Future of flying? JetZero CEO takes on Airbus and Boeing with jet that aims to cut emissions in half

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1:08Welcome. I'm Michelle To, a journalist most recently with CNN, and this is Behind the Business, a show about the people behind top consumer brands, category creators, and emerging disruptors, and how they push through to make the most of both work and life each day. Today's guest is a visionary leader at the forefront of reshaping how we fly. Tom O 'Leary is the co-founder and CEO of Jet Zero, the startup behind the Z4, a new aircraft that seeks to use up to 50 % less fuel than today's commercial jets. This means it could in turn cut fuel burn and emissions in half, making it cheaper and greener for airlines to operate.

1:49Unlike your typical tube in the sky, the Z4 is shaped like a manta ray. And unlike anything currently in service, it's being called the widest body commercial plane to take to the skies this decade. The company is backed by the U.S. Air Force and airlines like United and Delta. It was a pinch me moment. Before Jet Zero, Tom held leadership roles at Tesla, as well as electric aviation startup Beta Technologies. You were there like right before Elon took over. Was there anything from seeing how he operated Tesla that really gave you inspiration? What he's best in the world at has been taking really big structural problems in big, hard-to-disrupt industries and just breaking it down to first principles.

2:34What is the way we're going to get after this problem? There's just an amazing unlock there that really every entrepreneur, every investor is looking for. Tom, welcome to the program. Thank you so much. Great to be here with you. So let's start with some context. Can you walk us through your background, where you grew up, and what shaped your ambitions early on? Oh, great. Well, I grew up in the Northeast. I was born in Connecticut and lived in Boston, Rhode Island, basically everywhere in New England. What shaped my sort of early development, I think, as a person was being not a great student, but very attentive.

3:13So I paid a lot of attention in class, but I didn't read a lot of books. People know that as ADHD. which is not uncommon for a lot of people who get into startup business, right? It's that like drive, go hard, go fast. But sports really. So what engaged me was just that live action and played pretty much every sport you can think of. That was really a lot of my upbringing and even my early career. Oh, wow. And growing up, did you always have that itch to do something different, something entrepreneurial? Yeah, absolutely. was thinking about just products of the future, was always thinking about future, future, future.

3:56And I think that's pretty, it's sort of a Gen X thing, right? Because we were in this amazing time, right? Where we were sort of pre-technology, but coming of age with the technology. I find it to be not unique, but very common amongst peers. I know a lot of people who are in this sort of expansive, right? You know, I was born right when we were landing on the moon and then off we go, right? Everything has changed in this lifetime that I've lived. And it's amazing to think about what the future will bring even now. Wow. So that's what you were focused on as you were growing up. You were already thinking, what will the world look like, you know, 20, 30 years from now?

4:37Absolutely. It's funny, you know, like one of early memories was just thinking about the environment. You know, that was something that from an early age, all the way through my college studies and into my professional career, I remember writing a letter to President Jimmy Carter at the time, suggesting that he should urge people to ride their bike more, because I rode my bike a lot and I thought it was great. It was kind of a naive, like, why don't people ride their bike to work more? Not really a cultural fit in the United States, But I got a response that he sent me the transportation policy.

5:13I thought that was an interesting response to a nine year old boy. But sure. Go ahead. Well, I love that. So already thinking about ways you can get around in a more sustainable way. I think I like see the inklings of, you know, obviously where you are now back then already. Yeah. And very civically engaged, it sounds like. That's really fascinating. Well, Tom, looking at your resume, you've had quite a range of experiences right across industries. before obviously getting to where you are today. Before aviation, as I noted, you worked at both Tesla, which at the time was a new market entrant.

5:47That's right. And Ford, which of course was an incumbent. What aspects from these experiences kind of influenced you the most in the way that you've now built your company? Yeah, so they were all sort of cutting edge learning experiences. When I went to Ford, it was to work on the internet. And at that time, the dealer locator was the internet for Ford. It was sort of like you go to Ford.com and you type in your zip code and you get a list of dealers and their fax numbers. That was early, early days, late 90s. And so it was breaking new ground. And I worked for eBay Motors after that. And that, again, was new ground.

6:22This was online auctions. I was responsible for that. How do we put car dealers onto this platform where people are buying or selling? It's this live, real-time, virtual marketplace. With Tesla, it was also about how do we do something new, right? It's groundbreaking. How do you go into the market with this new product and really focus on go-to-market strategy? How do you go direct to the consumer, set up your own stores, your own sales process, direct through the website as opposed to going through the traditional retail network? That's what I find engaging and the thing, right? How do you go to market with something that's in a whole new space, right?

7:05You're trailblazing. It's fun. It's engaging. And that's really what's been a consistent thing throughout. Yeah. Constantly seeking reinvention, whether it's with a bona fide startup or a player that's been around for ages. Yeah, for sure. And that was certainly the case with Ford. We covered a lot of ground in a very short period of time, basically rolled out the Internet to Ford corporate and through the dealer network. It was great. But yeah, with the Tesla program, it's been a huge success, right? I mean, what Tesla has been able to do selling direct to the consumer is just a whole new way.

7:39That was amazing. Yeah, absolutely. You were there through late 2008, right before Elon took over. He took over right as you were leaving, I think, like fully a CEO. Is that right? Yeah, he was involved from the beginning. He was there at the beginning. Investor, board member, basically helping that company formulate. But he wasn't CEO until that period. And that was a really tough period, if you remember, because we went through the financial crisis. And then it was how to keep not just Tesla, but Tesla and SpaceX for him at that time. That was a critical piece. From seeing how he operated Tesla and kind of interacted with Tesla, that really gave you inspiration.

8:24For sure. I mean, what he's best in the world at and over the past couple decades has been taking really big structural problems in big, hard to disrupt industries and just breaking it down to first principles. What is the way we're going to get after this problem? Let's go back to first principle physics. If you go to Jet Zero, like why did we believe that this was a challenge accepted? You know, right? Why did we go after this? is because we felt that its root in first principles physics was undeniable. There's just an amazing unlock there that really every entrepreneur, every investor is looking for, well, how are you going to unlock this disruption?

9:08If you're tying all the way back to the basic, the absolute first principles in physics, then that's your best starting point. And that's really what he has done in each of his businesses that he's got involved in. Go back to the basics. Yeah. Really interesting. It's also fascinating to hear about how you describe yourself as not the best student, because I think that oftentimes, by the way, I was the same. I was like a decidedly average student, but I was always like much better in the workplace and just like learning by doing. Did you feel you were kind of the same? Yeah, learning by doing, engaging.

9:41I really, what I was there in school to do was to learn how to learn because you're, and I found that as an adult, is that you're really just constantly learning new things. And so you're learning how to learn. Being a student was an interesting thing. I think to be an engineer or a doctor are these things where you really have to get straight A's all the way through. I had a different path. You know, I would get A's, but it would sort of be on accident, you know, when things were, they just clicked. And so, but by and large, it was more just like paying attention. My first job actually out of college was as a school teacher and a coach.

10:16I learned more from that experience than a lot of other things I did professionally. being a coach above all, but being a teacher was really more of like, you know, learning something to take a test is one thing, but learning something to communicate it and impart wisdom, experience, knowledge, know-how to another person, that's a whole different skill. And once you learn that, it accentuates your ability to absorb new information. Right. And what kind of teacher, what kind of coach? Well, everything from fourth grade students all the way up through high school, When I was in college, it was wild because when I was doing an environmental studies degree, that was in political science.

10:57But I minored in environmental studies before there was such a thing, right? I sort of cobbled it together by taking geology and geography and different classes that became environmental studies. But I would end up giving lectures at the university level because there was so much interest in the topics that we were researching. It really just worked out that way. So really even up at the college level. And that was the most engaging thing. that's what keeps you on your toes. It wasn't, you know, studying for the test. It was how do you study to prepare to explain to people what you've been working on?

11:30Do you take that, the principles that you learned there from your time in teaching as a coach to your approach to corporate leadership now? Coaching, absolutely, positively. I think the place where it comes out the most for me is just in people, people often will ask about like, okay, where are you at with management? How do you lead to start up. And those are the two key words, right? It's management or leadership. What you're looking for in a startup situation is you're looking for a team of leaders. So it's different, like in football, for example, when you're coaching football, the coach is, you know, every play effectively is a timeout where the coach puts in a new play.

12:10In basketball, you're constantly coaching in, you're running an offense. It may not look to, if you're not a basketball aficionado, you may not realize that every time down the court, the offense is running a pattern play. In high school where I coached, it's every single play, every inbounds pass, it's all pattern play. Soccer though, I think is the best analogy because there are no timeouts. There's no stoppages, you know, stoppages of play where the coach has the opportunity to go, okay, everybody set pieces, fine. That's the exception. But what I learned coaching soccer is you as a coach, you have to have your game plan understood.

12:47We have a system of principles. And then each player is challenged to be a leader on the field. You don't get to manage them. What you need is 11 leaders who all know the game plan and who are all executing and who are all actually also interacting and adapting. So having coached is a big thing because there's about management of the players. It's also about strategy, but it really gets into like what you're doing in a startup ultimately is building a team and the best teams are the ones that you're not micromanaging they're the ones who look at their individual segment of the business as if they own that that piece right as if they're you know they're approaching it the way you would you would approach that situation so can one expect a pep talk or a lot of hoorah when it comes to sitting down with you at jet zero actually no i i wasn't that type of coach in sports and i'm not that type of leader here at Jet Zero or in other places.

13:46Of course, we have our moments where we get together, but it's more the camaraderie. We did this as opposed to now the coach is going to do the victory speech. We've had some great victories. We just designed an airplane. So we have a four-year program to build a full-scale demonstrator. That's what the Air Force is involved in. That's what NASA is involved in now, going back even further. But it was two years to design and two years to build. So happily, the team executed that design, read it out to the Air Force and NASA in our CDR, Critical Design Review. We executed that, and it's really more of the team coming together and all feeling good about the sense of accomplishment as opposed to big hoorahs.

14:32I'm sure those will spontaneously erupt at various points in the business as we achieve milestones. No, exactly. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel, maybe. Or white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom-scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto.

15:07Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for a therapist to help me with that. My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot. Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life-changing.

15:43Discover what BetterHelp Online Therapy can do for you. Visit BetterHelp.com today. Well, more on that later. But, you know, this takes us to jet zero, right? Yeah. Before we dive in, Tom, can we break down some of the more technical terms for viewers that might not be familiar? Sure, sure. Just to start off, what exactly is a blended wing body design and how does it differ from the traditional design? Yeah, so a blended wing body aircraft is generated from an all wing design. So you think of all wing aircrafts, it goes back to people's frame of reference would be the stealth bomber, right? The B-2 spirit that Northrop produced late 80s, early 90s is where we first started to see these in use.

16:27And that was actually the genesis of the blended wing body, also an all wing design. So that just means lift across the entire wingspan. Effectively, the entire plane is wing. So that's really what it means. Lift across the entire wingspan in an all wing design. What's different between a B2, that's a flying wing versus because there's really no fuselage. It's just wing. And then on the other side, we have a fuselage that's meant to hold around 250 passengers. So you have to blend that fuselage into the wing. And I know that you've mentioned that this plane that you're developing, it's intended to serve what you guys call the middle of the market, correct?

17:09Yeah. Tell us what that is again. Yeah. So interesting thing that's even simpler than physics is geometry. The interesting thing about the airplane market, it's kind of staggering to think about. And it's one of the reasons why I was so excited to get into this particular market with this particular technology. There are no planes from 200 to 250 passengers in the market today being sold. This is a staggering thing. Can you imagine if there were no four passenger cars? We've got one, two, and three, and we've got six and seven, but we've got five, six, and seven, we've got no four passenger cars.

17:41If somebody then invented a four passenger car, you'd say, wow, that's in the middle of seat class. You're probably going to do pretty well with that. That's really what's happening here. And when I say, okay, so you have to go apples to apples, right? You're talking about three class. Like what you typically fly on United across country would be a three class, first class, a premium economy coach class. So if you normalize for that, the single aisles tap out at about 200 passengers. The wide bodies start at about 250 passengers. And so in that gap, you know, there's single aisles and twin aisles, but there's no such thing as an aisle and a half aircraft.

18:21With this design, with a wider, shorter and wider, you can specifically design a plane to hit that middle of the market more efficiently. And it's something that the airlines are really thirsty for. Yeah. And I've seen that these are basically usually, you know, things like long transcontinental flights, right? Like, let's say like L.A. to New York, would that be like an example of a route or like Boston to Dublin or something like that, where it's maybe too long for a narrow body, but doesn't justify the wide body jets. Doesn't justify or it's just way more efficient to fly with this super aerodynamic shape.

19:00So we can get up to 50 percent based on on multiple factors. Right. So lift, weight, drag and thrust. Those are the four forces of flight. So we speak to all of them. It's a lifting body. It's lower weight, all composite aircraft. It has lower drag and it requires less thrust, which actually a smaller engine means also lower weight and lower drag. So there's kind of a virtuous cycle there. So that's inherently more efficient than a wide body flying a cross-country flight, for example, which both wide bodies and narrow bodies can fly a cross-country flight. But we can fit more passengers than the narrow body and we can do it more efficiently than the wide body.

19:43That's the middle market. So you're absolutely right. It goes effectively from a cross-country flight, a North Atlantic flight, you know, a Boston to Dublin for sure. that's where the sweet spot for this aircraft, because middle of the market doesn't just mean passengers. It also has the connotation of range. Right, exactly. So let's talk about the origin of the business. What exact problem did you and your co-founder, Mark Page, see that led you to the founding of the company in 2020? And how did you even go about getting started? Interesting. So I was working with an electric aircraft company called Beta Technologies.

20:22and we had hired Mark and his design firm, which was called Design, D-Z-Y-N-E. We had hired him to design that aircraft. And so this was a couple of years before we founded Jet Zero. So in his portfolio, I had noticed this, wow, that plane is amazing. It looks like the future. What is that? Oh, that's my blended wing body design. And so I asked him about it and I got really curious And I really started to dive into the history of it, what it meant, what it could offer. And that 30 % aerodynamic efficiency number really shot out to me because I was fairly new to the business. I've been in aerospace for about 10 years.

21:02So at that point, I was only a few years in having worked previously in automotive and software. At that point, I'm just a sponge. And I'm noticing that the airlines, they come out and you're sponging up all this information and you're starting to see the trends in real time. you notice they are scratching and clawing to get 1 % fuel burn benefit. And they're also looking for a mid-market solution. So I went to Mark and I said, hey, you're saying 30%. And over here, I'm seeing anywhere from 1 % to 3 % is worth an investment of millions and millions of dollars on the part of the airlines. Why aren't you taking this to market?

21:40And I kept pushing him. And eventually he came back to me and said, well, I'm on the engineering side. I've never built a business. You're the one who's been with all these businesses that have grown. Beta has become a really successful company. Before that, Tesla and some others that I had worked with. And he said, how do you do it? Which was really your question. Like, how did this happen? And my answer to him was simple. You just do it. And he's like, I know, but what does that mean? And I said, that's the only explanation there is. Like startups of this nature do not come by sitting down, in my opinion anyway, and I haven't seen it this way, by sitting down and putting your MBA hat on and writing this 400-page business plan.

22:21It starts by looking at the basic building blocks of how you do something and just attacking them. You just go after the most important things that allow you to build a story that you can take to really all the people that it's going to take because something, for example, with Jet Zero that's this big to go after building big aircraft, you really have to build a broad coalition. No, absolutely. So what, you guys had a conversation and then it was probably many conversations. And then it was kind of off to the races, right? Like you decided to leave your job and go off with him and start your own venture.

22:57That's essentially what happened. Yeah, exactly. And the way it worked for me, he actually showed me a picture of this. He came over to my house and said, how do you do this? So I thought of all the different things that had to be done. I put each one of them on a post-it note, colorized them, and then I put them on the wall. And so when he came over, he was like, what is this? He's all these post-it notes all over the wall. Kind of mad scientist vibes. Exactly. And he was like, these are the things that we would have to do. Which of these things seems impossible once you break it down to a thing on a post-it note.

23:32And of course, anything looks possible if you can break it down to a thing on a post-it note. So I think that gave him the confidence of saying like, okay, I don't know how to build a business, but clearly you know what the constituent parts of this thing are. And each of them looks discreet and doable. We just have to attack them one by one. It's really actually more just about belief. You have to believe that something's worth doing and you have to know that you don't know everything about it. You understand the destination and you commit yourself to the journey, even though you don't know what the road is going to be like between the starting point and the destination.

24:07That's okay. Just take the plunge. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people want that certainty. In aerospace, it's called ATP, authority to proceed. So that's what would normally happen in a big business and a big aerospace business is you would go in and present your whole plan of how you're going to, and then they would give you authority. And that basically means we're backing this thing from the beginning until you're successful. Well, it's funny you talk about belief because I was going to ask, you know, we've heard so much about the future of flying in recent years, right? As a reporter, I've previously covered flying taxis, autonomous passenger drones, China's effort to build the C919, its first large homegrown passenger plane.

24:47I think the challenge is that sometimes people can feel like this is literally a pie in the sky, right? In this specific case, how did you convince folks to get on board? Did you have to grapple with that kind of skepticism? Well, in our case, it's a piece of pie in the sky, right? Everyone likes to talk about how it's a triangle-shaped plane. So not the whole pie, just a piece. A slice. Yeah, just a slice of pie. The beauty of this is people like pie in the sky. They want you to go after the future that we all want to live in. And we think of ourselves simply as humble servants of a future that everybody wants.

25:21Who doesn't want to fly on a more efficient, less polluting, less noise, more comfortable, more commodious, more future-oriented plane with better tech? Everybody wants that. Without planes, what would our modern world be? It would be wholly different. I think people want that, but they also want believability, right? They want the believability of, okay, you're not just promising us flying cars. You're promising us something that we're going to see in our lifetime, that we're going to feel comfortable and safe about, that's not going to create this not in my backyard thing. This really fits all that, right?

25:58Because we have airport infrastructure, we have FAA guidelines that are already existing that we can design to. And when people see the reality of what we're doing, the pragmatism of what we're doing, that's where the belief connects to the reality, the pragmatic reality. And that's where I think people helped us grow a really broad coalition to back the business. No, absolutely. I want to ask you more about that in a second. But to your point earlier, you decided to take on, you know, one of the toughest industries there is, right? It's one of the most regulated industries that exists. What gave you confidence that you'd be able to overcome inherent challenges, like extremely slow innovation cycles compared to, let's say, software, right?