Austin + Detroit = winning
- Stephen McBride
- Jul 25
- 8 min read
Cities that say yes
Watch the news and you’ll hear America is failing. The system is rigged. The dream is dead. Our best days are behind us.
Visit Austin and Detroit, and you’ll see the truth: America is just getting started.
ROS co-founder Dan Steinhart and I just spent a week travelling around these two cities meeting with innovators and entrepreneurs. I wish you could have been there. Today, I’ll give you the next best thing and share my notes from the field.
Everyone agrees Austin is awesome. But Detroit, really? That’s what I thought too. Then I saw for myself it’s not a has-been city, but a city rising from the ashes, host to the greatest gathering of startups I’ve ever attended.
Austin and Detroit offer distinct but equally important blueprints for America’s future. We need both. Let’s start with Austin.
If Austin, Texas was a stock it’d be smashing through record highs
The city feels new and gritty, like it’s being born right before your eyes. Palantir co-founder, American Optimist and Austin resident Joe Lonsdale talks about the importance of having a frontier. We humans need a frontier to explore, or we stagnate.
Austin is America’s tech frontier.
Our first stop was Gauntlet AI’s office at 9am Monday morning.
Gauntlet is like the Navy Seals for AI engineers. Around 5,000 people apply, and only around 2% are accepted. If you make it through the 10-week program, a guaranteed $200,000 job is waiting for you. That’s the minimum guaranteed salary. One student scored a $950,000 AI programming job right after graduating.
The students work HARD. 7 days a week, 14 hours a day, for 10 straight weeks. Zero days off.
The rules: you can’t write any code yourself. You must use AI to write all code. Every week is a new project, and every student must create and “ship” a functional product by the end of the week.
Man, I thought I was using AI to max my productivity. The students at Gauntlet are operating on another level. They use AI to quickly build everything from new games to new businesses.
We met one team, led by a Yale graduate who’d worked in genetics for 8 years. They built a personalized genomics screening tool in a single week, complete with privacy safeguards that 23andMe lacked.
Many dads like me are wondering, "What should I tell my kids to do, to learn, as AI disrupts everything?" Apprenticeships like Gauntlet AI are one great answer. Expect many more to sprout up.
Shoutout to Gauntlet founder Austen Allred for showing us around.
America’s new energy capital is…
Same as the old one. Texas.
Rational Optimists know energy is the master resource. Cheap, abundant energy is the bedrock of all innovation.
Texas gets this. West Texas oil fields pump out nearly half the nation’s black gold.
But did you know Texas is also rolling out solar power faster than any other state, including California? And it’s rapidly becoming America’s nuclear capital.
In Austin we visited Matt Loszak, founder of Aalo Atomics. Aalo is building nuclear reactors small enough to fit in a Manhattan apartment but powerful enough to run a whole neighborhood. Its goal is to churn out 100 mini reactors per year, just like the one below, by the end of the decade.
Aalo is built for speed, designing its reactors to leverage existing supply chains and off-the-shelf components. It plans to start building a reactor at Idaho National Lab next year.
Matt said something that made the hair on my arms stand up: “Regulation will soon be a solved problem.”
For 50 years, regulation has killed all nuclear ambition. Now one of the sharpest builders in nuclear says the logjam is breaking. This is very bullish for America’s future. We’re entering America’s second atomic age, and it’s going to be better than you could imagine.
Austin is a city that says “yes.”
If I moved to the US, I’d live in Austin.
Because it says yes to robotaxis. Waymo’s robotaxis silently chauffeured us between meetings. A self-driving car ferrying us to see nuclear reactors. C’mon!
Yes, to building lots of homes. Affordable homes close to cities with great jobs is a pillar of the American dream. Unfortunately living in superstar cities like San Francisco and New York has become unaffordable for most.
Austin shows the “fix” isn’t rocket science. If you want to keep homes affordable, build more homes.
Spot the outlier:
Austin also says yes to new world class schools. We visited University of Austin (UATX), a startup university which I believe will be the next Harvard. We’re planning something big at UATX for November – more soon!
Austin is what happens when you combine top-tier talent and a culture that wants to build. The rebirth of the American dream: a city with affordable housing, fantastic job prospects and world-class schools.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the highlight of our trip, Terry Black’s BBQ. Yes, the brisket is so good it’s worth the 14-hour door to door trip.
But Detroit??
When Austin Bishop, co-founder of the Reindustrialize conference invited me to Detroit, I hesitated. Did I want to visit Murder City?
All I knew about Detroit was Eminem’s movie 8 Mile.
Happy to say I was wrong! If Austin is the frontier, Detroit is the heartland. It’s been struggling to stage a comeback since the 1970s, and now it’s finally succeeding.
The first thing that struck me about Detroit was its architecture. It has gravitas. I stayed downtown in the renovated Book Tower. Man, that building is beautiful. Detroit is very walkable. I ventured out at night and saw families with young kids eating outside. Everyone said hi.
Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013. The decline of the auto industry and “Made in America” decimated what was once the world’s richest city. Many people said it foreshadowed America's decline.
Wrong again, America haters. Detroit is back.
At Reindustrialize, I shook hands with founders building anti-drone turrets, next-gen batteries, military-grade lasers, robo mining trucks, portable nuclear reactors, flying cars, autonomous boats, weather modification tools, quantum computers, supersonic jets, and more.
These entrepreneurs are reclaiming America’s industrial might. They’re transforming the physical world with technology. That matters more than you might realize.
Ever notice how “technology” has a negative connotation these days? That’s because for most people tech means iPhones, the internet and social media.
The digital boom created immense wealth. It changed my life. But our homes, schools and energy sources all stagnated. For many this felt like a simulation of prosperity. “If we’re richer than ever, why is our infrastructure crumbling?”
The entrepreneurs I met in Detroit are bringing physical innovation back to America. Like Austin, they are saying yes. Yes to the end of red eye flights (supersonic jets). Yes to clean, safe energy (nuclear). And maybe even yes to the end of traffic jams (flying cars).
The most exciting startups I met
I’ll share much more about the founders we met with on our trip soon. For now, here’s a taste…
Neros
El Segundo-based Neros is building America’s answer to China’s DJI, which dominates drone manufacturing. It’s making factories that pump out ultra-low cost, lightweight war drones. Neros’ Archer drone weighs about 3 lbs. and is the size of a dinner plate. It’s the first mass scale US drone made entirely from non-Chinese components.
In Detroit Neros co-founder Olaf Hichwa told me they’re now producing 10,000 drones per month with the goal of making hundreds of thousands within the next 1-2 years.
Aalo Atomics, Valar Atomics, Radiant Nuclear
The race to power up America’s first small modular reactor (SMR) is on. Aalo and Radiant will both build test reactors at Idaho National Labs next year. Valar Atomics recently inked a deal with Utah to turn on its first reactor by the time America celebrates its 250th birthday.
The biggest takeaway from meeting with this nuclear trio was that regulatory roadblocks are being demolished. It’s time to build.
Allen Control Systems
Allen Control Systems’ flagship product is a turret called Bullfrog. It weighs 165 lbs. and can be mounted on a truck. Bullfrog takes an M240 machine gun and imbues it with computer vision and AI, allowing it to identify and shoot down enemy drones.
I got my hands on Bullfrog in Detroit. Very cool product. The team drove the truck 22 hours from Austin to show it off.
ACS CEO Steve Simoni told me demand is off the charts. Steve is a great guy and the perfect example of the ambitious folks behind the innovation avalanche. He spent years building products for software companies like DoorDash before deciding to help America win the drone war. (Check out our conversation with ACS's Director of Mission Ops here).
Bedrock Robotics
Robotaxis are truly a joy to ride in. Now three veterans who helped build Waymo are on a mission to make heavy construction equipment autonomous.
I shook hands with Bedrock Robotics CEO Boris Sofman in Detroit. He and his team are building a future where big yellow diggers won't need a driver. They can scoop up dirt and carve out the ground all by themselves.
Bedrock makes a smart kit with cameras and sensors that can be bolted onto any normal excavator, giving it a brain and eyes of its own.
The startup just emerged from stealth mode and raised $80 million in funding, led by Joe Lonsdale and our friends over at 8VC.
Rainmaker
Rainmaker’s CEO Augustus Doricko sees what we see as rational optimists: humanity’s greatest challenges are invitations to innovate.
An app that predicts the weather? So last decade. Controlling the weather? That’s more like it. Using specialized drones Rainmaker can make it rain on demand for a fraction of the traditional costs of cloudseeding.
Imagine ending droughts by watering crops directly from the clouds, turning barren deserts into lush farmland and stopping wildfires by pre-soaking forests.
We don’t have to be passive climate victims. We can be architects of our environment, engineering abundance where scarcity once ruled. More from my chat with Augustus, soon.
Boom Supersonic
New York to London in 3 hours. Need I say any more?
Boom Supersonic had a flight simulator at the Reindustrialize conference in Detroit. I had a go and got the top score for the day! I’m max bullish on start-ups making flight faster like Boom, Astro Mechanica and Hermeus.
Meanwhile…
I met a young couple on the plane who felt the need to apologize…
To me, an Irishman, for how messed up America was.
Huh? Please, get your head out of social media and the news.
One more big takeaway from this trip: the shifting job market. For 40+ years we told kids to go to college and get four-year degrees. Go work at a snazzy office, not with your hands.
That’s changing. America is building things again. That’s awesome for kids like my son Ri, an energetic little boy who wasn’t born to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day.
My friend and economist Tyler Cowen once said his No. 1 worry is societal pessimism.
Let’s change that by sharing the stories of America’s entrepreneurs.
—Stephen McBride
Stephen is a co-founder of the Rational Optimist Society.
