Key Wins

Getting glide reliably flying in 6 weeks

Though pretty painful, we took glide from nothing to something reliably flying (at least in the environment we can test frequently in), in under 6 weeks. We’ve now fulfilled full mission set from quad-dropped 6 times in a row. Though a lot of work is left to productize it, and there is massive risk to be burned down in testing the full mission set at altitude (something that for legal reasons we can only do in front of customer), I am very happy with the work the team has put in.

Speed of manufacturing shop buildout

Moving to Austin, it took us 7 months to get power run and machines calibrated, not something out of line of what most companies go through. When originally moving to California, I budgeted 2.5mo, something I thought was very aggressive. This time, our manufacturing team did an excellent job of killing the compliance and moving quickly. Within 7 days of being handed the keys, we built out a 20,000 sqft prototyping sub shop, ran power, air, and gas, and had machines calibrated and making parts.

Confidence on quality of California, personnel cut and product cut decisions. The results show that they were generally the right call.

We made a few decisions at the beginning of this year

Move to LA

This one quantitatively has been a huge success. Our pipeline is flowing several times faster now and the quality of people we are hiring is far higher than it was previously.

Significantly Cut Headcount

This one, which was the most difficult, has significantly increased productivity. We are still smaller than we were when this path was taken, but we are getting significantly more done.

Cut Product Lines

This one is almost impossible to get quantitative on, but the focus at a company level has gotten significantly better and both products have significantly more customer draw than the other two ever did.

Lean ops / excellent IT

I feel very good about the status here. Our Build/Finance team, which covers finance, recruiting, hr, general operations, much of legal, IT, EA/scheduling, and all program management (example - moving, factory setup) consists of just 4 people (

Brian⁠

Finn⁠

Clare⁠

Matt⁠

). We’ve built out a ton of internal tooling to make this possible, and I think it will be a huge longterm differentiator.

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