// Preface

Winds have shifted. It’s Detroit’s moment.

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After decades dominated by software, we’ve abruptly awoken from glowing terminals to discover a multi-generation deficit in our most critical technologies.

International trade relations are the tensest they’ve been since the Cold War. Manufacturing job replacement rates are negative. Housing inaffordability threatens to wipe out the American Dream for our youngest generations. Our energy grid teeters on the brink of max capacity. Americans are sicker and more obese than ever.

And still, there is light.

We’ve launched an unimaginable rocket destined for Mars and caught its 11 million pounds of stainless steel with a tower, deployed fully autonomous taxi systems, developed humanoid robots, constructed concrete housing with 5-ton 3D printers, terraformed cities out of flood zones and (of course) reached artificial general intelligence.

For all our critical technology faults, we’re in a second industrial revolution.

When we look back on this generation of Americans and future ones to follow, we’ll note those faults but mark this moment as a generational shift away from bits towards atoms. Away from enterprise SaaS, consumer apps and fintech tools, towards manufacturing, robotics, defense, space, biology, energy and industrials.

What’s more, we have the opportunity to mark the moment as Detroit’s.

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Let’s be blunt for a minute.

Our window is extremely limited. It’s measured in low, single-digit years and becoming exponentially competitive with every passing week as startups building at the frontier – those building autonomous factories, manufacturing weather-inducing drones, developing terraforming drills and sending rockets to orbit – pile into established cities like San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles and Austin.

Yes, these cities are far ahead. They have an incredible strength of infrastructure, depth of venture capital networks, volume of startup platforms at all stages and a maniacal, borderline delusional, culture of building the impossible. All of which we don’t have.

But what some forget in the shadow of the financial crisis, automotive bailouts and city bankruptcy is that we’re Detroit. We’re a city born of steel and grit. We’re the home of Ford, Edison, Hudson, Parks, Knoll, Armstrong, Franklin and Wonder. Tycoons. Inventors. Industrialists. Activists. Explorers. Artists. We sculpted the first automobile from a shed, invented the modern industrial machine and laid the first asphalt for the super highway that powers this country’s interstate trade and travel.

We’re the heartland of American industry. 

Now’s the time to reclaim that story and seize the moment.

To do it, we need to think differently, dig back into our own storied history and take a big bet on those same early, weird and illegible archetypes that made this city great so long ago.

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This is a once-in-a-generation moment. Detroit loses time to grab ahold of it with every passing minute.

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More soon.