#101 Ryan Gury, PDW: Drones, Innovation, and Lady Gaga

In this episode of The Vertical Space, Ryan Gury — co-founder and CEO of Performance Drone Works — argues that the last two years of Ukraine have done more to reshape the battlefield than anything since World War II, and that commercial technology is now eating aerospace. His core thesis: the US has everything it needs to win the small drone era — the chips, the engineers, the capitalist competitive culture — but the procurement and manufacturing systems are still built for a world of exquisite, decade-long programs of record, not for weapons that cost hundreds of dollars and go obsolete in months.

Ryan covers the full stack — from FPV tactics in Ukrainian trenches, to why radios are effectively gone in contested environments, to the case for a defense procurement marketplace where O-6 officers can order drones the way they order from Amazon. He also shares the full story of how PDW won the Army's C-100 contract, why having Navy SEALs running the product team is non-negotiable, and why he thinks the valley of death is finally getting narrower.

Key Topics

• Why small robotics have fundamentally changed ground warfare — and why maneuver as an organizing principle may be dead
• How commercial technology is eating aerospace: the Apple Watch, DJI, and what Analog Devices' agile transceiver did to the RF landscape
• Why radios are effectively gone on a jammed battlefield and why fiber optics are now crisscrossing the entire Ukrainian front line
• The case for a DOD drone marketplace — O-6 officers with purchasing power, user reviews, and price-per-lethality comparisons
• Drones as ammunition: why combat systems need to be designed for single use, injection-molded like consumer products, and evolved continuously
• Sleeper robotics — dormant autonomous systems that activate on sensor triggers — as the next major frontier in combat technology
• How DJI built the world's best drone company using Intel, Broadcom, and American technology, and what the US needs to do to fight back
• The C-100 contract win: how PDW designed backwards from a soldier's rucksack and why veterans in product leadership is their biggest competitive advantage
• The valley of death is getting narrower — what the HGSF memo and recompete cycles every three to six months mean for startups
• Where Ryan would direct entrepreneurs today: radios, signals, planetary gear motors, maritime submersibles, fixed wings, and everything else that's about to change

+ Read Full Transcript

Ryan Gury: If you have visibility into user reviews and feedback, if you have visibility into price points and generally the cross axis of lethality and price, that sorts itself out. I love the idea of the marketplace. My business is set up for this new style of consumer-driven warfare, commercial technology-driven warfare. I don't know what AeroVironment makes that's compelling for the future. Maybe their new fixed wing. But the Switchblade — that's old news. And if that was on a marketplace, and I can compare the Javelin versus the Switchblade versus the small FPV, and allow O-6 officers and up to make that purchasing decision — I think that's the beginning of what's really going to drive the industry.

Luka: Welcome to episode 101 of The Vertical Space. In this conversation we sit down with Ryan Gury, co-founder and CEO of Performance Drone Works. We explore insights from the war in Ukraine, how spectrum and radios are evolving — including Ryan's bold claim that radios are gone — how commercial technology is reshaping aerospace, the current state of autonomy, lessons from winning government contracts, and much more. Ryan co-founded the Drone Racing League in 2015, establishing it as the world's leading professional drone racing property. As CTO at DRL he spearheaded the design, engineering, and production of custom built racing drones and developed groundbreaking radio technology to counteract jamming and interference. This led to the establishment of PDW in 2018. In 2024, Ryan's innovations in anti-jamming radio technology earned PDW an award from US SOCOM. Additionally, the US Army selected PDW's flagship C-100 Quadcopter to support its company-level small UAS directed requirement. Ryan holds 10 patents for pioneering drone technologies.

Luka: Is there anything that very few in the industry agree with you on?

Ryan Gury: There hasn't been this much change in this space since World War I and World War II. In Ukraine you can strike a target 10 miles away from under the cover of a foxhole. In any situation where there's a ground war — boots on the ground, infantry and units covering land — you're going to see small robotics in the same way that Ukraine has. Ukraine is up against a pretty modern adversary and they have most of the NATO equipment. And they choose a drone the size of a dinner plate to do most of their work. You get 45 minutes to place a sizable munition in a square inch of a target from under cover. Compared to something like a Javelin where you have to stand up, point and face the enemy, get one shot. Flying around and identifying targets from safety with incredible precision — watching FPVs fly down trenches, finding tanks and armor inside dugouts, slowly finding their way into tunnels. It's just an incredible amount of precision. I would much rather have a drone than an M4. And commercial technology — the way that we develop technology to support B2B and B2C and industrial applications — is eating aerospace. I can get an Apple Watch for like 300 bucks on eBay. Aerospace will never be able to make that. That's what we see in Russia, Iran, the Houthis — small systems developed with commercial and consumer-minded design approaches are going to have capabilities that aerospace does not yet have the capability to deliver.

What Replaces Maneuver Warfare?

Ryan Gury: I imagine it's an evolution of maneuver warfare. These drones hit targets 20, 30 miles out. There'll be an evolution of how that's conducted and how they integrate new combat systems and how they leverage robotics on the edge, whether it's a Shahed, a dinner-plate-sized drone, or a fixed wing that can do surveys, identify enemies, and strike them. There's going to be a spectrum of solutions that will always be moving. That's why velocity and iteration is the key to success for the future battlefield — requirements are changing day in, day out. You have to stay ahead of the curve constantly and develop an industry that supports that, and procurement that supports that, and a marketplace that supports that. This is the very beginning — the first chapter of robotics that are lethal, that act without humans in the loop. It's going to speed up, not slow down. In two and a half years it's been the first time a small drone was used in Ukraine. All of this happened in the last 24 to 30 months. It's going to continue for the next thousand months.

Drones as Ammunition

Jim: You've mentioned drones are like ammunition. Explain that.

Ryan Gury: The way that we develop an artillery shell is fairly standardized — they're one-time use. I think that's part of the problem with robotics: you have to design your drones to be single use, which means injection molds, electronics that go together like Legos, the ability to make 10,000 a month. The other problem is how you adjust the manufacturing as the product is enhanced. You have not only the complexities of mass manufacturing and looking at weapon systems as consumer technologies, but you also have to refine that line continuously — because what we make today is not going to be useful in two years. You have to treat it as such. You have to support an industry and pay for it. Billions of dollars need to be there for lots of companies to work on this. You have to treat these combat systems essentially as single use and only a few thousand dollars each, like munitions. And you have to evolve them really fast over time. Those three big things — mass manufacturing, single use, fast evolution — is what the industry will be up against in the next decade.

The DOD Marketplace

Ryan Gury: Capitalism. You can see the HGSF memo around the marketplace and the ability for O-6 officers and up to make purchasing decisions, removing all the red tape around small robotics. Look at Brave One in Ukraine. Look at Walmart and Amazon. If you have visibility into user reviews and feedback, if you have visibility into price points and generally the cross axis of lethality and price — that sorts itself out. I love the idea of the marketplace. I don't know what AeroVironment makes that's compelling for the future. Maybe their new fixed wing. But the Switchblade — that's old news. If that was on a marketplace and I can compare the Javelin versus the Switchblade versus the small FPV and allow O-6 officers and up to make that purchasing decision — I think that's the beginning of what's really going to drive the industry.

Radios Are Gone

Ryan Gury: There are dozens of jammers operating on the edge — software-defined radio systems, mostly built around analog devices with a massive RF front end putting tons of energy into the spectrum. If you want to strike an enemy and your drone is flying far away and it gets close to a jammer that has more energy somewhere around your band, you lose contact with it. There is a reason why the entire front line is crisscrossed with fiber optics. It's very easy to jam a radio, especially if you have a wide-spectrum jammer. Some of the systems — if you want to change spectrums you have to change out the module or change out the antennas. The idea of a radio system operating anywhere near 50 of these jammers — it's never going to work. All these radio companies were built on FCC allocations and amateur radio bands. They're still operating on 1.3, 2.4, or 5.8, or roughly around it. No one is making an array of radios solution. The Russians just wait for a drone to get close, then they shut down the whole spectrum with a little toggle — from literally 600 MHz to 6 GHz — with thousands of watts of energy in all directions. For 10 seconds when they hear a drone, they click it, the drone falls out of the sky, they turn it back on. The idea of wireless links in a battlefield environment like we see now in Ukraine — that's why we see all the fiber optics. And you also have directional jamming and GPS jamming. You go to gpsjam.org and you can see how the Kaliningrad region basically stops GPS all the way from Germany to Finland. It's just not sexy so no one talks about it.

Luka: Where does this lead — the end of traditional comms, a new RF doctrine?

Ryan Gury: It'll be satcoms, directional comms, directional antennas on gimbals. Shield AI was using a laser beam from a ship to get over the horizon. It's going to be a smorgasbord. And you can find signals way faster now — lots of groups coming out of the space using direction finding. In the same way that the aerospace primes are being disrupted, we'll see the signals space get disrupted as well. Look at Distributed Spectrum — a bunch of kids from MIT, they hang an SDR out the window in Madison Avenue, doing incredible work using commercial tech, Nvidia CUDA, analog devices SDRs, collecting and processing data in ways that are vastly superior to aerospace. Commercial groups and commercial-style product development with the speed of iteration — that's going to allow us to always be leading that cat-and-mouse game.

Commercial Technology Is Eating Aerospace — and DJI Is the Case Study

Ryan Gury: DJI is another topic. The CCP did something incredibly brilliant — they backed them early. First thing they did was go to Intel's RealSense platform. That chip draws a 3D SLAM map in front of it using two cameras and a time-of-flight sensor — all on the edge, no cloud. Then they went to Leica and took that technology, then turned around and said hey, we're going to buy you. And all of a sudden they have the new Movidius chip, which I more or less believe they just reverse-engineered from Intel. Then they went to Broadcom and took that LTE modem. The DJI O4 unit — amazing, crystal-clear 1080p video, prioritizes the center of the frame with pixels so if video begins to deteriorate it deteriorates at the edge not the center. Based on LTE principles. I could put on goggles and fly my drone two neighborhoods out from my house with a 1080p image. Nothing comes close to that product. Their motors, their electromechanical design combining electronics and mechanical design together — it's the best in the world. DJI started that, and the CCP backed them and fostered and incubated their drone industry for 10-plus years using a bunch of American tech to do it. We still have Intel, we still have Broadcom, we still have analog devices, and we have Lady Gaga. So there's not that much ground that we lost. We just need to fight hard and fight back, do what we do best.

Winning the C-100 Contract

Ryan Gury: PDW has a long history where we spend meaningful time with veterans and special operations operators to develop our products. Our CTO Dylan Ham came from the SEAL teams. Our head of R&D and head of revenue are also soft veterans. Our leadership team is about 60% veterans and up. The C-100 was simply a drone that we saw a market availability for. We saw procurement and the need as a way to generate capital. The first drone we made was an FPV drone with a picatinny rail and a thermal camera — done in 2016, 2017 — because Dylan knew what he was deploying with, which was his own assets because he didn't like the Switchblade at the time. That's almost 10 years ago. We designed the C-100 backwards from a soldier's rucksack. Literally bought the biggest rucksack and then measured the propellers backwards from that. Everything else really fell according to that. We undersell it — that thing will fly in 55 to 60 mile-per-hour winds, but we tell customers 35. It can actually lift 15 pounds, but we tell the customer 10. It's flying around POTUS detail looking for bad guys in golf courses. It's also used across strike brigades, special forces, Texas DPS. It can drop ignitions. It can do ISR. We were doing cross-domain precision fires with the F-35 a few months ago, hitting targets with lab munitions. The C-100 is the first of our cargo series. We'll have a C-50 and a C-25. We want to corner the market of motherships.

Ryan Gury: Our FPV is different from everything else out there — not only in how it's manufactured, injection-molded with no harnesses and no soldering, putting it together like Legos, but it's a real combat system. The core body has seven different payload slots — four for the arms, one for the camera system, and two for munitions and power. Depending on your mission set you click in your stuff just as you would an M4 and go out on your mission. If the drone falls down you can fix it. If you want to switch from EO to IR payload, you can do that in under 10 seconds. If you want to switch the drone arms — big to small — under five seconds. If you want to put on a new radio, a couple seconds. If you want to put on a shaped charge to an anti-personnel charge, that's a couple seconds. High voltage fuse, encryption, meeting the standards of safety and security for our end user. It's very different from using a couple of carbon fiber plates with some 3D prints and some COTS components. It's a fully integrated, vertically designed product that should compete very well against the Javelin and the Switchblade.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

Ryan Gury: Working with veterans is a huge part of product development — not just sales, but how you make your product. This is the most different user I've ever seen by far. And it can only be done through the eyes of a war fighter. One of the first demos I had was with a special operations group. They put the drone in a hover, took out an AK from the back room, and walked away from the drone with the AK in the air. They only cared about how far away they could see a bad guy's gun. And I couldn't believe that. The whole gimbal we picked was wrong because the IR requirement wasn't there. So if you really want to be an expert in this subject, find someone who's been at war, find someone who knows how important it is and that there's life depending on the success of it. That just becomes your culture and your backbone. The second thing is cash flow. It takes a long time to get your first check. The growth curve is slow and short, and then very fast. Show up everywhere — Vertex, AWE, exercises. Failing in front of a customer and showing them prototypes, as damning as that is, it shows a lot of trust. They see the effort and the change over time and it's a long relationship. Once you're in it, it is by far the coolest job you can have. We're at the foothills of a lot of growth. If you're out there saying can I compete against the C-100 — absolutely, literally, it's the early days. We need tons of American entrepreneurs in this space. It is about to explode.

Where to Build Next

Luka: Where would you direct innovators and entrepreneurs to go and build?

Ryan Gury: Radios, signals, motors, planetary gear motors. Where's my four-legged robot that costs five grand from Amazon? There's space in maritime submersibles, ship building, fixed wings, spaceships, balloons — everything's about to change. There's a huge movement in deep tech. The whole thing is open. It's just getting started.