Clad in a black tank top, 28-year-old Jared West wheeled a mystery object to the front of a packed room of investors and young engineers in El Segundo, California. He yanked off the mysterious item’s blue tarp to reveal a gleaming, porcelain toilet.
Then he declared that his company, Western Chemicals, had developed the first synthetic fuel process with net negative carbon and hydrogen input costs.
Simply put, West is making gasoline out of wastewater.
Since wastewater has the same elemental ingredients as gasoline (carbon and hydrogen), biomanufacturing can turn human filth into a potential power source. And West says he can do it 50% cheaper than anyone else.
Every seat in the darkened warehouse was filled, and the back half was jammed with mostly young men, standing shoulder to shoulder. At one point, when several loud conversations in the back made it difficult to hear the presentations, I watched attendees turn around, looking annoyed.
As West spoke, a jittering line of other early-stage founders stretched along the left side of the room, waiting for their two-minute turns. They promised tech ranging from autonomous surgical robots to using terahertz (THz) for radio connectivity for the first time.
Each founder was selected to present by Discipulus Ventures, a venture capital fund and hard-tech accelerator. Last Wednesday’s group of young entrepreneurs marked the fund’s fourth cohort. This go-around, applicants had a 1% chance of acceptance.
Each of the ten early-stage companies chosen to make presentations was awarded $100,000 and given access to 120-plus partners from top firms.
Discipulus Ventures is run by Jakob Diepenbrock. In less than a year he raised $60 million for this project. He’s 22 years old.
His goal is to aid the country’s transition from a software-based tech market to a Renaissance of physical hardware. Diepenbrock and others believe this shift will help the U.S. compete in a global market where advanced software comes to life through physical infrastructure.
The result has been a hard-tech explosion in El Segundo.
Palmer Luckey, the designer of the Oculus Rift and founder of Anduril Industries, gave the event’s keynote address.
The ‘Build Real Things’ movement
Luckey has been a trailblazer in the “build real things” movement for more than a decade and has been outspoken about his values — an attitude which left him scathed by Silicon Valley.
After word got out that he’d donated $10,000 to an anti-Hillary Clinton group, Facebook fired him from his executive position in March 2017.
Luckey picked himself up, and the next month he founded Anduril — now a $60 billion company — just to the south of El Segundo in Orange County. During his remarks on Wednesday, he presented a case for building in Southern California.
The area’s natural beauty and existing infrastructure make it well suited to attract talent and develop new hardware, he said.
And Discipulus Ventures agrees. In an interview with the Deseret News, Diepenbrock explained how his firm chooses which companies to boost.
“Our target persona is basically a young technical founder,” he said. Ideally, each founder has worked at a company in their space for several years, understands their problem well and wants to solve it with physical infrastructure.
But beyond a shared hard-tech interest, this generation of new industrialists has several other unifying qualities. Critics have painted the self-described “Gundo bros” as a political phenomenon, which Diepenbrock says is wrong.
Discipulus Ventures describes itself as being dedicated to ideals like religion, patriotism and family. When aligned, those ideals drive founders to success, Diepenbrock said. “If you want to build important things, work hard, solve real problems, push through it and make it work, that’s what we want.”
Building El Segundo into the hard-tech capital of the U.S.
Warehouses dot the tight sunny streets of El Segundo, just south of LAX. Inside the buildings, wires have been absentmindedly draped over open doors. American flags are pinned up against walls, and engineers sit quietly, bent over their work.
In 2023, Augustus Doricko, now 25, was deciding where to set up headquarters for his cloud-seeding business, Rainmaker. His friend Cameron Schiller, the co-founder of an advanced metal-casting company, told him, “I have a vision. El Segundo can become the deep-tech hardware capital of the U.S.”
The city is located right beneath Los Angeles International Airport and is close enough to San Francisco to raise money, Schiller reasoned.
Doricko said Schiller told him they could start companies right where they were, and make it cool to work on hard problems again instead of going into finance or crypto.
That fall at a conference, Diepenbrock met Doricko. “He was pretty convincing about what was going on there,” Diepenbrock said. “There was this cultural change in tech, specifically in El Segundo, where a lot of people were very excited about building really critical companies for the country.”
So Diepenbrock dropped out of Northeastern University where he was studying computer science and finance and moved to Southern California.
“Jakob is so compelling because he’s incredibly young. He’s so well spoken, and he’s outspoken about his faith”
— Jared West, founder of Western Chemicals
Just as Doricko hooked Diepenbrock, Diepenbrock has been attracting others to the area.
“Jakob is absolutely a magnet,” West of Western Chemicals told the Deseret News in an interview, Friday. “I think the quality of the program, along with the character and technical talent he attracts is insane.”
He continued, “I think Jakob is so compelling because he’s incredibly young. He’s so well spoken, and he’s outspoken about his faith. I’m a Christian man, and having investors who back me who have the same value set is of critical importance to me.”
West also mentioned Doricko and Isaiah Taylor, the founder of Valar Atomics. Taylor designs small nuclear reactors, the first of which is currently being assembled in Orangeville, Utah. Dubbed the “Ward250,” Taylor’s first reactor is expected to come alive on July 4, this summer.
“Magnets attract more magnets. I hope to be that for more young guys and gals — whoever wants to start companies," West said.
Discipulus Ventures now brings 10-20 new companies to El Segundo a year.
However, the momentum in El Segundo did not appear ex nihilo. The area has a century-long legacy of building hard tech. Howard Hughes founded Hughes Aircraft in 1932 as a 28-year-old; Boeing set up shop there in 2000, developing military satellites and spacecraft components; Elon Musk founded SpaceX in El Segundo in 2002.
A rejection of Silicon Valley and internet-isolated software
Silicon Valley changed the world, and now — according to the Gundo bros and much of the internet — it is now facing a reckoning.
This small region, in the southern San Francisco Bay Area, developed the internet, the smartphone, social media and artificial intelligence. The top 10 tech companies in Silicon Valley produce around $1.8 trillion in revenue annually.
However, in March, two of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies, Alphabet Inc. (Google) and Meta, were found guilty of engineering their apps to “addict and harm” young users. The now-20-year-old plaintiff will be awarded $6 million in damages, with Meta on the hook for 70%.
The ruling’s precedent is not the only threat Silicon Valley faces.
“Software is dead,” one 20-something engineer told me in an El Segundo warehouse last Wednesday. Artificial intelligence annihilated the barrier to entry for much of the software industry. Anyone can vibe-code an app, he said.
And the Gundo bros see the reckoning as an opportunity to return the best American minds to physical infrastructure.
“Human beings are capable of multitudes if we believe so.”
— Jared West, founder of Western Chemicals
“Our generation was really sold, ‘Go to school, get a good job, work that job, retire.’ That job looks like sitting in an office. That was the American ideal. And I think that young folk now are feeling in their bodies that that is not the truth,” West told the Deseret News. “The truth is in the physical world. The truth is in exploration. The truth is in adventure.”
He referenced the Wright brothers and their early test flights in North Carolina. “I would have loved to be in that barn right when they were building. Those guys were having the best time. They were exploring a new frontier that nobody thought was possible,” West said.
“I remember a headline from that time where it was like, ‘It would take the combined effort of all human minds a thousand years to take flight,’ but it was just two guys in a barn. And that’s just the truth. Human beings are capable of multitudes if we believe so,” he said.
An unapologetic place for young men
When Diepenbrock was still in school in Boston, he applied for a job in investment banking. He was a freshman at the time, and the interviewer told him that “if I was a different race or gender, I would have been pushed forward.”
“I was actually told that,” Diepenbrock said with a laugh. “Obviously, that’s not encouraging.”
He thought to himself at the time, “I already have a knock on my resume because of a particular thing I can’t control.”
In El Segundo, “no one’s asking about any of that stuff,” he said.
The Gundo bros are focused on fixing real-world issues like energy deficits and drought. They’re scaling their solutions to reach as many people as possible.
The earliest and most successful Gundo bros do not have traditional higher-ed credentials. Doricko dropped out of UC Berkeley his senior year, Diepenbrock dropped out of Northeastern after two years, and Taylor didn’t attend university at all.
Their success in attracting other intelligent and capable young men (regardless of credentials) is likely due to their belief that the American education system has left boys behind.
In 2022, the top two-thirds of the 10% highest achievers in schools were girls, and the inverse was true of young men, according to Brookings. Of the bottom 10% of students, two-thirds were boys. Boys are three times as likely to get expelled as girls, and women significantly outpace men in college attendance.
Beyond the current American education system, Gen Z faces other issues, like a drought of worthy role models. Thanks to the rise of social media, which consumes nearly five hours of Gen Z’s days, the most visible and hailed people of the generation are “influencers.”
Instead of aspiring to become astronauts or doctors, more than half of Gen Z (57%) said they’d become influencers if ever given the chance, per Morning Consult data.
“I thank God that we just went around the moon,” West said. “We sent people as far away from Earth as they’ve ever been. That is amazing. I hope that kind of activity — same with the El Segundo companies and other great startups and hard tech — will continue to inspire young children to see these things and be like, ‘Oh, humanity is actually capable of so much more than talking into a little microphone and saying stuff that’s weird and, you know, harmful.”
To the Gundo bros, being alive in 2026 is spectacular: it’s the age of splitting atoms, turning sewage to fuel and catching rockets with chopsticks.
The best of American excellence is not locked in the past, buried alongside the Wright brothers and Manhattan Project engineers. It’s in the present, hunched over a piece of machinery in El Segundo, wrench in one hand, a Celsius in the other.