Startup company visit : Airobotics\Tamar Nitzan
Airobotics has developed an unmanned drone solution, the first of its kind in the global market.
Airobotics provides an end-to-end, fully automatic solution for collecting aerial data and gaining invaluable insights. The industrial grade platform is available on-site and on-demand, enabling industrial facilities to access premium aerial data in a faster, safer, more efficient way.
The team at Airobotics fuses expertise in aerospace hardware design, robust electronic systems, leading software engineering, and years of experience in commercial drone operations. This varied experience has allowed them to design a solution suited to address the needs of the world’s most complex industrial environments.
“Starting a company is like getting married or having kids… if you
think about it too long – you’re not gonna do it.”
“I don’t believe in having fun. Being fulfilled has always been attached to extreme suffering in my life. There’s nothing fulfilling I’ve done that didn’t come with stress and anxiety.”
“I care about creating cool shit with people that I like working with. That’s my motivation. Not money.”
“There are a lot of things you could say about entrepreneurs. Over
cautiousness is not one of them, lack of confidence is not one of them, over confidence IS one of them.”
Take the example of Adam Neumann (WeWork) – nowadays he’s being slandered by his investors and everybody else, but really – he created something amazing. That required him to be someone who could look at reality and see what he could sell, someone who would be the type of boss to take tequila shots with his employees so they’d follow him everywhere – create that kind of relationship, have that kind of charisma. These very characteristics are the ones that are now being thrown at him.
Entrepreneurs are dilutional by nature, it’s just a matter of being able to back the delusions up with facts. It’s easy to find a reason why a startup wouldn’t work, and most startups indeed don’t, but what people tend to forget sometimes is that entrepreneurs are the driving force of the economy (in any country, and globally). We need those people, even if 9 out of 10 fail, because they’re creating jobs, pushing technology, and generating solutions that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Sometimes, the positive aspects of the entrepreneurial type are forgotten because people like to point fingers when they fail (drawing the focus on the negative aspects).
From an investor’s perspective – when you’re looking to invest in something, you want someone who’s stubborn, creative, half-crazy – because you’re investing in the person first and foremost.
“you can’t expect a lion to be a vegetarian”. You can’t say you want a lion because it can run fast and hunt, but then ask it to eat grass. The intricacies of defining skills: someone who’s charismatic can also be seen as manipulative. It’s a very fine line. If you were to take the cold facts of any startup and just fax them over to an investor – no one would have invested in anything ever. There needs to be a driving- force.
You can say entrepreneurs are liars when they promise things are going to turn out “x” and then that doesn’t happen… but they aren’t liars. They’re believers. Genuinely believing they can make “x” happen. Sometimes that turns out to be delusional... but other times it doesn’t, and that’s when great things happen.
The OODA loop - (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop)
S&P 500 – a stock market index that measures the stock performance of
500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. The only one on the list now that was on that list 100 years ago is General Electric. Nowadays: “Business on steroids”.
Q: What would you tell your younger self, given what you know now?
A: First, if possible, raise capital right out the gate. Second, look at the company as a business, rather than a hub to develop cool technology.
Q: As a creative, how do you differentiate between the good ideas that are worth perusing and the bad ones that aren’t worth your time?
A: It’s more of an art than a science. It’s one thing to be able to do something very difficult, it’s another thing to be detached from the feed-back loop that comes back from reality.
Q: Looking back, would you have studied entrepreneurship?
A: I’m usually not an advocate of higher education, but this is a great program, very practical. So yes, I would have.
Q: Why drones?
A: I thought they were cool. I know that if I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing, I wouldn’t have been able to put up with the shit I had to put up with. The passion was the motivation. The money-making aspect was never enough for me to find the motivation to start a company.
Q: When starting the company, what did you bring to the table?
A: I’m not an engineer. But I always say – “even rocket science is not rocket science”. There’s a difference between having an engineering state of mind, and actually being an engineer. Just having the state of mind is enough to start. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos… weren’t technical people.
“I think it’s good I didn’t understand what the engineers were saying sometimes... because if I did, when they told me something couldn’t be done – I probably would have believed them.”
When I look for people to hire for managerial positions, I look for people whose source of motivation I understand. I make sure they’re powered by the right fuel, that they’re passionate, and that they’re very intelligent (critical thinkers).
Q: What is the company’s vision for the future?
A: Short-term: financial growth, to break-even. Long-term: to map and build digital models of urban environments.