101–110 of 313 posts
I am looking forwards to the legal circus after some rich idiot buys one of these and runs out of fuel over someone else's house.
Drones are pretty good at landing themselves these days if there's a need. I can't imagine one of these couldn't enforce a height limit when it's low on fuel and then land itself when it's nearly empty.
I wish there was a "moonshot" for something like The Kidney Project ( https://pharm.ucsf.edu/kidney ) A project to produce an artificial kidney. It was kept alive by small donations by kidney patients over the years. Now maybe on better footing and closer to human testing. But still nothing funded like these pie in the sky moonshot project that people will care nothing about in a few years.
If you want to start it and apply to YC, we'd be very interested.
3.5 years ago my cofounder were working on what was actually becoming an okay telecom referral business at the YC Fellowship, but my cofounder and I weren't happy. Pretty much every partner there enthusiastically told us that we should definitely consider doing our totally insane idea to try and bring modernized commercial agriculture to smallholder farmers in subsaharan Africa.
We started our moonshot and it's still growing. I think the only people who really believed in us were us and my parents and a couple YC partners, and a couple people at Accion Venture Labs. That was all we needed though.
By the way, I still think our company is a moonshot. Starting a moonshot company is stressful, it's foolish, it's a thousand mistakes to crawl out of, and by far the most rewarding professional decision I've ever made. Any moonshot worth taking will have a real shot at changing the course of human history, and I'm much happier to have a 0.5% chance of ending hunger then to have a 30% chance of a medium amount of wealth.
These don't look safe, even assuming perfect mechanical reliability, because humans will be piloting them over major population centers. Humans are generally dumb and inattentive, and this particular vehicle looks like it would attract especially dumb humans who'd use them to try dumb things. Since they won't need any piloting certification, this is basically offloading risk onto everyone on the streets below. I'd fe…
One of the excellent things about YC is how they are completely unphased by moonshots. I don't know of any other organization that is nearly as supportive of ideas that would literally be called crazy other places. 3.5 years ago my cofounder were working on what was actually becoming an okay telecom referral business at the YC Fellowship, but my cofounder and I weren't happy. Pretty much every partner there enthusias…
Now I work on an enterprise saa. Much happier with the saas, but maybe it is a life stage thing.
Can you imagine how fucking LOUD one of these things would be? Regular motorcycles drive my crazy with the noise from their ICEs. Now what if they had jet ingines one them instead? That alone should be enough to get these things banned.
If this isn’t a sign of how out of touch some people in Silicon Valley has become, I don’t know what is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our tech could not be more different to the MJP. Theirs was a gasoline engine powering a pair of ducted fans. Too many single points of failure and never able to keep the engine cool, not possible to fly much faster than 60mph. Ours is 1/3rd the size, will fly at 4x the speed. We’ve flown our jetpacks all over the world. We already have a development agreement with the US Navy. They are perfect for overt (perhaps not…
Hey first things first I respect what you're doing. A 1% chance of success is worth it here. That being said... You are literally exactly this with your comment... > When Glenn spoke to a group of potential investors (which I was somehow a part of) back in 2011 you'd think that they were on the cusp of having a finished product and a stack of orders from the US DOD, a variety of commercial organisations, and dozens o…
Glenn Martin and Martin Jetpack [0] (Glenn left the company in 2015 though) has been trying to build and bring to market something similar for the past decade (development has been going on decades before that). There's apparent commercial, private, and government interest in the device, but somehow that hasn't actually manifested into a finished and delivered product. When Glenn spoke to a group of potential investo…
Our tech could not be more different to the MJP. Theirs was a gasoline engine powering a pair of ducted fans. Too many single points of failure and never able to keep the engine cool, not possible to fly much faster than 60mph. Ours is 1/3rd the size, will fly at 4x the speed. We’ve flown our jetpacks all over the world. We already have a development agreement with the US Navy. They are perfect for overt (perhaps not…