🌌 Hi everyone, Robert here. I hope you’re enjoying The Deep End, a subsection of the Airframe newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed yet, join the pioneering aerospace executives, investors, and deep tech operators who read Airframe and The Deep End weekly.
Discussing Utah’s controversial gondola proposal
Today I jumped on Fifth Wall VC’s podcast to discuss a proposal by Utah’s Department of Transportation to build the world’s longest gondola. Many hope the gondola will reduce carbon emissions and ease the traffic that runs up Little Cottonwood Canyon, a two-lane road to Alta and Snowbird ski resorts. Others disagree. Check out our discussion here.
Why recycling nuclear waste could be the answer
Oklo is near and dear to my heart, and I was happy to see them covered this week in Cleo Abram’s popular YouTube series “Huge if True.” Oklo is a venture-backed nuclear energy startup based in Silicon Valley, a company I joined in 2019 as their first business development lead.
Nuclear is a promising source of carbon-free, affordable, abundant energy, but it suffers from a lack of innovation and negative public perception. Fortunately, both of those issues are changing. Companies like Oklo are transforming the industry and Americans now support nuclear energy at a higher level than at any other time in the past decade.
WSJ: Venture Capitalists Should Bet on America
Two Andreessen Horowitz partners call on the venture capital industry to bet on ambitious companies that serve the national interest. Excerpt below. Check out the whole article here (paywall).
As the pace of technology accelerates, Washington and Silicon Valley must build together to maintain America’s leading global position. Fortunately, the two ecosystems’ goals are more aligned than headlines often make it seem. The two largest venture capital fund-raises of the past year (in both of which Andreessen Horowitz participated)—SpaceX and Anduril—are American aerospace and defense companies building solutions for the Pentagon. That would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.