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.
00:35:30 · Ty Morse, Adam Bry
[00:35:30] S0: You know, were watching this video yesterday of, I think like a SWAT team breaking down someone's door, and then they launch a drone, and instead of someone walking into an apartment, they just have a drone fly around in the apartment and, like, not risk someone getting shot at. This is like a very chaotic environment. So has there been any really great examples of some situation where you did not plan for, like, you did not expect and things went horribly wrong? [00:35:56] S1: Well, So this was an example of R 10 flying in like an indoor tactical situation. Yeah, I mean, These... The R 10 gets the shit beaten out of it. I'm like, you know, we've had bad guys, like, grab it by the gimbal head and throw it out the window, and break its neck, so to speak. We've had people go after it with baseball bats, we've had drones get shot. To me, that's like all great news, right? Like, the alternative there is a police officer or a citizen is is getting the the, you know, the violence aimed at them. So, I actually love it when our drones are victims of violence, because it it means that the, like, chances of a person being a victim of violence are much lower, like that's kind of the whole point, like these things, we're building thousands a month here, know, who cares at the end of the day? And our terms and conditions with our customers actually take this into account, like, you know, if a drone gets injured or killed in the line of duty, we're happy to replace it.
00:35:56 · Adam Bry, Ty Morse
[00:35:56] S1: Well, So this was an example of R 10 flying in like an indoor tactical situation. Yeah, I mean, These... The R 10 gets the shit beaten out of it. I'm like, you know, we've had bad guys, like, grab it by the gimbal head and throw it out the window, and break its neck, so to speak. We've had people go after it with baseball bats, we've had drones get shot. To me, that's like all great news, right? Like, the alternative there is a police officer or a citizen is is getting the the, you know, the violence aimed at them. So, I actually love it when our drones are victims of violence, because it it means that the, like, chances of a person being a victim of violence are much lower, like that's kind of the whole point, like these things, we're building thousands a month here, know, who cares at the end of the day? And our terms and conditions with our customers actually take this into account, like, you know, if a drone gets injured or killed in the line of duty, we're happy to replace it. [00:36:48] S0: How often are you trying to refocus the entire team towards here's what the customer is actually experiencing? Totally, that's a huge huge part
00:36:56 · Adam Bry
[00:36:56] S1: of what we do, and it's actually interesting, so like when we started working with public safety, so we work with a lot of different kinds of customers, public safety is typically the most controversial, and we started working with public safety in the summer of twenty twenty, right after George Floyd, which was like maybe one of the most polarizing moments in the company's, in the country's history, right, in terms of attitude towards law enforcement, and just the thought of a Silicon Valley company selling technology to public safety was like total anathema. You know, we got all kinds of articles written about how could you guys do this and how evil it is, and I would say prevailing attitudes amongst tech people in Silicon Valley at the time were somewhere between mixed and negative, that this was like a worthwhile thing to be doing, and internally at Skydio it was polarizing. I think, you know, there's lot of reasonable concerns to be had. What has happened over time, and it's, it's like, I've seen it over and over again, it's pretty deterministic, like even people who are generally concerned or skeptical of public safety, the more that they're here and the more that they actually see what it means to work with public safety and the missions that those customers have and how they use our products, I would say people not go from being like sort of skeptical to okay with it, but skeptical to like- Champions of it. Champions of it, proud of it. And so, it's a very... And then, so that's part of it. Think the other... For me, and I think many of us at Skydio, it's hugely motivating to see how our products are being used. And then it also just, I think is key to developing good products. And so we do a lot to have as many people at Skydio as immersed in pot as possible in the reality that our customers are living. I mean, and in good and bad ways, like, you know, another example of this, are my weekly staff meeting, so all the senior leaders of the company, we get together once a week, once every two weeks, we start that meeting by looking at all of the product issues that we've had in customers' hands over the last two weeks, and it's very painful.
00:38:51 · Adam Bry, Ty Morse
We literally spend like half an hour looking through videos of things going wrong, and we do that to like, for a few reasons, one, to like immerse ourselves in the pain that our customers are feeling, and two, to make sure that we're like, we're doing the right things. We're not gonna solve everything in that meeting, but we can make sure that we're at least organized and have lines of work that are aimed solving all these things. So, think, yeah, we do a lot to try to just continually immerse ourselves in the reality of our customers, both good and bad. [00:39:20] S0: You've been at this for like thirteen or fourteen years. You took, I don't know, a set of, let's say your peers, and other CEOs that are operating these types of companies, what do you do fundamentally differently that you think they should be doing, but they don't?