00:30:14 · Bobby Healy
[00:30:14] S1: 100% we will. We're going be the number one drone delivery operator in Europe. But I don't want piss everybody else off. No, I would say we're five years away in Ireland. Because first of all, the IAA, really credible team, Air Nav, a really credible team, have no mandate to make this happen. It needs to come from the Transport Minister. Transport Minister needs to say, we want use space and we want it fast. And it's not about Manna, it's not to enable Manna, it's to enable every startup that wants to build technology in Ireland in this space needs a use space, right? Hospitals, the Rotunda Hospital needs use space, right? So there's so many users, but it has to come at cabinet level that says, IAA, make this happen, make it happen quickly. And until that happens, it's not going to happen. So you need political will, and that's what China has. You know, obviously with a dictatorship, it's handy if you're a dictator. America has a dictator too, and, you know, verdict commas, but shit happens, right? So there's four companies in the world doing drone delivery, and they're now all in The United States. It's Amazon, Google, Wing, sorry, Google, Wing, Zipline, us, right? They're all there because now collectively there's about 5,000,000 deliveries by the end of this year, maybe a little bit less, say 4,000,000 deliveries by the end of this year, next year probably about 50,000,000, So it's grown at 10x next year. We're gonna be part of that. We'll probably be two to 5,000,000 of those next year, something around those lines.
00:31:46 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:31:46] S2: And you guys position yourselves as the Ryanair of the industry. Because the [00:31:51] S1: business model, we think the business model is low cost airline. Yeah. So it's not sexy, it's not tech, it's not about that. Like, see, Zip Line's vision is amazing or whatever. Know, say to everyone, look at it, it's so cool. But it doesn't work financially yet. It's to be a lot of hard... So think about it this way. Ryanair beat British Airways, they beat Lufthansa, they beat Air France easily. They're all flying the same planes. It's the same product in the Verticomas. But actually... [00:32:19] S2: You shift more passengers. You ship, I think, you've you've more deliveries per aircraft [00:32:26] S1: Oh, yeah. Like, per we're four times better than the next best. Yes. We do eight deliveries an hour per aircraft. [00:32:32] S2: Okay. And that's down to?
00:32:34 · Bobby Healy
[00:32:34] S1: Architecture. Right. It's like architecture is it's so we don't have to wait for our aircraft to charge or for the battery to cool down, everyone else does. So a zipline aircraft comes home after a 10 mile flight, battery is hot as hell, you have to cool it down, that might take fifteen minutes to cool it down, so it's safe to charge, then you have to charge it. So we don't do that. Our aircraft lands, we get the cargo into it, it's back up in the air in thirty seconds. And it's not because we're geniuses, because we start at the start saying the tech just needs to be safe and scalable and easy to manufacture. That's all. And you can use humans to load the cargo, that's okay to use humans. One of our humans, as we call them, can do 15 to 20 deliveries an hour, whereas the guy in the car can do two, so we're 10 times more productive. And that's important. So, low cost airline, you know, you see Ryanair gate when they board the plane, it's the flight attendants that board the plane using an iPhone or an Android phone with the app, everything they need. You see British Airways, there are six people there dealing with all the exceptions and all that shit, and then they have to hand it off to people that are in the plane. That's our competition in the drone delivery space. None of them think about that, you know, ultimately at maturity, when you're doing hundreds of millions of flights, it is actually about the process and the operation that makes you make money and makes you better than the next guy. And we're, you know, unabashedly comparing ourselves to Ryanair and saying that that's actually how you create a winner in this space, is you create an operationally excellent culture.
00:34:08 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:34:08] S2: I heard you talk before about your vision was a ten year time frame. I think you might have moved that out [00:34:14] S1: to Yeah. Fifteen or twenty [00:34:17] S2: And you raised a series b, which we call massive. You made not so [00:34:22] S1: Okay. Much Can I give you the numbers? Yeah. Amazon has spent over 6,000,000,000 on their drone delivery program. Google has spent about 4,000,000,000, just shy of 4,000,000,000. Zipline have raised 2,800,000,000, and most recently they closed a 1,000,000,000 round on a 20,000,000,000 valuation. We've raised 100,000,000. So just So to [00:34:46] S2: be I take it you are going be going for a Series C at some point. [00:34:49] S1: Yeah, 100%. [00:34:50] S2: Yeah. And are we looking next year for that? [00:34:53] S1: Yeah, we'd run out of money then. [00:34:56] S2: Okay. And that's gonna be for bigger sum money, it has to be.
00:34:58 · Bobby Healy
[00:34:58] S1: Yeah, for sure. Like, if we fail, it's gonna be we won't be able to raise enough capital, and we'll just have to sell the thing or whatever, you know, whatever outcome is the outcome. So right now the critical thing for us, we have the best platform, or at least certainly it's better than Amazon's platform, it's in some ways better than Google, some ways not as good, and ahead of ziplines, I would say, in some ways and other ways not. But we're in the mix, and we have a rightful claim to be the winner, right? So therefore now it's completely about capital. So now we're building an airline in The United States. R and D will grow. I would say we'll intensify R and D here in Ireland. We'll build more planes, we'll build more designs, we'll go faster, we'll probably have we made a big promise about jobs, 400 jobs in our Series B, everything got just messed up because of what happened, our inability to grow here. But we are growing engineering here in R and D, so that's grown more slowly than we want, you know, but we'll grow it, and all of that will happen in Ireland. And that's not me wearing my green jersey. That's me standing by my promises because I made some commitments and I'm going to keep them, and so R and D will grow here. And by the way, it's still the best country in the world to grow this business, to start it. Like, it, bring it to where it is, still the best place. Because we have great workforce, we need stock options sorted out, that's a bit of an embarrassment. We have an unbelievably strong regulator. That gave me, by the way, a pain in the ass the whole time. It's a proper industrial grade regulator that is big, by the way, 80% of transatlantic flights come to our airspace, but it's a regulator that actually was willing to go to the table and work and partner with industry to bring it forward, right? And they were always a pain in the ass for us, as any good regulator should be checking absolutely everything to make sure everything is the way it should be. And so there's no reason the next Manna or something like it shouldn't be building here. It's only when you actually go to roll out the service that you run into the brick wall in Ireland.
00:37:06 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:37:06] S2: What has been the trickiest moment so far in Manna's life? [00:37:10] S1: Explaining to investors why we weren't growing. It's like investors say, this is all great, but you have a license to fly, why aren't you flying? It's like, that was a bit tricky, [00:37:21] S2: you know? Did it ever come close to death, to failure?: No.