#18 - Cat Orman, Co-Founder of Flyby Robotics

0:00So I just turned my phone off, withdrew all of this Bitcoin money that I now had, told my parents I was going to the library, drove to a different town in Texas. I drove to Lexington, Texas. I don't know if you would possibly know where that is. Is it like 100 miles away or something? Yeah. It's like, I don't know. It's like far. And then just jumped out of a plane. This is my conversation with Kat Orman, one of the co-founders of Flyby Robotics, a drone startup based here in LA. I hope you enjoy. Let's start off with why has DJI dominated the drone market for the past 20 years? Ooh, OK. Yeah.

0:38So we wrote about this for No Opinion. earlier this year, but it kind of boils down to, I think, one, like the easy answer is America doesn't have a Shenzhen, right? Like that's kind of, that's the more relevant answer for everyone else that's building things that are not drones. The other answer is like the, kind of like the CCP has, the CCP has definitely worked to give China a deliberate advantage in drone manufacturing because I think they view these drones not just as like an industrial manufacturing base advantage, but also as a strategic asset for intelligence collection in a way that, you know, that's not the same way that the American government has looked at, like, Skydio or 3D Robotics or any of these other ones.

1:21Why do you think the regulatory environment in the United States has kind of evolved the way it has? Oh, in terms of FAA stuff? Yeah. Yeah. So I think the FAA is definitely not as resistant to the idea of the stuff like flight operations over people, operations over moving vehicles, BVLOS, which is the biggest one, remote ID. They're definitely not as resistant to the idea of, you know, opening up the national airspace system as people think they are. I think it's just that, yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the whole Doge thing. Like, it's just the nature of bureaucracy. And I think there's no promotion for being the guy that says yes to something that ended up being really good economically.

2:08There's no upside to being that person. But there's a huge downside to being the person that said yes to something where there was a crash or it wasn't safe. Do you think that Elon and Doge, once the new administration comes in, is going to kind of switch things up and make it easier for new drone startups? I mean, yeah, I think they've been pretty pro at the NDAA Countering CCP Drones Act, to my knowledge. So yeah, that's probably the biggest thing. I don't know if like BBLOS regs are a priority for them. How did you and Jason meet? Oh, Jason, so Jason started this thing that was like a sort of like a startup incubator on Yale's campus.

2:46So it was like matching undergrads who were interested in startups with grad students who had startup ideas that they wanted to commercialize. and actually when I met him I got into that and then and met him at it and I thought he was like 27 which was for me that would have been like super old personage at the time which really just goes to show that I thought he was very smart. Did you guys try to work on anything before Flyby? Yes yeah so we we iterated on a couple of ideas in like the health tech space I had sort of a whole I had like a whole like neuroscience bio phase that was like way long ago before this.

3:19And then we originally started off on Flyby. We were retrofitting DJI drones. You mean like read Chinese spyware. We were retrofitting Chinese spyware to fly chicken sandwiches to our friends and other dorms. Why did you guys go away from the consumer delivery model? Yeah. So in the process of trying to build something ambitious on DJI, so first I'll speak to like why we perceive that there's such a need for American made of hardware, which is, you know, just purely like not from an ideological perspective, but just purely from like a practicality perspective. You know, there's just the same way that you have the TikTok ban, you have the Huawei ban.

4:01You also have this thing in the drone space, which is the DJI ban, which is where this massive incumbent that takes like 90 percent market share in some of these sectors is getting booted out of the market because there's a concern about cybersecurity. And so there's this kind of unique opportunity where you really can't get an American-made drone. A lot of these different use cases across industrials, across consumer, also across military are all looking for American-made hardware. And then the second reason why we thought it was so important to build Flybay is we're hacking stuff on top of these DJI drones.

4:40We're trying to build this autonomous use case on top of drones. we're realizing that nobody's making a drone that's a platform. So no one's making a drone where you can really have a modular payload, where you can have ports that you would think that you would be able to have, where you can configure it in different ways just from a hardware perspective. And from a software perspective, they don't give you an SDK. They don't give you, if they do, it's very, very limited. There's not an open architecture. And they don't give you any of the onboard compute that you would think that you would have.

5:09So it's super, super limiting. Like when we were developers, we felt super, super limited by what was out there already. And so in early 2023, we just put out like a spec sheet on a developer forum. We were like, this is kind of who we are. This is what we're thinking of building. Something that has like this flight time, this payload, this form factor can do these things. And we were just immediately inundated with people saying, you know, like we need this. What was the like response to that? Was it just 20 people saying, I want to give you money? Yeah. Yeah, and it was actually, I mean, it was so interesting because it was just, it wasn't just people that were doing, like, things with drones that have already been done before, but it was people who were building their own things.

5:48So whether, you know, people like Palantir who built this GPS navigation capability on top of the F-11, people who were building their own things in the security space, people who were building their own things in mining and, like, mineral prospecting and hyperspectrals. So it was a lot of things that we had just never heard about before. What is, like, the best and worst thing about having a co-founder? Ooh, good question. I have a ton of respect for Jason. I have not spent a lot of time thinking about any bad anything about having a co-founder. I think that's, and it's a big reason why we've been able to do, stick to something that has a hardware timeline, is because I like working with this person.

6:31I have respect for this person. And I think it's another reason why Jason has recruited really, really outstanding talent. I think he's very much an engineer's engineer. and has built like a really, really strong team because he's not like a, you know, I think there are some founder archetypes that are not like move fast and break things. But I think there's, um, you know, if you ever watch like fundraising with hostility and rudeness from Silicon Valley, like the Ehrlich Bachman, where I don't know if you like know what I'm talking about. Like, I think maybe those people like don't have the, they have a lot of churn.

7:03And so Jason is Not that guy. If he were in the room, why would, like, why did he want to work with you instead of anyone else? Yeah, I think I was just, like, willing to, well, I guess, okay, maybe the best answer to that is I'm definitely, like, the yapper in chief. Like, he doesn't want to do this, right? But I'm, this is the part that I would be more inclined to do. Like, you kind of enjoy championing the mission, and he wants to be, like, elbows deep in a drone? Yes. Okay. What role has, like, X played on your growth and, like, the company? Yeah, we've gotten a few customers from Twitter.

7:36The Palantir partnership actually came from Twitter, which is great. So the SHAM, the CTO of Palantir, saw one of our earlier tweets about just a demo and kind of the mission, which was building an American-made drone as a platform for machine learning. And they just DM'd us and said, like, hey, we've had a similar thesis for a long time. We've been looking for something in this vein for a long time. Can we like have one of your drones to play with and build something on? And the end result of that was this GBS denied nav capability that we released a little bit earlier. How do you get that initial interest from them and then like end up actually creating a partnership?

8:14I mean, there was not too much conversation around it. I think they just like they were actively looking for it. I think they like really, really believe in the space. Like they spend time every day talking to people who are operating these drones in every branch of the U.S. military, military um other militaries other just government government agencies like i think they they think a lot about you know tactical isr which is what um the use case will be um you know situational awareness and all of that and so i think they definitely did not take very much convincing that it was something that was worth building and once they saw that like the tech was real it flies well like everything is sort of architected the way that um you know it's not it's not vaporware it's like it's like right there um yeah it was like off to the races very quickly I'd be curious to know why you decided to be a founder in the first place.

9:01Yeah, I think there's a lot of, I think I was very, I was very interested in the idea of like going off on an adventure, I think, which I definitely got that. Like that was the big thing that I was looking for in college and really just in general as a person. And I definitely got it. What was the like arc of you growing up to deciding that that was kind of the trajectory? Did you have anyone that you like look up to or, you know, role models? Okay, I'll tell this like one story. So I had, when I was in high school, I was writing SQL at this fund that was like in Austin. It was like a prop tech thing.

9:37And I had this boss who, this was probably, yeah, this was definitely the first person I knew that, I think he went on to start a company very soon after this. And he, like, I hope he sees this. He's so great. He was like left-handed and he would always write notes with pencil. And so he's constantly, he was like very like sort of quirky, etc. Like constantly his hand and arm was like black. And he was also keto. And so we would all eat lunch together every single day. And he would just be eating like just like a full thing of cottage cheese. Like just a tub of cottage cheese. And he was so skinny.

10:09And so I was like, this must really be working for you even though you are eating just like a, just mainlining cottage cheese in this ridiculous way. And so, and he taught me like a bunch of stuff. But one of the things that he was doing when he wasn't at this fund was he was writing like a shitcoin trading bot. Oh, God. And this was like what? This was like junior year of high school. So I can't remember what. But, you know, this was my first exposure to Bitcoin. And I was like, oh, Bitcoin. And I ended up like just putting my little internship salary like all into Bitcoin from that. What year was this?

10:50This was like my... So this was 2016. Yeah, this would have been 2016.

10:56And then like fast forward a year, it's like 2017, 2018, my senior year of high school was a good time for Bitcoin. And I was in this... This was like, I mean, I think the through line here is very much like I wanted to be going on an adventure. But this was my senior year of high school. I was walking out of an English final and I was like, I was like so sick of being in high school. I was like, I'm so ready for this to be over. And I was just very, you know, very, very like annoying teenager of me. I was like, I'm not going to let like I'm not going to let this English final define like what my day is.

11:31And so I just turned my phone off, like withdrew all of this like Bitcoin money that I now had, told my parents I was going to the library, drove to a different town in Texas. I drove to Lexington, Texas. I don't know if you would possibly know where that is. Is it like 100 miles away or something? Yeah. It's like, I don't know, it's like far. And then just jumped out of a plane. And I did like this whole, I did like tandem skydiving and then I did this whole like solo skydiving thing. And ended up getting like my AFF cert. You went and just like randomly decided to go skydiving and then you got a certification to do backflips out of a plane?

12:10Oh, it's just like your AFF cert, which is just how you get cleared to do solo without a coach. I'm totally blanking on what AFF actually stands for, but it's the certification to go without a coach. And they do this thing where first they go with you, but then they're not attached to you. And then they're like, you're doing this trip and that trip, and they teach you how to land it and find where the runway is, which is at times challenging. and yeah I was just very much like that was like that was like 18 year old cat I was just very much in the mindset of like I want to be on an adventure. Did you do any other kind of sporadic random adventures like that before starting this company?

12:50The summer before college I was in I was living on Lesbos I was living in this like little village and it's called Scala Sycameneus in Greece And it was, I was doing this, I had like a, I had like this, not like a first responder, but I had this like minor, it was like a wilderness first responder certification from like doing backpacking trips. And I was working with this organization that is basically lifeguarding refugee crossings into the EU from Turkey. And so there's this, like there's this huge problem where usually when people are trying to make that crossing, they're working with coyote types who are, I mean, it's just extraordinarily unsafe.

13:31And they're coming in boats that are duct taped together. They usually can't swim. A lot of times they have life jackets that they think they're wearing life jackets, but they're actually made of material that takes on water. They're just not real life jackets at all. And so a ton of people drown. It's very, very, very sad. A ton of people die trying to do the crossing every year so this this organization that i was with um uh like lifeguards the crossing and like rescues people did you decide like was this the first company that you tried to start or did you use any of your like bitcoin money to start any other things before this i feel like that's yeah it's almost like insulting to even like mention that in the same room as like an actual company.

14:15You'd be shamed. I know, I know, literally, yeah. No, like this was our, yeah, this was our sort of first go around. I mean, other than the delivery thing. Where do you think, where do you think like this company will be in 10 years? Building a lot of drones. Yeah, I mean, the actual answer to that is like, there's kind of two plays here. Like one, there's this, like, I think, I think right now there's this massive opportunity to, take market share away from DJI. That's, you know, the only, the person that's going to win doing that is somebody that jumps in right now that is positioned to really, really focus on hardware and be obsessed with hardware.

14:51I think that's one of the better answers to why DJI is where it is, is that they were just truly, truly obsessed with the hardware design in a way that, in a way that very few people are. I think it's like Steve Jobs level over there. and so I think like where we are right now is very much focused on the hardware like focused on getting drones out the door focusing on like building this sort of hardware as a mode like opportunity and then the second thing is like we're building you know we're kind of building drones as a platform for machine learning and so there's this a software play that's on top of that that comes later and I think the like seeing what you know partners like Palantir and some of our other developer partners build on top of the platform will define like the like the really massive things that the drone will be able to do in five years down the road are you worried at all about like other startups or are you just like i kind of think i've talked with a bunch of different drone companies and they're all just going in different directions to be honest um yeah that's like that's a very um it doesn't feel like they're competitors to be quite honest that's such a good point and i think there's i yeah i'm actually i didn't realize that you had interviewed multiple drone companies but i didn't mean to no they're just good founders Yeah, you're so right about that.

16:04We're the best founders. Yeah, I think a lot of BCs think a drone is a drone is a drone, and a lot of people on Twitter think a drone is a drone is a drone. I know that you said that there was five different categories of drone, and there's the ones that cost a few hundred bucks or whatever, and you can just fly them in to blow something up, and then there's also 100-plus thousand-dollar drones. Oh, yeah, so there's loosely just group one. This is official typology. It's group one being a tiny little FPV. to Group 5 being massive General Atomics, Reaper, I mean, millions of dollars. It's like a plane.

16:39Are you guys going to try to do delivery at all? I mean, we will never be a delivery operator. I think that's something that you have to focus on very specifically. I also, I'm not sure that the quadcopter form factor for... Is like the right thing? Yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, I also think that's... Why would it not be? Well, there's a trade-off with range, right? And then I think Google Wing and Zipline, they have fixed wing. And then you're able to achieve a range with that that's very different. It's also very light. So if it crashes in someone's yard, it's not a big of a deal in a way that if someone – I think somebody just did this with the whole New Jersey thing.

17:22But if somebody shot this out of the sky, this is like flying over people and moving vehicles and some angry HOI members is shooting it out of the sky. I mean, there's parachutes that can mitigate that, but that's still, yeah, I think the ideal form factor for delivery is probably something much closer to what Google Wing or what Zipline is doing than like a Prime Air or like a drone app. Okay. I'd be curious to know what the most difficult thing that you've had happen in the past year is. I mean, there's a little bit of an element when you're dealing with hardware versus software where you're kind of at the mercy of suppliers.

18:00and I think when you're building a software company it's like just everybody with their laptops and you can just bang it out. It's like ultimately just, it's just like a test of your own will and skill and motivation and when you're dealing with suppliers and supply chains and things that are operating on these much longer timelines like you can, you know, something - There's less like failure things you can't - Yeah, like something cannot be right and then you cannot know that until like weeks later when it shows up and it's not right. So that's like just building, like building a resilient supply chain with, you know, where everything works as it's supposed to.

18:34And you're, you know, you're having the right things in-house and the right things that are not in-house. That's probably the most difficult thing. How do you think about like building a super successful team? Yeah, we're actually writing something for Turpentine about that right now. So you'll read like our long form thoughts on building a successful team shortly. But yeah, one of the answers is I think like it's also a big hardware software difference. Like, you can't necessarily look at someone's GitHub, you know, because there's, like, this actual, like, fine motor skills component to, like, just physically working with your hands that's way harder to assess in an interview.

19:08It's, like, way harder to assess from a website, way harder to assess from these traditional top of funnel modes. Like, you really have to have people come in, which makes that process more difficult. And I also think, you know, a lot of people have spoken to, like, the death of, like, manufacturing talent bases in the last. Especially in the U.S. like it's all over China but yeah yeah so a lot of the people the people that are the best like assembly techs um you know they're not like they're not necessarily like as part like they're not necessarily like the part of the same culture that like the best software engineers are what does a typical day look like oh yeah um I mean a lot of customer calls yeah so just a lot of and like today uh today I'm going to I'm getting on a red eye I'm going to Chicago I'm like onboarding this customer in Chicago to the drone.

19:56Do they expect you to do that kind of stuff? It's more, it's very worth it for us to do that early days because we want to get feedback. And I think there's, when you see someone actually put their hands on the controller, like see the way that everything is put together, like see the way the hardware looks and feels, like actually interact with the interface of the controller in a flight environment that's in, you know, the weather that they're going to be flying it in, you get feedback and a sense of how things are and a sense of what you need to change that you could not get over Zoom or whatever.

20:32Yeah, just by sending a spec sheet. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that would be like super interesting to know? Oh, I have like a fun story about a ride along. Do you want to hear like my best, you know, my best customer onboarding experience? Yeah, no. So I was, on this like island and we were supplying this um public safety agency that's that's on this this island and it's like you know it's like an allied it you know it's a nice it's a friendly yeah it's a friendly island right like it's not it's not guantanamo um but i was i was on this island we're supplying this uh public safety agency that deals with a lot of um human trafficking and arms trafficking and drug trafficking um and like the vessel interdiction that sort of thing um on this island.

21:14And, you know, I go down there. I'm like by myself. I get it through like customs or whatever. And, you know, it's I mean, it's very much an island. So I'm kind of like I'm kind of like, well, like I know that this is EAR 99. Like, but how do you know that it's EAR 99? Like, because it's there's all these particularities. So anyways, I show up. I teach this this customer like this drone program, how to fly the drone for like a few hours. Goes great. I'm staying in this Airbnb. And then he calls me and he's like, do you, uh, we're going to go on a ride along to like raid this gang leader's house at three in the morning.

21:48Um, do you want to like come? I'm just like, yes, I want to come. Absolutely want to come. Um, and so I, uh, like this, this guy like picks me up at three in the morning, gives me a bulletproof vest to wear, puts me in the back of this armored van that was used to fight the IRA during the troubles in Ireland. And fully takes me to this HQ. And they have this map up of this compound where this gang leader is. And they're like, we're going to go around from this angle. And this is what we're going to do. And they were like, air support unit. And they're doing their roll calling or whatever. And they're like, air support unit, so-and-so, air support unit, Cat Orman.

22:26And I was like, here. Which was so funny. And so I was literally like holding, I was literally holding this radio up to like the customer's mouth as he was like flying the drone and, you know, telling people like, oh, they're going this way, they're going that way. Like this person has a gun, this person doesn't have a gun. And it didn't get home until like, didn't get home until like 8 a.m. And then had just a bunch of like investor calls the next day that I was just fried for. I imagine that, did you tell the investors about that? Yeah. Yeah, that was a good. Were they pumped? I really appreciated that story.

22:59Okay. Final question. What's the hardest thing you've overcome? Funny you should ask. There is kind of this ongoing debate within my housemates right now as to, like, whether in order to be, like, a great founder or, like, this sort of ambitious, hardworking person, you have to have this, like, perpetual chip on your shoulder. Like, is it possible to do those things and also sort of be happy and self-actualized? I'm actually writing something for Palladium right now on like why you like why you should not frame things that way and like why it is possible to be both like ambitious and actually happy.

23:37So you will have to stay tuned for that.