00:29:00 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
So for us, it's figuring out how we can, while still being, you know, financially smart, build capacity ahead of demand, and try to match those two things closely together. [00:29:11] S1: How successful have you been, like, to date on when you say you have a timeline that can work, that it actually does, and then if things do go wrong, how do you kind of rapidly course correct that?
00:29:22 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:29:22] S0: That's a good question, because we've not been perfect. You know, there there have absolutely been failures in in our history of thinking we could do something faster and making a commitment, and then, you know, realizing we can't. I think we've done a very good job of maintaining high communication with the customer, like, you know, balancing... Understanding what is actually mission critical for them versus, you know, what is their sort of desire versus, you you... Like, a lot of it is about the relationship and communication with the customer. I've seen that go really wrong for other companies, just making these commitments burning bridges. We try really hard not to do that. So, like, being... Yeah. Being very honest and and then just getting better, building the muscle of, you know, engineering and production time lining, we started with a team that had, you know, great experience from other verticals and and, you know, have have done parts of this before, but it's clearly a learning process doing it for the first time as as Neros, and so we've we've, I'd say, gotten much better at it. And there there was a time, like, 2025, you know, we're trying to ship our ground station for the first time, ship like production units of it for the first time, and that was really biting us, just getting everything functional and reliable and sort of, you know, working the way we had promised to people, and that was one of the hardest pushes of like, we we just didn't give ourselves enough time to to finish the engineering and then hand it off to production. So, you know, you learn by making mistakes, but I think the severity of those mistakes are seriously defined by, like, how well you communicate externally, and then make it up to people or or, you know, figure out like, what can you do for them, you know, your customer typically, that is solving some of the issue, even if you're not ready to solve all of the issue.
00:31:37 · Ty Morse
[00:31:37] S1: Elon has this idea where I think in the past he had timelines slip a lot more than he does today, and now he's got some idea where he's trying to do roughly like 50% of the time. He wants the maximally aggressive timeline that 50% of the time they can actually hit and that by definition means that half the time they won't. But without that, there's not the same level of, like, urgency. How do you kind of think about maintaining just extreme urgency while also making sure that you're not, like, committing things that are impossible?
00:32:07 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:32:07] S0: I think maintaining urgency comes a lot from the mission and the sort of, like, broader timeline that the company is thinking on. And that's why we're, you know, right now is a 120 person, you know, tens of thousands of drones per year company talking about a million drones per year. In some ways, that's ridiculous, but this is also something that Elon seems to do extremely well, is look into the future and say, here's what needs to exist, and here's why it's existential for it to exist, so we're gonna push as hard as possible to get there. So that's what I believe drives urgency, sort of at the the broadest level within the company. Then you have these sort of events, and rocket launches are a great thing to drive urgency, right? You have a launch date, and it's very binary if it if it succeeds or fails. So we sort of have that when there's a contract opportunity that we're getting ready for, you know, a fly off to go and prove that we're the best, that we should win the contract or, you know, really important test event or, you know, delivering some big milestone to the customer. There's again, it's the careful balance, right? Because those have high risk if you you you mess up, if you over commit, sometimes it's not the it's not a penalty on the customer, but it's really a penalty on you if you just like are going off to try to win a contract and you try to build too much new stuff and then it doesn't work the day of, you know, they're not... It's not like the customer needed it because they're gonna go and and deploy with it shortly, like we we deal with those situations too, but that's more like, okay, the company just failed on that on that goal. So that's where I'd say the time lining piece is really important. And we we we have what we call fly off mode at the company. So if we're getting ready for one of these these testing events or fly offs, you know, we're buying dinner for everyone in the office, we're we're doing these things that help just keep people at the office longer, because, I mean, even if we weren't buying people dinner, engineers are gonna be there till 10:11PM at night. It's not the dinner that keeps them there, but it's the recognition that we're pushing really hard, that's important, and so we we were like quite intentional with with when we do that. You can't do that all the time.
00:34:46 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
You can't ask people to go, you know, that absolute maximum effort. [00:34:50] S1: By definition, sprint has to be for a short Yes. Period of [00:34:53] S0: Exactly. But, yeah, it's weird in software development, they say like, you just go from sprint to the next sprint to the next sprint, that's it's not how it works. You get, you know, I think you get a couple good sprints a year in a company, that we try to use them sparingly. [00:35:10] S1: Interesting. What what have been the sprints over the past 12
00:35:13 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:35:13] S0: We had the fly off for the army program, the PBAS program. That fly off, I believe, was in August last year, but we were building around the program well ahead of that, and we we had new products that we needed to ship for PBAS. So that was kind of our best example of, you know, many many months away, time lining out what what new do we need to build, exactly what we wanna deliver on the day of the fly off, and then deliver when we think they're going to ask us to actually ship the production product, you know, given that we win the contract. So that was a big one in 2025. 2024 was winning the... Our first production contract for Ukraine. That was the hardest push sort of summer of twenty twenty four. So it was like summer of twenty four was the IDCC contract, summer of twenty twenty five was for PBAS, and right now we're getting ready for Drone Dominance, which is a really exciting program. That one's a bit different because we are essentially shipping the product like our current production product. You know, our product is more mature and sort of ready to meet the demands as it as it is, but there's still a lot of things we wanna, you know, ensure before we go to a fly off, and I would say one of our strengths of the company because we have such a strong racing background and just competitive team is the preparation we do for every single one of these events. I mean, we are like an f one team when we show up to one of these things, and I I really think it's it's one of our our big strengths and has contributed to our our success so far with just how successful we've been in in sort of winning these early contract opportunities and like showing up when it matters and showing the, you know, the decision makers that sort of the the full capability of what Neros is. It's not just the product in isolation, you know, it's it's the team behind it, and if you you get a bit of