TWiST News: Skydio's Drones, High-Skill immigration, and M&A Unleashed | E2040

0:00Thank you for tuning in to the speaking startups today after the election. I know some of you are here to hide, some of you are here to celebrate, but everyone's welcome. We are going to talk to the CEO of Skydio, Jason. They've been in the news for running afoul of sanctions in China. They're an incredibly important American manufacturing company in the drone space. Lots to talk about there. Then we do have a quick look at what happened since the election results got called last night. We're going to talk about immigration and especially M &A and some other winners and losers that relate to the startup world.

0:27And then Jason put me to the task and said, Alex, go out there and find a whole bunch of different ways that search works today to put the upcoming perplexity round up to$9 billion into context. So we got a packed freaking show today. It's going to be great. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Oracle. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Save up to 50 % on your cloud bill at oracle.com slash twist. Notion. Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects into one beautifully designed space with AI built right in.

1:04Try it for free at notion.com slash twist. And Assembly AI. Get maximum value from voice data with Assembly AI. Build powerful products and features for end users on the industry's leading speech to text models. Get 100 free hours to start building at assemblyai.com slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me again is Alex Wilhelm. It is November 6th. It's the big day, Alex. It's the day after the big election. How are you feeling, Alex, the day after? i'm doing uh processing but i i do think that it's good that the results were clear forgetting who won i think it's very constructive that there was a clear victory in the popular scenes and electoral college vote i think that diminishes acrimony tensions and arguing about the election itself and then we can get on to the policy questions so that's good that said uh i did not vote for president trump and i have concerns about him on a policy and personal level but here we are and um yeah i guess i'm still kind of just digesting all the numbers back to policy positions we have a lot of that on the show today jason but i'm curious uh how do you feel i uh felt this was going to be a close race i thought it would be closer to be honest um i had problems with both candidates i made that very clear to everybody not a fan of socialism i felt one candidate was pretty like much in the socialism camp uh maybe moving to becoming a moderate i don't like authoritarianism either and so i was looking for a different candidate uh but now that the country has picked their winner i think it's critically important that everybody get behind that person and support them and let's hope for the best that you know uh and that's where i'm really hoping that the people trump listens to include our friends elon sacks chamath etc people around them and that they actually do something productive which would be to lower spending i think there's like there were like two existential things i was actually worried about one is spending that's by far my number one and number two is like censorship and like overreach by the state whether it's like breaking into somebody's home and confiscating their squirrel and euthanizing it or policing speech and and going after freedom of speech none of that stuff i like um and but that was like a distant number two and uh i feel like both those issues might get addressed by trump in a positive way and so i will hope for the best here i'm very disturbed though about you know some of the deportation stuff just on a practical basis yeah we're going to get into that in in a little bit i'm super excited to get to work here so let's do it all right adam bry is the ceo and co-founder of skydio a drone company jason that was famous back in the day for building really cool consumer drones that followed you around and took video they were awesome my friend kyle worked there and now the company has pivoted more towards the enterprise working with governments in defense context and with corporations and they've raised more than a half billion dollars so please welcome to the show adam bry all right nice to see you adam how are you doing doing well Great to be here.

4:22So maybe for the audience, just explain what Skydio does and what's happened here. So we make autonomous drones. They're basically flying sensor platforms, and we serve critical industries. So we sell to public safety, we sell to defense, we sell to critical infrastructure operators, energy utilities, and our products basically enable them to get a real-time digital picture of things that they care about. So they're very easy to fly. You can deploy them in a few seconds. You can use them to inspect a cell tower or power plant, or you can use them to respond to 911 calls. And one of the things that I'm most excited about, and this is a market that's rapidly accelerating, is the use of drones in public safety, where you have drones that live in network-connected charging base stations.

5:05We call them docks. They could be on top of a fire station, on top of a police station. You distribute them across the city, and then you can get on scene in a matter of seconds after there's an emergency or an incident. And the drone can provide better information to first responders. And we're seeing this really accelerate across the nation. And it's transformative for public safety. It keeps communities safer, it keeps officers safer, it increases transparency and accountability in policing. And I think it's one of these things where, you know, drones that we started Skydio in 2014. There was a huge wave of hype and excitement around the technology 10 years ago.

5:40It's kind of been this like 10 year overnight success where there's been this steady build for a long time. But we're finally at the moment where the autonomy technology is good enough. The hardware and the software is all there. And you can really start to deploy these things at scale to in many ways, transform the way the physical industries that we all depend on work. and there are a couple of things alex i remember you know having been tracking uh adam's company for a long time here there are a couple of unique things about your solution one is you need to have a housing uh for drones if they're going to be truly autonomous i have a drone i've got a dgi on the shelf over here i use it but i have to set it up i have to turn it on i have to make sure it's charge i have to swap the batteries out there is a long list of things that i need to do before the drone goes out and does its work if you're using skydio you have a landing pad that does inductive charging that manages the drone on the roof of a say a police station or a building like a walmart or if there was a solar array there might be like a shed or something where where this thing exists and then it can take off and do autonomous flying that that is the the product uh in terms of the key features correct that that's exactly right um we i mean we sell drones without the dock uh and there's all kinds of exciting uses that we can talk about there i mean these things are critical on the battlefield as well um where you're probably less likely to have docks uh but the dock is really the full automation and one of the analogies that i use it's it's it's kind of like a cloud server or something like all of us use cloud servers all the time without thinking about it, right?

7:21They're just in the background doing useful work for us. And that's what docs do for drones. You can have these things existing, they can be flying themselves on a schedule, automated missions, and you're just interacting with it through a phone or through the web browser. And so it becomes a purely software defined experience, which is just incredibly powerful for all the different things you can do with drones, all the all the sort of physical friction is gone. And it's a it's an automated device that just lives out there and does useful work. So Adam, about that, your analogy to cloud services, I think is really great.

7:49But one thing that I like about cloud services that I rent them, I don't have to own them. And so when you make that analogy, to me, it implies a future in which we have Skydio drones inside their little homes, out and around the world that I can just effectively lease by the minute. Is that the direction you're going in? So it's a really interesting idea. It's certainly something to think about. And I think, yes, I think that's a not unlikely future scenario. I mean, the instances where we're seeing this happen the fastest and the first is kind of shared infrastructure for cities, where, you know, for a city, you can have a shared network of drones that are responding to 911 calls, they're responding to fires, but they're also inspecting buildings and monitoring city infrastructure and monitoring coastline.

8:30And, you know, it's a really, really powerful tool. Could you tell me about the number of drones we need? So I live in about a million person town, and I'm just curious to have shared drones for just public services, fire, police, etc. Is that dozens? Is that hundreds? I don't have a good idea of how many we need to cover the city effectively. Yeah, well, it depends on, you know, how many different kinds of incidents or events you want to respond to. What really drives it is volume. It's, you know, people sort of tend to think in terms of area of like one drone can cover a few square miles. But what really drives it when you get into it is volume.

9:02So like in the context of policing, how many calls for service are you getting? So, you know, round numbers, the U.S. has 240 million calls per service per year. One drone annually can respond to something like 2000 calls per service. So, you know, a city like a city is population of a million people. You're talking about, you know, a couple hundred drones to cover it completely. you don't need to start there. You can do useful work smaller than that, but that's the sort of order of magnitude. All right, let's talk about AI, everybody. It's everywhere. Self-driving cars, breakthrough medical research, and of course, business tools that make everybody better and faster at their jobs.

9:42If AI hasn't hit your industry yet, trust me, it is on the way and it's happening fast. But AI requires a ton of computing power, you know that. And those costs will skyrocket if you're not careful. I have seen these bills come in. It can get crazy quick. And that's why it's time for you to upgrade to the next generation of cloud. And that means Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is a blazing fast and secure platform that covers all the bases, infrastructure, databases, app development, and of course, all your startups, AI, and machine learning needs. Now here's the kicker. OCI costs 50 % less for compute and 80 % less for network compared to other cloud options.

10:24That's a lot of savings, especially when every minute counts in the cloud. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including MGM Resorts, Specialized Bikes, and Fireworks AI. So here's your call to action. Right now, if you switch to OCI, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half for new u.s customers with minimum financial commitment but you'll need to act fast the offer ends december 31st 2024 see if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com slash twist oracle.com slash twist for people who don't know your firm um is the largest producer of drones in the united states domestically you are now the largest producer is that correct that's correct yeah i mean there's there's different categories people are making toy drones but for this class of sort of like enterprise grade flying sensor platform uh we're the largest producer by a pretty wide margin and the drones consist of obviously the motors and the propellers you have gps you've got a computer on it there's a lot of different components there yeah and most people are buying drones like i did from a company called dgi they're the are they the the 800 pound gorilla in the space they are yeah and this is a chinese based company from what i understand it is yeah it's a oh how should we feel about that in america we're talking about drone warfare and then we'll i guess we'll dovetail or back into your issue we have a company like dgi producing drones here in the united states should that is that a healthy relationship for the united states to have given that people believe now that drones are going to be a vector for terrorist attacks or just generally attacks and they're being used in warfare obviously in ukraine yeah so there's there's a little bit of interesting historical context here so drones if you called out the key components of drone and one a simple mental model to think about this is it's basically like the components that go into a cell phone smashed together with a quadcopter.

12:26So like four motors. That's, you know, high level, that's kind of what we're doing. You know, you've got compute, you've got wireless, you've got cameras, and then you've got this on the frame of a quadcopter. Historically, radio control toys and phones are all made in China. And so China, from a hardware perspective, got out to a pretty substantial lead starting like 15 years ago. and the sort of first wave of predominantly manually flown drones were almost all made in China and DJI was the big winning company there. What's happened over the last decade is that these things that started off looking like consumer toys have just become critical tools for all these critical industries.

13:09And as that has happened, it's become increasingly clear as the geopolitical tension with China has gotten up that it's very risky to be depending on China for these products that are critical to national security that, you know, are used for public safety that are used on the battlefield. I mean, it's very much dual use technology, you can see this super clearly in Ukraine, but the sort of civilian class quadcopter is being used at very, very high volumes on the battlefield. And ultimately, you know, you can see this in other categories of technology as well, you know, the products that come out of China tend to align with Chinese foreign policy and Chinese national interests.

13:49Shockingly enough. I'm curious, though, about Skydio and Chinese manufacturing just kind of going back in time. So I know you guys are now the largest manufacturer of drones in the US for your class. But was that always the case? Or was there a history at the company of using Chinese manufacturing lines that have now changed? So we from the very early days, we did all of our manufacturing in the US. So we have a global supply chain. And we can talk about that. I'm sure we will. But from the very early days, we did all of our manufacturing in the US from our first product onwards. And honestly, we didn't start doing that because of geopolitical concerns.

14:23We started doing that just because we felt like that was the way to build the best product. One of the things that people misunderstand about drones, it's much closer to building a fighter jet or a spacecraft than people realize. I mean, this is like you've got aerodynamics and thermals and vibration and very extreme mass constraints. It's a really extreme engineering challenge. And just like most aerospace companies tend to be pretty closely coupled with manufacturing, so it is with the most successful drone companies. So we started doing manufacturing in the U.S. basically so we could just have it down the street from where we were doing R &D.

14:54and we've kept doing it since and it's become a really important strategic advantage for us i mean the customers that we serve especially the military this is something that they care a great deal about and we were i mean we were swimming way upstream in 2016 you know in 2016 people thought this was insane like just go to china find a factory there to build it we didn't do it we invested in building up the capacity in the u.s um and i'm i'm very glad that we did i think it's critical from a national security perspective well it also dovetails with the news that caught my eye from a couple days ago that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs sanctioned three companies, Edge Autonomy Operations, Huntington Ingalls Industries, and Adam, a little company called Skydio.

15:33So on that point, any operational disruptions, I presume not given what you just said, but wanted to ask. And two, how shocked was the company that it was singled out by the Chinese government for essentially getting out of China? Yeah, so I should be clear. So we do all of our final assembly manufacturing in the US, We still have a network of global suppliers. Typically, all drone components come from China. Over the last two or three years, we've done an enormous amount of work to get our supply chain out of China because we anticipated this as a possibility. We still had one critical dependence, which was batteries.

16:06And so our batteries for our latest drones were coming from China. So that is a disruption to us. So we were bringing up parallel suppliers. We have now accelerated that work and we anticipate being able to to basically bridge the gap with inventory we have on hand. But it'll be probably next spring before we have a new battery vendor. China doesn't want you to sell drones into Chinese companies or to American companies in China. That's what this is about. Well, so the sanctions, the stated reason for the sanctions was selling drones to Taiwan. Um, so we, um, now our, our first customer in Taiwan is the Taiwan fire department.

16:51Um, so you can, you know, you can judge for yourself, uh, what the ulterior motivations might be here. I mean, the, the, the other backdrop for this is that GI, the leading Chinese company faces increased pressure in the U S you know, the, there's, there's legislation being considered that would, that would essentially ban them from introducing new products into the U S. I think it's plausible that this was a retaliatory effort by the Chinese government against that. And we've also gotten big enough now that we're competing with DJI successfully, we're taking market share away from them. And we're really the first US company to do so in the civilian markets.

17:30And so I think there's kind of a trade war national security backdrop to this whole thing. well this actually i think is a really interesting point if you were to talk about you know uh networking equipment huawei comes to mind we don't allow huawei in the west because we know that it would have back doors for the ccp to be able to look at data and vice versa i don't think they want cisco equipment in china on their backbone looking at data they understand it's a possible risk now we get to um autonomous devices like self-driving cars and drones we've already seen drones being used in this new uh battlefield in ukraine and and being highly effective and you can make them yourself if you were to go to instructables um you can basically build a quadcopter right this is like a hobbyists are doing this all the time those quadcopters they have no rules on them there's no geo fencing so if you wanted to put an armament on it or bomb whatever you wanted to do so how and then you have self-driving cars obviously with self-driving cars somebody could take over a fleet and do bad things with them like god forbid we've seen you know terrorist attacks where people drive cars through markets you could do that with a fleet of them if they were hacked so this is a new vector how should we look at drones should we in your mind as Americans as the West, just wholesale ban the use of or the importing of these drones from China because of the risk?

19:08What do you think the actual risk is here in terms of public safety? So I think the thing that's really important to understand is that the industry is still very early. You know, like most people are familiar with drones in the context of like consumers and videographers and capturing cool video. Yes. And I think that the, I don't want to say that there's no risk there, but I think the risks are pretty low. But if you think about a future, and this is happening now, where these things become infrastructure, where they're installed at every power plant, every city has hundreds of these things across the rooftop.

19:39They're all network connected. They're autonomous. They can be controlled remotely over the cloud. I think it would be pretty insane to accept a future where all those things are Chinese products that are ultimately going to be tools of Chinese policy. Like if you're concerned about Huawei routers, the idea of like network connected autonomous devices distributed across our critical infrastructure in US cities, like they're not, you know, it just doesn't seem like a great idea. And so I think that's the that's kind of the key distinction I would make is like it's looking towards the future. like where is this technology going and i think if you look at where it's going it's just it's untenable in my view to to say that like you know we want all this stuff to be to be made in china i i want to ask more about that because one thing i'm a little bit concerned about when it comes to an expansion of drones something that in general i'm very bullish on is the cyber security element because it's great if drones are made in the u.s we can control the supply chain manufacturing etc But if they're still hackable, they're still in danger.

20:41So I'm kind of curious if you can tell me just a little bit about how Skydio approaches the cybersecurity element to this to make sure that drones at power plants literally don't go rogue. Yeah, look, it's, you know, the two number one things for us are reliability and security. Those are the two things that make products useful for that kind of critical application. So, you know, we basically do everything you can imagine up and down the stack. I mean, we do like secure boot, secure signing of our software at the root that we like control in our factory. We have our drones authenticate to our cloud in a secure way.

21:14We have all the internal processes and controls. uh so you know we do everything at that you need to do at every layer of the stack like the link is encrypted i mean all the different things yeah to uh to to be as secure as as you possibly can okay one more on the defense point and then uh the promise we'll wrap up here but drones in ukraine have been used for a host of things from surveillance to literal combat missions and i'm just kind of curious is skydio willing to make drone systems that are used for more than surveillance in conflict zones? Yeah, it's an interesting question. So we I mean, our the US military is a major customer we've delivered to Ukraine.

21:53You know, our our identity as a company is is different from say a company like Andrew, like Andrew is pretty clear that like their goal, they're like a pure play defense contractor. Yeah, we're building, you know, people call like dual use technology, like we're building this flying sensor platform that's useful for all these different kinds of industries and applications. But the military is an incredibly important customer of ours, and we are deeply committed to their mission. From a product perspective, I would say that we're focused on building flying sensor platforms. We know that you can attach payloads and other things to this.

22:22And we're supportive of whatever military customers need to do to accomplish their mission and putting munitions on there being able to drop these things is it's certainly part of the portfolio for them. And that's something that we, you know, our platforms can can support like the x10, our latest flagship drone has payload bays, modular attachments. And I think this, I'm actually glad that you asked this. I think this is kind of like a, it's somewhat of a controversial topic in Silicon Valley, like how's this technology really going to be used? This is something we've thought deeply about as a company.

22:50And in my view, if you're going to sell to and support the military, you need to trust their judgment on how they're going to use these things. I mean, these are people who devote their lives to protecting our nation. They put their lives on the line um and i just don't think like us in silicon valley as technologists are in any position to say like oh sure you can use this but like you know no you're not allowed to have something like you know and so yeah so that that's the way that we think about it like we're not there's a different category of drone that's basically like a kamikaze drone it's like a flying bomb essentially it's pretty different from a technology perspective that's not what we build we're focused on building like best in class isr systems yeah yeah but but adam my brother's active duty so i care a lot about this because you know he's been in war zones and so forth but there's a difference between like you know winking at the army saying yeah we'll put bays on any kind of doing it yourself and i'm just curious why not take that next step and and and do the work to turn them into more andro style weapons platforms i mean to me it just seems like you're right there but you're not taking that last step but i'm just curious why i think uh it it's they're kind of different technologies i mean even the folks who are building munitions you know it's like there's a whole expertise in like building explosive devices and targeting systems and like how all that stuff works um and i think the product trade-offs are pretty different if you really want to build i mean like i don't know the video that andrew put out got a lot of plays like they built this thing that's like a terminal flight quadcopter like there's a whole slew of product trade-offs that they made there that are pretty different our product is like better for is what they call isr intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance but X10 was designed with payload bays for whatever missions customers need to do and I would also say like philosophically I think it's a different you know waking up every day figuring out how you're going to make the thing like more lethal is like different from waking up every day to figure out how you're going to make the thing like better responding to 911 calls like I think you know the mindset of like building something that's like the express purpose of purpose of it to be like a lethal machine is somewhat different and i think you know it's it's it's a little bit different from like our core dna as a company got yeah i think it makes total sense and there are contractors who make humvees and there are contractors who make 50 caliber guns that go on humvees and yeah there are different levels of expertise and and so yeah i see there being That's a good analogy.

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27:02We have one for all in. Everybody is using Notion. You don't want to lose data. You don't want to lose knowledge notion.com slash twist and when you use our link they know you're supporting the show what do you think of nova sky stories as we wrap here my friend kimball musk has a company that like brings art to the skies and we're seeing more and more of this uh what are your thoughts on these drone shows and light shows do you guys participate in that because it does seem like that is a perfect uh analogy to what war might look like in the future it's like a thousand drones going out there yeah so we don't do that ourselves the way that most of that stuff works i mean basically all of it works it's using gps um so it basically like it all those drones have gps on them you can pre-script out the trajectory that all of them are going to fly they fly around they turn on off the lights um gps doesn't work at all on the battlefield it's just always jammed this is one of like the key lessons which invalidates um sort of the like the first layer of technology for most drones this is so skydio drones have a visual navigation system so they don't need to rely on gps um but i do think there is this fairly critical point here i'm not the the first person to make this observation but every time that you see like a 10 000 drone light show in china yeah there is sort of this element to that of like it's a display of power right it's a display i agree that was my interpretation of it like they're sending a message to taiwan that like 10 000 of these things could go over your city identify people with guns i also known as soldiers and just zip and kill you know 10 000 people with 10 000 drones i think that is the future of warfare i you know i think it's one of these things where you're getting a glimpse into like oh boy you know this is really critical technology and we need to like we need to step on it in the u.s you know we need to like we need to have strong industry here we need to have robust policies we need to think about national security and have to have the ability to make every component right i mean i think that's one of the challenges here you're only as good as your slowest supplier so if you've got like a component in these drones and you want to make 10 000 of them and you're getting your rotors from china or vietnam and it's a chinese manufacturer who has a factory in vietnam we could basically not be able to create drones and they can Yeah, supply chain security integrity is super critical.

29:29I don't think it necessarily all needs to be made in the US, but it's certainly having it within our circle of really trusted close allies, I think is very important. uh this has been amazing uh congratulations on the success of the company doing great work and uh in some ways congratulations on the chinese government being so concerned about you that they sanctioned you for helping the fire department in taiwan with uh putting our fires and and helping yeah thank you guys for having me on it's a conversation we're proud to support taiwan All right. And if you're an engineer, Skydio is hiring.

30:07Amazing engineers, I know. So go to the Skydio webpage and apply if you're a great engineer, right? You need some engineers, I think. Yeah, I'm not neutral on this, but I think we work on the most exciting stuff in the world. It's flying robots. It helps people do their jobs better. It keeps them safer. And a lot of exciting stuff happening now, but it's still very early days. Yeah, it's early days and it's super awesome. I'm waiting for somebody to make one of these for homes or ranches and just keep track of the cattle. Yeah, we get within the most requested feature with our investor community, which has something about investors, is the ranch use case.

30:44I think the number of target customers there might be. There's like five of us, six of us. Yeah. So making this is the crazy thing for poor founders who have VCs on their board. They're like, you know what? i need this can you make me a 50 000 drone for my ranch to go do to do sorties and count my sheep and uh my my steer uh it's pretty crazy but it's uh super awesome and uh we'll get you some some uh sheep counting drones for your ranch day cal eventually it's going to be a thing where i think people will have these on the top of their homes right yeah i agree i think that um you know it's it's like classic technology deployment like we're starting in the highest value highest impact scenarios like 9-1-1 calls life and death situation inspecting the energy grid but like you know our costs will keep coming down the technology keeps getting better and and yeah i think there's a very clear path to this becoming like a standard part of building security standard part of armed security um i mean anywhere where you have to cover a large surface area and you know record what's going on i was just thinking ski season's coming and i was just watching this incredible documentary on netflix about this tragic avalanche that happened in palisades um you know the the ski resort in tahoe it happened in the 80s and it was just real tragedy and we had another one happen in avalanche where a couple of people passed away sadly um just last season yeah and one of the things you have to do is they literally shoot mortars alex at the mountain uh to start avalanches when there's too much and this um crazy documentary that i watched it's it's well worth watching because there are these people who do the science of mountaineering and monitoring these mountains um you know it's something that started at this specific place in tahoe and sending drones out to test the snow to monitor the snow to know the differences in snow and where snow is building up and then also to drop a grenade essentially yeah in certain areas to start avalanches means a person doesn't need to do that mission and that's just going to be better for everybody yeah i mean it's it's pretty closely related like any sort of natural disaster like in the wake of the hurricanes the two recent hurricanes drones are like the most critical tools like we were we have a bunch of customers in florida um and after milton i mean they had drones in the air like multiple drones in the air 24 7 like initially it's search and rescue and then you're having helping to like map map and assess the damage um and i think it's another one of these sort of glimpses like you get in ukraine where it's just like oh oh my goodness this technology can make such a big difference yeah in the high-stakes scenarios and it's you know it's exciting having been working on it for 10 years it's exciting to be at a point now where it's like some of them have the ability with a payload that you could actually rescue a human oh yeah you can drop you can drop a flotation device yeah you can drop a battery actually one of the most common this is a little bit surprising to me in search and rescue one of the most common things they want to drop is a battery because people have their phone but they ran out of battery so you drop a battery charger down to them and they can get back online and communicate um and some of them i've seen people get lifted in a drone right some of them are powerful enough that you could actually lift somebody out of a dangerous situation I'm wondering when that will happen for lifeguards.

34:05Why would a lifeguard go out into, or a coast guard go out into this open ocean when they could send a drone with a buoy and just drag the person in? Yeah. I mean, there's really just a continuum from drones up to the like tools. I was just about to say that. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of the same ingredients. It's like electric propulsion, autonomy, automation. and i think i mean unsurprisingly like you're going to see drones reach massive scale first but there's non-trivial sort of technology crossover there like basically to build a bigger drone um and uh yeah yeah the the drones to save uh you know the drone rescue uh swimmers are definitely coming and the documentary buried the 1982 alpine meadows avalanche uh is the name of that one if you want to watch it alpine meadows eventually became palisades um and then what's called squaw i think for a little while yeah all right great having you on the program adam and continue success if you're an engineer go apply at skydia well done all right thank you guys it really is amazing alex when you think about watching this technology you and i have been watching drones we've been watching vr we're now watching ai you watch these technologies and they go through a cycle right where they are in absolutely capture everybody's imagination and then founders need to basically work a decade to make an actual use case exist and and what i love about what adam's doing at skydio is you heard in there an incredible piece of startup advice i don't know if you heard it when he dropped it but it is what is the highest use of this technology where is the most acute situation paul graham called it i think hair on fire situation like yes if you if you're selling buckets of water and somebody's hair is on fire they really need it some people refer to this as the vitamin versus a painkiller vitamins a big business but like yeah you take your vitamins today or if you don't you might forget it's no big deal but if you have pain and you broke your leg man that vicodin you're gonna seek it out if you've you know really need it and they just work backwards hey we know people in the military need to assess situations they may have to drop payload or pickup payload whatever it is this the sending a burrito is already covered you know like getting your burrito by a drone is an eight dollar burrito a fifteen dollar service charge it doesn't actually make sense and and so many times founders come to me alex with like i want to start with the masses i want to start and sometimes it's really good intentions like i just think everybody should have this technology go after the most expensive highest margin business first why those customers are hair on fire customers who have money and they're willing to pay a premium which then allows you to iterate on the software and then eventually get to the rescue swimmer which there might only be the need for a thousand rescue swimmer drones or ten thousand so you don't go after that first and those people are you know comparing it to a twenty dollar an hour lifeguard it's not as much a stake as like a black hawk helicopter with navy seals which are i think valued by our military at about 10 to 25 million dollars for each navy seal if you save a navy seal from dying the way the government looks at that not just the human life but the cost of that asset as my friends in the military would say it's like i'm i had a friend who was a green beret he's like i'm worth 12 million dollars currently my friend's worth 22 million you know depending on if you're a medic or you know whatever you are so no i i really like i i'm very optimistic about drones writ large i'm very optimistic about skydio and have been watching technology for a long time to your point it's just very exciting to see how things go one two four eight and then a thousand because drones were something that i think we all had too long in the consumer bucket and the number of military and corporate uses are so large frankly i'm very excited about skydio i'm a little surprised that jason they're valued like 2.3 billion in their last round which just feels very small for a company with that large of a footprint and is already causing geopolitical waves yeah hardware is hard so you know i really always tip my hat off to hardware founders because you know you have to inventory stuff you have to prototype stuff and with software you know there's no inventory in the software business and if you make software and it's janky okay yeah just rewrite the code start from scratch fire the developers hire two new developers do it in parallel make three versions of the same feature with three different teams in hardware you cannot do that it's it's cost prohibitive absolutely and you have to go through a very grinded out process as i learned with cafe x with density.io which is doing people counting i've made these bets and my lord any i have another one free drum which is like drumming sticks that teach you how to drum it's very cool you know these poor founders have to deal with the kickstarter elements of what they do and then scaling it and man if you have a production problem you could be sitting on inventory you have customers who want to buy it and like one supplier screws something up and literally you're as fast as your slowest and least reliable a person this uh i think will dovetail nicely into the trump discussion and our country and relationship with China.

39:31Yeah, yeah. That's why I'm so glad we had the Skydio CEO on because we're literally looking at a situation in which there is a American company dealing with a geopolitical tension that is driven by decisions made by administrations. If your startup has any voice data, and I'm sure you do, Assembly AI is going to help you catch up fast. They have powerful, ready-to-go speech-to-text modules that are going to make it easy to turn your data into features that your users are going to love without a massive investment. It's very simple. You just take a few lines of code and then you start building.

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40:52What will you think of? Think of all the talking we do, phone calls, podcasts, huddles, Zoom calls. Just think of all of that opportunity being inside of your app and go to assemblyai.com slash twist to get 100 hours process free and let yourself dream of new features to delight your customers. To let everyone understand what happened last night, Trump, former president, won the White House His party took over the Senate And is looking pretty good in the House As we come here today We don't actually know who's going to win the House But it's looking GOP If you track prediction markets and so forth And as Jason said at the top of the show I think it was about 51.5, 47.5 Which in American terms is a shellacking That is the technical term Is a shellacking So two points is normal One point's close, four points is a lot is how to kind of think about that a reaming yes they got trounced and so if we look at it i think you know it does beg the question why why was this such an incredible victory for trump and uh you know if i look at it there's many layers here um i think a lot of this comes back to entrepreneurship and i maybe it's just the glasses i look at it but i do think there is an existential battle in america right now and if you were to look at europe very socialist leaning um you know maybe less entrepreneurial less rabid capitalism uh you know is the version over there and then here we have a capitalist system which is very hard driving and it does create a polarization of wealth and i think one party picked we're going to go pro-entrepreneur were going all in with elon with sax with chamath with entrepreneurship with venture capital and they picked a venture capitalist as their number two and they picked a billionaire capitalist as their number one so putting aside how i personally feel about trump i have issues with character which i think any trust me my friends who are the biggest trump supporters in the world have problems with this character and they've been public about the problems they have with this character they put all that aside and if we just look career politicians on one side and capitalists on the other that's what happened here and i think people because the personalities are so large alex people kind of get caught up in that but putting aside the personality issues and the style issues which in some cases are absolutely abhorrent uh on one side and that i'm not a fan of i don't like the name calling etc um but let's just pause for a second here billionaire real estate tycoon and venture capitalist beat a lifelong public serve two lifelong public servants that i think is what we as the technology community venture capital and as americans should really look at and then they enlisted elon and he seems to have pushed a lot of uh young men to vote a group that previously hadn't voted and i don't know if that's come out in the statistics yet but that's what i was hearing since i have a lot of friends on the inside was that hey there's going to be a change here in the activation of young men who are capitalist entrepreneurial and not part of this previous group you know um i'll say on the social side so that's the argument uh that i think is worth considering what's your take out i think that is a very uh that that's one point of view you could take i think it was inflation and a long period of spending and low interest rates across parties that caught up to us and the party that was in office when inflation took off lost that's that's my you're talking about nuance and policy and such and i just don't think that carries amongst the broader electorate the way it does amongst our highly educated wealthy group of friends out there yeah interesting folks are pretty dumb and pretty poor yeah there is that and i but i do think they look at these folks as heroes and i think they looked at one group as aspirational and one group maybe as not aspirational that's just my gut but i could be wrong we're still i mean i i would like to wait until we have a little bit more data before i make any any strident um kind of points about this i mean what is clear is that trump did better amongst uh people of color yes genders and uh young men did shoot to the right a little bit just as college educated women jumped into the left it seems like everybody moved to the right there was a very interesting um image i tweeted and trump has increased his support across the electorate republican margin over democrats changed since 2020 by demographic group and this just shows very simply what percentage uh shifted republican versus shifted democrat and if you look at white collage if you look at just the arrows here what you'll see here is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 i think it's 14 different demographics age ethnicity uh and gender there are two groups that shifted more democrat 65 year olds and above yep and white college women and then the other 12 all shifted to varying degrees republican and the size of the arrow is how far they shifted and the three groups that shifted the most were hispanic asian and 18 to 29 year olds that is stunning those are the people who would normally associate with democrats they made the biggest move to the republican party along with 30 to 44 year olds there are other groups that are de minimis they could have gone either way um so what are your thoughts on that i think a lot of people were surprised at the scale of this well i mean it's everyone i've been reading a lot of twitter as you have been since you know we started seeing results come in and what i find very impressive is that everyone thinks that they were right about what should have been done or why they won or why they lost so i don't think people are really learning a lot about this i'm very curious to see uh later on some deeper polling about views on gender and how that may have impacted this particular election yeah i think the divergence from biden to harris's results with not that much policy difference makes me wonder a little bit uh but i also think the democratic party needs a new set of leadership because clearly clearly the biden pelosi era is over and they're getting their ass kicked and it doesn't seem like they know what they're doing so uh i think it's time for a house clearing but i suppose i'm trying to sort out some dissonance jason and i want you to help me with this because when the trump uh victory went from likely to okay, this is happening.

48:08The stock market in the U.S. began to pick up steam. And so today, before we hit record, just so everyone knows, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up three points, new 52-week high, S &P up two points, NASDAQ up two points. Clearly, a lot of ebullience in the market about the next Trump administration. And Jason, we're going to talk about immigration in terms of high skill and M &A in a second. But the thing that I don't understand, Jason, is the dissonance between everyone in the business community not wanting extreme tariffs on Mexico, China, and the world at large and the trump policy to do that and so what i don't understand is was trump lying the whole time or do your friends on the inside think that he's actually going to do these very inflationary tariff moves right away as you promised yeah absolutely this is one of the things that breaks intelligent people's brains with trump i have now having so many people close to trump um and having interviewed jd vance and spoken to folks you know in public and in private trump says insane things he gets massive amounts of attention for saying things that are either you know is literally having a talk with a young person about this like they're like is that is what he said racist i'm like it's kind of like racist adjacent you know when he says mexico sends all their terrible people to america is that literally racist or is it factual that he sends you know that mexico sent criminals here because they don't want to have to deal with them and they didn't send like their ceos over here across the border and so when he says he's going to deport 15 million people and then bannon says yes bannon said on the all-in live stream last night confirming yes we're that's like job number one now bannon's not part of the trump administration nor do i think they're going to let him in again but i do think that is uh part of what you're identifying here is trump will say something that is absolutely outlandish impractical and then it's up to people around him to execute on some version of it and i think the version that we'll see specifically with immigration and we should start with that one i think and then we'll go to tariffs i think with immigration he's going to deport people who beat up police or who are fentanyl dealers or criminals and then let the other 14.x million of the 15 uh stay here so i just want to be clear the people because this is useful for me to know jason because you have very different friends in terms of their political alignment than i do mostly and that's not a diss by the way just kind of a factual statement there were all they were almost all democrats you know five years ago so no no no i i i i said that and then it sounded like i was being pejorative i was trying to point out that you're hearing different things so i want to i want to double click on them they think based on their knowledge of trump his policies and the election and the campaign that much of what he promised that you and i would consider to be bad for the economy tariffs you know a labor shortage etc won't happen they'll be cut down to a a much smaller size sounds like with the correct some deeper okay okay well he exaggerates so if you interpret trump as lying or exaggerating i think is the journey people go through he is like some pt barnum exaggerator in order to make points we're gonna smash him i'm gonna or i'm gonna go in there and i'm gonna the you the war in ukraine will be over in you know the day i come into office he will say something bombastic maybe crazy maybe people interpret as a lie and basically the way people who are are in and around trump interpret everything he says is he's going to put the goalposts and the target you know like i'm going to shoot for the the moon i'm going to shoot for the stars and get the moon kind of situation and so i think we just let's just meditate on immigration here yeah we had him on all in here's the clip from all in where i asked president trump about um immigration and high school immigration specifically roll the tape what i want to do and what i will do is you graduate from a college i think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country and that includes junior colleges too anybody graduates from a college you go in there for two years or four years if you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college you should be able to stay in this country okay so when he said that the question is is he pandering to me and to the business community by extension or not and what happened was after that quote they the admit his uh group of uh you know around him backtracked it a bit and said this is only for high skilled only for phds this is not for people crossing the border etc but i do think that the influence around him are going to say we need to get more high-skilled immigrants in here while shutting the border here he here's steve bannon the architect of maga who literally put a bunch about it last night on the all-in live stream talking about specifically uh when i i asked him hey tell me about immigration and you believe he should start deporting millions of illegal immigrants?