The Integral Mass Manifesto: Reducing the Cost of the John Henry Hour

For over a decade, venture capital has operated on a singular, compelling metric for the future of aerospace: reducing the cost of getting a kilogram of material into space. It is a metric of depth—a vertical line drawn in the sand to conquer the final frontier.

But while we have been looking up, we have neglected the ground beneath our feet. We have ignored the breadth of human productivity.

At Integral Mass, our line in the sand is drawn on the shop floor. Our metric is reducing the cost of the John Henry Hour.

The Spectrum of Misallocation: PLM to CRM

For the last 35 years, the tech and finance sectors have suffered from a massive misallocation of capital, shifting away from the creation of physical value toward the extraction of attention. This shift is best understood by looking at the enterprise software spectrum:

• PLM (Product Lifecycle Management): This is the tangible foundation and the heart of manufacturing data science. It represents the deep, complex knowledge of how things are actually engineered and built, relying on heavy-duty architecture like Siemens Teamcenter or PTC Windchill. Over the past three decades, we actively outsourced this knowledge base to places like India. We traded away our grandfathers of manufacturing.

• ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): The operational middle ground. This handles day-to-day resource tracking and logistics. While still present domestically, it has been partially hollowed out and offshored.

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management): The intangible obsession. Today, CRM serves as the overarching umbrella for managing brand awareness, perception, and the attention economy.

Capital and talent have become dangerously skewed toward the CRM end of this spectrum. The dominant startup model of the last decade became painfully predictable: Social Media + Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Startups paired digital interfaces with food, sex, shelter, or transportation, injected a layer of algorithmic randomness (like matching you with a driver or a host), and called it innovation.

The Intangible Illusion

In this CRM-dominated paradigm, capital flooded into intangible assets. Investors encouraged startups to defer profit indefinitely, leading to unbounded valuations untethered from tangible reality or supply constraints. Companies began borrowing liquidity against pure brand awareness.

In this attention economy, resources only flow to the loudest voices. It is a system built to water the lawns of the masses with indiscriminate sprinklers, completely starving the delicate, specialized flowers that require the precise nourishment of drip tape.

Righting the Inequality of Honor

Aristotle wrote about the necessity of righting the "inequality of honor." Today, there is a profound inequality of honor between the actuary and the machinist.

Society has elevated the manipulators of spreadsheets, the managers of digital brands, and the architects of CRM, while sidelining the machinist. Yet, it is the specialist working with CNC machines, aerospace components, and optical science who actually turns raw potential into physical reality.

We must restore the honor of the hard asset and the people who forge them.

The John Henry Hour

John Henry is the ultimate myth of human grit facing the dawn of the machine. Today, we do not pit the human against the machine; we combine them.

The "John Henry Hour" is our core metric. It represents power per capita—doing more physical, tangible work in less time, amplified by hard machines.

To reduce the cost of the John Henry Hour is to solve the modern productivity paradox. It means investing heavily in Property, Plant, and Equipment (PP&E). It means viewing specialty machinists not as an outsourced expense, but as a premier, investable asset class.

The New Paradigm of Capital

Capital deployment operates in tiers, and the middle is hollowed out:

• Low-Tier Finance (Spray-and-pray VC and hedge funds) continues to play roulette with thousands of intangible software startups, hoping one or two survive.

• Top-Tier Finance parks its massive wealth in the static safety of real estate.

• Mid-Tier Finance is where the revolution must happen.

Integral Mass is calling for mid-tier capital to pivot toward hard assets. We are building a private equity framework designed to invest in the machinist, the CNC machine, and the physical infrastructure of tomorrow.

We are not just building brands. We are building the real world. We are reducing the cost of the John Henry Hour.