Steel ships, railroads, and data centers: A VC takes the Industrial Revolution analogy seriously
Source: Fortune ·
Notable Capital’s Hans Tung argues that in every tech revolution, the geopolitical winner wasn’t the best inventor.
From the source
In 2026, Hans Tung and I are talking about 19th-century ships. “The Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese—they sailed around the world with beautiful large ships, but they were wooden wind ships,” said Tung, Notable Capital managing partner and early backer of companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, and Anthropic. “The British were the first to scale ships with the steam engine. Adopting steel technology and applying it to the steam engine—that made the British Navy stronger than the rest of the world combined. Without that buildout—steel ships, the steam engine—we wouldn’t even have the American concept of free trade.” Tung loves history (as do I, which anyone subjected to whaling ventures-centric writing knows), and I came to him with something that had been irking me: I’ve often heard VCs talk about AI as an “Industrial Revolution-level change,” in a way I’ve frequently found hand-wavey. My question to Tung: What if we took the historical analogue seriously? What does it mean to take that…