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Eric Chrisman

Eric Chrisman

Partner at Altimeter Capital, investing in aerospace, defense, and deep technology companies including Anduril, SpaceX, and K2 Space.

Aug 4, 2026

48:05
They're, you know, attempting to rebuild the US manufacturing base, but, uh, tell us a little bit about that company.
48:11
Yeah, Hadrian, special company, Chris, special entrepreneur, and if you think about, um, the defense industrial base, one, um, a lot of it is, is, is, i- is aging out, but it, it's made up of, you know, large primes and then a lot of thousands of different types of shops.
48:33
And, and fundamentally, if you look at some of the marquee programs, um, across the Department of War, whether these are- Especially submarines and in, and in shipbuilding, but you can kind of go across some of the big programs, and they're, they're, they're far behind, right? They are, um, way behind schedule, they're way over budget, and fundamentally when you look at, well, what's going on there, there's just a massive gap in terms of, uh, worker hours required to deliver these products.
49:04
And so how do you ramp up the capacity and start to get, um, a little bit more or a lot more, um, e- ef- efficiency to close the gap, to get these things back on track? And so what Chris and the Hadrian team are doing is they are building significant manufacturing capacity, and they're using technology to get a lot more utilization and efficiency out of these machines.
49:30
And so, you know, if historically, whether you're talking about, um, uh, pick- whether it's CNC- CNCing or, or assembly, et cetera, you're talking about, you know, two, three, four people to one machine, and then you're talking about 10% utilization on that machine.
49:49
Like, that's really inefficient.
49:51
Um, and Hadrian has built a lot of interesting technology to allow them to have, you know, four, four machines being operated by one person, and then they're getting, you know, 40, 50, 60% utilization.
54:37
Like, what did you see there?

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