Season 2, Episode 10

Host: Matt Hall

Guest: Tyson Weihs

Tyson Weihs (00:00): A number of companies over the years that were truly disrupted by ForeFlight and these platforms and went out of business. I was asked once, "How do you feel about those companies going away?" My response is, "If it wasn't us who had done it, it would have been somebody else", right? But the disruption is not something you can ultimately ignore or dismiss. It will end up transforming your business.

Matt Hall (00:35): Welcome to Take The Long View with Matt Hall. This is a podcast to reframe the way you think about your money, emotion and time. The goal? Helping you put the odds of long-term success on your side.

Matt Hall (00:50): My guest today is Tyson Weihs. Tyson is an entrepreneur, co-founder, and CEO of ForeFlight, the market leading provider of critically acclaimed, essential, integrated flight application software for aviation.

Matt Hall (01:06): He changed the game for pilots. Since its founding in the garages of the two founders in 2007, the company has grown into a multi-national operation with offices in the US and Europe. ForeFlight serves personal, business, military and commercial flight operations around the world and has been recognized for the impact it has made in improving safety of flight.

Matt Hall (01:26): ForeFlight was acquired by Boeing in 2019. The company has been recognized with awards and so have the founders. I'll mention a couple. In 2018, Tyson and his co-founder, Jason Miller, were presented the Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Living Legends of Aviation for their achievements. In 2020, Tyson will be inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame. Tyson serves on a number of boards, including the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Matt Hall (01:52): Some people have said he's responsible for the best aviation software ever produced and that he single-handedly dragged the aviation world forward. Tyson, welcome to Take The Long View.

Tyson Weihs (02:04): Thanks, Matt. Good to be here.

Matt Hall (02:06): Before we get to how you changed the aviation world, let's talk a little bit about some of your early influences. I have heard that your dad was a big time chef or a culinary person. Is that right? Did that have any influence on you early on?

Tyson Weihs (02:20): Yeah. My dad was ... First, he's an immigrant. He came to the United States in 1969, $600 in his pocket and has a culinary background. Grew up in a restaurant family in Germany, a restaurant/hospitality, and immigrated to the US.

Tyson Weihs (02:35): He had a 30 year career in the restaurant business and very early on, some of my first memories are being in his restaurants. I learned how to walk in one of them. I grew up busing tables, waiting tables, and hosting in the restaurant.

Tyson Weihs (02:50): That entrepreneurial influence has been important in my life. I remember early teens, writing code for his business, using that as a way to make money and even through college I was looking for opportunities to be entrepreneurial. The restaurant business and my dad, in particular, were very influential in creating a work ethic. They were very influential in shaping thoughts and philosophies around customer experience because in a restaurant, your reputation of your business is pretty much on the line every evening with every meal that comes out and the experience there. That's had a big influence on how we take care of our customers and try to build the overall experience with our brand.

Tyson Weihs (03:31): Being a chef and a restaurateur requires an immense amount of creativity, right? You are constantly trying to invent new experiences and new things for customers to buy and taste. That was a big one.

Tyson Weihs (03:44): The other one is my mother is an artist. She's a large format painter and also as a calligrapher early on and as a painter, that's entrepreneurial also. Going to art shows, selling artwork and being so exposed to all of those elements as well. That created a good entrepreneurial foundation, I think a work ethic, and then a creative foundation.

Tyson Weihs (04:06): Writing software and applications is a highly creative craft and mine and my co-founder both have creative backgrounds and support from family in those regards and that really shaped the company.

Matt Hall (04:20): Who spurred or encouraged your computer interest?

Tyson Weihs (04:28): School did. I remember in the third grade getting exposed to Apple computers for the first time. We had a computer lab in the early '80s when Apple computers were becoming pervasive in education. I started with computer classes that my mom found at her high school alma mater in Charleston, South Carolina. They were doing turbo loading programming classes. I remember going to those as a kid and then computers were always present in grade school, elementary and middle school.

Tyson Weihs (04:58): You get exposed to it and it was something that I got attracted to early on. I don't think we actually owned a computer until I was in middle school but that was the first exposure. I think being in that environment and getting exposed to it and having teachers that were excited about teaching us about those magical machines was foundational.

Matt Hall (05:16): Do you remember playing Oregon Trail?

Tyson Weihs (05:20): It's sort of a fuzzy memory but I do. I remember playing in the neighborhood, Zork. Kids, neighbors, who had that, which was an early command line game where you type a command and then something would be spit back at you. No graphical user face. It was just sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure game but some of those early games were also really influential.

Tyson Weihs (05:42):

I can't remember all the names of them but I got involved in that and got my first game console at age 10, which was young in those days but those were all part of the experience.

Matt Hall (05:51): Before ForeFlight you started a company. You were at Trinity in San Antonio I think?

Tyson Weihs (05:57): I was.

Matt Hall (05:57): Tell me about that.

Tyson Weihs (05:59): Gosh, it was 1997, '98. I visited with a friend in his dorm room or a new friend there who had a business that he was running out of his dorm room. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. He was a year ahead of me. I think he was a senior at Trinity at the time.

Tyson Weihs (06:15): I wanted to do something similar, right? What happened eventually is he and another computer science classmate of mine, we teamed up in late senior year of 1998 and started an e-commerce consulting company. Back in the '90s, webpages were still novel. Netscape went public in 1996. That sort of started the ascent of the internet and in the late '90s, building HTML and webpages was kind of black magic.

Tyson Weihs (06:42): We started a consulting company doing that. That led us into building e-commerce applications. We helped take catalog companies online and built all sort of different custom software for different companies in and around Texas and abroad. That led to an acquisition in '99 when companies were rolling up boutique consultancies and trying to build larger internet consultancies. That was our first entrepreneurial endeavor and we started in '98 and sold it in '99.

Matt Hall (07:13): Wow. How did that experience change your life or not? Was that just a fun thing to have done? Did it change your life financially? What lessons did you learn from that experience?

Tyson Weihs (07:26): One of the big lessons was how to not structure a deal. When we sold the company in September of '99, we did an all stock deal. We were locked up for 18 months. Got to witness the rise and fall of the dot com era. We sold in September of '99, peak of the market, and in March of 2000 our stock went from $6 to $96 and then it went to zero.

Matt Hall (07:54): Wow.

Tyson Weihs (07:55): It wasn't a financial success for us. We probably all walked away from that with enough money to buy a used car. That was formative, right? We learned a very expensive lesson. I think one of the things we probably underestimated was what the potential of the business could be. The business at that time probably made just about a million dollars a year, which is pretty significant for guys in their early twenties starting a business out of college. From a dollar perspective, looking back on it, it wasn't a life changing liquidity event. We probably made in stock a few hundred thousand dollars and thought we had hung the moon, right?

Tyson Weihs (08:34): I think we were sort of attracted by the notion of building a company and selling it and didn't realize what you could do over the long-term if you continue building the business and how much value you could really create.

Matt Hall (08:47): Where did your interest in aviation come from?

Tyson Weihs (08:53): After we sold that company in '99, I went to work for a software company in Charleston, South Carolina called Benefit Focus. The founders of the company, as well as the executive team, most of them were pilots. I think there might have been one non-pilot on the executive team and so the first week after signing on with them, my boss at the time took me up for a flight in his airplane and that was the first time I got to get my hands on the controls of a plane. I just thought it was amazing.

Matt Hall (09:24): You weren't terrified at all about going up with this person you just started working with in his airplane? That was exciting?

Tyson Weihs (09:31): That was exciting. It was not terrifying. It was something I very much looked forward to. It was pretty transformative. I thought after getting that experience, "I want to be able to do this too." I started taking flying lessons while I was in Charleston. Ultimately, didn't get my pilot's license until the end of business school in 2006. It took me some time to get through that process and build up enough money to afford flying lessons because flying is not an inexpensive hobby. That's where aviation formed roots.

Matt Hall (10:01): I'm imagining just because I know how the story ends or where the story is now, are you offended at this point as you're learning to fly by the technology that is available to you?

Tyson Weihs (10:15): Great question. I think at the time, some of the technology I thought was pretty neat. I mean, there were desktop applications that were tele-netting into FA systems and that, to me, at the time seemed pretty clever. It was later down the road when I was starting to work on different ratings that I realized the technology was fragmented. That's what led to wanting to improve upon the state of the art.

Tyson Weihs (10:42): Not only that, but it was disruptions that occurred along the way that caused the status quo to then look archaic. The offense wasn't probably really immediate when interacting with those applications. It was once there was a technology shift and it became obvious that the existing technology would not survive long-term, there was a drive to create new applications and software for those emerging computing platforms.

Tyson Weihs (11:10): I think I remember feeling like, "Wow. Some of the technology that exists is pretty neat" and circa 2005, 2006 but when the iPhone was introduced in 2007, it changed everything and it was immediately disruptive and created that effect of making the existing technologies look immediately dated.

Matt Hall (11:30): See, I am imagining in my head, I don't know if you ever did this, I'm 46 years old and when I was a kid and we took a trip, my parents would get this thing called a Trip Tick from AAA.

Tyson Weihs (11:42): From AAA. That's right.

Matt Hall (11:42): Somebody had had this map that would unfold and you could never really get it put back together quite right and it'd have a neon line going down the route you were taking. Somebody would be opening this thing up trying to look at it and one person might say, "Hey, can you hold the wheel for a second?"

Tyson Weihs (11:59): You were counting mile markers.

Matt Hall (12:01): Yes. Exactly. Exactly. That's what I was imagining pre-ForeFlight, pre-your innovation. That's what I was sort of imagining. If someone said, "Hey, you want to come up in the cockpit?" I was imagining paper and that kind of experience. Is that far from reality or is that pretty close to reality?

Tyson Weihs (12:21): That was the reality. I remember when preparing for my check ride, which that's the point at which the pilot is getting tested by an FAA examiner who will deem you worthy to get a pilot's certificate, you walk into the examiner's office with a stack of paper that you had prepared and that paper was, just as the Trip Tick had yellow highlighting, you would have your aeronautical chart unfolded so you'd show them your paper chart with the highlighted route on it. Then you'd show them all the calculations you'd made for the routed flight.

Tyson Weihs (12:54): Very much like a Trip Tick where it would say, "Take a left turn here and then drive 50 miles to mile marker X" same thing in aviation, which is I'm going to take off from this airport, I'm going to navigate to this particular point in space, and I'm going to take a turn and then for each one of those legs, they're called, you had to compute what was the heading that you were going to take, which is the direction you were going to fly, how much gas were you going to burn, what direction were the winds at altitude pointing and how hard were they blowing. All those things were important to managing fuel to make sure you get from point A to point B.

Tyson Weihs (13:32): The amount of time that it took to prepare for any flight was probably 10 to 100 X more than it takes today with ForeFlight and that technology because you had to sit down and, one, collect all the information and the inputs required. You had to run computations for each one of these legs. You had to reference charts and grids inside of the aircraft manuals. Every airplane has a how-to manual that includes if you're flying at a certain altitude at a certain temperature, how much gas are you going to burn? That's probably one of the most critical things about preparing a flight is making sure that you fill up the tanks.

Tyson Weihs (14:11): Then when you fill up the tanks, you have to make sure that the airplane isn't taking off heavier than it is actually authorized to take off at and then when you land, you have to make sure that your landing weight is of a certain value.

Tyson Weihs (14:23): There's all these things that you had to compute and check to make sure that you are operating the airplane safely. Now in ForeFlight, in contrast, you pick an airplane, you pick a departure and destination like the AAA trip kits, we figured out the route to take, we'd run all those calculations for you, we'd make sure that if there's any condition that would be unsafe like you're landing with too much weight or you're taking off with too much weight and the airplane couldn't climb, we'd flag all those sort of things.

Tyson Weihs (14:52): The pilot that I fly with tells me, "Hey, back in the day, a flight that we're taking today might have taken us five to 10 minutes to prepare for today, that might have taken hours pre-ForeFlight." It's transformed the efficiency and the accuracy and the safety that impacts how people fly.

Matt Hall (15:15): You are learning to fly. You're sort of experiencing the systems that are available. Impressed in some ways, dissatisfied in others. What gave you the sort of audacity to think you could change it, you could do anything about it? What made you and your co-founder think that you could solve this big problem that I guess lots of other big companies hadn't even thought about solving?

Tyson Weihs (15:44): Yeah. You know, I'd say that we didn't sit down and think about ... In 2007, when we started the company did we know what 10 years forward would look like? We didn't even know if we'd have a business actually.

Tyson Weihs (15:56): What we were really motivated by was, "Hey, there's a platform here with no software on it and we have the skills to write something for it." It was really more about, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we did the following?" We didn't sit down and scratch out a plan and say, "We're going to transform this world."

Tyson Weihs (16:15): What happened was this technology platform appeared and it inspired us and helped us imagine what sort of tool we could write that others, really, first ourselves and then others might use. It was really just that, which is, "Hey, this platform exists. Here's an idea. Let's build something. That's cool." That creates another spark and another idea. Why don't we build that feature into it?

Tyson Weihs (16:42): What we started realizing was we can take things that were fragmented or available in other applications on legacy platforms like desktop computers and things like that and put them on an iPhone and later an iPad. That was really sort of how we approached it.

Tyson Weihs (16:59): The first time we put out the first release, the next day we had somebody buy it. That was sort of a wake-up call where we said, "Wow. We've done something that we just thought was cool and fun" and we happened to wrap a credit card form around it and someone put in their credit card and paid for it.

Tyson Weihs (17:16): That's really been the story of the business. We haven't sat down at any point and said, "What do we want to be in three to five years?" It has been this steady stream of disruptions and just a race and a sense of urgency to keep adopting those to, ultimately, build cool things for us and for pilots that make, first, our lives easier and turns out made a lot of other pilots easier and delivered a lot of value that they would pay for.

Matt Hall (17:43): Okay. You mentioned this earlier but I want to circle back to it. Apple, the iPhone, it's hard for us to imagine ... I mean, I was even talking with my kid recently about how cool it is to have thousands and thousands of songs in your pocket. That idea back in the old days, again, going back to Trip Tick days or making a mixtape kind of thing, kids today won't know what that's like and so the iPhone comes out and how did that change everything for you?

Tyson Weihs (18:11): Yeah. When I picked up the first iPhone in 2007, it was the day ... It was a Friday that Apple launched it and we went to the Galleria Mall in Houston, Texas and sort of poked our nose into the store going, "Okay, what is this new thing? Maybe we'll take a look at it." I didn't intend to buy one.

Tyson Weihs (18:29): Then I went into the store and I unlocked the phone for the first time. For those that may not have an iPhone in 2007, you used to have to swipe and unlock a user interface on the phone and it would make this click and then the home screen would appear.

Tyson Weihs (18:43): When I did that for the first time and saw a full sort of edge to edge screen and compared that to the Blackberry that I had at the time I was like, "This is unbelievable." I've got this device in my pocket that's got applications running on it, that's way easier to interact with and a heck of a lot cooler than a Blackberry with an LCD black and white screen on it for just typing messages. It was at that point where we said, "Wow. This thing is really different."

Tyson Weihs (19:12): It was that disruption that caused us to say, "Okay. Everything that we had been working on in an attempt to deliver a web application, we're going to change directions and we're going to build an application for this device." Yeah. I think it's hard for us to imagine today life without it but at that point in time it was so novel and clearly going to be so disruptive that we were really just excited about the opportunity to write software for it.

Tyson Weihs (19:40): Looking back, there had only been a handful of major computing transitions that have generated opportunities for entrepreneurship. One is, obviously, the emergence of the desktop computer in the '70s and the '80s and then the next major disruption was in business computing where client server was invented. You used to have software you'd run in your desktop and then software you'd run with a server and then the internet came about and now you had software running in the browser, talking back to servers so that created a new wave of invention.

Tyson Weihs (20:11): Then between that and the iPhone, you had social networking so that created a whole bunch of new companies around connecting folks together online and then the iPhone came out and that created a new computing platform, which you can now run sophisticated software on a mobile device.

Tyson Weihs (20:28): Then in 2010, the iPad came out, which was now you have a bigger screen and can run advanced applications on a slightly larger device with an eight battery battery that you can take onto an airplane.

Tyson Weihs (20:40): We were just inspired by this new green field computing platform that emerged for which there were no applications. We were fast enough and fortunate enough to be the first application for aviators in the App Store when that launched in 2008. That was what helped create the business. First is the platform which is the iPhone and being able to write applications for it and then a new distribution mechanism, which is instead of running around with CDs and putting those in your computer or floppy drives or things we used to use to install software, that was sort of thrown out, right? Oh my gosh, we've got a platform that includes a distribution mechanism. Those were Apple's inventions that we got to ride the coattails of in order to build a new enterprise.

Matt Hall (21:26): I think you told me the story about maybe Steve Jobs at one point saw your technology on an iPad.

Tyson Weihs (21:35): One of the things that helped us early on was within Apple, there was actually a large pilot population. As new platforms were being created, folks that were internally developing those platforms, whether it was the Apple Store or the software development kits that Apple provides, they would showcase developer applications.

Tyson Weihs (21:56): I remember a friend of mine at Apple being in line at the Apple Café behind Steve Jobs who was getting lunch and he said, "Hey, Steve. I just want to show you this. Here's this application for pilots that's super cool. I just wanted to show that to you." My recollection is Steve Jobs took a note and asked what the name of that application was and said, "Thank you."

Tyson Weihs (22:20): Years later, we ended up providing our software to Apple's flight department, the airplanes that it flew for Apple and the family there. That was one of our encounters with Steve a long time ago was just someone in line with him saying, "Hey, look at this cool thing that these guys are doing for the iPad."

Matt Hall (22:39):

I think I also heard that your app was the most expensive app at one time available in the App Store?

Tyson Weihs (22:45): Yeah. In 2008, when the App Store launched the average price of an app was probably somewhere between 99 cents and $4.99. Right? We had already been charging for our little web application, $75 a year, as a subscription and one of the new dynamics of the App Store in 2008 was they had no subscription offerings. You had to put your application in the store, put a price on it, and sell it one-time like a lot of software was sold before subscription businesses emerged.

Tyson Weihs (23:16):When the App Store was about to launch in the summer of 2008, reps at Apple sat down with us and said, "Guys, you can't charge $75 for an application. These things cost 99 cents to $5. Maybe $9. This is where you need to be." We stuck to our guns. One of the first articles written about the App Store and the apps in it included a summary of what sort of apps were there. One of the categories was most expensive applications and ForeFlight was at the top with $75, the most expensive app. We were displaced shortly after that by an app called I Am Rich, which was something that someone charged $999 for and all it was was a button that you pressed.

Matt Hall (23:57): Wow.

Tyson Weihs (23:57): That was more of a marketing stunt that didn't have long legs but until that came out we were the most expensive app in the App Store. That earned us some press and some free media.

Matt Hall (24:10): That's a good segue. Speaking of press, how did people ... It's one thing to create a cool product but my guess is you didn't have a huge marketing budget. How did the word spread and how did you convince people to start using the tool?

Tyson Weihs (24:25): One of the first things that we benefited from was the App Store in addition to distributing apps would allow you to search for applications. Search has been a really important growth or adoption driver of applications or websites.

Tyson Weihs (24:42): Being the only application in the App Store in 2008 that was aviation-focused is one of our customers would buy an iPhone, get into the App Store and start searching on aviation keywords, we were the only application that showed up in the results.

Tyson Weihs (24:59): There were keywords in aviation like flight plan or [inaudible 00:25:03], which is an aviation weather report and Apple indexed all the keywords in your description and so for the first few years of the business we bought no advertising. I think it was probably maybe four years into the business before we bought our first ad.

Tyson Weihs (25:20): We had the benefit of being one of the only applications in the App Store, by being in the App Store early, those keywords would get weighted such that when you searched for one of those aviation terms since we had been downloaded the most, we would show up in the search results first.

Tyson Weihs (25:37): That drove a tremendous amount of adoption early on because we were the only thing that showed up in the search results. As I mentioned, it wasn't until years later that we bought our first ad. Another dynamic that exists in the aviation world is aviation is very social. There's lots of opportunities for pilots to come together, whether it is a gathering at their local airport, they call them pancake breakfasts, every Saturday morning pilots would get together at the airport, they'd have a breakfast, they'd all go flying and that's an opportunity for them to show their fellow pilots something cool.

Tyson Weihs (26:14): Very early on, customers of ours that adopted early would either be flying with another pilot and just say, "Hey, let me show you this." There was a big viral and community and social aspect to our success, which is pilots telling other pilots about that and then some of those pilots would go to work where they flew professionally and tell the directors or the chief pilots of the flight operations, "Hey, I downloaded this new application on my iPod. I want you to check it out."

Tyson Weihs (26:45): We put a lot of credit or attribute word of mouth as a big driver of the product early on because it was so influential that we didn't have to buy advertising until years later when other competitors started showing up.

Matt Hall (27:01): Okay. Perfect. Why didn't any of the big people once they caught wind of what you were doing, put their own programmers on something and create a competitive product?

Tyson Weihs (27:12): They eventually did. I remember being really paranoid and scared when one of our first large competitors released their first application for the iPhone and that was Garmin. That was not until years after the iPhone had been introduced. I want to say it was maybe two, if not three, years later.

Tyson Weihs (27:30): You know, when you think about why isn't it that a company jumped onto that as quick as we did? I would probably point to there are all sorts of priorities within any business that gain attention, right? If this new platform emerges and you've got a bunch of other things that you're already doing and projects that you're engaged in, someone has to advocate strongly enough for that or someone at the leadership level has to latch onto that and drive the investment and it can be challenging for those new upstart things to get investment dollars.

Tyson Weihs (28:03): For us, we had no competing priorities. Our priority was this is a cool new thing and this is what we're focused on. I would say it's sort of the classic innovator's dilemma, which is this was truly a disruption and often it's hard to understand what the impact of that disruption will be and shift enough resources and investment dollars to capitalize on it.

Tyson Weihs (28:28): I remember a friend of mine was running Nokia at the time the iPhone came out and wrote the famous burning platform memo, which is they recognized it very quickly and that is this thing is very disruptive to Nokia's phone business. Other competitors of ours didn't latch onto that very quickly.

Tyson Weihs (28:47): I remember a number of companies over the years that were truly disrupted by ForeFlight and these platforms and went out of business. I was asked once, "How do you feel about those companies going away?" My response is if it wasn't us that had done it, it would have been somebody else. The disruption is not something you can ultimately ignore or dismiss and it will end up transforming your business. We were just early enough and fast enough and continued moving with this underlying principle of I would say a combination of fear and urgency that we had to continue building up the capability.

Tyson Weihs (29:30): I think classic innovator's dilemma was applicable here and we were just fast enough to ride the wave.

Matt Hall (29:39): At any point in the early days did people come to you and try to buy the company or did that not happen until Boeing approached you later on?

Tyson Weihs (29:47): We had other companies approach us over the years. I remember being offered really in 2014, what at that time I'd consider a considerable amount of money and then there was a company that we were disrupting that came to us and they made a couple million dollars in revenue and it was a company that we had aspired to get as big as, "Man, if we could make a couple million in revenue every year we'll have really succeeded."

Tyson Weihs (30:17): I remember there was a point where we were talking about merging with that company. I think this was in 2009 and the net proceeds to the owners would have been maybe $3 million or so and we were thinking, "Oh my gosh. That would be an unbelievable success."

Tyson Weihs (30:34): We ended up not doing the deal and within 12 months I think we were many times the size of that company in revenue. Had we made that decision back then, the company would ... I don't even know if it would have survived. The incentives would have changed and we might have missed some of those opportunities that we capitalized on by remaining independent. That was one of the early opportunities I remember.

Tyson Weihs (31:00): Then in 2013/2014, we had some large industrial companies approach us at that point in time and decided, similar reasons, we'd stay independent. We did take some investment money in 2014 but stayed independent, largely bootstrap for a significant portion of the company's history.

Matt Hall (31:18): At what point does Boeing come to you and what do they say?

Tyson Weihs (31:24): One of the really important relationships we had created amongst many over the company's history was with Boeing and, particularly, a subsidiary of Boeing called Jeppesen that had been in the aviation industry for at the time 80 years. They really invented a lot of the tools and charting products and procedures that pilots use to fly into airports when they can't see outside of their windshield, when there's clouds around the airplane.

Tyson Weihs (31:52):We established a partnership with them in 2016 that was two components, one is we would become a reseller of their charting products, which were very popular amongst professional pilots. They made a product that pilots would consider essential and that is what are called approach procedures that tell you how to get under an airport.

Tyson Weihs (32:11): We became a distributor of theirs and they were also interested in our technology for the commercial aviation [inaudible 00:32:17] and so we partnered with them on building a next generation application with a commercial flight deck.

Tyson Weihs (32:23): What had happened over the years was we became a more important distributor of their products and we also became an essential partner for a very significant business within Jeppesen and the Boeing portfolio, which is delivering this application to the commercial market.

Tyson Weihs (32:39): I think we both looked at one another and said, "Boeing is really essential to our future and is becoming a really significant customer" and vice versa, ForeFlight's got an amazing market share in technology and the combination would be more valuable than the two companies independently.

Tyson Weihs (32:58): We had a discussion with them about doing a merger and the benefits to us were pretty clear, which is there is a lot of technology that Boeing had that we would be able to leverage and use to create more value for our market. One of the things they had was the world's best set of global navigation data and navigation data unlike road data is, one safety and life critical because it describes how airplanes get to a runway and it was unmatched in its coverage, in its quality.

Tyson Weihs (33:29): We became reliant on that navigation data. They became reliant on our technology. Our futures were really intertwined. It was clear that having them come together would be important as competitors get stronger and we become more reliant on one another's technology.

Matt Hall (33:47): Now that you have the backing of the big, big company what's the future going to be? How much safer, how much better, how much cooler can the tools you've created or will create become? What's next?

Tyson Weihs (34:02): I mean, one of the things that happens with our technology is there's more places that either the ForeFlight applications or components that we have technology puzzle pieces, if you will, can end up helping other products and customers of Boeing.

Tyson Weihs (34:19): That could include things like integrating more tightly with avionics. We got instantly global distribution so we had a product that we'd make for militaries, almost overnight that product now becomes available to all of the militaries that Boeing serves. Those sorts of opportunities exist where because we now have exposure to more types of customers and more geographies, that drives more investment in the product in order to serve whatever the particular customers are.

Tyson Weihs (34:53): One of the benefits of having a large footprint is you get much more intelligence where the market is heading and what customers want and value that ends up driving more revenue opportunities.

Tyson Weihs (35:06): We're still digesting [inaudible 00:35:08] expansion and tailoring the product or fitting the product to work for all of these different markets and we've become even more essential to all types of aviators and types of aviation operations around the world from individuals that fly their own planes up through commercial airlines and militaries around the world.

Matt Hall (35:28): Yeah. I'll tell you this, I have an old house built in the '20s and it frequently requires some TLC and I have to find a really great contractor person to help me. I'm somewhat handy but I can't do really skilled stuff. I found someone who has all the skills and he's become a friend and we were talking one day and I'm not sure how it came up but I said, "You should check out my podcast" or something. He was like, "Oh, really? What kind of people do you have on?"

Matt Hall (35:55): Somehow I mentioned your name and he could not believe it because he's a pilot. He uses ForeFlight. He went on ... I've never seen him so excited. He was excited because your product has changed the game and he had stories to tell me. Safety stories about what weather situations and what it would have been like in the old days and what it's like now and sent me a Facebook post showing little cartoon that showed the difference between how they used to feel about flying versus now it's like ForeFlight is down, I think I'm going to die.

Matt Hall (36:33): The story he told me is basically everyone has an iPad now or two with ForeFlight on it. That across, just as you said, from personal or recreational pilots all the way up to the highest level and even the military, that this tool has changed the game from the Trip Tick world to a new place.

Matt Hall (36:55): It's just really interesting because I asked several people, I know very little about aviation but every person I asked sort of gave me this story about how revolutionary what you've done has been and in some ways I think it's interesting because it probably took sort of that beginner's mindset, as you were learning to fly and not having been tethered by some corporate experience or whatever ... It feels in some ways like the recipe for just the perfect setup but you had to do it and execute it and I guess all of us as customers thank you for making it better and safer.

Tyson Weihs (37:30): Thanks. It's been a pleasure. I think one of the most fulfilling things about the business has been, one, the team and what we've been able to create but customers really are fanatical and love the product and I think, one, they've gotten exceptional utility and capability that previously didn't exist, which is delivered efficiency and safety and really improving the sophistication of the sorts of things that pilots can do but it's also wrapped around a really great experience with our support team.

Tyson Weihs (37:58): The product is really reliable. I think our customers [inaudible 00:38:03] rank the top five or 10 applications that they use, ForeFlight would be somewhere near the top, especially on a day that they're flying. It has become so essential and its a really reliable tool for them to use when they're out and about.

Matt Hall (38:17): Okay. Let's do a couple fun questions to end. I heard you're a tennis person. Is that true? Who is your favorite tennis player and what do you love about the game?

Tyson Weihs (38:27): Gosh. Great question. Favorite tennis player, I'd probably say it is Roger Federer. Contemporary tennis player. Just because of the man and the character and just the remarkable talent he has and his persona on and off the court.

Matt Hall (38:45): What about old school tennis players since you mentioned he's your contemporary favorite?

Tyson Weihs (38:49): You know, it's hard not to admire and like John McEnroe, right?

Matt Hall (38:54): Yeah.

Tyson Weihs (38:55): Just dramatic, talented, a unique personality and was just so dominant in tennis when I grew up but others that are up there, Pete Sampras, love Rafa Nadal, just watching him run around the court, his speed, agility, endurance. Those are some other names that come up.

Matt Hall (39:17): What do you wish more people understood about flying or about aviation?

Tyson Weihs (39:22): That there are aspects of aviation that I think a lot of people don't get exposure to like back country flying. That is one thing that I've started to do more of in my flying career. What you get to see and the experiences you get are amazing. I think people probably don't have a good understanding of all the different types of flying there is out there.

Tyson Weihs (39:45): The other thing I don't think people realize is how many airports are out there that you can access as a pilot that get you close to adventure or where you might want to be. The United States alone has probably about 5000 paved airports. You probably only know of a few dozen of them because you fly them commercially or most people. That's just paved airports. Then beyond that, you have grass and dirt airports, significant.

Tyson Weihs (40:10): The other is just how much general aviation and business aviation do for the economy in terms of moving supplies around from large to small towns, the role that aircraft play in things like wildfires and evacuations and search and rescue but there's so many facets of it and there's so much that it does that it's really hard to get the word out I think on all of the things that aviation does because most people just read about airplane accidents, which unfortunately get a lot of attention ... There's car accidents every day, for example, but those don't make the news, right? The airplane ones do.

Tyson Weihs (40:47): I think there's a lot of untold stories that most people aren't aware of about aviation globally.

Matt Hall (40:53): Okay. Then selfishly, when I go to Charleston, which one day I want to, what's the best restaurant in Charleston?

Tyson Weihs (41:00): The best one I know of, Edmund's Oast.

Matt Hall (41:03): Edmund's Oast. Do you live in Houston and Aspen now?

Tyson Weihs (41:07): I live in Houston full-time but we've been in Aspen since the rise of COVID around May.

Matt Hall (41:13): What's your favorite restaurant in Houston?

Tyson Weihs (41:15): Favorite restaurant in Houston would be Uchi.

Matt Hall (41:19): Yeah. Good one. Okay. Well, thank you, Tyson. I can't wait to hopefully see you at some point in person in Houston again and thank you directly. Really appreciate this. I think people will find it very valuable and interesting. Just respectful and appreciative of your time. I really appreciate it.

Tyson Weihs (41:33): Great, man. I'm glad we got to pull it together.

Matt Hall (41:39): If you were a pilot and could fly anywhere, where would you go? Please note the information shared in this podcast is not intended as advice. The intent is to share meaningful experiences. I am likely not your advisor nor wealth manager nor financial planner and my opinions are my own and not necessarily shared by Hill Investment Group. Investing involves risk. Consult a professional before implementing an investment strategy. Thank you.