Weekly Dose of Optimism #151

Hermeus, FAETON-I, Chai-2, Figma Files, 3I/ATLAS, Ambrook

Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 151st Weekly Dose of Optimism, which happens to land on America’s 249th birthday.

Every week, we find reasons to be optimistic. But zooming out, nothing fuels optimism quite like the American experiment itself. It hasn’t all been pretty, plenty of highs and some very real lows, but the long-term trend line is clear: up and to the right. Democracy works. Capitalism works. Freedom works. Let’s not mess it up. Let it cook for another 249 years (or more). I like our odds.

Sing it with me…

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Civilizational Velocity

Abundance Institute x Hermeus x Story Co

Any time we’ve seen an acceleration of a transportation network, it’s always been accompanied by pretty significant social and economic growth. And we haven’t seen one of those since the dawn of the Jet Age.

In May, Hermeus flew its Quarterhorse Mk 1 for the first time. It “took off from Edwards AFB, achieved stable flight, and landed smoothly.” Jason Carman and Abundance Institute captured it all.

Unlike future Hermeus aircraft, this flight wasn’t meant to prove in-air speed. It was meant to prove aircraft development speed. From 1945-1975, it took about five years to develop and field a new military airplane. Since then, that timeline has quadrupled. (see: wtf happened in 1971?). “The F-22 and F-35 took about 20 years to get to their initial operational capability,” Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica says in the video. Hermeus was founded 7 years ago, and “went from clean sheet to flight-ready in a little over a year.”

The next step will be to go supersonic, which Hermeus aims to do by the end of the year with the Mk 2, which is currently being manufactured at Hermeus HQ in Atlanta. This, too, bucks the trend. In the video, AJ says that the last time we broke a speed record was nearly a half-century ago, in 1977. Since then, new planes have gotten slower: the F-15 was Mach 2.5, the F-22 was Mach 2, and the F-35 is “like Mach 1.3ish.” Hermeus plans to fly Mk 2 at Mach 2.5, and get faster from there.

What Hermeus is doing is important for America, pragmatically and spiritually. Pragmatically, because it gives our military more speed and shrinks the globe. “Any time we’ve seen an acceleration of a transportation network,” AJ says in the video, “it’s always been accompanied by pretty significant social and economic growth.”

Spiritually, because we want to be a country where we can make faster and faster vehicles at a faster and faster clip again, where the trend lines start pointing back up after a half-century of pointing down.

Key to the American Dream is to live in an America that dreams.

(2) Experimental results and analysis of plasma dynamics and radiation output of the 100 kV dense plasma focus FAETON-I

Fuse Energy in Nature

FAETON-I is quadruple (4x) the neutron output efficiency than the next best pulsed fusion neutron source and >10x more than traditional z-pinch machines. FAETON-I also demonstrates the potential of a combined neutron/gamma radiation environment. This is a big step forward and paves the way for our next fusion machines. (

Speaking of the American Dream… the Fuse Energy team, which we dubbed the “American Dream Team” in our Deep Dive, published the experimental results of the world’s highest direct-charged dense plasma focus device in Nature, Scientific Reports.

As a refresher, Fuse’s founder, JC Btaiche, is a Lebanese-Canadian immigrant, and its Chief Engineer, Dr. Vahid Damideh, was previously the No. 2 nuclear fusion scientist in Iran’s nuclear fusion program. “Yes, you read that right,” Fuse wrote in a recruiting memo, “and no Dr. Damideh isn’t a spy; he’s a political asylee who also happens to be a world-renowned nuclear fusion physicist.”

JC, Dr. Damideh, and the Fuse team achieved something many thought impossible: excellent performance despite severe electrical "re-strikes" that typically cripple such devices.

As JC wrote, the paper shows that, “FAETON-I is quadruple (4x) the neutron output efficiency than the next best pulsed fusion neutron source and >10x more than traditional z-pinch machines.” Dr. Damideh explained, “We present—for the first time in Z-pinch history (over 70 years!)—a clear correlation between the dynamics-induced pinch voltage and the number of fusion neutrons produced.”

Fuse proved a few important things for fusion energy:

• High-voltage, high-current plasma focus devices can work effectively

• Deuterium-Tritium operation looks even more promising - the optimal energy range (80-200 keV) aligns perfectly with what these devices naturally produce

• Re-strikes may become irrelevant for D-T fusion, eliminating a major engineering challenge

• Peak yield reached 8 × 10¹⁰ neutrons - outperforming the universal scaling law for plasma focus devices

Beyond energy, they proved:

• Exceptional radiation testing capabilities for electronics, aerospace, and medical applications

• A unique combined neutron-gamma environment for materials testing

The Fuse plan is to sell radiation to build a real business on the way to fusion energy. This is a big step in that plan, and therefore, a big step closer to both a safer world and a more abundant energy future.

(3) Introducing Chai-2: Zero-shot antibody design in a 24-well plate

From Chai Discovery

When we set out on this project, we were aiming for a 1% hit rate , and we thought that if we could do this, it would be transformative for the field.

But when the data came back, we couldn’t believe it. We were way past 1%.

Rather than the 1% we were hoping for, it was closer to 20%.

Chai Discovery launched Chai-2, an AI model that designs brand-new antibodies, molecules that bind to specific parts of proteins, without needing any prior data. It finds successful binders 16% of the time, which is 100x better than older computational methods.

Instead of spending 6–18 months testing millions of guesses in the lab, scientists can now get working antibody candidates in just two weeks. Chai-2 does this by combining atomic-level protein modeling with generative AI to design stable, precise, and diverse binders right from the start. They liken it to Photoshop for Molecules.

Antibodies are the backbone of many modern medicines, from cancer treatments to vaccines, but they’re still slow and expensive to discover. Chai-2 flips the process from trial-and-error to something more like programming biology. It could mean faster, more targeted treatments, especially for diseases that were too complex or too costly to go after before.

Our house view is that LLMs aren’t going to turn into gods that take all of our jobs and render us meaningless meatsacks, no matter how much Zuck spends on researchers. But AI excels at navigating vast search spaces where traditional trial-and-error approaches are prohibitively slow, like in biology.

As they say in the video, “There are more possible protein sequences than there are atoms in the known universe. Previous methods have had to screen millions or sometimes billions of protein sequences to find a solution. But with our latest breakthrough, we’re often successful on the first try.”

The company believes that in the next few years, they should be able to design drug candidates in a single shot, straight out of the model. If that’s true, Chai-2 (or future iterations of Chai) will save a lot of human lives. Which is good, because we’ll need a lot of humans to keep coming up with new Chais.

(4) Figma Files Registration Statement for Proposed Initial Public Offering

From Figma

Figma, Inc. (“Figma”) today announced that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) relating to a proposed initial public offering of its Class A common stock. Figma has applied to list its Class A common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “FIG.”

Figma S-1

What’s that breeze I feel? Did Figma just open up the IPO window?

Early this week, Figma filed its S-1. You can find some great breakdowns of the business (TL;DR: strong business, beautiful business). For the purposes of this newsletter, we’re just happy to see strong companies that we love and use every day going public, and cracking open the window for others.

We make all of our beautiful images for Not Boring in Figma. We are very happy users and, via a portfolio company acquisition, small shareholders. In September 2022, Packy used Figma as one of the examples of magical software in Indistinguishable from Magic. It’s good to see magic rewarded.

Strong capital markets are essential to the companies that we write about in Not Boring every week. For investors to invest, they need to believe that they will be able to get their money back, and then some, through an acquisition or IPO. The IPO window has been pretty tightly closed (at least at the prices companies would want), and acquisitions have been hard to get past regulators.

Three years ago, Adobe actually announced it was acquiring Figma for $20 billion nearly three years ago, before European and UK regulators caused them to terminate the deal (which triggered a $1 billion reverse termination fee from Adobe to Figma).

And now, on America’s birthday week, Figma is dumping tea in the Boston Harbor, metaphorically speaking, and going public in American markets under American regulators and returning billions of American Dollars to employees, investors, and LPs, greasing the wheels of capitalism and setting the stage for the next wave of American companies to find their way into the accounts of American retail investors.

We’re looking at you, Stripe, SpaceX, and OpenAI. If not, we’ll see you on Robinhood Europe.

(5) It Came From Outside Our Solar System, and It Looks Like a Comet

Kenneth Chang for The New York Times

For only the third time, astronomers have found something passing through our solar system that came from outside the solar system.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…3I/ATLAS?!

Astronomers have identified a rare interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, entering our solar system, only the third such object ever spotted, after ‘Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019. It’s currently speeding toward the inner solar system at 130,000 mph and is believed to be a comet likely ejected from another star system. Its detection was first made by the ATLAS telescope system. Its brightness levels suggest a comet-like structure with a visible gas-and-dust coma, but its true size is still unknown.

Thankfully, it comes in peace: 3I/ATLAS poses no threat to Earth and is passing no closer than 160 million miles to us. But its extended visibility gives scientists a relatively rare view to study such an object in such depth. And while 3I/ATLAS is merely just a glowing rock racing space, it does always make you tingle when we’re unexpectedly visited by objects from outside our solar system.

bonUS: America, the Beautiful

Packy here. Sending you into your 4th of July weekend with a conversation with an entrepreneur helping Americans build their American Dream from the ground up. It’s hard to not be optimistic with people like Mackenzie on the case.

bonUS: Unlocked: New Test Footage.

Ok, last one. Please enjoy this recently released test footage of an Anduril Anvil-M taking down a Group 3 UAS (drone).

USA! USA! USA!

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Have a great weekend y’all.

We’ll be back in your inbox next week.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan