The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#130:
Over 5,000 Businesses and $140M of VC Investment for Smarter Drone Use — Mike Winn, CEO of DroneDeploy
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Mike Winn:
DroneDeploy is a tool to build your own Google Earth and street view of the assets that you care about and you can do that with a drone. It'll capture imagery at extremely high-resolution accuracy down to a millimeter per pixel that you can explore. You can analyze and understand. And historically, what people have done is they used tools like surveying wheels, so literally it's people walking along with a surveying wheel, climbing on a roof with a tape measure and a clipboard to survey a roof.
Now, instead of taking those kinds of manual measurements, they can just get a drone to fly over the top, capture hundreds of photos of their site. And from those photos, we can create these extraordinarily accurate 3D models from a house all the way up to a massive oil refinery.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding:
Welcome to the Entrepreneurs for Impact podcast. My name is Chris Wedding. As a former environmental private equity investor, four times founder, climate tech CEO, coach and professor, I launched this podcast to share the entrepreneurial journey, practical tips and hard-earned wisdom from CEOs and investors tackling climate change. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. This is the number one way that listeners can learn more about the climate CEOs and investors I interview. All right, let's get started.
My guest today is Mike Winn, Founder and CEO of DroneDeploy. DroneDeploy is a software company harnessing drones to provide interior and exterior visual data, any altitude, any angle, all in one platform. They've raised over $140 million and serve 5,000 businesses in 180 countries, including 18 of the 20 largest construction companies.
01:52
In this episode, we talked about why he was happy to have an angry customer in the early days. What a digital twin is and why they matter. How they're making work on critical infrastructure safer, quicker, and more productive by avoiding dull, dirty, and dangerous work. How his love of remote-control helicopters and a trip to South Africa helped start this business. The role of timing in determining the success of any startup, including this one. How AI and robots can make us superhuman. How to procrastinate in a productive way and a whole lot more. Hope you enjoy it and please give Mike and DroneDeploy a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
Mike Winn, Founder and CEO of DroneDeploy, welcome to the podcast.
Mike Winn:
Thank you for having me, Chris.
Chris Wedding:
So, if folks were to go to your website or other websites, they would see at least three very shocking, impressive statistics. Not that this summarizes your entire company's history over the last 10 years, but they're wonderful stats. So, here they are, 5,000 businesses that you all count as customers who trust you to make their operations more efficient. About $140 million of outside capital raised to grow your company over the last 10 years or so. And in one particular industry that you all serve agriculture, 310 million acres surveyed through this kind of AI robotics combo. The question I want to ask, no simple answer is, which of these three wonderful stats was harder to achieve, Mike?
Mike Winn:
Yeah. It's super exciting to see the company you build creates great impact like that. We have 5,000 customers and we've got something like 20 to 30,000 people using our products, all of them build upon each other. So, you can imagine more customers means more usage, which helps you create more revenue and therefore raise more money. The hardest thing of course is getting off the ground, getting somebody to care.
I remember going back in time, getting our first customers and how we were so excited when we had the first angry customer. It was back in 2014 and our product at the stage was very immature and not yet reliable, and we really needed it to work. It's like, oh wow, now we've actually got somebody that depends on our product for the first time and that was a really important moment you don't think about. Then everything we've ever done at this company has been because of customers saying they need to do something. They need us to extend to do one more thing.
04:28
And so, as a company, there's this notion, I was an economics degree, but there's this notion that companies have profit. As from the 1970s, I think companies exist to solve a problem and to solve a problem for people. And so, that 5,000 customers is the thing that's actually most important to us.
Chris Wedding:
Well, luckily, as it turns out, when businesses solve problems, they often make profit as well.
Mike Winn:
Yeah, that's a consequence.
Chris Wedding:
You said an interesting thing, that you were almost happy to have an angry customer. It makes me think of that quote that no press is bad press. I mean, a customer is still a customer as long as you can make them happy again, they're a customer. You keep figuring shit out. Right?
Mike Winn:
Well, I think it's a signal. You can imagine you start building a thing just as you started this podcast. What’s exciting is when you actually get people listening and it's not just your mom or your friends. You want to get that email, like when's the next one when you go on vacation, that's when you really know you're making an impact when people are starting to expect and rely on you for something.
Chris Wedding:
You said an interesting thing earlier where the customers would ask you for the next thing, and I know from my prior ventures that it's a balance between listening to customers, what they want and then being a Steve Jobs, like, “I'll tell you what you want. You're not quite sure.” How you all balance what you think the market needs versus what customers will? Because you serve many customers across many industries, they can't all be right, or they can't all be the right strategic direction for you all to invest in, software people, et cetera.
Mike Winn:
No, you're right. I mean, it's funny, there's obviously that quote in the faster horse concept and there's something to that, but that's the exception. You can imagine for us – We're three founders of this company are technology people, and we serve customers in agriculture and construction and energy, all sorts, and there's no way that we can be experts in all of their fields. So, where it's come down to our customers asking for things, it’s like, well, we've said when the first person says, “Hey, can you do this thing?” You say, “No, that's interesting,” but by the time the third or fourth person says the same thing, you're like, “Okay, maybe there's something here.” It's not something you just say yes to, but after you dig around and you figure out, okay, what's the cost benefit of this thing? Can we truly solve this? Are we the best people to solve this? Then you can go about voting yes. I would say there are literally hundreds of things that come together to make our products today that just arrived because our customers who themselves are technology majorities have come to us and said, “Hey, look, we love the products. This is the one extra thing that will make a huge difference to us. Can you help?”
07:08
Chris Wedding:
Well, we've teased the listeners enough over the last few minutes. Give us the pitch. Who slash what is DroneDeploy?
Mike Winn:
DroneDeploy is the world's leading industrial reality capture platform and what that means to people that are not in the industry is, it's basically a tool to build your own Google Earth and street view of the assets that you care about. For example, your construction site, your house installs our panels on. We have lots of environmental users, so your wetlands, and you can do that with a drone and with 360 cameras, you can fly a drone completely autonomously through our software. It'll capture imagery at extremely high-resolution accuracy, in some cases, down to a millimeter per pixel and down to an inch of accuracy that you can explore. You can analyze and understand and it's the baseline of kind of GIS and avoid inspection for many, many industries now.
Chris Wedding:
Can you give us the metrics for granularity or resolution again? You mentioned, was it a millimeter per pixel and what was the next one?
Mike Winn:
Yeah, down to a millimeter per pixel. So, I'm swapping between units of measurement here, but an inch of accuracy, one 25th of an inch of resolution. Then accuracy is really interesting. I'm by no means an expert, but if you want to talk about accuracy, there's so far that you can go down, there's so much depth and detail and our customers in GIS and construction, in mining, for example, they really need to know where everything is down to an inch. Am I building the building in the right place? And being wrong is extraordinarily expensive.
Historically, what people have done is they used tools like surveying wheels, so literally it's people walking along with a surveying wheel or out with a tape measure, climbing on a roof with a tape measure and clipboard to survey a roof. Now instead of taking those kinds of manual measurements, they can just get a drone to fly over the top, capture hundreds of photos of their site and from those photos, we can create these extraordinarily accurate 3D models of whatever it is, from a house all the way up to a massive oil refinery.
09:14
Chris Wedding:
You mentioned this phrase, industrial reality capture where I've seen on your website, where you go next is this digital twin concept. I think you described it in so many other words, but maybe just hit it. What is a digital twin?
Mike Winn:
A digital twin, it's basically a digital representation of an asset and this is increasingly important to customers across many industries, whether it's construction or solar, oil and gas. It's that they want to understand what's happening in the physical world and in our business and technology, it's very easy. We can know every click that happens on our products, but if you're a construction company, you can't put an IoT device on every brick or on every quantum plant, but you can get imagery of everything. And so, we can create digital twin of their assets or their fields, farmers’ fields, who are just capturing this imagery. We can help them understand the progress in laying foundations, digging trenches, the growth of their crops through getting this high-resolution accuracy. We can do this really cool measurement.
Actually, right now across America, farmers, corn fields and soybean fields are just starting to sprout and one important decision they've got to make is, has the germination happened at a high enough rate? Has the weather damaged, for example, those crops? Do I need to replant? And so historically, they've gone to their fields and literally counted the plants in certain areas and done samples. Now, they can fly drones over the field about 30 feet and we can use machine learning to count every crop in their field to help them understand, not just the economic decision of should I start again and replant, but also how much fertilizer should I be putting down? Because where there's more plants, more success, you want more fertilizer or less. So, it just enabled a million downstream decisions to really know what's happening with your digital twin of your asset.
Chris Wedding:
You've given us two examples already of how your solution is very different than the, let's say old fashioned, more manual method. I wonder if you can maybe talk about the quantification of the benefits. I mean, clearly it varies by customer and by sector and who knows what, but maybe one of the metrics, I mean, obviously dollars are part of that set of metrics you would use. I can imagine safety is somewhere in there as well. Operating costs get lower. How do you compare contrast the problem they solved with you all versus without you all?
11:43
Mike Winn:
I mean, that's the big opportunity for us, but also the big challenge is we help our customers do a lot of different things. So, I started with the highest level is across pretty much every industry, especially right now in 2023, companies are looking to become more efficient. There are challenges that input costs are rising, workforces are getting older, carbon emissions are going up when we need them to come down. And to become more efficient, they need to actually really know where the opportunities are to become more efficient. They need measurement and I was saying, measurement is hard.
If you go back to management 101, is you can't manage what you can't measure, so without real measurement, it's really hard for them to improve things. The challenge today is we're not sharing. It's like, it's hard to measure the real world. Often it's manual. I was walking around the fields. It's dull, dirty and dangerous often, we brought on some gas inspectors going to dangerous places to understand what's going on. Instead, we can get robots and AI to do the work. We can empower those inspectors and their surveyors with a robot to do the work as opposed to them walking around, and the result is they can do it more safely. They don't have to go into the dangerous areas. They don't have to climb on roofs or repel off the side of a cooling tower. Instead, they can get the drone to do it and it's safer, it’s a big impact.
The second thing it’s faster. For example, in solar surveying or residential solar, a surveyor can do twice as many roofs per day and not only is it fast, it's more accurate. And so, the error rate is much lower, which has downstream costs implications that in the speed of downstream costs implications. And so, it's cheaper for companies to use these technologies. It's a whole bunch of things coming together. Being safer, that's number one for a lot of industrial companies, but then creating the efficiency around how they do their work, providing them with more scale in a time when it's hard to recruit people to do all the jobs that need to be done. It's actually helping our critical industries meet the needs of modern society.
Chris Wedding:
I'm curious, how do customers pay? What's that model look like?
Mike Winn:
The software as a service business, so it's a subscription. Customers pay to use the products and we say use as much of it as you want. Generally, people pay per user and that one thing that's interesting for a software service business is that we're only successful as our customers. So, we really need to keep our customers using our product every year and the name of the game is to land, to help them adopt their first robots and AI tools, but know that we only like one or 2% penetrated today. And so, every year we've got to help them with more problems on more sites with more people, and that's the big growth engine of our business.
14:21
Chris Wedding:
Your solutions come in at least two forms. There is the actual movement of a drone around some facility, and then there is the hosting or maintenance of a digital twin somewhere for them to, I suppose, manipulate, utilize, et cetera.
Mike Winn:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Maybe tell us about, how often would you bring these drones, these robots, to a site to create a new digital twin? Is this a yearly thing? I guess, obviously, if there were some major retrofit or whatnot, well, yes, it happens after that occurs. How often do drones show up on site, if you will?
Mike Winn:
Now it totally depends on the use case. I'll just pick a few. For example, I was sharing residential solar installations. If you were to buy a solar for your house today, it's quite likely you'll get a drone to come and survey the house. Instead of the guy coming on the roof with a ladder, he'll come with a drone and you only need that once to get the solar installed in your house. But if you go in the other end of the spectrum, you take construction, most of our construction sites will be doing it once a week, capturing data, because the site is continuously changing. Really what we're trying to get to in the long run is drones that are fully automated that can fly out of the box on a schedule where they might be flying every couple of hours. And so, every change that happens on a job site can be documented.
Chris Wedding:
I see. Okay. And are there DroneDeploy personnel each time that a drone flies or is it you empower customers with the drones to do it themselves?
Mike Winn:
Yeah, we empower our customers. so we have customers all around the world. They do about two million operations and flights every year. If DroneDeploy was an airport, we would be the busiest airport in the world on takeoff and landings. Yeah, and it's really enabling them. When you mentioned 300 million acres, they're the heroes going out there in the field in the heat. That's not a lot and the software is pressing the button, but they're the ones going out there collecting the data.
16:21
Chris Wedding:
I'm with you. Okay. Let's go back in time a second. So, you talked about having your first angry customer being excited about that. What led you to create DroneDeploy in the earliest days, Mike?
Mike Winn:
Well, that was a good couple of years ago. I've been a long-time remote-control helicopter hobbyist. I left school. I studied economics and math and so with that, I went to work for a bank and luckily bank bonuses were quite good. With my first bank bonus, I bought myself an RC helicopter. Over time I also had a little bit of that ability to program and things like that, so I started to learn about autopilot and how I could program this helicopter to do things. I started to recognize that there was room, an opportunity. Never before have people been able to use this guy about them productively and now all of a sudden you didn't need to have a pilot's license to be able to capture data about the things you cared about. And so, we started off with a whole bunch of use cases and the biggest use case we drove the concepts behind this business was the three co-founders are all South African.
I used to work for Google back in Ireland and support the South African market and every time I went home to South Africa, they used to give me a security driver, which is funny as I am going back to my home country, but those guys were often involved in anti-poaching. I was in talking to them and realizing that they had to monitor these vast, vast areas with a small number of people I said, “Hey, but how useful would it be to have eyes in the sky if you just have a remote control helicopter or a plane flying above to capture thermal imagery, to see people that shouldn't be there in the park?” We went down the process looking at, okay, what did the solution look like? Along the way we realized lots of people were building hardware, drone hardware, this is back in 2011, 2012, but no one was focusing on making software and making these tools easy to use for anyone.
We happened to be three software guys. They said, “Hey, actually that's the problem we should solve. Let's make software that works on mobile phone and makes it a button tap for a person to launch a drone, flying robot to capture data and get that data to where it needs to be.” And yeah, we ended up the next year starting DroneDeploy and moving to the United States to join an incubator and we are still solving that problem today generally. Not very much on the security side or like anti-poaching, but across many markets of construction, et cetera. That helps a lot.
18:48
Chris Wedding:
So, it would be easy for a listener to think, “Oh, well, this is cool. They realized there is this need and they launched the company and it was just a straight line up into the right, baby,” right?
Mike Winn:
It was easy.
Chris Wedding:
What were some dead ends along the way? You're like, “This is totally going to work,” but it didn't.
Mike Winn:
Yeah. It reminds me, there's a great comic online. I don't know if it’s xkcd or somewhere where like how you imagine the journey from A to B and then actually it's full with mountains and rivers that you've got to cross and all sorts of challenges. Absolutely, there's been a lot of challenges along the way. There's so many mountains that you need to cross and there's lots to figure out and you really got to just persevere and get through it.
One thing I remember doing through this incubator and the guy that ran the incubator said, “Look, if you knew about all the challenges ahead, you wouldn't start this. Use that kind of naivety or ignorance to your advantage. Just try and run through the walls.” And that's what you've got to do. I'd say for anyone starting a startup there's going to be a hundred reasons why it's not going to work, and that's why a lot of startups don't quite get there, but you can't just focus on what's not going to work. You've got to focus on what's going to go wrong. You've got to think about what can go right and that's one of the things that's been so valuable about being in this community of startup founders, that people do think in that way. They think, “Oh, what happens if this all works out?” And amazing things can happen.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I'm pretty sure that being in the Bay area broadly, most folks think about what can go right and many fewer folks think about what can go wrong. I think that environment does help, it's not naivety, but optimism, I think. The comment on how naivety is a blessing, just this weekend, I was writing up I think 10 good takeaways from my work coaching like a hundred plus climate CEOs. That comment showed up basically where that's a blessing. It's hard road. A fun road, but a hard road as well. Mike, what are some, I guess, proof points or examples, perhaps, what allowed you all to start raising this outside capital to pour fuel on the fire of you-all’s growth?
Mike Winn:
I think that the starting point was when we started this company, we were actually very lucky on timing. There's been some analysis by some venture capital firms before and okay, what's the prime factor in a company succeeding? And timing was actually the number one beyond even the team. There’s a funny saying, being too early is the same as being wrong. So, you got to pick up the right time.
21:32
We were actually a little bit early for the industry, but we were the right kind of early for three first time founders. The market was just picking up and people could see this future. We're flying robots. We're going to be compelling tools in the industrial context and I think that's fun. For any entrepreneur listening, the best thing that ever happened to us was that while we were in an incubator, one of our competitors raised a lot of money and we were first time founders. So, we took it initially, it's like, “Oh no, they've got all this, they've got $10 million, sounds like they're going to do everything. Look at their amazing team, look at their amazing investors.” And so, we took those like, oh my gosh, it was a massive threat, but actually it was the best thing that ever happened to us because this company had gone around.
They'd educated all the investors on the opportunity and they were taking a path, which was a hardware and software combo. We were taking just the software combo. And in fact, we were more interesting, I think to a lot of investors because we had smaller goals. There were big goals, but we just didn't have to do quite as much and that led to us having an audience that was primed, that was interested and we came along with a fortune to have what to release more co-founders that are quite impressive. A business idea that people thought, “Oh, that just might work, building software for drones.” And so, that was just the start of it.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I wrote down two things here. One is that you recognize timing is partly about luck, and timing super, super important. The other comment, being too early is also the same as being wrong. It's kind of like, being contrarian is a really great thing, but you got to be right as well as contrarian.
Mike Winn:
A turn in wrong is not helpful.
Chris Wedding:
No, it's not. Tell us about something that you or maybe you and your co-founders strongly believe in that is likely outside of the drone specific business you're running that has led you all to this point of creating a pretty big company.
23:35
Mike Winn:
What are we contrarian on?
Chris Wedding:
Well, it doesn't need to be contrarian, but just something you all strongly believe in. Something that perhaps influences your culture or the way you think about strategy, perhaps.
Mike Winn:
I’ll tell you something that's interesting for what we do and I think really it's our success early on as one thing we really believed in, is that people often divide up markets into like, okay, it's this type of person and this industry. That's only one way to divide up a market. I think about a market as just a group of people that want something. And so, initially when we started pitching our company, we're always horizontal. And we said, “Look, we'll people are going to use this for many different reasons.” It's very hard to early on to tell which were the most important industries to craft and we said, “Look, we're not going to go after agronomists in agriculture or project managers in construction.” We're instead going to say, “Everyone that wants to use a drone commercially, that's who our target is.” We're just going to focus on those innovators, early adopters.
We had a lot of investors think that was totally the wrong idea. Like, “No, you have to focus on just one thing,” and focus can be a good thing. We said, “Look, we've got to focus on an even narrow audience, an audience that most people wouldn't even think about is just the people that really want this technology.” And that to this day is still an important part of what we do. I have a strong belief, it’s very hard to convince anyone to think differently. You got to go on that journey by themselves. They’re not going to listen to some commercial company marketing at them. They've got to listen to their friends, their associates, their colleagues and so instead focus on the people that really can have a vision for your technology and let them be the missionaries for your products instead of going out there and trying to change everyone's mind and say, “Hey, you should all do change management. Why aren't you adopting robots already?” That's actually a very hard thing to do.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Hear, hear. I think something else that listeners may be thinking about is you've referenced AI and robots. I think perhaps legacy, but one interpretation is, oh, well, both of those are actually subtracting the number of jobs out there for folks to earn a good living at. I think you already partially described this, but let's just hit it on the head. How do you respond to a perspective like that?
25:49
Mike Winn:
I think we're very fortunate at this stage. There's so many stories and well-established research on this that just shows you that, yeah, if you think at the first level is using tractors, not oxen, it really doesn’t mean that there are fewer people working in fields. But what happened was that now it became a lot cheaper for everyone to buy food and we could move up the chain and solve bigger problems. We're doing the same kind of thing where it's just like what we are is we're a tool that empowers field workers. We help those surveyors get off roofs and work twice as fast and deliver twice as much value doing half as much work. They can focus rather on understanding that the measurements, making the decisions and less about doing the dull, dirty dangerous stuff.
My favorite story is I was in banking. And so, the favorite thing is that since the ATM was developed, this might be changing now in a different way, but the number of bank workers multiplied, I think by in the order of 10 X. You're like, “Hey, we're taking the bank teller away,” but the reality was that the ATM made banking accessible to everyone. And so, at that point it was very expensive.
And so, we're on this journey. I'm really interested in right now what's happening in the AI world. My two co-founders did their PhDs in machine learning. My background's also applied math, I did a lot of that. One thing that's happening that's super exciting is the amount of progress in AI code generation. For a lot of people, they'll look at that and be like, “Oh my gosh, now programmers can be five or 10x more productive in a few years’ time. Does that mean we need 10X fewer programmers?” I think it's the opposite. We're going to have 10X more programmers. Everyone's going to become a software engineer because we have these tools and now the cost of doing this, of these tools and the ability to use them, it's going to become accessible to everyone. So, it's going to need even more people employed to do these things, but just people working on a higher level than they used to before.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. There's an author of a newsletter in the AI space, I'm forgetting his name, but on his LinkedIn the title is superhuman, which is kind of what you're describing. It's like, well, AI and robots can make us all much more productive. Yeah.
Mike Winn:
If I take that idea, that's what we try at our company, is making our field workers superhumans. We give them the ability to fly above their fields, see the drones, they can see, get the bird's eye view. They get the ability to see through walls because we take a photo internally of constructions or as things are being built. We allow them to go back in time because they could see what happened last week or last year on a job site. So, there's a whole different number of ways, but we're just taking photos. Here's people capabilities they would never have had before.
28:28
Chris Wedding:
Superhuman, period. Awesome.
Hey, it's Chris. Just a brief message from our sponsors and we'll get back to the show. Just kidding. We don't take sponsors. On the other hand, I do have the privilege of leading the only executive peer group community for growth stage, CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. With monthly group meetings, annual retreats, and one-on-one executive coaching calls, our members help each other boost revenue, impact capital raised, clarity, confidence, work-life balance, and team effectiveness. Today's 30 plus members represent over $8 billion in market cap for assets under management for climate solutions. If you're interested, go to entrepreneursforimpact.com and join the waiting list today. All right, back to the show.
Let's switch to your path a little more, Mike. What kind of advice, looking back, might you give your younger self to be a happier, more effective on this path?
Mike Winn:
No idea where I learned this, but I think one thing is just really important to learn, especially as an entrepreneur is this notion that no one knows what they're doing. Everyone's out there figuring it out. Even the most successful people, they have figured things out, but they're still learning. And so, just like to get through that notion of our kids, the imposter syndrome or the challenges of this being hard, it's just like, “Look, everyone else is in that position too.”
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. When I'm talking to, I don't know, grad students of mine at Duke or UNC, or just emerging professionals looking for career advice, I say, “Look, we're all still figuring this out, including myself.” Or the other is behind every beautiful logo and company brochure is a hot mess. It's never as good as it looks on the outside. How about some habits or routines, Mike, that keep you healthy, sane, and focused? The reason I pause is, I wanted to tell listeners that they can't see you, but here you are on this 10-year journey doing what a few others can, and you're smiling quite a lot, man. You look pretty happy in your role here. Anyway, habits or routines, what you got for us?
30:49
Mike Winn:
Why am I happy right now? We have a big problem with just recognizing what makes you happy, what gives you energy. There's a lot of things that suck about doing any job. It doesn't matter what job, even my job as a founder, you just got to do whatever is required and sometimes it might not be the thing that you want to do, but like, hey, what are the things to give you energy? I'm smiling. I just came back from a trip and meeting some customers and that always gives me energy to hear their stories, hear how we're making an impact to them. So, that's a big thing for me. I just love hearing about how the world works. I think that's something we've got at DroneDeploy that's quite special is we're just exposed to so much.
Habits and routines. I think a fun thing for me that I've always used is that, I remember hearing about a professor that talked about this, you should procrastinate in a productive way. Now, in the time I don't want to do the thing that's important to do, but if I work on the second most important thing, then you can actually achieve quite a lot because you can procrastinate by doing something valuable. And so, that's one of the things that's okay, I can keep working for quite a long time. I might not quite get to the most important thing as fast as I would want to, but at least I'm actually delivering something valuable.
Chris Wedding:
Well, there is certainly a portion of the audience that is feeling a lot of relief right now to hear you recommend that procrastination can still be a good thing. How about some recommendations for books, podcasts, tools, quotes, et cetera, that you think listeners may find value in?
Mike Winn:
I mean, the startup bible is two of them that were important to us early on was obviously Crossing the Chasm and the other one was Four Steps to the Epiphany. That's a really good book if you're just getting started. This is the ocean in there that my co-founder [inaudible – 00:32:35], which is good. The answer isn't inside the building, to get out there and talk to customers.
In terms of podcasts, there's just so much out there. If you want some like wisdom density with a bit of an edge, the Valves podcast is really good. There’s some really interesting things we talked about today earlier and you reminded me of what he was saying about you want to be a rational optimist.
33:02
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. For listeners, this is Naval Ravikant, the AngelList and lots of other things.
Mike Winn:
Yeah. That's probably like two or three hours of talking, but 40 years of good ideas.
Chris Wedding:
For sure. Yeah, I would just add on that the book that Eric Jorgensen maybe compiled of Naval's thoughts called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It’s two, maybe 300 pages compiled from his Twitter, podcast writings, et cetera. I think I've got synthesis underlined on almost every page so a good compilation for sure. Hey Mike, so let's wrap here with maybe a final call to action to listeners. Who would you slash who would DroneDeploy like to hear from? Types of customers, types of future employees, et cetera.
Mike Winn:
We want to talk to as a company is we want to talk to those leaders in business and it could be at any level. Those leaders in business that have a vision for robotics and AI and solving really big problems. We'd love to hear what that vision is and where it's going to take them and how a company like ours can help them.
Chris Wedding:
Well, when folks check out your website, they'll see you active in lots and lots of sectors across, I think, 180 countries. So, clearly solving lots of problems and I heard and wrote down your stat earlier, maybe 1% market penetration. So, lots more folks who could be knocking on your door. Hey, Mike, excited that you all are addressing problems around the, what did you say here? Dull, dirty and dangerous parts of work and critical infrastructure, making it safer and more and more efficient. Hey man, we're rooting for you-all success. Talk soon.
Mike Winn:
Yeah, thanks very much.
Chris Wedding:
Thanks for listening and if you want more intel on climate tech, better habits and deep work, then join the thousands of others who have subscribed to our Substack newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com or drop me a note on LinkedIn. All right, that's all y'all. Take care.
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