They've Built A New Hardware City In Texas To Try And Save America
TL;DR
Prototown is a hardware startup disguised as a place — Merl and Josh, both 27 and former Duke friends, are building an 1,100-acre test-and-prototyping hub in Central Texas where companies lease land, use construction services, and iterate faster than they could in Austin or the Bay.
Their core bet is that America needs Shenzhen-like hardware density, but with a Texas frontier culture — they argue the US lost the ability to colocate design, testing, manufacturing, and talent, and that speed suffers when founders have to move to Shenzhen for a year just to dial in batteries, motors, and factories.
Texas won because it combines Austin engineers, San Antonio vocational talent, and local tolerance for building weird things — they describe Austin as “the most coastally competitive city not on the coast,” while Lockhart and Caldwell County offer land, receptive communities, and a practical, mechanically fluent culture.
The companies already there are the point, not the real estate — examples include Bedrock Robotics testing autonomous excavators, Atmas building solar-triggered thermal cooling panels, Eden making desalination centrifuges, Base Power hardening the Texas grid, and Terran Robotics building adobe homes from on-site dirt.
They’re explicitly avoiding the ‘utopian startup city’ playbook — instead of a libertarian or ideological experiment, they frame Prototown as apolitical, “extremely America”-oriented, and focused on one thing: giving hardware founders permits, land, and infrastructure so they can move at “Elon speed.”
The project started absurdly and they know it — before the ranch, it was just Josh’s red bus, missile-silo fantasies, and Zoom calls from air mattresses; they say that very craziness became a filter that attracted unusually committed founders and believers.
The Breakdown
From college rocket kids to hardware-town founders
Merl and Josh open as old Duke friends, with Josh tracing the whole thing back to his obsession with hardware and a student rocket project that nearly reached the Kármán line before the nose cone sheared off at Mach 6. That brush with ambitious physical systems sent him from Duke to Mountain View to try starting a rocket artillery company, where he learned firsthand that the Bay is exciting but deeply frustrating for actual hardware.
Why Texas, and why this ranch near Lockhart
Josh says Texas came into focus after Tesla’s Gigafactory announcement, but the real draw became the overlap: Austin’s relocatable engineering talent, San Antonio’s vocational workforce, and enough land to test things without feeling boxed in. The site itself is a former cattle ranch and hunting property, 1,100 acres, and had even been eyed amid the Micron fab wave — a sign that serious industrial infrastructure was already creeping toward the area.
The original vision was weirder than the current one
The host jokes about hearing there was once an “underground hardware town” plan, and Josh happily confirms he was touring missile silos and fantasizing about hardware cities in giant pits. What survived from that version wasn’t the bunker aesthetic, but the thesis: hardware companies need space, freedom, and a more pioneering feeling than the coast currently offers.
The red bus era: how the idea stopped being a slide deck
Before Prototown was a ranch, it was a TWA-style bus Josh used to roadshow the concept around the country. Merl admits he thought the bus sounded ridiculous until he saw it in person on Treasure Island and realized it made the vision tangible in a way a deck never could — enough to pull him out of his energy job and into the project full-time.
What Prototown actually is: speed as a service
They describe Prototown as a startup building a place for other startups, with the immediate product being speed: land, permits, construction, and test infrastructure wrapped into one turnkey environment. Josh says the goal is to let early-stage founders move with something like “Starbase-level infrastructure” before they’re large enough to build that kind of capability themselves.
The companies already make the place feel real
This isn’t a speculative city; it’s already a cluster of hardware teams with odd, concrete needs. Bedrock Robotics is using the land to train autonomous excavators, Atmas is building ultra-cheap cooling panels, Eden is scaling desalination centrifuges, Base Power is testing grid hardware, Terran Robotics is turning on-site dirt into adobe homes, and Dynamo is building a quadcopter with a rotor span as large as an NBA court.
Their real critique of the Bay is cultural, not just cost
Josh is careful to say he still respects the Bay, but says it felt too constrained by its own history — “like Steve Jobs was just dead, like you could just feel it.” In contrast, they think Texas still has that gold-rush or oil-wildcatter tolerance for risk, plus neighbors who instinctively understand welding, machining, equipment, and construction in a way many prestige hubs no longer do.
Not a utopia, not a cult, not politics — just a frontier for builders
They’re unusually explicit about what Prototown is not: not a nonprofit, not a libertarian city-state, not a utopian ideology project. Their pitch is simpler and more grounded — reopen a frontier for impactful hardware in America, keep Prototown itself rough-edged and Los Alamos-like, and if it works, prove that more places like this should exist across the country.