The Exchanges

Q Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective. With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit Turing.com slash sorcery. Spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com slash sorcery. I think there are certainly some misconceptions around drones and applications, so could you just share more about what you focus on at Skydio and how it differentiates between this boom in defense?

A So drones are like, it's a very general purpose technology. I mean, it's like computers, right? Computers show up all over the place for all different kinds of things. We are super focused on flying sensor platforms, and our biggest, fastest growing businesses are in the civilian sector. They're not in defense. We work with US military. We're super proud of that work. Our products are doing amazing things there, and that business is, is great and growing. But the thing that I think is much less seen and appreciated Is this kind of critical infrastructure you work? You know, an energy utility just doing persistent inspection with drones and proactively finding issues where they can spot a defect in one of their, like, conductors and fix it before it blows up and causes an outage, or in the worst case, causes a fire. The alternative is having a person climb that pole or flying a manned helicopter down there, which is very dangerous and expensive. And so, it's, it's awesome work to get to be a part of, and, and part of the fun for me is just getting in there and learning about these industries, and the people that do this work on a daily basis are special. The one that I think is going to get more and more visible is law enforcement and public safety. Having drones respond to nine one one calls flying out of docks. That's happening. Skydio drones are in most major cities respondin…

AI assessment note: “our biggest, fastest growing businesses are in the civilian sector. They're not in defense.”

Q Could you share how the product has expanded over time and their different use cases?

A So for the first 10 years of the company, we were basically solely focused on trying to build a really good medium-sized quadcopter, which is the most versatile kind of workhorse drone, and then for the last six, seven years, focused on doing that in the context of a dock, so it can fly remotely and autonomously. So we've been very narrow for most of the life of the company, but we're now at a point where that product is really working at scale, X-Ten and dock for X-Ten. And the core technology that sits behind it has gotten very mature. All the hardware, the cameras, the compute, the sensors, all the low-level firmware to run these things, then the core autonomy system that has, at this point, been exposed and built on hundreds of thousands, millions of flights, and all the, the little learnings that go into that. So now we're in a position to use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases, and that's where the indoor drone comes into place, because a lot of Dangerous work happens indoors. It's where the fixed wing drone that can cover much longer ranges comes into play. And it's a very exciting, fun time to basically like take these mature technology building blocks and be able to pretty quickly assemble them into a fundamentally new capability. And then we're also in the great position that our customers are asking us for these things. Like, you…

AI assessment note: “use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases”

Q and get back to building. Visit deel.com slash sorcery. That's deel.com slash s-o-u-r-c-e-r-y. Enterprise AI runs on Merge, the AI infra platform for integrations, agent tooling, and model orchestration, so your teams ship product, not plumbing. Mistral, Dropbox, and Drada already trust Merge in production. Start building at merge.dev. Your biggest competitor is China. So could you talk about how that's evolved with DJI, and what is that like, honestly?

A Yeah, so we have, we have the great joy, and we've had it for the last 12 years, of being the U.S. underdog against the best of Chinese industry, early state-sponsored Chinese industry. It's great. You know, I, I think, I think competition is generally great. It pushes us to be better. In the case of DJI, we have some interesting history. So we, we actually met them in 2014, so we were a seed stage company. We had, had just, ah, basically gotten started, and they found out about us and, and basically pretty quickly became interested in, in acquiring the company. And through that process, we met their leadership. We visited China, Shenzhen, ultimately decided not to do it. The main reason we decided not to do it was because we felt like they didn't really understand the importance of autonomy and how much that was going to change who could use drones and how they could use them. We felt like it was really important. And, you know, we believed in our ability to execute against it. So our strategy has, has not been to try to kind of like Copy what the Chinese drone companies are doing. I mean, DJI is incredibly impressive from a technology standpoint, especially on the hardware, but we've really focused on building these end to end solution capable solutions that use autonomy and flying robots to solve problems, uh, that, that customers couldn't get any other way. I mean, I think …

AI assessment note: “In the case of DJI, we have some interesting history. So we, we actually met them in 2014”

Q How is the headquarters set up? We're going to go through a couple of different things today. What's the flow?

A Yeah, so I wanted to start here because this is the end result. Making all this stuff work the way that it is right now is super hard, and that's what the vast majority of the company is focused on, is just making these things work, uh, in a reliable way. Uh, we will, uh, give you a feel for what it's like to actually fly one of these things remotely. We'll look at some of the new vehicles we're developing, which I'm super excited about. Uh, we'll show you kind of the, like, ultimate stress testing rigs, That we use to put these things through the paces. Uh, and then I'm excited to talk about, you know, the impact that this is already having today with customers, because I think because the industries we serve are a little bit out of sight, you know, don't, people don't think a lot about what is Caltrans doing to keep the road safe, or what is PG&E doing to inspect their infrastructure. Um, people don't really understand how deployed and impactful these things already are, so I'm excited to talk about that.

AI assessment note: “We'll look at some of the new vehicles we're developing, which I'm super excited about.”

Q What do you think your biggest lessons have been as a leader? There's a lot of hype going on, and so, like, how do you discern the fact from the fiction, and then just keep a straight level head?

A I think one of the big early lessons for me, uh, was the importance of humility as a leader. I think, you know, your job isn't to have all the answers. Your job is just to help the team, the company get to the best answers. And there's lots of different ways you can do that in these sort of like hype moments when you're going up the, like the hype cycle curve. I think it's really important to just keep people focused and grounded in the substance of what we're doing. And the most important thing at the end of the day is having world leading products and technology that really work the customer The way our customers need them to, and then delivering them to our customers and making them fully succeed and realize the full potential of what the products and tech can do. We just spend a lot of time thinking and talking about that and try to spend as little time as possible getting distracted by anything else that might be happening. I mean, one of the, I didn't invent this, but one of the frameworks I think about is like, get rich slowly. Like, I think that enduring value and enduring impact is built on a lot of patience and a lot of hard work and It's easy to lose sight of that, um, but ultimately, like, the signal trumps the noise. Uh, it always does. You know, it might take a year, it might take a decade, um, but the, the real substance is ultimately what matters.

AI assessment note: “one of the big early lessons for me, uh, was the importance of humility”

Q I want to talk about performance a bit. So one of Sorcery's sponsors is Brex, and they're all about spending smarter and moving faster. The performance, Burpicar. So on the topic of performance, how are you measuring out the next milestones? What metrics are you using to measure success?

A We define our success in terms of our customer success. And you have to think on long timescales here and different timescales. Like my, uh, weekly executive staff meeting starts with our head of customer success. Giving us a rundown of what's happening in the field with customers, good, bad, and ugly. You know, if the customer had a great win, we'll talk about that, but we'll spend a lot more time talking about the things that are struggling, they're not working as well, whatever the case may be, whether it's technical or some other issue that we might be able to deal with. So everything is kind of downstream from that. I am not big on these, like, sort of, like, super granular cascading OKRs through the whole organization. I'm very big on coming up with, like, targets that we're aiming at. I sort of think of these things as, like, you know, We think that this product for this market has enormous opportunity, organizing really small teams around them. You want the team to be as small as it possibly can be, and in the AGI you can do pretty amazing things with pretty small teams, and then giving that team the authority and autonomy to operate however is going to be most effective for them. So, you know, our, our teams are setting very granular goals, oftentimes of like this week, this day, this hour, here's what we're trying to accomplish. Uh, but they're, they're doing so kind …

AI assessment note: “We define our success in terms of our customer success.”