Chris Anderson's company disrupts aerospace by doing the opposite of traditional practices: accepting frequent crashes on uncrewed drones, targeting three-nine reliability (comparable to smartphones), and operating below 400 feet to avoid FAA regulations. This low-cost, low-regulation approach accelerates innovation and has built a massive customer base.
Chapters
And so when you look at how we did this, we basically disrupted an industry by doing everything they did. We did the opposite, right? This is pretty much. It's not Elon Musk, exactly, but it's pretty close. So rather than high price, we're like, how about zero or as close to zero as we can get. Rather than the aerospace industry, which has an impeccable record of safety. It has never been safer to fly a. Flying a jetliner. Today we're like, how about if we crash all the time in the beginning? Because we're learning. But don't worry, no one's on board, so nobody gets hurt. And so it's like, you know, so the aerospace industry is like, you know, even the notion of nines, you know, five nines, six nines of reliability. We like spent three years going for one nine. Because before, you know, initially it would like crash every time we flew it. And then by the time we were at about 20, 10 or so, it crashed about once every 10 times, which is pretty good. That's 1 9. Then it crashed about once every hundred times. And that was pretty much where we were ready to go to consumer side. Because remember, your Phone probably crashes one out of 100 times used, and now we're shooting for about three nines. Crashes about one out of a thousand times. But it's no big deal. Nobody gets hurt. They're cheap. And that's the thing, is if you take nines out of the equation, then the pace of innovation really accelerates. And if you don't have humans on board, then the risk of innovation, the cost of crashing, is so low that you don't have to emulate the aerospace model. The aerospace industry is highly regulated. It's export control, it's faa, it's fcc, it's Department of Transportation, the works. And we're like, let's not do that. Let's not replicate this, the aerospace model. Let's find ways where we can find sandboxes where we can innovate that have no regulations. And so we found under 400ft within visual line of sight, no flight over people, no flight at night. Suddenly it's deregulated. You don't have to get these permissions. We said initially, if you sell to consumers, you have to get FCC approval. If you sell it to developers, you don't. You have export control unless it's public domain, open source, public domain, or at least, so we argued, exempted from export control. And everyone's like, what? But these rules were written in the 70s. It never occurred to them that cruise missile controllers were going to be created by nine year olds on dining room tables with Lego. And so it never, you know, the notion of public domain cruise missile controllers, which is essentially what an autopilot is. This wasn't a thing. It never occurred to them that this could happen, and yet it did. So we just found ways where the regulations were low, the pace of innovation as a result was high, and the numbers of customers was super high.
