Solving America’s Drone Problem, with Soren Monroe-Anderson (CEO of Neros)

**Soren Monroe-Anderson** (0:00)
You can build completely new types of defense systems that accomplish the task for way less money or just more effectively, and these things are going to look a lot more like consumer electronics than traditional weapons systems. Making much more accessible and high-quantity weapons systems, that is what Neros is fundamentally trying to do for America and all of our allies. It just requires thinking about the problem differently and trying to 10 or 100x cost reduce from where a traditional defense system is.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
Do you think that defense tech startups in general are living up to their promises? I couldn't help but notice how many plants you have around here.

**Soren Monroe-Anderson** (0:43)
Yeah, when we were moving in, I just told the team, like, go crazy on plants.
You know, we have this, like, very mixed floor where we've got manufacturing right here, and then everyone's sitting right next to it. And I think it's good, like, everyone should feel like they are in a factory, but that doesn't mean they need to feel completely sterile. So I just like adding, you know, some life and some color to the scene here. There's a long way to go, though. We said we need to, like, triple or quadruple the amount of plants. So I really want to have some, like, vines coming down on all these poles and wires.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:17)
And real plants, not fake.

**Soren Monroe-Anderson** (1:19)
Yeah, real plants.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:19)
Okay, there you go. I love that. So I want to start with a story that you've told in the past that I find quite amusing, which is you strapped a jar of strawberry smucker strawberry jam to a drone to troll a military jamming team.
Tell me about that day. What were you testing and what happened? And a little bit behind why you did that.

**Soren Monroe-Anderson** (1:45)
Yeah, so we were out in Alaska. We were doing testing with the Defense Innovation Unit. We were working on a program with them for radios, for radios that work in a highly contested environment. So the idea behind all the testing we were doing out there was flying against these jammers that the military had brought out to see if the radio we developed as part of this program was going to hold up or fail.
We had sort of the first day where we did a little bit of testing and everything looked really positive for us, but we didn't really do anything at range and that's where stuff gets hard. And so we knew the next day we were going to be doing that. And we were actually just stopping at Walmart. This was in Fairbanks, Alaska. There was one place that everyone shops and it's the Walmart and it's gigantic. It's actually the largest Walmart in America for a very long time because it's such a center of Fairbanks. So anyway, we're stopping at Walmart before driving out to the test range. And I just had this idea when we were walking around, we should have some type of payload on the drone for the soldiers to see if we were able to get close enough and hover in front of the jammer. And so I don't know, it just came to me, it was like, all right, let's get a container jam and strap that as our payload. And then if we do really well, we've jammed the jammer because they'll be able to see it because we're hovering right next to them and it means the jammer didn't work.
And it ended up, we ended up doing super well on the testing and we were actually able to hover in front of the jamming team as they were trying just like thing after thing after thing to try and take us out and they were never successful.
And then they ended up, they had a backpack mounted jammer. And so one of the guys was just like seeing how close he could get to the drone. And so he just like, we were hovering in place and we just walked up to it like literally 10 feet away. And then we were on radio with them. And so we said like, hey, can you see the payload? And they're like, yeah, we see the drone as a payload. We're like, no, can you see what the payload is? And they just like went dead silent.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:47)
What was, I mean, what was, I mean, clearly they thought they were gonna succeed.
What, I mean, or maybe, I don't know, what was their expectation? And like, what do you, like, how do they react kind of post that test?

**Soren Monroe-Anderson** (4:00)