Me and my friends have decided that the US is back. We’re building things here again. Outsourcing was a silly little game for “financial engineers” with no patriotism or even financial vision that went beyond 10 years. It’s over. We’re back.

Picogrid is proud to have been down selected for the US Space Force’s Adaptive & Intelligent Space (AIS) Challenge. As space operations become increasingly software-defined, interoperable infrastructure will be critical.

250 years ago, a small group built something the world had never seen: America. 🇺🇸 That spirit never died. In 2002, @elonmusk moved into a warehouse in El Segundo and proved Americans could still build the impossible. A generation of companies was born from that building. They're still being built here today. If you're building something your family and your country will be proud of, come to the Gundo and build what you need to. Apply for the Fall Cohort below. Deadline July 17th. Featuring @jordannoone and @jordan__black

1/ Defense tech has advanced more in the past twenty-four months than in the previous three decades. We’ve identified five frontiers driving innovation in defense and national security. 1️⃣Autonomy moving from concept to combat 2️⃣AI permeating DoW workflows 3️⃣New vectors for advanced manufacturing 4️⃣Edge and network resilience 5️⃣Energy and materials independence. 🧵

My third interview with @Isaiah_p_Taylor, Founder of @ValarAtomics. Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor. 0:32 Manufacturing nuclear reactors is a SpaceX style problem 2:58 Scaling from 1 reactor to 10 4:31 Why it’s so tempting to iterate on paper instead of actually building reactors 7:37 Having contact with reality - modular shielding 10:09 Steel is cheaper than software engineers 11:09 Why the idiot index is so high in nuclear 16:02 Becoming a nuclear company 18:57 It's important not to lie to yourself 21:55 Obsessing over critical path 24:54 Nuclear reactors are relatively simple 30:35 Safety is a function of iteration speed 30:55 Why Valar had to vertically integrate 35:01 Designing a Toyota Camry vs a Ferrari 38:07 Running through 1-way doors 41:13 Pulling rabbits out of a hat 46:13 Wartime mode 48:49 Being willing to do unreasonable things 51:20 How Elon injects urgency into his companies 56:56 Relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10x cheaper 58:32 What’s changed over the last 3yrs 1:00:51 Designing safe nuclear reactors 1:13:05 Learning from SpaceX - optimizing for scale 1:18:07 Having a high tolerance for looking dumb 1:19:50 How Palmer Luckey handles hit pieces 1:20:55 Inevitable time 1:25:26 Predicting unknown bottlenecks 1:28:08 Scaling 1:29:45 July 4th will be a rebirth for nuclear in the United States

1/ I'm excited to announce that @Picogrid closed a $45M Series A, led by @BessemerVP. We're building the open infrastructure layer for the military's growing arsenal of sensors, drones, autonomous systems, AI agents, and C2 software.