YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Power

lines on the record: 75
first: 2022-11-17
most recent: 2022-11-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter, 2112 Power. And if you want to come work for us and manufacture the future, you can email us at jobs at adrian.co.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of what we're doing is incredibly hard, but it's not that hard. And the way we've built credentialism into our society is like really bad because it's like most of 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 moron. Trust me. This is hard. But most of the trick is being able to take the emotional pain of just hitting the wall with a sled shammer until it breaks down. And that's not what we teach people. We teach people. You have to have this degree or you have to be born a certain way or whatever. And like 99% of the time, except for like advanced maths, that's just not true. You just have to be willing to 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 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.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like cattle mill of people coming out of education and going and clicking butts on computers at Google or Goldman Sachs or whatever. We've still got this incredible ability to go off and do random things. Other examples is like I'm obsessed with these random YouTube building videos where some like nutcase convinces his wife or whatever that they're going to like build a cabin out in the woods or whatever and he has no construction experience and he like does it and it's awesome. 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. I'm just going to like do this album and toil away at it for like eight years and hold myself to an incredibly high standard and like create something from scratch. And I think why that's important to me is”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What really inspires me is musicians that tool away by themselves in bedrooms or caves for like five years and then produce these works of art that are orders of magnitudes 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 an Area rock band, it was like one guy that not only wrote the music, wrote the albums, played all the instruments, but then half of the recording equipment he custom built himself 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, I am nothing without the team, but it's because it's a reminder that these mythical heroes exist and like people from non-college educated backgrounds or like completely outside the system are still there, are still there toiling away and like humanity is still got it.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, yeah, I mean, like, apart from helping the defense run scale and, you know, buttingheads of the CCP, it's going to be amazing in a couple of years to see a bunch of engineering grads tolling around of their garage and seeing Google-style startups happen without $40 million in funding 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 get ourselves closer and closer to the Jetsons flying car future versus getting stuck where we are today.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Automate this so much that it's basically like flicking the switch on AWS and spinning up a new East Coast instance and starting 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 entrants 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 rapidly iterate on whatever they want. And all of a sudden we see this 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”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Madness, and then amazing things come out of it. And who knows what they are? But who could have predicted that downstream of Microsoft Azure is like Dole E2? I don't know. But without that compute later existing, none of that would exist. So who knows? Self-driving.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the analogy I use is for software engineering, we have so many incredible software engineers and software products, 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 $100. Because that infrastructure exists, you get this Camdrian explosion of randomness. And firstly, the people that exist in the ecosystem can get 100 more tries at building something incredible and then new people come into the ecosystem because the cost of entry is so low, the cost of experimentation is so low that you get more flood of talent and randomness. So who knows what comes out of it, but it's obviously true that if you have this cheap infrastructure layer that enables rapid iteration and lower barrier cost to do an experiment or to launch a product, you get this Cambridge explosion of like,”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teaching kids things 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 think that potentially it's something in pharma where so much of the cancer or genetic research can only be performed or can be performed far, far far better in terms of materials or chemical research in space. And I think if there's a major pharma breakthrough where it's like, oh, we cured 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 app. But I think the rest of it's all infrastructure. And yeah, so pharma would be a really amazing one. And I can see like a core kind of consumer link to where they really like viscerally feel the impact.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Google Maps or Apple Maps. It's like it's recognizable by a consumer and they kind of get it very viscerally. I think I don't think there's a killer app and I don't think there will be because it's like, you know, does your average consumer know about AWS? Not really 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 world countries having access to the internet the first time through things like Starlink, which will be really incredible for those parts of the earth, which will become like a killer app because it's consumer focused. It's clearly linked to space, like it's cool, it has real benefits in terms of education.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 vs degrowth. And I think the case for space is it 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 going to 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 going to get blown past by everyone else. And I just wish people would frame the problem correctly. It's growth versus degrowth. There is no like economic argument. You're either for humanity isn't expansive moral species or you're against it and you want to like corral us in this bubble where we're just going to compound the problems. I think it's ridiculous.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capitalism, you know, it's all a poor abstraction over growth versus degrowth. And ultimately, like you've got to be excited 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. But basically it comes down to expansion or population control. You know, like at a certain point, it all comes down to either going to cut down trees or going to mine asteroids. Okay, don't want to cut down trees. That makes sense. So let's go, you know, go do something cooler and more sustainable a way to do that. But the third option of stretching resources and 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 net, net is way, way, way less morally and economically impactful than solar panels where 90% of the solar panels”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that rewards people nonlinearly, the people who are reaching towards that future. And 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 resources are going to die out. And we have kind of one shot in the next couple of decades to expand so that we can get new resources and make ourselves more efficient and start solving all these problems. 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 shit and like grow as fast as possible and see what's out there? Or do you want to sit there twilving your thumbs because you're scared? And that is the eternal growth versus degrowth by it. And everything that we see in the media, whether it's legacy media or politics or wars or communism versus capitalism or crony capitalism versus true kind of junk.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead of inventing the toilet. And all these people out there who are like, Stretching towards the future, we need to concentrate on the problems of today. And what people don't realize is that historically throughout humanity,”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all that other stuff. But all of that is an abstraction of why Columbus, like why go jump on a city raft and go look at a new island in Polynesia as like a tribal leader. Like in some ways, it's manifest destiny. Like humans are able 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. 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 a planet to go get new resources so we can continue this magical species-wide 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 continue to shoot in a hole?”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to sell the startups at first and you want to hit that earlier dump 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 CollingBot's machine chart, but they're young enough from 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. So it's just your classic early adoptive problem. Then I think holistically is like why go to space at all? Like why put humanity's resources out there? And I think we could go through this argument of like, you know, spaces of warfighting domain, like you need observability of the planet to stop nuclear launches, so you need satellites, like GPS is a great example. We can go through all the time worn arguments that most of the medical advances on the planet have been downstream of NASA and the ISS and how that flows through society.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really short version is like Stripe doesn't get to sell to ATT until they sell to a bunch of white communities startups. And there's just a bunch of huge amounts of capital flowing into commercial space, which means there's a bunch of net new spend, and they're being run by 30-year-olds, not 50-year-olds, which”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rest, and then the expo machinists can go learn software engineering, or they can go learn harder and harder levels of machining, or they can just spend 100% of their time on 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 you don't ever have to do that again. And cool, go solve this other problem and figure out how to automate that, you know?”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great example. Is a HR rep to do that without rippling is 20, 40 hours, and you still need a HR rep to do that job, but it takes them 30 minutes and they're not filling out forms for like 40 hours a week and drinking a bottle of wine at night because they're filling out 40 hours or forms a week. And it's the same. It's like we're not replacing the human and machining. We're just like, hey, click three buttons, not click 20 dumb buttons where you do it a bajillion times a week and it's you know it's painful 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 BZ visa holders or whatever because it's all like workflow logic it's all about 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”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even integrating with the hardware, if the other type of software engineer that is okay with reverse engineering, some crappy API, which anyone from like a rippling, for example, has done with some crappy payroll API from the one vendor that 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. Don't get me wrong, but that you don't need a manufacturing background or aerospace background or aerospace background to kind of get in the mix and start adding a lot of value very quickly.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How many people Anvils, yeah, handful Factory talent is yes, we always need more people, but there's no 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 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 Andrell to be able to be a competitive candidate or create value with your software skills. A lot of what we're building looks and smells like enterprise SaaS except our customer is internal users, not external users. And even the detect side is very close to like if you're a developer that's been working on Unity and building video game geometry engines and stuff like that, that is very close to the software engineering we're doing internally.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the reality is it's everybody. I think if I had to wave my hand, I would say give me 100 software engineers that work at a startup. 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 manufacturing, what is aerospace engineering. So that would be the magic wand, which obviously doesn't exist.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whether it's an acquisition, it doesn't matter. There is now a clean funnel of which this can be done. And then in terms of training and reskilling, 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. Without building all of that from scratch, you never have that core of like, what does great look like? And then how can you merge people into that starting from a incredibly divergent hardware base and process base it's almost impossible to go in and clean that up both culturally and then just like systematically cool now you're doing 200 hardware integrations instead of three it's just like it's impossible you know”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can squeeze out some margin improvement, but you would never ever, ever get it to the point where it was a scalable system or it was repeatable enough that it was going to solve the problem at the kind of multi-billion dollar level that I don't want to solve the problem at. So that was the core reason why you have to build this from scratch hardware hand in hand with software hand in hand with processes 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 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 sort of transfer a legacy machine shops parts to Hadrian. There is a process, whether it's a new customer.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that you don't really learn until you're in the weeds is every piece of hardware variability, whether that's a different machine or a different cutting tool or a different vice or piece of work holding, every mu combination of those things that you add on to the kind of like the search space of the problem has a nonlinear impact on the software engineering complexity that you need to build to get to a 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 close enough to impossible that you can call it impossible.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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'll lose the magic, right? It starts can basically survive infinitely 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 versus how do we need to be disciplined around error reductions versus shooting ourselves on the foot.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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're behind the A-Pole and then customers AU. 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 really, really hard. And then 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 100 times that's not like a mistake. It's like, okay, now this has downstream impacts on schedule or 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. If 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”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 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. So the execution, you know, it's a complex coordination problem to take a teal meme. I think the second problem is as the business grows, the reality, the truth-seeking of like, is this automation possible within X timeframe and how we're planning headcount around that 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 the scaffolding in the process. But recruiting cycle of someone highly skilled, it might take three months. And if 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.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like calling Bob's machine shop three times a week, being like, Bob, have you put the butts on the machine yet and getting lied to? Or the aerospace engineers themselves 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 say we can let companies move 10x faster and lower their cost of manufacturing by 50%, I don't mean because we're cheaper. You can make a fighter jet in six months, not 12 months. And that's what makes it $150 million, not 300 million.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 flowing because they can't meet their order book, not because they're not working hard because the supply chain is a complete mess. The example I would give is like, you know, if you're a back-end software engineer and you weren't really sure where you could spin up a new like EC2 instance or not, and it might take three months, it might take a week, like 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 triddling your thumbs for three weeks because you're blocked on this core piece of infrastructure. So like imagine if there was no supply chain team and all these smart people could be doing more value added activity versus”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we say here is the date, it's reliable, everyone can compress their schedules around that reliability. And because manufacturing time is payroll cost, it's working capital of inventory, it's a build rate. If you just compress time in manufacturing, you just win on cost. So I think that most of the products will be able to drop their manufacturing costs by like 30 to 50 percent, not because of cheaper parts, but because of the reliability and the ability to compress schedule around that reliability. The second point is Ford notice of errors. So if you have a manufacturing line down because some vendor 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 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, they can't do anything, which is a huge cost in unto itself. And another CEO I was talking to last week basically”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if you skip a couple years ahead and like everything's being done through Hadrian, whether we're building it first party, but 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 an example, if you think about a gat chart to build a satellite and it takes 90 days and 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 GATT chart super tightly they're building it with about 50% of slack in it because 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”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what customers want is like, no, this is the platform as 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 we have to face up to the problem and we can't shoot parts, which seems crazy from everyone outside the industry, but it's like a magic wand to everybody else in the industry.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, like the world's best GATT chart, basically. To build that, though, you need the entire factory data system to get that data. Because if you just have the flexport strategy in the early days was build the customer portal first and then have a bunch of analysts just like typing and shipping and receiving data, you can't do that in manufacturing because it's so complicated and you have all these cultural 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 they got white line fever. They're going to get the job done. 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 even now we're sending like just excel spreadsheet summaries of like hey here's where item is production on and people are literally responding like this is amazing no one's ever given this data or whatever which is from from like software land is completely insane it would be like aws not having a dashboard of like what's your sla uptime which is insane um that's a really hard problem to solve”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, those are two good assumptions of potential Adrian customers. Secondly, in terms of the data, what all customers want is transparency and observability. So we had the CEO of a large defense prime in last week. His number one problem for their supply chain team is observability. And there's this metric that they use internally, which is average number of days before the part is meant to land their shipping and receiving facility that they get notified it's going to be late. And the average is one. So out of a six to 12 week purchase order or something like that, in terms of lead time, the average number of days that they're being notified that something's potentially off track is like basically the day that it's due. And this is a huge cultural problem. It's a huge observatory problem. So yeah, 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 pull it out of the fire.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 mass and people standing around trying to do time studies which have their own psychological flaws. 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 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 to point resources and where the pain is coming from.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then very quickly, the factory can go from smooth to chaos, and all of a sudden, 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 was actually the original root cause of why this issue came across here. And some of that is system, some of that is just really good. Foundational operational leadership and being intellectually honest enough to go like, yay, this is not like a paperwork problem. This is because the customer did this and we need to build a product around here because that's actually what prevents all these downstream issues. I think the other problem that people don't realize, and you were talking about marketing data, no factory on the planet has observability. So you can't simply, and maybe like Foxy.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a really good question. So there are 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 the factory and then being very prepared to rip up half your roadmap and realize that 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. 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 at 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,”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organization is incredibly hard problem. And even really simple things like making sure suffrage engineers are out on the factory floor as much as humanly possible, sitting behind operators and even doing their jobs where possible is incredibly important culturally and also just for 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 user pain 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 growing.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Serious issue, and that means a lot. The big problem to solve is continually reinforcing that everyone's working hard and there are different challenges. And I think people not from the software domain are like, why are you building this feature? And it's like, that is six months of two software engineers. And yes, I understand it's painful, but continually 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 or vice versa. So yeah, there are many, many challenges to getting that right. But the important thing is to like have some shared pain both ways and then make sure that the interaction is like operator gives feedback, software engineer picks it up but the really difficult part is like this is really painful for you but it's also six months of software engineering so it's getting deprioritized but like how do you make sure that is actually understood and communicated throughout a rapidly growing”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think, and again, we're not perfect, we're probably the only ones doing it at all, but many, many, many challenges. I think the first one is making sure that the software engineering team understands that the person that's operating is the golden goose and they are the customer and changing that mindset from, oh, there's this internal team that does some function, you know, it's like the customer service team at a SaaS startup, like who cares, you know, whatever. But if the SaaS customer screams and says we need this feature, like everyone knows to go and jump. So making sure we understand that our internal team is the customer of what we're building. And if they have one hour of downtime, it's a really serious problem. And also their happiness as a user is like a really serious problem. And that creates this interesting dynamic where you've got like technicians that are on hourly wage or whatever and there's a software engineer from Stripe running around being like, oh shit, this guy thinks my product is terrible. Like this is really, this is a really...”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To people, can you put your own job at risk? Whereas in software engineering, your salaried, you're in high demand, 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're just going to train someone up to replace you or the owner of the crappy factory that yells at you every day of why the part is light is no longer incentivized to give you a higher hourly wage you know”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineers have every technician in Hadrian, whether you're packing boxes or whether you're an absolute master of your trade and maybe you're one of the only 20 people left that can do it is being given the opportunity to have probably the only opportunity they've ever had to create generational wealth for them and their families. And with that, you're an owner 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 $40 an hour because I have this tribal knowledge. Why would I go and share it? Because that's what's the incentive. And that's why oddly there is no stack overflow for a machining. Because I think it's basically a function of the fact that manufacturing has been an hourly workforce for such a long time, even the highest skill positions. Because then you get this like weird localized competitive set where even within your facility, you're not really wanting to train or”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 siloed and not given the opportunity to stretch and grow. And I think culturally they understand that if we're automating one part of the factory, we're not going to suddenly fire 20 people. Like, no, no, no, go pick whatever else you want to do, you know, manufacturing engineering or CMM or a higher skill level of CAM programming. 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 the same tier of equity as the best software.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And this is something that software engineering has done really well, where there's a clear delineation between SRE, DevOps, data science, front end, backend, and different tiers within that. And traditionally machining has often been there's one guy that does 90% of that whole pipeline 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 sole operating the entire thing, which just doesn't scale.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to work for Google or Goldman Sachs, you know, just like Key Going back to the cultural challenge. Because unless it's awesome and celebrated, that's a really, really hard problem to solve.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go train 100,000. And that is like barely doable, but it has to be a combination of solving the talent pipeline. Using automation to basically lower the burden of that talent pipeline problem and then focusing on the areas where talent is scarce or harder to come by, as well as attracting as much as possible entrance to the new workforce, which is why 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 get in the fight and 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 unless it is going to sound dumb, but like unless some 19 year old from like UCLA can go basically like convince some hot girl at a bar that like manufacturing is cool, then like why would they ever go super manufacturing versus going?”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build software around those talent bases to remove the boring stuff, automate what we can. And then in the last 20 or 30 percent 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 scaffolding that if they just kind of follow the instructions, they will get 90% of the way there. For some parts of high precision machining that is way harder than others, basically we're using technology to solve the talent problem. And then what we can't use technology, we have to simplify it so that you could hire in someone who has had no aerospace experience and they're making flight hardware for a rocket program in 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, you know, we can't go and hire a million machinists. We have to automate our way so that we can.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way we look at it is there are five or six core parts of high precision machining. Some are lower skilled but others, but they're all pretty highly skilled. So what we are doing is basically at each part of the factory developing software, 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 automate as much as possible that part of the skill. And in reality, you can only over automate 60 to 80 percent of that. Some of it is just like the technology curve doesn't exist. You're like waiting for 10 years of machine vision to catch up. So the job of a startup is to industrialize research or existing technology and apply it to a new domain. It's not sit there with 40 PhDs and try and create something that's high risk. That is like the science pipeline. So we grab and integrate whatever we can and”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, like, hey, we've got these kids and they kind of fit. And by the way, we've got this training program, and in two years they'll be wouldn't be like this. Like, doesn't work like that.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source