Cyrus Sigari of Up Partners

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that explores the evolving landscape in the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Veer, the managing partner of Veer, Negron, and Troff and the president of CMEG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. There needs to be something that we're excited about when we wake up in the morning.

We can't just be buried in what the media wants to tell us that we should be worried about. There's nothing more exciting than going on an adventure and doing it with people you love and that you wanna learn from. Being an investor, a venture investor in technology companies is going on adventures with brilliant young entrepreneurs that are inspired and inspiring. Today, we are up and away with Cyrus Seghari, a veteran aviator, investor, and cofounder of UP Partners, a venture firm at the forefront of helping entrepreneurs develop cleaner, faster, and smarter modes of transportation. Cyrus shares his journey from his boyhood level of flight to the rise of companies he champions in the ever changing world of mobility.

So I wanna welcome you, Cyrus Sagari. And before we jump into this enlightening, uplifting discussion, tell us a little bit about your background and, what got you to UP Partners. Well, Jim, thanks so much for having me. And it's a life's journey and exploration around mobility has got me to be here and helping build UP Partners. My fascination with mobility really started with aviation as a very young child and fell in love with airplanes when I was a little kid.

I, took my first flying lesson when I was 11 years old at the Santa Monica Airport where I'm sitting now, where our offices are. I happened to meet another 11 year old kid also taking flying lessons at the airport. His name is Ben Marcus. Turned out he was four days older than me, also the youngest of three boys. His parents also from The Middle East.

One small difference, he was an Israeli Jew, and I was an Iranian Muslim. So geopoliticals for enemies that were best of friends starting at age 11, and and we've had about a thirty year friendship partnership together, really starting with aviation. So we soloed at 16 together, got our license at 17 together. We became two of the youngest flight instructors and commercial pilots in the country at 18 together, then went to university at Purdue in Indiana and studied aerospace engineering and aviation technology, then went to go to an aircraft manufacturer where worked as a propulsion systems engineer designing jet aircraft, then a flight test engineer, and then got into selling airplanes. And he did a he had a very similar sort of trajectory.

And then from there, went off to start our first business called JetAviva, which is today one of the largest sellers of business jets in the world with a couple thousand clients in 40 different countries, really helping expand the benefits of a particular type of mobility to a significant amount of people. And, it was a ride of a lifetime to get to build my passion into my profession, where I got to help design these things, fly these things, operate these things, and then ultimately help people benefit from them. And it was through that lens really started to understand how powerful mobility is for humanity. When you give somebody the opportunity to have frictionless control over where they want to be, when they want to be, some pretty magical things can happen. And that really started an exploration around helping in many cases, when you sell in jets, you're selling to a very privileged class of humanity.

How do you go from helping billionaires fly to helping billions fly? And it was really part of an inflection point in my own career in recognizing that we've got a really unique time in the history of humanity where you've got converging exponential technologies all coming together that will allow a larger percentage of humanity to be able to benefit from these technologies in similar ways that I benefited and many of the folks that have had the opportunity to work with the benefit where you can move your people and goods cleaner, faster, safer, and at lower cost in a multidimensional world. So it was kind of a long winded answer to your question, but it really started with a a fascination with flight and making that my life in one way, shape, or form for the last thirty years and then translating it into being a professional investor and investing in entrepreneurs that are transforming the moving world going forward. So, Cyrus, when you're looking at it from a partner's perspective, I mean, here you were. You started out at 11 loving flying.

As you're seeing new technologies now, what is getting you excited now? You know, a really cool technology that has just become available in the last few weeks is something that's come out of OpenAI through the development of something called d a l e two, DALL e two, which is an AI program that you can type in natural language into to describe an image you want to see, and it shoots out the best possible artistic creation you could have ever imagined using AI. And you can go on Twitter and look at some of the stuff that's coming out. I mean, the best designers on the planet can come up with some of these pictures that are coming out. Well, why is that interesting relevant around mobility and the question that you just asked?

What AI in this capacity has done has democratized creativity, has given anybody from a three year old child to, you know, somebody that's in the twilight of their life, the ability to say and think of things and have an image of it show up. And it inspires you when you do that. And then so how do I translate that into the world of mobility? Well, anything that can make it easier for people and things to move, particularly in the world of autonomy, is an unlock for providing these sort of technologies to more and more people. So in the example, in Africa right now, there's a company called Zipline that's using drones to deliver blood to communities that otherwise wouldn't have access to blood.

And about every minute, a drone's taking off delivering life saving payload to someone in need from vaccines, blood, other medical supplies. And the reason that that's able to happen is because of autonomy. Not too dissimilar than this AI that's being used for creating beautiful imagery. There's a bridge that can be connected around general AI and different applications around ultimately creating a more beautiful exciting life that can give people a better quality of life. So when you're seeing these new developments and you're referring to AI, for instance and we all know about drones.

Are drones evolving from an AI perspective and getting more and more sophisticated? Most certainly. And, really, they need to for them to become more useful. So there's another company that we're early investors in called Skydio. And Skydio is, my opinion, the most technically advanced flight autonomy company in the world where, you know, they have about a thousand dollar consumer product that you can buy right now that is a drone that you don't need to fly.

It flies itself. So if you're a mountain biker and you wanna go catch some incredible imagery of yourself riding some awesome terrain, the thing will follow you. It's like out of a sci fi movie. It's incredible. And the technology that's in this this thousand dollar drone is on par with the same technology you'll find on autonomous cars.

In fact, it's the same NVIDIA chip that's inside of this Skydia drone that's using a combination of, I think it's, like, 12 different cameras and sensors to allow it to fly. Then you go one step further. They're now doing this for the military. In this particular case, Skydio is is using their drone for war fighters to help them get a better perspective of what's happening in the battlefield. And as you look at what's going on today with the conflict in East Europe, you feel kinda good having access to these technologies to theoretically protect way of life that we know it today.

You brought up the Ukraine situation. I mean, I know that everybody's talking about this big battle that's coming where there's gonna be tanks on this open plane, for instance. Will drones come into play there? There already is. You know, who knows where this war goes?

But probably the biggest tool in the Ukrainian side's toolkit that's been hugely advantageous is the use of the Turkish drone that's been firing missiles at Russian targets. That's been a asymmetric tool against a lot a lot of tanks where you weren't fighting one for one in this case. That's more of a traditional UAV thing that we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Ukraine's been using. There's another product that was just approved to be sold to the Ukrainian Armed Forces called the Switchblade 600, which is manufactured by a drone company called AeroVironment here in Southern California. And AeroVironment is the same company that created the Mars helicopter.

If you remember when we landed on Mars, there was a helicopter flying around. They did that, and they've also done some other really, really cool products, but they've developed a number of military applications. In this case, the Switchblade 600 is a drone that launches out of a mortar shell kind of thing, and they can fly 40 kilometers with the same warhead on it as the Javelin missile. It can be remote controlled and put on target. So that's a pretty interesting tool in a traditional war that can give a group like the Ukrainian army an unfair advantage.

And I never really expected to see another traditional war in my lifetime. You know, I thought this was all posturing by superpowers, but recognizing that a legitimate traditional war with tanks and helicopters and fighter jets and all that is, like, a reality that we still have to live with. Creating technologies for the benefit of at least the side that we're collectively probably rooting for, I'm pretty happy it's on our side. So that's interesting because, you know, you hear about all the things about sending over fighter jets, and you hear about all the tanks and the, as you said, the missiles and stuff. But it sounds like you would say that drones I mean, we've heard about them in terrorism, but it sounds like in open warfare like this, you think that that may be the weapon that people talk about more going forward.

Yeah. Most of the videos you're seeing on CNN or Fox or Twitter, whatever, they're all videos of drones doing, you know, some pretty incredible things. And I'm pretty against war in general and creating any sort of tools that are gonna harm the life of another. But, you know, when you're seeing some pretty nasty things happening, you understand why we need to continue to invest in these technologies. You know, so much of the technology that we benefit from today in our normal day to day to life comes from the military.

Just give you an example, like, there would be no Uber if it wasn't for the military. Why do I say that? Well, Uber wouldn't work without GPS. Right. And GPS was originally created during the Cold War to determine the location of submarines.

God knows what the investment was made back then. It certainly was an economic decision to do it. It wouldn't have made any economic sense. But if you extrapolate the benefit of deploying GPS as a digital infrastructure for mobility to know where things are, you can't even wrap your head around what the economic impact has been through that sort of technology. And so, you know, you go from GPS for Uber to autonomous cars to airliners.

There's probably hundreds, if not thousands of examples of national defense being the driver to invest in technology that ultimately can have implications for civil society as well. So are you investing in a lot of companies down in Southern California? I mean, is that where you're seeing a lot of this technology develop? We have investments all over the world from Israel to Ecuador to Singapore. Our most of our investments are coming out of California and most cases out of Silicon Valley, and we continue to see that that is an area where you're attracting a lot of start up attention and activity.

But what we have been excited to see is more and more startups coming out of the heartland of places where you would expect to see startups, like in Kansas and Ohio and Arkansas. Because startup mindset has been, like, there's been this monopoly of Silicon Valley holding on to it, but COVID kind of unlocked that. And you don't necessarily have to be in Silicon Valley to go develop a company that might change the world, and Zoom has made it pretty simple for people to operate from where they wanna be. But that's just as our current portfolio. I mean, we've got a one of our biggest winners right now is a company out of Burlington, Vermont that has created a electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, a company called Beta Technologies, which has developed, quote, unquote, flying car that UPS has ordered, the army has ordered, Dyna Therapeutics has ordered.

It's a pretty spectacular vehicle Amazon's partnered with that can carry the effective truckload of an Amazon truck, fully electric, take off like helicopter, fly on no gas, land at a distribution center, and transport the packages. So it's kind of long winded way to answer your your short question, but we're seeing it all over the world. In terms of big changes in our lives as people, you know, LA or just in general around the country, where is this technology gonna show up, and where will we notice it the most? Well, before I answer that question, I think it's important to address, like, two major themes. The first theme is around sustainability related to transport.

If you look at the data, the movement of things and people is responsible for one third of all c o two emissions. That's huge. A third of all c o two emissions comes from transportation logistics. That's the first data point. Second data point is that transportation logistics is hugely important.

It's 10% of global GDP. It's a $10,000,000,000,000 market. And history has shown as you provide more access to mobility, be it people or goods, you increase the quality of life for people around you. So this is a thing we want to expand upon, but we have this really difficult challenge of as you expand it in the status quo, you're continuing to contribute to what is probably the largest existential threat that we have, maybe second to a nuclear war, is climate change. So you have these two major areas.

You've got sustainability and then you got expanded benefits of mobility. Well, it turns out that you can't really be a clean tech investor unless you're a mobility investor. And so really focusing on mobility first is, like, kind of the best way to get to creating a future where you're moving people and goods cleaner, faster, safer at lower cost on the ground, in the air, in the sea, in space. And you've got a number of different exponential technologies that are coming together that as you compound them on top of one another, you can have transformative impacts to humanity. And so just as this example of DALL E two, the AI system that allows you to just say a few words and it creates the best possible image that you could have ever imagined, You dial that in with GPT three, which also came out of OpenAI, which is you can give some prompts to the AI to say, hey.

Write me a story about so and so topics, and it writes an entire story. And then you put those two things together, you see a world where movies will be built by AI. You don't even have to be a filmmaker anymore. You just have to be able to give it the prompts of what to make. That's pretty incredible.

And then you can extrapolate that to designing things. So as a designer of physical things, you will no longer have to do the math to figure out how you build a trust for a vehicle. You can use AI to be able to optimize the load pathways to minimize the total weight, pick the best material so that you can ultimately have something that can help you move people and goods cleaner, faster, safer, lower cost without having to be 10 different engineers to design it. Anybody can be able to design as we continue to go forward. I think at the core of what I'm sort of heading towards here is we are stepping into a future where we will all be able to be creators.

We don't need to just be consumers because the barriers of entry to create will be removed by technology, and that's really exciting. And it's going to continue to democratize the ability for entrepreneurs to build businesses on top of these technologies to benefit from them, like in this case of drone delivery. You know, you said, what does this future look like that I'm really excited about? Right now in Bentonville, Arkansas, if you live in a town called Pea Ridge, Arkansas, just outside of Bentonville, you can get on your phone and order products from Walmart, and a drone will drop it off in two minutes in your backyard. That's going on right now?

That's happening right now as we speak. Okay. And it's not gonna be that long before that's rolled out throughout the country. That's hard not to get excited about. I mean, if you're a kid, five years old, looking up at the sky and you're seeing this drone fly by and it drops this little package off in your backyard, it's gonna make you dream about what's possible.

And when you've got leaders like Elon Musk, you know, as clear as that as possibly be that he's getting to Mars and he's gonna get us there to Mars and he's building the pathway to get there, he's giving a lot of other I'm really excited about children and the next generation a license to think really big and think creatively about the sort of solutions you can create that'll be good for humanity broadly. Oh, it's kind of a roundabout way of getting to your question, but, man, it's an exciting time to be alive. So do you think there'll be drones like birds flying around all over the place, or will there be, like, FAA limitations because they're gonna be banging into each other, or or all of a sudden changing our, you know, the site and making noise? I mean, how is the regulation gonna work? Regulations are really, really important.

You know, as a airplane pilot and helicopter pilot, I'm actually terrified of little drones running around into my airplane or helicopter. And that's a serious concern that we should all have. And, thankfully, we've got the FAA that's primary job is to protect the population around anything to do with the sky. And so the FAA's got a lot of energy right now towards this new future of drones that then leads way to flying cars that are fully autonomous. But you brought up birds, and so let's just talk about that for a second.

There are currently roughly 200 to 400,000,000,000 organic drones flying around right now. Birds. So I wanna repeat that. There's 200 to 400,000,000,000 birds flying around at any one moment living on this planet. And somehow, someway, they figured out how to do that without running into each other and killing each other.

Now birds have some pretty incredible sensors. They've got magnetometers to help them figure out north and south is. They've got optical sensors called eyes to make sure they don't run into each other. They've got audible sensors to listen to one another. They've got sonar sensors to help figure out where the ground is.

They've got a world class suite of sensing technology with a little bit of AI called the brain to get themselves from a to b without running into either people or planes or buildings, whatever maybe. Yes. There's a, you know, on the edge cases, there's collisions that happen, but it's probably 99.9999999999% safe as a bird considering the total number of bird flights. And I think we have a lot to learn from birds around the future of drones and eventually flying cars where you go away from a world where they are being commanded from a central location to you're giving it where it needs to go. It figures out how to get there on its own based off of what's going on around it.

If it sees a plane, it moves on its own to recover. If it sees bad weather, it knows how to move on its own sort of recovery pathway. And I'm seeing today already technologies that are gonna allow us to get there, where you can build in enough safety systems into these technologies that will provide detect, and avoid both visual, audible, radar, sonar, all that where you can have safe operation. The other point you brought up is noise. Noise is a real big issue.

And what's interesting about drone noise is on the frequency range that it operates, It's actually, like, the most annoying sound scientifically that you can be exposed to. And the reason is it's that it's it's very similar to, like, the sound of a bee. And we are programmed in our minds to know that, like, get away from a bee. It's gonna bite you. Right?

So there are companies today that are developing technologies to make rotating blades, specifically drone rotors and plane rotors, very, very, very quiet. This is probably the single biggest unlock for this future is how to make flying things that are moving a lot of air exceptionally quiet. And once you do that, you're gonna have a hard time having people complain about it when they can get whatever they want whenever they want in, you know, minutes in their backyard, and there's not a person driving it where you have to worry about privacy issues, that it's just a blind robot taking something from a to b. How long do you think before the noise issue is solved? Solved is a wide ranging thing.

Improve substantially. I'd say there's technologies in work today that have already solved it, that I've seen and heard, but depends on what scale. I would be surprised that in ten to twenty years, it's not a 100% solved. But there isn't a technology in place where the movement of air is done in such a way around these rotor blades that it's almost undetectable. So we've talked about drones and delivery.

What about the average person's ability from a commuting perspective or sightseeing perspective? How's that gonna change in the next ten years? It's funny you mentioned that. Just last night, there was a sixty minutes episode with Anderson Cooper where he went out and visited with a number of companies that are in the world of what we call electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, eVTOLs, which is a fancy term for flying cars, also known as electric vertical aircraft. There are somewhere on the order of 400 companies developing some sort of flying car to move people from a to b, and this includes the largest companies in the world like Boeing, Airbus, Textron, Embraer, Toyota, you know, you name it.

Everybody from aerospace to traditional automotive to upstarts that have gone public in the last year, like companies like Joby and Vertical Aerospace and Lilium and so on and so forth. There is no lack of attention and capital being invested into companies that are going to be developing some sort of flying car. And there's a pathway to get there that's there's, like, the easy stuff and there's the really hard stuff. So there's a company based in Austin called Lyft, which is creating effectively like, do you ever go to a go kart track as a kid? Sure.

Yeah. So imagine a flying go kart track where you get in this vehicle, you pay, I don't know, something like a $100. There's a digital fence around where you can go, and you can zip around on the little flying car thing and come back and land. In fact, that's one of the companies that Anderson Cooper yeah. He actually flew it in the video last night.

So that's a very simple problem, both from a regulatory perspective and use case perspective. It's really for leisure and excitement. And, you know, if you go back to the early days of aviation, there's a term that you may remember called barnstormers. Barnstormers would literally be guys in airplanes that would fly airplanes through barns. And, you know, the doors are open on both sides and they give, you know, rides to people for a dollar and to get people exposed to aviation.

That's how the industry started. You get enough people involved, you get enough technology developed, and you figure out all these other applications. That's on one end. Then on the other end, you have companies developing vehicles that are being designed to be used for commuting within cities. So a company called Joby based up in Santa Cruz, you know, they've raised a couple billion dollars.

They've built a beautiful machine. It's very easy to fly. It's very quiet. Toyota's a big backer. They've gone public.

And whenever they do certify their product, it's gonna be a game changer. It's gonna allow the use of these sorts of vehicles in city centers to get over traffic and give people more time back that are stuck on the ground. It's gonna be a while before you've got the Jetsons happening, but it's not gonna be that far. I'd say twenty years, you know, where it's a legitimate opportunity for a significantly higher amount of people to be able to benefit from flight that's not just every year flying to go see mom and dad in Illinois or whatever it might be. Just give you a stunning statistic.

Only one out of five humans living on the planet today has ever been in an airplane. 80% of humanity has never flown, period. Right. And my assumption is most of the people that are listening and yourself, every one of the people on this call, had been on some sort of airplane and have used flight as a tool in their lives. You have to go to college, to go to a job interview, to be at a family event, whatever it might be, where they had an amazing life experience.

To think that 80% of humanity has not benefited from this, what happens when they do? What happens for culture where people get to know each other better, where they get to learn from each other, they do business with one another? It's transformative. We like to think about the next chapter of mobility being not too dissimilar to the Internet. The Internet provided very low latency access to data.

I want to know something. I know it. Very low cost. To the Internet of matter. I want to be somewhere.

I'm there. I want to have something. I have it. Where you can do it cleaner, faster, safer, or lower cost. From your perspective, is it the low flying satellites that make such a difference, for instance, for self driving cars?

Is that the technology that's fueling this, or is it just that there's such a expansion in technology in general? There's, like, five or six major reasons why it's all happening now. The first reason is going electric and having batteries that have power densities that can allow us to have meaningful flight time of things. And even for driving things, right? Range anxiety is not nearly as big a deal as it used to be around electric cars.

That's the first thing. Second thing with flying things specifically is something called distributed electric propulsion, Having like a quadcopter kind of design where you can have software that's controlling the speed of each one of those rotors to be able to allow you to control the vehicle in a very simple way. You don't have to be a really skilled pilot to fly some of these vehicles. Then comes underlying software, having really great software with easy user interface to allow people to interact with the product. So Steve Jobs didn't come up with the first touch screen phone.

He came up with the best UI for humans to experience the product. I mean, there is no manual for an iPhone. I remember when my first PalmPilot, you know, had a manual that was a page thick or blackberry or whatever it might be. So however you can create a user experience with technology that allows anybody to use it is a huge enabler for this future. So those are some key components.

Then you get into things like new manufacturing technologies, three d printing that can significantly reduce the cost to build things, communication links. You know, our five g technology is allowing us to have very low latency command and control of air based vehicles, ground based vehicles, and so on and so forth. The last thing I'll add is not necessarily a technological thing, it's more of a societal thing. You have society wanting these things. This is not just for the rich anymore.

You know, you go back to the movie Wall Street where he had Gordon Gekko on his big old cell phone. You know, back then, it was just the rich that had the Gordon Gekko Motorola cell phone. Now every 12 year old on the planet's got a cell phone. And most people are seeing these technologies that are coming as to not being for just the most fortunate people on the planet. It's really a democratized access to technology, knowledge, and the movement of things to allow us to experience this exceptionally exciting future.

So it sounds like from a personal level, what excites you in terms of what motivates you to do this. What from a personal level do you think is also driving your passion here? You know, if you listen to Elon speak, and I'm admittedly a big Elon fanboy, there needs to be something that we're excited about when we wake up in the morning. We can't just be buried in what the media wants to tell us that we should be worried about. There's nothing more exciting than going on an adventure and doing it with people you love and that you wanna learn from.

Being an investor, a venture investor in technology companies is going on adventures with brilliant young entrepreneurs that are inspired and inspiring. Many of them have exceptional personal stories. Many of them are first generation immigrants that have fled challenging places in the world to come to, in this case, in The United States, to build a better future for themselves and for others that are taking advantage of what they're creating. And, you know, as I go back to my comment earlier about AI and it being a tool to help humans create, I think our core jobs as humans is to love and to create. And that's kind of what I see a lot of the things that we're touching doing.

It's it's giving love by giving access to things that otherwise you wouldn't have that can increase the quality of life. And it's creating jobs. It's creating dreams. It's creating this incredible future that I don't know how you don't get excited about it. I sure as hell do.

From a technological perspective, do you see any big breakthroughs coming with battery technology soon? I mean, you said it it's one of the things that's allowing this to take place as these batteries have greater range and stuff. Is there gonna be any big change in battery technology in the next few years coming out along? There are so many people looking at battery technology right now. You know, if you look at the history of battery improvement, it's pretty linear.

And has been for the last thirty years or so. Handful of percentage points a year, I think up to maybe 10% a year. There hasn't been necessarily like a step function change in battery density and access to batteries I've seen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it comes. My guess is if it comes that Tesla's gonna be the first one to see it or to buy it and because they're buying a lot of batteries or creating a lot of batteries these days. I think we're gonna see, on the topic of batteries, hydrogen is gonna be something we see a lot more of.

It's easy to get confused of what and how hydrogen plays a role in batteries and energy in general. So there's really two ways to use hydrogen to create power. One is to burn it, and which case the byproduct of burned hydrogen is water. It's not a big deal, but in a combustion cycle, like, in an engine. And the other is it's escaping me the name, but it's effectively where you can create electricity using hydrogen, then use that electricity to power motors and some of it goes into batteries.

So effectively, the hydrogen becomes a battery. It's a source of energy that's stored, in this case, a tank as opposed to an actual battery cell, and then you can create electricity from it. So you're starting to see a lot more use cases for the use of hydrogen to be able to power things, especially big things, like big ships. Like, that's an area where we've seen hydrogen becoming pretty interesting. Well, I know I know there's some people talking about doing some big hydrogen plants in North Dakota, for instance, to help with trucking and other things where there's a lot of concentration in the Midwest, for instance, where you've got a lot of 100 mile or 200 mile trips, for instance, and hydrogen can be kind of one of the bridge fuels as we're moving away from fossil fuels and so forth.

So it's interesting you see that also having a big role in kind of this expansion of battery accessibility. It's in the same world, and I remember what I blanked on. It's hydrogen fuel cells. So hydrogen fuel cells is what allows you to go through a process to extract electricity from hydrogen. Got it.

Yeah. It's all kind of in the same world. It's around using new sources of power to move things. Hydrogen's been around for a while, but it's getting a lot more attention now. The biggest issue with hydrogen is the infrastructure necessary to support it.

Hydrogen is kind of flammable. If you've seen the Edinburgh video, that big old blimp that blows up, that was fueled with hydrogen. Yeah. And it's a very small particle, so it leaks very easily. You can't necessarily use the established infrastructure pipelines to move hydrogen because of some interesting interactions with hydrogen and steel that are problematic.

So there's no list of easy wins here. This is all hard stuff. Absolutely. But I think we have gotten, particularly in light of the Ukraine conflict, a lot more interest towards energy independence. And we can do that through traditional crude solutions or continuing to invest into new technologies that allow us to get away from fossil fuels altogether and start using some of these new exciting technologies.

So I had another question in terms of the technology. You were saying that for the self flying cars, so to speak, that they're gonna be a lot easier to operate. What about just staying in the air? Is the technology such that cars break down less often than they used to, but when they do, you know, they're on the ground. What about when you have all these flying vehicles with people, how reliable are they gonna be?

The good news is the FAA is not going to allow them to be certified unless they're exceptionally reliable. I mean, the fact is, the safest form of transport on the planet right now is flying on an airliner. Driving your car more than I mean, it's we've only had one person lose their life in a US operated airliner in the last eleven years. That's because an engine blew up, and it threw some parts into a cabin of a seven thirty seven. It wasn't a plane crash.

You know, it was an unfortunate situation. I can't even imagine how many billions of people or hundreds of millions of people have flown for that one incident. So flight is actually an exceptionally safe modality of transport. And as a result of that, our regulators have got some pretty stringent requirements in place to ensure that we don't lose this incredible margin of safety. So I think this is a place where regulation is actually really good, and that you can have a service that's being provided by the government to ensure that the citizens are safe when they get onto something.

But at the same time, we're talking about new technologies that, in this case, the FAA has never certified before. And there's a lot of learning happening, and it's not easy. We're in this really interesting, transitory period where you don't have what I did yesterday to inform what I'm gonna do tomorrow. And this is gonna take some pretty significant leadership on the behalf of regulators to figure it out. I mean, just to give you an example, you may remember the July MAX debacle with Boeing where two seven thirty sevens fell out of the sky, one in I believe it was Ethiopian Airlines, and then the other being in Southeast Asia.

Those were all attributed to one part that was changed on the most successful airplane that's ever flown, the seven thirty seven. It took two years for Boeing to recertify that one individual system on the most conventional traditional airplane ever built. My point in that is that a lot of these folks that are developing quote unquote flying cars have got a long road ahead of them in terms of developing brand new systems from scratch. But I think there's enough political and social goodwill behind these sorts of technologies that's going to continue to push innovation from the regulatory side just as much from the entrepreneur side. What's interesting is there's been so much money that's gone into the VC world in last few years.

And again, the government creating so much liquidity obviously had a lot to do with that. But it sounds like, when you talk about how much money is going into this, it sounds like there's just a ton of money in an awful lot of new companies starting up. I mean, it sounds like you said there were hundreds going into these spaces, which is just shocking. I mean, like, you know, I'm just hearing, like, one or two companies are doing this, but it sounds like there's hundreds of companies doing this right now. This is the future we were all promised when we were kids.

There is something that I can't put my finger on or words to describe the feeling around the freedom associated with flight that just about most people can nod their head and say, yeah. I want that. I wanna be able to fly like Superman. I wanna be able to fly like Batman. I wanna be like Maverick in Top Gun.

There's not many people that say, no. I don't want to be. It may be some people that don't say they want to be, but there aren't many people that say I don't want to be. Right? And I don't know if that's, like, a spiritual programming in us.

There's a reason why people climb tall mountains. They wanna go up to go get a beautiful view and maybe connect with the ethereal in in a way that is hard to describe in purely scientific ways as to why we wanna do it, but it's there. And I think the fact that we've got a capital markets that are excited about it, the fact that you could theoretically put a dent in c o two missions as a driver to do things like this, to have defense reasons to do things like this, for supply chain, transportation logistics reasons to do this, and then you've got technology being ready to do these things. It's kind of a perfect storm. And I don't think the market can support all these hundreds of companies.

In fact, I'm certain of it because it's just building a lot of machines is really hard as indicated by Tesla. They almost went out of business a bunch of times, and they've done just about everything as right as they could. And Boeing almost went out of business by virtue of the seven thirty seven MAX. And at scale production, manufacturing is one of the hardest things a company can do. Designing a flying car is easy.

Building at scale certified is exceptionally hard, probably two orders of magnitude harder. So it's still a long, long way to go, but it's exciting. It's really cool, and I'm just lucky to be alive to see this all happening now. If you had to throw anything out there in terms of, I mean, you know, the jet packs and the flying cars and the Jetsons or anything else, is there anything, you know, that's coming down the pike that we haven't been talking about? Everybody knows about drones I guess, you know, these electric cars that are taking off and so forth.

But is there anything that, conceptually, we haven't talked about? I think that the framework to think about all of this is really around the movement of matter. How do we move matter cleaner, faster, safer, lower cost on the ground, in the air, on the sea, and in space? And you have a lot of different ways to think about how you do these things. So let's just talk about for one second, right sizing your delivery vehicle.

So I just got off the call this morning with an entrepreneur at a company called Serv Robotics, which has these little robots that drive on sidewalks that deliver food for Uber. And, you know, it turns out the average delivery for Uber Eats or DoorDash, whatever is two and a half miles away. If you can have a vehicle that's, you know, only like a 100 pounds or so that is delivering a payload that's maybe like four or five pounds, that's way more efficient than having a gas guzzling car on the road, potentially killing someone with a driver driving it, making traffic, being a safety hazard, turn up the environment that is just there's room there to do this using a different modality, using different framework, which is sidewalks. Now that doesn't work for every market, but, you know, you have these little robotic delivery vehicles where you drop the food in, and thirty minutes later, it's at the front door of somebody's house. That's kinda cool.

That's a neat thing. So I bring that example up because we're talking really about less the modality of moving something, but really how do we do it in a way that's cleaner, faster, safer, lower cost. And it may be on the ground, it may be in the air, it may be in the sea, it may be through space. And, you know, the topic of space, there is all of a sudden a pretty significant interest in hypersonic technology that The United States hasn't really been investing in for quite some time. There was the example of a hypersonic missile that was used from Russia and Ukraine.

Just, I think, two weeks ago, apparently came out that The US had done a test of a hypersonic missile. I know of about four or five companies that are developing hypersonic technology here in The United States that before this Ukraine conflict, probably weren't gonna get a lot of interest. Now that the Ukraine Conflict's happening, they're getting a lot of interest, not only from private sector, but from from military sector. The consequence of these technologies is not just for delivering missiles. There's a pathway to potentially deliver people using hypersonics.

How do you get from one side of the planet to the other in an hour, not sixteen hours? And, you know, we had the Concorde where you could be in from New York to London in two hours. We haven't had that in twenty years. We've gone backwards. And so how do we continue to push into new ways of getting people from one side of the planet to the other in sort of really exciting new ways?

So while I love flying things, I'm actually become much more passionate about moving things, and really figuring out what's the right way to move either a person or a package in a way that has the the least negative impact to society and the most positive. Well, when you talk about Elon, I mean, I guess the tunnels is another way to move things right under ground and and certainly in some areas, supposedly, the cheapest, safest way that he's exploring. That's right. Yeah. Well, Cyrus, this has been wonderful.

As you said, we're living in exciting times, and every kid wants a jet pack or wants to be able to figure out how to fly around. And we've heard it was gonna happen and happen and happen, but it really sounds like these are evolutionary things that are really around the corner. And it's not about if, it's about when. And it sounds like, again, there's an awful lot of money and a lot of really, really smart people chasing this right now. Yep.

It's a exciting time to be alive. Well, I will ask you this, though. Are you when's the new Top Gun coming out? May 23, I think it is. I had a funny feeling you'd know when that was coming.

I think it's May 23, but I will definitely be there because, you know, it's actually an interesting segue to kinda close this up. If Top Gun one didn't come out, I wouldn't probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. Why is that? Because it was Top Gun one that inspired me to wanna become a pilot. So wait.

How old were you when it came out? Because you said you learned to fly when you were 11. It came out when I was, like, five or six. Wow. Okay.

And I remember being so enamored with it and getting Top Gun, the Nintendo game, and models, and I was just in love. I wanted to be Tom Cruise. I wanted to fly around in in an f 14 Tomcat. And I think it's really, really important for people to realize and appreciate the importance of the arts in inspiring people and communicating a story that can get you fired up. And so I'm just so excited to see twenty five years from now, thirty years from now, the kids that are affected by Top Gun two.

You know, what sort of technologies and things are they creating? I think the intentionality of creating inspiring media for the benefit of future generations is exceptionally important for the future of technology. I couldn't agree more. As you said, it's amazing to see what inspires people. And I'm glad you shared that about how Hollywood and art had a such a positive impact on your dream to go out in an 11 years old with your buddy, fly.

It's hard to predict something like that when you start out in life. That's right. Best we can do is put some good information out there, hope a few people watch it, listen to it, and maybe in this case, maybe there's a young future entrepreneur or student that's listening to this that gets inspired and ends up being the next Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, who knows. It's an exciting time to be alive. I love your optimism and energy.

We need more of that right now. People are focusing on kind of the glass half empty a lot. Well, I appreciate it. Thanks so much. The Puck Venture Capital Beyond is produced by CMEG Advisors.

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