Tech CEO on the Future of Travel & Technology w/ Adam Goldstein | EP #82

28:00We always show a kind of smooth boring flight. So it'll climb up to around 2 ,000 feet in a forward motion. And then the same thing descend again, very gently until I get to go back down. Now, if there's complicated airspace and there's things that you need to fly around, you may ascend or descend for a much longer period of time. So for example, in New York City, if you fly from, if you take a blade from the Blade West Side 34 Street to the Hamptons, right when you get to the Hamptons, you have to ascend to a very high level to just reduce noise. Because these vehicles are much quieter, they won't have that same problem, but there are other situations like that where you might have to climb at certain areas just to get around certain airspace.

28:48And if your folks are not familiar with the EVTOL and getting electric vertical takeoff and landing space, there's a number of different approaches and some of them have wings like midnight and some of them are just multi -copters. They're just drones. And the wing enables a massive efficiency of energy and also much higher speed, I assume. Yeah, it's funny. I remember Peter, I saw you at the maker unveil that we did in 2021. And at Hawthorn Airport, yeah, right next to SpaceX. Yeah, and Aaron Paul was there, you know, the actor from Westworld. and the episodes that were coming out, during that same year, he was flying around in an EVTALT.

29:35They were all wingless vehicles. And so, we talked about that and he said, oh, why do you have a wing? The ones in the show, if you've seen, they don't have wings. The wing actually provides lift and reduces energy usage, which allows the vehicles to just perform better. It also adds a safety feature. Yes. Because these vehicles don't auto rotate, So you can't like with a helicopter, you can kind of keep using the air on the way down to rotate You know the rotor to you know for to slow you down so you don't just go down that too fast for eight But these vehicles have a wing and so they can actually glide on the way.

30:12Yeah, so the engines if the engines go out if you know if you get And I am never mind If the engines go out you could just you can glide to a landing on airport So if you think about the levels of certification that like, let's say like an A380 has, like one of the biggest, you know, planes out there, you know, you're certifying an extraordinarily high level of safety, where, you know, you're looking at one and a billion, you know, chances, one and a billion flight hours of something catastrophic happening. And the reason you can certify at levels at high are because of the redundancy. Because inevitably, parks will fail.

30:49That's why you need redundancy. And so the wing is the ultimate redundancy. So again, six battery packs, 12 engines. None of the battery packs are connected. None of the engines are connected. So for all of them to fail, like one after the next, after the next, after the next, after the next, it's so unlikely. That's how you get to those safety standards that are similar to the big commercial airliners that we know today. And ultimately, you still have the wing. Yeah. Okay, so we have just taken off, we're in our flight profile, we get to our location. Now, one of the things that's interesting is where you can land and take off.

31:28Because, you know, and I'm just curious, in the beginning, I imagine you're going to be operating out of traditional aviation hubs, but you tell me, I don't know, Atlantic aviation being one of them, But I can imagine, like for example, you know, I have friends of mine living to Panga. And when I fly my, I have an SR -22, when I fly out of Santa Monica Airport, I'm over to Panga in, you know, in five minutes, you know, max. If on the wrong day trying to drive there can take me a good over an hour. So can you imagine that there will eventually be sort of land, small landing ports in and it convene locations for regional communities at your service.

32:12Yeah, absolutely, I think there will be.

32:18There's several different ways to think about where you can start and where you can stop. One version of this is just simply point to point services where there's routes where people are already taking every single day. So again, Manhattan to one of the three airports. There's something like 30 million trips per year just going from Manhattan to one of three airports. So you could effectively have a gondola in the sky that just runs those routes from the you know the the vertiports to the airports going all day every day non -stop you know like every two minutes it's taken off and going right yeah or I just think like it's like a ski lift right they just never stop they just keep going it doesn't matter which one you get on it's like greenlight or red light if you can do it so that is a a or a version of it which I think will happen other versions will be where they can actually fly you know you know the routes that aren't necessarily exactly planned that way.

33:07And so that starts to get into political conversation where in California, that's much harder to do than it is in Texas. So I've flown on helicopter in Texas and you can land wherever you wanna land. First of California, it's very specific where you need to land. And so there's different rules for different places and then also depending on the congestion. So New York City will be obviously extremely tight on what you can do regardless of the politics It's just because it's so congested. The air space is actually quite crowded. But it's also still because it's quite crowded, they're used to having many vehicles operating all the time.

33:43So at any given point in time in New York City, you can see helicopters flying, big commercial airlines flying, tour operator flying, all types of aircraft in there at all times in New York City. So that's why it's also a good place to start because they're already used to it. And there's already a lot of established rules on how to do it. I find that impressive that you're starting in one of the most difficult air traffic control congested areas versus starting in the middle of the Midwest, where it's prairies and cattle. So let's talk about when are you going to get operational? Where are you in certification testing operations?

34:19You've also announced some great contracts with players. Can you speak to you sort of with the rober or the rotors hitting the air? I sort of speak. Yeah, so New York City is really interesting for several reasons to start. One is it's just the global stage. And if you think about people from all around the world that come there, I want the CEO of Charles De Gaulle to call me and say, hey Adam, I just took one of your planes from JFK to Manhattan. That was incredible. You have to bring this to Charles De Gaulle. You have to. This is unbelievable. So New York City has that draw. Versus in Kansas, that'll be harder to get to.

34:56It will obviously be easier to operate in Kansas because the airspace will be so much less crowded. The second thing is I lived in New York City for 20 years. So I love New York City. I feel like I'm more of a New Yorker than anything else. And so for me, it's like kind of a homecoming to be able to do that. So that's another reason why. I also think the other thing that people don't talk about as much and maybe it's not cool to talk about it is this is an extraordinarily capital intensive business. The thing that has allowed it to happen, really, it's the technology, it's the kind of political nature of where we are with the regulators, meaning they want this to happen too, which is very positive.

35:36But then it's the capital. So even if the other two things happened, until the capital markets opened up to a point where we could actually do this, you couldn't actually get it going. And so thankfully, for whatever reason, the capital markets opened, I guess you could probably we thank Tesla for having a very successful hardware business. It enabled companies like Archer, which were very small, nascent companies to raise substantial amounts of capital. So, we raised almost a billion dollars of capital in our IPO. And by the way, we had 45 people working at Archer at that point. And so, it was a very low amount of people to go out and do this because you need a lot of money up front to start this.

36:19So, New York City is really important for lots of reasons. If you think about the next phase in scaling out manufacturing, capital is going to be just as important. And so, we need the people that control some of the largest pools of capital to see these vehicles, to feel these vehicles and ride them. And because I've done it, the first time you experience like a helicopter in Urban Armability Trip and you get to do an amazing day, all of a sudden the world changes for you. So the trips that you know we offer investors all the time are come to California We will make you drive from SFO down to our office in San Jose.

36:57It'll take you 45 minutes an hour. It'll suck You'll then come see the headquarters. You'll see the factory next door We'll then go to San Jose, which is five minute drive from from our headquarters, which is next to Levi Stadium We'll fly you on our helicopter down to flight test Which is down in silliness like right outside of Monterey It'll be a 15 minute flight. It'll replace the 90 minute drive. You'll come see some planes fly. We'll then fly to Napa. We'll go have lunch. We'll then fly at SFO and you'll leave. And that is an incredible day that people can experience using a helicopter that will all of a sudden understand what the future is about to be like because you could not do anything like that without an air vehicle because it's just too much time on the ground.

37:40And by the way, you feel good and refreshed. You haven't spent that much time in a vehicle. it's moving actually really fast and you got to do lots of different cool things. Once you experience that, it's just you see the future. It's like the first time I put on an Oculus headset, I was like, oh my God, I understand virtual reality now. That was just mind -blowing to me. Same thing. First time you experience urban mobility, you are like game changer, I understand what's about to happen. Yeah, it's interesting. My experience of that was massively, I mean, I've done that in New York, you know, just basically getting from two and from JFK and Manhattan.

38:17But the place that really lit me on fire was Brazil in Sao Paulo. I don't know if you've ever spent any time down there, but everybody's got a helicopter to avoid the incredible traffic down below. And it's like, their helicopter's flying everywhere. So I imagine that's going to be a huge market for you. Yeah, absolutely. And just one more point on that, too, Peter. We talk a lot about these commuting solutions. But the routes we don't talk about, I think are actually the really interesting one, which are all the future things that these vehicles can do. So I believe someone who knows, maybe it's Archer, maybe it's May, will build an amazing project 15 miles outside of LA in the middle of the desert.

39:06You can only get to it by plane and you can fly there in five minutes, but it feels like you're at the Amon Gary Which is like a gorgeous hotel in the middle of Utah. It's like kind of known as the nicest hotel in America and it can be something you do to go to work. It could be something you do to go, you know, stay at overnight. It could be something you do just to get away. There are experiences that people will start to build using these vehicles that are totally different non -commuter routes that I think are going to just be a totally new way of living.

40:28you

40:58you

41:06I love that. It's building the cities of the future, right? I mean, it used to be that you'd go move to New York or Detroit or Chicago or LA because that's where the education was, what entertainment was, that's where the jobs were. And given autonomous cars, EV tall, and things like Starlink, there's going to be brand new modes of living. And that is beautiful. Talk about when you're going to see your first commercial flight and first commercial services and who are your customers right now. So there are there are two ways to get to market. The first way is the way that we've been talking about, which is through the FAA, through traditional routes going from Manhattan to JFK, those routes.

41:54The plan is to get certified and start operations in 2025. That's We remain on track for that target. Right around the corner. Yeah, the other version of that though, is we will make alternative plans to launch regardless of the timing of the regulator. So we already started by when we announced last year, some of the contracts that we did with the Department of Defense, where we will start delivering aircraft and that will be used in non -kinetic use cases, so not war machines, but for all different types of scenarios. So there's a handful of aircraft we can start making those deliveries on. But then we'll also look for alternative routes, the way the drone industry did it.

42:35So we've been looking at the drone industry, which I think is really fascinating. Zip line is a good example. They want to have a great business model of living blood. So we will talk to world leaders and start to find places where we can start to become an operating company, whether it's humanitarian, delivering doctors or supplies or food to areas that are hard to get to. I had a conversation with a CEO of one of the large mining companies and he told me that they bring supplies, doctors, food, medicine to a community, an average community in Australia. And he was asking if he could buy, you know, the planes from us could say he uses the fleet of helicopters today to do it.

43:27And he wants to increase the size of his fleet, but it's so expensive to operate and maintain helicopters. And so those are great places to go, where you're not flying over crowded urban centers. But you are doing something great for humanity with a project that will be on the one yard line, you know, with the regulator kind of waiting for the final sign -offs. that I think we will be able to find ways to operate kind of before certification. And that's like almost like a hedge to, the regulator is hard to, we don't call the shots they do. And so whenever they let us start operating, it's gonna be obviously a great day, but we also will start operating in 2025, no matter what.

44:06Amazing. People when they see these EV tall vehicles, they think of the military osprey, which is an awful track record of safety and it couldn't be more night and day just to compare contrast one second because I can imagine the military replacing those vehicles with this next generation. Yeah, so they're actually just two totally different categories of vehicles. So the Osprey is a huge vehicle with a very high ability to carry payload and travel far distances. So that vehicle is extraordinarily complex. One of the guys that ran program at, you know, for when they were building the Osprey, Kent was over at Archer running program.

44:56And he said the cross shaft, the part that, you know, goes between the two rotors, he said, was heavier, more expensive, and more complex than our entire vehicle, just with the one part of the cross shaft. And so that one part had to make sure, you know, the fuel could go back and forth to the two, you know, rotors in case one of them went out. So that is extraordinarily complex vehicle. This is a very, very simple vehicle. And the simplicity behind these vehicles are actually, and the similarity of these vehicles to cars are actually why the automakers are so heavily involved. So Archer has a big partnership with Stalantis.

45:34It's the third largest automaker out there, Jeep Ram, Mazurati Pugeot. And we have, they're an incredible partner for us helping us manufacture, they provide capital, they provide engineering guidance. They've been a great partner and there's other automakers out there too that have been involved in the industry. So I would actually equate these vehicles closer to cars than those complex vehicles like Ospreys. So they're kind of on different spectrums. The other thing too is they have giant Ospreys, they have giant rotors and the bigger the rotor, the harder it is, the rotor dynamics get extremely challenging.

46:04We have much smaller propellers, which are just much easier to use. It's not by the air traffic control here. So you're flying, do you imagine that in volume operation? I mean, let me ask you a different question first. Five or 10 years from now, how many are being produced per year? What's the volume potential for something like this? So it's funny. One of the guys at Estlantis said, look, Adam, I was bragging. I was like, oh, the facility that we're making in, you know, in Georgia, in the first phase He can produce up to 650 planes and then the second phase 2 ,300 planes per year. I was like, it's unbelievable.

46:42And he's like, yeah, you know, 2 ,000 planes is cool. It was like, but you know what's really cool? It's like a million planes per year. It was like the social networking moment when Justin Timberlake says to, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg character. He's like, you know what's cool? A billion dollars. That's what I felt like. I was like, oh, I felt really stupid. 2 ,300 planes seems really, you know, not like a lot. And so that's how the automakers think it's scale. So there are step changes that need to happen. And then there are adoption kind of curves that need to happen. But that's why the international market are so interesting.

47:16Because there are places like India that have an extraordinarily challenge ahead of them in terms of scaling infrastructure. So the US, by the way, for people don't realize this, India, an amazing nation of very intelligent, and scientific engineering, English speaking, and one of their major holdbacks is their transportation ecosystem. Yeah, in the US, we have 950 cars per 1 ,000 people. India, there's 200 cars, sorry, 20 cars per 1 ,000, 20 cars per 1 ,000 people. And the same equivalent of the JFK, at Manhattan, takes you three hours there. I've done it in Delhi, in Bangalore, in Hosoar. It is extreme, the traffic's brutal.

47:59And it's only going to get worse as they continue to industrialize. So they need technology to leapfrog 2D transportation. And so that's why there's been such an interest. And we've partnered with Rahul Bhattia from Indigo, which is the largest airline in India. It's like 60 % plus percent market share. And he's very close with a Prime Minister Modi who wants to find transportation solutions. So when you start to look outside the US in the international markets, there is a real potential to leapfrog politics, where in the US, if you want to talk about putting a million vehicles into the air, you can imagine the challenges of scaling things here, beyond just the traditional challenges, the political challenges are tough.

48:44Internationally, there are places that need this, it's almost like they have to have this. I also imagine this for Africa, right? Africa went from landline to Lefinae to mobile and revolutionized the nation where you know, to Lefinae and Africa is better than some parts of the United States. But I can imagine, there's such a little road infrastructure in the Africans of continent that this could be transformational. If you get the volumes up and the cost down and you just said it's just, you know, the electrons become free after a while and then it's the cost of infrastructure. Yeah, absolutely.

49:21So, so when you're, so let's talk about, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of vehicles flying as, you know, packets which humans point to point is, is the air traffic control system able to handle that? Does it, does it go fully automated? What do you, you know, what's the conversations with the FAA like? Where, what's your hope? because I mean, listen, as a pilot, it's as much as I respect the hard work the FAA does, and air traffic control does, it's insane right now that they read me over an open, crackly radio, and I have to write down, you know, the details of my IFR flight plan, and then I have to read it back, and that's just crazy.

50:11Yeah, I think there's a lot of parts of the sort of old infrastructure that need to get redone. The good news is we can launch using the existing infrastructure. There will be a kind of period of time where there's both helicopters and EV stalls and then ultimately switch out. I think for all of these, you know, electric airplanes and so that transition period will take some time. There's still 50 ,000 helicopters out there So we still have to, you know, that'll still take us many years to build and replace those vehicles. But ultimately, we'll have to, I think, completely change the system here.

50:45The good news is NASA has been working on this for over a decade. So there's a lot of work that's been put into this, but it is a monumental task for sure. A lot of it will also depend on, you know, it's funny when you look at the movies, right? And I was thinking, you know, back to like the fifth element where Bruce as well as is driving an air taxi, right? It's actually an air taxi. They're driving online in a line, that can erode. It's actually, you can manage that. You're effectively just managing, making sure you don't bump the vehicle in front of you. So I can see that routes that get planned, heavy use routes that get planned, where they become actually very dense, that they start to operate like that, because it's easier to get volume that way, because all you're really doing is spacing these vehicles.

51:30And then with the autonomy features, you can put, you know, it's actually much easier to do that. And again, because it's different than, you know, terrestrial vehicles where there's the long tail is just so great. You know, there can be any number of scenarios that can happen that are almost impossible to train for. In the air, you can see from all directions and there's nothing really like coming at you. The sky is basically empty. And it's impenetly scales effectively. So it allows just a lot more room to put a lot more more more vehicles in the air. So it's going to be hard, but I think it's actually, you know, something that's been worked on for quite some time and is very doable.

52:08And there is a lot of room and AI will be our friend and the sensors and the technology to enable autonomy there. Is here now and it's a matter of when do we get the regulatory structures. I want to turn the conversation to the origins of Archer because folks listening who are aspire to building moon shots. You know, because, listen, as Peter Tiel said, the world was expecting flying cars and got 140 characters. And it's, I mean, the idea of flying car to use that term has always been the definition of the future, right? There's the Jetsons and it's like, when do we have flying cars? Well, they're here.

52:52And they, you know, I remember earliest days of these conversations when people were talking about maybe now we can have these vertical take -off and landing vehicles. And over like over the span of like a year or two, a dozen companies really materialized. I do believe archer is in my mind top of the stack in terms of how far you've come and what you've built. Congrats on that. But can you take me back to when this entered your mind as a, yeah, I'm going to go build or go build a company to do that because it's kind of a crazy desire. And then actually I want to talk about how do you start? Yeah, so my story isn't I guess I don't know if there is a typical founder story, but you know I actually started when I graduated college and I went to work it was 2001 so I got hired in 2000 to get a job which was basically the end of the dot -com boom and I actually went and I became an investment banker and I actually didn't know what an investment banker was I did it for Merrill Lynch And the only reason I did it was because, you know, one of my friends, family members had said, that's not really a job for you Adam.

54:17That's more of a job for some of the Ivy League kids. And I was like, pfff, Ivy League kids, no way. I'm a state school kid. I will get any job. And I literally dedicated myself to the next, you know, really 18 months to getting that job. I end up getting that job. My second day of work was 9 -11. And so I worked really, I worked in the World Financial Center, which was effectively one block away from the World Trade Center, and I lived about four blocks north of the Trade Center. So I'm walking to work in this new city in New York, which I'd spent basically no time in, and literally the plane flies over my head into the building.

54:54I watched it all happen, and then of course the second one. It was just this completely shook me. And I left banking after six months, because effectively there was nothing to do, because the world basically stopped. And I went to work for a hedge fund. But hedge funds in back in 2002 were not what they are today. That was the Wild West of investing. And I ended up working for a guy that was just an absolute genius. And he had said to me, I'm going to show you how to find value in the world. In his big thesis was, Fall of the Research, wherever it takes you, public private, it doesn't matter. And so we did all types of crazy stuff together, looking at public companies, private companies.

55:39I remember where we actually invested in Bovespa, the Brazilian stock exchange. It was a private company and we had went and figured out a way to buy seats on a foreign countries stock exchange, which was very hard to do through other entities, which ultimately demutualized and then going public and was very successful. All these things were basically impossible, impossible things to do. It was like, you can't go buy seats on a stock exchange of a foreign country. They won't let you do that as an American. It was always started with the note. He was like, I'll show you how to get things done and find value.

56:14So against him, it's very different than going to work today and just buying a stock and shorting another stock. It was kind of the wild west back then. We also invested in Bitcoin very early off the white paper, the early early days. It was just a wild period of time, but all that was training. I studied what makes companies good and what makes companies bad, what makes industries good, what makes industries bad. As I was following that research, I started looking at tech companies, I started investing in tech companies, and then I started building tech companies. And so I started messing around on the internet and what I quickly discovered was the same thing that you know as You always find which is it's not reserved for the few It's actually an open system that anyone can go and compete in and start building stuff And it was just so fun and so I built a bunch of different things failed pretty much every single time But ultimately figured figured some stuff out each time that you know, I would start I would start an idea or project It always was very sound in nature, but getting an idea is nothing.

57:21Getting somebody to use your product is really hard. Getting a lot of people to use your product is extraordinarily hard. Getting people to pay for your product is unbelievably hard, and a lot of people to pay for your product is absolutely extraordinary. And so the whole crossing the chasm concept was always very interesting to me. And so my last company that I had started was a company called Veteri. It was a software -based business in the recruiting space. I did it with a partner. And it was a really, really fun company where we had a great time, a great culture. It wasn't really in the space that we wanted to be in, but it was a really great experience.

58:00It taught us all that raising capital and building teams, recruiting and scaling products, and all that good stuff, which all of this was training for Archer, which led me to that. But the one thing at at veterinary that I just hated was the grind of sales and so like the month to month you start over You know each time and so as you know I thought about you know a next company one of the things that was really important was the tech was so good That I wouldn't have to sell it it could actually sell itself and so when you start thinking like that like your product has to be really amazing And you start to think about product in your life that are like that.

58:39They're not very many of those right maybe your iPhone, maybe your Apple computer, maybe your Tesla. There's not many that you can keep going down a list that if you replaced it with something else, you don't really care who cares. It's fine, whatever. It's one pair of jeans for another pair of jeans. It's fine. Right. Right. So, I started looking at much bigger and bigger projects with a really interesting tech. Now, when I looked at electrification of transportation, we had been following Elon for a long time, and as an entrepreneur, what year are you in now at this point? So, in really, at the better years, we're 2015, really to about 2018, that was like where it got became like successful.

59:23And ultimately sold it to a company called the Adeco Group, who lost so many incredible lessons there to so many interesting things that happened. But when you know sold the you know sold the company Started thinking about you know different ways to grow and scale and I remember reading you know the You know the book on Elon Musk and just being so inspired at the big projects that he did And the moon shots the moonshots out there. Yeah exactly and reading the Peter Thiel books You know zero to one and those kind of you know stories and a lot of lessons were really interesting where the bigger the projects that you build like the more inspiring it is, actually in a way that easier it is.

1:00:04And that's like a kind of an interesting thing to say, but it's actually very true. It's much easier to hire. It's much easier to raise a lot of capital for, you know, at veterinary, it was very hard. It was like, hey, come over, we're doing this really cool thing, building a talent marketplace. It's really hard to recruit that way, versus, hey, we're going to go change the future of transportation building flying cars. Like it's a much better pitch for people. But you You have to be credible to do that. Having sold thatery gave me credibility to do this. It wasn't like I was just a crack pot.

1:00:33It was like, oh, this is actually a person that's done real stuff. It's been serious as sold some stuff. The other thing that was just such a huge factor in being able to do this was the ability to raise capital. Through my 20 years in New York City, I had made a lot of great friends. I had made people money over the years from my finance days. and then I'd made people money over the years in my startup days. I built a good network, but a lot of my friends were running banks, running funds. And so it allowed the network that I had built allowed me to leverage my track record and go raise a substantial amount of capital.

1:01:10So again, we were 45 people raised a billion dollars a capital. That was pretty unprecedented. And maybe it was a moment in time that we just were lucky that we hit. But that was a kind of a critical piece. But when I looked at the business models, what was going on in the industry of these EV tall companies, nobody was building a vehicle that was based around a business model. It was very much R &D. And so there were autonomous only companies that you just knew the FAA was never going to let you take the market in the near term. There are companies, 3D printing. There were companies building planes without a wing, which meant your range and your payload capabilities were so limited you could not create a business.

1:01:50And so I kind of put back on my, you know, more practical head thinking about my old job of what I want to hear. And so we built a vehicle that was based around a business model. And that was shockingly very attractive to the engineering community. And so that pitch was, was quite interesting because people had been working on this for a long time. And so one of the guys that I met early was a guy named Tom Yunes who was the head of engineering at Zero, which is kind of the original EV talk company that Larry Page started. I remember Larry Page pulled me aside one time and he was on my board at X Prize and I said, so what are you working on that no one else knows about?

1:02:32He goes, I'm building flying cars. So he really paved the way for a lot of the industry. And you start a number of companies in this area. He and Sebastian Thruin. Yeah. And so when I talked to Tom and said, well, Tom, why don't we just go try to build a plane that could actually get to market instead of an R &D project. And he was like, I am 100 % on board. Let's go do it. And so Tom was on board. And then a really funny thing happened. This journalist wrote this article that said, hey, there's a company called ArtChirts, a new EV talk company that's hiring up engineers and paying them three times what they normally make, which was not true.

1:03:14But it was the best advertisement you could ever have, and everybody would talk to us all of a sudden. And so we ended up hiring the best team in the world, just such an incredible group of engineers, and went for it and built it. And so the concept of, you know, our saying was always find the most efficient path to market. We followed the Tesla model, which is build the Roadster, get it to market, and then Then we'll build the Model S. Don't try to build the Model S first. That went back to our strategy. A lot of the industry was vertically integrating. We tried to buy as much stuff off the shelf as possible.

1:03:48We ended up building the powertrain ourselves because you couldn't buy it, but everything else we would, vertically, we would buy from a tier one supplier. That lowered the risk to the regulators because they're very familiar with most of the parts that we use, which again was a great message back to the the capital allocators, which allowed us to raise such a substantial amount of capital, which allowed us to be where we are today. That's amazing. The old saying, no bucks, no buck or adjures, it really is true here. So it's interesting. I think about, because you didn't come from an aviation background.

1:04:26You didn't come from even a physical manufacturing, engineering, or automotive, or a rocket background. And do you think that held you back in any ways, or did that give you an advantage? Unconstrained. I think about my job as kind of like four core areas, vision, capital, people, and risk. And it's an augmented version of Mark Laurie, who is one of my good friends and investors. Well, both you and Mark will be speaking at a button in 360 this year. will be at the end of the summit. So, excited, excited for that. Yeah, he's great. Yeah, excited to be there. Yeah, he's awesome. He's a great visionary entrepreneur.

1:05:10And so I have a very clear vision of what we want. We need to do. For example, this year, the goal is extremely clear, which is to fly the piloted production aircraft. Like that is the single goal for this year. So by having very clear goals like that, it allows people to optimize around decisions, which allows you to get things done and move really, really fast. So that has been very effective. I'm very good on the capital side just because of my background. And I've been able to make people, I have a good track record of doing it, which has been helpful. And then I spend a lot of my time on the people side and really trying to make sure we hire the best people.

1:05:48And I really believe in the Steve Jobs adage where you hire the best people and they tell you what to do, not you telling them what to do. And so if you can truly hire the best people, you can do that. As long as they have a very clear vision of what to do, you can get these people to work together. And then I'll spend a lot of my time understanding where the risks lie and trying to make the big calls to make sure we go left to right to avoid the big pitfalls. I do think it was an advantage when I look at the competitors because I don't have the desire to chase the shiny objects in our space. There's so many shiny objects because you The design space for aviation has never been so wide open because electric motor scaled down.

1:06:30You can do so many cool things. So I don't have that same neck. And I also think, again, it's going to be critical in the industry, not only that we just execute, but that we can actually show we can build a real business. Because if you don't build a real business, you will not get the capital to actually be able to fulfill this dream because it is so capital intensive. As you said, aviation is hard, and if you can't find a way to make money. That I think is actually the hardest thing about hardware. Most of these hardware products, the question is not can you make it. Yes, you can make it. The question is can you build a business around it, which in other words, is are you in the right decade?

1:07:11That is the thing that you always have to figure out. Did you pick the wrong decade, unfortunately, where cool, you built an amazing toy, but But it's too expensive to actually generate economic returns. Therefore, the capital game does not last forever, and the cycles will hit you. Eventually, you'll hit a rough patch, and you will run out of money with these big, intensive hardware companies. For any moonshot entrepreneur's listening, that is gold. Because just because you can make it build it doesn't mean the business is going to succeed. seed. And so many people have gotten the timing wrong and done it too early, which is the same as just failing.

1:07:52Because the whole market needs to be ready for you. That includes people's perspectives, regulatory structures, capital markets, everything. I mean, Bill Gross from IdealLab, who also with us at A360, he gives some great talks about timing is one of the most critical thing is that Uber came into existence because the iPhone was there, because Google Maps was there, because people wanted to make money after the 2008 recession. It's really funny. People always ask me, always ask me this question. Adam, do you regret going public or do you, how does it feel? They always ask in a negative connotation.

1:08:29How does it feel to be public as a public company? And the answer is, it's amazing. Are you kidding We found a way to raise a billion dollars of capital with less than 50 people. It was the best thing we ever did. Unquestioned. It was great. And yes, it's definitely a luck played a huge portion of it. But we, as the Keele likes to say, increased our luck surface area by prepping for that. And so I was, had my ear to the ground, it was very close to the SPAC market. So a friend of mine who runs capital markets at Morgan Stanley, I would check in with all the time. I would say, how do I do this?

1:09:05Tell me what's going on. He would say, first of all, there's a big cash component you have to willing to risk. You have to go do a public company accounting on it, PCA will be on it. Second thing you have to do is get all your legal docs in order, which is very expensive. After you've now spent $6 million, now maybe if the market comes to you, you can do this. It's very expensive to just do the legal work to get ready for before you even figure out if you can do any of this stuff. You spend that we spent the money. And then tried to understand what was happening in the back market. In Nikola was actually the one that was out there that was doing really well at the time.

1:09:38And so a lot of the early companies paid attention and understood what the investors were interested in. And that's what I think I did a good job of following that. And Archer was the first company in the space to announce. We announced before Joe B. We went out and did it. And we picked a really great sponsor in Ken Molyce. And so they were been extremely helpful to the company. So Ken Moles is one of the most prolific investment bankers in the world. So when he goes out and he talks to some of his clients or some of the leaders of the world, he mentions Archer and he talks about it. He's almost like Ijoukos.

1:10:15I can't near my lead gen guy. And so that was a very effective and picking the right partner there. And then again, we hit it. And if you look at some of the competitors that went after us, the difference of three months was a difference of 100 % redemptions and no pipe and a huge pipe and 50 % redemptions. We had 48 % redemptions and we raised a monstrous pipe, a $500 million, $600 million, round just got us up to $900 million. So it was just, again, a lot of it was timing. We definitely increased our luck surface area and then I think we've been responsible with the money too and the whole thing has been on execution.

1:10:55We have to show results for what we're doing. And that's why, if you listen back to what I said before, which was we are launching in 2025 without FAA approval. It doesn't mean we're launching the US, but we will launch. We will find markets to go launch because business model to me matters. Yeah, and experience matters and demonstrated operations matters. And I guess the next big thing is gonna be going into mass manufacture. And maybe we can wrap on that subject. You're going to build plants to produce the midnight vehicle. Where are you thinking about? So we announced a big factory in Covington, Georgia, which is right outside of Atlanta.

1:11:36Great town. I mean, really great town. It's a cute little town with an awesome square. But also right next to Georgia Tech, you know, a good, you know, which is a great aviation school. Great aviation school. Governor Camp has been very supportive of bringing these green jobs jobs to a state. So we got a great incentive package to go there. But a lot of my strategy has actually been focused on looking at what like Apple did. And so the Apple Foxconn relationship is really interesting. Apple owned the design, they owned the manufacturing engineering process, and then they work with Foxconn on the operations manufacturing side, the mass scaling of that.

1:12:16And so our partnership with Stolantis, I think, is really unique, and it's blossomed into to a great relationship where we focused very heavily on the design for working on the manufacturing and engineering together. And then ultimately the goal is to hand it off to them to go print. So when you think about these companies, like Stoantis, they are absolute masters at logistics, sourcing raw materials, bringing them together, keeping these things super tight, managing the supply chain, and getting stuff out the door. They turn raw material into finished product in days. And so they're really incredible at doing that.

1:12:48So when we think about scale, I just didn't think it made sense to look at the traditional aviation companies because they don't build that scale. It's a very different mindset, but the auto is due and there's a lot of lessons learned there. And again, the partnership that we have with Stellantis and specifically the CEO Carlos Tavaris is a really positive one that I think we can both benefit from immensely and we can leverage the lessons in scaling that Stellantis has shown with their vehicles. I mean, they're building something like 500, 600 ,000 cars per month. And so there's just an incredible amount of things we can do.

1:13:27And we can also be protected, potentially, protective, I guess I should say, from squeezes and raw materials. And so when you think about different things getting cut off, you'd rather be one of the big guys than the little guys. And I think it is going to be important to protect against raw materials because especially on the anything that has to do with batteries is going to get tight here at some point. You know, a member having a conversation with Elon, he said, you know, when you look at the people try and protect their idea, and he said, the ratio of the value of the idea to the value of putting something into mass production is, you know, is erudio infinity.

1:14:06It's just, yeah, the idea is the easy part. It's actually turning it into a business and actually operating at scale. That's everything. Yeah. I really like Teed said, his IP is his speed. It's almost like he didn't care. I think he does care, but like you would say, we're not trying to just protect the IP from extritional way. Speed is the way that you protect it. I really agree with that. Also, again, if you look at the market, it's really interesting. the total addressable market tam for our industry is huge. Morgan Stanley put out a number and they said it could be as big as 9 trillion. It's like an auto size number.

1:14:44It's one of the biggest markets out there. But you have a certain point where you have to prove that too. And so before you get to market, you're in this typical like $1 to $3 billion market cap range. It's the same place where Tesla, Rivion, Lucid, all were. They all three were there. As soon as they hit to production, they all went to $30 billion. Again, go back and look at Tesla when they launched the Roadster. The stock goes to 30 billion market cap. Rivian and Lucid did the same. It's up to you to prove that the tam is real. Tesla has made it. Rivian and Lucid are still trying to figure out if they can be part of that story.

1:15:20Hitting production for us is really exciting, but we have to prove the market is as big as we're saying. Not only is the manufacturing hard, but actually building the business is going to be hard. And so I don't want to underestimate the, you know, the difficulty that is going to be too. And so we're very focused on that as well. And we built up a good team internally to go start building up the airline operations and all the partnerships that we've launched internationally. But that, the scaling of the operation side, especially our business is going to be quite challenging. Adam Goldstein, founder, CEO of Art Traveation Manufacturer of Midnight EV Tall.

1:15:59I can't, okay. in one. So, 2025's right around the corner. Listen, thank you, my friend. Thank you for the work that you, your team, Nikhil are doing and a pleasure looking forward to seeing you in March at the Abundance Summit and coming up to visit. I want to come and see the plant, come and see the view. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it and you're welcome anytime. Thanks, Bell. All righty. Thank you.