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What's up everybody? Welcome back to the All Things Croatia podcast. I'm your host,
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Stanko Zovak and I'm bringing you the best of Croatia from around the globe.
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This episode is brought to you by Adriatic Tours, the best place since 1974 to book
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information, go to www.adriatictours.com or click the link in the description. Now,
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eat a modalia and let's get started. Alright, welcome back to the podcast everybody. In this
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week's episode we have special guest, AJ Piplica. AJ is a Croatian-American entrepreneur and
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engineer. After working for years in the aerospace industry, AJ is the founder of Hermias, a startup
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that's building the world's fastest aircraft. AJ was also listed on the NFCA's 40 rising
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Croatian Americans under 40. And in this episode, we're going to learn more about him and his
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innovative startup. AJ, thanks for coming on the podcast.
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Thanks so much for having me.
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I feel like I always find a way to butcher a word in the introduction, but we'll go
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for a round two. We'll keep this going.
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Just keep going.
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Yeah. AJ, I appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast here. I know you're
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a busy guy. I definitely want to get into the startup and talk about that, a lot of
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interesting stuff you guys are doing. But can you first start us off with sort of your
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Croatian background, your heritage?
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Sure, absolutely. So yeah, both my parents, born in Croatia, my mom from Malinsk, on Kork,
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north from the islands, and my dad from a little village inland down south called Dobrinje,
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and not too far from Imotski. So two very different cultures in and of themselves growing
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up. I'd get yelled at by one parent for saying some words wrong, but it was just the wrong
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dialect. So yeah, that was pretty fun. Not that my language skills have grown a ton because
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of that. But yeah, so both my parents being Croatian, they came over to North America
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in, let's see, in the early 60s. They were both like four or five years old at the time.
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My mom came over to New York with her parents. She was an only child. And then my dad came
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over to Canada, the Mississauga, Toronto area with his family. He had a bunch of siblings
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already and then some more when he got there. So they met through Croatian kind of student
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exchange program between New York and Toronto. So the Croatian community had always been
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front and center in their relationship. And I think that continued quite a bit for myself
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and my sister. So we grew up in, were born in New York and moved down to Florida when
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I think I was like six or something. But always really clung onto my parents' backgrounds
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and their histories and their families' histories. For me, it was something that was super unique.
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I didn't really grow up around a lot of Croatian kids. The most Croatian kind of stuff in my
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life would happen when I go back to Canada and hang out with my family there. But we'd
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go to Croatian American Club picnics every couple months or so in the Tampa Bay area.
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But yeah, for me, it's always stuck with me as that's where I came from, that's where
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my family came from. And it's continuously been a part of me. I've been back a couple
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times over the course of my life. I haven't spent a ton of time there. Maybe in the future
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when the flights are a little bit faster, spend some more time over there. But yeah,
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a beautiful country and really kind of proud piece of who I am.
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Well, speaking about flights as you just brought it up, when did you really get interested
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in aerospace?
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Yeah, so I've always kind of liked building things and the future. So I grew up playing
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with Legos and Kinects and Rector Sets and all these sorts of things. I just love building
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things, taking them apart. Neither of my parents were engineers, so it was kind of first generation
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of that profession or family. So it took a while to figure out what it actually all meant.
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But you also really love the future. So Star Trek, Star Wars, that was something I always
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really liked. So I kind of made fun of plenty for it in school, but I'll live with that
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for now.
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And one of the things that kind of struck me looking back was that those worlds, those
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universes that have been created relate to people moving around really massive, massive
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areas. And you don't really think about it, but the vehicles that allow people to interact
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with each other over long distances are kind of incredibly important parts of those stories
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in those universes. So kind of those things got paired together for me. Pretty clearly,
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I think it was in middle school, I went to an air show with my dad and some friends.
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And we saw the C5 Galaxy fly. So it's the largest cargo aircraft that we have in the
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US. And the thing is like a building on its side with wings and wheels. And it just kind
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of broke my brain. Like seeing that airplane fly was like that shouldn't physically be
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possible. But it was. And through middle school and high school, it was pretty involved in
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STEM curriculum, science, technology, engineering, and math. Pretty good there. And when it came
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time to kind of decide what I wanted to do in college, university, you know, aerospace
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was was the thing that I enjoyed the most. I'll go back to what I said before, though,
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of like being a first generation engineer. I had no idea what it actually meant. So,
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you know, get to get to Georgia Tech where I did my undergrad, my first introduction
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to aerospace engineering class, and Professor stands up and like, you know, asked everybody
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to list out their three favorite airplanes. I'm like, well, I only know like one airplane.
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Meanwhile, everybody everybody else in the class, like, yeah, the, you know, 1965, blah,
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blah, blah, blah. It's, you know, it was a pretty quick flash in the pan. And I got
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to get my get my wits about me pretty quick. So, but at least I had like a good, good math
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and science basis for, you know, building the skills on the engineering side that were
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necessary to grow and be successful in in this area. A lot of people said that aerospace
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was the hardest of all the engineering disciplines to go through. I don't think I would agree.
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I think definitely for me at least there's there's other harder ones chemical engineering,
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biomedical engineering, not my fancy aerospace I could do though. And yeah, so as I was at
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school, did a couple co-op or internship semesters out at NASA Johnson Space Center, worked on
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a bunch of different things. The space shuttle got to sit console for a number of missions,
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which is pretty cool. And then got into computational fluid dynamics, so essentially numerical modeling
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of aerodynamics and aerothermodynamics. And that's I think really what kind of solidified
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the area that I wanted to go into. So, you know, as a as an aerospace engineer who focuses
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in aerodynamics and wants to work on the frontier, well, the front here is typically in space,
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but there's no, there's no air up there. So it's not too much not too much an aerodynamic
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this can do. So hypersonics or high speed flying high speed in the atmosphere was kind
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of what what really, you know, got me got me hooked and once you get bitten by that bug,
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he can't get on bit. And you know, follow that through a couple different jobs and positions,
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you know, before deciding to step out of my own with with three other co-founders and
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start Hermia's back in 2018, almost almost four years to the date, I think on Wednesday,
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it's our four year anniversary.
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Going on the all things Croatia podcast for the anniversary.
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Yeah.
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You know, you brought up, I'm going to butt in with a story real quick because you just
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remind me of something. I actually I just had an interview a few weeks ago at some company
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over here in Croatia, international company, airline company. It was like a sales position
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and they asked me, what do you know about aircraft? Like, can you list off some aircraft?
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I didn't know anything. I said, I've seen top gun.
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There you go. That's that's always a good answer. And then they're going to ask you
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like the new one or the old one?
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Yeah, she actually asked, what did you think of the new one? I said, oh, actually, I only
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saw the first one.
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Okay.
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All right.
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So I didn't didn't hear back from that job yet. Not sure why, but you mentioned you mentioned
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hypersonic. And I wanted to ask what's the difference between hypersonic and supersonic?
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Yeah, so to some degree, it's semantics. But you know, typically supersonic is pretty easy
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to delineation, you have faster than the speed of sound. But then once you once you go faster
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than the speed of sound, there are like certain speeds at which the governing physics change
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a little bit. And in some cases, by a large bit. So that's kind of where the hypersonic
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regime has been delineated. The reason like a kind of a hard line, although it's typically
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defined as faster than five times the speed of sound. And that's because when you get up
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to around that speed, there are kind of different governing physics or different elements of
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physics that are driving what how the flow behaves, relative to flying, you know, two
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to three times the speed of sound. So it's it's a gray area because like those those
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physics aren't like at a discrete point, like they are at Mach one, they kind of bleed
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from kind of Mach four up to around Mach six. So you know, that's that's why Mach five has
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been picked as kind of the standard definition of hypersonic kind of like the Karman line
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where we define space. It's not exactly a hard delineation. You know, there's like the
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the US definitions actually 50 miles, whereas the international definition 60 miles. So
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yeah,
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that's interesting. Okay, well, I think if anyone asked me, I'll stick with the it's just
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semantics explanation. There you go. Now, you know, talking about Hermes, AJ, what was
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your sort of goal with the ultimate goal with starting Hermes?
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Yeah, so big picture long term vision to radically accelerate air travel by building Mach five
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passenger aircraft. You know, it's not an easy thing to do. There are a massive set of technical
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challenges to get there. And a whole another set of business challenges that are arguably
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harder, which is maybe heretical for an engineer to say that the business side is harder than
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the technical side. But but it is very much true. This is not an inexpensive endeavor.
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And none of the four of us are billionaires to start out with. So, you know, even billionaires
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have failed trying to do this in the past. So we kind of have to do it the hard way.
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But yeah, at the end of the day, we want to see a world in which people and goods move
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around quite a bit faster than they do today. We haven't seen a change in the speed of transportation
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network since about the 1950s. And if you look back even further in history, you know,
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when there have been significant speed ups in transportation networks, they've almost
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always been accompanied by massive social and economic growth within the affected regions.
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So you know, if we can do that at a global scale, if we can accelerate global transportation
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by five X, perhaps at the same cost as today's business class flight travel, what does that
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do to global economic productivity and the spread of social ideas? I think it does quite
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a bit. And it's like, it's growth that is new. It's not zero somewhere. We're going
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to grow here. And then other parts are going to suffer. It is very much new growth. And
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we need to be able to unlock the kind of latent potential of humanity if we're going to solve
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a lot of the challenges that we have ahead as a species. And this is a pretty unique
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way in which I think we can do that. So that was really the guiding motivation behind starting
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the company when we did. And there are a number of kind of things that I think gave us the
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confidence that what we wanted to do was possible. Number one, the technology to build Mach 5
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aircraft is mature enough, at least at a component level today to get started. You don't need
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a miracle of some new material that doesn't exist yet or a new propulsion cycle that doesn't
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exist yet. It's very much an engineering challenge, very hard engineering problem, but engineering
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and not science. The national security applications of hypersonic aircraft, especially autonomous
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ones are pretty expansive. And on top of that, now you've created intermediate markets for
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the products as you're de-risking the technology before you're flying people. That kind of
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helps buy down those financial challenges. And then finally, we had a hunch that private
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capital was willing and interested and excited about investing in high-speed mobility. So
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since over the past four years, we've basically been testing out those three hypotheses and
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slowly but surely working our way through and proving them correct.
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Well, yeah, because right now you guys, you raise a lot of money in funding. I forget
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how much I read. Was it like $100 million in funding?
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Yeah, about $120-ish total.
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Okay. And then, but you also have a military contract?
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Yep. Yeah, we have a $30 million contract with US Air Force and a number of other contracts
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in the Department of Defense as well.
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Okay. And there's no, like, it's not a conflict of interest to, I mean, you want to work towards
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passenger planes, but at the same time you're doing, you know, sort of the unmanned planes.
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Is that just sort of all steps in the process for us?
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Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we try to really stay on path. You know, these are things
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that we have to build and do anyway. We can't just build a 20-passenger Mach 5 aircraft
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right off the bat. We have to iterate through the technology. And in doing so, there are
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some natural kind of like pausing points there where, you know, the thing that you've
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built to de-risk the technology is actually a useful product for customers. So, you know,
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the early use cases for these smaller autonomous platforms, which is certainly, you know, primarily
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defense and national security. Although, I think toward the end of that, there will be
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a bleeding over into the commercial worlds ahead of flying passengers, specifically around
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high-speed cargo. So, yeah, you know, there are really important challenges to solve.
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And I think, you know, beyond just, you know, the reasons that we have for going after these
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challenges on the defense side, you know, toward our end goal, you know, I think it's
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the thing that we kind of have a responsibility to do. You know, there really isn't another
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place in the US or in the world that's taking, you know, a commercial space or a new space
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approach to developing these kinds of platforms. And, you know, if they're able to, you know,
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keep a future conflict from happening, like say, you know, something like what's happening
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in Ukraine, keep that from happening in the South China Sea, that's a pretty strong responsibility
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that we have to place on our shoulders and something we take very seriously. So, kind
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of keeping all those things aligned and making sure that we're doing things for the right
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reason is pretty critical. But, you know, this idea of, like, dual-use technology where
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there's commercial applications and defense applications is new and I think is actually
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going to be really, really critically important as things move forward here over the next,
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you know, a couple decades or so. Because there's more kind of innovation and capability
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that's being built out in the commercial world than there is, you know, within the halls
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of the Pentagon in a lot of cases. So, you know, where those can be aligned pretty well.
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Yeah, I think there's quite a bit to do there.
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What's the timeline looking like for those, you know, a couple of steps?
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Yeah, so we're working on our first aircraft right now called Quarter Horse. That aircraft
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will be in the air sometime next year, it's toward the end. And then it'll hopefully break
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the first airspeed record in almost 50 years in 2024. Dark Horse, which is the next aircraft,
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will come along after that and, you know, pushing to get Halcyon, which is the passenger
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aircraft up in the air before the end of the decade.
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Wow. And then I saw on the website there was some sort of barometer. I forget what flight
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they use. Was it from New York to London, maybe?
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New York to London in 90 minutes.
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90 minutes, wow. And how long does that take right now?
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About 7 and a half hours.
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Geez. Yeah, that would be, yeah, I mean, you could definitely go visit Croatia more
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often if you're having flights like that. I mean, I was sitting in traffic in LA when
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I was working there two hours just to get home every night. So an hour and a half to
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get to London from New York.
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Yeah, we'll leave the last mile problems to all the electric vertical takeoff and landing
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companies that are out there now. But yeah, we're focused on the long haul crossing oceans.
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And what's it like for you working with all these, I mean, you're obviously one of them,
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these brilliant minds. But you know, these sort of top engineers in their field. I mean,
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are you still getting excited trying to solve all these problems and finding solutions?
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I mean, you mentioned the science is already there. It's just the sort of engineering aspect.
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Like, does that stuff excite you trying to like try all the air type of stuff?
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It's incredibly motivating. You know, so much of what we do is focus on you getting to integrated
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hardware and software systems as quickly as possible. And then testing. Knowing that
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what we build probably isn't going to work the first time. But it's within that kind
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of relentless pursuit of iteration and improvement. I think that we find the right solutions to
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our problems, you know, the particular technical challenges that we're going after here. Nobody's
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ever even really tried in the air. So we don't even know what the right problems are to solve
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yet and we won't find them until we, you know, put hardware in the real world and test it.
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So, you know, seeing some of the really best engineers in the world, you know, work on
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those types of problems and supporting them and doing so is incredibly motivating.
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And now I wanted to point out, you also started a podcast, as I mentioned before we started
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recording. Talk a little about that. How did that come about? And what were the reasons
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for that?
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Yeah. So, you know, culture is very important to us here at Hermias and it's a, it can be
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a difficult thing to share and kind of tell people about in an authentic way. I mean,
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you can talk all day about our culture of our choose and then how we think about certain
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things. But we really wanted to give the, you know, the public a view into who we are
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in the most authentic way possible. And, you know, a podcast is the best way that we have
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found to do that so far. So, you know, it's one of those kind of iteration things where
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it's like, Hey, we don't know if this is going to work, but we'll try it and see how it does
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and then tweak it along the way. And, you know, we did it in such a way that it was
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a pretty low bar, you know, we don't do a lot of editing. It's basically like five
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person hours to do, you know, four people on the pod and an hour to cut and prepare
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everything afterwards. And yeah, so it's like a really, really low lift for everybody
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involved. And I think the, you know, the impact that it's had, it's been fantastic. You know,
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pretty much anybody who comes and talks to the company for the first time, you know,
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be it in somebody we're recruiting or folks on the customer side, you know, they know
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a lot more about who we are beyond just what we put on our website because they can see
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it firsthand. And yeah, I think it's been massively, massively influential. You know,
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the kinds of things that we do are like, they're not kind of easy to digest for everybody.
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And like, we kind of try to own that and like really get into the weeds and talk about stuff
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as much as we can, you know, within the realm of kind of proprietary information and export
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control, of course, but, you know, we try to make some of that stuff accessible. And
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hopefully, you know, people learning a little bit about, you know, what it is that we're
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doing and why it's important and how we're going about it. Hopefully that inspires more
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people to pursue the cause.
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I'm sure also when hiring that helps, you know, and finding the right candidate to what's
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your plan like to, you know, expand how many employees are you at right now?
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Yeah, so we're, we're in the 90s right now. Got a couple more hires to put together this
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calendar year and we'll be around 100 soon. And then, yeah, growth beyond that is, you
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know, really going to be dependent on how successful we are, you know, within the technical
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side of what we're doing on the product development side with Quarter Horse and on the sale side
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with the US government. But, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if the company continued to
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double. So we tripled last year, we doubled this year. And yeah, I would love to see that
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level of growth continue. But, you know, that that fate is all on our shoulders.
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Yeah, that's crazy tripling and doubling. Is it a lot of, is it mostly engineers or?
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Yeah, most mostly engineering. Although, you know, we do have an operation side to the
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business that kind of really builds the infrastructure that's needed for us to all do our jobs well.
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So yeah.
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Well, you know, speaking about sort of the business side of it all, because you're also,
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I forget if I read that or I just thought that you majored also in entrepreneurship as
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well as engineering.
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I did a certificate in entrepreneurship. Yeah. So it was like four classes of, let's see,
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management, marketing, accounting and entrepreneurship. So a little bit of a taste, but like no education
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will prepare you for entrepreneurship better than doing it and failing at it and then doing
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it again.
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Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. And I mean, for me, it seems completely different entrepreneurship
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and engineering. Because to me, as someone who's probably neither, definitely not an
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engineer. Engineering seems so like everything has an answer like mathematical, there's a
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solution and a way to find that solution. You just go step by step. And then entrepreneurship
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for me is, you know, everything is fluid and changing. Even if you do everything right,
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and it's, you know, the wrong time or just, you know, you can do everything right and not
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succeed. So for me, they're almost like opposites. Do you see it that way too?
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That's interesting. Not exactly. I see the engineering side closer to what you just described
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on the entrepreneurship side. When you're working on things outside the realm of what's
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been done before, you're extra on known data sets, there's a ton of uncertainty. And like,
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you don't know that success is a likely outcome. It's actually probably not a likely outcome.
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You do have to know that it's a possible outcome, and then you have to go find the path to it.
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But that path is by no means obvious. And it takes a massive amount of iteration, getting
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it wrong, learning more, doing it again and again and again and again, until you get it
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right. So in that regard, it is actually, it's a pretty similar to entrepreneurship, at
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least in this context of like building a new product where, you know, engineering is such
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a critical piece of it.
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Yeah, that's an interesting viewpoint. I mean, yeah, I know nothing about engineering. So
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I was just throwing a spitballing in the dark over here about that. But just on outside,
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I don't know, that's, I guess just, that's how I viewed it. But yeah, that makes sense
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the way you said it.
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And both, both frankly, are like very human centric. I think too often us engineers get
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down in the weeds thinking, you know, looking at the ones and zeros and expecting things
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to just work out because the math works. It's a lot more complicated than that. And that's
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something that I've learned from the entrepreneurship side of the business side. So like at the
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end of the day, you're still working with people. Yes, the numbers are important, but
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you're still working with people. So you have to work those systems as well.
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Yeah, you have to find a way to put that all together. AJ, I wanted to bring up the Croatian
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Americans 40 under 40, which, you know, every year the end, make sure I get the acronym right
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here, NFCA, you know, puts together a list of the top 40 rising Croatian Americans under
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40 years of age. And you were put on that list was that 2019?
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2018 or 2019. Yeah. How did you hear about that? Did they reach out to you before? Did
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you want to, you know, already got it? You heard about it or what?
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Yeah, just kind of came through the network of folks my family has known and, you know,
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folks that I've gotten to know over the years. I think Steve Rukavina is the guy who would
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reach out to me initially. And yeah, it's a real honor to be chosen for that.
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Yeah, that's pretty cool. I saw you on there. One of my good friends Johnny Svietkovic was
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on there just this, I think, most recent year. So yeah, it's pretty cool. Before, you know,
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last couple of months, I hadn't even heard about it. And then, you know, as I've sort
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of been starting this podcast and getting involved in everything over here, I saw that
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they were doing that. That's pretty cool. You know, as we're winding down here, AJ, I
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want to thank you, of course, for coming on the podcast. I know you're super busy with
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everything going on. I know with Hermes, of course, you know, that's your, I mean, that's
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your main project. That's your doing everything. You've got the podcast, other side projects
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with that. Are there any other future, you know, plans or projects that you're hoping
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to work on aside from those?
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Well, I know that you got so much on your plate that...
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We have a young family that's hopefully growing this week, so we're expecting our second kid
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this week. So that is quite a program in and of itself.
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Right. I totally forgot. You told me you're about to go on leave soon. That's why we're
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here. We had to get this in. Well, yeah, congratulations on that, of course. Yeah, that's definitely
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big plans, I would say.
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Yep. Yeah, for sure.
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Awesome. Well, AJ, thank you so much for the time and for coming on the podcast. I really
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appreciate it.
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You bet. Thanks, Uncle.
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That's it for today's episode of the All Things Croatia podcast. Thanks for tuning in, and
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I hope you all enjoyed it. You can subscribe to the Patreon and check out the All Things
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Croatia Instagram page to stay updated. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions,
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tips or ideas, and make sure to tune back in to the next episode. Thanks again and...
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peace out.