Episode 2: The Sport of the Future is Here; DRL Brings Star Wars Pod-Racing to Real Life
Behind-the-scenes at The Drone Racing League’s offices, and a conversation with CEO and Founder Nick Horbaczewski.
In Episode 2, Lux Capital managing partner and co-founder Josh Wolfe sits down with Nick Horbaczewski, CEO and Founder of DRL (a Lux portfolio company). Watch the entire episode above, and what follows is an edited version of the interview transcript.
Josh: Hey, everyone, I’m Josh Wolfe, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Lux Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in emerging science and technology ventures at the outermost edges of what’s possible. This is our new series, Futura, where we’re going to introduce you to the rebels of science in invention who are turning sci-fi into sci-fact. Today, we’re sitting down with Nick Horbaczewski, the CEO and founder of The Drone Racing League, the global professional circuit for drone racing. We’ll show you how DRL combined the thrill of pod racing from Star Wars with the real world adrenaline of Formula 1 to become the sport of the future.
Josh: The gap between science fiction and science fact is always shrinking, and Drone Racing League seems like it is right out of pod racing from Star Wars. What was the origin of you starting the company?
Nick: I started The Drone Racing League because I saw drone racing for the first time in a field behind a Home Depot in Long Island. And it was these homemade drones, people were flying them in a relatively small circle, and I just thought it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. There were these moments when the drones went past each other, and it immediately made me think of science fiction movies and Star Wars. And I was just thinking to myself how do we bring this to a mainstream audience? How do we take this to people around the world? And so I think we are born directly from science fiction. When I think about the early days of DRL, convincing people to invest, or let us use venues, or join the team, I would always go back to that, I would say imagine pod racing in real life. And people would instantly get it.
Josh: We’ve seen new sports arise over the past decade including UFC and fighting and wrestling and F1 that have captured people’s minds. Do you see this as a new sport? Is this a hobby? What is this to you?
Nick: Drone racing is definitely a sport. There’s a global community of people that do this all the time, racing every weekend, competing. There are global and national competitions. There’s obviously DRL, which is the global professional circuit. So, it really is a sport, but I think like all great sports, it’s also a community, there’s a huge community of people that are out racing, supporting each other. It’s not just competition. And drone racing adds the elements of technology. Most people in the world that participate in drone racing make their own drones, so they’re learning about computer programming, they’re learning about hardware design. They’re learning about the actual creation of drones. So it’s got a real STEAM education component to it. We love that it’s a sport that comes with other social goods, and its global appeal really crosses cultural and language barriers. So, it’s a very exciting thing.
Josh: So, technologically, this actually seems pretty complex behind the scenes. So, run me through what‘s actually involved?
Nick: Putting on a professional drone race is extraordinarily complicated from a technical stand point. DRL actually has six different primary verticals of technology. So, we build high speed, high performance drones and high performance radio systems. We do aerial tracking for scoring. We do fleet management, so the software to control the drones. And then we do autonomy. And then finally we have simulation, which is a big part of our business. We have a highly realistic simulator than people can download to teach them how to fly. But we also use the data from that to learn a lot about drone performance.
Josh: So what is involved technologically in building the physical drones, building the software, and integrating everything together?
Nick: We have a hugely diverse technical team. I mean you’re talking about hardware, software, integration, and embedded systems. It’s a very complicated task. We often refer to our technology as a complete stack, and I actually think that’s a really good description, because it all integrates together. So the team is working across different core verticals of technology. But within a product they’re looking at every level from the hardware we’re building to the software we’re writing to power it all. One of the things I think is cool about drone racing is I like to think of it as a long chain of interconnected technologies. And if one of those links breaks, the whole thing collapses. The drones won’t fly, the radios won’t connect. And so we have to think about building an incredibly strong chain, not just very cool links.
Josh: You’re collecting huge amounts of information, whether it’s simulation or real racing. Presumably that information is data that will ultimately instruct drones to fly themselves. You’re doing something in this space, tell me about it.
Nick: This year we’re launching AIRR, which stands for artificial intelligence robotic racing, along with our partner Lockheed Martin. AIRR is going to be an autonomous race circuit, so we’re going to take AI drones and have them race the same complex courses that our human pilots race. And the goal of this is to build an autonomous drone that can fly these courses faster and better than the best human pilots in the world.
Josh: Now, let’s talk about the recent past and the near future. In the recent past, what were the confluence of technologies that came together that made this possible now, that it wouldn’t have been possible say five years ago?
Nick: A lot of technologies had to come online. So, drones emerged from a combination of the miniaturization of sensors that came from cell phone technology, as well as some of the gyroscopic sensing that came out of things like the Nintendo Wii. Actually some of the first drones were basically hacked Nintendo Wii’s, and the sensors on that that understood gyroscopic movement. So, those came together to help make drones. And then on the artificial intelligence side, you’ve seen huge leaps in GPU’s for processing, as well as the quality of the cameras that you can put on these. So, if you look at something like the racer AI, which is the drone that people will be competing with, it’s an amalgamation of different components, and it’s something you couldn’t even build a year ago, let alone five years ago.
Josh: As you look forward over the next five years, what are some of the technologies that you see on the horizon that are going to enable all kinds of things that we could have never imagined before?
Nick: There are two types of technology the DRL has that I think are going to fundamentally introduce new opportunities. So, one is our radio technology that allows us to do very advanced high speed communication between drone and a pilot. And it enables human piloted drones to do things that have never been possible, like way beyond visual line of sight, flying complex urban environments that are sensor denied, or GPS denied, so you can’t get a GPS signal that you can process. And that’s going to open up and let drones do a lot of the things we’re really excited about. Firefighting, first responding, package delivery in the immediate term. And the second technology is autonomy. So, autonomous drones are going to change the game. These will be drones that can navigate complex spaces better than people, which opens up the possibility for them to replace all sorts of functions. I mean people often think of package delivery as the first application, but that will just be the beginning once these things can fly.
Josh: Now let’s talk about pushing boundaries. We love it at Lux when we have rebel scientists and inventors and engineers who are breaking some sort of rules, whether it’s technologically or in your management style leading the company. What are the rules that you’re breaking?
Nick: We break rules on the radio side a lot in terms of pushing the boundary with what’s possible. I remember when we first laid out our first track and wanted these drones to whizz around, go through tunnels. We met with a lot of folks in radio community who were just like you’re not going to be able to build that. It’s just not going to happen. And it took us the better part of a year to get there where we could even navigate it at the most basic level. So, we never take no for an answer. I think it’s one of the exciting things of being inspired by something like science fiction, is that it gives you this vision that you’re not going to give up. This dream that you’re trying to achieve. Audiences have an expectation, they’ve seen Star Wars, they want something like Star Wars. We need to give it to them, that means smashing through the restrictions that previously existed.
Josh: Nick, love the intensity, love the passion, thank you so much for being here.
Nick: Thank you.
Josh: That’s it from us today. I want to thank the rebel scientists and inventors at The Drone Racing League for giving us a sneak peek of the future. And I want to leave you with two sci-fi recommendations. The first is Ender’s Game, phenomenal book and a wonderful movie. The second, The Last Star Fighter, one of my all-time favorites. If you want to get in touch with us, reach out at futura@lux.vc. We’d love to hear your crazy ideas and inspirations.
This episode’s sci-fi recommendations:
The novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and the film The Last Star Fighter.
