James Black (00:02):
Happy new year and welcome back to The Exchange for Entrepreneurs Podcast. This is your host, James Black, and this is going to be a different year for The Exchange for Entrepreneurs Podcast. After producing the show for a few years now, I think we've decided to take a specific approach to the show and that's to park ourselves firmly at the intersection of where entrepreneurship meets the public markets. We are going to spend our time on this show talking to the people that you'll find at this intersection, whether it be executives, investors, or other influencers in the world of investing, finance and business.
(00:32):
The goal of every conversation will be the same, and that'll be to uncover new insights on entrepreneurship and investing that can power your own decisions and actions in the market. So the guest I have today, Cam Chell, he's probably the best person I could have brought on to be our debut guest of 2023. If you look at some of the biggest stories of 2022, whether it be the collapse of FTX or the war in Ukraine, you can rest assured Cam had a front row seat in the action. It's a fascinating conversation and a stark reminder about how quickly things can change when the world undergoes stress. So without further ado, welcome back to the show. It's 2023 and we can't wait to share more with you in the coming year.
(01:13):
My guest today, Cameron Chell, from Business Instincts Group, big and a many multitude of companies that we'll talk about in a minute, but I want to get into the heart of what Cam's been up to. Cam, welcome to the show. It's been a couple years and a lot has changed since we last spoke. It was the onset of the pandemic. And you tell me, I mean, from that point to where we are today, you've done a lot of things. What are you most excited or interested to share today about what has happened since we last talked two years ago on this show?
Cameron Chell (01:42):
Yeah, well first of all, thanks James for having us and thanks to the CSE for the support of the Canadian entrepreneur ... well, the global entrepreneur out there. We are big fans of the CSE and love what you do. There are a lot of things to be excited about. Certainly '22 was a challenging year on lots of fronts. But I think one of the things that keeps me awake in a good way each night right now is the speed of innovation that is happening in the aerospace and the drone industry in particular because of what's going on in The Ukraine. And it's been an incredible experience to see how innovation paths change between ... given different circumstances.
(02:29):
So we saw innovations come into ... innovation paths come into light as the pandemic was moving in, which is probably right around the last time we were talking. And that was a very interesting shift to see where budgets and how approvals happened and what was most important and how your product development had to adjust accordingly. And then as that subsided and then we see things like what's happening in the Ukraine, how that has even accelerated that further. And so to me, the dynamic of product development has really been probably the most exciting thing that I've been learning more and more. As old as I am, it's just like, oh my gosh, this is an entirely new learning cycle and pretty amazing what can be done when it has to get done.
James Black (03:14):
Absolutely. And so what I would surmise from that is that you're mentioning these innovation paths and these stresses in the world in the global market. First the pandemic, which obviously we're on a streaming platform right now recording this, there was nothing working quite like this two or three years ago. I remember we were doing Zoom calls and stuff and now we're light years ahead on this platform. I can attest to that. But you're talking about the Ukraine and that was a year ago, just under a year ago, Russia invaded Ukraine and you had the guts to take your business, Draganfly, into that space, literally airspace, to pilot these drones. And maybe just tell our guests what your motivation was to go into that environment at that time and your mission and maybe the things that you've now developed as a result of it.
Cameron Chell (04:03):
Yeah. So Draganfly is often referred to as the oldest commercial drone manufacturer in the world. It's been around since the late nineties. A small Canadian company. But no other North American drone manufacturer has survived that long. But our focus typically, we're in a lot of industries, but typically has been in public safety. And in fact, a Draganfly drone is the first drone that was ever credited with saving a human life in a search and rescue mission. And today that drone sits on permit display in the Smithsonian. So it was an inbound call from an NGO, a US non-government organization that was working in the Ukraine. They had heard about a project that we were doing in Texas called DFR, drone as a first responder. And what this is is a drone, actually it's two drone systems, that when a 911 call comes in is instead of just trucks rolling to the 911 call, what happens at the same time is a drone also gets there. And it gets there 12 to 15 minutes quicker on average than the trucks get there.
(05:10):
And it provides visual observation, it provides situational awareness, really reconnaissance. Is it a false alarm? Do we need more resources? Is there a crowd? What's the extent of the injuries? Those types of things. So it's been wildly successful in the US just because of the ROI, just in terms of turning trucks around 25% of the time or whatever it is because it's a false alarm. And then there's a second drone system that can be deployed immediately as well that has a temperature sensitive or temperature managed box on it that can deliver things like insulin or pharmaceuticals or different blood types or things. Where it typically takes 23 to 38 minutes for an ambulance to get additional blood supply or different equipment or EpiPens or whatever simple often to the site, drone gets it there in seven to 12 minutes. And so we're working with the EMS in Texas to stand this system up.
(06:07):
And this is a big push for Draganfly over the next decade. It's a massive multi-billion dollar market and a really important market. And so we were reached out to by Revived Soldiers Ukraine that said, "Hey, we just bought 30 ambulances and they're either getting shot, confiscated, blown up, taken away, roadblocked, we can't get into these besieged cities. You've got this temperature sensitive box. We've got to get insulin into these places. Can we use your drones?" And that was the beginning of ... I even get emotional just thinking about it. That was the beginning of our company, just everybody, everybody standing up and just going, "Yeah, we're going to make this happen." So we deployed three drones there immediately just for testing and learning. They then bought five more and we've had 30 and 40 different types of units now over in there, whether they're reconnaissance drones or delivery drones. Or the big, big push now was mine detection drones, which we developed.
James Black (07:03):
Yeah, no, and I want to hear more, but I just want to interject. Not to editorialize, but it's pretty cool when your use case for your product is to save lives and to take what might not have been a vital situation and make it vital again. I just want to go in your mind a bit though, I mean, you were on the ground filming in Ukraine, what? March of last year? February of last year? I mean, it was shockingly soon after the invasion, I believe. And I just want to get into your mindset as an entrepreneur as to why you're okay taking that risk. Why were you okay going there and doing that when so many people were trying to get out?
Cameron Chell (07:42):
Yeah. So I was lucky enough to make a couple trips in there last year. Our teams have been over there several times and we've got active teams that are on rotation now. And we'll continue to increase our presence there in a big, big way. I think the bottom line is you need ... when you're developing product and you're doing something that important, you need to be where your "customers" are. And I put customers in quotation marks because these are much more than customers to us. But the reality is you need to be there on a number of levels. One, to see how your product works. Lots of times it's not just about the technology, it's about the process, it's about the nuances, it's about understanding you put a drone up in Ukraine and it can be shot down by anybody. Nobody trusts how that drone ... So building those lines of communication, building the protocols for how it can fly, where it can fly, what are the jamming techniques. Things that technology can't solve. But hands on work has to be there doing it.
(08:41):
And then as, in fact, much more importantly, showing the commitment and the trust. So if you're going to expect people to use your product in those situations and have their lives rely on it, I think that, as a company, we need to put ourselves in that same situation and demonstrate our commitment to do that same thing. And so we've built trust there and hopefully we'll continue to build trust there. But you can't do that via Zoom call. Any of that. You've got to be there working with it. And then as a leader of a company, if I'm going to expect any of our employees or contractors or such to be over there, I'm not going to ask them or ask their wives or husbands to be okay with their wives or husbands being there or their dads or moms unless I'm willing to do it too. So yeah, that's just a really important part of company culture and product development.
James Black (09:37):
Yeah. Lead by doing. And I assume that wasn't an easy conversation with your family either.
Cameron Chell (09:44):
Yeah.
James Black (09:44):
Okay. Where do you see this project going? I mean, obviously there's still conflict. We just heard about obviously some counteroffensive activity in the regions, and this isn't going away anytime soon. I assume you guys are there for the long haul or at least your product is and you guys are going to continue to help support that situation.
Cameron Chell (10:03):
Yeah, well, we're fervent believers in the cause, so we're not going anywhere. We're there in support of freedom and we believe that the freedom's at stake here. And so we're really committed long term in that regard. The use cases for drones in particular have expanded and opened up so much. So now we're doing mine detection work and we're doing the reconnaissance work, we're doing the delivery work, we're doing. We're using our vital intelligence technology, which was developed during the pandemic, in search and rescue missions where the drones are actually taking vital signs of people on the ground to determine triage, who needs to be treated first, where to ... So it's expanding literally weekly. The other interesting part is the interest that now comes from the rest of the world. So whether it's India or Asia or other parts of the world that see these use cases, what they're going to is they're looking for organizations, again, they just aren't building the technology but have boots on the ground there and are doing the work.
(11:10):
So getting the practical experience. The Ukrainian drone market now is absolutely the most sophisticated drone market in the world. And the big advent of this is not since the introduction of tank in World War One has there been something as disruptive likely in warfare. And probably the next biggest disruptive thing in warfare will probably be AI. But at least for the next five to eight years, drones are it. And the very practical reality is that in order to basically win a situation or dominate a situation previously, the overriding factor was air dominance. So if you were able to establish air dominance, whether it's admission or a war or a battle, that was generally a major if not the major determining factor. Well now pretty much anybody can establish air dominance from 10,000 feet down because you can do it with 10,000 or 20,000 or $30,000 drones, where before you needed multi-million dollar platforms to be able to establish air dominance.
(12:14):
Now above 10,000 feet, you still need that type of budget and such. But the battles happen below 10,000 feet and that's where all the reconnaissance is happening. That's where ... So it's completely changed tactics. So now we see global budgets shifting very quickly into these small UAS platforms that really the essence is to establish air dominance. So whether that's reconnaissance, whether it's delivery, whether it's troop movement, whether it's delivering blood on the battlefield, whatever the case is, that can all now be done by these drones. And so it's really quite limitless and it will establish the global drone market in terms of public safety for the coming decade, what happens over the next number of years in Ukraine.
James Black (13:01):
Yeah. And hopefully the use case isn't always predicated by the use of or needs of a war or a conflict. It comes to mind just the other night when there was a situation at a NFL football game. I can't imagine anyone doesn't know what happened on Monday night football and the athlete collapsed on the field and had a heart attack basically. And I'm wondering if there's any scenario in your mind with some of the technology you use where monitoring vitals, and I do know you have some products in that space, where if we can just do, in certain cases, apply this technology. Whether it's on the sports field or at a conference where we could avoid a lot of needless deaths just by having more insight as to, obviously with consent, people's health. I mean, do you see any other opportunities outside of warfare that you're excited about?
Cameron Chell (13:46):
Oh, for sure. I mean, public safety is a passion, right? And so that leads into the non-pointy military stuff that we do. So we don't do things that hurt people or blow people up.
James Black (13:57):
No, exactly.
Cameron Chell (13:59):
And we're really comfortable with that. But we see our vital intelligence technology being used more and more now and actually extensively in things like federal buildings, corrections facilities, remote patient monitoring. So literally, you and I could be on this call right now and I could turn on our vital intelligence technology and I could be reading your heart rate, your respiratory rate, your blood pressure, your blood oxygen level, your heart rate variability. And so when we think about the implications of that for telemedicine or remote medicine and the cost that that drives down in such ... And again, these are all things that came out of the pandemic.
(14:41):
These are all areas where automation, I will call it, and whether that's machine vision, AI, but then utilizing the hardware to actually be the interface. We think 15 years ago, there wasn't an iPhone like there is today, right? And where it's going ... It's exponentially happening. The speed at which things are being implemented now, which is really interesting to watch that product initiation path change during COVID and then change during a conflict. And some of that's going to just now continue into mainstream. So the speed of getting things implemented and the expectation of the end users is changing dramatically.
James Black (15:25):
Absolutely. And I'd be remiss if I didn't put a plug in for your company, Draganfly, which is on the CSE listed under [inaudible 00:15:32].
Cameron Chell (15:31):
Oh, thank you.
James Black (15:33):
That's kind of why we're here. But like I said, that intersection of public markets and entrepreneurship. I'm going to make a little bit of a hard pivot here just for a minute, and maybe it's not so hard of a pivot, but we talk a lot about ... we were talking about Currency Works, which is now Metaworks, another listed company that you are I believe chairman of, is that correct?
Cameron Chell (15:50):
I am, yes. Yeah.
James Black (15:50):
A co-founder. And now a very, I guess, catalytic event this year was the fall of FTX. If you don't know about it, you can read about it anywhere on the internet. It's probably been the biggest business story since Madoff, I'd say, if not around the 2008 fall of the market. And not to get into too many details around that, but crypto itself in its own right has had a pretty rough year. And I know you've been working in that realm somewhat. I just want to get to your ... If we're going to use the parlance of this conversation, 10,000 foot view of the crypto space and digital currency and decentralized currencies, where do you see the world in a post-FTX world? I think it's a new reality and I know you've had your foot in it. What's your mindset on that space, and what are you trying to do in it?
Cameron Chell (16:44):
Yeah, so the FTX story, in our opinion, is really the culmination of what needed to happen in this space. And it would be the equivalent of what's going ... in the drone industry, Ukraine, FTX is in the crypto space. And there's a lot of things that led up to that or the precursor to that. But the reality ... well, our reality has always been that a decentralized platform that is regulated is the only thing that's going to mainstream. So right from the very beginning when we started building our own proprietary blockchain, it is a non-public blockchain. The idea was that we could provide decentralized infrastructure for Fortune 5000 companies that want to use the advantages or need to use the advantages of blockchain. But by the time you get up to your CFO or your chief legal officer or your compliance folks, there's no way that they are going to let the outside world and developers have it decentralized.
(17:43):
You can't regulate it. There needs to be [inaudible 00:17:47]. And so we saw this in particular in the gaming industry, as an example, in the early 2000s where we saw a lot of offshore casinos emerge, we saw a lot of payment systems emerge. But it was really a fringe industry. It seemed to have impressive numbers but it was a fringe industry. And so we were involved and helped build out a company that was totally compliant in the space. And eventually it became the largest mover of money in the gaming world because it worked with regulators. Before anybody knew what KYC, know your clients, and any money laundering law was, we built systems that were all about that. So that if a gamer want ... a gambler, excuse me, wanted to come on and use an offshore casino, then they could, but they just had to follow the rules.
(18:36):
And for years, we were just this nascent little gnat on everybody's shoulder that [inaudible 00:18:44] cared about until the regulators ... And what a lot of people don't understand is that the regulation is not put in place as oversight for some conspiracy theory. Most regulation, whether it was in the payment space that we're talking about, or whether it's in crypto today, or in the FinTech industry today, isn't driven by regulators trying to control. It's driven by consumers trying to be safe. So most of these regulations in there, and the friction that's there, actually isn't friction because what it does is it provides confidence to a consumer as an example that I know I'm not going to have a chargeback. Or that if there's fraud on my card, I'm protected. If I didn't know that I wouldn't use my card as much. So the economy isn't as big.
(19:26):
And I think that a lot of the crypto space was young and a lot of the crypto space didn't really grasp the fact that the regulation is a really important part of mainstreaming a market. And I think that's what we'll see now is actually an increased adoption of decentralized ... Because it is much more secure, it is much more flexible. It has all these advantages, but it will have a regulatory oversight on it. And so I think it's still going to take a couple years but this is the beginning of the mainstream of digital currencies and Bitcoin and the rest of it. This is just a natural progression that had to happen.
James Black (20:04):
Of course. I mean, look at all the scams that are cash based or obviously credit card fraud and all the insurance that goes behind that. There's got to be a better way, right? There just has to be. So if some of these tools can be used to intermediate or dis-intermediate what's currently out there that doesn't work super effectively, the capital markets and the banking systems aren't perfect. This is obviously part of the solution. And I will also add that Metaworks' platforms is listed on the CSE under MWRK. Again, there's a lot to digest. And just going back to the last two years, as an entrepreneur, maybe if you can just share with those listening, what was one of your big insights about either being an entrepreneur that you've learned or relearned through all this stuff that you've been through, or perhaps something as an investor that came to light? Always have to just try to pick people like yourselves brains to learn a bit more about the things I should know as both an investor and an entrepreneur.
Cameron Chell (21:01):
Well, I think there's ... One thing that's confirmed for me as an entrepreneur is that I don't do this for the money. That is for sure. Or the lack of stress. Because it's been a really lean few years, a couple years, for a lot of people. And so the entrepreneur mindset is really one that, if you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which isn't perfect by any stretch, but the first thing you do is you look after your base security. And then you start looking after your shelter and then eventually you get up to self-awareness, right? And creating something bigger than yourself. I mean, that's the higher ... And what happens in the entrepreneurial mindset is that triangle is turned completely upside down. And so what we do as entrepreneurs is we're really, honestly, we care more about creating something bigger than ourselves.
(21:58):
Because if we didn't, we wouldn't sleep on couches, we wouldn't have the stress of families and no paychecks and making payrolls and finding money and developing product and working with customers. It's relentless. And so if anything of the last couple years has reaffirmed to me is that the entrepreneurs that I like to follow are entrepreneurs. They don't do it for the money. I mean, hopefully that's a big payoff and all the rest of it. But the reality is they do it because they're doing something because they want to create something bigger than themselves. And I think that's the essence of entrepreneurialism. And it's the essence of what happens when necessity breaks out.
(22:38):
So when you see things like COVID or when you see things like war or disasters or environmental challenges or problems, you get people in there. The most successful people in my mind or the people I like to follow are the ones that are solving the problems because they want to solve the problems. And then the economics that will come out of that are absolutely tremendous. But I know that when I start focusing on how much money I've got to make, I get demotivated. And no matter how tough it is, if I focus on the problems that I get to solve and the people that get to be helped, things just ... they work out. So it's a tough gig, but man, there's nothing else. There's nothing else like it.
James Black (23:17):
No. When it works, it's a rush. And obviously, as you said, the carrot stick. If it's just cash money, that won't get you through the hard times. Absolutely not. And even see the biggest entrepreneurs in the world like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, I mean, they do things that completely make you shake your head from a corporate perspective. But you go, that's how they're wired. I mean-
Cameron Chell (23:37):
Those are such great examples, James. They don't need to take the risks.
James Black (23:41):
No.
Cameron Chell (23:42):
But of course they do, right?
James Black (23:45):
No, it's wiring. And in another episode, we'll talk about what you have to do, and the wiring goes haywire, but it's the way it is. And that's the way it's got to be. Or else we don't create new things, new beautiful things.
Cameron Chell (23:58):
You're right.
James Black (23:58):
And in your case, we don't save lives. So with that, Cameron, I just want to thank you again for being on our inaugural show of 2023. It's hard to believe we're already here. It's the future. And wish you nothing but success this year and beyond.
Cameron Chell (24:09):
[inaudible 00:24:10].
James Black (24:10):
Thanks again for being a part of the family and we'll see you soon.
Cameron Chell (24:13):
It's an honor. Thanks, James.
James Black (24:19):
Thank you again for listening to The Exchange for Entrepreneurs Podcast, a proud presentation from CNSX Markets Inc., operator of the Canadian Securities Exchange. As a reminder, the viewpoints on this show do not reflect those of the Exchange and are solely those of the guests and do not constitute investment advice. For more information about the Exchange, its services and listed companies, please visit www.thecse.com. Until the next show, thank you for listening, and don't forget to hit the like or subscribe button on your favorite listening platform. Thank you so much.