The Builders are Back

For over twenty years, our smartest people built toys.

Clickbait. Swipes. 15-second dopamine machines wrapped in minimalist fonts and moral branding. We called it innovation, but really… it was optimizing for addiction.

We took the internet — one of humanity’s greatest inventions — and turned it into a slot machine for attention. The brightest minds of a generation optimized the color of a notification bubble while bridges rusted, grids failed, and nobody built anything that actually mattered.

But something’s changing. You can feel it. That buzz in the background.

The engineers are restless again. We finally have kids that want to be something other than an influencer. We have kids that want to be Palmer Luckey or Elon Musk. Love them or hate them, but those motherfuckers are changing the world. 

The next generation of builders are making real things again. They want to see movement that isn’t a social media feed or a CRM dashboard. AI, fusion, SMRs, reusable rockets, biotech, batteries, supersonic planes. Real progress. Not the illusion of motion, but motion itself.

Maybe we needed the distraction era. Maybe it humbled us. You can’t appreciate substance until you’ve been high on nonsense for long enough to crash. Shoutout to those of you that have crashed, and for getting back up and getting to work.

The next great era won’t be posted.

It’ll be welded, coded, cultivated, printed, and poured. It won’t come from algorithms; it’ll come from insomnia. That 2 a.m. thought that has builders sitting bolt upright when they realize something broken could actually be better.

I’ve felt it with Beach Sherpa. There’s nothing glamorous about it, I’m just solving a simple, physical problem for real people. But the moment you move an idea from your head into the world, you feel it: the buzz. That’s the current running through every builder alive right now. 

And honestly, the buzz running through me is nothing like the one running through people that are changing the world like Blake Scholl of Boom Supersonic. Beach Sherpa is a lifestyle company that will grow into an epic enterprise, but the truth is I started it because I know that if I solve a real problem for real people I have the potential to make outsized money in a ‘relatively’ short amount of time. Then that outsized money can fund the future. Whether it’s space, deep ocean, biotech, energy, supersonic travel, or robotics. These areas (and many others) were barely touched or even talked about for years, but are now blazing to life. It’s where the next Rockefellers and Vanderbilts will be minted. But more importantly it is how humanity will be furthered and preserved. 

The dopamine factories are closing.
The foundries are reopening.
And the smartest people I know are finally bored of fake progress.

Let me know if you wanna come along for the ride.

— Mack Linstead