By Ryan Mac. This interview originally appeared on Forbes, January 19, 2016.
Click on above image to view full video interview with Jason Soll and Louis Gresham of Cape Productions.
It’s the day after a storm dumped a few inches of snow on Homewood Mountain Ski Resort and I’m strapping into a cheap, rented snowboard trying to take in the dramatic views. Below me, Lake Tahoe glistens in the morning sun, framed by miles of white dusted evergreens and what seems like an unlimited supply of fresh powder.
Pristine and peaceful. Or rather, just pristine. The peace is interrupted by the incessant, jarring buzz of a $2,500 drone hovering overhead. Its ivory shell makes it difficult to track in the winter landscape.
On most days, I’d be annoyed that the four-propellered embodiment of technological progress is interrupting my zen-like moment with nature, but the drone is why I’m here. It will document my every turn down the mountain as part of a video that will attempt to make me look more like Shaun White than someone who immediately fell after getting off the chairlift.
Cape Productions, a year-old startup founded by ex-Google employees, owns that drone and is hoping to make a business out of making regular people seem like stars of an extreme sports video. While it sounds a little extravagant, Cape is among a handful companies offering drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as a service, whether to survey corn fields on a Nebraska farm or capture overhead shots on the set of a Hollywood blockbuster.
“Most people are not going to have their own drone so there’s going to be services like Cape and even Amazon’s drone delivery,” said Jason Soll, a company cofounder and CEO. “Most customers have never even touched a drone because these things are dangerous when not handled properly.”
While drones theoretically have many futuristic applications, today’s reality means that there are technological and regulatory limitations to what they can actually do. At most of the nation’s ski mountains, for example, lift operators have banned customers from bringing their own drones, fearing that inexperienced operators or faulty aircraft could pose a danger to others. That’s created a unique opportunity for Cape, which has developed partnerships with some resorts to offer video packages to skiers and snowboarders.
Founded in 2014, Cape Productions began as a project between Soll and current Chief Technology Officer Thomas Finsterbusch, two former employees of Google’s special projects lab, X. While they never worked on Google’s drone delivery experiment, Project Wing, they saw that potential for UAV technology and departed the search giant to start their own venture. Soll, a former competitive downhill skier who grew up on Warren Miller snow sports films, also points to the emergence of drones videos around that time as an inspiration.
“I remember seeing a video on Vimeo called “Cinedrones Are Awesome” and it was the first time I’d seen footage shot by drones,” he said. “It got me thinking. I had my action cameras and I loved my GoPro, but I envisioned how cool it would be if there was a drone that could lead me through the trees as I was skiing.”
Along with Soll’s Stanford business school classmate Louis Gresham, Cape began building relationships with resorts and getting acclimated with the regulatory landscape. The Federal Aviation Administration currently bans the general commercial use of drones, so the company applied for a special drone-use permit, known as a Section 333 exemption. Cape also raised $10 million in funding from XSeed Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Madrona Venture Group and the Commercial Drone Fund, an investment group overseen by fellow UAV startup Airware.
A Cape Productions drone captures video of skiers at Lake Tahoe’s Homewood Mountain Ski Resort. (Photo courtesy of Cape Productions)
Today, Cape is the only company to have FAA approval to film with drones at American ski resorts and recently received additional permission to fly UAVs within 500 feet of consenting skiers and snowboarders. That gives it a distinct advantage in a nascent industry limited by regulation “where the vast majority of people” are flying drones illegally, said Gresham, Cape’s Chief Operating Officer.
With the FAA’s blessing, the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup has opened up full operations in the states and is now flying in Lake Tahoe at Homewood and Squaw Valley. Packages, depending on the amount of runs and location, range from $49 to $149, a price point that may appeal in sports that already attract higher-income participants. Customers sign up at the resort or on the hill and can expect a fully edited, two-minute film from the company within 48 hours of shooting.
I had two rides with the drones on Homewood’s “Last Resort” run, which had been blocked off to notify other skiers and snowboarders that drones were being flown in the area. After getting my cue from an employee at the top of the run, I made my way down the hill as aDJI Inspire drone piloted by a former military UAV technician whirred above me and eventually disappeared behind the tree line.
“The service model is unique,” former Google X head and Cape advisor Sebastian Thrun said in an email to FORBES, adding that he’s very optimistic of drone imaging and delivery. “And the model is proven in many other fields, like wedding photographers.”
Kevin Mitchell, the general manager at Homewood, likened the drones to the hired photographers at many resorts who roam the hills taking photos and then sell specific prints to customers at the lodge. He said the revenue-sharing partnership with Cape, in which Homewood will receive less than 30% of the company’s sales, is a “natural fit” taking advantage of under-utilized runs and adding another attraction to the mountain.
Others, including at least two potential investors that met with Cape as it was fundraising, were skeptical. One was worried that the startup would be too reliant on ski resorts, while another believed that improvements in technology could eventually see drones that have the ability to follow a user and avoid objects in its environment, making human pilots and Cape’s people infrastructure obsolete.
Soll disagrees, arguing that his company may not have to just stick to snow resorts to make the business work. And while, they’ve encountered some difficulty opening at new resorts like at Colorado’s Copper Mountain where officials backed out of an agreement due to safety concerns, Cape said it will be opening soon at mountains in Idaho, New Jersey, Oregon and Utah.
As for the technology, it will at be at least a few years before drones will be able to operate autonomously in crowded areas. Though some companies, like Lily Robotics, have shown prototype drones that follow skier and snowboarders down mountains, those are in “very contrived scenarios” said Airware CEO Jonathan Downey, a Cape investor. “I haven’t seen any of these things work very well in a very unconstrained, real world environment.”
In an industry that’s dominated by hype, Cape’s realistic approach to drone operations may be the start of a potentially healthy business. Still, it’s very early days and Soll believes there’s plenty of improvements that can make Cape more effective. He’s hired engineers to build programs on top of drone maker DJI’s software platform, allowing the robots to be programmed to move along defined flight paths. The 18-person company is also working on a wearable that will allow a UAV to autonomously track a user as well as on self-editing video capabilities that will make it faster to deliver finished videos.
“The goal is instant gratification,” he said. “Imagine the moment finish run, you pull out your phone and all your friends are commenting on how cool your jump on an edited video that was posted on Facebook. Pretty awesome.”