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
The Honorable Will Hurd is a former CIA officer and congressman whose career spans intelligence, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence policy, and public service. He currently serves as Division President of ICON Prime, a space and defense tech company and will lead ICON Prime's strategy and government partnerships as the company scales its robotic construction technology across the national security enterprise and beyond Earth. He is also the author of American Reboot: An Idealist Guide to Getting Big Things Done. Hurd brings deep expertise at the intersection of technology, national security, and governance to his board roles and ongoing policy work.

Hurd began his career serving overseas in the CIA, where he worked to prevent attacks on the United States and disrupt efforts to smuggle nuclear materials into the country. He later held roles at Crumpton Group and FusionX, helping defend critical infrastructure from cyber threats. In 2014, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Texas’s 23rd District, where he served three terms and played a key role in shaping technology and national security policy.

Following his time in Congress, Hurd held leadership roles at Allen & Company and CHAOS Industries. He also previously served on the boards of In-Q-Tel and OpenAI.

He currently serves on the board of directors for Personal.AI, The Aerospace Corporation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and advisory boards of Palo Alto Networks and the Center for European Policy Analysis.

A San Antonio native, Will received a BS in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

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