Hey friends,
It has been a busy but exciting few weeks. This newsletter continues to grow, and I am currently evaluating a few sponsorship opportunities. If you or your company would like to sponsor a future issue to connect with a diverse, tech savvy, and engaged reader base, feel free to reach out!
If we haven’t met before - hi, my name is Ilona, and I have a lot of opinions. Here’s just a few of them. This newsletter usually arrives in your inbox in Tuesday but as you’re about to see, it’s been quite a busy week!
🏭 From Steel to Silicon: What Manufacturing Can Teach Us About the Future of Innovation
In both my latest Forbes article on AI-powered proptech and recent investor conversations in New York and Philadelphia, a common thread emerged:
We are applying advanced software to physical systems that were built for a different era. Sometimes it works. Other times, it reveals just how fragile the foundation is.
Take U.S. manufacturing. Nearly half of the country’s 50,000 plants are over 30 years old. Many were built in the 1970s or earlier. After decades of underinvestment, regulatory friction, and slow modernization, factory output has declined by nearly 40% since the 1960s.
Yes, I did annotate my physical copy of The Economist and specifically saved this chart.