"Expanding the Radius of Daily Life" — Packy McCormick + Tsung Xu

Why this is in the vault

Packy hands the keyboard to a founder he angel-invested in to pitch eVTOL "flying cars," and the essay restates a clean hard-tech industrialization template (software-defined hardware + electric stack + a regulatory opening + a leisure-market beachhead riding a cost curve down) that is directly transferable to RDCO's reshoring / capital-cycle interests.

⚠️ Sponsorship

Two separate layers:

Explicit paid sponsor: Framer (website builder) — standard top-of-essay block, no editorial entanglement.
Structural bias — the essay IS a founder's go-to-market and recruiting collateral: the byline is co-written. Packy frames the intro, then "hands the keyboard" to Tsung Xu, founder/CEO of Vight, who writes the body in first person ("That is the future I'm working on at Vight"). Packy explicitly discloses "I angel invested in Vight" — so the investor relationship is verified (Packy personally; not a confirmed Not Boring Capital fund position, the disclosure says angel). Treat the company comparison set (Vight benchmarked favorably against Joby/Archer/EHang/Cessna and the air-taxi cohort), the "empty quadrant in our 2x2" framing, and the "why flying cars now" / "the hard part is now execution, not invention" claims as Vight's narrative, not neutral analysis. The essay closes with a recruiting CTA ("come build it with us"), confirming its function as founder collateral.

The core argument

Built on Marchetti's Constant: humans hold travel time roughly constant (~30 min each way) and spend any speed gain on reaching further, not on saving time ("we are born to spread"). So a faster point-to-point vehicle doesn't just shorten trips — it expands the radius of where people can live, work, and visit.

The framing device is a speed-vs-freedom 2x2. Walking is maximally free but slow; cars give point-to-point freedom but are gated by road infrastructure (urban speeds barely beat a Model T, and drag scales with velocity squared so "just make cars fast" fails on physics); hub-to-hub aircraft give speed but lose freedom and add last-mile friction. Flying cars claim the empty quadrant: aircraft speed with car-like point-to-point freedom. AVs (Waymo/Tesla FSD) are dismissed as easier-to-use cars that still don't expand the radius because the infrastructure layer, not vehicle intelligence, is the binding constraint.

The "why now" rests on four converging enablers: software-defined flight (closes the sim-to-real loop, autonomy reduces pilot workload), a maturing electric powertrain stack (batteries, motors/power electronics, embedded systems), designs built for higher-volume standardized manufacturing, and a regulatory opening (MOSAIC, the new FAA path). The claimed punchline: the small-aircraft cost premium can collapse by ~an order of magnitude, so the problem is now execution, not invention.

The go-to-market: don't start with downtown rooftops/vertiports. Start with private-property owners (acreage, second homes, resorts, golf courses, marinas) who already buy leisure vehicles — the US powerboat market alone is ~200k units / ~$15B/yr — plus flight clubs and schools freed from runway dependence. Target ~$200k-$250k at ~1,000 units/yr, then walk down the cost curve (explicitly the Tesla Roadster -> mass-market "secret master plan" analogy, and the Model T). An "operating flywheel" compounds learnings across five loops (aircraft model, customer experience, endpoint/destination, cost, autonomy/services), with private-property takeoff/landing sidestepping public-vertiport buildout and permitting friction.

Mapping against Ray Data Co

Medium overall — the template transfers, the domain does not.

Medium-to-strong: the hard-tech cost-curve + manufacturing-volume thesis. The load-bearing claim — that a software-defined-hardware category with a maturing electric/embedded stack can collapse a historical cost premium by an order of magnitude once you hit volume and standardized manufacturing — is the same shape as the chip-fab / memory capital-cycle thesis RDCO already tracks (the reindustrialization / hard-tech-cost-curve lens). The "ramp to ~1,000 units to unlock the next cost step" logic is a capacity/volume-cycle argument in miniature. Useful as a clean restatement of the why-now-for-hard-tech pattern, not as an eVTOL investment signal.

Medium: the regulatory-opening-as-unlock framing. "Regulations are destiny and constrain the GTM pathway" and the MOSAIC path being the thing that flips the category from impossible-to-ship to executable is a transferable diagnostic — when assessing any reshoring / American-manufacturing bet, the binding constraint is often a policy/cert gate, not the tech. Pair it with the standard frontier-industrialization lens already in the vault.

Weak: anything domain-specific. Direct eVTOL / aviation exposure is not on RDCO's roadmap; don't manufacture "data-modeling-for-flying-cars" angles. The induced-demand / Marchetti's-Constant point is a nice rhetorical device for any "faster tool just makes people do more, not less" argument (including AI-agent throughput), but that's borrowing a frame, not a real mapping.

Skip as evidence: the company endorsements. Because this is the founder's own collateral, none of the competitive comparisons or "Vight is uniquely positioned" claims should be cited as neutral. Treat Tsung as a messenger pitching his own book.

[[2026-04-23-notboring-great-blue-frontier]] — the same Not Boring pattern (Packy hands the keyboard to a portfolio-adjacent founder; explicit Framer block + structural founder bias); near-identical processing template
[[2026-02-18-not-boring-power-age-of-intelligence]] — prior Packy long-form on the physical/energy constraints behind the next build-out
[[2026-06-02-not-boring-westmag-electric-stack]] — adjacent electric-powertrain / hard-tech stack essay, same enabling-curves logic
[[2026-06-05-not-boring-wdoo-196]] — most recent Not Boring Weekly Dose of Optimism curation note
[[2026-04-19-hengsperger-reindustrialize-america]] — adjacent reindustrialization / American-manufacturing thesis; the hard-tech cost-curve and incumbent-displacement framing this essay's manufacturing-volume thesis maps onto

Copyright note

Substack-rendered plaintext via Gmail; redirect-wrapped links. Paraphrased throughout; no single quote exceeds 15 words, per [[02-sops/copy-paste-caution-newsletter-processing|copy-paste caution]].