Most of the computer science graduate students in the US are on temporary visas, and so are about half of the engineering students. Funders who back student founders rarely say how they reach these people, or what happens to a founder when the visa gets in the way.

I grew up in Arizona and I'm not an international student, so I'm writing this from the outside. What I do know is what it feels like to be filtered by something that has nothing to do with what you can build. I ended up at ASU for reasons beyond my control, and it took me a long time to stop hearing that as a verdict. A school name is a soft filter. A visa is a hard one, with dates attached.

ASU has a large international population. Open Doors counted 20,368 international students at the Tempe campus in 2024/25, a number that includes students on OPT. At the Arizona Microcredit Initiative, where I run operations, some of the people we lend to are immigrants and refugees starting their own businesses. It made me curious what the same barriers look like one step up, for a student on a visa who wants to start a company that raises venture money. I'd like those students to have real resources, and I'd like the funders who come through campuses like ours to think about them. This is my attempt to work out what those resources should be.

The National Science Foundation counted graduate students in science, engineering and health fields at 635 institutions in 2024. In computer and information sciences, 96,536 of 161,368 were on temporary visas, or 59.8%. In engineering it was 89,281 of 176,012, or 50.7%. Those counts include part-time students, and the shares are my arithmetic from NSF's counts.

The founder side points the same way. The National Foundation for American Policy counted US unicorns in April 2026. Of 775, 455 (59%) have an immigrant founder, and 183 (24%) have a founder who first came to the US as an international student. NFAP is an advocacy group, and it says immigrant-founded unicorns include many of the AI, medical research, space and defense companies. Those are the same fields where graduate programs are mostly international.

I couldn't find the rules laid out in one place, so here is my summary of DHS and USCIS pages. An F-1 student can form a company and pitch investors, but starting a business counts as work and needs authorization. That means CPT or OPT. Before graduation, OPT is capped at 20 hours a week while school is in session, and CPT has to be integral to the program. In the first 12 months of post-completion OPT the rule is more open, and you may start, own, and work for your own business. STEM OPT adds up to 24 more months, but a sole founder generally can't qualify. It needs a real employer, a training plan and E-Verify, and you can't sign off on your own plan. When OPT ends, you can't keep working for your own business unless you have another status.

The clock is also changing. DHS published a final rule on July 17, 2026 that ended "duration of status." Since September 15, F-1 students are admitted until the end of their program, capped at four years, with 30 days after that to leave or change status. OPT and STEM OPT remain, with a six-month reprieve on the new filing. On September 18 the White House extended the $100,000 payment on H-1B petitions through September 21, 2027.

Put those rules together and a pattern shows up. Take a student who starts a two-year master's in fall 2026 and has an idea in the first semester. For the next two years the student can plan, form the company and raise money, but working for it is limited to CPT or part-time OPT. The company's first real working year is the year after graduation. After it, the student needs another entity or person to be the employer, or a different status.

Add it up and the best case is about five years from enrollment to the end of work authorization, and only if the degree qualifies for STEM OPT and a structure exists to employ the founder. For a funder's perspective, it's important to note that the visa clock starts at graduation, not at incorporation, and a funder's first check usually lands well before that.

I read the public visa language of four different venture programs. Entrepreneurs First says, "We do not provide visas for the EF program," though it can help with applications. Techstars says it can't help before you're accepted. a16z speedrun says the B-1 visitor visa is the most common route for its 12-week program, and offers attorney introductions and support letters. Its post doesn't discuss F-1 students or OPT.

What I could not find, from any of them, is the share of accepted founders on student visas, how an investor treats a founder's visa status in diligence, who pays the legal bills, or whether a student-run fund can write a check to someone on an F-1. I also found no study of whether investors discount visa-dependent founders. My guess is that it happens informally, in how a funder reads the phrase "not full-time yet."

The closest evidence is indirect. A study of nearly 1,900 startups found that those that won the H-1B lottery got follow-on venture funding within three years 49% of the time, against 41% for those that lost. A visa outcome changed a company's odds for a reason that had nothing to do with the founder's quality. I think that's a hazard a funder should price, and one a funder can help reduce.

A student who keeps founding when a sponsored job is the easy path is making a trade a funder can see, and that I am personally bullish on. They are choosing a company over the default way to stay in the country, with a clock running. A student who has also worked out their own paperwork before pitching has already shown how they handle a hard constraint. Those are two reasons I'd look harder at these founders.

That being said, NFAP counts unicorns that already exist. It can't say how many international students tried to found something and left, so a rate built on winners overstates the odds. The same sponsorship pressure that makes founding a bold choice also keeps the supply small, since most students on OPT are taking jobs. Nothing I found measures a funding gap, so "under-funded" is my inference, not a sourced fact. I couldn't measure MBA founders either. The one dataset I found, from Stanford GSB, has MBAs at about 13% of founders at 1,826 US unicorns, and about 11% for those that crossed $1 billion in 2020 or later, so I wouldn't build an argument on MBAs.

I also counted the 319 companies on DRF's public portfolio page by hand (this is the fourth program from before), using each company's website description. Nine (about 3%) are defense, space or public safety, and eight (about 3%) are biotech or life-science tools. About 21% I couldn't classify because the sites had no usable description. The page shows no year, school or region, so I can't say who funded what, when. My categories are my own judgment and I'd expect to be corrected. They fit the question, though. If immigrant-founded companies cluster in AI, space and defense, as NFAP says, I'd want to know whether DRF's pipeline reaches the people building them. From outside I can't tell.

If I joined DRF, the first thing I'd do is ask for that number. The second would be to find out where the graduate students are at the campuses DRF already covers.

There has never been a better time to work for a startup. The tools are cheaper, a small team can do what used to take a hundred people, and the on-ramps are everywhere if you look. The pitch almost always comes with a number attached, and that number is the reason a lot of people take the job over a safer one. Equity. Some fraction of something that might be worth a great deal someday.

I have taken that pitch twice. I was an early hire at two startups, and at the second, I was the first employee they ever granted equity to. Which meant I was also the first person there to find out how little any of us understood about what we were handing out and taking on.

It is easy to get misled here, knowingly or not. Often it is not. The founders may not have much visibility into any of this yet, because they have never had to. The first time a company grants equity, no one in the building has done it before, and the answers live in documents that may not be finished yet. This means that, especially in the day-to-day rush of an early-stage startup, a lot of questions get honest answers that aren't really answers.

None of that is bad faith. It is just the shape of the problem. The information you need to evaluate the thing you're being offered is sometimes not yet held by those offering it to you. Which means the work of understanding it falls to you, by default, whether you realize it or not. Throughout my own journey, I took a lot of notes, and tried to condense them into a resource here that might be useful for any early-stage employee or founder looking to make the jump.

Let's start at the barebones. Equity means ownership. When a company grants you equity, it is handing you a piece of itself, measured in shares. A share is one unit of ownership, a single slice of a fixed pie. If a company has issued ten million shares and you hold one hundred thousand of them, you own one percent of the company.

The record of who holds those slices is the cap table, short for capitalization table. It lists every founder, investor, and employee, and how many shares each one holds. When someone says you are getting half a percent, they mean your shares will equal half a percent of the cap table on the day they say it.

Focus on your share count, not your percentage. Your percentage is that count divided by a total that keeps moving, and the total almost only moves one way, up. Every time the company raises money or sets aside stock for new hires, it issues new shares, the total grows, and your unchanged share count now represents a smaller slice. This is dilution. It is normal, and it is how startups fund themselves, but it means the percentage you are quoted at signing is a snapshot and your share count is the thing that stays yours. A percentage also tells you nothing without the total behind it. Half a percent of ten million shares is fifty thousand shares, half a percent of a hundred million is five hundred thousand, same percentage and ten times the stock. Ask for two numbers, your share count and the total shares outstanding, and treat the percentage as something you derive rather than the figure you trust.

Sometimes a later round comes with an equity refresh, an additional grant meant to offset your dilution and keep your ownership percentage roughly whole. It is worth knowing the term and worth asking about. It is also not a guarantee and not owed to you, it is a retention decision the company either makes or doesn't. The Social Network dramatizes this effect well. Eduardo Saverin, a Facebook cofounder, holds roughly a third of the company, the company issues a wave of new shares to everyone but him, and in the film his stake collapses to a fraction of a percent while the others stay whole. The lesson for an early employee is smaller and more useful than the betrayal. Dilution is coming for everyone. The only question is whether anything is being done to offset yours, and you will not know unless you are tracking the one number that is actually yours.

You also rarely receive your shares all at once. You earn them over time, on a schedule called vesting. Vesting is the process by which equity becomes truly yours, normally across four years. The company wants you to stay and keep building, so it releases your equity as you go instead of handing over everything on day one. The four-year schedule is a convention that hardened in Silicon Valley through the 1980s and 1990s as stock options became standard tech pay. Venture firms began requiring it on their term sheets, in part because a cofounder walking away early with a full stake was one of the most reliable ways a young company tore itself apart. By the late 1990s it was written into the standard templates of the big startup law firms, and today Y Combinator builds it into its own standard documents. Four years with a one-year cliff is now close to universal.

A cliff is a waiting period at the start of the schedule, usually twelve months, during which nothing vests at all. Leave a day before it and you walk away with nothing, whatever the year cost you. Reach it and a large block vests at once, normally twenty-five percent, after which the rest vests in small increments over the remaining three years until the whole grant is yours at year four. My own cliff fell on the first anniversary of my full-time start date, twenty-five percent of my shares in a single day and monthly vesting for three years after. I was anxious in the weeks before it, because the cliff was the line between owning a quarter of my grant and owning none of it.

This covers half the story. The other half is what form that equity actually takes, and that is where it turns technical, and where most of the real traps are waiting.

So you know how much equity you have and when it vests. The next question is what kind of equity it is. I think this arguably matters more than the size of the grant. Two people can be promised the same number of shares and end up in completely different financial situations, because the equity came to them in different forms.

There are two basic categories. One is the right to buy shares later at a price locked in today. The other is the shares themselves, bought now. The first is an option. The second is restricted stock.

Let's start with the option. An option is the right, but not the obligation, to buy a set number of shares at a fixed price, no matter what the shares are worth later. That fixed price is called the strike price, and it is set at the fair market value of the stock on the day you are granted the option. Fair market value comes from a 409A valuation, an independent appraisal of what the common stock is worth, named after the tax code section that requires it and good for about a year. If the strike is set at five cents and the company is later worth five dollars a share, your option lets you buy at five cents and capture the difference. A low strike is good. It is the gap between the strike and the eventual value that becomes your gain.

The catch with an option is that it is not ownership. It is a coupon. You do not own anything until you exercise, which means actually paying the strike price to buy the shares. Until you write that check, you hold the right to buy, not the stock. Exercising is where the hidden cost lives, because of how it is taxed. When you exercise an option while the company is still private, the IRS can treat the difference between your strike price and the current fair market value as income, even though you have not sold anything and cannot, because the company is private and there is no buyer. You can owe real tax on a paper gain you cannot turn into cash. This is the trap that catches people who joined early, watched the 409A climb for years, and then discovered that exercising their options would trigger a tax bill far larger than the cost of the shares themselves. The equity was real. The ability to afford keeping it was not.

Restricted stock works the other way around. Instead of the right to buy shares later, you buy the actual shares now, at today's fair market value, and you own them outright from day one. There is no strike price and no later exercise event, because there is nothing left to exercise, you already bought the stock. If the price today is five cents a share, you pay five cents a share, and because you paid full value there is no gap between price and value for the IRS to tax. The shares are still subject to vesting, so the company can buy back the ones you have not yet earned if you leave, but the thing you bought is stock, not a coupon for stock.

You may also hear about RSUs, restricted stock units, which are a third form, but you can mostly set them aside. An RSU is a promise to give you shares in the future once certain conditions are met, and it is an instrument built for large late-stage and public companies. If you are early enough that this guide is useful to you, you should almost certainly be looking at options or restricted stock, not RSUs.

The reason the option-versus-restricted-stock distinction matters so much is the timing of the tax. With an option, the taxable moment is pushed years down the road, to whenever you exercise, by which point the gap between your strike and the company's value can be enormous. With restricted stock bought at fair market value, there is no gap today, which means there is nothing to tax today. But that advantage only holds if you do one specific thing within thirty days of buying the shares.

This is an 83(b) election. It is a short form you file with the IRS, and all it does is tell them you want to be taxed on your shares at the moment you bought them, rather than later as they vest. When you buy restricted stock that is still subject to vesting, the IRS does not consider the unvested shares fully yours yet. By default, it waits until each chunk vests and then taxes you on its value at that moment. If the company is growing, that value climbs every year, so you would be taxed again and again, on higher and higher numbers, as your shares vest, even though you bought them all up front for almost nothing and still cannot sell them. The default treatment quietly turns a clean purchase into a multi-year tax bill that grows with the company's success.

The 83(b) election shuts that down. By electing to be taxed now, you lock in the value as it stands on the day you bought the shares. You bought at fair market value, so the taxable gap is zero, and zero is what you are taxed on, for the entire grant, including the unvested part. The years of climbing value that the default would have taxed are now taxed as capital gains only when you eventually sell, not as income as you vest.

You have thirty days from the date you buy the shares to file the election. The responsibility is also entirely yours. The company does not file it for you.

Holding the shares long enough can also make the eventual gain tax-free. There is a provision in the tax code, Section 1202, that lets you sell qualified small business stock and pay no federal tax on the gain, up to a cap that runs into the millions. Stock qualifies if the company is a C corporation, the default corporate form most venture-backed startups use, if the company was still small when your shares were issued, and if you bought those shares directly from the company rather than from someone else.

The benefit is tied to how long you hold. For most of this provision's life the rule was strict: hold for five years and exclude the gain, hold for less and exclude nothing. The 2025 tax law turned that into a sliding scale for shares acquired after July 4, 2025. Hold three years and you exclude half the gain, four years and you exclude three quarters, five years and you exclude all of it. The same law raised the ceilings, lifting the per-company exclusion cap from ten million dollars to fifteen, and the size limit on the company when the shares are issued from fifty million in assets to seventy-five.

The clock starts when you acquire the shares, not when they vest and not when you sell. By buying my shares up front and filing the 83(b), I started that clock on day one, for the whole grant, vested and unvested alike. Someone holding options does not start it until they exercise, which is often years later and sometimes never. The same filing that zeroed out my tax at purchase also began the holding period that could, years from now, make a sale tax-free. Qualification depends on the company's structure, its size when the shares were issued, and the kind of business it runs, and the rules have sharp edges worth confirming with a financial advisor (not me).

All of this assumes the shares are worth something and that you can turn them into money. Start with what the shares are actually worth in a sale, because it is rarely what the headline number suggests. The stock you hold as an employee is common stock. The stock investors hold is preferred stock, and preferred comes with a liquidation preference, the right to get paid first in any sale. A standard preference returns the investors their money before common shareholders see a cent. Some are larger, paying back two or three times the investment first. Some are participating, meaning the investors take their money back and then also share in whatever is left. These preferences stack into money that has to be paid out before common stock is worth anything at all.

The consequence is that a company can sell for a number that sounds like a windfall while your shares return little or nothing. If a company raises a hundred million dollars across its life and sells for eighty, the preferences can absorb the entire sale, and common stock (the stock you own) gets zero.

Then there is the simpler problem, which is that vested shares in a private company are not money. You cannot spend them, and you cannot easily sell them. Your equity becomes real only at a liquidity event, a moment when the shares can finally be converted to cash. There are three of them. An acquisition, where a buyer purchases the company. An IPO, where the company lists publicly and its shares can be sold on the open market. And a secondary sale or tender offer, where someone is allowed to buy your private shares before either of those happens.

That last option is a lot more constrained than people expect. I assumed at one point that if a buyer turned up I could simply sell them my shares directly, and that is not how it works. Private shares carry transfer restrictions, and a sale almost always happens as part of a larger, company-sanctioned transaction. Secondary markets for private stock exist, but access to them is not guaranteed and is often controlled by the company.

There is also the question of what happens to your equity if you leave, or are made to leave, and the answer is less in your favor than most people assume.

Unvested shares are the simplest case. With restricted stock, the company keeps the right to buy back any shares you have not yet vested if you stop working there, at the lower of what you paid or what they are currently worth. This is the repurchase option. Leave at year two and the company can reclaim the unvested half of your grant for the few cents a share you paid, regardless of what those shares might be worth on paper.

Option holders face a sharper version of the leaving problem, the post-termination exercise window. If you hold vested options and you leave, you typically have ninety days to exercise them, which means ninety days to find the cash to buy the shares and pay any tax that exercising triggers. Miss the window and the options expire and the equity you spent years vesting simply vanishes. This is the trap that turns vested options into something you can lose by not having enough cash on hand at the moment you depart, and it is why some companies have started extending the window to several years. If you hold options, the length of this window is one of the most important terms in your agreement, and one of the most overlooked.

Finally, acceleration, which is about what happens to unvested equity if the company is acquired before you finish vesting. Without an acceleration clause, an acquisition does not speed anything up, you keep what has vested and the rest is subject to whatever the deal and the acquirer decide. Acceleration changes that. Acceleration is usually reserved for founders and senior people.

Owning the shares does not mean controlling them. Buried in the documents you sign, are a set of provisions that govern what you can do with your stock and when.

A right of first refusal means that if you ever do find a buyer for your shares, the company gets the first chance to buy them on the same terms before you can sell to anyone else. A co-sale right lets major investors sell alongside you, taking part of your buyer's demand. And a drag-along provision means that if the major shareholders approve a sale of the company, you can be compelled to sell your shares on the same terms, whether you want to or not. None of these are unusual, and all of them are reasonable from the company's point of view. But together they mean that the stock is yours in name while the decisions about when it moves, to whom, and at what price largely are not.

Almost all of this is more negotiable than it looks, and the people across the table are often as new to granting it as you are to asking for it.

The list of what you can ask for is longer than most employees realize. The size of the grant. The vesting terms, including the length of the cliff. Whether you are allowed to exercise early. How long your window to exercise stays open after you leave. Whether any of your equity accelerates if the company is acquired. Whether a later round brings a refresh. And how forfeiture works, including whether a Cause termination can reach the equity you have already vested or only the part you have not. None of these are exotic. The thing that makes asking worthwhile is that the cost of asking is almost nothing. The worst outcome is a no.

I had asked for four specific changes before I signed. A confirmed price so there would be no gap to tax. A longer window to exercise after leaving. A narrower forfeiture clause so a Cause termination could not reach what I had already earned. And the right to buy the whole grant up front and file an 83(b). In the end, the options became restricted stock, bought up front, with an 83(b) filed, and most of what I had asked for stopped being necessary because the thing it protected against could no longer happen.

Nobody on the other side was hiding anything. The terms were standard, the people were acting in good faith, and the answers to my questions did not exist on their side of the table because no one there had needed them before. The advantage did not come from being adversarial. It came from doing my research and reading the documents.

So the work falls to you. As much as I hope this guide can help, the information you need to evaluate what you are being offered is not yet held by the people offering it, and the only person reliably motivated to understand your equity is you. The structure rewards whoever understands it best. At an early-stage company, by default, that is not the employee. It can be, but only if you decide it will be, and only before you sign.

I went through all of this as the first person at my company to be granted equity. There was no one else inside the company who had done it before me, so I leaned on people outside the company who had (shoutout Dens and Rishi). A lot of what I understand, I understand because they were willing to explain it to me.

If you are thinking about an equity pitch, take it. There has never been a better time to. I am confident that working in the early stage at some point in your career will be one of the most rewarding professional journeys you will ever have. Just read what you sign, ask the questions while they are still cheap to ask, and find the people who have done it before you. The upside you joined for is real, just make sure you are still holding it when it arrives.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union could threaten the United States militarily. It could never match us technologically. China can do both. That single difference rewrites the strategic calculus, the policy, and where capital flows for the next thirty years.

The USSR's parity was episodic. Sputnik shocked the country in 1957, but the breakthroughs were narrow and never diffused into productivity. The regime could build a bomb and launch a satellite. It could not connect research to production, or tolerate the experimentation innovation requires. By 1985, computer backwardness alone cost an estimated 10 percent of national income. Because free information threatened political control, Soviet researchers were cut off from the global ecosystem exactly when integration became the whole game.

When the United States answered with NASA, semiconductors, and the computing revolution, the contest was over, and the world drew a lesson: market-led innovation beats state-directed industry at the frontier. Venture capital ran on it. Decentralized bets on technical founders, unconstrained by government priorities, produced Google, Facebook, and the entire SaaS ecosystem. The contrarian insight, patiently held, was the winning move.

China broke the pattern. CSIS's James Andrew Lewis calls it market-Leninism^*, market mechanisms for dynamism, the Party for control.

*Market-Leninism: in simple terms, China lets companies compete and prices move like a real market, but the Party can step in whenever it wants to move money where it likes, seize a business, or bend an entire industry to its goals.

The numbers carry the argument. For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition reached 60 percent of US GDP. China is past that. It manufactures more than twice what the United States does and trails in almost nothing except semiconductors and aviation. It controls over 80 percent of every stage of solar manufacturing, and more than 95 percent of the polysilicon and wafers upstream. It holds 80 percent or more of battery cell production and refines about 91 percent of the world's rare earths.

When technological leadership is contestable, the old playbook stops working. With no peer competitor, markets optimize for efficiency, capital chases the highest private return, and software scales with almost no friction. That was 2008 to 2020. With a peer rival, efficiency turns fragile, supply chains become weapons, and private return diverges from national survival. Markets chase margin, not sovereignty.

So industrial policy came back, because the alternative was losing. The CHIPS Act^* put up $280 billion, the Inflation Reduction Act^* close to $400 billion, the first time since the Cold War that Congress aimed industrial policy at a named rival.

*CHIPS Act: a 2022 law that put roughly $280 billion toward semiconductor research and manufacturing in the US, including about $52 billion in direct subsidies for building chip factories, explicitly to counter China.

*Inflation Reduction Act: a 2022 law originally scored at $369 billion (later estimates run far higher) for clean energy and domestic manufacturing, mostly through tax credits, with energy security as the strategic aim rather than environmentalism.

A narrow set of sectors turns disproportionately important: defense, energy, transportation, robotics, space. Each has the same shape, a committed government buyer underneath and a physical product that cannot be cloned in software.

This should change how capital gets allocated. TAM matters less than mandate: a company tied to a national priority has a demand floor no consumer startup can touch. The lowest-cost producer is not the winner if it sits in an adversary nation and can be cut off. Winner-take-all weakens, because governments refuse single points of failure and cultivate second and third vendors. And software alone captures little. In hardware-intensive industries, the platform that does not own the underlying asset takes almost none of the economics. The winners look less like Salesforce and more like Tesla, one loop of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

The last cycle rewarded the investor who saw what everyone missed and waited. I think that this one rewards whoever builds what a government needs and owns the hardware underneath it.

I was inspired to write this after recently completing my application for the Bessemer Venture Partners Summer Analyst program, where an application prompt asked: "What industry trend are you most excited about, and why? Please provide an example of an early-stage startup (Seed or Series A) that exemplifies this trend." They gave Fintech for the Aging (a Bessemer roadmap) as an example trend, with a note not to choose a Bessemer portfolio company. I answered with asteroid mining, highlighting the startup Karman+ and its audacious plan to mine water from asteroids, and have challenged myself to expand that answer into the full roadmap below.

The Asteroids Are Waiting

Space mining may sound like science fiction, but a convergence of technological and economic forces is bringing it into the realm of reality. Humanity's appetite for critical minerals is surging just as traditional supplies are becoming harder and more harmful to obtain. At the same time, the cost to reach space has plummeted, and the foundation of a space-based economy is being laid. Why mine on Earth, with all the environmental and social costs, when vast untapped resources float above us? Asteroid mining offers the tantalizing promise of abundant metals and water that could fuel both our planet's industries and an expanding presence in space, ushering in an era of sustainable growth beyond Earth's confines.

To put this opportunity in perspective: a single metal-rich asteroid just a few hundred meters across can contain more platinum-group metals than have ever been mined on Earth. The total assessed mineral wealth of the top ten near-Earth asteroids is estimated in the trillions of dollars. Tapping even a fraction of these resources could fundamentally reshape global markets. Of course, the flip side of such abundance is the potential to flood markets (one simulation showed a large asteroid haul could halve global gold prices), but managed wisely, off-world mining could usher in an age of material abundance. Beyond the dollars and cents, there is a profound ethical and environmental incentive: every ton of metal or liter of water sourced in space is one that doesn't require strip-mining a rainforest or exploiting vulnerable workers. In short, asteroid mining represents a chance to radically expand humanity's resource base while reducing the toll on our home planet.

I have been mapping out the macro trends that are turning asteroid mining from fantasy to feasibility, and four converging shifts stand out as the driving forces behind this emerging industry:

1. Launch costs continue to fall

Access to space has become dramatically cheaper and more frequent in the last two decades. NASA's Space Shuttle used to cost >$50,000 per kilogram to lift payload to orbit; today, SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 offers launches at roughly $2,700/kg, a 20× reduction in cost. This revolution in launch economics, driven by reusability and private competition, means missions that were once the exclusive domain of superpower governments are now within reach for startups. Every year, new records are set in launch activity: in 2023, over 2,600 objects were launched to space (about 15× the annual launch count a decade ago). Cheaper, frequent launch is a game-changer for asteroid mining. It lowers the upfront cost of sending prospecting probes, mining equipment, and return vehicles. It also enables rapid iteration: companies can afford to test technologies in space, learn, and try again, rather than betting everything on one enormously expensive mission. In short, falling launch costs are the enabling condition that makes the rest of the asteroid mining equation start to close.

2. Demand for critical minerals is soaring

The push for electrification and clean energy on Earth has created an unprecedented hunger for metals and minerals. Electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and high-tech electronics all require elements like lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare-earth elements, platinum-group metals, and more. The International Energy Agency projects that mineral demand for clean energy technologies will triple by 2030 and quadruple by 2040, reaching ~40 million tons per year. Already, lithium demand jumped 30% in 2023 alone, with other battery metals seeing high double-digit demand growth. Terrestrial mining and supply chains are struggling to keep up, and in some cases, the Earth's known reserves are insufficient to meet projected needs. For example, cobalt (critical for many batteries) is largely sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produces ~70% of the world's supply. Not only is this a fragile, geographically concentrated supply chain, but it's plagued by ethical issues like child labor and dangerous working conditions. Rare earth elements and other strategic minerals face similar bottlenecks and geopolitical risks. Asteroid mining directly targets this problem. A small Near-Earth Asteroid can be phenomenally metal-rich. One famous example is the asteroid 16 Psyche, thought to be a 140-mile-wide chunk of metallic iron-nickel core; it's been speculated to hold on the order of $700 quintillion in metal value (though any attempted monetization would obviously crash market prices). The exact figures may be speculative, but the order of magnitude is clear: space has essentially untapped, nearly infinite mineral resources compared to the finite crust of Earth. As Earth-facing demand climbs and shortages loom, the economic incentive to develop off-world sources becomes very compelling.

3. Terrestrial mining is hitting sustainability limits

Even if we could squeeze more production out of Earth's mines, doing so comes at increasing cost, both financial and human. High-grade ores are depleting, forcing miners to dig deeper and process more ore for the same yield. This diminishing return drives up energy use and expense. More importantly, traditional mining exacts a steep environmental toll: extracting and refining metals often produces toxic waste and chemical runoff. For instance, mining operations can release lead and arsenic into local waterways and cause acid mine drainage that poisons ecosystems for decades. Mining is also a major source of carbon emissions and habitat destruction (e.g. clearing rainforests for open-pit mines). Then there's the social toll, from the aforementioned labor abuses in cobalt and other mineral supply chains to the displacement of communities. In short, the current path of digging up ever more of Earth to meet insatiable mineral demand is increasingly viewed as unsustainable. Asteroid mining, by contrast, offers a chance to decouple resource acquisition from environmental degradation. If you mine an asteroid, no delicate ecosystems are destroyed. No communities are poisoned or uprooted. And any hazardous byproducts or processing can be done in space, safely away from Earth's biosphere. In effect, asteroid mining could offload the dirty work of resource extraction off-planet.

4. A burgeoning off-world economy is emerging

Perhaps the most subtle shift, but a crucial one, is the rise of a market for space resources themselves. The past few years have seen an explosion of commercial activity in orbit: thousands of new satellites (for communication, imaging, etc.), plans for private space stations, lunar exploration by companies, and more. The global space economy hit $570+ billion in 2023 (nearly double what it was a decade earlier) and is projected to reach $1-2 trillion by 2040. Importantly, over 75% of this activity is now commercial, not government, a complete flip from the Apollo era. With this rapid growth comes a new problem: logistics. All these satellites and spacecraft need fuel and maintenance. Future space habitats or factories will need raw materials and construction supplies. If every ounce has to be launched from Earth, the costs remain astronomical. For this exact reason, NASA and others have been loudly pushing in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) aka "live off the land" in space. Now that getting to space is cheaper, the next cost breakthrough is getting resources in space. Water is a prime example. Water, when split into hydrogen and oxygen, is rocket fuel. It's also essential for life support and even radiation shielding. But water is extremely expensive to launch. Asteroids (as well as the Moon) offer water in the form of ice or hydrated minerals that could be mined and turned into usable propellant. Space agencies are already contracting to buy propellant in orbit in the near future, essentially creating a market for space-sourced water. In fact, in 2020 NASA made a symbolic purchase of a few ounces of lunar regolith from private companies to establish the legal precedent for space resource sales. The private sector is responding: companies are planning orbital fuel depots, refueling missions, and more. Asteroid mining stands to both supply and benefit from this trend. A startup that can deliver water or metal in orbit has eager customers waiting, from satellite operators looking to extend the life of billion-dollar assets by refueling them, to governments planning permanent installations on the Moon and Mars that will require local materials. We're essentially witnessing the very beginning of an off-world supply chain.

These shifts (cheaper launch, spiking mineral demand, unsustainable mining practices, and the rise of a space economy) together create a perfect storm of opportunity for entrepreneurs. As with any nascent industry, asteroid mining will require a whole ecosystem of innovators attacking different pieces of the problem. We're already seeing the first wave of ambitious startups forming to seize this opportunity, and here is how I see several key opportunity areas in the asteroid mining value chain:

Entrepreneurial Opportunities

1. Water mining for in-space propellant

The most immediate and pragmatic opportunity in asteroid mining is extracting water to create rocket fuel in space. Water ice exists on many asteroids (particularly C-type carbonaceous asteroids), and when split via electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen, it becomes the propellant that powers most rockets. The economics are compelling: launching propellant from Earth costs thousands of dollars per kilogram, but mining and processing water in space could reduce that cost by orders of magnitude. This creates a clear, near-term market: satellite operators, space stations, and future lunar/Martian missions all need fuel, and they're willing to pay for it delivered in orbit.

Several startups are pursuing this angle. Karman+ raised a $20 million seed round to build autonomous spacecraft capable of mining water from asteroids and converting it into propellant. Their approach focuses on small, cost-effective missions that can prove the concept and generate revenue before scaling up. TransAstra is developing similar capabilities, with plans for orbital fuel depots that would serve as gas stations in space. The beauty of this model is that it doesn't require returning anything to Earth. The entire value chain exists in space, which simplifies the technical challenges and regulatory hurdles.

2. Metal extraction for Earth markets

While water mining serves the space economy, the holy grail of asteroid mining is the bounty of high-value metals and minerals that could be shipped back to Earth. Certain asteroids (particularly M-type metallic asteroids or the cores of fragmented protoplanets) are loaded with elements like platinum, palladium, iridium, gold, and nickel that are rare on Earth's crust. These platinum-group metals (PGMs) are crucial for electronics, catalysts, specialized alloys, and EV components, and they typically command high prices. A wave of startups is looking to unlock these asteroid metals, effectively opening new mines in the sky. One prominent example is AstroForge, a California startup that in 2024 raised a $40M Series A to pursue mining of platinum-group metals from asteroids. AstroForge's approach is to send small, cost-efficient spacecraft to intercept near-Earth asteroids, scrape off material, and process it on-site to extract the target metals, which would then be sent back to Earth in dedicated re-entry capsules. The ambition is bold, and they're acutely aware of previous failures (the early 2010s companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries both folded without achieving their mining goals), but are betting that 2020s technology, and a different market environment, will give a different outcome. If a company like AstroForge can bring back even a few hundred kilograms of platinum from a small asteroid, it would be a historic proof-of-concept (and potentially very profitable, 100 kg of platinum is ~$3 million at today's prices). In the long run, successful extraction of metals from asteroids could profoundly alter supply dynamics on Earth. Imagine a world where the constraints on rare metals are eased by imports from space. Electronics manufacturers, EV battery makers, and cleantech firms would all benefit from a more abundant supply of critical materials. Of course, there's a balance to be struck: a massive influx of asteroid metals could crash prices and upend mining industries in countries that rely on those exports.

3. Building the space resource supply chain (logistics & manufacturing)

Mining the resource is only half the equation, you also need to get it where it's needed and integrate it into the existing supply chain. This opens the door for startups focused on the "picks and shovels" of the space mining industry: orbital logistics, transport vehicles, processing tech, and storage solutions. For instance, once water is mined from an asteroid, how do you efficiently move it to a depot in Earth orbit or to a customer satellite? Companies are working on specialized space tugs (transfer vehicles) that can rendezvous with a mining spacecraft, take on its cargo, and deliver it to the destination. Orbit Fab, mentioned earlier, is one such player, effectively an early infrastructure company providing orbital fuel tanks and interfaces to make fluid transfer in microgravity routine. They're creating standardized refueling ports that satellite makers can incorporate, and have demonstrated transferring water in space as a proxy for fuel. There's also room for innovation in storage and processing: for example, an orbital refinery that takes crude asteroid ore and concentrates it before shipment could save lots of mass and cost. Startups developing microgravity processing techniques, whether electromagnetic separation, vacuum distillation of metals, or novel smelting processes using solar heat, will be crucial enablers. Another facet is manufacturing in space. One way to avoid gluts on Earth is to use asteroid materials to build things in orbit that never have to be lifted from Earth. This is a whole sub-industry in itself, and it's synergistic with asteroid mining. I foresee partnerships where one company delivers raw materials and another uses it in a space-based 3D printer to produce satellite trusses or antenna dishes on-site. All these pieces, mining, transport, processing, distribution, must come together to make the extraterrestrial supply chain real.

4. Prospecting, data, and asteroid asset discovery

Before you can mine an asteroid, you have to find it and know what's in it. Thus, a critical opportunity (and one of the likely earliest revenue streams in this sector) is asteroid prospecting and characterization. Today, there are over ~30,000 known near-Earth asteroids, but we have detailed composition data on only a tiny fraction of them (mostly from spectral analysis via telescopes, and a handful visited by spacecraft). There is a clear need for better "resource mapping" of near-Earth space, essentially a catalog of mineral-rich asteroids, their trajectories, and composition. Some startups are focusing on this by developing advanced space telescopes and sensors to remotely assess asteroid content. For example, TransAstra (aside from mining tech) has been working on the Sutter Ultra telescope array concept to detect small asteroids and estimate their water/metal content via spectroscopy. Beyond remote sensing, there will be a need for scout missions, small, relatively low-cost probes that can visit candidate asteroids, do on-site analysis, and radio back data. These probes could hitch rides on rockets (perhaps rideshare on launches, like many CubeSats do) and go evaluate targets, almost like robotic field geologists. A service model could emerge: mining companies might pay a prospecting company for data on which asteroid is worth $100B vs which is chock-full of worthless regolith. In essence, data about space resources will be as valuable as the resources themselves, just as oil companies pay for seismic surveys and mineral companies pay for geologists to map deposits. I think there's room for "Asteroid Intelligence" startups that become the Bloomberg terminals of space resources, aggregating and selling information on asteroid trajectories, composition estimates, and even real-time tracking of who might be extracting what. On the flip side, companies that secure rights (or at least first-mover advantage) on particularly juicy asteroids might see their asteroid claims become appreciable assets. While the legal status of owning an asteroid is still a bit gray (international space law prohibits sovereign appropriation but is permissive of private resource extraction), the U.S. and other countries have passed laws granting companies rights to resources they extract. Entrepreneurs who can navigate the regulatory and legal frameworks for resource rights, and perhaps create marketplaces for trading those rights or futures on asteroid ore, could pioneer a completely new kind of commodities market.

What's Next?

The concept of mining asteroids still has significant challenges. On the technical side, everything from autonomous rendezvous to extraction techniques in microgravity must be proven out. However, in comparison to prior setbacks, there is actual market pull for space resources. Crucially, we now see a pathway to commercial viability, the first asteroid mining ventures aren't trying to haul back $100B of platinum overnight. Instead, they're following a pragmatic path, start with water or another easily monetizable resource in space, sell to known customers to generate early revenue, prove the tech, and then scale up to metals for Earth when the process is mature. This phased approach makes us optimistic that asteroid mining will not be a repeat of the dot-com era "too early" companies. It's more akin to the evolution of the commercial space launch industry: what was once only governments is now done by SpaceX and others at lower cost, likewise, what was once a crazy idea (mining asteroids) can become a real industry segment in the next decade.

Make no mistake, the impact of success in this field would be enormous. If even a single private mission returns, say, 1000 tons of useful material from an asteroid, it will mark a paradigm shift in how we view space. It would effectively open a frontier, with cascading effects on economics and geopolitics. Countries rich in mineral exports could see new competition from space miners, potentially reducing the leverage of some resource-rich nations. At the same time, a plentiful supply of formerly scarce metals could turbocharge high-tech manufacturing and green infrastructure on Earth. Strategically, nations might race to secure alliances or stakes in space mining ventures to ensure access to future resources. We may even witness "astro-diplomacy" and negotiations about who gets to mine where (I would envision this in the way we had treaties for the high seas or Antarctica). Environmentally, the widespread adoption of space resources could allow Earth to heal from some of the scars of heavy industry, as mining moves off-planet over the long term.

In the near term, what matters is that a handful of bold startups are forcing the issue by attempting the first extra-terrestrial mining missions. The next 5-10 years will likely give us the first concrete answers, and these milestones, even if modest, will be analogous to the Wright Brothers' first flight, proof that it can be done. Much as we saw with the internet or commercial launch, success breeds a virtuous cycle: once it's shown that an asteroid can be profitably mined, capital will flood in, talent will flock to the sector, and entire sub-industries (like those outlined above) will blossom to support scaling it up.

I believe the emergence of off-world resource industries is not a question of "if," but "when." All the macro trends point to the inevitability of extending the human economic sphere into the cosmos, with all the profound implications that it carries for our species' future.

If you're building the next great company striving to mine the skies and supply the Earth (and beyond) sustainably, I want to talk to you. The asteroids are waiting, and the future is up for grabs, a trillion miles away, perhaps, but getting closer every day.

This is the first post in a two-part series on EV charging economics. Here I stay close to the ground, focusing on how charging actually behaves as a real-estate asset, why utilization matters more than hardware counts, and what that looks like week-to-week for me. A follow-up essay zooms out to the capital-markets view, going into my theory on who ends up owning the economics of all this infrastructure.

Over the last few years, EV charging has been framed as a straightforward scaling problem. More electric vehicles require more chargers; therefore the job of governments, utilities, and startups is to pour concrete, pull wire, and install as many ports as possible. From the vantage point of a driver, the system already feels contradictory. In some places, there are no chargers at all. In others, there are shiny new chargers that sit empty. Elsewhere, chargers exist but are constantly full, broken, or ICE'd. The felt reality oscillates between scarcity and mismanagement. Either nothing is available, or what is available doesn't work the way it needs to.

From the vantage point of property owners and capital providers, another reality emerges. Chargers are no longer abstract symbols of "infrastructure;" they are line items in an underwriting model. They sit somewhere between a gym and a boiler as an amenity that may or may not move rent, occupancy, or NOI, and an electrical asset that may or may not generate enough revenue to justify its cost.

This essay is an attempt to spell out a thesis that has been forming while I work at BreatheEV: EV charging is not primarily a hardware problem or even an energy problem. It is a utilization problem embedded in real estate, governed by incentive structures that often push capital into the wrong places, on the wrong terms, with the wrong operating model.

Charging as a Real-Estate Asset

Almost every non-highway charger is physically attached to a specific property with a specific owner, capital stack, and tenant base. That property operator has a mental model that has very little to do with kilowatts or connector types. Their questions sound more like:

• Will this investment make the building easier to lease or sell?
• Will it raise rents, reduce vacancy, improve retention/foot traffic?
• Will it consume management time and create new sources of tenant complaints?

In that sense, chargers behave like other real-estate-linked amenities. They sit alongside pools, package lockers, co-working rooms, and gyms. They are not national infrastructure in the mind of the owner; they are local choices that must compete with other uses of capital and attention.

At the same time, they are not purely amenities. A charger can also generate direct revenue. That pushes it toward the category of "operating asset" rather than "pure cost center," especially when external capital is involved. Infrastructure funds, utilities, or even electricians willing to finance installations begin to treat chargers less as a nice-to-have feature and more as a small but growing asset class.

The tension in the system is that these two perspectives, amenity and asset, often coexist in the same project. The property owner is primarily interested in tenant experience and NOI; the capital provider is primarily interested in utilization and long-term cash flows; the network is primarily interested in throughput and growth; the driver simply wants a working, predictable experience. Aligning these perspectives, or at least preventing them from pulling directly against each other, is what determines whether EV charging feels abundant or broken.

Overbuilding Hardware versus Coordinating Usage

A simple thought experiment helps clarify the problem.

Imagine a 200-unit apartment building with a growing number of EV drivers. You are deciding how to deploy a given amount of capital toward Level 2 chargers in the garage.

One option is to overbuild hardware. You install ten chargers, scatter them through the lot, and adopt a first-come, first-served model. Tenants are told that chargers are available and that they can plug in whenever they like. You are betting that sheer quantity will smooth out behavioral noise.

The second option is to right-size hardware and introduce coordination. You install three or four chargers instead of ten, but you require tenants to reserve specific time windows.

On a whiteboard, the first option looks generous. More physical chargers mean more concurrent plugs and less visible scarcity. But the economics that matter are not based on installed ports; they are based on effective utilization and who is exposed to its variance.

In the first configuration, cars are likely to occupy charging spots for far longer than they actually need to. Drivers plug in when they get home from work and leave the car until morning, even if charging only takes two or three hours. Others will avoid the system entirely after a few frustrating experiences. Aggregated across the building, each port's actual charging time per day may be surprisingly low, even though chargers are frequently occupied.

In the second configuration, the number of physical plugs is lower, but each hour of hardware time is more densely packed with useful charging. Tenants book two- or three-hour windows, know when they are expected to move their cars, and can see availability in advance. Even if human behavior is imperfect, the average number of useful charging hours per port per day is much higher.

From a capital perspective, these are very different assets. Ten unmanaged chargers require more capex, more potential maintenance, and more parking friction, yet they may underperform dramatically on a kWh-per-dollar basis. Three or four disciplined chargers may generate similar or even greater total utilization, with less capital at risk and a clearer operating model.

This is the core intuition behind BreatheEV's focus on reservations. The point is not merely to offer a more convenient user experience. It is to convert scarce hardware and electrical capacity into a schedulable resource. Once you view chargers as real-estate-linked assets whose value depends on utilization, it becomes possible to talk about incentives more precisely.

Consider a stylized commercial project financed with external capital. The property owner contributes little or no capex, provides the physical site and tenant access, and receives a modest share of revenue, a fixed ground lease, or an amenity they can market to residents. A capital provider funds most of the installation and expects to earn back their investment over time through session revenue. A network like BreatheEV provides software, reservations, and operational management in exchange for a platform fee or revenue share.

In that structure, the property owner is effectively long tenant satisfaction and property value, but only weakly exposed to utilization downside. If tenants use the chargers heavily, that can marginally support rents and retention and may even produce a small revenue stream. If they do not, the owner has still added a line item to their amenities list and invested relatively little.

The capital provider, by contrast, is directly long utilization. They are underwriting an uncertain stream of future sessions at a particular price, under a particular regulatory regime, in a particular building with a particular tenant mix. If utilization is low or policy changes, they may never hit their target IRR.

The network sits somewhere between them. It is long throughput and long the durability of relationships with both property owners and drivers. If utilization is robust, it earns more per-session fees and has a stronger story for future growth. If utilization is weak, it can still earn some baseline revenue per site, but churn risk rises^* and the platform's reputation may be harmed.

*OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) is an open communication standard that allows EV chargers to "talk to" any compatible network management system, regardless of who manufactured the hardware. For network providers, OCPP compliance is a double-edged sword: it makes initial sales easier (property owners aren't locked into one ecosystem), but it dramatically increases churn risk because a site host can swap to a competing network without ripping out and replacing their physical chargers.

Drivers occupy a different axis altogether. They do not care who owns the charger; they care whether it works when they arrive, and how seamless the overall experience is.

The effective design question is: can we structure deployments such that the parties best positioned to influence utilization also have meaningful skin in the game?

The Coordination Layer in Practice

In abstract, this sounds like another incentive alignment problem. In practice, it becomes a series of very specific workflows. For context, my role sits squarely in that operational middle.

On the front end, a large portion of my time is spent on site selection and early underwriting. I regularly pull down sets of properties that share certain traits: unit counts within a particular band, rent levels suggesting a meaningful penetration of early EV adopters, certain headliner retailers, parking configurations that can accommodate charging without heroic construction, ownership structures that would allow success at one property to be replicated across a portfolio.

From there, each candidate site is translated into a rough demand model. How many existing EVs might be in the lot today? How quickly is that likely to grow over the next five to seven years? What is the split between residents who can charge at work versus those who can only charge at home? How many hours per day is it realistic to expect a single port to operate under a reservation regime? What incentives are available in the jurisdiction?

These are not perfect forecasts, but they are a disciplined alternative to "tenants like EVs, so let's put in some chargers." They determine whether we present a property to a capital partner as a ready candidate or quietly drop it from the pipeline.

Once a site clears that bar, the work becomes relational and contractual. Ownership groups, capital providers, and BreatheEV all have different starting points about what "fair" looks like. A property may balk at long terms or revenue shares that encumber future sale. A capital provider may demand minimums or protections that assume a certain adoption curve. We are continually trying to carve out structures where no one is implicitly writing a free option for someone else.

Underneath all of that, the reservation system is treated not as an add-on feature but as a core risk management tool. Because we can see booking patterns in detail, we can quickly tell whether a site is tracking to its expected utilization curve or diverging. That, in turn, informs whether we propose hardware expansions, adjust pricing and time-window policies, or accept that a given site will remain a modest performer and calibrate future project selection accordingly.

Correlation, and What Happens When the World Changes

Policy is the most obvious. Incentive programs that make a project attractive at one moment can be revised, capped, or canceled in response to budget constraints or political change.

Behavioral regimes exist as well. Early adopters of EVs are often willing to tolerate friction. They plan around limited infrastructure and accept that the system is still maturing. As adoption moves into the next generation, expectations harden. Drivers are less willing to drive across town, wait for an open stall, or wrestle with inconsistent apps.

Macroeconomic regimes matter too. Slower rent growth, higher interest rates, or stress in the broader real estate market can make property owners more conservative. Projects that could be justified as part of a "premium amenity strategy" in good times may be deferred if they threaten short-term cash flow.

Why Treat This as a Utilization Trade at All?

It is fair to ask why any of this framing matters. One could argue that as EV adoption rises, these issues will resolve naturally. More drivers will demand charging. More owners will respond. The system will scale.

I do not think that is guaranteed. Infrastructure history is full of examples where misaligned incentives produced distorted build-outs. The fact that EV charging has a climate lens and a feel-good narrative does not exempt it from those dynamics.

Treating EV charging as a utilization trade forces certain disciplines. It forces you to care less about raw charger counts and more about kWh delivered per dollar of equipment and construction. It forces you to build tools and contracts that can manage behavior, not just hardware.

The built environment is already a massive exercise in coordination between people, capital, and engineering. EV charging adds another layer on top of that stack. I do not pretend that this essay is a complete model of the space. There are DC fast-charging networks with different dynamics, fleet charging with its own patterns, utility-owned infrastructure with different constraints. But the underlying wager is the same: that utilization, not installation, is what makes infrastructure real. I spend my weeks trying to get that wager right.

It is slow, unglamorous work. But so is most of what holds the built world together.

Taken on its own, this is a very local story: specific buildings, specific tenants, specific capital stacks, and a lot of unglamorous work to squeeze more useful hours out of a few metal boxes. In the companion post, I flip the vantage point, asking who actually captures the long-term economics of all this, why software struggles to capture value on its own, and why I believe the center of gravity is drifting toward vertically integrated owners of real estate and customer relationships.

In a separate post, I wrote about EV charging as a utilization problem embedded in real estate. This essay zooms out to the market structure around that world: why public charging networks have torched so much capital, why software can't capture much value on its own, and why the gravity of the business pulls toward vertical integration.

The charging infrastructure market is racing toward a $100B+ opportunity by 2040, but the thesis that pure-play software companies will dominate misreads the fundamental economics. Value is accruing to vertically integrated operators who control real estate, customer relationships, and software, not to asset-light platforms or infrastructure installers. Tesla remains the only profitable charging network, and the greatest returns will flow to retail giants like Walmart and automaker consortiums who can subsidize infrastructure with adjacent revenue streams. Pure software plays succeed only as B2B enablers, not consumer-facing winners.

This essay is my attempt to lay out that thesis and the market map behind it. I've tried to make it accessible to readers without deep EV industry or financial knowledge while keeping enough detail for those who want to test the logic. If you disagree with anything here, especially the investment implications, I'd genuinely welcome the pushback.

The working hypothesis that "winners will look like software/coordination businesses, not infrastructure installers" contains a critical truth but misses the endgame: software is necessary but not sufficient. The real winners control the full stack.

Business Model Crisis

The SPAC boom^* delivered three major public charging networks, ChargePoint (CHPT), EVgo (EVGO), and Blink (BLNK). All three have been catastrophically unprofitable despite explosive revenue growth. ChargePoint lost $253M on $417M revenue in fiscal 2025, EVgo burned $127M on $257M, and Blink lost $198M on $126M. Their stocks have collapsed roughly 82%^**, 85%, and 98% respectively from their 2021 peaks.

*A SPAC is a shortcut to going public: investors create an empty shell company, take it public, then merge it with a private company. In 2020-2021, low interest rates and speculative hype created a frenzy where SPACs took hundreds of companies public, often with billion-dollar valuations based on optimistic projections.

**ChargePoint did a reverse stock split in 2025, so the price comparisons were adjusted for that. Data shows an adjusted all-time high of $922 (post-split adjusted), but the unadjusted peak was ~$49. The key point remains: these companies have destroyed massive amounts of shareholder value since the SPAC-era highs.

Tritium, a major DC fast charger manufacturer founded in 2001 that went public via SPAC in 2022, filed for insolvency in April 2024 after never achieving profitability, hemorrhaging $121M on $185M revenue in its final fiscal year. Electric bus and battery maker Proterra, which also went public via SPAC in 2021, filed Chapter 11 in August 2023. Charging infrastructure provider Charge Enterprises followed with its own Chapter 11^* filing in March 2024.

*Chapter 11 is a U.S. bankruptcy process that lets a company hit "pause" on its debts and keep operating while it restructures, rather than immediately selling off everything. The business can survive, but shareholders usually lose everything.

Tesla Supercharger stands alone as the profitable exception. While Tesla doesn't break out Supercharger financials, its "Services and Other" category, which includes charging, grew profit 64% sequentially in Q2 2025, with Bloomberg estimating the Supercharger network will generate $7.4B revenue at 10% margins by 2030. The network operates 70,000+ connectors globally with 97% uptime.

Unit Economics Explain Why Infrastructure Alone Fails

The brutal math of DC fast charging reveals why pure infrastructure plays struggle. A typical 4-charger, 150kW station in California costs $600-800K in capex. At current average utilization of 16.1%, these sites generate $265-285K annually.

McKinsey's analysis shows break-even requires 20% utilization without subsidies or 15% with incentives, but national averages sit at 16.1% as of Q2 2025. High-performing metro areas like Las Vegas hit 45.5% peak utilization, while rural states like South Dakota limp along at 1.1%. The geographic dispersion creates structural unprofitability. Networks must serve low-density areas to provide useful coverage, even if those sites never achieve viable economics.

The capital intensity dwarfs comparable businesses. DC fast chargers cost $300K installed versus $20K for gas pumps. Yet the margin on selling marked-up electricity is razor-thin, and 80% of EV charging happens at home, severely limiting the addressable market.

EVgo, which actually owns and operates its 4,590 charging stalls, is approaching break-even with 35% charging network gross margins and expects positive adjusted EBITDA in Q4 2025. But even EVgo's progress depends heavily on subsidies (which are set to expire soon).

Software Creates Value but Struggles to Capture it

Watching infrastructure players bleed cash, investors pivoted to a cleaner thesis: forget owning chargers, build the operating system. Software platforms could aggregate demand across fragmented hardware, optimize pricing and utilization, and handle payments and customer support, (all the things ChargePoint and EVgo were failing at) all without the capital intensity.

The thesis was right in that the incumbents were embarrassingly bad at the basics. With broken chargers, payment failures, and zero customer support, user experience was genuinely a nightmare. Good software creates value by fixing these problems. But that value flows to whoever controls the real estate and customer relationship, not to the middleware provider charging 15% transaction fees.

The economics turned toxic with the rise of OCPP^*. A property owner can swap networks without replacing a single piece of hardware. Strong utilization lets you charge premium fees. If utilization is weak, networks can still earn some baseline revenue per site, but churn risk^* rises and the platform's reputation may be harmed.

*OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) is an open communication standard that allows EV chargers to interface with any compatible network management system, regardless of hardware manufacturer. For network providers, OCPP compliance makes initial sales easier (site hosts aren't locked into one ecosystem), but also eliminates switching costs.

The path to scale makes it worse. Unlike consumer, you can't grow virally. Even when you win, you're trapped in a low-margin, high-churn business where the customer has all the leverage.

The market delivered its verdict quickly. Driivz, once positioned as the "operating system for EV charging," got acquired by Vontier for parts, not spun out as the software giant investors imagined. The real money went to companies that controlled both the hardware and the site relationship, not the ones trying to be neutral platforms in between.

Real Estate Hosts Treat Charging as an Amenity

Most property owners don't think of EV charging as a standalone business. They treat it like better lighting or nicer landscaping: something that makes the asset more attractive, keeps tenants happy, and helps fill parking lots with the "right" kind of customer.

In the most common structure today, a third-party operator fronts the capex, handles interconnection, owns the hardware, and runs the network. The host kicks in parking spaces, some electrical capacity, then gets a small rev share, fixed ground lease, or just the intangible benefit of being "EV friendly."

On a per-site basis, the absolute dollars a landlord can earn from charger revenue are tiny relative to rent roll or in-store sales. What matters is traffic quality and dwell time. If chargers help fill units faster, push renewal rates higher, or grow basket size inside the building, they're doing their job, even if the station barely breaks even itself.

We've already seen this movie once with fuel. Gas became a low-margin commodity, and the real profits migrated past the doorstep. EV charging is running that playbook in fast-forward, with the winners being the people who own the doors.

Walmart and Retailers will Dominate

If the pure-play charging networks are failing and software can't capture value independently, where does the smart money flow? Follow Walmart, which plans to install EV charging at "thousands" of locations by 2030, potentially doubling the U.S. DC fast charger count.

Walmart's model inverts the charging economics, similar to what we were talking about earlier: infrastructure serves as a traffic driver and dwell time monetization play, not a profit center. The target 20-30 minute charging window aligns perfectly with shopping trips. The company uses charging as a loss leader while capturing margin on in-store purchases during extended dwell time. Walmart+ members receive additional discounts, creating subscription service attachment.

This mirrors the century-old gas station evolution: fuel became a razor-thin margin commodity with station owners earning just 7 cents per dollar spent on gas, while convenience stores generate 30-35% gross margins and deliver the majority of net profits. Walmart's scale, existing infrastructure, and integrated business model can tolerate charging margins that would bankrupt standalone operators.

Target follows with 100+ locations planned across 20+ states, partnering with Tesla, ChargePoint, and Electrify America. The automaker consortium IONNA^* committed $250M over three years for 1,000 charging bays in California alone, targeting 30,000 bays nationwide by 2030.

*IONNA is a joint venture of eight major automakers (BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota) formed to build a North American charging network. Unlike traditional charging networks, IONNA stations are designed as destination charging hubs with amenities, retail integration, and Plug & Charge technology that automatically handles payment. For the automakers, this is defensive infrastructure spending: vehicle sales depend on charging confidence, and they can't rely on third parties to deliver reliable customer experience.

Oil majors view charging as a customer retention strategy as gasoline volumes decline, leveraging existing real estate and convenience store expertise. They can afford to operate charging at or below breakeven to preserve location traffic.

Vertical Integration is the Market Structure

By 2030, I see the U.S. DC fast charging market consolidating from 50-plus players down to roughly 8-12 networks controlling about 80% of public fast charging. These leaders will all be entities that control real estate, balance sheets, and a primary profit center that is not the charger itself.

Cell towers started as a fragmented mess of regional operators and carrier-owned sites in the 1990s and ended with three REITs that control around three-quarters of U.S. macro towers. Gas stations peaked at a little over 200,000 sites in the late 20th century and then bled out thousands of small independents as environmental regulations and razor-thin fuel margins pushed the industry into the arms of big chains and c-stores. Telecom companies in the late 1990s poured more than $500 billion into fiber-optic and related network infrastructure, went bankrupt en masse, and then quietly made private equity investors rich a decade later once demand finally caught up.

EV charging sits on the same curve, just running on a slightly faster clock. 2020-2026 will be the overbuild and idealism phase. 2026-2030 will be the profitability inflection phase, when average utilization climbs into a range where stations actually consistently generate profit. And finally, 2030-2035 will be the oligopoly phase, where the surviving networks have enough density, enough capital, and enough adjacent revenue streams that the game shifts away from charger spam.

Capital Intensity versus Software Economics

Going back to the unit analysis, we mentioned how a typical 4-charger, 150kW station would cost anywhere between $600K and $800K in capex.

Now look at the software slice of that stack. Most charging management platforms charge $30-$100 per port per month. On a 4-port site, that's $1,440-$4,800 a year in recurring revenue sitting on top of a half-million-dollar asset. You're capturing maybe 0.3-1.0% of the capital you supposedly "operate." The rev-share variants don't change the physics much, they tax sessions instead of ports, but they're still skimming a small percentage of gross revenue without owning the thing that sets volume or price.

That's the real weakness in the "we'll be the operating system of EV charging" story. The people writing the $400,000 checks can switch between network providers with essentially no hardware replacement cost.

Policy risk just amplifies it. As we know, the 30C tax credit can swing a site's projection from deeply negative to comfortably positive. When that incentive effectively sunsets for a big chunk of use cases in 2026, a lot of marginal stations that looked fine in underwriting models won't look too great anymore. The only actors who can ride that out are the ones who can make the loss back somewhere else [retail baskets, you get where I am going here].

A software-only platform doesn't have that option. Most of the time, they don't have any say where the concrete gets poured, what the power costs, how pricing is set, or whether the landlord dumps you for a cheaper competitor once your contract is up.

Where Software Still Matters (and where it doesn't)

This doesn't mean software is irrelevant. Good software is the only reason this ecosystem functions at all. Somebody has to route drivers, manage queues, arbitrate between onsite loads, optimize time-of-use rates, handle payments and refunds, and interface with a dozen different utilities and incentive programs.

There are two slices of the stack where I think software looks genuinely interesting.

The first is pre-construction: site selection and underwriting. Deciding which retail center to put hardware at is a data problem as much as it is an electrical one. If you can consistently pick above-average sites, you create real value. Do that at scale and your model gets better over time as you observe actual utilization against your forecasts (Stable Auto has done this well).

The second is bundling: making yourself sticky by wrapping software with things that are not easily commoditized. That might mean locking in multi-year operations and maintenance contracts, offering financing so hosts don't have to write big checks out of pocket, or stitching together enough volume to negotiate better hardware pricing than a single landlord ever could. The moment you start doing that, though, you edge away from pure software and toward being a developer or operator.

What almost certainly won't work at scale is the idea of being a neutral, asset-light consumer brand that "owns" the driver relationship while outsourcing everything else. Drivers will go where the chargers are. Hosts will work with whoever can get projects financed and built. The small gap in between those two realities is not a big enough space to build an enduring, high-margin consumer software business.

The coming 24 months will be decisive as incentives expire and true private-market economics emerge. The winners will control distribution, customer relationships, and software, but not any single layer independently. This is a capital-intensive infrastructure business.

Software is necessary but not sufficient. In a world of expensive boxes bolted to concrete, the center of gravity sits with whoever is willing to own the concrete, and wait.

If this essay is the outside view, its pair is the inside view. If you haven't already read it, the first part stays near to the property line, following how a single multifamily building or retail center actually decides whether to add chargers, how reservations change utilization, and what it looks like to align incentives between owners, capital providers, networks, and drivers. Read together, the two posts are the same argument from opposite directions. Utilization, not installation, is what makes infrastructure real, and the value settles with whoever can both influence that utilization and afford to be patient.

Or: On American Exceptionalism

I am six years old in a classroom that smells like dry-erase markers and institutional carpet cleaner. A woman is asking me questions, showing me patterns, watching how quickly I can make connections that she has decided matter. This test, whose name I cannot remember, whose questions have faded into the general blur of childhood, will follow me for the next decade like a promise and a prophecy and a curse.

I am gifted, they tell my parents. Gifted. As if excellence were something bestowed by the gods rather than constructed by circumstance, and as if the word itself didn't carry the weight of every expectation that would come to define what it meant to grow up exceptional in America.

There's something uniquely American about the obsession with gifted children. We sort kids into categories before they've lived enough life to know what categories mean. We are a country built on the mythology of potential, on the idea that talent, properly identified, properly cultivated, properly leveraged, can transcend any limitation. It's the same impulse that drives parents to spend hours researching the best preschools, that creates waitlists for kindergarten, that makes college admissions feel like a referendum on whether your entire childhood was well-spent.

BASIS was supposed to be the answer. A school where being gifted wasn't exceptional but expected, where the curriculum moved at the speed of ambition rather than the pace of state standards. The rankings promised everything: a top public high school in America, college acceptance rates that read like lottery odds reversed, average SAT scores that made other schools look like they were teaching a different subject.

What the rankings didn't capture was the specific texture of excellence as a baseline. The way "good" was never quite good enough, how every A was contextualized by someone else's A+, every achievement shadowed by someone achieving more. There was always another AP class to take, another competition to enter, another line to add to the resume that would eventually land in the hands of admissions officers at Stanford, MIT, the Ivies, schools whose names we spoke like incantations, as if acceptance letters were proof of something fundamental about who we were.

I believed it all. Why wouldn't I? The world had been telling me since second grade that I was destined for extraordinary things. The gifted label had become infrastructure, the foundation on which I'd built my entire sense of self. Smart was who I was, not just what I did. Success wasn't a possibility; it was an inevitability, a promise the universe had made when that woman with the clipboard declared me worthy of special attention.

In the fall of my senior year, I submitted applications to universities I'd been taught to want. Not just want, expect. The narrative was clear: gifted child goes to BASIS, gets perfect scores, gains admission to elite university, becomes the kind of success story that validates every adult who ever believed in the sorting system. It was supposed to be simple. It was supposed to be earned.

The rejection letters, or worse, the deferrals and waitlists that eventually became rejections, landed like evidence of a cosmic clerical error. There must have been some mistake. I had followed the formula. I had done everything right. The gifted program had promised that talent plus effort equaled success, that America rewarded merit, that the kids who worked hardest and scored highest would inherit the earth, or at least the Ivy League.

What no one tells you about being a gifted child is that the label comes with an expiration date, a moment when you realize that being smart at seven doesn't guarantee anything at seventeen, that potential is just another word for untested, that the world has thousands of gifted kids and only so many spots at Stanford.

I ended up at Arizona State University. Not because it was my dream school, but because it was the school that said yes, because somewhere in the chaos of rejection and recalibration, I had to choose between bitterness and curiosity, between defining myself by the doors that closed or the ones still open.

There's a specific kind of shame that comes with going to a state school when you've spent your entire educational career being told you were destined for more. You feel it in the way people's faces shift when you tell them where you ended up, in the apologetic tone you adopt when explaining your college choice, in the way you still check on Instagram to see where your classmates landed.

But shame is just another word for caring what other people think, and what I've learned, slowly, painfully, incompletely, is that other people's metrics of success are not neutral observations but constructions, stories we tell ourselves about what matters and why. The gifted program taught me that success looked like elite universities and prestigious careers, that there was a hierarchy and you either climbed it or failed. ASU is teaching me something different: that success might be less about the name on your diploma and more about what you actually do with the education you get, less about following someone else's predetermined path and more about building your own.

The story I was told growing up was fundamentally about scarcity, limited spots at good schools, limited opportunities for success, a zero-sum game where someone else's victory meant your defeat. BASIS reinforced this every day, with class rankings and grade distributions and the tacit understanding that we were competing not just for knowledge but for position, for the right to call ourselves successful in a very specific, very narrow way.

But maybe that story was wrong. Maybe success isn't about getting into the right school but about what you do once you're there. Maybe intelligence isn't about being labeled gifted at seven but about being curious enough to keep learning at twenty. Maybe American exceptionalism isn't about sorting people into winners and losers but about believing that anyone, even someone at a state school, even someone who didn't get their first choice, can still do exceptional things.

The students around me at ASU aren't failures. They're smart and driven and interesting, and although not all of them spent their childhood being told they were gifted, somehow they're succeeding anyway.

The question I ask myself now isn't "Why didn't I get into Stanford?" but "What am I building here?" Not as a consolation prize, not as second-best, but as genuine inquiry. Because whatever BASIS taught me about achievement, it also taught me about work ethic, about intellectual curiosity, about not being satisfied with easy answers. Those skills don't disappear because you're at a school that didn't make the US News top ten. The gifted label might have been bullshit, but the ability to think critically, to work hard, to ask interesting questions, that's real, and it doesn't require institutional validation.

The American Dream promises that talent and hard work guarantee success. The gifted program promised that intelligence and achievement would unlock specific doors. Both were lying, or at least telling incomplete truths. What they left out was the chaos, the luck, the thousand contingencies that shape a life more than any test score or school ranking ever could.

I'm older now, and things have happened, some good, some disappointing, all instructive. But everything is still possible, just in ways I didn't expect. The gifted child is growing up. The story isn't over. And maybe that's the most American thing of all: the stubborn belief that where you start doesn't determine where you end, that potential isn't destiny, that every kid can do extraordinary things.

The only question is what comes next. And for once, I don't already know the answer.