Inside drone startup Skydio's Silicon Valley offices, where it tests the autonomous gadgets using leaf blowers
The company is based out of Redwood City, California, a Silicon Valley town where office space is cheaper than its tech country cousin cities.
Skydio has two buildings across the street from each other housing about 100 employees in total, counting veterans from Tesla, GoPro, and Apple among them.
"It's fairly small for everything that we have to do," Moss said. "But we hire very, very good people."
The company is the brainchild of three MIT grads, two of which — CEO Adam Bry and CTO Abraham Bachrach — are both ex-Googlers who worked on the early stages of the tech giant’s drone delivery program Project Wing.
They teamed up in 2014 to found Skydio and took the then-controversial route of using computer vision instead of LIDAR, Moss said.
They were able to develop collision avoidance and tracking technologies that allow the drone to follow you on its own while simultaneously dodging obstacles, like trees and buildings.
It’s a feat that other companies haven’t been able to pull off, Moss said.
“If you can use a camera app on your phone, you can use a Skydio2 to follow you and film you,” Moss said. “And there’s nothing else that does that.”
The drones have become a hit with adventure seekers, drone enthusiasts, and photographers and videographers.
You can see the appeal for action junkies, or what Moss calls the "GoPro crowd" — users can both capture their surroundings and themselves in the midst of an experience fluidly.
For example, you can put the Skydio2 — the second-generation drone — in Lead mode, instructing it to film you and your surroundings from the front of you as you move along.
Skydio released the R1, the company’s first-generation drone, in 2018.
Moss said the company refers to the R1 as the "Tesla Roadster" — it was meant to showcase that the technology was possible.
"There's been years of companies promising this type of technology or talking about this type of technology, and it all kind of fizzled out," Moss said. "Nothing ever actually worked."
Moss said consumer drones can range from $400 to $4,000.
But in order for it to work at the time with the then-current state of technology, it would have to be fairly expensive. It was priced at $2,000.
"It was out of reach for a lot of people, and we knew that going in," Moss said.
The goal for the Skydio2 was always to make it more accessible as a consumer product, Moss said.
So it’s priced at $999, and it has its differences from the R1 — it’s faster, smaller, and quieter.
The R1 had 12 navigation cameras, which were necessary at the time — drones need that depth perception to avoid collision.
But the company was able to capture that entire 360 sphere with just six cameras for the Skydio2, rendering the lower price possible since the fewer cameras mean lower costs.
"That was kind of a necessary big breakthrough," Moss said. The company also made the Skydio2 much easier to assemble.
And accessories are available with the Skydio2, like a $150 controller that allows you to fly it yourself with more accurate tracking capabilities and at a longer range.
Users place their smartphones into the controller. There's also a $150 remote control available as an add-on.
The Skydio2 launched on October 1 and promptly sold out, but Moss said they’re still taking preorders. Customers can reserve a spot on the waitlist for a refundable $100 deposit.
Moss said the company is fully focused on getting the Skydio2 out the door with the high volume of demand they're encountering.
"The camera that you don't have to hold yourself — it's kind of like the next step in cameras," Moss said. "I do think that's going to be a growing market over time."
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