Then he found himself on Wall Street thinking about his career, doing something he didn’t want to do where he wanted to be: back in Vermont.
“His home state engineers have a brain drain,” he said. “People go to college and come back when they’re 40 because they realize San Francisco or Boston isn’t cat food.” Returning to Burlington in the mid-20’s, Mr. Clark became director of engineering at a company that designed power converters for Tesla.
In 2017, she attended a conference where Mrs. Rothblatt built her own pitch for an e-helicopter.
“There were 30 people in the room, none of whom encouraged me,” Ms Rothblatt recalled. “Then Kyle stood up and said, ‘I’m an electronics and power system person, and I’m sure we can get your specialty with an exhibition flight in one to two years.’ Other people were shaking their heads. He was probably the youngest boy in the room, so I approached him during the break and said, ‘Where is your company?’ And he said, ‘I live in Vermont.’
A few weeks later, after a second meeting, Mr. Clark drew a watercolor of his design and sent it to Mrs. Rothblatt. Within hours, the ਬੀ 1.5 million seed capital for Beta Technologies was wired into his bank account.
“She made a great design,” said Mrs. Rothblatt.
A prototype with four tilting propellers was assembled in eight months, Mr. Clark piloted the vehicle himself. Built in Burlington, the plane had to fly over Champlain Lake, away from population centers.
Mr Clarke told an audience at MIT in 2019, “It was so much fun to blow it that we got every excuse.” Mr Clarke told an audience at MIT in 2019. In the end, however, the design was complicated and Mr. Clark dropped it. Outside he built a smooth prototype after an Arctic turn, a small, slow bird capable of flying extraordinary distances without landing.
Since then, Beta’s workforce has grown from 30 to 350. The company’s headquarters have been expanded to include several buildings around the runway at Burlington International Airport, with plans for an additional 40-acre campus.
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