00:37:12 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:37:12] S1: an You get opportunity opportunity [00:37:13] S0: to showcase how much you care and how good you are when every time you interact with these government decision makers. So if they see a team that is coming to a fly off that has, you know, absolutely everything perfect and has amazing communication and is is clearly passionate about their... What they're doing and everything just like runs super smoothly, that builds a lot of confidence beyond just the specific things they're testing for in the product. [00:37:40] S1: You have this like well oiled machine when you have to basically do one of these sprints. How does the the brain of Soren operate in one of these environments?
00:37:40 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:37:40] S1: You have this like well oiled machine when you have to basically do one of these sprints. How does the the brain of Soren operate in one of these environments? [00:37:50] S0: It's had to change over time because now it doesn't make sense for me to be giving a 100% on these sprints, because there's so much other critical stuff going on at the company that I have to be paying attention to. So this has been a bit of a a, like, learning as well, because in 2024, when we were trying to win the IDCC contract, all I did every day was contribute to winning the IDCC contract. You know, I was like, I was doing like drone design decisions. I was doing some like basically technical project management tasks. I was going out with the flight test team every single night till like 4AM. I was, you know, soldering drones together. Like, was just do everything that we have to do to win. 2025 for PBAS, way more like the engineering team, just owning like the product development and the preparation, but I basically canceled all my responsibilities or like my meetings and everything, you know, for the weeks coming up to the fly off, and just was like running through all of the gear, running through Just [00:39:02] S1: goblin mode.
00:39:02 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:39:02] S1: goblin mode. [00:39:03] S0: Yeah. Just running through how we're doing every single thing at the demo, running our rehearsal demo, or or being, you know, a part of it. And, you know, like, the credit now is all on the team. The team, like, makes everything happen. We we basically, now can get ready for these things without without my involvement, which is what we we... That's where we should be, but it's also hard to like, not, it's so fun to just, you know, go full all in, hey, all I'm doing today is just going out and testing drones, running running a company, you do a lot less building and flying drones than you would have hoped. [00:39:47] S1: Is your like favorite way of of operating, or the favorite part of your life just basically preparing for one of these competitions?
00:39:47 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:39:47] S1: Is your like favorite way of of operating, or the favorite part of your life just basically preparing for one of these competitions? [00:39:55] S0: It it can be. Yeah. I do really love it, but again, it's just not it's not that practical anymore. So... But there's other things that we have to like cut out some of the like day to day stuff to focus on when we're doing like, you know, whether it is the the like annual planning of the company or or, you know, pushing for some other really big funding opportunity or... There's a lot of things in these categories where you sort of have to like go and and put most of your attention towards them while they're going on, it just becomes harder and harder to do that as the company grows, and as there's more critical path things happening in parallel. So been learning learning a bit about how to do that, and I do wish that there was more opportunity still to just fully focus on one thing, but fully focusing on one thing is kind of a it's not really something you get to do as the company scales. [00:40:53] S1: Yeah. I remember when when Facebook started, Mark is obviously just coding the entire product, and he's building it himself. I think it was the same thing here where at first, you guys are just building drones. You and Olaf are building drones together in a garage, I believe. Yeah. And then over time, you basically have to spend more of your time not focused on the thing that is just, you know, coding or or building? How has your energy shifted over time from actually building drones to more like company building?
00:41:23 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
[00:41:23] S0: There's basically no opportunity in the day for me to build drones anymore. Like, that wouldn't make any sense. So, I don't know. It's it's just something I joke about with founder friends because you're like, wow, you know, I started a drone company or whatever type of company it is. It's like, I loved doing this thing. I started a company around it. I don't do any of that thing anymore. Ask me like, do you still fly? I'm like, yeah, I do, you know, on occasion, but not usually ever for fun, and and it's it's just like these super small opportunities to to like go and fly a drone or go and build a drone. This is natural, so it's it's like it's good that this is happening. It's just funny to think about like the original motivations for starting a company can be, you know, very different than what you end up actually doing. But, you know, I I I wouldn't have started Neros if I if I thought that I was just gonna be building drones and and if it it wasn't for the sort of, like the greater purpose of what we're trying to accomplish. So it's all it's all expected and good. It's just interesting to experience. [00:42:37] S1: What are the new things that you're getting to start to focus on now, now that the company is like really ramping and scaling that you didn't get to focus on in the beginning?
00:42:46 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:42:46] S0: I would say my time is is split sort of between leadership hiring. So recruiting, of course, is the driver of company growth. You know, we have a great head of talent and, you know, a team that works around the whole recruiting process, but, you know, like before we had that head of talent, it was hiring that head of talent, ensuring that we get the right person in the door. Now it's focusing, you know, the time I have for interviews on sort of the critical leadership hires, making sure that we, you know, the best thing we can do if we wanna scale rapidly is hire the right leadership to then... For them to go off and hire the people under them. So I'm doing a good bit of that. There's more time being spent on the long term vision of the company and the, you know, product roadmap beyond sort of the, like, more obvious stuff that we've needed to build so far. And then, you know, management just becomes a bigger job, and not necessarily like having to micromanage the people who report into me, that's not how how we operate, but just the the number of meetings in a day that need some amount of my input has become pretty high. So I've I've actually just been looking through like how can I get rid of these recurring events and and like make just more open blocks of time on my my calendar to do like real work, sit down and do real work or or deep work is maybe the better term for it? So that balance can be really tricky. It's very hard to be actually directly responsible for any work product as as the, like, as a co founder or CEO. And so we have to... I have to be very measured in like signing up for things. And and, you know, there's a lot of stuff that I wish I could just sit down and do myself, because I I would like to to do it, but often it's not realistic to to sign up for that, so then you sort of go through the list of, like, alright, what do I have... What do I need to... What can I delegate? And if there's not a person at the company who can take over this task right now, they should... That should probably become a role. So I've been trying to be more intentional about thinking about that too. Like, I I just have a running list of things that I I should be delegating, and then eventually those sort of hit critical mass and become a role.