Skydio CEO argues more drones will make us safer

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It's almost always an unwelcome surprise.
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**Nilay Patel** (1:51)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor in chief for The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas.
Today, I'm talking with Adam Bry, the CEO of Skydio, the leading US maker of autonomous drones. You'll hear us talk about it, but before we recorded this episode, I actually got to remotely operate one of Skydio's drones in the Bay Area from Adam's laptop in our podcast studio in New York. I also got to fly an indoor drone around our office. You can check out the full video of all that on our YouTube channel. We'll link it in the show notes. Beyond letting me fly drones around the country, Adam and I talked about why Skydio is so focused on the enterprise market. I of course asked him a lot about working with police and the military, but you'll hear him say that a lot of Skydio's customers are utility companies that use drones to remotely inspect important infrastructure in ways that simply weren't possible before. That's a big and important market, but it's also one that was being serviced by cheap consumer drones in the past, products that basically no longer exist in the United States since most of them came from China. And the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones late last year. All of those inexpensive DJI drones disappeared overnight, leaving expensive Skydio products as the main alternative. Adam and I talked about all of that and the reality of manufacturing complex electronics like drones here in the United States. We also talked about Skydio's use of AI and how it lines up with its use in the military. I really wanted to know if Adam had any lines here at a time when military use of AI is more controversial than ever. As you can tell, there's a lot going on in this one. Maybe more than anything, it was refreshing to hear Adam talk about hiring more people at Skydio as AI makes the company more efficient. Again, I got to fly the drones, which ruled. Okay, Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio. Here we go.
Adam Bry, you're the co-founder and CEO of Skydio. Welcome to Decoder.

**Adam Bry** (3:43)
I'm very excited to be here with you.

**Nilay Patel** (3:44)
I am super excited to talk with you. We just had a little demo of flying an X10 drone remotely. I have a lot of questions to follow up about that. That was super interesting. The drone business itself is in a moment of extreme change, I would say. There's policies keeping some of your competitors out of the country. There's what you're doing with autonomy and working with governments and the militaries around the world. And then in general, there's just the state of drone technology, which seems like it's on the cusp of being yet another thing. So there's quite a lot to talk about. Let's just start with the very basics.
Unless you're a drone nerd, you might not have heard of Skydio. Explain what Skydio is and how the company came to be.

**Adam Bry** (4:22)
So we are the largest US drone manufacturer. We make drones that are essentially flying sensor platforms. We started in 2014
At this point, we serve what we think of as the critical industries that our civilization depends on. So we work with public safety, we work with militaries, we also work with energy utilities and construction companies and departments of transportation and security organizations. The common thread between all of our customers is that they have hardcore oftentimes high-risk physical operations, where putting sensors in the right place at the right time to get better information can fundamentally change outcomes, and that's what we deliver. We deliver end-to-end solutions where the drone is a key piece of it, but the software and the autonomy and the integrations and increasingly the end-to-end workflows for the different industries built around the drone capability are really what our customers are buying, and we're at a super exciting moment where after years of talking about a lot of this stuff, it's really starting to work at scale with incredible impact.