Mike Oda

@max_spero_ @tenobrus I thought it was only me

@tenobrus It’s all worth it though because as a founder, my phone number is now on ZoomInfo so I get thirty calls a day that look like this

being a founder is reaching status lows i have never before seen my entire time in tech

@MollySOShea @Hylio_Inc !! In Houston

Have a long overdue trip to Austin + Texas upcoming.. Which factories & companies should I visit?

@HowToAI_ Haha this is awesome. After they get the practice they can do it next in real life @Hylio_Inc

Someone just built a game where you literally have to program a drone using python-like language to automate a farm tasks. You write actual code to plant, harvest, and optimize yields.

@AnthropicAI @CyberpunkGame @edgerunners

Introducing Project Glasswing: an urgent initiative to help secure the world’s most critical software. It’s powered by our newest frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, which can find software vulnerabilities better than all but the most skilled humans. anthropic.com/glasswing

⚡️Houston is what happens when the physical world starts mattering again. That chart is a regime signal. A metro that large adding that much real GDP that fast means capital is flowing toward throughput, energy, logistics, engineering, fabrication, and movement of actual molecules. Houston is not winning because it has better vibes. Houston is winning because the economy still runs on power, pipes, ports, chemicals, steel, freight, and scale. That is the part a lot of people still do not get. The last cycle trained everyone to worship abstraction. Apps, media, software, branding, financial engineering, digital prestige. Then the world got more constrained, more fragmented, more inflationary, more physical. Suddenly the winners look different. Power matters. Land matters. shipping matters. Industrial competence matters. Houston lives there. The deeper truth is that Houston is one of the clearest expressions of American hard power inside a city. Energy complex. Port complex. petrochemicals. aerospace adjacency. medical scale. construction. immigration. Business formation. It is one of the few places in America where the old industrial world and the new compute world can actually shake hands. AI can talk all day about transforming civilization. Civilization still needs electricity, cooling, concrete, gas, transport, and buildable land. Houston sits closer to those choke points than most of the prestige cities that dominate the cultural conversation. That is why this growth matters at size. Small boomtowns can rip for a while on one narrow driver. Houston doing this means the underlying machine is broad. It has enough depth to convert population, capital, infrastructure, and commodity advantage into real output. That is a very different thing from a tourism bounce or a housing sugar high. The highest coherence read is simple. America is rotating back toward cities that can do hard things. Not talk about them. Not regulate them. Not aestheticize them. Do them. Houston is ugly, functional, rich in substrate, and built for scale. In a serious era, those traits start compounding. That is what this chart is really saying. The future is getting more physical again. Houston was already there.

Mac Mini production in Houston? Hmmmm.

How did Hylio get to where it is today? Eleven years ago, we made a decision that many would have considered foolish. Many believed the U.S. drone market was already dominated by foreign players a decade ago. While others saw the industry as impenetrable, Hylio took a different path. We spent the last 11 years as a founder-bootstrapped company and developed our technology into what it is today. Learn more: startengine.com/offering/hylio

VCs don’t know how to scale factories and PE firms don’t know how to underwrite hard tech. The next generation of hard tech investors will look like a VC/PE hybrid with an operating arm.

Join us today at 5:30PM CST for a Fireside Chat at the @Hylio_Inc Factory with CEO Arthur Erickson. Watch live here: youtube.com/live/kA8CJ2FkS… This is a great opportunity to gain insights into Hylio's future and the drone industry as a whole. If you are in Houston and would like to attend the factory reception - DM me for an invitation. 3:00PM - 7:30PM today.

@zebulgar At least 5

call me old fashioned but I think if you founded a company you at least gotta give it 3 years before throwing in the towel especially if you raised over $1b?

@chrisbarber @Hylio_Inc

robotics labs and startups list draft - which ones am i missing, and which categorizations are terrible and need updating? labs - pi (most people felt like this was the best team on the research side. also more of a general foundation model company, very ambitious.) - also tesla (but xai is making the models?) - gdm robotics - uma - nvidia robotics - intrinsic - rai institute, kind of - genesis ai - general intuition - generalist - dyna - skild ai for science incl lab automation - periodic labs - prometheus - lila sciences - futurehouse (tbd) - medra industrial - halcyon - boston dynamics (hyundai) - unitree - agibot - ubtech - amazon robotics - also tesla - also dyna - dynatronics - stealth - sanctuary - agility - covariant (acq) - humanoid - figure - apptronik robots for homes - 1x - also tesla - prosper - sunday - matic - bot company product - orchard robotics (farming) - path ai (manufacturing) - ironsite (construction) different axes to look at robotics labs - precustomer vs post customer - manufacturing vs home automation vs something else - specialist vs generalist - simulation training vs real world training - lab vs product focused thanks to friends who suggested companies and ways to improve organizations which am i missing, and which categorizations need updating

It’s becoming abundantly clear that America’s Shenzhen will be here.

2026 will move fast don’t miss it

President Trump is going all in on robotics. “We're gonna need the help of robots... We're gonna be employing a lot of artificial things.” This is literally becoming a reality. Robotics + AI gold rush is in full swing.

This is huge for domestic drone manufacturing. The golden age of aerial robotics is coming to America.

BREAKING: FCC bans foreign-made drones over national security

What does “US made with US and Global Components” mean? In this video, our CEO Arthur Erickson answers that exact question with a deep dive into Hylio’s product design and supply chain. Watch to learn about Hylio’s transition from system integrator to a component level manufacturer with its new HYL series drones. 📽️: youtu.be/OA_neTh93TA #hylio #precisionagdrones #hylseries

The secret: