Joby, Dirac & Allen Control: The Future of Air, AI & Defense Tech

0:00We're actually going to be the air taxi provider for Dubai. We're making the greatest weapon system in American history. We're building the first automated work instruction platform. We're partnering commercially with Uber and with Delta to be able to integrate our service seamlessly into these different consumer-facing products. We realized that this is a very capital-intensive business. Toyota came in early as an investor. Toyota Motor Corporation announced it will invest$500 million in new funding for Joby Aviation. I was starting to get the feeling that the West was forgetting how to build great things, and I wanted to make sure that didn't happen.

0:30A lot of folks who actually knew how to do things correctly and took pride in that work are retiring. The net new talent that comes in that's like addicted to TikTok doesn't care. I sold my last company to DoorDash. Imagine selling your startup to DoorDash and then turning around and building an AI-powered machine. And then right when the deal closed, Putin invaded Ukraine. And we saw very early on that the countermeasures we were investing in as a country, I don't think those are going to be like long-term sustainable. Eric Allison, Philip Ehrenstein, Steve, welcome to Sorcery.

1:14Eric Allison, welcome to Sorcery. Thanks for having me. We're at day two of Reindustrialize and we're talking about manufacturing in America. You had some big news yesterday for Joby. Could you share more about that? Absolutely. So we're really excited to announce that we are expanding our California facilities and actually doubling our capacity overall at our pilot manufacturing site in Marina, California. And we're just opening a new building. And that's really exciting because we've been doing a lot of work there for a while. But this represents kind of the next step in the evolution of our basically made in America manufacturing that we're doing for this new generation of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

2:00And actually, so we are actually also taking steps to expand into Ohio. We acquired a building. We've been refurbishing it. We now have equipment coming in. We're training employees at our California facilities to start production of parts out of that Ohio facility. That'll be part of our certified aircraft that we're building. So exciting. So why did you decide to double down in America versus manufacture elsewhere? So we're a company that's born kind of on the coast of California, Santa Cruz, California. And we've really been investing in, from the very beginning, in an approach that I think in the industry we call vertical integration.

2:40So we figured out very early on in the process of developing this revolutionary new type of aircraft that the components, the parts to actually make this aircraft just weren't available. You couldn't buy them from anyone. You couldn't, you had to make them essentially. So that's in the DNA of Joby. We started doing that very early on. Our founder and CEO, Jovan Bervert, he's a longtime engineer, a very successful serial entrepreneur in other industries. And he brought that experience to bear when Joby was started. And so we started to build out that capability. And we really value the idea of designing, building, and testing in as tight of a loop as you can because that's how you drive innovation in this new wave of technologies that we're bringing to market and so that kind of just led to that philosophy we're building um near where we are right and so we we built the facilities to manufacture to test everything that we have to do um all in that tightly knit way and as we figure that out then we can bring in other sites like ohio where we're actually expanding to those new locations where we can take that learning span to that location and put it together into the aircraft that we're building.

3:54Are they going to be manufacturing two different aircrafts? I know that with this announcement, you also announced a new aircraft to your fleet. So that's right. How are they going to strategically? So actually everything will be feeding into this one aircraft. And we actually have a nice representation of it here at Reindustrialize that people can see. It's the most popular entrance. Yeah, it's really cool. We have it in a perfect location, like right at the front door. So it's great to someday people will just be able to land and walk right in. So that's not quite there yet, but working on it.

4:24We are working on the certification of our aircraft with FAA. And what that entails is it's a very intensive process of first working with FAA to define what it means to even be able to design this type of an aircraft. So setting up the rules, essentially, and then working methodically downstream of those rules to kind of define how you're going to meet the rules. and all of the different myriad tests that you have to do to prove with documentation. And in many cases, FAA people actually witnessing the tests that you're doing and signing off, like literally signing off on it, that you are meeting those rules.

5:02And your performance of all of your little parts is mapping to what you agreed to. And that's that process that we're in right now. So all of the stuff we're building, whether or not it's parts in Ohio or lots of parts in California, that's all feeding into the aircraft that demonstrate the compliance to those rules to get to the certification of the aircraft. Joby is an operationally expensive, regulatory heavy company. And you had decided to go public earlier on in the life cycle than other companies. It's probably one of the largest frontier tech companies that's public. What was the decision to do that earlier on than later?

5:50Strategically, was it financing? Because now you get access to secondaries via public markets. How do you think about that as you build out this really CapEx-heavy business? I think that's all part of the equation. We were founded in 2009 and stayed very small for a long time, really understanding the fundamentals, the foundational pieces of that technology understanding what needed to be invented um what worked what didn't and uh it was it was in 20 kind of 2019 2020 they closed in 2020 we raised the first big round it was a series c that toyota led so toyota came in early as a uh as an investor from one of their venture arms and then uh and then came in as a and led the series c which is between four and 500 million um that we that we raised but we realized that this is a very capital intensive of business.

6:41And especially with a vertical integrated model, we don't just vertically integrate down into designing, building, and testing all of the components that go into the vehicle platform. We're actually vertically integrating up as well, I like to think of it as. So we're vertically integrating to the customers. So we're actually designing and building the software that then takes that vehicle, the aircraft, and lets you book it on demand either through the app that we're developing or through one of our partners. We're partnered commercially with Uber and with Delta, for example, to be able to integrate our service seamlessly into these different consumer-facing products that will allow anyone to get a ride when they want to.

7:25All of that takes a lot of capital. We took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself in 21. We listed, we worked with one of the company, a SPAC company called reInvent, which was a great partner, some great, great backers. And so we've been off to the races since then. And so, you know, hard at work at bringing this technology to market. This is not financial advice, but I saw the stock last night and then this morning and I was like, whoa, you guys had a little bit of a run up the last couple of days. Yeah, we're excited to see enthusiasm across the board for what we're doing. And so we think we've got a lot of potential here.

8:11And we're really, really excited to be making great progress, whether or not it's in manufacturing or in testing. I was in Dubai a couple weeks ago where we have been doing a bunch of work with the UAE government there. And we're actually going to be the air taxi provider for Dubai once we launch. And so we were doing some initial proving flights in the desert where it's like quite hot and actually surprisingly humid. And we were, I think at the max temperature we flew in was something like 43C. It's like 110 degrees, something like that. And kind of stress testing a lot of our components and making sure the air conditioning works for the pilots and future passengers inside the aircraft.

8:50So that's really fun that we're able to show with real world work that we're doing, like what this looks like, what it sounds like. That's a really important part of this. I don't think we have it here, but we have even a little experience, and you can see it online actually, on what the acoustics of this aircraft are like. This is actually one of the things we invested in really early. That time when we were really small, a lot of that early foundational work we were doing was understanding what are the trade-offs, what are the different key innovations and technology that are necessary to make a product that actually can work.

9:27Because today you can get an air taxi in New York and other places, but it's a helicopter, right? And there's a kind of a limit on the scaling that's possible with that technology for really a couple different reasons. Cost is one of them. It's pretty expensive. But another really important one is noise. And so, you know, anyone that lives near where the helicopters fly, I've talked to a lot of people that had the experience. It's like, yeah, it's just really loud, right? And it's great if you can do it, but it's really loud. And so we really early on invested in the foundational understanding of the physics to make a really quiet aircraft.

10:06And so that's part of even like what we were showing in Dubai to the different folks that were seeing those demonstrations and the proving flights that we're doing. It's just like letting people experience what the acoustics of this is like. and it's hard to describe but basically we could have this conversation when the aircraft is taking off and landing 300 feet away without really raising our voices and then when it's up and flying it's basically silent when it's overhead so if at 1500 feet, which is pretty low actually, flying you just hear a whisper as it comes by and that's a really, really different experience when it comes to the acoustics of how these aircraft work And we've spent a lot of time and energy investing into that to make something that's pretty remarkable for the ability to integrate them into communities and have people want to have this in their backyard, basically.

11:00So we're not going to have to wear headsets and microphones when we're cruising with our friends to dinner in XYZ City. You might still have to wear the headset, but maybe to hear the pilot. So it's kind of fun to wear the headsets. And it's really fun. Let's be honest. It's fun. I want to talk more about the consumer experience because it is it's a delightful thing. We've been wanting flying cars for a while. I don't I don't think helicopters are flying cars, but I think this is more akin to a flying car. So could you explain more of like what that experience will be like to the consumer? Absolutely.

11:36So fundamentally, you're going to open up an app on your phone. Maybe it's a Joby app, maybe it's Uber, a rideshare partner. And you'll select where you want to go. Just like today, you open up Uber and you say, I want to go to the airport or I want to go to downtown or something. And in the Joby app, the only option will be Joby. But in the Uber app, you'll be able to choose the Joby option, which is going to be faster than any other way to go. And so then the reason why we're integrating and have partners, a partner like Uber for rideshare, is that typically people won't be right next to where one of these aircraft can take off and land.

12:19So we think of it as vertiports or skyports, like to call them. And so, you know, depending on where you are, a car will come and get you, just like a car picks you up today if you're just going to ride in a car all the way. but instead of taking you to your destination and maybe sitting in an hour or two of traffic or something depending on where you're going it'll just take you a few minutes to the nearest Vertiport and then what we're doing is building the back end technology that we can have multiple people kind of meeting just in time essentially at that Vertiport who are all kind of going in the same direction so it's kind of a just in time shared ride of experience which helps to drive the economics better so it's cheaper essentially per seat for the folks that want to take the rides and then when you land wherever it is you're going the destination vertiport cars will be dispatched just in time again to pick you up and the other people who are on the aircraft to go to your final destination if you're close enough you can just walk which sometimes is a really great experience but if you're not a car will take you there so that's the idea of this kind of seamless multi-modality I like to call it where car, Joby, car is or car, Joby walk is kind of the the idea and it's all kind of woven together and the technology just makes it work in the back end you'd have to think about it but that might seem uh difficult and it is but we actually have done this and test this out so i came from uber where i ran the elevate team uh previously before joeby acquired it and we actually had a product that we built and and and ran actually for for a while to test this all out we use helicopters that we were in manhattan and uh and we actually though had you know this showed up in the uber app and you could people selected it We did lots of trips for people and we demonstrated how you could do this matching and you could get people to meet just in time at the heliport.

14:07In fact, one of the interesting challenges was that a lot of the Uber drivers had never dropped people off at a heliport before. And where it was, it was easy to miss. And so we actually ended up having to put our general manager out there with a sign, like, turn here. That was one of the interesting operational problems we had to solve to make it work. But I think it was a really great proof point that you can do this. And if you build the right technology back end, you can make this a really great experience. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30 ,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S.

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15:52For Joby, like, how do you think about that when you scale up the company because it's so capital intensive? Like, how are you moving internally? What systems are you constantly checking or like milestones are you reaching? Yeah. So that's a, that's a great question. It's, But we have a couple thousand people working at Joby across all the different sites and disciplines, everything from folks who are building the composite parts that actually make up the aircraft to the folks writing the software that's building that customer experience that I was just describing. And so you have to keep people aligned and driving toward goals.

16:33And so we do a lot of that, set up goals and we drive people toward them. we drive to accomplishments and celebrate the accomplishments when we get there but we also are building systems that help to make this easier too so we're looking at how do we leverage the latest advances in AI across different aspects of the enterprise whether it's mundane things where it's really easy now to get fantastic results on reading a shipping slip or a packing slip in a shipment and you can integrate these tools right into systems, especially when you're developing them ourselves like we are, to more advanced things.

17:15How do you start to augment and enhance some of the work that engineers are doing across the board beyond just speeding up coding that lots of people are doing? We have that well embraced across our entire team. That's so interesting. I just came across this company called Turing that helps build and deploy next generation AGI systems across real world problems. And so it brings up a funny question for these manufacturing companies, physical products, but a lot of them come down to data because you're collecting lots of data with every flight, every test that you take off. How are you thinking about AGI and data within the organization?

18:00Yeah, so we are building kind of a really intense data foundation across the whole company. So electric aircraft are kind of massive data machines basically, which is really, it's really cool. We have to choose what data to keep instead of what data to collect, right? So it's a, or we have a richness of data because every, computers run the whole airplane. And so they collect data at some crazy high rate. and they'd be like, well, I only need that every one a second instead of like 100 times a second or something, right, for different data sources. So we generate gigabytes and gigabytes and gigabytes of data on every flight.

18:38And we've built a whole data system where every time we do a test flight, we pull like very fine-grained data off the airplane. It goes right up a secure pipe into the cloud. And then a whole bunch of processing gets kicked off and dashboards show up for all of our engineers to review that data. And that all happens just automatically every time we fly. and we're building on that foundation and one of our partners on this is Databricks we use it pretty heavily across everything and with that vertical integration we can bring everything into the same context whether or not it's flight test data, manufacturing data, safety data for our enterprise safety management system that we're building and that's really important to be able to work with your data in a single context and then do really interesting things with it as our developments and the work that we're doing rolls forward.

19:28Hopefully we get some Joby AI agents soon. We have lots of agents running internally. That's exciting. As we wrap up, I really want to know, what are you most looking forward to this year? So we've got a lot more great stuff in store. We're making progress across every front, whether that's flight testing, whether or not it's the manufacturing certification work is the north star that we're all driving toward. So I can't wait to tell the world about more of the things that we're doing in the weeks and months ahead. Exciting. Well, I can't wait to go check out the aircraft you have outside. Maybe I'll get in it.

20:08I don't know if I can. Absolutely. We have a selfie station, so you can take a selfie. We're going to go straight down there. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. In today's high-speed business world, Staying ahead means using the smartest tools possible, including the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence. Meet Turing Intelligence. Turing builds customizable AI systems designed to solve your mission-critical challenges no matter your industry. From expert guidance to tailored projects, Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective.

20:42With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit Turing.com slash sorcery. Spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com slash sorcery. Philip Ehrenstein, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Molly. How is it out there at Reindustrialize? It is packed. It is? Yes. You've never seen so many people who care about saving the West. It is exciting. I'm excited. Excited to be here. Excited to see so many familiar faces. Someone to actually characterize it as really just a really big Twitter meetup, but it's actually more than that. A lot of folks from all over the world coming to re-industrialize to talk about how do we turn the tides of the degrading industrial base that we are looking at in this country.

21:25And we are in the heart of America. In Detroit. Detroit. It's where we did it. It's where we did it. We're going to continue doing it. And do it better. Do it better than it's ever been done before. Yeah. So how are you keeping yourself energized today? Well, thanks to our sponsor at Dirac, C4, the energy drink of America. That's how I'm staying afloat. We stock these in the office. I actually live, so I'm from near - Are they actually a sponsor? No, that would be awesome. C4, if you're watching this, we would love for you to sponsor our company or to work with you in some capacity. We actually stock C4s.

22:02Like we have some Red Bull, but like mostly it's C4 in the fridge. Figure out who their manufacturer is. Get integrated. Yeah, I think Cellucor owns them. That's my understanding. But I mean, these are delicious. I've been taking C4 as a pre-workout for roughly 10 years. So how's that going? That's great. It's great. I love C4. My heart might be exploding, but it's actually, it's with passion and pride for America and not the stimulants that are in C4 pre-workout. Talking about passion and pride for America, we are at Reindustrialize. What excites you most about this year at Reindustrialize? So there are a lot of, so last year's Reindustrialize was really great in that we got a bunch of different companies to come together and try it out.

22:44like you know this is there are manufacturing conferences all over the place these are not like new things that happen but there hasn't been so much of a like a silicon valley tech orientation towards them and they haven't been positioned with such a level of aggression like the the mission of re-industrialize is we cannot let the american industrial base degrade anymore um you go to you know your average manufacturing conference we were at automate this year. Really cool conference. A lot of really cool companies also here in Detroit is actually down the block. It was about a month or two ago, but the, you know, the vibe there, the, the environment there is not sort of there, there is an urgency and re-industrialize is about urgency.

23:27It's about addressing a really, really dangerous trend that we're all witnessing happen to the American industrial base. And that's its degradation. And if that degradation continues, it will eventually result in collapse. And with that, our way of life. So that is the sentiment. That is the patriotism and fervor and energy that a lot of people are bringing to the conference this year, especially. There are some critical players in the building this week. We even have some protesters. I don't know what that's about. I love the protesters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You love that? It shows that you're doing something.

23:58This is the thing. If you didn't have protesters, it would mean that what you're doing doesn't matter, right? So I love the protesters. It's hilarious. They are like Palantir protesters for the most part. Yeah, they always have, you know, fangirls. Yeah. Good for them. They're like, screw Alex Carb. Stop working with the CIA. It's hilarious because, you know, as everybody knows, Palantir runs the CIA, right? And so I find it amusing that protesters are coming out. There's only like maybe 10 of them out there. It's kind of disappointing. I was expecting a better turnout because like, you know, you know, you're not doing something like you said, you know, you're not doing something special unless people are turning out to say you should stop it.

24:33So they can come in. We can give them jobs. I know the whole reason they're protesting is because they're generally unemployed and unemployable. But, you know, we could actually employ them in a production line. Detroit is a city that we have, I think, two and a half million. Show them the future. Let's show the future. It's like we have two and a half million open jobs in manufacturing. We need more people who are willing to put down the phone, turn off TikTok, and get on a production line. And the protesters, we can start with them. Sorcery is proudly sponsored by Carta. Carta is transforming the private marketplace, connecting founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital.

25:09Trusted by more than 65 ,000 companies in over 160 countries, Carta's platform of software and services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. Carta's fund administration platform supports over 9 ,000 funds and SPVs, representing nearly$185 billion in assets under management, with tools designed to enhance the strategic impact of fund CFOs. For more information, visit carta.com slash sorcery. That's C-A-R-T-A dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Production lines are fun. You are helping reindustrialize America. I want to talk about you as a critical power player. So what is Dirac?

25:54Dirac is a company driving America towards context-aware production planning. It's a new one-liner I'm going with lately. We at Dirac have built, actually, I can give a little bit of background about myself just for a little context. So my background's originally in electrical engineering and robotics. Spent a little bit of time over at Northrop Grumman, you know, did a little bit of electrical engineering work, some mechanical engineering work, a little bit of technician work, and just got to see how, unfortunately, our kick, all of the infrastructure was in the manufacturing side of things. I wanted to just do something about it.

26:22I was starting to get the feeling that the West was forgetting how to build great things, and I wanted to make sure that didn't happen. And so Dirac, at our company, we're building what we call the first automated work instruction platform. So we'll take a CAD file or 3D model of an assembly as an input, figure out the assembly sequence automatically, and then automatically generate 80%, 90 % of the assembly instructions for that system that we're trying to assemble. You can sort of liken it to, you ever build IKEA furniture? You know, a little paper instruction book tells you how to build the thing.

26:50Imagine that, but instead of being like paper, which is what we actually have today in like most manufacturing facilities, you'll either have like a like white binder. That's like this thick with like a bunch of like photos. And it looks like templates out of like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. That is like what the modern work instruction looks like today. It is unfortunately super paper-based, very archaic, very manual to make. It takes like weeks or months to make and they suck, right? It's just like awful. So that is basically what people use to build planes and engines and cars and missiles all across the world, but especially in the United States.

27:22And so what we've done is with BuildOS, we take your CAD file as an input. We will figure out the sequence automatically. And then in this 3D animated rendered environment, generate the assembly instructions for your manufacturing team. So does this make it easier for workers, more efficient? Like what are the positive externalities of this? So there are a bunch. I'm sure it's a lot. Instead of it taking like weeks or months to do your production plan, you can do a couple minutes, a couple hours, a couple days, tops making the work instruction. And then what ends up happening is, you know, we like to say like a picture is worth a thousand words, but an animation is worth a million.

27:58Instead of a like literal Ikea, you know how awful it is to follow Ikea assembly instructions. Imagine somebody's like, all right, build this missile with this picture. Guys on the shop floor are looking at that and they're like, wow, like I don't know how the hell this thing. So tons of questions, things are built wrong. things are built really poorly. Unfortunately, in many cases, scrap rates are super high because of that in many different cases. And so what we found is not only have like as our software made it fun and like actually enjoyable to do like to make work instructions, but it makes lives a lot better for the guys on the shop floor.