John Coogan’s Post

Transcript

American hardware innovation is making a comeback, and it's happening in Elsa Gundo. When I grew up in LA, Elsa Gundo was just the place you went to go to catch a flight at LAX, but now it's the place you go. If you're a founder of a hard tech company. The list of companies that were started in El Segundo is crazy. You've got SpaceX, Radiant Nuclear, Varda Industries, AB L, Space Systems, and if you zoom out a bit, you'll find Amberol, Hadrian, Rocket Lab, Relativity and Impulse Space. Tons of companies staffed by engineers who love solving hard problems and working on. Projects that won't pay off for decades. So let's talk about the history of hard tech and why so many founders are moving to El Segundo right now. A few weeks ago, I decided to take a trip out to the Salton Sea with a guy named Augustus Jerico. He's building a company that's trying to commercialize technology to control the weather. The Salton Sea used to be a resort destination, but has completely dried up and left the area devastated. It's a perfect example of something we could have avoided if we had more control over the weather. While we were there, we talked about China's weather modification investments. They're doing something called the Green Wall of China Project. Not only do they have the most large scale and technologically impressive cloud seeding operations in the world for supplementing the hydroelectric dams on the Yangtze River and the agricultural production on the Yangzi River, but they're also trying to terraform the entire Gobi Desert. We also talked about his company, Rainmaker. We're going to make it rain over farms. I think that in the next 12 months by servicing farms potentially in California, probably in Idaho, and we talked about his religious beliefs. God gave man dominion over the earth this season, the skies. Right. And so we've done pretty decent at taking dominion over the land. We have no control over the sea. We have no control over the sky. Right now I think that the onus is on everybody to bring about a world that's closer to paradise than when we were born in it. We have to try to build it. We also ranked all of his favorite energy drinks. STR is truly unrivaled. God tier, TRF tear is like you should never consume it under any circumstances. Sure. Water. Sewer. Water. So it's not as simple as Red Bull light blue can. A solid B tier. A dark blue can is a C tier then all like the varied flavors. D tier beverage D tier Yeah do you go with the 8 oz can or the big boy? The more sophisticated drinker does an 8 oz can try to stick to the 8 oz can monster. I think that the white 0 Ultra that is an S to your beverage green marking black can AT your beverage rock star. F Tier Garbage. Bad flavor. Bad sensation. Horrific memories. 5 hour energy that is interesting to see to your beverage. Bang. Not a good flavor profile. Those are DTR. Peter. Those are very bad beverages in my. Augustus has gotten to know pretty much everyone who's building hard tech and Elsa Gundo, so I called him up and asked him to give me a tour. But before we dig into the companies building in the area, let's talk about the history here. The town is tiny, just 5 1/2 square miles. Only 17,000 people live there. But a culture of building massive things in the physical world is in the water, literally. The town is right next to the huge Hyperion sewage treatment plant. It's also flanked by the LAX airport and the Chevron oil refinery. We're actually at the El Segundo refinery, which is. Don't buy Chevron. El Segundo gets his name from this refinery, Chevron. They actually set up this entire city as a refinery. It was their second refinery and so they called it El Segundo the 2nd. And now the whole city is named after this refinery. El Segundo has a really, really interesting history where obviously they started refining oil decades ago back in like the 40s and 50s. I think later in the 60s and 70s, eighties defense tech companies started moving in. Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman. All have offices there. So does the aerospace corporation, Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings. And the Los Angeles Air Force Base is there too. So it's become like a hub for building missiles, building weapons, building planes, a lot of really interesting companies here. SpaceX opened an office at 1310 E Grand Ave. in 2003, and today the building is occupied by a BL, Space Systems. I talked to Scott Nolan, an early SpaceX employee and current partner at Founders Fund, about this a few weeks ago. It's like one of the most underappreciated towns in LA. Think. The little community that's its own bubble, next to the refinery and next to LAX. And Ashley Vance, the first author to write a book about Elon Musk, was blown away when he toured SpaceX for the first time. I thought it would be like one rocket and this little rinky **** factory and people were not manufacturing stuff in the US. They definitely weren't making stuff in California. And so anyway, I walked in and there was just like thousands of people throwing massive amounts of energy to many rocket bodies on the floor. And so I just got super into it. All this talent has led to a culture of building hard tech in the area. Lots of defense companies have moved in, but also entrepreneurs working on energy manufacturing and anything else that requires rolling up your sleeves. The culture is really different from any other city. The anonymous poster praying for exits described it to me this way. I would encourage anybody who has the opportunity to go to El Segundo to go check it out. It is this combination of young kids, high levels of caffeine, nicotine, intense gym culture. And so I think the culture is like, you know, 1/3 deeply patriotic, 1/3 like semi unhinged and then one third like extremely hard pushing towards things that might not seem obvious to other people. So I had to go see it in person. First up was checking in with Augustus at Rainmaker. He gave me an update on his plan to control the weather and introduced me to some founders who were staying in the area. This is silver iodide. OK, so it's the traditional glycogenic seeding agent used. I wouldn't recommend eating it. It can in sufficient quantities turn your skin permanently blue. Part of why we're doing all of this ice nucleation agent experimentation in R&D is because we want to shift one the cost profile of nucleation agents down. This is silver. It's expensive and then also to make it more. Go friendly, make it usable across different temperature. The simplest way that we can test nucleation is with just like this car chest freezer in here. So this is 3D printed. We'll have an array of Q vets in here. This is temperature controlled and cooling rate controlled so we can go down from 0 C to -20 and then the the clever way we test performance of nucleation agents is with this silicone oil. It is more dense than ice, but it is less. Dense than water. And so you put a droplet of water with the ice nucleation agent in it, so like silver iodide. And then when that freezes, the droplet floats to the top. So you can do extremely high throughput identification of how long it takes for a droplet to freeze with a given Iona within it. Elsa Gundo has Hadrian right up the road, has the legacy of Spacex's original headquarters, the Bay Area. It has a lot of perks. It's beautiful. They've created a lot of value, but also like this sort of profile of the antisocial. Hunchback software engineer Starting a company is not cool enough to revive American manufacturing. And like deep innovation, we want to attract all of those teenagers and college graduates and other folks to come. Perhaps, like, even convert into this mode of cool engineering, and part of that is conferring social status onto it. So we do a lot of nagging of software and finance and law. Gundo is not zoned for software companies. But yeah, Then I talked with Isaiah Taylor, the founder of Velara Tonics. He wants to use nuclear power to pull oil out of thin air. It sounds crazy, but the plan is basically to synthesize gasoline from the atmosphere directly. So you can kind of think of it as using hydrocarbons as a battery for nuclear energy. Or as the transportation rail, one of the biggest problems with nuclear is that it's always done creating electricity. And if you're creating electricity you're basically transferring it to a local like city center which means that nuclear and cities are always near each other, always Co located. And that means that there's a huge regulatory burden on nuclear basically anywhere it's deployed. Then we drove over to Pico Grid. They're building a software platform to help different pieces of military equipment talk to each other. They have two different hardware products to help power cameras and sensors and then connect them to the Internet. Notably, we build a platform for autonomous systems, helping support the ISR, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance systems in the field with everything where the information needs to go, whether those are other unmanned systems, command control interfaces, different software systems, analytics tools. So this is one of the hardware systems we build and kind of our flagship product called Lander. For the first time in decades, we're seeing the DoD by real technology from smaller players and that's a real fundamental phase shift that's enabling companies like this, companies like like you see in this area. To actually hit scale, hit those first contracts and then started playing in the field. I think we saw the downside of what happens when you roll up the entire industry into a an oligopoly, essentially that controls most contracts, controls most technologies. There isn't much incentive to really push the boundary. There isn't much incentive to really innovate beyond what exists today. What is the next couple of years look like here? Are you going to graduate from the Gundo and move somewhere else or. Well, no. I mean, I think this is a really good space and the reason why I stayed here and didn't go back to the way it was because of the community that was here. Yeah. And I didn't realize this was here before I moved down. I I think a lot of it's credit to SpaceX on the broader aerospace community that's that's down here and kind of brought a lot of talent and just excitement for this kind of technology that I didn't find of the day. Of course it's there in some in some sense, but it's not the same density as it is here. I was just really drawn to that and it just felt like the better place to build this company. Specifically after Pico Grid, we went to talk to Cameron Schiller about his company, Range View, which is focused on making parts for aerospace and defense companies. They 3D print a custom ceramic composite and then pour molten metal into it to make the final part. Big example of one of the smaller molds that we're printing right now. You can see all the information on it, right? What logic came from, what order it's going to, And this has negative cavities on the inside, which filled with molten metal. There's a lot of complicated material science that we've spent the last few months nailing down. Range view represents more than anything, a new mentality and a new energy in the world. An energy that says I will not take what is happening in the country right now and I will work on the problems that matter. I wanna tell you about this alleyway that that we sit in right now. So Smokey Hollow, which is the the real heart of the industrial happenings and also Segundo right now has a massive aerospace history. This was built for manufacturing the space shuttle. The space shuttle was happening just South of this and we needed machine shops for it. Smokey Hollow, before EPA was a thing. It was pretty smoky here. And so all of these brick buildings, this, that, this, this one, all of here, they all have the right power requirements. They all have the right loading docks. Everything that you would need is a startup to like. Get your hands dirty on cutting metal and doing these things. It's all here. Most of it kind of turned into warehousing 10 years ago and it's seeing a resurgence now with really the last, the last year of what else you're gonna is becoming. I surveyed all of America when we left Northern California. Also going to was the spot and let's like also not beat around the Bush. 30% of it is like the SpaceX effect. And then and then that's just like started this flywheel of like Andrew being in the neighborhood and Varda and stuff and like just like one thing after another snowball. Exactly. It's awesome. Amazing. Then it was time to go fly some drones with the guys over at Neros. They've already been to Ukraine to help drone pilots improve their FPV skills and defend their territory more effectively. Soren is also one of the best drone pilots in the world. I used to be a professional drone racing pilot. I've been building high performance UAV since I was 11 years old. So it's it's just kind of been what I've been doing naturally and I realize that there's you know, tons of applications and defense for this stuff. A lot of what we're trying to do here at Neros is actually produce the components that go into these types of drones and eventually other types of smart weapons that we see to be really necessary now for a for a complete arsenal. Right now we have our, our first products just called N1 pretty simple quadcopter. We have that deployed over in Ukraine. It's being used successfully over there. This is one of the drones that we have over in Ukraine. Right now, two cameras, we have antennas in the back. These are swappable. This is a pretty standard like off the shelf drivetrain for the moment. You know this is a standard control setup for one of these FPV drones. You have, you know your goggles, your RC radio. So a lot of the stuff we we build right now is kind of based on this ethos. But to actually build defense products, you know for the DoD, there's a lot more that goes into it and there's a lot more considerations. I'm trying to make something that's very easy to pick up. For for every soldier, the goal is to make a drone that's standard issue across, you know the Army and every branch of the DoD that gives this incredible like range capability to every individual soldier. And I think that's another reason why we're very passionate about building cost effective systems because you end up with something that's so much more widely adoptable should go fly. Let's do it, let's do it. I picked because I started to see a lot of the companies that were based here, some really interesting startups. I saw the range. The guys like settled here when they got their new factory, one of the things I was looking for. Was a good hard tech community. I think it makes a huge difference being around founders who are experiencing similar things. And you know there's also such a direction towards like realness and manufacturing and really doing meaningful things here. Feels like there's a real community here. Here are the values are aligned properly and like the mayor of the town is a successful entrepreneur, he has seen combat like he. Is so aligned with what a lot of these companies are working on and many of the residents here work at some of the big defense companies or they work at the refinery. They understand the like need and value behind these kind of industrial endeavors and I think they're. Not necessarily against change, because a lot of innovation has happened here, but I think it's really important to balance that advancement, that change with kind of keeping the spirit of the town that makes it so great. I don't know what I was expecting, but I was not expecting that. That was incredible. Wrapping up a day in Elsa Gundo, or the Gundo as they call it here. Really interesting companies, tons of awesome founders building really cool technology. It's a very different culture from what you see in other cities. It's a lot of people working really hard. Hopefully a lot of these companies workout and become really big. It's awesome to see kind of the next generation coming up and and building here. Yeah, stay tuned for what's next.