Katherine Boyle: evaluation

Transcript context

…I'll share the story of how I met Hadrian, which was my first investment since being in Andreessen Horowitz, and how that relationship blossom, because that's another Los Angeles-based company, typically not a place where VCs spent much time, but of course, with the emergence of the just extraordinary new space movement, there are a lot of people spending a lot more time for different reasons in Los Angeles. I know my partners are certainly spending time there in games and other areas, too. Hadrian is a company where it was our first formal investment out of the American dynamism practice. It's a company that is building automated machine shops for aerospace and defense manufacturing. Talk about a sector that technology just did not go to. We just mentioned the private equity world. Private equity had been buying up machine shops for a long time, seeing that as a great place to do roll ups and to cut people. But in terms of building jobs and creating new machine shops to actually service the needs of these large aerospace companies, that was not something that Silicon Valley was interested in or that technologists were really interested in. The origin story of that company, the founder, Chris Power, is this extraordinary founder who moved from Australia a few years ago, was very devoted to this idea that he wanted to do something in manufacturing and wanted to build something new. Actually, he started out with, hey, maybe the only way is to raise a small private equity fund, so he raised a small private equity fund and talked to a bunch of different shops, machine shops, where people were retiring. The nature of this field is that a lot of the machine shops are owned by people who are baby boomers, and they're trying to get out, and their kids don't have the capacity to either leave the shops or want to. He realized, he's like, this is a nightmare of what is about to happen. This is an impending nightmare, because even if you are to try to bring software into these existing shops, it's almost impossible from a technical perspective. There's not much that can be done unless you build something from scratch. We actually returned capital to his investors and said, this is not feasible from a private equity standpoint or with existing shops. We have to build new machine shops with automation, and then we have to upskill American workers so that they can do this type of work. We need to bring in a new generation of machinists, who are technically competent but also where it doesn't require some sort of special artisan knowledge. He built his first factory and now on to a second. He's serving a lot of large aerospace and defense companies in a lot of the new space sector. It's one of these things where, when you talked about how we met, we met through a number of people in the ecosystem. It's one of these things. I always joke about anytime you hear this about a founder, like you should always pick your head up. ked about how we met, we met through a number of people in the ecosystem. It's one of these things. I always joke about anytime you hear this about a founder, like you should always pick your head up. Every third call I was having about aerospace, about what's happening in defense, his name would come up. This company would come up. This is one of these things where if it doesn't succeed, we will be in a bind. We will be in a bind if we can't get parts delivered as a hardware company or if we have to fly out to a random machine shop in the middle of the country and find out why things are delayed. It was one of these things, where you hear people talking about it on the Internet, but you also hear it just in your entire network that everyone is rooting for a founder to succeed. That's also just what's so cool about a lot of these companies. They don't have real competition. Everyone is excited about their success because if they don't create this world of abundance in a lot of these categories, we’ll all suffer. Particularly, things like aerospace and defense will suffer. That's one of the companies I point to, because it's an immigrant founder, solving one of America's biggest problems. It's being built in Los Angeles at the heart of our defense and aerospace industry. It's right next to the customer. It's been able to interface with the customer every day. It also has this really, really important mission that I think is people see it as secondary to what's actually happening. But it will be the legacy of this company, which is that you were upskilling a generation of people who were told that working with their hands was embarrassing, who were told that they had to go to college, and they had to [...]. You're describing David's college experience.…

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