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.
00:20:09 · Ty Morse
[00:20:09] S0: I haven't heard very many people talk about profitability, and profitability of a specific product, And one of the things that I saw was you guys kind of measuring, you know, here's how long the development process was on a new product, you know, we've had it for like eight months or something at this point, and here's where we are on, I think it was like a couple tens of millions or something in revenue, and like, now we've basically broke even on the development costs plus, you know, the the product costs themselves. So, like, when you think of building a new product, how are you kind of deciding how much are we going to invest, and then what is our payback period on that?
00:20:45 · Adam Bry
[00:20:45] S1: Well, I mean, touched on a lot of pieces of it. I think we're we're getting more and more sophisticated and just kind of measuring what we're doing in a granular way. And again, you don't wanna like... This is kind of a cliche, like Boeing has come under a lot of fire on this, of like the, you know, the accountant started running the company and they stopped caring about making great products. Like everything we do is really oriented towards great... Building great products, but the efficiency with which we can build this stuff matters a huge amount. And again, I think this is not broadly understood, eventually it will be, but we really have, I think, one of the best robotics businesses in the world. We're at hundreds of millions of revenue, we're growing extremely quickly, we have very strong unit economics, and I think we've, I think I know, we've gotten here by being really like, one, having super capable lean team, so with a very small number of people we can do incredible things, and also being very thoughtful about the kind of investments that we're making. And so, you know, in my mind I kind of have a map of, you know, how much are we spending in different areas, what's my kind of expected payback time scale for these things, and sometimes it's short, sometimes it's very long, you know, we'll work on things that we think might be five year plus payback, but it's certainly satisfying to like, to be able to add up, here's all, you know, here's everything we spent developing our 10, here's how many of them we sold so far, and in a pretty short period of time, this is already like a profitable program for us.
00:22:10 · Ty Morse, Adam Bry
[00:22:10] S0: You mentioned that basically building the dock that allows drones to autonomously, you know, fly up, go do a mission, and then come back and like charge was a major unlock. When you were working on that or starting the development of that, how were you thinking about it? [00:22:25] S1: Yeah, it's a great question, and I say this was one of those more, this was just kind of one of those existential gut bets for the company, where there was no, so when we started really investing heavily in docs in like 2021, there was no market for doc products, there were no customers that were saying, you know, like, we want to buy these things at scale, there were no budgets set aside for this, and we were burning a shitload of money to develop it, and it was, you know, we were arguing about it of like, the only thing we're making money on now is selling standalone drones, we're wildly, at the time, wildly unprofitable as a company, you know, sentiment towards drones and the kinds of things we've done has gone up and down, and so at low moments there where you're like burning a ton of money, investors aren't really excited about it. [00:23:16] S0: And there's no customers.