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.
00:23:16 · Ty Morse, Adam Bry
[00:23:16] S0: And there's no customers. [00:23:16] S1: There's no customers, there's no market. It's like, what the fuck are we doing? You know? And that was one where we just had like, we had very deep conviction that like this was the way the market was gonna go. And you know, I could have drawn up a spreadsheet that show, you know, if I had drawn up a spreadsheet in 2022 that is showing what's now happening with the business, I think people just wouldn't have believed it, you know, it'd be like, sure, if that comes true, it's gonna make sense, but like, it won't. There's like no data to suggest that's how the world's gonna work. And look, I think sometimes that's the stuff that like great products and great companies are born out of, is like, making bets like that and being right about them, and then putting yourself in a position to like, really capture a new frontier. [00:23:58] S0: And like government sales, you make the thing, you get the contract, and then like some political change makes it so you literally can't deploy the thing. How do you think about making these contracts when you're in that sort of environment?
00:24:10 · Adam Bry
[00:24:10] S1: We sell to a variety of customers, we have a very big, what we call commercial business, which is selling to private enterprise, so this is selling to energy utilities, construction companies, and so on. We also sell to a lot of government customers, we sell to government customers at the federal level, the military, and then state and local level for public safety, departments of transportation. My overall outlook on this is like, when we are selling to government customers, our products are being bought with taxpayer dollars and it is healthy and right that like we are going to be subject to political processes. You know, these things are messy and noisy and imperfect but over time it's basically like people expressing what they care about, what they value, and electing political leaders that reflect that, and then political leaders making decisions on their behalf, and those things have real consequences for us. You know, we don't necessarily always agree with it, but I think it's like it's healthy and good, and one of the things that I've really come to appreciate with our state and local government business is just the, like, the degree of community engagement and feedback and accountability that comes with it. Like, when we sell to a law enforcement agency, our ultimate customer there is the community that's being served. We're obviously working with the agency and contracting with the agency, but both us and the agency have pretty strong alignment that like, we're only gonna do this if it makes sense for the community, and the vast majority of the time that works out well for us because our products, I think at this point, are pretty well proven to like, in this instance, really improve public safety, like, get fundamentally better outcomes, keep officers safer, keep communities safer, and do so in a way that protects people's privacy and in a very transparent way that the community can understand what's going on. And so, I think overall that's been very good for us. Sometimes elected officials or leaders have less emphasis on public safety or don't like the idea of deploying a particular kind of technology for public safety, and that's fine too. Like, we may not agree with it, but I think it's, it puts the right kind of pressure on us to make sure that we're, we're doing right by the communities that we serve.
00:26:10 · Ty Morse
[00:26:10] S0: I assume that you have thought a lot about the privacy situation, and the way that you guys are operating, you'll have, you know, if there's some incident and a police area, like someone calls 911, and they say, hey, there's a situation, You'll have a drone just take off that was static, fly out to that thing, take a video of it, and then kind of return back. Is there any products that you decided not to make because they were going to be too invasive or not really fit that mission set?
00:26:40 · Adam Bry
[00:26:40] S1: Well, we... Look, we are like, we're drone people, right? Like, I've, you know, I've been doing drone stuff my whole life. The company is really based on building world leading flying robots. So, you know, we're not... Any anything that's not like a flying robot or using that as the foundation, like we do a lot of software and workflow stuff on top, is probably not a good fit for us. Like the the first filter for us in like in building a product is do we think that we can do it uniquely better than anybody else out there in the world? Because I think those are the most exciting things to work on, and those are the ways that we feel like we can add the most value to civilization, which is ultimately what this is all about. The nature of flying robots in public safety is much more kind of like narrow targeted response than it is kind of like blanket always on surveillance. So, the domain of flying robots, you know, we want to do everything we can with our products to make it easy for agencies to be transparent with their communities and what they're doing, to make sure that they're flying in a way that protects privacy and civil liberties. We do a bunch of product work on this, we also do a bunch of policy work, like we have model policies that we work with agencies on that we kind of can give them a framework for, you know, if you're gonna roll out a drone program, here's like some policies that we think is like healthy for you to operate by. Ultimately, they make the final decision, but we have a lot of influence and impact in that process. And look, like I don't want to live in a like sort of blanket surveillance world where we each of us has a drone that's like spying on us 20 fourseven, like I don't want to live in that world, I don't want to help build that world, but I've just seen, you know, every day now, like the impact that these products can have, and so the, you know, the mandate for us, and I think the agencies that we work with, is continuing to develop and deploy the technology in a way that that is is just overwhelmingly positive for for civilization and and ultimately, that's not judged by us. It's judged by voters and and citizens, which I think is the exactly the right kind of like feedback and accountability mechanism.
00:28:48 · Ty Morse
[00:28:48] S0: I love this story from, I think, the 2018 Model three production ramp where Elon was basically in the Fremont factory all day, every day, and he would just walk to the red, wherever the biggest bottleneck was for production line, he would just walk over there and basically stay there until it was unfucked. For you, when you're trying to think about what is the highest leverage activity that you could possibly be doing at any given moment, like how do you decide where to spend your time and what to focus on?