Entrepreneur

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forward. Retailing from $499 to $799, it is the fastest production
drone on the market, topping off at 80 mph, and it can respond
to voice commands through Siri. When it debuted in June, it sold
out almost immediately.
Matus parks his SUV, gets out, and walks over to a strip of sidewalk
abutting a large park. He straps on a pair of futuristic goggles
equipped with something called FPV, for “first-person view,” which
allows him to fly the drone as if he’s sitting in the cockpit. He then
unsnaps a carrying case about the size of a suitcase and removes the
drone, which is small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.
“Meet Teal,” he says.
With that, Matus hits a button on a handheld remote control
and the drone shoots up hundreds of feet into the overcast sky,
with the whoosh of a little rocket. As the craft traces loops in the
air, a serene smile spreads across his face.
“I’ve always loved the feeling of flight, to be untethered, to
feel limitless,” he says. As he flies, he reflects on the chaos of
building a company over the past few years, what the experience
taught him about who he is. He pauses for a moment and
watches his drone soaring above him. “Unflappable,” he says,
finally. “Maybe that’s how I’d describe myself.”
WHEN MATUS WAS A KID—really a kid—he dreamed of flying.
His parents met on a plane from Prague to New York. His mom
was a flight attendant; his dad, a recent business school graduate.
After they married and had George, they flew to Slovakia each
summer to visit George’s maternal grandparents. Because his
mother worked for the airline, Matus was often granted access
to the cockpit, where he’d pepper
the pilots with questions.
Matus had another passion:
making money. When he was
little, following the lead of countless
other entrepreneurs, he
“I wanted to say
started a lemonade stand. It went
no,” recalls an
well, but he foresaw a problem.
Lemonade was seasonal. That early investor.
made him wonder what drink he
“But when he
could sell in the winter. Seeing
an opportunity that no one else started talking,
was exploiting, Matus started a
I forgot I was
hot chocolate stand.
talking to
One day, a customer told
Matus he wanted to buy out all
a 17-year-old.”
his inventory for $60. Matus
agreed. He loaded his stand
into the back of the customer’s pickup, and they drove to the
man’s office and served what was left of the hot chocolate to all
his employees. Luckily, the buyer turned out to be a friend of his
father’s, but Matus didn’t know that at the time, and his parents
were alarmed that their 10-year-old would go somewhere with a
stranger. They grounded him for two months.
When Matus was 10, his family moved from San Diego to a
suburb of Salt Lake City. Their home sat next to a large park, and
Matus, still obsessed with flying, persuaded his parents to let him
save up for a remote-controlled airplane. He got it, and gave it to
his dad to try. His dad crashed it. Matus cried, saved up to buy
spare parts, and fixed it. Something sparked. He started tinkering
with other planes and helicopters. Before long, Matus was making
them do things they weren’t designed to do. He made a video of
one helicopter he’d modified to fly upside down and posted it on
YouTube. The helicopter manufacturer both asked him to take it
down and offered him a job as a test pilot. Matus accepted, and
every week or so, the company sent him new prototypes to test.
Matus got in deeper. He turned his bedroom into a lab and
eventually migrated to the basement, commandeering a Ping-
Pong table. He built a helicopter that could fly for two hours and
a drone that could go more than 100 miles per hour. At the age
of 14, he won a world-champion drone race against engineers
from Germany, Japan, and Russia. “I was totally obsessed,” Matus
recalls. “Like, every two minutes, I’d be thinking about drones,
from the second I got up.” His father, George Matus, Sr. recalls,
“He’d be down in the basement soldering until 2 a.m. We saw
smoke coming up the stairs; there were funny smells. We’d hear
the drill going. It was like Tony Stark from Iron Man, down in the
basement, tinkering away.”
At 16, Matus started going to hackathons, where coders and
software engineers gather to compete, building new products
and apps. Matus won a few of them. At one, set at Stanford,
he spoke about the limitless potential he saw for drones—how they
can go way beyond just taking photos and video. Matus wanted
to explode people’s narrow perceptions of drones. That caught
the attention of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, whose foundation
pays young people to forgo college and pursue “radical innovation
that will benefit society.” Thiel gave Matus $100,000 to launch
a company of his own. Matus named the company Teal, partly
for the teal duck, one of the fastest birds on Earth. He envisioned
a drone that would be faster, easy to adapt and upgrade, and outfitted
with a supercomputer that would eventually be equipped with
artificial intelligence to give it a boundless range of capabilities.
As Matus worked on his design, the headmaster of the private
school he was attending put him in touch with an investor
named Mark Harris, who was on the school’s board. They met,
and Harris eventually agreed to put in $150,000. Later, Matus
was called in for a meeting by a Salt Lake City VC firm called
Pelion, which specializes in tech startups. “This kid came in, and
I had planned to say no,” says Pelion’s Ben Lambert. “I wanted
to say no. But when he started talking, I forgot I was talking
to a 17-year-old. We realized his vision was much bigger than
what drones were.”
Pelion offered Matus a term sheet a few days before his 18th
birthday. It would put in a hefty chunk of what ended up being a
$2.8 million round if Matus could raise the rest within a couple
months. With his father’s help and intros from Pelion and people
at the Thiel Fellowship, Matus met with more VCs in Salt Lake
City and started cold-calling VC firms in Silicon Valley. “A lot of
people were skeptical at first,” he says. “They’d see my dad driving
me there, waiting for me in the parking lot. I’ve got braces and I’m
asking for millions of dollars.”
It wasn’t easy—at one point the deal nearly fell apart—but
Matus eventually cobbled together the financing to trigger the
$1 million investment from Pelion. Because of Matus’ age and
inexperience, Pelion put in what he refers to as “a few checks
and balances.” He had to work out of Pelion’s offices, couldn’t
spend more than $25,000 without the board’s approval. What's
more, the hectic fundraising push strained friendships and
48 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / September 2017