YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Marcus

lines on the record
21
first
2018-01-05
most recent
2018-01-05
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Well, I think five years from now, we're going to be helping millions of drones flying every single day, flying autonomous routes, bringing value to people in their daily lives, and this entails serving not only the market that exists today, but really working with those leading companies that are developing very innovative use cases for drones, thinking about connectivity, thinking about autonomy, working with the regulators, working with the airspace managers to make sure that we deliver the technologies and the policy framework that will allow for high-scale operations.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that with drones, success is not a matter of if but when. And there are many constraints and sort of unknowles that are difficult to control, like the regulatory environment. So I think it's important that you invest in curious multidisciplinary teams that can navigate a windy path.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, I think some of the most brilliant engineers, some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs, innovators actually didn't even graduate from school. And so often we hear from our parents, get good grades in high school so you can get to a good college, get good scores in college so you can get a good job when you get out of college. The most incredible inventions were developed by people who never graduated from college.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'd have to say the wealth of nations by Adam Smith. I think it's a timeless regulation of the laws of the economics that will last forever.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think it's a legitimate concern drones have already been used as weapons in the battlefield. So there have been reports of ISIS using drones, for example, carrying grenades and things like that. And that's really scary. And, you know, we don't want that to happen, certainly not in the homeland, right, whether that be in the United States or the UK or anywhere else. But it's horrible that that's happening with soldiers as well. I think that there are a number of technologies being developed that are mitigating those risks. We're seeing all sorts of interesting companies working on detection of drones. There are some companies working on mitigation of drone attacks, but that's a lot harder to do. And interestingly, I think the most effective means for mitigating unwanted drones to date has been trained eagles, which you might find interesting. The Dutch police actually trained eagles to catch drones. So there's no sexy technology there, but it seems to be working pretty well.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But I think that the FA itself probably doesn't care that the largest drug manufacturer is a Chinese company. I think that the FAA and other civil aviation regulators like them around the world are purely interested in safety. So the aircraft itself is safe, if the operations are safe, it doesn't really matter where it's manufactured. There has been concern from other U.S. government agencies. Like there was a report earlier this year that the U.S. Army stopped using DJI products because they were concerned about cybersecurity and things like that. Those are sort of a separate set of concerns. I don't know if they're founded or not, but I think that the regulators are just looking to make sure that the vehicles are safe.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think regulation is very important. I mean, until we had traffic lights and speed limits and lane markings on the roads, there was no efficient commerce on the road. So you need to have some regulation in order for you to have any scale logistics, transportation platform at all. And so the regulations are still very much in development. About a year and a half ago in the United States, we had a new regulation enacted called Part 107, which allows for commercial operations of drones before that, before a year and a half ago. Flying drones for commercial purpose was not permitted.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And so forth. It is sort of a boring, unsexy thing, but it is important in order for us to really find some traction in this market over the next couple years.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, so frankly, we haven't done a lot of direct-to-enterprise selling. Most of our integrations are with third-party app developers and with drone manufacturers who end up going and talking to the enterprises. But we do certainly do quite a lot of interviews and back and forth on a product basis with these enterprises to understand exactly what sort of safety and compliance and efficiency tools they'd like to see in the products that they take delivery of. So we definitely recognize that enterprises want answers, right? They don't want complexity. They want to be able to know exactly how much rock is in this pile of rock or where is vegetation encroaching on my power lines. Those are the results that they want. They don't really care how the data is collected. So it has to be very boring. I absolutely agree with Jonathan. But the other thing that they are concerned about is liability. Enterprises, large companies, they always look at every business decision through a lens of liability. And so they're very interested in making sure that they're flying compliantly, that any unnecessary risks are mitigated, that they have insurance for their operation.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “On a flying car. And that's where drones are really going to touch hundreds of millions or billions of people. And I think that's the biggest growth opportunity. But I think that there will always be excitement around consumer. There's going to be a big DIY community, which is always going to be extremely important for developing innovative technologies that will then later apply to the enterprise and to the B2C market. And it's all good.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think there's huge opportunity in both areas. In consumer, we're seeing increasing automation helping people buy drones and feel comfortable flying drones without having to know anything about flying. You don't have to wiggle sticks on a controller anymore to be able to fly a drone. Pretty soon you're going to be able to go through forest running or mountain biking or whatever, and the drone's going to follow you and take incredible video and be able to stream that live onto your Snapchat or Facebook feed or whatever. And that's awesome. That's going to get easier and easier. And I think more and more people are going to be capturing really cool imagery and video of themselves and their friends with drones. But I think on the commercial side, drones become really interesting as a value add to society is when people can benefit from these things without having to even care about the drone, right? So today we're talking about consumer. We're talking about enterprise. This is where people go out and fly drones for their enterprise business, if that's collecting data about their construction site or their mine or whatever. But where this becomes really exciting is really where it goes B2C, which is I take delivery of a package or I fly to work.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I mean, again, I think in the early days of any industry, it's easiest for folks to really deliver a complete solution to an end user in order to learn exactly what that end user customer wants and to be able to control the entire experience and not rely on any sort of third parties to help you be successful in your business. So it makes sense that folks like Kesperi are really focused on a specific vertical and delivering a complete solution, both hardware and software. But I think over time, that's going to have to change in order for the business to scale. Different organizations, different individuals, entrepreneurs, companies, et cetera, are going to have to focus on delivering something, a component and doing it really, really well. And that's a transition I think we're going to see over the next few years.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Significant transition, for example, with 3D robotics from being a hardware centric company to being a service-centric company focused on delivering services for the construction market.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, I think a lot of the money to date has poured into hardware. So the biggest companies that have been funded to date have been DGI, 3D robotics. They've really taken the majority of the investment. And thus far, it's been really hard to build a great drone. You know, the drone is a complicated device. There's lots of systems that have to be integrated with one another. And it's not easy to do. So I think that conventional wisdom to date has been that drones are going to quickly go to a commodity. And yet what we found is that DGI has remained pretty much untouchable in delivering this sort of complete hardware package for an end user. I think that's going to change over time. You know, we're seeing more and more investment from chipset makers like Intel and Qualcomm trying to make it easier for more OEMs to bring drones to market. We're seeing significant contributions to open source flight control stacks that help people make drones. So I think over time, we're going to see less consolidation around the hardware itself and some of those investments may not necessarily pay off. And we've seen a”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, you know, I think it's still a bit too early to tell exactly what their motivations are. I agree with Hamant that certainly this would be within the sort of broad realm of controlling information, organizing the world's information as sort of Google's mandate. But thus far, Google and Amazon have mostly been focused on how do we deliver packages with drones. And certainly they recognize as we do that having an airspace orchestration element is a critical enabler for their businesses. I think the reason why they've been focused on it is really to be able to enable their own operations. But I think time will tell if they open up those services for third parties.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I think there's going to be some significant consolidation. I think that to date a lot of investors have been looking at sort of specific vertical use cases, going after specific industries, sort of really focused on enterprise sales and support, that whole experience for sort of the Fortune 500 company. And that's a great way to start building a decent business. But I don't think it's where the mega businesses are going to be created. And so I think we are going to see quite a lot of consolidation there. There's going to be some consolidation around things like analysis tools, photogrammetry pipelines, the drone hardware itself. You know, all of that is super important, but I don't think it's exactly where the mega businesses are going to emerge.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Into AirMap, but I'm also really excited about things like sensors that allow drones to detect and avoid fixed and moving objects. So companies like Amazon, for example, can drop a package in your backyard when the dog is playing. I'm really excited about connectivity for drones that are flying. How do we establish a reliable, high bandwidth connection between drones and the internet? I think real estate is actually really interesting. So where will these things live when they're not flying? Where will flying cars take off and land? Those are the kinds of key enablers that I think will help make this a really robust industry.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, so when I was doing that investigation back in 2014 and exploring this space, I had the opportunity to make a couple angel investments. One of those was in SkyDio. And I think that we're still in the very early days of this industry. There's not a lot of money being made yet in drones. With the exception of the military market, the only company really making any revenues is DJI. And even that is quite small. So we have a long way to go before this is really a big scalable business. So I like to think about what are the key enablers that will take drones from being sort of a cool thing. relatively few people are playing with or experimenting with to really drones benefiting hundreds of millions or billions of people and I think those key enablers really have to significantly increase the level of automation of the operation and provide a level of assurance of safety to the public at large so what are those key enablers you know clearly I believe that platforms that provide navigation information for highly automated drones at scale are a good investment that's why i put my life”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Can own and fly their own jet. And so while it was a lot of fun, it was a great business, got to me incredible people. Go back to my roots and that core mission again of helping make flight part of daily life. And so in 2014, it started getting really excited about drones. I started researching the whole drone space. There were all kinds of amazing things happening and really came to appreciate that drones were the next frontier for flight and that millions or billions of people potentially could benefit from drones in their daily lives. So as I started looking at the space, I was looking at all types of different companies, manufacturing companies, service provision companies focused on specific industrial verticals. And the thing that I found was really missing in all of this was what is the orchestration layer? What is the airspace management layer that's going to allow for millions or billions of drones to fly highly automated flights and really deliver capabilities to people in their daily lives? And that was really the inspiration to start AirMass.”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Sort of created this To get to medical If it wasn't for a volunteer pilot offering them this flight. And so throughout my life, I've really always come back to this primary concept for me, which is how do we extend the benefits of flight to more and more people? Flight instructor, and I had the pleasure of introducing lots of people I joined a startup called Eclipse Aviation, which was building the very first And I was really excited about Ecl Opportunity to expand the market for private jet travel. In 2006, I started my first company, which is called Genaviva, and my best friend. Into what it is For small business jets, and it was really fun because Transition from propeller airplanes to jets. These were people who had always had a passion for flight, were excited about flying their own. But it was a small”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “The fence and watch airplanes taking off and landing all day long. And I just really fell in When I was four or five years old, I used to read as many books as I could get my hands on about flight. And in fact, in my kindergarten yearbook, I wrote that I wanted to become a pilot when I grew up. So it's really been in my blood since I was a little kid. And I used to build model airplanes quite a lot, remote control airplanes. I had a chance to take my first flying lesson when I was 10 years old. And over time, I got some jobs at the airport so I could pay for flying lessons, sort of had an accelerating rate. And when I was 14, I started volunteering for a nonprofit organization called Angel Flight West, which coordinates Volunteer pilots and medical Be close to where they live. And it was through the volunteering I did for”

    2018-01-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Right Drone Investing Strategy, The Catalyst That Will Take Drones to 100s of Millions & Will Amazon and Google Win The War of The Airspace with Ben Marcus, Founder & CEO @ Airmap · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source