El Segundo, a beachside city of 17,000 near Los Angeles International Airport, known to its industrial denizens as "Gundo", has become an important hub for American hardware startups focused on defence, space and energy -- often described alongside Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv as one of the West's most important innovation clusters.
From 1932 to 1962 El Segundo was the "aerospace capital of the world", hosting a Douglas Aircraft Company factory that produced navy planes flown in three different wars. Hughes Aircraft Co, based there, built the first American unmanned vehicle to land on the moon. Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin still maintain major offices. In the 1990s, defence-industry consolidation and the lure of Pentagon cash drove the industry closer to Washington, killing the industrial heft of the area.
In 2002 Elon Musk founded SpaceX in a nondescript building in El Segundo, marking the start of the city's rebirth as a hub for ambitious engineers. SpaceX's LA facility has since expanded to a factory-sized premises in nearby Hawthorne. The diaspora of former SpaceX employees forms the basis of Gundo's startup culture, alongside alumni of Palantir and Anduril.
The cluster includes firms such as General Matter (working on uranium enrichment for nuclear reactors), Varda Space Industries (building pharmaceutical labs to operate in space), Rangeview (high-precision metal casting for turbine blades), Neros (lethal drones, claiming the highest drone production rate in America at about 2,000 per day), Metal Cross (x-ray testing equipment) and Picogrid (platforms linking military systems).
The cluster's culture is self-consciously anti-Silicon Valley: flags, classic cars, cigarettes, church on Sunday and flip-flops rather than kombucha fountains. Firms adopt prosaic names echoing General Electric and General Motors. Many founders are backed by Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm led by Peter Thiel, who advocates "atoms" versus "bits".
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