Q&A with Brendan Schulman, former VP of policy at DJI and a leading global advocate for sensible drone regulations, as he takes up a new job at Boston Dynamics
Scott Simmie / DroneDJ : Tweets: @llsethj , @dronelaws , and @uavhive Tweets: Seth Weintraub / @llsethj : Big story here. DJI has cut ties with a huge chunk of its US workforce after being put on the US Commerce Department entity list. Brendan Schulman reflects on his DJI career and the industry: A DroneDJ exclusive https://dronedj.com/... Brendan Schulman / @dronelaws : Between jobs, I sat down with @DroneDJ to share some thoughts and reflections on the drone industry and my time at @DJIGlobal: https://dronedj.com/... @uavhive : Just a note that a key player in the global drone industry, now he's left the industry has given his view that there was no drone at Gatwick. He can say that without controversy. His interview is here: https://dronedj.com/... @samirashackle @shuclarke @GazTheJourno
Context & Ripple Effects
Brendan Schulman built his reputation as DJI's policy chief, the industry's most visible advocate for workable drone rules while DJI held roughly three-quarters of the US consumer market. The backdrop to his exit is grim: after the Commerce Department put DJI on its entity list in December 2020, the company's North American operations lost about a third of their 200-person team, per Reuters reporting on the entity-list workforce cuts.
Schulman's move to Boston Dynamics is also not an isolated departure — it fits a pattern of senior DJI talent leaving for robotics-adjacent ventures, most prominently chief scientist James Wu later founding FJDynamics to build farm and construction robots. The Q&A reads as a bridge interview: the drone industry's leading policy voice crossing over into ground robotics at the moment its home market turns hostile.
First-order effects
- Boston Dynamics gains one of the few policy voices with credibility across regulators and drone operators worldwide, exactly as it pushes commercial machines into regulated public spaces.
- DJI loses its most prominent US-facing policy defender while its American team is already hollowed out by the entity list, compounding the erosion documented in the earlier profile of DJI's precarious 77% consumer share.
Second-order effects
- The advocacy vacuum in Washington shifts weight toward domestic rivals: Skydio's pivot to enterprise after abandoning consumer drones gives US vendors both the market position and the political standing to fill the space Schulman occupied.
- DJI's repeated trust setbacks — including its admission that AeroScope tracking signals aren't encrypted — mean its remaining US advocates have less to defend, raising the cost of any successor's job.
Third-order effects
- If senior departures continue along the Wu–Schulman path, drone expertise migrates into the broader robotics industry, blurring the line between aerial and ground platforms and consolidating talent around companies like Boston Dynamics and FJDynamics.
- Geopolitical screening of Chinese-origin hardware is pushing the industry toward two separate ecosystems — a US-aligned one championed by firms like Skydio and a Chinese one anchored by DJI — with policy talent increasingly choosing sides.
The trend: Senior talent is draining out of consumer drones into general-purpose robotics as US-China tensions split the industry into competing ecosystems.