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.”
