Hadrian

“So, I'm excited about everything from Planet Labs that does commercial satellite imagery, to Neros, the drone company, to Hadrian that's doing AI manufacturing.”

“Even the basics, like some of the exquisite stuff can only be made in a certain state to feed the defense ecosystem because all the other states banned it or like they're literally in facilities that got certified 50 years ago and you could like, you literally…”

“We're gonna have visions and demos of the future from Sean Sankar from Palantir, Chris Power from Hadrian Jake from Gecko Lisa from AMD. We'll have Secretary Burgum speaking Secretary Rubio and a bunch of other secretaries speaking as well, which will be reall…”

“We just raised another two hundred sixty million dollars equity and factory financing. So Founders Fund and Lux led the round. So a hundred and ten million in new equity dollars as well as new investors like Altimeter.”

“And we also raised the rest of that two hundred sixty million dollars is factory financing from Morgan Stanley, which we're very appreciative of.”

“The whole company I think we're probably up to the 500 range which is good, but we're actually incredibly capital efficient so we have most of the prior round from the Series B still left in the bank”

“When we launched, ah, like the factory to all of our customers in January, we basically 10 X revenue in four quarters last year.”

“So actually we were done and closed within the round from starting to pitch to term sheets being signed or a deal done within, I think three weeks.”

“Our factory in LA, which is about a 100,000 square foot we basically filled it in a year from all that customer growth.”

“So we're launching factory three in Arizona, which will be up and running in Christmas. We're in July, we signed the lease a couple of weeks ago, so it'll take us six months from start to finish to have it up and running, which I think is really fast.”

“Our current ones look like data centers, the ones that we're going to launch for whole products look more like, you know, Tesla Model Three Gigafactory.”

“I would say we're serving currently the vast majority of hardware startups through our product for Atlas”

“I don't think there's going to be more SpaceX's. I don't think there's going to be more Andrews, you know, of like new defense primes or neo primes, and I don't think there's going to be more than a handful of large industrials companies.”

“The second thing is, I think it'll generate a bunch of great acquisitions for us. If any of them grow too fast in the category that we're going to enter, we have this phrase internally, which is we're either going to scoop them up, or we're going to bonk them.”

“So we're the only company that's actually generating labeled data that you can then train models around for advanced manufacturing in the US.”

“You know, we want to be close to a billion in top line by, like, 20, like, 20, 27.”

“We built a 100,000 square foot in LA, and then we're going to launch two new facilities next year, which are about half a million square foot each, and then we'll keep expanding to every state”

“Designed and launched the actual building and all the construction in three months, and then sat around waiting for permits and energy for six to nine months and probably had to put more documentation together to convince Southern California Edison to give me …”

“Three years ago for very young talent or software engineers, it was like convincing them that manufacturing or national security was incredibly important. And now I think if you're starting a startup, I think if you're a software engineer, actually most of wha…”

“No, we're lights out today. We were on 24 seven with a handful of really smart people running the fleet. The lights are on now cause we're all here. We're a 24 seven, seven day a week operation.”

“And 100% of our workforce that people have never set foot inside a factory before.”

“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.”

“80% of our processes were at that point where we're in Ghibli mode, one shot. Ah, 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 …”

“Because American manufacturing is largely regulated in ITAR, there is no training data on the internet. So 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 th…”

“For a lot of the newer entrants or for new programs, we are becoming a, like, co-prime where the DoD Hey, John, you can definitely make 50 drones or 50 of this product, but we'd really love you to partner with Hadrian because we think they should build your Te…”

“We can only build so many factories a year. So the waiting list of everyone wants a Hadrian factory to deploy their products at scale in the US is growing quite a lot, which we're very lucky.”

“We don't buy for them because they got spyware all over this stuff.”

“We're in a really good position where we can eat those long continuing resolution cycles because our core business is growing like 10 times, you know, 10 X year on year.”

“So we have so much work to do here in the US that we'd love to support our allied partners in Europe and the, you know, the Middle East and countries like Japan re-industrialize as well. And they often have the same kind of core skilled labor problem. We've go…”

“Similarly, in 20, 21, I only made one investment the whole year this company Hadrian. And why is that? Well, I just didn't find any companies that met my criteria.”

“Members include Palantir, Eight VC, Y Combinator, Hadrian, Allen Control Systems, and many more.”

“We're a capex-heavy business. So we like to spend debt instead of venture dollars on factory equipment.”

“The only way to produce that is that you run a manufacturing company with a vertically integrated software and robotics team so that you actually build the right product.”

“Many operationally heavy companies fail at this at scale because they end up having 2000 employees and 500 software engineers in their operations team and a bunch of product managers in the middle where You scope something out. It takes nine months to build it…”

“And we are never going to be like fully, fully automated. Cause like Tesla tried to do this. SpaceX tried to do this. It's just like a bad idea. Cause you build this inflexible system. It's just super brittle.”

“90% of our people now that we recruit have never set foot inside a factory.”

“From a workforce and training piece, we can train and onboard them in 20 to 30 days from their Home Depot, their bus driver, literally any background.”

“The best engineers, frankly, just want two things. One is like three things. Work with other fantastic engineers. Work on really hard engineering problems that actually create business value and then have as few product managers as humanly possible.”

“Everyone at Adrian bar a handful are like fully onsite. Writing software on the factory floor hand in hand with operations.”

“The off switch can't be digital. And sometimes the best solution is just put an eight-bit drill through a hard drive.”

“And to do the amount of hiring, scaling, and execution that we need to do is like, 40% chance it works, 60% we're having this conversation in like 18 months, and like, company, company no longer works.”

“Hadrian's got like 70% gross margins and they're growing in the top three percent of all SaaS companies”

“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 scaffolding that if they just kind of follow the instructions, …”

“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 tier of equity as the best software engineers have, you know every technician in Hadrian, whether you're packing boxes or whe…”

“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 it's forced to do that job every couple of weeks and like relearn the real Real user pain is, is an…”

“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…”

“No factory on the planet has observability. So you can't simply, and maybe like Foxconn does but you can't simply throw up in 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…”

“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.”

“I think the broad risk of Hadrian is that it's just unbelievably complicated, and if one piece doesn't work, then the whole thing doesn't work.”

“You don't need a hardware or manufacturing background to come into a business like Hadrian or SpaceX or Anduril to be able to, you know, be a competitive candidate or create value, you know, with your software skills.”

“It's going to be amazing in a couple of years to see, you know, a bunch of like engineering grads you know, tooling around at their garage and like, Seeing, seeing Google style startups happen without forty million dollars in funding and just to get off the gr…”

“So he raised a small private equity fund and talked to a bunch of different shops... Cause even if you are to try to bring software into these existing shops, it's almost impossible from a technical perspective. Like there's not much that can be done unless yo…”