00:45:20 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:45:20] S1: What have been the biggest things like over the past year that stopped you from like executing really well? [00:45:26] S0: I think our biggest blocker to execution has been recruiting, and just not leaning forward enough on building up the internal recruiting resources and how, you know, how many people should we have at the company for at any given time. Now we're sort of in the mindset of support maximum sustainable growth. And if we had, you know, more engineering resources, more operations resources, we'd just like be able to go faster, build better. So I I think that's one of my key takeaways from... Like, if I if I was doing this again, if I if I... If you have a company where you see the clear growth trajectory, build the recruiting muscle early and set the bar for talent. I think we did a good job setting the bar for talent. We just didn't build enough of an engine to to find those people because they're super rare, it's really hard. But I just... I I wish I'd put more attention into that earlier on, and sort sort of our our just constant trend is is, like, turning things down or or going slower because because of lack of people resources. We've not really lived in a demand constrained world in the company, so we should have [00:46:51] S1: just built faster. If the biggest constraint over the past twelve or twenty four months was basically just finding amazing people, how are you kind of systematizing figuring that out going forward so that when you need to hire that next executive, things just go work?
00:46:51 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:46:51] S1: just built faster. If the biggest constraint over the past twelve or twenty four months was basically just finding amazing people, how are you kind of systematizing figuring that out going forward so that when you need to hire that next executive, things just go work? [00:47:07] S0: The whole process gets easier as you scale the company. As you build momentum, people see that, and and there's a lot of great talent who are willing to join a startup, but maybe not willing to join a, you know, seed or series a startup. I'd say there's been a really significant shift post post series b and post a few kind of critical government contracts. It's just been a lot easier to attract and close the level of people that we're looking for. We've also built a pretty good system for finding the people who don't have flashy resumes. [00:47:47] S1: How do you
00:47:47 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:47:47] S1: How do you [00:47:48] S0: do that? I think instead... You you you train your recruiting team instead of looking for logos, they're looking for sort of core skills, and also seeing the examples of the people at the company who've done incredibly well, who came from, you know, random company. They were like string of random companies that you, as a logo, would not expect them to have the best talent in the world, especially I'd say in Southern California. There's a lot of like shops, like, there's a lot of companies in aerospace and defense and, you know, sort of the technologies that support those and like sub suppliers. There's like tons of companies supporting this industry that aren't very well known that do have some really great people. And then there's a lot of amazing schools here for where people will like go and get an incredible education, but then go to a company that, you know, most people have never heard of, and then sort of be missed by the the typical recruiting pipeline. And so I think we've done a decent job at identifying people like that, which is I'd say something we should lean, you know, even heavier into going forward. [00:49:05] S1: When you're thinking about taking risk and which risks you want to take, I think the most important thing is to just make sure that whatever you're committing, you can actually pull off. But then later on, there's the risk of, like, not scaling fast enough and not building capacity fast enough. How are you kind of going through the, you know, risks in your own mind and then just checking those things off?
00:49:05 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:49:05] S1: When you're thinking about taking risk and which risks you want to take, I think the most important thing is to just make sure that whatever you're committing, you can actually pull off. But then later on, there's the risk of, like, not scaling fast enough and not building capacity fast enough. How are you kind of going through the, you know, risks in your own mind and then just checking those things off? [00:49:27] S0: I'm 90% concerned about execution to... For for... Like, I'm way more concerned about are we going to be, know, are we gonna be able to build this factory and and do it in a quick timeline and build credible deterrence versus, you know, worrying about, like, the demand side of the side of the equation. Pretty big believer in the, like, if you build it, they will come, especially with the importance of the technology. Yeah. With the importance of the technology that we're making, I'd say it's it's almost all execution risk, and then it, you know, again comes back to like finding the right people to do it. But if you can find the right people to do it and give them resources, then it's it's it's possible. We have the financial resources to do it. And so, again, the mindset is just is just like pick the thing that matters the most, which to me is is building this factory and and putting full steam, full effort into that.
00:50:30 · Ty Morse
[00:50:30] S1: Yeah. I remember, I think I was at Olaf's house probably three or four months ago, and I was talking with one of the people that works at Neros, and he mentioned that when you guys were out on some, like, testing thing, I don't know if it was in, like, Hawaii with with the military, they had a, like, RF or, you know, a a jammer. And you guys flew a drone right by a jammer, and they didn't even pick it up. What's it been like when you kinda run into the situation where the military or some other organization thinks that they have capability to, you know, detect or or jam drones, and then they realize like, oh shit, we don't actually have that?
00:51:06 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
[00:51:06] S0: We've done this a bunch of times with the US military. Yeah. We we've defeated... On on first pass, we've defeated, like, every single jammer that the US military has put up put us up against. And there's a lot of nuance in in, like, how you do testing with jammers, but I think a really good example of this was in Alaska with a event where we were flying about seven kilometers away from the jam... Our ground station was 77 kilometers away from the ground station, and so, you know, the the the advantage at that point is really with the jammer, not with the the drone system. The soldiers, they knew our the frequencies we were operating on. They'd we'd already done a bunch of testing runs and they collected data, so this was not a realistic scenario. It was so in favor of the jamming team, and so we flew seven kilometers over to the jammer, and then just hovered in front of them for like ten minutes, you know, letting them adjust their settings, seeing if they could if they could degrade our link to the point where, you know, they would actually take us out of the sky. After ten minutes, they eventually with five jammers going at once, they got to essentially taking out one of our control links. We have two. So the drone is still operating, but they had they had degraded about half. In a real world scenario, you know, that would... That it just... Our drone would have obviously won there. Right? Like, we wouldn't have hovered. We would just have come in and hit the target. [00:52:44] S1: It would've taken, like, a few seconds.