Zane Mountcastle
@zanemountcastle
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"Patriotic software developer attached to a defense startup" -Gizmodo. Cofounder & CEO @Picogrid. Techno-optimist. 🇺🇸/acc.
El Segundo, CA
Joined May 2010
The average age of engineers in mission control when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon was 28
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First new US nuclear reactor since 2016 is now online
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It's insane that OpenAI's revenue model of selling credits for DALL-E 2 usage was toppled almost immediately by Stable Diffusion's open release.
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imagine watching starship launch from europe . and then going back to another long day of coming up with new regulations.
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the elites don’t want you to know this but you can just build a factory and start making things.
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formerly shuttered mall being converted to a classified defense manufacturing facility . we’re so back
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Periodic reminder that China has 230x more shipbuilding capacity than the US
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Investment in US factories now at $190B per year
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this is what being a founder feels like.
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highlight of this wedding: getting served ice cream by the ben who is the literal ben from ben & jerry’s
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🚀🚀🚀.
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software engineers eager to build for national security in El Segundo, send me the most impressive project you’ve built. I will personally interview you and you will start as soon as Monday if it’s a fit.
honestly cs job market is cooked—you send 1,000 applications and get 3 callbacks, it’s just over. if you actually still want a cs career without already being credentialed you have to probably network & get a gig at startups, not even sure what else you’d do.
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men only want one thing . (a 130k sqft warehouse)
Build baby build!. 28541 Ave Penn, Valencia CA is our latest 127k sf warehouse development.
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build a factory, nobody can stop you.
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El Segundo is the ideal American city. - clean, walkable downtown.- world class aerospace + defense industry .- perfect weather year-round.- 10 mins to major international airport.- 10 mins to the beach
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> year is 2030. founder: I’m building in AI. VC: sorry, low margin commodity businesses aren’t investable, have you tried building hardware?.
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For the first time in over a decade, American manufacturing is outpacing the rest of the world
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“Babe come back to bed”. Not now darling, I’m not done rebuilding the American industrial base
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Serious engineers will eventually build their own hardware.
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when VCs ask how I plan to crush my competition
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@TaschaLabs 100% of these ideas are possible today using fiat money, but 0% are implemented. How does adding cryptocurrency make *any* of these more possible or appealing for the end user?.
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production hardware should be beautiful.
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The U-2 spy plane was built in 3 years
BART was expected to arrive in San Jose and Santa Clara in 2026, but now officials say rising labor and construction costs will delay the project 10 years.
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@jc50000000 @sgourley I think it's wonderful. It's just insane how quickly multiple competitors popped up when Dall-E 2 was heralded as such a massive leap forward in AI.
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Gainmaker Technologies, Inc.
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thinking about that time a VC told me they don’t invest in defense because they only fund things that make the world a better place.
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Imagine building incremental SaaS when you could be doing this instead.
Today I'm excited to unveil Valar Atomics!. Valar is my master plan to make energy 10x cheaper in 10 years by pulling oil and gas out of thin air with nuclear fission. This will untether energy from climate and politics, fuel American industry, and unlock a new era of growth
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we should be producing so much excess energy that we have no need for storage.
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Over the last 12mo, Lockheed made an average of $1.3B per week
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I’m extremely skeptical of any former Web3 founders migrating to American Dynamism.
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a bunch of 20-somethings are manifesting sci-fi novels. the composer of the Halo theme song is running for congress. America’s technofuturist era is here 🇺🇸.
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some poor VC analyst about to spend the next 3 days dissecting this.
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the biggest companies to be built over the next decade will be in aerospace & defense. but most modern SaaS can't be used due to ITAR export restrictions and data security concerns (eg. Slack, Deepnote, etc.). [x] for aerospace & defense might be a place to build a big company.
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journalists: hard tech bros are ruining the world .hard tech bros: haha look at my big machine.
you spend billions training models that have questionable value, and we have dune ass heavy machinery, we are not the same (this thing is HUGE)
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before it was the current thing, I was told by a VC that they don't invest in defense technology . because they only fund things that make the world a safer and better place for future generations. I still think about that often.
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another day, another historic technical breakthrough in america.
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her: what’s holding you back?. me: the maximum rate of welding aluminum 6061.
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Days like this give me tremendous confidence in America’s future
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yes.
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one more factory will fix me
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without downloading any new pics, what’s your energy going into 2025
without downloading any new pics, what’s your energy going into 2025
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Our portfolio company @Picogrid led by CEO @zanemountcastle is growing like gangbusters 🇺🇸 🚀 . They are hiring. 📍 El Segundo HQ
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this the meanest thing anybody could say.we are *not* software developers
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Selling pure software to the military is extraordinarily difficult because you can’t do this
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you can just call your office a factory, nobody can stop you.
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It’s a bad day to be a doomer.
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Hurricane Helene damage is much worse than the media would have you believe
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Picogrid, ABL, Radiant, Impulse, Rainmaker, Rangeview, Valar Atomics, Cambium, and Varda of course.
Except for the VCs who have had an office in El Segundo before "Gundo" was a thing right?.
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There’s nothing more satisfying than turning metal into machines
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Imagine believing this.
@G_S_Bhogal It's impossible to get rich without exploiting someone unless you were born into it because your ancestors did.
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big shift going on with many top software engineers eager to leave SaaS and work with hardware.
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This is my politics.
The thumbnail images from defense tech news articles are such a vibe
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military customers have seen *a lot* of vaporware in their careers. as a defense tech founder, your first job is to prove that your product isn't vaporware.
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Really great to see defense tech in this list for the first time.
The world is full of founders with expertise that could be tapped into something new and great. Our hope is that our Request for Startups (RFS) inspires some of those people to do so — or if they’re already building, to apply to YC.
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me and who?.
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my politics is that 3M should be renamed the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company
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Deadliest Catch but it's Gundo founders and their teams.
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I bet you didn’t know that Jason invested in Uber. you probably feel silly now don’t you.
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The continued success of wildlife conservation gives me tremendous hope that we'll be able to solve the biggest problems facing humanity today.
Technology (…saved the whales). Dense Urban Cities (…saved mammals). Institutions (…created norms).(Education, Law, Morality, Conservation Laws). = Saved animals.
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$20B but instead of enabling crypto scams it went toward funding American high-speed rail.
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the Portuguese air force still uses the symbol of the Knights Templar on their planes
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At this point we should just have a VC walking tour of El Segundo.
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software people think hardware is way harder than it actually is.
Hardware people think software is easy; software people think hardware is easy. Why? . Hardware people know how hard hardware is; software people know how hard software is.
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Picogrid saved another life in the Arizona desert this morning. [8:35 AM MT] Person autonomously detected, alerts dispatched. [8:48 AM MT] Nearby response team reaches the scene. [8:55 AM MT] Person rescued 2 days hike from nearest public road.
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“Consume more energy, have more kids”.
"Valar is my master plan to make energy 10x cheaper in 10 years by pulling oil and gas out of thin air with nuclear fission.". Founder @isaiah_p_taylor explains to me what he is doing at Valar Atomics like I was a 5-year old. Full episode here on X. Enjoy :)
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you may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
@zekedup @isaiah_p_taylor @cameron62s @HiLanden @KennethCassel @OHichwa @zanemountcastle @FilArons @JoshuaSteinman
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@alwsmssngBeirut Subsidies for domestic EV and solar production, CHIPS Act, IRA, and a 20yr trend of reshoring many other goods.
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*slaps top of cloud* this bad boy could produce so much rain.
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> excellent ML candidate declines offer in early 2023 in favor of stealth startup.> stealth startup diligently builds for 12mo.> stealth startup finally launches: turns out they were building AI-powered email spam software.> we might not yet be back.
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