YouSaid · the spoken record

Colin Guinn

lines on the record: 20
first: 2017-03-25
most recent: 2017-03-25
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

“Few years ago, if you had a drone, you also usually had this giant box that you wheeled around with you called a ground control station, and it had joysticks and it had this screen. And all of that is being replaced for most drone operations by an iOS or an Android device with software that you touch with your hand. And that consumerization of this technology is also a big part of what's actually going to make it really scalable because the military's approach to a lot of these things is not scalable.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a good question. I think a lot of that thinking about ease of use and thinking about breaking some of those traditional assumptions on the military side of like, oh, we have a thing flying in the air, there has to be a pilot. Like that person has to have been traditional aviation. They know how piloting an aircraft works. That's starting to break down on the DoD side as the consumer in the commercial space proves out, autonomy helps you handle that actual flight.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, honestly, a lot of it. I would almost say all of it. A lot of the things that the military was thinking about back in kind of the early 2000s, about autonomy and about building out mission plans and running these operations and things, that's all trickled down to the consumer side, thinking about, I mean, even you buy an off-the-shelf drone and you can do what in 2005 was really advanced for military small UAVs of like planning on a mission, hitting go, it takes off, flies a thing, comes back. I think that's amazing. And even the sensor systems have trickled down drastically. The fact that DJI sells a system with a high-end thermal imager on it is huge.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other piece that beyond line of sight and greater autonomy gives you over time is scalability of all these things. It means that you eventually break the one-to-one ratio of one pilot operating one drone. That's a thing that the military started thinking about a long time ago when they started thinking about drone operators in the field and how do you build that autonomy to the point where you can have one operator operating essentially five drones or 10 drones. And that operator is really only called into service when there's something weird going on or there's something that requires manual operation. But I think that's where the real advantages start to come in.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's other inspections and jobs that are similar to that. I think over time as autonomy is enabled and as the regulations allow for flight operations that don't have a person there at all, we're going to see a lot of applications enabled where the person doesn't need to go out into the field at all. One of the other industries is the mining industry where right now people are flying drones weekly, in some cases even daily, but you need that person there who's operating them. I think that's a great application or market where as soon as the regulations enable it and the technology enables it, they'd prefer to not have a person operating the drone at all. And the drone's regularly flying day after day on their own and automatically.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we've been one of the first companies to really lean in and work really closely with the FAA. When it comes to autonomy, I think it's important to understand autonomy for what? For what purpose. Autonomy just to be autonomous isn't necessarily inherently good. We think about autonomy in terms of automation and taking something that maybe you could do it manually. But if you go and you do it manually, it's often not repeatable. It may not be accurate enough. And it may just consume too much human capital and other capital to be able to do it repeatedly and all the time. And so we think about automation throughout the”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, actually, I would say the DGI vehicles are great for all kinds of applications. And three years ago, we were tracking about 700 manufacturers of commercial drones around the world. And most of you will have never heard of most any of those seven companies because they've all been passed now by the company who made the best consumer drone, who's now making some of the best drones regardless of use case consumer or enterprise. And the only differentiating factor really is what software you're using along with the drone and whether you're using the consumer software that can, in many cases, provided by the drone manufacturer themselves, or whether you're using the enterprise software that's provided by one of the companies focused on enterprise use cases.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number of companies deploying drones for highly valuable use cases where they say the DGI drones even at the highest end just don't quite cut it. So what is the set of, I guess, capability cutoffs where you leap from maybe spending a couple thousand dollars per vehicle to moving up to something that's tens of thousands of dollars? What are the requirements where you kind of need to make that leap today?”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or crashed it into a tree now in years kind of two and three have just gotten better and better at a really rapid pace. And those companies have started releasing models that are more geared towards prosumer and even enterprise use cases, but are lacking the software that enterprises need to make them successful. And so now you have this kind of stack of different software companies. Some of them focused on consumers and an app that can help you plan a trajectory that takes an incredible video of your friend as they're skateboarding and you have companies who are focused on kind of the enterprise data collection and business analytics of it and how you integrate that data back into all the other things that your company is doing.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we should lay on things like, I think some of that is kind of tough, partly because, and from a kind of safety and accountability perspective, I have very few concerns about the commercial drone space. They're the ones who have all the incentives to be a good actor to think about these issues and not try to upset people. But I think one of the dangers right now is the consumer drone market and the major companies that are pumping out all these consumer drones. They're doing so in a way where they currently just don't want any regulations that restrict their ability to sell drones. They want as little friction as possible. And that's good. But the danger is that we have bad events that happen before that regulation quite worked out before kind of we figure out what we want the restrictions to be and just the whole market kind of sours on the idea of just having drones and bad actors hurt the potential for that commercial use.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Follow up on that, it's one thing when you're deploying drones as a business and you don't want to annoy customers. You don't want to cause an incidences because of lead to bad press. At the same time, drones are also in the hands of consumers who are going to push rules. They're going to use it for just getting footage of a wedding or random events that they just thought I wanted a camera with a unique perspective. And so given that tension, how do you think about kind of regulation versus normatively deciding where we should line things like?”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think there's still a lot of things that we haven't quite worked out, not just kind of from a straight regulatory, we need to make laws about it, but I don't think we've quite had the conversation about what we want that drone future to look like, where we want drones flying, where we don't want drones flying. Right now, it's been kind of an ad hoc thing because it's worked because for the most part, we don't have drones everywhere. We don't have 10,000 drones over our heads in the sky. But as we move to the point where it becomes commonplace for every house to be inspected by drones, for drone delivery to happen, medical supplies, all that stuff, we need to actually kind of sit down and think through what are the privacy implications, what are the safety implications, and how do we navigate that. I think there's a real danger that we kind of move ahead like, okay, here's the current area. We can just kind of fly wherever. And we end up having kind of major backlash because we have major public incidents that happen. And the public kind of sours on the idea. It's really easy for us to say, well, we have all these great applications.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, today, if you have wind or hail damage and you call your insurance company, it means most of the time there's probably someone coming out to your house and they're climbing up on your roof. If you have a one-story house, it's probably with a ladder. If you have a two-story house or with Steve Ruptoft's, it's often with ropes and harnesses. It can take as much as half a day to do the inspection. In many cases, the actual roof actually can get damaged as a result of the inspection. So it's really a process that I think in five years, we're going to look back on and think it was totally archaic that somebody would climb up on your roof because you have hail damage when a lot of this damage can clearly be seen from an aerial perspective. And instead of filling out a paper report describing the damage, all of this...”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collecting data across multiple drone operations, either at individual site over a time history or over a lot of different geographic locations. And we knew whatever the use case was, you needed to be able to manage the data. You needed to be able to manage who was flying, what drones at what locations were, and you needed to make it really easy to use for the operator in the field. So when we started to really get kind of pulled into the verticals where there was the most urgency from large enterprises where the enterprises had a real felt business problem and where drones could be a big part of that solution. And I was actually surprised one of the verticals is the insurance vertical. We're working with some of the largest carriers in the United States to transform their residential claims inspection process and also the commercial underwriting of buildings.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So back in 2010 and 2011 was when we started to hear a lot of large enterprises asking about drone technology and trying to figure out how could they incorporate this into their business. And we didn't have great visibility into where was this going to be adopted earlier and where was it going to be adopted later. But we had a sense of for any of these different applications, there's kind of a lot of the fundamental building blocks that are just missing from the ecosystem entirely. And so we really focused on building out a lot of that. So think about software for operators in the field so that you don't have to be a pilot or an engineer to operate the drones. And back in 2011, everyone who was doing any software for drones assumed the operator was some military pilot or some incredibly experienced software and electrical engineer. And so we hire a bunch of game developers and build a UI that's just really easy to use. We knew that that was going to be required. Another thing was our cloud backend and kind of a web UI for managing all of the aspects of”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not what we do, unfortunately. It sounds very exciting and awesome. We don't have a Falconry. But no, our focus is more on the communication side, on looking at the drone protocols, on identifying what drones are flying in an area so that that can lead to actual airspace management of authorizing drones to be in an area and knowing when there are drones that aren't authorized to be there, instead of just saying, oh, there are drones here, we don't want drones at all. We're all about facilitating actual proper use of drones and making sure that they can control those spaces.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we're kind of on the security and drone protection side, we talk to a lot of customers that their biggest focus right now is on thinking about protecting themselves from other people's drones. But I think along with that conversation about airspace enforcement and what the rules are and how the regulations are changing, part of that is also a conversation of how can they actually use drones themselves in the future. So prisons can use drones for all sorts of things, like inspecting, you know, they have really large physical perimeters. There can be all sorts of inspection, kind of constant perimeter security applications. Stadiums would love to use drones in the future to do their filming and to do all kinds of other stuff, but their big concern is they don't want to just roll drones into their infrastructure if they can't control what drones are there and what drones aren't.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gotten it into smaller and smaller form factors and made it really ubiquitous. And so now with Silicon Valley is best at, which is building a lot of software that makes this really useful for a variety of different applications is making this available to just about every industry.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've actually been in the drone space for about 12 years going back to 2004. And I remember at 2004 this was unquestionably only a military thing. And around six or seven years ago started to see a lot of large enterprises go in many cases to military companies and say, hey, is there a version of this? Can we use this for power line inspection and monitoring vegetation encroachment and monitoring oil and gas and infrastructure applications and things like that? And so the conversation definitely changed. And I think six years ago when some enterprises were looking for this, there were a lot of missing pieces. There was a missing commercial version of the technology. A lot of the software was missing to actually make the images and the video taken by drones useful business intelligence. And of course, there was a missing regulatory framework. So a lot of those things now exist and have been accelerated by the introduction also of a consumer market, which has further driven down the price of the technology.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this was definitely one of the biggest concerns when we went out and raised our first round of financing. There was a big question of will this ever even be legal to do? And finally, as of this summer, it's called Part 107. It's essentially the rules of the road for using drones for commercial applications. And what it says is that commercial companies can do this. They can do it up to 400, 500 feet. They can do it when there is an operator who's responsible for the vehicle who can see the vehicle, although they don't have to actually be flying it. And in fact, in most cases, the drones are usually flying pretty autonomously. But that's kind of some of the basics of it. So there's also some limitations. The converse of that, it means you cannot fly aircraft beyond your visual line of sight, although there is a waiver process now where the FAA is going to grant kind of case-by-case permissions to companies that are going to allow them to do that in the future.”
2017-03-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Eyes in the Sky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source