AppliedElements @ElementsApplied

Applied Elements is joining Cohort 003 of @PalantirTech’s Startup Fellowship. This will help us develop Antaeus faster and build the industrial capacity to sustain American leadership. Thank you to the Palantir team for selecting us. Let’s build.

Palantir @PalantirTech

5 days ago

Welcome, Startup Fellowship Cohort 003, and thank you to all who applied.

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I’ve founded Applied Elements to help rebuild America’s industrial strength. Applied Elements will build factories that learn, starting in Nashville, Tennessee. For more than five years, I’ve become increasingly troubled by what decades of offshoring have done to America’s ability to provide for itself. We’ve become dependent on countries that can turn our supply chains against us. I’ve benefited from generations of Americans who sacrificed, who built and defended the country that has given me so much. I believe this carries a responsibility to help preserve what they made possible, that is, to “participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project.” I believe the world is better when America leads. The freedom and prosperity we’ve come to expect are fragile achievements in a history dominated by coercion and conquest. They require the power and resolve to defend them. The CCP is actively working to displace American leadership, export authoritarian control, and build the industrial strength to impose its will on other nations. We cannot meet that threat without the industrial capacity to build and replenish what our security depends on. And yet, so much of that capacity depends on a small number of people who know how to make things. A design can specify exactly what a system must be and still leave an enormous amount of work before anyone can manufacture it. Experienced engineers and technicians determine how to fabricate its parts, how to assemble them, and how to verify that the finished hardware meets its requirements. They see how decisions in one part of the build affect another. When the physical work produces something unexpected, they have to understand why and decide what to do. That judgment makes complex manufacturing possible. But it also takes decades to develop, and the people who have it can be in only so many places at once. Building more factories or buying more machines does not reproduce their ability. When they retire, much of the knowledge a company depends on goes with them. I founded Applied Elements to to make advanced manufacturing truly scalable. We’re starting with high-integrity fluid assemblies, including manifolds and formed tubes, for energy, computing, space, and defense. Our first factory will combine manufacturing and instrumentation with our software, Antaeus, from the outset. Antaeus will connect the conditions engineers and technicians encounter, the decisions they make, the actions they take, and the physical results. This will create structured manufacturing experience that people and increasingly capable AI can learn from and apply across products and factories. The same physical processes recur across different products, so what we learn making one system will help us make the next. Each new factory will start ahead of the last. The goal is to multiply what exceptional people can accomplish and expand the range of things we know how to make. Our ambition is hundreds of factories, new materials and manufacturing methods, and control over physical structure at ever smaller scales. Within three years, our target is multiple factories operating or underway. We have to deliver useful industrial capacity on a timeline that matters to the country. I’m looking for world-class engineers in manufacturing, software, and AI who share this mission. We have to solve difficult physical problems, build systems that learn from real work, and turn that learning into production. This will be hard. You’ll have the authority to make decisions and pursue ideas, including ones I disagree with. What matters is whether they work. America must be able to make what it needs, when it needs it. If you want to help us build that capability, I want to hear from you. Thank you to Alex Karp, @ssankar, Nicholas Zamiska, @Madeline_Zimm. The Technological Republic, Mobilize, and @PalantirTech's American Technology Fellowship were enormously impactful on my thinking and convictions. I'm also grateful to @aphysicist, @2112Power, @jimbelosic, and many others who, without knowing it, contributed to my decision to make Applied Elements my life's work.

@chadwahl This is precisely what we’re building at Applied Elements.

@MFG_SMB @reindsummit Constellation of modernized factories

Shyam on why the US needs to become reindustrialization maximalists: "The biggest lie of globalization was that the US would do the innovation while China did the production. The breakthrough behind the Attention Is All You Need paper came from Google trying to improve Translate by 3%. Innovation is a consequence of production. WuXi went from being a cheap pair of hands for pipetting contract research to now 50% of all clinical trials are drugs that are created in China. We ceded the innovation. It wasn't taken from us. We ceded it because we had a completely incorrect preset. I don't think it's true that we're not great at building things in this country. Look at Elon and the progeny of Elon. Apple has spent the equivalent on an inflation adjusted basis in the last five years of two and a half Marshall plans (~$350B+) building talent and capacity in China. How about we try to spend one Marshall plan here?"

Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag

8 months ago

My conversation with Shyam Sankar (@ssankar). Shyam has spent nearly 20 years as the most important person at Palantir that most people have never heard of. We spend a lot of time understanding his worldview, which helps explain why he has devoted his life to this work. At the

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Nothing puts a nation on wartime footing quite like war itself As we speed towards the limits of our munitions capacity, the bill on decades of procurement failures will come due. This is a generational opportunity to genuinely remake the DIB and we should not let it go to waste

William Thibeau @WilliamThibeau

8 months ago

The US military is now reaping incomprehensible Biden administration THAAD procurement efforts. Procuring just 11-12 interceptors annually in recent budgets left inventories critically exposed. More than 150 were fired defending Israel in June 2025, draining roughly 25 percent of

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To be clear, the small handful of companies won't be PE rollup finance parasites. It'll be a few highly effective vertical integrators.

Caleb (OSH Cut) @OSHBuilt

8 months ago

In ten years, most of the $10 billion job shop metal fab market in the US will be owned by a small handful of companies.

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Data centers mean reindustrialize or bust. There's no getting around the amount of demand we have, and we can't keep purchasing it from China.

Cully Cavness @Electron_Cowboy

9 months ago

The reindustrialization of America is underway and AI is a big driver. @CrusoeAI operates 5 factories throughout CO, OK, and LA to manufacture electrical components for AI data center builds. We employ about 500 FTE in factories today, up from less than 100 a few years ago.

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Generally agree. I just think it’s a dangerous slippery slope to say “we’ll use China for just the first iteration to bootstrap.” That first iteration is not a throwaway. It’s the capex wave that creates the compounding advantage, tooling, supplier graph, yield know how, and the muscle memory of scaling. Whoever builds v1 eats the pain but gets v2 and v3 for free. Once you sponsor that initial cycle for someone else, it’s incredibly hard to ever catch up again, because you’re not competing with a snapshot, you’re competing with a flywheel you helped spin up.

we cannot let this happen. and it will lead to complete industrial capture by china. apple spent $500B+ building hardware supply chains in china, we don't need to make that same mistake again. you could build a complete domestic robotics supply chain in <5 years with $100B.

manufacturing capacity wins wars

Yes it is

Ishaan @ishaan0a

9 months ago

it is the year of the manufacturer

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If the US is going to reindustrialize, we need lots of manufacturing startups. The problem is, starting a company that actually makes things here is SUPER hard. Plus you have to compete with cheap imports. We can make stuff at scale in the US again... but only if we help each other. So my company is giving away a free American-made transformer to a deserving factory startup. Up to 1000 kVA. It's just one piece of building (or rebuilding) a factory, but it's our little way of helping the next gen of American manufacturers get started. If your building something important, shoot me an email, or pass it along to someone who is: [email protected] @reindsummit

the best argument to dump massive amounts of resources into tech differentiated manufacturing startups, is sheer scale. they are the best bet we have to rapidly take back more of the global market. look at plastics here, the gap is completely insane.

Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors @isaiah_p_taylor

9 months ago

The United States will undergo a massive effort of reindustrialization like nothing that has ever been seen before. It is not optional. For a nation to be strong, it must produce. And to produce, a nation needs power. Valar Atomics Gigasites will be the cornerstone.

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single biggest takeaway from 75+ factory tours: there has almost never been a better opportunity to go out and make things in America > there are many people retiring with no succession plan > there is renewed interest in secure, local supply chains > barriers to entry have lifted in previously-overregulated industries > SBA improved 7(a) loans program > institutional infrastructure investment is back

“The factory is the weapon, because without the factory, you have no weapons.” Anduril’s @traestephens says even if we had equal labor costs, the US still couldn’t compete with China on manufacturing: “We offshored a lot of manufacturing work to lower-cost labor locations like China.” “Not only did they soak up a lot of that manufacturing capacity, but they also developed advanced tooling and know-how to build the things that we use every day.” “At this point, even if there was complete labor cost parity, we still don't have the ability to just magically reshore a lot of these critical components that are going to be important to the next 50 or 100 years.” “We're in this place where we really need to reindustrialize.”

Telling look at what it’s like to deal with PE owners/investors. One point stood out to me: “8. Be prepared to offshore They believe deeply in offshoring because labor offshore can be equally talented at 1/2 to 1/3 the cost. There is an organizational tax that comes with this, you can’t negotiate it away. You just have to prepare the company to manage it.” Consider what it means for your company to take money from investors who have a spreadsheet-driven mindset — who understand cost-cutting, but know far less about what sort of company culture actually drives long-term value creation. And consider what it means for America when such people become our dominant capital allocators.

Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck

9 months ago

Over the last 12 years, I've worked with 4 Private Equity funds at ZoomInfo. Here’s my 12-step playbook for working with PE Owners. In 2014, I took on my first PE investors (TA Associates and 22C Capital). In 2018, we brought on Carlyle and CPPIB. Private Equity is in the

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@willalverson "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."