Prototown, a hardware startup campus between Austin and San Antonio, houses the Qube, an inflatable factory where entrepreneurs build products. Evan is developing solar-powered air conditioning using thin-film panels that store cooling energy like a battery, targeting homes, warehouses, data centers, and military use.
This is Prototown, and it's meant to be the birthplace of a revolution. Logistically speaking, Prototown is some ranch land located about halfway between Austin and San Antonio. Rhetorically speaking, this is the site of a new age hardware utopia. Prototown. My real exploration of Prototown began in earnest the next day. The Qube, behold. I made my way over to an inflatable factory that has served as the first the center of gravity for startups here. People work day and night on a handful of different projects, and many of them live on the grounds. The first pioneer I encountered was Evan, and he wants to build solar-powered air conditioning.
They look like solar panels. This is one of our prototypes. Okay. Um, they basically take heat from the sun and they have very thin layers of chemical reactions, so like endothermic, you know, cooling reactions that basically charge like a battery and then they release it as cooling.
Okay, so it's just taking the heat from the sun, right? And then some kind of like chemical spread throughout this panel. The cold air just like comes out of the panels. Okay. I mean, these are meant for buildings, they're meant for houses.
So large infrastructure warehouses. Warehouses through data centers, through the military. And so we'll be doing like this building, some of the other buildings that they're planning in Proto Town.
And how long have you been in Proto Town?
I, I moved here April 1st. I was April Fools' joke to my parents.
