How Zipline Scaled to 2 Million Drone Deliveries | Keller Cliffton

Summary

Keller Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline, shares the extraordinary journey of building an automated logistics system that has completed over 2 million drone deliveries. The interview takes place at Zipline’s original test site, “Nezero,” a cattle ranch where the company started 12 years ago with just five people living in construction trailers.

The conversation covers Zipline’s scrappy beginnings, their decision to launch in Rwanda delivering blood transfusions to hospitals, and the countless “WFIO” (We’re F*cked It’s Over) moments that nearly killed the company. Keller explains how launching in Rwanda with a life-saving healthcare use case gave them both regulatory permission and the moral imperative to make the technology work, ultimately helping reduce maternal mortality rates by 51% in that country. He discusses hiring philosophy (practical problem solver, fast learner, low ego, mission-driven), the 8:30am daily meeting ritual learned from Valor, and how Zipline is now scaling to thousands of daily deliveries in the US with partners like Walmart, Chipotle, and major health systems.

Highlights

”99% of the world is dying for innovation - that’s the story of Zipline”

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“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.” — Keller Cliffton, 0:00

”Our board member asked: Is this how you thought it would end?”

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“I remember a conversation with our board member at the time who basically said, ‘Is this how you thought it would end?’ He was 100% sure that the company was dead. Like, there was no question in his mind. And I was like, well, it isn’t over.” — Keller Cliffton, 7:50

”We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy”

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“I saw this picture on Twitter: we do this not because it is easy - but because we thought it would be easy. This is like the definition of Zipline. A certain amount of naivete is 100% required. If you knew how hard it was going to be, you probably would not try at all.” — Keller Cliffton, 9:08

”Shut up. Just do blood.”

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“I’m pitching the Minister of Health of Rwanda in a hoodie. I said we’ll deliver every medical product in the supply chain. She looked at me and said, ‘Keller, shut up. Just do blood.’ 50% of transfusions go toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging, 30% toward kids under five.” — Keller Cliffton, 13:15

”My co-founders bought deep sea fishing poles from Walmart to build our recovery system”

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“My co-founders went to Walmart and bought two deep sea fishing poles, built a metal hinge, bolted it into the ground, strung a line between them, and flew the aircraft at those fishing poles. It worked. That became snapcatch, which has now recovered 1.8 million aircraft.” — Keller Cliffton, 6:18

”Normal delivery platforms have -10 to -20 NPS. We have 95.”

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“Normal delivery platforms actually have net promoter scores of like -10, -20. The service right now has a net promoter score of 95. We deliver to apartments, townhomes, hotels, even public parks. We’re hitting new record numbers of deliveries practically every day.” — Keller Cliffton, 0:19

Key Points

• Building an Automated Logistics System for Earth (0:51) - Zipline’s vision is to automate logistics globally, replacing 100-year-old technology (humans driving 4,000lb vehicles) with drones delivering 5lb packages 10x faster and cheaper.

• Starting in a Trailer Park (2:22) - Zipline started on an active cattle ranch called Nezero, paying $3,000/month rent. Founders slept on couches in construction trailers.

• Scrappiness in the Early Days (6:09) - Co-founders bought deep sea fishing poles from Walmart to prototype the aircraft recovery system (snapcatch), which is still used for 1.8 million recoveries today.

• “We Do This Not Because It Is Easy” (9:08) - Famous quote riff: “We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”

• “Shut Up. Just Do Blood” (10:47) - Rwanda’s Minister of Health told Keller to stop pitching broadly and focus on blood transfusions. 50% go to moms with postpartum hemorrhaging, 30% to children under five.

• Flying to Rwanda (18:08) - Keller would read entire 800-page textbooks on the 30-hour coach flights. Team lived in bunk beds in a “zip house” near the distribution center.

• Scaling Up Is Always A Disaster (19:46) - The first 9 months in Rwanda were painful - system barely worked, constantly breaking. But they rapidly iterated their way out of the pain.

• Blood Bag on Hospital Roof (23:22) - GPS error caused delivery to land on a hospital roof. A nurse climbed up, retrieved it, and transfused the patient 5 minutes later - proving customers will meet you halfway if the mission matters.

• Falling in Love with the Process (26:38) - Success is rare; you must be motivated by the learning and growth from failure, not by praise or wins.

• Valor 8:30am Meeting (26:38) - Daily 8:30am meetings (including weekends) with engineers and executives reviewing top issues from the previous 24 hours. No hierarchy - individual contributors present directly to leadership.

• WFIO Moments (32:06) - “We’re F*cked It’s Over” moments happened repeatedly. Board member asked “Is this how you thought it would end?” Launcher broke at 7pm the night before Rwanda president’s inauguration visit.

• Building a New Industry From Scratch (38:34) - No precedent exists for drone delivery at scale. Unlike Tesla (knew it had 4 wheels), Zipline had to invent everything: charging, business model, maintenance, pricing, regulation.

• Rwanda Weather Without Looking (42:29) - Team launched in Rwanda without checking weather forecasts - country has some of the most volatile weather on Earth. Became “hyper-gravity training” for the system.

• Building FAA Relationship (43:39) - Used 40-50 million commercial autonomous miles outside the US to prove safety to FAA. Became productive partners with individual contributors who wanted to innovate.

• Creating Customer Love (47:49) - 95 Net Promoter Score vs -10/-20 for normal delivery platforms. An 82-year-old grandma in Bentonville ordered 350 times in one year.

• 4 Traits of Great Hires (54:35) - Practical problem solver, fast learner, low ego, mission-driven. These innate characteristics matter more than specific experience.

• Scaling Zipline (58:34) - Company survival hung in balance just 18 months ago. Platform 2 launch was 6 months late; team worked through Christmas. Launched January 15th.

• Growing 15% Week Over Week (1:02:01) - Since April, platform 2 deliveries in US have grown 15% week over week. Now hitting record numbers practically every day.

Mentions

Companies

• Zipline (0:43) - Automated drone delivery company with 135 million commercial autonomous miles
• Amazon (38:34) - Jeff Bezos said drone delivery in 2 years (2013), was spending hundreds of millions/billions; hasn’t scaled
• Valor (26:38) - Major investor in Tesla and SpaceX, deployed special forces teams into Zipline for a year
• Tesla (32:06) - Model 3 nearly bankrupted Tesla even 16 years after founding
• SpaceX (38:34) - Best company in the world at HIDL (hardware-in-the-loop) testing; Zipline learned from them
• Walmart (43:39) - Major partner enabling teleportation from stores to homes
• Chipotle (0:52) - Restaurant partner for drone delivery
• Uber ATG (38:34) - Example of how bad safety events can impact company trajectory
• Cruise (38:34) - Example of how bad safety events can impact company trajectory
• Waymo (47:49) - Hit a cat, big NYT article about banning them (though 30x less likely to hit cat than human driver)
• Cleveland Clinic (43:39) - Major health system partner
• Michigan Medicine (43:39) - Major health system partner
• Memorial Hermann (43:39) - Major health system partner

Products & Technologies

• Platform 2 (58:34) - Next-generation Zipline system for home delivery, 10x more complicated than Platform 1
• Snapcatch (6:09) - Aircraft recovery system prototyped with Walmart fishing poles, now has 1.8 million recoveries
• HIDL (38:34) - Hardware-in-the-loop testing; plane thinks it’s flying while sitting on a desk

People

• Keller Cliffton (0:43) - Co-founder and CEO of Zipline
• Agnes Binagwaho (10:47) - Minister of Health of Rwanda who said “shut up, just do blood”
• Abdul (18:08) - First team member hired in Rwanda; became a legend at Zipline
• Ryan (23:22) - Co-founder at Zipline
• Antonio (26:38) - From Valor, was on Model 3 production line with Elon
• Paul Kagame (10:47) - President of Rwanda, deeply involved in the contract, technocratic leader
• Travis Kalanick (18:08) - Mentioned visiting India and noting the level of hustle in the culture
• Mark Rober (18:08) - Visited Rwanda for YouTube video, noted entrepreneurial spirit
• Sam Altman (32:06) - Quoted on surviving multiple company-killing moments
• Elon Musk (32:06) - On Tesla Model 3 production line during near-bankruptcy
• Pavel Durov (18:08) - Does 100 pushups and situps every day; Keller aspires to this

Countries

• Rwanda (2:22) - First country for Zipline; reduced maternal mortality by 51%
• Ghana (47:49) - Expansion country for Zipline
• Nigeria (47:49) - Expansion country for Zipline
• Cote d’Ivoire (47:49) - Expansion country for Zipline
• Kenya (47:49) - Expansion country for Zipline

Surprising Quotes

“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.” — 0:00

“We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.” — 9:08

“Shut up. Just do blood.” — 10:47 (Rwanda’s Minister of Health to Keller)

“Is this how you thought it would end?” (Board member to Keller during a crisis) — 9:08

“If a startup has a good enough mission, if the need is high enough, your customer will meet you halfway.” — 23:22

“Normal delivery platforms actually have net promoter scores of like -10, -20. The service right now has a net promoter score of 95.” — 0:22

Transcript

0:00 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.

0:19 Normal delivery platforms actually have net promoter scores of like -10, -20. The service right now has a net promoter score of 95. We would deliver to apartments. We would deliver to town homes 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.

0:38 Today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Keller Clifton and he is the co-founder 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 want to just explain like the future that you’re trying to build here?

0:55 Sure. Sure. I mean, I guess, you know, the simplest way to think about Zipline is that starting about 13 years ago, it seemed to us pretty obvious that someone was going to build an automated logistic 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 100 years old, which is a human driving a 3 to 4,000lb gas combustion vehicle to deliver something that weighs on average about 5 lbs.

1:27 And so we always thought this was bizarre. You 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, 4,000lb vehicle driven by a human to deliver something that weighs 5 lbs 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.

1:56 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 going to happen with packages and I think you also see it happening with people right now. But I mean that that’s like the promise of autonomy. It’s like a global network that gives everybody totally different level of access to things like healthcare but also to economic opportunity packages, products.

2:22 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 kind of 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.

2:53 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 Nezero. 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 going to work. People thought that it was kind of preposterous.

3:20 And so, we needed a place where we could fly and test and learn. And so, we ended up on this farm. I mean, this is like an active cattle ranch. And the owners here were, you know, incredibly gracious. 12 years ago. Did you know them beforehand? We didn’t know them. You know, they they’ve owned this land, I think, for like a hundred years or something like that. The family has and they’ve been ranching cattle on it for a hundred years and we met them through mutual acquaintance and they put up with us.

3:50 You know, we ended up signing this little lease for 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. I 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.

4:15 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. 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, failed 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.

4:48 But - cows get spooked a little bit. The cows honestly don’t really mind us. They mainly break in and eat our stuff. So that they like eat our rope and our hardware. So the fences are mainly to keep the cows out. But yeah, you know, 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, you know, it was like, oh, the idea of hiring an engineer from Google was like the best thing you could imagine, which is amazing how far we’ve come.

5:22 But you know and I remember we’d have a lot of people out here but 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.

5:50 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 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 Nest Zero and how we came to be here.

6:18 Do you have any particular scrappiness stories that like stick out in your mind? I mean, there are a million. I think 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 like how to get the aircraft out of the air is not an easy thing.

6:48 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 co-founders - I think my co-founder 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.

7:18 You know, I think people were pretty shocked because that was like a really obviously very ghetto way 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 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 1.8 million aircraft reliably.

7:50 So you know there were a million things that we had to do out here that looked totally crazy you know and I also think that when we started building this everybody thought it was like so obviously a bad idea like it was so obviously not going to work. Well, I mean, I remember a conversation, you know, with our board member at the time, who, you know, basically said, “Is this how you thought it would end?” So, like, he was like 100% sure that the company was dead. Like, there was no question in his mind.

8:20 Your board member saying that - It’s not ideal. It’s not ideal. You could see the writing on the wall sort of thing. And, you know, I was like, well, it isn’t over. Like, we’re going and doing this, we’re doing that. You know, we’re like launching in Rwanda. We think that they’re going to let us deliver these blood transfusions.

8:42 And we had this like grand ambition and I think that you know the idea was preposterous like designing a fully autonomous system that would operate 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 10 years later. The idea of starting in Africa was kind of preposterous. Like everybody thinks that the best technology is going to start in the US and then trickle its way out to the developing countries rather than the other way around.

9:15 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. 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.

9:45 I see a shadow of a droid making a delivery right behind you. I’ve got this theory now that like I think 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 it’s just they wanted to go pursue it and make something real. Yeah. I think a certain amount of naivete is like 100% required. You know, if you knew how hard it was going to be when you are starting the thing, you probably would not try at all.

10:15 But I don’t - I mean there’s a million - whether it’s, you know, the sewage tanks like literally never worked here. So we have a truck that comes and would pump these like tanks. So that, you know, so we had like 50 people working out here. We definitely kind of reached the breaking point for Nezero at some point where we had too many people here every day and we would have to like pump the tanks every single day and everyone would be like sitting trying to write code and smelling this incredibly nasty smell.

10:45 Yeah, I mean it was like exactly nobody who was coming from like the Google Plex, you know, and having like every possible corporate perk - living in the lap of luxury would - pitches. We’re running out of money. Our board member doesn’t know if it’s going to work. We don’t really have an obvious first customer. Yeah. And you’ll smell while you’re writing code every day.

11:10 Anyway, you know, suffice it to say again, it was like it was definitely a rag tag 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.

11:30 This wasn’t like the first thing you - you were building another company for 3 years before this from like 2011 to 2014. What was kind of going through your mind like on a psychology level in those super early days when things weren’t going well?

11:48 I don’t 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 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 kind of traveling the world. And I made about $3,000 that year, and I had a blast. I got to kind of like see the world and go to all these inspiring places.

12:20 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.

12:42 And I think the idea inspired us as we started spending more and more time looking at problems that we felt like would be inspiring to solve, especially in terms of healthcare logistics. Like we always felt, okay, no one is going to give us regulatory permission. No country is going to 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.

13:15 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. I 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 build these autonomous aircraft and we can deliver every medical product in the public healthcare supply chain and, you know, deliver it 10 times as fast in a way that’s going to save all these lives.

13:55 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, 50% of transfusions are going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging, 30% are going toward kids under the age of five. It’s this incredibly important use case. And it was very narrow.

14:20 And you know, you mentioned - so I actually didn’t find out until 10 years later. Well, actually, I guess like 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 - 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 hemorrhage.

14:58 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 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.

15:28 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 20 minutes later.

15:48 And so you realize like getting any progress in these kinds of startups - yeah definitely relies on an element of luck. You know, there was 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 hundred reasons for her to tell us - to Yeah. No, but I think she felt like perhaps she was frustrated, like how could this have happened? And sort of beside herself enough to be like, “Yeah, we’ll try something crazy.”

16:22 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 opportunity that this thing could prevent that in the future.

16:40 I mean, I think there was less than zero data. You know, there was - I mean, we had not fielded a system commercially in the real world. We were a small team of 15 people who knew nothing about healthcare or aviation. So, there was every reason to believe that like there was no chance we could do this. We did not yet have regulatory permission which seemed like a pretty big consideration and you know we didn’t know how to integrate with a national health care system or with a national airspace regulator.

17:12 So there were a lot of reasons to say no 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 100 times as fast that would save a lot of lives.

17:35 And you know I think that the president of the country was also kind of like deeply involved in the contract. He had a lot of vision. He is a kind of extraordinary technocratic leader and I think he also knew that Rwanda doesn’t have a lot of natural resources. So if they want to win like their natural resources are their people and technology and innovation and they’ve kind of modeled - the scrappiness of a startup.

18:05 Yeah. And the reality actually was that like that country felt like it was a startup in its own way, right? That country to a certain degree, you know, the modern version of that country is 30 years old and they are moving incredibly fast and ultra scrappy. I could always at like 8 9 10 p.m. on a Saturday get on the phone with any of the ministers or with any of 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.

18:38 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 kind of 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 kind of just is very high.

19:05 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, genius and talent and entrepreneurship is evenly distributed in the world. Opportunity is not. 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 do think largely technology is still serving more kind of like tactical or like rich white people problems in the US.

19:40 You know, we’re kind of like focused on these better understood markets, even if in reality they’re actually not necessarily the largest. Yeah. I imagine going over there, you know, 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?

20:02 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’s a 30 hour coach class, one, you know, brain, red eye, you know. So, I mean, I would read textbooks like 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 journey and I loved it.

20:38 It was like, you know, you didn’t have an internet connection, so you were locked in. And I mean, we made that flight hundreds of times, you know, 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 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 legendary at Zipline.

21:08 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.

21:28 I actually have started doing the same thing. I know Pavel Durov does like 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups every day. And I’ve just started to work my way up there. And once I’ve done 100 push-ups and 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.

21:52 When you were scaling this initially, I imagine 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 the back of your mind?

22:18 Yeah. I mean, I think that when you’re trying to do something really hard, maybe people have this sense that, oh yeah, I mean, 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 my perspective is very different than that. Basically, it will 100% always be a show. And then the companies that execute really well can rapidly iterate themselves out of that pain.

22:50 And for sure, I mean - or at least that’s what we tell ourselves because like the first year was really difficult. And - that was just the experience you had. That was our experience. And you know, 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 relying on the old system. Yeah.

23:22 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 it was so painful. You know we could get it to like do a couple deliveries a day and then it would break and we’d have to figure out what was wrong with it and fix it and then 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 US teams trying to kind of like marry this technology with the complicated operation with this health system.

24:00 We also had to get regulatory approval for what we were doing and like integrate with the civil aviation authority which is called the RCA, 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 like we’re holding all these different - I mean blood is not simple. You have packed red blood cells, platelets, cryoprecipitates, 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.

24:40 And we had to be managing this inventory because we were now holding 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 minimum viable product, the scrappiest version of what we thought would work.

25:05 And for 9 months we were struggling to serve that one hospital. And then after 9 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 wide range of other products, vaccines, infusions, transfusions, cancer products, basically everything in the public healthcare supply chain.

25:38 Then we expanded from 21 to 100 to 500 to a thousand 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.

26:05 There’s this one story that I was hearing about before we started when I was just inside and they were talking about basically at one point I think a blood bag just landed on a roof. Yeah. What was that?

26:20 Yeah. So again like everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I mean we were - and so I remember - I was in the US at the time but we I think we’re probably 3 or 4 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 would always know where to collect the package and go back inside.

26:55 And I got this call at 2 a.m. We had like a pager duty system. So I got woken up at 2 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 zip control algorithm wasn’t working correctly.” And there’s a mom, you know, who was having like an emergency C-section, needed an emergency delivery of blood and we delivered onto the roof of the hospital.

27:28 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 a bunch of other people on the team, and we kind of like rallied from 2 to 5:00 a.m. trying to figure out what had happened, like why was the GPS so off?

27:58 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 kind of like, hey, you know, we think we have a solution. 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.

28:28 She’s like, “Oh, no, no, no. Like when we delivered onto the roof, some like nurse climbed up like a - I 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 5 minutes later.

28:48 And so I realized in hearing that - you know there’s this very interesting experience for me which I actually - 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 and on a roof and this guy willing to risk life and limb like climbing up the side of the building and then onto the roof to like get it and go back in and save this person’s life.

29:25 It was like very powerful for me. It kind of inspired me. It was like, you know what, we don’t have to be perfect. Like this - 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.

29:52 I imagine over the course of 10 years, you get incredibly good at when something goes sideways, how do you actually like resolve the issue? What’s your type of process when something goes horribly wrong? What is the checklist that you go through or the steps that you go through to fix it?

30:12 Yeah, I mean actually for a hardware company that’s operating, you know, at Zipline scale today, I mean, Zipline now has 135 million commercial autonomous miles and zero safety incidents. And so we take safety incredibly seriously. That’s why we have these large test sites. We’re at our first test site 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.

30:45 And I think you kind of realize that every morning you’re going to wake up and whatever is like the most screwed up thing - like that’s what’s going to be at the top of your inbox and so - yeah the fire - and so I think 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 like untie yourself - it feels so bad - and just look at the facts.

31:18 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 going to 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 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.

31:50 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 times you try you are going to fail. And so I think you have to be like motivated by failure and motivated by that learning and growth rather than 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 10 years of a hardware company.

32:28 Yeah. We ended up, you know, this wound up becoming - there were times in Zipline’s history where 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.

32:55 Valor was the largest investor - I think one of the largest investors in Tesla and SpaceX for many years. They were like on the ground I think when they were first spinning up the Roadster production. Antonio and one other guy Tim were just flying all over the damn place basically figuring out all the different suppliers and I think it was just a total show.

33:22 It’s an incredible story and 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.

33:48 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.

34:22 And if we didn’t want to crash, we had to have 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 mean, you know, this stuff was - it was desperate. It did not feel like the company was going to survive.

34:48 And Valor helped us kind of like build this process that we’ve now turned into our 8:30 a.m. meeting, you know, which is like Zipline’s engineering leaders, and some of our ops leaders meet every morning at 8:30 a.m. including Saturdays and Sundays to look at like all of the highest priority issues that we observed the day previously in the 24/7 period because these test sites operate 24/7 by the way.

35:18 So, you know, even if you come in at 7:00 a.m., you’re like catching up on, you know, 12 hours maybe that you missed out on of data and things going wrong. And so 8:30 a.m. 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 going to do to fix it and ask for any resource that they need inside the company and have access to me and the executive team. That became a big part of our culture.

35:55 And I think it’s anyway it’s kind of 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.

36:15 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 sweats at night, that sort of situation. By the seventh time, you know, you survived the first six and so you’re like, “Oh, well, you know, if we survived the first six, we’ll probably survive this one, too.”

36:42 Even you said as of last year, like you had another one of those. What have been the like key moments where you were kind of waking up in the middle of the night thinking to yourself like, “Are we going to survive?” And how did you manage through those?

37:00 I mean, yeah, we jokingly called them WFIO moments at Zipline. Have you heard of that? WFIO - We’re F*cked It’s Over. Like okay here’s another WFIO moment that we’re encountering.

37:18 You know I mean I can certainly remember one in the early days like when we were actually launching in Rwanda. 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.

37:48 We had used this 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 7:00 p.m. 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.

38:18 They built this big tent for the president to give a big speech and he was going to launch the first aircraft. And it was 7:00 p.m. and the launcher broke. And we were then trying to fix it. Trying to fix it. It’s like 10 p.m. it’s not fixed. 1:00 a.m. 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 like take this thing apart again, put it back together.

38:48 I remember we were Skyping back to the team because it was Skype at the time. We’re Skyping back to the team in the US and it was like, you know, it was basically like Apollo 13, right? Where it’s like, you know, Houston, we have a problem. And they’re like, you know, what do you have? We’re running out of oxygen in 1 hour. And they’re like, what do you have to fix it? We have like duct tape and styrofoam.

39:18 And so we, you know, they kind of 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 12 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 1 or 2 a.m. You’re under the gun. Yeah.

39:45 And you could tell they’re looking at us like, “You guys are totally - you know? Like, what are you doing?” Like, the president is showing up in seven hours and you’re taking this launcher apart. And so we ended up putting it back together, testing it once and then thinking like, you know, what more can we do?

40:08 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 as amazed as - we were more amazed than everybody in the audience.

40:35 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 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 9 months straight.

40:58 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.

41:22 Like I think that you can look at - I think the Model 3 is a really good example. I mean, the Model S was a profitable product, but like the Model 3 nearly bankrupted Tesla. Even 2018, like I think 16 years after Tesla’s founded, like that nearly - Yeah, the Model 3 production ramp. I don’t even - I don’t know. I think Antonio was actually on the Model 3 production line in Fremont with Elon.

41:52 Yeah, I think they all were like, you know, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. When you’re 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. It only takes one to screw you. It only takes one unreliable supplier. Your performance is the worst of your 10,000 suppliers, you know.

42:22 And so it’s pretty harrowing and the scale - if the company’s 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.

42:42 And so we went through that moment with platform 2. You know, we knew that platform 2 was serving a market that was 100 to a thousand times the size of the market that Zipline had originally focused on, which was just healthcare logistics in rural areas. You know platform 2 which is operating behind us is designed to really enable teleportation - like logistics from any business, health system, from a hospital, healthcare facility, warehouse, retail store or restaurant directly to homes in a way that’s 10 times as fast and dramatically less expensive.

43:18 But you know platform 2 was a way more complicated product and the scope and scale of what we were trying to do was more ambitious and we wound up being you know 6 months late shipping the product and it felt like the company - I mean it was certainly the case that I think had we gone another six months I think Zipline would not have survived.

43:45 And so it was like we just got into this hardcore mode where it was like there was no - there were no other options. Like we knew what we had to do - the boats - yeah the boats were burned. And there was no - no one was going to 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 even less than that like a year ago.

44:15 And the team worked through Christmas and everybody canceled their vacations between Christmas and New Year’s and then we launched the product on January 15th.

44:28 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 be improving the technology at the same time. How have you kind of married the two over time to be able to do as many deliveries as possible while also cycling in new builds?

44:50 Yeah, I mean that’s like that’s the main trick. Especially when it comes to this kind of - you know, in this industry, automated logistics, drone delivery. I mean, no one has any idea what this is going to look like at scale. It’s 12:01 a.m. We’re figuring everything out completely from scratch. There are no precedents.

45:12 When you think about it, at least Tesla like knew they were building a car. Like they knew it probably had four wheels and a steering wheel, you know, but like no 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 does it need to be, how should you price it - no one has any idea.

45:42 And 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 60 Minutes saying they were going to 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 going to be a fast forward Amazon.

46:10 They were spending like who knows, you know, hundreds of millions - 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, but we always knew for sure like we were the most practical.

46:35 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.

46:55 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 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 need to move really fast.

47:28 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 maybe the best company in the world at HIDL.

47:58 And we learned a lot from them and built these complicated HIDL 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 is 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.

48:32 I’d imagine it’s way more expensive and way more time intensive if you have the latter. Yes. But even so, 5% of the problems 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 24/7 in the US. We have three major test sites. One just opened last week.

48:58 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 it 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.

49:25 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.

49:48 Was the fact that the weather in Rwanda is so bad and there’s like lightning storms and all this sort of thing just like the perfect environment for - we were complete idiots and we had no idea. You didn’t know at the time? No, we had no idea. Like we launched in Rwanda with zero context on like what we were getting ourselves into.

50:12 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 - it has some of the most volatile weather on Earth of any country. It has challenging terrain.

50:38 I mean, there 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 million 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.

51:05 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 24/7. But we were sort of like forced into that by the nature of the original use case that we chose.

51:28 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 million miles autonomous miles flown before you even started doing commercial operations in the US. Yeah, sounds right. 40 million, 50 million.

51:52 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?

52:10 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 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 vehicles and unions and it’s just this like very complicated antiquated system in certain ways.

52:42 And we kind of felt like ultimately this is all just going to 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 billion humans who are not in the golden billion. And those seven billion people, their access to logistics either sucks or is non-existent.

53:15 And so, you know, we felt like by far the most exciting thing here would be to build a logistic system that could serve all people equally. Like that was the promise of automation and robotics being applied to this problem.

53:35 And so in 2019 when the US - I mean 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 teleresence and we need ways of delivering directly to customer homes faster or we need ways of meeting like home healthcare nurses where they are at.

54:05 And then we’re also hearing from big companies like Walmart which has been 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 Sweet Green or Mendocino Farms or Wendy’s and they also wanted to be able to do teleportation directly to customer homes.

54:35 And some of the biggest health systems like Cleveland Clinic in the US 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.

54:55 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, we can prove that it’s safe once you let us operate.” It’s the catch 22. Yeah, it’s a catch 22.

55:22 And so, Zipline had this big advantage, which is we had 40 or 50 million 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.

55:45 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 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 want to do.

56:18 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.

56:42 So, I think that, you know, maybe there was this narrative that like, oh, the FAA is going to 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 accelerating this.

57:10 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 at Zipline and there was just like this smile that came across his face and he’s like, you know, go right through no problem.

57:32 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 an entire like nation honestly by creating something that’s super valuable for a single person.

57:58 How do you think about just like kind of creating the right customer brand and like love for drones in general in your mind?

58:08 I mean, yeah. And by the way, you know, we’ve now expanded from Rwanda to Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, and then obviously the US and 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.

58:32 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.

59:00 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 51%. 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.

59:28 That’s incredible. Do you know how many like lives that’s saved? Like if you had to - many thousands. Yeah. I mean, we, you know, these other big studies like estimated that Zipline is saving about 17,000 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.

1:00:02 Yeah, 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 much more than that, you know. It is a necessity for the poor and instant delivery particularly is like a necessity.

1:00:28 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 economic perspective and from a healthcare perspective.

1:00:55 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.”

1:01:22 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 proved themselves.

1:01:52 And so I think there’s this very strong sense that this is not like an American company or an African company. It’s a global company. Yeah. And anybody in the company can rise super fast if they are extraordinarily talented.

1:02:12 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.

1:02:38 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? 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 30 times less likely to hit a cat than a human driver, you know?

1:03:05 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 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.

1:03:35 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.

1:04:05 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 Zipline. 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.

1:04:28 You know, when we launched in the US, we launched in Bentonville, Arkansas. And then we launched in Dallas. And we’re going to announce a lot of other metros that people don’t think of as like technology - the top place, but then you know San Francisco, New York, Boston, you know.

1:04:50 So anyway, I think that is the cool thing about this next generation AI and robotics technology is that 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 do it in partnership with regulators. You have to do in partnership with cities.

1:05:18 And that is going to 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.

1:05:45 Yeah. We are hitting new record numbers of deliveries practically every day. And if you just look at like platform 2 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.

1:06:10 And it made me realize when you’re getting into like thousands of deliveries a day, tens of thousands of deliveries a day, it’s like this is - even though it’s still a small scale compared to UPS or FedEx, this is something that is going to grow a lot and it is going to be completely normal for our neighborhoods.

1:06:35 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, the service right now has a net promoter score of 95, which I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a - Yeah, I mean normal delivery platforms actually have net promoter scores of like negative -10, -20.

1:07:02 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 opportunity and the scale of the market - like how much people want this is 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 ice cold and gross and doesn’t taste nearly as good.

1:07:35 But like you know even so these platforms have scaled to extraordinary scale. I mean, it’s definitely a testament to the operational knowhow and performance of those delivery platforms. But ultimately it seems very obvious that these systems need to be automated. Like we should not be using technology that’s 100 years old to solve a problem that like a brand new industry that we’ve only really understood in the last 5 or 10 years.

1:08:05 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 going to transform that and that’s the sort of simple idea that Zipline has been pursuing for 12 years.