san-francisco
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San Francisco’s AI Boom Has a Downtown Problem
The city has the talent, money and momentum to lead the AI era. The harder question is whether a cluster of brilliant companies can bring an entire downtown back with it.
Laurence Allen
Laurence Allen, co-founder and CEO of Terranova, explains how his startup lifts land out of flood zones by injecting slurries of waste wood chips deep underground, an inexpensive, scalable alternative to seawalls, levees, and demolition. Drawing on a 1970s Venice mudjacking experiment and powered by autonomous robots and AI geology modeling, Terranova aims to be 'the anti-subsidence,' protecting whole communities and critical infrastructure. Allen also reflects on his formative internship at SpaceX, his maker upbringing, the intensity of deep-tech founding, and his vision for licensing the technology to contractors worldwide.
Inside Pallet: Culture, Ownership, and the Race to Automate the Physical Economy
A behind-the-scenes look at the culture of Pallet, an AI logistics-tech company building the intelligence infrastructure for the global movement of goods. Founder and CEO Sushanth and members of the team describe a fast-moving, ownership-driven workplace where decisions are made in meetings and acted on within the hour, where everyone pitches in across engineering, sales, and post-sales, and where the company aims to become a generational logistics AI company. The piece captures Pallet's values, its people-first ethos, and what it feels like to build software that recreates decades-old logistics workflows.