00:13:08 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:13:08] S0: When you first started the company, you and Soren built like 30 drones then just literally put them in your backpack and went to Ukraine? Samsonite. [00:13:14] S1: Yes. The American Tourister. [00:13:16] S0: Okay. Samsonite. The cream of the crop. With this sort of like with launching a new product after you've already built a brand and built a reputation, and you also have the credibility to say like this thing will work, is there a different decision process for launching the product if you're gonna do something completely new? [00:13:31] S1: Totally. I think we've built a brand of products working and that brand can come down just as fast as it comes up. Right? Like we only have to have like one bullshit demo product for users to no longer trust us. People's lives are at stake with this thing and and with with products like this. So we have to be a little more careful maybe than just like, hey, let's try it. We also have to be a little more intentional in what we're doing with a product. You know, we'll we'll have user groups that we're really close with and we really trust, and we'll be like, you know, don't we know if this thing's gonna work. We don't know if this is a good idea yet, but let's give it a shot. Let me get your input. We we take that input very seriously before we, you know, go public with something like Archer AI.
00:13:31 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
[00:13:31] S1: Totally. I think we've built a brand of products working and that brand can come down just as fast as it comes up. Right? Like we only have to have like one bullshit demo product for users to no longer trust us. People's lives are at stake with this thing and and with with products like this. So we have to be a little more careful maybe than just like, hey, let's try it. We also have to be a little more intentional in what we're doing with a product. You know, we'll we'll have user groups that we're really close with and we really trust, and we'll be like, you know, don't we know if this thing's gonna work. We don't know if this is a good idea yet, but let's give it a shot. Let me get your input. We we take that input very seriously before we, you know, go public with something like Archer AI. [00:14:14] S0: So there's this idea of like focus. Yeah. Right? And it's very easy to get distracted and work on like multiple things before you're ready. How'd you decide now is the time to start building multiple products in parallel? That's a good question.
00:14:27 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:14:27] S1: I think you need to kind of earn your right to to take the distraction. I feel like Archer is finally on a path to a million drones where it seems plausible. You know, we're, like I said, building thousand plus per week right now. By the end of the year, we'll be doing a 130,000 a year run rate. And we've got great plans for next year and the year after. We have some preliminary designs on that million drone line. It feels like we're ready for our... Archer is is set up to really hit its stride where we can actually start spending a little bit of our our company bandwidth, our our brain power on some other innovative products like Archer AI. I think that it's it's kind of a necessity to offer multiple products because not every Battlefield solution can be solved by one product. You know, it has to go back to what are we doing so America can credibly maintain its position at the top of the world, you know, stage in in deterring conflict. In saying, you know, don't fuck with us because we have the largest, most powerful military in the world and we're going to maintain peace. If you don't want to maintain that peace, if you don't want to maintain PAX America, we have something to say about it and something to do about it. We want to be able to maintain that position, and I don't think America will be able to maintain that position as well if if Neros just builds one product, if we just build the Archer, regular variant. I think America needs small low cost attract... Attack drones. It needs AI powered small low cost attract drones. It also needs interceptors. Base defense is a huge problem. Right? It is like... I'm sure you've seen the news in The Middle East. We need to be able to blow up incoming drones, and that's why we're building Bandit. We're kind of expanding to products because America needs it, not because it's a cool, you know, demo or, it's going to kind of make an investor happy. We build it because America needs it. On shooting drones down,
00:16:27 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:16:27] S0: why did you guys decide to go with just like an interceptor instead of like lasers or some other form of, you know, interceptor? [00:16:33] S1: It's a good question. I think from the first trip in Ukraine, it was just so clear, like, the entire country had transformed to a drone country. You know, FPV has always been this, like, niche kind of thing that, like, weird people on the Internet do, and there's, like, random YouTube channels and that kind of thing. Walking around in Kyiv on that first trip, like, there were there were, you know, shirts and signs of these weird niche YouTubers. Like, the entire country had kind of rallied around this, like... And and seeing that, it was clear that these drones were more than just kind of a fad or a a toy. Right? These drones were the country's survival. It it was kind of the manifestation, the early manifestation of this, you know, once in a lifetime, once in a generation, shift in how military activity works towards towards drones. I think from that point on, was really clear that the only weapon that can stop a drone is another drone. The only thing that can stop a, you know, a a group of drones is another larger group of drones, and that's really the logic behind drone interceptors. So are you [00:17:41] S0: gonna have to have like way more autonomy in the system for intercepting drones in there?
00:17:41 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:17:41] S0: gonna have to have like way more autonomy in the system for intercepting drones in there? [00:17:45] S1: Interceptors really... So autonomy does best in structured environments. Like, you know, you drove my Tesla Model three today. The FSD on that, you know, it's still at this point, like if someone walks out from behind a bus or, you know, walks into... Walks behind one side and out the other, it's not really good at predicting that, you know, they're gonna come out the other side. It it might run into them. Those kinds of unstructured environments are are where it really struggles. If you think about, like, you know, humanity has spent close to a trillion dollars developing, like, full self driving, and a Tesla Model three has more compute than, you know, hundreds, thousands of times more compute than we could put on a $2,000 drone, that makes the, like, go, you know, hunt an individual soldier task very hard. But the, like, hit a dot in the sky task is much more reasonable. Like it's it's it's much more easily automatable. It's a much more controlled environment. It's it's much more math defined. Right? You just need to make these intercept paths. So Bandit will be a much more autonomous solution. We're still gonna have that manual precision. I I won't go into details, but we have ideas on where it's really helpful. But then it will be a much more autonomy focused product. [00:18:58] S0: What was the biggest, like, technical challenge on building that?
00:19:01 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:19:01] S1: I mean, we're we're... Look at this thing. It's a three d print. We're super early. The biggest technical challenge will be manufacturing it, as always, and we built 10 or 20 of these things. This is serial number three. So the biggest challenge has not been hit yet. But right now, one of the big challenges that we're working on is making sure that we can build a component base that's compatible across these two products. So, you know, we've invested a ton into this production facility, and we have gotten really good at making drone flight controllers, the the guts behind drones, drone motor drivers, radios, these these components that are made in volume. No one else has a factory like this. If we wanna be able to really mass produce Bandit, which is what is needed of course, we should leverage this factory to build Bandit as well. We should, you know, use 80% of this production line to make components, and then those components should be shared. So one of the big challenges was like working on, you know, a spec for Archer components, spec for Bandit components that overlap. Bandit goes a lot faster than Archer. Bandit goes north of two fifty kilometers per hour in this prototype state. It'll probably get a lot faster. And kind of misusing those components to go that fast has been a, has been a big challenge. I think also figuring out, the kind of flight dynamics of this product. As you go faster and faster, the odynamics change a lot. That impacts the control systems, and that needs to be really carefully tuned. But this has a huge set of problems. It's a really fun project, because it's still very much early days near us. It's a tiny team developing this. You know, we're flight testing all the time. We're crashing. It's failing. You know, there's a bunch of hot glue in this thing. It's it's very much a a early stage, you know, mess around and find out product that will eventually, just like Archer, hit mass production.