The Limitless Podcast

Josh Kale:
[0:03] Today we're highlighting a company that feels like it shouldn't exist and not because it's not important because the technology seems so outrageous it's hard to believe that it's actually even possible at scale until you see it for yourself it's called zipline it's a drone delivery company that's not only possible but it's actually flown more than 100 million autonomous miles and completed 1.4 million deliveries of everything from blood and vaccines to walmart groceries we're lucky enough today to be joined by the ceo and co-founder of zipline keller renato so keller question for you. Most people don't even

Josh Kale:
[0:30] know that Zipline exists. And yet your drones have flown the equivalent of to the moon and back 200 times, I think, which is crazy. So can you explain to everyone what Zipline is?

Keller Rinaudo:
[0:39] The simplest way of understanding Zipline is that we're a robotics company focusing on building an automated logistics system for Earth. So by using autonomous aircraft, we can design a delivery service that is 10 times as fast, half the cost, and zero emission compared to the way that we've been doing logistics over the last 100 years. And from a mission perspective, the reason logistics really matters is that, you know, there are five and a half million kids every year who lose their lives due to lack of access to basic medical products. We've always felt like someone needed to go build a logistics system that would actually serve all people equally. And that's what we're focused on doing.

Josh Kale:
[1:18] That was the thing that made the most impact on me is, is the fact that you make deliveries is actually one of the least interesting things. The fact that you use these drones to deliver things. The thing that really affected me was reading about the story of Zipline and reading how many lives it impacted. I think everyone's seen drones kind of dropping off things and can imagine a world where drones are dropping things off on packages and doorsteps. But I want you to be the one to deliver the stat, which was really inspiring

Josh Kale:
[1:42] that I read, which has the number 20 million in it and has to do with saving people's lives. I think that was the thing that touched me the most and that might impact other people is what these drone deliveries unlock in terms of saving people's lives and helping people. Because it's not just about getting Amazon packages to your doorstep faster.

Keller Rinaudo:
[1:56] It was a little counterintuitive, even for some of our early investors. But we really wanted to focus on life-saving use cases. You know, for the first decade of the company, we only focused on healthcare use cases. We initially started delivering blood transfusions across the country of Rwanda, which is in East Africa. And it turns out that blood is this really precious product. It's hard to get the right thing to the right place at the right time. you have different components packed red blood cells platelets cryoprecipitate plasma each of those has different storage requirements and shelf lives platelets for example only last six days and then they're also typed so you have a a b b and o you have all different types of blood and you got to get the right thing to the right place at the right time it's a huge pain as a result of that

Keller Rinaudo:
[2:46] 50% of transfusions are going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging, and then 30% are going toward kids. So it's a really important product for family health. We partnered with the Ministry of Health in Rwanda to begin delivering blood in a completely different way, where you could deliver it autonomously, instantly, to every hospital in the country. And, you know, a lot of people thought that idea was totally stupid, thought that it wasn't going to work at all. It really scaled. I mean, today we deliver 75% of the national blood supply of the country outside of the capital city. And as a result, a study just came out a couple months ago from the University of Pennsylvania showing that Zipline has been able to reduce maternal mortality by 51% across the country of Rwanda. So, you know, it turns out that using new kinds of technology can solve old problems in healthcare in dramatic ways. The stat that you were citing, the 20 million, Zipline has now delivered, I believe, about 22 million doses of childhood vaccine over the last 24 months. It's a huge part of what we do as we've kind of expanded across the global public health care system.

David Hoffman:
[3:54] So Keller, curious, you branded yourself as a robotics company. And then now we are unpacking the story of the way that you guys really got your foot in the door, which was delivering blood in a very efficient way. And I'm wondering, is the analogy here kind of like blood is to Zipline as Amazon Books is to Amazon, whereas Amazon got started by sending books because that was the right form factor for the needs of the time. And then it was able to expand from there. Is that an okay analogy or would you accept or reject that?

Keller Rinaudo:
[4:25] No, I think that's a great analogy. I mean, it's actually hard, you know, for any startup, you have this tension between you want to pick a grand vision, something that is super inspiring, that, you know, this most amazing talent in the world is going to want to join the team and be a part of because, you know, it's so cool to imagine that thing existing in the world. So you need this grand inspiring vision, but it's also pretty important to pick a beachhead that is actually something that you can build quickly and get customers to pay you for. And those two things are usually in tension with one another. So I think it's pretty important that, you know, it really helps to choose something very narrow. I know, you know, Peter Thiel has talked about this a lot. He talks about it in his book. You know, that idea of finding that beachhead is actually way harder to do than most people think. And you have to be pretty smart about what you select. In our case, luckily, you know, we weren't smart enough to select that initial narrow market, but our customers were. So I remember this conversation with the Minister of Health in Rwanda. You know, this was in 2015. I mean, we were completely naive, no idea what we're doing. We knew very little about, you know, public health care systems. And I was sitting with her just saying, oh, yeah, you know, this is technology. It's really cool. We could use it to deliver all medical products to every public health, you know, public hospital and health facility in the country. And she looked at me and was like, Keller, shut up, just do blood.

Keller Rinaudo:
[5:54] And as she was explaining, you know, hey, 50% going toward moms, 30% going to our kids, super difficult logistics product. We kind of said, wow, yeah, that sounds great. We'll just do that. And so the initial thing that we agreed to do was to deliver blood and just blood to 21 different hospitals throughout the country autonomously. And so she was the one who was smart enough and knowledgeable enough to focus us on this super, super narrow use case for the first few years. And honestly, had we not focused in that way, I'm convinced the company would have failed.

David Hoffman:
[6:27] That's really interesting. Okay, so Keller, I think you're a great guy. But I think the messaging that I'm hearing is like the focusing on blood wasn't done out of like altruism or like nobility. It was because you saw a market demand for a niche that you could actually penetrate very, very well. And so it wasn't because you have this aspiration to solve this one particular problem. It's because you saw a market problem that you could fix, and that was your beachhead that you narrowed in on. You weren't trying to solve blood logistics. You were specifically just trying to solve logistics, and then you found that market. it.

Keller Rinaudo:
[7:01] I think we always had an intuition that healthcare would be a pretty good place to start. And it's not just, I mean, you know, it's a multifaceted decision. It was a really inspiring mission and it got us fired up. We felt like that was something that we would be more than happy to dedicate the next 10 years of our lives to doing. You know, had you told us that we were going to be able to reduce maternal mortality

Keller Rinaudo:
[7:23] by 5%, we would have, we would have gladly dedicated 10 years of our lives. So we also had this strong customer pull because it was a really intensely painful problem for them. And finally, we had an intuition that would make it easier to get regulatory approval because it was such an easy to understand use case that really nobody could deny the value of this kind of a service. So even if we were trying to do something for the first time in the world ever, and there was no precedent for it and really no data that we could provide to the regulator. Even a conservative regulator would be likely to want to work with us to see if we could make this happen. And yeah, I think all three of those assumptions wound up being true. I've always felt really strongly that, you know, we need to get like capitalism and technology focused on the most important healthcare problems in the world if we want to solve those. Like, you know, the assumption that, you know, capitalism should focus just on the like,

Keller Rinaudo:
[8:21] Making money and making life easier for rich people. And then, you know, nonprofits and government should be the only entities trying to solve the like massive humanity scale problems that affect 7 billion humans on earth. I think that assumption is crazy. Like if we want to build a future that we'd be proud to hand to our kids, we got to get the strongest engineers in the world and the best investors in the world. And we got to go build for profit mission driven companies focusing on those humanity scale problems.

Josh Kale:
[8:47] I remember watching a YouTube video, I think it was seven years ago of Zipline early days where you were showing how you were using these like tiny little planes that had like these, they were kind of like launched off of this pad. And it's like, it was amazing to see, but I would imagine over the course of the last seven years or the last decade that you've actually been working on this, things have changed quite a bit. So I'm wondering if you could kind of connect the dots for us. You went from delivering blood to doctors clinics in Africa to grocery store deliveries in suburban Texas. And David mentioned earlier like hey you had these this like niche version of amazon kind of like the similar startup where amazon started with books you start with blood and then they kind of expanded into this whole all-in-one thing which i imagine is probably not too far from what you're doing so could you explain to us the amazon vision of zipline you

Keller Rinaudo:
[9:32] Know in 2013 when we were starting to build zipline we had that intuition kind of felt like oh our backgrounds are in robotics and software and automation really seemed to us like logistics was just crying out for like new innovative solutions, new ways of thinking. And we thought that someone would build an automated logistics system for earth. I mean, I actually remember I knew the CEO of this company called Kiva and they were acquired by Amazon and they built these orange robots that were running around inside warehouses and the robot would go to the shelf and pick up the shelf and bring it to a human packer. And then the human packer would pack a box and ship it. I just remember seeing all those robots running around inside the warehouse, moving these boxes around thinking, man, somebody's going to build that for outside the warehouse. And that is going to be transformational, like in terms of how the world works. And so again, that idea is very naive in retrospect, a very simple way of thinking about things, but wound up kind of causing us to think like someone was going to build such a legendary company if you could just go do this. And

Keller Rinaudo:
[10:44] You know, when we were getting started, we had no money, no credibility. Nobody believed this was going to work. And so it actually really helped ZipLine to go and say, hey, what's like the simplest, most life-saving thing that we can do that would be of undeniable value? And it honestly kind of helped that we weren't really thinking about launching in the U.S. We didn't think we could get regulatory permission in the U.S. fast enough. And so we went to a part of the world that most Americans can't find on a map. And we spent a lot of time, you know, working closely both with Rwanda and then, you know, four other countries in Africa where we've now scaled the infrastructure. And frankly, we kind of got to work outside the spotlight and focus on problems that really mattered for people's lives. And we spent 10 years iterating, making the system more reliable, safer, more performant. And what's interesting is, you know, we started in Rwanda, you know, that initial contract I talked about, 21 hospitals, just blood transfusions. The first nine months were a disaster, super painful. Like we didn't know, you can't emphasize enough, really had no idea what we were doing. We did not know how to integrate with a national health care system, and we didn't know how to integrate with a national civil aviation authority on the regulatory side to help them understand where the fleet was and what it was doing. And so for nine months, we actually only served one hospital. And it was extremely wreckety and painful. I mean, constant all-nighters and, you know, long weekends trying to just get the system to work reliably for that one hospital.

Keller Rinaudo:
[12:12] And then it ended up expanding. Finally, after nine months, the clouds kind of parted. It was working reliably. We then took three months to expand the service to the other 20 hospitals in the contract. And then we expanded to 50 hospitals. Then we expanded to 400 primary care facilities across the country, and then expanded into four other countries. From a use case perspective, interestingly, like once we had built the infrastructure, all these other use cases started coming out of the woodworks. You know, we were by probably 2019 in Rwanda, we were already delivering almost all medical products to almost every hospital and primary care facility in the country. We were like, wow, we did it. You know, this was the vision, mission accomplished. And the government was like, no, no, no. Now we need you to deliver animal health care products. So we started delivering all this different medicine for animals. Then they were like, now we need you to deliver artificial insemination, the original AI.

Keller Rinaudo:
[13:04] And, you know, if it sounds weird, you're like, okay, there are these cryogenically frozen straws of bull semen that you're now delivering to all of these farms all over the country. It sounds totally weird. I had no idea about this industry, but it actually makes sense. I mean, an average cow in Rwanda produces two liters of milk a day. An average cow in the U.S. produces between like 10 and 12. So actually giving farmers the ability to like genetically modify their cattle is a huge deal for families. It links to childhood malnutrition, brain stunting, cycles of poverty. So, you know, ZipLine started doing that. Where now I think they're going to be something like 70,000 piglets born in Rwanda this year, thanks to ZipLine. And then, you know, the government was immediately like, hey, now we wanna do e-commerce. We wanna start delivering e-commerce products for a lot of different Rwanda companies throughout the country. So we immediately said yes and started doing that. Now we're talking to the government about building a new national postal service on top of the infrastructure. So we were totally clueless when we got started. We really had some high-level intuition for, oh, wouldn't it be cool if you could build an automated logistic system for Earth? But how to get there, I would say it's more been our customers who are just kind of like pulling us along and telling us what would be valuable. And I think we have been surprised, you know, if you go and build these roads, you go and build this infrastructure, it's kind of surprising the variety of cars that wind up driving on the roads.

David Hoffman:
[14:29] That's a really interesting metaphor. I think myself and I think many of our listeners are all kind of, I'm not like prepared to understand how far the logistics has already gotten that you've already built out. Like as Josh said, you guys are already like pretty far along in this maturation of being a logistics company solving problems. But I think when you tell the average person in the United States, like they will say like, oh, yeah, totally in the future, like there will be drones delivering my Uber Eats foods. But that hasn't happened yet for us, but it is happening elsewhere. And I want to unpack that specifically. Like, so you have your foothold in Africa, starting with health care and then expanding outwards from there. Maybe you can talk about why have things worked in that region, in Africa, and why am I still getting my Uber Eats delivered via a person, a human in a car inside of America? So why is the innovation happening offshore in developing countries? And then we'll go through a little bit more of just what that took to expand from just the base of a single hospital to an entire region.

Keller Rinaudo:
[15:34] First of all, you know, I think a lot of Americans assume that all cool technology is going to start in the U.S. Not just start in the U.S. They think it's going to start in like two cities in the U.S. You know, that happen to be... On different coasts of the country, right? And like all cool technology is going to start in those cities. And then maybe over time, it'll trickle out to other parts of the US. And then over decades, it might trickle out to other parts of the world. And I just think that that model is no longer accurate. Technology is expanding really fast. The world is way more global. You have incredibly talented entrepreneurial people in all different countries who all speak English and are pretty excited about adopting robotics and AI to solve problems.

Keller Rinaudo:
[16:20] And I think especially when it comes to a lot of these frontier technologies, whether you're talking about, you know, nuclear energy or biotech or robotics, a lot of times it's going to make more sense for these technologies to start in countries that are a little smaller, a little more innovative and faster and can, you know, adopt new regulatory precedents and frameworks faster than a bigger country like the U.S. So I think Zipline maybe was one of the first countries to kind of walk that path, but there are now other companies walking the path. And I would guess that we'll see a lot more of that. This assumption that it'll just, it has to start in San Francisco or New York, it's just not true anymore. So I think that's one idea. I think, you know, another big concept just in terms of like, oh, you know, 2013, you know, the CEO of one of the biggest companies on earth was on 60 Minutes promising drone delivery to every single person in the U.S.

Keller Rinaudo:
[17:08] Within two years. What happened? You know, it must be impossible or it must be vaporware or whatever. I think that on one hand, I think that, you know, the technology is just a bit harder than people really anticipated. Like designing systems that can fly at scale safely over cities you know day in and day out 24 7 in all weather figuring out maintenance figuring out fulfillment operations figuring out you know multi-vehicle communication and deconfliction just a lot of stuff that people didn't quite understand how complex it is and i think that

Keller Rinaudo:
[17:43] You see a lot of these other parallels. If you look at autonomous cars, for example, there was like a lot of excitement, 2015, 2016, it's right around the corner. And, you know, there's just, it's like the technology hype cycle that I'm sure you guys have heard of where it's like, you know, first one or two years, it's the complete bubble and everybody's like, oh my God, you know, autonomous cars are here. And then there's the, you know, the precipitous decline and the trough of disillusionment where everybody's like, oh, it's impossible. Nevermind. It was a terrible idea. And it's like, then during those 10 years, all of the actual work gets done by, you know, smaller number of contrarian people who are like, nope, this idea is really good. It's just going to take a long time to make it good. And I think, you know, today you now see companies like Waymo actually fully scaling an autonomous car service that's totally awesome and that customers love. And, you know, Zipline 10 years later, after that initial hype cycle, finally scaling the service, not just in Africa, but now also in a number of cities in the US. So I think that those hype cycles, especially for, you know advanced technology it's just i think it's actually it's kind of universal like it's just how humans you know operate when it comes to an exciting new technology

David Hoffman:
[18:51] Maybe you could eliminate some of the obstacles that you had to get over in order to get here in the first place right like there i'm sure there were a bunch of just like technical constraints that you needed to to break open in order to make all of this work i would imagine drone design is one of them maybe like battery, longevity, like dry, like weather. What are some of the big hurdles that the nuts that you had to crack? And maybe we'll talk about that to get up to this point. And then we'll also talk about the nuts that are still left to crack open to get to the Amazon scaled like $2 trillion company.

Keller Rinaudo:
[19:23] I mean, you know, hardware is hard. There's so much complexity. It's so much harder to build a hardware company than a software company. It's more expensive. You know, there's a lot of capex involved. And you kind of get one shot. Like if you don't get the product right, you're, you know, the company's likely dead. And then by the way, you have multiple cycles of that as you build new versions of products. The biggest thing that we learned the hard way is, you know, as we were starting to focus on this, we're like, okay, we had the problem. We had signed this initial contract. We knew what we needed to do. We kind of had it scoped. We built that initial version of the product. We thought, oh, we've got a really cool autonomous aircraft. This is going to be so awesome. And we launched it in 2016.

Keller Rinaudo:
[20:04] And as I've already mentioned, it was a disaster. It was incredibly painful. Why was it painful? Because as it turns out, the vehicle was only 15% of the complexity of the solution. There are so there's so much there's so many systems that go into building an overall logistics service that people can rely on 24 7 365 with their lives and the lives of their loved ones when we launched we didn't know how to do fulfillment operations you know we had to be holding all these precious medical products in a shipping container that we had to operate like a little you know like a little fulfillment center we didn't know how to even do customer ordering Like how are customers, especially in sometimes rural areas or places where they may not have reliable internet, how are those customers ordering consistently from Zipline? Didn't know how to build an unmanned traffic management system that our regulator could use. Didn't know how to figure out multi-vehicle deconfliction and communication. We weren't that good at maintenance and knowing proactive and reactive maintenance and how to systematize those things. It turns out that if you think about like UPS, UPS is a lot more than the brown trucks. And I think this, you know, the idea sounds simple, but we just didn't quite realize that until we launched into the real world to understand, whoa, there's huge amount of different software and operational systems that all have to be operating in concert with the autonomous aircraft. And by the way, that have to be redesigned because of the autonomous aircraft. It's not like we could have just taken exactly what UPS does and we just do that.

Keller Rinaudo:
[21:33] Like all those different systems have to be redesigned with autonomy in mind to then design an overall system.

Keller Rinaudo:
[21:39] Is reliable and magical for customers. So that was, anyway, you know, we can talk more about some of the technical details because there are a thousand learnings that we had to learn the hard way by getting into the real world and learning by doing. And we never would have been able to guess any of those things sitting in an ivory tower or like, you know, an R&D center trying to build something cool.

David Hoffman:
[21:58] Maybe you could just illuminate and illustrate the current state of things at Zipline. So you've penetrated into the American markets. You're now actually delivering groceries in Texas in addition to all of the infrastructure that you've built out in Africa. Can you kind of just like, for the listeners that have not been exposed to this, and I was still trying to like get a grasp on what it looks like on the ground, what does the actual state of play look like for you guys? So if you were to somehow look at a top-down bird's eye view of the Zipline system, the Zipline logistics, what would it look like? Just really paint a picture for us if you would.

Keller Rinaudo:
[22:34] Yeah, maybe it's simplest to think in terms of, you know, major technology platforms. So for the first 10 years, ZipLine was really focused on scaling what we would call Platform One, which was a system that was really designed for healthcare delivery and rural delivery. That vehicle, I'm actually standing on the original manufacturing line for Platform One right now. And you can actually see some P1 aircraft behind me. That system was designed for range and it was designed to be really, really cost effective because we weren't selling to rich customers. I mean, these ministries of health care a lot about cost-effectiveness. And there, we would build a small distribution center, and then we'd actually stock the products at that distribution center, and we would launch and recover the aircraft from that distribution center. We had a fair number of humans working there, and each distribution center could serve, say, like 300 to 400 hospitals and primary care facilities within the range of the vehicle. In about 2020 and 2021, it was really kind of the a pandemic that accelerated this, but there were a lot of big companies, a lot of big US companies in particular, that were looking at this like massive infrastructure that Zipline was starting to rapidly scale

Keller Rinaudo:
[23:42] In other parts of the world, and basically said, hey, like, we need that, we would want that. But the big difference was, especially in the US, the main desire was really

Keller Rinaudo:
[23:51] for instant delivery, automated delivery directly to homes. And so this is what triggered Zipline to build Platform 2. Platform 2 is our next generation technology, we launched it commercially on January 15th of this year. It's now been scaling super fast over the last six months, across many different cities in the US and we'll announce more soon.

Keller Rinaudo:
[24:13] But Platform 2 is designed to basically automate delivery from any existing building, whether it's a Walmart or a hospital or even a restaurant, and automate delivery from that building to any home within range. And our goal is, we often joke about like, maybe this is too nerdy, but we talk about approximating teleportation. Like we want delivery that feels like the thing was beamed to you so you press a button on your phone you order whatever you want from whether it's you're feeling sick and you need you know a prescription from your local health system or you need cough syrup or you you're ordering food for your family or you're getting you know just doing like grocery shopping you just go to the app order what you want press you know press buy and and then it's like teleported directly to your GPS coordinates. And so that's like the service that we launched earlier this year and that we're scaling out, you know, we're adding tons of homes almost every single day to the network. And it's been super fascinating to like watch, you know, customer behaviors and just customers like rapidly adapt and then come to expect this service day in and day out.

Josh Kale:
[25:23] I am so curious for you to walk me through the process of Platform 2 as a customer, because I think a lot of people would be interested in like, okay, is this kind of similar to Uber, where I go on an app, I push a button, and it shows up. And then in addition to that, I'm curious, what actually happens behind the scenes on your end to make that magic teleportation happen? So just for the average person, walk us through what that looks like on the consumer side versus what that looks like on your side. Yeah.

Keller Rinaudo:
[25:46] You know, our goal is always to design a customer experience that is magically simple. So it's super easy to describe the customer experience. You download the Zipline app, or you can also order through some of our partner websites. Just buy whatever it is that you want. Select, you know, especially if you're on a partner website, you're going to select that you want delivery from Zipline. If you're on our app, then it's automatic. And then you just type in your address and then we'll immediately show you a satellite image of your home. You get to pick wherever, you know, you want the delivery. Backyard, front yard. Backyard, front yard, driveway, front doorstep. Apartment buildings, we're often delivering onto roofs if they have roof access. townhomes. We actually serve a bunch of townhomes where they have a cool little designated spot where Zipline delivers and one delivery site can serve like a hundred homes. So totally flexible. But once you pick that, then we will deliver to that exact place every single time. That's a great thing about robotics. It's way more reliable and consistent than humans. And so then you'll see basically a few minutes to fulfill your order. And then you can literally watch the vehicle on the app, take off and fly in a straight line directly to you. And we even show you a timer, right? When the vehicle takes off, it's like, we are delivering in three minutes and 42 seconds. And then you can watch that timer tick down by second. And when it says, you know, three, two, one, like that is when the package is literally being

Josh Kale:
[27:13] Deposited onto your

Keller Rinaudo:
[27:14] Doorstep. And the cool thing, actually, I think we're realizing, you know, there are five and a half billion instant deliveries that are going to be done in the U.S. This year. And that's just instant. So that's not like UPS or FedEx or, you know, Amazon. That's just the instant delivery platforms delivering things like food or groceries. And we're using a human being driving a 4,000, in most cases, a 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle to go pick something up that weighs on average five pounds. With four seats in it to pick something up that weighs five pounds and then drive it, you know, three, four, five miles to your home to deliver. And usually they're not doing a lot of batch processing because it's meant to be instant. And so, you know, I think high level, like you do not have to be a physicist to realize this is actually a bizarre way of solving that problem at this scale. It's super expensive for customers and for the businesses. It's surprisingly slow. It's super high emission from a, you know,

Keller Rinaudo:
[28:17] Global warming perspective. And at the end of the day, it's also not that great of a service because there, you know, that there's a lot of inconsistency in the quality of the service that you receive. So, you know, the, yeah, I mean, I think for customers really, you know, what we see, by the way, you know, right now the service has a ultra high net promoter score. We see customers ordering three to four times per week on average. So, I was just talking to a grandma a couple weeks ago when I was visiting

Keller Rinaudo:
[28:45] You know, a customer was sitting in her living room. She's like, oh, yeah, you know, I grocery shop once a week and I order from Zipline three to four times a week. And she's not kidding. She's ordered 300 times in the last year. Whoa. And, you know, she's just completely like living in the future. She's like, it's completely normal. My grandson came over and he's like special forces in the military and he was freaked out. He said it's more advanced technology than anything they have access to through the DOD. And, you know, and then grandma is in Arkansas using an autonomous aircraft and you know she's just showing me she's on her phone she's like yeah boop boop boop like order whatever i need double click you know face id apple pay like it's on its way so it's kind of amazing to me even how fast like you know more elderly people have been able to like quickly figure it out and she's like it's amazing when the weather is bad i don't have to risk breaking my hip

Keller Rinaudo:
[29:31] So i i would say we've been quite surprised by the way that people just like instantly integrated into their lives. And we often joke at Zipline that, because we've had people, I've even visited like hospitals that we serve where, you know, for the first seven days, I mean, it seems completely sci-fi magic that an autonomous aircraft is delivering this product that's going to save someone's life. But then on day eight, a nurse was looking at her watch and looked at me and was like, it's 30 seconds late. And, you know, this is like for a product that used to take days, you know, or like if they could get the product at all and, you know, all these healthcare complications and tragic outcomes, like when they couldn't get it. And it kind of made me realize like humans go from science fiction to entitlement in seven days, you know, like period. And that's just a funny thing about humans. I think it's called like, you know, hedonic adaptation. And like, that's what we see. You know, if you like, you see people jump into these Waymos and they're like, oh my God, I'm in an autonomous car. This is insane. You know, do I feel safe? And that's like 60 seconds. And then they're just like scrolling on Instagram for the rest of the ride, you know, totally oblivious. So I think, you know, humans adapt these kinds of technologies really quick. And I would say it's surprising how quickly they kind of like just integrated into their day-to-day lives.

David Hoffman:
[30:42] Yeah, there's something about like autonomous drone deliveries or robot deliveries that I think just strikes us in a very like, I think primitive is maybe the right word. Like a child will be able to tell you that, yes, a robot will come deliver me things in the future. And they're just using their basic imagination. I don't think it's that crazy of a leap of logic. So the idea that we can like very quickly adapt to this like new reality, I think makes it makes a ton of sense. Keller, you talked about two things, a retail app, but then also partners. And so I want to understand a little bit about where Zipline fits on the B2B versus B2C spectrum, because it sounds like you're doing both. Tell us about the philosophy there.

Keller Rinaudo:
[31:24] Yeah, we really, you know, the goal is just to integrate into people's lives and provide this new layer of logistics that is way faster less expensive better service better for the environment can't deliver everything. I mean, we're not going to be delivering flat screen TVs anytime soon. But suffice it to say, actually, a surprising amount of stuff being delivered in 85% of Amazon packages are five pounds or less. And very significant percentage, like north of 90% of those instant deliveries

Keller Rinaudo:
[31:55] are eight pounds or less, which is the current payload of Platform 2. So we, you know, in terms of us helping a lot of these different businesses in the US, kind of transform the way that their logistics works and provide their services or products to customers in better ways.

Keller Rinaudo:
[32:13] You know, I mean, our original vision, I mean, ZipLine was for the first decade, a healthcare logistics company. And so when we came to the U.S., we've been working with partners like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic and Michigan Medicine, Ohio Health, Memorial Hermann, Texas Health Resources, the list goes on. There are lots of others actually who we've signed who we aren't yet ready to announce. These are some of the biggest health systems in the U.S. And they are all, I would say the pandemic has really caused this shift, which is, you know, they saw telepresence go completely exponential during the pandemic. They do a hundred times, some of these systems do a hundred times as many telepresence visits as they did pre-pandemic. But that means that they have these big initiatives around healthcare at home, even hospital at home. They're really trying to find ways of taking care of you without having you come into the hospital, which is more expensive for them and usually worse experience for the patient. And so you can really think of teleportation as just the other half of telepresence. You can now pick up a phone, talk to a doctor. She can write you a prescription. But then she can be like, hey, you're not feeling well. Like, relax, stay in bed. Products are going to be delivered to you in five minutes. It'll be on your doorstep. Instead of asking someone to drive into a hospital or to a primary care facility and wait in line with a bunch of other sick people. And, you know, what if you have kids? What if it's the middle of the night, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what we're focused on. You know, healthcare is a huge part of what we're doing in the U.S. Our biggest partner in the U.S. is actually Walmart.

Keller Rinaudo:
[33:34] And, you know, they're just, I mean, Walmart, by the way, one of the largest pharmacies in the U.S. I think they might be the, yeah, if not the one of the largest pharmacies, especially in rural areas. And so, you know, Zipline is delivering both for Walmart pharmacy directly to customers as well as all of the different SKUs. So we deliver, I think, 95% plus of the 100,000 SKUs in a super center directly to customers in a way that is, radically faster and more convenient. And then finally, we're also working with a lot of food partners. So last year we announced Panera and Sweetgreen and Mendocino Farms and Inspire Brands, a number of others. In I think Q1 of this year, we announced that Zipline's starting to work with Chipotle. So we're launching with Chipotle in a couple months. And there are a couple more really, really exciting ones that I'm not allowed to talk about yet. But those are really the three main kinds of partners that we work with in the U.S. It's healthcare, quick commerce, and then food. And we think that those are the three main industries that are going to be transformed by autonomous delivery.

Josh Kale:
[34:40] I'm stoked for these partners because I'm a customer in a lot of those lunch places that you just listed. So I want to know, I live in New York City, but Zipline isn't really here. So I'm curious, and a lot of the places you've described Zipline working in, you mentioned Arkansas, it's working in parts of Africa that are a little more remote. I assume population density plays a fairly big role in how you're able to roll this out. What does the rollout look like? Like, what role does population density have? When am I going to be able to access this in the city? When could I get my zipline delivered to me?

Keller Rinaudo:
[35:07] Our biggest operations in the U.S. are actually in Dallas right now. And so we're investing a ton in Dallas, expanding really, really quickly there. And, you know, it's funny. People always ask. They're like, oh, okay, I totally see that this will be great for rural areas and suburban areas. But then they're often like, but is this going to work in a city? And when people ask that question, I always know exactly what they're thinking, which is they're thinking of Manhattan. And I don't know if that's where you live,

Josh Kale:
[35:33] But- Yep, right outside of in Brooklyn.

Keller Rinaudo:
[35:35] Okay, all right, yeah.

Josh Kale:
[35:36] That's what I'm thinking.

Keller Rinaudo:
[35:37] You know, people always think city, Manhattan. The reality actually is almost no cities in the US look like Manhattan. Even the rest of New York City does not look like Manhattan. And so I think the big realization here is like, yeah, Manhattan is with massive 100-story skyscrapers. Like that's a pretty tricky place. That's not really where Zipline is starting in the U.S. But the reality is almost all cities in the U.S. Look like Dallas or look like Phoenix, which is where I grew up, or look like Denver, or look like Seattle or Cleveland or Detroit. These are all metros where Zipline's launching over the next year. Yeah, actually, mostly metros where ZipLine is launching in the next year. And so the reality is that cities like Dallas, I mean, there the system is designed, you know, from a regulatory and safety perspective to be able to fly over all of those population densities to serve 99 plus percent of homes in those metros. And it's not to say that and by the way, we even have contracts to serve to build infrastructure and build homes in New York City just outside of Manhattan. So i think you know this system will definitely work great for the vast majority of cities in the u.s it's just that when you hear the word city you know just remember that almost no cities look like manhattan

Josh Kale:
[36:56] I think speaking of hearing things i think one of the it's funny i was mentioning to some friends that we were speaking with you and one of the things they were talking about was hearing drones i think a lot of perception people have about drones is that they're loud and they're noisy and in the same way people are kind of nervous to have flying cars going over them they're probably similarly nervous to have flying drones over them. And what I found interesting is earlier in the show, you described yourself not as a logistics company, but as a robotics company, which means that the zipline is the product. And I'm really curious for you to walk us through. It's funny, for people who are listening, Keller is on the production floor. There is a tiny little drone behind him. We are in the factory floor. And I want you to kind of walk us through the iterations and where we're at in terms of form factor for these drones. Because I remember back in the day, it was this kind of zipline, maybe zipline thing, it was kind of like a slingshot and now it's more of a two-piece system so can you explain to me how the drone works and if it's going to be this noisy annoying thing that's just flying around everywhere

Keller Rinaudo:
[37:50] I think, you know, it's funny, you're actually pointing out something that is an issue of active debate at Zipline. So if people, you know, who are listening have really smart ideas for us, we want to hear them. We worry about whether the word drone is really confusing people or not. You may have noticed I'm usually talking about like, oh, yeah, we build aircraft, like we build autonomous aircraft. And yes, the reason we say that is that two things really. One is when people hear the word drone, they think of two things. One is like a little, like five pound quadcopter that they've seen their friends flying around that takes pictures of whatever houses or people doing sports. And so these little quadcopters are a pretty different class of aircraft than what Zipline is building. You know, these quadcopters, they fly for 15 minutes. They can probably fly like one mile. They're not very reliable because it's a consumer product. They crash all the time because like people are flying them and don't know what they're doing. You know, Zipline is building like 50 to 60 pound aircraft that fly hundreds of miles on a single battery charge and that have to operate tens of thousands of cycles. I mean, we actually have aircraft in the Platform One fleet that have flown through wind, rain, dust, lightning storms and have flown more than a million commercial autonomous kilometers each. Whoa. So like you likely don't have a car that has done that many miles.

Keller Rinaudo:
[39:09] Right. I mean, yeah. So these vehicles are already more reliable than cars is a way to think about it. And and so this is a very different class of vehicle. And sometimes when people think drone, they're thinking of like a little five pound octo or quadcopter octocopter. Whereas like, you know, this looks very much more like a 50 to 60 pound, extremely reliable, extremely performant autonomous aircraft. The other problem with drone is that the word itself evokes the experience of like a really super annoying sound. Like, you know, everybody on Earth hates the way the drones sound. They are like, you know, those spinning propellers. They sound like an angry swarm of bees. And Zipline, you know, one of our best.

Keller Rinaudo:
[39:53] Most important hypotheses inside the company was there is no way people are going to be able to scale autonomous delivery if it sounds really bad. And so Zipline has a large aerodynamics and a large aeroacoustics team that has been working for six years to design these systems to be nearly silent and very difficult to hear at all. It's significantly less loud than the motorcycle or the car that is delivering something to your doorstep. When people come and see the service in person, the number one comment is always like, oh my God, it's insanely quiet. And that comes both from the design of the vehicle, but it also comes from the overall architecture. And so you were mentioning the kind of the system of platform two. One of the advantages of platform two is that the aircraft actually stays really high up in the air when we're delivering to. We stay a hundred meters, full football field, and we're lowering something that we call a delivery zip. That's actually, you know, for those who can see the video, this vehicle right here, the delivery zip is actually controlling its own position. X and Y axis is being lowered 100 meters by the main aircraft. And that's the only thing that comes close to your home. Delivery zip is really super cute. It's super safe and it's super quiet. And so.

Keller Rinaudo:
[41:09] We really think there is zero chance that people or neighbors are going to put up with like a really grating, annoying sound. It has to be extremely quiet and soothing and better than traditional delivery. And that's been a huge focus from an engineering perspective for Zipline over the last six years.

David Hoffman:
[41:28] How far away is the aircraft when it lowers the actual delivery vehicle? So you have like a thing that looks like a more closer to a plane with wings and that's where it gets its lift from. And then it lowers the zip behind you to the ground. What's that distance?

Keller Rinaudo:
[41:43] 100 meters. It's a full football field.

David Hoffman:
[41:46] Okay, that's very far.

Keller Rinaudo:
[41:47] It's actually hard to see the main aircraft when the delivery is happening. Cool. The only thing that our customers are really interacting with is that super cute looking delivery zip. It's quiet and it's adjusting its position, but all it has to do is fight wind. It doesn't have to fight gravity.

David Hoffman:
[42:02] Micro adjustments, not actually proportion.

Keller Rinaudo:
[42:05] Exactly.

Josh Kale:
[42:05] That's what I found amazing. I want to focus a little bit more on the safety of it because I was shocked at how safe these drones are relative to mine. I am a drone enthusiast. I love flying quadcopters and getting videos. This is a completely different class. You mentioned they go 100,000 kilometers or a million, however far. They fly farther than most cars can go, but they also have a lot of redundancy. I read you guys have a hardware redundancy in case things fail. That cute little box that comes down on the ground, it's able to kind of fight against wind and fight against elements of wind and rain. So it's not actually going to fall. It's not going to sway. It's not going to hit anybody. And in the case that someone pulls on it or tries to mess with it, it'll actually just disconnect and the main drone will fly away. So there's no case where the big drone is actually going to fall and crash and hurt people. Is this true? Like people can be pretty assured that this is not going to harm anyone, right?

Keller Rinaudo:
[42:53] You know, because Zipline started in these life-saving healthcare systems. Deliveries, you know, we had to design reliability and safety into like the core of everything that we were doing. And it also meant that we didn't get to sort of play cute games. We're like, oh, you know, we'll deliver to you as long as it's like sunny, you know, and the weather is perfect. And as long as it's between the hours of like 9 a.m. And 3 p.m. or whatever, like we immediately had to operate 24-7, 365, no holidays, no breaks. We fly through any gnarly weather because someone's life is on the line, like we're going to do the delivery. And this meant that Zipline had 10 years of hardening the system in gnarly conditions. And that led us to design redundancy and into every part of the aircraft. So, you know, redundant propulsion, if you lose a propeller or a motor, any part of the powertrain, the vehicle can still safely fly itself home. Redundant flight compute so that you can fail from one flight computer to another. Redundant avionics architecture so you You can reach into the aircraft while it's flying and cut any wire. The vehicle can still safely fly itself home. Redundant control surfaces. So if you have a hard over control surface failure,

Keller Rinaudo:
[44:04] Kind of the scariest and worst thing that can happen for an airplane, the vehicle can compensate and still safely fly itself home. After all those other levels of safety, we also have designed a system that we call the parachute landing system. It means that if every other level of safety and redundancy has failed and the vehicle cannot make it home safely, it can deploy a parachute and bring itself gently to the ground.

Keller Rinaudo:
[44:26] That is, you know, all of those different designs and all that real world experience has enabled Zipline to achieve 100 million commercial autonomous miles and have zero human safety incidents during that time. So we're pretty proud of that track record. You know, that's a pretty good track record. And by the way, Zipline has saved a lot of lives during that time. But no track record is going to be perfect. And, you know, you never want to say like, oh yeah, like the technology is perfect. I mean, nothing is perfect. We operate in the real world. It is always a game of statistics.

Keller Rinaudo:
[44:55] And, you know, I mean, we're deeply, like we're deeply, deeply focused on like, you want to build the safest, most reliable system ever. I would say, yeah, the data supports what you were saying. I mean, we have aircraft that have already flown more than a million commercial autonomous kilometers in their lifetime. So way more reliable than most cars. But even so, like, you know, the game is not to be perfect. The game is to be orders of magnitude

Keller Rinaudo:
[45:22] better than the status quo. And that is really what we target. Like we were like, as long as we can be 10 times safer than a 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle making that similar delivery, then we think there's a moral imperative to do this because you're saving so many lives just on the safety side, let alone on all the healthcare use cases that we're also serving.

Josh Kale:
[45:41] Yeah, we see this a lot on the autonomous cars too, is you reach a point where you're 10 times, 20 times, 30 times, 40 times safer than humans. And then you're just kind of marching down this, the march of nines, where you're like 99.999. And it feels like it will not be perfect, but it will be far superior to the existing thing, where I'd much prefer a little drone that is powered by batteries than a 4,000 pound car powered by this guy who is driving with gas and oil. So that alone feels like a really big difference. So I want a lot of these, clearly. I would love to see these everywhere. What is preventing you from having drone deliveries everywhere across the country in the world? And what does that rollout look like? Like, I assume you're planning on scaling fairly quickly. How quick, where to, and how does that happen?

Keller Rinaudo:
[46:23] Right now, you know, ZipLine is continuing to grow internationally. I mean, that's always been a huge part of our business. But the U.S. Is growing super, super fast. We're expanding into new counties and areas of Dallas as quick as we can. Most of the expansion through this summer is all happening in Dallas. And it's super exciting. It's just really cool to see. I'll be there this week. And just hanging out with customers and getting to meet people who are using the service every single day.

Keller Rinaudo:
[46:49] So you can think of it a bit like Waymo, how Waymo started in San Francisco and kind of scaled and got really, really stable, ironed out all of the kinks in San Francisco and now they're launching in Phoenix and Austin and the system's scaling super, super fast. That's really our strategy as well. We want to make sure to get everything working perfectly, learn anything, any little nuanced things that we need to learn about the service or maintenance, logistics, customer experience, all those things. We wanna learn those things in one metro where it's easy for us to be investing and we can all kind of be there observing and making it perfect. And then we're gonna start adding metros as quick as we can. So you'll start to see that happening toward the end of this year. And then we'll announce a lot of big metros that we'll be launching next year over the coming months. So I think ultimately, I never wanna over-promise and these timelines are always imperfect. I think that everybody's always like, when is this going to be in my city though? Like, I want to use this. You know, I live in, I live in whatever, you know, New Hampshire, I live in Florida. Like, I think that it depends, you know, if you, we will launch a lot of big cities next year. And so there's a chance that we'll launch your city. But I would think that in three years, it's almost certain that you'll have access to, you know, to Zipline and hopefully be able to have it be a, you know, fundamental part of just normal everyday life. Yeah.

David Hoffman:
[48:13] Yeah, it definitely does feel that we are on the cusp of things.

David Hoffman:
[48:16] So that's definitely exciting. I'm wondering, Keller, just what's the regulation conversation like? Every single city, it's its own municipality. So I'm assuming there's different rules for different cities. But then maybe there's also like global federal rules with like air zoning. What is the whole like regulation and compliance look like? How hairy of a mess is that?

Keller Rinaudo:
[48:37] Yeah, really important distinction. Because I think when people think about regulation, a lot of times, you know, they've seen these companies like Uber or, you know, Bird or Lime, the scooter companies that were kind of having to fight these very gnarly local politics battles on a like city by city basis to try to like figure out how they were going to operate. The U.S. airspace is managed very differently than that. The FAA has something called federal preemption. This is really the assumption that the entire airspace in the United States is managed by one institution and one institution only, and that is the FAA. And that's actually, you know, I mean, to a certain degree, it was challenging in the early days because getting certified by the FAA as a part 135 air carrier in the U.S., I mean, that's like United, American Airlines, those are part 135 carriers. Zipline is now certified as a part 135 carrier as, and in fact, and Zipline was the first company in U.S. History to be given full regulatory permission by the FAA to fly beyond visual and a sight in all 50 states. So, that wasn't an easy regulatory approval to get. I mean, the only reason we were able to get that is that we had, I think around the time, 80 million commercial autonomous miles, zero human safety incidents. I mean, we were able to provide them with a lot of data to demonstrate that the system was in fact safe.

Keller Rinaudo:
[49:54] But the good news is once you have that regulatory permission, you're not going on a state-by-state or city-by-city basis. Like the system is approved nationwide. We do still work really closely with cities because it's a big part of infrastructure. And, you know, honestly, most of the cities we're launching are like amazing allies to ZipLine. They help us in all kinds of different ways. A lot of times we're still permitting different like charging infrastructure and certain kinds of ground infrastructure. We're usually, you know, renting land and we're building a maintenance depot in each metro. So there's a lot of stuff that we're still doing with cities. And generally, like the cities we've launched in have been amazing partners like Dallas, you know, Bentonville and Arkansas. Like cities have been awesome. We're often hosting Congress, you know, men and women. We're hosting senators. We're hosting governors and mayors. Like, you know, a lot of these cities are super excited to have physical AI and robotics and autonomous delivery starting there. It's obviously creating high paying jobs and becoming a point of real pride for those regions. And and so generally, you know, we found even local governments to be awesome partners.

David Hoffman:
[50:57] Mm-hmm yeah the there's a metaphor here where like uber and anyone who's like down on the ground had to really fight tooth and nail they really did the ask for forgiveness strategy which definitely worked but they ultimately that was a a trench warfare with like the local local tag cab companies and like the metaphor i'm seeing here is like zip lines just literally flying.

Keller Rinaudo:
[51:18] Over all of

David Hoffman:
[51:19] That literally and figuratively with the drones by just like occupying a completely different part of like, resources, which is just airspace rather than clogging up the roads and fighting with fighting down on the ground.

Keller Rinaudo:
[51:31] It's a really good point. And by the way, just really quickly on that, I mean, I don't think people have yet quite anticipated how much better our neighborhoods are going to get when we have Waymo and Zipline

Keller Rinaudo:
[51:44] you know, serving you. I mean, soon Tesla, robo taxi, hopefully. Like, right now, I wouldn't feel comfortable having my kids. I mean, I grew up playing in the street outside my house. I don't think most parents would be comfortable. There's just, you know, a commercialization of like, you know, delivery drivers and Amazon drivers like bombing up and down. It's just, we've given a lot and obviously creating a lot of traffic and a lot of air pollution when you're driving a 4,000 pound vehicle that delivers them that weighs five pounds. I just, a lot of noise, you know, safety considerations. I just think, you know, as we kind of like automate and, and, and then for sure, what Zipline can do is give a ton of space back to people. You know, when we see these like sidewalk robots, a lot of times I'm like, wow, really? Like, like the sidewalks, the last place where humans are supposed to, you know, like we, the streets are now mainly like delivery drivers like, oh, but you still have this sidewalk. No, nevermind.

Josh Kale:
[52:39] We're taking that from you too.

Keller Rinaudo:
[52:40] We just generally don't think that's the future because we think that technology should be making neighborhoods more beautiful, quieter, more serene, more safe, less polluted. And like technology. So exactly as you said, like, let's just take that layer up into the sky, which is really not utilized at all. You're flying so high that humans on the ground can't really see the vehicles. You certainly can't hear them. And, you know, we think that's like a huge advantage here. It's like, give space back to humans, make neighborhoods quieter and safer and less polluted. Like that's, I don't think people quite appreciate how much that can change if we get these new kinds of technology right and scale done.

David Hoffman:
[53:21] Yeah, Peter Thiel and his whole like zero to one book and like this, the whole like innovators like challenge is always to produce a product that's like 10x better. You can't produce a 2x or 3x better product. You need to produce a 10x better product. but i'm just seeing just a lot more than 10x here because for all the a lot of the reasons why you talked about there's no gas consumption we're not driving cars uh we're freeing up our actual physical land but in addition to all of that the product or my little like five five pound widget that i bought is going to be delivered to me even faster than somehow amazon overnight is able to deliver to deliver it to me and just at the tip of my fingers in addition to all the safety benefits We're not driving cars. We're not burning any combustion. The order of magnitude of improvement I'm seeing here is like, it's hard to kind of like really reason about. It's easy to imagine. I can imagine a drone delivering me a product very instantaneously. That sounds exciting. But I think the second order benefits, which will take a while to kind of just permeate, I think are really the big reasons, the big societal reasons why this is like really worth getting excited about.

Keller Rinaudo:
[54:27] Yeah, we already see that. I mean, we, we see behaviors changing, like people already aren't planning as much, right? Like, that's kind of what the instant delivery economy has already enabled. And so people, that means people can live their lives a bit differently. Like you're not constantly having to plan ahead. You're not having to stress about, oh, I need to, you know, do all my grocery shopping for the entire week, or, oh, you know, I'm going to need to like take time off work to go pick this thing up. I think, you know, people often think that convenience is like a luxury for the rich, we actually think it's like a necessity for the underprivileged. You know, like if for people who are working multiple jobs, or even just people who work a normal job where you have to be there from nine to five and, you know, clock in, you don't get to just like, oh, yeah, I can just be at home to receive this thing at this time that's convenient for the logistics system. Or, you know, FedEx says they're going to drop the thing off between two and 4pm. That's really inconvenient for normal people. And so, you know, I think the promise here is like logistics that works around your schedule.

Keller Rinaudo:
[55:26] It's 10 times as fast. It operates 24 seven. And it is super consistent. Like you get to set, you know, we'll either deliver as fast as we can, but you can also set deliveries and you can tell us the minute that you want it delivered. You know, you can say, I'm going to be home at 11 PM and I want this thing delivered at 1110 right before I go to sleep at 1120. We will deliver in that 60 second window. And so I think that is to your point, I don't think people have quite conceptualized, whoa, like there are major advantages to having an automated system that heals and operates more like the internet where things are delivered instantly and very reliably and consistently. Like I think actually a huge part of this is not just speed, it's also just

Keller Rinaudo:
[56:08] Like the stress and uncertainty of like, when is the thing actually going to come? And, you know, it's often delayed or it comes early and you're not at home to be there and et cetera, et cetera. So I think like predictability is a huge thing here. Predictable, consistent systems are going to feel way better to humans than, you know, kind of chaotic ones that have a lot of human factors and traffic involved.

Josh Kale:
[56:30] So I'm curious, is this it kind of as Zipline stands with the current technology is this enough to scale to this vision that you are painting for us now is there any improvements that need to be made on on the device front on the logistics front like a new drone are there problems with this one that needs to be solved i'm kind of i'm wondering what what is the end game what needs to happen in order for this to be everywhere and for people to use it down to the minute delivery to get anything they want you

Keller Rinaudo:
[56:56] Know the work is never over i would say two big categories you know obviously we've come a long ways i mean you know we

Josh Kale:
[57:02] We have been building

Keller Rinaudo:
[57:03] This now for 12 years and we've learned by doing and by operating in the real world. And we've made thousands of design changes, architecture changes based on things that we learned by serving people. But the work is never over. There are a lot of things that we know today that we want to make better. You know, you're increasing performance, you're increasing the life cycles of the vehicles, making it last longer. You're increasing the reliability, you're decreasing the maintenance intervals, sorry, increasing the maintenance intervals. So, you know, it's less often that you have to do maintenance. You're improving the unit economics. You're working with supply chain to figure out how to cost down parts so that you can then pass those cost savings on to customers as service becomes, you know, less and less expensive. Yeah.

Keller Rinaudo:
[57:47] You know, all of these things are like the work never stops. You're just constantly iterating and working. And I would say, you know, right now, I mean, we have a really exciting product roadmap for the next two years of like all of these performance changes and modifications and cost downs and all the things we want to do. And then there's always also kind of like the unknown unknown, which is we're also going to learn a bunch of things over the next six to nine months from commercial operations in the U.S. And in Africa that are going to necessitate us designing new solutions and figuring out how to incorporate new things into the overall system fast. Zipline is, as a company, we're a full stack company. We design the avionics, all of the avionics in the aircraft designed from scratch by Zipline. We write all the low level firmware embedded software that runs that avionics. We design the aircraft itself, all the structures and mechanisms,

Keller Rinaudo:
[58:41] 43 major sub-assemblies, 700 unique components, some of which you can see behind me that we are then, you know, building either internally or through a massive complicated global supply chain. And then on the software side, we're building not just the flight control algorithms, but multi-vehicle deconfliction, communications architectures, the entire autonomy stack, customer ordering interface, the unmanned traffic management system that we provide to regulators, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So all of that is built from scratch, but the advantage of owning everything is that we can move lightning fast. Like the entire company is tooled for customer learning and velocity. And so even as we discover those unknowns I was just talking about, you can like quickly walk to the desk of the person in Zipline who actually owns that system and say, uh-oh, we just learned something that we weren't expecting. We got to make modifications here. Like, you know, let's work hard over the next couple of days and we can rapidly iterate, design something new, get it to our test sites, test it over the course of a couple of weeks and then have it rolled out to the global fleet.

David Hoffman:
[59:35] Keller, one last question before we wrap up here. I believe your last funding round in 2023 valued you guys a little over $4 billion. Is there a path to going public? Is that something you guys are interested in? Is that something you guys are working towards? When can I get exposure to Zipline?

Keller Rinaudo:
[59:52] Definitely honored by the question. And we, you know, Zipline's been lucky and we have a lot of the best investors in the world who've kind of like believed in this vision and who are very long-term oriented. I mean, that's really the best kind of investor, right, is one who kind of like understands the long-term vision, understands that, hey, if someone's going to build an automated logistics system over the next 10 years, that company is going to be one of the most valuable companies on earth,

Keller Rinaudo:
[1:00:16] but it's also going to take time and it's capex intensive to build. So I think we have at least a couple more years of work to do in terms of getting the company to a very significant exit velocity and profitability before we would consider going public. But certainly like we, there's so many people who like follow Zipline's journey online and on, you know, X and...

Keller Rinaudo:
[1:00:42] We're super honored. Like we really appreciate people who believe in us. And on that front, you know, if you don't want to wait, if you don't want to wait until next year or the year after that for us to come to your Metro, people can go to Dallas. Like we have a number of different Airbnbs that are now enabled with Zipline delivery where people can stay. We're also starting to add hotels. So we are kind of like trying to, in the same way that Waymo became kind of a cool attraction for San Francisco, I'm pretty hopeful that like autonomous delivery and Zipline are going to become really cool attraction in Dallas. And it's a relatively easy place to get to. So for the people who are super excited, even if you can't buy shares in Zipline for another year or two, you can experience the service today and it's getting easier and easier to do so. And we love hosting people.

David Hoffman:
[1:01:24] Keller, one of the treats of doing this podcast is we get to have visions of the future given to us by people who are helping build that future. But I think this podcast particularly feels so close and that's very exciting to have what feels like something very, very futuristic be rolling out to parts of America and then we'll find our way into play. I'm in Seattle right now. And so I think you guys will be here pretty soon and then maybe back in New York as well. Keller, it's been great having you on the show.

Keller Rinaudo:
[1:01:51] Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

Josh Kale:
[1:01:52] Thanks, Keller. And a quick thank you to you and the team. Like what you described, the full stack of drones is impossibly hard where you could pick any one of those things and form an entire company around it. So to do the entire stack, I hope people understand how challenging that is. And to do it as well as you guys are doing,

Keller Rinaudo:
[1:02:08] Very much

Josh Kale:
[1:02:08] Appreciated i'm excited for companies that make the future look like the future and zip line is absolutely one of those that is doing that so very badass appreciate

Keller Rinaudo:
[1:02:16] Our language man totally couldn't agree more um that was an awesome interview guys thank thanks very much for having me thank you for being patient sorry for the whole illness thing and no worries yeah glad glad that we waited for like my voice to be normal and to make it like really high quality so yeah yeah that was awesome thank you guys