Inc.

Burn It All Down

Icon is on fire.”

The phone call woke me in the early morning of the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Even though it was still dark out, I had enough mental clarity to know that our COO meant it literally and not figuratively.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Bad.”

All told, two buildings—our headquarters and our engineering lab—were destroyed by the fire, along with almost everything inside them. Just days earlier, we had made headlines when we announced we were building one of the largest communities of 3-D-printed homes in the world, in partnership with one of the nation’s largest developers, Lennar, and one of the world’s top architectural firms, Bjarke Ingels Group. And we were planning to make an equally large announcement in just a few days more: a $57.2 million contract with NASA to develop technologies capable of printing infrastructure on the moon. We’d

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