 3D Robotics, a 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. 3DR 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 that when the editor-in-chief of Wired decides to create the biggest drone company in America that he picks a 19-year-old kid from Tijuana he just met on the internet. But that, in fact, was exactly the right person. Well since I have a memory, I've been in love with electronics, Legos, computers, but I also was in love with airplanes. And I always wanted to be a pilot. Basically I ended up in LA when I was 21. At that time I had the opportunity to get a remote-control helicopter, and it was very difficult to fly. And that's what got me into the rabbit hole. So now I wanted to make it work. So that's when I started my research, and that's when I discovered that I needed something more complex electronics and more complex software to be able to achieve that. This was not expected to be a company. This was really not expected to be a community. This was just me trying to get my questions answered on the internet. So I created a website called DIY drones, which is basically to answer questions, what the heck. And it was just the right place and the right time. The community took off, and people started to say, hardware has suddenly gotten interesting. I must explore. You can be an expert in software, but not in hardware, expert in electronics, but not in avionics. And the community started building projects, started actually collaborating on electronics and code and actually making real drones. So that time is when Arduino was released, which is the platform that changed everything for the makers and hackers out there. So I was able to get my hands on one of them. And it was exciting to learn from scratch a new computer system. This guy, Jordy Munoz, who was showing how to fly a helicopter with a Wii controller using Arduino, it was really impressive. And we were learning a lot from this guy. He was clearly the smartest of the bunch, and it was a smart bunch. He was clearly, he figured something out. It was the Arduino. It was the Kalman filter. It was the fact that he actually did it. It was just clearly a guy who, you know, everyone was smart, everyone knew stuff, but this guy somehow had put it all together. So I thought, I need help. I need someone else to do that. I've got a day job. I'm the editor of Wired, right? I need someone to actually do this. And I thought, who's the smartest guy out there? It was Jordy. And I said, you want to build boards? And he said, sure, I've got some time. And I said, what do you need? And he says, components. And I said, here's a check. So he just wrote me a check, $500 check, probably the best investment in his life. So that's basically how everything began. 3DR started out with a focus on building an open source platform that could 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 robots to fly. The second hard part was to make it easy. People don't care about software. You don't buy the software in 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 want it to have one button and I just want it to always work. And to turn software into a consumer electronics product, to integrate it, to embed it, etc., to basically turn something that's beautiful and reliable and affordable, that is a whole different skill set that's ultimately necessary to sell to consumers. I'm in charge of sales, marketing, revenue, customer service, making sure we sell our products. We do a lot of product development, kind of all the early Solo definition stuff, what it should be, how big it should be. Solo was my chance to kind of, you know, if I had a wish list of all the things that a drone that could fit in a backpack could do, these are all the things I wanted to do. I think challenges from just like an overall brand perspective or just second mover challenges is, you know, well, there's this company DJI that's been around for three years and my buddy's 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 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 a thousand dollars, you play with it for 29 days. If you don't like it, you just send it back to them. They 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 and 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 a community and open sourcing that technical progress. As a company, we make hardware. As a community, we make 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 software platform that can be used by lots of people, but there's also 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. 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 a black box reporter. If they determine that they were at fault, they will just replace your drone and that's also a first. I think if you look at the company as a whole and really the 360 degree view on channel engagement strategy and our customer support story and logging everything about the flight and 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 were more not just in the moment of flying based decisions. Take really great care of our customers. That's simple. I'm a user, our whole marketing and sales team, our video production team, they're all users of the product. 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. 3DR's technology is currently used across multiple industries including agriculture, infrastructure, construction, photography, search and rescue, and even ecological study. 3DR might not outsell 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 of drones. Very soon you will see delivery, medicine, rescue, traffic, whatever you can imagine or whatever you need to put something there or move faster between point A to point B. Now you're going to be able to do that safely and that's something that I'm really looking forward to. 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 6am they go up and they do their thing and they come back to their pads, etc. and that people control fleets of hundreds of thousands of them. Or I could be completely wrong. And the point is it doesn't matter if we use the open innovation approach, we get the collective innovation of everybody out there on our platform rather than just what, just my capacity to imagine.