The prospect of man made rain sounds a bit ludicrous. Do humans really have the power to change the weather and turn clouds into floods? As it turns out, this concept doesn’t belong in science fiction anymore: it was invented in 1947, but with so little success that the attempts were soon forgotten. Today, Augustus Doricko, a Thiel Fellowship member of the latest class, intends to use his company to develop cloud seeding technology to provide rain in areas of the world that desperately need it on a time-sensitive schedule.
The first rainmaker was Charles Hatfield, a Quaker from Kansas who was hired by the city of San Diego after seeing success using early methods of cloud seeding to produce rain for small farms. In 1915 following a long drought, he promised to fill the city reservoir with rain and charge nothing if it didn’t work. Except, it worked a little too well. The Californians rejoiced at first as rain finally fell in their notoriously dry city, but by the second week, the reservoir was full and they were ready for it to stop. The rain kept falling. By the time the clouds moved on, 30 inches of rain had fallen and 20 people were dead. Hatfield decided to skip town instead of asking for his money.
It’s possible that Charles Hatfield was a great con man who was just ahead of his time at predicting the weather – he took his cloud seeding mixture formula with him to his grave, so it’s impossible to determine if he used chemicals that scientists could retest for effectiveness today. But today in a different Southern California town, another young man is also working toward being able to modify the weather. This time, he has $6.3 million in capital funding and his HQ in El Segundo, an LA neighborhood. Augustus Doricko is a Thiel Fellow, meaning he won a hefty sum of cash to develop his startup in place of going to college, and his company Rainmaker is taking off after being founded a year ago in 2023.
The most interesting thing about Augustus Doricko is his view on weather modification, which is influenced by the cultural mandate. In interviews, Doricko has said he’s tried every religion he can find, and says that now he’s a Christian. In his perspective, allowing droughts to occur – especially in his home region – when he knows he can put an end to them with his technology would be a failure to responsibly steward our God-given dominion of the earth. He wants to see people and nature both flourish in the desert, and hates that droughts are causing water wars and extinction of flora and fauna.
What’s next for Rainmaker? Doricko wants to set the focus of the company on the American West first and foremost: southern California, Arizona, dry parts of Colorado, and other states out west. Currently, the company is expanding their team (degrees of any kind are not required for their roles, only the necessary skills/knowledge and a willingness to do hard work ) and further developing their technology with the seed funding they’ve secured. They market themselves as the only scalable, immediate solution to create freshwater. If their mission can succeed in regions out west, Rainmaker could be a hugely profitable startup operation in the years to come as they expand worldwide.
