Edition #28: America - The Original Startup

A special Independence Day edition — America turns 250, and writes its next chapter in code

By Mykel Salomon · 2026-07-04

<h3>A special Independence Day edition — America turns 250, and writes its next chapter in code</h3><hr><h3>🔓 Opening Reflection</h3>Two hundred and fifty years ago today, a group of people did something reckless.They took an idea, that ordinary human beings could govern themselves, that dignity wasn't granted by a king but built into the person, and they bet everything on it. No proof it would work. Plenty of evidence it wouldn't. They signed their names to a document that could have gotten them hanged.America has always been, at its core, the boldest startup in human history.Founded not on a bloodline or a border, but on a claim. A pitch, really: that people are created equal, and that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are worth risking everything to protect.And here's the part I love most, the part that makes it so deeply human. The founders knew they hadn't gotten it right. They didn't write "a perfect union." They wrote "a more perfect union." They shipped a version one that was incomplete, that excluded people it shouldn't have, that would need constant work, and they said so, in the founding document itself.They built the country in permanent beta.Two hundred fifty years of patches, arguments, expansions of who "we the people" actually means. Never finished. Always iterating.Which brings us to now. Because America is writing its next chapter, and for the first time, it's writing a lot of it in code.The question on this birthday isn't whether America will build the future. It always does.It's whether we'll build it in a way that's worthy of the human beings it's supposed to serve.<hr><h3>🔦 Signal of the Week</h3>Here's a number that captures something profound about this country.Of the top U.S.-based AI companies on the 2025 Forbes AI 50 list, 60% were founded or co-founded by immigrants — 25 of 42 companies, with founders hailing from 25 different countries. Widen the lens to include the children of immigrants, and one analysis puts it at 77%. The names behind the tools defining this era came from India, China, France, South Africa, Taiwan, Russia, Iran, Romania, Canada, Israel, and more. Many arrived as students and simply... stayed to build.Sit with that. The most future-facing technology on earth is being built, in large part, by people who came to America looking for something.That is not a new story. It is the American story, in its newest form.And it was written into the country from the very beginning. Most people don't know this, but invention is in the Constitution, Article I gives Congress the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The founders, in the same breath they used to design a government, made room to protect the inventor. In 1790, the young republic issued its first patent. In 2026, it leads the world in artificial intelligence.Same engine. Two hundred thirty-six years apart.The thing that makes America good at building the future isn't a lab or a budget. It's a disposition: openness, reinvention, and a stubborn belief that where you came from matters less than what you're willing to build.That's not a tech story. That's a human one.<hr><h3>🌍 In the Wild</h3>Four things about America that the age of AI throws into sharp relief.<h3>1. Reinvention is the national superpower, and it's exactly what this moment demands</h3>Every technology America has met, it has eventually absorbed and remade: the printing press, electricity, the assembly line, the internet. The country's genius was never being first. It was being willing to become someone new in response.AI is going to ask that of all of us. Careers will shift. Skills built over decades will need rebuilding. Whole industries will reinvent or fade.For a lot of the world, that's terrifying. For America, it's Tuesday.This is the country of second acts and second chances, the place that has always told people, including its own citizens, that you are not permanently who you were. That belief, that you can start over and build again, may be the single most valuable asset we have going into this decade.<h3>2. The tech you live on was a very American marriage of public daring and private risk</h3>The device in your hand is a monument to a partnership most people never see. The GPS, the touchscreen, the internet protocols, the core chip research, much of it began in publicly funded American labs and universities, decades before anyone saw a product. Then private founders took the risk of turning it into something you'd actually use.That handoff, patient public investment feeding bold private invention, is one of America's quiet masterpieces. It's how a curiosity about how cells work becomes life-saving medicine. It's how a defense research project becomes the thing you're reading this on.AI is the latest child of that marriage. Worth remembering, on the day we celebrate the country, that the future was never built by the market alone or the government alone. It was built by both, and by the people brave enough to bet on it.<h3>3. "A more perfect union" is the original iterative design</h3>Silicon Valley loves to talk about shipping, iterating, improving. America did it first, and at the scale of a civilization.The founders released an intentionally unfinished product and built in the mechanism to keep improving it. Amendments. Movements. Hard, painful, ongoing revision of who gets counted as fully human under the law.That's the ethos AI desperately needs right now. Not the arrogance of a finished, perfect system handed down from on high, but the humility to build something, admit where it falls short, and keep making it more just, more inclusive, more worthy of the people it touches.America's founders modeled the mindset 250 years ago: build boldly, then never stop making it more human.<h3>4. The Declaration protects the pursuit, not the outcome</h3>This is the line I keep coming back to on this birthday. The Declaration doesn't promise happiness. It protects the pursuit of happiness.The founders understood something we're at risk of forgetting in an age of frictionless everything: the striving is the point. The building, the struggling, the earning — that's not a bug to be optimized away. It's where meaning lives.AI is extraordinary at removing friction. And there's a lot of friction worth removing — drudgery, disease, barriers to opportunity. But the pursuit itself, the deeply human act of reaching for a life that means something, is not a task to hand to a machine.The best future isn't one where the pursuit is automated away.It's one where more people, freed from what crushes them, finally get to pursue at all.<hr><h3>💬 The Big Question</h3>On America's 250th birthday, the question underneath all the fireworks is this:In the age of the machine, do we want to automate the human out , or use the machine to enlarge what a human being can be?The country was founded on a radical bet on human dignity. The technology we're now building will either honor that bet or quietly erode it.That's not up to the algorithm.It's up to us.<hr><h3>🧠 A Small Exercise</h3>In the spirit of the day, write your own short declaration. Ten minutes. No performance, just honesty.<ol><li>What do I hold to be self-evident? The handful of things about being human I believe are non-negotiable — the things no efficiency should be allowed to touch.</li><li>What am I declaring independence from this year? A habit, a fear, a definition of success that was never really mine.</li><li>What future am I willing to actually build toward — not just consume or complain about?</li><li>Where should I let AI remove friction in my life — and where is the friction the whole point?</li><li>What does the "pursuit of happiness" mean for me right now — and am I actually pursuing it, or just optimizing around it?</li></ol>A country is just a lot of people deciding, together, what they're willing to build. So is a life.<hr><h3>🎆 A Note This Week</h3>No guest episode today , we're taking the holiday. Regular conversations resume next week.But if this theme is pulling at you, two recent episodes go deeper on it. My conversation with Nicholas B. Dirks of the New York Academy of Sciences digs into how public investment built American scientific leadership , and what we risk when we cut it. And my talk with Jack Wagoner wrestles with the "pursuit" question head-on: what a meaningful life looks like when technology makes everything easier.Both, in their way, are about the same thing we're celebrating today. The human being at the center of it all.🎧 The Human Protocol is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.<hr><h3>🧭 Thought to End the Week</h3>America has always been an unfinished sentence.Two hundred fifty years in, it's still being written, by every generation that inherits the bet and decides to raise it rather than fold. The founders didn't hand us a finished country. They handed us a first draft, and a responsibility.Now we hold the pen at a strange and remarkable moment, one where some of the writing is done in code. The tools are more powerful than anything the founders could have dreamed. The question they'd ask us is the same one they asked themselves: will you use this to make people freer, or not?So today, celebrate it. The fireworks, the flaws, the audacity, the reinvention. The messy, unfinished, deeply human experiment that keeps betting on people.And tomorrow, get back to building , the country, your work, your life, in a way that keeps the human at the center.Because the code may change. And it will.But our humanity is the constant.Happy 250th, America. 🇺🇸— Mykel<hr><h3>📚 Sources</h3><ol><li>Institute for Progress, Most of America's "Most Promising" AI Startups Have Immigrant Founders (2025), via Axios — 60% of the top 42 U.S.-based companies on the Forbes AI 50 were founded or co-founded by immigrants, from 25 countries. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://ifp.org/most-of-americas-top-ai-companies-were-founded-by-immigrants/">https://ifp.org/most-of-americas-top-ai-companies-were-founded-by-immigrants/</a></li><li>National Foundation for American Policy, via Forbes — 77% of leading U.S.-based AI companies were founded or co-founded by first- or second-generation immigrants; 70% of full-time graduate students in AI-related fields are international students. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="text-[#4FD1C5] underline hover:opacity-80" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/07/24/trump-ai-plan-omits-role-of-immigration-and-foreign-born-talent/">https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/07/24/trump-ai-plan-omits-role-of-immigration-and-foreign-born-talent/</a></li><li>U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (the Patent and Copyright Clause) — Congress empowered "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." First U.S. patent issued 1790.</li><li>Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) — "life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"; U.S. Constitution preamble — "a more perfect Union." (America's 250th anniversary / semiquincentennial: July 4, 2026.)</li></ol>