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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“Yeah, I mean, we are extremely heavy users of AI. Like, one of the things that I've seen throughout the company that I'm super excited about is hardware engineers who, you know, they're brilliant engineers, but they don't have deep background in software. Probably they've written a little bit of software when they were an undergrad or something. They're now vibe coding up incredible software applications to help them optimize different aspects of hardware design, to study vibration or aerodynamics or something. And so the hardware that we're building is for sure better because of AI. And on the software side, we're super heavy users. I mean, we have all kinds of automations internally. You know, we have the ability for designers or product manager or anybody to prompt a change to the code base that will then automatically put into the queue and test it and review by A, I ultimately approve by person. So we're super heavy users of AI. Nobody knows exactly how this is going to play out. I do think that having hardware in this world”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where we can be and we need to be much more iterative and ship things faster. And it's okay if there's a bug or an issue or something isn't as polished. When we start a new hardware program like R10 or indoor drone, very different risk profile, it's not flying over people. In many ways, it's designed to crash because it's flying in indoor spaces. So reliability is still super important, but it's a different profile from X10. Part of the challenge, and I think part of what we're pretty good at is being able to focus on the specifics of what we're trying to accomplish, what a particular product is meant to do, whether it's hardware or software, and deal with it on its own merits rather than just applying blanket rules across everything.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I'm so deep in it at this point that it's probably hard for me to perceive. I don't know what it's like to lead a pure SaaS company. You know, I certainly know that hardware is extremely unforgiving and you're dealing with real hard physical constraints and the kind of surface area and complexity of things that can go wrong is immense. And I think that that forces a deep level of rigor. But one of our goals is to be able to tolerate a very heterogeneous posture with respect to risk and complexity and uncertainty. So our flagship mainline products, reliability is the single most important feature we focus on maniacally. We have to vet everything that we ship extremely rigorously and carefully. But not everything is like that. There's pieces of like the cloud user interface.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I ask you, I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of the tech industry and what kind of products we've all been dealing with. And I don't know, the rise of like B2B SaaS companies, Diamond Dozen. Do you feel like it's different because you make hardware that your attitude towards your customer and what you have to deliver is because there's going to be a complicated piece of hardware that they have to charge and put on the roof and deploy versus you signed up for a subscription software product and maybe you forgot about it and that's our whole business.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The frontiers is where you kind of have to do slow thinking or like reasoning in the LLM parlance. For me, writing is a very powerful tool to do that. Anytime we're facing a lot of uncertainty or ambiguity, I kind of tend to just start writing to help myself think about it. And that helps clarify my thinking. And then I also think the output from that tends to be a really powerful artifact for fostering debate and discussion and then ultimately having the thing that says like, all right, here's the plan. Here's what we're going to do. The other thing that I think it's super obvious, a lot of things are like super obvious, super simple. It's just hard to do them. Like the whole point of a company is to do useful things for other humans. And it's very easy, it's surprisingly easy to lose sight of that, especially as companies get bigger. And so we really force ourselves to focus on that.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of what makes companies effective if they become super effective is that a lot of decisions almost become reflexive. It's like when you're learning a new skill as a person, you have to think about it a lot. Like if you're learning to ice skate or something, you spend a lot of time thinking about foot placement and stride and whatnot. And then over time, it just becomes very natural. For me as a leader and for us as a company, I think a lot of what's enabling us to move so quickly now is that we're just reflexive on a lot of things. Like we've been through a bunch of product development cycles. We've seen new industries start to adopt our products and technology and the patterns that they go through. And so, you know, myself, my leadership team, kind of everybody in the organization, we just know how to deal with a lot of different kind of stuff such that it doesn't even feel like we're making decisions oftentimes. Things just happen. The right thing just happens. And it's super powerful and fun to be a part of that. That's not everything. And the new stuff.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask you the other Dakota question, then I want to start to pull on some of these threads that I've been pointing out along the way. You've had to make a lot of decisions in your run as CEO. Most importantly, I think the decision to switch from consumer to enterprise. How do you make decisions? What's your framework and how has it evolved?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not trying to build foundation models that are like 100 or 200 million dollar training runs. I think we were probably some of the earliest users of AI in real products. We use deep neural networks in our perception system going back to 2017, 2018 before I think anybody was doing that on a shipping robotic product. So we certainly are hiring folks and have folks on the team who are experts in AI and neural networks and all the other recipe of kind of algorithms it takes to build these autonomous systems. So I think there's now there's sort of this smaller set of folks that are experts in these like very large cloud-based models. We're not training those ourselves.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's possible in our space, and there's a huge amount left to be built, but we build it knowing that if we can deliver it, it's really going to matter. It's going to save people's lives. It's going to make the energy infrastructure in our country operate more safely and efficiently. And because of that, we've been able to track and continue to be able to attract really, really excellent folks to SkyDio.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's certainly a very competitive talent market, which is great. I'm an engineer. I think it's great that engineers are sought after and are the market compensation for them is going up. I think we have a pretty unique kind of value proposition for everybody, and especially for engineers, in that we're building products that are very real and having real impact today. Like robotics is hot again, and there's a lot of companies talking about robotics. There's a lot of grand promises being made. I think a lot of these companies that are starting off today are probably five to ten years of away. They don't think this, but I think they will realize that if they succeed at all, they're five to ten years away from having anything that's like a really viable business. We've been through that journey. We have an awesome core business. It's growing really quickly. But I still think we're at the beginning of kind of...”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is one of the weirdest talent markets in tech that I've certainly ever covered. You have outrageous salaries for people who work in AI, outrageous promises about AGI, and maybe you want to be on teams that are going to build AGI. You have some of the big platform companies saying that all 6,000 people are going to report to Jack Dorsey with the power of Agentix software tools. I'm not sure what any of that means. Is that affecting you? Is it hard to get the talent you want? Is it hard to pay them?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I'm not anti moneyball. I just think that I actually don't think this is that anti-money ball. A lot of what they were doing, I would argue, was sort of talent assessment kind of things, like deeply studying what are the attributes that lead individual players to be successful or not. And I'm not saying the batting order doesn't matter. It does. You might as well pull all the knobs to optimize them. But the most important piece is having world-class people”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's ultimately what it comes down to. And our head of people ops is awesome. And she and I work together quite closely on recruiting and talent management inside of the business to get more and more of that.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As baseball, but one exceptional person anywhere in the organization can just completely change the trajectory of a product or a business. And I think most things more than people realize really come back to talent, even for big late stage companies, certainly for early stage companies. And so we spend a lot of time really focused on that, on trying to get the best people in the world for each of the different disciplines that it takes for what we're doing and putting people in a position to have tremendous impact. And if you look at amazing new product things that we've done over the last year, like we talk about the F10s, this fixed wing drone that gets caught with a robotic arm, it's like a crazy sci-fi thing. I think that we did a good job like creating an org structure for that team to be successful, but it's really just the people on that team are phenomenal. And the same thing with R10, our indoor drone, which I think is now the best enterprise indoor drone that's ever been created with that 15 months. Just amazing people did that. And I think that's...”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a very talent centric view of business, so we talked about the organizational structure. I think that matters, but I think it's less important than just the people at the company. One of the analogies I used to think about this, I love sports analogies for business people obsess over batting order in baseball. I don't know if you're a baseball fan, but there's this whole theory of batting order, and it's evolved over time where you want the leadoff hitter to get on base a lot, and then you get into the meat of the order where you've got the power hitters that are supposed to knock them in. We're now at a point where you can use analytics to study this stuff. And I think the estimates are that the difference between like the most optimal batting order and the worst batting order is like 20 or 30 runs per year for a major league baseball team. They score, I think, something like 500 to 800 runs per year. Adding one star player to the lineup is like 100 runs per year. And I think business is the same way. It's not as directly trackable.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What that sounds like the antithesis of that. Yeah. I mean, I'm certainly familiar with that story. It sounds awful. I think it's really just us doing what we think is in the best interest of our customers.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technical functions. I think it's useful for them to get steeped and exposed to what's happening technically and then vice versa. I think having our engineering leaders really well versed in the business and what's happening financially, what's happening with our customers is super important for them because they're making some of the most consequential decisions at the company on the technical side that are ultimately going to manifest in the market with our customers and in our financial results.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm very technical. I come from an engineering background. I still consider myself an engineer. I get pretty deep into the details sometimes on products and technologies that we're working on. And it reflects our belief that these are cutting edge aerospace devices. And if you want to be a great company in this space, you need to be world class at engineering them and delivering them. We spend a lot of time at the senior levels deep in the technical weeds. Like my weekly staff meeting starts with a comprehensive review of like every little technical thing that's gone wrong with our products over the last week. And we'll go as deep as we need to in that meeting to figure out what's going on and what we need to do about it. We do the same thing on new programs. And we do that for a couple of reasons. I think one, I think it's the most important thing. It's not the only thing that matters, but it is the most important thing.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm giving you a lot to come back to. To pull on here So we're about a thousand people, which I think for the scope and complexity that we manage is actually a pretty tiny company. We do a lot with a very, very small team because we have to spend so many different disciplines across engineering, across software development, across direct sales and support for our customers and across manufacturing. In many ways, I think the company's structured kind of traditionally. We have a head of sales, we have a chief financial officer, we have a head of marketing, we have a head of people ops. I think PeopleOps, in which we could talk more about, I think one of the most important functions at the company. You know, I think what might be a little bit unique is just how technical we are at senior level. So I have six or seven direct technical reports spanning hardware and software and hardware operations and chief engineers for a number of the vehicle programs that we're working on. And a lot of that is”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to come back to that too. There's a lot of to pull on here. I want to ask about Scotty O itself. You've taken a lot of investment recently. The company is getting bigger. I think you're up to Series F. You have like a multi-billion dollar evaluation. You're about to make 2,000 more jobs here in the United States manufacturing drones. How many people work at Scotio today and how's the company structured?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it's ever finished. I think there's just so much upside here in what you can do and how good the automation can get and what that means for what people can do with them. We work with public safety agencies today that are using these things to respond to 911 calls. And a part of what they need to do sometimes is follow a suspect. Like somebody's fleeing a crime scene in a car and they'll do incredible things flying semi-manually. Our autonomy system is still under the hood, but flying semi-manually to track moving vehicles through urban canyons. And our AI system is very, very good. It's not yet as good as the greatest human pilots that I've seen fly these things in those scenarios, but it will be. And when it is, it'll be that much more powerful and capable for more people to reap the benefits.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just so curious about the notion this thing can fly itself, and now we can build applications on top of that core capability. But it sounds like this thing can fly itself is not a finished project. That's something you're still spending a lot of time on.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into a computer that's running onboard AI and can use the visual information to make intelligent decisions, to hold position even if you don't have a good GPS signal to avoid obstacles to track moving subjects. And we started in 2014. That was around the time. It still seemed like a crazy idea, honestly. It's hard to remember 12 years ago. Using computer vision for anything outside of the lab seemed somewhat far-fetched. We launched our first product in 2018, the SkyDOR1, which was, I think, really the first drone built around computer vision. Our competitors started doing similar things. And we're now at a point where that stuff has reached maturity. I still think there's incredible capabilities yet to come, but it's mature enough that you can really count on it and rely on it and build products around it. The fundamental thesis there is like build the skills of an expert pilot into the drone. I think the only way you can do that is using computer vision.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The orientation of the quadcopter. And without that, a person couldn't fly a quadcopter. There's no way you could move the stick to give a raw motor command, just the mapping would be too much for our brains. And so that was sort of the beginning of these things becoming a little bit more accessible. The next step on top of that was GPS position hold of not just holding an attitude, but using GPS to figure out your rough position and being able to hold a position in Sky. And that was a big step forward because that meant you could go hands off and the drone would just sit there and hover. So that was kind of a necessary step to get beyond like expert pilot level skill to have them be usable by anybody. And that's what most drones historically have done. And most drones still today operate mostly based on GPS. I would say the next big chapter, and SkyDio really helped pioneer this, is using computer vision, putting cameras on the drone, not just the camera that captures the video the user might care about, but cameras that see everything go”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Originally, drones flew in raw stick to control service input. So I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes. You held joystick transmitter. When you moved that joystick, there was a direct command sent to either an electric motor or a servo motor that would move a control surface, and that thing just moved directly in response to what you did. There was no compute between your stick input and what happened on the device. The next step after that, which is really what made the quadcopter possible, is taking very low level, pretty primitive microprocessors next to inertial measurement units, the thing in your phone that tells it what orientation it's in, and writing these pretty basic, what's called an attitude control loop. And that's the fundamental thing that's running at the bottom of every quadcopter control stack, which basically tells it which orientation to hold in physical space. And so then when you move the stick, it maps.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to come back to the phrase world class. I have a lot of questions about what it means to be world class in our current regulatory and tariff environment. But just give me some examples. We have a consumer audience, probably everybody listening or watching has used one variant of a consumer drone at one time, but just like every other product every year they get slightly better until the five-year newer model is a step change better than the model people might be familiar with. What are some of the big advancements?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spend a ton of time investing in that. There's kind of in this trope in the drone industry of like, oh, it's not about the drone, it's about the data. Which is sort of true. You could say the same thing about almost anything. Like, it's not about the phone, it's about the apps or the software or whatever. But you have to earn the right to deliver these solutions. The way you earn the right is by being world-class at designing and manufacturing these systems and making them super capable and super reliable. And I think one of the things that's oftentimes missed with drones is they are cutting edge aerospace devices. They vibrate. They have aerodynamics. They have thermal concerns. We've got really advanced compute running on board, a bunch of sensors. It's really akin to building a self-driving car that flies. And if you want to be a good drone company, you need to be a world-class aerospace engineering organization across 10, 15 different disciplines. And it's only once you have that and you're great at it that I think you can then start to focus.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea that the flight is almost the fundamental building block that you don't need to think about as much because you're talking about the capabilities built on the second and third order of the thing being able to fly itself. Describe that. Do you spend time investing in how the drones fly themselves or is that solved?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything we've seen thus far, and we've seen a lot of good stuff this far. I mean, I think the world of drones as tools, a lot of great work has happened there. I think it's just very small scale compared to what's coming. And we're really at the transition moment into that now.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I actually think what you described there to me parallels pretty closely the sort of chapters of the drone industry that I think about. The very early days for the category of thing that we make, these electric flying machines, were really toys. And I sort of think of the first chapter, the first 10 years, was the electrification of radio-controlled airplanes, and they were recreational. It was fun to go out and fly. This is the world that I come from. I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes. And then I think what happened is people started bringing the toys to work and realizing that if you put the right camera on there and you had a skilled pilot there flying it, you could do a lot of useful stuff. And that created cool videos, that showed up in cinematography, commercial real estate, things like this. The next chapter is really about autonomy, where the drone lives in a docking station, it's connected to the internet, it can be flown remotely, and autonomously and becomes a piece of infrastructure itself. And I think the impact that we see from that is going to be orders of magnitude larger than ever.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I think about just our coverage of drones over the years, you know, you start with this first DGI drones almost 10, 15 years ago now, the first phantoms, they were pretty rickety. They had these giant batteries. And it was really just about flight, right? Being able to control flight in a pretty easy to use way. And then we got very quickly to, oh boy, we could put fancy cameras in the sky. And that was really fun. And those cameras got really fancy. And now you're saying it's a whole sensor suite or is it just augmented cameras?”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we are the largest U.S. drone manufacturer. We make drones that are essentially flying sensor platforms. We started in 2014. At this point, we serve what we think of as the critical industries that our civilization depends on. So we work with public safety. We work with militaries. We also work with energy utilities and construction companies and departments of transportation and security organizations. The common thread between all of our customers is that they have hardcore oftentimes high risk physical operations. We're putting sensors in the right place at the right time to get better information can fundamentally change outcomes. And that's what we deliver. We deliver end-to-end solutions where the drone is a key piece of it, but the software and the autonomy and the integrations and increasingly the end-to-end workflows for the different industries built around the drone capability are really what our customers are buying. And we're at a super exciting moment where after years of talking about...”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am super excited to talk with you. We just had a little demo of flying an X10 drone remotely. I have a lot of questions to follow up about that. That was super interesting. The drone business itself is in a moment of extreme change, I would say. policies keeping some of your competitors out of the country. There's what you're doing with autonomy and working with governments and the militaries around the world. And then in general, there's just the state of drone technology, which seems like it's on the cusp of being yet another thing. So there's quite a lot to talk about. Let's just start with the very basics. Unless you're a drone nerd, you might not have heard of SkyDio. Explain what SkyDio is and how the company came to be.”
2026-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT