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For more than two years, on the small and simple beach of the city of El Segundo, dozens of young people have accumulated with a singular mission: to save America. They will achieve this, they say, by building the next generation of wonderful generation companies. What they build is real garbage, not what Northern software engineers invent while writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: they spend their workdays toiling in labs and production lines, and their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to control the weather. Others include the construction of nuclear reactors and army weapons aimed at fighting 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 silly software. Behind him, on the wall of Rainmaker’s office, hangs an American flag the size of a dumpster. Opposite, below, a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently in a bench press. “Right now,” he adds, “Gundo is in hard technology, what Florence is in Renaissance art. “
For decades, U. S. cities have aspired to take on Silicon Valley’s role as the next tech hub. Rumors had recently spread that the business epicenter had moved to Austin and then Miami. Before that, there were Silicon Alley in New York and Silicon Beach in Los Angeles. When it comes to “The Gundo,” the tech zeitgeist of the age 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 around warehouse-lined alleys hoping to get a date with an entrepreneur. The monetary frenzy is so feverish that Gundo’s founders joke about renting a double-decker bus, filling it with potential investors, and offering local tours. )
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