The Vertical Space
The Vertical Space is a podcast at the intersection of technology and flight, featuring deep dives with innovators, early adopters, and industry leaders.
We talk about the radical impact that technology is creating as it disrupts flight, enabling new ways to access the vertical space to improve our lives - from small drones to large aircraft. Our guests are operators and innovators across the value chain: airframers, technologists, data and service providers, as well as end users.
The Vertical Space
#101 Ryan Gury, PDW: Drones, Innovation, and Lady Gaga
Welcome to episode 101 of The Vertical Space. In this conversation, we sit down with Ryan Gury, Co-founder and CEO of Performance Drone Works (PDW). Ryan argues that “commercial is eating aerospace,” and shows why the center of gravity has shifted from exquisite programs to fast iteration, modular hardware, and drones treated as munitions. We dig into lessons from Ukraine, why precision from a foxhole beats posture from a ridge line and what “velocity + iteration” really means for design, manufacturing, and doctrine.
We also unpack the RF war: proliferated jamming, fiber-tethered ops, directional links and why legacy radio assumptions break down at the edge. Ryan contrasts automation vs. true autonomy, swarming myths vs. realities, and the coming wave of sleeper robotics. He shares PDW’s playbook: veteran-led product development, the C100 mothership, and building to BOM and scale. Plus a frank take on how procurement and a DoD “marketplace” must evolve.
If you have visibility into user reviews and feedback, if you have visibility into price points and generally the cross axis of lethality and price, that sorts itself out. I love the idea of the marketplace. My business, we're set up for this new style of consumer driven warfare, commercial technology driven warfare, whatever you wanna call it. And we want to compete against those who are slower against us, right? So let's have at it. I don't know what AeroVironment makes that's compelling for the future. Maybe their, new fixed wing. But the Switchblade, that's old news. And, if that was on a marketplace, and I can compare the Javelin versus the Switchblade versus the small FPV and see that, allow O-6 officers and up to make that purchasing power. I think that's the beginning of what really is gonna drive the industry.
Luka:Welcome to episode 1 0 1 of The Vertical Space. In this conversation with sit down with Ryan Gury co-founder and CEO of Performance Drone Works, PDW. We explore insights from the war in Ukraine, how spectrum and radios are evolving, including Ryan's bold claim that radios are gone, how commercial technology is reshaping aerospace, the current state of autonomy, lessons from winning government contracts, and much more. With over a decade of experience as an inventor, entrepreneur, and drone expert, Ryan has been a driving force in the small drone industry. In 2015, Ryan co-founded the Drone Racing League, DRL, establishing it as the world's leading professional drone racing property for elite pilots. As CTO At DRL, he spearheaded the design, engineering, and production of custom built racing drones and developed groundbreaking radio technology to counteract jamming and interference. The technological innovations under Ryan's leadership attracted significant interest from the US Department of Defense and the broader defense community. This led to the establishment of PDW in 2018 to meet the specialized needs of military and government agencies. In 2024, Ryan's Innovations in anti jamming radio technology earned PDW an award from US socom. Additionally, the US Army selected PWS flagship C 100 Quadcopter to support its company level small UAS directed requirement. Ryan holds 10 patents for pioneering drone technologies and has been recognized with two Guinness World records, fastest battery operated, remote controlled quadcopter, and longest endurance for electric powered quadcopter. Enjoy this fascinating conversation with Ryan. Ryan, welcome to The Vertical Space. Great to have you on the show.
Ryan:Thanks. Looking forward to it. Thanks for having me.
Luka:Absolutely. We're looking forward to it as well. We usually start by asking the first question, if there's anything that very few in the industry agree with you on
Ryan:First and foremost you have to look at like the basics where, there hasn't been this much change in this space since World War I, world War ii, right? And we all watched in the two big films, 1917 and Band of Brothers, right, where the first tank crossed the line in World War I, and that was the beginning of Armor. And, we saw captain winners in Band of Brothers deliver a very comprehensive strategy to, to take out, artillery that was hitting Omaha Beach by use of maneuver warfare. And things have largely been the same. there's been air superiority and, long range strike platforms, but you know, for ground wars. That's kind of been the way that we have delivered ground wars for some time, and that's been completely changed on its head, I think over the last two years as you can strike a target 10 miles away from under the cover of a foxhole. Right. I think that, there's also different ways that wars are waged and, I'm a civilian, so I think that's, IM important to note, like I'm a technologist and I'm a civilian, so my word only goes so far by, by what I see. But you can draw conclusions. Like if the US were to wage war with another country would probably use just a ton of tomahawks and medium and long range precision fires and you know that's going to be, a pretty heavy handed lopsided. attack, right where we'll come away with, what we saw in Iraq where it was, very lopsided and, we moved too quickly. But I think in any situation where there's a ground war that boots in the ground and, infantry and units are covering land, I think you're gonna see small robotics in the same way that Ukraine has, right? And I, Ukraine is up against a pretty modern adversary and they have all the NATO equipment, most of it, I think as of today, they get the tomahawk right, to really, attack the red army and defend their motherland. And they choose a drone the size of a dinner plate to do most of their work. And there's different combinations and configurations and reasons and rationale. But at the end of the day, get 45 minutes to place a sizable munition in a square inch of a target from undercover. You could do that in a hole in the ground, right? And compared to something like a javelin where you gotta stand up, point and face the enemy, you get one shot and it's up for that munition to, strike on top of the, top of the tank and so forth. But it's a very different style of warfare where you're conducting missions through, robotic edge device. That's completely different, than anything else. I also think like the time on target, like the hunter style approach of FPV, where you can fly around and identify targets, do some ISR, and if you decide to strike, you can with incredible precision, right? And we watch all the footage of F PVS flying down trenches, finding tanks and armor inside dugouts. Slowly finding their way, in, in tunnels so forth. Like it is just an incredible amount of precision. And you can do that from safety. I think that's just the game changing thing there. I would much rather have a drone, wanna have a drone than an M four, right? And, I think that's going to continue into the future. and I think that the thing about Ukraine is that it's not stationary, right? I think people like to just draw a line and say, oh, this is what Ukraine has, this is what they have today. And if you really wanna peel back the onion, what's happening is commercial technology, the way that we develop technology, to support B2B and B2C and industrial applications is eating aerospace. So commercial technology is eating aerospace and I can go get an Apple watch, right? I can get that for like 300 bucks on eBay. Aerospace will never be able to make that. I don't care what's gonna work, things they can do. That Apple Watch is pretty damn hard, especially at that price point. And I think in a lot of ways that's what we see in Russia, Iran, Houthis, and what you know, we'll see in the future where small systems that are developed with commercial and consumer minded design approaches are going to have capabilities that aerospace does not yet have the capability to deliver.
Luka:Ryan, let me follow up on, on your earlier point about maneuver, because I think it's a really important one. And yes, you're right. The, the way that western militaries fight is around maneuver. And so one of the common criticisms about extrapolating what's happening in Ukraine to other future wars, that discussion centers around maneuver and how the US military, for instance, would utilize maneuver, and not get itself engaged in this, trench style warfare. But, here we are seeing a war in Ukraine where maneuver is dead. my question to you is what replaces it as an organizing principle of warfare? Is it mass and attrition? Is it autonomous systems? Is it dominance in the information domain? What do you think replaces maneuver?
Ryan:I don't know. I think West Point, the printers must be running. Right. And, myself and my chairman, Tony and a few others, have been engaging the dean over there to talk about how they're looking at doctrine and what they're thinking about in the future. But, I imagine it's an evolution of maneuver warfare, and. you gotta remember these drones hit targets 20, 30 miles out, right? So I think there'll be, an evolution of how that's conducted and how they integrate in new combat systems and how they leverage, robotics on the edge, whether it's, shot head, or dinner plate size drawn, or a fixed wing that can do surveys, identify enemies and strike them. there's going to be a spectrum of solutions that will always be moving, and I think that's why, velocity and iteration is the key to success, for the future battlefield, where requirements are changing day in, day out, and they'll continue to for decades and there's not going to be a very stagnant way of doing this. And it is just gonna change so much. You have to kind of stay ahead of the curve constantly and develop a, an industry that supports that and procurement that supports that, and marketplace that supports that. Because this is the very beginning, it's the first chapter of robotics that are lethal, that act without humans in the loop that do things we never seen before. And, I think everybody wants to draw a conclusion, but it really is just, a new style of combat development or a new style of procurement and developing solutions in the space because, we're at the very beginnings of this. And, it's going to speed up, not slow down, in two years, right? Two, two and a half years. It's been the first time a small drone was used in Ukraine. All of this happened in the last 24, 30 months. Right. And it's going to continue for the next thousand months. So taking a step back and looking at that saying, oh gosh, all this is changing. It's gonna continue to, how do we adjust the way that we develop combat systems? How do we adjust the way that we develop doctrine? How do we adjust the way that we work with our customers and our war fighters and our contracting officers and, appropriate management officers? All of that has to evolve and we're seeing the beginnings of that. so I like to say that commercial is eating aerospace, but when you look at commercial, it's a very fierce, competitive, capitalist architecture to support that, right? Like, if you don't make the next iPhone, you are, Samsung's gonna come after you and the consumer body being on Amazon or having people rate you and tell you how effective, like, I would love to know. What the effectiveness of an FPV from Ukraine versus a switchblade is, and the price per kill and the price per lethality, and how you scale that. So like, in the consumer world, you're up against your, you're always on defense. You get a product out there and the next day people hate on you and you gotta change it and you gotta fight for it. And you gotta continue and iterate and you have your r and d and your irad and it goes and goes, look at Apple. How do we develop weapons like that? How do we sustain an industry to support that? I think as of today, the US DOD has bought what, like 3000 small drones, right? So, I think there's a lot going on.
Jim:Hey, listen, one thing you've mentioned is there's a lot of what you're saying, boy, things have to change, right? and all in the last couple of years, and whether everyone agrees we're gonna take all the lessons from Ukraine and it'll apply to the next battlefield, but you're clearly right. Massive changes. You've mentioned drones are like ammunition, I think it ties in with what you're saying right now. Explain that a bit.
Ryan:Yeah. So I think the way that we develop like an artillery shell is fairly standardized. They're one-time use, everyone tells me we have arsenals of 30 millimeter mic mics to be used, right? And they're designed to be, they know thrown away. And, I think that's part of the problem with robotics. Like you have to design your drones to be single use, which means things like, you gotta use injection molds, and the electronics have to go together like Legos. You have to be able to make 10,000 a month. I think the other problem though is what I was saying is how you adjust the manufacturing. As the product is enhanced. So you have not only the complexities of mass manufacturing and looking at weapon systems as consumer technologies, right? and treating them as such so that they're really inexpensive and you can treat them like scale, right? But also you have to refine that line continuously. 'cause what we make today is not gonna be useful in two years, and you have to treat it as such, right? So it, it's a very complex problem, that we're about to face, right? We have to support an industry and pay for it. billions of dollars need to be there for lots of companies to work on this. You have to treat these products, these combat systems, essentially these javelin systems as single use and only, a few thousand dollars each as munitions. And you have to evolve them really fast over time, right? And those three big things, is what the industry will be up against in the next decade.
Peter:Those are some profound differences that, that we're then dealing with because when you describe the battle space, we have. number one, the reemergence of mass as a really important factor and the economic balance of executing the fight. and that obviously, plays into magazine depth. Then we have this dimension of the rapid evolution of this having this side of, it's really machine versus machine and constant one-upmanship in terms of innovation, in terms of, okay, well there's a fiber drone, and then how do we defeat a fiber drone? Or how do we use a drone to intercept a shahe? it becomes this really fast iteration of machine versus machine. And then what you just mentioned is, these systems, many of the smaller systems are treated as munitions, not as equipment that you would sustain for decades. But the difference being that they will go obsolete sitting on the shelf and potentially go obsolete very quickly on the shelf, unlike the munitions that we are accustomed to stockpiling. And so from a pure procurement standpoint, how do you balance the idea of stockpiling and maintaining an in an industrial base to produce the stuff when you actually need it, versus the fact that, at the very least, the firmware onboard those systems is going out of date. and equally likely the hardware itself is becoming obsolete in a matter of months while it sits in your stockpile. How are people dealing with these factors as they think about, okay, how do we stop talking and start taking action to be prepared for what's around the corner?
Ryan:Great question. I think first and foremost, like we, we can't forget who we are and. We invented 3D printing, we invented, apple, Microsoft. I mean, there's no lady Gaga anywhere else in the world. Right. That's for a damn reason. Right. And I think just, we just have to look across the aisle at the other stuff that we're doing in this space. And, apple, it's the first company in the world to do essentially, mass scale manufacturing and robotics. If you really think about it, you just don't have actuators. But those are pretty decent clamshell, computers. And I think we sold a lot of the manufacturing capacity off to China in the last 10 years. They've gotten pretty damn good at it. But I don't think that's something that's too hard to come back onshore, especially as automation goes up, so I really just think that we have the model, right? It sits in, our consumer world and we have to learn the lessons of that. I think for, it's product development. We're making products and they're lethal and they have to abide by, safety and security restrictions and requirements. That's it. Everything else we're the best at, there's no, there's nobody else out there doing chips, doing electro mechanical work. Like it still says, designed in California. Let's not forget that. Okay. And I think that, we just have to change the way things have been done for a long time. Aerospace has been making global hawks and ser 70 ones and satellites, and they've held this exquisite crown and the style has changed. That's all it is. And in a part, partially due to us. And, I think that, if we really want to behave as a modern co product company, we have to, procure and act like one and design toward one. Right? So. For us, when we design robotics, we're thinking about a bomb cost of thousands of dollars. our FPV is like hundreds of dollars, right? And we have to work backwards from that. But so is the iPhone, so is my apple mouse, so are the speakers that I use, right? it's just a different style of te of design. And I think that's why the deep tech space is so interesting now because you have a lot of startup people in the space doing things differently than they were in the past. and, that's disruption, right
Luka:Ryan, what you were describing is on the product development side, but I think part of Peter's question was how does the DOD procurement, world need to adapt in order to. Accommodate these, quick to obsolescence products and not stockpile. Something that, in even two months will be not usable.
Ryan:Capitalism. you can see h excess memo, around the marketplace and the ability for, officers oh six and up to make purchasing power decision and removing all the red tape around small robotics. Look at brave one in Ukraine, right? Or heck look at Walmart and Amazon. if you have visibility into user reviews and feedback, if you have visibility into, price points and generally the cross axis of lethality and price, right? That sorts itself out. I love the idea of the marketplace. My business we're, set up for, this new style of consumer driven warfare, commercial technology driven warfare, whatever you wanna call it. And, we want to compete against those who are slower against us, right? So let's have at it. I don't know what AeroVironment makes that's compelling for the future. Maybe their, their new fixed wing. but the Switchblade like old news, right? And, if that was on a marketplace, and I can compare the javelin versus the Switchblade versus the small FPV and see that allow O-6 officers and up to make that purchasing power. I think that's the beginning of what really is gonna drive the industry.
Luka:at the same time, if I can, push back on this, I, I agree with the general direction, but I also, understand how the DOD would not want to take on this third party risk and depend on the marketplace to meet the surge in demand that it will need at some point right there, there has to be some level of stockpiling and inventory, to be held. Yet at the same time, we, we know that obviously it, it doesn't last from a technology and relevance standpoint, and so what's the fix for that?
Jim:Hey Ryan, can I volunteer something that you've said before? talk a little bit about, and I think it applies, talk a little bit about General George's transformation and contact, because I think I've heard you talk about it in some other sessions. I think it probably applies here and I think it's describing sign of the dynamic. Nature of the battlefield and, a dynamic way to be able to address the needs of munitions and the like. Does it?
Ryan:Yeah, so look, I think there's two points. To Luka's point, I don't know what we do to solve the arsenal buildup. We certainly can look to lessons by Iran, Russia, and China who have the industry to support hundreds of thousands, if not millions of shot hits, right? And we can go online and we can see the factories in North Korea. We can go online, we can see the factories in Russia. We can go online and buy all the parts to a shot head right now off of Alibaba. I'll get you a GPS Constellation, a scooter engine two stroke. And I think right now, if you go to Ali Express, you can just buy the body of a shot head. That's, Very evident of a full-fledged industry moving and the sha head changes, we see that day in, day out. I just saw a new GPS constellation this morning. They have jet propulsion, they have different vitol options. They have the Gerbers coming in. there is a ton of iteration in the SHA head product and they're running it like a, they're running it like a modern commercial product company. Right. They have, they're sharing resources. They have different factories, they have different block models you can follow it. It's fascinating. And they also operate in swarms, like the only group out there doing actually like proper swarm techniques, to overwhelm our air defenses and so forth. Right. So I think in terms of like what an arsenal looks like in the future, I think the SHA head is probably an early glimpse of that. But it is an engine and it is not stagnant. There's a new GPS constellation of SHA head every two weeks. Right. So they can get, they can remove the GPS problem. And, there's different power plants, there's different styles, but like, man, is that an early glimpse? Jim, transformation and context in early glimpse to how the army's gonna move, right? We have these brigades all over the world, different feedback. We can ship, a fleet to each one, and they give us feedback in a, four to eight weeks. We can make that change on the line immediately. And, that is a very early glimpse into that iteration cycle. They call that transmission of contact to reduce the technology gap to speed things up. So the army at large knows there's a velocity and iteration problem and knows that, there's a need for higher iteration. The Hgsf memo as well, O six officers are not having a marketplace, removing red tape, another indication. That this is transforming and I think that's gonna continue into this year and next, right? Where we will see procurement, project management bodies and transparency from the vendor to the customer be uplifted, right? I should be able to have a user on my end tell me I'm terrible immediately, right? And be able to make that change to the product and fix it. And when, I worked on other products where they be apps for Kohler and McDonald's and MLBI, we put an app out there, you get review back in 15 minutes, you can make that change, redeploy that, and fix that in, in two course time. And I think that's the name of the game. You see Tesla doing that at massive scale, right? Where my Tesla is different from my friends who bought it two months earlier. He has a front cam or he's, I, he does not have a front cam. And I do making changes live on the line, changing the way that block models. Atos are done. so we're working quickly with our atos and, DIU to get them done on a quarterly basis. Right? Or I have four or five, six versions of the craft out a single time. That's insane to some people. Right? And I think that's, that's where things are going. And I think the Army, they haven't changed as much since World War ii. they're doing a lot in a little, right? So I, if anybody's worked in the big corporation, right.
Jim:So with this much change, let's, and you're talking about the army here, how does that affect you at PDW? How do you deal with that change? how does it play to your strengths and what kind of environment does it make for somebody who's trying to anticipate the needs?
Ryan:Well, I think it's getting a lot easier to cross the Valley of Death and it's gonna continue to, We've been working in
Jim:Which value of death is this?
Ryan:the value of death before you get your first check in the DOD, right? So, we gotta raise a ton of money to build a team, staff the team, get a headquarters, develop a thesis, generate requirements, prototypes, flying demos, compete exercises like vertex and awe, get feedback, make new drones, manufacture them at scale. Get into a program of record, get down selected, make all those drones, buy all those cogs, wrap them all up, ship them all over the world, and then you get a check, your first check, alright? that is a decade in the making that is hundreds of pitch decks to manage expectations to show the growth model, right? All to get your first check. And that meant that groups like my group is far and few between. There are literally no drone makers in America. some due to China is taking away the consumer model, right? So that you can't, the commercial model. So you can't have your drones at Best Buy and selling and supporting that. I think some of that is the procurement cycle is not made for this era, right? They're made for intercontinental ballistic missiles and F 30 fives and righteously show, right? Like that's a very big expensive investment. You gotta get it right. And I still think we're living off of a lot of rules from McNamara during the Cold War, right? So, there's just been a dearth of competition in the space. It takes us a mind boggling amount of capital to get in. And I think once these barriers have been lowered, like we're gonna get a lot more, competitive. Groups in the dod making money, building a team, getting good, getting ip, right, like capitalism, shit, right?
Luka:Ryan, have you heard any, success stories in the post hsf memo that would, support this vision of streamlined procurement and any oh six and above being able to, go to the equivalent of the marketplace and order stuff? Is that happening or is it still kind of preparing?
Ryan:It's still preparing like, so PEO aviation and PM UAS have a change of hands. There's, a ton of logistical items to get in place. they have to get the marketplace up. But I see evidence of all that, Some I'm privy to some, is, you hear through the grapevine, but you can see the need for it. And, it's gonna take them a little bit of time to, to stand it up. But it's common and,
Luka:What will this marketplace look like? Do you think that there's a good vision. For it. Will it be, government owned and operated? Will it be some third party?
Ryan:I am sure you know his normal civilians won't have access to it. Right? That would be a little crazy. I'm sure it's gonna be very secure, but I'm sure it's going to follow the very common patterns of e-commerce that we all know. And well taking items and putting them into a cart and selecting a way of paying. I want to see user reviews. I would love to see performance specifications, right? But all the great things about capitalism should surface in that marketplace. Eventually, I.
Luka:Switching gears a little bit, but, you're following the developments in Ukraine very closely. What's the latest wave of technology and how technology is being, employed there on the small UAS side of things?
Ryan:Oh my gosh, so many things. I could talk about this all day. I think Sleeper robotics is a huge one. You see that on, small ships. We saw that in the, uh, Operations spiderweb I think that sleeper robotics that stay dormant, come online when necessary are gonna be huge. Small solar panel, small timer. I currently have a webcam in my front yard, lets me know when people are coming and going. Solar powered, never need to charge it. It's awesome. ISR device, right? And drones are gonna work the same way. They'll be intelligent landmines. They will stay in the trees, they'll stay on the side of boats, they'll be shipped and shipping containers, they'll perform actions on the edge. And, landmines, operate in the same way when they, a sensor is triggered, right? They go off. And I think it'll just be a more highly advanced sensor. When a sensor sees a certain target or it's, a certain condition is met, it'll deploy a series of actions. And, that's sleeper robotics. And I think that is going to be tremendously powerful and scary.
Peter:Like the landmine that steps on you.
Ryan:totally. And we already see it now. We see, I like to use the word autonomy over ai. I think autonomy is a huge, important word, but AI gets a little silly. the UK Ukraines and the Russians are already deploying. Assets that deliver the whole mission of lethality by themselves. Fly over this area, conduct a survey, use whatever computer vision model that is available. And they probably use YOLO 'cause that's open source. But in the US we have Athena Turbine, one Project Maven. And when you meet the conditions of a bad guy or armor strike them, that's happening now with thermal cameras and thermal vision models. We already see the beginnings of sleeper robotics. Now drones that sit on the side of the road, drones sit on the side of the road with solar panels. So you merge that all together and you're starting to see what the beginnings of AI and, autonomy will be, and whether they're standoffish and generally made, one at a time, or they mesh together and make multi-age a missions occur. Right? Like the shot headss. That's just gonna be, one of the many ingredients driving, combat systems into the future.
Peter:You could really see, sleeper robotics as a concept blurring the lines between peace, time, and times of conflict, and they could be used across a spectrum of timeframes and circumstances.
Ryan:Oh yeah. I mean, we do that with code now. I'm sure. I'm sure our cells in our adversaries have many zero day injections that they could utilize
Peter:everyone's got a gun pointed at each other's heads in the cyber domain and also in the orbital domain.
Ryan:absolutely. And we, I'm sure I'm sure there's a huge library of zero days that the Pentagon has access to. Right. And so does China. We're gonna see the physical manifestation of that where cyber warfare or lethality. is dormant until necessary. And there's not a lot of people working yet in that space, but I can see that space being one of the most dominant growth industries in combat system development. We could talk about radios, for a while too, but I think radios are just gone.
Peter:Unpack that.
Ryan:Yeah. So, I mean, you can go on chat TBT or you can, bring 'em up yourself. there are dozens of jams operating on the edge. And they're called things like the zytel or the, I'm looking at my list now. The ZR three or the Lear three, the VO ad, the pole 21, the NoDa, the Netline. They're seriously just software-defined radio systems, mostly built by in analog devices with a massive RF front end putting tons of energy into the spectrum. So if you want to strike an enemy and your drone is flying far away and that drone gets close to a jamer that has more energy somewhere around your band, you lose contact with it. There is a reason why the entire front line is crisscrossed with fiber optics. It is very easy to jam a radio, especially if you have a wide spectrum jamer. And some of the systems, if you wanna change spectrums, you have to change out the module or change out the antennas, so, so the idea of a radio system, operating anywhere near close to 50 of these jammers, China, Russia, whatever, it's never gonna work. And all these radio companies were built on like compliance, like the FCC ations or amateur radio bans. They're still operating on like 1.3, 2.4, or 5.8, or roughly around it, But no one is making, the solution is either you make use of the entire spectrum and you have an array of radios, or you use fiber optics. we currently. Selling fiber optics in our FPV, right? And, I don't really see a lot of energy being pushed toward radio solutions that counter these systems. I think the other problem is that our, most radio jamming solutions like, radio and shorts, or a handful of radio jammers that you see from top primes, they're just doing protocol sniffing against a known library. So they look for a certain protocol, they find that protocol, and they stop that protocol, but the Russians just wait for a drone to get close, and then they shut down the whole spectrum, right? And they do it with like a little toggle. You see jammers on donkeys, jammers on people, jammers on tanks. You see these big jammers, across big vehicles. They just go from literally 600 to six gigs and they just stop half of it with like, thousands of watts of energy. In all directions. So for, 10 seconds when they hear a drone, they click it, that part of the spectrum goes down, the drone falls outta the sky, they turn it back on. That's it. The idea of wireless links in a battlefield environment like we see now is, as we see in Ukraine, I think that's, that's why we see all the fiber optics. And I also think like a lot of the learnings from this are allowing for directional jamming and GPS jamming. You go to gps jam.org. I think that's it. You can see how the Collin grad region basically stops GPS all the way from like Germany to, to Finland. It's just not sexy, so no one talks about it. You don't see a small drone with an RRP G on the front of it, but it's a core ingredient to success. Otherwise, everything's gonna be lethality without a personal loop or fiber optics, both of which, have their pros and cons. What happens to our remote systems when you don't talk to them or if you have to tether everyone with a piece of glass, right? How are we preparing for that? these jammers from Russia and China, they're not sophisticated. You can go look them up on chat, PT and see how they work at, see how much energy, there's brochures and spec sheets and conferences that you can go to and learn all about 'em. It's just putting energy into the band. That's it. So
Peter:Isn't it tremendously difficult though to put enough energy into the entire set of frequencies that people might be communicating on to do that simultaneously? Doesn't that become just infeasible at some point, technically or economically?
Ryan:I mean, if you look at these jamming systems, and you look at how much energy they're using in the bandwidth they're using. It's an extraordinary amount of energy being put into the band. And they do it across many different radios at once. Right. So yeah, if I got one radio and one RF front end and one, one module, sure. But then they just make 12 of 'em and put 'em together, so like they're using an array of jammers and, it, it's not that it's not that scientific, so they make these systems, they have, 10 different power amplifiers, 10 different RF front ends. They're basically putting gau and noise into the band. And, they have a spec end sometimes where they can see where, energy is coming from or what frequency they're moving on. But, it's just really easy. They just momentarily just stop all radios. And I think like we've always come to inclusion. Well, they can't just do that because then we'll stop their communications. Well, yeah. If there's a bunch of drones in the sky, they're gonna click it and turn it on. Right. And then you just turn it off. Now you can talk on your manna radio again.
Luka:Right. I mean, it works, but it's also very stone aged type of, operational deployment. You take down everything that flies, including your own ass. Sets. And oh, by the way, if the drones are using LTE, then you, wipe LTE or cellular networks to the population that lives around it and all of the other, government users of it, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a,
Ryan:for a moment though, like there's, even during this podcast, there's gonna be periods of time where we're gonna have a little hiccup here. Right.
Luka:but the drones are flying constantly over,
Ryan:They'll do position
Luka:So.
Ryan:like, and like if you have, most of the drones are like, I think that's the thing about, it's only around you like. When you set off that energy, it's only when drones come close to you. Right. So it just depends. And like, look, at the end of the day, everyone's flying with fiber optics, right? And manna radios are still used on lower frequencies. 'cause they don't, I think the frequencies for manna radios like the super low stuff. The cellulars in 707 9 60 and it's just what's happening. Right?
Luka:Where do you think this leads? Is this a, the end of traditional comms or repurposing of it, or being more disciplined about its use? Or are we facing a completely new. RF doctrine.
Peter:I mean, I think it's just a continual game of cat and mouse. It just never ends. But I mean, I wanna hear what Ryan thinks.
Ryan:Yeah, I think it'll be, I agree with that. It's gonna be satcoms, it'll be directional comms. We should see directional antennas on gimbals with drones that, that face, the end user with a very small field of view shield AI was using a laser beam from a ship Right. To get over the horizon. So, and they had to fly at high altitude, some assuming to do that. So it'll be a smorgasbord. Right. I can also find signals way faster. there's all types of groups coming out of the space, all with the help of analog devices doing direction finding. and, I just think that the same way that, that like the aerospace primes are being disrupted. We will also see the signals, space gets disrupted as well. and that includes, links or anti links, right? We still have yet to see seek gun jam, which is on Twitter, something that we really want to see, which is a small FPB, I don't know. It has the same idea as a harpoon or a penguin or something like that and can identify a jammer and strike it just based off of Ding, right? We'll see that soon. It all goes back to the thesis, like, look, like nothing is stagnant. We need an industry to support incredible iteration and competition, and I think that's where a lot of people see eye to eye. We need a marketplace. Everyone should have access to purchasing power. We need a user base to be able to give feedback and talk shit, and we need a customer who's gonna spend, right? I think that they're kind of waiting to really deploy the purses until it makes sense. The last thing I think the DOD wants to do is buy an arsenal of drones that don't work. So I think that, the DOD is gonna be smart. They're gonna wanna deploy capital where it's sustainable, not look silly. Where think the marketplace and removing the red tape for oh six officers and above is a huge portion of that. I think they have to re reformulate the, and retrofit the PM offices to support that, because that's a huge amount of change for them. And then I think they're gonna set up a system for fast iteration. I think that recompetes and program of records are gonna happen every three to six months if they exist. And I think everything else is gonna be through the marketplace. And, then once that's all stood up, I think that's where you're gonna see the purse strings or, the capital really getting deploy to the space. Right. I think that PAS like PAS is really badass. that is the, The new program of record, a handful of people who competed in it. Uh, it is thoughtfully named the Purpose Built Attributable System. that is a quadcopter of the future. Completely modular. Change out munitions, change out cameras, change out, radios, the price point is a few thousand dollars. Super lethal Antiar, anti, personnel, and they're gonna recompete that every three to six months indefinitely.
Luka:I want a quickly follow up to one of your just recent points on spectrum when you mentioned array of radios as a way to counter the proliferated jamming. Do you mind unpacking this a little bit?
Ryan:So there's like, the electromagnetic band is like a rainbow. You have all different colors and instead of colors you can call those bands. So I got the yellow band, the green band, the blue band, the prop band. This is for the general audience who's listening here, but the window to transmit video only exists in a small sliver. You have like 1.3 on the low end that's gonna get you your four 20 low frame rate. but it goes really far. It'll push to your house. And on the other end you have like six gigahertz, maybe even seven. I saw seven gigahertz on FP, which is crazy, which is like your, your 5G, right? And it, it'll get you 12 K video, but it's not gonna go very far. Those are small waves. You can stop them with a window in that band is where all communications happen. Your car tire pressure monitor your wifi, your Bluetooth, your cell phone, you know your little aura ring. Everything is operating in that spectrum. And you have these radio suppliers only working on a small little portion of the yellow band. Some only work on a small portion of the blue band, like that's gone. You have to transmit on every band and receive on every band now. And your radio has to do that. Like, that's just, that's what I would want as a first principle, right? And these Russian jammers and Ukraine jammers, they'll say, Hey, shit, I'm gonna take out red, yellow, green, and blue, and I'm gonna wait until you're close to me to turn it on. And that's what's currently going on. And that cat and mouse game is playing out and that's why you see 20, 30 kilometer long fiber optic lines crossing the front line. You can see. I eights, flying overhead and just glistening fiber optic strands across the corn fields. And that's what's happening, right? And you can go on Chacha PT and say, Hey, make me a table of a window of frequencies. The power of those systems and why it matters. and it will generate that from both sides of the front line, Ukraine and Russia, and their jamming systems. It's pretty straightforward.
Luka:What's
Peter:seems to be almost, at this point, almost an antiquated concept to be transmitting on a frequency or to be even frequency hopping. You're still transmitting on a frequency and then hopping to another one after some amount of time, It seems rooted in 20th century oscillator technology when we had oscillators that would work on one frequency at a time. But are people thinking about defining instead of a frequency to transmit on defining a kind of a diagonal slope that moves across frequency and time and using that, and then if they're transmitting that way, they might pass through a band that's being jammed for a few milliseconds, but come out the other side and still be able to resolve their communications. Is with software defined radios, is that a place where we're going, which would define a whole new space in terms of how you're using electromagnetic energy in order to move information.
Ryan:Well, yeah, but you gotta blame analog devices, which, 20 13, 20 15 came out with the agile transceiver, right? So everything was cool until that happened. And now they're in gen like hacker, RTL devices and the, what's that little orange guy? flipper, right? Those are all just analog devices or that little chip analog devices should probably not sell to anyone outside America. That would be pretty sweet, just NATO in America. But like, that's what's happening. They're making, agile transceivers that are software definable that allow you to communicate against a wide frequency set that didn't exist until that time. So it's only been 10 years since I came out. Right? and yeah, if you're only, so all these radio companies, right, made all their IP outside of an agile transceiver like this, right? Or using an array of them, or seeing, ultra wide band jamming, or they just built their radios around compliance. 'cause the FCC only says you can operate in these small, tiny little windows for amateur radio bands, right? So I, I think that, capitalism dries everything. There's a reason why they made, these decisions. And I think analog devices, SDR, the agile transceiver has become really popular and commoditize. And you could do a lot of fancy things with it.
Luka:Ryan, what does that mean? practically, if we extrapolate a modern battlefield with, hundreds of thousands, potentially even more, agents that are deployed, and then you have the classical, joint force structure. And up until now, and the doctrine is, very disciplined spectrum allocation. And, and deconfliction. And so what does that look like in a world where now you want to, in order to avoid, being completely denied, you're transmitting across the spectrum, across all of those bands. At some point it doesn't become feasible with the scale of all the agents involved. Is there a technology that comes in as a required, infrastructure to help manage all of this? Or, how do you think that this ultimately gets solved?
Ryan:I think it's gonna be an evolution for some time. And I think, to Peter's point, it's going to be a cat and mouse game for some time. I think that. Again, it's the idea of a commercial space, eating away aerospace. There's a great company that I met three years ago called Distributed Spectrum. A bunch of kids from MIT, they work in Madison Avenue. They hang an SDR out the window. Last time I saw 'em, and I won't give away too much of their clues, but they're amazing. And, they're a bunch of young adults, fresh outta school, doing incredible work that vastly is superior to aerospace and they're using commercial tech. They're using Nvidia Cuda, they're using analog devices, SCRs, they're collecting data, they're putting it together. They're being thoughtful about it. And I think lots of groups like that are gonna be the future where commercial groups and commercial style product development and the speed of iteration. It's going to allow us to, to be always leading that cat and mouse game. And the cat and mouse game has played out in the Cold War forever. Right. In airspace superiority, we always had to have the F 14. The F 15. Oh gosh. if you ask Chad, TPT, all the fighter jets came out in the seventies. It was like the F 14, F 15, F 16, and the FA 18 or the F 18, that was like five, six years apart. Like that's all the cool posters in your childhood bedroom in five or six years. I can't imagine how cool that would must have been seeing all those fighter jets come off the line and you ask why, why did we have to make the change from F 15 to F 18 and F 16? Like, damn there was so many fighter jets. Well, that's happening now with signals with small drones and speed and, industry need to support that in the same way that we were doing air superiority in the seventies. Right. And I think we're just becoming aware. Right. And I'm sure in the sixties there were a ton of people developing, their thesis or their architecture or their first principles around what, air superiority looked like, whether that be speed or stealth or taking off from, an aircraft carrier or being able to land, in short runways or having, some fighters be there so that they're, made for, submarine hunting and some fighters there so that their for strike. Like there's a whole air superiority, thesis that came from the sixties and seventies era. It's the last of this day and it's kind of, now we're dealing with the F 35, they 22, N 47, they're kind of chilling out, right. But I can, it's kind of, they're gonna take men out of them, right? And that's the next generation, right? But like, I think that we're in a very fast tive cycle now. It'll probably mature and plateau in 10 years, and we need to support an industry so that we're the fastest and leading same thing we've always done. Same thing we do now too, by the way. Like, let's not forget Lady Gaga. Opening eye and apple we're pretty badass at it when it comes to it. Tesla
Luka:Gaga, lady Gaga fan, are you,
Ryan:No, I'm just saying there's no way in hell China's got Lady Gaga. There's no way. I have not heard one good Chinese song and I love all music. Right. But like, they just don't have that approach and that style and that innovation cycle that demands the best and has that competition. Right. We're the very best at that. And I
Luka:I was gonna ask you, I was gonna ask you what the drone industry should learn from Lady Gaga, but I'll skip that.
Jim:Or we could talk about what the American drone history could learn from DJI.
Ryan:Well, okay, so DGI is another topic. DGI came over here. They met up with three Dr. Right. And the CCP did something incredibly brilliant. They backed them early on. Around the same time I quit my job and said, wow, drones are the coolest thing ever. I'm gonna make my career out of this. The CCP was saying the same thing. First thing they did is they went to Intel's Real Sense platform as a chip called the Vidia X. That chip basically draws a 3D slam map right in front of it. It's an asic, it does it all on the edge, takes two cameras. some other sensors like a, I think it's like a LIDAR unit, something like that. Like a TOF camera combines it all to a 3D image. 3D map, awesome product. So, they were buying tons of them for their Phantom four, their Mavic, and they turned around and they said, Hey Ledcor, we're gonna buy you, we're gonna fold you underneath DGI. And all of a sudden they have the new Movidius two chip, which I more or less believe they just reverse engineered right from Intel. Right. So now DGI has a wonderful sensor stack for the use of the stay. It's two cameras. TOF or range sensor and they use it in every access up, down, left, right, front, back. And that allows 'em to not hit trees, right? Awesome vision sensor. And they can even make 'em on a 250 gram drone. The same sensor stack on the Mavic, same sensor stack on the matrice, same sensor stack on the DGI fly mini, whatever the hell you want. It's an awesome chip. It's made by Ledcor. The next thing they did is they went out to Broadcom and they took that LTE modem. Same thing. I think it's Ledcor chat. TPT will tell you, but it's like Ledcor making that ASIC for them. And now you have the DGI oh four unit. Amazing, crystal clear. 10 80 p video prioritizes the center of the frame with pixels. So if your video begins to deteriorate, it'll deteriorate in the edge of the frame, not in the center. It's based off of LTE principles. But literally, I could put on goggles. I have a 10 80 p image. I could fly my drone two neighborhoods out from my house. Nothing comes close to that. Nothing. It is unbelievably great of a product. DGI i's radio transmission industry is incredible. And they, CTP backed DGI and they've been cooking that for 10 plus years and they took a bunch of American Tech to do it and they fostered an incubated their drone, industry. And that parlayed in everything of all robotics. Now they're making sick accu actuators. it goes into Huawei with their phones. they have awesome planetary gear motors, their ability to use NH 52 s magnets with zero gap line them with, square, wires and, dip skaters and later state like their motors are manique. Like I, every time I get a new DGI drone, I take it apart. It's like taking apart an Apple watch. And again, they, we're just today on, in our internal slack, we're looking at the manufacturing methods, utilized by, what's it called? Unit tree. Yeah. So like that, dog's, arms are fabulous. They have poker pins or modular border board connections, rigid flex PCBs locking and polarized pugs permanent joints, epoxy for liability cloth, tape on the strain relief for cable. Bumbling harness routed cleanly and taped down for vibration control. They have carbon fiber extenders. Their motors, their style of electro mechanical design. Combining electronics and mechanical design together is the best in the world. And DGI started that. They beat out 3D to do it and they, they invested into that and that's all that happened. Right. we still have Intel, we still have Broadcom, we still have analog systems, and we have Lady Gaga. So, there's not that much land that we lost because of it. Right. We just need to fight hard and fight back, do what we do best.
Luka:Ryan, you mentioned, autonomy earlier. I'd like to maybe, pivot to that if you're okay. offline. You mentioned that, autonomy is a $5 word, and I totally agree. I think it is a fancy buzzword that gets thrown around too easily. and it has become this catchall, and it's overused, undefined. when, in my experience, when I hear people use autonomous, they can mean, a PAD lube that maintains altitude. It can be a navigation stack that follows a pre. Plane path. It can be even, a machine learning model that's making real time targeting decisions. or it can be full mission level decision making with dynamic goal setting. What we're seeing, being used in Ukraine is also far from at least my definition of autonomy, where, we might see a yellow based detector and then a simple guidance routine that lets the drone fly to those coordinates. it's automated behavior. It's not true autonomy. So I really wanna get your take on what true autonomy really means to you. how far are we from, from those, practical implementations of that, of that stack.
Ryan:That's great. Yeah. I have a lot of new investors who ask the $5 question of how do you swarm? And I think it's such a really good question. if you take a step back and you say, how do you swarm? It's a few different ingredients. The first ingredient, the ingredient that everyone likes to talk about and gets everyone so excited is the first layer of command and control. Right. And, we've seen that forever, that command and control first layer. When you have a top down mission view of all the drones flying around the battle space, you click them and combine their imagery to get the spoke decisions on the edge. Okay, well I've seen this since command and conquer. I could grab like eight infantry guys and send 'em to a base and there's a basic, like if this, then that style front end layer to it. Right? So it's a front end layer. It's like a website. I'm sure there's other things in implied there where you can build, complex conditional events. I'm sure that you could upload computer vision models. I'm sure you combine ISR devices. And have an automated style of detection of enemy. And I'm sure there's ways to plan multi-agent missions where you're using many devices to collaborate and do one thing, right. I think that's the easiest layer. I think that's software. It's front end, it's user interface, user discoverable, and probably the most commoditized part of the stack. And I think that includes everything from like, the, I don't wanna name names, but like, there's a lot of startups out there showing the swarm front end
Luka:Lady Gaga.
Ryan:yeah. Fair. Right? But I've seen the swarm front end so many times. Right. and I'm always like, great. That's great. Cool. Go ahead, build that. Let me know when you want to plug, some hardware in. I think the other hard part of it is fleets and fleets of drones that are ready to deploy and are sleeper and, are not in connection at all times with the end user. And, we saw the beginning parts of some of that stack, right? spider web There was, cellular naval devices, being held, in a sleep mode and a set of conditions, evoked them to turn on to connect to an end user. And they were manually flown into targets using, PX four, or, I think it's even a PM already pilot, mega, the front end, right? So that was, incredible because that was a, A sleeper cell, sleeper robotic cell that was deployed remotely. And that's kind of like one of the first swarms we've seen. I think the other swarm we've seen is the shot headss and they change their style and conditions, daily. Sometimes they'll fly very close to the earth, sometimes they fly very high, sometimes they foot go away from a target and then insert into the rear. Sometimes they, loiter and wait for a volume of shy headss to enter the space and attack it once. And I find that to be really fascinating. And, that's, it's pretty rudimentary stuff too, right? Some of it has cellular devices, some of it has satcoms, some of it has radios, but most of it is on the edge. Right. And we haven't really seen any, like mesh networking. they don't talk to each other. So I think in the future state, a swarm robotics is a wonderful command and control layer that can do sensor fusion. I think it's a, a radio layer, that is built on cellular and mesh and satcoms potentially. But I think most of it is how you build a sizable and replaceable fleet in the tens of thousands that can be used day in, day out.
Luka:I agree with you that the near term bottleneck appears to be in hardware, especially in comms and sensing, and oh, by the way, just having the industrial base muscle to produce, these systems at volume. but I'm also a little surprised to hear you say that the software element is trivial. because, my understanding of the hard part of real autonomy is the, this robust integration of perception, reasoning, assurance, and the hard part being the perception brittleness. the uncertainty of decision making, the communications when communications are denied. verifying or proving that systems won't do something that's, out.
Ryan:that's a conditional matrix and we've seen these front ends in front of us before. Like, I don't believe any new front end is gonna come outta nowhere to support this. Right? And these front end patterns are seen everywhere. There's a
Luka:it the, is it just a front or is there some, fundamental technology that needs to be there in order to make these agents truly independent, in context aware, in their decision making?
Ryan:I think they do, but I think that has to be pre-programmed. I think some of the first principles that go into this is there're gonna be periods of time where you're not gonna be in, in link with a swarm fleet. They're gonna have to make decisions on their own, on the edge, they're gonna have to draw conclusions.
Luka:okay. So somewhat related, but in this context of, autonomy and swarming at a system level, how do you see the balance between hierarchical architectures meaning a master slave type of architecture between a central node that's, quarterbacking, multiple agents, on one end and then on the other end having a fully distributed decentralized approach, are those complimentary layers of that same ecosystem or competing paradigms?
Ryan:I think it's probably the same fundamentals built into that. You'll probably have two different modes, but it's really conditional, right? Like we've seen this in software before where you're making a wizzy wig. What you see is what you get. or you're using a wizard, which is procedural, user interface. First you do this, then you do that. So, I tend to look at software like that as, obviously novel, but nothing like astronomically complex, you're taking a group of assets, you're setting conditionals on them, right? If you see a bad guy, if you're met with certain, behavior, then you should do this or that, And I think like if you were to go through, user discovery or user journeys, right, you would sim you'd be simply, left with a few obvious decisions we're making and supporting that front end, But it's not like you're building a crazy complex neural net or making the next version of GPT. If you're making user interface so that if certain conditions happen on this swarm, they can change and deliver a different condition, So when I take a step back from that, I'm like, okay, that's not like rocket science. That should be pretty straightforward. I've kind of seen these user interfaces before on my Apple phone, right? Or on my computer. So I believe that's commoditized, and I believe that sensor fusion is pretty straightforward too, right? Taking multiple video feeds, multiple images, timestamping them, observing those feeds with computer vision models, and then presenting conditions. And then, in turn, programming behaviors from that. Like, you can do that. In fact, yesterday, chatt PT just left, like just made an agent UI where you're basically deploying an agent to do, an open-ended project. And it's, so, it's, even Palantir, they have, Foundry that works in the same way. So we've seen software that does this. That should you be able to be solved and, follow a very standard software paradigm role. I'm not sure how it has to do with the overall battlefield management, right? Like your Jad C twos, but like how do you swarm that layer doesn't really scare me the most. think the sha head effort, right, is they've weighed heavily on industrialization. Again, buying your own Shah head and Alibaba is very easy. It'll come through in USPS mail and, they make them everywhere and they're built to be deployed, with arsenals all over the place. So like, I think the weight there goes into what are we building 50,000 of? Where are they, being deployed from, how are they kept alive for software updates and, what's that long strategy, to industrialize around that asset? the software is, I think just the stuff that people find sexy and they wanna talk about, and it's easy to bet on because it's straightforward or, you can make sense of it. But again, I think we've seen that since Command and conquer and StarCraft days, right? It's nothing like crazy. it might be half.
Jim:Ryan, congratulations around all the success around the C 100. tell us a little bit about The process of winning the contract. And also I wanna ask you a little bit about how did you develop it? I mean, you work hand in hand with the military in developing what you do. Love to know from the very beginning. how did you develop that capability?
Ryan:Yeah, so, PDW has a long history. Where we spend meaningful time with veterans and soft operators to develop our products. Today, our CTO, Dylan Ham came from the SEAL teams, our head of r and d and our head of revenue. we're also soft veterans and, our leadership team is like, 60% veterans up. So, at the end of the day, the user is a highly specialized person who has a highly specialized, you know, operational environment right. That we're trying to meet. So the C 100 was simply a drone that we saw a market availability for. We saw procurement and the need, as a way to, to generate capital. Our first drone that we made though was a FT V drone that had a picket rail and was a thermal camera, and that was done in. 20 16, 20 17. And, we knew that because we knew Dylan and we knew what he was deploying with, which was his own assets because he didn't like the switch plate at the time. It's almost 10 years ago. Right. So I think that like there's two things, like one, we know what the future's going to be and we're very excited to work on it, but there's also like, where is money being spent? And that's being spent on things like SRR and MRR for us. MRR was a much easier market. There's not a lot of competition. You have these really old primes like, FLIR and Lockheed making tons of money on old fashioned products like the INGO and the Skywriter. So, essentially for us, we're like, okay, that's a safe bet. Let's build toward that area. I think the other thing about the C 100 has a lot of, different segments in customer markets, right? So we have a bunch of them flying around POTUS looking for bad guys in golf courses, but they're also used across the tick brigades soft forces, Texas DPS. so, h it's just a huge, Tam dress and make money, right? And, I think all around it's a great product. It's a great camera drone. It can drop ignitions. it can do, sgin with a khaki mast on today we were doing cross the main precision fires, with, fighter jets out in, in Europe. We were doing cross main precision fires with the F 35 a few months ago, hitting targets, with lab munitions. And, it can serve a lot of different needs. So, we designed the C 100 backwards from a soldier's rock sack. Literally bought the biggest rock sack and then measured the propellers backwards from that. And then everything really fell according to that our payload size, the dynamics of the aircraft. And, we undersell it. That thing will fly in 55, 60 mile an hour winds, but we tell the customers 35, it can actually lift 15 pounds. But we tell the customer 10 pounds and we just work really hard to have a good price point to support the customer. we knew if we leaned in hard on a mothership, a BAA today, it was going to provide value. And, as a company we're able to focus on that product. We're not distracted. We could build into, a nice business and, get ready for all these curve balls and the speed and iteration that we see today. so that, in, in essence mothership or C 100 is, the first of our, cargo series of drones. We'll have a C 50, we'll have a C 25 that's a five pound and 25 pound variant of that asset. And we want to corner the market of motherships multi-mission style, and fight hard for that heavy set quad coter that holds a hundred thousand dollars payloads and never falls outta the sky and is reliant. I think on the other hand, it gives us room to really push hard on FPV, what we believe is the master thesis for what that product will. And our FPV is different from everything else out there. not only the way that it's manufactured, but injection molded and no harnesses and no soldering and putting it together like Legos, but it's a real combat system. The core body is just a body with no arms, no motors, no payloads. It has, seven different payload slots, four for the arms, one for the camera system, and then two for munitions and power. And depending on your mission set, you click in your stuff just as you would an M four and you go out in your mission. If the drone falls down, you could fix it. If you wanna switch EO to an ir payload, you can do that in under 10 seconds. If you wanna switch out the drone arms for a big drone arms to a small drone arms, you can do that in under five seconds. If you wanna put on a, a new radio, you switch that in, switch that out in, a couple seconds if you wanna put on a shape charge to an anti-personnel charge. That's a couple seconds. And it's also made with a high voltage fuse and uses encryption. So we're meeting the standards of safety and security to our end user. And, it's very different from using a couple of, carbon fiber plates with some 3D prints and some cots components. It's a fully integrated, vertically designed product that should compete very well against the jalin and the switch plate. and yeah, it's edge enabled too. So you can throw a computer vision model on it. It can fly itself. You can swarm with it, you can intercept with it. It's really a, our purpose-built attributable system, multirotor, right? We call it the AM 10, the attributable MULTIROTOR 10 inch. We also sell a five inch and a seven inch, and eventually, I'm sure we'll go up and down the line and, compete on that non exquisite. Throw away style, quadcopter, that can strike and loiter and and swarm and intercept. And that's what we're building for.
Jim:You just went through a long contract process, describe, for our entrepreneurs who would love to win similar size contracts, give them some lessons learned that you've took from the program,
Ryan:So just know it's gonna be a really long journey and prepare for it. And, uh, cash flow is the, is really the name of the game for us. I think the first lesson is working with veterans is a huge, important part of product development. Not just sales, but how you make your product. The leader of our product design, our CTO, who's in charge of everything from requirements engineering is, Navy Seal and, I've spent my whole career in product development, I've worked on, one of the first things I did was the BM BMW website. In 20 2006. I worked on the JCPenney Women's line. I worked for McDonald's and Kohlers and MLB and all these different, companies and making stuff for them. and this is the most different user I've ever seen by far. And they have requirements that I would never even realize. And I didn't really understand that until I started working with Dylan. And it kind of dawned on me, I was like, my gosh, this is, this can only be done through the eyes of a war fighter. And, I think that's the biggest cheat for us. it's just leveraging veterans, putting them in, high executive positions, allowing them to make big decisions. Right. and that was critical to the success of designing our quadcopter. I see a lot of quadcopters out there designed by civilians. Something I would've done a load. The, one of the first things I saw was, one of the first demos I had was with a soft group. They put the drone in a hover. They took out an AK from the back room, and they walked away from the drone with the AK in the air, and they only cared about how far away they could see a bad guy's gun. And I couldn't believe that. I was like, oh, so the whole gimbal we picked was wrong because the IR requirement wasn't there. And that goes into everything. There's so many different tiny little caveats and things like that you can learn through the eyes of an operator. So if you really wanna be an expert in the subject, find someone who's been at war, find someone who knows how important it is, and that there's life depending on the success of it. That just becomes your culture and your backbone. The second thing is cashflow. It takes a long time to get your first check. And the growth site, the growth curve is slow and short, and then very fast. So we built slowly starting in 2017. I had a handful of people who I worked with, but it was skeleton crew for a long time until we really started to meet traction. And, we had our first, manufacturing line was in the woods and Backwood, Huntsville, Alabama, where we had enough property to fly aggressively all the time and manufacture next to it. So we had a manufacturing line in this super backwoods retrofitted barn. It was sealed, it was clean, it was ac, we had electro static discharge floors, but it was in the middle of nowhere. And, we would manufacture a drone and fly, manufacture a drone and fly it and we'd have our demos there and we'd make changes on the line there. And we'd brought our engineering to sit there and it was a cohesive team for a while. Right? Getting our first boards out the door. Finding fault fast. I think when we first started selling drones, we would fly the drones for like 10 hours each before we gave them to a customer. 'cause we were so paranoid something would go wrong. And then, yeah, you gotta show up everywhere. We were at ae, we were at Vertex, we were dropping bombs way before it was cool. And, I think showing up at exercises and failing in front of a customer and showing them prototypes, as damning as that is, and as shitty as it is, they'll lose a few days in backwards, in army bases and everywhere else. Sitting and waiting for your time to, to see if you can make it or not, going out on a limb. It shows a lot of trust with the customer. And, I think that's a core part of what makes us successful. We are always out there with a customer. They see the effort and the change over time and it's a long relationship and there's a lot of trust there. You are making weapons that can determine the livelihood of somebody, and we take that really seriously. but once you're in it is by far the coolest job you can have. I can't believe I'm in this space and I get to work with these people and I came from Manhattan TV show for kids flying all over the world with colored drones and this job puts that to dust is so cool and so important and has purpose and meaning behind it. And I get to work with all these crazy cool guys, right? so it's definitely worth it. And I think we're at the foothills of a lot of growth. So if you're out there saying, can I get a drone? Can I go in there and compete against the C 100? Abso literally, it's the early days of this And, we need tons of American. entrepreneurs in this space, it is about to explode. And you can see evidence of that everywhere. I just be real, careful. 'cause it's different than the other startup. You have to be really smart with cash flow and, gotta get your hands dirty. but it is the most rad and cool industry to be in. And, it's time to disrupt and shake up things. And, these primes, those guys wearing those khakis and drinking white wine, it's time to shake them up and, show 'em what, commercial American tech can do.
Luka:That's very inspiring. Thank you for sharing that story, Ryan.
Ryan:Yeah, of course there's a room for a lot of competition. I don't see any of it. There's us, there's Neros, there's Firestorm. I really like Mock industries. Ethan's cool. Soren's cool. Dan is cool and, there's a room for a ton. Yeah. Or cup in Europe is cool. They're very cool, right? But like there's just room for tons of American growth and the customer is going to be there to support you. And I think that you just gotta read it and tweet tv. Sometimes they're not very forthcoming with announcing, like they're not gonna have a ww DC and tell you all the jobs are coming and all the PO potential. But like, sit on Trape tea, look at he, this memo, it's old school military doctrine written from, veterans who have missed their lives. And it is a very orthodox space to be in. Very orthodox. But, it's time,
Luka:Maybe, as a, final question, where would you direct innovators and entrepreneurs to go and build next? What corner of the technology or capability do you think deserves focus and attention today?
Ryan:Radios signals, um, motors, planetary gear, motors. Where's my four-legged robot that costs five grand from Amazon? Come on. I think that there's space in maritime submersibles. I think that there's, ship building to be done, fixed wings, spaceships, balloons, everything's about to change. And, it's just, glaringly obvious. And I think, there's a huge movement on Twitter and personalization and tech and deep tech and all the cool people are living in El Segundo and, I think the whole thing is open. it's just getting started.
Luka:Let's see. Not even 90 minutes was a four hour conversation. I'm sure we could go on for another 90.
Ryan:Yeah. I'm done down for another one.
Luka:Cool. we'll have you back at some point guys. Anything else that we should ask Peter or Jim?
Jim:Good. Thanks Ryan.
Ryan:yeah, of course.
Peter:This was a great discussion.
Luka:Yeah, really appreciate the time Ryan and the insightful conversations.
Ryan:Yeah, absolutely. it's a pleasure.