For over two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, 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 China. (Russia, too, if necessary.)

Out in El Segundo, California, where the salt-water-tinged air thrums with steady plane traffic and oil refineries sweep across the shoreline, these founders have settled on a place where they can act 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. Before that, there was Silicon Alley in New York and Silicon Beach in Los Angeles. 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. (You can sometimes catch VCs wandering the warehouse-lined back alleys in hopes of snagging a meeting with an entrepreneur. So feverish is the financial frenzy that Gundo founders often joke about renting a double-decker bus, filling it with potential investors, and offering local tours.)

But the founders are adamant that their city, despite its investment windfall, is not Silicon Valley’s next act. In fact, it is ideologically opposed to what they consider the soft and comfortable world of the Bay Area and the lightweight commodities it now largely produces: corporate subscription software and trivial consumer applications.

“This is not ‘San Francisco lite’ or ‘San Francisco plus a little bit of hardware,’” says Zane Mountcastle, the straight-talking CEO of the defense technology company Picogrid. “It’s a different world from San Francisco and it has a completely different mindset.” Mountcastle, who first started working in the Bay Area city of Livermore, saw that only a few years ago Silicon Valley had little appetite for companies that aid the military. “At parties, when I told people what I did,” he says, “they’d be like, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’”

Despite its proximity to Los Angeles, El Segundo is a factory town with a laid-back temperament. The city is home to less than 20,000 people and has deep manufacturing roots: Nearly three quarters of its land is dedicated to industrial uses, including petroleum refineries, power plants, and aerospace manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It is imbued with Californian nostalgia: Patrons sip beer on bar patios alongside their dogs and the occasional parrot. Below billowing steam towers, the downtown streets are flanked with retro diners and vintage record shops.

The founders in El Segundo have settled on an expansive terrain in which to express sentiments that might chafe otherwise progressive sensibilities. They have an outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their Lord and savior Jesus Christ. They are aspirationally blue collar, often wearing blue jeans, clean leather work boots, and dark T-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets. By day, the founders often trek to the Central Valley to launch drones into the airspace. By night, they can be found drinking Singapore slings at the Purple Orchid tiki lounge, or burning pallets at Dockweiler Beach, chewing nicotine pouches, and chugging energy drinks.

At the offices of the nuclear energy company Valar Atomics, where I was invited to attend a Bible study, Bibles were propped up on desks beside laptops. Valar Atomics’ head of business operations, Elijah Froh, who is 26 years old and has the straightforward self-assurance of a car salesman, offered me a glass of raw milk, increasingly the drink of choice in many conservative circles. Then, he led our small group in prayer and read aloud from a passage in Hebrews.

Later, Froh invited me into Valar Atomics’ cigar lounge, where actual cigars can’t be smoked due to a permitting issue with the building. We sat in enormous leather armchairs beside a small table stacked with cigars sealed in Ziploc bags. On the wall hung four large classical paintings depicting Columbus discovering America, the pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention. Froh told me that God needed businessmen just as much as he needed missionaries, and that God had put him on this earth to build a nuclear energy company. “A lot of people are seeing the societal value of religion,” he said.

During the three days that I visited companies in The Gundo, I saw three women and spoke to one: the wife of an employee at Valar Atomics who attended the Bible study along with her two young children. She had moved to a house near the beach with her husband three weeks earlier. When I asked if she was meeting many nice people, she laughed and said that she was too busy taking care of her children to leave the house.

Later, I asked a founder in The Gundo why he thought there were so few women. “You’re missing the point,” he told me, claiming that this line of inquiry is “a little boring. It is a non-thing. It muddies the story and it distracts from our core mission of trying to save the West.” Then he mentioned Katherine Boyle, a partner at the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz who helped spearhead the defense tech movement. Boyle is in fact a woman. But more importantly, “She is awesome,” he said. “She is extremely sharp and observant. She is serious with a capital S, but not serious with a lowercase s.”

The Gundo founders, for their part, think of themselves as serious people who do not take themselves seriously. This, they say, is in contrast to those in Silicon Valley: unserious people who take themselves extremely seriously.

Just about every company in The Gundo has a huge American flag in its office, but the biggest—an object of envy among all the Gundo founders—is on the wall of Olaf Hichwa and Soren Monroe-Anderson’s 15,000-square-foot drone factory, Neros. Hichwa is a wide-eyed, toothy 22-year-old from the DC area. He dropped out of the Rochester Institute of Technology computer engineering program his sophomore year to build drones. In May, Neros raised nearly $11 million. In the Neros factory, Hichwa showcased his company’s product: a wickedly fast drone that he maneuvered to terrifying heights above my head. Later, he showed me a video of Ukrainian soldiers detonating a bomb, latched to a Neros drone, on Russian artillery. Up close, the drones belie their potent capabilities: They are deceptively flimsy, almost like toys.

The war in Ukraine has both legitimized and popularized the efforts of many founders in the defense tech industry, especially Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril. The Gundo founders speak of Luckey often and reverentially. In 2017, Luckey left Facebook. He has said he was fired for supporting Donald Trump. (Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied that politics was a factor in Luckey’s departure.) Today, he is vindicated: His company has been awarded multiple lucrative military contracts. This year, it is seeking a $12.5 billion valuation. In a recent interview, Luckey said that Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists are investing in defense tech because the “Silicon Valley bubble is going to collapse, and that left behind are going to be the industries that actually create value…defense is one of those.”

Politically, Luckey is hardly a rarity. In recent weeks many of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists have rallied behind the former president, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, and All-In podcast hosts David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya. (Sacks and Palihapitiya were reportedly both instrumental in helping Trump pick J.D. Vance, who had a stint in venture capital, as his running mate.) It is felt that Trump is an essential player in Silicon Valley’s investments in defense tech. But during my conversations in El Segundo, Trump came up only twice. When I asked Froh if he supported Trump in the 2020 election, he told me he couldn’t remember who he voted for, or if he had voted at all. Fil Aronshtein, the voluble and charismatic founder and CEO of Dirac—an “anti-software software company” that generates assembly instructions for industrial manufacturers—told me that Trump was early to the idea that China would someday figure as the United States’ greatest threat.

Like many of the Gundo founders, the threat of the “Great Red Dragon” weighs heavy on Aronshtein’s mind. Sometimes he loses sleep over it. “China wants to see the West and our way of life and democracy collapse,” he says. “People need to understand that their way of life is in danger. The stakes are serious. This is not a movie, and no one is coming to save them.” The El Segundo founders live in a world that is neatly ordered between heroes and villains, a world in which military might is a moral obligation rather than a national necessity. “Having an adversary is very interesting,” says Aronshtein. “Because it gets people to work harder.”

Sometimes it seems that the El Segundo founders are acting out a studied caricature of nostalgic Americana, especially on Twitter, where they frequently post about smoking cigarettes, bench-pressing, and loving their country. At least some part of the scene is pure performance. “It’s totally intentional. You have to make it cool,” says Cameron Schiller, the cofounder and CEO of the aerospace manufacturer Rangeview. “We’re trying to bring more young people into manufacturing.”

Schiller is tall and lean, with the good looks of a Hollister model. He recently tricked out his office with a set of concert speakers which he plans to use at office parties. Rangeview’s office is tastefully decorated, its lab lit with purple and orange mood lighting. In the office, Schiller points out a jet engine, a race car simulator, and a photo of Rangeview employees with Aaron Paul, the actor who plays Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad. In the photo, Paul and the employees are all dressed in matching lab coats. When I ask about the photo, Schiller tells me that the actor wandered in off the street one day.

“Yeah,” says Aronshtein, who had accompanied me to Schiller’s office. “He was like, ‘Man, I heard you guys were cookin’!’”

“Basically,” says Schiller. “He was like, ‘I heard you guys have a lab. Can I come and check it out?’”

The founders sometimes have private discussions about whether they are posting too much on Twitter. “We don’t want this to be a fad,” says Aronshtein. When I tell Isaiah Taylor, the 25-year-old founder of Valar Atomics, that the Gundo scene seems a little contrived, he shrugs.

“Maybe we just really like America,” he says. In The Gundo, patriotism is theatrical, but it is not theater. “For me, being patriotic is like asking me if I love my mom. Like, you love your mother, right? I don’t know why we in the US have such a hard time with that.” The tobacco products, the bench-pressing, the jumbo-size American flags, the devotion to God and country, all would be happening, he tells me, “whether or not there’s a spotlight on us.”

Taylor and I were having breakfast at a diner in The Gundo, and he was eating a country-fried steak. He had been up late the night before at the Purple Orchid with some of the guys. Later, on the way home, they had climbed into Doricko’s utility van to get Cane’s chicken. They had lit up cigarettes, and someone began to sing the national anthem. He showed me a video on his phone: There they were, swaying side to side, their faces lit by the orange embers of their cigarettes burning in the dark. Together they sang, their voices earnest. (“O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave!”) The song ended and they yipped into the night.