Skydio CEO Adam Bry on why Silicon Valley shouldn’t draw red lines for drone use

Today, I’m talking with Adam Bry, who is CEO of Skydio, the leading US maker of autonomous drones. Before we recorded this episode, I actually got to remotely operate one of Skydio’s drones in the Bay Area from Adam’s laptop in our podcast studio in New York and fly an indoor drone around our office. You can check out the full video of that on our YouTube channel. Beyond flying drones around the country, Adam and I talked about why Skydio is so focused on the enterprise market — I asked him a lot about working with police and military, but you’ll hear him say a lot of Skydio’s customers are utility companies that use drones to remotely inspect important infrastructure in ways that weren’t possible before.  Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. That’s a big market, but it’s also one that was being served by cheap consumer drones in the past — products that basically no longer exist on the US market since most of them came from China, and the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones late last year. All those inexpensive DJI drones disappeared overnight, leaving expensive Skydio products as the main alternative. Adam and I talked about all that and the reality of manufacturing complex products like drones in the United States. We also talked about Skydio’s work with the military and how Skydio’s use of AI lines up with defense work — I really wanted to know where Adam’s lines were, at a time when military use of AI is more controversial than ever.  There’s a lot in this one — maybe more than anything, it was refreshing to hear Adam talk about using AI to bring even more people to work at Skydio as the company expands. And again, I got to fly the drones, which ruled.  Okay: Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Adam Bry, you are the co-founder and CEO of Skydio. Welcome to Decoder. I’m very excited to be here with you. I am super excited to talk with you. We just demoed flying an X10 drone remotely. I have a lot of follow-up questions about that. That was super interesting. I would say the drone business itself is in a moment of extreme change. There are policies keeping some of your competitors out of the country. There’s what you’re doing with autonomy and working with governments and militaries around the world. Then, there’s just the state of drone technology in general, which seems like it’s on the cusp of being yet another thing. So, there’s quite a lot to talk about. Let’s just start with the basics. Unless you’re a drone nerd, you might not have heard of Skydio. Explain what Skydio is and how the company came to be. We are the largest US drone manufacturer. We make drones that are essentially flying sensor platforms. We started in 2014, and at this point, we serve what we think of as the critical industries our civilization depends on. We work with public safety. We work with militaries. We also work with energy utilities, construction companies, departments of transportation, and security organizations.  The common thread between all of our customers is that they have hardcore, oftentimes high-risk physical operations, where putting sensors in the right place at the right time to get better information can fundamentally change outcomes. That’s what we deliver. We deliver end-to-end solutions where the drone is a key piece, but the software, autonomy, integrations, and, increasingly, the end-to-end workflows for the different industries built around the drone’s capabilities are really what our customers are buying. We’re at a super exciting moment where after years of talking about a lot of this stuff, it’s really starting to work at scale with incredible impact. If I think about just our drone coverage over the years, it started with those first DJI drones almost 10 or 15 years ago now. The first Phantom drones were pretty rickety. They had these giant batteries. And it was really just about flight, and being able to control flight in an easy-to-use way. Then we very quickly got to, “Oh boy, we could put fancy cameras in the sky,” and that was really fun. And those cameras got really fancy. Now you’re saying it’s a whole sensor suite, or is it just augmented cameras? I actually think what you described there closely parallels the chapters of the drone industry that I think about. In the very early days, these electric flying machines were really toys. I think of the first chapter, and the first 10 years was about the electrification of radio-controlled airplanes, which were recreational. It was fun to go out and fly. This is the world that I come from. I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes.  What I think happened is that people started bringing the toys to work and realizing that if you put the right camera on there and you had a skilled pilot flying it, you could do a lot of useful stuff. That created c

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