A Conversation about DJI – with Adam Lisberg

by Nino LeitnerJanuary 2^nd, 2019

Just over a month ago I was in New York City for DJI’s launch event of the Osmo Pocket. (In case you missed it, you can find our review here.) Parallel to that event, I was able to interview Adam Lisberg, DJI’s Communications Director for North America, about company strategy. 

Thanks to Austrian journalist Patrick Wollner, who set up this interview with Adam Lisberg, I was able to film this conversation. It’s a rare opportunity to have someone from DJI talk about company strategy in front of the camera – and considering the popularity of DJI’s products, I was excited to hear about their thought progress “behind the scenes”.

We talked about how DJI evolved from a small Chinese company that made “drone kits” to use with your own cameras into what it has become today, a truly global company with over 15,000 employees around the world, and a brand name that has become synonymous with drones (at last count, their market share in the non-military drone space was 70%). We asked Adam Lisberg about what differentiates them from other big tech companies, being originally from China, unlike most others. We went on to talk about how they deal with new regulatory measures regarding drone use around the world – the Gatwick drone incident is the most recent example of how drone use will definitely be much more regulated in most countries in the near future – and how they talk to governments around the world in order to create a more global regulatory environment for drones. As Adam explained, DJI doesn’t see itself as the “drone company” unlike most audience members however, as the use of gimbals and small cameras evolves into more product categories like the Osmo Pocket, for example.

Watch the entire interview above. As a reference, here’s a full list of the questions we asked and the topics we talked about.

Topics / Questions:

00:32: How did DJI develop from a small to a global company?
03:11: Does becoming a big company make it harder to compete for making even more innovative products?
04:41: Being from China, what distinguishes DJI?
06:55: Are you perceived as a Chinese company?
08:39: Do you develop anything outside of China?
11:12: How did you manage to become good at both engineering and software design?
12:42: Do you still regard yourselves as a drone company only?
14:41: How do you face new global regulatory challenges around drones?
19:45: Does DJI lobby governments to create international legislation around drone use?
23:41: In what areas can we expect DJI’s technology to improve more?
25:22: Are cameras going to improve more with their hardware or with processing of the images in the future?

We hope you found this in-depth conversation useful and interesting and look forward to your thoughts. We plan having more discussions with filmmakers and filmmaking tech companies alike in 2019. Let us know what you think in the comments below!