Skydio

Skydio is one of the few drone companies out there that goes against the trend in the drone industry of over-promising and under-delivering. The team at Skydio was heads down on building a truly reliable and robust autonomous drone when I joined in 2017 and we waited to announce publicly until we had something that actually did what it promised and was ready to ship, when we announced the Skydio R1.

Then with Skydio 2 we started with the crazy ambitious goal of taking the tech in R1 and making it less than half the price, while also vastly improving the camera, size, weight, top speed, range, and battery life in response to the customer feedback we had on R1. Which we did, and launched in October 2019.

This ability to set out on ambitious goals and actually deliver on them is a direct result of the talent on the team and the investments in building a solid platform of infra/tooling that makes engineering on the Skydio team extremely rewarding and fast paced.

Pros:

• Technical co-founders: All three of our co-founders can get into the weeds on technical details, and their background is why the company places a high value on good engineering, investing in infrastructure and developer tooling, and managing feature-work vs tech-debt.
• Strong talent: We've been fortunate to recruit great engineers; it is a good mix of folks coming from academic backgrounds and others with years of strong industry experience.
• Hard tech: It's easy to see students making 'autonomous' drones in research labs and assume that it's a figured-out problem, but it turns out that autonomy in the real world, with reliability that customers can depend on, is incredibly hard to get right. The problems we tackle on the software team are truly 'full stack': embedded firmware, real-time systems, ML, computer vision, optimization, data streaming, backend and frontend web, iOS and Android apps, devops, distributed systems, APIs/SDKs/platforms, 'medium' data, etc.
• Transparent Leadership: Adam, who is CEO, is very transparent with all employees, and regularly gives updates on the company financials, business outlook, future product strategies, etc without sugar-coating.
• Product: Skydio is basically the only US drone company that has a real chance of taking significant market-share from DJI, and solving many problems that are only possible with the level of on-board autonomy Skydio drones are capable of.

We're going through a growth phase where the entire team is no longer fully in sync on short-term priorities, goals, and objectives. Figuring out how to better communicate and keep everyone in sync is something management is aware of and actively working on, but not yet there.

Maintain the current engineering-driven culture as we scale up.