In 2013, I was standing in an empty field in Zhuhai, China with a group of government officials and manufacturing executives for Flex, where I was working at the time. They were telling me a new factory would be up and running on that site within nine months. And I just didn’t believe it.
Where they saw a fully functioning factory, capable of manufacturing products to ship around the entire world, I only saw barren farmland — and miles of red tape. From permitting complexities to the labor and time-intensive process of putting in supportive infrastructure like roads, water, and power, it seemed impossible.
Nine months later, the field wasn’t empty. A massive, state-of-the-art factory stood there, filled with hundreds of highly skilled workers. I was blown away.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. By the time I was standing in that field, China’s GDP had been growing 9% annually for more than 30 years straight — more than triple the growth rate of the United States’ GDP during that same time — thanks to the country’s intentional approach to industrialization. China’s integrated model for economic growth was built on the strategic coordination of public and private sectors, with government initiatives and business roadmaps developed in total alignment.
But I did not grasp just how advanced they were at building industrial-scale substance out of literally nothing until that very moment. Over the next year, as I traveled around the country with Flex, I repeatedly saw rapid transformation. What had been a life-changing, “aha!” moment for me was just daily business in China. This was an industrial engine at scale.
This realization gave me goosebumps — and not in a good way. While the world had gradually begun to recognize the risks associated with our dependence on China’s manufacturing capabilities and supply chain, we hadn’t yet acknowledged the country’s next emerging advantage: The alignment of stakeholders, policy, and capital towards the same comprehensive, long-term goals that allowed China to build a production powerhouse also created the perfect environment for people to continually learn and acquire new skills. The United States still had the technology edge, yet the application of (and financial benefits from) advancements were concentrated to a handful of mostly knowledge-based sectors. China’s advantage was systemic, cultural, and expansive. They could easily become the next innovation powerhouse.
This was on my mind when I returned to the United States in 2014. If China’s integrated approach to analog industrialization had enabled the country’s remarkable ascent from one of the world’s poorest nations into the second-largest economy on earth, imagine how far (and how quickly) it could leap ahead of the U.S. by leveraging that same model to the digital transformation of critical industries.
That’s when I started believing the most powerful way to supercharge our next wave of domestic progress was to take our greatest strengths (advanced technology and sophisticated talent) and apply it to our biggest markets (physical industries). The fact that decades’ worth of U.S. industrial stagnation had made every sector ripe for innovation deepened my conviction, and the increasingly adversarial nature of our relationship with China made it urgent.
I wasn’t alone. A small but growing collective of bold founders and investors, armed with the insight and practical skills they gained working in 1.0 techno-industrial startups, were striking out to build and back the next generation of American industry. These people were atypical — true visionaries who could have easily started enterprise SaaS or consumer app companies, but they were driven to solve the harder problems of the world. They weren’t deterred by people who said it was too hard to build in physical industries. They knew our industrial base had become our weakness, but also that the maturation of tech and talent made it possible to apply the startup approach of rapid iteration, high-volume product shipping, and an embrace of risk to these critical sectors.
This is why we started Eclipse in 2015. While we were initially chipping away at our goal to digitally transform critical industries with a fringe group of like-minded builders, more people joined the effort every year — especially in the last five years as a series of world-changing events drew attention to the vulnerabilities associated with a weakened industrial base. Over time, an ecosystem began to emerge: Companies were increasingly overlapping, turning to one another (and across the rapidly-expanding network that included more legacy players and government agencies) for the modern materials, production capabilities, critical infrastructure, and talent they needed to rebuild entire categories from the ground up.
In the past decade, the Eclipse ecosystem has become an engine of economic transformation. It’s also the talent network, R&D lab, production line, and customer acquisition channel. This integrated system acts as a flywheel, enabling startups to move from blueprint to breakthrough to fully-built products, manufactured at scale, faster than ever. What once took decades takes a few years. What once took years is now happening in months.
When I see the speed at which companies are going from concept, to concrete product, to customer pilots, to commercialization, I’m reminded of what I saw in China — but built with American values. Our integrated approach to techno-industrial growth is rooted in trust, transparency, and access to opportunity. This emerging ecosystem is enabling us to see a future where we aren’t dependent on a foreign supply chain, source of labor, and manufacturing capacity, and the intention of this movement is resilience and self-reliance — not the ability to weaponize our capabilities in times of crisis.
But I also know we have to move fast in order to maintain our economic leadership and thus autonomy. Even faster than before — because China is right behind us, but is now embarking on a strategy that more directly threatens U.S. leadership. As we’ve been reinventing our industrial base over the past decade, China has been executing on its next act for economic growth: The Made in China 2025 initiative. Coincidentally launched the same year as Eclipse, MIC is focused on the digital transformation of critical physical industries. Given China already has a robust, overlapping network of connected industries and the unparalleled coordination of public and private sectors, the country has been able to move astonishingly fast on its initiative.
This isn’t a competition we can win by punitive measures and isolationist tactics abroad, and we never set out to unseat China as the world’s factory floor. I never thought it was in our best interest to recreate, exactly, what I had seen in the country 12 years ago and since then, given the extreme wealth disparity, sustainability issues, and numerous other drawbacks of their approach. At the same time, we won’t make great leaps forward using the playbook Silicon Valley has optimized for the SaaS age. We’re not disrupting consumer sectors and knowledge work; we’re redefining the foundational infrastructure that underpin every aspect of life. By infusing the best parts of each of the above strategies, we can reinvent and strengthen our critical industries, establish an even greater technology advantage, and grow our GDP at a transformative level.
Now, at the end of 2025, I’m thrilled that Eclipse is no longer an outlier but a microcosm of a national reindustrialization movement spreading across the United States. We set out to build an engine of innovation that generates opportunity, prosperity, and sovereignty for everyone. We set out to ensure the U.S. doesn’t ever have to question our ability to continually progress together, as a nation. As we’ve spent our first 10 years reinventing physical industries, I’ve come to believe that the products that move, build, power, and protect our world will be made in America – and likely made in Eclipse.
