For God, for country, for rain

Doricko, who resembles a baby-faced Billy Ray Cyrus, is quick to note that being Christian isn’t a requirement for joining the El Segundo scene; everyone is welcome, “as long as you want to build something spectacular,” he said. But he also believes that if he does achieve his version of greatness — if he manages to upend the way we interact with the weather or alleviate the water shortage that scientists say is imminent — his success will be in service to something bigger. “Any technology that moves the needle on humanity’s well-being, that is something that brings us closer toward Heaven on earth,” he told me while striding across the sticky carpets of the MGM Grand.

“I view in no small part what we’re doing at Rainmaker as, cautiously and with scrutiny from others and advice from others, helping to establish the kingdom of God.”

It won’t be easy. There’s a long way to go before cloud seeding becomes a viable option for solving one of humanity’s many self-made crises. Beijing claimed to have used cloud seeding to ensure clear skies for the 2008 Olympics. And last year, the US government spent $2.4 million on a cloud-seeding program to revitalize the dwindling Colorado River. But the industry has seen little innovation since the 1970s, and some are skeptical that the process even works outside a laboratory, where things like wind patterns and topography are hard to control.

I view in no small part what we’re doing at Rainmaker as helping to establish the kingdom of God.
Augustus Doricko

Doricko’s peers are certain he’s on the cusp of something big, though. His former roommate Cameron Schiller, whose company uses 3D printing to manufacture metal parts, said Doricko’s determination borders on obsession. “Augustus is going to be an individual that truly changes the world — someone that people can point to and say, ‘This person did something that stands the test of time and history,'” Schiller said.

“He really cares,” Schiller added, “and I don’t think he’ll stop until he sees greatness.”

El Segundo, population 17,272, has long been a bastion of American engineering, home to aerospace and defense giants like Boeing and Raytheon. That’s still true, but in the past four or so years, it’s been flooded with ambitious new startups, including the autonomous-defense-systems company Picogrid, the nuclear-fission company Valar Atomics, and the pharmaceuticals-in-space company Varda Space Industries.

Doricko and his self-described “Gundo Bros” are over app-based companies seeking to “disrupt” the way people catch cabs or order meals. They want to usher in a new era of American economic growth and stability that allows people to work in a “more embodied way.”

“Respect to Zuck, but I certainly hope the next cohort of people that build great things do it in the real world, and build products that really make everything radically different and better,” Doricko said, “rather than just trying to skim a little bit more efficiency off the top of the economy.”

The day after the conference, we fly back to California and Doricko takes me on a tour of Rainmaker’s headquarters. On the walls, I spot two of El Segundo’s biggest American flags (and, yes, it is a competition). The largest room, for engineering, houses the drones Rainmaker uses for cloud seeding, as well as a bench press where Doricko sometimes takes interviews. In another room, desks are scattered with half-used tins of Zyn, climbing chalk, dumbbells, and a broadsword Doricko bought at an estate sale. An aerosol chemistry lab rounds out the floor, with a large, opaque bottle labeled “DO NOT DRINK” sitting in a corner. There’s an audible buzz in the air, which I later find out is the hum of the avocado-oil processing plant across the street.

In some ways, El Segundo feels like a big college campus. Doricko led me through the sunny streets to Smoky Hollow Coffee Roasters, a local staple filled with people typing away on their keyboards. We sat outside on a bench, and he told me how proud he was of his neighbors. They “are trying to enact a vision for the industry they’re in, the country that we’re in, the future of humanity — that requires radical execution,” he said. At the same time, they’re “silly, can go booze, can go burn a bunch of stuff at the beach.”

The burning happens every Friday around 8 p.m. at a bonfire on El Segundo Beach. (Doricko once posted an invite on X urging his followers to come watch “the finest Swedish assemblies set ablaze” and tagging Ikea.) Founders go, but so do young people from states as far away as North Carolina or Texas. They’re hoping to shake some hands, meet some people, and land a job in the Gundo by the time Monday rolls around, Doricko said.

Several hours after our coffee, Doricko and I arrived at that week’s bonfire party in his white Chevrolet pickup. The crowd, mostly white men and some women, chatter about tech, work, and Elon Musk, who’s only ever referred to by his first name. At the fire’s edge, I strike up a conversation with Isaiah Taylor, the 25-year-old founder of Valar Atomics and a friend of Doricko’s. “I can look around right now and see a lot of people that sleep in the office,” Taylor said. “It might be making it rain more, making the Earth habitable, might be making energy cheaper — we’re not apologetic about wanting to build extremely hard things for our community and country. We all love America.”

For Taylor, like Doricko, love of country is closely linked to love of God. Taylor periodically hosts community Bible study and prayer sessions and invites his fellow founders to join. Not all of them believe in God, but many do. And Doricko has a theory why: “This is a pretty rebellious group of people,” he said. “And if the zeitgeist is nihilistically secular, then the rebellious stance is to be Christian.”

Almost prophetically, much of Doricko’s childhood took place in the water. He grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, and learned to sail at the Stamford Yacht Club, where his parents were members until they separated in 2007.

He considers those years, which he often spent soaked through and freezing — once to the point of hypothermia — to be formative. His sailing coach, Rob Coutts, who won a world championship title for New Zealand, was “tough as nails,” Doricko said. “Kids would be crying, there’d be howling wind, and he’d use very choice words to tell them to get back in the boat. Most kids didn’t like him, but I loved him.”

If the zeitgeist is nihilistically secular, then the rebellious stance is to be Christian.
Augustus Doricko

In high school, Doricko lived with his mom and younger sister. He stayed busy with the debate team, more sailing, and countless hours playing the video game “Spore,” which he used to turn barren planets into diverse and sophisticated ecosystems. He’d hoped to become an astronaut, but his plans were scuppered when a swim in a Costa Rican bog ruptured his right auditory nerve, leaving him deaf in one ear. Instead, he went to the University of California, Berkeley, as a physics major.

By the end of his first year, he was disillusioned, frustrated at the prospect of spending decades doing research to move the scientific needle forward even a millimeter. He started to get restless. Then, Doricko found God.

It began because his love of absurdist philosophers — who posit that everything in life is random and irrational — started to drive him mad. His classmates seemed comfortable with the idea that their lives were of no moral consequence, but Doricko, who hadn’t grown up religious, ironically found the idea “insufferable.” He started to think that if life was truly meaningless, there was no reason not to pursue a path of “reckless hedonism.” Things came to a head one day in January 2020, when he walked past several homeless people on the streets of Berkeley. “I was starting to think, ‘Well, it’s entirely possible to end up like them, and there’s no reason not to,'” he said.

That moment sent him on a frantic search for meaning; he spoke to two nondenominational pastors, a Catholic priest, a Sunni imam, and two rabbis. He seriously considered converting to Judaism, but eventually, inspired by historical accounts of Jesus of Nazareth, he settled on Christianity. “Believing that something, someone, God, loved me no matter my faults — desired that I improve upon my faults, but loved me in spite of them — that was earth-shaking,” Doricko told me.

Still, some of his views put him at odds with the average Gen Zer. “I have and I love plenty of friends that are gay or that are very pro-choice, and I’ll continue to,” Doricko said. But “I don’t know if those are the things that our Lord wants for us.”

In October 2020, Doricko moved to Fort Worth, Texas, to attend Berkeley remotely. He dove into Bible study while simultaneously crafting his powerlifting, milk-drinking, gym-bro persona. At Berkeley, he’d been clean-cut and preppy — a style he saw as a “rebellion” against omnipresent athleisure. But these days he’s more likely to sport shearling-lined denim jackets, Jesus-themed T-shirts, and sweats. “My aesthetic preferences are just trying to push the needle on what we can look like,” he explained. “Because if we stay the same, we stay the same, and the current condition is not good.”

But Friedrich warns that this isn’t a perfect solution, pointing to obstacles like FAA regulations, drone battery life, and collecting accurate measurements from the drones, which can’t carry as much monitoring equipment. Friedrich isn’t the only one who’s skeptical. While Jonathan Jennings, who oversees Utah’s cloud-seeding program and serves as president of the Weather Modification Association, is a Doricko fan in general, he said that “there’s always going to be a human element that I want to see in the field. So I’m a little resistant to drones in most cases.”

Doricko isn’t deterred. For one thing, he claims that the industry-wide aversion to drones is, in part, financially motivated because business owners don’t want to spend money to update their technology. “There is momentum and vested interest in what are potentially less efficient modes of delivery,” he said. Plus, he has a planet to save. Just look at the dwindling levels of water in the Colorado River Delta; the enormous drops in drawdowns from Lake Mead, Las Vegas’ primary water source; and housing development bans in Phoenix, which no longer has enough water to support new inhabitants. “I would certainly prefer a world where we at least can avert catastrophe,” Doricko said, “to a world where we just have a slow, whimpering death and march toward said catastrophe.”

Doricko currently has a team of 23 people, including Kaitlyn Suski, an aerosol scientist who used to work at Juul. Suski is developing an alternative nucleation agent to silver iodide that Rainmaker eventually hopes to patent. (Exposure to large amounts of silver iodide can cause symptoms like vomiting and respiratory issues, and while cloud seeding uses so little that the likelihood of side effects is thought to be minuscule, Doricko wants to get ahead of the problem.)

Doricko’s plans for innovation at home are equally ambitious. He wants to extend the Great Plains from the Midwest through West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California, blanketing the Western states in lush, arable land capable of supporting communities. “We have this planet that we can turn into a garden,” he says. In his eyes, protecting that planet — and preventing climate disaster — is God’s will. “Mankind was made to take care of and tend to the garden and make it grow well and flourish,” he said. “That extends to now, right? It’s in our nature to take dominion and be generative with it.”

Ultimately, Doricko hopes to turn El Segundo into something like Amsterdam during the Enlightenment, or Milan during the Renaissance. But that all depends on whether companies like Rainmaker have staying power. “The reputation of the Gundo will very much live or die by the success of these startups,” Gibson, the early Rainmaker investor, said. If they fail, “all this countercultural stuff will have faded out, because the companies just didn’t make it.”

Gibson believes that Doricko has enough “gusto” and “love of the fight” to make it happen. But his faith isn’t blind.

Doricko “has said sometimes, ‘I think God is on our side,'” Gibson said. “And I’ll say: ‘Yeah, but the Lord works in mysterious ways.'”