Ian Smith, CEO of Ware, shares the story of his career and how he ended up in the business of employing drones for supply chain inventory tracking.
Danny:
Hey, thank you for joining me today on today's IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Ian Smith who is the CEO at Ware. Ian, thank you so much for joining me today.

Ian:
Pleasure to be here virtually. Thank you for having me.

Danny:
I'm excited to talk more and learn more about you. Thanks for coming on. So for those who are not familiar, we'll start with this. Ware, what do you guys do?

Ian:
Yeah, so at Ware, the easy way to explain it is we deploy self-flying drones inside of warehouses to automate the tracking of our customers' inventory. So all the stuff on the pallets in the warehouses that the lay-people, you and I as consumers never see or even think about when we click Add to Cart, Checkout, and it shows up at our door, there's an entire, obviously, massive industry that manages all of our stuff. So we at Ware tell them where their stuff is.

Danny:
I like it. I think I see where you're going with this. This is cool. Well, I'm excited to jump into that and get into the back story on everything. But before we do that, I really want to get to know a little bit more about you, about Ian. So take me back. How did you get into this space in this industry?

Ian:
Well, it's a saga. So I grew up in Houston, Texas. My dad is an engineer at NASA, and so I grew up always fiddling around with machinery, cars, and building things and just working in his shop with him. Eventually, we settled on building a model aircraft. So if anyone's built model aircraft before, today you can buy a fully-assembled one. It's really easy. But there used to be the hard way of doing it, which is the way we did. It was thin balsa wood. It was glue that you have to set overnight. I was 10, 12 years old.

Danny:
Wow, so we're not talking an RV-10 or an 8 or anything like that. We're talking Ficaro.

Ian:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these– well, small, radio-controlled model aircraft.

Danny:
Okay, okay.

Ian:
So you had the heat shrink. You had to use heat shrink and a heat gun. And it was really, it was really difficult. And it was a huge test of patience, but that was my first taste of aviation. And, of course, in between that I would be going into the space shuttle mock-ups where the astronauts trained. So I was really lucky to be able to do that since my dad ran that building at JSC in Houston. And eventually I became a helicopter pilot. That was my first profession, commercial helicopter pilot, flight instructor. I was a new flight instructor in 2008 which, as everybody knows, was a pretty bad economic recession. I used to hold, I guess, the honor of having that on my list of experiences, and it was the worst time to be a new flight instructor. But unfortunately with Covid-19, I'm pouring one out, proverbially, for all the new flight instructors now because it's got to be pretty tough for those folks.

Danny:
Oh, yeah.

Ian:
So in 2008, I pivoted. I spent a lot of time in aviation brokering jet fuel to corporate flight departments, the Gulf Streams and the Hawkers and all those things that the big companies fly. And I just remember, very vividly, in 2013 I was going to the grocery store. I parked my car. I was listening to NPR. I heard this story about drones and how they were a thing and that there were people out there using small drones that they built to make money. But unfortunately, it was illegal. And so that piqued my interest,