Jonathan Downey

Founder & CEO, Airware · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

Jonathan Downey is the Founder and CEO of Airware, an aerial data startup using drones. He is also a General Partner at the Commercial Drone Fund.

9statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 3.67/5average certainty → 1.78/5average debate potential → 4.5/5argument clarity · the sources → 3said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 2 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 2 assertions · 3 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Jonathan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
DJI dominates drone hardware manufacturing through vertical integration in China
“One is actually building the drones, and this is a space that's dominated by players like DJI, which are vertically integrated in China, really focused on being operationally excellent when it comes to manufacturing, and really focused on kind of rapidly itera…”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 9:17 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.5 / 5 directness 4.8 · coherence 4.9 · precision 4.3 · compression 3.8

answered every one of 19 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

211 words/min while actually speaking · 11.8 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,566 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Jonathan Downey said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Jonathan Downey says consumer drone innovation enables the commercial drone market
“I think we've seen a ton of innovation actually come from the consumer space, which is proving to be an incredible enabler for the commercial market, because at this point, the consumer drones, which, you know, started as fun flying toys under our Christmas tr…”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 7:54 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware
Assertion Supported
DJI dominates drone hardware manufacturing through vertical integration in China
“One is actually building the drones, and this is a space that's dominated by players like DJI, which are vertically integrated in China, really focused on being operationally excellent when it comes to manufacturing, and really focused on kind of rapidly itera…”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 9:17 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware
Insight
Jonathan Downey argues enterprise drone software must be as boring as possible
“This needs to be as boring as it possibly can be. You want your team member to be able to show up with a drone, do as little as possible, have that drone just fly the pattern that's required to collect the aerial data, and then transform that data and deliver …”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 11:44 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Large enterprise CIOs now evaluate drone technology like standard enterprise IT
“Large enterprises are making kind of enterprise-wide decisions, you know, in the CIO's office about adopting, evaluating, and implementing this technology just as they would a lot of other enterprise IT.”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 14:23 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2022
Jonathan Downey predicts the FAA will enable beyond visual line of sight
“Today from the FAA you're not able to fly drones beyond a visual observer's ability to see the drone, but that is going to be changing, and the FAA is going to come out with rules enabling you to do that, and there is a number of key technologies that are goin…”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 16:51 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware
Insight
Enterprises prefer partnering with aerial data experts over developing in-house technology
“I would say most companies, while they may begin thinking this is core to their business in terms of developing some of the drone technology, really realize this is context for them, and it's best for them to partner with a company who really brings that aeria…”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 18:06 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Manual roof and tower inspections will seem archaic within five years
“I think in five years, companies are going to look back on the way things are being done today as part of their business and think about how archaic it is. People climbing up on towers, climbing up on rooftops, waiting days and weeks sometimes for accurate inf…”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 23:25 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware
Disclosure
Andreessen Horowitz made the commercial drone space's first $10 million investment
“And that led to the first ten million dollar investment into the drone space with Andreessen Horowitz.”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 6:20 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware
Disclosure
Early commercial drone startups attempted to build hardware and software simultaneously
“A couple of years ago, it was a extremely early market, and so almost every company in the space was doing a little bit of everything. Some amount of kind of building hardware and building drones and software and data and analysis and a lot of manual work and …”
Jonathan Downey May 19, 2017 ▶ 8:50 20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As Possible with Jonathan Downey, Founder & CEO @ Airware

The other half of the tape: Jonathan Downey's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 2 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 3

Every mention by year

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: The Future Business Model For Drones & Why Enterprise Drones Need To Be As Boring As May 19, 2017 17m
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