Relentless: Chris Power on Building America’s Modern Manufacturing Edge

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When manufacturing gets serious, everything gets harder, faster, and more unforgiving. In this episode of Relentless, Ti Morse sits down with Chris Power, founder and CEO of Hadrian, a company that has opened six factories since 2022, including a latest facility that spans 2.2 million square feet. That's massive scale in just two years. So what's Power's big insight about building factories in America today? He says modern factories cannot be built like old assembly lines. He argues for GPU-style stations that can be modularly configured inside a factory, because standardized systems allow high-mix, low-volume manufacturing to behave more like software. That's fascinating, treating physical production like software architecture.

But I imagine there are huge obstacles to this approach in the U.S. market. Absolutely. Power puts it bluntly: "The United States has no contract manufacturing capacity," so companies often have to build before the contracts arrive. That means betting on demand early, sometimes at 1.2 times future sales capacity, just to prove execution. Wait, so you're building massive capacity on speculation? That sounds incredibly risky. That's exactly Power's point, but he argues the risk is usually misunderstood. He says large manufacturing bets are not really optional: "You have to build it ahead of demand, which takes a lot of capital and courage." But those bets can be made safer if the factory is designed for flexibility, with capex that can move between programs.

So it's about shared infrastructure, where one line can serve multiple products?

Precisely. He describes it as shared infrastructure, where one line can serve drones, munitions, or other products without rebuilding everything from scratch. That flexibility matters because, as Power puts it, "There is no such thing as asymmetric manufacturing." What does he mean by that? There may be asymmetric products, but there is no magic process that suddenly makes hardware cheap and easy. Instead, success comes from scale, detail, and careful decisions about what can be changed later and what cannot.

That sounds like hard-won wisdom. Did Hadrian learn this the hard way? They did. Power shares a near-fatal lesson where they discovered a batch-wide hardware flaw in equipment from a trusted vendor. The fix threatened to take too long. Power spent 48 hours confirming the issue, then pushed the vendor to send thirty engineers and repair the problem quickly. How often do these crises happen? He says "These company-killing events happen about once a quarter," underscoring how close manufacturing can live to failure.

That's why Hadrian's company design is so deliberate. They keep teams small, caps them at 30 to 40 people, standardize hiring tests, and use shared equipment like "shared Lego bricks."

And what about financing this whole operation?

Power emphasizes financing discipline, long-duration infrastructure credit, and honest communication with investors. His message is simple and sharp: in manufacturing, reliability, flexibility, scale, and trust matter far more than vanity speed.