In the fast-evolving world of unmanned aviation, what sets Airgility apart in the competitive landscape of drone technology?
According to Pramod Raheja, a seasoned entrepreneur and visionary in the field of aerial autonomous systems, Airgility is pioneering a blue ocean strategy, focusing on uncharted territories of AI and autonomy in unmanned aviation. Pramod emphasizes the importance of innovation and strategic product-market fit, driving Airgility’s mission to solve complex challenges with drones in both commercial and defense sectors. He highlights the company’s approach to creating versatile drones capable of operating in GPS-denied environments, reflecting a commitment to enhancing safety, efficiency, and the potential for autonomous operations across various industries.
In this episode of America Open for Business, host Cameron Heffernan is joined by Pramod Raheja, Co-founder and CEO of Airgility. They delve into the intersection of AI, autonomy, and the future of unmanned aviation, discussing Airgility’s unique market position, the significance of customer feedback in shaping innovation, and the visionary leadership driving the company forward.
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Narrator: 0:03
Welcome to America Open for Business, where we talk with high-growth entrepreneurs and leaders who have found success in one of the world’s most important markets.
Camaron: 0:15
Hello and welcome to America Open for Business. I’m the host of the podcast, Cameron Heffernan, and I talk with high-growth entrepreneurs and leaders who have found success in one of the world’s most important markets. This episode in our Founders and Owners series is brought to you by your B2B Marketing. We are a truly global marketing agency. Many mid-market B2B companies face challenges in clearly defining their value proposition and articulating it to customers, so we help founders and leaders to understand what makes their products and services invaluable to customers and help them put that front and center. This enables our clients to focus on company growth and new market entry, not marketing initiatives, and realize the best and highest use of their time. Discover how we can drive your expansion by visiting yourb2bmarketingco. That’s co, not com.
Camaron: 1:08
And speaking of not coms, I’m going to introduce the founder and owner of Airgility, which is airgilityco. It’s Pramod Reheja and he is our guest today on the show. Pramod is the CEO and co-founder of Air Agility, a leader in artificial intelligence and aerial autonomous systems based in Washington DC metro area. Pramod is a technology entrepreneur of over 25 plus years, an angel investor, a longtime member and past president of the Entrepreneurs Organization in Washington DC and oh, by the way, Pramod is also a commercial pilot, with over 14,000 hours in 30 plus aircraft types. Busy guy, Okay. Pramod thinks of himself as half a geek and half sales guy. He’s passionate about how innovative deep tech technologies, particularly aerospace tech, can solve problems, and that’s what we’re going to probe a little more closely today. Please welcome to the show, Pramod Reheja.
Pramod: 2:15
Hey, thanks, Tramon. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here and talk about all this.
Camaron: 2:18
Thank you so glad you could join us. So I want to see if you could take us back in time a little bit to the beginning of Agility us. So I want to see if you could take us back in time a little bit to the beginning of Agility how this got started, why it got started and focusing on specifically what problem you identified you were looking to solve.
Pramod: 2:36
Yeah, sure, so we’ll go a little further back just to give context to how Agility started. Yeah, so my co-founder and I started AirGility in the middle of 2017. But both of us had been completely different backgrounds. My background is really around entrepreneurial, some of the aviation stuff but aviation and aerospace for me specifically goes back to age three, four, five years old, where pretty much anything that flew was of interest to me and I had pictures of airplanes and spaceships on my walls. I would say similarly for my co-founder. I think he was flying remote control airplanes when he was about five years old with his dad.
Pramod: 3:20
And then fast forward to 2017, when we started the company. He was a faculty at the University of Maryland and was a pioneer there in their own department of learning, teaching students how to design, build and fly UAVs or drones. And myself I kind of transitioned over to what I would call the sales and marketing world and became more of a sales and marketing guy, although my background and roots is all engineering and aerospace. So it was a nice combination, and the problem we were trying to solve when we first started the company was building a delivery logistics vehicle that could deliver something anywhere in any kind of environment. It incorporated sort of this vertical takeoff and landing and fixed wing capability, which just gave it immense breadth.
Pramod: 4:14
But as we went on, we kind of changed course and pivoted, and we can get into that a little bit also, but we started out with trying to solve one problem and ended up solving another problem, so, and the beauty of it is. The beauty of it, though, however, is what we’re solving for now can be applied to what we were originally trying to solve, and that you know, it can be applied to that same mission set. We’ll call it.
Camaron: 4:40
So what are you guys trying to solve now?
Pramod: 4:43
Yeah, so we eventually, as we, as we kind of went down the journey of what we were doing there, we were fortunate enough to get some funding and get some small contracts with, at the time, the Department of Homeland Security, where they said to us and we were one of many applicants probably a few hundred and we were picked to be part of this Mark Cities project where they said, hey, we would love to roll out new technologies to see how we can improve public safety in cities, and drones is just a piece of that. There’s other components to it, of course, as well. Is there’s not a great solution for a drone to be able to fly into an austere environment where you don’t have a gps signal and be able to, and maybe this, maybe the environment is dark, maybe it’s a a natural disaster, and and there’s rubble everywhere and you know we’ve got to go see who’s alive. That’s just one example, and um, and so we would love for you guys to develop this is what they told us uh, a solution that is, an autonomous drone that can fly in a GPS-denied environment. So not an easy problem to solve, not something we were necessarily going down the path of, but they happen to really love our designs and thought that our approach to things had some legs. So we did what I would call a blue ocean exercise. So, for any of our listeners, if you’ve ever heard of the book Blue Ocean Strategy, we did our own exercise around this to figure out blue ocean, red ocean, that sort of thing.
Pramod: 6:12
And what we discovered as we did that sort of strategic analysis in-house was that what we were trying to do initially, the problem we were trying to solve, was more of a red ocean. Everybody was trying to solve that problem. Millions of dollars were being thrown at it by Google and Amazon and stuff, and our chances of doing anything there or surviving past a year were slim unless we raised just tons of money. And this problem that we were trying to solve with DHS in terms of flying indoors and flying in GPS in our environments much tougher problem to solve, but much more of an opportunity space, much more of a blue ocean, and not to mention that the technology, whatever we develop, could be used, you know, outdoors and back to that delivery mission that we originally thought about and logistics mission. So so that’s that’s.
Pramod: 6:55
That’s kind of how we pivoted and went down that road and it was really. It was really driven somewhat by what I would call a product market fit in terms of the market looking to solve a problem, but also driven by, quite frankly, money as well. We were getting funding to help develop this and we saw it as a good opportunity. Not to mention that, when you start a company like this and you do your SWOT, if you’re not sure what SWOT is your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats regulatory risk is a big threat and if you were going to fly outdoors at all, the FAA was going to be involved the Federal Aviation Administration and the government and usually technology moves way faster than regulatory laws and even now, fast forward, 2017 to 2024, there’s still a lot of issues of regulatory risk. So we took that out of the equation when we started to develop more of the indoor technologies where you don’t need to have government approval and need to be flying in national airspace and things like that.
Camaron: 7:56
So that is that area that doesn’t require FAA approval a little bit easier for you to, let’s say, navigate within or make things happen faster. So that’s something you prioritize. Is that part of it?
Pramod: 8:12
Well, yeah, if you think about the mission, that’s required to be able to fly, say, indoors. Now, just to be clear, we can fly indoors and outdoors with our technology, but the focus initially was on indoors, because that was the mission that DHS had put in front of us. Yeah, there was no requirement because you’re not flying in any kind of airspace.
Camaron: 8:29
You’re usually flying inside a building on a private property, and so really, all the approval you need is from that private property, and so really, all the approval you need is from that private property, and typically those approvals might be driven by their own comfort for flying in those environments, but also somewhat maybe by insurance requirements too, but not regulatory necessarily. Case for your technology. That’s, like you know, a in a gps denied environment and the use of a semi-autonomous drone or fully autonomous drone. What would be some scenario that you would have to your technology would be applied to, yeah, sure.
Pramod: 9:07
So in a commercial world, think of, um, all the infrastructure that’s out there, um for yeah, from power lines to cell phone towers, to even underground subways, as another example. So, and one real life example would be in the DC metro area, we have something called the metro system and it’s, you know it’s, it’s run by the Washington Metropolitan Transportation Authority and essentially, you know new stations and they have to inspect certain areas of these stations and these tunnels where the trains go through regularly. And so one application use case is, hey, instead of having the human walk down the train tracks a mile to go look at something, let’s have a drone go do that and come back to us. And then, if we need to investigate further or take care of something physically, we’ll do it, but we could save a lot of time by just having the drone take care of the visual inspection, and so we could watch it. You know, sitting at our ground control, at our station, you know, to see what the drone sees, essentially Right, and that’s one use case. And then that’s that would.
Pramod: 10:18
I would call that a commercial use case. And then there’s a government. You know the government use case might be um, we need to go into a. This is absolutely a real, real example is you know there’s a building and there’s some bad stuff happening in the building and we need to go in there and figure out what’s going on and maybe, instead of risking human life, let’s go ahead and send in a drone to be the first set of eyes on what’s going on and get some intel before we actually send in people to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of. Okay, as another example that this drone could work very well, why? Because it’s, as you mentioned, it’s autonomous, so I can literally press a button and have it go in and fly and start exploring on its own. Or, if I have a specific place I need it to go, I can go ahead and press that on my user interface Say, go there, and it’ll go there on its own and it doesn’t need GPS to do that.
Camaron: 11:06
Okay, and in those cases of, let’s say, the disaster recovery or the investigating I don’t know a live threat of some type, would the drones be used by municipality?
Pramod: 11:22
Absolutely could be. Yeah, pretty much. These days, I think most government agencies, whether they be federal, state or local, are many, I don’t want to say all. It’s still a very wide open market. It’s becoming more ubiquitous. To say I need a drone to do things with the New York City Police Department is one example of what I would call quite far along in terms of their usage of technology and drones. For, like you said, either it could be an active threat, it could be just. Let me just go get eyes on something just because we need to inspect it, whatever the use case is.
Camaron: 12:00
Sure, and your product. When I think of what you do, I guess I should think of it more as you’re a technology provider rather than a specific specializing, just one narrow kind of product or service, because it sounds like at the beginning, entities came to you and could you work on this solution, and your team and your smart people go back in the lab and kind of come up with what that might look like. Is that an accurate way to describe what you do?
Pramod: 12:28
It can be, yes, so we have done some of that.
Pramod: 12:30
But we have now kind of gone down the path where we’ve become experts and have really niched on autonomy and AI for specifically for what we call aerial robotics, meaning you know, something that flies and and and and has a level of autonomy that makes it somewhat independent, and hence why we call it a robot.
Pramod: 12:48
And so because robots in general should have some intelligence right, and so this has fairly good, you know, fairly good level of intelligence in a flying robot. So, to kind of make that as simple as possible, we are a company that builds flying robots and we do the hardware and software to make that entire system work. But, you know, we’re very open to also working with other companies that build hardware but don’t have any brains and that are like hey, I have a, I have a drone that flies, but it could really use some autonomy and AI and we’d love to partner with you on that. So that’s a potentially a good you know, a good collaboration for us as well as we, as we start to really open up our software to the world and and kind of be more of an enabling technology and be the as you, you know, as you I’m sure you’ve heard the term the Intel inside. You know we want to be the AI inside, or AI where AI stands for Agility Incorporated and also stands for AI artificial intelligence right.
Camaron: 13:47
Okay, so aerial robots? How I hadn’t heard that phrase before. How big is the space going to become?
Pramod: 13:56
Well, I think robotics in general is just a growing space and if we look at any kind of numbers given, you know, put out by any type of entity big, you know, mckinsey, or even a lot of the analyst firms it’s definitely a growth industry and specifically aerial robotics being a component of that is growing significantly as well. We’re seeing that adoption pretty much all over the world, actually, both commercial and DOD. If we use an example, really, the Ukraine-Russia conflict is a perfect example of seeing aerial robotics start to take shape. They started out with, you know, if we go back two years, almost to when the conflict started, you know, duct taping things together or putting something on a drone and making it fly, and it’s gotten to a point two years later where, you know, now you’ve got swarms and things like that.
Pramod: 14:51
So the nature of war, you know, if we just zero in on that for a moment, the zero, the nature of warfare has changed forever. Right, you know, do you need a tank anymore? Maybe, but you know you could do a lot more damage. You could do a lot of damage still with little drones that are cheap and have some brains to be able to, you know, act as a robot as well. So so, yeah, I think it is a growing space, both. You know. You know we call dual use, both on the commercial side and, of course, the the military side of things and the government side of things as well. And if you look back in history, pretty much every anything that’s been developed for the government, that’s that that’s of consequence, has become a commercial product. You know, the internet obviously is the easiest example to use that started out as something that was in the government that eventually was given to the world, or made its way to the world, I should say.
Camaron: 15:44
When you go about your product development or identifying product market fit you’re looking for maybe the fit right now for the government, but down the road later it’s got to be something that’s commercially viable. Is that what the dual use reference is to?
Pramod: 15:58
Yeah, it can be both at the same time as well, I mean. So what makes it different is that you’re going to you might have a different payload on the drone itself, so you might use the same base drone and software they are not, you know, autonomy and AI software to get what you need done, but the payload could be different. The military might have a you know a certain type of camera they want to use for a certain type of mission, and the same thing can apply in the commercial sector, where they say, hey, we, you know, we need to do some thermal imaging of a, of a, of an area, or we need the different methane and we need a, you know, optical gas sensor to be able to do that. And so so you know, the drone itself, the robot, we’ll call it the robot itself is the tool, it’s a tool for, for, for somebody to use, and then the payload. What’s on that tool is what becomes the important piece of it to get you the data that you need, the insight that need, and, and sometimes those payloads, the sensors could be more than the drone themselves.
Pramod: 17:00
Right, so you know, so you might have a drone that costs a few thousand dollars to build, but your, your payload could be $20,000. Right, and so, and, and those are small numbers. I mean I’ve seen, I’ve seen much bigger numbers of you know where something, some piece of payload, costs a hundred thousand, you know, or two or more, and, and, and. So it’s important. And that’s where the drone then becomes important, because you want to design that protects that payload best they can as well. Right, If you think about it from a design perspective and safety perspective. So you know, you’re talking about an all out engineering effort when you combine integration, when you combine payloads and sensors and how they interact with the drone itself, and you know and, and where it’s flying, and so so it’s. It’s a fairly complex technology endeavor to do what we do and the end result is that it could be used in many, many different use cases.
Camaron: 17:48
Just like you, asked Can you give us a sense for the size of some of these different drones for different use cases, and how big are you talking about? What’s the range?
Pramod: 17:58
yeah, so the, the, the um, they can range anywhere from, uh, something sitting on my desk like we’ll I’ll try to, you know, pop this in the screen here for a second. That’s like right in front of me, right here. Yeah and uh, and, and you know which I can literally hold my hand and potentially even launch from my hand, if if’s a desired way to do it, to something that is, you know, the size of your kitchen table, is kind of the range that we work with. You know there’s bigger drones or smaller drones with a another commercial company that does a lot of dod work, that builds small, tiny we’ll call them micro drones or or you know, marsupial drones that are like little, like you know, like that big right and, and so we’re, we’re working with them on some joint projects to you know, to uh, to do some things, and so you know, and then, and then you’ve got, uh, you’ve got.
Pramod: 18:52
You know what some of our audience probably have seen on tv or on the internet or in the news is, you know gigantic drones that you know, like the military might use to do intelligence surveillance or reconnaissance, as an example, you know that fly way high up in the sky, way above our heads and can stay in the air for hours and hours, and hours. So you know, those are mostly what we call remote. Just to give you a little differentiation, those are called remotely piloted vehicles, so typically the pilot controlling those they’re not necessarily just pure drones where you launch them and then you, you know, um, and then they, maybe they fly. So those aren’t really robots, they’re still piloted. But okay, what we’re building are robots that actually you could let them go, and they’ll go, fly by themselves, and they’ll come home, based on a certain set of rules and algorithms that we’ve created, typically, or they’ll complete the mission, they’ll land whatever, whatever the case is.
Camaron: 19:45
So the scenario here is also that, because of that autonomy, that semi-autonomy, you’re not requiring an individual, whether it’s a pilot or an operator, to be doing something each time there’s a mission Right.
Pramod: 20:01
Yeah, typically you’re going to have some sort of operator, but that’s the difference. You have an operator versus a skilled pilot. One of the things we hear, mostly in the commercial sector, is that it’s hard to find good, skilled drone pilots there. It’s not like the economic support you just being a drone pilot full-time all the time. Maybe in some cases you do. I don’t want to paint that as a complete general statement, because there are companies that are going to hire drone pilots and pay them quite well, but let’s say you need a lot of drone pilots and the economics becomes harder. So if we can equip an operator to, say, be able to go and do a mission and operate the drone as well as pay attention to the mission at the same time, that is an ROI a company loves, because typically what happens today is people go out and they fly their drone and they have two people as they have a payload operator and a drone operator. The payload operator is really responsible for getting that data, making sure that they’re getting the information that they need. That’s important and then the pilot is really tasked with they’ll make sure you fly that drone and don’t crash it into the cell phone tower or whatever. Whatever the case may be, and you know so.
Pramod: 21:14
Companies love it If you say, hey, we, you don’t need two people, you just need one, because the drone essentially flies itself and the operator just has to press buttons to make things happen. They don’t have to be sitting there paying attention the entire time like a manual drone and, by the way, most drones on the market today are manual maybe with some very small, tiny level of autonomy, if that even. And so the next stage of evolution for drones is robots, aerial robotics, and that’s again going back to your question about what that differentiation is. You’re adding autonomy and AI to it so that the drone can actually do some things on its own and help and really become what I would call a take the workload off that operator, become really an extra body, almost an extra person. Generative AI that’s taken the world by storm in the last year. It’s kind of like that. You know you’ve got almost another person working for you if you use generative AI properly. Wow.
Pramod: 22:11
So we’re doing the same thing for drones we’re putting, you know. Well, I see, you know, I see the world as a whole and you know, kind of embracing drone technology and, um, I think it’ll it’ll completely continue to become even more ubiquitous and you’re going to at some point. Yeah, I don’t think this is going to happen as fast as we think, but it’ll happen. Where, you know, drones are flying around over our heads and they’re doing things and and and you know it’s probably going to be. If you look at the news is already. You know Walmart is delivering product via drone, and I think Amazon is doing some limited stuff too right now. So it’s happening.
Pramod: 22:53
Medical deliveries are starting to happen as well.
Pramod: 22:55
Where you’re going, you know, say you know.
Pramod: 22:56
Let’s say, you’re in a city and you need to deliver something from one hospital to another it could be medication, it could be blood whatever one hospital to another it could be medication, it could be blood, whatever and instead of sitting in traffic for two hours on the beltway in Washington DC, you might be able to just fly this drone point to point and be there in a matter of 20 minutes or 15 minutes versus, you know, an hour and a half or two hours, and so there’s definitely an ROI but, as I mentioned earlier, there’s regulatory risks still.
Pramod: 23:20
That, you know, keeps it from happening ubiquitously, but you know, to answer your question of where is this going, that’s where it’s going. We’re going to see more and more use cases. We’re going to see more and more use and this drone will become just another tool. At some point It’ll become a tool that a company has in their arsenal for all the different things they do, whether companies own trucks and they own ladders and they’re going to own drones and we already are seeing that they’re growing their drone fleets already.
Camaron: 23:49
So do you see uptake happening faster in other parts of the world, or is America on the cutting edge of some of this? Or it depends.
Pramod: 23:59
I would say we’re definitely on the cutting edge technology-wise, but I would say the adoption is happening more in other countries, faster. There’s a lot of reasons for that. It’s probably a whole other separate podcast for the reasons for that. But yeah, I’m seeing some of the European countries moving faster when it comes to allowing drones to fly around. But I will say that I will also say that there’s still you know, there’s still a big case for what you asked me earlier about autonomy, because we have seen drone crashes.
Pramod: 24:31
In fact, there was one a few years ago I think it was about a year or two ago where you know, this company had been doing drone flights in Europe and they accomplished a few thousand and then one crashed into a playground, accomplished a few thousand and then one crashed into a playground.
Pramod: 24:43
Luckily nobody was hurt no kids, nothing like that but it caused an immediate halt right to oh whoa, what happened there? We got to take a look at this because obviously you don’t want a drone falling in a playground, right. And so I think there’s still, you know, reliability risk also because you know any kind of machine you know involves engineering and the reliability on that engineering has to be good, and so there’s still a reliability sort of what I would call reliability hurdle, still as well that needs to be overcome, and so so, yes, I see the future is very bright for this industry, but I don’t think it’s going to be straight line. It’s it’s choppy, it has been choppy and it’s going to continue to be choppy in terms of how we get to where we go to, and that’s probably no different than any new technology and new industry as well. If we go back to Geoffrey Morris crossing the chasm, there’s cycles we go through to get there.
Camaron: 25:35
Yeah, I think of just autonomous vehicles on the ground have enough hurdles and you’ve got the complexity of being several hundred to several thousand feet in the air. It makes it that much more difficult that many more bodies to work with. A lot of the rules and regulations were set up at a time when they were thinking first about hot air balloons and then aircraft and helicopters. And all that. How quickly it’s shifted. I’m not sure that the regulation can keep up with the pace of technology.
Pramod: 26:03
Yeah, and it has not. I don’t think it ever will. But as long as you keep making progress, then you know it will see more and more use cases and more and more uses and businesses will flourish in this industry.
Camaron: 26:15
Yeah, how do you manage to to kind of juggle your? You know, at heart you’re an engineer, you’re a tinkerer, you’re a pilot. How do you balance that with the need to get out there and run a company and be a leader and be a business person at the same time?
Pramod: 26:33
Yeah, and I would say, on the engineering side, I no longer. While I have the engineering background, I’m not the engineer. I’m not sitting in the lab and tinkering and all that. I’m not sitting in the lab and tinkering and all that. I love meeting with our team and all that and talking tech and seeing what they’re up to and then asking all the questions I need to ask and that’s a lot of fun. But no, I’m no longer really. Now I like to call myself more of a sales and marketing tinkerer. I’m kind of a geek when it comes to all the different things we use, the tools and the CRM and all that sort of thing. So I’d say most of my time is spent in. You know, with FaceTime I’m mostly in front of customers, prospects, partner partners, collaborators. You know, that’s. That’s where I’m going to spend most of my time as a CEO.
Camaron: 27:16
Okay, well, there’s people just like you listening to this very podcast, so would you share maybe one nugget or a thing that’s worked for you guys in in getting responses, getting feedback, getting meetings, whatever it might be, to kind of move the ball down the field yeah, I mean there’s probably a couple bullet points there like that that are good take-home things.
Pramod: 27:36
I think one is uh, you know, uh, sometimes we question or you know how we use. I think this is all of us as human beings, we question best use of our time. I’ll call it, and I would say one thing that I’ve always questioned but has always kind of paid off is going to industry conferences in person. Whether you spend money to display, whether you pay for the whole conference or just get a hall pass or what have you, depending on your budget, I think just showing up in person is a big deal and a lot of deals get done, a lot of relationships get built just by showing up in person. So that’s one thing. I think that’s been really helpful to us from a marketing and sales standpoint and business development. Sales point is just you know showing up and you know introducing ourselves and saying here’s who we are showing up and you know introducing ourselves and saying here’s who we are and you know that’s that’s. That’s one.
Pramod: 28:30
Two is is really being open to conversations. You know, again, you know we try to start our time and make best use of our time. But I, I think one I live. One value I live by is to always be open, you know, to listening. And so if somebody approaches me and says, hey, I have an idea or I’d love to talk to you about this, I’ll always have one call, meet and greet to see what it’s all about. And if there’s some legs there, we’ll continue talking and spend time on it. And if not, then we’ll just say, hey, this was great. Timing’s not that great right now. This may not be the best time. We’ll move on, but I think having an open mind really opens up business development opportunities. That being said, you have to be careful and you can’t say yes to everything and you have to say probably no to most things. But I think just having an open mind is key to developing those key relationships as well.
Camaron: 29:19
I love that aspect of the importance of still being there in person and meeting people and walking a trade show floor and shaking hands with people, and particularly in your sector, where things are moving and changing so quickly and there are people out there investors and private equity people and venture capital firms that are really looking for their next investment or family offices and deal flow when I’ve talked and heard from people is that deal flow in the last two to three years has slowed down a little bit. The opportunity to look at really smart technology companies that are really innovating is as good as it ever has been.
Pramod: 29:54
Yeah, I think the last two or three years, two years really, specifically a year and a half maybe has been really tough from that deal flow perspective, really tough from that deal flow perspective. And you know, just going back to that analogy to or reference to the crossing the chasm, you know, yeah, we’re going through some cycles right now where you know companies are going out of business, companies emerging, et cetera, et cetera, and you know, if companies will emerge, new ones will be born. It’s just. It’s just a continuous cycle. Like you said, it’s an exciting industry. Things move fast, things change every day. So, yeah, showing up in person as much as you can is super helpful in terms of growing the business, forming the relationships that eventually grow the business too. I mean, sometimes you plant seeds that you know nothing happens right away, but then a year later you know stuff starts to happen. So you’ve got to plant the seeds as well.
Camaron: 30:50
Right. Can you give us a cliff notes overview of a blue sky, or say blue ocean versus red ocean approach?
Pramod: 30:59
Yeah, I mean, the cliff notes is really pretty straightforward. It’s, it’s, you know. I think the book gets into how you do the analysis and things like that, so I won’t get into that here. But the real, the high level there is. The high level there is, let’s say you’re, let’s say you’re, you’re a business and you’re looking at a new product line or maybe you’re just starting, trying to start a new business in the market, versus what you’re doing and figuring out your unique selling proposition.
Pramod: 31:25
I think is very, very important to figure out how to differentiate. And you may still end up with the conclusion of hey, that’s OK, I’m going to be like everybody else, I’m just going to do it better, that’s OK, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you’re going to end up in what I would call then, just kind of going back to the high level of this. You’re going to end up in what I would call then, you know, just kind of going back to the high level of this. You’re going to end up in a red ocean. You’re going to get a lot of competitors uh, commoditization, possibly where it was competing on price, you know, maybe I don’t know and then you know.
Pramod: 31:53
So blue ocean is more. Hey, there’s not as many players here, you know, but if we do, we’re going to be, you know, we’re going to be in a, in a nice place here. We’re going to have more, more of what I’ll call although it hasn’t been this always but more smooth sailing right In the blue ocean. So so that’s, that’s really the cliff notes. It’s really just doing analysis and there’s different ways to do that. The book goes into it Even just doing a general SWOT strength, weakness and opportunities threat. That’s super helpful and it can take some time to do properly, depending on the industry.
Camaron: 32:37
So you’ve got to have a really good understanding and you alluded to it before but you’ve got to know your product market fit inside and out. Where is this solution going to be absolutely essential? Let’s go there and reach out to those companies and those people.
Pramod: 32:49
Yeah, and I’d say product market fit for early stage technology like us can be difficult. Like you may get 95, 98% there and then not really have it perfect until you actually embed with the customer and then know exactly what they’re looking for. Right, so it’s it’s. I wouldn’t say it’s linear or the same for everybody, but but the the concept is still the same. Like you know, like, get that product market fit. The faster you get that the better, and I think that’s fairly obvious.
Camaron: 33:20
And then just continue to iterate and keep running faster. Yeah that’s right.
Pramod: 33:25
That’s right, and talk to your customers and prospects as much as you can, because that’s where the gold is in terms of knowing what the market wants.
Camaron: 33:33
Yeah Well, I’ve got one final question for you, but before I ask it, I want to point people to your website, that is airgilityco A-I-R-G-I-L-I-T-Yco. A ir g I l I t yco and um. My question is in 15, 20 years, when they’re about to introduce you at the uh? Uav international hall of fame awards dinner, what will they say about promoting?
Pramod: 34:00
at that time, oh geez, that’s a good question. I think I’d love to be remembered or looked at as a leader that had an impact in terms of advancing some of these technologies that we’ve talked about to where they will go right which is what we talked about as well and have become a mainstay, and I think that would be around AI and autonomy. So, you know, really advancing those concepts, you know. That being said, I love pretty much everything in aerospace, so you know, we don’t know what the future holds in terms of other things that we’ll do, that I’ll do with aerospace, but yeah, I’d love to, I’d love to, you know, I’d love to be recognized in that way, as a sales and and as a leader, not just in sales, but as a leader in the industry in terms of advancing, you know, the concepts for the greater good.
Camaron: 34:57
Fantastic Sounds good to me. Pramod Rahesha is the CEO and co-founder of Air Agility, a leader in artificial intelligence and aerial autonomous systems based in the Washington DC metro area. Pramod, thanks so much for your time today on America Open for Business.
Pramod: 35:14
Thank you, Cameron.
Narrator: 35:19
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