The iPhone of Drones Is Being Built by This Teenager
His drone, he believes, will be revolutionary. It will come equipped with artificial intelligence so it can recognize faces and objects and pick them out in a crowd; it will help police departments find lost children, ranchers monitor their herds, cities inspect buildings. If all goes according to plan, it will do for drones what the iPhone did for phones. It will make them useful, helpful. It will change the way we live. And it will be very, very fast.
Related: How Drones Are Changing the Way We Do Business
Yet, until a year ago, whenever its creator, George Matus, went to see a venture capitalist to ask for money to bring it to market, his father had to drive him. That’s because Matus didn’t have a driver’s license. He wore braces, lived at home and was still in high school. Unique were the challenges facing young George Matus. That was then. On a morning this past June, he sits behind the wheel of a Mercedes SUV, navigating traffic in the leafy suburbs of Salt Lake City, where he lives. He is 19, rail-thin, quick to laugh and unfailingly polite and optimistic, as he describes his vision for his drone. At a red light, he hits the brakes just a tad too hard and the SUV lurches to a halt. He smiles sheepishly, as if to say, Oops; still getting the hang of this.
