Blake Scholl

So one of the things that makes hardware companies traditionally harder to do is the development cycles are longer.

The iteration cycles are longer.

It's harder to make changes.

It's harder to iterate.

And so we do everything we can to make hardware development look more like software development.

And so we've got a huge investment in digital engineering.

And the way we do that is we hire great software engineers that are incredibly curious about airplanes.

They don't have to know anything about them.

They just have to think it's cool.

And then we have them sit with the hardware people, and they look over the shoulders of the hardware people, learn from them, and learn how to automate the work that they're doing.

We have, I think, the best airplane design tools ever made in software, and they keep getting better.

What we find is, if we put new assumptions in about engine performance or aerodynamics or something, we can press a button and the rest of the airplane gets automatically redesigned.

That's all the power of software.

Now, AI just takes that a whole step further.

There's an old joke in the industry that for every pound of airplane, there's a pound of paperwork.

You know what AI is really good at?

Filling out paperwork.

And not only does that allow the team to be much smaller than it otherwise would have to be, it makes the jobs a lot more fun.

The kind of engineer that is happy spending two months filling out paperwork is not the same kind of engineer that really wants to invent the future.

So, by having AI do the really boring work, we can thereby increase the caliber of the kind of people that want to come join the company.