Then he found himself contemplating a career on Wall Street and doing something he didn’t want to do outside of where he wanted to be: back in Vermont.
“There is a brain drain” among engineers from his home state, he said. “People go to college and come back when they’re 40 because they realize San Francisco or Boston isn’t the cat’s meow.” Returning to Burlington in his mid-20s, Mr. Clark became the director of engineering at a company that designed power converters for Tesla.
In 2017, he attended a conference where Ms. Rothblatt made her pitch for an e-helicopter.
“There were about 30 people in the room, none of whom turned me on,” recalls Ms. Rothblatt. “Then Kyle stood up and said, ‘I’m an electronics and power systems person, and I’m confident we can get to your specification in one to two years with a demonstration flight.’ Other people shook their heads. He was probably the youngest man in the room. So I came up to him during intermission and said, ‘Where is your company located?’ 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, $1.5 million in seed capital for Beta Technologies had been transferred to his bank account.
“He drew a nice design,” said Mrs. Rothblatt.
A prototype with four tilting propellers was assembled in eight months, with Mr. Clark driving the vehicle himself. Built in Burlington, the plane was to be flown over Lake Champlain, away from population centers.
“It was so much fun flying it that we found an excuse for every chance we could,” said Mr. Clark to an audience at MIT in 2019. But in the end, it turned out to be too complex a design, and Mr. Clark threw it away. from. He created a sleek prototype modeled on the Arctic tern, a small, slow bird that can fly uncanny distances without landing.
Since then, Beta’s workforce has grown from 30 to more than 350. The company’s headquarters has expanded to include several buildings around the runway at Burlington International Airport, with plans for an additional 40-acre campus.
