Tech CEO on the Future of Travel & Technology w/ Adam Goldstein | EP #82

In this episode, Peter and Adam discuss the future of transportation, when we’ll have flying cars, and how vehicle technology will evolve in the coming years. 17:28 | Ready for the Driverless Sky? 30:17 | The Future of Urban Transportation 1:03:23 | Disrupting the Aerospace Industry Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer since October 2018, previously led Vettery from 2012 to 2019 and served as Co-Managing Partner at Minetta Lane Capital Partners. His career includes roles as Portfolio Manager at Plural Investments and Senior Analyst at Cedar Hill Capital Partners. Goldstein, a board member of the Museum of American Finance, holds a B. S. in Business Administration from the University of Florida and an M. B. A. from NYU Stern School of Business. Archer’s goal is to transform urban travel, replacing 60–90-minute commutes by car with estimated 10-20 minute electric air taxi flights that are safe, sustainable, low noise, and cost-competitive with ground transportation. Archer’s Midnight is a piloted, four-passenger aircraft designed to perform rapid back-to-back flights with minimal charge time between flights. Learn more about Archer here: https://archer.com/ Follow Adam on X: @adamgoldstein13 ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:00Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I'm here with Adam Goldstein, co-founder, CEO of Archer Aviation. And I am excited to talk about flying vehicles, my favorite subject. I have to start with a question, Adam, which is, what do you call these things? Because, you know, flying cars sort of like feels like a euphemism and calling them EV Tolls just doesn't roll off the tongue. Any, any recommendations?

• 1:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, that is the kind of age-old question for the industry, but electric air taxis seems to be the cleanest way to describe it.

• 1:35Peter Diamandis?

  Electric air taxis, all right. I like that. And eventually they'll become just called transportation, I think. Hopefully. Anyway, a real pleasure, my friend, to have you and talk about this moonshot, which has been around for a while. One of my favorite examples. Is one of the quotes that Peter Thiel said is like, you know, we were promised flying cars and all we got were 140 characters. Well, guess what? We've got flying cars now and congratulations. You know, I look at all of the electric air taxis out there. Archer has done an extraordinary job in terms of creating a viable business. And I know how hard the aviation business is

• 2:18Peter Diamandis?

  having played in that and the space business and the consumer business. And you've got, you've had a lot of battles, but you've conquered so much. So, congrats.

• 2:30Speaker 04

  Thanks, Peter. I appreciate it. It's definitely, the road has not been easy. I can say that.

• 2:35Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, we're entering a time where this idea of flying cars is something that is real. You know, a number of companies, including Archer, have gone public. You have raised and invested a significant amount of money and have actually made something that is extraordinary. I want to start with like, first of all, if you can describe Archer and your beautiful Midnight vehicle. What is Archer? What is Midnight capable of doing? How should folks think about it?

• 3:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so these are electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. So think like an electric helicopter with wings. They take off and land vertically and then fly forward on a wing like an airplane. And we're, you know, going to market using these vehicles really to replace trips that you would typically take on the ground in a car. That might take you 60, 90, 120 minutes to travel 20, 30, 40, 50 miles. Replace those with trips in the air that can take you five to 10 minutes. And so, you know, if you look at like a typical use case of going from, you know, like a city center to an airport, like a Manhattan to a JFK or an LAX to Santa Monica, those are like brutal trips that we've all sat through that

• 3:51Speaker 04

  are actually not that far that we could actually do very, very quickly in a vehicle like this.

• 3:56Peter Diamandis?

  I think about this, I think of like packet switched humans, like being able to hop in for the lowest price and speed. Are these vehicle, is the price per mile going to be competitive? How expensive is this going to be in the final result?

• 4:11Speaker 04

  Well, I think the really the go to market price point will be somewhat similar to an Uber, like an Uber Black. But over time, and when I say over time, I'm not talking 50 years, I'm talking five years, seven years. You know, these vehicles will be lower than car ownership. So, I mean, the 2D infrastructure in and around cities doesn't scale. It's very hard to build new roads. It's very challenging. But infrastructure in the sky obviously is basically very little. You don't need anything. You can scale it infinitely. And so there's an opportunity to just build a lot more vehicles and to serve, you know, a lot of people and ultimately drive the cost, you know, way, way down. But if you just look at helicopters, they're extremely complex vehicles, you know, very complex

• 4:53Speaker 04

  gearboxes and, you know, tricky vehicles to maintain and keep up in the air. They'll have 200 to 300 single points of failure. First, with these vehicles, these air taxis that we can build, they'll have single, zero single points of failure. And because they're electric and the the powertrains are, you know, using electric engines and lithium ion batteries, they won't need to undergo the same type of maintenance. It's just similar, like I have a Tesla, I've owned it for many years, I've never maintenance it once. And so you have a dynamic that you can build a lot of these vehicles, drive the cost down even further, that ultimately will allow this to be accessible to everyone on earth.

• 5:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, the old adage, friends don't let friends fly helicopters, right? Because they're so, they're so dangerous. But let's describe the Midnight vehicle. First of all, it's, it's gorgeous. It's probably the most beautiful of the electric air taxis out there. Can you describe its sort of range, number of people, its support structure, speeds, that sort of the stats that people would be interested in?

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's a piloted vehicle and it can carry up to four passengers. It's designed to go up to 100 miles, but the typical use case will probably be, you know, 20 to 40 miles. And the vehicles fly 150 miles per hour. So first of all, when you fly in a straight line, instead of like weaving throughout where the roads take you, you can reduce the total amount of distance that you travel. You can also fly 150 miles, you know, consistently the entire flight, so it can get you there much faster. And because you can take off and land vertically, you don't have to drive out to an airport. You can get to your endpoints, you know, very, very quickly. So it's a, it's a vehicle that was actually designed with a lot of the same mentality in the way that we design cars.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  And so when you look at the way aircraft are designed, they're almost always not very attractive. Even if you look at today's planes, you know, the Boeings and the Airbus's, they all kind of, the planes all look the same. They don't have to. But, you know, we took an approach with the vehicle where we said, we're going to take a much more emotional view to designing the vehicle rather than a pure mathematical view. Because this is a vehicle that we want people to want to touch, they want to, you know, get in, they want to fly, they want to be passionate about. And so that came with some, you know, performance hits. And so a lot of the engineers, you know, that work at Archer were upset about that. But I do think design is actually a really important part of introducing a product like

• 7:26Speaker 04

  this and ultimately introducing a product that can really revolutionize and ultimately become a mass market form of transportation.

• 7:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, badass is the, is the description that comes to mind when I, I look at them, I look at the midnight and, you know, if you're listening, go to Google and check out an image of it, it's gorgeous. Talk about, one second, a subject that I'm super passionate about, which is convergence of these exponential technologies. This wasn't possible a decade ago. What are the technologies that came together to make this possible?

• 7:59Speaker 04

  So if you think back to, you know, I guess when I was a kid in the 90s. You know, batteries were still used, lithium ion batteries were around. And batteries have just become more and more energy dense. And, you know, back then it was, you know, a miracle to keep things powered up for any substantial period of time. You know, the thought of, you know, powering up a car and driving any reasonable range in the 90s or even in 2000 was pretty unthinkable.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  If you, you know, flash forward to today, you know, we all almost take it for granted still that, you know, a Tesla, you know, a car with lithium ion batteries can, you know, drive you, you know, 300, 400 miles on a charge. And that's pretty incredible and it's very, very effective and good for everyday use. Today, when we think out, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, it's just even hard for people to understand what batteries will be able to do, you know, going forward. So, based on technology today, these planes can fly up to 100 miles. And so you can take a 6,500 pound maximum takeoff weight plane like the midnight vehicle, fly it, you know, quite far and use it every day, recharge, repeat that trip over and

• 9:14Speaker 04

  over and over again, all day long. So battery technology is one breakthrough. So battery tech has been probably the biggest one. And the reason why that one is so interesting of all of them is just because it hasn't, it's not like it's stopped, it's just getting better. So the product literally gets better every year. So we can just use the newest cell that comes out, we're agnostic to which one, to just constantly improve the performance to increase the, you know, the ride quality, the luxuries inside these vehicles. So even the midnight plane today, which, thank you Peter, I do agree, looks very, very cool, it will get cooler because there's a lot more flexibility, once you can, you know, keep adding more energy into these vehicles. So that's been a really big breakthrough.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  I think another one that's been really big has been all about lightweighting these vehicles. And so, you know, it's a, you know, composite structures have been a big deal. So they're not, you know, aluminum or metal structures or composites. They're all lightweight. The reason why that is so important is energy density is only so good. And it's still not nearly as efficient as kerosene. And so we need to lightweight these vehicles as much as possible to preserve enough of the maximum takeoff weight percentage for payload, for people, for stuff. And so that's been a really big, critical part of what we're doing. But the aviation industry has not advanced substantially across all the different parts of the supply chain.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  And so there's so much more to do. It's just unthinkable. And it's really because there hasn't been demand for an aviation product that, you know, is, is used, you know, we think about like a Boeing and Airbus, they make 500, you know, planes a year, making more than a thousand planes a year is kind of unthinkable. But this is an industry where actually we think you can be making millions of planes per year, which will totally change the aerospace supply chain.

• 11:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I would, just to wrap up the list, I would imagine that direct electric propulsion, DEP propulsion, has been one of the drivers. Obviously electronics and compute. I would love to believe that automation and air traffic control was part of the equation. But we can, let's talk about the FAA in a minute. But your point about the aviation industry being stagnant is insane, right? We, we take off in December 17th of 1903. And then we cross the Atlantic and then we go supersonic. And then we go to large bodied aircraft.

• 11:46Peter Diamandis?

  And there really has been very little innovation in the aviation industry. It's like we stagnated.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically, the planes have gotten more efficient. You know, they're more fuel efficient, they are safer. So we've increased there, but but these are all like, you know, marginal in the grand scheme of things of like what you can do. There's there's no reason you couldn't build a new, you know, blended wing plane that looks more like a, you know, like a triangle that totally reconfigures the interior, the way people, you know, operate. It doesn't have to be a tube with a wing. There's lots of other configurations that could work. And I actually think that, you know, the eVTOL, electric air taxi companies have a chance to totally just change aviation beyond the original products themselves.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  Because, you know, to to build a new airplane is quite expensive. I think, you know, Boeing will spend 20, 40 billion dollars on a new plane. And by the way, it's not even really necessarily a new plane. A lot of them are, you know, upgrades. So like the 737 MAX is still a 737. It's a, you know, I don't know how old, 50, 60 year old, fifth generation type of plane. It's not a clean sheet aircraft. So there's so much to do here, but that will require these companies to get like Archer to get substantially bigger, to have substantially more capital to be able to invest to go do this, but all very, very possible.

• 13:07Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, the FAA does an amazing job of keeping us safe. The track record is extraordinary, think about it. But the, I remember when I was certifying my ZEROGR plane for doing parabolic flights, right, which was a relatively minor modification to avionics and and the hydraulic system. It was brutal just to get, you know, the the mods approved and the adage was from the FAA is not happy until you're not happy.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:39Peter Diamandis?

  It's a lot of, it's a lot of work and, you know, I mean, we take for granted the fact that we're just like cattle getting on and off of airplanes and everything is operated as safely as it does, which is extraordinary.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and maybe I'll, you know, I'll leap my own words on this one, but potentially this time it's different. And the reason why it could be different this time with this industry is that geopolitics have played a pretty significant role here. So the US has done, you know, over the long term, a great job of maintaining a leadership position in aviation, and that's been important, not only just to, you know, the economy and being able to move people around, but also from a defense perspective. And so, you know, even if you just look at the regulators today, if you want to go certify a new plane, there's four big regulators you can go to. You can go to the FAA, you can go to Europe's version, which is called EASA, you can go to Transport Canada, you can go to ANAC in Brazil. There's not that many options to go to do there.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  Most of the world looks to the FAA to do this. EASA is kind of viewed as almost like the second biggest regulator, and there's, you know, around 500 people that work at EASA versus, you know, the FAA will have something like 45,000 people that work there. So it is sort of the dominant global, you know, regulator. But the US has done a poor job when it came to air dominance and drones. And China with DJI has done a very good job and has a very significant market share, majority market share, and has left the US behind. And so there's been a real kind of drive from, you know, the White House all the way down, bipartisan, that the US does need to maintain this leadership position, and if there is

• 15:18Speaker 04

  a Tesla-like moment in the sky, that needs to happen here in America. And so there's a big push to make sure that the regulators are working very collaboratively with the companies, obviously, safety first, but collaboratively to make sure it's not a roadblock to actually get this industry to market. And that's what we've seen. We saw that with Billy Nolan when he was the FAA Administrator, and of course, he stepped down and joined Archer. But then the next Administrator that went in actually came from an eVTOL company. So Mike Whitaker, the new FAA Administrator, came from Hyundai's eVTOL company called Supernal. So obviously, there's some, you know, kind of, you know, interesting things to at least note of what's happening there. So we have seen a lot of that, you know, the regulators.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  That is actually being on board, which I think is really great. And I think these vehicles, you know, another reason why they are on board with these vehicles is they already have certified vehicles that are substantially less safe than what EBITOLs can be, which are helicopters.

• 16:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's crazy. It is crazy in comparison. Can you talk about the safety? Because I think one of the things that's beautiful about the design of Midnight is the safety factors. Can you speak about what you put, what you built in?

• 16:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so one of the points I didn't get to in the list of like the advancements and that you had mentioned is really around the electric engines. And so if you look at a helicopter and you know, if you almost drew a circle around the rotor, that is what they call like the disk area. You need a certain amount of disk area to lift, spin, you know, spin a rotor at a certain speed in order to generate enough lift to, you know, to lift these vehicles off the ground. But when electric motors became an option, all of a sudden you had a new type of motor that could be scaled down and still very efficient. And that was a game changer for the EBITOL industry and a huge just unlock which allowed, you know, the industry to really move forward. So if you look at the Midnight aircraft, it has 12

• 17:15Speaker 04

  electric engines, which have each one of the 12 have a set of propellers tied to them. And so that means instead of having one single point of failure, like where the rotor is, and then all the parts that go that lead into that rotor, with helicopters, it can be as many as 200 to 300 single points of failure. We have none, zero single points of failure. It's a fully redundant aircraft. So if we lost a motor or a propeller for any reason, a fluke accident or bird strike or whatever the case is, it's no problem at all to the vehicle. It can balance and trim, as they say, to make it stay stable and fly and complete its mission. That is a huge, huge advantage. And so electric engines really helped do that. But we also were able to break apart the battery pack. So there's not just one fuel source.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  So if we had something happen to one of the battery packs, we have six different battery packs that each power two diagonally opposed motors. So if we lost a battery pack, we would only lose two engines and again, still have 10 and can still fly and complete the exact same mission. So it is just such a higher level of safety than what helicopters are able to provide because of the redundancy. And that's a huge part of the ability to scale the industry.

• 18:27Peter Diamandis?

  Do you need the pilot in the vehicle? Or is that to make people feel comfortable and get through FA regulation? Do you imagine a time when we're going to see these electric air taxis, which are fully autonomous? And if so, what kind of timeframe would you imagine?

• 18:42Speaker 04

  You don't need a pilot. From a like a technical perspective, from a practical, when when theory meets practice, you do need a pilot. So I think for a couple of reasons. One is in order to start a new industry like this, it's going to be critical to make people not only just, you know, understand that these are safe, but really feel safe. And I think pilots are a big part of that journey. And so the pilots can be there to reassure you to, you know, it's kind of like when you, you know, you, you look over at the, you know, the person on the plane to see if they're nervous, to see if, you know, you should be nervous. You know, the people there, I think, can really help. That being said, there are already a lot of features built into the vehicles from the very beginning that will reduce pilot workload

• 19:27Speaker 04

  and prevent the pilot from crashing the plane. So things like envelope protection. So the pilot can't roll the plane over. They can't stall the plane. So there are features that have been built in that will help really, again, allow these vehicles to, you know, to scale from a, from a safety perspective. But if we really do want to scale beyond, you know, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 vehicles, there is a point where we certainly will need to go autonomous because there simply aren't enough pilots out there to do this. The way you get there, though, is optionally piloted. So you can build the vehicles with the auto land features that can take over if anything happens to the pilots and then ultimately gets people comfortable. And then you start removing the pilots. You can do that by having pilots on the ground.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  And then finally, just no pilots at all, just completely out of the blue.

• 20:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I can imagine, especially with the progression of AI and we're seeing autonomous vehicles, it's going to become. I mean, there is an argument to be made that at some point it's safer without the pilot in the vehicle. And I've heard that I've heard those conversations for commercial jet airliners, where human-induced error is a, you know, a significant percentage of the of the problems out there. But I'll put that aside for a separate conversation on the on the FAA. I want one. So initially, Archer Archer is an aviation, your transport service. And Matt, do you liken yourself to more of an Uber where I've got my app and I need

• 20:58Peter Diamandis?

  to get from Santa Monica to Dodger Stadium and I just tell it where I'm starting, where I'm ending, and it gives me a slot? Is that what it sounds like, feels like?

• 21:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's the sort of the right approach from a go-to-market perspective. There will be a, you know, I think a solution that is available to the masses. There may be, I'm sure, VIP type of services. You can imagine, you know, corporates, you know, could have their own, you know, type of, you know, VIP service or, you know, certain different groups that make sense for hospital systems, that kind of thing. Especially in the beginning, though, I think it's going to be critical that Archer as the OEM really manages a lot of the data to make sure we fully understand the safety, you know, of these vehicles, maintenance of these vehicles. And, you know, we protect that, you know, very, very critically.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  And so I don't see us selling individual vehicles, you know, on a significant basis because of that. And I think it will, you know, there's other ways to accomplish the same goal. So if you want one, Peter, you know, it'll be interesting for you in LA, but what what happens when you leave LA, right? Like, you can go to New York. And so there are other variations of that, that you can gain access to the vehicles in a similar type of service. You know, if you think about like what NetJets did, you know, that's like an example of a premium version of, you know, air travel that's more convenient, that's a bit more private, but you don't physically have to own the plane yourself because you don't use it all the time. So like, how often would you use it?

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Even if you used it just once a day or twice a day, it's still the plane would just be sitting there, you know, unused. And because they're expensive, I think there are other ways to actually, you know, reuse them to, again, keep keeping the cost at a price point where it can become more everyday use instead of just novelty.

• 22:51Peter Diamandis?

  So I want to walk through a little bit how, because the last time I really dove into the operations of this, I was at the Uber Elevate conference back years ago when Uber was thinking about autonomous air taxis. And the idea was there were going to be electric vertiports that would sort of be regional. And I just saw an announcement that you and a dear friend who works for you, Nikhil, put out that you've inked a deal with Atlantic Aviation. Congratulations on that. That's huge.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks.

• 23:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So for those who don't know, Atlantic Aviation is a fixed base operator. I fly my airplane out of Santa Monica out of the Atlantic, FBO there, and they're all over North America. And so the idea is you'd have charging stations there. And so I would, when I go to my Archer app and I say I want to fly from A to B, it would say, go to this location and get on and it's charged there. So walk through some of that logistics. Paint a vision of what it's going to look like when it's operational.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  So you're at your house in Santa Monica. You open up your Uber app, which will be integrated, and you want to go from Santa Monica to, let's say, the crypto center to go watch a Lakers game. You can kind of book the entire service that way. The first leg of the service will be an Uber comes and picks you up, takes you from your house to a vertiport, a place where you start your journey, you take off and land. The good news about vertiports is they require very little infrastructure. All we really need is charging. And so, and obviously a safety area. And so the vehicles will charge using similar type of technologies that you see with EVs,

• 24:49Speaker 04

  so 2C, just like a Tesla Supercharger, which charge app.

• 24:52Peter Diamandis?

  How long would you imagine a charge takes for? It depends again how exhausted the batteries are, but what's the typical charge time?

• 25:00Speaker 04

  So, you know, the typical trip that we would fly, so say like a, you know, a 25 mile trip if we were going from, you know, I don't know, LAX to Northern Park, you know, somewhere in LA, maybe, you know, somewhere in Malibu, a trip like that will only use a small percentage of the battery. And so the plan is to really just top, just top off at each of the legs. So you're really only charging during the loading and unloading of passengers. You're not ever really just sitting down, not using the planes because they're just sitting there charging. Now, when you do take, you know, full trips, you know, using kind of a bigger chunk of the battery, you will have to charge for longer and you can charge the batteries up in 30 to 40 minutes, all the way up from start to finish. Again, yeah, yeah, again,

• 25:43Speaker 04

  a very, very, very quick charge. And that just will get better over time. So like, our joke is like, this is the worst product we'll ever build. And so, because it just keeps getting better because the core underlying technologies just keep getting better.

• 25:54Peter Diamandis?

  So we've just gotten to the vertiport, let's call it the Atlantic Aviation Terminal at Santa Monica Airport, the vehicles unloaded, and I'm getting on, you're topping it off. We are, this is fully a, is this a part 121 operation, a part 135 operation in FAA province?

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're part 135. And so these are, you know, you should be able to go from your car, walking out of an Uber into the air in 90 seconds. I know that's possible. I know that's possible because I've done that many times on helicopters. I've done that in New York City. And so places with complicated airspaces, with vehicles, you know, that are in tightly constrained areas. So 90 seconds, you walk in and you're in the air. And you're on your journey.

• 26:46Peter Diamandis?

  So let's talk about the profile. You're climbing straight up, you're climbing at an angle. These vehicles are vertical takeoff and horizontal flight. But can you describe a little bit what that, what that profile might look like?

• 27:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, a lot of it will depend on where you are at, but we want to get into forward flight as soon as possible because it's the least intensive on the batteries. So pure hover is just draining the battery at a rapid rate. So think about, you know, in your Tesla, you know, you slam on the pedal, but not for very long because it ends up goes 060 in two to three seconds. So it's very quick. So then you take your foot off a bit. But if you were to hold it down, you're draining the battery much faster. So the hover is us putting our foot, you know, on the pedal. And so that is what's draining the battery. So we do want to move to forward flight as fast as possible, just to, again, preserve the charge that's in there. So typically you'll start moving forward pretty quickly,

• 27:42Speaker 04

  but you'll do it at a rate that's, you know, very comfortable. And so, you know, you can, again, the videos that we'll show of the vehicles will always be boring because we never show like what the planes can really do because we don't want people to imagine themselves in the plane while it's banking at a very hard angle or it's accelerating at a very rapid pace. We always show kind of smooth, boring flights. So it'll climb up to around 2,000 feet, you know, in a forward motion. And then the same thing, descend again, you know, very gently till I go back down. Now, if there's complicated airspace and there's, you know, things that you need to fly around, you may ascend or descend, you know, for a much longer period of time. So for example, in New York City, if you

• 28:26Speaker 04

  fly from, if you take like a Blade from like the Blade West Side, 34th Street to like the Hamptons, right when you get to the Hamptons, you have to ascend to a very high level to just reduce noise. Because these vehicles are much quieter, they won't have that same problem. But there are other, you know, situations like that where you might have to climb at certain areas just to get around certain airspace.

• 28:51Peter Diamandis?

  And if your folks are not familiar with the EVTOL, Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing, space, there's a number of different approaches and some of them have wings like Midnight and some of them are just multi-copters. They're just, they're drones. And the wing enables a massive efficiency of energy and also much higher speed, I assume.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's funny. I remember Peter, I saw you at the Maker unveil that we did in 2021.

• 29:23Peter Diamandis?

  At Hawthorne Airport, yeah, right next to SpaceX.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and Aaron Paul was there, you know, the actor from Westworld. And the episodes that were coming out during that same year, he was flying around in an EVTALL. They were all wingless vehicles. And so, you know, we talked about that and he said, oh, why do you have a wing? The ones in the show, if you've seen, they don't have wings. The wing actually provides lift and reduces, you know, energy usage, which allows the vehicles to just perform better. It also adds a safety feature because these vehicles don't auto-rotate. So you can't, like with a helicopter, you can kind of, you know, keep using the air on the way down to rotate, you know, the rotor to, you know, for it to slow you down so you don't just go down at too fast a rate.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  But these vehicles have a wing and so they can actually glide on the wing.

• 30:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so if the engines, if the engines go out, if, you know, if you get, and I am, never mind. If the engines go out, you could just, you can glide to a landing at an airport.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  Exactly. So if you think about the levels of certification that like, let's say like an A380 has, like one of the biggest, you know, planes out there. You know, you're certifying at extraordinarily high level of safety, where, you know, you're looking at one in a billion, you know, chances, one in a billion flight hours of something catastrophic happening. And the reason you can certify at levels that high are because of the redundancy. Because inevitably, parts will fail. That's why you need redundancy. And so the wing is the ultimate redundancy. So again, six battery packs, 12 engines, none of the battery packs are connected. None of the engines are connected. So for all of them to fail, like one after the next, after the next, after the next, after the next, it's so unlikely. That's how you get to those safety standards

• 31:10Speaker 04

  that are similar to the big commercial airliners that we know today. And ultimately, you still have the wing.

• 31:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Okay, so we have just taken off. We're in our flight profile. We get to our location. Now, one of the things that's interesting is where you can land and take off. Because, you know, and I'm just curious, in the beginning, I imagine you're going to be operating out of traditional aviation hubs. But you tell me, I don't know, Atlantic Aviation being one of them. But I can imagine, like, for example, you know, I have friends of mine who live in Topanga. And when I fly my, I have an SR22, when I fly out of Santa Monica Airport, I'm over Topanga in, you know, in five minutes, you know, max.

• 31:59Peter Diamandis?

  If on the wrong day, trying to drive there can take me a good, over an hour. So can you imagine that there will eventually be sort of land, small landing ports in convenient locations for regional communities that you'll service?

• 32:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely, I think there will be.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  You know, there's, there's, you know, several different ways to think about, you know, where you can start and where you can stop. One version of this is just simply point-to-point services, where there's routes where people are already taking, you know, every single day. So, again, Manhattan to one of the three airports, you know, there's something like 30 million trips per year just going from Manhattan to one of three airports. So you could effectively have a gondola in the sky that just runs those routes from the, from the, you know, the vertiports to the airports, going all day, every day, non-stop, you know?

• 32:50Peter Diamandis?

  Like, every two minutes, it's taken off and going, right?

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, or I just think like, it's like a ski lift, right? They just never stop, they just keep going. It doesn't matter which one you get on, it's like green light or red light if you can do it. So that is a version of it, which I think will happen. Other versions will be where they can actually fly, you know, you know, the routes that aren't necessarily exactly planned that way. And so that starts to get into political conversation, where, you know, in California, that's much harder to do than it is in Texas. So, you know, I've flown on helicopters in Texas and you can land wherever you want to land. Versus California, it's very specific where you need to land. And so there's different rules for different places. And then also, depending on the congestion. So New York City will be obviously extremely tight on what you can do, regardless of the

• 33:35Speaker 04

  politics, just because it's so congested, the airspace is actually quite crowded. But it's also Still, because it's quite crowded, they're they're used to having many vehicles operating all the time. So at any given point in time in New York City, you can see helicopters flying, you know, big commercial airlines flying, you know, tour, you know, tour operators flying. There's all types of aircraft in there at all times in New York City. So that's why it's also a good place to start because we're already used to it. And there's already a lot of established rules on how to do it.

• 34:02Peter Diamandis?

  I find that I find that impressive that you're starting in one of the most difficult air traffic control congested areas versus starting in the middle of the Midwest, right? Where, you know, it's prairies and cattle. So let's talk about when are you going to get operational? Where are you in certification, testing, operations? You've also announced some great contracts with players. Can you speak to sort of where the rubber or the the rotors hitting the air, so to speak?

• 34:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so New York City is really interesting for several reasons to start. One is it's just the global stage. And if you think about, you know, people from all around the world that come there, I want the CEO of Charles de Gaulle to call me and say, hey, Adam, I just took, you know, one of your planes from, you know, JFK to Manhattan. That was incredible. You have to bring this to Charles de Gaulle. You have to. This is, that was unbelievable. So New York City has that draw versus in Kansas, that'll be harder to get to. It will obviously be easier to operate in Kansas because the airspace will be so much less crowded. The second thing is I lived in New York City for 20 years, so I love New York City. I I feel like I'm more of a New Yorker than anything else. And so for me, it's like kind of a homecoming to be able to do that.

• 35:14Speaker 04

  So that's another reason why. I also think the other thing that, you know, people don't talk about as much, and maybe it's not cool to talk about it, is this is an extraordinarily capital intensive business. The thing that has allowed it to happen, really, it's the technology. It's the kind of, you know, political nature of where we are with the regulators, meaning they're they're they want this to happen too, which is very positive. But then it's the capital. So even if the other two things happened, until the capital markets opened up to a point where we could actually do this, you couldn't actually get it going. And so Thankfully, for whatever reason, the capital markets opened. I guess you could probably thank Tesla for having a very successful hardware business.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  It enabled companies like Archer, which were very small nascent companies, to raise substantial amounts of capital. So we raised almost a billion dollars of capital in our IPO. And by the way, we had forty five people working at Archer at that point. And so it was a very low amount of people to go out and do this because you need money, a lot of money upfront to start this. So New York City is really important for lots of reasons. If you think about the next phase in scaling out manufacturing, capital is going to be just as important. And so we need the people that control some of the largest pools of capital to see these vehicles, to feel these vehicles and ride them.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  And because I've done it, the first time you experience like a helicopter in urban air mobility trip and you get to do an amazing day, all of a sudden the world changes for you. So the trips that we offer investors all the time are come to California. We will make you drive from SFO down to our office in San Jose. It'll take you forty five minutes, an hour, it'll suck. You'll then come see the headquarters, you'll see the factory next door. We'll then go to San Jose, which is five minute drive from our headquarters, which is next to Levi's Stadium. We'll fly you on our helicopter down to Flight Test, which is down in silliness, like right outside of Monterey. It'll be a fifteen minute flight, it'll replace the ninety minute drive.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  You'll come see some planes fly, we'll then fly to Napa, we'll go have lunch, we'll then fly to SFO and you'll leave. And that is an incredible day that people can experience using a helicopter that will all of a sudden understand what the future is about to be like because you could not do anything like that without an air vehicle. Because it's just too much time on the ground. And by the way, you feel good and refreshed, you haven't spent that much time in a vehicle. It's moving actually really fast and you got to do lots of different cool things. Once you experience that, it's just you see the future. It's like the first time I put on Oculus headset, I was like, oh my God, I understand virtual reality now. That was just mind blowing to me.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  Same thing, first time you experience urban air mobility, you are like game changer, I understand what's about to happen.

• 38:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's interesting. My experience of that was massively, I mean, I've done that in New York, just basically getting from. To and from JFK in Manhattan, but the place that really lit me on fire was Brazil in Sao Paulo. I don't know if you've ever spent any time down there, but everybody's got a helicopter to avoid the incredible traffic down below. And it's like there are helicopters flying everywhere. So I imagine it's going to be a huge market for you.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And just one more point on that, too, Peter. We talk a lot about these, you know, we talk a lot about these, you know, kind of commuting solutions. But the, you know, the routes we don't talk about, I think, are actually the really interesting one, which are it's all the future things that these vehicles can do. So I believe someone, who knows, maybe it's, maybe it's Archer, maybe it's me, will build an amazing project 15 miles outside of LA in the middle of the desert. You can only get to it by plane, and you can fly there in five minutes. But it feels like you're at the Amman Gary, which is like a gorgeous hotel in the middle of Utah. It's like kind of known as the nicest

• 39:18Speaker 04

  hotel in America. And it can be something you do to go to work. It could be something you do to go, you know, stay overnight. It can be something you do just to get away. There are experiences that people will start to build using these vehicles that are totally different, non-commuter routes that I think are going to just be a totally new way of living.

• 41:09Peter Diamandis?

  I love that. It's building the cities of the future, right? I mean, it used to be that you'd go move to New York or Detroit or Chicago or LA because that's where the education was, what entertainment was, that's where the jobs were. And given autonomous cars, EV toll and things like Starlink, there's going to be brand new modes of living. And that is beautiful. Talk about when you're going to see your first commercial flight and first commercial services? And who are your customers right now?

• 41:44Speaker 04

  So there are two ways to get to market. The first way is the way that we've been talking about, which is through the FAA, through traditional routes going from Manhattan to JFK, those routes. The plan is to get certified and start operations in 2025. That's been our goal, that's been our target, and we remain on track for that target.

• 42:04Peter Diamandis?

  Right around the corner.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, the other version of that, though, is we will make alternative plans to launch regardless of the timing of the regulator. So we already started by when we announced last year some of the contracts that we did with the Department of Defense, where we will start delivering aircraft and that will be used in non-kinetic use cases, so not war machines, but for all different types of scenarios. So there's a handful of aircraft we can start making those deliveries on. But then we'll also look for alternative routes the way the drone industry did it. So we've been looking at the drone industry, which I think is really fascinating. Zip Line is a good example. They went to Africa.

• 42:43Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, amazing company.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, a really great business model delivering blood. So, you know, we will talk to, you know, world leaders and, you know, start to find places where we can start to, you know, become an operating company, whether it's humanitarian, you know, delivering doctors or, you know, supplies or food to areas that are hard to get to. I had a conversation with a CEO of one of the large mining companies and he told me that, you know, they bring supplies, doctors, food, medicine to a community, an Aboriginal community in Australia. And he was asking if he could buy, you know, if he could buy, you know, the planes from us because he uses a fleet of helicopters today to do it.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  And he wants to increase the size of his fleet, but it's so expensive to operate and maintain helicopters. And so those are great places to go where you're not flying over crowded urban centers, but you are doing something great for humanity with a, you know, a project that will be on the one yard line, you know, with the regulator kind of waiting for the final sign off. I think we will be able to find ways to operate kind of before certification. And, and that's like, almost like a hedge to, you know, the regulator is hard to, you know, we don't call the shots, they do. And so, you know, whenever they let us, you know, start operating, it's going to be obviously a great day, but we also will start operating in 2025, no matter what.

• 44:09Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. You know, people, when they see the, these eVTOL vehicles, they think of the military Osprey, which has an awful track record of safety and it couldn't be more night and day. Just to compare and contrast one second, because I can imagine the, the military replacing those vehicles with this next generation.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so they're actually just two totally different categories of vehicles. So the Osprey is a huge vehicle with a very, you know, high ability to, you know, carry payload and travel far distances. So that vehicle is extraordinarily complex. One of the guys that ran program at, you know, for, you know, when they were building the Osprey was over at Archer running program and he said, the cross shaft.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  The part that goes between the two rotors, he said, was heavier, more expensive and more complex than our entire vehicle, just with the one part, the cross shaft. And so that one part had to make sure the fuel could go back and forth to the two rotors in case one of them went out. So that is extraordinarily complex vehicle. This is a very, very simple vehicle. And the simplicity behind these vehicles are actually, and the similarity of these vehicles to cars are actually why the automakers are so heavily involved. So Arctur has a big partnership with Stellantis. It's the third largest automaker out there, Jeep, Ram, Maserati, Peugeot. And they're an incredible partner for us, helping us manufacture.

• 45:45Speaker 04

  They provide capital, they provide engineering guidance. They've been a great partner. And there's other automakers out there too that have been involved in the industry. So I would actually equate these vehicles closer to cars than those complex vehicles like Ospreys. So they're kind of on different spectrums. The other thing too is they have giant Ospreys, have giant rotors, and the bigger the rotor, the harder it is. The rotor dynamics get extremely challenging. We have much smaller propellers, which are just much easier to use.

• 46:10Peter Diamandis?

  Let's talk about air traffic control here. So you're flying, do you imagine that in volume operation? I mean, let me ask you a different question first. Five or 10 years from now, how many are being produced per year? What's the volume potential for something like this?

• 46:27Speaker 04

  So it's funny, one of the guys at Stellantis said, look, Adam, so I was bragging. I was like, oh, the facility that we're making in Georgia, in the first phase, it could produce up to 650 planes, and in the second phase, 2,300 planes per year. I was like, that's unbelievable. And he's like, yeah, 2,000 planes is cool. It was like, but you know what's really cool? It's like a million planes per year. It was like the social networking moment when Justin Timberlake says to the Mark Zuckerberg character, he's like, you know what's cool? A billion dollars. That's what I felt like. I was like, oh, I felt really stupid. 2,300 planes seems really not like a lot. And so that's how the automakers think and scale.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  So there are step changes that need to happen, and then there are adoption kind of curves that need to happen. But that's why the international markets are so interesting, because there are places like India that have An extraordinarily challenge ahead of them in terms of scaling infrastructure. So the US will have-

• 47:28Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, for people don't realize this, India, amazing nation, a very intelligent, scientific engineering, English speaking, and one of their major holdbacks is their transportation ecosystem.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, in the US, we have 950 cars per thousand people. In India, there's 200 cars per thou- 20 cars per thousand people. And the same equivalent of the JFK to Manhattan takes you three hours there. I've done it in Delhi, in Bengaluru, in Hossor. It is extreme, the traffic.

• 48:01Peter Diamandis?

  It's brutal.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  And it's only going to get worse as they continue to industrialize. So they need technology to leapfrog 2D transportation. And so that's why there's been such an interest. And we've partnered with Rahul Bhatia from Indigo, which is the largest airline in India. It's like 60-plus percent market share. And he's very close with Prime Minister Modi, who wants to find transportation solutions. So when you start to look outside the US and the international markets, there is a real potential to leapfrog politics, where in the US, if you want to talk about putting a million vehicles into the air, you can imagine the challenges of scaling things here beyond just the traditional challenges. The political challenges are tough.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Internationally, there are places that need this, that it's almost like they have to have this.

• 48:51Peter Diamandis?

  I also imagine this for Africa, right? Africa went from landline telephony to mobile and revolutionized the nation, where telephony in Africa is better than some parts of the United States. But I can imagine, there's such little road infrastructure in the African subcontinent that this could be transformational if you get the volumes up and the cost down. And you just said, it's just the electrons become free after a while, and then it's the cost of the infrastructure.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 49:24Peter Diamandis?

  So let's talk about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of vehicles flying as packet-switched humans, point-to-point.

• 49:35Peter Diamandis?

  Is the air traffic control system able to handle that? Does it go fully automated? What's the conversations with the FAA like? What's your hope? Because, I mean, listen, as a pilot, as much as I respect the hard work the FAA does and air traffic control does, it's insane right now that they read me over an open crackly radio and I have to write down the details of my IFR flight plan and then I have to read it back. And that's just crazy.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think there's a lot of parts of the sort of old infrastructure that need to get redone. The good news is we can launch using the existing infrastructure. There will be a kind of a period of time where there's both helicopters and eVTOLs and then ultimately switch out, I think, for all of these electric airplanes. And so that transition period will take some time. There's still 50,000 helicopters out there. So that'll still take us many years to build and replace those vehicles. But ultimately, we'll have to, I think, completely change the system here. The good news is NASA has been working on this for over a decade. So there's a lot of work that's been put into this. But it is a monumental task for sure.

• 50:57Speaker 04

  A lot of it will also depend on, you know, it's funny, when you look at the movies, right? And I was thinking back to like the fifth element where Bruce Willis is driving an air taxi, right? It's actually an air taxi.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  They're driving on lines like in a line, like in a road. It's actually, you know, you can manage that. You're effectively just managing, making sure you don't bump the vehicle in front of you. So I can see that, you know, routes that get planned, heavy use routes that get planned, where they become actually very dense, that they start to operate like that because it's easier to get volume that way because all you're really doing is spacing these vehicles. And then with the autonomy features you can put, you know, it's actually much easier to do that. And again, because it's different than terrestrial vehicles where the long tail is just so

• 51:45Speaker 04

  Great, you know, there can be any number of scenarios that can happen that are almost impossible to train for. In the air, you can see from all directions and there's nothing really like coming at you. The sky is basically empty. And it's infinitely scales effectively. So it allows just a lot more room to put a lot more, more, more, more vehicles in the air. So it's going to be hard, but I think it's actually, you know, something that's been worked on for, for quite some time and is very doable.

• 52:11Peter Diamandis?

  And there is a lot of room and AI will be our friend and the sensors and the technology to enable autonomy there. Is here now and it's a matter of when do we get the regulatory structures? I want to turn the conversation to the origins of Archer because, you know, folks listening who are aspire to building moonshots. You know, because listen, as Peter Thiel said, you know, the world was expecting flying cars and got 140 characters. And it's, I mean, the idea of the, of flying car, to use that, that term, has always been the definition of the future, right? There's the Jetsons and it's like, when are we going to have flying cars? Well, they're here.

• 52:55Peter Diamandis?

  And they, you know, I remember earliest days of these conversations when people were talking about, maybe now we can have these vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. And over like, over the, the span of like a year or two, a dozen companies really materialized. I, I do believe Archer is in my mind, you know, top of the stack in terms of how far you've come and what you've built. So congrats on that. But can you take me back to when, when this entered your mind as a,

• 53:35Peter Diamandis?

  yeah, I'm going to go build or go build a company to do that because it's kind of a crazy desire. And then to actually, I want to talk about how, how did you start?

• 53:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, so my story isn't, I guess, I don't know if there is a typical founder story, but you know, I actually started, when I graduated college and I went to work, it was 2001, so I got hired in 2000 to get a job, which was basically the end of the dot com boom, and I actually went and I became an investment banker, and I actually didn't know what an investment banker was. I did it for Merrill Lynch, and the only reason I did it was because, you know, one of my friends' family members had said, "That's not really a job for you, Adam. That's more of a job for some of the Ivy League kids." And I was like, "Pfft, Ivy League kids? No way. I'm a state school kid. I will get

• 54:26Speaker 04

  any job." And I literally dedicated myself to the next, you know, really 18 months to getting that job. I end up getting that job. My second day of work was 9/11. And so I worked really two, I worked in the World Financial Center, which was effectively one block away from the World Trade Center, and I lived about four blocks north of the Trade Center. And so I'm walking to work in this new city in New York, which I'd spent basically no time in, and you know, literally the plane flies over my head into the building. I watched it all happen, and then, of course, the second one. And it was just this, completely shook me. And I, I left banking after six months, because effectively, there was nothing

• 55:10Speaker 04

  to do, because the world basically stopped. And I went to work for a hedge fund. But hedge funds back in 2002 were not what they are today. That was the Wild West of investing. And I ended up working for a guy that was, you know, just an absolute genius. And he had said to me, "I'm going to show you how to find value in the world." And his big thesis was, "Follow the research. Wherever it takes you, public, private, it doesn't matter." And so we did all types of crazy stuff together, looking at public companies, private companies. You know, I remember where we, you know, we actually invested in Bovespa, the Brazilian stock exchange, and it was a private company, and we had went and figured out a way to buy seats on a foreign, you know, you know...

• 55:55Speaker 04

  Countries stock exchange, which was very hard to do through other entities, which ultimately de-mutualized and ended up going public and was very successful. All of these things were basically like impossible, impossible things to do. It was like you can't go buy seats on a, on a stock exchange of a foreign country. They will never let you do that as an American. It was always started with the note and he was like, I'll show you how to, um, you know, get things done and find value. So again, I mean, it's very different than like the, you know, going to work today and just like, you know, buying a stock and shorting another stock. Um, and it was kind of the Wild West back then. We also invested in Bitcoin very early, um, off the white paper. Uh, you know, the, you know, the, the early, early days. And so it was a, um, you know, just a wild period of time, but all that was training. And I studied what makes companies good and what makes companies bad.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  What makes industries good? What makes industries bad? But as I was following that research, I started looking at tech companies. I started, um, you know, investing in tech companies and then I started, um, building tech companies. And so I started messing around, um, on the internet. And what I quickly discovered was the same thing that, you know, as you always find, which is it's not reserved for the few. It's actually an open system that anyone can go and compete in and start building stuff. And it was just so fun. And so I built a bunch of different things, failed pretty much every single time, uh, but ultimately figured, figured some stuff out. Each time that, you know, I would, I would start, I would start an idea or a project. Um, it always was very sound in nature, but getting an idea is nothing.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Getting somebody to use your product is really hard. Getting a lot of people to use your product is extraordinarily hard. Getting people to pay for your product is unbelievably hard and a lot of people to pay for your product is, is, is absolutely extraordinary. And so the whole crossing the chasm concept was always very interesting to me. And so, um, my last company, um, you know, that I, that I had started, um, was a company called Vettery. It was a software-based business in the recruiting space. Um, I did it with a partner and, um, you know, it was a really, really fun company where we, we had a great time, a great culture. Um, it wasn't really in the space that we wanted to be in, um, but it was a, um, a really great experience. It was taught, you know, it taught us all not raise. Using capital and you know, building teams, recruiting and scaling products and all that,

• 58:09Speaker 04

  all that good stuff, which all of this was training for Archer, which led me to that. But the one thing at Vettery that I just hated was the grind of sales. And so like the month to month, you start over, you know, each time. And so as you know, I thought about, you know, a next company, one of the things that was really important was the tech was so good that I wouldn't have to sell it, it could actually sell itself. And so when you start thinking like that, like your product has to be really amazing. And you start to think about products in your life that are like that. There are not very many of those, right? Maybe your iPhone, maybe your Apple computer, maybe your Tesla. There's not many that you can keep going down a list that if you've replaced it with something else, you don't really care. Who cares? It's fine, whatever. You know, it's that one pair of jeans for another pair of jeans.

• 58:54Speaker 04

  It's fine.

• 58:55Peter Diamandis?

  Right, right, right.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  So, so I started looking at much bigger and bigger projects with really interesting tech. Now, when I looked at electrification of transportation, we had been following Elon for a long time. And as an entrepreneur-

• 59:11Peter Diamandis?

  What year are you in now at this point?

• 59:13Speaker 04

  So, in really, you know, the Vettery years, you know, were 2015, you know, really to about 2018. That was like where it got, became like successful. And ultimately sold it to a company called the Adecco Group, who lots so many incredible lessons there too, so many interesting, you know, things that happened. But when, you know, sold the, you know, sold the company,

• 59:41Speaker 04

  started thinking about, you know, different ways to grow and scale. And I remember reading, you know, the, you know, the book on Elon Musk and just being so inspired at the big projects that he did.

• 59:51Peter Diamandis?

  The moonshots, the moonshots out there, yeah.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  Exactly. Reading the Peter Thiel books, you know, Zero to One and those kind of, you know, stories. And a lot of lessons were really interesting where the bigger the projects that you build, like the more inspiring it is, actually in a way, the easier it is. And that's like a kind of an interesting thing to say, but it's actually very true. It's much easier to hire, it's much easier to raise a lot of capital for. You know, at Vettery, it was very hard. It was like, hey, come over. We're doing this really cool thing and building a talent marketplace. It's really hard to recruit that way versus, hey, we're going to go change the future of transportation, building flying cars. Like, it's a much better pitch for people. But you have to be credible to do that. And so having sold Vettery gave me credibility to do this. It wasn't like I was just a crackpot. It was

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  like, oh, this is actually, you know, a person that's like done real stuff, been serious, has sold some stuff. The other thing that was just such a huge factor in being able to do this was the ability to raise capital. And so through my 20 years in New York City, I had made a lot of great friends. I had made people money over the years from my finance days, and then I'd made people money over the years in my startup days. I built a good network, but a lot of my friends were running banks, running funds. And so it allowed the network that I had built allowed me to leverage my track record and go raise a substantial amount of capital. So, you know, again, we were 45 people, raised a billion dollars of capital. That was pretty unprecedented. And maybe it was a moment in time that we

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  just, you know, were lucky that we hit. But that was a, you know, kind of a critical piece. But when I looked at the business models of what was going on in the industry of, you know, these, you know, EV tall companies, nobody was building a vehicle that was based around a business model. It was very much R and D. And so there were autonomous only, you know, companies that you just knew the FAA was never going to let you take the market in the near term. There are companies 3D printing. There were companies building planes without a wing, which meant your, your range and your payload capabilities were so limited, you could not create a business. And so I kind of put back on my, you know, more practical head, thinking about my old job of what would I want to hear? And so we built a vehicle

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  that was based around a business model. And, and that was shockingly very attractive to the engineering community. And so that pitch was, was, was quite interesting because people had been working on this for a long time. And so one of the guys that I met early was a guy named Tom Muniz, who was the head of engineering at ZerO, which is kind of the original EV tall company that Larry Page started.

• 1:02:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I remember Larry Page pulled me aside one time. He was on my board at XPRIZE. And I said, so what are you, what are you working on that no one else knows about? He goes, I'm, I'm building flying cars.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  So he really paved the way for a lot of the industry.

• 1:02:43Peter Diamandis?

  And he started a number of companies in this era, he and Sebastian Thrun.

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so when I talked to Tom and said, well, Tom, why don't we just go try to build a plane that could actually get to market instead of an R and D project? And he was like, I am 100% on board. Let's go do it. And so Tom was on board. And then a really funny thing happened. This journalist wrote this article that said, hey, there's a company called Archer, it's a new EV talk company that's hiring up engineers and paying them three times what they normally make, which was not true, but it was the best advertisement you could ever have. And everybody would talk to us all of a sudden. And so we ended up hiring the best team in the world, just such an incredible group of engineers and

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  went for it and built it. And so the concept of, you know, our saying was always find the most efficient path to market. We followed the Tesla model, which is build the roadster, get it to market, and then then we'll build the Model S. Don't try to build the Model S first. That went back to our strategy. A lot of the industry was vertically integrating. We tried to buy as much stuff off the shelf as possible. We ended up building the powertrain ourselves because you couldn't buy it. But everything else we would vertically, we would, you know, buy from a tier one supplier. That lowered the risk to the regulators because they're very familiar with most of the parts that we use, which again was a great message back to the, you know, the capital allocators, which allowed us to raise such a substantial amount of capital, which allowed us to be where we are today.

• 1:04:15Peter Diamandis?

  It's amazing. The old, you know, saying no bucks, no buck Rogers. It really is true here. So it's interesting. I want to think about, because you didn't come from an aviation background. You didn't come from even a physical manufacturing or engineering or automotive or rocket background. And, and do you think that held you back in any ways? Or did that give you an advantage unconstrained?

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  I think about my job as kind of like four core areas, vision, capital, people and risk and it's it's an augmented version of Mark Laurie, who is one of my good friends and investors.

• 1:04:59Peter Diamandis?

  Well, both you and Mark will be speaking at Abundance 360 this year, will be at the Abundance Summit, so excited, excited for that. Yeah, he's, he's great.

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, excited to be there. Yeah, he's, he's awesome. He's a, he's a great, you know, visionary entrepreneur. And, and, and so I have a very clear vision of what we want, we need to do. Like, for example, this year, the goal is extremely clear, which is to fly the pilot of like production aircraft. Like, that is the single goal for this year. So by having very clear goals like that, it allows people to optimize around decisions, which allows you to get things done and move really, really fast. So that, that has been very effective. I'm very good on the capital side, just because of my background and, you know, I, I've been able to make people, I have a good track record of, of doing it, which has been helpful. And then I spend a lot of my time on the people's side and

• 1:05:49Speaker 04

  really trying to make sure we hire the best people. And, you know, I really believe in the, you know, Steve Jobs adage where you hire the best people and they tell you what to do, not you telling them what to do. And so if you can truly hire the best people, you can do that, as long as they have a very clear vision of what to do, you can get these people to work together. And then I'll spend a lot of my time understanding where the risks lie and trying to make the big calls to make sure, you know, we go left or right to avoid the, you know, the big pitfalls. I do think it was an advantage when I look at the, the competitors, because I don't have the desire to chase the shiny objects. In our space, there's so many shiny objects because, you know, the, you, the design space for aviation has never been so wide open because electric motors scale down. You can

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  do so many cool things. So I don't have that, you know, same, that same knack. And I also think, again, it's going to be critical in this industry, not only that we just execute, but that we can actually show we can build a real business. Because if you don't build a real business, you will not get the capital to actually be able to fulfill this dream because it is so capital intensive. As you said, aviation is hard if you can't find a way to make money. And that, I think, is actually the hardest thing about hardware. Most of these hardware products, the question is not can you make it? It's, it's, yes, you could make it. The question is, can you build a business around it? Which, in other words, is are you in the right decade? Right? And that is the thing that you always have to figure out is did you pick the wrong decade?

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, where, cool, you built an amazing, you know, toy, but it's too expensive to actually generate economic returns. Therefore, the capital game does not last forever and the cycles will hit you. Eventually, you'll hit a rough patch and you will run out of money with, you know, these big, intensive hardware companies.

• 1:07:35Peter Diamandis?

  For any moonshot entrepreneurs listening, that is gold. Because, just because you can make it, build it, doesn't mean the business is going to succeed. And so many people, you know, have gotten the timing wrong and done it too early, which is the same as just failing. Because the whole market needs to be ready for you. That includes people's perspectives, regulatory structures, capital markets, you know, everything. I mean, Bill Gross from Ideallab, who will also be with us at A360, you know, gives some great talks about timing is one of the most critical things that, you know, the Uber came into existence because the iPhone was there, because Google Maps was there,

• 1:08:19Peter Diamandis?

  because people wanted to make money after the 2008 recession.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  It's really funny. People always ask me, always ask me this question. Adam, do you regret going public? Or do you, you know, how does it feel? They always ask in a negative connotation. How does it feel to be public as a public company? And the answer is, it's amazing. Are you kidding me? We found a way to raise a billion dollars of capital with less than 50 people. It was the best thing we ever did unquestioned. It was great. And yes, it's definitely a luck played a huge portion of it. But we, you know, as Nikhil likes to say, increased our luck surface area by prepping for that. And so I was, had my ear to the ground and was very close to the SPAC market. So a friend of mine who runs capital markets at Morgan Stanley, you know, I would

• 1:09:06Speaker 04

  Check in with all the time and I would say, how do I do this? What? Tell me what's going on? And he would say, well, first of all, there's a, there's a big, you know, cash component. You have to be willing to risk. You have to go do a public company accounting audit, PCAOB audit. Second thing you have to do is get all your legal docs in order, which is very expensive. And so after you've now spent $6 million, now maybe if the market comes to you, you can do this. So it's very expensive to just do the legal work to get ready for, before you even like figure out if you're going to do any of this stuff. So you spend that, we spent the money and then tried to understand what was happening in the SPAC market. And Nikola was actually the one that was out there that was doing really well at the time. And so a lot of the early companies paid attention and understood what the investors were interested in. And that's what, what, you know, I think I did a good job of following that.

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  And Archer was the first company in the space to announce. We announced before Joby, we went out and did it and we, we picked a really great sponsor in Ken Mollis. And so they were been extremely helpful to the company. So Ken Mollis is one of the most prolific investment bankers in the world. So, you know, when he goes out and he talks to, you know, some of his clients or some of the, you know, the leaders of, you know, of the world, he mentions Archer and he talks about it. He's almost like, I joke, I was like, Ken, you're my lead gen guy. And so he's a, you know, that, that was, that was very effective in picking the right partner there. And then again, we hit it. And if you look at some of the competitors that went after us,

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  the difference of three months was a difference of 100% redemptions and no pipe and a huge pipe and 50% redemptions. We had 48% redemptions and we raised a

• 1:10:39Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 1:10:40Speaker 04

  A monstrous pipe, you know, a $500 million, you know, $600 million, you know, round got us up to, you know, almost $900 million. So it was just, again, a lot of it was timing. We definitely increased our luck surface area. And then I think we've been responsible with the money too. And we, the whole thing has been on execution. We have to show results for what we're doing. And that's why, if you listen, you know, back to what I said before, which was we are launching in 2025 with or without, you know, FA approval. It doesn't mean we'll launch in the US, but we will launch. We will find markets to go launch because business model to me matters.

• 1:11:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And experience matters and demonstrated operations matters. And I guess the next big thing is going to be going into mass manufacture. And maybe we can, we can wrap on that subject. You're going to build plants to produce the midnight vehicle. Where are you thinking about?

• 1:11:33Speaker 04

  So we announced a big factory in Covington, Georgia, which is right outside of Atlanta. Great town. I mean, really great town. It's a cute little town with an awesome square, but also right next to Georgia Tech, you know, a good, you know, which is a great aviation school.

• 1:11:47Peter Diamandis?

  Great aviation school.

• 1:11:49Speaker 04

  Governor Kemp has been very supportive of bringing these green jobs to the state. So he was very, we got a great incentive package to go there. But a lot of my strategy has actually been focused on looking at what like Apple did. And so Apple, the Apple Foxconn relationship is really interesting. Apple owns the design, they own the manufacturing engineering process, and then they work with Foxconn on the kind of operations manufacturing side, the mass scaling of that. And so our partnership with Stellantis, I think, is really unique and it's blossomed into a great relationship where we focused very heavily on design, we're working on the manufacturing and engineering together, and then ultimately the goal is to hand it off to them to go print.

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  So when you think about these companies, you know, like Stellantis, they are absolute masters at logistics, sourcing raw materials, bringing them together, keeping these things super tight, managing the supply chain and getting stuff out the door. They turn raw material into finished product in days. And so they're really incredible at doing that. So when we think about scale, I don't, I just didn't think it made sense to look at the traditional aviation companies because they don't build that scale. It's a very different mindset, but the autos do, and there's a lot of lessons learned there. And again, the partnership that we have with Stellantis and specifically the CEO Carlos Tavares is a really positive one that I think we can both benefit from immensely and we

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  can leverage the, you know, really lessons in scaling that Stellantis has shown with their vehicles. I mean, they're building something like 500, 600,000 cars per month. And so, you know, there's just an incredible amount of things we can do and we can also be protected, potentially protected, I guess I should say, from squeezes in raw materials. And so, you know, when you think about different things getting, you know, cut off, you'd rather be one of the big guys than the little guys. And I think it is going to be important to protect against raw materials because especially on the, anything that has to do with batteries is going to get tight here at some point.

• 1:13:52Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I remember having a conversation with Elon. He said, you know, when you look at the people try and protect their idea, and he said the ratio of the value of the idea. To the value of putting something into mass production is, you know, is zero to infinity. It's just, yeah, the idea is the easy part. It's actually turning it into a business and actually operating at scale. That's everything.

• 1:14:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really liked T had said, you know, his, um, his IP is his speed, right? So it's almost like he didn't care. I think he does care, but like you would say, like, you know, we're not trying to just protect the IP from a traditional way. Speed is the way that you protect it. And I really agree with that. It also, again, like the, if you look at like the market, it's really interesting, you know, the total addressable market TAM for our industry is huge, right? You know, Morgan Stanley put out a number and they said it could be as big as nine trillion. It's like a, an auto sized number. It's one of the biggest markets out there. But you have a certain point where you have to prove that too. And so, you know, before you get to market, you're in this typical like one to

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  three billion dollar market cap range. It's the same place where Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid all were. They all three were there. As soon as they hit to production, they all went to 30 billion. So again, go back and look at Tesla when they launched the Roadster, you know, the stock goes to 30 billion market cap. Rivian and Lucid did the same. And then it's up to you to prove that the TAM is real. So Tesla obviously has made it. Rivian and Lucid are still trying to figure out if, if, you know, that there, they can be part of that story. And so hitting production for us is really exciting, but we have to prove the market is as big as we're saying. And so that not only just is the manufacturing hard, but actually building the business is going to be hard. And so I don't want to underestimate the, you know, the, the difficulty that is going to be too. And so

• 1:15:41Speaker 04

  we're very focused on that as well. And we've built up a good team internally to go start building up the airline operations and all the partnerships that we've launched internationally. But that, the scaling of the operations side, especially in our business is going to be quite challenging.

• 1:15:54Peter Diamandis?

  Adam Goldstein, founder, CEO of Art Aviation, manufacturer of Midnight eVTOL. I can't, okay, if I can't have one, I can't wait to fly in one. So 2025 is right around the corner. Listen, thank you, my friend. Thank you for the work that you, your team, Nikhil are doing. And a pleasure, looking forward to seeing you in March at the Abundance Summit and, and coming up to visit. I want to come and see the plant, come and see the vehicle.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And you're welcome anytime.

• 1:16:26Peter Diamandis?

  Thanks, pal.

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  Alrighty, thank you.

• 1:16:40Speaker 05

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