SECRETARY RUBIO: There was this fantasy, really, that the whole world would become a free enterprise democracy, and that everyone would look like us. That ran into reality.

I learned last week that VCs don't seem to fly out to see the hardware companies they're investing in. This struck me as totally insane. While I was in India, my walk through @Airbound_Aero revealed much of what I wanted to know. Have been through so many factories that I can usually tell in about five minutes what's real and what's hoping to be real and what's total garbage. Airbound had lots of the touches of an early @RocketLab - organization, attention to detail, etc. I get that investors are looking at the founder and the business and their models. But feels like you could save a lot of heartache by bothering to get on a plane.

America doesn't need to rebuild the factories of the 1950s. It needs to invent the factories of the future. @EdwardMehr and @freeform_future CEO @ErikPalitsch discuss reindustrialization, lessons from SpaceX, outmaneuvering China, and the future of physical AI. Full discussion 👇

Helicon is building factories to industrialize composites. We raised a $16.5M seed round led by @alley_corp (@abemurray /@JonesBrannon) with participation from @joshbuckley, @chalfs, @gokulr and other top investors. We’re ramping production at our factory in Los Angeles to deliver against millions of unmanned systems that need to be built domestically. We're building a world class team. Join us. helicon.tech

Okay it’s happening: - Added 160k square feet in Reno for our automated high volume lines and parts up to 5’x10’. Operational now. - Added 170k square feet in Pittston PA for 1-day shipping (or faster) to the Northeast US. Landing machines and growing the team now. - Southeast US is next (flying out next week to negotiate a lease). 3 more leases in 3 more states to sign after that. Expect massive lead time reductions across our factory network. - Finalizing our first acquisition and working on the second and third. These are services you’ve been asking for. More coming. We’ll be able to say yes to more of your BOM. - Welding is ramping nicely. More assembly support soon. - More materials and capabilities for CNC machining in development now, including much smarter pricing. Increased capacity will also help us cut lead time drastically. - Added 450 people so far this year. Hopefully double that in 2027. - Candy and merch budgets have been tripled. …And we’re just getting started. That’s a big part of why we raised again: to build more, ship faster, and make manufacturing easier and more accessible. I’m doing my best for ya. I love you guys. Big thanks to @willreed at @sparkcapital , @caitlinbolnick1 at @CRV, @marksugarman at MHS, @andrew__reed at @sequoia and @matthuang at @paradigm for supporting our Series B (and the extra rocket fuel) LFG!!!!! 🇺🇸

This evening I sat across from the CEO of a so-called trading neo lab with over $1B val. He told me their models—built on best-in-class RL environments and online learning algorithms—have produced exceptional pnl and sharpe ratios. I later learned that the company is, in fact, a data broker LARPing as a frontier lab. Its actual edge is trading stocks and options on insider information of model releases and synthetic-data acquisitions. It appears I have once again materially underestimated the absurdity of this industry.

It’s really simple. Our Robots and AI vs their Robots and AI. If we can catch up on robotics/software , and can stay ahead on AI, there is zero reason manufacturing won’t come back, or initiate here. At Cost Plus Drugs, the only thing holding us back from making generic drugs cheaper in Dallas than we can buy from Asia, are the fees we have to pay.

I've spent years in China building robots. I can tell you this playbook won't work: Pre-seed $: Invent the ultimate actuator. Seed $$: Figure out mass production. The hard part isn't inventing a beautiful topology. It's process engineering. The real delta between the US and China is the ability to execute the enormous amount of physical x mental work required to iterate thousands of times on product designs and manufacturing processes. Partly because much of the tacit knowledge / management systems has left the US, but also because of the sheer human labor required. This isn't something you can solve by buying traditional automation lines either. It requires: 1. Ideation driven by human intuition. Walking up and down the line, talking to assembly workers, and developing hypotheses about what and where improvements can be made. Raw human hours and attention spent understanding a specific manufacturing process. 2. Large batches of experiments across multiple variables. Coordinating experiments that can easily involve 50+ people, issuing instructions, and tracking the execution and results of each experiment. 3. Purpose-built test design to identify key metrics. For example, a change in gear hobbing profile might require accelerated aging tests on a dyno, while a change in bearing tolerance might require NVH testing. 4. Data + human intuition-driven analysis. Interpreting test results and deciding whether to implement a process change or run the next set of experiments. 5. Strict process control. Reissuing work instructions to the line and ensuring every process is followed to the letter. The best manufacturers in Asia, from Foxconn to TSMC, have built their competitive advantage on systematically turning thousands of physical experiments into better manufacturing processes. Their moat isn't just production scale. It's the organizational machinery that makes manufacturing learn and improve faster than anyone else. I don't think most people in SF clock this. Say you're manufacturing actuator gears in-house in the US. After you've made your first article, will you hire a team of 10 process engineers to coordinate the 50 technicians running concurrent experiments with designs, processes, and materials? To understand wear patterns across every pin in a cycloidal drive after 10,000 hours? To reduce backlash from 15 arcmin to 5, then to 1? Just to keep pace with China's progress over the next few years? Do you have the skill set and management systems in place to do this? That's why our approach isn't just to automate manufacturing. It's to automate the process of learning how to manufacture better. Automate simulation and design optimization. Automate assembly and physical testing. Automate the design and execution of process experiments. Feed real-world experimental data back into simulation to continuously improve sim-to-real accuracy. The goal is to turn what currently takes 50 engineers coordinating thousands of experiments into a closed-loop system that continuously learns and improves. Then the same robotic line mass-manufactures the product. PS: Coming back to actuator design, many actuator designs are already commoditized in China. The project in the video is open source, and CNC machining cost in China is just $27 (watch the video). I hope people understand this reality. I'll link more examples in the replies.

so the productized lanes @OSHBuilt wrote about last week have a 28-year history. i did a bit of digging this week. here's what each one said NO to: > protomold, 1999: anything that wasn’t a two-part aluminum mold > quickparts, 2000: no quote without a file, and they patented that > osh park, 2009: one purple stackup, $5 a square inch > rapid sheet metal, 2013: no prints, 3d files only (sold for $120m) > sendcutsend, 2018: no prints, 44 by 30 inches max > osh cut, 2018: same price for everyone, no negotiation > fabworks, 2023: metals only > digital metal, 2025: no tooling, castings from a printed tree > finalrev, 2025: step files only, same day > twentyfour26, 2026: one part size, 6061 > phoenix heat treating, 2026: in testing there are more for sure, but many didn’t survive (plethora, tempo, fast radius, shapeways), mostly because they said YES to everything. but yeah, this is a long one. give it a read over the weekend and let me know who i forgot or got wrong.