#38 - Manufacturing American Drones At Scale | Olaf Hichwa, CTO Neros

Summary

Ti Morse interviews Olaf Hichwa, co-founder and CTO of Neros, a company manufacturing American-made FPV drones at scale. Olaf opens by holding up what he claims is one of the most American drones in the world — with all core electronics, PCBAs, and structural components made domestically, not just assembled from Chinese parts. He draws a sharp distinction between companies claiming to be “China-free” versus those that are merely “China-limited,” arguing that most defense drone companies are so clueless about their own supply chains that they genuinely believe their drones are American-made when the critical components come from China.

The conversation covers Neros’s origins building FPV drones as kids, their hundreds of design iterations, flying to Ukraine with 30 drones, and the sobering reality that China sells drones to both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war. Olaf reveals that FPV drones now represent 70% of all casualties in Ukraine. He discusses scaling from 2,000 to 10,000 drones per month, Neros’s Longbow and Crossbow product lines, the challenge of educating American military leadership about drone warfare, building a real American drone industrial base, the Algorithm for manufacturing efficiency, and what it takes to hire A+ talent. The conversation also touches on Ukraine giving soldiers money to choose their own equipment, getting real-world product feedback from the front lines, and Olaf’s experience as a world champion FPV drone racer arriving in a war zone.

Highlights

”China Sells Drones to Both Sides”

“China sells to both sides very aggressively. Talk about a win-win situation for China. It’s evil.” — Olaf Hichwa, 0:01

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”FPV Drones Are 70% of All Casualties”

“FPV drones, these kinds of drones represent 70% of all the casualties in the war in Ukraine right now.” — Olaf Hichwa, 0:06

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”Flying to Ukraine with 30 Drones”

“We flew to Ukraine with 30 drones. Arriving as a world champion FPV drone racer in a war zone — it was surreal.” — Olaf Hichwa, 12:50

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”Most Defense Companies Don’t Know Their Own Supply Chain”

“There’s two kinds of defense companies. Defense companies that are so clueless about their own product that they actually think it’s China-free. And then there’s defense companies that know it’s not China-free but say it is anyway.” — Olaf Hichwa, 0:53

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Key Points

• China-free vs China-limited (0:25) - Neros makes genuinely American drones with domestic PCBAs and structural components
• Two kinds of defense companies (0:53) - Those clueless about their Chinese supply chain and those who know but lie about it
• FPV drones = 70% of casualties (0:06) - Drones now cause the majority of casualties in the Ukraine war
• Building FPV drones as kids (5:10) - Olaf and co-founders grew up building FPV drones
• Hundreds of iterations (7:05) - Neros has gone through hundreds of drone design iterations
• Flying to Ukraine (12:50) - Flew to Ukraine with 30 drones to get front-line feedback
• China sells to both sides (17:47) - China aggressively sells drones to both Russia and Ukraine
• Scaling to 1M drones/year (20:54) - Vision for scaling Neros to one million drones annually
• World champion FPV racer in a war zone (22:29) - Olaf’s experience arriving in Ukraine as a drone racing champion
• Ukraine lets soldiers choose equipment (27:22) - Ukrainian military gives soldiers money to buy their own gear
• Building American drone industrial base (29:29) - Creating domestic supply chains from scratch
• Longbow & Crossbow products (33:29) - Neros’s two main drone product lines
• Scaling from 2K to 10K/month (36:14) - Manufacturing ramp-up timeline
• Educating American leadership (40:06) - Challenge of teaching military leaders about drone warfare
• The Algorithm (1:15:56) - Elon’s manufacturing efficiency framework applied to drone production
• Finding A+ killers (1:22:45) - Hiring top talent for defense hardware

Mentions

Companies

• Neros (0:25) - American FPV drone manufacturer
• DJI (17:47) - Chinese drone company selling to both sides of conflicts
• SpaceX (1:15:56) - Referenced for manufacturing Algorithm

People

• Olaf Hichwa (0:25) - Co-founder and CTO of Neros, world champion FPV drone racer
• Elon Musk (1:15:56) - Referenced for the Algorithm manufacturing framework

Surprising Quotes

“FPV drones represent 70% of all the casualties in the war in Ukraine right now.” — Olaf Hichwa, 0:06

“There are two kinds of defense companies. Those that are so clueless about their own product that they think it’s China-free. And those that know but say it is anyway.” — Olaf Hichwa, 0:53

“China sells drones to both sides very aggressively. Talk about a win-win situation for China. It’s evil.” — Olaf Hichwa, 0:01

“Ukraine gives soldiers money to choose what equipment to buy. It’s actually a really effective procurement model.” — Olaf Hichwa, 27:22

Transcript

Olaf Hichwa: 0:00 Who supplies Russia? China. Which drones? China sells to both sides very aggressively. Talk about a win-win situation for China. It’s evil. FPV drones, these kinds of drones represent 70% of all the casualties in the war in Ukraine right now. This is the Manhattan Project of our generation and we’re losing. This is Olaf Hichwa, co-founder of Neuros, the CTO.

Ti Morse: 0:21 How much of the drone is actually made like in America and not just assembled?

Olaf Hichwa: 0:25 Yeah, so I believe this is one of the most American drones in the world. All the core electronics, so all the printed circuit board assemblies, PCBAs inside of this body are designed in the USA, the bare boards are fabricated in the USA, that means like the lamination process, the lithography, the SMT process, that means picking the chips up, placing them on the board, it’s made in the USA, and the chips are China-free.

Ti Morse: 0:51 Crazy.

Olaf Hichwa: 0:53 So I think there’s two kinds of defense companies. Defense companies that are so clueless about their own product that they actually think it’s China-free, and then defense companies that understand they have some reliance on China and try and limit it. We try very hard to fall into that second category. So we’ve gone, you know, starting at the design and assembly level, then to the board level, now to the semiconductor level. So we’re obsessed with every single chip in the system, and I can name off the top of my head the few like three Chinese chips that exist in this entire drone. I think the, you know, effort that we’ve put in and the accomplishment that we’ve had by de-Chinafying this entire drone from the chip level up is definitely the largest technical accomplishment of my lifetime. Um, and hopefully we can just, just keep going. You know, we have to have a fully China-free and then eventually a fully American-made drone from the sand up in my opinion.

Ti Morse: 1:43 Yeah, do you want to talk about like how many of the components were initially just like, you know, third party kind of things off the shelf, and then slowly moving towards this thing that’s fully in-house, fully American, what that process has been like?

Olaf Hichwa: 1:58 Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a good question to understand the kind of essence of Neuros, you know, to start the company, Soren and I, we just took our drone racing background, we had been drone racing for nearly 10 years, and we just built racing drones, 30 of them in our basement, um, in his parents’ basement in Norwich, Vermont. And of course, we just picked what was available, which was completely Chinese. There’s actually, there’s a wall over there that shows the evolution and that first revision, we didn’t care, we didn’t think about country of origin, we’re just two kids that build racing drones, we like to go fast, and I think we liked to potentially hit a tank with a bomb. Um, so we just wanted to build the best, the best system possible. We didn’t even think of country of origin. And turns out every single part, I’m talking every single screw, every single vibration isolation adapter, the gummy that goes between the flight controller and the frame, carbon fiber, antenna, radios, flight controller, camera, lens, optics, motors, propellers, every single part is made fully in China. And I think that was like a really powerful realization that just by accident, they managed to have…

Ti Morse: 3:00 Complete full supply chain from from sand and carbon to drone. Um, and of course it performed well. It was, it was, uh, it was, you know, just a drone racing optimized system and it it flew really locked in. Uh, the pilots were used to some some like less than ideal, not, you know, world champion level drone design, so it it flew really well and, you know, it it got us uh far enough to get get some interesting meetings in Ukraine and uh eventually a confirmed strike on a Russian artillery position with our with our platform. Uh, but we only then realized how big of a problem de-Chinafying the system is and also mass producing the system. You know, uh Soren and I and Levi, one of our our very early believers, um, spent countless hours in this basement and uh, you know, it’s kind of a meme at this point, but that basement was hell. We had like an SLA printer going down there and I was like tweaking, uh, and like I’m like trying to like design boards in this in this cave, dank place. And to be fair, it was a very nice place, like I’m I’m being extremely over-the-top dramatic. As far as basements go, it was top-tier basement.

Olaf Hichwa: 4:13 Top-tier basement in uh pristine Norwich, Vermont, middle middle of nowhere Vermont, you know, gorgeous, gorgeous place but simultaneously just like production hell, but production hell sucks even more when it’s three guys. Um, so I like called my friends up from college. I’m like, will you drive here and build some drones with me please, please, please, please, please, I’ll do anything. Um and and I I had some friends, uh Cole Johnson from from RIT came by and and helped us out which was hugely appreciated, appreciated. And then a few of Soren’s friends, but we kind of got to see firsthand that manufacturing is hard and understood the problem, but we we put together these thirty drones. Um and that was really just the tip of the iceberg of like, okay, we can validate the the idea works, the idea of an FPV drone, like a racing drone with a bomb on it will go and do its job, but we did not, we were just starting on the the difficult problems of actually engineering the components in America and building the production line that can produce the system in volume.

Ti Morse: 5:10 Let’s go back to that like initial basement. I know that you guys built drones together for years uh as part of like FPVs and stuff. Um, how did you and Soren just begin to start building drones together? What was that like?

Olaf Hichwa: 5:24 Yeah, we met at a at a drone race of course. Uh, Muncie, Indiana MultiGP IO and we were two young kids, uh I believe I was uh seventeen at the time, something like that. Um, maybe a little younger actually, sixteen. Um and we bonded very much over obsession of the of the craft, right? We both like had a million reasons why our setup was the best, like every every part of it was the best, and every gram was was shaved off and, you know, every one of his solder joints was so perfect, the the wires… routed so spectacularly, I maybe left a little to be desired there, but you know I was so obsessed with the exact flight computer being used and optimization across the full system. So we got along very, very heavily there and I think we also really liked to see our designs validated. Like we wanted not just to build pretty things, but we wanted to win.

Ti Morse: 6:27 You want to see it perform in the field on the competition line and crush.

Olaf Hichwa: 6:30 Exactly, exactly. There was like no greater feeling than, you know, the countless of months of design work, testing, and practice being vindicated by a race win, right? And we were, you know, two people very obsessed with flying, very obsessed with practicing and ripped together and ended up, yeah, like hung out at that event. That was like a three-day event, we hung out all day together and then just kept chatting about the ideas of, you know, what we want to build and eventually the companies we wanted to start in drone racing and beyond.

Ti Morse: 7:06 Yeah. How many iterations of the like FPVs did you make with him or like separately? And then also like, how much has that translated into what you’re building now with Archer?

Olaf Hichwa: 7:18 I think we built well, like hundreds, hundreds of different drone configurations. And it’s not like it’s like, you know, drone one, drone two, it’s more like, okay, I’m gonna buy this frame, the carbon fiber, like mechanical structure and then I’m gonna try these motors and then, oh, let me make my motor a little wider than it is tall. That way my like ramp up, my response, throttle response is sharper, but my top-end torque is lower. Or let me try a flight controller with a, you know, higher gyro update rate at the cost of noisier gyro data as an example. It’s just like a bunch of different components and I mean, I was changing components, you know, I had a fleet of about five drones that I maintained and I had a Notion page with that information, Apple Notes originally. And I would change parts on those different drones like weekly for five years.

Ti Morse: 8:14 Was it, how many competitions were you doing every week? Like one?

Olaf Hichwa: 8:22 Competitions were every few months.

Ti Morse: 8:25 Every few months. Okay. So you’re updating those like at your house? Where’d you grow up by the way?

Olaf Hichwa: 8:27 I grew up in the DC area. Great place to fly drones.

Ti Morse: 8:30 Okay. Yeah. Did you have any issues finding a spot where you could like practice?

Olaf Hichwa: 8:34 Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, I just ripped in my backyard, which was no permits in Minecraft, in Minecraft. Right. Um, yeah, yeah, it was definitely tough finding a place to fly. I ripped at the local elementary school. I’d set up racing gates and host a bunch of people out and we’d just fly there and it was mostly like, I don’t know, still to this day, but especially back then drones were considered very harmless. Like, it’s just some kids messing around, we’d stay below the tree line, so. But yeah, definitely tough. It was definitely sometimes hard. The races were far away. You- you could get away with practicing, you could not get away with hosting a race in the middle of- of the DC area. Uh, so-

Ti Morse: 9:07 I mean, Soren had to fly down from like Anchorage, right?

Olaf Hichwa: 9:09 Yeah, I mean, Soren- Vermont was great, Anchorage, Anchorage was also great, especially for like fixed wing and the- like military heritage and the- like, you know, atmosphere of Anchorage is incredible to build aerospace. Um, and then Vermont, he’s got an insane setup. There’s like, you know, it’s middle of nowhere, so it’s like big ass yard in the front and he can sit- sit on his porch and just set up gates and rip all day long, it’s- it’s pretty sweet. We- every summer, uh, there was like a group of online friends, uh, the- the FPV kids, we called ourselves Kids Corner, and we’d host Soren GP. Soren would host Soren GP every summer, um, generally around the 4th of July, and we’d- we’d set up gates at his house and just rip all day every day for- for two weeks. It was so fun.

Ti Morse: 9:52 Did Soren start it and immediately just like call you, uh, with an idea like, ‘I want to build a drone company’?

Olaf Hichwa: 9:57 For Neros?

Ti Morse: 9:58 Yeah.

Olaf Hichwa: 9:59 Yeah, so I mean, Soren- Soren had definitely been like thinking about startups a lot. Uh, he was working on a venture fund, um, and was in that- in that world. And then very s- well, he introduced me just kind of randomly to a- a startup that I liked quite a bit, and I started the process of dropping out of school for that, I like did the, you know, infinite gap year kind of thing. Um, and became really, really obsessed. Moved down to Silicon Valley and, um, that was- that was my life, and I was super, super excited. Uh, like, it was- it was incredible being, you know, first engineer, first employee and getting to just build- build my dream, essentially. Uh, or- no, not my dream, but build a dream, really. Um, something that mattered. And something that was a lot more interesting than taking classes, honestly. So I was like- I was psyched on that. Uh, and then, you know, Soren started thinking about this, and a month or two in was, uh, just showed up to my office and was like-

Ti Morse: 10:55 In San Francisco?

Olaf Hichwa: 10:56 Yeah, in- in front of my boss, too. G- great move. Uh, and he was like, ‘Well, you know, uh, tryin’ to get some advice on the deck,’ and- and just like slowly started looking at it and he was like, ‘You know, we should- we should probably design some boards for this,’ and I was like, ‘What if we made- what if we made a drone on a board?’ That- that was like- that excited me so much because it’s like, we want to mass-manufacture drones for defense applications and right now, you know, there’s 40 different manual solder joints that require a ton of skill and a ton of- they’re super unreliable, blah, blah, blah. A lot of reasons you can’t build racing drones off the shelf at volume. What if we- and I started thinking about the technical ways to make this- make this a reality. And then I found myself slowly like, uh, thinking about that more than- than my day job. And then like, I’d be like, I’d have one monitor with like my day job, and then I’d be like, second monitor, like, Googling this stuff on the side, and then slowly, like, I couldn’t sleep ‘cause I was designing the- the drone on the board solution, uh, early on. And I thought, you know, at that point, like, uh, probably- probably made sense and, you know, Soren and me… …raise some money, so there was a, some like financial reasonableness. It was still, it was still a jump, but some financial reasonableness, and then he was like, “Well, maybe we should go to the border with Poland to hand these drones off,” and then, you know, “Maybe we should just go to Lviv and then Kyiv,” and then, before you know it, we were at a military installation outside of Kyiv. But, yeah, it was definitely like a, just give me a taste of what we could be doing, and then it was very addictive, very addictive from there.

Ti Morse: 12:30 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a little bit like, I was listening to this podcast about the guy that, like, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and it’s a little bit like that, except for Olaf Dreams of Drones.

Olaf Hichwa: 12:42 Exactly. Exactly.

Ti Morse: 12:43 Awesome. Okay. So you guys are in, like, Vermont for how long before you go to Ukraine for the first time?

Olaf Hichwa: 12:47 We were in Vermont, let’s see, I believe it was April, May, when Soren showed up in Palo Alto. And then, you know, I was working on the first generation of Neurus motherboard for a little while, and then we moved in full-time in Vermont, I think in the July range, and then we shipped—like, put the drones in our suitcase—in September.

Ti Morse: 13:23 Crazy. Okay. What was that first trip like to Ukraine?

Olaf Hichwa: 13:27 That was crazy, dude.

Ti Morse: 13:29 Did you guys both go?

Olaf Hichwa: 13:31 Yeah, we both went with his dad, with Soren’s dad, who was in like an adjacent space. And he had been to some interesting offbeat places, so… and Soren’s dad is a character, I fucking love him, Jim is great. But yeah, it was like, you know, kind of set in when we were doing like some emergency medicine training, you had to like put the fucking gauze inside the body or whatever. And you know, it’s just prep and Kyiv is pretty safe, but just in case. I was like, wait, I was living in Palo Alto, California, taking my electric skateboard to work every day, designing boards, and all of a sudden, like, I have 30 killer drones in my suitcase that I’m trying to, with my best friend and his dad, bring into Ukraine. It was like, what are we doing? But, a little surreal. It was really surreal. And then, you know, met up with this guy that we got introduced through Twitter, of course, Blockchain—absolute fucking legend. He picked us up in Chicago and he was already, already headed back over. And he was involved in FPV training, so he kind of showed us around, was our first intro into Ukraine. And just seeing that, seeing the country, seeing what true like wartime innovation looks like, it was jarring for sure. And seeing like an entire country who just understands the…

Ti Morse: 15:00 If you don’t mass manufacture things, and if you don’t build weapons, you will be replaced.

Olaf Hichwa: 15:07 You got to outproduce the other guy.

Ti Morse: 15:09 You have to outproduce the other guy. And like, you could, you know, you can like choose not to build weapons systems and that’s, that’s fine. You’ll just be replaced by someone who does. Um, and that was a, that was a formative experience for me. Uh, since, you know, candidly like, I, I, there’s a lot of questions on whether like, it makes sense to build things that kill people. And seeing that in person, uh, definitely was very, very impactful. Uh, it was like a, like, it just seemed so obvious at that point. Um, and I don’t think I could have, like, understood how this works without, without seeing it. Um, and also understood the like, you know, understanding the people behind, uh, the Ukrainian fight, understanding, you know, like, Blockchain has a tremendous family. Um, and he’s a, he’s a father. And, uh, worked in the tech sector and he’s just like, a guy. Um, and you know, he, he, uh, could be living in the states with us chilling, but he’s going back to fight for his country. And he knows that if, if he doesn’t, um, he won’t have a country anymore. So, uh, it was very, very impactful trip. Um, and then also, you know, beyond the, like, uh, kind of, uh, finding myself in defense and that kind of thing, um, it was also just a huge technical aspect of, holy cow, they are really working at this. You know, I was, uh, walking the streets of Kyiv and I saw like Joshua Bardwell, who’s this big YouTuber. He’s like, Soren and I watch Joshua Bardwell all day every day to learn how to fly drones. He’s the, the teacher of drones. And he’s on a shirt. Like, he’s famous. And then like, it was a bake sale where, uh, some soldier’s wife was like making cookies and she made them in the shape of FPV drones because he wrote home that he wanted an FPV drone. And you know, that was, that was 2023 before, uh, you know, FPVs were widespread, but definitely not nearly as widespread now. And there was much less government funding for FPVs. It was a lot of just like personal warfighters like out of their pockets they’d buy a $400 drone from banggood.com and fly it into a Russian. Um, and so there was a lot of like grassroots fundraising and then you, you saw these like skyscrapers with the wives of warfighters just building these things, you know, one drone per station, learning how to solder and building drones and just seeing that in, in 2023 that, you know, like, this is what happens when you don’t build weapon systems. You have to build things to defend your country otherwise you’ll be replaced. And then the technical rallying around building a FPV industrial base in Ukraine and the effectiveness of these systems, the importance of these systems, the lethality of these systems I think made our roadmap very, very clear.

Olaf Hichwa: 18:00 Clear, it made it tremendously clear that this capability and more has to exist in America. And, oh boy, when we came back, we were so shocked, like, like we just started digging, it’s like, holy crap, America can’t make drones, you know, America makes…

Ti Morse: 18:13 What was the production capacity, for like a monthly or yearly production capacity, in like 2023, prior to NEUROS?

Olaf Hichwa: 18:19 My understanding is that America makes between 40 and 70,000 drones per year, uh, but like, and that…

Ti Morse: 18:25 …that includes everything?

Olaf Hichwa: 18:26 …that’s per year, everything, uh, and I think starting in 2024 that’s not up to date. It’s hard to get these stats, but based on, based on, like, you know, discussions with the DOD…

Ti Morse: 18:37 …but whether it’s 70 or 100, it’s basically zero.

Olaf Hichwa: 18:41 It’s, yeah, it’s basically zero. And, you know, China makes between 20 and 40 million. Uh, it’s very hard to get stats out of DJI, but it’s very likely that DJI makes a drone a second during working hours. It’s just freaking crazy. Um, you know, how can we have with—people talk about like the shipbuilding delta, it’s like 260 times, something like that? We have a 1000x delta in drones, potentially. Uh, so it’s, it’s way worse than the shipbuilding delta and, you know, drones are a really world-changing technology. Drones represent, FPV drones, these kinds of drones, represent 70% of all the casualties in the war in Ukraine right now. So…

Ti Morse: 19:13 That’s insane.

Olaf Hichwa: 19:15 This is the, you know, the Manhattan Project of our generation and we’re losing, very, very significantly.

Ti Morse: 19:21 Who supplies China with drones?

Olaf Hichwa: 19:22 China does themselves. They, uh…

Ti Morse: 19:25 Or, excuse me, Russia.

Olaf Hichwa: 19:26 Russia, yeah, yeah. China sells to both sides very aggressively and talk about a win-win situation for China. It’s evil, to be very clear, it’s, it’s ridiculously evil, but they are winning immensely. And, and by China winning, the US is losing. You know, look at all the innovation that’s happening in, in FPV. Uh, you know, in FPV in 2023, there were no anti-jam control links. It was just the regular things. There was no fiber optic, there was no, you know, long range, very efficiency-optimized strike platforms. There was no wideband video hopping or anything like that. All these innovations just did not exist. And then China got feedback from Ukraine and Russia at the same time to tell them exactly how to build that and they didn’t have to use government funding. They just used Ukrainian and Russian funding to build the industrial base in their country. So they got—they got the research and development handed to them from both sides of the war, the battlefield tested handed from both sides of the war, and then the production capacity not even built in Ukraine or Russia for the—for the most part, it’s built in China. Uh, you know, of course, Ukraine and Russia, they do a lot of assembly, they do a lot of screening, and Ukraine is making a lot of progress on sub-components. But 97%, I think, is a conservative number of the percentage of components that are made in China. It’s, it’s all Chinese. And seeing, seeing how our, in my opinion, number one geopolitical adversary is winning so insanely out of this is, uh, infuriating and is, is terrifying.

Ti Morse: 20:52 Probably like a month ago or something, you guys announced that you were going to move…

Olaf Hichwa: 21:00 Try to make it so Neuros gets to basically a million drone production per year as fast as possible.

Ti Morse: 21:05 Yep.

Olaf Hichwa: 21:05 Yep. And what’s crazy is like even at a million a year, it’s like a drop in the bucket relative to China.

Ti Morse: 21:11 Yeah. Yeah.

Olaf Hichwa: 21:12 How do you move from like making a few thousand a month right now to that kind of number?

Ti Morse: 21:17 Yeah. And to be clear, a million drones a year is batshit crazy goal, right? Like, it’s insane. You know, we are just now making 2,000 drones per month and it is a challenge. And this is the largest drone manufacturing line in America by a factor of two. So, you know, a million drones is a, is a serious challenge, but China recently announced they cut a million drone single PO to one drone company that’s going to supply these at rates, like it’s no big deal. Like we just cut the PO and, you know, there was no like R&D dollars to build the Chinese drone industrial base or anything. It’s no big deal. So we need like, you know, 50 Neuroses that are building a million drones per year.

Olaf Hichwa: 21:57 Did you say like a million dollars or a million drones?

Ti Morse: 22:00 A million drones. The CCP, they put out a press release and they’re like, ‘yeah, we just cut a PO, we just wrote like, please deliver us a million drones’. Gave it to one company and they’re going to do it.

Olaf Hichwa: 22:08 Wow. Is it a startup or is it DJI?

Ti Morse: 22:12 It’s not DJI. It’s not DJI. It’s a more established Chinese drone company.

Olaf Hichwa: 22:17 Okay. Crazy.

Ti Morse: 22:18 Yeah, I mean DJI could do that. I don’t even think you’d have to cut them a PO. I think you could just buy them. They just have them in the warehouse.

Olaf Hichwa: 22:23 I mean, how many, how many seconds is in a day? It’s like 30 days worth of production? Something like that?

Ti Morse: 22:28 Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s trivial for DJI.

Olaf Hichwa: 22:30 Yeah, crazy. Okay, uh… How did you, so you basically go to Kyiv and my understanding is because you know, Soren was like a world champion drone racer and you were also similarly at that level, um, you kind of had the doors open for you or doors opened that wouldn’t have opened otherwise. What was that like?

Ti Morse: 22:49 A little bit, yeah. I remember there was a, you know, Ukrainians rightfully are very proud of what they’ve built and we were at this training installation or whatever where they had these gates. And the, there’s like the, you know, jaded Ukrainian dude and he’s like, you know, he knows his stuff really well. He’s like, ‘who is this kid?’, you know, all that. And then they see Soren put the goggles on and start ripping the track. They’re like, ‘oh, yeah. Hello’. And they’re like, ‘what league did you win? Oh, MultiGP? Oh’. You know, and so that was, that was definitely part of it. I also think that we came in with a lot of immediate respect for the warfighter, which I think has carried. Um, and I can talk more about how important that is to our, our company set of values.

Olaf Hichwa: 23:34 Do you want to just quick do that?

Ti Morse: 23:35 Yeah, yeah. I think that defense acquisitions is tough because the users don’t buy the product. You know, the guy in the trench that’s flying this drone into an enemy is not sitting in the Pentagon writing, you know, multi-hundred million dollar program of records that span over five years. And then the guy in the Pentagon isn’t the guy that has the… Money. Congress has the money. So part of the reasons, you know, everyone says defense acquisitions are broken, defense is broken, well it’s set up very difficult, it’s very difficult.

Olaf Hichwa: 24:10 It’s like layers of bureaucracy from the end user.

Ti Morse: 24:12 Exactly. Exactly. And we try and be as end user obsessed as possible and as empathetic to the end user as possible because we know they are the the the people that we are working for at the end of the day. And I think we resonate with them, you know like, I don’t know, I go out to these these events and like we’re both 23 years old, we both didn’t go to college, and we both really like to fly drones and we’re like you know both like pretty good hand eye coordination and we both like you know don’t have electrical engineering background but we’ll take the drone apart and we’ll solder it together and we’ll make it work, we’ll experiment, we’ll also practice at our craft especially with like the tier one units that we’re working with. You know being really good at being a warfighter is not that dissimilar to like at least the practice is not that dissimilar to being a competitive drone pilot and of course you know um learning learning how to blow people up is a lot a lot harder a lot more different than you know flying a toy drone through a track but it requires a similar kind of focus and dedication. So I think that you know Soren and I just resonate very very well with the end users and we think, the bet, but we think DOD procurement will recognize that. That you know if we take a bottom up procurement approach where we you know maybe don’t invest time wise as much into the you know like top level like can we lobby Congress all that but really obsess with like let’s fly to every end user demonstration and let’s let’s literally I will go teach this end user how to fly this thing or I will go to Ukraine, learn the lesson and then bring it to the end user hand it to them. That will bubble up.

Olaf Hichwa: 25:52 So they’re kind of bang on the door of their superior or whatever and saying this is what we want.

Ti Morse: 25:57 Exactly. Exactly. And that’s paid off. Like you know we a few weeks ago I was in an interview and I got a Twitter notification and I clicked on it and it was Pete Hegseth with our drone like holding it there. And I was like what how’d that happen? And you know everyone thinks that like we paid some lobbyist a ton of money. We didn’t even know it was happening. It was just someone in the Marine Corps attack drone team who you know I flew with really really liked our freaking drone and they drove like there’s a bunch of stories on how hard they pushed to make that happen and that was fully organic. That was exclusively because we made a product that people liked.

Olaf Hichwa: 26:34 Goes so good that like even JD Vance was wearing it and like…

Ti Morse: 26:36 Exactly. Exactly. And you know that kind of organic growth I think is very rare in the defense industry. Like um you know building products that your customers like in every other industry is of course like you know Jeff Bezos is customer obsessed as an example. Um in defense somehow that’s like not standard and um we’re really really end user focused. We want to build a company for…

Olaf Hichwa: 27:00 Yeah. I mean I imagine even from kind of that perspective, um, the the like end goal is to equip militaries with like superior capability. And so, you know, if you’re if you’re focused on just like some guy that’s signing paperwork, that’s not exactly, he doesn’t know necessarily what the like front-line people need.

Ti Morse: 27:23 For sure. For sure. There’s a disconnect. And it’s not to say all people in procurement are incompetent or stupid, you know, most of the people in procurement were end users themselves. But no matter how skilled you are being in procurement, it’s it’s very different than if you’re on the frontline, if you’re training, if you’re that kind of thing. And, uh, you know, one of the things they do very well in Ukraine is they just give soldiers money. Uh, there’s like, you know, these like Amazon-style storefronts, where, uh, you know, users can buy drones. Um, and they don’t get a ton of money, right? There’s a lot of people in the military, but giving end users that kind of flexibility I think is really, really smart.

Olaf Hichwa: 27:59 And do they basically get to choose what equipment they’re buying?

Ti Morse: 28:01 A little bit. So it’s there’s a lot of reasons. As an example, if you, you know, providing a counter-example to my point. If I gave end user a million dollars, they would buy a Chinese drone because Chinese drones are better. So, like, there needs to be some, you know, and if we just completely rely on China, we will lose, we will lose for sure. And then, you know, if we buy give every end user a million dollars, they will all buy different drones and none of them will work together. So there’s there’s limits to this. But one of the things Ukraine does really well is they have um good lists and Mykhailo Fedorov, who’s someone in the startup space and someone I look up to a lot, I think is someone who’s really on it, has been a big pioneer of this in Ukraine. But they have these like web-based sites where they list the various drones that have been approved because they, you know, they’re safe enough to carry an explosive and they’re, you know, not made in Russia or something like that. Um and end users can buy those drones and then also, if they get kills with those drones, if the drones work, if the product does its job, they report that back and they get cash incentives to to buy more. And so you get this like feedback loop, it’s just like Amazon where there are reviews. And I think there are people pushing for this in the DOD and you know, I see the value of of more traditional procurement as well and it’s not to say that we need to give up on traditional procurement, but I do think this kind of like Amazon-style storefronts are super, super cool for defense and definitely part of what is going to help us uh rebuild our industrial base and and get to parity with China for drones.

Olaf Hichwa: 29:29 Yeah. I also kind of imagine like because you’re trying to focus on a fully American supply chain, um you could potentially probably like hamstring yourself short-term on scaling just because you want to build it in America. So how does the trade-off in your mind work? Like you want to maximize number of drones built and like iteration loops and everything while also like building this entire thing that hasn’t existed previously.

Ti Morse: 29:57 Yeah. We could build so many more drones than we currently do if we just bought from China. And there’s a few…

Olaf Hichwa: 30:00 What we did today, if we, you know, production line here, it’s not that big. It’s six desks long on each side. And right now, not only then all the desks are full. And then you know, look at all the people that exist outside. They are in general, like designing the components and and doing the, you know, stuff to feed the line.

Ti Morse: 30:19 If we made the decision early, early on to do what they’re, you know, successfully doing in Ukraine, just buy parts from China and focus like on assembly, hire a lot of people that do these manual solder joints, that use these Chinese chips, that use these Chinese components, we could have a way- we could produce way more drones. But that’s not what building the American drone industrial base is about. Building the American drone industrial base is about obsessively removing every adversarial component in your system as possible. And that’s about the humiliating realization that no one has a fully adversary-free supply chain. It’s it’s literally impossible given the way world politics, international trade works. But having the humility to realize you are dependent on China, you know, we have Chinese chips in this system and we’re fighting like hell to remove them, and working extremely, extremely hard to to to move as much of the supply chain step by step to allied producers, ideally American producers, as possible. And also being transparent with our DOD partners about it.

Olaf Hichwa: 31:10 You know, a lot of, a lot of people come out and say, you know, when when they get sanctioned by China, they’re like, ‘Oh, jokes on them, we don’t, we don’t have any Chinese parts.’ And it’s like, you know…

Ti Morse: 31:21 You do. But you should double check that. Um, and you know, realizing that the customer is your friend in this instance, right? America, the the DOD wants to help us get rid of Chinese components. And you know, if we’re transparent about like, listen, there’s, you know, we have probably the most China-free drone in in America and we’ve worked so hard to to remove each part, we’ve made tremendous progress on de-Chinafying the entire stack. Just, you know, work with us to procure this. We’ve had uh, great success like creating partnerships and just being transparent with the government in that sense.

Olaf Hichwa: 31:46 I also kind of imagine like, wouldn’t this not only be like the most China-free drone in America, but actually probably the most China-free drone in the world?

Ti Morse: 32:00 Probably. Yeah. Um, you know, I I don’t get to see exactly what happens in Iran, um, that that’d be a place I’d look for a China-free drone. Um, I don’t- I don’t get to see exactly what happens in Russia uh that much. But yeah, I do believe this is the most China-free drone in America. I’m not aware of another drone on the market right now as an example that has a- in the US DOD market- that has a a strike capability, you know, precision strike warhead, with a custom designed flight computer, custom designed BLDC motor driver, custom designed command and control anti-jam radio link, and a custom designed video- That combination of vertical integration is extremely hard. Yeah, it’s just not present, and I’d love to be proven wrong there. But I’ve looked pretty hard, and I have not seen anything, anything available right now. And that vertical integration is how you de-Chinify. If you’re buying components off the shelf, you’re just trusting that they’re China-free, and it’s pretty much every component I’ve taken apart has ended up being somehow, you know, linked to China. Yeah.

Olaf Hichwa: 33:29 So, I know that for like you guys start out with 30 drones. You go to Kyiv, you get a bunch of learnings, you come back. At what point did you, you know, I think probably focus is the most important thing on just like figuring out how to make one thing really, really well. How did you decide to like start building the Longbow and Crossbow?

Ti Morse: 33:51 We built the ground systems and really the full kit based on our success criteria being successful missions.

Olaf Hichwa: 33:58 And do you want to explain what they are?

Ti Morse: 34:03 Yeah, yeah. So Longbow is our electronic warfare, EW resistant ground control system built for maximal range. We also have another variant that’s Crossbow right there, and that’s a more lightweight, you lose a little bit of anti-jam capability on the command and control link, but we’ve still pushed that out and we can consistently push that out to 25 kilometers. Crazy. Still some pretty impressive radio performance in there. So these two base stations are the emitters. They’re what put out the RF energy to control the drone. And then you connect a long cable to a more secure position, a position that’s not being given away by RF emissions, usually underground to actually operate the drone via a wired link, a hard RF-free wired link to here. And, you know, we realized pretty quickly going to Ukraine, seeing our drones go to Ukraine, that if we just made the drone, you know, they’re going to run into an issue or they’re probably going to have to use a Chinese handheld, Chinese controller, Chinese radio. But even then, they’re going to configure it in a way that’s not optimal for our system or they’re going to run into supply chain risks when they have to procure the ground station or they’re going to have a production issue or the shipment’s going to get delayed so that the drones get to the front line before the ground station does. So we found that missions were not being successful because we didn’t enter that market. And that’s when we’re like, well, we have to make the whole system. And, you know, I think that can extend much further. You know, we need to make the backpack that carries the drone. It sounds small, but it’s actually super, super important. We need to think fully tactical.

Olaf Hichwa: 35:35 What was the process for that?

Ti Morse: 35:37 Well, it’s just understanding that, you know, when we go take the system out, we have to carry a cart and like, you know, five guys need to carry the system out originally. That’s not going to work, right? Or, you know, when Soren and I go to Ukraine, like we can’t reasonably carry a full system to Ukraine. That’s probably a problem. I don’t think the end users can either.

Olaf Hichwa: 36:00 And reasonably either, in that case, it’s just thinking, again, thinking about their experience actually using the product.

Ti Morse: 36:06 Exactly. Putting putting yourselves in the shoes of the end users and thinking, what do I need to do to achieve the mission. So right now, you’re producing like 2,000 a month. What are the next steps for getting to like 5,000 to 10,000 plus a month?

Olaf Hichwa: 36:23 Yeah, it’s supply chain hurdle. So we’re right now buying to 4,000 units a month, and that inventory is back there. That cage is our very, very precious stockpile of drone parts. There’s a lot of a lot of parts in there that, you know, maybe the some of the biggest stockpiles of drone parts in America. And right now, we are ordering to 4,000 a month. There’s a big lag in how we, you know, you start ordering the parts, that means the, you know, at this scale, the order goes to the chip companies, which get allocation in a semiconductor fabricator, probably in Taiwan, which then go to a packaging facility. Those are usually in China, but our supply chain is based in Malaysia and elsewhere, and then the packaging facility sends it to your PCBA contract manufacturer, and then they, you know, load the systems up, they wait for the boards to, blah blah blah. But there’s a big delay between, like, you know, placing the order and seeing drones come off the line. And that’s that’s really tough.

Ti Morse: 37:24 What’s the, like, time delay? Is it a few weeks?

Olaf Hichwa: 37:27 Minimum six months.

Ti Morse: 37:29 Six months? Wow.

Olaf Hichwa: 37:31 Yeah. Yeah, for these, but usually longer for for large large volume orders where you are ordering at the semiconductor level, it’s long.

Ti Morse: 37:40 So do you have to, like, plan out a few months and kind, or like maybe even a year or more, on guessing how much you need to be producing a year out?

Olaf Hichwa: 37:46 It’s a pretty pretty crazy game of game of guessing. Uh, you know, we, you know, we sell our our system for around $2,000 at low volume. Um, and, you know, at those kinds of numbers, it’s a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah.

Ti Morse: 38:00 Well, the other thing, too, is like it’s hard. I mean, if you have a six-month-plus lead time, it’s really difficult, I imagine, to like iterate.

Olaf Hichwa: 38:07 It’s a balance between staying flexible, which is something the Ukrainians do very well, and giving the supply chain team hell based on the fact that the design is freaking changing. How can they order, you know, a year in advance when the design is changing? And flexibility is something we pride ourselves on. Um, and we do a lot of we have a lot of neat tricks, you know, like as of recently we separated our part number for the PCB from the part number for the BOM, the the chips that go on the PCB from the full assembly, which includes a test procedure and firmware and all that. That way, we can, you know, order the boards way in advance, which probably won’t change, but the BOM itself, the bill of materials, the the parts, that changes. And we change RF matching networks as an example; we could potentially go to new frequency based on that. So yes, you know, life is way, way, way easier when you have a locked BOM, but we try and stay flexible. And I think that’s that’s the secret to mass manufacturing drones. Of course, you know, a lot of…

Ti Morse: 39:00 is an efficient assembly and the incredible technicians that put these systems together are work instructions are designed for assembly all that but that’s that’s kind of a given and then the the tricky stuff is the is the supply chain and the demand forecasting and the like playing putting pretty freaking big bets like pushing the chips into the table especially when DOD demand is not as high as it could be for FPVs you know we still sell more than half the production capacity is not going to the DOD and you know we closed a 6,000 unit production contract with the Ukrainians or for the Ukrainians through the a European coalition of countries before we even got a thousand units ordered in America which is as far as I know I mean it if you just think about it it’s it’s pretty backwards that like the Europeans are paying for America production capacity when the Americans won’t even pay for it so we’ve we’ve had to kind of stick our head like way up the window here to invest in this capacity but we believe it’s the right thing to do we believe that building production capacity in America is what we have to do government demand or not and and we’re gonna do it.

Olaf Hichwa: 40:08 Yeah, do you has it been kind of difficult to like educate the American kind of government leadership on the necessity of actually having like a stockpile of these FPV drones and like actually building it? Make sure that the supply chain works here without a bunch of Chinese-made parts? Like how’s that education process been?

Ti Morse: 40:21 It’s been tough. American like the DOD people we’ve talked to understand the importance of production. They understand the importance of supply chain. Um, with that being said, there’s a lot of forces working against us. Uh and like early on, you know, all of our requests for uh selling FPVs just fell on deaf ears, no one wanted to buy them and you know…

Olaf Hichwa: 40:44 How long was that?

Ti Morse: 40:47 In 2023. Um, and really part of 2024. And now, you know, we’ve had to…

Olaf Hichwa: 40:54 So it was like a year?

Ti Morse: 40:56 Yeah, hey, I mean we struggled to sell any FPVs to America for first year of our country. Company. Uh, and that was tough.

Olaf Hichwa: 40:59 But what do you think made the switch?

Ti Morse: 41:02 Bloody evidence. 70% of all casualties, like that that is really never happened before as far as I know. I mean that’s that’s you know up there with the machine gun um in in World War One and you know we’re starting to see it uh we we’ve uh you know having having this kind of volume has has started to get a lot of US traction and you know right now like I said we sell a thousand drones a month that that end up in Ukraine through Europe and uh the other thousand in our current production capacity is is going to America which is which is great you know I’m very very interested in supporting the American drone industrial base. I think it’s taken a quite a while like it would be make a lot more sense if uh you know America led the production uh initiative but we’re starting to see change and uh based on the the data coming out of Ukraine based on the end users liking the system based on our live fires being very successful you know real explosives on these systems being used by end users based on a lot of uh factors.

Olaf Hichwa: 42:00 Are- demand in the DOD is- is increasing. And there’s a lot of believers in the government that, you know, understand that you have to buy these systems in- in mass, in- in huge volumes and at low prices. Uh, for this to work, you cannot buy, you know, quarter million dollar loitering munitions and expect, uh, you know, mass- mass manufacturing to really, really happen. So we’re- we’re starting to see the shift. It is definitely slower than you’d ideally hope for. Yeah.

Ti Morse: 42:25 Um, so I know for the actual drone itself, it’s like fully built with Neuros. And then I know that you, for like the payload, you’re using like Kraken Kinetics. Um, eventually, will Neuros build the entire thing, including the payload?

Olaf Hichwa: 42:41 We’re, we’re-

Ti Morse: 42:43 Or is this something that you want even to talk about?

Olaf Hichwa: 42:44 No, no, no, happy to talk about it. It’s really important. Um, and like Brian Davis from Kraken, Ryan Hayes, are two incredible, brilliant individuals. And you know, I spent a lot of time at their facility. And I think that, you know, I talked about how there should be 50 drone companies building a million drones per year. I think that when you have a- a monopoly in the- the industrial base, bad things happen. And I think that part of the reason these like legacy defense systems are so ineffective is their lack of like modularity and willingness to integrate with other payloads. So I think it makes a lot of sense to have a- a modular, um, payload system. And, you know, the work that Kraken has done to make a firing device that is safe, a bomb that works, and the- the training to have the end users use the system effectively. The integrations between our platform and Kraken makes it an incredible, incredible system. And you know, uh, I think like, that’s what we have to optimize around. And both Kraken and Neuros will do whatever it takes to build an incredible system. But as far as I can tell, for- for ever, I think it’s going to make a lot of sense to have a- a very tight partnership between our two companies. And you know, I’m not an expert in bombs. I- I- I’m an expert in FPV drones, board design, um, electrical, that kind of thing. That’s- that’s- I’m not- I’m not- I’m not an expert in bombs. And I think we can share a lot of information, but having that symbiotic relationship and building production capacity in two companies across the American industrial base is a really, really- I think it’s a good strategy.

Ti Morse: 44:26 Yeah. I know- I know that for this, you can kind of get to some massive volume just based on the FPV drone, um, product. But do you think that there’s going to be any like future products that seem pretty obvious to build, uh, once you already have everything scaled up and working?

Olaf Hichwa: 44:41 What goes into an FPV is a sensor suite, usually a camera, um, could be a thermal imager, something like that. Um, a flight computer, so something to stabilize the system. A motor driver, something to turn motors, and a radio suite. And if you think about what goes into a fixed-wing loitering munition, it’s exact-

Ti Morse: 45:00 everything, right? It’s sensor suite, flight controller, motor driver, and radios. What goes into an unmanned ground vehicle? Again, you gotta turn the wheels, motor driver; radio, you gotta talk to it. It’s this same like core set of components that make virtually all unmanned robotics. And I think that FPV is a cool place to start because you can build a custom radio suite like we have in America that’s anti-jam, you could build a custom flight computer in America, and you do that all in-house. Like, you don’t have to, you know, you probably could not build a, you know, a core flight computer for a fighter jet in-house on a million-dollar, you know, pre-seed. Um, but you, you know, it’s possible to do it with an FPV. So the FPV market is a great place to enter to own that component suite and then readapt them and hone that component suite because there’s nothing that beats real-world testing. You know, we’ve, we knew freaking nothing when we did the first revision of all these electronics and every part of it changed based on battlefield feedback. So being able to hone that core set of components and then kind of build the frames, the airframes, the externalities around those core components to achieve different missions—you know, air vehicles, ground vehicles, you name it, semi-submersibles maybe—is, I think, is in our cards long-term.

Olaf Hichwa: 46:14 Really? You think you’re going to be hitting like submarines?

Ti Morse: 46:18 I mean, that’s way out. Way out. Okay. But I believe that the, you know, hey, submarines have basically flight computers, you know, little real-time processors that tell it where to go. They have communication links which are very, very difficult and, you know, maybe fiber optic potentially. Um, they have motor drivers, that’s for sure. Uh, it’s, it’s a lot of, and that’s like the furthest from, from an FPV, but there’s still a lot of overlap. And then much closer is, hey, let’s just take these four motors and, and rotate them and put a, put a wing and then you’ve got a, you know, longer range fixed-wing system that I think is in our roadmap. With that being said, as you mentioned, focus is king, right? Across the entire business, you, you have to maintain focus. And we’ve got a big problem of producing a million drones and, you know, I really want to stay focused on, on winning that before we spread ourselves thin.

Olaf Hichwa: 46:54 I want to know like what is the biggest piece of feedback, you know, I imagine that even though it kind of sucks that Ukraine is at war, um, it’s very positive from a like feedback angle where you’re actually getting real-world data, um, on the product, right? Where you wouldn’t if it was just like being playtested. Uh, what has been the biggest piece of feedback that you’ve gotten or information that you wouldn’t have expected?

Ti Morse: 47:24 Yeah. It’s a good question. Um, I remember like one of the first revisions that we made in in somewhat volume, Charlie, of our system, it was the first time we had an injection molded part as an example. Um, we received a memo in Ukraine. They they have a pretty pretty solid testing regimen where it goes to these like test facilities and they put together a an assessment of the system and they do a ton of tests like apparently like government has spectrum analyzers and they put the antennas a vector network analyzers they put the antennas on and all sorts of impressive technical tests and we got back that Charlie was not fit for battlefield use and they were like this doesn’t meet…

Olaf Hichwa: 48:00 criteria, you need more powerful radios, like the radio is not going to survive jamming. You need, uh, you know, uh, they- they wanted a better camera. You need more range. It was too heavy, a problem. Hall of problem. And definitely like seeing that document, that- that hurt, right? Like, uh, and, you know, we had brought Charlie to Ukraine. People were using Charlie in Ukraine. Like, you know, it was a functioning drone, but seeing the like harsh feedback and they don’t hold back, right? They’re like, ‘this is stupid,’ you know. Uh, seeing that harsh feedback that ‘not fit for battlefield use,’ uh, that was- that was impactful. And, you know, we- we sent that to the Slack channel and it was a 10-person company back then, but definitely rallied- rallied the troops a lot on like, ‘Hey, let’s make this better.’ And, you know, we’ve received a bunch of those. A bunch of these documents, and they get evaluated all the time. And, you know, recently we received, uh, a few weeks ago, I got- I- I got a- another one of these documents and it’s ‘fit for battlefield use.’ Uh, they still had- still had some feedback, uh, for us. Um, and, you know, some of it, you know, it’s- it’s- some of it’s like issues with the platform. Some of it’s like, ‘Oh, well we just didn’t communicate that feature to you. Like if you do this thing differently, if you employ this tactic, then you don’t have to do that,’ you know. Um, but it’s been super vindicating to see that difference between, uh, ‘not fit for battlefield use’ and then being ‘fit for battlefield use.’ And then maybe even more, getting to hang out with the- the end users. Um, you know, this- this past, uh, Christmas, instead of- instead of going home, I- I went to- went to Ukraine again to see some of the users that got our- our platform and, uh, was in- like had a- a very impactful dinner, uh, in Zaporizhzhia with, uh, some of- some of the folks using our system and just talked through, like, all the component choices, what they liked about our system, what they didn’t, and then got to see, uh, kind of their- some of their operation out there, where they prepare the drones, where they build the, uh, Esads and all- all those- those kinds of parts and- understanding, like, ‘Hey, this is where your platform does well and this is where your platform is shit.’ And, like, accepting that this is not the best drone in the world. The Chinese have 100,000 people working on FPV. America has a hundred.

Ti Morse: 50:08 I kind of love that they’re that blunt.

Olaf Hichwa: 50:13 Oh, they’re so blunt.

Ti Morse: 50:14 The Ukrainians, they are so blunt.

Olaf Hichwa: 50:16 It’s just like, ‘this fucking sucks. Here’s what you need to change.’

Ti Morse: 50:17 Have you gotten any feedback where you heard like ‘this fucking sucks’ and then you were like, ‘No, actually, we should keep that’?

Olaf Hichwa: 50:23 That’s the initial reaction every time, pretty much. Which is- which is like classic, you know, you tell an engineer their engineering’s shit and then they’re like, ‘Uh, fuck you, actually.’ Exactly. Um, and, you know, sometimes- sometimes we’re right. Usually we’re wrong. Um, and, you know, you- like I said, it goes back to end-user empathy. Like, okay, the end user does not understand the electrical engineering behind this, nor do they understand, you know, deeply how the system works at a technical level. But they understand how to employ it. And the engineers usually don’t understand how to employ it. Um, so it goes back to a respect for the end users. And, you know, Henry Ford said, ‘If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ And if they would have told me, build a faster horse, right? And I think that’s really important. You know, we don’t ask the end users what power amplifier should we switch to, how do we solve this problem? But we do, you know, hear that this radio is too weak and this radio is getting jammed. Not this one, but the one in Charlie. Um, and then we came back with with this version and, you know, the radio becomes 10 times better or something like that.

Ti Morse: 51:19 Is that one of those things where when you get that, you know, that uh memo back or whatever, can you rapidly incorporate that or is that the six-month lead time where you have to be shipping something that you know is suboptimal for months in order to just keep on shipping product while you basically reincorporate uh whatever that feedback is?

Olaf Hichwa: 51:37 Every day you wait, warfighters die.

Ti Morse: 51:39 Yeah.

Olaf Hichwa: 51:40 And that’s the that’s the important factor.

Ti Morse: 51:41 Imagine that’s a massive fire under you.

Olaf Hichwa: 51:43 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And like, you know, we uh for the first many, many, many drones, uh you know, our signal contact was in the QR code in the in the box. So it’s like not just some text us warfighter, like some guy calls you and like you have cell service in the trenches and it’s like not working. Uh like this is wrong. Um and you can imagine that creates a lot of pressure to make that six months less. Um and a lot of times it’s less. A lot of times it has to be more. You just cannot build an artificial intelligence-based drone swarm in a six-month product design cycle. It doesn’t work. Um and, you know, the engineer in me wants a very, very long product design cycle, but I love having the pressure from the end users, from the um procurement as well in Ukraine especially, that innovation has to happen very, very quickly and we have to get really, really creative about how we um build our supply chain, build our manufacturing strategy around product flexibility.

Ti Morse: 52:52 How many of those uh calls have you actually gotten? Like has there been a has there been a call where you’re just like sleeping or something and someone calls you in the middle of night and says, you know, things not working, I need a I need this fixed and then you were able to like remotely support them and fix it in order to like complete some mission?

Olaf Hichwa: 53:10 Yeah. And then you get the video back. Wow. Um and it’s it’s definitely not good for uh one’s sleep schedule.

Ti Morse: 53:22 No. No.

Olaf Hichwa: 53:23 But or or sanity maybe, but it’s important. It’s important. And it’s like we’re not building abstract things. We’re not like building like some satellite that, you know, might put a dot on someone and or I don’t know. Like we really realize it. We build drones that put warheads on foreheads. That’s that’s what they do. And we don’t we don’t hide that. And I uh I live for it. Like knowing the uh actual impact of the product. Um and and uh seeing seeing as close as I can get without, you know, um actually being the like on the battlefield with them necessarily.

Ti Morse: 53:51 Yeah. Yeah. I I think both you and Soren, you talked about this a little bit earlier, but you guys are flying to meet these people, you know, whoever your end users are in person talking with them building these relationships. Um do you have any good really good stories of you know some inflection point from meeting some person because you showed up in person?

Olaf Hichwa: 54:13 There is there is no replacement for face-to-face time with end users and it is such a fun part of my job. I think it’s actually kind of like what I count as vacation. Um like I’ll I’ll like you know stay here on a crazy technical sprint and I’ll be beat like it just drains you and then I’ll get to go hang out with end users with the product and like yes that is so fun I am so refreshed I can go go grind so much harder. But there’s definitely been times especially with US end users that like you know you go to these live exercises you go to uh you know certain certain events that I probably can’t give too many details on and hang out with these people that are just such incredible people. Such masters of their craft especially since the people that are using FPV or at least historically that have been using FPV in the US forces are are really the Tier 1s the the like most incredible warriors that America has produced. The people that are the you know world champion level of of of being a warrior and getting to see how they operate, getting to see their tactics, getting to see how they think, getting to see you know what questions do they ask and what goes wrong and just standing there and watching them not telling them how to do it. Just watching them see like how do you how do you take it out of the box? How do you you know do you read the manual or not? Do you um and and building the product around that critical. So so so critical. Um and also just like getting to hang out with them and understand them as a person helps make it that much more logical to have that obsession with like end-user empathy. Like these are the people you know it’s they’re first ends right? Um that are that are using the product that we are building the product for.

Ti Morse: 55:59 Yeah. Do you have a list in your mind of you know you talked about like end-user like empathy for what their experience and everything like that. Pure obsession over the line and how everything’s manufactured and making the best product as fast as possible short iteration cycle that kind of stuff. What’s kind of like the top things in your mind day to day?

Olaf Hichwa: 56:21 Uh hum. Yeah I’m I’m pretty uh development timeline obsessed. Uh it’s definitely not like sexy. Um yeah I was like I was like uh random aside but I was talking to a guy at Cliff Jumps and he was like you know it’s like never never uh you know you never feel more alive um than like the closer you are to death. Um and then like uh you know like Soren’s like he comes up and he’s like yeah Olaf that’s why you spend your day in Notion timelines. And I’m like true true but hey that’s what makes uh that’s what makes the product work. So like top of my mind day to day is like will next-gen radio ship on time? Will the design be qualified fully and released to production, and when an engineer says they’re going to get it done in this amount of time, like is that for real? And you know, obviously you have to have a ton of trust but like, goddamn, there’s a lot of, a lot of, you know, importance on that assessment, on that, on that timeline. So I’d say like, you know, I go to bed thinking still very like tactically on like… is board release happening Monday for real, for real? Like actually, actually, actually? Um, so that’s, that’s definitely top of mind like day to day.

Ti Morse: 57:42 You’re trying, you’re basically trying to take whatever timeline people have or you guys have and push it up as much as you possibly can. And try to also like, really think about is the timeline real?

Olaf Hichwa: 57:52 Yes. Is the timeline real? And it’s not only pushing it up, often it’s pushing it back. Really? In that like, if you ship an unqualified design, if you ship a design that you don’t know works properly, and then you build a thousand of it, that is a way, way, way worse problem to have than telling them, ‘Listen, sorry, it’s not going to happen this week. Like it’s just, I’m sorry, the physics are such that it will not happen this week. Production cannot start this week and you will have to wait until you start.’ That is a way better solution to be in than having a thousand drones sitting there that don’t work, that now the engineers need to go fix. And we’ve been there. The, the production hell of bringing this, these two systems up, we were like four months late, which is a long, long time. And you know, we were like, we were, I mean I remember just like, you know, nodding off in that, in that corner like building these things because we can’t hand it off to production because we’re still unsure on part of the design and that’s like, that’s been very informative, like playing that, that game of like do you delay production or do you just go for it? And slow is fast in engineering, right? Um, you win by doing design reviews early. You win by, I don’t know, I’m pretty board obsessed. You win by spinning test boards before you integrate everything. You win by using dev boards. Um, you win by quickly fabricating mechanical prototypes on our CNC back there and running flight tests. Like, and sometimes like, it’s kind of surprising how people like don’t want to run flight tests. But we are flight test obsessed. We fly…

Ti Morse: 59:27 Why don’t people want to run flight tests?

Olaf Hichwa: 59:30 Um, there’s good reason like, you know, especially when you’re developing radios, like you’re doing basically fundamental physics. You know, if you put your hand here just near this antenna, everything changes. The entire system changes. If you, you know, turn your phone on and pick up a call, that interferes. If your Starlink is going off, it interferes. It’s a, it’s a very like hypersensitive field, finicky field. So you want to do everything, you know, conductively wired in an anechoic chamber with no, with isolation, blah blah blah blah blah. You know, when you get back from flight test, drone no work, drone crash, radio breaky, like how do you debug that? Or like 10,000 things could have gone wrong.

Ti Morse: 1:00:10 So there’s a lot of reasons like not to flight test. With that being said, I’m flight test obsessed and we’ve got an incredible team led by Levi, the FPV specialist team, and they go and they rip the system every freaking day and we have a- we have a beyond visual line of sight waiver for Manhattan Beach. So we are, you know…

Olaf Hichwa: 1:00:23 Whoa. Are you like the only company with that?

Ti Morse: 1:00:25 Um, I’m sure there- I mean there- others could get it. Uh, I’ve never seen another company there. Um, but you know, being able to operate our drones near our facility, hugely valuable and being able to get reps on the system regardless of even if like some of it’s unscientific, but knowing like, you know, I get- I should get confidence on the design like ideally through you know, lab tests, but I don’t feel good about shipping the design until we have hundreds of flights. And uh, that’s like the kind of like-

Olaf Hichwa: 1:00:58 That’s entirely reasonable. It’s like- it’s like shipping Starship without actually putting people on Starship and just hoping for the best in version 1.

Ti Morse: 1:01:03 For sure. And a lot of great engineering like they don’t, you know, they don’t test- like they are confident that the design will work in space before they put it in space, right? And they do a lot of testing in the lab to build that, but we are very like flight test obsessed.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:01:16 You want contact with reality early and often.

Ti Morse: 1:01:18 Exactly. And sometimes like I don’t know, what I do day to day it’s a lot of like, like I said, timelining, project management, but also just like knowing when to push. Like sorry you don’t get to do your scientific test and I know you’re not going to be able to root cause it thoroughly if you just go fly it, but it is time to go freaking fly it. And that’s across you know mechanical designs, it’s across electric designs, it’s across firmware, it’s across autonomy, it’s across the full stack of engineering.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:01:43 Crazy. So when you’re under the gun, you have you know four months where you like want to be shipping something but you just can’t and there- I imagine there’s like insane pressure every day that you’re not doing this, basically people are probably dying or some version of that, like extreme level of pressure. Um, how do you kind of cope with that and like under- you know keep- stay sane when you know that you’ve got like the- if you ship one day earlier and you just make it work one day earlier, maybe someone lives?

Ti Morse: 1:02:15 Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think you can have like balance or be what other people would consider sane. I remember the push we made for that 6,000 unit drone order when we developed a ground station for the first time, like I fell asleep in that corner there, we were working on a bunch of fiber optic and I like found like a fiber optic spool and I just like-

Olaf Hichwa: 1:02:41 Just passed out?

Ti Morse: 1:02:42 Passed out and then like woke up and like everyone was like messing with me and shit and then like you know it was- it was brutal. Um, and we had you know definitely like people were getting sick and then they’d like you know and- and sometimes like people would um…

Olaf Hichwa: 1:03:00 you know work through their sickness, which I don’t know how is even possible, um, and we learned a lot in in PACE. Um, you know, I think we would not have delivered on that demo in Latvia if we hadn’t had that that push. Um, but we also learned that like that’s not how you build a company that survives over 10 years. Um, like I I definitely, like, would have physically broken down, like I think I I would not be able to like, you know, physically do those kinds of hours for for more than than a few months.

Ti Morse: 1:03:30 How many hours a week were you like, was it one of those situations where you’re basically Elon in 2018 sleeping in the factory?

Olaf Hichwa: 1:03:41 Yeah we were sitting here, there’s a bed bed over there. So wake up, work, you know 18 hours or whatever, and then fall asleep when you can’t really function anymore and then wake up and do it again for four months in a row. Exactly, yeah. The IDCCC sprint will live in infamy. Um, and like it’s it’s cool to be in a, you know, in an industry where you have these like sprints, it’s like and then the entire team goes to Latvia together, and we fucking kill it. Um, we the the we don’t lose a single packet, we have 100% link quality flying over the jammer.

Ti Morse: 1:04:12 What was that feeling when that happened? You’ve you’ve spent four months just grinding on that.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:04:17 It was, you have to you have to act cool like in front of the big wigs at the government and you just want to jump up. You want to jump off and you got like Peter in the van, our RF engineer, mastermind behind a lot of the system, he’s with a spectrum analyzer. He’s like losing his shit. Um, and he’s like but we’re trying to act so serious where no one can see him.

Ti Morse: 1:04:31 Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Yeah, and it’s like

Olaf Hichwa: 1:04:35 the the like, you know, Levi under the goggles saying cucumber cool, like sticks, you know, you can’t shake, right? And he’s like, you know, our drone went eight kilometers before that IDCCC push and, you know, we hit 10, we hit 15. Um, and then we, you know, we come back and we just keep hovering there and it’s like five minutes of extra hover past that maximum maximum distance and it was like seven minutes of just like it just keeps going and going and going and the system just keeps working and just like acting like it’s nonchalant. And then seeing, you know, seeing how we did compared to the competition, which is, you know, part of it, seeing that we had the 100-meter cable working. Um, the the very important to have the antenna very far from the end user and it was very hard to get, you know, power transmission analog video transmission over that that length and seeing that we had, you know, in-flight frequency changing for the video link working and seeing that our dual-band link was doing what it what it should with with anti-jam capabilities and seeing that you’re able to identify the target at range and just like all these things going right, uh, over and over again and then you get like, you know, of course the the military procurement people are, they’re you know, very like, you know, kind of, you know, manly manly figures that are like, oh yeah, cool, nice work or something like that. You you like at best get like a, yeah, we’ve had that for a while but it’s good to see it, you know.

Ti Morse: 1:05:51 It’s good to see that it actually works.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:05:54 And then being able to as a team like let loose, like we we uh we celebrated very very very very very very hard. …aggressively in in Latvia.

Ti Morse: 1:06:02 I got to imagine this felt like, you know, the fourth starship or the fourth, you know, initial I think was it like a Falcon? The the fourth rocket that actually worked for SpaceX after the first three blew up. And like the fourth was the last pallet of cash that they could send into space. Hopefully that thing doesn’t blow up. And it did.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:06:20 Yes. Yes. And, you know, legendary companies are built on these like these sprints and like painful experiences, yeah. And your culture is set on on that. And like, you know, Levi and Peter and Glad and Soren and the squad from Latvia, like that that night, it it really cemented, like I think like lifelong partnerships.

Ti Morse: 1:06:33 Yeah.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:06:34 Um, and you know, I’m not gonna say that the, youation know, I I uh I loved every moment leading up to that event, but man, I look back on it so fondly because of the success. And I think part of it is like, um, you know, you can keep sprinting as long as you’re winning. What really, really sucks is sprinting and losing. You know, those three launches before uh things worked for SpaceX, I’m sure…

Ti Morse: 1:06:59 That was years.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:07:00 Yeah. And I’m sure people were, people were lost, right? You know, people, people, some people don’t don’t have it in them to to fight that hard and then lose over and over again.

Ti Morse: 1:07:10 What do you think you learned about yourself and like what what did you learn about the team during those like four or five month, you know, period?

Olaf Hichwa: 1:07:21 I think it reminded me that like happiness is not about any given state. Like you cannot perpetually be happy. You can only be happy based on becoming less unhappy. If that makes sense. Um, there’s no like stability, there is struggle and then joy of the struggle ending kind of.

Ti Morse: 1:07:42 You can be in the pit and you see yourself climbing out of the pit one step at a time and that like it doesn’t necessarily provide happiness but it’s like satisfaction and you know joy of like we’re getting closer to the promised land kind of thing.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:07:51 Yes. And I think that like I don’t know, uh I’m really young and I haven’t haven’t really figured this out, but I see myself just like like I don’t really see like an end. Like what uh you know, if we make a million drones, I’m going to be very, very happy because that was a lot of of pit. But then I’m going to be unhappy and it’s going to be 10 million drones and I think it’ll keep going.

Ti Morse: 1:08:07 Um, I also I think you have to learn like that’s the that’s like the the devil on the shoulder, right? The like we’re going to keep pushing for fucking ever, which is very true. I just think of it as perpetually unsatisfied.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:08:15 Yes.

Ti Morse: 1:08:16 Yes, exactly.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:08:17 And obsessed with making it better. There’s also zooming out and being strategic and realizing that like sprints like that are not how you build like decade long companies. Um, and not how you…

Ti Morse: 1:08:28 You don’t win by heroics.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:09:00 You win by careful planning.

Ti Morse: 1:09:02 Execution day after day over time.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:09:04 Exactly. And you know, you don’t build a million drones on a four-month sprint. You build it by betting that the DOE is going to buy a lot or whoever your customer is going to buy a lot and being really smart on your supply chain and thinking long, thinking strategically. And I think it was a formative experience and I learned a lot about like company building and what Neuros should be about balancing those those two very…

Ti Morse: 1:09:30 Opposite requirements of…

Olaf Hichwa: 1:09:31 Let’s get this tech working, let’s get this prototype out, let’s make the system perform but let’s also think on long development timelines, let’s you know, not work 16-hour days. Let’s let’s work 12-hour days, um or or or who knows, maybe an 8-hour day eventually. Um, and let’s build a company that people can can live at and you know, Peter has a had a daughter, um a very young daughter, um that that he wants to be a good father to as an example. Um and uh like he has done both raising his daughter and building Neuros RF, um together, which I I respect and you know, I I remember there’s a, you know, great image of Aleia, his daughter, in in his arms and he’s soldering with with Aleia in his arms. And he’s like yeah, she’s gonna learn how to solder very, very young. Um and I think that’s awesome. I think that like there is there is else in life besides uh building uh drones at at high volume.

Ti Morse: 1:10:33 But not much.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:10:34 Not much.

Ti Morse: 1:10:35 Okay. So when you’re thinking about like massively scaling up drone production, mainly that has to do with like figuring out how to make this factory way more efficient and then also scaling to more factories. Um how do you think about like designing the machine that builds the machine?

Olaf Hichwa: 1:10:54 Good question. Um there’s a lot of good like uh guidance on building factories out there on on the internet, right? You you know, listen to Ben Rich and you put the engineers next to the production line. It’s very obvious. Um you have manufacturing engineers in design reviews. Um you know, there’s like you can probably ask ChatGPT and it will output all all this stuff. Um I think maybe what’s not as known is how unmanufacturable legacy defense is.

Ti Morse: 1:11:27 What do you mean by that?

Olaf Hichwa: 1:11:29 One of my uh mentors, very, very, very good engineer, um Ben Stabler, um he told me something that I found pretty funny that’s very, very true. Um whenever you find like a part in electrical engineering, he’s also an electrical engineer, that is uh you know, mil-spec or uh you know, you know, defense product, an aerospace product, um it generally just means it was designed by someone who was like fairly intelligent in 1970 and then never changed. And it’s very true. Um like as an example, this…

Ti Morse: 1:12:00 This part right here is one of the only like made-for-defense components that we use, and it’s one of the worst parts of the entire system. That connector is, depending on where you buy it, over $200, that little connector right there. So dumb, so, so, so dumb. And it’s an embarrassment that that is on an Anduril product and it’s being removed as soon as possible. But the, like, that connector is also like a standard issue DOD connector. It’s part of like the Net Warrior system, I’ll spare you the details, but that connector is used on like so many freaking defense products. It’s on the, it’s on the Abrams tank. And in my opinion, there is a like a mind virus in unmanufacturable parts in defense. And just being in defense pushes you towards these parts. And like, we’re pretty, I think we’re about as forward-thinking as you can get in that we make toys, we make FPV racing toys that were so freaking cheap, $500 drones that go zero to 100 miles an hour in like a second or so. Like we, we are the opposite of aerospace grade design in 1970 and never changed. And yet, Mighty Mouse connector on that thing. So it’s like, and it’s not like you know like I woke up one day and found a Mighty Mouse connector on my product, like, it was a decision that we had to make, it was, it was forced, but…

Olaf Hichwa: 1:13:29 It was the same thing with like using China-made parts at the beginning because that’s the only, like, that’s the best thing to do at the moment in order to move forward.

Ti Morse: 1:13:34 Exactly. Exactly. And so part of, part of what I think about, like, part of what we do with being able to mass manufacture stuff is, don’t take a defense product and then try and mass manufacture it. Like, or like take a defense-only an aerospace part and try and get it cheaply. Don’t take a, you know, massive complicated FPGA and, you know, squeeze it into a low cost system. Take a consumer system. Take a toy drone. Take an off-the-shelf consumer component and upgrade it. Take an RF chip that’s used for parking meters, and manipulate its drivers, and manipulate its, you know, different channels for different countries, different frequencies for different countries to make it into an anti-jam system that’s very, very wideband. That’s actually how we implemented our, our wideband anti-jam radio. Take a, you know, STM32F411, a $3 MCU that runs at 48 megahertz, on a Cortex-M0+. These are, these are like ridiculously weak numbers, and put it in charge of the entire drone. You know, have it be the most powerful piece of silicon in the entire drone. And take a, you know, cheap stuff all around. And cheap isn’t the right word. It’s inexpensive stuff, really.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:14:56 It’s the same situation, I think, with, like, Elon and the rock… at where, you know, you could buy the like 500,000 to a million dollar AC unit to throw on the rocket, or you can just like retrofit the one from the refrigerator that costs, you know, $150.

Ti Morse: 1:15:11 Economies of scale. It’s crazy. Economics 101.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:15:15 When you when you buy consumer products in volume, they become they become so much cheaper. And so we do a mix. We we follow the advice the very it’s it’s not obvious, but it’s tried and true. The Elon advice, the, you know, put the production line right next to the engineers, the DFM obsession, the like, no, you can’t freaking have direct solders on your drone. You need to have everything connectorized. No. You cannot have five different boards in the product. You know, three board drone should be a one board drone eventually. Um, but then also we fight back against the the legacy defense component mind virus of of ultra expensive and not that performant parts that just never change.

Ti Morse: 1:15:58 Do you guys have something similar to Elon’s the algorithm?

Olaf Hichwa: 1:16:01 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, Sean, our COO, uh, spent twelve years at SpaceX, and he he brings the SpaceX wisdom there, and he wrote up the algorithm and made us all memorize it.

Ti Morse: 1:16:07 Oh, do you guys literally copy it?

Olaf Hichwa: 1:16:08 Yeah. I mean, it’s in it’s in our notion. Uh, you know, some things you don’t change. Um, and, uh, you know, the responsible engineering mentality, that’s great. And there’s a lot of problems with SpaceX culture, a lot of great things about it. Um, and, uh, we’re trying to try to copy as much of what works as possible. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And it’s been super helpful. You know, like, SpaceX is it’s like I think, you know, already, but, like, historians are going to look back on, like, LA hard tech was defined by SpaceX really. Like, it’s like, you know, all these startups are, uh, a lot of them are founded by, you know, SpaceX people that leave SpaceX and understand what SpaceX has done because what they’ve done is just never happened in in human history really. Um, so yeah. It’s it’s important to pull the the right things. They do make a lot of mistakes. Um, and, uh, you know, getting to see, uh, the Bastrop PCB, again, I’m PCB nerd, seeing the PCB production line in Bastrop, Texas, where they are making five million Starlink user terminals per year, um, just wild. Like, no one in America besides ultra low volume defense primes has built a PCB line, not the PCBA, not the pick and place assembly process, but the bare board. Um, no one has built a vertically integrated production line like SpaceX has has done. And and they’ve done it so so effectively. They are doing the hardcore chemical material science, like, lithography where you, um, take, you know, sheets of copper and you pour, uh, a essentially I’m simplifying, but like something like an acid that removes copper to make these microscopic patterns that connect all these chips that build the city that powers these drones. They’re doing that all in-house, and they have, you know, vats of different chemicals. they’re bringing in these raw materials, these raw fibers, and building it into these ultra-refined pieces of electronics all in-house because the industrial base doesn’t exist in America. And just building that capacity is so incredible, so incredible. And of course, getting to see Starbase, like seeing the city that they are erecting out of the middle of fucking nowhere, to produce a really, really, you know, humanity-defining product. And then building a city. You know, really they’re building a city. Seeing that is inspiring and that’s where Neros needs to go. We need to have—this is a detail, but it presents the picture—we need to have a board manufacturing division that makes millions of boards in America because there just doesn’t exist the industrial base. In China, that’s no big deal. You know, you have JLC PCB that rips out these things like no problem. But we need to solve these hard problems and obviously it expands well, well, well beyond boards. It goes into camera optics, it goes into the ground systems, it goes into the antennas, it goes into the injection molding of propellers, the, you know, injection molding in the frame eventually. But we need to build that core capability, that production capability here like SpaceX has.

Ti Morse: 1:19:09 Am I right that SpaceX with Starlink built basically like the highest or the largest production American-made manufactured product like out there? Or complex engineering, you know, product? And I’d imagine that like Neros is going to be kind of the second iteration of Starlink instead of putting, you know, putting out these terminals, you’re going to be putting out drones. But it’ll all be American.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:19:41 I’ll zoom out a little bit. I think that like there have been ages in human history, like the steel age, the bronze age, and I think we live in the consumer electronics age, right? And I don’t think anyone in America does consumer electronics, except for SpaceX, well. Um, so I think absolutely, to answer your question. Um, and you try and get a board made in America, you try and get this flight controller pick-and-place in America, they’ll charge you $120. I’ve quoted it. You try and do that at JLC PCB in China at low volume and they’ll do it for under $2. The delta there is wide.

Ti Morse: 1:20:19 60x.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:20:20 Yeah, it’s—it’s bonkers. And no wonder you can’t make consumer electronics in America. No—no one is doing it except SpaceX. And the way they’ve done it is so hard. It’s just like inherit all the problems possible. You know, in China, um, incredible country. I—I went to Shenzhen and I think it’s got some serious competition. You know, you can wake up and order a board at 9:00 a.m. and they will etch away, they will create this multilayer, microscopic, you know, thousands of an inch precise copper pattern to connect all these chips, weld the chips, solder the chips on there, test the system in one…

Ti Morse: 1:21:00 Morning. You can order at 9:00 AM and get your board at lunch. In America, it’s like I’m fighting like hell for one week board spins. I think that’s key to our company. Right now we’re like three week board spins on certain items. It’s so much slower. And SpaceX developed this product without that industrial base, right? And then developed the production capability without that industrial base, all in the same house.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:21:18 And also, like, without the tribal knowledge.

Ti Morse: 1:21:20 Without the tribal knowledge, without the talent pool, without the work ethic that a lot of, you know, obviously people at SpaceX work very hard, but like a lot of the techs in China, you just can’t compete.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:21:28 And the ethics were, like, hardcore.

Ti Morse: 1:21:31 And just like the commitment to quality, the fact that they’re okay living at the factory, that’s like standard in segregated dorms. I mean, it’s rough. But, yeah, just the baseline, like, insane work, the migrant workforce, the fact that the government is willing to just ship, you know, laborers from certain provinces into the cities just to lower wages and then ship them back out. Like the government exists to kind of allow for consumer electronics manufacturing, I think, to a certain degree. SpaceX did… did the impossible all without it and not because they were regulated into, like, they could make Starlink in China. They just think that it’s strategically a bad idea and it’s the wrong thing to do for the country. And Elon just fucking did it. And that is… that is awesome. And their boards are competitive with China. Like they are… they are making, you know, Starlink for cheap, right? You can buy a Starlink and…

Olaf Hichwa: 1:22:21 It’s like 250 bucks or something.

Ti Morse: 1:22:23 Yeah, and I think I’d get in a lot of trouble for and probably don’t know the real numbers, but for sharing, like, the numbers I saw on the screen on how cheap their stuff is, but I believe it.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:22:29 They’re making it at very low cost.

Ti Morse: 1:22:30 They are making it for China prices. And no one does that. No one does that. Um, so, wow. You can… I’m sure you can tell that this is where Nearness needs to go.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:22:37 Yeah. Okay. When you’re trying to, like, hire people, you know, this is a very… like you’re trying to build a team of A+ killers that are just like absolutely all in on the mission. How do you find those types of folks and like what’s the process for onboarding them?

Ti Morse: 1:22:54 They’re never in plain sight. You know, Saron found each other on Discord and we would hang out 24/7. You know, I… in middle high school, like I didn’t have like normal friends. I had… I had Discord and I got to hang out with my friends, you know, for two weeks in July in Vermont a year. So you find them in weird places. And like one of my first hires I met through Reddit. Um, a lot of personal connections.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:23:26 Yeah.

Ti Morse: 1:23:29 And also a lot of like, you know, being good at that initial screen. Super, super, super, super important. Like one of my best engineers, his resume was terrible. Um, it was like… his question was bad and I was like convinced to take the screen. In 10 minutes I knew.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:23:51 You were like, this guy’s amazing.

Ti Morse: 1:23:54 Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like, it’s… wow. less scientific than I’d like it to be and it’s something that like getting wrong kills the company because you know one bad player really drags down the average. But I’d say how do you build a good team? It’s look at like asymmetric recruiting opportunities like look at look at the Discord servers, look at the Reddits. Ted does this maybe better than anyone I know. Put the sticker on the Tesla charger that I see every time or the billboard next to SpaceX. Um, and be really, really good at that initial screen. Um, and then grill them, right? Like have a quantitative process, have fixed questions that change every so often that way you don’t have them memorized, but like judge the different candidates on the same set of questions and put them through the technical wringer. Do a case study. Um, you know I pull up a schematic with every electrical engineer I talk to. And still, like we haven’t hired a single electrical engineer that I haven’t personally grilled at the schematic level. And that’s awesome and I love it. And you can tell so much about whether someone knows their stuff or not just by giving them a like somewhat concrete like technical, you know, challenge and then just working through it together.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:25:08 See how their minds work.

Ti Morse: 1:25:10 Exactly, exactly. While still maintaining similarity. Like I’ve then, I’ve kind of like syoped myself before where like techinally I didn’t make the hire but like I’ve felt so highly about a candidate and then like finally gave them a quantitative like here’s the same schematic everyone else got and they fail it. And I was like “Oh shit, wow, that’s scary. Like I almost hired that guy.”

Olaf Hichwa: 1:25:29 Have you had any situations where you just went out on like one of these missions or you go to Ukraine or Kiev or wherever and you just like find someone there where you’re like “Holy shit, we gotta have this guy?”

Ti Morse: 1:25:37 Yeah, it’s funny you ask actually. Like Pavlo who runs our Ukrainian entity, our chief engineer in Ukraine, definitely one of those.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:25:41 Wow. What was that story?

Ti Morse: 1:25:43 That was incredible. It was a trip but we got introduced through an investor through D3, very, very helpful group of individuals. Um, and we just started talking and we were like we were talking about video systems where we’re like he’s really into like DVBT-based digital video systems and I was like dude I’m big on analog and the unidirectionality and you know if you’re doing like forward error correction you’re just never never gonna get the same performance blah blah blah blah blah. Can’t have bidirectional communication just going so deep into like the technical debate and it just lasted hours and I remember I was there like it was like me, Pavlo and someone who’s on our team doing mostly on the VD side and just like watching uh you know I love him of course but watching his eyes just glaze over he’s like these guys are never going to stop freaking talking. You know that level of just like shared obsession and like we’ve all read the same Reddit posts and we’re all in the same weirdass forums and we’re all reading the same…

Olaf Hichwa: 1:26:46 You make some esoteric reference and they already know it.

Ti Morse: 1:26:48 Exactly, exactly. And that that’s the kind of person that you’re like you want to you want to hire immediately but also like give resources to and put in charge. Um, and Pavlo’s done great. things and it’s so cool to have, you know, engineering in-country. Um, and candidly, you know, this drone is the best in the world in a lot of ways. It’s also very behind the state-of-the-art in Ukraine in other ways, uh, based on the fact that they innovate faster. Um, and, you know, I had a really, really impactful lesson, uh, in Zaporizhzhia, uh, within, uh, glide bomb range. They had an SMT line, a production line that picks up chips, places it on boards, underground, where they were fabricating radios, you know, five miles from the front line. Um, so it was like, you know, dude with the cigarette, like it’s, um, it’s not very scientific, right?

Olaf Hichwa: 1:27:36 Straight out of Breaking Bad.

Ti Morse: 1:27:39 Straight, yeah, well, but Jesse was running the show, not Walt. Um, and like, you know, they’d send a guy to the front line, they’d take a spectrum measurement, and they’d come back to the lab, like that night, and then populate a new matching network with resistors, capacitors, inductors on the, uh, on the SMT line, and then place the components for a specific set of frequencies that the Russians are not on that day and then fly the drones next day.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:27:54 Wow.

Ti Morse: 1:27:55 That level, like, we don’t do that here, right? Like, it’s impossible. Like, just the flight, the flight from here and the train, sum those two together, no engineering time, zero minutes, is longer than the feedback loop to product iteration in Ukraine. So, obviously, um, we have to have the respect to know that, like, this drone is going to be behind in, in some meaningful ways.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:28:09 Yes.

Ti Morse: 1:28:10 But so having the, only way to really catch up is having the engineering in-country and, and give them the innovation potential. And I think Pablo’s done an incredible job of that.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:28:17 Crazy. Okay. So, like, long-term, when you’re thinking about entering some country or whatever, you’re going to be shipping a lot of product, let’s say to Ukraine for now and other places, you know, soon. Um, are you thinking about just spinning up an entire factory in that country so that you can do, like, local iteration really fast?

Ti Morse: 1:28:31 Yeah. It’s, uh — again, there’s a lot of dreams, and we can’t let any of our dreams get in the way of our core dream, which is million drones a year here in America. That’s the number one priority. With that being said, you have to have localized logistics. You have to have production. And as a country, you know, if I was in charge of defense procurement, I would only buy from in my country. I would only invest in local production capability, and local jobs, and in the local ecosystem. And I think Neros, in time, can do a very good job of bringing local production capacity to countries, you know, having entities in those countries. And, you know, as an example, our Ukrainian entity would be awesome if they built drones in Ukraine. That would be so freaking cool. Maybe in Taiwan, uh, we could have an entity, a Taiwanese entity that is run by Taiwanese people that is building the Taiwanese industrial base and is building Taiwanese production capability. And I think this isn’t like, uh, I reject the idea of, like, how, uh, you know, Apple… develops products where they just have a contract manufacturer, you know, oh we’re too good to do the manufacturing, I’ll outsource that manufacturing. This isn’t what we’re doing. It’s not like we’re, you know, hiring a Taiwanese CM. We are giving the Taiwanese entity or the Taiwanese effort the ability to generate production internal to Neuro. Um, and I think that’s that’s really important. And if you—

Olaf Hichwa: 1:30:23 You want to copy more of the Tesla model where they actually build their own, you know, non-partnered factory in China and obviously employs Chinese people but it’s a Neuro factory.

Ti Morse: 1:30:33 Exactly. We’re not hiring Foxconn like Apple is, not to say I hate Apple, but we’re we’re not hiring Foxconn like Apple is, we’re building Gigafactory Shenzhen like Tesla is.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:30:45 Awesome. Okay. Let’s let’s end it on what’s the hardest thing you’ve overcome?

Ti Morse: 1:30:48 Hardest thing I’ve overcome. Um, I’d say I’ve lived a lot of my life very split. Um, like you know, in in middle school I wouldn’t really talk to too many people and I’d like just like spend all day dreaming about like when can I get home and fly. Um, and I remember just like just like moving my thumbs in class and just like so obsessed with like doing something that I’m not doing. Um, and I think that like, you know, obviously I love that but definitely it took a little bit of a toll. Like I think I am a like I love interacting with people. People are the most incredible machines imaginable. Um, and it it took a toll on me to be so uh disconnected from from people um and so obsessed with the online world. Like all my friends, you know, Soren and Liam and Will and all the, you know, Nick, the the group of people we’re all just Discord emoji kind of, or Discord profile photos. Um, and I’d say that like living that split life of just like and trying to do well in school, and you know, like I was pretty academically focused as well. I I you know was very lucky to go to a a a good public school in the DC area and you know my parents really really really wanted me to do well and I cared a lot about my SAT score and things like that. Um—

Olaf Hichwa: 1:31:21 You felt like much more connected to the people that you were communicating with like over Discord.

Ti Morse: 1:31:24 Yeah, and I like didn’t have friends in high school based on like I just went to school to like get a good grade, maintain my GPA and then can I please go home and fly. Um, and just like get this over with as quickly as possible and I definitely feel like uh went through a like not so great time, um where I was just like so fed up with only online friends, um and wanting like in-person friends. Um, and I think like that was, you know, sort of dissolved by leaving leaving college and going to hang out with people that do startups because like building was really like the core of drones is building. Um, and then really felt fulfilled via Neuro because my friends are are these people that that— You’re finally getting to kind of be in the environment where you don’t have to go home, you’re just here and you get to be here all the time.

Olaf Hichwa: 1:33:07 I’m sure. I’m just here and there’s no Discord server, there is my friends here.