Boys and THEIR TOYS

Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo

- Zoë Bernard

FOR MORE THAN two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, California, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight Russia and China.

Out in El Segundo, where the saltwater-tinged air thrums with steady plane traffic and oil refineries sweep across the shoreline, these founders see themselves as faithful foot soldiers of American industry as well as bold incubators upending Silicon Valley’s status quo.

“We’re pollinating different ideas,” Augustus Doricko, the founder and CEO of the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, which raised $6.3 million from venture capitalists in May, tells me. “We’re sick of nihilism and goofy software products.” Behind him, on Rainmaker’s office wall, hangs an American flag the size of a dumpster.

Opposite is a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently onto a bench press below. “Right now,” he adds, “Gundo is for hard tech what Florence was for art during the Renaissance.”

For decades, cities across America have aspired to assume Silicon Valley’s mantle as the next technological hotbed. It was rumored for a short while that the entrepreneurial epicenter had shifted to Austin and then Miami. When it comes to “The Gundo,” the technological zeitgeist is, like all of these places, fueled by venture capitalists, who have invested more than $100 billion in defense tech companies since 2021, many of which are located in El Segundo.