The First Thing Built on the Moon Will Come from Austin | Jason Ballard & Will Hurd, ICON

ICON has been telling the same story since 2018. Humanity has a construction problem that solving for regulations and supply-demand incentives alone won't fix. We need fundamentally new ways to build.

Jason Ballard, ICON's founder and CEO, and Will Hurd, the former CIA officer, congressman, and OpenAI board member who just joined as President of ICON Prime, came on to lay out what happens when a non-consensus thesis held for eight years starts to materialize in the real world. The conversation cuts across the full stack, housing, AI, robotics, labor, reindustrialization, and space. The through-line is Ballard's argument that breakthrough technologies are never narrow, that building the technology for a moon base solves the housing and building crisis on Earth.

Agenda

0:00 What ICON is building and why shelter is broken 6:40 The regulation stack and ICON as a technology company 11:40 Customer shapes, business model, and the innovation stack 17:10 AI, ChatGPT from the inside, and the case for optimism 23:40 The spoons-and-ditches fallacy and Hurd's regulation inversion 30:30 What is ICON Prime and the barracks crisis 36:40 Military construction, Afghanistan, and expeditionary printing 42:40 The moon base, Olympus, and in-situ resource utilization 49:40 Eight years of the same thesis and software's limit 56:40 Austin's talent gravity and the ICON diaspora 1:00:40 The moon in our lifetime 1:04:40  National security, espionage, and Austin as a target 1:08:40 Laser on the moon, 2028 Previous ICON Episode with Evan Loomis

Guest Links & Bio

Jason Ballard: X/Twitter

Will Hurd: LinkedIn

ICON: Website, ICON Prime, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube

Jason Ballard

Jason Ballard has dedicated his life to working on big problems in service to humanity, most recently and notably as the co-founder and CEO of ICON, the construction technologies company using construction-scale 3D printing to tackle the global housing crisis and prepare to build on other worlds. ICON has been named one of the "Most Innovative Companies in the World" by Fast Company and recently profiled on CBS’s 60 MINUTES.  Raising $451 million to date in funding, ICON has delivered communities of resilient 3D-printed homes at high-speed and lower cost in the U.S. and internationally and forged partnerships with world-renowned architects, builders and housing organizations missionally aligned to shift the paradigm of homebuilding. In fall 2022, ICON was awarded $57.2 million from NASA to develop a lunar surface construction system that will target humanity’s first-ever construction on another planetary body. In 2019, Ballard was awarded the Austin Under 40 Award in the Technology category. In 2021, Ballard was named to TIME100 Next as one of the emerging leaders shaping the future as well as Newsweek’s America's Greatest Disruptors: Visionaries and Innovators Who Are Changing the World.

Prior to co-founding ICON, Ballard served as CEO of an eco-friendly home upgrade company that normalized sustainable and healthy approaches to home improvement. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Ballard worked at a homeless shelter, in various roles in sustainable building, and as an environmental consultant for ACRT. Ballard is a GLG Social Impact Fellow and served on the Carbon War Room / Rocky Mountain Institute Energy Think Tank. Ballard hails from East Texas and studied conservation biology at Texas A&M University. He also completed a masters program in Space Resources at Colorado School of Mines in 2022. He enjoys astronomy, ultrarunning, chess, comic books, and outdoor activities when he has free time.  He resides in Austin, TX with his four children.

Will Hurd