01:05:44 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:05:44] S0: Yeah. I mean, we've been able to formalize a lot of stuff, you know, it's it's no longer bringing drones over in a suitcase, which is a good thing. We have established an office in Kyiv, and in 2025, we sent over 6,000 drones to Ukraine. So that was from that, we've gotten to work with a lot more units, we've gotten to see a lot more results from Battlefield, which has been amazing. And we've also, you know, taken a lot of measures both in the design of the core product, but also in what we do in Ukraine and support with our Ukraine office to make the product as effective as possible. So there's an example of this is, you know, depending on the area on the frontline that the drones are operating on, certain frequencies work way better than others. And, you know, Neros does not build radios for all of these frequencies, you know, eventually we we may or build something that's much more flexible, but in the current state of things, there are frequencies that, like, our radios don't support that the Ukrainians need on... In in areas. So, you know, we we actually help the units with supplying and and swapping out new radios into the drones and and, you know, things of that nature to make the platform as effective as possible for the specific user. We measure our success very heavily off of Battlefield results and like true effectiveness of the product. And, you know, we see this with all of... We try to track this with all of our customers, not just in Ukraine, but it's it's absolutely vital that we are measuring ourselves by, like, the product making a real difference in the world versus, you know, just the sort of like top level size of the contracts or, you know, whatever because there's... There's a lot of metrics you can measure yourself by that are sort of removed from reality and don't actually mean you're being super impactful. Like, you can build a very large company in the defense space without having a seriously measurable impact. So that's something we care a lot about, and our operations in Ukraine are are part of that. And, yeah, we've gotten... As I said, we've gotten to deploy a lot more systems there and establish those relationships a lot better and and build a better system for feedback too.
01:08:20 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
Like, getting high quality feedback directly from the end users and putting that back into our engineering process is something we've we've gotten a lot better at. [01:08:32] S1: Was that something that was difficult at the beginning? Like, have you been able to get better feedback of real world outcomes with your Yeah.
01:08:40 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:08:40] S0: We've been able to get much higher quality feedback and also know how to respond to it much better. Because at the beginning, we're trying to figure out everything, and also everything seems critical. So like here, like, you try to do everything that you hear from the end user. There's a approach to valuing everything you hear from the end user, but you have to prioritize stuff. You can't do everything at once, and you also have to listen to the problem, not the proposed solution for for a lot of stuff. Right? Because it's like the classic, you know, you build people a faster horse. You you like, you you... What you what you wanna do is deeply understand the problems the end users are running into. And especially in Ukraine, they have a a lot of amazing knowledge on how to build good drones. So there are learnings to take away from that, but there's also cases where we do things differently and we, you know, they... For an an example, our propellers are much more like flexible than the standard prop that they use in Ukraine or the standard propellers that they use in Ukraine. So a lot of units will receive the drones and just like see and feel the prop and be like, this will not work well with a heavy payload because the prop is too flexible, it will it will deflect under the load. And every time we see that, we we make a bet with them, we're like, you know, we go try it, go go actually fly it and compare it back to back with your props. And then they do that and they're like, okay. Yeah. It works really well. But it's just this is like knowledge that they've built up is like stiffer props work better with heavy payloads, and that's a very logical thing to to think. And generally the props that are designed for heavy payloads are much different, and so they're like completely understandable why that's an assumption. You can, you know, we broke that assumption by testing a lot of different stuff and ending up on this prop. And so, yeah, we we just like have to have that that good back and forth with the customer.
01:10:45 · Ty Morse
[01:10:45] S1: What other like product assumptions do people in conflict have that have been wrong, and you've been able, basically, by having this, like, super in in-depth knowledge on how to solve these problems, and, like, understanding their problems, you've been able to figure out unintuitive solutions?
01:11:02 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:11:02] S0: We we we covered it a little bit earlier, but the flight performance of the drone, how well the drone flies. You know, there's a lot of opinions about how to make a drone fly well, and also, like, how much does that matter? Actually very fair question, like question the requirement, do you need a drone that flies good? I'm serious, like if you're just trying to take a, you know, take a payload from one spot to another spot, maybe you don't need it to fly that well. There's actually a lot of precision that can be gained from, you know, a high performing drone, and that's actually become something that our users appreciate, and they're... They immediately notice every time they fly that, wow, this was amazing, and a lot of that is from, you know, the way we design the airframe, the stiffness of the whole vehicle, and then, you know, mostly in the tuning as well, and and also the the motor and the prop selection for the payload size, like there's lot of factors that go into it, but it it ends up becoming something that is highly appreciated, but at first undervalued, like you tell someone, yeah, our drone's better than yours because it flies better, and they're like, I don't care. I I like how how much does it carry? How far does it go? You know, does it hit the target? So that's that's something, you know, the the the steps to get there actually are things that we've gone against the grain on, you know, our motors are for our eight inch drone are significantly bigger than a lot of eight inch drones, and when the initial reaction of the Ukrainians usually when they see that is like, this is a waste of money or it's like, you don't need this, you just want this size motor. Every eight inches drone uses this size motor, like go try it. See how it flies with a heavier payload, show that it actually works better, and, you know, we we've again, we got to that answer by doing an insane amount of testing, and we we are very confident in the fact that it is a better solution,
01:13:01 · Ty Morse
[01:13:01] S1: and so you just sort of have to break through assumptions sometimes. What's been the evolution of your testing process since end of twenty twenty four to today?