The Autonomous Drone Tech Stack & Economics of Drones — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Guest Host Noah Smith, Noahpinion

**Yaroslav Azhnyuk** (0:00)
So, think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world. China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones.

**Noah Smith** (0:10)
Would you say that right now, China is now the supreme conventional military power on earth, given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described?

**Yaroslav Azhnyuk** (0:20)
I don't think we have all the information to claim that, but we cannot count it out, and that alone should be a big warning sign. And as I say, at some point in my life, I went from making cameras that fleeing treats to pets, to cameras that fleeing explosives to the occupiers.
So that's a short story. And when you think about what your nation, what your compatriots are going through, you realize that that's the only morally right thing to do is to fight back. And it is immoral not to fight back. And then the choice becomes very clear.

**Brandon Anderson** (1:04)
Welcome to Latent Space. I'm Brandon. I normally do science podcasts, but today we're going to do something a little bit different. I'm joined by Noah Smith of Noahpinion on Substack and Twitter.
And he has lots of interesting things to say about drones. And as a guest, we have Yaroslav Azhnyuk, the founder of The Fourth Law and several other drone-related startups.
But yeah, to get started, so it is February 23rd, 2022 You are running a pet startup.
You are connecting pets with their owners. Let's go ahead and just a little bit of background. How did you get started in tech and what were you working on before the Ukrainian war started?

**Yaroslav Azhnyuk** (1:50)
Yeah. Good to be here. Thank you.
On February 23rd, late in the evening, I think 11 PM Kyiv time, my wife and I, we landed in Kyiv. Actually, then she was a fiancé.
We came from Lviv where we were looking at a church where our wedding should have taken place. We got into this cab riding from airport to our home and the driver was like, crazy, like everyone's leaving Kyiv. Why do you come? Like what? Nothing's going to happen. Like dude, chill.
And then obviously, eight minutes later or eight hours later, the bombs fell in the city. I was quite surreal. We probably landed on the last flight, landed in Kyiv on one of those last flights. But yeah, my background, I'm a tech guy. I studied applied mathematics in Kyiv Polytechnics, born and raised in Kyiv. Parents, you know, all the PhDs from academia and grandparents, too. Like everything, you know, from linguistics to nuclear physics. And I'm an entrepreneur, so I build a bunch of companies. PetCube is the one you were referencing. So I lived in San Francisco 2014 to 2020 I'm building PetCube, which is one of the leading pet device companies in the world. Selling lots of pet cameras and then, yeah, as I say, at some point in my life, I went from making cameras that fleeing treats to pets to cameras that fleeing explosives to the occupiers. So that's the short story.

**Brandon Anderson** (3:27)
Yeah. So February 24th, I guess a few hours after you go to check out your wedding chapel, what do you do?

**Yaroslav Azhnyuk** (3:36)
Well, we had a plan for this situation. So my parents and family live in Kyiv, and we're like, okay, this has actually started. The worst has come true. And so we basically packed our belongings and got in the car and spent 17 hours riding west.
And that was pretty sure most people in our audience watched at least one apocalyptic movie in their lives. So that was exactly like that, like felt exactly like that. I, you know, missiles are falling. It's like there was smoke in Kyiv. Like, you know, my dad and I went like to central part of the cities. It's probably like 800 meters from the presidential office to pick some stuff in his workplace. He's like the head of an academic institution. So he had to get some of the things with him. And super surreal, like the streets are empty, like the gas stations are out of gas. Like we found some gas station.
We didn't have spare canisters with us. So we're like, we figured out, like the car was diesel. Like we figured out if it's diesel, you can actually store it in plastic canisters. And we bought some window wash for the cars. We poured it out of the canisters, and we poured the diesel into that.
Yeah, so it was like that. And then like, you know, helping friends get out, like my friend and his dog, like we found, like my brother was also like riding in a separate car. We found the place for my friend who didn't have a car. It was like, yeah, it was like totally surreal. Wow. And we didn't know, you know, of course, and you didn't know this will last for so long. You didn't know whether Kyiv will be able to, whether you kind of will be able to defend Kyiv. And it was like, yeah, very little information and very little insight into the future.