Why I mailed 30 axes to CA, TX, and NY
Hard tech’s toughest league
In today’s Diary:
30,000 generations of no change
A room that makes rain
Why stories beat facts
LA vs. the world
What I’ll tell Aubrey
Hey Rational Optimist,
This week 30 heavy parcels landed at some of the most interesting addresses in America.
A castle in Burbank… a drone factory in Torrance… a biodefense lab in Redwood City.
Inside each box was an axe engraved with the founder's name and a number out of 30.
These axes went to the inaugural Innovators League 30: our handpicked list of startups that are inventing the future.
Pictures of them are making the rounds on X (Twitter). Here’s one from Casey Handmer, founder of Terraform:
Why an axe?
For 25 years most of the smartest kids built apps and optimized ads.
Meanwhile the things you can touch, like power plants, homes and medicines, got slower and more expensive to build. ROS co-founder Matt Ridley calls this "the innovation famine."
The 30 founders on the Innovators League are bringing technology back to the real world, where good jobs, cheaper stuff and real prosperity come from. The axe is my salute to them.
Also, Matt Ridley once put a stone hand axe next to a computer mouse while he was giving a talk on stage. They're a similar size and shape because both were made to fit in a human hand.
Our ancestors made that stone axe with almost the same design for about a million years. In Matt's words: "Homo erectus made the same tool for 30,000 generations… There was no progress, no innovation."
Today a mouse goes obsolete in five years. What changed?
People started trading, and ideas started generating other ideas. Matt calls it "ideas having sex." Look at the size of the world economy over the last 2,000 years. For most of history the line barely moves.
Then about 200 years ago it goes whoosh:
Sixteen years ago, I was a broke college student reading a book on the bus.
It was Matt's The Rational Optimist.
Page after page it showed how and why the world had never been better. Compared with 1955 the average person on Earth in 2005 earned nearly three times as much… ate a third more food… and could expect to live a third longer.
I thought everyone would catch on… yet the mood got darker. Today about three in four Americans think their kids will grow up worse off than they are.
How can the world keep getting better while people feel it's getting worse? Because facts don't change the world. Stories do.
We're living through a golden age of innovation and a dark age of storytelling.
It’s not good, especially for kids, who are shaped for life by the stories they hear.
ROS exists to fix this. Over the past two years we’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in trips and flown just as many miles to visit 100+ companies. Dan and I kept walking out of factories asking each other the same question: How is this not front-page news?
So we built two things:
The ROS database tracks 1,100+ frontier companies, updated weekly. It's how we find and keep up with the founders worth meeting.
The Innovators League 30 is our handpicked list of the founders we've met and believe in most. It's a living Rolodex of the startups reshaping America, which most people don’t even know exist.
From the 1,100+ companies in the ROS database, 30 made the Innovators League.
Harder odds than getting into Harvard!
There’s no application form, and no PR firm can get you on it. Every company had to pass three tests:
It's working on a problem that matters for all of humanity.
The technology is real.
We've seen it with our own eyes.
That last test matters most to me. We've met every founder on this list in person, most of them more than once. We're looking for people who'll be far more important in 10 years than anyone realizes today.
They’re building bodyguards for satellites. Nuclear reactors that roll off a production line. Natural gas made from sunlight and air. Houses built like flat-pack furniture. Excavators with nobody in the cab. Supersonic jet engines. Drug factories in orbit. A box that turns seawater into drinking water. And so much more.
What I love most is visiting founders and getting my hands on this stuff. A few recent highlights:
At leading drone maker Zipline they try to break every part before a customer ever touches it. There's a room that makes rain, tables that shake parts, and chambers that swing from boiling-hot to colder than anywhere on Earth.
AstroForge is using special lasers to mine platinum from asteroids. They cranked the laser up for us, and the rock it pointed at started to burn and smoke.
At Varda, which makes drugs in space, I looked inside a 200-pound capsule built to bring home a few grams of crystals. Why fly so much for so little? Think of it like a sourdough starter: grow a near-perfect crystal in space, then use it to grow far more back on Earth.
I'd love to build satellites like Apex Space’s Ian Cinnamon, whom I call the Henry Ford of satellites.
Or nuclear reactors like Isaiah Taylor, who founded Valar Atomics in 2023 and in less than three years took a reactor critical.
But my skill set is telling stories. And I've come to believe the story matters as much as the machine.
In the 1960s and 70s America built nuclear reactors by the dozen. Then after 1978 regulators didn't approve a single new one for 34 years.
Supersonic flight worked too, until America banned it over land in 1973. Today's airliners fly no faster than a Boeing 707 did in 1958:
In both cases the technology worked but the story lost. So we stopped building.
But a good story puts technology in people's hands. Last month I wrote about Vital Lyfe's $749 box that turns seawater into drinking water. Lots of you wrote back to say you'd pre-ordered one.
Remember Matt's hand axe? It barely changed for 30,000 generations because ideas couldn't travel. Stories are how ideas travel.
And stories matter most for our children. A kid who grows up internalizing defeatist stories doesn't try to improve the world. Nobody studies nuclear engineering for a future they don't believe in.
What have you heard about the future lately? “We can't build anything anymore. The best days are behind us.”
As a dad of three young kids, I want mine to hear a different story. I imagine my daughter Aubrey asking me one day: "Dad, what did you do when everyone was telling us the world was doomed?"
The Innovators League is part of my answer. One day I want to tell her…
I found the people building the future, and I told their stories before the rest of the world knew.
Seeing the future early is a superpower. Investors find opportunities on the ground floor. Job hunters find the industries of the next 20 years. Parents can point their kids toward the frontier.
Another perk of tracking 1,100+ companies? Patterns jump out that you'd never spot one company at a time. For example…
1. LA > Europe.
Draw a 10-mile circle around LAX. Inside sit 12 private frontier companies worth $1 billion or more. The entire European list has 11.
California, the state everyone keeps telling me is dying, holds over half the US companies we track and nearly two-thirds of their money.
I've said it before: Los Angeles is becoming the world’s most important city for building things. There will be more $100 billion+ companies born in LA over the next 25 years than any other city on Earth.
2. Born after ChatGPT.
Eighteen of the Innovators League 30 didn't exist before ChatGPT launched in late 2022.
Three of them, Neros, Valar Atomics and Bedrock Robotics, are already worth more than $1 billion. Across the whole database, 27 companies born since 2023 have crossed $1 billion.
Most people still haven't heard of them. That's the best time to start paying attention.
3. SpaceX is the new Harvard.
Nine of the 30 founding teams include SpaceX alumni.
Across the database we count 58 companies started by SpaceX veterans, from its very first employee, Tom Mueller, who now runs Impulse Space, to Chandler Luzsicza, a 24-year-old former SpaceX propulsion engineer building missiles at Galadyne.
Want to spot the next great hard-tech founder? Keep your eyes on SpaceX.
4. The CIA outguns Sequoia.
In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, backed 47 companies in our database. Sequoia, the most storied investor in Silicon Valley, backed 29.
Count the investors behind every company in our database and you see who's backing the frontier. Andreessen Horowitz leads with 77 companies.
5. Builders beat coders.
The Innovators League 30 has more than 1,000 open jobs. For every software opening they're hiring four or five people to build physical things: machinists, welders, technicians and engineers.
Torrance and El Segundo have a fifth of San Francisco's population but almost as many hard-tech job openings. "Learn to code" was the advice of the last decade. The advice for this one is "learn to build."
The Innovators League 30 is a club for founders.
ROS is a club for everyone who believes the future can be better, and wants to help build it.
Last Sunday I asked whether you'd come on a small ROS trip to meet founders. Two dozen of you said yes. A reader who'd toured Anduril's headquarters said it beat the Louvre and the Vatican. I agree!
These founders are doing some of the hardest jobs in America and building a better future for our kids. Two quick ways you can help:
Send someone a job. Founders tell me they are crying out for engineers.
Senra Systems will train you to wire jets and rockets, no wiring experience needed, starting at $18 an hour. Neros pays up to $90,000 a year for technicians who build and fly its drones. Valar is hiring a senior welder at $35 to $50 an hour.
Know a tinkerer, a veteran or someone ready for a new career? Forward this to them.
Share these stories. It matters more than you might think. I've watched founders whose stories get told recruit better, raise money faster and win more contracts.
So share this with your kids and grandkids, your nieces and nephews, your spouses. Text it to the friend who keeps telling you America can't build anything anymore.
Many of you already do. Thank you!
As President Reagan said in his 1989 farewell address, "All great change in America begins at the dinner table."
—Stephen McBride
P.S.: Next weekend I fly back to America…
I’ll meet up with Dan in Austin, then we head to LA, San Francisco and New York. I'll squeeze in as many founders as I can.
Who should I see? Tell me about the founder building something hard in a garage down the street.
And if you're in New York on Thursday, 29 October, we are speaking at NYU about our new book, Disruption Investing. Hit reply, and I'll send you the details.
