00:49:28 · Adam Bry
[00:49:28] S1: So, think that this is a... This idea of, like, vertical integration, I think is a little bit misunderstood. Like, vertical integration is all relative, and, you know, nobody's running their own mind, like, the companies that are like considered very vertically integrated, Maybe Tesla. Yeah, I mean, in a few instances, but they're not doing it for everything, right? Like Tesla is considered highly vertically integrated, Tesla works with a ton of great suppliers, and if you, you know, they have a supply chain team and, and if you like, dive into that, like a lot of what goes into a car and a lot of Tesla's success can be attributed to having a great supply chain. The thing that I think is universally true is, if you wanna be building, like, world leading hardware capability reliably at scale, you need to have a lot of control over everything that's going into your product. And you can either do that by doing it yourself and having it be done inside your company, or you can do it by forging deeper and deeper relationships and partnerships with companies that are building key components. And every company that's successful at scale with hardware building great products does some mix of those two things, and we're no different. If you look at it through that lens, it's really a question of like, where is there, where are there gaps in what we want to exist that are stopping us from being able to build the best products that we think should exist? And, and if nobody, if no other company is building that thing, then we're going to go after it ourselves. And, you know, we're in an unfortunate position where, like, you know, we are extremely demanding when it comes to cameras and we've gotten more vertically integrated with cameras over time. We have a world class camera team in hardware and software and supply chain, but we're not grinding glass ourselves to make lenses, right? Because there's companies that are world class that wake up every day thinking about how to better grind glass, we're just like partnering with them. We're not making our own silicon yet because the things that we want out of our compute are extremely well aligned with the chips that go into like other kinds of robots, AR devices, VR, and so on.
00:51:29 · Adam Bry, Ty Morse
I think a lot of the mechanical stuff, there's like, there's more nuance there where we've had to go deeper and do more things ourselves, but we're still in a position where we can benefit enormously from tens of billions of dollars that are being spent in supply ecosystems that are much broader than just drones. [00:51:46] S0: When you think about your just general most enjoyment in life, like you said that you're a very competitive person, is your favorite time kind of wartime mode when there's actually a competitor that is trying to kill you?
00:52:00 · Adam Bry
[00:52:00] S1: Yeah, for sure my happy place is when there's something really challenge, existentially challenging to solve. I mean, like the mode of like operating with our back against the wall, either like we're gonna run out of money or we're facing a key threat or we're deployed with a customer and things aren't working as well as they need to and we just need to like, to get in there and figure out a way to solve it. I mean, I've probably just been doing it for too long, like that's, I'm just used to that, I love that, that's like the normal way of operating, And it's not everything all the time. I mean, it's different parts of the business are in different states of challenge at any moment in time. I love the... Actually, I didn't really discover this aspect of it until we started working with enterprise and government customers. Like, you're selling to consumers, there's not the same kind of competitive element to it because you don't, you don't see your, you know, you're not like looking into the eyes of your competitors. Like, when you're selling to an enterprise organization that's gonna go one way or the other, like, you're... It's like a... It's a cage match or something, and... But I, you know, I love that element of it. Like, I love, you know, I know what our competitors are, you know, are trying to do, and and, you know, I love thinking about like, what do we need to do to win by being better partners and and providing more value to our customers.
00:53:13 · Ty Morse
[00:53:13] S0: I saw this interview with Michael Dell, like a year and a half ago, where he said that he loves having a competitor and he thinks that it's like an incredibly good forcing function for focus, and so when he didn't have a competitor, or like the company didn't have a competitor that he was really set on, he would just create one out of thin air, and then he would like redirect the team, like he basically put the team and company in situations where they had to fight as a forcing function for focus.
00:53:39 · Adam Bry, Ty Morse
[00:53:39] S1: Yeah, agree with that. I think, I mean, to pick an example outside of Skydio, and I don't want to pick on them too hard, but I think Google is an organization that had a very strong like search monopoly, it was a money fountain. They didn't have a real competitor in that space, you know, have like maybe competition around the edges. And I think the rise of Anthropic and OpenAI has been great for Google, because it's like, it helps you kind of get rid of a lot of the bullshit and get everybody focused on like, we've got a job to do here, and if we don't do it well, like, we're, you know, this company's not gonna look the way we want it to look. And so, yeah, I think there's something in human nature where it's just like, you don't you don't wanna like, you know, where it goes south, don't wanna just be like copying your competitors, right, like that that's not helpful for anybody, but as a motivation to like, to bring your best and do your best, it's, I think there's something in human nature where it's like, it's it's a it's a powerful force. You've been kind [00:54:36] S0: of in this grind mode of R and D for the past, you know, decade plus, and now you're starting to really scale up. How is the company going to evolve to kind
00:54:44 · Adam Bry
[00:54:44] S1: of meet that? Well, think it... I thought I used a similar theme over and over again. We need to be able to operate in a very heterogeneous way, where there's, you know, there's some teams and some products where it's really all about, like, scale and efficiency and optimization, and I think those sets of problems are like very fun and interesting, and there's some parts of the company where it's still really very much about like invention and experimentation and resolving ambiguity and figuring out what we need to do, because my belief, and I think this is pretty well informed by the data that we see and what we know to be possible, is we're still like 1% penetrated, right? So, we're still... It's not like a mature market with cell phones, right? Where it's like it's a zero sum game and you're like battling against somebody to like take, know, like really we're trying to invent new products that create new workflows, that unlock new value in the world, create new efficiency, make things safer than they could have otherwise been, And so, we absolutely have to maintain the ability to like invent new things as a company and I think that's actually the single most important thing and we need to do that in the context of having like a core business and large scale customers that are counting on us and the way that you do that is by having awesome people that are looking after and have responsibility for these different things and can wake up every day really focused on like whatever their particular mission is.