AirMap Reviews

Please note - this review was previously taken down after Airmap complained. To Glassdoor admins, please note - this review fastidiously adheres to the Glassdoor Community Guidelines. Only the senior public face of the organization (CEO David Hose) is identified by name. No confidential information is contained in this post. Opinion is clearly identified as such and made distinct from any claims of fact. Any grey areas from the original post (which was quickly marked as one of the "most helpful" reviews about Airmap) has been removed. Cons; It's hard to summarize my disgust with Airmap as a company. I cannot warn people enough - employees, investors, partners - In my opinion, nobody should consider doing business with Airmap. Airmap is one of many companies in the drone space that got a lot of hype early on and got quite a lot of funding early, before they had really built a meaningful business. Now, reality is starting to set in, and many of these overfunded drone businesses are struggling. Several big name companies (such as Airware), raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and have now imploded. With high expenses, limited revenue, and low growth, all of these businesses are desperate to raise more money to stay alive. It appears to me, Airmap is no exception. And with the whole VC community now far more skeptical about drones, it is very unclear whether Airmap will be able to raise enough money to keep the lights on. {Note to admins: there is no confidential information here regarding how long Airmap's cash will / won't last} Not all drone companies are failing. There are successful companies out there. But Airmap isn't one of them. *In my opinion*, Airmap's core business strategy does not fit the current world of drones. Airmap wants to sell software that tells drone pilots (or fully autonomous drones) whether they are clear to fly in their area or not. The big problem here is there just are not enough drone pilots flying to make this a valuable business. Airmap would only have enough drone flights happening to make a real business out of all this if there were a lot of autonomous drones (really autonomous, where there are no pilots involved and everything is fully run by computer) flying. And today, there aren't. And there won't be lots of autonomous drone flights happening for a long, long time. The FAA has zero interest in enabling high volumes of drone traffic that could interfere with airplanes or cause accidents that interfere with traffic and pedestrians. We are many years away from this happening. And Airmap - like all start-ups, burning money all the time - is struggling to figure out what to do to produce any revenue at all. Airmap's current CEO, David Hose, does not seem to have a strategy to build a real company. Hose took the CEO position about a year ago. Hose has no experience in the drone space or aviation. It's not clear why he was selected for this role. He claims he once built a company that made online maps, and thinks that makes him relevant. But Hose really comes across as a dinosaur; with no real understanding for where the industry is going or how Airmap will ever be able to make any money. Hose himself appears to mainly enjoy using Airmap as an expense account. *I am personally aware of a his activities over a 4 week period this summer*, where Hose travelled to Singapore (on "company business") and spent *a significant part of the week* watching Formula 1 time trails. He returned briefly to LA and spent *a significant part of the week* at cocktail parties. And then flew the next week to Berlin to spend a *significant part of the week* partying with his son after his graduation. What made these choices especially interesting is that at the time, Airmap had just completed an acquisition (more on that later). Most CEOs would want to be close to the action and ensure things went smoothly. But Hose had Formula 1 and parties in Berlin that needed his attention. Hose's other main focus appears to have been hiring old friends into all of the senior management positions. {Note to Glassdoor Admins: This objectively a fact that the senior management positions listed below are old acquaintances of Hose}. To some extent, it makes sense when a new CEO comes in that they would hire executives that they know and trust into top positions. However, the way things have played out at Airmap *this looks to me* a lot more like "jobs for the boys". Hose's old friends take top titles and big salaries, but do little if any work. The official heads of Engineering, Marketing and Product (all Hose's old friends) are physically located in Europe. As the company is based in LA, this makes them all very (totally?) ineffective. In reality, all the real work is done by mid-level managers based in LA. But the Hose cronies are able to take credit when things succeed and use their managers as scape goats whenever things go wrong. If Hose's worst sins were that he simply neglected work, partied a lot and hired all his friends; that would make him an adolescent, but not necessarily a nightmare. But those are not his worst sins. Based on my personal experience (which is shared by many people who still work at Airmap) I can say that as someone to work with, CEO Hose is atrocious. In my experience, CEO Hose is a bully, a liar, and constantly abusive. In my opinion, Hose gets emotional over nothing. From what I have seen and heard, he threatens and fires staff without justification. If you check out the churn of employees at Airmap since he was allowed in - the business has lost practically all seasoned staff. The Santa Monica team that remains looks shell-shocked. At team meetings when Hose and his team of "old friends" are present, the LA-team usually sit with their heads down, in silence, avoiding eye-contact. They honestly look like broken people. It's impossible to imagine Airmap building a winning team if Hose and his friends treat people this way. Based on my experience of him, Hose is impulsive, and usually wrong, He makes bad decisions on little information, and then never reconsiders what could be done better. This makes his business judgment absolutely laughable. If you read other reviews on Glassdoor you will several reviewers mention decisions made that made no sense, cost a lot in terms of Engineering investment or just seemed to be decided on a whim. It seems pretty clear - This is where that comes from. You should remember that Airmap's business is largely dependent on building great partnerships with major drone companies, like DJI, and with foreign governments. It is impossible for me to imagine Airmap succeeding at this with someone like Hose running the company. Terrible business judgment and atrocious interpersonal skills destroy relationships. This is one of the reasons DJI publicly abandoned partnerships with Airmap. Any partners considering doing business with Airmap are encouraged to discuss their partner relations with other players in the industry. Whilst there are some interesting product developments taking place at Airmap, the focus right now appears doing whatever it takes to convince VCs into pouring more money into the company and keeping it alive a little longer. To that end, I speculate that Airmap is trying to make itself look more important through acquisitions. This summer, Airmap acquired another, smaller company in the drone space, called Hangar. This acquisition was small enough to be ignored by most of the tech press. It's a shame because in many ways this acquisition showed off what has gone wrong at Airmap. Airmap and Hangar are in completely different businesses. Airmap is a primitive directory of rules for flying drones in different locations. It's fairly simple stuff really - a bit like a web service that provides a zipcode lookup when you want to send a parcel. Hangar is in a completely different part of the drone industry, trying to build autonomous flight plans for drones to inspect cell towers. On paper, the two businesses have almost nothing in common. But this didn't matter to Airmap. I am unable to go into details on Glassdoor, but I can say that Airmap's acquisition of Hangar is highly questionable. Without revealing any confidential information, I will speculate - It seems to me Airmap just needed to close a deal to try and make themselves look more important in the industry. If they can pretend that Hangar was a really big company, with unique technology, maybe that will be part of the story that convinces the next wave of (dumb) investors to pour more money into the drone space. To that end, they didn't care whether Hangar had anything worth buying or not. I guess if Airmap can't raise money soon, they won't be around much longer anyway. It is possible Airmap will find a deep pocketed, uniformed investor who will still buy into all the hype and the smoke and the mirrors. Airmap might raise enough money to keep going. There is a lot of dumb money in the VC world and it might happen. But again, without revealing confidential information - VCs have lost hundreds of millions in this space already, and Airmap is not considered an all-star company by anyone in the industry, so it seems very unlikely they will sustain a massive valuation and raise a lot of money. For anyone considering working at Airmap, I would strongly advise you to consider other employment opportunities. With top jobs filled by friends of the CEO, and middle management living under intense pressure, is this somewhere you want to work? For potential investors, I strongly advise you to examine the fundamentals of the business and perform deep due diligence on this business. For potential partners, I advise you to ask around in the industry and hear the reputation Airmap has already received from other players.