You know, I hearken back to 2022 where our drones were delivering insulin into besieged cities in Ukraine. So, in the last 25 years, no other North American manufacturer has not gone bankrupt. But it's that purpose and that's that ethos of certainly not just me, but our entire company racking credit cards up, second mortgages on homes, all the rest of it, you know, just to survive in order to see this actually get to the point where it's at today. And there's nothing that the rest of our company would rather do.
Our innovator today is Cameron Chell, a serial entrepreneur, technologist, and current CEO of Draganfly, a leading drone manufacturer. His journey is unlike any other. From founding his first company at the age of 14 to leading billion-dollar ventures before losing it all, going bankrupt and homeless for 10 years. He then made a great comeback to become a successful CEO once again, this time with a different set of values. In this episode, Cameron opens up about what it takes to rebuild from rock bottom, the lessons learned through failure, and how he's applying them today, such as using his technology in working with county sheriffs on surveillance and operations along the southern border. This is Bay Area, and I'm your host, Stevie Spas.
Cameron, welcome to our program.
Well, thank you very very much for having me.
Cameron, great to have you here. Out of Vancouver, Canada, that's where you are now. So, you had an amazing career in so many ways. And I really want to start with, you know, you had your first company, your first business at age 14 and then you went through a cycle where you went all the way to the bottom and then you started again. It's very unique. I would love if you tell us a little bit about your start, what made you get into business, and how you came back up again because that's just such an amazing story.
Wow. Well, so first of all, thank you very much for having me on and for the consideration and thanks for the work that Epoch Times does. It's really important work and any way that we can support that appropriately, we definitely want to do that. So I grew up in a small farming community. My dad was the local butcher. He was a rancher also, and my mom was the local florist. So all I really knew was small business, what they call entrepreneurialism. It wasn't a word back then. But that's all I really knew. I didn't know that education was really a route—I just assumed that I was going to be in the agricultural world or I was going to have a small business of some sort. And so when I was about 14, I was lucky enough to—the computer revolution was on, and so I would piece together PCs and sell them to the local businesses and farmers. And I also installed duck ditches, I installed irrigation systems. And then from there I kind of went on and bought a little one-hour photo business and a little rental property and just kind of did those typical kind of things. But my father had always said to me, you can go and get a job, but in that job or in your businesses, you need to understand finance and money. But the rich know money, but the wealthy know people. So we were always very focused on how do we connect with people, how do we contribute to community, how do we make sure that what we're doing helps them succeed. And so he gave me great training in that, but he didn't have any finance background. And so I was lucky enough to study a securities course and started to learn about the markets and some things like that. And so that gave me a little bit of background.
But in about '94, myself and my brother-in-law came up with this idea that there's this new thing called the internet. And the idea was, what about if we built servers in a central location and allowed this thing called the internet to access these servers so that people didn't have to carry around, at that time, transportable computers—which I was building literally in my garage and selling to people. They didn't have to carry these around because they were the size of sewing machines, right? And a five-megabyte hard drive was about this big and cost thousands of dollars. And so they could actually have one computer in one place and just access it via terminal. And so it was a novel idea at the time and not really well accepted, that's for sure. But we ended up getting a client in a small auditing firm that thought it was a good idea because they didn't want to buy these transportable computers and there were already computers at their clients' locations. And so I'll make a very long story short, that's kind of how it got started. We had a real application. So the primary software people were using at that time for small and mid-market firms was called Great Plains, which is now Microsoft Dynamics. And so they ended up doing it and implementing it successfully. And then another little—this was back in the day where there were small regional audit firms. Now, of course, there's only three or four out there, the big four, a few others. And we got two clients and then three clients and then five clients and then eight clients, and we had a real little business.
I very much identify with that. In '91, when I was 21 years old, I had my first company as well, and it was very similar. I would have computer products, either an entire computer or parts, that I would send to Romania for them to assemble. And that was my first business. Obviously, it didn't grow very much because the limit that people in Romania had to buy computers was very low. But I very much identified—like buying different hard drives and motherboards and monitors and putting it together to build it. Now then you got to bigger things, right? Soon after that.
Yeah. So this thing called the dot-com was on, and I can't say I really knew much about it, but we kind of got classified as a dot-com business and we had a significant New York bank approach us. But so what else had happened at the time is that Microsoft had bought Hotmail, and so after we did Great Plains, we actually integrated the Microsoft productivity suite—Office and Excel and PowerPoint, etc., well, PowerPoint didn't exist at that time—into our offering, and it was the first subscription deal that Microsoft had ever done. And so I happened to be in the right room at the right time shortly after they bought Hotmail, and they were like, you know, what do we do with this thing? Like, nobody really understood client-server type things, and they were like, isn't that kind of what you guys do? And I was like, yeah, and they said, well, can you help us with this? And of course, I'm a salesman, so I said yes. Had no clue what I was talking about or what I was doing. And so we got to be deeply involved in how that unfolded. And so because of that and some notoriety that we got, we got contacted by a US investment bank—and they were big, I didn't even know they were big—and they said, you know, there's this thing called the dot-com and you're this little business that's doing 80 million bucks in revenue. Like, you want to go public? I'm like, sure, let's go. And next thing you know, we had a three-and-a-half-billion-dollar market cap in 2000 or 1999, and I was 25, 26, and didn't know what I was doing. And it was a great ride. I learned a ton. Prototypical—got fired about a year later, which was a good move for the company because I really didn't have the experience to be operating at that level.
But I was able to get a little bit of liquidity, so that was fortunate. So I invested—I think I was the first outside investor in a company called NetTeller, or close to one of the first—and got involved with them. And that company ended up going public in London and it became the largest mover of money in the offshore gaming space. And so again, probably seemed like good fortune at the time, but unfortunately I really thought I knew what I was doing and I didn't. And so, you know, things continued to kind of progress. I was acting like a big-shot financier, flying around on jets and that kind of stuff. And I was in New York for some meetings and was walking into the base of the towers on 9/11. And for sure a life-altering event, not as much for me as for most or that certainly that were there, and my hearts go to them obviously, all those that were affected by it. And yeah, my life was already kind of spiraling in the wrong direction, but that really solidified it. And that was the first night I remember thinking I'm just going to go get drunk, and I did. And about eight months later, I had disappeared. I completely checked out of life. Drinking progressed into harder substances. I ended up living on the street.
Would you say it was only the drinking that created this downward spiral?
Oh gosh. No, no, no. The drinking was a symptom of the challenges and the out-of-controlness of my life and the ego and everything else that were there. And the drinking just became a way to mask or cope with my own behaviors and ego. And then drinking turned into hard drugs and, as hard as you can imagine. So quite quickly I just completely checked out, didn't make any decisions, lost everything over the course of about two years.
And that was, you know, 20-ish years ago now. So I was very, very lucky. Grace of God, loving family, great friends, great friends. I was able to get myself cleaned up. Many trips to rehab, many trips to that type of stuff. And so since that time, again, grace of God, I've been clean and sober, and best thing that could have happened to me for sure.
For someone at 25 years old to have billions of dollars in a company, it's probably not easy to handle. I wonder—is there—are you now telling young entrepreneurs how to handle this? You know, it's probably very difficult, right, to have that much money or that much glamour at that young age, right?
Yeah, you know, some folks—there are certainly many other people, well, as a percentage very few, but there are many other people that have been in that situation, an even greater situation than that, and you've seen them handle it with grace and they've been successful. So if you think of the Zuckerbergs or the Steve Jobs or the Gates of the world or those types of things, their intellect and brilliance is far beyond what I ever could imagine it to be. But also they've got a level of maturity, like them or not, that allowed them to sustain it. And I didn't have that. But for the majority of the rest of us in the world that may find ourselves chasing success, sometimes it's the worst thing that you catch. It's like that dog that caught the car. You hang on to that tire and you're going to go around the tire and get run over. And that's exactly what happened. And quite often people don't survive it. And again, I was lucky enough to survive it. And I wouldn't trade wealth and fame for the peace of mind that I have today for anything.
Absolutely. Well, I definitely want to talk about your company, Draganfly, that's been making news that you're working with the Cochise County in Arizona to protect the border. But before I go there, I want to get a sense of what was the moment that you were able to come out of this sad environment. You were on drugs, you were homeless. How did you come out of it? What made that change?
Uh yeah. So I mean I had gone through several episodes of seizures and overdoses and the list goes on, and missing Christmases and all those types of things. Subconsciously I just assumed that I was going to die and I kept not dying. Like every overdose I just kept not dying and I finally just got tired. I was like, if I'm going to have to live—and whether that was remorse for 9/11 or just my own insecurities or whatever that led up to that—I was just like, okay, well, if I'm going to be here, I'm just tired of being tired. Just so tired of being tired. And so at that point, I finally didn't have an expectation that my life would be defined by success, but that my life—anyway, for whatever it's worth, everybody's got their own journey—was going to be defined by being alive each day. Just be grateful for it. And so I know that success is empty. And so if I get to live in the day and enjoy whatever the day is bringing, then that's all there is. That's all there needs to be. And so I was like, okay, well, I certainly didn't have a religious bent at that time, and I certainly do much more now. And it's like, okay, well, if God's going to keep me on this earth, I may as well make the best of it and be alive each day. And so I was just like—yeah, too long of an explanation. I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Wow. That's amazing to make such a comeback and to pretty much come back into the business world, right? And then you were able to start new companies and get to where you were before, pretty much, right?
Well, from a monetary standpoint, absolutely not. We've had a couple of modest wins over the years. We built a company called EarthCast and sold to a group that took it public, where me and another co-founder had a company where we built cameras and put them on the outside of the International Space Station, and they were doing Earth observation work, selling the data to hedge funds and governments—not highly sensitive data but really interesting data. It was the first and still is the only video camera in space. And that camera today is turned off. It's not on because it sits on the Russian side of the space station, but the servers are on the US side of the space station. And I don't think this is a coincidence, but the day we turned the cameras on initially was the day that Russia invaded Crimea.
So is that the reason it's not turned on, is because of the war in Ukraine? Is that the reason?
I believe so. Yeah. Yeah.
Wow. Yeah, I think relations have changed significantly, you know. I think in particular during the Biden administration, that was no longer an option. But very interesting.
