The Big Tech Show
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.
00:37:21 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:37:21] S2: you know? Did it ever come close to death, to failure?: No. [00:37:25] S1: Well, I mean, we're always close to death. So we're venture backed, we don't make money, we burn money, and everything that's in our control, we can do fine. Engineering, product, strategy, that's like, we will not fail so long as it's in our control. But the stuff that's out of our control, the environmental, like not being able to grow, I would say the political part of it, not in our control, and that potentially could have killed us. Like, definitely, we lost two years because of it, which is an age in our world. And the next kind of risk for us becomes to meaningfully, like to be a leader, we need to be thinking about 10% market share in The United States. And that's, you know, there's 4,000,000,000, 4,500,000,000 deliveries, food deliveries a year today in The United States, growing at 15%, probably should be three or four times that, but there's not enough drivers, so right now it's, say, 4,000,000,000 growing to five, half of those we can do because they're valid for drone delivery. There's probably a market of two to 3,000,000,000 deliveries a year today in The United States for us to replace. Yeah, it's a lot of aircraft, lot of growth, a lot of boots on the ground, thousands of employees. It's rolling out a low cost airline. [00:38:43] S2: Tens of thousands of drones.
00:38:43 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:38:43] S2: Tens of thousands of drones. [00:38:45] S1: And actually, probably tens of thousands of employees too. It's closer to hundreds of thousands of drones. So to get there, you just need an inordinate amount of capital because what will happen is the McDonald's of this world, the Chick Fil A's, the Burger Kings, the hospitals, whatever, they're gonna come to us to say, yeah, we'd love to work with you, and here's our 30,000 locations we need you to roll out to. You need to be ready to do that. You can't just go from what we have now, 30 bases to 30,000 bases. [00:39:15] S2: Is there any capital left? AI is just sucking in the last cent. [00:39:19] S1: I think that environment is very helpful for us because embodied AI is with that, right? And we're embodied AI, right? So physical devices, robots with AI, we're in a good place there. [00:39:31] S2: But there may not actually be...