Why Listen:
I'm so honored to have had time with Christian today I want to give a little bit of backstory that I give at the start of the interview but I think it's worth recapping here. So, as many of you know we were fortunate to receive financial sponsorship from the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. It allowed us to do a new series of interviews and so as Steve Bane and I were talking about who we wanted to interview, I realized that we haven't talked to anyone in the drone industry, and I think it's an industry that has a lot of interest for veterans - it's growing rapidly, it's cool, it's high tech. And so I did a little bit of searching and Steve sent me some articles and we looked for Veterans in this space. And I came across Christian. He was the only person I emailed and I just sent a cold email explaining what I do with Beyond the Uniform and asking if you'd be willing to be on the show. And I just want to bring that up first of all to say like, I was so energized and inspired by this conversation. And it all came about because of simply writing an email to another veteran. And I just want to bookmark that for all of you listening because I think great things come when you get out of your head when you get out of your comfort zone when you get out of your office or home and talk to people. And that's a major theme in today's interview and Kristen has a really brilliant man I think that will come across in his, his advice to listeners, but he in 1998 got out of the military went into tech, when tech was just or that you know that is software programming, and that was just becoming a thing. And I think that you'll learn a lot from his story, although it's, it's one of entrepreneurship it's one about the drone industry. It's really advice relevant to every career path, because his story demonstrates, time and time again, the value that comes from pursuing one's passion, the value that comes when you put aside money. At least temporarily to focus on adding value and learning, and also a story of how, when you get out of your comfort zone when you talk to people when you circulate ideas, great things come about. So we cover a lot of ground we talk about minimum viable product we talk about customer development. We talked about why you should never have an NDA that's a non disclosure agreement. We talk about leadership on it was just really exhilarating conversation and so I'm really honored to have had Christian on the show.
About Christian:
Christian Sanz is the CEO and Founder of Skycatch, the leading industrial aerial data collection and analytics company, focused on indexing and extracting critical information from the physical world. He served in the Navy for 4 years, and his civilian career includes work as a software engineer for The Walt Disney Company, a Senior Software Engineer at LoopNet, the Senior Director of Engineering at Break Media, the CTO at Kin Community, the Founding CTO of Storify (acquired by Adobe), and the Founder of DroneGames. Over the last 7 years, Christian has grown Skycatch to have over 50 employees and $46M in funding.