Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer

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I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Adam Brey, the CEO of Skydio, the leading U.S. maker of autonomous drones. You'll hear us talk about it, but before we recorded this episode, I actually got to remotely operate one of Skydio's drones in the Bay Area from Adam's laptop in our podcast studio in New York. I also got to fly an indoor drone around our office. You can check out the full video of all that on our YouTube channel. We'll link it in the show notes. Beyond letting me fly drones around the country, Adam and I talked about why Skydio is so focused on the enterprise market. And of course, asked a lot about working with police and the military, but you'll hear him say that a lot of Skydio's customers are utility companies that use drones to remotely inspect important infrastructure in ways that simply weren't possible before. That's a big and important market, but it's also one that was being serviced by cheap consumer drones in the past. Products that basically no longer exist in the United States since most of them came from China and the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones late last year. All of those inexpensive DJI drones, well, they disappeared overnight, leaving expensive Skydio products as the main alternative. Adam and I talked about all of that and the reality of manufacturing complex electronics like drones here in the United States. We also talked about Skydio's use of AI and how it lines up with its use in the military. I really want to see if Adam had any lines here at a time when military use of AI is more controversial than ever. As you can tell, there's a lot going on in this one. Maybe more than anything, it was refreshing to hear Adam talk about hiring more people at Skydio as AI makes the company more efficient. And again, I got to fly the drones, which ruled. Okay, Adam Brigh, CEO of Skydio. Here we go. Adam Brigh, you're the co-founder and CEO of Skydio. Welcome to Decoder. I'm very excited to be here with you. I am super excited to talk with you. We just had a little demo of flying an X10 drone remotely. I have a lot of questions to follow up about that. That was super interesting. The drone business itself is in a moment of extreme change, I would say. There's policies keeping some of your competitors out of the country. There's what you're doing with autonomy and working with governments and the militaries around the world. And then in general, there's just the state of drone technology, which seems like it's on the cusp of being yet another thing. So there's quite a lot to talk about. Let's just start with the very basics. Unless you're a drone nerd, you might not have heard of Skydio. Explain what Skydio is and how the company came to be. So we are the largest U.S. drone manufacturer. We make drones that are essentially flying sensor platforms. We started in 2014. At this point, we serve what we think of as the critical industries that our civilization depends on. So we work with public safety. We work with militaries. We also work with energy utilities and construction companies and departments of transportation and security organizations. The common thread between all of our customers is that they have hardcore, oftentimes high-risk, physical operations where putting sensors in the right place at the right time to get better information can fundamentally change outcomes. And that's what we deliver. We deliver end-to-end solutions where the drone is a key piece of it, but the software and the autonomy and the integrations and, increasingly, the end-to-end workflows for the different industries built around the drone capability are really what our customers are buying. And we're at a super exciting moment where, after years of talking about a lot of this stuff, it's really starting to work at scale with incredible impact. Yeah, if I think about just our coverage of drones over the years, you start with those first DJI drones almost 10, 15 years ago now. The first Phantoms, they were pretty rickety. They had these giant batteries. And it was really just about flight, right? Being able to control flight in a pretty easy-to-use way. And then we got very quickly to, oh boy, we can put fancy cameras in the sky. And that was really fun. And those cameras got really fancy. And now you're saying it's a whole sensor suite, or is it just augmented cameras? So I actually think what you described there, to me, parallels pretty closely the sort of chapters of the drone industry that I think about. The very early days for the category of thing that we make, these electric flying machines, were really toys. You know, and I sort of think of the first chapter, the first 10 years, was the electrification of radio-controlled airplanes. And they were recreational. It was fun to go out and fly. This is the world that I come from. I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes. And then I think what happened is people started bringing the toys to work and realizing that if you put the right camera on there and you had a skilled pilot there flying it, you could do a lot of useful stuff. And that created cool videos that showed up in cinematography, commercial real estate, things like this. The next chapter is really about autonomy, where the drone lives in a docking station. It's connected to the internet. It can be flown remotely and autonomously and becomes a piece of infrastructure itself. And I think the impact that we see from that is going to be orders of magnitude larger than everything we've seen thus far. And we've seen a lot of good stuff this far. I mean, I think the world of drones as tools, a lot of great work has happened there. I think it's just very small scale compared to what's coming. And we're really at the transition moment into that now. The idea that the flight is almost the, like, fundamental building block that you don't need to think about as much because you're talking about the capabilities built on the second and third order of the thing being able to fly itself. Describe that. Do you spend time investing in how the drones fly themselves, or is that solved? We spend a ton of time investing in that. You know, there's kind of been this trope in the drone industry of, like, oh, it's not about the drone, it's about the data. Which is sort of true. You know, you could say the same thing about almost anything. Like, it's not about the phone, it's about the apps or the software or whatever. But you have to earn the right to deliver these solutions. The way you earn the right is by being world class at designing and manufacturing these systems and making them super capable and super reliable. And I think one of the things that's oftentimes missed with drones is they are cutting-edge aerospace devices. They vibrate. They have aerodynamics. They have thermal concerns. We've got really advanced compute running on board, a bunch of sensors. It's really akin to building a self-driving car that flies. And if you want to be a good drone company, you need to be a world-class aerospace engineering organization across 10, 15 different disciplines. And it's only once you have that and you're great at it that I think you can then start to, like, to focus on enterprise software integrations that connect your solution into, for example, the 911 dispatch software that a public safety organization might be using or the incident management system for an energy utility. You know, those things really matter. But if the core technology foundation isn't great, they're less important. We're going to come back to the phrase world-class. I have a lot of questions about what it means to be world-class in our current regulatory and tariff environment. But just give me some examples. We have a consumer audience. Probably everybody listening or watching has used one variant of a consumer drone at one time. But just like every other product CEO, I think in five years of doing this show, to say that people ops is really interesting. We should talk about it more. What do you mean by that? I have a very talent-centric view of business. So, you know, we talked about the organizational structure. I think that matters, but I think it's less important than just the people at the company. One of the analogies I used to think about this, I love sports analogies for business. You know, people, people obsess over batting order in baseball. I don't know if you're a baseball fan, but there's this whole theory of batting order and it's evolved over time where you want like the leadoff hitter to get on base a lot. And then you get into the meat of the order where you've got the power hitters that are supposed to knock them in. We're now at a point where you can use analytics to study this stuff. And I think the estimates are that the difference between like the most optimal batting order and the worst batting order is like 20 or 30 runs per year for a major league baseball team. They score, I think something like five to 800 runs per year. Adding one star player to the lineup is like a hundred runs per year. And I think business is the same way. It's, you know, it's, it's not as like directly trackable as baseball, but one exceptional person anywhere in the organization can just completely change the trajectory of a product or a business. And I think most things more than people realize really come back to talent, even for big late stage companies, certainly for early stage companies. And so we spend a lot of time really focused on that, on trying to get the best people in the world for each of the different disciplines that it takes for what we're doing and, you know, putting people in a position to have tremendous impact. And if you look at amazing new product things that we've done over the last year, like we talk about the F10s, this fixed wing drone that gets caught with a robotic arm. It's like a crazy sci-fi thing. You know, I think that we did a good job, like creating an org structure for that team to be successful, but it's really just the people on that team are phenomenal. And the same thing with our 10, our indoor drone, which I think is now the best enterprise indoor drone that's ever been created. We did that in 15 months. Just amazing people did that. And I think that's, you know, that that's ultimately what, what it comes down to. And our head of people ops is awesome. And she and I work together quite closely on, on recruiting and talent management inside of the business to, to get more and more of that. I like this anti-Moneyball approach to running a tech company. We're going to send this clip to the sabermetrics people. It's going to go viral. Look, I'm not, yeah, I'm not anti-Moneyball. I just think that, uh, you know, just, I don't actually don't think this is that anti-Moneyball. Like a lot of what they were doing, I would argue was, was sort of talent assessment kind of things, like deeply studying what are the attributes that, that lead individual players to, to be successful or not. And I'm not saying the batting order doesn't matter. It does. Like you might as well pull all the knobs to optimize them. Uh, but the, the most important piece is, is having world-class people. This is one of the weirdest talent markets in tech that I, I've certainly ever covered. Uh, you have outrageous salaries for people who work in AI, outrageous promises about AGI. And maybe you want to be on teams that are going to build AGI. You have some of the big platform companies saying that all 6,000 people are going to report to, to Jack Dorsey with the power of agentic software tools. I'm not sure what any of that means. Is that affecting you? Is it hard to get the talent you want? Is it hard to pay them? Well, it's certainly, it is a very competitive talent market, um, which is great. You know, it's a, it's a, uh, I'm an engineer. I think it's great that like engineers are sought after, um, and, uh, are, you know, the market compensation for, for them is, is going up. I think we have a pretty unique kind of value proposition for, for everybody, and especially for engineers in that we're building products that are very real and having real impact today. Like robotics is hot again, and there's a lot of companies talking about robotics. There's a lot of grand promises being made. Um, I think a lot of these companies, uh, that are starting off today are, you know, probably five to 10 years away. They don't think this, but I think they will realize that if they succeed at all, they're five to 10 years away from, from having anything that's like a really viable business. We've been through that journey. We have an awesome core business. It's growing really quickly, but I still think we're, we're at the beginning of kind of what's possible in our space. And there's a huge amount left to be built, but we build it with knowing that if we can deliver it, it's really going to matter. It's going to save people's lives. It's going to make the energy infrastructure in our country operate more safely and efficiently. Um, and because of that, we've been able to attract and continue to be able to attract really, really excellent folks to Skydio. Are you competing in the sort of bleeding edge AI research area or are you hiring different kinds of engineers? You know, we're not trying to build foundation models that are like, you know, a hundred or $200 million training runs. I think we were probably some of the earliest users of AI in real products. Like we, you know, we use deep neural networks, uh, in our perception system going back to 2017, 2018, um, before I think anybody was doing that on a shipping robotics product. So we certainly are, you know, hiring folks and have folks on the team who are experts in AI and neural networks and all the other recipe of, of kind of algorithms it takes to build these autonomous systems. So, you know, there's, I think there's now, there's sort of this like smaller set of folks that are experts in these like very large cloud-based models. Like we, you know, we're not training those ourselves. Let me ask you the other decoder question that I want to start to pull on some of these threads that I've been pointing out along the way. Uh, you've had to make a lot of decisions in your run as CEO. Most importantly, I think the decision to switch from consumer to enterprise. How do you make decisions? What's your, what's your framework and how has it evolved? I think a lot of what makes companies effective, if they become super effective, is that a lot of decisions, um, almost become reflexive. It's like when you're learning a new skill as a person, you have to think about it a lot. Like if you're learning to ice skate or something, you spend a lot of time thinking about like foot placement and stride and whatnot. And then over time, it just becomes very natural for me as a leader and for us as a company. I think a lot of what's enabling us to move so quickly now is that we're just reflexive on a lot of things. Like we've been through a bunch of product development cycles. We've seen new industries start to adopt our products and technology and the patterns that they go through. And so, you know, myself, my leadership team, kind of everybody in the organization, we just know how to deal with, with, with a lot of different kind of stuff such that it doesn't even feel like we're making decisions. Oftentimes things just happen. The right thing just happens. Uh, and it's, it's super powerful and fun to be a part of that. That's not everything. And the, the new stuff, the frontiers is where you kind of have to do slow thinking or like reasoning in the like the, the, uh, LLM parlance. For me, writing is a very powerful tool to do that. Um, so anytime we're facing a lot of uncertainty or ambiguity, uh, I kind of tend to just start writing to help myself think about it. Um, and that helps clarify my thinking. And then I also think the, the output from that tends to be a really powerful artifact for fostering debate and discussion and then ultimately having the thing that says like, all right, here's the plan. Here's, uh, here's what we're going to do. The other thing that I think it's super obvious. A lot of things in business are like super obvious, super simple. It's just hard to do them. Like the whole point of a company is to do useful things for other humans. And it's very easy. It's surprisingly easy to lose sight of that, especially as companies get bigger. And so, uh, you know, we really force ourselves to, to focus on that. Like, you know, what, what is what we're doing now going to mean for how is it going to be valuable to somebody and, and what are ways that we can make it more useful and more valuable to somebody? And ultimately everything in a company, um, should be oriented in that direction. And then probably the final thing that I'd say, this is one of our values is love the problem. Get to the essence. I think it's really worth spending a lot of time going deep, deep, deep on understanding problems, whatever they are. Um, the best solutions are, are, I think born out of like deep, deep understanding of problems such that the solution oftentimes, the simple elegance solution oftentimes emerges from that kind of deep understanding. So for myself and for You got to build the drones here. How is that working right now? Are you invested in that supply chain? Do you have all the pieces you need to build them here? How does that work? We have always manufactured our drones in the U.S. We started doing this in 2016 and 2017 when people thought it was truly insane. You know, like, we had investors in the early days that would come and do diligence on us and see a manufacturing line and just basically pull the ripcord. Like, what the hell are you guys doing? I'm out of here. Like, conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley in 2014 was, like, one, probably don't do hardware, and two, if you are going to do hardware, definitely outsource it to China. That's just not the path that we went down. And honestly, we didn't go down it originally for geopolitical reasons. We went down the path of U.S. manufacturing for practical reasons because they're aerospace devices. Engineering and manufacturing are tightly coupled. And doing both side-by-side just enables you, I think, to build better products faster. Now, it has become a critical strategic imperative for national security and I think a critical strategic advantage for us that we've got a decade of experience under our belts building these things in the U.S. because manufacturing is hard. You know, hardware is hard. Manufacturing is definitely hard. Running a factory, integrating the supply chain for your product in your own factory is an extremely complex, messy endeavor. And we're very, very good at it now. I think that we, you know, I saw you key on world-class. I don't think that we are a world-class manufacturing outfit yet. Like, blunt assessment, I think China is still better at manufacturing drones than we are. But I think we're pretty good. And I don't think there's any law of physics that says that you can't be a world-class drone manufacturing outfit in the U.S., and we're going to do it. I mean, we'll invest in whatever hardware and software and systems and talent and people we need to such that, you know, we have the world's greatest drone factory right here in the U.S. Let me ask you about that. The idea that you can be a world-class drone manufacturer in the United States is, in one way, like, that's the right ambition for a company that makes drones. But it's also fairly narrow. So, I don't know, Apple just turned 50. We did a bunch of coverage on Apple turning 50. And a big part of that story is they stood up the supply chain in China. And there's a huge array of vendors. There's a huge array of sophisticated manufacturing partners, component suppliers. You talked about the history of drones. Why are there cheap IMUs and microprocessors all over China? Well, it's because Apple built the smartphone supply chain. And we could build a bunch of stuff out of lithium-ion batteries and cheaply available IMUs. We don't have that here. So, I guess I'm just asking, you can be a world-class drone manufacturer, but the ecosystem that allows you to do that doesn't exist here. Do you need that ecosystem or have you found a way to do it all on your own? I 100% agree with you. It's in, like, drones are, in many ways, the combination of kind of consumer electronics with hobbyist quadcopters. And historically, all consumer electronics have been made in China. I'd say a couple things here. I think, one, I don't think there's any law of physics that says that we can't have a world-class consumer electronics-wide scale hardware manufacturing ecosystem here in the U.S. You know, I think there's some alternate universe, maybe with slightly different policy decisions and a few decisions here or there, where the East Bay in San Francisco Bay Area looks something like Shenzhen, China. And I think it's a bummer that we don't have that kind of hardware richness in the U.S., because I think we, you know, counterfactuals are always hard, but I don't think there's, like, a rule of physics that says that that couldn't be the case. We're focused on drones. We're focused on doing awesome stuff with drones. I do see broader momentum towards building more and more stuff in the U.S. I think some of this is driven by policy. I think some of it is driven by, you know, capitalist opportunity. And I think all of that is to the good. We're still using supply of components that are coming from Taiwan and Japan, Korea, and so on. Over time, I think more of those probably can be made in the U.S., but the drone piece is the one that I have the most visibility into and the most confidence in. We can definitely do that at world-class levels in the U.S. Let me ask you about that. The idea that you can be a world-class drone manufacturer in the United States is, in one way, like, that's the right ambition for a company that makes drones. But it's also fairly narrow. So, I don't know, Apple just turned 50. We did a bunch of coverage on Apple turning 50. And a big part of that story is they stood up the supply chain in China. And there's a huge array of vendors. There's a huge array of sophisticated manufacturing partners, component suppliers. You talked about the history of drones. Why are there cheap IMUs and microprocessors all over China? Well, it's because Apple built the smartphone supply chain. And we could build a bunch of stuff out of lithium-ion batteries and cheaply available IMUs. We don't have that here. So, I guess I'm just asking, you can be a world-class drone manufacturer, but the ecosystem that allows you to do that doesn't exist here. Do you need that ecosystem or have you found a way to do it all on your own? I 100% agree with you. It's in, like, drones are, in many ways, the combination of kind of consumer electronics with hobbyist quadcopters. And historically, all consumer electronics have been made in China. I'd say a couple things here. I think, one, I don't think there's any law of physics that says that we can't have a world-class consumer electronics wide-scale hardware manufacturing ecosystem here in the U.S. You know, I think there's some alternate universe, maybe with slightly different policy decisions and a few decisions here or there, where the East Bay in San Francisco Bay Area looks something like Shenzhen, China. And I think it's a bummer that we don't have that kind of hardware richness in the U.S. because I think we, you know, counterfactuals are always hard, but I don't think there's, like, a rule of physics that says that that couldn't be the case. We're focused on drones. We're focused on doing awesome stuff with drones. I do see broader momentum towards building more and more stuff in the U.S. I think some of this is driven by policy. I think some of it is driven by, you know, capitalist opportunity. And I think all of that is to the good. We're still using supply of components that are coming from Taiwan and Japan, Korea, and so on. Over time, I think more of those probably can be made in the U.S., but the drone piece is the one that I have the most visibility into and the most confidence in. We can definitely do that at world-class levels in the U.S. Are there any Chinese parts in Skydio drones right now? Very, very, very, very few. So we had the great distinction of being sanctioned by the Chinese government about a year and a half ago. We knew that we had China risk. We had done a lot of work to get our supply chain out of China. And the big remaining dependency that we had, this was public, was batteries. And we fortunately had a decent supply of batteries on hand, but we had to, in very short order, stand up a new supply chain for batteries independent of China. At this point, all the first-level dependencies are gone. And it's, you know, anybody who's saying that they don't have any Chinese content in what they're building is probably deluding themselves, because it's very hard to trace back to the second and third levels. But all the critical components, all the first-level dependency stuff, is outside of China. Just for the listener, explain what you mean by first-level dependency. You know, the suppliers that we work with. So buying the camera module, the sensor in it, the processor, the circuit board, the metals and plastics, the suppliers that we're working with directly. And as far as we can push, the suppliers that they're working with. But, you know, you go back to, like, some passive component on a circuit board or the material that's used in a particular thing. It's, you know, it's hard to say with 100% certainty on things like that. The reason that Chinese government sanctioned Skydio was because the United States government was trying to kick DJI out of the country. The FCC banned foreign drones last December. They had basically been fulminating about doing it since 2020. Do you understand why the FCC banned DJI drones? Well, I correct some. So the stated reason for China sanctioning Skydio was that we sold drones to Taiwan. Yeah, I'm glad you would intuitive, possibly the real reason. You know, I think the real reason, as you stated, is that, you know, we compete with DJI. And the U.S. government has taken actions against DJI, and I think it was retaliatory. I don't know exactly what the right answer is, but I think it's pretty clear and non-controversial at this point that depending on Chinese technology in critical industries has a lot of risks associated with it. And this spans a bunch of different categories. I mean, we've seen this in chips. We've seen it in raw materials like steel and magnets. We've seen it with cars. And I think drones are like, you know, if the military is going to be using Chinese drones in a conflict, if we want our troops to have the best capability, the stuff coming out of China is the relevant competition. That's the standard that we hold ourselves to from a hardware standpoint, whether or not they're in the market or not. I can say with pretty high confidence that in this new world, the world of drones as infrastructure, where AI and autonomy are central, we're integrating these things together into end-to-end solutions is the winning recipe that's most valuable for customers. I think that, not think, I know, we have the best solutions in that space. And you can talk to customers who have used both and will tell you that. I think in that world, we have the upper hand. In the kind of hand-flown world where it's more manual and there's more pressure on price, China has the upper hand. Fortunately for us as a company and a country, I think we're headed more towards the autonomous remote world. But I still think that whether or not they're allowed in the market, that's the competitive bar that we want to hold ourselves to. Obviously, the United States is just one market. The European market is huge. There's a lot in, who knows what will happen with NATO. There's a lot of pressure on the kind of contracts that you want to fulfill. As you go in different markets around the world and you compete with DJI, are they winning on price, like you're saying? Are you winning on features? What's the balance? I think it's going to be a slightly different story in different markets for different customers that care about different things. And most of our business is still here in the U.S., but we operate in Canada now. We operate in Japan. And we have and will continue to successfully compete head-to-head on the strength of the integrated automated solutions that we can deliver. And as we get bigger, we get better and better at manufacturing more hardware at lower cost, which will enable us to serve more and more markets. Are you going to keep all the manufacturing here in the United States? That's the plan. Yeah. Yeah. We're doubling down. Like we announced we're spending $3.5 billion over the next five years in the U.S. on our own manufacturing with domestic suppliers on our own internal operations. You know, we're getting a new giant factory. Like we're all in. I think that, yeah, I think that we're already one of the leading examples of like real U.S. manufacturing working at substantial scale, but I think we have many more gears that we can find. Real U.S. manufacturing working at substantial scale. You have 1,000 employees. How much of your manufacturing is automated? And as you invest in manufacturing, how many people are you going to hire versus how much automation are you going to bring to bear? Automation is definitely a key part of the story. R10, the product that we just launched, is the most automated product that we've had from a manufacturing standpoint. We actually over-invested in automation there because we wanted to develop and trial a lot of new techniques. So, you know, automation will be a key piece of it, but there's always going to be a lot of jobs involved in running a factory and in just operating the company and delivering and installing this stuff for customers. I'm just thinking about the sort of like famous Steve Jobs quote of, I couldn't fill this ballroom with manufacturing, engineering, management. And in China, I could fill like multiple football fields. Do we have the talent base for you to do what you're saying you want to do? Well, I think that these things take time. Like, you know, I don't think you're going to overnight create the like the talent base and the ecosystem that exists in China, but it's not zero. I mean, and look, I think, you know, Tesla gets a lot of the credit here. They, you know, they have built and operated factories at large scale in the area. We have a large number of Tesla alumni that work at Skydio. There's actually a lot more than people realize. I mean, a lot of like higher-end enterprise servers and things of this nature are built in the Bay Area. So the talent base is larger than I think most people realize. And there's a lot of momentum behind it now. So, you know, it's easy to look at the world today and say like, yes, China has a richer ecosystem. They've got more happening there, but I don't think that it has to be that way. I think we've actually, as a company, got a great foundation. And, you know, these things ultimately are demand-driven. Like if, if there's a need to build more and more drones, like that creates the conditions for more people to like, to want to get into it and, and get great at it. And we're seeing that happen right in front of our eyes. We have to take another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute. Support for this show comes from Klaviyo. There are only so many hours in a day, and Klaviyo's two powerful AI agents can make sure your team spends them on big things. 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I'm talking with Skydio CEO Adam Vree about the challenges and implications of autonomous drones, especially in defense and law enforcement work. I want to end by talking about AI and autonomy here. The need to build more and more drones, and we're seeing it happen in front of our eyes from a government defense contractor. It's going to cause a lot of our audience to have a lot of very specific feelings about what these drones are for, who's making the decisions, whether they have any say in the matter. The demo I saw with you was very cool, right? There's an emergency somewhere. The drone takes off from the dock. It flies to it. It helps the first responders do whatever they're going to do. The flip side of that is, boy, there's a lot of surveillance ideas baked into that. As you add more and more autonomy to the drones, boy, there's a lot of ideas baked into that about who's making what decisions, especially if the drones have any lethal capabilities. What's your perspective there? How do you draw the lines? There's two things that you kind of alluded to, and we could talk about either of them. There's the military use of the products where we are in a technology race against China. I very strongly believe we want our troops to have world-leading capability. I think the world is better off. I certainly think the U.S. is better off. If that's the case, our military is ultimately accountable to democratically elected folks who are calling the shots. And they're controversial. Obviously, not everybody agrees, but there is a democratic process in place. And then the other side of it is public safety and law enforcement where the products have incredible impact. And I actually think if you care about transparency and accountability in policing, drones, it's hard to imagine a better tool than a drone. I mean, it's kind of like a or you know a loved one goes missing, what do you want to have happen? You know, like do you want like a drone to show up in 30 seconds so that the officers know exactly what they're heading into if you have a loved one lost in the woods, do you want to be able to very quickly surveil that area with a bunch of autonomous drones to increase the chances of them being found? And it's not to say, like, I think that the concerns around privacy and transparency are totally valid, but I think you also have to weigh that against the alternatives. And I think drones in particular kind of uniquely optimize this, where you're getting maximum benefit in terms of better outcomes with minimum trade-off in terms of sort of like mass blanket always-on surveillance. Let me make a comparison for you. Jamie Siminoff runs Ring. He's been on the show several times. His thesis is that if you put up enough Ring cameras in certain neighborhoods, you can, quote, zero out crime. And he and I have debated this at length, whether you can actually zero out crime. Does that feel doable to you? Or is that the wrong trade-off in actually if you put enough Skydio boxes on enough roofs, you can zero out crime? You know, I think the Ring cameras are great. I have one myself. I'm not an expert in deep and in all things Ring. I certainly think, let me take a sort of different spin on it. But it's an example of what you're talking about. There's a trade-off here. You put up enough fixed cameras. Let me give you like a more concrete, like in our space, I think this gets at what you're talking at. There's something like 300 million 911 calls per year in the U.S., one per citizen per year on average. Do I think the world is better off if there is an autonomous drone that shows up in 15, 20 seconds to every one of those by default? Yeah, I do. I think that will save a lot of people's lives. I think cities will just operate more efficiently. And I think we can do that with maximum protection of privacy and civil liberties because it's targeted, it's narrow. It creates a digital record. Because of that, it's less subject to abuse. Does that end crime? Probably not. But I think it probably takes a really big bite out of it. And I think a lot of people are going to be safer and happier because of it. And, you know, it's a huge motivator for what we're doing at Skydio. And I do want to emphasize that this is not like, it's fair and right that public safety and military get a lot of attention, but this is not all that we do. I mean, a lot of our drones are just off inspecting the energy grid and making sure that the power stays on or gets back on faster, or keeping roads open for departments of transportation, which, you know, to most people is kind of like boring out of sight. I think that stuff actually ultimately might end up being the biggest segment in the business. But I think this is an example of technology just fundamentally moving things forward for the better. Sadly, I have to keep asking about military applications. I do want to talk about power line inspection. We'll do a full hour on that one of these days. The other sort of complicated moral question that you've alluded to already is how the military uses this technology. There is obviously a brewing controversy with Anthropic where they've drawn some red lines about how Claude might be used in military applications, whether or not it's even capable of doing things the military might want it to do. Certainly mass surveillance has come up in the Claude discussion. Do you have red lines where you've told the military that you won't allow your technology to be used for certain things? So this is an area that I think is actually one where we've, I've gotten some things wrong. I think that historic, like, we've said some things previously that led some folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, like we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones. Now, you know, we're generally focused on building flying sensor platforms. We're what the military calls dual-use technology. And it turns out that the requirements from a sensor and flight time and reliability standpoint for inspecting the energy grid are actually pretty similar to what makes something useful to a soldier on the battlefield for what they call ISR, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, short-range intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. I have a pretty strong opinion that the people who are putting their lives on the line, who are ultimately accountable to democratically elected leaders, they are in the best position to make these life or death decisions of, like, what tools to use and how to use them. And I think it's very easy from an office in Silicon Valley to sit back and think that, you know, we're very smart and, you know, we know the technology and the idea of using it for XYZ things seems evil or bad. So we're just going to write a policy or ban people from doing it. I think that's ultimately misguided. I think it's actually dangerously misguided. And I think it's not giving democratic processes enough credit. I think it's not giving the servicewomen in our military enough credit. I mean, the military has a whole policy wing of brilliant people that sit around thinking about this stuff. And they're not going to get it exactly right, but they care a lot about it. And then at the end of the day, you're talking about typically, you know, a young person in a trench somewhere whose life is on the line. I think it's just, it's not our place to tell them what they can and can't do. We're focused on making our products great at certain things. We're less focused on other things and our voice matters in the conversation. But I think ultimately it should be up to the folks whose job it is, who are putting the lives on the line to decide how to use it. Do you think this is different because you make hardware? From like Anthropic, for example? Yeah. No, I think that, I mean, the practical implication, you know, the instantiation details might be different. But, you know, we faced this question of, you know, when the army started running some experiments where they were putting grenade droppers on our drones, there were people who felt like we should shut that down. There was, you know, questions internally. So, you know, I think that's a pretty like visceral example of like, you know, the military's experimenting with turning this thing into like a lethal device. But, you know, I just don't think it's, it's our place to decide. And so there's decide, but then there's like building the capability, right? Yeah. Maybe in the case of Anthropic, no one knows what the models can do and you can just ask it for anything. You're like, make me a bomb. And like maybe it'll do it. And maybe Anthropic has some real feelings about whether or not that's a good idea and they restrict it. For you, it's right. I mean, the military like hands you a purchase order and says, put a grenade dropper on it. And you, you can or cannot do that. You can literally say, we will not allow our sensor platform to target people and identify them and then fire the gun. I think one of the problems here is you end up with really strong adverse selection. So like if you make a policy that says you're not allowed to do X, Y, Z thing with our products, the chances are pretty high that the U.S. military is going to follow it, right? They have lawyers. They look at this stuff. They will probably follow the terms of service. And ultimately it may mean they just don't buy the product. Our adversary is terrorists. They're not going to follow the terms of service, right? They don't care. They don't care what our policy says. Like they're happy to buy the thing or hack it and they don't care about like what Anthropic's policy says. If you try to draw these lines to establish purity of like, oh, we think X, Y, Z thing is bad. You shouldn't do it with our product. We're going to try to create legal terms or like things in the product that prevent you from doing it. I think ultimately you just end up on the wrong side of this stuff because the quote unquote good guys, you know, maybe not uniformly, but will generally follow what the policy says. Bad actors are not going to care. They don't care at all what the policy says. And I think it's just, it's not to say that you can't have an opinion. You can't talk about it. You can't debate it. But I think when you start trying to draw these like bright lines and say, this is good, this is bad. You more often than not are just going to end up on the wrong side of moral questions ultimately. Can I bring this back all the way to the beginning? You started by talking about talent and recruiting talent and getting the best people and how that is better than the right structure, which is some real decoder bait. I have to be honest with you, like I, that's, that's the whole thesis of the show. Um, as you're out in the world recruiting, people have a lot of feelings about working for defense contractors, about working for the military, about helping to kill people. Um, Google right now is beset by internal controversy about working with the government. Then they're going to do it anyway. Cause I think Google has enough people that maybe some attrition is fine. You only have a thousand people. You've got to recruit some more. How does your talent base feel about this? And how has it affected your recruiting? Look, I think debate about this is healthy. I think questions about it are healthy. Different companies have different postures. You know, there's some companies where like get on board or get the hell out. Um, I, I generally think it's