00:11:02 · Ty Morse, Adam Bry
[00:11:02] S0: to close the gap. Were you flying around and meeting with a bunch of suppliers? [00:11:06] S1: Yeah, I mean, were scouring the earth, yeah, well, scouring the free world, you know, The US and our allies around the world to find all the ingredients that it takes to build a battery that performs at the level that we need for these systems, and look, we came out of it the other side with better performance, which was surprising even to me, like we picked up a couple minutes in flight time going with a different cell and a different pack. [00:11:33] S0: There's this interesting idea of like trade offs, and one of the things that we talked about yesterday was there's a number of companies, I think DJI included, that are trying to do battery swapping docks, and so a drone will just land, have its battery swapped out, and immediately start flying again. But you basically said if you surveyed your customers or their use cases, it's very, very small, Or you'd increase flight time or something by 5% with a battery swapping doc. So how do you think about making product trade offs just informed by actual customer experience versus what sounds like a good idea, but may not in fact be actually useful?
00:12:08 · Adam Bry
[00:12:08] S1: So, we're increasingly in a position now of having really deep insight into how our products are being used, what adds the most value for our customers, and so product development is always a blend of a lot of different inputs. Like, you never want to only look at the data of what people are doing today because you're gonna miss the possibilities of what might exist, but you know when we're developing drones today, we're steeped in the data of existing usage and you know flight patterns, flight speeds, different mission profiles that people are flying, time between flights, all these things, and that informs the investments that we're going to make. So, something like battery swapping, you know, if it's free and it's perfectly reliable, add some value, but it's not free and because it's a more complex mechanism, it's also gonna cost you something in reliability and so it's a question of like what are the trade offs against other things that you could put your time and resources into and what's best for the customer. You know, one example of, you know, incredible series of inventions that's resulting in an incredible product that wouldn't fall directly out of the data is F10, which is a fixed wing drone that's robotically launched and caught, so basically lives in a drone vending machine, there's a robot arm that picks it up, releases it into the air, that thing has two hours of endurance, it's got a 100 miles an hour top speed, which is just a total paradigm shift in what you can do with autonomous dock drones in terms of the area that you can cover. So, this is like first response for sheriff's office that cover thousands of square miles, like somebody calls 911 in a rural area, it might literally take sheriffs an hour to get there on the ground, and this thing can be there in ten minutes providing real time situational awareness, you know, be like a lost hiker, potential fire starting, things like that. So that's a product that came out of a lot of conversations with customers and also our conviction in some core technology blocks that we could apply to bring these things together.
00:14:00 · Adam Bry, Ty Morse
So, it's always a mix of different sources, it's never just one thing that's gonna drive the development of a product, like, it's blending a lot of different inputs and then brokering the right set of like optimizations and trade offs to solve the things that matter most for the people that we're serving. [00:14:16] S0: When I was looking at the fix tween yesterday, Rob told me that basically you guys started the design process by just looking at the camera and what you wanted the camera to do, and then you designed the rest of the vehicle around that. [00:14:28] S1: Mhmm. [00:14:29] S0: How do you actually go through the design process on a new product like that?
00:14:33 · Adam Bry
[00:14:33] S1: So, this is the F 10 Light Runner drone, so the the really unique thing there is the the camera gimbal sits on the wing tip. So, you look at basically every fixed wing camera carrying drone that has ever existed for the history of the industry, payload is always in the center because that's where the mass is, that's where the drag is, and so from an aerodynamic standpoint, not putting in the center seems kind of crazy, but the problem with putting the camera in the center is that when the airplane is banked and turning and orbiting, once per revolution, that wing is going to block the field of view of the camera, and there's just no way around that, it's just like the most basic physics and visibility analysis out there, and that's a really terrible experience for the person that's operating the drone. Like, the ideal experience is you just have this magic camera floating in the sky that can look and see whatever it wants, And so, we think about the design of F10, that's basically what we're trying to deliver, is how can you deliver this experience of you basically just have this magic camera that goes wherever you want it to go, can look in any direction you want it to look, and delivering that with a fixed wing is incredibly challenging because you've got fixed wing dynamics, I mean the thing needs to keep flying forward in order to maintain lift, it needs to turn, it needs to maneuver, and so it's an integration of hardware and software like the motion planning algorithms, putting the wingtip out of the gimbal to accomplish it, and you know, said this is, that stuff's just like the most fun things in the world to me, we have incredible teams, like we're a full stack company, we control all the hardware, control all the software, we do all the manufacturing, so there's basically no rules except for physics for like what we can accomplish when we get, you know, like the world class engineering team sitting together and jointly optimizing. One of our core values as a company, and you say how do we think about product design? I say love the problem, get to the essence.
00:16:17 · Adam Bry, Ty Morse
We're very big believers in getting down to the essence of the problem, like, what's the fundamental thing that we're trying to deliver for customers, and what's like, what are the fundamental physics that govern what we can design and build, and then using that kind of like, that core understanding of the essence to build back up to the right solution. [00:16:35] S0: That was one of the things that you did, I think, quite a bit in the meetings yesterday. You'd be talking with someone and they'd be explaining something, and then you would just like stop them and ask them like, why, and keep on drilling down into the why until you either understood it or like pushed back, and said this like doesn't make sense for these reasons. How much do you want to genuinely understand on, you know, some level of new product versus just trusting great people to know what's best?
00:17:02 · Adam Bry
[00:17:02] S1: Like, what... The way that I think about companies... Like a good organization is kind of a maximization function. It's gonna get, like, whatever the maximum capabilities and skills and knowledge that exist with individuals inside an organization, you want the company to be the expression of the best of that. Like, we all have strengths and weaknesses, I've got strengths and weaknesses, everybody on our team has strengths and weaknesses, and so, the way that I think about the, you know, the company and what we're doing at a broad organizational level and in any individual conversation or meeting or project that we're working on is like, how can we get the absolute best out of what we have to offer as a team? You know, and some of the stuff that you saw yesterday, we were pretty deep in the architecture discussions around some like, some new technologies we're working on, and so I'm, you know, I'm always like pushing and prodding to like understand this stuff well myself, so like to build up my own understanding of what we're doing and how it all fits together, and then to also try to like, get the team thinking at, like, the deepest level possible about what we're solving, and, you know, some of the stuff you saw yesterday, we have world experts in robotics and applying deep learning to computer vision and the kinds of problems that we're working on, and so I think it's just fun to be in the room where we're like poking around the frontiers and understanding what's possible and what we think the best way to go after it is.