Cameron Rowe [00:00:00]:

These are areas in which we call it locked markets where traditional methods of delivery are falling short. And so we're not trying to do everything or replace jobs of delivery drivers because the reality is even a guy on an electric bike is probably more efficient in many cases to go down the block and quicker than a drone. And you don't need as much logistics setup. Everything is very easy to do, but for many, many instances, longer deliveries, islands, or even during traffic, these create these locked markets that we're able to service with the drones that are super efficient, super fast, and much better than a vehicle.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:39]:

Welcome to WISKing It All with your host, Angelo Esposito, co-founder of WISK.ai, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome to another episode of WISKing It All. We're here today with Cameron Rowe, the founder of Hover. Cameron, thanks for joining us.

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Cameron Rowe [00:01:05]:

Thanks for having me, Angelo, of course.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:07]:

So I couple episodes back, or more than a couple, probably 30 episodes ago, we had the founder of a really cool robot company here in Miami that kind of does delivery on the ground, basically. And so when I saw what you guys were doing, it caught my attention. I'll let you explain it. So why don't you let people know what is Hover?

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Cameron Rowe [00:01:26]:

Certainly. So hover is a drone delivery startup. We can deliver pretty much anything that fits within the five pound payload of our smaller drone. And just recently we've launched a larger drone. But for the sake of what we're chatting about with food delivery, the smaller drone is what we've done most of our 6000 deliveries with. And we're able to do about five pounds worth of anything you would think of with Uber Eats doordash, those typical things. So last mile food products, like cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:53]:

So I was on the website, so just for people listening in, like to give you a visual. I saw the video, but literally a drone, right? You know, other way to describe it, just carrying your order in the air and dropping it off. So a really cool concept. We'll get more into it and then how it's working, logistics and who your ideal customers and all that fun stuff. But I always like to understand what made people want to do what they're doing today. So kind of your why. So like, I love to understand a bit more about your background and just what, what inspired you to start hover in the first place.

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Cameron Rowe [00:02:25]:

Yeah, for sure. So I've been working in the drone space as a drone engineer for a long, long time. I have a funny picture in 2001 of my four year old self that my parents had taken, and I was messing around with an RC car. And over the next few decades, up until 2018, when I started the company at Queen's University, I'd been racing, building, piloting, destroying pretty much every single RC toy that I had, including helicopters, drones, like ground based vehicles. So that was just always a passion of mine. And it was actually my grandfather who had said, you know, you should look into maybe doing some of this as a business. And previously, I would say a lot of the toys that we had, it was just that it was a toy. It wasn't anything that was really capable of doing some of the commercial grade work that we're currently now doing.

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Cameron Rowe [00:03:17]:

And in 2018, that shifted because I had purchased a $2,000 drone and use that to start doing, essentially residential real estate and commercial real estate photography for listings so that these realtors could have super high quality listings from above. We had found some research that indicated that aerial photography and videography helped sell properties better. It would retain more people on the MLS websites. And so there was an obvious value added to having that. And so I could actually go into listings that had been idle for more than 30 days and pitch the realtors and say, hey, we can refresh the listing. A couple hundred bucks for you. I'll go out in Kingston and I'll take the bus, go film it, and the next day upload it and edit it for you guys. And.

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Cameron Rowe [00:03:57]:

And it was a great way for me, as this broke college student, to get some cash in, help pay rent, get some beer money in. And so it ended up growing significantly from that. Helped pay for my master's degree. And here we are today, kind of slight pivoting from the drone services into last mile drone delivery.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:15]:

Wow. And I know, if I'm not mistaken, I think you were part of Techstars cohort 2023, right?

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Cameron Rowe [00:04:21]:

Correct.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:22]:

Cool. Yeah, we were part of 2018 when, when Textars first came to Canada. So, first of all, it's cool to meet a fellow text company, but would love to know, like, tell me a bit about that. Like, how did you guys get into techstars? And then how was your kind of techstars experience? And then. And how did that help hover?

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Cameron Rowe [00:04:37]:

Yeah, for sure. I absolutely loved it. So I had been introduced to Sunil in November of 2022, and we had originally thought we were going to do a chat, but it didn't end up going through. And then I got reintroduced again back in I think this was would have been March or April of 2023 of last year. And first off, I absolutely love Sunil. He had just immediately identified us as a potential customer or a potential sort of participant, excuse me, within the Techstar program, and moved super quick. So we had let him know, hey, we're going on Dragon's Den. We hadn't really raised that much money that far.

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Cameron Rowe [00:05:18]:

Just a couple of angel investors and people within our space. In the drone space.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:22]:

Yeah.

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Cameron Rowe [00:05:22]:

And we had said, this is something we're really interested in. And he had immediately gone, okay, we had met on the Monday over Zoom. He said, tomorrow, let's meet in person. And Wednesday was the filming day for Dragon's Den. And so it was like, bang, bang, bang, where they go, you know what? We're interested then in person. I remember bringing Adriana, one of the guys who had worked with me, and it was one of those things where I had always found he was just easy to talk to. And it was one of, like, it was an investment meeting where they were potentially going to give us hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, it didn't feel necessarily like that.

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Cameron Rowe [00:05:53]:

He has a good way of kind of not necessarily putting people at ease, but just making it more conversational, sort of like, what are you guys working on? I think the dynamic between Adriano and I really came through as well, where it was like we had confidence in what we were doing. We were just coming off some really big wins as well. So he could see that. And then, as well, the situation. Like, we honestly were generating a bit of fomo by being like, we're about to go on Dragon's Den.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:15]:

That's a good.

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Cameron Rowe [00:06:15]:

Yeah, that's awesome. So he was thinking, hey, maybe you guys can mention this. And so we did. They actually ended up cutting that part out, which is kind of hilarious, but I loved it. Like, as a solo founder as well. These types of sort of incubators and accelerators are super crucial for my personal relationships with people. Being able to have the ability to kind of mix friendships and business is important because every day I'm waking up thinking about the business. And so it's hard to kind of separate that.

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Cameron Rowe [00:06:44]:

And that balance becomes a little bit easier to do when you're with other people who are also trying to manage it, because you can just connect easier. If there are certain friends that are in a different space, they just don't understand some of the challenges. And so that was one of the benefits that Techstars had, aside from just the cash and some of the network. And I just really liked the community that was built from it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:04]:

That's awesome. And obviously, I'll be honest, I did my research, but I didn't even realize you were on Dragon's Den. And for our listeners, we have obviously a lot of us listeners, that's the equivalent of Shark Tank, but in Canada. So can you talk to me a bit about that? Like what happened? Did you guys end up on the show? How was it?

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Cameron Rowe [00:07:21]:

It was a really cool experience. So I had always grown up listening to and watching dragons Den and Shark Tank. And it's kind of funny because Mister wonderful, who's Kevin O'Leary? He is friends with another guy through a separate incubator I did a couple years earlier. His name is Reza Satchu. And I had gotten the chance to chat with Reza a bunch. It just was, there's a lot of overlap between it and so I had mentally thought I was prepared for Dragon's Den. It definitely is a little bit different than you kind of imagine. It is a reality tv show.

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Cameron Rowe [00:07:51]:

So it's lessen emphasis on the business side as much as people think it's more. Much more. Hey, this is what's going to happen. Here's what you're going to say. You can't say this. You got to do this. Okay, pause. We're going to adjust the cameras.

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Cameron Rowe [00:08:02]:

And it's, it was very much a reality tv show, but we had a great pitch, practiced a lot for it, a little bit nervous. But the cool part about kind of doing a pitch of your company that you've been working on for years is you intimately know it. It isn't. It's like you could ask me a bunch of different questions and I don't necessarily never have an answer for it. I always can say something about it that would answer your question. I think the key here is picking the answers that you, you have to kind of change the answers depending on who you're talking to. So you got to do research on who the dragons are at the time, like Robert Herzkovac was absent, which I kind of really was sad about because he is a little bit more on the software side of things. We would have understood a little bit of it, but you kind of got to roll with it because it's not.

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Cameron Rowe [00:08:42]:

It is what it is at a certain point.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:44]:

Who is that? I'm curious. So Kevin O'Leary.

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Cameron Rowe [00:08:47]:

So he was not there at the time. Robert was not. They keep switching it up and putting new dragons in. Michelle Romano, Wes hall, and there were a couple others as well. But those, the other people kind of weren't really my focus. I would say Wes and Michelle are just based on their investment thesis, even just the amount of money they have to be able to do the deal size. Like, we had already raised some money from us investors. And so if you're in the states, you kind of probably are aware of the differences between the canadian and the us venture market.

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Cameron Rowe [00:09:15]:

And it just, canadian investors don't.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:17]:

Very conservative.

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Cameron Rowe [00:09:18]:

Very conservative. They also just have less money. They're not doing investments in us dollars. And so when we say, hey, we're going to do it in us dollars and at us multiples, people don't usually have the ability to stomach that. But I thought we handled it really well of like, preemptively explaining that and saying, hey, here's our revenue multiple. Here's why we're valued at what we are. You guys are able to kind of search it up. It was a, we had asked 300K for 10%.

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Cameron Rowe [00:09:44]:

Michelle had countered and said you'd give it to 25%. It just, that was too much of the company I wasn't willing to give up. And again, it was just not what we were really looking to do at the time. That's 300,000 Canadian is a pretty small.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:57]:

It's gonna go fast.

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Cameron Rowe [00:09:58]:

You go through it very fast, especially with some of the salaries of what Bay Area engineers want. It's, it just, it didn't make sense. And so I definitely handled it as best as I could have. I was very polite and courteous with them. I didn't want to be one of those clips that you see where they're like, oh, you guys are missing out. It's like, no, hey, thanks for your opportunity. Things don't always work out. And the other four dragons ended up saying, hey, we're out.

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Cameron Rowe [00:10:21]:

We're not going to invest. And so, great opportunity. We then aired in September of last year, and I think it went really well. I'm really pleased with it and I think I handled myself well and I'm proud of myself, which is all you can really do in situations where you don't have final cuts.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:35]:

No, for sure. And that's what I was going to say. Like, the fact that you have final cuts is tough because sometimes you'll watch tv and you'll look at someone and be like, oh, man, this guy's getting grilled. But meanwhile, the guy might have been speaking for an hour and made like 98% good points. And like, he got you choked on one point. Now he's getting grilled. And they take that clip and make him look like an idiot.

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Cameron Rowe [00:10:53]:

And my Adriana who was there was like, oh no, they were zooming in on you twiddling your thumbs. After it was an hour and a half that we were in the studio and I had just ran the Toronto marathon the day before so I can't remember the exact timeline. It was a day or two before my legs were sore and I was standing and I didn't want to pace because it looked weird. So I was feeling it and I was trying not to shake.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:12]:

That's so funny.

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Cameron Rowe [00:11:13]:

It was a lot of fun.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:14]:

The zoom in the drama. That's funny. And out of curiosity, would you say. I know sometimes, especially shark tank is, it's us. So like just population wise is much bigger. A lot of people also go on just for kind of the publicity. Did it help? Like did you see a traffic spike like post airing in the show and what did that happen?

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Cameron Rowe [00:11:31]:

Absolutely. I would say that like any one thing that we do doesn't necessarily make or break the company. Especially because we're relatively unique. Like we're not. We don't have product necessarily immediately available for sale. So it's harder to judge like what does increased traffic really mean? To be honest with you, nobody, they don't really publish the viewer data. I'm pretty sure YouTube shows have higher viewership than a lot of the Dragons den shows. So even if it's a couple hundred thousand or half a million viewers, how many of those are actually going to then go click? The one nice thing is that they're pretty much all canadian viewers.

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Cameron Rowe [00:12:04]:

So it is very segmented. I think it's really great for the brand of the company and my personal brand. And even just again, the opportunity to be on there is really exciting. We, I would say the benefit is not necessarily from the eyeballs on it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:19]:

It's more of a social problem.

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Cameron Rowe [00:12:21]:

Yeah, exactly. Like we've gone through, we survived, we got an offer. Even if we turned it down, it's conversation pieces so that we can then talk to other investors about it. And it's one of many different things that kind of validates us of, hey, we've done 6000 deliveries, we have patents. We were on Dragons Den, we were part of techstars. And then it helps people form an idea of what is hover, who are they? Who's Cameron?

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:43]:

That's cool. Really well said. And I mean, look, it's a, we're talking about it here so like it's definitely a story worth mentioning. So that's awesome. So I'm curious. So, like, when, you know, post x stars, post even dragons. And, like, how you guys kind of go to market, right. Because it's pretty niche product.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:59]:

Not niche, but it's like, it's not something you can start, you know, overnight. Yeah. So how do you go about, like, let's say, finding customers, right. Which I guess if we're talking restaurant space or grocery space, like, how do you go about finding those people? And then I'm just curious because I have no idea, and I have a feeling our listeners might be thinking the same thing. Is permits like. Like, how does it work? If you can you just start delivering groceries or do you have to get permits? Like, tell me a bit about what that looks like.

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Cameron Rowe [00:13:23]:

Absolutely right. With your instinct thinking about permits. You need permits everywhere. It's anytime that you have something in the airspace over a certain weight or doing a commercial delivery, you require certain licenses to be allowed to do this. In Canada, that's called a cargo delivery license. A company called Air Canada Cargo, they have the same license that we have, which is pretty cool to think about and a pretty interesting sort of achievement that we were able to achieve that same level. Insurance, the regulations, the framework for delivery. You need to do test deliveries.

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Cameron Rowe [00:13:54]:

How do you do test deliveries when you don't have the license? Well, you just don't have cargo. And you do the flights. How do you do the flights? Well, you need the certifications for the aircraft. You need the pilot licenses. You need the insurance. You need incorporation documents. You need good relationships. You need to have no issues on it, like, they do all of this.

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Cameron Rowe [00:14:09]:

You need good background checks. Everything takes time. You need to pay them a fee. All of these things add up in. And how do you pay for food and rent and mortgage when you're doing all these employees? So it's like, yeah, we're not on mortgage yet. We're still renting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:21]:

But still.

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Cameron Rowe [00:14:22]:

Yeah, it adds up so quickly. And so I think it isn't an easy thing to do, but because it's very iterative of, like, we started off small doing real estate, then we got slightly bigger drones in 2018. When I started at Queen's, I actually had a vision of doing Ocega drone deliveries. So the Schwartz meat sandwiches, we could pick them up and ship them off to the island there where they're doing the concerts. And I thought that, what a great opportunity. So the reality with drone delivery is that in the short term, it's hard to kind of do it everywhere. You have to tick your area as well. So the reason we started on the Toronto island and we're successful for us viewers, it's just an island just south of Toronto, which is a couple kilometers wide and about a kilometer offshore.

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Cameron Rowe [00:15:06]:

A lot of people still live there. They have about 800 people who are living there full time. And then on weekends, Toronto published stats saying up to 10,000 people a day are traveling to Toronto islands. So the market size is there and we only need to do about 50 deliveries a day to be profitable. And we were doing 100, 150 deliveries a day. And so that environment is what we have been recreating in other locations. And so that may not necessarily just be neighborhoods, right. It could be areas like boats, for example.

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Cameron Rowe [00:15:36]:

These are areas in which we call it locked markets, where traditional methods of delivery are falling short. And so we're not trying to do everything or replace jobs of delivery drivers, because the reality is even a guy on an electric bike is probably more efficient in many cases to go down the block and quicker than a drone. And you don't need as much logistics setup. Sure, everything is very easy to do, but for many, many instances, longer deliveries, islands, or even during traffic, these create these locked markets that we're able to service with the drones that are super efficient, super fast and much better than a vehicle.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:13]:

Super interesting. I actually lived in Toronto a few years, well, actually when I was in Texas, and then I stayed, I think, two, three more years. So I've been to the Toronto island. So just. Just to get the visual. Like, I remember taking a ferry or whatever there. But you're saying that for those people on the island or guests visiting, for them not to have to leave, you can get stuff from the actual core Toronto and bring it over. Okay, that's really neat.

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Cameron Rowe [00:16:37]:

And not just food. We had originally wanted to do prescriptions and groceries and packages. The reality is, though, the demand for food superseded everything else by a margin of ten. And so we ended up just focusing on that and starting to build relationships with restaurants.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:52]:

That's super cool. And so I'm curious to, like, just. Okay, so tell me more about the logistics. Right, so people are listening in there like, it sounds really neat. So give me, like, one example of, like, an order. Right? So I'm on the island. I want, I don't know, some sandwich or. Let's go back to shorts.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:08]:

I love shorts. I want shorts even though they're from Montreal, but I want short smoked meat sandwiches. Great. So I placed my order. Is it. Where are they placing this? Is it. Are you guys also building the kind of front end, or are you guys connecting to a front? And tell me more about, like, kind of. I'm just curious to understand the user experience.

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Cameron Rowe [00:17:24]:

Yeah, certainly. So in the first iteration, what we would do is we would actually just order it off of these services or directly from the restaurant to our pickup point. And because many of these markets, these locked markets, don't even have any access, but people are used to ordering things on the delivery apps, we wanted to launch in the easiest way possible. So we built a text chatbot that was similar to how chat GPT is now, although ours is a lot dumber. We were, this is, yeah, this is like summer 2022. So we were kind of just doing the logic chains by hand, which was really, really interesting to do, and we would then just simply tack on a ten dollar charge and have it delivered over. And because we were doing the volume we required, those would be profitable. We could operate for five, 6 hours a day during peak time, and we then could go home and plan the rest of it.

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Cameron Rowe [00:18:12]:

We wanted deliveries. We didn't really care how we did it, and we didn't need to own the entire transaction right away, because we were like, we just want to do deliveries. Is there demand? How can we validate this moving forward? Our goal is to integrate with partners like pizza pizza to be able to simply use their existing workflows and their delivery methods. They already have all of the tablets there that say, hey, this order comes in. At this point in time, the biggest change in workflow would be loading the drone. And that's what we're currently testing and figuring out, because it just obviously is a complicated environment, and it depends on where you can do. And certain areas, like in the bottom of Eaton center, you can't get access to those restaurants, and it wouldn't make sense for an employee to walk up to do it. So there are, I would say, even in the core of downtown cities, it doesn't always make sense to do this.

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Cameron Rowe [00:18:58]:

It's much better in suburban landscapes, which is 80% of where America lives, and most of Canada as well. So it's, most of the population of us. And Canada don't live right in a downtown core. They live slightly outside of it or in the neighborhood. And so those are the areas that we are targeting initially as we sort of develop the technology better get more funding, things like rooftop delivery and balcony delivery.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:23]:

That's what I was just thinking. I was just about to ask you about balcony.

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Cameron Rowe [00:19:26]:

We have a balcony just right here. It would be wonderful to do that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:29]:

But think of downtown Toronto and all those skyrises. But I'm sure there's a bunch of challenges that come with it.

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Cameron Rowe [00:19:35]:

You're then flying directly over big groups of people. You have updraft that occurs naturally within cities when you have tall buildings. What happens if I strong wind pushes it against a bit? Like, there are all of these things that you. You want to simplify your life, and we don't want to have to deal with those questions right now because it's just so complex. And the reward for delivering a $30 parcel isn't as, like, there's a cost benefit analysis. You have to ensure that what you're doing makes sense. And so perhaps for organ delivery, that would make sense to figure out how to manage that within a complex airspace such as downtown Toronto. But we have multiple heliports here that people can come if the orange helicopters need to drop off a patient.

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Cameron Rowe [00:20:15]:

You would now have to have infrastructure negotiating with them, making sure who owns what airspace. And so it's to a point exactly where it's like, it's better to simplify your life and try to do it for other areas that are easier to.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:30]:

That makes sense. And out of curiosity, who would you say is your typical kind of customer these days? Like, I know you mentioned I for Toronto island is an example. Like, you're doing well with kind of maybe groceries and food and restaurants. Is that. Does that seem to be, like, where you're gaining traction, or are there other areas?

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Cameron Rowe [00:20:47]:

Yeah, I would say specifically not necessarily in groceries or prescriptions or anything like that, really just food delivery.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:53]:

Okay.

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Cameron Rowe [00:20:53]:

So a lot of it would be almost like, if you're having a fun night and you want to order wings off of Uber Eats, those environments in those situations are what happens frequently in the Toronto islands and other locked areas, because it's so hard to get there. People are saying, sure, I'll spend a little bit extra to get. Get delivery of whatever I need. And so that is where it's almost like going to Canada's wonderland. Yes, it's $10 for a pop, but you're okay with that? We don't want that to be the cost long term, but we want. Is it painful enough that somebody is willing to pay that? That is valuable information that when you're running a business, you want to know. And we a b tested it. We did $5, we did $15.

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Cameron Rowe [00:21:30]:

We wanted to see how people would react, and it was fairly non elastic, meaning people would just pay whatever it was. So we wanted to make sure it was reasonable enough. But we don't need to charge $20 a delivery. We wanted to keep it to a point where we would get people coming back.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:45]:

That's interesting. I was actually. I wonder if this would work or not, but I was actually in Colombia and Cartagena with my brothers not too long ago, and we rented a boat for the day, all that. It was fun. It was nice, nice, fun day. And then, because it's like, you know, it's close to all these islands, and so then the smaller boats come next to you, and they're selling oysters or this or that or different foods, and they kind of deliver on the smaller boats. So they. What do you think about situations like that? Just pure curiosity.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:11]:

Like, is there. Is there a situation where, like, maybe close enough, obviously, to the island, but, like, tell me more about that, because I feel like that audience wouldn't mind, definitely wouldn't mind paying a premium. You're already spending money to be on a boat, right?

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Cameron Rowe [00:22:25]:

Certainly. I think the key here is to make sure it scales. We've done many, many different types of events, and we've done events where we've got paid $10,000 for one single delivery. And it's like, that's great, but how sustainable is it if we can make a business just doing that? And we did a bunch of them a day, that would be wonderful. But those are outliers. And so I think the problem with events is that they're not sustainable. And so when you're running a business, you don't want to. If you're trying to build a large business, it's okay to have a business that does services, which is what that would be for events.

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Cameron Rowe [00:22:55]:

But we would need an area that has a lot of repeatability. So that was an area within Colombia in which every day there were lots of boats that were there, then that would be something that would consider, or if it was like a weekend. But the only real way we do that is if the promo value is there, as well as the revenue, as well as we're not doing anything else that could supersede it. And then even then, as a business owner, I'm thinking, am I distracting myself by doing that? Should I simply be focusing on the core markets? Because once you get those running, it's almost like spinning up a bicycle, like, or an engine. Once you get it running, it's self sustaining. But if you take fuel out of the engine and you put it into a fancy bicycle or doing, like, you want the engine to run and you want to have that sustaining. So that you don't have to be constantly staring at the engine. But in the initial phases, that's what you need.

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Cameron Rowe [00:23:41]:

You need the starter fluid, you need to rev it. It's not going to work. You need to change the oil, you need to do all these things. And that's kind of a funny sort of metaphor, but that is how it is. We actually are looking at boat delivery, but it will be in areas like Miami or for cargo ships, which is some of the larger drones I mentioned.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:58]:

Interesting.

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Cameron Rowe [00:23:59]:

The core technology overlaps and that's where we're saying we want to make sure what we're delivering is meaningful enough. And the cost that we can charge isn't something that is overwhelming to the customer, which when you're in food delivery, people want to spend as little as possible. So that's a tricky market to make a lot of money in unless you have the volume.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:17]:

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And it's funny. I totally agree. It's like you got to scale the rule, not the exception. So like, but who knows, you know, sometimes like, you know, you think of like a, obviously this is a massive company, but you think of like a red bull in the experience side. And one piece of advice, I mean, I don't know if you guys are already doing the events, maybe you're already doing this, but document those things because those are such fun videos that like, if you, I mean, if you guys are, I apologizes, I haven't seen them, but, but like watching, I don't know, you guys deliver something at this event or whatever. Like, that's super entertaining value. So I think you also have something unique just from like a content perspective, but obviously from just a business perspective, you want to build what's like you said, what's scalable, definitely.

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Cameron Rowe [00:24:56]:

So we're excited. I think it's a lot of challenges associated with it. But did you guys find that with your tech stars experience, were you creating some of these sort of memorable experiences and trying to capture as much content as possible?

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:10]:

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I realized with techstars was how important, I guess, networking was and then also how important maybe storytelling was. The idea is important, execution is obviously important, but I think I underestimated the idea of the storytelling. And so for me, it took time. But even just like doing this podcast, it's like I realized the importance of doing content. And I think the trick I realized after many, many years is focus on the quantity, not the quality in the beginning, just to get the reps in. Like it's like, I don't know what I'm doing. This podcast was shit. Okay, episode two, this didn't make sense.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:45]:

Fuck. I didn't record my audio. That might like, but just if you make the goal in the beginning, just quantity. Like, I want to get through 50 episodes. Magical things happen. Yeah. And then eventually you say, okay, now I want to make quality. And then the bonus is now want to make a lot of good quality.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:01]:

So it's quantity and quality, but it's a hack I learned or a mindset I learned, because then you don't judge yourself so hard. So, like, let's say you want to start posting on TikTok. It might feel so overwhelming. So if you make your goal, like, I want to get 10,000 views, it might feel stressful, and then you might feel like you failed. But if you're just like, hey, you know what? For hover, I want to make a goal that from now until December, we're going to post 100 pieces of content.

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Cameron Rowe [00:26:21]:

Cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:22]:

So it's a slight shift, but that was a big lesson I learned. It's just like, make the output the goal in the beginning, and then eventually, because that output, you get better. You learn shit, you refine it, you figure out what's working, what's not working, so. But you just focus on the output. I'm curious to know from your side. Right. Like, so obviously the perks or the benefits for the customers is a no brainer. It's the convenience for reasonable price, all that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:43]:

What would you say? Or like, how do you kind of pitch it to the, let's say, restaurant? Like, what's, is it just an added revenue stream? Like, how do you guys pitch that to them? I'm curious to understand, like, that angle.

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Cameron Rowe [00:26:55]:

So typically we don't go to direct to, if it's a franchisee, it's different than sort of the corporate. So most of the time what we're doing is we're going to the corporate office. Because when you're dealing with sort of pilot projects, you need to have a little bit of money that they're okay with saying, hey, we're going to take this risk to invest it. Individual store owners, unless they're really wealthy, which many aren't, considering some of the stuff that's going on with restaurants and brick and mortar stores right now is really tough. So going to the chains, they're looking for this. Well, we talk to them and we say, you know, we can upskill some of your drivers that are currently doing delivery. So there's this subset of them, like pizza. Pizza was a perfect example that we are doing some work with where you're able to get the interest and buy in of the head office.

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Cameron Rowe [00:27:41]:

In corporate. They're willing to invest some cash to be able to do trials, to be able to set something up to see if it makes sense. And then as well, once that's ready, the reason that it's good to go from this top down approach, they can turn on in every location. And so that is key for us because we want to have the, like, we want to have the scalability factor, something that all we're really concerned about is just, hey, how does it work? And not how can we get in? Like, distribution is everything. So if we have the distribution part figured out, we want to just do some tests now, and as soon as we have a repeatable model with the store that's, for example, pizza is a little bit different than just a bag that you can put on a drone. Then you're able to turn it on and boom, you're off to the races.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:23]:

That makes sense. And I'm curious, like, if you think more futuristically, hover blows up and now there's a couple of competitors, which again, is not easy to do, but maybe the Amazons of the world are doing delivery on drones and stuff like that. Do you see a world where, like. Because one of the things I was thinking just like, again, just visually, I was like, I'm imagining a world where there's so many drones, there's just sky traffic, because everything is now, like, what we have on the street is just now above us, but basically there's like shipments and this. Do you see that happening? And what effect do you think that would have? Let's say just more from, I guess, like just a pure human perspective. You see a world where it's just like, you look up at the sky and you're not even enjoying the sky because it's just like drone traffic. Like.

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Cameron Rowe [00:29:04]:

So you kind of had two questions in there I'll do my best to address. The first one is regarding something that we call in the industry, UTM, or unmanned traffic management. And that is sort of, how do you have a complex airspace where there are drones, there are planes, there's vtols in the future. That's a hot topic right now. A lot of companies are investing in that. There are helicopters taking off and landing, emergency helicopters, there's aircraft, cargo, passenger, like. Yeah, and a lot of that is already well defined. And so the FAA and Transport Canada, which governs the airspace, have rules in place for a lot of this.

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Cameron Rowe [00:29:38]:

The difficulty comes in when you're trying to say sort of lower altitude operations, which, when you're operating from taking off from a roof of a building, for example, that is what it would be defined as. And so the biggest challenge when you're talking about the larger aircraft, which we don't have to follow because we're smaller, is regulations associated with manned aviation. Those are typically always taking precedence. The lucky part about that is that they don't really fly at low altitudes. And so as long as you avoid these heli ports is what they're called, you're typically able to, like, the sky's big, you're really able to have a situation where there's very low risk. You've filed flight plans, and because with drone delivery, we're typically taking off from the same spot. So you can put a radius in there of a certain location, set what's called a notam or a notice to airmen. So other drone pilots and aircraft are doing things correctly.

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Cameron Rowe [00:30:31]:

The challenge comes from non compliant aircraft where some guy's just flying his model drone up and this guy doesn't really care. Oh, he got it as a gift, drives across the border with it. And there's numerous instances in which that has happened. And so how you get around that is you have onboard sensors that can detect other aircraft. You have remote drone id, and then in more complex situations, one of our investors actually is called air matrix build solutions that they want to have in place so that the drones are even outside of the range of the sensors and the permits and everything, they'll talk to one another. Because as you start to add autonomy, drone is now going to be able to make decisions without you necessarily approving it. Hey, we'll go around the left side of this building. And so how can you have a system that knows that this drone is going around the left side of the building? What happens if it's at the same time of the right side?

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:20]:

Right.

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Cameron Rowe [00:31:20]:

Someone comes around. The good news is that there are so few people doing this right now, that isn't a massive problem right now, but it's something that these regulators are prepared to do. And so that's kind of how we're trying to approach that situation.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:35]:

Got it. And this question is just pure curiosity. But now I'm like, I kind of want to buy a drone. I imagine the rules are different where you live. I'm in Miami right now. But for people who do have drones and they like doing video, whatever I is it is it pretty regulated. Like, do those people have to like. Okay, so they still have to, like, file things.

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Cameron Rowe [00:31:53]:

Oh, yeah, but many people don't. This is the thing. There's a new class of drones that are the sub 249 grams, because that for whatever, there's a. There's various reasons, but it's somewhat of an arbitrary number that FAA and Transport Canada have both said, if you're under this sort of weight threshold, you don't need to do certain things. So in Canada, they're called micro drones. You don't need an advanced license. That doesn't mean that you can operate in controlled airspace, though. And this is a problem.

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Cameron Rowe [00:32:20]:

Most drone flights are non compliant, and so this is the challenge of what regulators are worried about. The lucky part, I guess, if you call it that, is that the drones are so small that the energy, or joules, as it's referred to, that can be generated from it. It still can hurt people. But the reason it's not a bigger deal is because the injuries that occur from somebody crashing a drone are maybe a broken window. Typically not. It doesn't have the power, really enough power to break a window when you're that small. And so it gets lost. Most of the time the drone just gets destroyed or somebody's finger gets cut and maybe they go to the ER, but it's not really a newsworthy thing.

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Cameron Rowe [00:32:52]:

And so I think we use bigger drones, so we have to be more careful than that. But what happens if one of those drones crashes into ours? Who's responsible? So all of that, that's why we have insurance, that's why we operate safely. That's why we put these notice to airmen out. And that's also why you're. You have to be responsible and aware you can't be distracted when you're doing a lot of this. And so I think that solves most of the challenges. There are going to be, I predict, situations in which there will be problems occur even after doing everything right. But those outliers are where hopefully, we're gonna be able to address those preemptively with new technology, like remote id, with better drone technology, with better autonomy, with sensors on the drone.

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Cameron Rowe [00:33:30]:

So even if I miss it and I tell it to go towards that building and it's in a cloud and I don't see it, the drone will stop me from actually moving forward. So, interesting. I would say that's where technology can be helpful.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:40]:

That's super cool. And, you know, obviously we spoke a lot about the challenges, but with that means, like, you know, harder barrier to entry. So you're building something really cool, and it's hard for people to mimic it. But I'm curious to know what. What's been maybe one of the most, or a few, if you want to have a few rewarding parts of this kind of entrepreneurial journey so far, I.

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Cameron Rowe [00:34:01]:

Really love the learning curve that I've experienced. I feel like I've lived multiple different lives. Like, I've been lucky enough to just be friends with people. Like I mentioned earlier, like, the community, when. When I'm talking with some of my friends about challenges that they're working on, you learn so much from the insight. You can test their product out. You're at the forefront of some of the technology. Even if it fails.

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Cameron Rowe [00:34:21]:

I think that mindset shift is very, very exciting because you get to meet some really phenomenal people. Like, there's a company called ramp which does kind of like corporate spend. I ran into the CTO one day, and then we're just chatting away a little bit, and it's like, this is a very, first off, he's a billionaire. Second off, it's a very sort of interesting space when you just bump into people like this and you can get some other time, and they look at you in a way that. Yeah, like, they. Even if we're not, we're still figuring things out, and we're not their level, they still have some level of respect for you because they understand, like, they've been through your level and understand how challenging it is. And then even just obviously, the benefits when you meet someone like that, of if you need the help or, like, we're gonna switch over to ramp now because of it. And I just.

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Cameron Rowe [00:35:05]:

I really like the guy who was very nice. And so it's like, these instances that occur are so serendipitous. You can never really plan things like that. But those are some of the nicest things that I think are, because I'm doing this, you know, the personality sort of determination that I have, the confidence I have in myself, even if it fails, I'll be okay, because I have a good network of people, because I've learned a ton of things. Any potential job interview that I would have in the future, I have hundreds of things I could talk about. I could talk for hours and hours, similar to how we're doing this, how it relates, hiring, firing people, raising money, how to unlock capital effectively, you know, how. How to manage investors, how to send out newsletters.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:42]:

Your.

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Cameron Rowe [00:35:42]:

Your hand is in so many different areas that you're doing marketing. You're doing finance, you're doing hardware stuff because I'm still an engineer. And you got to balance your time. So you got time management skills. You're working really hard. So it almost makes other things seem a little bit easier, which is good, because that increases your confidence. You want somebody who is confident, and so I think I just love it. I don't know.

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Cameron Rowe [00:36:01]:

You feel the same way.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:02]:

I feel the same. Yeah, I feel the same way. And, like, for me, you nailed it. But, like, when you're talking, I'm like, I agree. It's like you. You feel so confident because of, like, just how many hours you put in. It's not like. It's not like, you know, delusional confidence.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:14]:

It's just like you do so many things. You wear so many hats because you need to. You work long hours in the beginning because you have to. So it's like you're juggling so much. You learn so fast because you have to. So it's like at a certain point, you just look back and you're like, yeah, I'm confident because I raise money. I hired people. I've hired people.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:30]:

I've gone through this. Okay, maybe I had a lawsuit. I got to deal with it. Like, you just learn so much. And again, it's like this crash course because it's. It's not structured where it's like, okay, day one, I'm like, you do whatever you want. I'm learning content. And this.

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Cameron Rowe [00:36:45]:

Yeah, like, you just sell overseas. Nobody's telling you not to do that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:48]:

Exactly.

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Cameron Rowe [00:36:49]:

And that's freeing. And that's obviously a great part of it. But it's also scary because there's no right answers. In many cases, there's a lot of wrong answers, so. But you're making decisions. Reza, talking back to him, he ran next 36, and he's actually, I believe, a professor at Harvard as well, the business school there. He had said one of the important parts about being a founder at a young age is you get experience making decisions with consequence. Yes, it's good that you make mistakes now, and it's especially good that, like, when you have kids and you're in your forties and you make decisions, that's not the time you want to make decisions that absolutely can ruin you.

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Cameron Rowe [00:37:28]:

But when you're in your mid twenties, that's when it's actually good to. Because you learn so much more. And that is valuable for you as an individual, that how many people want the like? People would pay for those opportunities for personal development, and you're getting it. And so I think the mindset shift that if you can have is super crucial and helps just your personal belt. Like, everything we're doing is personal development. If you're not getting better, that's a problem because you then get lost behind. You know, we all know some, like, my grandpa never learned how to use a computer, and that's okay, but it's like, he might have been able to facetime us more if he did. And so it's like, these are all lessons that I take and say, you know what? You want to be able to adapt and you want to learn constantly and you want to make mistakes because that's how you're going to be able to grow.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:09]:

I love that. And especially, like, I remember one of our main investors, advisors. Like, I'm very close with them. He's actually from, from Toronto, Robin from Mantella. And he, he actually told me something in the early, early days, and it stuck to me to this point. He goes, listen, obviously depends on the company and the space, but in general, let's say, like your tech company, you're ideally doubling or tripling. Again, it depends if it's very, you know, robotics heavy, it could take time, whatever. But in general, he was just like, look, your company, let's just say three x to just talk shit.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:39]:

If it's grown three x a year, it means you as a CEO have to grow three x a year. And so he's like, what you're gonna learn is that the team you have today might not be the team you have tomorrow might only the team. So it's like, but you want to still be in your company. So it's like, you got to keep up. So, like, that's where the challenge was, where it's like you're always learning, always growing. You're pushing the limits. Your shy will start. Start speaking.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:59]:

You don't like contents. Pull out the phone. Like, I hated content. Like, I know when I look like it, but, like, I would hold the phone and, like, if someone walks by on the street, I would like, stop.

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Cameron Rowe [00:39:09]:

Recording normal insecurities that we all have, that you just, you, repetitions, all right, you don't like that. Do it again. It's a little less painful the second time around. And the third time you're like, all right, I'll get through it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:20]:

Exactly, exactly. I love that. And so, and so, look, you know, to wrap up, I always like to, number one, do some plugs, and then I'd love to know, like, what's next for you guys? But first thing first, let's do some plugs. So just for people who are like, this camera guy sounds cool. Hover sounds cool. I'd love to keep up with their journey. Where could they find you? Where could they find your website? So this is a chance for you to plug whatever you want to plug.

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Cameron Rowe [00:39:42]:

Thanks so much. So hover drone delivery. The actual domain is hover direct. Super cheap to buy. And on Instagram, just hover direct. LinkedIn. You can follow me. I'm doing a lot more thought leadership for my personal brand associated with hover.

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Cameron Rowe [00:39:56]:

So just Cameron Rowe on LinkedIn. I post a ton about what we're working on with the drones as well. We're gonna be working on some pretty cool stuff, not only with boat and yacht and even potentially cruise ship delivery, but also hopefully actually doing more delivery to homes within certain neighborhoods, not only in Canada, but we're having a presence now. We have an office in San Francisco.

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:19]:

Oh, wow.

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Cameron Rowe [00:40:20]:

And so we're spending a lot more time down there, and we're hoping to expand soon, ideally into the LA, SF, Miami and Texas areas.

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:28]:

Hey, I'd love to see you here in Miami. That'd be cool. That's awesome. Well, look, Cameron, thanks again for joining us. Once again, it's Cameron Rowe, founder of Hover, and if you want to catch him on LinkedIn, Cameron Rowe, r o w e. Thanks for joining us. This was so cool. You're really working on something super unique, so it's great to have you on the show.

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Cameron Rowe [00:40:48]:

Thanks for your time. Angelo.

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:49]:

If you want to learn more about WISK, head to WISK.ai and book a demo.

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