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
00:33:41 · Ty Morse
[00:33:41] S0: think of manufacturing, and just coming up to speed and knowing what you shop for and what you shouldn't, what have been the biggest things that you didn't expect and just absolutely smacked you
00:33:50 · Adam Bry
[00:33:50] S1: in the face? A lot of manufacturing, and actually a lot of product development, comes down to trying to reduce entropy. Like, the natural state of the world is the atoms are all going in their own little direction, Brownian motion takes over. And so, trying to squeeze down to the exact right configuration of like bits and atoms that will deliver the capability you want, repeatedly over and over, is extremely difficult. The most challenging, when things are in our own factory, we act... We can solve any problem. We've got great teams, and it may not always be pretty, but like we can roll up our sleeves, we can deploy a lot of like brainpower and manpower to come in here and basically do anything that we need to do. The really tricky ones are the things that happen outside of our direct control, that happen upstream in the supply chain where supplier out of the goodness of their heart, just decides to like slightly change one of their processes or slightly change one of their materials in a way that to them seems innocuous, but couples to something either that happens in our factory or in the worst case, couples to something that happens like downstream with with customers. And so I would say those are the ones that are the trickiest to solve where you haven't changed anything about your process, but something about the product is behaving differently from you expect. And the answer to it, the only answer really is you've just gotta go deeper and deeper in your supply chain and get more and more detailed in the level of analysis and control that you exert over all the components that are going into your drone, which is kind of, there's no shortcuts to that, like it just takes a lot of like, thought and ultimately like, manpower upstream.