How Quickly Fortunes Turn

So when I say we disrupted the aerospace industry, this is what we did. This is where we launched right there. This is the price of helicopters, import price of helicopters in the United States. We basically destroyed the helicopter industry because it turned out not because we make helicopters, but because we made another way to, to levitate sensors in the sky. And it turns out a lot of helicopters didn't want to be helicopters. They didn't want to have pilots. They just wanted to put a camera. In the sky, like traffic helicopters or firefighting helicopters or LIDAR scanning. They just want to put a sensor in the sky and there's better ways to do it than putting a man in the sky, a human in the sky. So you don't see that very often. Remember, this is me. I'm right here at the dining room table with my children and Lego, right? This is me right there sending $500 to a teenager in Tijuana. This is the teenager in Tijuana building a factory on his own by buying used pick-and-place machines on eBay and downloading the manual from the internet. And this is the US helicopter market. Now, we didn't do it alone, I have to say. At this point, a lot of other people were starting to use our Autopilot. And we created an industry of people who are this kind of bottoms-up grassroots approach to aerospace. But that's pretty profound. Unfortunately, because of the scale, you can't see it starts at $1 million and it pretty much looks like it goes to zero. It didn't go to zero. It went to about $1,500, which is where we came out with this. But that same force that we used to disrupt the aerospace industry was used to disrupt us. And a very good company named DJI out of Shenzhen just did what we did but did it better. They brought the cost down, they brought the innovation pace up, and the price of a consumer drone went from $1,300 to $500 in 9 months, which I don't think the world has ever seen either. And that is— that's a neutron bomb, right? That is the end of the American drone industry, or at least consumer drone industry. That's it. Boom. It's gone. Everyone is gone. We're gone. GoPro's gone. Lily, and everybody. It completely vaporized the American drone industry on the hardware side. So I'll talk about that in a moment. So this is pretty dramatic, right? I mean, this is like— we talk about disruption. This is the future of aerospace is being played out at light speed on a global scale using open innovation. Using all sorts of ways to get around regulatory barriers without breaking the law. Things like export control and FAA regs, all of them had exemptions for what we were doing. So that's pretty dramatic. And so basically, when you pull back, this is what happened. There was an industry that was going like this. And it was going to continue going like that forever until suddenly we came out of nowhere. And we're like, hey, it's just— developer stuff, it's just, you know, boards, it's just autopilots, it's just open source code, and they laughed. Right, and then we're like, hey, you know what, you can actually put that in some plastic and batteries and motors and it's a pretty cool, it actually works, it's really easy to use. And you know, maybe the audience, again, discovering new audiences, maybe the audience is not, you know, the Air Force or the CIA, maybe the audience is like kids at Christmas. Or maybe the audience is like construction workers. Or maybe the audience is scientists looking at land management. So if you made it really cheap, maybe you'd find something there if you'd only made it easy for them. And then we went a little further. And they're like, you know what? Maybe, maybe this isn't even about drones. Maybe this is just about measuring the world. Maybe this is more like satellites and the internet of things than it is like aerospace. Maybe, maybe we're just extending the internet into the sky. And that becomes a kind of really big deal.