Flyover Event

Is this heaven? No. It’s Iowa. For decades, the coasts derided this place as a “flyover country" while building dog-hotel-matching apps and the millionth crm. Meanwhile in Iowa: Lee County - has a $15B steel complex going up. Domestic ore from Minnesota. Electric-arc steel. Up to 6,000 construction jobs. 1,750 permanent ones. Pitched as the largest steel plant in American history. Near Ames: BioMADE and Iowa State breaking ground on a $40M biomanufacturing pilot turning Iowa crops into fabrics, adhesives, and plastics America used to import. Cedar Rapids: Sub-Zero putting nearly $200M into refrigerators and Wolf kitchens. Hundreds of jobs. Across the state: nearly $775M in BIG manufacturing awards by midyear, with more since. Pharma. Hydraulics. Auto structures. Pressure vessels. It’s giving flyover country? Please. It's giving heaven. cc @KimReynoldsIA @BusinessIOWA @MesabiMetallics @TheBioMADE @IowaStateU @subzerowolf

Time to dust off those old 2020 decks, y'all. It's GREEN TECH TIME. I don't know about you guys, but I can't wait to have an inclusive reactor powering the town where my women- and minority-owned business manufactures non-binary ball bearings.

Absolutely nobody: Midwestern college kids: "Yo let's start a space scavenging business" There are already thousands of satellites in orbit, live and defunct. Kall Morris provides solutions to acquire, scavenge, reposition, and deactivate satellites. KMI Space helps their customers maximize “value per launch.” Founded in a dorm room at Northern Michigan University by Troy Morris, Austin Morris and Adam Kall, KMI is now backed by $34M from SpaceWERX and a $3.5M Michigan grant. They’re trusted by NASA, the US Space Force, and partnered with MIT and Stanford. They have 60 jobs on the way to Marquette, Michigan in the remote Upper Peninsula. You could say all space tech is coastal, as long as you count the coast of Lake Superior. The Company — KMI

The AI boom creates a lot of friction. …literally, not just on social media. All that compute consumed by chatbots and agents generates thermal waste. Gradian Thermal Solutions is solving that problem from the Midwest. Their $60M, 500,000 sq ft plant in Dayton, Minnesota is now building the chillers and liquid cooling that keep data centers alive. They employ 150 people to date and are on track to bring 850 more jobs to Dayton in the coming years. AI models are developed in California, but the infrastructure that sustains their operation is tucked away in smaller locales across Middle America.

Americans are the greatest innovators in history. We're reindustrializing America. We're automating factories. We're building flying cars. We're going to conquer the stars. There is no stopping us.

Ben Franklin got struck by lightning on purpose. Maybe you’ve heard the story before of how an American tradesman without a college degree combined a simple kite and a key to tame lightning. Franklin conducted his experiment in 1752, at a time when electricity was not fully understood. Scientists and academics in Europe were studying static electricity, and the hypothesis circulated that lightning might also be a form of electricity. But none of them dared to go outside and goad the forces of nature. It took an AMERICAN to do it. For his unorthodox field experiment, the Royal Society in London awarded Franklin a medal in 1754. The study of electricity wasn’t broken open by a Parisian salon or an Oxford academic, but by a self-employed printer from Philadelphia who braved the storm. Americans have been on the forefront of hard tech since before we called ourselves “Americans.” We’re going to stay there. Build American.

Let's GO

We're doing it live