Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:05:14 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders Forslund
[00:05:14] S0: When Anders got to YC, there was no playbook for this. [00:05:17] S1: With YC, we were all focused on getting some early interest from airlines. We got some LOIs from SAS and Braun and Lidra and the three Nordic airlines. We really had no technology. Like, I came to YC Demo Day with a little three d printed model. So we we went from having the LOIs to them building, like, the 400 kilowatt motor, which was, the size of a small jet engine. That, in turn, attracted actual, you know, preorders, and then they came from United. And then that attracted more capital, and then we started building, and now we're building towards the plane. [00:05:50] S0: If you're a founder listening to this, the learning that you should have is every time you need more capital, it needs to be something material Yeah. Ideally, something physical you can touch Yeah. That you can show that you made. Their first big airline customer actually came out of the spam folder. [00:06:06] S1: United Airlines came through an inbound email through our info email. Clara was looking at it, she was like, I think this might be a thing. Like, he was, like, cleaning out the spam, and that led us, like, through the front door. We just brought them over, showed showed them the electric motor we built that was the size of the jet engines we tried to replace, and they kind of immediately got it. [00:06:26] S0: And the design itself? Most electric aircraft startups try to look futuristic. Heart did the opposite on purpose.
00:06:26 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders Forslund, S2
[00:06:26] S0: And the design itself? Most electric aircraft startups try to look futuristic. Heart did the opposite on purpose. [00:06:33] S1: It looks very much like the turboprops we're trying to replace. We're not trying to build a sports car. I'd rather build something that looks very conventional, but is kind of hiding its Superman cape under the hood. This is the first one. [00:06:45] S0: Yes. [00:06:45] S1: We never even tested this one because we just realized that it wouldn't hold. And the new one just goes all the way through to the bottom here and like this big thing. So it's like really [00:06:54] S0: sturdy. This is the pilot plant. Most of this plane is designed and built right here. [00:07:00] S2: This is a cylinder body for the actuator 6,061 aerospace aluminum. There's about 15 machine components in the actuator that we're working on developing in house processes for. [00:07:13] S0: In traditional aerospace, this would be a supplier. [00:07:16] S1: And you'd source it, and you'd them a year to get one. And now you can just play around with it and test it. This is the same basic architecture for aileron, rudder, landing gear extension, braking, even in the pitch of the propellers. If you want to build something in house, you should start with the things that you don't have to go to one supplier, you go to like eight different, like so. Then it just scales with the number of technologies rather than the number of suppliers. [00:07:44] S0: The whole plant is wired like one giant test bench.
00:07:44 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders Forslund, S3
[00:07:44] S0: The whole plant is wired like one giant test bench. [00:07:48] S1: You can deconstruct it like a Picasso painting. And here's the cockpit, here's the cabin, here's the tail. And all of this is being fed, you know, 1.6 megawatts of power. You could keep the aircraft in the air from just everything that's happening here. We're gonna be testing fault injection. So everything from, like, putting in programming error to cutting a wire, everything's gotta work, even if everything goes wrong. It looks like the first time you get into Model three and you're like, oh, it's [00:08:19] S0: just one screen. Yeah. [00:08:20] S1: I think that's a lot of the idea here. As the guy designing this, he worked on the Dragon capsule. You can fit up to 36 passengers. [00:08:28] S0: Yep. But most common probably gonna be 30 passengers, which means everybody's gonna get, like, six inches of extra leg room. And the heart of the operation is the battery lab, where the team is choosing the cell for the next aircraft. [00:08:41] S3: This is the battery cell lab where we are trying to determine what our cell is going to be. We have lots of different cells which are on display here from Chinese, American, and Korean manufacturers. We can determine which one's gonna have, you know, the most flight cycles, the best safety, cost, and energy density. [00:09:01] S1: We talked about Elon coming to MIT twelve years ago and talking about, like, 400 watt hour per kilogram batteries. Do we have any cells that are, [00:09:09] S0: like, 400 watt hour per kilogram?
00:09:09 · Gustaf Alstromer, S3, Anders Forslund
[00:09:09] S0: like, 400 watt hour per kilogram? [00:09:10] S3: The highest thing that we have on this table right now is about 370. One of the manufacturers is producing something at that 400 level, that we're expecting to have within the next couple months. Easily meets our targets for the first generation of the aircraft. [00:09:24] S1: So you got the countdown timer there. Twenty three days. Inspired by YC demo day. [00:09:30] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Chrome extension. The hardest problem had nothing to do with the motor or the battery. [00:09:35] S1: It's probably the biggest challenge we've had in the company. One in every thousand flights in The US gets diverted to another airport. You kinda need forty five minutes of loiter, and then you need to go to something that could be like a 100 miles away. [00:09:49] S0: Yeah. [00:09:50] S1: So if you build a battery electric aircraft, you kinda have to carry two thirds of your battery needs to be for reserves. [00:09:56] S0: Unlike jet fuel's batteries don't get lighter. Their answer is a hybrid engine. [00:10:01] S1: We're basing it on on a very simple turboprop engine. It's one of the most inexpensive ones. We don't have to use it for most flights, but it's still adding about, I guess, 20% of the upfront cost of the aircraft. And I think it's worth it. You can fly up to to 125 miles all electrically, and then you fly up to 500 miles with a hybrid system operational range. [00:10:23] S0: That call comes out of the philosophy that Anders borrowed from SpaceX about how you should treat risk.
00:10:23 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders Forslund
[00:10:23] S0: That call comes out of the philosophy that Anders borrowed from SpaceX about how you should treat risk. [00:10:29] S1: Traditional aerospace is like, well, impact is always catastrophic, so let's minimize the probability. We don't know anything until we know everything. Whereas if you look at, hey, how do we minimize impact to getting it wrong? Then you can select a process that's a lot cheaper, that's a lot easier to iterate on. Planes don't crash these days because of a broken wing. They crash because of broken logic. We want to build a software defined vehicle, so the computer own wings. [00:10:54] S0: Anders has heard all the doubts. For example, why not just build flying taxis first? [00:10:59] S1: It's super cool. Like, they're really trying to build a flying car. We're attacking not the helicopter market, but the mainline, you know, like, airplane market. While these these companies have, like, three or four passengers, we have, you know, 36. We're also operating from an infrastructure that is already there. You know, there's 5,000 airports in [00:11:20] S0: The US. Another common question he gets is why not use hydrogen? [00:11:23] S1: And the same with hydrogen. The great thing about using hybrid electric is that it's a... It's already now at a at a at a significant, like, negative green premium. So you're surfing on a much bigger wave. The planes we're trying to replace, they're 40 years old. It becomes an appreciating asset. The plane will actually be better in ten years than when you buy it. It becomes like buying a house.
00:11:23 · Anders Forslund, Gustaf Alstromer
[00:11:23] S1: And the same with hydrogen. The great thing about using hybrid electric is that it's a... It's already now at a at a at a significant, like, negative green premium. So you're surfing on a much bigger wave. The planes we're trying to replace, they're 40 years old. It becomes an appreciating asset. The plane will actually be better in ten years than when you buy it. It becomes like buying a house. [00:11:43] S0: 36 seats is only the beginning. [00:11:45] S1: We love to build bigger planes. The large market is the narrow bodies. The seven thirty seven is the A320. There's ridiculous backlogs. Somebody doing what SpaceX did with rockets on airplanes just makes sense. [00:11:59] S0: Longer term, the plane is built for a world with fewer pilots in the cockpit. [00:12:04] S1: A remote pilot that is supporting many aircraft, kind of like there's remote operators of the way most. Then we're gonna see autonomy happening in cargo where there's, you know, lower stakes and then, you know, eventually making its way into, to aircraft. Obviously, a lot less noise. There's a lot less vibration as well. There's gonna be more flights. There's gonna be cheaper ticket. So you're gonna be able to go [00:12:31] S0: to your neighborhood airport and take a plane in the way you actually could in the past. It's also why Heart is building it here in LA, the new center of gravity for this kind of company.