EV Atlas — every Emergent Ventures grantee, in one place

Brian Potter's December-2021 EV grant — 'to improve productivity in construction, through both writing and practice' — became Construction Physics, one of the most-read niche Substacks on the internet. It's the rare publication that engineers, urbanists, YIMBYs, and contractors all read. The central thesis is that physical-world productivity has stagnated for reasons that are technical and institutional rather than mysterious: building codes, fragmented industry structure, the loss of in-house industrial research labs, the death of catalogue housing. Potter writes long, carefully-sourced explanations of why a tilt-up concrete wall costs what it costs, why prefab housing keeps failing, why solar got cheap and nuclear didn't. The EV grant landed when Potter was still relatively unknown; the newsletter has since become essential reading in the progress studies / abundance movement that EV itself helped seed. It's one of the cleanest examples of EV's small-grant-to-big-impact thesis.