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?
00:20:43 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[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? [00:21:16] S1: Yeah. Yeah. It's very important to understand first what Manna is. Up to now, it's been an R and D business that operates up to now in Ireland. So, you know, I love that The Irish Times announced that we racked up 50,000,000 in losses, clearly understand how venture works, right? So, we've been investing and building a platform, right? So, if you think about it that way up to where we are now, then it became time to start, right? We had a great aviation license in Europe and The EU, allowed us to fly beyond visual line of sight, pretty much unrestricted. We could fly anywhere, even centre Dublin if we wanted to. Then we just you saw, mean, it's well documented, we just couldn't get plan and permission anywhere. And unfortunately, no one's I can't blame anyone, you know, it's just we don't have planning regulations in any way that understand the concept of use space. I'm sure you've heard of use space, the drone regulations. Yeah. [00:22:18] S2: And look, you've always adopted the green jersey. You always... Whenever you get a chance, you usually talk up Ireland. I do. It's a place
00:22:18 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:22:18] S2: And look, you've always adopted the green jersey. You always... Whenever you get a chance, you usually talk up Ireland. I do. It's a place [00:22:26] S1: to do business, the [00:22:27] S2: government, the IDA, all of those things. Also the regulator here. [00:22:31] S1: Yep. [00:22:32] S2: And Ireland as an aviation hub. Yeah. Yeah. And yet, when it comes down to it, when it comes down to it, there's one part of that system at least where you kind of felt you couldn't continue the business there, that you had to leave. [00:22:50] S1: Would say it did huge damage to our business. Like, we were two years unable to open up new bases. Like, in Glasnevin, where we had like, what, 150 people working? We couldn't even open a base in our own HQ. To no particular anybody's fault. We went too fast for Ireland. Like, I don't blame Ireland here. We went so fast, no one saw it coming, like, space is what we needed, right, to give the planners what they need to permit stuff, and we we have no use space in Ireland. The IEA, ERNAV, Ireland, you know, they've no budget to do use space.