I found the American dream… in China

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In today’s Diary:

• America’s builder revival starts in… China?

• Buffett’s $37 billion bet

• A factory that updates like software

• The secret spreadsheet treasure map

• “Save the West.”

Hey Rational Optimist,

The whole world is talking about the SpaceX IPO. Even Elon sounded surprised: “It’s hard to believe a little company started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now the largest IPO ever.”

You’ve heard me rave about El Segundo before. It’s a 5-square-mile beach town in the shadow of an oil refinery, 10 minutes south of LAX, that’s now the beating heart of America’s hard-tech revival.

Last month I spent time inside one of its most storied buildings: the factory where America tested Space Shuttle engines and built the Minuteman nuclear missile.

The factory stood dark for years and became a monument to things America used to make.

A new tenant just moved in, and the building is making critical parts again, for fighter jets, nuclear reactors, and the AI boom.

The company is called Rangeview. Its founder, 26-year-old Cameron Schiller, is one of the most impressive entrepreneurs I’ve met.

Every time I meet a new founder, I ask…

Building things when nobody is making you is the hallmark of a great founder.

As a high-school freshman Cameron won the world’s largest robotics competition… as a one-person team, beating squads of kids.

But Cameron’s real education happened 7,000 miles away. His father worked in offshoring and started bringing him inside Chinese factories at age eight. By 14 Cameron was flying over alone to manage production runs.

China seduced him first. He rode bullet trains while California couldn’t lay a mile of track. He worked in an 11-story building where his entire supply chain was one elevator ride. “I found the American dream in China,” he says.

Then it horrified him. Factories with suicide nets. Workers color-coded by performance score. Today, he says, “all I want to do is get America working as hard as China has.”

Cameron doesn’t look like your typical factory worker. He has flowing hair, the good-looking California surfer type. A Joe Rogan CEO who could carry three hours of airtime. And a great storyteller, which you learn the moment you walk into his factory.

Past the customary giant American flag, down the entrance hallway, Cameron stops me in front of four posters. Together they tell the whole arc of American manufacturing:

1. Steve Jobs holding up the iPhone in 2007. The masterpiece America designed and, as the back of every box admits, China-made.

2. A Chinese megafactory. Robot arms in ranks, working in the dark.

3. A shuttered American mill. Rust on the gates, weeds in the parking lot.

4. An idyllic American barn in a green pasture.

So how do you fix American manufacturing?

Cameron started with a spreadsheet. He listed more than 100 manufacturing processes and ranked each one by two questions: Where could modern technology leap furthest? And where was America most dangerously exposed?

The winner was an obscure 5,000-year-old process called investment casting.

$37 billion to buy Precision Castparts, a Portland company whose castings sit inside virtually every jet engine flying.

Buffett knew what most investors don’t: castings quietly run the world. You’re never more than 10 feet from one. The engine block in your car. The valves in your water main… all castings.

But the number of US foundries that make these castings has collapsed 70% since the 1950s. Maybe that’s why Buffett pounced. When an essential industry shrinks this much the survivors can name their price.

The decline shows up in America’s most advanced fighter jet. The F-22 Raptor is ready to fly just 40% of the time. Cameron told me it’s mostly for want of castings and forgings.

American casting is “down so bad,” as Cameron puts it, that the surviving foundries are overbooked, understaffed, and turning away work.

It doesn’t help that the process has barely changed since the 1960s. To make a single part the traditional way, you:

Machine a $500,000 steel die and wait 8 months for it. Use the die to stamp out wax copies of your part. Dip the wax copies in ceramic slurry, let them dry, dip them again, repeatedly, for weeks, until they wear a thick ceramic shell. Melt out the wax. Pour molten metal into the shell. Smash the shell to free your part, then finish it with saws and grinders.

Forty hours of human labor can hide inside a part that fits in your palm. And if the design needs one tweak? Start over.

Cameron noticed every painful step of the process exists to produce the ceramic shell. So he asked:

3D-print the shell directly from a digital file, and half the steps in a 5,000-year-old process simply disappear. It’s a page straight out of SpaceX’s playbook, where Musk’s first rule is: the best part is no part.

Rangeview is the answer to Cameron’s question. Cameron started the company in his parents’ garage, where he slept on the floor for months. A few short years later they’re pouring nickel superalloys at 1,500°C (hotter than lava) and making critical parts out of a 35,000-square-foot Shuttle-era hangar.

El Segundo does this to me every time. I meet a founder, hear their remarkable ascent and then quietly ask myself: “what did I get done in the past three years?”

I’ve toured Rangeview twice in recent months. The first thing you notice on the factory floor is how quiet it is. Say “foundry” and you probably picture a dark, hot factory.

The floors are clean. It’s cool. There are machines everywhere, each one air-gapped from the internet to keep out spies.

Then across the floor is a glassed-in room, glowing orange. Rangeview’s secret sauce.

Behind that glass, printers harden liquid ceramic with light, layer by layer. It’s the same way a chip fab uses light to etch circuits into silicon. And like a chip fab the process is so sensitive ordinary light would ruin it. So the rooms are bathed in amber, the one color the material ignores.

Every step runs to a digital recipe. Sensors watch the pour temperature and pour speed. Robots do the nasty work that maim people in old foundries. The factory, Cameron says, “is just as much a computer as it is a metal-shaping device.”

That’s why Rangeview calls its factories Cyber Foundries. A new part is just a software update. A digitized line can pour a part for a nuclear reactor in the morning and an F-16 joystick in the afternoon.

Time from order to pour-ready shell: about 12 days. The old way: closer to a year.

You might be wondering: hasn’t metal 3D printing promised all this for years? It has. And it keeps dying on the qualification hill. Aerospace parts must pass years of brutal testing before they’re allowed to fly. But parts printed from metal powder have no track record.

Rangeview’s genius was to reinvent how the part is made, not the part itself. What comes out is a normal casting a 1960s engineer would recognize… just made 20x faster.

When I first visited Rangeview 18 months ago my Irish passport kept me out of the factory. This time they let me in, mostly. There are still rooms in El Segundo an Irishman isn’t allowed to see. The juicy ITAR-regulated stuff stays behind closed doors.

Turbine blades.

More countries can build a nuclear bomb than can make turbines.

A turbine blade lives inside a gas stream hotter than its own melting point, spinning at tens of thousands of RPM. It survives only because microscopic channels cast into the blade’s core run cool air through.

Turbine blades are among the hardest objects humans make. So hard even mature production lines scrap roughly two out of every three of the toughest blades.

When I asked what’s next for Rangeview, Cameron said: “The big story is AI data centers.”

AI needs data centers. Data centers need electricity. Most of the new power being built for data centers comes from gas turbines. And the handful of companies that make those turbines are sold out to 2030.

ChatGPT runs on castings.

The many casting foundries we so desperately need shut down decades ago. That’s Rangeview’s opportunity.

Rangeview has its pick of contracts today. “Design is the easy part,” Cameron says. “Making it is the hard part.” It’s the exact opposite of what Silicon Valley preached for 20 years.

Or as Cameron says in an ode to Dune: “He who controls the spice controls the universe. For a long time we thought the spice was software. We’re slowly waking up to the fact that the spice is the parts.”

Energy is Rangeview’s big growth driver right now. And the beauty of a Cyber Foundry is Cameron doesn’t have to choose.

Cameron first greeted me in the America Room off to the side of his factory. It’s a time capsule inside a factory of the future.

Walking in you’re transported to 1970. Beige carpet. A record player. Old wood cabinets. Three pictures on the wall: the Space Shuttle. JFK giving his Moon speech. And the Empire State Building mid-construction.

The Empire State Building went up in just 400 days. Standing in front of that picture I asked Cameron: “how do we get back to an America that builds that fast?”

“War,” he said. “It needs a jolt and a wake-up call.” He believes things get worse before they get better.

The whole point of Rangeview, using technology to breathe life back into America’s industrial base, is to make the wake-up call unnecessary.

We leave the America Room and walk down the hallway. Cameron slides open a big wooden door, and we step onto the very concrete where Minutemen took shape.

For decades this room sat like a museum piece. Now it hums again. Decline and renaissance in El Segundo.

Cameron shows me the parts rack: components for a portable nuclear reactor, fighter-jet parts, and what the industry calls “alien castings.” The onesie-twosie spares that would traditionally mean rebuilding a million dollars of tooling that rusted on a shelf decades ago.

Rangeview is a startup of fewer than 50 people. It should be burning cash. Instead Cameron says it’s cash-flow positive. It’s signed more dollars in purchase orders than it’s raised in venture capital. And it turns away roughly 3X the revenue it accepts.

He tells me he likes walking this floor and closes the laptop when the emails pile up. “Lose touch, and then you wake up and become Boeing.”

I ask what this specific building means to him.

“This means everything to me. It’s what I live for.”

That’s what I love about Gundo. It’s one of the most serious places I’ve ever been.

The last time an unremarkable El Segundo address transformed an entire industry, it ended in the largest IPO ever.

I can’t help thinking in a few years we’ll be reading about many more billion-dollar companies born in Gundo workshops: Valar Atomics. Neros. Picogrid. CX2. Durin. Rainmaker. And of course, Rangeview.

The talent density of Gundo is unmatched. When Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor moved to California he crashed in Cameron’s guest room. When Isaiah moved out, Soren Monroe-Anderson, co-founder of Neros, moved in. “That’s a multi-billion-dollar guest apartment,” Cameron laughs.

Back in the America Room, Cameron pointed at his boots and asked if I knew the story of Red Wing, the Minnesota bootmaker so woven into its hometown that the company and the town share a name.

“That’s the goal,” he said. One day there’s a Rangeview town, with a Rangeview bar.

The revival of American manufacturing will be one of the most important investing themes of the next decade. That’s obvious. The nonobvious part is how big this opportunity is.

“The idea that there will be one winner is crazy. There isn’t one winner in tech, so why would there be one winner in manufacturing, which is much larger?”

Software was the greatest wealth-creation machine of the last few decades. It crowned dozens of winners. Manufacturing is a multitrillion-dollar economy made of hundreds of sub-industries. Casting, forging, stamping, machining, welding—each one its own kingdom.

Remember that spreadsheet ranking 100 manufacturing processes? It’s a treasure map. Casting was just the first X. Rangeview’s mission is to build the foundry system that reindustrializes America.

Ten years from now Cyber Foundries will hum across the plains. A submarine pulls into port needing a part, which is poured the same day. Data centers have all the turbines they need. America’s fighter fleets fly again… all because a kid who decided the country that built the Space Shuttle wasn’t finished.

When I asked Cameron what motivates him, he summed up the whole Rational Optimist project in eight words:

“Save the West. Do it for our kids.”

Hit “like” and “restack” to let more Rational Optimists know America is back to building.

—Stephen McBride

P.S. Everyone knows someone who would be a rational optimist … if only they read more stories about founders building the future. Send this link and make them one of us: https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack.com/p/join-us