Weekly Dose of Optimism #203
Travis is Back, Jacobian Conjecture Falls, Skyroot, Star Axis, Thunder + Extra Doses
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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