By Colleen Konetzke, Principal Our economy and infrastructure are built on the wheels of trucks – class 8 tractor trailers, cement trucks, utility trucks, and more. As the final, physical, on-the-ground tools for logistics and supply chain, trucks make our modern-day lives possible. The thing that makes you nervous on the interstate is what provides […]
By Adam Bridgman, Co-Founder & General Partner and Max Adelman, Associate On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released the world’s first consumer-friendly Large Language Model (LLM) to the public. The apparent overnight success of ChatGPT was an iteration of research that Ilya Sutskever and others started at Google Brain a decade earlier, which was itself an […]
By Ty Findley, Co-Founder & General Partner It is no secret that US-Mexico cross-border freight activity is on a historic rise, with Mexico becoming the US’ top trading partner in 2023, (total two-way goods trade came in at $807B, surpassing China) and already this year, trade reached $415B from January through June, the highest total […]
By Ty Findley, Co-Founder & General Partner, and Colleen Konetzke, Principal Skilled manufacturing labor is in short supply – and that supply is only dwindling. Nearly 50% of manufacturers say they have turned down work due to lack of labor, and in 2023, 10,000 baby boomers retired every day. Between 2024 and 2033, the net […]
By Ty Findley, Co-Founder & General Partner, and Colleen Konetzke, Principal At Ironspring, we’re all about the latest technologies for making and moving things. Often, these improve how we design, build, operate, and distribute using critical but often overlooked assets across the industrial supply chain. Trailers caught our attention as one such asset ripe for […]
By Ty Findley, Co-Founder & General Partner, and Colleen Konetzke, Principal Skilled labor in manufacturing and supply chain is in short supply and difficult to manage. Nearly 50% of manufacturers say they have turned down work due to lack of labor. There is a 2.1M factory worker shortage predicted for 2030, costing ~$1T in productivity. This is […]
By Ty Findley, Co-Founder & General Partner & Colleen Konetzke, Principal At Ironspring Ventures, we focus on backing innovators in massive industries that make modern life possible, industries that are often out of sight and out of mind to the general public. The distribution of building materials, which we will do our best to roughly […]
By Ty Findley, Co-Founder & General Partner, and Colleen Konetzke, Principal Ironspring Ventures is proudly headquartered in Texas, the energy capital of the country for both traditional and renewable energy. The state produced the most wind energy in the country last year, and the second most solar, behind only California. In the fourth quarter of 2023, real GDP for […]
By Colleen Konetzke, Principal Welcome to our third edition of The Blueprint, Ironspring Ventures’ new series to share what we’re thinking about, observing, and predicting across the digital industrial innovation ecosystem. Want to learn more about The Blueprint? Check out this primer as well as our previous pieces on the power of vertical industrial labor […]