Closing 2025: Building the Exponential Future
Reflecting on 2025 and announcing new publication sections Constraint Capital and Sourcebook.
Sourcing high-quality industrial insights looked different in 2025. Exponential Industry has always prioritized ‘direct from the source’ information, but high-value ideas are now surfacing on X (watch first 5 minutes) and other socials before they hit official channels. That’s why I’ve added ‘Discuss on X’ links to our weekly digests, to give you a front-row seat to those live conversations. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, this is part of a larger movement where companies are hiring storytellers to wrest back control of their own narratives.
It’s become clear to me, and to the people around the company, that my role increasingly involves being a spokesperson. But I don’t really have a good way to talk directly to everybody. X gives me that opportunity.
There’s also a broader point: almost nobody talks about AI in the real world—where it intersects with cars, trucks, tanks, and fighter jets the way we see it at Applied Intuition. The conversation about self driving should be more than Waymo vs Tesla.
-Qasar Younis, Founder & CEO at Applied Intuition
As Qasar notes, we are witnessing the fall of confidence in institutions, and people with ideas are now bypassing institutions entirely. The most valuable insights are in the raw, lived experiences of those building in real-time found before the press is released.
Institutional filtering is now an anti-signal. How many corporate X accounts are you following and taking seriously?
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Reluctantly, I’ve come to accept that I do have a distinct point of view to share.-Qasar Younis, Founder & CEO at Applied Intuition
To meet this moment, I am excited to announce two new sections to the publication that capture distinct points of view from uniquely brilliant people operating in the industrial world.
Last chance to lock in a discount for the upcoming year! If you need an invoice for expense or tax purposes, please request by replying to this email.
2025 Year in Review
Before revealing the details behind the new publications sections, I want share with you all a few goals I set out before the year.
Highlights
In 2025, Exponential Industry reached several pivotal milestones thanks to your continued support. We focused on growing our community methodically while deepening our connection with you through the successful launch of our paid membership tier. Behind the scenes, we also pioneered new branding (thank you better half!) and a new content system that leverages AI to scale our insights without compromising the rigorous quality and technical depth you have come to expect from this publication.
Lowlights
Not every experiment yields the results we hope for, but each one provides a vital lesson in our pursuit of excellence. This year, our GenAI podcast experiment, Machine Chatter, fell short of my quality standards, resulting in lower engagement than anticipated. While the project is currently on hiatus, the insights gained into synthetic media will inform our future audio and video strategy. Similarly, while exponentialindustry.com launched, it has yet to reach its full potential as a content hub. I am excited to populate the site with exclusive lifestyle content that explores the culture and mindset of our field, which will exist as a unique destination outside of Substack.
Announcing Two New Sections to Exponential Industry!
Introducing two new paid sections!
1. Constraint Capital > For Venture Capitalists and Investors
Navigate the bottlenecks and shifts within industrial value chains requiring capital to overcome. We provide a technology-first perspective on the industry by analyzing the direct words and actions of its principal agents.
2. Sourcebook > For Founders, Operators, and Students
Your library of “hard-won” operating guides. Learn to build industrial businesses and accelerate your career through the journeys of principal agents who have already done it. We break down software packages, systems of records, and shop floor machines and robots into tiers to help you navigate price points and capability upgrades.
More on Constraint Capital
Constraint Capital will focus on forecasting technological progress following Wright’s Law like semiconductors, LEDs, and solar photovoltaic modules, and more across five mega trends: AI Factories, Energy Systems, the Mineral Frontier, the Physical Capital Stack, and Embodied AI through the lens of the companies and people working on removing these constraints.
AI Factories - The hardware components within “a specialized computing infrastructure designed to create value from data by managing the entire AI life cycle, from data ingestion to training, fine-tuning, and high-volume AI inference. The primary product is intelligence, measured by token throughput, which drives decisions, automation, and new AI solutions.”
Energy Systems - The technologies enabling civilization’s technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using.
The Mineral Frontier - The technologies to extract, refine, and synthesize the materials necessary to push product performance to the edge of physics.
The Physical Capital Stack - The technologies that extend the capability of the production systems to operate autonomously with human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience.
Embodied AI - The Integration of AI into physical machines, enabling machines to navigate and manipulate unstructured environments.
Constraint Capital will also contain the long list of funding rounds and acquisitions across the entire industrial technology landscape that are left out of the weekly digest.
Inspiring Sourcebook
Sourcebook will help students, founders, and seasoned operators sense when to make the investment in upgrades across business systems of record like manufacturing execution systems (MES), enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM) and hardware like additive manufacturing printers and injection molding machines.
The goal with Sourcebook is to help you avoid catastrophic systems integration and build cost-effective and compatible technology stacks.
On to 2026!
What began as a passion project five years ago has evolved into a mission to bridge the gap between today’s breakthroughs and the leaders of tomorrow. Sharing these learnings with you is a privilege, and I am constantly energized by our collective potential to reshape the industrial landscape. Thank you for being a vital part of this journey and for your unwavering support. Here’s to a year of bold innovation, boundless progress, and building the future together.
Happy New Year,
David