Logistics today really only does a good job of serving the golden billion humans on Earth and one of the advantages of making it dramatically less expensive more broadly available is that basically you’ll be able to push a button on your phone it will be able to order whatever you need in 5 minutes or less how many uh drone deliveries have you done so far are you doing per day what what are some numbers there we just passed 80 million commercial autonomous miles it’s become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth I believe we’re now at about 1.1 million commercial autonomous deliveries when I look at what you’ve accomplished and we’ll dive into it um you pulled off really an extraordinary moonshot in Rwanda zip Line’s existence today has decreased maternal mortality rates by like yeah it’s 51% had you told me we were going to reduce maternal mortality in the country by 5% I would have said hell yeah everybody Welcome to moonshots today I’m going to be talking to an
[00:01:01] incredible moonshot entrepreneur Keller Clifton he’s the CEO of zipline zipline is an amazing company doing drone deliveries of Health Products they started in Rwanda delivering blood and vaccines today they’re doing a delivery every 60 seconds in eight different countries uh The Audacity Of of Keller’s vision and his execution is amazing we’re going to dive into the top six or seven lessons for moonshot entrepreneurs and today from a start in Rwanda where he had near-death experiences almost every day of his operations he’s over $4 billion in valuation incredible stories to be learned here if you like stories like this about moonshot entrepreneurs and learning about them subscribe so I can bring you even more all right let’s jump into our conversation with Keller Clifton hey Keller welcome to moonshots it’s great to see you buddy thanks Peter you too yeah uh listen first of all I loved visiting your Diggs in South San
[00:02:01] Francisco and I have to say I walk in just to describe the scene for folks and it is bustling I mean it is a beehive there are hundreds of people I think you’ve got like 1300 employees now they’re not all there in South San Francisco but hundreds of people crowded around desks building Hardware there are like uh displays every place with data about what’s being picked up and dropped off it was amazing it was palpable energy and I love that so well I’m really glad you got to visit in person and that is one of the things that’s special about zipline I think you know when you get talented passionate people together to work on um ambitious products sometimes magic results yeah I I think uh you know it’s what I miss postco uh we can talk more about having you know a a team in place so this is your 10y year anniversary um happy you know 10 years so an overnight success after 10 years of hard work I think
[00:03:00] that’s what it feels like yeah you know I I think the audience listening here all entrepreneurs excited about moonshots and when I look at what you’ve accomplished and we’ll dive into it um you’ve pulled off really an extraordinary moonshot and let me just start by asking you when you got zipline going a decade ago uh to set the scene here what what did you set the probability of success at I mean you know when we were starting to build zipline uh it seemed like the chances of success were less than 10% I remember a conversation with our team when we were 10 people um we were at a very hole in thewall Chinese restaurant celebrating we were having like you know our our annual holiday party 10 people it was it was when the whole company fit around one table in a restaurant and someone asked me that question like what do you think are the chances that we’ll succeed in building this I said well it’s definitely less than 5% I think people were quite shocked by that and disappointed they were like why why are
[00:04:00] we here and I remember saying yeah but it’s you know it’s it’s 5% of getting to build crucial infrastructure for Humanity like that’s such an important thing it’s totally worth trying to build this and and to hit the punch and hit the punchline for folks listening who don’t know zipline it’s now I think your last valuation was above $4 billion and how many uh drone deliveries are you have you done so far are you doing per day what what are some numbers there well I mean you know when we it’s crazy to think because when we launched in 2016 we were serving One hospital and we were doing a couple deliveries every day um eight years later zipline serves over 4,000 hospitals and health facilities globally it’s become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth we just passed 80 million commercial autonomous miles uh and I believe we’re now at about 1.1 million commercial autonomous deliveries that’s amazing from a 5% chance you know I
[00:05:01] think one of the one of the biggest questions uh I want to get through in this conversation here is the advice you have for people looking to take moonshots right because you know how do you how do you inspire a team when you’ve got probabilities against you and I’ve heard you say this I’ve heard it from a number of places you know Hardware is hard and what you’re doing is is not easy yeah I think that you know we had to keep two ideas in our mind at the same time one was that we had this very clear long-term Vision which is that we thought it was very likely that someone was going to build a robotic or automated logistic system for Earth the thing that really excited us about that vision is that you know if you could achieve that you could build the first logistic system that serves all people equally you will directly save millions of lives the majority of them kids it just seemed like such crucial infrastructure for Humanity to build on the other hand it’s really hard to get I think investors to to invest in
[00:06:00] something that is 10 years away and so it it’s really crucial for us to be very Scrappy and practical and Learn by doing and so we were really focused on what is the absolute most basic thing that we can get to work anywhere in the real world today that would have clear value for customers and for communities um and that’s really what led to us in 2016 to make this bizarr looking decision for a Silicon Valley startup to launch infrastructure in Rwanda so I want to get to that but I want to go in reverse order in our time machine so it’s 2024 now 10 years from now you’re 10 years old today 10 years from now 2034 we’re both we’re both trekkies right we both love trekkies and I love your description of uh of zipline as a teleportation company and it’s it’s a beautiful uh Vision 2034 what will zipline be doing give me a vision of what you imagine this possible a decade from now a kid’s born
[00:07:02] what do what’s different in the world for them I think a couple things I mean one is that you know the promise of truly instant and automated Logistics is that it will be 10 times as fast dramatically less expensive and it’ll be zero emission relative to the way that we deliver things today so the advantages are that it will be uh it will be used far more than we use Logistics today I think we’ll probably be receiving you know three or five instant deliveries a day if you’re a family living in a house uh we’re also going to transition this very carbon intensive part of the economy to a fully zero emission future and finally Logistics today really only does a good job of serving the golden billion humans on Earth and one of the advantages of making it dramatically less expensive more broadly available is that I actually think there’s an opportunity to extend
[00:08:00] very high Quality Logistics to every single human on earth which means people are going to have access you know tens of millions of people hundreds of millions of people are going to get access to healthare they’re going to get access to Economic Opportunity in ways that they just don’t today so in the future I’m going to you know I guess the world’s learned about Domino’s deliveries in 30 minutes and is it a future where my AI is just when I order something it’s deciding it’s going to get delivered by a drone or by some other means is this in every city in the world is this how how ubiquitous could it be yeah I’m pretty much at this point 100% sure that this will be in every city on earth and that it’ll be possible to do you know basically you’ll be able to push a button on your phone or more realistically probably just talk to your you know talk to your home AI yeah and um you know it will be able to order whatever you need in five minutes or less and I think I I think that a it’s
[00:09:00] quite provocative to think wow you know when we needed to when we used to need to send information we paid someone to like write we wrote a letter and then we paid someone to deliver it on Horseback now I just send you a text message or an email so there’s this the magic of what the internet did for how we move information making enabling information to move at near zero cost instantly to any person I think that same thing is going to happen with Logistics I think automated Logistics is going to make it possible to deliver packages in a way that is near zero cost and instantaneous um so yeah I I think it’s going to profoundly change how people live their lives I it might even change the way that we think about ownership how so well I mean I think you just need to own less stuff I mean I have tons and tons of stuff at my house that I only use like once a year maybe even less than that nice and if it’s easy to just teleport something to my house and then teleport it back you can imagine a pretty fundamentally different kind of sharing economy where we can actually have a lot less junk in our house in our
[00:10:00] houses but have access to vastly more things like only when we need them I love that and and my AI can anticipate what I need before I need it and get it here and it’s there and then set it back exactly so that’s 2034 today if you don’t mind I was super impressed by what I saw Logistics wise in um in sort of your uh uh drone design one and two can you describe what’s operational today um and then I want to go back to the origin so um people who’ve heard of zipline heard about your early Roots but you’ve got an incredible operation burgeoning in the US today so give me a sense of the scope of what you’ve got going and uh yeah I’d like to hear it yeah I mean in 2016 we launched this uh what we call our Enterprise delivery service um we started with one hospital and rapidly expanded across um hospitals Primary Care Facilities uh even some patient homes and then across different countries globally uh the service is
[00:11:02] quite simple it just means that any doctor or nurse at a hospital or Primary Care Facility mainly can push a button on a phone can order exactly what they need to serve a patient or save a patient’s life and then that product is packed and loaded at one of our distribution centers loaded onto uh one of the aircraft that you can see right behind me these are all aircraft waiting to go out and begin making deliveries um and then we we launch that aircraft from our distribution center vehicle flies autonomously to the GPS coordinates where it needs to deliver uh descends close to the ground and then delivers using a really simple paper parachute so honestly it’s a relatively simple service send a text message get what you need to serve a patient uh or save someone’s life uh it is way way faster than delivering things via traditional Logistics it’s a lot less expensive it’s also zero emission and interestingly delivering things instantly actually kind of transforms the way that you can think about doing Healthcare in a country because you can provide a lot of
[00:12:01] kinds of Health Care at a lower level of the health system that’s more cost effective close to where people live you can also store inventory centrally and then only send it when it’s actually needed which increases access and reduces waste I you know okay let’s start with in the beginning then so you’re you graduate Harvard uh you’re in the Robotics and you’re focused on early on sort of I would call it molecular nanotechnology you’re fascinated I mean and we we both have that love of the future of where longevity and biotech is going um we met each other at a at a friend’s biotech uh Summit uh a few months ago um how did you get from there to to robotics how did you get from there to uh to zipline I mean that was a a transition that was not expected yeah I mean you know I spent Underground building computers made of RNA and DNA
[00:13:01] that operate within human cells the idea was that we could build these molecular doctors that could compute inside cells and make complicated decisions and cure cancer as well as a lot of other diseases so you know I think the big takeaway is I’ve always been a nerd I’ve always been a you know massive fan of sci-fi it seems you know we need a reason to be excited when we wake up in the morning and for me that was always imagining a future that was radically different and better than the one we live in today when I graduated uh and I was starting to get really really interested this was in 2011 2012 when we were starting zipline it was pretty obvious to us that it was really the moment it became clear that every human on earth was going to have a smartphone MH and the scope the scale of the smartphone economy and the kinds of Hardware that was being commoditized and made very inexpensive it goes into smartphones I think one of the fundamental realizations we had was
[00:14:01] that there the the the slow progress of Robotics a lot of that was due to just Hardware being expensive and not very good and we realize that a lot of the components that go into a smartphone are the fundamental components that you need to make a good robot you know you need compute you need a good IMU you need GPS you need good Wi-Fi um all of these things were reaching a level of ubiquity that we felt you know instead of us going and working on smartphone app for example which it felt like everybody else was doing we thought that you know hey this is like an awesome time to go focus in robotics because we felt like there were just a lot of enabling foundations that had been built due to smartphones that were going to make it possible to finally go build robotic and autonomous systems um that would have a huge impact on the world this is the convergence argument right all these Technologies were converging to create new capabilities new business models back
[00:15:01] then yeah exactly and so um what happens next where where did the where did the you know the seed Crystal for zipline happen where were you what conversation were you having when did you know delivering blood in Rwanda become a a founding concept well we knew you know when we were starting to build this I it’s probably you know important to point out we spoke to so many experts in global public Healthcare and almost every expert told us that we were idiots and people told us like there is no chance you’re going to be able to build a vehicle that flies at all even if the vehicle flies you’ll never be able to make it reliable even if it were reliable you know in California you’re never going to design something that is actually going to work at scale and the kinds of environments that we have to operate in no customer will ever sign a contract with you you’ll never get regulatory approval for this even if you could do all those things it won’t be useful because Logistics isn’t the problem anyway so you know pretty spiriting this conversations this is
[00:16:01] where I put my phrase in the day before something is truly a breakthrough it’s a crazy idea right yeah I mean worse than crazy people were like offended by it and like you know I don’t know I think that you know a lot of people spend a lot of time I think I I think you know the way that you become an expert in a field in an industry over many decades is you see a lot of things fail and you learn what not to do and I think sometimes it does take someone to come along who is stupid and naive and just happens to believe like well why don’t we just do it in this completely different way you know and of course there are a hundred reasons that that thing won’t work um a lot you know I think what we were able to prove over many years of hard work is that those things can be solved with engineering yeah you know I was having this this the same conversation with John Mackey the founder of uh of Whole Foods who had no background in the grocery business and enters it naively right and like Elon
[00:17:00] had no b no background in the rocket business and enters it and I think that naive and that not knowing what you can’t do and then bringing engineering talent to the table is uh is the formulation for for real transformation yeah like I I saw this thing this picture the other day of like a big kind of inspirational looking banner and hanging in like a high school gymnasium and it says we do this not because it is easy but because we thought that it would be easy and and this is like the perfect description of zipline like had we known how hard it was going to be when we were getting started you know we may have we may have um we may have not ever done it to begin life yeah well in in 20 other universes you didn’t make it but in this one you did um yeah I guess so uh so were you planning originally time Success is Not gued Peter I I I I’m betting on you buddy I think you you’ve uh you’ve passed that now the question is can you you know dominate globally
[00:18:00] and I think you can I think an amazing team you have and the tech is beautiful but did you originally be think you were going to be doing the deliveries in the US I think we always knew that you know Logistics shouldn’t really discriminate I mean if you can build a logistics system that is significantly safer zero mission less expensive faster that’s something that every person should have access to we always knew that with any with any disruptive technology where you’re going to have to be working hand inand with a regulator it is easier to start in smaller more startup oriented countries we wanted to go to a country that was able to make decisions fast where we could meet immediately with the decision makers where they didn’t have a ton of like bureaucratic or legal blockers to them just making a decision and you know on that front I think we got quite lucky I mean Rwanda really wound up being the perfect partner for us there’s sort of known as you know the Singapore of Africa it’s incredibly forward leaning yeah a
[00:19:00] technocratic uh country really focused on building the future and so they wind up being the perfect partner for us on the Regulatory and government side to say well hey like we’d like to lead in this industry what are all the regulatory exemptions that need to be made or regulatory precedents that need to be set to enable this technology to show what’s possible you know I think that regulatory Arbitrage that you know you’ve played beautifully here is so important for moonshine shot engineers and moonshot entrepreneurs to think about you know when I was working on my asteroid Mining Company we ended up in Luxenberg and got the laws passed in Luxembourg for private ownership of asteroidal materials and um I’ve heard I mean you know we have uh different governments in South and Central America looking at you know cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin so I think where you go and start is uh is super important just doing it in your backyard in a highly regulated you know US economy is
[00:20:00] probably a really difficult thing to do so you go to Rwanda and and we knew we knew the US was important I don’t think zipline would have been able to you know raise the money from investors that was necessary to really build out all of the different infrastructure that was required to make this technology you know do what it does today in investors needed to kind of understand that regulatory Arbitrage argument as well and had to be able to make that leap of faith or that kind of logical leap to say oh well if you can get it to work in some of the hardest places to operate in the world then it’s very likely to also have a pretty big impact in the US once the US catches up from a regulatory perspective and that’s basically what we saw you now that we’re eight years in it’s basically what we’ve seen over the last two years everybody I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that’s very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love company is called Fountain life and it’s a company I I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very
[00:21:02] talented Physicians you know most of us don’t actually know what’s going on inside our body we’re all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side you go to the physician or the emergency room and they say listen I’m sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn’t start that morning it probably was a problem that’s been going on for some time but because we never look we don’t find find out so what we built at Fountain life was the world’s most advanced diagnostic Centers we have four across the us today and we’re building 20 around the world these centers give you a full body MRI a brain a brain vasculature an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque dexa scan a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup it’s the most advanced workup you’ll ever receive 150 gabt of data that then go to our AIS and
[00:22:00] our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it’s solvable you’re going to find out eventually you might as well find out when you can take action Fountain life also has an entire side of the Therapeutics we look around the world for the most Advanced Therapeutics that can add 10 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers so if this is of interest to you please go and check it out go to Fountain life.com back/ Peter when Tony and I wrote Our New York Times bestseller life force we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain life memberships if you go to Fountain life.com Peter we’ll put you to the top of the list really it’s something that is um for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family the CEOs of my companies my friends it’s a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespan go to fountainlife
[00:23:05] docomo back to our episode can you describe what was going on before you arrived in Rwanda what was the state of delivery how were things being delivered what was the you know the tragedies um and then where is it now give me that prein poost description understand the impact it might help to you know focus on a single commodity so we could talk about blood and then if you want I mean zipline also delivers massive numbers of vaccines and transfusions and infusions Cancer Treatments a lot of other things but just focusing on blood you know when we when I went I remember going and having this initial conversation with the minister of health of Rwanda in 2015 we went and spoke to her and basically went in being really excited you know young naive Engineers saying hey we have this awesome solution and we’re going to uh you know we’re going to use autonomous aircraft to deliver all medical products to every hospital and help with in the country and I remember
[00:24:00] so clearly her looking at me with this look of significant skepticism saying Keller shut up just do blood and as she started to explain to us uh you know 51% of transfusions in the country are going toward moms with postp hamran 30% are going to uh uh kids under the age of five with severe anemia and so this is a really important product for Family Health and it’s quite tricky because you have all these different components you have platelets plasma Crow precipitates packed red blood cells each of those has different storage requirements and different shell lives and then obviously have different types A B A and O positive and negative Rh factor and so what they were doing before is they had these Regional blood uh facilities think that there were four of them spread throughout the country and they would the entire country of Rwanda yeah the entire country they had four of these centers and it’s it’s a relatively small country of I think about 18 million people and uh they
[00:25:01] would you know do big blood drives they’d collect all the blood they’d send it to one centralized facility where they would test and type it and then they would distribute the blood to these Regional facilities and whenever there was an emergency occurring at a hospital a doctor or nurse would drive assuming it they didn’t just need the most basic blood products so the packed red blood cells of you know a uh unal donor positive yeah like a positive basically the most common unless it was the common component and the most common blood type you were probably needing to get into a car and drive a couple hours to this Regional uh facility where you’d wait in line fill out some paperwork get the blood you needed get back into your car drive back to the hospital I mean the challenge here is obvious a it’s really expensive and you need someone to do that b like four or five hours have elapse while a woman may be bleeding in child birth and it’s just you know um has a pretty big impact on patient health and sometimes you’re going to lose people are going to lose their
[00:26:00] lives uh during that weight and so and by the way this is Rwanda actually has one of the best blood Logistics systems of any country on earth like it Rivals the US um even in the US blood Logistics is a huge challenge really hard to make it work especially in rural places there’s significant waste um so it’s it don’t you know it’s actually important not to get confused at like oh gez like what a disaster it is there like it’s pretty much the same in the US and um we were able you know by by by listening to the minister of health because it’s incredibly smart that she told us to just focus on you know this in this one area to get started it wound up being you know plenty for us to bite off and chew for the first year it was a significant challenge just to deliver blood to 21 different hospitals and we ended up uh consolidating the national blood supply into two zipline distribution centers that we built and then delivering from those distribution centers only when a patient was having an emergency and needed something
[00:27:00] delivering from those distribution centers directly to hospitals uh where where a patient needed the product and delivery time at that point uh was you know significantly shorter it was anywhere from you know 10 to 40 minutes mhm and and I assume much more inexpensive and saving lives I remember um in Reading I think uh in Rwanda uh zip lines existence today has decreased maternal mortality rates by like 88% I think was the number yeah it’s 51% um according to the most recent numers by University of Pennsylvania um 51% reduction in maternal mortality across all the hospitals that we serve and you know when we started building zipline had you told me we were going to reduce maternal mortality in the country by 5% I would have said yeah hell yeah this is worth the next 10 years of our lives so you know I it’s kind of hard to put into words like we get to meet
[00:28:00] patients who are alive every day because of the infrastructure and the service and honestly I mean on one hand that’s inspiring on the other hand it’s a little distressing realizing that today zipline only provides service to about 45 million people and we think that probably there’s a moral imperative for every human on earth to have access to this kind of legistics can you take a moment and talk about you know um the startup mode because I think most entrepreneurs are way overly optimistic about how easy it is to get their product built and you know the whole ethos of getting to a minimally viable product and learning from actually building and I’ve heard you describe some of the lessons learned and again just speaking to sort of the you know entrepreneur who’s looking at at building anything um he talked to your sort of your early lessons Le learned and your MVP and what was hard that you
[00:29:01] didn’t think was hard and what was easy that you thought was hard give me some some sense of uh advice for folks there yeah I mean we could talk for an hour and a half about just that question but I guess I can share you know at a high level one thing that was true for us and I think is probably true to a certain degree for every single entrepreneur trying to build kind of a moonshop product maybe any product is that it will definitely be 10 times harder than you think it will be yeah uh it will be 10 times as expensive it will take 10 times as long it will be 10 times as difficult and I think it’s pretty important as we described like the naiv on one hand it’s useful not to know that because if you knew it you might not get started but I remember this conversation where Keen you know keen and my co-founder and I were kind of trying to think through what kind of Hardware we needed to build and we were considering building this far more advanced product that interestingly looks a lot like the product that zipline is just now launching into the real world 10 years later and but you know the more we talk
[00:30:02] to customers and we were really pushing customers on what would they pay us for it turned out that the customers we were talking to really only cared about two things they wanted to be as cheap as possible and they needed maximum range so that we could actually operate at national scale we could serve health facilities and hospitals that were quite far away and as we were thinking about it we kind of said well I mean if those are the only two things that really matter we should probably build a very simple fixed Wing platform um which you know this is the realization that led to the vehicle that you see right behind me on on the manufacturing line and which we call platform one and I remember this conversation with Keenan at the time where Keenan and I both basically said okay well the beautiful thing about that is we could knock that product out in six months like that’s a really easy thing and then six months later we’ll immediately get to the more advanced version of product well here we are a decade later still perfecting the six-month project that we thought was going to be so incredibly simple and and
[00:31:00] so on one hand it’s like it was really important that we choose something that seemed like it was going to be very easy to us because it wound up being 10 times harder but that was still doable whereas yeah had we chosen the harder and more ambitious thing we for sure would have failed and I think you see a lot of Hardware startups kind of fail in that mode I think the other you know important thing that was a big part of our DNA was just this attitude that we were pretty sure that we didn’t know what the heck we were doing like we you that we were clueless we weren’t clueless about the fact that we were clueless that’s the one thing we knew so I think that for that reason we did not trust any of our assumptions we spent very little time building in a bunker we had this assumption that we got to go out and try to sell the product from day one and so we were talking to customers getting doors slammed in our face like hundreds of doors slammed in our face um from day one learning okay what what is it about this that would be powerful enough that we get customers to take a bet on us um and we were lucky enough to
[00:32:01] find a few Partners who are willing to pay us and take a risk on us even when we were just you know a team of 15 nerds and then I think the the last point was we we knew we needed to be Scrappy and unfancy and get the product into the real world quickly and Learn by doing yeah and that meant we needed to go out and serve actual customers and ask those customers to pay us we didn’t want to do unpaid Pilots we didn’t want to do demos or exhibitions was like let’s just go start operating the service anywhere in the world and uh that was an incredibly painful experience K let me let me hit on something here because it’s something that I think a lot of especially I would say moonshot entrepreneurs get wrong is is the is they wait for revenue and they are building their company on fundraise after fundraise after fund raise you did something which I think is the absolute right way to do do it which is you know get something that earns you
[00:33:00] money immediately um and build from there how how critical is early revenue for uh for an entrepreneur trying to do something like this yeah I mean for us we would not have built the right product if we didn’t have that constant uh iteration I mean it’s it’s incredibly important even just for the team like for our entire engineering team at that time it sharpens the mind like nothing else to have a product that is operating in the real world that customers are depending on and then every night you know we would operate the Distribution Center all day long this is for the first nine months of operating and serving customers we had a single Distribution Center we’re supposed to serve 21 hospitals and actually for the first I think seven or eight months we only served One hospital because we were just trying to get the service to work correctly for that one Hospital from one distribution center and we would turn on the Distribution Center at 7: a.m. and they would just battle through it’s like
[00:34:00] trying to turn gears that have rocks in them and it doesn’t feel good there’s so many engineering challenges we had made a lot of mistakes in the design of the system we also had definitely underestimated the importance of all the auxiliary software systems around the actual aircraft can you can you talk to that one second because you know someone naively looking at what you did would think building the plane building the Drone would be the hard part yeah yeah that was what we thought and that wound up being wrong what was the hard part the hard part was designing a service that felt like teleportation for our customers that would be reliable M and what it you know I think we like probably most maybe nerds were trying to build Hardware or trying to build a product it’s very easy to get obsessed with the cool thing in front of you whether that’s an autonomous aircraft or you know a rocket or um an autonomous vehicle or anything but I think what what we realized is the aircraft itself
[00:35:02] is about 15% of the complexity of the solution we had to build all of this like none of our customers give a damn about drones that was like a core thing for us to realize all our customers care about is can they move a crucial product from point A to point B fast enough to save someone’s life or fast enough to create a really important Economic Opportunity and so designing a logistics service and experience that would feel magical and feel like teleportation and always be there whenever you needed it and be reliable 247 365 wound up depending you know 15% on the vehicle but 85% on all of the auxiliary systems you have to build so things like multi-vehicle deconfliction algorithms data logging pre-flight checks uh the software that we use to control our distribution centers make sure that we pack the right thing into the right box and it goes into the right aircraft uh unman traffic
[00:36:03] Management systems that we provided to our Regulators so they knew where we were at any given time and we could get access to the Aerospace at all the way we integrated with the national Healthcare systems that we were partnering with all the way down to like customer ordering interfaces all of these things had to be really good uh for the service to be useful and life-saving for customers how many near-death experiences did you have along the way I you know I would say for the first nine months it felt like every day was a near-death experience I think like the team was under no Illusions there were 25 between 25 and 40 of us probably during that period and some of us were living in Rwanda in person with you know keep in mind zipline is half American half African so we’re this fully integrated team um so you know there were some of us living in
[00:37:00] Rwanda working at those distribution centers working all day long and then you know if you were in the US you’d work on engineering problems all day long you’d go home and have dinner and then because of the time difference around the time you’re going to sleep was the time that the Rwanda Distribution Center was turning on and usually we get woken up at like 1:00 a.m. 2: a.m 3:00 a.m. something’s wrong we need to dig in to figure out how to unblock the distribution center and get you know get aircraft flying and it you know it was like that for n straight months uh and it was never clear the challenge in engineering with engineering problems is you can never see all of the engineering challenges ahead of you you can pretty much only see the one that is currently blocking you so that can be kind of demoralizing because you fight like heck to solve this problem and then you’re immediately move an inch and then you’re into the next problem and so it was just this incredibly difficult grind with the team being very sleep deprived and cranky and having no idea if we had you know two more months of Hell or 12 more months of
[00:38:00] Hell ahead of us I think the thing that really uh kept the team going through that period was that a we knew how important the impact of the service would be if we could get it to work and B our partner the government of Rwanda was super understanding and patient during that period realizing we were trying to do something for the first time in the world ever and they you know they kind of gave us the time and space that we needed to to um work through problems and get the system to the point where it was viable you know um I talk a lot about abundance my book and uh my abundance Summit and I I see zipline as an abundance enabling company um how do you think about that I mean I read your book I think it was in like 2011 or 2012 it was right before we built zipline um and as you know I’m a big treky I believe very deeply in that Vision I think that you know we stand at this
[00:39:00] interesting I think we stand at like a very interesting kind of precipice or Crossroads depending on how you think about it because it feels like you when you look at what technology is doing and what has become possible I me we’re living in the wealthiest healthiest happiest most democratic world that any human has ever lived in and I also think simultaneously we’re living in a world where we people are more negative about the future more hopeless I think the world is going in the wrong direction and broadly I think we just don’t we have to a certain degree lost like these clear optimistic Visions for how the future can be better yes and so I guess that’s how I think about it it seems we both paths are available to humanity and I think that it’s almost like whatever Vision we believe in is the one we’re going to manifest either we’re going to manif either we’re going to say we can build a better world and here’s the path to do so where we’re
[00:40:00] going to believe more of like you know the Hollywood I think the Hollywood vision for the future of like science bad technology bad um you know World becoming worse every year and everybody’s out to get you and everybody’s your enemy and that’s um seems crazy that that plays such a big role in you know politics and people’s worldviews and people’s attitude on how humanity is doing today but it seems really important yeah I I think I think I think you Blake buers and Brian Armstrong and I are having that conversation we need we need uh new stories that paint the positive Vision so people can believe you know Star Trek was amazing in that regard and we need a Resurgence of those positive these non- dystopian visions of the future I’m just so tired of uh of the crisis News Network and and Hollywood’s destruction of our hopeful future and so I mean I think the incentives are all wrong like all of the there’s this book factfulness which I assume you’ve read and just does
[00:41:00] a beautiful job of illustrating through this 13 question quiz that should be easy and people do terribly on like people do worse than monkeys so it would have been better if they just guess at random we’re biased yes and these are basic yeah these are basic questions about how humanity is doing and you know he gives this quiz even to groups of like Nobel prizewinning scientists and they get it wrong he gives it to Global Health experts these are people who definitely should know the answers to these questions and they do worse than random it really makes you realize we are not uninformed we are actively misinformed about how the world is doing and I think that’s you know it’s just super important um to to have access to the data about how humanity is doing in an objective way because the enlightenment is working reason science progress and humanism are worthwhile missions and we should stay you know we should stay on track and continue um believing in those things yeah I’m pushing datadriven
[00:42:02] optimism a lot because you can drive optimism with the data right so proof of abundance proof that the world is getting better not on every parameter but on almost all parameters in increasing access to energy literacy Health Care you know Communications intelligence um and yet people on the average like you said feel like the world is getting worse and um it’s it’s a bloody shame because as we’re getting faster and faster in the world uh we can’t go back to our default scarcity and pessimistic mindsets that’s the wrong place for us to face the future from yeah exactly exactly I mean please to you know to it does feel like so many shows that you watch on TV today are rooted in this like very negative dark cynical sarcastic I mean look you know
[00:43:00] succession which I watch and thought was hilarious but it’s like all about people who are terrible to each other and you know don’t like themselves and are you know um and have no real Mission I just I think like the new Star Trek that just came out I think it’s called um New Frontiers I watched the first couple episodes and man I cried after the first episode and it’s so nerdy to say this but I cried after the first episode because I’m like wow they’re such a great team you know and I I I know that that sounds really dorky but um there’s honestly like we yeah we need positive examples of people who are like Earnest and positive about the future and can work together and trust each other to build important things did you see the movie Oppenheimer if you did did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent billions on biod defense weapons the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their
[00:44:01] RNA well a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood now viome has a product that I’ve personally used for years called full body intelligence which collects a few drops of your blood spit and stool and can tell you so much about your health they’ve tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical Health guidance like what foods you should eat what foods you shouldn’t eat as well as your supplements and probiotics your biological age and other deep Health insights and the results of the recommendations are nothing short of Stellar you know as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine after just 6 months of following biomes recommendations members reported the following a 36% reduction in depression a 40% reduction in anxiety a 30% reduction in diabetes and a 48% reduction in IBS listen I’ve been using
[00:45:01] viome for 3 years I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities best of all viome is Affordable which is part of my mission to democratize health if you want to join me on this journey go to vi.com Peter I’ve asked navine Jane a friend of mine who’s the founder and CEO of viome to give my listeners a special discount you’ll find it at vom.com Peter I’m going to deviate from what’s been going on in Africa a second to talk about um building things that matter so one of the things I’m like you know on the on the podium and shouting from the rooftop is we don’t need another photo sharing app um you know talking to entrepreneurs you know build something that matters the world’s biggest problems or the world’s biggest business opportunities want to become a billionaire help a billion people can you speak to that because I mean you’ve obviously and you know Hardware is hard and and you dove
[00:46:02] in um and incredible what you’ve built what’s your inspiration for entrepreneurs who are trying to decide where do they invest their time their resources yeah I you know I think that I never want to necessarily be negative for things that maybe would be viewed as like more iterative or um I don’t know know less impactful I mean I think there are a lot of important companies to be built I think it depends what you want to build I think one of the shames though is that you do see so much of the top talent from engineering schools across the United States I think being lured by either like resume building instincts or compensation to go like let’s try to figure out how to get this search engine to make 0.00001% more Revenue every year and I think and then the crazy thing is that a lot of the industries that
[00:47:01] clearly really matter like energy or education or health care or Global health care or you I mean the list goes on and on I think uh you you just don’t re in in fact I mean Global public Healthcare there’s like basically no engineering Talent I’m sorry I mean it’s maybe perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration but not that much like I think there is relatively speaking yes yeah and and that’s kind of crazy to think about you’re like what’s the most important problem for Humanity to solve today I mean for sure one of those problems is that over the next 10 or 15 years we have an opportunity to end childhood malnutrition globally and child brain stunting and probably end extreme poverty globally if not end poverty like these are the the trend lines yeah the trend lines are all in the right
[00:48:01] direction but every year that they’re not accelerated is millions of lives exactly and the weird thing to think about is that today you could be like wow that seems like an really important problem who’s working on that it’s like oh like these nonprofits over here that are funded by you know us a and other kind of sovereign uh funders and it’s like they there’s very little technology very little engineering very entrepreneurship and like that is really sad for Humanity that’s bad for Humanity and so I think that one of the things that is clearest to me is there are so many Industries out there that are incredibly aifi and where people just don’t think that’s a place where you could build a startup or that’s not a place where like like really talented Engineers should focus I think often those are the most exciting places where you know Engineers
[00:49:00] can have a massive can find a massive lover to move the world and and um save lives make make make the world a better place where did you get your capital from early on because this is a crazy audacious project um how did you how did you fund it in in the first year was it individuals was it Venture Capital yeah I mean for the first year you know building zipline it was super scary and difficult it you know the idea just basically seemed stupid I think and a lot you know people are like okay you’re you know trying to build robots and you think you’re going to go launch these robots in subsaharan Africa and you’re going to get governments to pay you which by the way governments make terrible customers you know most investors don’t like inves everything stacked Revenue yeah yeah so idea just seems so stupid and I think that uh we talked to a lot of investors to
[00:50:00] raise a couple million dollars and every step along the way it felt like it could all fall apart at any moment it was so desperate um like I remember getting a call from this one angel investor who we were he was going to invest $50,000 but I remember this other bigger investor was had kind of told me well we’ll invest if so and so invests so like I get on the phone with so and so I’m talking to him he’s like well I’ve been thinking about it and I decided this could be really important for the world if if if it actually works so I’ll invest and I remember being like cool thanks bye and hanging up on him because I had started to cry you know like it’s pretty raw and pretty desperate and I don’t know if I would like wish that on my worst enemy I think that I think we just didn’t give up I I just think I think that message is so critically important you know I talk about having a massive transformative purpose something that keeps you going
[00:51:00] at 3:00 a.m. in the morning wakes you up the next morning and is just is going to keep you from giving up because that’s really it I mean I’m sure you had so many excuses in so many reasons that you could have just hung it up right um yeah I think that’s right and I mean but it helps like one of the problems with startups is you get you know you get you’re you get committed like that’s why n is important you get so committed and you’re like oh oh God we’ve gone too far to go back now we have to go for and that is kind of one of the feelings you know because at some point you’re just committed I remember you know 2016 when we’re launching and now we have hospitals that are depending on us and at that point we’re like okay well there’s no one going back now only way forward only way only direction is forward and we’re going to have to figure out all these problems and that’s basically what we spent the last eight years doing I love it so let’s let’s bring it from uh from the first hospital you served to
[00:52:02] today so let’s talk about Africa first what what are some of the numbers of the scale of your operations in in Africa yeah I mean today you know we operate in five countries in Africa three outside of Africa including the US um we deliver 75% of the national blood supply of Rwanda outside the capital city fully autonomously um and by delivering blood in this way we’ve been able to reduce blood waste by about 66% while increasing access to rare blood products by 75% so it turns out I mean it’s just enabling instant delivery particularly in healthare can be super impactful because it can reduce waste while increasing access normally those things you know are are uh you know they don’t move in lock step normally they they’re in ttention with one another because if you want to increase access send a lot more products to The Last Mile and then more stuff gets
[00:53:01] wasted in Ghana we Ghana was the first country where began delivering vaccines at scale over the last two years we’ve delivered over 16 million doses of vaccine including two million doses of covid-19 vaccine uh know when it comes to vaccine delivering in this way is it it’s much more cost effective um you can you can reduce missed vaccinations by 42% we’ve been able to reduce vaccine waste by 60% and in fact in in Ghana we were able to reduce zero dose children these are kids who never received their first vaccine by 23 percentage points across all the regions that we serve so yeah I I don’t know I I you know I mean I think based on all of these research studies that have been done across all these countries where we operate I think the estimate is something like 22,000 lives saved directly by this technology over the last two and a half years and I think it’s very hard to for us as
[00:54:03] humans to conceptualize that number it’s much easier to meet someone who’s alive like a single person who’s alive and be like wow you know that is a that is someone who is alot because of this technology and it’s pretty powerful and then you just have to multiply that by 22,000 um by a football stadium yeah um so you make a decision to enter the US how do you do that I mean so you’re operational in Rwanda and Ghana Nigeria Kenya things are are going well the system is working it’s scaling and you make a decision okay it’s time to come back to the US um but you’ve got a whole new regulatory structure and I know the FDA I’ve dealt with them on you know private space flight with the X prize and on zerog and my old saying the FAA was they’re not happy till you’re not happy um uh and it’s it’s a they’re you know I
[00:55:02] remember years ago when they said we want to have zero deaths as our as our objective in the fa which means the only way you get there is by just not flying and so it’s it’s a tough structure you know FDA and FAA are both very difficult uh you enter um how did you enter the US and talk a little bit about platform 2 yeah the you know in around in about 2021 so middle of the pandemic I think there were several things that were kind of all happening at once one thing was that we the service was scaling very fast in in Africa it was I think we had gone from this moment of like oh that’s an interesting experiment to whoa that’s now becoming Global infrastructure very very quickly and a lot of big Health Systems like Inner Mountain Healthcare MultiCare Cleveland Clinic many other were seeing that the technology was doing that saying we have the exact same
[00:56:01] challenges here in the US we want access to that technology I think when the pandemic hit that create created a um is permission for innovation in some of these health systems that otherwise would have maybe moved a little slower I think it kind of felt like wow things are changing so fast all of this is transitioning over to telepresence telepresence if you’re keeping patients at home dramatically increases the need for these kinds of logistic services and so I think there was just a willingness to try new things that that was part of that period and finally if I if I could just uh you know for entrepreneurs listening you know you get Uber and Airbnb started in 2008 um during you know the financial crisis then uh you know never let a disaster go to waste I think is the important lesson here during the time when when there’s a shakeup uh there’s opportunities for entrepreneurs to come in and that I think what happened as you’re describing in 2021 definitely you know I I think we
[00:57:01] we saw it was like oh wow there’s tons of demand we could launch immediately we ended up launching uh with nant uh uh the nant health system in North Carolina delivering covid products we got special FAA permissioned uh because of the pandemic and so it was just was this unique moment and then I think the third thing was that you know zipline at that time was probably passing 25 30 million commercial autonomous miles as I mentioned today were over 80 but we were getting to a level of flight data you know tens of millions of commercial autonomous miles and zero human safety incidents it was very valuable in terms of convincing the FAA this technology was ready for prime time yeah um yeah and I can you we can talk a little bit more about the relationship with the fa and how that’s changed over time um if helpful so um I mean it’s interesting for me that Health was the entry point as well in the United States versus getting your Slurpee or your uh your slice of pizza um because everybody sort
[00:58:02] of thinks of the large consumer Market but it was it was saving lives and I didn’t realize that the that the challenges in the US were at the same level and scale that you saw in distribution in Africa yeah and I I don’t mean to be I don’t mean to say mean these health systems are identical obviously they’re not the US has like private healthare so all these kind of like fragmented health systems all over the country um Africa primarily Public Health Care Systems run by ministries of Health but I think the difference is much less than the average person thinks like when you ask them kind of how these systems work you know really important to realize that a lot of the same challenges you have in Africa it’s like oh maternal mortality really big problem in Rwanda guess where else it’s a problem in the United States the US has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any developed country on Earth so you know the I think it’s just really important for us to not sometimes when we talk to people people sort of
[00:59:02] make assumptions about the US US healthare system that aren’t true there there are really significant challenges I me we have critical access hospitals in rural areas closing at a record rate um you know people who live in certain rural parts of the US over the last decade their life expectancy has actually declined yeah whereas you know life expectancy has obviously increased on average for Americans and so I think that uh you know we Face many of the many of the same challenges and a lot of the health systems that we work with in the US are ambitious and forward-looking and excited to use new technology to to address those inequalities and and those problems I want to talk about platform 2 Mark rooper did A A Beautiful video show on uh on you know teleportation sort to speak with uh with with uh platform 2 and it looks magical so platform one just to describe it to everybody again fixed wing it it launches on a catapult
[01:00:01] it’s flying how fast to get um about 110 kmers an hour and it’s flying over a GPS location uh and it’s sort of like just like we were kids we we’d throw something up in the air with a with a little parachute and it drops a parachute in somebody’s field or somebody’s parking lot um in Africa and it gets it there and people are waiting for it I assume are they tracking it on a phone on platform one yeah I mean uh exactly you basically send a text message or you order via our app um we receive it we confirm the order we tell you when the thing’s going to be delivered we can usually tell you within you know a 60 a couple minutes or a 60-second period when it’ll be delivered it’s then you know the vehicle arrives makes the delivery turns around heads back to the Distribution Center to get loaded with another package so by the way when it launches on the Catapult when it comes back how does it land yeah that is probably the hardest part to SC cribe of all of this you know we use a system that was inspired by aircraft carriers uh we have a 1 cm tail hook in
[01:01:04] fact ah it’s a little hard to see on the but it’s right here on this aircraft one cimeter tail hook on the back of the aircraft as the aircraft’s basically flying through the Distribution Center we have an actively controlled line that we basically um aircraft in the air it’s like an aircraft carrier and so it’s an arresting line um the vehic the line is controlling to the aircraft the aircraft is controlling to the line can basically uh catch that hook decelerate the aircraft it swings into space our operators can go take the vehicle put it back on the launcher put a new battery in it put a new package and have it launched a couple minutes later how many flights per day can a platform one do order magnitude I mean I think I’d have to go check I think today um on busy days we’re exceeding 2,000 flights a day wow that’s amazing it’s amazing Okay so so that’s that’s platform one but the accuracy of a of the parachute Landing is what like
[01:02:02] 5 10 m 20 M yeah you can kind of think about like three or four parking spaces I mean it works great for hospitals and primary care facilities and some kind of Enterprise customers or sites that we’re suring but the thing that we heard for the first six years that we operated this service was now what about home delivery what about home delivery it’s every customer we talked to it was so obvious that really the Holy Grail in this space was enabling teleportation from any building whether it’s a hospital Primary Care Facility or store or a warehouse or a restaurant we really wanted to do is just enable teleportation from any pre-existing building directly to homes in a way that was 10 times as fast half the cost and zero emission and that was really the vision that led to us start led us to start building platform 2 about um 3 and a half years ago we’re now 6 weeks away from from launching platform 2 with our first customer in the US amazing and and and describe platform 2 uh and uh you
[01:03:02] know I encourage people to you know check out a link below for some video of it but help us help us Envision it CU it’s pretty magical and and and and talk about let’s let’s actually start with I’m I’m a I’m a vendor I’m either a Walmart store or I’m a 7-Eleven or someone who I wants to Cleveland Clinic Cleveland Clinic so some some who wants to get something what’s it look like on my side and how does the system work so I’ve got something in my hand uh how heavy is it how big is it and how does it get to the person’s home yeah so you know say you’re like a large health system in the US and you say Hey you know we’ve seen telepresence visits increase 100xs during the pandemic and after the pandemic so we’re just doing you know we’re treating way way more patients at home home health care and Hospital at home are massive kind of growing Trends especially in US Healthcare and you know you might say oh
[01:04:02] wow I mean what we really need is the other half of the equation which is you can talk to a doctor then that doctor you can write you a prescription and she can tell you that prescription is going to be on your doorstep in five minutes or you know the health system can make a delivery to a community health care uh nurse who might a Home Healthcare Nurse who might be at your house trying to help you solve a problem without needing you to get admitted to a hospital um all of these kind of logistics use cases the idea the way we talk to customers is just that we will show up and install a magical sci-fi portal in the wall of your building and so if you’re like a Rick and Morty fan or a Stargate you know fan like these are shows that I love and so we really have this idea of just an actual magical portal in the wall so that any team member any Cleveland Clinic team member as you said any Walmart team member sweet Green Team Member these are all partners of zipline in the US they can uh get something loaded into a box it’s a pretty big box like think of
[01:05:01] it as a you know like a large is Amazon box you can put up to 8 pounds inside you walk up and you just pass the Box through the magical portal in the wall in fact we show and we call this the portal we designed it it’s part of the hardware of the system we actually uh once the package basically goes through the portal we it it’s then automatically loaded into an aircraft that aircraft can then automatically launch from the side of a building fly out to the home where it needs to make a delivery and then fly back and so the the goal here is really to design a system that is uh there are no humans in the loop other than the human who’s loading the package and when we show this uh loading experience to people at for example some of these leading Health Systems they’re often like oh we totally get it it’s just like our pneumatic tube systems in the hospital except now instead of shooting it somewhere else in the building now we’re torting it directly to the customer or patient’s home and it’s like yeah that’s a great way of thinking about it so really you know
[01:06:00] there’s a lot of technology that goes into the a lot of Technology on the back end necessary to make all of this work but we want the customer experience to be very very simple so platform 2 unlike platform platform one was uh fixed Wing alone and it was had to fly at velocity forward in order to stay aoft it was using the lift of the Wings platform 2 is using wings and it’s also using uh electric uh horizontal uh lift Motors yeah to in order to hover so give me a sense of um of the altitude it’s hovering at and how it delivers that as you call it dinner plate accuracy and that’s a great description right it’s accurately to within the radius of a dinner plate yeah um to build that overall customer experience you’re right we needed to move away from a system that was a pure fix wi vehicle because the fix wi vehicle required to build big distribution centers that were pretty expensive and you don’t always have room to do that what we really wanted was a
[01:07:01] system that can just install onto the wall of any pre-existing building so to do that we build docks that are just sort of you can almost think of it like an EV charger except instead of for a car this is an eeve charger for an aircraft the vehicle can come and dock onto the side of a building and we the platform 2 aircraft is a hybrid sometimes they’re called electric vertical takeoff and Landing hybrids which means that you hover like a helicopter and fly like an airplane so the vehicle can detach from the dock hover hover up to altitude fly on a fix Wing in a more efficient mode out to the GPS coordinates where it wants to make a delivery when it arrives there we actually hover at a relatively high altitude and very very quietly uh and then we lower something that we call a Droid and the Droid is basically being winched up and down by the main vehicle but the cool thing about a Droid is that uh it enables us to the Droid is controlling its position on X and Y AIS using computer vision and small thrusters and so that enables us no
[01:08:00] matter what the weather um no matter where we’re delivering we can always deliver with dinner plate level accuracy so the neat thing for the End customer relative to how we experience inant delivery today is that we can deliver to your front yard to your backyard for apartment buildings we may even deliver to a rooftop we can deliver hyper reliably and very consistently like we tell you the 60-second window uh that it’s going to be delivered and will always show up in that 60c window so actually I mean it also operates 24/7 there there are just a bunch of things actually about automated Logistics that are going to be way better that customers are really going to love and I think we don’t yet fully appreciate actually how much anxiety and annoyance and lack of reliability that we have to put up with with this kind of clu together so you’re going to spoil people for autonomous deliveries I I see you went with the Star Wars metaphor instead of the Star Trek metaphor on the Droid you didn’t consider you didn’t consider shutt Droid we’re looking
[01:09:00] for um so you’re you’re coming in what altitude you’re typically hovering uh above a home that you’re delivering to the vehicle hovers at 100 meters so 300t 100 met and and you have probably zero sound impact on the neighborhood at that point yeah what’s really cool you know zipline has I mean today zip Line’s now over 400 Engineers who own every part of the system from you know the electrical engineering so building the flight computer and all the avionics that runs on the aircraft to the firmware team that’s writing all the low-level code that uh that runs that avionics our mechanical engineering team building all the different structures and mechanisms that are required for the vehicle to fly you get the aircraft itself plus all the ground equipment docks infrastructure uh software owning everything from flight control algorithms so very you know low level to unman traffic Management Systems multi vehicle multiv vehicle deconfliction data loging Communications architecture customer ordering
[01:10:00] interfaces but we also have a really extraordinary aerodynamics team and a very specific Aero Acoustics team like zipline has a world class Engineers who have been focused for five plus years on just designing systems that can be quiet we think that it’s not good enough to just be 10 times faster than half the cost in zero Mission if you really annoy the crap out of people based on the way that it sounds like it has to be basically be better in every way and so we you know we do think that sound and the aeroacoustic profile of these kinds of vehicles are super important the way drones sound are terrible like everybody hates the sound the quadcopter it’s it’s really grading and terrible and so there’s a huge amount of work that goes into designing vehicles that are actually um they’re generally very very quiet and have different kinds of um harmonics and AER acous profiles so that um so that you basically can’t hear them and they’re um you know and and they
[01:11:02] just basically Fade Into the environment so and then obviously the other Advantage is just staying far away from the homes that we’re delivering to yeah so you’re 100 meters above you you drop the Droid on a line it is coming down and even if there’s a crosswind it’s correcting for that crosswind it’s coming in using image pattern recognition I assume that the consumer has selected someplace on a digital map that is clear that that zip lines approved yes your backyard looks like a good place we can we can land it or your rooftop or whatever right yeah it’s really cool it’s really simple when you’re signing up for the service you just type in your address we show you a satellite image of your home and then you just click where you want your mailbox to be and if in fact uh you know the com the H the household dog or the three-year-old kid grabs onto the zipline line um the Droid gets get released and gets recovered in some other fashion or the the consumer
[01:12:00] gets charged for that yeah I mean um the Droid will act pretty shy it has cameras pointing at the ground so if there’s like someone if there’s like a kid waiting there to grab it and grapple it the Droid is just going to be shy and you’ll get a notification the app saying please like give us some give us some room yeah but um you know but yeah in the worst case scenario if someone were to like you know if someone were to try to be tamper with the system and like try to come out of nowhere and um grab it and we can always leave a joy behind it’s not ideal um but uh unfortunately that that just means we can’t like deliver to that location again so I I don’t actually think it’s going to be much we’ll have to see I don’t think so either but I’m just you know you got to ask It’s Curious um one of the things you did which I found amazing was using uh Acoustics to identify aircraft right so people think that you know it’s going to be hard to you know there’s traffic up there other airplanes and so forth but you’ve done something brilliant um can
[01:13:01] you explain it yeah I mean you know one of the key one of the key kind of Holy Grail regulatory Milestones that we needed to get was the ability to fly Beyond Visual and a sight particularly in the US yeah and flying Beyond visual in a sight means you need to have a detect and avoid technology that gives the FAA confidence that we are going to deconflict from other airplanes in the airspace make sure we’re not going to hit hit things other things that are in the air and the zipline ended up basically having to build from scratch many different layers of technology that kind of all Stack Up stack on top of each other to achieve the overall level of safety that we needed to achieve so you know we have uh cameras on the vehicle um we have a microphone array that connects to a powerful neural net so that we can actually passively listen for other aircraft and avoid them that way uh we provide un man traffic Management Systems to Regulators so they can track where we are we also have adsb transponders this is kind of a very
[01:14:01] specific kind of sensor that most airplanes have um that are basically constantly communicating to other aircraft in the airspace where you are and where they are um and then finally we have other kind of deconfliction layers one of the big things is that we fly below the commercial Aviation floor in the United States so there is zero chance that zipline is flying in an air if you’re flying on a commercial jet for example there’s zero chance that zipline is we don’t interact with it’s completely segregated airspace so you don’t have to worry um on that front like you know we worry more about crop dusters hot air balloons um you know pilots flying Cessnas suicidally low to the ground and where they shouldn’t be like those are more of the things that are kind of concerns for us and for the FAA real quick I’ve been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin truth is I use a lotion every every morning and every night religiously called one skin it was developed by four PhD women who
[01:15:01] determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a cytic that kills scile cells in your skin and this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it’s one of the most incredible products I use it all the time uh if you’re interested check out the show notes I’ve asked my team to link to it below all right let’s get back to the episode Walmart um and your current hospital system you’re operational now with with platform one we launch yeah we launched Platform One in the US in Bentonville and in Salt Lake City uh about two years ago and it’s been quite shocking to see the level of customer demand and customer excitement I without going into details I mean customers are ordering more often than people than Amazon Prime subscribers use Amazon Prime h so it’s like I mean it’s quite shocking and I I thought oh well maybe people will like order for the first few
[01:16:01] weeks because it’s really cool and sci-fi but then you know you’ll see like a tapering off or something we’ve seen the opposite of that like people you know once people experience Logistics that works around their schedule rather than vice versa like constantly expecting people to inconvenience themselves or be home at this specific time or like you come home to the annoying FedEx sticker on your door like sorry we missed you call this phone number and stay on hold for 30 minutes and then we won’t have your package anyway um it’s just you know it’s pretty profound seeing I mean when people can experience a logistic system that is super reliable super fast and where you don’t have the guilt you know it’s like zero emission U people use it a lot like a lot a lot in fact the data that we’ve seen over the last two years would kind of indicate that so this year there will be about four and a half billion instant deliveries done in the US that’s just instant deliveries that’s just using a 4,000 gas combustion vehicle to deliver a package to a home that weighs on average 5 PBS of course
[01:17:00] that vehicle is driven by a human I think what we’re realizing is that if you can design a logistic system that is 10 times faster than half the cost and zero emission customer demand is actually probably more than 10 times that I I agree with you um and because you know you need something in the moment and you don’t want it you don’t want it tomorrow you want it in the moment so I mean I here’s the question right so Amazon you know I remember Bezos announcing Amazon Prime air you know and so why isn’t Amazon and FedEx and Uber and everybody else just trying to buy you right now I mean it would it would seem like you’re the next you’re you are you are Netflix to Blockbuster I mean you really are you’re you’re packet switched uh packages um you know I think I mean zipline doesn’t spend a ton of time thinking I mean you know had we when we started building zipline in 2013 um you know the I mean Jeff Bezos
[01:18:02] was on 60 Minutes saying that Amazon was going to be Dr doing drone delivery to every home in the next two or three years so had we spent a lot of time thinking about what our customers were what our competitors were saying or doing we probably would have been freaked out and we never would have tried at all and you know today zipline is something like 10 or 20 times the scale of the entire rest of the industry com mind um so I think you know my takeaway was it was just really us spending a lot of time worrying about what um other companies were working on wasn’t nearly as important as us just spending time figuring out who were customers who we could create a ton of value for how could we get something into the real world as quickly as possible and then just iterate by doing and I think that you know a lot of other companies have tried to build drone delivery and it’s obviously you know a lot of them have um not had the same success and I think I think a big part of it was just willing to be unfancy and Scrappy and operate in the real world as fast as possible and Learn by doing can we take
[01:19:02] this home for again someone who’s wanting to do something big and bold they got the message that you know an entrepreneur today and and this is for me one of the most important messages it’s I call it 10 to the 9th plus thinking that a single individual or team can build something that can possibly impact the lives of a billion people right it never was possible you know if you the the king and the queen or the robber baron before the best you could do was millions of people you know and but today you can you can really do something at scale um what I heard you say and I just want to just just count these off because I think they’re really important um key points number one um going after something big and bold you need to have the passion that’s going to keep you through those just constant near-death experiences um how about the people you employ to be
[01:20:00] part of that Journey with you how do you find the right people who are willing to take that 5% chance Journey with you because that’s got to be somewhat difficult I think you know before we even talking about team I do think that there is some good news or just something I’ve been thinking about over the last couple weeks which is I was kind of reflecting on when I moved to the Bay Area after college and we were building zip lines this is like 2011 2012 2013 I remember having this very distinct feeling when I moved to the Bay Area which was there was this one company that was by far like the most exciting company in Silicon Valley it had all of the best Engineers they had amazing talent they had grown super fast uh they had all the best investors it was in my understanding The Pinnacle of what you could achieve and it was Dropbox drop box you know yeah which in you know in reflection I mean and obviously Dropbox is an incredible
[01:21:00] company in reflection it’s like a file sharing company you know and when you look just 12 years later it is quite amazing to think we are now building you know we’re building Starship to make life multiplanetary you know you and I met at an event you know for new limit this amazing company working on extending human uh reprogramming yeah people are building DNA computers people are building nuclear fusion reactors build automated logistics for earth like I mean the list goes on uh you know you’re working on asteroid mining I I think that open AI uh the scope and scale of human ambition in just a single decade has expanded by several orders of magnitude and I think that’s like quite profound and very exciting for Humanity and you know when it comes to the team I mean we made you we made every mistake in the book but I think that we needed to hire people who um deeply believed in
[01:22:01] the vision and the mission and we willing to uh go through tons and tons of pain and chaos and crap um for many years to really get the system working at all I guess the last thought I’ll just share on team is that like the biggest lesson we learned over the last decade is that it’s always you know emphasize innate characteristics over specific experience like whenever we hired for a very specific experience we thought someone had something cool on their resume we often end up regretting it whereas whenever we really focus on innate characteristics which in Ziplines cases you we look for practical problem solvers fast Learners low ego Mission driven if we can just find people who have those four things it’s like almost impossible for them to fail inside the company you know I I when you were just saying what you’re were saying I I the first the chapter one of the book I’m read with Steven Cotler which is the follow on to abundance called age of abundance and the chapter is titled our
[01:23:00] ancestors would would view us as Gods right I mean it it really truly I mean what we have and what we do today is is Godlike you know with a small G compared to you know a century or centuries ago um another lesson I heard you talk about was uh going for early Revenue um and that’s think that’s one of the most important things and one of the big mistakes people go they say we’re going to be uh raising raising raising and fund it and eventually we’ll we’ll get to a revenue product yeah I mean I think that maybe you know this one’s pretty simple I think sales is an important function of a company and I think maybe we got a little too fancy and especially during you know 2021 during that kind of craziness people started to think that sales and revenue weren’t that important and even for hard tech companies I think it’s super important to be figuring out what can you sell today it’s not that useful to
[01:24:01] ask customers what they want if the customers aren’t putting money on the table if they aren’t putting money on the table then you can’t really trust what they’re saying in my opinion like if they’re like oh I love the product it’s really cool you’re like oh great I mean they said it’s really cool you’re like okay will you pay me a million dollars for it well I don’t think it’s really in our budget you know it’s like they in lies the learning like what would have to change about the budget to get someone to buy it and and so it’s like the reason that sales was so super important even from year one like we knew we needed to build a world class engineering team but we never wanted to underestimate the importance from a sales perspective of um of like learning from customers and getting a lot of doors slammed in our face so that we could really iterate the value proposition of the product that we were building it was it was very very important learning next one for me was build and break it right getting learning by doing right I mean that seemed like a really important
[01:25:00] growth curve for you yeah I mean it was so important that we moved out we had this little office in this like motorcycle um dealership in San Francisco and we ended up uh closing that office and moving the entire team to a construction trailer on a farm in halfon Bay um where zipline still operates today by the way and the reason that was important is that it gave us the ability to do engineering manufacturing and flight operations all in the same place so we would build something we would we wouldn’t try to guess what would work we would just say great if we’re pretty confident let’s let’s go fly it I think it’s very similar to the way that you see SpaceX iterating on Starship today it’s like actually takes leadership there a lot there are a lot of reasons say no no no no no don’t fly it yet don’t fly it like we need more time we need to perfect it but you know it kind of takes a very determined leader and Engineering mindset to be like we’re going to go fight and sometimes you know under test
[01:26:00] circumstances on that farm we would crash and that was really hard for the team and we have to go up pick up the pieces root cause it go back into you know try to make whatever engineering changes were necessary make those modifications to the fleet in the manufacturing uh site and then go launch an aircraft the next day and and it’s it’s like that iterative kind of rubber meeting the road engaging with reality process that in my opinion is it’s a core part of world class engineering teams yeah I I just I was visiting the same day I think I visited you I went to go see Brett atock at at figure and again same thing just you know test build break over and over and over again um and I saw that at your San Francisco site you had that you know netted area in the backyard where you’re you were doing uh testing so I think the proximity of all those elements together the the next thing I heard you say and and was core to your startup was the geographic Arbitrage um uh finding a
[01:27:02] permissive environment and I think a lot of Technologies whether it’s biomedical um and crypto and you know humanoid robots and all of these things uh if you find the right geography uh you can accelerate your learning very quickly yeah and in fact I think a lot of the most important ideas and maybe the most important ideas that people haven’t touched yet or built yet are in regulatory in regulated areas or in you know and possibly in highly regulated areas in the US like healthcare or like Aerospace or like education and I think you know it was a very powerful approach to say we don’t need every country to approve this we only need a single country to approve this and then once we have that country then we only need the next country to approve it you know it’s like taking that step like one by one um was very
[01:28:02] powerful because countries are going to move at different speeds and also countries have different kind of balances between like Risk tolerance and desire to be an innovator and a leader in an industry and so you know we were able to achieve significant International scale um which then got us to the point where we had the necessary flight data to then come back and launch in bigger um economies like the United States and I think that that’s that’s pretty natural and there are a lot of other instances whether it’s energy or education or healthare um I think we’re going to see this I think we see this in in the longevity world I think you know there’s going to be risky prolongevity Health span extending treatments that are going to be a while to get through the FDA and we already see Medical ISM and if it’s approved in some nation and and you are fully disclosed and want to take the
[01:29:01] risk right I think that is another area but I agree with you because a lot of a lot of companies use regulation as their shield for competition against competition that is a subject that we could talk about for a long time that I have strong opinions on you know I do think that perhaps Americans in general like we spend so so much time in politics for example or so much of like the country is focused on these kind of political hot button issues without realizing how how many of our challenges can be traced back to regulation you know there are I mean just as an example the you know um NEPA for example so the you know Environmental Protection or you know the the um Environmental Protection act which I think was passed under Reagan or no sorry I think it was passed under Nixon has become
[01:30:00] this regul regulatory body it has prevented there are something like 20 billion dollar worth of green energy projects in the United States that cannot be built because they are stuck in the courts because it takes 10 years for us to approve something like a solar farm or a wind farm it’s kind of a really sad statement on how you you know we have certain intentions when we pass regulations but there’s actually no like checking function as to whether the regulation is being used to achieve the outcome that the politician wanted and there are many examples where sadly the exact opposite of the desired effect is achieved I think another example is you know people look at a lot of the safety problems that Boeing has had over the last couple years and you know so much of that stems to like well where is the competition for Boeing like why did we get ourselves into a position where it is literally a monop in the United
[01:31:02] States and that has a lot to do with regulatory Frameworks that make it so incredibly expensive that startups cannot compete or build new products and by the way you know you want to know how this works for I think something like 60 years Boeing’s headquarters were in Everett Washington which is where engineering was located I might get these dates a little bit wrong I think in something like 1990 Boeing’s headquarters moves to Chicago to Chicago because the company gets really focused on financial engineering and then I think it was like around 2010 that Boeing actually moved its headquarters to Washington DC and so you know actually pretty clear yes where is the Innovation occurring um well that’s your answer to like the Innovation is occurring in Washington DC around creating new regulation that’s going to favor incumbents and and prevent startups and more like little Tech from creating you know safer products more reliable products less expensive products that’s that is insane um is
[01:32:01] there another core learning in your mind uh for the person who wants to do something extraordinary um I’m I’m you know I I do believe having a massive transformative purpose and a moonshot right like providing instant access to health care at scale globally um is is so it’s been your your driving emotional energy yeah yeah I mean it it has been and uh even to this day you know no one at zipline is breathing a sigh of relief in fact I mean the team is working you know possibly in a more hardcore mode than ever um we have a huge number of customer contracts for this next Generation product and that ranges from you know governments in Africa that are relying on us to a lot of the leading Healthcare institutions in the US like Cleveland Clinic and in Mountain Healthcare Memorial Herman Michigan
[01:33:00] medicine many many others um and then some of the biggest country companies in the world like Walmart who are also relying on us and so I guess one you know one thought is like it only gets harder and even at this scale um no one at zipline assumes that we will be successful or feels like we’re on the downhill um I think that I’m trying to think about like you know the the lessons about that that wouldn’t sound trit because I think a lot of the trit things are true which is that um you know you have to choose a mission that is important enough that you’ll be willing to chew glass for a long time because a lot of it is way less fun than it sounds it is not fancy is often very painful everything that can go wrong will go wrong you know um I was talking to Brian chesy at Airbnb and he once told me this thing I was ask him advice about like you know hiring and promoting leaders and he he told me everyone you love will leave you that was his advice which I I can’t
[01:34:02] say it was super inspiring advice to get from someone who’s you know four or five years ahead of you and um I don’t know so you know it’s very painful and often very dark and so I think it means you got to be working on something that is is worth it and lonely there are many times at 3:00 a.m. in the morning where you have to look yourself in the mirror and pick yourself up off the ground and remember why you’re doing this yeah and unless you’ve got that deep emotional drive right that I I call it my my massive transformative purposes my North Star that when everything gets really cloudy and difficult I can remember that and pick it up the next day but I can say I guess like one you know one Coral area is that and I’ve gotten to you know see the things that zipline has gone through and also you been gotten to be an observer to many many other startup efforts over the last decade and I do think it’s surprising the degree to which the cause of death is usually just
[01:35:02] giving up yeah I I I like it’s probably 80% and and so it is kind of like if someone is just so freaking stubborn and messed up in the head that they actually just won’t give up no matter how painful it is and no matter how dark it seems and again like there was a moment where you know in zip lines history where I went and met with our you know senior most board member and he said so is this how you thought it would end like he had fully written off zipline he was like it’s definitely dead wow and um you have to hold on to that memory you have to hold on to that memory that memory yeah I’ll never forget it and I think you know or there other I mean you know people it’s like co-founder drama or like the team falls apart or people give up or people lose hope but yeah I think it’s like it’s very surprising that you know I think stubbornness and hardheadedness are are
[01:36:02] important and if you just actually will not allow um you know you will not allow the company to give up you will not allow the team to give up it’s kind of amazing you can you will eventually iterate your way and you’re listen to customers because again I guess the other danger is like you’re just in the middle like building something actually doesn’t make sense or isn’t useful but um and you have the right smart people on the team to actually Implement what the customers are saying you know Bill gross did an interesting study once in which he looked at you know 50 companies that succeeded and 50 companies that failed and what was the attribute of the success over the failure and timing was one of them right you were there at the right time you know uh SpaceX was there after the space shuttle was shut down and it got a contract just on the on the edge of Elon you know out of money and um I think good good luck comes from lasting Lang long enough to intercept yeah exactly yeah I think a
[01:37:00] lot of it is like the other thing I guess the other thing that sometimes I think about is that you know if you’re graduating from college today you’re 22 years old I mean when I was 22 I was completely clueless you know and and so I would not have had very good chance going and competing with people this is at least my logic like I wouldn’t have a very good chance of going and competing with people who are already experts at doing something that was well understood MH so instead I kind of had this thought of like well you know if we’re all living in this little city I will leave the city and go out onto the frontier and find land that I think will be valuable in the future and I’ll spend a lot of time becoming an expert in something that people don’t know anything about I think that’s like a really powerful model for young you know engineering Talent OR entrepreneurial Talent who are thinking about new things if all you do is like run to whatever the hype train is focused on that month yeah you’re always way way way behind like that’s just not a good way of
[01:38:00] building something valuable I think the key is you got to have your own unique vision for the future and have your own conviction in in and an idea or technology or a kind of product that would be valuable and it’s actually way better if you can go out and have a couple years on your own becoming an actual expert and creating you know value and technology and creating a team and then you kind of want the world to catch up to you know two four five years later and obviously you know one of the challenges is people chasing hype and just constantly working on something two years or five years too late the other thing is like you could go out into the middle of nowhere and work on something that winds up not being important and like the world never comes to where you are or or you’re just 10 years too early or 5 years too early right this as bad as being too late it really is it is timing and you you iterate closer in on timing by listening to the customer yes what you what you said yeah and uh again the number of number of entrepreneurs who have been extraordinary successful
[01:39:01] in disrupting an industry that had no background in the industry because they didn’t know what they couldn’t do I love that story I think it’s required yeah very rare that you find someone who like Works in an industry for 30 you know 20 years and then goes and starts a startup that disrupts the industry it happens but I think it’s less common amazing um Keller I I have to say I love what you’re doing I love the energy of your team uh God bless it’s uh uh you’re you’re having impact on a scale that few entrepreneurs have known and and thank you thank you for doing it um you know if you’re interested by the way in uh you can go to flyzipline up early uh for their platform to service go to flyzipline decomg get H hyphen delivery um I’m
[01:40:04] going to do it I’m in La hopefully you’ll be here not too distant future I just came back from a week in India God knows they can use you there um it’s uh but you know I think it’s hard to compete with bicycle delivery but uh it’s needed everywhere any place I’ll St should look for you where are you on social media ker yeah I think you know follow zipline on X that’s a really cool way to just kind of follow dayby day engineering progress and we try to share a lot of raw information on there so if an engineering you know if a test flight works you’ll see it if a test flight doesn’t work you’ll see that too um so it’s a great way to kind of just follow along and um yeah I mean you know thanks for having us on it’s it’s an honor and you know much work remains thank you buddy I’m excited to come visit you again and to and to learn more
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