The video spotlights Chris Power, founder of Hadrian automation, a Los Angeles-based company committed to transforming American manufacturing. Chris's unique strategy involves rebuilding the future through automated factories for the aerospace and defense industries, addressing critical challenges like the retirement of 40,000 small business owners and the outsourcing that turned America's manufacturing heartland into the "rust belt." Chris's journey from a student in Australia to the epicenter of manufacturing innovation in San Francisco exemplifies his mission-driven approach.

Chris saw that traditional industrial software didn't deliver real value to businesses, leading him to conceive the idea of vertically integrating software with industrial companies. He took an unconventional path, combining luck and relentless determination with lessons from past ventures to raise funds and build his vision. Manufacturing in the U.S. faces demographic challenges, as older professionals retire without replacements, making a timely technological overhaul necessary. Hadrian addresses these issues by leveraging advanced robotics and software to shorten manufacturing timelines for high-precision parts.

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. reindustrialize [ˌriːɪnˈdʌstriəˌlaɪz] - (verb) - To make or become industrial again. - Synonyms: (industrialize anew, remanufacture, reestablish)

So Hadrian's mission is to basically reindustrialize America, and the way we are doing that is building automated factories for space and defense.

2. fragmented [ˈfræɡˌmɛntɪd] - (adjective) - Broken or divided into pieces or parts. - Synonyms: (disjointed, split, divided)

...and I started hearing the same things from a lot of the supply chain, which was, it's fragmented, the customer experience is terrible.

3. vertically integrate [ˈvɜrtɪkəli ˈɪntɪˌɡreɪt] - (verb phrase) - Integrating all stages of production and distribution under one organization. - Synonyms: (consolidate, merge, unify)

You cannot put SaaS software into industrial companies. You need to vertically integrate a software company with the industrials company.

4. equity [ˈɛkwɪti] - (noun) - The value of ownership interest in a company, usually in the form of stocks or shares. - Synonyms: (shares, stock, ownership)

It was my first experience with equity in a company.

5. demographic [ˌdɛməˈɡræfɪk] - (noun) - A specific segment of a population having shared characteristics. - Synonyms: (population group, cohort, class)

And then you have a bunch of 56 year olds demographically, and you're fucked.

6. search fund [sɜːtʃ fʌnd] - (noun) - A pool of capital raised by entrepreneurs to search for, acquire, and operate a private company. - Synonyms: (investment fund, venture fund, acquisition fund)

And through that, I discovered the concept of search funds.

7. automation [ˌɔːtəˈmeɪʃən] - (noun) - The use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human assistance. - Synonyms: (robotization, mechanization, computerization)

He's the founder of Hadrian automation, a young company based in Los Angeles that's aiming to change how manufacturing works in America

8. monopolize [məˈnɔpəˌlaɪz] - (verb) - To obtain exclusive possession or control over a commodity or service. - Synonyms: (dominate, control, corner)

So there's a real race, because whoever gets to the moon and basically monopolizes these four pills of light and the resources will basically control the tipping off point for the moon.

9. pax americana [pæks əˌmɛrɪˈkænə] - (noun) - A state of international peace regarded as overseen by the United States. - Synonyms: (American peace, US hegemony, global order)

If all America can do is maintain pax americana, fix our cultural issues, and survive 20 years as a global leadership position, we will inevitably win.

10. lead time [liːd taɪm] - (noun) - The time from initiation to completion of a production process. - Synonyms: (production time, period, delay)

Cause I had a nine month lead time on it.

Hadrian's Bold Vision Revolutionizing American Manufacturing Industry

When you've been into a factory that looks like a garage out of the Fast and the Furious two, and you ask the guy, what's that shiny piece of metal under the cardboard box? And they go like, oh, that goes on like this rocket or this fighter jet. And then, you know, in those, like, teen movies from the nineties where someone realizes something, and then it zooms out to the earth, and then it comes back in. I had one of those moments, and I was like, oh, God, this is how the whole thing works.

This is Chris Power. He's the founder of Hadrian automation, a young company based in Los Angeles that's aiming to change how manufacturing works in America. He's already built one automated facility, but that's just the start. The true difficulty is building the machine that makes the machine. In other words, building the factory. Hadrian is trying to build the factories of the future.

The real problem is that America's greatest companies are resting on this house of cards of 40,000 small business owners, propping up the aerospace and defense industry. And now they're just old and retiring, taking all their knowledge with them, and there's no one to replace them. American manufacturing has a huge problem primarily because in the eighties and nineties, we outsourced manufacturing. We decimated the midwest. Now it's called the rust belt for a reason.

But Chris has a unique strategy for how to solve it. Our task has been to rebuild the future on a stronger foundation than we had before. So Hadrian's mission is to basically reindustrialize America, and the way we are doing that is building automated factories for space and defense. I don't think you get the Jetsons flying car future in a western led system without something like a Hadrian, and we're trying to build it as fast as possible.

I first met Chris a few years ago and attended an event at his facility to see exactly what Hadrian was working on. After joining founders Fund, I got to know him a lot better and thought it would be great to take you inside his factory and show you how he's trying to revolutionize american manufacturing.

It's 2008, and Chris is a student at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. But he wouldn't last long there. So the real story is, I got a year into accounting and law, started failing classes, and I decided it was because I was bored. So I got a full time job, mostly just so I could work nine to five and then force myself to study at night, basically.

So I got a retail job, and then six months into the retail job, the business owners, they'd acquired this company that was 90% e commerce, had a small retail store selling video games. And I was like, I had no idea. So they're like, hey, do you want to come run the online retail business with us? So I was just like, sure, why not? So they, we ended up doing that, the three of us. It was my first experience with equity in a company.

I had no idea what startups were at this point in time. There's no Mark Zuckerbergs in Australia. And we built this thing from 3 million at more than ten in top line in like two years with three business units. And Australia is very logistics heavy for e commerce. There's no Amazon. We're running our own warehouses. That went really well.

We realized that for one of the business units, the working capital required to scale, it was too much. I was also getting a little bit bored, even though the guys were awesome, and ended up leaving and looking for something else to do, and then eventually found my way to Ento. Ento was a workforce scheduling software company. Businesses would use the software to schedule shifts for their employees.

And it was at Ento that Chris had a key insight. And through that, I basically learned that a couple of things which led me to Hadrian. One is that the product incentives of building software for industrial companies is wrong because the buyer is the CFO. So you always want to build more software to sell it. So you end up with a bunch of pretty dashboards, but you get no operating efficiency.

The second thing is you get about 20% of the automation as a software vendor into the actual business value. You do this big business case, you're saying, we'll save you 30% to 40% on labor or overtime or whatever, but at a certain point it caps out because you really need to be running the operation and hiring and firing people and restructuring it in parallel with all the software can do.

And that's what made me realize in this very, like, Tealian straussian way, that the real reason why industrial software hasn't made its way to industrials in America is because the mechanism is wrong. You cannot put SaaS software into industrial companies. You need to vertically integrate a software company with the industrials company.

So I realized that one needed to move out of Australia, and I wanted to find something in this techno industrial thesis. And thirdly, I had to be very, very mission oriented, like something I cared about. And that's what really kicked off the whole journey to America. The very short version of the story is I landed in San Francisco, made a lot of friends. Very quickly, it was truly the luck of the universe.

And then I decided that there was no data on the Internet about manufacturing or how fragmented it was. So I had a hundred page spreadsheet that was half mission, half market dynamics, which I was going to use to downselect what industry I would do this in. So I spent four or five weeks in the worst hostel in Dallas, cold calling and cold linkedining hundreds of plant managers, calling ten of them a day and visiting two or three of them a week.

And then through that, I started catching on to aerospace, and I started hearing the same things from a lot of the supply chain, which was, it's fragmented, the customer experience is terrible. Everyone's 55 to 65, and it's a highly technical industry, and there's, like, there's no really good reason why software or robotics hasn't been put into place.

So one of the tricks is you have to start in this high precision, high margin industry, otherwise you're never going to get the thing started. The problem was, is that to even become a supplier to an aerospace or defense company, the average time a normal machine shop takes, where they're making parts for some simple industry, and they finally get good enough to, like, get their shot at Raytheon or something, is eight years.

So I decided that the only way to do this was to somehow acquire existing suppliers and then put the technology into them. So December and January, I spent googling what is private equity fund, truly? And through that, I just reached out to a couple of people and I was like, hey, you're running a small private equity fund. Like, how did you do this? And through that, I discovered the concept of search funds.

Chris was still inexperienced in the world of buying established businesses, but that didn't stop him from jumping right in. So I just decided that I was going to raise a private equity fund. And I managed to convince a bunch of fine people to give me a couple of hundred thousand dollars of operating capital in a search fund. I honestly think probably 70% of them just did it because they thought I was insane.

So I closed that fund, and the last check was signed, and I had $150 in my bank account, and I wasn't going to make rent the next week. Then I got to work, found a small office in San Francisco, worked with three or four other startup founders who are now very close friends, and we all started our companies together. By November 2019, Covid was hitting America.

Fast breaking developments. Coronavirus, pandemic spreads the number of cases soaring. 2020 is now the deadliest year in us history. So I went and visited tons of SaaS companies, tons of services companies, tons of machine shops, tons of small manufacturers, and really started to dial on the thesis. One of the reasons I survived that period is because I decided that I would rather risk getting Covid than failing my only opportunity to, like, be someone.

So I was on planes, visiting manufacturers and software companies all across America, when there was like one person on the Delta flight. And I started to have this feeling in my gut that this is the wrong path to take. It turns out that this industry exists because it's a highly regulated environment, so you can't offshore it.

And in the eighties and nineties, we told all the kids that if you didn't have a four year college degree, you're a moron. So we have no people that are interested in manufacturing, even though it's incredibly high paying and a wonderful industry. And then you have a bunch of 56 year olds demographically, and you're fucked.

So once I'd seen this problem before I made this decision, I interviewed and called every single founder in robotics, manufacturing, software, or people that had tried this before, because I thought this problem was so obvious and so important that someone like, must have, must have been doing it, you know, and I couldn't find anybody that was doing it.

So I basically called everyone and said, hey, you guys are going to hate me. I'm really sorry. You like, gave me my shot, but I have to do this. There have been many attempts to fix american manufacturing. Lots of startups have failed, and a few private equity roll ups have actually performed quite well financially.

But no one has completely solved the problem yet. Chris is betting that a new startup is the only way to get the job done. Look, I had never done venture before. I had no investor connections. I had some friends who were founders, but I just like, took the bet that I'd figure it out.

So what happened basically is we had a clean cutover from the search fund. January, I started building prototech technology with a machinist friend of nine, enough that I could prove to myself to, like, do it. And I'd started hiring contract engineers from upwork to start building flow.

And then, little did I know that it was the top of the market. So by the grace of God, got a couple of old friends to start bootstrapping us for eight weeks with just enough to pay. Some people turned that into a pre seed round with a bunch of friends. Some space angels and then Village Global were actually the ones that really stepped up. And Dwayne put in the biggest check for the pre seed round and then we started building.

The team started going and then ended up doing the seed round in March 2021 with Lux founders fund construct and a couple other people, and then moved to LA in August to start start the first facility. So we started off in a off brand wework in LA with five or six people, and I was paralleling hiring 50 people at once.

Never hired a software engineer before. Product managing four products. And then we were trying to figure out how the hell to build this facility. Cause I figured we had to launch in less than twelve months. I got very good at recruiting software engineers and we started building copilot flow and a bunch of other products simultaneously.

Then we found a terrible building. Cracked floors, linoleum, everywhere was dark. Building factory one allowed them to prove out the concept. It was 20,000 far from the polished factory they have today. But it was enough to get started making parts for customers quickly.

So basically what we wanted to do is launch less than twelve months from the zero, actually shipping something to customers. And my plan was basically, you've got to build everything zero to one in your head. The only way to do it is then run the factory for six months with real customer parts without selling them to them, just because you need to throw 300 skus into the system and start bug fixing for like, close to a year to get it right.

Luckily, lucky groom and Brandon and Josh at Lux decided that we were hiring the best people in the world so fast that they were going to do the series A in November, December, because one of the other things that I decided was that, oh, crap, if I'm right, we are only going to be able to fit four, maybe five machines in this first facility we're going to be launching to customers.

It's going to start scaling, and then we're going to have to pause customers for three months to migrate to a bigger factory. So I also decided straight after the series A in November, before we'd even launched any of the systems, to start building factory two at the same time, because I had a nine month lead time on it. So then I started building the second factory before. Before it launched the first factory in parallel through November, going back to 2021 to when Catherine did the round.

There are a couple of things. So Catherine was on gardening leave as she was going from general catalyst to Andreessen Horowitz. Me and Katherine have such a great relationship. We always wanted to work together. I was like, Katherine, we gotta find a way to work together before the valuation gets crazy. This is still when we're in factory one, because I was still building this thing in parallel, and then. Yeah, called the top.

Andreessen invested. We did some follow on safe notes, and then the market started to crash hard and fast. And I'm very lucky that we called it the right way. The real value prop for Hadrian is speed of execution. For many companies, it can take months to get a part made. But Hadrian is laser focused on cutting down that turnaround time.

That all sounds great on paper, but how do they actually deliver on that promise? So, yeah, break it down. There's a whole bunch of machines here. What are we looking at? Primary machining fleet. You will notice that all the lights are green.

Okay, everyone leaves at 5530, and the machines will all run themselves overnight. Make one part, make 100 parts. Everything's set up the same way. And that's a real trick of the automation, is making sure that the physical tasks are really simple, but 90% of the effort is being done by the machines. So the only job that people do manually is basically put the block of metal on and press go much more like a data center than like a traditional factory where there's a ton of people.

To help build this, Chris brought in Matt McLoughlin, the head of copilot and controls. What our stack does. And like, what our deep tech stuff is, is it's kind of three sections. The first is DFM, which is designed for manufacturing. It's kind of telling us automatically using software, can we make the part, should we make the part, and how much is the part going to cost? And should we bid on it after that? We do cam automation.

CAM is basically the process of taking the inputs that customer gives us, which can be a 3d model and usually a PDF print. And it's taking those inputs and basically creating g code, which is kind of like you can think of as like assembly code for these machines out here. So we have four deployed manufacturing engineers that work on customers. They send us drawings and CAD files. We spit back a price and a quote and a scheduled lead time within an hour or two, and then it's basically, yes, no, and we load it into the software, and then we start taking it.

Alex is a senior software engineer on the Hadrian team. The CNC machines that Matt kind of works with are what actually cut the raw metal into the part itself. And then once we, like, make these parts, we need to actually check that they fit the customer requirements. So we have these machines, they're called CMM's coordinate measuring machines, like, tells you where like points and surfaces are to like micron level accuracy, one micron is one 70th of a human hair.

So every unique part we make for customers needs 40 to 200 unique cutting tools. Let's say this tool can last a thousand minutes before it wears out. What a brilliant machinist will usually do, as you're cutting 100 parts is eyeball the tool and look at how it's wearing down, and then adjust on the machine. Okay, we think this is five microns shorter on the top.

Now we have to tell the machine in software it's five microns shorter. Yep. Times that by 100 tools. Times that by number of parts. It's really hard data to manage. So one of the things we had to build is we scan everything.

So it's got a perfect representation in code of the geometry of the tool when it's in the machine. We laser scan at it every time it changes tools. So we can basically tell how far it's worn down. Research and development is super important. For Hadrian, that means writing software to automate as much as possible and deliver parts quickly and efficiently.

So, before I started the company, I really studied anyone who'd try to automate any type of manufacturing. We believe that the answers are already out there in experts, brains, great machinists, or great quality people, or great operations. People already know what to do. And the game is not to reinvent what they're doing. The game is to get the decades of knowledge out of their head and get it into automation and get it into software.

And basically what we do is, like, every bit of automation we build, it's co built by a software engineer and a machinist. So kind of like our philosophy is we pair software engineers with people who really know what they're doing. And that's kind of where the magic happens and kind of like our blessing. And the curse is we actually run a factory, so there's not much room for kind of like, bullshit software.

What in the factory is most bottlenecked? Can we solve that while also trying to see, you know, okay, assuming we solve this, what's going to be bottlenecked a month from now? We believe that engineers are fully responsible for the product. Okay. It's not just writing code. They have to think about the efficiency metrics, the user experience.

Hadrian's head of engineering broke down exactly how they decide what software to build and when. What are the bottlenecks in the factory? And that often is that there's some specialized skill set, and that could be a cam programmer, a CMD programmer, a machinist, et cetera. How do you first build tools to make that person super powered?

And so to use a software analogy, this would be like, how do you build GitHub copilot for these specialists? Yeah. And I think it's what impacts the most users. Where is the most risk? Where do we see the most variability is the decisions that really weigh into what we go build. The variability obviously makes it harder to operate.

I think that, like, one thing that differentiates us from other automation companies is like, we actually have an expectation that there will be a human in the loop. Whereas, like, most companies in every workflow are. Autonomy is like true robotics, where human has no intervention. I think I look at it as we have done so much to automate the machines and the manufacturing, and it's like, yes, those are huge challenges, but then there's the stuff that's like, how do I move apart from the machine to quality every day?

And it's like, those challenges exist across the industry. And those are the things I get stressed about and I get anxious about because we have so many smart people working on, how do I automate machining? How do I make it a one button touch for an operator? We don't have anybody looking at how do I move a 50 pound part 15 times a day?

So what you have to do is build five software companies and a robotics company internally, simultaneously, because otherwise you invest all of your dollars in optimizing one part of the equation, but then the rest of the factory is inefficient, or you miss the operational scalability, and it doesn't actually work.

So the only way to do that is to have SWAT teams of engineers in each part of the factory doing two things. Get automation to 80%, leave the last 20%, put it in software, but make it simple. And it's a workflow tool. But don't actually try and automate it, because to go 100% on every single part of the factory would take a decade.

And that's frankly not fast enough for us to scale to meet the massive demand curve from customers and replace the collapsing supply chain. In high precision machining. You can barely get there with 30 of the best software engineers in the world building five things at once to 80%. Completely impossible to get five things at once to 100%. So there's a bunch of dynamics, but that's how we think about it.

Hadrian isn't like most tech startups, where everyone has prior experience. At big tech companies. They need to pull people with unique skill sets from all over the place, and then help them start performing at the highest level immediately. I think culture is our number one asset and risk in this business.

We have a wildly diverse workforce. So you have folks coming out of high school and you have folks coming out of high tech engineering. The tech white collar scene is a great model that needs to be adapted into manufacturing, but it's hard. And so you're also dealing with a lot of folks that are coming out of manufacturing. We are inherent in all these cultural issues that they've had about distrust from leadership, management, poor bosses, things that are promised that never happened.

And I think like, candidly, one of the reasons I never wanted to come back into machining is the cultural environment that usually exists within a machine shop. It's usually competitive in a negative way in a sense of it took me 25 years to build Minecraft, so it'll take you 30.

What we've been able to do with physical and like software solutions or automation, we can lower the bar experience so we actually don't have to look at did someone work in an environment where they did x, Y and Z to come work at this company? We can hire people for their character, for their work ethic, for their curiosity and like, willingness to grow. It's culturally important because I never wanted to be this company that is Silicon Valley or New York elitists.

We have to blend a lot of cultures together at this company and that is important. Having people in lockstep. You can go from home Depot to machinist to more advanced operations roles. Operations, leadership, software engineering, they're all equal. I worked at Home Depot, actually. Yeah, I was just an order puller.

When I was working at Home Depot. I became forklift certified, fell in love with running forklifts. And so I left Home Depot, tried to go back to school, decided to just start applying to places. And I saw that Hadrian was offering a third party forklift certification. So I was like, oh, I should apply to this place because the value of this company is the people that are here.

I mean, we're working really closely with the programmers, right? And the worst thing would happen with a programmer is when you crash the machine. I crashed the machine in factory one. I was the first one to crash the machine. So I was like working in a part and I was like trying to push through the system, you know, I was running hermit one and I said, okay, hermit two is stopping.

Let me, is not running. Let me take another set up and put it hermely two. I check it out. Everything, one, two, three. Like sequential was fine. I just, okay, send the part five minutes after bow. Oh, my God. What the happened? I run to the machine.

I just like, oh, that's the. Used to be like this. These pins are 18,000 revolutions per minute, so, like, it's super fast. That's not a good feeling to look at it, actually. And I went home. I didn't sleep at all, man. It's like a 05:00 p.m. i come back to the shop. Got to the shop.

I saw Baker, and I went to him, like, crying. Like, dude, I fucked up, you know? And then he looked at me, like, what happened? What happened? So I crashed the machine. And he looked at me, and he just hugged me. He said, felipe, don't worry about it. I thought it was something else.

That moment with him was so special because I feel supported. I didn't know anything about machining. I was really self aware of the fact that I was supposed to hire and then eventually train for a trade that I myself could never control or never understand, could never master. I remember about a few weeks in, starting to stay late at night and having programmers show me how to program. And eventually, I made a very, very, very easy standoff on the CMM.

Yeah, but it was late at night. The shop was empty, and that was absolutely incredible. But that still happened, and that's really something. I'll try taking a look inside. Hadrian's factory is cool and all, but why does this really matter? Well, it's all a part of Chris's bigger vision. America needs this, and we need it now.

We have to settle the stars before we run out of natural resources on earth. To do that, you need a settlement point, a jumping off point to the solar system. The thing about the moon, though, is there are only four or so points where there is enough active sunlight on the moon at any given point in time where you would want to set up a solar state.

And because of dynamics of the lunar treaty and stuff like that, basically, whoever lands the settlement next to that stuff, no one can come within something like 500 miles. And you can factor. Check me on this, because the rule is, you land next to a guy's base, you kick up a bunch of moon dust, it shatters everything on there, so you're not allowed to do it, you know, trying to have a nuclear rover on the dark side of the moon, we have no idea what it's doing.

So there's a real race, because whoever gets to the moon and basically monopolizes these four pills of light and the resources will basically control the tipping off point for the moon. And this race is on and it's happening. So every time we end up in this global trap of rising and falling powers, usually the rising power wins because they've just got more moxie.

It's like a startup disrupting an incumbent. They're just faster, they've got the energy. You know, this time it can be different for two reasons. One is we can bet on America because one more Americans and we'll figure it out. Secondly, the chinese one child policy effectively means that in 20 to 30 years, they will halve their working population of men, so they have a ten to 20 year window to take Taiwan and take a leadership position in the global world order.

Or they will inevitably halve their population and be back to 1000 years of pain, and they can try again in a thousand years. If all America can do is maintain pax americana, fix our cultural issues, and survive 20 years as a global leadership position, we will inevitably win. But the time horizon is incredibly short because of all these dynamics.

And one of the reasons why building so fast and why you have to mix the right balance of automation and training is because we don't have the time to fully automate. We can't sit here for five years and get everything perfect. We have to get technology leverage as fast as possible, which we've done. And then you have to be able to copy paste factories across America as fast as possible at billions and billions and billions in capacity at scale to be able to basically meet the supply demand imbalance that is inevitably going to happen to ensure that the western american led system is the leading system while we decide what to do with AI, climate, space, race two, and the inevitable challenges we're going to face in this country.

And that's why I started the company. I think it is barely possible. I think America will win because there's enough hard people working on it. But the time horizon is very short. We have years, not decades, to retool the economy and fix this problem. And yeah, that's why we're working so hard. And yeah, that's why we started the company, why I think it's so important.

A few weeks after we finished recording, Chris closed another big funding round. So I hopped on a quick call with him to catch up and understand what happens next. So we just got out of the board meeting. A bunch of new investors came in, which is great. Dana Grayson from Construct Capital is joining aboard founders Fund.

Lux and Andreessen are participating in major ways as well. We're well past $20 million in our first year of operations in terms of revenue, which is. So we're scaling faster than most software companies. That's great. So we end up raising a $120 million Series B across two months. Two months at the end of the year.

And also a bunch of customers or customer related funds are investing as well. And one of the big ones is Raytheon. Wow. We'll be focusing heavily on partnering with DoD large customers, the USG in general, to figure out how we can help them point towards the right problems that can have a real impact in the next couple of years if we keep going at the pace we're going.

Factory two that you toured will be full at the end of 2024, early 2025, which means that we need to start construction on factory three. So, yeah, basically we need to go super hard and super fast. Since we last chatted, we're in fully autonomous production with our new version two of our production cell.

That's awesome. Which we, the team were working seven days a week to ship. They got it done on time, we're making customer hardware, and now we've got to go figure out how to replicate this as fast as the industrial base standards to, which is super challenging. But if anyone can do it, it's us. If you want to join Chris and his team on their journey, Hadrian is hiring, so go check out their job postings. Hope you enjoyed this story. Stay tuned for the next one.

Chris Power, Manufacturing, Technology, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Science