Today, we’re launching an ambitious new school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy. Based in San Francisco, The Academy serves the most promising young high school graduates. We think this can be an elite institution that attracts top tier talent. One that prepares students for the future rather than remaining stuck in the past. The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They'll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups. There are classes and guest lectures, too, from some truly amazing people who have built modern-day Silicon Valley. The Academy is designed as a network, since that’s the reason students go to school in the first place. Core to that network are our 10 Founding Partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The network includes over 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors. To join as a hiring partner or faculty member, you can apply on our website. We raised $42M in funding led by @a16z. I'll be CEO and @pmarca and @eriktorenberg will join me on the board. Applications are open for our Founding Class Fellowship, which will be one year and tuition-free. Eventually, pending regulatory approval, we plan to offer a two-year program that charges tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university. We're looking for the most unusually ambitious young builders on the planet. Come join us in San Francisco: theacademysf.com/

🚨 WE'RE HIRING THE NEXT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF STATION DC !!!! We’re looking for someone with vision. Someone who wants to create something great for the District, region, country - and won’t accept anything less than what they know is possible. Someone with a will to win. With charisma. Someone who can inspire, lead, and align people around a big idea that almost feels impossible. Someone who genuinely loves helping founders, investors, policymakers, military leaders - and loves seeing them win and succeed. You are the side character. You need to deeply love DC and want to see this city grow. You need to understand the city deeply - both federal and local government. Know venture and what/who "matters." Love startups/tech. Be a natural connector. Honestly, this is a pretty incredible job and an unbelievable opportunity for someone with ambition. My network has compounded in ways I never could have expected. I’m regularly meeting with generals, Cabinet secretaries, world-class investors, and founders of $100B+ companies. I’m in conversations I never imagined I’d be in. I've learned a TON. And, maybe most importantly, I’ve had the chance to actually build something that matters for the greater DC community. It's been the honor and thrill of a lifetime. If someone comes to mind who is a natural connector, builder, networker, and leader - maybe from startups/tech, venture, hospitality, government, or just someone who has a track record of making things happen - please reach out. My DMs are open. Timeline ASAP!!!!

Should I start a Hacker House in DC? Thinking it would be in Dupont Circle, 4-5 bedrooms with 6-8 Hackers at all times. All the bells and whistles - fully furnished, utilities, wifi, cleaning included. Weekly dinners (with a special guest). 3-month minimum commitment per Hacker. Residents need to be building a company across some pre-defined category (energy, biotech, drones, robotics, industrials, etc.). Wouldn't take any equity or anything - it wouldn't be an accelerator, just a place to build with some community. I don't think DC gets to the "next level" (whatever that means) unless there's multiple of these/a legit Hacker culture spread throughout the city/region.

Few thoughts in response: 1) NASA has not given up on LEO. Within weeks of being on the job, I publicly addressed the Starliner situation and the role NASA played in it, and we have since taken a very active role with Boeing in implementing the investigation recommendations and putting Starliner on a path to life beyond Atlas V. We intend for Starliner to safely transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and commercial LEO destinations, in the years ahead. I actually agree that we should have more crewed transport vehicles, but how many major endeavors do you want NASA to solve simultaneously? The more NASA takes on in parallel, the less will be accomplished. And if there is considerable demand in LEO and lots of economic potential, nothing stops the companies referenced from raising capital and building vehicles. We are trying to get back to the Moon, build a base, get underway on nuclear power, launch more science missions, replace the International Space Station with a commercial service, but now we also need to fund several new crewed vehicles too? To the author’s point, nothing stopped one company from building a suborbital vehicle and operating it dozens of times without NASA as an anchor tenant, but I think market realities have spoken and the service appears to have been paused. 2) America and NASA are not giving up our astronauts, and as a commercial astronaut, I state that as emphatically and patriotically as possible. Of course, if useful research and affordable data become available as a commercial service, similarly to how we purchase and make available Earth observation data, we would have to look at it. 3) I am about as pro-commercial space as it gets, for what I hope are obvious reasons. But to be clear, you cannot simply slap the word “commercial” on every problem or opportunity, pound the table about “deleting NASA’s burdensome requirements,” and assume it automatically produces a more affordable, better solution supported by a thriving market. When people talk about relying on private capital and commercial services, someone still has to pay, a service provider has to execute really well, and if NASA is the customer, it is likely a service that has rarely been done before. If it turns out NASA is ultimately the only meaningful customer, that has the potential to become a very expensive proposition, if it works at all. 4) Premature commercialization can set both the NASA program and the emerging industry up for failure. We have seen approaches ranging from spacewalking-as-a-service to lunar-nuclear-power-as-a-service, often premised on NASA eventually being just one customer of many. Sometimes that market materializes. Many times--it is speculative. NASA, the taxpayers and the interested public should care about whatever achieves the intended mission outcome as quickly, affordably and safely as possible, and the contracting method is secondary. We can screw up cost-plus, fixed-price and as-a-service contracts just as easily. The outcomes are what matter. If, along the way, we can create a credible demand signal, help industry mature the technology and buy time for a market to develop, that is outstanding. But we should be grounded in reality rather than pretending a market already exists when it does not. 5) There are absolutely areas where the commercial model works extraordinarily well. Launch, Earth observation and communications are real services supported by real markets, and have been for decades, where NASA truly can be one customer of many. There will be more examples in the years ahead. In those cases, NASA can execute missions at lower cost and free up more of the NASA budget for the low-TRL, cutting-edge missions that have no obvious business case or revenue model, but change the world in air and space. 6) People often point to commercial crew and cargo as proof that this model works everywhere. It does not. Those programs benefited from NASA providing substantial early demand across dozens of missions, creating an opportunity for private capital to generate a return, even though I believe most did not, while also allowing an iterative design process rather than jumping immediately to the dream state. There is a big difference between maturing capabilities over a dozen cargo missions before building a no-fail crew vehicle and jumping directly to the crew vehicle, and I think the real-world data has demonstrated that. Even then, the development record across all of the crew and cargo providers was far from perfect. And today, the category leader is increasingly focused on opportunities with much larger potential markets, which should tell us something about the near-term economics of the market NASA helped create. 7) I have been very open that, in the near term, I do not know whether there is a sufficiently large LEO market where NASA can truly be one customer of many, but we will do everything within reason and within our budget to set industry up for success and ensure there is a home beyond the International Space Station. I do know demand for commercial LEO destinations will be heavily influenced by transportation cost, and those costs are likely to go up in the near term rather than down. Now, you can argue that if NASA had funded more commercial crew vehicles in years past, that would have changed the dynamic, but how many did you want for two crewed NASA missions to the ISS per year? We picked two providers, the results are apparent (for better and for worse), and clearly there was not enough supplemental commercial demand to justify further industry investment. The same uncertainty exists on the Moon. I cannot promise today that the economic value extracted from the lunar surface will exceed all of the input costs. What we can do is create a demand signal for landers, rovers, power, communications and other infrastructure, do so in a logical way that affords iterative design, and give a lunar economy every opportunity to emerge. I believe it will, but there are no guarantees. The mission is to return to the Moon and build the base for scientific, technological, national security and even inspirational reasons, and along the way, we hope enormous economic potential is unleashed. 8) If the objective is to force an economy out of every NASA endeavor, then NASA should probably sit inside the Department of Commerce. But NASA is an independent agency with a broader mission: to extend humanity’s reach farther into space, pioneer breakthrough technologies, undertake the near-impossible and unlock the secrets of the universe. While at times that is sure to leverage commercial capabilities and stimulate economic activity, it is not a prerequisite to achieving every mission.

As production of Marauder continues to scale, we're expanding the infrastructure that supports every vessel from shipyard to delivery. We're announcing our expansion to Gulfport, Mississippi, where we've established a dedicated Marauder on-water testing and commissioning facility at the Port of Gulfport. Our first Marauder is already undergoing on-water testing at the site, with trials running 12+ hours a day, seven days a week. Additional Marauders under construction at our shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana will follow the same path to Gulfport as production ramps. Thank you to @SenatorWicker, leadership from the @PortofGulfport and the University of Southern Mississippi, and representatives from the offices of Governor @tatereeves, Senator @cindyhydesmith and Congressman @RepEzell for joining us on site to mark the facility opening. We're proud to continue investing across the Gulf Coast. Read more here: medium.com/saronic-technolog…

Job Opportunity! In-N-Out Burger seeks a Director of Government & Legislative Affairs to serve as the company's senior advisor on legislative, regulatory, and public policy matters impacting the business. daybook.com/job/director-of-…

Yesterday I told you about Starfall, and how bringing orbital material to Earth is critical to the post-terrestrial economy. Today, I'm going to talk about the Valar reactor. In the future, we build things in space because space has infinity free power. Build a solar panel once and milk it forever. Elon Musk is trying to sell you solar panels on Earth so he can develop them for space. Solar panels are awesome in space. But they suck on Earth. What's awesome on Earth is fissionable material. These special rocks just radiate free power. And I don't mean a little bit of free power. I mean a huge amount. Like, you may think your modern automobile is pretty cool because it gets 30 miles to the gallon of gasoline. But a gallon of gasoline weighs 6 pounds. If you could run your car on HALEU nuclear fuel instead, then those same six pounds would drive you 11.3 million miles. You know, just in case you wanted to drive to the Apollo landing site and back. 23 times. But that's only 17 years of continuous driving, so you should probably put that six pounds of fuel in your Tesla instead. That way you could drive to Mars. In 69 years. At the end of your journey, you would have a bunch of highly dangerous radioactive waste, of course... six whole pounds of it. You would have to dispose of it by taking extreme precautions, such as handling it with gloves. And burying it one meter deep. In a coffee can. Do I have your attention yet? Now, the spicy rocks are really great because they're super spicy, but the traditional way of using them involves building a great big power plant that weighs about hundreds of thousands of tons, has to be built on a full square mile of wherever you want your power to be, and, for legal reasons, needs to be covered in the thick layer of federal bureaucrats to make sure things cost more, take longer, and generally suck. So that's where this dude, @isaiah_p_taylor, comes in. And he says "Wait a minute... if the spicy rocks are so goddamned spicy... why do we need a whole bunch of them in a huge containment vessel surrounded by acres of power plant?" That's old thinking. Based on our preconceived notions of what a power plant is, which we got from burning coal and oil and other stuff that can't bring you to Mars with one coffee can. Why not build a little tiny power plant? Like, a power plant the size of a train car? A power plant that you can load onto a train car, or a the back of a semi-rig, take it wherever you need it, and just set it down right there? Each one holds a wee bit more than that 6 pound coffee can. Like, maybe 90 of those. That'll get your Tesla to Neptune, if you have 4000 years to spare. Of course, that's not San Onofre. It won't power New York City by itself. But that's what the word "modular" means. Bring as many as you need. Need one? Bring one. Need ten, bring ten. If you actually do need to power New York City, bring 2000. And 2000 isn't an unrealistic number. Because that's also what the word "modular" means. Standardized. Interchangeable. Perfect the process with one, and then churn them out systematically. At scale. No individualized custom site design. No years of construction. No environmental impact study committees. No thick layer of bureaucrats. One design. One set of safety standards and protocols. One approval process. Then you crank them out forever. The concept is already proven. How do you think the Navy gets from San Diego to the Strait of Hormuz? Immigrant galley slaves? Sailcloth? And that's exactly where you get your workforce of modular plant operators... Navy vets who were running submarine reactors when they were twenty-two years old. Except you can put these on a construction site because they're not a big box of weapons-grade plutonium. They're a barrel of low-grade fuel you have to handle with... gloves. In the Robert Heinlein future, you run your factories in space with solar panels, because don't even get me started on how much power the sun gets from six pounds of hydrogen. But on Earth, you run your air conditioner like this.

The male urge to move to a small town, reinvigorate its economic engine, improve the quality of life for the people, be well-liked by his neighbors, and raise a family in a community of which he’s become a pillar away from the nonsense and excess of big cities and loud societies.

1k is so close. Surely 20 more people want to reindustrialize America and make life multi-planetary?!