Battery-swapping docks must earn their added complexity

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 11:43

   And so a drone will just land, have its battery swapped out and immediately start flying again. But you basically said if you like surveyed your customers or their use cases, it's very, very small or you'd increase the like flight time or something by like 5% with a battery swapping dock. So how do you think about... making product trade-offs just informed by actual customer experience versus what sounds like a good idea but may not, in fact, be actually useful. So we're increasingly in the position now of having really deep insight into how our products are being used, what adds the most value for our customers. And so product development is always a blend of a lot of different inputs. You never want to only look at the data of what people are doing today because you're going to miss the possibilities of what might exist. But when we're developing drones today, we're steeped in the data

2. 12:35

   of existing usage and flight patterns, flight speeds, different mission profiles that people are flying, time between flights, all these things. And that informs the investments that we're going to make. So something like battery swapping, if it's free and it's perfectly reliable, add some value, but it's not free. And because it's a more complex mechanism, it's also going to cost you something in reliability. And so it's a question of like, what are the trade-offs against other things that you could put your time and resources into and what's best for the customer? One example of an incredible series of inventions that's resulting in an incredible product that wouldn't fall directly out of the data is F10, which is a fixed-wing drone that's robotically launched and caught. So it basically lives in a drone vending machine. There's a robot

3. 13:23

   arm that picks it up, releases it into the air. That thing has two hours of endurance. It's got 100 miles an hour top speed, which is just a total paradigm shift in what you can do with autonomous stock drones in terms of the area that you can cover. So this is like first response for sheriff's office that cover thousands of square miles. Like somebody calls 911 in a rural area, it might literally take sheriffs an hour to get there on the ground. And this thing can be there in 10 minutes providing real-time situational awareness. It can be like a lost hiker, potential fire starting, things like that. So that's a product that came out of a lot of conversations with customers and also our conviction and some core technology blocks that we could apply to bring these things together. So it's always a mix of different sources. It's never just one

4. 14:04

   thing that's going to drive the development of a product. It's blending a lot of different inputs and then brokering the right set of optimizations and trade-offs to solve the things that matter most for the people that we're serving.