everybody I’m here with Adam Goldstein co-founder CEO of Archer Aviation uh and I am excited to talk about flying vehicles my favorite subject um I have to start with a question Adam which is what do you call these things because I you know flying cars sort of like feels like a euphemism and calling them EV TOS just doesn’t roll off the tongue any uh recommendations yeah that is the uh kind of a age-old question for the industry but electric air taxis seems to be the uh cleanest way describe it electric air taxis all right I I like that and eventually they be they’ll become just called Transportation I think hopefully a real a real pleasure my friend to have you and talk about this moonshot which has been around for a while one of my favorite examples um is one of the quotes that Peter teal said is like you know we we were promised flying cars and all we got were 140 characters well guess what we’ve got
[00:01:01] flying cars now uh and congratulations uh you know I look at all of the uh electric uh air taxis out there uh Archer has done an extraordinary job uh in terms of creating a a viable business and I know how hard the aviation business is having played in that and the space business and the consumer business and you’ve got you you’ve had a lot of battles but you’ve conquered so much so congrats um thanks Peter I appreciate it it’s definitely uh the road has not been easy I can say that so you know we’re entering a time where this idea of of uh flying cars is something that is real uh you know a number of companies including Archer have gone public uh you have uh raised and invested a significant amount of money and have actually made something that is uh extraordinary I want to start with like uh first of all if you can describe Archer and your
[00:02:01] beautiful midnight vehicle what is Archer what is midnight capable of doing how should folks think about it yeah so these are electric vertical takeoff and Landing aircraft so think like an electric helicopter with wings um they take off of land vertically and then fly uh forward on a wing like an airplane and we’re you know going to Market using these vehicles really to replace trips that you would typically take on the ground in a car that might take you 60 90 120 Minutes to travel 20 30 40 50 miles um replace those with trips in the air that can take you 5 to 10 minutes and so you know if you look at like a a typical use case of going from you know like a city center to an airport like a Manhattan to a JFK or an LAX to Santa Monica those are like brutal trips that we’ve all sat through um that are are actually not that far that we could actually do very very quickly in in a vehicle like this I think about this uh I think of like packet switched humans like being able to hop in for the lowest
[00:03:03] price and speed are these vehicle is is the price per mile going to be competitive how expensive is this going to be in the final result well I think the really the goto market price point will be somewhat similar to an Uber like an Uber black but over time and when I say over time I’m not talking 50 years I’m talking five years seven years U you know these vehicles will be lower than car ownership so I mean the two infrastructure in around cities doesn’t scale it’s very hard to build New Roads it’s very challenging um but um infrastructure in the sky obviously is basically very little you don’t need anything you can scale it infinitely and so there’s an opportunity to just build a lot more vehicles and to serve you know a lot of people and ultimately Drive the cost you know way way down but if you just look at helicopters are extremely complex Vehicles you know very complex gear boxes and um you know tricky vehicles to maintain and keep up in the air um they’ll have 200 to 300 single points of failure um first with
[00:04:02] these vehicles these air taxis that we can build um they’ll have single zero single points of failure and because they’re electric and the uh the power trains are um you know using electric engines and lithiumion batteries they won’t need to undergo the same type of Maintenance just similar like I have a Tesla I’ve owned it for many years I’ve never maintenanced it once and so you have a a dynamic that you can build a lot of these vehicles Drive the cost down even further that ultimately will allow this to be accessible to everyone on Earth you know the old adage friends don’t let friends fly helicopters right um because they’re so they’re so dangerous but I let’s describe the midnight vehicle first of all it’s it’s gorgeous it’s probably the most beautiful of the uh electric air taxis out there um can you describe its sort of range number of people it’s uh support structure um speeds that sort of the stats that people would be interested in yeah so it’s a piloted
[00:05:01] vehicle and it can carry up to four passengers um it’s designed to go up to 100 miles but the typical use case will probably be you know 20 to 40 miles and um the vehicles fly 150 miles per hour so first of all when you fly in a straight line instead of like weaving throughout where the roads take you you can reduce the total amount of distance that you travel um you can also fly 150 miles you know consistently the entire flight so it can get you there much faster and because you can take off and land vertically you don’t have to drive out to an airport you can get to your endpoints uh you know very very quickly so it’s a um it’s a vehicle that was actually designed with a lot of the same mentality in the way that we designed cars and so when you look at the way aircraft are designed they’re almost always not very attractive um even if you look at today’s planes you know the boeings and the air buses they all kind of the planes all look the same they don’t have to um but you know we took an approach with uh the vehicle where we said we’re going to take a much more
[00:06:00] emotional view to designing the the vehicle rather than a pure mathematical view because this is a vehicle that we want people to want to touch they want to you know get in they want to fly um they want to be passionate about and so um that came with some you know performance hits and so a lot of the engineers you know that work at Archer were upset about that um but I do think design is actually a really important part of introducing a product like this and ultimately introducing a product that can really revolutionize and ultimately become a mass Market form of transportation yeah badass is the is the description that comes to mind when I I look at them I look at the midnight and you know if you’re listening go to Google and check out an image of it it’s it’s gorgeous um talk about um one second a subject that I’m super passionate about which is Convergence of these exponential Technologies this wasn’t possible a decade ago um what are the technologies that came together to make this possible so if you think back
[00:07:01] to you know I guess when I was a kid in the 90s you know batteries were still used lithium I batteries were you around and batteries have just become more and more energy dense and you know back then it was you know a miracle to keep things powered up for any substantial period of time um you know the thought of you know powering up a car and driving any reasonable range in the 90s or even in 2000 was pretty Unthinkable um if you you know Flash Forward to today you know we all almost take it for granted still that you know a Tesla you know a car with lithium ion batteries can you know drive you you know 300 400 miles um on a charge and that that’s pretty incredible and it’s very very effective and and good for everyday use um today when we think out you know uh you know 10 years from now 20 years from now it’s just even hard for people to understand what batteries we’ll be able to do uh you know going forward so based on technology today these planes can fly up
[00:08:00] to 100 miles um and so you can take a 6,500 pound maximum takeoff weight plane like the midnight vehicle fly it um you know quite far um and use it every day um recharge repeat that trip over and over and over again all day long so battery battery technology is is one breakthrough Battery tech has been probably the biggest one um and um the reason why that one is so interesting of all of them is just because it hasn’t it’s not like it’s stopped it’s just getting better so the product literally gets better every year so we can just use the newest cell that comes out we agnostic to which one to just constantly improve the performance to increase the you know the ride quality the luxuries inside these vehicles so even the midnight plane today which thank you Peter I do agree looks very very cool it will get cooler because there’s a lot more flexibility um once you can uh you know keep adding more um energy into these vehicles um so that’s been a really big breakthrough I think another one that’s been really big has been all
[00:09:00] about lightweighting on these vehicles and so you know it’s a um you know uh composite uh structures have been a big deal so they’re not you know aluminum or metal structures or composits they’re all lightweight the reason why that is so important is energy density is only so good and it’s still not nearly as efficient as kerosene and so we need to lightweight these vehicles as much as possible to preserve enough of the um uh maximum takeoff weight percentage for payload for people for stuff and so that’s been a really big critical part of what we’re doing but the aviation industry has not Advanced um substantially um across all the different parts of the supply chain and so there’s so much more to do it’s just Unthinkable um and it’s really because there hasn’t been demand for uh an aviation product that you know is is used you know you think about like a a Boeing and an Airbus they make 500 you know planes a year making more than a thousand planes a year is kind of Unthinkable um but this is an industry where we think you can be making
[00:10:00] millions of planes per year which will totally change the Aerospace supply chain yeah I would just to wrap up the list I would imagine that uh direct electric propulsion D propulsion um has been one of the drivers um obviously electronics and compute um I I would love to believe that Automation and air traffic control was part of the equation um but we can let’s talk about the fa in a minute but uh your point about the aviation industry being stagnant is insane right we we take off in uh December 17th of 1903 um and then we cross the Atlantic and then we go Supersonic and then we go to large bodied aircraft and there really has been very little innovation in the aviation industry um it’s like we stagnated yeah basically the planes have gotten more efficient um you know they’re more fuel efficient they are safer um so we’ve increased there but
[00:11:01] but these are all like you know marginal in the grand schema things of like what you can do there’s there’s no reason you couldn’t build a new you know uh Blended Wing plane that looks more like a you know like a triangle that totally reconfigures the interior the way people you know operate it doesn’t have to be a tube with a wing um there’s lots of other configurations that could work um and I actually think that you know the evall electric air taxi company have a chance to totally just change Aviation beyond the original products themselves because you know to to build a new airplane is quite expensive I think you know Boeing will spend 2040 billion dollars on a new plane and by the way it’s not even really necessarily a new plane a lot of them are you know upgrades so like the 737 Max is still a 737 it’s a you know I don’t know how old 50 60 year old fifth generation type of plane it’s not a clean sheet U aircraft so there’s so much to do here but that will require these companies to get like
[00:12:00] Archer to get substantially bigger to have substantially more Capital to be able to invest to go do this but all very very possible I mean the fa does an amazing job of keeping us safe um the track record is extraordinary think about it uh but the I remember when I was certifying uh my zero grr plan for doing parabolic flights right which was a relatively minor modification to avionics and uh and the hydraulic system it was brutal just to get you know the the mods approved and the adage was from the F uh the fa is not happy until you’re not happy yeah um it’s a lot of it’s a lot of work and then you know I mean we take for granted the fact that we’re just like cattle getting on and off of airplanes and everything has operated as safely as it does which is extraordinary yeah and and maybe I’ll you know uh I’ll leap my own words on this one but po ually This Time It’s
[00:13:00] Different and the reason why it could be different this time with this industry is that geopolitics have played a pretty significant role here so the US has done you know over the long term a great job of maintaining a leadership position in aviation and that’s been important um not only just to you know the economy and be able to move people around but also from a defense perspective um and so you know even if you just look at The Regulators today if you want to go certify a new plane there’s four big Regulators you can go to you can go to the FAA you can go to Europe’s version which is called yasa you can go to Transport Canada you can go to anac and Brazil there’s not that many options to go to do there most of the world looks to the FAA to do this yasa is kind of viewed as almost like the second biggest regulator and there’s you know around 500 people that work at yasa versus you know the FAA will have something like 45,000 people that work there so it is sort of the dominant Global um you know regulator but the US has done a poor job when it came to air dominance in drones in China with DJI has done a very good
[00:14:02] job and has a very significant market share majority market share um and has left the us behind and so there’s been a real kind of drive from you know the White House all the way down bipartisan that the US does need to maintain this leadership position and if there is a Tesla likee moment in the sky that needs to happen here in America and so there’s a big push to make sure that the Regulators are working very collaboratively with the companies obviously safety first but collaboratively to make sure it’s not a roadblock to actually get this industry to Market and that’s what we’ve seen we saw that with Billy Nan when he was the fa administrator and of course he stepped down and joined Archer but then the next administrator that went in actually came from an evall company um so Mike Whitaker the um the new fa administrator um came from Hyundai’s um evall company called superal so obviously there’s some you know kind of uh you know interesting things to at least note of what’s happening there so
[00:15:01] we have seen a lot of that you know The Regulators actually being on board um which I think is really great um and I think these vehicles you know another reason why they are on board with these vehicles is they already have certified vehicles that are substantially less safe than what balls can be which are hel yeah it’s CRA it is crazy um in comparison can you talk about the safety because I think one of the things that’s beautiful about the design of of midnight is the safety factors can you speak about uh what you put what you built in yeah so one of the the points I didn’t get to in the list of like the advancements and that that you had mentioned is really around the electric engines and so if you look at a a helicopter and you know if you almost drew a circle around the rotor um that is what they call like the disc area you need a certain amount of disc area to lift spin you know spin a rotor at a certain speed u in order to generate enough lift to you know to lift these vehicles off the ground but when electric motors became an all of a sudden you had a new type of
[00:16:02] motor that could be scaled down and still very efficient and that was a game changer for the Evol industry and a huge just unlock which allowed you know the industry to really move forward so if you look at the midnight aircraft it has 12 um Electric engines um which have each one of the 12 have a set of uh propellers tied to them um and so that means instead of having one single point of failure like where the rotor is and then all the parts that go that LE into that rotor um with helicopters it can be as many as 200 to 300 single points of failure we have none zero single points of failure it’s a fully redundant aircraft so if we lost a motor or a propeller for any reason a fluke accident or bird strike or whatever the case is it’s no problem at all to the vehicle it can balance and trim as they say to make it stay stable and fly and complete its Mission um that is a huge huge Advantage um and so Electric engines really helped do that but we also were able to break apart the battery packs so not just one fuel
[00:17:00] source so if we had something happen to one of the battery packs we have six different battery packs that each power two diagonally opposed Motors so if we lost a battery pack we would only lose two engines and again still have 10 and can still fly and complete the exact same Mission so it is just such a higher level of safety than what um helicopters are able to provide because of the redundancy and that’s um a huge part of the ability to scale the industry do you need the pilot in the vehicle or is that to make people feel comfortable and get through fa regulation do you imagine a time when we’re going to see these air electric air taxis which are fully autonomous and if so what kind of time frame would you imagine you don’t need a pilot um um from a like a technical perspective from a um practical when when Theory meets practice uh you do need a pilot so I think for a couple reasons one is in order to start a new industry like this it’s going to be critical to make people not only just you know understand that these are safe
[00:18:01] but really feel safe and I think Pilots are a big part of that journey and so the pilots can be there to reassure you to you know it’s kind of like when you you know you uh you look over at the uh you know the person on the plane to see if they’re nervous to see if you know you should be nervous um you know the people there I think can really help um that being said um there are already a lot of features built into the vehicles from the very beginning that will reduce pilot workload and um prevent the pilot from crashing the plane so things like envelope protection so the pilot can’t roll the plane over um they can’t stall the plane um so there are features that have been built in that will help um really again allow these vehicles to uh you know to scale from a from a safety perspective but if we really do want to scale Beyond you know uh 10,000 20,000 50,000 100,000 Vehicles there is a point where we certainly will need to go autonomous because there simply Aren’t Enough Pilots out there to do this the way you get there though is Ally piloted so you can build the vehicles with the
[00:19:00] Autoland features um that can take over if anything happens to the pilots and then ultimately gets people comfortable and then you start removing the pilots uh you can do that by having pilots on the ground and then finally just no Pilots at all just completely out of the yeah I can imagine uh especially with the progression of AI and we’re seeing autonomous vehicles it’s going to become I mean there is an argument to be made that at some point it’s safer without the pilot in the vehicle um and I’ve heard that I’ve heard those conversations for commercial jet airliners um where human induced error is a you know a significant percentage of the of the problems out there but I’ll put that aside for a separate conversation on the on the FAA I want one uh so initially Archer Archer is an aviation your Transport Service um do you do you liken yourself to more of an Uber where I’ve got my app and I need to get from Santa Monica to Dodger Stadium uh and I
[00:20:01] just tell it where I’m starting where I’m ending and um it gives me a slot is that what it sounds like feels like yeah I think that’s the sort of the right approach from a go to market perspective um there will be a um you know I think a solution that is available to the masses there may be I’m sure VIP type of services you can imagine you know corporates you know could have their own you know type of uh you know VIP service or you know certain different groups that make sense for Hospital systems that kind of thing um especially in the beginning though I think it’s going to be critical that um Archer as the OEM really manages a lot of the data to make sure we fully understand the safety uh you know of these vehicles maintenance of these vehicles and um you know we protect that you know very very critically and so I don’t see us selling individual vehicles um you know on a significant basis um because of that um and I think it will you know there’s
[00:21:00] other ways to accomplish the same goals so if you want one Peter you know it’ll be interesting for you in LA but what when what happens when you leave LA right like you can go to New York and so there are other variations of that um that you can gain access to the vehicles um in a similar type of uh service you know if you think about like what netjets did you know that’s like an example of a premium version of um you know air travel that’s more convenient um that’s a bit more private but you don’t physically have to own the plane yourself because you don’t use it all the time um so like how often would you use it um even if you used it just once a day or twice a day it’s still the plane would just be sitting there you know unused um and because they’re expensive I think there are other ways to actually you know reuse them um to again keep keeping the cost at at a price point where it can become more everyday use um instead of just novelty so I want to walk through a little bit how cuz the last time I really dove into the operations of this I was at um The
[00:22:00] Uber Elevate conference um uh back years ago when Uber was thinking about autonomous uh air taxis and the idea was there were going to be electric um verti ports that would sort of be Regional and I just saw uh an announcement uh that you and a dear friend who works for you nille um put out that you’re you’ve you’ve ined a deal with Atlantic Aviation congratulations on that that’s huge thanks yeah so for those who don’t know Atlantic Aviation is a fixed Base operator I fly my airplane out of Santa Monica out of the Atlantic um FBO there and they’re all over uh North America um and so idea is you’d have charging stations there and so I would when I go to my Archer app and I say I want to fly from A to B it would say go to this location and get on and it’s char there so walk through some of that Logistics give give paint a vision
[00:23:01] of what what it’s going to look like when it’s operational so you’re at your house in Santa Monica you open up your Uber app which will you know be integrated and you you know you want to go from you know Santa Monica to let’s say um you know the crypto Center to go watch a Lakers game you um can kind of book the entire service that way uh the first leg of the service will be uh a new comes and picks you up takes you from your house to a verta port a place where you start your journey you take you take off and land the good news about ver pors is they require very little infrastructure all we really need um is charging and so um you know in obviously a safety area and so the um the vehicles will charge using similar type of technologies that you see with EVS so 2C just like a Tesla Supercharger charge app how long how long would you imagine a charge takes for and it depends how exhausted the batteries are but what’s the typical charge time so um you know the the
[00:24:02] typical trip that we would fly so say like a you know a 25 mile trip if we were going from you know I don’t know LAX to northern part you know somewhere in La maybe uh you know somewhere in Malibu um a trip like that um will only use a small percentage of the battery and So the plan is to really just top just top off at each of the legs so you’re really only charging during the loading and unloading of passengers you’re not ever really just sitting down not using the plan because they’re just sitting there charging now when you do take you know full trips um you know uh you using kind of a bigger chunk of the battery you will have to charge for longer and you can charge the batteries up in 30 to 40 minutes um all the way up from start to finish again yeah yeah again very very quick charge and that just will get better over time so like our joke is like this is the worst product we’ll ever build um and so um because it just keeps getting better because the core underlying Technologies just keep getting better uh so uh we’ve just gotten to the verta port let’s call it the Atlantic uh
[00:25:02] Aviation terminal at Santa monic airport the vehicles unloaded um and I’m getting on you’re topping it off um we are this is fully a uh is this a part 121 operation a part 135 operation in FA parin yeah they’re part 135 and so these are um you know you should be able to go from your car walking out of uber into the air in 90 seconds I know that’s possible I know that’s possible because I’ve done that many times on helicopters I’ve done that in New York City and so places with complicated airspaces with vehicles you know that are in tightly constrained areas so 90 seconds you walk in and you’re in the air and you’re on your journey so let’s talk about the profile you’re climbing uh straight up you’re climbing at an angle um these vehicles are vertical takeoff in horizontal flight but can you describe a little bit what that what that profile
[00:26:00] might look like yeah a lot of it will depend on where you are at but we want to get into forward flight as soon as possible because it’s um the least intensive on the batteries so pure hover is just draining the battery at a a rapid rate so think about you know in your Tesla um you know you slam on the pedal but not for very long because it ends up goes 0 to 60 in two to three seconds so it’s very quick so then you take your foot off of it but if you were to hold it down you’re you’re draining the battery much faster so the hover is US putting our foot you know on the pedal and so that is what’s draining the battery so we do want to move into forward flight as fast as possible just to again preserve The Preserve the the charge that’s in there so typically you’ll start moving forward pretty quickly but you’ll do it at a rate that’s you know you know very comfortable and so um you know you can um um again the videos that we’ll show of the vehicles will always be boring because we never show like what the planes can really do because we don’t want people to imagine themselves in the plane while it’s banking at a very hard angle or it’s accelerating you know at a
[00:27:01] very rapid Pace we always show like kind of smooth boring um plights so it’ll climb up to around 2,000 feet um you know in a forward motion um and then the same thing descend again you know very um you know gently um to allow you to go back down now if there’s complicated airspace and there’s um you know uh you know things that you need to fly around you may Ascend or descend you know for a much um longer period of time so for example in New York City if you fly from if you take like blade from like the blade West Side on 34 Street to like the Hamptons right when you get to the Hamptons you have to ascend to a very high level to just reduce noise um because these vehicles are much quieter they won’t have that same problem but there are other you know um you know situations like that where you might have to climb at certain areas just to get around certain airspace and if you’re folks are not familiar with the evall again electric vertical takeoff or Landing um there’s a number of different approaches
[00:28:00] and some of them have wings like midnight and some of them are just uh multicopters they’re just they’re drones um and the wing enables a massive efficiency of of energy and also much higher speed I assume yeah it’s funny I remember Peter I I saw you at the maker unveil that we did in 2021 and at Hawthorne airport yeah right next tox yeah and in in a Paul was there uh you know that the actor from Westworld and um if the the episodes that were coming out um you know during that same year he was flying around in an Eevee TL they were all um wingless vehicles um and so you know we talked about that and he said oh why do you have a wing the ones in the show if you’ve seen they don’t have wings um the wing um actually provides lift and reduces uh you know energy usage which allows the vehicles to just perform better it also adds a safety feature because these vles don’t auto rotate so you can’t um like with a helicopter you
[00:29:01] can kind of uh you know keep using the air on the way down to rotate um you know the rotor to you know for to slow you down so you don’t just go down at at too fast of a rate but these vehicles have a wing and so they can actually Glide um on the wi yeah so if the engines if the engines go out if you know if you get uh an I am never mind uh if the if the engines go out you could just you can glide to a landing at an airport exactly so if you think about the levels of certification that like let’s say like an A380 has like one of the biggest you know planes out there you know you’re certifying at an extraordinarily high level of safety um where you know you’re you’re you’re looking at one in a billion you know chances one in a billion flight hours of something catastrophic happening and the reason you can certify levels that High um are because of the redundancy because inevitably parts will fail that’s why you need redundancy and so the wing is the ultimate redundancy so again six batter battery packs 12 engines none of
[00:30:00] the battery packs are connected none of the engines are connected so for all of them to fail like one after the next after the next after the next after the next it’s so unlikely that’s how you get to those safety standards that are similar to the big commercial airliners that we know today and ultimately you still have the wing yeah uh okay so we have uh just taken off we in our flight profile uh we get to our location um now one of the things that’s interesting is is where you can land and take off because uh you know and I’m just curious in the beginning I imagine you’re going to be operating out of traditional Aviation hubs um but you tell me I don’t know Atlantic Aviation being one of them but I can imagine uh like for example you know I have friends of mine who live in Tanga and uh when I fly my have an SR22 when I fly out of Santa mon airport I’m over to panga in you know in five minutes you know max if on the wrong day trying to drive there it can take me a
[00:31:01] good over an hour uh so can you imagine that there will eventually be sort of land small Landing ports uh in in convenient locations for regional communities that you’ll service yeah absolutely I think there will be um you know there’s there there’s you know several different ways to think about you know where you can start and where you can stop one version of this is just simply point-to-point um service where there’s routes where people are already taking you know every single day so again Manhattan to one of the three airports um you know there’s something like 30 million trips per year just going from Manhattan to one of three airports so you could effectively have u a gondola in the sky that just runs those routes from the the from the you know the the ver deports to the airports going all day every day non-stop you know like every two minutes it’s taken off and going right yeah or just think like a it’s like a ski lift right they just never stop they just keep going it doesn’t matter which one you get on it’s like green light or red light if you can do it so that is a a
[00:32:00] version of it which I think will happen um other versions will be where they can actually fly you know um you know the routs that aren’t necessarily um exactly uh planned that way um and so that starts to get into Political conversation where you know in um California that’s much harder to do than it is in Texas so you know I’ve uh I’ve flown on helicopters in Texas and you can land wherever you want to land um first California it’s very specific where you need to land um and so there’s different rules for different places um and then also depending on the congestion so New York City will be obviously extremely tight on what you can do regardless of the politics just because it’s so congested there the airspace is actually quite crowded um but it’s also still because it’s quite crowded they’re they’re used to having many Vehicles operating um all the time so at any given point in time in New York City you can see helicopters flying you know big commercial airlines flying um you know tour you know tour operators flying there’s all types of aircraft in the air at all times in New York city so that’s why it’s also a good place to start because we’re already used to it
[00:33:00] and there’s already a lot of established rules on how to do I find that I find that impressive that you’re starting in one of the most difficult uh air traffic control congested areas versus starting in the middle of the Midwest right where you know it’s prairies and and cattle so let’s talk about when are you going to get operational where where are you in Certification testing operations you’ve also announced some great contracts with players can you speak to sort of where the rubber or the uh the road is hitting the air so to speak yeah so New York City is really interesting for several reasons to start one is it’s just the global stage and if you think about you know people from all around the world that come there I want the CEO of Charles the gall to call me and say hey Adam I just took you know one of your planes from you know JFK to Manhattan that was incredible you have to bring this to Charles de gal you have to this is that was unbelievable so New York City has that draw um ver in Kansas that’ll be harder to get to it will obviously be easier to operate in Kansas
[00:34:01] because the airspace will be so much less crowded um the second thing is I lived in New York City for 20 years so I love New York City I I feel like I’m more of a New Yorker than anything else um and so for me it’s like kind of a homecoming um to be able to do that so that’s another reason why um I also think the other thing that you know people don’t talk about as much and maybe it’s not cool to talk about it um is this is an extraordinarily Capital intensive business um the thing that has allowed it to to happen um really it’s the technology it’s the kind of you know political nature of where we are with The Regulators meaning they’re they want this to happen too which is very positive but then it’s the capital so at even if the other two things happened until the capital markets opened up to a point where we could actually do this um you couldn’t actually get it going and so thankfully for whatever reason the capital Market’s opened I guess you could probably thank Tesla for for having a very successful Hardware business it enabled companies like Archer which were very small nent you
[00:35:01] know companies to raise substantial amounts of capital so we raised you know almost a billion dollars of capital um in you know uh you know in our IPO and and by the way we had 45 people working at Archer at that point and so it was a very you know you know low amount of people to go out and do this because you need money a lot of money upfront to start this so New York City is really important for lots of reasons if you think about the next phase and scill out manufacturing capital is going to be just as important and so we need the people that control some of the largest you know pools of capital to see these vehicles to feel these vehicles and ride them and I i’ because I’ve done it the first time you experience like a helicopter an urban air Mobility trip and you get to do an amazing day all of a sudden the world changes for you so the trips that you know we offer investors all the time are come to California we will make you drive from SFO down to our office in San Jose it’ll
[00:36:00] take you 45 minutes an hour it’ll suck you’ll then come see the headquarters you’ll see the factory next door we’ll then go to San Jose which is five minute drive from from our headquarters which is next to Levi Stadium we’ll fly you on our helicopter down to flight test uh which is down in silliness like right outside of Monteray it’ll be a 15-minute flight it’ll replace a 90-minute drive you’ll come see some planes fly we’ll then fly to Napa we’ll go have lunch we’ll then fly SFO and you’ll leave and that is an incredible day that people can experience using a helicopter that will all of a sudden understand what the future is about to be like because you could not do anything like that without an air vehicle because it’s just too much time on the ground and by the way you feel good and refreshed you haven’t spent that much time in a vehicle you’re it’s it’s moving actually really fast and you got to do lots of different cool things once you experience that it’s just you see the future it’s like the first time I put on an Oculus headset I was like oh my God I I understand virtual reality now that was just
[00:37:00] mind-blowing to me same thing first time you you experienced urbaner Mobility you are like Game Changer I understand what’s about to happen yeah yeah it’s it’s interesting um my experience of that was massively I mean I’ve done that in New York you know just basically getting from to and from JFK uh and Manhattan but the place that really lit me on fire was Brazil in uh in South Paulo I don’t if youve ever spend any time down there but everybody’s got a helicopter to avoid the incredible traffic down below and it’s like their helicopters flying everywhere so I imagine that’s going to be a huge market for you yeah absolutely and just one more point on that too Peter we talk a lot about these um you know we talk a lot about these um you know kind of commuting Solutions but the you know the the routes we don’t talk about I think are actually the really interesting one which are it’s it’s all the future things that these vehicles can do so I believe someone who knows maybe it’s
[00:38:01] maybe it’s Archer um maybe it’s me Will build an amazing project 15 miles outside of La in the middle of the desert you can only get to it by plane and you can fly there in five minutes but it feels like you’re at the amanar which is like a gorgeous hotel in the middle of Utah it’s like kind of known as the nicest hotel um in America and it it can be something you do to go to work it can be something you do to go you know stay overnight um it can be something you do just to get away there are experiences that people will start to build using these vehicles that are totally different non-commuter routes that I think are going to just be a totally new way of living
[00:39:26] e
[00:40:09] I I love that it’s it’s uh building the the cities of the future right I mean it used to be that you’d go move to New York or Detroit or Chicago or LA because that’s where the education was what entertainment was that’s where the jobs were and um given autonomous cars EV tall and and things like starlink um there’s going to be brand new modes of of living um and that’s that is beautiful talk about when you’re going to see your first commercial flight and first commercial services and who are your customers right now so there are there there are two ways uh to get to Market um the first way is the way that we’ve been talking about which is through the FAA um through traditional you know routes going from you know Manhattan to JFK those routes the plan is to get certified and start operations in 2025 that’s been our goal that’s been
[00:41:01] our Target and we know we remain on track for that Target right around the corner the yeah the the other version of that though is we will make alternative plans to launch regardless of the timing of the regulator so we already started um by um when we announced last year some of the contracts uh that we did with the Department of Defense um where we will start delivering aircraft and um you know they will be used in you know non-kinetic use cases so not war machines um but for all different types of scenarios so there’s a you know handful of aircraft we can start making those deliveries on but then we’ll also look for alternative routes the way the Drone industry did it so you know we’ve been looking at the Drone industry which I think is really fascinating you know zipline is a good example they went to amazing amazing yeah a really great business model delivering blood um so you know we will talk to you know world leaders um and you know start to find places where we can start to you know become an operating company um whether
[00:42:01] it’s humanitarian um you know delivering doctors or you know supplies or food um to areas that are hard to get to I had I had a conversation with um a CEO of one of the large mining companies and he told me um that um you know they bring um supplies doctors uh food medicine to uh a community u in abin community um in Australia and um he was asking if he could buy you know hel if he could buy the you know the planes from us because said he uses a fleet of helicopters today to do it and he wants to increase the size of his Fleet but it’s so expensive to operate and maintain the helicopters um and so those are great places to go um where you’re not flying over crowded Urban centers um but you are doing something great for Humanity with a you know a project that will be on the one yard line you know with the regulator kind of waiting for the final sign offs that I think we will be able to find ways to operate um kind of before certification and and that’s like almost like a hedge to you know the the regulator is hard to you know we don’t call the shots they do and so uh you
[00:43:01] know when whenever they let us uh you know start operating it’s going to be obviously a great day but we also will start operating in 2025 no matter what amazing you know people when they see the these evall vehicles they think of the military Osprey which has an awful track record um of safety and it’s couldn’t be more night and day um just to compare and contrast one second because I can imagine imagine the the military replacing those vehicles with this next Generation yeah so they’re actually just two totally different categories of vehicles so the Osprey is a huge vehicle um with a very um um you know High ability to you know carry payload and travel far distances um so that vehicle is extraordinarily complex um one of the guys that ran program at uh you know for you know when they were building the osprey was over at Archer running program and he said the cross shaft the
[00:44:02] part that you know goes between the two rotors he said was heavier more expensive and more complex than our entire vehicle just the one part the cross shaft and so that one part had to make sure you know the um the fuel could go back and forth to the two um you know rotors in case one of them went out um so that is extraordinarily complex vehicle this is a very very simple vehicle and the Simplicity Behind these vehicles are actually and and the similarity of these vehicles to cars are actually why the automakers are so heavily involved so Archer has a big partnership with stellantis it’s the third largest automaker out there Jeep Ram Maserati PUO and um we have they’re an incredible partner for us helping us manufacture um they provide Capital they provide engineering guidance um they’ve been a great partner and and you know there’s other automakers out there too that have been involved in the industry so I would actually equate these vehicles closer to cars than those complex Vehicles like Ospreys um so they’re kind of on different spectrums
[00:45:01] the other thing too is they have giant ospre have giant rotors and the bigger the rotor the harder it is the rotor Dynamics get extremely challenging we have much smaller propellers which are just much easier to uh to use let’s talk about Air Traffic Control here so your flying are do you imagine that in volume operation I mean let me start let me ask a different question first uh five or 10 years from now how many are being produced per year what’s the volume potential for something like this so it’s funny one of the um one of the guys at stallant said look Adam it so I I was I was bragging I was like oh the facility that we’re making in you know in Georgia in the first phase it can produce up to 650 planes and in the second phase 2300 planes per year I was like it’s unbelievable and he’s like yeah you know 2,000 planes is cool it was it was like but you know what’s really cool it’s like a million planes per year uh it was like the social networking moment when uh you know Justin Timberlake says to you know the you know the Mark Zuckerberg character he’s like you know what’s cool a billion
[00:46:00] dollars that’s what I felt like I was like oh I felt really stupid 2,300 playing seems really you know not like a lot um and so that’s how the automakers think and scale um so there are step changes um that need to happen um and then there are adoption kind of curves that need to happen but that’s why the international markets are so interesting because there are places like India that have an extraordinarily challenge ahead of them in terms of scaling infrastructure so the US by the way for people don’t realize this India an amazing Nation a very intelligent scientific engineering english- speaking and one of their major holdbacks is their transportation ecosystem yeah in the the us. we have 950 cars per thousand people in India there’s 200 car uh sorry 20 cars per thou 20 cars per thousand people and the same equivalent of the JFK to Manhattan takes you three hours there I’ve done it um in Delhi and bangaluru and hosur it is a uh it is Extreme the traffic it’s
[00:47:01] brutal yeah and it’s only going to get worse as they continue to industrialize so they need technology to Leap Frog 2D transportation and so um that’s why there’s been such an interest and we’ve partnered with uh Rahul baa from Indigo which is the largest airline in India it’s like 60 plus percent market share um and he’s very close with uh you know Prime Minister Modi who wants to find Transportation Solutions so when you start to look outside the US in the international markets there is a real potential to LeapFrog politics where you know in the US if you want to talk about putting you know a million Vehicles into the air you can imagine you know uh the challenges of of scaling things here Beyond just the traditional challenges the political challenges are tough internationally there are places that need this that they they it’s almost like they have to have this I also Imagine I also Imagine This for Africa right Africa went from landline tany to mobile um and revolutionize the nation
[00:48:00] where you telepan in Africa is better than some parts of the United States but I can imagine you know so there’s such little road infrastructure in the African subcontinent um that this could be uh transformational if you get the volumes up and the cost down and as you said it’s just you know the electrons become free after a while um and it’s the cost of infrastructure yeah absolutely so so when you’re so let’s talk about you know tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of vehicles flying uh as you know packet switched uh humans uh point to point um is is the air traffic control system able to handle that does it does it go fully automated what do you you know what’s the conversations with the fa like where what’s your hope because I mean listen as a pilot um it’s as much as I respect the hard work the fa does and air traffic control does insane right now that they they read me
[00:49:01] over an open crackly radio and I have to write down you know the details of my IFR flight plan and then I have to read it back and that’s just crazy yeah I think there’s a lot of uh parts of the sort of old infrastructure that need to get redone um the good news is we can launch using the existing infrastructure there will be a you know kind kind of a period of time where there’s both helicopters and eveve TS and then ultimately switch out I think for all of these you know electric airplanes and so that transition period will take some time there’s still 50,000 helicopters out there so we still have to you know that’ll still take us many years to build and replace those vehicles um but ultimately we’ll have to um I think completely change the system here the good news is NASA has been working on this for over a decade um so there’s a lot of um you know work that’s been put into this um but it is a Monumental task for for sure a lot of it will also depend on you know it’s funny when you
[00:50:00] look at the movies right and I was thinking you know back to like The Fifth Element where Bruce Willis is driving an air taxi right it’s actually an air taxi um they’re driving on lines like in in you know in a line like in a road it’s it’s actually you know you can manage that you’re effectively just managing making sure you don’t bump the you know the you know the vehicle in front of you so I can see that you know routes that get planned heavy use routes that get planned where they become actually very dense um that they start to operate like that because they’re they’re it’s easy easier to get volume that way because all you’re really doing is spacing these vehicles and then with the autonomy features you can put um you know it’s actually much easier to do that and again because it’s it’s different than um you know terrestrial Vehicles where there’s the the the long tail is just so great you know there can be any number of scenarios that can happen that are almost impossible to train for um in the air you can see from all directions and there’s nothing really like coming at you the sky is basically empty um and it’s uh infinitely scales effectively so
[00:51:00] um it allows just a lot more room to put a lot more more more more vehicles in the air so it’s going to be hard um but I think it’s actually um you know something that’s been worked on for for quite some time and is very doable and there there is a lot of room and AI will be our friend and the sensors and the technology to enable autonomy there um is here now and it’s a matter of when do we get the regulatory structures I want to turn the ation to the origins of Archer cuz you know folks listening who are um aspir to building moonshots you know because listen as Peter teal said you know the world was expecting flying cars and got 140 characters um and it’s I mean the idea of the a flying car to use that that term has always been the definition of the future right there’s the Jetson and it’s like when are we going to have flying cars well they’re here um uh and they you know I remember earliest days
[00:52:01] of these conversations when people were talking about maybe now we can have these uh vertical takeoff and Landing vehicles and uh over like over the the the span of like a year or two a dozen companies uh really uh materialized I I do believe Archer is in my mind uh you know top of the stack in terms of how far you’ve come and what you’ve built so congrats on that but can you take me back to when you when this entered your mind as a yeah I’m G to go build or go build a company to do that because it’s kind of a crazy desire and then to actually I want to talk about how how’ you start yeah so my story isn’t I guess I don’t know if there is a typical founder story but you know I actually started when I graduated college um and I went to work um it was 2001 so I got
[00:53:00] hired in 2000 to to get a job which was basically the end of the doom boom um and I actually went and I became an investment banker and I actually didn’t know what investment banker was I did it for Mar Lynch and the only reason I did it was because you know one of my my friends uh family members had said that’s not really a job for you Adam that’s more of a job for some of the ivy league kids and I was like ivy league kids no way I’m a state school kid I will get job and I literally dedicated myself to the next you know really 18 months to getting that job I end up getting that job um my second day of work was 911 and so I worked um really two I I worked in the world financial center which was effectively one block away from the World Trade Center and I lived um about um four blocks north of the Trade Center and so I’m walking to work in this new city in New York which i’ spent basically no time in and you know literally the plane flies over my head into the building I watch it all happen and then of course the second one
[00:54:00] and it was just this completely shook me and um I I I left banking after six months because effectively there was nothing to do um because the world basically stopped and I went to work for a hedge fund but hedge funds in back in 2002 were not what they are today that was the wild west of investing and I ended up working for a guy um that was you know just an absolute genius and he had said to me I’m going to show you how to find Value in the world um and his big thesis was follow the research wherever it takes you public private it doesn’t matter and so we did all types of crazy stuff together um looking at public companies private companies um you know I remember where we you know we we actually invested in um beespa the Brazilian uh Stock Exchange and it was um a private company and we had went and figured out a way to buy seats on a foreign you know you know country’s Stock Exchange which was very hard to do through other entities which ultimately demutualized and ended up going public
[00:55:00] and was very successful all these things were basically like impossible impossible things to do it was like you can’t go buy seats on a on a stock exchange of a foreign country they will never let you do that as an American it was always started with the no and he was like I’ll show you how to um you know get things done and find Value so again I mean it’s very different than like the you know going to work today and just like you know buying a stock and shorting another stock um and it was kind of the wild west back then we also um invested in in Bitcoin very early um off the white paper uh you know the you know the the early early days and so it was a um you know just a wild period of time but all that was training and I studied what makes companies good and what makes companies bad what makes Industries good what makes Industries bad but as I was following that research I started looking at tech companies I started um you know investing in tech companies and then I started um building tech companies and so I started messing around um on the internet and what I quickly discovered was the same thing that you know as that you always find
[00:56:00] which is it’s not reserved for the few It’s actually an open system that anyone can go and compete in and start building stuff and it was just so fun and so I built a bunch of different things failed pretty much every single time um but ultimately figured figured some stuff out each time that you know I I would start I would start an idea or project um it always was very sound in nature but getting an idea is nothing getting somebody to use your product is really hard getting a lot of people to use your product is extraordinarily hard getting people to pay for your product is unbelievably hard and a lot of people to pay for your product is is is absolutely extraordinary and so the whole crossing the chasm concept was always very interesting to me and so um my last company um you know that I that I had started um was a company called vety it was a software-based business in the recruiting space um I did it with a partner and um you know it was a really really fun company where we we had a great time a great culture um it wasn’t really in the space that we wanted to be in um but it was a um a really great
[00:57:02] experience it was taught you know taught us all about raising capital and you know building teams and recruiting and scaling products and all that all that good stuff which all of this was training for for Archer which led me to that but the one thing at at veter that I just hated was the grind of sales and so like the month-to month you start over you know each time and so as you know I thought about you know a next company one of the things that was really important was the tech was so good that I wouldn’t have to sell it it could actually sell itself and so um when you start thinking like that like your product has to be really amazing and you start to think about products in your life that are like that they’re not very many of those right maybe your iPhone maybe your Apple computer maybe your Tesla there’s not many that you can keep going down a list that if you replaced it with something else you don’t really care who cares it’s fine whatever um you know it’s that one pair of jeans for another pair of jeans it’s fine right right right so um so I started looking at much bigger and bigger projects um with really
[00:58:01] interesting Tech now when I looked at um electrification and transportation um we had been following you know Elon for a long time and as an Entre what year are you in now at this point so um in really you know at the the bettery years you know were 2015 um you know really to about 2018 um that was like where it got became like successful um and ultimately sold it to a company called the Ado group um who um lot so many incredible lessons there too so many interesting you know know things that that happened um but um one one you know sold the you know sold the company um started thinking about you know different ways to to grow in scale and I remember reading you know the um um you know the book on Elon Musk and just being so inspired at the big projects that he did um and the moonshots the moonshots out there yeah exactly and reading the Peter theel books you know 0 to one and those kind of you know stories and a lot of lessons were really
[00:59:00] interesting where the bigger the projects that you build like the more inspiring it is actually in a way the easier it is um and that’s like a kind of an interesting thing to say but it’s actually very true it’s much easier to hire it’s much easier to raise a lot of capital for um you know at veter it was very hard it was like hey come over we’re doing this really cool thing and building a talent Marketplace it’s really hard to recruit that way versus hey we’re going to go change the future of Transportation building flying cars like it’s a much better pitch um for people um but you have to be credible to do that and so having sold V gave me credibility to do this it wasn’t like I was just a crackpot it was like oh this is actually a you know a person that’s like done real stuff been serious has has sold some stuff the other thing that was just a such a huge factor in being able to do this was the ability to raise capital and so through my 20 years in New York City I had made a lot of great friends um I had made people money over the years from my Finance days and then i’ made people money over the years in my startup days I built a good network
[01:00:00] but a lot of my friends were running Banks running funds and so it allowed the network that I had built allowed me to leverage my track record and go raise a substantial amount of capital so you know again we were 45 people raised a billion dollars of capital that was pretty unprecedented and maybe it was a moment in time that we just you know were lucky that that that we hit um but that was a uh you know kind of a critical piece but when I looked at the business models of what was going on in the industry of you know these you know evall companies nobody was building a vehicle that was based around a business model it was very much R&D and so there were autonomous only you know companies that I you just knew the FAA was never going to let you take the market in the near term there were companies 3D printing there were companies building planes without a wing which meant your your range and your payload capabilities were so limited you could not create a business and so I kind of put back on my you know more practical head thinking about my old job of what would I want to hear and so we built a vehicle that was
[01:01:02] based around a business model and and that was shockingly very attractive to the engineering community and so that pitch was was was quite interesting because people have been working on this for a long time and so one of the guys that I met early was a guy named Tom munes who was the head of engineering at zero which is kind of the original eeve company that Larry pagee started yeah I remember Larry Larry Paige pulled me aside one time he was on my board at X prise and I said so what are you what are you working on that no one else knows about he goes I’m I’m building flying cars like so he really paved the way for you know for a lot of the industry and he started a number of companies in this in this era he and Sebastian thrun yep yeah and so um when I talked to Tom and said well Tom why don’t we just go try to build a plane that could actually get to Market um instead of an R&D project and and he was like I am 100% on board let’s
[01:02:00] go do it and so Tom was on board and then a really funny thing happened this journalist wrote this article that said hey um there’s a company called Archer it’s a new EV talk company that’s hiring up engineers and paying them three times what they normally make which was not true um but it was the best advertisement you could ever have um and everybody would talk to us all of a sudden and so um we ended up hiring the best team in the world just such an incredible group of Engineers and went for it and built it and so the concept of you know our saying was always find the most efficient path to Market um we followed the Tesla Model which is build the Roadster get it to Market and then then we’ll build the model S don’t try to build the model S first that went back to our strategy a lot of the industry was vertically integrating um we tried to buy as much stuff off the shelf as possible we ended up building the powertrain ourselves because you couldn’t buy it but everything else we would vertically uh we would you know buy from a tier one supplier that lowered the risk um to The Regulators
[01:03:00] because they’re very familiar with most of the parts that we use um which again was a great message back to the you know the capital you know allocators which allowed us to raise such a substantial amount of capital which allowed us to be where we are today it’s amazing um the old you know saying no bucks no Buck Rogers um it really is is true here so it’s interesting when I think about because you didn’t come from an aviation background you didn’t come from even a a physical manufacturing or engineering or Automotive or rocket background um and and do you think that held you back in any ways or did that give you an advantage unconstrained um I think about my job as kind of like four core areas um Vision Capital people and risk and it’s it’s an augmented ver of Mark Lori who is one of my good friends and investors who has both both
[01:04:00] you and Mark will be speaking at abundance 360 this year we’ll be at the lon Summit so excited excited for that yeah he’s he’s great yeah excited to be there yeah he’s he’s awesome he’s a he’s a great you know Visionary entrepreneur um and and and so I have a very clear vision of what we want we need to do like for example this year the goal is extremely clear which is to fly um the piloted like production aircraft like that is the single goal for this year so by having very clear goals like that it allows people to optimize around decisions which allows you to get things done and move really really fast so that that has been very effective I’m very good on the capital side just because of my background and um you know I um um I’ve been able to make people I have a good track record of of of doing it which has been helpful um and then I spend a lot of my time on the people’s side and really trying to make sure we hire the best people and you know I really believe in the you know Steve Jobs adage where hire the best people and they tell you what to do not you telling them what to do um and so if you
[01:05:00] can truly hire the best people you can do that as long as they have a very clear vision of what to do um you can get these people to work together and then I’ll spend a lot of my time understanding where the risks lie and trying to make the big calls um to make sure you know we go left or right to avoid the uh you know the big pitfalls um I do think it was an advantage when I look at the um the competitors um because I don’t have the desire to chase the shiny objects in our space there’s so many shiny objects because you know the you the the design space for Aviation has never been so wide open because electric motors scale down you could do so many cool things um so I don’t have that you know same that same Knack um and um I also think again it’s going to be critical um in this industry not only that we just execute um but that we can actually show we can build a real business because if you don’t build a real business you will not get the capital to actually be able to fulfill this dream because it is so capital intensive as you said Aviation is hard if you can’t find a way to make money um
[01:06:00] and that I think is actually the hardest thing about Hardware most of these Hardware products the question is not can you make it it’s it’s you yes you can make it the question is can you build a business around it which in other words is are you in the right decade right and that is the thing that you always have to figure out is did you pick the wrong decade unfortunately where cool you built an amazing you know toy but it’s too expensive to actually generate economic return therefore the Capital game does not last forever and the Cycles will hit you eventually you’ll hit a rough patch and you will run out of money with you know these big intensive Hardware companies for any moonshot entrepreneurs listening that is gold um because just because you can make it uh build it doesn’t mean the business is going to succeed uh and so many people uh you know have gotten the timing wrong and done it too early which is the same as just failing because the whole Market needs to be ready for you that includes people’s perspectives regulatory structures Capital markets
[01:07:03] you know everything I mean Bill gross from ideal lab who will also be with us at a360 gives some great talks about timing is one of the most critical things that you know the Uber came into existence because the iPhone was there because Google Maps was there because people wanted to make money after the 2008 recession it’s really funny people always ask me always ask me this question Adam do you regret going public or do you you know how does it feel they always ask in a negative connotation how does it feel to be public as a public company and the answer is it’s amazing are you kidding me we found a way to raise a billion dollars of capital with less than 50 people it was the best thing we ever did unquestioned it was great um and yes it’s definitely u a luck played a huge portion of it but we you know as nikelle likes to say increased our luck surface area by prepping for that and so I was had my ear to the ground and was very close to
[01:08:00] the spa market so a friend of mine who runs Capital markets at Morgan Stanley um you know I would check in with all the time and I would say how do I do this what tell me what’s going on and he would say well first of all there’s a there’s a big you know cash component you have to be willing to risk you have to go do a public company accounting audit pcob audit second thing you have to do is get all your legal docks in order which is very expensive and so after you’ve now spent $6 million now maybe if the market comes you can do this so it’s very expensive to just do the legal work to get ready for before you even like figure out if you going do any of this stuff so you spend we spent the money and then tried to understand what was happening in the spa market and niola was actually the one that was out there that was doing really well at the time and so a lot of the early companies paid attention and understood what the investors were interested in and that’s what what you know I think I did a good job of following that and Archer was the first company in the space uh to announce we announced before Joby um we went out and did it and we we picked a really great uh sponsor um in Ken Mullis
[01:09:02] um and so they were been extremely helpful to the company so Ken moles is one of the most prolific investment bankers in the world um so you know when he goes out and he talks to you know some of his clients or some of the you know the leaders of uh you know of the world he mentions Archer and he talks about it he’s almost like I joke I was like Ken you’re my lead gen guy um and so he’s uh you know that that was that was very effective in picking the right partner there and then again we hit and if you look at some of the competitors that went after us the difference of three months was a difference of 100% redemptions and no pipe and a huge pipe and 50% redemptions we had 48% redemptions and we raised a a monstrous pipe uh you know a $500 million you know $600 million you know round get got us up to you know almost $900 million so it was just again A lot of it was timing we definitely increased our luck surface area um and then um I think we’ve been responsible with the money too and we the whole thing has been on execution we have to show results for what we’re doing and that’s why if you listen you
[01:10:01] know back to what I said before which was we are launching in 2025 with or without um you know fa approval it doesn’t mean we’ll launch in the us but we will launch we will find markets to go launch because business model to me matters yeah and experience matters and demonstrated operations matters and I guess the next big thing is going to be going into Mass manufacturer um and maybe we can we can uh uh wrap on that subject you’re going to build plants to produce the midnight vehicle uh what are you thinking about so um we announced a big Factory in Covington Georgia which is right outside of Atlanta um great town I mean really great town it’s a cute little town with with an awesome square but also right next to George Tech um you know a good you know which is a great Aviation School great avation school um Governor Kemp has been very supportive um of bringing these green jobs um to the state so he was very they we got a great incentive package to go there um but a lot of my strategy has
[01:11:00] actually been focused on looking at what like apple did and so Apple the Apple foxcon relationship is really interesting Apple owns the design they own the manufacturing Engineering Process and then they work with foxcon on the um kind of operations manufacturing side the mass scaling of that and so our partnership with stellantis I think is really unique and it’s blossomed into a great relationship where um we focused very on design we’re working on the manufacturing and Engineering together and then ultimately the goal is to hand it off to them to go print so when you think about these companies um you know like stellantis they are absolute Masters at Logistics sourcing raw materials bringing them together keeping these things super tight managing the supply chain and getting stuff out the door they turn raw material into finished product in days and so they’re really incredible at doing that so when we think about scale I don’t I just didn’t think it made sense to look at the traditional Aviation companies um because they don’t build that scale it’s a very different mindset but the Autos do and there’s a
[01:12:01] lot of lessons learned there and again the partnership that we have with stellantis and specifically the CEO Carlos tarz is a really positive one that I think um we can both benefit from immensely and we can leverage um the you know really lessons in scaling that um stanas has shown with their vehicles I mean they’re building something like 500 600,000 cars per month um and so you know there’s just an incredible amount of things we can do and we can also be protected potentially protected I guess I should say from squeezes and raw materials and so you know when you think about different things getting you know cut off you’d want rather be one of the big guys than the little guys um and I think it is going to be important to protect against raw materials because especially on the anything that has to do with batteries um is going to get tight here at some point you know I remember having a conversation with Elon you said you know when you at the people try and protect their idea uh and he said the ratio of the value of the idea
[01:13:02] to the value of putting something into mass production is you know is is zero to Infinity um it’s just yeah the idea is the easy part it’s actually turning it into a business and actually operating at scale that’s everything yeah so I really like teth said you know his um his IP is his speed right so it’s almost like he didn’t care I think he does care but like you would say like you know we’re not trying to just protect the IP from a traditional way speed is the way that you protect it um and I really agree with that um it it also again like the like if if you look at like the market it’s really interesting you know the total addressable Market Tam for our industry is huge right you know Morgan Stanley put out a number they said it could be as big as nine trillion it’s like a an autosized number it’s one of the biggest markets out there um but you have in a certain point where you have to prove that too and so you know before you get to Market you’re in this typical like one to three billion dollar market cap range it’s the same place where Tesla
[01:14:01] rivian Lucid all were they all three were there as soon as they hit to production they all went to 30 billion so again go back and look at Tesla when they launched the Roadster you know the stock goes to 30 billion market cap rivan and Lucen did the same and then it’s up to you to prove that the Tam is real so Tesla obviously has made it rivan and Lucen are still trying to figure out if if you know that they’re they can be part of that story and so hitting production for us is really exciting but we have to prove the market is as big as we’re saying and so that not only just is the manufacturing hard but actually building the business is going to be hard and so I don’t want to underestimate the you know the the difficulty that is going to be too and so we’re very focused on that as well and we built up a good team internally to go start building up the um Airline operations and all the Partnerships that we’ve launched internationally but that that the the scaling of the operation side especially in our business is going to be quite challenging Adam Goldstein founder CEO of arch Aviation manufacturer of midnight evall uh I
[01:15:02] can’t okay if I can’t have one I can’t wait to fly in one um so 2025 is right around the corner listen thank you my friend thank you for the work that you your team nille are doing and uh a pleasure looking forward to seeing you uh in March at the Abundant Summit and uh and coming up to visit I want to come and see the plant come and see the vehic absolutely thank you for having me I appreciate it and you’re welcome anytime thanks pal all righty thank [Music] you