Draganfly's CEO on Disrupting the Drone Industry -$DPRO

Adam, I'm a big fan and really pleased and honored that you have me on your show. So, thank you very much.

Well, sure. Again, thanks again, Adam. So, I've been a tech entrepreneur since my early teens. You know, I was a dot kid, if you will. Like that's kind of like you know my early 20s right when the dot-com was just going hard and I had a little company and our idea was that we were going to take servers or PCs really at that time and put them in a central location and we were going to use this thing that was kind of up and coming called the internet to access software that was on our servers and so people could use different software from their home or from wherever they were at and not have to necessarily buy it. They could subscribe for it. And it was a stupid idea and nobody there was no use for it. I mean, you got to remember this is when like, oh, the internet's, you know, oh, it's kind of like the yellow pages, but it's online, you know, and kind of thing. So, we found a market in the fact that audit firms would use our data farm, we called it at the time. And they would we so we'd load up Great Plains which was in little fun fact Great Plains was the first SaaS company out there. It wasn't Salesforce and it wasn't a bunch of the others. It was Great Plains. So they did a deal with this kind I think more out of sympathy than anything else on this stupid idea. We loaded their software and our servers and then a couple of small regional audit firms would take out their transportable computers which look like sewing machines at the time and they'd go to the rather than having to take them out to the office they use computers that were at their clients offices access the Great Plains software in this small kind of mid-market area that they were in at the time and they would do their accounting work on it and it caught on and so the next thing they asked for is said well we need some productivity software we need to use our Lotus 123 again dating myself there and some of us are actually using you know this Microsoft product suite as well and Excel is pretty you know was kind of up and coming at the time so we approached Microsoft and said well could you know explain what we were doing it took us about a year but they finally said okay we'll do a subscription licensing deal with you so Microsoft was actually the second software as a service company out there believe it or not and that was the first time they'd ever had a subscription licensing model so we did that and we had then we had two then we had four and then we had six and then we had you know kind of eight you know regionalish you know kind of semi-national accounting firms on board and working and growing and then Microsoft bought Hotmail and I just happened to be in the right spot at the right time and they were like oh what are we going to do with this thing now like we like what are server farms data utility da da da and I happened to be in the right room at the right city at the right time and somebody started asking me those questions and so I explained what we were doing and then so somebody said well can you help us do that and of course I'm a sales guy like it or not and so I said yes I really didn't have any clue what I was saying yes to but I yeah we can do that and so we became an integral part of that whole world of Hotmail getting out there. So, you know, we built the company up. We were doing $80 million in revenue and we didn't know that that was a big deal or wasn't a big deal. And we got approached by a big New York bank and they said, you know, there's this thing called the dot-com going on and you're a startup and you're doing 80 million in revenue and everybody else is trying to figure out if they how to replace the yellow pages. So we went public and you know I was 25 I think and you know company went to three and a half billion dollar market cap which in 2000 is probably like 8 billion today but and again I still didn't realize the impact of it and I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't of course I thought I did and so you know did that for about another year and we had all the right investors and all that type of stuff and but I so I got fired about a year later which was the right I should have been fired kind of thing and so I left there and then I went and became one of the early I think the first but one of the early outside investors in a company called Neteller and I got involved with the product team there and Neteller went on to become the largest mover of money in the online gambling space and so we took it public over in London and that was a big success and long story short I thought I knew everything about everything and I didn't know anything about anything but I had gained a lot of great experience I was in New York on 9/11 at the base of the towers and you know I like you know I was kind of already you know somewhat out of control in my life but that kind of pushed me over the edge And over the course of about a 5-year span, I just completely blew everything up in my life and was homeless and bankrupt and in every way imaginable. And that was a long time ago. It was, you know, 20 plus years ago, obviously now, but and so but I got things cleaned up and for the last 20 years I've been you know, building companies 20 plus been building companies and the you know, in particular Draganfly in the drone space. So that's probably a longer version of the backstory than you were probably looking for, but I believe that what we're doing at Draganfly and the 20 plus years of work that we put in here is now going to you know hopefully you know turn into you know another one of those fantastic stories that does a lot of good for society.

Yeah, sounds great. So Draganfly is at least to my knowledge, it's the oldest standing dual-use drone manufacturer in the world. And so you know, we've been around for 27 years now. There's not much that we haven't done in the drone space. We've seen, you know, probably half a dozen drone cycles where it was all going to take off and be great and amazing and you know, our we got our start in the public safety space. So, we were building drones really as hobbies as hobbyists and were approached by a federal police force that wanted to use it actually for accident reconstruction. And that's and you know one day they got a call from a search and rescue team that said, "Hey, we can't put our helicopters up. We've got somebody that's wandered away from a car accident in you know -40 degree weather. They've been missing for many hours. Any chance you could take that drone that you got for accident reconstruction because it had thermal cameras on it and go look for this person?" And they did. And they found the person and it saved their life. And so, that Draganfly, it was called the Draganfly 4 at the time. So, the Draganfly 4, is the first drone that was ever credited with saving a human life. And that Draganfly, that drone now sits on permanent display in the Smithsonian. And so, that really became the beginning of our public safety work and the work that we've done with law enforcement and military and humanitarian around the world. And so, that's really the kind of the deeper part of our ethos. And then you know we definitely grew that business and have just you know managed it a month at a time and a quarter at a time through the last 27 years where in that time frame we have seen every single drone manufacturer that was started in North America you know except for say the last 5 to seven years where we're in another drone cycle right now which is different this time. But every single drone manufacturer has gone out of business, whether it was Airware, Airy, GoPro, Airwise, 3DR, and they all had hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars behind them. And so I think what strategically at the root of what strategically differentiates us is that we're very boots on the ground. We were very bootstrapped. We're very customer focused. We've only had two people that have left the company. one I think was well one was retirement and one was maternity leave. So those same engineers that we had you know 25 plus years ago are the same engineers that and we've got many more but that we work with today. So for a company that's still relatively small, our ability to service and execute on concepts of operation and capacity wise meet the large orders that are now coming through this drone cycle, I think are maybe second to none, but can certainly match anybody that's raised hundreds of millions of dollars out there.

That's exactly it.

Yeah. Obviously ahead of your time. Curious.

So well the company was actually in existence and the founder his first name was Dragon D-R-A-G-A-N and that's why our name Draganfly is spelled with an A instead of an O and he had had the business really as a hobbyist for about 5 years separately I was designing some software to use for body cameras in the police space and you know they would turn on and off automatically transmit and stream and some things like that. And I got introduced to Draganfly because they were doing this public safety work. And as I got to know Dragon and the whole company, it became really apparent to me that this was going to be the future. Now, of course, at that time, I thought that oh, just within a few years, this is going to be amazing. And here we are 20 some years later, I like oh my, if I had any idea, you know, but so I was right. it was just 20 years late in my thinking but so I put a little investment group together and combined our two companies together and so that's why I have the privilege and I say it with ultimate you know due respect that I get to call myself a co-founder of the business and so that's how I got involved in the business and the vision at that time was really to drive the drone industry to where what we see happening in the drone industry today so all the different like drones will be as pervasive as iPhones. Drones will be as pervasive as the internet and the impact of drones will actually be as big as AI. And the reason and all of those things do culminate into the drone industry. And the reason I say that is that nothing collects data better than a drone. Nothing. Because what you've got is you've got something that's got an aerial perspective in a 3D space with a massive battery pack on it that you can put multiple sensors. So every time you're flying a drone, you can be doing ground penetrating radar, you can be doing LAR, you can do air quality, you can do like absolutely anything. And you combine all those data sets in with now what's happening with the AI and you can actually compute on board now with we have NVIDIA chip integration and you get real time AI interpretation of literally hundreds of data sets all at once. The insights are absolutely incredible and the implications both commercially and military-wise are beyond like just mind-blowing when you start to see these results. So but that was actually oh that's what's going to happen. But again 20 plus years ago that's not what was happening. But that's where we started knowing that we are a drone company, but ultimately we're a data company and that's where that and so our vision eventually is to give away our drones. Like the only way that we're going to compete with Chinese inexpensive, very high quality manufacturing in North America, isn't by tariffs. It isn't by protectionism. It isn't by those are all great things right now. I'm not taking away from them. We have a market right now that's exploding because of that. So I'm grateful for that. But ultimately we have to compete on a better playing field than that. And we are better than that. And so we're going to have to give away these drones at some point. But how we do that is by having better data. A drone does two things. It either delivers something. It might be a package. It might be an ordinance or it collects data or it does both at the same time. And the people that can do that best and collect that data to provide better benefit back to their customers, whether they're government, military, commercial, law enforcement, whatever, that's the company that's ultimately going to be a, you know, a trillion dollar company candidly in my mind.

Yeah, I have found that the best way to manage risk at least in our circumstance and certainly over the number of years is to worry a little bit less about the future. You got to be cognizant of it. You got to have strategy and you have to be totally aware. But you know we don't react to the future. We react to what's happening right now. So we are very one step at a time. What's in front of us right now? If we can execute the next step, we're likely, you know, 50% ahead of everybody else either in the market or the problem that we're trying to deal with at that moment. And then if we just execute the next step, you know, we're another 50% ahead again. And it what it does is it keeps us surviving, but it also gets us better intel and better information, which then creates a more clear picture for what we're worrying about out here. I find a lot of risk analysis and a lot of strategy turns out to be a lot of worry. And if you're planning for what you're worrying about, you're going to end up in that exact situation. Now, I'm not talking about being ignorant or putting head in the sand or anything like that, but I am talking about where the proportionate amount of focus absolutely needs to be. And you know, if you're in a firefight or if you're in a serious situation, emergency rescue, and this is you know, our customers have taught me this. If you're in those situations, you have to deal with that situation. Not necessarily like how do we prevent this in the future from ever. Yeah, you'll get there. But right now, you got to deal with that situation and save that life or your life or accomplish the mission. And so we treat our risk management with in kind of in that same light. We just make sure that we execute on the exact next thing.