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The self-taught coder building a drone empire
00:22:06
We meet Bobby Healy whose company is among the largest drone delivery firms in Europe
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- [00:00]
Bobby Healy
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- [00:06]
BBC Narrator
we face the greatest challenges of our time. Challenges that test our limits. There is a place where we can find answers. Where journeys break new ground and connections unlock opportunities. Where innovation can spark real change and our actions can push our world forward. Singapore, where business events can create lasting impact.
- [00:36]
Podcast Advertiser
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- [01:09]
Sarah Rogers
Hello, I'm Sarah Rogers and this is Meet the founders from Business Daily on the BBC World Service. This is where we speak to innovators around the world about the ideas, risks and realities behind starting a business today. A serial entrepreneur who's tackling one of the most strictly regulated industries in the world.
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Bobby Healy
Aviation laws and regulations move very, very slowly and that's where the risk was. There was always a huge likelihood that we would build something great that would never be allowed to fly.
- [01:42]
Sarah Rogers
My guest is a self taught coder who wants to build one of the world's largest drone delivery companies.
- [01:48]
Bobby Healy
I genuinely wasn't sure if a 49 year old has any right to be building a startup. Do I have the energy to do something like this? Maybe I'm too old. I shouldn't be doing this. I should just be taking it easy.
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Sarah Rogers
That's Bobby Healy, the founder of Manor Air Delivery. Hello, welcome to meet the founders. Thanks so much for joining me today, Bobby.
- [02:14]
Bobby Healy
Pleasure to be here.
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Sarah Rogers
So founding a drone delivery food business, very much a notion of sci fi when we were just kids. I mean, the tech didn't even really exist. I can't imagine you were sitting around dreaming of doing that. What were you like when you were younger?
- [02:30]
Bobby Healy
I'm one of six children and I'm the one in the middle. Eldest sister, five boys. But I was the only one that was the kind of mad scientist in the family. I was the kid that opened the toaster to see how it worked. I was the one that was putting the thermometer in the boiling kettle to just verify that water boiled at 100 degrees Celsius. You know, I was inquisitive and I was up in the attic with my chemistry set, with my electrical set, with all this equipment, you know, doing experiments. And I was like that from a kid. I remember in third class, I would have been 10 years old, I won a spelling competition. I was given a prize of a book on experiments with everyday objects. And I still remember getting the book. I was absolutely delighted to because it told me everything I needed to kind of do as much damage as possible to everyday objects at home. And it was great times, Very, very happy times.
- [03:19]
Sarah Rogers
I bet your mum loved that. Just you going around destroying various household items.
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Bobby Healy
Yeah. The funny thing is, when I did put the thermometer in the kettle, it obviously exploded because it was a mercury thermometer for measuring, you know, human temperature. And I do not know what happened in the end with that mercury in the bottom of the kettle. I hope everybody was okay.
- [03:39]
Sarah Rogers
So you had this real passion or thirst to just learn how stuff worked. What were your mum and dad doing at the time?
- [03:49]
Bobby Healy
My father was a professional footballer and became then a traveling salesman, traveling around Ireland selling clothes, basically wholesale clothes. My mother raised six children, so she didn't have time for anything, but she. I would say they both set a good example for me to just do something, be your best. They weren't saying learn science or learn technology, but they would have encouraged me or supported me in my madness. And it's actually my mother really unlocked my career when. When I was 13 and she spent pretty much all the discretionary budget of the family on buying me a computer, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And it was £200 at the time, which was a lot of money. And she knew that I was obsessed with. I told myself I had program before I even had a computer. And she bet on me in a way and gave me what I needed to really unlock the creativity.
- [04:48]
Sarah Rogers
And that £200 that your mum managed to scrape together, would that have been a lot of money in your family?
- [04:53]
Bobby Healy
Yeah, it would have been. I mean, the disposable income back then was close to zero. You know, we weren't eating meat every day of the week in the house. Like, we were a relatively poor family, so the amount may not be significant, but the availability of any discretionary income was almost zero back then. So it was a massive unlock for me. Like, it absolutely enabled me to properly learn. I was a really strong computer programmer. I was able to build video games. I was able to do stuff that most people, you know, would have had to have gone to college for. You know, that decision that she made to buy that for me was very smart one, I think, and created my career.
- [05:31]
Sarah Rogers
And did you Decide you wanted to do something different to them. Was that a conscious decision or were you just this nerdy techie kid?
- [05:40]
Bobby Healy
The mid-80s when I was, you know, eligible to work, there were very few jobs. Most Irish, young Irish people were emigrating to the UK or USA and so there was definitely a bit of, I felt a bit of anxiety around how, how am I going to get a job, what do I need to do to get a job, do I need to go to university, all this stuff. When I realized that I had a good skill in programming, it was very evident around that time that programming was going to become a career and it was going to be a job that paid money. And so I knew that, look, now I have a path to having a career and actually making some money and in something that I really was absolutely certain I would enjoy doing, there's absolutely no questions in my mind what I wanted to do and that that was a path to being able to pay rent, being able to buy a car, you know, all of those things that a young man would want to do. A company called Martech actually set up a video company in Ireland and advertised for programmers. I applied and I got the job. It was just, it was like somebody gave me the job to, to pilot the space shuttle and a thrill for me to do that.
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Sarah Rogers
And did you think you'd made it then? Was that the point that you thought
- [06:53]
Bobby Healy
I had made it? I mean I, I, I remember the salary was £14,000 which was more money than I could dream of at the time. You know, I was independent and not just independent but I was independent, you know, building video games and this was it. You just couldn imagine how big a deal that was for a 17 year old kid that worshiped technology. And on top of that then having a career like it weighed off my parents minds no doubt that one of their kids, you know, has a future. I, I wrote the video game for Michael Jackson's Moonwalker movie and for Arnold Schwarzenegger Running man, the movie. I wrote those games. And it wasn't really for me about success particularly or you know, making a lot of money particularly was genuinely the thrill and the excitement of that learning process of building something like that which was at the time state of the art.
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Sarah Rogers
Did you learn all of that whilst you were at school? Did you go to university?
- [07:55]
Bobby Healy
No, I didn't. I taught myself how to program because I had that computer and school suffered as a result of it. I would say I didn't do very well in secondary school or you know, I did okay, kind of middle of the pack, I would say. I never went to university. Even if I did, I probably wouldn't have done very well if I'm honest.
- [08:16]
Sarah Rogers
So why didn't you stay with making video games if you loved it so much?
- [08:22]
Bobby Healy
Because there's no money in video games. It's like being a musician, it's a hit. Space industry. I wanted to build my own company and as it turns out I just fell upon a different industry, which is the travel technology industry. And that's an industry full of interesting customers, interesting people, but huge financial opportunities if you build good piece of technology. So I was definitely motivated by becoming rich in that change, but I never have really been motivated by purely becoming rich. I've always been motivated by enjoying my work, enjoying what I'm building.
- [09:01]
Sarah Rogers
So just briefly, tell me about your other businesses. Various amounts of success. You weren't an over overnight success.
- [09:08]
Bobby Healy
Now it's 40 years of building companies. This is my seventh business. Today I'm running a business called Mana Drone Delivery where we build autonomous flying robots and they deliver hamburgers and food and hardware store and everything in between. And that's an incredibly difficult and large business. And then before that I built three different travel technology companies that actually all were very successful. Car Trawler was a huge business. There's over a billion and a half in sales when I left. And I ran that for 15 years. And then before that, Eland Technologies and VTI Technologies were both travel technology businesses that I sold. And my first company, Doodlebug Designs was actually a video games company with spin off from my employer's business. And that was great for about a year, but we went, we ran out of money and it's kind of testament to my point on video games because as great as it is as a, as a small cottage industry, it's just very, very difficult to make money.
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Sarah Rogers
Was that a tough lesson?
- [10:12]
Bobby Healy
Yeah, not really. Funnily enough, not really. I didn't, I didn't care. It went bust in a good way. Like we just ran out of cash and we didn't have any jobs lined up. So we decided, well, we better do something else then. Failure doesn't faze me at all. I mean, when I started Mana, which is my, my current business, you know, I thought it was very unlikely to succeed and it was going to take a decade of my life and I was willing to give a decade of my life to try to succeed with something as difficult as drone delivery. I'm never embarrassed about them not working out or declining or whatever. I'M only doing it because I really enjoy it. I mean, I absolutely love what I do. I work seven days a week. I have 180 people working for me here in Manor now. Most of them enjoy it as much as I do. And it gets better every year. We get bigger. It gets more enjoyable, more fun, I would say more stressful, but not in a negative way.
- [11:09]
Sarah Rogers
Seven days a week. I hope you're not asking your staff to work. Are you that kind of person though, that even when you finish, you're on your phone, you're checking your emails, you're taking calls, when you're on holiday, you're still working? Is that who you are?
- [11:25]
Bobby Healy
My favorite day is Sunday because that's when everyone leaves me alone and there's not much going on at work. Most people are taking their weekends and my family are, you know, happy playing sports or doing whatever they do. But I'm writing code and I'm still up till 3 or 4 in the morning. Regularly writing code with AI now, but it's the same thrill.
- [11:44]
Sarah Rogers
I'm surprised you found time. So you're married and you have a family then?
- [11:48]
Bobby Healy
Yeah, four kids. Yeah. And you know, a wife that completely gets what I'm about, understands what I love to do and it works very well for us. You know, we've, we've a 4 year old girl, 10 year old and 12 year old boys. And then I have a 22 year old daughter. My 22 year old daughter thinks I'm a bit mad probably. But that's 22 year old daughters for you.
- [12:11]
Sarah Rogers
Do you get the kids involved? Have you made video games that are just for them?
- [12:16]
Bobby Healy
So I'll do little classes maybe in the weekend where we'll show look, this is how to make a ball move on the screen. This is what, this is how you build a Pac man game now with AI and stuff. And they're interested, but they're still too young to be more than just interested, to pursue it and to devote some serious time.
- [12:35]
Sarah Rogers
You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
- [12:41]
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- [13:45]
Sarah Rogers
I'm Sarah Rogers and in Meet the Founders Today I'm talking to entrepreneur Bobby Healey, founder of one of Europe's biggest drone delivery companies, Mana Air Delivery, about his journey in business. By the time you get to Manor Air, you're in your 40s, you've got some money behind you, I suppose from selling your other companies. But did it feel like a last chance at all to just really build something big?
- [14:13]
Bobby Healy
Yes. When I started Mana, I was 49 years old and I genuinely wasn't sure if a 49 year old has any right to be building a startup. It's 10 years no matter what way you look at it. If you want to build a startup, it's 10 years before you can get out of it and conclude things. And so I think, does a 60 year old have the energy? And for the wrong reasons, like I would say for ageism reasons, I said, maybe I'm too old. I shouldn't be doing this. I should just be taking it easy. And then finally I saw an article in the Economist and for whatever reason, at the right time, I saw this article and it said that the average age of a successful technology entrepreneur is 49 years old.
- [14:59]
Sarah Rogers
That's you.
- [15:00]
Bobby Healy
Yeah, it was like they wrote it for me, but I said, you know what, I can't sit still. So what am I going to do? I'm not going to go gardening or sighting or traveling or anything like that. I just very quickly I knew as I learned more about drones, it was going to be an absolute thrill and very, very interesting project to build. And if we are successful, it would be absolutely the biggest thing I ever built. And that is what I wanted to do. I wanted to build the biggest possible thing I could ever and have the biggest company that ever came out of Ireland, if not Europe. And this is the space where you could actually achieve that.
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Sarah Rogers
So just take me back to the inception of Manor Air I live in
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Bobby Healy
a suburb of Dublin and about 30,000 people in the suburbs called Ratifarnam, and it is next to impossible to get a food delivery on the weekends. I'm thinking about that whilst also knowing what I know about drones and technology, thinking, why couldn't I just build a drone to fly to my local chippers, get my bag of chips and bring it? And that made a lot of sense to me. It probably wouldn't make a lot of sense to many people, but to me that is a good, fun technology project. And as it turns out, that's a 300 billion dollar industry today. So the penny drop moment for me wasn't the technology, it was the realization that this is a gigantic problem across the world of moving goods around suburban communities.
- [16:26]
Sarah Rogers
It's fine to have an idea, oh, it'd be great if a drone could just drop off my chips for me. But how do you then make that a funny?
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Bobby Healy
You know, the first thing I bought was I actually rented a gigantic crane cherry picker and I brought it to my house like it was an 80 meter cherry picker. And I bought everything off the McDonald's menu. I went into McDonald's, I bought absolutely everything that they had. And then I tested dropping all of the meals out of the crane onto the ground in my house, in my garden, with various different systems, with a parachute, all sorts of different things with special packaging to see how would you get the product onto the ground from a drone? Because I already knew the drones would work. The only two doubts I had were whether that could be done in a way that made sense financially. So in other words, it needed to be as cheap as the guy driving the car. And then the other part was, well, it's illegal to do this, right? So would it ever be legal? It's illegal to fly a drone out of line of sight. It always has been. And so there's no point building a business that's great, that everybody wants that it's never going to be allowed to happen because the airspace is very complicated and difficult. And that was a regulatory question. You know, if I build this, will I actually be able to expand it and when will those regulations come? That was probably the biggest risk of this industry in this business for me, because aviation laws and regulations move very, very slowly. And that's where the risk was. There was always a huge likelihood that we would build something great that would never be allowed to fly. And then as it turns out, the eu, which loves to regulate things, has regulated drone delivery and done it very well. And so that was my final decision. Point was realizing that actually Europe wants to legalize drones and low altitude economy and that therefore this industry is going to open up soon and therefore it's worth a punt. This is worth a decade of my life.
- [18:25]
Sarah Rogers
How do you think regulation is going to go? Will things open up in time for you to scale up the business in the way that you want to?
- [18:32]
Bobby Healy
Yeah. So I mean, we have now an EU wide license, so we can go anywhere we want in the eu. And we're live now in Finland. We just opened a new city, Cork City in the south of Ireland. We've got five more cities in Ireland we're going to go live with. We have an unlimited license in the United States as well for the UK market. Unfortunately, the regulations are not there yet to permit what we do and that's because of post Brexit. Unfortunately, when the UK left the eu, it also left the EU drone regulations. And so the UK has needed to build its own. We're very hopeful though. We are in discussions with both UK local government and with the regulator there about doing our first operation in the UK this year. So the market is finally starting to open up. And I think in Europe, UK would be by far the biggest market for us because of the buying behavior and delivery behavior there.
- [19:29]
Sarah Rogers
What about wildlife and privacy, drones hovering over people's gardens? And we know you've had noise complaints
- [19:36]
Bobby Healy
as well, for sure, you know, and this is a brand new world, you know, so there's so much to unpick in that. First of all, there's no issue with wildlife. We frequently see birds actually just flying and landing on our drone. And now with our new propulsion system, we've introduced new technology this year that's just almost completely silent. You really don't hear us when we fly overhead.
- [20:00]
Sarah Rogers
So talk to me about the numbers then. Are you making a profit?
- [20:05]
Bobby Healy
So this may shock people, but we've raised venture capital, about $120 million. We lose a lot of money because we have nearly 180 employees. But the operations themselves are profitable, which is very unusual for an industry like this. So we already make money on every single flight. But those 180 people that are in manufacturing and engineering, research and development, those salaries have to be paid. So we would need to be a lot bigger than we are now to be profitable. I think we would probably reach profitability within the next two to three years. And for a venture backed space like we are, that's actually a very good position. So we're in a net net. We're in a very strong position financially.
- [20:52]
Sarah Rogers
Was there a particular moment for you where you realized this is the one, it's a success?
- [20:59]
Bobby Healy
Well, it's still not there. It's still like I'm running this business nearly eight years now and the jury is still out on whether we're going to be what we think we can be. There's still risk ahead for us. So now the hard part actually starts where we're actually going to start growing it.
- [21:16]
Sarah Rogers
And what about other people in the sphere? Not just drone deliveries, but food deliveries. Just Eat, Deliveroo, Uber.
- [21:26]
Bobby Healy
Well actually we work with all of those companies. So we announced contracts with Uber Eats with Deliveroo with Just Eat doordash. Yeah, they are. There are several hundred million dollar contracts each one of them. They're global contracts. They're really well managed companies. But for them to find drivers on Friday night or Saturday night, you know, in a, in a slightly less dense suburb in bad weather, it's very difficult for them to do that. So we augment their business. We don't replace those drivers and riders that they already have. We just add additional capacity for them that you know, gives them a bit of a breather.
- [22:05]
Sarah Rogers
Can you beat your competitors?
- [22:07]
Bobby Healy
I don't see them as competitors either. I mean this is a trillion dollar industry, at least a trillion dollars. I'd be very happy to share a third each with Amazon and Google. That'd be absolutely fine for me.
- [22:19]
Sarah Rogers
So what does the future look like for you then if you get your crystal ball out of it?
- [22:22]
Bobby Healy
Future means I'm going to spend the rest of the year in the United States. But that's mostly about hiring a great team over there, getting our manufacturing over there a bun. Things that really I have to be there for. But the HQ is and always will be Dublin, Ireland. Once we get operations and manufacturing running there, I'll be able to come home to the back to the reign of Dublin. I think in the next two years we're going to have a gigantic US footprint. We're going to have hopefully a gigantic UK footprint as well. And the only thing between us and growth in the UK is going to be the regulations and how quickly they can come out. And crystal ball, in five years time we'll be a public company and we'll be the biggest delivery company in the world.
- [23:05]
Sarah Rogers
Is there anything that you wish you'd known before starting the company?
- [23:09]
Bobby Healy
Nope. You know what? Nothing has come as a surprise. I went into this very open minded. I took it from every angle to understand where the pitfalls would be where the risks would be all calculated and well thought out. I think we are where I expected us to be. I'm even more positive and more bullish, I think, about the future. There's nothing that's surprised us, neither positively nor negatively, about this, as surprising as that may be for people.
- [23:39]
Sarah Rogers
Bobby Healy, founder of Manor Air Delivery thank you very much for joining me on this episode of Meet the Founders.
- [23:47]
Bobby Healy
Thank you very much.
- [23:49]
Sarah Rogers
And that's it for this week's edition of Meet the Founders. With me, Sarah Rogers, the producer was Nev Mellow McDermott. To listen to more conversations like this, search and subscribe to Business Daily. Wherever you get your podcasts and you can get in touch with the team, our email address is business dailybc.co.uk thanks for listening.
- [24:21]
BBC Narrator
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