After running through his options, Nick decided to place a call directly to Ryan over at DJI. As DJI's Chief Technology Officer, the man possessed an exhaustive, encyclopedic knowledge of the commercial drone supply chain, making him the absolute most qualified industry veteran to point them in the right direction.
"Kacy, patch me through to Ryan's personal line at DJI."
"Understood, sir. Initiating the connection now."
The line only buzzed twice before Ryan's booming, charismatic laughter flooded the speaker. "Well, hello there, Nick! To what do I owe the absolute honor of a phone call from the man himself?"
"Hey, Ryan! Honestly, I just missed hearing your voice, man," Nick said, lying through his teeth with a completely straight face. If it weren't for the immediate propulsion bottleneck threatening his engineering sprints in the lab, he probably wouldn't have remembered the guy's extension. While they had forged a solid professional rapport during their consecutive months operating out of the Miami tech incubator, it had ultimately been a tactical joint-venture partnership—ordinary industry peers who respected each other's talent, but certainly not close enough to call each other up just to swap weekend golf stories.
Ryan was far too corporate to fall for the casual routine, but he chose to play along with the dance. Instead of calling him out, he let out a hearty chuckle, teasing, "Come on, CEO Harryson! You're the absolute centerpiece of Silicon Valley right now, a certified titan. I figured a small-fry tech director like me had completely slipped off your radar."
"What titan? I'm practically running on fumes and a prayer over here, man."
Nick let loose a heavy sigh for dramatic effect, adding, "And look, I could forget anyone in the sector but you. Our hardware integration sprints back in Miami were some of the cleanest operational runs of my career."
"Alright, now you're just insulting my intelligence. Your consumer voice assistant ecosystem literally just cleared billions in net valuation, and you're trying to tell me you're clipping coupons!" Ryan countered, his tone dripping with mock disbelief.
Nick instantly doubled down on the defensive, adopts a victim complex as he began listing his corporate grievances. "Man, don't even get me started on the margins. You run a hardware manufacturing matrix yourself, so you know the brutal reality. Once you subtract the tier-one component costs, the contract manufacturing overhead, and the localized assembly fees, the net profit margin gets incredibly thin. More importantly, our capital conversion cycle is painfully sluggish, and once the major e-commerce platforms and retail distributors take their percentage off the top, the cash flow isn't nearly as staggering as Wall Street claims."
"On top of that, our R&D burn rate is absolutely hemorrhaging cash; every single validation sprint demands an ungodly amount of capital. I swear, I get a literal migraine every single morning just staring at our balance sheets and those endless strings of negative numbers."
Hahahaha... Ryan burst into a loud, roaring laugh. He knew with absolute certainty that Nick was spinning a massive corporate yarn; their actual balance sheets were nowhere near as desperate as the kid was letting on.
In point of fact, multiple teardown analysis firms and supply chain experts had already published granular cost-of-materials breakdowns of the H1 assistant across the web. Tracking their baseline consumer model, which carried a retail price of 1689, the combined bill of materials and factory manufacturing costs didn't even breach the 500-dollar threshold. Even when aggressively factoring in shipping logistics, regional warehousing, and middle-man commissions, the total cost per unit topped out at six or seven hundred dollars, leaving an absolutely massive, printing-press level of net profit margin.
During the current quarter, virtually every executive board from Seattle to Austin had been laser-focused on tracking Nick's corporate trajectory at Militech and parsing the staggering sales velocity of the H1 voice assistant. There was simply no avoiding the data; the product line was a runaway cultural phenomenon, commanding the absolute gravity of the tech sector.
Moreover, the underlying software architecture was undeniably flawless. Ryan found himself staring at his own smartphone, realizing he had become completely dependent on the very contextual AI assistant that this twenty-something kid had compiled over pizza during their shared Miami residency.
Processing the reality filled him with a subtle, existential sting; it was definitive proof that some geniuses simply operated on an entirely separate evolutionary tier.
The major global wealth indices hadn't updated their billionaire metrics for the fiscal year yet, but when the new rankings cleared the wire, the data was going to completely shatter the tech community. Nick was mathematically guaranteed to debut on the chart with a staggering, historical valuation.
The defining metric wasn't just the sheer velocity of his wealth accumulation—it was the fact that his corporate equity was completely independent compared to traditional tech billionaires. To this exact day, Ryan hadn't picked up a single rumor through the Silicon Valley grapevine suggesting that Nick or his board had any intention of filing for an initial public offering.
The moment this company chooses to execute an IPO, even if it doesn't instantly match the staggering scale of enterprise giants like Alphabet or Microsoft, hitting the evaluation trajectory of Tesla or Apple is a foregone conclusion.
Most critically, the guy currently possessed a total economic vacuum—he had zero authentic competitors in his vertical. In the consumer artificial intelligence sector, while they hadn't technically achieved a state-sanctioned monopoly, they had successfully locked down an absolute, unassailable industrial chokehold.
Capturing one hundred percent of the global market share was simply a matter of execution timelines, unless a rival development team managed to reverse-engineer their encryption matrix or deploy a competing language model capable of matching the H1's cognitive flexibility.
But evaluating that vector from an engineering perspective, the probability was near zero. As a seasoned R&D director who understood the grueling, multi-year reality of deploying a groundbreaking technology platform, Ryan knew that hitting a hardware breakthrough in cutting-edge deep learning was an uphill battle.
He had closely audited the fraudulent terminal exploit video that had gone viral overseas the previous week. In truth, behind closed doors, dozens of multinational tech conglomerates and elite cybersecurity firms had been running non-stop, black-box reverse-engineering sprints against Nick's voice assistant framework.
Even Ryan's own internal software engineering division at DJI had quietly spun up a isolated sandbox cluster to run targeted penetration testing and tentative decompilation attempts against the Militech kernel.
But at the end of the sprint, his developers hit the exact same unyielding wall as every other global enterprise and academic research lab: they couldn't even map the registry points.
"It's an absolute ghost fortress. It's a cleaner security layer than the Pentagon's internal network architecture," had been the universal, defeated consensus among his senior developers.
He found himself constantly wondering what kind of black-swan codebase Nick had discovered to synthesize this technology. The kid wasn't just deploying an encryption standard that defied contemporary mathematical models; he had architected an entirely unprecedented system framework from the ground up. A few theoretical computer scientists had even floated the hypothesis that Nick's team had engineered a completely proprietary, non-public programming language to compile the software.
If that hypothesis held water, it meant that unless a developer managed to acquire the master syntax keys to the language itself, cracking the underlying system logic was a mathematical impossibility.
So what exactly was the objective behind this sudden afternoon call? Militech and DJI were currently locked into a lucrative commercial partnership managing the autonomous Drone Swarm Light Show network. The tracking software was rock-solid, the operational parameters were fully mature, and their respective field teams were executing events seamlessly across the country, meaning there shouldn't be a single technical error on the board.
Nick Harryson never picked up the phone just to pass the time. What chess piece was the kid moving?
Sure enough, after cycling through a few routine corporate pleasantries, Nick finally pivoted to his true objective. "Hey, Ryan, all joking aside... the primary reason I'm hitting your line today is to pick your brain on a specific supply chain variable."
Here it comes, Ryan thought, his internal radar instantly spiking. Maintaining his calm, corporate composure, he smiled into his handset. "Oh, absolutely, man. Lay it on me. If it's within my operational purview, I'll give you everything I've got."
"Awesome. Honestly, it's a pretty routine component question. I'm trying to track down if there are any elite, high-spec domestic hardware manufacturers that specialize in fabricating ultra-high-output, custom brushless motors specifically engineered for micro-UAV frames," Nick said casually, his voice perfectly smooth.
Thump. Ryan's heart did a violent, sudden drop against his ribs. Is this kid actually trying to pivot his development teams into the physical drone manufacturing sector? Why the hell would a pure software enterprise suddenly start sourcing drone propulsion units? Did they crack an entirely new automated flight framework? Spurred by an immediate wave of competitive anxiety, Ryan adjusted his headset, keeping his voice carefully neutral. "Uh, Nick... walk me through the roadmap here. Is Militech actively structuring a product launch to penetrate the commercial drone market?"
"No, no, nothing like that, man. We're just running some baseline, internal hobby prototyping in the back lab. You remember our foundational Swarm-Array Control Technology, right? Our engineering guys recently cooked up some wild new telemetry theories. But we hit a physical bottleneck during live hardware validation, and we need some serious high-horsepower propulsion units to scale up our structural velocity," Nick explained with a light, easy laugh.
A triple-layered corporate denial? The more casually Nick tried to minimize the development track, the more intensely Ryan's corporate defense alarms started blaring. When you're operating at this level of the tech sector, every single component query involves highly classified industrial secrets; who could possibly guarantee that Nick wasn't spinning a strategic web? For all he knew, the kid was using this casual call to deliberately feed a calculated piece of disinformation straight back to DJI's executive suite.
But logically, why would Militech deploy a competitive smokescreen right now? They didn't have a competing hardware chassis on the market.
Furthermore, asking straight-up about high-horsepower, specialized military-grade propulsion specs felt entirely too concrete to be a manufactured narrative.
"Wow, okay... the more you hedge, the more fascinated I'm getting here, Nick. Can you give your old industry partner a high-level overview of the specific structural friction point your team is hitting? Why exactly does a software array require that much mechanical horsepower?" As he spoke the words, Ryan subtly reached out with his index finger and tapped the secure call-recording icon on his terminal screen.