Tech CEO on the Future of Travel & Technology w/ Adam Goldstein | EP #82

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I'm here with Adam Goldstein, co founder, CEO of Archer Aviation and I am excited to talk about flying vehicles. My favorite subject. I have to start with a question, Adam, which is what do you call these things? Because you know, flying cars sort of like feels like a euphemism and calling them Evtols just doesn't roll off the tongue. Any recommendations?

Yeah, that is the kind of age old question for the industry, but electric air taxis seems to be the cleanest way to describe it.

Electric air taxis. All right, I like that. And eventually they'll become just called transportation, I think hopefully. A real pleasure my friend to have you and talk about this moonshot which has been around for a while. One of my favorite examples is one of the quotes that Peter Thiel said is like, you know, we were promised flying cars and all we got were 140 characters. Well guess what, we've got flying cars now and congratulations. You know, I look at all of the electric air taxis out there. Archer has done an extraordinary job in terms of Creating a viable business. And I know how hard the aviation business is having played in that and the space business and the consumer business. And you've had a lot of battles, but you've conquered so much. So congrats.

Thanks Peter. I appreciate it. It's definitely the road has not been easy, I can say that.

So we're entering a time where this idea of flying cars is something that is real. A number of companies, including Archer, have gone public. You have raised and invested a significant amount of money and have actually made something that is extraordinary. I want to start with first of all, if you can describe Archer and your beautiful Midnight vehicle, what is Archer? What is Midnight capable of doing? How should folks think about it?

Yeah, so these are electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. So think like an electric helicopter with wings. They take off and land vertically and then fly forward on a wing like an airplane. And we're, you know, going to market using these vehicles really to replace trips that you would typically take on the ground in a car that might take you 60, 90, 120 minutes to travel, 20, 30, 40, 50 miles. Replace those with trips in the air that can take you five to 10 minutes. And so, you know, if you look at like a typical use case of going from you know, like a city center to an airport, like a Manhattan to a JFK or an LAX to Santa Monica, those are like brutal trips that we've all sat through that are actually not that far that we could actually do very, very quickly in a vehicle like this.

I think about this, I think of like packet switched humans, like being able to hop in for the lowest price and speed. Are these vehicle, is the price per mile going to be competitive? How expensive is this going to be in the final result?

Well, I think the, the really the go to market price point will be somewhat similar to an Uber, like an Uber Black. But over time, and when I say over time, I'm not talking 50 years, I'm talking five years, seven years. You know, these vehicles will be lower than car ownership. So I mean the 2D infrastructure in and around cities doesn't scale. It's very hard to build new roads. It's very challenging. But infrastructure in the sky obviously is basically very little. You don't need anything. You can scale it infinitely. And so there's an opportunity to just build a lot more vehicles and to serve a lot of people and ultimately drive the cost way, way down. But if you just look at helicopters, extremely complex vehicles, very complex gearboxes and tricky vehicles to maintain and keep up in the air, they'll have 200 to 300 single points of failure. First, with these vehicles, these air taxis that we can build, they'll have zero single points of failure. And because they're electric and the powertrains are using electric engines and lithium ion batteries, they won't need to undergo the same type of maintenance, just similar. Like I have a Tesla, I've owned it for many years, I've never maintenanced it once. And so you have a dynamic that you can build. A lot of these vehicles drive the cost down even further that ultimately will allow this to be accessible to everyone on Earth.

Yeah, the old adage, friends don't let friends fly helicopters. Right. Because they're so, they're so dangerous. But let's describe the midnight vehicle. First of all, it's gorgeous. It's probably the most beautiful of the electric air taxis out there. Can you describe its sort of range, number of people, its support structure, speeds, that sort of the stats that people would be interested in?

Yeah, so it's a piloted vehicle and it can carry up to four passengers. It's designed to go up to 100 miles, but the typical use case will probably be, you know, 20 to 40 miles in, and the vehicles fly 150 miles per hour. So first of all, when you fly in a straight line, instead of like weaving throughout where the roads take you, you can reduce the total amount of distance that you travel. You can also fly 150 miles consistently the entire flight. So it can get you there much faster. And because you can take off and land vertically, you don't have to drive out to an airport. You can get to your end points very, very quickly. So it's a vehicle that was actually designed with a lot of the same mentality in the way that we design cars. It's. And so when you look at the way aircraft are designed, they're almost always not very attractive. Even if you look at today's planes, you know, the Boeings and the Airbuses, they all kind of, the planes all look the same. They don't have to. But you know, we took an approach with the vehicle where we said we're going to take a much more emotional view to designing the vehicle rather than a pure mathematical view, because this is a vehicle that we want people to want to touch, they want to, you know, get in, they want to fly, they want to be passionate about. And so that came with some performance hits. And so a lot of the engineers that work at Archer were upset about that. But I do think design is actually a really important part of introducing a product like this and ultimately introducing a product that can really revolutionize and ultimately become a mass market form of transportation.

Yeah, badass is the, is the description that comes to mind when I look at the, look at the midnight and you know, if you're listening, go to Google and check out an image of it. It's gorgeous. Talk about one second, a subject that I'm super passionate about, which is convergence of these exponential technologies. This wasn't possible a decade ago. What are the technologies that came together to make this possible?

So if you think back to, I guess when I was a kid in the 90s, batteries were still used, lithium ion batteries were around. And batteries have just become more and more energy dense. And you know, back then it was, you know, a miracle to keep things powered up for any substantial period of time. You know, the thought of, you know, powering up a car and driving any reasonable range in the 90s or even in 2000 was pretty unthinkable. If you, you know, flash forward to today, you know, we all almost take it for granted still that, you know, a Tesla, you know, a car with lithium ion batteries can, you know, drive you, you know, 300, 400 miles on a charge. And that's pretty incredible. And it's very, very effective and good for everyday use. Today when we think out, you know, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, it's just even hard for people to understand what batteries we'll be able to do, you know, going forward. So based on technology today, these planes can fly up to 100 miles. And so you can take a 6,500 pound maximum takeoff weight plus plane, like the midnight vehicle, fly it, you know, quite far and use it every day, recharge, repeat that trip over and over and over again all day long.

So battery, battery technology is, is one breakthrough.

Sure. So battery tech has been probably the biggest one. And the reason why that one is so interesting of all of them is just because it hasn't, it's not like it's stopped, it's just getting better. So the product literally gets better every year. So we can just use the newest cell that comes out, we're agnostic to which one, to just constantly improve the performance to increase the, you know, the ride quality, the luxuries inside these vehicles. So even the midnight plane today, which, thank you, Peter, I do agree, looks very, very cool, it will get cooler because there's a lot more flexibility once you can, you know, keep adding more energy into these vehicles. So that's Been a really big breakthrough. I think another one that's been really big has been all that lightweighting these vehicles. And so, you know, it's a, you know, composite structures have been a big deal. So they're not, you know, aluminum or metal structures or composites, they're all lightweight. The reason why that is so important is energy density is only so good and it's still not nearly as efficient as kerosene. And so we need to lightweight these vehicles as much as possible to preserve enough of the maximum takeoff weight percentage for payload, for people, for stuff. And so that's been a really big critical part of what we're doing. But the aviation industry has not advanced substantially across all the different parts of the supply chain. And so there's so much more to do. It's just unthinkable. And it's really because there hasn't been demand for an aviation product that, you know, is used. You know, you think about like a Boeing and an airbus, they make 500 know, planes a year. Making more than a thousand planes a year is kind of unthinkable. But this is an industry where actually we think you can be making millions of planes per year, which will totally change the aerospace supply chain.

Yeah, I would just to wrap up the list, I would imagine that direct electric propulsion depulsion has been one of the drivers, obviously electronics and compute. I, I would love to believe that automation and air traffic control was part of the equation. But we can. Let's talk about the FAA in a minute. But your point about the aviation industry being stagnant is insane. Right? We, we take off in December 17th of 1903 and then we cross the Atlantic and then we go supersonic and then we go to large bodied aircraft. And there really has been very little innovation in the aviation industry. It's like we stagnated.

Yeah, basically the planes have gotten more efficient, you know, they're more fuel efficient, they are safer. So we've increased there. But these are all like, you know, marginal in the grand scheme of things of like what you can't do. There's no reason you couldn't build a new, you know, blended wing plane that looks more like a, you know, like a triangle that totally reconfigures the interior. The way people operate. It doesn't have to be a tube with a wing. There's lots of other configurations that could work. And I actually think that the Evtol electric air taxi companies have a chance to totally just change aviation beyond the original products themselves. Because to build a New airplane, it's quite expensive. I think Boeing will spend 20, 40 billion dollars on a new plane. And by the way, it's not even really necessarily a new plane. A lot of them are, you know, upgrades. So like the 737 Max is still a 737. It's a, you know, I don't know how old, 50, 60 year old, fifth generation type of plane. It's not a clean sheet aircraft. So there's so much to do here. But that will require these companies to get, like Archer, to get substantially bigger, to have substantially more capital to be able to invest to go do this. But all very, very possible.

I mean, the FAA does an amazing job of keeping us safe. The track record is extraordinary. Think about it. But I remember when I was certifying my zero GR plant for doing parabolic flights. Right. Which was a relatively minor modification to avionics and the hydraulic system. It was brutal just to get the mods approved. And the adage was the FAA is not happy until you're not happy.

Yeah.

It'S a lot of work. We take for granted the fact that we're just like cattle getting on and off of airplanes and everything is operated as safely as it does, which is extraordinary.

Yeah, maybe I'll leap my own words on this one. But potentially this time it's different. The reason why it could be different this time with this industry is that geopolitics have played a pretty significant role here. So the US has done over the long term a great job of maintaining a leadership position in aviation. And that's been important not only just to the economy and being able to move people around, but also from a defense perspective. And so even if you just look at the regulators today, if you want to go certify a new plane, there's four big regulators you can go to. You can go to the faa, you can go to Europe's version, which is called easa, you can go to Transport Canada, you can go to ANAC in Brazil. There's not that many options to go to do there. Most of the world looks to the faa, to Yasa is kind of viewed as almost like the second biggest regulator. And there's, you know, around 500 people that work at YASA versus, you know, the FAA will have something like 45,000 people that work there. So it is sort of the dominant global, you know, regulator. But the US has done a poor job when it came to air dominance in drones in China with DJI has done a very good job and has a very Significant market share, majority market share, and has left the US behind. And so there's been a real kind of drive from the White House all the way down, bipartisan, that the US does need to maintain this leadership position. And if there is a Tesla like moment in the sky, that needs to happen here in America. And so there's a big push to make sure that the regulators are working very collaboratively with the companies, obviously, safety first, but collaboratively to make sure it's not a roadblock to actually get. Get this industry to market. And that's what we've seen. We saw that with Billy Nolan when he was the FAA administrator, and of course he stepped down and joined Archer, but then the next administrator that went in actually came from an EVTOL company. So Mike Whitaker, the. The new FAA administrator came from Hyundai's evtol company called Supernal. So obviously there's some, you know, kind of, you know, interesting things to at least note of what's happening there. So we have seen a lot of it, you know, the regulators actually being on board, which I think is really great. And I think these vehicles, you know, another reason why they are on board with these vehicles is they already have certified vehicles that are substantially less safe than what EVTOLs can be, which are hella.

Yeah, it's crazy. It is crazy in comparison. Can you talk about the safety? Because I think one of the things that's beautiful about the design of Midnight is the safety factors. Can you speak about what you put what you built in?

Yeah. So one of the points I didn't get to in the list of, like, the advancements and that you had mentioned is really around the electric engines. And so if you look at a helicopter and, you know, if you almost drew a circle around the rotor, that is what they call, like, the disk area. You need a certain amount of disk area to lift, spin, you know, spin a rotor at a certain speed in order to generate enough lift to, you know, to lift these vehicles off the ground. But when electric motors became an option, all of a sudden you had a new type of motor that could be scaled down and still very efficient. And that was a game changer for the EVTOL entry and a huge disunlock, which allowed, you know, the industry to really move forward. So if you look at the Midnight aircraft, it has 12 electric engines which have each one of the 12 have a set of propellers tied to them. And so that means instead of having one single point of failure, like where the rotor is, and then all the parts that go that lead into that rotor. With helicopters, it can be as many as 200 to 300 single points of failure. We have none, zero single points of failure. It's a fully redundant aircraft. So if we lost a motor or a propeller for any reason, a fluke accident or bird strike or whatever the case is, it's no problem at all to the vehicle. It can balance and trim, as they say, to make it stay stable and fly and complete its mission. That is a huge, huge advantage. And so electric engines really helped do that. But we also were able to break apart the battery packs, so there's not just one fuel source. So if we had something happen to one of the battery packs, we have six different battery packs that each power two diagonally opposed motors. So if we lost a battery pack, we would only lose two engines and again, still have 10 and can still fly and complete the exact same mission. So it is just such a higher level of safety than what helicopters are able to provide because of the redundancy. And that's a huge part of the ability to scale the industry.

Do you need the pilot in the vehicle, or is that to make people feel comfortable and get through FAA regulation? Do you imagine a time when we're going to see these electric air taxis, which are fully autonomous, and if so, what kind of time frame would you imagine?

You don't need a pilot from a technical perspective, From a practical. When theory meets practice, you do need a pilot. So I think for a couple reasons. One is in order to start a new industry like this, it's going to be critical to make people not only just understand that these are safe, but really feel safe. And I think pilots are a big part of that journey. And so the pilots can be there to reassure you to, you know, it's kind of like when you, you know, you, you look over at the, you know, the person on the plane to see if they're nervous, to see if, you know, you should be nervous. You know, the people there, I think can really help. That being said, there are already a lot of features built into the vehicles from the very beginning that will reduce pilot workload and prevent the pilot from crashing the plane. So things like envelope protection, so the pilot can't roll the plane over, they can't stall the plane. So there are features that have been built in that will help really, again, allow these vehicles to scale from a safety perspective. But if we really do want to scale beyond 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 vehicles, there is a point where we certainly will need to go autonomous because there simply aren't enough pilots out there to do this. The way you get there, though, is optionally piloted, so. So you can build the vehicles with the autoland features that can take over if anything happens to the pilots and then ultimately gets people comfortable and then you start removing the pilots. You can do that by having pilots on the ground and then finally just no pilots at all. Just completely out of the loop.

Yeah, I can imagine, especially with the progression of AI and we're seeing autonomous vehicles, it's going to become. I mean, there is an argument to be made that at some point it's safer without the pilot in the vehicle. And I've heard those conversations for commercial jet airliners where human induced error is a significant percentage of the problems out there. But I'll put that aside for a separate conversation on the faa. I want one. So initially, Archer is an aviation. You're a transport service. Do you liken yourself to more of an Uber where I've got my app and I need to get from Santa Monica to Dodger Stadium and I just tell it where I'm starting, where I'm ending, and it gives me a slot. Is that what it sounds like?

Feels like, Yeah. I think that's the sort of the right approach from a go to market perspective. There will be a, I think a solution that is available to the masses. There may be, I'm sure, VIP type of services. You can imagine, you know, corporates, you know, could have their own, you know, type of, you know, VIP service or, you know, certain different groups that make sense for hospital systems, that kind of thing. Especially in the beginning, though, I think it's going to be critical that Archer, as the oem, really manages a lot of the data to make sure we fully understand the safety, you know, of these vehicles, maintenance of these vehicles, and, you know, we protect that, you know, very, very critically. And so I don't see us selling individual vehicles on a significant basis because of that, and I think it will. There's other ways to accomplish the same goal. So if you want one, Peter, it'll be interesting for you in la, but what happens when you leave la, right? Like, you can go to New York. And so there are other variations of that that you can gain access to the vehicles in a similar type of service. You know, if you think about, like, what NetJets did, you know, that's like an example of a premium version of, you know, air travel that's more convenient, that's a bit more private, but you don't physically have to own the plane yourself because you don't use it all the time. So like, how often would you use it? Even if you used it just once a day or twice a day, it's still. The plane would just be sitting there, you know, unused. And because they're expensive, I think there are other ways to actually, you know, reuse them to again, keeping the cost at a price point where it can become more everyday use instead of just novelty.

So I want to walk through a little bit how, because the last time I really dove into the operations of this, I was at the Uber Elevate conference back years ago when Uber was thinking about autonomous air taxis. And the idea was there were going to be electric vertiports that would sort of be regional. And I just saw an announcement that you and a dear friend who works for you, Nikhil, put out that you've inked a deal with Atlantic Aviation. Congratulations on that. That's huge.

Yeah, thanks.

Yeah, thanks. So for those who don't know, Atlantic Aviation is a fixed base operator. I fly my airplane out of Santa Monica, out of the Atlantic FBO there and they're all over North America. And so the idea is you'd have charging stations there. And so I would, when I go to my Archer app and I say I want to fly from A to B, it would say go to this location and get on and it's charged there. So walk through some of that logistics, paint a vision of what, what it's going to look like when it's operational.

So you're at your house in Santa Monica, you open up your Uber app, which will be integrated and you want to go from Santa Monica to let's say the crypto center to go watch a Lakers game. You can kind of book the entire service that way. The first leg of the service will be an Uber comes and picks you up, takes you from your house to a vertiport, a place where you start your journey, you take, you take off and land. The good news about vertiports is they require very little infrastructure. All we really need is charging. And so, you know, in obviously a safety area. And so the vehicles will charge using similar type of technologies that you see with EVs. So 2C, just like a Tesla supercharger charge app.

How long would you imagine a charge takes for. And it depends how exhausted the batteries are. But what's the typical charge time?

So you know, the typical trip that we would fly. So say like a, you know, a 25 mile trip if we were going from, you know, I don't Know, LAX to northern part, you know, somewhere in la, maybe, you know, somewhere in Malibu. A trip like that will only use a small percentage of the battery. And so the plan is to really just top. Just top off at each of the legs. So you're really only charging the. During the loading and unloading of passengers. You're not ever really just sitting down, not using the planes because they're just sitting there charging. Now, when you do take full trips using kind of a bigger chunk of the battery, you will have to charge for longer. And you can charge the batteries up in 30 to 40 minutes, all the way up from start to finish. Again, a very quick charge. And that just will get better over time. So our joke is this is the worst product we'll ever build because it just keeps getting better, because the core underlying technologies just keep getting better, better.

So we've just gotten to the vertiport, let's call it the Atlantic Aviation Terminal at Santa Monica Airport. The vehicle's unloaded, and I'm getting on. You're topping it off. We are. This is fully a. Is this a part 121 operation, a part 135 operation in FAA province?

Yeah, they're part 135. And so these are. You know, you should be able to go from your car walking out of an Uber into the air in 90 seconds. I know that's possible.

Wow.

I know that's possible because I've done that many times on helicopters. I've done that in New York City. And so places with complicated airspaces, with vehicles, you know, that are in tightly constrained areas. So 90 seconds, you walk in and you're in the air and you're on your journey.

So let's talk about the profile. You're climbing straight up. You're climbing at an angle. These vehicles are vertical takeoff and horizontal flight. But can you describe a little bit what that. What that profile might look like?

Yeah. A lot of it will depend on where you are at. But we want to get into forward flight as soon as possible because it's the least intensive on the batteries. So pure hover is just draining the. The battery at a rapid rate. So think about in your Tesla, you slam on the pedal, but not for very long because it ends up goes 0 to 60 in two or three seconds. So it's very quick. So then you take your foot off of it. But if you were to hold it down, you're draining the battery much faster. So the hover is us putting our foot on the pedal. And so that is what's draining the battery. So we do want to move into forward flight as fast as possible just to again preserve the charge that's in there. So. So typically, you'll start moving forward pretty quickly, but you'll do it at a rate that's very comfortable and so you can. Again, the videos that we'll show of the vehicles will always be boring because we never show what the planes can really do because we don't want people to imagine themselves in the plane while it's banking at a very hard angle or it's accelerating at a very rapid pace. We always show smooth, boring flights. So climb up to around 2,000ft in a forward motion and then the same thing. Descend again very gently to allow you to go back down. Now, if there's complicated airspace and there's things that you need to fly around, you may ascend or descend for a much longer period of time. So, for example, in New York City, if you fly from. If you take a blade from the blade, west side, 34th street to the Hamptons, Right. When you get to the Hamptons, you have to ascend to a very high level to just reduce noise because these vehicles are much quieter, they won't have that same problem. But there are other, you know, situations like that where you might have to climb at certain areas just to get around certain airspace.

And if you're folks are not familiar with the EVTOL and electric vertical takeoff and landing space, there's a number of different approaches. And some of them have wings like Midnight, and some of them are just multicopters. They're just. They're drones. And the wing enables a massive efficiency of energy and also much higher speed, I assume.

Yeah. It's funny. I remember Peter, I saw you at the Maker unveil that. We did in 2021 at Hawthorne Airport.

Yeah, right next to SpaceX.

Yeah. And Aaron Paul was there, the actor from Westworld and the episodes that were coming out during that same year, he was flying around in an evtol. They were all wingless vehicles. And so we talked about that, and he said, oh, why do you have a wing? The ones in the show, if you've seen, they don't have wings. The wing actually provides lift and reduces energy usage, which allows the vehicles to just perform better. It also adds a safety feature because these vehicles don't auto rotate. So you can't. Like, with a helicopter, you can kind of, you know, keep using the air on the way down to rotate, you know, the rotor to, you know, for it to slow. You Down, So you don't just go down at too fast of a rate. But these vehicles have a wing, and so they can actually glide on the wing.

Yeah. So if the engines go out, if, you know, if you get an im. Never mind if the engines go out, you could just. You can glide to a landing at an airport.

Exactly. So if you think about the levels of certification that, let's say an A380 has, one of the biggest planes out there, you're certified at an extraordinarily high level of safety, where you're looking at one in a billion chances, one in a billion flight hours of something catastrophic happening. And the reason you can certify at levels that high are because of the redundancy, because inevitably, parts will fail. That's why you need redundancy. And so the wing is the ultimate redundancy. So again, six battery packs, 12 engines. None of the battery packs are connected. None of the engines are connected. So for all of them to fail, like one after the next, after the next, after the next, after the next, it's so unlikely. That's how you get to those safety standards that are similar to the big commercial airliners that we know today. And ultimately, you still have the wing.

Yeah. Okay, so we have just taken off. We're in our flight profile. We get to our location. Now, one of the things that's interesting is where you can land and take off, because, you know, and I'm just curious, in the beginning, I imagine you're going to be operating out of traditional aviation hubs. But you tell me, I don't know, Atlantic Aviation being one of them. But I can imagine, like, for example, you know, I have friends of mine who live in Topanga, and when I fly my. I have an SR22. When I fly out of Santa Monica Airport, I'm over Topanga in, you know, in five minutes, you know, max, if on the wrong day, trying to drive there can take me a good over an hour. So can you imagine that there will eventually be sort of land, small landing ports in convenient locations for regional communities at your service?

Yeah, absolutely. I think there will be, you know, there's. There's, you know, several different ways to think about, you know, where you can start and where you can stop. One version of this is just simply point to point services where there's routes where people are already taking, you know, every single day. So again, Manhattan to one of the three airports. You know, there's something like 30 million trips per year just going from Manhattan to one of three airports. So you, you could effectively have a gondola in the sky that just runs those routes from the vertiports to the airports, going all day, every day, nonstop.

Every two minutes it's taken off and going.

Yeah, or just think it's like a ski lift. Right. They just never stop. They just keep going. It doesn't matter which one you get on. It's like green light or red light if you can do it. So that is a version of it, which I think will happen. Other versions will be where they can actually fly the routes that aren't necessarily exactly planned that way. And so that starts to get into political conversation where, you know, in California, that's much harder to do than it is in Texas. So, you know, I've, I've flown on helicopters in Texas. And you can land wherever you want to land versus California. It's very specific where you need to land. And so there's different rules for different places and then also depending on the congestion. So New York City will be obviously extremely tight on what you can do regardless of the politics. Just because it's so congested, the airspace is actually quite crowded, but it's also still because it's quite crowded, they're. They're used to having many vehicles operating all the time. So at any given point in time in New York City, you can see helicopters flying, you know, big commercial airlines flying, you know, tour, you know, tour operators flying. There's all types of aircraft in the air at all times in New York City. So that's why it's also a good place to start because they're already used to it. And there's already a lot of established rules on how to do that.

I find that, I find that impressive that you're starting in one of the most difficult air traffic control congested areas versus starting in the middle of the Midwest. Right. Where, you know, it's prairies and cattle. So let's talk about when are you going to get operational? Where, where are you in certification, testing, operations? You've also announced some great contracts with players. Can you speak to sort of where the rubber or the, the rotor is hitting the air, so to speak?

Yeah. So New York City is really interesting for several reasons to start. One is it's just the global stage. And if you think about people from all around the world that come there, I want the CEO of Charles de Gaulle to call me and say, hey, Adam, I just took one of your planes from JFK to Manhattan. That was incredible. You have to bring this to Charles de Gaulle. You have to it was unbelievable. So New York City has that draw versus in Kansas that'll be harder to get to. It will obviously be easier to operate in Kansas because the airspace will be so much less crowded. The second thing is I lived in New York City for 20 years, so I love New York City. I, I feel like I'm more of a New Yorker than anything else. And so for me it's like kind of a homecoming to be able to do that. So that's another reason why I also think the other thing that, you know, people don't talk about as much and maybe it's not cool to talk about it, is this is an extraordinarily capital intensive business. The thing that has allowed it to happen, really, it's the technology, it's the kind of political nature of where we are with the regulators, meaning they want this to happen too, which is very positive, but then it's the capital. So even if the other two things happened until the capital markets opened up to a point where we could actually do this, you couldn't actually get it going. And so thankfully, for whatever reason, the capital, capital markets opened. I guess you could probably thank Tesla for, for having a very successful hardware business. It enabled companies like Archer, which were very small, nascent, you know, companies, to raise substantial amounts of capital. So we raised, you know, almost a billion dollars of capital in, you know, you know, in our IPO. And by the way, we had 45 people working at Archer at that point. And so it was a very, you know, you know, low amount of people to go out and do this because you need money, a lot of money upfront to start this. So New York City is really important for lots of reasons. If you think about the next phase in scaling out, manufacturing capital is going to be just as important. And so we need the people that control some of the largest, you know, pools of capital to see these vehicles, to feel these vehicles and ride them. And I, because I've done it the first time, you experience like a helicopter, an urban air mobility trip, and you get to do an amazing day, all of a sudden the world changes for you. So the trips that we offer investors all the time are come to California. We will make you drive from SFO down to our office in San Jose. It'll take you 45 minutes, an hour, it'll suck. You'll then come see the headquarters, you'll see the factory next door. We'll then go to San Jose, which is five minute drive from our headquarters, which is next to Levi's stadium. We'll fly you on our helicopter down to flight test, which is down in silliness, like right outside of Monterey. It'll be a 15 minute flight. It'll replace a 90 minute drive. You'll come see some planes fly. We'll then fly to Napa, we'll go have lunch, we'll then fly you to SFO and you'll leave. And that is an incredible day that people can experience using a helicopter that will all of a sudden understand what the future is about to be like, because you could not do anything like that without an air vehicle because it's just too much time on the ground. And by the way, you feel good and refreshed. You haven't spent that much time in a vehicle. It's moving actually really fast. And you got to do lots of different cool things. Once you experience that, it's just, you see the future. It's like the first time I put on an Oculus headset, I was like, oh my God, I understand virtual reality now. That was just mind blowing to me. Same thing. First time you experience urban or mobility, you are like game changer. I understand what's about to happen.

Yeah, it's interesting. My experience of that was massively. I mean, I've done that in New York, just basically getting to and from JFK and Manhattan. But the place that really lit me on fire was Brazil in Sao Paulo. I don't know if you've ever spent any time down there, but everybody's got a helicopter to avoid the incredible traffic down below, and it's like their helicopters flying everywhere. So I imagine that's going to be a huge market for you.

Yeah, and absolutely. And just one more point on that too, Peter. We talk a lot about these, you know, we talk a lot about these, you know, kind of commuting solutions. But the, you know, the, the routes we don't talk about, I think are actually the really interesting one, which are it's all the future things that these vehicles can do. So I believe someone, who knows, maybe it's. Maybe it's Archer, maybe it's me will build an amazing project 15 miles outside of LA in the middle of the desert. You can only get to it by plane and you can fly there in five minutes. But it feels like you're at the Arman Gary, which is like a gorgeous hotel in the middle of Utah. It's like kind of known as the nicest hotel in America. And it can be something you do to go to work, it could be something you do to go stay overnight. It can be something you do just to get away. There are experiences that people will start to build using these vehicles that are totally different non commuter routes that I think are going to just be a totally new way of living.

I love that. It's building the cities of the future. Right? I mean it used to be that you'd go move to New York or Detroit or Chicago or la because that's where the education was, where entertainment was, that's where the jobs were and given autonomous cars, evtol and things like starlink. There's going to be brand new modes of living. Um, and that's, that is beautiful. Talk about when you're going to see your first commercial flight and first commercial services and who are your customers right now.

So there are, there, there are two ways to get to market. The first way is the way that we've been talking about, which is through the faa, through traditional, you know, routes going from, you know, Manhattan to jfk. Those routes. The plan is to get certified and start operations in 2025. That's been our goal, that's been our target and we remain on track for.

That target right around the corner.

Yeah. The other version of that though is we will make alternative plans to launch regardless of the timing of the regulator. So we already started by, when we announced last year some of the contracts that we did with the Department of Defense where we will start delivering aircraft and they will be used in non kinetic use cases, so not war machines but for all different types of scenarios. So there's a handful of aircraft we say could start making those deliveries on. But then we'll also look for alternative routes the way the drone industry did it. So you know, we've been looking at the drone industry, which I think is really fascinating. You know, Zipline is a good example. They went to Apple.

Amazing, amazing.

Yeah, a really great business model, delivering blood. So you know, we will talk to, you know, world leaders and you know, start to find places where we, we can start to become an operating company, whether it's humanitarian, delivering doctors or supplies or food to areas that are hard to get to. I had a conversation with a CEO of one of the large mining companies and he told me that they bring supplies, doctors, food, medicine to an aborigine community in Australia. And he was asking if he could buy, you know, if he could buy, you know, the planes from us because he said he uses a fleet of helicopters today to do it and he wants to increase the size of his fleet, but it's so expensive to operate and maintain helicopters. And so those are great places to go where you're not flying over crowded urban centers, but you are doing something great for humanity with a, you know, a project that will be on the one yard line. You know, with the regulator kind of waiting for the final sign off set, I think we will be able to find ways to operate kind of before certification. And that's like, almost like a hedge to, you know, the regulator is hard to, you know, we don't call the shots, they do. And so, you know, whenever they let us, you know, start operating, it's going to be obviously a great day. But we also will start operating in 2025, no matter what.

Amazing. You know, people, when they see these evtol vehicles, they think of the military Osprey, which has an awful track record of safety. And it couldn't be more night and day just to compare contrast one second, because I can imagine the military replacing those vehicles with this next generation.

Yeah, so they're actually just two totally different categories of vehicles. So the Osprey is a huge vehicle with a very high ability to, you know, carry payload and travel far distances. So that vehicle is extraordinarily complex. One of the guys that ran program at, you know, for, you know, when they were building the Osprey was over at Archer running program, and he said the cross shaft, the part that, you know, goes between the two rotors, he said was heavier, more expensive and more complex than our entire vehicle. Just the one part, the cross shaft. And so that one part had to make sure the fuel could go back and forth to the two rotors in case one of them went out. So that is extraordinarily complex vehicle. This is a very, very simple vehicle. And the simplicity behind these vehicles are actually. And the similarity of these vehicles to cars are actually why the automakers are so heavily involved. So Archtur has a big partnership with Stellantis. It's the third largest automaker out there. Jeep, Ram, Maserati, Peugeot. And we have, they're an incredible partner for us, helping us manufacture. They provide capital, they provide engineering guidance. They've been a great partner. And you know, there's other automakers out there too, that have been involved in the industry. So I would actually equate these vehicles closer to cars than those complex vehicles like Ospreys. So they're kind of on different spectrums. The other thing too is they have giant Ospreys, have giant rotors, and the bigger the rotor, the harder it is. The rotor dynamics get extremely challenging. We have much smaller propellers which are just Much easier to, to use.

Let's talk about air traffic control here. So you're flying. Do you imagine that in volume operation? I mean, let me start, let me ask a different question first. Five or ten years from now, how many are being produced per year? What's the volume potential for something like this?

So it's funny, one of the, one of the guys at Stellantis said, look, Adam. So I was, I was bragging. I was like, oh, the facility that we're making in, you know, in Georgia, in the first phase it can produce up to 650 planes and in the second phase, 2300 planes per year. I was like, it's unbelievable. And he's like, yeah, you know, 2000 planes is cool. It was, it was like. But you know what's really cool? It's like a million planes per year. It was like the social networking moment when you know, Justin Timberlake says to, you know, the, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg character, he's like, you know what's cool? A billion dollars. That's what I felt like. I was like, oh, I felt really stupid. 2300 planes seems really, you know, not like a. And so that's how the automakers think and scale. So there are step changes that need to happen and then there are adoption kind of curves that need to happen. But that's why the international markets are so interesting. Because there are places like India that have an extraordinary challenge ahead of them in terms of scaling infrastructure. So the U.S. by the way, for.

People don't realize this, India, an amazing nation, a very intelligent scientific engineering, English speaking. And one of their major holdbacks is their transportation ecosystem.

Yeah. In the, the US we have 950 cars per thousand people. In India there's 200 car, sorry, 20 cars per thousand. 20 cars per thousand people. And the same equivalent of the JFK to Manhattan takes you three hours there. I've done it in Delhi and Bengaluru and Hosur, it is a, it is extreme. The traffic, brutal.

Yeah.

And it's only going to get worse as they continue to industrialize. So they need technology to leapfrog 2D transportation. And so that's why there's been such an interest. And we've partnered with Rahul Bhatia from Indigo, which is the largest airline in India. It's like 60 plus percent market share and he's very close with, you know, Prime Minister Modi who wants to find transportation solutions. So when you start to look outside the US in the international markets, there is a real potential to leapfrog politics where, you know, in the US if you want to talk about putting, you know, a million vehicles into the air, you can imagine, you know, the challenges of scaling things here beyond just the traditional challenges. The political challenges are tough internationally. There are places that need this, that they, it's almost like they have to have this.

I also imagine, I also imagine this for Africa, right? Africa went from landline telephony to mobile and revolutionize the nation. Where telephony in Africa is better than some parts of the United States. But I can imagine, you know, there's such little road infrastructure in the African subcontinent that this could be transformational if you get the volumes up and the cost down. And you just said it's just, you know, the electrons become free after a while and then it's the cost of the infrastructure.

Yeah, absolutely.

So let's talk about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of vehicles flying as packet switched humans. Point to point. Is the air traffic control system able to handle that? Does it go fully automated? What's the conversations with the FAA like? What's your hope? Because I mean, listen, as a pilot, as much as I respect the hard work the FAA does and air traffic control does, it's insane right now that they read me over an open crackly radio and I have to write down the details of my IFR flight plan and then I have to read it back. And that's just crazy.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of parts of the sort of old infrastructure that need to get redone. The good news is we can launch using the existing infrastructure. There will be a kind of period of time where there's both helicopters and EVTOLs and then ultimately switch out, I think, for all of these electric airplanes. And so that transition period will take some time. There's still 50,000 helicopters out there, so we still have to. That'll still take us many years to build and replace those vehicles. But ultimately we'll have to, I think, completely change the system here. The good news is NASA has been working on this for over a decade. So there's a lot of, you know, work that's been put into this. But it is a monumental task for sure. A lot of it will also depend on. You know, it's funny when you look at the movies, right? And I was thinking, you know, back to like the Fifth Element where Bruce Willis is driving an air taxi, right? It's actually an air taxi. They're driving all in lines, like in, you know, in a line, like in a road. It's Actually, you know, you can manage that. You're effectively just managing, making sure you don't bump the, you know, the, you know, the vehicle in front of you. So I can see that, you know, routes that get planned, heavy use routes that get planned where they become actually very dense, that they start to operate like that because they're. It's easier, easier to get volume that way because all you're really doing is spacing these vehicles. And then with the autonomy features, you can put, you know, it's actually much easier to do that. And again, because it's different than, you know, terrestrial vehicles, where there's. The long tail is just so great, you know, there can be any number of scenarios that can happen that are almost impossible to train for in the air. You can see from all directions and there's nothing really like coming at you. The sky is basically empty and it's infinitely scales effectively. So it allows just a lot more room to put a lot more vehicles in the air. So it's going to be hard, but I think it's actually something that's been worked on for quite some time and is very doable.

And there is a lot of room and AI will be our friend. And the sensors and the technology to enable autonomy, there is here now, and it's a matter of when do we get the regulatory structures. I want to turn the conversation to the origins of Archer because folks listening who are aspired to building moonshots, because, listen, as Peter Thiel said, the world was expecting flying cars and got 140 characters. And the idea of flying car, to use that term, has always been the definition of the future. Right. There's the Jetsons. And it's like, when are we going to have flying cars? Well, they're here. And I remember earliest days of these conversations when people were talking about maybe now we can have these vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. And over the span of a year or two, a dozen companies really materialized. I do believe Archer is, in my mind, top of the stack in terms of how far you've come and what you've built. So congrats on that. But can you take me back to when. When this entered your mind as a. Yeah, I'm going to go build or go build a company to do that because it's kind of a crazy desire. And then to. Actually, I want to talk about how. How do you start?

Yeah, so my story isn't. I guess I don't know if there is a typical founder story, but, you know, I actually started when I graduated College. And I went to work. It was 2001. So I got hired in 2000 to get a job, which was basically the end of the dot com boom. And I actually went and I became an investment banker. And I actually didn't know what an investment banker was. I did it for Mayor lynch. And the only reason I did it was because, you know, one of my friends, family members had said, that's not really a job for you, Adam. That's more of a job for some of the Ivy League kids. And I was like, ivy League kids? No way. I'm a state school kid. I will get any job. And I literally dedicated myself to the next, you know, really 18 months to getting that job. I end up getting that job. My second day of work was 9 11. And so I worked really two. I worked in the World Financial center, which was effectively one block away from the World Trade Center. And I lived about four blocks north of the Trade Center. And so I'm walking to work in this new city in New York, which I'd spent basically no time in. And literally the plane flies over my head into the building. I watch it all happen. And then of course, the second one, and it was just this completely shook me. I left banking after six months because effectively there was nothing to do because the world basically stopped. And I went to work for a hedge fund. But hedge funds back in 2002 were not what they are today. That was the wild west of investing. And I ended up working for a guy that was just an absolute genius. And he had said to me, I'm going to show you how to find value in the world. And his big thesis was, follow the research wherever it takes you. Public, private, it doesn't matter. And so we did all types of crazy stuff together, looking at public companies, private companies. I remember where we actually invested in bovespa, the Brazilian stock exchange. And it was a private company. And we had went and figured out a way to buy seats on a foreign country's stock exchange, which was very hard to do through other entities, which ultimately demutualized and ended up going public and was very successful. All these things were basically impossible things to do. It was like, you can't go buy seats on a, on a stock exchange of a foreign country. They will never let you do that. As an American, it was always started with the note. And he was like, I'll show you how to, you know, get things done and find value. So again, something is very different than like the, you know, going to work today. And just like, you Know, buying a stock and shorting another stock. And it was kind of the wild west back then. We also invested in bitcoin very early, off the white paper, you know, the, you know, the early, early days. And so it was, you know, just a wild period of time. But all that was training. And I studied what makes companies good and what makes companies bad, what makes industries good, what makes industries bad. But as I was following that research, I started looking at tech companies. I started, you know, investing in tech companies, and then I started building tech companies. And so I started messing around on the Internet. And what I quickly discovered was the same thing that, you know, as you always find, which is, it's not reserved for the few. It's actually an open system that anyone can go and compete in and start building stuff. And it was just so fun. And so I built a bunch of different things, failed pretty much every single time, but ultimately figured some stuff out. Each time that, you know, I would start an idea or project, it always was very sound in nature, but getting an idea is nothing. Getting somebody to use your product is really hard. Getting a lot of people to use your product is extraordinarily hard. Getting people to pay for your product is unbelievably hard. And a lot of people to pay for your product is absolutely extraordinary. And so the whole crossing the chasm concept was always very interesting to me. And so my last company that I had started was a company called vettery. It was a software based business in the recruiting space. I did it with a partner and it was a really, really fun company where we had a great time, a great culture. It wasn't really in the space that we wanted to be in, but it was a really great experience. It was taught, you know, it taught us all about raising capital and, you know, building teams and recruiting and scaling products and all that, all that good stuff, which all of this was training for Archer, which led me to that. But the one thing at vettery that I just hated was the grind of sales. And so, like the month to month, you start over, you know, each time. And so, as you know, I thought about, you know, a next company. One of the things that was really important was the tech was so good that I wouldn't have to sell it. It could actually sell itself. And so when you start thinking like that, like your product has to be really amazing and you start to think about products in your life that are like that, there are not very many of those, right? Maybe your iPhone, maybe your Apple computer, maybe your Tesla, there's Not many that you can keep going down a list that if you replaced it with something else, you don't really care. Who cares? It's fine. Whatever, you know, it's that one pair of jeans for another pair of jeans. It's fine.

Right, right, right.

So. So I started looking at much bigger and bigger projects with really interesting tech. Now, when I looked at electrification of transportation, we had been following, you know, Elon for a long time. And as an entrepreneur, what year are.

You in now at this point?

So in really, you know, the better years, you know, where. 2015, you know, really to about 2018, that was like, where it got. Became, like, successful and ultimately sold it to a company called the Adeco Group, who lost. So many incredible lessons there, too. So many interesting, you know, things that happened. But when, you know, sold the, you know, sold the company started thinking about, you know, different ways to grow and scale. And I remember reading, you know, the, you know, the book on Elon Musk and just being so inspired at the big projects that he did. And the moonshots.

The moonshots out there.

Yeah, exactly. And reading the Peter Thiel books, you know, zero to one. And those kind of, you know, stories. And a lot of lessons were really interesting where the bigger the projects that you build, like, the more inspiring it is actually, in a way, the easier it is. And that's like a. Kind of an interesting thing to say, but it's actually very true. It's much easier to hire. It's much easier to raise a lot of capital for, you know, at vettery, it was very hard. It was like, hey, come over. We're doing this really cool thing and building a talent marketplace. It's really hard to recruit that way versus, hey, we're going to go change the future of transportation, building flying cars. Like, it's a much better pitch for people, but you have to be credible to do that. And so having sold vettery gave me credibility to do this. It wasn't like I was just a crackpot. It was like, oh, this is actually, you know, a person that's, like, done real stuff, been serious, has that. Sold some stuff. The other thing that was just such a huge factor in being able to do this was the ability to raise capital. And so through my 20 years in New York City, I had made a lot of great friends. I had made people money over the years from my finance days, and then I'd made people money over the years. In my startup days, I built a good network, but a lot of my friends were running Banks running funds. And so it allowed the network that I had built, allowed me to. To leverage my track record and go raise a substantial amount of capital. So, you know, again, we were 45 people, raised a billion dollars of capital. That was pretty unprecedented. And maybe it was a moment in time that we just, you know, were lucky that, that we hit. But that was a, you know, kind of a critical piece. But when I looked at the business models of what was going on in the industry of, you know, these, you know, ev tall companies, nobody was building a vehicle that was based around a business model. It was very much R and D. And so there were autonomous only companies that you just knew the FAA was never going to let you take to market in the near term. There are companies 3D printing. There were companies building planes without a wing, which meant your, your range and your payload capabilities were so limited you could not create a business. And so I kind of put back on my more practical head, thinking about my old job of what would I want to hear? And so we built a vehicle that was based around a business model, and that was shockingly, very attractive to the engineering community. And so that pitch was quite interesting because people had been working on this for a long time. And so one of the guys that I met early was a guy named Tom Muniz, who was the head of engineering at Z Aero, which is kind of the original evtol company that Larry Page started.

I remember Larry Page pulled me aside one time, he was on my board at xprize. And I said, so what do you. What are you working on that no one else knows about? He goes, I'm. I'm building flying cars.

So he really paved the way for, you know, for a lot of the industry.

And he started a number of companies in this. In this era. He and Sebastian Thrun. Yep.

Yeah. And so when I talked to Tom and said, well, Tom, why don't we just go try to build a plane that could actually get to market instead of an R and D project? And he was like, I am 100% on board. Let's go do it. And so Tom was on board. And then a really funny thing happened. This journalist wrote this article that said, hey, there's a company called Archer. It's a new evtolk company that's hiring up engineers and paying them three times what they normally make, which was not true, but it was the best advertisement you could ever have. And everybody would talk to us all of a sudden. And so we ended up hiring the best team in the world, just such an incredible group of engineers and went for it and built it. And so the concept of our saying was always find the most efficient path to market. We followed the Tesla model, which is build the Roadster, get it to market, and then we'll build the Model S. Don't try to build the Model S first. That went back to our strategy. A lot of the industry was vertically integrating. We tried to buy as much stuff off the shelf as possible. We ended up building the powertrain ourselves because you couldn't buy it. But everything else we would, vertically, we would, you know, buy from a tier one supplier. That lowered the risk to the regulators because they're very familiar with most of the parts that we use. Which, again, was a great message back to the, you know, the capital allocators, which allowed us to raise such a substantial amount of capital, which allowed us to be where we are today.

That's amazing. The old saying, no bucks, no Buck Rogers. It really is true here. So it's interesting when I think about. Because you didn't come from an aviation background, you didn't come from even a physical manufacturing or engineering or automotive or a rocket background. And do you think that held you back in any ways or did that give you an advantage unconstrained?

I think about my job as kind of like four core areas. Vision, capital, people and risk. And it's an augmented version of Mark Laurie, who is one of my good friends and investors who has.

Both you and Mark will be speaking at Abundance360 this year, will be at the London Summit. So excited for that. Yeah, he's. He's great.

Yeah. Excited to be there. Yeah, he's awesome. He's a great visionary entrepreneur. And so I have a very clear vision of what we want we need to do. Like, for example, this year, the goal is extremely clear, which is to fly the pilot of production aircraft. That is the single goal for this year. So by having very clear goals like that, it allows people to optimize around decisions, which allows you to get things done and move really, really fast. So that has been very effective. I'm very good on the capital side just because of my background, and I've been able to make people. I have a good track record of doing it, which has been helpful. And then I spend a lot of my time on the people side and really trying to make sure we hire the best people. And I really believe in the Steve Jobs adage, where you hire the best people and they tell you what to do, not you telling them what to do. And so if you can truly hire the best people. You can do that. As long as they have a very clear vision of what to do, you can get these people to work together. And then I'll spend a lot of my time understanding where the risks lie and trying to make the big calls to make sure, you know, we go left to right to avoid the, you know, the big pitfalls. I do think it was an advantage when I look at the competitors, because I don't have the desire to chase the shiny objects in our space. There's so many shiny objects because, you know, the, you. The design space for aviation has never been so wide open because electric motors scale down. You can do so many cool things. So I don't have that same. That same knack. And I also think, again, it's going to be critical in this industry not only that we just execute, but that we can actually show we can build a real business. Because if you don't build a real business, you will not get the capital to actually be able to fulfill this dream because it is so capital intensive. As you said, aviation is hard. And if you can't find a way to make money, and that, I think is actually the hardest thing about hardware. Most of these hardware products, the question is not can you make it? Yes, you can make it. The question is, can you build a business around it? Which, in other words, is are you in the right decade? Right. And that is the thing that you always have to figure out is did you pick the wrong decade? Unfortunately, where cool, you built an amazing toy, but it's too expensive to actually generate economic returns. Therefore, the capital game does not last forever, and the cycles will hit you. Eventually you'll hit a rough patch and you will run out of money with these big intensive hardware companies.

For any moonshot entrepreneurs listening, that is gold. Because just because you can make it, build it, doesn't mean the business is going to succeed. And so many people have gotten the timing wrong and done it too early, which is the same as just failing because the whole market needs to be ready for you. That includes people's perspectives, regulatory structures, capital markets, everything. I mean, Bill Gross from Idealab, who will also be with us at a 360, gives some great talks about timing is one of the most critical things that Uber came into existence because the iPhone was there, because Google Maps was there, because people wanted to make money after the 2008 recession.

It's really funny. People always ask me, always ask me this question, Adam, do you regret going public or do you, you know, how does it feel. They always ask in a negative connotation, how does it feel to be public as a public company? And the answer is, it's amazing. Are you kidding me? We found a way to raise a billion dollars of capital with less than 50 people. It was the best thing we ever did unquestioned. It was great. And yes, it's definitely a luck played a huge portion of it. But we, you know, as Nikhil likes to say, increased our luck surface area by prepping for that. And so I was had my ear to the ground. I was very close to the SPAC market. So a friend of mine who runs capital markets at Morgan Stanley, you know, I would check in with all the time and I would say, how do I do this? What? Tell me what's going on? And he would say, well, first of all, there's a, there's a big, you know, cash component. You have to willing to risk. You have to go do a public company accounting audit, PCAOB audit. Second thing you have to do is get all your legal docs in order, which is very expensive. And so after you've now spent $6 million, now maybe if the market comes to you, you can do this. So it's very expensive to just do the legal work to get ready for before you even like figure out if you're going to do any of this stuff. So you spend that. We spent the money and then tried to understand what was happening in the SPAC market. And Nikola was actually the one that was out there that was doing really well at the time. And so a lot of the early companies paid attention and understood what the investors were interested in. And that's what I think. I did a good job of following that. And Archer was the first company in the space to announce. We announced before Joby. We went out and did it and we picked a really great sponsor in Ken Molis. And so they've been extremely helpful to the company. So Ken Moles is one of the most prolific investment bankers in the world. So, you know, when he goes out and he talks to, you know, some of his clients or some of the, you know, the leaders of, you know, of the world, he mentions Archer and he talks about it. He's almost like, I joke. I was like, ken, you're my lead gen guy. And so he's, you know, that was, that was very effective in picking the right partner there. And then again we hit it. And if you look at some of the competitors that went after us, the difference of three months was a difference of 100% redemptions and no pipe. And a huge pipe and 50% redemptions. We had 48% redemptions, and we raised amazing. A monstrous pipe, you know, a $500 million, you know, $600 million, you know, round. It got us up to, you know, almost $900 million. So it was just, again, a lot of it was timing. We definitely increased our luck surface area. And then I think we've been responsible with the money, too. And the whole thing has been on execution. We have to show results for what we're doing. And that's why, if you listen, you know, back to what I said before, which was, we are launching in 2025 with or without, you know, FAA approval. It doesn't mean we'll launch in the US but we will launch. We will find markets to go launch. Because business model, to me matters.

Yeah. And experience matters and demonstrated operations matters. And I guess the next big thing is going to be going into mass manufacture, and maybe we can. We can wrap on that subject. You're going to build plants to produce the midnight vehicle. Where are you thinking about it?

So we announced a big factory in Covington, Georgia, which is right outside of Atlanta. Great town. I mean, really great town. It's a cute little town with an awesome square, but also right next to Georgia Tech, you know, a good, you know, which is a great aviation school.

Great aviation school.

Governor Kemp has been very supportive of bringing these green jobs to the state. So he was very. We got a great incentive package to go there. But a lot of my strategy has actually been focused on looking at what like Apple did. And so Apple, the Apple Foxconn relationship is really interesting. Apple owns the design, they own the manufacturing engineering process, and then they work with Foxconn on the kind of operations, manufacturing side, the mass scaling of that. And so our partnership with Stellantis, I think, is really unique. And it's blossomed into a great relationship where we focused very heavily on design. We're working on the manufacturing and engineering together, and then ultimately the goal is to hand it off to them to go print. So when you think about these companies like Stellantis, they are absolute masters at logistics, Sourcing raw materials, bringing them together, keeping these things super tight, managing the supply chain, and getting stuff out the door. They turn raw material into finished product in days, and so they're really incredible at doing that. So when we think about scale, I just didn't think it made sense to look at the traditional aviation companies because they don't build that scale. It's a very different mindset but the autos do and there's a lot of lessons learned there. And again, the partnership that we have with Stellantis and specifically the CEO Carlos Tavares is a really positive one that I think we can both benefit from immensely and we can leverage the, you know, really lessons in scaling that Stellantis has shown with their vehicles. I mean they're building something like 500, 600,000 cars per month. And so, you know, there's just an incredible amount of things we can do and we can also be protected, potentially protected I guess I should say, from squeezes in raw materials. And so, you know, when you think about different things getting, you know, cut off, you'd rather be one of the big guys than the little guys. And I think it is going to be important to protect against raw materials because especially on the anything that has to do with batteries is going to get tight here at some point.

I remember having a conversation with Elon, he said when you look at the people try and protect their idea and he said the ratio of the value of the idea to the value of putting something into mass production is zero to infinity. Yeah, yeah, the idea is the easy part. It's actually turning it into a business and actually operating at scale. That's everything.

Yeah, I really like teeth said, you know his IP is his speed, right. So it's almost like he didn't care. I think he does care but like he would say like you know, we're not trying to just protect the IP from a traditional way speed is the way that you protect it. And I really agree with that. It also again like the, like if you look at like the market it's really interesting. You know the total addressable market TAM for our industry is huge. Right. You know Morgan Stanley put out a number, they said it could be as big as 9 trillion. It's like an auto sized number. It's one of the biggest markets out there. But you have a certain point where you have to prove that too. And so you know, before you get to market you're in this typical like $1 to $3 billion market cap range. It's the same place where Tesla, Rivian, lucid all were. They all three were there. As soon as they hit to production they all went to 30 billion. So again go back and look at Tesla when they launched the Roadster. You know the Stock goes to 30 billion market cap, Rivian and lucid did the same. And then it's up to you to prove that the TAM is real. So Tesla obviously has made it Rivian and Lucid are still trying to figure out if, you know, that they can be part of that story. And so hitting production for us is really exciting, but we have to prove the market is as big as we're saying. And so that not only just is the manufacturing hard, but actually building the business is going to be hard. And so I don't want to underestimate the, you know, the difficulty that is going to be too. And so we're very focused on that as well. And we've built up a good team internally to go start building up the airline operations and all the partnerships that we've launched internationally. But the scaling of the operation side, especially in our business, is going to be quite challenging.

Adam Goldstein Founder CEO of Archer Aviation, Manufacturer of Midnight Evtol I can't. Okay, if I can't have one, I can't wait to fly in one. So 2025's right around the corner. Listen, thank you my friend. Thank you for the work that you, your team Nikhil are doing and a pleasure looking forward to seeing you in March at the Abundance Summit and coming up to visit. I want to come and see the plant. Come and see the vehicle.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it and you're welcome anytime.

Thanks, pal.

Alrighty. Thank you.