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?
00:29:13 · Adam Bry
[00:29:13] S1: I basically think about two, I'll maybe say three things. The Foundation for Everything, I have a very talent centric view of business, Foundation for Everything is having an incredible team, and every good thing we've ever done at Skydio traces directly back to awesome people. Like, when I look at these products, I mean, I can just... Looking at these parts, the components, the capabilities, what's happening in this factory, all of it is downstream from people who I know who are exceptional at what they do. So, that's a constant, and I'm always spending a lot of time on that, of, you know, what are the needs on the team today? Do we have the right people for what we're going after? Ultimately, I think the way that you, like, you become the place that the best people in the world wanna work is good by having an exciting, awesome business building interesting products. So, I spend a lot of time focused on that. The other thing is is just operational excellence across the business. Like, we are we running the right motions? You know, I think about sort of like the targets that we're going after, do we have the teams in place to go after them, do we have the right operating rhythms? So I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and then the most fun, where I also spend a lot of time, is on the frontiers, like where are we doing something new, where we don't yet have... We don't know, really know what we're doing, either it's a new technology, new product, a new market, and how should we think about going after that and setting ourselves up for success, and the frontiers are always changing. I mean, could be a new product thing, it could be a new market thing. I love spending time out there with customers, I travel an outrageous amount really to like go and meet with people and see how they're using our products and seeing what's working and seeing what's not, because there's just, it's just, every time you visit you're gonna learn something new that feeds back into what we're doing. But the specific mix of those things can change a lot, like, you know, the kinds of customers I'm visiting changes a lot over time depending on what's happening in the business and where sort of the frontiers and the most ambiguity is.
00:31:02 · Ty Morse
[00:31:02] S0: If you're gonna make like a thousand of these drones, you may be happy to have a less refined design process, because you don't want to set up, you know, if you're making a million cyber trucks, maybe you have like one stamping breast that costs a fuck ton of money, and you install that. But if you're doing a thousand drones, you might be willing to have, you know, this piece, you know, this part could be one part, but you're gonna make it two parts because it's just more efficient to do that on a thousand pieces. When you think about designing a product that can scale, what is the process of going from, this is the first iteration and what is it like shippable, but then here's how we're going to basically like systematically eliminate complexity, so that it's just simpler and simpler.
00:31:42 · Adam Bry
[00:31:42] S1: This is why I think it's really important to... Context is so important and I force myself to do this, I encourage everybody at the company to really think specifically about what problem we're trying to solve here. So, for example, R10 that you're holding there was a brand new product for us, brand new product line. We'd never had like a specific optimized indoor drone for public safety and for confined space inspection. We also know just based on the dynamics in that market today, like, you know, we're not going to be building like 10,000 of these things a month, like that market is just not that place. Think eventually it'll probably get there because we don't have any history here, like we're also not gonna wanna come out of the gate by shipping too many and getting ahead of our skis in terms of like the actual maturity and delivering the results that our customers expect. So the set of trade offs that we make when we're developing R10 is very different from what we do when we're developing like the successor to X10. Like the successor to X10, our current flagship drone needs to come out of the gate with better reliability than this thing, which is already like a hard and mature platform. It needs to come out of the gate with more manufacturability at higher scale than this thing, and so the development process that we run for the successor to X10 is necessarily like way more rigorous in manufacturing and reliability than what we do for like a new program that's targeting lower volumes, and this is kind of an Elon ism, but I think that there's just no substitute. The only way to learn like the really hard lessons in manufacturing and reliability is to have done it with prior products, like there's just no shortcut on that stuff. So, when we're developing, you know, the successor here, we're just deep in the data of what's happening on our manufacturing line, what quality issues have there been in the field, what have we learned from that, how can we shortcut all those things in the design process, You know, what's... Where are we spending the most money in our supply chain in the factory that can be optimized out? And I'm very excited about what we'll be able to do here, but it's a very different process from a brand new product that's gonna start at lower volumes. When you