AI Summary
5 min readChris Power, an Australian accountant and lawyer turned tech entrepreneur, moved to San Francisco in 2020 with a macro thesis: the United States had hollowed out its industrial base, and a great power conflict with China would expose the fragility. He landed in a communal house called the Embassy, met the founders of Planet Labs, and spent a year figuring out the right angle of attack. The result was Hadrian, a company that uses software and automation to replace the aging, retiring mom-and-pop machine shops that supply critical parts to aerospace and defense primes like SpaceX and Lockheed. This summary covers how he diagnosed the problem, what he built to solve it, and what he thinks it will take to reindustrialize America.
The Diagnosis: A Hollowed-Out Industrial Base
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of Core Memory
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **The Crisis Chris Power Set Out to Solve** - Ashley Vance introduces Chris Power and his thesis: mom-and-pop aerospace/defense shops are retiring with no successors, threatening U.S. manufacturing, and Power plans to fix it with software and automation.
- 2 (02:58) **From a Bar Napkin Idea to Hadrian** - Power recounts the earliest conversation with Vance about the idea, his background as an accountant/lawyer in Australia, and the accidental path that landed him in a San Francisco communal house.
- 3 (08:55) **The Macroeconomic Thesis: Why Manufacturing Is Broken** - Power explains the historical pattern of great powers outsourcing industry and the specific U.S. crisis of an aging, unsystematized supplier base for aerospace and defense.
- 4 (14:14) **The Two-Pronged Problem: Suppliers and Primes** - Power details the dual crisis of the aging supplier base and the lack of internal production expertise at primes, exacerbated by the Ukraine war exposing inventory depletion.
- 5 (16:10) **The Scale of Hadrian's Operation** - Power gives a tour of the current factory footprint, revealing the speed of build-out: three main factories, with a new Arizona facility four times the size of the current one, ramped in six months.
- 6 (19:52) **How Hadrian Automates the Craft** - Power breaks down the six-part software stack that captures expert knowledge and replaces the need for decades of experience, turning operators into 10x more efficient workers trainable in 30 days.
- 7 (24:49) **From Parts to Full Products: The "Factories as a Service" Model** - Power explains the strategy of mastering eight discrete manufacturing types to offer full-product assembly, aiming to solve the entire production bottleneck for defense customers.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
A few years ago, I was lunching with a young Australian man who told me he hoped to modernize manufacturing in America. This man seemed enthusiastic and ambitious, but I must confess to holding some serious doubts about the dramatic scope of his plans and his ability to pull them off.
This man was Chris Power, and, well, he did the thing. He’s the founder and CEO of Hadrian, which has a growing empire of mega factories packed full of machines that cut, bend and weld metal. Hadrian has become a workhorse for defense and aerospace and other big industries. It has used software to make it easier for people to control many machines at once and to keep track of the manufacturing process in a bid to add more quality control to industry.
Power has become one of the main players in the Reindustrialization movement and one of its more direct and critical voices.
We did this interview at Hadrian’s headquarters in Los Angeles with factories humming behind us, and we’ll have a video with all the machines soon on our YouTube channel. Chris and I get into his history, Hadrian’s history and the state of American manufacturing.
To celebrate AMERICAN MANUFACTURING and AMERICA and THE WORLD CUP and BEING SUBJECTED TO A BROKEN HEALTH INSURANCE SYSTEM, we’re offering a magnificent 4th of July merch SALE, SALE, SALE. Come get 30 percent off Core Memory’s hats, shirts and hoodies by using the promo code AMERICAAA right here.
OUR SPONSORS
SendCutSend
You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.
Brex
The Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
Timestamps (they link out to YouTube)
00:00 Intro
04:07 From M
More from this podcast
Core Memory →