
2026: the Year to Be Optimistic
Every Sunday morning, I wake up to what has become my favorite newsletter: The Rational Optimist Society Newsletter. It generally highlights companies both large and small who are at the cutting edge - the very frontiers of knowledge in score of industries that are busy creating the future while the vast bulk of the media focuses on all the problems.
The original Rational Optimist was my friend Matt Ridley, one of the greatest thinkers and writers of our age. He literally wrote the book on rational optimism. The author of many books, I believe his two most important are The Rational Optimist and The Evolution Of Everything. (I put this in my top five of must-read books!).
One of the frustrations of the entire Mauldin Economic leadership team is that so little is written about the amazing transformational technologies happening right above our eyes. Many are not yet investable ideas, but they are going to impact everything in our future. We decided to form The Rational Optimist Society and every week highlight the amazing progress being made throughout the world. We reached out to Matt Ridley and not only did he agree to become the honorary founder, but he has also become very involved in working with our team to produce a weekly letter that is quite frankly my favorite Sunday read. It will always be free.
Over 20,000 people have already joined the community of thinkers at The Rational Optimist Society. You can sign up at the link and also browse through past letters and research papers.
I want us to start off 2026 with an understanding of how all of the problems we will face (and sadly, there will be more than a few) are going to be overwhelmed in the future by the progress being made. Yes, we have to deal with those problems, but we also want to make sure that we are taking advantage of the revolutions all around us.
This week’s letter will be an edited version of last week’s RSO letter: The Inaugural Rational Optimist Awards. It’s the Oscars for optimists where we celebrate the most important breakthroughs of the year. Written by Stephen McBride, let it remind you of the fabulous future our children and grandchildren will live in. With that said let’s jump in:
2026: the Year to Be Optimistic
By Stephen McBride
Having visited scores of companies all over the world done interviews with our team and especially Matt Ridley, we want to highlight what we think are the best of the best. These are our choices. But remember, ROS is a community. You will disagree with at least a few of my picks. So nominate alternative winners—or just tell me why I’m wrong—in the comments below.
If enough of you shout about the same topic, we’ll turn it into a full deep dive in 2026.
Time to hand out some trophies!
Rational optimist of the year…
Winner: Zipline
Rational optimism is believing the future can be better than the present, but only if you do the work to build it.
No company embodied that mindset in 2025 better than Zipline.
Zipline is an American company, but when it launched in 2016, regulators wouldn’t let it operate in America. The FAA’s “beyond visual line of sight” rule required operators to physically see their drones at all times.
Undeterred, Zipline went to Rwanda to prove itself, delivering blood and medical supplies to remote hospitals. Regulators won’t let us do business at home. No problem. We’ll do it in the African bush!
Zipline’s drone network now ships 70% of Rwanda’s national blood supply and has saved countless lives.
Recently a four-year-old girl in Ghana got bitten by a snake. Doctors had 45 minutes before paralysis set in. Zipline to the rescue. Minutes later its drone dropped the medicine by parachute to doctors. The girl lived.
Now Zipline is bringing its battle-tested tech back to America. After inking a deal with Walmart earlier this year, it announced a new partnership with Chipotle to deliver hot burritos through the air in Dallas.
We had the pleasure of visiting Zipline at its HQ in California last month. Very cool!

Innovator of the year…
Winner: Valar Atomics
Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, is one of the most impressive entrepreneurs we met in 2025. He’s a high school dropout who basically taught himself nuclear physics, then actually went and built a reactor.
This year Valar turned a bold idea into a real company with steel in the ground. What it achieved in merely one year makes me question my own ambition.
February: Valar completed Ward Zero, a non-nuclear thermal prototype that validated the tech. And Isaiah’s team did it in just 10 months!

September: Valar broke ground on its first full-scale reactor in Orangeville, Utah, with criticality targeted for July 4, 2026.
November: Valar became the first startup in history to split the atom. This helped it raise $130 million in a Series A funding round.
This is what “0 to 100” looks like in an industry that usually moves in decades.
Congrats to Isaiah and the whole Valar team. I can’t wait to see them again in early 2026.
Breakout success of the year…
Winner: Neros
If you want to understand modern warfare in one sentence, it’s this…
A handful of $2,000 drones can now destroy a $10 million tank.
That’s the world Neros is building for.
The El Segundo-based startup was founded by two kids who learned to build flying robots through competitive drone racing.
Neros makes small, cheap, disposable strike drones. These are the quadcopters dominating Ukrainian battlefields. They’re flown with what looks like a PlayStation controller.
Neros went from cool startup to America’s #1 drone maker… in just 12 months! And now it’s winning major US defense contracts.
When we visited co-founder Olaf Hitchwa at Neros’s factory in November, his small team was pumping out roughly 1,000 drones a month, by hand. In the warehouse, Olaf showed us $20 million of inventory that sits waiting to be assembled:

Olaf gave us the heads-up they were about to raise $75 million from top VC firm Sequoia. Neros plans to scale up manufacturing so it can build 100,000 drones next year. That’ll make it America’s largest drone maker by an order of magnitude.
Next, our first “anti-award” ...
“Decel” of the year…
Winner (loser): Europe
“Decel” is short for decelerationist. It describes people who instinctively pull the handbrake on progress. They’re the natural enemy of rational optimism.
Europe is the undisrupted champion of this category.
I’m Irish. I’ve never voted in a political election. But this year I voted with my feet and moved my family (wife and three kids) out of Europe.
One of my core beliefs is where a child grows up shapes how they see the world. I don’t want my kids being poisoned by Europe’s anti-innovation mind virus.
Three examples:
Europe now rakes in more tax dollars fining US tech companies than it does collecting tax from its own tech firms.
Ireland’s state-owned energy company plans to decommission its own wind farms. All because it failed to file an environmental impact assessment back in 2003. Wait for the punchline…
The project might be saved because tearing down wind turbines also requires an environmental report. You can’t make this stuff up.

