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.
00:20:46 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:20:46] S0: What was it like when you first decided to start working on this? Like what was the first few weeks and iterations of this product like? [00:20:53] S1: Yeah, I remember that. I mean it was nights and weekends at the very beginning. [00:20:56] S0: And when did you decide? Like what what made the flip in your head?
00:21:00 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:21:00] S1: Really it was it was taking that call with the Ukrainians and just getting getting on those calls, really, and seeing the need. You know, I grew up in DC. Very normal nice bring up. Right? Went to, you know, a good local school in the area, and never really thought about, like, the dangers of getting bombed or anything like that. It was just so foreign. And I kinda had the thought, like, why work on weapon systems when I could work on, you know, Bay Area stuff, like, you know, getting a burrito to arrive thirty seconds faster at at a house or something like that. Talking to Ukrainians really quickly changed my mindset. I can't believe I, like, like, how quickly it became abundantly clear that if you don't build weapon systems, everything falls apart. And not building weapon systems is a massive luxury. Like, being able to, you know, sip your matcha and take your electric skateboard to work, to your Bay Area cushy job, is something that, you know, every Ukrainian dreams of, I'm sure, but does not have. Right? They they have... They are worried about getting blown up by Russians as as, you know, that's a real threat. I think if Americans kind of remembered what what history was was like and and what the generations before us did to make sure that we can live this good life, people would be much more interested in in building weapon systems. I think that realization was really what made me, like, wanna stay up all night designing the motherboard, the the main PCBA, printed circuit board assembly in Archer at the time. So, yeah, that was like the first big engineering project, just ripping ripping the motherboard. It was... I was a full time board designer, so I I had been doing it for quite a while. And I remember that motherboard, I bought it on my credit card. It was the first PCBA of my career that I designed that worked for a spin. And that was really important because there was not time for another spin. That was that was that was our shot. So really really thankful that that worked out. Thankfully it was a it was a lot of, you know, knowledge pulled from the drone racing days. Was the exact same flight computer that I designed in high school as an example. Yeah, those early days were awesome. It was just Soren and I cooking.