Inside the World’s Most Extreme Jet Suit | Gravity Industries Founder Richard Browning

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0:48The team very kindly arranged for me to go jetpack racing in Somerset. This is the conversation that we had with the founder Richard Browning about it. It's an incredible story, a company that is employing 30 people and shows how the UK is at the future of innovation. But I would seriously encourage you to go and watch the full version on YouTube because you can see that I am quite good at taking off in a jetpack but perhaps not so good at landing. Big thanks to Octopus Legacy for backing us on this episode. You should not fly a jetpack without a will. there is a free opportunity for Jimmy's Jobs of the Future listeners to get a free will but there's only a limited amount so click the link below and get on with it it's a the long-term listeners of you will remember me interviewing Sam Grice about three years ago the founder it's a pretty emotional story but it's one of the most interviews that I'm proudest of doing and it turns out that writing your will can be a joyous experience if not a bit emotional I had to stop halfway through the first time I did it.

1:53Thanks as always. Here's the full interview with Richard Brannan, the CEO.

2:01Richard, how many people do you employ here at Gravity? It's around 30. We've got an engineering team, technical team. We've got an events team, which consists of people who train pilots and train members of the public, the guys that look after you, and they get deployed to do events as well. And then we've got a sort of third group, which is kind of the commercial and administration team. What are your hopes for it for the next five years? Where would you like to expand those teams? So our big journey and what was the basis of the big financial raise we did about two years ago, so the money's in the back about 18 months ago, it was around$9,$10 million or so.

2:40That was all about scaling the, I mean, frankly, professionalism, not that we weren't professional, but to get to a junior level of BAE systems process, if you like, when it comes to selling to our military clients who have been desperate for us to sell to them. But behind the scenes, no matter what is said publicly, the amount of paperwork and testing and process that you need in order to sell to essentially a government is enormous compared to an R &D prototyping company that would make do and mend and jump on a plane and do an event and then come back and make the next version. So that's been a big journey because Again, as lots of startups would attest to, in the defense area, it's feast or famine.

3:24It's like we've been working some of those deals for six years and not really seen any money out of it. And yet, if we get over the line, it's an order of magnitude more money than doing the events. So it's a potential death trap. And what is the valuation of the company now then after the last race? I think the last race a few years ago was about$83 million. So probably nudging 100 now, given the progress we've got. And the order book would more than justify that 100 million valuation. The journey to get to what I'm about to describe has been very much like the engineering journey, which is this idea of have an idea, work how you can quickly test it in a way that if it probably doesn't work, you can get back up again and try again.

3:58So we've done the same on the commercial front. So now I sit here, we've got an entertainment business and we've got a professional business. The entertainment business is doing commercial events. We just opened the T20 and Cricket simultaneously across Mumbai and Sri Lanka. and a few weeks ago. We've done stuff with the Kardashians. We've opened baseball seasons. We've done stuff with Google, Dell. We've done stuff with Brooks Trainers. I mean, you name it. We delivered Domino's pizzas. You name it. And as long as they're not dangerous or stupid, then they're amazing because they generate a lot of what you see on our social media and it demonstrates what we can do with equipment.

4:34And we can pack all this gear up, not these ones, these are old now, but into two check-in suitcases and just go anywhere in the world. So the ability to move it is quite remarkable, really. The professional business is the special forces mobility stuff. And a close bedfellow is the medic response side of things. So that is where you're flying medics up mountains in a couple of minutes to get to a heart attack victim and bring them, you know, keep them alive until you get the cavalry to arrive. So that professional business is where there's a lot more process and burn rate of money because it's a big grown up professional business compared to the entertainment side, which is very professional, but you don't have the same burden.

5:13So those are the two divisions. And it's been great because, as I mentioned, when you're doing the military work, you just need some colonel to change jobs. And the next person comes in and even you've been working for three years goes, oh, it's not a priority anymore. That's always a risk. We're generating an entirely new category of aviation after all. um and on the on the entertainment side it's very unpredictable uh the phone can ring in an afternoon within 24 hours we've got people deployed out in australia flying some air show um but that's really good money you can earn you know 100 150 000 in a weekend with one pilot which is amazing my speaking fees are similar um how many jetpacks do you do you physically own them now um so we used to in the days of what's behind us we'd usually only have about five or six sitting in kind of stock and the oldest, most ropey damaged one would then get torn to pieces and bits salvaged for the next version, which would be better, hopefully.

6:07Yeah, yeah. And there was this rolling, you know, what's the Del Boy broom kind of joke about changing the head and changing the handle? What's his name? Triggers broom, that's it. There's an element of that. But now we've got a stock of more like a dozen. We've got quite a few in the hands of some of our customers as well. We had to lock the design down quite a bit, which is a little boring, but it means we've gone more to a production basis, which is new for us. So yeah, a dozen or so, I mean, that's enough to deploy a lot around the world. Who was the first person you hired and what did they do?

6:39So I did a lot of this myself initially, and that was probably one of the reasons for the pace and the success, because with an idea as crazy as this, if you're relying on enrolling a dozen people, unless you've got loads of money and I didn't have any money to spend on this, it's going to be tough, right? I had one guy, a wonderful guy, John Reese, who helped me with the electronics that I was slightly out of my depth with. But other than that, was me and him. When we got it to work, and then there's a crazy story about the launch and accidentally raising half a million dollars in a parking lot in America and all that kind of stuff.

7:09I actually hired the wife of a Red Devils parachute lead guy because I had him over. They were kind of family friends. And I had him over talking about parachutes and maybe the relevance to what we do. And turns out really, we don't really go high enough for parachutes. And that was not really going anywhere. But actually, she went by, you mind me saying it? Katie, his wife had two tiny children kind of crawling all over her when we were having this conversation in my house. And she was alive with questions. She had just endless thoughts of what we could do. And why do we do this? And what about that?

7:41One of these people just, you know, when she left that evening, I was like, oh, my goodness, you know, her brain is alive with ideas and thoughts. And it felt like just opportunity had not crossed her path. I think, you know, it felt like one of these people where life had pushed it down direction of, you know, and having kids is the hardest job in the world. But I think before then, I don't think anything had crossed her path that had lit her brain up like that, or that somebody had seen the opportunity of exploiting that. And anyway, she jumped in completely with me and we made up how to ship equipment around the world, how to do events.

8:12We started from scratch and built it between us for probably the first year or so and then I quickly started hoovering up graduate engineers and kind of built from there as we got more money in but yeah Katie and she's still with us we're very bad at getting rid of people we've got an amazing team and most of them when they're here I don't think we've ever lost anybody that was somebody do we we didn't want to lose if that makes sense yeah yeah totally and it's not just people in Somerset who've noticed the visitor list here is not normal either along here or who have we actually been involved with in some of the 300 plus, we've stopped counting now, events across 53 countries that we've done events or exercises at.

8:54We've done stuff with Tom Cruise. I live with Jeff Bezos for about a week, no, 10 days actually for his Mars event. That was pretty cool. Having breakfast with Jeff most mornings. Done a couple of things with Elon before it all went a bit crazy um branson at ted um even a gin launch for the kardashians um i didn't even go to that one sent to my younger chaps who uh there's a very uh flushed looking photo of them at the end of the event anyway i won't embarrass them any more than that um um yeah lots of people um it's been amazing really uh to to genuinely have uh people like tom cruise take time out to go no this is this is or or jeff bezos or you know master go no this is this is genuinely really impressive uh even quite long chat with zuckerberg that's really nice you know and it's not asking them for anything it's just you show you you show them your thing and they go wow that's amazing well done and you think well that's that's coming from somebody who's done publicly a lot yeah i mean that is incredible right you think of most british entrepreneurs if they've got instructions to people like that like um yeah surely you're tempted to ask for investment or whatever it is well.

10:00Do you know that? That's funny. That's what everybody thinks. But A, as soon as you go, hey, really nice to meet you, Mr. Bezos, Jeff, if the first or second thing comes out your mouth is, by the way, do you want to see my little business pitch for an idea I've got? I mean, those poor people are pitched endlessly, even I am. And it just immediately, they have to glaze their eyes over. There's not enough hours in their lives left to give all those ideas the time. And that also implies they're not doing something cool already themselves. that you think they're going to take time out from what they're already doing, somebody you really are impressed by and admire, you think they're going to pause a section of that to go and get involved in your thing.

10:41I know that's not what it feels like is you as the person asking them. But my advice to anybody is do not ask people for stuff, right? If they come to you afterwards and go, but I'm really impressed with you or your company or what you're doing, great, then you're in. But these people are endlessly pitched like that. But you think they'll do that? Your logic with this, which I think is totally fair, having been on some of that, is that they will get in touch with you and they are such go-getters, whatever, right? It's not actually going to be about you sort of getting in touch, which is different to what we were talking about in terms of people starting out, I guess, and being proactive.

11:18I mean, look, if you're actually doing a raise and you're at an event where they're there and they know that there are people doing raises, then fair enough, right? You're allowed to. I'm saying if you're like a social event and you happen to a friend of a friend to get introduced to somebody like one of these people that's a massive privilege be a human to them don't rush to them and say hey really nice to meet you and by the way look can I have half a million quid because you've got billions I mean there's when is that ever going to work if you subtly get a chance to demonstrate what you're doing yeah and they go my god that's one of the best ideas I've ever seen how can I get involved done but you can't force that artificially no and I suppose It's the context of some of these things of like, yeah, you'll be at a social event.

11:56If it's a pitching event, then crack on. Don't hide in the toilets. Don't do it. My advice is terrible. How did you get people to take you seriously at the outset? You must have had to have done some stunts and get a traction. Okay, so the really interesting moment at the beginning was started in March 2016. By about October that year, did that very first wobbly-legged flight. You know, it's all in the TED Talks and everything like that. and landed and thought, oh my God, I can see the door had opened. All my recoverable failure stuff I've just been talking about. This was suddenly one of those ideas.

12:28I think one in 20 of my ideas works. That's about the run rate. This was turning into one of the ones that would work. And it's like, oh my God, this could work. So then this cloud formed over me of like, but what do I do? I'm staying in a farmyard with a bunch of jet engines strapped to me and I think I could fly. I just did. But where do I even begin? Because I can just see all the British media headlines, The easy to grasp for one is lunatic British inventor alongside the picture of the back of the future mad inventor trying to blow us up in his garage. Ha ha, funny. And I'm dead. After that, I'm dead.

12:59Who's ever going to invest? Who's going to believe in any future of that, right? And it is a bit of a British problem, that or European problem. So I happen to know, luckily, through friends of friends of friends, and I worked this really hard, I got into the realm of Wired and Red Bull. And I thought if I could pick two brands that would hopefully feel excited enough because I invited to this farmyard to come and see this secret squirrel project. And they both were like, this is epic. This is really cool. And I entrusted my reputation still as an active oil trader and for a big city firm. I entrusted my entire reputation to them to do a launch film that they sort of co-developed.

13:36And they did let me see a little bit of it and not very much. And they revealed it when I was on business in the US. And I literally almost burst into tears when they revealed it because I thought I was going to live or die by this film, right? It's going to be an enormous embarrassment or just enough oh my god this is like aspiring human capability you know nudging into that human dream if you walk out of the cave and go i want to be like the birds which we haven't really made inroads and in terms of you as a human that is manifested by marvel and dc and everything and americans get this but this side of the atlantic it's like what you're a kid you're gonna get a plastic toy do you want to you know do you have a little plastic doll when you you know wanted to make real all this stuff but no the films they did were epic they were like tear-jerkingly like this is the ambition of mankind and this is one small step you know for the you know it's beyond the right brothers kind of stuff and it was them saying it not me i did not build this to build an iron man suit i love the first film but only after i'd built all this and it was like oh my god this is i didn't didn't have to do it in a cave but there was an element of having no resources and having to build it and under some duress to a degree um but this really smart marketing execs that I happen to know looked at me and said, I know what you need to do.

14:45You do not make this look like Ironman, but you don't also deny it either. What you do is you make it its own thing. And we used to have this sort of leather jacket, 1920s biker kind of look that was sort of Steve McQueen, pioneering aviator. You could almost have a scarf flapping, but you wouldn't get stuck in the engine. But that kind of era between the wars where people were racing cars and bikes and boats and all of this kind of gritty kind of thing. We positioned it like that and we flew it all over the world. And the reaction was the same. People would look at it and go, it's its own thing, but they'd look at their friends and family and go, I know what it's like.

15:20It's like Iron Man. And then they'd come up to you having convinced their family and friends, and they're all going, oh my God, it's like you built a real life Iron Man suit. And the genius of that marketing guy was you need the observer to tell you it. If you try and clink around in gold and red a marvel are going to get the hump but also you're gonna get a letter um also his exact feedback was to me was that people will subconsciously compare it to the film and go well it's no way as good as a film yeah okay which is lunacy lunacy right but that that was an amazing piece of guidance when i said to you that i didn't know what to do having got the damn thing to you know launch it was little bits of advice like that but in hindsight were magic and my co-founder that originally invested he came up with the word word gravity which nobody in the aviation world would have ever thought of, but he wasn't from it.

16:04He was from the outside and went, what about gravity? You're kind of fighting gravity. It's like, nobody in the history of aviation has ever kind of looked at it that way. What were the items that you had in mind before that? I didn't have any idea. I did have one idea. I had a name for the suit and that was a lovely idea that came from my son who was about, my youngest son at the time was about 10. And he was fascinated by ancient Greek heroes and stuff like that. He used to listen to story tapes as a kid. I thoroughly recommend doing that. He just knows all the Greek and Roman legends because he just listened to it while he was asleep it's amazing um and he came up with the name Daedalus so Daedalus was Icarus's father Icarus was the lunatic silly son ironic when my son came up with the name but anyway Icarus was the one that got famous for basically abusing the rules the rules of the guidebook Daedalus was the smart dad who built it all so actually it's quite cool in the sense that um but the problem is it sounds like the word dead no one knows what it is I got bored of explaining exactly that story it was like nah Ah, forget that.

17:03What does this business in your most optimistic, ambitious dreams look like in 20 years? Gosh, 20 years. I mean, that's amazing, isn't it? We've been going an already ridiculous nine. So I think, I mean, I was Royal Marines Reserve for about six years, a long time ago. So I am deeply honored and also passionate about embedding the Special Forces maritime soldier mobility capability we have. If you've got to get troops from a landing craft onto a beach or up a cliff or onto another ship or across a minefield or across mud, wire, water, all the things in Ukraine, and we were there for a little bit, we do it like nobody else.

17:46We can do it skirting low over the ground, below anti-aircraft, anti-drone systems. We offer a tool in the toolkit to militaries that does things no one ever imagined. And we demonstrated it countless times. It does not mean it's a slam dunk because of all the process you have to go through. But I really want to embed that. I forecast that once we've done all the hard work, the big primes out there hungry for another product in their stable will then want to acquire the rights to that, us having taken all the risk to get it to that point. That's such is life. And actually, I think in a way, I'd be happy kind of licensing that.

18:19Our core skill as a company is to turn the impossible into something that actually, to everybody's surprise, actually works, but probably only one in 20 times. To turning a crazy concept into something that people didn't imagine. It's as impossible as nothing as you walk into a place. That's a funny phrase. Sounds to a British person, which sounds ridiculous, right? If you take that to America, everybody's like, hell yeah, I'm down with that. Or let's say Californians. when you really unpack impossible or that microphone i've already talked about that's an impossible piece of technology what probably about 200 years ago 150 years ago uh the iphone chat gpt ai all of these things were completely impossible until suddenly they weren't yeah and if you'd been stuck in well of course it's impossible it's never going to happen you never would have tried to make it possible so actually unbanging your assumptions around where the barriers are is the first step to actually any kind of breakthrough so that's why it's across the doorway.

19:12I'd like our team to be focused on that and also carrying on doing events and scale our race series. And to be honest, in this miserable world, we seem to have invented for ourselves at the moment. I love the inspiration, the authentic manifestation of what innovation is, hopefully bringing entrepreneurship to life, trying to inspire what creative humans can actually achieve if you just navigate that risk pathway right of making those failures recoverable. um i that's the bit i love i think that's more positive um but you know what this miserable world we live in there's plenty of money if we can crack it properly in the defense world moving soldiers more safely across any terrain plenty more business for that how has the drone warfare particularly changed that element i think yeah actually it's helped surprisingly so people often say to us like surely that's now you know removed i need for us but no we can move special forces with drones now.

20:07So there are plenty of reasons why they have not, well, they've dragged their feet so much of taking pilots out of aircraft. And even now with the autonomous aircraft coming, they are loyal wingmen to a pilot in a plane because we are still as humans. And I sadly only give it 10 years, maybe 20. We still don't really trust anything other than a human eyeball close to the target going, oh my God, it's a school. It's not a bomb factory. Most of the time. Yeah. And I think there are plenty of special forces missions where you've got to talk to the hostage, you've got to place the explosive, you've got to recover the intelligence, you've got to make a judgment on the ground.

20:45And yeah, fly with a recon drone, a fire support drone, a weapons equipment drone, you know, equipment drone. But we can allow people to keep up with drones. So actually it's helped. How have you changed your kind of like hiring methods over the years? Because at the beginning, it's a real punt, right? Yeah, again, we've cheated the system here. so we used to have a training system at goodwood it's now here at rhq and we'd have clients there we'd have um training there we'd do all sorts of things there and if somebody reached out we were deluged constantly on linkedin on every social media platform you know it's not under not surprising that people yeah quite fancy coming work for you know jet suit company um now the ones that look interesting or they've got a skill set that generally is genuinely is potentially a fit for what we're looking for.

21:34Or they just sound really interesting and really passionate, and they've done interesting stuff in their background, built stuff themselves, gone over and above what just the education system maybe has done with them. We used to say, and we do the same here, well, look, just drop down to Goodwood, watch some training. No more instructions than that. And the best people would just dive in, and within an hour, they'd be wearing a gravity top, they would be pitching in, they'd be mopping the floors, they'd be helping get somebody lunch, they would just be having a joyous experience of being endlessly helpful yes some people and again it's no personal criticism and i think society's got more to blame with this education in particular some people just stand there like a lemon kind of waiting like well what do i do tell me what to do and it's like look if you aren't taking the initiative this isn't going to work any small company you know knows that yeah i'm not even going to define the job you're going to do if you can come along and start being useful and valuable and the value you're delivering is going to be more than what it's going to cost us to pay you, you're in.

22:32And actually we'd have an even luxury, a greater luxury of that for at least two, three, four weeks, people would just even be happy to come along without even being paid. They were so passionate about it. And it would be us saying, this isn't fair now. We really need to start paying you. And that's how nearly everybody in the company started. It was passion first, followed by like, I guess we should pay you. And they'd be like, yeah, I guess I probably should be paid. Yeah. Would you want to pay me? I don't mind. They'd literally do it for free. It's that old adage about, you know, the dream of life of finding something you'd do even if you weren't paid for it um and how do you keep yourself in check from a personal development side to use some rather sort of um terrible corporate language but in terms of like yeah you started off innovating and now you've got like a really quite sizable business to run which you're the chief executive of like how do you keep both those sort of engines running?

23:24It's been the unexpected, fascinating life journey for the last nine years. You know, I was 16 years in a corporate job running a trading book, doing all sorts of exotic business development and everything. And that was pretty cool. And I think very useful to mean that I'm not like 21, unfortunately. I'm not 21 starting this business, in which case that's a big, big journey. Because to your point, the skill set that I've realized you need to exhibit changes almost on a weekly basis. So if you're the mad maverick nutter in a garage, and this is exactly the headline I was trying to avoid when we launched with Wired and Red Bull, but anyway, I'll say it nine years later.

23:58If you were the crazy back to the future white-haired lunatic that comes up with this, there's nothing on paper that says you're going to be the guy who then also knows how to recruit a fractional CFO or even knows you need one. Yeah. Or knows you should pattern stuff before it goes on the public domain or even knew anything about social media or how to position it. How do you market this? How do you brand it? What do you tell the public this even is? It's a blank page. You're going to get their attention, but you've got to fill that void. And you've got to fill it just enough that they engage with it and they don't go, this is ridiculous or dangerous or stupid.

24:27Oh, my goodness. I mean, the explosion in my mind almost on sort of day one of launching the company, having cracked the technical problem, which I thought was hard enough, right? Most people just think that's it. That really was only about 7 % or 8%, I think, of the problem. The rest is like, where do I begin? I've got to, from scratch, go on this classic entrepreneur's journey, which there is end of the podcast about, of trying to market, finance, scale, recruit, lead, manage, risk manage, a whole journey that there is no guidebook on. Yeah. So I've actually come to realize that's probably even more rewarding, probably even more rewarding than the technical fiddling, which people listening to this that like a good technical fiddle of their car or their coding or whatever it is.

25:17That's a great incestuously nerdy thing. And that's very rewarding. I like I used to like that. actually the the challenge of looking stepping back and looking at the the thing you're running and going what is it i'm not seeing what what i'm gonna what i mean what am i gonna regret not thinking about today in 18 months time yeah like the raising is the good example the point you need to start thinking about raising is way earlier than you really need the money and that's terrifying um so i i've really enjoyed i think that journey and i think the biggest thing i would say about it is it's the humility you know it's frankly the opposite of what we see in the american leadership at the moment to be controversial probably not very controversial anymore but if you surround yourself with people who go yeah that's a brilliant idea richard excellent brilliant that's a disaster yes easy it's easy for a while but actually surrounding yourself with bright people and rewarding them when they challenge you constructively um and and sharing the problem set with people in a way where they know that when it comes to it you will have that fist on the table and go right we're going this way yeah but in but before that moment inviting that open creative thought process actually it's it's so much more stress relieving than trying to think leadership is about just everybody shut up and follow me i know i've got all the answers because i sure as hell haven't and let's talk a bit about ambition in the uk as well because i know this is something you are very passionate about and it's something that this podcast is all about is trying to encourage people have more agency try things and be ambitious i think more people can achieve more with their professional lives than at times they give credit for.

26:46You must have had a heck of a lot of doubters and naysayers at the outset with this. Yeah, although I had a good solution. I just didn't tell anybody. I mean, I genuinely didn't tell anybody. There was about five people knew what I was doing, including my family, until I got it to work. And even then, I was like, look, I still don't really know what I've created in a farmyard in Wiltshire. It's a sort of very loud flying suit, which I think has got lots of potential. But, like, again, back to that problem of how do I even position this? How do I communicate? What even is it? That is a challenge.

27:19Now, but I think to your point about trying to encourage, in my mind, innovation on entrepreneurship, if you take a step back, I think at every level, whether it's government, whether it's corporate life, whether it's at school, whether it's running your own business, those twin attributes of innovation on entrepreneurship are the most under-talked about, undervalued factors that all of our prosperity, all of our comfortable lives and the future of our children entirely depends upon. Yeah. You might think in government or in big corporate, well, you know, innovation, entrepreneurship, what's their relevance?