00:12:38 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:12:38] S1: And for the evolution of your own technology over the past, you know, couple years, what have been the biggest step function improvements and capability? [00:12:47] S0: So we've spent a lot of time on radios and making jamming resistant radios, so it's one of the number one things that you deal with in FPV drones on the battlefield is is electronic warfare. So we've gone through a ton of different iterations on that. We've made our the efficiency of our drone really second to none, like every size category that we have a drone in, I've never seen a more efficient drone. So how [00:13:19] S1: do you do that?
00:13:20 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:13:20] S0: We're really good at flight performance, and we I think test in a very unique way. We're super analytical in our testing. We care a lot about the performance of the system. So there's a there's a lot of drone companies and FPV companies that sort of either care about building components or care about building drones. They don't... A lot of them don't really like build the most performant components to build the most performant drones. We do, and we we try to make a very high performance integrated product, because we own basically all the component design as well. And then there are, you know, we we've heard very very frequently from the actual end users that they really appreciate the way our drone flies, the amount of precision it gives them, and just how well it's built. We've had units in Ukraine tell us that this is the first actual like military spec drone they've ever used, and they've used, you know, all the FPVs. So that's pretty cool. And and that's been a good bit of work to get there. And in the past, you know, we've definitely shipped products that are not up to like the spec that I want for a for a military system. And even on the current product, there's tons of stuff that needs to be improved, and we're working on we're working on new revisions of of everything and a lot of new products right now. So over the next few months, there'll be a lot of really cool stuff coming out and being visible publicly, that's gonna be pretty significant changes in the way our our system can operate. So I'm really excited about those as well. I can't talk about most of the the biggest step changes that we've had because a lot of those have been recent and not announced yet. But I'll say that our... The sort of cohesiveness and performance of our entire system across the ground station to the drone and the way the operator interfaces with all that, it's gonna get a a really big level up soon.
00:15:25 · Ty Morse
[00:15:25] S1: You're scaling up production, but you also have to basically be improving the product as fast as possible. What's going through your mind when you know something can be improved, but you also have to ship at the same time, so you gotta make that trade off?
00:15:37 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:15:37] S0: Yeah. It's... Honestly, it can be such a frustrating feeling to even see, you know, we we have products that are awesome. We have, like, prototypes of them that we are flying with internally, like we're using every single day, but they're not production products. There's a huge difference between a prototype and a production product, and so there's this like, you have to... You know, it's a little frustrating to be like looking at this thing that's so beautiful that you want all of your customers to have, but it's like six months away, even though it already exists. Because the time it takes to actually properly qualify something and move it into production, do your production validation builds, and then actually start shipping it to the customer. There's there's a decent lead time there, and yeah. So it's it's like we we also try to measure how much we can show the new stuff to current customers, because they get really excited and they wanna buy it too quickly, and we're like, hold on, you know, this isn't a production product, like if we if we try to ship this to you, we'll have a lot of problems, it will be, you know, not very efficient for us because we're doing these like small batches, so we kind of limit the exposure of the new stuff until it's really ready, but it's always a feeling of I wish this was, you know, I wish we could ship it right now.
00:16:54 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:16:54] S1: Are you just basically like living, I don't know, six months or twelve months in the future, and then you're having to ship the twelve month, you know, six twelve month old product simply because of that? [00:17:03] S0: Most of the time, yes. Yeah. But this is... I mean, this is quite normal. I think it's just like learning learning it as we build up the sort of suite of products in the company and and improve our... The way we design products and the way we validate products and move them over to production. So there's a lot of like learning here, but, you know, many many companies deal with this. It's just kinda funny to to see it. [00:17:28] S1: One of the things that you're most focused on is you want to be like the first drone that is just fully made in America with all the components and like sub assemblies and everything. How close are you to that? And like what are the key constraints to actually getting there? [00:17:42] S0: I mean, if... It's just about how far down the supply chain you go. There there's just every level is is hard work. [00:17:54] S1: Do you wanna talk about each of those levels?
00:17:54 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:17:54] S1: Do you wanna talk about each of those levels? [00:17:55] S0: Yeah. I mean, you know, we we've gone... So the the biggest supply chain hurdle we've had to clear so far is getting all of the quote critical components China free, and then we've gone beyond that definition as well. So we, you know, we we go down to things like motors as well. And then also we've gone down to the neodymium that goes into the magnets that goes into our motors, but that's not work that we can always do directly. I mean, most of it's not. Right? It's actually just finding the right supplier and building a partnership with them, building a relationship with them. And so when I say it's like just how far down the supply chain you go, you know, Neros is not gonna be the company that can solve like neodymium mining and refining in America, at least not for a long time. [00:18:43] S1: Not gonna go full Tesla where you're like building the lithium plant?