Originally posted on the Terraform Industries blog. Terraform Industries is making cheap, synthetic, carbon neutral natural gas from sunlight and air. I founded Terraform in November 2021 with a clear vision of what this product would look like, how it would work, and a 95% correct preliminary design for the various components and system integration. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, but overall, we’re doing better than I ever dared to hope. We have a kickass team that delivered a comprehensive end-to-end demo, validating our low capex approach by making carbon-neutral pipeline grade synthetic natural gas and selling …

Last year’s post “You Should be Working on Hardware” was mostly targeted at people with established careers and financial security, but I was surprised to see it enjoyed much wider readership. Disclaimer: My own path to hardware has been personal, contingent, and path dependent. Do not feel obliged to validate my mistakes by repeating them. Also, hardware businesses are objectively much more capital intensive, risky, and challenging to execute. If you’re optimizing over expected returns in a finite lifetime, the best strategy is to pick the highest return thing with a decent chance of success for you. Starting some insanely …

Solar is in the process of shearing off the base of the entire global industrial stack – energy – and the tech sector still lacks a unified thesis for how to best enable, accelerate, and exploit this transition. There is a bitter lesson here – solar is all you need. Modern humans evolved perhaps 200,000 years ago, and for the 10,000 intervening generations between then and now, endured 100 billion mostly short, poverty stricken, ignorant, and fearful lifetimes. Our current time is so different from even the lives of our grandparents that it is difficult to make a comparison, but …