The following interview is a conversation we had with Guilhem de Marliave, CEO & Co-Founder of Elistair, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over €8 Million Raised to Build the Future of Aerial Surveillance and Security
Guilhem de Marliave
Hey, Brett, thank you for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building there, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Guilhem de Marliave
Yes, of course. I’m 34, I’m French, I have an engineering and business background. I’m married, father of young kids and north traveling backcountry skiing and tennis and border climbing.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. And shout out to you for making it work as a CEO of a startup and being a father for kids. That can’t be easy to manage that.
Guilhem de Marliave
No, it’s not. When I studied, I didn’t have any kids. It’s a different challenge. It’s a very great thing that happens to me.
Brett
Nice. That’s incredible. Now, a couple of questions that we like to ask just better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about that?
Guilhem de Marliave
I don’t have specific founders in mind. I enjoy read books about entrepreneurship stories. And if I had to pick one, I recently read the Story of Evil Evan as we now from Patagonia. It was a great read. He’s a great entrepreneur and very good at branding and building a culture. So, yeah, I really enjoyed what he’s done. And recently he sold, so he gave all these shares for his course, like for environmental foundation. Yeah, so great read. I would recommend it.
Brett
Nice. Is that available in French or is that just in Amit in English?
Guilhem de Marliave
I found it in French. I’m a bit lazy. Sometime I have to read in English because the book, I can’t find them in French, but this one I could.
Brett
Very nice. Very nice. Now let’s jump into the origin story. So I know that the company launched, I think I found, online in 2014. So can you take us back to 2014? What was going on in those early days?
Guilhem de Marliave
So I did an internship at the end of my studies in a drone company called Studio Fly of French Company. And my job was to be a business developer. So I was looking to extend the services this company was providing. And were struggling with batteries because with drones batteries, usually you fly for 30 minutes to 50 minutes ish, and it’s great for some short missions like inspections, but it’s very limiting, in fact for longer applications. And one day we had a mission where we had to put a leash on the drone for legal reason to be able to fly in Paris. And that’s kind of the way the ID came to build Tether drones, to solve the limitation on battery, but also to solve the communications and legal permissions.
Brett
And what are the legal permissions look like today in France and just globally? How have you seen them evolve?
Guilhem de Marliave
France was quite early on this drone space and on the regulations because in 2012 there was a first draft. Currently there is a European rules that are being worked on that will be applied in the next two years, I believe. Let’s say the context doesn’t evolve much in terms of risk and limits to fly drones. Usually the categories, it’s the same in North America, the categories are defined by weight and globally, the risk that people are injuring and other aircraft might injure because of drones. But it’s good, it allows enough space to develop companies using drones and it hasn’t been outfield at least a limiting factor.
Brett
And in my mind, one of the benefits of drones is the fact that they can move around and cover large distances. So is there a downside there of this having to be Tethered in? I understand there’s major benefits, it sounds like from a battery perspective and communication perspective, but do you lose some of those benefits of the drone capabilities because it’s Tethered?
Guilhem de Marliave
Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s not designed for every application, of course. The idea is that I say the maturity of the drone market is now at a stage where for each application it will have a specific aircraft with different capabilities. So we are going away from the time where everyone thought that one drone would solve everything. So it’s a very interesting space, at least on the B, two B side to be in. And for us Tether drones, yes, we are. I’d say it’s very hard to beat a Tether drone for border surveillance, for instance, or forward operating base surveillance, or for tactical comms, or for large event surveillance, but for other missions like reconnaissance or inspections, we are not at all on that field. And it’s good for us also on the building of the business, it means that we can focus on very precise personas.
Guilhem de Marliave
Ours are in the military and police public safety and be very sharp on how we build the product.
Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I think that’s probably what happens with a lot of emerging technology, right, where it starts off very broad and people try to use it for everything and then as the market develops and matures, the more niche solutions and purpose built solutions begin to develop and gain traction. So that makes a lot of sense.
Guilhem de Marliave
Yeah, absolutely.
Brett
Now looking on your website, I see the applications broken out. So we have defense, public safety, private security. One thing I want to ask about defense because in the United States this is a very active topic in the startup world that you may be aware of, where for maybe the last 1015 years it became basically unacceptable or not allowed for Silicon Valley tech companies to support defense. The workers at these companies can say hey, we didn’t join this company to build missiles, blah, blah, all of these things. It’s changing right now, a lot more and more companies are popping up to say hey, we have a duty in this country to support the government and support defense and help price them. Is there a similar conversation happening in France or has France generally been more open to the idea of technology companies working with the defense sector?
Guilhem de Marliave
Yeah, I think it’s very similar. It’s maybe not as transparent as you said it, but you’re saying we have two struggles, let’s say during our journey of looking for fundings, it’s that we are on hardware, company building, hardware products and we are in defense. So it’s two things that didn’t help us. But I think with the growth, with the strategy, the business plan and the results we got step by step, it took time, maybe more time than we originally wanted to, but the markets maturing on the drone side also and in public safety took time also. So in the end I think we had the right timing but I think were lucky also because every deal we stroke on the funding side, it was difficult, it took time.
Brett
Yeah, I can imagine. And I’m guessing you’re not the first Founder to say oh man, that took a little bit longer than expected and costs more than expected. That just seems to be what happens in entrepreneurship in general, right?
Guilhem de Marliave
Yeah, absolutely. Patience is a good value that you are forced to develop.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. Now, from those different applications, are there any that you’re really seeing gain a lot of traction and you’re personally very excited about?
Guilhem de Marliave
I’d say, on the public safety side, we’ve been engaging more and more with police forces on protecting big events. And it’s very exciting because we have systems on the Super Bowl, for instance, in Atlanta. And this year or so we have been engaged also in the Football World Cup in Qatar on the Rider cup it’s always very exciting moments, great exposure also and it’s all about our mission which is to protect those who protect us. So the Metry and the police. So at least those moments are great. At the beginning of the company it was a challenge because were prototyping, of course took time, but now we have over 1000 systems deployed. We’ve built a great production, quality management and so on. So it’s a good moment.
Brett
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Guilhem de Marliave
It’s usually a few units between one and five. For Super Bowl. There were two. One was with the police and the other one was with CNN. So there was two applications, one for protection around the stadium and the other one was for broadcasting, media broadcasting usually kind of volume we are in.
Brett
That makes a lot of sense. And on the security side, Ben, what is the drone monitoring? Is it doing a heat map? Is it doing some type of image scanning of every person’s body to see if they have a weapon on them? What exactly is it screening for and doing up there in the sky?
Guilhem de Marliave
It’s usually depending on the context and the events and what the police is looking for. So if it’s for instance, a game recently there was in Montana, they used our tele drones for Pear Stadium and they were looking on the mountains around to see there were people lost at night. They were so checking money transfers between sales points of beverages and food. They were looking into restricted areas to see if no one was over trespassing. So usually there are four, five to six, you know, points of interest that are checking and yeah, it’s multi use around security.
Brett
Got it. So is it typically more about providing visibility to the person operating it? It’s not as much scanning each individual and trying to figure out if there are potential risk. Do I understand that correctly?
Guilhem de Marliave
Yeah, it’s usually having an Il view, offers you great data because you have a very good view of what is happening at a few kilometers around the system and all the goal is to make faster and better decisions when time is sensitive. So it’s the same for police, work isn’t a thing, but also for public safety. Firefighters on a forest fire, for instance, they will locate faster the points of the fire and be able to geolocate under the software where it’s happening and quickly tell the team how they can fight better. But it’s usually a global view and when you see something specific happening, you can zoom in. So we have the opportunity on Tether drones, as we have unlimited power, we have the opportunity to put bigger camera capacity so they can usually detect up to 10 km vehicle moving. So it’s a great way to limit the impact of not having mobility.
Guilhem de Marliave
We usually try to fly the highest possible with bigger cameras.
Brett
That makes a lot of sense. I have to say every time I go to a large event there’s always a point in time where I look around and just think, wow, this is a little bit making me uneasy. I can see how there could be a terrorist attack here. Maybe that’s just because I live in the United States and that’s something that we all have to think about. Is there going to be a terrorist attack? Is there going to be a shooting or stabbing that’s kind of become like life for I think a lot of us here and I know other countries have similar problems. So that makes me feel a little bit relieved to know that there’s devices like this that are flying around the events, or at least in the sky in the events and keeping a watch over things. So that’s comforting.
Brett
I’m going to feel better next time I attend an event because of you.
Guilhem de Marliave
In France we have history also on attacks on big events and next year there’s Olympics coming in France, so it’s a big topic. And Tether drones are, let’s say small parts of the whole system of course, but it’s always finding the way to make hardware and data sensors collaborate well through the right network so that we can collaborate well and solve those kind of crises faster.
Brett
Yeah, that take a note of sense and I can see how it’s part of the tech stack. I feel like there’s never going to be one thing that resolves the problem. That requires a lot of different tools all combined together, along with great people I’m guessing, to of course make sure things are secure.
Guilhem de Marliave
Yeah, absolutely.
Brett
Now seeing on the website I see the Guns and Roses concert, I see the Montana University Police. Like you mentioned, these are very American sounding things. Guns and Roses, Montana. So, being a company in France, has it been difficult for you to break into the US. Market? Or have you generally seen that they’re so impressed and excited about the technology that they don’t really care that you’re from France and you’re not from Silicon Valley or maybe DC, where more of the government contractors are?
Guilhem de Marliave
Yeah, actually it’s been very organic from the start. We chose when starting the company, it’s kind of a long tail problem for us challenge because we are on a niche technology, so we had to export the system. We have a few targets per country, very precise. So we builded all the marketing, the go to market strategy through the web, through internet. Even if at first it sounded a bit counterintuitive, especially in the defense sector, but actually it worked well. And let’s say Europe and North America drove the company and the growth. And with the pool from North America, we bought it a team two years ago. So now we have a team of five people based in North Carolina. And now we are very happy and very proud to serve this market. And our intent is to strengthen the team and the support, technical support there, because we see there is a lot of challenges, especially on the police side and public safety to solve.
Guilhem de Marliave
So we are striving for it.
Brett
Nice. Makes a lot of sense. And are there any other numbers you can share with us that just demonstrate the growth that you’re seeing?
Guilhem de Marliave
Last year we had 50% growth for the company. It was a good, strong year. We are aiming for the same this year. I talked about 1000 systems deployed, companies eight years old. We are around 60 people now. The pool is great. We have a lot of new products coming this year. Last year was a year of development and we kept the same range of products. And this year we have three or four new releases. So we are very excited to see what’s coming.
Brett
Nice that’s amazing. Now, what’s the competitive landscape look like today? Are you seeing more and more competitors enter in? Or what’s that competitive landscape like today? And how has that evolved since 2014?
Guilhem de Marliave
I’d say currently we are three or four companies at similar level between 40 and 60 people, two in Europe and two in the US. Every company has a different focus, I’d say. And our specificity that we released the first Tethering station on the market and customers were most of them were entrepreneurs that believed in the solution. But weren’t really knowing what customers to target, what it was and what it would be used for. So it was very early and now we are at a different stage. Our customers, they know what a tether drone is and they know how to use it and what for. It’s more a question of scaling programs and convincing Erkey and using it in real life situation to scale. So it’s a very interesting time.
Brett
Yeah, I can imagine. And I’m sure you’ve encountered a couple of challenges along the way. If we had to choose one go to market challenge that you faced and overcame, what would that challenge be and how do you overcome it?
Guilhem de Marliave
We had a lot of challenge, but I would say we spoke about hardware and I would say it made it a challenge to find the first product market fit, let’s say to find the first customer and to build a prototype we could sell to them. That was a pivotal moment for the company because at first we tried a lot of things and the pricing weren’t right, the targets weren’t right, and so on. So it took, I don’t know, eight, nine months and we finally made the first sale to Phallus in France and after that I’d say it was the real selling point because we could raise funds and we began our iterations getting feedbacks, improving the products and so on and so on. The challenge is always in the hardware space to reduce the cycles of developments. It’s a lot easier with the software, but we worked in a fab lab at first and then refined our ways to get shorter and shorter cycles of developments.
Brett
Nice, that’s amazing. Okay, last question here for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the company look like?
Guilhem de Marliave
That’s a great topic and I wish I knew. Usually we are caught in the day to day operation. Let’s say our main goal is to build the leading Tethered drone manufacturer in the world, but also a European Drone champion. So it’s very exciting and challenging. And in terms of technology, drones evolve very fast. So our goal is to foster adoption by making Tether Drone technology fully autonomous. And we still have work to do that, enhance it with AI to help the operator focus on the mission, not on the system, and to build the right apps for the right missions. And we also working on making it ready for 24 remote surveillance operations. So currently our solution are built for events for operation from one day to one week. And what we want to do is developing fully autonomous tele drone boxes that can be remotely deployed on sites borders and controlled through kind of a cloud system, which will really widen the market and the value can bring mostly in the private security sector.
Brett
Wow, that’s super exciting. Now unfortunately, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here. I would love to keep you on and ask you another 50 questions, but we’ll have to save that for part two. So before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Guilhem de Marliave
Well, we are quite active on LinkedIn, so you can follow the company on LinkedIn and also the website and the blog is a good way of getting the latest news.
Brett
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to tell your story and really share the vision and everything that you’re building there. It’s always exciting talking with companies that are really using technology to solve important problems in the world. So really appreciate your time and wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision.
Guilhem de Marliave
Thank you for inviting me and it was a great moment. We can have them. Thank you, Brett.
Brett
Thank you. Keep in touch. Take care.
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