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Kyle Clark
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, BETA Technologies, Inc.

Kyle Clark - Beta Technologies [UP.Summit 2025]

📅 Oct 15, 2025 UP.Summit 15 MIN 13 SEGMENTS · 3 SPEAKERS
At UP.Summit 2025, Kyle Clark, Founder & CEO of BETA Technologies, shared a milestone year for the Vermont-based ...

Questions asked in this interview

1
  1. 0:01Dad, what's the future going to look like?
Child 0:01 ↗
Dad, what's the future going to look like?
Kyle Clark 0:15 ↗
All right. Well, it's really good to be back again. And I was just reminiscing this morning about the 2018 UpSummit when I was here. And every year, what we've done is we've simply told the story of what we've done over the last year of the company. And over time, it's created kind of a, I don't know, a sequel of things to build an aerospace company. And at the time, I described eight people who designed, built, and flew a 4,000lb vertical takeoff and landing airplane. And at the end of it was grabbed actually by Stuart Walton. And he made a trusting investment in our company along with a number of other people. And that was really a turning point and a catalyst for us. And at the end of that pitch, I showed a sketch of the airplane that you see out here. So last year showed up to the UpSummit and in January of last year, we got a certificate of occupancy of our production facility. And our goal was within the year to produce an aircraft out of the production facility that we opened in January. And we did that. And so I left the UpSummit saying that we were going to go and build our first production vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. So, this production facility isn't like just a regular building. It has class A clean rooms. It has all the power infrastructure that we need to test all the motors, the batteries, the safety infrastructure and flow airplanes directly out onto the Burlington International Airport and fly them away. We set a goal. We do this every 84 days within the company. We set an audacious goal and we all get behind it. Our goal was to fly our first production aircraft by November 11th. And we did that. And this is that morning, 5:00 am in the morning, the whole company showed up. And I had the pleasure of getting inside an airplane. And by the way, if there's a dramatic pause, it's not dramatic. It's because I just realized something dumb that I said. I'm going to go forward from there. Of getting in an airplane that was created by all the people on the ground. We make our own computers. We buy copper, steel, magnets and we make the motors. We make all the bits and bobs of the airplane and they all have to converge at the same place at the same time with the appropriate level of quality and perfection to go and fly the aircraft in the air. And this is images from that actual flight on November 11th. And I remember getting up, climbed, I think it was to 5,000 ft, pointed west, the Adirondacks are lit up, and it's just an amazing feeling to be in a machine that didn't exist earlier that year that was made by the people on the ground.
Perfect. Where's Jim Ensley? Is he here? Where's the guy I took flying? There he is. How was the flight this morning?

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Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Clark, K. (2025, October 15). Kyle Clark - Beta Technologies [UP.Summit 2025] [Interview transcript]. UP.Summit. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1165637/

MLA

Kyle Clark. "Kyle Clark - Beta Technologies [UP.Summit 2025]." UP.Summit, 15 Oct. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1165637/.

BibTeX
@misc{clark2025_1165637,
  author       = {Kyle Clark},
  title        = {Kyle Clark - Beta Technologies [UP.Summit 2025]},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, UP.Summit. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2025},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1165637/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}