An Abundant, Dynamic Future: Part 4

• up & up | Sports & fashion have big weeks

• deep dive | Exploring American abundance & dynamism (Part 4: Transportation)

• odds & ends | Life paths

• Super Bowl Sunday: In a not shocking pullback from last year, there were no crypto or web3-focused Super Bowl ads following the collapse of FTX and disillusionment with the crypto industry. But brands still used Super Bowl LVII to experiment with web3, NFTs, and the metaverse. A few examples: the NFL hosted a Saweetie concert in the metaverse (we get it, Roblox isn't a metaverse) and Doritos launched a similar experience in Decentraland with NFTs to boot.

• Rihanna: Speaking of the bowl, Rihanna squeezed in some very well-timed product placement for her beauty line Fenty. In another savvy move, Rihanna's Savage x Fenty lingerie line has partnered with FIT:MATCH which uses lidar sensors to anonymously scan your body and recommend the best fitting products from the brand.

• New York Fashion Week: Not to be outdone by #sports, the fashion world continued its foray into digital worlds during NYFW. Emerging web3 startup Syky (Series A, $9.5m, 776 Ventures, Jan 2023) hosted an IRL event where Syky token-holders met with emerging digital fashion designers, while BCBG hosted a metaverse runway show to showcase their real world collection.

An Abundant, Dynamic Future ⚛️ Part 4

On repeat: We're continuing our journey of exploring an abundant, dynamic America with reinvigorated institutions and future-fit sectors. As with previous write-ups, we're looking at Derek Thompson's analysis of 5 critical areas suffering from scarcity - Healthcare, Education, Housing, Transportation, and Energy & Climate - and taking a bottoms-up approach (inspired by Katherine Boyle) to identify entrepreneurs and startups solving these issues. This week: transportation.

Part 1: Healthcare 🏥

Part 2: Education 🎓

Part 3: Housing 🏘️

Part 4: Transportation 🚆

Two years ago, a 20-year old tweeted this fake image showing what a high speed rail system could look like in the United States. It went viral, garnering over 185k likes and 50k retweets.

You might be thinking "Interesting...but why does this matter?"

It's a signal. A signal of frustration with our nation's crumbling and antiquated transportation infrastructure. Our trains are in need of upgrades and are definitely not high-speed, while our airlines gifted us one of the most chaotic travel summers ever. This was compounded by the average age of US airports being over 40 years old and lacking the infrastructure to manage demand surges. Collectively, airports have a backlog of essential infrastructure updates worth $115 billion.

Meanwhile, our ports were at the front and center of the shipping crisis. Images of cargo ships stuck in weeks-long "traffic jams" around coastal ports were commonplace in 2021. But the pandemic was just the straw that broke the camel's back, with decades of systemic problems and policy decisions coming to bear in a perfect storm.

In his analysis, Thompson points out that policy decisions, even well-intentioned policy decisions, are often the culprit which delay or stop critical investment in new or updated infrastructure across land, air, and sea. He shares the example of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, 1970) which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impact prior to building new infrastructure. In theory this is a good thing.

In practice NEPA can significantly slow down infrastructure progress while not acting as a true filter (many projects get approved post-environmental assessment regardless of the findings). There have been recent bi-partisan attempts to reduce this unintended side effect: both the Obama and Trump administrations issued Executive Orders to quicken federal permitting and modernize NEPA, respectively. Regardless, this is just one example of the procedural headache that policy can cause infrastructure projects.

Speaking of administrations, the Biden administration passed the Bi-Partisan Infrastructure Bill in 2021 to provide $550 billion in additional spending for our national infrastructure, including modernizing airports, railways, and ports. And while it will provide some much needed investment, more will be needed.

Remember that $115 billion backlog of investment airports need? They received $15 billion from this bill. Between 2021 and 2025, ports expect to spend $163 billion on capital expenditures. They received $17 billion from this bill. And while the bill provides the most significant funding to train transportation in 50 years, we still can't realize a high speed rail system with it. So despite all this publicly-funded investment, we still need more to solve our transportation problems

As in other domains we've explored, the private sector can help us to solve the transportation problem. And we can do this through the atoms powered by bits principle. We need to retrofit our old atoms with new bits, and only build new atoms with natively integrated bits. Slightly different from other domains, wide-scale bottoms-up innovation and adoption in transportation industries is not as clear cut. So instead of highlighting startups grouped by function or benefit, we'll look at specific technology domains and how they can provide solutions to our transportation woes.

1: Cloud Platforms, IoT, and Edge ☁️

Transportation companies (cough *Southwest* cough) and transit authorities (cough *FAA* cough) alike could benefit from replacing their outdated technology infrastructures with modern, extensible cloud platforms which can scale up and down with demand, provide more reliable data and performance, and have critical redundancies for outages. There's plenty of options from legacy players. Heavy-hitters like IBM, Amazon, and Oracle have specific cloud platform offerings tailored to the transportation industry to help reduce costs and optimize service levels.

In turn, cloud platforms lay the groundwork for more connected transportation technology ecosystems. These ecosystems can leverage advanced IoT sensors and devices to create smart networks. For example, sensors can be added to trains which monitor rails for wear & tear to get ahead of track maintenance issues, or monitor real-time throughput of autonomous container vehicles at ports. This will be a ton of data to process, but with edge computing it can happen at the asset (atom)-level and reduce central process loads. Ultimately, cloud, IoT and edge can provide significant value across the transportation sector which has not deployed these solutions at scale.

2: Robotics & Automation 🤖

A lot of the current stress placed on the transportation ecosystem is high demand for services with insufficient resources to meet the demand, especially on the human capital side. There are already signs of a future where we can use AI-powered vehicles and robots to better meet that demand (and could be more easily managed via cloud platforms):

• Parallel Systems are developing a more flexible freight rail system with self-assembling electric rail vehicles (Series A, $50m, Embark Ventures, Jan 2022)

• Reliable Robotics is building AI-powered autonomous aircraft to improve supply of commercial pilots (Series C, $100, Coatue, Oct 2021)

• Orok Robotics is using AI-powered carts to automate airport ground operations (e.g., baggage handling) and provide a safer environment for workers (private funding)

• Captain AI provides automated cargo ship solutions including AI-powered route planning and autopilot modes for automated ports like the one in Rotterdam (Seed, $300k, Uniiq , July 2019)

3: Digital Twins 👥

Digital twins are digital representations of physical assets, processes, or systems. What makes it different from a 3D rendering or animation is the use of real-time data and AI-powered models to monitor the real world thing. For example, Southwest could install advanced sensors and data feeds into one of their many Boeing 737s and then predict when one of the engines needs preventative maintenance before they put the plane in service and load it with people and bags.

Southwest could also build a digital twin of its entire flight operations network using real-time data points from across the entire fleet, ground operations, and personnel. It could have real-time insights into the "health" of its fleet, the service levels of their ground operations, and crew available for route allocation. They could do this without a digital twin, but with one they could visualize the real-time performance of their operations and then model different scenarios - e.g., if they take out ten 737s for preventative maintenance, what is the downstream impact to ground operations and crew-to-route allocations?

This can help avoid situations like their holiday meltdown, but can also streamline their normal day-to-day operations. And digital twins can do this for other airlines, rail operators, freight liners, ports, transit providers, and more. And while this is definitely a dream state for digital twins, which have not yet realized this level of sophistication, it can and will happen one day.

Ultimately, transportation is such an atoms-intensive industry that sometimes it is hard to imagine a world where every train is high-speed, every airplane is on-time, and every port has automated infrastructure. It will take time, smart policy, and much more public & private investment. But we can use existing & emerging technologies like the ones listed above to transform our existing atoms and their operating environments. Over-time we can replace them with more advanced and, importantly, sustainable solutions...which is a good tee up for the last area we'll explore: Energy & Climate.

Life Paths

Tim Urban is excellent at taking nebulous, intangible concepts and creating simple, explanatory visuals. This is a good one. It might be cliche (we'll allow it 😮‍💨) but it's a good reminder that it's never too late to take a new path.

Thanks for reading 😬