00:09:48 · Bobby Healy
[00:09:48] S1: Yeah. You would you would go to an airline, let's say it was, you know, British Airways or whatever, Virgin Atlantic, you'd booking your flight, and then there'd be suddenly three cars offered in Malaga, know, three car hires, and you'd say purchase, and that would be us. And we would take your £200 for your car hire in July for your holidays, and we would sit on your £200 for six months, and it would be ours. And then you'd rent the car, you'd go get the car, and then we would pay the supplier a month later, two months later, whatever. So we had what's called a negative working capital model where we were taking all the customer cash beautiful model, and like it doesn't work anymore, that model doesn't work anymore, but it all worked great. And we were, you know, over 1,000,000,000 in sales, billion and 0.5 in sales, I think, at the peak, 600 people. But it was like, I always say this, a ham sandwich could have built that business and made it successful. It wasn't a difficult business to build or to grow. And Mike McGurty, who is the CEO, is, you know, proper legend, proper management guy, knows how to grow a team, knows how to foster a culture, knows how to, you know, put discipline, commercial discipline, all that stuff. We were a very good team because I have none of that. And so I was tech strategy product, Mike was the CEO, but the actual business was you could build that tech stack in a couple of hours with AI now. I mean, I could literally point an AI at a car trawler website and tell it how the middleware works and say, give me that. Opus 5.5, you'll have it working industrial scale within the day.
00:11:23 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:11:23] S2: Well, to be fair, that's a twenty year old, tech stack that we're talking about, twenty year old code. [00:11:27] S1: Yeah, correct. Yeah. So I [00:11:29] S2: can see how AI might, do that now. But anyway, so you're wiped out to zero. COVID comes along, the model, the travel gets [00:11:37] S1: All the cancellations came in, so we had to refund everybody. Suddenly, we're refunding six months of working capital, but the bills are still coming in from suppliers. [00:11:45] S2: So you took a major bath on that then? [00:11:46] S1: Yeah. Totally. Got zeroed. [00:11:48] S2: Right. Okay. But you had enough from It
00:11:48 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:11:48] S2: Right. Okay. But you had enough from It [00:11:50] S1: was a fine time. Yeah. COVID was very special for me. But, you know, like, honestly, I won't say I didn't care. You know, was quite philosophical about it. You know, I knew I could build again. Was already building man at that stage anyway, so it was like, you know, I'm motivated by enjoying what I do. And I was bored out of my face for six years in Gardner, I was fifteen years running with Mike, and I was really like, I like to build. I like to start with a principle, with a plan, build a team, build a product, you know, get it flying, in inverted commas. And that's where I'm happy, you know? And that is my life's mission, to continue building companies. It isn't you know, maximize, you know, whatever, the money, any of that stuff. Like, of course, I'm always trying to do that, but what makes me happy is being, you know, running the teams, building the product, and driving that forward. And so, did okay, just to be clear, we did okay out of CarTrawler, everybody did, and it was a great story, and it still is, like it's still there, just got sold to Expedia. Good ending for it, I think it was probably the best ending for it that could have been achieved because it's 20, it's nearly twenty five years old now, it's no longer relevant, it's broker model, all that stuff. [00:13:06] S2: Talk to me about hiring a cherry picker crane for your back garden and everything in McDonald's just to see if the McDonald's bags will survive when they're dropped to the ground because you've been playing with drones.
00:13:06 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:13:06] S2: Talk to me about hiring a cherry picker crane for your back garden and everything in McDonald's just to see if the McDonald's bags will survive when they're dropped to the ground because you've been playing with drones. [00:13:20] S1: Yeah. So that was, I had the idea for drone delivery, then I was thinking, okay, well, what's the You're still on [00:13:26] S2: CarTrawler at this point? [00:13:27] S1: Yeah, was still on the board of CarTrawler. Was, I was the face of CarTrawler. I was the one meeting customers, doing all the public speaking, all that stuff, and I was on the board, but I was just not interested in, like when I was on the board I was on my laptop coding during the board meetings. Manna was obviously different, and at the very start, before I started the company officially and started to say, right, this is what I'm doing, because I'm thinking, right, what am I going to do next? Everything you build is a decade, right? So you're saying, right, what's my next decade? And I was 49, so, like, you know, not a lot of decades left, right? I'm going to pick something, I'm going to research it, I'm going to be sure that it's doable, subject to a bunch of risks. And so I was clear that, you know, drones, the technology was commoditized, like confluence of pricing and ability Well, [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
00:14:14 · 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...