Ian Smith is the host of Commercial Drones FM, a drone podcast. He has been working in the drone industry since 2013 but has worked in aviation since 2007.
Ian has worked at two of the world’s leading drone startups—one, a hardware OEM in France building long range, fixed-wing drones called, Delair. The other, a cloud-based drone data and mapping software company in San Francisco called, DroneDeploy. Ian is currently CEO and co-founder of Ware. Ware deploys drones for warehouses to automate their inventory tracking and digitize their assets.
With more than 12+ years of broad international experience in aviation and startups, Ian is also an FAA-certified commercial helicopter pilot, flight instructor, drone operator, aerial photographer, and subject matter expert on the aviation fuels industry. He has a passion for anything that flies and loves the smell of jet fuel in the morning.
Recently, prior to starting Commercial Drones FM, Ian created the Commercial Drones Slack group, which has over 400+ members—of which include CEOs/founders from Google X, Pix4D, DroneDeploy, Skyward, Propeller, Redbird, Skyfront; team members from PrecisionHawk, Kespry, QueenB, Drone Base, Skysense, Skycatch, DJI, Esri, Delair-Tech, Airware; global commercial drone advocates; legal experts, and more.
Ian’s Twitter handle is @SkyCapture and you can view his personal website at iansmith.xyz
He is CEO of Ware and lives in San Francisco, California.