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Joby will be the most consequential aviation company in generations. They're creating instant gratification aviation.
I put this video together because an essay just wouldn’t do this story justice.
Not only is $JOBY building and operating their aircraft, they’re also building software that allows users to fly at short notice anywhere within 10-50 miles and eventually beyond that. With a single press of a button, the entire end-to-end journey is handled, with car rides automatically taking you to and from the aircraft.
This incredible use case is made possible thanks to Joby’s acquisition of Uber Elevate. This gave Joby the multimodal orchestration software that makes seamless door-to-door aerial mobility possible.
By acquiring Elevate, Joby also gained years of intellectual property around operational constraints and coordination such as: multimodal orchestration, demand modelling, noise mapping network/vertiport placement, airspace mgmt., reducing friction points of journeys, etc.
They also acquired most of the Elevate team including the head of the program, Eric Allison (@eallison), who is now the Chief Product Officer at Joby. Eric Allison led the team at Uber in building out the multimodal software that was successfully put into practice with Uber Copter, the first true door-to-door aerial service in aviation history. Eric Allison is now at Joby refining the very same software he built with his team at Uber, now aptly called ElevateOS.
Joby has all the Lego pieces to provide what Geoffery Moore calls the “Whole Product”. Eric Allison’s team has done the hard miles with their software to deliver the best possible door-to-door service. The engineering and testing team have put in the hard miles with the aircraft as it gets closer to TIA and then type certification. The operations team is building a robust pilot training pipeline alongside other airline-standard capabilities like maintenance and safety management.
The aircraft Joby is building is the “shiny object” that everyone focuses on, and for good reason. Its low noise and high safety through redundancy is a key enabler, without which this revolutionary business model, which relies on high throughput flights at scale, is dead in the water.
But to me it’s the multimodal software that is the most important piece for allowing incredible scale. It “productizes” the entire flying experience in a seamless way, allowing anyone to instantly acquire a flight at a moments notice. Anytime something is made easier, people do more of it. Jevon’s Paradox is referenced all the time when it comes to AI. The same applies to flying with Joby.
Instant gratification aviation will certainly induce demand to outlying destinations around cities and most importantly, it will provide rural access to communities that have been cut off from airline service.
Without Uber Elevate, the level of instant gratification that we will experience with Joby wouldn’t be possible. Special appreciation to the founders of Elevate, Jeff Holden, Nikhil Goel, & Mark Moore. The net result of Uber Elevate is now a Joby superpower that is hidden in plain sight. And no, it’s not theory, it was proven out with Uber Copter.
Still, everything is contingent on type cert. But with ElevateOS, Eric Allison and his team are to going fulfill JoeBen Bevirt’s vision of ubiquitous electric-powered flights by putting his aircrafts to the best possible use. We are witnessing aviation history.
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