00:41:00 · Ty Morse
[00:41:00] S0: Do you think that you do anything that you've never read in an operating book on how to be CEO?
00:41:06 · Adam Bry
[00:41:06] S1: I'm sure I do. I mean, you know, I said everything is kind of contextual and specific, like, think of my job as I need to do whatever it takes, everything in my power, every drop of energy and capability that I have, to set the company up to be successful and deliver the positive impact that we seek to create in the world. The thing that I would say over time, I've gotten more and more focused on, and I think and hope I can bring more and more clarity to, to the organization on, is really, it sounds trite, really trying to provide value to civilization. Like, I'm kind of an optimist capitalist, like, think that the most business value is created by just doing useful things for other humans, and companies and government agencies, like, these things are really kind of abstractions, they're just, they're abstractions to like help people have a mental model for what they're supposed to do on a daily basis. But the end goal is to, to like create technologies and provide services that are really useful and impactful to other humans. And so, I spend more and more of my time when I'm thinking about long term strategy and investments and talking with the teams about what we should build of like, how can we be most useful to other humans, you know, like what can... And I was saying before, what can we... What products can we build better than anybody else in the world is a different framing of that same thing, like, that's a statement of like, what can we do that's gonna be really, really useful to other people that they're not gonna be able to get from anybody else, and let's go and do those things.
00:42:38 · Ty Morse
[00:42:38] S0: I had a conversation with Chris Power probably three weeks ago from Hadrian, and I was talking about one way and two way doors, where a two way door, you know, you can make a decision and walk forward, and then walk back if it's not the right one, and one way doors, you walk in and you can't walk backwards. And he had this interesting idea where he said, yes, there are one way and two way doors, but, in a lot of cases, especially with hardware companies, you have to effectively just walk in the one way door and roll a hard six, where you have to bet the company and then just be right. What have been situations, you know, like the doc example, where there was a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, quote unquote, mixed feelings about making those bets, but you knew that they were the right ones and just bet the company on it?
00:43:25 · Adam Bry
[00:43:25] S1: Yeah, I generally agree with that. And I think that may be true for non hardware companies as well, I just think for hardware companies it's a little bit more visceral and clear. I mean, there's been a whole series of key decisions where if it didn't work, we really had no... Like, the company just wasn't gonna work. You can go all the way back to the beginning, I mean, the big, big bet that we made when we started the company was that you could build a reliable, capable, autonomous drone based on computer vision, which in 2014 was very unclear, like, even experts in computer vision research labs and robotics were skeptical of that claim because the stuff barely worked in the lab, And that was, you know, if that turned out to be wrong, there was gonna be no Skydio. A subtle one, but a critical one, when we developed Skydio two, which was our second generation drone, we knew we needed to simultaneously get, like, better three-dimensional sensing of the world around us in a lower cost way in order for our economics and products to make sense, and so we shifted from using what are called global shutter cameras, where basically the whole frame is exposed at the same instant, which is what historically, basically all had been used for computer vision, to rolling shutter cameras, which is what go into our phones and basically everything, where every line is exposed one row at a time, and so if the camera's moving, like if you take a video with your cell phone where it's moving, you'll see this skew across the image because it's a rolling shutter sensor. So, at the time, when we started working on this in 2018, there was almost no computer vision done on rolling shutter cameras because the math just kinda gets explosive, and we built the rolling shutter cameras into the drone before we had solved the algorithms, and there was no turning back from that, right, like, we had to make that decision to bake it in and just say, you know, we think we're gonna be able to solve and we did, and we got, not only did we get to like, parody from the old capability, we took a huge step up.
00:45:26 · Adam Bry, Ty Morse
So that was a really big one, I think the focus on doc was a really big one that's worked out for us, And then I think that we correctly recognized that public safety and emergency response was going to be the first kind of dock infrastructure use case to reach substantial scale, and that it would be a, a great beachhead and and kind of lighthouse to other applications and we went all in on that a couple of years ago, which has also worked out super well for us. [00:45:53] S0: You've been in this for a very long time, and you said, like in 2021 or 2022, when you're making this decision to move to enterprise and start working on doc. [00:46:03] S1: A bit sooner than that, yeah. [00:46:04] S0: You're basically like burning a huge amount of cash, and you're mostly focused on consumer. How do you, in your mind, when you're just looking down the barrel of like a shotgun, make a massive bet and say, okay, I know that this is, you know, how things look today, but here's how we're gonna basically steer through this tunnel.
00:46:19 · Adam Bry
[00:46:19] S1: Yeah. Mean, I to some extent, you just do it. I think in order to do anything as a company, as a CEO of company, you've got to convince other people it's a good idea. And I find it much easier to convince other people for good... It's a good idea if I actually believe it's a good idea. And so, if- Crazy. Yeah, and so, well, it sounds simple, it's true. So, you know, if I find myself in a position where I'm trying to, like, explain to an investor or a potential employee, you know, why we're doing a particular thing. And, you know, I find that I don't have the, like, conviction that, like, I, you know, I believe it to my bones. That's a clue that, like, we need to do something different. And so with the doc example, like, I just couldn't... I couldn't explain to anybody why we wouldn't be massively investing in it. Like, you know, I couldn't explain why, like, couldn't simultaneously explain to somebody why Skydio is gonna be a super valuable company and we're not investing in Doc. Like, to me those two things just did not fit together logically. So, the only path forward is like, we're gonna do the thing, and I think when you have that, you're not gonna be able to convince everybody, when you have that level of conviction, it makes it easier to convince other people and get them on board, or at least get them curious enough to like come along for the journey and see what happens.