El Segundo, California is the most consequential hard tech cluster in America right now.
$5.9 billion in venture capital flows down Franklin Street, most of it into companies that didn't exist before COVID, building things the Pentagon needs yesterday.
Standard & Works came last month to understand what’s happening here.
We toured the factory of a fast-growing startup with its founder, walked the streets with a real estate broker who has helped 30+ hard tech companies establish their headquarters, and sat down with the Mayor.
Visiting changed how I think about economic development. It became clear the traditional playbooks are invisible to the founders reshaping American defense and aerospace at breathtaking speed.
Here’s what we saw
Zach Silber
Editor-in-Chief
Standard & Works
🎙 Go Deeper: Watch our podcast episode “Inside the Cluster: El Segundo, CA” on Spotify.
The Industrialist
Sitting in his office overlooking the former bay of an aerospace company that made parts for the Space Shuttle half a century ago is Cameron Schiller, founder of Rangeview.
Rangeview was founded in a garage in 2020 and is now in its fourth space.
Schiller has been on the lookout for more real estate to take over.
From there? Within the next year, he’s eyeing the country.
"I want to build factories across the plains,” he tells me.
Schiller says he wants Rangeview to be part of the fabric of a factory town.
Think: Red Wing, Minnesota, where company and community are synonymous.
This pace and scale is the trajectory for many founders in El Segundo.
They start by shifting through subleases, clamoring for space with the electricity to power advanced manufacturing machines.
They expand into bigger digs across the 405 into Hawthorne and Torrance.
After that: somewhere in America, to be determined.
Los Angeles's booming aerospace and defense cluster has become the launch ramp for some of the decade’s most consequential economic development deals:
El Segundo’s SpaceX in Brownsville
Costa Mesa’s Anduril in Ohio
Torrance’s Hadrian in Arizona
Long Beach’s Jet Zero in North Carolina.
These companies don't operate through the traditional machinery of economic development.
They don't know what EDO stands for.
They aren't picking up a site selection trade magazine that’s older than their parents.
And their names don’t come up in chatter on the site selection speed dating circuit.
Welcome to the next generation of economic development.
Schiller has a clear answer when I ask what a state or region out in the country needs to do to get on his radar and possibly earn the kind of factory he wants to build – one so big “they name a bar after it.”
"The number one thing I care about is the timeline," he said. "Doing everything you can from permitting process to knocking down barriers.”
“And hopefully with that, a great place to live,” he adds. “These guys work really hard and want to play hard too.”
Rangeview’s previous home, a few blocks away in El Segundo.
Schiller grew up in the machinist suburbs of Burbank, in the shadow of Bob Hope Airport, near where Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works built the SR-71 Blackbird, still one of the fastest manned aircraft to ever fly.
By the time he was born, the shops were hollowing out.
Friends' parents had run beautiful machine operations.
Then the work left. He watched it happen.
Like me, Schiller visited China as a teenager, witnessing where American industriousness had been exported – and the threat it posed.
That inspired Rangeview – an advanced manufacturing company building the foundry processes, equipment, and materials to produce critical components at speed – for defense, for data centers, for the infrastructure of a country trying to reindustrialize.
He went to Berkeley.
“We got funding. We were the last in the game who actually wanted to build things,” he said. “They tried to turn us into a SaaS company. Twice. We didn’t really fit in.”
He dropped out and returned south, looking for a place where “people care about making stuff, something real.”
Rangeview landed in Smoky Hollow, an El Segundo neighborhood packed with industrial buildings once home to race car teams, machine shops, and aerospace companies. It borders a Chevron refinery that occupies over half the city’s landmass.
When the refinery opened in 1911, the refinery was Standard Oil's second in California and gave El Segundo its name – "the second."
"This is a very special place," Schiller told me.
"It's the perfect center of three things: talent, electricity, and spirit."
The first thing you see walking into Rangeview’s factory is a framed photograph of the Space Shuttle riding on the back of a 747, soaring over the California desert.
"People were really proud to be part of going to the threatening stars," Schiller told me. "We were strong and we were together. And then we financialized it all."
Schiller’s intangible criteria – spirit – is palpable at Rangeview (I couldn’t take photos because much of their work is classified).
He walked me outside, through a loading bay door beneath a two-story American flag, and pulled up a vintage photo on his phone of the same entrance, fifty-years ago: workers in jumpsuits. A solid rocket booster being maneuvered for delivery.
As we walk back inside, he points toward a white building a few blocks away.
"Elon's office was right there," he said. The place where SpaceX started.
The most consequential aerospace company in a generation looms large here – it still manufactures heavily in nearby Hawthorne despite moving its HQ to Texas, and its alumni network is now seeding a new generation of startups on Franklin Street.
The building where SpaceX began
“You have this spirit just waiting to be cracked open,” Schiller says of El Segundo.
He adds it’s a city that was never fully absorbed by the California mainstream.
“It smells like oil.”
That’s a feature, not a bug.
The Landman
Erik Stiebel has a front-row seat to all of it.
A commercial real estate broker who founded CREA, Stiebel also runs the Space Dirt newsletter and is keeper of the SoCal Hard Tech Landscape Map, which tracks the fundraising and real estate moves of 250+ startups across the South Bay.
The real estate market tells the story.
Near-zero industrial vacancy.
Primes are shedding square footage as they consolidate, and developers are building into it.
What was a 30,000-square-foot building five years ago is now a 99,000-square-foot, three-story R&D and office complex that will be home to Chaos Industries.
The constraint here is the same as everywhere else: power.
It can cost half a million dollars and 18 months to upgrade electrical capacity.
Buildings with sufficient power get leased instantly. Everything else waits.
For a company racing toward a DoD contract, 18 months isn't a delay – it's disqualifying.
"Time is the biggest priority," Stiebel said of his client’s demands. "They have to move as quickly as possible.”
The Mayor
Chris Pimentel is the mayor of El Segundo. In most places, he'd be the parent who crashes the party. Here, he knows his role – and he plays it deliberately.
"Clear, concise, predictable regulation," Pimentel says to me. "We try to work with them as opposed to being the government that's just there to say no."
In practice, it looks like this.
When founders told him precision equipment was getting knocked around in the unpaved alley between buildings, he paved the alley.
A fire marshal who finds unlabeled wiring doesn't shut the company down — he works with them to fix it.
A planning director who answers the phone.
The city has also played strategic offense.
Before the current wave arrived, the City laid fiber down Franklin Street, where arrays of former machine shops were wired for electricity but lacked IT.
When COVID hit, the City went to Silicon Valley to pitch El Segundo to venture firms whose portfolio companies make things.
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and the ancillary services it provided to early-stage founders evaporated, the City stepped into the void, becoming a matchmaker for lawyers, treasury services, and investors.
"You get a bunch of guys making a nuclear reactor, but their dad might still do their taxes," Pimentel says. "Sometimes you forget where people are in the progression of life."
He credits Rangeview's Schiller with the best description of what El Segundo has become:
“The Florence of hard tech – a renaissance moment of high-density, high-quality output.”
Despite the fervor sweeping this five-and-a-half-square-mile city, Pimentel says what comes up most at city council meetings isn't hypersonics or the threat from China.
“It's whether the permit for the chili cookoff came through. That's city government."
