Gadgetory

3d robotics startup based in Berkeley California is one of the most interesting companies in the fast-growing drone industry it started from a community of drone enthusiasts and now it makes a wide range of models for everyone from average hobbyists to industrial railroads three are sets itself apart by serving as the centerpiece of a large open-source software community developing some of the most advanced autonomous flight programs on the market so now the question is is this commitment to open innovation enough to compete with bigger more established brands you would not think and when the editor-in-chief the wire decides to create the biggest one company America that he picks a 19 year old kid from Tijuana he just met on the Internet but in that in fact was exactly the right the right person well since I have a memory you know I've been in love with electronics Legos computers but I also was in love with our planes and I always wanted to be a pilot basically I'm living in LA when I was 21 at that time I have the opportunity to to get the remote control the copter and it was very difficult to fly and that's what I got me into the rabbit hole so now I wanted to you know make it work so that's when I started my research and that's when I discover that I needed something more more complex electronics and more complex software to be able to touch it and this was not expected to be a company this was really not even spected to the community this is just me trying to get my questions answered on the Internet so I create a website called DIY drones which is basically to answer questions what the heck and it was just the right place in the right time the community took off the people server said hardware has suddenly gotten interesting I must explore you could be an expert in software but not of hardware expert electronics but not on avionics and a community started building certain projects started actually collaborating on electronics and code and actually making real drones the last time is when Arduino was released which is the one the platform to change everything for the makers a main hackers you know out there so I was able to get my hands on one of them and it was I'm exciting you know to learn like from from a scratch like a new computer system this guy Geordi Munoz who was showing how to fly a helicopter the Wii controller using Arduino it's really impressive and we were learning a lot from this guy he was clearly the smartest of the bunch and it was a lot as the smarter bunch they was clearly he figured something out it was the Arduino is the common filter it was the fact that he actually did it it was just just clearly a guy who you know everyone was smart everyone knew stuff but this guy somehow it put it all together so I thought I need help I need someone else to do that like that date job I'm the editor of Wired right I need I need someone to actually do this and I thought she was the smartest guy out there was join me and I said yeah you wanna wanna build boards and they said sure I got some time and I said what do you need he says components here's a jacket so she just brought me a check $500 to finally the best investment in his life so that's basically how I everything Deanne 3dr started out with a focus on building an open-source platform that can be tailored to fit the needs of different clients across a broad range of industries but in the last few years it's become clear that the drones leading the consumer space were also the ones being most widely adopted by commercial operations so to catch up 3dr had to create a compelling model for the average beginner and it just released the finished version of its mainstream consumer drone the solo so the drone marketplace has become really crowded over the past couple of years and 3d robotics is seen as something of an underdog DJI this Chinese company has the majority of the sales and the majority of the profits in that space and is continuing to innovate at a pretty fast clip well the first challenge for us was getting robust apply the second hard part was to make it easy people don't care about software you don't you don't buy the software and a phone you buy a phone and you know you're like it's like I want to buy a slab here that just works and I wanted to have one button and I just wanted to always work and to to turn software into a consumer electronics product to it integrate it to embed it etc to to basically turn something that's beautiful and reliable and affordable that is a whole different skill set that's ultimately necessary to to sell to consumers I'm in charge of sales marketing revenue you know customer service making sure we sell our products do a lot of product development they're kind of the all the early so low definition stuff what it should be I think it should be so low as my chance to come and you know if I had a wish list of all the things that a drone could that could fit in a backpack could do these are all the things I wanted to do you know I think you know challenges from just like an overall brand perspective or just second mover challenges you know well well there's this company DJI that's been around for three years and my buddies got a phantom and you know my uncle has a phantom why should I buy this other drone you know they've been around they've been doing this for longer than you have what makes yours better you know and just trying to educate the consumer you know what what is different and special about solo over the incumbent in the market you know and so it's just that you know it's the second mover challenges this year they introduced solo this is the first drone that's been introduced that has a 30-day money-back guarantee so you buy this drone for $1000 you play with it for 29 days if you don't like it you just send it back to them to give you your money back while 3dr is far from the leading manufacturer in the drone industry it's made a name for itself by building innovative in quality products 3dr came out of a community of drone enthusiasts and developers it has the deep respect of many industry veterans due to their continued commitment to building community and open sourcing that technical progress as a company we make hardware as a community we make the open part of the software we're modeled a little bit after Android in that respect which is to say that there's a platform there's an open-source off you know this is a software platform that can be used by lots of people but there's also a you know a company behind that platform and that company makes its money from selling some hardware but also going forward building software and services around it drones are expensive and they crash right it's a product that flies and occasionally falls out of the sky and usually when that happens the message that you get back is I'm so sorry and best luck with your next drone 3dr built a system so that they essentially have like a blackbox recorder and if they determined that they were at fault they will just replace crowd and that's also a first I think if you look at the company as a whole and really the 360-degree view on you know channel engagement strategy and the customer support story and logging everything about the flight in the controller so we know we can always take care of our customers on the back end there's a lot of decisions we made around solo that that were more not just in the moment of flying based decisions take really great care of our customers it's simple I'm a user you know our whole marketing and sales team or video production team they're all users of the product you know we really have a passion for these things and we want to make the flying copters that we want and love if this doesn't feel great to us then let's not do it for our customers it almost feels like we're trying to develop the best copter we can for ourselves and we're sharing it with the world and I feel like that's a distinct advantage we have over DJI the potential uses for drones are expanding rapidly 3d our technology is currently used across multiple industries including agriculture infrastructure construction photography search-and-rescue and even ecological study 3d arm might not have some more established brands like DJI or parrot but that's not what they're betting on they're betting on open innovation from the growing community to help create the future trends very soon you will see the livery medicine rescue traffic whatever you can imagine or whatever you need to put something there or move faster between the point A to point B now you're gonna be able to do it safely and that's something that really looking forward soon I think I think some drones are going to be like sprinklers you know irrigation systems on farms where they just sit there and every morning at 6 a.m. they go up and they do their thing and they come back into their pads etc and that people control fleets of hundreds of thousands of them you know or I could be completely wrong and the point is it doesn't matter if we use the open innovation approach I think we get the collective innovation of everybody out there on our platform rather than just what just you know my capacity to imagine you you