How Zipline Outcompete Amazon In Drone Delivery | Keller Cliffton

The places that have the most access to technology are the places that appreciate it the least. 99% of the world isn't that. They're dying for innovation, dying for a tech startup to show up and help them solve problems in a really innovative way. That's kind of been the story of ZipLine. It's like we went to parts of the world that people ignore.

Normal delivery platforms actually have net promoter scores of, like, negative 10, negative 20. The service right now has a net promoter score of 95. We deliver to apartments. We deliver to townhomes, to hotels. We even deliver to public parks.

We are hitting new record numbers of deliveries practically every day. This is something that is going to grow a lot.

Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Keller Clifton, and he is the cofounder and CEO of Zipline. And I think what we just saw was basically one of the first Zip deliveries of a droid coming down and delivering a Chipotle burrito. That was a test. But do you wanna just explain, like, the future that you're trying to build here?

Sure. I mean, guess, you know, the simplest way to think about zipline is that starting about thirteen years ago, it seemed to us pretty obvious that someone was gonna build an automated logistics system for Earth. Especially when you look at the way that instant delivery works in the world, whether for an emergency medical situation or for something that you want delivered quickly to your home, we're generally using technology that's like a 100 years old, which is a human driving a three to 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle to deliver something that weighs on average about five pounds. And so we always thought this was bizarre, know, like if you think about it from first principles, that is not the best way to solve that problem. You don't have to be a physicist to realize that using, you know, 4,000 pound vehicle driven by a human to deliver something that weighs five pounds is not very efficient.

So we always felt like it should be possible to design a robotic system that would do that 10 times as fast, dramatically less expensive, zero emission, just like an overall better, safer, more reliable product experience. And, you know, I always envisioned it a little like the way the Internet moves information around. Like, we used to pay people to carry letters on horseback. You know, now we send an email. And I think a similar thing is gonna happen with packages, and I I think you also see it happening with people right now.

But I mean, that that's like the promise of autonomy. It's it's like a global network that gives everybody totally different level of access to things like health care, but also to economic opportunity, packages, products.

I think for a number of years, this was, like, very non obvious. And I think at one point, you said that basically you were just kind of, like, written off by your investors and stuff. Yeah. So I'd love to kinda go back to, like, when you first started. This is the first test site.

What was it like kind of going to Rwanda and building out the operation there? And then I know the, like, hospital that first signed on, they had had someone die of blood loss that morning, and then you went and talked with them, and then they said yes.

Yeah. Well, I mean, before we went to Rwanda, we started in a trailer park, which is what we have behind us. You know, like, we On a hill. On a hill, which is where we are right now. We call this place Net Zero.

And, you know, we were five people. We had this idea about building this new kind of logistics system, but we needed a lot of space to test it. No one thought that this was gonna work. People thought that it was kind of preposterous. And so we needed a place where we could fly and test and learn.

And so we ended up on this farm. I mean, is like an active cattle ranch. And the owners here were incredibly gracious twelve years ago. Did you

know them beforehand?

We didn't know them. You know, they've owned this land, I think, for like one hundred years or something like that. The family has. And they've been ranching cattle on it for one hundred years. And, we met them through mutual acquaintance, and they put up with us.

You know, we ended up signing this little lease with them. I think, I mean, I think the original lease was like $3,000 a month, you know, which was a lot to us at the time. And we actually moved ourselves out here. Mean, some of us were like sleeping in these little construction trailers. I was I would often sleep on the couch.

And, we would the advantage of being out here is that we had hundreds of acres to, design, build, and fly. And so we would, you know, we would, design all the different fundamental components. We had our little manufacturing area here, and then we would just be flying every single day. So when you walked outside, there was always going to be an aircraft flying around. And if something went wrong, if, you know, an aircraft had, you know, periland or couldn't fly and basically crashed itself on the bluff out here, we would go out and, like, pick up the pieces and people would be, like, crying while we were picking up the pieces,

you know, because it was, like,

not clear that the company was going to survive.

Cows get spooked a little bit?

The cows honestly don't really mind us. They mainly break in and eat our stuff. So they they, like, eat our rope and and, our hardware. So the the the fences are mainly to keep the cows out. But, yeah, you know, I I think this being out here wound up being this, like, interesting forcing function for even the kinds of people that zipline could hire.

Because I remember in the early days, we were trying to know, was like, the idea of hiring engineer from Google was, like, the best

thing you can imagine, which

is amazing how far we've come. But, you know, and I remember we we have a lot of people out here, it'd be like, you could tell, you know, normal people were so put off by the idea of, like, working out of these construction trailers and, like, driving all the way out, you know, to the middle of nowhere every day. Everything we were doing was very scrappy and unfancy and, like, you know, just make it work in the real world as fast as possible, and the company was running out of money every month. And so I think that attracted a special kind of person, you know, we attracted people who wanted an epic adventure, wanted something different, were willing to take a lot of risk, knew how to get their hands dirty, and and, you know, operate in actual real weather and real world conditions, which, you know, maybe those traits are kind of rare in software companies, but those traits are kind of required for the survival of a hardware company. So, yeah, that's, like, that's the background on NetZero and how we came to be here.

Do you have any particular scrappiness stories that, like, stick out in your mind?

I mean, there are a million. I think there there are, like, definitely famous examples. You know, early on when we were designing the first generation of our system, we wanted to test how we would recover these aircraft. It's a fixed wing aircraft that doesn't have landing gear, and we didn't have runways where we were operating. So the idea of how to get the aircraft out of the air is not a it's not an easy thing.

And we eventually decided we were going to prototype a solution that kind of looked like how aircraft carriers arrest these planes out of the air. And so my cofounders, I think my cofounder went to Walmart and bought these two deep sea fishing poles and then basically built this metal hinge and just bolted that into the ground and then strung a line between these deep sea fishing poles and set the tension. And Then we flew the aircraft at those fishing poles, and it worked. You know, I think people were pretty shocked because that was, like, a really, obviously, very getaway of kind of, like, rapidly prototyping and showing, like, would this work or would it not work? And we found out that it did work, and then we ended up going and build building, you know, a much more advanced version of that which we call Snapcatch, and then Snapcatch ended up I mean, it's still in use today in distribution centers all over the world.

It's recovered probably 1,800,000 aircraft reliably. So, you know, there there were there were a million things that we had to do out here, that looked totally crazy. And and I also think that when we started building this, everybody thought it was, like, so obviously a bad idea. Like, was so obviously Well, not gonna I mean, I remember a conversation, you know, with our board member at the time, who, know, basically said, is this how you thought it would end? So, like, he he was, like, a 100%

sure that the company was dead. Like, there's no question in his mind.

Is your board member saying that? Right.

It might be over.

It's not ideal. It's not ideal. You could see

the writing on the wall sort of thing.

And, yeah, I was like,

well, it isn't over. Like, we're going and doing this. We're doing that. You know, we're we're, like, launching in Rwanda. We think that they're gonna let us deliver these blood transfusions.

And, we had this, like, grand ambition. And I think that, you know, the idea was preposterous. Like, designing a fully autonomous system that operated in the real world had never been done before. I mean, even to this day, like, you only see the first system starting to scale now ten years later. The idea of starting in Africa was kind of preposterous.

Like, everybody thinks that the best technology is gonna start in The US and then trickle its way out to the developing country to developing countries rather than the other way around. And, also, obviously, the technology is extremely complicated, and I don't think people thought that a team of 15 or 25 people could field early versions of this technology in a way that would be useful for people. So, I mean, you know, to a certain degree, I think that they were kind of right. You know, I I saw this picture on Twitter. It's like, we do this not because it is easy

But because we thought it would be easy. Exactly.

This is like the definition of zipline. Oh, I see a shadow of a droid making it deliberate right behind you.

I've got this theory now that, like,

I think a lot of the a lot of

the best founders are it's not even that they thought it would be easy. It's just they didn't know how hard it would be, and and it's just they wanted to go pursue it and make something

real. Yeah. I think a certain amount of naivete is, like, a 100% required. You know, if you knew how hard it was gonna be when you are starting the thing, you probably would not try at all. But I I mean, there are a million whether it's you know, the the the sewage tanks, like, literally never worked here.

So we have a, you know, a truck that comes in would pump the, these like tanks that, you know, so we had like 50 people working out here. We definitely kind of reached the, you know, the breaking point for Net Zero at some point where you had too many people here every day, and we'd, we'd have to like pump the tanks every single day and everyone would be like sitting trying to write code and smelling this incredibly nasty

Trace the

right color. Smeller.

I mean, it was, like exactly.

Culture. Nobody who was coming from, like, the Googleplex, you know, and having, like, every possible corporate perk living in the lap of luxury

would

have The pitch

is we're running out of money. Board member doesn't know if it's gonna work. Yeah. We don't really have an obvious first customer.

Yeah. And you'll smell shit

while Anyway, you're writing code

you know, suffice it to say, again, it was like, it was definitely a ragtag team of, like, adventurers, and, you know, that really set the culture of the company for a long time. Like, people who wanted to put up with that and who wanted to operate in these kinds of conditions,

that was a small subset. This wasn't, like, the first thing. You you were building another company for three years before this from, like, 2011 to 2014. What was kind of going through your mind, like, on a psychology level in in those super early days when things weren't going well?

I don't I think, it's way easier if you don't have a lot of other awesome options to worry about. You know? I had previously, to starting the company, been you know, I was I was rock climbing full time. I was a professional rock climber for a year, which is way less fancy than it sounds. I was basically living out of my Honda Fit, driving all over The US, and kinda traveling the world.

And I, made about $3,000 that year, and I had a blast. I got to kinda, like, see the world and go to all these inspiring places. And I think that that was empowering in a way because I realized I don't need a lot to be happy, and I didn't have a lot else going on in my life.

You know? It was, like,

no real obligations. It seemed to us like it should be possible to do something like this, and I think the idea inspired us. As we and as we started spending more and more time looking at problems that we felt like would be inspiring to solve, especially in terms of health care logistics, like, always felt, okay, no one is gonna give us regulatory permission. No country is gonna give us the ability to fly at scale unless the use case is so incredibly compelling and clear.

Like lives being saved.

Yeah. Lives being saved that we could kind of force it through. And so we had this thought that we needed to focus on a small country. We wanted a public health care system, so obviously kind of like eliminated The US. And, you know, that first country was Rwanda.

Mean, we were talking to a couple different countries at the time, but I remember this conversation with the Minister of Health of Rwanda where, you know, I was going in, and of course, I'm totally clueless. I show up in a hoodie as like, you know, an engineer from Silicon Valley saying, you know, hey, we'll we'll build these autonomous aircraft and we can deliver every medical product in the public health care supply chain and, you know, deliver it 10 times as fast in a way that's gonna save all these lives. And she kind of looked at me and was like, Keller, shut up. Just do blood. And as she was explaining it to me, she was like, fifty percent of transfusions are going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging.

Thirty percent are going toward kids under the age of five. It's this incredibly important use case, and it was very narrow. And, you know, you you mentioned so I actually didn't find out until ten years later. Well, actually, I guess, like, eight eight or nine years later, I was on a panel just like a year ago with this minister. Her name is Agnes Binagwaho.

I was on a panel with this minister at, like, UN General Assembly in New York, and she told the other half of this story because she had heard me say this. And I didn't know this, but basically that morning before I met her, we had gone and, right before I even showed up in her office, this basically tragedy had happened, where a mom was giving birth, in a hospital in Rwanda, and she had postpartum hemorrhaging, and there was this, like, cascading chain of failures where they were supposed to have blood in the hospital, but they didn't. And then they placed an order for blood, but it couldn't be delivered. And so then someone from the hospital got into a car and drove to get the blood, but then there was like traffic, and they couldn't, they couldn't, they couldn't get there fast enough. And then they got to the center for blood transfusion and they were unable to I think it like took an hour once they got there, and by the time they got back to the hospital this mom had lost her life.

And there was this big email chain inside the Ministry of Health on like, how the heck did this happen? And she was reading that email chain. And then I happened to like walk into the office twenty minutes later. And so you realize like getting, you know, any progress in these kinds of startups that, yeah, it definitely relies on an element of luck. You know, there's probably more luck involved there than even I appreciate.

Because, like, we walked in with this idea that seemed totally preposterous, totally stupid. There were a 100 reasons for her to tell us No. To yeah. No. But I think she felt like perhaps she was, what's the word?

You know, frustrated, like, how could this have happened? And sort of beside herself enough to be like, yeah, we'll try something crazy.

I imagine that there was basically, like, no data that said you could actually do it at the time, but then the emotional, like, rawness of, you know, you just had this tragedy, and there's an there's an opportunity that this thing could prevent that in the future.

I mean, I think there was less than zero data. You know, there there was I mean, we we had not fielded a system commercially in the real world. We were a small team of 15 people who knew nothing about health care or aviation. So there was every reason to believe that, like, there was no chance we we could do this. We did not yet have regulatory permission, which seemed like a pretty big consideration, and, you know, we we didn't know how to integrate with a, yeah, with a national health care system or with a a national airspace regulator.

So there were a lot of reasons to say no. And and yet this minister basically said, shut up. Just do blood. And she gave us 21 hospitals and said, if you could deliver blood transfusions to these 21 hospitals in a way that is 10 or a 100 times as fast, that would save a lot of lives. And, you know, I think the the the president of the country was also kind of like deeply involved in the contract.

He had a lot of vision. You know, he is a kind of extraordinary technocratic leader. And I think he also knew that, you know, Rwanda doesn't have a lot of natural resources. So if they want to win, like, natural resource is their people and his technology and innovation. And they they've kind of modeled Singapore-

The same scrapiness of the startup.

Yeah. Yeah. And the reality actually was that, like, that country felt like it was a it was a startup in its own way. Right? That country, to a certain degree, you know, the the modern version of that country is 30 years old, and they are moving incredibly fast and ultra scrappy.

I could always, eight, nine, 10PM on a Saturday, get on the phone with any of the ministers or with any of, you know, the regulator, and we were able to move lightning fast in a way that would not have happened in a bigger, more complicated market like The United States.

Yeah. I remember when, Travis Kalanick was going to India for the first few times, he said that, like, the level of hustle that was just, like, in the culture was just not the same as The United States at all. And I kinda think the same thing with Mark Rober going, and visiting Rwanda for the video that he did two years ago. He's like, the level of, like, entrepreneurial spirit is kinda just Is very high. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you know, genius and talent and entrepreneurship is evenly distributed in the world. Opportunity is not. Yep. And so I do think people probably underestimate the degree to which a lot of this, cutting edge AI and robotics technology could transform major parts of the world.

We can build new kinds of infrastructure that can save money and save lives. And we're still sort of I I do think largely technology is still serving more kind of, like, tactical or, like, rich white people problems in The US. You know, we're kinda, like, focused on these better understood markets, even if in reality, they're they're actually, not necessarily the largest.

Yep. I imagine going over there, you know, you you knew what you were asking, and you knew what you were pitching. What was it like on the flight just heading to Rwanda that time before that meeting? What was going through your mind?

I don't think there was any I mean, we lived there. You know, we lived there for months and years on end. And we would travel back and forth between headquarters here in San Francisco and Rwanda. You know, I mean well, first of all, what's it like? I mean, that that's a thirty hour coach class.

One, you know, damage, red eye, you know, mean, I would read textbooks like I love I love reading textbooks. And so I would bring like a 800 page textbook and my goal would be to read the entire textbook on the on the journey. And I I loved it. It was like, you know, you didn't have an Internet connection, so you were you were locked in. And and we made that flight hundreds of times, you know, and and we, built what we call the Zip House, which was this little we rented this little house right next to the distribution center, and we all lived together.

And, you know, I I bunked, in bunk beds with Abdul, the first team member that we hired in Rwanda. Abdul's kind of become like a legend. His story is is is legendary at Zip Line. But Abdul and I would wake up early in the morning, take ice cold showers, do push ups, and then, like, jog to the distribution center together. And, that was, like, how we figured things out and built the company for the first couple years.

I actually have started doing the same thing. I know Pavel Durov, does, like, a 100 push ups and a 100 sit ups every day, I've just started to work my way up there. And once I've done a 100 push ups and a 100 sit ups every single day for, like, two months, at that point, I get the you know, I can go with good faith, go and do that Pavel interview. When you were scaling this initially, I imagine with with the 21 hospitals, you can't immediately serve all of them. And with every day that you delay, I imagine there's, like, a couple people that basically need that blood, don't get it.

What was the vibe, at the beginning, just trying to scale up as fast as possible with that in your back the the back of your mind?

Yeah. I mean, I think that when you're trying to do something really hard, maybe people have this sense that, oh, yeah. It means some companies will execute super well, and it goes right on the first try, and then some companies don't execute that well, and it's kind of a disaster. I think, you know, the reality actually from from my perspective is is is very different than that. Basically, it will 100% always be a shit show.

And then the companies that execute really well can rapidly iterate themselves out of that pain. And for sure, I mean, or at least that's what we tell ourselves, because like the first year was really difficult.

That was just the experience you

you had? That was our experience. And, you know, we we were doing everything we possibly could to, get the system to work at all. We had been given this contract to deliver to 21 hospitals. We only launched one hospital to start.

So it's not like 20 hospitals were going without. 20 hospitals were just, you know, they were they were just relying on the old system. Yeah. And so we had switched one hospital over to Zipline. The system was extremely unreliable.

Like we could not get it to operate. I mean, was so painful. You know, we could get it to, like, do a couple deliveries a day, and then it would break, and we have to figure out what was wrong with it and fix it. And then a couple deliveries a day, and then there'd be something wrong operationally. And so it was just, you know, day after day, night after night, long weekends, working between the Rwanda and U.

S. Teams, trying to kind of like marry this technology with the, you know, with the op- with this complicated operation, with this health system. We also had to get regulatory approval for what we were doing and, like, integrate with the civil aviation authority, which is called the RCAA, Rwanda Civil Aviation Authority. So all of those things, like we had no clue what we were doing. We built the first version of we were holding all these medical products all of a sudden.

We were holding all these different I mean, blood is not simple. You have packed red blood cells, platelets, cryoprecipitate, plasma, so four different types of blood. And then you have AB and O, positive and negative Rh factors of each, like, really hard to get to the right thing to the right place at the right time, and we had to be managing this inventory because we were now holding it, this precious product. And so we wrote like a Google sheet, that we were using to basically do like inventory management. I mean, everything was, like, the bare minimum scrappy or the the minimum viable product, the scrappiest version of what we thought would work.

And, for nine months, we, you know, were struggling to serve that one hospital. And then after nine months of, like, all nighters and nights and weekends, we were able to get the system working pretty reliably for that one hospital. We expanded to the other 20. And then from there, once it was working for all 21 hospitals, we expanded into a wide range of other products: vaccines, infusions, transfusions, cancer products, basically everything in the public health care supply chain. Then we expanded from 21 to 100 to 500 to 1,000 to 2,000 to now 5,000 hospitals and health facilities across eight different countries.

So it's crazy how many years of your life, you know, will be taken off by the stress of, like, the first one. And now we add, you know, hundreds at a time, and I don't even find out about it unless I look on Slack.

There's this one story that I was hearing about before we started when I was just in inside, and they were talking about, basically, at one point, I think a blood bag just landed on a roof. Yeah. What was that?

Yeah. So, again, like everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I mean, we were you know, we and and so I remember, I mean, I was in The US at the time, but we I think we're probably three or four months in, and we were supposed to be able to deliver very precisely. We were supposed to be able to deliver to, like, three or four parking spaces was kind of the idea. That's what we called, like, the mailbox.

And this ZIP was supposed to be accurate enough that we could put it in their mailbox every time, and so they could always know where to collect the package and go back inside. And I got this call at two a. M. We had like a pager duty system. So I got woken up at two a.

M, middle of the night, and one of the members of our Rwanda team was like, Hey, Keller, we have a problem. It's like, Okay, great. You know, lay it on me. And they're like, Well, the the the zip control algorithm wasn't working correctly, and we this there's a mom, you know, who is having, like, an emergency c section, needed an emergency delivery of blood, and we delivered onto the roof of the hospital. And I remember thinking like, wow, I mean, so we missed big.

Like, to end up on the roof, I mean, we missed by, like, 50 or 100 feet. Like, it was a big, big problem. And I remember immediately thinking like, okay, I was asking all these clarifying questions, and then I called Ryan, my co founder, and and, you know, a bunch of other people on the team, and we kind of, like, rallied from two to five a. M. Trying to figure out what had happened, like, why was the GPS so off, and, basically made some updates to the system and immediately pushed out a software update, like, a couple hours later.

And I called the Rwanda team member back, and I was kinda like, hey. You know, we think we have a solution. It's it's being rolled out now. And I was like, but by the way, like, what happened to the blood? And she was like, what do you mean?

And I was like, well, is it, like, still sitting up there on the roof? You know, this, like, blood bag, like, sitting out there in the sun. She's like, oh, no. No. Like, we delivered onto the roof, some, like, nurse climbed up like a don't know.

Yeah. Like something. And, like, got scrambled onto the roof of this hospital and got it and went back inside, and they transfused the patient five minutes later. And so I realized in hearing that, you know, was this very interesting experience for me, which I actually you know, if a startup has a good enough mission, if the need is high enough, your customer will meet you halfway. Like in this case, we had failed to provide the product experience that we had promised.

Like the product was not working correctly, but we had gotten the blood close

to them, you know, even if it wasn't

100 feet away.

On a roof.

And, you know, this guy willing to risk life and limb, like climbing up, the side of the building and then onto the roof to, get it and go back in and save this person's life. It was like very powerful for me. It kind of inspired me. Was like, you know what? We don't have to be perfect.

Like this, like as the, the, the mission was so important that we were willing to launch things that were not yet perfect, that were actually in some cases sort of bad. And it was still good enough to save lives, and we were able to rapidly iterate from there to something that was extremely reliable and dependable.

I imagine over the course of ten years, you get incredibly good at when shit goes sideways. How do you actually, like, resolve the issue? What's what's your type of process? When something goes horribly wrong, what is the checklist that you go through or the the steps that you go through, to fix it?

Yeah. I mean, actually, for a hardware company that's operating, you know, at Zipline scale today, mean, Zipline now has a 135,000,000 commercial autonomous miles and zero safety incidents. And so, you know, we take safety incredibly seriously. That that's why we have these large test sites. We're- we're at our first test site.

And- and yet, like, somewhere in the world with a fleet this large doing that many commercial autonomous miles, like, there's always something going really wrong, especially at the test sites. And I think you kind of realize that, every morning you're gonna wake up, and whatever is like the most screwed up thing, like, that's what's gonna be at the top of your inbox. The fire. Yeah, the fire. And so I think you you have to you definitely, I think at some point, are realizing it's important not to have like an emotional reaction, because I think it's like completely exhausting, right?

Because it feels so bad.

You know, like, untie yourself.

It feels so bad. And just Yeah, look at the and especially for a company that's trying to go really fast and do something very difficult, like nine out of 10 things you try on any given day are gonna fail. Like, Zipline is very used to failure at this point. Like, we are constantly trying new things, failing in a wide variety of ways, having to rapidly iterate from there. And so I think you you definitely learn to instead of, like, craving if what you are, like, sustained by and what motivates you is success, success is actually, like, few and far between.

Like, the vast majority of the experience is failure. And so I think that you have to be very zen about actually being in love with the process of like being in a painful, uncomfortable situation and having to rapidly iterate your way out of it and learning by doing. And the first 10 time 10 times you try, you are going to fail. And so I think you have to be, like, motivated by failure and and motivated by that that, like, learning and growth rather than learning by, like, having some big success or getting a bunch of praise or having you know, those things don't come that often, especially for the first, like, five or ten years of a hardware company. Yep.

We ended up you know, this wound up becoming there were times in zipline's history where I the company's survival 100% hung in the balance, and every day, we needed to be, like, attacking core engineering challenges or core operational challenges in a very relentless, disciplined, and focused way. Something we actually learned from one of our biggest investors, Valor. Valor was the largest investor in, I think one of the largest investors in Tesla and SpaceX for many for for several on

the ground. I think when they were first spinning up the, Roadster production Yeah. Antonio and one other guy, forgot his name, Tim, were just flying all over the damn place, basically figuring out all the different suppliers, and I think it was just a total shit show.

It's an incredible story, someone has to write the book on Valor sometime. But, you know, Valor is an amazing investor in that, like, you know, they are there aren't that many I mean, Zipline has a lot of big amazing investors. But I would say Valor is our only investor who actually, like, hands on knows how to build hardware and scale manufacturing and operations in the real world. And so, you know, they were kind enough. They actually, like, deployed Special Forces teams into Zipline for a year.

This was only a year ago where it felt like, you know, we were launching our next generation product, which you can now see flying very reliably behind us, but it was not flying reliably at the time. In fact, like, I don't know, just a year and a half ago, I was, like, here at midnight on a Saturday night belaying one of these aircraft because it was so unreliable. Like, it would just turn itself off, like, every fifth flight. And we didn't wanna crash. We had to have the the aircraft on belay, you know?

So we had like a high lift and a rope running from me using a climbing harness up to the top of this high lift and then down to the aircraft. I I mean, you know, this stuff was it was desperate. It did not feel like the company was gonna survive. And Valor helped us kind of, like, build this process that we've now turned into our 08:30 a. Meeting, you know, which is like ziplines, engineering leaders, and some of our ops leaders meet every morning at 08:30AM, including Saturdays and Sundays, to look at like all of the highest priority issues that we observed the day previously in the twenty four seven period.

Because these test sites operate twenty four seven, by the way. So, you know, even if you come in at 7AM, you're, like, catching up on, you know, twelve hours maybe that you missed out on of of data and things going wrong. And so 08:30AM we would meet, and it was always like executives plus like the individual contributors on the team who are actually doing the work. And so it's a really good chance to like, there is no hierarchy or no like middle management in that meeting. It is like the person doing the work able to give a direct update on what we're gonna do to fix it, and ask for any resource that they need inside the company, and have access to, you know, me and the executive team.

That became a big part of our culture. And I think it's anyway, it's kinda like how we responded to this feeling of, like, desperately trying to solve problems day in and day out that are arising, you know, in eight different countries, many different metros, different test sites. Like, there's always something horrible going on.

Yeah. I remember Sam Altman talked about, you know, the first time that you have this experience, this, like, company killing moment. It's like the end of the world, and you're, like, cold spots at night, that sort of situation. By the seventh time, you know, you survive the first six, and so you're like, oh, well, you know, if we survive the first six, we'll probably survive this one too. Even you said as of last year, like, you had another one of those.

What have been the, like, key, like, moments where you were kind of waking up in the middle of night thinking to yourself, like, are we going to survive? And how did you manage through those?

I mean, yeah, we we jokingly called them WIFIO moments at Zipline, which have you heard of that? WIFIO? WFIO. We're fucked. It's over.

Have an

weird okay.

Here's another WIFIO moment that we're that we're encountering. You know, I mean, I I can certainly remember one in the early days, like, when we were actually launching in Rwanda, I the president was coming to the distribution center to inaugurate the distribution center and for us to do our first commercial delivery. And we had been kind of like soft launching, trying to do our first commercial deliveries for a couple weeks before he showed up, and it was a disaster. I mean, the system was not operating successfully. We had used this contractcom contractor company to design the launcher for us.

It was terribly designed. The launcher is what would basically catapult the aircraft into the air. And so it would break every, like, third launch, and we're trying to fix it, trying to fix it. It was, like, 7PM the the night before the president was coming to this huge we had like, you know, the BBC and the New York Times, all these big media outlets were showing up for this huge kind of production. They built this big tent for the president to give a big speech, and he was gonna launch the first aircraft.

And it was 7PM, and the launcher broke, and we were then trying to fix it, trying to fix it. It's like 10PM. It's not fixed. 1AM. It's not fixed.

And so Abdul and I were out, like, on our backs in the gravel, like, holding flashlights in our mouths, trying to, take this thing apart again, put it back together. I remember we were Skyping back to the team because it was Skype at the time. We were Skyping back to the team in The US, and it was like, you know, it was basically like Apollo eleven, right? Where or sorry, Apollo thirteen, right? Where it's like, you know, Houston, we have a problem.

And they're like, you know, what do you we're running out of oxygen in one hour. And they're like, what do have to fix it? We have, like, duct tape and Styrofoam. And and so we you know, they kinda, like, walked us through taking it apart, putting it back together. As we were doing this, by the way, the president has this, like, security team that goes twelve hours in advance to any location that he shows up at.

So there are, like, five Navy SEALs looking guys holding submachine guns just watching us work at like one or 2AM.

You're under the gun.

You can tell they're looking at us like, you guys are totally fucked. You know, like,

what are you doing?

Like, the president is showing up in seven hours and you're taking this launcher apart. Like, and so we ended up putting it back together, testing it once, and then thinking like, you know, what more can we do? And so, you know, all the media showed up, all of the ministers showed up, the president showed up in a helicopter, and he gave this big speech and then came to the distribution center. And we, like, showed him to the launcher, and he launched the aircraft, and it worked perfectly. You know, we're all sitting there.

We were like as amazed as we were we were as amazed we were more amazed than everybody in the audience. And, you know, this zip flew off, made a delivery, came back, landed, and we acted like that was totally normal and expected. And then the president actually just ended up spending like two hours with us, kind of talking about the future, and then he left, and then the system like broke again for the next nine months straight, you know? And so I think it was, again, some luck is involved, but, that's a good example. And, yeah, and then just I mean, I think hardware companies especially, the scope and scale of what you have to do with each new generation platform is so much higher than the last that every single cycle nearly bankrupts the company.

Like, think that you can look at, you know, I think the Model three is a really good example. I mean, the Model s was a profitable product, but, like, the Model three nearly bankrupted Tesla.

Even 2018, like, I think sixteen years after Tesla was founded, like, that nearly that yeah. The Model three production ramp. I don't even I I I don't know. I think Antonio was actually on the the Model three production line in Fremont with Elon

at Yeah. That I think they all were. Like, you know, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. You know, when you are doing these big hardware launches, it is, you know, getting hardware to be reliable and launching into the real world is incredibly hard, obviously. You have this big, complicated global supply chain, and it only takes one to screw you.

It only takes one unreliable supplier. It's, you know, you your performance is the worst of your 10,000 suppliers, you know? And and so it's it's pretty harrowing, and and the scale, if the company is growing fast and you're building a big ambitious product, the scale and scope of what you're doing means that, like, a couple months of not producing is probably like bankruptcy for the company. And so we went through that moment with Platform two. You know, we knew that Platform two was serving a market that was a 100 to a thousand times the size of the market that Zipline had originally focused on, which was just health care logistics in rural areas.

You know, platform two, which is operating behind us, is designed to really enable teleportation like logistics from any business, health system, from a hospital, health care health care facility, warehouse, retail store, or restaurant directly to homes in a way that's 10 times as fast and dramatically less expensive. But, you know, Platform two was a way more complicated product, and the scope and scale of what we're trying to do was, was more ambitious. And we wound up being, you know, six months late shipping the product, and it felt like the company's mean, it was certainly the case that I think had we gone another six months, think Zipline would not have survived. And so it was like, we just got into this hardcore mode, whereas like, there was no op there were no other options. Like, we knew what we had to do.

Bring boats.

Yeah. The the boats were burned, and, there was no no one was gonna give us more money. And so it was like we needed to launch this product. And this was only this was only about a year and a half ago, or less than that, like a year ago. And the team worked through Christmas, and everybody canceled their vacations between Christmas and New Year's, and, and then we launched the product on January 15.

How have you kind of thought about the hardware iteration side? Because I know you want, like, the most reliable system, but you also have to improving the technology in the you know, in in at at the same time. Have you kind of married the two over time to be able to do as many deliveries as possible while also recycling in new builds?

Yeah. I mean, that's, like, that's the main trick, especially when it comes to this kind of an you know, in this industry, automated logistics, drone delivery, I mean, no one has any idea what this is gonna look like at scale. It's 12:01AM. We're figuring everything out completely from scratch. There are no precedents.

You think about it, at least Tesla, like, knew they were building a car. Like, they knew it probably had four wheels in it and a steering wheel, you know? But, like, one has any idea what this looks like. There really is no precedent for, like, how should charging work? What does the business model look like?

How does maintenance work? You know, what's the right regulatory strategy? How reliable it does it need to be? How should you price it? No one has any idea.

And I I think one of ZipLine's advantages was, I mean, for sure, we were like the smallest team. I mean, Amazon at the time, right, Jeff Bezos had been on sixty Minutes saying they were gonna be doing drone delivery to every home in The US within two years. This was in 2013. And so we always thought, okay, well, we're definitely gonna be a fast forward Amazon. They were spending like, who knows, you know, hundreds of millions, a billion dollars a year funding that effort.

And we had, you know, a tiny fraction of that and a tiny team, and we always thought, you know, we were not the biggest team, not the we didn't have the most money. We always knew for sure, like, we were the most practical. That was in our DNA. We were extremely practical. We were living in these, you know, construction trailers out here, working nights and weekends, and we thought that our DNA should be like we could move super fast in the real world and get things into the real world quickly.

And so the whole trick is that when it comes to hardware systems like this, safety is obviously paramount. I mean, you can look at Uber ATG or you look at Cruise. I mean, you can see the impact of a really bad safety event on the company's trajectory, and and it was especially important because Zipline was delivering a life saving product to someone whose life was, like, hanging in the balance. And yet we knew we needed to move really fast. And so really the answer to that is, like, being extraordinarily good at testing.

Zipline invested a lot, not just in this large team that was doing software in the loop testing, but we also built these really, powerful HIDL systems. HIDL stands for hardware in the loop testing. We learned a lot from SpaceX on that front. SpaceX may be the best company in the world at HITL, and we we learned a lot from them and built these complicated hills HITL systems that meant that we could deploy new software onto the actual avionics of the aircraft, which is then connected to a simulator, so the plane thinks it's flying even though it's basically sitting on a desk, is how to think about it. And it's a really powerful thing because it means that 95% of software bugs we can catch without sending something to a test site and accidentally crashing an aircraft due to some stupid software

I'd imagine it's way more expensive and way more time intensive if you have the latter.

Yes. But even so, five percent of the problem is you can only catch at the test site, which is why Zipline has invested a lot of money and time and resources into building these large test sites that operate 20 fourseven in The U. S. We have three major test sites. One just opened last week.

These test sites enable us to get access to a ton of different real world conditions that would be impossible to replicate in simulation, and some stuff you are only going to see a break in the real world. You know, you're looking for the really weird edge cases of like some bird nesting in some part of the hardware or, you know, like solar weather for example. You know, solar weather wound up being a pretty big consideration for us in terms of getting the GPS reliability that we needed, the number of nines we needed. Solar weather winds up being, like, a really major consideration, something that most normal people don't even know that much about, but, like, is really important for these kinds of systems.

Was the fact that the, like, weather in Rwanda is so bad and there's like lightning storms and all this sort of thing, like the perfect environment

for you course we were complete be with idiots and we had no idea. You didn't know at the time, No, we, we had no idea. Like we launched in Rwanda with zero context on like what we were getting ourselves into. Had we had any, you know, ounce of common sense, we would have like looked at the weather forecast before we signed that contract. I don't think we did.

Also, Rwanda is actually a very high elevation country, which means it's like they're just- The mountains. It has some of the most volatile country weather on earth of any country. It has challenging terrain. Mean, were a lot of things that were really challenging about Rwanda, but it was hyper gravity training. Like, we had to build the system in a way that 10,000,000 plus people could rely on with their lives and the lives of their kids.

And obviously failure was not an option, and so we just had to make the system we had to harden the system to these extreme weather events, and, you know, that work has obviously become immensely valuable to Zipline over time because Zipline is now the only autonomy company that operates at this scale in all these gnarly weather conditions day in and day out twenty four seven. But we were sort of, like, forced into that by the nature of the original use case that we chose.

I think Antonio was interviewing you at some point, and he said that you guys are basically the only company that was able to just collect all the data through just doing all these tests. I think it was, like, 40,000,000 miles, autonomous miles flown before you even started doing commercial operations in The US

at this time, or even more. Sounds right. Yeah. 40,000,000, 50,000,000.

What was it like when the FAA came over there and basically went and talked with the authority in Rwanda and basically talked to them about potentially, you know, working with you guys on The US operation? What was that like?

Well, we always I mean, you know, the big vision here was to build an automated logistics system for Earth. We think that in the same way that the Internet can move things back move information back and forth very efficiently no matter where you are in the world, we thought, man, logistics, it's like all built on top of humans and gas combustion vehicle and unions, and it's just this like very complicated antiquated system in certain ways. And we kind of felt like ultimately this is all just going be automated. It's going to be dramatically less expensive, dramatically faster. And, of course, the advantage of that is that logistics today only does a good job of serving, like, maybe the golden billion people on Earth.

But if you're not in the golden billion, there's 7,000,000,000 humans who are not in the golden billion. And those 7,000,000,000 people, their access to logistics either sucks or is nonexistent. And so, you know, we felt like by far the most exciting thing here would be to build a logistics system that could serve all people equally. Like, that was the promise of automation and robotics being applied to this problem. And so in 2019, when The US I mean, it it it wasn't the FAA.

I mean, it was really a lot of these big US companies. A lot of big US health systems were seeing what we were doing, saying like, hey, we have all these similar problems. We're trying to advance telepresence, and we need ways of delivering directly to customer homes faster. Or we need ways of meeting, like, home health care nurses where they are at. And then we're also hearing from big companies like Walmart, which is, you know, was one of our main partners in The US that they wanted to be able to enable teleportation from their stores directly to homes.

And we were hearing from a lot of these amazing restaurants that we work with, like Chipotle or Sweetgreen or Mendocino Farms or Wendy's. And, and they also wanted to be able to do teleportation directly to customer homes. And so, and and again, and and some of the biggest health systems like, like Cleveland Clinic in The U. And Michigan Medicine and Memorial Hermann, they were all like really, really excited to launch, and so it kind of became this issue of like, well, we got to get regulatory permission, and the FAA didn't have a precedent for how to do this. I think it's just a really challenging chicken and the egg problem because they, you know, drone delivery companies had been asking the FAA to do this, but the FAA was like, cool, prove that it's safe.

And these companies were like, well, can prove that it's safe once you let us operate. It's the Catch-twenty two. Yeah. It's a Catch-twenty two. And so Zipline had this big advantage, which is we had 40 or 50,000,000 commercial autonomous miles outside The US with zero safety incidents that we were able to provide to the FAA and say, here's how you know it's safe.

And that wound up being really, really valuable. And so, you know, the FAA was able to move pretty quickly. Like, we you know, we've always kind of had this strategy of just being an amazing partner to them. Like, the FAA wants to innovate, especially all the people, I I would say, doing the actual, like, individual contributor work. Like, they want to win.

They're often constrained by, like, crazy legal bureaucracy and just these, like, crazy processes and rules and, you know, don't get me started on NEPA and all these things that actually prevent federal agencies from doing what they wanna do. But we ended up creating this really productive partnership with the FAA over five years, and ZipLine has now been able to basically like year over year over year kind of like push the envelope, expand what's possible, and the FAA has been our partner every step of the way in making that happen. So I think that, you know, maybe there was this narrative that like, Oh, the FAA is going be impossible, or It's like too bureaucratic. It's not going to get the job done. I mean, it's like, it's been the exact opposite over the last three to four years.

Like, there is no regulatory constraints on Zipline's business right now, because once we were able to show that the thing was safe, the FAA, you know, was a partner in in accelerating this.

I was talking with Denton beforehand, and he mentioned basically flying to Rwanda recently, and he was, like, having trouble with the border patrol or something. And then the guy heard that he worked a zipline, and there was just, like, this smile that came across his face, and he's like, awesome. You know, go right through. No problem. If you deliver a million bags of blood or vaccines or so on, maybe you're only touching a million people's lives, but then you have this, like, ripple effect where there's not only you know, it's a million people with families.

Right? And so you create a bunch of, like, customer love and goodwill with with an entire, like, nation, honestly, by by creating something that's super valuable for a single person. How do you think about just, like, kind of creating the right customer brand and and, like, love for drones in in general, in your mind?

I mean yeah. And by the way, know, we've now expanded from Rwanda to Ghana, Nigeria, Cote D'Ivoire, Kenya, and and then obviously The US, and and we'll we'll be announcing new countries next year too. But, like, I think that in all of these countries I mean, yeah, you're definitely right. If you if you spend time in these countries, like, you will for sure meet people who are alive because of Zipline or they have loved ones who are alive because of Zipline, and, like, you hear stories all the time. And so, like, you know, people at Zipline, they'll be in, like, cabs, and they'll be talking to someone.

They're like, oh, yeah, my sister, my mom, my son, my grandpa, whatever. Like, there are a lot of stories. I mean, Zipline now, you know, these global public health institutions estimate that Zipline I mean, University of Pennsylvania did this big study showing that we've been able to reduce the maternal mortality rate in Rwanda by fifty one percent. In fact, the Minister of Health of Rwanda was just named to the Times 100 list this year for improvements to maternal mortality the country achieves. It's an incredible progress.

You know

how many, like, lives that's saved? Like, you had to

Many thousands. Yeah. Mean, we, you know, these other big studies, like, estimated that Zipline's saving about seventeen thousand lives a year. Now we're about to triple or quadruple the scope and scale of, like, our platform one infrastructure in the world as part of this big contract with the US State Department. And so that'll go from 17,000 lives a year to 60,000 lives a year.

Yeah. That that that's definitely a huge part of why we do what we do, and it's why, like, logistics I mean, people often think of logistics as, like, a luxury for the rich. And the reality is it is is much more than that. You know? It is it is it is a necessity for for the poor, and, and instant delivery particularly is, a necessity.

Like, the less time you have in your life to, you know, drive yourself to somewhere or that you have access to, like, get to that good hospital or get to that place or, you know, show up for that, appointment, you know, being able to meet people where they are is incredibly important from an from an economic perspective and from a health care perspective. So, anyway, as we've expanded to all these countries, like, I think that one observation is that obviously that's really, really kind of critical for the brand of the company and for, like, community acceptance where we operate. If you ask people, a lot of times they'll say like, oh, yeah. Like, our drones save lives. Our drones deliver these blood transfusions.

So I think there's, like, an extremely strong sense of local ownership. That's because Zipline hired entirely local teams. We created all these really high paying jobs of like, you know, flight operators and fulfillment operators who ran the distribution centers, and then we promoted those people into positions of global leadership and global executive leadership over time as they were, like, you know, prove themselves. And and so I think there's this very strong sense that this is not, like, an American company or or a African company. It's it's a It's different a global company.

Yeah. Yeah.

And anybody in the company can rise super fast if they are extraordinarily talented. And if you're in San Francisco, I think the perhaps sad reality is that the places that have, like, the most access to technology are the places that appreciate it the least. And in fact, are often the places that have these really strong, like, NIMBY or kind of, like, anti tech, anti progress strains and ideologies. You can see, like, the coning of autonomous cars in some of these cities and, like, you know, there's this I mean, Waymo just hit a cat.

Right? They're, like, ban Waymo now.

Yeah. There's this like big New York Times article about how like they should ban Waymo. And obviously only at the very end of the article do they mention that Waymo is not is is 30 times less likely to hit a cat than a human driver, you know? So it's like, do we care about the cats, guys, or is, you know, something else going on here? I think the reality is that, like, some of these cities, have had have had it so good and get so much tax revenue from technology companies and from this kind of, like, technology boom that they actually have become pretty negative on it and maybe just think that, like, no matter how hard they try to strangle the golden goose, like, it'll always be there.

But, like, the reality is 99% of the world isn't that. They're dying for innovation, dying for a tech startup to show up and help them solve problems in a really innovative way. They are dying for entrepreneurship and technology and high paying jobs. And there are entrepreneurs in all of these countries and in all these other parts of The US that are dying for an opportunity to work on something really cool. You have only to open the door a single inch, and these kinds of people will do the rest.

And I think that that's kind of been the story of Zip Line. It's like we went to parts of the world that people, you know, ignore. And we did that outside The US, and then we even did that inside The US. Know, when we launched in The US, we launched in Bentonville, Arkansas, and then we launched in Dallas, and we're gonna announce a lot of other metros that people don't think of as like, like,

top technology is the top place, but then, you know

San Francisco, New York, Boston. You know? So anyway, I think that is the cool thing about I think a lot of, you know, this next generation AI and robotics technology, it's like a lot of this stuff requires operating in the real world. And when you have to operate in the real world, you actually have to do it in partnership with government. You have to it in partnership with regulators.

You have to do it in partnership with cities. And that is gonna lead, I think, more companies to do what ZipLine did and go and find government partners that are as aggressive and startup oriented as they are and, like, really want to, create change and move super fast. They exist. In fact, they might be the majority. It's just that they're not the metros that most people think about when they think about advanced technology.

Yeah. If you had to, like, go back and you were given the same set of cars, but you have the knowledge that you have today on how you built the business and survived, what would you have done differently?

It's hard to know the counterfactual. I think Zipline got incredibly lucky at a lot of key moments. You know, always, like, the biggest mistake you make is is around hiring. Like and I think probably everybody has to learn these hard lessons for themselves. Like, you can hear it, but you have to eventually go make the mistake.

But I think that the biggest mistake that I made on hiring again and again was that I would fall in love with specific experience over innate characteristics. And whenever we hired for specific experience over innate characteristics, it was a huge mistake. The reality is, like, a startup that's moving super fast and rapidly iterating, like, you'll hire someone, and then, you know, they'll have a role and have a job description. But, you know, two months later, it's like, Oh my god, everything's changed. New direction, new strategy.

Now we need you to work on this completely different thing. If you hired someone because they were like just super, super deep in this one thing, they're instantly gonna be irrelevant as soon as the company is like changing, and the company is changing direction so often. Whereas we realized that there were these, like, four innate characteristics of people who, when we hired them, they practically couldn't wait. It's like we couldn't get it wrong. Like, people would always end up winning at Zipline.

And these four innate characteristics were practical problem solver, fast learner, low ego, mission driven. Those were things that we felt like were very hard to teach someone. Like, we didn't really think we could teach it to people. But if we could hire people who who had those four innate characteristics, you know, they might fail a couple times while they were figuring out how to do the thing, but eventually they would succeed. And that was, it's crazy how many times I had to make that mistake.

What were the, like, most memorable, and how did you kinda, like, shift that over time towards just focusing on these four things?

I mean, every single bad hire you make is extremely memorable. Firing people is no fun. And, also, you know, when you're trying to lead a startup, you're having to constantly ask everybody to, like, believe in you, you know? You're like, Okay, everybody. I have this great idea.

We're gonna hire this person, and they're gonna be absolutely amazing for all these reasons. And so, you know, they're gonna lead this team, and these four people are gonna report to them, and, it's all your credibility. And so then three months later or six months later you're like, Alright guys, bad news, that didn't work out at all. I was a complete idiot, but now I've learned my lesson. Now we're gonna do this new thing.

I mean actually like leading a startup is kind of shameless. You know, you're making all these stupid mistakes and having to like constantly ask the team to, okay, now you should believe in me because now I have the right idea, now we're gonna go do this other thing. And, yeah, I think it is it is kind of shameless in that way. But

I do love this line of, I think I I forgot exactly where it's don't think it's from start ups, but it's like, winning is just going from loss to loss or failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. Mhmm.

Maybe. Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of losing, and we hired a lot of people who didn't work out. And I think that, you know, to me, those are all, like, the if you if if I look at the mistakes where I'm like, oh, man, you know, the things I could have done differently, it's all around, like, how could we have bet bigger on the people who have wound up, you know, being at Zipline for decade and have grown by leaps and bounds and become executives in the company? How could we have you know, you wanna hire as many people like that as you possibly can.

And then, just treating hiring like a sacred duty. And, like, no amount of time spent with a candidate is too much time because the cost of getting the decision wrong is so is so high. So I think getting those it

right is so high.

Yeah. And and so those are the biggest like, when I look back, those are always, the biggest things. It's like, could you have moved faster to build the team? But I don't know. Maybe everybody has to learn those lessons for themselves.

How are you kind of deciding when the right time to scale up is, whereas, you know, just focusing on the thing that you're currently doing and getting it absolutely right, is the best focus?

I think that largely we've just, like, listened to the market. You know? For five or six years, it was kind of clear to us that The US probably wasn't open to us from a regulatory perspective. We just needed to prove what we were doing. We were expanding all of our kind of like health care logistics business outside The US, and we we had our hands full.

But in 2020, I think it started to feel like, okay, We could see three or four years into the future, never more than that. But, like, three or four years, it felt like automated logistics was going to dramatically accelerate. And we felt like if we could build a product that would really compete against cars in every way, be dramatically better, that we had enough regulatory progress that we could get regulatory permission. This would work in in every country, including in The US. I think we kind of had a good enough understanding of the problems.

We also had these customers telling us what the problems were. We had big partners like Walmart willing to sign big contracts with Zipline to provide this kind of technology. And so, you know, at every stage, you're kind of like 10x ing or 100x ing, and you're having to build hardware that is dramatically more cost effective, dramatically more reliable, dramatically higher performance. Like, it's usually every product is much more complicated than the last. You can look at, like, SpaceX going from Falcon one to Falcon nine to Starlink and then Starship.

Like, we you know, platform two is, like, 10 times as complicated as the original version, platform one, of the technology that we built. And, yeah, as I mentioned, like, it almost killed us trying to get that product into the real world, but the thing was, like, we we knew that the the market on the other side was, like, incredibly vast. It's, one of the biggest markets on Earth already, instant delivery. And we actually think that if you can make it well, actually, we now have data showing that if you make it 10 times as fast and less expensive and way more reliable and safe for customers to use, they'll consume, like, 10 times as much of it. So we actually believe that the instant delivery market that you see in in The US today, for example, five and a half billion instant deliveries being made every year, it's actually very obvious that there's demand for 50,000,000,000 instant deliveries.

And there's definitely, you know, not enough roads, not enough cars, not enough humans who wanna do that job in The United States to deliver 50,000,000,000 deliveries a year, but that's where the world is going. And so we need to do it using technology that is, you know, that actually takes cars off the road, that gives humans high paying, like, next tech, you know, next gen technology jobs rather than, you know, low wage minimum jobs that people basically, as soon as they can get any other job, they they abandon it and take it. And we gotta do it in a way that's quiet and serene and beautiful for neighborhoods and, like, reduces pollution in our neighborhoods. Yeah. And so that's that's the vision, and I think that I it's only really this year that it's become clear.

I mean, looking at the way that Zipline has been scaling in The US, it's only now that it's suddenly clear that that's all gonna happen over the next, you know, three to

five years. What was kind of the day where you woke up and you were like, this is gonna work?

I don't know. Last week? Last week? May maybe may maybe I haven't had that day yet, honestly. I mean, you live in a state of constant paranoia, and, you know, I don't think I ever tell myself, like, it's definitely gonna work, but I definitely think there have been eyebrow raising moments over the last couple weeks.

You know, we are hitting, like, new record numbers of deliveries practically every day. And if you just look at, like, platform two deliveries in The US, since about April, we've been growing about 15% week over week. And so when you look at that on a graph, I mean, it is, like, super vertical. Like, we're in a completely vertical part of the graph, and it made me it makes you realize when you're getting into, like, thousands of deliveries a day, 10 thousands of deliveries a day, it's like, this is even though it's still small scale compared to U UPS or FedEx, this is this is something that is going to grow a lot, and it is gonna be completely normal for our neighborhoods. I mean, I went and visited a grandma in Bentonville.

She's 82 years old. She's ordered from zipline 350 times in the last year. You know, there are the service right now has a net promoter score of 95. I don't know

if I've ever heard of

a Yeah, I mean, normal delivery platforms actually have- Really bad. Net promoter scores of like negative, negative 10, negative 20. Yeah, a lot of these delivery platforms have scaled really, really fast with negative, with net detractor customer bases. It's kind of an amazing thing. And I think it's honestly a testament to the, to the opportunity and the scale of the market, like how much people want this.

It's that like they're willing to use a service that's actually like super expensive and pretty unreliable and sometimes unsafe. And where the experience of the product is usually bad, where the food is like It's cold. Ice cold and gross and doesn't taste nearly as good, but like, you know, even so, these platforms have scaled to extraordinary scale. Mean, it's definitely a testament to the operational, you know, the operational know how and performance of of those of those delivery platforms. But ultimately, it seems very obvious that these systems need to be automated.

Like, should not be using technology that's a 100 years old to solve a problem that like, a a a brand new industry that we've only really understood in the last five or ten years. Like, basically, to solve these problems of instant delivery, to solve these problems of, global logistics, we think we should be using technology. You know, AI and robotics are gonna transform that. And that's the sort of simple idea that Zipline has been pursuing for twelve years. And when we are now seeing customers adopt the service, adopt the the, know, and ordering everything through the Zipline app.

It's kind of crazy to see the user behaviors. I mean, people are, you know, people are ordering at their offices, people are ordering at universities, we deliver to apartments, we deliver to townhomes, We deliver to hotels. We even deliver to public parks. And, I think people realizing that you can just pull out your phone and press

a It's couple super delightful experience.

Yeah. Have something delivered quietly and precisely and safely ten to fifteen minutes later, no matter what your GPS coordinates are, is a it definitely changes the way that people live. Like people change their grocery shopping behaviors. You know, we talk to families who are like, oh yeah, now we we grocery shop like once a week and then we do three to four fill in orders with zipline a week. And so it enables them to like eat healthier food.

Yeah, they can eat fresher food. They can they waste less because they don't have to batch process and like plan ahead. And most importantly, it's like saving these families three to five hours a week that they don't have to be battling in traffic, parking in a parking lot, dragging kids, kicking and screaming into a store to get something. It's like everything is delivered to you. And so it's like three to five hours that you have to just enjoy time with your kids or loved ones rather than fight in traffic or in a store.