Keller Rinaudo Cliffton on Zipline's Drone Delivery Journey from Blood to Burritos

We become inured to the things that just exist in the world. So for example, we are inured to traffic. We're inured to the delivery drivers that are like barreling up and down our streets, meaning like our kids can't play in those streets anymore. We're inured to the like pollution and environmental impacts of people driving a 3,000-pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human to deliver something to us that weighs like 5 pounds. You know, like that's, these are actually pretty crazy costs that I think we're just used to at this point. And the reality is there are ways of delivering that are totally quiet, that are way less obtrusive, that are better for the environment, that are 10 times as fast and less expensive.

Hello everyone, we are here for another edition of Core Memory. Um, today we're going to be talking with the co-founder and CEO of Zipline, Keller Renato Clifton. Zipline, you may have seen on TV or the internets, does, does Drone delivery. We're going to be getting our, our sandwiches through the air any day now. They're actually doing it, uh, in the United States and, and have a kind of surprising, fascinating track record of doing these types of deliveries for many, many years overseas. The US is kind of behind here. So, um, I think we got an interesting show for you. Thanks to everyone who's been listening. For our subscribers, we, um, do put up audio versions of my stories on Substack, and a lot of you have been checking those out. So as always, please support us if you choose to do so. We appreciate it. And with that, let's turn to Keller. Keller, how are you?

I'm good, a little bit tired. You know, we just launched our Next-generation platform last week. So the team's been working in a very hardcore way, but we're also very proud.

And where are you? Are you in Half Moon Bay?

No, I'm at Zipline HQ, which is in South San Francisco. This is where we have all of our engineering as well as the manufacturing facility that builds the autonomous aircraft.

Okay. All right. Well, we're going to get into these aircraft. I'm going to start us off with— this might not be like my most flattering introduction, but I think we're going to get somewhere good. You know, you and I, Well, we met for the first time, I think, about 6 weeks or so ago. You guys had an event. You do have this facility at Half Moon Bay where you do some testing. And I got an invite to come out for this dinner. And the unflattering part is just going into it, I was really skeptical. You know, I've heard about drone delivery for a long time. I've heard about Zipline for a long time. It wasn't an area that I was paying super, super close attention to. And, and I think I was, um, scarred— I don't know if that's totally the right word— by, by this 60 Minutes piece Amazon and Jeff Bezos had done like a decade ago that told me we were going to have drone deliveries, you know, any minute, and, and this had taken a while. So anyway, this is all to say that my expectations were low, and then during this, this visit with you guys, I, I was really impressed. I mean, we were having dinner and I thought we'd see a couple drones, but you guys had this, this nest full of dozens of them flying all around us and delivering, dropping down boxes of cookies for dessert. And, um, you know, anyway, I was, I was like kind of shocked and just to see, um, I guess how realistic this seems like it, it might be now.

Yeah, I think seeing is believing and I think probably the vast majority of Americans have had the exact same experience you had, which is, you know, a really big company came out and made a crazy promise in 2013 that they were going to do drone delivery to every single home in the US within a couple of years. And I think it's not terribly surprising that when it comes to radical new kinds of technology, you know, it's, it's harder than people expect. It takes longer. And I think often the great product And innovation comes from maybe where people, you know, were, were less expecting it. You know, it's sometimes it's not the biggest companies in the world that come up with the most important innovations. You know, I think the reality is that probably most Americans have had the exact same experience you had, which is that they heard a big company make all kinds of promises in 2013 about how drone delivery was going to be available in 2 years. The reality is that with any new technology, it's a lot harder than it initially seems. There's a lot of technical detail and, and work to be done to design autonomous aircraft that can fly reliably in all weather, 24/7, in any geography in the world. And, and so I think Zipline has a special advantage in that we launched outside the US and focused on life-saving use cases and then expanded that for 8 years. Before we really tried to take on this much broader challenge of automating home delivery in the US. And, and so we're able to bring a lot of very specific experience about how to make these systems work in the real world at scale very reliably.

You guys have been around for about 11 years, if I'm, if I'm got the dates right.

Yeah. Yep.

Take me back for people who know nothing about this field or your, your company. What was, what was the vision 11 years ago and why did you even decide to get into this?

You know, when we were starting to build Zipline, our backgrounds were in robotics and automation and software, and it seemed that it should be possible to build a new kind of logistics system, a fully automated logistics system. And the reason that was exciting to us, I mean, it seemed like you could build something that was 10 times as fast, half the cost, and zero emission. That just seemed like such an important idea. I actually remember this moment. I got to go and meet the founder of a company, Kiva, which ended up being acquired by Amazon. And I, and if you're familiar, they did this warehouse automa— is warehouse automation robotics. And they had these orange robots running around inside the warehouse and it would bring items from a shelf. It'd actually bring the entire shelf to a human packer who could then pack something into a box and ship it. I just remember seeing that, seeing all these robots running around inside the warehouse, kind of avoiding each other, moving things around, thinking, whoa, somebody is going to build that for outside the warehouse. And that's going to be like one of the most important companies on Earth.

I've met one of the Kiva co-founders. It is, it is crazy to see these like early videos of them zipping around, like sitting on their little robots as they, as they tried to dial all this in. When you were thinking about this, at the start when you're talking about revamping logistics from a robotics background, you knew that you were going to do something in the air or you hadn't even settled on that idea yet?

No, I don't think we'd settled on that. I mean, we were just really attracted by this idea that logistics is this immensely important global industry. It's kind of like running water, you know, you just— nobody thinks it's cool. It's really boring. Logistics is super boring, but it's something we all depend on with our lives and that is just constantly operating in the background. And that's kind of a, that's a perfect, uh, kind of thing for automation and for robotics because you want boring, you want just repetitive day in, day out, just do the same thing again and again. Uh, I think that what, you know, what we ended up deciding is that like, look, if you want to move really fast and you want to, and efficiently, it's way easier to do that in the air than it is on the ground. You want to be able to go fast and far, basically. And as we start to understand that, like, look, building an automated logistics system that could operate at national scale, it's going to be complicated from a regulatory perspective. That was pretty obvious from day one. And so we decided it'd be really smart to focus on life-saving use cases and to go to countries that we felt would make exceptions quickly and would be really good partners to us as a startup.. And so this is actually the reason that we ended up launching the company in, uh, in Africa, Rwanda at first, uh, rather than trying to launch the service in the US in the early days.

Yeah. Rwanda, I've like run into this multiple times over 20 years. They tend to be very tech forward, um, and, and try out some wild ideas. So again, like for people who have never seen your products or this, this initial vehicle that you guys build, like what does it look like and, and what was the job? You were trying to do in Rwanda?

In, you know, 2014, 2015, when we were just building the first version of the technology, we didn't really know exactly what was required. We had some kind of sense that, hey, like, let's focus on these life-saving use cases. If we could deliver medical products to hospitals and health facilities at the right time, way faster, that would probably save lives. And, you know, A lot of people told us that this was a stupid idea and that it would never work. We would never get regulatory permission. The unit economics would never work, et cetera, et cetera. And it was the Minister of Health of Rwanda at that time who, you know, in meeting with her, I remember saying, hey, we're going to use autonomous aircraft to deliver medical products to every hospital and health facility in the country. And she looked at me and said, Keller, shut up, just do blood. And that was the best advice we ever received because, you know, we said Sounds good. And as she was explaining it to us, you know, with blood, 50% of transfusions go to moms with postpartum hemorrhaging, 30% go to kids. It's a really complicated combination of products. You have packed red blood cells, platelets, cryoprecipitates, and plasma. Then everything has different shelf lives, different storage requirements. You have A, B, AB, and O, positive and negative Rh factor. It's just getting the right thing to the right place at the right time is super hard.

Well, because is it mostly because if once you get outside of a big city, then you're limited on the supply of all these things that you're talking about and getting it to somebody who's going through a traumatic event in time. Is that, is that like the biggest problem?

It's a combination of things. So for example, plat— platelets only last 6 days from when you get them from a donor to when they need to be transfused into a patient. So it's very short shelf life product. Uh, packed red blood cells last 30 days. Then you've also got them typed, and certain people have rare blood types. So for example, negative blood types are quite rare in Rwanda. For that reason, they didn't stock any negative blood type products at the hospitals that we served when we started serving them. So if you came into that hospital and say gave birth and needed a blood transfusion and had a negative blood type, you're in big trouble. Now, you know, if you're lucky, the doctor, the nurse will get into a car and drive a couple hours to the closest facility, like blood, regional blood center to get a negative blood type product and bring it back. By the way, various, a lot of similar challenges exist in the US in rural healthcare. This is like the crazy thing we've learned in the last few years. But, um, yeah, suffice it to say that, and also it's just a hard thing to predict. You don't know when a mom is, or when anybody's going to need a transfusion or a massive blood transfusion. And on top of that, it's priceless. You never have enough of it. You cannot manufacture it. And so you just, you know, getting the right thing to the right place at the right time is super difficult.

And that, like, the idea or what you do today, do you fly from hospital to hospital or you have a central distribution center that's feeding all the hospitals?

So when we originally launched in Rwanda, our contract was to deliver from our distribution center, which we built from scratch, to 22 hospitals within range. And we started just delivering blood to those 22 hospitals. And then we expanded from there. We expanded to 50, then to 200, then to 500 hospitals and health facilities throughout the country of Rwanda. Then we expanded into 4 more countries. Today we serve 4,500 hospitals and health facilities globally. You know, we've delivered 20 million doses of vaccine. We deliver 70% of the national blood supply of Rwanda fully autonomously. System has scaled and we're about to cross 100 million commercial autonomous miles. It's, it's the largest commercial autonomous system on earth.

Yeah. Like, I mean, not to, this is not like a ZipLine ad. It was just those numbers were what really drew my attention. You know, I think, um, I don't know, I'm pretty tech savvy and follow stuff. I just had no idea of the amount of stuff that you guys were already doing. I think because it's not, it's not like front and center to a American, you know, mainstream audience at the moment.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think, you know, there was a long time when very few Americans used WhatsApp. Like, I think there are a couple interesting examples where technology just goes— it just grows like exponentially outside the U.S. for a long time before it comes to the U.S. And, uh, you know, in our case, being able to launch in a country that was super tech-forward and willing to kind of disrupt and innovate, like Rwanda, which is kind of known as like, you know, I think you can kind of think of it as like the Singapore of Africa. It enabled us to grow, grow, grow and scale to the point where, you know, I mean, in Rwanda, we've expanded to all medical products. We've expanded into a lot of additional use cases, animal healthcare, e-commerce, tourism. You know, there's huge— I mean, if you're in that country, you're going to see autonomous aircraft flying through the airspace making deliveries, and everybody there will act like it's totally normal. And Americans are like, whoa, what is this? The way that we thought this was impossible.

Like on a, on a given day, I mean, how many aircraft are flying? Um, how many flights are taking place?

Globally? Yeah, globally today, Zipline's doing upwards of 2,000 flights a day. And that number is, is still doubling year over year, even 8 years in. And that's on Platform 1, our kind of original version of the technology. Platform 2, which we just launched last week, we actually expect to grow dramatically faster.

So, and the vehicle you guys describe as Platform 1, don't get mad at me if I use the wrong words. It looks a little more like a small plane to me than like what people are used to seeing with a drone.

Yeah. So Platform 1, you know, it was really inspired. I mean, when we were originally talking to customers, we thought, oh, we need to build this complicated system., you know, that can do all these things. And then as we were talking to a lot of these customers, especially in healthcare in the early days, we understood that actually the only thing they care about is range and it needs to be cheap. It has to like be cost effective. And so if you want to go really far and you want it to be affordable, we realized, hey, we got to build the simplest possible thing. And so that was a fixed-wing vehicle that looks, you know, it kind of looks like a 50-pound electric aircraft with about a 10-foot wingspan., and that vehicle, by virtue of having a very high lift-to-drag ratio, which you can kind of think of as like miles per gallon for airplanes, uh, that vehicle can fly very efficiently. It has a similar lift-to-drag ratio of a Boeing 787. And so that means that we can fly on a single battery charge, uh, almost 200 miles. Okay. And so we, we guarantee, we guarantee a service radius of up to like 110, 120 kilometers.

So does it— and it looks— I remember, I mean, it sort of takes off on this, this like rail, right? And then just zips up in the air. Does it— it flies from your distribution center to a hospital and then does somebody recharge it and send it out? How does it get back?

Yeah, so the vehicle leaves our distribution center. We pack the product into the vehicle. We can carry about 6 pounds of payload. One of our operators will launch the vehicle. We use a launcher. It's kind of like a catapult., to accelerate the vehicle from 0 to 70 kilometers an hour. Once the vehicle leaves the end of the launcher, it flies autonomously out to the GPS coordinates of the hospital that we're serving. Again, every distribution center will typically serve maybe like 300 hospitals and health facilities. Uh, and then when we arrive there, the vehicle will descend closer to the ground, um, maybe 20 to 30 meters off the ground. And then we use a really simple paper parachute to just get the package to the ground in a way that is gentle. So The beauty of this is that the doctors and nurses and technicians who use the service, it's incredibly simple. It's like order something on the app or send us a WhatsApp and we deliver. I mean, you never interact with any technology. You're just like, the product is just teleported to your mailbox.

And you guys charge per delivery or—

Yeah.

Okay. Yep. And after Rwanda, where would be the I mean, because this sounds like I want to go to Rwanda and see all this happening in the, in the sky. After Rwanda, what would be the next, you know, 2 or 3 biggest countries that have adopted that, that first vehicle and technology?

Yeah, we, we scaled in Rwanda for about 3 years from 2016 to 2019, and then we launched in Ghana. Today, Ghana is our largest country by volume and by number of distribution centers. We serve almost 2,000 hospitals and health facilities in Ghana. Um, then we launched in Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, um, and then more recently launched in the US and in Japan.

Okay. And so I, obviously you just called out the US and you said there's a need for this in, in rural spots, but it just sounds like Europe, the US, um, some of the more, I guess, developed countries, they just haven't, they haven't caught on to this or they're too densely packed for, for some of that to make sense?

I think that the main thing is that, you know, bigger countries and ones that are going to have slightly more complicated airspace, they're just going to be slower. And a lot of, you know, it's interesting to think, I mean, over the last 15 years, it's both good and bad. There was so much focus, I think, on internet innovation. And the internet is uniquely unregulated. And so it allowed a lot of startups to move really fast. I think it's the birth of SaaS and, you know, the explosion of the app, you know, mobile apps and these kinds of things. Like, they're all unregulated. The reality is most of the things that we need for the kind of abundant sci-fi version of the future for humanity that we were promised in Star Trek or by, you know, more optimistic versions of sci-fi. That's all stuff that's in highly regulated markets, you know, whether it's nuclear fission and fusion energy or, uh, biotech, you know, yeah, biotech, like DNA computers or, um, you know, flying autonomous aircraft or, uh, 3D printed homes or like even better education is like super, super regulated, you know, better versions of healthcare. Like these are super regulated markets. So I actually think what's happening is that it's just inevitable that we need to see innovation and new companies in these spaces. And those companies are going to have to think very carefully about how to find regulatory environments that are conducive to moving fast and innovating. And those environments won't always be the US. I mean, I hope it will be. As a US citizen, I think it's awesome, and I'm really hopeful that the US, you know, pushes really hard to be the center of innovation for a lot of these technologies. Um, but I think it's very powerful to have some competition amongst, you know, for, for, for innovation.

Well, on the drones that I think most people are familiar with, kind of the quadcopter style thing and the successors of that, I mean, well, I'd love to get your take because I'm just a dilettante on this stuff, but you know, the reputation of the FAA with, with some of those devices is pretty bad. The US was at the forefront of this technology. Most of the first US drone makers don't even exist anymore. DJI in China, you know, basically wiped out the market. And I know a lot of people were frustrated that they thought the FAA was making it extremely hard to compete with companies in China that already had a big manufacturing advantage. Um, I don't know, the, you know, as far as getting into drone delivery and things like that, am I reading this right? Or were there different things at play? Um, just in terms of how, how the journey to get to this point where we're actually doing it.

Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, I, look, it's not the FAA's fault that China has a massive manufacturing advantage over the US. You know, like that's a more complicated thing. Um, and I think that that's the main thing that's at play when you think about like DJI versus, yeah, some of those early players like 3D Robotics. There were a lot of companies building early versions of drones. I think that, uh, that I would think of as a bit more inevitable. You know, a lot of these $1,000 quadcopters that just need to have a camera that can fly for 20 minutes. That's a pretty simple hardware product. And I don't, and there's not a lot of software or technical complexity. I think it's like kind of clear that China would win in that space given their just massive manufacturing scale advantages. And I think arguably, you know, the FAA probably did move too slow for some period of years. But the good news is that over the last 5 years, I mean, the FAA actually think has been amazing at like moving very quickly to like modernize and find new ways of enabling this kind of innovation in the US. Zipline's actually found them to be an awesome partner. I mean, we're, we're making like rapid progress with them every month at this point. I think that, yeah, I actually think there are a lot of people in government who are, you know, I know that maybe this violates a little bit of the narrative, but there, there are tons of people who are doing a really good job and are highly competent and are actually who are moving quite fast. I think maybe the mistake that Zipline made in the early days is we took a little bit more of an approach, you know, it was like the days of Uber and we were like, well, you know, screw the regulator, we're going to be the bad boys and we're going to move fast and we have all the answers. And it turned out that approach didn't work super good with the regulator. And so we actually had this moment where we're like, you know what, we're not going to be the bad boys. We're going to be the golden child. And golden child is a way better— it's a way better approach. And I think I guess the main thing that is my takeaway is a lot of these regulatory relationships, it might seem like certain things are stuck in like legalese or bureaucratic process. But actually, my takeaway is that a lot of these relationships are about trust. I think a lot of it has to do with, can you demonstrate that you are trustworthy? Like, that you are a trustworthy guardian of public safety, and that you won't launch products that are going to crash or hurt people. Um, a lot of companies violate these norms and don't deserve the trust. And I think, you know, Zipline, by virtue of, you know, being able to go to the FAA with almost 100 million commercial autonomous kilometers of flight with zero human safety incidents, I think we were able to demonstrate to them that we were trustworthy, and that's what has resulted in a really awesome relationship.

So, like, I mean, you're— you were going through some even more numbers with me when we met in person, and, and you do have this impressive track record. I still think most people, the average person, if you tell them that we're actually heading to a world where there's going to be thousands of drones in the air at all time dropping off sandwiches and stuff from Amazon or Walmart or whoever. Um, I don't know, you know, I'm not even sure. I think obviously this is the United States, people love convenience and, and that part I could see appealing to them. I'm not even sure like most people either believe this or, or would think that's even like a, a good idea. Um, but I mean, that, that is like very much the future you see, right? Is, is not just like a few of these things, it's like a sky full of these making deliveries all the time.

Yeah, I think it's really important to realize that, you know, new technology always seems really scary to us. And I would point out that you saw the exact same consternation and fear around automobiles when automobiles were released for the first time. People were like, these are going to be terrible for our cities. They're extremely loud. They create pollution. I mean, there were, there were regulations passed in states. These are real regulations that are like, you can still see on the books that said that if a car was driving down the road and a horse was coming in the opposite direction, the owner of the car was required to pull off to the side of the road, disassemble the car, and hide the parts in the bushes so as not to upset the horse, which was the obvious driver of like economic productivity of the day. And so what I would say is we become inured to the things that just exist in the world. So for example, we are inured to traffic. We're inured to the delivery drivers that are like barreling up and down our streets, meaning like our kids can't play in those streets anymore. We're inured to the like pollution and environmental impacts of people driving a 3,000-pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human. To deliver something to us that weighs like 5 pounds. You know, like, that's— these are actually pretty crazy costs, um, that I think we're just used to at this point. And the reality is there are ways of delivering that are totally quiet, that are way less obtrusive, that are better for the environment, that are 10 times as fast and less expensive. And so I think you know, there is that, you know, people have this scary sense for, I think, two reasons. One is people have this sense of like, oh, you know, the sky is going to be dark with these vehicles. The reality is you can practically, you can't even see them at the, at the height that we're flying at. And two, it's like people have an experience of drones of being like, oh, it sounds terrible. This really annoying, grating sound. The reality is you can design vehicles that sound, um, totally different than that, as, as you experienced when you visited us.

Yeah. I mean, you, you tricked me when I, when we, when we came. Yeah, you didn't know Yeah, I mean, just to give people an idea, we almost did a delivery right next to you. I mean, you did, you did. I, I've got like a little video up on the YouTube channel. Um, yeah, so we were, we were standing around. I mean, it's pretty cool. You guys have this— it's like I get to see a lot of weird stuff, but when I walked onto your campus at Half Moon Bay, it was insane. You have these like tree-like Um, do you guys call them nests? Is that—

Yeah, yeah, we call them docks.

Okay, docks. So they sort of have these arms with all these drones attached to them, and, and we're just standing around talking, and every— I don't know, every few seconds there's another one that gets— sort of pops off and it goes up in the air. And then we're, we're standing around and all talking, and, and so people know, I mean, the drone It's about the size of, I would say, like at least my microwave, um, maybe a little bit. It's like this little container, you know, with, with, with propellers on it and, and, and kind of like Styrofoamy or very lightweight.

Are you thinking about the droid? I mean, yeah, it's probably worth saying you saw Platform 2, which is our next generation technology. And Platform 2 is really designed to solve the problem of like enabling teleportation directly to customer homes. And so platform 2, we can actually install docks, which you can kind of think of as like a supercharger, except instead of a supercharger for electric car, a dock is a charger for an aircraft. So we install docks on the side of buildings, whether it's a hospital system or a Walmart or a Sweetgreen or any of our other customers. And once we've installed that dock, now that building has a teleportation capability directly to the home. So an employee or a team member there can just take a package Load it into the system. The system can now automatically— it will, um, there, there are two parts of the system, a Zip and a Droid. The Zip is the main vehicle that flies out to your home and it's carrying something that we call a Droid. The Droid— the Zip stays at 300 feet and we lower the Droid, um, all the way down to the ground and the Droid's actually controlling its own position in an X and Y axis. So the advantage of doing it in this way is that we can deliver in a very quiet way. And very precisely. Yeah. And keep the main vehicle completely far away from you. You can't hear it. You can hardly see it.

You like— we were right under it and you could not hear that main vehicle. And the droid comes down on a tether, right? And then— and you guys are like you said, I mean, there's these systems in place to keep it from, from jostling around. I mean, it's coming down in this pretty, like, extremely precise location. I remember you guys put 2 bags of cookies right next to each other from— with that technology. I mean, I've seen you guys have had deals with companies like Walmart and Panera. And I know you're saying this just launched. I mean, when, when do, when, when do I see one of these outside of my house?

Where do you live?

I'm in Silicon Valley. I'm in Mountain View. Okay.

Unfortunately, California, for some of the reasons that we've already discussed on this call, California isn't like the number one state that we're launching in. We're pretty focused on Texas next. We're launching in Dallas.

Great. So we, we build it, we build it all, and then Texas gets it first.

Yeah, I think there are some other companies that are also falling into that category that you've spent significant time with. Yeah, but yeah, you know, we got to go to places where it's easy and efficient to build infrastructure. And the good news is there are a lot of states in the US that are all in on building infrastructure. And, you know, and building the infrastructure of the future.

So, so you're saying, but like Texas, Texas is first this year?

Well, we launched— yeah, we launched in Bentonville last week and then we'll launch Dallas very soon.

And what can— like, what can people order in Dallas?

You'll be able to order a lot of things. You know, we have a partnership with Texas Health Resources, which is the largest hospital system in Dallas. We have a big partnership with Walmart there. And then we have a partnership with like 10 different food partners. So anything healthcare, quick commerce, or food, you'll be able to order through the app and get delivered to you in just a few minutes.

So the healthcare, it's like, um, you're getting your prescription or some kind of medicine delivered to your house.

Yep.

And then the other partners, it's what? Is it food? Like, are people going to do sandwich? What are they going to do?

Yeah, they already are. I mean, we're already delivering like a ton of food items in Bentonville. Um, I think you should think of it just like DoorDash. It's like 10 times as fast and half the cost.

And how many pounds can they deliver?

Up to 8 pounds.

8 pounds. Okay.

Um, there's a lot, like, unless you're having a really, like, maybe you have 10 people over and you're having a huge party, but even then we just do 2 deliveries.

And you were okay when we were hanging out. I mean, this is one of the wildest sort of concepts to me. I mean, you were talking right now about Sweetgreen or whatever. Um, in and out. So you, you— I know there's two, there's two models to this. There's one where maybe you kind of like put this on your rooftop or in the parking lot, and then there's also this model where you had almost like today where we drive to a, to a, uh, drive-through window, almost having just like a little window inside of the restaurant where somebody just plops the order in and, and it's being carried out. I just found this like crazy. So you, I know these things take time and you have to put infrastructure in place, but this is what you expect people, restaurants, companies to do is actually build, um, build some of this on, onto their physical infrastructure to support all this.

Yeah, it's pretty easy. It's no more complicated than installing an electric charger for a car. So if you're going to install it, if you know any of these restaurants would, I mean, many of them obviously have installed, you know, whether it's a Tesla charger or some kind of different EV charger, very similar. We're just going to install the dock onto the side of the wall. Once you have that, it's really easy to load the vehicle. Now you can load it from outside, but I think what you're kind of alluding to is a lot of times we're actually just putting a tube straight through the wall so that the Droid can lower right into the building. And the cool thing about that is it's, we're really just taking inspiration from the way that, um, pneumatic tube systems work in hospitals, if you're familiar with that, or banks where you can just, you don't even have to leave the building. You just, you know, put it straight into the tube and it shoots. Um, so like in this case, instead of shooting something somewhere else in the hospital, now you're just teleporting it directly to the customer's home that it needs to go to.

So in that model, Zipline has a building somewhere full of drones and it's going to that restaurant and sort of sucking the order up, or, or these restaurants all have their own systems?

That's a good question. We have a, you know, we are building charging infrastructure all over Dallas. A lot of it will— we can do bigger installations like on the side of a Walmart. Some of them might be smaller installations and some of them might just be charging. So in the same way that, you know, you might have like a Tesla Supercharger parking lot, we'll just have, you know, some space and we might have 50 or 80 or 100 aircraft just charging there. But the cool thing is that, you know, the vehicles allocate themselves dynamically in a metro. So wherever there's demand, the vehicles can kind of preposition themselves to serve that demand.

And you make— you physically make the aircraft in a factory in California?

Yep.

And we— and we're going to be last to get this.

You got to come visit. You got to come see it.

You know, I mean, as a state, we're going to be— we're going to be last to actually get—

I mean, things could change, you know, like there could be There could be changes that change that plan. I, I, I think that would be awesome. But, uh, again, the reality is actually there's just a lot of states and a lot of countries, frankly, that are like fighting for this kind of innovation and technology and are saying like, we want to leapfrog into the future. We want to find ways of delivering that are less expensive, faster, zero emission. Um, I think, you know, to a certain degree, Yeah, some states, I think, you know, I don't know, some states, some cities are just really, really hungry for innovation and, and this kind of change.

Like, how did you as an individual end up here? Because like, is this something you mentioned at the beginning? You were, you were into robotics and then I know you have this like actually incredibly impressive background in science and biology as well. I mean, when you were a kid, did you imagine you would be running like a Was, was this even remotely some kind of vision you had that you'd be running, you know, a robotics logistics company dropping off food at people's houses through the air?

No, I mean, I, you know, I mean, I worked in a restaurant all through high school, like 40 hours a week making $6 an hour. So I didn't know that. I didn't even know startups were really a thing. I didn't grow up in a place where startups, you would talk about that. I got through almost all of college without realizing that startups or entrepreneurship was a thing that you could do. I didn't really have like any role models in my life that would have caused me to, you know, be like, oh wow, yeah, that's, that's a possible path. I think I was a huge nerd growing up. Like, I loved reading science fiction. I, I think I've always kind of believed like the future will definitely be super weird and different than it is today. And then in college, I did get this chance to work, you know, building DNA computers and kind of exploring a pretty dramatic new field of science that I was just really interested in because it seemed so obviously like the future. And so when I was graduating from college, I think I had, you know, some sense of, um, how cool it is to get to work on things on like the frontier of what's possible in engineering or in science., and then I, I read it. I read a book by Tony Hsieh called Delivering Happiness. And, you know, Tony had actually lived in the exact same dorm that I had lived in just 10 years earlier. And so that was this moment for me realizing, oh wow, like, that's like a thing you could do. You could go just try to build something from scratch and try to find a team of, you know, nerds and misfits to do something. And, uh, That's what I ended up doing.

It's a big shift because I posted a video about the delivery, you know, when we were hanging out, and then I had these like pretty famous biologists in there being like, oh, I haven't heard of that guy. I like, as soon as I saw that name, I remember this, all these papers he wrote at Harvard. And, and, you know, it seemed like you'd really, you're being kind of modest. I think these DNA computers were no, no joke. This is also pro— this has to be like the only podcast where during our first episode we also talked about DNA computers.

I think, um, yeah, I, I, I actually saw that response. That's kind of cool.

Um, Adam Marblestone, who's like, yeah, he's a brilliant, um, brilliant scientist in his own right.

I mean, I think I got really lucky. You know, I got to work with a professor directly, basically just him and me and him and I. And he took a huge bet on me as an undergrad, as a freshman and sophomore with no experience. And we got to build something together that wound up, you know, it was wound up, I think, having a really big impact on a field of science. And that field of science has continued to develop and grow dramatically over the last 20 years.

So, but like at some point you just, you, you just had kind of like this other calling. I mean, it was to, to go make a company to, and, and robotics was just where you settled as the most interesting thing at the time.

Yeah. I mean, when I graduated from college, I, I actually was a full-time professional rock climber for a year and a half. It was a cool thing to do. You know, it seemed like I was never gonna get a chance to do that again, uh, again in my life.. And then I just started getting really, really interested. You know, it wasn't like at that time DNA computers didn't seem like a possible career path, you know, unless I wanted to go into academia, which I think I knew I didn't want to go into academia. Um, and so trying to find, I guess I was just, you know, in search of something, um, that would be important for the world. And we felt like robotics and we had seen the crazy scale that smartphones were achieving in like 2011, 2012, 2013. And it seemed very obvious to us that, oh wow, all the components that go into a smartphone are basically the components that you would need to build really powerful robots. Um, and yet everybody's building mobile apps and no one is focused on robotics. So when we started Zipline, I think it just seemed, it seemed like an amazing opportunity to, uh, to take the, a lot of these components that had gotten to crazy scale and go build new versions of hardware that could change the way people live their lives.

Yeah, just change stuff. Um, can you make money professionally rock climbing?

Not really.

Is that like a spectator sport?

It doesn't sound fancy and it's less fancy than it sounds. You know, I got paid to go travel around the world and, um, got to go to really cool places, but I also spent a fair amount of time living out of my Honda Fit.

So, you know, like, but people come watch or how does that even work?

Yeah, I mean, there are like competitions that you can climb at, but then there's a lot of going to new kind of like exotic locations and trying to do first ascents of climbs.

Do you still do that?

I do. It's a huge part of my life. I love, I love rock climbing.

Okay. All right. Going back to deliveries just for a second. The— okay, so when, when Amazon does this thing on 60 Minutes, I went back and watched it before we hopped on this interview, like, I guess to Jeff's credit, he does actually say like, this is years away during the segment, although, you know, he says, this isn't science fiction, this is fact. And I don't know, he kind of seemed like he was couching it, but he also seemed like he was giving the impression that it was going to happen the next day. And this was 2014. I mean, has that been like detrimental to the field? I feel like it set people's expectations, like, like this was gonna happen a long time ago.

Yeah, I don't know that. Maybe, maybe it helped and hurt at the same time. I'm not totally sure. You know, the reality is that I think the approach we've always taken is just that what the competition is doing actually doesn't matter very much. You know, I think that what matters way more is can you build a product that is extraordinarily magical and that people really want to use and, and integrate into their lives. And so Zipline focused first and foremost on building life-saving products, um, and then got that to massive scale. And, you know, now we're focused on building this kind of like teleportation capability directly to customer homes. And the reality is what the competition does doesn't matter that much. I mean, when we got started, I remember seeing that video of him talking about that, and I was thinking, oh, we're going to be a fast follower to Amazon. I mean, had you told me that, hey, 10 years in the future, Zipline is going to be the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth and will have 20 times the scale of the rest of the industry combined, including some of the biggest tech companies in the world, that would have seemed impossible to me. But that is the future that we live in. So I don't know. I think it's just better not to overly focus. I think it can be easy to get intimidated. You're like, oh man, these people have like infinite money. This, you know, this tech behemoth is coming after us. The reality is that it's actually really hard for big companies to innovate in fundamental new industries and create great products. Like, why on earth, you know, was Tesla allowed to have a 10-year head start building electric vehicles? Something super obvious. Um, I think it's hard. Yeah, it's hard. You know, the resource curse is a real thing. Sometimes infinite money, it makes it really, really hard to build good products.

So, but like, sometimes when we talk, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, I sense like a little bit of frustration because, you know, you guys do have competitors now that, um, and I realized, you know, after seeing both like how quiet your stuff is, how accurate it is, the safety, that there's a lot of of engineering that goes into this, and you can't just, just copy it or anything like that. But, you know, it feels like there is competition. I, I feel like, um, people don't— lots of people don't know your track record. I mean, is there like some frustration that you've been doing this for a while and, and now, you know, there's, there's other people, um, chasing something similar as well?

No, I wouldn't describe for sure. I mean, you know, I mean, we're What do they say? Uh, imitation is the purest form of flattery or something. I don't remember the exact quote, but I don't know. I think that, uh, no frustration. I think, uh, I think it's probably a little surprising to me the degree to which Americans don't know about stuff that's happening outside of the US. I think it's surprising to me that we were able to grow like so much, so dramatically outside the US and like basically most people living in America still think that drone delivery is completely impossible. Let alone happening at massive scale. So yeah, I think that, uh, that's interesting. But, uh, to be honest, that's probably helped us more than it hurt us. Like, it really enabled the company to stay super focused, and we didn't have, like, some crazy spotlight on us, and we didn't have a crazy target on our back either. We just could focus on, like, we knew what the problem was, we knew that we could dramatically improve maternal mortality and improve childhood vaccination rates, and we knew it was life-saving, and we knew exactly what we needed to do., and we were able to spend, you know, 6 to 7 years just focused on that, making the technology really reliable, making sure it works in the real world 24/7, 365. And, and so I think it was honestly probably a pretty big gift for Zipline that we got to stay out of all the crazy hype cycles and just focus on getting the job done.

And like that side of the business, I mean, it's the humanitarian stuff sounds amazing. I mean, my sense is that But, uh, to the extent that you're backed by venture capitalists and you want to, you want to change logistics globally and all that, I mean, it's, it is this next stage of the business around this more, um, traditional consumer-focused device that would be like what people out here would think of as the, the promise of the, the big money-making business. Is that, is that the right way to think about this?

Yeah, I think it's, you know, you gotta know as a startup, you gotta know like what's your minimum viable product? How do you make sure you don't bite off more than you can chew? That's probably, you know, the number one mistake committed is like you just work on something that's too hard and you end up just running out of money before you can ship something. So I think it's especially easy to do in hardware because hardware is just so much more expensive and it takes so much more time. Um, so. The reality for us is that like we knew we had to, uh, we knew we had to keep it really simple. We had to move lightning fast. And, uh, you know, the product was way harder to build. Even Platform One was way harder to build and scale than we were really expecting. So it's a very good thing that we selected a use case that was very narrow and focused and, and quote unquote simple. Um, and as the company's grown, as you know, our vision has been able to expand. And I think as we kind of look at the overall global logistics market, I mean, you know, the biggest— I mean, practically one of the biggest markets on earth is how do you deliver things directly to homes. And that market is, by the way, growing incredibly fast because people are just ordering in different ways. And so I think it's a bit like, you know, you want to build the You want to build the Model S before you have the ability to build the Model 3. And Zipline needed to go build Platform 1 before we had the ability to build a far more complicated, scalable product serving a vastly bigger market, which is what Platform 2 does.

And okay, and just to, to kind of leave people with like a vision of where you think this is going, I mean, could you lay out, you know, it's always hard. To predict the future, but lay out like what you think. Okay, let's start here. What is— what do the skies look like in the United States 5 years from now?

Well, the sky will look exactly the same. That's a very important point. You won't really be able to see these vehicles. And again, the scale is just off. People think of it as like, oh, you're going to see all these things. Like, I mean, we know because we're at massive scale in countries like Rwanda., and you generally don't notice anything different. Like, if you know what to look for, you can see, oh, you're like, oh, wow, like, there are quite a few aircraft flying up there, but you aren't gonna hear them. You're not really gonna see them. The sky isn't gonna look any different. I have this cool— didn't we show you that cool— when you came and visited, didn't we show you that cool picture that kind of looks like a Windows XP background?

Yeah.

We have this thing that we like to show people, which is a picture from one of our test sites, which happened to be very beautiful. So it's just these, like, rolling green hills, beautiful bluebird sky. And we show people this picture. Well, what's special about this picture? And everybody's like, I have no idea. Is that like a Windows XP background? And then as you start to zoom in, you realize there are actually 37 aircraft in a holding pattern in that picture, because we were doing some like high volume testing. And like, the point is, even with an absurdly high number of aircraft in a single airspace at one time, You can't even see them or hear them.

Okay. No, no, no. Fair. That, that's, that's fair. And, and like important to get across to people, but okay. But if we—

your broader point, what does the future look like?

Yeah. Like, like what quantity of, uh, of stuff that I buy on a regular basis am I getting delivered to my house by a, by a drone?

I think that the best way to think about it is that there are, you know, if you just look at the instant delivery market in the US, there are about 4.5 billion instant deliveries done in the US every year. So this is not really including UPS or FedEx or most of Amazon, but 4.5 billion instant deliveries every year. That market is growing super, super fast. Um, we actually think there might be demand for 20 or 30 or 40 billion instant deliveries if there are a way of doing it that wasn't super expensive and bad for the environment. Uh, and frankly also kind of slow, like an hour is not actually that fast. And a lot of times if you get food delivered over the course of an hour, food actually tastes kind of cold and not that good. So if you were to make the experience dramatically better, yet 10 times faster, yet less expensive, how big is that market? I mean, it's really big. It'll be one of the biggest markets for any industry in the United States. And the majority of things that are being delivered are less than 5 pounds. And so generally we're using a, you know, 2,000 to 3,000-pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human to deliver something to your home that weighs 5 pounds. You just have to reason from first principles, kind of like a physics perspective, to know that actually makes no sense. That is a bizarre way of solving the problem. Like, if aliens landed on Earth and looked at the way we're solving that problem, they'd be like, oh, there's no intelligent life on Earth. So I think that, um, it's quite obvious from a physics perspective that if you want to deliver something that weighs 5 pounds, probably want to do that with a vehicle that weighs about 50 pounds, and the vehicle should be electric, and it should be autonomous.

Okay.

That's kind of like all you have to conclude.

So you think a lot.

A lot.

And like, eventually, do we start getting bigger versions of these? Is that what you're thinking? Or you just stick with, with, uh, all this volume on, on what you can handle today?

That's a really cool question. I, you know, I can't— I mean, the reality is scaling to 2 or 3 or 4 billion deliveries a year, you know, I mean, Zipline would be one of the largest companies on Earth. And so I think it's important to kind of point out, like, we're really just focused on logistics. Like, we're a logistics company. We're an instant delivery company. We think that someone's going to build an automated logistics system for Earth, and that'll be one of the biggest companies. Like, that, that's That's really the core vision. I do think it is a lot of people who come in and spend time with us. And so I think you're asking the same question. It is very provocative to, and it's so obvious to say like, well, gosh, like pretty soon you can put a human in it. And yeah, I think it's a really interesting, cool idea. I don't, based on what I've seen, I don't think the iPhone moment for that product has quite arrived, but I also am not convinced that it's more than like I don't think it's, I don't think it's 10 years away.

Um, okay.

But I think that, you know, the whole point, what my feeling is like carrying humans is a pretty serious sacred thing to do. And you better be darn sure that this system is extremely reliable. So in the same way that, you know, SpaceX delivered cargo and then delivered humans, um, it makes a lot of sense to me that I want to get Zipline to many billions of deliveries of packages before we consider whether we would build something that would scale up and carry, carry people.

Okay. Well, and I know you guys hate to like, uh, put specific numbers on things and I appreciate how large you're saying this market can get. I still, I'm still, I mean, 5 years from now, like this is a regular occurrence or it's going to take a bit longer to, to have that.

This will be, well, I mean, I, again, it kind of matters geographically because this is going to expand. Uh, in the same way that if you're living in San Francisco, a completely autonomous car driving you around as a taxi service is now totally normal. Yeah, I can't tell exactly, but it seems to me like Waymo might be the same size as Uber in San Francisco now. Like, there are so many, you know, getting an autonomous car is extremely easy. Some cities you don't have access to that. And I think this is going to be a little similar in that, because we're rolling out metro by metro.

Okay.

So by the end of this year, Autonomous delivery is going to be a very normal thing in Dallas, and most people will have access to it. Millions of homes in Dallas will have access to it. And then it's just a question of how quickly can we add additional metros.

And like, it's something that ha— does it have to work in a city that's a little more suburban, like Dallas? Like, can, can this work in Manhattan?

It's a good question. So everybody always asks about Manhattan. Yeah, everybody's always like, can it work in a city? And whenever I hear that question, I know exactly what's kind of implied, which is, can this work in Manhattan? Because that's how people think. When people think of a city, they think of New York City. The reality is almost no cities in the US look like New York City. Very few cities look like Manhattan. The majority of cities look way more like Dallas or like Phoenix, where I grew up, or like Seattle or like Denver, like Houston, or, you know, any of the Atlanta. So, you know, to a certain degree, yes, we are kind of we're more focused on those kinds of cities like Manhattan or like downtown Chicago, which are like really skyscraper land, that's more complicated. But also like that's actually where instant delivery services today work the best. So it's not really where the need is the highest.

Okay. Okay. Well, this is— it's been an awesome chat. It's a super interesting, compelling view of the future. This is a funny one. I feel like, I feel like lots of people will want this and the convenience. It is like, it is one of those things where you, it even like, what, I don't know, even way more than self-driving cars for me. It takes a little wrapping your head around where all this could go. Um, and just like, like picturing it, you know, I, I get your point that It's not like you're gonna look up and the sky will be dark and these things will be flying all around.

You'll hardly know. You'll hardly know it's even happening.

Okay.

Um, but, but I think, look, the point I would make is I, I, I think with any new technology, it's always actually really weird and hard to wrap your head around it. Like, you know, people had a hard time wrapping their head, like their heads around the iPhone. If you remember, I saw a video with Steve Ballmer where he was clearly struggling to wrap his head around the iPhone, and that's when the iPhone was launching. Yeah. Where he is like, uh, well, we'll see how many people are willing to pay $800 for a cell phone.

That worked out. Hahaha. Worked out well for him.

Yeah, it didn't end well. So I think, you know, but the funny thing is Zipline has seen now many, many cities and metros and even countries go through the process of kind of like adopting this kind of technology. And what I would say is that we know exactly what it looks like. Basically, for the first 7 days, there's this sense of pure sci-fi amazement because it's like really feels magical that you push a button on your phone,, and now something is instantly in an automatic way delivered to you just a few minutes later with no human in the loop. It feels very magical. You know, one doctor told me it's as though Jesus Christ himself is delivering blood from the sky because it's a, you know, we delivered a blood transfusion. And there's like 7 days of sci-fi amazement. And then on day 8, people are completely bored of it and totally ignoring it. Like it's completely in the background. One doctor, one technician, I actually was standing out like watching as she was receiving a delivery and she looked at her watch and then she looked at me and said, it's 30 seconds late with this like very annoyed look. And I thought, wow, this is amazing. You know, humans go from science fiction to entitlement in approximately 7 days. And that's—

that sounds about right.

Yeah. Yeah, it is like it is. And you hear the same stories about people riding in autonomous cars. Where they're like really uneasy and scared for the first like 2 minutes, and then they're kind of like relaxed for a minute, and then the rest of the ride they're just on Instagram and just like completely oblivious to everything else going on around them.

I've, I've totally had that experience. Yeah, yeah, it is, it is. That one's nuts.

Um, like we, we adjust very quickly to the new, and we very rapidly become entitled and dependent on. And it's like, oh yeah, of course you can summon an autonomous car, or of course we have like a smartphone, or of course you can just press a button and get something delivered to your GPS coordinates in 5 minutes. I think humans just become very quickly used to it. And so a lot of the, um, homes that we've been delivering to actually for years in Bentonville, you know, we have homes that place orders 3 to 5 times a week. They completely rely on it. It totally changes the way they can grocery shop. Um, it's just like having access to teleportation. And I think the market for teleportation is really big. Like, once people experience logistics that works around their schedule rather than vice versa, and once they can just push a button and it's instantly teleported to you, I just, yeah, it's going to change a lot of behaviors and it's, it becomes a pretty big part, I think, of how people live their lives.

So we're talking like average burrito time goes down from like, what, like 20 minutes to—

well, depending on where you live, I mean, I think it probably goes more, more from like 45 minutes to like 5 minutes.

The 5-minute burrito delivery. I'm here for it. Um, thanks, Keller.

Especially important, you know, like if I have a— I mean, I have young kids at home. Like, if your kids aren't feeling well, you wake up in the middle of the night, you need something, I mean, they're just like You know, fast logistics, I think sometimes it is about convenience, but sometimes, um, you know, sometimes convenience has a really big impact on our lives. It's not just about like people who are lazy or want something delivered faster. I mean, sometimes it's, you know, makes you more productive. You don't have to waste your time. And a lot of times it's like makes a really big difference if you can get something in the middle of the night that makes your kid feel better or makes you feel better.

Well, now you're making me feel like a schmuck. For focusing on the, on the burrito. Um, Keller, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I think we're gonna come out again, um, with our cameras to show people what these, what, like, I, I thought the, the dock was one of the cooler things I've seen in a long time. So we'll, we'll give people, um, a better picture of what all this looks like. And, and yeah, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. It's an honor. And you got to come to Nez Zee. Um, Nez Zee is like 3 times the scale of Nez Zero, which you visited. So if you thought Nez Zero was impressive, Nez Zee is going to like completely blow your mind.

I want to go to the biggest, baddest side of Nest. Although that other one is like on the edge of the Pacific Ocean among those ruins.

I know, it's very beautiful. Well, maybe, maybe, maybe do both. Maybe do both. But Nez Zee. I mean, I took Alfred Lin from Sequoia out there on Saturday and he was just like blown away because he visited Starbase the week before.

Yeah.

And then he visited Nessie and he's like, holy shit. I think he just had this sense that, you know, there are a lot of similarities between those two efforts and it's just really worth seeing Nessie.

It is weird, man. It was like, um, it was like walking into a movie set in the future or something like that. I mean, it was true. The other crazy thing about these is that they, um, You know, when you hold the actual sort of, um, the droid and even the droid, I mean, they're just like a lot. The, the droid is kind of, it is kind of Styrofoamy, isn't it? Like, like, I mean, it's not, um, you know, I guess in my head I was like aerospace grade materials. Yeah. Well, I was like, oh, this is going to be some hardened package and, uh, you know, making it light in hindsight makes all the sense in the world. But I, but anyway, there's a lot to the design of it that was like surprising. To me.

It also has to be, I mean, yeah, in the exact same way that, you know, Starship is made out of stainless steel and that's like a very weird counterintuitive thing. But again, you have to design the thing for the specific use case. And for us, like we care a lot. I mean, the thing needs to be extremely light and it needs to be pretty cost effective to manufacture.

Right, right. Um, nope, that makes all the sense in the world. Well, thank you so much for your time, man. And, um, and I appreciate hearing, um, some of the story of how we got here and where we're going.

Yeah, I'm really pumped to show you around NSSE. And, um, whenever you want to come visit Pattern, come visit Pattern. You know, we can, you can see DNA computers. They're going to have DNA computers curing cancer in patients next year.

I am, I'm all for that because I'm still not sure I understand like how a DNA computer works at all. And I, I would like to—

It's not that complicated. We can explain it to you. You're going to, if you, if you, if you wrote a book about, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, you can definitely, you can get your head around DNA computers.

All right. All right. I'm in. I'm in. Core Memory is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our guest today was Kjeller Renato Clifton. Our theme song is by James Mercer and Jon Sortland, and our audio is edited by Jon Sortland. Thanks for listening.