Delivering the future in drones with Keller Rinaudo Cliffton of Zipline

Keller Rinaudo Cliffton thinks we’re already experiencing the technology of tomorrow, just that it’s not evenly distributed... About a decade ago, Keller transformed his smartphone robot company into Zipline, which today orchestrates on-demand drone deliveries all over the world. Zipline got its start delivering critical medical supplies to hospitals in Rwanda: a testament to Keller’s belief that innovation is already improving lives outside the U. S. This week on How I Built This Lab, Keller recounts the ongoing and often challenging development of Zipline’s delivery drones. Plus, how Zipline is now chasing the commercial market, and could soon be delivering packages from stores like Walmart within an hour of a customer clicking “purchase.” This episode was produced by Carla Esteves and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Josh Newell. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

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• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobilefuels.com for details. Welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So most people who live in cities have relatively easy access to emergency medicine, and most hospitals in cities can get the supplies they need quickly. But in rural areas with fewer roads or with challenging terrain, it's a different story. In some parts of the world, it can take an entire day to get medicine or blood plasma to a distant medical facility. So a few years ago, an entrepreneur named Keller Renato Clifton decided to take on this challenge, and he's doing it with drones.

• 5:48Guy Raz?

  Drones that are delivering critical supplies to hospitals in remote areas around the world. But before Keller launched ZipLine, he started another business called Remotive, a robotics business that would eventually pivot into drones. The company basically built an application on an iPhone that turned it into a mini robot.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  The more we saw smartphones scaling, the more we felt like, hey, a lot of the components and supply chains behind these phones are going to enable a new kind of robotics company to be built. And so, we were asking ourselves, what would the Apple of robotics look like? Is there an opportunity here to build, really, the first global robotics company? And so, we didn't have much money. My co-founders and I, we were all unemployed, which is a great motivation for entrepreneurship. And we started building these little, we called them smartphone robots, and they literally used an iPhone as the brain of the robot. You would connect an iPhone to the robot, and it could run around on the floor and do telepresence.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  And that was the first thing that we started selling as a company.

• 6:58Guy Raz?

  And just to describe them, for people who don't know what they look like, they're sort of like, it was like a translucent, plastic platform with like, a motorized track wheel on each side. So it would sort of look like, it looks like a toy, but you would mount the iPhone vertically on it, like you would do on one of those speakers that you find in hotel rooms. And that would, essentially, would turn into like, a little robot, like, with a smiley face.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:24Guy Raz?

  On the screen, on the iPhone screen.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. We started selling them, we didn't have product market fit figured out, I wouldn't say. It was half a toy, half a telepresence solution, half a way of teaching kids to program. I think we were circling around this intuition, that it was a good time to be building a robotics company, that new things were possible. And also, we needed something that we could sell in a month or two, because, again, we had no credibility, no investor was going to give us money. And so, we needed to be able to build and sell a very simple product, very fast, if we wanted to keep the company alive. And so, that was the very first thing that we ever built.

• 8:02Guy Raz?

  All right. So, the idea was to build this into something, of course, bigger. And I guess, you got in touch with the late Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, who was on our show many years ago, an incredible person, incredible entrepreneur. But you had read his book. And you got in touch with him. Why? Tell me the story.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Tony was someone who super inspired me. When I graduated from college, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And frankly, you know, school didn't do much to teach you about entrepreneurship. It wasn't even really. It was never clear to me that that was actually an option, like something that you can do. And when I read Delivering Happiness, Tony's book about building Zappos, it totally blew my mind. It was also inspiring because Tony had gone to the same school and in fact had lived in the same dorm that I lived in. And so he was just 10 years ahead of me. And so when I was in Las Vegas, I emailed him and said, hey, I'm here. I am deeply inspired by your book and we're building this robotics company and I want to meet. And I think this is one of the things that's special about Tony and maybe also just special about

• 9:08Speaker 01

  certain circles of technology entrepreneurs, which is someone like Tony was happy to meet me, even though I was a nobody.

• 9:16Guy Raz?

  He was so impressed with these robot iPhones or these iPhones mounted on these robotic platforms, like instantly when you showed it to him?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  I don't know if anybody could have been that impressed by what we were building. It wasn't very impressive on its face, I don't think. Perhaps, you know, I think maybe he believed more in us. We were very nerdy. We were very hopeful. We were certainly very naive. So I think maybe he was interested in the bigger vision of trying to build a new kind of robotics company. And he was willing to take a bet on three nerds who had no credibility and no money.

• 9:56Guy Raz?

  He made an investment and you guys, as you say, you set up shop in Las Vegas. And the project lasted, I think, a little over, about three years. And I guess you sort of wound it down. But what happened? Did you come to sort of a, I mean, Did you come to a realization that maybe this wasn't wasn't going to work?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  That exact same company is what became ZipLine. So we actually, you know, we didn't, we didn't necessarily wind it down. We did kind of, over the course of a year, we realized that, you know, building a new kind of robotics company meant that we had to focus on a really big, bold vision. And, and I also kind of realized we did not want to focus on operating in the home. We wanted to focus on a more controlled environment and something where automation would just be a more natural fit. And that's sort of the reason we became obsessed with logistics.

• 10:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  But, you know, the crazy thing is that that same company that Tony invested in 12 years later has now become ZipLine.

• 10:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, all right, so initially it started out as like, let's use the iPhone to be the brains of a little toy robot. But what, I mean, you sort of came to this, this realization that maybe you need to focus on something like, as you say, like logistics, something that, that could have a larger impact and where there could be a bigger market. And when you were thinking of logistics, were you initially thinking, maybe we can create robots that can deliver things or that can work in a warehouse or something like that?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  I think there was, there were a couple aha moments. You know, one is that I met a guy named Mick who had founded a company called Kiva. And probably most people won't know what Kiva Robotics, but they had just been acquired by Amazon and they built these amazing orange robots that could run around inside a warehouse and basically go to a shelf, pick up the shelf and then bring it to a human packer to pack something into a box. And if you saw one of those warehouses, you would see all of these autonomous orange robots just running all over the place, moving things. And I remember seeing that thinking, wow, what an incredible company. And somebody is going to build that for outside the warehouse. And whoever builds that, I just remember thinking, that is going to be a world-changing company.

• 12:14Guy Raz?

  All right, so it's around 2014 and you're kind of trying to figure out what is, what can I do in this area of logistics? You know that you sort of have, have some experience with robotics. How did you get to drones, to, to aircraft?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  I mean, our backgrounds when we started building Zipline were already in automation, robotics, and autonomy.

• 12:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  We had this sense that it was probably going to be possible to build an automated instant logistics system for the planet, but there were so many things standing in our way. And to be honest, like, every expert that we spoke to told us that this idea was stupid, it was never going to work, we were wasting our time.

• 12:54Guy Raz?

  So what was the idea that you would talk to people about?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  We had this sense that if you wanted to deliver something very quickly over a distance of anywhere from, you know, say, 10 to 50 miles, you wanted to do that with a vehicle that was 10 times as fast as traditional logistics, half the cost, and zero emission. And so we had a sense, just reasoning from first principles, that what you really needed was a vehicle that was electric, that was autonomous, that weighed more like 50 pounds rather than 4,000 pounds. And if we wanted to go really fast, we knew we probably needed to fly rather than drive.

• 13:27Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you're thinking like a Jetsons world?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  I had grown up reading all of this great, kind of hopeful, optimistic science fiction. And the funny thing is, you know, this is totally normal in most science fiction books. And so I think I had this sense that if technology had advanced to a point where we thought it was possible to build this product, we were pretty confident that it was something that people would want.

• 13:47Guy Raz?

  So you guys start to do the research into the world of logistics. And presumably, you spent quite a lot of time just digging into this world for a while to figure out where you could kind of get in, where you could sort of start to work on something.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it's totally fair. When we started building this, our backgrounds were not in healthcare, they were not in aerospace, and we didn't even know that much about logistics. So a lot of investors who were looking at us, or even experts, were saying, what do you guys know about this space? You're totally clueless, you don't know what you're talking about. The reality is, I think the one thing that I had experienced is that, you know, graduating from school, I had been rock climbing full-time for nine months and got a chance to travel to a lot of different countries in the world. I had seen, I at least had this sense, that logistics... The kind of logistics that we take for granted in the United States is not broadly available globally. And I think that that was a kind of important insight.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  It was that logistics does a good job of serving the golden billion people on Earth. But for the 7 billion people who don't fall into that category, your access either sucks or is non-existent. And we've been pretending for 100 years like this problem is somehow excusable

• 15:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  or unavoidable. And we felt like it was not either of those things.

• 15:05Guy Raz?

  But how did you, how did you come across that, that information real? I mean, it's, obviously, it's available to know, but where did you first hear about this issue?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  I was spending some time, you know, in 2013, we were already starting to think, okay, if we're going to build a new kind of logistics system, we're going to need to find a public healthcare system we can integrate with. So that already meant we needed to be looking outside the US. We were focused on countries where we thought this sort of technology would have a really outsized impact in terms of healthcare access. And so I was in Tanzania. I actually met a researcher in Tanzania who had built this really cool early warning alert system using cell phones, unsurprisingly. And so he had several hundred primary care facilities and hospitals using the system. Each of them had a cellphone. And they would text into a database when they had a patient who was having a medical

• 15:57Speaker 01

  emergency and needed something specific in order to save their lives. And so he had this real-time database of all of the medical emergencies that were occurring across these 300 health facilities and hospitals. And I remember seeing that database and realizing that it was basically a database of death. Because half of the system had been built, but, you know, they were receiving all of these emergency requests. And it was like, okay, thanks for letting us know. Good luck. And there was no other half of the system that could deliver what was needed quickly. So these network solutions had advanced to the point where we have the information we need. We know that there is a medical emergency occurring, and we know exactly the product

• 16:41Speaker 01

  that is needed to save that person's life. But logistics has not advanced enough to actually solve the problem.

• 16:49Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how Keller shifted from rolling iPhones to flying couriers. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 17:04Guy Raz?

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• 20:35Guy Raz?

  One more thing before we get back to the show. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. It's usually just at the top of the app. And it's totally free.

• 20:58Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Keller Renato Clifton, the co-founder and CEO of ZipLine. It's a company that uses drones to deliver medical supplies and other consumer goods on demand.

• 21:12Guy Raz?

  All right, so before the break, you had talked about how, you know, because of the infrastructure challenges, getting medical supplies to rural hospitals in Tanzania is obviously a huge challenge. And it's interesting because it's a similar story in Africa with cell phones, right? Like, a lot of people didn't have access to telephones because there weren't telephone lines installed all over the country. And then all of a sudden, cell phones come and they essentially solve that problem. And so, sort of a similar idea, right? Which is the infrastructure of roads aren't there. But you knew that if you could somehow fly, you could basically bypass that problem.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that kind of infrastructure is often referred to as leapfrogging infrastructure. You know, the first people who said that they were going to build cellphone networks in Africa were widely called idiots. People thought that was totally unrealistic because landlines hadn't really succeeded in taking off in Africa.

• 22:08Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  And obviously now, you know, a lot of the countries we operate in have better cell service than the United States does. You've seen this incredible leapfrogging technology where you sort of get the technology, the use case, right? And it can actually grow in these developing economies faster than anybody really appreciated.

• 22:23Guy Raz?

  Let's now sort of break down how you did this. Because you land on this idea, and there are a lot of things you've got to do. You've got to find a country with a regulatory environment that is willing to work with you to allow you to fly these drones and deliver medication. The other thing, you've got to build the planes. You've got to build the infrastructure, the hardware, to create these, you know, safe, autonomous planes that can, I guess, drop a parachute of medical supplies. So, let's start with that. How did you, how did you start to develop the technology? I mean, drone technology was around, has been around for a while. So, was it, did you start with off-the-shelf equipment?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  When we initially had this idea, we started talking to a lot of different customers to try to figure out what exactly did this need to do? What was the actual problem we were defining and what needed to be the specifications of the thing that we were going to go build? We started to understand that if you could deliver something really quickly over a range of, say, 80 to 100 kilometers, so 50-plus miles, that could have a massive impact. We would be able to serve hundreds of hospitals and health facilities from a single distribution center. You could keep more medicine centralized. You could send things just when it was needed. It would save a lot of lives. This is what we were hearing. And so, we started building the first product in 2013.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  By 2015, we were flying nonstop at our test facility, which was in Half Moon Bay. And around that time, we were about 15 people. I started spending a lot of time talking to governments, trying to find someone who would be our first customer. And that was when we ended up having this conversation with the government of Rwanda. And I actually remember, in that conversation, we were saying, "Hey, we have this cool technology. We can do teleportation to any hospital or health facility. We can deliver any medical product to any hospital or health facility instantly." And I remember the Minister of Health looking at us at the time, and she basically looked at us like we were goofballs and said, "Look, shut up. Just do blood."

• 24:28Speaker 01

  And as she was explaining it to us, she was someone who was a true expert in running this kind of national healthcare system. And she was explaining that blood transfusions, 50% of them are going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging. 30% are going toward kids. It's a total logistics nightmare because you have packed red blood cells, platelets, plasma. Each of those has different shelf lives and different storage requirements. Plus, you have all the different types of blood, A, B, A, B, and O. So, getting the right thing to the right place at the right time to save someone's life was really hard, and there was a lot of waste in the system. And this was a product that was absolutely crucial for family health. And so, she ended up saying, "Look, just here, deliver blood to these 21 hospitals and prove that it can be done."

• 25:10Speaker 01

  And so, we ended up signing a $200,000 contract with the government of Rwanda to deliver blood to those 21 hospitals. And that was how we got started.

• 25:18Guy Raz?

  Wow. Why Rwanda? I mean, I'm just curious. I mean, probably a lot of people are like, "Rwanda, huh?" But actually Rwanda is quite innovative around taking risks like this and trying new things, right?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  A lot of people may find it surprising, but the reality is Rwanda has really modeled itself on Singapore. It is a small, highly efficient, technocratic, fast-moving, innovative country in East Africa and run by a lot of very visionary leaders who believe in technology. And they often talk about being a proof-of-concept country. They want to be the first adopter of new technologies and show how it works and then let other countries follow in their footsteps. And so they're unique for a lot of reasons. I also have to say, when we were signing that initial contract, when we were launching during that first year, we would be on constant calls with executives and government leaders Saturday, Sunday, Sunday early morning, Sunday late at night.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  I just remember thinking, no US government official would be talking to us at this time. I think that by virtue of what that country has been through over the last 30 years, it is extraordinarily entrepreneurial and willing to work hard to move the country forward.

• 26:33Guy Raz?

  All right. So initially, the idea is, let's figure out a way to get medical supplies to people in rural parts of Rwanda and eventually we'll expand beyond Rwanda. But really, you start with blood, blood supplies, right? And blood has to be refrigerated, it has to be kept at a certain temperature, it has to be delivered fairly quickly. You could do all of these things in the plane, right?

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Well, we thought we could.

• 27:02Guy Raz?

  Okay. But?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  We were wrong. I mean, I joke because we were very naive when we were launching in 2016 in Rwanda. We thought that we had a system that was going to be reliable. We thought we had it figured out. We thought we knew how to integrate with a national healthcare system. We thought we knew how to work with a national airspace regulator. We were basically wrong about all those things. We had no idea what we were doing. Honestly, it reminds me, I saw this flag in a gymnasium recently. It's like a big flag, like an inspirational flag. And the slogan on it is, "We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought that it would be easy." And when I saw it, I was like, this is a perfect description of ZipLine in 2017.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  You know, like, full of optimism, thinking that we had this figured out. We had signed this contract to deliver just blood, right? A very narrow part of the overall healthcare system to just 21 hospitals. And we thought, oh, that's great. We'll just knock that out and then we can expand to other things. But for the first nine months, we only served one hospital. Because everything that could go wrong did go wrong. We were really struggling to get the system to work reliably. The technology wasn't as reliable as we thought it would be. We didn't have a lot of the integrating software that we needed to really make the system integrate with the overall health system built. So we had to be building that. And the team was pulling constant all-nighters, working through the weekend. I mean, it was a really painful time and it was not clear that the company was going

• 28:33Speaker 01

  to survive those nine months. We were desperately, desperately trying to get it to work reliably for just one hospital. And meanwhile, we were lucky that the government was patient enough to say, hey, we know this is hard. We know you're trying to do something for the first time ever, so, you know, figure it out for that one hospital and then you can expand to the other 20.

• 28:47Guy Raz?

  And how did you, I mean, how did you work with the hospitals? Because, I mean, these planes would be launched, right? From, I think, a central facility in Rwanda, where, you know, the blood deliveries would arrive. And then they'd be launched. And they could travel up to, what, one, like, round trip up to?

• 29:06Speaker 01

  About 300 kilometers.

• 29:07Guy Raz?

  300 kilometers. Wow, that's a long distance. And they could carry this payload, drop it, like, it would just come down, parachute down, in a designated spot, like, outside the hospital?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. We had, when we started building the first system, it was lucky that we were talking to a lot of customers, because we were considering, oh, we need more complicated versions of the technology. We need, you know, to build a vertical takeoff and landing hybrid that can fly like an airplane but hover like a helicopter. We need different ways of delivering. But the more we spoke to customers, the more we really understood. All the customers really cared about was range and price. It was, you know, how do we make sure we can cover the maximum number of hospitals and health facilities by having a lot of range on the system? And how do we make sure that the cost of a delivery is as low as humanly possible? Because it's probably not that surprising, you know, working with... Health systems in these parts of the world, they don't have a lot of extra money sitting around. So if you're going to solve the problem, it has to be really cost effective.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  So that led us to build, we wanted to build like as simple of a system as possible. So we built a fixed wing system that really looks like a small airplane. It's a small electric airplane that has a wingspan of about 10 feet. And we started building these distribution centers where we would launch the aircraft and recover the aircraft and where we held inventory and we would load that inventory into a zip, which is what we call the vehicles. We load it into a zip when we receive an order, launch it, the vehicle would fly out to that maximum. We guarantee a service radius of 100 kilometers around our distribution centers. And the vehicle can fly 300 kilometers on a single battery charge because we have to go there and back.

• 30:42Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  But from there, each distribution center was capable of serving anywhere from 200 to 400 primary care facilities and hospitals. And it really was meant to just be that other half of the system we were talking about earlier. We said, hey, if telepresence is working, then teleportation is the other half of that system. If we know that a patient needs something, we should be able to have a doctor or a nurse at that hospital, press a button on a phone, and we can teleport the product that's needed to save that patient's life in just a few minutes to the GPS coordinates of that phone.

• 31:11Guy Raz?

  You are obviously in Rwanda and have expanded to Ghana and several other countries in Africa, Cote d'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, and even have some operations here in the US. But initially, this was about delivering medical supplies, so essentially to presumably to medical facilities. But earlier in this year, in 2023, you announced a new, I guess it's a platform, but it's a new aircraft or plane, a drone, that can deliver to homes, essentially, to you and me. And not just medical supplies, but like

• 31:53Guy Raz?

  could deliver food or packages. Could you tell me about that sort of, I mean, was that part of the plan originally?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Over the first year, we actually ended up serving all 21 of those original hospitals that the government had asked us to serve. And we ended up expanding from that to about 350, 400 hospitals and primary care facilities throughout the country.

• 32:14Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Then we expanded from just blood to all medical products. Today, we've delivered 2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, 5 million-plus doses of traditional vaccine. We deliver 75% of the national blood supply of Rwanda outside of Kigali, fully autonomously.

• 32:28Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And then we went from about 400 hospitals and health facilities in Rwanda to well over 3,000 today across, you know, seven different countries. The system grew a lot. We, you know, we've now crossed 40 million commercial autonomous miles. It's become the largest commercial autonomous system of any kind, ground or air, on earth. So, we definitely never really expected it growing in that way. One of the most interesting things that we've heard from customers again and again and again, both healthcare customers, but also a lot of the governments we work with, is that, you know, home delivery is really the holy grail. So many of these health systems want to be able to deliver directly to a patient at home, because there are a lot of cases where you can actually keep someone at home. It's much better for the patient, and it's more cost-effective for the health

• 33:14Speaker 01

  system if the patient doesn't have to come into a hospital. And so, a lot of the health systems that we started working with in the US, for example, that are betting on ZipLine are adopting ZipLine's next-generation technology, which you were just mentioning, which is really our home-delivery service. And so, we heard from so many of these different customers that ultimately what's needed is teleportation from a central point, from any hospital, or store, or warehouse, directly to a home.

• 33:38Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another short break, but when we come back, how drones could eventually deliver everything. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 34:28Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Here's more from my conversation with Keller Renato Clifton, co-founder and CEO of ZipLine. All right, let's, let's talk about how this would work in, in the United States. Because obviously, it's a different regulatory environment. The FAA oversees airspace. And first of all, these planes would fly at fairly low altitudes, like below 1,000 feet?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Across all of our global operations, we always fly under 500 feet. That's, that's basically the commercial aviation floor in most countries. And so it's a way of us just fully de-conflicting from commercial aviation.

• 35:08Guy Raz?

  Right. Okay, so they fly low. And what, I mean, what kind of hurdles do you have to get past before you can start to deploy these in the United States?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Well, we launched in the US in 2021. And the pandemic was really the thing, I think, that drove a lot of the urgency around that. We were seeing a lot of healthcare logistic systems struggle in the US during that time. People weren't showing up to work, or humans weren't allowed to show up to work. And so a lot of logistic systems that were depending on large numbers of humans weren't working the way we hoped they would. We launched with Navant Healthcare in Charlotte under emergency circumstances. But once we started flying in Charlotte, the FAA started looking through a lot of the data that ZipLine had. We had tens of millions of commercial autonomous miles with zero human safety incidents.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  And so I think that was really this moment where the US started to realize that this was a key area of economic and technology growth, where we didn't want the country to fall fundamentally behind the rest of the world. And so we've worked closely with the FAA over the last four years. The neat thing is, you know, today's ZipLine operates three distribution centers in the US. That's expanding dramatically this year and next year. So the good news is, you know, although the US has been a bit of a fast follower here, they're, you know, the US isn't falling far behind. And, and if you live in some of the cities that we serve today, You know, homes are already receiving deliveries day in and day out via this autonomous delivery service. I think it reminds me, sometimes when people talk about science fiction,

• 36:44Speaker 01

  they say, you know, the the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. I think that a lot of people who hear about this sort of thing say, oh, well, it must not be working because it isn't serving me in San Francisco or in Manhattan. And the reality is, it's almost twofold. One is, well, it didn't start in the US. It started in, you know, rural parts of developing economies. And two, now that it's coming to the US, it's starting in places like Bentonville, not San Francisco.

• 37:10Guy Raz?

  Obviously, Amazon, you know, sort of famously, Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes a couple of years ago to talk about this idea, this dream of delivering packages via drones, right? And he makes this point, too, which is that a huge percent, 80, 85% of their deliveries are under five pounds, which is great for a drone, to be able to deliver by parachute to somebody's home. But that still hasn't happened. It's been a tough nut to crack. Why do you think so? Why do you think that that's the case?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  I think like a lot of fundamentally new and disruptive technology, the idea is easy and the execution is hard. I think, you know, we always knew, I mean, ZipLine, we were a much smaller team. We were not the best funded team. You know, these big companies had been investing billions of dollars in drone delivery, trying to make it work. And we never even necessarily thought of ourselves as the smartest team. But we were definitely by far the most practical. That was in our DNA. We were practical problem solvers. We were willing to go anywhere in the world where we could scale a service, where we could get regulatory permission, and where we could operate a service that would have a fundamentally positive impact in the world, where it could save a lot of

• 38:20Speaker 01

  lives. But I would point out, I mean, the first four years of operating at scale were incredibly painful. The technology was way harder than when we realized. I think a fundamental realization was that we were very obsessed with building a good vehicle, building a good drone. It turns out, the drone is 15% of the complexity of the problem. There is so much auxiliary software and systems that have to be built around it, because none of our customers care about drones. All our customers care about is teleportation. They want something to go from point A to point B, fast enough to save someone's life, or create a Really big economic opportunity. And there's a lot of software and systems that have to be built in the background, whether that's communications architecture, or data logging, or air traffic control

• 39:05Speaker 01

  software, or even just the software that we use to run our little mini fulfillment centers.

• 39:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Customer ordering interfaces. All of this had to be built out. And I think it's a little easy, probably, to look at the problem and discount how challenging it is to build essentially that whole new kind of logistics system from scratch. And so that's what was really hard about the first four or five years of operation for ZipLine. But luckily, we weren't sitting in an ivory tower. We weren't just working, doing research and development in a fancy lab, trying to build the perfect version of the product. We assumed that the first version of the product we built wasn't going to be very good. And that assumption was correct. And the team had to spend four years desperately iterating and working nights and weekends in order to improve the product over time. So hopefully, that gives other small groups of nerds, without a lot of money and a lot

• 39:54Speaker 01

  of resources, some hope. Because the reality is, if you think that these big, ultra wealthy technology corporations are going to build the thing, I mean, had we been worried about what they were doing, we never would have started ZipLine. And so I really think it shows, money is not the rate-limiting factor with these kinds of new technologies. I actually think that practical problem-solving, unfanciness, and willingness to ship product quickly and learn from customers is actually the rate-limiting factor.

• 40:25Guy Raz?

  So tell me about this new drone. I mean, it basically is also an electric drone, but it has like a rover drone inside that then is sent off to complete the delivery?

• 40:37Speaker 01

  We sort of build on everything that we've perfected over the last seven years with regard to our enterprise service, which sometimes we call internally Platform One. The next-generation product, we knew that we needed to be able to deliver with dinner-plate level accuracy and deliver silently.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  To a home. That's really what we think is required to unlock automated delivery for homes across the world.

• 41:01Guy Raz?

  Dinner plate accuracy means it could land on your dinner plate?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it means like if you give us a dinner plate, we can deliver a package onto that dinner plate every single time.

• 41:09Guy Raz?

  Gotcha.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  So that means that we can deliver to a front doorstep. It means we can deliver to a table on the side of your house. We can deliver to a driveway. For apartment buildings, we can either deliver to a little shared space right out the front door. We can even, for apartments that have roof access, we can deliver onto the roof. But we know we need to be hyper-precise and we think that their sound is incredibly important when it comes to these kinds of systems. I mean, anybody who's heard a drone knows it sounds incredibly annoying. We think it's going to be important for this overall delivery experience to be essentially silent for you as well as for your neighbors when we're making a delivery. And so we've invested a huge

• 41:50Speaker 01

  amount of time, effort, money in designing new kinds of hardware that essentially enable that kind of a delivery experience that will be very magical for someone ordering something at home.

• 42:04Guy Raz?

  So when, I mean, I know you've partnered with Walmart, for example. Let's just talk about Walmart for a moment. I mean, tell me what that could mean in, I don't know, let's say 10 years from now. I mean, Walmart or Amazon or whatever, I mean, a lot of those things are coming to us via trucks. And many of those trucks are electric and many of them, there are many companies, as you know, some who we've featured on this show, who are developing autonomous technology to essentially develop these autonomous electric delivery vehicles that will efficiently make their way through the streets of our cities and towns. But in 10 years from now,

• 42:46Guy Raz?

  Is there a world where there are Walmart distribution fulfillment centers that are just like sending your drones out to make deliveries like every 30 seconds?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and the funny thing is, again, even with that question, that's already happening in the US in certain towns. You know, to even give a little more context to your question, one of the most interesting things we've found is that a lot of the earliest customers that we work with are already kind of going on this journey. So if you look at Rwanda, for example, we started by delivering just blood. Then we expanded to deliver essentially all medical products to every hospital and health facility in the country. And then the government immediately started saying, okay, what about our other national priorities? What about agriculture and agricultural productivity? Can you deliver animal healthcare products? Can you deliver artificial insemination for cattle? It's like, okay, we'll do that. So now ZipLine does deliver a lot of agricultural products. And it was like, can we do childhood malnutrition products?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Now we do that. And it's like, okay, what about economic growth? Can we start delivering e-commerce products? Can we build a new national postal service on top of the system? Now ZipLine's in the process of doing that. And so similarly, in the US, a lot of our early customers in the US were big healthcare systems like Intermountain or MultiCare. But as we've grown, folks like Walmart have looked at the technology and said, hey, this is going to be really, really strategic. Having the ability to build a magical portal in the wall of any store where we can now just pass products through the magical portal and teleport them directly to a home in a way that is 10 times as fast, half the cost, and zero emission compared to how instant delivery works today is pretty strategic.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And so we launched with them about a year and a half ago. And interestingly, for the homes that ZipLine serves, day in and day out, I mean, the service went from being like sci-fi to totally boring in about seven days. So it turns out people really love teleportation, and once they have access to it, they use it a lot. And so I think that the question of how long is it going to take to expand from the thousands of homes that are served today to the hundreds of millions of homes that we ultimately need to serve, I think that that process will probably take something like five years.

• 44:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it's amazing. Well, hopefully it'll come sooner than later because I look forward to just clicking a button and watching a drone drop my lunch or my salad or my burger off on my dinner plate.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Or, you know, something that your kid, if your kid's sick in the middle of the night, you need something, something can be delivered in five minutes to your, you know, to your front doorstep. And keep in mind, like, we think, we've seen this massive acceleration of instant delivery. It's clear that the demand is there, right? During the pandemic, a lot of these instant delivery companies grew by an order of magnitude. But using 3,000 to 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicles to deliver something that weighs five pounds is really bad for the planet. So we think that we kind of convinced ourselves that we were innovating, while in fact, we were using technology that's like 100 years old, which is a human driving a car.

• 45:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  And the reality is, you know, new kinds of technology can solve these problems in ways that are good for the planet, 10 times as fast, less expensive, and a way better customer experience to boot.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Keller, thank you so much.

• 46:02Guy Raz?

  Of course. Thanks for having me.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  That's Keller Renato Clifton, co-founder and CEO of ZipLine.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Josh Newell. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Malane Coats, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Kerry Thompson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

• 47:08Guy Raz?

  The.