1.

In a beach town of 20,000 people, young men sleep on bunk beds, pray over raw milk, and build nuclear reactors to save America — then climb into a utility van at 2 a.m., light cigarettes, and sing the national anthem. El Segundo is either the future of defense tech or a $100 billion performance art piece.

2.

Saltwater and steam towers

• El Segundo, California: 20,000 residents, three-quarters of its land industrial — refineries, power plants, Boeing, Lockheed Martin
• Downtown streets flanked by retro diners and vintage record shops, below billowing steam towers
• Patrons sip beer on bar patios alongside dogs and the occasional parrot — a factory town with a laid-back temperament
• For decades, cities have tried to be the next Silicon Valley: Austin, Miami, Silicon Alley, Silicon Beach — none stuck

3.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

• Zane Mountcastle, CEO of defense tech company Picogrid, worked in Silicon Valley's Livermore and watched the culture turn against him
• "At parties, when I told people what I did, they'd be like, 'What the hell is wrong with you?'"
• The Bay Area had little appetite for companies that aided the military — the founders in El Segundo are defining themselves in opposition to that
• "This is not San Francisco lite or San Francisco plus a little bit of hardware. It's a completely different mindset."

4.

$100 billion in two years

• Since 2021, venture capitalists have poured more than $100 billion into defense tech companies, many of them in El Segundo
• VCs now wander the warehouse-lined back alleys hoping to snag meetings — founders joke about renting a double-decker bus for investor tours
• The money is real, the companies are real, the mission is real — and the founders are building an identity around all of it

5.

A flag the size of a dumpster

• Augustus Doricko, founder of cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, raised $6.3 million in May — on his office wall hangs an American flag the size of a dumpster
• Opposite it: a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently onto a bench press below
• "We're sick of nihilism and goofy software products. Gundo is for hard tech what Florence was for art during the Renaissance."
• The founders are aspirationally blue collar — blue jeans, clean leather work boots, dark T-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets

6.

Raw milk and Hebrews

• At Valar Atomics, where the reporter was invited to a Bible study, Bibles were propped up on desks beside laptops
• Elijah Froh, 26, head of business operations, offered a glass of raw milk — increasingly the drink of choice in conservative circles — then led prayer and read from Hebrews
• In the cigar lounge where actual cigars can't be smoked due to a permitting issue, four classical paintings depict Columbus, the Mayflower, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention
• Froh: "God needed businessmen just as much as he needed missionaries. God put him on this earth to build a nuclear energy company."

7.

"He was like, 'Man, I heard you guys were cookin'!' "

• Cameron Schiller, cofounder of aerospace manufacturer Rangeview, is tall and lean with the good looks of a Hollister model
• His office has concert speakers, purple and orange mood lighting, a jet engine, a race car simulator, and a photo of employees in matching lab coats with Aaron Paul — Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad
• Paul wandered in off the street: "He was like, 'I heard you guys have a lab. Can I come and check it out?'"
• Schiller: "It's totally intentional. You have to make it cool. We're trying to bring more young people into manufacturing."

8.

"This is not a movie"

• Fil Aronshtein, CEO of Dirac — an "anti-software software company" — loses sleep over China
• "China wants to see the West and our way of life and democracy collapse. People need to understand that their way of life is in danger. The stakes are serious. This is not a movie, and no one is coming to save them."
• "Having an adversary is very interesting. Because it gets people to work harder."
• The founders live in a world neatly ordered between heroes and villains, where military might is a moral obligation rather than a national necessity

9.

"A little boring"

• During three days in El Segundo, the reporter saw three women and spoke to one — the wife of a Valar Atomics employee, who had moved to a house near the beach three weeks earlier and was too busy with children to leave the house
• When asked about the gender imbalance, a founder called the inquiry "a little boring" and "a non-thing" that "muddies the story and it distracts from our core mission of trying to save the West"
• He cited Katherine Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz as a counterexample — "She is extremely sharp and observant. She is serious with a capital S, but not serious with a lowercase s."
• The founders think of themselves as serious people who do not take themselves seriously — in contrast to Silicon Valley's unserious people who take themselves extremely seriously

10.

Orange embers in the dark

• Isaiah Taylor, 25, founder of Valar Atomics, was eating a country-fried steak at a diner when the reporter asked if the scene felt contrived
• "Maybe we just really like America," he shrugged. "For me, being patriotic is like asking me if I love my mom. Like, you love your mother, right? I don't know why we in the US have such a hard time with that."
• The night before, Taylor and the guys had been at the Purple Orchid tiki lounge, then climbed into Doricko's utility van at 2 a.m. for Cane's chicken
• They lit cigarettes, and someone began to sing the national anthem — Taylor showed the reporter a video on his phone: faces lit by the orange embers of their cigarettes burning in the dark, swaying side to side, voices earnest

11.

"Whether or not there's a spotlight on us"

• "O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave!" — the song ended and they yipped into the night
• The founders sometimes have private discussions about whether they are posting too much on X — "We don't want this to be a fad," says Aronshtein
• Taylor insists the patriotism is not performance: "The tobacco products, the bench-pressing, the jumbo-size American flags, the devotion to God and country, all would be happening whether or not there's a spotlight on us"
• The question the article leaves open: is El Segundo building the next generation of great tech companies, or is it building a $100 billion stage for a performance of American masculinity?