[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today, we're speaking with Bobby Reason, CEO of WAF Dynamics, a flight training platform that's raised over 29 million in funding. Bobby, how are you? >> Doing great, thanks for having me on your show. >> Not a problem, super excited. Let's jump right in, tell us about what you're building today. >> Fantastic, yeah, we just came back from a great company of sight. Everyone energized, getting your seeingstone, having the chance to swing with the whole team was pretty great. >> Amazing. >> Tell us now, let's talk about the company, tell us about everything that's going on there at a high level. What does the platform do? >> Yeah, so basically, Lough Dynamics, developing, designing, creating, manufacturing, and operating fly simulators in the professional market. The speciality is Lough Dynamics is the company which introduces in the professional fly simulation, the visual system using virtual reality headset. So, head mount that set, which is basically finally providing the pilot's correct visual system. I can explain it in a little bit more detail to understand what that mean by this. By today, we are still on the whole shelf. The only company which is having qualified simulators using that head mount technology display, technology in fly simulators. >> Take us back to the founding of the company 2016. What was going on in your world that you decided, "This is the business I want to go build?" >> Yeah, well, everything has started with a passion, which is for even longer back, I mean, as you know, aviation. Edel, you have the passion or not, already as a kid. So, myself, I was always fascinated in that. Having glasses, I didn't end up as a professional pilot, so I end up as an engineer, worked for around 20 years in a law company as an engineer, and I did my PPL back in 1999, the PPL private license on a fixed-wing. So, engineering, aviation, passion, somehow in my mind for all the time. And back in 2013, I got my first virtual reality headset. It was a very SDK, development kit version 1 of virtual reality headset. So, quality-wise, far away from what you have today, but the moment I had it in hand, it was for me like, "Okay, that's going to change in aviation training." Now, why? If you're having a head-mounted display that allows you that if you move the head, the whole environment is moving in a three-dimensional deep perception way. Like, if you watch a TV and you move your head a little bit left to right, it's still the same picture. But if you go in reality, you see that everything which is not aligned on the same distance is moving against each other, and that's basically the depth of perception. Having flight simulators, which are 20 millions or more, they still have static protection. So, if a pilot is moving a little bit the head left and right, it must change. So, that said, it is simply wrong. And because it's simply wrong, pilots have to adapt their flight skills to learn to fly the simulator. And if a head-mounted headset, that's not the case. You can even watch 360 degrees. You can do vertical reference flying and so on. I mean, you can do all those crazy stuff, having a virtual reality headset. So, this is 11 years back. So, 10 years back, I got the first prototype working in the living room with motion platforms, VR glasses and so on. And then in 2015, I did met the CTO, today's CTO, from the company via a university project. And we just decided there that we want to build the world's best simulator. Then, in 2016, we found the company and just started to develop. And when people, so the team was growing and it was another free time project in 2018. This is basically the tipping point. So, approximately six years back from now, we've been contacted by the European Aviation Authority, based on seeing a YouTube video of what we did. And that's where they reached out. And we realized that apart of having a passion, we, out of some, build something, where it's a real problem for, which is very seldom having engineers doing something. Yeah, I didn't do that. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now, back to today's episode. Now, who are the typical customers? Who are you selling this to today? By today, it's a pretty road type. So, even that the fly simulators, the traditional full fly simulators are super expensive. The customers were basically the end customers' pilots. They simply don't have access. They operate all airlines or whatever. They don't have their own ones or whatever. All of this, they always build simulators. Three years ago, there were cool simulators in whole Europe, where it was possible to get a check right on the H125 simulators. So, the customers there were completely different. So, all the pilots had to travel somewhere to make their half-year check. Now, with making this more realistic and also more affordable, being more than 20 times cheaper, we, out of a sudden, have a new customer base. Well, what does it mean? Out of a sudden, you have a small helicopter operator, which is able to afford training device instead of sending their pilots far away to a place to get trained. So, our customer base is small operators, fly schools, and so on, which are just embedding the safe and better training in today, or syllabus in today, or initial training in today, or initial training of also in today or half-year with check rights and type ratings and so on. So, from that point of view, those are typically customers, and those buying the devices are all quite those fly schools, and the end customers, what you call the user's other pilots. How long did it take from when you first started to develop until you were generating revenue? What was that time period? Yeah, so, keep in mind, 90 to 2018, the European Authority asked for each other to ask, "How old goal was not to create business?" From that, our goal was to create the world's best simulator. So, from that point of view, in 2018, we decided to create the whole company into direction that we really generate business, and in 2019, we got our first launch customers. In 2022, we've been breaking. Amazing. What have you learned about GoToMarket and bringing technology to market throughout the journey so far? Yeah, so, one of the biggest learning was, like I've mentioned a week before, we somehow enter in a market which already exists. So, I mean, simulators in aviation, a fly simulator, a train device, it's not new, it's a huge business, but we completely disrupted it based on the fact that, out of the sudden, we were able to make it affordable. So, it's a very similar situation, like we had years ago, at the universities, there were those big mainframe calculators, where you had to bring the self-made software, and they were running it through the mainframe, big computers and so on, then you got the results and then you went home. By two days, everyone is having their computer as a laptop, or always in its mobile phone and so on, and make this data. It has been made affordable as well accessible. So, the biggest learning there was that, as we had in mind, fly simulators, it was always a fly simulator training being the customers from a TDM training device manufacturer. But out of the sudden, we were able to provide such a device, doing the same thing to a fly school or to an operate, which is not an environment where you have hot delivery, several engineers and so on, it is out of the sudden, something completely different, somewhere in a hangar, built a small loft at the simulator there. And from that point of view, we had to build the product, first of all, it was much more simple to use. So, a fly instructor can make a half-a-day training, and then a fly instructor will be able to use that device, the simulator, with his students or with his pilots will reach it. We found a lot of engineering, well, needed a route. So, we had to adapt the product to make it much more use of frankly, than traditional fly simulators on. In addition, you also had to create a huge organization, which takes care of the customer, that machine is always qualified, gets requalified, is maintained, and so on. So, it was really taking care of the customers, able to use it just as a tool, embedding their regular workflow. Then the second thing, we also had to learn, given that we completely disrupted the business model, that it takes a while until those changes are happening, and there is a lot of, let's say, dynamic and politics involved, because not everyone likes it, because it's wrapped in business, but that's actually also the very nice thing in the approach we are doing. And last but not least, we also had to learn that building a simulator is 2% of the whole thing. Although 98% is making sure that we can qualify the simulator in a regulatory framework from aviation. So, that's basically the main task. What about marketing? From a marketing perspective, what's the strategy look like today? Yeah, so we have a fantastic team doing great work there, to make sure that we are known as a company in the industry, but also known as a company for further employees. So, that's working really well. In the meanwhile, in aviation, it's known, especially the company itself, it's still the only one which is having that specific qualification achieved with that new technology. So, at the end, we started, in aviation, we started in the helicopter, in the rotorcrafts, in the helicopter corner. It is more an niche in the whole aircraft, which is also the area, the visual system is very, very important, flying close to the ground. So, from that point of view, it is the most demanding area. Figuring are going to be easier as well. Evitos, it's much more logical to use a time of technology. But in helicopter, people try never to go on the simulator. They hate simulator, because the simulator is simply not really present active, like the real aircraft. So, from that point of view, the strategies get the pilot on the device, and then it's a darn deal. That this sounds quite funny, but the moment more skeptical pilots are sitting on the device, they get hands on, they immediately go on. And this is not a big work afterwards to convince, because everyone who is a real pilot immediately understands the big advantage. Because, you know, in real helicopter, you can't do a lot of things you should do. You can't do emergency training and so on, malfunction training. You can only talk about it on the simulator. You can do real and malfunction training, which is basically the best thing what can happen for a pilot. What about fundraising? What have you learned about fundraising so far? As I mentioned there on the intro, you've raised over 29 million to date. What's that journey been like and what have you learned? This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet, and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co Yes, we started a while back with folks, friends, and families. And in 2022, we got that fantastic contact where we were able to raise that millions with us. I mean, as it could really be skydating and a huge network behind. Basically, the important thing is if you do a product or a service, a lot of passion is important that whoever is becoming an investor also needs to share that passion. Because that gives you a good understanding, first of all, of seeing in which direction it should go, but also to understand the business. So sometimes it sounds quite abstract, but it's all happening in the aviation business. So if you just start looking on the numbers, without understanding that first qualification is needed that needs time. We need to do such things and so on. It's quite important to work to have that. And with that, we were so lucky. And it today to have a fantastic investors, and we were super lucky to have these nicely aligned with development path from the company. So we never had to go XPC, run the round and start pitching, the ID and so on. It was just perfect timing. We will be good in contact with those people. Have you seen conversations with investors evolve since you started in 2016? Are you sitting a lot more appetite for hard tech like you're building? Yeah, I mean, every day we get more requests to be part of capital. The reason is quite simple. The moment it's understood how that several billion businesses getting disrupted, the appetite is increasing. And I think that's also the interesting part of the way we approach the whole thing. So from that point of view, it is disrupting it from a distribution point of view. I mean, like instead of having two simulators in whole Europe, we already have 59 will follow very soon. So this is one thing which is changing. And the other part which is also changing is that the level of the devices are much more realistic. And from that point of view, it allows much more possibility to move things into software than hardware. I'll give you an example on that. If you have a tradition of a full-size simulator, and you want to have on the helicopter a mirror to make vertical reference training, they had to add somehow a screen there, which was somehow not realistic, but to represent the mirror to watch vertical. I mean, those are all things you don't need to touch. Those are all things you can make very easily in software. And then you can change it. You can have flight with, you can fly without, you can have a different door with a different view and so on. Everything you don't need to touch is just software. And software just can upgrade to the boxes, they are connected and so on. So it simplifies a lot. And out of the sudden, it's slightly like a Tesla, which can convert your device and upgrade it adding additional modules without having any intervention in a VONIX or whatever. So from that point of view, it is a slowly but a short move from additional hardware thing in a specific business area into software. This is always interesting for investors. Final question for you. Let's zoom out three to five years into the future. What's the big picture vision here? Well, from that point of view, the training devices in aviation, they definitely change. It's not going to be any more or three-story high building. It's not going to be any more a training center, which is so expensive that you need to run it 22 hours per day. It's not going anymore to affect that pilots first need to travel one day to get afterward into a simulator with the wrong visual system at two o'clock in the morning. It's not any more of the way that helicopter pilots prefer to use the real helicopter, even if it's much more dangerous because it's unrealistic, you know. So there will be a big transition in that area and fly training is going to be much more accessible and much more available. And there will be much more things we don't on the simulator on the FCD rather than in the real aircraft, which has an indirect impact. There'll be a huge amount of accidents, which won't happen anymore. Because when we buy two-day ones of the accidents, it's happening during docking and training in the helicopter world. And with the availability of accessibility, the pilot is going to be not anymore so high. And the big change in that is that the training is not anymore centric and it's much more embedded in the regular workflow from the pilot. So they have the helicopter close to the simulator, or they have the aircraft close to the simulator. They can maybe come back from a long flight lag and quickly jump in the simulator to complete a check rather than going home in the day after flying to a local place to make the check and stay again three days away from the operation of the family. Amazing. I love the vision. All right, and we are up on time. Before we wrap, if there's any founders listening in, they feel inspired, they want to follow along with your journey. Where should they go? Well, it's always a good start to follow us on social media, like on LinkedIn, on Facebook, email, wherever we are on the webpage. You also post a regular thing that you can subscribe to get the news. And definitely don't hesitate to reach out if you want to know more. It's I think one of the most exciting stories happening in aviation. And from that point of view, I'm happy to share it if everyone is interested. Amazing. I love it. Bobby, thank you so much for taking the time, especially given that it's late in the evening on a Friday there in Switzerland. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot for having me in you show and looking for. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Frontlines Media, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. And for the latest episodes, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode. [Music]
