Longer truth nuke: Hardware investing isn't a refuge from software commodification. There's no defensibility in most hardware. What's more, the way venture describes hardware as "cheaper, faster, at scale" is actually describing a race to the bottom that strips value from OEMs. Sure, you can sell a lot of picks for a low cost and high demand and print. And you look up market and see most buyers are low profitability organizations, so you figure picks are the place to be. Strip back the layers and realize how much physical labor costs, and that every competitor pays the same for it. The second you build a mining robot you have a choice though: sell it and stay in the (fancy) pick business, which is a race to the bottom, or run it yourself and now you're the labor. The labor budget on any job is a multiple of the tool budget. And a pick gets priced against the next pick, while labor gets priced against the humans it replaces, with the cost of the robot doing it being the thing that's collapsing. It was only ever a bad business because it was made of people. There's a brief moment in time right now where robotics has not yet been adopted at scale outside the factory, and broadly replacing physical labor is going to be a generational shift in how business gets done. That means there is a window in nearly every industry to eat up incumbents by doing the work they do today with robotics. It's ultimately a labor arbitrage. Incumbents have little way to combat it until they can buy a platform AND orchestrate it, and right now they can't because it doesn't exist in the market, so you have to build it yourself. And then figure out how to drive value with it. But hardware commodifies, then orchestration commodifies, and ultimately the only thing that doesn't is owning outcomes: the contract, the liability, and the record of every job you've ever run on a customer's assets. A competitor can match your robots on day one but there's no way to buy ten years of history. If you can replace full workflows with robotics and own that outcome, each additional workflow you can complete compounds your gravity. You start looking a lot like a labor force, which alongside energy and capital are the three fundamental forces of getting anything done. You essentially become infrastructure for the physical world.