Welcome to the A16Z podcast. In this episode, recorded as part of the A16Z summit, Jonathan Downey from Airware and Grant Jordan from SkySafe, discuss with A16Z partner Kyle Russell, all things drones. They take a close look at the FAA regulation for drones released this past summer, where we are now and where we're going in the drone market. Thanks for joining today. So drones. At A6 and Z, we're incredibly excited to see today, cameras,

tomorrow, flying computers. We're excited to see them take humans out of dangerous jobs like

climbing towers or oil rigs. But even with all the excitement about what they could do,

there's this kind of dark cloud hanging over the ecosystem regarding, you know,

what is government going to do about flying computers over cities or over workplaces?

And so, Jonathan, just for those of us who haven't been following that story,

what was the regulation introduced this summer?

What were the kind of key takeaways that people should know about regarding how that's going to shape the ecosystem?

Yes, this was definitely one of the biggest concerns when we went out and raised our first round of financing.

There was a big question of, will this ever even be legal to do?

And finally, as of this summer, it's called Part 107. It's essentially the

rules of the road for using drones for commercial applications. And what it says is that

commercial companies can do this. They can do it up to 400, 500 feet. They can do it when there

is an operator who's responsible for the vehicle, who can see the vehicle,

although they don't have to actually be flying it. And in fact, in most cases, the drones are

usually flying pretty autonomously. But that's kind of some of the basics of it. So there's also

some limitations. The converse of that, it means you cannot fly aircraft beyond your visual

line of sight, although there is a waiver process now where the

FAA is going to grant kind of case-by-case-based permissions to companies that are going to allow

them to do that in the future. You've been doing this for five years now. I imagine that the

conversations kind of evolved once the groundwork was starting to be laid by regulators.

How have the conversations changed with the people you were talking about,

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