Hold on tight! The Legal Department is going on a wild ride of acquisitions, IPOs, and spinouts with Eric Lentell, General Counsel of Archer Aviation. At the start of Eric’s legal career, the GC informed him that the company had been sold and he no longer had a job. Since that first role, he has ridden the roller coaster at companies like Fitbit, DISH Network, and Google, taking companies to IPO and through other major transitions. In his current role, Eric is leading legal and government affairs for an electric airplane company that is disrupting the established and highly regulated aviation industry.

In this episode, you’ll learn Eric’s suggestions for selecting and managing outside counsel for “bet the company” litigation and M&A, how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and how to vet opportunities to join the legal department of a start-up. Eric’s energy and passion are sure to get you pumped up.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Level Up And Hold On: Leading The Legal Department Of A Start Up To IPO: Eric Lentell Archer Aviation

My name is Eric Lentell. I’m the General Counsel at Archer Aviation, building electric aircraft so we can finally live in The Jetsons era. A fun fact about me is I took 99,000 steps in one day during my time in the Legal Department at Fitbit. We were pretty intense at Fitbit on department challenges and we were up against it. We did not want to lose on the last day. Unfortunately, the clock ran out at midnight and I was at about 99,200 steps. I came up short of 100,000 and haven’t had the push to go back and try to get to 100,000 steps in one day. Someday I’ll do that.

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On this episode of The Legal Department, I’m excited to welcome Eric Lentell, General Counsel of Archer Aviation. Archer Aviation is working to electrify aviation and bring sustainability to an industry that has otherwise been quite the opposite. Eric has had a long career with a lot of different transitions and fun transactions. I’m excited to dig into that. Eric, how are you?

How are you? It’s great to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

It’s been a pleasure. We have run in similar circles. We’ve worked with the same crisis counsel on a few matters that we were not related to, but that’s how we’re connected. I know from talking with our mutual friend that you’ve gone through a lot. I know you have a lot to share with the audience.

I’ve seen a lot of interesting transactions over my twenty-year career. The first day after I finished the bar exam and walked into my first job, I walked into the GC’s office and he said, “We just got bought and you don’t have a job anymore.” That was the only way for where my career was headed. It’s been an interesting run since then.

Growing Fitbit To IPO And Beyond

You stepped onto the roller coaster right out of the bar. I don’t know if I’ve heard a story like that before. That’s unique. I know you’re at Archer now. I don’t want to go through your whole career journey, but you spent a lot of time at Fitbit. You grew that company to IPO, and then eventually got bought by Google. Can you talk a little bit about that experience?

I started at Fitbit when it was in its early stages. When I started, we had about fifteen new hires every Monday that would cycle through the building. The company was growing like a weed at that point. We had launched some of our early products. They were super popular and we were trying to figure out how to harness the excitement about the industry and our products.

I joined there because I was at a company before that of FinTech in the Valley. Our COO had left and he had gone over to Fitbit. He called me and said, “This place is amazing. You should come to work here. It’s going to be an unbelievable journey.” I started talking to the GC. Similar to what we talked about, the GC and I had used similar crisis counsel, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and we started talking and getting to know each other and thought we would like to work together. I ended up taking the job. I went over there and helped him build out the legal team.

We went from a very small team to a team of 30, went through IPO, and then the eventual sale to Google, and a lot of trials and tribulations along the way. We got to Google together and then he and I stuck around together and we ended up coming to Archer together. In 2023, he stepped aside and became a senior advisor and I took over the GC role from him at Archer. We had about almost a twelve-year run together, working right alongside through a lot of ups and downs and crazy issues along the way.

As I look out into the legal market for in-house, there are your bigger established companies with giant departments. There are nonprofits, and then there’s this whole, I’m going to call it a startup community primarily in the tech space, where there’s a lot of let’s say growth-oriented companies. I see a lot of job ads, head of legal, general counsel, and different things, and I have never worked at a company that. That’s where you cut your teeth. Can you talk a little bit about what is that job? When you’re starting at a company that is growing to 50 employees every week, what is that in-house job?

It’s very all-encompassing. In those early days, months, and years, you’re signing up to be on 24/7, 365. I remember being three years in the Fitbit, sitting down with one of my colleagues, and she said to me, “It’s great. I finally feel like I can take a vacation now because we have built out the team and there are other people to respond to issues.”

In those early years, you know what you’re biting off is that you’re going to be on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week because the business is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are key issues that are defining whether or not the company is going to be successful or not. You can’t say, “I’m taking a day off or two weeks off.”

That’s what you’re signing up for and I’ve enjoyed that. I’ve enjoyed being immersed in the business and being a part of whether or not the business is successful or not. One of the things we talk about at Archer is we don’t have data waste in making decisions. We’re a pre-revenue company. We’re trying to change an industry and we burn about $1 million a day of capital.

That’s major. I’ve always worked at established organizations that had no chance of going away. Even after getting hit with a couple of black swan events, USC is still there. When you talk about not being able to take a day off because the business is needed, it needs to be fed every day, that’s not an experience I’ve had before.

I’ve had very different stops around my career journey. I started at a tech company that was doing storage area network design and then went to a TV company, and then a FinTech, and then onto Fitbit. Each of them has been rethinking their business and retooling it along the way. When I was at Dish Network, I was there during the timeframe when they were trying to figure out how they pivot to over-the-top TV from satellite.

When I got to the FinTech space, they were trying to get out of hardware and into services, and then I got to Fitbit and they were trying to figure out how you do wearables and how you do smartwatches. It’s been an interesting journey to see that you’re much a part of that product design. You’ve got to be there as the business is trying to navigate through that and support it, and make sure you’re giving answers in the timeframe they need it.

A lot of times, they’re moving faster than you can even keep up with. That was much of what we saw at Fitbit. We were moving fast and you had to make decisions very quickly. You had to hit a product release cycle. We were releasing products every 3 to 6 months in those early days to keep up with our competitors.

In those early days, we didn’t even have Apple as a competitor, and then Apple came along and became a competitor to us. You’re trying to keep up with the best hardware company ever to be there in the world. Keep up with them on features and products that they have an endless amount of capital to chase.

The legal industry does not move typically. We’re still using fax machines in some courtrooms. I had to get an order of fax the other day from a court, for example. Were you ingrained to adapt my advice or my work product was matching that pace? How did you get comfortable making risk decisions with very little time to make sure you were right?

I got a little lucky in having the right mix of executives to work with and having a skilled general counsel who had seen a lot throughout his career and realized that you have to have a safe space to fail. We didn’t get every decision right. I look back and we made a lot of wrong decisions, but we had reasoned logic for why we made those decisions and they were calculated risks.

 

That’s the space that you have to move in when you’re moving at that pace, which is we’re going to make our best decision, given the facts that were presented to us, and we’re going to make it and move on. If something goes wrong, we’ll deal with it and we’ll fix it but we’ve got to go make that decision because the paralysis of not making the decision is way worse than making the decision.

It’s a bigger cost. As you were saying, with the $1 million a day, if it takes two weeks for you to come up with a decision, you’re burning $15 million.

At Fitbit, we were timing our product release cycles around important things. If you were delayed one week on our product release cycle at Fitbit, that meant you missed Black Friday. You would miss a million units too.

Advice For Junior Lawyers In High-Growth Companies

You mentioned the safe space to fail. If you were advising somebody maybe a little more junior in their career who was looking at opportunities at high-growth companies, what advice would you give them in kicking the tires about the company and the leadership team?

That is tough because you’re on the outside. Everyone that I’ve gone to has been through some type of connection where you can vet it because it’s very challenging from an outsider’s perspective to get a real view of how that company’s culture is. I don’t know that I would go to one that I didn’t have some connection into, have some surety as to what I thought the culture was, or how the executive team operated because it is challenging to vet that from the outside.

You have to lean on whether or not it’s outside law firms that have connections to them. Most companies are already working with some type of law firm that you probably know. That’s typically been how I’ve vetted them and how a lot of those opportunities have come to me. Outside law firms typically hear about the need for in-house counsel way before recruiters or I would as a general counsel at another place.

They’re usually the ones that can give you the best take. They’ll give you a frank take because you build those lasting relationships with key outside counsel and then they’ll tell you whether or not it is a place you want to go or not. Every time I get a call about another company that might be looking to hire a GC, I ask around and see who does work for them. Is this an interesting opportunity?

It’s a shiny thing. I guess then being near or having a network of people that you can count on to do that vetting is important.

Absolutely, but sometimes you go take those risks. Sometimes you know that the jobs you’re stepping into are going to be unbelievably challenging, but that’s what you’re signing up to. I’ve mentioned it to you, but when I was at Dish Network, my boss and I were there, and we were very close. We were a pan and glove together. A year and a half ago, he called me and said, “I think I’m going to do it.” He went and took the job as GC at Tesla.

Sometimes you have to run into that fire. That’s where you get the unbelievable experience. That’s very much what Archer was for me when I came to Archer. We had closed the Google transaction. We had made it through all of the antitrust reviews that the European Union and the US put us through as going into Google. Two months into being at Google and seeing what a giant legal department of almost a thousand people was going to feel like, I got the opportunity and got the call from Archer.

At that point, it was making or breaking for Archer. They didn’t have funding and they were trying to go public. A big competitor had sued them saying, “You stole their trade secrets. You’re infringing our patents.” I knew they had three months to close a public transaction or they were out of business. As you said to me, “Why did you go work there?” I think that’s where you cut your teeth. It’s running into those challenges and figuring out a path through them and helping the business get through them.

It goes back to this idea of risk tolerance. If you’re somebody who wants stability and you want an organization that’s going to be there no matter what, which could be a little less exciting, you want to pursue a startup-type environment. You get to Google, which for many people would be the golden way.

Coming out of law school, my wife always laughs because when we started dating early on, I thought that was always an aspiration, “Someday, I’ll go in-house and work at Google.” It was an aspiration of my career. As soon as I got there, it was almost like I couldn’t get out there fast enough.

I’m sure you had a lot of degrees of freedom, probably made a lot of business decisions in some of these other roles, and then now you’re in a big company and one of many.

That was challenging and seeing what that was going to look like inside of Google. For me, the transaction was amazing. It was super interesting to be. I was at the day one meeting with the European Union and day one meeting with the DOJ, and getting that experience at a time when Google was under such antitrust scrutiny. Google didn’t want to be in front of those regulators.

They let Fitbit take the spotlight and allowed us to go up and be in front of those regulators, which was very interesting. I’ve always enjoyed the part of being an in-house lawyer impacting the business. At Google, it’s such a big organization. Looking at where Fitbit was on that total organizational map, it was going to be hard for us to impact it.

Managing Major Transactions And Litigation

You have such great energy coming along with you in all these big transitions. Let’s talk about some of these transactions. From the outside, there’s a perception that if you’re in-house or at a company and they go public, it’s like your lottery ticket is cashed in. It’s like, “We printed all these documents where whatever we filed, we rang the bell in the NASDAQ, and we’re all running to the bank.” Maybe that happens, but it’s not all glitz and glam.

Yes, I agree. That’s not necessarily the case at Fitbit. We IPO’d and then we traded up for the next 120 days straight. We had a pretty insane run right after we went public. We were the largest hardware IPO in history at that time. We went from $60 a share to $4.

Is there a job at Google that you can’t make?

It’s a roller coaster of emotions. You have to be ready for it. When we were going through our IPO process, we had just launched our roadshow with the bankers, with all the hard work and diligence. We were ready to go. The team was out there, our CEO and CFO were flying around the country, meeting with investors. A couple of days in, we got sued by our biggest competitor at that point, which was Jawbone.

They sued us for patent infringement and theft of trade secrets relating to hiring our employees. The bankers said, “We’re not going to continue the roadshow unless you can get us comfortable that you didn’t do what Jawbone says you did.” We had about 72 hours to do forensics and diligence on a massive IP case to try and prove to the bankers.

72 hours?

Yes. I worked around the clock for 72 hours straight.

Were you able to multiply the hours somehow because even if you didn’t sleep, that sounds nearly impossible?

We brought in an army of outside lawyers in a short amount of time. As you know, I’m close with some of the IT litigators at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. We brought them in. We brought the team from Orrick because they happened to be in the same building as we were at Fitbit.

Proximity helps.

That scenario’s proximity helped a lot. We brought in a huge team to interview all of the people who were accused of doing these things, looking at all points of the patents. We had to essentially put on a case in about 72 hours for the banker’s lawyers, where they were drilling us on, “Did you do this or not?” They had to get comfortable that they could continue and let us go on the roadshow that we hadn’t done what we were accused of.

This is getting my adrenal glands going. I don’t know if you’re feeling the stress of going back to those times, but that’s about as high stakes as it gets. This case is all about our company’s crown jewels, and we won’t have money to continue the company if we are in trouble here. Lawyers go and make it go away.

It’s an interesting conversation with the founders and CEOs when you’re up against that type of situation.

Balancing Multiple Stakeholders

Let’s talk about that because I see the GC and the lawyers having a bunch of different stakeholders that you have to show up for. You can’t misrepresent anything to investors. There are going to be all kinds of reps, warranties, and whatever in the funding documents. Be sure you give this to the company. You have confidentiality issues. How did you balance all these?

I’ve been lucky in both situations I’ve been in. The facts were favorable to us. I wasn’t up against the situation where it was the opposite and we had to navigate out of it. Luckily for us in both situations, the facts were very on our side, and you don’t always get that lucky. I’ve been in cases where the facts aren’t on your side. In the company situations that I’ve been in at Fitbit, the facts were favorable to us. It was about how we get out the good facts and make sure people understand what the situation is.

I would think that the facts are helpful, but having the trust and confidence in the leadership team and I would think especially the lawyers. In the past, I’ve had to meet with rating agencies, which are super important, especially in the nonprofit sector. They’re looking at you dead in the eye and they want to know that you’re not bullshitting them.

Having a history of work at other companies, having been in these places before, bringing in the right outside counsel that has seen these types of transactions before and could say, “No, this isn’t an issue, and here’s why.” I’ve been lucky enough early on in my career and throughout my career to see some of those skilled senior partners at big law firms handle those board meetings where you are dealing with some very delicate and challenging issues.

Balancing multiple stakeholders is tough, but having the right facts and trust in your team makes it manageable. Share on X

Learning from them and watching in a very skilled manner how they explain those issues to the board, auditors, and other lawyers who are representing the financial advisors. It brings it home and you have a good understanding of how important it is to have someone who has seen those things before and can explain them in a very digestible manner.

In part confidence.

It takes me back to when I was working on a spin-off type transaction when I was at Dish Network. We were one publicly traded company. The company spun off into two and then the legal department represented both public companies afterward. We had not fully separated yet. Ninety percent of the business from the spinoff company was from the former parent before that. They were commonly owned by one founder.

Little cozy.

We were having some issues shortly after the spinoff. We were on the phone with the auditors trying to get ready to file both of our 10Ks. It was about 2:00 AM and we were on with who’s now the chairman or co-chair of Sullivan and Cromwell’s Securities practice and we were on with PWC’s auditors. The auditor at PWC was trying to explain to us what this guidance meant that was written in this PCAOB handbook.

The partner from Sullivan and Cromwell responded afterward and said, “That’s not what I meant when I wrote it.” The person from PWC was trying to explain to him what he meant when he wrote the language. He’s harking back to that. You have to have the people in the room who understand the stuff at key junctures.

Ensuring The Right Resources For Big Cases

This is a great jumping-off point for this next question, which is making sure you have the right resources for the matters that the company situations. I’ve gotten stung a couple of times when we’ve worked with this firm. The relationship partner recommends somebody and then you’re pregnant with them and they are not that Sullivan and Cromwell guy. They’re not living up to it. Other than having OARC in the building, what other ways and strategies have you used to identify the right resources?

The important stuff that I and my cohort have done in the last ten years, we loved the practice of going out to get two firms to work on things. For most of the important stuff, we would go get two firms on it.

Tell me about that in the world of burning $1 million a day.

It’s expensive, but you get a much better outcome. I’d rather win than save a little bit of money here and there. On the big case I handled at Archer, we had both Morrison & Foerster and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher involved in it.

Did they handle different aspects of the case or do you have them staffed?

They did. We had Gibson Dunn come in and replace Mo Foe who was handling the case early on, but then Mo Foe handled some of the individual defendants instead of the company after that. You have people who can give you different views on strategies along the way. It’s nice to have at least two firms in the mix even though they may not be doing the same thing.

You can have two different views on what’s going on. We recently had a dispute around a settlement agreement that we signed a little while back. Instead of relying on the outside counsel that drafted the settlement agreement, we went out to Skadden and said, “I want a third-party view.” Get outside of the comfort zone of “We’re a big law firm. We’ve got someone who can do this for you. We’ve got antitrust folks. We’ve got exact comp folks, you should go over here,” and go find the experts.

That’s been super key in some of the big transactions that we’ve worked on. When we went to do our deal with Google, we didn’t just use the antitrust firm that did the negotiations of the actual sale of the company. We went and found the best antitrust counsel in the world that we could, knowing that we were going to be in a tough situation trying to get a deal done with Google.

It’s nice for you to have the time. Did the GC at the company companies you’ve been at have full rein and discretion to select counsel or did you have to vet that? I’ve had this situation where either board members or the CEO know somebody, and then you have to involve that person or you end up needing to work with them because that’s who they want.

That’s always a challenge. There’s a lot of relationships, a lot of decision-makers and you’ve got to navigate through that. At the end of the day, you’re the one making the calls and you’ve got to get someone who you trust. If for some reason you’re not sure if that person is the right person, you’ve got to go out and find someone that you trust. I’ve been lucky enough throughout my career to work at places where we’ve had enough ability to find the resources we want and make changes. Yes, there will be those relationships, but bolstering them with somebody else in a lot of ways.

I’ve had matters where I had multiple firms and I agree with you. Diversity of opinion is always a good thing and having people who are looking at things from a different perspective. I’ve had a couple of rough spots where there was some competition among the firms and some unfortunate backbiting.

That happens.

Put your counselor’s hat off on that and hope that everything is going to be okay. I’ve spoken with other in-house folks about this. Some of the folks who tune in to this are outside counsel as well. I always try to have something for them specifically to learn from us. We talked before about law firms that are trying to get business from companies and some of the more traditional ways of pitching. That doesn’t hit the mark always.

For these transactions, you’re looking at usually a minimum of several million dollars in fees and sometimes tens of millions of dollars in fees. I think back to the antitrust work at Fitbit. Between us and Google, we probably spent north of $50 million on antitrust fees to get those cases done because that’s what it takes these days, given the volume of stuff you’ve got to produce.

You think back to the pitches, we probably interviewed ten firms, and I’m sure Google did the same when they were making their decision about who to hire. The typical thing is you get a PowerPoint from that firm that has their bios on it and instructive cases that they’ve worked on. They got on the phone for you for an hour and they’re pitching for huge amounts of business.

Major money.

I’ve talked about it with a lot of my friends. Get on a plane, get in front of the VC. Get in the room. Come with a hot take, not just, “This is what we’ve done. This is the law school I went to. This is the big firm.”

In the legal market, a pitch isn't just a presentation. Get in front of your client, show your strategy, and make your case. Share on X

I want to emphasize that nobody wants to read your bio. When you get those glossy books, I never look at them. It’s a waste of paper. Save the Velobind. I don’t need it.

A much better way to think about it for law firms is this is your pitch. Imagine you’re in front of a VC trying to get someone to invest in your company. That’s how I think law firms have to pivot and pull together their pitches. You can’t do that on every single matter, but for the big matters that you’re going after, this is the type of business that you’re chasing. This is big accounts and big business. You got to go after it that way.

As you said, give a hot take. Give us a peek into the strategy. We want to like you, trust you, and know that you’ve done this before, but part of a big thing that we’re hiring for is your strategic brain. What are you going to bring into this? Especially for litigation, I feel like many litigators are following the playbook. “We’re going to have a massive discovery and we’re going to have some motion practice and we’re going to try to get an MSJ and then move it to settlement.” I want more creativity than that.

We had a securities case come in last year on a bogus short-seller report. We went out to all the big firms like Wachtell or all of them. Every one of them said, “You’re never going to win on a motion dismissed. Don’t even bother.” We went to another one and that firm said, “We’re going to win on a motion dismissed, and here’s why I’m going to go in it.” They did.

The case got kicked. They didn’t even have to get the motion dismissed. We filed it and the plaintiff firm said, “We’re in trouble. We could be open up for sanctions. We didn’t do a good enough job of diligently seeing this short report. It’s all BS.” They voluntarily withdrew the case. Before you select a counsel, everything is free. Go get as many takes as you can.

That might be the takeaway from this episode, “Get the free advice.”

Free advice is the best thing you can get.

 

These two things going up against each other, which is I’m seeing the time pressure of being in a high-growth company and needing to get the right resources. A big part is you must have a good network, first of all.

You have to have that Rolodex of folks that you know you can call when you’ve got urgent issues and you need an answer right away. I’ve been lucky over the years to develop some deep relationships with key folks that I trust inherently. You talked about it in some prior episodes. It’s important to build a deeper relationship with outside counsel where it’s not just transactional. Some of them have come to my wedding. That type of thing. It’s a deep relationship, and I know I could call them if we get in a bind on an issue, and they’re going to give me their top associates. They’re going to give me whatever we need from a resource perspective to attack that problem.

Developing deep relationships with outside counsel is key. Some even came to my wedding! It's not just transactional. Share on X

Navigating The Complexities Of Government Affairs

They’re going to come to your office for 72 hours. That is a wild story. In addition to leading the legal function at Archer, you also handle government affairs. Unlike wearable technology, aviation is highly regulated. I’ve been thinking about this. You’re at a startup, building a new category in an established industry that is highly regulated, and safety is the number one priority. How do those things come together?

I started to see government affairs when I was in-house at Dish Network. We were building satellites and rockets and started to get pretty involved in our government affairs there as I saw the different departments working on it across legal. We had a government affairs team that was growing there. It spiked my interest.

When I got to Fitbit, we started to have a lot of work in that regard as we shifted towards health. We started to do more things that were regulated by the FDA. Seeing that progression, we managed to get Obama to start wearing a Fitbit. When we were there, we got caught up in the tariff wars during the Trump era. We’re essentially a break-even company at that point.

If our products got caught in a tariff bin, somewhere about 25% of our revenue would have disappeared overnight. I remember when the CEO of Fitbit walked into the area where the legal department was, grabbed me and the RGC, and said, “If you don’t get us off the tariff list, we’re in big trouble.” We had an impossible task, but six months later, we managed to get wearables taken off the tariff list.

That’s why you’re not allowed to take a vacation.

Yes, but when I got to Archer, part of what attracted me to the role was being in a space where the biggest challenge right now is there weren’t clear rules and requirements for how to bring an electric aircraft to market, especially with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. Getting to work alongside some of the best and brightest minds that we’ve got in the aerospace community who are doing the certification of these things.

It’s been super interesting to learn and get to bring some of my past experience in emerging industries to aerospace, help evolve my thinking, and get to how we move fast but still maintain the levels of safety that are required from an aviation perspective. That has been the reason the US has led in aviation. It’s because the levels of safety in the US have been the highest in the world. We’re in a pretty challenging time at that point. The crisis that’s been going on with Boeing over the past 3, 4, or 5 years has challenged that.

Isn’t it in the last year or so? I’m not just talking about Boeing and I don’t remember which aircraft, but the door flew off or whatever. I don’t remember these weird aviation incidents.

It’s interesting because we’ve got people who’ve been in aviation for 20, 30, 40, or 50 years here at Archer. You ask that question and that stuff has been going on for years, but we live in a new world where Boeing is under such a microscope. What a lot of those incidents tell you is that our aviation infrastructure is very fail-safe because it’s been built on this principle that you can’t have any single point of failure.

You can have these things go wrong and the planes get to the ground safely. With some of the Boeing issues that occurred, that is where the principle, the engineering, and the manufacturing went wrong. I think it is a testament to how much this industry has focused on that fail-safe principle and it has been a guiding light that you can’t have a single point of failure. You’ve got to be able to get to the ground safely because lives depend on it.

Coming from a startup background, we talked before about going fast and breaking things with the lens of you can’t have a single point of failure. Safety is important. How do you rectify those two contradictions?

That is the challenge of bringing aerospace and Silicon Valley together. Our CEO and founder do a very good job of understanding and making sure the culture here is strong. Without safety, we don’t have a company. That’s got to be our foundation. It’s safety and then the product. That’s going to continue to be a challenge as we commercialize this space.

It’s a two-horse race. Two companies in the US are leading the charge on the electrification of aviation and then it’s our Chinese competitors. Historically, they’ve cut corners a bit more. We look at some of the things that they’re doing. It makes us pretty uncomfortable from a safety perspective. I think that’s where our worry is. It’s not just us and the other US competitors, but looking around the world and making sure that we don’t have products and planes that get to market that shouldn’t be in the market.

I don’t know anything about aviation, but I would think that would be one benefit of being in an industry regulated by the US government. Couldn’t they set the standards and ensure that products from outside the US need to meet those standards to fly in the US?

They do. When you think about the FAA as compared to the other regulatory bodies around the world, we dwarf them in size. That’s why we have such a leadership position. Our head of regulatory affairs who I work closely with as a former FAA administrator, Billy Nolan. He talks about it all the time. There are 50,000 people at the FAA.

The European equivalent of the FAA has about a thousand or a couple thousand. You work for every other regulatory agency from a size perspective, except for China. They’re working hard to catch up from that perspective, but it is. We take it for granted here in the US, but we’re very lucky that we have such a strong regulatory basis for aviation.

Hearing you talk about products at Fitbit and Dish Network and now at Archer, I can tell you’re in the business. You’re knowledgeable and passionate about it. It must be a dream job for you.

Passion For The Product And The Industry

I feel it has to be. I always talk about that. I don’t think I can go to someplace where I am not passionate about the product that I’m working on every day because I live and breathe it. I’ve had a bunch of opportunities to go to SaaS companies working on software. I always joke about recurring revenue, B2B business, and no consumer customer. That sounds nice.

I don’t know that I would have the same level of passion for what I’m doing every day. It’s pretty hard to beat it. I got to take my three-year-old son down to the first flight of our last aircraft, and he stood there and watched the electric aircraft go straight up for a vertical takeoff for the first time. Watching that is pretty awesome. It’s tough to beat.

That’s cool. Eric, your passion comes through and I’m hopeful then that you have passion around a pump-up song.

It depends on what I’ve been listening to lately, but I go back to law school. I always listened to Eminem on my way to every law school exam. Lose Yourself was the song that I would listen to as I was driving from my apartment to a law school exam. I harken back to that a lot because I feel those were some fun times in law school, studying late nights with close friends, then going in the next day and having to perform.

It’s that 72-hour diligence process, I’m sure you were doing that on those days.

I look back to law school and what the best thing was about law school from a training perspective. It was getting you ready for those types of things. For me, I don’t apply constitutional law a lot, but having that ability to go through long stretches of challenging times is what it did to me.

Endurance. Eric, thanks for being in The Legal Department today. I enjoyed it.

Thanks for having me and so do I.

 

Important Links

• Eric Lentell
• Archer Aviation – Website

 

About Eric Lentell

Eric Lentell has served as General Counsel of Archer Aviation since April 2024. Prior to being promoted into this role, was Deputy General Counsel from when he joined the Company in June 2021 to March 2024. Prior to joining Archer, Eric was a Director of Legal at Google LLC where he oversaw the legal matters related to Fitbit’s products and services.

He joined Google after the acquisition of Fitbit, Inc. where he spent seven years in roles with progressively more responsibility, eventually serving as Vice President, Deputy General Counsel at the time of the acquisition. Prior to Fitbit, Lentell was a member of the legal departments at VeriFone, Inc. and Dish Network LLC. He holds a B.S. in Information Systems and a J.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder.