Or, why Elon Musk’s impossible hardware businesses have succeeded.

Audio version.

“Why should I work on hardware???”

I hear you cry.

Not because I work on hardware, and I need you to validate my questionable life choices by repeating them.

Definitely not because I find working on hardware to be the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done.

You should work on hardware for one simple reason:

One day you will die.

You only get a few chances to work on really big projects, to build the future, to move humanity forward. Choose wisely!

“What sort of project should I work on?”

It should be something at the limit of your capability, so that you grow the most and have the most leverage.

It should be something that you, personally, need to see exist in the world.

It should be something that would not occur if you don’t do it. You need to seek out inefficient markets for effort.

“What do you mean by inefficient markets?”

SaaS is mature – there are enough smart people working on every possible permutation of code that your particular marginal addition is unlikely to accelerate the future by more than a few weeks, maybe months. The hardware sector is not mature outside of a handful of extremely restrictive verticals.

Most hardware concepts will never even be dreamed, let alone designed, built, and brought to market. There are many, many more important, good businesses to build than there are people building them. When you build something, you can accelerate the future by decades!

“But I just exited and I’m excited to work in VC to reduce stress and help allocate capital.”

Don’t be tempted! Hard things are hard. Do like Elon or John Carmack and stay an operator. One day, you will …

“Can’t someone else build it?”

In general, no. Google X and Blue Origin among others should function as cautionary tales. There is a class of hardware businesses that cannot be catalyzed by money alone, no matter how much is spent. No matter how long the buyer waits.

What this means is that if your vision for the future includes hardware technology that cannot be bought but has to be built, exclusively running a gold mine SaaS project to generate wealth is a losing strategy – because the outcome is the same. No hardware unless you fight to make it real.

“But I don’t know anything about hardware?”

No-one does. Humanity is still in its infancy. It is true there are people that know more about particular kinds of machines than you do, today. But nothing they learned is beyond your intellectual capacity to deeply understand and all can be learned in finite time. Step One is to admit that it’s time to read books and ask stupid questions. Step Two is to spend a year or three in the trenches climbing a new tower of esoteric knowledge.

This is time consuming but it is a necessary precondition for success. The class of sufficiently-interesting hardware startups must be founder-led. They must embody both the business and the technical side in order to find the intuitive clarity necessary to break out of analysis paralysis and actually build stuff.

“But I don’t have infinite resources!”

No quantity of raw money is enough to make up for a lack of vision, a lack of grit, or a lack of commitment to see the idea function in the real world. To coerce rocks into coming to life and embodying a sentient idea. Everyone’s resources are finite. Time, skill, attention, and last of all capital are vital.

Most of the hardware we need you to build does not require vast sums of money. Gaining competence in some school of design can be achieved by dedicated middle schoolers. Bootstrapped business models launched many of the greatest companies ever built, such as Ford.

“I could build a space station if I had NASA money.” “I could build a space station if I had a hardware technical cofounder to decide how to spend my wealth.” These are two sides of the same coin.

“Why now?”

First: The longer you wait to start building hardware, the longer it will have been since you should have started. Hardware is not instant.

Second: The time is right. Massive changes in industry are afoot. There is more opportunity to disrupt incumbents and build wealth than any time in the last century.

“Can you give me an example of this strategy working?”

What is unique about Elon Musk’s companies?

Let’s start by stating obvious things. SpaceX has landed more rockets in the last 12 months than the rest of the world has managed to launch. This apparently impossible feat occurs roughly twice a week, and was first performed by SpaceX in 2015.

Meanwhile Tesla is on track to sell nearly 2 million electric cars this year, while its competitors, including all the automotive titans, struggle to ship EVs with the specs of the 2012 Model S.

Elon’s companies are not unique in their ability to produce advanced hardware, but they are (AFAIK) unique in their ability to continually deliver innovations which are considered “impossible” by other industry experts who should know better, and have almost certainly advanced the state of the art by more than a decade.

“How? Why? Can anyone do this?”

In my opinion, Elon’s business acumen, recruiting ability, intelligence, immigrant journey, abusive father, etc are exceptional but hardly unique. What is unique is that when he started SpaceX he tried, and failed, to hire a chief designer, and kept that role. And at Tesla, he lost his faith in the early technical leadership and, against his better judgment, assumed technical responsibility for subsequent product development.

In both cases, by his own admission, he started out knowing nearly nothing about either rockets or cars and aggressively vacuumed up knowledge for several years before becoming usefully knowledgeable. When he ran out of English rocket textbooks he learned enough German and Russian to read those too.

Statistically speaking there is someone in the US who has survived being shot six separate times, so it is possible Elon is just lucky. But I don’t know anyone who has worked in any of his businesses who would attribute their success to luck.

Elon’s assumption of technical as well as business authority in his two successful hardware companies, started two decades ago, provides a roadmap for other would-be hardware founders. It allows them to maximize the rate of correctly-made decisions. No-one should suggest that building Tesla and SpaceX wasn’t extremely painful at times, but if you want to be 52 years old and have delivered millions of EVs and have landed rockets 220 times, you have to start today.

“But what should I build?”

Whatever will get you out of bed in the morning. Whatever you dream about waking and sleeping. Whatever the future must contain, but will not, unless you build it.

Your particular contribution is to pluck a worthy idea from the infinite sea of possibility, to determine how it must take form in the physical world, and to contrive a way to connect it to the engine of capitalism so it can generate self-sustaining wealth and value for its users.

“Okay, if you had infinite time, what would you build?”

If you’ll indulge me, here’s my list of potential projects, with light editorializing.

Energy supply

• Synthetic fuel.
• Better polysilicon production tech. The Siemens process feels paleolithic.
• Flexible silicon solar arrays, ground mounted and ultra cheap (<$30k/MW).
• Radioactivity applications. “Make rock hot boil water” seems mid.
• Weather control.
• Accelerated weathering for carbon capture.
• Atmospheric sulfur injection.
• Fusion.
• Room temperature superconductors.

Cheap energy applications

• Synthetic liquid fuels.
• Low carbon low cost metal production. Steel and light metals.
• Lower impact chemical synthesis. Electrocatalysis of everything.
• River-scale desalination.
• Ecological restoration at industrial scale. Eg. restore Owens Lake, Aral Sea.

Health

• Immortality.
• Artificial wombs.

Transport

• Drop in replacement electric power trains for cars.
• Drop in replacement electric power trains for small planes.
• Electric VTOL.
• Better electric unicycles.
• Long range electric flight.
• Solar electric flight.
• Flying cars.
• Space planes.
• Supersonic electric flight.
• Cheaper supersonics.
• Better drones.
• Zero carbon aviation fuel. Abundance aviation mind set.
• Zeppelins.
• Electric boats.

Manufacturing

• Atomic 3D printing.
• Deep crust zero impact mining with giant tunnel boring machines and in-situ refining.
• Atomic recycling.
• Compact manufacturing (small factories).
• Compact manufacturing (rapid prototyping).
• Compact manufacturing (full stack mass production with far fewer people).
• Fix the housing shortage.
• Awesome buildings that create excitement about the future.

Space

• Starship applications.
• Starlink atmospheric tomography.
• Moon city applications.
• Mars city applications.
  • Solar farm.
  • Air miner.
  • Water miner.
  • Rock miner.
  • Fuel plant.
  • Life support.
  • Heavy machinery telerobotics.
  • Pressure structures.
  • Space suits.
• Mars terraforming.
• Nuclear fission propulsion.
• Nuclear fusion propulsion.
• Antimatter propulsion.
• Warp drive.
• Time travel.
• Ground penetrating radar at the physical limit.
• Ground penetrating imaging with gamma radiation.

Computing

• Better AI. First non-human consciousness since Neanderthals.
• One trillion AIs with legal personhood.
• Brain-machine interface. Or better VR.
• Feral robots.
• Brownian dust (microscopic free flying robots).
• Autonomous dynamic lift transoceanic gliders.
• Fast custom ASICs.

If you are working on these and want me to link to your business, let me know. If I have missed any obvious items on the tech tree, let me know.

“That seems like a lot.”

The scope and importance of these projects runs to the limits of a human lifespan. Very few, if any, will occur without you making them happen. No product will be the last word in engineering, but it might be the first.