Investor (possibly Dalian Asparuhov) (101:12)
Yeah, that's one where it's like, look, I got involved in basically like company formation. Basically like you know, sort of seed round where it was Chris and like maybe one or two sort of people. And so what did diligence on that one look like? Well, it was effectively like, you know, four and a half years of working with Chris very closely, going to every single board meeting, watching the company like adapt over time. And in like, you know, Q1 last year in 25, it was clear there was just this inflection point that I felt like I could appreciate but not everyone else was really appreciating yet. The first was they basically, you know, for those who don't know, Hadrian basically builds these like automated CNC basically, you know, facilities. They basically cut metal on behalf of, you know, aerospace and defense companies. So, you know, think a lot of the biggest logos in the founders fund portfolio won't list, you know, sort of all of them since I'm not sure which ones are allowed to be public. But, you know, ones that, you know, build rockets, make drones, you can guess which ones those are. And they cut metal on behalf of those companies. For a long time they were just in the R and D production grind, trying to figure out basically how to make the economics of the business work. Switching from what were originally quick turn small prototype contracts into production multi year, basically large contracts. In Q1 last year, there were two things that happened that just made it very clear to me that it hit my spidey instincts of, oh, this is the point that I'm supposed to come in and do the series seed. My whole job was to have done the seed and then wait for this exact moment. The two things that happened were one, they just got through production hell. Basically, like the economics started making sense. They were producing sort of way more volume. And then the second thing was, we talk about this a lot, but the defense industry is obviously going through a huge shakeup and there's a whole set of neoprimes that are coming out that are going to get anointed And Hadrian was clearly in this transition point from what was previously just purely like a back end sort of supplier of parts and a vendor into somebody that was becoming more of like a strategic neoprime that was going to be code bidding alongside others, but as a neoprime that is focused specifically on production. Right? So if we think about groups like you know, Andrew Saronic, Shield I, you know, name your favorite, basically, you know, mock industries, name all your favorite, you know, neoprines. They all roughly follow the same model, which is like they are product developers fundamentally, right? Like they go and like design net new products. They may do a decent amount of production and assembly themselves, but they still are reliant on like out of sort of house sort of vendors for a vast majority of their like you know, subcomponents. Adrian fundamentally is a very different type of neopride, right? They are neopride that is explicitly focused on production. They do not produce basically like end products themselves. They only amplify others and products. But that is a significant bottleneck that the Defense department or war department is looking to go unlock and is leaning on a Hadrian for a wide variety of programs, both directly as Hadrian as a contractor as well as like co bidders alongside other neoprot. And so I think, when I think about like, you know, the way that hadrian was interpreted Q1, Q2 last year, people were squinting at, they're like, man, these economics have only turned in the last quarter. You know, isn't this just a back end vendor that doesn't have a ton of upside? From my like insider perspective, having watched it for five years, I'm like, dude, this is the type of business where once the economics turn a corner, they don't unturn a corner, you know, I mean it only gets easier from here. We finally got to fucking positive. We're going to 20% margin, 40% margin, 60% margin. And it's like, you know, accumulating advantage. Like materials get easier, the factories get easier and the states want to send the stuff. It's just like, you know, you're rocking and rolling. But like when people look at like a SaaS business, they don't appreciate that. Like yeah, in like hardware, especially when you're producing something that is like kind of a commodity, there's sort of like semi infinite demand. There's like not semi infinite demand for data bricks. You know what I mean? Like, you know, the scale of the market is not nearly as large.
