How Skydio Ships Flying Robots With Just 20 Product Managers

Most people think of drones as toys. Alden Jones thinks of them as infrastructure. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) visits Skydio's California office to sit down with Alden Jones, VP of Product at Skydio, the autonomous drone company building "flying robots" for public safety, defense, and infrastructure inspection. With a history degree and a military background (he was a truck-driving officer running supply convoys in Iraq) rather than an engineering one, Alden explains how a vertically integrated company of nearly 1,000 people builds everything in house, from chip-level design to hardware, embedded software, and cloud, and why autonomy, not just flight, is the real product.

He breaks down Skydio's "Drone as First Responder" (DFR) program, where a drone often reaches the scene before human officers, and the outcomes dashboard cities use to track response times. He compares the economics against police helicopters (roughly $3,000 an hour to operate and $10-25M to buy), walks through the defense and tactical ISR use cases shaped by the war in Ukraine, and explains how thousands of cheaper camera drones could democratize air support while saving lives. He covers physical security (where 90-95% of alarms turn out to be false), the work of earning FAA trust to unlock groundbreaking waivers, and why Skydio's $3.5B, five-year investment in US and allied supply chains is funded by revenue instead of debt. He also opens up the product org itself: roughly 20 product managers across the entire stack, "strike teams" that work like forward-deployed engineers, and a customer-first culture where PMs are expected to go watch the robot fly in the real world.

What you'll learn:

• Why Skydio calls its products "flying robots," and the "toys to tools to infrastructure" thesis
• What full vertical integration looks like: chip-down design to cloud, all in house
• How "Drone as First Responder" changes 911 response, tracked in a live outcomes dashboard
• The real economics of drones vs. police helicopters
• How the war in Ukraine reshaped Skydio's thinking on tactical ISR and democratizing air support
• Why 90-95% of physical security alarms are false, and how autonomous drones clear them at near-zero marginal cost
• How Skydio earns FAA trust to fly beyond visual line of sight and win first-mover waivers
• Why a $3.5B, five-year US manufacturing commitment is funded by revenue, not debt
• How one pilot flying multiple drones becomes possible only through real autonomy
• How Skydio runs product with ~20 PMs, "strike teams," and a customer-first org design
• Why shipping hardware plus software (the Tesla comparison) shapes a roughly two-year program cycle

Connect with Alden Jones, VP of Product, Skydio:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aldenljones/

Host: Carlos, CEO at Product School
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/

About Skydio: Skydio is a US-based manufacturer of autonomous drones ("flying robots") for public safety, defense, security, and infrastructure inspection. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in California, the company is vertically integrated across hardware, autonomy software, and cloud.

About the Product Podcast: Product School's podcast brings you candid conversations with the founders and product leaders shaping tech.

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Transcript

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:00:00

We've all probably heard of drones. We actually believe that we're on a journey from toys to tools to infrastructure.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:00:06

Alden Jones, VP of Product at Skydio. Competing head to head with Google for talent.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:00:12

Yeah, the mechanical engineers, the electrical engineers you're competing with. We're in the Bay Area to get the best talent, but we're definitely competing for it.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:00:20

When can we expect fully autonomous fleets of robots flying?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:00:25

It is very near term.

Introduction
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:01:01

Hey, this is Carlos, CEO at Product School and your host on The Product Podcast. Today I flew out to Skydio's office in California because my guest builds flying robots. Alden Jones runs product there across hardware, software, and autonomy, which is rare enough. What's rarer? He has a history degree. He is not an engineer, and he drove supply trucks in Iraq before any of this.

Here's what we cover: why they refuse to call them drones. The $3,000-an-hour helicopter they are replacing. 55,000 emergency calls a month, and the metric for when nobody gets dispatched. 20 product managers, no travel budget, go get the signal. And a $3.5 billion commitment funded by revenue, not debt. Let's get into it.

Alden, welcome to The Product Podcast.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:01:39

Thank you for having me.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:01:40

I'm technically the host of the podcast, but you're hosting me at your office.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:01:45

Yeah, but you're in charge.

Why Skydio Calls Them Flying Robots, Not Drones
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:01:47

I had to come, because what you guys are building is incredible. It's flying robots, and I feel very lucky and grateful that I had the opportunity to see it. I hope we can capture some of that magic and explain what you're really building here. But let's start at the beginning. Why am I using the term flying robot instead of just drone?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:02:08

Sure. I think we've all probably heard of drones, and we think about quadcopters, and many people probably think about them as toys. Many people who work with them maybe think about them as tools. We actually believe that we're on a journey from toys to tools to infrastructure. And when you think about robots being used to do really important jobs, there are so many different things we're building that isn't just the flying quadcopter.

So we're building different kinds of platforms. We're building robotic base stations to host those platforms. We're building robotic arms. In order to deliver the full solution, we don't just build the quadcopters people are used to. We're now building a suite of robots to solve problems.

The Scale of the Business and How Product Fits In
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:02:51

Give me a sense of the scale of your business today.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:02:54

We're just under 1,000 people, which includes manufacturing, which we also do here in California, and a super multidisciplinary team of experts. We do everything in house: software, hardware, logistics, supply chain, manufacturing, chip-down design. Most of the engineering team is here in California, but we actually have engineering offices around the world to capture certain disciplines like autonomy and cameras, some defense tech, and then go-to-market is all over the place.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:03:24

And you guys cover the full stack. You're vertically integrated.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:03:28

Vertically integrated. Build the hardware, ship the embedded software, ship and build all the cloud software, all of it.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:03:35

As the product executive, how do you actually fit into this picture?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:03:40

Day to day, the way I think about my team is we have the core product platform team. These are the folks looking after hardware, the core software experience, core autonomy, embedded work, communications or connectivity as we call it, and product operations. They're supporting a lot of the tech stack our business is built on.

And then we also have vertically integrated PMs who aren't quite GMs, but they're really focused on delivering bespoke value for a particular use case for a customer. We do that across several different industries.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:04:14

So you oversee both the software and the hardware components. They are robots.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:04:18

Yep. And then we have software leaders on the autonomy side, an SVP of engineering overall, and I also work with the hardware engineering and manufacturing leaders.

A History Degree, the Army, and the Road Into Drones
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:04:28

Typically the CPOs I host work in software-only products: Netflix, Airbnb, many others. This is quite unique. I'm curious what your background is, to make you want to combine both worlds, because it's not something easy.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:04:46

It's a great question. Spoiler alert: I'm not an engineer. I have a history degree, and I was really motivated at a young age to join the military. I come from a family that has done service, and I really wanted to give back. So that's what I did in my career. In that, I got to see how technology needs to be used to succeed in really critical situations.

As I got back into the workforce, I had some Fortune 500 leadership jobs. Kind of boring stuff, that's what you do when you get out of the Army. But I eventually found my way to an innovation role at a telco company, where I got to start experimenting with drones. I had an opportunity there to really teach myself about technology: I got to work a little bit in software, try to code a little bit, learn about drones, learn about physics. Ultimately that led me to Skydio.

I actually started at Skydio as the customer success leader. We had a team of zero. We built all the functions, everything from pre-sale solution engineering to post-sale support. But this is just an incredibly technical company, so I got to build really great relationships and learn a lot with the engineering leaders, hardware and software. As we grew the business and bumped into all the problems, I got to learn how the tech stack works and really dive deep to explain what was going on.

And then ultimately I got the opportunity to move into product. I'll also say we have fantastic technical founders. Adam is our CEO and co-founder, and they're brilliant engineers. Adam and I work quite a lot together. Vision-wise, he absolutely owns the hardware vision and executes more on the hardware side; my team and I are a little more on the software side and the leadership there.

The Four Use Cases: Response, Defense, Security, Inspection
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:06:30

Now I want to dive a little deeper into the actual product. You gave me what I wouldn't even call a demo: you were flying multiple drones, multiple robots, at the same time. What is the actual use case, or the main use cases, you're covering with your flying robots?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:06:47

To zoom out a little bit, like you mentioned, we call ourselves a flying robot solutions company. At the end of the day, we're trying to solve business problems or critical problems, across four main use cases.

One is response. We call that drone-as-first-responder, and it maps pretty nicely to public safety. Two is ISR: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, a term used in the military essentially for gathering information on the battlefield. We provide camera drones to collect intelligence and work with militaries. We have every department under the Department of War and 29 allied nations, so we're very proud of the work we do there.

Three is security. Imagine large fixed sites our customers have: a data center, a dam, a power plant. They want to secure that. Today, customers usually have roving patrols of human beings walking or in cars 24 hours a day. It's expensive, it's inaccurate, and there are a lot of false alarms.

And four is inspection. There are trillions of dollars of infrastructure around the world, and this is what I did in my previous role: digitizing a portfolio of assets allows businesses to be so much more efficient.

I have a couple of stories I want to tell, but let me talk about DFR real quick, just for a sense of scale. There are around 250 to 300 million public safety or 911 calls in the United States every year, depending on how you count. Today, Skydio ingests about 3.5 million 911 calls every month, and we respond to about 55,000 of them every month. Around the country, 25 million Americans now live within two miles of a Skydio dock, up from about 12 million just eight months ago. So things are really growing. The use case is helping public safety get the best information as fast as possible to make the right choices as they help the community.

Replacing the $3,000-an-Hour Helicopter
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:08:45

I want to double-click on that. I was asking you this off camera: what's the traditional alternative today?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:08:53

In public safety, there are two alternatives. The one everyone immediately thinks of, and the conclusion you'd reach, is the helicopter. It's an interesting proxy. It's a flying camera, it's just really expensive: $3,000 an hour to operate, and the going rate of a helicopter is somewhere between 10 and 25 million dollars, depending on how much you want to spend. It's a very expensive tool, and you just cannot respond to the density of calls you have in any given city.

So one of the things we do with DFR, when we sit with customers early in the pre-sales process, is sit down with their data and map all of their 911 calls for the year. They give us parameters on which kinds of calls and priorities they care about, and then we advise them on where they can best place docking stations to respond most quickly.

The other alternative, and I know some of your guests and listeners have done this, is a police ride-along, which you can request from your community. If you go, what you'll see is just the radio. They'll have what's called a mobile data terminal, a little tough-book computer in their car, and they'll get a one-line dispatch: "suspect with knife, threatening," whatever. That's all they know. No images, nothing visual. And we're such visual creatures. Maybe a radio call saying get there, or drop this job and go do that. There's a lot of nuance department to department; there are something like 18,000 different public safety agencies in the United States, so it's a wide tapestry. But generally that's the workflow: imperfect information in a really high-stress scenario.

How Skydio Measures Success in Public Safety
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:10:28

Let's talk about success metrics, because here you're literally responding to emergencies. How do you measure success?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:10:36

We have something we call the DFR Outcomes Dashboard. We measure a couple of critical things. We measure response: did the drone get there first? That's a big, important one. We measure what the response time was. We talked about this a little off camera, but if you go to any city council meeting, any mayor, any police chief, they're really interested in response time. There's a lot of budget and funding tied to it, and a lot of contributing factors, but as a community, we expect public safety to show up when we call, and how fast they show up matters.

We also track whether the drone provided useful information: did it actually help the officers on scene make a better choice? And last, this is a fun one, maybe for the b-schoolers, we track how often an officer was not dispatched because the drone got there so fast, realized nothing was going on, saw it was a nuisance call, and it would have been a waste of city resources to send a cop. So they don't go. And the best part is that customers report all of this themselves in the product, and then their leaders get to see the metrics.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:11:52

And this is the main segment for your business.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:11:55

This is the largest part of our business.

Defense and Tactical ISR
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:11:58

The other two, I'd group three and four into one. So two is defense. What are the main use cases there?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:12:04

Defense is really interesting. If you think about a military unit, it's like a mini city. It has a base with a border, almost a mini country. There are houses where people live, a grocery store, police, people going to work every day, commuting, traffic, training areas. That's on base, and it's probably not what most people think of when we talk about military applications, but it's important, and it's mostly the security use case.

On the ISR side, tactical ISR is what you imagine. We're all reading the news today, and we know what's happening in Ukraine. It's a very unfortunate, tragic situation. But essentially the goal is to have the best information possible to keep yourself safe and complete whatever objectives you're assigned.

I'm happy to get personal and think about my own deployment. My job wasn't anything fancy: I was a truck-driving officer. I had 20 trucks and the folks who worked for me, and we'd bring supplies back and forth in Iraq, from base A to base B to bring them medical supplies. As an example: there might be something in the road, and we'd stop, look through our binoculars, look around, maybe get out of the truck and go poke at it with a stick. Instead of doing that, just send a drone, find out exactly what it is, and then you get to make a decision.

In Ukraine, they're doing a lot more, unfortunately, really large-scale battle. Today, a Ukrainian soldier will not move on the battlefield without air support from a drone. They're doing really sophisticated stuff, unfortunately born out of need. They'll recon the objective, using drones to see where the opposing forces are. They also use drones in what's called a kinetic way, to deliver battlefield lethal effects. We don't do that; we're camera drones only. Our job is to help those soldiers identify where the people who are going to hurt them are, and use that to make decisions on the battlefield.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:14:17

And similar to the first segment, the traditional alternative was maybe no alternative, right? Air support was extremely expensive.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:14:25

Air support is really expensive. A Predator drone, which we've probably all heard about in the news, is millions of dollars. Special forces or units in really hot areas might get some air support, but you just can't build or buy enough of them. Our belief is that thousands of camera drones on the battlefield, giving commanders much better information to make better decisions, is a way to democratize the technology. My battalion was about 750 people, and we never had air support, and we wanted it. Today we have units at the squad level, which is ten people, and they have a drone.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:14:58

Again thinking about success metrics, I imagine lives saved is one, based on the examples you gave. Is there any other way to measure outcome success?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:15:08

It's really interesting. I could rattle off a bunch of flight metrics. We're about to cross 5 million flights, which is really exciting. But none of those metrics include our tactical ISR users, because all of that is completely disconnected, offline, air-gapped. So we actually don't get as much feedback there; there are different feedback methods with national security customers. But yes, lives saved is the metric. Sometimes it's grim, because this is when we ask soldiers to do something. Sometimes it can be that they accomplish their mission, which might be to move to a piece of terrain, or capture something.

Physical Security and the False-Alarm Problem
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:15:43

Moving to the next bucket. I was just at the World Cup, sorry, at the tournament in Spain. I was born in Spain, so I had to say it.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:15:52

Amazing. Congratulations. That's so cool. We were rooting for you.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:15:55

I saw one of your drones there, right? So maybe that's a good way to show how you cover the other type of commercial applications.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:16:03

Yeah. We talked about this a little. Public safety agencies use the drones there, but they're doing what we'd call a physical security use case. A stadium is a great example. There's a big stadium with tens of thousands of people. You want to protect them, make sure everyone is safe, do perimeter sweeps, know what's going on, be able to get eyes on a hotspot.

The two ways we think about security applications are kind of dual use. One is autonomous patrol. We essentially tell the drone, all happening autonomously, to just fly around. The way it can happen autonomously is we're also running AI, communicating back to models to look through the images we're getting, either onboard the drone with certain models or off-board with others, and identify the things the customer decided they cared about. That's the patrol mode. Today that's happening with guards walking around or people driving cars, which isn't the greatest job.

The other is response. I can't mention the customer's name, but we're working with venue-type companies, data center companies, logistics companies. You can imagine they have an alarm, and today a guard has to physically go to where that alarm is, or try to see it in the camera, and clear the alarm. We pulled these stats when we were talking with some customers recently: somewhere between 90 and 95% of all physical security alarms in the United States are false alarms. So it's a huge waste of time. Why wouldn't you just send a drone? It'll probably get there in 50 seconds or less, depending on where it is on its route, and then you immediately know whether you need to do something. Now that we're building indoor and outdoor drones, we're really excited for this application to scale.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:17:53

I like that, and I think it applies to all the segments in terms of confirming false positives. It's not only about accomplishing a certain mission, but knowing when there's no mission, so you don't have to do anything.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:18:04

Exactly. Why not send it? The marginal cost of 3% of a battery is nothing. It's not quite software zero marginal cost, but it's almost nothing. It's a couple of electrons. Why wouldn't you do that?

The Software: One Pilot, Many Drones
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:18:16

Let's talk about the software, because you showed me some behind-the-scenes, and it seems like one human can handle multiple flying robots at the same time.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:18:24

Yeah, it's very exciting. I want to talk about two things. One, just to nerd out on the tech: today we have customers flying one pilot to four drones. We do two-to-one; it depends on the use case and how much attention you need to pay to every drone. You can honestly command the drone to go do things.

One of the things that makes Skydio great is our autonomy. What we mean by that is a combination of deep learning models on the drone that are looking around. We have cameras that look in all directions, so we're both building a three-dimensional model of the world, identifying and digitally creating objects we can navigate around, and identifying things to know where we are and make smart decisions.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:19:06

So it's like Minecraft.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:19:08

The 3D model is very Minecraft. You just need enough to know where you are, and especially if you're flying 45 miles an hour, you're not going to resolve fine details, but you need to make sure you don't bump into things. One example of where the deep learning models are used: we have customers who fly into a parking garage to clear an incident, and the drone can automatically find its way out. When it sees the sky, it can decide, okay, I see the sky, I can go do this.

The reason autonomy is important is that the only way you can truly operate multiple drones is to trust that the system can handle itself, including when there are off-nominal situations. Let's say the city loses power. You need to trust that all those drones can fly home by themselves and land safely by themselves. So one-to-four is an amazing application, and it's just the beginning. This is going to continue to scale.

The second thing I wanted to talk about: for a long time in the drone industry, there was somewhat of an adversarial relationship with the FAA. You'd go into the forums and people would be complaining.

Earning the Trust of the FAA
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:20:14

The FAA is the Federal Aviation Administration.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:20:16

Thank you. We've taken a completely different approach. We believe it's our duty and our mission, as a vendor and manufacturer, to earn the trust of our regulators. The way we do that is we built autonomy, we've hired some of the best folks in aviation safety and regulation in the world, and we understand it deeply. We work with the FAA every day to make sure we're earning their trust. In doing so, we've been given groundbreaking waivers before everybody else, because the tech can support what we want to do, and they believe in us because we prove it to them. They didn't believe right away, and we're also working collaboratively with them.

When Fully Autonomous Fleets Arrive
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:20:59

You said one-to-four is the beginning. When can we expect fully autonomous fleets of robots flying?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:21:06

I don't want to give away too much about our user conference, so people should tune in; it's in September. But it is very near term. In the industry, people imagined a world where we'd talk about this and talk about it and nothing happened. But the scale we're reaching in autonomous flight is happening every day, for the majority of all our flights. Even on a response, it's most of the time flying there autonomously and flying back; there's some time on the objective. We've now earned the trust that this system can do what it needs to. So this is not ten years out. That's not what this is anymore. It's happening now.

Funding the Business and the $3.5 Billion Commitment
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:21:48

As a product leader, I'm sure you're looking for patterns and ways to group use cases, but you're covering a lot of ground, quite literally. How are you thinking about funding the operations and making sure you can continue building across the entire stack?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:22:05

It's interesting you ask. We've been working with these customer bases for quite a long time. The company was founded in 2014, and for the first half of the company's life there was just a lot of R&D and innovation teams. We had this novel thing: autonomy and obstacle avoidance, and people could see where it was going, but we weren't really delivering value yet.

As a company, we then got close to our customers and started to deliver real value. What changed for us was X10, the workhorse quadcopter platform, plus the dock and the remote operation software. When those came together, it fundamentally changed the paradigm. Lots of folks wanted to work with us, and DFR really took off.

From an investment perspective, we prioritize pretty ruthlessly. When we were on that path, it was the number one company goal to make DFR successful, and we didn't invest as heavily in some other areas for a period of time. But once DFR took off the way it has, and we've been so pleased with the results our customers are getting, we say internally that we've now earned the right to invest in all these other areas. We've always had a large military business too, and we're extremely proud of that. It's a little more lumpy, and some of the other businesses are less lumpy.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:23:30

This reminds me of what we're seeing with a lot of the AI labs. They were in the dark for years, raised money, no product, then suddenly product-market fit and they're growing, while the capex is massive. They're growing revenue but not profitable at all. As I think about hardware investments, how are you thinking about funding the operations and making sure you can sustain it? I think you had a stat about a certain level of commitment.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:24:05

Our CEO announced this a few weeks or months ago: a commitment to $3.5 billion of total investment over the course of the next five years. There are really two flavors of this. It's all the work Skydio is going to do, all the drones we're going to produce, and a lot of investment in the US and allied supply chain. In order to build the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of drones we're going to be shipping, we want really secure supply chains, and we want a lot more investment in the US and our allied nations. That's part of our commitment: US manufacturing backed by allied and partnered supply chains. A lot of the investment is going to go there, plus all the other activities we'll be doing.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:24:49

So that's a pretty big number. With a B.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:24:52

Yeah.

Competing for World-Class Engineering Talent
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:24:53

As you look at the competitive landscape, what's your strategic position, and what gives you the confidence that you'll be able to raise those funds so you can actually deploy them?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:25:05

The great thing is we're not taking that approach. We're not trying to go raise a big round to do that. That's just the revenue of our business driving how we're going to make those investments, which is really exciting. I think our last round, we only raised $100 million, because that's not what we're trying to do. We're not funding this via debt. We could decide to do more if we wanted to go after even more markets, and we might. But that particular investment is just revenue-funded, which is really exciting.

In terms of the market landscape, there are a couple of things that make us special. The company, and I don't put myself in this category, is a world-class engineering company. I'm so impressed with the talent we have here. We have a very high bar for talent and a culture for how to go get the best engineering talent.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:25:50

Where do they come from?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:25:52

All over. On the autonomy side, you can imagine labs, PhD programs, autonomous driving, probably some of the more traditional paths. But on the software engineering side, we have folks from all different walks of life.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:26:06

So you're competing head to head with Google for talent.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:26:10

Yeah. And on the mechanical engineers, electrical engineers side, you're competing there too. We're in the Bay Area to get the best talent, but we're definitely competing for it.

Designing a 20-Person Product Team Across the Whole Stack
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:26:20

In terms of the team and how you're designing it, you have people focused on different segments, not quite GMs in terms of owning the number. Tell me more, because I think this is quite unique. Most of the product teams I've interviewed have software only, so maybe the taxonomy is slightly different. I want to learn more about it.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:26:44

To zoom out, this org structure comes from the philosophy. Our philosophy at Skydio is customer first. I was listening to a bunch of the folks you've interviewed, and one thing that's true of all successful companies is that they're customer obsessed and customer first. It might sound different and how they do it might differ by company, but it's very clear that's the most important thing: are you delivering value for your customers? We have a very mission-oriented culture here around solving real problems for customers. That's the start.

Then, when we look at the team, we know we have deep, deep investments we're making on the engineering side to do the things we do. One example: X10 is an amazing platform, but our customers in the military, public safety, security, and inspection need to fly at night. They love that we have 360-degree obstacle avoidance and autonomy, but it only worked in the day, and that's 12 hours of robots not doing what they need to do. So we invented Night Sense, active illumination invisible to the naked eye, in IR, so you can do all the autonomy functions at night. That's deep investment across a wide range of teams: hardware, software, autonomy. We didn't want to disrupt the engineering and invention engine of Skydio.

So you have this platform at the bottom. And at the same time, we're incredibly customer focused. We believe that if you don't really know what the customer needs, you're not doing a good job as product and engineering leaders. I say this to everybody who joins my team at Skydio: our team is not very big, we're about 20 product managers across that whole stack. We run pretty lean, and we like it that way. When you join Skydio as a product manager, I call them product leaders, there is no travel budget. If you need signal, go get it. I don't care where it is. The thing about physical AI is we love data. I host something called Product Data Day, where we all get together, look at stuff, and poke at each other's data. But you have to go see the robot in the real world and see how they're using it. Otherwise, how do you know? So you need that: deeply embedded, with customer focus, from the product and engineering teams. The product leader is paired with an engineering leader and an engineering team, and they go do what they need to do.

And then we have what we call strikes. A strike is when you have a deep investment. We have a feature called Pathfinder: we take maps of the world, digital surface maps, we know where buildings and trees are, and we autonomously plan a route for the drone that's the most efficient way to get there without bumping into anything. That was a deep feature we built very expressly for DFR, to minimize the time to get to site. Several core members of autonomy and embedded engineering embedded with the DFR team, and that's what we call a strike. They sit in the same place, they eat lunch together, they do everything for six months until it's done. Then they go back to platform.

Strikes, Forward Deployed Engineers, and Design
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:29:50

That sounds like what other companies would call forward deployed engineers, almost.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:29:55

Yeah, very similar.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:29:58

So it's engineering plus product as part of the same work, with an R&D platform underneath.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:30:03

Yeah. And design, I can't forget my design partners.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:30:07

How do you think about design here? What do you mean by that?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:30:09

When we think about design, there's so much raw engineering that goes into how we deliver something that works. It's a really hard problem. The product managers spend a ton of their time thinking about whether this is the right thing to prioritize. We have so much demand for what we're building that every day is an agonizing choice between where to invest, here or here. And design is really important to make sure that what our customers experience is intuitive to use and feels safe to use. If you think about more and more autonomous actions from a flying robot, the customer needs to feel that this thing is going to do what they ask, and that when it takes its own action, it's doing so in a safe way, and showing them how it's going to work. I don't know if you've done any self-driving with a Tesla or whatever, but it's great when you know where it's going to drive. You need that intuitive user experience to make sure they trust the robot.

The Hardware Cycle
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:31:19

Let me use that example, because I can see some similarities. You're building hardware plus software, and the software can be upgraded very frequently. How long is your hardware cycle?

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:31:32

What we call a major program is about two years. We've done one, I think our X10 indoor drone, in maybe 13 or 18 months, but generally about two years, and we make big jumps. We also do revisions on that hardware to make reliability improvements and other capability improvements, and we have attachments and accessories, so that's shorter. But generally it's about two years.

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia | Product School 00:32:03

Well, thank you for the masterclass on hardware plus software in a flying robot context. This is definitely a very unique episode; we've never had anyone building something like this before. It's been a pleasure.

Alden Jones | Skydio 00:32:17

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's been great.