No the meaning is that there's a wave of hardware innovators who started as software innovators. Musk (Paypal) is the most obvious example. The Boom CEO featured here is another. There's a fair bunch more, I agree with the author that a weirdly high % of founders of cool hardware / deeptech companies have a software engineering background. Like, you'd expect that space to be dominated by mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and physicists etc but somehow it isn't.

From virtual goods to physical goods I assume.

Never heard before either so you're not alone.

EDIT: the reference to America is, again I assume, the trend to bring manufacturing back to the US from mainly China.