5 Technology Trends I’m Thankful For This Thanksgiving
Because gratitude pairs well with carbs.
1. America Is Rediscovering How to Build Things
It took a few supply chain shocks and a cultural reset, but the U.S. industrial base is having its comeback tour. Next gen manufacturing technologies and suppliers are commercializing innovations in areas like precision electromechanical assembly, automated CT-based QC, and data center efficiency. Their success is good for the country and great for anyone backing companies that build real hardware.
2. Space Infrastructure Is Becoming… Infrastructure
“Space” used to mean rockets and inspiration. Now it includes the incredibly unglamorous but mission-critical systems like phased array ground networks, resilient RF, and in-space platform that that make everything else viable. It’s often not flashy, but nothing works without it. And most importantly, Federal budgets are quickly catching up to these emerging capabilities.
3. Autonomy That Works Outside the Lab
Robots are finally graduating from tidy test environments and venturing into the chaos where humans dwell. Maritime sensing networks, dexterous manipulation, and industrial systems that don’t freeze when the world gets weird are where autonomy becomes actually useful. We get to back founders who see an unstructured environment and think, “Perfect. Let’s automate that disaster.”
4. The Government’s Long-Overdue Software Upgrade
Massive scientific and federal systems like weather models, climate analytics, and geospatial pipelines were overdue for a modernization that didn’t involve patching Fortran and hoping for the best. New companies are stepping in with cloud-native architectures, modular tooling, and enough urgency to cause mild panic in legacy systems. It’s not glamorous, but it’s quietly transformative, and the country needs about 20x more of it.
5. The Rise of High-Fidelity Sensing Everywhere
Advanced sensing is becoming the superpower behind everything interesting: AI at the edge, robotics, environmental intelligence, even next-gen comms. Tightly coupled sensor + compute stacks are turning the physical world into something we can actually measure in real time. Better signals lead to better decisions, better automation, better safety, and better products. It’s the invisible layer powering half the frontier companies worth building.
Mostly, I’m thankful for the founders doing the hard, unglamorous, real-world work. These are challenging problems that don’t bend to hype cycles. They sit there until someone stubborn enough decides to fix them.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
