Hi, thank you so much for coming to this year's Vermont Tech Jam. My name is Kathy Resmer. I'm the deputy publisher of Seven Days and I'm one of the organizers. I can't tell you, I've been waiting for a couple years now to have this space filled with all of you folks and our speakers tonight. So, I'm really, really happy to see you. Thank you for coming.
I want to acknowledge a few folks before we get started. First of all, I want to acknowledge our hosts at Hoola. What an amazing building this is. I think Russ Scully and Rob Lair, Cassidy Pettit, Jeff Henderson, Tim Wall, I think you folks are here. Just want to thank you guys very much not only for making this amazing space and also being a partner on this event, helping us to plan it and sponsoring it. Couldn't have done it without your support.
I also want to thank a few of our other community partners this year. We had Beta Technologies who we'll hear more from in a bit. Biotech, Agyant, C2, Coldwell Banker, Hickok and Boardman, Data Innovations, Global Foundaries, Marll, Mascoma Bank, Norwich University, OnLogic, VIP, Vermont Technology Council, and our organizing partner from the very beginning, the Vermont Technology Alliance. Thank you.
There are a few other folks I feel like I should thank for providing security today. Chocolate Thunder Security. Atomic for our AV during the day. These guys have miked us up and they've got these video we're going to show you here. They are also recording, filming this session which we'll have a recording available online in a bit.
I need to also thank some of my co-workers. Well, the staff of Seven Days has been here helping all day long, answering questions, and doing registration, and it's just been fantastic. But in particular, I want to single out Katie Hodges and Don Edgar who really put this all together. And I have to also acknowledge Paula Routley, our publisher and editor-in-chief. Paula had this vision for the Tech Jam from the very beginning and she has been relentlessly pursuing this day since like January of 2020. So, thank you Paula.
So, those of you who have been to Tech Jam before know that we have never had a keynote speaker. We've never done it because we weren't sure who to ask, like who would be the perfect keynote. They'd have to be someone with a national reputation but also ties to Vermont. We wanted someone who was solving real world problems that all of us can relate to, not just necessarily in one specific industry. And we really wanted someone who could inspire us to reach for the horizon. And I am so excited because our two guests tonight check all of those boxes. And to introduce them to you, I'm going to bring up Seven Days staff writer Chelsea Edgar.
Hello everyone. Thank you so much for being here today. I am super excited to introduce our two guests, Kyle Clark and Martine Rothblatt, who are building something incredibly cool here in Vermont. Kyle is a native Vermonter. He's a former professional hockey player, a licensed pilot, an entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of Beta Technologies, which is an electric aviation startup based here at Burlington International Airport. Depending on where you live, you may have seen Beta's signature electric aircraft, Alia, cruising the skies over Chittenden County during one of its practice flights. And in a few minutes we'll show you a short video that will get you an even closer look at Alia.
But Beta isn't just trying to develop a cool electric plane. Their goal is to transform the way people and goods move around while minimizing the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. And towards that goal, they've already earned some major votes of confidence. This year Beta brought in $368 million in investor funding from major companies including Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund. UPS has requested 10 Alia planes for its shipment routes by 2024. And since Beta launched in 2017, it's grown exponentially. Today it has 300 employees and a valuation of 1.4 billion dollars.
But before all of that could happen, some pretty important people had to believe in Kyle's vision. And one of those people, Martine Rothblatt, will also be joining us in a few minutes. Martine's accomplishments are kind of impossible to summarize, but I shall try. She's an author, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, a futurist, an airplane and helicopter pilot, a transgender rights advocate. I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but she's also the founder of Sirius Satellite Radio, and a pioneer in the field of digitizing human consciousness through her Terasem Movement Foundation, which she launched from her home in Lincoln, Vermont in 2004.
And Terasem's most popular spokesperson is a talking AI robot named Bina48, created using the downloaded memories of Martine's wife, Bina. And Bina48 has been a Tech Jam guest previously. So, in the 1990s, Martine and Bina's daughter, Genesis, was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension, which is a fatal disease. So in an effort to save her daughter's life, Martine researched possible treatments and launched a biotechnology firm called United Therapeutics to pursue them, because that's what you do when you are Martine Rothblatt.
Today United Therapeutics sells five FDA approved medicines to treat the disease and Genesis works for the company. But the only cure is a lung transplant. And organs are in incredibly limited supply. So, United Therapeutics plans to manufacture the organs and deliver them to recipients using a very special kind of aircraft, which is where Beta comes in. Martine put up $1.5 million in funding to help Kyle launch Beta, and she serves on Beta's board of directors. So, I'm really looking forward to bringing them both together for a conversation in just a few minutes. But first, here is a short video of the two of them flying Alia.
Best day of my life. Best day of my life.
Yeah.
Today's objectives, obviously we've got Martine Rothblatt here. We're doing her checkout and familiarization with the aircraft and we're also validating some tunes made on the controls for both drag and some adjustments made to the tuning of the front casters. We'll do a quick roll call.
So, we're joined this morning by Martine Rothblatt, who's the founder and CEO of United Therapeutics. They are our first customer. And Martine met Kyle four years ago and has been supporting him and this company and this quest ever since. And today she's going to fly with him in this electric aircraft that together they helped design.
In a minute we're going to be finishing up our pre-flight inspections and loading batteries. We're going to push them out and she and Kyle are going to fly this aircraft. And we're really excited to see this happen. Her flying this aircraft is validation of that faith that she's put in us and the hard work that the team has put forward.
Got a nice little armrest pad here for the side.
She's just an amazing person. She's shown me how much she cares about people and about doing the right thing for the planet. And something she's always said to me is, you know, there's always time to do it right. She's never been like, 'Let's do this. Let's get this done.' She says specifically, 'There's always time to do it right. So, let's just take our time. Let's learn it the proper way.'
What piqued my interest in urban air mobility is the work we do at United Therapeutics in flying organs from one place to another. When we make an organ, it has to be used within hours, like at the outset 12 hours. The only practical way to get the product to the patient who needs it is by flying. As we continue to help more and more people with organ transplants, it has to be gotten there by flight. And if we do this all with regular aircraft, we're going to be making a humongous carbon footprint.
So this is what got me thinking about electric aircraft, what they call now like, you know, eVTOL, electric vertical aircraft, as a solution to being able to deliver our organs without a carbon footprint.
I mean, this is an awesome day for a lot of people, but for me, as one of her flight instructors and somebody that's flown with her, and understands her passion for flight and her passion for people and the planet, to see her able to fly an airplane that she was instrumental in the opportunity to build this thing, it's awesome.
You're not fighting a machine through the air. Instead you're almost like surfing the air. It's also aesthetically very beautiful anywhere your angle of vision goes, whether it's to the beautiful booms, or the fuselage, the way that you have like an almost 360-degree, certainly more than 180-degree field of vision. You're like you're sailing through the air in glass.
But here we came up with this idea. Kyle sketched it out on an iPad and the same shape, the same dynamics, the same aircraft that he had sketched out on an iPad here exists in person and I'm flying it through the air. I'm banking it. I'm pitching it. I'm climbing. I'm taking off. I'm landing. It's like, holy Christ, can life get any better than this.
Ah, man. Best sense of achievement and accomplishment in my entire life.
Oh, that would be saying a lot.
Wow. That was incredible.
Please keep it going for Kyle Clark and Martine Rothblatt.
Hello Martine. Hello, Kyle. So awesome to have you with us. Thank you so much for being here. So I'd like to start by asking you, Kyle, tell us about the day you and Martine first met and how that led to the creation of Beta.
She might correct me on a couple things, but it was March of 2017 and I was asked to analyze another project that Martine was working on which was an electric helicopter. And by a mutual colleague in North Carolina and in going through this he said, 'Hey, would you like to come to a meeting in Philadelphia and present some findings?' but more importantly how you may contribute to a project that Martine was sponsoring in electric aviation.
And so I did an analysis on the batteries and the motors, the inverters and put that in together with another analysis on the aerodynamics and structures that other people had done. And Martine was there to kind of evaluate the overall program. And this is how I remember it. She said to me, she goes, 'Who are you and why are you here?' And the one thing I definitively remember you asking me, 'Are you getting paid to be here?' And I said, 'Well, not yet.' And she goes, 'I can tell because you just love this stuff.' Which was I think hopefully came across in the way I was talking about just batteries and motors and inverters, which are just boring parts, but it was on an airplane. And that's what was exciting to me.
And then as I had done since, as my wife knows over here, since 2002, pitched around the concept of Beta Air which was a more intuitive way to fly an aircraft but it had a lot of fundamental principles. And the way I see it is she took this vision of Beta Air which I had pitched at Peak Pitch, the Road Pitch, everybody that would listen here in Vermont and couldn't find anybody invested, and she just gave me a little quarter turn adjustment. She said, 'How about if we do it in this direction?' And she said, 'I've got a house in Lincoln. Come up here this Friday,' which was Willa's birthday, my daughter. And I was supposed to go up there for a 9:00 meeting in the morning and come back for Willa's birthday party. And she was 14. Now she's 18. And I never showed up for the birthday party.
We started talking. That's how we met. And all we could talk about, all the stuff we talked about for that entire day. I think I got there at 9:00 and I didn't get home till midnight. But it was awesome and that's what really kind of solidified in my mind anyway that there was somebody who was thinking about physics and the world and the interdependencies at a level way beyond which I'll ever be able to do, but at least in that little area that I thought that I was thinking about and I had 13, 14 years of thinking about it, right? And she got it immediately and said, 'Yeah, let's go do that.' And I'll finish the story. And then I got home that night and I was all motivated and she has an art curator and an artist by the name of Bill Rock who designs her website and all this stuff. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, how do I write a proposal to Martine? And so I sat down and painted a watercolorish, made it into a couple slides, wrote all over it with pen and sent it to Martine. And it was about 9:00 a.m. and I was out in the wood shop actually working on a motorcycle and Katie came out with my phone and she held it in front of me and there was just two words from a text from Martine. She said, 'You're on.' And that was the acceptance. Thank you.
So Martine, what did you see in Kyle that day that made you curious about him?
I don't think it was so much a matter of being curious about him as a matter of being blown away, impressed by him. I saw an individual that had an ability to merge art and engineering together. He had a synergy of like left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking that he understood all of the aerodynamic and the electronic principles that would be needed for an electric vertical aircraft. But he also had an intuitive sense of how to make something beautiful. And in aviation design, beauty is very important because especially when you have limited power as you will always have with an electric aircraft compared to one powered by gasoline or Jet-A fuel, you have to rely on aerodynamics to a much greater extent to go a long distance. And the way you rely on aerodynamics is you're supposed to have a very good ratio of lift to drag. That means that the plane needs to kind of float through the air as much as possible and not be overly dominated by wind resistance from flying through the air.
Kyle understood that nature has been well aware of this principle for millions of years and developed all kind of beautiful birds that can fly very long distances and some of them like frigates that can literally fly a thousand and more miles. And he designed this beautiful Alia aircraft as described in the video and I saw, wow, this is an individual who truly merges art and engineering, who loves flying, loves being able to take an idea and convert it to practice. He's a maker in his soul. He would not like to do something if he cannot make it. This is kind of like, if I can say, the business soulmate I've always been looking for. And I really fell in love with him, to tell you the truth.
You know, on that note, just we were actually out flying earlier today and I was flying a 1942 Piper Cub and I had the power firewalled on a 65 horsepower motor, maybe a little past the red line, so maybe was putting out 70 horsepower. And I kept asking Martine what they were pushing for kilowatts. And they were putting about half the power into the plane and outperforming my plane.
And this is where it is immediately obvious to us that when we're building an electric plane or was obvious to the folks that built the plane that we flew, she flew this morning, that precious energy in the batteries has to be sipped as carefully and purposefully as possible. And that means people like, where's Mano?
Right here. Jeez, I knew you were over here somewhere. You moved. Mano, who's developing the propulsion system with a whole bunch of smart people and the aerodynamicists who did the detailed computational fluid dynamics are putting, they're not thinking, okay, I just got to build an airplane. I got to build an airplane the way that Tesla thought about door handles. Like that's a little bit of drag. The underside of the Tesla, who's crawled underneath the Tesla and see that it is almost perfectly smooth with a couple ridges. All those little things matter in order to make a system.
And just today when we were flying, I was just chuckling to myself while I was singing because I sing when I fly a lot. And so does Katie. She was singing all the way back from New York into the microphone.
I was singing this silly song that Charlotte's been playing on the ukulele over and over again. But anyway, the point is you're happy. You're happy. But what made me even happier was the fact that they're using half the power that I'm using in an electric plane.
So, talk a little bit about the evolution of Beta from this sort of idea of aviation as a kind of passenger-specific form of mobility to the cargo and logistics stuff. Like how did that come about?
Yeah, it actually wasn't a transition from passenger to cargo and logistics. The industry however has transitioned from a focus exclusively on passenger to a realization that cargo, medical logistics is the right point of departure into this new technology. But for Beta, and this is where the first directional clarity that Martine provided us was look at this focal point. She gave us a spec with 10 points on it and it was a 10-system spec and it was 600 lb, 250 nautical miles, greater than 100 knots. These are the performance portion spec, recharge in less than an hour. We looked at that specification and the specification was designed around moving organs in these organ containment systems. Well, what's interesting about organs is you can't really think of a more precious cargo or a higher value cargo. At least I can't. It's going to save somebody's life. It's time dependent. There's a lot of reasons. And because of that decision and then when we sat down and talked about customers and how we're thinking about it, focusing on cargo was very, very purposeful.
And it's a saying that I first heard Martine say in a board call that I listened to which was finding a quarter of relative indifference and running like hell down it. There's a lot of those in our business, but this was one of them. And it was everybody's circling the light bulb of passenger mobility. We all sit in traffic and the obvious thing is hop over the traffic. But if you think for the last year how many packages came to your house and how many times you got on an airplane and what the volume of you is times those airplane rides and those packages times the times they came to your house. Cargo and logistics is a massive industry that's underneath everything. Hey Val. This is my original mentor. It's just so obvious that that's the case, but it's relatively indifferent to our daily lives because the stuff just shows up. So, it was clear to Martine that you take the most precious cargo and that's our focal point. And then it became, I was slow. It took me a little while. We went through some relationships with other companies that were looking at passenger and we got renewed focus on doing this.
So, when it came time to launch Beta, you both have strong ties to Vermont. You have a house in Lincoln. You grew up in Essex, Kyle. But why here? Why launch Beta here in Vermont? What makes this the right place for it?
I mean, there's a billion reasons why it's the right place. I think the most important thing is the people and the people that are here in Vermont. And it was said to me when we sold to Dap Power by this guy by name Adam Nudson and he goes, big snowstorm. And he goes, 'I think more people show up to work when we get a big snowstorm.' And it's just this undertone of that. It's like there's a challenge out there. We're going after it. And that's the attitude that I see in a lot of Vermonters.
For me it's very kind of full circle for me in Vermont. When our youngest daughter Genesis developed pulmonary arterial hypertension as mentioned in the video. One of the first things that the doctor said is she first fainted and collapsed on a ski trip in Telluride, Colorado. And our family always took skiing trips together. The doctor said you cannot go above 5,000 ft altitude anymore. It's going to cause her arteries to constrict more and at any time it could just cause her right heart to collapse.
So, we gathered the kids around. We have four kids and we said, 'Well, we won't be going skiing in Colorado anymore. We'll just have to go skiing in like Maryland, which is kind of like not skiing.' So, the three older brothers and sisters said, you know, why can't Genesis stay home and we'll all go to Colorado? I said, no, we're not going there. So, I did research. I said, you know, there must be some place on the east coast which has Colorado-like snow. And there were like early versions of the internet at this time, like in the 90s. And I came across Jay Peak, Vermont, which had like the number of inches of snow and the fluffiness and just beautiful ski ability that you would find in Colorado. So, we began going every winter to Jay Peak and Genesis was able to go there and continue skiing. And then our son, we were in Vermont so much he wanted to go to Goddard College and went there, graduated from UVM, then got his masters from Goddard later. So, we developed really strong ties from Vermont. But it started with our daughter.
And so, when I meet Kyle and he says like, you know, I'm from Vermont. My nascent company is from Vermont. It kind of seemed to me like this relationship with Kyle was to save Genesis with, you know, lung transplants that could be delivered in a green fashion. And it kind of seemed like all sort of like the energy flows of the universe were coming together for Vermont. And I'm not trying to be metaphysical. I'm like a total scientist, my mind frame, but I will say that I think it has worked out very much like it was meant to be.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's interesting you started with this analytical approach of snowfall and we end up with this.
Yeah. But look how beautiful it's worked out. And so on top of that, I will say that we have offices in, you know, a dozen different states in the United States. We have employees in almost every state. In my life I have not met a state that has a higher percentage of freethinking and hardworking and honest people than the state of Vermont.
So, Kyle, in just about four years, you've taken Beta from a concept on an iPad sketch, to a company with more than 300 employees. And you know, you've started businesses, you're an entrepreneur, Martine has been at it a little bit longer. What are some things that you've learned from Martine about building a company from the ground up?
I would say like the biggest thing is that culture is king. Is that culture eats strategy, eats tactics every day. Really focus on the culture and the number of employees is like a tertiary byproduct of this. It's what I'm most proud of is if you, when we walk into our business today, all the people that are in the business and there's tons of them here today. They know what they're doing. They know what their purpose is. They feel good about it. They want to work with their colleagues. And the second thing is focus. It's here's what we're after. Define it very clearly and it makes it easy for all those people to get behind it. And yeah, as you grow the business, you got to add people, but the objective is not to add people. That's not the measure of progress in my mind. The measure of progress is what the output of those people are.
And I think the most extreme example is in software where you can have a software engineer like Art Turad who has an office down here who can put out about 10 times as much as another software engineer next to him. And how is that possible? Well, it's possible with focus. And the same thing is true in writing. We've all been in there. We have three hours to write a 10-page report. Somehow we get it done. Last week it took us two weeks to write the same 10-page report. But when you know there's a clear objective. It's focused and you're not kind of sure that maybe something might be in that direction. It's that spec that I just, you know, 250 nautical miles, charge in less than an hour, 105 knots. That's where we're going. There's no, you ask anybody in the business what our objectives are. It's clear. We're not going to get there in one shot. So I think that's one of the biggest lessons. 10 other, hundred other lessons, but that's the first one that comes to mind.
Would you like to add something? Do you feel like there's anything you've imparted to Kyle that you've seen him take and run with to great effect at Beta?
I think there's a lot of things I've actually learned from Beta and learned from Kyle. One of those is that no paper project ever fails. If you want to do something, you have to make it. And I have been so impressed with Beta and Kyle that every single idea they have, within 24 hours they're trying to make it. They have an idea for a better motor, Mano is going to be in charge of building it. She is like 100,000% hands-on. If it's not real, it's just fiction.
And I was one of the, right after I met Kyle, we developed this idea of why don't we try to persuade people in the country that electric aviation is real by flying an electric plane across the whole country. And so within again within days Kyle was building it and we could have talked about it and it would have never failed but it would have also never taught anybody anything. Instead we started building it. It was and is the heaviest eVTOL that has ever been built and ever been flown. And it's flown up and down Plattsburgh airport countless times vertically lifting, transition, everything. But there was a time in building it when we said, you know, this is something that we built for the purpose of flying it across country. It's not something that was built for the purpose of getting it certified by the FAA, approved by the FAA, and starting to fly people's organs to different places to save them. So, now that we've learned everything that we can learn from this, let's cancel that project and move on to what's most important.
That takes a great deal of fortitude to come up to a person who's funding you to do something and to say, you know, maybe I made a mistake or maybe I'm changing course or I want to do something different. I'm not doing exactly what we all agreed we were going to do. But that made me believe in Kyle even a thousand times more because he was willing to question authority. And everybody at Beta is willing to question authority. Whenever I participate in a pre-flight review at Beta before anybody gets in an aircraft at Beta to fly anywhere, there's a whole room full of people that everybody is supposed to stand up and challenge any aspect of the flight plan, any aspect of the aircraft. It is the most question-authority culture that I've ever seen. And I have been myself tremendously inspired and educated by my experience being a member of the Beta team.
It's funny because as everybody here probably surmises, I remember like the weeks before presenting this course correction with Martine like just sweating and thinking, is this the right thing? And how do we go about thinking about this? And I started into this well-thought-out presentation to her and she goes, 'Stop, Kyle. If you're asking me if you fulfilled what you said you were going to do, the answer is yes.' And I said, 'Okay, well, how should we move forward?' And she goes, 'Keep your promises and think about the patience.' And those two things. And there's a certain time when I think I learned from Martine, there's a leader has to get into every little detail and make sure that you're right there and doing everything. And there's another time when you provide clarity by saying this is our objective. And thinking about the patients of course is translating to how does this thing save lives and what are the right steps today? Was it flying across country or was it transitioning to something that was going to actually make that happen? It's a longer road and you have to have a whole lot of patience, which is a weird thing to think about. But that patience can't come without this absolute determination that you're going to succeed at this. But it was readjusting what success was. And it was the patience and keeping your promises. And what was our promise? And fundamentally our promise was to elicit critical thinking of aviation. That was our first objective.
Yeah. Of course, flying across the country on an electric plane was going to elicit a lot of critical thinking because it wasn't a paper project and we were going to fail. And when we walk into flight tests, aside from what Martine says is this challenge culture that we've attempted to really encourage is the concept of let's not go have a perfect flight test. It's let's go expose the issues. Let's go find out what's wrong because that gives us the next thing to address.
I always find it very odd when people don't want to be questioned or challenged because I have this image in my mind that when those of us who are trying to create new technologies, we're always walking along a cliff line because the technology might fail. It's like you fall off the cliff. And the people who challenge you and question you and criticize you, they're your best friends. They're the ones telling you, you know, you might be about to step off a cliff behind you. So, the main kind of guidance that I always tell people is, you know, embrace challenge, embrace questioning, embrace criticism. If it's something that's not true or you don't believe in it, then it's just like water off a duck's back.
But this is why I'm confident that Beta will succeed when all of these other electric vertical companies will not succeed because it's really hard for me to imagine that there's more of a challenge culture than you see at Beta. I just recently had the pleasure to be on the stage with the head of the FAA who was the individual who oversaw bringing the 737 Max back into flight. And as some of you may know from reading the papers at Boeing, you know, a name that's synonymous with aviation, there was a lack of this challenge culture and people knew that things were wrong in the software and they were afraid to tell their boss or whatever and it was like a whole big hierarchy and look unfortunately all the lives that were lost in that. The new head of the FAA, Steve Dickson, I think is a very solid guy and he told me how he personally made sure that before the 737 Max was brought back into flight, he personally flew it. He is a former F-15 pilot, so he knows how to fly, but he said before he was going to put Americans and other people back on that plane, he was personally going to fly it and he was going to challenge and question everybody at Boeing in the hierarchy about it. And that's what Kyle does. Kyle is our Steve Dickson and this is why I'm confident that Beta will succeed.
So, what are some of the qualities that you're looking for in employees aside from this willingness to question and challenge? You know, what are the kinds of people that you are seeking right now?
I feel like I'm going to give away all of our secret interview techniques. A couple things, and this was the theme of Designbook and Venture Co which was my former business here in town, which was common passions and complementary skill sets. Like fundamentally you have to have a team that is built up of different puzzle pieces of people who do different things, are experts in different things but what makes those people really powerful is having a common passion. So when people come in I will ask questions that will expose whether they care about sustainability, they are just intensely curious about technology and if they love aviation. And if everybody in the business has two out of those three, then you always share a common passion with your colleague, which makes your work better. That's the first one.
The second thing is something I learned from Martine is that artists that are engineers that love what they do make better employees. And so the subtlety there is that art comes in many, many different forms and you expose this when we talk to people about, you know, you just start asking what do you love to do? Is it something that is creatively driven? Is it something that's analytically driven? Is it trade stocks? I don't know. Nothing against a broker in here, but it's like if you love creating things and you have this ability to see beauty and it's in many different forms like structural beauty and load paths are different than aesthetic beauty and form are different than beauty in certain forms of art or decoration or whatever. But you see things as a system when you see things beautiful. And that systems thinking can be kind of mixed in with art because it all has to fit and be, you know, I don't want to say symmetrical but it has to be in harmony I think is the right way. So it's those two things. It's common passions, complementary skill sets, artist who loves what they do.
Yeah. And you know in terms of the workplace culture also, it's for instance employees don't have to get vacation time cleared with their supervisors right? They can just check in with their teammates and say hey how's this project going is it cool if I take off. Why that particular vibe? Like why is that right for what you're trying to accomplish at Beta?
