Interviewee
Billy Thalheimer, Co-Founder & CEO at REGENT, shares with us how they are creating regional, coastal, high comfort travel, and how they are planning on reducing the cost of regional transportation.
Transcript
Billy Thalheimer: So I'm Billy Thalheimer, co-founder and CEO at Regent. My background is actually as an aerospace engineer. So I spent my undergrad in grad at MIT working on sort of advanced aircraft design, multidisciplinary optimization, and writing sort of design codes. Spent some time in commercial space, Blue origin, Virgin Galactic, had a great time there, but decided I'd liked mobility and, and transportation better. So I found my way back to aviation wound out, but a company called Aurora Flight Sciences, which was working on sort of electric aircraft and these cool new configurations. And this was right around the time when this ev toll movement, so electric vertical takeoff and landing, these air taxis were popping up.
Companies like Joe B and Liam and Archer were starting to pop up, and Boeing, the largest aerospace company in the world, didn't have a horse in the race, so they acquired Aurora. They said, Go build one. So that's what we did. I started engineering there. I led the conceptual design and, and performance modeling of this vehicle. So this is called the passenger air vehicle or, the pav, which went from basically a code on my computer to a 2000 pound autonomous electric aircraft in about 13 months. So super fun, fast program. I transitioned into program management and then after a while into business development.
And so sort of my time at Aurora Flight Sciences in Boeing was really unique. And then I got the opportunity to see this new space, this electrification of aviation space from the lenses of an engineer, a program manager, a business developer. I'm a private pilot, so I've also been able to see the lens of, you know, in the cockpit, in the national airspace and sort of form the thesis while I was doing all this work that, you know what, electrifying airplanes is really hard.
The hard parts about it are that, you know, you have this certification pathway that takes a decade and a billion dollars, still not one commercial passenger has flown on an electric aircraft and, and electric cars are ubiquitous. It's crazy. You know, they are everywhere. So that certification pathway is a huge, huge hurdle. And additionally, with existing battery technology, you can't go that far. Yes, we can get people up in the air, but when you think about how you actually operate these things and reserve fuels and the batteries get old, you don't go that far. And so what myself and my co-founder, Mike Klinker, who was also an MIT alumni also at Aurora Flight Sciences, decided to do when we founded the region was say, we wanna disrupt regional mobility.
We wanna disrupt routes like LA to San Francisco, Boston to New York. And we want to do that with an electric vehicle with all these great benefits, you know, sustainable, low cost, low noise, high redundancy, all these awesome things. But we wanna do it with existing battery technology and we still wanna figure out a way to go these long routes and we want to do it in a, in a, under a different certification pathway. And so that's what we, what we did when we designed the sea glider and, and founded Regent about 18 months ago.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow. 18 months ago. It was in the middle of the pandemic, right? The middle of 2020. So how was the first idea you pitched, or how did you get your first investors? Wasn't it hard?
Billy Thalheimer: Yes, no, definitely. You know, taking, taking that leap from, you know, a cushy engineering job and a guaranteed paycheck to, to zero paycheck and, and just finding your own way is, is definitely difficult. We sort of got to the point where we said, You know what? We're ready to do this. You know, we need to sort of sever the tie if we really wanna explore this, if we wanna do this and, and sort of own all the IP from it. So we left Boeing, we started doing, you know, more of the engineering, more of the business development. We said, Okay, we think there's something here. Now when our, when, when we are thinking about this idea, our wife said, Okay, you know, this is cool. You guys are following your dreams. We'll give you five months, okay? And, and by the end of month three, if you don't have any money, you gotta start looking for a new job. And by the end of month five, you have to have a new job. That was, And we're like, okay, that's, that's very reasonable to go without salary for that long.
So we left Aurora and Boeing in November of 2020, and, and Christmas was coming up, and so our wives made us custom t-shirts that said, you know, because salaries are overrated, This is, this is the founder lifestyle. But actually we applied. So we sort of went through our network and we found people that had built startups before or invested before. And we, you know, we just asked everyone in the world, What do you think of this pitch deck? What makes sense to you? What doesn't, would you invest in this? Why or why not? And so one of them advised us to apply to Y Combinator. Now we had missed the deadline already, but we certainly knew about the prestige of Y Combinator. So we wrote the application applied late, and we're actually in the program. We actually got accepted on my co-founder's birthday in mid-December. And so by the time we got our Christmas presents, these custom shirts that said salary is overrated, we had already raised money and, and you know, we're paying ourselves a small salary.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow, this is such a great story. I mean, it sounds like it came out of a fairytale. Wow. It's amazing.
Billy Thalheimer: It felt like that. But I mean, it was definitely like that first step where you're like, I'm, I'm done with a paycheck for now and we're gonna go out on our own and try to find money. Was, was definitely, I mean, that, that was a big step. So, you know, you look backwards and it's like all these things worked out and that's amazing. And I, and I attribute a lot of it to the, you know, the support of our wives and our extended support network to the advisement of, you know, this network we had built and people, you know, former founders and investors and everyone that sort of held our hands and helped us through this is, this was our first rodeo. But no, it's, it's, it was a great way to start.
Elisa Muñoz: It is a great story. Thank you so much for sharing. Okay, so back to the airplane. I know that it's an all electric vehicle, right? With no emission. I mean, for a mortal like me, it sounds expensive. So how is it that it decreases the cost of transportation?
Billy Thalheimer: Yeah, so that's the best part about electric, really any electric propulsion system, you think about a Tesla versus a normal car, and the maintenance cost of a Tesla are about actually a third of a normal car. And actually most of the maintenance events for a Tesla are like computer screens and chips and stuff. But the motors don't wear out the batteries, you know, these are like fixed systems. They don't have moving parts. When you think about what ages on an airplane, airplanes age by the cycle. So when you take off, you know, you pressurize the cabin, so you expand the cabin and then you go back down and, and they shrink again. So you're constantly expanding and contracting a cabin.
When you think about the engines, they're, they're heating up, you know, as they, as they run, and then they're cooling down when they land, and there's all these moving parts. And so as you heat up and cool down, they expand and contract and they rub against each other. You think about the landing gear, they're impacting the pavement every time you land. So all of these fatigue events happen cyclically, and it's not the best way to do it. You know, it makes a lot of sense when you're flying very long ranges, right? Because those cycles are very long. But if you're doing very short cycles, a hundred, 200, 300 miles, you're gonna do many cycles in a day.
And so you're actually gonna age out your assets really quickly. And so that, you know, the way that the operator, the airline, or even a ferry company pays for that is through maintenance cost. And it becomes very expensive. So what you want for a short range system is something that's low altitude, so un pressurized and something that's electric so that it doesn't, it actually ages by the hour. There's really no moving parts. It's just a solid state battery. You have a bunch of wires that go out to the motors. The only moving parts in the motor are the motor bearings. And that's a very easy thing.
You sort of just pop off the cap and replace the motor bearings or inspected, and so your maintenance costs drop drastically. And then the other part is your fuel cost, right? So fuel is very expensive, getting more and more expensive given, you know, geopolitical environments, it's even more expensive. And of course, with the sustainability tailwinds, it's being taxed or even outright capped and banned like we're seeing in California and in other states, actually in New York, you know, the actual banning of non-electric cars, which can certainly extend to other modes. So actually this makes the vehicle far more affordable to have an all-electric propulsion system. Our maintenance costs are lower, our fuel costs are lower, our taxes are lower. And in so doing we can actually offer something with the speed of an aircraft that's half the cost.
Ask everyone for advice, do not sugarcoat it. Go into them with your initial pitch saying “What is wrong with this?” You know, “What would cause you not to invest?” You want to expose yourself to all of the negative feedback.
Elisa Muñoz: And how long did it take you guys in order to develop this proposal system? Like is it really hard to build?
Billy Thalheimer: Well, that's sort of the best part. You know, I think some of the best companies I say, you know, you build on the shoulders of giants. And so really the, the only reason we could even envision something like an all-electric sea glider now is because we've had such, such advances in motor technology and battery technology because of the electric cars, because of the electric aircraft. And in that industry where Mike and I and a lot of our founding team came from. So, you know, we can now go out and buy motors and batteries from third party vendors and, and hook them together.
And obviously there's some intricacies in how you design that system and manage heat of that system and things like that. But, you know, at the bare bones, like we don't need to design and build the motor. We can buy it and we can buy the batteries and these are available. And so now we can build new configurations that, you know, use physics in new ways.
Elisa Muñoz: I was actually reading an article of yours and about the REGENT, and I was really curious to ask about the wave tolerance. How does that work?
Billy Thalheimer: Yeah, so this actually was sort of a, a key, you know, founding principle, a key aspect of the sea glider value proposition as a differentiator from previous craft. So you think about a sea plane or a flying boat you're taking off and landing from a hole or from the floats, right? They're flat bottoms or skipping off the waves as you come up to speed and certainly land, I don't know if you've ever been on one, but even if you've been on, you know, a, a motor boat or a fast boat before, going over the waves, horribly uncomfortable. And so if you think about how you accelerate up to take off speed, you know, at best it's uncomfortable.
At worst you can't take off at all because the waves are too high. So for our system, for our water based flying machine that we call a glider, the key, the key differentiation was to give it that wave tolerance. And that's what we did with hydrofoils. So we're using technology from the America's Cup, which is, you know, the absolute cream of the crop in terms of racing technology in the maritime world, it's sort of like the F1 racing of maritime. And so these hydrofoils, they're underwater wings. So they provide lift underwater, they lift up the vehicle on stilts. So if you watch some of the videos on our website, you'll see it moving around the surface of the water with these submerged foils making no wake being incredibly efficient, highly maneuverable in most of all wave tolerance.
So as long as the foil stays submerged, the hole is above the waves, the waves can go in between it. So with this quarter scale prototype that you see flying over my shoulder, and then we have videos online, it can do between about a foot to a foot and a half of wave tolerance. So when we multiply the size by four, that's about four to six feet of wave tolerance where if you're riding on board that vessel, it is totally comfortable, totally maneuverable, totally safe. And so we do that through the harbor where there is just a hydrofoil ferry in the harbor. When we get to the edge of the harbor, that's when we take off onto our wing when the traffic dies down and we fly at aircraft speeds, again, always within a wingspan of the surface of the water on route to our destination.
Elisa Muñoz: I know that you guys can have like 12 passengers and the two guys in the cabin. So is there a specific license in order to drive one of your seagliders that people need to have?
Billy Thalheimer: Yeah, so sea gliders are under maritime jurisdiction. They're regulated by the Coast guards, so they're a US flagged vessel internationally. We've been working with Bureau Veritas, which is a classification society, and actually recently announced that we achieved our first certification milestone, the approval in principle with Bureau Veritas. So, you know, we take this one step further, it's not just that we're certifying the vehicle under maritime jurisdiction, we're actually certifying the captains under maritime jurisdiction as well, which makes sense because we're staying within a wingspan of the surface of the water at all times, dock to dock over water exclusively. Really, we're never going above the height of a sailboat mask.
So we operate in the maritime environment. We're not going to airports, we're not going, you know, we're not going in the air traffic or, or airspace. And so what we've done on the region team is we've taken sort of the latest and greatest in sensors and flight controls and we've taken all of the airplane stuff out of the system and automated it. So your role control, your pitch control, your altitude control, your coordination of the takeoff and landings, like all this stuff you train pilots for is now automated by the digital flight control system. Super safe. And so the only thing that the captain of this vessel does is boat controls left and right fast and slow. And again, the transitions between the float foil and fly modes are automated.So coming back to your question, I know sort of a long roundabout way of answering it, but perfect.
The captains of the sea gliders will be maritime certified, so it'll be maritime masters and then they'll get a sea glider endorsement, which is a six to eight week programs or really fast where you familiarize yourself with, you know, the sea glider technology specifically do some safety courses and then you're sort of ready to go. So, you know, that makes it similar to a high speed craft or even a hovercraft rating where you get sort of your baseline maritime master rating and then you get a specific craft endorsement.
Elisa Muñoz: And last but not least, do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs or people starting on this path?
Billy Thalheimer: I think one of the things that, that we did well or that, or that served us well was just asking everyone for advice and not to sugarcoat that advice. You know, like what, go into them with your initial pitch deck saying what is wrong with this? You know, what would, what would cause you not to invest? You know, when you're, when you're founding something, you want to expose yourself to all of the negative feedback so that when you, you know, it's sort of like practice, like you play, right? You wanna, you, you wanna see every question in the book so that you already have the answer to it rehearsed or you have a slide about it so that when you actually go to pitch the investor that does have money, you're totally prepared for it.
I remember when we were practicing for our YC interview or Y Combinator interview, you only have 10 minutes. And so what we would do is we'd practice and our advisors would, would interrupt us and they would throw everything at us and sometimes they would play the nice one and sometimes they'd play the mean one and sometimes they'd play the distracted one or the uninterested one. And it was brutal. It was absolutely brutal. But you subject yourself to that pain yourself so that you know, when, when you actually go out there and play, it's so much easier. So I, I'd absolutely recommend for founders ready to make that leap, just expose yourself to all the crap you can because when you actually go for the pitch it'll be much easier.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow, thank you so much for that. Great advice and thank you so much for being here, Billy, for taking the time to share your experiences.
Billy Thalheimer: Elisa, thanks so much.
