The Company Competing With Amazon for Instant Delivery w/ Keller Rinaudo Cliffton | EP #117

Logistics today really only does a good job of serving the golden billion humans on Earth. And one of the advantages of making it dramatically less expensive, more broadly available, is that basically you'll be able to push a button on your phone. It will be able to order whatever you need in five minutes or less.

How many drone deliveries have you done so far are you doing per day? What are some numbers there?

We just passed 80 million commercial autonomous miles. It's become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth. I believe we're now at about 1.1 million commercial autonomous deliveries.

When I look at what you've accomplished, and we'll dive into it, you've pulled off really an extraordinary moonshot in Rwanda. Zipline's existence today has decreased maternal mortality.

Rates by like, yeah, it's 51%. Had you told me we were going to reduce maternal mortality in the country by 5%, I would have said, hell yeah.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshot. Today I'm going to be talking to an incredible moonshot entrepreneur, Keller Clifton. He's the CEO of Zipline. Zipline is an amazing company doing drone deliveries of health products. They started in Rwanda delivering blood and vaccines. Today, they're doing a delivery every 60 seconds in eight different countries. The audacity of Keller's vision and his execution is amazing. We're going to dive into the top six or seven lessons for moonshot entrepreneurs. And today, from a start in Rwanda, where he had near death experiences almost every day of his operations, he's over $4 billion in valuation. Incredible stories to be learned here. If you like stories like this about moonshot entrepreneurs and learning about them, subscribe so I can bring you even more. All right, let's jump into our conversation with Keller Clifton. Hey, Keller, welcome to Moonshots. It's great to see you, buddy.

Thanks, Peter. You too.

Yeah, listen, first of all, I loved visiting your digs in South San Francisco. And I have to say, I walk in just to describe the scene for folks, and it is bustling. I mean, it is a beehive. There are hundreds of people. I think you've got like 1300 employees now. They're not all there in South San Francisco, but hundreds of people crowded around desks, building hardware. There are, like, displays every place with data about what's being picked up and dropped off. It was amazing. It was palpable energy and I loved that.

Well, I'm really glad you got to visit in person. And that is one of the things that's special about Zipline. I think when you get talented, passionate people together, to work on ambitious products. Sometimes magic results.

Yeah, I think, you know, it's what I miss. Post Covid, we can talk more about having, you know, a team in place. So this is your 10 year anniversary. Happy, you know, 10 years. So an overnight success after 10 years of hard work. I think that's what it feels like. Yeah. You know, I think the audience listening here, all entrepreneurs excited about moonshots. And when I look, look at what you've accomplished and we'll dive into it. You've pulled off really an extraordinary moonshot. And let me just start by asking you, when you got Zipline going a decade ago to set the scene here, what did you set the probability of success at?

I mean, when we were starting to build zipline, it seemed like the chances of success were less than 10%. I remember a conversation with our team when we were 10 people. We were at a very hole in the wall Chinese restaurant celebrating. We were having like our annual holiday party. 10 people. It was when the whole company fit around one table in a restaurant and someone asked me that question, like, what do you think are the chances that we'll succeed in building this? I said, well, it's definitely less than 5%. I think people were quite shocked by that and disappointed. They were like, why are we here? And I remember saying, yeah, but it's, you know, it's 5% of getting to build crucial infrastructure for humanity, like, that's such an important thing. It's totally worth trying to build this.

And to hit the punch and hit the punchline. For folks listening who don't know zipline, it's now, I think your last valuation was above $4 billion. And how many drone deliveries are you. Have you done so far? Are you doing per day? What are some numbers there?

Well, I mean, you know, when we. It's crazy to think because when we launched in 2016, we were serving one hospital and we were doing a couple deliveries every day. Eight years later, Zipline serves over 4,000 hospitals and health facilities globally. It's become the largest commercial autonomous system on earth. We just passed 80 million commercial autonomous miles, and I believe we're now at about 1.1 million commercial autonomous deliveries.

That's amazing. From a 5% chance. I think one of the, one of the biggest questions I want to get through in this conversation here is the advice you have for people looking to take moonshots. Right? Because, you know, how do you, how do you inspire a team when you've got probabilities against you? And I've heard you say this, I've heard it from a number of places. You know, hardware is hard and what you're doing is not easy.

Yeah, I think that we had to keep two ideas in our mind at the same time. One was that we had this very clear long term vision, which is that we thought it was very likely that someone was going to build a robotic or automated logistics system for Earth. The thing that really excited us about that vision is that if you could achieve that, you could build the first logistics system that serves all people equally, you will directly save millions of lives, the majority of them kids. It just seemed like such crucial infrastructure for humanity to build. On the other hand, it's really hard to get, I think, investors to invest in something that is 10 years away. And so it was really crucial for us to be very scrappy and practical and learn by doing. And so we were really focused on what is the absolute most basic thing that we can get to work anywhere in the real world today that would have clear value for customers and for communities. And that's really what led to us in 2016 to make this bizarre looking decision for a Silicon Valley startup to launch infrastructure in Rwanda.

So I want to get to that, but I want to go in reverse order in our time machine. So it's 2024 now, 10 years from now. You're 10 years old today, 10 years from now, 2034. We're both Trekkies, right? We both love Trekkies. And I love your description of Zipline as a teleportation company. And it's, it's a beautiful vision. 2034, what will zipline be doing? Give me a vision of what you imagine is possible a decade from now. A kid's born. What are, what's different in the world for them?

I think a couple things. I mean, one is that, you know, the promise of truly instant and automated logistics is that it will be 10 times as fast, dramatically less expensive, and it'll be zero emission relative to the way that we deliver things today. So the advantages are that it will be, it will be used far more than we use logistics today. I think we'll probably be receiving three or five instant deliveries a day if you're a family living in a house. We're also going to transition this very carbon intensive part of the economy to a fully zero emission future. And finally, logistics today really only does a good job of serving the golden billion humans on Earth. And one of the advantages of making it dramatically less expensive, more broadly available is that I actually think there's an Opportunity to extend very high quality logistics to every single human on Earth, which means people are going to have access, you know, tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people are going to get access to health care. They're going to get access to economic opportunity in ways that they just don't today.

So in the future, I'm going to, you know, I guess the world's learned about Domino's deliveries in 30 minutes. And is it a future where my AI is just, when I order something, it's deciding it's going to get delivered by a drone or by some other means. Is this in every city in the world? How ubiquitous could it be?

Yeah, I'm pretty much at this point, 100% sure that this will be in every city on Earth and that it'll be possible to do. Basically, you'll be able to push a button on your phone or more realistically, probably just talk to your home AI and it will be able to order whatever you need in five minutes or less. I think that a. It's quite provocative to think, wow, when we used to need to send information, we paid someone to, like, we wrote a letter and then we paid someone to deliver it on horseback. Now I just send you a text message or an email. So there's this. The magic of what the Internet did for how we move information, enabling information to move at near zero cost instantly to any person. I think that same thing is going to happen with logistics. I think automated logistics is going to make it possible to deliver packages in a way that is near zero cost and instantaneous. So, yeah, I think it's going to profoundly change how people live their lives and it might even change the way that we think about ownership.

How so?

Well, I mean, I think you just need to own less stuff. I mean, I have tons and tons of stuff at my house that I only use like once a year or maybe even less than that.

Nice.

And if it's easy to just teleport something to my house and then teleport it back, you can imagine a pretty fundamentally different kind of sharing economy where we can actually have a lot less junk in our houses, but have access to vastly more things only when we need them.

I love that my AI can anticipate what I need before I need it and get it here and it's there and then send it back.

Exactly.

So that's 2034 today. If you don't mind. I was super impressed by what I saw, logistics wise, in, in sort of your drone design. 1 and 2. Can you describe what's operational today. And then I want to go back to the origin. So people who've heard of Zipline, heard about your early roots, but you've got an incredible operation burgeoning in the US today. So give me a sense of the scope of what you've got going and, yeah, I'd like to hear it.

Yeah. I mean, in 2016, we launched this, what we call our enterprise delivery service. We started with one hospital and rapidly expanded across hospitals, primary care facilities, even some patient homes, and then across eight different countries globally. This service is quite simple. It just means that any doctor or nurse at a hospital or primary care facility mainly can push a button on a phone, can order exactly what they need to serve a patient or save a patient's life. And then that product is packed and loaded at one of our distribution centers and loaded onto one of the aircraft that you can see right behind me. These are all aircraft waiting to go out and begin making deliveries. And then we launch that aircraft from our distribution center, vehicle flies autonomously to the GPS coordinates where it needs to deliver, descends close to the ground, and then delivers using a really simple paper parachute. So, honestly, it's a relatively simple service. Send a text message, get what you need to serve a patient or save someone's life. It is way, way faster than delivering things via traditional logistics. It's a lot less expensive. It's also zero emission. And interestingly, delivering things instantly actually kind of transforms the way that you can think about doing healthcare in a country, because you can provide a lot of kinds of health care at a lower level of the health system that's more cost effective, close to where people live. You can also store inventory centrally and then only send it when it's actually needed, which increases access and reduces waste.

Okay, let's start in the beginning then. So you graduate Harvard, you're in the robotics, and you're focused on early on, sort of, I will call it molecular nanotechnology. You're fascinated. I mean, and we both have that love of the future of where longevity and biotech is going to. We met each other at a friend's biotech summit a few months ago. How did you get from there to robotics? How did you get from there to zipline? I mean, that was a transition that was not expected.

Yeah, I mean, I spent undergrad building computers made of RNA and DNA that operate within human cells. The idea was that we could build these molecular doctors that could compute inside cells and make complicated decisions and cure cancer as well as a lot of other diseases. So I think the big takeaway is I've always been a nerd. I've always been a massive fan of sci fi. It seems we need a reason to be excited when we wake up in the morning. And for me, that was always imagining a future that was radically different and better than the one we live in today. When I graduated and I was starting to get really, really interested, this was in 2011, 2012, when we were starting Zipline. It was pretty obvious to us that it was really the moment it became clear that every human on earth was going to have a smartphone. And the scale of the smartphone economy and the kinds of hardware that was being commoditized and made very inexpensive that goes into smartphones. I think one of the fundamental realizations we had was that the slow progress of robotics, a lot of that was due to just hardware being expensive and not very good. And we realized that a lot of the components that go into a smartphone are the fundamental components that you need to make a good robot. You need compute, you need a good imu, you need gps, you need good WI fi. All of these things were reaching a level of ubiquity that we felt, you know, instead of us going and working on smartphone app, for example, which it felt like everybody else was doing, we thought that, you know, hey, this is like an awesome time to go focus on robotics, because we felt like there were just a lot of enabling foundations that had been built due to smartphones that were going to make it pop. Possible to finally go build robotic and autonomous systems that would have a huge impact on the world.

This is the convergence argument, right? All these technologies are converging to create new capabilities, new business models back then.

Yeah, exactly.

And so what happens next? Where did the, you know, the seed crystal for zipline happen? Where were you? What conversation were you having? When did delivering blood in Rwanda become a founding concept?

We knew when we were starting to build this. I think it's probably important to point out we spoke to so many experts in global public health care, and almost every expert told us that we were idiots. People told us there is no chance you're gonna be able to build a vehicle that flies at all. Even if the vehicle flies, you'll never be able to make it reliable. Even if it were reliable in California, you're never gonna design something that is actually gonna work at scale. And the kinds of environments that we have to operate in, no customer will ever sign a contract with you. You'll never get regulatory approval for this. Even if you could do all those things. It won't be useful because logistics isn't the problem anyway. So, you know, pretty dispiriting conversations.

This is where I put my phrase in the day before something is truly a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea, right?

Yeah, I mean worse than crazy. People were like offended by it and like, you know, I don't know. I think that a lot of people spend a lot of time. I think the way that you become an expert in a field in an industry over many decades is you see a lot of things fail and you learn what not to do. And I think sometimes it does take someone to come along who is stupid and naive and just happens to believe like, well, why don't we just do it in this completely different way? And of course there are a hundred reasons that that thing won't work. I think what we were able to prove over many years of hard work is that those things can be solved with engineering.

I was having the same conversation with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, who had no background in the grocery business and enters it naively and Elon had no background in the rocket business and enters it. I think that naivete and that not knowing what you can't do and then bringing engineering talent to the table is the formulation for real transformation.

I saw this thing, this picture the other day of a big kind of inspirational looking banner hanging in a high school gymnasium. And it says we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought that it would be easy. And this is the perfect description of zipline. Had we known how hard it was going to be when we were getting started, you know, we may have not ever done it to begin with.

Yeah, well in 20 other universes you didn't make it, but in this one you did.

Yeah, I guess so.

So were you planning originally?

Success is not for me, Peter.

I'm betting on you, buddy. I think you've passed that. Now the question is, can you dominate globally? And I think you can. I, I think an amazing team you have and the tech is beautiful. But did you originally think you were going to be doing the deliveries in the us?

I think we always knew that logistics shouldn't really discriminate. I mean if you can build a logistics system that is significantly safer, zero emission, less expensive, faster, that's something that every person should have access to. We always knew that with any disruptive technology where you're going to have to be working hand in hand with a regulator, it is easier to start in smaller, more startup oriented countries. We wanted to go to a Country that was able to make decisions fast, where we could meet immediately with the decision makers, where they didn't have a ton of like bureaucratic or legal blockers to them just making a decision. And, you know, on that front, I think we got quite lucky. I mean, Rwanda really wound up being the perfect partner for us. They're sort of known as the Singapore of Africa. It's incredibly forward leaning, technocratic country, really focused on building the future. And so they wound up being the perfect partner for us on the regulatory and government side to say, well, hey, we'd like to lead in this industry. What are all the regulatory exemptions that need to be made or regulatory precedents that need to be set to enable this technology to show what's possible?

You know, I think that regulatory arbitrage that, you know, you've played beautifully here is so important for moonshot engineers and moonshot entrepreneurs to think about. You know, when I was working on my asteroid mining company, we ended up in Luxembourg and got the laws passed in Luxembourg for private ownership of asteroidal materials. And I've heard, I mean, you know, we have different governments in south and Central America looking at cryptocurrencies and bitcoin. So I think where you go and start is super important. Just doing it in your backyard in a highly regulated US Economy is probably a really difficult thing to do. So you go to Rwanda, and we.

Knew the US Was important. I don't think Zipline would have been able to raise the money from investors that was necessary to really build out all of the different infrastructure that was required to make this technology do what it does today. Investors needed to kind of understand that regulatory arbitrage argument as well, and had to be able to make that leap of faith or that kind of logical leap to say, oh, well, if you can get it to work in some of the hardest places to operate in the world, then it's very likely to also have a pretty big impact in the U.S. once the U.S. catches up from a regulatory perspective. And that's basically what we saw. And now that we're eight years in, it's basically what we've seen over the last two years.

Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic Centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. You might as well find out when you can take action. Found Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter when Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is for me, one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Can you describe what was going on before you arrived in Rwanda? What was the state of delivery? How were things being delivered? What was the, you know, the tragedies and then where is it now? Give me that pre and post description. Understand the impact.

It might help to focus on a single commodity so we could talk about blood. And then if you want. I mean, Zipline also delivers massive numbers of vaccines and transfusions and infusions, cancer treatments, a lot of other things. But just focusing on Blood. You know, when we. When I went, I remember going and having this initial conversation with the Minister of Health of Rwanda in 2015. We went and spoke to her and basically went in being really excited, you know, young, naive engineers saying, hey, we have this opportunity. Awesome solution, and we're going to, you know, we're going to use autonomous aircraft to deliver all medical products to every hospital and health facility in the country. And I remember so clearly her looking at me with this look of significant skepticism, saying, keller, shut up. Just do blood. And as she started to explain to us, you know, 51% of transfusions in the country are going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging. 30% are going to kids under the age of five with severe anemia. And this is a really important product for family health. And it's quite tricky because you have all these different components. You have platelets, plasma, cryoprecipitates, packed red blood cells. Each of those has different storage requirements and different shelf lives. And then obviously, you have different types. A, B, A, B and O positive and negative RH factor. What they were doing before is they had these regional blood facilities. I think that there were four of them spread throughout the country. And they would.

The entire country of Rwanda.

Yeah, the entire country. They had four of these centers. And it's. It's a relatively small country of, I think, about 18 million people. And they would, you know, do big blood drives. They'd collect all the blood, they'd send it to one centralized facility where they would test and type it, and then they would distribute the blood to these regional facilities. And whenever there was an emergency occurring at a hospital, a doctor or nurse would drive, assuming they didn't just need the most basic blood products. So we packed red blood cells of a universal donor. Positive. Yeah, like AB positive, or basically the most common, unless it was the common component and the most common blood type. You were probably needing to get into a car and drive a couple hours to this regional facility where you'd wait in line, fill out some paperwork, get the blood you needed, get back into your car, drive back to the hospital. I mean, the challenge here is obvious. A, it's really expensive, and you need someone to do that. B, like four or five hours have elapsed while a woman may be bleeding in childbirth. And it's just, you know, has a pretty big impact on patient health. And sometimes you're going to lose. People are going to lose their lives during that wait. And so. And by the way, this is Rwanda, actually has one of the best blood logistics systems of any country on earth. Like it rivals the U.S. even in the U.S. blood logistics is a huge challenge. Really hard to make it work. Especially in rural places, there's significant waste. So it's actually important not to get confused at, like, oh, geez, what a disaster it is there. It's pretty much the same in the US and we were able by listening to the Ministry of Health, because it's incredible, incredibly smart, that she told us to just focus on this in this one area to get started. It wound up being plenty for us to bite off and chew. For the first year, it was a significant challenge just to deliver blood to 21 different hospitals. And we ended up consolidating the national blood supply into two zipline distribution centers that we built and then delivering from those distribution centers only when a patient was having an emergency and needed something, delivering from those distribution centers directly to hospitals where a patient needed the product.

And delivery time at that point.

Was significantly shorter. It was anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes.

And I assume much more inexpensive and saving lives. I remember in Reading, I think in Rwanda, Zipline's existence today has decreased maternal mortality rates by like 88%, I think was the number.

Yeah, it's 51%, according to the most recent numbers by University of Pennsylvania, 51% reduction in maternal mortality across all the hospitals that we serve. And, you know, when we started building Zipline, had you told me we were going to reduce maternal mortality in a country by 5%, I would have said, hell, yeah, this is worth the next 10 years of our lives. So, you know, it's kind of hard to put into words like, we get to meet patients who are alive every day because of the infrastructure and the service. And honestly, I mean, on one hand, that's inspiring. On the other hand, it's a little distressing realizing that today zipline only provides service to about 45 million people. And we think that people probably there's a moral imperative for every human on earth to have access to this kind of logistics.

You take a moment and talk about, you know, the startup mode, because I think most entrepreneurs are way overly optimistic about how easy it is to get their product built. And, you know, the whole ethos of getting to a minimally viable product and learning from actually building. And I've heard you describe some of the lessons learned. And again, just speaking to sort of the entrepreneur who's looking at building anything, can you talk to your sort of your early lessons learned and your mvp and what was hard that you didn't think was hard and what was easy that you thought was hard? Give me some sense of advice for folks there.

Yeah, we could talk for an hour and a half about just that question, but I guess I can share at a high level. One thing that was true for us, and I think is probably true to a certain degree for every single entrepreneur trying to build kind of a moonshot product, maybe any product, is that it will definitely be 10 times harder than you think it will be. It will be 10 times as expensive, it will take 10 times as long, it will be 10 times as difficult. And I think it's pretty important, as we described, like the naivete. On one hand it's useful not to know that, because if you knew it, you might not get started. But I remember this conversation where Keenan, my co founder, and I were kind of trying to think through what kind of hardware we needed to build. And we were considering building this far more advanced product that interestingly looks a lot like the product that Zipline is just now launching into the real world ten years later. And but the more we talked to customers and we were really pushing customers on what would they pay us for, it turned out that the customers we were talking to really only cared about two things. They wanted to be as cheap as possible and they needed maximum range so that we could actually operate at national scale. We could serve health facilities and hospitals that were quite far away. And as we were thinking about it, we kind of said, well, I mean, if those are the only two things that really matter, we should probably build a very simple fixed wing platform. Which this is the realization that led to the vehicle that you see right behind me on the manufacturing line, which we call Platform one. And I remember this conversation with Keenan at the time where Akin and I both basically said, okay, well the beautiful thing about that is we could knock that product out in six months. That's a really easy thing. And then six months later we'll immediately get to the more advanced version of the product. Well, here we are a decade later, still perfecting the six month product project that we thought was going to be so incredibly simple. And so on one hand it's like it was really important that we choose something that seemed like it was going to be very easy to us because it wound up being 10 times harder, but that was still doable, manageable. Whereas, yeah, had we chosen the harder and more ambitious thing, we for sure would have failed. And I think you see a lot of hardware startups kind of fail in that mode. I think the other important thing that was a big part of our DNA was just this attitude that we were pretty sure that we didn't know what the heck we were doing. Like, we, you know, that we were clueless. We weren't clueless about the fact that we were clueless. That's the one thing we knew. So I think that for that reason, we did not trust any of our assumptions. We spent very little time building in a bunker. We had this assumption that we got to go out and try to sell the product from day one. And so we were talking to customers, getting doors slammed in our face, like hundreds of doors slammed in our face from day one, learning, okay, what is it about this that would be powerful enough that we get customers to take a bet on us? And we were lucky enough to find a few partners who were willing to pay us and take a risk on us, even when we were just a team of 15 nerds. And then I think the last point was we knew we needed to be scrappy and unfancy and get the product into the real world quickly and learn by doing. And that meant we needed to go out and serve actual customers and ask those customers to pay us. We didn't want to do unpaid pilots. We didn't want to do demos or exhibitions. It was like, let's just go start operating the service anywhere in the world. And that was an incredibly painful experience.

Keller, let me hit on something here, because it's something that I think a lot of, especially I would say moonshot entrepreneurs get wrong is is they wait for revenue, and they are building their company on fundraise after fundraise, after fundraise. You did something which I think is the absolute right way to do it, which is get something that earns you money immediately and build from there. How critical is early revenue for an entrepreneur trying to do something like this?

Yeah, I mean, for us, we would not have built the right product if we didn't have that constant iteration. I mean, it's incredibly important, even just for the team, like, for our entire engineering team at that time. It sharpens the mind like nothing else, to have a product that is operating in the real world that customers are depending on. And then every night, we would operate the distribution center all day long. This is for the first nine months of operating and sort of serving customers, we had a single distribution center. We were supposed to serve 21 hospitals. And actually, for the first, I think, seven or eight months, we only served one hospital because we were just trying to get the service to work correctly for that one hospital from One distribution center. And we would turn on the distribution center at 7am and they would just battle through. It's like trying to turn gears that have rocks in them and it doesn't feel good. There's so many engineering challenges. We'd made a lot of mistakes in the design of the system. We also had definitely underestimated the importance of all the auxiliary software systems around the actual aircraft.

Can you talk to that one second? Because, you know, someone naively looking at what you did would think building the plane, building the drone would be the hard part.

Yeah, yeah. And that was what we thought and that wound up being wrong.

What was the hard part?

The hard part was designing a service that felt like teleportation for our customers, that would be reliable. And I think we, like probably most, maybe nerds, were trying to build hardware or trying to build a product. It's very easy to get obsessed with the cool thing in front of you, whether that's an autonomous aircraft or a rocket or autonomous vehicle or anything. But I think what we realized is the aircraft itself is about 15% of the complexity of the solution we had to build all of this. None of our customers give a damn about drones. That was like a core thing for us to realize. All our customers care about is can they move a crucial product from point A to point B fast enough to save someone's life or fast enough to create a really important economic opportunity. And so designing a logistics, service and experience that would feel magical and feel like teleportation and always be there whenever you needed it and be reliable. 24, 7, 365 wound up depending 15% on the vehicle, but 85% on all of the auxiliary systems you have to build. So things like multi vehicle deconfliction algorithms, data logging, pre flight checks, the software that we use to control our distribution centers, make sure that we pack the right thing into the right box and it goes into the right aircraft. Unmanned traffic management systems that we provided to our regulators so they knew where we were at any given time and we could get access to the airspace at all. The way we integrated with the national healthcare systems that we were partnering with all the way down to like customer ordering interfaces. All of these things had to be really good for the service to be useful and life saving for customers.

How many near death experiences did you have along the way?

I, you know, I would say for the first nine months it felt like every day was a near death experience. I think like the team was under no illusions. There were 25 between 25 and 40 of us probably during that period. And some of us were living in Rwanda in person with, you know, and keep in mind, Zipline is half American, half African. So we're this fully integrated team. So, you know, there were some of us living in Rwanda, working at those distribution centers, working all day long. And then, you know, if you were in the US you'd work on engineering problems all day long. You'd go home, have dinner, and then, because the time difference around the time you're going to sleep was the time that the Rwanda distribution center was turning on. And usually we get woken up at like 1am, 2am, 3am, something's wrong. We need to dig in to figure out how to unblock the distribution center and get, you know, get aircraft flying. And, you know, it was like that for nine straight months. And it was never clear. The challenge in engineering, with engineering problems is you can never see all of the engineering challenges ahead of you. You can pretty much only see the one that is currently, currently blocking you. So that can be kind of demoralizing because you fight like heck to solve this problem, and then you immediately move an inch and then you're into the next problem. And so it was just this incredibly difficult grind with the team being very sleep deprived and cranky and having no idea if we had, you know, two more months of hell or 12 more months of hell ahead of us. I think the thing that really kept the team going through that period was that A, we knew how important the impact of the service would be if we could get it to work, and B, our partner, the government of Rwanda, was super understanding and patient during that period, realizing we were trying to do something for the first time in the world ever. And they, you know, they kind of gave us the time and space that we needed to work through problems and get the system to the point where it was reliable.

You know, I talk a lot about abundance, my book and my Abundance Summit, and I see Zipline as an abundance enabling company. How do you think about that?

I mean, I read your book. I think it was in, like 2011 or 2012. It was right before we built Zipline. And as you know, I'm a big Trekkie. I believe very deeply in that vision. I think that we stand at this interesting. I think we stand at a very interesting kind of precipice or crossroads, depending on how you think about it. Because it feels like when you look at what technology is doing and what has become possible, we're living in the wealthiest, healthiest, happiest, most democratic world. That any human has ever lived in. And I also think simultaneously we are living in a world where people are more negative about the future, more hopeless, think the world is going in the wrong direction. And broadly I think we just don't. We have to a certain degree lost like these clear optimistic visions for how the future can be better.

Yes.

And so I guess that's how I think about it. It seems both paths are available to humanity. And I think that it's almost like whatever vision we believe in is the one we're going to manifest. Either we're going to manifest either we're going to say we can build a better world and here's the path to do so, or we're going to believe more of like you know, the Hollywood, I think the Hollywood vision for the future of like science, bad, technology, bad, you know, world becoming worse every year and everybody's out to get you and everybody's your enemy. And that's seems crazy that that plays such a big role in politics and people's worldviews and people's attitude on how humanity is doing today. But it seems really important.

Yeah, I think you, Blake Byers and Brian Armstrong and I are having that conversation. We need new stories that paint the positive vision so people can believe Star Trek was amazing in that regard. And we need a resurgence of those positive, these non dystopian visions of the future. I'm just so tired of the Crisis News Network and Hollywood's destruction of our hopeful future.

And so I mean, I think the incentives are all wrong. Like all of the. There's this amazing book Factfulness which I assume you've read and just does a beautiful job of illustrating through this 13 question quiz. That should be easy. And people do terribly on like people do worse than monkeys. So it would have been better if they just guessed at random. We're bia and these are basic. Yeah, these are basic questions about how humanity is doing. And he gives this quiz even to groups of Nobel prize winning scientists and they get it wrong. He gives it to global health experts. These are people who definitely should know the answers to these questions and they do worse than random. It really makes you realize we are not uninformed. We are actively misinformed about how the world is doing. And I think that's just super important to have access to the data about how humanity is doing in an objective way. Because the enlightenment is working. Reason, science, progress and humanism are worthwhile missions and we should stay on track and continue believing in those things.

Yeah, I'm pushing Data driven optimism a lot. Because you can drive optimism with the data. Right? So proof of abundance, proof that the world is getting better. Not on every parameter, but on almost all parameters. Increasing access to energy literacy, healthcare, communications, intelligence. And yet people on the average, like you said, feel like the world is getting worse. And it's a bloody shame because as we're getting faster and faster in the world, we can't go back to our default scarcity and pessimistic mindsets. That's the wrong place for us to face the future from.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I mean, please.

It does feel like so many shows that you watch on TV today are rooted in this very negative, dark, cynical, sarcastic, I mean, look, you know, succession, which I watched and thought was hilarious, but it's like all about people who are terrible to each other and, you know, don't like themselves and are, you know, and have no real mission. I just, I think like the new Star Trek that just came out, I think it's called New Frontiers. I watched the first couple episodes and man, I cried after the first episode. It's so nerdy to say this, but I cried after the first episode. Cause I'm like, wow, they're such a great team. I know that that sounds really dorky, but there's honestly, we need positive examples of people who are earnest and positive about the future and can work together and trust each other to build important things.

Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their rna? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool and, and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine, after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, VIOME is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com Peter I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it@viome.com Peter I'm going to deviate from what's been going on in Africa a second and talk about building things that matter. So one of the things I'm like, you know, on the, on the podium and shouting from the rooftop is we don't need another photo sharing app. Talking to entrepreneurs. Build something that matters. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. Want to become a billionaire, Help a billion people. Can you speak to that? Because I mean you've obviously. And hardware is hard and you dove in and incredible what you've built. What's your inspiration for entrepreneurs who are trying to decide where do they invest their time, their resources?

Yeah, I think that I never want to necessarily be negative for things that maybe would be viewed as more iterative or, I don't know, less impactful. I mean I think there are a lot of important companies to be built. I think it depends what you want to build. I think one of the shames though is that you do see so much of the top talent from engineering schools across the United States, I think being lured by either like resume building instincts or compensation to go like, let's try to figure out how to get this search Engine to make 0.0001% more revenue every year. And I think and then the crazy thing is that a lot of the industries that clearly really matter, like energy or education or health care or global health care or, you know, I mean the list goes on and on. I think you, you just don't. In fact, I mean global public health care, there's like basically no engineering talent and sorry, I mean that's maybe perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration, but not that much. Like I think there is, relatively speaking.

Yes.

Yeah. And that's kind of crazy to think about. You're like, well, what's the most important problem for humanity to solve today? I mean for sure one of those problems is that over the next 10 or 15 years we have an opportunity to end childhood malnutrition globally, end Child brain stunting and probably end extreme poverty globally, if not. And poverty, like these are the trend lines.

The trend lines are all in the right direction, but every year that they're not accelerated is millions of lives.

Exactly. And the weird thing to think about is that today you could be like, wow, that seems like a really important problem. Who's working on that? It's like, oh, like these nonprofits over here that are funded by, you know, USAID and other kind of sovereign funders. And it's like, there's very little technology, very little engineering, very little entrepreneurship. And like, that is really sad for humanity. That's bad for humanity. And so I think that one of the things that is clearest to me is there are so many industries out there that are incredibly ossified and where people just don't think that's a place where you could build a startup or that's not a place where really talented engineers should focus. I think often those are the most exciting places where engineers can find a massive lever to move the world and save lives, make the world a better place.

Where did you get your capital from early on? Because this is a crazy, audacious project. How did you fund it in the first year? Was it individuals? Was it venture capital?

Yeah, I mean, for the first year building Zipline, it was super scary and difficult. The idea just basically seemed stupid, I think. And a lot people were like, okay, you're trying to build robots and you think you're going to go launch these robots in sub Saharan Africa and you're going to get governments to pay you, which, by the way, governments make terrible customers. Most investors don't like investing. I agree.

Everything's stacked.

Government revenue. Yeah. So idea just seems so stupid. And I think that we talked to a lot of investors to raise a couple million dollars. And every step along the way, it felt like it could all fall apart at any moment. It was so desperate. I remember getting a call from this one angel investor who he was going to invest $50,000, but I remember this other bigger investor had kind of told me, well, we'll invest if so and so invests. So, like, I get on the phone with so and so. I'm talking to him, he's like, well, I've been thinking about it, and I decided this could be really important for the world if it actually works, so I'll invest. And I remember being like, cool, thanks, bye, and hanging up on him because I had started to cry, you know, like, it's pretty raw and pretty desperate. And I don't know if I would like wish that on my worst enemy. I think that. I think we just didn't give up.

I just think, I think that message is so critically important. You know, I talk about having a massive transformative purpose, something that keeps you going at 3am in the morning, wakes you up next morning and it's just is going to keep you from giving up. Because that's really it. I mean, I'm sure you had so many excuses and so many reasons that you could have just hung it up, right?

Yeah, I think that's right. But it helps. Like one of the problems with startups is you get, you get committed. That's why naivete is important. You get so committed and you're like, oh, God, we've gone too far to go back now. We have to go forward. And that is kind of one of the feelings because at some point you're just committed. I remember 2016 when we were launching and now we have hospitals that are depending on us and at that point we're like, okay, well, there's no one going back now, only way forward. The only way, only direction is forward. And we're going to have to figure out all these problems. And that's basically what we spent the last eight years doing.

I love it. So let's bring it from the first hospital you served to today. So let's talk about Africa first. What are some of the numbers of the scale of your operations in Africa?

Yeah, I mean, today we operate in five countries in Africa, three outside of Africa, including the U.S. we deliver 75% of the national blood supply of Rwanda outside the capital city, fully autonomously. And by delivering blood in this way, we've been able to reduce blood waste by about 66% while increasing access to rare blood products by 75%. So it turns out it's just enabling instant delivery, particularly in healthcare can be super impactful because it can reduce waste while increasing access. Normally those things, you know, are, you know, they don't move in lockstep normally. They're in tension with one another because if you want to increase access, you send a lot more products to the last mile and then more stuff gets wasted. In Ghana, we, Ghana was the first country where we began delivering vaccines at scale. Over the last two years, we've delivered over 16 million doses of vaccine, including 2 million doses of COVID 19 vaccine. When it comes to vaccine delivering in this way, it's much more cost effective. You can reduce missed vaccinations by 42%. We've been able to reduce vaccine waste by 60%. And in fact, in Ghana, we were able to reduce zero dose children. These are kids who never received their first vaccine by 23 percentage points across all the regions that we serve. So, yeah, I don't know. I think based on all of these research studies that have been done across all these countries where we operate, I think the estimate is something like 22,000 lives saved directly by this technology over the last two and a half years. And I think it's very hard to, for us as humans to conceptualize that number. It's much easier to meet someone who's alive, like a single person who's alive and be like, wow, that is someone who is alive because of this technology and it's pretty powerful. And you just have to multiply that by 22,000 by a football stadium.

Yeah. So you make a decision to end, enter the U.S. how do you do that? You're operational in Rwanda and Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya. Things are going well, the system is working, it's scaling and you make a decision, okay, it's time to come back to the US but you've got a whole new regulatory structure. And I know the fda, I dealt with them on, you know, private space flight with the X Prize and on zero G. And my old saying with the FAA was they're not happy till you're not happy. And it's, it's a there. You know, I remember years ago when they said we want to have zero deaths as our, as our objective in the faa, which means the only way you get there is by just not flying. And so it's, it's a tough structure. You know, FDA and FAA are both very difficult. You enter. How did you enter the US and talk a little about platform two.

Yeah. In about 2021. So middle of the pandemic, I think there were several things that were kind of all happening at once. One thing was that the service was scaling very fast. In Africa, I think we had gone from this moment of like, oh, that's an interesting experiment to, whoa, that's now becoming global infrastructure very, very quickly. And a lot of big health systems like Intermountain Healthcare, Multicare, Cleveland Clinic, many others were seeing that the technology was doing that, saying, we have the exact same challenges here in the US we want access to that technology. I think when the pandemic hit, that created a permission for innovation in some of these health systems that otherwise would have maybe moved a little slower. I think it kind of felt like, wow, things are changing so fast. All of this is transitioning over to telepresence. Telepresence, if you're keeping patients at home, dramatically increases the need for these kinds of logistics services. And so I think there was just a willingness to try new things. That was part of that period, by the way. Finally, if I.

If I could just, you know, for entrepreneurs listening, you know, you get Uber and Airbnb starting in 2008 during, you know, the financial crisis, then, you know, never let a disaster go to waste, I think is the important lesson here during the time when. When there's a shakeup, there's opportunities for entrepreneurs to come in. And that's, I think, what happened as you're describing in 2021.

Definitely, you know, I think we saw it was like, oh, wow, there's tons of demand. We could launch immediately. We ended up launching with navant, the Navant Health System in North Carolina, delivering Covid products. We got special FAA permissions because of the pandemic. And so it was just this unique moment. And then I think the third thing was that, you know, zipline at that time was probably passing 25, 30 million commercial autonomous miles, as I mentioned. Today we're over 80. But we were getting to a level of flight data, you know, tens of millions of commercial autonomous miles and zero human safety incidents. It was very valuable in terms of convincing the FAA technology was ready for prime time. Yeah, yeah. We can talk a little bit more about the relationship with the FAA and how that's changed over time, if helpful.

So, I mean, it's interesting for me that health was the entry point as well in the United States versus getting your Slurpee or your slice of pizza, because everybody sort of thinks of the large consumer market, but it was saving lives. And I didn't realize that the challenges in the US were at the same level and scale that you saw in distribution in Africa.

Yeah. And I don't mean to say these health systems are identical. Obviously, they're not. The US has private health care, so all these kind of like fragmented health care systems all over the country. Africa, primarily public health care systems run by ministries of health. But I think the difference is much less than the average person thinks when you ask them kind of how these systems work. Really important to realize that a lot of the same challenges you have in Africa, it's like, oh, maternal mortality, really big problem in Rwanda. Guess where else it's a problem in the United States. The US has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any developed country on Earth. So, you know, I think it's just really important for us to not Sometimes when we talk to people, people sort of make assumptions about the U.S. health care system that aren't true. There are really significant challenges and we have critical access hospitals in rural areas closing at a record rate. People who live in certain rural parts of the US over the last decade, decade, their life expectancy has actually declined, whereas, you know, life expectancy has obviously increased on average for Americans. And so I think that, you know, we face many of the, many of the same challenges and a lot of the health systems that we work with in the US are ambitious and forward looking and excited to use new technology to address those inequalities and those problems.

I want to Talk about Platform 2. Mark Roper did a beautiful video show on teleportation, so to speak, with Platform two. And it looks magical. So Platform one, just to describe it there, but again, fixed wing, it launches on a catapult. It's flying how fast to get?

About 110km an hour.

And it's flying over a GPS location. And it's sort of like just like we were kids, we throw something up in the air with a little parachute and it drops a parachute in somebody's field or in somebody's parking lot in Africa and it gets it there and people are waiting for it, I assume. Are they tracking it on a phone on Platform one?

Yeah. I mean exactly. You basically send a text message or you order via our app. We receive it, we confirm the order, we tell you when the thing's going to be delivered and we can usually tell you within a couple minutes or a 60 second period when it'll be delivered. It's then the vehicle arrives, makes the delivery, turns around, heads back to the distribution center to get loaded with another package.

By the way, when it launches on the catapult, when it comes back, how does it land?

Yeah, that is probably the hardest part to describe of all of this. We use a system that was inspired by aircraft carriers. We have a 1cm tail hook. In fact, it's a little hard to see on that, but it's right here on this aircraft. Okay, one centimeter tailhook on the back of the aircraft as the aircraft's basically flying through the distribution center. We have an actively controlled line that we basically aircraft in the air. It's like an aircraft carrier. And so it's an arresting line. The vehicle, the line is controlling to the aircraft, the aircraft is controlling to the line, can basically catch that hook, decelerate the aircraft, it swings into space. Our operators can go take the vehicle, put it Back on the launcher, put a new battery in it, put a new package and have it launch a couple minutes later.

How many flights per day can a Platform 1 Do? Order of magnitude?

I mean, I think I'd have to go check. I think today on busy days, we're exceeding 2,000 flights a day.

Wow, that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, so that's Platform one, but the accuracy of the parachute landing is what, like 5, 10 meters, 20 meters?

Yeah, you can kind of think about like three or four parking spaces. I mean, it works great for hospitals and primary care facilities and some kind of enterprise customers or sites that we're serving. But the thing that we heard for the first six years that we operated this service was now, what about home delivery? What about home delivery? It's every customer we talked to. It was so obvious that really the holy grail in this space was enabling teleportation from any building, whether it's a hospital, a primary care facility, or a store or a warehouse or a restaurant. We really wanted to do is just enable teleportation from any pre existing building directly to homes in a way that was 10 times as fast, half the cost and zero emission. And that was really the vision that led to a start, led us to start building platform two about three and a half years ago. We're now six weeks away from launching platform two with our first customer in the U.S. amazing.

And describe platform two and I encourage people to check out a link below for some video of it, but help us envision it because it's pretty magical. And talk about. So let's actually start with I'm a vendor, I'm either a Walmart store or I'm a 711 or someone who, I want Cleveland Clinic. Cleveland Clinic. So someone who wants to get something. What's it look like on my side and how does the system work? So I've got something in my hand. How heavy is it, how big is it and how does it get to the person's home?

Yeah, so you know, say you're like a large health system in the US and you say, hey, you know, we've seen Telepresence visits increase 100x during the pandemic and after the pandemic. So we're just doing, you know, we're treating way, way more patients at home. Home health care and hospital at home are massive kind of growing trends, especially in US healthcare. And you know, you might say, oh wow. I mean, what we really need is the other half of the equation, which is you can talk to a doctor, then that doctor can write you a prescription and she can tell you that prescription is going to be on your doorstep in five minutes. Or, you know, the health system can make a delivery to a community health care nurse who might. A home health care nurse who might be at your house trying to help you solve a problem without needing you to get admitted to a hospital. All of these kind of logistics use cases. The idea, the way we talk to customers, is just that we will show up and install a magical sci fi portal in the wall of your building. And so if you're like a Rick and Morty fan or a Stargate fan, these are shows that I love. And so we really have this idea of just an actual magical portal in the wall so that any team member, any Cleveland Clinic team member, as you said, any Walmart team member, Sweetgreen team member, these are all partners of Zipline in the US they can get something loaded into a box. It's a pretty big box. Like, think of it as a, you know, like a large, ish Amazon box. You can put up to eight pounds inside. You walk up and you just pass the box through the magical portal in the wall. In fact, we show, and we call this the portal. We design it. It's part of the hardware of the system. We actually, once the package basically goes through the portal, it's then automatically loaded into an aircraft. That aircraft can then automatically launch from the side of a building, fly out to the home where it needs to make a delivery, and then fly back. And so the goal here is really to design a system that is there are no humans in the loop other than the human who's loading the package. And when we show this loading experience to people at, for example, some of these leading health systems, they're often like, oh, we totally get it. It's just like our pneumatic tube system systems in the hospital. Except now, instead of shooting it somewhere else in the building, now we're teleporting it directly to the customer or patient's home. And it's like, yeah, that's a great way of thinking about it. So really there's a lot of technology that goes into the. A lot of technology on the back end necessary to make all of this work. But we want the customer experience to be very, very simple.

So platform two, unlike platform, Platform one was fixed wing alone, and it had to fly at velocity forward in order to stay aloft. It was using the lift of the wings. Platform 2 is using wings and it's also using electric horizontal lift.

Motors.

Yeah. In order to hover. So give me a sense of the altitude it's hovering at and how it delivers that, as you call it, dinner plate accuracy. And that's a great description. Right. It's accurately to within the radius of a dinner plate.

Yeah. To build that overall customer experience, you're right. We needed to move away from a system that was a pure fixed wing vehicle because the fixed wing vehicle required us to build big distribution centers that were pretty expensive and you don't always have room to do that. What we really wanted was a system that can just install onto the wall of any pre existing building. So to do that we built docks. They are just sort of, you can almost think of it like an EV charger, except instead of for a car, this is an EV charger for an aircraft. The vehicle can come and dock onto the side of a building and the Platform 2 aircraft is a hybrid. Sometimes they're called electric vertical takeoff and landing hybrids. Which means that you hover like a helicopter and fly like an airplane. So the vehicle can detach from the dock, hover, hover up to altitude, fly on a fixed wing in a more efficient mode out to the GPS coordinates where it wants to make a delivery when it arrives there. We actually hover at a relatively high altitude and very, very quietly. And then we lower something that we call a droid. And the droid is basically being winched up and down by the main vehicle. But the cool thing about a droid is that it enables us to. The droid is controlling its position on X and Y axis using computer vision and small thrusters. And so that enables us, no matter what the weather, no matter where we're delivering, we can always deliver with dinner plate level accuracy. So the neat thing for the end customer relative to how we experience instant delivery today is that we can deliver to your front yard, to your backyard for apartment buildings, we may even deliver to a rooftop. We can deliver hyper reliably and very consistently. Like we tell you, the 60 second window that it's going to be delivered and it will always show up in that 60 second window. So actually, I mean it also operates 24 7. They're just a bunch of things actually about automated logistics that are going to be way better that customers are really going to love. And I think we don't yet fully appreciate actually how much anxiety and annoyance and lack of reliability that we have to put up with with this kind of kludged together.

So you're going to spoil people for autonomous deliveries. I see you went with the Star wars metaphor instead of the Star Trek metaphor. On the droid, you didn't consider shuttlecraft.

Yeah.

So you're coming in at what altitude you're typically hovering above a home that.

You'Re delivering to vehicle hovers at 100 meters.

So 300ft, 100 meters. And you have probably zero sound impact on the neighborhood at that point.

Yeah. What's really cool, you know, Zipline has, I mean, today Zipline is now over 400 engineers who own every part of the system. From, you know, the electrical engineering, so building the flight computer and all the avionics that runs on the aircraft to the firmware team that's writing all the low level code that, that runs that avionics, our mechanical engineering team building all the different structures and mechanisms that are required for the vehicle to fly the aircraft itself, plus all the ground equipment, docks, infrastructure, software, owning everything from flight control algorithms. So very low level to unmanned traffic management systems, multi vehicle, multi vehicle deconfliction, data logging, communications architecture, customer ordering interfaces. But we also have a really extraordinary aerodynamics team and a very specific aeroacoustics team. Zipline has world class engineers who have been focused for five plus years on just designing systems that can be quiet. We think that it's not good enough to just be 10 times faster, faster than half the cost in zero emission. If you really annoy the crap out of people based on the way that it sounds like it has to be basically be better in every way. And so we, you know, we do think that sound and the aeroacoustic profile of these kinds of vehicles are super important. The way drones sound are terrible. Like everybody hates the sound of the quadcopter. It's, it's really grating and terrible. And so there's a huge, huge amount of work that goes into designing vehicles that are actually, they're generally very, very quiet and have different kinds of harmonics and air acoustic profiles so that, so that you basically can't hear them and they're, you know, and they just basically fade into the environment. So. And then obviously the other advantage is just staying far away from the homes that we're delivering to.

Yeah. So you're at 100 meters above, you drop the droid on a line, it is coming down. And even if there's a crosswind, it's correcting for that crosswind. It's coming in. Using image pattern recognition, I assume that the consumer has selected someplace on a digital map that is clear that Zipline's approved. Yes. Your backyard looks like a good place we can land it or your rooftop will, whatever.

Yeah, it's really cool. It's really simple. When you're signing up for the service, you just type in your address, we show you a satellite image of your home, and then you just click where you want your mailbox to be.

And if in fact the household dog or the three year old kid grabs onto the Zipline line, the Droid gets released and gets recovered in some other fashion or the consumer gets charged for that.

Yeah, I mean, the droid will act pretty shy. It has cameras pointing at the ground. So if there's someone, if there's like a kid waiting there to grab it and grapple it, the droid is just going to be shy and you'll get a notification, the app saying, please, like, give us some, give us some room. Yeah, but you know, but yeah, in the worst case scenario, if someone were to like, you know, if someone were to try to be tampering with the system and like trying to try to come out of nowhere and grab it, we can always leave a droid behind. It's not ideal, but unfortunately that just means we can't deliver to that location again. So I don't actually think it's going to be much fun. We'll have to see.

I don't think so either. But I'm just. You got to ask. It's curious. One of the things you did, which I found amazing, was using acoustics to identify aircraft. Right. So people think that, you know, it's gonna be hard to, you know, there's traffic up there, other airplanes and so forth, but you've done something brilliant. Can you explain it?

Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the key kind of holy grail regulatory milestones that we needed to get was the ability to fly beyond visual line of sight, particularly in the U.S. yeah. And flying beyond visual line of sight means you need to have a detect and avoid technology that gives the FAA confidence that we are going to deconflict from other airplanes in the airspace, make sure we're not going to hit things, other things that are in the air. And Zipline ended up basically having to build from scratch many different layers of technology that kind of all stack up, stack on top of each other to achieve the overall level of safety that we needed to achieve. So we have cameras on the vehicle, we have a microphone array that connects to a powerful neural net so that we can actually passively listen for other aircraft and avoid them. That way we provide unmanned traffic management systems to regulators so they can track where we are we also have ADS B transponders. This is kind of a very specific kind of sensor that most airplanes have that are basically constantly communicating to other aircraft in the airspace where you are and where they are. And then finally we have other kind of deconfliction layers. One of the big things is that we fly below the commercial aviation floor in the United States. So there is zero chance that Zipline is flying in an air. If you're flying on a commercial jet, for example, there's zero chance that Zipline we don't interact with. It's completely segregated airspace. So you don't have to worry on that front. Like, you know, we worry more about crop dusters, hot air balloons, you know, pilots flying Cessnas suicidally low to the ground and where they shouldn't be. Like, those are more the things that are kind of concerns for us and for the faa.

Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. The truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously. Called One Skin, it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 millimeter amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Walmart and your current hospital systems, you're operational now with Platform One.

Yeah, we launched Platform One in the US in Bentonville and in Salt Lake City about two years ago. And it's been quite shocking to see the level of customer demand and customer excitement. Without going into details. I mean, customers are ordering more often than people than Amazon prime subscribers use Amazon Prime. So it's like, I mean, it's quite shocking. And I thought, oh well, maybe people will like order for the first few weeks because it's really cool in sci fi. But then, you know, you'll see like a tapering off or something. We've seen the opposite of that. Like people, you know, once people experience logistics that works around their schedule rather than vice versa, they're constantly expecting people to inconvenience themselves or be home at this specific time. Or like you come home to the annoying FedEx sticker on your door like, sorry, we missed you, call this phone number and stay on hold for 30 minutes and then we won't have your package anyway. It's just you know, it's pretty profound seeing, I mean, when people can experience a logistics system that is super reliable, super fast and where you don't have the guilt, you know, it's like zero emission, people use it a lot. Like a lot, a lot. In fact, the data that we've seen over the last two years would kind of indicate that. So this year there will be about four and a half billion instant deliveries done in the U.S. that's just instant deliveries. That's just using a 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle to deliver a package to a home that weighs on average five pounds. Of course, that vehicle is driven by a human. I think what we're realizing is that if you can design a logistics system that is 10 times faster and half the cost, and zero emission customer demand is actually probably more than 10, 10 times that.

I agree with you. And because you need something in the moment and you don't want it tomorrow, you want it in the moment. So I mean, here's the question, right? So Amazon, I remember Bezos announcing Amazon Prime Air. So why isn't Amazon and FedEx and Uber and everybody else just trying to buy you right now? I mean, it would seem like you're the next. You are Netflix to Blockbuster. I mean you really are. You're packet switched packages.

You know, I think, I mean, Zipline doesn't spend a ton of time thinking. I mean, you know, had we, when we started building zipline in 2013, Jeff Bezos was on 60 Minutes saying Amazon was going to be doing drone delivery to every home in the next two or three years. So had we spent a lot of time thinking about what our customers were, what our competitors were saying or doing, we probably would have been freaked out and we never would have tried at all. And you know, today Zipline is something like 10 or 20 times the scale of the entire rest of the industry combined. So I think, you know, my takeaway was it was just really us spending a lot of time worrying about what other companies were working on wasn't nearly as important as us just spending time figuring out who were customers who we could create a ton of value for. How could we get something into the real world as quickly as possible and then just iterate by doing? And I think that, you know, a lot of other companies have tried to build drone delivery and obviously, you know, a lot of them have not had the same success. And I think, I think a big part of it was just willing to be unfancy and scrappy and operate in the real world as fast as possible. And learn by doing.

Can we take this home for, for again, someone who's wanting to do something big and bold, they got the message that an entrepreneur today, and this is for me one of the most important messages. I call it 10 to the 9th plus thinking that a single individual or team can build something that can possibly impact the lives of a billion people. It never was possible if you're the king and the queen or the robber baron. Before the best you could do was millions of people. But today you can, you can really do something at scale. What I heard you say, and I just want to just count these off because I think they're really important key points. Number one, going after something big and bold, you need to have the passion that's going to keep you through those just constant near death experiences. How about the people you employ to be part of that journey with you? How do you find the right people who are willing to take that 5% chance journey with you? Because that's got to be somewhat difficult, I think.

You know, before even talking about team, I do think that there is some good news or just something I've been thinking about over the last couple weeks, which is I was kind of reflecting on when I moved Bay Area after college and we were building ziplines. This is like 2011, 2012, 2013. I remember having this very distinct feeling when I moved to the Bay Area which was there was this one company that was by far like the most exciting company in Silicon Valley. It had all of the best engineers, they had amazing talent, they had grown super fast, they had all the best investors. It was in my understanding the pinnacle of what you could achieve. And it was Dropbox. Dropbox, you know. Yeah. Which in, you know, in reflection, I mean, and obviously Dropbox is an incredible company. In reflection, it's like a file sharing company, you know. And when you look just 12 years later, it is quite amazing to think we are now building, you know, we're building starship to make life multi planetary. You know, you and I met at an event, you know, for new Limit. This amazing company working on extending human epigenetic reprogramming.

Yeah.

And people are building DNA computers, people are building nuclear fusion reactors, humanoid robots, automated logistics for Earth. Like, I mean the list goes on. You know, you're working on asteroid mining. I think that OpenAI the scope and scale of human human ambition in just a single decade has expanded by several orders of magnitude. And I think that's like quite profound and it's very exciting for humanity. And you know, when it comes to the team. I mean, we made, you know, we made every mistake in the book. But I think that we needed to hire people who deeply believed in the vision and the mission and were willing to go through tons and tons of pain and chaos and crap for many years to really get the system working at all. I guess the last thought I'll just share on team is that like the biggest lesson we learned over the last decade is that it's always emphasize innate characteristics over specific experience. Whenever we hired for a very specific experience, we thought someone had something cool on their resume. We often end up regretting it. Whereas whenever we really focus on innate characteristics, which in Zipline's cases, we look for practical problem solvers, fast learners, low ego, mission driven. If we can just find people who have those four things, it's like almost impossible for them to fail. Inside the company.

You know, when you were just saying what you were saying. The first, the chapter one of the book I'm writing with Steven Kotler, which is the follow on to abundance called Age of Abundance. And the chapter is titled Our Ancestors Would View Us as Gods. Right. I mean it really truly. I mean, what we have and what we do today is godlike, you know, with a small G compared to, you know, a century or centuries ago. Another lesson I heard you talk about was going for early revenue. And that's, I think that's one of the most important things and one of the big mistakes. People go, they say, we're going to be raising, raising, raising and fund it and eventually we'll, we'll get to a revenue product.

Yeah, I mean, I think that maybe, you know, this one's pretty simple. I think sales is an important function of a company and I think maybe we got a little too fancy. And especially during2021, during that kind of craziness, people started to think that sales and revenue weren't that important. And even for hard tech companies, I think it's super important to be figuring out what can you sell today. It's not that useful to ask customers what they want. If customers aren't putting money on the table, if they aren't putting money on the table, then you can't really trust what they're saying. In my opinion. If they're like, oh, I love the product, it's really cool. You're like, oh, great. I mean, they said it's really cool. You're like, okay, will you pay me a million dollars for it? Well, I don't know. I don't think it's really in our budget. You know, it's like therein lies the learning. Like what would have to change about the budget to get someone to buy it. And so it's like the reason that sales was so super important even from year one. Like we knew we needed to build a world class engineering team, but we never wanted to underestimate the importance from a sales perspective of like learning from customers and getting a lot of doors slammed in our face so that we could really iterate the value proposition of the product that we were building. It was very, very important learning.

Next one for me was build shit and break it. Right. Getting learning by doing. Right. I mean that seemed like a really important growth curve for you.

Yeah, I mean it was so important that we moved out. We had this little office in this like motorcycle dealership in San Francisco and we ended up closing that office and moving the entire team to a construction trailer on a farm in Half Moon Bay, where Zipline still operates today, by the way. And the reason that was important is that it gave us the ability to do engineering, manufacturing and flight operations all in the same place. So we would build something, we would, we wouldn't try to guess what would work, we would just say, great, if we're pretty confident, let's, let's go fly it. I think it's very similar to the way that you see SpaceX iterating on Starship today. It's like rapid iteration actually takes leadership. There are a lot, there are a lot of reasons say no, no, no, don't fly it yet, don't fly it. Like we need more time, we need to perfect it. But you know, it kind of takes a very determined leader and engineering mindset to be like, we're gonna go fly it. And sometimes, you know, under test circumstances on that formula, we would crash. And that was really hard for the team. And we got to go up, pick up the pieces, root cause it, go back into, you know, try to make whatever engineering changes were necessary, make those modifications to the fleet and the manufacturing site, and then go launch an aircraft the next day. And it's like that iterative kind of rubber meeting the road, engaging with reality process that in my opinion is it's a core part of world class engineering teams.

Yeah, I just, I was visiting the same day I think I visited you, I went to go see Brett Adcock at Figure and again, same thing, just you know, test, build, break over and over and over again. And I saw that at your San Francisco site you had that netted area in the backyard where you were Doing testing. So I think the proximity of all those elements together, the next thing I heard you say and was core to your startup was the geographic arbitrage, finding a permissive environment. I think a lot of technologies, whether it's biomedical and crypto and humanoid robots and all of these things, if you find the right geography, you can accelerate your learning very quickly.

Yeah. And in fact, I think a lot of the most important ideas and maybe the most important ideas that people haven't touched yet or built yet are in regulatory, in regulated areas or and possibly in highly regulated areas in the US like healthcare or like aerospace or like education. And I think, you know, it was a very powerful approach to say we don't need every country to approve this, we only need a single country to approve this. And then once we have that country, then we only need the next country to approve it. It's like taking that step one by one was very powerful because countries are going to move at different speeds and also countries have different kind of balances between risk tolerance, tolerance and desire to be an innovator and a leader in an industry. And so we were able to achieve significant international scale, which then got us to the point where we had the necessary flight data to then come back and launch in bigger economies like the United States. And I think that that's pretty natural. And there are a lot of other instances, whether it's energy or education or healthcare.

I think we're going to see this and I think we're going to see this in the longevity world. I think there's going to be risky pro longevity health span extending treatments that are going to be a while to get to the fda. And we already see medical tourism and if it's approved in some nation and you are fully disclosed and want to take the risk, I think that is another area. But I agree with you because a lot of companies use regulation as their shield for competition against competition.

That is a subject that we could talk about for a long time that I have strong opinions on. I do think that perhaps Americans in general, we spend so much time in politics, for example, or so much of the country is focused on these kind of political hot button issues without realizing how many of our challenges can be traced back to regulation. There are, I mean, just as an example, the NEPA, for example, so the Environmental Protection or the Environmental Protection act, which I think was passed under Reagan or no, sorry, I think it was passed under Nixon, has become this regulatory body that has prevented there are something like $20 billion worth of green energy projects in the United States that cannot be built because they are stuck in the courts because it takes 10 years for us to approve something like a solar farm or a wind farm. It's kind of a really sad state on how we have certain intentions when we pass regulations, but there's actually no checking function as to whether the regulation is being used to achieve the outcome that the politician wanted. And there are many examples where sadly the exact opposite of the desired effect is achieved. I think another example is people look at a lot of the safety problems that Boeing has had over the last couple years and so much of that stems to like, well, where is the competition for Boeing? Like, why did we get ourselves into a position where it is literally a monopoly in the United States? And that has a lot to do with regulatory frameworks that make it so incredibly expensive that startups cannot compete or build new products? And by the way, you want to know how this works? For I think something like 60 years, Boeing's headquarters were in Everett, Washington, which is where engineering was located. I might get these dates a little bit wrong. I think in something like 1990, Boeing's headquarters moves to Chicago because the company gets really focused on financial engineering. And then I think it was like around 2010 that Boeing actually moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C. and so, you know, it's actually pretty clear. Yes. Where is the innovation occurring? Well, that's your answer. Like innovation is occurring in Washington, D.C. around creating new regulation that's going to favor incumbents and prevent startups and more like little tech from creating safer products, more reliable products, less expensive products.

That is insane. Is there another core learning in your mind for the person who wants to do something extraordinary? I do believe having a massive transformative purpose and a moonshot, right, like providing instant access to healthcare at scale globally has been. You're driving emotional energy.

Yeah, I mean, it has been. And even to this day, no one at Zipline is brilliant. Breathing a sigh of relief. In fact. I mean, the team is working possibly in a more hardcore mode than ever. We have a huge number of customer contracts for this next generation product. And that ranges from governments in Africa that are relying on us to a lot of the leading healthcare institutions in the US like Cleveland Clinic and Intermountain Healthcare, Memorial Herman, Michigan Medicine, many, many others. And then some of the biggest companies in the world, like Walmart, who are also relying on us. And so I guess one, you know, one thought is like, it only gets harder. And even at this scale, no one at Zipline assumes that we will be successful or Feels like we're on the downhill. I think that I'm trying to think about, like, you know, the lessons about that wouldn't sound trite, because I think a lot of the trite things are true, which is that, you know, you have to choose a mission that is important enough that you'll be willing to chew glass for a long time, because a lot of it is way less fun than it sounds. It is not fancy, is often very painful. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. You know, I was talking to Brian Chesky at Airbnb. He once told me this thing. I was asking him advice about hiring and promoting leaders, and he told me, everyone you love will leave you. That was his advice, which I can't say was super inspiring advice to get from someone who's four or five years ahead of you. And I don't know. So it's very painful and often very dark. And so I think it means you gotta be working on something that is.

Worth it and lonely. There are many times at 3am in the morning where you have to look yourself in the mirror and pick yourself up off the ground and remember why you're doing this. And unless you've got that deep emotional drive. Right. That I call it my massive transformative purpose as my North Star, that when everything gets really cloudy and difficult, I can remember that and pick it up the next day.

But I can say, I guess one corollary is that. And I've gotten to see the things that Zipline has gone through and also been gotten to be an observer to many, many other startup efforts over the last decade. And I do think it's surprising the degree to which the cause of death is usually just giving up.

Yeah.

Like, it's probably 80%. And so it is kind of like if someone is just so freaking stubborn and messed up in the head that they actually just won't give up, no matter how painful it is and no matter how dark it is seems. And again, like, there was a moment where, you know, in Zipline's history where I went and met with our, you know, senior most board member. And he said, so is this how you thought it would end? Like, he had fully written off Zipline. He was like, it's definitely dead. Wow. And.

You have to hold on to that memory. You have to that memory.

We talk about it. Yeah, I'll never forget it. And I think, you know, or there are other, I mean, you know, people. It's like co founder drama, or like the team falls apart or people give up or people Lose hope. But yeah, I think it's like, it's very surprising. You know, I think stubbornness and hard headedness are important and if you just actually will not allow, you know, you will not allow the company to give up, you will not allow the team to give up. It's kind of amazing. You can, you will eventually iterate your way and you're listening to customers because again, I guess the other danger is like you're just in the middle, like building something actually doesn't make sense or isn't useful but.

And you have the right smart people on the team to actually implement what the customers are saying. You know, Bill Gross did an interesting study once which he looked at, you know, 50 companies that succeeded and 50 companies that failed. And what was the attribute of success over the failure? And timing was one of them. Right? You were there at the right time. You know, SpaceX was there after the space shuttle was shut down and it got a contract just on the, on the edge of Elon, you know, out of money. And I think good luck comes from lasting long enough to intercept.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I think a lot of it is like the other thing, I guess the other thing that sometimes I think about is that, you know, if you're graduating from college today, you're 22 years old. I mean, when I was 22, I was completely clueless, you know, and so I would not have had a very good chance going and competing with people. This is at least my logic. Like I wouldn't have a very good chance of going and competing with people who are already experts at doing something that was well understood. So instead I kind of had this thought of like, well, you know, if we're all living in this little city, I will leave the city and go out onto the frontier and find land that I think will be valuable in the future. And I'll spend a lot of time becoming an expert in something that people don't know anything about. I think that's like a really powerful model for young engineering talent or entrepreneurial talent who are thinking about new things. If all you do is like run to whatever the hype train is focused on that month. Yeah, you're always way, way, way behind. Like that's just not a good way of building something valuable. I think the key is you gotta have your own unique vision for the future and have your own conviction in an idea or technology or a kind of product that would be valuable. And it's actually way better if you can go out and have a couple of years on your Own becoming an actual expert and creating value and technology and creating a team and then you kind of want the world to catch up to two, four, five years later. And obviously one of the challenges is people chasing hype and just constantly working on something two years or five years too late. The other thing is you could go out into the middle of nowhere and work on something that winds up not being important and the world never comes.

To where you are or you're just 10 years too early or five years too early. That's as bad as being too late. It really is timing. And you iterate closer in on timing by listening to the customer. Yes, exactly what you said. Yeah. And again the number of, number of entrepreneurs who have been extraordinarily successful in disrupting an industry that had no background in the industry because they didn't know what they couldn't do. I love that story.

I think it's required.

Yeah.

Very rare that you find someone who works in an industry for 20 years and then goes and starts a startup that disrupts the industry. It happens, but I think it's less common.

Amazing. Keller, I have to say I love what you're doing, love the energy of your team. God bless. You're having impact on a scale that few entrepreneurs have known. And thank you. Thank you for doing it. If you're interested by the way in, you can go to flyzipline.com to get information. If you want to sign up early for their Platform 2 service, go to flyzipline.com get delivery. I'm going to do it. I'm in LA. Hopefully you'll be here. Not too distant future. I just came back from a week in India. God knows they can use you there but you know, I think it's hard to compete with bicycle delivery but it's needed everywhere. Any place else they should look for you. Where are you on social media, Keller?

Yeah, I think you know, follow zipline on X. That's a really cool way to just kind of follow day by day engineering progress and we try to share a lot of raw information on there. So if an engineering, if a test flight works, you'll see it. If a test fly doesn't work, you'll see that too. So it's a great way to kind of just follow along and yeah, I mean, you know, thanks for having us on. It's, it's an honor and you know, much work remains.

Thank you buddy. I'm excited to come visit you again and to, and to learn more.