Why We Invested In A Jetpack Company in 2017

The Story of Boost VC's Investment in Gravity Co.

Something that other Deep Tech investors should know about investing in Deep Tech Founders is to celebrate the wins!

In April of 2017, 40 people emailed me essentially the same message:

“Gravity.co built an Iron Man suit”

With a link to this video:

I emailed their contact@ email address, and a man named Richard Browning got back to me. I believe my exact message was “Is this real? Does it work? Do you want to fly it at our demo day?”

Some background is that for years I had been telling people, “My dream is to invest/build the iron man suit, so send me the most wild deals you run into.”

Long story short, a month later, I picked Richard Browning, the creator of this jetpack suit up from the airport. He told me a hilarious story about getting through security with jet fuel and explaining what his jetpack engines were to the TSA. We stopped at the local gas station to fill up his backpack full of diesel fuel… for his jetpack!

Boost VC hosted a Demo Day and Richard showed up half way through in our parking lot and flew (For the first time publicly):

In my family, we have a rule, if you see someone fly - you invest. We saw someone fly… so my Dad and I ran over to the middle of the parking lot and negotiated a deal with Richard Browning right then and there to be investors. We signed the deal on the back of a $100 bill. I hope he still has that bill.

From there, Richard was focused on building the brand and doing demonstrations everywhere!

There was no real clear business model for jetpacks, but the novelty of them and the media that they generated propelled the company forward. They stayed profitable… they stayed lean.

I don’t want to list all the videos, feel free to browse the Gravity Youtube channel to see, but this is one of my favorites which included tactical operations:

So over the last 6 years as an investor in Gravity, he and his team have flown publicly hundreds of times, and become a media sensation. Grown the number of pilots, and demonstrated for dozens of military entities.

And recently… this happened… They raced three jetpack pilots at the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Austria!

And the Gravity team kindly put the Boost VC logo on their jerseys.

I’m constantly impressed by the momentum that Gravity can generate and the tenacity with which they take on the challenges of today. They are an incredible story of putting one foot in front of the other.

I remember I was on a panel with Richard, the founder at Comic Con in 2018 and a girl asked him, “I’m 16 years old, How do I start a business. How do I get from where I am to where you are?”

And he gave the greatest founder answer ever:

“I had an idea, and I thought about the one thing I could do that day in order to take a step towards accomplishing it. I put a cylinder around my arm to see what it would be like. The next day I took the next step. So if you have an idea, figure out what the smallest thing you can do towards building that idea today.”

Keep an eye on Gravity… this team is off to the races. *pun intended. Congratulations on the progress, and keep up the hard work!

Also this was fun for me to track down on these photos and videos. Something fun about most hardware deep tech is that the products are usually photo-genic.