The HIVE, a unique hybrid accelerator in Grand Forks for UAS and autonomous systems and its executive director, Johnny Ryan. Weekly new chat with Dave Thompson, and Matt Olien reviews Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie.
The HIVE UAS Tech Accelerator in Grand Forks (transcript)
Main Street
This is Main Street on Prairie Public. I’m Craig Blumenshine. The HIVE serves as a central hub for US and autonomous tech systems in Grand Forks, offering programming and support services for those companies. Its managing director isJohnny Ryan, who has over a decade of experience in leading technology education, curriculum and programming across the country, including Silicon Valley. Johnny, welcome to Main Street.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
Thank you for having me.
Main Street
If you were to describe the HIVE to me, and I want to let our listeners know, I just had this wonderful tour and saw amazing technology and science that’s happening here in Grand Forks. But having said all that, what is the HIVE?
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
The HIVE is, it’s a lot of things. It’s collaboration. It’s dedication to the US industry. It’s kind of a first of its kind. It’s companies that all have a focus on being in the sky, supporting the sky, building autonomous systems, autonomous drones and really just pushing each other to get there. And I think it’s competitive in the fact that companies here will work on, on similar contracts or similar projects. It’s also collaborative in the sense that most of them have worked together, supporting each other on different projects around the state, around the country, around the world. In fact, it’s great to see kind of everyone kind of grouping together. And it’s North Dakota maybe versus other areas. It’s really just a fun environment. Everyone is has their own space to, to get their work done and, and be focused, but they also have opportunities to meet their US neighbor and, you know, discuss maybe things that haven’t worked or have worked and and learn from there.
Main Street
We want to let our listeners know that UAS stands for Unmanned Aircraft or Aerial Systems. What is the history of the HIVE and why was it named the HIVE?
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
So the history of the HIVE is fortunately, we had a mayor that Mayor Blonsky that took a chance and really wanted to to make this building what it is today with the focus on autonomous systems and drones, particularly a HIVE, is a cluster of drones. So when you go look up terms around the HIVE or what a drone is, in fact all will have relation to bees and their colonies. So it’s it’s pretty fascinating, but it’s really caught on. We’ve just had a lot of excitement around joining the HIVE, supporting the HIVE, you know, how do I have an event at the HIVE? And really, this is you know, this isn’t for me. This isn’t for the city. This is for everybody else. So we’re trying to make it just an environment that can be a catalyst for, for what everyone’s trying to do for us. And I think the Grand Forks is leading that charge.
Main Street
I think that’s true. It’s marketed, Grand Forks is, as the Silicon Valley of drone research. It’s. Sure seems to be true.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
Yeah. I think just knowing the companies that I’ve talked to and the caliber of companies in the last six months and the six months before that, just seeing how it’s jumped up, it was already at the top of my list, for sure, of tell people from other cities and states, you know, Grand Forks is the place to be for drones, period. And now I see companies coming to me that are from other countries, other states, and I mean, they’re top of their class. So what they do and they want to be a part of this. So I mean, it’s absolutely taken off if it wasn’t already. It’s now fuel on the fire.
Main Street
Tease our listeners with some of the technology that companies are working on right in this building. Sure.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
So we have companies working on autonomous, basically a payload that can connect to another drone and make it fully autonomous so it can do critical infrastructure inspection that that would be thread. And so they can basically find issues with damages on a wind blade, or they’re faster to the information, which is the biggest thing. The quicker you can give information and make the decisions, the quicker you can move on to the next maybe wind blade that you’re inspecting or electrical power lines, you know, any critical infrastructure. We have companies that are specializing in mid-air drone refueling. We have companies that have very advanced radars that can basically detect this is a bird, or this is a drone or this is a plane, and distinguish between them. We have companies that can collect ton, a ton of data and basically, you know, start to map out very precise weather data. We have companies that can basically analyze any data that they get and stitch it together and give 3D models of whatever, whatever data is that could be rock piles, that could be construction sites, that could be a 3D map of of anything going up. And then we also have companies like Northrop Grumman that obviously have the big birds, as we say. So, you know, there’s kind of a little bit for everyone. But we also have startups that are small drone manufacturing companies that basically want to be a foundry to just say, hey, I want to I want a drone that’s made 100% in the United States. And what’s even better than that? 100% made in North Dakota. Even better than that, we think 100% made in Grand Forks, North Dakota. And so they’re working on that, which is unheard of.
Main Street
We’re in what used to be the old Grand Forks Herald building. It does not look like an old newspaper shop to me anymore.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
No. We were fortunate enough to go through the EDA grant process. We were awarded $1.2 million from the EDA. What’s the EDA? The economic development agency. So with a partnership with them, we were able to up fit what you see today. And that project is finishing now. And then we have phase two of that, which I just showed you kind of the old Herald space. What’s going to be our kind of next phase for office space, which will have 6000ft², probably 15 suites. Grand Sky will be having kind of the anchor tenant. They have a commitment for one of the largest spaces up there and so does aerospace. So it’s exciting and we are locked. Offices have been full now for over a month. So we’re excited to get the second phase rolling out.
Main Street
You have people I’m looking at someone just through the glass who’s just sitting in a booth, drinking her coffee and working in kind of a public space. Then there are these smaller, shared kind of private cubes, and then there are open space offices. And you have all of the technology that I can think of to support all of this. Give us a background of how you designed it like you did or how it was designed, and then the technology that is here to support it all.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
Yeah. Good question. One of the biggest pieces of technology that we have here is our security infrastructure, our encrypted internet.
Ten years ago you’d say what’s your what’s your download speed? Everybody wanted to download a video, a movie and see how fast it can stream. Or is it buffering? Know. And that’s what everyone’s pain point is with the drone industry. The pain point isn’t the download speed, it’s the upload speed. So how can you get data from an SD card from a drone, data that you just collected, and heavy data? How do you get that up to the cloud? Every time a new camera comes out or a better camera comes out, each file is going to be a larger file to download onto your computer, and then you’ve got to get that file from your computer locally up to the cloud.
So our upload speeds are what we kind of pride ourselves on. We recently just upgraded. We have two gigabyte per second upload 2000mbps. Those are the same thing. So that we we think that that’s really a substantial thing. Because when you’re if you’re an individual business owner, you can’t afford that kind of internet upload speed. So here’s a good example, Craig, if we had a pilot who’s a commercial pilot and he’s collecting data on site that, you know, some power company are out in Watford City and he’s collected a ton of data and he needs to upload it to the cloud. If he goes back to his hotel room and does that, he’s going to be looking at five megabits a second upload. And it’s insecure. Yes. Not secure.
So if he comes here, rather than sit 12 hours and wait for that to finish uploading, if it airs out any, if there’s too many lost packets in between and airs out, he might have to start over. So if he can come here and do that in 20 minutes, he might be on the road to Oklahoma tonight, finish their job tomorrow and be back home a day early. And that’s, you know, a full time commercial pilot working on a new project versus waiting around for this data to upload.
Main Street
We’re enjoying our conversation with Johnny Ryan. He’s the managing director of The HIVE, which serves as a central hub for US and autonomous tech startups in Grand Forks. Offering programming and support services to those startup companies. There are memberships that allow people to have access to everything that’s here. What is a membership?
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
There are a few ways to become a member. Obviously, we have a heavy criteria application process around you must be US related, US focused. There’s a lot of different ways to get to that. There’s a lot of different non technical and supportive roles that that are played out in the US ecosystem. For instance there’s financial roles. There’s there’s legal roles. There’s just other supportive roles data support centers. So it’s not just somebody building a drone necessarily. But we do have criteria on that. To become a member, we charge $150 a month for a flex membership. And my background in Palo Alto was teaching programming in an immersion, fast paced, 12 week bootcamp where you’re not guaranteed any degree.
At the end of that, well, everybody in there is a startup and they would hire right out of our space. And so basically that tech accelerator, any time you put a new person in a seat, they charge you. Every time you take a conference room, they charge you. Every time you use the boardroom, they charge you per hour. And so companies would expand. And if there was enough space, they’d take over maybe a conference room while they’re paying 24 hours a day for that conference room. The benefit of our membership is once you’re a member, you can use our internal booking system, which is super slick. And basically, whether you’re a 2000 square foot member paying per square foot times how many members you have, or you’re paying one person $150 a month, you can book our boardrooms, our our flex space, our huddle rooms as many times as you want for free our community. You could have an event in our community room for free. You could have an event over in our kitchen for free, you know. So that’s it really makes it just an equal playing field for all.
Main Street
Does the HIVE break even? Is it subsidized? Is it sustainable?
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
It’s sustainable. We’re working on getting our max capacity now so that we are sustainable. Right now. We think that we’re definitely ahead of schedule as far as leases coming in. You know we’ve been our lock spaces have been full. We’ve only been able to even sign leases since June of this year. And now we’re in October. So we’re really excited about where we’re at. We’re approaching 20 companies. I think our original goal was, can we get to 20 companies by the end of the year? I think that’s going to be a lot higher now. And then April 1st, we plan on having 15 more locked offices that are leased. Revenue coming in for us obviously won’t be full day one, but we’re moving at a pace that it could be. You never know. So there’s a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of support, and these companies are only growing. I mean, we have a lot of companies that plant their flag here want to have are just hiring one person. That one person is is is supposed to be hiring two, three, four, five. In the next six months. So where are they going to be operating? Most likely here, if we’re their office.
Main Street
Describe your relationship with the University of North Dakota.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
Yeah, we have a great relationship with the University of North Dakota. We are working on a program to have three months free membership. Membership waived, if you want to say it that way, for any current or grad students from engineering, both engineering and aerospace. And basically we want to make it just a space that they can come work on flight logs if they want to come study, if they want to come apply for jobs, even if it’s supplied elsewhere. We kind of just threw it out there that, hey, check this out first. You might not want to move to Milwaukee. You might not want to move to Chicago, you know, before graduating or get that job, because where are you going to find something like this? And they can interact with our companies. Our companies can talk to them about what they’re working on. And and the idea is that most of our companies will probably hire almost every one of these students if they allow them to.
Main Street
The US summit was in Grand Forks recently, and you described it as literally anyone who’s graduating from the University of North Dakota’s aerospace programs or flight programs can be hired today. Yep. Tell me more about that.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
Yeah. I mean, I think from what I’ve seen from a US level, just if I give an example on that, the US grads, there’s not enough to go around. So if their commercial pilot and their US grad, that’s the the double combo, you know, because then they’re comfortable talking to the towers, talking to FAA stuff like that that, you know, part 107 operator might not be that comfortable. I’ve seen that part 107 is a drone pilot. So a part one of seven would be somebody buys a drone, they study, they take the class, they pass the class, and now, hey, I’m part 107, quote unquote certified. I can legally fly a drone commercially, but you might not have the background to do all these other things and troubleshoot when there’s an issue with airspace. You might. But from what I’ve seen, having a commercial license and then us is. Pretty effective out in the field because you’re running into so many different situations with airspace and towers, and, you know, it’s a lot to call a tower to ask for permission to fly a certain drones around. And so I think either way, coming out of and I think there’s so many applications for aerospace UAS unmanned that the demand is just huge for hiring those graduates.
Main Street
The large conference, the US Summit, was held recently, as I said just a moment ago. What did that mean for you here at The HIVE?
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
That was a that was a powerful week for us. That was kind of a defining moment for us. We had an event Tuesday night. We’d really prepared a lot for it. A lot went into just having a one hour event. And our event was the idea was to to come take a tour of the HIVE. If you haven’t seen it, get out of the summit for a little bit. Yeah, the summit is awesome and we partner with them and they partner with our event here. But just to get them into town a little bit, you know, maybe see downtown, but come to see the HIVE, get a tour from the mayor. And that went really well. We had over 150 people here from Grand Sky to Northrop Grumman to General Atomics to Tremseh, the government, to our tenants and others. And it really went well. Everyone’s just networking and and just just being excited about what’s going on in Grand Forks. So that was a big deal for us. The next day we had the Lieutenant Governor come through here with her staff. And so just a ton of action that week.
Main Street
What are the challenges that are ahead for you? I mean, it sounds like everything’s going so well. Everything is new, the infrastructure is in place. You’re continuing to build. Are there challenges down the road that you see?
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
For sure? For sure. And we’ve had we’ve had a ton of challenges up to this point. I mean, our tenants have been very flexible with us. We had to put a new roof in almost immediately when we were just getting going. So to have that construction have there was making sure we weren’t getting any water damage or anything. That was a big thing. But our tenants stuck by us and it was a month and a half of construction and we got it done. So that’s that’s good.
Our future challenge is just, you know, figuring out what the space looks like upstairs, kind of how we partition things, how this how we decide on those things and ultimately the budget to move forward with that. We’re looking at this afternoon and then just getting the right tenants. I mean, I think we want to have tenants that are just really good in a group environment, but also have their their focus for their own stuff, but just meet the kind of criteria that we have and we have heavy background process on where, where are these companies coming from, where are they funded from? Where are they American companies? Are they not? So there’s a ton of stuff that we have to figure out and that we vet heavily. And we’ve turned down quite a few companies as it is, you know, when they don’t meet that criteria.
Main Street
Sure. What’s the administrative infrastructure, Johnny, who do you report to?
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
So I report to Todd Phelan, city administrator, and the mayor’s office. So up through the mayor and then we have an advisory board that we have to guide us here at the HIVE.
Main Street
So is that a governmental operation? Are you really a part of the City of Grand Forks?
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
I work for the City of Grand Forks.
Main Street
You may in the future have opportunities. For K-12 students, or at least maybe high school students, to come to the HIVE and have interactions.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
100%. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’re trying to figure out what that looks like. So Fen works. One of our partners runs Esports. They were looking at holding their Esports competitions here. And so they would come and chaperone. And basically back in the classroom there, we’d have all their supercomputers and that would be K through 12 enabled right there. That’s something that we’re still looking at right now. If that doesn’t play out, then we’ll probably do something directly with coding classes or figure out how can we get drone technology to the younger ages in the HIVE.
Main Street
You yourself have a drone operation business, that you’re trying to develop, and it’s providing real time response to first responders. Tell me about
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
Yep. Yeah. So I have a company that PSI Data Sciences, and we have a box that lets us encrypt video from a drone controller and stream that feed encrypted and decrypt it into the cloud, and have a command center so that first responders can can view in real time, near real time, with low latency and encryption of what’s happening. They use it locally here at the border and around the state. They use it at LA fire, LAPD, New York Fire, New York PD, and then separately, we have another company that I helped build, which that spun off of this company that’s an automated drone in the box called first AI. And basically it’s mounted on top of a building like a college university, for example, Boston University or maybe UCLA.
And when the drone deploys, it deploys on a tethered fiber optic line up to 150ft, 150ft is the kind of delineation between the FAA for different regulations. So that’s how we chose that. And basically it’ll have a super camera on it where rather than having a camera up in the sky, that is done after 20 minutes with battery dependencies, fire and swat, whoever’s going in there can see the live feed of what’s going on that could see kale and someone’s teeth from two miles away, you know? But that’s real, you know, so they can see if there was an active shooter that could see what’s going on.
Main Street
Give our listeners an idea of the fast pace of change within this industry, what it was, say, even five years ago or two years ago.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
Oh, I mean, the pace of change is you think the pace of change in technology is already so fast where you you think, oh, MiniDisc is going to be the thing and then it’s everything’s digital, right? So in drones it’s even faster. It’s, you think I got this thing on a string and it’s good, or I got this thing without a string, and then you think you go in one way or another and it switches and it’s, you know, something you didn’t think about. But I think what’s great is a lot of these companies are willing to share kind of what hasn’t worked, because ultimately they’re on the same path. Everyone has the same goal of, like, are these products that protect the country or protect maybe our children or make things safer or things like that, so they evolve in the right way. But it’s yeah, it’s really fast paced.
Main Street
Any use of drone technology that has just surprised you, that I wouldn’t have even thought about that is being used today that you can share with us.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
I’ve seen some automated fire hose systems that basically are connected to a fire hose, and when there’s a fire, it. Start flying in the air and precisely pick where the fires are. And instead of a ladder truck. Yeah, instead of a ladder truck at risk. Pretty amazing. I think any of these autonomous inspection ideas, if you think about somebody climbing up on top of a wind blade, how dangerous it is and how many accidents happen with that, having a drone do that is pretty amazing. Being able to spot spray something on a farm versus like a crop duster, that’s obviously dangerous. I mean, a lot of those things are people are aware of those and they’re pretty well known.
Main Street
Give us insight into how autonomous drone flights have evolved.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
So autonomous drone flights have evolved a ton. There’s so many open source systems that are basically like, okay, I can go download this autonomous operating system and I can go buy the hardware for 100 bucks and I can prototype backyard monitoring system or something. And basically I have 95% of the code to autopilot, to, to balance, to stabilize, to go to this height, to go down to this altitude, to move a gimbal, all those things. And then I only need to maybe put the 5% that I want on top of that code to get it to where I want to, how I want it to operate. Most of the stuff for cents and avoid in that is just a matter of the open source, the hardware and the sensor, and they’re working together. Somebody has already maybe built the code and it can do all the things on its own. So we’re already there where people can take that and then build on top of that.
Main Street
Tell me about the programming, events and classes that are upcoming.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
Yep. So we just finished on Friday. I can’t even stress this enough. One of the most amazing classes I’ve ever attended, including college. I’ll say that. And it was drone law with Professor Jovicic from UMD, and he basically opened up the first five minutes to throw all your questions at me, and then he’ll make the presentation around that. And I’ve never the questions I was asking, I couldn’t there’s no information on the internet for those specific questions. And he was able to address all of them and talk about the industry, where it’s going, what’s legal, what’s not. And there’s so many things around that. And that’s always changing because states are all different. When they change, you don’t necessarily know it. There’s not really a central repository to know all that stuff. So that was the first class. And then we have from Fargo US intellectual property law coming this next week. We have some other soft skills, but they’re on our website for members. It’s free and I think it’s maybe $100 for non-members. These are all based on suggestions from members. And then we try to find the experts. Johnny Ryan, he’s the managing director of The HIVE, which serves as a central hub for US and autonomous tech startups in Grand Forks.
Main Street
Johnny, thanks for joining us on Main Street.
Johnny Ryan, The HIVE
Thank you, Craig.
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