The first thing you notice in El Segundo is how serene it is. Yet, as I take in the quiet charm of its Main Street, my mind is still withdrawing from the rattle-banging anarchy I left behind moments ago. Back on the Imperial Highway, before the turn-off, planes landing at or departing from Los Angeles International Airport screamed overhead. Cars jostled, windows open, hard music ripping out. A sea of red brake lights flashed commuter frustration. One hell-bent driver darted across three lanes—no, four—and, in defiance of honks and middle fingers, made an exit from the freeway. Life in Los Angeles! I had managed to exit with less drama, and now, in El Segundo, I wait peacefully at a red light, considering the public church directory posted by the Kiwanis Club in the middle of the main intersection (15 churches are listed). It dawns on me that maybe the highway exit was really a time machine.
In 1903, the Wright Brothers invented powered flight in Kitty Hawk, but it was in California in the decades that followed that aviation soared. Lockheed, Northrop, and Douglas—just about all the names that became industry giants in aviation and then later in defense and aerospace—began here.
On the Imperial Highway, as you drive toward the Pacific Ocean, you can still spot those old, respected names on several buildings. But as with the Theme Building—that dated, spider-legged flying saucer plopped down in the heart of LAX—one also gets the feeling that the utopian aerospace avant-garde of the 1950s has aged into the sclerotic bureaucracy of an outdated mega-state machine. We are more than a century past the days when Donald Douglas founded his aircraft startup in the back of a barbershop on Pico Boulevard. Today, only one commercial aircraft maker remains in America—Boeing—and the wheels and doors are flying off.
But something young and adventurous is stirring again in El Segundo: Southern California aerospace engineering might be coming back to life. Startup founders, top-tier investors, and prospective employees have heard the call to pay homage to the glorious past, flocking to the Gundo, as they call it, in a new migration of hardware freaks. The number of new startups in the Gundo may reach only the twenties—more mature companies tally higher—but no matter. The beacon signal is sweeping the horizon and reflecting its call off the skies. As Jacob Goodwin, a British investor from London, told me, “The Gundo is the purest expression of American confidence.”
Only five years ago, practically no one in tech wanted to work in defense, let alone do anything involving atoms instead of bytes. Hardware is hard. As for defense . . . well, it wasn’t just a bad career move; it was sacrilegious, the equivalent of working for Dow Chemical during the Vietnam War. (Recall Google’s employees revolting in 2018 against their managers over a contract with the Pentagon called Project Maven.) But now, young engineers are flying in from around the country and cold-knocking on workshop doors to get a chance to join a garage startup chasing the forgotten dreams of a space-faring civilization.
What sparked this shift? Some industry people note that the world has become a more dangerous place. Russia, China, and the Houthis, sure—but something deeper may be at work, too. A Zeitgeist flip starts with a question: Since when did anybody start calling this area the Gundo?
I take a seat at a table at Wendy’s Place, an old-fashioned diner just off Main Street. The time machine is in full effect. Big-band jazz from the 1940s streams in the background on a radio, and 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzles—made from Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers—have been solved, glued, and hung around the dining room. Locals in flannel shirts debate how far they can get on the I-10 on a single tank of gas. Aromas of burnt coffee and hash browns on the griddle mix in the air.
I’m here to meet Augustus Doricko, the 24-year-old founder of Rainmaker Technologies. His company flies drones high into the clouds in order to seed them with tiny particles that make it rain more in dry places, but he’s also the showman, the self-described cult leader (he says it only half in jest) who coined the name “The Gundo” and sent it viral on the Internet. I’m here to talk shop because my venture fund, 1517, was the first to invest in Doricko’s company. Much to my delight, talking with Doricko always leads to further meditations on the state of the world. When he arrives, he comes through the front door of Wendy’s Place with a devilish grin, sporting a fluorescent yellow safety jersey (the kind that is used to find guys buried in rubble), unlaced Nike high tops, and a lion’s-mane mullet last seen on construction sites in 1985.
“How are you?” the waitress asks Doricko as soon as he’s seated in the booth. “I’m blessed,” he says—his standard response to small-talk greetings, but the faint touch of the holy makes people pause and smile. In public, he is forthright about his faith. After winning one of Peter Thiel’s fellowship grants for innovators with no college degree, Doricko expressed his gratitude in similar terms on social media: “I hope to use this to serve Jesus Christ, my country, and Rainmaker’s mission to make Earth habitable.”
A fit, suntanned blonde in her fifties walks through the front door at Wendy’s and recognizes Doricko. “Mr. Rainmaker!” she yells, as the screen door slams behind her. She’s lived in El Segundo for 28 years and wants to sell her house and move to Florida. She thinks that Doricko and some of the other startup founders should buy it.
“Why are you leaving California? Are the taxes too high?”
“Taxes, government, prices. It’s all gone to shit.”
“Well, we’ve got to turn it around.”
“Only Trump can do that,” she says.
It’s remarkable, I reflect, that only five miles to the north, in Venice Beach, on the other side of LAX, she might get stoned for walking around with a MAGA hat on. Nevertheless, Trump or no Trump, Doricko and his friends are determined to turn California, and America, around. Doricko tells me: “There is a song, ‘The Story of Tonight,’ in the musical Hamilton. And in the song, you have all the revolutionaries meeting in a bar, talking about their ideas and how they’re going to win the revolution. I view the Gundo as analogous to ‘The Story of Tonight.’ Here, there are like-minded people who are pro-America, who want to see a radically different and revolutionary future. It feels the way, I imagine, that Florence or Milan did during the 1400s: a tight, small walkable place with surreal opportunities and brilliant people, all of them trying to totally change the shape and direction of the world. Only now, the necessary rebellion is bringing hardware into the world.”
It would take a hard heart not to feel the allure of the revolutionary spirit, especially in song, but money is part of the equation, too. Investment from venture capital funds has poured into defense startups over the last three years—more than $100 billion, according to PitchBook Data. In 2022, Andreessen Horowitz, a top-tier Sand Hill Road mainstay, launched its $500 million American Dynamism Fund, dedicated to backing companies that will “build for America” and restore its industrial base. Without a doubt, the extraordinary success of SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril has inspired the next generation of startups and investors to seek fame and fortunes in hardware, weapons systems, satellites, space cargo, energy, and frontier computing.
The out-of-whack cost ratio seen on today’s battlefields suggests a real opportunity. War is too expensive for America, and startups think that they can build success cheaper, better, and faster. It costs the U.S. $5,000 to make a single 155-millimeter artillery shell; it costs Russia $600. The Houthis are launching unsophisticated drones to attack commercial vessels in the Red Sea; the missiles that our navy fires to take out those drones cost $2.1 million apiece. Think also of the cheap spy balloon that China floated over the U.S. last year. Cruising at over 60,000 feet, it could not be shot down with guns but required $500,000-a-pop Sidewinder missiles. Even the U.S. is not rich enough to protect itself and its interests at these prices.
Our supply chains are vulnerable, too. The shadow that China casts over Taiwan has raised a sense of urgency in the effort to build critical technologies like semiconductors at home. Covid shortages have also revealed the fragility of relying on shipping components from Asia.
But even so—and though these are all strong reasons—they do not fully account for the Gundo. Such factors can explain an uptick in business in Virginia Beach just as well, after all, so why the sudden beating of the patriotic heart south of LAX among the young?
“It’s hard to put in a bottle the absolute passion and dedication everybody has here to rebuilding America and American industry,” Isaiah Taylor says. Taylor is a close friend of Doricko’s, a member of the Gundo brotherhood, and the founder of Valar Atomics, a firm trying to make oil and gas by way of nuclear power. “We have a ton of fun, but there’s an undercurrent beneath all of it. We hate the fact that America doesn’t build things anymore. We are extremely angry about it! It comes out in different ways for different people, but it’s a shared conviction that we must build things again.”
“We are so back” is a common refrain heard in the Gundo. Also, with more vulgarity, “Fuck it, we ball.” The phrases get posted on social media or are spoken as celebratory statements. Often, they’re used somewhat ironically, as if a tiny win for a startup—the announcement of a new contract, say—represents the turning of the tide for a nation. But the defiance is a response to America’s economic history over the last 50 years, in which stagnation and decline have shadowed the building of hard, material things. Reversing this waning of American industrial creativity is at the heart of the Gundo culture.
The fight to reverse stagnation comes in many forms, not just in technology. It’s also in dress and philosophy. In the 1950s, when progress moved faster than today, the engineers building the future in Southern California were bespectacled men wearing white, short-sleeved button-down shirts with black ties, with yellow slide rules protruding from their shirt pockets. This was the 1950s, when everyone tended to dress the same, bought the same kitchens and cars, watched the same two shows on TV, waved to their neighbors, talked baseball, and remembered everyone’s birthdays.
But then we saw, of course, the enormous shift in the dress, lifestyles, and reigning ideologies of the ruling establishment in America, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, but accelerating in the 2000s. What was once the counterculture—the graybeard poets, beatniks, psychedelic edge-seekers, and political activists of the 1950s and 1960s—has now become the ruling elite. The corporation, the state, the industrialists and bankers, the academics, the journalists—all tend to be faithful these days to what were once the bohemian, minority views and ideals of the earlier era. Just think of the purple-haired DEI czar in human resources or the tenured professor sporting a Palestinian keffiyeh. Now, as the establishment, these “rebels” expect conformity to their pessimistic worldview of living less assertively under the shadow of vast impersonal forces. They embody, on the deepest level, a gloomy philosophy of history. Individual responsibility, in this philosophy, is ultimately an illusion, and the range of freedom has narrowed. It assumes that only governments and political movements, not particular men and women, have the power to save us from (to mention a few things that this worldview despises) overpopulation, structural racism, mountains of garbage, and hot weather.
An antidote to this conformist establishmentarian- ism is to build right at the edge of science fiction, in earnestness, in the name of the family, the nation, and even God—and preferably to do it in the Gundo. “There is a natural pendulum swing,” Doricko tells me. “Kids are always going to be rebellious. And my cohort have been told for our whole lives, ‘You will own nothing, and you will be happy. You will have a remote, e-mail job. You will not see any meaningful technological progress in your lifetime. You will eat bugs.’ A lot of the Gundo is about bringing together high-agency, assertive guys who are rebelling against the narrative we’ve been fed for so long.”
Reversing America’s decline requires a hearty breakfast. At Wendy’s Place, Doricko orders coffee and three sides of bacon, which amounts to 15 slices. Nothing else. When his order arrives, it looks as though a whole supermarket-size package of bacon has been sizzled crisp and tossed onto a plate. All 15 slices devoured, we walk through the Smoky Hollow, the heart of El Segundo, to Rainmaker’s workshop and laboratory.
Rainmaker’s headquarters contains many of the items that one would expect to find in a frontier garage startup: lab equipment, flasks, mad-scientist liquid concoctions, prototype drones and a wind tunnel to test them, and—a beloved staple for many young men in the startup game—mattresses tossed onto the floor. The room seems otherwise barren, save for a laptop charging.
But unexpected items catch the eye. On the walls in Rainmaker’s main bullpen, I notice an enlarged photograph of a 1950s military unit tasked with modifying the weather. Placed on a desk in front of computer monitors, I find a first-edition book from 1926, Rain Making and Other Weather Vagaries, by W. J. Humphreys. Then, in the main room, one comes across a symbolic motherlode: a bench press and a ten-foot-tall American flag hanging on the wall.
Three weeks before my visit, Doricko cohosted a defense-tech hackathon in this space, which, despite being about the size of a Jiffy Lube garage, managed to pack in about 200 people for the event. Organized by a gang from a handful of organizations—8VC, Entrepreneur First, Apollo Defense—they had 100 or so hackers fly in from New York, Washington, San Francisco, and even Canada to take part in a 24-hour event where people could show off their talent to build. They also squeezed in another 100 startup mentors and Defense Department officials.
“There were people who hadn’t signed up, trying to get in,” Anish Goel explains later. Goel is one of the hackathon’s organizers and a sophomore studying applied math at Caltech. “We had investors pretending to be builders try to get in. So many people showed up that we had to establish a point-of-entry ID verification process.” Goel and his team had put on a defense-tech hackathon just four months earlier in New York, in November—but only 50 people came to that. The difference, he says, was the appeal of the Gundo.
“Augustus is responsible for, like, 95 percent of the Gundo buzz,” Goel says. “He is not just a young man. He is a culture. In Pasadena, at Caltech, it’s very old-school; people are much older. It’s a slower pace, more academic. But in El Segundo, everyone is on ZYN nicotine pouches—you’re criticized if you’re moving too slow, and you have to bench-press 400 pounds. You wouldn’t expect a guy who builds a rocket propulsion system also to be the guy talking about how it’s important to have kids when you’re 20 or to be capable of lifting 400 pounds.”
Andrew Bartholomew, an investor and former Marine, managed to slip past Goel’s security into the hackathon. It was his first weekend after moving to Santa Monica to get more involved with the Gundo community. “It was awesome,” he says. “A really fun, exciting blend of startup culture and defense tech. The mayor of El Segundo gave a speech to open it. He said that if you’re an innovator trying to find a way to deliver groceries ten times faster, go somewhere else. We don’t want you here. We want people who are going to make a difference.” One company that Bartholomew invested in was based in Washington, D.C., but after attending the hackathon, the owners were so impressed that they decided to relocate to the Gundo.
There is a rough but moving self-assurance to these young men (and it’s mostly men driving these startups). My catch-up with Doricko finished, I rush to make a flight home out of LAX. As my plane takes off and climbs out over the Pacific, I can see the rectangle of the Gundo out my window. Its Craftsman bungalows and well-manicured lawns look precious and hemmed in by the smoke-belching Chevron refinery to the south, LAX to the north, and the Scattergood steam plant to the west, with its orange and white smokestacks puffing vapor over one of the most glorious beaches in all of America, where the Gundo bros meet on Friday nights to burn wooden pallets in a bonfire as the oil tankers offshore blink their lights in silence.
Such a small place, and with so few people. Does it have a chance to survive the colossal forces sapping California of its vitality: the debt, the taxes, and the bureaucratic barbarism of the state’s dysfunctional, regulation-obsessed government? Don’t they know that history is determined by forces beyond their control? I fear that the Gundo may be California’s last gasp of creative energy. “We’re just a couple kids in El Segundo,” says Taylor. “But it’s always a small group of people that make history. It was decisions that individuals made that led to America’s decline, so why not the turnaround? It’s just people making those decisions.”
A week or so later, I call Doricko to ask him about the five-bedroom house that the blond lady at Wendy’s Place was trying to sell him. He is surprised that I remembered. He and some Gundo friends are finding a way to structure the loans and rent payments to cover the mortgage. “It would certainly facilitate more of the frat-house accusations,” he says.
Why does he think that a small group of people in a small town can change history?
“Because they always have,” he says.
Top Photo: One of the “Gundo brothers” who gather around bonfires on Friday nights, Augustus Doricko is the 24-year-old founder of Rainmaker Technologies, which uses drones to seed clouds. (Kip Mock)
