsticks that can catch a Statue of Liberty-sized rocket as it stumbles back to Earth, only to have to wait for the wires to turn the whole thing on. They’ve undoubtedly attempted to just do it themselves, because that’s their whole thing, only to find out firsthand what makes it so tricky to do well.

So when two of their own went and started a wire harness company, they’d seen enough to look a little more, and the more they peeled, the more they liked.

In the US alone, annual spend on wire harnessing for just aerospace and defense is something like $25-50 billion. Maybe the money itself isn’t that important anymore, but it says that the problem is big. It’s also getting bigger. This is one of those classic stories of an industry whose demand is ripping just as the old skilled hands who were trained during America’s manufacturing golden age are aging out. So the problem is big, and it’s urgent. And the answer is obvious, on the surface: automate!

And that’s where Senra really gets ya, if you’re the kind of person who likes solving really hard problems, because automating skilled assembly is probably the hardest thing you can do in manufacturing, especially when you’re talking something that’s high mix, low volume, flexible, and very complex, like aerospace and defense wire harnessing.

If you view America’s ability to manufacture as one big engineering challenge, and your goal, ultimately, is to automate as much of it as you can, you arrive pretty quickly at skilled assembly, manufacturing work that requires trained human judgment and dexterity instead of simple repetitive motion, as the place the machine gets stuck. Within skilled assembly, wire harnesses are perhaps the trickiest to get right, or at least the trickiest that we need a lot of, the trickiest without which nothing else turns on. So if you’ve been trained to heatseek bottlenecks at the system level and throw everything you’ve got at them until they’re knocked out and you can move on to the next one, then wire harnessing is the logical place to start.

And it turns out you can’t automate it, yet. In Elon’s five-step design algorithm - make requirements less dumb, delete the part or process, simplify or optimize the design, accelerate cycle time, automate - automation comes last. You can’t automate until you can configure.

What you need to do with skilled assembly generally and wire harnessing in particular, and what Senra is doing, is to make everything around the skilled assembler better, so that the skilled assembler can deliver wire harnesses at 4x the speed of traditional vendors while maintaining exceptional quality and accuracy.

Senra gives skilled workers superpowers and trains up tons of them so that they can make wire harnesses faster and with fewer defects so that everyone else can make whatever it is that they make faster and cheaper so that America might be able to manufacture competitively again.

We’d like to tell you a little bit about how, and why.

Why, er, harnesses?

Wiring harnesses are like referees - most people only notice them when they mess up.

President Kennedy promised that America would go to the Moon and that we would be first, not “first but, first and, first if, but first period.” The Apollo Program was the vehicle through which this promise would be made real over eleven years, through the toil of 400,000 engineers and workers, and roughly $25 billion (nearly $200 billion in today’s dollars) of concentrated national will directed at a single goal.

What we remember is that America posthumously proved him right, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon as Michael Collins orbited above. What we forget is that the very first Apollo mission, Apollo 1, ended in tragedy.

In January 1967, three NASA astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into the Apollo 1 command module for what was supposed to be a routine pre-launch dress rehearsal on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral.

As the three men sat in the oxygen-rich capsule, behind a hatch that was designed to open inwards in a process that took 90 seconds, a fire broke out. It killed them within a minute. Investigators later determined the fire was sparked by a wiring fault. The review board cited poor workmanship and vulnerable wiring design as underlying causes. It was a bad wire harness that took the lives of those three astronauts.

That was a long time ago. Surely we’ve gotten better at bundling a bunch of wires together since?

On June 9th, Jeep recalled more than 1 million Wranglers and Gladiators, warning that they may catch on fire and advising owners to park them outside and away from other vehicles or structures.

The issue, as you might have guessed, was a wiring harness, specifically an electrical connection issue in the power-steering-pump wiring harness, something like this:

Drivers are advised to “inspect and, if necessary, repair or replace the wiring harness.”

Wiring harnesses can kill people when done wrong, but even in business-as-usual situations, they can kill production timelines.

Few people in the world know this better than Jordan Black.

Since working as a host at a burger restaurant at 16, Jordan has mixed service and engineering. He’s manned pizza joints, barbacked, bounced, and bartended, and even worked as a librarian. In each, he was obsessed with making customers happy and in each, he learned how to work with people. He loved solving hard physical problems, too. Back in his freshman year of college, high school, Jordan began working as a technician fixing roller coasters at the Santa Monica Pier. He parlayed that experience into internships at Enerpac and then The Ford Motor Company, which is where he expected to return after graduating from University of Wisconsin-Madison until SpaceX called and hired him as an Avionics Manufacturing Development Engineer. What that meant in practice was a lot of wire harnesses, wire harnesses for Starship and Dragon Spacesuits and Radio Frequency Cables and more.

Over the next five years at SpaceX, Jordan worked his way into the center of advanced hardware manufacturing, eventually running an Avionics R&D team with visibility into nearly every component that went into rockets and satellites. He saw firsthand how SpaceX would bring capital-intensive manufacturing capabilities in-house to increase iteration speed. He was often the one doing it. But highly skilled assembly work, the craftsmanship layer underlying nearly every advanced hardware system, remained dependent on fragmented suppliers operating with outdated systems and limited scalability, even at SpaceX.

A wire harness is in everything, nothing turns on without them, and everybody hates them, for two reasons.

One, to design it, it’s all in Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides.

Two, to manufacture it, it’s all done by hand, arts and crafts style.

“It’s a really screwed up supply chain from start to finish.”

Because the wire harness supply chain is screwed up, everything else is. The wire harness is one of the last designed but first needed parts of any modern aerospace and defense system. You can’t know where your wire harnessing should go in a missile until you’ve figured out how you’re going to build the entire missile. You don’t know how long the missile is going to be, where the sensors are going to go, what needs to connect to what, where, until you’ve actually figured all of that out. Then and only then can you design the wire harnessing that connects it all. But then you have to design and produce custom wire harnessing as quickly as possible, because you won’t be able to turn the thing on in order to demonstrate it to the customer until you have it.

The wire harness is kind of like the fartlek of manufacturing; when it’s your turn, you have to sprint from the back of the back to the front as fast as you can. “You can get as far ahead on everything else as possible,” Jordan puts it, “but you can’t make a grilled cheese sandwich without the cheese.” (Wire harnesses are both cheese and fartlek here, for those keeping metaphor score at home.)

Sourcing high-quality harnesses is harder than you’d expect, too, because it sounds so simple. “Just give me a cable that plugs this thing into this thing.” But some of these designs end up being really complex - you need a cable that has 45 different offshoots, and they all need to be built to spec, so they’re highly custom products.

And for customers like SpaceX they’re really high mix, which makes them almost impossible to automate. One SpaceX wire harness will look totally different from this other SpaceX wire harness, and they might need five of this one kind but 100 of another kind, and so maybe it’s not surprising when you read it, but it was surprising to Jordan when he just needed wire harnesses pronto, that smaller wire harness shops would quote four to six month lead times on new programs.

Jordan learned this the hard way, going around to suppliers when he needed harnesses to make whatever he was working on work, and they’d come back with “Oh, cool, we can do it in four months,” but he’d need it way faster than that, because think about it; as an engineer, whether you’re building rockets or stringing a Christmas tree with lights, the first thing you actually need to do is to make sure that when you plug it in, the thing turns on.

A longstanding theme of Not Boring is that if a company is a bad customer or supplier, they might make a very good competitor.

So Jordan decided to leave SpaceX and start a wire harnessing company, teaming up with Ben Shanahan, a neuroscientist turned SpaceX software engineer who worked on WarpDrive, the company’s ERP / manufacturing execution system (MES), the software that runs the factory that is the product.

In March 2023, they founded Senra Systems.

Senra’s Strategy

In its early years, Senra has focused primarily on manufacturing wire harnesses for aerospace and defense (A&D) customers.

A&D is the highest-margin segment, the most fragmented slice of the market, and it’s ITAR-protected, meaning that customers are effectively required to source American. It is also the most challenging part of the market, and the least amenable to automation in the near-term, given the high mix and low volume compared to, say, a Toyota Camry. It is where America’s skilled workforce crunch is felt most acutely, because the work can neither be automated nor outsourced.

Put simply, the American wire harness workforce is on the decline while the demand for wire harnesses for A&D is taking off. There are fewer technicians to make more harnesses.

There is no government statistical category for “wire harness technician,” but the closest public workforce category - electrical, electronic, and electromechanical assemblers - has a median age of 47.2. More than a quarter of the workforce is 55 or older, approaching retirement age, while only 8% is under 25, stepping in to backfill the roles. Even if there were more people excited about taking the roles you still wouldn’t be able to scale up in time because that training period takes 18 months. In a typical shop, you’ll have a year and a month apprenticeship, and it’s like, “There’s this guy Doug, he’s been building Boeing harnesses for 25 years. Just go follow him around and see if you can learn something.” The industry isn’t training replacements at anything close to the rate at which it is losing experienced hands. The IPC, the electronics manufacturing trade association, calls the shortage of adequately skilled workers “chronic.”

Even if demand were flat, that would be a problem. Demand, however, is not flat. America sent 3,708 objects into space in 2025, up from 2,261 in 2024, and those numbers should look tiny in a decade.

Meanwhile, the fiscal year 2026 national defense budget request crossed $1 trillion for the first time, including $153.3 billion for procurement and $142 billion for research & development. And the systems that the DoW will be purchasing and developing will require a lot of wire harnesses. As we wrote in Electromagnetism Secretly Runs the World, “Electronics comprise 35% of the cost of the F35 Lightning II, more than the cost of the engine itself, and 15% of the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine, which costs $20 million. By the 2030s, when it’s projected that defense contractors will be building the F-47, they’ll be spending over 40% of the $300 million airframe on electronics.” The more electronic our vehicles and weapons go, the more wire harnesses they’ll need.

The government knows its suppliers are not prepared. In a 2024 review of the commercial aviation supply chain, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that 15 of the 17 manufacturers it interviewed had struggled to hire enough skilled workers to meet demand. Nine of 15 suppliers said they had also struggled to fill orders as demand rebounded. There’s no reason to believe this is any better for the Defense sides of these Aerospace businesses.

The roughly 800 American harness shops that make up the supply base are largely small, owner-operated businesses. Their ability to grow is constrained by the amount of veterans they have to train apprentices, but the veterans are retiring, training takes years, they’re swamped with the growing demand, and apprentices aren’t signing up anyway. Worse, when they retire, their knowledge is gone with them, because they aren’t spending precious time writing it down.

So as much as Senra is manufacturing wire harnesses, its more important role may be “manufacturing” wire harness technicians to make all of the wire harnesses and increasingly electronic world needs.

This supply/demand imbalance also creates the market foothold for Senra. Because declining supply is buckling under growing demand, A&D is also where there is the most room for improvement: lead times on a new program are 4-6 months, only 25-50% of wire harnesses pass on the first try (first-pass yield), and quality is so inconsistent that many customers have to employ in-house technicians whose job it is to fix the wiring they receive from their wiring suppliers.

All of those characteristics make wire harnessing for A&D particularly amenable to Senra’s approach, which is to get configuration right long before worrying about automation.

Automation can be thought of as replacing humans with machines. Configuration is creating a system with any combination of humans, machines, software, materials, and processes to turn a design into a product. It is the layer above automation, and counts automation as one of its tools.

You can’t automate until you can configure, and long before getting to automation, there’s a lot that you can do to improve wire harness manufacturing by redesigning the system.

In a traditional shop, practically everything runs on tribal knowledge locked in veterans’ heads. This is the same challenge that Hadrian identified in precision machine factories; to fix the problem, it’s “turning tribal knowledge into scalable software and processes.” It also rhymes with what Poetic does; instead of just magically throwing AI at a problem, “We need people to get out there into Minnesota to be like, what the hell do you guys do all day?”

Relying on veterans’ head-knowledge works decently well as long as it’s the veterans doing the work, but people-as-operating-system doesn’t scale. Take training. In a typical shop, you’ll have an 18-month apprenticeship, and it’s like, “There’s this guy Doug, he’s been building Boeing harnesses for 25 years. Just go follow him around and see if you can learn something.” And that’s really it. There’s no trade school for skilled assembly work.

Jordan compares wire harnessing today to a Cheesecake Factory recipe where skilled workers can just look at the menu and kind of figure out how to make everything that’s on there. The hope is that other metaphorical chefs will watch them do that enough that they, too, can look at the menu and reverse engineer the recipe.

That doesn’t work that well now, let alone when the skilled vets retire, or when demand continues to grow and manufacturers need to bring on a lot more people to meet it.

So you have this situation where the incumbents actually do a pretty poor job…

… that is not fully automatable yet, but where there is an absolute ton of low-hanging fruit for a player with scale ambitions to make the investments into getting the configuration right.

Which, at its simplest, is what Senra does.

You know what, I’m just going to hand the mic to Jordan for the rest of this piece to explain.

Standardize → Optimize → Automate

The way we see it, you need to standardize, then optimize, then automate, in that order.

What Senra is doing is taking that Cheesecake Factory menu item, then reverse engineering, in software, what the recipe is, then training cooks over a few weeks to be able to cook to that recipe, reliably. That’s standardization.

To end the food metaphor, what Senra does today is take a wire harness design and turn it into work instructions, which break down the component parts of building a wire harness and serve it up on a silver platter to a technician.

Get everything as step-by-step as possible. This is how you cut the wire for this specific harness, this is how you strip it, this is how far back you strip the rubber that encloses the metal, this is how you connect it to this connector, and this is how you lay everything out on the form board. Check check check check check, until you have a working wire harness.

Today, Senra takes in a wire harness drawing from a customer, and then have a team of engineers look at the drawing and convert it to work instructions. Right now, the process is like 20% automated, which is fine, because even having work instructions is a step-up. Over time, it can use those human-crafted work instructions to train models that can get to somewhere like 90% of the way from drawing to work instructions, with an engineer doing the final check-off, which would speed up the process and increase accuracy. This is optimization.

Even before then, though, there’s a lot that you can do with really good work instructions, each of which feeds on the others.

To start, you can train people up much more quickly and effectively. The question is how you can grab someone who has never seen a wire harness, certify them through Senra’s apprentice program in a month instead of a year or two, and get them to work meeting customer demand. The key is that because workers follow a recipe for each harness, they don’t need to keep all that tacit knowledge in their head.

Senra hires people who have never touched a wire harness, and after the four-week program, they’re building harnesses on the production floor for SpaceX and Anduril.

Those same explicit steps mean we know which parts are needed where when, so we can optimize our supply chain and inventory. It would surprise you how big a source of error just giving technicians the wrong components is. With work instructions in software, we can make sure that the instructions on how to kit components for each job, including what goes in the kit, are accurate. All of that can tie back to our inventory, to purchase orders. Then our inventory tracking system goes from being a kind of crazy startup system to fully optimized and ready to scale.

If inventory runs smoothly, then it becomes even easier to get someone trained up and productive more quickly, because they have everything they need at their fingertips. The machine runs more smoothly through a bunch of mutually reinforcing improvements.

We are basically creating a digital twin of the manufacturing process, capturing and digitizing data at every point so that we can optimize each and every part. Then we build custom machines that integrate with our software.

For something like cutting and stripping a wire, since our software knows what’s in each kit and what it’s being used for, our technician can scan a barcode from the machine and input the wire, and the machines cut and strip exactly to the specification we need.

The line between optimization and automation gets a little blurry here.

Something like cutting and stripping is relatively easy to build a machine for; that machine is a tool for the human technician, who drives the process.

Crimping – taking a piece of metal, putting a wire in it, and squeezing down with a tool - we can make a machine for that next. Something like connector insertion is such a high-dexterity operation that we probably won’t automate it for a very long time.

Our intent is to train our technicians, optimize everything around them, give them custom machines, give them better tools, and remove any of the non-value-add work from their plates.

We think we can make our technicians 3x more productive than industry average simply by optimizing everything else around them. We care a lot more about that than we do about full lights-out automation.

Meanwhile, again because we can track the process step-by-step, we embed quality control throughout the process, so we catch things when they go wrong. Inspection during the process is something we’ve already begun to automate, and thanks to a combination of everything we just described and that automated inspection, we’re at a 99% first-pass yield, versus 75% for our competitors.

And we’re tracking and collecting data at every part in the process, from inventory to quality control, in our Amp platform, which is like our operating system, Senra’s version of SpaceX’s WarpDrive. It spans the full thread: Design (ITAR-compliant cloud harness design tool) → Quoting & BOM (AI reads messy aerospace RFQs) → Procurement & Warehousing (kitting) → Manufacturing Planning (work-instruction generation) → Build (a 100% digital thread for every crimp, connection, and serial) → Quality (real-time enforcement + traceability).

The operating system, training environment, data infrastructure, and years’ worth of data give our workers superpowers, and the results have been strong. We are higher-quality, higher-reliability, and faster-turnaround than the incumbents. We can deliver in four weeks something better than they’d be able to turn around in four months. And we can bid on jobs at a 20% margin to win the business with the comfort that we’ll be able to optimize the process to well north of 50% over the life of the contract. And of course, the more we do, the more we learn, the faster we optimize, and the better we get.

In the near-term, our focus is on scaling wire harness capacity while improving efficiency and maintaining quality in order to meet the tremendous demand that is currently underserved.

For a sense of scale, individual customers of ours are doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in wire harnesses, and they are impatient for us to expand capacity to take on more of that business. Our customers don’t like having to employ people to fix their wire harness suppliers’ mistakes, nor do they like waiting four months to turn on their new product.

If we can continue to execute, we can continue to grow our share of the market even as the market expands, and we hope that by offering a better product, faster, to our customers, we’ll be able to speed up American manufacturing on the whole. Our job is to eliminate this bottleneck for the industry.

For now, the fact that this is really hard to do well is our moat, but as we scale, we dig traditional 7 Powers moats in the form of Scale Economies and Process Power. We should be able to offer a better, faster product than the fragmented incumbents, or than any would-be venture-backed challenger if we continue to execute.

More than that, we want to be the company our customers turn to whenever they have any wire harness needs because we know how to help them from the very beginning, the same way that the expert at Blockbuster could point you to the right horror movie or classic Western or “I’m going through a breakup and I need a great romcom,” the same way that I could Norm from Cheers a patron with a fresh drink and open ear when I was a bartender. The practical way we do this is that we’re on contract with our customers to provide design and engineering feedback on their harnesses, even before they get to the manufacturing stage.

All of that said, this opportunity is way bigger than wire harnesses for aerospace and defense.

Optimizing All Skilled Assembly

We started in wire harnesses for A&D because it’s what we know best, and because it’s the most challenging, highest-willingness-to-pay portion of the skilled assembly market. At $25-50 billion annually, it is a big enough market to keep us busy for a while.

But we want to fix all of skilled assembly. That’s why we’ve been able to attract the team we have, to solve the biggest challenge in manufacturing. As we get good at the hardest part, adjacencies are already opening up. In the past month alone, we’ve been hit up by companies making chillers for data centers and mail trucks for the US Postal Service, and a lot in between. Both the AI data center buildout and the electrification of everything means that there’s going to be a lot more wiring everywhere.

The fun part, and the part that we debate internally, is that expanding into automotive and industrials requires a different skillset than A&D. One satellite company inside of one Prime builds something like 8,000 unique wire harnesses every year. That electric truck company has just 25 that they put on every single truck, over and over again. This would move us into low-mix, high-volume, which can be more (although not fully) automated today. Doing this work wouldn’t build the same hard-to-replicated skilled workforce bench that high-mix A&D work does, but if we can do it at a positive (and expanding) margin, it allows us to get to scale more quickly and establish a foothold on the commercial side.

It’s a matter of when, not if, because we want to own as much of the $200 billion total wire harness market as we can eventually. We want to be in the data centers, the trucks, the nuclear reactors, the aircrafts… in everything, because wire harnessing is in everything, and we think we can offer a better wire harnessing product across the stack.

Moving into lower-mix, higher-volume wire harnessing also serves as a bridge to the rest of the skilled assembly market. Things like sensors, electromechanical assembly and testing are skilled assembly jobs adjacent to what we do now, and demanded by the same customers. If we do a great job on wire harnesses for our customers, we can say, “Oh you have a problem with sensors, too? Let us give it a shot.”

As we figure out how to standardize, optimize, and automate as much of wire harness manufacturing as possible, everything else becomes much easier. Because we tinker at the configuration level, we can copy-and-paste a lot of the processes and software from wire harnessing into sensors and electromechanical assembly, and tweak specifics like which machines and components we need. We built Amp to generalize; it’s a design and manufacturing software platform, not a wire harness-only tool.

Wire harness manufacturing is really a wedge into our broader ambition: how do you make the products of skilled assembly available more like Amazon than like manufacturing?

You should be able to go to our website, design your harness or your sensor or whatever you need, click buy, and get it two weeks later.

A lot needs to happen for that vision to come to life. We probably need to pony up for senra.com, for one thing. We need to offer better design software; the stuff people use today sucks. It’s really fragmented and not standardized, and there’s an opportunity for us to do it better, and turnaround outputs faster when customers design to our standards. We need to standardize and optimize across a growing number of products, and turn designs into work instructions and kits of parts smoothly. We need our people to be able to turn those work instructions into anything quickly and at high-quality. We need to inspect it all in real-time to maintain quality. We need to make new machines when it makes the work better, and look for opportunities to automate once we’ve standardized and optimized all we can.

Ultimately, we need to build up massive capacity so customers can get whatever they need really, really quickly, so that they can build, iterate, and scale their main products really, really quickly.

It’s that opportunity to unblock American manufacturing that’s why so many people who don’t need to work anymore are choosing to work at Senra.

Gathering the Grinders

In the past month, we’ve made two ex-SpaceX hires that we’re really excited about.

Ken Venner was the CIO at SpaceX, where he architected WarpDrive, which we’ve modeled Amp after. He’s a legend. He’s joining us as CTPO (Chief Technology and Product Officer) because, as he told us during the process, “This is the most excited I’ve been about a startup since SpaceX.”

Jessica Chavarria started her career in contract manufacturing, moved to SpaceX as a Requirements Planner in 2011, and worked her way up to Supply Chain Manager over eight years at the company. She has worked increasingly senior supply chain roles at a number of A&D companies, and just joined us in June to go back to her contract manufacturing roots as our Head of Supply Chain.

We’ve noticed something with the SpaceX alumnae. There’s a group that will make like $3-5 million and take it easy. Then there are the people who have been there long enough, and in important enough roles, to make hundreds of millions of dollars who have negative desire to retire and sit on a beach sipping pina coladas. These are people who worked for over a decade at a crazy company and loved the rush. They want to do it all over again. You can’t take the grinder out of them.

We’ve created a place where the grinders can grind on a challenge that’s endlessly deep and deeply important. We see it as validation of the opportunity that the people who’ve been at SpaceX long enough to know where all the bodies are buried are saying “If we could solve this, this is the most important thing we could work on.” Now it’s up to all of us to actually go solve it.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably bored of hearing that the US forgot how to build. That we sent the jobs overseas in search of profits, and hollowed out the golden goose. That you’ve heard it a lot doesn’t make it any less true, but the interesting question isn’t what happened in the past, but what we’re going to do to fix it.

We think that skilled assembly is the fulcrum point. It’s a really fucking big problem waiting to happen; you can’t necessarily feel it today, but you’ll feel it in the next two to five years. Our skilled workforce is retiring, just as the demand for their skills is surging. We’ve realized that we need to build big things here again, but all of those big things are made up of a lot of little, complex, custom things that a shrinking group of people know how to make.

A lazy solution to this coming crisis is that we’ll just let the robots take care of it. As you understand by now, most of our industrial base’s skilled assembly isn’t standardized or optimized, and until you standardize and optimize, you can’t automate.

When the time comes - when the brains are smart enough and the hands are dexterous enough - we believe that robotics adoption in manufacturing will be constrained less by hardware and more by the absence of structured, well-configured operational environments. We’re solving that problem first, by encoding manufacturing into executable, measurable, and machine-readable systems.

Far before automating skilled assembly becomes possible, we will reindustrialize by giving humans better work environments, environments that work for them. That’s little things – our attrition is comically low because we offer air conditioning and a pleasant workplace - and big things, like making sure they have the tools, components, and instructions they need at all times.

All of this is really hard. It’s not as clean or as sci-fi as throwing robots and ASI at the problem. But we love that. We’ve been out here screaming into the ether: humans matter, we need to figure out how to scale them.

Ours is a belief that the more the easy stuff gets automated, the more valuable skilled humans will become. We agree with ex-Uber-now-Atoms founder Travis Kalanick, who predicted on TBPN that skilled workers will get paid like LeBron James because, “Humans [are going to] become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress - and that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more robust.”

The future, like the past, is human. It’s just that we can give humans superpowers now.

If you’re out there and you hear our scream, come join us.

Thanks to Jordan, Greg, and Sam for working with me on this piece, and to Alexa for the introduction!

That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with our Weekly Dose.

Thanks for reading,

Packy

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 201st Weekly Dose of Optimism.

We’re jam packed again, and you don’t come here for the intro, so…

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Aalo Goes Critical on the 4th of July

On July 4th at 12:20am, Aalo Atomics went critical, becoming the fourth advanced nuclear company to accomplish the mission by the July 4th, 2026 deadline, and the third whose founder we had on Age of Miracles back in 2023. I actually wrote a small personal check into Aalo before the podcast, back when I didn’t think nuclear was fund investable but that it was incredibly important. I was right on the latter but very wrong on the former.

Aalo joins Antares Nuclear, Valar Atomics, and Deployable Energy in hitting the target, with a number of others including Radiant, Oklo, X-Energy, Deep Fission, and Last Energy expected to hit criticality later this year or next, and deploy commercially in the months and couple years ahead. As Abundance Institute’s Chris Koopman put it, “In just over 13 months, the United States of America went from a handful of executive orders to FOUR DIFFERENT advanced nuclear reactors reaching criticality.”

This is an insane state of affairs given where nuclear was just three years ago. Getting any one advanced reactor to criticality by July 4, 2026 would have been considered a minor miracle, but getting four with more to come means that there’s going to be competition. Whoever can deploy most quickly, with a product that customers want, at the best price, will win. The field shifts from science to manufacturing. I think that good ol’ competition is what it’s going to take to make nuclear cheap and abundant.

One of nuclear’s challenges has been that utilities are terrible customers for the product. Fortunately, they are not the main customers for these smaller advanced reactors. Data Centers are, and they will fund whoever gets them something that works fast (and safe, cheap, clean, and eventually affordable).

(2) Data centres are a crucial test of US industrial resolve

Josh Zoffer for The Financial Times

This is the argument that I made in Thank God for Data Centers, and part of the argument that my friend Josh Zoffer made in the Financial Times this week:

The data centre bonanza is a special kind of opportunity: one where deep-pocketed buyers like Silicon Valley’s hyperscalers are willing to open their wallets to pay for fast, reliable access to industrial technology. It offers a chance for the US to get ahead in the next key technologies and to build domestic supply chains based on demand rather than subsidies and tariffs.

I’m glad to see Josh making the case for U.S. data centers (we use er here, FT) in front of the policy and business leaders who read the FT, and making it so eloquently. Data centers are useful in their own right, but they’re also a turbocharged way to turn on that big, beautiful American Demand engine and fund the technology that will carry us into the Age of Miracles.

(3) American Turbine Comes Out of Stealth

John McElhone

Including gas turbines. Lots and lots of gas turbines. If you can make a gas turbine, or retrofit a jet engine to work as a gas turbine, the data centers would like to buy it from you. And this week, American Turbine came out of stealth to sell it to them.

What’s interesting about AT’s approach is that instead of very large, complex turbines that take a long time and a lot of scarce expertise to make, they’re making small, highly manufacturable turbines that they can get to customers quickly. If you need a lot of MW, they’ll just sell you a lot of turbines.

For now, the goal is speed, and buyers are happy to pay for speed in lost efficiency. Over time, though, whether data center demand slows or the supply chain gets worked out and time-to-power is no longer as big an issue, turbines will still have a ton of value.

The beautiful thing about turbines in the American context is that America has bountiful natural gas resources. We have an advantage there, if we have the turbines to turn it into power.

Part of American competitiveness in the century ahead will be beating China at things China currently dominates, but an equally important part will be winning things that we can do uniquely well. Turning natural gas into power to turn ideas into economic activity is one of those things.

(4) Vigils Uses Colors That Are Grown, Not Applied

Neri Oxman for OXMAN

Not everything in the good future will be manufactured or petrochemicals-based, though. Some of it will be grown naturally.

Neri Oxman, the ex-MIT designer, engineer, scientist, and artist working on computational design, synthetic biology and digital fabrication whose 2023 Lex Fridman appearance was one of my favorites, announced a new line of capes from her company, OXMAN, called Vigils, “whose color is not applied but grown. We engineer bacteria to produce indigo and melanin pigments, then let them work directly on the surface of a 3D-knitted silk textile. When the process is complete, the cells are washed away, leaving only the pigment they have grown into the fiber.”

“For a century,” Oxman (the person, not the company) tweeted,

One day, OXMAN might even apply this technology to garments people actually wear.

(5) 1X Gives Neo Alien Hands

Giving robots hands that work like human hands is one of the hardest challenges in robotics. If these videos are real, it looks like 1X may have solved it.

Yesterday, they announced their “25 Degree of Freedom (DOF), tendon-driven hands for the NEO humanoid platform– achieving near human-level dexterity, strength, safety, and reliability.”

Watch the video. Or this one.

1X argues that with these hands, the hardware problem is basically solved and what’s left is gathering the data that drives the robots capabilities. It’s a bit of a self-serving argument, because 1X is selling and deploying tele-operated robots into homes in order to collect data, but any good company argument should be self-serving. And that is, once again, an absurdly impressive hand.

One thing I particularly like is that they call the hand an “API to the Physical World,” which is a catchy way to express that our hands are how we interact with the world. Our legs can walk us up to a door, but our hands push it open. Our eyes can locate a glass in space, but our hand picks it up.

The new 1X hand can pick up a wine glass with ease. It can do LEGOs. It can even screw in a lightbulb. If you want to learn more about what it does, and how it works, check out their blog post.

Over the past couple of days, OpenAI released a new voice model that talks more like a human and 1X released hands that are more human, and in both cases, unexpectedly, it feels that the more human-like features we give the machine, the clearer it is that they are not becoming human but will be very useful to us.

Long humans.

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Aleph Speech, Levin, Quantum

I know you’re probably overdosed on optimism at this point, but I do think the Science Breakthroughs are worth reading as an Ulkar-vetted glimpse into the future. This is the stuff that’s not on X yet. Check ‘em out.

Read more

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome to our 200th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

A full 200 weeks after Dan and I started writing the Weekly Dose at the depth of the despair market in the July 2022, the optimism is at an all-time high around these parts. We write this 200th Dose to you on the eve of America’s 250th birthday, just two days after the USMNT beat Bosnia and Herzegovina, a man down, to advance to the round of 16 and the Sixers (finally) fleeced the Celtics in a trade. Welcome to Philly Jaylen Brown. Come join him Lebron. America feels like it’s on fire, because it’s way too hot outside for one, but more importantly because the energy around the World Cup has been exquisite, we’ve played the role of host to the world well, the markets are soaring (if scary), and everyone’s a little happier in the summer.

Since we started the Dose four years ago, obesity has been cured, cars have begun driving themselves commercially, AI has become very smart and useful, there has been a renaissance of atoms companies in America, and multiple new advanced nuclear reactors have gone critical. That was just a quick list off the dome; if you’ve been following along, you know that practically every week is that jam-packed.

And this week is no different, so…

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Conception Bio Generates First Early Human Eggs from Stem Cells

Imagine telling George Washington that in four generations, scientists in the nation he founded would turn blood cells into egg cells, which might become human.

The team at Conception, a startup in Berkeley, is doing just that. The company says it has grown the first early human egg cells, called primary oocytes, from stem cells. To do it, they drew blood, reprogrammed the blood cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, then coaxed those into miniature human ovaries that in turn grow the eggs inside them. Their early eggs went through meiosis, and support cells wrapped each one in a follicle, recreating the defining structure of a real developing ovary. The whole thing is absolutely insane.

In vitro gametogenesis has worked in mice since 2016, when Conception’s collaborator Katsuhiko Hayashi made mouse eggs that grew into healthy, fertile pups. Humans have been far harder, which is why this took Matt Krisiloff, an OpenAI founding-team alum who’s talked openly about wanting a child biologically related to both him and a partner, eight years of trying. The urge to reproduce is one of nature’s strongest, and Matt is putting his to work on behalf of all humankind.

The caveats, for now, are that these are early-stage oocytes, not mature eggs ready for IVF, and clinical use is years away. But what it points to is a world in which we can make as many healthy eggs as we need from a single drop of blood. Elizabeth Holmes weeps.

There will be a lot of debate over the ethical use of these eggs, I’m sure, in the coming years. They will allow for two biological fathers, improve the efficacy of embryo selection (more eggs to choose from), extend a woman’s fertile life (and restore it in cancer patients), compress generations of breeding (no gestation period, theoretically), and de-extinct more animals.

To my mind, it passes the “increase the range and depth of experience in the universe” test.

(2) This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. And It’s Manmade.

Carl Zimmer and Marco Hernandez for The New York Times

Big week for tiny little cells.

Where Conception took human stem cells and turned them into an egg, scientists at the University of Minnesota created the first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle assembled entirely from non-living chemicals. They call it SpudCell.

For as long as we’ve had biology, making a living cell required a living cell. Cells divide, life reproduces sexually and asexually, thanks to Yamanaka, we can turn specialized cells into iPSCs and then into whatever kind of cell we want, etc…

SpudCell is built different, created in a lab and able to do things like “feed, grow, reproduce and compete with one another for food.”

I would try to compress an explanation of how they did it, but honestly, the NYT does an excellent and visual job and you should just read their version or the 190-pager the lab put out.

Kate Adamala, the lead researcher behind SpudCell, argues that the core functions of life “do not need some magical spark.” With SpudCell, we may be able to begin engineering life from scratch, instead of starting with an E.coli.

Drew Endy, whose belief that “Atoms are Local” and humans should be able to grow anything Elliot has written about a bunch, is teaming up with Adamela on a non-profit research organization, Biotic, that will open source and develop the work with hundreds of scientists. To the New York Times, Endy compared “SpudCells to a biological version of the Wright flyer, the crude plane that the Wright Brothers used to make the first sustained controlled flight in 1903, ushering in the age of airplanes.” Let’s fly.

(3) Meta Releases v2 of Its Mind-Reading Model

Relative to the other two, this is pretty ho-hum, but Meta just released a new version of its model that can read minds from outside the brain and translate brain activity into words. Whatever. Yawn.

(4) Nuclear Race Update

There’s so much happening in nuclear around the July 4th criticality target date that we’re giving it a whole section with the highlights:

• Radiant receives 100 pounds of (not boring capital portfolio company) Standard Nuclear’s medium enriched uranium TRISO fuel for its first reactor

• Aalo loads fuel bundle into its first reactors and begins splitting atoms pre-criticality

• Valar Atomics powers NVIDIA Spark with nuclear power

• Deployable Energy achieves criticality in Unity demonstration reactor

• It looks like Aalo is going to attempt to go critical today.

And it’s only Friday morning… let’s see what nuclear fireworks this weekend brings.

(5) America’s Next 250

By Scott Nolan

I don’t normally include the week’s essay as one of the five main entries in the Dose, but I can’t think of a better way to head into this monumental 4th of July Weekend than by reading Scott’s on how much progress America has made in its first 250 years and what it will take to blow that out of the water in the next 250.

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Thursday, Happy 4th of July, and Happy 250th Birthday, America 🇺🇲

The United States Men’s National Team is advancing to the Sweet 16 after beating Bosnia in what is now called Soccer. The sun is shining incredibly hard on America. We are just two days away from the Fourth of July. And this particular 4th of July marks the 250th birthday of the United States of America.

I figured we should do something special to celebrate.

In May, I had the chance to moderate a panel with Oklo’s Jake DeWitte and General Matter’s Scott Nolan at Utah’s Operation Gigawatt Summit. After getting into the nitty gritty about what it would take to scale nuclear now that it’s both regulatorily possible and popular, I asked a final question: “What do you want the next 250 years in America to look like?”

I really liked Scott’s answer, which looked back on everything we’d achieved and forward to everything we might… if we get a few important things right in the present.

Scott is someone with a front row seat to America’s potential. He was a very early engineer at SpaceX, has spent over a decade as a partner at Founders Fund, and recently launched General Matter to make sure that nuclear energy has the fuel it needs to power America’s growth.

So I asked him to share what he thinks America’s next 250 will look like, and what we need to do to make that good future happen.

Let’s get to it.

America’s Next 250

By Scott Nolan

To imagine what America might look like 250 years from now, a good place to start is what life was like in the colonies that would become the United States of America 250 years ago, on July 4th, 1776.

In 1776, we did not have running water, light bulbs, electricity, or gas stoves in our homes. We had no insulin, no penicillin, and no x-rays. We did not have cars, and we certainly didn’t have planes. We didn’t have trains or even horse-drawn streetcars.

In 1776, there was no anesthesia. Instead, you were held down and fully conscious during surgery. Surgeons didn’t realize that they needed to wash their hands and the average American was most likely to die from an infectious disease. We didn’t understand blood types, and blood transfusions could not be safely performed. Infant and maternal mortality were extraordinarily high.

There was no synthetic fertilizer with which to grow food — we used animal manure — and no refrigeration to store it once harvested. Food supply was limited by season and geography, stretched with salt or smoke or ice.

There was no telegraph. Paul Revere used a horse to warn that the British were coming. Storms arrived with even less warning; there was no weather forecasting. Because there was no real-time coordination across even modest distances, there were no standardized time zones. Every town kept its own time by the sun.

Pause on this one for a second. Today, it is trivial to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world, at any time. We inhabit a shared present. That experience did not exist in 1776. Information could move only as fast as the horse, ship, or person carrying it. A New Yorker could imagine that something was happening in Virginia, but they couldn’t know what. By the time the news arrived, it was history.

We could continue listing things that did not exist then but seem eternal now — the U.S. dollar, modern steel, plastics, stainless steel, concrete skyscrapers — but what’s even more fascinating is what the absence of those things meant for the experience of being human.

When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he did so with a quill pen on a homemade portable desk. The digital world did not exist. No photographs or recorded sound meant that nobody alive in 1776 could preserve exactly what a person looked or sounded like. A gone person stayed gone in all but memory and art.

Americans alive at the signing of the Declaration of Independence worked not for fulfillment but to prevent their families’ hunger. They lived in a world of wood: downed trees were both America’s dominant energy source, and its main building material. We had very little mastery over the natural world. We were input-takers, not input-makers.

250 years ago, there was a lot we didn’t know, and a lot we didn’t have.

But we had capitalism, safe and bountiful geographical blessings, and waves of intrepid new Americans in search of a better life, and a frontier spirit. Thanks to the constant combination and recombination of essentially just those attributes, the last 250 years have taken us from something pre-industrial to an industrial, digital age.

Two hundred and fifty years seems like a long time, but it’s just three peoples’ lifetimes at current averages. It would have been six lifetimes back then, except the average American’s life expectancy has doubled over the past 250 years.

Even in one generation, a lot has changed. I spent my formative years growing up outside of St. Louis, Missouri in the 1980s. My sense of Americana was formed in Mark Twain’s America. I remember riding my bike down our suburb’s sidewalks, past the BMX half pipes in neighbors’ driveways and crumpled Busch cans along the road. I remember eating cheeseburgers at a McDonald’s that was on a Mississippi riverboat, which felt every bit as cool to a kid as you might imagine.

And I remember floating in our humble above-ground pool, under a tree, exploring TIME magazine’s July 1988 Onward to Mars issue and looking at pictures of the Mars Rover concept, wondering about space.

It’s grounding to think about how much has changed in less than one lifetime, a fraction of 250 years. In many ways, the world is as different between my childhood and today as it was between 1776 and my childhood.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, the Internet was still ARPANET, a military and academic network. Tim Berners-Lee wouldn’t propose the World Wide Web until 1989, and Marc Andreessen wouldn’t popularize the browser until 1993 when I was entering middle school.

Today, 96% of Americans use the internet to connect, work, learn, entertain ourselves, and increasingly, use AI models.

Americans today primarily do these things from our mobile phones, which 98% of Americans now own. All but the least connected Americans carry a device in their pockets, giving them powers Jefferson could only have dreamed of.

The Human Genome Project, the ambitious quest to map the blueprint of life, kicked off in 1990, and was completed thirteen years later, at a cost of $3 billion. Since then, the cost to sequence a human genome has fallen faster than Moore’s Law, from $100 million at the turn of the new millennium a quarter century ago to a few hundred dollars today, with the newest machines pushing $100.

As a result, the genome has gone from a singular scientific monument to a routine source of data. Researchers can sequence millions of people, compare their genetic differences, identify the mutations that cause disease, trace cancers as they evolve, diagnose rare conditions, and design drugs for increasingly precise groups of patients. With impressive frequency, they are using these tools and others, such as CRISPR and CAR-T, to create therapies that fight back against the leading causes of death, like heart disease and cancer.

When I was growing up in the 1980s, America did have electric cars, but they were much closer to golf carts than a modern Tesla. The Comuta-Car was a small lead-acid electric city car produced until 1982 that boasted about 40 miles of range. Excluding the Cybertruck, which I greatly respect, the aesthetics of modern EVs have changed as well.

Now, not only are there millions of Teslas on the road, but they can drive themselves. Motor vehicle crashes remain one of the nation’s largest causes of preventable death, but those, too, may be on the decline. Over the past three years, autonomous vehicles have evolved from a novelty to a reliable part of everyday commutes, from Tesla FSD to Waymo, both about 10x safer per mile than manual driving.

At the founding of America, there were no cars. Now the cars drive themselves, and do it more safely than humans.

We have made a tremendous amount of progress in science and in the digital world in the two and a half centuries since our nation’s founding, much of it since I was born, and more of that in the second half of my life than the first. The past five years alone saw the introduction and widespread adoption of those self-driving cars, large language models like GPT and Claude, and GLP-1s.

American progress has been world historic, and it is accelerating.

Then there are the things that we have not made real progress on, or have even backslid on until very recently.

One of these is nuclear power, where we made practically no progress on nuclear energy in the past quarter century, despite nuclear having fewer emissions than solar and being statistically safer than wind.

In 2001, the United States generated 768 million MWh of nuclear power. In 2023, the United States generated 775 million MWh of nuclear power. That’s less than a 1% increase in two decades.

In fact, on a per capita basis we’ve made barely any progress on energy at all. We fell off the “Henry Adams Curve,” on which America steadily grew usable energy by 7% per year, in the 1970s and never recovered.

Have we just gotten more efficient with the energy we use, making us all richer? Unfortunately, no. If you look at the average personal income on a real-dollar basis post-1970, when there was the oil shock and regulatory and cultural institutions making it harder to build, there hasn’t been real wage growth per capita.

Real wage growth is a measure of our prosperity in the physical world, and we haven’t made progress in our ability to physically sculpt our environment in over half a century. America has lived one-fifth of its young life in what Tyler Cowen calls The Great Stagnation.

That is changing.

America’s 250th Birthday is an opportunity not only to reflect and predict, but to commit to making the progress of the next 250 years dwarf the past 250.

How do we do it?

When asked what form of government the Constitutional Convention had created, Ben Franklin famously quipped, “A republic, if you can keep it.” What he was saying was that the Constitution could create a republic, but it would be up to engaged citizens to work to maintain it.

The same is true for growth, prosperity, and abundance within the republic that we’ve managed to keep for a quarter millennium. The American project is of the people, by the people, and for the people. There is no monarch or dictator promising to provide. If we want the growth, prosperity, and abundance of the next 250 years to exceed those of the last 250, it’s up to every one of us to keep it in the best way we see fit.

For my part, that’s helping support energy abundance, because there is no such thing as a prosperous low-energy country.

I have been fortunate to live out the dream that began while reading TIME in our modest pool. At Cornell, I joined the rocket club and built propulsion systems with my friends. When a young company called SpaceX was looking for interns in 2003, I signed up. I came back full time when I graduated in 2004, just in time to contribute to the original Merlin propulsion systems and Dragon capsule.

One of the things you learn at SpaceX is to identify bottlenecks and to attack them. That applies to both micro engineering topics and macro civilizational issues. It’s been clear for a long time that the bottleneck to civilizational abundance and individual prosperity is energy, and it’s been even clearer that nuclear power is the best way to generate it. It is clean, safe, energy-dense, reliable, and scalable in any geography.

At Founders Fund, where I’ve been a Partner for about 15 years, we searched for transformational nuclear investments for over a decade. In 2023, we invested in Radiant, a microreactor startup founded by ex-SpaceX engineer Doug Bernauer. Doug started Radiant to tackle a bottleneck of his own: if we wanted to power a Mars civilization, we’d need to send nuclear reactors up there. Here on Earth, clusters of stranded energy demand, like remote Alaskan villages and military bases, needed power as well and were willing to pay. Both could be powered by containerized reactors.

Over the past three years, as baseload power demand expanded dramatically, partly driven by AI, and regulation began modernizing, a number of ambitious new nuclear companies like Radiant were founded. With more advanced reactors coming online, the bottleneck in nuclear energy shifted to something that the U.S. had once produced but stopped: enriched uranium. This meant America relied on foreign companies, including from our adversaries, for over 20% of the enriched uranium traditional reactors run on, and 100% of the fuel consumed by advanced reactors. After nearly a year looking for an American company to invest in that would enrich uranium at scale, I realized none existed.

So at the end of 2023, I started a company called General Matter. We are enriching uranium in America to fuel the nuclear reactors that will power America into the 23rd Century and beyond.

The formula is simple. To unlock economic growth, generate power. To generate power, build nuclear reactors. To fuel those nuclear reactors, enrich uranium. Enrichment was the most important bottleneck I felt I could help move the needle on. Today, almost three years later, our team at General Matter is restoring U.S. capability at our facilities from California to Kentucky, with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy.

America will progress over the next 250 years to the extent that our citizens continue to find and eliminate bottlenecks and come up with entirely new capabilities. All of these capabilities will require more energy.

If we get energy production right, what will the next 250 years look like? Let’s start with the next 25 and build from there.

We will have a base on the Moon. As my Founders Fund colleague Mike Solana will tell you, Moon Should Be a State.

We will have direct-to-cell communication anywhere on Earth, connected by an ever-expanding fleet of telecommunications satellites. An ever-expanding network of sensors subtly blanketing the globe will give us real-time visibility into the status of the home planet. Although our ancestors couldn’t know what was happening in Virginia from New York, we will know everything that is happening everywhere.

When we want to see something for ourselves, we will zip around the globe supersonically. We will build infrastructure to reclaim roads and parking spaces for plazas and green spaces. And when we do need to drive, our cars will be fully electric and fully autonomous. There will be no more meaningful car emissions, and there will be far, far fewer traffic fatalities.

Cars won’t kill us, and neither will today’s most deadly diseases. We are already experiencing medical breakthroughs that make our lives longer and healthier, from GLP-1s to CAR-T cell therapies to early detection. Just last month, Midjourney announced a new way to scan the body and Aleph previewed a new way to scan the brain, both using ultrasound, which now comes on a chip. These will accelerate, as human scientists devise new ways to fix and enhance our bodies, from epigenetic reprogramming to bioelectric therapies, and use AI to turn over every stone.

Twenty-five years from now, we will look back on this current era as AI’s awkward adolescent years. Having figured out the right relationship between humans and our intelligent assistants, we will have AIs helping us everywhere in our daily lives. The term “artificial intelligence” will be as outdated as saying “color TV” today. We will have integrated it into how we live, work, and play. Robots will be a routine part of life. Every person who can today afford a car might tomorrow own a personal chef, a massage therapist, a physical trainer, and the staff of a five-star hotel… all in one robot.

Provided there’s enough energy to power today’s tech revolution, it’s hard to comprehend how right things could go. In just 25 years, the amount of time since I was first in the rocket club in college, we will be living in a future that looks like sci-fi compared to today.

Just as our lives today are dramatically better than the Founding Fathers could have imagined, we’ll have lives that are better than we could possibly imagine today in the next 25 years… if we allow ourselves to.

On this trajectory, life in 250 years will be practically incomprehensible from today’s perspective. Sci-fi does the best job imagining, but even sci-fi failed to anticipate the world we now live in. For the same reason that free market capitalism beats centrally-planned communism, it is impossible to predict exactly what the future will be like, or just how great it can be.

In 250 years, most transformatively, people will be living indefinite periods of time, effectively as long as we want to. We will have full command over the Earth and its oceans — to travel wherever we’d like, whenever we want, to terraform, and to grow anything. Malthus will have been proven completely wrong. Our world will look very much like Star Trek.

Inevitably, this will include expanding off of the home planet. We will have the technology to physically support hundreds of billions of people or more on Earth, but people are born to dream and expand. To support those fundamental human desires, we will need to spread.

We will expand our civilization to other planets. I hope that we export our founding American values, including the freedom to experiment with new systems based on the will of the people living there.

All of this could be the inheritance we pass to future generations of Americans, if — like Franklin said — we can keep it. These next 10 to 20 years will determine the course of the following centuries.

None of this will just magically happen. It’s going to take hard effort and tough calls to reach a future that will look like today’s science fiction.

If we can’t find the will to build data centers, and the energy to support them while giving every citizen more energy, for less… if we can’t fix and expand the grid to carry all of the electricity that we’ll need, even though we have the technology to do so… if we can’t continue the momentum around nuclear until it shows up in thousands of powered and grid-connected reactors… if we can’t build that base on the Moon and use it to start pushing towards other planets… in 250 years, it won’t mean these things were impossible. It will mean something has gone horribly wrong.

That something might be cultural. Maybe hatred towards data centers and a modern Luddite movement. Maybe we’ve faced something worse, like another World War.

All of these fears have the same cure: abundance. Conflicts are based on scarcity or the concern about future scarcity. But if America re-accelerates our output, and if both us and China realize we’ll be living in a post-scarcity world anyway, there’s far less reason for conflict.

The task on which the next American quarter-millennium will be built is to dramatically increase clean, safe, baseload energy, so that we can use it to power everything else, unlocking a world of abundance.

The time to do all this is now. On a timescale as long as 250 years, getting things a little bit more right now has an enormous compounding effect on our trajectory.

There is perhaps no better example of that principle than the document whose anniversary we celebrate this weekend: the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The America of 250 years ago didn’t always live up to those promises. But there’s no doubt Jefferson’s quill set us on our path: a 250-year long pursuit of the ideals captured in those well-crafted words. What started as the American Experiment has become a republic worth keeping.

The Pursuit of Happiness is the magical part. Correctly interpreted, those words speak to the opportunity for any American to build a good life for themselves and their family, not simply to joy or comfort. Joy, in the American context, is often found in the exhaustion of a job well done.

America has always granted its citizens the right to be industrious, the right to go do things, build, and create prosperity. These rights are fundamental to who we are.

What has made America’s first 250 years great is that it has been this place where people knew they could come and have the space and freedom to build the future they believed would be good. The U.S. has always been the place for that, a place of freedom to, not just freedom from.

The success or failure of the next 250 years will depend on these fundamentals. If the U.S. continues to be the place where we celebrate ambition — and if we commit ourselves to our best visions for the future — we will thrive, and the rest of the world will thrive with us.

America should be the birthplace of superintelligence, the nuclear renaissance, the spacecraft that takes us to Mars, and the first people to populate the moon. This is the frontier country, wherever the frontier happens to be.

We will have another 250 years of growth, prosperity, and abundance if each of us chooses to continue to work for them. The most beautiful thing about the American project is that there is no one to blame, and no one coming to save us, other than ourselves.

Thanks to Scott, Avery, and Sally for working with me on this piece, and to the Founding Fathers for America.

That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with our Weekly Dose.

Thanks for reading,

Packy

Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Friday and welcome to our 199th Weekly Dose of Optimism! For some reason, maybe it’s the fantastic summer vibes, this one was particularly fun to write, so without further ado…

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Stripe Launches Intercept to End Respiratory Infections

for Stripe

I have had a cold all week. You forget how little fun a cold is! It sounds innocent, if annoying, a little cold. You don’t want to be the guy who complains about a cold. Rub some dirt in it, get back to work. But I’ve been operating at like ~40%. It would be way better if I didn’t have a cold…

And thanks to a new effort from Stripe, in the future, I (and everyone else) may not have to. Nan Ransohoff, who runs Public Goods at Stripe, announced that they’re launching Intercept: “a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past.”

As Nan wrote:

We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics.

But respiratory infections are technically challenging and they’ve been underfunded, so we haven’t made much progress against them. Every year, we just accept that part of our year is going to suck (more time if we have kids, and suck more if it’s a particularly bad virus that kills us).

Intercept is solving the underfunded part, with money from Stripe, Anthropic, The OpenAI Foundation, Flu Lab, and people from Jane Street. It believes it can solve the technical parts, with a mix of broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies.

Obviously, I hope they pull it off, and I think they will, but in any case, bravo to Nan and Stripe for continuing to rethink what modern institutions can to against the big problems facing humanity, and to the funders for taking a big, concentrated swing. This is what our billionaires should be doing, and I hope as many people copy Stripe here as copy the design of their homepage. Magnificenza!

(2) Congress Passes 21st Century Road to Housing Act

Ronda Kaysen for The New York Times

On Tuesday, the House voted 358-to-32 in favor of a bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, in a touchingly bipartisan agreement that we need to build more housing in this country.

Vacancies are too low, mortgage rates are elevated, home prices keep rising, and the rents are too damn high! The bill, negotiated over many months, aims to bring down housing costs using a number of tools:

It loosens federal regulations, making it easier, faster and cheaper to build; eases lending rules; rewards communities that build; delivers aid to communities reeling from disasters; and, in a policy that proved to be one of the biggest flash points but was favored by Mr. Trump, sets new limits on the role institutional investors can play in the market.

Hear hear. We at the Dose are big believers in making it much much easier to build new housing, through regulatory and technological means. Not Boring Capital invested in Cuby to tackle the technical part, and now the government is doing its part to clear the way for new homes.

This is an obvious one. Voters, whether R or D, want to be able to afford a place to live. It’s clear that many rules in place get in the way of that happening.

No one in their right mind would oppose this thing…

To that end, President Trump is currently refusing to sign the bill unless Congress passes his SAVE America Act (his priority elections/voter ID legislation, which he called a “National Emergency”), and has doubled down since, telling House Speaker Mike Johnson “nobody gives a f*ck about housing” and telling the press that he’s not signing it because he doesn’t want to lower home prices for those who own them.

As of this morning, Speaker Johnson said that he’s formally sending the bill to the White House after a productive conversation with President Trump.

So, optimistic because a healthy majority from both sides understands that a lot of Americans do give a f*ck about housing and are finally doing something about it, and because the majority is so strong that it’s veto-proof, but also a good reminder that these NIMBY f*cks can be really dangerous.

(3) U.S. Bets Billions in Low-Cost Loans Can Revive Nuclear Power

Jennifer Hiller for WSJ

Another big week for nuclear!

On Tuesday, the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office (of which the Dose and the broader Not Boring universe have long been fans, shout Julie Kozeracki) conditionally commited $17.5 billion in funding to support the construction of 10 Westinghouse AP1000 reactors.

These are the big boys, the 1GW guys that you’re familiar with, the gigareactors that can power whole towns by themselves indefinitely, but that can take over a decade and over $10 billion each to build.

These loans are meant to ease some of the financing and timeline fears that utilities have had when considering embarking on AP1000 builds.

Per the DOE:

EDF financing will support up to five loans, each loan supporting two reactors at a project site. Westinghouse will partner with up to five eligible utilities and energy companies nationwide to procure the long-lead items at a fixed price. Each project will be jointly owned by Westinghouse and a utility or energy company partner. Both Westinghouse and the partner are required to fully commit their project equity, $500 million each ($1 billion total per project), upfront prior to accessing DOE loan funds. Purchasing for each project will be staggered based on the timing of equity commitments and other relevant factors. Westinghouse has signed letters of intent with seven potential partners, each with identified project sites.

When Westinghouse and its utility partners commit their combined $1 billion in equity upfront, the DOE will chip in $3.5 billion in low-cost loans early, so that the project can start to purchase long lead-time items that typically delay nuclear projects, like containment vessels and turbines.

It’s a smart way for the government to aim its balance sheet at a high-leverage point in the process. Big win for the big reactors, while the small ones keep racking up wins too…

Yesterday, Aalo Atomics announced that DOE Secretary Chris Wright had “just signed the approval to turn on our first nuclear reactor at the Aalo-X site.” If successful in turning it on, Aalo would be the third advanced reactor company to go critical before America’s 250th Birthday on July 4th, meeting President Trump’s goal, and it would be the biggest to do so.

Meanwhile, Valar Atomics, whose criticality we covered last week, has gone on to generate power and then demonstrated 24 hours of continuous operations at 100% power.

Between all of this reactor progress and the USMNT’s performance at the World Cup, this summer is giving Nuclear Football a whole new, and much better, meaning (although it’s called Soccer now).

(4) Aleph Neuro Obtains Highest Resolution Extracranial Brain Image

Ultrasound is on an absolute tear. Prophetic’s dreaming headband. Last week’s Midjourney Scanner. And now a startup, Aleph Neuro, announced that it has “obtained the highest-resolution 3D images of the human brain ever taken from outside the skull” using “ultrasound transmitted through the skull, with a contrast agent.”

Best I can tell, the co-founders Marley and Lev injected contrast microbubbles into the bloodstream of their own brains, fired ultrafast ultrasound through their own skulls, tracked individual bubbles moving through their own brain vessels, and computationally combined thousands of frames into a super-resolution 3D map of their own brains.

Per Marley:

I could never convey the feeling of this discovery: it’s a random Tuesday and, all of a sudden, we saw a branching, treelike structure.

Moreover, it’s my own brain. A brain was looking at itself, while also knowing that it was the first time anyone in the world had seen this kind of brain image; this was divine poetry.

The tech is super cool. Aleph wants to make telepathy happen, and long time readers will know how I feel about telepathy. The cooler part of this story, though, is the good ol’ fashioned scientist-as-subject research the founders did on themselves to get to this breakthrough.

Marley put out a thread on the whole journey that I hope inspires you to find something that you know little about but want to, or a thing that you want to exist but don’t know how, and then to go out and learn whatever it takes to learn and do that thing.

~*In the age of AI*~ this feels like a pretty great skillset to have.

(5) Analogue Group Funds Soviet Papers Translation

Friend of Not Boring Aishwarya Khanduja’s Analogue Group announced the inaugural cohort of its Revival Fund: “an experimental fund dedicated to restoring neglected, illegible, or prematurely dismissed research to active circulation.”

Recipients are doing things like “reviving molecular inference by building DNA Learning Systems for programmable biology - sequences that learn, adapt, and act through chemistry” and “reviving brain-in-vat research with modern perfusion technology - bringing back forgotten work on sustaining living brains outside the body” and “reconstructing China's engagement with anomalous bodily phenomena from 1979-1999” that might not otherwise have a home but are important, and do now.

The one I’m most excited about is one that I talked to Aish about last December: translating old Soviet research papers. I’d had enough conversations with founders who told me that actually the tech they’re building is based off a Soviet research paper from like 1957 that I figured there was probably a lot there.

Now, Seconds is working on it at SovietRxiv, so we will find out soon enough! If you’ve been wanting to start a sci-fi company but have just been short on ideas, get in there and start digging for золото.

Poetically, the same day that Aish announced that they were translating the Soviet papers, Mike Grace announced that Longshot Space had raised $20M.

A conversation with Mike, in which he mentioned that the idea for his launcher came from an old Soviet paper, was one of that small handful that led me to believe that there was gold in them hills.

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Space Wars, Impulse, General Intuition

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 198th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

I spent the week at the third annual Reindustrialize conference, which has the highest density of people we’ve covered in the Dose and in not boring more generally than any other event I know of, so the optimism is flowing particularly smoothly through my veins.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Midjourney Announces Midjourney Medical + Scanner

When the AI image and video company Midjourney said that they were going to be hosting a demo of their first hardware product this week, most people, understandably, assumed that they would unveil something related to AI image and video. A digital canvas, perhaps. Glasses. VR. Art-immersed physical environments, even.

Wrong. All wrong. Thinking way too small.

“Today we're gonna announce something a little weird and a little crazy,” the company wrote, “but also spectacular and filled with hope.”

When I wrote a Deep Dive on Ezra a couple years back, I started the piece with a vision of the future:

In the year 2050, each time you step in front of the mirror in your bedroom, it runs a quick and dirty MRI on you. The MRI won’t be as high-resolution as something you would have gotten in a tube in 2023, but it doesn’t need to be. AI fills in the gaps and pulls signal from noise.

Most days – 99.9% of days – you don’t even remember you’re being scanned. There’s nothing to report, so your mirror reports nothing.

Very occasionally, though, it might notice enough of a change in your cells that it recommends a higher-resolution, localized scan on, say, your prostate, moves some things around on your calendar, books you an appointment, and summons your car to whisk you away to an imaging facility for a closer look.

That is basically the weird, crazy, spectacular, hopeful product that Midjourney announced, the first from the newly-formed Midjourney Medical: the Midjourney Scanner, “something as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa.”

It’s not an MRI, but the idea is to use lots of ultrasound and compute to get to the same place. From Midjourney’s (very well-done) announcement post:

It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.

The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.

You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you’re done.

While you’re in there, ultrasonic waves hit your body and ripple back millions of times per second, producing terabytes of data. Then, computers turn all of those waves into images to form a 3D map of your body down to the millimeter.

Midjourney calls the process Ultrasonic CT (computer tomography), a whole body ultrasound scanner. They explain it in more detail here:

Of course, this is just an announcement, and there’s a lot to build and a lot to prove. Some people are unsurprisingly more skeptical of the Scanner, and others are more measured about what it is and isn’t. I really like Friend of Not Boring and Ezra co-founder Emi Gal’s breakdown.

Having said that… a few thoughts beyond the technology itself:

1. It’s very cool to see a company branch out so aggressively. It’s imaging-adjacent, and it requires a lot of computation, but the company admits that “It’s not related to anything you’ve seen from us so far.” But, they write: “However, we feel an obligation as people standing on the frontier to look at the foundations of the human experience and ask: ‘What do we want to be different?’ ‘How do we want to be different?’ and ‘What do we want to become?’” That’s a very cool way to think about it, and I hope more companies get creative with what they can do given a bunch of smart people, money, and attention, even if many fail in the process of unfocusing.

2. Midjourney hasn’t raised VC and is profitable, which gives them the leeway to do this (or whatever they want).

3. The reason they’re able to do this so quickly is because they’re partnering with Butterfly Network, which is a fascinating company that makes ultrasound-on-chip. Interestingly, Matthew de Jonge, the founder and CEO of hearing aid company Fortell, which we covered in Dose #172, is the ex-VP of Product at Butterfly. You can do magical things with hardware when you’re willing to go all the way down to the chip.

4. If you look at David Holz’s bio, this isn’t as crazy as it looks. He’s built hardware as the co-founder and CTO of Leap Motion, worked on planetary imaging at NASA, and researched neuroimaging algorithms at Max Planck Florida to map an “entire rat brain” to the cell level.

   

5. Holz said the Scanner is the first of eight major announcements it plans to make in 2026. MOAR.

6. This is a new entry into The Great Differentiation canon, and it’ll be interesting to see how the other seven fit in (or don’t). Different products as differentiation would be fun.

(2) Making the Invisible Visible with the Laser Phase Plate

CZ Biohub & UC Berkeley

Bigggg week for seeing litttttle things.

Zuck’s CZ Biohub, in partnership with UC Berkeley, announced their Laser Phase Plate last week, which looks and sounds cool, but which honestly I didn’t understand until I saw a lot of very smart people tweet something to the effect of “most people won’t appreciate how huge this is but I do because I’m very smart” so I looked into it.

Basically, scientists can’t see the proteins inside of a cell in real-time in their natural environment. They can image ~10% of the proteins once they’re pulled out and purified, using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), or < 1% when they’re actually working inside a cell, but most of our cell’s proteins operate in the shadows. They stay too faint to see because current imaging techniques can’t create enough contrast.

In light microscopes, the normal ones, scientists have understood how to solve the contrast problem since Fritz Zernike won a Nobel for it in 1942. With an electron microscope, though, it’s way harder, because anything you place in an electron beam gets zapped and fried. So fifteen years ago, Berkeley physicist Holger Müller proposed swapping the physical part for a laser. Cool idea, but “because light barely interacts with electrons, the laser would have to be extraordinarily intense,” so intense as to be impractical.

Until now! The CZ Biohub and UC Berkeley researchers (led by Müller himself) published two papers (Science and Nature Communications) and a preprint explaining their laser phase plate, including Müller’s solution to the laser intensity problem:

Müller’s solution was a so-called Fabry-Perot cavity: a pair of mirrors that bounce a laser beam back and forth roughly 10,000 times. Each bounce amplifies the intensity until the light focused between those mirrors reaches roughly 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the Sun — the brightest continuous-wave laser in the world.

See the results for yourself. The image on the left is with the beam off, and the right is with the beam on (you can drag it on the Biohub blog).

Interestingly, better contrast also unlocks cryo-electron tomography, or cryo-ET, which “builds three-dimensional reconstructions of structures inside intact cells — revealing not just protein shapes, but how proteins interact with their neighbors,” and which I bring up because how often do I get to cover tomography in back-to-back entries?

The hope is that the better we can see, the better we can fix. We down with LPP.

(3) Valar Atomics Goes Critical

Out in Emery County, Utah, Valar Atomics’ Ward 250 reactor went critical. This makes it the second new advanced reactor to go critical before America’s 250th Birthday on July 4, 2026.

What makes this one particularly sweet is how much doubt Valar founder and CEO Isaiah Taylor faced when he initially announced the company a little over two years ago. He didn’t have a traditional background - no college degree, let alone nuclear physics PhD. The way that he talked about building a lot of reactors really fast, and even using them to produce hydrocarbons if that’s where the first market was, was just Not How Things Are Done Here.

His reputation preceded him. And it was totally wrong.

When I got to speak with him for Age of Miracles, it was obvious that Isaiah was a rare actual example of that thing that everyone claims to be: a first-principles thinker, which is something it’s easier to be when you come from outside the industry.

He did things like start with the market and work back to the specific technology, make systems-level trade-offs for speed over efficiency, and compare the cost of machines of different sizes (like buses and gas plants) to nuclear reactors instead of just taking for granted that nuclear reactors are expensive. He became one of our go-to people for Age of Miracles because he was so clear in his explanations and novel in his approaches.

Anyway, it’s cool to see him just do the thing in such a short amount of time. Now, he and the Valar team have to fulfill the rest of the mission: first, power operations by July 4th, then, print tens of thousands of reactors across the globe to make energy 10x cheaper than it is today with mass-scale nuclear fission.

Being Critical: 0

Going Critical: 1

(4) Anduril Wins Production Contract for U.S. Air Force CCA Program

Wayyyy back in Dose #91, in April 2024, we led with Anduril’s selection for the U.S. Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program. In that early phase, for which it beat out a number of incumbent primes, “Anduril will design, manufacture, and test production-representative CCAs.” Then, we wrote, “Ultimately, the USAF will make a final, multibillion-dollar production decision in two years from now — it said that it wants ~1,000 craft — with the goal of having fully operational crafts by the end of the decade.”

Two years is up ladies and gentlemen, and … drum roll please… we have a winner.

This week, the Air Force picked Anduril’s FQ-44 “Fury” as one of two jets going into production for the CCA fleet: uncrewed fighter jets designed to fly alongside human pilots as autonomous wingmen.

Anduril went from prototype award in 2024 to a production contract this June, which is the fastest any fighter has gone from prototype to production in more than half a century. The decision landed four months ahead of schedule, so good on the Air Force, too. It’s also the first time a new company has won a fighter aircraft program since the 1970s, before the F-16 existed.

The Air Force wants more than 150 FQ-44s by the end of the decade.

Anduril didn’t get the W solo. General Atomics won an identical contract for its own jet. But the Air Force resolicited Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop, the incumbents who’ve owned fighter programs for fifty years, and it passed over them in favor of Anduril once again.

It’s time to produce now, lots to prove, but it’s a great step on the way towards “saving western civilization by saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens of billions of dollars a year.”

(5) Notes from Reindustrialize

This week, I went on my annual pilgrimage to the Motor City for Reindustrialize. This was my third, and in my opinion, the best yet.

The thing that’s stayed consistent is the density of great people. They save me like 10 discrete trips by pulling so many good people to Detroit.

Where else can you eat Westmag hot dogs with your favorite founders, investors, and policy people while watching a drone show in a metal factory?

What’s changed is that where Reindustrialize 1.0 focused on arguing that we should build things in America again, Reindustrialize 3.0 was packed with examples of companies actually building in America. It was much more focused on execution details than before, because Reindustrialization is happening.

I got to moderate two panels - one with Micah Springut of Monumental Labs and Alexis Ohanian of 776 on AI and the Workforce (and how to build beautiful things), and one with Sam D’Amico (Impulse), Justin Lopas (Base), and Adam Warmoth (Chariot Defense) on The Electric Slide. Both got very specific - the right balance of automation and craft, how to decide where to integrate and where to buy, etc…

It’s wild how much can change in two years. At Reindustrialize 1.0, I moderated a panel making the case for nuclear. To my left were Valar Atomics’ Isaiah Taylor and Decisive Point’s Tommy Hendrix.

This week, just this week, Isaiah’s company went critical, and the company that Tommy founded after Reindustrialize 1.0, Standard Nuclear, filed its S-1 to go public. Not Boring Capital is an investor in Standard Nuclear because of Reindustrialize.

There’s a ton of momentum, capital, and talent going into making big things again. I can’t wait to see what this year’s crop announces during Reindustrialize week two years from now.

EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, SpaceX & the Sentient Sun, Dean W. Ball

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