Hard tech. Until it’s ordinary.

On September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan began supplying electricity to customers in a quarter square mile of the city. It proved the system worked, though it was not an immediate financial success. Spreading it took decades. By 1930, nearly nine in ten urban and nonfarm rural homes in the United States had electricity and about one in ten farms did. By 1955, nearly every home had it.

Nobody thinks about any of that when they flip a switch. A technology changed how things work, and then it stopped being news. It became ordinary.

But ordinary can also arrive fast.

Diabetes used to be considered a death sentence. Canadian Sir Frederick Banting and American-Canadian Charles Best began insulin experiments in Toronto in May 1921. James Collip purified the extract that worked in January 1922, and Eli Lilly began shipping the first commercial supply in October 1923, about two and a half years after those first experiments, forever changing the prognosis for millions of people.

And chemistry has its own version: Fritz Haber demonstrated his ammonia apparatus to BASF in 1909. Carl Bosch led a team of chemists, engineers, physicists, and metalworkers that took it to a plant in Oppau, which started up in September 1913, producing up to 30 metric tons of ammonia a day. BASF says the Haber-Bosch process now secures the food of billions of people.

Each started with a problem that couldn’t be solved with the tools of the day. Each ended up with a hard tech solution that became ubiquitous.

Problems like that haven’t gone away.

Pangaea’s belief that hard tech can meet our planet’s most pressing challenges is why we do what we do.

When our team sat down to see if we could capture our ambition in one line, the idea of helping hard tech innovations become ordinary arose and we couldn’t shake it.

Eventually we worked our way to a line that captures what motivates us:

Hard tech. Until it’s ordinary.

We get that it might feel like an odd pairing. But we’re sticking with it because it so clearly names the finish line we work toward: the innovations our portfolio companies create become so widely used that nobody calls them breakthroughs anymore.

Our job? 

To help them get to ordinary, sooner.