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For more than two years, on the small and simple beach in the city of El Segundo, dozens of young people have gathered with a singular mission: saving America. They will achieve this, they say, by building the next generation of wonderful generation companies. What they build is real garbage, not what software engineers in the North invent while writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: they spend their work days toiling in laboratories and production lines, and their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to monitor the weather. Others are the construction of nuclear reactors and army weapons intended to combat China. (Russia too, if necessary).
In Segundo, California, where saltwater-tinged air vibrates with constant air traffic and oil refineries sweep the coast, those founders have settled into a position where they can act as unflinching infantrymen of American industry or as brave ones. prestige quo of Silicon Valley.
“We’re pollinating other ideas,” Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of cloud seeding company Rainmaker, which raised $6. 3 million from venture capital firms in May, tells me. “We’ve had enough of nihilism and dumb software. Behind him, on the wall of Rainmaker’s office, hangs an American flag the size of a dumpster. In front, below, a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently on a bench press. “Right now,” he adds, “Gundo is into hard technology, what Florence was to Renaissance art. “
For decades, American cities have aspired to take on Silicon Valley’s role as the next tech hotspot. Rumors had recently spread that the business epicenter had moved to Austin and then Miami. Before that, there was Silicon Alley in New York and Silicon Beach in Los Angeles. Angels. When it comes to “The Gundo,” the tech zeitgeist is, as in all such places, driven by venture capitalists, who have invested more than $100 billion in defense generation corporations since 2021, many of which are located in El Segundo. (Venture capitalists can rarely be found wandering warehouse-lined alleys in hopes of landing a date with an entrepreneur. The money frenzy is so feverish that Gundo’s founders joke about renting a double-decker bus, filling it with potential investors and offer local tours. )
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