YouSaid · the spoken record

Kyle Clark

lines on the record: 48
first: 2023-08-24
most recent: 2023-08-24
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

“We start to capture more and more of aviation. Not only do we curtail that awful trajectory it's on now, we start to bring it down to one of the most sustainable modes of transportation because it doesn't require all this infrastructure and other things. And the last little bit there is you have to charge it in a sustainable way. So part of the reason that we own the charging network is so that we can control where that energy comes from and that we're charging in a clean way. I mean, I mentioned briefly that we built a net zero manufacturing facility. Our job as millennials is to turn the corner on climate change. And we're not going to do it with our head in the sand. And so how big of a difference can it make? You ask? It is the biggest difference that we can make as a company and I can make as a person. So a big difference.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, so cars are going electric, scooters, motorcycles, Marines going electric, rail went hybrid a long time ago, and it's incredibly sustainable. Aviation has this bow wave of unconsumed technology, and we prioritize weight and performance over sustainability. And so unfortunately, we operate in this cognitive dissidence as aviators that we're doing something good as we fly around the country. But what we're doing is we're using 1960s technology in turbines and jet engines, and we're polluting the environment. And even with leaded fuel in piston engines, right? So with that as a foundation and the fact that new technology isn't being adopted by 2035, if we don't do anything about aviation, it will be the biggest producer of carbon emissions in transportation. We're doing something about it, right? Not only that, as we get to higher, higher inefficiencies and battery energy densities get better and better.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stay like near a stall, and then you bring it down, you go faster, and it starts accelerating. It's like you don't even need an airspeed indicator because you just feel the plane strapped to your shoulders, which you never get. You get it in a glider sometimes, but in an electric airplane, it's magical. And never mind how good it feels to me. For passengers that are flying these in the future, they're not going to be like, oh God, I got to go in that beating drum of a claustrophobic plane. They're like, this is awesome.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, look, two comments on that. It is just a matter of time. Anybody who's going to pretend that everything that can be invented has It's a fascinating new paradigm in aviation. So we absolutely will be flying coast to coast. I mean, I know I'm an evangelist. I've recognized that I'm about to jump through the microphone right now because I'm so excited about it, but it is an entire new paradigm that people are, in some cases, in denial of because their businesses don't allow them to accept it yet. And, you know, the other thing that I think people are underappreciating is when I take people up in the electric planes and they get in it and the propeller, remember, is 20 something feet behind you. And the windows go from your forehead all the way down to your feet and it's silent inside the cockpit. So you lose the claustrophobia. You lose that anxiety from all the noise and the percussion of the propeller. And it's beautifully quiet and the visibility and you can hear the air coming over the wings and over the fuselage and you feel like a bird. I know that sounds corny, but you can hear the wing.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now is ourselves. And we're working our tails off to industrialize this, put these aircraft in the air. And there's a line around the block to get them. Like I said, it is amazing. And it's not complicated why. You know, you're at a six to half the cost of flying gas-powered airplanes and you're doing it sustainably. The aircraft doesn't need much more than that.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, I'm at the risk of sounding too optimistic. By 2030, you'll see more electric airplanes in the air than gas-powered airplanes. And when you walk into our production facilities, people walk in and they're like, what are you doing? Like, how could you, you're proposing to build more airplanes out of this facility than the largest producer of general aviation aircraft right now? And I'm like, of course we are. And if you walked into our facility, you'll see it'll be the largest net zero building east of the Mississippi. And we're turning it on here in a couple months. And we're already building conforming product. And those aircraft will go into type certification testing. And yes, by 2025, they're doing commercial operations here in the US. And then we just basically build them as fast as we can. I mean, we have a 600 unit backlog right now, right? We have to, we have to, our biggest impediment.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow. So realistically, what is the timeframe? I mean, this future we're talking about, having these short hops, 250 mile hops where packages are delivered, maybe even humans are delivered on these all-electric planes. I mean, they fly. I think you've had 22,000 lifetime miles on these aircraft. So they work. You know they work. You've flown them all over the United States. Realistically, do you have a sense? Like, are you able to say, you know, by 2025, this is just going to be normal. It's going to be like the internet. It's just kind of an anticipated 20 years ago.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're predominantly at airports. And the neat thing is we put a charger in and then we put a dispenser, like the part that plugs into the vehicle on the airport side and on the parking side. And we have been flooded with people who go to the airport to use a super fast charger because it's, you know, it's higher power than a Tesla supercharger to charge their cars or their trucks or their package delivery vans”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. We've built a network for all these test flights that goes from here in Vermont down to Arkansas. We've commissioned a bunch down the East Coast. And right now we're building a network that connects Texas to Florida. And so we have about 105 permits around the country for charging stations”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's neat. It's fascinating thing where here in the US, when you go and you propose a new thing and a regulated environment, the first question is, how does that relate to our entire mental inertia and prejudice of what regulation means in the context of what's already been certified? Over there, they ask the simple question, like, prove to me it's safe, it's reliable for the mission that you're going to do. And you're not trying to redefine what a turbine engine is. They're looking very forward. Here we kind of compare it to all the stuff we've already done first before we can move forward. So they just fundamentally move faster in a regulated world.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not a yes or no answer. So we are commercializing with the military. So we received what they call a military flight release to get paid to fly for the military. So we're doing that. We've been doing that for more than a year. We've had Air Force and Army pilots flying our planes. We're deploying planes into bases. And we've flown into bases and they're doing operational experimentation. And then domestically, we've been flying trial missions with Amazon and UPS and other customers where we're not allowed to get paid. So we move packages for charity, for example, because we don't have FA certification yet. When we get FA certification, they can use it for commercial hire. But the secret little knob there is that we just got regulatory approval to do this over in the Middle East. Four higher, for commercial making money.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but even better than that. So in the near future, the next few years, they'll go to the airport only because of regulatory challenges of putting off airport landing sites. But in the next four to six years, what will happen is these aircraft will actually go to the distribution center, which is where the UPS trucks go. It doesn't even have to go to the airport, and it'll go directly from a distribution center. And when there's sufficient package volume between Burlington and Buffalo, they'll fly the airplane directly to Buffalo. And so it omits all the handoffs and the trucks and the airport access. And that's, we're going to get there. It's going to take a couple steps. Like you said, it's going to go to the airports first. But that's the future of what we call a distributed mesh network of cargo and logistics.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And these aircraft essentially can land in these sort of purpose built helipad type areas, maybe at airports where they would just be charged as they sit there. And then, so let's say you want to send something from Burlington to Buffalo. What you're essentially saying is that you would maybe drop it off at a UPS store. That UPS van would deliver them all to Burlington Airport as they do now. But instead, the package is going to the northeast would be flown to Boston on one of these electric planes instead of going down to Louisville.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so these logistics companies, the Express Cargo Companies, they need a way to grow and accommodate the growing e-commerce shipping market. So they imagine, and this is what we've been demonstrating, by the way, we just completed a bunch of flights with these guys, they imagine doing direct point-to-point, like I said, a mesh network of the future, what fundamentally enables it is the airplane, because not only is it sustainable in all electric, but it's substantially lower cost. And when you put those things together, you can start to right size the aircraft and sweat the asset and use it continuously from point to point, from Burlington to Buffalo, Buffalo to New York City, New York to Portland, Boston to Hartford. And it starts to kind of hit parody with trucking. And the whole logistics world changes.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because look, they got to bring everything to the hub and then redistribute it. Now, if they're very short range, they drive it, like if it's going from Hartford to Boston or New York to Hoboken. So that's a 1,300 mile trip from Burlington to Buffalo. If you go that route, where if you go direct, it's 130 miles, right? The hub and spoke network of yesterday will be replaced by a mesh network of the future where we have already saturated, as you pointed out, Memphis and Louisville. You can't put any more jets in there every night. The jets can be bigger.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. So right now, you're right. It's a radial network where if I ship something from Vermont to Buffalo, New York, it'll go from Burlington to Manchester, New Hampshire to Philadelphia down to Louisville at the hub, get sorted along with another five to eight million packages, and then it'll get sent out to Buffalo, which by the way is only 130 miles from where I sit today.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our business has gone through a few phases. We were a think tank, we were a product development company, we're an engineering company. Then we went into this commercial exploration over the last, I'd say, 2022, where we started doing demonstration flights for UPS and Amazon and the Marines and the Army and the Air Force. And the thing really worked. And we were able to prove to our customers that we had something that worked really well. And in doing so, we got orders. And of course, that led to funding.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, her and I talked a lot about this. The cost to develop an aircraft program and everything. And what we agreed to was that even though she was funding to, like you said before, this $46 million contract to develop the aircraft, she knew that that wasn't enough to develop an aircraft. So she took a license to be able to use this in organ and tissue delivery, yet we maintained the ability to build this airplane for military, passenger, cargo, logistics. surveillance, all these other applications. And that allowed us to go to the financial markets and say, look, we've got not only a launch customer, but a launch customer that is funding R&D. And she only wants one and a half percent of the total market opportunity, all these other massive markets are available to us. And we believe we have the best design. And when we started.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now, as you are obviously building this out, you have to assume you had to raise a lot more money and you have because this was going to become much, much more expensive to do that. At what point did the business model kind of evolve to maybe it didn't evolve, maybe it was always the idea, but it seems like now the model is to really work with transport and delivery companies down the road like UPS and Federal Express and Amazon, did that become clear pretty soon after you started collaborating with Martine that that's what this could be?”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's about what it took. It took us from August of 2018. And in our first round the pattern flight was January 1st, 2020. So it took us under 18 months with a fresh, clean sheet design where we had to build the molds and the structure, design a flight controller, write the code, build the propellers and put it in the air safely. is actually an exceptionally fast program.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the pusher motor is pushing you now through the air. So you have this super slippery airplane that used a lot of power, but remember, energy is the integration of power over time. But it was a very short amount of time. So you didn't use a lot of energy to pick this thing up and make a runway in the sky. And then you're off to deliver the organ, and at the other end you do just a reverse.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Down the wing and on the four corners of those two long tubes are 12 foot diameter rotors with motors underneath them. And that's what picks the airplane straight up in the air. And then right at the tail, there's a conventional propeller with another electric motor. And the way it works is that those four rotors on the top pick the aircraft up off the ground at the hospital. And then if you imagine that rear rotor turning on and pushing the aircraft forward, those top rotors start reducing their thrust as the wing starts to develop lift. And 30 seconds after you take off, you've totally shut down your top rotors and you stow them like javelins straight into the wind.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, after we did all these analyses, we realized that the simplest and most elegant and lowest drag version of an electric vertical takeoff in landing aircraft was to kind of make it really simple. It has a big 50-foot wing that's on the top of the fuselage. It's 44 feet long from the tip to the tail. Has two longitudinal, we call them booms. You can imagine just two big long tubes.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the initial specs that Martine had outlined, and she did this by taking simple physics around four elements of flight, liftover drag ratio, which is how slippery the aircraft is, the empty weight fraction, which is how much is leftover for batteries, the battery energy density, and the conversion efficiency. All of those things together said the theoretical maximum of an electric airplane was to fly about 250 nautical miles. Within the context of flying at 100 knots and carrying 600 pounds and having less than a 50 foot wingspan, and I could tell you all the reasons for those things, but fundamentally, we wanted to be able to deploy them immediately without regulatory change or helipad changes and do meaningful work, which was move organs.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, range and payload. Range and payload. And some of the big realizations we had were that it was too complex to make truly redundant. What we need is a really simple aircraft. So it was hard. I had to go to Martine and say, look, I think the right thing to do for our program is to retire Ava. That's what we call the first aircraft and start designing this new one. And here's what it's going to look like in concept. And she came to me and she said, I remember this very specifically. She goes, if you're asking me if you kept your promise, Kyle, you did. And that's all she said to me. And I sat there thinking about it. And what she was really saying was that you did the right thing. You elicited critical thinking in electric aviation. Now go do the thing you said you're going to do.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the reality was that all that testing and all that critical thinking revealed that we had an aircraft that probably couldn't be certified and probably wasn't the highest performing aircraft.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you spend most of 2018 trying to commercialize this prototype. But after working on this for about a year, I guess you decided to kind of tear up the plans of this thing that had worked that you liked, that Martine liked, and you sort of were like, no, we got to start over. What happened?”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. Right. Yeah, $48 million she had out in contracts elsewhere. And she brought those back in because they were behind schedule not keeping promises. And she redirected that at us and said, go build a commercial version that I can move organs with. So we did, but we learned what not to do in that aircraft because in all those test flights, we learned what was not reliable, which was problematic from a noise and EMI perspective and focused all our efforts on making the simplest, most elegant aircraft that we could.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's amazing, actually So, all right, so you get this off the ground Martine Rothblatt, who had huge contracts with other companies working on this technology, essentially took most, or maybe all of those contracts and just diverted it to your company. That's exactly $50 million.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly. So you take off like a helicopter, but it wasn't that beating sound of a helicopter because every rotor is turning at a different speed. So it almost felt like you were swimming and it was like a whooshing sound. Yet because electric motors produce instantaneous torque, it was incredibly responsive, almost dangerously responsive. And you've seen a drone. Yeah. Do aerobatics. It is you're inside that. And the aircraft handled way better than any helicopter I'd ever flown. And all of a sudden, you're like, this sounds different. It feels weird. And the controllability is spectacular.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's fascinating about it is that this particular plane had eight 11 foot diameter rotors. Okay. And they were positioned four spots coaxially. So they were turning in alternate directions at each corner of the airplane.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It flew for about 17 minutes at a time, and we were really restricted to flying over the airport. So we did about 100 test flights in it, though. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. And we brought it up to about 65 knots, shut the torque down, put it on the wing, did it in a heavy crosswinds, a lot of maneuverability. It was actually a remarkably good performing aircraft.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we started with a fixed-wing drone design with eight rotors that took off vertically, thrust vectored forward. That means the rotors tilt in the air to push the air backwards after it's pushing it down. And we designed, built, and flew a 4,000-pound version of this with me in it after 10 months, and we kept our promise. And when we did that, Martine looked around and she's like, wow, not only did you elicit critical thinking in aviation, you just blew past companies that were funded to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars with this small, scrappy, you know, proactive and frankly pragmatic team in Vermont, I want you to build me a commercial version of that.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you have got this team gathered. You're going to start to work on building this electric transport aircraft. And was the original design going to be a drone, sort of a fixed-wing drone design?”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All electric zero operational emissions. We'll figure out how we charge that in a sustainable way as well. We want it vertical. We need to go hospital to hospital and we need it to move cargo, like you said. Now, the most critical cargo you can imagine is human organs, right? Somebody's life's on the line. It's very valuable. And it doesn't, you know, it's cost per mile or per hour or whatever is nearly irrelevant relative to the benefits it's providing.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And started to convince them to come and work with me. And my pitch was simple. Let's go change the world. I'm not going to pay anything. And I don't know where this is going. And they started joining the team. But I'll tell you what the other interesting thing I did is I had this early revelation that it was more important to me that this business and this idea was successful than I got any financial gain out of it. So day one, I took 70% of the business and usually people take eight or ten or seven or five percent of the business and say that's going to be the employee pool. I took 70% of the business and I said, this is what I'm going to use to attract people to be really meaningfully a part of this.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I mean, you have to be wildly audacious and stupid to do any of this stuff, knowing that the probability of failure is pretty high. However, what I did then is I opened up my Blackbook and I called the 20 smartest people that I've ever worked with.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and interestingly enough, it wasn't actually in seed capital. She proposed to be a customer. So she did not take an equity position in the company. She just said, I believe in what you're doing, let me fund this as a customer.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I leave there somewhere before 11 o'clock at night and she goes, listen, why don't you write down how you would elicit critical thinking in aviation? And again, that's another like interesting, not how you'd build an airplane, but how would you elicit critical thinking in aviation? And so I went home, I painted a watercolor, wrote all over it, and sent it to her at about 4 a.m. And I went to bed for a couple hours, got up a couple hours later, went out to the garage, was building another motorcycle. And my wife comes out with my phone and there's a text on it from Martine. And it just says two words. It says, you're on. I'm like, wow, I mean, now I got to actually create this company. I've got a customer. I've got a vision. And I told her that in 10 months, we would create this electric aircraft and fly it across the country”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or an idiot. Yeah. Well, that was my first thought, right? But what she meant was that I was expressing so much passion and so much care about this that this wasn't a job for me. And she goes, We should talk. And so after the meeting, we're standing in the entryway of the Philadelphia Yacht Club where this meeting was. And she goes, come to see me on Friday morning at my house in Vermont. And so I plan to do that.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, I'm Kyle, I'm from Vermont. I've worked a lot in batteries, motors, inverters, and other such things. And she goes, are you getting paid to be here? And I said, no. And she goes, I can tell. And I didn't know quite how to. Respond to that because”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. So Martine, through a couple other colleagues that I knew had been very interested in having people download to her thoughts on electrifying aviation. And one of the entry points was the assessment of this electric helicopter. Like you said, she had commissioned to be built. And so I was given a rough outline of what it was and asked to come and present how batteries, inverters, and motors are either fit or unfit to electrify aviation. And about halfway through my presentation on batteries, this gal who I didn't know at the time, Martine Rothblatt, she kind of interrupted me and she said, who are you and where are you from?”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I met a few people that were in, but nobody that was able to catalyze it alongside me. And meanwhile, I was sponsoring teams at the university here to build elements of it. So I had several years of actually senior design teams that had built a flying drone that you flew from the ground doing the same idea, a fixed-wing aircraft you flew from the ground. Ironically, those people now work here. But I was just materializing and formulating the ideas. There were a lot of believers in what I was doing. But look, it takes a lot of dough to bring an aircraft to market. And so there's a bit of an initiation cost to bring it from that. We're flying scale models, flying computer simulations, have designs to look, we're going to go build a real airplane and fly it.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you do this thesis, but after you graduate, you actually kind of went in a different direction. You went on to found a few other companies, including a company called iTherm Technologies, another one called Energy Management Systems, both of which you would go on to sell. And then you also started another company called Venture.co, which was, I guess, like a social network for entrepreneurs. But all the while in the back of your mind, you were still thinking about something in aviation.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a hybrid electric design because I started to realize that electric propulsion had unique advantages over traditional reciprocating engines. And that was actually called beta air. And that was kind of the germ of the whole beta air idea. Of course, it wasn't fully baked. It was just the beginning of it.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, mostly model airplanes, but I'd go over to a local airport and help people build experimental airplanes. And even before that, in a high school, started building real scale ultralights and airplanes.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, this was probably the best education a kid could ever have. It was called the instrumentation of model facility where professors would come in with wacky ideas and the machinists would figure out ways to build it. And so my jobs there were actually taking 20 years of drawings and converting them into computer models and then serving them back to the machinists or serving them to the professors. And all I was doing was really copying the designs of other people. And on the side, I was building parts for airplanes, for ice boats, for go-karts. You know, after hours, we called it government work or G-Jobs. And I built a whole lot of stuff in that machine shop, which I can say now because my dad's retired and no repercussions for him at the university.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My passion was designing things, building things. And even the name of our company, Beta, which is named because of my nickname in hockey, because beta was the nerd in the matrix movie in the back, always hammering away on his computer. And on the hockey team, everyone had a nickname. And my nickname was Beta because I was a nerd. And I was always studying and was doing applied math and engineering. And so on the hockey team, I was a little bit of an outsider, respected, but an outsider, focused on designing things and building things.”
2023-08-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Electrifying aviation with Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT