It's a Siri's off failures on not giving up a Siri's off, you know, wanting to do something for myself. Something on my own, um, and really just having the patients and positivity because there's a lot of hard times. Ah, but if you don't give up and you learn from your failures, you can definitely get to a point where you know you have something successful. Um, you know what? Incidents and extremes shaped my career path. Ah, the biggest one was, I was a lot of my background was in sales and marketing, and I was selling everything from swimsuits to oxygen to real estate on. And one day I wanted I was wanting to get into more marketing on my own, and I had a friend that was really good at video production. We were starting to do some videos ourselves for local bands, nothing big, and we got a request to do a pool party and they wanted an aerial shot. And this was around 2000 end of 2013 early 2014 and we I did research and looked everywhere online and actually saw my very first video of a drum there was a DJ I phantom, and I thought it was the coolest thing. It was very affordable, had high quality camera, and I looked there was no regulations for us to actually be a pilot. You know, there was nothing at the time, so I got super excited. I went to my friend's apartment out by University of Central Florida, and we I was parking up in the visitor's parking lot, and I look up in the air and I saw the D. G I Phantom the one that I saw the night before for my research. So I ended up speaking to the gentleman who was flying it. And it turns out that it was Alexander billows who is my current CTO and co founder for Aaron Night. We hit it off. He was making drones in the apartment building there, and that's kind of where my passion sparks. You know, I thought it was the coolest thing. Um, you know, So you know what inspired me to work on the startup idea? Ah, it was really meeting him, really understanding that this industry at the time was so new, especially in the commercial side. There was no regulations definition in the U. S. Or around the world on That was on Lee about five years ago, and you five years later. Now you have global standardisation happening. You have the FAA providing different pilot programs for testing and you know, the military. The U. S Army has just, you know, put out a big grant four different providers to create and manufacture these drones. So it's been such a a wild roller coaster. But when we when I first got into the industry, I actually worked for another start up for the gentleman that I met and we were building drones and ended up seeing that, you know, there's it's at that time was very difficult cause there was no supply chain. There was no there was no vendor network that existed, you know, everything was so new on the commercial side. Granted on the military, it's been happening for over two decades. But you know, on the commercial there is still nothing established. So we saw that for the big benefit of using a drone waas. It's a tool, right, and you have to functions for that to a one delivering good commerce or good or to collecting some sort of data, and we knew that the delivery part would be a little difficult with the regulation. So we wanted a focus on how we can create a system that can help enterprises collect and inspect their large door out assets and how we can do that at a scalable platform. And that's where that idea first started. And, you know, it's been a world wind of different experiences. But no, we're very happy that we're still part of it that were partnered with the FAA, and, you know, we're moving forward with the industry.

Oh, wow. Yeah, The first few weeks were very interesting. We a zai mentioned with the first start up. We were building them and we ended up moving from that first start up in starting Aaron. I'd because we there was a military grant in place and there was the need for weaponization. And we, myself and my current cto Alexander were against, um, weaponization of a system. So that's when we left that and started with Aaron. I'd and the first few weeks was just figuring out the paperwork, figuring not the relationship, how we're going to move forward. Um, we had certain clients in the from the first company that wanted to utilise a system and wanted the service aspect versus just buying the Schoen's cause. The drones, you know, it was very difficult. You needed a pilot. You needed to understand what payloads you wanted, What sensors. And it was a lot of engineering work. So for ah, large department, like a police department or for ah, large department like an energy company at the time, it was just very resource intensive eso We were just looking for certain projects that we can start ah and gain from there. And we The next question, you know how these things change. Over the next few months, things were changing daily, you know, it wasn't, you know, a few things were constant for a few months, and then it shifted. It was changing daily. Trying to understand, You know what? What presentations we needed to put together. Who do we need to talk to? Uh, our what markets. We wanted a hit do. We wanted to stay in the US that we want to go to Latin America. Do we want to go overseas? Um, who could we partner with to make this happen? So these are the constant thoughts and questions that we're asking ourselves every day on Finally, you know, we we, uh we had a good solid climb in Colombia where we did some consulting work. We build him a platform. We helped them integrate that platform for project down there with the national police force. And it was successful. We started going to different parts of Central America and in South America, too, to kind of understand what the system can be. And in doing that, we ended up making great connections that started building our network in pipeline and we ended up refocusing 2017. We ended up raising funds and refocusing to just the United States. And that's where we focus on creating that business plan, really defining the markets we wanted to hit. But it was very interesting because it was so new that we didn't know the regulation. You know, the first commercial pilot regulation for specifically for drones in the U. S. Came out in 2016. Ah, you know it. So it was. We didn't know where the next point was going and there was no standardisation or regulation for beyond visual line of sight operations at the time. So that's that was where we were living in. So I mean, things change from the next few months. Ah, lot on and then for the next year or so, changed even Mawr. And even this year, everything that's happened this year has changed us significantly. So that's you know, it's a constant battle of pivoting and trying toe, you know, stay on that pivot and focus. So you know where that next pivot needs to happen or you know that you can

the initial team myself Alexander cto and then Danny Chung, who is also co founder with us. We we were all friends, right? And we had the ability to kind of start from scratch and the the next point was trying to identify the other schools that we needed right way Didn't have financial skills. Internally. I you know, I was so in college. You know, Alexander, actually, you know, he has his n b A s. So he has really great business sense. But, you know, he was he had the most experience with actually the technology side on then. You know, Danny has fast experiencing manufacturing, especially overseas in South Korea. And ah, you know, even though he had that engineering all mine, he was very excellent at understanding what, like creating outcomes and goals and following them and making sure we're meeting them. So we had all our different skills and sets, but find a financial one wasn't one that we had, um and so we ended up, you know, one through our friends found ah, financial officer at the time. And then we also found that in doing the research, there was a lot of need for real estate because the u A. V if you wanna build it out as ah connected system a networking system, you're gonna need infrastructure in place, just like how we do for the Internet. On DWI, we saw that there was a huge need for identifying real estate and identifying that infrastructural need for this system. So we ended up creating a position, you know, the chief real estate officer. Ah, and you know, that was my best friend from high school. So we ended up starting it with the friends. Um, the team's composition, dynamics, time, resource, commitment involved tremendously, you know, getting support from one partner, and then financially. But then also time we were all involved 24 7. I mean, the first year and a half, it was non stop working 150 you know, 200 hours if we could, you know, basically sleeping an hour to a night. Once we got to a point where we found more individuals who have the experience, you know, our current CFO. He was a CFO of a public company. He has over 50 years of experience in business. He is a professor at Florida Institute of technology. So we ended up finding individuals once we got to that point that that really helped us bring it to that next level, cause in the beginning was just us friends trying to figure it out. But then we you know, as we matured with our company, we matured with our product in our service offering and the industry's matured. We've definitely had to reposition ourselves correctly based off of where you are at both at a personal level in at a professional.