The Boy Wonder Of India’s New Tech Scene - EP 95 Naman Pushp

0:00Naman Pushp: I mean, it's nuts to sort of be like, I'm 18, I'm going to design aircraft better than anyone has done before. Our goal is really to make aerial transports that are cheaper, faster, and more versatile than 80 % of the entire logistics market and 90 % of the human transportation market. Still built that aircraft, it got like a quarter second of airtime. To quote Toy Story, we were not flying, we were falling with style. So at 16, I ended up moving out. A lot of people ask like, oh, how did you convince them to like let you move out? And I'm like, it was their idea. What we've managed to do is we're lifting five kilos of payload with a three kilo aircraft.

0:35That's when, you know, it sort of hits. They're like, oh, shit, you know, this is an actual company now. I also don't think that peak democracy is necessarily the best way to run a country.

0:46Naman Pushp: This week's guest is part of a revolution. His name is Naman Pushp. He is the founder and CEO of a startup called Airbound. They are based in India, and they are trying to make the world's lightest, most efficient aircraft for the moment for delivering goods. Basically, deliveries like you might see Amazon and DoorDash and Zipline trying to do today. And then he thinks he can build a whole new class of aircraft for carrying people one day in the future. I say he's part of a revolution because Naaman is one of these kids. I just got back from a trip to India where there are a ton of 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds building a new class, a new, far more ambitious class of startups in India than we've seen before.

1:40Naman Pushp: They're doing hardware. They're doing very difficult technology. They're not trying to do internet startups or mobile apps or software and services. They're really getting into it. Naman is one of the leading examples. Airbound has raised millions of dollars. They've already built one generation of aircraft in a second. The first is so light that I could pick it up with a couple of fingers. The larger second generation, I could hold the whole thing in my hand and it's able to deliver about 10 pounds of goods through the air. And we saw them fly. It was pretty amazing. They're very quiet. They can hover.

2:19Naman Pushp: They kind of take off vertically and then fly like a plane. They can hover. Super impressed by the factory that I saw. This dude strikes me as quite possibly the real deal. It had early Peter Beck from Rocket Lab vibes for me, at least. And so there's a lot of people now like Nauman that want to stay in India, build their startups, raise money and try to do things differently and dramatically use use some of India's limitations things like traffic as the impetus to to invent around them get up in the air and move things around all these kids are super into carbon fiber we're gonna have tons of podcast episodes coming with some of these entrepreneurs we are going to have videos on our main video YouTube channel we We'll have one on Airbound shortly, which you should check out.

3:12Please, as always, like, subscribe, leave a review, tell people about the show.

3:18Naman Pushp: It would be an immense help. I think you're going to love this chat. He's thoughtful. He's brimming with confidence and enthusiasm. And he has ideas about how ambitious India can be in the future. I am Ashley Vance. This is Core Memory. Here we go.

3:51Naman Pushp: This is very exciting for me. We, well, I do this podcast from Playground, which is where we first met like seven or eight months ago, I think. I think close to a year ago, yeah. Something like that. and you immediately struck me as a super bright interesting person and and then just i don't know when this podcast will air but two weeks ago basically i went to visit you and airbound in india in begalore yeah yeah and uh and so we got to people will have video that comes out people will get to see the aircraft flying both generations and and a bit more on the factory and how these all get built and and um so it'll be it'll be a cool episode that was it was a amazing day i people won't get to see it on this podcast but they will see it in the videos we had aircraft everywhere i think we put up like 26 if i remember 28 oh yeah so 26 i think first gen and yeah two of the second gen i was surrounded and it was glorious and um they were super quiet i got to pick them up they are indeed super light and um and it was it was awesome i i um i was just interviewing somebody else shruti who works at emergent ventures who funded you guys and i i was just i was giving her like the report card from the field um you know i was i was really impressed by what you guys have done your factory um i've been to so many aerospace oh i've just been to so many factories and there is like a, there's a certain aesthetic, I guess, that I noticed sometimes just with people who take stuff seriously.

5:37Naman Pushp: It was all, it was like super well organized. It was clean. You could tell people were taking their jobs seriously. You know, it reminded me a little bit of like Rocket Lab and Peter Beck who takes these things very seriously. So anyway, I was impressed.

5:55Naman Pushp: let's let's get into your background a bit because it's it's kind of it's fascinating or you know what i so i i i just gave my two cents on like describing it around but do you want to you want to describe it first just so people have a feel for the way you're thinking about the company and then and then we'll go back maybe to like how it got started yeah yeah so i mean i think around what we're doing has evolved a lot over time. But I think where we are today, we deeply believe in this idea of what I would call a universal transport, right? And it's a fact that anything that we use for movement is generally evaluated on sort of three axes, your cost, speed, and versatility, right?

6:42Cost and speed are obvious. Versatility is sort of how easily can I get from point A to point B without needing to use any other transport. So for instance, trains, not very versatile. And the other is, you know, how much payload do I need for this to make sense, right? Trucks and buses, not very versatile. Cars and scooters, very versatile. And we believe that if you want to, you know, displace a form of transport, if you are cheaper, faster, and more versatile, you are pretty much guaranteed to win in that market. So our goal is really to make, you know, aerial transports, right, that are cheaper, faster, and more versatile than 80 % of the entire logistics market and 90 % of the human transportation market.

7:31Naman Pushp: And so it's this massive goal, and you talk about it so confidently. I love it. But, you know, so you guys have made this huge bet on carbon fiber. I mean, that's really one place where you start. And it's when we were talking in India. I mean, correct me if I'm, like, mischaracterizing this. But it's sort of obviously we use carbon fiber in aircraft today. There's rockets made of carbon fiber in Boeing or Airbus. as I understand it, they've been replacing bits and pieces of their aircraft over time with carbon fiber. It's very light. It's very strong, but obviously didn't go in to making the plane with carbon fiber in mind.

8:19Naman Pushp: This is like something that's come on over time. And when I was talking to you, it just seemed like you seem to be saying, if you knew about carbon fiber from the very beginning and you were going to go all in, you would design your aircraft differently. And we're starting from that thesis and that first principles approach. You're looking at me like, maybe I'm getting, getting, getting this wrong. But so that was, that was a bit of my impression of talking to you is, is, um, people, even though carbon fiber has been around for a long time, it has a reputation of being expensive. It was a little bit harder to make for a while.

8:57Naman Pushp: and you felt like we'd reached a point with it where if you really took it seriously, you would do things differently. Yeah. So I was right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you're definitely right. I think I've also just like found some ways to make this like a bit more intuitive and easy to understand. Yeah. I think one of the things that like people often don't realize, but it's actually really obvious once you start thinking about it is that the way we design anything right in this world is a function of our manufacturing limitations right if you look at the mic that you have the sort of you know metallic mesh that you have there you wouldn't see a mesh like that made out of any other material because it is uniquely easy to manufacture a shape like that out of metal and the best engineers whether they do this consciously or subconsciously they're always designing with the production limitations of a material in mind.

9:55Now the problem when you move across material classes is if you are designing based on metal intuition and you are designing for carbon fiber, then you are somewhat limited to the overlap of parts that can be made out of metal and can be made out of carbon fiber. And we feel like that overlap is like there's not a lot of great stuff in that overlap, right? Similar to how there's not a lot of great stuff that can be made in the same way out of wood and metal. And we realized that actually the best parts you can make out of carbon fiber would be impossible to manufacture if you try to make them out of metal.

10:31So it's a lot of both breaking the intuitions we have around how we make things around metal and also just about actually pushing the frontier and building new manufacturing processes for designs that we've known for a long time are impossible to make out of the old era of materials but suddenly become possible with a new era of materials.

10:52Naman Pushp: And I think one way also to explain this, maybe for people, well, I don't know, this is totally fair, but my sense was you don't love it if people call your vehicles drones. You prefer aircraft. And that's because, and I want to describe it to people who haven't seen them. I mean, they're not like you're, they're not a drone. Like most people think of a drone like a DJI. It's not this quadcopter thing with four propellers. You guys have two. I mean, it looks more like an aircraft. It looks, God, this shape is kind of unique. It's hard to describe. I mean, it's sort of got this curved, fatter middle bit than with the wings on the side and then just two propellers.

11:34Naman Pushp: And obviously there's a spot for the batteries and the flight controller and some of the avionics. But I mean, it's quite simplified. The first generation, I mean, how light, it was so light. It was... Yeah. Like, I mean, the aircraft shell itself is around, what, like 300, 400 grams? 300, 400 grams. And that one can fly two pounds of... Yes. Two pounds. Yes, one kilo, 2.2 pounds. Okay. And then the bigger one, what was the wingspan on it? Bigger one was 2.4 meter wingspan. Okay. And it can carry about five kilos, so 11 pounds. And how much does that one weigh, the frame? So the structure itself weighs about 700 grams.

12:17Naman Pushp: Okay. And so they take off vertically, vertical takeoff and landing, and then the propellers kind of shift to then let you fly in a way that would look very similar to a plane or kind of a bigger drone. And just super quiet. I mean, like they were up there flying with all these birds and it was sort of hard to tell which one was which, to be honest. I mean, it had just like a little hum to it. And then they, as you know, I got super hung up on, I mean, they can hover like a helicopter just with the two propellers. And I was, I mean, so they're kind of gimballed. And I was sort of shocked. I mean, it's not a violent movement.

13:02Naman Pushp: It was like very fine-grained controls to do the hovering. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it just comes down to, you know, the same way you have three axes of movement, you have three axes of rotation, pitch, roll, and yaw. And if you can control your aircraft in all of these rotational axes, then you can achieve great control. So that's really it. It doesn't matter whether you use one propeller, two propellers, five propellers to do it. It just matters how finely can you control this and how quickly can you respond to, you know, any disturbance. And so in these early days with the one kilo, two pounds of capacity flying things like medical goods, remind me how long they can fly and what distance?

13:52Naman Pushp: Maybe do both the first and the second gen. Yeah, so the first gen can do about, you know, 30 kilometers of distance. And that's, I mean, flies at 60 km per year, so roughly around like 30, slightly longer than 30 minutes of flight time. The version 2 can do up to 800 kilometers, and that would generally correspond to a flight time of around an hour. Okay. But it depends. I mean, you can go faster and, you know, drain that range more quickly. and and for the moment i mean this is vaguely comparing to zipline or what amazon is trying to do with delivery i am most familiar with zipline by far just because i spent a bunch of time with them i mean they had pretty lightweight aircraft they it was made of sort of like a styrofoam material in a lot of parts they do this thing where the there's kind of like the big drone is is covering the distance and then they pop out this little baby drone on a tether and that's what's like bringing your sandwich or your coffee down to the ground and they have mechanisms on that if I remember right like kind of little propellers to try to combat the wind while it's it's lowering this thing down on the tether is your approach is similar I mean I remember I mean there is a bit of a tether so I think one of the main differences in our approach is that we realized weight alone is not the issue volume is actually a much bigger issue.

15:23And so you can build an aircraft with like three kg, five kg of payload capacity. But if you have to fit that all in a tiny space, you'd be hard pressed to find payloads that actually use up the full capacity. So what we focused on is just making like a big, what we call a big payload basket, where you can just dump items in and you can put like in like, frankly, a disgusting amount of stuff inside of each aircraft. And that's the thing, right? Like you can put I-6 orders in there. You can use this to restock dark stores, restaurants, small warehouses, etc. It's viable for a lot more than just single package delivery.

16:01Naman Pushp: Okay. And then one contention, I mean, well, I guess this is just math and metrics. I mean, Zipline and Amazon, they're just heavier machines than what you guys make. I forget off the top of my head. I mean, do you know the comparisons? Yeah, so generally sort of industry best is around for every kilogram of payload that you lift, you need about four to five kilograms of aircraft. I think ZipLine's at about 5.8. Amazon is even higher, I think somewhere in the six to seven range. So, you know, vast majority of the weight is the aircraft there. What we've managed to do is we're lifting five kilos of payload with a three kilo aircraft, right?

16:43as compared to, you know, industry standard would be a, like, 25 to 30 kilogram aircraft.

16:49Naman Pushp: Right. Okay. Okay. So, okay. Both those companies have been at this for a very long time. I think beyond a decade. And, you know, I know Zipline takes a lot of pride in safety. And some of this engineering they've put in, I think they would argue, is to get the thing down on the ground without plonking someone in the head and also to withstand pretty gusty wind and weather conditions. I'm kind of going on a tangent to my main question, which is there were very well-funded companies who have been trying to do this for a very long time. You're a young man, you know, starting well behind them. And so clearly that didn't intimidate you.

17:40Naman Pushp: that you're just betting on this theory that you can design just a far more efficient vehicle than what they've done. Yeah, because I think what we have moving later is the benefit of foresight and the benefit of just being able to see how everything plays out. When a zipline or an Amazon started, drone delivery was really a question of if, not when. Today, it's a question of when, not if. And so we get to see that, hey, things are panning out. Regulations are being made. We can, you know, build according to those. We can see, you know, how the market is adapting to this. And so rather than having to invest our energy across multiple different fields of, you know, not just the aircraft, but how do you think about, you know, figuring out the loading, unloading when there is zero standard for it that exists?

18:37How do you figure out noise, the customer experience? How do you figure out the infrastructure, the regulations? You're sort of being the aircraft, the airport, and the airline. And that's a lot to do, right? Excellence there really means being good at a lot of things. Now, our belief is that as a lot of this becomes more standardized, we feel like there's actually minimal differentiation in doing the airport right or doing the airline ride, it really comes down to the aircraft. And so we have the luxury to focus all of our energy on the aircraft, on making that as efficient as possible. Because at the end of the day, you know, we believe that autonomy is getting soft.

19:22Autonomy in the air is much, much easier than autonomy on the ground, right? The systems that, like the 28 systems we put up in the air, all fully autonomous. We also believe that safety is the kind of thing that, you know, comes with maturity of development, and you're already starting to see great safety with a lot of these platforms. The key thing with both of these is they're sort of binary checkboxes, right? If you're autonomous, great. If you're safe, great. But nobody's going to choose you over someone else because you are 10x more autonomous or 10x safer. But when it comes to efficiency, that's not the case.

19:56Unit economics are something that continuously matter. And if you are able to have a structurally lower cost than your competition, regardless of what their costs are, you have an edge over them, which is not true when you apply that to safety or, you know, how quiet the aircraft is or, you know, anything else.

20:20Naman Pushp: This episode is brought to you by Brex. I spend all of my time inside of the world's most ambitious companies making rockets, semiconductors, robots. Very often the business is struggling and then all of a sudden things click and take off. Then the company's expenses spin out of control. They either have to clamp down, start counting pennies, or cross their fingers, hope for the best that the quarter or the year comes out okay. Brex was built to handle exactly these situations. It helps you move fast, spend smarter at the same time. They've got credit cards, banking, expense management, all in one place.

20:59They've got AI technology

21:01Naman Pushp: looking over everything, taking care of tasks for you. No more chasing down receipts. We use Brexit Core Memory. It has been a godsend in giving me back so much time. Giants like Anthropic and Zoom use Brex as well, and so do tens of thousands of startups. You should use Brex, and you can find out exactly how to do that by going to brex.com slash core memory. I think we're fine to talk about this because we talked about it in India. I mean, you're not just Toby to do cargo. I mean, you have a vision all the way up to transporting people one day. Yes. I tweeted about this. People seem like this was the first time they'd heard it.

21:45Naman Pushp: I guess I had already tweeted it. No, we put it up on our manifesto. But yeah, it's something that, you know, I understand if, you know, you didn't read the full 10-pager. You know, most people in the world have not read that. I should have. I should have if I was a decent reporter. I just meet people. I think the manifesto came out after your trip. So I will give you the benefit of the doubt. But so that is the goal, is all transporting objects and flesh. Yeah. And I think that's sort of that idea of the universal transport that I began with. That, you know, this is, it has to work for everything.

22:26right? It has to work regardless of whether you're moving flesh, whether you're moving, like, you know, physics doesn't exactly care whether the payload you're moving has a soul or not. It's all the same at the end of the day. Yeah, sure, you need to add like, you know, windows and seats and like a little bit of HVAC to keep the humans happy inside. But, you know, in the grand scheme of things is there's not a big difference between a system that has that and one that doesn't, especially in aviation, right? It's practically the same aircrafts that move cargo and the ones that move people.

22:59Naman Pushp: Okay. Okay. So I have some, I mean, I've got some questions. They're vaguely tough, I think about the technology, but I'm going to save those just for one second. Um, and I just want to, I want to go back to the origin story a little bit because you're, you're a fascinating dude. Um, so you're, I mean, if I remember right, You're about 16 years old when you start to put together this idea and look for some funding behind it. Yeah, yeah. Around that age. So what happens? You're sitting around at 16 and you're like, I think I can make a better aircraft than anybody else. How does this happen? I wish.

23:38I wish. I wish I sort of, you know, started with that level of conviction. But no, I think I had very realistic ambitions when I started out. Airbound actually started off as OpenDrone. So it started off as a project to create an open source delivery drone design that, you know, anyone could use and 3D print and, you know, just make like drone delivery in their own locality.

24:04Naman Pushp: Just because you wanted to do it or you were into drones or? Yeah, I think just I actually so that's like a funny thing where I've just never been into drones. the first drone that I ever flew and the first drone that I ever built were both an airbound drone and it was actually less than a year ago that I like first owned a drone that was not an airbound drone so that I'm like I'm definitely not the drone guy but I was like a lot of like why I'm doing this sort of goes back to much much earlier I think one of like my core memories from when I was a child, like when I was around first or second grade was...

24:47Naman Pushp: Good job using court memory. Solid. Yes. You know, shameless plugs. Was, so this was when, this was like, I think me learning about the Fermi paradox, you know, where are the aliens out there? And I just found the concept really fascinating that there exists a question, right? And actually there exists many questions. that a first or second grader is capable of understanding, yet no human in the world is capable of answering. It just opened my eyes to like, there is so much out there that is not yet discovered. There is so much that can still be done with humanity, which, you know, at first when you look around, you're like, damn, we like solved everything.

25:34There's nothing else left. So that was there. I'd been sort of deeply obsessed with kind of the scale of humanity and like what it takes to, you know, answer these questions, do something that hasn't been done before. And at first, it just feels impossible, right? Like there's 8 billion people in the world. Statistically, like, you know, each one of us is insignificant. You're insignificant, I'm insignificant. But somehow that is not true, right? Somehow there are still people that in spite of the odds, move forward and really like measurably impact humanity as a whole. And I've been deeply interested in being one of those people.

26:17I think it comes through leverage. And the strongest leverage we have is technology. If you invent a new technology that changes the way people live, then you would have by proxy change the world. And so I always wanted to invent something. And I think why I just landed up in this space was honestly more coincidence than anything. I'd actually seen some videos on ZipLine. I was deeply inspired by what they were doing. And I just wanted to see what I could do to contribute to this space.

26:47Naman Pushp: And so you're 16 and you start tinkering to try to build one. Yeah, yeah. I sort of, so this was around COVID 2020. I sort of joined this, you know, hackathon project. There were these like online groups where people had come together to volunteer their time. So did a hackathon there, managed to get a$500 grant. And I was just like, you know, I want to build this. I want to see how this goes. And that was the Emergent Ventures career or different? No, no, no. Okay. This was Emergent gives more money than$500. You know, yay for Shruti. So that's the, this was at 15. This was just like the conception of the idea.

27:28Then I realized that, oh God, I like messed up the design completely. I learned a bunch through the process. Still built that aircraft. It got like a quarter second of airtime. And then I was like, okay, here's what I need to fix. I designed a new aircraft. That one is the TRT, like we still use it today. And I think with that design, I managed to get$8 ,000 grants, still not Emergent Ventures. You know, use that to like, I could finally afford a 3D printer, start working with carbon fiber instead of fiberglass. And so I was just building this, had these weird sims in my bedroom. And I think somewhat in parallel, I ended up getting, you know, our first investment, which was like a$25 ,000 investment from Dread Capital.

28:10and I also got a roughly like$12 ,000,$12 ,500 grant from now Emergent Ventures.

28:17Naman Pushp: Okay, okay. And how did you hear about them? So this was actually through the$1 ,000 grant. So I got this from 1517. I don't know if they still do. They used to run a grant program. And so they just had these weekly calls with people from the community and they were like, oh, you should check out Emergent Ventures. And so I did and it didn't look very interesting. because it was this like weird fund. And then they're like, no, no, no, you're on the wrong website. There are a couple, yeah. Yeah, there are like VCs called Emergent Ventures. And I was just like, is this what they want? No, it's like, you know, the market.

28:52Now it's the first thing that comes up when you search Emergent Ventures. Back then it wasn't. So after like going to the wrong website, I finally made my way to the right one. I sent an application. I think two weeks later, I got a call from Shruti and she was like, cool, we will give you money.

29:07Naman Pushp: Yeah, yeah. And you're telling your parents about all this? What are they making of it? I think they're just deeply confused. I think they were trying to figure out whether all of this is a scam or not. And I think they were just confused as to how do you scam a 16-year-old by giving him$10 ,000?

29:30Honestly, with the Grad Capital investment, the founder of Grad Capital, Abhishek, said he literally had to get on a call with my dad to convince him why he should let his son take money from them and why they are not a scam or a money laundering scheme or something.

29:45Naman Pushp: Yeah, yeah. I guess I could see that. Yeah. What do your parents do? They're both in the banking sector. Okay. Oh, so they were on alert looking for some money fraud. Actually, my mom used to work in anti-money laundering. Do you have brothers and sisters? No, I'm an only child. Okay. So you were mentioning it a bit, So describe your bedroom to me at peak prototyping. Oh, God. There's too much to describe. I should actually send you a photo of it. I have it on my phone. But it was like, because I was basically trying to run an entire workshop out of my bedroom. And my desk only had space for one thing at a time.

30:27So I would just have a random 3D printer on the side. The floor would always be filled with newspapers. because I would work with like resin and carbon fiber a lot. And my parents were like, you're going to destroy the floor. So just like replace the newspapers every day. I spent a decent amount of time like taping newspapers to the floor.

30:43Naman Pushp: Shouldn't you have some like airflow for this? Yeah, yeah. This is like what I learned later. I was working with these chemicals and my parents were complaining about the smell. And I'm like, no, no, no, don't worry about it. Like it does smell weird, but it's safe. Like, you know, I checked the material safety data sheet, you know, I'll show it to you. And I just whipped out the material safety data sheet. And I was like, oh, shit, no, this is like, this has a toxicity rating of four on a scale of one to four. And it is like a class three carcinogen. And I was just like, okay, I should buy a respirator.

31:17That was also like a lot of the impetus for like, you know, hey, when I get money, I should probably move out. Like, I don't have the space. Like, I don't, like, yeah, it's a small apartment, right? So I had to build out of my bedroom. I needed to go to a place where I could sleep and build in different rooms. That was the ultimate luxury. So at 16, I ended up moving out, got my own place. Oh, wow. I just sort of had a master bedroom for this, had a tiny half-bedroom for me to sleep.

31:45Naman Pushp: What did your parents think of that? They actually suggested it. So I was living in Mumbai at the time, and my plan was to move to Bangalore, because that's where all the startup stuff is. and they were like no you are still in school and it's all in school i can just like they don't know whether i'm in bangdore or mumbai and they're like no nothing doing uh you know we know some localities nearby you can get your own place but it has to be in the city so a lot of people ask like oh how did you convince them to like let you move out to you know this other part of town and i'm like it was their idea okay okay so you did stay in town though um uh okay this is fascinating And then, so you're, and you're teaching yourself carbon fiber on YouTube.

32:29Naman Pushp: I mean, you're learning these skills from YouTube. Yeah. YouTube is awesome. It's kind of amazing, right? Yeah, it is. Yeah. Okay. So you're moving along, you're getting some money, and then how does this start to become a company? It's a good question. And I think like different ages of Naman would give you different answers, right? I think that while I was in school, while I was spending a bunch of my time building this out, I was still juggling classes at the same time. It was really just like me. It was basically me just being paid by the nice VCs of the world to learn engineering. And thank you to them.

33:09I will hope to make you money someday.

33:14But that's it. Like, I think Airbound was really a science project while I was in school, which I think teenager number would take a lot of offense to me saying that. But I think it's true. I think a lot really changed, you know, around when we got our pre-seat round. So this was, you know, I graduated from high school. I was like, look, I really want to pursue this. Let me just defer my admission by a year. You know, still have a seat at college. Worst case, I'm just late by a year.

33:41Naman Pushp: In the US or India? In the US, yeah. India doesn't really do differ. Okay. Which school? This was CMU. Okay. So that's there. I deferred my admission. And in that year, I was figuring out a bunch of things, but we ended up raising a, you know, one and a half mil round led by Lightspeed. And that's when, you know, it sort of hits that like, oh shit, you know, this is an actual company now. This is not just me. Like, it's hard to spend a million dollars, like, you know, just building tech out of your bedroom. But, you know, it's really, that's when we started to hire people. That's when we started to, you know, build a real business and not just, you know, me creating some tech for fun.

34:22Naman Pushp: So there's like part of this that would fit in the Silicon Valley lore, clearly been funding college dropouts for decades, you know, and some of them have done all right. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the list goes on. But I mean, there's something wild about like an 18-year-old saying, you know, I'm going to design aircraft that nobody else have ever done. You know what I mean? Because it's a field, obviously, 100 years of people trying to design aircraft. You didn't have any of the typical credentials people might want to see. When I talk to you, I mean, I think anyone who talked to you would understand you're incredibly bright so i'm sure this was playing a factor in everything you know you're convincing when you talk about this stuff is you don't come off as just like totally crazy but i mean it's nuts to sort of be like i'm 18 i'm gonna design aircraft better than anyone has done before trust me um so i mean that seems like almost like the highest bar to talk a vc into why do you maybe it's a hard question for you to answer maybe i should ask them but yeah why do you think they they sort of bought into the pitch i you know i'll have to be like it's just just me and i'm like i'm just i'm just great at this you know i floored them no i i think this is like just the natural evolution of um i think bc as a whole like look i think the frank reality is that if I started doing this even five years earlier, I don't think everyone would have ever gotten off.

36:02Like just, you know, off into even being a company, off to like hiring our first employee. I think a few different things that have like come together for this. One is that, you know, case studies like SpaceX and Tesla, which, you know, you know very well. I'm familiar. You're familiar. have, I think, proven that you can build great tech in this manner, right? Musk was also a complete outsider, right? It's not like, sure, he wasn't an 18-year-old, but he started these companies without having done any engineering before. He learned everything on the job. And it's that, hey, actually, if you're just, you know, really good at thinking from first principles and building this, it's a different skill set, but it's a similar skill set to just building a business.

36:46You just have to be exceptional at the tech. So I think that's one of the things that helped, you know, obviously young founders being successful was becoming more and more common. And, you know, there were just starting to be funds that were contemplating the idea of like, hey, maybe I'll fund a kid that's still in high school.

37:04Naman Pushp: And you had, you'd built something. Yeah, I'd also built something. Like I could see it. Yeah. It was flying and... It was not flying. Was it not flying? It was not flying for a while. I would not, like, I think we got to, like, actual flying, you know, meaningfully after the light speed round. Yeah, we were, you know, to quote Toy Story, we were not flying, we were falling with style. Okay. And so, and you were, you finished, you said you were in online school, you finished high school. Yes. And then you're kind of getting this light speed check at the same time, roughly. And then you're, how many people are you hiring?

37:41uh i think we were slow to hire early on but i think by the time we raised a seat round we were

37:48Naman Pushp: maybe around like 15 20-ish people holy cow okay wow and and the i don't god i don't think i'm being like um too egregiously stereotypical or something i just feel like i feel like um you know in the u.s if you come from a family where you're supposed to kind of like be on the path to college there's a lot of pressure to drop out although obviously sort of become a thing in the in the tech world I just feel like all my Indian friends everything I know is just that you're meant to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer and those are like kind of like all the options and not going to Carnegie Mellon is definitely not not on the recommended path is that changing or was that was that a really difficult conversation?

38:39I think, again, a mix of both. I do think it's starting to change. I do think, you know, especially like India, I mean, it's obviously not close to Silicon Valley, but India is like the third or fourth largest startup ecosystem in the world. We have seen enough cases of like really young kids go out and, you know, be hyper successful. And I think the government is also pushing a lot on making these stories more visible. So the idea of being a startup founder is becoming less and less alien. Like there are more comparisons. Like somehow my parents had a friend that had like done a startup, which I wouldn't have imagined happening, you know, to like with their parents for sure.

39:20And I think the other thing is it's a lot of this is sort of about, you know, wealth at a country scale. I think India is a country where, you know, my generation is sort of the first generation where you have at least some people that do come from, you know, a decent amount of wealth, right? Like, I think for me, the biggest luxury is that I knew no matter, you know, what happened, I would always have food to eat and I would always have a roof over my head. And at the end, like, how much more do you need, right? And I think that's what, that's the luxury that I had that my parents never did, right?

39:57For my dad's success meant always being able to put food on the table for your family. He had seen a lot of people in his family run businesses. To him, running a business meant that if the business doesn't do well, you can't eat. He wanted the opposite of that. He wanted that stability. He was never thinking about, oh, this is what I enjoy doing, etc. But it was because of that that my parents were able to let me have passions. right I think one thing that was a bit unique about my childhood is my parents never like pushed a career path on me I do think it helped that like I never wanted to become an artist or something that like doesn't make money I always wanted to like get into get into like

40:40Naman Pushp: engineering and physics and the hardest I'm gonna be a industrialist yeah but like one of the things that my mom told me from a really early age is just you know do whatever you want but be the best at it right like you can go and cut hair for all i care but then you better be the best barber in the city right like everyone should say like i want naman to cut my hair right like that's what i want you to do do whatever career you want just be excellent okay okay okay so they didn't try to talk you out of it or anything did anyone try to talk you in to moving to the u.s to build the company? I think, you know, folks, early on, I just, I just never saw like a very compelling reason for it.

41:25I think, yeah, I don't know. I think, I think a lot of people move to the US because it's just like, oh my god, there's more money here, right? And I mean, you have a lot of accelerator programs that just have a like, standard investment deal. But the standard deal gives you double the valuation if you move to the US. And I just like, like, there's a lot of these, early stage money things where you can just be like, oh, just move to the US. But to me, there's no compelling reason for the business. I am trying to build great technology and that great technology can be built anywhere. I think there is a lot of talent in India and I think I can build it here.

42:02And over time, I think it's gone from this ambivalence of just why move to the US to like, no, actually, I think India is the better place to build this tech. I think there's a lot of unique things about India that make it a better place to build a company like Airbound than the U.S.

42:20Naman Pushp: Let's get into those. Because, look, we've got multi-decades of this brain drain of India to the U.S. You and I were hanging out playing board games one night and something you guys were talking about really struck me, which was, and please correct me if I'm misremembering sort of how you put it, but that people didn't have young, young people maybe didn't have like pride in India. And, and so maybe that was another reason you sort of want to go to the U S and make your mark. Um, and so you're talking about, Oh, I think there's business reasons to stay. I don't know. Walk me through both sides of that was, was some of it emotional and, and, um, and, and wanting to build a company like this in India?

43:09Naman Pushp: Or was it just quite practical? I think in the early days, it was mainly practical. I can't deny that, you know, I think there are emotional reasons now. And I, you know, I think especially when you get to a point that you realize that you could genuinely be one of the people that like pushes your nation forward, that like, if I succeed hard enough, I actually become part of the reason that India is becoming better, then it's pretty hard to leave India and to give up on that ambition. But yeah, I think early days, it was really purely practical, right? I mean, first off, just early days when you don't have a lot of money, it doesn't make sense to, you know, come here, you know, ramp up your burner bunch.

43:56But I think like, yeah.

43:58Naman Pushp: Can we break that down for a second? I mean, you're saying land is cheaper, a building's cheaper, the people are cheaper, all of that? Yeah. Like, yeah, just, I mean, cost of living is much lower, right? Like a dollar goes much further in India than it goes in the US. But, you know, as you scale up, that stops being a good reason, right? It just becomes that, hey, you know, we've raised like 37 mil now, and that is actually enough money to like run a company out of the US by like a decent margin. I think for me, there's a few different reasons. I think one of the biggest ones is the people, right?

44:33I think Indians are sort of one of the greatest talent pools that exist globally. I remember seeing this, like, little diagram of, like, what is the highest paid nationality in each state in the U.S.? And I think 70 % of the states were just Indians, right? Like, Indians do really well. And I think, like, pretty much all of the great businesses you see here are built on top of Indian talent, right? There's an obscene number of Indians in Tesla, SpaceX. And I mean, now they're just running multinational companies. So I don't think there's any question that Indian talent is not good. I think Indian talent is great.

45:12And especially if you're able to get that talent early, it works really well. There's also an increasing... Moving out of the country is becoming less and less popular. And this has changed dramatically even at a timescale of three to five years. right five years ago when I was looking at going to college it was just like duh I mean if you can afford to go to the U.S. why would you ever stay in India right like nobody was thinking about staying in India and you know like in my school about 80 percent of the class would go to college abroad and now a decent chunk of those people are planning to come back to India after they're done with college and you know spend the rest of their lives in India.

45:54Naman Pushp: Is it because like the U.S. got shittier or India's nicer? I think it's a mix of both, right? Like, I think it's interesting because, you know, like, again, 10 years ago, when you go to the US, it's just an objectively higher quality of life than India. But, you know, I don't know, like, I feel like today, it's more just a different quality of life, right? The US is better in certain regards, but it's also worse in certain regards. And suddenly it's not as clear that, you know, India is the worst place to live. Yeah, I mean, I'll run the risk of giving my three weeks in India survey of things.

46:37Naman Pushp: I would say I feel like life is probably like at least, you know, again, sorry, audience, this is my limited experience as a momentary traveler. But it feels like life is easier day-to-day here, just a little smoother. You know, there's just shit tons of traffic. Not that we don't have traffic, but the traffic in Bangalore and Hyderabad is no joke. I mean, both cities, it feels like my assumption is they grew so much quicker than anyone had ever planned for. And there was no central planning at all. And so it's just kind of like hanging on for dear life. I think India in general is that bit more like chaotic and frenetic and full of energy.

47:23Naman Pushp: And all of that like is actually awesome. And then but also adds this like friction to just getting around doing your daily life. And so I mean it's like what – but I mean what a – and I – reminds me of like when I went to Nigeria, which I – it's like in Lagos. which I feel like most people, a lot of people do not like. I love the energy and like the, not just like the chaos, but like just the, everybody's doing something and is like out, quite ambitious, trying to make their way in the world. And there's just, and then, oh man, I just love, obviously like all the culture, the colors and the food and everything.

48:06Naman Pushp: But I mean, what do you like when you're doing the pros and cons, what are the, what do you love about staying in India then? Yeah, I think, look, I think the US has like a lot of obvious benefits, right? I think traffic is definitely better. The roads are a lot better in the US. The air is a lot cleaner. You know, there's much more nature present. But then there's a bunch of things like in India, if you're living in India, your day to day life becomes a lot easier, right? Like most homes have house help. you're generally looking at you know getting deliveries is a lot easier right like food comes a lot faster you're able to just get anything in in 10 minutes right like I was like I had to go for a wedding and I couldn't find my kurta which is like Indian version of a suit yeah I couldn't find my kurta and so I just ordered one and it came in 20 minutes I don't think like anyone in the u.s can imagine like not having a suit for a wedding yeah and getting that in 20 minutes it is hard to explain i was like at a party and i'm like oh i'm not feeling my best and then everyone's ordering me medicines teas all these and they're just arriving but like as i'm trying to leave the party they're like no no it's gonna be here in two minutes and it's like it's just a total cultural thing with these delivery apps yeah it's it's like one of those things where again, I feel like whenever, look, you'll always be biased towards the place where you are, right?

49:32And I think as an American coming to India, you're going to notice the things that like India doesn't have that the US has. And generally, you never notice the flip side. Indians going to the US are like, oh my god, it's just so much better here. But what I find surprising is like, I start to notice things. I'm like, oh god, I have to like pre-plan my food. Because I can't just order when I'm hungry and expect it to show up in like 15-20 minutes. I have to, like, just a really random thing, right? Like, I generally don't shave, I trim my beard, I forgot to bring my trimmer, which in India is not a problem, like, you'll just get one in 10 minutes.

50:07I like, I just couldn't find a trimmer here that I could get ordered. And I was just like, I really, like, Indian deliveries have just spoiled to you, I just don't have any to go to a store and buy something physically. And so I'm just like, well, I guess I'm shaving.

50:24Naman Pushp: David Nicholson, our cameraman who you met, if you remember, he also forgot his razor and had one delivered in like four minutes. Yeah. So that's there, right? Like getting food at midnight is like a big pain over here. It's not a pain at all in India. So I think there's differences. Crime rates are actually like surprisingly low in India. Like you don't have, because just employment is is much higher like you don't really have to you know worry about you know like the homeless or any other like like just safety is i'd say like honestly i i feel much safer walking around in india at night because i this had not occurred to me and a couple people brought this up i mean is it anecdotal or are there numbers behind this that all the gig work in India has had this material difference on unemployment and that?

51:15I'm sure there are numbers. I don't know the numbers. I think for me, it's mostly anecdotal. For me, the biggest anecdote is just, I remember when I was like, I don't know, 10, 12 or something, and I was going around, my parents would just be like, don't leave your bag in the car. Be careful when out in the street, someone could just snatch your bag or anything. you know like just be really careful right like what if you get kidnapped etc and now what I hear is when you're in Europe and when you're in the US be careful about this right like don't leave your bag in a car

51:48Naman Pushp: like San Francisco is a fucking nightmare yeah like my parents and again like this I don't know it's just it's hard when you're brought up this way this feels like such an inversion right like my parents are just like they went to holiday in Europe and they were in Spain and they were just like shit scared for their belongings all the time. And they were like, there was this one moment when we went, we were checking into a five-star hotel and just left your bags, you know, just down next to you in the lobby. And then they were stolen. Somebody nicked them. Yeah. Okay. And just like, you don't hear about things like this in India.

52:22Naman Pushp: Spain's like that. I love Spain, but it's been like that for a long time. Okay. So this is fascinating. And then you and I, we talked about this a lot when I was there. I mean, in this um you're not alone i mean there's there's a whole okay so there's a part of bangalore called oscote i kept describing it as like the el segundo of india meaning um for i guess for people who aren't nerds um sort of like this hard tech uh centric place people building aircraft, missiles, everything you could imagine all in this, this region and setting up in these, um, you, like you guys in this kind of warehousey type environments.

53:07Naman Pushp: And so there is this generation. I mean, everybody I met and hung out with all your friends, they all either didn't go to college, dropped out of college or doing this, this, these startups. And, and, um, again, I mean, we talked about this a lot, but, but there does seem to be a thing going on. I mean, there's, this is like a moment. Yeah. It feels like it, right? It is. And so this is, it's just part of, you said you couldn't do this five years ago. It's part of, it's part of what, like what in those five years, people just, what, what, like what totally changed to make everybody want to kind of take this risk now and stay and do things different.

53:51I feel like a lot of founders are going to hit me for saying this, but like, I think there's a lot of reasons, but I think it's mainly just venture capital, right? Like it is venture as much as like founders like to shit on venture and be like, ugh, investors. The reality is that like deep tech cannot exist without venture. Like it is, you know, especially when you look at like historical accounts of how, you know, businesses, industrialists were made in the, you know, 19, like early 1900s and all. Like it is, it is genuinely insane that people are willing to throw tens of millions of dollars at pre-revenue companies to be like, yeah, just, just build the tech.

54:31Like we know you'll get money later. It is, it is insane. Like this environment did not exist even until very recently.

54:39Naman Pushp: So, okay, we've been doing deep tech. In the US for a very long time, although the interest in it has these boom and bust cycles, we're clearly in a bit of a boom. And so that you, if I'm reading you right, that kind of carried over to India as well? Yes, absolutely. And I think like lots of things the government has done combined. But honestly, like I don't, I honestly don't think that deep tech has really been a thing in the US until this boom cycle. Obviously, you've had cases like, you know, SpaceX, Tesla, Android and all, but I think these are all like second time founder companies. I guess the way I'm describing it is like we did semiconductors for decades and it was expensive and it took years to pay off.

55:23Naman Pushp: We did gene sequencers. We, you know, we have, I've lived, I've lived through these periods. Like, you know, what tends to happen is like the dot com boom comes along and then it's like, wow, it's way easier to make money potentially off of a website than it is to like fund semiconductors. So people pull away, you know, and then something like, like you're saying, then something like Tesla comes along or SpaceX and it's like, oh, well, if you hit this right, it's fucking massive, you know? And so then it swings back and then obviously we have this kind of political, um, national moment of wanting to manufacture again and, and, and all that.

56:02Naman Pushp: But I think we did actually used to do deep tech. It looked just slightly different. Yeah. But I think, again, back then it wasn't really venture that funded it. These were large research bodies. These were traditional investments. You had weird structures if you wanted to get money for this. Either you get a government grant because it's spun out of a PhD program. You're doing this from like a very big college that has a lot of money behind it. Or you're somehow able to figure out how to commercialize early. You get like weird debt things. I know I've like researched a lot about like this innovation like 100 years ago.

56:45So like free semiconductor era. Like if you look at a lot of like surprisingly insightful conversations between inventors happened in debtor's prison.

56:57Naman Pushp: Yeah, okay. because that was the only way they could get money okay and and because they couldn't pay it back fast enough some of the greatest minds were just locked up in prison yeah yeah yeah because financing structures were terrible back then yeah and i guess i mean the definition of deep tech i guess could be very i was just thinking back to like you know it's like when um i mean really some of the first instances of what we think of as venture capital of the day would be like Fairchild Semiconductor and then Arthur Rock putting money into Intel and then you had the whole PC run with Apple and Microsoft and things like that but anyway we don't have to get so this is part of what changed is that people are willing to take risk on an 18 year old who has a wild idea on aircraft in this moment in time and so okay so it's sort of like a big picture change and then your friends are like, we might as well do it here.

57:57Naman Pushp: There's structural advantages. I like living here and money can get here. But you guys, you seem to have done pretty well with the venture capitalists. I mean, almost everybody else I talked to in India, it was quite critical of the local VCs for still chasing the easier money in apps and AI and software and not wanting to take risks on the hard tech when i was there um hung out with with aether which is on a path to make a million electric scooters over the next year um has been around for almost for a decade i think um i went to their factory it was like couldn't be more legitimate there's just people making scooters everywhere they're awesome they're cheap um couldn't couldn't raise money had to go public because nobody would give them money to expand as fast as they wanted.

58:55So there is a local, it felt like a dislike for the local venture capital community. Yeah, no, I think Ather's story is especially funny because I think Ather grew more in their first year in the public markets than they grew in their past five years in the private markets.

59:17Naman Pushp: Like people missed out. People really missed out on Ather. In fact, the funny thing is that when Aether IPO'd, it was a really lukewarm reaction because investors were like, yeah, sure, they're like a unicorn now, but it took them way too long to get there. And then guess what? They like 4X'd in less than two years. Right. And if somebody had given them$200 million earlier, they would have grown. So much faster. Yeah. So that's there. I do agree. I think this environment is starting to change. And I think the change is happening fast. I think the government is also throwing a lot of fuel to the fire.

59:52Naman Pushp: So they open these deep tech funds. Yes, exactly. You know, to encourage investment in deep tech. So I think what this means is that like this whole deep tech boom cycle that you're seeing in SF has, I think, transferred to India much faster than most other boom cycles do. Yeah. And I think that's great. The challenge is just, I mean, if you think about like structurally how to build a fund, I think deep tech requires a very different thought process. And, you know, the large funds in India, the LPs behind them, generally do not like that kind of risk appetite, right? Like they don't like the idea of, you know, throwing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars at a company that has a similar risk profile to a seed stage bet.

1:00:36Even if, you know, the eventual outcome can be many orders of magnitude higher. So I think it's because of those risk profiles that the large funds have not yet been able to make a great jump into doing like late stage bets. And you see a lot of early funds that are doing really well, but it takes time for a small fund to grow into a big fund. And so I think, you know, honestly, right now, if you're trying to raise like single digit millions, maybe up to 10 mil, India is honestly a really great environment to raise for deep tech. The problem is just that when you're looking for larger chunks of capital, the amount of parties that can give that just in out really quickly.

1:01:15Naman Pushp: And do you think you're committed to keeping Airbound in India as the headquarters? I am. I do. I do see India. Like I honestly, like everything else aside, I just don't see any other place making sense as the headquarters. We will naturally expand globally. We'll have offices in other locations. but I think our like center of operations right you know what like you know Fremont is to Tesla for us will always be you know India Bangalore ideally host go to and then we talked about this I mean usually if you're in deep tech land the easiest way to make money is to get a large defense contract and you seem like you're pretty committed to not doing defense business yeah I think again this is this is really just a function of the majority of the ecosystem now because look if it was between survival and getting a defense contract like you know I like sort of getting a defense contractor dying I'd obviously pick getting the defense contract and I think in an earlier world that would be the case like we would need to show revenue sooner and defense is a great way to do that um I think what's changed now is the fact that you can raise a lot more pre-revenue, the fact that you can use this time to really build out the tech, it gives us the luxury of being focused as a company.

1:02:38I think your company will be far, far worse if you try to scatter your focus. And because we're not a core defense company, it doesn't make sense to do that just for the sake of early revenue. And because we're able to run the business without needing that early revenue, we can be fully focused on the end state that we want, on the markets that we really want to capture.

1:02:59Naman Pushp: Are you ideologically opposed to defense? Is that where that is sort of coming from? I think it's a very complex question on, you know, ethical question on whether or not I would want to do defense. I think I'm clear I don't want the technology I've built to, like, you know, accelerate, you know, sort of weaponry or any capabilities that can lead to the death of humans. Like, I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but I don't think, like, the nuke was good for mankind as an invention. And I really don't want to invent, you know, something like a nuke. That being said, though, you know, I think that doesn't necessarily mean that defense is bad.

1:03:42I think there's a lot that can be done. But if my ambition is to, you know, 10x, 100x a market, I don't think I want to live in a world where I make defense as a market 10x bigger than it is today. Yeah, like I just personally would not want to cheer for a larger defense market because that means we are in a world that is more at war. But the other like, honestly, like other really clean sheet reason for this is that defense as a market is generally not that big considering what we're looking at. If we want to solve for logistics and human movement, that combined is a close to$30 trillion dam.

1:04:21And that just blows the dam of global defensemen out of the water. And it is much easier to capture this as a global market than to capture defense as a global market. You are effectively locked to one side. Yeah.

1:04:35Naman Pushp: When I get optimistic, I came back so optimistic about what I saw going on in India. And then I have many, many Indian friends and talk to them and they're like, dude, don't get your hopes up. That place is going to undermine itself. The government is too bureaucratic. There's too much corruption. It's just the infrastructure is they're like, don't, don't, don't get your hopes up. It's not fully going to happen. And then, you know, when I was there, you know, like everybody I talked to was like reticent to sort of criticize the government and push back. Obviously, they would when our cameras were not on, but not when the cameras were on.

1:05:17I mean, is it hard to like operate in that environment?

1:05:21Naman Pushp: Is that true? Is it? It is. It is an interesting question. And I think, like, India sort of plays. Because, again, like, I think democracy is a spectrum. And I think naturally, like, it is not controversial to say that India is not as democratic as the U.S. or not as democratic as other countries. The U.S. is also not the most democratic country in the world. We have our moments. This is probably not a peak. So that's there. But I also don't think that peak democracy is necessarily the best way to run a country. I think that India as a country needed very, very dramatic change, and it needed that change very quickly.

1:06:11And I think a government that can assert its will is the most effective way to get that change done. the reality is that I don't think a highly maybe they could but I just think that like for a a like you know very democratic government like a government that was just constantly listening to the people at every moment I don't think it would have been able to provide this unified vision for the country and change the country as deeply and dramatically as it has and I do think that you know the country has meaningfully changed for the better now is this a good long-term pathway that is unclear, right?

1:06:50And I think that is really the sort of threat with countries that, you know, slowly lose their democracy, because if that slips away too much, then you end up in a dictatorship and you end up with a lot of issues. I don't think India will necessarily end up there. I think there are obviously risks to, you know, the way it is run. But I also think that you can't deny, like, these two things kind of go hand in hand. You can't, And the reason why corruption has lowered so much from 10 years ago, the reason why bureaucracy has become so much cleaner, the reason why just ease of business has improved so much from where it was previously, that trend line being so sharp is very much thanks to the government.

1:07:37Okay.

1:07:40Naman Pushp: I'm going to come back to carbon fiber nerdery shortly. So just sort of one last question. I mean, play this out for me. United States, multi-decade track record of doing interesting things in technology. China, last 20, 30 years, clearly became the world's manufacturing powerhouse. And then now is also pushing the edge of innovation on all sorts of fronts. India has a, it's got a manufacturing base. It does a lot of stuff internally. um you know has these capabilities he has nuclear energy has a space program um very like massive big things um obviously tremendous education system and talent and and all that so you know if we if you have um i'm trying to think of like countries of size that would be substantial players in the tech and manufacturing field moving forward and all three of those really jump out at me and i see europe is kind of like a um dying i love europe but i don't think it's going to be in that in this discussion um so yeah like fast forward whatever however many years you want 10 15 20 um what's like the most optimistic case for india in this spectrum between making stuff and innovating and you know is it does it have its own totally unique niche compared to china in the united states or it's it's like it's decided yeah we're gonna take china on in manufacturing and we're gonna innovate over here or i i think india does build out it's very broad question yeah yeah i'm just like i don't know why you think i'm qualified to answer these questions but I will do my best at answering them.

1:09:43I think India does have its own niche. I think it looks very similar to China on the surface but I think India's superpower is the idea of leapfrogging. I think that's a very unique Indian concept, right? Like India never had landline. We skipped straight to mobile. The interesting thing in India is that like most people have phones but most people don't have Wi-Fi because it's just like 5G is so good. why we have unlimited data plans, why even have Wi-Fi in your home? Which is, again, a concept that you wouldn't really imagine here in the US, but it's really because Wi-Fi came first. If data came first, a lot of people wouldn't have Wi-Fi.

1:10:22So that's there. And maybe I'm personifying countries too much, but I sort of see China as this really sensible country, which is like, okay, first I will do A, then I will do B, then I will do C. Like this idea of we will first be the low cost manufacturing hub of the world, then we will sort of, you know, scale this to getting into higher tech manufacturing. And then we will eventually use this base of like difficult technologies we're able to build and incrementally innovate on them to make them even better. Right. Kind of like how China, China got good at cars, then China got good at EVs. And now not only are like the cheapest EVs made in China, but also the highest performance EVs are made in China.

1:11:04right? Like, it blew my mind that the fastest car in the world is an electric Chinese car, right? Like, they didn't just beat the record for the fastest electric car, they just beat the record for the fastest car. So that's insane. But at the end of the day, like, it is just incremental in nature. I think when China tries to do, like, massive leaps, it doesn't tend to work out the best. I think, like, the best example of this is, I mean, Comac is generally considered to be a broad failure of China. It's their attempt to fight against Airbus and Boeing and build a third major aviation player. And there's a reason why most people have not heard of Comac.

1:11:46I think India is much better at this. And so I think if we're able to get our talent in order, if we're able to build a powerful ecosystem that is able to get capital into it, able to get talent into it, and able to get the right founders, then I do think that India is really uniquely positioned for these hardware moonshot opportunities, where it is tech that is just so, so meaningfully different that I don't think China's sensible approach will work. And it's also tech that just requires the sheer amount of skill and proficiency in the trades that I don't think the US has the kind of labor base to match what can be done in India.

1:12:23And so India gets this kind of like, I think I see US as like the innovation hub and China as the manufacturing hub. And like India can be that melding of the two, where if you need to do innovative things that are like at their core, great mass manufactured products, I think India is the right place to do that. Like India, to me, feels actually shockingly similar to like, you know, industrialist US in like the early 1900s, where like you had this powerful industrial base that was powering the development of the economy, combined with these highly ambitious individuals that wanted to, you know, do crazy things and like really reshape the way people live.

1:13:03I think those combinations exist in India. And I think in the next few decades, we can genuinely see, you know, that kind of economic boom come out of the country.

1:13:14Naman Pushp: That was a really nice note. That's probably where we should end. I do have carbon fiber questions. So I'm going to sneak a couple in. I mean, you know, just since having visited you. Yeah. And I'm excited. Like, you know, I say anything I say, it's like with, um, it's not even devil's advocate. It's just like kind of thinking these things through a little bit because I definitely don't like to like squash people who are, um, chasing a big idea and definitely not when they're young and when their company's young, you know, you've got, it's like, you guys got a long way to go. So, but, you know, it's like, got excited.

1:13:56Naman Pushp: I'm telling people about Airbound and all my aerospace buddies. We talked about this. I know you've heard it before, but I mean, they're just a hundred. There's like carbon fibers too fucking expensive. You know, this is like a fruitless exercise. And I know you've heard this before, but, you know, why would all these people be getting that wrong? Great question. So I think there's like, there's two different layers to this problem. it's worth thinking about carbon fiber the raw material which I'm not even talking about the cloth I'm talking about like the the raw like threads used to make carbon fiber and then there is like making a final carbon fiber part out when you look at the cost of these threads um they are expensive don't get me wrong but they are about 10 times more expensive per kilo than steel which like steel is really really cheap right and I think for the scale of carbon fiber a you can make an argument that when this ramps up to steel level scale, this will get to similar cost to steel.

1:14:55And the other thing is because of the aggressive weight advantage you can get with carbon fiber, I think you can actually outcompete steel on cost even today with select parts, because you are just putting less stuff in it, right? Something that would need 10 kilos of steel, we can make with one kilo of carbon fiber, and that is much cheaper than 10 kilos of steel. but that's not actually where like most of the cost lies when people say that carbon fiber is expensive they actually say that making a carbon fiber part is expensive because it needs it needs a lot of human labor in the process it's i mean it's got its own issues um right my my view on this is that carbon fiber is genuinely hard to manufacture with but i i genuinely believe that steel is even harder to manufacture with, right?

1:15:46Because it's worth just thinking, like, what have we actually done with metals? And it's genuinely insane, right? Like, between, like, tell me which one seems more reasonable and easy to manufacture, right? Taking this material, liquefying it to over 3000 degrees Celsius, injecting it, and also making sure that, you know, all of this is in an environment without any oxygen because that fucks things up. Injecting this inside a mold, which again, without any oxygen inside, you need to also ensure you're able to evacuate all of the air from it because if there's an air bubble, it'll screw things up.

1:16:29You need the material to cool consistently and at a very specific rate so that it crystallizes the way you want to. It then solidifies and then you inject it from the mold and you're doing this multiple times a minute. Is that easier? Or is taking a cloth, putting some glue on it, pressing it on a surface and letting it cure in an oven easier? Right? Like, like, to me, there's actually just, like, we think manufacturing with metals is easy, because we have been doing it for the past two centuries. Processes like this, like, you know, I mean, I just described, like, you know, just casting of metals is, is just second nature.

1:17:08Like, nobody thinks about how difficult and complex this really is. So what we are doing is we are getting into this arduous journey of figuring out the zero to one of manufacturing with carbon fiber and recognizing that carbon fiber is its own material. If you ask a woodworker to work with metal, he will not be able to make anything for you out of metal. And I think the problem is today, because carbon fiber is so new as a material, we're not asking carbon fiber engineers to work with carbon fiber. I'm sure everyone you spoke to is working with metals right now. These are engineers that were trained to design and make things out of metal.

1:17:46And if you show them carbon fiber, they're like, God, this is a shitty material. The same way that if you show a woodworker steel, they'll say, God, this is a shitty material. We need a completely new skill set to be built around carbon fiber. And, you know, we need to create new production techniques in your design language around the material. And that is the only way that we can really make it manufacturable. Do I believe that we can fully automate carbon fiber to the level that we have automated metals and steel? I think we absolutely can. But it will take time. There will be new technologies that need to be developed for it.

1:18:20I just believe that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is very well worth it. I believe in a world where, just like how you see steel and metals everywhere around you, there's not a single part of the world you can go to where you don't see metal somewhere. I believe the same thing will happen out of carbon fiber. That if we have this conversation, maybe three decades later, you'll be chatting to me on a carbon fiber mic or this boom will be made out of carbon fiber. There'll be things in this room that are made out of carbon fiber.

1:18:55Naman Pushp: So do you think Airbound will play, do you think you'll be vertically integrated making those machines? Yes. Yes. Okay. That's really, like, I would say Airbound at its essence, right? Like, if you strip away everything, you strip away the market, the drone, etc. Like, we are really a carbon fiber manufacturing play. We are a company that is saying that we are better at making things out of carbon fiber than anyone else in the world. and we will maintain our position by continuing to be better than the rest of the world at making things out of carbon fiber. If we can do that, we have an insane edge that we think is best applied to, you know, movement and aircraft because they really care about Mars.

1:19:38But this can honestly be applied to anything, right? Like, I think eventually when this becomes commoditized and it becomes common enough, you'll see like tables and chairs made out of carbon fiber. the same way that someone in a pre-industrial era could never imagine a world made out of steel, right? If you spoke to a blacksmith in the, you know, 1700s, they would say that, look, dude, we've been working with steel. We've known how to use this material for 4 ,000 years now. This is not new. If there was some discovery to be made, we would have made it. It's just not possible to make this in a like highly like non highly labor intensive format right it takes an immense amount of care and effort to forge something out of steel you need to be have like decades of experience to work with this material and so yeah you'll never see like a table or a chair made out of steel that's ridiculous it'll always be wood that makes these things so maybe this is the way this has to happen, but like, you know, how can you be so confident about this?

1:20:43Naman Pushp: I mean, you're still in your 20s. You've never worked in a big manufacturing operation before. You must have had someone far smarter than I am push back on this, maybe while they were doing due diligence or something like that. I mean, it takes a lot of gusto to just to believe this, but you know, also this is how things change so i think it's just that i've the only arguments i've received against carbon fiber are all some flavor of it hasn't worked before right and things have always been this way and the metal processes don't work with carbon fiber i have not yet come across a real first principles argument for years why carbon fiber can never be made manufacturable and until I come across a you know highly like structured and convincing argument in that format I'm going to keep on believing in carbon fiber yeah yeah and this is this is a really difficult question it's not it's sort of shitty it's it's like a intuition I have um it's just you know I every time I'm with like a rocket company it's like you build the first rocket and then And first of all, it's crazy hard to manufacture that one.

1:22:06Naman Pushp: And then when you get bigger, a whole new world of hurt opens up and companies go under and crumble and they can't do it. And, you know, when I was looking at where you guys are, again, I was just so impressed that especially with the first generation, you were able to manufacture. It's like what, like four or five a week or I mean, I forget the numbers. More than that. Yeah, like about two a day. Two a day. Okay, so clearly, you know, you had people building away. They were flying great. The second one, it looks like you guys have a lot of testing still to do on, like, I don't even know how long you've been flying it by the time I'd gotten there.

1:22:49Like, I think a week.

1:22:51Naman Pushp: A week, okay. Like a really, really short period. Fair enough. So you've got to work it out. So my general takeaway was like super fucking impressed. And then I was just playing through in my head. I'm just like, oh, there's going to be problems because there always are as you get bigger and everything. And then, and then again, this is like, this is based on nothing other than, um, I'm just like, man, I wonder if the thesis starts to break down as you, you know, like it was working great now, but as shit gets more serious and bigger, I just, yeah, I wonder if it breaks down again. Again, I have no math or anything to back this up.

1:23:27I think it may. It may not. I think manufacturing is really, really difficult. I think we're not ones to underestimate it. I do think, though, historically, the reason why manufacturing and scaling is really hard for companies is because people underestimate that challenge. They think that, hey, I've made one. How difficult could making 10 be? And I think part of our edge is the fact that we know that, again, At our core, we are a manufacturing company. There's nothing else to it. Like this is everything else is just like layers of design and market and like other shell and fluff built on top of a production company.

1:24:07Like all we are is a manufacturer that has found a pretty good design to use and monetize. and yeah my deep belief is that at the core of it manufacturing is just you take a certain amount of stuff and you have to pay for the cost of producing that stuff and you have to pay for the cost of bringing that stuff together into the thing you're trying to make and I just feel like to me it just feels obvious that structurally if you need less stuff to do the same thing if you can do the same thing with 10x less stuff That stuff might be more expensive early on, but eventually you can figure out cost, you can figure out supply chain.

1:24:49All of these to me feel like temporary problems. And when I say temporary, it might be like a 20-year-long temporary problem. But the end state will always favor the product that needs less stuff. And carbon fiber fundamentally needs less stuff to do the same things that metal can. You can, with great design, achieve the same strength that you would with steel while using 10x less mass in carbon fiber. And so what that means is that as long as per kg our production costs can eventually get to within 10x of steel, which we're already pretty close without having scaled up this industry at all, then it will be a more manufacturable and scalable material.

1:25:30Naman Pushp: Okay. Okay. I'll stop torturing you. I remember meeting you for the first time you came in with just this like boundless energy. and I don't even think you had any idea. I think somebody had just sort of told us to meet. I think Junior's walking through aircraft design with me and folding this napkin and I was like kind of taken, but I didn't really know what to make of you. And then, you know, just going to see what you guys had built really. I don't say this often. I mean, you just, you like stand out, you know, and it was impressive. and um and i do not i'm nowhere near enough of an engineer or at all um to sort of like approach some of this the right way but i have been to like a lot of these facilities with people trying to do stuff like this and everything you guys are doing looks like super spot on and so um yeah i just wish you so much luck man it's been really fun getting to like hang out with you a bit Yeah, and I'm excited to see what the future holds.

1:26:37Naman Pushp: I am too. I can't wait to see what you guys next. So you've set the bar pretty high next week because now I think I want to make an annual pilgrimage to India. Oh, that'll be great. So you're going to have to like up. We're going to have to do more. Yeah, I think we can do more. I'm not worried about that. All right, you have to let me know when we should come out next year so we can kind of time it for maximum visual stunningness. And thank you. Thanks so much for spending time with us and coming by again. Yeah, awesome. The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashley Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together.

1:27:17It is produced by me and David Nicholson.

1:27:21Naman Pushp: Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland. And the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brext for all your support. And thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all of those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.