2026-07-24 21:07:04
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.
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.
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.
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! 🇮🇳
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.
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.”
2026-07-17 19:43:07
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)…
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.
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.
2026-07-16 20:53:19
Welcome to the 1,738 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 273,329 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
2026-07-10 20:56:10
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.
Most founders understand their finances in spreadsheets, and that’s a problem.
Your bank has the data. But to actually use it — check your cash position, reconcile transactions, understand your burn — you export it, paste it somewhere else, and do the work outside your account.
Mercury Command closes that loop. It’s AI built directly into Mercury* that surfaces insights and takes action from your live account data. Ask what you need to know, then act on it instantly — follow up on an outstanding invoice, set a limit on a card, categorize a transaction — all in the same conversation. You approve every step. Command executes.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2026-07-03 20:58:20
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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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.
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.
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.
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:
Aalo loads fuel bundle into its first reactors and begins splitting atoms pre-criticality
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.
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.
2026-07-02 22:06:26
Welcome to the 2,306 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 271,591 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
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.
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
