Show notes
This week’s guest is Naman Pushp, the founder and CEO of Airbound.Pushp is all of 21 years old and trying to build an aerospace giant in India. His company, Airbound, produces carbon fiber to create very lightweight, very efficient aircraft used for the moment to deliver small packages of cargo around the country. Pushp’s core thesis is that the aviation industry has not been aggressive enough with its use of carbon fiber and that he can uses materials advances to outflank drone delivery companies first and then perhaps create a new class of planes for humans too.These are big hopes and dreams and very big claims! And the company has a long, long way to go. But this is all to be expected. I recently visited Airbound’s headquarters and test sites in Bangalore and came away rather impressed with Pushp and his team. They’ve built two versions of their aircraft, and we watched dozens of them fill the skies. The machines take off vertically and then zoom off like airplanes. They’re quiet, and they can hover.Pushp is a self-taught engineer who learned how to build things with carbon fiber by watching YouTube videos and then began constructing aircraft in his teenage bedroom. He got into Carnegie Mellon but skipped university to build Airbound instead. He’s bright and (very) confident.He’s also representative of a new era in Indian technology. Some of the country’s brightest, most ambitious youngsters are opting to stay at home and to try and build hard tech companies that do real innovation, as opposed to mimicking what has happened elsewhere.We get into ALL of this on the podcast. And this marks the start of a series of videos, podcasts, and stories we have coming on the rise of the Indian tech scene. I’ve already managed to anger a large swath of the Indian venture capital industry with this story and am sure to anger others as we go on this journey.SPONSORThe wonderful people at Brex helped make these stories from India possible. You can catch a taste of the adventures here. I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time.Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here.TIMESTAMPS CHAPTERS0:00 Intro6:01 Replacing Roads With Aircraft7:37 Designing Around Carbon Fiber14:23 Taking On Drone Delivery21:29 From Deliveries to Passengers23:09 Aircraft From a Bedroom32:38 From Project to Company37:53 Choosing Aircraft Over College41:11 Why Build in India?48:13 Life With Instant Delivery52:28 India's New Hardware Generation1:01:48 Why Skip Defense Contracts?1:04:35 Democracy and Getting Things Built1:07:40 India Between America and China1:13:18 Can Carbon Fiber Get Cheaper?1:21:44 The Trouble With Scaling This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe
