Airbound: As We May Move

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Hi friends 👋, Happy Monday! Today is a good day. Today, I get to tell you the story of Naman Pushp and Airbound. There are very few people with the combination of ambition and skill than I’ve seen in Naman in the year since I first invested and have gotten to know him. Just twenty-one, he taught himself physics, engineering, and manufacturing on YouTube during COVID, and turned that knowledge into real, flying aircraft and a company backed by Greenoaks, Lightspeed, and Lachy Groom. I suspect he is in the early days of what will be a decades-long pursuit. He has chosen a worthy mission. There is no category that so physically reshapes the world as transportation technology. Where you live and work, what you can access, how much you pay for everything, and most importantly, who you spend time with, are all a function of the transportation technology at your disposal. In my opinion, improving the way we move will have a more positive and noticeable impact on our lives than AI will, and Naman’s aim is to move all movement to the sky. This is a Deep Dive on how he plans to do it. Airbound: As We May Move Every morning, or most, when I can, I wake up before my wife and kids, tip-toe downstairs, ease open the front door, and sit on the stoop as the sun comes up. Huberman says the morning sunlight is good for your circadian rhythm or cortisol or some shit. I’ve been doing this for a little while now, since the winter at least, but some time in the spring I noticed the birds. There’s a honey locust tree on the sidewalk in front of the stoop, framed by Eric Adams’ legacy (new garbage cans) every Monday and Thursday, and as the sun rises, a quarrel of house sparrows flits back and forth between it and their little nooks at the top of each brownstone. Since I started noticing these birds, I’ve started noticing other birds more consciously. I think, but I can’t be quite sure, that I can see their wings flapping in higher-resolution, or slower motion, or both? And I’ve been wondering why. Like are the birds a sign? Am I supposed to follow them? How can I follow them, when I can’t fly? One morning, as I approached my office in Soho thinking about this very piece you’re reading right now, a great blue heron floated regally over the roofs of the block’s cast-iron buildings, and I was like, “Oh, I get it.” Some time in the spring, I started talking to Naman Pushp about writing a deep dive on Airbound. Pretty much every week since, often more than once, we’ve hopped on a Zoom, me in Manhattan and him in Bangalore, to talk about what the world looks like when flight is the way everything and everyone moves, and what it would take to get there. One of the things that happens when flight dominates, Naman said, is that buildings flip. “You fly on to the roof and enter from there,” like a bird. Birds have long been the envy of and inspiration for earthbound humans. Leonardo da Vinci studied birds to understand flight at the turn of the 16th century. Humans failed to turn those avian observations into flight for four centuries, but the Wright Brothers studied those failures. As bicycle makers, they understood that a machine didn’t have to balance itself if its rider had the right controls. They studied the birds, too. Watching birds twist their wingtips helped them develop “wing warping,” the control mechanism that helped make their 1903 flight possible. “Learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician,” Orville later said. “After you once know the trick and what to look for, you see things that you did not notice when you did not know exactly what to look for.” Flying progressed quickly from the Wrights to October 1958 when Pan Am flew the first Boeing 707 from New York to Paris and ushered in the Jet Age, an age that we, 68 years later, still inhabit. That we can fly through the air, across the globe, while watching movies and munching on snacks, is a technological miracle. It has shrunk the globe, made roses cut in Kenya available in Brooklyn flower shops, and allowed Naman to fundraise in New York and San Francisco without permanently leaving Bangalore. “Like seriously what in the ever-loving fuck are planes,” Naman marveled in an old blog post. “I’m an aerospace engineer and I still refuse to believe that shit is anything short of magic. Like there’s genuinely no other way to put the accomplishments of humanity other than just… sheer magic.” And yet… humans still do not flit about in the air as birds do. Planes are much too big for that, for one thing, and too expensive to operate, for another. Daily, we are roadbound, grounded to the streets by feet and wheels, stuck in traffic on streets built for cars at the expense of humans. Naman wants to change that, by sending all movement to the sky, with aircraft that borrow from birds not just in their wings, but in the shape of their whole bodies. To do so, Airbound must beat existing vehicles on speed, versatility, and cost. All three are required for victory. How quickly can you get somewhere? Can you go from where you are to where you want to be, when you want to go? What does it cost? “Our goal is to build vehicles that dominate1 across these axes,” Naman wrote in a recent technical memo. “If an aircraft can be more versatile than the car, faster than the train, and cheaper than the bus, then you can replace all of them. That is the universal vehicle we intend to create.” An eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) naturally falls out of these requirements. It takes off and lands straight up and down like a helicopter, so it doesn’t need a runway (versatile), it flies over traffic in a straight line (fast), and it runs on electric motors, which are cheaper to power and maintain than engines (cheap). Every delivery drone you’ve seen is an eVTOL, as are the air taxis Joby and Archer are building. Others are making eVTOLs, too, so while they will all be fast and versatile, Airbound must beat them on cost. That seems crazy, when the competition has so much scale. Amazon - Amazon! - the company that is the best in the Western Hemisphere at moving goods to people - Amazon is making eVTOL delivery drones. Last week, The New York Times wrote a story on Amazon Prime Air’s nascent operations in Richardson, Texas: It’s Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb. Describing the logistics king’s flying machine, Juliet Macur wrote, “Within a minute or so, an 83-pound drone with six blue arms and whirring propellers appeared in a corner of the sky before zipping over nearby houses, looking like a cross between a mechanical dragonfly and an X-wing fighter, and buzzing like a battalion of bees. The drone’s mission: delivering an Amazon package. The single cardboard box of cargo held a maximum of five pounds...” Six arms and 83 pounds to carry a maximum of five. Before I met Naman, I would have read that and thought, “Woah, the sci-fi future has arrived,” but after meeting him and hearing what he’s building and why, those numbers sound absurd. To be fair, Amazon’s 83 pounds is fully-loaded, so it’s really 78 plus the five pound payload, for a payload-to-empty-weight ratio of 0.06x. Zipline has a much stronger ratio; its P2 weighs 55 pounds and can carry eight, good for 0.15x. Airbound’s is in a different league. Its first drone, the TRT, is so light (1.5kg) that Naman could hold it with three fingers, and carries 1kg, for a payload-to-empty-weight ratio of 0.67x. Its new V2 drone can carry five kilograms (11 pounds). Its payload-to-empty-weight ratio is 1.67x. It can carry more than it weighs. It is not that Amazon doesn’t have resources or smart engineers. It’s just that Naman is obsessed with building aircraft that carry the most payload with the least weight, because he believes that combination is what will allow Airbound to offer the cheapest deliveries possible (fast and versatile, too), which is what he believes it will take to win. “We believe that if we can truly solve for cost,” Naman wrote, “flight can dominate all existing transportation for 80% of all cargo and 90% of all human movement.” If they can – and that is certainly not guaranteed – then not only will they move movement to the sky, they will force the earth to shape itself around this new mode of movement. As Naman wrote in Airbound’s Manifesto, this world is “A world where goods move as freely as information does today; a world where flying is cheaper than taking the bus; a world without compromise.” Naman’s Vision I first heard of Naman when my plane landed in Mexico City for an event last October. When my international service switched on, I saw an email from Lachy Groom, who had invested in Airbound and called Naman “One of the most exciting founders I’ve backed recently.” Naman was going to be in NYC the next week, “Want to meet (I highly encourage)?” I wasn’t particularly interested in a drone delivery company, to be honest. It was a competitive space in which it felt like Zipline had an insurmountable lead and the culture to keep it. Amazon and Google waited in the wings anyway. Regulation is tough. And Naman didn’t seem to have a PhD in aerospace engineering, or a college degree, for that matter. But I respect Lachy’s judgment, Airbound’s monthly flights were going vertical, and I was intrigued by Naman’s simple explanation - “we’re building the most efficient way to transport atoms” - and ambition - “we can make 1 cent deliveries possible and enable a world where you see trillions of deliveries annually,” so I said I’d love to. When I met Naman, at Felix Roasting back in Soho, 8,306 miles from Bangalore as the crow flies, he looked young, because he was, just 21 years old, which made it even more embarrassing when he opened his mouth and proved himself to be about 8,306x smarter than me. In that first conversation, he showed the grasp of the spectrum from 30,000 foot vision to sub-millimeter details that great Vertical Integrator founders seem to possess, and which, I’d come to appreciate, are necessary to hold in one brain when you want to solve a tightly coupled optimization problem like building the “perfect aircraft.” By the end, he’d convinced me it might be possible to make flight the cheapest mode of movement, inevitable even, that whoever did it would build an enormous business, and that he might just be that whoever. I invested in Airbound’s $37M Greenoaks-led Series A, and my conviction has grown as I’ve spent time with Naman over the past year and come to better understand what he is trying to achieve, and how. The idea behind Airbound is really simple: if you move mass more cheaply than anyone else, you win. “There is one loss function that we care about: cost per kilogram-kilometer,” Naman told me. The total cost of making and operating the aircraft, divided by how much payload it moves and how far it moves it. “Everything is secondary to that.” Those kilograms might be a burrito, a box of company t-shirts, building materials, or even people. Transportation and logistics are both forms of movement, and Airbound is a Movement Company. Today, everything that moves needs a human chaperone, and chaperones are expensive. A bus is cheaper than a taxi per-person because it’s cheaper to have one driver move 20 people instead of two. A truck is cheaper than a car per-package because it’s cheaper to have one person move 1,000 packages instead of one. So humanity built its movement networks around batching. Autonomy removes the onboard chaperone, so the vehicle can be sized around what it carries. Airbound’s bet is that a light enough aircraft can make small, frequent shipments economical. It will start with a small aircraft, where experiments are cheap, and use what it learns to build larger aircraft that move each kilogram, including humans, more cheaply still. Scale that up or down, and most of movement eventually becomes point-to-point, in the air, carried by billions of aircraft, which Naman thinks, given the astounding size of the sky, will be no more noticeable than birds2, which is to say: barely noticeable unless you choose to notice, from time to time, and marvel. Birds or Airbound Aircraft? (Airbound Aircraft) Because if Airbound really succeeds in its mission, those bird-like dots will reshape the world. Reshaping the World I grew up outside of Philadelphia, America’s first capital and once-largest city. I love it there. Go Birds. But I don’t live there. I am writing to you from New York City, where I live and work, because of the mad ramblings of a man named Jesse Hawley under the pen name “Hercules.” See, Hawley was a flour merchant who milled his wheat upstate in Seneca Falls, New York, and he had a devil of a time getting it to the big market of New York City. There was no direct route to the Hudson River from Seneca Falls. He and his partner went bankrupt, and back then, going bankrupt landed you in debtors prison. There, with nothing but time and what-ifs, Hawley as Hercules wrote a series of fourteen essays, published in the Genesee Messenger in 1807 and 1808, making the case for a “Genesee Canal.” President Thomas Jefferson called the scheme “little short of madness.” In 1817, President Madison denied federal funding. New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, on the other hand, took it up and went it alone. Opponents called it “Clinton’s Ditch.” Seventeen years after Hercules’ letters, his ideas took physical form. On October 26, 1825, Governor Clinton and a party of dignitaries boarded the Seneca Chief in Buffalo and led a flotilla of horse-drawn boats east across the state on the brand new Erie Canal, and on November 4, off New York City, Clinton poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic, a ceremony they called the Wedding of the Waters. The Canal connected Buffalo, the gateway to the Great Lakes, to the Hudson River, and from there to New York City and the Atlantic Ocean. Before the Canal, it cost $100 and three weeks to move a ton of grain from the midwest, where it was grown, to New York City, where it was consumed or shipped overseas. After, it cost $10 and took six days. That meant that a lot more grain came to New York, which meant that ships bringing immigrants and manufactured goods from Europe could bring grain back to the Continent instead of returning on a costly empty dead leg. That meant that most of the westbound ships came to New York City instead of Philadelphia, Baltimore or Boston; it was the economical thing to do. And that reinforced and grew New York City’s lead as America’s leading city. In 1820, New York ranked third among American ports in flour. By 1827, it had taken the lead. By 1860, its population had climbed from 124,000 to 814,000, nearly 250,000 more than Philadelphia’s. Everything organized around the people and the trade, and today, New York City is America’s financial capital, the place where a wide-eyed new college grad like I once was just had to move, largely due to the Erie Canal. This is a very old pattern. Cities don’t typically grow their own calories, so their size and influence has historically been capped by how economically they could get calories to come to them. Rome was likely the first city to support a million people, despite the fact that Rome itself couldn’t grow nearly enough to feed a million mouths. It did so by shipping somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000 tons of grains a year across the Mediterranean, most of it from Egypt and North Africa, in a vast logistics system called the cura annonae (“care of the grain”). Based on Diocletian’s 301 AD price edict, scholars estimate that for the same weight over the same distance, wagon transport was about 50x as expensive as sea transport. No European city would hit a million residents again until London did at the turn of the 19th Century, fueled by coal. Just like calories, cities need to import energy. A wood-burning city’s scale is capped by how much forest it can reach by cart, and London had chewed through its hinterland by the 1500s. So it started burning coal from Newcastle, 300 miles up the coast, carried down by a fleet of fat, flat-bottomed colliers that by 1800 were landing something like a million tons a year on the Thames. I can keep going. In America, as the Erie Canal cemented New York’s advantage on the east coast, Chicago became the country’s Second City thanks to the railroad. Lee Kuan Yew is rightly admired for his work turning tiny Singapore into a prosperous nation, but the shipping container deserves just as much credit3. And just as Singapore emerged from the swamps thanks to the movement of goods, Dubai emerged from the desert due to the movement of people, on planes like the Boeing 777. Venice had the galley. Amsterdam had the fluyt. Los Angeles had the car. Atlanta, like Dubai, had the jet. Did you catch that? One of those is not like the others. The galley, the fluyt, the canal boat, the grain ship, the railroad, the container ship, and the jet are all centralizing batch machines. They’re expensive to build and expensive to crew, so they only make economic sense when they’re full, and they only stop where there’s enough cargo or enough people to fill them. That means they make points – ports, junctions, stations, hubs – around which cities grow. Rome, New York, Chicago, Singapore, and Dubai are all, at bottom, places where big batches come and get broken into smaller ones. Even when batch machines spread a city out, they spread it along lines. The streetcar suburbs that grew up around American cities at the end of the nineteenth century reached out in fingers along the tracks. The car is different. It carries one family or one person, leaves when that person or family wants to leave, and can go anywhere there’s a road. It doesn’t make points or lines, but area. Ford made that vehicle cheap enough for almost everyone, and over the next few decades, the space between the fingers filled in. Los Angeles grew, as did countless American suburbs previously too inconvenient for those who wanted to work where batching machines agglomerated economic activity. Transportation reshapes the world in two directions. Batched vehicles pull people and activity toward the places where those vehicles land. Individual vehicles let people spread out. The map of the world’s biggest cities is the result of both: great cities formed where the batch machines met, then spread as far as a car could take people in half an hour. It is notable, then, that despite all of the technological progress of the past half-century, very little has changed on the transportation side. Planes have gotten bigger and more efficient. Cars are beginning to drive themselves. But there has been no great leap. Peter Thiel’s quip that “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” is drastically overused but appropriate here. Flying cars would expand the radius of daily life, as Vight founder Tsung Xu wrote in not boring earlier this year. In 1934, Lewis Mumford, paraphrasing Bertrand Russell, noted that “each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination.” In a 1994 paper, Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior, Cesare Marchetti formalized the idea into what others would call Marchetti’s Constant: humans like to commute about 30 minutes each way, or about an hour a day, and the further we can travel in 30 minutes, the further we will. For a while there, further we did! Per Marchetti’s study of Berlin, people walked about 2.5km both ways in 1800, then horses pulled us 4.5km starting around 1850, then electric trams, subways, and cars each contributed to growing the radius to about 20km by 1960. Then we stopped expanding. Distance traveled is just about the same now as it was in 1960, and may have actually shrunk since then due to increased traffic. Progress in the speed with which we move things is arguably even worse. Container ships, for example, travel more slowly today than they did during the Nixon Administration in the name of fuel efficiency. Planes fly about the same speed as they did back then. Freight trains are a little bit slower. Of course, the average consumer does get their orders more quickly today. You can order almost anything on Amazon and get it tomorrow. That’s because Amazon, and those who have followed suit, have invested a tremendous amount of capital building distribution centers closer to where customers are. When I run to Red Hook, I run past block-sized Amazon DCs that should be houses or restaurants. Per the NBER, Amazon went from eight warehouses across the country to 54, and cut the average package’s trip from 450 miles to 141 miles. Then, they added DCs like the ones in Red Hook where items are sent from fulfillment centers in bulk to be carried the last few miles in smaller batches by vans or silly little bike/car hybrid things, which then block traffic on my street or nearly hit me when I cross the street, respectively. The car (and its sometimes-goofier logistics-specific offspring) explains this, too. It unbatched people by letting the human cargo drive itself. But a package can’t drive, so for things, we’re still stuck with the batch. Breaking Batch Good technology eliminates trade-offs. Airbound wants to eliminate the trade-off between cost and speed in the movement of matter. Imagine that you absolutely need to get an item from where it’s made to its final destination as quickly as possible. A pen, let’s say. A Namiki maki-e fountain pen, lacquered and gold-dusted and encrusted with diamonds, finished by hand at Pilot’s factory in Hiratsuka, an hour southwest of Tokyo on Sagami Bay. For some reason, this pen is the only pen with which two parties in a Park Avenue conference room can sign a $10 billion agreement, and for another reason, the deal explodes in 18 hours. The artisan sets down her brush at 11:00 AM Tuesday, Tokyo time. It is 10:00 PM Monday in New York. You have until 4:00 PM Tuesday. Obviously, price is no issue. What do you do? The courier takes a car fifty minutes to Haneda, where he boards a Bombardier Global 7500 and flies for eleven hours and forty-five minutes over the Bering Sea before landing at JFK. Teterboro has a 100,000 pound weight limit, and while the plane would come in under after burning its fuel, the Port Authority needs a weight certification seventy-two hours in advance and you don’t have seventy-two hours, so JFK it is. The courier walks the case, still strapped to his wrist, through customs, which takes twenty-five minutes, and boards a helicopter bound for the city. A few minutes later, he and the chopper land at the 34th Street Heliport. He takes a car from the Heliport to the office on Park Avenue, gets out, enters, checks in with security, takes the elevator up to the thirty-seventh floor, and is escorted into a conference room, where he unlocks the case, hands over the pen, and watches the contract get signed at 1:30 PM New York time, with two and a half hours to spare. The whole trip costs around $430,000 for a 0.04 kg pen over 10,900 km, or $1,000/kg-km. You can get something anywhere you want pretty fast as long as you are willing to pay. This is, of course, a ridiculous example, meant to show that the cost to move things exists on a spectrum. You can move something fast if you send it by itself, with its own chaperone and its own vehicles. If you want to pay less, you need to send it with other items. You could send the pen from Japan in the mail for ~$10, in which case it will share a commercial plane with 300 passengers and a bunch of other mail. You could send it even more cheaply if you put it in a container on a ship with 300,000 Pilot pens; it would cost a few cents, but it would take a couple of months. If you want to send something cheaply today, you need to batch it. This is how our logistics system is designed, whether global or local. It is built around moving the people who move the goods, which means aggregating as many items per person as you can reasonably manage. The further you are from the destination, the bigger the batches that make sense; you wouldn’t tug a ship to each customer’s door. So we’ve built a series of smaller locations to break big batches down into smaller ones: hubs, warehouses, distribution centers, fulfillment centers, sort centers, depots, and last-mile vehicles. Modern logistics is an exquisitely tuned machine that has squeezed nearly every ounce of optimization out of the existing possibility space. Given the transportation technology available, routing technology has pushed the efficient frontier out as far as it can go, and logistics companies exist to let customers choose from any point on that frontier. Every vehicle sits somewhere on that frontier, making a different set of trade-offs between speed (and versatility, which impacts factory-to-door speed) and cost. Trains can be fast and cheap, but they only go where the tracks do, and stop wherever the stations are. Cars take you from your driveway to your destination whenever you’d like, but spend much of the trip negotiating other cars. A truck can move goods cheaply as long as it’s full. Bikes are slow, but they’re cheap and versatile. Planes are really fast, but they’re not cheap and they have to land in airports. That’s why the economy makes so many different types of vehicles to do what is fundamentally the same job: move matter, living or dead. But we are still very limited. Batching means waiting for the other items in the batch before moving. A restaurant’s delivery driver may need to wait for four meals to finish cooking instead of delivering each meal as soon as it’s ready. It also means pre-positioning with expensive, fixed, CapEx-heavy locations closer to customers, which costs rent, inventory, equipment, and salaries, all of which get amortized into the cost of the item the customer purchases, and may force further trade-offs, between speed and getting the exact item you want. A retailer may offer limited SKUs for same-day delivery and only make the full catalog available in two to three days. To solve this problem and make logistics both fast and cheap, you need a transportation technology that is cheap, fast, and free of batching, like the one Airbound is building. The path to such a technology mirrors that of the path from the steam carriage to the automobile. You Can’t Replace a Horse with a Steam Engine When we talk about the history of the car, we often discuss the 23 years from Karl Benz’s three-wheeled Patent-Motorwagen in 1885 to Henry Ford’s Model T in 1908. Benz’s invention, however, arrived over a century into humanity’s quest to replace the horse with a machine. Before internal combustion engines, engineers used steam engines. In 1769, a French military engineer named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built a steam-powered vehicle intended to move artillery. The project was abandoned two years later, but Cugnot had demonstrated something extraordinary and unprecedented in human history: a heavy vehicle could move itself across the ground, without an animal pulling it. In 1803, the Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick brought a steam carriage to London. It could carry around eight passengers and required no horse, but its replacement occupied a considerable portion of the vehicle; coal and water rode along with the people, including one person whose job it was to shovel the coal into the engine. By the 1830s, these experiments were turning into actual transportation services. Walter Hancock, an engineer in East London, ran steam buses on regular routes. His 22-seat Automaton made more than 700 journeys and carried over 12,000 passengers in 1836. Trevithick and Hancock’s vehicles were novel and inventive, but they were not what we would recognize as cars. They carried eight to twenty-two passengers along established routes at regular intervals. They were, in other words, buses. They moved humans in batches, because their economics strongly favored batches. In order to move one person somewhere, that person would have to pay for the time and expertise of the two other people, in addition to the depreciated capex of the machine, its fuel, and its maintenance. Like the ships arriving on America’s east coast before the Erie Canal, the cost of this steam carriage might also have to support an empty ride back home. Those costs are easier to bear if they’re spread across twenty passengers heading in roughly the same direction, and twenty more heading back. For more than a century, mechanical transportation advanced without making independent, everyday movement affordable. Steam’s greatest successes came from moving more people and goods together. Replacing the family horse and carriage would require a machine that worked economically at the scale of a family. Enter Benz, who was an engine maker before he was a car maker, and in 1885 created a vehicle with a compact gasoline engine built into a purpose-designed chassis. It had two seats, three wire-spoked wheels, a tubular steel frame, and a single-cylinder four-stroke engine that produced three-quarters of a horsepower. Burning fuel inside the engine eliminated the separate steam boiler and the job of continuously attending to its fire. The engine was small enough that the vehicle it carried could be small, too. Over time, people could even learn to drive it themselves. Finally, it was practical for an individual to own and operate their own car, to hit the road with no other living human or beast along. It’s just that the individual who owned and operated the car had to be pretty rich. At 600 marks, the original Benz Patent-Motorwagen would have cost a German factory worker a year’s wages; Benz only made 25 of them anyway. It wasn’t particularly powerful, either. It couldn’t, for example, climb up hills. Over the intervening