Hadrian CEO Chris Power on autonomous factories, the US manufacturing deficit, and becoming the 'index of the market'

um right in Time Square and speaking of the Moon we got one of my good friends who's obsessed with with the moon Chris power welcome to the show uh Jordy slacking off he's he's taking a break he'll be back in a couple minutes but good to have you welcome to the show thanks for having me it's a pleasure to be at the capital the capital thank you uh yeah it's good to have you here uh how has life been you've been traveling uh you were spotted on a flight to Washington DC a couple couple weeks ago the paparazzi caught you yeah that was crazy yeah that was crazy I I didn't realize that there were so so many uh spies out there in Silicon Valley but uh how was your trip to DC it was incredible obviously can't talk about most of it uh some of it's classified very impactful especially with the new Administration coming in wants to fix American manufacturing and you know the vice president gave an incredibly rousing speech about reindustrialization at the inter racing conference so it was incredible and yeah look I don't know who leaked that photo to you I was a bit concerned whether it was a fan or like a communist spy tracking down a the defense Tech Founders but you know you got to be careful these days yeah yeah you got to be careful uh maybe we like a full be weard and glasses next time full disguise I just I just got to go out and say I think you have the coolest office of anybody that's been on the show so far it's a fantastic office what would have you unless it's a green screen it's I've been there it's real it's not of green screen real factory and a lot of a lot of Machines working constantly how are the lights today I know that on the top of each one of those machines there's a light it can turn red it can turn green how we looking today very very green fellas GRE that's just like just like the ramp logo everything's going on fantastic that's great to hear well anyway you didn't even get a chance to uh introduce yourself can you just give us like the highle pitch for hadrien what you're building and where it's going yes on Chris power Hadrian builds autonomous factories um so you know we de-industrialized the country from the 70s through the 90s and gave all our industrial power to China and now the incredibly skilled Workforce that does incredible technical things in high Precision Machining or castings are all aging out so we really don't have an industrial base anymore so our our mission is to reindustrialize the US by building highly automated factories that are you know as efficient as China with a lot more software robotics than a new manufacturing Workforce I see that the lights are on in that factory we're trying to get to Lights Out factories is that the goal is that is that just Chinese propaganda when I hear them talk no we're we're we we were lights out today we were on 24/7 with a handful of really smart people running the fleet uh the lights are on now cuz we're all here yeah we're 24/7 7day a week operation wow that's awesome can the robots save us right uh it's a very scary time right now where China's producing a lot of robots that uh have uh can be used for a lot of things you know flying you know maybe over your kids birthday party to get fun footage or they can you know be used uh in comicazi ways but uh it feels like Automation and advanced robotics Le manufacturing is the only way that like you said it yourself maybe the only way that we really reindustrialize we just don't have the sort of skilled labor force but um you're you're betting the the company on that uh but uh but maybe kind of talk a little bit more about that specifically yeah I mean our goal with our software in robotics is to make it so easy to be highly skilled that anyone can do it um and 100% of our Workforce of people have never set foot inside a factory before they're just 10 times more productive uh because we're getting them superpowers with software robotics right and I would you know you guys are big fans of Formula 1 so like a lot of what our software does is you know imagine if your son or daughter who was learning to drive they had Tesla autopilot on an F1 car they can just you know drive a McLaren very quickly without much training that's kind of what our software does and we really believe in using the best of software and Robotics to give the new Workforce 10 times more efficiency with superpowers you know versus like replacing them entirely you know yeah and so is this the same way like uh to compare yesterday anybody can can do uh gibli Studio gibl animation so like anybody should be able to make like you know the the most you know Advanced Aerospace you know Parts Etc that's exactly right that's exactly right yeah um uh is is do you think we can get to the like what was impactful yesterday is that over the past maybe a couple years if you were really really good at prompt engineering you could uh you could kind of create some outputs like we were seeing yesterday but the average person would go go into these models and they wouldn't have any success right they tried a couple times and be like this is slop are we still at the point today on the sort of manufacturing side and what you're doing where it's like you need to be like actually like very very good but you're sort of aiming to get to that point where somebody can come in and just sort of like make make a part and and oneshot it I think 80% of our processes were at that point where we're in gibl mode onot uh there's some really deep digital manufacturing stuff that you still need an expert to do so we're in the like software engineer is 10 times more productive Land versus anyone can code but I would say 80% of our Factory is like anyone can code today are are there a the the specific programming language is like cam programming right isn't that it yeah um is there is there like a are there llms that are good at that type of coding language like there's no cursor for Cam that you're like on top of and just plugging in to speed things up no so we we had to build that full stack ourselves okay um and the main reason is all of those digital manufacturing tools which are super hard to use and you need to be an expert generate basically terrible assembly code that the machines run on yep um but because American manufacturing is largely regulated in itar there is no training data on internet yep so uh the one of the reasons why our internal models actually work for manufacturing you know machine learning models is because we're the only ones with a label data set because we're creating it daily in the factory there is no stack Overflow for manufacturing data so none of the off-the-shelf models actually have ever been trained on any of this interesting uh I imagine that every hard tech defense Tech Frontier Tech founder eventually has to come through and kiss the ring uh at your uh at your factory just because it's like hey you they're basically like Hey we're going to make we're going to make prototypes and then we're going to go sell contracts and then we're going to eventually need to deliver on those and like somebody's got to make the parts uh how many how many companies right now do you have that are like they're going out there promis ing these big things and then you know at the end of the day they're going to come back to you and be like okay now we need to make this I imagine you you you you work with some of like you some of these sort of more established companies but then I'm sure like I'm sure there's like a hundred plus you know pretty exciting companies that are basically like in almost like in your pipeline where they're like we're going to work with you we just need to like prove that we could someone's got to make the parts for the f47 yeah and you know someone's going to make the whole products as well so you know I would say that for a large established customers like you know we're making a lot of stuff for them for a lot of the newer entrance or for new programs we are becoming a like co-prime where the dod hey hey John uh you can definitely make 50 drones or 50 of this product but we'd really love you to partner with hadrien because we think they should build your Tesla gigafactory for this product line there's really this partnership's model of helping them prototype and then scale rapidly uh yeah we're like you know we can only build so many factories a year so the waiting list of uh everyone wants a Hadrian fact Factory to deploy their products at scale in the US is growing quite long which we're very lucky for what do what do you think about uh the classic Harvard MBA who's like I'm going to go buy this sort of SMB manufacturing shop that's you know putting up $5 million of iida and they've done so for 30 years so they're just going to are they like buying like sort of an aging asset or or is it worth is there sort of like value and sort of like understanding what they're doing and sort of upscaling it or Mach sh roll idea machine shop roll of the world I think in general it's a terrible idea and the main reason is is like you want to run a factory you got to you got to be Leading the People and you got to have that credibility and no master machinist or welder is going to respect a kid who's got to suit in the Harvard NBA on coming and telling him what to do um I think it's a really tough gig is it also one of those things where you want Chris actually tried to do this like years and years ago yeah but but is it also before it was a trend no but I imagine there's been so many advancements and everything from robotics to AI that you would want to just think about the factory like how would you build a factory today versus sort of buying this asset that's been operational for decades because we're having um drva on from deterrence later and he's got all these crazy stories we walking around these Factory floors and there's an active machine being used that's from the 40s like the 1940s like it was working in World War II and we're still using it today keep using it and so imagine if you have the opportunity to partner with a new defense tech company and say well like here's what's available now like you don't have to go and try to take over some old factory yeah and a lot of the Capital Equipment in all of the naval facilities or you know everywhere in machine shops is you know somewhere between from the 1950s to the 1980s and it's just impossible to automate it because often none of them have computers on them in the first place so you really got to you really got to build these factories from scratch with new technology and new Workforce how do you think about uh when you're setting up one of these new factories and and for companies that are in defense at all uh are are there the the actual machines themselves that then sit on the factory floor I imagine a lot of the best ones are built and designed and manufact you know everything like in China so how do how do you think about sort of the supply chain for the autonomous factories that you guys are building and sort of you know figuring out it's a very hard question that the country's got to answers so the Machinery market so we invented in Air Force invented CNC machine um and we no longer make CNC machines in the US and I think you saw this article about you know har white labeling some China ones and selling to the Russians um but the main the main manufacturing markets where we buy from is China's number one we don't buy for them because they got spyware all over this stuff and then it's you know Germany South Korea Japan are the best machine makers and it's kind of like the car market you know you can buy an Italian one and it behaves like an alfha Romeo and it's really fast but it's going to it's you're going to be in maintenance hell forever the German ones are really stable and the Korean are quite good so you know if the balloon goes up with the conflict uh you know can we even buy the amount of Capital Equipment to put in the factories because we don't produce that Capital Equipment in the US anymore so you know part of my job is grow super fast and buy all the capex from our from our Allied Partners to make sure it's in the US but uh yeah we no longer make the underlying machines in the country anymore can you talk uh can you talk a little bit about the continuing resolution um you're not a company that's going directly for program of record but obviously your fate is kind of tied to that I mean I yeah I know that you probably can but um uh can you talk about like how did you interpret the news there's been a lot of chatter about this is a bare case for the entire industry maybe there's uh green shoots of opportunity how are you processing and what's your strategy so we're in a really L lucky position where we're everyone's Factory so as long as we have enough customers who are winning and losing like we we're growing at a rapid clip right because we're kind of the index of the market which is Lu to be we also partner with the select few companies to Co on these major programs that manufacturing is a real challenge but for our Core Business you know if you're a small defense startup that they've got one big program of record and that gets delayed n9ine months your burn rates through the roof you're canceling your ramp credit card you know you can't put ads on adquick anymore you're in a really tough position no eight sleep brutal I mean if you paid for it sleep's not leaving you but for for Logic for logic companies like andrel you know they're working on 10 programs at once if a couple of them get delayed it's not a huge issue I think Delan is absolutely right about like if you're a startup and you're bidding on one and that revenue cycle blows out nine months you're in real trouble for platform companies like ours where we're growing with many customers and sure some of them get delayed like it doesn't really affect us that much um and we're really good position where we can eat those long continuing resolution Cycles because our Core Business is growing like 10 time you know 10x year on year um so it doesn't affect us as much it's kind of like you know do you guys really care whether people watch movies on Netflix or Hulu because everyone's using AWS we certainly don't and we try not to have favorites you know we love to manufacture everything for everybody what what what does success look like uh just purely from a you know the thing that comes to mind is like there was this meme that like 30% of venture dollars go to go to meta right I I I don't think it was quite true but is the future of hadrien it's like 30% of hard dollar just go straight to Adrien is like it's like obviously like if you're just if your job is to produce products like and you need a factory to do that like a huge part of the Cog should be the Factory and then yeah I think the most successful companies that are continuing to raise huge growth rounds are building faster and better with Adrian um you know and uh yeah I think 70% of all the Deep Tech dollars goes to you know there's some headcount for engineering but a lot of it is producing prototypes and then scaling Factory and components so yeah we we believe that we will are quickly becoming the index of the market and you know everyone needs a gigafactory right that's right uh what's going on uh what's your thoughts on Europe Broadley we've covered the automotive Market quite a lot on the show just you know Germany's kind of throwing in the towel some manufact you know sending their manufacturers you know it was even Porsche setting up us manufacturing I think it's a bit of a shame do they is there a world in which hadrien you know helps kind of revitalize some of these you know the German industrial economy just because maybe they they they they have this great industrial base but then haven't maybe focused as much on on sort of core Innovation around the factory yeah so we have so much work to do here in the US that we'd love we'd love to support our Allied Partners in Europe and the you know the Middle East and countries like Japan reindustrialize as well and they often have this same kind of core skilled labor problem but we've got so much to work to do here fixing the Navy fixing Munitions production helping our customers scale I think we'll get there in a year or two I think really what you're seeing in Europe is two Waring tribes one is the people that uh you know set their energy policy based off the poor advice of a 14-year-old Swedish girl and gave all the leverage to Russian oil and gas uh and then you've got your kind of Richard the lion Hearts you know it's like we need to reindustrialize Europe let's go make our own fighter jets and drones and naval fleets so uh you know it's it's it's good that the English are waking up in my opinion we need we need everyone in the fight fantastic well that's a great place to wrap up thanks so much for coming on the show we'll have to have you back soon it took way too long to get you on the show I know I know messed up this great day for this you bu it's a perfect day I'm happy to uh happy to be at the capital of capital anytime and uh you know God bless United States of America and uh you know the financial system of the US economy thank you gentlemen it's just fantastic thanks for coming on great to see you bye uh early supporter and I'll always remember that yeah he he text once he was like I'm out at the gym and I'm just cracking up laughing about your holiday guide or something like that uh we had a lot of fun we're a lot more serious today still trying to inject some humor but having a lot of fun with it and we have another guest joining in just a minute but uh I mean maybe we could run it back public.

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