Van Espahbodi has spent 25 years in aerospace and defense, starting as a congressional staffer before joining Raytheon's CEO office on foreign military sales. He co-founded Starburst Aerospace and later launched Generational Partners, which has backed 14 companies since its first investment in January 2023. Espahbodi notes that his friends from SpaceX were leaving the space vertical and moving horizontally across physical industries, prompting him to follow.

He observes that AI has dramatically changed hardware economics, making it less capital-intensive and encouraging software investors to rush into industrial technology. While AI has improved augmentation and performance, enabling companies to tackle legacy industries more aggressively, Espahbodi warns that many software investors misunderstand the sector, mistaking hard tech for deep tech and missing the fundamental differences in technical defensibility and commercialization challenges. He emphasizes that hardware has historically been capital-intensive, slower to commercialize, and difficult to scale, but AI is reshaping that narrative.