YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Bry

lines on the record: 83
first: 2026-06-15
most recent: 2026-06-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Look, this is probably the hardest question to end on because I would love to do it. I think we could do it, but we're still so early in these markets where the potential is so massive and there's still so much left to build. I can't justify taking our focus off of that. So I really hope somebody else does. Maybe we can partner with them in some way. Maybe we can provide some technology. I certainly think there's a need there. I hope that we will get great American consumer drones. I think it's unlikely that it's going to be us that's manufacturing them.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're our own thing. And I would say each of those companies of their own thing. Everything the business is growing right now, defense is growing very quickly for us. It's actually a shrinking percentage of our overall business because other things are growing just that much faster. So I'm super proud to work with the US military. And I think it's generally good that more tech companies are doing so. But I would say that our identity is probably compared to other companies you're talking about less defined by being sort of a defense contract or being super defense focused. I actually think some of the biggest value we can provide to our defense customers, especially in our space, is by being incredibly successful in civilian markets such that when they're going head to head against adversaries using Chinese consumer drones, we've got the best thing to match that.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A mastermind injury sin particularly because their American dynamism project, they do a lot of government lobbying. There's reports today that they're going to do even more lobbying in this cycle. Palantir exists, Andrew exists. There is a new cohort of defense companies that are thinking very differently about what it means to defend America and be some of these contractors. Do you perceive yourself to be part of that group? Do you have a different culture? How does that work?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredibly impactful positive work to be a part of. So I'm happy to have this conversation with anyone. I'll have it with a candidate that I'm talking to. I'm having it with you right now for the world to see. And people get to make up their own minds on it. But if you really care about developing cutting-edge tech to have positive impact in the world defined as helping people do their jobs better, helping our critical industries run in a safer, more efficient way and saving lives, I think SkyDio is hard to beat.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think debate about this is healthy. I think questions about it are healthy. Different companies have different postures. You know, there's some companies where like get on board or get the hell out. I generally think it's healthy to have a diversity of perspectives on this stuff. I think this is actually one area where we have quite a bit of diversity and diversity is awesome. I'll say one of the dynamics that I've seen, and I think you can see this most clearly in public safety, When we started work, we started working with military and police in the summer of 2020, which was not a super popular time for law enforcement in the US. There was a lot of negative headlines about it. There were a lot of people internally who had some concerns. I think over time as our products have grown in that space and people have seen the impact that they had, almost everybody, including folks internally who are initially very concerned about it, have come to the belief that it's really”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I bring this back all the way to the beginning. You started by talking about talent and recruiting talent and getting the best people and how that is better than the right structure, which is some real decoder bit. I have to be honest with you. That's the whole thesis of the show. As you're out in the world recruiting, people have a lot of feelings about working for defense contractors, about working for the military, about helping to kill people. Google right now is beset by internal controversy about working with the government. Then they're going to do it anyway because I think Google has enough people that maybe some attrition is fine. You only have a thousand people you've got to recruit some more. How does your talent base feel about this and how has it affected your recruiting?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the problems here is you end up with really strong adverse selection. So if you make a policy that says you're not allowed to do XYZ thing with our products, the chances are pretty high that the U.S. military is going to follow it, right? They have lawyers. They look at this stuff. They will probably follow the terms of service. And ultimately, it may mean they just don't buy the product. Our adversaries, terrorists, they're not going to follow the terms of service, right? They don't care. They don't care what our policy says. Like they're happy to buy the thing or hack it, and they don't care about what anthropics policy says. If you try to draw these lines to establish purity of like, oh, we think X, Y, Z thing is bad, you shouldn't do it with our product. We're going to try to create legal terms or like things in the product that prevent you from doing it. I think ultimately you just end up on the wrong side of this stuff because the quote unquote good guys, maybe not uniformly, but will generally follow what the policy says. Bad actors are not going to care. They don't care at all what the policy says. And I think it's just not to say that you can't have an opinion. You can't talk about it. You can't debate it. But I think when you start trying to draw these bright lines and say,”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's decide, but then there's like building the capability, right? Yeah. Maybe in the case of Anthropic, no one knows what the models can do and you can just ask it for anything. You're like, make me a bomb and like maybe it'll do it and maybe Anthropic has some real feelings about whether or not that's a good idea and they restrict it. For you, it's right. I mean, the military hands you a purchase order and says, put a grenade dropper on it, and you can or cannot do that. You can literally say, we will not allow our sensor platform to target people and identify them and then fire the gun.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From Anthropic, for example No, I think that, I mean, the practical implication, the instantiation details might be different. But, you know, we face this question of when the army started running some experiments where they were putting grenade droppers on our drones, there were people who felt like we should shut that down. There was questions internally. I think that's a pretty visceral example of the military's experimenting with turning this thing into a lethal device. But I just don't think it's our place to decide.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decisions of what tools to use and how to use them. And I think it's very easy from an office in Silicon Valley to sit back and think that we're very smart and we know the technology and the idea of using it for XYZ thing seems evil or bad. So we're just going to write a policy or ban people from doing it. I think that's ultimately misguided. I think it's actually dangerously misguided. And I think it's not giving democratic processes enough credit. I think it's not giving the service women and our military enough credit. I mean, the military has a whole policy wing of brilliant people that sit around thinking about this stuff. And they're not going to get it exactly right, but they care a lot about it. And then at the end of the day, you're talking about typically a young person in a trench somewhere whose life is on the line. I think it's just not our place to tell them what they can and can't do. We're focused on making our products great. It's certain things. We're less focused on other things.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is an area that I think is actually one where I've gotten some things wrong. I think that we said some things previously that led some folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones. Now, we're generally focused on building flying sensor platforms. What the military calls dual use technology, and it turns out that the requirements from a sensor and flight time and reliability standpoint for inspecting the energy grid are actually pretty similar to what makes something useful to a soldier on the battlefield for what they call ISR intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, short-range intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. I have a pretty strong opinion that the people who are putting their lives on the line, who are ultimately accountable to democratically elected leaders, they are in the best position to make these life or death.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sadly, I have to keep asking about military applications. I do want to talk about power line inspection. We'll do a full hour on that one of these days. The other sort of complicated moral question that you've alluded to already is how the military uses this technology. There is obviously a brewing controversy with anthropic where they've drawn some red lines about how Claude might be used in military applications, whether or not it's even capable of doing things that the military might want it to do. Certainly mass surveillance has come up in the Claude discussion. Do you have red lines where you've told the military that you want to allow your technology to be used for certain things?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cities will just operate more efficiently. And I think we can do that with maximum protection of privacy and civil liberties because it's targeted, it's narrow, it creates a digital record. Because of that, it's less subject to abuse. Does that end crime? Probably not. But I think it probably takes a really big bite out of it. And I think a lot of people are going to be safer and happier because of it. you know, it's a huge motivator for what we're doing at SkyDio. And I do want to emphasize that this is not like it's fair and right that public safety and military get a lot of attention, but this is not all that we do. I mean, a lot of our drones are just off inspecting the energy grid and making sure that the power stays on or gets back on faster or keeping roads open for departments of transportation, which to most people is kind of like boring out of sight. I think that stuff actually ultimately might end up being the biggest segment in the business.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up enough fixed cameras. Let me give you a more concrete in our space. I think this gets at what you're talking at. There's something like 300 million 911 calls per year in the US, one per citizen per year on average. Do I think the world is better off if there is an autonomous drone that shows up in 15, 20 seconds to every one of those by default? Yeah, I do. I think that will save a lot of people's lives. I think we'll...”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the ring cameras are great. I have one myself. I'm not an expert and deep in all things ring. I certainly think, let me take a different spin on it. But it's an example of what you're talking about. There's a trade-off.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me make a comparison for you. Jamie Seminoff runs Ring. He's been on the show several times. His thesis is that if you put up enough ring cameras in certain neighborhoods, you can quote zero out crime. And he and I have debated this at length, where you can actually zero out crime. Does that feel doable to you, or is that the wrong trade-off in actually if you put enough SkyDio boxes on enough roofs, you can zero out crime?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a bunch of autonomous drones to increase the chances of them being found. And it's not to say, like, I think that the concerns around privacy and transparency are totally valid, but I think you also have to weigh that against the alternatives. And I think drones in particular kind of uniquely optimize this, where you're getting maximum benefit in terms of better outcomes with minimum trade-off in terms of sort of like mass blanket always-on surveillance.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them may want to be there more than others. But look, I think that the feedback loops there, I think, are actually generally pretty active and pretty healthy. And again, not everybody's going to like the outcome. There's going to be some percentage of the population that just doesn't like the idea of having police at all or doesn't like the idea of having police with advanced technology. But I always think it's helpful to think like, well, what do you want to have happen? Like, let's say that somebody's trying to break into your house. you know, a loved one goes missing. What do you want to have happen? Do you want a drone to show up in 30 seconds so that the officers know exactly what they're heading into? If you have a loved one lost in the woods, do you want to be able to very quickly surveil that area?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was the thing with social media. Like, what is the ground truth? How do we decide what misinformation is? Who gets to decide? There's no perfect answer to these questions. The thing that I would say is I think there is actually, almost uniquely with state and local law enforcement, there are generally very good accountability and feedback loops there. I mean, in the case of sheriffs, so county sheriffs, they're directly elected. In the case of police chiefs, they're usually appointed by an elected mayor. When something goes wrong, they're on the nightly news explaining it. Or if there's a concern about technology they're using, they're on the nightly news explaining it. And they usually don't want to be there. I mean, it's part of their job. Some of them really.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you validate that if you're, you know, you're a citizen, you're like, man, I see that drone flying, they're big, they're noisy, they're not some, you know, they're, I have seen like a lot of TikTok clips of people noticing the boxes getting installed on roofs and the conspiracy theories flourish, right? And you can say there's a dashboard. You can look at the dashboard provided by a company. You have to validate. You need some external perceived independent validator of that. How does that work? Is there a feedback loop there?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is not in response to Flock. I mean, the transparency dashboard was largely driven internally. It seemed like a good thing to do, but a lot of the specific features have been iterated on and improved based on concerns that have been raised. There was a case, I'll anonymize a little bit, but there was a case where a woman was afraid that a police agency flying one of our drones might have been looking at her in her private property. They weren't. And so we enhanced the transparency dashboard to show the camera footprint on the ground such that you could just, she could go on and see for sure that they weren't”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or replaced with something else. And again, I don't know exactly what the right answer is. It's probably different for different communities, but I think it's an example of the process in action where communities get to decide. And there's inevitably going to be some concerns. My personal view on it is, you know, even the sort of harshest critics, I think, are valuable because it's part of the accountability mechanism for us. It's like we get to see what are people concerned about, what don't they like. And even if it ends up getting deployed in a community, it's valuable to see what the concerns are and to be asked tough questions because it changes in some cases how we think about product development and what can we do to address this.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think the trajectory the space is on actually proves that. Like I was concerned five years ago that public pushback was going to be one of the big barriers to adoption, even though we knew the impact would be strong. And we just haven't seen that. I mean, we've seen communities oftentimes asking for their local police department to use it. And the story speak for themselves. I mean, the videos of finding a missing person, de-escalating it in a situation where it's just obvious without a drone, you would have had a different outcome. I think when people see that, they tend to get it. And so the good news, you know, I'd say for people that”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of all the flights that they've done, where the drone went, what it was responding to, what its trajectory was along the way, what the camera looked at so we don't publish the video. But you can see the camera footprint on the ground. So somebody, any citizen can go and look at this and see what their agency is doing. And I think this is an example where technology is just a straight win. You know, in the trade-off between better policing and better outcomes and protecting civil liberties and transparency, drones are an example of, I think, technology just fundamentally moving that curve up to the better such that you can get better outcomes while still protecting privacy and transparency.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's happened, and it's extremely narrow and precise. It's not blanketing a city in cameras that are passively collecting, it's responding where you know there's an emergency and providing very narrow intelligence just in that scene, just in that scenario to drive better outcomes. There's definitely legitimate concerns and questions about this stuff. One of the things that I've learned and actually been very positively surprised by is just the level of direct accountability that exists with state and local law enforcement today. Like all the contracts that we have with police customers have to be approved by the city council. And that incentivizes the police agency and us as a company to do everything we can to make it just an obvious win for the community. And so we have a feature we call the transparency dashboard that makes it easy for agencies to publish the flying that they're doing so they can create a public record.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two things that you kind of alluded to, and we could talk about either of them. There's the military use of the products where we are in a technology race against China. I very strongly believe we want our troops to have world-leading capability. I think the world is better off. I certainly think the U.S. is better off. If that's the case, our military is ultimately accountable to democratically elected folks who are calling the shots, and they're controversial. Obviously not everybody agrees, but there is a democratic process. in place. And then the other side of it is public safety and law enforcement, where the products have incredible impact. And I actually think if you care about transparency and accountability in policing, drones, it's hard to imagine a better tool than a drone. I mean, it's kind of like a flying body camera. It provides objective documentary video evidence of everything.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that these things take time. I don't think you're going to overnight create the talent-based and the ecosystem that exists in China, but it's not zero. I mean, and look, I think Tesla gets a lot of the credit here. They have built and operated factories at large scale in the area. We have a large number of Tesla alumni that work at SkyDio. There's actually a lot more than people realize. I mean, a lot of like higher-end enterprise servers and things of this nature are built in the Bay Area. So the talent base is larger than I think most people realize. And there's a lot of momentum behind it now. So it's easy to look at the world today and say like, yes, China has a richer ecosystem. They've got more happening there. But I don't think that it has to be that way. I think we've actually, as a company got a great foundation. And, you know, these things ultimately are demand driven.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Automation is definitely a key part of the story. R10, the product that we just launched, is the most automated product that we've had from a manufacturing standpoint. We actually overinvested in automation there because we wanted to develop and trial a lot of new techniques. So automation will be a key piece of it, but there's always going to be a lot of jobs involved in running a factory and in just operating the company and delivering and installing this stuff for customers.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Real U.S. manufacturing working at substantial scale, you have 1,000 employees. How much of your manufacturing is automated as you invest in manufacturing, how many people are you going to hire versus how much automation are you going to bring to bear?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The plan, yeah, yeah, we're, I mean, we're doubling down like we announced we're spending three and a half billion dollars over the next five years in the US on our own manufacturing with domestic suppliers, on our own internal operations, we're getting a new giant factory. We're all in. I think that, yeah, I think that we're already one of the leading examples of real U.S. manufacturing working at substantial scale, but I think we have many more gears that we can find.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's going to be a slightly different story in different markets for different customers that care about different things. And most of our business is still here in the US, but we operate in Canada now. We operate in Japan, and we have and will continue to successfully compete head-to-head on the strength of like the integrated automated solutions that we can deliver. And as we get bigger, we get better and better at manufacturing more hardware at lower cost, which will enable us to serve more and more markets.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only long term stable solution is building the best drones here in the US. I don't really care, honestly, from a product development standpoint whether Chinese drones are allowed in the market. I think we serve the US military. We know for certain that our adversaries are going to be using Chinese drones in a conflict. If we want our troops to have the best capability, the stuff coming out of China is the relevant competition. That's the standard that we hold ourselves to from a hardware standpoint, whether or not they're in the market or not. I can say with pretty high confidence that in this new world, the world of drones is infrastructure where AI and autonomy are central, where integrating these things together into end-end solutions is the winning recipe that's most valuable for customers. I think that Nothing I know, we have the best solutions in that space. And you can talk to customers who have used both, and we'll tell you that. I think in that world, we have the upper hand.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so on the cost, I think the cost permission for that F10 will be way lower if you do a fully balanced analysis of like, what does it take for the person's time to go out there and fly it and how much training is involved versus like clicking a button on a map and having a dock-based F10 show up? Not everybody's going to like that answer, but I think it's fundamentally true in most scenarios.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think being able to click a button on a map and have an F10 show up 10 minutes later, 30 miles out from its docking station, like that is life-saving capability. And I think it'll be, not to say that great stuff hasn't been done with some consumer drones in the hand of volunteer firefighters. But when I think about what's the best possible solution here, I think it's a badass dock-based F10 that's zipping around at 100 miles an hour and can cover thousands of square miles.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just make the thing available to be driven through software, there's much more you can do with it. And we compete head to head against DGI in the doc-based world and have for the last year and win head to head on the capability. I mean, there's a lot of agencies out there that were skeptical of SkyDio and like flying their Chinese drones that were doing this sort of like 911 response with drones that were open-minded enough to trial our system and will tell you that it's better. It's the autonomy and the integration of the whole thing just enables them to do more, faster. Ultimately, I think that reaching massive scale is going to be our highest impact path. So the F10 product, our fixed wing drone, for example, will have something like a 50 mile coverage radius from its docking station. And when you think about sparsely populated areas where there might be like a volunteer fire department,”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two pieces to this. One, yes, we definitely can. And R10, our indoor drone, is $6,000 for the hardware. And that includes the controller, it includes the drone, and there's incredible capability there that I don't think you can get for any other price point. I mean, there's people who build other flavors of indoor drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars that are outpaced for the R10. The more scale we get up to, the lower cost we can reach with our products. But the highest impact in most scenarios, I believe, and I think the data is bearing this out now, is coming from more advanced stock-based, remotely operated autonomous drones. You can see this in the data. Like, you know, we have handfown fleets, we have dock-based fleets, the dock-based drones fly 5 to 10x as much, just the same way that like, you know, a cloud server is fully loaded, even though a desktop computer might sit at home unused.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It depends on the configuration and whether it's in a dock or not. As a standalone system without any of the cloud software associated with it, with the advanced sensor package, probably something like $15,000. But with a dock and everything associated with that, it's substantially more.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody was really doing anything with these things in 2014. So the beginning, the idea was like, we'll build these consumer products. The consumer market's probably going to develop the fastest and the first. And then the technology platform that we have there will enable us to go and do other things. Now, I think at the time we were maybe thinking we could do it all. I think in practice, when we got there, it really did feel to me like we had to choose. But it's really life-saving, efficiency driving work for our civilization, the customers that we serve. And yes, it seemed like there was a good business opportunity there, but at the time, the markets were basically zero. So it's not like, you know, it wasn't obvious. I was really drawn and I think a lot of us at the company were drawn to the impact potential and a belief that there was a great business to be built.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was a very difficult. This is probably like one of the most consequential difficult decisions that we made as a company. And it was hard, largely because I personally thought the consumer product was awesome and I loved the things that our customers were out there doing with them. It was really driven by the fact that we were still just a very small company. There's always this trade-off between like focus and serving different customers in different ways. I didn't feel like we could be great at both. I didn't think that we could be great at continuing to build the best consumer products for the kinds of things that we're doing and figure out how to serve enterprise and government customers. It was a combination of factors. Honestly, the biggest one was just the impact opportunity that we saw with enterprise and government customers. And when we started in 2014, these markets didn't exist. The enterprise stuff was always part of our long-term vision.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That seems bad. I'm just saying in a consumer market. So there I think it's sort of like a direct cybersecurity exposure risk. I think on the consumer side, it's more the supply chain leverage that ultimately, and I'm not, you know, I don't think there's like anybody's done anything wrong by buying and going out and buying a Chinese consumer drone, but ultimately economically that is essentially supporting like a Chinese defense contractor, right? And it's helping them build up their technology and economic might and in aggregate that really matters. And again, you can debate what the right answer to that is, but I don't think you can deny that there is, it is not in our national interest to be supporting Chinese drone companies.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a supply chain, and then there's software command and control. Like, I don't, it doesn't seem likely that the Chinese government is going to take my Mavic error and launch it in the sky on my behalf, right? And then do something nefarious with it. So is it the actual consumer drone a danger, or is it the fact that at some point it connects to the internet?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“U.S. cities and across critical infrastructure doesn't seem like a great idea to have those things calling home to Chinese servers. The most controversial piece of this is probably consumer drones. And I think there's frustration in that market now that people who've been using these inexpensive, very capable Chinese consumer drones are now having trouble getting access to them. But even there, I think the national security stakes are quite real. I mean, if you look at the drones the Ukrainians are using and the Russians are using, there's a lot of direct consumer heritage there. And the supply chain that goes into a consumer drone is very closely aligned with the supply chain that goes into a military or an enterprise drone. And so I think it's hard to completely disentangle those things. Ultimately, that's what the policy actions, which by the way have spanned both administrations and I think are fairly bipartisan, are aimed at.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'd correct something. So, the stated reason for China sanctioning Skydio was that we sold drones to Taiwan. I'm glad you intuitive possibly the real reason. I think the real reason. As you stated, is that we compete with DGI and the US government has taken actions against DGI. And I think it was retaliatory. I don't know exactly what the right answer is, but I think it's pretty clear and non-controversial at this point that depending on Chinese technology and critical industries has a lot of risks associated with it. And this spans a bunch of different categories. I mean, we've seen this in chips. We've seen it in raw materials like steel and magnets. We've seen it with cars. And I think drones are like one slice of this broader geopolitical competition, which is really technology competition. Specifically with respect to drones, I don't think it's a uniform landscape. You know, the drones used by our military are probably the most sensitive, like buying that from China seems like pretty clearly a terrible idea. I would argue, you know, the drones that are living in docks deployed across”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The suppliers that we work with. So buying the camera module, the sensor in it, the processor, the circuit board, the metals and plastics, the suppliers that we're working with directly. And as far as we can push, the suppliers that they're working with, but you go back to some passive component on a circuit board or the material that's used in a particular thing, it's hard to say with 100% certainty on things like that.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very, very, very few. So we had the great distinction of being sanctioned by the Chinese government about a year and a half ago. We knew that we had China risk. We had done a lot of work to get our supply chain out of China. And the big remaining dependency that we had, this was public, was batteries. And we fortunately had a decent supply batteries on hand, but we had to in very short order stand up a new supply chain for batteries independent of China. At this point, all the first level dependencies are gone. And it's, you know, anybody who's saying that they don't have any Chinese content in what they're building is probably diluting themselves because it's very hard to trace back to the second and third levels. But all the critical components, all the first level dependencies stuff is outside of China.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wide scale hardware manufacturing ecosystem here in the US. I think there's some alternate universe maybe with slightly different policy decisions and a few decisions here or there where the East Bay and San Francisco Bay Area looks something like Shenzhen, China. And I think it's a bummer that we don't have that kind of hardware richness in the U.S. because I think we, counterfactuals are always hard. But I don't think there's like a rule of physics that says that that couldn't be the case. We're focused on drones. We're focused on doing awesome stuff with drones. I do see broader momentum towards building more and more stuff in the US. I think some of this is driven by policy. I think some of it is driven by capitalist opportunity. And I think all of that is to the good. We're still using supply of components that are coming from Taiwan and Japan, Korea, and so on. Over time, I think more of those.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I 100% agree with you. It's like drones are, in many ways, the combination of kind of consumer electronics with hobbyist quadcopters. And historically, all consumer electronics have been made in China. I'd say a couple things here. I think one, I don't think there's any law of physics that says that we can't have a world-class consumer electronics.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Under our belts, building these things in the US because manufacturing is hard. Hardware is hard. Manufacturing is definitely hard. Running a factory, integrating the supply chain for your product in your own factory is a extremely complex, messy endeavor. And we're very, very good at it now. I think that I saw you key on world class. I don't think that we are a world-class manufacturing outfit yet. Like blunt assessment, I think China is still better at manufacturing drones than we are. But I think we're pretty good. And I don't think there's any law of physics that says that you can't be a world-class drone manufacturing outfit in the US, and we're going to do it. I mean, we'll invest in whatever hardware and software and systems and talent and people we need to such that we have the world's greatest drone factory right here in the US.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have always manufactured our drones in the US. We started doing this in 2016 and 2017 when people thought it was truly insane. Like we had investors in the early days that would come and do diligence on us and see a manufacturing line and just basically pull the ripcord. Like, what the hell are you guys doing? I'm out of here. Conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley in 2014 was like, one, probably don't do hardware. And two, if you are going to do hardware, definitely outsource it to China. That's just not the path that we went down. And honestly, we didn't go down it originally for geopolitical reasons. We went down the path of US manufacturing for practical reasons because they're aerospace devices, engineering and manufacturing are tightly coupled and doing both side by side just enables you, I think, to build better products faster. Now, it has become a critical strategic imperative for national security. And I think a critical strategic advantage for us that we've got a decade of experience.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of AI is super valuable because the integration of hardware and software gets more and more powerful and hardware, I think, is going to be amongst the last things to just be five codable, to like prompt, I want a drone that does XYZ thing. Maybe someday we'll get there. But doing the hardware is really hard. And once you have it, being able to just more and more easily add software on top of it to adapt it to more applications and more industries is, I think, a very valuable place to be.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT