Sorry for the interrupted. Barely worthy its name, but I’m back on track and ready to post. Locked in, founder mode, celibate and unary focused; everything to make the readers happy. Not going to George RR Martin y’all. 3-person fan-club goes crazy (u know who you are)
🤼 People
Vishaal Hariprasad - CEO at Resilience
Vishaal helped us out as an expert in cybersecurity, and government—something we’re looking closely at right now. (Probably those are two of the most hated words in trad VC). He’s been very a founder for 10+ years, and prior to that was a supreme being of cybernetic warfare in the service of the US Airforce, presumably preventing the Chinese from installing little kill-switches into powerplant inverters and such.
🚀 Companies
Heron Power - Better power electronics
Status: Seed
Source: CAVI
Founders:
Why it’s cool:
Electrifying everything and renewables means a huge shift in grid balancing and massive strains for the infrastructure that goes along it. Transformers, inverters, rectifiers, even the high-voltage cables weren’t meant to stand up to the volatility and frequencies we’re about to put them up to. Two questions: 1. What’s the timeline on this shift and how is demand distributed? 2. What’s the venture business in selling relatively low cost components?
Stealth - part investment firm, part semiconductor co
Status: Seed
Source: Network
Founders: 1
Why it’s cool:
How do we build an Intel today, and why should governments be interested in funding not just the incumbents, but new large scale projects like Stargate and the data center buildouts in the Gulf region? Probably with massive ambition and realisation that it’s not something you finance through VC only. The tides should have turned with the CHIPS act in the US and similar investments in Europe, but critical industry components are still sourced through Taiwan, China and South Korea. Somewhere in the space between specialized chips, on-shore trailing edge fabs and sovereign wealth funds there’s a massive business to be built.
💡 Ideas & Science
High-Precision Navigation: The future is near
Mostly basic info on how GNSS works, but good reminder of how it’s not perfect, yet. There are some ways of using tricks to get to high-precision, but nothing magical.
The Re-Industrialization paradox
Felix Neubeck of Playfair published a great thesis on re-industrialization and what types of companies will truly succeed in this space. This type of content is much better suited for humans to write and consume. Why read AI slop from someone else’s prompt? Much prefer to read well-founded opinions and future looking conclusions than primers I could interact with myself.
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Recommended read for everyone, even those who actually studied physics. Carlo Rovelli explains complex topics in simple ways, without lessening the beauty of the ideas.
thanks for the feature 🙏🏽