#258 Adam Bry - Why China Fears Skydio’s Rise in AI Drone Technology

Adam Bry is the Co-Founder and CEO of Skydio, the leading U. S. drone manufacturer and world leader in autonomous flight technology, founded in 2014 to develop AI-powered drones for consumer, enterprise, and defense applications. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in aerospace engineering, Bry was an early team member at Google X's Project Wing, contributing to delivery drone initiatives before launching Skydio. Under his leadership, Skydio achieved unicorn status in 2021 with a $1 billion valuation after a $170 million Series D round and has since grown to a multi-billion-dollar company, securing contracts with the U. S. Department of Defense and international partners for autonomous systems like the Skydio X10 drone. Bry has testified before Congress on U. S. drone policy and national security, emphasizing innovation in aviation and electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) technologies. He advocates for American leadership in the next century of aviation, ethical AI in drones, and bridging public-private partnerships to advance critical infrastructure and defense capabilities. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://RocketMoney.com/SRS Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to https://RocketMoney.com/SRS today. https://lumen.me/SRS Head to https://lumen.me/SRS for 15% off your purchase. https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://trueclassic.com/SRS Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at https://trueclassic.com/SRS! #trueclassicpod https://helixsleep.com/srs Go to https://helixsleep.com/srs for 27% Off Sitewide Make sure you enter our show name into the post-purchase survey so they know we sent you! Adam Bry Links: X - https://x.com/adampbry LI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adambry Skydio - https://www.skydio.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:04Shawn Ryan?

  Adam Bree, welcome to the show, man. Very excited to be here, Sean. Very excited to have you.

• 1:27Shawn Ryan?

  What do we have? Oh, shit.

• 1:49Shawn Ryan?

  We have a third joining us? So this is the SkyDR10?

• 1:55Shawn Ryan?

  No way.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  So this is our, uh, brand new indoor tactical drone, uh, designed to get into dangerous situations. You don't have to send a person, uh, and as you can tell, it's got a speaker on here. It's, uh, it's detected a threat.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Attention, attention, please exit the area immediately. I repeat.

• 2:15Shawn Ryan?

  Is somebody behind that or is that programmed in there?

• 2:19Speaker 03

  Uh, so you can do two-way communication. Um, so you can actually like perch this thing and establish two-way communication. If you've got a barricaded suspect or something like that, or you can just have pre-recorded audio where it says whatever you want it to say.

• 2:32Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, that is, that is bad. So in case you haven't figured it out, we're talking about all things drones today. The founder of Skydio and, um, yeah, you guys are doing all kinds of badass stuff with drones. So I can't wait to dig in. So this one, so this one is an indoor drone and will rove around.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:57Shawn Ryan?

  Whatever you put it in.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we basically built it, uh, because a lot of the most dangerous work that our customers do happens indoors, like in law enforcement. You got a barricaded suspect, you don't know what's in there, you don't know if they're armed or not, and typically you'd have to send a police officer in, you know, gun drawn. They don't know what they're heading into, and this is the root cause of a lot of tragedies. Um, so if you can send a drone, you get perfect situational awareness, you can de-escalate the situation, you can establish two-way communication. Uh, so the general mantra is like, send the robot, not the person. Um, so this is a brand new product for us.

• 3:29Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, that is cool. Can you put a gun on that thing? I know you can. I know you can.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Uh, well, in the U.S., it is illegal, uh, to put any kind of weapon on a drone.

• 3:42Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's dumb.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  And fly it in civilian airspace.

• 3:46Shawn Ryan?

  Just kidding.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  But, uh, you should, you should talk to our friends at Axon about the possibility of putting a taser on it.

• 3:51Shawn Ryan?

  Axon. I think we have talked to them. Uh, maybe.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're, they're the inventors of, uh, of the, the taser and body camera.

• 4:01Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, so this, nobody's seen this yet?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Well, this, this product is, is brand new. We just announced it about a month ago, uh, and it's just getting into customer hands now. So it'll, it'll be a steady build, but it's actually flown real missions, uh, in the hands of some of our early access customers.

• 4:15Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations. Who, who is the market for this? Is this gonna be in all, everybody's home?

• 4:21Speaker 03

  So initially-

• 4:22Shawn Ryan?

  Shopping malls?

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, uh, initially it'll be heavily law enforcement, um, and right now drones are used by SWAT, like indoor drones like this would be used by like high-end SWAT teams, um, and we certainly expect that the R10 will be used by SWAT teams in high-stakes situations. But our real goal with this is to build something that's much more accessible for kinda everyday patrol officers. Because they're the ones that oftentimes find themselves in the most dangerous situation. They don't have backup, they're out there by themselves. And so this thing really becomes like a flying robot assistant. Um, so we expect it to be heavily adopted in, in law enforcement. Uh, but we also are seeing incredible interest in critical infrastructure inspection.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  So we work with energy utilities, uh, that have all kinds of gnarly indoor infrastructure in, uh, generation plants and so on, where they have to do really dangerous, slow, expensive inspections. You know, they have to shut the whole plant down, they have to build scaffolding, somebody has to go and like climb around to look for cracks and defects. Uh, and so for them, just being able to put a drone in the air, fly around, see this stuff super quickly, super efficiently, is, is a total game changer. And then over time, we also expect this to be adopted, uh, by the military, uh, for, um, confined space type situational awareness work.

• 5:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. Man, your customer, I mean, uh, we had talked about this off-camera right before the interview, but I, uh, my old buddy Jake Johnson-

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:50Shawn Ryan?

  Who, uh, apparently did, did some work for you guys. Uh, I mean, he was, he was just, gave me a little bit of inside baseball on-

• 6:00Shawn Ryan?

  On everything you guys are doing, your your customer is pretty much everyone and anyone.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Well, we

• 6:08Shawn Ryan?

  Seems like, I mean, from inspecting naval ships for rust to power lines to cellphone towers to SWAT teams to clearing buildings. It's crazy, man.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean,

• 6:22Shawn Ryan?

  It you have so many markets.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  The the thing that is exciting to me, like the way that I think about it, we we really serve the critical industries that our civilization depends on. And historically, Silicon Valley has generally been oriented towards like, you know, tech and finance and social media, and that stuff is all important. Uh, but I think there's really something very special about building technology to serve the hardcore physical industries and the people that do hardcore physical work. And that's really what our products are all about. You know, it's the most basic, uh, sort of fundamental piece is digitizing the physical world, like putting sensors in really important places, get useful information to help people make better decisions and get better outcomes. And that applies across a very broad range of of sectors.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  And it's just an amazing set of people to get to work with that I think have historically been underserved by technology. And we're in a position now where we're building this cutting edge AI robotics. I mean, really like the bleeding edge of tech, but we're deploying it to these like these traditionally slower moving physical industries. Uh, and it's just a super fun thing to get to work on.

• 7:28Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I love what you're doing. I love what you're doing.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Appreciate it.

• 7:31Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody gets an introduction here. Let me give you yours. Adam Bree. Co-founder and CEO of Skydio, America's leading drone company revolutionizing autonomous flight technology. Visionary engineer who turned a passion for robotics into a unicorn enterprise valued in the billions. A former Google X innovator contributing to Project Wing. Testified before Congress in 2021 on autonomous drones' role in national security and in 2024 on countering China's strategy in semiconductor shipbuilding and drones. Driving force behind drones that fly themselves, making them safer and more accessible for

• 8:15Shawn Ryan?

  military, public safety, and commercial applications. You've been building stuff that can fly since you were five years old.

• 8:24Shawn Ryan?

  Quite the intro here and um you know and later later on in this intro in this uh interview we're gonna have some some pretty badass show and tell which we already did there's already did lots more flying to come I always like to say that you know the flying robots are the real stars of the show so we'll uh lots of flying robots apparently I'm a I'm a threat now

• 8:45Speaker 03

  I think your crew suggested that that was uh that's how we should address you

• 8:49Shawn Ryan?

  yeah well they might they might not be wrong I'm scared but um dude that thing is super cool yeah so alright I got a couple of things to knock out uh before we get to in the weeds on the interviews so one everybody gets a gift I got you a couple here Adam first those are vigilance lead gummy bears bears made in the USA still legal in all 50 states should be good to go and um

• 9:24Shawn Ryan?

  you're in California right I am alright we got we got you a special model Sig here alright California compliant go ahead open it up it's not loaded you like firearms right

• 9:35Speaker 03

  uh it's been a long time since I've shot a firearm but I was very into it in summer camp

• 9:40Shawn Ryan?

  good deal

• 9:42Shawn Ryan?

  alright so that is the Sig P365 Legion it's all metal it's got those little slits up front uh the barrel up top up top there you go for gas dispersion helps with the muzzle flip it's uh actually the normal version has 17 rounds in the magazine plus one I don't know what the California compliant uh model has I think it might be 10 but it's got a little cut there if you want to put an optic on there anyways that is like the latest and greatest everyday carry gun that's the rage everybody's going on about and uh so we thought you might like

• 10:22Speaker 03

  that's amazing

• 10:23Shawn Ryan?

  I might like one

• 10:24Speaker 03

  yeah I really appreciate it Sean

• 10:25Shawn Ryan?

  my pleasure

• 10:27Speaker 03

  mine I'm allowed to take this back to California with me

• 10:30Shawn Ryan?

  well yeah at least right now you are alright but uh great and then um

• 10:38Shawn Ryan?

  I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription account. We've turned into into quite the community. They've been here with me since the beginning and and they're the real reason that I get to sit down with you today. So one of the things I do is offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. So this is from Leland King.

• 10:59Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of range or flight distance do drones like SkyDO10 or X10D have during autonomous missions? I'm curious about this because I often consider how challenging it would be to have a swarm of drones launching and landing at your position while attempting to conduct reconnaissance on a nearby enemy force without being detected.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, so the military variant of our product, the X10D, is what's called a short-range reconnaissance system. Um, so the typical range is out to six, seven miles, kind of like max flight distance, max flight time. Um, most of the missions are shorter than that. Most of the missions tend to be in the kind of like one to two mile range. In the civilian sector, our drones fly with LTE modems on them, uh, and so they can basically go anywhere that you have LTE coverage.

• 11:53Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  And we've done flights that are, you know, 10, 15 miles in LTE conditions.

• 11:59Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, well, before we-

• 12:01Shawn Ryan?

  These are all autonomous? I mean, nobody's controlling this?

• 12:06Speaker 03

  So you can, you can fly them in a bunch of different ways. You can fly them quite manually. Um, uh, you can, you know, you can hold a controller, you can push around the joysticks. Um, or you can operate them autonomously. You can give them a mission, they'll fly out and do waypoints. You can give them a task, like follow this person or thing, um, inspect this area, map this structure. So there's a whole bunch of different ways that you can control the drone. The thing that we've really invested heavily in and what we really see is the future of the industry is just more and more autonomy. Um, we kind of say, you know, the drone should work for the person, not the other way around. So one person should have like five, 10, 50 drones doing useful work on their behalf. And the only way you're going to get there is with AI and autonomy, making the thing smart enough to fly itself. And so that's what we're really focused on.

• 12:49Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, before we get too deep into it, I have a gift for you as well.

• 12:54Shawn Ryan?

  I love gifts.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  So, uh- What you've seen here is the R10, which is a new drone. Uh, this is our flagship drone. This is the Skydio X10. Um, so this thing is out there, uh, kicking butt at scale in the world today. Uh, but this is a very special X10. This is not a normal X10. So you see that there?

• 13:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  So that's a bullet hole. Uh, and and this X10 was shot in the line of duty. So this was used by the Oklahoma City Police Department, uh, and it was shot serving a homicide warrant.

• 13:28Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Uh, so it kept flying. It completed the mission. Uh, but honestly, when we see stuff like this, when we see a drone that's been shot, that is great news, right? Cause it's better the drone gets shot, uh, than a person. Um, so we, we thought you, uh, you might like to have this.

• 13:42Shawn Ryan?

  This is fucking awesome.

• 13:46Shawn Ryan?

  Drone with a purple heart.

• 13:50Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, this is cool. So what was this doing on the mission?

• 13:54Speaker 03

  So it was, uh, it was, they were serving a homicide warrant. Um, so they were going out to, to arrest somebody. Um, and it's actually surprisingly common that our drones get shot at in the context of law enforcement, because oftentimes you're going after a bad guy. Bad guy's got a gun. They say the drones show up and they start shooting at it. Um, but as I said, from our perspective, it's all good news. That's the whole point of the drone is that it, it can take the risk and get the awareness, uh, rather than having to put a person in harm's way.

• 14:22Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that is cool, man. Thank you.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:24Shawn Ryan?

  It's being here. I guess we'll hang it from the ceiling.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:28Shawn Ryan?

  This is awesome.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Put it wherever you want.

• 14:30Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Very cool. Very cool. And this is the X10.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Skydio X10.

• 14:39Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's cool. Thank you.

• 14:44Shawn Ryan?

  All right. So I want to do a little bit of a backstory on you. See what, what, what captured your interest in drones and stuff anyways? And, you know, and, and talk about all the products that you guys are coming out with, what they do and all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, and then there's a lot of discussion about, you know, what's going on in Ukraine with the drones and especially China.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:05Shawn Ryan?

  So I'd love to, uh, probably end with a, with a, with a decent chat about where China's at with drones and, and, and kind of what drone warfare looks like in the coming years.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, get in all of it.

• 15:17Shawn Ryan?

  Cool. So where did you grow up?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Uh, so I grew up in Denver, Colorado. My mom grew up in Colorado Springs and her father served in the Air Force, so he was stationed in Colorado Springs. So she wanted to have kids in Colorado. And I've really been obsessed with stuff that flies since I was a very young kid. I think some of it came from my grandfather, my mom's dad. But really, from as early as I can remember, I was, you know, building the little balsa wood airplanes, the rubber band powered stuff. And then I got into radio controlled airplanes, which were really the predecessors to drones when I was 10 or 11 years old. And I was just obsessed with it. I mean, I spent most of my childhood

• 16:02Speaker 03

  in my basement, building the things and then out at the flying field, flying them. I took it way too seriously. I traveled all over the country.

• 16:10Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, you won some national championships, right?

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, most people don't even know that this world exists.

• 16:15Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't know.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  It's kind of a niche hobby within a niche hobby. But it's pretty cool. I mean, you're basically, you're building aerobatic airplanes. And then you fly set sequences of maneuvers and you get judged on how precisely you do everything. And it's a little bit like NASCAR, where it's like, it's a combination of how good is the machine and then how good are you at flying it? And so I got very into like optimizing every little detail of building these things. And then I also, I mean, in order to be good at it, it's like anything else, you spend a lot of time practicing. So I got, you know, very good at flying these systems. And I, you know, I wasn't doing it at the time because I thought it was going to be a career. I thought it was just like fun, cool stuff to be working on.

• 16:59Shawn Ryan?

  How old were you when you started that?

• 17:01Speaker 03

  So I was like, I think I probably first flew when I was eight or nine years old. And then I, like, they call it soloing, like being able to fly completely by myself. I think I was maybe 10 or 11. And then I started competing when I was 13 or 14 and then won national championships, I think when I was 16 and 17.

• 17:20Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  So I was like in that world, I was kind of a little bit of like the child prodigy, you know, like kind of coming up, coming up flying these things. But I think I was just, I was super fortunate because I got exposure to this stuff at a very young age and really developed, before I had a formal engineering education, I developed like a really deep intuitive sense for how these things work and how flight dynamics work. And, you know, when you're flying it yourself, the control system is all in your head.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  But that kind of like deep intuitive understanding is, is one of the things that I think has enabled me to, to do, you know, both the research that I later did as a grad student and then do some of the things that we're, we're doing at Skydio. Like one way that I think about what we're doing is we're building the skills of an expert pilot into the drone. And the foundation of that for me really started with like my skill as a radio controlled airplane pilot.

• 18:15Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. When did you start thinking about autonomous drones versus, you know, versus RC planes?

• 18:24Speaker 03

  So, um, so I, it was pretty obvious, like basically from the beginning that I was going to be an engineer. I mean, I, I loved building and flying RC airplanes and I also loved kind of physics and math. And I had some formative experiences in high school really where I first got exposure to this idea that you can do kind of like theoretical analysis and, and math and optimization that results in something cool happening in the physical world. So, you know, everybody does like the high school physics bridge competition where you like, you know, you build the bridge out of popsicle sticks to see how much weight it can support. And, you know, I had some experiences on that, like figuring out how to optimize this thing and make it really efficient. I think probably

• 19:09Speaker 03

  in, in undergrad and engineering was the first time that I got to write software that does something in the physical world, which I, at the time and still today find to just be a magical experience. When you, you know, you sit there and write code, you give the computer instructions and then you see those manifest in real world with the behavior and action of a robot. So the first robot that I worked on. Was a tractor. It was an autonomous tractor that could like drive itself around in an orchard, which is a very fun project and I learned a lot doing that. And then I was a grad student in the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at MIT, which is where I met my my co-founders for Skydio.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  And that's where I really got exposure to writing software for for autonomous systems. And this was like, the research program in the lab that I was in started in like 2007. I got there in 2009, so it was before drones were really seen as a major technology category. The only drones that really existed at the time were the very high end expensive military systems. And that that was just completely addicting to me. I mean, writing software and transferring a lot of this kind of intuition that I built as a as a human pilot into AI systems that could fly these things, and then seeing what that could create in the physical world is just amazing. Like, the the main output of my master's project at MIT was an airplane that could fly itself

• 20:31Speaker 03

  around in a parking garage, which the culmination of that was kind of 2012. So it was still before the drone industry really existed.

• 20:40Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, so you you started flying, you said eight or nine years old?

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:45Shawn Ryan?

  And then took maybe a small detour with the tractor and then right back into flight with autonomy, right?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:55Shawn Ryan?

  That's that's.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:58Shawn Ryan?

  That's pretty.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  My hope.

• 21:00Shawn Ryan?

  There's not that many people that focused, I'll say that.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Well, it's one of these things, you know, in hindsight, it all lines up perfectly. And I look, I'm I'm super lucky in a bunch of ways, like my dad. My dad had wanted to do radio controlled airplanes when he was a kid, and his parents just weren't that into it, and they didn't really support him in it. So he didn't get to do it. And so he had a ton of pent up energy of like wanting to do radio controlled airplane stuff, which he he took out on me, which was incredible, you know.

• 21:28Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, brother.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  You know, so I did it with my dad growing up, like, you know, we spent a ton of time building and flying these things together. And then I was just fortunate to be starting grad school right around the time when you could take radio controlled airplanes. I mean, the a lot of the hardware that goes into drones really grew out of the radio controlled airplane, the RC helicopter, kind of the toy industry. So I was starting grad school basically when you could take, you know, radio controlled airplanes and the computers and sensors were getting light enough and cheap enough and powerful enough that you could put them on RC airplanes and then, and then the big unlock, once you do that is you can write the software to get the thing to fly itself. And so, you know, I think I'm, it was like just a fortunate kind of series

• 22:07Speaker 03

  of, of timing and exposure at the right moments to be into this stuff that, that's enabled now what we're.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 22:49Shawn Ryan?

  Want to stay up to date on all things SRS? You bet your ass you do. Our newsletter brings you the latest SRS news and critical updates. Get instant alerts on the newest episodes. Never miss a beat. Exclusive intel briefs from counterterrorism expert, Sarah Adams. You've seen her many times on the show. She's going to give unfiltered insights on global terrorist activity. For Patreon exclusives, you're going to get epic range days with me and damn near every guest that's come in the studio. You're also going to get behind the scenes content and guest updates. You're going to get first dibs on new merch drops and limited edition items that will never be sold again.

• 23:32Shawn Ryan?

  Plus, exclusive offers from our partners you won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the Vigilance Elite newsletter right now.

• 23:47Shawn Ryan?

  How did you, I mean, so how did you meet your co-founders?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Uh, so, uh, our CTO, our Chief Technology Officer at Skydio, Abe, was my lab mate at MIT, and he was the senior person in the lab when I got there. So he'd already been at it for three years. Um, so he was one of the first people I met when I was starting in the research lab. And it's actually, so he is, I mean, he is the most gifted problem solver I've ever met in my life, across any domain, hardware, software, uh, radios, cameras, anything. I mean, he's one of these people that can just intuitively like figure out how the system is working, how it needs to work, uh, how to fix it. Uh, and he's also an incredibly nice guy, but he has kind of a rough edge. And so my first experience with him in the lab was feeling like, uh, you know, who is this guy? And I don't know what I'm doing.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  And he's kind of like scary and intimidating. Uh, and so that we, it was kind of like a rough first intro. And it's actually funny now because I get to see this play out constantly at Skydio. Like every time we hire a new engineer, they're like, they're kind of freaked out and scared of Abe. Um, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's Abe is wonderful. You'll get used to it. Like, um, and I, so I can empathize with him though, because I've been on the other, other side of it. Um, and then our third co-founder, Matt, was actually in the MIT Media Lab, um, which is, is adjacent to the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Um, and so he was working on a lot of like human computer interaction stuff. And the, you know, the, the bet for the company was just kind of a combination of like the, the hardcore science and robotics combined with like different user interaction paradigms,

• 25:17Speaker 03

  uh, would be an interesting recipe to kind of try to build the next chapter of what drones could become.

• 25:23Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. So all you guys share, obviously a fascination with drones.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:29Shawn Ryan?

  So how did the, so what was the original concept of Skydio?

• 25:34Speaker 03

  So the original concept, so we were, Abe and I were lab mates together through 2012. Um, after that, we got the opportunity to go and, uh, start Google's drone delivery program, Project Wing. Um, so the two of us, along with our, our professor, our advisor from MIT, moved out to California, started working on the drone delivery stuff. Um, this was like 2012. Uh, and that 2012, 2013 were kind of the era where people were starting to think about, yeah, maybe there's this new category of drone thing emerging, you know, like electric propulsion, autonomy, it seems interesting. And we were then in Silicon Valley, working at Google. And I think we just started to look out there and see that there was a lot of excitement

• 26:17Speaker 03

  around drones for all kinds of different applications, for capturing cool video, for doing critical infrastructure inspection, for delivering packages, for public safety, sort of maybe a new wave of drones for defense. And we felt like the possibilities of what the tech could do were incredible, like the impact that could be had was amazing, but none of it was going to work the way that people really wanted if you needed to have expert drone pilots flying the thing the whole time. It's just a very high barrier to entry. And I knew this because I was one, you know, I grew up and I spent thousands of hours becoming a skilled pilot, but it's just not, it's not accessible and it's not going to be useful in the way that you want it to be. And we knew a ton about the autonomy technology from our research at MIT and it just, it

• 27:01Speaker 03

  felt like that was going to be a foundational layer, kind of a big unlock to move the industry forward. And that was really it. I mean, the big bet that we made was that computer vision, AI, autonomy would be kind of a foundational tech layer that would make the products more useful to more people in more places. The first product that we built was a consumer product, basically like a flying GoPro that could follow you around and weave its way through obstacles and capture amazing video. And we did that because we felt like the consumer market was probably going to develop the first, because there's just, there's kind of less that has to come true. Like, you don't have to convince a big enterprise to change the way they work and adopt some

• 27:42Speaker 03

  new system, you can just say like, hey, this is a cool thing that you can go and buy and capture some cool video with and it's going to be fun. So it's a little bit of like a lower friction entry point. And then we also felt like the consumer product ethos of small and light and integrated and easy to use, rather than kind of like big and clunky and complex, would be the right foundation to serve other industries as well. And, you know, I think we were like right about some of that, maybe wrong about other pieces of it, but the vision, I was actually reading the, you know, the blog post that I wrote when we announced the company in 2014. I would say that like the, the vision has really stayed exactly the same since the

• 28:24Speaker 03

  beginning of like, make these things super smart to make them more useful to, to more people. You know, it's, it's always hard to imagine when you start, like where you're gonna end up, but the like, the central kind of bet was the same.

• 28:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, how did you, I mean, how did the customer base develop into what it is with, with, I mean, actually, before we get to, before we get to that question, I mean, how many other drones were out there at this time period that were, you know, able to follow people and dodge?

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Uh, well, so this, this, one of, one of the interesting aspects of the drone industry is that, uh, it's, it's always very easy to imagine the concept of like, it would be great to have a drone that does this. And it's typically pretty easy to make some kind of marketing video that shows what that might look like. And so at the time and still today, there's always a ton of companies that are like talking about various aspects of this. So when we started, there were probably like 30 other companies out there that were talking about like sort of a follow-in film type drone. Um, and, uh, I think like a fair assessment is like basically none of it worked. Like we were the only ones that were able to like solve the hard technical problems

• 29:38Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  that it actually took to make this thing come together in a reliable, scalable way. Um, and the technology foundation that we developed there has served us extremely well as we expanded to serve other markets. So, you know, we started in 2014, we decided we were going to do the consumer product first. It took us four years to develop the first product. I mean, it's very, one of the things that I think people don't understand about this stuff is it really is a cutting-edge aerospace device. I mean, it's small, but it's got aerodynamics and propulsion and vibration and thermals. Um, and we've got the whole computer vision and AI system, like a lot of the software and hardware is similar to what you find in a self-driving car. We've just had to shrink it down to something that weighs a couple of pounds, which is actually makes it even harder because you have less margin to work with. Um, so it's a very hard technology build.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  Um, it took us four years to get to our first product, the Skydio R1. Uh, which was a kind of the first instantiation of a consumer follow film drone. Um, and I, I kind of described the R1 like it was a, it was a technology success, but a commercial failure. Like everybody that saw it said like, that thing's amazing. I can't believe you guys pulled that off, but nobody bought it. So, so it was. Why do you think that is? Um. Too expensive or? It was, it was too expensive. Um, so it was 2,500 bucks, which is a lot for a consumer product.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  And it also had too narrow of a feature set. Like we basically, and we, this was an intentional decision. We focused very narrowly on like the autonomy system on this thing needs to be mind blowing and awesome and do things that nothing else in the world can do. But the wireless range was not very good. The camera that went on it that actually recorded the video was not great. The like breadth of different things you could do with it was pretty narrow. And all these things were intentional choices. And honestly, I would probably make the same trade offs again. Cause like, when, you know, when you're a startup, when you're doing something new, unless you can break through in some way and do something that is really like better and different than everything else out there. There's just no reason for anybody to care at all about what, what you're doing.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  So we had this kind of huge spike in autonomy capability, which we use to raise money, venture capitalists and, you know, attract the team and kind of get the whole flywheel spinning. And then, and then it, you know, it's a period of years afterwards to kind of build out everything else that has to be great to have a great drone. Like the radios, the cameras, the form factor, the propulsion system and so on. But yeah, we, we were in kind of an interesting position in 2018 because we launched this product. Everybody thought it was amazing. Nobody bought it.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  We had just enough money in the bank to, to develop a second version of it, uh, which became the Skydio two. And so we really had our backs against the wall there for like 18 months or so, where it's like just enough money to get through, take one more shot at this, take everything that we've learned, um, and turn it into a better version of the product. And this was also when. We started to get a lot of inbound interest from enterprise customers. You know, it's kind of been a steady build in enterprise. Like in 2014, the big companies were talking about using drones, but very few of them were actually doing anything. It was all kind of slide ware. By 2018, more of them were kind of starting to poke around and actually had started some drone programs. And so when we launched the R1, even though it was a consumer product, I think a lot of the leading enterprises in law enforcement,

• 32:49Speaker 03

  defense, as well as, you know, energy utilities and so on, they kind of saw this and said like, that's, you know, that thing isn't designed for us, but the technology and it looks like it could be very relevant for us. And so we started to get a lot of inbound interest, which started to impact what we were doing from a product perspective. So when we launched Guido 2, it was still mainly aimed at consumers, but there was more kind of enterprise thinking built into it.

• 33:13Shawn Ryan?

  Who, what enterprises were reaching out? What did they want?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Well, we started to, we started to hear from the DOD. And that was, that was, you know, one of the big opportunities that got a lot of attention and that we spent a lot of focus on. You know, that's a, we could talk about that whole trajectory. So that was a big one. You know, there were insurance companies that wanted to use the drone for inspection of houses and other assets. There were, our first law enforcement kind of interest came inbound because they saw the capabilities of the R1. And I think they probably imagined like, if you could, you know, if you could take the R1 and make what has become the R10, like that would be an incredibly powerful thing for us. So it was very broad, which was actually great because it just, having this kind of core technology

• 34:02Speaker 03

  that got a lot of people's attention, exposed us to a lot of the needs and opportunities that people had and were wanting to do with drones.

• 34:12Shawn Ryan?

  Man, so I mean, what? What specifically are they asking for? I mean, are they asking, like, when you're talking about, so here's what comes through my mind. When you're talking about, you know, in a drone that does inspections for an insurance company, I'm thinking like roofing inspections after a hurricane shit like that. I mean, I wouldn't think you would have to make very many modifications to the drone to be able to do that.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  I mean, it's.

• 34:40Shawn Ryan?

  Here's a drone with a camera on it.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it depends on, you know, how you want to do it and how well you want to do it. But it's true. And one of the, one of the, the cool things about drones is that it is, it's really a technology platform. You know, it's like a laptop or a phone or something where you can use it for a ton of different stuff. And with different software, you can specialize it for different tasks. So one of the general patterns is that, you know, the hardware is very general purpose. And if you're flying it manually, you can do a lot with it because the adaptation for the application basically comes from the pilot. You know, the pilot's like, okay, I want to inspect this thing. And so I will, I will do the things that I need to do flying it manually to inspect this thing. If you want to automate it, you typically need to write more custom software for different applications.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  And so we did both those things, like we would enable our customers to, to operate it manually, to do whatever they wanted to do. But we'd also, as they were operating it manually, we'd learn like, all right, what are they actually doing? What kind of algorithm is running in their head? And how can we turn that into autonomy software such that we can do it in a more reliable, scalable way? So one of the examples of this, we have a product called 3D Scan that we built because we basically saw that one of the fundamental kind of primitives that, that many of our inspection customers were doing was basically digitizing a 3D structure. And it could be a bridge, could be a cell tower, could be a crime or an accident scene even. And so we built a piece of software where basically you just say,

• 36:11Speaker 03

  like, here's the thing that I care about. And then the drone will autonomously explore and map and capture high resolution imagery of the whole thing. And so that was kind of an example where you could do it manually, but the better way to do it is autonomously. And it took us a little while to like, to write the custom software to do it autonomously. You can almost think of it like apps on your phone, right? Like the phone is general purpose and then you get specialized software to do different specialized tasks.

• 36:37Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense. Makes, actually, that makes a lot of sense. So how many, I mean, how many different models of drones do you have?

• 36:44Speaker 03

  So, uh, right now, we have three major products. We've got the X10, which is the flagship. And we're huge believers in that category of drone, the kind of medium-class podcopter. It's small enough that you can take it with you anywhere, but it's big enough to be super versatile, super powerful. It carries great sensors, so it's got a thermal camera, it's got a zoom camera that can read a license plate, uh, at 800 feet.

• 37:06Shawn Ryan?

  At 800 feet?

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's got, so for that size of drone, it's crazy, the level of like optics that you can get in there. Um, so, uh, the X10 is kind of like the, the workhorse platform. Um, but now that we've done that, and for a long time, our product strategy in the enterprise is like, we need to nail that thing. That's, that's going to cover the most, the most applications for our customers. It's going to deliver the most value. We've got to get that thing great. It's got to be awesome and reliable. Um, and you know, we'll, we'll probably look at some of this stuff later. There's like, there's other accessories around it that enable even, even more exciting capability. Uh, but now that we've got that amazing core of technology and it's out there in the world, operating at scale, we can kind of take a lot of the, the, the core pieces of it and reconfigure it into different form factors.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  So the R10, um, is the next major example of this where we've, we've basically taken a subset of the hardware from X10 to get it into a smaller, lighter, less expensive package. Um, so this is designed for indoor operation, uh, and then maybe I'll, I'll leave it till we see it live. We've got another thing, uh, that we're working on, which is still in prototype form that unlocks, uh, much longer range, much longer endurance kind of missions. And I really, I think those three together, we think of as sort of the family of robots that solve the vast majority of the, the data capture needs that our, our customers have.

• 38:29Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 38:32Shawn Ryan?

  So can we go through, can we go through each one and what, what, what all of the, the purpose of, of each application for these drones are?

• 38:41Speaker 03

  Sure. Um, so the X10 is really the workhorse, um, and it's used, I mean, it depends on the industry that we're serving, so. For law enforcement, it's used in two major modes of operation. One, we call it kind of drone in the trunk, where you put these things in patrol cars. And if somebody's out there and they run into a situation where aerial situational awareness would make a difference, they can take it out of the trunk, launch it in the air, and just kind of get real-time awareness of whatever they need to see. The other mode of operation, which is really the future where all this stuff is going, is having the drone live in what's called a docking station, which we'll see here in a bit.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  And the dock turns the drone into a fully autonomous device. So the dock is a network-connected charging base station. It's got a whole HVAC system in there, so it can be out in any kind of weather and basically keep the drone ready to fly at a second's notice. And it's super powerful. And this is a big part of autonomy and making these drones useful to more people, because you can have somebody who's just in an op center somewhere and say like, "Oh, there's a 911 call here. I want to send a drone." They just click a button, drone autonomously launches, gets there in a few seconds, and can oftentimes change outcomes.

• 40:03Shawn Ryan?

  So are these... So are these... What cities are using these?

• 40:10Speaker 03

  A bunch. I mean, all over the US at this point.

• 40:12Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 40:13Speaker 03

  So like, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Oklahoma, Albuquerque. I mean, most major cities in the US are in some stage of deploying Skydio drones.

• 40:25Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  As part of law enforcement.

• 40:28Shawn Ryan?

  Are these cameras?

• 40:30Speaker 03

  They are, yeah. So the hardware there, yeah. So the thing on the front is the gimbal. So we call those the user cameras. So those are the cameras that capture the data that our customers are going to see. That's like, there's a thermal camera, there's a zoom camera. And then there's kind of a wider field of view camera. And it's on a... If you can pop off that red clip.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the gimbal, you can kind of wrench it out of the gimbal there. You can pull it out of the red thing, out of the... Yeah, so the gimbal is three axes stabilized, so there's three motors that keep it perfectly stable. So even as the drone is moving around, those things are stabilized, they'll stay locked on to whatever you want to look at. But then the other cameras, good observation, there's three on top, and then there's three on bottom.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  So those are navigation cameras.

• 41:21Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  And this is the part, this is basically like the self-driving car part. So those are fisheye cameras, they have a 200-degree field of view. So the top three see the whole top hemisphere of the drone, the bottom three see the whole bottom hemisphere. So the drone has, you can basically think of it's got eyes that see everything in every direction. It's got a very powerful Nvidia CPU GPU onboard, which is running all of our AI software. And it's basically doing like what a self-driving car does. Like as it flies, it's constantly mapping the space around it, predicting into the future, avoiding obstacles, and doing all the things that like a skilled pilot would do.

• 41:56Shawn Ryan?

  So when these, so do these cities, I mean, so obviously they are connected to law enforcement dispatch.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:05Shawn Ryan?

  So do they have these staged all over the city in various locations?

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we actually, we have some examples we could look at, if you're up for it.

• 42:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I would love that.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  What this actually looks like.

• 42:17Shawn Ryan?

  Let's do it.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  So, the way this works is you have the drones in the docking stations, and then as you say, you distribute these all over the city. Typically, they go on the roof of fire stations, because fire stations are kind of nicely spread out for faster response time. And they typically are installed in what we call hives, where you have like three docks on one rooftop, because that gives you capacity to respond to more calls. Like it ends up being driven, very similar to just how you staff an agency with officers based on the call for service volume. That's how you staff it with drones too. So if you have a high crime area or a high-density area, you need a lot of drones in that area to respond to all of the incidents. And it just becomes part of the 911 dispatch flow.

• 43:04Shawn Ryan?

  How do you make that determination of how many drones a precinct would need?

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. So this is actually something I'm very passionate about. So I come from an engineering background, I love data and algorithms, and so I...

• 43:20Speaker 03

  I don't get to do as much engineering on the drone itself anymore. But I, I, we got asked this question all the time by cities, like, how many drones do I need? Where should I put them? And so I actually wrote a simulator where you can ingest historical 911 call data. So you get like time, location, priority. And then we can simulate through it like literally second by second and say like, all right, if we had a drone here, here's how long it would take to respond. And that's become a useful tool for us to, to work with our customers on like, here's where we could put them. And the, the real output that we care about is the response time curve. Like what percentage of calls are we going to get to? How quickly? And so based on the crime patterns and the call data, we can sort of optimize that whole thing.

• 44:00Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm. So is it, so do you, are you just going off of, well, I shouldn't say just, are you going off of previous 911 calls or population size, mixture of both?

• 44:12Speaker 03

  So 911 calls are the primary driver because that's the primary job of the drone is to respond to, to calls for service and respond to incidents. Even though I love the data and the tool, at the end of the day, the, the judgment of the experts of the people who live in that city is the thing that matters most. So we kind of use that as a starting point, but there's always just infinite kind of local knowledge within the police department of like, oh yeah, this, like this is a tough neighborhood and this is, you know, if we put this here, we'll be able to respond to this kind of incident. And so that ends up being, in most cases, kind of the primary factor at the end when we're, we're fine tuning these things for what the deployments look like.

• 44:51Shawn Ryan?

  What, what kind of, what kind of 911 calls are they responding to?

• 44:55Speaker 03

  So we should, uh, should look at, so it's all different times. I mean, it's, it's basically as diverse as 911 calls are, which cover a huge range of things. So, uh, if we look at a couple of examples here, so this is, uh, from the Oklahoma City Police Department.

• 45:10Shawn Ryan?

  Is this the, is this my gift here?

• 45:12Speaker 03

  This is not the one that was shot, but so this was a situation where there was a train operator, um, that called 911 in a panic, afraid that they might've hit somebody who was on the tracks. So they launched the drone, they get there in a few seconds, they can fly up and down the train. This is like a multiple mile long train. So it would've taken like 15, 30 minutes, an hour maybe. With the drone, they saw, unfortunately, there was a homeless person asleep on the tracks, but they found him in, in just a couple of minutes. And because they found him so quickly, they could guide in first responders and they saved this guy's life because of the drone, uh, because in, you know, these situations, the seconds matter. So that's kind of one example. We've got another one here. This is from the San Francisco Police Department. So same

• 45:55Speaker 03

  situation, drone is launched from a rooftop. This was one where there was a stolen vehicle. So they had a report of a stolen vehicle. They launched the drone and now they can just go out and follow stolen vehicle from the air. And this guy has no idea that he's being followed. So they knew that oftentimes these folks would steal license plates. It's called cold plating, but they never actually caught anybody in the act with the drone. They see him like pull up, steal the plates off the vehicle. And then, you know, once he's got the new plates, he's gonna put them on the car. He actually holds the plate up here so you can read it from the drone. Holy shit, man. So he puts the plates on. Now he's, he's window tinting it. So he, he went down a dead end street and he's, he's putting window tint on. And this is like, this is the beginning of bad news, right? This is a crime spree. It's a stolen vehicle. He's

• 46:39Speaker 03

  cold plated it. He's tinting the windows. Like, he's gonna go off and do a bunch of bad stuff. They know exactly where he is. They know exactly what he's doing. They send out a plain clothes unit. They roll a spike strip. So now his tires are flat and it's basically game over. He can't go very far. They go in and, and, and pick him up. And videos like this, I find just like deeply satisfying. Yeah. Where the criminal is just kinda screwed. You know, it's like, there's, there's just a huge asymmetric advantage that the officers have. And it's safer for everybody. I mean, it's safer for the officers. It's safer for the community. It's honestly even safer for the perpetrator because there's like, there's a much lower chance that the officers are gonna need to use force when they, when they get to pick the time and the place to, to

• 47:22Speaker 03

  intervene. So it's like, for me, and you know, for our customers, it's, it's pretty awesome to see this stuff. And like, the impact in San Francisco is incredible. I mean, San Francisco has had a rough run over the last three or four years. Unfortunately, the voters voted to allow drone technology. And since they've deployed this, along with like, some license plate reading cameras around the city, I mean, the statistics are staggering. I think crime is down overall like 30%. No kidding. Yeah. How long of a time for it? Like, less than a year. Holy shit. Cause you, I mean, you just can't get away with it, right? Like, there's, there's, they, they will find you. They will follow you with the drone. And, and they will stop you before you can do anything, anything more. So it, it really just.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  Completely changes the game. We hear this, they'd like game changer. We hear that all the time from our law enforcement customers.

• 48:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Like, you know, we had people say it's the biggest change in policing since the invention of the radio, because it just totally changes the nature of first response.

• 48:22Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I mean, any, is this another example?

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've got another example here. So this, this was really like a tragic situation. This was in Albuquerque. So these are a couple of nine-year-olds in their parents' backyard with a gun. And they were, you know, the neighbor basically reported that there were shots fired in the backyard. So they sent the police out. Because they have the drone, they know exactly what's going on. So they can see that it's a couple of kids, rather than adults. They can use the information from the drone to de-escalate the whole thing. So you'll see they do a couple of things here to distract the kids and, and kind of pull their attention away. And there's just no mystery for them, right? Like, they're watching this live feed the whole time. They know exactly what they're dealing with. And they can use that to, to

• 49:09Speaker 03

  make better decisions. Like, rather than guessing, they know exactly what they're dealing with. The officer goes in there, grabs the gun. And the sheriff actually said, if not for the drone, they probably would have had to shoot these kids. Because they wouldn't know what they were dealing with. But with the drone, it's, it's just a completely different situation.

• 49:28Shawn Ryan?

  Man. I mean, what about, what about violent crime? Violent crime, like, I don't know, some type of, you know, domestic call? I mean,

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:42Shawn Ryan?

  Are these responding to stuff like that?

• 49:45Speaker 03

  They're responding to everything. Like, I, you know, this is in public, so I, I probably can't say the customer, but I was, I was visiting a customer a couple of weeks ago, where they had, there was a guy in kind of a low-income apartment complex. He was drunk. His neighbor was playing ping pong in the parking lot, which was pissing him off, apparently. And he, he shot the guy. Fortunately, he didn't kill him. But he shot him. Everybody heard the shots. They called 911. The drone got there in 20 seconds. Um, and it got there.

• 50:16Shawn Ryan?

  20 seconds?

• 50:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. It got there just in time, just in time to see the guy with the gun walking back towards his apartment, putting it away and walking into his apartment complex. And so the difference in response here is transformative, right? Without the drone footage, all the officers know is that somebody got shot. They have no idea who did it. They have no idea where he is. They have no idea if he's still armed. So they probably need to lock that whole place down. They probably need to go door to door, guns drawn. The chances of something tragic happening is non-trivial, right? But because of the drone, they knew, they knew who it was. They knew where he was. They knew that he was still armed. So they basically can just surround his apartment complex, yell at him, tell him that he's busted. He has no options and he eventually came out and surrendered himself.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Um, and that, stuff like that is happening all the time. So we, uh, by the end of this year, we will be doing close to a million flights per year rate. Um, so close to 100,000 flights per month. Um, and so it's literally like almost every minute, something like this is happening somewhere in the country where the drone is responding to an emergency.

• 51:22Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I just feel like these, I mean, uh, that while one, this would have totally alleviated the Charlie Kirk assassination.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:31Shawn Ryan?

  Be great if, you know, was it Salt Lake? Was it Salt Lake?

• 51:35Speaker 03

  In Utah.

• 51:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Was it Salt Lake or Park City? Can't remember which one. But, um, yeah, it'd be great if they invested in Skydio for the next, you know, outdoor event.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so I, I mean, I just see so many uses for the stadiums, shopping malls.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:55Shawn Ryan?

  Outdoor parking lots, police stations, soft, any military unit that's going to clear a building or a ship or.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean.

• 52:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, you're, you're a hundred percent right. I mean, you've got exactly.

• 52:07Shawn Ryan?

  The high-speed chase goes too long, then I mean, what are the, how, what's the, uh?

• 52:13Shawn Ryan?

  Flight time on these.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  So, uh, max flight time's up to 40 minutes, practical real world conditions, it's closer to 30 minutes. And then the top speed is 45 miles an hour. So it can keep up with cars in kind of urban and suburban areas, but it's not going to keep up with a car on a highway. It's not, it's not fast enough for high speed chases. Uh, but that is one of the motivations for the, the kind of the other form factor, uh, that, that we'll look at in a bit here to, to fly much faster, uh, much longer range, much longer endurance. Uh, because the, the, uh, you know, the only stories that I, I don't like in, when we're looking at what's happening in public safety is where the guy gets away. And, and the cases where we see that happening now is where somebody just gets on the highway and speeds away.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Um, and so we're, we're, we're building another drone to, uh, to take care of that.

• 53:00Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. I mean, and then, I mean, these, so these can just switch each other out too.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:05Shawn Ryan?

  If it's taken too long.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 53:07Shawn Ryan?

  Switch each other out in the middle of the chase or whatever.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  With the autonomy, it, it really, one of the ways that we think about it is historically, flying a drone has been like playing like a first person shooter video game or something, right? Where you're like, you're in the character, you're driving it around. Um, and we want to make it more like playing a strategy game where, you know, you've just got a lot of assets. And you can say like, I want to look at this thing here. I want to inspect this thing at this time of day. And the drones just, they just figure out how to do it. So you can kind of, the humans can operate at a higher level of abstraction, at a higher level of judgment. And that's exactly what we see happening now. So this whole concept is called drone as first responder, using drones to respond to emergencies. Um, DFR is what people call it, kind of in the, the law enforcement world.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  Um, and DFR is at the leading edge of all of these themes of like using AI and, and more automation.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  And it's, it's, it's honestly, it's, uh, it's kind of surreal to see it. I mean, it's something that we've held as kind of the focal point of our product vision for like the last six or seven years. Um, and it's really only in the last 18 months or so that I've seen, we've really seen it, it take off.

• 54:18Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I mean. So are these are these are these just responding to calls or are they is there a presence?

• 54:27Speaker 03

  Uh, I would say it's like it's 99% just responding to calls. Um, it's ultimately up to the discretion of the agency and different agencies have different policies. Different states have different rules on this. Um, you will see sometimes where if you know, if there's going to be a parade or a demonstration or something, they will do some like some proactive work around that. Uh, you know, I am, one of the things that that I think is fundamental here uh is is transparency around operations because you know, the idea of having like AI powered drones flying all over US cities is kind of crazy, right? And honestly, like six, seven years ago, I thought that public acceptance of this stuff was going to take a very long time. Um, and I actually thought this was going to be one of the last markets to develop.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  This is one of the big things that that I was wrong about. I was, I thought all the other like infrastructure inspection stuff would happen at much larger scale before we had drones responding to 911 calls. Uh, because it does sound kind of nuts that we're going to have like AI powered flying robots with cameras flying over cities. I think the thing that has really made it work and and the credit goes to our customers is just the investment in transparency and community communication around like what they're doing and and why they're doing it. Um, and it's one of those things where, you know, when you see these examples of of what the drone can do, it's it's very difficult to argue with it, you know, it's very difficult for somebody to say like, no, I I wish they didn't have a drone in that situation and I wish that guy got away.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Or, you know, I I wish that they they couldn't tell that those were nine year olds rather than adults and deescalated. I mean, when you see these specific examples, it's, I feel like it's basically just irrefutable that it's providing uh incredible positive impact.

• 56:04Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, we're, we're, we're all under surveillance pretty much 24 hours a day anyways, right? So what's the difference whether they're just static cameras or roving cameras?

• 56:15Speaker 03

  This is something that I think a lot about, you know, I this, I really view this as my life's work. You know, I've been working on this stuff since I was a little kid and I want to be working on it for the rest of my life. And I don't want to be a part of building this kind of like dystopian future where we've got, you know, drones following us around all the time. Um, and so I I think there is a balance to be struck and I think the best way to do it is is through very aggressive transparency of, you know, like here's when we're flying, here's why we're flying. And drones, I think, are actually They're they're visible and they get people's attention because you know, everybody's like, oh, man, there's like a drone. What's it doing? But I actually think they're they're one of the least invasive forms of surveillance because it's very reactive to emergencies.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Like, rather than just blanking against city and cameras that are going to capture everything, you're just putting the camera exactly when and where you need it at like the most important moment in time in a very targeted, precise way. And and I actually, I think that this is sort of a general theme, but I, you know, there's always this tension between like, public safety and and privacy and civil liberties. And technology, I think, is the thing that enables us to make better and better trade offs of like, protect privacy and civil liberties while also improving public safety. Like, if you, this is one of the thought experiments I do. Like, if you imagine a world with with extremely primitive technology, like, you could achieve a high degrees of public safety by basically just locking everybody in their house all the time, right? With with no technology. And inventing

• 57:43Speaker 03

  better stuff like autonomous drones enables you to, I think, actually have like, extremely high levels of public safety while also protecting extremely high levels of of civil liberties and and and privacy.

• 57:56Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, with the rise of crime in some of these cities, I think people would be, I would, I would think some, some of these cities would be begging for you guys to show up.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  This has been, this has been probably the most positive surprise that I've had in building the company is the the generally extremely positive public reception. And we see this all over the place where, you know, it's not to say there aren't like, some folks with concerns. And I, and I think in general, there are reasonable concerns to be had. But there's a huge amount of enthusiasm typically for bringing this kind of technology to a city or a community because of the impact that can have. And especially when people see the examples. You can kind of be concerned about it in the abstract. But once you see the specifics, it's almost hard, it's almost impossible to to argue with.

• 58:38Shawn Ryan?

  Are are any cities using these as is like a roving presence patrol?

• 58:45Speaker 03

  To my knowledge, no.

• 58:46Shawn Ryan?

  Like, more of more of like a deterrent, like, hey, we're, we see you.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  I I haven't seen that. It could be happening in in some places. And and I think there there could be positive impact to be had there. I just think you want to be careful with it. And, you know, whatever you're doing, I think you want to like, you want to be transparent with the community about like, what you're doing and why you're doing it. One of the things that that so. You know, the the highest, highest impact stuff for the examples that we looked at where it's like a life or death situation, the drone gets there, it changes an outcome. There the reality of policing is that it's like most of the time, it's it's pretty fucking mundane, right? It's like somebody called, you get there, there's nothing really happening. It's kind of a waste of time. And one of the the real beauties of this is that it also

• 59:33Speaker 03

  enables you to take care of all that stuff. So, you know, we've had situations where there were like, you know, there were a couple of youth like hanging out at a car dealership and loitering and annoying them, and they shouldn't be there. And rather than having to send an officer and taking like an hour of an officer's time, they send a drone, it's got a speaker on it, you can talk to him through the drone, tell the kids to like, go do something else, and the whole thing is taken care of in five minutes. And so it saves the officer's time to actually be doing something that's like, that's really high impact. And so there's a huge efficiency piece to it as well on just sort of like the more mundane calls of like, somebody's parked in the wrong spot, or there's like a noise complaint from a neighbor or something. You can clear a lot of that stuff from the air without needing to send somebody on the ground.

• 1:00:15Shawn Ryan?

  These things. Yes, I get the privacy concern, and I don't want to like, you know, pretend like it's not there. I know people, you know, I mean, look, if there was a drone flying around my house every day, I'd be like, what the, I would shoot it down, too.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  You'd put another bullet hole in it.

• 1:00:30Shawn Ryan?

  I would. Put a couple of them in there. But, but I mean, you know, when you think about everything, I mean, there's ring cameras on probably at least 50% of the homes in America at this point. You know, but I mean, when we're talking about, you know, car dealerships, like you were just, car dealerships, stadium, shopping malls, just all, yeah, gas stations, anywhere where there's, you know, where you see theft, crime, all these things. I mean, it seems like, I don't know what these things cost, but if these are landing in a, in some

• 1:01:11Shawn Ryan?

  type of base station, recharge, weatherproofing, all that kind of stuff can come back out and rove around. I mean, it seems like every car dealership, every stadium, every shopping mall, every Walmart, Target, grocery store, I mean, you, you, you name it, should have these.

• 1:01:30Shawn Ryan?

  Just 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, roving their properties.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Shawn Ryan?

  You know, not only as a, we got you, but as a deterrent.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Shawn Ryan?

  Because they'll chase, they will chase a criminal.

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I agree with you. I think that the.

• 1:01:48Shawn Ryan?

  Is anybody doing that?

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  It's, you know, the future's here, it's just not evenly distributed. So we have customers that are like, everything you just described is happening. It's just not happening everywhere all the time yet. Uh, but we have retailers that are installing these things for security and patrol. Uh, you know, we have like military bases are using them for security, uh, patrol. So, um, you know, data centers are using them, these like massive facilities with really high security stakes. So, yeah, I mean, I think we're, we're headed for a world where these things, so one of the ways that I, I think about this stuff is.

• 1:02:24Shawn Ryan?

  I would think high net worth individuals for properties as well will be using this stuff.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I've got one of my.

• 1:02:30Shawn Ryan?

  Who is your biggest customer?

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Uh, our single biggest customer, that's actually pretty close. Historically, it's been the US Army. Um, and, and just using the, the kind of ISR, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance drones on the battlefield. Although they are starting to do more dock stuff now, although the, the big cities are getting close now to the US, US Army in terms of like, you know, the scale that they're deploying drones.

• 1:02:57Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I mean, so why, why do you, it sounds like that you are not, um,

• 1:03:05Shawn Ryan?

  you're wanting more people to, to express interest. What do you think that the, is in the way of that? Is it, is it marketing, advertising?

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  I mean, the bottleneck right now is how quickly we can install them.

• 1:03:15Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, the demand is very, very high, very, very high. And it's, um, it's basically how quickly can we build and install these things?

• 1:03:23Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  And I think it's.

• 1:03:26Shawn Ryan?

  That's pretty, it's a good problem to have.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Shawn Ryan?

  How, how quickly can you build and install?

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  We're ramping up. I mean, we have the, what we have, I think, is the largest drone factory in the US. Certainly for this class of drone. We've always built our stuff in the US, which is a whole other. I mean, I'm very proud that we're doing this. A lot of people thought it was impossible 10 years ago. So we're, we're cranking.

• 1:03:50Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome, man. I love hearing that, too. So these are 100% manufactured in the US?

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  Well, we like, we have global supply chains. We're getting parts and components from, from all over the world with a couple notable exceptions like China. But, you know, we, we work with companies in Taiwan and Japan for, for different parts and components. But all the, the manufacturing, assembly, testing is, is done in the US.

• 1:04:15Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's awesome.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, it really is awesome. It's like, when we started in 2014, the conventional wisdom at the time, especially in Silicon Valley, was like, one, you probably shouldn't do hardware to begin with because like hardware is hard and it's, you know, it's dirty and expensive and all this stuff. And then two, if you are going to do it, you should just outsource it to, to a contract manufacturer in Asia. And we actually honestly started down that path. You know, we started down the path of working with a contract manufacturer. It was a great company based in Taiwan. But basically what became clear was that we, we didn't know how to build a drone yet. They didn't know how to build a drone. It was fundamentally new technology and it just wasn't working. Like we didn't, we didn't know what to do.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  We didn't know how to tell them what to do. And the only way to, to do it was to pull it in-house and just figure it out ourselves and just get like the really fast iteration cycles of having engineering and manufacturing basically right next to each other. And so at the beginning, it was really just a practical thing of like, this is the way that we're going to get the best product the fastest. And, you know, in the back of our minds, we probably thought at some point, at some level of scale, we're probably going to have to, to, to outsource this. But a couple of things happened. One, like we got better and better at it. And then two, It's really become clear that these things are like they're critical infrastructure. I mean, when you're installing these things in docks and they're talking to the network and they can fly themselves anytime that they need to and they're taking instructions from the cloud.

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  I mean, these are incredibly powerful robotic devices and and even when we're selling to civilian customers, I think the national security stakes are extremely high. And I think there's increasingly broad recognition of that, that there's, you know, this is, this is among the most critical technology in the world. And so being able to manufacture it in the U.S. has become a massive strategic imperative. And and at this point, I mean, we're all in like we just keep investing in our factory and making it bigger and better and more automation. And it's it's an awesome thing to get to be part of. I mean, it is, it's really, I kind of think of Skydio as like a, you know, we have, we kind of have like components and raw material come comes in one end and autonomous drones

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  come out the other end and we do all the design and manufacturing and write all the software and sell them ourselves and support them ourselves. And it's very cool to have all those things under one roof because it basically means you can do anything, you know, you can, any crazy product concept that we come up with, there's nobody to tell us no, you know, we can just, we can do all the engineering across all the different disciplines, build it ourselves and and get it out there in customers' hands.

• 1:06:51Shawn Ryan?

  That is awesome. How did, so how does, how does it know? How does the system know how to respond to different, different scenarios?

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  So I, so I'm a big believer in A.I. and autonomy and I think we're, I think this is like the most exciting moment in human history. I mean, I think the technology that we're building and where it's going, as much as I believe in A.I., I also believe that there's really no substitute for human judgment. So we're not trying to, we're not trying to take the human completely out of the loop. We're basically just trying to give them the tools to like really efficiently exercise their judgment. So there's still a human in the loop today of deciding to send a drone. Like they have all the context in our software. So we integrate with what's called a CAD system, computer aided dispatch. So all the calls show up in our software on a map. So you can see location, priority, description.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  And we're actually integrating now, there's some really interesting companies doing kind of nine one one innovation to make that even faster and have A.I. insights from the call. So all that stuff comes into our software. It's still a human judgment that says, I want to send a drone to this, you know, this for this kind of call, this kind of. Of incident, I think it's worth getting real time situation awareness, but all they have to do is click one button and and away it goes. You know, I think at some stage, we might get to the point where we would provide customers the option to automatically launch, like if you hear certain keywords like, you know, shots fired or fleeing suspect or something on the 911 call itself, you could automatically dispatch a drone and then and then still have the people kind of like consume the video stream and make decisions on it.

• 1:08:28Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, why not? It's it wouldn't hurt anything, right?

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:08:31Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's just an extra asset involved in a in a unfortunate situation.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree. And I think the part of the beauty of of these things is that the, you know, the the marginal cost per use is basically zero, like it costs nothing to and if, you know, the worst case scenario, it's like a false positive or something, you just send the drone back. And so I think that there's also an adoption thing, right? Like the law enforcement's been doing things one way for for 40 years. It takes some time.

• 1:09:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  To adapt the way that that you do it. But I I think we're headed towards a place where there's kind of a default expectation that any call of any kind of significance, you're going to send a drone just in case. And one of the things that we hear all the time from our customers, actually all over the country, is once they've been doing this for a little while, the officers hate responding on the ground without a drone because they feel like they're just going in blind.

• 1:09:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  You know, they have no idea what they're headed into. They don't feel as safe. They're not as confident. And so I think we will, we will get towards a place where it just becomes kind of a default expectation.

• 1:09:36Shawn Ryan?

  I have just random questions that don't really fit in anywhere. This this indoor drone.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Shawn Ryan?

  So, I mean, let's say I'm I'm like, hey, I want to buy this for my personal residence.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Shawn Ryan?

  Or or right here in my studio.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:52Shawn Ryan?

  I buy this drone. How much setup is there involved? How much? How much? How much do I need to learn? Or is it just, here's the base station, set it over on the counter, put the drone on it, and it just figures it out?

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  So you'll you'll get the chance to to fly these here. Our goal is to make it. So that anybody who can use an app on a phone should be able to like very quickly feel comfortable flying one of these systems. And the autonomy system is a huge part of that. Like they see everything in every direction, they avoid obstacles. So it's, it's, it's pretty darn safe and easy to get up and running. But like anything, there are, you know, there are different depths of skills that, that can unlock different things. And, you know, like for example, our, our, the San Francisco PD drone pilots are, are, no offense to any of our other customers, the SFPD ones are the best that I've seen. And they have some guys that are just wizards flying these things. I mean, they're like, they're video gamers and the things that they can do and the speed

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  with which they do it is incredible. So like anything, like it's the barrier to entry is extremely low, but the, the people who are great at it can, can unlock some, some special things.

• 1:11:03Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha, gotcha. You want to take a break and go look at some of these things?

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

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• 1:11:44Shawn Ryan?

  Lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now. And it's to the point where I don't even believe my own eyes anymore because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the political violence, the division. I partnered with this production company called Ironclad and we're doing an eight-part audio series on psyops, on why foreign countries, governments, maybe even our own government would conduct a psyop on its own people. And I just think that, that this series is going to be extremely important because it's going to open the eyes of people on why these things happen. You can head over to psyopschool.com, order it today. I think you're going to get a lot out of this.

• 1:12:29Shawn Ryan?

  Who's pulling the strings? Who's pulling them?

• 1:12:39Shawn Ryan?

  Alright, we're out here. This is the X10.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Yep, so this is the flagship drone. This one doesn't have a bullet hole in it, so it's good to fly. And we'll get to show you what it can do. So I just put it down on the ground here, and then I'm holding the controller. So this is how we fly it. So I'm just gonna swipe up to take off.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  So this is kind of like the typical manual flight experience. So I've got joysticks. I can move the joysticks around, and it'll just respond to my commands. Now, the fun part here is with the autonomy system. So I've got it lined up at a tree there, and I'm just gonna jam the joystick forward. So I'm gonna go full forward, and it's just gonna weave its way through the trees. So this is basically autonomous flight. All I'm telling it to do is go forward.

• 1:13:39Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, it's just doing all that on its own?

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  It's doing all that on its own. So now I'm gonna go backwards. I can't even look where I'm going, right? And it's just gonna weave its way through, keep itself safe.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  So it comes up to the tree wall here. It'll find its way through that gap.

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  And this is just a huge difference of what it's like to fly a drone, right? Like normally, the normal experience of flying a drone is like, I'm looking at that thing, I'm trying to figure out where it is in relation to the tree, I'm worried about crashing it. And here, just don't give a fuck. Just full stick forward.

• 1:14:12Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, dude!

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  We can turn around here. So this will give you a sense of what the cameras can do.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  So here we are, looking at ourselves. So right now, I'm on kind of the wider field of view camera. If I punch in...

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  So you'll see a transition here to the zoom camera.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  So I can like...

• 1:14:35Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. And it shows the thermal right next to it.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  So there's my Scotty logo. Can punch back out. We've got the thermal feed, so we're obviously gonna pop on thermal.

• 1:14:53Shawn Ryan?

  I gotta be honest, I don't like seeing myself, uh...

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  It's not your best angle?

• 1:14:58Shawn Ryan?

  Looks like a AC-130 Spectre Gunship is targeting us right now.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Shawn Ryan?

  What's the thing sticking out of the side?

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the thing on the side is an attachment, it's a speaker. So we've got four attachment ports. You can put anything you want on there. So we've got a spotlight, we've got Night Sense, which gives it the ability to basically have night vision. And the speaker enables you to talk to people on the ground. So, for example...

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  If you wanna like, you know, get somebody's attention.

• 1:15:33Shawn Ryan?

  Attention, attention. Please exit the area immediately. I repeat, please exit the area immediately.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  I think we've got, uh...

• 1:15:43Shawn Ryan?

  That's great. Oh, nice. Nice.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  Always a fan favorite.

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  We actually, so Miami Beach Police Department...

• 1:15:58Shawn Ryan?

  They requested that?

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  They, uh, they're one of our great drone as first responder customers. They deal with like huge drunk crowds around spring break. And this has become a very useful tool for them to...

• 1:16:10Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  Communicate with the spring break folks. Um, so, if you want, you can, uh, you can fly it here. So, uh, it's a little bit like playing a video game. So you were asking about how hard are these things to fly? So the right stick is gonna move you around. So the first thing to get familiar with, if you push that right stick forward, that'll push you forward.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  And then back will go back. And then...

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  You can go side to side.

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  Uh, and to... I always recommend to get comfortable with the autonomy system. Just, you know, jam the stick forward into some trees and see what happens. Yeah, so that's how you turn, left stick will turn.

• 1:16:51Shawn Ryan?

  Get that comfortable, just, just, just do it. There we go.

• 1:17:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Shawn Ryan?

  Get the fuck out of here.

• 1:17:07Shawn Ryan?

  It's gonna go through all that shit?

• 1:17:09Speaker 03

  I mean, it has a tolerance for how close it'll let you get.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  But yeah, I mean, so you're like, you're how far into flying it? Like, one minute into flying it? This is like world-class drone pilot stuff. Like, flying at high speed through obstacles. Uh, and with the autonomy system, it's just...

• 1:17:25Shawn Ryan?

  Look at that shit.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  It's a piece of cake.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  And the, you know, the real point of it is like, it's fun to watch it weave through obstacles. But the point of it is that you can focus on the mission. So like, if, you know, if you were a cop or an energy utility worker, like, you'd be looking down at the screen, right? Because you'd be wanting to do an inspection on something. Um, and you can totally comfortably fly just looking down at the screen without worrying about, like, where the drone is or crashing into anything.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  So it's actually, so like, if you...

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  If you look down... So you can, like, you can see what it sees. You've got, the left wheel here will control the gimbal. So if you, you can look, you don't have to look at the drone because it's not going to crash. So you can, uh, push the wheel down below. See this thing?

• 1:18:13Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  So if you, so that controls gimbal pitch. And then on the right one, it controls zoom. So the right wheel will zoom you in and out.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  And this is the point, is you just focus on the mission. Like, I want to inspect a damaged, uh, conductor. You can just perch yourself next to it and zoom in and, uh, and see whatever you need to see.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  And then when you're done, if you want to land it...

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  Or you want to keep flying it?

• 1:18:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  You can test the obstacle avoidance on yourself.

• 1:19:00Shawn Ryan?

  That's wild, Ben.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Shawn Ryan?

  Alright, here we go. Let's play some chicken.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  Make sure you get it properly lined up. In the crosshairs there.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  So you've got a bunch of telemetry here telling you what's going on. Like you've got your altitude, your heading, it's estimating the wind speed. It's flying over what we call Connect Fusion. So right now it's got a point-to-point radio. So there's antennas here that are talking to the drone. But it's also got cellular built in. This has a cellular modem in it. The drone has a cellular modem in it. And it's using Connect Fusion to fuse both those two things together. So

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  the quality of the video link is basically the like the sum of the point-to-point radio plus the cellular. And it can fly on either. So you know, you could fly this thing out 10 miles. The point-to-point radio connection would go away, but it would just keep going based on cellular. You can, I'm sure with your background, you can imagine this being a useful capability on the battlefield. Like from a soldier's perspective, it basically just removes the mystery of what's happening around you. You know, you can go out a couple of miles, get real-time awareness, know exactly who's coming, what they've got, where they're moving. And this, so this is actually a good example. You see these power lines, like this is the kind of work that our energy utility customers would do. Like they would inspect those things.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  They would stop at every tower and zoom in or out and look for damage. Or if there was an outage or something, they could find what the issue was and direct the responding folks on the ground. So when you want, so typically what I would do here is you can just, when you want it to come home, if you tap that button there. Okay. So you just tap, or I can do it, you tap that and say return to launch. So if you tap launch. So it'll now autonomously come back home. It uses a thing we call Pathfinder. So basically it has its own local map that it's building, but it also has access to global data about where the buildings are, where the terrain is.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  And it uses all of that to plan like the safest autonomous path, autonomous path to come home. No way.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  It's actually, it'll show up here in a second.

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  Where is it?

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Probably coming back.

• 1:21:42Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit, it's way up there.

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, how fucking sick is that shit?

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  So the other thing we can do, can I uh?

• 1:21:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  Get back here for a second, so. It will recognize uh people, so if I turn and face it here, I can go into the skills mode here. Activate subject tracking, so uh it's now showing me on screen all the people that it sees.

• 1:22:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  So if I, I'll zoom in a little bit. So if I tap on you, so it's now following you, so if you run out that way.

• 1:22:30Shawn Ryan?

  Is it following me?

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  So it's basically just gonna stay in place and look at you.

• 1:22:44Shawn Ryan?

  It is?

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I don't have it, I could set it to move, but right now I have it.

• 1:22:48Shawn Ryan?

  What does it do if I go inside?

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  Uh, it'll basically just like, sit there and look at you, and then when you come back out, it'll re-identify you and keep tracking. So you can see on this screen here, so it's locked on to you. Um, and you know, like if you move over there, like it'll just keep staring. We're about to ship a feature where it'll actually like move itself to follow you.

• 1:23:08Shawn Ryan?

  Oh really?

• 1:23:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so then when we're done, I can just hold down on that button. It'll find itself a safe landing place. It's using computer vision to find a good safe place to land and it just sets itself down. And that's it.

• 1:23:25Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, that's awesome.

• 1:23:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Shawn Ryan?

  That is awesome.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  It's an amazing set of uh technologies that come together to make all that possible.

• 1:23:32Shawn Ryan?

  What's this thing? What's this robot thing over here?

• 1:23:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so everything that we just did, I kind of think of as like the classic experience of flying a drone. Like you've got the controller, you're on the ground, you can do some incredible stuff. And the autonomy system makes it much easier, you know, like you'd never flown a drone of this class before. Literally a few seconds, you were comfortable flying at high speed through obstacles. So it's great, but the next chapter is dock and remote operations. And that's what we've got here. So this is really the future. This is where the industry is going. So this is the Skydio Dock. This is basically like the network-connected charging base station for the X10. So it's got a wind sensor, rain sensor on top. It's got everything it needs to keep the drone ready to fly 24/7. So it's got a heating system, a cooling system. It can melt snow and ice off of it.

• 1:24:19Speaker 03

  And it's basically designed to operate in as extreme weather conditions as possible. So it opens up here. It's got the X10 inside.

• 1:24:28Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  So this is what turns the drone into a fully autonomous device.

• 1:24:35Shawn Ryan?

  So this is what's staged all over all these cities.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah, it's installed like infrastructure.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  And, you know, it kind of turns the drone into like a cloud server or something where the people that use it never have to touch it, right? It's just out there, ready to do useful work. You guys can kick off the mission whenever you're good to go. So we've programmed an autonomous mission here. So this could just be running on a schedule. Like if you had a security patrol that you wanted to fly, you just say, these times of day, I want it to take off and do its thing. And then the drone will just in the background, fully autonomously, run this mission. So, you know, it's up there now. And the person who's controlling it can be 100 miles away, 1,000 miles away. Anybody with an internet connection can access it and fly it.

• 1:25:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:25:27Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  So if we come over here, so this is what the drone is seeing. So this is, you had the controller experience. This is basically the web flight experience. So this is just a standard, normal web browser. Anybody with an internet connection and of course, the security credentials to access it can fly the drone. And it's flying this mission where we've given it like a set stuff to go and look at. So we've got a good shot of the American flag there. So for example, our utility customers are using this to inspect all of their infrastructure continuously. So they'll say like, you know, these transmission lines, these distribution poles. I want to go and see from these angles on this schedule. And the drone will just go off and capture the data. And then, you know, you were mentioning all the kind of security patrol use cases at corporate campuses and so on.

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  Same deal, like you can say, these are the locations that I care about. The drone will go, you know, take the same shot from the same location. And one of the ways that I think about the drones is it basically enables you to simulate having as many cameras as you want in as many different locations because it's fully software defined. So you just tell it what views you care about and it'll go off and get them.

• 1:26:34Shawn Ryan?

  So let's say, let's say I have one of these for this property here. And goes out middle of the night, it's using thermals and it sees, I don't know, a couple of people hiding in the bushes.

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:26:49Shawn Ryan?

  Then what happens?

• 1:26:50Speaker 03

  So this is still stuff that we're working on, but basically it has the ability to detect people, right? So you saw like the tracking technology. So anybody, any person or vehicle that it sees, it'll detect. And then our software has APIs. So now it's finished its mission. It's going to come back and do a landing sequence. We should go and check out the land. But basically it'll just send a push notification out to any system that you want to send an alert of like, hey, here's, you know, here's what's happening and here's what you've got. So now the dock has opened itself up. The alignment slides. And so the drone is using computer vision to detect the dock. The yellow and blue QR codes there. So it'll come down.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  It does a precision landing. You can see the slides come in to align it. And then right at the back there, there's a charging pin that'll insert as the roof is closing over the top.

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  And that's it.

• 1:27:51Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, that is awesome.

• 1:27:53Speaker 03

  It's pretty wild.

• 1:27:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's a, I mean, to me, the exciting, it's amazing technology. I mean, it's incredible stuff to get to work on and build. But the point of it is the work that it can do for our customers and the capability for them to be able to deploy these things anywhere that they need sensing and then to be able to run it remotely and autonomously. I mean, it's just a paradigm shift in the way all these physical industries operate.

• 1:28:17Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  It gives them, I sort of think about it, you know, our identity as a company is building flying robots that give people superpowers, and this is a superpower.

• 1:28:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you've done it.

• 1:28:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  So everything you just saw, like, these are products that are currently at scale in the wild. What we're going to show you here is still a prototype. But, you know, we were talking earlier about high-speed chases and long-range response. We see this really intense need from our customers to have something that can cover much longer distances at much higher speed, which was the motivation for building this thing. And we figured the best way to sort of show it in prototype form was to integrate it into a Cybertruck. So this is the Skydio Cybertruck. And in the back of the truck, we've got a robotic arm

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  that can pick up a fixed-wing vehicle.

• 1:29:12Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, what?

• 1:29:13Speaker 03

  So it's all the same core technology that goes into X-10, but now we've got it in a fixed-wing drone that's launched by a robotic arm. So that thing's got a gripper on it, and it can pick it up out of the truck.

• 1:29:30Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. Look at that thing.

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  So the beauty of the robotic arm is that you take all of the complexity of launch and land and you put it on the ground. So the vehicle itself can be as sleek and light and aerodynamic as possible. So the vehicle itself is literally just a flying wing, like, the most efficient shape you can possibly get, and it's just got a fin sticking off the bottom of it. So it's using the same computer vision technology to detect the Cybertruck here. So it's got those same yellow and blue QR code-looking things.

• 1:30:14Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, what?

• 1:30:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, the future.

• 1:30:20Shawn Ryan?

  Is sick.

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  So historically, people talk about vertical takeoff and landing. And we think of this as kind of a whole new category of robotic takeoff and landing, where the launch and the land is robotically assisted. And eventually, our goal is to be able to do this at speed. So have the drone or the arm be able to throw it just like you throw a paper airplane or something, and then catch it in an autonomous way. And when it's done, it stows it back in there.

• 1:30:54Speaker 03

  And that's it.

• 1:30:55Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  So, right now, we've got this integrated into a Cybertruck. But we're building a dock for it. So just like we've got a dock for X10, there will be a dock for F10, which is the fixed-wing drone, that'll probably hold three of them. So you've got three of them in there, and then one robotic arm to launch and catch them. And it's going to be an incredibly powerful capability, because this thing will have 100 mile an hour top speed, over an hour of endurance. So with one dock and three wings in there, you will be able to have two drones in the air continuously, 24/7, two flying, one charging, with, you know, 40, 50 mile an hour, or 40, 50 mile coverage radius from that, which we're super, super excited about.

• 1:31:36Shawn Ryan?

  That's... So would these be in the backup patrol cars all over the city?

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  So these, we anticipate, you actually don't need that many of them, because they have such long coverage range. So I think most of our cities would probably have, you know, like dozens of the X10 docks across the cities, and maybe just like one of these in one location for high-speed chases. But the other thing that this does is it opens up the possibility of drone as first responder to much sparser population areas. So, you know, like rural counties, where you couldn't afford to have docks everywhere. But because this can cover so much more land area, you can have a few of these things. And then same thing for our infrastructure customers, like being able to inspect long power lines, you know, these folks have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of miles of transmission line.

• 1:32:24Speaker 03

  And it's not feasible to put docks everywhere along that for with the X-10, with the quadcopters, but with the fixed wing it is. So you can have like one of these things that covers a shit ton of infrastructure. So we got the full family of robots. We got the R-10, the X-10, and then the F-10, which is coming next year to cover long range, high speed, fully robotic launch land system.

• 1:32:47Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, awesome, awesome innovations.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:32:50Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:32:52Shawn Ryan?

  Super cool.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  It's a huge team effort. Hundreds of people at Scotty working to make this stuff come to life.

• 1:32:57Shawn Ryan?

  Very cool. Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:33:01Speaker 00

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• 1:34:04Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Adam, we're back from the break. And that was an awesome break, by the way. But so we flew the X-10, the F-10.

• 1:34:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:34:16Shawn Ryan?

  And so when you say F-10's a prototype.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Shawn Ryan?

  How long do you expect for that to take before it's mainstream?

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  So we have made super fast progress on it to get to where we are now. So everything that we just flew was about six months of work. The team is incredible and they've just been absolutely blitzing in it. My goal is end of next year to have that thing starting to scale up in customer hands. I think we're going to be pretty close to that. We'll see. The most important thing really is getting the product right. And so we move as quickly as we can, but these things need to be reliable. They need to have all the right capability and you can't rush that. But it's moving pretty quickly. And one of the, one of the great things about the position we're in now is we can do collaborative development alongside of our customers. I mean, we're already showing our customers these prototypes, getting their feedback and what they want to do with it. And it oftentimes really feels like

• 1:35:10Speaker 03

  we're just on the same team with them trying to solve these, these problems, which is super fun.

• 1:35:15Shawn Ryan?

  So will that, I know we talked about it out there a little bit. I can't remember if it was on camera or off camera, but will the F-10 replace the X-10?

• 1:35:23Speaker 03

  No, definitely not. I think that the quadcopters are, are just beasts in terms of their versatility and capability. And, you know, with our public safety agencies, they'll fly X-10s out at 200 feet to respond to a call. But then if need be, like we had one in San Francisco, the other week where the guy went down to the pier, jumped into the water and was hiding under the pier. And they got that X-10 down to literally like five feet off the water, staring under the pier to figure out where he was and guide in the responding officers. And so the versatility to do that is just incredible. You know, you can all the way from 400 feet down to like negative two feet if needed. And, and that's the kind of thing you can only really do with a quadcopter. So I expect

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  that the X-10 will remain kind of like the workhorse platform. But it's, we think of them as really complementary systems. You know, if you have something that's like going to become a high speed chase, or you need to cover a really large area, that's a job for, for the F-10.

• 1:36:20Shawn Ryan?

  How fast did you say the F-10 will move?

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  100 miles an hour.

• 1:36:22Shawn Ryan?

  100 miles an hour.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  That's an FAA limit. There's a, you know, for this class of drone, there's a regulatory limit at 100 miles an hour. So that's what we'll develop towards.

• 1:36:30Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. And the other, the X-10 is 45 miles?

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  Up to 45 miles an hour. Yeah.

• 1:36:37Shawn Ryan?

  Man, so where do you see, where do you see the F-10 being deployed?

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  Initially, we're gearing very heavily towards public safety because we just see a really acute need there for these high-speed chases, which are super dangerous. You know, agencies, they have, they call them pursuit policies, and every agency is a little bit different, but they have rules about when they're allowed to follow a suspect and when they're not. And it's a terrible set of trade-offs because oftentimes you've got somebody who could be a violent criminal who's getting away from the cops, but because high-speed chases are so dangerous, oftentimes the policies will say they're not allowed to pursue under XYZ conditions. And, you know, when they do pursue, they're taking a ton of risk. And so it's just a, you know, it's one of these situations where it's a terrible set of trade-offs. And if you can just send a drone, I think you can basically eliminate the need for high-speed ground pursuits because if the, you know, the drone's in the air, in most

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  situations, the person won't even know that it's there following them. And you can follow them for as long as you need to, to, to end the thing. So that's a major motivation. And then large area coverage, like in urban and suburban areas, the X-10 is unbeatable for coverage because you have enough incident density that you can justify having multiple docks in different locations. But if you need to cover like a 2,000-square-mile county, as many of our customers have, you're not going to be able to put docks over that whole thing. And so you need something that's got longer range. So those are the, the two initial areas that we're quite focused on, but then the long linear inspection stuff, we're also very excited about. So rail lines, roads, power lines, you know, the areas where oftentimes now people are

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  flying helicopters, which costs a couple thousand bucks an hour and are also quite dangerous. You can, you should be able to do all of that with, with, with F-10s.

• 1:38:22Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. You know, when you, when you, when, when we're talking about, you may have answered this already, but when we're talking about, you know, when it does a roving patrol and you'd had the X-10, you had had me targeted out there, that little green.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say targeted, I would say, you know.

• 1:38:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Speaker 03

  Followed.

• 1:38:38Shawn Ryan?

  Followed, followed. So is the, so I think it's, I'm fairly certain that you are the ones that made, made me the target or the follow.

• 1:38:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just tapped on you.

• 1:38:52Shawn Ryan?

  On the thing. And so kind of what I'm asking is, is...

• 1:38:59Shawn Ryan?

  Let's say I bought one of these for this property. Somebody came on the property, left. Would it follow them? Would that be, would that be a human decision for them to follow them? Or does the, does the, does the brain tell it to do?

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's, it's basically all defined through software and you can kind of do whatever you want. I think a typical workflow for the kind of security patrols is going to be,

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  you basically give the set, you give the drone like rules of engagement, kind of, you know, it's like, I want you to like follow this area. And if you see anything that matches this description, which could be as simple as like any person or vehicle, I want you to look at them, ID them, follow them around and send me a notification so that I can decide if I want to do anything else based on that. I think that's going to be like a very typical kind of, of workflow for the security patrol kind of stuff. And all of that is very easy to build on software and we've got all the sort of building blocks there. And we can do it. We also have third-party developers that are building on top of the platform and enabling capabilities like this. And that stuff frankly is like relatively easy to do.

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  The hard part is like making the drone reliable and autonomous and having the AI to detect this stuff. It's relatively easy, once you have that, to compose it into different kinds of capabilities for different mission sets.

• 1:40:23Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I just, you know, I,

• 1:40:27Shawn Ryan?

  I just can't see, I can't think of anybody that wouldn't want this. I mean, it's just, there's so many businesses, venues, events,

• 1:40:39Shawn Ryan?

  stores, parks, neighborhoods. I mean, you know, and I know that there is a, you know, I know, I know there's like a, there's a concern, there's a privacy concern, but I mean, And I could just think of a lot of places where there isn't a privacy concern. I mean, every grocery store and department store parking lot.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:03Shawn Ryan?

  How is that a privacy concern? A stadium, how is that a privacy concern? A mall, a park?

• 1:41:09Speaker 03

  The privacy stuff can also be managed, I think, in really sophisticated ways with the technology. I mean, you can do things like this stuff already exists. You can blur out and recorded D you can blur out faces and license plates and any kind of identifiable information. So there's all kinds of controls that you can put in place to make it such that it's really just targeted towards whatever the the particular security objective is. And I agree with you. I think that we're, everything you just described is happening today in some form with, you know, one or two customers in some cases. Like, you know, we have a customer that is using these for major events and venue overwatch and security. And they're having incredible success. I mean, they have, when you get these big events where you have

• 1:41:51Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking schools?

• 1:41:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:53Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, school, school, it's active shooter every other week in this country.

• 1:41:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:58Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, the school could just deploy one or two of these things to rove the campus.

• 1:42:03Speaker 03

  We have, I mean, we have a number of college campuses and some high schools that are customers today. You know, I think that it's, again, it's all, it's all their kind of, some of this stuff is getting a larger scale. Like law enforcement is getting up to larger scale. I think a lot of the other applications are still relatively nascent, but the value is just so obvious and so strong. I mean, one of the things that we see over and over again is that oftentimes the drone pays for itself on like the first mission. You know, there's like one incident where somebody stole something worth $50,000 and the drone is there and interdicts. Or Caltrans, California's Department of Transportation, they had a great one where they installed it at a bridge. And literally the first inspection that they did from that drone would have cost them probably like 50,000 bucks of scaffolding and manual time

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  to go and inspect that bridge. And so I think it's, there's an inevitability to it. It's just kind of a speed of adoption kind of thing of like, how quickly can organizations figure out how to adapt themselves to the tech and how quickly can we?

• 1:43:01Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like even farmers could use this.

• 1:43:04Shawn Ryan?

  It's serious.

• 1:43:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we have a, we have. We have some investors that own a lot of property and have ranches and whatnot, and they're on the leading edge of using these to like count cattle and things like that. But yeah, anywhere, you know, the fundamental thing is like anywhere, anything, anything where you care about what's happening in the physical world and you just want to be able to with very low friction deploy sensors to figure it out. The autonomous drone is just an unbeatable platform for that because it can be anywhere, it's network connected, and it's all automated, so it's all software defined.

• 1:43:33Shawn Ryan?

  Man, can I, what is the cost of these things if you don't mind me asking?

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  So there's, we have a few different packages. The dock, it really depends on like what you're doing with it and like what hardware and software configuration we're doing. It's on the order of like tens of thousands of dollars per year for everything, for like the dock, the drone, the software, installation, maintenance, support, like everything it takes to just give you sort of a complete solution that's up and running. The drone by itself without the dock is more affordable, but you know, because the dock is a more expensive thing for us to build and also it delivers quite a bit more value. The R10 is our least expensive product right now, and for the hardware it starts at 6,000 bucks.

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  So it's 6,000 bucks for the drone and the controller to fly it, and then...

• 1:44:28Shawn Ryan?

  And that will autonomously go inside of whatever structure you put it in?

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can fly it around in any indoor environment, and we'll keep adding more, more software capability on top. So it's, you know, these things are not yet, I mean, there's a whole other category of consumer drones, which we used to be in, which are, our consumers understandably are very price sensitive, you know, they're looking for things that cost like 500 bucks or 1,000 bucks. We don't have anything today in that price range, but the more scale we get up to, the lower our costs are, and the more market we can reach. And I'm very interested in, you know, for example, making a dock for this thing, and to have something that rather than tens of thousands of dollars a year for a dock solution is thousands of dollars a year. And I think that's when you can start to get into like, you know, more of the like private security and every store everywhere where one of these things could be useful.

• 1:45:19Speaker 03

  And eventually, I think it will come down to like residential security. We just need to keep, you know, making the tech better and better and making it more and more affordable, so it's more accessible to more people.

• 1:45:32Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, tens of thousands of dollars a year doesn't sound terrible to me when you're talking about schools, businesses, I mean.

• 1:45:40Speaker 03

  It's not, yeah, and as I, I mean, the demand is.

• 1:45:42Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people spend that on home security systems.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the demand is faster than we can keep up with right now. I mean, the bottleneck is how quickly can we build and deploy them, especially with the docks, because the value is just so high there. And, you know, as I said, there's many instances where it pays for itself on literally the first mission, because it can, it can do things you couldn't do any other way.

• 1:46:08Shawn Ryan?

  When you guys are making recommendations for, for, for, for customers with the X10 in the dock, how many, I mean, so what are, what are your suggestions? Are your suggestions that there's a drone in the air 24 hours a day? Or is, is your suggestion, I mean, how fast does it recharge when it got a 40 minute runtime?

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  Up to 40 minute flight time. Typical flight time is more like half an hour. And then it, it, it right now charges in about 20% longer than flight time. So if you fly for 30 minutes, it'll charge for like 35 to 40 minutes. We have a hardware update which will, will retrofit into all of our existing docks and all the new ones will ship with it. That'll take it down to 20% less than flight time. So you fly for 30 minutes, you charge for like 20, 25 minutes, which is a really big deal because that means the percentage of time you can spend in the air is that much higher. So it depends on the industry. And one of the things that I actually really enjoy about what, what I get to do, what we get to do now, is really getting into the details of like, you know, how does a Department of Transportation work? And what are their mission sets? And what are the key cost drivers to them? And what matters to them from an efficiency standpoint? And

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

  then how can we best tailor our products? And then also how we deploy our products to meet those missions? So in law enforcement, for example, one dock drone can respond to roughly 2 to 3,000 calls per year. As you know, rough rule of thumb. And so you can use that as a guidepost. And on average, there's roughly one call per citizen per year. So the US population, you know, whatever, 330 million, there's roughly 300 million 911 calls in the US per year. And so you can basically, for any city, do quick back of the envelope math of like, you know, all right, it's a 100,000 person town. They're going to get about 100,000 calls for service

• 1:47:59Speaker 03

  per year. If we want to respond to the, you know, the most important, say, 20% of those, so 20,000 calls for service per year, you're talking like roughly 10 docs. For a big city like New York, you're talking hundreds of docs. And so it scales like that. And so, you know, there's rules of thumbs like this. But every, you know, every customer and every city and everything's always a little bit different. So one of the things I've learned is you never want to be too worried on these things. You want to be very adaptable to like the particulars of a location, a geography, and the needs there.

• 1:48:31Shawn Ryan?

  How long do they, how long do they last?

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  The docs are designed for a heavy, heavy life, five-year lifespan, heavy, heavy use, five-year lifespan.

• 1:48:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:41Speaker 03

  So typically, when we're deploying these there, we're doing five-year contracts. We're flexible on this. We can do different things. But typically, it's a five-year contract. And then we'll replace the drone actually halfway through. The drone at heavy use has a two to three-year lifespan. So you get a new drone halfway through, but the doc should last five years.

• 1:49:01Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. So, so, okay. Wow. That's pretty fucking good.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:07Shawn Ryan?

  Nice, nice. Well, let's, I know you, um, so let's move on, just drones in general. You're the, I mean, you are the drone guy. So, you know, I know you guys went over to Ukraine.

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:19Shawn Ryan?

  What is, what does drone warfare look like today? Where's it going?

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:24Shawn Ryan?

  What did you guys learn over there?

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, there's a lot in there. I think, uh,

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  So even before Ukraine, like the US Army I mentioned is our biggest customer and was actually our first kind of non-consumer big customer. So we kind of went from being a pure consumer company to like consumer plus the US military as the rest of the enterprise stuff filled out. I mean, the first thing I would say is that what the Ukrainians are doing just in general is incredibly impressive. And there's a sense of, which makes sense, but there's a sense of kind of national unity and purpose there that is really awe inspiring to see, especially coming from the US and the West where I think we're lacking that in many ways. Now, it's a tragic set of conditions that's created it for them, but

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  it's still incredibly impressive to see. And look, the like, the macro headlines are all true. I mean, drones are everything there. Like, at this point, the majority of the strikes are carried out by drones. All the reconnaissance and surveillance is done by drones. And the pace of innovation is just wild on both the Russian and the Ukrainian side. I mean, it's just a continual back and forth, hardware and software. And I think the Ukrainians have done just an incredibly impressive job in an incredibly scrappy way of building some incredibly impressive systems that do all different kinds of things. One

• 1:50:58Speaker 03

  of the really obvious and I think really important things that you can see there is just the inherent dual-use nature of the technology. Especially for reconnaissance drones, the vast majority of what they're using at the small scale is basically consumer quadcopters. And unfortunately, most of them are still coming from China, but it's just that it's an incredibly dangerous dependency for them because they're essentially at the whim of these Chinese companies. And there's a back and forth there where the Chinese companies keep locking them down in ways to try to make them not useful for the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians have to keep like cracking them. And there's constant fear that, you know, flying a Chinese drone is going to give away your location and the Russians

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  are going to use that for targeting. So I think there's a bunch of different lessons to be learned there. And we've had a journey ourselves. So we You know, we won a program in 2021 to be the Army Short Range Reconnaissance Drone. The program of record, there's a big competition. We, we basically went all out to try to win this thing. We were a consumer company at the time. It seemed like a great opportunity, both from a business perspective and from an impact perspective. And we were very naive. I mean, we didn't know anything about working with the military. We didn't really understand kind of the different user needs landscape at the time.

• 1:52:20Speaker 03

  And so we, we basically built our first enterprise drone, X2, largely informed by the requirements of this program, the Army Short Range Reconnaissance Program. And we did a bunch of like customization, the hardware and the software to meet the requirements. When the conflict in Ukraine started, you know, everybody needed drones and we sent a bunch of X2s and they basically didn't work on the front lines. And the painful thing was like, not only were the things that we did to meet the US Army spec not helpful, in many cases, they were like unhelpful. It like actively made the system worse. Like we integrated a radio that, that operated basically on one very narrow set of frequencies.

• 1:53:03Speaker 03

  It's turned out to be extremely easy to jam. There was nothing in the requirements about being able to navigate without GPS, even though that turned out to be critically important. And it was, it was a super painful, I mean, one, it sucked that the drones didn't work. And it was a painful moment for us as a company to just be facing this situation where, you know, we were selling drones to the military, the US military, which is great, but when it turned out they, you know, the situation where they actually needed to be used, they weren't meeting the need. And ultimately, that's what led me to, to visit myself a couple of times to just kind of see firsthand like what's going on here, what technology needs to exist. And we built all of that into X10, which is the successor to X2.

• 1:53:46Speaker 03

  And got to a place where the system performed extremely well in the in the harshest conditions and you know electronic warfare, GPS jamming, all the different things that that matter. And now through mainly European partners, we've deployed thousands of these systems into Ukraine, which is still relatively small scale compared to like the scale of drone use that they're they're they're going after, but I think is is pretty unique among Western companies in our class to have systems that are actually like meeting the need on the battlefield and and surviving electronic warfare.

• 1:54:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, so you are all of your drones surviving electronic warfare? Are these the ones that you're sending over there? So they all have this capability?

• 1:54:33Speaker 03

  It's there's some variation. There's some differences between the X10 and the X10D. In general, a lot of this stuff, you know, you'll hear this term like dual use, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but basically it means that something that can be used for civilian purposes or for military purposes. In this class of drone, a lot of the stuff turns out to be strikingly dual use in nature. So one of the things that we've really focused on is GPS to night navigation, being able to use computer vision to fly the drone autonomously such that if GPS is jammed, it can still be stable, it can still return on and so on. So that really matters on the battlefield. It also matters flying through the urban canyon in New York City, because GPS is oftentimes completely unreliable when you're flying in in urban settings. And so there's a lot of things like that. I would

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  say the biggest difference is the radio. So we integrate a different radio for X10D, which is the defense variant, which operates on a wider set of frequencies now and can do frequency hopping. And we've done a bunch of innovation there. And then we've also done a bunch of software work on top to be able to do automated missions and intelligent missions in the face of like jammed or partially jammed communications and jammed or partially jammed GPS. And that that so we went through kind of a philosophical shift as a company where, you know, we went for our defense business from being oriented towards the Army's requirements to frankly, kind of Putting less weight on that and putting a lot more weight on like, what's the reality on the ground in Ukraine?

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  Let's make it awesome for that with the bet that one, the mission there matters. And then two, whether they realize it or not, that's what all of our defense customers are eventually going to need. And that's been a journey. We, you know, we have lost some major programs in the U.S. because we weren't sort of going after the specs that they were putting out there. But we've actually then come back and over time been pulled back in because our drones were the ones that like actually work and meet the need and deliver the capability in the situations that they care about. And at this point, I have a very deep commitment to that. Like I, you know, philosophically for us as a company, we want to make systems that really work and really meet the need of the end user.

• 1:56:38Speaker 03

  And we're willing to like take business risk on particular military programs to, you know, to potentially risk losing them in favor of just building the thing that we think is actually going to work and meet the need. And it's frustrating to have to make those choices, but I think for our identity as a company and ultimately, I think it's the right thing to do. That's the way that we approach it now.

• 1:56:58Shawn Ryan?

  Where, I mean, what capabilities are the U.S. Army interested in?

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  So you mean that like might be divergent from? So one of the things, I mean, a lot has been said and written about like military acquisitions and what works and what doesn't. The thing that I find is that it's fortunately, we are not in like a large scale active conflict today, which is great. But it also means that all this stuff is a little bit theoretical and it's very easy to get wrapped around the axle on things that don't actually matter that much. I mean, one of the things that I like about selling to our civilian customers, like law enforcement and others, is that it's very real. You know, you sell a drone to a cop, they're going to fly it later that day on a real mission. And if it doesn't work, they're going to call you and be pissed and like, you know,

• 1:57:48Speaker 03

  you better fucking fix it or you're out. And that kind of immediacy doesn't really exist or it's not the default state in the military because fortunately, we're not at war. So, you know, one example of this is they're, they're very interested in having kind of like common hardware and software to control any drone, which in theory I get, you know, it's like, it'd be great to have like one remote that can talk to any drone and standard interface to the whole thing. But if you imagine kind of like a, imagine if like. Every TV had to work with like a government-designed universal remote control. Like, the chances that that would be like a good, reliable experience is pretty low. Even under the best of circumstances, universal remote controls are not very good.

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  And when they're dictated by government requirements, the chances of it being good is even lower. And so this is, it seems like a small thing, but it's a real thing. It's like, that's how you interface with the drone. And if you have to work through third-party hardware and software, it's just harder to make a really awesome, reliable experience. And so, you know, that's one of the things where, and I understand where it comes from. Like, in theory, it kind of makes sense. I think in practice, for the way technology works and what it takes to build good, reliable systems, it's not the best way to get there. So we do a bunch of work to make it so that our system can play nicely with third-party stuff, and you can get all the data you need out, and you can fly it from a third-party controller, which sometimes some people are going to need to do. It's just, you know, it's not the default way to get the best experience. So there's a lot of stuff like that, that I think kind of looks good on paper, seems

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  like it makes sense in theory, but in practice is not the way that you're going to get the best capability to the end user. And at this point, we're really just focused on that. And we will, you know, we'll try to work with anybody to steer things in a direction that's going to result in great capability, but we're also less afraid to sometimes just say like, "Sorry, that's like, we don't think that's really going to work, and we don't want to put some, we don't want to put a system in somebody's hand that's not going to do what they need it to do.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

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• 2:00:51Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into the competition with China.

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:57Shawn Ryan?

  Drone warfare. What, what, who's ahead right now?

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  Well, um, look, I think historically China, especially at the lower end of the market in consumer drones is dominant. And, you know, when we started in 2014, uh, a lot of people thought the prospect of trying to build a US company at all to compete with Chinese companies was insane. Um, I think the, if you think about what goes into a drone from a hardware standpoint, it, you can sort of think of it as like a mobile phone, like processors, cameras, radios, combined with a radio controlled helicopter, you know, at the most basic level from a hardware standpoint, that's what you're talking about.

• 2:01:39Speaker 03

  And both of those devices, radio controlled helicopters and, uh, phones, consumer electronics have been built in China. Um, and it's not an accident that that has happened. I mean, it's a result of, of, uh, very intentional policy actions on the part of the Chinese government to favor local manufacturing and build up their industrial base, uh, and, you know, do things that make it very difficult for other countries, not just the US, but other countries to, to compete based on, on, on some of the things that they do to kind of like favor their own companies and subsidize manufacturing and so on. Um, which, you know, you can't necessarily fault them for. They've got their strategy and they're, they're gonna, they're gonna do it. Um, I just think we, yeah, everybody in the West has to be aware that this is what's really going on. So they, from a hardware standpoint,

• 2:02:24Speaker 03

  They had the right ingredients and DGI, which is the leading Chinese company that we compete with in civilian markets, has done a phenomenal job from an engineering standpoint of like capitalizing on that and building incredible hardware systems at extremely low cost. Now, they're doing so with quite a bit of government support, both explicitly and implicitly. But from a technical standpoint, they are, especially on the hardware, they are formidable. And the vast majority of US drone companies over the last 12 years have just not been able to survive in the market. The reason why I think we have been able to get to where we are is because we weren't, our strategy was not to try to kind of like copy what they were doing, or just compete head to head with like the same thing. We

• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  really focused, like we think of the drone as more of a flying robot. It's got a bunch of sensors, it's got AI, it's got autonomy, it's going to be smarter, it's going to be able to do more stuff. So we really focused on that as a core differentiating technology and really the direction the market was going. And I think that's, that's how we've been able to survive and now thrive by building products that are differentiated. It's, you know, it's where the puck is going, it's not where it's been. And then we are also the beneficiary, I think, of just a ton of momentum in this country towards realizing this is a critical industry. So, you know, a lot of our customers are, they like buying

• 2:03:52Speaker 03

  from a US company and they're willing to pay more for a US product, which we deeply, deeply appreciate and benefit from. And increasingly now at the federal government level, there's a recognition that this is critical technology, depending on China, is untenable. And, you know, we're beneficiaries as well of the political will to kind of push back against China. There's an increasing series of kind of like restrictions on Chinese drones. It started with federal government, some of that has trickled down to state and local government. There's a potential ban now on the whole consumer market as well. No kidding? Yeah. DGI? Yeah. They're going to ban DGI drones? That, it's a possibility. Wow.

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  Which is a very, so this is a whole, you know, this is obviously a big deal in the drone world. And it's become very polarizing for us. And actually, a lot of people Especially like kind of in the drone enthusiast community now see us as like the enemy because we're the, you know, they like blame the DJI ban on us even though we really did have nothing to do with it. I mean, we are, everything that I'm saying now, I would say in any forum, and I think the Chinese drones pose a real risk. We've advocated for policies to restrict them, especially in critical markets. But DJI has kind of successfully turned us into like the boogeyman in many circles, at least from a PR standpoint. So nobody knows exactly how this is going to play out. And honestly, I don't know exactly

• 2:05:14Speaker 03

  what the right answer is, but I think it's the, the national security stakes I do think are pretty objectively clear. Like if you think about, I think it was Operation Spiderweb, the like, the Ukrainian operation where they snuck a bunch of drones into Russia and then use them to like to launch an attack. I mean, like without sounding too kind of

• 2:05:36Shawn Ryan?

  Destroyed billions in dollars.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, destroyed, yeah. It's like, I mean, we are willingly importing Chinese drones right now that like are internet connected and take instructions from the cloud. Like the, the threat surface area is, in the worst case scenario, is, is really, really bad.

• 2:05:52Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, can you elaborate on that a little bit? I mean, that are connected to the network taking direction from the cloud. I mean, what, what could that look like?

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  Look, I don't, you know, I would kind of put like, so you saw the dock, right? The dock drone. So that thing can be flown remotely and autonomously. And it's, it's a network connected device. So ultimately, the, you know, we, we do a bunch of things to make that link as secure as it possibly can. So you can't hack into it, but ultimately you have to trust the person that's making it. DJI has a dock. And, you know, I would sort of pose the question of like, does it seem like a good idea to install dock drones all over our cities, all over our critical infrastructure, that ultimately are running software on the drone that is controlled by an adversary? You know, the Chinese government

• 2:06:45Speaker 03

  at the end of the day has control over their companies and whatever they tell them to do, they will do. Whatever the management of the company thinks at the end of the day doesn't really matter. And so I think the, you know, the, that's like kind of the worst case scenario. But even aside from that, I mean, one of the things that I think about, like historically, And this is much bigger than just drones. Historically, like in the peak of the Cold War in the 60s, the federal government kind of had a monopoly on cutting-edge technology. Like 70% of the R and D spending in the US was directly funded by the federal government in the 60s. And you know, all the cutting-edge stuff of like nuclear missiles and submarines and fighter jets.

• 2:07:28Speaker 03

  I mean, that was the cutting-edge technology of the day. And most of it was funded by government research. And today it's completely flipped. Now it's like 80% R and D spend is funded in the private sector. And generally, I think that's great because we all benefit from it. You know, we're surrounded by technology companies that are spending tens, hundreds of billions of dollars a year to build products that are basically just awesome for us and make our lives better. But it also means that the government has kind of lost its grip on cutting-edge tech. And, and all the cutting-edge stuff now tends to be kind of civilian or consumer first. And we need a strategy for that because it still matters from a military perspective. I mean, something outside of drones, like AI technology, large language models.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  I mean, these things are incredibly powerful from a defense standpoint, from a war standpoint, national security. But they're not originating in like a government-controlled company or a defense contractor. And so there's different approaches that you can have there, like, you know, what Andrell is doing, what Shield is doing, which I think is phenomenal. Like these companies I sort of think of, and I think they would probably say the same thing. Like they're standing up defense-focused companies that are trying to harvest and integrate the best of the like, the cutting-edge civilian technology. We're a little bit different in that we are pure, we are dual-use ourselves. I mean, the same kind of core drone that we sell to a energy utility is very, very similar to like what a soldier needs on the battlefield. And so as a country...

• 2:08:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's really important that we have a strategy to harness the best of the civilian tech for defense purposes. And then the other thing is that if all this stuff is going to be developed in the private sector outside of the government's direct grip, you know, where it's developed and the supply chains that lead into it are also incredibly important. And it really is a technology. I mean, I think that the technology battle with China, I think, is the number one battleground. Like, who's going to control the chips? Who's going to control AI? Where are the drones going to be made? What servers are they going to call home to? And even all the tech that's like developed and sold into civilian markets has enormous national security implications.

• 2:09:37Speaker 03

  Because if you, like, you know, if you buy a Chinese drone, and I don't mean this in, you know, it's like, there's nothing wrong with somebody going to Best Buy and buying a Chinese drone, or, you know, a police agency buying a Chinese drone. But you are basically funding, you know, military technology of an adversary. I mean, that money is going to China to help them build better drones. So that's one risk. And then the other is they can cut it off anytime that they want, you know? So you can, there's just, being able to maintain supply is not guaranteed. And probably when you need it most is the time when they're going to, like, pull the rug. They tried to pull the rug on you, didn't they? They did, yeah. So I have... DGI specifically?

• 2:10:21Speaker 03

  Well, the Chinese government. The Chinese government? Yeah, so we, last year, we had the great honor of, I think, and I think we were really like the first US drone company to be sanctioned by the Chinese government. Congratulations. Thank you. I was named personally, so now I've been personally sanctioned by Iran and the Chinese government. Nice. So, I haven't gotten Russia yet, but, yeah, and they, so their stated reason for sanctioning Skydio was that we had sold drones to Taiwan. The only drones that we'd sold to Taiwan at the time went to the fire department. So, you know, I think the stated reason is likely not the real reason.

• 2:11:01Speaker 03

  I think the real reason is that we are now quite successfully competing against DGI, their leading company. In the market and we're taking market share away from them. And then two, the US government is starting to restrict DJI. And so I think it was kind of retaliatory move against that. And it's been extremely aggressive. I mean, they have, so we, we knew that we had risk, right? And we didn't start life as a military company. So we didn't start life saying like, all right, we can't get any components from China. We started life saying, we want to build like a really great drone. We're going to build it in the US.

• 2:11:33Speaker 03

  You know, we had a preference away from, from using Chinese components, but we still had a few of them in the drone. The biggest of which was the battery. So on the day that they announced the sanctions, they showed up at, at any component vendor we had in China. Literally government officials showed up and, and like shut them down, took the tools and equipment that they were using to build Skydio stuff. In some cases, they actually took people into custody. No kidding? Yeah. And it's been a, and over the last year, they've basically been doing everything they can to put us out of business. In second and third level dependencies in our supply chain. Even, so if we work as a supplier, even if that supplier isn't, isn't directly using any Chinese material in our component,

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  the Chinese government will try to use it as leverage against them to, if they have, if that supplier is any other dependence on China, to get them to stop doing business with us. And we're fortunate to have a bunch of, you know, a bunch of awesome suppliers that, that, that are going to do, you know, that want to do the right thing and are, are, are still working with us outside of China, obviously. So China is very concerned with you. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a global, it's a battlefield for technology, right? And they, DJI is a formidable company, like from a technical standpoint, they're incredibly impressive. And, you know, the Chinese government, you can tell they want to maintain that kind of stranglehold on the market.

• 2:12:59Speaker 03

  And the more it gets challenged, the more that they try to, to fight back. We actually, so I haven't, I haven't told this story broadly, but we have some interesting history here. So when we, we started the company in 2014 and Shortly after we started, we were approached by DJI about wanting to license our technology to go into their drones. And this was a different world back then. I mean, this was really before the geopolitical tension had exploded. And we were like three people in a basement. They weren't as big of a company as they are now, but they were still a very big kind of behemoth organization, certainly from our standpoint, like being three people in a basement. So we, you know, we went and visited them. And we basically

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  felt like there was, there was just kind of a different vision of the future from what they had. Like, they were very focused on building these manually flown drones. And we felt like there was just an op, this autonomy presented a fundamentally new opportunity. It wasn't just sort of like a checkbox feature. It was like a different paradigm. You know, it's kind of the shift from like a flip phone to a smartphone or something. It's just sort of a different way of operating. And we ultimately just felt like that wasn't the direction they were going. And that's really what we wanted to do. So we decided not to do it. And when we decided not to do it, they made it very clear that they were going to try to crush us. You know, they, they basically said, like, if you don't do this, like, we're, you know, we're going to come after you with everything that we've got as a company. And they implied, you know, with the support of our government, we're going to try to kill you. And they basically have been since we started, you know, since 2014.

• 2:14:30Shawn Ryan?

  How's that feel?

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  Well,

• 2:14:35Shawn Ryan?

  Are you proud of that?

• 2:14:36Speaker 03

  You know, it feels awesome to be where we are. I think, one of the things, look, I'm, I'm super proud to be doing what we're doing in the US. I think the national mission is incredibly important. I'm also a very competitive person. And so I'm, you know, there's lots of motivators for me. I love the impact that we have with our customers. I love working with our team. I love building the product. I also love competing. And so I love the feeling that, you know, we've got, we've got competitors, we've got adversaries out there. And, you know, they're going to try to beat us, and we're going to try to beat them. And we're, you know, we're going to, for me personally, I'm going to do everything I can to, to make this stuff as awesome as it can be and, and have it be the best in the world.

• 2:15:22Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, I'm just curious, do you see yourself going back to a consumer product?

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  We get, we get asked this question a lot now. I

• 2:15:34Speaker 03

  I think that the impact and the opportunity for the kinds of customers that we serve in critical industries is just so big and so important that it really demands our full attention. And I think consumer drones, it's painful for me. We had a consumer product, I, you know, I used it myself, I loved it, consumers did all kinds of amazing things with it. But I just think that the like, the work that we do and the mission that we have with, with our enterprise and government customers is just so important. I mean, it's really life-saving stuff now on a daily basis that people are doing with our drones, that for the stage that we're at as a company, I still think that deserves our full focus and attention, because I think it's still so early. I mean, all the things, like, you get it, you're, you know, you're talking about like

• 2:16:18Speaker 03

  these, you know, you should have dock drones at every shopping mall and every school and people can be using them for personal security. Like, I agree with all that stuff, and we're like 1% of the way there today. And so I think that's, that's, that's, for where we are right now, I think that's really where we need to be focused. I would love to find some kind of way where, you know, if DJI really does get banned, we can enable somebody to build a great consumer drone, maybe with some of our technology or something, because I do think there's a need there.

• 2:16:50Shawn Ryan?

  How fast can you make these things? I mean, I, I, I want one. I'm being, I'm not fucking around, I'm being serious.

• 2:16:58Speaker 03

  So this-

• 2:16:59Shawn Ryan?

  Take security seriously.

• 2:17:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, like, how fast can we develop a new drone?

• 2:17:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, how, how fast can you pump out these X10s?

• 2:17:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:17:08Shawn Ryan?

  Because when I was asking, you know, I think I had asked what the, what's the biggest hurdle, and I believe you said manufacture.

• 2:17:14Speaker 03

  So we're at about 1,000 drones a month coming out of our factory today. The docks are, the dock is like a more complex thing, and we're earlier in the ramp cycle there. So the dock is like hundreds a month, but we're, we're ramping up there, and we're getting better and better at it. I mean, this, so this product, the R10- This whole thing from concept to what you see here, like functioning awesome drone, was like six or seven months. It'll probably take us another three or four months to get to the point where we're really ready to scale it from a manufacturing standpoint. But as a company, we've really got the flywheel spinning now. We're, you know, for any sort of flavor of quadcopter, we can do really awesome stuff really quickly. And with this

• 2:17:59Speaker 03

  thing, we, the demand for this has been through the roof since we announced it. Luckily, we decided to kind of over invest in automation for the factory line, mainly just because we knew we needed to get better at it and we wanted to like to use this as kind of like a trial balloon to deploy a lot more automation. So the assembly of this thing will be by far the most efficient we've ever had. Like our goal, my goal, which I'm pushing the team towards, I think we'll get there, is less than an hour total of human operator time to build one of these from like raw parts to all the way through, which if you get into like the details here is pretty remarkable. I mean, if you were to do all this stuff manually, you'd be talking about like five or six hours of like gluing and screwing stuff together. So the assembly of this is going to be very, very automated

• 2:18:43Speaker 03

  for the level of complexity. And we're going to, you know, every time we do a new product, we, we take step forwards on stuff like that to be able to build more of them and have them be more affordable.

• 2:18:50Shawn Ryan?

  And who are the main, who are the, who is the main customer for the indoor drone?

• 2:18:54Speaker 03

  Initially, it'll be law enforcement. Law enforcement and then indoor infrastructure inspection. So like anywhere where you have to put a person into a confined space to like see if there's a crack or see if something's healthy. A lot of, a lot of energy generation stuff, like a lot of power plant kind of, kind of inspections.

• 2:19:09Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. So in, what would law enforcement use these for? They use these for hostage situation, active shooter? Or will this be, I guess it wouldn't be law enforcement, but I mean, it's, I mean, why aren't these going to be roving around in malls? So being serious, it's just a, it's a moving, active deterrent.

• 2:19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:33Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody knows you're on camera in malls and casinos and stadiums and all this shit all the time, but that I think that's actually active like

• 2:19:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:42Shawn Ryan?

  We're fucking following you if you do anything.

• 2:19:45Speaker 03

  I think eventually we'll get there. One of the things with this, which is a very practical consideration, it's, it's pretty noisy because there's one of the key sort of considerations in designing a drone is what's called the disc loading, which is basically if you, you know, so this thing's got four rotors. And if you look at the, the area swept out by all of these rotors, that's the disc area. And then if you divide that by the weight of the drone, that's called the disc loading. And so the higher the disc loading, that basically means you've got a very low rotor area that's supporting a lot of mass, which means that the rotors are going to have to spin really fast and they're probably going to be pretty loud. So in order to make this thing small, we've got a pretty high disc loading.

• 2:20:22Speaker 03

  Over time, we'll, we'll, you know, we'll figure out ways to make it lighter and lower the disc loading, which will make it quieter. And I think that's for some of these applications, like if you want the thing really operating around people, it needs to be a quieter system. Like another one, you know, there's a bunch of, in retail, there's a bunch of work you can do just counting inventory in a store. I mean, stores, they call it shrinkage, but they lose like five or 10% of their stuff to like theft or being misplaced and having one of these every like day, just fly around all the aisles of a store and just count what's there. I mean, it sounds kind of mundane.

• 2:20:54Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:20:54Speaker 03

  Uh, but that's like that.

• 2:20:56Shawn Ryan?

  We're doing inventory too now.

• 2:20:58Speaker 03

  Well, we're, we've, we've, I'd say we've

• 2:21:00Shawn Ryan?

  Shit, man.

• 2:21:00Speaker 03

  We've dabbled in it. Um, I, I think with R10, we've, we've got a product that's decently, decently well suited to it. I think at, at really large scale, you need something that would be super quiet so it could operate around people. Um, but this is what I say. I mean, I think this is why we're focused, you know, I think we're still 1% of the way there in terms of all the things that these can be used for in an industrial enterprise government setting. And, uh, yeah, we've got a lot of work left to do to, to realize the full opportunity.

• 2:21:28Shawn Ryan?

  Man. How big's your team?

• 2:21:30Speaker 03

  Uh, the company now is getting close to a thousand people, um, including, you know, that's everybody. That's people that build them, design them, sell them, support them, uh, which is, people hear that and they think it's either big or small. For the, for the complexity of what we do, it's an incredibly small team and I have a very, I have a very talent centric view of business. I think that if you have the right people, you can do almost anything. And if you don't have the right people, you can do almost nothing, you know? It's like you could have the grandest strategy in the world, but, uh, if you don't have amazing people, you're not gonna make it work. And if you can have a shit strategy and have amazing people and they'll like figure out that the strategy is shit, they'll fix it and then they'll make it work.

• 2:22:11Speaker 03

  Um, and so from the beginning, we've invested a huge amount of time and energy into trying to really get like the best people in the world for all the different disciplines we cover under one roof. And that's really the magical piece of it and that for where we are right now, that's one of the most fun pieces is we've just got an incredible team. We've got engineers and engineering leaders, uh, that have been with us since almost the beginning. So folks that have spent the last 10 years at Skydio that have been through all the product cycles together. Um, and you know, it's like any team, like you spend enough time together, you can, you know, everybody's strengths and weaknesses and we know what we're good at. And we've got a bunch of shared learning and shared history together. Uh, and so because of that, we're able to just move faster and, uh, and faster on everything that we're doing.

• 2:22:53Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you have put something really special together.

• 2:22:58Speaker 03

  I, I appreciate that.

• 2:22:59Shawn Ryan?

  It's impressive.

• 2:23:00Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a big team effort.

• 2:23:02Shawn Ryan?

  I can see your team too out there. Everybody's stoked to be here, excited.

• 2:23:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:07Shawn Ryan?

  Moving.

• 2:23:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, uh, look, I'm not neutral on this, but it's hard for me to imagine anything that'd be more fun in the world to work on. I think the combination of the technology and the customers that we serve and, you know, getting to the feedback cycles of like getting to build this thing and, and then put it out in the world and see what people do with it and see the impact that it has. Like we've already had these deployed on some, some like actual indoor operational scenarios, just a month after we announced the thing. I think that is a, it's a unique set of circumstances that we're in where we can, we can move incredibly quickly on cutting edge technology that's having incredible real world impact.

• 2:23:43Shawn Ryan?

  How are people finding you? How are, how are law enforcement agencies and is this word of mouth?

• 2:23:48Speaker 03

  It's, it's heavily word of mouth. I mean, especially in the law enforcement community. They all know each other. They all talk. We do the standard stuff. I mean, we go to events. We, we have a big annual event that we host ourselves. We love having our customers out and that's where we, that's where we unveiled all the new products a few months ago.

• 2:24:05Speaker 03

  So we do all, all that kind of stuff. And then we, in the new industries, it'll oftentimes start with a real innovator at the customer. You know, there'll be somebody at a concert events venue, for example, that recognizes like, hey, I bet we could use, just like you had the insight, like you, I bet we could use drones for this. And, you know, it oftentimes starts with somebody who's really innovative and forward thinking at a customer in some, in an industry we're not even in, reaching out to us. And, and then that just kind of starts the cycle where, you know, we'll, we'll learn what we can about what they're doing. If we think our existing products meet the need, you know, we'll typically like sell them or demo a couple. And then we'll just get in there and start learning and working

• 2:24:48Speaker 03

  with them to figure out what do we need to do to make this thing like really scale and work for, for your application. And so we've got core industries that, you know, we've hired deep industry experts into like law enforcement, military. We've got a bunch of former operators on our team, energy utilities, got a bunch of folks that have worked in the energy industry in our company. And so we have a deep level of expertise and focus, but then we also have kind of these frontiers where, which are the new applications where we're, we're working alongside innovators in those industries to figure out exactly the right recipe. And then as we find it, it really starts to scale and, you know, we'll lean in behind it and we'll do the sales and marketing activities to go and get to, you know, every oil and gas company or, or every college campus and so on.

• 2:25:29Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you've got a lot of work to do.

• 2:25:31Speaker 03

  I, I agree.

• 2:25:32Shawn Ryan?

  You've got a lot of work to do.

• 2:25:34Speaker 03

  It's, it's, it's, uh, it's all consuming, but it's a, it's a fun set of stuff to work on.

• 2:25:40Shawn Ryan?

  How do you lead your team?

• 2:25:43Speaker 03

  Well, there's there's different dimensions to it. I think one of the one of the traps that I fell into early on. So when we started the company, I was 27 years old. And I actually came to realize we hired our first 10 employees and we were all at lunch one day and I realized I was the youngest person at the company.

• 2:26:01Speaker 03

  And I think I fell into the trap early on of, you know, my job as the leader is I need to have all the answers, you know, everybody's looking to me, they're betting their careers on this place and I I better know the answer for everything we're doing in every situation. And one of the the ways that I feel like I developed as a leader is is just the more I do it, honestly, the more I feel like I get humbled by by all the people around me and the speed with which we're learning. And so I try to approach everything that we're doing with a great deal of of humility and I'm just constantly learning. I'm learning from all the people that we've hired. I'm learning from our customers. And I I kind of see myself as just trying to be a conduit for the best information.

• 2:26:43Speaker 03

  You know, there's there's always it's at the high level, you think like, oh, the founder builds the company. One of the things that I've come to believe is that the company also kind of shapes the founder and you know, when I'm here showing you this stuff like I'm representing the work of 1,000 people. Yeah, you know, the best ideas that I have are oftentimes coming from other people on our team. And so I really try to be like a conduit and an amplifier for the best ideas anywhere that they can come from, from a customer, from internally. And then, as I said, I have a very talent centric view of this stuff, so I place enormous focus on trying to get like literally the best people in the world for every function that we're going after. And I'm I'm fortunate enough, and I think we're fortunate enough as a company now to have an incredibly strong leadership team. And I've actually become

• 2:27:26Speaker 03

  more technical over the last couple of years. I mean, when we were in the basement together at the start, I was writing code. And, you know, I'm an engineer at heart. And as the company has gotten bigger and we've gotten more operationally sound, I actually can spend more time on the technology. And the two things that I really love doing where I feel like I can add the most value is being in the field with customers, seeing what's working, seeing what's not. Making sure if something's not working, we're on track to fix it, but then also seeing what's possible and feeding that back into our product development machine and working with our engineering teams to make it come to life. And so it's a, you know, it's a, it's, it's really a incredible thing to get to be a part of, to have this great organization that builds these things with the expertise that we have.

• 2:28:08Speaker 03

  And I get to kind of float around, spot opportunities, spot problems and then dive in very deep to either try to fix them or, or realize a new opportunity.

• 2:28:21Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I am like blown, I'm blown, I am blown away at like what you guys are doing and, and I mean, it's just very cool, very, very cool.

• 2:28:34Speaker 03

  I appreciate that. And it's, it is a huge team effort and I think that that's, it's true of every company and I think oftentimes too much gets ascribed to like the founder or the CEO. But it's, you know, all this stuff is possible because we just have an amazing group of folks.

• 2:28:51Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you can go anywhere you want. I mean, there's so many people that are interested in this. I mean, just, just in the couple hours that we've spent together here. I mean, you know, I was thinking police, defense, you know, that kind of stuff, but I mean, the possibilities are legitimately endless. I mean, I don't, I don't think you could scale this company fast enough to, to, to, to cover all this stuff. I don't even know how you're picking which direction to go in.

• 2:29:19Speaker 03

  It's a hard problem. That's.

• 2:29:20Shawn Ryan?

  If you're talking oil and gas.

• 2:29:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:23Shawn Ryan?

  Defense tech.

• 2:29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:25Shawn Ryan?

  Law enforcement. I mean, these are big, big, big, big.

• 2:29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're all.

• 2:29:29Shawn Ryan?

  Problems.

• 2:29:30Speaker 03

  They're, they're big problems. They're big industries and.

• 2:29:35Speaker 03

  I think we are at kind of a transition moment in civilization. Like, I think robotics is gonna be the, really the most important industry ever. You know, having, having robots that can do useful work in the physical world, I think is gonna be the biggest industry ever. And flying robots are, are in many ways, the first instantiation of that. They're the first robotics category to reach substantial scale and real-world impact. And it's very real today, but it's still very small compared to what it eventually will be.

• 2:30:10Shawn Ryan?

  And you're at the cutting edge on it.

• 2:30:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:12Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking awesome, man.

• 2:30:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:14Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:30:15Speaker 03

  It's sweet.

• 2:30:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, Adam, I wish you the best of luck. I hope to see you again, and, um, seriously, man, congratulations. I love what you're doing.

• 2:30:25Speaker 03

  All right. Thank you, Sean. This is great.

• 2:30:39Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan's show from, if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly,