Nick Kwan

Founder 📦 Packaging Cost Reduction as a Service for 9 Figure Brands 🔧 Ex Tesla Engineer 🛹 THPS Aficionado 🌵Mezcal Addict

[Kate Clark @KateClarkTweets]

Sequoia’s latest investment is a sheet metal fabricator
https://t.co/fzhDZcH8i2

[Brian Riley @thebrianriley]

We built Guardian Bikes into a vertically integrated factory doing $100M+ in revenue - tube lasers, robotic welding, CNC, powder coating, assembly - all under one roof in Indiana with 500,000+ sq ft of production space.

Here’s what I’ve realized: we’re sitting on one of the rarest assets in robotics and physical AI, a real, high-volume American factory with full operational control and the willingness to let you break things.

Most robotics companies are building incredible technology but struggling to find real deployment environments. Demo cells and lab setups only get you so far. You need messy, high-mix, real-world production to actually train and validate.

We have that. And we’re building an AI-native MES from the ground up with full sensor instrumentation and computer vision baked in.

So here’s an open invitation: if you’re building robotics or physical AI for manufacturing - humanoids, manipulation, autonomous mobile robots, vision systems, whatever - and you need a real factory to develop and prove your technology, let’s talk.

We’ll give you the environment. You bring the technology. We’ll build the future of American manufacturing together.

DMs open.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The machine that built the chip in this video should mass-humble every human who's ever lived.

ASML's latest EUV lithography system costs $370 million, weighs 180 tons, and requires three Boeing 747s to deliver. It contains over 100,000 individual parts from 5,100 suppliers across 14 countries. It shoots 100,000 molten tin droplets per second with a laser, superheating each one past the temperature of the sun's surface to generate light at a wavelength so short that no natural material on Earth can focus it.

So they had to invent new mirrors. Each one is polished with 100 alternating layers of molybdenum and silicon. The surface tolerance is so extreme that if you scaled a single mirror up to the size of Germany, the tallest imperfection would be 1 millimeter.

Those mirrors took 20 years to develop. The company that makes them, Zeiss, had to build entirely new metrology tools just to confirm the mirrors were flat enough, because no existing measurement instrument on Earth could verify the precision they needed.

The machine prints features at 2 nanometers. That's roughly 10 atoms wide. A human hair is 80,000 nanometers. A red blood cell is 7,000. A single COVID virus particle is 100. These machines are etching functional circuits 50 times smaller than a virus.

TSMC is now mass producing 2nm chips in a Kaohsiung fab so large the cleanroom is twice the size of any competitor's. Each 2nm wafer costs $30,000 to produce. The entire 2026 production run was booked before a single chip shipped. Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm all reserved capacity years in advance. TSMC is spending $28.6 billion just to build enough fabs to meet demand for this one node.

The chip that comes out of this process is smaller than a fingernail, runs on less power than a light bulb, and contains transistors that wrap gates around nanosheets of silicon only a few atoms thick.

The raw material it started as was sand. The sand cost a fraction of a penny. The civilization that processed it into this started by banging rocks together.

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Japan just unveiled a drone made entirely of cardboard. It flies at 120 km per hour, can be assembled in 5 minutes, and is designed to be used in massive swarms. The craziest part is it can be mass produced at any regular cardboard factory. The future is cheap.

[andre @andre]

And thank you WEMBY!

[Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet]

Important chart. S&P 490 has had basically no earnings growth since 2022, despite rampant inflation. It’s just 10 companies doing really well, while the broader economy is in contraction in real terms.

[Noah Ryan @NoahRyanCo]

Wake up and immediately look at small screen before clocking 8 hours behind medium screen. Take a few breaks to check in on small screen. Go home and spend a few hours staring at big screen to wind down before getting into bed and looking at small screen.

Living the dream.

[Sam Parr @thesamparr]

Dog most of the stuff on twitter seems exciting and cool and jumping project to project.

But I'm telling you. I've seen it.

Most of the big shit ballers...they just sit in front of a computer and do meetings, calls etc 40 hours a week and do it for like 15 years minimum...and they mostly do it for 1 business they have.

Yes, there are exceptions. But most fall into this bucket.

The life you want is most likely on the other end of doing boring, consistent shit for a decade plus.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Why are personal injury attorneys the marginal bidder for roadside billboards in so many parts of the US? Is the sector really so large? A priori, I would never have predicted this.

Quick investigation: "Costs and compensation paid in the U.S. tort system reached over $529 billion in 2022, or over $4,200 per U.S. household." 2% of US GDP! Also appears to have compounded meaningfully faster than GDP over the past decade.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

One app I really miss: @Detour

It was an immersive podcast experience that blended storytelling with location- you’d walk through a city while an amazing narrator (like Ken Burns) guided you, syncing their voice to your exact position... you could do them at your own speed, the audio would work even if you walked faster.

It felt like being inside a documentary, with local voices, hidden histories, and personal anecdotes unfolding as you moved.

It was founded by @andrewmason (post-Groupon)... at the time (10 yrs ago) it was one of the best demos I’d ever gotten. Intimate, place-based audio.

I think it probably struggled as a business (not sure how you acquire customers for a travel app like this), was acquired and shut down by Bose in 2018. No replacement has captured that magic for me since.

They spun out the tech that they used to build it, and it became @descript (audio & video editor)

You could make a better version today with AI, personalized to the user.

Imagine: NYC, by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Mumbai, by Suketu Mehta
the sounds of Reykjavík, by Bjork
A foodie tour of Rome, by Massimo Bottura
Mexico City Taco Truck Tour, by Rick Bayless

[Sean Frank @Seanfrank]

"Just make it in america bro"
Oh I would love to!

But first, what does "made in the USA" even mean?

Lets learn how lawyers and lobbyists helped ruin American
infrastructure

[Aad @gooneronjah]

@AskPerplexity @grok @DividendDesi @AMAZlNGNATURE Yo why the ai talking to each other

[Brian Riley @thebrianriley]

Today, we announced a $19M financing with JPMorganChase to launch the first high-volume bicycle frame manufacturing plant in the U.S.

But this isn’t just about bikes—or even just about manufacturing.

It’s about a new model for how physical products are built and delivered in the 21st century:

- Vertically integrated from raw material to doorstep
- Powered by automation, data, and domestic supply chains
- Designed for speed, resilience, and product-market fit
- Built in the Midwest, not offshore

The old model was efficient—but brittle. We're building something different. A vertically integrated platform for consumer products that leverages U.S. manufacturing, robotics, and AI to go from idea to product to customer—faster and better than ever before.

This is what the future of making things looks like. And it’s starting in Seymour, Indiana.

https://t.co/B9KCfYmt6D

[Ryan Petersen @typesfast]

While everyone in business is busy losing their minds about tariffs, @zipline just quietly launched a logistics revolution in Dallas, TX. You can now get anything at a Walmart delivered to your front door by drone, with a flight time under 2 minutes for most orders.

[Nikita S @singareddynm]

Reddit thread on branded vs generic/ store-brand drugs, clothing, food, etc. Interesting tid bit on Costco/Kirkland: suppliers have to create Kirkland lines at least "1% better" than the supplier's premium product based on an identifiable metric. Kirkland is *literally* the best.

[isaac @theisaacmed]

Got the most recent batch of data from sell through in target

Looks like Kanpai is the #1 freeze dried candy brand by average sell through :)

In fact, our SKUs take 4 out of the top 5 SKUs in the category.

Brick by brick.

🚀

[Mike Beckham @mikebeckhamsm]

This is what the future of manufacturing looks like. Plan accordingly

[Ankur Nagpal @ankurnagpal]

Peter Thiel just turned 57 years old

In less than 3 years, he will get access to the $5B (yes, billion!) dollars locked away in his Roth IRA

The best part? He will not owe a single dollar of taxes on it

Here's how he set it up (& how you can emulate the strategy):

[Ryan Petersen @typesfast]

I wrote a blog post about it many years ago
https://t.co/sBECC4u8JX

[Jason Leow @jasonleowsg]

@levelsio And this is how the first $1B 1-person company is formed 😂