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.
00:18:22 · Ty Morse
[00:18:22] S0: How long does it typically take between spending time just talking through a problem, and like, okay, we're going in this line, and this is the direction?
00:18:31 · Adam Bry
[00:18:31] S1: I'm a big believer that business is very, very contextual, and so I think sometimes one of the things I push myself on, I push our leadership team on, really everybody at the company, like thinking, treat every problem as like its own little thing. Every program we're working on, every new feature, every product, And sometimes, you know, the cost of getting something wrong or just trying and seeing what happens is very low. And so, sometimes, you know, it's not worth that much debate. It's like, let's just try it and see if it works. And sometimes it's the opposite of that. Know if we're gonna chunk down like $50,000,000 on a new hardware program like we want to be pretty fucking thoughtful about like where we're aiming. So some of the things we were talking about yesterday are initiating new lines of really research Like, you know, we're on the frontiers of AI and autonomy for flying systems. And so, I sort of think about that as like an iterative aiming process of like, know that we don't know all the answers out front, and we're setting out to do experiments and try some things and see how it works, and so what I'm trying to do in that context is basically like iteratively aim what we're working on, of like, you know, take a step, see what we learned, use what we learned to like take another step, and one of the things I've like, I've gotten more deliberate about as the company's gotten bigger is investing a lot of time upfront and things like that, because I think the aiming exercise, like, know, if if a line of work has been going for eighteen months, and you don't like where it ends up, fixing it then is much more expensive than spending like a lot of time upfront, being really thoughtful about about what we're doing.