Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies

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2:34Start creating for free at framer.com slash design. And use code BUILT for a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com slash design and use promo code built framer.com slash design promo code built rules and restrictions may apply. Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it seems pretty clear that within, say, 50 years, most cars will likely be electric. The internal combustion engine is on its way out, but that's not necessarily the case for air travel. So far, it's been difficult to figure out how to create a long-range commercial electric airplane. But when it comes to shorter distances, electric planes will start to play a much bigger role, especially in transporting goods like medicine and packages.

3:28One of the leading companies in the space is Beta Technologies. The company's founder, Kyle Clark, is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. He's a serial entrepreneur who started three other companies, And he's also a former NHL hockey player. But he's always been mainly interested in building planes. In fact, the name of his company could be traced back to his early reputation as a tinkerer. My passion was designing things, building things. And, you know, even the name of our company, Beta, which is named because of my nickname in hockey. Because Beta was the nerd in the Matrix movie in the back, always hammering away on his computer.

4:07and on the hockey team, everyone had a nickname and my nickname was Beta because I was a nerd and I was always studying and just doing applied math and engineering. And so on the hockey team, I was a little bit of an outsider, respected, but an outsider, focused on designing things and building things. I read that your dad ran a machine shop that made items for researchers at the University of Vermont. And you, as a teenager and as a kid, we used to go to that machine shop and like take parts and just tinker around and make stuff. So what were the kinds of things you were making? Yeah. I mean, this was probably the best education a kid could ever have.

4:49It was called the Instrumentation and Model Facility where professors would come in with wacky ideas and the machinists would figure out ways to build it. And so my jobs there were actually taking, you know, computer models and then serving them back to the machinists or serving them to the professors. And all I was doing was really copying the designs of other people. And on the side, I was building parts for airplanes, for ice boats, for go-karts. After hours, we called it government work or G-jobs. And I built a whole lot of stuff in that machine shop, which I can say now because my dad's retired and, you know, no repercussions for him at the university.

5:34So when you got to Harvard and you studied material science and engineering, did you think that you would go into aviation? Was that sort of your goal? Yeah, there was no question in my mind at that point that I was going into aviation. In fact, I was building all kinds of airplanes in my dorm room. When you say building airplanes, like model airplanes? Yeah, mostly model airplanes. But, you know, I'd go over to local airport and help people build experimental airplanes. And even before that, in high school, started building real scale ultralights and airplanes. I read that while you were an undergraduate, you wrote your thesis on designing a hybrid electric airplane.

6:18And at the time, this is 2004, some of your mentors there, professors were like, this is not realistic. You can't really, this won't work. Can you tell me what you were designing? Yeah, it was a hybrid electric design because I started to realize that electric propulsion had unique advantages over traditional reciprocating engines. And that was actually called Beta Air. And that was kind of the germ of the whole Beta Air idea. Of course, it wasn't fully baked. It was just the beginning of it. All right. So you do this thesis. But after you graduate, you actually kind of went in a different direction.

6:55You went on to found a few other companies, including a company called iTherm Technologies and another one called Energy Management Systems, both of which you would go on to sell. And then you also started another company called Venture.co, which is, I guess, like a social network for entrepreneurs. But all the while, in the back of your mind, you were still thinking about something in aviation? Oh, it was straight in the front of my mind. I was developing notebooks and notebooks of ideas on how to make beta error reality. And so the idea that you had for beta at the time, what was it? Was it exactly as you laid out in your thesis or had it evolved into something different by that point?

7:38Yeah, it evolved to a passenger aircraft, a two-person passenger aircraft with a high wing, a hybrid drivetrain, and a pusher propeller. Your vision was to do a two-passenger electric aircraft, like a drone, that could be used for leisure or for just private aviation because presumably it wouldn't go that far. That's correct. It was a private plane that you could take to an airport, disconnect parts of a motorcycle from it. There was a whole idea around enabling point-to-point travel. Wow. It would be a motorcycle embedded into an electric plane? That's right. Wow. And look. It's like a transformer.

8:18It is. And it was really, it still is a very elegant design. And someday I'm going to go and bring it to the market. Cool idea. I want that. Me too. So you would, yeah, because it's like when you see like an RV with like a, you know, towing like a small vehicle behind it, basically, or a motorcycle. You basically could fly somewhere, drop the plane off and get on your motorcycle and go to the final destination. That's right. And you would actually ride your motorcycle straight out. And that's what made it hybrid because you'd use the high power density motorcycle engine to maintain the charge on batteries that would be the primary propulsion to the airplane.

8:54Wow. All right. So this is your idea. And did you have any interest? Anybody who was like, this is it. This is, I'm in. I met a few people that were in, but nobody that was able to catalyze it alongside me. And, you know, meanwhile, I was sponsoring teams at the university here to, um, to build elements of it. So I had several years of actually senior design teams that had built a flying drone that you flew from the ground, doing the same idea, a fixed wing aircraft. He flew from the ground. Ironically, those people now work here. Um, but I was just materializing and formulating the ideas. Because there were a lot of believers in what I was doing.

9:42But look, it takes a lot of dough to bring an aircraft to market. And so there's a bit of an initiation cost to bring it from that. We're flying scale models, flying computer simulations, have designs to, look, we're going to go build a real airplane and fly it. I mean, even with your access to the University of Vermont and students there and the fact that you had sold businesses previously, were you – did you have the capital to independently finance this? No, not independently. And I was aware of that. You know, this is hundreds of millions of dollars even, you know, optimistically. Yeah. All right.

10:24So meantime, I guess you're invited to present or to go down to either a conference or some kind of presentation that was hosted by a woman named Martine Rothblatt, who some people will know that name, a pioneer, a very famous engineer. engineer. She's a co-founder of SiriusXM, United Therapeutics. She's given TED Talks. I've seen her TED Talks. Amazing story of innovation. She's working on an electric helicopter, I guess, and what you're invited down to go assess it or what was the story? Yeah, exactly. So Martine, through a couple other colleagues that I knew, had I've been very interested in having people download to her thoughts on electrifying aviation.

11:17And one of the entry points was the assessment of this electric helicopter. Like you said, she had commissioned to be built. And so I was given a rough outline of what it was and asked to come and present how batteries, inverters, and motors are either fit or unfit to electrify aviation. and uh and about halfway through my presentation on batteries um this gal who i didn't know at the time martine rothblatt she she kind of interrupted me and she said who are you and where are you from and i said i'm kyle i'm from vermont um i've worked a lot in batteries motors inverters and other such things and she goes are you getting paid to be here and i said no and she goes i can tell and i didn't know quite how to respond to that maybe she was like i can tell you're you're an idiot.

12:04Yeah. Well, that was my first thought, right? But what she meant was that I was expressing so much passion and so much care about this that this wasn't a job for me. And she goes, we should talk. And so after the meeting, we're standing in the entryway of the Philadelphia Yacht Club where this meeting was. And she goes, come to see me on Friday morning at my house in Vermont. And so I plan to do that. So just to sort of clarify what she was working on, she was interested in coming up with some kind of electric helicopter because she had started this company, United Therapeutics, and she wanted to figure out a way to transport, I guess, synthetic or donated organs from hospitals to patients, but she wanted to do it in an environmentally responsible way.

12:55So she's trying to figure out this challenge, right? Yeah, she I mean, she said to me, there's no sense in creating a unlimited supply of lungs to save people's lives if we're going to destroy our environment. Yeah. So what's interesting about Martine and a lot of folks that I've met that she actually doesn't have a concept of how to do it. And she but she has an idea of the elements to get it done and what she wants done or what is feasible. So she had written this 10 point spec of what she thought was realistic and aspirational at the same time to move organs. And actually, she didn't care what it looked like, whether it was a helicopter, a drone, a fixed wing plane, a balloon, as long as it met this spec.

13:36Okay, so you end up going to Martine's house and you spent pretty much all day with her, right? Like talking about this electric plane project and aviation more broadly. Then what, like at the end of your time together, I guess she gave you some sort of special assignment? Yeah, so I leave there somewhere before 11 o 'clock at night. And she goes, listen, why don't you write down how you would elicit critical thinking in aviation? And again, that's another interesting, not how you'd build an airplane, but how would you elicit critical thinking in aviation? And so I went home, I painted a watercolor, wrote all over it, and sent it to her at about 4 a.m.

14:14And I went to bed for a couple hours, got up a couple hours later, went out to the garage, was building another motorcycle. And my wife comes out with my phone, and there's a text on it from Martine. and it just says two words. It says, you're on. And I'm like, wow. I mean, now I got to actually like create this company. I've got a customer. I've got a vision. And I told her that in 10 months, we would create this electric aircraft and fly it across the country. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, Kyle spends months building an aircraft just to scrap it and start all over again.

14:55Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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19:10Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Beta Technologies founder Kyle Clark. Back in 2017, he started designing an all-electric aircraft for transporting organs and critical medical supplies. So, all right, so you get this commitment from Martine Rothblatt. And at that point, I guess she wired you$1.5 million in seed capital for Beta Technologies. Yeah. Interestingly enough, it wasn't actually in seed capital. She proposed to be a customer. So she did not take an equity position in the company. She just said, I believe in what you're doing. Let me fund this as a customer.

19:50Wow. So with$1.5 million, you said, this is nuts. You said within 10 months, I'm going to have a prototype. That's right. So how did you? How did you do that? How did you start to even do that? Look, I mean, you have to be like wildly audacious and stupid to do any of this stuff, knowing that the probability of failure is pretty high. However, what I did then is I opened up my black book and I called the 20 smartest people that I've ever worked with and started to convince them to come and work with me. And my pitch was simple. Look, let's go change the world. I'm not going to pay anything. and I don't know where this is going.

20:34And they started joining the team. But I'll tell you what the other interesting thing I did is I had this early revelation that it was more important to me that this business and this idea was successful than I got any financial gain out of it. So day one, I took 70 % of the business and usually people take eight or 10 or seven or 5 % of the business and say, that's going to be the employee pool. I took 70 % of the business and I said, this is what I'm going to use to attract people to be really meaningfully a part of this. And, you know, diluted myself, but I would rather be a meaningful business and a smaller equity holder than a big equity holder in a business that can't do something.

21:16So your initial idea was to have a two-passenger aircraft. Her idea was totally different. It was not to transport passengers. It was to transport medical supplies, organs, right? So now you're focusing on creating a plane designed, really purpose-built designed for transporting goods. Yeah. I mean, there was a couple of big points that she made was no more of this hybrid talk. We're going - All electric. All electric, zero operational emissions. We'll figure out how we charge that in a sustainable way as well. We want it vertical. We need to go hospital to hospital. And we needed to move cargo, like you said.

21:57Now, the most critical cargo you can imagine is human organs, right? Somebody's life's on the line. It's very valuable. And it doesn't, you know, its cost per mile or per hour or whatever is nearly irrelevant relative to the benefits it's providing. All right. So you have got this team gathered. You're going to start to work on building this electric transport aircraft. And was the original design going to be a drone, sort of a fixed-wing drone design? Yeah, we started with a fixed-wing drone design with eight rotors that took off vertically, thrust-vectored forward. That means the rotors tilt in the air to push the air backwards after it's pushing it down.

22:37And we designed, built, and flew a 4 ,000-pound version of this with me in it after 10 months, and we kept our promise. And when we did that, Martine looked around and she's like, wow, not only did you elicit critical thinking in aviation, you just like blew past companies that were funded to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars with this small, scrappy, you know, proactive and frankly pragmatic team in Vermont. I want you to build me a commercial version of that. All right. So you figured out how to build this. And when you had this prototype, what did it do? I mean, how far did it fly?

23:20It flew for about 17 minutes at a time. And we were really restricted to flying over the airport. Right. So we did about 100 test flights in it, though. Wow. And we brought it up to about 65 knots, you know, shut the torque down, put it on the wing, you know, did it in heavy crosswinds, a lot of maneuverability. It was actually a remarkably good performing aircraft. And did you go in some of those early flights yourself? Oh, I did them all, yeah. And how did it fly? I mean, did it feel like you were flying a helicopter or a plane or not quite either? No, what's fascinating about it is that this particular plane had eight 11-foot diameter rotors.

24:03Okay. And they were positioned in four spots coaxially. So they were turning in alternate directions at each corner of the airplane. And these, by the way, and these rotors would rotate up and sort of down midair to sort of fly horizontally. But then they would rotate to land. So you could just like land like a helicopter. Exactly. Exactly. So you take off like a helicopter, but it wasn't that beating sound of a helicopter because every rotor is turning at a different speed. So it almost felt like you were swimming and it was like a whooshing sound. And yet, because electric motors produce instantaneous torque, it was incredibly responsive, almost dangerously responsive.

24:41And you've seen a drone do aerobatics. You're inside that. And the aircraft handled way better than any helicopter I'd ever flown. And all of a sudden, you're like, this sounds different. It feels weird. And the controllability is spectacular. Yeah. I mean, it's like an electric car. The first time you sit in one, you hit the gas or you hit the accelerator and it just takes off like a rocket. That's right. I mean, even the cheapest electric car feels like a Porsche. Yeah, it's amazing, actually. So, all right, so you get this off the ground. And Martin Rothblatt, who had huge contracts with other companies working on this technology, essentially took most or maybe all of those contracts and just diverted it to your company.

25:28That's exactly right. $50 million. That's right. Yeah. $48 million she had out in contracts elsewhere. And she, she brought those back in cause they were behind schedule, not keeping promises. And she redirected that at us and said, go build a commercial version that I can move organs with. Yeah. So, so we did, but you know, we learned what not to do in that aircraft because in all those test flights, we learned what was not reliable, which was problematic from a noise an EMI perspective, and focused all our efforts on making the simplest, most elegant aircraft that we could. All right. So you spent most of 2018 trying to commercialize this prototype.

26:08But after working on this for about a year, I guess you decided to kind of tear up the plans of this thing that had worked, that you liked, that Martine liked, and you sort of were like, no, we got to start over. What happened? Yeah, I mean, the reality was that all that testing and all that critical thinking revealed that we had an aircraft that probably couldn't be certified and probably wasn't the highest performing aircraft. In terms of range, in terms of what? Yeah, range and payload. And some of the big realizations we had were that it was too complex to make truly redundant. What we need is a really simple aircraft.

26:52So it was hard. I had to go to Martine and say, look, I think the right thing to do for our program is to retire AVA. That's what we call the first aircraft and start designing this new one. And here's what it's going to look like in concept. And she came to me and she said, I remember this very specifically. She goes, if you're asking me, if you kept your promise, Kyle, you did. And that's all she said to me. And I sat there thinking about it. And what she was really saying was that you did the right thing. You elicited critical thinking in electric aviation. Now go do the thing you said you're going to do.

27:29All right. Tell me a little bit about what some of these specs were in terms of, you know, things that we would, you know, understand non-technical people. Like, for example, how far did you want these to fly? How much, you know, what kind of payload? How much freight could it carry? What were you trying to get to? Yeah, so the initial specs that Martine had outlined, and she did this by taking simple physics around four elements of flight. Lift over drag ratio, which is how slippery the aircraft is. The empty weight fraction, which is how much is left over for batteries. The battery energy density and the conversion efficiency.