"America Spins on Westmag" — Packy McCormick

⚠️ Sponsorship

Two distinct sponsor layers, disclosed separately per the Not Boring gotcha playbook:

1. Structural sponsor (the real bias) — Westmag. This is a single-company deep-dive of a company the author is personally invested in. Packy discloses it in-text: he invested in Westmag "alongside a16z, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG, Menlo Ventures, and my Electric Slide co-author, Sam D'Amico." This is stronger than the usual co-written-founder-pitch gotcha — Packy is on the cap table, not just co-bylining. The essay is the company's go-to-market narrative (TAM framing, offtake-agreement name-drops, "Westmag will be the winning motor company") dressed as analysis. Read the strategic frame as bull-case collateral, not neutral diligence. Portfolio-disclosure check: NOT a concealed relationship — Packy states the investment plainly in the body. The conflict is disclosed; the spin is the issue, not hidden ownership.
2. Paid sponsor block — Framer (website builder). Standard top-of-essay ad placement, unrelated to Westmag or the thesis. Clean; ignore for bias purposes.

Single byline (signed "Packy"). Sam D'Amico is referenced as co-author of the prior essay ("The Electric Slide") and as a fellow Westmag investor/advisor, but is NOT a co-author of this piece — do not co-byline.

Why this is in the vault

Packy's Electric Stack series is the most articulate public statement of the reindustrialization / electrification thesis that overlaps the founder's investing lane. This installment translates the abstract "make the Electric Stack in America" argument into a concrete capital-cycle story: defense-demand bootstrap, ride the patriotic premium down the cost curve, vertically integrate a CapEx-intensive process-knowledge business, and serve a fragmented downstream horizontally. The TSMC-fabless analogy and the "China spent thirty years compounding process knowledge" framing are directly portable to how the founder reasons about chip/memory capital cycles. Worth filing as evidence, with the sponsorship caveat front and center.

The core argument

• The bet. Motors and actuators are the layer of the "Electric Stack" where everything converges (a humanoid robot's bill-of-materials is ~50% actuators). China dominates because it has made a lot of motors for thirty years, accumulating compounding process knowledge — not because of a materials edge. Motors are a process problem, not a materials problem.
• Why a Western motor company can exist despite China's scale/subsidy advantage. The geopolitical case (don't put a software-controlled Chinese component in every American drone/robot/home) is "half the story." The corporate case is the other half and the one Packy focuses on: proximity to fast-iterating American drone/robot customers lets Westmag shorten the design-iteration loop, which Chinese suppliers (who deprioritize lower-volume American buyers) can't match.
• The bootstrap mechanism — the "Red, White, and Blue Premium." Defense and DC buyers will pay more for American-made components today, which is where the volume is now. Not a long-term strategy, but a jumpstart: use defense offtake to fund the automation and design-for-manufacturing work that eventually reaches cost parity with China without subsidies. Westmag claims it has already signed offtake agreements for hundreds of thousands of motors.
• The TSMC analogy (load-bearing). DJI and Unitree vertically integrated down to motors the way early chipmakers fabbed their own silicon. Westmag wants to be the TSMC of motors: absorb the hard, CapEx-heavy, process-knowledge work and serve the whole ecosystem horizontally, growing up alongside it so the compounding becomes uncatchable. Explicit chip-era parallel: "we are at the same place in the Electric Age today that we were in the Information Age then."
• Scale over efficiency. Founders (David Hansen, Jordan Sanders) argue marginal efficiency gains (89% → 91%) don't matter; volume and adoption do. "You only get good at the stuff if you build a lot of it." Plan: start by copying Asian-supply-chain designs, then progressively redesign motor + factory together for American capital-intensive processes (stamping, die-casting, automation), moving upstream into magnet cutting and stator stamping, "conveyors not couriers."

Mapping against Ray Data Co

Strength: strong. This sits squarely inside the founder's two active lenses and reinforces both:

• Chip-fab / capital-cycle muscle (the founder's core investing thesis). The whole essay is built on the founder's exact mental model: a CapEx-intensive, process-knowledge-compounding manufacturing business where the winner is whoever rides volume down the cost/performance curve fastest. The explicit TSMC/Nvidia/Jerry Sanders "real men have fabs" framing maps the motor capital cycle onto the chip capital cycle the founder already reasons in. This is the same demand-bootstrap → capacity-build → cost-parity arc the [[2026-05-18-memory-cycle-v1.1]] and [[2026-05-18-power-cycle-v1.1]] theses formalize, applied to a new substrate (motors/actuators).
• Electrification / "Electric Stack" reindustrialization theme. Westmag is a pure-play instance of the power/electrification capital cycle the founder tracks via the power-cycle thesis. Defense-demand-as-industrial-policy is the same mechanism Packy used in "Thank God for Data Centers" ([[2026-05-27-not-boring-thank-god-for-data-centers]]) and that shows up in the founder's power-cycle anchor data. Rare-earth magnet supply (MP Materials, Vulcan Elements, government price floors) extends the map upstream into a materials-bottleneck angle worth tracking.
• Honest caveat on extension. This does NOT give the founder a tradeable signal — Westmag is private (a16z/FF/Lux/Menlo round), so there's no public-equity expression. Its value is as a framework reinforcement and a forward-indicator of where defense-demand industrial policy is flowing (motors/actuators as the next layer after data centers and rare earths). Treat the specific company claims (offtake volumes, "winning motor company") as investor-narrative, not verified fact — Packy is on the cap table.

Related

• [[2026-03-24-not-boring-electromagnetism]] — Packy's prior Electric Stack installment (motors/electromagnetism as the physical-world substrate); closest neighbor in the series.
• [[2026-05-27-not-boring-thank-god-for-data-centers]] — cited in-essay; same defense-/government-demand-as-industrial-policy mechanism applied to data centers.
• [[2026-05-18-power-cycle-v1.1]] — the founder's electrification/power capital-cycle thesis that this reindustrialization narrative reinforces.
• [[2026-01-16-not-boring-robot-steps]] — adjacent Not Boring robotics coverage (downstream demand for Westmag's actuators).