How Natilus is Designing the Future of Cargo and Passenger Planes from the Ground Up

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And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I am so thrilled to have on one of my favorite founders in San Diego, Alexei Matushev, co founder and CEO of Natilus. Hey, Alexei, thanks for being on the pod.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Neil. Excited to be here. You're one of my favorite investors here in San Diego.

Well, I feel like we've actually known each other, I think about two years now, but yet we have spent a lot of time together while we've gotten to know the true potential of the future of aerospace here in San Diego. So I'm stoked to kind of tell the backstory here because we're very excited for what you guys are building. And why don't you give us a quick high level overview of Nautilus and then we'll kind of take it back of where it all began.

Yeah, absolutely. So Nautilus is a San Diego based startup focusing on what we want to be is the next Boeing, actually. So we design, build and sell large scale airplanes to major airlines all across the world. The company has over $39 billion worth of orders, which is really exciting. And we're actually building right here in San Diego, which is even more exciting I think too.

It is super exciting. San Diego has a deep legacy of aerospace, by the way. Right. Like Lindbergh Field is a name for a reason. Right. Should we talk about a little bit of San Diego aerospace and the legacy you're carrying forward?

Yeah, I think a lot of people forget about how deeply rooted we are here in aviation. There's a lot of aviation first that actually happen here in San Diego. I think today all we see is just a military basis. But all the research and development kind of has been consolidated and moved away. But the history here in San Diego as far as aviation and aerospace has really been centered around the Navy and how we actually deploy airplanes on carriers. But what it started to morph into was the birthplace of Convair. And so Convair got folded into Boeing in the 1995 and it finally left San Diego, but it actually Had a really big facility up until 1995, early 1990s over at the airport. San Diego International as we know it today. A lot of that infrastructure has disappeared, except maybe two buildings. The first one is the San Diego Low Speed Wind Tunnel, which not a lot of people know is actually right here next to the airport. And it's a world class facility. Every single Boeing airplane through the 787 has been tested there for a variety of reasons. And the second piece of it is, I believe it's the Naval command center. You know, the corrugated metal or the corrugated. With a corrugated kind of almost roof triangular building if you see like as you rolled past the highway. But that's actually the old Convair building. And so they actually would produce airplanes over there and that would wheel them across the tarmac, which used to be tarmac at that point directly to San Diego.

Whoa. And we're talking all the way back to World War II. Weren't the B24s? That's, that's where the. Is that your talking about the assembly line there?

Yeah, the assembly line was. Yeah, I believe it's up to B24s, was here. And then we also had the, the first supersonic seaplane and the only one ever designed and built and tested here. It's called the Sea Dart. It's at the museum. It's essentially the airplane with the skis, which has been quite a bit of a story, but it was actually tested here in the bay and it's the only seaplane that ever went supersonic, which is kind of neat as well.

That is cool. And. And then even further back, like Charles Lindbergh, there's a San Diego connection there too, right?

Yeah. So the story is the Charles Lindbergh airplane, which was the first airplane to cross the Atlantic, was actually designed and built and you know, built here in San Diego, but the city did not actually have enough money to be able to sponsor it. And so that's why I got painted the spirit of St. Louis. So even though the airplane was built here and thought about here, it was then maneuvered over to St. Louis, which kind of culminated into the historic flight. But yeah, the city was just a little bit broke at that time. Interesting.

We can talk, talk a lot about just that. But. But we've got a replica hanging in the San Diego airport. Right. The spirit of St. Louis. So that one reminds people as they're landing our historic heritage here on aviation, for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. I wish somebody would just write Spirit of San Diego on it too. At one Point. But that'll cause a lot of, a lot of money.

But yeah, totally. Well, yeah, deep roots here. And obviously all the bigs are here. Have presence here of some sort, small or little presence, you know, like the United Technologies and the Pratt Whitney's even have been here and the like. But how about you? How did you get the aviation bug and where did it all start?

Yeah, so I was born and raised in the Soviet Union and then it broke apart one day and became Ukraine. I remember the price of ice cream just kept going up exponentially. And I asked my mother what the heck was going on and she's like, well, that money that we have is not longer valid and so we got to go find other money. So no ice cream for you today.

Well, what a. Learning early on.

Crazy. But my, my grandfather was career military. He helped build a lot of the ICBMs around the Soviet Union, which of course is now really a different topic given the war and everything. But we used to have an airfield right around where I grew up. And because he was not, you know, active military, but he used to be able to walk us over. He was really high ranking in the city. And so me and my brother, we used to actually walk onto this active airfield and there would be like migs and Sukhois and all sorts of helicopters, just like an active airfield, which was really neat. Ironically enough. We didn't really. That didn't capture our imagination right away. We actually were more interested in the decrepit buses where we could actually crawl in and play at that point. But it definitely left an impression that these really cool machines really existed around me since a very early age. And then, you know, going over here into the United States and immigrating. I grew up in Iowa, so went to high school over there of all places and wanted to be a pilot. Turned out to be, I was too tall. And so the next best thing was, you know, aerospace engineering. So at least I get a little bit of a ride in an airplane is what I was thinking. And I honestly thought my, my deepest passion was going to be maybe an astronaut somehow maybe in the cars there was going to be an astronaut ticket there. And I did a summary at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, which is, believe it or not, one of the old world oldest aerospace companies. Not a lot of people know that. So yeah, their majority of their business is in the canning. So if you drink like a bottle, like a can of Coke, you'll see ball on it. And it's actually produced over in Colorado.

I didn't Know that's the same company. I've heard both names, Ball Beverages and Ball Aerospace. Wow.

Ball Aerospace. Yeah. And so they, for some reason, even before NASA existed, the founders got really excited about aerospace and rocketry and they started Ball Aerospace. Long story short, it feels like the can business supports the aerospace business, not the other way around. But I did an internship there, worked in the clean room, saw like Worldview 2, which was like the top of the line, I would say telescopic satellites that did a lot of Google Maps. I saw James Webb Space Telescope. So when I actually was going through thermal vacuum testing and this two story canister, it was really neat. But I really figured out that things were just moving way too slow. And so I think I got, I was really disappointed and I thought I got more excited about aviation at that point. And so I went back to college and switched my major because in arm school we actually could switch majors into Aerospace and Aeronautics and Astronautics. And so I became Aeronautics shortly afterwards. But yeah, fast forward to that. Spent got really lucky, worked at Piper Aircraft, became an aerodynamicist, which is very few of us. So it's kind of like we call ourselves rarer than heart surgeons. You don't really need a lot of us in the United States. I think that's part of it. But I did a lot of airplane programs over there and then moved over to the west coast to work on cutting edge unmanned technologies for Kratos. And so a lot of my work is now declassified or is flying, which is really exciting.

That is exciting. But I want to peel back a little bit because your entire career has been in aerospace, you went to school that was exclusively aerospace, right? Aeronautics and aerospace.

Really weird school. It's called Embry Riddle University. There's two campuses, one out of Daytona beach and the one out of Prescott, Arizona. And I didn't want to be in the desert, so we went to, to Embry Riddle in Daytona. That's actually where I met my co founder Anatoly. So we've known each other a very long time. But yeah, very weird school. It lives and breathes aviation. The running joke is you only read one book that is not aviation related and it was Seabiscuits. For some reason. There's this one teacher that always had like the Seabiscuit school book. But like we read, you know, everything from like the right stuff, all the movies that we were educated, all the history was entirely aviation based. We had like Chinook helicopter land on our base. You know, we're on the school campus during the rotc training. Half of my friends were pilots. We had the flight line right over there. We had business jets that were taken apart. So it was just live and breathe aviation is what it was.

And just pretty much then therefore go into that as an industry, I'm guessing.

Yeah, yeah. So a lot of people go into the school realizing that maybe aviation is not what they want to do because it's very, very constant, concentrated. But the folks that do graduate, it really feels like, you know, this is their bread and butter and there's an incredible amount of passion for it. So I think we're always excited when we meet an Embry Riddle grad, you know, and so we actually don't have that many working for us, ironically enough. They usually go to like the bigger companies, but still interesting.

Yeah, but I'm get. Yeah, like I would imagine it's a tight knit group and it's. I think you've got a story of some other classmates who have gone on to start other companies. Related as well too.

Yeah, it was when we were raising a pre seed round and Draper Associates led our pre seed round out of San Francisco. And it was. He kind of made a joke. Is like, I mean like the last three founders that I invested in aviation airspace all came from Embry Riddle and we were all classmates. And so there was like us Nautilus. There was a company called Mothership which doesn't exist anymore. And then the third one is Bagaviv Aviation. They did rocketry and so that one does exist unfortunately either. But yeah, all in a span of call like six to eight months. Tim Draper precede. He's just like, what is the school doing over there?

Well, it makes sense. It's hyper focused. You know, you have the built in talent pool and classmates who you know are potential co founders or future hires. So you know, kind of makes sense to have it all built out in a box. Piper, you said was in Florida. Was that kind of the natural move or do you seek out, you know, specifically you wanted to go build, you know, that kind of planes.

Yeah, it's quite an interesting story. I did not want to go work at Piper for some reason I thought like I wanted to go to Gulfstream, which was like higher end business jets in Savannah and they also paid better. So I think that was attraction. But like right when we graduated 2009, 2010, like the market collapsed. And so as everybody told us, beggars cannot be choosers. And out of everybody in aviation, everybody was essentially pinching everything as far as hiring. But Piper was actually on the rise. They had this big business jet program that had a lot of funding under it. It was the first business jet built out of Piper. And so there was a lot of technology that the company was inventing itself and reinventing itself too. And they were taking kids by the buttload just down the street or directly from Ember Riddle into Piper. And if you know anything about Piper is, it's got a very long history. There's a lot of ups and there's a lot of downs. And you know, I would say at that point, one of us was being hired for $47,000. That was like literally a brand new grad out of embryo, $47,000. And so I remember I tried to negotiate my salary and then they were like, look, we can hire another 10 of you tomorrow, so don't even bother. But my starting salary was pretty darn low. But what was really interesting about that whole process was they were interviewing a lot of what we call like airframe engineers and structural engineers. So a lot of like the CAD work behind it and the analysis, but very few aerodynamicists. In fact, they were not even hiring for the position. And what happened was I was interviewing for a structural position, but I brought over an aircraft design that I did for a company in Norway, which is actually a flying airplane, one of the first hybrid seaplanes ever designed in the world that I designed in college. And so I brought this report over to them and the hiring manager was like, what the heck is this? And so I explained this project that I did or inward college, and you know, I designed the wing and the tails and that's now flying. And he's like, look, you know, this is strange, like our aerodynamics, you know, we just lost one. And so we actually are looking for one. And so I'll give you a connection to my. What became my boss at Piper. And so it was a very weird hire. All my friends got hired into structural and airframe engineers, including my co founder. But I was one of the very. I was the only one chosen that kind of graduating class to really move into aerodynamics, which of course is a very much a rarity.

Totally really interesting, by the way, right around the same time, 2000, 2008, 9 was when I was entering the workforce and I ended up at Pratt Whitney, which I was in California, but they had a huge test facility in West Palm Beach, Florida as well. So Florida also has an interesting, you know, density of aerospace or aviation, it seems like, as well too. I was more on the space space propulsion side, but they had a Whole jet engine test facility there that I got to tour a few times where you only kind of one of the few places where you get crocodiles, you know, on the test stand.

That's right.

They're in Mississippi where we also tested our rocket engines. So yeah, Florida's got its unique quirks there, for sure.

Absolutely. Yeah. It feels like it's more space centered, less aviation centered. Although that's changed widely over the last 10 to 15 years with Embraer and the Northrip also planning up over in Melbourne, Florida, but.

That's right. Yeah. I think it's talent pool based. Right. So many people from Kennedy Space center no longer launching as frequent as they were until SpaceX came around. And people obviously still want to live in Florida, so might as well hire them up for other projects there. Take me through a little bit of Piper, like. And what is the role of the aerodynamicist that, you know, kind of applied towards developing new planes?

Yeah, so the aerodynamicists essentially are, as I mentioned, the beginning. So we're usually given requirements. Usually it's a single sentence in places like Piper is at that point on the business jet was we want to take seven people, carry them 1100 miles. And that was it. That was like literally a single sentence requirement. Oh. And we had to do it at a Mach 0.6 or something like that. So they gave us the speed requirement. But we took that as a team and started essentially at that point there was an idea of a design that was kind of being pushed through the company. Company. But it was changing rapidly as our competition was changing. And it's really important to note that that business jet program was part of what we call like the dark in the skies approach. And something to note about that is because we're seeing the same thing today with evtols. But a company appeared out of nowhere called dayjet. And so dayjet was essentially trying to figure out how to create the taxis of the sky, essentially carrying four people about 200 to 300 miles on these, you know, call it small little routes. And they were going to be essentially the taxis of the sky. They put out on RFQ for essentially an airplane for like 10,000 airplanes. And we were just like everybody in the industry was Piper, Cessna, you know, Sirius, we were. All of us had Piper or like these business jet programs that just appeared out of nowhere, specifically designed for this one specific customer. And you know, fast forward, I'll kind of back up a little bit. Fast forward a little bit is deja went under because nobody could bring the airplane to market. For a variety of reasons, the unit economics didn't make sense. And so Deja folded. And so just as this market kind of came overnight, it disappeared overnight too. And so a lot of us were left with these business jet programs, but no use cases. And only I would say one was a two business jets survived through that era and it was serious jets. And then kind of like Cessna had a Mustang which was kind of very similar. But fast forward to today evtols and it sounds like exactly the same, you know, market. And we always say naviation, history repeats itself. And so Uber came out with this white paper, you know, we're going to darken the skies of airplanes and look, you know, we're going to carry four people, you know, 200 miles. And we were like, oh my gosh, we've seen this before. So I don't know, we've lived through part of that cycle. We'll see how this one, you know, is going to come about with this new technology aspect of it. But we've heard this story before during.

The Piper era, but related to that because so much VC money is poured into EVTOLs right now. The same happened at a bunch of like startups also or like you think billion dollar kind of pourings into, into these business jets overnight. Sue?

Yeah, there was a really interesting startup at that point. It was funded by Paul Allen. It was called Eclipse Aviation based on the Albert Quirky. And so it was a four person business airplane. And Paul's direction was, you know, make it as cheap as possible. And the story was it has to cost less than a million dol. And so the engineers started to pour over it and then Paul Allen also wanted to design his own avionics software, being a software guy, which was like a big mistake. So like a million dollars, sorry, the program ended up costing a billion dollars and they still could not certify the airplane. And they had brand new avionics, they had to build a brand new engine for the program and they were doing like stir weld friction welding. I mean it was just like this was as high end as you would go, stupid business jet thing. And so all of our programs like within the Pipers and the Cessnas, we're closer to about like 250, $350 million. And so this company is like burning a billion dollars and they can't get to market. Anyway, long story short, what we learned through that process is it's hard to get a software engineer to go build an airplane company to make the right decisions. And so that was it's called like one of the biggest, I guess, blunders in aviation over the last 30 years was this Paul Allen project that essentially just torpedoed I would say any new programs for a very long time because they were very public about how much money they spent.

Man. Interesting. Well, let's jump over to Kratos. So you had, well first, you know, illustrious career at Piper, bringing new products to market. Right. On a legacy company that obviously had been there, done that before, many, many times. Kratos, kind of a newer company to aviation. Right. Take us through a little bit of that.

Yeah. So just maybe one last note. As the biggest learning lesson at Piper that we had specifically around product market like positioning or for a product or especially like an airplane or a big program was at Piper we figured out there was this PhD paper that somebody found was that the only way to be successful in aviation was that if you couldn't start out at the very smallest airplane, so specifically like, you know, at Piper it'll be a two seat airplane, you had to go into like the, where the market was going to be larger. So you're talking something that's close to like a 19 seater or a 30 seater. And then when you really start to make money is when you go to like the Boeings and the Airbus Territories because the competition is, is, you know, there's very few players and the differentiation is very little. So it's really easy to differentiate a product, create a better value proposition. But you had to go raise a ton of capital or you have to just like really go for the big product. And so that's something that we embodied at Nautilus. We can talk a little bit more but that was a very big learning lesson that we took away at Piper. At Kratos everything was different. Money was no object. I was brought in is like, you know, if you have to go tank something, you're able to go tank it because we're building unmanned aircraft. And so, you know, at Piper the mentality was you can't lose an airplane because obviously there's people on board. And in Kratos it was like how quickly can we lose problems products so we can iterate faster? Was an entirely a different approach.

Interesting. And Kratos, the history did come out of saic. Is that the history of Kratos?

Yeah, so I was actually working for a company called Composites Engineering CEI at the time and then it got gobbled up by Kratos and so we were working for the unmanned division. And then really what Kratos Bought was the unmanned division essentially while I was working on it.

And as in San Diego. Is that what brought you to San Diego?

No, so actually I was working out of Sacramento. That's where the unmanned division was. So there is an office here. But I think they do completely separate. Separate things. Yeah.

Okay. I think more cyber security and software and communication. Okay, got it. So you've moved. So you've moved cross country a few times and I'm in Sacramento. What is the Kratos? What do they ultimately develop?

So at Kratos they were, they were essentially building something called target drones. So these expendable vehicles that were unmanned that were able to replicate certain technologies of our adversaries. And so essentially like the, what the pilots are able to do is practice live ammunition. And so, you know, these drones would come up, they get deployed, first of all, they would go shoot lasers at it and they would get targeted by points. And then finally as part of the last test, they were able to essentially open up a live missile and actually fire it and actually know exactly what it feels like to do. So. So these were expandable to aircraft and drones, but then they also were starting to test different weapon systems. So as an example, one of the big programs was at that point, which is now public, is something called msst, which was replicating hypersonic missiles. So there's a lot of conversation about hypersonics right now in the industry, but it was like a low sea skimming hypersonic missile meant for ships. And so long story short is we were building this product to essentially replicate this threat so then we can test the weapon or defensive technologies that were being put or developed together for the ships. So that's what the bulk of the airplane or the business was working on. What I got put in to do was start to really think about how do you actually supersize it and move into fifth generation threats. And so we were trying to essentially replicate fifth generation threats in a very low cost package. And that was completely just mind boggling to the industry because we have, you know, F22 strike fighters that cost $250 million. Our target amount or cost per airplane was $10 million. And so we had to like perform as an F22. We had to look like an F22. Like we had to do 80% of an F22 for $10 million. So that was a very weird program. We had skunk works come out because in many ways this was something that I've never done before. And even Kratos became. Kratos has never done before and the industry hasn't done before as a whole. And so the folks that came out were the head of structures and manufacturing, the F22, head of aerodynamics on the F22s like strike fighters. The guy who invented the codes for the SR71, Bob Lovsky, who did all the flight controls for the F117 which is like the. These guys are in the textbooks that you would read. So all of a sudden I show up working at Piper and all of a sudden it's just like these just completely star studded bench of all these really senior engineers. And so really exciting program. Learned a lot. Really started to figure out how to combine what we learned in general aviation, which is really low cost and manufacturing and things like that, but with carbon. And how do you actually blend the two together and actually spin out unmanned systems. And so that kind of culminated. That entire work culminated into a couple of products by what became now known as the Valkyrie. So and that's a really tip of the spear Kratos product that is out in the field today.

That's pretty cool to be part of that. Another product. And that's specifically Air Force or no, it's every. It's used across anywhere with a F22s and F35s. Right. Is what they kind of use it for training against.

Yeah. So they use it for training and now they're using it part of the. What they're calling the Quiet Wingman program or it's called the CCA compatible. What is. There's a better. There's an acronym that I'm sure you understand. But it's essentially like the fact that to multiply our forces you have a manned F22, but they could actually command like 10 of these unmanned Kratos products or the Valkyries. And they can tell them what to do. They can spoof adversaries. They can also distract them. They can also unload ammunition. And so. So they become kind of like a force multiplier in many ways against the very expensive fighters that the United States has today.

Wow. Super interesting. Huge leap I would think going from a variety of things, right. Like general aviation to now defense focus. Right. Different kind of power plants I'm guessing that are on these kinds of things and unmanned like a lot of different things. But as an aerodynamicist, does that change a lot for you or not as much in terms of plane development?

It really does for me. I got a taste of supersonics and so not very few people get to touch that. I got to touch it Firsthand, it's like supersonics and transonics and then also stealth technologies. There's different ways that we think about airplanes and what you actually do and then. Which is relevant to Nautilus. It was the first time we were looking at tailless airplanes. And so I actually, believe it or not, at Piper, we always take the tail for granted, the horizontal tail. And you can fix almost an entire airplane with a bigger horizontal tail. And here we were doing tailless airplanes, which just. There's so much more finesse around them. And so it was definitely that. And then also with cutting edge computer codes and things like that that were brought by Skunk Works and just different ideas and how you analyze airplanes was just like, blew my mind. And so essentially merging certification and what we were able to do really well in general aviation, but also kind of what is the tip of the spear actually looks like for defense. And so I kind of came out as a Being a hybrid almost, you know, being able to do both, but always thought that there was a better way than to go after commercial technologies using a little bit of both of those ideas.

Yeah, really interesting. We're gonna. I'm foreshadowing a little bit, but it'll probably help us jump ahead, you know, doing passenger, then defense, and then be like, you know what? I'm gonna go for cargo as my next area, because the untouched area, that. Is that the right way to think about areas that you wanted to touch with in aviation?

Yeah. I mean, actually, after that, after working at Kratos, I was. I was completely done with aviation. So there's a funny bar story that I have. So I was literally sleeping under my desk trying to get through this whole. Was it, I think cdr critical design review with, like, Skunk works folks and a bunch of generals. Super frustrated, but we got it done. But I remember, like, after it was all said and done, me and the Skunk worked team, like, came out, like, for a couple of beers, and I was like, hey, guys. Like, you guys are at the tip of the sphere. Like, this is, like, this is your life, you know? And so fast forward, you guys are all 55, 65 years old. You're retired. Like, what is the salary? And the guy's like, look at me. Is like, oh, you know, it's like $220,000 at the very peak. And we were like, what the heck? You know? So, I mean, I was like, all this work and, you know, all this passion being thrown into it, and I was just exhausted. I mean, I was like, I Had to look at myself in the mirror. I'm like, man, there's got to be, like, something better way to make money that is not this hard. And so that kind of culminated into my first company, which was an industrial design studio.

Interesting. Designing consumer products or. What were you designing?

Yeah, consumer products. So this was a time, like, when I remember, like, the iPhone cables came out, and they were like three feet, and everybody was like, what? What? What is going on here? So we literally found the manufacturer over in Asia. We called them up and said, can you make them six feet? They're like, sure. How many do you need? We're like, oh, like 5,000. Just give us 5,000 to start out with. And so we were one of the first companies to extend the cables. And we went through Kickstarter successfully as a marketing stunt and grew that to be a pretty successful business. But we did cables, we did chargers for a while. We moved into textiles, we did glassware. And it was really cool because in airplanes, sometimes the cycles or Design cycles are 10 years. And so here we could do something in two days, send it over to Asia, have a product. And we also figured out a bunch of growth marketing hacks as well, because we were essentially left over with a bunch of these mailing lists from Kickstarter with probably like 10,000 people. And so we would take a product, we would render it, we create like a landing page for it, and then we would send it out with a pre buy button or all like, mailing list for 10,000 people. And if the product reaches, call it like, you know, 40 or $50,000. We're like, okay, there's something here. Let's go order tooling and let's go buy. And so we were able to test products really, really quickly, not only from a, you know, design perspective, but also from a marketing perspective. We had, like, almost zero risk when we were doing this stuff. It was pretty cool. At one point, I remember we were making like a thousand dollars per hour. Like, we were all just like sitting there, just like, our phones just kept going off of, like, product being bought from us. And we were like, this is way better than engineering. Way better.

Yeah. And every new iPhone or new product, like, it build a whole ecosystem of new stuff for it, you know, whether it's cases and car holders and new charger cables. So it kind of was. Was good to just like, stay in that, stay in that. And every year you'd have a whole new set of products to release, right?

Yeah. We found out that people were moving faster than us. So like there was bigger conglomerates in China and then anchor came about which completely ate everybody's lunch. So the answer that we had was like let's get out of, let's get out of the electronic side of it because the cycles are too short and we don't know like when the decisions are going to be happening. And Tim, it as all difficult. So we actually started to go into more these, what we call like long term products which have longer shelf life. So like high end goods like glassware, like I have a patent believe it or not for like a self rating wine glass. We were doing all sorts of other stuff as well. So it was just like this other really fun stuff that she would take it like that to Williams and Sonoma that could, you know, sit there on the shelf for you know, two or three years and somebody will eventually buy it.

Wow, interesting. But come on, the aerospace itch is always there. Like at one point you're like, but, but planes in the sky or no or is it no end in sight?

Well, the money was good. But then I was coming, coming to like my early, well I was about to hit 30 years old and I was going through a little bit of a 30 year old crisis. And there was two books that came out. The first one was Zero to One by Peter Thiel, I'm a big reader. And then Bold by Peter Diamandis. And it was like, why do we have all these, you know, really smart people doing all this really stupid stuff where there's all these really big markets that are ready to be disrupted. And so I kind of felt a little bit ashamed. And then we were really struggling with this problem of air freight. And so I was like, man, like we have this really one like I, I think I have like one big company in me is what I told myself. And so we originally like I remember I told my girlfriend, which is now my wife, I was like, look, you know, I'm gonna send this, this pitch deck out to Silicon Valley. I'm not going to try really hard but if we get a bunch of meetings, like I'll have to go. And so we started sending our deck cold turkey to Silicon Valley. And all of a sudden we were getting all these crazy meetings and all of a sudden it's just things like it became a flywheel. And so it kind of started to really look like we should really take a deep look at it. And so that was kind of like the birth of Nautilus and Tim Draper did our pre seed round and then we were off to the race after that.

What's on that first deck? I want to see it first of all. And what was the original pitch idea that you originally had?

So the original pitch idea, we pivoted a little bit out of it. We figured out we wanted to do air freight and we knew that it was like the big idea behind Nautilus was it's really volume, not weight that drives air freight today. And so how do you create a more cubic volume centric design, which is what we have in the blended wing.

Bodies, which by the way, you learned firsthand by shipping probably boxes, big Amazon boxes with a tiny little court three six foot coordinate. Right. Like a big waste. Yeah.

So I actually saw the problem firsthand and so I knew that there was in fact exact something here. And it was hard to not imagine that Amazon was going to go out of like they're not going to go out of business. Like for the next 40 years, E Commerce is going to be a driving factor. So we knew that the market was there. We just needed the product which was the airplane. But we thought like, why don't we be extra clever and then make it a, a seaplane. So the company actually started with a seaplane design. We were thinking like, look, all these container ships, you know, interface at the port. Aviation started at the sea, you know, here in San Diego with the Clippers and in San Francisco Bay with Clipper Lagoon. Like, why don't we bring that back? You know, take the airplanes outside of the congested airport. So we actually, we raised $750,000 from Tim, me and my co founders. You know, we moved into a house including my, my then girlfriend in San Jose and we were like hell bent on building the seaplane. And long story short, in 14 months we actually had a 30 foot seaplane that was on the water the size of a Predator drone with exactly the same engine. And so like still feather in the team's cap. Like we were, we were there, we were built it, we got Coast Guard approval to go test it and we, my G was also autonomous, which was scary as heck. Wow. But yeah, we finished like, we did a little bit of flight testing and at that point we were really starting to talk to UPS and FedEx and we were with like senior vice president, the CEO of UPS in a meeting and then we were pitching the seaplane idea and like, I remember like was like Alan Grishenhorner, one of the UPS bigwigs, He looks at me, he's like, Alex, do you see like a port anywhere here? Like we're in a planet, do you see a port within 200 miles? I was like, nope. He was like, there's a reason for that. You know, all of our infrastructure, the billion dollars is not at the ocean ports. In fact, it's a very small part of our business. It's really at the airport, so you got to change that. And so that's when there was like the, the biggest pivot in the company's life was essentially moving into, you know, blender wing body, dropping the gear. And that's really kind of like the products that we have today.

Oh, wow. Didn't know that came from ups. Is feedback. Customer feedback, for sure.

By the way, I got that meeting through a cold email to Alan. Yeah.

And. And they're still alongside today as, as customers, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, yeah, take us through a little bit of life and where Natalist has gone, obviously move from seaplane, but cargo focused to cargo. And did you always have a plan to have like a fleet and size up like regional, domestic and intercontinental or how did that all come about?

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So the thing that we kind of learned at Piper, meaning that, you know, you have to go big and then you have to go even bigger right away to be able to be successful in aviation. So that was really the thinking behind the products and the way we structured them. So we kind of looked at what Series A could essentially be burdened with in Silicon Valley. So what can the market bear as far as the amount of cash that we can raise? And we worked our way backwards into the products and that became essentially the two products that you see today. Show a little picture of that. We have the Kona regional freighter. So that's our first product. That's a four metric ton payload, which sits exactly into a very nice niche of category for regional air freight for customers like UPS and FedEx. And it's also got quite a bit of a Department of Defense interest and contested in our theater logistics. And then a little bit before that, we've also started to essentially move into the passenger space. And so what we learned is that cargo is fantastic, but it's usually almost like a leftover as far as the balance sheet on a lot of airlines. I mean, short of UPS, FedEx and possibly Amazon, but those airlines are far and few between. And so we kind of were designing the airplane as dual use or, you know, cargo first, but with a passenger kickback. But then major airlines started approaching us and asked us could you guys should go head to head again against Boeing and You know, we're sick of the duopoly and your technology can be scaled and used for this. And so that culminated into our second product, which is the Horizon. And as soon as we started to market that, the order book, you know, almost quadrupled overnight. And it's still growing. And so we found quite a bit of market traction. But I really like the idea and I think a lot of our investors and customers do is still the, you know, the beach market being centered around air freight and regional air freight at that.

What's the. Let's, let's break this down a little bit within a UPS or something like that, like cargo wise. Yes, it's about fitting more, I think into a, an airframe, more cargo at a time. Or take me through like what's the, the true value prop for, for this versus the current that, that they're already using.

So UPS's fleet is, I think they have a fleet of like 200 airplanes, maybe more right now. And they have kind of two facets to the business. I mean, the first one is regional air freight, which they have other customers flying for them. And then they have the big airplanes, which is really what they fly. An airline typically is a really low operating margin business, typically 2 to 3%. So to live and die, if you look at their balance sheet, specifically 65% of that is tied to fuel. And so fuel is everything for them. If you can reduce the fuel burn that is, I mean even by, I call it 3 to 5%, which is what current engine technology does. But like Nautilus is a transition where we reduce fuel burn by 30%. So it's a huge step change for them. So fuel burn is really key. And the second piece is that if we can carry more goods. So sometimes they would actually send two airplanes literally like back to back with each other to do exactly the same route.

They're full.

Yeah, they're both full. And so they have this song and dance every single night where an airplane lands every single minute over at Louisville. But it's just like they need capacity to move to San Diego. So actually two airplanes will fly back to back next to each other. And they would literally land. And so if you can actually carry more capacity, which is really important for them, they don't need to send that second airplane, which is also like a really big value proposition for them.

That's a labor value prop. But I guess it's the same amount of fuel. Two planes or one plane of the same size carrying two planes worth.

Yeah, it's two airplanes Carrying the same full loads. So if you can reduce it from two full airplanes, which again is a fuel question for them to like a single airplane, that is the answer.

Got it.

So the problem with these airplanes is that cargo again is very volume centric and so they can actually carry more weights, but they just, they, the cabin just gets full of volume first. And so if you can carry double the amount of revenue cargo, which is what our product is tend to do essentially, you're essentially doing exactly that. Instead of two airplanes, you're sending one airplane and then that one airplane is way more efficient than, than, you know, just a single one of those airplanes as well. So it's a double whammy for them.

Got it. I'm going to jump ahead of passenger just to compare here because you obviously were hyper focused on cargo. You've been in passenger market before in Piper why or who like were not other airlines saying, hey, this is great, you can carry more than I want one for passenger or were you were hyper focused on cargo for, for a very specific reason?

Yeah, we, we didn't want to get distracted for a very long time. And so, you know, we, we, we just, we wanted to do freight first and get that out into the market. But slowly it started to become really clear that we were just kind of plateauing during sales and revenue was still farther away because of these cargo airlines being more stingy, if that makes sense. And so we, we really needed like a near term product. And so we started to then listen on the passenger side to these major brands that were coming over to us and so became really easy then to do deals. And of course that's what really grew the business. We always knew we wanted to get into it eventually, just didn't know the right time.

Okay, but a lot of, but within the cargo world, almost all planes, I think I learned this from you. All cargo planes are like second life planes, right? They start as passenger generally and then. Or is that not true in the regional world of cargo?

Yeah, it kind of depends on the airline. As an example, UPS would typically buy all new airplanes. You know, FedEx would do the same just because this is their bread and butter. Emirates cargo would buy brand new airplanes. But if you look at kind of like the totem pole of, you know, these African airplanes or airlines, they would usually try to do secondhand. So what that really does is just limits the market for you right away. And so for us it was kind of important, like, well, can we then leapfrog onto the passenger, you know, first then kind of you know, backwards our way into the freight sector. That's very true. On the big airplane side, on the regional side, there was a huge frustration because they typically would buy new if they could and if they. But now it's, it's like these airplanes are like 60 years old and so, you know, it's time ready for a replacement. And so now they're seeing a lot of fleet turnover and really focus on, on brand new airplanes and getting like literally good 20 years out of the airplanes that they want to buy.

Got it. So does that kind of tell you who's buying new is who you kind of go after for cargo? It's like, well, you're, you obviously prioritize new airframes, not like cargo isn't a secondary priority to you. And compared to passenger, I'm guessing is kind of how you focus that on sales for cargo.

Yeah. So if somebody's buying new, then we know that they have money. If somebody's buying used, then we know that they're going to nickel and dim us and there's likely no deal to be had right now.

So that's, even if you're offering huge savings on fuel and other things like that, it's still just not a priority.

Yeah, it's the, like the secondary airplane market, they will take a hit on the fuel burn and the maintenance cost, but then the acquisition price is quite a bit lower and so they can able, they're able to finance it and they usually don't have great credit ratings and so for them it's just an easier way to stomach it.

Got it. Okay, well take us through a little. So the, the Kona, you know, what's it take? You talked about the seaplane, how quickly you kind of got it out together. What's it take to get the Kona together and the out in the market?

So yeah, we're going to be at a 24 month spread. We're closing out a fundraise right now to get their first airplane to market. The, the key thing about the smaller airplane, what we're able to do quickly is we didn't have to invest into tooling and so we were using more cutting edge technologies for a one off where with this airplane, you know, it has to be very much representative of what the FAA will look at for certification. And so we have to do two lanes and the moment you make a decision on tooling, you kind of have to spend the money to be able to get it done. On top of the, just the sheer size of this airplane is huge and so the first seaplane was 30ft in wingspan. This is 85ft in wingspan, and it's about 18 times larger in weight. Some more atoms, more materials and everything.

Amazing. Well, I know you've built a lot of it in San Diego, right? You've got not just engineering here, but you've had manufacturing here as well. Take us through kind of the assets, I guess, and what brought you to San Diego because of those.

So after Covid. Well, Covid actually was a really great time for us as a company in many ways, because it gave us some time to think about what the next stage of the company looks like. So on one hand, we had these big orders that were ready to kind of be materialism. We're ready to start building product. We were trying to get into the wind tunnel, but we couldn't. And so we were kind of a little bit pushed back. But it gave us time to finish the designs, which was really important. And so it became very clear from our seaplane experience that we could not build the company in San Francisco or the Bay Area. There was really, I'd say, two fundamental reasons why. The first one was it's really hard to test there. So there's three major airports around the Bay Area, and getting clearances is just for a new company will be really hard. Second part of it was we felt like the Evtol market was really spinning up and they were poaching engineers like crazy. Crazy. Like it was really hard for us to attract. I mean, we could attract the talent, but it was hard to pay the salaries that people were really looking for. And so we needed a shift. And we looked at two places. Florida was one of them. Given our experience in Florida, we knew what the infrastructure was over there. We knew we could attract talent and how the company would look like. And the second kind of choice we had was between Los Angeles and then over San Diego. And the big kind of thinking we were approaching was, is it better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? Like, Los Angeles was really booming, but it was hard to get manufacturing space and clearance as well. But San Diego was right down the road, and we would be probably one of the, I would say the only startup or very few startup aerospace employers here, which means the talent would be easier. We can probably do a better cost curve there. And also the supply base that existed here in the infrastructure that we talked about at the beginning of the call exists here as well. So. So actually where we felt LA was really good at the space side of it, we felt San Diego is actually better at the aviation side of it. And so it became almost a push or pull between me and my co founder of Florida versus San Diego. And I put my foot down and says it's easier for me to go raise capital and fly to San Francisco, so it'll be San Diego.

True. And by now, now you've got some real serious drone ecosystem in San Diego by this time. Right. You've got Northrop and General Atomic. Right. Doing their own drone programs and obviously SHIELD AI building kind of a big defense drone. And then Anduril up the road in Orange county doing also kind of aerospace kind of stuff as well. Those were kind of what you're looking at in terms of talent pool.

Yeah, exactly. We, we've learned since then that maybe you need to blend the talent pool a little bit. But you know, one of the things that we figured out that the folks at these military organizations just build things like Rolex watches. And so, you know, they're really great at the cutting edge technologies. What we were learning, like what I learned at Kratos, but things were expensive. And so we, you know, as we're scaling and growing, we believe that there's still an opportunity to blend a little bit with general aviation folks who know that, you know, you can't lose an airplane, you know, that it doesn't need to cost this much and kind of really think about things in a little bit different way. And I think that's really the way that we're thinking about as we're growing this kind of like the, the talent side of it.

Amazing. Well, I know you've also been, I feel like quietly building in South County, San Diego at Brownsfield, this underlooked resource. But every time I step into it and every time I bring people to it, they're like, what is this? What is happening here? What is that as an asset for you guys as well too?

Yeah. So getting the airspace clearance in San Diego was easier. You know, between Montgomery, which we looked at really closely, Brown was the only other opportunity for us. And Brown felt like the sleepy little village that nobody really knew about. And even though it's got this 8,000 foot Runway, hangar space and all sorts of assets for us, so it became home really quickly for us. And then the testing areas were easier to get. But yeah, we have a 12,000 square foot facility over there where we're building real flight hardware. We actually have simulators already put together and we're going to be building the final version of the full scale Prototype over there as well. And so we still do rely on, I would say, three or four key suppliers, but the final assembly and all of it is actually going to come together here in San Diego, which makes me very excited because I feel like it's like full circle is bringing back that cutting edge aviation that San Diego is really, really missing for a long time. The only concern is it looks like a big military drone right next to the Tijuana border. So I think we just have to be very careful.

Hyper focus on cargo. And you've been building out, you know, not just Kona, but also a whole story and plan for how do you build domestic and intercontinental. At what point do you then start to entertain passenger? Or does passenger come to you because of the big macro, which is the 737 Max, which is just like in everyone's face in a big way?

Yeah, it's kind of both. We're really hyper focused on cargo, of course, but we still have to create the path forward for the horizon. And believe it or not, this is actually a great time for us to start on it. Usually in a lot of these airplane programs, it's usually one or two engineers, an aerodynamicist and somebody else who are spending the time to actually get the airplane right. You don't need big teams at point this. This point. And so we do have resources already, you know, maturing the design, getting it ready for wind tunnel testing next year.

Okay. And so when. Who's the first that really. What's the first customer that comes knocking on your door? Or is it some of these ones who already knew you from the car cargo conversations? And they're like, this is nice. This will solve like a small part of our business, but our big business, like, what's that conversation like for the first customers?

Yeah, I think the first customers were one of the three big airlines here in the United States. And then we also learned was India is the second largest market for airplanes. And so we just went there for a kind of exploratory trip just to see what that might look like. And we came out with meetings with the three major airlines over there and most recently an order from one of them as well. So I think there is a very dire need in India. And it feels like they feel that Boeing and Airbus are ignoring them because again, their upstart airlines typically don't have the credit ratings of like a Lufthansa or like, you know, a Delta or an American here. And so they really need that attention. And so they've been really excited to actually push and pull and move things a little bit forward faster, which has been exciting for us from a sales perspective.

Wow. So how about design? So now you're building two whole different lines, right? Cargo and passenger. What's it like to design passenger? Because now you actually get to like, kind of look at experience and that kind of stuff as well too. Does that come into play and around that?

Yeah, I think, you know, passengers are very needy creatures is what I would say. And so making them happy is. It takes a lot more effort than boxes. There's a lot of, I would say, you know, challenges like egress, how to get people out. You know, we care more about the windows now than ever. Like, where does the window look, you know, how much sunlight, you know, what about that cabin space that everybody, everybody complains about for the, you know, the carry on baggage? So it's like all these things that started to come a little bit. Can we do this better? It's more like what I would. What Elon did with the first roadster is like, you know, look at what is exists and then how can we make it like 10 times better? And so we're trying to be, you know, mindful of trying to rethink everything from the ground up. And so on one hand it's presented interesting opportunities and on the other hand too, we're also realizing, you know, why things have been doing like the way that things have been done for the last 50 years and why it exists. So it's a really good time for us to be a little more, I would say, playful on the second product where we do have the time knowing that the first product is really coming down the pipeline. That's really going to be our big revenue stream in the near term.

Got it. And you mentioned fuel burn on cargo. Is it the same kind of big value prop for passenger airlines of what they're looking for in an alternative passenger plane now?

Yeah, it's definitely fuel burn. And the second piece that comes into play is actually like city pairs are different. And so like a lot of our airline customers, you know, they like to fly from Denver to Hawaii. Can you go into Likeue Airport, which has got a smaller Runway to create that, you know, summer rush or that winter rush that we've been craving for but couldn't get these airplanes. And so the city pairs are very different. Range becomes more of an issue. When range becomes more of an issue is like the comfort. Can we make it more spacious? Can you offer different amenities? And so the other thing, as one major CEO Told me is, you know, if you look at the products across call like Delta, American and United, there's very little differentiation. And so if we can create that product, you know, the seat is a little bit better or more elbow space while we still generate the same amount of revenue, that is the big winner for us.

And are people, I mean, comparing you to Boeing, like, are you getting that kind of, like, well, this is what our current pool is, or are they saying, no, I need diversity and, you know, I just need something new.

I think the way they're seeing us as a complement to Boeing, you know, it's very hard for them to imagine right now that Boeing will disappear. And it is really hard for me. But it's just the amount of airplanes that need to be built over the next 20 years is 40,000 brand new airplanes. And so Boeing and Airbus only have capacity for 35,000. Somebody needs to build 15,000 brand new airplanes. So. So there is room for, I would call it a third and a fourth entry into the market space that, you know, compete differently on the same Boeing products, if that makes sense.

Got it. Okay, so what's the timeline? What can, what can we look forward to seeing in the next few years, especially locally?

Yeah, locally. So we'll be doing wind tunnel testing next year, which would be really exciting. So sharing videos of that. And then we are also flying maybe another big subscale, which is really exciting for us. We might be doing it here in San Diego or somewhere else. Just we'll see how that plays out. And then lastly, just a lot of manufacturing going in our facility. And when this, this thing actually sits on gear and does the taxi test, I'm really excited to get the local, you know, news involved and to tell how this just amazing story of something that is brand new, that being built in aviation here in San Diego.

Absolutely. Well, when everyone loves inventure, capital, loves to say hardware is hard. Right. I think you've spent your entire career in hardware and so you know what it's really like. But I think what people also say alongside hardware is hard is that it takes a lot of capital. And so from your end, from a investor's perspective, it feels like you haven't raised as much, nearly as much as some of the, you know, some of these even EVTOLs, which are doing way less than what you are building in this area. Like, take us through like the capital needs that you've needed to date and then what it is going forward.

Yeah, so the company has raised $15 million to date, you know, I feel like we were even inefficient in capital. But you know, as you mentioned, like venture capitalists look at what we've been able to accomplish and it is a lot for 15. I think there's a large misconception about, especially in aviation and aerospace, about, you know, what it takes to actually get to what we call like the inflow point, you know, and people say like, well evtols, you need a billion dollars, you know, and they've now all of them have burned a billion dollars and you know, they still haven't gotten there. But you always remind them it's the technology stack. Well, they're electric with a brand new power plant that they have to certify their helicopter or an airplane, we don't even know. And then there's also got this whole like autonomy portion that they're trying to do and put into it as well. So it's a very different product for what we're used to. Like a Piper or a Cessna cannot do billion dollar program programs like they will all go bankrupt. And so like in general aviation you have to believe that, you know, a typical program like ours is closer to the $250 million or less mark. And so that that starts to become really palatable. And on top of that, I also remind people that Elon put $100 million and flew four rockets, you know, and so as I was pitching, I remember like really early on, you know, folks were saying we were going to do like another five or seven million dollars. And we had this really major investor walk us around and he's like, well, you know, just the risk in return for five to seven million dollars is just like, I don't think you can build a full airplane for 5 to 7 million. We were talking about the seaplane at that point and I was like, you know, dude, you just invested $100 million into a juicing machine. You know, like what? You know, why don't we spend that capital on something that actually will move the needle on these macro industries instead of, you know, the silly juicing machine. And you know, long and behold, that juicing machine went under eight to ten months. But well, the interesting thing that the investor said, well, that wasn't my team. And I'm like, well, you know, somebody has to own up to these amounts of dollars. So I feel like, you know, I. Investors are choosing not to invest into hard things because they're really afraid of what people around them will think. And it's that group think, you know, mentality. And so I believe that if there was, you know, a little bit more understanding of what it takes, a little bit more belief, a little bit more proof points, I think people will inevitably want to spend the capital, invest into these big projects because the returns are way bigger. I know the horizons are a little bit longer but it's the competitions are so much, so much different. And so I think the, the alpha is definitely there.

Well and that's true startups and venture capital is non consensus thinking. Right. And it is systematic changes, not incremental. So you know, I think if you're hearing from that, from certain ones, they may not be the true venture capitalists that we aspire to have funding fundamental change for humanity. Which is why it's hard right to be out front, but also will be so much sweeter when you actually like change humanity as opposed to change a few people's countertops with juice packs or.

Something like that that I think I just read this somewhere but they say like with hard tech the market is always obvious but the technology is the risk. Whereas like with a software SaaS product the market is never obvious and the technology is never the risk. And so it's just how you think about it. But yeah, if you understand the technology, I really believe that you should be investing in hard tech.

Yeah. Well we have a lot of it in San Diego so we're stoked to have you here building here and come down and see the next few milestones in San Diego. We also have an amazing taco scene that's for sure. But with a plane you can fly anywhere. With a good tacos scene as well too. Where do you pull up for tacos for you?

I still haven't found a taco shop that I like in San Diego and I'll tell you why. Growing up a little bit in South Florida, there's this called like carnet melita or like ground spicy beef taco that's like slow roasted for 18 to 24 hours at this place in West Palm Beach. And I've never been able to find anything better like that. And so I begged and barred and I have the recipe for it so I've been making them at home. So.

Okay.

Tacos in San Diego is my house right now.

Okay. I love it. Well, challenge accepted. Let's go find some good carne melita locally or at least within a Kona range distance so that we can fly in there. I have after, after doing a few tours at your guys hangar, I've taken a few groups to Tacos El Gordo in Chula Vista, which is not too far from. From your guys hangar. Their El pastor obviously is kind of legendary and they have an entire line of just. Just for talk, just for the El pastor. Right. Which is kind of pretty nuts. But yeah, I love it. Let's go find some good carnes. Molina. It's gotta be here. There's like every version of a taco here. Or at least maybe in Tijuana. Maybe there's a version there. That's right.

Yeah. I feel like South Floridian Mexican cuisine is very different. And I don't know, I. I'd love to get you like into South Florida next time you're over there and we're gonna go like hunt around for these tacos.

Totally into that. I've got a bunch of colleagues still in West Palm beach too, doing hypersonics testing and a bunch of different stuff. So let's go do it and meet up with some aerospace engineers maybe to recruit over to the team here.

Love it.

Well, Alexa, it was so great to have you on the pod. Thank you for joining. Thanks for what you're building, for sharing the story, but also being a part of the local tech community and I know you're onto it to go fly some big things here. So. So thanks again.

Yeah, thank you so much for being a great investor and excited to be here in San Diego and excited to bring back aviation here, which would be really exciting. Of course.

Very exciting. We have a lot of San Diegans who joined us in our last investment on the seed round. And so we're excited to have the community in on your long term potential here as well too. And doing another round here from Rising Tide Partners that we're excited to bring alongside with you too. So thanks again and excited to have all of the local resources available to you as well.

Thank you, Neil.

Thank you. Cheers.

Guacamole keep accountants counting beans Contador Quentan Frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rap and fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a craft beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing Coronado eatin tacos el gordo the taco standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero gotta shout out to cost Angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside the Tijuana SD be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who believe stars are within reach? We interview and founders who be shooting for the moon? South Dakota Tacos with your host, Neil Bloom.

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