This Startup Fused Human Brain Cells with Silicon Chips | E2295

26:59Yes, we used to think that was fun. It still is, frankly. um but you told me that when you you built the system you had to kind of like create a reward or punishment mechanism i forget which to give it the incentives to learn how to play correctly right correct yep in pong not a lot of variables in doom many more yes so do you know how they managed to set up their reward or punishment mechanisms to actually interact with a game of that complexity? Because I'm curious if it was hard or not. Yeah. So it pretty much is also the same. They're using audit stimulus versus disordered stimulus as a reward and punishment signal.

27:40There were a few more variables. And, you know, honestly, it's kind of funny because I think they didn't disincentivize or punish it for wasting ammo because there was no ammo restrictions. And so essentially what it did was it figured out that if it just spammed the shoot button and just spin around in a circle, it would just win. So it's kind of funny because that's what happens in actual reinforcement learning systems as well. So when we changed it, you know, it actually was, I guess, punished for wasting ammo and all that stuff. And I started to learn and actually started to have some interesting gameplay from that.

28:17I just realized why it's very important that you don't create conscious systems because they can feel pain. because if you're using disordered inputs as a punishment mechanism is a little bit harsh, everybody, we're working on the terms, but you wouldn't want to do that to a conscious system. Correct, exactly. Yeah, okay. I've connected that and that makes a lot of sense. But here's the takeaway. I mean, okay, look for Doom's great. If you haven't played Doom 3, do it. You owe yourself to have that fun. But if a kid, and I say that with love, can build this with your API. To me, it shows that the technology is not that hard to bring to real world application, hence the cloud.

29:00And that brings me to my last question, which is how many people can you, customers can you serve with 120 CL1s in a data center? One, 10 ,000, I literally have no idea what the range is. Adding a new member to your team is a crucial decision. You don't wanna rush into a hiring situation that you will regret. But if you're a busy founder, you also don't want to spend a ton of time in the trenches looking for that perfect candidate. Instead, you need a partner and you need a trusted partner. And LinkedIn Hiring Pro is that partner. How do I know this? Because I use LinkedIn Hiring Pro. You want a real world testimony?

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30:10So we have 120 that we've deployed. Unfortunately, there has been some teething with the biology. So while we do have 120, only about 20 or 30 users are on the cloud at the moment. Actually, no, 20 users. We have another 10 more that we have to bring online, but that's also because there's a whole conveyor belt like system of getting cells grown and all that stuff. And it's one of those things where, unfortunately, because it takes some time for it to grow, what we see now is the result of decisions made two months ago kind of thing. so they're only starting to come online we've had a slow sort of start but yeah a lot of uh so not a lot of people have started to come on board and the waiting queue is getting smaller um so yeah we you know we have that we actually have a couple of um uh corporates and partners coming on board to do some experimental work yeah um but yeah you know yeah but so when uh when doom is running on your biological computers is that one cl1 is that five like how much does it take one it was just one so we haven't come up with the with the chaining of the systems yet that's coming in i think two okay so each one's still a discrete box they're okay that then my question was actually relatively silly then you could serve 120 customers yeah exactly i mean sorry i don't know that's fine because you know this is where we we are what we're doing at the moment there has been some internal research work about you know where we we're doing uh pdms microfluidic wells so we can actually segment out this the surface of the chip and you know rather you get all 60 maybe you only need 16 and that way i don't know if you're familiar with like vmware maybe you can get a hybrid like a virtual machine with multiple people running the same thing so that way we can increase yield and stuff pdms is a polydimethylsiloxane yep that's which is also known as a dimethicone.

32:03What are we talking about? It's a material. It's like a gel type of material that you can make microfluidic devices with. So think of it like a well. Actually, I'll show you what it looks like. And then define microfluidics for me because, again, I nod my head like I understand, but we are outside of my comfort zone. This is not SaaS economics so you're going to have to help me along okay so uh i'm gonna show you this so this is a microfluidic device so um there are probably several thousand neurons in one well um and they are now segmented into these little sections and we actually have channels that we can turn on and turn off um so we can actually control this more like a circuit now what we're looking at here if you didn't know what it was, you would think these were top-down views of water storage tanks with pumps and pipes coming into them.

32:58But instead, each one of these little octagons, each one of these octagons has a bunch of neurons in it. And the microfluidics allows you to feed and then also transfer information between them. Yeah, the microfluidics are these channels. And what they do is they constrain the growth of the long part of the neurons. So they can only communicate with their nearest neighbors, or we can block them off and say, you can only communicate with your east-west neighbor or your north-south-mid. So you have a lot more like circuitry control over that. Right. And then you could, in theory, segregate to have more than one person using the same computer because you can essentially not let the axons get too busy sharing information.

33:38Got it. Correct. So this is kind of like a triplet model that we've been experimenting with. so we can say all right you can have this one here you'll have one two three three four four electrodes to work from and if your workload is pretty low maybe this is just good enough and you know you can actually have if you want get two and then you can have them sort of network up like this and then we can you know um you know share the instance and stuff like that so there's a lot of things that we're working on internally um to try to figure out hey can we increase yield can we get more interesting, like, you know, learning some that kind of stuff.

34:12So how much are you raising? What's your target? Yeah, we're raising. Oh, and actually one more thing. We're raising 30, but I also want to show you guys this. So this is the Cortical Cloud. Ah. Yeah. If you're on the audio version, it looks like a standard developer backend, which is a compliment. Yes. And then you just hit the instance that you've acquired. And there you go. I'm in New York right now. My lab is in Melbourne and I am live streaming neural activity from a cell culture that my team have assigned me for demo purposes. And what is it doing? What are these dots that I'm seeing? If you're on the audio version, imagine you're looking at the window of a spaceship and you're seeing stars go by.

34:50That's what it looks like in slow-mo. Yep. So the window with stars, this is what we call raster plot. So as we go down, you can see the channels are like increasing in number. And if you look on the right side, that's the topological mapping of it. So that's the surface of the chip. And so every time there's a spike or an action potential, we're marking it on this grid here. And we're also marking it on this. So you can actually see there's like a temporal correlation. You can see bursting activity. You can see synchrony on this view. So you can see this cluster here. There's another cluster there.

35:25And after a while, you can watch this. Oh, look, they're getting really active here. You can just watch this and sort of figure out what's going on. And then you can also look at the activity view. So here we can actually see the raw waveform. So this is kind of the same thing that a neural link would be picking up. And, you know, if we wanted to like, you know, give them a bit of a poke, we can just say, all right, I'm going to poke the neurons in this region here and I can click and I've delivered a stimulus across. And then that wakes them up a bit going on. That's really good if it's not conscious.

35:55Otherwise that would be kind of rude. Like I was sleeping. I know, yeah, how rude. Now it's a good dream there. We can see like the spike waveforms. We can actually see what the shape of them are. So you can verify that they're actually really like action potential spikes. And the cool thing here is that if you're a developer, by the way, I'm on Team Human here. So we still need developers to think of really cool applications. LNMs are not going to solve this for us. You write all the application code in Python. Yeah. And yeah, they're all in Jupyter Notebooks. So you specify what programmers actually do with CL1 is think of them as mini architects for mini matrices, right?

36:36So you're building the matrix that the neurons are going to be put in. You specify the parameters of the game, the reward and punishments, the objective functions and so forth. And you just let them, you know, get connected to it. And so, yeah, this is how you can do it. documentations on, you know, docs.corticalabs.com. There's an SDK you can pip install and off you go. You know, it's one of the best parts about talking to founders that I get to do, is just straight up getting to see the future. Usually it feels like I'm looking about 12 feet out. This is one of those chats, which I feel like I'm looking 12 years out.

37:13Like there's, there's enough optimization, expansion, programming languages, how to teach these things. Like there's so much here that isn't done yet. I feel like you have like, well if you have your life's work ahead of you this is gonna be this is gonna be a lot um okay i gotta let you come back on in six months and tell us how the cloud's going and how singapore is going because apparently we're just gonna have you on all the time but for folks who want to learn more what's the url and is there a job you want to shout out to the audience in case the right person is tuned in yes uh so check us out at cortical labs.com the cloud is at cloud.cortical labs.com documentation docs.codical labs.com uh i'm on twitter as well dr1337 and also um we are we're looking for talented developers stay tuned to our twitter uh feed there may be a hackathon coming out at mit uh soon um are you gonna go to that uh yeah probably we'll have to go for that one so i i only live like uh half an hour away from that area i wonder if i could uh maybe I can speak wide.

38:17It'd be fun. I'd love to see them. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. All right. So stay tuned. And yeah, more developers. Chilling the inner sea bomber. Developers, developers, developers, developers. At least you're not wearing a sweaty collared shirt. Han, thank you so much for coming back to the show. We'll see you again soon. Thank you. We're talking about drones. No, not drones that sit on the water or go beneath the water or just fly up in the sky carrying a single hand grenade. No, today we're going to talk about very large drones, mostly outside of the battlefield context. So I rung up my dear friend, Michael Nortjer from PICA to come on and tell us about why drones are good for agriculture, why they're good for near-term cargo transport, and why they may soon be dropping couches from the sky onto your head as long as you're within a radius of 50 meters.

38:59Please welcome to the show. It's Michael from PICA. How you doing? Awesome. Thank you for having me. Doing well. So I'm really excited about your company because I thought of you guys as the company that makes large drones that are powered by batteries that sprays crops. But as it turns out, you guys have really broadened out in the last couple of years and do quite a lot more. But Michael, to get to that point, I feel like we should go back to the future. So take me back to the start of the company, the initial vision, and how you guys literally quite got off the ground. Yeah, great question.

39:27So honestly, the start of the story begins when I was like four years old. I've been just incredibly passionate about aviation my entire life. So I started with paper airplanes when I was about four, rubber band-powered airplanes, little electric planes, pretty much obsessively built aircraft throughout my childhood. Ended up studying physics, and then I got to work on a number of different EVTOL projects in the Bay Area, three or four of them, actually. So mostly passenger carrying, vertical takeoff, and landing air taxi concepts. Super fun, like, you know, really hard technical challenges. But it was clear this was like almost 10 years ago.

40:03There was just no way we were going to certify those aircraft for commercial use for another, like, realistically two decades. That took the wind down my sails. So decided to leave to start PICA. And yeah, that was now almost 10 years ago. So it's a long journey. When was the first flight? And how far have you guys gone in terms of like commercial penetration of the agricultural sector with your drone that can handle crop springs? I'm curious if you've managed to gain material market share in that industry. Yeah. Yeah. So first flight was actually like a week before demo day. We went through Y Combinator.

40:40so we it was it was a wild time uh we spent one month designing a sort of 600 pound what would be about a two passenger autonomous aircraft uh we built it in two months actually a little under two months and flew it on like week 11 of the whole program a week before demo day uh so that was awesome it actually flew itself it took off and landed running our own software um you know great testament to the realities of hardware. Like we had a flying prototype autonomous big UAV 11 weeks in. That was, I think, literally like 1 % of the work that we've done now. So the other 99 % has been going from, you know, prototype to now a like widely deployed aircraft that is operating with customers literally seven hours, sorry, seven days per week.

41:31You know, some hour customers are doing 12 to 13 hour shifts. So yeah, where we are today, believe it or not, we're actually the only company on earth that I'm aware of that have deployed a group for UAS to commercial customers at scale. And interestingly, this is happening in the like rural jungles of Brazil. That is the only place on earth that big drones like this are being flown commercially. That's weird. Talk to me about group four. I don't think that's a particularly well-known metric outside of the UAS space. Yeah. So, uh, it's a more like military classification of drones. It's basically, uh, drones that are bigger than 1 ,320 pounds.

42:07Um, so, you know, things like the MQ-9 Reaper, that's the most common group for UAS. All right. Now you said you'd only done 1 % of the work when you'd gone from no plane or no big drone to having a big drone that can fly. A lot of people out there that watch this or listen to this are software founders, and they're probably familiar with if you code up a feature that does not mean product market fit it doesn't mean the sales cycle is over there's still a lot of work to be done once you have some code but for folks outside the hardware space tell them why it was only one percent of the work because from the outside going from no plane to plane sounds like you made a lot of progress yeah totally so i mean the thing with uh our products are a blend of hardware and software and so really like the last nine years have been this just steady march of maturing both the hardware and software in parallel well.

42:57The hardware, I think, is the particularly difficult one to mature quickly. So that first aircraft, you know, couldn't actually complete an interesting customer mission. It didn't have the features it needed to spray a crop. It couldn't really move cargo even. So there was a lot of like work there. But, you know, I think the most interesting thing really is actually what's been happening in the last three or four years for us with commercial deployments with customers. So, So a prototype can be operated by N number of engineers. It can be operated by your entire company if need be. Your uptime requirements are non-existent.

43:36If you fly for one hour in one week, you'll be like, hell yeah, we've got an awesome video. That's all we need. Put it on YouTube immediately. We're raising the next rub. Exactly. With customers, it's completely different. Our customers are very, very upset if the aircraft is down for more than 24 hours. And these customers exist in like extremely remote regions of the world. Like they're literally in some cases a six hour drive from the nearest city. And so getting to that sort of level of uptime takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort. So it's, you know, it's deploying multiple aircraft with customers, flying them, learning, retrofitting, fixing, re-engineering over and over and over again until you achieve, you know, it's like the equivalent of product market fit is a tool that a customer can actually rely on.

44:30Yeah, yeah. Product rely, no, market product reliability fit, maybe we could call it. Yeah, exactly. Why are we not using more of your ag drones here in the States? You talked about, you know, Latin America, remote regions. I know that agriculture is different across different areas based on what we're growing and seasons and so forth. But, you know, I've laid drip tape on a farm. I've driven large pieces of equipment. And to me, like going above the crops here would make tons of sense. And your system seems to be very robust and it's got a good spray width. And why can't I use this in Nebraska?

45:04Or why aren't you involved? Yeah, yeah. So it's coming. It's coming fast. So the things that drew us to Latin America were twofold. One is regulatory. So Brazil actually deregulated agricultural drones about two years ago, which is very convenient for us. We do have commercial approval to operate our aircraft here in the United States. We actually have the largest drone approved for commercial use by the FAA, but it has some cumbersome limitations. We can only fly the drone about four kilometers away from where it took off and landed from, which is not commercially viable today. No, that's ridiculous.

45:37Why? It has to do with like line of sight to the vehicle. Oh, Zipline told me about this, that if you want to fly outside of line of sight, there's another entire set of regulations on that. But it works in Brazil, right? It does, yes. Is the air different in Brazil compared to the United States? Does something change to navigation and computing when you cross the border? Yeah, actually, it's totally, no, no, it's not. Yeah, so in Brazil, we're operating typically anywhere from like 5 to 15 kilometers from where we took off and landed from. Yeah. So, I mean, the good news is we have data about this.

46:10Like no one has ever done an operation like this before. And so the FAA understandably is sort of apprehensive about what that looks like. We've been working with them over the last year to actually remove that limitation and expand it to more like what we're doing in Brazil, making really good progress on that. So, like I said, we're coming to the US. We do have one customer already here who has an aircraft, but we're going to have far more in the coming year. All right. So I think this is good. I'm going to talk about fuel because it's going to come up when we go over to Dropship in a minute.

46:39You currently make mostly electric drones. And I know that when you sell the ag drone, you send with multiple sets of batteries. You can kind of hot swap them and move them in and out. But if I'm six hours from a town, what I probably don't have is as good of access to the grid. So to me, it's lovely that I don't have to cart fuel in a truck up some mountain roads. But I'm curious about just recharging these damn things out in the woods or mountains. Yeah. So farms have electricity. Some farms are pivot irrigated, for example. They have these giant circular pivots that go around, big water pumps, blah, blah, blah.

47:14So the farm will always have electricity. The question is whether they want to run the electricity from the sort of center point to the actual runway. And I would say half of the customers that we have today do that. The other half use a diesel generator. But what's really remarkable, so the kind of competition for our aircraft is a vehicle called the Air Tractor. It's a big, you know, roughly 8 ,000-pound vehicle. It burns roughly 55 gallons of jet fuel per hour. Which is not small at today's prices. No, yeah, it's a lot. The Pelican, in the worst case, if you're charging it off of a diesel generator, is about two gallons per hour.

47:58that's a lot better even if you're doing even if you're doing dirty charging as you might call it it's still much more efficient okay now i know you guys say on the site that the current ag drone starts at if memory serves 550 000 um as far as farm equipment goes that's not super crazy but it's also not that cheap so i'm curious about the the uh roi here and kind of like time to repay the purchase because the way that i think about it more efficient flight uh probably need fewer human pilots because it's autonomous and you're using electricity and blah, blah, blah. So I presume there's some savings baked into this.

48:31What is the time to recovery for people that are changing over to this type of ag work? Yeah, that's a really good question. So it's, you know, depends highly on how heavily you utilize the vehicle. So that's sort of one other benefit of Brazil actually is they're just crazy about the way they do agriculture. They have multiple seasons back to back and they just have an intense culture of like work uh so you know we have customers who one of our newest customers planning on running three shifts with the pelican and so the thing at you know at most could operate literally 24 hours in one day how comfortable would that make you as the guy who has to take the phone call if it goes down while it's working 24 hours a day because that sounds like a maintenance nightmare but maybe i'm overestimating it's intense but i mean we're already we have customers doing 12 hours a day right now okay so the difference between 12 and 24 is it's not that big um in time are we gonna see like uh smaller farmers be able to like do ride share equivalent of rental for these things to to handle their cops because i don't think everyone's gonna need their own yeah correct yeah so in the u.s for example you would need to have a farm that is almost 20 ,000 acres in order to fully utilize the aircraft.

49:51And that's huge. That is, by U.S. standards, very, very big. By Brazil standards, that's actually like midsize. So yes, in the U.S., it will be much more common to have spray as a service where a contractor owns the vehicle and then services a number of customers in a surrounding radius. You know, we can make an acronym out of that. We can call it SAS. No one's ever used that before. Yeah, totally. Yeah, maybe our valuation would go up. Anyways, so you asked about economics and payback period. So yeah, it depends on the utilization, you know, two to three years roughly. But the thing that people don't understand is Pelican, yes, it is a lower cost solution.

50:33Yes, there is a different type of labor you use, a much easier to access labor pool. you can train someone to operate a pelican in two to four weeks versus a aerial application pilot is you know 18 months but really the like the reason people love the pelican is because of its ability to spray really really well um and so you know the simplest way to understand this is the cost of the chemical that is being sprayed is typically about four times the cost of the application so this very precious resource oh you're yeah and you're trying to like deposit this fine mist of chemical very evenly over an entire crop including around the boundaries of the crop which is very difficult so the pelican has like a bunch of things about it that make it just a like massively superior solution for actually applying the chemical and right now i mean as you and i record this the state of hermos is still totally blocked off and i presume that behind this comes out it'll still be blocked which is killing fertilizer prices around the world so people are probably extra price conscious right now about these chemicals they're spraying over the crops yeah totally so input costs are you know like chemicals are a very very significant portion of growing food man that's yeah that's it's worrying to me that the solution to that which is apparently you guys is not as uh applied as the need for fertilizer is because there's a mismatch between solution and crisis in our food supply yeah anyways uh for everyone listening to this If you're confused why we're talking about farming here on Twist, it's because I'm working this towards a point, which is that Pika has put together a not just drone, but also software and the integration with the hardware to make a cool system that allows the company to really quickly build new devices.

52:16And this brings into play Dropship, which, as you explained to me before the show, is really the second generation of your cargo plane. So how did you get Dropship up and into the air so quickly? What have you learned? And then when will it reach the market? Yeah, great question. So just as general background, Dropship is a dual-use product. Within the commercial sector, it's used for logistics. Within the defense sector, it sort of forks yet again. It is used for contested logistics. And then it's also a very versatile multi-mission aircraft, good for carrying large sensor payloads, et cetera.

52:53Could it carry bombs in the little container? Sorry to be rude, but I'm curious. I mean, technically it could. That's not the most interesting use case for it, I would say. Okay. And why not? Because when I think about drones today, we think a lot about drone-based warfare in Ukraine and around the Middle East and having a large drone that can carry more boom sounds good to me. Yeah. So our vehicles are designed to be quite reliable and low operating cost. And so like, if you want to deliver, if you want to do more kinetic stuff, you don't build a vehicle like we did. Uh, our vehicles last too long, basically they're too nice.

53:32Um, if you wanted to make a really low cost bomber, um, there would be different decisions that you'd make, uh, than, than what we did with drop ship. And probably also like, you know, electronic emissions and, uh, noise and there's quite other factors that would have gone into making this a bomber if you wanted it to be one correct yeah and so yeah yeah so you guys had a test flight recently a drop ship um really quick process to get it you know from as you said cad to the runway yeah yeah so we went from uh like initial cad renderings to first flight in 180 days uh which was pretty awesome yeah that was so that wasn't the fastest i guess what we called big bird the plane that we built in my parents' backyard during Y Combinator technically was faster, but Dropship is way more complicated and useful.

54:21So yeah, it's the second generation cargo plane. First generation cargo plane was an all electric cargo aircraft, really cool plane. We built eight of them. We're actually going to probably build quite a few more for commercial customers. That aircraft only has a 200 mile useful range. So that was a sort of key limitation for defense. Anyways, kind of the backstory there is we built eight of those. We sent three of them to the Air Force, got very positive feedback from them, sent one to the Army, got really positive feedback as well, and invitations to some big demos that are coming up in the next two and a half months.

54:56Air Force, we want to follow on contract as well. I think the thing that was so cool about this is we got really, really good insights into what it is that both Air Force, SOCOM, and Army want from a tradable contested logistics and multi-mission UAS. So there's no requirements written for this type of vehicle yet. This is too new. And so the main feedback that we got, willing to share it now because Dropship is out in the market, is basically like Pelican cargo, the electric thing, really awesome, super easy to use, practical, easy to maintain, needs much longer range. So ideally, 1 ,000 miles of range with 500 pounds of payload, check, Dropship hits that.

55:37It needs to fit in a 20-foot shipping container. So all of our vehicles actually fit in 40-foot containers already. ready we designed them to do that but they're just like two and a half feet too long to go into 20. Um so dropship meets that requirement the tail is removable which is really cool ah okay got it yep um and then the last really big one uh was or sorry two more operation off of heavy fuel this is true for any defense focused UAS um so JPA JP5 diesel um and then the the most critical one was the ability to airdrop payloads um so the because the first cargo plane opened up in the back like like a C-130 versus opening up in the middle, like, sorry for the analogy, the Bombay of a B-17.

56:18Yeah, exactly. So the nose opens on both of them. But on the electric one, the whole floor was a battery. So there's no - The nose that ended up, not the battery. Oh, I totally misread that image. I'm so sorry, everybody. No worries. Yeah, the nose opens on both. But yeah, we had this giant battery in the way. So we couldn't make the electric one airdrop. Which is, I feel like we're beating around the bush. The new dropship is hybrid. So it has both a diesel engine, as far as I understand it, for getting somewhere. And then it has batteries for very quiet looping in around the area once it arrives.

56:50Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's a really cool architecture. I don't think there's any airplane out there that's a hybrid turbo diesel architecture. So it's a parallel hybrid, like you said. So the diesel engine actually has a propeller attached to it. It can also charge the batteries in flight. And then the electric propulsion system. So the diesel engines behind the fuselage, just a pusher propeller, kind of normal UAV configuration in that sense. And then up in front of the wings are two very high power electric motors. And so those are used during takeoff. That's how we get this really ballistic takeoff performance, like takeoff and landing and under 600 feet.

57:26All three at the same time. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Oh, so it's just supposed to be going mad, like a little beep. Yeah, it sounds really cool. It's this like combination of turbo diesel and then the electric. um so yeah the the diesel engine is about uh it's like just over 30 kilowatts peak um and then the electric motors in the front are each about 25 kilowatts so when the electric propulsion system is running you know our peak power is essentially three times our cruise power yeah um so yeah so we use that for this like ballistic takeoff and landing performance um use it to climb to altitude and then once that altitude actually shut down the entire electric propulsion system we have these neat passive folding propellers and then the airplane cruises just on the diesel you know i was really excited about dropship uh not because of its dual use uh capabilities but more because i was thinking about domestic commercial applications like getting stuff places like can i send my mom a couch you know but it sounds like our prior our prior point that we talked about with uh your agricultural drones is that regulations may not be ready yet to turn into a domestic fedex if you will are are we going to shoot our own foot here as a nation and not end up with a lot more autonomous flight because it seems much more economically viable environmentally friendly convenient like it just seems better to me yeah 100 so i mean the uh the reason that we kind of pivoted away from mass manufacturing Pelican cargo, the electric one wasn't because there was a lack of interest from customers.

59:00It was really exactly the reason you mentioned we could not get regulatory approval to fly like scaled beyond visual on a site operation in a timeline that was relevant to us. So that was the biggest factor. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think there's this very just getting back to the original point, Like these hardware, software blended products are so important to our society. They're also going to create so much value. But their value is 100 % determined by their exposure to the real world. You know, like SpaceX is worth how much it is because they blew up rockets, figured out how to stop doing that.

59:41And now, you know, the idea of a self-launching, recovering rocket is just like taken for granted. um there are very few companies have who have figured out a way to actually collect that data so pica we've done it we had to go to brazil zipline they've done it they had to go to rwanda yeah yep and then there's a bunch of other companies that have gone to ukraine so ukraine is the the other place to like learn essentially um but outside of that there are very very few options um which is troubling i want to make sure we get to supply chains components and uh and kind of sovereignty. Now, if you were just making agricultural drones for Brazil, I wouldn't really care.

1:00:22But we are talking about the military. We are talking about dual use a little bit. So how well are you able to source materials, components, or any sort of input without reaching into Chinese supply chains? And how much better can you do in a couple of years? Yeah, good question. So I think kind of because of when we started the company, there wasn't like a bunch of stuff we could just buy off the shelf to build these drones out of. And so we actually vertically integrated essentially every critical component on our product. The motors, batteries, motor controllers are our own design. All the avionics is our own design, airframes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

1:00:58So we're already able to create NDA compliant versions of our product. There is some difference in sourcing. For example, the battery management system we will manufacture here in the United States for an NDA product. For our commercial products, we'll manufacture the battery management system in China. what's the cost differential there uh it's about 2x that's is that a high price component compared to the overall cost of the device no not i mean so for dropship no there's two bmss in in the entire vehicle um for pelican it's more there's 15 batteries that ship with each airplane yeah yeah so more complicated okay that makes sense to me i was just thinking that 2x didn't sound as bad as i was expecting i wasn't quite sure why well so if you own the design it's not that bad i mean And so you can, for example, if we don't source from China, we could source from another low-cost region.

1:01:48The 2X is actually doing it in the United States, though. Oh, no way. Oh. Yeah. Huh. All right. Well, that's better than I thought. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think if you own the design and manufacturing in the U.S. versus China is order of magnitude 2X difference. if you don't own the design and you're buying from an oem and it's like oem in the u.s versus oem in china then it's probably going to be like 4x difference yeah yeah quite quite a lot okay uh that makes good sense to me but you mentioned how when you started the company things weren't available on the shelf so you managed to do it all yourself did that slow you down materially and i ask that because it doesn't feel like the company is moving slowly but you've taken on a lot more um what we might call a technical risk by building something house that i'm kind of shocked that you've gotten this far given that you really blank sheet of papered this entire thing.

1:02:38Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I mean, we, I think we have an extremely strong technical team. It has slowed us down. There are some components that have matured really nicely in this sort of OEM space that it, you know, if we knew now how far they would have come, we maybe would have paused on developing our own. So the motor controller, for example, is something we did in-house, they've gotten bigger and bigger and better. And now there's off the shelf options that are vaguely similar. Got it. But you know, on the flip side, it's really hard to say because it's kind of the grass is greener scenario.

1:03:10Like we've run into issues with our own designs and our own products, you know, lots of issues. We've resolved them all. Or we haven't resolved all of them. We're working on the last couple of resolutions, everybody. Give us two or three Three weeks. Yeah. Um, whereas, you know, we've had issues with our off the shelf products and getting to a robust resolution with those often as far more time consuming. So, um, yeah, it's, it's tough to say. I think the, the biggest thing for us though, is like, you know, if you think of the most successful hardware companies out there are a blend of hardware software, um, you know, Apple, great example.

1:03:50Yeah. Tesla, um, DJI. Perfect example. Sure. And I think what those companies are able to do is make something incredibly complicated seem just really, really simple to the end user. When you take a picture with your iPhone, it's phenomenally good. It's better than my dad's super fancy DSLR camera now. And I don't know how or why, but there's so much going on. What are all these? What are all these little camera things back there? I don't know what a single one of those does. Not once have I looked it up. And you know what? My pictures of my kids look fantastic. So thank you. Totally. Yeah. And so like the way you do that is if you, you have to own everything, you have to own the hardware and the software, in my opinion, like that's how you make that really magical experience.

1:04:34If you try and integrate a whole bunch of different systems, you end up with this like customer experience where you can tell. And so, so that's, I think that's like the biggest benefit, but it's. Are we just talking around Boeing's decision to stop making things in-house and just supply everything externally and integrate all the systems. I feel like we're slowly circling the Boeing story here. Michael, I have to let you go. But one last question before I do, which is really simple. There is a lot of money flowing around the venture capital world today. However, I talked to a lot of people that are now building enterprise agent orchestration NCP servers, and they tell me that, oh my God, people are not interested in us.

1:05:12So does the company have enough access to capital today to continue growing if you still need more money to bring this vision to reality because i can see a really cool future which we have tons of quiet safe friendly drones in our skies doing quite a lot of work for us and i want to get there quickly yeah yeah good question um i would say yes and no i mean we we've been able to raise the money that we need uh if we had more money we would move faster um so if you're a vc listening to this hello come on stop backing sass companies that are slapping on an ai rapper back something cool we're building drones, y 'all.

1:05:48Michael, a treat. Where can people find the company? And is there a job you are hiring for? You want to shout out into the void? Yeah, great. So you can find us on our website, flypika.com. P-Y-K-A, not P-I-K-A. Yeah. Correct. P-Y-K-A. Very active on LinkedIn, actually very active on Instagram. Most of it's in Portuguese, I'll warn you. But really, really cool shots from Brazil of our actual customer operations there. Fantastic. All right. Thank you very much. We'll see you soon. Great. Thank you.