Daily Grind July 8, 2025: Rainmaker Corp, Seth Godin, and Time Spent Wisely

Tech's morning newsletter, featuring one startup headline, one great book page, and one question to ponder

Hello there,

Welcome to The Daily Grind for Tuesday, July 8. We have a pretty somber edition today, but reflecting on tragedy can tell us a lot about our own lives.

In the startup headline below, we discuss questions raised about Rainmaker Corporation’s role in the deadly Texas Floods. I want to be clear: there is zero evidence that Rainmaker’s technology played a role, and the company has been leading with transparency.

I wanted to cover this headline because a) it’s one of the biggest stories of the year and b) it gives us an opportunity to learn about cloud seeding technology.

Let’s dive in:

📰 One Startup Headline: Rainmaker CEO denies connections to Texas Floods

In south-central Texas, horrific flooding has taken the lives of over 100 people including 27 girls at a summer camp. Questions arose about whether Rainmaker Corporation, an El Segundo-based cloud seeding startup, played a role.

Rainmaker’s mission is to end water scarcity by re-invigorating cloud seeding technology in the United States. The startup currently operates in large swaths of Texas, including around the Guadalupe River, where the flooding occurred.

Rainmaker’s CEO Augustus Doricko wrote a thread on X addressing the situation and his company’s role:

Did Rainmaker conduct any operations that could have impacted the floods? No.

The last seeding mission prior to the July 4th event was during the early afternoon of July 2nd, when a brief cloud seeding mission was flown over the eastern portions of south-central Texas, and two clouds were seeded. These clouds persisted for about two hours after seeding before dissipating between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. CDT. Natural clouds typically have lifespans of 30 minutes to a few hours at most, with even the most persistent storm systems rarely maintaining the same cloud structure for more than 12-18 hours. The clouds that were seeded on July 2nd dissipated over 24 hours prior to the developing storm complex that would produce the flooding rainfall.

While it’s important to question Rainmaker Corporation in the wake of tragedy, it seems clear they had no impact.

According to local news site ABC 11, there were three causes:

1. The jet stream sent moisture from the Pacific Ocean eastward across the state.

2. At the same time high pressure over the Gulf also sent moisture into Texas.

3. Lastly tropical moisture from what was once Tropical Storm Barry supercharged the rainfall rates.

All three of these sources converged across Mason and Kerr counties in central Texas where rainfall exceeded a foot in some spots.

Rainmaker addresses the possibility of causing flooding on its website

Rainmaker maintains strict operational criteria to prevent flooding and hazardous precipitation (hail, snowstorms, and torrential rain). We continuously collect data from local water and snowpack levels as well as public and in-house weather forecasts to determine if we should suspend operations.

Precipitation enhancement has never been shown to be zero sum; it does not decrease precipitation in regions downwind of the operational area. This is because precipitation enhancement operations cause clouds to expand, resulting in continued precipitation outside of the project area. Additionally, precipitation enhancement only affects a relatively small amount of the overall moisture in a cloud.

Cloud seeding is a surprisingly mature technology that encourages rain in existing clouds. Planes fly through clouds and release a “cloud seed,” typically silver iodide, that acts as a magnet for molecules to coalesce and form droplets or ice crystals. Once those droplets or crystals get large enough, they fall as rain.

One of the classic problems with cloud-seeding was proving it had any effect. That’s part of Rainmaker’s innovations. Their technology includes:

• Radar validation

• Weather-resistant drones

• Numerical weather patterning

• Sustainable precipation enhancement (new cloud seeds)

Rainmaker raised $25 million Series A in May 2025 to re-invigorate American cloud-seeding technology.

A Few Good Links:

There were a lot of interesting stories to cover today. Here are a few more to explore on your own:

• The Information: TikTok is building a new version of its app ahead of US sale

• Bloomberg: Upgrades coming to QSBS tax break for startup founders and investors

• X: Jack Dorsey builds a new, fully-encrypted messaging system on Bluetooth

• Techcrunch: Waymo heading to Philly and NYC (Chicagoans jealous)

📚 One Page: This is Strategy by Seth Godin

I am not always a Seth Godin fan, but this latest book, This is Strategy, is one you can re-read multiple times and take away something different each time. It is a book of great pages, so one I’m likely to share a lot in this newsletter.

Today is a good day to think about time and our lack of it:

81. No Time to Waste

Of course there isn’t.
  Time is all we’ve got.
  Time is all there is.
Time is not only the calendar or the clock.
Time is the scarce resource that fuels every project and bounds every strategy.

  We can’t waste time because it’s not ours to waste. It’s simply the way we keep track of everything else.

❓ One Question for Reflection: Time is all we have. Are you using it the way you want?

Reflecting on life and death is a bit cruel, but it’s an great bullshit filter.

However, I don’t like Steve Job’s version of this question: “If today were the last day of your life, would you still want to do what you are about to do today?"

If I had one day to live, I would spend it with my wife, play frisbee with friends, and eat pizza.

But when it comes to our work and leaving a dent in the universe, one day isn’t enough time to plan.

So let’s think a little bigger:

If you had just 10 years to the day to live, would you still want to do what you are about to do today?

Excuse me while I go run through a wall.

🗳️ Wrap Up and Feedback

That’s it for today’s Daily Grind! I’d love to hear what you think of this new format. Take the poll below and reply with any feedback or ideas.