Every Industry Has a Capital

Next stop: Roboticsville, USA

Hi, I’m Brandes! I just joined the Also Capital team full-time after spending the summer as a scout. You might have seen Mike’s announcement or my earlier guest post, but this is my first piece as an official member of the team. In my first two weeks, I’ve spent most of my time observing and asking questions, and now I have one for you:

We have an aerospace capital, a software capital, and an automotive capital — why not a robotics capital?

This idea hit me last week on my first trip to Detroit. I saw a very cool factory floor, ate some great food, and spent time with one of the most exciting teams we’ve backed. You can still feel the history of the automotive industry everywhere you go. Detroit was, and still is, where automotive ideas go to grow up.

That pattern repeats across industries:

• El Segundo for aerospace

• Silicon Valley for chips, then software, then AI

• Huntsville for missiles and rockets

• Detroit for automotive

• Rochester for optics

Every industrial hub starts with an anchor tenant. Detroit had Ford. El Segundo had Hughes. Silicon Valley had Fairchild. Huntsville had Wernher von Braun. Rochester had Kodak. One big player sets up shop, and the rest of the ecosystem grows around it.

Pieces of Roboticsville might already exist. In Shenzhen, there’s a single street lined with robotics companies. They can move from prototype to product in days, not months, because everything they need is within a short distance. The U.S. version hasn’t emerged yet. No dominant center of gravity. No canonical Roboticsville.

Every frontier sector eventually finds a home base, a place where talent clusters, suppliers line the streets, and iteration loops compress. Put enough people in one place, and work accelerates. Frontier industries need frontier towns. We learned it a long time ago in manufacturing, and it’s still true now.

So if Detroit was cars, and El Segundo was aerospace, and Silicon Valley is software — where should we put Roboticsville, USA? And who will be our Ford, our Hughes, our Fairchild?