“Everyone loves love,” as they say. I’ve noted many times just how much I enjoy people enjoying their work—and that pride & purpose clearly come through in this brief glimpse into the making of Skydio drones.

Skydio makes more drones than any other company in America, and it builds all of them inside one factory in Hayward, California. In this episode we go onto the floor with co-founder and CEO Adam Bry to see exactly how the Skydio X10 comes together, from a pile of thousands of parts to a finished autonomous drone that thinks more like a flying robot than a traditional quadcopter.

You will see the steps most companies never show. Skydio waterproofs the critical electronics with a nanocoating process so the X10 can fly in the rain, fuses the drone arms together using high frequency ultrasonic welding, and hand solders the motor wires onto the power board. Inside the chassis sit an NVIDIA CPU and GPU plus a Qualcomm chip running the camera feeds, all stabilized by a custom gimbal that keeps the camera locked while the drone fights wind in the air. Then comes the part that matters most. Every single drone gets pushed through a brutal burn-in stress test, flown by hand, and run through a calibration robot before it is ever allowed to ship.