The Flying Supply Chain, with Isaac Roberts (CSO of Skyways)

0:00Valley of Depth Host: You identify a problem or a need, and then you go and you build to it. And it's going to take deep tech engineering with a lot of focus to make the thing happen. And then you just sell the living crap out of it. Skyways has been focused on the defense department and saying, how do we do something that's actually meaningful? And so it's always been that payload and range increasing over time. We're starting to see reindustrialization occur, but I think the drone space is having a lot of pressure to get mature really quickly. Okay, let's put a missile on it. Let's go from camera to now we'll shoot at the things we see on the camera kind of stuff.

0:25Valley of Depth Host: One third of casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were in logistics. No one's been going and saying, how do I move an ammo can from the ship to the beachhead and do it in a way that's not costing anybody their life?

0:38Isaac Roberts: Do you have a perspective on what the future of warfare is going to look like with drone technology?

0:48Isaac Roberts: So, Isaac, tell us where we are today.

0:51Valley of Depth Host: So, we're at the Skyways office. Behind you, there's half a million dollars in tooling. that one piece right there. We just got in for V3 Block 2. So this is the production floor of the company. Here's where we make all the final assembly and get everything ready to go out.

1:08Isaac Roberts: Well, I appreciate you having me while you have all the magic happening right here live behind us. Yeah, for sure. Now, I can't but hope, I can't but not point out, like we come to a lot of these types of factory floors and production lines and we usually see a giant American flag. But there's three here. There's an American flag, a Texas flag, and a French flag. So maybe tell me a little bit about that.

1:31Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, so obviously we're in Texas, right? So as you know, there's a lot of defense tech happening in the Austin area. But Charles, the founder, he's from France. It's actually, he's over there right now with family. But it's this, yeah, let's say like homage to Origins. Funny enough, he actually grew up next to the Boeing, or sorry, the Airbus facility over there. So like aviation has been in his blood since he was really young. Been building planes and started working over at Google as a software engineer and decided to merge the two. And then that's kind of how Skyways came about. Yeah. So French flag.

2:04Isaac Roberts: Well, I do appreciate how in Texas the Texas flag is given as much airtime as the American flag. Yeah, naturally. In some cases, more airtime. Citizens of the world, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, okay. So tell us a little bit about what problem you're solving here.

2:20Valley of Depth Host: We see logistics as fundamentally broken around the world, right? So this started, Charles experienced it when he was over in San Francisco working at Google. He's crossing the Bay Bridge, dealing with all the traffic, getting to the office, and he's just like, look, this traffic sucks. How do I avoid that? And then the idea of self-flying car, he's got a pilot's license. He's been doing aviation for a long time, so he understands the problem pretty well. Was looking at Waymo and how that was all coming together, so wanted to tackle it, and that was about 10 years ago now. For me, another anecdotal item is like I just flew in from Colorado, right?

2:55Valley of Depth Host: So got in at 1 a.m. after getting on the road at 5 p.m., right? So we get in our little boxes, drive to the next box, get on train, go over to the airport, get in the right terminal, get into the plane, fly. I'd much rather just get into my backyard, get in a flying car and go to sleep while it's taking me to Austin, right? And so I think that we kind of take for granted the potential, but there's a lot of complexity involved, right? So what we're trying to do is not necessarily solve the problem of container ships that are going transatlantic or something like that. It's like these big bulk cargo systems like trains would be able to accomplish, but rather the really high value, really high need urgent items getting done in a bespoke manner.

3:38Valley of Depth Host: So is it primarily commercial logistics? yeah so um you can think of us as like zipline for defense and b2b okay yeah i said okay so so

3:49Isaac Roberts: you mentioned defense like i mean how acute is this how how problematic is the logistics problem

3:56Valley of Depth Host: for defense so i didn't know this until maybe a year and a half ago um but one third of uh one third of casualties in the iraq and afghanistan wars were in logistics so you think about that. One out of three casualties was in some kind of convoy trying to handle some kind of logistics problem. That's a major issue. Those are lives lost. Diesel fuel

4:20Isaac Roberts: transport was a huge issue and actually one of the probably leading causes of troop deaths during Afghanistan.

4:28Valley of Depth Host: If you're running an insurgency, that's exactly what you do. You cut the supply chain. I think that the idea is that you can automate that supply chain for high-value items, allowing for a smaller footprint and a larger reach. Yeah.

4:42Isaac Roberts: So I want to go back to the overall logistics problem that you highlighted. Now, when I go back, so when I order something on Amazon, right, I mean, that's pretty efficient, right? So how do you sort of like sort of couple the the human transport issue versus like, maybe I'll call it like the goods and transport of like cargo, which seems pretty efficient, but tell me if I'm not thinking about that.

5:13Valley of Depth Host: No, I think that's right. The, so there's this anecdotal item, Walmart, when a hurricane starts to come to Florida, they move more strawberry Pop-Tarts into the state. You know that?

5:23Isaac Roberts: I didn't know that.

5:25Valley of Depth Host: There's this data analog with like, you know, world events, something happens, there's a storm coming or whatever. I grew up in Florida. And so it was like every time a hurricane came, it was always hurricane party. You go to Publix, you buy a cake,

5:36Isaac Roberts: you hang out at home, the end, right?

5:38Valley of Depth Host: There are some things you can predict you can see coming from a mile away because hurricanes only move at 25 miles an hour. You know, tomahawks move a little faster, right? So when you end up in this world of hyper reactivity, the model for Amazon or Walmart moving Pop-Tarts starts to break down. And it's like as the world moves faster, data models that are built up to support those infrastructure items fall apart. Right. So what Amazon's doing is, just as the case that you mentioned, they're staging things at various warehouses and they're monitoring the web traffic based on the location that it's being delivered to.

6:12Valley of Depth Host: And then they're figuring out how to sort like, okay, well, these battery packs will go over to this facility in San Antonio. These other battery packs are going to go over to the one in Austin and people that go to the website in Austin or served up one battery pack as opposed to the other one in San Antonio. And it happens for like broad stroke stuff, but defense is far more, let's just say agile, reactive. You know, there's like a lot of conversations around staging. How do these things start to mesh when you have response needs that are, you know, mission critical, right? And very short term.

6:44Valley of Depth Host: So we're trying to be able to, we're trying to build up a network of capability that that has a much higher level of flexibility for the things that are actually like super urgent.

6:54Isaac Roberts: Yeah, right. So Amazon is, I mean, back to your Amazon point, Amazon is telling us what we should buy that's most convenient for them to ship. I mean, Amazon.

7:02Valley of Depth Host: I'm not surprised. Yeah, what was Amazon's batteries or like Amazon's, what's their?

7:07Isaac Roberts: Essentials, I think is what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, Amazon Essentials, exactly.

7:09Valley of Depth Host: It's like, yeah, let's just copy that because people seem to like that backpack. We'll make it ourselves and stage it all over. Exactly, exactly.

7:15Isaac Roberts: Okay, well, okay, so this is your V3 version of the drone. Maybe tell me a little bit about what is that product? And it is V3, so what has come before it and how has that product evolved?

7:29Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, so when Charles started the company, I think before he even left YC, he had two units purchased by the Marine Corps. Based off of General... How long was that? Like nine years ago now, I think.

7:40Isaac Roberts: So you've been working effectively with the military since the very inception of the company. Yeah, since the inception.

7:46Valley of Depth Host: So they got something that was the V1, and it was all electric, EV tall, but still a fixed wing for forward flight, right? But the propulsion was all electric. And so that means you've got limited payload, limited range, and the batteries are really heavy for it, right? So it was able to do around maybe five pounds of useful load and go maybe 50 miles. They got it and they were saying, oh, this is amazing. How do we go and get more payload, more range? And the Marine Corps, not exactly the biggest budget in the DoD, they moved it over to the Navy, and the Navy took it on as a part of the Blue UAS program, which is run by Bill Macchione, or at least he's been our liaison to the best of my knowledge.

8:25Valley of Depth Host: And so Bill took it on and said, okay, well, the Marines need this, but also this is really a, if it's the Marines needing it, it's a Navy problem. And the broader Navy has this issue because it's ship-to-ship logistics too, right? So ship-to-ship logistics means you're not talking 50 miles, you need an order of magnitude more. So Skyways moved over from all electric to a heavy fuel engine, and that was the version two. And so the Navy contract was for multiple years, but it was clearly take the same capability, put a heavy fuel engine on it, hybrid system for the eVTOL to continue to be capable.

8:58Valley of Depth Host: And then that was going really well, went out and did some events, beat companies like Boeing on it, and then moved over to an Air Force contract.

9:06Isaac Roberts: Well, I just wanted to ask about that for a second, because nine years ago, I mean, the number of drone companies that exist today are very different from almost a decade ago. So you mentioned Boeing. Who did you compete with on a program like this? And you said you beat Boeing, so how did that happen?

9:21Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, Shield the Eye is an example of one company that we beat out. Boeing was another. There's been a lot of competition, but nobody's been focused on the single problem that we've been building on the entire time, which is logistics, right? So if you look at the drone space, I don't think I need to tell you or the audience, but if we just break it out for anybody that doesn't know, drones have been monetizing ISR for a long time. So everybody's been saying, oh, well, there's a thing that flies itself. That's cool. What can I do with it? Let me put a camera on it and look, I can go see things.

9:52Valley of Depth Host: That's cool. Real value, the ScanEagle. Then, of course, you get into MQ-9, Predator, Reaper systems. Okay, let's put a missile on it. Let's go from camera to now we'll shoot at the things we see on the camera kind of stuff, right? No one's been going and saying, how do I move an ammo can from the ship to the beachhead, right? And do it in a way that's not costing anybody their life, right? Because it's one ammo can instead of hundreds. And it's this idea of taking an entire supply line and moving it over to a more bespoke manner. So there's not been an obvious need because everybody's looking at what is going on as opposed to what's going to happen, right?

10:33Valley of Depth Host: And so when you look at the logistics need, like the VBAT, it's able to maybe take a couple packs of pencils, right? The V3, you look at it, it's seven cubic feet of contiguous space, right? That's payload capability, whether it's a modular payload or a whole bunch of cargo, whatever that is. And it's just singular in its capability, right? It's also very difficult to build because the closest competitor I can think of is Zipline. And they're doing great, but man, do they have a slog, right? And they were raising a lot of money, going out and servicing Rwanda, doing a whole bunch of things. And then, of course, they don't want to get into defense, but now they're delivering burritos and stuff, right?

11:21Valley of Depth Host: And so the easiest way to think of it is Zipline was doing the same thing, but focused on the commercial space, focusing on how do I get that Amazon or that burrito delivery, coffee, whatever it is. Whereas Skyways has been focused on the defense department and saying, okay, how do we do something that's actually meaningful? And so it's always been that payload and range increasing over time, where a zipline can go and say, five miles is good enough if you can carry a burrito and a coffee, right?

11:46Isaac Roberts: How did you beat Boeing? Because I'm assuming like the capabilities is table stakes and technical requirements, right? Everyone has to meet the requirements of what the what the buyer's asking for. But did it come down to cost? Like how, if you were to rewind the clock, like what would you attribute it to?

12:02Valley of Depth Host: So it was definitely performance that we beat them on. It was performance. Yeah. The funny thing is though, it's like, you know, you look at a big defense prime and they've got a million and one things going on and all these contracts that are getting paid on and they're resource fighting, right? Like they're trying to fight for resources to get this project, that project done. It's hard to fight for a project that hasn't yet been birthed. Right. Right. So there have been multiple companies that have gone out and tried to do similar stuff, but they've been operating inside of bigger companies.

12:29Valley of Depth Host: And then they just they just don't get the resources. Right. Skyways, on the other hand, has been just a team of grinders trying to solve this problem because they believe that it's a real problem and they all want the flying car. And so they realize strategically, and this is like a philosophical difference, but companies like Joby, Archer, Beta, they've been pushing towards the flying car in a way that's like, well, helicopters are gas powered, they should be electric. And then that's what drove them. Skyways kind of went the opposite direction, but it's this modality of the customer doesn't care about ESG.

13:06Valley of Depth Host: the customer's like, you need to be able to go 1 ,000 miles with 80 pounds. How do you do this? And so that spec is a big difference. And so I think that it comes down to resources and focus on the long-term objective.

13:19Isaac Roberts: Now, I know it doesn't work this way, but if you were to do 500 miles at 160 pounds, could you start carrying people? So from the strategy... Is that remotely part of the V4, V5, V6 roadmap?

13:36Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, so this has been my song and dance internally advocating for it. But what's really interesting is the Department of Defense, they don't really care what the FAA says, right? They're kind of like, we take over the airspace, stay out of our way.

13:48Isaac Roberts: Right, because I mean, if you were to, then you'd have to go through type certification, supplemental type certification. And a lot of these companies like Joby and Archer have been tied up in that for many, many, many years and probably still left to go a number of years. Yeah.

14:02Valley of Depth Host: And you see them transitioning over to our frame of thinking, right? Which is like, well, regulations are killing us. We got to get into defense. Let's go and build something. And now there's an Archer and Dural partnership, right? I think that Beta is now pushing into cargo. So our path has been start small, get bigger, focus on cargo, transition to people. The V3 is 100 pounds, 1 ,000 nautical miles is the spec target, broadly speaking. But when it comes to the V4, because there will be a V4,

14:33Valley of Depth Host: my advocation has been for about 1 ,300 pounds and about 400 pounds of useful load. And the reason is because you're seeing Part 108 on the commercial side with the FAA. And to be clear, the U.S. is not the leader in this space right now. It's very much a laggard. Like China is going out and just saying, hey, you want to fly? Like get after it, you know. But the U.S. is more concerned about, you know, crashes and rightfully so. Right. Nobody the demand for not crashing on my house is bigger than my demand for having a flying car. And at the end of the day, it's the body politic that decides that and government is a laggard.

15:06Valley of Depth Host: So with that being said, the V4 is targeted at this part 108 as the let's just say like regulatory framework that we can operate within. 13-20 is the MG-TOW max gross takeoff weight, I believe. That's their target right now. And the general rule of thumb that we operate under is about a third of the airframe MG-TOW is capable of being useful load, fuel or cargo. So if we make the V4 and it starts to take on the same kind of mission profile that the V3 does, which is moving cargo, ship to ship, ship to shore, all that stuff, island chain logistics, etc. then we have a V4 that starts to look like okay you can carry 400 pounds of cargo you get hundreds of millions of flight hours on that airframe then all of a sudden it's like oh this might be safe enough to carry a person and I think that's the way that the flying car starts to actually unlock why was cargo

16:00Isaac Roberts: the right choice for you guys versus kinetic systems or the weaponization of something like this because it is a light frame high performance vehicle and that is where most of the drone systems that are out there that are out there raising money and building

16:16Valley of Depth Host: businesses around are focused on um if you take it down to first principles i think you see if you build a flying car and you want to like get off the ground with you know pocket money right um you identify the things that don't change right i really like this philosophy from bezos it's like you focus on the things that don't change what are the things that don't change in a flying car it's like you're going to move some kind of weight, right? And you're going to do it without a pilot, right? And you're going to ideally, I mean, this is the whole idea of a drone. The presupposition is that it's going to be in the air, right?

16:52Valley of Depth Host: So it was going to be in the air moving some kind of weight and it's going to be autonomous. Then you can start with something small and scale your way up, right? And this is a pretty common practice in aerospace, right? It's the scale up modality. Like you build a subscale system and you get bigger and bigger. You prove out the concept because it's either you're touching a little air or you're touching a lot of air, but at the end of the day, the air is going to be the same across the entire airframe. So with that being said, I think it was really intelligent for Charles and the team early on to go and say, we're going to just focus on something small, get some utilization on it, and focus in an area where we can actually fly and get flight hours and provide some value and then work our way into larger markets.

17:32Valley of Depth Host: And I think that what we're seeing is that V3 hits the sweet spot, right? 25 pounds is just, it's difficult to make it work from an economics perspective and overall value chain because you're just not carrying enough like packages, weight, whatever. But that V3, um, a hundred pounds useful load really starts to make a meaningful difference. Um, because not surprising. I mean, it's half of one of our body weight, for example, right? Most humans are on 200 pounds, carry half the body weight on a single flight. Like, yeah, that starts to add some real value.

17:59Isaac Roberts: Yeah. What is the, um, autonomy stack look like? And then also like, Like, does this need constant connectivity to be able to operate?

18:07Valley of Depth Host: Constant connectivity, no. But it's useful. It's like, you know, typical autonomy, common filter approach, right? You just have a bunch of sensor fusion. And so it's like constant connectivity, maybe not necessary. Some kind of connectivity over some duration of time, super useful, right? There's drift and, you know, you have error propagation. And so it's like you don't want to end up in recent events. You don't want to end up in Poland when you're trying to hit Ukraine. Right, right, right.

18:38Isaac Roberts: That makes sense. Well, OK, speaking of Ukraine, let's talk about Ukraine for a second. How has Ukraine changed the nature of warfare in your mind when it comes to drones? I mean, I know that's a seemingly obvious question, but from your vantage point, especially when it comes to the cargo perspective, what do you think?

18:59Valley of Depth Host: I have infamously said, I think that Ukraine, as much as I hate to say it, I think the Ukraine was the best advertisement for the drone industry that it's ever seen. It's tragic what's happening, but I love to see democracy, capitalism, freedom kind of fighting back on that tyrannical front. So obviously I have my own personal biases on this whole thing. but when you start to see the Ukrainians have asymmetrical power and go and kick the living crap out of the Russians using autonomous systems and the one weakness that the whole conflict has was, you know, Ukrainians are smaller population than all of Russia plus, you know, a bunch of North Koreans and anybody else wants to come and play on their side for money.

19:46Valley of Depth Host: You know, they need that. And so it's like this urgent need that ultimately drives all technological innovation. So I think what's really interesting is you see it on the surface and you say, okay, well, there's all of this power that's being accessible or that's being created and accessed by Ukraine. And now even we are getting access to that expertise through these international partnerships. But what you start to see is the governments generally understand all of a sudden, oh, this is really important for warfighting. This technology, we need to adapt into the commercial segment because that's how we won World War II was you have F-150 type production lines turning into Sherman tank production lines and it's quantity, right?

20:30Valley of Depth Host: And so right now, China is absolutely crushing us in quantity production capability. And as a near-peer adversary, that's a concerning thought, right? So we're starting to see reindustrialization occur. But I think the drone space is having a lot of pressure to get mature really quickly. And the laggard is the FAA. And so it gets into this question of, okay, well, we're a dual-use capability. How do we take that dual-use and push it into the commercial market? And we have commercial partners that are ready to go, but we're blocked by FAA regulations. So it's advantageous for us to push into defense, even though it's not as big a market as what the commercial space will be.

21:05Isaac Roberts: Right, right. Before we get into the commercial, because I do want to talk about that, do you have a perspective on what the future of warfare is going to look like with drone technology? like is it going to continue to become very very tactical or do you think there comes a point where we just develop enough counter systems that like we aren't going to like drones are just not going to be as relevant as everyone says they are today i think the future is going to be real weird i

21:30Valley of Depth Host: think it's going to get real weird uh real quick okay i i think that we're at a point now where it's increasingly clear to everybody that's in tech or looking at it that we've got ais breaking out of sandboxes, going and attacking adversaries that aren't adversaries, getting access to data. We're able to build autonomous systems much faster than we ever were before. And it's the lightning in a bottle moment for anybody building anything, because you just have all this access to these data centers and what they can put out. The question starts to be how we control it as a species. And it's a species level thing.

22:10Valley of Depth Host: It's not a country by country thing. And I think this is the problem is that I think Amir wrote this book I mentioned before, Hyper, I think it's Hyperware. But he's making the argument that I believe is very valid. And he's saying if China adopts the ability to go full kinetic and have the kill chain completely automated, then it's the natural outcome that all other adversaries will do the same because they have to keep up or they're going to fall behind. And so if you have a human in the loop that costs you an extra two seconds to push the button, you've got a problem. And having that go towards nuclear silos is a super scary thought, right?

22:46Valley of Depth Host: And I don't know how that gets pulled back because of the geopolitical angles. I think it's very concerning. I don't know if that answers the question, but I get to talk about it a lot.

22:58Isaac Roberts: It does. I do have – I wanted to ask – have you seen the movie Dark Knight? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you know Operation Skyhook? Yeah. When Batman's in Hong Kong, he just captures Mr. Lau and needs a fast and easy way to get out. And he deploys a helium balloon, has some type of nylon wire. Yeah, and a cable. And then a plane comes and gets pulled out. Now, I know that was an actual military program, but I'm curious, is there, I think it's called the Fulton Air to Surface or Surface to Air Recovery System, something like that. Okay. Is that something that one of these things could be used for in the future?

23:38Isaac Roberts: Yeah, it certainly could be. It seems like a pretty interesting use case, right? Because right now, in order to do it, you have these giant airplanes, which obviously costs a lot of money. But to think that if you delivered a cheap system to get agents, intelligence officers, military professionals out of dangerous situations, that feels like a pretty interesting use case.

24:01Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, I mean.

24:02Isaac Roberts: And I just say that because, you know, you're saying like your V4 is going to be something like, you know, 1 ,300 pounds. Like, I mean, at that point, you know, that's like one or two people.

24:15Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, well, I mean, it gets into the physics of it, right? So I would imagine that the V4, even at 1 ,300 pounds, so with, you know, 400 pound cargo capacity, I think that would probably still be too light for a person or two in terms of that particular use case, right? But if somebody wanted to pick up some blood or something and then have it go or extract some kind of hard drives or something, then yeah, for sure. It's interesting you bring that up because what we're seeing is that when you make a really capable system, then everybody wants to use it for their own case. So what we've done is take the V3 and the seven cubic feet of contiguous space, make it into modular payloads where it's just a plug and play modularity for various use cases, whether that's ISR or some flavor of it or cargo or just a comms relay.

25:08Valley of Depth Host: And there's, of course, marsupial operations and these other modalities that could be interesting.

25:12Isaac Roberts: What's a marsupial operation?

25:14Valley of Depth Host: So this idea that a robot carries a robot.

25:16Isaac Roberts: Oh, I see.

25:17Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, so like you might, for example, V3 could go and, for defense purposes, deploy a bunch of FPV drones and act as the comms node back to operators. Or it could just be the comms node to a larger neural net that then feeds down into a system that would then be able to navigate to its target better.

25:34Isaac Roberts: Right, right, right. Right. Yeah. Well, okay, let's talk about the commercial side for a second. So you're a chief strategy officer now, but you work chief commercial officer, right, for the last couple of years. What were those conversations like? I mean, I got to imagine some of these larger companies that are out there like an Amazon could find something like this extremely useful for certain types of cargo delivery until the systems get cheap enough for other items. But like how have those conversations been? And you mentioned FAA as like a blocker. Where is the FAA a blocker? So right now, this is just a, so how to sequence that answer.

26:16Valley of Depth Host: Right now we have some demand in oil and gas, right? And what we're seeing is there's a lot of understanding around ISR capabilities. So infrastructure requires inspections, right? And so these inspections are monitoring pipelines, looking at oil rigs, checking for methane leaks, checking for oil spills. It's all just flying around and looking at stuff, right? And so that's simple ISR. But in order to get the legs that you need, they use Cessnas or they use like PHI uses helicopters, right? Or Bristow uses helicopters. And there's logistics needs along with these ISR missions, right? Just like taking critical parts to an oil rig, for example.

27:00Valley of Depth Host: And so there's a lot of this that's going on with these manned aviation systems, but an unmanned system is going to be cheaper, right? The Cessna is more expensive than the V3. And so what we're seeing is that there's a bunch of demand in oil and gas to go and take these modular payloads, shove them into the aircraft, and then do this mission. And it could be a payload for this customer, a payload for that customer, or a generic payload for all of them, just doing the job. And we can't fly those missions because of FAA regulations around the unmanned systems not being approved. So it's a, you know, part 135 and we have a 4407 and there's all the, you know, FAA jargon that goes along with it.

27:39Valley of Depth Host: But at the end of the day, it's like, how do you stand up scalable operations? It's not one flight at a time approvals that require, you know, six months of planning to do, right? You need to be able to say, I'm going to go and do this just like manned aviation does. And there's a real concern there, right? Because it's hard to do detect and avoid when you're flying aircraft. There's, you know, big sky, little planes, people move really fast in the air and all that. And so there's a lot of work that needs to be done, but we haven't seen that work come to fruition yet. And so what we're seeing is there's a bunch of oil and gas companies like our partners over at Shell, some folks we're talking to over at Chevron, and they're just saying, hey, look, we want this.

28:16Valley of Depth Host: We see the value to an extreme degree. How do we make it happen? And then it's six months or seven months of planning before we can get anything off the ground. And having said that, now we're starting to work with the, I think it's the EIPP and HOMA, which is they have these test areas basically to stand up these commercial operations in the US, like in CODIS. And we're looking at the Gulf of Mexico as being the first target for us because there's a ton of oil and gas infrastructure out there. Got it.

28:43Isaac Roberts: What type of traction have you had on the defense side? Like what is that? What are those contracts look like so far?

28:48Valley of Depth Host: So on the defense side, we've done almost as much. So the company's raised$24 million to date, and I think we've done about that in revenue so far. And all of it's pretty much, well, I want to say now it's around$70,$30,$80,$20 kind of split between defense, leaning defense on the heavy and then commercial. But the contracts, we've done phase one, phase two, phase three, IDIQ. Now we're on a StratFi contract, and that's our main vehicle. But now we're looking at some operational contracts and trying to dial all that in. And so, yeah, I guess the traction is, to Lucky Palmer's point, it's like, you build it and they will come kind of framework.

29:30Valley of Depth Host: But it's a you got to build it and you got to have it ready. And then the DoD doesn't like low TRL levels going into real operations. Right. They like things that work.

29:39Isaac Roberts: Yeah. Who do you go up against in these contracts?

29:42Valley of Depth Host: There's a company called TRL Dynamics that has a smaller payload, smaller range. their all-electric system. They've got some novel design work. They built a subscale system, and we've gone out and done some exercises with them, so I know some of their team a little well. And then the real competitors are more not flying. It's like the boats, right? Because at the end of the day, you're trying to solve a problem. People don't really care about the modality you're solving the problem. They care about the problem being solved and the timeline and the cost and the pain in the ass and all the things, right?

30:18Valley of Depth Host: They just want to solve the problem. And so sometimes a boat that's just able to go and do a thing by itself is fine and it's lower energy costs and all that. But if you need it faster, then a boat might not be so good, especially if it's rough sea conditions. Right, right.

30:30Isaac Roberts: Well, okay, let's talk Andrel for a second. So they have a couple different systems, like I think Fury is for Strike, Ghost for ISR. If they decided to go into long-range cargo, like what i mean what would that look like do you is that something that would worry you yes and no

30:49Valley of Depth Host: so i'm i'm the paranoid type right i i'm always about execute as fast as you can try not to worry about everybody else's stuff um but i think that we're seeing endural partner with uh archer now or seeing uh the omen right i think that um the internal bet is that they are slower well i I shouldn't say that. I should say the internal bet is that it takes time to mature an airframe. And we've seen it over and over again. And so it's like, you know, you got to chew a lot of glass before you can, you know, come out with something that's actually viable. I don't think an infinite amount of money like solves that problem, but it helps.

31:28Valley of Depth Host: Right. So I think that the Omen and the Archer systems, I think they are potential threats, but we certainly aren't worried about them catching up to us in the short term. the more interesting thing starts to be like how this plays out long term in the sense of the Omen they look at it and go well we're a defense company that's all we're going to focus on even if they took our exact same philosophy and said we're going to make a modular payload we're going to have it be a mod payload compliant we're going to have everybody bought in on it and it's going to be amazing because we're going to use our brand and everybody's going to jump on board as soon as we launch anything even then the commercial market trumps all this, right?

32:10Valley of Depth Host: So like, there's just way more demand in the commercial space. And so long term, you start to argue, well, maybe the FA won't be a blocker forever, right? Like maybe we can operate in different continents, and maybe we can get some regulatory approvals before the FA unlocks the US. And so it starts to move the needle away from where it is today, which is right now, it's all about defense traction. But it's like DARPA net is now the internet, nobody really cares about DARPA net, right? So they're just saying, well, the internet is where the money is. DARPA net is going to live off of the internet.

32:39Valley of Depth Host: And I think this is the same scenario, right? Like logistics is just too big a market to assume that it's all going to be, you know, the defense department decides. And so if there's a company that's all defense and nothing commercial, of course, they're just gonna be focused on defense and rightfully so. But that means that the commercial market is going to be the one that actually takes this home because it's a unit economics problem, right? It's like, for us, the flywheel is pretty simple, but it points to the problem, which is, it's about utilization on the first aircraft, then you make 10 aircraft because you have the max utilization, you want more of them.

33:08Valley of Depth Host: And once you have more of them, you need to worry about the autonomy. And then once you have the autonomy, then it's all about costing down so you can drive utilization again, right? And so what we see right now in the civil side is you got the, I don't remember the name. General Jacobson has told it to me half a dozen times, and I still can't remember. It's like the civil air service or civil air fleet. And it's the idea that the defense department pays and keeps on retainer American Airlines, United Airlines, all the bigs to be able to commandeer their aircraft for moving troops in the event of an emergency right i think the exact same thing is going to play out in this space right it's going to be hey you're doing zipline for industry that's great now you need to be moving this blood and it needs to be right now right so there's going to be an interesting thing but of course then 700 737 is being made every year um we're probably not going to get to that level of volume on like the small we're going to be closer to the millions per year or millions per month on the DJI side, but it's like this missing middle that we're tackling.

34:08Isaac Roberts: Yeah. Well, you mentioned unit economics. Like what are the current unit economics of V3? What does that look like at a high level? And then how is that going to evolve as you scale manufacturing?

34:20Valley of Depth Host: Yeah. So right now they cost about half a million dollars. Right. And of course, you know, this is all funny numbers. When you look at a tool that's not been used to complete a single one and it costs half a million dollars right so it's like you know the typical robot problems or hardware problems in general but yeah rough numbers half a million dollars for a v3 right now we want to get that down below 250 when we get into the thousands we think we can get it closer to 100 000 okay um you know maybe that 150k is the sweet spot if we can hit the velocity and the volume that we want um we have a mandate where we're not going to put an aircraft out there if we don't get the money back within 18 months so it's that flywheel, right?

34:57Valley of Depth Host: Like we could sell the aircraft and get the money back immediately. That's great. What we really want is to build an asset, own the asset, and then be able to generate value from that asset and have that go for as long as possible and have the margins be as high as possible, right? And so we know that just from experience, no customer is going to drive utilization like we will because it's not part of their core need. They're just trying to service the contracts. But if we can pull all of that demand and provide a flight as a service, now you're talking about a scenario where we get that max utilization and then that's what really drives unit economics to propel forward faster.

35:28Isaac Roberts: So right now, all the deployments, Skywise is operating. You're not handing off the systems to...

35:33Valley of Depth Host: No, we have some folks that are doing operations. But basically, the rule of thumb is we're handling everything in CODIS and everything outside that's commercial is being handled by partners. And it's just because of footprint and the way the partnerships want to work and stuff. But it's an innovator dilemma problem, right? Technological adoption is not easy. There's a lot of interest in it in the aviation space. but it's that same problem like okay will they drive utilization if they do then we're happy to

36:00Isaac Roberts: have it but if they're not then we need to get our hands dirty so i want to um i want to take a step back for a second i know you have very strong thoughts about this next one like what is your perspective on the current state of drone technology and like maybe general aviation technology especially like the new things that companies are building or claiming that they can built or they have yeah uh yeah i think there's a lot of hype and bs in the aviation space like in aerospace in general it's like i mean i say this in a world where there's spacex you know

36:38Valley of Depth Host: catching i mean everybody says like catching rockets with chopsticks and stuff it's like not hype right like super cool amazing deep tech um but then there are a lot of other people that

36:48Isaac Roberts: are just like yeah we're doing this super new crazy thing we've never put two bolts together

36:53Valley of Depth Host: like we don't really you know and it's like how do you how do you funnel in the middle of that i think drones don't serve like drones don't uh suffer from that as much right like aerospace is super hypey drones is far more grounded in reality like dan maggie he like i i look up to him a lot in this he's just like looking at what's going on in the battlefield and surfacing it to like, you know, all the normies on LinkedIn, right? And just like, look, this is happening. Like you're afraid for your life and you're shooting a drone with like buckshot to try and stay alive, you know? And it's like, that's not hype.

37:28Valley of Depth Host: That's ground truth reality. So I think that on the drone space, it's far more real. On the aviation space, it's far more bullshit. Having said that, for us, it's a bit of a sore spot because we're trying to be, it's like the under promise and over-deliver kind of framework, right? And that's how we operate as a company culturally. And operating like that in a world like aerospace, it looks weird, you know?

37:55Isaac Roberts: Well, what do you think then should investors be looking for to determine the technologies that are real versus not?

38:03Valley of Depth Host: Oh, man. I have a few folks recently that have reached out asking me to vet some companies that they're considering investing in and stuff, right? And I think that it's maybe the easiest way to get to ground truth is to talk to customers. Talk to the customers and be like, yeah, how's this going? For an eVTOL system like us, an easy one would be, have you transitioned to forward flight? Have you delivered a mission for pay? Have you gone out and serviced a customer? What's your revenue like? All these things. But VC has this framework around robotics in particular where it's just like, yeah, your revenue is going to be zero until it's infinite.

38:43Valley of Depth Host: Right. And it's just like this immediate inflection point. And I don't think that's really real, but it's easy to make that story believable through copium. If your whole angle is just hype, hype, hype. Right. So I think it just turns into who's been doing the long slog, who's been servicing customers, getting them to actually pay, not like, oh, we went out on a ship and look, we did a thing. We've got some pictures and whatever and we did it all on our own dime but like no who went to bat for you to get a million dollars to do that exercise not just that you went and participated it's like who paid you did you get paid did you actually do the mission well like did you get a trl report yeah uh and defense is its own monster right because it's like hidden away it's really hard to pick the winners it's hard to see from an outside perspective who's actually got it figured out and driving that real uh growth as opposed to who's just bullshitting me and has a couple guys that were in the teams to be able to say that they need it, but they're really just buddies behind the scenes.

39:40Valley of Depth Host: So it's not an easy job, I suspect. Tell me about how the company's been funded so far,

39:45Isaac Roberts: and what does the next phase of growth look like?

39:48Valley of Depth Host: So we're in the middle of a raise now, dialing that in. The company's only raised$24 million to date. The only price round the company has been through was led by Thursday Ventures, and that was maybe four years ago now. The company's not put a big focus on fundraising and going out and, you know, selling the hype dream to be able to make that happen. So it's been a little bit of a, you know, slow start in the sense of like getting that machine starting to turn, but now it's going pretty well. I think that the bootstrapping in a super deep tech area, it's hard, right? Like it's chewing glass for sure.

40:30Valley of Depth Host: So now we're going out, raising, and looking at what we're going to need to do to capitalize on the inflection point that we're seeing right now.

40:37Isaac Roberts: What is your take on how SkyWays is structurally different from other defense tech companies?

40:43Valley of Depth Host: So Lucky had this idea of like, well, you build it and they'll come. You identify a problem or a need, and then you go and you build to it. And it's going to take deep tech engineering with a lot of focus to make the thing happen. And then you just sell the living crap out of it. there's clearly risk in that model because you're raising a lot of money and you don't have any certainty that the POR is ever going to hit. But there are people like Dino over at Sironic that are just like, I know this problem so well. I know exactly what needs to happen. And they have the inside track and they can align those needs from the engineering side and from the customer side.

41:19Valley of Depth Host: So there's real potential there. But I think for Skyways, the path has been, we have this core philosophy of a large problem. And then we're going to continue grinding on it until it becomes obvious to everybody else. And so it's that really weird thing of, and I think it's really rare, right? To like see the problem before anybody else does, and then go and just like start cranking on it and having the conviction that it is a real problem that needs resolution. And then eventually people start pouring in, right? And that's what we're seeing right now. Like there's just an obvious need that's getting surfaced and people are starting to recognize it and go, oh yeah, this is a real problem and who has a solution?

41:53Valley of Depth Host: And we're just standing there.

41:55Isaac Roberts: Yeah.

41:56Valley of Depth Host: Yeah.

41:56Isaac Roberts: How did you end up at the company?

42:00Valley of Depth Host: Yeah. So I started Scythe Robotics with two co-founders, Jack and Davis, maybe around, I guess around nine, nine and a half years ago. And one of our first investors was a guy named Mark McCabe, who was a Sequoia scout at the time. And he saw what I was doing on the BD side with Scythe. And he was like, hey, you seem to have this pretty well dialed. Would you mind talking to another portfolio company of mine? Because I don't think that he's like super dialed in on that front. I was like, yeah, sure. I'm happy to talk to him. So I got introduced to Charles, who's the founder of Skyways. And so I talked to Charles and dug in a little bit with him, had some conversations.

42:40Valley of Depth Host: He's like, yeah, look, I'm not focused on commercial. I'm just focused on defense and the regulators and showed me the whole picture and sold me on the dream. And I was like, I want a flying car. Like, yeah, like I'm also probably going to kill myself if I try to fly it myself. So like, you know, make it autonomous. And I'm in and got to know him a little bit. And I went back to Mark and I was just like, hey, man, he's doing the right thing. Like, don't focus on commercial. Those guys are all going to die. FAA is going to block them. Focus on defense and get the traction that you need to actually build the product, get them to fund the product.

43:12Valley of Depth Host: you're not going to be able to play the VC game super well because nobody wants to invest in defense. And then that's what he was doing. And I became an advisor. And then I guess about two and a half years ago, he convinced me to jump from Scythe and came on as a commercial officer and moved to strategy about six months ago. Was there any point over the last, I guess,

43:35Isaac Roberts: decade of the company's time in existence where it didn't look like it was going to make it?

43:41Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, yeah. And what was that like? I wasn't on the team full time, but Charles definitely had some anxiety, right? I mean, he paid everybody except for himself. The team had to shrink. There were just a whole bunch of problems in terms of just cash flow, right? And it's this really weird thing that happens in defense. It's like, you know there's a ton of traction. You know you're getting somewhere. The defense department folks you're talking to are all saying that it's contracts on the way, contracts on the way. but there's no contract signed and investors want to see a signed contract banks want to see a signed contract and so you end up in the starvation mode where you're waiting on the contract and so um you'd have to ask charles for the full story but i think that it was pretty bleak for a moment there yeah um yeah and what do you think you know when it comes to the

44:31Isaac Roberts: commercial side of the house it's just clearly a you know very big market and future growth market Like, how do you think the FAA is going to evolve over the next, like what's the unlock there, which tells you that, you know, we need to be all over this market. Like, I mean, not to say you're not right now, but clearly there's a larger focus on defense, at least from the revenue perspective. Like what flips that?

44:53Valley of Depth Host: Honestly, I feel like it's the customer traction, like inverting. So there's a lot of, you know, kick the tires type attitudes, right? And then there's some companies like the ones we partner with. We don't want the tire kickers. We want people that want to put the birds in the air, right? It's all about driving that utilization. So I think that in all honesty, I don't think that it's the customers as much as it's us. I think that it's V3 Block 2 gets out the door. Like that aircraft gets into customer hands flying real missions. It's legit commercial value. And so we see everybody's lining up for it.

45:28Valley of Depth Host: And so we're saying, oh, we just need to get this done and out the door and in their hands with a TRL level that's high enough to go and execute on a consistent basis. and then it's a money machine.

45:37Isaac Roberts: Yeah. I didn't ask this before, but what are we looking at right now? Is this like the full, effectively, I mean, obviously there's no wings on this craft, but like, yeah, maybe tell me a little bit about what it is that we're looking at right now.

45:49Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, so that's the core of the body. So that's the airframe. And what you see is... Versus what's right behind you, right? Yeah, exactly, the block one. Yeah, so block one is basically ready to go out the door. that could run a mission pretty much this afternoon, right? And what you do is you insert the wings through that little hole you can see on the side, right? And then those are the wings that are used for forward flight. And that prop on the back, that's the heavy fuel engine. And so heavy fuel engine activates for forward flight and then you're flying on the wing. And to get off the ground, you're using the eVTOL motors you're seeing on those booms to get up, to be able to make that transition.

46:29Valley of Depth Host: But the way you package it up is you want it to be the smallest footprint possible. So what we do is we take the wings apart and set them aside. We take the tail fins off, we set those aside, and then those can just go underneath and it fits into a crate that's able to go into like a, you know, 20 foot or 40 foot container. I think we can put probably three of those, maybe even four of them into, well, it's probably, I don't want to be certain here, but it's like two or three go into a 20 foot container.

46:55Isaac Roberts: Okay. Where do you do testing?

46:57Valley of Depth Host: Right here, over in, what is it? Elgin, I think, like right down the road. It's 30 minutes away. We used to test over in Giddings. That was an hour and a half away. Then we found some folks that we could do closer to the office. And so now it's like that windshield time getting reduced by 66%. Pretty great.

47:16Isaac Roberts: What's it been like building in Austin?

47:19Valley of Depth Host: Great. I think there's a ton of people doing super cool stuff. I mean, that's how we met. I think there's a whole network of people that are building really cool stuff in Austin. So the tech scene is definitely getting bigger. It's interesting to see the tech scene change. I don't know what your take is on it, but I'm really curious. Like Steve Case had this idea of rise of the rest. It was the idea that like, yeah, Silicon Valley is not a unique thing, but it kind of is. But it's like the idea that technology will propagate and eventually everybody else will also have that same kind of tech hub.

47:50Valley of Depth Host: And we're seeing it happen in real time. It's just not hyper speed. It's like now there's Austin. I live in Boulder and there's a lot of that going on. you've got stuff happening in Detroit, there's Boston Miami, even St. Pete there's a bunch of super cool stuff but how are you taking it off of me for a second I'm just curious, how are you setting up your events and how are you networking with people are you running around the country a lot?

48:17Isaac Roberts: Yeah, look, I'll say we are effectively all over the country, but what I'll say is specific to Austin and I find this interesting, so there's no doubt a growing, bustling tech community here, not even a question, right? And it's growing and more and more companies are moving here. There's a very strong defense tech community that's also growing. I do think it's interesting that on the space side, there was a period of time like a few years ago where it felt like there was a lot of space companies moving here. And a lot of that, I mean, SpaceX is here. They're Starlink satellite facilities right here in Bastrop.

48:54Isaac Roberts: Obviously, they have Starbase, Tesla Gigafactories here. There's a lot going on here for the Elon kind of ecosystem. So it was a natural thought to say, okay, there was going to be big... The center of the aerospace industry is LA, right? LA, El Segundo, that corridor. And I really did... I was like, Austin's going to be the next kind of big area for this. And there was almost like a false start. There was a growing number of companies and then a lot of those companies actually started to move out. and I think a couple reasons for that I think you know talent was part of it I think there was the center of that talent usually resides in Colorado and LA or I should say Denver and LA and and all some of its costs like Austin is becoming an expensive city in general but yeah so I thought I think in the space on the space side it felt like it it kind of like it expanded now it's like contracting a little bit and now it's like pretty stable so it'll be interesting to see how it evolves but there's no question the defense tech community here is quite significant it's part of the reason why we have our we have our event um in march our big kind of defense conference that takes place here so and we're going to continue to do that because i mean there's just going to be more and more activity here so yeah that's what i would say what do you think the change was with the aerospace

50:09Valley of Depth Host: companies moving around i mean these space companies in particular saying there's like a peak and then it kind of went to a lull was it because they died or they got too big for the area they needed talent and they relocated to some place i think it's a mix like so i mean

50:22Isaac Roberts: again, talent, I think was part of it, probably cost. But yeah, I'd probably say those are probably in my assessment of the situation. It's nice to have it flip sometimes, you know? Yeah, I mean, got to put it back on you at some point. Exactly, exactly. Well, just as we wrap here, I do want to ask what kind of keeps you up at night? Like, you know, you guys have been around for a decade. You have a technology platform that works, that's being utilized by the military. It's a necessity in a lot of ways. What is the thing that makes you worried about sort of like, okay, this could be a real potential failure mode here for us?

51:06Isaac Roberts: Not moving fast enough.

51:07Valley of Depth Host: I mean, I'm the paranoid type, right? I'm like, the competitor I'm worried about is the one I don't know about. Sure. And I don't want to know about him. I just want to execute, right? And so moving slower than we need to or moving slower than we could, I think is like the thing that really bothers me the most. But I also, I think that there are just like a million and one opportunities you can always be chasing. It's really important to just figure out, okay, which ones can burn and which ones need to take precedent. And so it's a constant struggle when you're building something that's like multimodal and there are a bunch of different opportunities, but it's like you've got to find some filter.

51:43Valley of Depth Host: And so I think that we're doing an increasingly good job at figuring out how to apply those filters. What does Skyways look like in five years? Operating hubs around the world. A thousand aircraft deployed operating at a utilization rate above 60%. That would be my goal.

52:07Isaac Roberts: And deeply embedded in, I would assume, the commercial market as well?

52:11Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, for sure. I mean, dual use applicability, 100%. I mean, some companies are totally fine with being a part of a network and putting all their hours on those systems that are not owned or operated by them kind of deal. But the Marine Corps is not one of those groups, right? So there's a need to make a bunch and having really high TRL, get them out, allow for everybody to do what they need to do with them. And same thing for us. We want to take advantage of the mass production that we set up and then be able to push it in to add value for everybody around the world, right? What do you do for fun?

52:43Valley of Depth Host: What do you do for fun? Besides DJing. Winnie told me all about it. She gave me the full rundown.

52:49Isaac Roberts: Yeah, that's it. I try to keep that on the down low. But it's becoming harder and harder these days. Well, yeah, look, music is a huge part of my life. I love music and music production. And that is when I find the time. That is what I enjoy doing. I am trying to get more into reading books. I have a very controversial take on book reading that a lot of people don't like, which is I don't think, this only works for nonfiction. You know, I don't think you need to really finish a book. I mean, you can if you have the time, but, you know, a lot of us don't. Yeah. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of amazing books out there.

53:24Isaac Roberts: And I think people are kind of like, they're prevented from reading more because, you know, they have a book, they're kind of stuck on it. They're like three, you know, two quarters of the way that, you know, they're halfway through and then all of a sudden they feel like they need to finish it, but maybe they're not feeling it. And maybe they're not reading it as quickly as they want to. So I kind of find that silly. And I think the big unlock for me was when I decided, you know what? Like, I'm just going to read certain chapters that are interesting to me. Sometimes the whole book is great. And that's great.

53:53Valley of Depth Host: But how do you identify the chapter that you want to read?

53:54Isaac Roberts: Yeah, I mean, you have to read some of it to understand. And you need to have some concept of what the topic here is. But then you can always just go into the table of contents and just say, okay, like, all right, I have a rough understanding of what this book's going to be about. So I'm going to check out these sections. and yeah, I mean, again, a lot of people don't like, every time I bring this up, I brought this up a bunch of times already. Everyone gives me like very weird looks. But yeah, so I'm getting more into reading, I'll say, like back into reading just because like I'm just trying to make more time for it.

54:20Isaac Roberts: You have to be very like, you have to really be like intentional about that. Yeah, especially now. I mean, everything's constantly vying for our attention. Yeah.

54:28Valley of Depth Host: But I think that's a great hack, right? Like going and saying, hey, you know what? Look, I've heard about this book. I'm interested because of this and that reason. Yeah. you know, Claude or Google, Gemini, whatever, tell me which chapters I should check out and then boom, straight to it. But I, uh, I haven't been reading as much for a long time. I just do audio books a lot more. And then it's like a content absorption thing for time. Yeah. The problem there is it's like, well, it starts at the beginning. So what I need to do is take your advice and just go, okay, chapter 17 to 20. And then I'm just not going to worry about the rest.

54:58Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

54:59Isaac Roberts: That's brilliant. Exactly. Exactly. Um, and now as I've sort of like, as I'm getting older, I used to play soccer in my young adult life or most of my young adult life. Now I'm getting back into that. It's actually a great field here in downtown Austin. It's like a rooftop soccer field. It's really cool. You're going to have to tell me where that is. I've got to check it out. Do you play soccer?

55:20Valley of Depth Host: I used to. My right knee has been not kind to me lately. This isn't too...

55:27Isaac Roberts: People aren't slide tackling. It's a little bit... It's a less injury-prone type of soccer.

55:33Valley of Depth Host: Okay, well, what do you do?

55:34Isaac Roberts: You didn't answer my question.

55:37Valley of Depth Host: I like to get on the river as much as I can. Okay. Yeah, so like right now, summer's winding down in Colorado, but I'm really hoping I'm going to hit Golly Fest this year. Have you ever done any whitewater rafting or anything like that? No, I haven't. So like every year, there's a festival in West Virginia they do, and it's called Golly Fest, and they release the floodgates or whatever, and it's just like tons of water go down the river, and people get super drunk and super stupid and just like, you know, run down.

56:05Isaac Roberts: Yeah.

56:05Valley of Depth Host: All about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything water sport, I'm super into, but I've been, I don't know, I do typical nerd stuff. Yeah.

56:16Isaac Roberts: Yeah. So you're an outdoorsy guy. Yeah. All right. When I can be, yeah, for sure. Amazing. Well, Isaac, thanks so much for being with us and thanks for having us here. This was very cool. Yeah, thanks for coming. To chat right in the middle. I'm thick of it. Hopefully we didn't bother these guys. Oh, no, I'm sure not. Until next time.

56:32Valley of Depth Host: Yeah, for sure. Great to see you, man.