S3E6: The Engineer's Edge – Jamie Gull on Why Hardware Moats Beat Software in the Next Decade

Jamie’s the solo GP of Wave Function Ventures, a freshly announced $15M Fund I writing $250K-$500K checks into pre-seed and seed across aerospace, defense, energy, manufacturing, and robotics. His bet is straightforward: B2B SaaS became hypercompetitive, AI is recreating products in weeks, and software moats don’t hold like they used to. Hardware is different. Once you’re in market, you’ve built something that takes real time and real money to replicate.

At 24, fresh out of Stanford with dual degrees in aerospace engineering, Jamie headed straight to the Mojave Desert to Scaled Composites. Two years in, he made a call to split the tail on what became Stratolaunch, the world’s largest aircraft. His decision survived a $100M development program and flew a decade later. In 2016, Jamie watched it take off from the same runway where he’d first sketched it out.

Then SpaceX. Five years on Falcon 9, designing the thermal shield that lets the rocket survive reentry and land vertically. World’s first for a hypersonic orbital rocket program. The foundation of SpaceX’s reusable launch business and the thing that makes their economics work.

Near the end of SpaceX, Jamie started angel investing. His first check: Boom Supersonic. Blake Scholl flew out to meet Jamie, the first engineer Blake was going to meet. Jamie wrote the check because Blake was knocking down barriers he had no business knocking down as a software outsider.

Then Jamie became a founder himself (twice!) His first company was space deployables, and the second was Talyn Air, an electric vertical take-off and landing company that went through YC Winter 2020. Talyn’s approach was pure SpaceX thinking applied to aviation: use a two-stage system where a vertical lift vehicle launches a fixed-wing cruiser, then another lift vehicle catches it on landing. The VTOL system is the problem with electric aircraft because it’s heavy, energy-intensive, and kills range. Talyn separated the systems. Eight government contracts, including US Air Force, and was eventually acquired by Ampaire in 2023.

This is what founders get when they take Jamie’s money. Someone who’s lived the capital intensity, the regulatory friction, the government contracts, the build-break-rebuild cycles that separate hardware winners from everyone else. When he sits down with founders, he’s not asking surface-level questions, but workshopping engineering models in Excel like weight, cost, performance, sensitivities. If tariffs double on inputs, do unit economics still work?

He’s the founder’s first call when they’re still figuring it out, helping shape the story, flagging risks. That’s the posture that matters at pre-seed. Not showing up when everyone else has validated the idea.

His rubric is simple: founding team matters, but unlike software, you can’t stumble around finding product-market fit in deep tech. The problem set needs to be nailed. PhDs are a red flag because the training optimizes for thoroughness over speed. The founder has to be technical. Non-negotiable. If they’re out with customers and need to ping their team for answers, iteration speed dies.

Jamie’s not chasing hype. He’s positioning for the decade ahead, where the biggest wins come from the world of building physical things that matter.

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Special thanks to Matt for introducing us to Jamie 🙏

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