1a:I[20549,["/_next/static/immutable/chunks/14apx1o_ijcx8.js","/_next/static/immutable/chunks/07q6s6zk2zvaz.js","/_next/static/immutable/chunks/3t2lhm5jgv8nw.js","/_next/static/immutable/chunks/1weteqgvc1_w-.js"],"Conversation"] 1f:I[27201,["/_next/static/immutable/chunks/14apx1o_ijcx8.js"],"IconMark"] 1b:T242b5,

View in browser

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

Thursday, February 20, 2025

Listen to this Update in your podcast player

Good morning,

This Stratechery interview is another installment of the Stratechery Founder series; as a reminder, one of the challenges in covering startups is the lack of available data. My solution is to go in the opposite direction and interview founders directly, letting them give their subjective overview of their companies, while pressing them on their business model, background, and long-term potential.

Today's Stratechery Interview is with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy. Manna, based in Ireland, builds and operates delivery drones; Manna started with the Dublin suburbs and is in the process of expanding to other European cities. The company has made over 150,000 deliveries, and its most popular product is a cup of coffee.

I thought this interview was fascinating. Healy walks me through the entire drone delivery process, from initial customer sign-up to order to pick-up to flight to drop-off (I've included relevant press photos from Manna in the transcripts where appropriate). After understanding how it all works we dive into details, including what kind of restaurants and neighborhoods are suitable for drone delivery, why Manna built their own drone, how does it deal with noise, weather, and privacy concerns, and more. This interview also turns out to be an excellent accompaniment to last week's Interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi: Healy sees Manna as delivery infrastructure with superior unit costs, and Aggregators as obvious partners who maximize the utilization of his assets.

My biggest frustration with this Interview was the fact that we don't have drone delivery in the United States, beyond some narrow trials. To that end, Healy explains why Europe is so far ahead — sometimes aggressive regulators are very useful! — and how drone delivery has been stymied by the FAA, which doesn't seem to be paying any attention to the space. We also discuss Manna's competition, including Google and Amazon, and consider what a world defined by drone delivery might look like.

As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.

On to the Interview:

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

This interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Topics:

Background

Bobby Healy, welcome to Stratechery.

Bobby Healy: It's a pleasure to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me.

Before we get started talking about your company and drones, I want to hear more about you. Tell me about your background, where you grew up, how you got started in technology. Take me back to the beginning.

BH: Yeah, happy to. I'm Irish born, bread and buttered, as they say. I'm a programmer, started my career writing video games for Nintendo, a lot of smash hits, the worst ever video games produced, but good fun.

(laughing) We won't list them.

BH: I was an 8-bit assembler, I'm hugely proud of them and I still have the source code, which I can publish, actually. Good fun work and if I ever do retire I'll go back into writing video games, it's a wonderful use of your time. So from video games to travel technology, I spent 30 years building various different SaaS companies in the travel technology space. All bootstrapped.

The biggest was CarTrawler, right?

BH: Yeah, CarTrawler was probably the biggest. CarTrawler was the last business I started and it was a big one, it was a mobility aggregator for mostly airlines and other online travel agencies, and I exited out twice to private equity, so the very boring EBITDA and margin run view of a business, but it was a very successful one. The travel technology space is one where you blend a combination of, I would say, medium travel or product and technology vision with a very legacy substrate running the infrastructure of a very large industry. So it's lipstick on a pig, largely. And my three previous businesses, I've founded six businesses, but all my other businesses were all travel tech start-ups serving that were lipstick in various different ways.

So why travel? What was the allure there?

BH: It's almost by accident, I fell into it. I started to build these systems where Windows, IBM OS/2 was a thing so WYSIWYG was the people were going from MS-DOS to user interfaces, and there was hundreds of thousands of travel agencies around the world that had a really terrible way to book flights for people. I mean you just mainframe a 3270 terminal or an AOC terminal and you would get a list of flights and that was how travel planning was done with travel agencies, so I was building then.

I started a company in Mexico City of all places to disrupt that, to provide — well, then it became Windows when Windows won that war — but a Windows interface for travel agencies to make it a little bit more rich and a little bit easier to use than a mainframe terminal. That was, again, when you think about it now, it seems trivial, but we essentially had to build an entire framework of Visual Basic but we wrote our own in C++ and our own interpreted language, kind of a C-style interpreted language to allow us to do the automation, the UI automation tied to the terminal emulation, and essentially automated a lot of the dumb process about searching travel.

Travel is no different today than it was when I started that business 35 years ago, it still suffers from awful legacy, underpinnings, like every airline essentially using almost still assembly language-based transaction processors to do flight search availabilities, things like that.

I mean, we're hearing similar stories with the US federal government these days, all these entities. It's funny, it's like an infrastructure story, people will go to say like China and they'll say, "Wow, the infrastructure's amazing", and yeah, because it was all built in the last 15 years.

BH: Correct, correct.

All this infrastructure and all these computer systems were amazing when they were built 50 years ago.

BH: Airlines were the first industry to automate inventory and pricing, but unfortunately they're still on those systems. They still have assembly language, 6-bit assembly language running underneath it all, and then you've got all the way up the top Google Flight search that's an amazing experience, lightning fast, but man, you would not believe the infrastructure that they've got on top of all of that crap underneath still to make it work, but you can make money doing that. So the aggregator advantage, well, essentially you're providing technology to take advantage of their disadvantage and it isn't difficult.

So you ask me why travel tech? Because it's almost like stealing candy from a child. Anything you build in that space, you've got 200 hungry customers that will do anything to optimize. So unlike the US government, they don't still live in caves and use paper to retire people, they do want to improve and it's easy to get them. It's a small community, so I love that consolidation at the top of those players because, again, all my businesses were enterprise SaaS businesses. Getting to your most important person in that top 100 customers, super easy — I like that. I like focusing on building the product, solving a problem and then the audience is very easy to find in travel tech. So boring but rewarding, I would say.

Why Drones

Well, if you went from boring and rewarding, was this like a midlife crisis where you're like, "Look, I'm sick of putting lipstick on a pig, this is not sexy, let me see if I can find the sexiest possible opportunity, and this time I'm going to take VC money, I'm going to do it totally different". I mean honestly, it's what drones sounds like.

BH: First time I ever took VC money, Ben, it's the first time I've ever burnt a single dollar running a business, so that's the first part. I never understood the VC world, I don't even know this unstructured, chaotic, personality-driven world — by the way, which suits me really well, P/E firms and banks didn't suit me. So when I looked at this space, it wasn't the old world, we didn't get into this because it's hard, we thought it was easy, actually we got into it because it was hard.

Yup.

BH: So I looked at this space as a natural kind of 10x or a 100x of anything I'd ever done before. It was about scale, it wasn't about sexy, I don't see this as sexy at all. I still see the numbers, I still see the basic unit economics, the capital economics. I see the operation, the process. Of course I see the tech and of course I see how sexy it is and how dreamy this vision is, I suppose. But it was the scale that interested me.

Well, step back. What was your "a-ha" moment? Like, "Drones are the future", modern day plastics, was there a specific moment where it occurred to you?

BH: There is. So you'll probably be familiar with the Irish culture and liking a glass of wine or pint of Guinness or whatever, and I live in a suburb of Dublin, and you're not allowed to drive anymore when you're drinking, we stopped that 20 years ago in Ireland, and so it is impossible to get a bag of chips delivered to your house or takeaway food or anything like that on the weekend. If it's raining, which it usually is, it's the weekend, you're waiting an hour to get a road-based delivery to your house and I live in a suburb, got four kids, and every now and then you get the munchies, you want to have bag of chips is the thing. And the a-ha moment for me was, because I was studying the technology, I'm a tech guy, a curious mind, I knew enough about drones to know that it would be pretty easy to control a drone and fly it to the local chip shop, get a bag of chips, and fly it back to me.

So it started off as a passion project where I built it, I built an autonomous drone that would fly to my chip shop, get a bag of chips and bring it to my house. But then five minutes later, you look at the fundamentals of, I suppose not really the food delivery industry, but you look at that capability where an autonomous object can very efficiently move things around three, four, five miles in a way that's just sensationally fast, low cost, low marginal cost to do. Forget about the user experience, that becomes important when you think about the size of the market and the current market where french fries are cold, the ice cream is melted, the coffee's cold, whatever. You think more about the businesses and the footfall and the hospitality industry where you have a local restaurant that's relying on people knowing about them, it's relying on footfall or relying on aggregators that in turn use road-based delivery with a high unit cost. So, I looked at just the food delivery industry initially and studied it to see, "Look, how does this work? Why does it take me an hour to get my hamburger? Why is it that it's impossible to order coffee for delivery?", why, why, why? And you look at it boils down to the good old unit economics, right? The unit economics just do not work in suburbs, it takes too much time, too many minutes for a human being to carry a hamburger and just the economics, the average basket value, mission numbers, the labor cost, the direction labor costs.

So you've got this $300 billion industry that is just top five companies doing five-and-a-half billion deliveries a year with really, really challenging economics. Outside of urban, dense areas the economics don't work. And here's me with a pretty, it's not straightforward, it's super difficult deep tech, but with a very clear solution to this horrible problem economics in an industry that wants to grow with consumers that want it to grow all public companies, and with awful unit economics, and here's the solution.

Was this the payoff of your 15 years of building these B2B SaaS travel or eventually SaaS travel solutions that — I mean, it seems kind of weird. Usually you would say, "Oh, I saw a drone and it was so cool and then I started". but you're like, "No, I went straight to unit economics". That's not the normal thought process.

BH: I've no interest in drones as toys or anything like that, I'm interested in the technology side of them and the way that's evolved. But if you look at drones now, your DJI, I mean it's a bit of GPU, it's a camera, it's an IMU, accelerometers, gyros, so on, lithium ion batteries, solid state sensor so all of that really is what a drone is and then of course the mechanical part. So we're not catching a rocket when it lands from the sky, the hard part about drones isn't building a drone or building a sexy drone for that matter, it is about making it safe at scale. While it is deep tech to solve a lot of those issues, it takes just time and testing and confidence-building on the regulatory side to become safe.

That's boring, Ben. Those are hard yards that take years to get right and that's not very attractive in theory to a startup guy. So I knew straight away that while the opportunity was there and immediate, the solution is going to take four or five years to build and to get to a point where you could scale it. But I was interested in, what I found very exciting about it, again was, well, how hard it is. I like how hard it is because it's not going to be a highly contended space, there's a huge barrier to entry here — that's appealing. I like the fact that there was big regulatory uncertainty at the time, particularly in the United States so you really have to be sure of your stuff to take it on now and not wait. I like the fact that we had a time advantage when we started and we still do. All of these things that would turn most people off, I've built five or six successful startups, I didn't need a sure thing this time around, I wanted to bat it out of the park.

This is your "go for it" moment.

BH: Yeah, it is. So I said, "I'm sitting here, a young guy still-ish, and I've got a decade or two-"

Hey, you were talking about OS/2 before, I might have to break some bad news to you here.

BH: (laughing) Yeah. No, I'm talking about Z80, Ben, 6502 and Z80, that's where I started. But you won't find a more attractive opportunity on the planet today than solving last mile, it's a trillions of dollars of upside here and we are solving it in style in Dublin, Ireland, and in Texas and in Finland.

How a Drone Delivery Works

Well, let's get to that. Just to set the stage for the rest of the interview. The way we met is I made some passing comment, I don't know if it was a podcast or something about drones and you reached out to me and you were like—

BH: It was Dithering, yeah.

Yeah, you were like, "You need to know more about what you're talking about".

BH: Yeah, you made me angry.

(laughing) We got about two minutes into a text chat and I'm like, "Just stop right there, we are going to do an interview because this is fascinating." And so, basically the way I want to frame the rest of this conversation, you are going to step out of your founder role and you're going to be in a teacher role. You're going to teach me and the audience about drone delivery. What are all the moving pieces?

BH: Let's do it.

What goes into the technology? What goes into the unit economics? What goes into the staging? All these sorts of pieces and we're just going to dive in when it makes sense and move forward when it doesn't. So does sound like a plan?

BH: That sounds great. Yeah, my kind of talk.

I like it.

BH: Where do we start?

All right. Well, let's frame it like this. I am in a suburb of Dublin and I want a cup of coffee. What happens?

BH: Today, you take out the Manna drone delivery app.

Okay, so you're starting out with your app, which I'm sure that will expand or be different things over time.

BH: We've also worked with the Aggregators too, but keep it simple for now. You open our app, we have about 35 stores in there with two coffee shops, ice cream, all the typical things, and you go through the back if you order. The only difference between using us and DoorDash or Uber Eats is we're showing you the volume and the weight of what you're ordering because we won't let you order more than eight-and-a-half pounds of cargo and 30 liters of volume. I don't know what that is in gallons, apologies to the imperial audience here. So that's the only difference, it's a standard shopping experience, getting your burger, getting your coffee — coffee is 22% of our orders by the way, hot coffee, and it tells you a lot about the business. So you order, and then if it's the first time we've seen you, we'll give you an overhead view of your house and we'll ask you to drop a pin where you want us to deliver, and we're using vision LiDAR that we've scanned before to make sure that area is safe.

Got it. So you've already scanned the delivery area, you've already seen the whole area?

BH: Correct. We have the whole area scan with high-res LIDAR and photogrammetry, so we have a good view. Although that changes, right? Trees grow. We're four years delivering commercially now and trees that weren't there before are there now, so you still need to solve it on the edge. But just from a batch perspective and customer onboarding efficient way, you let the customer on board themselves.

Got it. So I've put it in the map, I believe it's eight gallons is the limit, I've selected four coffees and it says it's going to be there in what? What is a reasonable time estimate that I'm going to get my hot coffee?

BH: It's two minutes, 40 seconds, is our average time, flight time.

(laughing) Okay, that's incredible.

BH: And then prep time. Sorry to show off, but physics is finally on my side.

So what happens then at the coffee shop? Do they walk out into the street and attach it? Are there dedicated coffee shops with delivery zones? How does that aspect work? How do they get the coffee in the drone?

BH: We put aircraft right there. So the coffee shop gets the order, ding, ding, the bell rings, they get an order. They don't know where it's going or who's going to, they just make the coffee and we partner with Ireland's largest coffee brand, they're called Insomnia. So they really know how to make coffee efficiently and well and they've got all the brand stuff. They make the coffee, we allocate a flight slot before they get the order and we know their prep time and their medians and their maximum stuff.

Got it. So you only send it to them once you know a drone's going to be ready.

BH: Correct, exactly, and we are frequently over-utilized so we don't have an aircraft, there's aircraft in the air and we need to wait for it to come back. But the nice thing is it's very predictable. So we will send them the order when we want them to prepare it and literally they're going to prepare, it will take them three or four minutes to prepare the coffee, then they hand it to us. I mean, our aircraft is there and you have to weigh everything.

Got it. So you have people on the ground at the coffee shop? The coffee shop themselves are not loading it.

BH: Loaders, yeah. So think high-throughput location, you might be doing 1,000 deliveries a day out of. We will do 1,000 deliveries a day with probably four people. The multipliers are phenomenal here, the efficiency of people. So it takes one of our people 30 seconds to load the aircraft.

Wait. How does loading the aircraft work?

BH: So loading it, you take the bag, you scan the QR code, you pull the lid down and you put the product inside the aircraft. And I should say we have what's called a hot swap system so there's a cargo bay, which is this big box, they put the bag into the cargo bay box and they slide that into the aircraft. It'll just slide an old one out and slide a new one in. Why that's important is that cargo bay is also the battery so the aircraft always flies with a full battery and most importantly, we do not need to wait for the aircraft to charge. If you wait for an aircraft to charge, you're getting one-and-a-half deliveries per hour per aircraft because you've got to let the battery cool down and charge up. But if you have a hot swap system, as we do, you get eight deliveries per hour throughput. But the person loading the cargo, one of our people will do between 25 and 30 deliveries per hour, that's because we've about a 60-second turnaround time aircraft lands. It's back in the air in less than 60 seconds. It's really — think Ryanair on steroids or, well, maybe not Southwest anymore. But think low-cost airline mentality in operations.

Got it. So the drone takes off and it just makes a beeline for the house. Is there any routing that's involved? Or is it just a straight shot? Is there regulations around this? Or how does that work?

BH: Well to the user it looks like a straight line and it generally is, we won't fly over schools or cemeteries or certain things, or hospitals we won't fly over. So sometimes there's a dogleg, but generally it's straight line, 85 kilometers per hour, just over 50 miles an hour flying at a height, about 200, 250 feet. So it goes straight to your house.

How does coffee not spill when it's going 50 miles an hour?

BH: Honestly, our NPS [Net Promoter Score], Ben, is high 80s, early 90s since we've been operating for four years. We don't spill a drop and the coffee loses about, depending on ambient temperature, you're going to lose about two to three degrees celsius in the flight, so it is not noticeable and the aircraft flown through air, you don't really get turbulence in this type of environment. The worst thing that happens to coffee is when we deliver, we're about 40 feet over your house. When we deliver we open the bomb bay doors and the bag that the coffee's in has dropped out of the aircraft and rappels down to the ground. There's a brief moment where when the doors open the coffee gets a jolt but it doesn't spill. I mean, you could deliver as we do, fresh eggs, all the time and we don't crack them, so it works really well.

So the drone comes to your house, you've specified where in your yard it goes. So your app gives you a notification to go wait outside and then you just watch it drop down from the drone?

BH: This is the really interesting part. We tell you to the second when the aircraft's going to take off, so you know when it's going to take off and we don't miss that ever, the aircraft will take off at that time and then you get a notification when it's taken off. You can track the aircraft's flight on the map as it flies towards you and then new customers will go out of the house, they'll film it for TikTok or Insta, whatever. The funny thing is they never know which way to look because no one can read a map so they're always looking the wrong way.

The aircraft is completely silent when it's cruising so there's no sound so you have to wait until it's really overhead to know when it's coming and so people will go out, they'll film it for their first orders. But real customers now, they're not buying drone delivery, they're buying a coffee, right? They're buying a hamburger or whatever it is. So they don't bother coming out, they wait for the notification to say it's landed in their back garden, and then they go out to get product. But the big win here isn't just temperature of the product, it's the reliability of timing of the delivery.

Right, because you don't have to worry about traffic.

BH: That's why people don't use road-based delivery. Correct, exactly. And customers, they state that they want speed but what I think actually want is certainty, most of them want certainty. They want to say, "Look, if you're going to give me the hamburger, say you're going to give it to me in 20 minutes or 40 minutes, whatever, so I know, but don't tell me 20 and give it to me in 60 minutes".

Yeah, so does the customer have to be outside to receive it? What if they got busy?

BH: No, it's fine. Fire and forget, they've paid for it. If they want their dog to have it, they can.

We do have confirmation delivery. So for example, we did a deal with Samsung where we were delivering their phones, and these are expensive devices, and we did require customer presence for those, so we could do it either way. If you think about parcel delivery, in some countries fire and forget is fine, you leave it in front of the house and hopefully it doesn't get stolen, and in some countries you'll need confirmation and we can do both.

But for food, we don't care, we just deliver it, and the only case we won't deliver is if there's somebody underneath the aircraft. We won't deliver simply because if you're delivering eight cans of Coke, the kinetic energy of eight cans of Coke at four meters per second will leave a mark, so we won't deliver. But we deliver onto the trampolines, we can deliver onto the roof of the car as we've done many times, it's pretty easy.

Aggregators and Restaurants

Fascinating. So there's so many pieces of what you just described to get through. Let's go back, we'll start at the beginning. So we touched on this for a moment. Right now, there's the Manna app. You recently announced a deal with DoorDash. This sounds like you'll just take orders however you get it, it's not really about owning the customer relationship. You could just be a DoorDash driver for all intents and purposes.

BH: Correct. Yeah, we're an answer to the unit economics problem for all the Aggregators. We've actually signed three of the top five Aggregators now. We've published DoorDash, we're live at one in Dublin, we're live at one in Helsinki. That's Wolt which is a DoorDash company.

What does that look like in their app? Do you choose drone in their app? Or you just choose delivery and it's like, "Hey, instead of 20 minutes, it's 5 minutes".

BH: Today — well, there's no future where somebody will choose road-based delivery if they have drone — but today they do give the customer a choice because there's still a lot to think about for a customer. It's like, "Would you like that with an electric flying robot? Or would you like it with the delivery driver that, by the way, the delivery driver's eaten some of your fries and whatever, but no problem" — no. So they do give a choice now, but if you experienced this product you're never going back, it is just so much better. And even for us to operate, we're already beating the unit cost of road-based delivery anyway, so it's not like it's some premium, it's not like it's Prime, right? This will replace road-based delivery completely, it's more practical, it's lower cost.

So is DoorDash charging the same price for this as they are for everything else?

BH: They are in Finland where they're operating now, yeah. But it's up to them, our business model is transactional, we want to fly every single hamburger that customers get, every single cup of coffee.

Got it. So you just charge a delivery fee?

BH: Yeah, fixed fee, and we don't care. If you think about the physical nature of us, we're like the airport and we're like the airline. We want them to be the shopfront, or the shopfront and someone else producing the goods. We have an advantage by powering all channels of distribution for that single restaurant or that single supplier so it is important and this is where the moat comes in. The first to scale in this industry ends up owning the real estate at the location and their aircraft are there.

We're going to get to that because that part — actually, let's get to that next. So okay, I'm still a little unclear how this works at the locations and how you onboard restaurants and coffee shops. So it sounds like they need to have a parking lot and you can set up your takeoff station there, because you have these loaders, you talked about how important it is they can do 60 an hour. That's not much time to go grab the bag, put it in the box, do the hot swap and get it in the air, proximity sounds pretty important here.

BH: Yeah, proximity is everything. For the first phase of this business we want it to be easy so we look at high-throughput brands and high-throughput products all in one location.

With a parking lot, I presume?

BH: No, we don't, that's the thing. Because of our hot swap, so we have eight aircraft in one location.

Oh, yeah. How much space does that take?

BH: It's about 12 car parking spaces if you go from the ground. But if you look at a typical McDonald's drive-through restaurant could fit about 10 of our aircraft on top of it, that's about 60 deliveries an hour, which is their peak output.

Got it. This is so interesting because I just talked to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and they were talking about one of the reasons they lost to DoorDash is DoorDash's famously focused on the suburbs.

BH: Correct, yeah.

And Uber was focused on urban environments, and you can understand why Uber was urban. It's more dense, theoretically shorter delivery times, all those sorts of things. It sounds like, actually, it's not just that you're starting in the suburbs, the suburbs are actually ideal for what you're doing. This is an outside-in service.

BH: Yeah, I don't think this works well enough in urban dense areas, and it's not for us to avoid competition, it's because the physical nature — two things, the physical nature, you're traveling further in suburbs, the demand density and the housing density is just much lower so therefore your batching factor, Dara will tell you that batching, and DoorDash will tell you this too, batching is how they make their economics work. They're sending a driver out with two or three orders every time and because all the locations are close, it works. But that doesn't work in suburbs, that equation is broken, so it's point-to-point delivery in suburbs, that's the first part.

And then if you want to go for suburbs, your typical consumer living in a suburb, they don't have 150 choices to buy from. They have probably a handful of well-known brands, a McDonald's, a Starbucks, whatever it is, and then a medium tail of well-known restaurants. So your supply challenge is much easier in suburbs and they tend to coalesce around strip malls, shopping centers, or dark kitchens, or whatever. So think about dark kitchens, think about shopping centers, and think about very high-throughput vendors. We can literally plunk five or six aircraft down and power 150,000 residents of a location with a high-throughput location doing 200, 300, 400 deliveries out of that location with four or five parking spaces.

So we don't need any infrastructure, we need absolutely nothing to site, all our aircraft live in the center of the city at our maintenance base. Every morning they all fly out to all the various different locations, and then every night they all fly home for their maintenance inspection. So it's like it's an automated fleet that self-organizes, it goes to the coffee places in the morning for the first four or five hours, and then it goes to the food places in the evening through. So your fleet automates itself, the advantages that you can take through software orchestration here are phenomenal, because of the natural peaks and drops of perishable stuff. So you map onto those peaks and troughs with a fleet that moves itself around, you don't need very much at the restaurants.

Interesting. But you do need at least to be building near the restaurants. Is there a future that you see, it's not built yet, where you can more easily support restaurants and you don't need a takeoff base for it? You can fly to pick it up?

BH: We have that already. So we've built numerous iterations of that where the aircraft hovers. The aircraft can either be the central hive as we call it, and then flies to the restaurant, picks the product up by hovering and dropping a winch and then flies to the customer, of course that's just engineering and releasing. But in a highly regulated world of aviation, which is what we are, you crawl, walk, and run, you don't go straight to catching the rocket. First you land the rocket on a ship in the middle of the sea, and our equivalent of that is do the easy stuff first where we can babysit the aircraft, no one goes near the aircraft. So building that system where you supply the long tail, the mom-and-pop restaurant, all of that, of course we will do, but first we want to take 70% of the market, which is the high-volume throughput stuff in every suburb in Europe and every suburb of the United States.

So you don't go for the hard stuff first, you go for capture-the-market first, that's just go-to-market strategy and that's why we partner with the Aggregators. If you think about those top five players, the moment we switch on capacity in a city, so 100 aircraft here or whatever it is, that capacity gets the nearly full utilization because of the Aggregator factor. They already have the customer base, they already have the demand, they are highly incentivized to move that demand towards us because we lower their unit cost and from a strategy point of view, the Aggregator looks at us as a huge opportunity just to bring down, like Dara Khosrowshahi would be saying, what does Waymo give Dara?

You don't realize, but we just published three minutes ago my interview with him, and this is like the hook in to it because you are making the case for why he thinks he'll do well with autonomous vehicles, you basically just articulated it.

BH: Yeah. Well, the thing is, we're an answer to his problem. I know Dara well from his Expedia days, actually. Travel, right? And he just like DoorDash or any of them, Just Eat, Delivery Hero, you name them, they all talk about unit economics. Dara's different because he's blended with mobility and food but the others, they only talk about unit economics as a means to be able to scale profitably, and they've all done a great job at doing that. But look at where labor laws are going, look where labor costs are going. They're all going in the wrong direction, putting pressure on those guys, so we answer that in style with what we're doing. Flying robots, that's the answer, of course.

The Manna Drone

All right, let's talk about those flying robots. What does one of your delivery drones look like? Is this a quadricopter? What is it?

BH: Our current aircraft is a quad coaxial, four arms and eight motors, and that gives you a lot of redundancy. It's big, it's 1.8 meters motor to motor, and it needs to be big because the cargo goes inside. It looks like a big flying golden retriever, it's white.

(laughing) One of the scarier golden retrievers, if you're going to put it that way.

BH: Yeah, it's cool. I picked the friendliest dog I could think of and added propellers.

Sounds more like a Doberman, to be honest. But yes.

BH: Yeah, they're big and they're beautiful, obviously. They're big props, like 31-inch props [propellers] for efficiency. They have a really low tone of sound, so the bigger the props the more efficient it is.

That's what everyone's thinking right now. Everyone is thinking, "Wait, we're going to have drones flying all over the place. That sounds terrible".

BH: Noisy, noisy, noisy. Yeah, there's even a Paw Patrol episode about it, the dystopia. But in truth it's not. We're serving now a couple of hundred thousand people, we get one complaint a month now and those are from people around privacy, not around noise. Because the truth is noise is not hard to solve, there's different ways to solve it, but the easiest way is just—

How do you solve it?

BH: Fly very high. You have the prop design as well is important, aircraft architecture is important. Bigger the prop, the lower the disloading, the slower you need to rotate the prop so the lower the frequencies you generate and then you have prop tips. Prop shape is a big factor, it doesn't lower the amplitude, it changes the height, the frequencies that you hear. So folks will be used to the DJI, the small consumer drones that have these little props. They're wonderful devices but they sound like bees, bees and hornets.

They sound terrible.

BH: They sound awful, people hate them. But industrial drones like ours just don't have that profile at all. So the big test is we fly a lot of drones now in Dublin, if we're flying over people's head nobody looks up, nobody looks up. And the only time you're aware of this thing is when it comes down to 50 feet above your garden, it's delivering and that's for about 25 seconds that happens.

So noise will not be an issue that holds this industry back. Privacy will be something that you need to just think about and be aware of because certain countries are very serious about privacy and of course we're in the EU, so we're right at the forefront of that. You just need to respect privacy and not collect any data and not be dumb and have anything recording or any cameras, anything like that. So that's an easy thing to respect.

But the perception, before you go into a city, and we're on our eighth operation now at different cities, before you go into a city there is this pocket of super worried people that are thinking about noise and privacy and then there's 99.5% that are excited about getting drone delivery.

Right, "I want coffee by drone".

BH: But it is one of those things. Oh, yeah. I mean it is so viral, it is so viral, 70% of our customers come from seeing the drone in the air flying past, that viral nature of it is really interesting. But once we announce we're going into a city-

Everyone's going to try it at least once.

BH: That's it, job done. There's no marketing. No marketing required, and they're all racing to get it. The funny thing, it's almost a nice problem to have, but we can't keep up with demand when we open a new location, it's just ridiculous. So we have to slowly roll it out and restrict people from using it and even then they find ways to use other people's addresses and stuff. The pent-up demand for this product is just phenomenal.

It's not a B2B SaaS travel business.

BH: No. It isn't putting middlewares in front of mainframes, no. I must say I love that part of it, I do love that part.

So did you design the drone?

BH: Oh, yeah. We design and we manufacture.

And you manufacture, got it. So where's it all made?

BH: It's made in Ireland and originally we had a team in the UK and a team in Ireland, now they're all in Ireland, and they're all built, designed and built everything. Everything, every bit of the stack is, all the software is written here in Ireland, and we have 120 people in the company.

Why are you doing it all yourself? Why not get some motors from China or whatever it might be?

BH: Because there's nothing, there's literally almost nothing you can acquire off-the-shelf here to match the requirements that the regulators will have around safety. So the hard part of this, what I would call the deep tech part of this, is proving your redundancy, your mitigations, your MTBFs [mean time between failures], having certifiable motors, data on batteries, all these things that the aviation regulator wants to see. We're getting into the weeds on safety, you've got this essentially a matrix or a hierarchy of failure modes, components that fail, mitigations for them failing, and then reliable data for each of those components. So you know what your mean time between failure of that is, this is and you've designed a system largely orchestrated with software that manages those things, that detects them and mitigates them when they happen.

There is no such thing as a commercially available drone even from the best, even from DJI. I love the scale that they have but if you want to operate in the US market, forget about it anyway in the current climate. But even still, they don't produce a drone for this market because up to now anyway, this market doesn't exist. Now, would I outsource the manufacturing of drones? Of course I would, because when we want to get the scale, we're going to be making hundreds of thousands of them.

It sounds like you're accidentally making the next defense contractor underneath the guys delivering coffee.

BH: Yeah for sure, these drones have all sorts of roles. We're focused on commercial use cases because it's straightforward. But look, Ukraine are producing two-and-a-half drones a day now. There's definitely a market and that market's not getting any smaller, but we're focusing on commercial use cases.

Did you have any idea you were going to get into the manufacturing business?

BH: Yeah, I did. Because I actually put out, the business is six years old now, I actually did a scour and did an RFP [request for proposal] or an RFI [request for information] and looked at a bunch of different companies building drones, and it was very clear that everyone's still in the garage shop and playing with engineering and no one's really thinking about safety at scale and reliability at scale.

So you said this was the first time you raised money, was this part of the pitch right off the bat then?

BH: Yeah, it was. Like I said, it wasn't easy going out there saying, "Hey, by the way, it's illegal to do what we want to do right now, there's no certainty on what's going to happen, we're going to be manufacturing our own hardware and designing our own hardware", you couldn't have come up with a dumber pitch. But then you look at the size of the market and actually it took us a short amount of time to build our first concept aircraft and it worked really well.

So there's just plenty of companies that still believe in doing the hard things at scale and this is the hard thing, and it is hardware which is sometimes not appealing. The marginal cost of hardware is not zero like software but it is way more interesting and because it's hard, I think there's not going to be many players there. So it is going to be a game of very few take the majority of the market here, there's not going to be a fragmented thing where there's one player in this market, in that market. It just takes too much time to get a product that's even ready for one flight, let alone millions of flights. So whoever's first is going to pull down a shit ton of capital to go as fast as possible into that top 10% of the volume in every market rather than deep into a single market.

Right. Because the hardware's the same and the software is the same.

BH: Go wide and shallow.

It's a classic scalable business.

BH: Correct.

How do they do in weather? Dublin, famous for its very balmy weather!

BH: It's not quite Taipei, we don't have monsoons but we have miniature versions. So we can fly in 97% of Irish weather and bring it back to numbers, that's critical because you don't have a right-to-replace road-based delivery if you can't reach that availability, there's no point being available 60% of the time. So the hard things with these aircraft are sand. Sandstorms, so Middle East will be hard. Icing conditions, so ice built up on the props. Icing conditions is this kind of Goldilocks, zero to three degrees with a certain humidity in the air, a certain size droplet, that's less than 1% of European weather. And then it's winds — so we fly in a 15-meter per second gust. Translating, that's about a 55 kilometer per hour, so 35 mile an hour gusting. So you're at already your 95, 97th percentile availability there.

What is the 3% conditions that usually ground your fleet?

BH: Storms and extreme heat, so over 46 degrees Celsius, don't ask me to translate that [115 degrees Fahrenheit], very hot. And very, very strong winds. Very hot can be solved with some engineering with active cooling rather than passive cooling which is what we currently do. So remove heat, you'll still have 1% to 2% of the weather that even though you can fly in it, the aircraft are completely controllable, you use too much energy from the current state of battery technology, but it's battery energy density. So if you think about five years from now maybe, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, with battery energy density improving, solid state batteries and so on, I don't think — we'll never be 100% of the weather. We'll certainly be at 98, 99% of the weather and that means that the big companies that are operating road-based delivery should be able to switch a 100% to drone-based delivery.

It sounds like winter is the problem. So if it's cold enough, you can deliver, it's just that sort of middle layer where icing can happen.

BH: Oh, yeah. 100%. Ben, we're flying in Helsinki in snow in -20 degrees Celsius [-4 degrees Fahrenheit], this is really miserable weather.

That's where the drone delivery of coffee sounds particularly alluring.

BH: It's the Arctic, yeah, and we're delivering coffee there. Again, it's less than a three-minute flight so even in -20 Celsius it works great. And the hotspot battery, believe it or not, it's another factor there. Because the battery is not sitting in the aircraft on the pad waiting to fly it doesn't get cold.

You keep up the range, yeah.

BH: The battery is always 25 degrees Celsius, always. It's got a BMS [battery management system], it's charging indoors, so the battery's only outside for 30 to 60 seconds before it starts to fly. And once the battery is flying, it's generating heat. The battery heats as it discharges so you've got this nice chemical reaction going on to keep everything nice and cozy and warm and we intentionally put the food right beside the battery. So none of this is an accident, by the way, you learn all this over time.

Well, I'm curious about that. You said you built a prototype early on, you have this amazing drone, we'll put a picture, I'm going to put a picture in the transcript here. How many drones did you build to get to this point?

BH: You would be surprised at how low a number there are. You need less than 100 drones to operate a city of Dublin at 1.1 million people.

No, I mean, like iterations. How many iterations of drones?

BH: Oh, sorry. Versions? We're on version six now and it has taken us, we're six years old and version six is about, I would say about two years old. And the only thing, it takes four years to produce an aircraft that the regulator will let you fly over people's heads in densely populated areas, it's four years, there's no quicker way to do that and so you don't arbitrarily do design changes. You do what we would call aircraft versions and that aircraft version needs to have thousands of flight hours on it before you put it out in the wild. So it's not like iterating a pair of headphones or anything like that or an iPhone every year, you think in three to five-year cycles and hopefully it's probably like a car. [Tesla] Roadster Model Three, or Model S, Model 3. Model 3 is viable, Model S was first, we're on our Model 3 now.

So this aircraft, we'd be happy to scale this aircraft. Is it perfect? No, but could you produce 100,000 of these aircraft and produce $10 billion of revenue? Yes, you could. Will we do another iteration? Yes, we will. We'll do a longer range one, a heavier cargo one, a lighter cargo. We will do a fleet, fleet types. But for now, this is our 737 and there's 500 million people in Europe, we have a license to fly everywhere in Europe.

Drone Regulations

Let's talk about regulations. Why can you do it? Why is Dublin, in the famous EU where you can't access an AI app, but if I'm in America I can't do this. What's happening here?

BH: Well, we all know what Europe loves to regulate. We have cookie pop-ups, everything in between and AI we nearly, we love to shoot ourselves on the foot in Europe. But that is changing and this, I don't call them regulations, call them rules.

Is this one where regulations helped you? Because they love to regulate, they put regulations in place, so you knew what to build for.

BH: Correct. They thought they were putting regulations in place to block us, but actually they enabled us. Now, that's not true. Europe saw the drone opportunity 10 years ago in EASA, the European regulator, and they've been working hard at it. And again, it's easy to get a budget if you say you get new budget to regulate something in Europe. and that's what's happened. And so we now have rules that were signed into law in the EU in January 2023 that the US wishes that they had, and there are rules that allow us to fly BVLOS, beyond visual line of sight, autonomous aircraft, any number of aircraft to an operator — so no pilots and those rules are signed into law in 2023.

So, our license now is an EU-wide license, we can go anywhere we want, but we wouldn't fly in dense urban areas. So Europe is the only place to scale now, USA is not ready, it will be, it's getting there. Part 108 laws will come in soon enough, but US is probably, I would say conservatively a couple of years behind Europe. And by the way, that doesn't make me happy. Yeah, we want to be in the USA.

We'll get to the US in a second. But were you able to, you said that they passed it in 2023, were you already in a place to help influence those?

BH: Oh, yeah.

Got it.

BH: Our name is all over those. Yeah, it's 100%. And even now as the regulations evolve, it's not regulatory capture, I don't like that, but there's us and pretty much nobody else in Europe helping the regulators understand what drone delivery companies need to fly. And you asked me about the flying in a straight line, even though we fly in a straight line there's orchestration of that 3D space over time or controlling of it. So we control that airspace with algorithms and designs that are ours that are now in the regulations. So if you want to share the airspace with us, as we've done with Google in Texas, as we've done with Google in Dublin as well, you need to adapt to the regulations that are, I would say, heavily influenced by Manna.

I was just going to ask you, how does that work? One solution would be one company gets a monopoly on a town so that they don't run into each other. But it sounds like there are already situations where there are other companies. I was going to ask you about Google, how does that work? How do you not run into a Google drone?

BH: Yeah, so it's standards based, it's a system called UTM, unmanned traffic management system. It's a software system that allocates a corridor over time through the air, like you've got waypoints and altitudes and volume. We allocate it for ourselves and we say, "Look, this is our space for the next six minutes", and then it's federated. So we advertise that to Google and Google confirms, "Clear", and so we know we've got that space for six minutes, and they won't fly into that space and when they want to do a flight, they will advertise it to us and we will confirm that's clear in our airspace and it works.

The hard part about it, that sounds like something you build with Claude in five minutes, but the hard part about it is a simulation you could do, which is great, but you need to be very confident of your aircraft position. So you need to know exactly where your aircraft is going to be in three-and-a-half minutes and it can't be anywhere else. Because if it is, it's in airspace it's not supposed to be in. So the hard part is making an aircraft that can stay in position irrespective of the weather and guarantee it's going to be no later than 30 seconds to enter and exit that small volume of space.

And so doing that, we've worked with Google for years on this, and it's a funny situation where you've got this small startup in Ireland working with the biggest, arguably one of the most successful tech companies in the world, to make sure that the airspace is not monopolized and we're the only two that are doing that and that flows then into the regulator that allows the regulator to let us scale.

Well, so let's talk about the US. So the US, this is a federal problem, right? This is the FAA, it's not a state-level problem? Or is it both?

BH: No, it's federal, the FAA govern this and the US has not had any regulations for drones other than what they call Part 135, which is in traditional air carrier license, the cargo, on-demand cargo license. So they've shoehorned the drone delivery industry into that and that's how everyone flies in the USA. So you'll see lots of trials going on in Texas and around the place but they're all trials because it takes a year to get permission to do one of those trials in any given location. So you're not going to be raising a load of capital and going all over the US with those regulations, it just wouldn't work.

The USA has been proposing what are called Part 108 regulations for years now and the FAA were supposed to release them at the end of last year — they didn't. And then with the new administration, there's obviously a lot of change going on now in government and FAA as well so we're waiting to see what way that goes. At Manna, we are hopeful that it's going to move forward very quickly and the US will be open for scaling this year, but there's been companies like Amazon that have been saying that for a decade, and here we still are, where irony of all ironies, Europe is ready and USA is not.

And is this just the USA, is no one paying attention? Is it being slow played? What's taking so long?

BH: It's funny, maybe one of these advantages that Europe has is the fragmentation that each market has its own regulator. So there's maybe 500 people here, 1,000 people there in a regulator. Whereas the FAA is 35,000 people and the larger the company, the slower it moves. It's just a more — I won't say bureaucratic — it's just a bigger organization with other fish to fry. And the last thing they're thinking about is-

No one is championing this.

BH: No, but there is I think a realization now with Anduril and a bunch of other companies that are providing real value to the long-term prospects for the United States, and then there's the DJI factor and sanctions and stuff where USA is saying, "We want to build", back to building, and I think that is the impetus that the FAA will appreciate and move forward hopefully in light speed.

And it's not lost, by the way, on the American companies what we're able to do in Europe, they're looking at Manna and they're asking rightfully, how is Europe winning here? And there's plenty of US capital, plenty of great US companies that could be doing this. But I just want to let everybody know, we plan to be the leader in the USA as well, we're only waiting for the regulations. Once the regulations are there you will hear a lot more of me in the United States. I mean, that's the key market, 92 million detached family homes that should be getting our service this year, but only for the regulations we will be there in scale.

Competition

So is Google Wing your biggest competitor?

BH: They're our friends. I think they're awesome. It's a much under-noticed and the under-appreciated part of Google I think. They have a fantastic aircraft, great team, same vision as us, and we work very closely together. We cooperate in all sorts of areas to move things forward.

Will we go to war? Of course we will, and it's a big enough market. Like I said, forget about food delivery. We want to move everything. Every single thing that customers get to their house we want to be carrying it for them. So this is trillions of dollars of value, I'd be happy to share half of that with Google, maybe even a little bit less than half.

Well, drone delivery was brought to popular attention by Amazon, you mentioned that before, we haven't really seen or heard much from them. What has happened in the last decade is they've completely changed their fulfillment center, rotation center, distribution center layout to have way more locations much closer to lots of people. That sounds like a pretty good base to launch a bunch of drones from.

BH: 100%. I mean, Amazon, we're not starting with parcels because it's just parcels can be solved well with the man in the van or the girl in the van, that trip for latent stuff. So if you can wait half a day, then wait, but Amazon absolutely will nail this. I mean, they've obviously had false starts or bad starts, whatever, they'll get there. Amazon, just like everyone else in the USA, are held back by lack of, I think, scalable regulations. And we applaud them, we think they're great as well, they have a different vision than us but I think they will get there.

But in the end, I think if you are only focused on one use case, you're an inefficient architecture, you're not taking advantage. What we're saying is — we want to have a meaningful commercial relationship with every house on the planet and that starts with something that they order every day, which is coffee. We make money every time we fly a coffee, Ben, we're already margin positive on delivering something that's trivial as a coffee. So I prefer that people are ordering coffees every day from us, I prefer that and maybe order a parcel every month or every two weeks.

Yeah, the repeat customer, it's very habitual.

BH: So I think Amazon will nail it. Yeah, like look at Wing's, look at Google's aircraft, it's a tiny aircraft that carries less than a kilo or whatever, a pound-and-a-half or two pounds. Great aircraft, reliable. But they know that it's that small thing that people need frequently that's the first use case to solve, so we agree very much on the use cases for this. There's other things we deliver, defibrillators, and Google are doing medicine delivery as well, there's decidedly beneficial use cases. But what I'm interested in is the one that has, like I said, a commercial relationship with every single household on the planet. Selling everything, bringing them everything. Maybe not selling but bringing them everything.

You keep saying scale, scale, scale. "If I could have a 100,000 drones out there" — can you manufacture that many drones? It feels like this is a looming choke point.

BH: The nice thing about manufacturing is it's linear and once you know what that equation looks like you can predict it. So we have a very simple aircraft to manufacture now, all of our subsystems we outsource to scalable vendors. So battery packs, BMS, avionics, those types of things. So scale for us is really about capital and probably a lot of debt to manufacture, it's linear. You can use robotics, maybe it's certain things but we know the cost, the bill of materials of an aircraft, we know the labor that goes into the aircraft, we know what parts of that labor can be automated. That isn't uncertain, it's hard, but it's not uncertain.

So just in the same way that Tesla scale up the Model 3 or Apple scale up the iPhone, we'll do the same with drones. But the numbers required are a lot less with drones because they're so productive. One of our drones does 100 deliveries a day and could probably do more than that. So the number of drones, like Dublin, 100 aircraft powers the entire city, 1.1 million people and so if I wanted to roll out to 500 cities, whatever, what's that? 5,000 aircraft, it's not a lot of aircraft.

Talking about scale and these repeatable processes, is this why you have the phrase, "I'm building a tech business, not a logistics business"? Because it's just every single thing you're focused on every single decision and this is sort of the Tesla analogy is scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, "I want to build it one time and then copy it a million times".

BH: Correct, yeah. You build the perfect widget and then copy that a million times. So it's deep tech for the first 5 years and then it's manufacturing scale for the next 20 years and the product is logistics, automated logistics. But you would really see it, I think, as a deep tech business. You would see it like a Tesla, no different than a Tesla I think.

Drone-Defined Cities

Is there a bit where you retreat to just doing the software and the hardware or what that might be? And when it comes to yes, you want to get to you can just fly to a business and they can attach it, but if you have these little setups in the parking lot that shuffle coffee through, is that something that you might outsource over time? Or there might be fleet builders?

BH: Correct. So what we'll do, so just as we use the Aggregators to solve the demand side, we will similarly use automation to solve the vendor side. So you will see us rocking up to a new city with whatever, a few hundred aircraft or 1,000 aircraft to a central depot or maintenance base where the aircraft all live, and we will have contracts with all of the vendors in that city and that's it. We will stay in the center and the aircraft will go out to those vendors and the vendors will load the cargo.

That's true scale, we won't do that today, but we will do that soon and that's where we have a city-based rollout model where we supply capacity to a city and those aircraft will just work for the city. They'll work for hospitals, they'll work for restaurants, they'll work for coffee shops, whatever. But our job will be simply to supply that capacity to a population center and the aircraft will do the rest and it's probably more software than the hardware to do that. There's obviously safety on the hardware side and reliability in the hardware side the rest of it is more like a Waymo, I think, than a Tesla.

What do cities look like in this future world dominated with your drones flying everywhere overhead? One thing that's interesting that you said is that actually strip malls are great for you, they have a lot of restaurants and they have a bunch of parking spots. What does the built environment look like in 50 years, 60 years, once it's had time to change? Are restaurants gone? Everyone just delivers in? What does the future look like?

BH: Well, I think it's the resurrection of the suburb. So suburban living will have all the advantages of urban living. Get delivery in 10 minutes to your house, get food delivered to your house and so we can fly food to your house from anywhere in the whole city. You have every shop in the city you can get to your house even if you live in a suburb, so suburban living gets better.

Do retail footprints change? I think they do. I think this whole idea of going out shopping around for things as an experience will still be there but I think the functional getting that thing, the screwdriver, the spark plug, the hamburger, whatever it is, you shouldn't be getting into your car for that, you shouldn't need to travel for that. So I think retailers, there will be an Amazon-ization that is much more viable in the suburbs now that isn't now because Amazon need these gigantic big things with every product in it. Whereas now we can aggregate that with the robots and that's the future.

But will there be more dark kitchens? Yes. Will restaurants look at the opportunity where right now they look at real estate to say, "I need to be where there's footfall, so I need to be in that strip mall because footfall"?

Now, "I need a flat roof".

BH: Yeah, exactly. I can be in a field so long as I have the product, and so long as — when we're mature, the only place you're going to come to buy stuff is to us. It's like Amazon, right? But micro-local. So therefore, if you're a producer or a supplier of goods, you only need to think about, "How the hell do I get my thing into the drone?", and therefore, "I need to make sure I'm not on the high street and not covered by a big tree", or basic stuff, that's it. A clear roof is probably the key requirement. But footfall and paying premium real estate prices for high footfall for many vendors won't need to be a thing. They'll still be there, but there's opportunities to grow a food brand or any other brand for that matter in a field on the edge of a population center and use the automation to get that product to your customers.

Well, I think I learned a lot. This is super fascinating, we'll be watching with great interest. What series are you at as far as raising goes?

BH: Series A. We've raised just over $60 million bucks so far, a tiny amount, and a small company still. But we're at the stage now where we are ready to grow, we want to start growing, so I think we'll start thinking about this as growth rounds now where most of the capital goes into generating revenue rather than building product.

Right now, because you're pricing on transaction model you're very confident in your unit costs in every delivery. You're making a profit every time?

BH: Correct. Every dollar we spend now, 70%, 80% of that will go into generating. So right now, every dollar you spend in this business produces three-and-a-half dollars of annual revenue, and it's profitable. Every operation we open is contribution positive year one. So it's nice, it's got a nice profile to it, a little bit better than rolling out a Starbucks chain, but with a much bigger moat.

Amazing, amazing stuff. I'm glad you reached out. I will try to not make any more drone errors in the future, or maybe I will so that you'll ping me again and can see where things are.

BH: I will indeed.

This Daily Update Interview is also available as a podcast. To receive it in your podcast player, visit Stratechery.

The Daily Update is intended for a single recipient, but occasional forwarding is totally fine! If you would like to order multiple subscriptions for your team with a group discount (minimum 5), please contact me directly.

Thanks for being a supporter, and have a great day!

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player:
Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China
Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

Subscription Information

Member: Nicolas Rocha
Email: nrocha22@gmail.com
Member since: August 13, 2021
Your subscription renews every month
Renewal date: March 13, 2025

You are receiving this email because you are subscribed to Stratechery.

Click here to view your account and manage your subscriptions.
Click here to unsubscribe.

© 2025 Stratechery LLC, 2093 Philadelphia Pike #9930, Claymont DE 19703

1c:T25038,

This is very cool

---------- Forwarded message ---------
De: Ben Thompson <email@stratechery.com>
Date: jue, 20 feb 2025 a las 7:04
Subject: An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery (Stratechery Interview 2-20-2025)
To: Nicolas Rocha <nrocha22@gmail.com>

View in browser

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

Thursday, February 20, 2025

Listen to this Update in your podcast player

Good morning,

As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.

On to the Interview:

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

This interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Topics:

Background

Bobby Healy, welcome to Stratechery.

Bobby Healy: It's a pleasure to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me.

(laughing) We won't list them.

The biggest was CarTrawler, right?

So why travel? What was the allure there?

BH: Correct, correct.

All this infrastructure and all these computer systems were amazing when they were built 50 years ago.

Why Drones

Yup.

Well, step back. What was your "a-ha" moment? Like, "Drones are the future", modern day plastics, was there a specific moment where it occurred to you?

This is your "go for it" moment.

BH: Yeah, it is. So I said, "I'm sitting here, a young guy still-ish, and I've got a decade or two-"

Hey, you were talking about OS/2 before, I might have to break some bad news to you here.

How a Drone Delivery Works

BH: It was Dithering, yeah.

Yeah, you were like, "You need to know more about what you're talking about".

BH: Yeah, you made me angry.

BH: Let's do it.

BH: That sounds great. Yeah, my kind of talk.

I like it.

BH: Where do we start?

All right. Well, let's frame it like this. I am in a suburb of Dublin and I want a cup of coffee. What happens?

BH: Today, you take out the Manna drone delivery app.

Okay, so you're starting out with your app, which I'm sure that will expand or be different things over time.

Got it. So you've already scanned the delivery area, you've already seen the whole area?

BH: It's two minutes, 40 seconds, is our average time, flight time.

(laughing) Okay, that's incredible.

BH: And then prep time. Sorry to show off, but physics is finally on my side.

Got it. So you only send it to them once you know a drone's going to be ready.

Got it. So you have people on the ground at the coffee shop? The coffee shop themselves are not loading it.

Wait. How does loading the aircraft work?

How does coffee not spill when it's going 50 miles an hour?

So the drone comes to your house, you've specified where in your yard it goes. So your app gives you a notification to go wait outside and then you just watch it drop down from the drone?

Right, because you don't have to worry about traffic.

Yeah, so does the customer have to be outside to receive it? What if they got busy?

BH: No, it's fine. Fire and forget, they've paid for it. If they want their dog to have it, they can.

Aggregators and Restaurants

What does that look like in their app? Do you choose drone in their app? Or you just choose delivery and it's like, "Hey, instead of 20 minutes, it's 5 minutes".

So is DoorDash charging the same price for this as they are for everything else?

Got it. So you just charge a delivery fee?

BH: Yeah, proximity is everything. For the first phase of this business we want it to be easy so we look at high-throughput brands and high-throughput products all in one location.

With a parking lot, I presume?

BH: No, we don't, that's the thing. Because of our hot swap, so we have eight aircraft in one location.

Oh, yeah. How much space does that take?

BH: Correct, yeah.

The Manna Drone

All right, let's talk about those flying robots. What does one of your delivery drones look like? Is this a quadricopter? What is it?

(laughing) One of the scarier golden retrievers, if you're going to put it that way.

BH: Yeah, it's cool. I picked the friendliest dog I could think of and added propellers.

Sounds more like a Doberman, to be honest. But yes.

That's what everyone's thinking right now. Everyone is thinking, "Wait, we're going to have drones flying all over the place. That sounds terrible".

How do you solve it?

They sound terrible.

Right, "I want coffee by drone".

Everyone's going to try it at least once.

It's not a B2B SaaS travel business.

BH: No. It isn't putting middlewares in front of mainframes, no. I must say I love that part of it, I do love that part.

So did you design the drone?

BH: Oh, yeah. We design and we manufacture.

And you manufacture, got it. So where's it all made?

Why are you doing it all yourself? Why not get some motors from China or whatever it might be?

It sounds like you're accidentally making the next defense contractor underneath the guys delivering coffee.

Did you have any idea you were going to get into the manufacturing business?

So you said this was the first time you raised money, was this part of the pitch right off the bat then?

Right. Because the hardware's the same and the software is the same.

BH: Go wide and shallow.

It's a classic scalable business.

BH: Correct.

How do they do in weather? Dublin, famous for its very balmy weather!

What is the 3% conditions that usually ground your fleet?

It sounds like winter is the problem. So if it's cold enough, you can deliver, it's just that sort of middle layer where icing can happen.

BH: Oh, yeah. 100%. Ben, we're flying in Helsinki in snow in -20 degrees Celsius [-4 degrees Fahrenheit], this is really miserable weather.

That's where the drone delivery of coffee sounds particularly alluring.

You keep up the range, yeah.

BH: You would be surprised at how low a number there are. You need less than 100 drones to operate a city of Dublin at 1.1 million people.

No, I mean, like iterations. How many iterations of drones?

Drone Regulations

Let's talk about regulations. Why can you do it? Why is Dublin, in the famous EU where you can't access an AI app, but if I'm in America I can't do this. What's happening here?

Is this one where regulations helped you? Because they love to regulate, they put regulations in place, so you knew what to build for.

We'll get to the US in a second. But were you able to, you said that they passed it in 2023, were you already in a place to help influence those?

BH: Oh, yeah.

Got it.

Well, so let's talk about the US. So the US, this is a federal problem, right? This is the FAA, it's not a state-level problem? Or is it both?

And is this just the USA, is no one paying attention? Is it being slow played? What's taking so long?

No one is championing this.

Competition

So is Google Wing your biggest competitor?

Yeah, the repeat customer, it's very habitual.

You keep saying scale, scale, scale. "If I could have a 100,000 drones out there" — can you manufacture that many drones? It feels like this is a looming choke point.

Drone-Defined Cities

Now, "I need a flat roof".

Well, I think I learned a lot. This is super fascinating, we'll be watching with great interest. What series are you at as far as raising goes?

Right now, because you're pricing on transaction model you're very confident in your unit costs in every delivery. You're making a profit every time?

Amazing, amazing stuff. I'm glad you reached out. I will try to not make any more drone errors in the future, or maybe I will so that you'll ping me again and can see where things are.

BH: I will indeed.

This Daily Update Interview is also available as a podcast. To receive it in your podcast player, visit Stratechery.

Thanks for being a supporter, and have a great day!

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player:
Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China
Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

Nicolas Rocha

ᐧ

1d:T24f23,

Thanks for flagging! I’ll read it

From: Nicolás Rocha O <nrocha22@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, February 21, 2025 10:23 AM
To: William Daniel Zapata <wdzapata@gmail.com>
Subject: Fwd: An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery (Stratechery Interview 2-20-2025)

This is very cool

View in browser

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

Thursday, February 20, 2025

Listen to this Update in your podcast player

Good morning,

As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.

On to the Interview:

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

This interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Topics:

Background

Bobby Healy, welcome to Stratechery.

Bobby Healy: It's a pleasure to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me.

(laughing) We won't list them.

The biggest was CarTrawler, right?

So why travel? What was the allure there?

I mean, we're hearing similar stories with the US federal government these days, all these entities. It's funny, it's like an infrastructure story, people will go to say like China and they'll say, "Wow, the infrastructure's amazing", and yeah, because it was all built in the last 15 years.

BH: Correct, correct.

All this infrastructure and all these computer systems were amazing when they were built 50 years ago.

Why Drones

Well, if you went from boring and rewarding, was this like a midlife crisis where you're like, "Look, I'm sick of putting lipstick on a pig, this is not sexy, let me see if I can find the sexiest possible opportunity, and this time I'm going to take VC money, I'm going to do it totally different". I mean honestly, it's what drones sounds like.

Yup.

Well, step back. What was your "a-ha" moment? Like, "Drones are the future", modern day plastics, was there a specific moment where it occurred to you?

This is your "go for it" moment.

BH: Yeah, it is. So I said, "I'm sitting here, a young guy still-ish, and I've got a decade or two-"

Hey, you were talking about OS/2 before, I might have to break some bad news to you here.

How a Drone Delivery Works

BH: It was Dithering, yeah.

Yeah, you were like, "You need to know more about what you're talking about".

BH: Yeah, you made me angry.

BH: Let's do it.

BH: That sounds great. Yeah, my kind of talk.

I like it.

BH: Where do we start?

All right. Well, let's frame it like this. I am in a suburb of Dublin and I want a cup of coffee. What happens?

BH: Today, you take out the Manna drone delivery app.

Okay, so you're starting out with your app, which I'm sure that will expand or be different things over time.

Got it. So you've already scanned the delivery area, you've already seen the whole area?

BH: It's two minutes, 40 seconds, is our average time, flight time.

(laughing) Okay, that's incredible.

BH: And then prep time. Sorry to show off, but physics is finally on my side.

Got it. So you only send it to them once you know a drone's going to be ready.

Got it. So you have people on the ground at the coffee shop? The coffee shop themselves are not loading it.

Wait. How does loading the aircraft work?

How does coffee not spill when it's going 50 miles an hour?

So the drone comes to your house, you've specified where in your yard it goes. So your app gives you a notification to go wait outside and then you just watch it drop down from the drone?

Right, because you don't have to worry about traffic.

Yeah, so does the customer have to be outside to receive it? What if they got busy?

BH: No, it's fine. Fire and forget, they've paid for it. If they want their dog to have it, they can.

Aggregators and Restaurants

Fascinating. So there's so many pieces of what you just described to get through. Let's go back, we'll start at the beginning. So we touched on this for a moment. Right now, there's the Manna app. You recently announced a deal with DoorDash. This sounds like you'll just take orders however you get it, it's not really about owning the customer relationship. You could just be a DoorDash driver for all intents and purposes.

What does that look like in their app? Do you choose drone in their app? Or you just choose delivery and it's like, "Hey, instead of 20 minutes, it's 5 minutes".

So is DoorDash charging the same price for this as they are for everything else?

Got it. So you just charge a delivery fee?

BH: Yeah, proximity is everything. For the first phase of this business we want it to be easy so we look at high-throughput brands and high-throughput products all in one location.

With a parking lot, I presume?

BH: No, we don't, that's the thing. Because of our hot swap, so we have eight aircraft in one location.

Oh, yeah. How much space does that take?

Got it. This is so interesting because I just talked to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and they were talking about one of the reasons they lost to DoorDash is DoorDash's famously focused on the suburbs.

BH: Correct, yeah.

The Manna Drone

All right, let's talk about those flying robots. What does one of your delivery drones look like? Is this a quadricopter? What is it?

(laughing) One of the scarier golden retrievers, if you're going to put it that way.

BH: Yeah, it's cool. I picked the friendliest dog I could think of and added propellers.

Sounds more like a Doberman, to be honest. But yes.

That's what everyone's thinking right now. Everyone is thinking, "Wait, we're going to have drones flying all over the place. That sounds terrible".

How do you solve it?

They sound terrible.

Right, "I want coffee by drone".

Everyone's going to try it at least once.

It's not a B2B SaaS travel business.

BH: No. It isn't putting middlewares in front of mainframes, no. I must say I love that part of it, I do love that part.

So did you design the drone?

BH: Oh, yeah. We design and we manufacture.

And you manufacture, got it. So where's it all made?

Why are you doing it all yourself? Why not get some motors from China or whatever it might be?

It sounds like you're accidentally making the next defense contractor underneath the guys delivering coffee.

Did you have any idea you were going to get into the manufacturing business?

So you said this was the first time you raised money, was this part of the pitch right off the bat then?

Right. Because the hardware's the same and the software is the same.

BH: Go wide and shallow.

It's a classic scalable business.

BH: Correct.

How do they do in weather? Dublin, famous for its very balmy weather!

What is the 3% conditions that usually ground your fleet?

It sounds like winter is the problem. So if it's cold enough, you can deliver, it's just that sort of middle layer where icing can happen.

BH: Oh, yeah. 100%. Ben, we're flying in Helsinki in snow in -20 degrees Celsius [-4 degrees Fahrenheit], this is really miserable weather.

That's where the drone delivery of coffee sounds particularly alluring.

You keep up the range, yeah.

BH: You would be surprised at how low a number there are. You need less than 100 drones to operate a city of Dublin at 1.1 million people.

No, I mean, like iterations. How many iterations of drones?

Drone Regulations

Let's talk about regulations. Why can you do it? Why is Dublin, in the famous EU where you can't access an AI app, but if I'm in America I can't do this. What's happening here?

Is this one where regulations helped you? Because they love to regulate, they put regulations in place, so you knew what to build for.

We'll get to the US in a second. But were you able to, you said that they passed it in 2023, were you already in a place to help influence those?

BH: Oh, yeah.

Got it.

Well, so let's talk about the US. So the US, this is a federal problem, right? This is the FAA, it's not a state-level problem? Or is it both?

And is this just the USA, is no one paying attention? Is it being slow played? What's taking so long?

No one is championing this.

Competition

So is Google Wing your biggest competitor?

Well, drone delivery was brought to popular attention by Amazon, you mentioned that before, we haven't really seen or heard much from them. What has happened in the last decade is they've completely changed their fulfillment center, rotation center, distribution center layout to have way more locations much closer to lots of people. That sounds like a pretty good base to launch a bunch of drones from.

Yeah, the repeat customer, it's very habitual.

You keep saying scale, scale, scale. "If I could have a 100,000 drones out there" — can you manufacture that many drones? It feels like this is a looming choke point.

Drone-Defined Cities

Now, "I need a flat roof".

Well, I think I learned a lot. This is super fascinating, we'll be watching with great interest. What series are you at as far as raising goes?

Right now, because you're pricing on transaction model you're very confident in your unit costs in every delivery. You're making a profit every time?

Amazing, amazing stuff. I'm glad you reached out. I will try to not make any more drone errors in the future, or maybe I will so that you'll ping me again and can see where things are.

BH: I will indeed.

This Daily Update Interview is also available as a podcast. To receive it in your podcast player, visit Stratechery.

Thanks for being a supporter, and have a great day!

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player:
Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China
Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

Subscription Information

Member: Nicolas Rocha
Email: nrocha22@gmail.com
Member since: August 13, 2021
Your subscription renews every month
Renewal date: March 13, 2025

You are receiving this email because you are subscribed to Stratechery.

Click here to view your account and manage your subscriptions.
Click here to unsubscribe.

© 2025 Stratechery LLC, 2093 Philadelphia Pike #9930, Claymont DE 19703

Nicolas Rocha

ᐧ

12:[["$","$L1a",null,{"thread":{"token":"voCbnKmXjsAF9fYMi1HkYi","subject":"An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery (Stratechery Interview 2-20-2025)","messages":[{"id":"195230813f45d3c5","internalDate":1740049486000,"from":{"emailAddress":"email@stratechery.com","name":"Ben Thompson"},"to":[{"emailAddress":"nrocha22@gmail.com","name":"Nicolas Rocha"}],"cc":[],"bcc":[],"attachments":[],"html":"$1b","snippet":"An interview with Manna founder and CEO Bobby Healy about drone delivery: how does it work, what is the regulatory landscape, and why the suburbs will be the place to be. View in browser STRATECHERY An"},{"id":"195291b47980e6b3","internalDate":1740151406000,"from":{"emailAddress":"nrocha22@gmail.com","name":"Nicolás Rocha O"},"to":[{"emailAddress":"wdzapata@gmail.com","name":"William Daniel Zapata"}],"cc":[],"bcc":[],"attachments":[],"html":"$1c","snippet":"This is very cool ---------- Forwarded message --------- De: Ben Thompson Date: jue, 20 feb 2025 a las 7:04 Subject: An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy"},{"id":"1952926b244fa723","internalDate":1740152152000,"from":{"emailAddress":"wdzapata@gmail.com","name":"William Zapata"},"to":[{"emailAddress":"nrocha22@gmail.com","name":"Nicolás Rocha O"}],"cc":[],"bcc":[],"attachments":[],"html":"$1d","snippet":"Thanks for flagging! I'll read it From: Nicolás Rocha O Sent: Friday, February 21, 2025 10:23 AM To: William Daniel Zapata Subject: Fwd: An"}],"sharer":{"displayName":"Nicolas R","email":"nrocha22@gmail.com","userKey":"agxzfm1haWxmb29nYWVyNQsSDE9yZ2FuaXphdGlvbiISbnJvY2hhMjJAZ21haWwuY29tDAsSBFVzZXIYgICAgICAgAoM","googleProfilePhotoUrl":"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a/ACg8ocKg7hWWoHpZpIrahWeeYgg6IpdGZgyFPFFkVY7p41ftqn3z6of1hQ=s96-c"},"participantCount":3}}],"$L1e"] 15:null 19:[["$","title","0",{"children":"An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery (Stratechery Interview 2-20-2025) - Streak Share"}],["$","meta","1",{"name":"description","content":"Thanks for flagging! I'll read it From: Nicolás Rocha O Sent: Friday, February 21, 2025 10:23 AM To: William Daniel Zapata Subject: Fwd: An"}],["$","meta","2",{"name":"robots","content":"noindex, nofollow, noarchive"}],["$","link","3",{"rel":"canonical","href":"https://share.streak.com/voCbnKmXjsAF9fYMi1HkYi"}],["$","meta","4",{"property":"og:title","content":"An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery (Stratechery Interview 2-20-2025)"}],["$","meta","5",{"property":"og:description","content":"Thanks for flagging! I'll read it From: Nicolás Rocha O Sent: Friday, February 21, 2025 10:23 AM To: William Daniel Zapata Subject: Fwd: An"}],["$","meta","6",{"property":"og:url","content":"https://share.streak.com/voCbnKmXjsAF9fYMi1HkYi"}],["$","meta","7",{"property":"og:site_name","content":"Streak Share"}],["$","meta","8",{"property":"og:image","content":"https://streak-share.imgix.net/frame.png?blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly9saDMuZ29vZ2xldXNlcmNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2EvQUNnOG9jS2c3aFdXb0hwWnBJcmFoV2VlWWdnNklwZEdaZ3lGUEZGa1ZZN3A0MWZ0cW4zejZvZjFoUT1zMjM5LWM%3D&blend-mode=normal&blend-x=194&blend-y=184&blend-h=239&blend-w=239&mark64=aHR0cHM6Ly9zdHJlYWstc2hhcmUuaW1naXgubmV0L2ZyYW1lLnBuZw%3D%3D&mark-x=0&mark-y=0"}],["$","meta","9",{"property":"og:type","content":"website"}],["$","meta","10",{"name":"twitter:card","content":"summary"}],["$","meta","11",{"name":"twitter:title","content":"An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery (Stratechery Interview 2-20-2025)"}],["$","meta","12",{"name":"twitter:description","content":"Thanks for flagging! I'll read it From: Nicolás Rocha O Sent: Friday, February 21, 2025 10:23 AM To: William Daniel Zapata Subject: Fwd: An"}],["$","meta","13",{"name":"twitter:image","content":"https://streak-share.imgix.net/frame.png?blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly9saDMuZ29vZ2xldXNlcmNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2EvQUNnOG9jS2c3aFdXb0hwWnBJcmFoV2VlWWdnNklwZEdaZ3lGUEZGa1ZZN3A0MWZ0cW4zejZvZjFoUT1zMjM5LWM%3D&blend-mode=normal&blend-x=194&blend-y=184&blend-h=239&blend-w=239&mark64=aHR0cHM6Ly9zdHJlYWstc2hhcmUuaW1naXgubmV0L2ZyYW1lLnBuZw%3D%3D&mark-x=0&mark-y=0"}],["$","link","14",{"rel":"icon","href":"/favicon.png"}],["$","$L1f","15",{}]]

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

Listen to this Update in your podcast player

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

Background

Why Drones

How a Drone Delivery Works

Aggregators and Restaurants

The Manna Drone

Drone Regulations

Competition

Drone-Defined Cities

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player: Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

Listen to this Update in your podcast player

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

Background

Why Drones

How a Drone Delivery Works

Aggregators and Restaurants

The Manna Drone

Drone Regulations

Competition

Drone-Defined Cities

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player: Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

Listen to this Update in your podcast player

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery

Background

Why Drones

How a Drone Delivery Works

Aggregators and Restaurants

The Manna Drone

Drone Regulations

Competition

Drone-Defined Cities

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player: Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player:
Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China
Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player:
Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China
Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

Listen to this update and other Stratechery Plus content in your podcast player:
Stratechery | Sharp Tech | Dithering | Sharp China
Greatest Of All Talk | Asianometry

An Interview with Manna Founder and CEO Bobby Healy About Drone Delivery (Stratechery Interview 2-20-2025)

Ben Thompson<email@stratechery.com>Feb 20, 2025, 11:04 AM

Nicolás Rocha O<nrocha22@gmail.com>Feb 21, 2025, 3:23 PM

William Zapata<wdzapata@gmail.com>Feb 21, 2025, 3:35 PM