Adam Bry
Co-Founder & CEO, Skydio. On 2 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerscientist@adampbry ↗LinkedIn ↗skydio.com ↗
After researching drone autonomy at MIT and developing software at Google[x]'s Project Wing, Bry co-founded Skydio in 2014. Under his leadership as CEO, Skydio grew into the largest U.S. drone manufacturer, providing autonomous systems for enterprise, defense, and public safety.
2shows
5appearances
58statements
16resolved
12supported
2contradicted
75%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Adam Bry said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Bry: Skydio is the only non-Chinese company scaling autonomous drone manufacturing
“We find ourselves in a position of really being the only company in the world, certainly the only company outside of China that's capable of delivering these things reliably at scale.”
Bry: Mass AI Drone Swarms Will Outperform Multi-Billion-Dollar Legacy Weapons
“Buying legacy exquisite systems that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, some cases billions of dollars, there's a trade-off between, like, one or two of something, or, you know, 10,000, or a 100,000, or a million drones, and, you know, if you just look into…”
Bry: Autonomous AI Strikes Cause Less Collateral Damage Than Unguided Bombs
“Oftentimes, you know, your choice if you want to take out a target is dropping a 500 or 2000 pound bomb, which is going to cause widespread destruction and a lot of collateral damage. And so, an AI system that might be using autonomy to, like, a pretty intense…”
Bry: Skydio has rapidly declining capital needs unlike AI peers
“We're in the very rare and hard earned position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs.”
Bry: Skydio's biggest and fastest-growing business is civilian, not defense
“Our biggest, fastest growing businesses are in the civilian sector. They're not in defense.”
Bry: Within five years, drones will respond to 911 calls nationwide
“I think a default expectation in five years is if there's an emergency, you call nine one, a drone shows up in a few seconds, and that's going to be everywhere in the US, hopefully everywhere in the world.”
Bry: SF auto theft dropped 42% after launching Skydio drone program
“San Francisco, I think, has seen a 42% reduction in auto theft since they launched their drone program.”
Bry: Chinese government sanctioned Skydio and blocked component suppliers
“A year and a half ago, we had the great honor of being sanctioned by the Chinese government, and it was a pretty aggressive action. They announced the sanctions, and then they showed up at the suppliers that we still had in China, shut them down, stop them fro…”
Bry: Expect 'pain and carnage' for recent wave of robotics investments
“I think that we are going to see a lot of pain and carnage on the investments and expectations that are being set in this sort of like most recent round of robotics companies, because it's just the physical world does not work the way the software world works.”
Bry: Modern Military Conflict Is Becoming a Software-Writing Fight
“I think a modern conflict becomes basically like a software writing fight.”
Bry: U.S. Drone Procurement Lags Demand by Three Orders of Magnitude
“The U.S. Military, I think to their credit, has programs generally pointed in this direction but those programs are operating at the scale of thousands, like single-digit thousands. So we're literally off by, like, three orders of magnitude, I would argue, rel…”
Bry: Skydio's First Drone Generation Failed in Ukraine Battlefield Conditions
“Candidly, like, our first round of drones in Ukraine basically failed.”
Bry: U.S. Army Quadcopter Requirements Originally Omitted Electronic Warfare Capability
“Had built the system largely informed by the US Army's requirements for what they thought was important for a quadcopter in this space. And electronic warfare was just nowhere on that list.”
Bry: Skydio Software Updates Can Take Up to Two Years to Deploy
“We've had the same experience where, like, sometimes it's taken us two years to push new software into deployed systems.”
Adam Bry: Single human operators will eventually control thousands of military drones
“You can have one operator responsible for multiple drones. Five, 1000, and eventually maybe someday thousands. And I think that's a super, super powerful operating paradigm.”
Bry: Tech firms should bear R&D risk while military buys products
“I think Andrew in particular has done a nice job of trying to sort of like advocate for this new model where companies should be taking product development risk and the government should be focused on, on, on just buying the best product, which is, is difficul…”
Brie: Skydio bet on computer vision over heavy, expensive LiDAR sensors
“We did a lot of work with LiDAR, but the vehicles were super heavy, super expensive. So when we started Skydio, we made a big bet on vision because we felt like the progress that's happening in computer vision now especially with deep learning, but even in sor…”
Bry: Skydio is the only surviving drone hardware maker from the 2014 wave
“I think we're really the only surviving company that's building drone hardware from that era.”
Bry: Skydio drones respond to 911 calls in most major cities
“Skydio drones are in most major cities responding to nine one calls today at sort of small scale, like maybe part of the city, some fraction of the incidents that they're dealing with.”
Bry: Skydio drones arrive before police 70% to 80% of the time
“I think across our customer base, when people are sending drones, they're getting to the calls roughly like, 70, 80% of the time, they get there first”
Bry: 16 million Americans live within two miles of a Skydio dock
“We did the math on this, I think, sixteen million Americans now live within two miles of one of our docking stations for first response, about five percent of the country”
Bry: Western drone manufacturing is not yet as good as China's
“I think that my honest assessment is I think we're not yet at like in the West, we're leading in terms of drone manufacturing. I don't think we're as good at China as drone manufacturing yet, but I don't think there's any law of physics that says we can't get …”
Bry: The East Bay can become a hardware hub like Shenzhen
“I think, actually, the East Bay, where we are near the Bay Area, has great potential for this. Like, there's some alternate universe Where this looks like what Shenzhen looks like, and I don't think there's anything fundamentally that should stop us from getti…”
Bry: Skydio is charting a roadmap toward flying agentic AI drones
“From a product perspective, I think the course that we're charting is towards Our drones being like flying agentic AI, just like you have an, you know, an agent that you interact with on your computer or in the cloud, this thing is an agent that can move and d…”
The other half of the tape: Adam Bry's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Molly O'Shea 1Chris Lyons 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 1
Sourcery 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Adam's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOURCERYLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Skydio | 2 | 32 | 67% 6/9 | full record on Sourcery → |
| a16zLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Skydio | 3 | 26 | 86% 6/7 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |