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

Tu mereces fruitartos favoritos por menos. Ja sel na Big Mac, McNuggets, or a sausage, egg and cheese, McCriddles, pidetuan to hocomo un meo ya hora.
Oof, nava comodarto un gustaso, por tam poco.

Los extra value meals están de regreso. Gana por la mañana con el extra value meal, sausage, mc, muffin with egg, hash browns, yun cafe aliente pequeño por solos se dolares.
Bara ba ba ba.

Preses y participación pueden varía. Los preci de la promosión pueden serminos que los de las comidas.
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Adam Bree, welcome to the show, man. Very excited to be here, Sean.
Very excited to have you.

Who do we have?

Oh, shit.

We have a third joining us.

So this is the Skydio R-10.

No way.

So this is our brand new indoor tactical drone designed to get into dangerous situations. You don't have to send a person.

And as you can tell, it's got a speaker on here.

It's detected a threat.

Attention. Attention.
Please exit the area immediately. I repeat.
Is somebody behind that or is that programmed in there?

So you can do two-way communication. So you can actually 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. No shit.
Yeah.

Dude, that is just...

That is bad. So in case you haven't figured it out, we're talking about all things drones today.

You 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 yeah whatever you put it in 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. So if you can send a drone, you get perfect situational awareness.
You can de-escalate the situation. You can establish two-way communication.

So the general mantra is like, send the robot, not the person. So this is a brand new product for us.
Dude, that is cool.

Can you put a gun on that thing?

I know you can.

I know you can.

Well, in the U.S., it is illegal to put any kind of weapon on a drone. Well, that's dumb.
And fly it in civilian airspace.

Just kidding. But

you should talk to our friends at Axon about the possibility of putting a taser on it. Axon.
I think we have talked to them.

Maybe. Yeah, they're the inventors of

the taser and the body camera. Dude, so nobody's seen this yet? Well, this product is brand new.
We just announced it about a month ago, and it's just getting into customer hands now.

So it'll be a steady build, but it's actually flown real missions in the hands of some of of our early access customers. Congratulations.
Who is the market for this?

Is this going to be in all everybody's home? So initially shopping malls.

Yeah. The initially it'll be heavily law enforcement.

And right now, drones are used by SWAT, like indoor drones like this would be used by like high-end SWAT teams.

And we certainly expect that the R10 will be used by SWAT teams in high-stake situations.

But our real goal with this is to build something that's much more accessible for kind of everyday 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.

So we expect it to be heavily adopted in law enforcement, but we also are seeing incredible interest in critical infrastructure inspection.

So we work with energy utilities that have all kinds of gnarly indoor infrastructure in 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.

And so, for them, just being able to put a drone in the air, fly around, see this stuff super quickly, super efficiently, is a total game changer.

And then, over time, we also expect this to be adopted

by the military for confined space-type situational awareness work. Wow.
Wow.

Man, your customer. I mean,

we had talked about this off camera right before the interview, but

my old buddy, Jake Johnson,

who apparently did some work for you guys, I mean,

he was

gave me a little bit of inside baseball

on everything you guys are doing.

Your customer is pretty much

everyone and anyone. Well, we seems like.
I mean, from inspecting naval ships for rust to power lines to cell phone towers to SWAT teams to clearing buildings.

It's crazy, man. Yeah, I mean,

you have so many markets. The thing that is exciting to me, like the way that I think about it, 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.

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 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 sectors.

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 man i love what you're doing i love what you're doing appreciate it everybody gets an introduction here so let me give you yours

adam bree

Co-founder and CEO of Skydeo, 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 military public safety and commercial applications you've been building stuff that can fly since you were five years old

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 we 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 we'll have lots of flying robots apparently i'm a i'm a threat threat now.

So I think your crew suggested that

that's how we should address you. Yeah, well,

they might not be wrong, but I'm just kidding. But

dude, that thing is

super cool. Yeah.
So, all right, I got a couple of things to knock out before we get too in the weeds on the interviews. So, one, everybody gets a gift.
I got you a couple here, Adam.

Those are Vigilance League gummy bears.

Made in the USA still legal in all 50 states

good to go and

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

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

all right so that that is the sig

p365 legion it's all metal it's got those little slits up front uh at the barrel up top up top there you go for a gas dispersion helps you 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 that's amazing you might like one yeah i really appreciate it sean my pleasure

i'm allowed to take this back to california with me well yeah

at least right now you are all right but uh great

and then um

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 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.

What kind of range or flight distance do drones like Skydio 10 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.

Yeah.

So the military variant of our product, the X-10D, is what's called a short-range reconnaissance system.

So the typical range is out to six, seven miles, kind of like max flight distance, max flight time.

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.

And so they can basically go anywhere that you have LTE coverage. Okay.
And we've done flights that are, you know, 10, 15 miles in LTE conditions. Wow.
Yeah.

Well, before we...

These are all autonomous. I mean, nobody's controlling this.
So you can fly them in a bunch of different ways. You can fly them quite manually.

You can, you know, you can hold a controller, you can push around the joysticks,

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, 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 as the future of the industry is just more and more autonomy.

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.
Right on.

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

I love gifts. So

what you see here is the R10, which is a new drone.

This is our flagship drone. This is the Skydio X10.

So this thing is out there kicking butt at scale in the world today.

But this is a very special X10. This is not a normal X10.
So, you see that there, yeah, so that's a bullet hole. Uh,

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.

No kidding, 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?

Because it's better the drone gets shot

than a person. Um, so we thought you uh you might like to have this.
This is fucking awesome.

Drone with a purple heart.

Dude, this is cool. So, what was this doing?

So,

they were serving a homicide warrant. So, they were going out to arrest somebody.

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 drone shows up and they start shooting at it.

But as I said, from our perspective, it's all good news. That's the whole point of the drone:

it can take the risk and get the awareness rather than having to put a person in harm's way. Man, that is cool, man.
Thank you. Yeah, being here.

I guess we'll hang it from the ceiling. Yeah, this is awesome.
Put it wherever you want. Thank you.

Very cool. Very cool.
And this is the X10. Yeah, it's the Scotio X10.

Man, that's cool. Thank you.

All right, so I want to do a little bit of a backstory on you, see what

captured your interest in drones and stuff, anyways, 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

what's going on in Ukraine with the drones and especially China.

So I'd love to probably end with

a decent chat about where China's at with drones and kind of what drone warfare looks like in the coming years. Yeah, maybe getting into all of it.
Cool. So where did you grow up?

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 fly 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 building the little balsa wood airplanes, the rubber band-powered stuff.

And then I got into radio-controlled airplanes, which are 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 in my basement building the things and then out at the flying field flying them.

And I took it way too seriously. I traveled all over the country.
Hey, you won some national championships, right? Yeah, most people don't even know that this world exists.

I didn't know. It's kind of a niche hobby within a niche hobby, but it's pretty cool.

I mean, you're basically, you're, 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. And 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.

How old were you when you started that?

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. Holy shit.

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 when you're flying it yourself, the control system is all in your head.

But that kind of like deep intuitive understanding

is one of the things that I think has enabled me to

do both the research that I later did as a grad student and then do some of the things that we're doing at Skydio.

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 my skill as a radio radio-controlled airplane pilot. Wow.
When did you start thinking about autonomous drones

versus RC planes? So

it was pretty obvious basically from the beginning that I was going to be an engineer. I mean, 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 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 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 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 drive itself around in an orchard, which was 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 co-founders for Scudio.

And that's where I really got exposure to writing software 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 was just completely addicting to me. I mean, writing software and transferring a lot of this kind of intuition that I built as a human pilot into AI systems that could fly these things

and then seeing what that could create in the physical world was just amazing.

Like the main output of my master's project at MIT was an airplane that could fly itself around in a parking garage, which the culmination of that was kind of 2012.

So it was still before the drone industry really existed. Wow.
So you started flying,

you said eight or nine years old. Yeah.
And then

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

That's that's

yeah. That's pretty

my whole- There's not that many people that focused. I'll say that.
You know what I mean? 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 control airplanes when he was a kid and his parents just weren't that into it and they didn't really support him in it. And so he didn't get to do it.

And so he had a ton of pent-up energy of like wanting to do radio control airplane stuff,

which he

took out on me, which was incredible.

Oh, breath.

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, a lot of the hardware that goes into drones really grew out of the radio airplane, the RC helicopter, kind of the toy industry. So,

I was starting in 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 it was like just a fortunate kind of series of timing and exposure at the right moments to be into this stuff

that that's enabled now what we're doing at Scudio.

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

So

our CTO, our chief technology officer at Scadio, 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.

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, 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, how to fix it.

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,

you know, who is this guy? And I don't know what I'm doing. And he's kind of like scary and intimidating.

And so 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 Scadio.

Like every time we hire a new engineer, they're like, they're kind of freaked out and scared of Abe.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's fine. Abe is wonderful.
You'll get used to it.

And so I can empathize with him though, because I've been on the other

side of it.

And then our third co-founder, Matt, was actually in the MIT Media Lab,

which is adjacent to the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. And so he was working on a lot of like human-computer interaction stuff.
And

you know, the, the bet for the company was just kind of the combination of like the hardcore science and robotics combined with like different user interaction paradigms would be an interesting recipe to kind of try to build the next chapter of what drones could become.

Damn. So all you guys sure are obviously a fascination with drones.
Yeah.

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

So the original concept, so we were, Abe and I were lab mates together through 2012. After that, we got the opportunity to go and start Google's drone delivery program, Project Wing.

So the two of us, along with our professor, our advisor from MIT, moved out to California, started working on the drone delivery stuff.

This was like 2012.

And

that 2012, 2013 were kind of the era where people were starting to think about, well, 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, there was a lot of excitement 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 that 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 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 new system you can just say like hey this is a cool thing that you can go and buy and and 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 vision has really stayed exactly the same since the beginning of like make these things super smart to make them more useful to more people.

You know, it's always hard to imagine when you start like where you're going to end up, but the like the central kind of bet is the same. Yeah.

So, I mean, how did you, I mean, how did the customer face develop into what it is?

I mean,

actually,

before we get to that question, I mean, how many other drones were out there at this time period that were able to follow people and dodge?

Well, so this is this, one of, one of the interesting aspects of the drone industry is that

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 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.

And

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

that it actually took to make this thing come together in a reliable, scalable way.

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.

And these are 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.

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 actually makes it even harder because you have less margin to work with. So it's a very hard technology build.

It took us four years to get to our first product, the Skydio R1,

which was kind of the first instantiation of a consumer follow-film drone.

And I kind of described the R1 like it was a technology success, but a commercial failure. Like everybody that saw it 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? It's too expensive or it was, it was too expensive.
Um, so it was 2,500 bucks, which is a lot for a consumer product. Um,

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 because 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 you're doing.

So we had this kind of huge spike in autonomy capability, which we use to raise money, venture capitalists and attract the team and kind of get the whole flywheel spinning.

And then 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 were in kind of an interesting position in 2018 because we launched this product. Everybody thought it was amazing.
Nobody bought it.

We had just enough money in the bank to develop a second version of it, which became the Skydio 2.

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 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 slidewear.

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, defense,

as well as energy utilities and so on, they kind of saw this and said, like,

that thing isn't designed for us, but the technology in it looks like it could be very relevant for us. And so we started to get a lot of inbound interest,

which... which started to impact what we were doing from a product perspective.

So when we launched Guide O2, it was still mainly aimed at consumers, but there was more kind of enterprise thinking built into it.

What enterprises were reaching out? What do they want?

Well,

we started to hear from the DOD.

And

that was one of the big opportunities that got a lot of attention and that we spent a lot of focus on. And we could talk about that whole trajectory.

So that was a big one.

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 interests 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 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. Man.
So, I mean,

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. Exactly.

I mean, I wouldn't think you would have to make very many modifications

to the drone to be able to do that. I mean, it's...

Here's a drone with a camera on it. Yeah.

I mean, it depends on how you want to do it and how well you want to do it.

But it's true. And one of the cool things about drones is that 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

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.

The pilot's like, okay, I want to inspect this thing. And so

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.

And so we did both those things. Like we would enable our customers 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 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, 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 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. Makes sense.

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

So 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 quadcopter.

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 the license plate at 800 feet.

It's got 800 feet? Yeah.

for that size of drone, it's crazy, the level of like optics that you can get in there.

So

the X10 is kind of like the workhorse platform.

But now that we've done that, and for a long time, our product strategy in the enterprise was like, we need to nail that thing. 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.

And

we'll probably look at some of this stuff later.

There's other accessories around it that enable even more exciting capability.

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 core pieces of it and reconfigure it into different form factors. So the R10

is the next major example of this, where we've basically taken a subset of the hardware from X10 to get it into a smaller, lighter, less expensive package. So this is designed for indoor operation.

And then maybe I'll leave it till we see it live.

We've got another thing that we're working on, which is still in prototype form that unlocks 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 data capture needs that our customers have. Wow.

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 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 um it's used in two major modes of operation one we call 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 into 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.

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 like 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.

So are these, so

are these,

what cities are using these?

A bunch. I mean, all over the U.S.
at this point. So New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Oklahoma, Albuquerque.

I mean, most major cities in the U.S. are in some stage of deploying Scadio drones

as part of law enforcement.

Are these cameras?

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.

Yeah. So the gimbal, you just, 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 axis 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.

So, those are navigation cameras. Okay.
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, it's got eyes that see everything in every direction. It's got a very powerful NVIDIA CPU GPU on board,

which is running all of our AI software. And it's basically doing what a self-driving car does.

As it flies, it's constantly mapping the space around it, predicting into the future, avoiding obstacles, and doing all the things that a skilled pilot would do.

So when these, so do these cities, I mean,

so obviously they are connected to law enforcement dispatch. Yeah.

So do they have these staged all over the city in various locations? Yeah. So we actually we have some examples we could look at if you're up for it.
Yeah, I would love that.

What this actually looks like. Let's do it.
All right.

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. How do you make that determination of

how many drones a precinct would need? 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 don't get to do as much engineering on the drone itself anymore.

But

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 work with our customers on like, here's where we should put them. And 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.

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?

So 911 calls are the primary driver because that's the primary job of the drone is to respond to calls for service and respond to incidents.

Even though I love the data and the tool, at the end of the day,

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 fine-tuning these things for what the deployments look like.

What kind of 911 calls are they responding to? So we should look at, so it's all different kinds. And it's basically as diverse as 911 calls are, which cover a huge range of things.

So if we look at a couple of examples here. So this is from the Oklahoma City Police Department.

Is this my

tier? This is not the one that was shot. So this was a situation where there was a train operator that called 911 in a panic, afraid that they might have hit somebody who was on the tracks.

So they launch 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 have 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 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.

Because in 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 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 the 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 going to 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 window tinting it.
So he went down a dead end street and 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 a stolen vehicle.
He's cold-plated it. He's tinting the windows.
Like, he's going to go off and do a bunch of bad stuff. But they know exactly where he is.

They know exactly what he's doing. They send out a plainclothes 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

pick him up.

And videos like this, I find just like deeply satisfying, where the criminal is just kind of screwed. You know, it's like 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 going to need to use force when they, when they get to pick the time and the place

to intervene.

So it's like, for me, and for our customers,

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.

And fortunately, 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, property.
How long of a time for like less than a year? Holy shit. Because

you just can't get away with it, right?

Like there's, there's, they, you know, they will find you, they will follow you with the drone, uh, and, and they will stop you before you can do anything, uh, anything more.

Um, so it, it really just completely changes the game. We hear this, they like game game changer.
We hear that all the time from our law enforcement customers.

Like, you know, we've 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. Man, I mean, any is this another example.
Yeah, we've, we've got another example here. So, this, this was really like a tragic situation.
This was in Albuquerque.

Um, so these are a couple of nine-year-olds in their parents' backyard with a gun. Um, 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 things here to distract the kids 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 make better decisions. Like rather than guessing,

they know exactly what they're dealing with. So 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 have known what they were dealing with.

But with the drone, it's just a completely different situation. Man.
I mean, what about

violent crime?

Violent crime, like,

I don't know, some type of

domestic call. I mean,

are these responding to stuff like that? They're responding to everything. Like I,

you know, this is in public, so I, I, I probably can't say the customer, but I was, I was visiting a customer a couple weeks ago where they had, uh,

there's a guy in kind of a low-in-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 20 seconds 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 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.

And that stuff like that is happening all the time. So we,

by the end of this year, we will be doing close to a million flights per year rate.

So close to 100,000 flights per month.

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.

I mean, I just feel like these, I mean,

well, one, this would have totally alleviated the Charlie Kirk assassination. Yeah.
It'd be great if.

Was it Salt Lake? Was it Salt Lake? In Utah. Yeah.
Utah University. Salt Lake or Park City.
Yeah. I don't remember which one.
But

yeah, it'd be great if they invested in Sky Deo for the next

outdoor event.

But

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

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

Yeah,

you're 100% right. I mean, if you've got exotic.
If high-speed chase goes too long, then I mean,

what's the

flight time on these? So max flight time is 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 fast enough for high-speed chases.

But that is one of the motivations for

the kind of the other form factor

that we'll look at in a bit here to

fly much faster, much longer range, much longer endurance.

Because

the only stories that I don't like when we're looking at what's happening in public safety is where the guy gets away.

And the cases where we see that happening now is where somebody just gets on the highway and speeds away.

And so we're building another drone to take care of that. I know, man.

So these can just switch each other out too if it's taken too long.

Exactly.

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

With the autonomy, 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,

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.

DFR is what people call it kind of in the law enforcement world. And DFR is at the leading edge of all of these themes of like using AI and

more automation.

And

it's honestly,

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.

And it's really only in the last 18 months or so that

we've really seen it take off. Man, I mean,

so

are these

just responding to calls or is there a presence?

I would say it's like cities. It's 99% just responding to calls.

It's ultimately up to the discretion of the agency. And different agencies have different policies.
Different states have different rules on this.

You will see sometimes where if there's going to be a parade or a demonstration or something, they will do some like some proactive work around that.

One of the things that I think is fundamental here

is transparency around operations because

the idea of having like AI-powered drones flying all over U.S. 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.

And I actually thought this was going to to be one of the last markets to develop. This is one of the big things that I was wrong about.

I thought all the other infrastructure inspection stuff would happen at much larger scale before we had drones responding to 911 calls

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 the credit goes to our customers is just the investment in transparency and community communication around like what they're doing and why they're doing it.

And it's one of those things where, you know, when you see these examples of what the drone can do, it's very difficult to argue with it.

You know, it's very difficult for somebody to say like, no, I wish they didn't have a drone in that situation and I wish that guy got away or I wish that they couldn't tell that those were nine-year-olds rather than adults and de-escalated.

I mean, when you see these specific examples,

I feel like it's basically just irrefutable that it's providing incredible positive. Well, I mean,

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? This is something that I think a lot about. You know,

I really knew this is 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.

And so I think there is a balance to be struck. And I think the best way to do it 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 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 one of the least invasive forms of surveillance because it's very reactive to emergencies.

Like rather than just blanketing a 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 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 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 extremely primitive technology, like you could achieve high degrees of public safety by basically just locking everybody in their house all the time, right?

With no technology.

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

privacy.

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

This has been probably the most positive surprise that I've had in building the company is 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 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 it 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 argue with.

are any cities using these as is like a roving presence patrol uh to my knowledge like more of more of like a deterrent like hey we we see you um

i i haven't seen that it could be happening in in some places um and and i think there there could be positive impact to be had there i just think you want to be careful with it um 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

so,

you know, the, the

highest, highest impact stuff are the examples that we looked at where it's like a life or death situation, the drone gets there, it changes an outcome.

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 real beauties of this is that it also 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 them 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.

Yeah. You can clear a lot of that stuff from the air without maybe

like 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 to.

You put another bullet hole in it.

I would put a couple of them in there. Yeah.
But,

but I mean, you know, when you think about,

I mean, everything, I mean, there's ring cameras on

probably at least 50% of the homes in America at this point. Yep.
You know, but I mean, when we're talking about, you know, car dealerships, like you were just car dealerships,

stadiums, shopping malls, just all

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

some type of a 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 name it, should have these

just 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year roving their properties. Yeah.
You know, not only as a, we got you, but as a deterrent. Yeah.
Because they'll chase, they will chase a criminal.

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

is anybody doing that? It's, you know, the future is here, it's just not even low distributed. So we have customers that are like everything you just described is happening.

It's just not happening everywhere all the time yet.

But we have retailers that are installing these things for security and patrol.

You know, we have like military bases are using them for

security patrol. So, you know, data centers are using them.
These like massive facilities with really high security stakes. So yeah, I mean, I think we're headed for a world where these things...

So one of the ways that I think about this stuff is... I would think high net worth individuals with properties as well will be using this stuff.
Yeah. Yeah.
I've got one in mind.

Who's your biggest customer?

Our single biggest customer, it's actually pretty close. Historically, it's been the U.S.
Army

and just using the kind of ISR intelligence surveillance reconnaissance drones on the battlefield, although they are starting to do more doc stuff now.

Although the big cities are getting close now to the

U.S. Army in terms of like,

you know, the scale that they're deploying drones. Man, I mean, so why do you, it sounds like that you are not,

you're wanting more people to

express interest. What do you think is in the way of that?

Is it marketing, advertising? I mean, the bottleneck right now is how quickly we can install them. Really? Yeah, the demand is very, very high.
Very, very high. And

it's basically how quickly can we build and install these things. Wow.

And I think it's pretty. It's a good problem to have.
Yeah.

How quickly can you build and install it? We're ramping it up.

I mean,

we have what I think is the largest drone factory in the U.S.

Certainly for this class of drone. We've always built our stuff in the U.S., 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 cranking. That's awesome, man.
I love hearing that too.

So these are 100% manufactured in the U.S. Well,

we have global supply chains. We're getting parts and components from all over the world with a couple notable exceptions, like China.

But, you know, we work with companies in Taiwan and Japan

for different parts and components, but all the manufacturing, assembly, testing is done in the U.S. and our facility.

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

a contract manufacturer in Asia. And we actually honestly started down that path.

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 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.

We didn't know what to do. We didn't know how to tell them what to do.

And the only way 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

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, I mean, these are incredibly powerful robotic devices.

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

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 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 comes in one end and autonomous drones 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 get it out there in customers' hands. That is awesome.

So how does, how does it know,

how does the system know how to respond to different

scenarios?

So

I'm a big believer in AI 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 AI, I also believe that there's really no substitute for human judgment. So we're not trying to

take the human completely out of the loop. We're basically just trying to give them the tools to 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.
And we're actually integrating now.

There's some really interesting companies doing kind of 911 innovation to make that even faster and have AI 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.

For this kind of call, this kind of incident, I think it's worth getting real-time situational awareness, but all they have to do is click one button

and away it goes.

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 still have the people kind of like consume the video stream and make decisions on it.

I mean, why not?

It wouldn't hurt anything, right? No, maybe it's just an extra asset involved in

an

unfortunate situation. Yeah, I agree.
And I think the part of the beauty of these things is that

the marginal cost per use is basically zero. Like it costs nothing.

And if 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 law enforcement's been doing things one way for

40 years. It takes some time to adapt the way that you do it.
But 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.

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 get towards a place where it just becomes kind of a default expectation.

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

So,

I mean, let's say I'm like, hey, I want to buy this for my personal residence or right here in my studio. I buy this drone.
How much setup is there involved?

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.
So you'll get the chance 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 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 pretty darn safe and easy to get up and running. But like anything, there are, you know, there are different depths of skills that can unlock different things.
And, you know, like, for example,

the San Francisco PD drone pilots are,

no offense to any of our 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 with which they do it is incredible. So, like anything, like, it's the barrier to entry is extremely low.

But the people who are great at it can unlock some special things. Gotcha.
Gotcha.

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A 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 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 psyopshow.com, order it today.

I think you're going to get a lot out of this. Who's pulling the strings?

Who's pulling them?

All right, we're out here. This is the X-10.
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 going to swipe up to take off.

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 going to jam the joystick forward. So I'm going to go full forward

and it's just going to weave its way through the trees. So this is basically autonomous flight.
All I'm telling it to do is go forward.

It's just doing all that on its own. It's doing all that on its own.
So now I'm going to go backwards. I can't even look where I'm going, right?

And it's just going to weave weave its way through, keep itself safe.

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

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.

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

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,

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

So I can like... Wow.

And it shows the thermal right next to it. Exactly, yeah.

So there's my Scotio logo. I can punch back out.

We've got the thermal feed. So we're obviously going to pop on thermal.

I got to be honest, I don't like seeing myself.

It's not your best angle. Looks like a AC-130 Spectre gunship is targeting us right now.
Yeah.

What's the thing sticking out of the side? 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,

if you want to like,

you know, get somebody's attention.

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

I think we've got.

That's great.

oh nice

nice

always always a fan favorite.

We actually so Miami Beach Police Department they requested that

they uh they're one of our our great drona source responder customers. They deal with like huge drunk crowds around spring break and this has become a very useful tool for them to

communicate with the spring break folks.

So if you want you you can fly it here. So

it's a little bit like playing a video games. You were asking about how hard are these things to fly.
So the right stick is going to move you around.

So the first thing to get familiar with, if you push that right stick forward, that'll push you forward.

And then back will go back.

And then

you can go side to side.

And

I always recommend to get comfortable with the autonomy system. Just jam the stick forward into some trees and see what happens.

Yeah, so that's how you turn left stick. You're not comfortable, just jip it.
Just do it. Here we go.

Yeah. Get the fuck out of here.

It's going to go through all that shit? I mean, it has a tolerance for how close it'll let you get.

But yeah, I mean, this is you're like, 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.

And with the autonomy system, it's just

that shit. It's a piece of cake.

And

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

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.

and you can totally comfortably fly just looking down at the screen without worrying about like where the drone is or crashing into anything

so it's actually so like if you

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 push the wheel It's down below.

See this thing? Oh, yeah.

So that controls controls gimbal pitch,

and then on the right one, it controls zoom. So, the right wheel will zoom you in and out.

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

And then when you're done, do you want to land it?

Or you want to keep flying it. Yeah.

You can test the obstacle avoidance on yourself.

That's wild, man. Yeah.

All right, here we go. Let's play some chicken.

Make sure you get it properly lined up

in the crosshairs there.

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 ConnectFusion to fuse both those two things together. So

the quality of the video link is basically 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.

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 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.

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, and it uses all of that to plan like the safest autonomous path, autonomous path to come home.

No way.

Where is it? It'll show up here in a second.

Where is it?

It's probably coming back.

Oh shit, it's way up there. Yeah.
Dude, how fucking sick is that shit?

So the other thing we can do, can I

sit back here for a second? So it will recognize

people. So if I turn and face it here,

I can go into the skills mode here.

We activate subject tracking. So

it's now showing me on screen all the people that it sees. Yeah.
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.

Is it following me?

So it's basically just going to stay in place and look at you. It is? Yeah.
So I don't have it. I could set it to move, but right now.
What does it do if I go inside?

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 onto you.

And if you move over there, it'll just keep staring.

We're about to ship a feature where it'll actually move itself to find out. Oh, really? 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.

Dude, that's awesome. Yeah.
That is awesome. It's an amazing set of technologies that come together to make all that possible.
What's this thing? What's this robot thing over here? 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 the 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.

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. What?

So this is what turns the drone into a fully autonomous device. So this is what's staged all over all these cities.
Exactly.

Yeah. It's installed.

Installed-like infrastructure.

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.
Wow.

That's awesome. 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 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 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.

So let's say

I have one of these for this property here

and

goes out in the middle of the night, it's using thermals, and it it sees, I don't know, a couple people hiding in the bushes. Yep.
Then what happens? 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.

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.

And that's it.

Dude, that is awesome. It's pretty wild.
Yeah. 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. Wow.

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.

You've done it. Yeah.
Wow. 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 Cyber truck. So this is the Skydio Cybertruck.

And in the back of the truck, we've got a robotic arm

that can

pick up

a fixed wing vehicle.

What?

So it's all the same core technology that goes into X10, 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.

Holy shit. Look at that thing.

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.

Dude, what?

Yeah, the future is sick.

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 be or the arm be able to throw it just like you'd 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.

And that's it. Wow.

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'll be able to have two drones in the air continuously 24-7, two flying, one charging

with 40, 50 mile an hour or 40, 50 mile coverage radius from that,

which we're super, super excited about.

So would these be

in the back of patrol cars all over the city? 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 X-10 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.

And it's not feasible to put docks everywhere along that for with the X10, 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 R10, the X10, and then the F10, which is coming next year to cover long-range, high-speed, fully robotic launch LAN system. Dude, awesome, awesome innovations.
Thank you. Congratulations.

Thank you. Super cool.
It's a huge team effort. Hundreds of people at Scadio working to make this stuff come to life.
Very cool. Thank you.
Thank you.

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All right, Adam, we're back from the break, and uh, that was an awesome break, by the way. But uh, so we flew the X10, the

F10. Yep, and so when

you say F10's a prototype,

how long do you expect for that to take before it's mainstream? So we've 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 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 we're just on the same team with them trying to solve these problems, which is super fun. 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 F10 replace the X-10? No, definitely not. I think that the quadcopters 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 X10 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 go all the way from 400 feet down to like negative two feet if needed.

And that's the kind of thing you can only really do with a quadcopter.

So I expect the X10 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 the F-10. How fast did you say the F-10 will move?

100 miles an hour. 100 miles an hour? That's an FA 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.
Gotcha.

And the other, the X-10 is 45 miles an hour. Up to 45 miles an hour.
Yeah.

Man,

man.

So

where do you see the F10 being deployed?

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 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

end the thing. So that's a major motivation.
And then large area coverage. Like in urban and suburban areas, the X10 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 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 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 flying helicopters, which cost a couple thousand bucks an hour and are also quite dangerous.

You can, you should be able to do all of that

with F10s. Wow.
You know,

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 had had the X10, you had had me targeted out there, that little green. I wouldn't say targeted.
I would say, you know, followed. 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 yeah i know

on the thing and so kind of what i'm asking is is

let's say i bought one of these for this property somebody came on the property left yeah would it follow them would that be would that be a human decision for them to follow them or so does the does the

does the brain tell it to do

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

you basically give the set, you give the drone like rules of engagement kind of.

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 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

workflow for the security patrol kind of stuff. And all of that is very easy to build on software.
I mean, 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. The hard part is like making the drone reliable and autonomous and having the AI to detect the stuff.

It's relatively easy once you have that to compose it into different kinds of capabilities for different mission sets.

Man, I just, you know,

I just can't see,

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

businesses, venues, events,

stores, parks,

neighborhoods. I mean, you know, and I know that there is a, you know, I know that

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.
I mean,

how is that a privacy concern? A stadium. How is that a privacy concern? A mall, a park.
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 in recorded video.
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 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 that is using these for uh major events and and venue overwatch and security and they're having incredible success i mean they have when you get these big events where you have-fucking schools?

Yeah. I mean, school, school, it's active shooter every other week in this country.
Yeah. I mean, the school could just deploy one or two of these things to rove the campus.

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 there kind of, some of this stuff is getting to 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 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.

I feel like even farmers could use this. I mean, I'm

in serious. Yeah, yeah.
We have a, we have,

uh, we have some investors that own, uh, own a lot of property and have ranches and whatnot. And, and they're, they're on the leading edge of using these to like count cattle and things like that.

Um, 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.
Man, can I

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

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 the 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 um installation maintenance support like everything it takes to just give you sort of a complete solution that that's up and running um the this drone by itself without the dock is is more affordable uh but you know it's because the dock is a more expensive thing for us to build and also it it delivers quite a bit more value the r10 um is is our least expensive product right now.

And for the hardware, it starts at $6,000. So it's $6,000 for the drone and the controller to fly it.

And then

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

Yeah, you can fly it around in any indoor environment. And we'll keep adding 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

consumers understandably are very price sensitive. You know, they're looking for things that cost like 500 bucks or a thousand 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.

And eventually, I think it will come down to like residential security.

We just need to keep making the tech better and better and making it more and more affordable so it's more accessible to more people.

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

And as I said, I mean, the demand is a lot of people spend that on home security systems. 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 do things you couldn't do any other way.

When you guys are making recommendations 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 your suggestion, I mean, how fast does it recharge when it comes to 40-minute runtime?

Up to 40-minute flight time. Typical flight time is more like half an hour.
And then

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 retrofit into all of our existing docks and all the new ones we'll 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 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 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 doc drone can respond to roughly 2,000 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 U.S.
population, you know, whatever, 330 million, there's roughly 300 million 911 calls in the U.S. 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 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 docks.

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 rigid on these things.

You want to be very adaptable to like the particulars of a location, a geography, and the needs there. How long do they, how long do they last?

The docks are designed for a heavy, heavy life five-year lifespan, heavy, heavy use five-year lifespan. Okay.
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 dock should last five years.

Right on. So,

okay.

Wow.

That's pretty fucking good. Yeah.
Nice, nice. Well, let's, I know you,

so let's move on just drones in general.

I mean, you are the drone guy. So, you know, I know you guys went over to Ukraine.
Yeah. What is, what does drone warfare look like today? Where's it going? Yeah.
What did you guys learn over there?

Um, I mean,

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

the

so even before Ukraine, like the U.S. Army I mentioned is our biggest customer and was actually our first kind of non-consumer big customer.

So we, we kind of went from being a pure consumer company to like consumer plus the U.S. 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 U.S.

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 it's still incredibly impressive to see. And

look,

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 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 are basically consumer quadcopters.
And unfortunately, most of them are still coming from China.

But it's just 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 cracking them.

And there's a constant fear that flying a Chinese drone is going to give away your location and the Russians 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. That's a program of record.
It was a big competition.

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. And so

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 to 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 U.S. Army spec not helpful, in many cases, they were like unhelpful.
It like actively made the system worse.

Like we integrated a radio that

operated basically on one very narrow set of frequencies. 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 a super painful, I mean, one, it sucked.

for that the drones didn't work and it was a painful moment for us as a company to just be facing facing this situation where, you know, we were selling drones to the military, the U.S.

military, which was 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 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,

and got to a place where the systems perform extremely well in the harshest conditions

and

electronic warfare, GPS jamming, all the different things 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 the scale of drone use that

they're going after, but I think is pretty unique among Western companies in our class to have systems that are actually meeting the need on the battlefield and surviving electronic warfare.

Yeah, I mean,

so

are all of your drones surviving electronic warfare?

Are these the ones that you're sending over there? So they all have this capability?

There's some differences between the X10 and the X10D. In general, a lot of this stuff,

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-denied 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 urban settings.

And so there's a lot of things like that. I would say the biggest difference is the radio.
So we integrate a different radio for 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,

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?

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.

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.

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

So

you mean that it might be divergent from.

So one of the things, I mean, a lot has been said and written about 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, 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 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 stand 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.

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 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 a system in somebody's hands

that's not going to do what they need it to do.

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Let's move move into

the competition with China in drone warfare.

Who's ahead right now?

Well,

look, I think historically, China, especially at the lower end of the market in consumer drones, is dominant. And when we started in 2014,

a lot of people thought the prospect of trying to build a U.S. company at all to compete with Chinese companies was insane.

I think

if you think about what goes into a drone from a hardware standpoint, you can sort of think of it as like a mobile phone, like processors, cameras, radios combined with a radio-controlled helicopter.

At the most basic level, from a hardware standpoint, that's what you're talking about. And both of those devices, radio-controlled helicopters and

phones, consumer electronics have been built in China. And it's not an accident that that has happened.
I mean, it's the result of

very intentional policy actions on the part of the Chinese government to favor local manufacturing and build up their industrial base

and

do things that make it very difficult for other countries, not just the U.S., but other countries to compete based on some of the things that they do to kind of like favor their own companies and subsidize manufacturing and so on,

which

you can't necessarily fault them for. They've got their strategy and

they're going to do it.

I just think everybody in the West has to be aware that this is what's really going on. So they, from a hardware standpoint, 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 capital 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 U.S. 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 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 focus on that as a core differentiating technology and really the direction the market was going.

And I think that's how we've been able to survive and now thrive by building products that are differentiated.

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 from a U.S. company and they're willing to pay more for a U.S.
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.

Oh, kidding. Yeah.
DGI. Yeah.

We're going to ban DGI drones. It's a possibility.
Wow. 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, you know, they like blame the DGI ban on us, even though we, 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 DGI 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 what the right answer is, but I think it's the

national security stakes, I do think, are pretty objectively clear.

Like if you think about, I think it was Operation Spider Web, the Ukrainian operation where they snuck a bunch of drones into Russia and then used them to like to launch an attack. I mean,

like without sounding too kind of destroyed billions of dollars. Yeah, destroyed billions of dollars.
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 threat surface area is, in the worst case scenario, is really, really bad.

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 could that look like?

Look, I don't,

you know, I would put like, so you saw the dock, right? The dock drone. So that thing can be flown remotely and autonomously.

And it's a network connected device. So ultimately,

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.
DGI has a dock.

And

I would sort of pose the question of, 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?

The Chinese government, 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 ⁇ D spending in the U.S. was directly funded by the federal government in the 60s.
And, you know, all the the cutting edge stuff of like

nuclear missiles and submarines and fighter jets. 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 ⁇ 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 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.

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 Andrew 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 an energy utility is very, very similar to like what a soldier needs on the battlefield. And so as a country,

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. 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, police agency buying a Chinese drone, but you are basically funding, funding

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.

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 pull the rug.

They tried to pull the rug on you, didn't they? They did, yeah. So I have

AGI specifically.

Well, the the chinese government the chinese government yeah so we um last year we had the great honor of uh i think and i think we were really like the first u.s drone company to be sanctioned by the chinese government congratulations thank you and i was named personally so now i've been personally sanctioned by uh iran and the chinese government nice um so i i i haven't gotten russia yet but um yeah and they so their stated reason for for sanctioning skydio

was uh 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

I think the stated reason is likely not the real reason. 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 U.S.
government is starting to restrict DGI. And so I think it was kind of a retaliatory move against that.

And it's been extremely aggressive. I mean, they have, so 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 U.S.

You know, we had a preference away 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

any component vendor we had in China. Literally, government officials showed up 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.

So if we work as a supplier, even if that supplier

isn't directly using any Chinese material in our component, the Chinese government will try to use it as leverage against them to,

if they have, if that supplier has any other dependents 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 gonna 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

DGI 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. And the more it gets challenged, the more that they try to fight back.

We actually, so

I haven't

told this story broadly, but we have some interesting history here. So when we started the company in 2014

and

shortly after we started, we were approached by DGI 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 went and visited them

and

we basically felt like

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 opportun 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 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.

How's that feel?

Well, it feels awesome to that.

You know, it feels awesome to be where we are. I think

one of the things,

look, I'm super proud to be doing what we're doing in the U.S. 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 make this stuff as awesome as it can be and have it be the best in the world.

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

Yeah, we get asked this question a lot now.

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 used it myself. I loved it.
Consumers did all kinds of amazing things with it.

But I just think that

the work that we do and the mission that we have 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 talking about like 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 one percent of the way there today

uh and so i think that's

that's that 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

um you know if dgi really does get banned uh we can enable somebody to build a great consumer drone maybe with some of our technology or something um because i do think there's a need there and how fast can you make these things things?

I mean,

I want one.

I'm not fucking around. I'm being serious.
So this.

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

I mean, how fast can you pump out these X10s? Okay. Because when I was asking, you know, I think I had asked

what's the biggest hurdle, and I believe he said manufacturing. So we're at about a thousand 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 RAM cycle there.

So the dock is like hundreds a month, but 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 really got the flywheel spinning now.

For any sort of flavor of quadcopter, we can do really awesome stuff really quickly. And with this thing,

the demand for this has been through the roof since we announced it.

Luckily, we decided to kind of overinvest in automation for the factory line, mainly just because we knew we needed to get better at it and we wanted 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, it's 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 for the level of complexity.

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

who is the main customer for the indoor drum? 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 energy generation stuff, like a lot of power plant kind of inspections. Gotcha.
So and 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 i'm being serious it's just a it's a moving active

deterrent yeah um everybody knows you're on camera and malls and casinos and stadiums and all this shit all the time but that i think eventually active like yeah we're fucking following you if you do anything i think eventually we'll get there One of the things with this, just a very practical consideration,

it's pretty noisy because

one of the key sort of considerations in designing a drone is what's called the disk loading, which is basically if you, you know, so this thing's got four rotors.

And if you look at the area swept out by all of these rotors, that's the disk area. And then if you divide that by the weight of the drone, that's called the disk loading.

And so the higher the disk 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 disk loading.

Over Over time, we'll, you know, we'll figure out ways to make it lighter and lower the disk 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.
Wow. But that's like that's going inventory too now.

Well,

I'd say we've

dabbled in it.

I think with R10,

we've got a product that's decently well suited to it. I think at really large scale, you'd need something that would be super quiet so it could operate around people.

But this is what I say. I mean, I think this is why.
we're focused.

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

yeah, we've got a lot of work left to do to realize the full opportunity. Man, how big is your team?

The company now is getting close to 1,000 people, including, you know, that's everybody. That's people that build them, design them, sell them, support them,

which is people hear that and they think it's either big or small.

For the complexity of what we do, it's an incredibly small team. And

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.

It's like you could have the grandest strategy in the world, but if you don't have amazing people, you're not going to make it work.

And you can have a shit strategy and have amazing people, and they'll figure out that the strategy is shit. They'll fix it and then they'll make it work.

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: we've just got an incredible team.

We've got engineers and engineering leaders 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.

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.

And so, because of that, we're able to just move faster and faster on everything that we're doing. Man,

you have put something really special together. I appreciate it.
It's impressive.

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

moving.

Yeah. It's 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 into 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.

How are people finding you? How are law enforcement agencies? And is this word of mouth? 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 have a big annual event that we host ourselves. We love having our customers out.

And that's where we unveiled all the new products a few months ago.

So we do all that kind of stuff. And then

in the new industries, it'll oftentimes start with a real innovator at the customer. You know, there will 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 with them to figure out what do we need to do to make this thing like really scale and work work for your application.

And so we've got core industries that we've hired deep industry experts into, like law enforcement and military. We've got a bunch of former operators on our team, energy utilities.

We've got a bunch of folks that have worked in the energy 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 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 we'll lean in behind it and we'll do the sales and marketing activities to go and get to every oil and gas company or every college campus and so on. Man, you got a lot of work to do.
I agree.

It's got a lot of work to do.

It's all consuming, but

it's a fun set of stuff to work on. How do you lead your team?

Well, there's different dimensions to it. I think

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.

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 better know the answer for everything we're doing in every situation.

And one of the

ways that I feel like I developed as a leader is just the more I do it, honestly, the more I I feel like I get humbled 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 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 kind of see myself as just trying to be a conduit for the best information. You know, there's, there's always, 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 a thousand people.

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 fortunate enough, and I think we're fortunate enough as a company now now to have an incredibly strong leadership team. And I've actually become 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 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 to make it come to life um and so it's a you know it's a it's it's really an incredible thing to get to be a part of to have this great organization that that builds these things with the expertise that that we have 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

man i am like blown i'm blown i am blown away at like what you guys are doing and um

and uh i mean it's just

very cool very very cool i appreciate that and it's it is a huge team effort and i think that that's

it's it's true of every company and i think oftentimes too much

gets ascribed to like the founder or the ceo um

But it's, you know, all this stuff is possible because we just have an amazing group of folks.

I mean,

you can go anywhere you want. I mean, there's so many people that are interested in this.

I mean, 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 think you could scale this company fast enough to

cover all this stuff. I don't even know how you're picking which direction to go in.
It's a hard problem. That's me.
You're talking oil and gas,

defense tech,

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

problems.

They're big problems. They're big industries.

And

I think we are at kind of

a transition moment in civilization. Like, I think robotics is going to be

really the most important industry. ever, you know, having, having robots that can do useful work in the physical world, I think, is going to be the biggest industry industry ever.

And flying robots 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. And you're at the cutting edge on it.
Yeah.

Fucking awesome, man. Yeah.

Congratulations. It's sweet.

Yeah. Well, Adam, I wish you the best of luck.
I hope to see you again in seriously, man, congratulations. I love what you did.
All right. Thank you, Sean.
This is great.

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