#15 - Chris Power, Founder & CEO of Hadrian

Podcast: Relentless
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 2537s
URL: https://anchor.fm/s/e402cdc8/podcast/play/90222508/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2024-7-8%2F384510366-44100-2-3fbc35c9de28f.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-03 01:45:13

Facebook went public, and I remember Googling what is an IPO, literally had no idea. I remember Googling what is an IPO because it had gone up massively, and I was like, wow, how do I invest in IPOs? I'm deadly serious. And then I realized the CEO was like 26, and I was like, what am I doing? And that's when the ambition really kicked in, because I just like, no one had told me that that was possible. Hello, I'm Tim Morris. It is my conversation with Chris Power, the founder of Hadrian. I hope you enjoy. What were you like, what were you like as a kid before you even went to college? Oh, super weird, shut-in. As much as you're a musician, the fact kid away is feelings. Other than that, I pretty much kept my head down. I didn't really call it any trouble. Yeah, pretty normal. Did you do anything unusual? Like you said, the musician, what was that? So my grandmother is a French artist, conservatory, train, conservators. So I started learning music when I was two. So I think I'm good at four instruments, bad at a mother four. And then nothing unusual, man. I mostly just worked at my job at blockbuster, played video games and kept my head down. Okay, how did you decide to do accounting versus like of all things? Oh, that is actually really easy answer. So Australia is equivalent of like what score do you have to get into college? What was it called in America? Probably like SAT score. Yeah, so the SAT equivalent was called something. And someone had rigged up this thing called intercalc. So in Australia, we call it an interscore. So it's like, you know, between, if you get a 50 year like failing, if you're in like 99.9, you get medicine. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. And if you don't know what to do in Australia, you go into a commerce or business degree and then you pick your majors. And I figured out that getting into the best university, which I went into would take a, on the rolling average would take a 91 antiscore. Uh-huh. And all the subjects are weighted on difficulty. So if you get an A in science, it's better than an A in English. That's what it's stuff. So I looked at how I was doing throughout the year. I knew I could like get A's in some stuff falling asleep. I hated chemistry. Uh, so I basically like just gamed it out and got got within like point half a percentage point of the interscore that I wanted. But it's really because that nobody would all do it again. I couldn't be bothered doing chemistry and stuff. So I just like gained it and then just got into university. What was your, what was your favorite like subject during that time? You hated chemistry. What did you like? Math mostly because, math mostly because, uh, with a great classroom or mostly just throwing books out the window. Um, I really liked music theory actually. Uh, and then what else do they study? Not, not much else. Oh, an IT, IT was good. IT was good. IT was good. And then I quite liked accounting and finance, which we did in high school. But yeah, I, yeah. Did you do anything in college, like outside of college, like projects? No, mostly just drinking, just mostly drinking. Yeah. Okay, how did, how did you end up like becoming ambitious? So, so the real story is that, uh, in the second year of university, I started failing classes because I was bored. Yeah, because you, it's like 12 hours a week, contact hours. So I was mostly running around as the treasurer of the commerce society, throwing parties and doing all, like interesting stuff. It was great. Um, and then I'm a big procrastinator, so I just figured, well, I think I can coast through this. I'll, um, I'd interviewed a PWC for like an early internship and realized I didn't want to do it. So I decided that the only way to get through university without failing was to just get a full-time job and not tell anybody, shop to zero classes and then just work at nine. And so that's what I did. So I got a retail store job from nine to five in the Melbourne city, and then I studied at night. Um, and then six months into that, six months into that retail store job, uh, had lunch with the owners and the owners basically said, do you realize that 90% of our business revenue is on e-commerce. The retail store is just a holdover for when we bought, they required this business. Do you want to come, you've somehow tripled the sales in the retail store and everyone loves you? Do you want to come help run the e-commerce business? Yeah, so I was like, sure, it sounds great. Um, so I started to help run the e-commerce business. And then at some point, what some point while I was doing that, you know, I started talking at conferences, I started like getting my head up and like, well, it's like a whole thing that you can do that's not work for someone. And I remember the moment was actually Facebook went public. It's like 2012. Facebook went public and I remember Googling what is an IPO, literally had no idea. I remember Googling what is an IPO because it had gone up massively and I was like, wow, how do I invest in IPO? I'm deadly serious. And then I realized the CEO was like 26. And I was like, what am I doing? And that's when the ambition really kicked you because I just like, no one had told me that that was possible. No one had told you that you could be ambitious, no one had told you that you could like, don't know what it was like. Obviously it was possible. I was like, okay, like, okay, what are we doing here? But yeah, I remember the day I googled what is my IPO? Yeah. Okay, so you, like, let's actually go back a little bit. You went in, you joined this like retail store. What was the base of revenue that you went from, that to 3X in a couple of months? Ah, I have no idea. Okay. I wasn't even paying attention. I was just, I love video games. I was just talking to people. I was writing email copy. Was this like GameStop for Australia or something? No, it was literally a small eB games in Australia as the GameStop competitor. This was the last remaining independent video game store in Australia. Well, okay. How did you end up, how did you end up like working at Splash Retail and why did you? So that was that kind of? That was Splash Retail. Yeah. Okay. Why did you end up leaving there? I, so we'd started three business units. And it started doing a lot of enterprise partnerships. It was going really well. And then I think I just got itchy feet. With some really interesting working capital issues. So what do you think about that? One of my biggest business lines was power tools. And basically we needed to buy so many power tools on such a long lead time to keep up with demand like the working capital cycle. Like, there was nothing wrong with it. And then I've been there for three years and wanted to do something else. And I'd started talking to friends about what businesses can we start and stuff like that. So I wasn't really like, there was anything that I wanted to jump to. I was like, I'm gonna give myself three months to like, figure out what the next thing is. Yeah. What did you do during that three months? Probably just talk to people. Yeah, nothing, nothing super intentional. I was way down the back there. Yeah. I mean, you later said that you basically for the private equity fund or whatever you're just like calling hundreds or doing like hundreds of calls every single day. And I was like, this is a very, but not many people do that. When they're coming up with ideas and stuff. So how did you end up working at catch of the day? So we were a supply to them. Okay. And when when people realized that the, that I would like, had nothing to do, had coffee with one of the founders and he's like, look, I got a couple of ideas. You want to come and then just start it. Under our banner. I was like, sure. And then we did it. Yeah, what was what was it like there? What did you do? So I helped out in a bunch of places. Really, we built the technology and launched it for daily deals, for music books and games, digital downloads. This is pretty Shopify, pre, this is like in the early days of iTunes. Yeah. And yeah, launched that, the, it worked. We sold 1,000, 1,000, 1,000, 1,000 of the units, like albums for a dollar clicked to download. The, it was a really, really good add-on to their existing business, but the volume was so small because you're selling it. Hey, some album exists for $20. You can download it for a dollar. And it was just like was never gonna scale with the population of Australia. Yeah. Because you were $2 skew costs or something like that. And then helped out with a bunch of like general, general e-commerce things along the side. And yeah, but that was, that was a practicing. Yeah. How did you decide to come to the US? That was really easy. So as running a software company, we did work for scheduling in Australia. And through that, I'd gotten really good at building a product and like implementing software inside factories, distribution centers, stuff like that. Like most of sales was technical engineering, product implementation. And I was pretty burnt out. So, and what I realized was that one, business was like good, but it wasn't ever gonna be like something that I wanted to spend the next decade on. And secondly, I'd realized I was like, I think I was like 26. And truly my logic was, at some point, I'm gonna want to settle down again married. And if I don't do it now, I'm never gonna escape. Australia. So I was like, I gotta do it now. And that was the logic. Yeah. And you came to the US and then how did you end up deciding to like start? Because I kind of feel like you had a very interesting learning curve. You said that you didn't do a whole lot when you were a kid and then you end up, you seem like you have a very thoughtful process for building this company and thinking long-term and having a huge ambition. And that seems slightly unusual to me. That like you didn't do a bunch of crazy stuff and then just like naturally come into this and feel stuff. I think in some ways I'm making it for last time. Okay. Moving to the US, so, okay, there's a couple of things. One is why manufacturing, why software and manufacturing. Yeah. And that is very a kind of tealian, Straussian thesis, which is there is never, no one's ever figured out how to get software and manufacturing. I think I have a unique insight because you have to vertically integrate software in manufacturing to build the rights for. And all your competitors are going to be running around on spreadsheets and you have a laser gun. So why would I sell, oh, and I was really frustrated at Intel selling like half a million dollar a year, SaaS contracts when I was optimizing these companies that would save like 20 million dollars a year. Yeah. I was like, why don't I just be the company? That's, yeah, being optimized, yeah. Being optimized. So that was the core vertical integration thesis. And then because I'm not an actually trained engineer, I never wanted to compete with Silicon Valley, like Palantir or Open AI, so it's like, well, I will just go compete over here, whether it is no software. Now, from an American perspective, basically, because Australia has a very small population, it became obvious to me why no good startups come out of Australia. And it's basically because there are no early adopters. So what you need to do with early adopters is like, find someone who has a big enough problem that they will end to use your garbage software for a long time and it eventually gets good. And then you get your, the rest of the curve, right? The end of early adopters for any market you could think of in America is like 100,000 companies. The end of early adopters in Australia for like, say, a retail. Yep. There might be 0.1. Why do you think that is? Because of the population. It's just not enough people. No, so I'll give you an example. There are probably 500 retailers in Texas with over 1,000 employees. There are probably five retailers in all of Australia with over 1,000 employees. So like the number of companies that you can potentially in that early adopter segment is potentially zero. And of a big student of history, I'd be like Macar, I'm a hobby Macar economist. So the first thing you do is get out of the small shitty market, which means you really go to China or the US. This is literally my thought process. Yep. So I'm a big like fourth-turning guy and I'm a big like Radelia Macar guy. My favorite books that buy bearings are the gates, not like software books. What do you actually like about that? So I saw you say something about fourth-turning. What about that book specifically like inspired you or whatever? I've always had this belief that if you're smart enough and thoughtful enough, you can write your own destiny and you wanna surf the biggest way of possible, right? So you can either work really hard at something that is a decade or multi-degeted long thesis or you can work really hard at something where like the customers aren't quite ready or the market just sucks, right? And the market for Antos sucked. Uh, mostly because it was already saturated, we were behind competitors, right? So I wanted to be so far ahead of anybody else that even if I executed like crap, the way it's still the way it's so big, you're just surfing. Correct, yeah. So the first thing is both the big market, China or the US. And we really start thinking about it and you read the fourth-turning and you think about interest rate cycles. Roughly every 120 years, there's a reserve of current stable changes. Yep. Now, the longer you go back in history when basically there is a sine wave of civilizational growth that it collapses, which matches the market, like it's many are in depression except that a country scale. Those cycles get shorter when information travels between humans faster. So basically, you know, the printing press, it's like 500 years, 10,000 years for Babylon because no one's communicating, right? Now the cycles are shorter and the sine wave because of these things. I'd be 10 years. 15 years. Good friend Sean Lennahan from Flexpoor. This is like the internet theory of time, which is basically time is just human emotions as time compresses, right? So anyway, became obvious to me that China's rising power, America's the failing power, that all the signs are there, decadent culture, inflationary events, degradation of like core industry, blah, blah, blah. You can see the signs of love in the place, China's going like this. So the correct the correct decision to make with my brain, which is like macroeconomics is like go to China because in your auto win, right? The difficulty though is that the CCP is like pure evil. And so the literal choice I was thinking through and made was what do I have to believe to believe that America can like maintain Pax America, right? And basically, so before I went over to the US, my assumptions were basically, if I'm correct about this civilizational theory, then core industry is going to be decimated. And there's a number of other dynamics that play into this, like actually in a hyper and inflectionary environment, you want to be in a CapEx heavy business because debt becomes an asset. So it just becomes, it starts becoming cheaper and cheaper. Yeah, so basically correct. So basically what I said was, if I'm correct, what do I have to see on the ground floor to believe my own thesis? So what I went looking for is a decimated manufacturing base and I found it. So my first six week of the US was about three weeks, in San Francisco, three weeks in Texas, visiting as many manufacturers as I possibly could and just talking to people about the problem. And I discovered it was way worse than I thought. But then you have to answer the question was like, what do you have to believe that leads you to believe that you can tilt the arc of history, right? Because the US has to win. And by the way, the reason why the US has to win is because there are no continents to expand to. There are no more fractals for humans to experiment with coordination systems based. That's all the countries. In America was the last experiment. And with AI rising, climate change, basically, I believe that all of this is coming to the point of which system and culture wins the world government and then it's a space, right? So my belief is that last time this happened, it's like the Dutch to the British, to the American Empire, great trades all through. This one is probably the last trade we get for a very long time. For a very, very, very long time. And I believe this one will bake the soil system as well. And I'll tell you what, is when you look at how Polynesian tribes jump from island to island and what religion spreads, there's always a kind of leverage point. And the way the islands are structured is basically, there's like a island here that's very far from like the big continent. And then there's hundreds of other islands, which are very prosperous, but it's basically like getting the first ones really hard and then it spreads. And it's obvious from the way humans, human cultures and religions and political systems kind of replicate is whichever one gets on the beach head first replicates. So in terms of space and soil system, the moon is the off because of the four pillars of light and hydrogen, oxygen and sunlight, blah, blah, blah. You can build rocket fuel, which solves a Delta V problem. But basically, it is a fucking bomb rush to monopolize the moon, because that is the tipping off point for everything else. So if we lose this one, the time window is such that you probably lose the soil system and then fucking calmness wins space. I'm dead serious. Oh, I totally agree with you, yes. So coming back, CCP super evil, I chemically castrate. I mean, moons are moving and immigrants every year. It's horrible. I truly believe they've infected big sways of the political system in DC through nonprofits. It's very obvious that most of the ESG stuff is just CCP driven. The fentanyl crisis since San Francisco is just revenge for the British Open Crisis. Like this is all just because their language is on a longer time series, they just play a thousand year games and we're idiots and we play four-year games. All of this has been bringing in from the start. They're coming from the whole thing. So what do you have to believe to believe you can do something that's never been done before which is basically break the fourth term. Yep. So the one thing is is China has about 30 to 40 years. So it's very hard to believe that you can arrest population decline, population growth. That is just, you know, however, because G is old and because of the one child policy, their demographics are going to shift in about 30 to 40 years where they will halve their working male population. The population is going to get hard. Much easy to believe that we can save it off for 30 to 40 years and then they can try again a thousand years because their population is fucked. And India is like two hundred years behind the communist in Europe of regulated the self-deaf Japan is doing nothing. We win. Much easy to believe how do we extend for 40 years back to Americana and not break this hundred year Brazil of Guarantee Cycle which no one has ever done in history before. Then the real question is, how do you fix what is the thing that's broken about American culture and how do you fix it? So, okay, so let me go back a step. The first thing that matters is what wins and prevents wars is not who has the fanciest drone or fighter jet. It's just who has the most raw production output? Just throw more shit at the other guy. This is how we won more war too. This is how actually all wars have been won. It's iteration speed and production capacity. We've completely decimated our industrial base because we've basically over-financialized it and outsourced everything. Much like a startup who starts looking at spreadsheets instead of building more product, it's the same thing. So anyway, the point behind all of this is hatred is an effort basically to reverse the hundred and twenty year forth turning cycle primarily so that the CCP doesn't end up owning the war government. That is the entire purpose of this company. Then one of the interesting of things learned about culture and manufacturing is how do you solve this multi-generational kind of decadent structure, right? There are only two ways that have ever been solved in civilizations before. One is martial doctrine, which is you make these senators' sons kill barbarians on the front and then they make really good decisions when they are senators. You make the elites go back down. Yeah, like fight. Because no one learns the lessons of what it... Civilization of decline is basically a degradation of values that made you see that in the first place they get forgotten because everything's too easy and then you're fucked. Because you're writing the co-tales of success and then but the engine on the back is not turning anymore. The second way is religion. Religion is a very good programming methodology to do multi-generational stories that bake in values through stories that last a long, long time. Long-term thinking. The Jews are incredibly good at this. So one of the things that happened to the USC in the 70s and 80s when we threw religion out for science is that we threw the baby out with the bath water. And we actually accelerated, and this is actually what happens is secularism, crimes, jury, success because families are about to march, blah, blah. It always happens. The interesting thing about manufacturing is, I think it is, the way I would frame it is that it was never nixin' mostly hippies which was Apollo and Dionysus. That was a complete nix frang, which is kind of, you know, you gotta work with your party. So that we really broke when the 70s called fully because it should have been nixin' and the hippies which is kind of work hard, play hard. And the misreading of that is that the Apollonian thing used to all party but you do it in a intentional way. So things like the winter solstice are actually intentional quarterly structures to keep society running, huh? Because it is a reminder that, so society works because you're the security guard and I'm the guy that makes bread. And in a small town, if either of us don't do our job properly, like we're back to fighting each other for food, but at some point society breaks down unless we can all party once games off, then we get back together, right? So the correct reading of Apollo Dionysus is actually serious on serious, okay? And the entire problem with America is that we're not a serious country anymore because no one's serious because we don't have to be serious because nothing matters. Because there are no consequences because we're so successful. That is the entire problem. Now the interesting thing about manufacturing is it is the closest thing to war that is non-violent as an industry. So what you lose when you remove your manufacturing is you also lose a cultural engine that produces serious people because the way you train serious people is having them as adjacent as possible to reality so that they can never kid themselves that the roads are gonna get paved. Yeah. So the reason why we see a lot of software engineers building dumb stuff is because they don't have to be serious because they're building on layers of abstractive society. They just assume that there's a guy that's gonna fix the plumbing, right? Finance, he's actually, you know, when we remove the gold standard, actually that was just finance is now un-serious, right? This is how, this is how it goes. The interesting thing about manufacturing is because you get slapped in the face every single day, you can't lie to yourself like it works or it doesn't work or the rules don't apply like most of high finance right now the rules no longer apply but it still somehow works. So one of my things about manufacturing and fixing American cultures not only do we lose a production capacity, it's there. We remove a core engine that produces serious people and we move the seriousness out. So that is a long way. So we export it serious in it, right? Basically, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause either it's religion, martial doctrine or core industry where, you know, if you don't make the thing that is not good and you can't lie to yourself about it, right? Yeah. It's either there or it doesn't. It's either there or it isn't. So mostly everyone's like what happened in 1971 or actually like we did three things. One is we removed the draft, we made a portion legal and we removed the gold standard. And we broke all the walls. And now we're here. So that was a long way to keep saying like, that's the entire thing. Basically, it's the thought process. So how did I think this through? How did I get here? This is kind of the point, right? And then yeah, when you see the demographics internally to manufacturing such that like everyone is in there, very late 50s, early 60s, then the long short trade has to play out over a decade where if you're the only one that can produce skilled labor for a core critical industry and the rest of the skilled labor is going away because of pure demographics. Cause we told all the kids in the 80s and not as a manufacturing or shit and you have to get a four-year journalism degree, then it should play out, right? Now then you get slapped in the face when you start executing a black holy fuck how do you actually do it? Which is a whole nother kettle of fish. But before we started, that was the thought process. Truly. Yeah. Okay, what other like civilization to have you studied? So you say you're a student of history, what's your favorite historical context of what's happening? Probably why my Germany. Okay. And the interesting thing there is that, you know, it's like what are the preconditions for tyranny basically? And there's, when you get hyperinflation and so I believe finance is mostly a fuzzy map of human emotions. So when you get hyperinflation and a recession at the same time, people are very angry, right? But it's a frustrating anger. It's not like you punch me in the face. It's just like, man, shit is just getting harder. I'm getting beaten down all the time. Everyone gets depressed like, you know, it's just very hard on the population. And actually the reason why normally when you have hyperinflation and recession generates a war is because the elites have to point at a bad guy because otherwise they've lost the population because things are so bad. Like lost the narrative. And the fury is there waiting for something to point to. Because everyone's already at boiling point because things are just really hard. Now, the interesting thing is that I think everyone knows the story of why my Germany where the financial situation led to the frustration in the population that led to the ability for Hitler to rise. And then it was just who we're going to point out return to the greatness of, you know, return to the greatest Germany. What people miss though is that the tinderbox for that was actually the decadent culture of the elites. So, you know, the first book burning was actually at the, like a university of sexology or something like that, sexual studies. And have you ever seen the movie Cabaret with Liza Manelli? I think so, yeah. It is quite literally about the decadent of the elites and why my German. And the tinderbox for the first book burning that was the precursor to the Nazi book burning is actually at a university that was studying, like, sexual proclivities. But the actual tinderbox was a combination of inflation in recession and the elites parading around, like, you know, prime ministers openly sleeping with prostitutes. So, what happens is the elites are just saying to the people, don't worry, your life will be fine if you follow these hard working moral values and then very publicly they're behaving in the complete opposite. And then a very strong leader comes along saying, it is a return to the values that got us here and then the whole thing flips and then you've got, you know, kind of that Hitler situation, right? And the most interesting understudied thing about why my Germany is not inflation or the degradation of the currency or the racism that eventually existed there, it is the decadent culture of the elites, which caused Hitler to rise in the first place. So when you look around, what do you see? There's a very interesting question about where we're at today in the US. Yeah, do you think that, like, social media has an impact on, I guess, how people perceive? Of course. So the biggest thing with social media was not that information travels more fast. It's basically the hot girl in the village problem. Do you know this? No. It was a great study around how mating matching works in villages and now on the internet. The way it works now on the internet is that something like I'm going to get the numbers wrong, this is directly correct. 10 to 20 to sad of males, access, 90% of the females. This is what you get in cellism because it's just a mismatch because everyone can see the graph, right? The hot girl in the village problem is basically when you're in a village with no internet, you might be the hottest girl in the village and you might be a global max in the 10 and you're a local max in the 10. The guy that you end up dating might be a five, a 10 in the village but a global max in the five, hot girl in the village walks to the next town and goes, wow. Like, I'm the hottest girl in this village. And then the dating cycle breaks down, right? So the thing the internet does is basically, one is degrades getting information from your local community, family, church, school, sports team, where you know, you might have different opinions, but your echo chamber is with variable people in your community, right? So, and how this plays out is like, you might say something off-collar to your body that might eventually lead to racism but you go, hey man, that's like not cool. Like, don't do that, but it's checked. Yep. Whereas what the internet creates is pockets of these clusters of these arms running out and then like you're not like communicating with your church or your family, you're just like in this cluster of the internet where you believe this one insane thing. But it's the reverse of the hot girl and the village problem because now you're only seeing tens in that vector of your thought process. So it creates this cultural fragmentation against all the nasty stuff. And you also see, you have a much higher information stream of like people are doing better than me. I'm not happy with my job, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like humans are not objective. Rankers were relational rankers. So that's the biggest thing, right? All of the line from Warren Buffett where Charlie said apparently Warren would remind him regularly that the world runs on envy. I'm not 100% and then now it's an attack factor for the ZZP with through TikTok. So it's like, go away with that band. But yeah, I mean, that's the internet, yeah. Yeah, I'd be super curious. So I think that it's a huge part of your job and probably most of the people in Elscundo is storytelling and becoming like a really good storyteller for whatever mission you're on. How did you become a good storyteller? The real answer was, I'm an incredible introvert. OK. And so I had to get good at talking to people. And when you were not naturally good at something that you were forced to, so Australia is a very extroverted culture. That are really belonging to Australia. But when you have to, you get very good at it. So that's why. Was your, was the partying and stuff in college a like almost over optimizing for that, like trying to course correct introvert as a kid? Yeah. You call. OK. So tell me about like, who did you learn from and who were you? Like, I imagine you emulated some people for doing this. No, but what I did was pick up clues of what not to do and where the macrofelling nodes are. So, you know, very early on, the obvious thing to do was like, you live or die by how good of a recruit you are. So I just got good at recruiting. How did you do that? Just do it. Just recruit. Just do it. OK. Just get good at it. OK. I'm being serious. I know you are. How do you get good at basketball? I don't know. Shoot lots of shoots. Shoot lots of shoots. OK. And then I very deeply studied every single automation company that had tried to automate manufacturing was running a robotics company. And I figured out what they were doing wrong and then I did the opposite of what they were doing. Well, we're the biggest failure cases. Failure cases is not building full stack. Second failure case is entering a low margin market to start within the hopes that you get into a high margin market, which never happens. You get stuck. You get stuck in the low margin market. Maybe an equivalent of this is, you might make money selling ERP software to forge for 100 companies. It's very hard to get there. But you might make no money selling ERP software to consumers. But if you start there with the hopes that you get up, you actually learn the wrong product cost and you like it stuck. And then the third one was that many companies try either to automate everything and then launch or bullshit their way into it and hope that they can patch the automation in later. Or many companies actually say, it's actually a very elite cultural thing to do. It's a bit like private equity acquiring manufacturers, which is like, we know what we're doing, fuck you, you're all fired. The software equivalent of that is I have 50 PhDs and they're all smarter than a machine is because he looks dumb. I'm not going to hire anyone from the industry. I'm just going to try and automate with software. And the reason why that's wrong is because you learn the wrong lessons and you automate the wrong things and the automation doesn't work in the real world and you're convincing yourself a three of it well. So we just do the opposite of that. Yeah, did you have a situation? So I find it very interesting that you seem to be not only like testing, but also building at the same time. How did you come to the conclusion that that was the right strategy? So with large, operationally complicated companies, there are only two paths that have ever been tried. One is the, let's cook the technology, so it's perfect, test it to a small scale and then kind of operate from there. The problem with that is you usually run out of time because venture investors want you to grow and you never get the growth muscle and you're operating off the wrong signal. But the technology works. The other way to do it is basically the technology will come eventually. So you have a software team and an operations team and they're running like this. But it's a real cultural problem because the software and operations team are not tied enough together that you can basically have enough internal customers that trust what you're doing and enough context in the software engine is brain that you can actually upgrade your operations as your flying ship. And then it takes a long time to correct. And I would call that the like kind of blitz scaling subsidize operation and he's waiting for the technology to come model. This one is like the PhD model. What we were doing is smack bang in the middle. And the core point is that you have to start setting the expectation and the mode which is basically what major is really better is change management. Change management. Because we are continually upgrading operations and changing processes to keep it a bit or a bit better. There's a core rhythm that exists and none of that will pull that off before which is you can scale the ship while upgrading into the same time. Okay. That's the trick. That's the trick. Okay. How do you, how did you get your first like few customers for this? Because I imagine that you basically like pre-sold. No, you didn't. No, we just built it and what just kept going. Okay. And you said, in fact, we had built and beta tested the first factory and scaled this one like the building was being constructed while we were running out of money before the series day. Because I was just doing everything in parallel. You're doing everything in parallel. One thing that I really love that you said or you just mentioned at the dinner if you need to go is you said there's almost this dynamic of there's like customers, investors, and then employees. Oh, that's one of my ideas. Basically like you basically are doing this. How does that work? How did you come to that? Here's my thesis on what makes the difference between small business and Theranos. Is there a two curves and one is narrative and reality. If you do this, you're Theranos. If you do this, you're a small business. What? I think Elon is probably the best at it is this. Where you narrative reality, narrative reality, narrative reality. And they're like convergent divergent over time. Yes. And the important thing there is that you are competent enough to actually pull it off. Because if you're not competent enough to pull it off, then you become Theranos. That's the road trick. The rest of it is tactics. That's the trick. Yeah. Okay. How did you, like during the private equity part, you'd spent like six weeks basically just going to about his different manufacturers and just talking with them. What was like the biggest learnings that you had during that time? So the biggest learnings was a is very hard to upgrade brown field opera sheets and that you cannot automate manufacturing unless you simultaneously standardize the hardware. And that by simplifying the physical world, you can usually make the algorithms easier. So one of that is just practicality. So if you walk into a factory and there's 40 machines, but there's end of one of each of them, they all have different code running on them, every node in that relationship. The non-standardization creates a massive exploding in software complexity, so it's just impulsive. The second thing is one of the reasons why we're successful at automating things that other people aren't is because we simultaneously standardize the physical world in the hardware. So you're automating on top of something that is controllable. And often there is a very good trade-off by controlling something very small in the physical world that now makes your computer vision robotics an automated shield easier. And paralleling that is the important part. Interesting. Okay. What was like how do you decide, because this is not something, this is not a business where people just come into it knowing how to do it, I guess, how to manufacture, whatever, how do you decide how to hire people with the understanding that it's just a steep learning curve or a steep growth curve? It depends. For a lot of software engineering, it's like, can you handle complexity? Do you want to crank and you're very high clock speed? And are you an artist internally or do you care about the customer? And then are you basically willing to operate the factor yourself to a level where you do understand it so that you don't need a product matching? The rest of it is context clock speed, what have you done before? Like, some of our engineers build very large systems that company like StitchFix. Are they gonna write our deep tech automation? No. Are they some of the best engineers in the country? Yes, because they built big complex systems for it. Some of our deep tech engineers are great software engineers with a real trick is that they started off as mechanical engineers and then switched to software. Now, they're not great mechanical engineers, but they've got enough context to know most of it and then they just get off for it, so. Yep, mix and match. It's match. Okay, the final question, what is the hardest thing you've ever come? A Hadroner in general. In general. Hmm, that's a great question. The answer to that is rebuilding a life while operating without losing your head. Yeah. Rebuilding a life while operating without losing your head. Yeah. Can you explain that? So, most people barely survive startups, not to mention complex ones like this. The thing that I'm most lucky for or happy about is doing that in an environment where you're also starting from scratch with friends, community, everything simultaneously, so you have a noticeable system functionally because you don't know anyone. Because you're just coming to a new place. Yep, that's the... Everything else is just... How did you get through it? How did you overcome that? Oh, well... Because you can't just like call, you can't just call them... Pipe intolerance. Pipe intolerance. Did you learn that, or is it just a name? I think it's just a name. It's just a name. Nature, who knows? Nature, who knows? Yeah, okay. Okay, Chris, thank you. It's a pleasure, man, thanks a lot for this. Appreciate it.