The Factory of the Future with Chris Power

in some ways it's Manifest Destiny like humans are built to expand and explore and that is just like a core Drive of the species and with that sort of an argument it just comes down to like growth versus degrowth like that is the Eternal cultural fight and you can call it capitalism or communism or you can call it like the state versus the people or you can call it decentralization versus centralization but what it comes down to is like are we going to use the limited resources on the planet to go get new resources so we can continue this magical species-wide journey or are we going to accept the status quo and sit there and like you know continue to like shoot in a hole instead of inventing the toilet or whatever like foreign Chris is the founder and CEO of Hadrian Hadrian is trying to build the factories of the future and in today's episode we talk about what Advanced manufacturing is how advanced it really is what's happened since the first base race the complexity of ensuring manufacturing the killer app for space and how simplifying the world of atoms can actually be done through bits and ultimately what kind of experimentation that might unlock if you like this episode I have a feeling you'll also like our recently published and first ever American dynamism 50 list this is a list of 50 companies building in the national interests that embody the ethos of American dynamism and guess who's on that list patreon you can find it at our homepage at a16c.com or at a160c.com American dynamism-50 enjoy the content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund for more details BC a16d.com disclosures [Applause] [Music] Chris welcome to the show thank you for having me all right let's start with a really simple definition what is Advanced manufacturing Advanced manufacturing is an industry term that generally covers uh the complex and high Precision side of all Industries which is usually semiconductor Aerospace defense basically anything you think of from like the Jetsons flying car future is generally bucket of advanced manufacturing I think it's it's interesting that this term advancing manufacturing covers an industry which at least isn't always that advanced or maybe hasn't kept up with the time so could you give a couple examples of ways that this space of advanced manufacturing is maybe not the reality that people might expect on the defense side is a great example you know everyone's is defense primes coming out with drone programs or you know advanced fighter jets and stuff and you know really flashy products and marketing and things while like everything everything works perfectly um under the hood once you get below the assembly level you know someone making a fighter jet really what they're doing is outsourcing all of the components but the wing the engine you know everything to a tiered layer of you know 10 mini primes then 20 you know tier 3 suppliers and then literally 10 000 small suppliers dotted across the country that are doing everything from a machine component to I don't know the circuit board that is one part of the fire control system or whatever and that entire layer is basically basically chaos you know the B2 bomber which is one of our most strategic assets in terms of um you know the nuclear program about a year ago the government had to issue an RFQ for some of the parts on the B2 not just to replace the parts but because no one you know the guy that designed it or engineered it retired and they didn't have it documented anywhere like there's literally no you know manual or document of how to make that part so the government had to go out and say hey we need someone to come up and like reverse engineer this entire thing so there's stuff like that that's really scary and another example is we shipped the ukrainians uh what we thought was three years of inventory of stinger and Javelin missiles which are shoulder mounted really cheap missiles that can take out a tank or something so for providing that to a human force in Taiwan or the Ukraine it's exactly what we want to be sending people to deter uh invasions so we shipped them three years worth of inventory the ukrainians blew through it in three weeks and then the Raytheon CEO basically came out and said you know hey buy the administration you want more stingers and javelins but one it'll take us a year or two to spin on manufacturing secondly we don't know how to make some of the components anymore so basically below that you know veneer of product everything else is a complete is a complete disaster and I think because of the flashy flashy products and you know you're making like a really incredible fighter jet or drone people think it's you know super Advanced under the hood in reality it's a bunch of people in garages making components that look like they're out of the Fast and the Furious tour it's it's all it's all duct tape and spit yeah I mean you use the word insane but it really does surprise me to hear that there are these samples and it also sounds like these examples are not unique I heard in a couple other interviews you mentioning that like 50 of f-16s are grounded because they don't have the requisite parts or I think you gave another example of the International Space Station something happening to it a hatch getting jammed and then a similar phenomena happening where they had to like go and hunt down a piece of paper right can you tell that story the F-16 one is is the scariest but basically if you look at the dod stats more than more than 50 of the f-16s are grounded and it's mostly because they can't maintain them and it's mostly because they can't get parts and what ends up happening is they end up cannibalizing other planes for parts and that makes the problem worse and worse and worse and what it was because of this you know Advanced manufacturing supply chain issue which is not a covet issue it's not you know an inflation issue it's been going on for years it's just now that it's coming to the Forefront as you know more and more people are realizing how important defense was and is from the space station one is hilarious so there's a I only get some of the details wrong here um so if anyone from NASA is listening I apologize but basically you know the the hatch at the space station gets jammed and has trolls astronauts want to know how much like force they can apply to I'm Jam the hatch because if they apply too much force and they snap it like you know we're screwed um so you know they ask NASA what's the spec for this hatch component and it takes them several days to figure it out because there's no there's no record of that part and eventually they find that you know the guy that made it 20 years ago or whatever is retired and as The Story Goes you know they find the drawing at his desk drawer you know from the paperwork that they've managed to save when the business got shut down and that was why that was how we knew uh how much force to apply um to the bay door to get it open and for something is Advanced and uh you know symbolic as International Space Station like that is that is the ground floor reality of how the supply chain Works which is yeah completely markets that is Bonkers but this as you mentioned didn't happen overnight right we didn't wake up one day and have everything broken so what's happened in the last couple decades if you know we Trace back all the way to when some of these things were being created decades ago during the first space race what happened between now and then you know in the U.S really won World War II because of manufacturing and Logistics not because we necessarily had the shiniest missile or whatever what ended up happening is we had a really good aviation industry we had a really strong automotive industry and we had a really couple of strong like core manufacturing Industries so we could very quickly retool to missile production or fighter jet production or you know or something like that after that through the financialization of everything you know in the late 70s and the 80s basically the you know corporate incentive outsourced everything to you know lower cost countries um like China where we basically sacrificed robustness for you know profit and loss uh optimization and through that we drove a lot of manufacturing out of the country and what people real what people don't realize is that when you do that you don't just lose that you know base layer manufacturing of the the cheap stuff you lose the skill set and the culture that people know how to manufacture things so that we went then when we need to retool it to semiconductor or we need to retool it to defense production or space production you know that Talent base and that capacity just simply doesn't exist in the system anymore so um part of the reason is Cost Plus manufacturing just because everyone's been so fat and happy in defense for a long long time you know that flows through the supply base and really you know if the government can't really do anything about it if you're shipping fighter jets late then does the supply chain really care about it you know at a base layer of you know so culturally basically the entire industry is tooled up around 50 of our promises we break all the time and once that sets in and that becomes like the accepted Norm then it's really really hard to turn that turn that needle you know another way both culturally and systematically um and then over the last 30 years because we haven't really had to fight a great power competitor we've only been really going up against like a bunch of people in the Hills or you know some really really uh you know small countries or you know basically warlord bands none of that system has really been tested because we can just kind of show up and look scary and people run for the hills so none of the stresses in the system have been revealed until now or it's really really started to break down rapidly and it's a bit like you know if you um don't maintain your personal health for like 10 years you know you might seem fine on the surface but until you go try and play like a game of touch football or something with your college buddies and you realize that your knee is completely you know it's the same type of situation where we think we're fine and it takes 10 years to find out we're not fine but by that point the rust is kind of set into the system and we're in a really dangerous strategic position yeah I mean I think the fitness analogy is a great one because everyone can relate to that idea where they're like oh I'm totally in shape and they try sprinting 100 meters and even that is like shock to the system so it sounds like we haven't kept up but I think there's there's also something you've talked about which is that the people who were involved several decades ago are also starting to retire so what does that look like how many companies are actually involved in this space of advanced manufacturing and what are we seeing there in terms of that almost lapsing yeah so there's something like 20 to 30 000 small businesses that make up the majority of the defense industrial base and I think just to frame this before I go into the detail basically if you're making a fighter jet you know you're actually Outsourcing most of the assemblies like a wing or an engine to another company like Pratt and Whitney and then Pratt Whitney has a network of you know 2 000 suppliers that give them the components and they might do some engineering and then so what these companies are actually doing is taking a lot of taking the Lego kits and assembling them and then throwing the assembly up another layer and then lock in finally Stitches the whole thing together to give an example so it's about 30 000 or so of these small manufacturers that in aggregate makeup the entire defense industrial base but individually I like small businesses where maybe they have 10 to 20 million in Revenue Max and there's maybe 15 or 20 employees and the danger there is um because we Outsource manufacturing and because we culturally decided that if you don't have a college degree you're worthless to society there's been no new entrance to the manufacturing Workforce because it's not sexy that's not rewarded in the culture and because we've had no shocks to the system no one's realized what a big problem it is so basically that entire band of owner operators at that twenty thousand thirty thousand small business level average age of a worker is like 55 average age of an owner operator who's a small business owner that is actually you know needed to function in the business um is 62. so basically you know if you switch back to the first space race or you know kind of the Cold War there's a bunch of 30 year olds that wouldn't start their businesses um and now 30 years later they're you know 60 62. and because we're not rewarding culturally um you know being in manufacturing uh you know all those people were relatively successful so their sons and daughters got a college degree so they don't want to take over the business so basically we have this problem where the entire defense and space in semiconductor industrial bases on this house of cards of 62 year olds that through no fault of their own are retiring there's no one to take over those businesses and also the knowledge that is used to make those parts is not like in some you know GitHub or something uh where they can pass it on to Lockheed and say hey someone else can go make this part if it may or may not be written down or recorded in their business it's mostly in some you know two or three people's heads that have been making that thing for 10 years and it is complete art so you know regardless of capital or Talent at the IP or the knowledge of how to make that component is not even fungible or transferable so you have the situation where it's not just a matter of throwing a billion dollars at the uh the problem and going out scaling some new factories it's like no literally there's like two guys in the country that know how to make this turbine blade for this engine component and they're always hiring and once they retire you know good luck now there's six months of reverse engineering just to figure it out um and often this is unlike specialized equipment one of the Northrop suppliers this is a couple of years ago but there are many many examples of this we're trying to move the production of one part from one facility to another in a different state right and part of making this part is to code it with you know coat it with a coating that makes the makes the component work how it's meant to work so it's like a chemical process and did all the manufacturing engineering rehoused it in this new facility in a different state and they couldn't get it to work for like a year and they finally figured out that there was a mineral content of the water in the different state that was slightly different and undocumented so the water as part of the process was different and they literally couldn't figure it out because you've got these minor differences in you know whatever like the localized environment which can all be controlled for it is not that scary on an individual basis but in an aggregate when you think when you realize that there's like 100 billion dollars a year of these parts being produced and it's all kind of crazy like duct tape accidents that it works at all uh that's kind of like the situation that we're in as a country yeah I mean it almost reminds me of those memes that are like expectations versus reality and expectations are like you have just like this image of let's say like a SpaceX rocket taking off and you're like oh my gosh look how far we've come and then the reality behind it is like these people about to retire with desktop drawings in their drawers or in this case like a specific mineral content in the water that's that's changing their ability to produce these products so I've actually heard you use the term dangerous when you when you speak to the point that we're at in in terms of this this Pipeline and this particular space of advanced manufacturing and so you know if someone's listening they might be like okay a bunch of people are retiring some people are are not very keen on the idea of us continuing to pursue space but would you say you know to to the average person like what's at stake here what are we gonna lose if these people retire and we don't have these things documented unless we solve this problem I think the country and you know our way of life is is a central risk I mean knowledge I give to people is if you're living in a small town or something like that you know we've built up 200 layers of abstractions in society so that like you can be an artist or you can be a painter or like you know you can be in finance or on crypto or you know making video games or whatever happens to be and the reality of the world is that you know 200 years ago you know we were killing each other over food and like it's a it's a miracle in the first place that we're here and that you know Society is relatively stable and like the roads get paid people forget because they grow up in America that it's so successful that like you know they don't have to worry about having a bulletproof car otherwise if you have more than like a hundred thousand dollar net worth someone in the game might try and steal your daughter which for the rest of the world is like a reality right um but because you know America is so isolated culturally you know in most Americans view of geopolitics is Russia bad you don't learn those lessons and as a younger person you don't realize that you know unless we quote unquote keeps keep the roads paved like this can all fall over you know very very quickly so if you run the scenario of saying okay right now basically we are successful because you know we are the world's police and whether we should play in that role or not is is obviously Up For Debate but the reality is is that we are fine culturally because everyone understands that if you with America we will you know put a missile over your head and you're dead um or if we go into a great power conflict we have enough Logistics and infrastructure to go and win that conflict or released be scary enough that conflict never exists in the first place and the analogy I like to tell people is you know bar fights happen when both people mispredict their ability to win the fight and bar fights don't happen for three you know two reasons one is there's two UFC fighters you know staring down each other and they both know the cost of a conflict and both the other person is scary so that fight never happens or there's a bunch of morons but there's a bouncer and like he's big and scary enough that like the conflict never happens in the first place um but that construct of a bar fight relies on Impressions and kind of social trade-offs that like hey enough people have seen their friend getting beaten up by a bouncer so I'm probably not going to even test that assumption that this is a real thing now the reality of course is that most police officers the most bouncers you know are probably incompetent can probably get taken out by someone relatively competent as a civilian but you know we have enough uh social construct around the concept that that is a really dumb idea that no one wants to take the risk and it's what I describe it in defense land is it's a lethality Mirage you know lethality Mirage is basically you know everyone else's impression of you is that you're a 10 out of 10 lethals to pay absolutely not going to with you and then maybe you lose one small conflict and someone goes well hold on like maybe these guys aren't so scary as we thought they were um and in reality I think we're about a a three out of ten and the real danger comes when you know a great power competitor finds out before you find out that you're actually a three out of ten so the problem with everyone thinking Advanced manufacturing is in a really good place is that we don't go fix the problem you know because culturally everyone thinks it's fine you know the roads are getting paved fighter jets get made you know we're going to a conflict we're fine in reality we're probably so far away from doing that that if we have one conflict with China where we expand most of our ballistics inventory we might not be able to remake it for like five years then we're basically standing around you know with our hands tied behind our backs and when there is not one or two great Powers you know in the globe kind of keeping the peace that's when you get fragmentations and you get deaf spots and dictators pushing the boundaries of what can be done in their country and then also they see weakness and when they start you know moving into invasions of other countries and we get back to this kind of multi-polar fragmented world so it really is quite serious and you know to go from the state that we are currently in where it's kind of the tail end of you know Pax Americana and peace through strength to a you know highly conflicted world is a really scary position and it's not going to be a matter of like oh we go to war it's like oh we go to war and we lose and also like we don't have food and like you know the American Consumer can't buy an iPhone for less than ten thousand dollars or have laptops at all you know imagine if GPS went down imagine if we just didn't have GPS right so there are obvious impacts of that in terms of being able to drive or whatever but all the airlines run on GPS all the train systems run on GPS our ability to uh coordinate military conflict relies on GPS but there are like less than 50 GPS satellites and uh all of those could be shot out of the air pretty easily and all it's preventing you know some adversary doing that and basically collapsing western civilization in one fell Sloop taking out you know less than 10 satellites for the cost of maybe 200 million dollars in lasers or Hypersonic missiles is the fear that the response from America is so great that you know we will win any conflict that's put ahead of us and what our adversaries are starting to realize faster than we are realizing is that our lethality is more like a three out of ten you know versus an eight or a 10 out of 10. as as VCS know uh risk happens slowly and then all all at once yes and by the time you realize the risk and it starts cascading it's it's kind of too late to respond the difference between this time around and the last time around was yes risk happened slowly and then very quickly in World War II but at least we had the fundamental culture and infrastructure of a defense industrial base to be able to go or making great cars so let's you know shift that to making fighter jet chassis and we're kind of okay and the response time might be 18 months for two years when you don't have that fundamental infrastructure you know the response time can be 10 years and you're in a really serious position where you're caught with your hands behind your back and you can't respond but everyone knows you can't respond and then basically everyone can you know run around doing whatever they want and that's how you get you know the collapse of society you know as soon as someone realizes the police force are incompetent you get a bunch of Bad actors that creep through the system and that's basically the state that we're at but not just kind of a localized bar fire level but like at you know how the globe operates in general um so yeah it's incredibly scary and I think people are going to get a really hard wake-up call on the next in the next two years I mean I think he brought up a lot of good points there one of them is this idea of space that many people think is a frivolous Endeavor but what happens in space directly impacts what happens on Earth you mentioned GPS but it's also whether it's also agriculture it's us understanding climate change all of this happens within space but I think you've also brought up the defense side and then even if people aren't interested in either of those there is the direct relationship to manufacturing that happens with as you mentioned iPhones but also medical devices semiconductors which are in so many of the devices that we use this is all part of advanced manufacturing and so I think it's important for people to realize that you know even if they they don't believe in this idea of American dynamism which we obviously do there are direct correlations to their everyday life that will happen if we don't have this structure you know even even if you're an EA type of person or you know you're a pacifist or whatever or if you're into climate change or like you know pick any industry that you think is important like Good Luck running compute on gpt3 there are no chips or China takes Taiwan and then the only chips you can buy have like a bug in them you know like it's it's not that hard to take a line to draw and it's like very serious you know well I want to understand this idea of onshoring or bringing some of this technology back to the system in the United States and what I want to understand here is it sounds like there is a Delta between where we are and where we want to be and how much of that Delta is broken down into the investment in the space versus the talent available or the technology that we have available or even is it is it just a matter of time for us to catch up obviously it's a you know multivariate equation but what would you say are the the most important drivers or maybe the things that are underrated by people because I I would imagine that some folks might just say okay let's just pour a trillion dollars into this well that'll fix the problem but will it won't and the most important bit is uh Talent so if you if you think about software engineering um and you want to you want to solve the problem of how can we produce more data scientists or people that are capable of working at open AI or something like that you know which is arguably like the top tier of software engineering the way that you get more of those people is having this base layer of you know application developers and then front and back-end engineers and then more hardcore back engineers and sres and the data scientists and you know maybe you have a million people you produce like a thousand really incredible people in these like domain spaces and knowledge like science knowledge stacks on each other you have this Talent competition and you produce amazing people in these fields like you know us doesn't have the uh track team that goes and wins the Olympics unless we have you know thousands of colleges that are really competitive for track and field right that's that's how it goes and to take that Sports example you can't just start from a cold start and say well we want to be competitive uh we want to go blow a trillion dollars and win the Olympics it doesn't work like that you know that that takes years and years of training you need to get people 14 you need to train them up like it's a cultural thing like why would a kid want to go do Sports in the first place and in America we have that problem solved because America loves sports like the Romans did and it makes sense so if you think about that from manufacturing Talent level you know you want to go solve uh rocketry or defense or hypersonics or semiconductor it's not a capital problem it's a where are the people that are going to go engineer that system and then run that system and the red the reality is they don't exist um so what the impact of that is is time so you know you look at the semiconductor problem and go how fast can we reach your semiconductor the reality is you know the button Administration gives Intel 50 billion dollars um that's arguably the hardest you know that's the heavy work division of manufacturing and the talent doesn't exist you know you can't go and hire 20 000 people or even a thousand people that know how to go and execute that construction how to go engineer that factory how to go run that factory they just simply don't exist um and you cannot simply go and train someone up in even three years to go from like you know Junior College you know a track and Fields or like winning the Olympics it doesn't it doesn't work like that you know you need the coaches you need the entire cultural infrastructure so that's really what we lost when we outsourced Manufacturing in the 80s is there is no Talent base uh that is generative of the genius types of people that can actually go and do all these Advanced things and that is the thing that people don't realize is yeah it's not it's not a capital problem it's a time and investment problem and you have to have the base layers there to be able to be able to execute the hard stuff yeah using the fitness analogy it's like taking the Olympians from 30 years ago and saying we're just gonna toss them back in and compete in the next Olympics and it's like it doesn't really work that way or like hey we've you know if we've got these kids and they kind of fit and by the way training program and in two years they'll be winning the Olympics like it doesn't work like right definitely okay so it sounds like what Hadrian is doing to solve this problem is a mix between fixing the talent Pipeline and also using technology so let's return to the talent but how how are we using technology to fix this problem so the way we look at it is there's like five or six core parts of high Precision Machining some are lower skilled than others but they're all pretty highly skilled so what we are doing is basically at each part of the factory um developing software uh basically grabbing the last smart people in each of those domains that exist and pairing them with the best software Engineers that we can find and saying go go automate as much as possible that you know that part of the skill and in reality you can only over automate you know 60 to 80 of that um you know some of it is just like the technology curve doesn't exist you know you're like waiting for 10 years of Machine Vision to catch up so you know the job of a startup is to industrialize you know research or existing technology and apply it to a new domain it's not good it's not sit there with 40 phds and you know try and create something that's like high risk that is like the science pipeline so we grab we grab and integrate whenever we can um and build software around those you know Talent bases to remove the boring stuff automate what we can um and then the last 20 or 30 where it's impossible to automate we build software that is highly process driven where we can throw someone new to that role in there within 30 to 90 days depending on the role they can be trained up into that and have enough staff holding that if they just kind of follow the instructions they will like get 90 of the way there and for some for some parts of high Precision Machining that is way harder than you know others um but basically we're using technology to solve the talent problem um and then when we can't use technology we have to simplify it so that you can hire in someone who has had no Aerospace experience and they're making flight hardware for a rocket program in you know 30 to 60 days because for us to scale out to replace the 50 billion so let's argue that we can get to 10 billion um you know we can't go and hire our going machinists we have to we have to automate our way so we can only we can go train a hundred thousand and that is like barely doable but it has to be a combination of yeah solving the talent Pipeline and using using automation to basically like lower the burden of that Talent pipeline problem um and then focusing on the areas where Talent is gets or harder to come by as well as attracting as much as possible entrance to the new Workforce which is why you know branding and marketing is so important in speaking about this problem over and over and over again because people don't know it's a problem and then they realize like Oh I'm a software engineer at Google I can actually contribute here or I work in hospitality and I can actually like you know get in the fight and help help solve this problem is really important from that aspect as well and that's why the cultural reward system where like manufacturing is not really sexy is a huge problem because you know unless this is going to sound dumb but like unless some 19 year old from like you know UCLA can go you know basically like convince some hot girl at a bar that like manufacturing is cool then like why why would they ever go shoot for manufacturing versus going to work for Google or Goldman Sachs you know and that's that's a huge this is why I keep going back to the cultural challenge Because unless it's awesome and celebrated you know that's a that's a really really hard problem to solve yeah I actually met one of your newly trained or currently trained machinists who used to be a copywriter Everest I think last week at La Tech University um yeah and so it is a fascinating process that you guys are undertaking to take people who aren't within this fear and training them up to be machinists and something I've heard you talk about before is this maybe counter-intuitive idea that to actually take the existing systems you need to simplify them in order to enable these new jobs right because you can't train a previous copywriter to be The Machinist from 30 years ago that can do everything that that person did but if you do simplify those processes that opens up the job pipeline for many of these people to to become that that machinist totally and this is something that software engineering has done done really well where there's like a clear delineation between SRE devops data science front-end back-end you know and different tiers within that and traditionally Machining is often vain there's one guy that does 90 of the that whole outline themselves so there's no clear snap-off points where there's a degradation of skill where you can kind of put someone here and then they learn the next run it's all one person solo operating the entire thing which just just doesn't scale how do you convince the existing machinist to transfer this knowledge I'd imagine there's some sort of incentive that you need to put into place because I mean maybe I'm wrong about this but I imagine they they might feel like their jobs are being automated away or that they're being replaced in some way and of course some of them it sounds like they're planning to retire but how do you actually convince the person who has all this knowledge to to want to share it and be part of this new system I think there's a couple of things the first one is the smartest and best people know that the industry is due for a transformation and that it's inevitable that someone's going to come along and do this and they want to be part of the winning team not not left behind so that's a big part of it yeah incentives really matter and I think culturally in manufacturing you don't get many opportunities for growth and there's a bunch of really smart people out there who've been kind of siled and not given the opportunity to you know stretch and grow and I think culturally they understand it if we're automating one part of the factory we're not going to suddenly like fire 20 people like no no you go pick whatever else you want to do you know manufacturing engineering or CMM or a higher skill level of Cam programming um and I think the other thing is yeah incentives really matter and I think we're probably the only Factory on the planet outside of SpaceX that is giving everyone in these roles you know the same uh tier of equity as the best software Engineers have you know our every technician in Hadrian whether you're packing boxes or whether you're an absolute master of your trade and maybe you you know you're one of the only 20 people left that can do it is being given the opportunity to have you know probably the only opportunity they've ever had to create generational wealth for them and their families and with that here in honor of the company and then you're highly incentivized to contribute to the system instead of being like well I'm on 40 an hour and this guy's on 20 an hour and I'm on forty dollars an hour because I have this tribal knowledge why why would I go and share it because that's what you know that's the incentive and that's why like oddly there is no like stack Overflow for a machining because I I think it's basically a function of uh the fact that manufacturing has been an hourly Workforce for such a long time even the highest skilled positions because then you get this like weird localized competitive set where even within your facility you're not really wanting to train or contribute to people because you're putting your own you know job at risk um whereas in software engineering your salary you're in high demand you know it's more about sharing knowledge and going as fast as possible and I think yeah that all comes down to culture but I think that actually gets driven off like historical being an hourly position for such a long time with no meaningful Equity upside because then why would you share your knowledge if you know you're just going to train someone to replace you or you know the owner of the crappy factory that yells at you every day of why the part is late you know is is no longer incentivized to give you a higher higher you know hourly wage you know yeah totally and and obviously there's positives and negatives to each of those cultures but something I've heard you talk about before is you have all of those different roles sit together at lunch were actually meld together in a way so that there isn't like the software Engineers here and then the new machine is here and the old machine is elsewhere and so can you speak a little bit to that and what you're seeing in terms of what aspects of each culture are being brought together and and highlighted yeah I think and again we're not perfect we're probably everyone's doing it at all but many many many challenges um I think the first one is making sure that the software engineering team understands that uh the person that's operating is the is the Golden Goose and they are the customer and changing that mindset from I was this internal team that does some function you know it's like the customer service team at a SAS startup like who cares you know whatever but if the customers if it's SAS customer screens and says we need this feature like everyone knows to go and jump so making sure we understand our internal team is the customer of what we're building and you know if they have a one hour of downtime it's a really serious problem and also their happiness as a user is like a really a really serious problem and that creates this interesting Dynamic where yeah you've got like technicians that are you know on hourly wage or whatever and they're the software engineer from Strife running around being like oh this guy thinks my product is terrible like you know this is really this is a really serious issue and that that means a lot the big problem to solve is continually reinforcing that everyone's working hard and they're you know there are different challenges and I think people are not from a software domain are like why do people this feature and it's like that is six months of twos off for engineers and yes I understand it's painful but like you know so continually like melding those communication streams together and letting people you know understand each other's worlds is really important I mean the ultimate Hadrian employee would be like a person filling out quality paperwork who was also always a software engineer so that like the localized pain they would just go and fix you know um or or vice versa so yeah there are many many challenges to getting that right but the important thing is to like have have some shared pain both ways and then make sure that the interaction is like operator gives feedback software engineer picks it up but you know the rating the really difficult part is like this is really this is really painful for you but it's also six months of software engineering so it's getting de-prioritized but like how do you make sure that is actually understood and communicated throughout a rapidly growing organization is an incredibly hard incredibly hard problem and even really simple things like making sure software Engineers are out on a factory floor as much as humanly possible sitting behind operators and even doing their jobs where possible um is incredibly important culturally and also just for like decentralizing the product learning I mean there's this classic trap of like you think the product's good and it's not and then whatever feedback mechanism you got is imperfect so trying to get it down to single threaded like the person that's building the automation for this part of the product is capable of actually doing that job and is forced to do that job every couple of weeks and like relearn the real real user pain is is an enormous challenge but is probably the most important thing that we can be doing to maintain that culture at scale as we're rapidly grow yeah I mean you hear of some companies doing this like if you work at Airbnb you're encouraged to stay at airbnbs and understand the product but this is obviously a different level of that something that stood out to me though is is you speaking to obviously this is a really hard problem to solve and I think you know people say that anything that integrates into some form of Hardware not just you know software and bytes is like playing on hard mode and I can speak to that I mean I've as in I've mostly worked in in the arena of bytes and even within the marketing sphere and So within that sphere you can just kind of a B test the out of everything if you're unsure you test it right if you have the right amount of traffic uh with hard but where you can't really do that and so I'm curious to know as you're building this company how are you deciding what bets to take and also like what signals are you looking for to make sure that you're on the right track because you don't have you know millions of page views that you can just test to get the signal from that noise yeah that's a that's a really good question so there are like very obvious projects that from the outset everyone knows are the biggest points of pain whether it's time or annoyance or whatever it is and then you can't sit in a room for three years and try and build an automated Factory is because you only really know what's actually what actually matters and what doesn't matter at all is by running a factory and then being very prepared to rip up off your roadmap and realize that what you know what you've been doing for the last year was an assumption and not reality so yeah you can observe a lot of pain you can observe where bottlenecks appear that you didn't expect them to um and there are two layers to that one is like a localized layer like okay what is causing this team this amount of downtime or pain or effort but then the factory level what is producing costs outside those localized things because in the real world you can have a highly optimized process over here but if it's spitting out unclear results or there's some like stochastic variability then very quickly the factory can go from smooth to chaos and all of a sudden 30 of the doubt 30 of the people in the downstream roles are like dealing with the poor outputs of this other thing so constantly going up and down those layers and making sure kind of each team has the ability to screen for what they need but then also having observability of the factory itself and going like yeah you guys think the cost is here and it is but we're not solving it here we're going to solve it here because that's that that was actually the original root cause of why this issue came across here and some of that is systems some of that is just really good foundational operational leadership and you know being intellectually honest enough to go like yeah this is not like a paperwork problem this is because like a customer did this and we need to build a product around here because that's actually what prevents all these Downstream issues and the other problem that people don't realize and you were talking about you know marketing data no Factory on the planet has observability so you can't simply and maybe like Foxconn does but you can't simply throw open a dashboard and go what is my uptime where are the costs for this job how much labor did we spend on it it's all kind of swags and like fuzzy maths and people standing around you know trying to do time studies which have their own psychological flaws you know so a big part of the technology that we're building is a factory data platform where all of the people and all of the hardware are hooked up to One internal data service so that and it took us like a year to build this and we're still three months away from like having it operationalized so that everyone in the automation team and operations can look at it and go oh we actually thought we were really efficient over here but we're not and then it becomes much more clear where where the costs and the systems are but even getting to that point is a bunch of software engineering that no one has ever done purely to solve the observability problem then it becomes much more obvious to everybody where where to point resources and where the pain is coming from yeah that's fascinating because again bringing my experience from marketing there's so many times where you think something is an issue or some article is going to work or some landing page copy is going to be best and you're wrong all the time and so if you really don't have that data layer it's so hard to tell what's truly going on and I'm curious to know how that impacts the End customer right so if you're a SpaceX or an Android buying parts uh through Hadrian do they get access to that data and if so how does that impact that relationship compared to what they're used to experiencing and what customers want is effectively like devops level visibility that's not muddied by human aggressiveness or hey we'll get the job done don't worry we'll you know we'll call it out of the fire so you know like the world's best Gantt chart basically uh to build that though you need the entire factory data system to get that data because if you just have you know the flex support strategy in the early days was you know build the customer portal first and then have a bunch of like analysts just like typing in shipping and receiving data you can't do that in manufacturing because it's so complicated and you have all these like culture issues of people are always going to say I'm going to get the job done and that's not because they're lying it's because like you know they're gonna they got white line fever they're going to get the job done we're a couple of weeks ish away from launching this to customers because it took so long to build that internal scaffolding to give people the data but yes it's like even now we're sending like just Excel spreadsheet summaries of like hey here's where we're at on this production run and people are literally responding like this is amazing like no one's no one's ever given this day this data which is from from like software land is completely insane it would be like you know AWS not having a dashboard of like what's your what's your like SLA up time which is insane um that's a really hard problem to solve yeah that's what customers want is like no this is a this is a platform it's a service and we have observability and then when things do go wrong you're learning about it an hour after it goes wrong not six weeks down the track when like we have to face up to the problem and we can't ship parts um which seems Seems crazy from everyone outside the industry but it's like uh yeah it's like a magic wand to everybody else in the industry yeah I mean even extrapolating past Advanced manufacturing I think it's just like a cultural phenomena that we expect these updates like even if you talk about like ordering from Amazon people have come to expect my package is going to arrive on this date and if it's not I'm gonna get a notification and only some small fraction of of packages get delayed within that sphere and of course Advanced manufacturing is much more complex there's many more reasons why you can't have that level of precision but it is I think like again a cultural phenomena that you you have come to expect that kind of of system and it's interesting that this is now being implemented within Advanced manufacturing um I'm I'm curious to know within the the spectrum of of Hadrian and and your customers with this implemented let's say you do get to the point where you have that Precision update what happens you know the the obvious thing is like okay a rock rocket gets uh shipped on time but how does that actually influence the wider industry does this mean that because things are being shipped on time companies have you know better margins because they operate better and therefore more companies can enter the space or can you speak to like the downstream or you could say like second third order effects of actually having that system in place yeah so if you you if you skip a couple of years ahead and like everything is being done through Hadrian whether we're building it first party but like either everything is being shipped on time or you've got four warning where something's going wrong two big things happen one is something like 50 of the total cost of a product like a satellite for example is through delays or inventory levels which you shouldn't need to have so as as an example if you think about a Gantt chart to build a satellite and there's it takes 90 days and you know you do this piece first and this piece first and all the parts have to arrive on time firstly because the supply chain is super unreliable no one is building that Gantt chart super tightly they're building it with about 50 of slack in it because you know you can't rely on those inputs coming in at the right time so once we get customers to a point where they know that if we say here is the date it's reliable everyone can compress their schedules around that reliability and that and because manufacturing you know time is payroll cost it's working capital of inventory it's a build rate it's if you just compress time in manufacturing you just win on cost and so so I think that most of the products will be able to drop their manufacturing costs by like 30 to 50 not because of Cheaper Parts but because of the reliability and the ability to compress schedule around that reliability the second point is forward notice of Errors so if you have a manufacturing line down because some Venda was giving you a bunch of satellite parts and you expected them on Monday and then you find out on Monday they're not going to come from for two weeks which happens like 30 to 40 percent of the purchase orders that Dynamic happens then you've literally got people standing around and they can't they can't do anything which is a huge costume unto itself and another CEO I was talking to last week basically you know and the way Aerospace works is you have an order book and then you can't book Revenue until you actually deliver your satellite or your product or whatever and they would have had an extra billion dollars in Revenue last quarter had more of their parts being delivered on time growth is slowing because they can't meet their order book not because they're not working hard because the supply chain is a complete is a complete mess so you know the example I will give is like you know if you're a back-end software engineer and like you weren't really sure whether you could spin up a new like uh ec2 instance or not and like it might take three months it might take a week like you you don't know so all of your Sprint planning is out the door all of your like can I get this product out to the customer and compete is out the door and potentially you're sitting around as a back-end software engineer like twiddling your thumbs for three weeks because you're blocked on this core piece of infrastructure um so like imagine if you know there was no supply chain team and all these smart people could be doing more value added versus like calling Bob's machine shop three times a week being like Bob have you put the parts on the machine yet and getting lied to or the aerospace engineers themselves like not not waiting for parts for six weeks and being able to have Parts every two weeks so that they can like make a test satellite and blow it up and then iterate really really fast when I when I say like we can let companies move 10x faster and you know lower their cost of manufacturing by 50 I don't mean because we're cheaper and we are cheaper than we can be but the main benefit is that you have this High reliability infrastructure layer so you can compress schedule around it and like that's that's the huge win is you know you can make a fighter jet in six months not 12 months and that that's what makes it 150 million not 300 million yeah I mean I'm I'm coming back to this meme of expectations versus reality and you imagine like these very very talented machinists and you picture what their their job is from the outside and then really it's it's calling Bob's machine shop three times a week being like where's my part uh so I think yeah a lot of that is is Illuminating to to realize that the the supply chain of course is complex um but with the use of technology and and training the right people can be simplified um but within Hadrian itself what would you say the key risks are so so this paints a really really interesting picture of what we can do to solve the problem if Hadrian were to fail why would that be would it be financing would it be you know a miscalculation on on how complex some of these systems are what do you think you know some of the the key risks are yeah I I think the broad risk of Hadrian is that it's just unbelievably complicated if one piece doesn't work then the whole thing doesn't work so the execution you know it's a complex coordination problem to take a to take a teal uh meme I think the second problem is as the business grows the reality that the truth seeking of like is this automation possible within X time frame and how we're planning ahead and count around that is is is really really hard because you have to make sure that people are being realistic around are we actually saving time with this or did we just build scaffolding for this process which is totally fine like you can't really build automation until you have to Scaffolding in the process but recruiting cycle of someone highly skilled it might take three months and as you're growing Revenue at an exponential monthly rate and you're booking customer sales on your ability to deliver that and you're expecting the automation curve to go here and intersect your hiring plan here and the automation curve turns out to be here and you have this Gap it's not as simple as hey we're breaking even on this part of the project let's just put more labor into it for another 12 months because you can't hire into that gap for three months and then you behind the April and then customers hate you and like so the prediction of when projects are going to land and when things may or may not be industrialized as a new piece of automation or process is is really really hard and then the other thing I think the third big risk is in manufacturing if you have a bad process and a bad process maybe is like something that generates an error more than one out of a hundred times um that's not like a mistake it's like okay now this has Downstream impacts on schedule or you know this machine is down or whatever if you scale before there is a level of error proofing that lets you scale you end up scaling to a point something was happening once a week now happens 100 times a week and there's so much negative work in the system that like yes not only do you make no money but then like you're chasing your tail and now you're behind on everything and you start this like really dangerous kind of like negative spiral of negative work and I think having the discipline to understand where that point is and continually say no to customers even though they really want stuff which is really exciting and like you know I want to grow a massive business so I also want to scale as fast as possible but if you go too fast before you're really ready to scale um and have that level of error reduction you can basically blow yourself up and you won't even know what's happening until the last minute once you've told customers you're ready to go and you're ready to scale and then you blow up a production order and you like break the promise that like hey we won't ever have a launch delay because of us then you lose the magic right and start startups can basically survive infinitely as long as as long as you hold the magic so that is something that I think about a lot is when is the right time to push those buttons and one level of scaling can we do now is how do we need to be disciplined around error reduction versus you know shooting ourselves on the foot yeah I mean every company deals with some amount of technical debt but you're right that hitting that scale button too soon can can really exponentially increase that amount one of the things that I think you explored originally when you discovered this problem was okay a bunch of people are retiring these machine shops may go out of business why don't I just acquire them why don't I do like a private Equity play and just acquire these shops instead of doing what you've done now which is more so build the technology train individuals to to service them or almost like absorb that that intelligence so can you tell us a little bit more about why you pivoted there and why you didn't go with that original approach one of the things that you know you don't really learn until you're in the weeds is every every piece of Hardware variability whether that's a different machine or a different cutting tool or a different visual piece of work holding every new combination of those things that you add on to the kind of like the search space the problem has a non-linear impact on the software engineering complexity that you need to build to like you know get to that getaway level of automation that actually solves a problem versus just hey you're 20 better than your competitors so you have a great private Equity roll up it wasn't until I was in the weeds of that problem that I realized that most Legacy machine shops have one of every machine ever made and even within you know they have 20 machines five of them might be the same but even those five are set up a completely different way and that adds this enormous non-linear complexity in terms of the software automation that you have to build on top of those systems to the point where it's it's close enough to Impossible that you can call it impossible and you can squeeze out some margin Improvement but you would never ever get it to the point where it was a scalable system or it was repeatable enough that it was you know gonna solve the problem at the kind of multi-billion dollar level that I want to solve the problem at so that was that was the core reason why you have to build you have to build this from scratch Hardware are hand in hand with software hand in hand with processors is so you're making those localized trade-offs and you can standardize the physical world to be able to abstract it into software to be able to abstract that into process and now that we have now that we have the base of that with clear line of sight to what that looks like at scale then we're actually going back into Acquisitions because then we can reliably say to customers and machine shop owners who want to exit is one we actually know what we're doing now secondly we have this standardized system so to transfer you know a legacy machine shops parts to Hadrian it's it's there is a process whether it's a new customer order or whether it's an acquisition it doesn't it doesn't matter there is now a clean funnel of which this can be done and then in terms of training and re-skilling some of these people that we acquire might want to stay on for the journey and that's great and now we have this kind of integrated system where we can plug them in and they can learn new skills and they can be like a part of the winning team but without building all that from scratch you never have that core of like what is great what does great look like and then how can you you know merge people into that starting from a incredibly Divergent Hardware base and process space it's almost impossible to go in and clean that up both culturally and then just like systematically it's either like cool now you're doing 200 Hardware Integrations instead of three it's just like it's impossible you know yeah I mean the complexity is is hard enough within one one of those shops something that I noticed on your jobs page is that you have around 20 open jobs at the moment it's always changing but they're so many different types of jobs as well so there's data scientists there's mechatronics Engineers they're security officers they're sales people we talked about the importance of marketing within this space as well but I'm curious to know across the spectrum that you're working in what talent is most needed right now like what are there are there specific types of folks that you just wish there was like 10x more of everyone yeah and the reality is it's everybody um the reality is it's everybody I think that's a way of my hand I would say give me a hundred software Engineers that worked at a startup and then worked at Big Tech but actually have an aerospace engineering degree and did an internship with Boeing because where we see people go the fastest is they have high context around what the real problem is versus having to kind of like learn the ropes on what is what is manufacturing what is aerospace engineering so that would be like the magic wand which which obviously doesn't exist I was gonna say how many people fit that bill three handfuls yeah apples um the factory Talent is yes we always need more people but there's no like one critical Talent base where we're really really struggling I think in terms of automation yeah we just need all hands on deck and I think what people don't realize that we struggle with sometimes in recruiting or at least have to over message you know to make sure people understand is that you don't need a hardware or manufacturing background to come into a business like Hadrian or SpaceX or Android to be able to you know being a competitive candidate or create value you know with your software skills like a lot of what we're building looks and smells like Enterprise SAS except our customers internal users not external users um and even the detect side is very close to like you know if you're a developer that's been working on like unity and building like video game you know geometry engines and stuff like that uh that's that is very close to the software engineering we're doing internally and even integrating with the hardware if you're the type of software engineer that is okay with like reverse engineering some crappy API you know which anyone from like a Rippling for example is done with like some crappy payroll API from the one vendor that like doesn't have it fully documented that's the exact same problem space and I would say that tons and tons of software Engineers need to kind of get it through their head that it's all just regular software engineering problems hard software engineering problems you know don't get me wrong but that you don't need a manufacturing background or a you know Aerospace background or a space background to kind of get in the mix and start adding a lot of value very quickly I love that you mentioned Rippling because I think there are so many examples of successful companies that really just did Venture into a space that was surprisingly complex and just document it and simplify it I mean I'm a Canadian who who happens to work in Canada and using a product like Rippling is so nice or you know there's there's other products out there that do the same thing like workday but the idea is that I just have to click a bunch of buttons and say are you an immigrant alien are you not or you know what state are you in et cetera and it just it just outlines the process for you and I think that's a nice parallel because many people have probably used tools like that before and imagining a parallel within Advanced manufacturing of of course the stuff is incredibly complex but if you can simplify it for the End customer to just understand okay I'm gonna get exactly on these dates and then internally what are the key steps along that way for us to map out and insert automation where possible that's a great example is like you know a HR rep to do that without Rippling is 20 40 hours and you still need to HR rep to do that job but it takes them 30 minutes and you know they're not filling out forms for like you know 40 hours a week and you know drinking a bottle of wine at night because they're sick of filling out for 40 hours of forms a week and it's the same it's like we're not we're not replacing the human and machining we're just like hey click three buttons not click 20 done buttons where you do it a bajillion times a week and it's you know it's painful you know and also click buttons in a nice workflow don't have to like go read the paper manual on like what immigration policy is for Canadian you know b z Visa holders or whatever because oh yeah it's all like workflow logic it's all a process and yeah it's it's very gnarly to wrap your hands around that entire problem simultaneously but yeah that's the game we're playing it's good yeah and using that example too it's like it's to your point you're not the experts from the space right so if I do have a question of like what the hell does a resident alien mean I go to my lawyer and ask them okay like what how should I respond to this but I only involve them when necessary and it's the same thing with Machining right you're only bringing in the expert machinist when absolutely necessary and then simplifying the rest and yes and then then the expert machinists can go learn software engineering or they can go learn you know harder and harder levels of Machining or they can just spend 100 of their time on like really gnarly problems that you need an expert for not like how to program a threaded hole which they've done for the last 10 years successfully you know four times a week and like you don't ever have to do that again you know and cool go go solve this other problem and figure out how to automate that you know all right so there are a bunch of different problems that you can attack within Advanced manufacturing we talked about medical semiconductors defense Etc um sounds like Hadrian is focused at least at the moment on space and uh as I mentioned before there are many people out there there are many people who disagree with this but there are many people that think that space or pursuing it is a frivolous industry I'll just read you one tweet for fun uh from someone that I saw recently that said no offense but I a hundred percent think space colonization is a childish desire so feel free to respond to that particular tweet but really what I want to get at is within the sphere of things that you could pursue within Hadrian why specifically space to start the really short version is like stripe doesn't get to sell to a t until we sold to a bunch of white combinated startups and there's just a bunch of huge amounts of capital flowing into commercial space which means there's a bunch of Net News spend and they're being run by 30 year olds not 50 year olds which you know you want to sell the startups at first and you want to hit that early adopt Spectrum so commercial space has all of the complexity of every other industry that we would want to serve in the future so the automation we're building for commercial space is almost completely transferable but there's a real need because these companies are trying to go super fast so they will pay for Speed you know if they are sick of calling Bob's machine shop but they're young enough from you know all these rocket and satellite companies that they're willing to take a shot on something new and really work with us to develop the system versus so it's it's just you classically adopt a problem then I think holistically is like why go to space uh at all like why put Humanities resources out there and I think you know we could go through this argument of like you know space is a warfighting domain like you need observability of the planet to stop nuclear launches so you need satellites you know like GPS is a great example we can go through all like the time worn arguments that like most of the medical advances on the planet have been Downstream of NASA on the ISS and how that flows through to society and all that stuff but all of that is is an abstraction of like why you know why Columbus like why go jump on a shitty raft and go look at a new island in Polynesia as like a tribal leader like you know in some in some ways it's Manifest Destiny like humans are built to expand and explore and that is just like a core Drive of the species and with that sort of an argument it just comes down to like growth versus degrowth like that is the Eternal cultural fight and you can call it capitalism or communism or you can call it like the state versus the people or you can call it the same centralization versus centralization but what it comes down to is like are we going to use the limited resources on the planet to go get new resources so we can continue this magical species-wide journey journey of like settling the solar system and finding out what's out there and improving our own lives and like going and getting at it or are we going to accept the status quo and sit there and like you know continue to like shoot in a hole instead of inventing the toilet or whatever like and and all these people out there who are like by stretching towards the future we need to concentrate on the problems of today and what people don't realize is that historically throughout Humanity you like you solve poverty by building Farms not by like trying to optimize this shitty like hodgepodge hunter-gatherer like system that we've got and yes that rewards people you know non-linearly the people who are reaching towards that future and like you leave some people behind but that is what takes the band from here to here and everyone's quality of life goes up and at some point the Earth's resources are going to die out and we have kind of one shot in the next couple of decades to like expand so that we can get new resources and make ourselves more efficient and start solving all these problems and I think but these are all like platitudes and economic arguments over the internal cultural problem of humanity which is like do you want to go and do cool and like grow as fast as possible and see what's out there or do you want to sit there chilling your thumbs because you're scared and that is the Eternal like growth versus degrowth fight and everything that we see in the media whether it's Legacy Media or politics or Wars or you know communism versus capitalism or anything is or you know coronary capitalism versus true kind of jungle capitalism you know it's all it's all a poor abstraction over growth versus D growth and ultimately like you've got a big side and I think growth and if we're picking growth then yeah let's go invent new technologies and settle the stars and find out what's out there and mine Asteroids for resources instead of ripping up forests in the Amazon you know but like you either have to like basically it comes down to like expansional population control you know like at a certain point it all comes down to like we're either going to cut down trees or gonna mine asteroids okay don't want to cut down trees that make sense so let's go you know go do something cooler and more sustainable a way to do that but the third option of like restricting resources and you know this is like a stupid argument over nuclear I mean you know like hey let's not incur some risk of getting totally clean energy that like net net is way way less uh morally and economically impactful than solar panels where 90 of the solar panels in the country are being made in China by basically slave labor where millions of minority and immigrant women are being chemically castrated every year and forced into servitude but so ultimately it's like growth versus degrowth and I think like the case for space is is the Last Frontier that we have and you can think about the moon as the eighth continent and as a species we're either gonna go out and get it and continue to grow and improve things or we're going to stagnate and if anyone's choosing to stagnate you're on the wrong side of history and like you're gonna get blown passed by everyone else and I just wish people would frame the problem correctly it's you know it's it's growth versus degrowth there is no like economic argument like you're the four Humanity isn't expansive moral species or you're against it and you know you want to like paralysis in this bubble where we're just going to compound the problems I think it's I think it's ridiculous yeah I mean one other way you could put it of growth versus degrowth is also kind of like a zero sum versus positive sum mindset right or of like we can pursue space the technologies will hopefully return back to things on Earth but also we can pursue space and pursue improving climate change and pursue Ai and pursue insert other exciting things here right it's it's not one necessarily versus the other although I do think it's really important to point out what we've talked about already several times is that you know there are several advancements uh from space I was looking this up because we're doing an episode with Privateer but like uh whether it's like Lasik to like limb Replacements to tires on your car like all of that has been impacted by you know unsurprisingly the very tough engineering challenge which is to to build these things in space return to Earth because it's much easier to actually apply them here um so you know without going down too far that rabbit hole I do think that one thing that maybe is missing I might be wrong but is this idea of like a killer app right something that people can understand within the context of face and I think some people might argue that like satellites are already like the killer application of space that we use on Earth um but do you have any thoughts there in terms of whether we already have this quote unquote killer app within space that people can understand and almost like helps them recognize the value I think that's a really really hard problem because a lot of the benefits of space are not the end product it's like the infrastructure it's like GPS you know sort of like space invented Google Maps or Apple Maps it's like it's recognizable by like a consumer and they kind of they kind of get it uh very viscerally I think I think there are many no I don't think there's a killer app and I don't think there will be because it's it's like um you know does your average consumer you know know about AWS not really like outside of our technology domain but like can any of the stuff that they love exist without it like probably not I think there will be something incredible in terms of not quote-unquote first of all countries having access to the internet the first time through um things like starlink which will be really incredible for those parts of the earth which will become like a killer app um because it's consumer focused it's clearly to space like it's cool it has real benefits in terms of education and like you know teaching kids things um versus having like crappy internet in the Philippines or something like that for the American population I think we're already buried behind so many layers of abstraction that's like really really really hard I I think that potentially it's something in Fama where so much of the like cancer or genetic research is can only be performed or can be performed like far far better in terms of materials or chemical research in space and I think there if there's a major Pharma breakthrough where it's like oh we cured the lupus or like you know like leukemia doesn't exist anymore and it's because of the research that happened on the ISS and it's very publicly done I think that could be a really killer like you know app but I think the rest of it's all infrastructure and yeah so so Pharma would be a really amazing one and I can see like a core kind of consumer link to where they really like this really feel the impact that reminds me of I think my final question which is just the idea of painting this future where Hadrian is successful or rather painting a future where there's let's say 10 or 30 hadrians that are successful like what does that world look like does that enable us to go and you know cure cancer on a satellite we're on the ISS or what are the types of things that we might might get and I say might because of course of course there's no certainty with the success of Hadrian or many of them yeah so the analogy I use is for software engineering we have so many incredible software engineers and software products that and that is Downstream of companies like stripe or twilio or Amazon because they lowered the barrier to entry for creating new companies and running more experiments on what's a good thing that the world needs from like a million dollars to like a hundred dollars because that infrastructure exists you get this Cambrian explosion of Randomness and firstly the people that exist in the ecosystem can get a hundred more tries at building something incredible and then new people come into the ecosystem because the cost the cost of Entry is so low the cost of experimentation is so low that you you get more flood of talent and Randomness and you know so who knows what comes out of it but it's obviously true that like if you have this cheap infrastructure layer that enables rapid iteration and lower lower barrier cost to do an experimental to launch a product you get this Cambrian explosion of like Madness and then amazing things come out of it and who knows what they are but like you know who could have predicted that Downstream of like Microsoft Azure is like Dolly too I don't know but like there's a clear without without that compute letter existing none of that would exist you know so who who knows um self-driving cars are all Downstream of cloud computing a roll Downstream of like elastic you know infrastructure layers um so what I hope happens with Hadrian is apart from speeding up the current companies you know making rocket satellites Jets and drones an order of magnitude so they can move faster on the iteration pace we automate this so much that it's basically like flicking the switch on AWS and spinning up a new you know like East Coast instance and starting to Tool around with something and by lowering the barrier to entry of complex Manufacturing and making it cheaper and making it accessible through an API we should see two things which is the smart people in the space get 100 times more experiments and new entrance to the space don't have to go and work at SpaceX for 10 years to figure out what the hell is going on and then go start something they can kind of drop into it straight out of college and have this manufacturing platform that enables them to like rapidly iterate on whatever they want and all of a sudden we see this like ridiculous explosion of like who knows what hopefully so much so the FAA is just chasing their tail trying to like stop kids launching Like Satellites off the roof of their houses you know and that's that's like the generative property that would be a real success case for us is we've built this kind of Archimedes lever of a company that by building it we've like generated all these huge second and third order impacts in the world and yeah yeah I mean like apart from helping the defense Prime scale and like you know butting heads of the CCP it's it's going to be amazing in a couple of years to see you know a bunch of like engineering grads uh you know touring around in their garage and like seeing seeing Google style startups happen without 40 million dollars in funding and just to get off the ground because they Tap a button Parts show up the next day through an API and then they're like experimenting and then who knows what happens after that but that would be the huge success case for us is that we are the enabler of that like Cambrian explosion of talent and Randomness that produces all these wild and crazy experiments in the physical world and lowers that barrier to entry so that we're getting ourselves closer and closer to the Jetsons flying car future versus you know getting stuck getting stuck where we are today I love that because I think maybe it's hard for people to imagine that you know Joe Smith in his garage is going to go create a a space rocket on his own but if we actually look back a couple decades ago the idea of someone publishing online which now we all do as long as you have an internet connection was not democratized right like I think the first blog was in the 90s and you had to spin up your own server and you had to understand how to do web development and today it's like you know you pull up your phone you have your your Twitter app or uh your own sub stack or whatever it might be and we can all participate and it does create this like infinite ecosystem on both supply and demand um and and it'll be fascinating to see if we can achieve that on the hardware side and specifically within space so that leads me to my final question which is just I think this work is really inspiring it is it inspires me to imagine that future where we have democratized Hardware where people are excited uh to participate even if they don't have a doctorate in you know aerospace engineering I want to know from you who is someone that you're inspired by and what are they working on inspired by or like have went from could be either I'll actually share where this question came from and there was an interview that Alex Honnold did on Tim Ferriss uh years ago and a lot of people see Alex Honnold as this like superhuman he's you know defied the laws of gravity or at least fear and and he's he's free soloing up these mountains and so it's kind of a interesting to imagine that there may maybe someone that Alex looks up to in a similar domain of like oh my gosh I can't believe he does this and his answer was this guy Mark Andre Leclerc he if you've heard of the alpinus It's a Wonderful movie I won't spoil the ending but uh that was kind of like a fascinating thing to understand that this person who I saw and many other people saw a superhuman saw someone else in a similar light and so I'm curious to know if there's someone that you are like wow I can't believe this person is building something no one's ever heard of them because in that case no one had heard of this guy Mark Andre the clerk at the time so does that help uh kind of paint a picture of what we're looking for yeah yeah yeah what really inspires me is musicians that tool Away by themselves in in our bedrooms or caves for like five years and then produce these like walks of art uh that are orders of main issues better than anything that like you know publishing Studios get out and whether that was like Boston in the 70s where literally everyone thought they were in a rear rock band it was like one guy that known like wrote the music wrote the albums played all the instruments but then half of the recording equipment he custom built himself purely purely just to like get his work of art out there stuff like that is inspiring to me not because it's like a single human like you know I am nothing without the team but um it's because it's a reminder that you know these mythical Heroes exist and like you know people from non-college educated backgrounds or like completely outside the system is still there are still there tiling away in like you know Humanity has still got it you know like it's it's not it's not a like Cattle Mill of people coming out of education and going and like clicking buttons on computers at Google or open sacks or whatever like we've still got this like incredible ability to go off and do random things I mean like other examples is like I'm obsessed with uh these random like YouTube building videos where some like nutcase like convinces his wife or whatever that they're gonna like build a cabin out in the woods or whatever and he has no concern she doesn't no construction experience and he like does it and it's awesome more like you know whatever those those things are what inspires me not because of the like singular genius because of just like the doggedness of getting the job done and also like the sheer idiocy of being like yeah I've never done this before I don't even know what the music industry is but I'm just gonna like do this album and toil away at it for like eight years and hold myself to an incredibly high standard and like you know create something from scratch and I think why that's important to me is all of what we're doing is incredibly hard but it's not that hard and the way we build credentialism into our society is like really bad because it's like most the barrier to entry to doing something amazing is like psychological and I try and tell people like constantly as much as I can like no I'm a trust me like this is hard but mostly most of the trick is being able to take the emotional pain of just like hitting the wall with a sledgehammer until it breaks down you know and that's not what we teach people we teach people like you have to have this degree or you have to have this like you have to be born a certain way or whatever and like 99 of the time except for like Advanced maths like it's just not true you just have to be willing to like you know get after it and be truthful to yourself and like take good feedback and then like run at it so yeah examples like that are are really inspiring and those are the people that I look up to versus like hey you're this amazing entrepreneur that's had this massive success for one reason or another yeah it's like perseverance instead of getting it right the first time which is generally what we're taught like getting a on the 10 test instead of like take the test 10 times but Ace it by the end and then really understand the material and it also reminds me of that famous Steve Jobs quote it's my favorite one and I'm totally gonna butcher it but it's something along the lines of everything that is built around us has been built by people no smarter than you and so I think that's a wonderful place to end off on Chris is there somewhere that you'd like to direct people how do they find out more about Hadrian what you're working on or anything that we've talked about today yeah you can follow me on Twitter at 2112 power and if you want to come work for us and manufacture the future you can email us at jobs at hadrian.co awesome well thanks for doing this I appreciate it it's great thanks for listening to the a16z podcast if you like this episode don't forget to subscribe here on YouTube to get our exclusive video content we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: a16z

Views: 12,247

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Id: LVthhttRyso

Length: 79min 30sec (4770 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022