This Week in Startups - ESG fraud, Stripe & Reddit markdowns, Remote productivity + DroneUp Founder Tom Walker | E1473

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

First, we talk about Deutsche Bank getting raided by law enforcement for “greenwashing” its ESG funds (2:59), then we touch on Fidelity marking down its investments in Stripe and Reddit (17:00), then we discuss companies going back to the office over concerns about worker productivity (19:35), Jason explains how he’s collaborating with everyone on the team to increase productivity as we go into this recession (26:00). To end, we have an interview with DroneUp CEO Tom Walker where we discuss their current rollout with Walmart, the regulations that need to get sorted out, and how DroneUp is approaching safety (50:00). (00:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s show! (2:59) Deutsche Bank raided by german law enforcement due to alleged fraudulent advertising of sustainable investment funds (11:23) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (12:37) OpenSea to take legal action against former executive who allegedly engaged in insider trading (17:00) Fidelity marking down its investments in Stripe and Reddit (19:35) Remote Work ending: thoughts on productivity (24:45) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (26:00) Productivity advice: how to avoid layoffs (39:14) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (40:30) Time blocking, Molly’s thoughts on productivity (48:00) Toss to Jason and Molly’s interview with DroneUp CEO Tom Walker (50:00) Tom Walker, CEO of DroneUp, joins to talk about the state of DroneUp and the future of drone delivery service

Hey, everybody, everybody. Big show today, 90 minutes of show. It's a lot of show. Yeah, it's a big, but we got a lot accomplished. What are we got on? Yeah, let's see. We are going to talk a little bit about what is happening in finance and ESG. We're talking about Deutsche Bank getting raided by German law enforcement for greenwashing its ESG funds, which is of.

That is a very timely topic right now, let's just say. And then we touch base on Fidelity marking down their investments in Shrepe and Reddit. We're going to talk about companies going back into the office over concerns about worker productivity and then leads to a nice big conversation about productivity. Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on professional training, time blocking and time management by employees, and obviously work from home and remote and then setting clear goals in your company. And I think I have a formula for success as we come out of the pandemic and move to pandemic and people are now deciding do we come back to work or not. I have a way for managers,

I think, and employees to navigate work from home. And it's really based upon productivity. And it's also a way for companies that are scared about this recession being an extended one, maybe getting 20, 30, 40 percent out of their current employee base and team rather than hiring 30, 40 percent, or maybe being 30, 40 percent more effective leading to more revenue and then reducing the number of layoffs you have to do. So if you're scared about those things, like I have a concern about, I don't know if I'm scared, but I am concerned and attuned to it. I've really been thinking about it and I have a really good strategy I want to share today in terms of operating your company. Yeah, it's a great show. That alone, by the way, is like a lot of

show. But then we have a great interview with the CEO of Dron Up, the company that's working with Walmart to pilot drone deliveries. Exactly. We had a million logistical questions. So we got Tom Walker on the show and he's fantastic. Yeah, it's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This weekend startups is brought to you by Odu. Odu is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business.

Your first app is free forever. And right now, Odu is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odu.com slash twist. That's ODO.O.com slash twist. Open phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back, but using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Open Phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. Visit Open Phone slash Twist to get 20% off your first six months.

And CODA. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets, Coda is the dock that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome to the show. We got a great interview with you on the second half of the show about Drone Up. And so you're going to love that.

We go into massive details about the actual drone deliveries happening in Arkansas right now by a company called Drone Up. And with their partner that you may have heard of, Walmart. It is a super compelling discussion. And this technology is here. earlier is actually happening. So maybe not earlier than we expected, but they're actually doing it, Molly.

It's pretty impressive, huh? Yeah. And I would argue it is earlier than we expected for some reasons that we talk about in the show that gave me a little bit of a series idea for the COVID fast forward. The COVID fast forward, yes. I mean, this technology like telemedicine

and food delivery is certainly benefited from, hey, we can't leave our houses. We need a COVID test. Well, drone delivery seems like a great way to get it and not have to have human interactions. But there's other news. Yes. And this Deutsche Bank getting raided one seems crazy.

Yeah. I saw this and I don't understand exactly what's going on. So maybe, Molly, you can educate me and the rest of the audience on the Deutsche Bank issue. You know, it's very interesting. So the Deutsche Bank issue is happening in the context. So the headline here is that Deutsche Bank was raided by German law enforcement because of alleged fraudulent advertising of sustainable investment. What makes us a super interesting story is, A, the bank was rated by German feds.

But B, this is all happening in the context right now of the SEC here in the United States, starting to roll out and float trial balloons on way, way, way tougher requirements around ESG. What can qualify as an environmental, what is it, environmental sustainability and governance type investment. So there's this sort of basket of investments that, you know, are maybe green or they're about corporate governance. Why those things got welded together, I will never know. But it's gotten environmental social and governance. So are you a fund or a company that is environmentally responsible, does a social good, or has, you know, progressive government governance? Governance being your board of directors has a woman on it, a person of color, an employee representative.

basically a standard ESG is kind of the concept at least and the intent seems good the execution seems kind of screwed up right now but it's supposed to be good for society is the intention.

It doesn't seem to be happening. Exactly. So this well, you know, I mean, right, it's sort of like does awareness matter? So I guess there was that question. But there is this a move afoot to crack down

on what is considered ESG and to get tighter disclosures. So that's sort of the context for the fact that now German authorities have not only declared that there was some greenwashing at Deutsche Bank, but because they're a lot tougher there, went in and searched, you know, tossed a place looking for evidence that could support allegations, according to a spokesman for the public prosecutor in Germany, of prospectus fraud. So basically Deutsche Bank saying, yeah, we've got these funds.

They're super ESG. It's all like really green. And the German authorities were like, no. Okay. These appear to potentially have been lies, asset managers, promising a certain thing with respect to these investments that didn't turn out to be true. So prospectus fraud, they, when you start a fund and you ask rich people to invest in it, you make a prospectus. You say, hey, these are going to be green funds. And then they invested in non-green funds.

funds. So the German authorities said, hey, this is illegal. And so, or at least that's the claim here. And they, it was strong enough of a situation to rate it, which is just, yeah, super disappointing. Like, why would you go through creating an ESG fund to do people to then invest it in non-ESG? I'm also, I'm thinking about the motivation here. I guess it's just money. I guess they were going to make more money investing in non-ESG stuff. But the public doesn't want to invest in non-ESG stuff so they ran a shell game. Yeah. I don't really.

I mean, honestly, though, I think, like Eric Garland, who I think is a former federal prosecutor, right, a former DOJ guy, is that the guy? Basically was like, isn't Deutsche Bank kind of rated every week or two now? There has been a very complicated bank. Yes. Overall. They were rated for money laundering at some point. And yeah.

They admitted, let's see, in 2021, admitted a breach of. 2021 DOJ tied to ESG reporting failures. Like they've had a whole bunch of issues related to this specifically. And other issues. There's like a whole long Donald Trump thing. There's a whole bank crisis within. It was a whole Donald Trump. Like who gave him the loans.

So you bank, yeah. But I think like, never found that out. Yeah. It's, you know, later in the show, we're going to talk about this idea of like moving really fast and potentially moving so fast that you. break things and put a stink on an entire industry. You could argue that ESG was, you know, a concept designed to incentivize stakeholder capitalism to encourage companies to green their operations, to reduce their own financial risk and also operate a little bit better. But then

what happened is that you ended up with skewed incentives. If you could make a lot for a long time, it was like money was just pouring in to these ESG funds with not a lot of oversight. So, it was like a quick way to make a buck. So of course, people started cheating, right? It's just a story about incentives over and over and over. And of course, if somebody was going to cheat, it just sort of feels like, of course, it was story to me. Well, and then it's like the, there's some way,

I know Elon was talking about this, like their, the S&P had some ESG rankings. And so it seems like it's pretty easy to game the ranking. So there's some sort of scorecard and Tesla came off the ESG rankings. And then I think Exxon was like at the top of them or something. And we're just all like, what exactly is happening here with this? And it's show me an incentive. I'll show you an outcome.

I think people are gaming the system quite obviously. And these ESG things feels like a giant grift and fraud. And the people who are making the money from it are lawyers and consultants. There are bigger grifts and frauds, to be clear. I'm sure. But I mean, when Exxon is gaming it, like they're producing all the oil in the world and burning a hole in the ozone layer and they're at the top of the rankings, I don't know how this makes sense. So I just, anytime these regulations come out, I've seen it like the attorneys and the accountants and the consulted seem to really clean up.

Yeah. What I would argue, and I'm actually super happy because it showed up in the Wall Street Journal today, Rochelle Tupinski wrote an opinion piece in the journal saying exactly what I've been saying, which is like the environmental part of this needs to come out. Like we've, the fact that we sort of welded on, you know, environmental reporting and risk disclosure and things related to the climate crisis with. social and governance and sort of social good and DE and I, like, yes, these are intertwining in some ways. There's a huge, like, climate justice component here. There's environmental racism. Those things are all real. But the fact is, like, as companies pursue risk disclosure, climate neutral policies, net zero, that's like goals. That's all business. And that's all necessary business. And I'm going to put this in a way that's going to get me yelled at,

but it was always going to be too messy, I guess, to combine these things. Like, companies need to have environmental goals and goals related to the climate crisis. Companies need to have DE and I policies and diversity that makes them stronger businesses. But the idea that those are somehow the exact same policy has created a lot of messiness around what these funds do and accomplish and should include. Yeah, they seem like separate issues and they should be changed. Yeah. Listen, right now, capital efficiency and extending your runway is more important than ever.

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You're going to go to odoo.com slash twist and get $1,000 off. What a generous offer. That's ODO.com slash twist. It's breaking news here. Somebody just tweeted at me that, when we had that OpenC story, remember that? Where the employees at OpenC were front-running the market, and they're quoting me here.

I don't know if this is my exact quote, but somebody says, Jason said that OpenC needed to take action against the rogue employee, and it said, this is my quote, I don't know if this is actually accurate. They need to sue the employee. I know that sounds crazy, and it looks like they, in fact, have. So this was the story where that product management,

committed insider trading. Oh, right. So they were trading NFTs. Right. Before they were publicly available, I guess. And so, yeah, opens. DoJ charges former OpenC executive and first NFT insider trading case. Prosecures allege the former OpenC had a product. Nathan Chastain used insider analysis to trade NFTs for profit. Department of Justice, I'm reading from Vice. The Department of Justice Charger, former executive at OpenC in connection with an NFT inside a trading scheme. The agency announced Wednesday. It's the first time.

That's today. That's such a charge that have been laid out in the realm of digital assets. This will be the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. Predict there will be. And remember I said that? Like, everybody in crypto thinks the rules don't apply because it's not a stock. But if you're selling these things

and they quack like a duck and they look like a duck And it's kind of obvious, like, this is going to get prosecuted at some point. I think this is just the beginning. The DOJ and the SEC, like, they seem to take like five, ten years to build these cases. So ICO cases happened over the last couple years, and ICOs happened, what, five, six, seven years ago. And now I think all this NFT stuff, if people were painting the tape, as everybody seems to think was the case, how many people were painting the tape at open. or other platforms. You know, in other words,

creating wash trades, fake trades to make people think this NFT is going up. And they're like, well, you can technically do it. And if that is your benchmark for behavior, that it's technically possible.

Yeah. It's technically possible to create a super drug called fentanyl that gets people super high and then takes them to the edge of an overdose. Like,

doesn't mean you should do it. So here we are again in terms of responsibility. Yeah. So he knew, so it looks like he knew I was trying to remember this story

because I was, I remember, there was some other story we talked about insider training and it was like trading and it was like these ding-dongs who only made themselves a million dollars and were super obvious. This was less than that. But he was the guy who knew was responsible for selecting what NFTs would be featured on the front page of OpenC. So he was like, so it'd be like if you were, you know, at Apple and you knew what was going to be

promoted in Apple podcasts and then you, I mean, assuming that podcasts made any money, right, you like somehow front ran those podcasts. So he was in charge of promoting the NFTs. And so then he obviously bought them first. Then they got promoted. And then he resold them at two to five times. He flipped them. It's crazy.

The story you're referring to to refresh their risk memories, the SEC charged three Twilio employees with insider trading. And they were like engineers. And at the time, we had a similar comment, which is like, if you work at OpenC and you're the product manager, you must be making six figures. You own equity in the company that might be worth million. of dollars potentially.

You could just buy, if you actually did understand NFTs, you could just buy them after they were released to the public because you'd probably still have enough information and you could just use public information, right? And you could disclose, I'm buying this NFT, I have an affinity for it. After, on day two of trading, who's going to, if you,

if this person bought these on day two of trading, could anybody complain? I don't think so. That would be like, I work at Nike and I bought the shoes after they were for sale for two days, but I just, you know, I wanted to own a couple pairs of them. As opposed to, I think there was a Nike person who was actually stealing the Nike shoes

and front running them in that market. So front running a market. We're learning all the tricks. Front running a market, using inside information to front run the market, painting the tape, wash trades, all this stuff is going to be coming out. So this will be a parade of malfeasance that we'll be dealing with for some time. In other news today, Fidelity is marking down its share of startup. So when you're in the private investing business, you do an audit every year.

You know, you may or may not mark stuff down that you've invested in at a certain valuation. When you're one of these more public larger entities, I think you have to do this quarterly. And so fidelity, according to information compiled by our friends at Bloomberg, has marked down some private market investments. So this is a judgment call they make based on what's happened in the public market. they start marking down investments they made in private corporations. We all know Reddit had filed to go public. Fidelity marked them down 36%. They marked Stripe down about 13%.

And Instacart, 48%, which I think Instacart had taken that medicine themselves and were to reprice their employee options. And so if you look at dollars per share, it looks like Reddit peaked in Q3 of 20, 21, at $62, and now is that $39? they're actually, because these are going to be public companies are obviously talking about the actual share price now.

$125 for instance to cart now down at like $62. So wise thing to do and just more indicative of the medicine being taken, Molly. So that people can then not keep crashing. And if you reset the peg and you say, hey, here's where the number is, now it can go up again. So you take this hard of medicine and, you, You know, hey, your house, sorry, your house isn't worth what you thought it was. Right.

Is what's happening here. In these public markets, it happens quicker. In a public market, it happens instantly because it's an open market. In crypto, it's a 24-hour market. It happens instantly. In private companies, these type of investors, the fidelities of the world have to report. They have a higher reporting in their funds because they have large other institutions in there, I guess. And they do it quarterly.

So this is just more proof that public evaluation. that are reset are impacting private companies. But you'll notice these numbers are slightly lower than what happened to public companies, which went down 50 to 85%. So you don't see 50 to 85% here. Right. Totally. I want to have a longer conversation about marking

in our BC Sunday school. But yes, what it shows is that the contagion, you know, the virus is spreading, if you will, if you will forgive a really unfortunate metaphor. Yeah. That, you know, rumors of a downturn have not been exaggerated. Yeah. We were talking earlier about productivity and the remote work sort of train ending for certain folks.

Apple went to three days a week. They had some resignations. But we haven't heard anything since then. And so people are going back to work. I was on a couple of phone calls this week or the last two weeks. And people were on the Zoom from their offices, which is a weird experience. When three people are in the window, you're like, whoa, what are you all tweaking the same Zoom window? There's three of you.

And what is this background? Are you at a party? Yeah, they're like, no, no, we're in our conference room. You are the ones who are at home. And so all of a sudden, this is getting real. And actually today, I have to make a decision, Molly. I'm going to need a little bit of your help here. I have a board meeting at 2.30 that I can go to in person.

I love this company. Incredible. It's one of our top performers. I also got my parents in town, my brother. And they invited me to come to dinner with the board. which we haven't done in close to three years now, over two years with the pandemic. So I'd have to leave my house at two

for the 230 board meeting. Hour and a half board meeting. It gets us to three, four o'clock. Then we have a five o'clock dinner, so there'd be an hour of work I could do independently in a conference room somewhere. And then dinner five to seven, so two to seven, 30.

Maybe I get home looking at a lot of time out of the house, but I'm kind of missing people and I want to go, but my mind goes to productivity. Mm-hmm. It's probably, you know, if I did go to dinner on my own, if I had dinner on my own or my parents, I would be an hour anyway. So this looks like it adds two hours, three hours to my day of extra stuff. Do I want to give up two to three hours?

Am I looking at it the right way, Molly? Or should I just be happy to see humans and build bonds? I know. I know. This, I just, I think this is going to be the question of the future because, I mean, you know how I feel about time, right? Like, I am murderously protective of my time. I call it on optaneum.

It is the most precious substance in the universe. No more of it can ever be created and so on and so forth. And so constantly, for me, it's this question of ROI. Like, when I convinced Marketplace years ago to let me work from home, it was by saying, like, effectively, you pay me too much to be in the car an hour and a half a day. Yeah. That's a stupid use of your money. And when I'm in the car, I'm in the car, like. during prime news breaking hours.

Right. It's like noon on the East Coast, four or five on the West Coast. Yes. That I am useless to you instead of live on the radio. Like that's just not a good dollar for dollar, like they say in public radio, challenge. And I sort of feel that way about these opportunities now too,

and I've gotten increasingly stingy about them. It's like, what is going to be the long-term payoff here? Now, relationship building, often worth it. But if you already have a relationship, what are you going to lose by not going? And I think that's like, you know, writ large,

that's like the question that we're all asking ourselves now. Will I be more productive in the office? Will some employees be more productive in the office, but others won't be? Is the amount that you pay me worth you having me in a car for an hour a day, right? Or two hours a day. And who pays for that?

Like literally I saw somebody on Twitter saying, I think it was actually an Apple employee was around the apple thing. Yeah, they were like, you should pay our commute costs. And I was like, whoa, whoa, that's not how this works, but okay. You know, like, I understand the argument, but when has anybody ever said, like, pay for my commute? That was always the employee's responsibility, but I guess after two years of working on house. No, that happens. Come on. That's actually been around for years. Commuter benefits. Nobody gets paid. are paying for your BART or your New York metro car.

You get like some pre-tax benefits that, you know, help with the cost of your commute. I mean, think about an expensive employee. What two hours a day equals 10 a week equals 520 a year, it'd be 25% of a pay bump. Everybody would be 20% more of your day. Think about a 25% more every day, eight hour a day plus two, 25% more. So if it's $100,000 employee and you paid for their commute, it would be $25,000 to pay for them reading books or listening to podcasts. Right. But if you, if you as the company, if that employee worked from home for this whole time and got everything done, no outcome changed and in fact was potentially even 20 or 30 percent more productive because they weren't going somewhere and they weren't tired at the end of the night, they could sort of pick up the laptop at nine because they're not pooped.

They didn't go somewhere all day. if there was no difference in productivity and then you company were like, no, I want you to come here now and lose those two hours. If I'm that employee, I would also want to get paid. I'd be like, oh, really? Because like, previously I was working during those hours. Yeah.

For free, right, for my salary. Like, I don't know. I mean, I think there's a real, it's a real management question for our time. It's a real management question. Listen, lots of founders are Lucy Goosey with their personal phone numbers. you know about this problem. People start putting their personal mobile phone in documents, proposals, and it makes things super messy. If you're running your own company, you need to be

professional. An open phone helps you create a business phone number, and it's really easy. How easy is open phone? You install an app, and you're done. You pick your number, you're done. And you can create a shared phone number. How great is that? You know how you have like an email for customer support? You do VIP ad? Now you can have that for a phone number where multiple employees can feel calls and texts, including those texts, super important, because that's how a lot of business happens. A lot of these young folks, they don't want to talk on the phone, they want to text. Well, Open Phone can help you with that as well, and it's affordable already. It's just $10 a month. I mean, it's so affordable. It's ridiculous. I think they should triple their prices.

I think I would pay $30 a month for this, but they charge $10. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off that for any plan for your first six months. That's even ridiculously generous. I mean, that puts it down to $8 a month. You're kidding me. You need to do it for yourself as an executive or a salesperson. openphone.com slash twist. And if you have an existing phone number with another service that's overcharging you or that doesn't have this incredible feature set, they'll put it over for you.

If you're thinking about phone numbers, I just want you to think, openphone.com slash twist. That easy, folks. So I would like to give advice. I've been thinking about this a lot. And I've been thinking about it in relation to the very scary recession

we're going into. Having lived through two recessions and in both recessions, having had to lay people off, I'm determined to not have to do that this time. Yeah. Yeah. For inside employees and launcher employees listening, as the boss, I am monitored things. I keep cash in the bank.

I keep myself cashed up. I'm very conservative in my lifestyle. You don't see me flying private, even though I arguably could. I don't do certain things because I try to keep cash reserves high so that I don't ever have to deal with laying people off. But we're all thinking it, right? Oh, my God. What happens if advertising takes a hit?

What if the economy is thrown in for two years? will you have to lay people off? Will our company be one of those companies? So I always think about, well, how do you avoid that? Well, one, you keep revenue high and you have to have efficiency high. So now we're all, if we start thinking of ourselves as a team, which in my later life, you know, I've really started to look at teams and team functionality. It's hanging out with, you know, Draymond a bunch and watching the Warriors up close and watching

that team. I've actually learned a lot from Draymond talking to them about team dynamics, Kevin Durand, staff. It's funny because of all that stuff. Of all people, right? I've learned more from him about team dynamics than any business person. I'll tell you that. That's the thing people don't understand about him.

But yes. He is that guy. He's that blue guy, right? So I literally was, you know, talking to him about this last couple weeks. So I said, okay, everybody's fear, right? And fear is a big driver of people's behavior. Everybody's fear is, oh, my God, pay cuts, layoffs. Am I secure?

Is the economy going to be okay? Inflation's going up and layoffs are happening at the same time. How do I play a role? role in that, like, what's going to happen? Okay. Efficiency is what's important. And so if you can't hire more people, well then, if we're each 10% more productive in a 20-person company, it's the equivalent of hiring two more people. Does anybody think, listening to my voice right now that there is a way for them to be 10% more productive

in their lives? What do you think, Molly? If you ask 20 people, could you be 10% more productive? How many people would say, sure, I think I could be 10% more productive? I'm not sure exactly how, but could I? Like 90%? 90% would say that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, almost nobody, it's like the human brain, right? That what do they say you're only, you only use 20%?

Exactly. So there is no world in which everybody could not be 10% more productive. And in fact, I think over if you became, I think everybody could probably be 10% more productive a month. I think they could be 10% more productive a month for multiple months in a row. So how do you become more productive? training, professional training, technical training. Those two things alone, just basic training.

If you invest in training, everybody is going to get 10, 20, 30% more effective. What have you seen me do over the last 30, 60 days? Yeah. Training, training, training, training. Totally. Training everybody. Then what's another way? And it might reduce productivity in the short term, right?

Because you spend a lot of time on training. It's an investment. Right. And it matters. And it matters. Okay. So you do a little training. Then I, I'd,

did my research, it turns out there's a group of people who do something called time blocking. And this is where I'm going to get, I'm circling back to work from home and that whole stand-up. Yeah. But then there is time blocking on calendars. And then there's reporting on what you're doing and having intentionality about your day. So it turns out there's something called time blocking. This is where you put like something that falls through the cracks maybe in your day-to-day. and so one of the things that's always falling through the cracks here at this week in startups

is checking the slack and checking the community groups that we have tried to do. So I said to the team, hey, this is falling through the cracks, just want everybody to put 15 minutes, I think I said, on their calendar every day for one week and just go to the Twitter group that we started and just interact there. I saw delightfully yesterday that Nick is out, but Rachel and Justin and myself went in there. You can jump in there too, Molly. if you have time to time block, even if it's five minutes,

to just say hi to the fans. And it's amazing. We all did it. And everybody's interacting all of us, send there's more questions coming in. So the power of time blocking is really interesting. But then I realized there's another time blocking me. And me as a boss,

I asked everybody on my team to share their calendar with me. He started going through them. I noticed a trend. Some of the most productive people have calendars that have time blocking on them. And I was like, oh my lord, what a really interesting

thing. And then I saw some people maybe who are younger in their careers, they don't even know what time blocking is. Yeah. So as but another example, I said to Rachel, you may. Well, let's explain too. We mean like not just so I use time blocking for

focus time. I also use it for things that are in my life that have to occur so that everybody knows like this is pickup, this is drop off, that kind of thing. Yeah, parenting. But you can be parent. Well, yeah, but also like parenting during work hours, right? Like, hey, this is

going to, uh, this is happening. Some people literally like I, and I encourage them, like, you need to put exercise on your calendar. Yeah, I just started that. Like, it's really, it's actually really important. And it's not only wellness. How do you think I skied 40 days last year? I skied 40 days because I put on my calendar.

You block it off. You know, every day, 12 to three. Don't put meetings here. I'm going to try to get on the mountain in that window. Right. And do two hours is what I was doing. And then I had, I'll do meetings until 730. So I opened my meeting window after that.

Right. Totally. And the thing is that it's sort of, like this is where I'm like obsessed with make a list of everything that you do every day because then you start to realize the things you do every day that you didn't think were work that could be on your calendar as work. Yes. Like if you're a person who like most of what I do here is talk here and then have meetings.

And I found myself in the trap of like almost every salesperson or EVP that I know who like has meetings all day and then is like I have a lot of work to do at night because they're like, I didn't do any work today. I just talked all day long. And so then it turns out that there's work you have to do, like, after we have an investment meeting with somebody or a founder meeting, you got to like organize your notes, not just take them, but put them all in the right place. And share them with people and come to a determination. Do you want to move this company onto the next step? That takes a decision making time.

Yep. So it's post meeting time. There's post meeting time. Then there's decision time. Then there's time to answer emails. All of that can be a calendar entry. Yes. And so you don't want to put silly stuff on there, you know, but.

having some intentionality. What this makes you think about as an individual I found was what actually am I here for? What's the priority in my job? Clearly, the priority in your job is to, and my job, to be on air and to do this podcast six days a week. Then there's another piece meeting with the companies, but there is another piece, which is also, hey, we have to make a decision about these companies.

So if I'm taking a 20-minute introductory meeting, which we all know goes to the 30 or 40, there needs to be another 10, 20 minutes for me to organize my notes. So it's really, even with a 20-minute introductory call, it's probably an hour of total war. Yeah. It goes to a half hour, and there might be another half hour, or maybe 15 minutes of writing it all down, and there might be 15 minutes of prep for the next call. So you put all this together. The thing I realized was, as a manager of a business, my anxiety went way down because I realized, wait, there's some more resources to capture here. And maybe I haven't done the best job telling people what the priority is.

So if people do time blocking, not in egregious, like, you know, I'm doing email for this hour. I'm doing email for this hour. I'm doing email for this hour. It's like, okay, email and Slack. Like, there are some jobs where you got to get through a lot of emails. Actually, mine is one of them because my emails are. I put literally Friday afternoons of email. Oh, really?

Yeah. The whole, like I try to have no meetings on a Friday afternoon because otherwise you're literally drowning. You've been introduced to seven great companies by other BCs and you have no clue because it's on page three of the inbox. you know. Yeah. So getting through, I was about, that was exactly where I was going, coming off of the past, which is my email box has the next 50 companies we need to meet with. So I do need to get in there for half an hour every year and just sort them. I mean, it's literally just sorting them. Do I know the person introduced me? Do I need to respond?

All that stuff. Yeah. So putting this all together, I just had this great realization that there is a way for this to work for both parties. Managers always have this fear that people are not doing their job. And that fear comes not from the 80% of people who are doing a great job in your company and all like that. It comes from the 10% who are bad actors who are fucking off and not doing their job, please bleep out the F word. My mom listens. And then the other 10% are people who are just inefficient. And maybe in your company, it's 60, 20, 20. Who knows what the percentage is? But that's the fear you as a team member should know about what bosses are thinking of. That's why they make a snap decision like everybody come to the office. That's why, or three days a week. Because they want to know at least

they have some engagement going on. And there are other reasons to be in the office, like physically making products that are physical in the real world and collaboration and relationship building. Put it aside for a second. Let's just talk about getting rid of that fear of that manager's have. There's a very super easy task for this, which is if you're intentional about your calendar,

you share your calendar with your boss and you say, hey, look, here's what I'm working on. Does this sync with you? Because I looked at our team here, and I realized like the booking of gas or researching of guests, it always seems to fall way behind on the priority. So I said, Rachel, I don't want you on air for the show when we're taping. We'll have another pretty, we only need one producer to be on air while we're taping.

Right. You, the second the show notes are done at 10 a.m., get off the show for this week, three hours of researching guests. I just want you to find us guests, rank them, and get to 10 a day. In one week, you'll have 50. And then I want you to tell us the 5 to 10 best. And I was actually going to ask you, Molly, to Time Bank, maybe on a Friday, a little mentoring there of half an hour. Maybe you look at her results and say, hey, here's what I think

of these guests. And maybe you pick your favorites and I'll put a half hour. Here's what I think. Or maybe we just do it all together. No, we have that. She and I have that half hour schedule. We have that tomorrow. It's on my calendar. It's on our calendar for tomorrow. We're doing it after the show. So here. And this is also for managers. You have to look at your business and say, hey, what's not hitting the notes that you think you need to hit to succeed? Great guess. Obviously, a big part of this. Yeah. So I said, okay, this week, you do that. Next week, Justin will switch into that position and then Nick will and write us a night tight best practices page

and we'll iterate on that and then that'll be training because each person has a different way of finding great guests. So anyway, this is a long way of saying I'm examining everybody's productivity and through this different techniques like time banking and time blocking and did I do a good job as a manager

giving the instructions as to what's important so that we don't have to hire a ton of people so we don't have to increase expenses into what could be a possible recession where revenue could be going down. And so as a leader and as an employee, if you do think we're in a recession, this is a great way to avoid layoffs or to make the company stronger. And if management and employees start looking at as a team, we want to win. And the analogy here is if you look at the Warriors, they don't think about who scores the most

points. They think about, you know, how crisp of a pass can they make? How can they break down defenses? What's the most optimal shot they can take? Not what's optimal for me. What's the most optimal shot? And so that's what I'm trying to think about as a leader for me is, am I creating in our organization the optimization that we need? And, you know, that whole discussion we had about the QS. I won't tell people what that is because I consider a competitive advantage, but the QS project we've been working on for the last 30 days? Did you see the massive uplift and productivity. It's like, whoa, this thing's going to be like a machine. That directly came from watching the Warriors and how they pass the ball. I was just thinking, the ball needs to move.

It's about the speed of the ball. It's not about the individual contributor's ability to shoot or not. Like, sure, you want Steph to shoot. But Clay can shoot, Tramon can shoot, Wiggins can shoot. They got a lot of Jordan. There's a lot of people can shoot on that team. Just move the ball around. That's what's important is the speed for that. But for us, it's the TTM, which I won't tell what that is. but that speed is what's the equivalent of the ball movement. So here ends at the lesson. Here ends up the lesson.

We're all in it together. If you're a founder of a company, this is this week and start up, if you're a founder of a company, start reviewing the calendars with your team and you have to just give them the disclaimer up front. I'm not doing this to micromanage you. I'm doing this so you're 10%, 20% more productive.

So we get the equivalent of, you know, 10% 20% more employees. And where this hits the rubber meets the road is if an employer can feel that you're working but eight hours a day, what you're getting paid consistently and efficiently, then the whole discussion about working from home becomes like almost an afterthought. Right. I know you're productive.

Right. And we're working on your productivity together. We're collaborators on your productivity. If you're a startup, you know you have to save where you can. I'm talking time, I'm talking money, and I'm talking bandwidth. That's why we love Coda. Coda is one document to rule them all. And here is a quick example.

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dot Io slash twist for $1,000 off. That change, I think, I don't know, you tell me what you'd think of my, you know, performance on this objectively and that just concept writ large in relation to go back to work in an office because we don't know if you're working or not. Right, exactly. Like I think that there is, I appreciate a lot the recognition that going to the office this becomes a shorthand for productivity, and that's not always the case. You know, that every organization, no matter what, has hitters and sitters.

And-sitters, I like it. I think I just made that up, actually. I've never heard that before. Hitters and sitters and it's sort of figuring, and frankly, there are some roles where you need hitters, and there are some rules where it's okay to have a bit of a sitter, but when you're in a downturn, you need them to stand up. And so the question is how you get them to do that. And I think like that there's no question that trying to understand where the misses are.

And, you know, my only note to you would be to say all of the things you just said up front before you're like, give me your calendars. Oh, okay. Because no one knows why. So in our meeting in like an hour. Yeah. That would be a great thing to set up the way you just said it. Because that there's nothing about that that doesn't make sense. And there's nothing about that that doesn't include the fact that like what we're really.

trying to do is say, what are we wasting time on? That's really the point. You know, and what could we be optimizing for? Because there's probably something in every organization I encounter this all the time. There's something your boss told you to do three years ago. Yeah, still doing. And you're still doing it like a nice squirrel on a hamster wheel. Two hours a week.

Yeah. You're spending two hours a week doing that. Three years, 300 hours. Have changed. Yeah. Right? Your boss's priority has changed. The goals have changed.

The market has evolved. You're still spending. 300 hours a year on that thing. So once in a while, we've got to go look at the wheel. Yeah. And figure out which routes we're running that we don't need to be running. And that's like exactly what we're trying to do now. And it's great.

And there should be a goal in mind. There are OK ours in mind at the end of the. If I think if every company did this, professional training, I think you get 10% better a month for three or four months sustained, no problem. Definitely. Five to 10% better. Then you look at time blocking and just time management and efficiency there. maybe depending on the person, it's one to 10%.

Anyway, you put these two things together. If the two numbers can equal between training and time management, and then there's a third, which is clarity of the goals. Yes. So those three pieces, clarity of goals, your own personal time management and training, let's say they get you five, but five percent better each month. It's 15 percent better. 15 percent better compounded because of the rule of 72.

You divide that 15 into 72. you're going to get like four point something, right? Five, basically. It means in five months you'll be twice as good. You'll be twice as efficient. Now that seems crazy. It's actually true. It's actually true.

If you actually compound being better at your job with training, you could be twice as good in six months. Of course. Like think of a chef. You know, some chef is making food. They can make it twice as good, twice as fast. If they got 15% better every month, it's just obvious. So compounding growth is the lesson.

And, you know, this all came up because there was, I guess, some leaked emails from Elon to his management team. That, he, you know, he's building real products in the world. Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum. And I mean a minimum of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask a factory workers. The factory workers obviously are putting in probably 50 hours a week. And then a follow-up email, the key graph was. there are of course

Elon I guess did a follow up email to be super clear because he's being clear as a manager as well there are of course companies that don't require this but when was the last time they shipped a great new product I think he's talking about Apple or Google maybe but then they're both coming back to work

I mean plenty It's been a while it's been a while I think he's probably talking to Apple about Apple there Tesla has and will create actually Apple come on it's been decades Like they're just iterating They've been iterating

I give them time for AirPods on the watch Yeah AirPods and the watch are great They are accessories to the iPhone I okay I think you're right I mean you know my belief on this right Like Apple revolves around the sun And the sun is the iPhone

You know I do think And they make great accessories to the iPhone But I don't know that like The watch I think by version 6 or 7 Which is when I was I finally got rid of my Fitbit Apple was being beaten by Fitbit Yeah

Which was like a deprecating product that nobody was paying attention to for many years. Like, you didn't see many changes in it. It was still a better product than Apple Watches. The Apple Watch, I think, is on par with the Fitbit now. But, you know, what Elon says here is there are, of course, companies by well, the Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth.

This is not be happening by phoning it in. So I think there's something different going on here. You know, he is actually building the stuff too. They're not outsourcing the building of this to some factory, which Apple does, right? Apple has contract manufacturers who make their stuff. Yeah. So I understand you want to whatever your company was,

if you are like, we can only accomplish this this way. Yeah. Then make that clear to your employees and that's the deal. Yeah. But I think managers are going to have a tendency, people are going to have a tendency reading this email to be like,

I too can only accomplish that my thing this way. And that may not be true for your company because you don't make cars or spaceshows. Exactly. Right? Like figure out what your product is and how your team can get it done and evaluate it. And you might find that 80% of your people

need to be in the office? I don't know, right? I think we're still, that's still really an open question. Yeah, it's going to be, and then there's this other thing, there's competition for employees. And so I've seen in companies

that are remote at the early stages, their costs go down, and the time to fill positions go down. Yeah. And their product shipping goes up in a software company, specifically. So now, will it make the most refined great products?

that's going to be another question. So it certainly is really hard to relocate people. You hire an iOS developer, and they start in two weeks. They resign. They start in two weeks. And they're working from anywhere. And they work for a third less than the one in Silicon Valley needs to. And the one in Silicon Valley is commuting two hours a day.

And they are less productive and hate their life. You can see how this works out, right? I think that's the way we'll hash out. What I think is it's going to be different strokes for different founders. and right now I gave it a lot of thought over the last couple of months as things were open

do I want to move back to an in-person thing and I was like for me I think I want to try for the next year four times a year getting together and doing like serious

team building professional development for four days or five days and so I guess working for me is going to be you have four weeks away from your family a year

which is not insignificant right it's going to be significant amount of time away. I mean, it's insignificant compared to going to an office. Right. But it's insignificant for never going anywhere. So I think that's going to just be the balance I'm going to try to do, which is, you know, it's 20 days away from your family a year out of 365. It's a lot less than, you know, going to an office every day. So there I think so. A lot of rambling thoughts. So many thoughts. Such a long show for you today. And next up is

our great interview, which also went longer than we expected with Drone Up founder and CEO Tom So don't be tired because this is totally worth that station. You got a lot of show. You don't do what I did. I went on the treadmill this morning. You got an Obi-Wan episode out. Tomorrow, Lon Harris is on the show. We'll go through the three Obi-1 episodes.

And I think we have two Star Trek. Two Star Trek. Also, I started watching Winning Time about the building of the Showtime Lakers. I want to start watching that. I heard it's great. You got to watch that. It's great. I'm one episode in.

It's fantastic. Maybe we'll have to add that to the docket. Yeah. So tomorrow we'll whip through the first three episodes of Obi-Wan and the first two episodes of the new Star Trek. Or is it three episodes of Star Trek? I'm not sure. Oh, God, I don't know.

I better go look. Yeah, we better check. Some producer. I better put Star Trek on my calendar today. Oh, time block it. Yeah, no, that's not your time, Molly. Not my time. That better not be during the day.

All right, next up on the show, Molly and I were talking about drone delivery, and we were super excited that, unbeknownst to us in America, Walmart, is shipping stuff with a company called drone up. and it's actually happening. And I also got somebody from Ireland who's running a test, by the way, Molly, who said, hey, you know, your premise that my premise was during that drone up talk here at Walmart

was that this would work in the countryside really well, like, you know, and that maybe cities were too dense, so it would kind of go least dense to most dense. But he said, hey, actually, we're in kind of a dense suburb, and he showed me a picture in Ireland of, you know, tens of thousands of flights that had been done for delivery. And so apparently these deliveries are starting to happen in less populated,

but somewhat populated areas. It's real. So we got pretty excited about this, but we also had a lot of just like logistical questions about the logistics of this. And so thank you to producer Justin, who just went out and got us the CEO of Drone Up, Tom Walker, who has a long history in super interesting things related to this in web development, in the late 90s through 2017 was in the Navy as a Web Systems Officer and Nuclear Power Plant Operator.

And then now has started Drone Up, which has raised $13 million last closed, a $5 million round in November, 2021. Walmart is an investor. And now these drones are in the air. Welcome to the show, Tom. Thank you for having me. And thank you for your service, nuclear power plant operator and in the Navy. So thanks so much. You can tell I have a H.D.

I've done a little bit of everything. Have you seen Top Gun? I think that's my really most important question. Did you go see Maverick? I saw it Sunday at lunch with my family. I did finally. And what did you think? What did you think?

I didn't think they could make it one better. And they did. Right? Wow. I totally agree. I'm getting so much FOMO. I'm waiting for my daughter to come back from a trip she's on to see it with her. I'm probably going to see it Thursday night.

But I am so, so. exciting. It's only the second or third movie I've ever been to in my life where the audience gave an applause. Wow. I know we have that experience. Two people were cheering. I saw it twice this weekend because I'm a giant nerd, but I'm glad that you liked it.

I saw it with an Air Force buddy who was pretty impressed, even though obviously it was hard for her because Navy. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But she appreciated her dad was a Navy pilot. Okay, we are way off topic now. We're really excited to talk about your own.

So I guess we have a lot of questions. How many Walmarts are currently actively delivering stuff? Like, what is the state of this? Because when we hear about this technology, five, six, seven, eight years ago, everybody was like, hey, this is going to happen. Then there was a 60 minutes episode, if you remember, where Amazon showed it. And then it kind of went away for four years. And we would all sitting here going, we were promised Starbucks, you know, cups delivered

and, you know, our medicine. And yeah, we see things in Africa. where people are doing the fixed wing, you know, delivery of blood and parachutes. Like it's a very cute situation. They don't have rivers. They don't have bridges and roads that can easily get this blood or medicine to places. So we kind of expect, I think, as consumers and technologists, okay, the most acute situations where people really need the technology is happening.

But we didn't actually weren't aware that this is happening. So what's the actual state? How many deliveries were done yesterday? How many stores have done it? I don't have the exact count yesterday. I would assume dozens were completed yesterday. But where we are right now is we're open in two locations. So we're in Farmington, Arkansas and in Bentonville. And over the course of the next several months, we'll be opening up 32 additional locations. So we'll be operating in six states and in multiple cities. Each city that we'll be operating in will have a minimum of three locations. There's some logistical reasons why we do that. But by the end of the year, yeah, the goal is to have 34 fully operational. And then we're already planning for 2023. You're headquartered in Arkansas, right?

We're headquartered in Virginia Beach. Oh, in Virginia Beach, sorry. Interestingly enough, I grew up in Arkansas in a really small town in southern Arkansas. And when I left and I left at 16 and said I'm never coming back to the state. And it's like the mob, it just dragged me back. And then I realized, well, Northwest Arkansas is actually a really nice place. And I didn't realize how nice it was. So we do have an office there, but we remain headquartered in Virginia Beach.

Gotcha. How do consumers actually interface with the product? Are people being invited? Or if you have that Walmart, can you just click a button, say, drone delivery? And then how do you communicate what happens next to a consumer and know where are they pre-invited? because you've looked at Google Maps and see they have a big enough backyard. How does one opt into drone delivery in Arkansas?

Yeah, we like to say we're one of the only companies, if not the only company, that's doing store-to-door delivery seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And it's not limited to a handful of skews. It's not limited to any particular, I mean, obviously within a mile, mile and a half of the store,

obviously is our range right now. Talk about why maybe later. But so you go right now, you go to drone up delivery. and you enter your address and it basically says whether you're eligible for drone delivery. And now right now that that's separate over the course of the next several months. That'll be integrated into the Walmart experience so that you won't have to kind of have two different experiences.

But it's like any typical e-commerce order. You go, you put in your address. It checks a lot of conditions. It checks the current, your location and where you are in the delivery area. It checks current weather. It checks if there are any type of issues going on like first responder activity that can interfere. If none of those things are blockers for you being able to get delivery, then you can go on and search through the catalog. You know, there's typically anywhere between 10 and 20 and in some of our larger stores, 30,000 items that are available for delivery.

You place the order and pay for the order. Once the order is placed, when typically in about 20 to 20, 22 minutes. The package is delivered on your back porch while we're in route. You get notified that the drone is en route. Please have all the children and pets and grandma in the house. And then once the drone is overhead, it lowers down to about 80 feet. It is visually inspected to make sure the area is clear. And then the product is gently lowered to the ground. The drone stays at 80 feet and the product is gently lower to the ground, set on the back porch and leave. And in fact, because we stay at that high altitude, we've actually had people let us tell us that they didn't even realize the drone had shown up and delivered the product.

So it's not noisy. It's not loud. It's not invasive. Wow. So what, can we back up to like sort of your origin story? What made you get into this space and make, you know, inroads into Walmart this quickly? Well, I got into space because I was in Best Buy one day and they had these drones for sale and I started researching them. And I was so enthralled that for less than a couple thousand dollars, you could buy something in Best Buy that had more technology on it than the space shuttle did at the time. And so I actually bought one, took it home and crashed it the very first day. but it was the information that the manufacturer shared with me in terms of how to analyze what had happened and what we had done. And I realized, well, these are very, very powerful. And I believed, and my colleagues believed at the time that drones were going to have an impact on society, positive or negative.

And we wanted to make sure that we could do our best to ensure that it was positive. So I have so many pragmatic, like simple questions about this. How this works. Here's one. how do you decide what route to take to somebody's house? Because I was thinking that these things would be great for cities, including V-TOLs, you know, the ones that carry humans, the vertical takeoff. I was thinking, wow, if you're in a city by the Bay,

like we are in the Bay Area or Sydney or New York with a lot of waterways, you can just fly these things over the water. If they fall out of the sky, which is everybody's big fear, safety, it just hits the water. No harm, no foul, in all likelihood. The chances of it hitting a boat are very low. So what route do you take? I was thinking maybe you go along the highway so that if it falls, it hits a car and that's more safe than not hitting a car, but maybe that's disastrous.

So you go over, you plot routes that are over farmland. How do you route these for safety? I'm assuming. It's a really good question. We don't do any routing. So our software is completely autonomous. So the only thing that we tell the drone is the address and it knows where it's taking off. And so it dynamically builds a route based on a lot of things.

Number one is there are certain areas that are flagged in the system to not fly over. Don't fly over moving vehicles. Don't fly over people. Don't fly over schools. Don't fly over parks. Don't fly over churches. So you're right. Water routes, our system will automatically take those routes.

If there's not a water route, it'll tend to take rooftop routes because these things are not that heavy. So if they go down and hit a roof, they might do some shingle damage, but they're probably not going to hurt anyone. And yes, there is a possibility somebody could be standing on a roof, but those generally that doesn't happen. And it also detects cell phone from the ground. We don't know who it is or that type of data, but we can actually detect cell phone

signals from the ground. If we see a conglomeration of three or more cell phones, it'll dynamically around them. So it's always attempting to obviate flight over people. And then it's using different altitudes and different directions. One other thing we take into consideration is environmental conditions. If we're carrying a package, we would certainly like the wind. We like the tailwind. It makes it more efficient. When we're returning, we'll fly into the wind. And then we'll also adjust altitudes based on what the most efficient flight altitude is for that particular area or environmental situation. That is fascinating. All that

is happening automatically with software. So if somebody's having a backyard party or they're having a party in a park and there's 100 cell phones there. It's like, yeah, maybe I shouldn't fly over a hundred cell phones. Pretty reasonable idea. That is incredible. What is the height they fly at and what is the speed they fly at? And why do you pick certain heights or speed? So we have to stay below 400 feet always because that's FAA regulations. There are certain areas that have different flight ceilings like around airports and other things that have different flight ceilings. We typically like to travel about between 180 and 200 feet is our travel altitude and then lower down and deliver from 80. We can deliver from as high as 200, but for efficiency purposes, we like to lower down to 80 feet.

It gets us in and out of there in under a minute. The reason that we chose that that particular altitude is we burn the most energy on takeoff and landing because you think about these things they're taking off. So the higher we go, we're burning a percent, two percent every 10 or 15 feet. So 200 feet is good because when we're flying over neighborhoods, especially when we're flying at night and it's quiet. They can barely hear it. It's much quieter even than an aircraft flying over. So it's low enough for efficiency, but high enough to ensure the sound profile is not obtrusive. Yeah, like how much reserve battery is built into plotting every route? Because I would imagine that would be a concern if you find, oh, there is that party in the park and we got to make a pretty

big detour. Battery seems like the biggest limiter. It's absolutely. I mean, right now in our operation, our two biggest costs are people in batteries because we tend to keep that battery percentage reserve higher than it probably should be. But we operate very, very cautiously now. We have to. I mean, you know, we've got to maintain the record of safety and demonstrate to the communities

and to the regulators that we can do this safely. So we're probably more cautious in terms of the number of personnel. available and in terms of the battery percentage. You got to remember, too, we're always dynamically rerouting. So we're keeping about 40 percent, 35 to 40 percent reserve on the batteries because the other thing that we do is if we detect a first responder activity. So if our system gets notified that there's a 911 call at a particular address or in a particular area or, you know, a fire dispatch into a particular area, all of the drones that are in the air will dynamically reroute and

de-conflict with each other. So there's continual rerouting going on, whether it's information on the ground, whether it's additional data coming in, or if we sense a low-flying aircraft from ADSB, we'll automatically adjust the entire operating fleet's altitude down just to

maintain a large margin of safety. Do the drone companies all coordinate drone activity yet on a central database in some way? I know planes have devices on them to let you know. I was actually in a small aircraft when a beacon went off

and we looked off to the left and sure enough there was somebody flying who didn't see us and we had to take in a slightly evasive maneuver. I don't know what those are called in small aircraft, but do drones have a similar system where they're aware of each other? And is there like some database of this? Like, hey, there's drone activity in this area. So if another commercial drone operator

or a police department was putting up a drone, I guess you would know because of the 911 call, But if, I don't know, a drone club, you know, at a high school has five drones in the air, how do you know that you're not going to have drones crash into each other? Yeah, that's one of the issues that our industry is trying to resolve now. So, for example, we have ADSB in. So ADSB is what the airplanes use to let everybody know who they are, where they are, you know, basic information about them. The FAA regulations say that drones can use ADSBN so we can hear the manned aircraft around them.

Now, that's also making the assumption that they all have. it and they don't. Some of the smaller private aircraft do not have ADSB yet. But we can't squawk. So the planes don't have a way of knowing where we are yet. One of the things that's coming is what's called remote ID. And that's going to be a new requirement for operating drones in the U.S. where you are basically transmitting your location and some basic fundamental details to create that picture that you're talking about. One of the things that we did last year was we acquired AirMap, which is a U-TM, unmanned traffic management platform that's being used in several places around the world. And one of the things that we do is we put all of our flights into that system and we share that

system. So anybody, public safety or the Department of Aviation or the FAA, they can see, they can see where all of our flights are. And then the other thing that we're doing to try to help promote commercial growth and collaboration is we are basically allowing any of the commercial operators that are operating the same place to go in and reserve their volumetric airspace. So if they say I need to do a commercial operation here, we let them go in and reserve that airspace and then we dynamically route all of our delivery traffic around that space so that those commercial operators can continue to do their operations. And by doing that in certain areas where there will be a high,

concentration of operators. We think that that database, until remote ID is more fundamentally set, we think that that will create that kind of picture, airspace picture that you're talking about. We have to do that because all of our systems will de-conflict our aircraft. Most of the operators that we're, you know, seeing on the other side or theirs will de-conflict, but we have to be able to de-conflict each other. So you're building. Go ahead, Molly.

We're probably going to say the same thing. I mean, it sounds like what you're creating is air traffic control for drones so that not only are you the delivery network, but you're the provider potentially of this future logistical hub for managing all of this traffic. Well, if you want to think over the rise in a little bit, I mean, you've got our drones operating in the air. You've got some of them are doing deliveries. Some of them are doing drone services. You've got other drone operators in the air, public safety, and so forth. And then let's think of head just a little bit. to urban air mobility when now you've got air taxis in the air. And then that means you've also

got air ambulances in the air. So it becomes not just a matter of deconflicting the airspace, it becomes a matter of prioritization, right? How do we, if it's an ambulance and this is a, you know, a medevac, you know, you've got to be able to clear air spaces and corridors for those folks to move quickly through there. Now, again, that's down the road a little bit. But we have to be able to figure out a way to not just de-conflict the airspace for safety purposes, but allow certain aspects to continue in certain conditions and certain operations that just have to be stopped at certain times. I love the concept, Molly, of there being like lanes.

So, like, you know, Walmart's like, hey, we're going to be taking this lane out and this lane back. It's almost like a dynamic flight plan where everybody knows, hey, this drone should be in this approximate height, 180. feet. And then if a drone's coming back, maybe the drones coming back are at the odd numbers. So 190, 210, 230, which I think planes do when they're going, I believe, east and west, you know, one direction is an even number of 31,000 feet and the other direction is 32. So this has been thought of before and thought through. You have so much volumetric space in air that you can actually do

really interesting general rules like that. Here's a question, Tom. Are you currently monitoring every flight. So, because we did see you have these like really interesting, almost like a tower, but it looks like it's on some sort of a hinge, and we were guessing what that is. And then you had a platform to watch the drones, I believe, or an operation center. The drones typically have cameras. So during this early period where you're doing dozens a day, eventually it become hundreds and hundreds and probably low thousands in the next year, I'm guessing, are you having operators watch, you know, the item drop, watch the route, and just how many humans to drones, you know, watching stuff do you have if you are using humans as safety.

We are. So right now under current FAA regulations, we have to have a drone operator maintain visual contact or a visual observer. Somebody has to maintain visual contact with the drone at all times. That is something that the industry, the FAA, Capital Hill, everybody's working on how to how do we adjust those and lift the constraint on the industry so that we can kind of cut that back a little bit. Right now, it's one drone operator to one drone.

There are a few of us who have waivers in right now to go one operator to four drones or five drones. From a standpoint of being able to scale without having to add that many bodies, that's going to be necessary. That is, and that is, I think it's 10725. It's an existing waiver that you can apply for. But our purpose in the tower, it is our air traffic control tower, the thing that you saw that looked like it, basically, an mobile air traffic control tower. The reason that we do that is to give the pilot a better line of sight so that we can send the drone out further.

So if you think about if you're standing on the ground at 5 foot 10 inch eyesight and the drone that goes out and has to land or has to go down below, you would lose it. You wouldn't be able to go very far. So we keep the operator's line of sight. The operator's eyesight is at 31 feet off the ground. And because the drone can go down as low as 80 but as high as 100, you can see how that gives us much better view and longer range. And then with, you know, enhanced lighting and other things,

we maintain a really good visual on the drone. So can one person watch more than one drone? Or do you have to have, is it a one-to-one equation right now? Today, it's one-to-one. They do offer the FAA does approve waivers for that, but you have to prove to them that your software systems, your safety protocols, and your risk assessments are justify allowing you to do so. And that is one of our active waiver submittals we have into the FAA right now is a one to five waiver application.

And 1.5 miles seems extremely doable given the battery. So I would assume part of this is as things get safer, the distance can go. And then eventually maybe you don't need to have somebody watching every one of them. Maybe there's a hundred of them going out. And if they have an issue, that one pops up. up in front of the operator. So I'm curious, how does safety, what is your, obviously, the goal is to have nobody get ever get hurt and no drones to fall out of the sky?

Obviously, that's not realistic. Accidents happen. And so I'm guessing, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're looking at delivery accidents that occur in the world in that neighborhood with Amazon or Walmart cars or Uber's or lifts. And then comparing the UPS and the FedEx drivers and their fender bender. and the damage they cause to yours. Is that the benchmark, or do you think your benchmark has to be two or three times higher,

which is already where Tesla's autopilot is? I think the latest study that came out is like Tesla drivers who are in Tesla's get in like a third as many accidents as when the same Tesla drivers are in their other cars. So, you know, that was like a very interesting way to study. It is not to compare Tesla drives to other drivers because then you got correlation issues. It's when they're in their gas power cars if they have both. They get more accidents with a gas power ones, which makes sense. They doesn't have the sensor kits.

So how are you judging safety? What's a reasonable way to be judged? But how do you think the public is judging you? So all those different judging. Yeah. Well, everything we do is about safety. When you hear our conversations, we talk about safety throughout the day. It's almost become an obsession with us in terms of how often we discuss safety.

And one of the things that I say to the new cohort groups that come on when we're getting ready to open. a new hub. One of the first things I say when I walk into the room and one of the last things I say when I walk out is safety over revenues. We will take safety over revenue every single day. If there is any reason that you, I don't care if you've been on site five years or you've been on site five minutes, if something doesn't feel right, then we stop the operation. And I think a lot of people are hesitant to do that at first until they realize we weren't kidding. I think there's an enormous amount of pressure on it. We take the responsibility of having this opportunity to help move the industry forward. We take it humbly, but we take the responsibility of operating

safely much more serious. And we look at that as the real opportunity to put numbers on the board. The problem right now, and I'm not being pejorative to the FAA when I say this, but we're being held in many ways to the same standards that crude aviation, or we used to say manned aviation, is held to. And so you start looking at the numbers of serious accidents that have happened by drone over the last three years of the handful, the handful, and I want to say five or six serious accidents that have happened that somebody was injured. In every single one of those cases, it was the operator who got injured. I mean, doing something like there was one where the drone just stopped responding is so the guy decided to reach up and grab it and pull it out of the sky. Bad idea.

And then another one where the tether, you know, they couldn't rewind the tether. So they tried to pull the drone out of the air using the delivery tether. Not our people, right? Just want to point out. But it's obviously the real challenge, and this is what I remind everybody, is yes, we've got a great track record as an industry. But we haven't been flying 100,000 flights a day beyond visual line of sight, carrying packages in disparate environmental conditions and other. radio wave signals and things that we may or may not be aware of. So what we have to do now is take this opportunity while we're in that smaller radius

to, like I said, put numbers on the board, demonstrate that we can be safe and also have the opportunity to deal with some incidents that we've had to deal with incidents. I mean, you know, and we learned from it. I mean, when we started in the early days, we were using 915 megahertz to connect the drones. Now, today, we have, you know, multiple SIM cards operating over LTE with at least two providers and at least two SIMs per provider for reliability, plus, you know, other types of redundancy that we've built in. And so I think double duplexed even on the connections. Yeah. That's correct. Yeah. So multiple carriers, multiple carriers, multiple SIMs per carrier.

That's how we operate. What's the, what instances have you had that are challenging? Have you lost a drone yet and what did you learn from it? So we've only of the heavy, you know, duty drones, the ones that are actually in production in the field, we have lost one that was not in the field. That was here in the test facility in Virginia Beach. Because, you know, when the man, you know, as we're rolling them out, we think we know what the specs are.

But, you know, we have a group here inside of drone up. That sole job is to find out what those limits really are. and and what kind of things can go wrong. You know, we'll put them in a scenario where we'll say you've got to launch this drone really, really fast. We would never do this in the real world, but stuff like that to see what kind of things can go wrong. How do we catch these in risk cases where somebody might be going a little quickly? And that's what happened with one that we had here. But it was in the test field.

It was in the test facility. And I say lost it. I mean, it's being repaired. But they did a, they did an undone. planned altitude drop event. I really want to come on a field trip and see the drone test pilots

push them to their limits. What is the speed now? Because, I mean, I've seen these things back in the early days when they were untapped. They didn't have limitors on them. And I saw these things doing 70, 80 miles an hour, I think. And it was terrifying. So, is there a limit that the FAA has put on speed?

What do you think the right speed limit it is because it would seem to me that going fast means the short of the trip, the less, the more safe it is because you have less time in air, less things that can happen? Or is there some sort of curve of speed to safety and there's some optimal speed to safety? Because does going faster make it less safe or more safe because it's a shorter trip? I don't know. What have you learned? You know, I think the FAA, we don't go anywhere near this speed right now. So I don't, I think it's 100 miles per hour. I have to confirm that. But, you know, none of us,

we maintain about 25 miles an hour about our maximum flight speed for a variety of reasons that are important. One is efficiency, battery efficiency. Two, well, let's start back with safety. You know, at that speed, there's always the ability to take control, alter route, do whatever. Also, at that speed, we found out that at 101,000 flights, we haven't had a single incident with a bird or something flying in the air,

and that's a big deal for us, right? Because when I was in the Navy, it was all about coming into port not hitting a whale. Here, it's all about not hitting a bird. People say, well, you don't want to hit the bird because it'll bring the drone down. It might. Probably not, unless it was a really big bird with the drones that we're operating, but it's more about wanting to minimize. Look, part of the benefit here is that we're operating on batteries.

There's, you know, we're not. There's no emissions from the drone. So let's go ahead and be one step safer. and let's try to do our best to protect the environment and the critters that were flying there before we were. Yeah, totally. One last sort of big picture question related to all of this, you know, FAA regulations, battery technology, adoption, consumer concern. What do you think that the time horizon looks like for this to be something that is totally commonplace when you're ordering online? You know, if you had asked me that two years ago, I probably would have given you a much different answer than I'm going to give you now.

But when we, I think part of the test, I used to joke until two years ago you had a better chance of getting hit by a stray golf ball in your bathroom than you did the news running a positive story about drones, right? Everything was negative, negative, negative, negative. Yeah. And when the pandemic hit and we were given the opportunity to partner with Walmart on the COVID test kit delivery. I think it was an interesting moment for our industry because people were scared. They wanted to know if they had COVID. A lot of them didn't want to get in the car. They didn't want to sit for hours in these lines.

So it was the first time for them to be able to order these kits and have them delivered at home and then just drop them in the mail and send them back. It was amazing the number of people who had even during the COVID test kit delivery in Cheek-Tawaga and North Las Vegas and Texas in El Paso, who wouldn't drive. up to the store to get tested, but would order the COVID test kit, have it delivered, and then drive to the store to tell us how amazing the experience was. And I think that's when we really started to see a shift. And people went, well, they're not loud. They're not noisy. We explain to them. We go in and we do community outreach and we tell them we don't record any

video while we're flying. We don't take any pictures. Even when we first started, we were taking a picture of the package just to show it's delivered, kind of like an Amazon driver does. So you'll get a picture says delivered. We don't even do that. So from the time that we take off to the time we land, we're not recording, we're not taking pictures. And we tell the communities this. And I'll tell you in Arkansas right now, we have people who drive up to the hub every day and ask, when are you going to be able to deliver to my house? When are you going to be able to deliver to my house? And we'll tell them and they'll come back. But to your question on when it's going to be commonplace.

I think it's going to happen a lot more quickly than people think. I mean, here's what we've got to overcome. We've got three different drones that we're working with right now. We've got these drones right now that you're seeing the pictures of. Those are being replaced next month by another drone. That'll have about a three to five mile range out and back and we'll be able to go a little bit faster. The next generation drone that's coming out is not a quad.

It's a whole totally different drone, and that's going to have about a 90-minute flight time, and it'll be able to travel at about 80 miles an hour. Holy cow, that sounds like a super game changer. That means you're going 20 miles away. It's great that we can go that fast and that far, but the problem is we're still stuck with regulatory issues, right? Yeah, a lot of sight, yeah. And because the FAA, we just finished this process with the FAA, but it's called the BVE loss arc. aviation rulemaking committee and given recommendations. We've got three or four paths that we think are going to crack the door open for going beyond

a visual out of sight. But what I tell the industry, and I remind everybody, is everybody wants to go beef loss. They'd say, look, our industry would just explode if we could fly beyond visual out of sight. And I ask all the time, okay, which one of your businesses is not able to scale now because you can't fly beef loss? well, you know, and it's, the reality is nobody's proven that that's limiting. What we're doing now by starting to do these deliveries and then hitting a concentration level where if we could go one more mile, we could increase, you know, delivery revenues by 45, 50, 60%.

And if you've got 200,000, say, flights at a mile or a mile and a half or mile 1.2, give me the chance to go to two. And I think that starts to increase it. And when you think about over 90% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of Walmart. And you've got basically a couple of hundred thousand skews that are designed for the audience that lives around that Walmart. These become distribution centers and that are providing incredible opportunity. And then the last thing I'll say is we are right now at about 22 minutes from the time you push, place the order until it's delivered. 70% of that time is trying to get the product out into the drone. And we think through optimization over the next 12 months, we'll get that down.

And our goal is to be delivering under 15 minutes here in the next, say, 8 to 10 months. Well, I mean, eventually the Walmart will be built such that you or an Amazon facility or whatever facility will be built such that you'll be able to go right up to the roof with the pack of batteries. or donuts or whatever it is. I'm ordering donuts. But those donuts going right up to the roof. The operators will be on the roof already. And you will need to build another air traffic controller because it'll be a high enough roof.

And the distance will be covered in five minutes. It'll just go straight up to the roof with some other. Like those nomadic tubes, like in the old banks, and it'll just, you know, shoot stuff like that. Right? There's got to be a better efficiency here in terms of the roof that already exists. And these places, right? And remember, at some point you don't necessarily even have to have an operator there

with a drone. So once you can fly beyond visual out of sight, we have another type of operation called telepreson operation. We actually test that today where we can fly drones from here in Virginia Beach. We can take off and land and fly routes in other countries. And obviously we do it in other countries because it would be a violation of FAA. So we're in safe areas in other countries. We take the drones off and fly them from here dynamically. At some point, once we, We've proven the viability of these platforms and we've proven that the parachutes work and that, you know, your mean failure rate is one in 150,000 hours. But by maintenance, you mitigate. Once we demonstrate, that's our responsibility as an industry is to not just prove it to the policymakers, not just prove it to the regulators, but we've got to prove that to the general public.

And the best way we can do it is with these controlled, safe operations that we're doing like we're going to be doing for the rest of this year. in communities where they can come out and see it and see how we do business. And that's not just drone up. I feel the entire industry is working together to try to prove that. And we will. Yeah, I mean, it's so obvious to anybody who has even moderately studied this, that drones are safer then. Cars driving on the road.

Anybody who's watched a delivery driver under the gun getting paid per delivery is going to know that a human driving a car on the roads is much more dangerous. There's pedestrians, there's other cars and other vehicles to hit. So that's obvious to everybody. And then, let's face it, you know, recreational aviation, it's not the safest thing in the world. I mean, every day, sadly, every couple of days, we see a Cessna or a Ceres or a Pilates or something goes down here in the United States. The FAA does incredible job breaking down the massive amount of user error that happens almost universally. You know this because you're in the field.

It's an era on takeoff or landing or a maintenance issue. If you watch the Blanco-Lirio channel on YouTube, which maybe you do or don't, but if you don't, there's a really good channel called Blanco-Lirio. And this commercial pilot breaks down every accident every day. It's unbelievable. I watch it and I gave him money on Patreon because I'm so obsessed with watching this. It's always the human, whether it's the human in maintenance or the human behind the controls. And, you know, when these drones are going out with the amount of software in them, they're just going to be a thousand times safer than humans at a minimum at this point in time, I think.

So I really appreciate it. You're right. I mean, it always comes down to decision chain, right? The decision chain. And somewhere along the way, yes, there may have been a mechanical failure, but it's way too often. And it's either the response to that failure or a series of bad decisions that ultimately end up in most of those. And because autonomy has reached the point where it is and the sensors that we have and the safety thing. You know, for example, on the generation drone that's rolling out now with us, if it senses a drop of more than a certain amount in a certain amount of time or a tilt or excessive vibration, it has a ballistic parachute that shoots out, it shuts off all of the engines, it disconnects.

the batteries and it makes this god awful noise. But for a reason, obviously, as it's floating to the ground is to try to notify anybody that, hey, because you can't hear it, it's just coming out of the air as a parachute. But, you know, it lands, you know, softly enough that you take the drone back, you figure out what happened. And it doesn't, it doesn't, it wouldn't, it wouldn't, it wouldn't create the type of havoc that a 170, you know, two or 182 coming down in the same condition would. Yeah, I mean, understatement of the,

yeah, century. Like these, we had a pilot here, you know, he's not, uh, able to, uh,

fly in fog or whatever. All he had to do recently just crashed into the headlands here in San Francisco, tragically was going out for a lunch ride from Sacramento to half aubei. And all he had to do was just go up. But he was afraid to call,

you know, call in a, um, a May Day and he didn't want to fly up apparently. And if he had just flown up, he wouldn't have hit the mountain. Instead, he just did a corkscrew until he hit something. And it's just these crazy tragedies. As you're saying, humans don't follow the protocols. They have all kinds of biases. The machines follow the protocol. They almost universally make the right decision. Something's wrong. You lose a rotor. You pop the

parachute. You live to fight another day. Humans are embarrassed. So many pilots have died because of just the sheer embarrassment of, you know, oh, I need help. It seems like the hubris is, you know, a significant percentage of the problems humans are making here, just and also being human. Right. Or suboptimal decision making. Listen, this has been amazing. I could talk to you all day.

Yeah. This is fascinating. I'm really excited that you're doing this, Tom, and we can't wait. Cities? That's what? A decade away, you think? I know, where are we in the cities part of this? I put in my address already, even though I knew better.

kind of in the verbs. It's kind of funny. People say, is this better in rural? Is this better in urban? Is this better? You know, it's in between. Because if you're too rural, then there's not enough density around you within your delivery radius for it to make economic sense. But when you're in cities, then what you end up with is a lot of multi-dwelling, you know, family dwelling issues and how do you deliver to them?

We have a solution that we're going to be rolling out in Q4 this year that we're pretty excited. about which will allow drone delivery to condos, hotels, campuses. And so we'll be doing that. But the issue with cities is we're not ready for that yet. And that's one of the things I think our industry also has to keep reminding ourselves is just because we think that we know what we're doing and just because we drive safety, we also have to acknowledge that things can go wrong. We were flying out in North Las Vegas at 150 feet.

And a police helicopter saw something on the ground that got their attention and they went into a dive and literally came down to about 100 feet over the ground to look at something. And this is out near the desert. And if it had to have been for the quick reaction of the pilots and the systems realizing what was going on, could have had a tragic end. The question is, is who was responsible for that? Well, technically, the helicopters out there have a floor. They're not supposed to go below. So the situation generally, back to your point is, is who has priority in the airspace and how do we figure out how to mutually respect those lines that drive that safety. But in the meantime, we have to be, we have to do the very thing I taught my troops in the military, and that is be ready for the unexpected because like the great philosopher, Mike Tyson once said, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

So we have to be ready for that. Yeah. Well, listen, continue success. This is awesome. And we just love the fact that you're doing this and taking it so seriously. I can't think of a better person to do this. You're taking it with a lot of responsibility. And I think that's going to pay off.

It may be a little bit slower. You may get there a little more a couple of quarters behind maybe somebody here in Silicon Valley who wanted to go faster and take more risk. But I think it's the right move because you're going to be judged to a much higher standard because it's a new technology. and you're well aware of that. So continue with success. Thanks for coming on the pod.

Tom Walker, we appreciate the time. Thank you so much. Take good care. Talk soon. Thank you a lot. Yeah, come back anytime.

Thank you a lot. Thank you a lot. That was great. That was interesting. Fascinating. Well, you know, somebody in the thing was like, you're not asking hard enough questions.

I was like, what is the hard question we missed here? I mean, we talked about these things falling out of the sky. Some people hate it. Right? Like some people hate it. it conceptually.

Why? What's the downside? Because I don't know about buildings and airplanes and all the other things that humans have done to like mess up the... I mean, listen, I understand the idea that like if you want to look up in the sky, you don't necessarily, you know, like buzzing drones. Like aesthetics and sound. I mean, I will say electric drones don't have to be very loud.

No. They're much quieter than trucks driving packages around. And planes. And planes. Think about planes. Like, have you ever seen those videos where like a plane goes over and every bird is like, boom? Yeah.

Like, I wonder. But I will say a drone flew over my house the other day and I was like, I will shoot that right? Like it sort of hovered in front of my window and I was like, I will come for you. So the privacy is a real question. Yeah. But it's also like that's not a thing we're used to. So when a drone flies over my house now, I know it's not from Walmart.

I know it's looking at my window and I'm going to shoot it. Yeah. So I mean, there's a difference between somebody going 20 stories above your one or two story house. There are 18 stories. You don't even notice them. Yeah. And they're going 25 miles an hour.

They're not lingering. Yeah. That's one situation. The situation I don't like, because I had this happen as well, is somebody was flying a drone, you know, around our neighborhood. And it was kind of obviously looking at us in the backyard. And like, that to me is kind of weird and creepy. Like, you know these things have high-res cameras on them. And they're obviously going around, you know, and it's, they're peeping tombs, you know, looking at people.

And there is something disturbing about somebody flying something over your house. house to watch you. That's why I think he was very, you know, specific. I don't know if you notice he said, we don't record anything. So we could record. They don't even take pictures of the drop off. Like no camera at all. I want a looped video of the drop off. That should be a checkbox I get to put in. I would like to see it land in my backyard. Yeah, but if there was ever like, I mean, I guess it would exist. Yeah. Then it exists on a hard drive somewhere. We'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah. You made a good point about, uh, in our chat about the number of crash is happening with the increased drivers.

So one of the things that's happening is as we all order more e-commerce and we stop going to stores is the number of rides being done, the amount of deliveries, the amount of delivery trucks is massively increasing in the world, which of course means more crashes. So maybe give us a couple of these stats here, Molly. I mean, and I don't think these ones even include Amazon. There have been some stories about Amazon delivery vehicles specifically because they've got those huge trucks and also let people use their own car. But so just if you're looking at UPS, DHS and FedEx, since 2012, UPS cars, the number of crashes has increased by 38%.

DHL Express vehicles, the number of crashes has increased by 100%. And the number of crashes involving FedEx vehicles has increased by 254%. That was between 2012 and 2021. And those, again, don't even include the Amazon delivery vehicle crashes, which in my quick duck during the show I didn't find. So what we need to know here is the number of miles driven. So if the number of miles driven, you know, doubled in that time period or tripled in that time period, they might in fact be safer. I don't know.

You know, so that's the one thing I don't know is the denominator here of what's changed. We're looking at the number of crashes in a vacuum. But anyway, net net, there's more crashes on the road. Now crashes per mile driven, who knows? But the bottom line is, I think these are going to be massively. I think like 10x, 100x safer than deliveries being done or the ways. It's not going to be for every delivery. It's going to be things that are, you know, 10 pounds and under now.

Maybe it gets to 20. Maybe there's some limit that we don't want hundreds of pounds in the air, 20 stories above us. But, you know, I could see these things dropping off. You could have five drones dropping off your groceries, you know, 50 pounds with the groceries, 10 pounds at a time. And they just back to back, you know, every two minutes show up at your house. and you just have boom, boom, boom, boom, can you imagine going out like you're having a barbecue

and you're like, you know, it'd be great if we had more chips and salsa? And it's like, beep, beep, boop. Chips and salsa are dropping from the sky? I mean, how many times do you're like, I would like some salsa? I'd like, we're out of the way. And I'm going to be safe. Like, these do, these are zero emissions vehicles, right? They're electric drones.

They don't contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Like, there are always going to be tradeoffs. But if we live in a world where, people want deliveries. If I, everything is going to, as somebody just said, have pros and cons. And I think this has more potentially pros than cons. Hmm. I don't, this is an interesting charge.

Also, like, as we've been saying, Tom is exactly the kind of guy that you want in charge of this, right? Like, you don't want a 22 year old Silicon Valley. Who's just like, farther faster, bigger. And then you've got him like running out of battery and falling out of the sky. And you got like, the fact that he, they're basically trying to build in air traffic control for drones, like figure out who has priority. Like, that's all, that's what has to happen.

It's got to develop in a way that allows for a healthy ecosystem as opposed to like one company winning it all and killing anybody in their past. I'm trying to figure out this chart here. This is a chart of injury rates by injury category for Amazon delivery system, Amazon DSPs and non-delivery, non-Amazon delivery in 2021. Injuries per 100 FTEs. I don't know what FTEs are in this.

Full time. Equivalence. Okay. So 18 out of 100 folks got injured, lost time, light duty or other. So basically the delivery partners, I think what happens is what Amazon is doing,

I think this has been criticized a whole bunch, is in order to have it be cheap and fast. And fast. If you put a delivery partner as opposed to one of your own employees, you then obscureify your, and you create a jump in liability, both for the driver, you know, their insurance, whatever. And let's face it, somebody running these small operations will take more risk than somebody who's a manager at Amazon. So by having delivery system

partners, DSPs, they're shielded a little bit from their behavior. And it's just like Google or Facebook, they use people to review content who are not employees, their contractors, so that they have a little bit of a shield. It's a little bit of a management trick, you know, in terms of responsibility. Yeah. And you see it here in the numbers. So you're the manager and you've got your own little mom and pop shop of, you know, 50 drivers in Arizona. You're trying to make money. You hire people for less. You demand they go faster. You know, you don't pay them overtime. Whatever. is. You skirt some rules and you increase performance, but then also increase injuries. BuzzFeed and ProPublica did a big story back in 2019. I knew that there was something about this

that talked about these Amazon delivery vehicles and the deaths that they were causing. And I mean, I think it was like they'd been involved in 60 accidents in one year, maybe 13 fatalities. I mean, yeah. You know, it's, it's if you probably, I mean, actually, it gets to our exact point. If you prioritize speed and cost efficiency overall, you're going to get people killed. Listen, there's a safety knob, there's a speed knob, and there's a cost knob. And if you want to play with the knobs, you know, like that's part of running a business. We get it. But when you got that safety one, you're kind of obligated to maybe not turn up the speed one as much and just think it through. And, you know, we, Darinose is the, is the perfect example.

She's trying to go faster than she should. She should have gone slow and did one test, then two tests, right? Like, this guy's the anti-Elizabeth Holmes. He's like, we're going to do a line of sight, then we're going to go to five miles. I'm like, I can't we go further. Oh, wow. You're on 25 miles an hour. It's like, we can.

And it's like, well, why? Why? What if that, you know, contributes 10% chance to our chances of getting in an accident, 1% of our chances to get an accident, why would you even do that? And so move fast and break things when you're building SaaS software is completely different

than when you're flying drones over people's heads or doing blood testing, you know, or doing delivery, you know, last mile delivery. So just something to keep in mind when you hear that phrase, if you're a founder, move fast and break things,

totally fine in your office with software. You want to challenge a server to, you know, run more cron jobs faster and you know that's that's like one thing you know you want to push your iPhone to the limit with your video game like move fast and break it yeah crash the iPhone it's not don't crash the car or the drone all right we got some other news so uh should we all right everybody uh hope you enjoyed this discussion obviously we want to hear more of your thoughts on what you think right what a what a what did what do you want a drone delivery in a town near you uh but i can say that for my part at least

I, as we have said ad nauseum, big, big fan of Tom Walker, big fan. Yeah, like it. And if you want to suggest any We Live in the Future content, producers at This Week in Startups.com, we always love when the founder, I'm sorry, when founders out there and fans of the show give us ideas for things for we live in the future, things that feel like science fiction, but are becoming, you know, science reality. More real every day. Yeah. So definitely put in the subject line. we live in the future. We're WL-T-I-F.

All right. See you tomorrow, everybody. Yeah. All right. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.