00:14:14 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:14:14] S2: remember that era, like DJI drones, was fascinated by them. I started buying them, flying them all over the place, putting drone videos up all over the web. Drones were the the next big thing at that time on everybody's Christmas But no [00:14:25] S1: one was making money, though. [00:14:26] S2: I was going to, you know, CES in Las Vegas. Yeah. There were drone cars, and people were talking about cities being rebuilt with drone pads on top. This was a moment for drones. [00:14:37] S1: It was, yeah. [00:14:37] S2: Now you're sitting in your back garden, you're still a chair of car trawler, you're probably messing with the drones, maybe you're hacking them as well. Yeah. And then what, you get this idea that they can start delivering things.
00:14:47 · Bobby Healy
[00:14:47] S1: Yeah, like, well, how do you make money? Said, right, so, okay, there's a core technology there, baseline technology, it's well understood, commoditized, know, off the shelf, DJI drones, beautiful out of box experience, like Apple levels out of box experience. So it's already too late. Clearly, the Chinese have won that war, so it's like, okay. And, you know, there's no... And at the same time, a load of people were setting up drone companies to build drones and sell them, like, that's just a loser's game. So I said, well, okay, when the drone doesn't matter, because in Manna the drone doesn't matter, right? It's just table stakes. He says, what could you do? What's the problem you can solve with drones? So there's the film footage, the weddings, the surveying, all that stuff. And those are all, you know, you can build a billion dollar business there, no problem, right? But still, I'm looking to build a $100,000,000,000 business or a trillion dollar business. It's all in or all or nothing for me. What spaces can you solve that are that big that drones are the answer? And actually, you get the logistics. It's moving stuff around. Because the way society moves stuff around now is just completely wrong. It's cars, roads, it's silly, it doesn't work, but we do it, right? Amazon's big advantage is that it has scaled logistics and that transfers into a marketplace that's viable, right? But if you look at the local chip shop or if you look at Uber Eats or Just Eat or DoorDash, they're all using people and cars, mostly in cars, in suburbs it's in cars. So I pretty quickly got to, well, the job that a guy does in where I live, Rafaarnum in Libros, again, I tell this story a lot but it's true, Libros is a mile away from the gaff, you know, great chipper, I'm allowed...
00:16:27 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:16:27] S2: It's chipper. [00:16:28] S1: It's chipper, yeah. Know, once a month I go and get me a bag of chips and I saw their delivery guy sitting in the car, he's a big lad now, and he's sitting in a big old diesel car with the engine running all winter and he's sitting outside to keep himself warm, and he gets four, five, six orders a night, he gets a fiver per order, might get a tip, that's whatever, $30.40, £50 in his pocket, goes straight into the pub and spends it, and he's happy with that, right? But his car is depreciating, he's funding those deliveries with his car, diesel, all that stuff, and customers are waiting half an hour for their chips and the chips are cold. So I said, I can replace that guy, fly straight out of Libros to my house, which is, as a crow flies, about a mile. And I did it, so I built, you know, I actually literally attached a bag of chips to a drone and flew it, probably breaking a couple of rules, straight to my house. The aircraft completely had no problem carrying a bag of chips. You know, it was a Mavic Air, as you would think, and it was fine. Like, I didn't even know... [00:17:27] S2: That is not a big drone. [00:17:28] S1: The final question... Well, the delivery thing with the cherry picker was I was toying with, you know, is parachute the way to do it, and and, can you just drop it on a paper parachute, right, and make it work? So I built a load of paper parachutes of different sizes and dropped it from a cherry... Big fucking cherry picker, by the way, I was terrified of the thing. [00:17:46] S2: You hired this?
00:17:46 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:17:46] S2: You hired this? [00:17:47] S1: Yeah, in my house. [00:17:48] S2: How do you hire a cherry picker? [00:17:50] S1: That's the fun thing most people don't know. You can literally get a gigantic cherry picker delivered to your house for a day for nothing. [00:17:56] S2: One of these kunatsis or... [00:17:57] S1: My god, this thing was 180 feet, 60 meters. And I get an extra pile on. It was so big, I was afraid to go the whole way up. I said, this thing's gonna fall over. But I did get a love for cherry pickers as part of that process, and you can literally just call up a cherry picker company, they'll drop it off in a flatbed outside your house, and you can just... With no license, nothing, you can have it. So outside your house? It's inside. I have a good sized garden I'm lucky to have. [00:18:23] S2: Okay. Then... [00:18:24] S1: And we have a yard, tarmac yard. So we drove the cherry picker into the tarmac yard, and we put the thing as far as it would go, and I brought all the products up, we had cameras, you know, slow mo, all that stuff, and I tested all the different systems of dropping the thing on parachutes. [00:18:40] S2: Sorry, these are Big Macs or chicken over [00:18:42] S1: Yeah, so McDonald's and Libros. I got everything off the menu, and it doesn't need to be hot to test, it doesn't change, so I bought everything off their menu, everything off Spice McDonald's Everything. Spice bags you can throw from a distance. [00:18:55] S2: Well, was gonna ask, what Not actually survived the
00:18:55 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:18:55] S2: Well, was gonna ask, what Not actually survived the [00:18:57] S1: much. So, like, everything explodes at terminal velocity, nothing survives, you know, like everything really, it's not great. So terminal velocity wasn't going to be good. Terminal velocity with cushioning was interesting, so put like think egg cartons, compressible cardboard. So I was thinking, what's the maximum velocity that it can tolerate with cheap packaging? That was the question I was answering, right? So it's a combination of compressible cardboard and paper parachute. Paper parachute would have to be enormous do the job, so... And then I concluded it's just going to be, at scale it doesn't work. Subscale it worked, we'd all be happy for one or two slightly smashed hamburgers, but... So the conclusion was, you need a winch, need a system to slow it down, which complicates everything, by the way. Okay, so... From a safety point of view. [00:19:53] S2: I'm fast forwarding again a little bit, because we know a lot of the story of Manna. Eventually you did set up delivery operations, a lot of towns around Ireland, a lot of parts around Dublin. You flew tens of thousands of delivery flights over quite a long period of time, because I remember at the beginning launching and then... [00:20:15] S1: 2019 Yeah, we started [00:20:17] S2: yeah, over quite a number of years, ultimately setting up a factory in Glasnevin to build your own drones. Then this year, you land a major funding round, series b, 50,000,000 Yeah. From ARK Invest. [00:20:32] S1: Well, need a billion, not 50,000,000.
00:20:32 · Bobby Healy, Adrian Weckler
[00:20:32] S1: Well, need a billion, not 50,000,000. [00:20:36] S2: We're here in Little Ireland. That's still Yeah. Yeah. To be a major funding round. So $50,000,000 from ARK Invest, Cathie Wood, celebrity investor [00:20:43] S1: Yeah. [00:20:43] S2: Tesla, OpenAI, many others. And then shortly after that, you announced a pause on operations, on flying operations here in Ireland, and also a move to The US Yeah. Both from a business development point of view and yourself personally. You moved to Tulsa in Oklahoma. I just wanna focus on that American bit first. Can you describe to me what Tulsa has in terms of, you know, two week permitting and and and the environment there Yeah. Compared to, say, Dublin?