#26 - Curt Lary, Founder & CEO of Hextronics

0:00What I want people to feel like when they see a drone in the air. I don't want them to think, oh, no, what's wrong? Oh, no, is someone in a car accident? I don't know. It's like, is there a train track that's broken? I want people to think, what are we building? In the past year, you've scaled from 28 employees to over 45, I think. You're now, like, scaling production of your Universal and the Atlas, which are your two drone stations. And you also smashed through that wall, which I'm sure we'll show, to double your, like, factory space. what's it been like yes we unlocked more of the map uh and during christmas party uh we had the whole team come and punch through the wall essentially everybody took a took a swing in it uh it was it was a pretty incredible time and yeah just kind of from starting uh in my garage and then coming out here uh getting orders and then kind of having more orders to really expand that's how we that's how we that's how we do things you know we expand for a reason we expand because we have people interested in our technology and because we're building things that get deployed across the world that people like rely on.

1:06Yeah, and they use them. And that's definitely something that comes with a lot of learning, a lot of mistakes, but also a lot of incredible times that are unforgettable. So yeah, breaking the wall was crazy. We repainted everything. We hung a bigger flag. And yeah, we've done a lot. What have been the biggest like growing pains over the past year with all this expansion? uh let's see i think well just there's a lot of things that go into uh like a hardware technology company that swaps batteries all across the world and i'd say one of the growing pains is just having so many so many buttons to to connect or so many buttons to press and in and really when people put your technology to the test in ways that you really haven't uh anticipated uh and And then really being able to scale these systems across the world that are used every day in these different conditions with minimal or no downtime.

2:08And that's something that we've been focusing on incredibly here, where it's not just a demo piece anymore. It's not just a proof of concept. It's not just something, hey, once a day, we're going to show that drones can fly around and be completely automatic. It's like, no, businesses, governments, countries, police departments are relying on our technology. and I guess the growing pain is that we just have more boats to carry, you know, and we're carrying them. Do you have any examples of customers like using your technology in a way that you just did not expect at all and just completely, you know, broke or whatever?

2:42Let's see. A lot of people want to put our drone stations on boats for some reason. I have no idea why, but they're like, okay great i got this this station i can launch it from anywhere and they get it and they're like all right now where's the boat mounting kit and i'm just like what who said it could work on a boat and i i know that there's a lot of things that we can do uh to to make that happen but in something i wouldn't expect is immediately to put a drone station on on a vessel nevertheless you're hearing from customers but you're like nah no don't use it like that well yeah i hear from select customers and they're just like, we look, we're patrolling this thing all the time or we got to go respond to emergencies or we're in some oil rig in the middle of the ocean.

3:28And I'm just like, OK, it makes sense now. So we'll work on that. Yeah. You when we were talking last night, you mentioned that, you know, if anything ever breaks in any part of one of your products or anything else you basically immediately send a guy to go fix it yeah whether it's a Sunday you know midnight whatever you just go do it they're called hex ops they basically parachute in uh they they fall from the sky or whatever and then they're on site sometimes faster than people really expect uh and how do customers respond when well sometimes they're they're like oh this is amazing and or they're someone's like dude it's like Sunday at nine in the morning I called you like last night how are you here already like can you give me like let me put my pants on or something uh and so yeah we are we are extremely responsive to to stuff like that and and it just comes with ensuring that like our technology is always operational and that's a guarantee beyond just like having an automatic drone station as you now are part of like a team that's driving forward and forcing your organization into like a new dimension of reality i don't mean to use too many esoteric terms here, but that's kind of what it is.

4:42When you were first starting the company, there was basically like a two or three year period where you were pulling at least one all-nighter pretty much every week, I believe. And I know that you were doing that so that you could build hardware because it didn't require as much brain power as building software. Has that kind of shifted since, you know, in the past like 12 months, you've gotten a little bit more scale? uh well i'd say they're not all-nighters anymore but it's most of the time like uh it's like go to bed around 2 or 2 30 and wake up at like 7 38 you know and so that's now my new margin but it's gotten standardized to that it's not like okay i do two or one all-nighters a week and then i'm back to like eight or seven hours of sleep it's like okay every night's like a short little mini sprint a little mini sprint you get like a few hours but i back to it i do have a couch in my office it's incredibly comfy and i live uh about 0.65 miles away you can check strava uh on that but um yeah it's it's pretty close yeah how how do you think that like impacts the kind of people that you're able to hire that you're like so like super dedicated to trying to make this thing work i think they they get it they get it pretty quick that like we're not like this isn't just a it's not a meme.

6:01You know, it's not just a, it's something that they see me just grinding away at some crazy, crazy thing. That's like, okay, I guess if I don't show up as much as this guy, like whatever I do, like it's not, it could, I could, I could do more, you know, I could always do more. And that's kind of what I want to drive forward, especially with the people that we, we service and our products, like they, we can always be better. We can always do more. And if I'm the blocker like I need to do everything I can to unblock everything so is that the thing that like weighs on your mind the most is just having you be the bottleneck yeah it's basically like every day I'm like what am I what am I blocking who am I who am I stopping like well we didn't why didn't we order this thing yet why didn't we get this mold made yet why didn't we get this like software pushed to these stations yet and it's just like either tracking all of that or just yeah in ensuring that the the teams are in place and everybody's unblocked to do so so yeah so i know that you spend a lot of time running as kind of like a stress outlet um how'd you even like initially get into that and then like how have there been any moments in the past year or so where there's been a super stressful moment but you've been able to kind of just like overcome it through just running 14 miles or whatever it is you know no yeah definitely initially well the first time I was like got into running was in in uh in middle school I was a little insecure about my my weight and so one one year I had a goal and I just woke up every morning at like 6 30 a.m and ran a mile uh and then after that I kind of got a little bit more into shape but then I met some some friends in college that really like running uh and uh some someone at one point had a dream and they just said, Kurt, you're in my dream and you were training for a marathon.

7:50Are you doing that? And I'm like, I guess I am now. So I just that's when I got into running longer. And I wouldn't say I'm the most like I'm the biggest runner in the universe, but definitely it's a good outlet to to let go of some stress. What's been like the biggest hurdle with, you know, I think you're growing something like over 100 percent year over year, which, you know, means that there's a lot of hiring. What have been the biggest hurdles for ramping up the production of your products? Sometimes just getting the parts, like getting parts from suppliers. A lot of this, we bust this down to create this new order of a large production run.

8:32And then immediately, that's when all of the tariffs came into effect. That's when all of the pricing started changing. And so of course - What was it like mid that, during the tariffs? We were just calling everybody and we're like, take take our po now at this price like don't change it don't change it and they're like we're gonna have to change it a little bit so yeah some of the components at least uh yeah before the tariffs before we were motivated to to change everything to u.s made stuff uh we were obviously sourcing some some things like motors and things from from overseas and we just had to like quickly lock down uh those prices right at the beginning of this whole uh debacle uh and then it was really great when just like tariff just up, down, up, down, up, down.

9:13And it's just keeping a hold of that is a whole nother challenge on its own. And we've got an incredible team here that just makes sure that at any moment we've got our eye on it. And we have some guy in the Dominican Republic that has been stashing these things for like the past few years and we just get them from that supply. So yeah, I'd say it's a whole nother like dimension or level to hardware manufacturing. It's yeah keeping a track on supply chain and now geopolitics with ever fluctuating tariffs you were in this warehouse pretty early right yeah so i think roughly last like may or somewhere around there you decided to smash through that wall what what did it like take for you to decide to make the decision to you know double your footprint yeah so the i mean one big decision was we saw our neighbors next to us, it was like a lamp store or a bike shop.

10:06And we were kind of just counting the days because we knew we were getting really cramped in here. Just like atlases were all over the place. You know, we had two like production lines running simultaneously and everyone was taking each other's tools and we just needed more space. And so we're eyeing it and kind of talking to the people that manage this complex. And really, in order to pull the trigger, a lot of dominoes had to fall you know the front office had to leave or as soon as the front office left we took it over we busted through through that wall and set up some more office space there and then yeah just over the the new years uh we got this this big order in and from a bunch of different customers and now we're like we're there's no way we're making all these in this space like i'm literally gonna fight you so we're we we broke down the wall we fully committed uh And that has had you just enjoy like expanding with violence.

10:59I think that, yeah, sometimes you got to break breakthrough walls, you know, you got to bump into walls. It's not always easygoing. And sometimes, yeah, if you can, sometimes it's not over or around, but the best way is through. Yeah. So I know like you're flying all over the place to go talk with customers and going to a bunch of events to like meet people. What's been the most success or like what's been the biggest success you've had from just meeting people in person by getting on planes? Well, I've got I've got a bunch of stories, but I really like this one. And it's with some of our partners in in Italy, where we were working on this big roadway project with the new universals.

11:40And we had to go out and deploy these drone stations all along a roadway. And so, of course, the team was new to this. It was some of the first like drone stations that were ever deployed for roadway management. Some of the first times that they were really seeing this utilized in the road autostrada. They're just the big roadway management company of Italy. And they were introduced from somebody who knew us from some show or from some like some event or podcast or something. And they they I flew out there. I flew the drones with them. They took me up to a big chalet or a really nice restaurant on the top of the hills.

12:19They treated me nice. And when I was there, they were actually previous customers of our first product, the Global. And they used the Dickens out of this thing. They were flying this thing like 10 times a day, way more than I ever thought it was possible. And they were doing that for like a year. And they're like, oh, this one motor, sometimes it's like glitchy, you know? And I'm like, I know, dude. So I'm not kidding. We are in the middle of like the middle of Italy, like an hour and a half north of Rome. And there's this drone station in the in in the middle of the of the mountains. And they're like, this is the motor.

12:58And I say, OK, OK, I know what's happening. There's a crimp on this wire. And sometimes the connection is loose after like like 10 ,000 cycles. So I go there. I take the I don't have the crimping device. I take I unplug it from the motor. I like cut off cut off the wire and I don't have a crimper or a wire stripper I strip the wires with my teeth and I put the connector back on and if you if you plug it in and you like secure it with super glue those connections are solid so they never because it needs to get unplugged and it it just worked dude so how they how they respond they were they were just like all right this kid nothing stopping this kid you know he didn't have crimpers want to give you more orders like yeah exactly yeah they bought like three more on the spot right there so it was a it was a good deal in there and i i really love working with them and i think there's a couple big things that we're doing with them soon yeah awesome uh how do you think about like product development you started with the global and then you went to i think the universal and then the atlas uh how do you decide to make like the transition and you know figure out when was the right time to be expanding instead of just focusing on making sure that the one product really worked well yeah so this is actually an incredible question.

14:08This is probably the question that I have to deal with every single day in my brain all the time. It's like, make everything that you've got as best as it can possibly be, or figure out how to take everything that you've got and make it into something new. And it's like somewhat an innovator's dilemma or some just issue where you know that you can continuously make incremental changes to things that are already working great, but they can be 99.9999999 and you can keep adding nines to that product with with new new revisions new products launched like the iphone whatever are we at 20 yet i don't know but they do keep getting some level of better um and so to that point i think that you do have to be doing both it's not one or the other there's both because there's so much that you learn from developing a product and it's never the right time it's never the right time you've always got a million different things on fire, but there's something that's just in your mind that's just like twisting around.

15:06And they're like, what if we did, what if we like flipped everything around and on its head and then everything's different? And I don't know, I, that's, that keeps me up at night a lot for sure. Um, but we're a thousand percent dedicated and beyond the whole team's focus on products that we, we currently have. Uh, and I just really, really think that understanding the customer is the biggest thing that drives us forward because yeah there's some things where it's difference between like putting a band-aid on something rather than like like solving the the root issue uh and so i i think it's also a spiral right we went from the global and then we had a customer come so it was global atlas we had a big customer said i like the global make it for this bigger drone and then we had somebody say i like the global now make it for like this drone this drone and that drone so that's kind of the oh was it so it was something you you had something that was working and then there was you know customers just said okay i have another you know what is it asset drone whatever exactly that also needs the same service yeah yeah please swap this drone's batteries now it's like three times heavier and this much stronger and you need x many more motors and stuff and so we're like all right we'll take it on how many do you want and that's kind of been how we we've grown how we've expanded it's been directly customer driven all product development has been customer driven uh and it comes down to just finding the best ways to like mechanically do something uh that drives how a product evolves over its lifetime i know that like it might be a pretty easy decision if you know some customer was buying like a thousand universals and then they were like actually i want you know a hundred atlases.

16:51But I imagine that's probably not how it starts. I imagine that someone comes in and says, okay, I've got a few universals and I want one or two or three atlases. So at what point does it make sense to you to actually make that leap to go build something, not knowing if there's going to be a huge number of customers? Yeah. So good question. But it actually does start the way that you said it initially. A lot of the times there's customers that come up and they're like, look i am like the government of croatia i want a thousand drone stations and i've heard that story way too many times yeah has the government of croatia actually told you that they want lots of drone stations okay amazing so i mean it's kind of like okay but you need to start with one so you understand it and it's kind of like okay they talk a big game and then they don't pull through on like step one which is like get one unit and figure it out you know and the people that are really trying to lead the industry are the ones that do take that first step that do get one five ten however many drone stations to scatter around their uh their locations their assets and track them to really get this kind of higher level view of how to manage the world and that's really what we're trying to drive and so from some standpoint i mean getting started like making the the global our first drone station it was i was just in the garage making it i know that somebody wanted a drone station for this one drone and they bought one of them so i said okay i have to make at least one and then there's a bunch of components inside you know you need like uh you need you need a fan you need a hvac cooler in case if it's in like a really hot environment you need six six batteries whatever and people were just like how do you know how many batteries to put in how do you know like what compressor to use it's like i'm figuring it out it's a little bit of guesswork yeah it's you're you're guessing it and then at the same time i'm feel like sometimes I'm like building products for myself.

18:46Like if I was receiving this or if I was wanting a drone station for my drone, what would I want in it? So it's a little bit of just like, how would I want to experience my product? Yeah. And how do you think about like building in reliability? Because I know that this is one of those things, this is a super complex product. And the first one, you probably use a whole bunch of third party parts. And then over time, you start using your own parts and building your own stuff in-house. How do you kind of get to the standard of quality where you know, or reliability, you know that the product is going to work pretty much every single time if someone buys it and uses it?

19:21Yeah. So, I mean, that comes down to somewhat the complexity of the product, all of the components in the product, and then being able to design it for quality and reliability, and then also tracking the procedures that go into manufacturing to ensure that each one's built exactly the same. and or you can track any any variation over a period of time and so it's a lot more of a of a system in place uh rather than just like the design or like what the component spec is because there's a lot of time we get we get components that are specced out for some level of uh of amperage or or voltage or or whatnot and some level of cycles but then we put them to the test and really they don't make it and then sometimes we put them to the test and in our standpoint but then it gets used more and more and more in the field.

20:07And then in the field, there's like, oh, it didn't meet that spec. And so then it's kind of like, how do we guarantee that prior to selling something that is still in its infancy of like, of what this product should be doing. And from just experience and getting the stations all over the map is how we can understand how to build in more levels of quality and reliability into our systems. And so, yeah, we're happy to have hundreds of thousands of cycles. We're past a half million across the board right now, which is great, but it's never enough. You can always do better. And yeah, we're going to keep going.

20:50Has there been any moment where you had to go fly out to, you know, you have this policy of flying out and saving a customer if anything ever breaks. Has there been any great story other than the one in Italy where that did I tell you the one last time about Saudi or no? I don't think so. OK, well, one time. So our very like one of our first customers, he was in in Saudi and he he bought a drone station and he wanted to see me like build it. He wanted to know the guts so he could he himself could like service it if needed. And so he flew me out to go and and kind of show him how the product works and build one with them.

21:29and I couldn't ship the whole thing in my suitcase or my carry-on because it was bigger than the allowable dimensions. So I broke it up into different parts, right? There's the back of the station, the HVAC, the gripper mechanism, all these different things. And then I put them in separate boxes, shipped them with, like went through TSA as my check luggage. I paid like 500 bucks for all the check bags. And then TSA of like, I don't know who I flew, but they wrecked some of them. like they stepped on them or whatnot uh and so i go to assemble it everything's going great everything aligns we swap the battery all is great and then i find out that the hvac like one of the the like the copper pipes was like fractured or like it just busted it but it busted yeah uh and so yeah we we braze copper tubing together to make the compressor based cooling system that makes our our drone stations work in hotter environments.

22:25And so I was in the middle of Saudi. Of course, I didn't have a brazing tool or I didn't have like the fluid to put into this thing. You normally have. Yeah, so I like, well, it is Saudi. So everything's hot. So that means there's a lot of business for HVAC guys. So we go out to this, we like leave the area. We go out like in the middle of nowhere, basically, to this shack in the middle of nowhere that's like we do HVAC repair. So we go in, I bring like the, one of the world's smallest, like refrigerators ever. I set it down in front of them and they're like, what the heck is this? They're like touching it, messing with it.

23:04I don't speak the language. So the guy I'm with has to like communicate with them. And then they, they like, they get out their vacuum pump and they set it next to it. And I, I, this scared me, but their vacuum pump had two wires coming out of it. And they just took the two wall wires and like plugged them into the wall, you know, like into the socket i was like oh that's there's no osha here and so they put the vacuum pump on it and they figure out where the leak is and they're like all right come back in 30 minutes go get like a fish or something and we'll fix it so get a fish yeah we went and got like one of the raw fish we like sat on the ground but not a raw fish it was like a fried fish okay it was nice it was nice it was very like experience the culture it was awesome uh and then we come back the hvac is like cooling like crazy like i didn't i couldn't get this thing to cool this hard so we go back uh we install the hvac in the drone station we put it outside uh and it it got a 50 degree temperature differential in the middle of the desert so it was it was 110 120 degrees out like 60 degrees like 70 degrees in the box and crazy and i was just like there's got to be some something in the universe that's making this this work.

24:19But yeah, just all this stuff lined up and that that event definitely changed my life. Yeah, that leads perfectly into, you know, you've got a bunch of customers all over the place. How did you like build the relationships and trust with like Chevron and Shell and some like BNSF and all those other guys? A lot of it is just kind of doing the early wins and making those successful, at least to a and a standpoint as far as you can take it. And really just being alive and telling your story, going to like expos, going on trade shows, giving live demos. If somebody submits a contact us, we've got some crazy people filling out our contact us forms.

24:59Got any good ones? We'll talk later. But there's so like just doing your stuff and telling your story and saying where your limits are because of course they don't believe that people that are like, oh, we can do everything. We're the best thing since sliced bread. We just go and we say, we can do this. We do it really well. We do this really good. We can't do that. We can't do that yet. We can't do this. What do you want us to do? And from there, they're like, okay, these guys are real. We can talk. We can communicate truthfully. And we can just say, what's the next step to get a win to prove the technology so that our organization and our stakeholders can really understand that this is technology that we're going to need across our fleet throughout the future yeah and how many people have come back to you and been like we want to put it on a boat or did that did did someone ask you if they could put it on a boat or did they just put it on a boat and then it like didn't work right uh-huh um like they they they the people that wanted on a boat this good story so they went on a boat they came to extronics and they made us physically simulate a boat so they like picked up the universal in the parking lot they had it plugged in and we had just like two guys just like shaking the the drone station as the drone was coming down to land you know like they actually picked it up and they're like okay this big boat we gotta swap to this side we're going of this side uh and and yeah the the drone made it on when the waves were not as as big awesome um so i know that like you recently hired uh a guy that you think is absolutely correct cory um yes yeah your first or one of your 10xers um how have your hiring practices kind of changed over the past year or so as you've learned more hiring is always a an an interesting can of can of worms because there's a lot of incredible people that reach out.

26:59And there's a lot of incredible people that want to learn from a company like Hextronics, or they want to be a part of something bigger, and they can bring some specific piece of the puzzle. And sometimes people come and they're like, look, I'm insane at this stuff, this, this, and that. What do you need me for? And sometimes it's like, well, if you can do this, this, and that, we weren't thinking about doing that, but maybe we can slot that in. But first we've got to, we've got to build the foundation and then we can go off onto this, like building another kingdom basically. And when it comes to hiring people with that drive and just saying like, look, this, we're going to get there.

27:41This is the thing that's like blocking us from getting there. Let's blast through that wall so we can keep to the next one. And so getting people, yes, that are specialized, that at least have incredible focus, dedication, to just whatever's in the way blasting through. A lot of the times it's somewhat easy to see that from when a person first presents himself, when they show what they do and how they communicate about their passions. A lot of the times it's just like, all right, is this guy gonna stop at nothing to get stuff done or is he gonna leave early? And we don't like the guys that leave early.

28:16Well, I'm not saying that like it's nine to five. Typically you do have two days per week, work from home Saturday and Sunday. You just want you just want people that want to be here. Exactly. Yeah. We want to build build a community and we want to build an incredible world. And I think people that want to build an incredible world will stop at nothing to do it. And I don't know if that's our practices, how that's changed. But that's just my mindset now of just people that want to do it are going to do it. Yeah. Do you think that you've got any kind of like advantage for being in Miami and being one of the, I wouldn't necessarily say like few, but there's not a whole lot of other really strong tech companies or early stage startups.

28:58Do you think you've got some advantage for finding people that want to be here and don't have a huge selection of opportunities? Yeah, I think Miami's an interesting story. And I don't, yeah, we're definitely not the only one, but the more I talk to people, the more they're like, why are you in Miami? You know, what's going on in Miami? And it's kind of like somewhat a blessing in disguise because, yeah, we're not any of the major hubs, you know, SF, L.A., New York, Austin, Chicago. But we are still a pretty incredible city and a great place to be. Miami Beach is incredible. We have amazing food.

29:38We have great music. it's always a good time and always a good good reason for customers to come visit Miami but beyond that it's kind of like we do have some level of seclusion or some level of like independence or freedom or just like calm and tranquility of just like hey we don't have people coming in every 10 minutes asking what's going on or causing a storm we we really hunker down and just just focus and the people that want to be here aren't here like too much for the for the scene or for other communities they're here to build hextronics and yeah on on sundays we go to the beach we play volleyball it's an incredible life we're starting uh yeah we're starting gta 6 a bit early um but but but yeah i i think that the limitation of other other i don't know if it's it's distractions about other noise uh around us really helps us focus in and hone in on what we do best so like every time i come here you've basically gone from you know putting something down on paper to having a physical version of whatever you were thinking about the you know three months ago um how do you think through what to make next and what's like a fun idea versus what's a product that you're actually going to build in the next like 12 months or two years yeah i have a lot of sketches i have a lot of crazy ideas that probably shouldn't work out but Sometimes I'd like tinker on the side and make them anyways.

31:06I don't know if I can still have a hobby and the hobby is making a random weird little product or something, but that's definitely one of mine. And a lot of the times in order to design something or or like think about some mechanical way to like swap a battery better or like be faster or swap the battery of this particular drone. drawing it out helps me at least uh and it helps me think through all of the different kind of geometries or methodologies behind it yeah or or kind of just like software paths that we need to do for some user interface it's a lot easier just for me to take that directly sketch it out and the more I do it the better I get at it and so it's kind of like I just I love doing that and I don't know if it makes me an artist or anything of doing these little mechanical sketches but I It definitely feels like I'm being creative, and I do like being creative, but definitely taking that creativity and turning it into an actual product that's being used by people and being manufactured at scale.

32:09There's definitely a certain level of energy and draw that the drawing needs to have behind it. It needs to have something that's just like, wow, that looks so cool. If that doesn't exist in reality, then why am I even in reality? Like, what do you think the typical timeline is from you going from like an idea in your head to a prototype to a shippable product? And like, how does that look? Yeah, well, from idea to prototype, it's not not not too much from a product to from a prototype to a shippable product. That's a lot more. So I guess doing like the early the early sprint, you know, like the 5k or something of a of an idea to a to a prototype.

32:46It's a lot different than that that full marathon. That's what it what it really takes. and I guess kind of like I was talking about is like initially the global, our first product started as an idea, as a sketch, as drawings on my wall, on a whiteboard that thought, oh, wouldn't it be cool if the thing could do that? But in order to do that and really flesh out that sketch, every single piece needs to be documented, needs to be defined, needs to be designed and then built and then built again and again and again and at scale and then supported throughout the future. So there's an incredible amount that goes into a product.

33:26It's not just my sketches or my designs, but it's also the pull of the world behind it. It's the community and it's the people that you talk to and that you whisper these little ideas to. And they're like, wouldn't it be cool? And they're like, yeah, heck yeah, I want one of those. And so it's all of that that comes into why to actually build something that you thought about. And if you if there's some if there's a reason that you don't build it, then you don't build it. But there needs to be like at least one or 100 reasons to build something. So I guess, yeah, it's just incremental little steps is how you get the whole marathon.

34:07Yeah. Is there any like what's the main limiting factor on growth? Is it, you know, hiring great people or is it like getting more customers? because I know there's like a few companies that I've talked or a few founders I've talked with where they've got a whole bunch of customer backlog, but they literally just can't find enough people or enough space to build the products faster. What's that for you? It's like there's the book or at least the idea like the mythical man month. You know, how much can you actually achieve in a particular month with like a team of people? And can you do the same thing or at least 80 % of what a team of 100 people can do with a team of five, right?

34:46And then once you get to that 80%, what North Star do you now see that will take you in a new direction? And so I wouldn't say that we're necessarily like, sure, if we had more money, we could do more things. If we had more customers, we'd be shipping more product. But what we're seeing is the growth of a new industry that's like organically forming in front of us through different use cases, through different stories, through different things that we see succeed in the world and things that we see fail. Big bets that people make that fail are little ones that actually shot up to the moon. And it's like, like you can't rush perfection and you can't rush the world.

35:28It's just going to happen. And right now I think we're in the place where, yeah, we're supporting an incredible fleet of products across the world we've got team at the ready to go teleport on a flight somewhere in in 10 minutes if we have to uh we've got incredible designers here making incremental changes to get that extra nine at the end of the 999 uh for reliability uh and we've got team yeah making new products as well how'd you find the like few people i think you said something like you have two people that are the guys that just fly all over the place if if you need them to how'd you find those two people well we have a they're a team it's hex ops and the first guys in the team were some of the first people that built like the globe the globals uh so one of them his name is tito and he was the best at like installing the drive shaft in the global and like twisting the the the the wrench on this really hard to reach alan alan screw and he could he figured it out he could do it every time and he knew why things would break And so obviously he's the best guy to help figure out other problems across the world.

36:31Like, oh, yeah, I've seen this before. Oh, yeah, I actually built that one. Or just like other things like that. And then there's there's people on the team. A lot of them have come from just understanding every way a product can fail, either through manufacturing or just kind of tagging along, watching us use the product. And then some on the team just really know how to how to how to manage these operations. Like, all right, I got your flight. Don't worry about it. Like a dude in the chair, you know, you need a dude in the chair. That's like got like talking to ops. Yeah. Yeah. And then one of the guys is my and this is a dream come true.