What is the lifespan of the most important technologies? Svilen Rangelov: CEO of Dronamics

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Foreign. My name is Stuart Allsop and this is my podcast, Crazy Wisdom, where I interview creative people about how they work with and manage the stress that is inherent in creative work. What I've realized over the past 10 years of my research is that anybody who is creating something of value that is significantly different from what has come before is considered crazy. Most of us have a fear, an ingrained fear of going crazy. So what I'm saying is grab onto that fear, realize that it's there and just go with it. Because the problems we're going to be facing over the next 20 years require crazy people in order to solve them.

Yeah.

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. My guest today is Svilin Rongelov. He is the CEO and co founder of Dronomics. They're medium range drones specific to cargo. And I'm talking with Svilin who is in Sofia, Bulgaria right now. So welcome to the show, Sveelin.

Thank you, Stuart. It's really great to be here.

So building a drone, how did you manage to find yourself building a drone company in Sofia, Bulgaria?

Well, you know, the inspiration came from the Amazon drones which were unveiled around six years ago. I think it was December 2013. And my brother is an aerospace engineer, so we were really impressed. But at the same time we thought, you know, in a country like Bulgaria, in a city like ours, maybe these small multi rotors are not going to be the best possible solution. And we started brainstorming and then realized, okay, you know, Amazon will solve that because they have all the money in the world. Why don't we just focus on the middle mile instead? So our drone is essentially the size of a small Cessna airplane. It's a fixed wing drone. So, you know, two wings, an engine up front, standard tail, and it's meant to carry around 800 pounds at a distance of up to 1500 miles. So really trying to reinvent the air cargo industry because right now we have very big airplanes flying between very big airports and getting offloaded onto very big trucks. Then these big trucks, they can't really drive through your neighborhood, so they do an additional offloading point to small vans. So we said, let's just create a flying version of that small van that does the last mile.