I am building VTOL prototypes from scratch, on the way to founding an eVTOL startup focused on the best vehicles of any kind for personal use.
Build progress and traction
[v0.2 3D printed long range VTOL] Designed, built and flew a VTOL capable of 130 miles of range, all in 90 days.
Reid Hoffman called my project “superagency in action” and compared it to the Wright Brothers’s work pioneering powered flight!
My video did numbers on X, and my VTOL posts have had over 1 M impressions across X, Youtube, LinkedIn and Substack in less than two weeks since the video launched.
My substack article about the build was #2 on Hacker News for the whole day of June 10th, driving over 13k visits to this blog in two days, and is the #1 search result for VTOL on HN, above submissions about Anduril, Lilium, Jetson, etc.
The Youtube video has been viewed 30,000 times in the first 12 days, surprising considering I only had 75 subscribers when I launched it (and now over 1700 subscribers just 12 days later).
while commercial drone makers spend millions on R&D, this guy in his workshop just showed them up.
That one’s for mom, MSN is still a top 4 news site in the US (!) and top 70 site globally with 500M monthly visits. It was also covered in Yahoo Tech, 3D Printing Industry, Tom’s Hardware, XDA Devs, Gigazine, and many other US and overseas publications, driving over ten thousand views on Youtube within the first week.
3D Printing Industry remarked:
this project represents a remarkable accomplishment in amateur aerospace engineering.
Maiden transition flight success in about 80 days:
Capable of 3 hours of endurance, one of the world’s longest in a 3D printed VTOL:
First hover test within 50 days of starting the project:
Previous VTOL and avionics projects:
[v0.1 foam VTOL] Successful transition flight within 100 days
[v0.0 copter avionics stack] Depth vision obstacle avoidance
I think now is an incredible time to build the new industrial giants of the 21st century. We have a generational opportunity ahead of us.
Background
I am a repeat founder on a mission.
Straight out of my undergrad, I built two bootstrapped mission-driven food logistics startups simultaneously, with combined revenues of nearly $1 M. That was in Sydney, Australia. I then did some startup consulting before landing in San Francisco to join Uber Eats working on UX research and helping start a skunkworks.
After leaving to build mission-driven startups again, I dived into the frontier of technology in energy storage, electric propulsion, materials, autonomy and more. This blog started as the sharing (and self-accountability) for that process. That writing was cited in an academic paper and book, a report by Tony Blair’s Institute for Global Change, Not Boring (multiple times), Exponential View, O’Reilly, the home page of one of Italy’s top daily newspapers and many more. I also did a stint as venture partner with Collaborative Fund and Juniper VC sourcing early stage hard tech startups.
I love learning, and learning fast. By the age of 12, I had speed-ran math through Grade 12. Chessmaster 5500 taught me enough chess in 2 years to become one of the top under 14 players in South Australia. After I left my job at Uber, I taught myself to code an MVP mobile app in React Native in two months. And of course, I’ve recently finished designing, building and flying my long range VTOL, in a short period of time (see above).
If you’re also interested in building at the convergence of aviation and mobility, connect on X, Youtube, LinkedIn or email me.
