For over two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight China. (Russia, too, if necessary.)
Out in El Segundo, California, where the salt-water-tinged air thrums with steady plane traffic and oil refineries sweep across the shoreline, these founders have settled on a place where they can act as faithful foot soldiers of American industry as well as bold incubators upending Silicon Valley’s status quo.
“We’re pollinating different ideas,” Augustus Doricko, the founder and CEO of the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, which raised $6.3 million from venture capitalists in May, tells me. “We’re sick of nihilism and goofy software products.” Behind him, on Rainmaker’s office wall, hangs an American flag the size of a dumpster. Opposite is a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently onto a bench press below. “Right now,” he adds, “Gundo is for hard tech what Florence was for art during the Renaissance.”
For decades, cities across America have aspired to assume Silicon Valley’s mantle as the next technological hotbed. It was rumored for a short while that the entrepreneurial epicenter had shifted to Austin and then Miami. Before that, there was Silicon Alley in New York and Silicon Beach in Los Angeles. When it comes to “The Gundo,” the technological zeitgeist is, like all of these places, fueled by venture capitalists, who have invested more than $100 billion in defense tech companies since 2021, many of which are located in El Segundo. (You can sometimes catch VCs wandering the warehouse-lined back alleys in hopes of snagging a meeting with an entrepreneur. So feverish is the financial frenzy that Gundo founders often joke about renting a double-decker bus, filling it with potential investors, and offering local tours.)
But the founders are adamant that their city, despite its investment windfall, is not Silicon Valley’s next act. In fact, it is ideologically opposed to what they consider the soft and comfortable world of the Bay Area and the lightweight commodities it now largely produces: corporate subscription software and trivial consumer applications.
“This is not ‘San Francisco lite’ or ‘San Francisco plus a little bit of hardware,’” says Zane Mountcastle, the straight-talking CEO of the defense technology company Picogrid. “It’s a different world from San Francisco and it has a completely different mindset.” Mountcastle, who first started working in the Bay Area city of Livermore, saw that only a few years ago Silicon Valley had little appetite for companies that aid the military. “At parties, when I told people what I did,” he says, “they’d be like, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’”
Despite its proximity to Los Angeles, El Segundo is a factory town with a laid-back temperament. The city is home to less than 20,000 people and has deep manufacturing roots: Nearly three quarters of its land is dedicated to industrial uses, including petroleum refineries, power plants, and aerospace manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It is imbued with Californian nostalgia: Patrons sip beer on bar patios alongside their dogs and the occasional parrot. Below billowing steam towers, the downtown streets are flanked with retro diners and vintage record shops.
The founders in El Segundo have settled on an expansive terrain in which to express sentiments that might chafe otherwise progressive sensibilities. They have an outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their Lord and savior Jesus Christ. They are aspirationally blue collar, often wearing blue jeans, clean leather work boots, and dark T-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets. By day, the founders often trek to the Central Valley to launch drones into the airspace. By night, they can be found drinking Singapore slings at the Purple Orchid tiki lounge, or burning pallets at Dockweiler Beach, chewing nicotine pouches, and chugging energy drinks.
At the offices of the nuclear energy company Valar Atomics, where I was invited to attend a Bible study, Bibles were propped up on desks beside laptops. Valar Atomics’ head of business operations, Elijah Froh, who is 26 years old and has the straightforward self-assurance of a car salesman, offered me a glass of raw milk, increasingly the drink of choice in many conservative circles. Then, he led our small group in prayer and read aloud from a passage in Hebrews.
Later, Froh invited me into Valar Atomics’ cigar lounge, where actual cigars can’t be smoked due to a permitting issue with the building. We sat in enormous leather armchairs beside a small table stacked with cigars sealed in Ziploc bags. On the wall hung four large classical paintings depicting Columbus discovering America, the pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention. Froh told me that God needed businessmen just as much as he needed missionaries, and that God had put him on this earth to build a nuclear energy company. “A lot of people are seeing the societal value of religion,” he said.
