The Company Competing With Amazon for Instant Delivery w/ Keller Rinaudo Cliffton | EP #117

29 Aug 2024 · 1 h 41 min

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Podcast Episode Notes: Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Episode #117

Episode Title

The Company Competing With Amazon for Instant Delivery w/ Keller Rinaudo Cliffton Release Date: July 23, 2024 Host: Peter Diamandis Guest: Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Co-founder of Zipline

Overview In this episode, Peter Diamandis interviews Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, the co-founder and CEO of Zipline, a leading drone delivery company. The discussion revolves around Zipline's revolutionary contributions to logistics, particularly in healthcare delivery, and explores broader themes of technology, entrepreneurship, and the future of logistics with a focus on drone delivery systems.

Key Segments

  1. Zipline's Journey and Valuation
  2. Valuation: Zipline has achieved a valuation of $4.2 billion.
  3. Autonomous Deliveries: The company has completed over 1.1 million commercial autonomous deliveries and surpassed 80 million miles flown autonomously.
  4. Funding: Keller shares insights about raising $330 million in Series F funding and achieving FAA authorization for commercial deliveries beyond visual lines of sight.
  1. Impact on Healthcare
  2. Rwanda's Blood Logistics: Zipline has revolutionized blood delivery in Rwanda, achieving a 51% reduction in maternal mortality rates through timely blood deliveries.
  3. Infrastructure: The previous system relied on a limited number of centralized blood facilities, resulting in long wait times during emergencies.
  4. Efficiency: Zipline's service allows for deliveries in as little as 10-40 minutes, directly to hospitals.
  1. The Future of Delivery Technology
  2. Teleportation Vision: Keller describes Zipline's mission as a form of teleportation, aiming for instant, automated, and eco-friendly logistics.
  3. Platform Two: Upcoming advancements in drone technology will enable home delivery with precision, promising to change logistics as we know it.
  4. Drone Specifications: Platform Two will feature hybrid vehicles capable of vertical takeoff and landing, enhancing delivery accuracy and reducing noise pollution.

Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs

  • Embrace Naivety: Keller emphasizes the importance of being naive as a strength, allowing innovators to challenge conventional wisdom and take risks.
  • Focus on Early Revenue: He stresses the need for startups to secure early revenue to validate their product and iterate effectively, rather than solely relying on funding rounds.
  • Geographic Arbitrage: Choosing a supportive regulatory environment can significantly accelerate innovation. Zipline started in Rwanda due to quicker decision-making processes compared to the U.S.
  • Team Dynamics: Hiring for innate characteristics over experience and seeking passionate individuals willing to endure challenges is crucial for building a resilient team.

Final Thoughts Keller reflects on the broader implications of technology in addressing humanitarian needs and emphasizes a hopeful vision for the future where logistics can be made available to every person on the planet. The discussion points towards an exciting future where instant deliveries become the norm, drastically transforming access to healthcare and other essential services.

Additional Resources

  • Zipline Website: [Zipline](https://www.flyzipline.com/get-delivery)
  • Follow on X (Twitter): [Keller Rinaudo](https://x.com/KellerRinaudo) | [Zipline](https://x.com/zipline)
  • Host Social Media: [Peter Diamandis on X](https://x.com/PeterDiamandis)

Closing Remarks This episode highlights the intersection of technology, healthcare, and transportation, showcasing how innovative solutions like Zipline can transform industries and improve lives globally. As entrepreneurs, the lessons shared by Keller can inspire others to pursue ambitious goals and make a meaningful impact.

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Transcript

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0:00Logistics today really only does a good job of serving the golden billion humans on Earth and one of the advantages of making it dramatically less expensive, more broadly available is that basically you'll be able to push a button on your phone, it will be able to order whatever you need in five minutes or less. How many drone deliveries have you done so far? Are you doing per day? What are some numbers there? We just passed 80 million commercial autonomous miles, it's become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth. I believe we're now at about 1 .1 million commercial autonomous deliveries.

0:34When I look at what you've accomplished and will dive into it, you pulled off really an extraordinary moonshot in Rwanda, Zipline's existence today has decreased maternal mortality rates by like... Yeah, it's 51%. Had you told me we were going to reduce maternal mortality in the country by five percent. I would have said hell yeah.

0:58Everybody welcome to moon shots. Today I'm going to be talking to an incredible moon shot entrepreneur Keller Clifton. He's the CEO of Zipline. Zipline is an amazing company doing drone deliveries of health products. They started in Rwanda delivering blood and vaccines. Today they're doing a delivery every 60 seconds in eight different countries. The audacity of Keller's vision and his execution is amazing. We're going to dive into the top six or seven lessons for moonshot entrepreneurs. And today from a start in Rwanda where he had near death experiences almost every day of his operations, he's over $4 billion in valuation.

1:40Incredible stories to be learned here. If you like stories like this about moonshot entrepreneurs and learning about them, subscribe so I can bring you even more. Alright, let's jump into our conversation with Keller Clifton. Hey, Keller, welcome to moonshots. It's great to see you, buddy. Thanks, Peter. You too. Yeah. Listen, first of all, I loved visiting your digs in South San Francisco and I have to say I walk in just to describe the scene for folks and it is bustling. I mean, it is a beehive. There are hundreds of people. I think you've got like 1300 employees now. They're not all there in South San Francisco.

2:14But hundreds of people crowded around desks, building hardware, there are like displays every place with data about what's being picked up and dropped off. It was amazing. It was palpable energy. I love that. Well, I'm really glad you got to visit in person and that is one of the things that's special about Zipline. I think when you get talented passionate people together to work on ambitious products, sometimes magic results. Yeah, I think it's what I miss post COVID. We can talk more about having a team in place. So this is your 10 year anniversary. Happy 10 years. So overnight success after 10 years of hard work, I think.

3:00That's what it feels like. Yeah, you know, I think the audience listening here all entrepreneurs Excited about moonshots and when I look at what you've accomplished and will dive into it You've pulled off really an extraordinary moonshot and let me just start by asking you when you got zip line going a decade ago To set the scene here. What what did you set the probability of success at? I mean, you know when we were starting to build zip line And it seemed like the chances of success were less than 10%. I remember a conversation with our team when we were 10 people, we were at a very whole in the wall of Chinese restaurant celebrating, we were having like our annual holiday party, 10 people.

3:45It was when the whole company fit around one table in a restaurant. And someone asked me that question, like what do you think are the chances that we'll succeed in building this? And I said, well, it's definitely less than 5%. I think people were quite shocked by that and disappointed. They really walked, why are we here? And I remember saying, yeah, but it's 5 % of getting to build crucial infrastructure for humanity. Like that's such an important thing. It's totally worth trying to build this. And to hit the punchline for folks listening who don't know Zipline, it's now, I think your last valuation was above $4 billion.

4:23dollars and how many drone deliveries have you done so far? Are you doing per day? What are some numbers there? Well, I mean, you know, when we, it's crazy to think, because when we launched in 2016, we were serving one hospital and we were doing a couple deliveries every day. Eight years later, Zipline serves over 4 ,000 hospitals and health facilities globally. It's become the largest commercial autonomous system on earth. We just passed 80 million commercial autonomous smiles and I believe we're now at about 1 .1 million commercial autonomous deliveries. That's amazing from a 5 % chance. I think one of the biggest questions I want to get through in this conversation here is the advice you have for people looking to take moonshots, right?

5:09Because how do you inspire a team when you've got probabilities against you? And I've heard you say this, I've heard it from a number of places, you know, hardware is hard. and what you're doing is not easy. Yeah, I think that, you know, we had to keep two ideas in our mind at the same time. One was that we had this very clear long -term vision, which is that we thought it was very likely that someone was going to build a robotic or automated logistics system for Earth. And the thing that really excited us about that vision is that, you know, if you could achieve that, you could build the first logistics system that serves all people equally.

5:47You will directly save millions of lives, and majority of them kids. It just seemed like such crucial infrastructure for humanity to build. On the other hand, it's really hard to get, I think, investors to invest in something that is 10 years away. And so it was really crucial for us to be very scrappy and practical and learned by doing. And so we were really focused on what is the absolute most basic thing that we can get to work anywhere in the real world today that would have clear value for customers and for communities. And that's really what led to us in 2016 to make this bizarre looking decision for a Silicon Valley startup to launch infrastructure in Rwanda.

6:30So I wanna get to that, but I wanna go in reverse order and not a time machine. So it's 2024 now, 10 years from now, you're 10 years old today, 10 years from now, 2034. We're both Trekkies, right? We both love Trekkies, And I love your description of Zipline as a teleportation company. And it's a beautiful vision. 2034, what will Zipline be doing? Give me a vision of what you imagine is possible a decade from now. A kid's born, what's different in the world for them? I think a couple things. One is that the promise of truly instant and automated logistics is that it will be 10 times as fast, dramatically less expensive, and it'll be zero emission, relative to the way that we deliver things today.

7:21So the advantages are that it will be, it will be used far more than we use logistics today. I think we'll probably be receiving, three or five instant deliveries a day if you're a family living in the house. We're also going to transition this very carbon -intensive part of the economy to a fully zero emission. future. And finally, logistics today really only does a good job of serving the golden billion humans on earth. And one of the advantages of making it dramatically less expensive, more broadly available is that I actually think there's an opportunity to extend very high quality logistics to every single human on earth, which means people are going to have access.

8:05Ten millions of people, hundreds of millions of people are going to get access to healthcare, they're going to get access to economic opportunity in ways that they just don't today. So in the future, I'm going to, you know, I guess the world's learned about dominoes deliveries in 30 minutes. And is it a future where my AI is just when I order something, it's deciding it's going to get delivered by a drone or by some other means. Is this in every city in the world? Is this how you bickwood is going to be? Yeah, I'm pretty much at this point 100 % sure that this will be in every city on Earth and that It'll be possible to do you know, basically you'll be able to push a button on your phone or more realistically probably just talk to your you know talk to your home AI and You know, it will be able to order whatever you need in five minutes or less and I think I think that A, it's quite provocative to think wow When we used to need to send information, we paid someone to write, we wrote a letter, and then we paid someone to deliver it on horseback.

9:10Now I just send you a text message or an email. So there's this, the magic of what the internet did for how we move information, enabling information to move at near zero cost instantly to any person. I think that same thing is going to happen with logistics. I think automated logistics is going to make it possible to deliver packages in a way that is near zero cost and instantaneous. Yes. So yeah, I think it's going to profoundly change how people live their lives. I mean, it might even change the way that we think about ownership. Also. Well, I mean, I think you just need to own less stuff. I mean, I have tons and tons of stuff at my house that I only use like once a year, maybe even less than that.

9:48Nice. And if it's easy to just teleport something to my house and then teleport it back, you can imagine a pretty fundamentally different kind of sharing economy, where we can actually have a lot less junk in our houses but have access to vastly more things like only when we need them. I love that. And my AI can anticipate what I need before I need it and get it here, and it's there. And then set it back. Exactly. So, that's 2034. Today, if you don't mind, I was super impressed by what I saw logistics wise in sort of your drone design one. and two, can you describe what's operational today? And then I want to go back to the origin.

10:31So people who've heard of Zipline heard about your early roots, but you've got an incredible operation burgeoning in the US today. So give me a sense of the scope of what you've got going and yeah, I'd like to hear it. Yeah, I mean, in 2016 we launched this, what we call our enterprise delivery service. We started with one hospital and rapidly expanded across hospitals, primary care facilities, even some patient homes, and then across eight different countries globally. The service is quite simple. It just means that any doctor or nurse at a hospital or primary care facility, mainly, can push a button on a phone, can order exactly what they need to serve a patient or save a patient's life.

11:13And then that product is packed and loaded at one of our distribution centers, loaded onto one of the aircraft. You can see right behind me these are all aircraft to be able to make deliveries. And then we launched that aircraft from our distribution center, vehicle flies autonomously to the GPS coordinates where it needs to deliver, descends close to the ground, and then delivers using a really simple paper parachute. So honestly, it's a relatively simple service, send a text message, get what you need to serve a patient or save someone's life. It is way, way faster than delivering things via traditional logistics.

11:48It's a lot less expensive. It's also zero mission and interestingly delivering things instantly actually kind of transforms the way that you can think about doing healthcare in a country. You guys you can provide a lot of kinds of healthcare at a lower level of the health system that's more cost effective close to where people live. You can also store inventory centrally and then only send it when it's actually needed to increase his access and reduce his waste. I, you know, okay, let's start with in the beginning then. So you're you graduate Harvard, you're in the robotics and you're focused on early on sort of I will call it molecular nanotechnology.

12:30You're fascinated. I mean, and we both have that love of the future of where longevity and biotech is going. We met each other friends biotech some a few months ago. How did you get from there to robotics? How'd you get from there to zip line? I mean, that was a transition that was not expected. Yeah, I mean, I spent undergrad building computers made of RNA and DNA that operate within human cells. The idea was that we could build these molecular doctors that could compute inside cells and make complicated decisions and cure cancer as well as a lot of other diseases. So, you know, I think the big takeaway is, I've always been a nerd, I've always been a massive NFSIFI.

13:17It seems, you know, we need a reason to be excited when we wake up in the morning and for me that was always imagining a future that was radically different and better than the one we live in today. When I graduated, and I was starting to get really, really interested, this was in 2011, 2012, when we were starting Zipline, it was pretty obvious to us that there's really the moment it became clear that every human on Earth was going to have a smartphone. And the scale of the smartphone economy and the kinds of hardware that was being commoditized and made very inexpensive, it goes into smartphones, I think one of the fundamental realizations we had was that the slow progress of robotics, a lot of that was due to just hardware being expensive and not very good.

14:09And we realized that a lot of the components that go into a smartphone are the fundamental components that you need to make a good robot. You know, you need compute, you need a good IMU, you need GPS, you need good Wi -Fi. All of these things were reaching a level of ubiquity that we felt, you know, instead of us going and working on smartphone app, for example, which felt like everybody else was doing, we thought that, you know, hey, this is like an awesome time to go focus on robotics because we felt like there were just a lot of enabling foundations that had been built through to smartphones that were going to make it possible to finally go build robotic and autonomous systems that would have a huge impact on the world.

14:53Mrs. the convergence argument, right? All these technologies are converging to create new capabilities, new business models back then. Yeah, exactly. And so what happens next? Where did the seed crystal for Zip Line happen? Where were you, what conversation were you having? When did delivering blood in Rwanda become a founding concept? Well, we knew when we were starting to build this and it's probably important to point out, we spoke to so many experts in global public health care and almost every expert told us that we were idiots. People told us there is no chance you're going to be able to build a vehicle that flies it all.

15:35Even if the vehicle flies, you'll never be able to make it reliable. Even if it were reliable, you know, in California, you're never going to design something that is actually going to work at scale in the kinds of environments that we have to operate in. No customer will ever sign a contract with you, you'll never get regulatory approval for this. Even if you could do all those things, it won't be useful because logistics isn't the problem anyway. So pretty disperting. This is my conversation. This is where I put my phrase in the day before something is truly a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea.

16:06Yeah, I mean, worse than crazy. People were like offended by it. I don't know. I think that a lot of people spend a lot of time. I think the way that you become an expert in a field, in an industry over many decades, is you see a lot of things fail and you learn what not to do. And I think sometimes it does take someone to come along who is stupid and naive and just happens to believe, well, why don't we just do it in this completely different way? And of course, there are a hundred reasons that that thing won't work. A lot, I think what we were able to prove over many years of hard work is that those things can be solved with engineering.

16:50I was having the same conversation with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, who had no background in the grocery business and enters it naively. Right. And like Elon had no background in the rocket business and enters it. And I think that naivete and that not knowing what you can't do and then bringing engineering talent to the table is the formulation for the rich generation. Very useful. saying this picture the other day of like a big kind of inspirational looking banner and hanging in like a high school gymnasium and it says we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought that it would be easy.

17:29And this is like the perfect description of Zip Line. Like, had we known how hard it was going to be when we were getting started, you know, we may have, we may have, may have not ever done it to begin like. Yeah. Well, in 20 other universes you didn't make it. but in this one you did. Yes, so. So were you planning originally to do? There's still a lot of success in the hardware. I'm beating on you, buddy. I think you've passed that. Now the question is, can you dominate globally? And I think you can. I think an amazing team you have and the tech is beautiful. But did you originally think you were going to be doing the deliveries in the US?

18:09I think we always knew that logistics shouldn't really discriminate. I mean, if you can build a logistics system that is significantly safer, zero mission, less expensive, faster, that's something that every person should have access to. We always knew that with any disruptive technology where you're going to have to be working hand in hand with a regulator, it is easier to start in smaller, more startup -oriented countries. We wanted to go to a country that was able to make decisions fast where we could meet immediately with the decision makers where they didn't have a ton of bureaucratic or legal blockers to them just making a decision.

18:46And on that front, I think we got quite lucky. I mean, Rwanda really wound up being the perfect partner for us. You're sort of known as the Singapore of Africa. It's incredibly forward -leaning, technocratic country really focused on building the future. And so they wound up being the perfect partner for us on the regulatory and government inside to say, well, hey, like we'd like to lead in this industry. What are all the regulatory exemptions that need to be made or regulatory presence that need to be set to enable this technology to show what's possible? You know, I think that regulatory arbitrage that, you know, you've played beautifully here is so important for moonshot engineers and moonshot entrepreneurs that think about, you know, when I was working on my asteroid mining company, we ended up in Luxembourg and got the laws passed in Luxembourg for private ownership of Astro -Ordal materials.

19:41And I've heard, I mean, you know, we have different governments in South and Central America looking at, you know, cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. So I think where you go and start is super important. Just doing it in your backyard in a highly regulated, you know, US economy is probably a really difficult thing to do. So you got to run down. And we knew the US was important. I don't think Zipline would have been able to raise the money from investors. It was necessary to really build out all of the different infrastructure that was required to make this technology do what it does today. Investors needed to kind of understand that regulatory arbitrage argument as well.

20:25And it had to be able to make that leap of faith or that kind of logical leap to say, Oh, well, if you can get it to work in some of the hardest places to operate in the world, then it's very likely to also have a pretty big impact in the US once the US catches up from a regular trip perspective. And that's basically what we saw, and now that we're eight years in, it's basically what we've seen over the last two years. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love.

20:55Company is called Fountain Life and it's company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians You know most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists Until that day when you have a pain in your side you go to the physician and they burn into your room and they say listen I'm sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn't start that morning It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers.

21:34We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI -nabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, dexascan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood blood work up, it's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Mice will find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers.

22:22So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife .com -peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30 ,000 people who reached out to us for fountain life memberships. If you go to fountainlife .com -peter will put you to the top of the list. It really is something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to fountainlife .com, backslash, Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners.

23:05Alright, let's go back to our episode. Can you describe what was going on before you arrived in Rwanda? know, what was the state of delivery? How are things being delivered? What was the, you know, the tragedies? And then where is it now? Give me that pre and post description, understand the impact. It might help to, you know, focus on a single commodity. So we should talk about blood. And then if you want, it means that, blind also delivers massive numbers of vaccines and transfusions and infusions, cancer treatments, a lot of other things. But just focusing on blood, You know, when we, when I went, I remember going and having this initial conversation with the Minister of Health of Rwanda in 2015, we went and spoke to her and basically went in being really excited, you know, young naive engineers saying, hey, with this awesome solution and we're going to, you know, we're going to use autonomous aircraft to deliver all medical products to every hospital and health facility in the country.

23:59I remember so clearly her looking at me with this look of significant skepticism saying Keller shut up, just do blood. And as she started to explain to us, you know, 51 % of transfusions in the country are going toward moms with postpartum emerging. 30 % are going to kids under the age of five with severe anemia. And so this is a really important product for family health and it's quite tricky because you have all these different components, you have platelets, plasma, cryopacipitis, pack rib blood cells. Each of those has different storage requirements and different shelf lives. And then obviously, you have different types, A, B, A, B, and O, positive and negative, RH factor.

24:42And so what they were doing before is they had these regional blood facilities, think that there were four of them spread throughout the country. And they would... The entire country of Rwanda. Yeah, the entire country that had four of these centers. And it's a relatively small country of, I think about 18 million people. And they would do big blood drives. They'd collect all the blood. They'd send it to one centralized facility where they would test and type it. And then they would distribute the blood to these regional facilities. And whenever there was an emergency occurring at a hospital, a doctor or nurse would drive, assuming they didn't just need the most basic blood product.

25:20So we packed red blood cells of a... Yeah, like AB positive or basically the most common, unless it was the common component and the most common blood type You were probably needing to get into a car and drive a couple hours to this regional Facility read way in line fill out some paperwork get the blood you needed get back into your car drive back to the hospital I mean the challenge here is obvious a it's really expensive and you need someone to do that be like four or five hours that elapsed Well a woman may be bleeding in childbirth and it's just you know has a pretty big impact on patient health and sometimes you're going to lose people are going to lose their lives during that weight.

26:03And so, and by the way, this is Rwanda, it actually has one of the best blood logistic systems of any contrainer of like it rivals the US. Even in the US, blood logistics is a huge challenge really hard to make it work especially in rural places. There's significant waste. So it's it don't you know it's actually important not to get confuse it like, oh, geez, like what it is after it is there. Like it's pretty much the same in the US. And we were able, you know, by listening to the Minister of Health, because it's incredibly smart that she told us to just focus on this, in this one area to get started.

26:37It wound up being, you know, plenty for us to bite off and chew for the first year. It was a significant challenge just to deliver blood to 21 different hospitals. And we ended up consolidating the national blood supply into two zipline distribution centers that we built and then delivering from those distribution centers only when a patient was having an emergency and needed something, delivering from those distribution centers directly to hospitals where a patient needed the product. And delivery time at that point was significantly shorter. It was anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes. And I assume much more inexpensive and saving lives.

27:21I remember in reading, I think in Rwanda, Zipline's existence today has decreased maternal mortality rates by like 88 % I think was the number. Yeah, it's 51%. According to the most recent number is by University of Pennsylvania. 51 % reduction in maternal mortality across all the hospitals that we serve. And when we started building Zipline, had you told me we were going to reduce maternal mortality in a country by 5%. I would have said, hell yeah, this is worth the next 10 years of our lives. So it's kind of hard to put into words. Like we get to meet patients who are alive every day because of the infrastructure and the service.

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28:05And honestly, I mean, on one hand, that's inspiring. On the other hand, it's a little distressing realizing that today's it will only provide service to about 45 million people. And we think that probably there's a moral imperative for every human honor, that access to this kind of logistics. You take a moment and talk about, you know, the startup mode, because I think most entrepreneurs are way overly optimistic about how easy it is to get their product built. And the whole ethos of getting to a minimally viable product and learning from actually building. And I've heard you describe some of the lessons learned.

28:47And again, just speaking to sort of the entrepreneur who's looking at building anything. He talked to you, your early lessons learned and your MVP and what was hard, that you didn't think was hard, and what was easy that you thought was hard, give me some sense of advice for folks there. Yeah, yeah, we could talk for an hour and an hour after about just that question, but I guess I can share. At a high level, one thing that was true for us, I think is probably true to a certain degree for every single entrepreneur trying to build kind of a moonshot product. Maybe any product is that it will definitely be 10 times harder than you think it will be.

29:29Yeah. It will be 10 times as expensive, It will take 10 times as long. It will be 10 times as difficult. And I think it's pretty important as we describe. Like the naivete, on one hand, it's useful not to know that. Because if you know what you might like, it started. But I remember this conversation where, you know, Keenan, my co -founder and I were trying to think through what kind of hardware we needed to build. And we were considering building this far more advanced product. That interestingly looks a lot like the product that Zipline is just now launching into the real world 10 years later.

30:00And the more we talk to customers, and we were really pushing customers on what would they pay us for, it turned out that the customers were talking to really only cared about two things. They wanted to be as cheap as possible and maybe to maximum range, so that we could actually operate at national scale. We could serve health facilities and hospitals that were quite far away. And as we were thinking about it, we kind of said, well, I mean, if those are the only two things that really matter, we should probably build a very simple, fixed -wing platform. which, you know, this is the realization that led to the vehicle that you see right behind me on the manufacturing line and which we call Platform 1.

30:38And I remember this conversation in the keynote at the time where the keynote and I both basically said, okay, well, the beautiful thing about that is we could knock that product out in six months. That's a really easy thing. And then six months later, we'll immediately get to the more advanced version of product. Well, here we are a decade later. still perfecting the six month project that we thought was going to be so incredibly simple. And so on one hand, it's like it was really important that we choose something that seemed like it was going to be very easy to us because it wound up being 10 times harder, but that was still do a manageable.

31:10Whereas, hey, yeah, had we chosen the harder and more ambitious thing, we for sure would have failed. And I think you see a lot of hardware startups kind of fail in that I think the other important thing that was a big part of our DNA was just this attitude that we were pretty sure that we didn't know what the heck we were doing. Like we, you know, that we were clueless. We weren't clueless about the fact that we were clueless. That's the one thing we knew. So I think that for that reason, we did not trust any of our assumptions. We spent very little time building in a bunker. We had this assumption that we got to go out and and try to sell the product from day one.

31:46And so we were talking to customers, getting doors slammed in our face, like hundreds of doors slammed in our face from day one, learning, okay, what is it about this that would be powerful enough that we get customers to take a bet on us? And we were lucky enough to find a few partners who were willing to pay us and take a risk on us, even when we were just a team of 15 nerds. And then I think the last point was, is we knew we needed to be scrappy and unfancy and get the product into the real world quickly and learn by doing. And that meant we needed to go out and serve actual customers and ask those customers to pay us.

32:23We didn't wanna do unpaid pilots, we didn't wanna do demos or exhibitions. It was like, let's just go start operating the service anywhere in the world. And that was an incredibly painful experience. I'm gonna... Let me hint on something here, because it's something that I think a lot of, especially, I would say, moonshot entrepreneurs get wrong, is they wait for revenue and they are building their company on fund rays after fund rays after fund rays. You did something which I think is the absolute right way to do it, which is get something that earns you money immediately and build from there.

33:04How critical is early revenue for an entrepreneur trying to do something like this? Yeah, I mean, for us, we would not have built the right product if we didn't have that constant iteration. I mean, it's incredibly important, even just for the team. Like, for our entire engineering team, at that time, it sharpens the mind like nothing else to have a product that is operating in the real world that customers are depending on. And then every night, we would operate the Distribution Center all day long. This is for the first nine months of operating and serving customers. We had a single distribution center.

33:42We were supposed to serve 21 hospitals. And actually for the first, I think seven or eight months, we only served one hospital. Because we were just trying to get the service to work correctly for that one hospital from one distribution center. And we would turn on the distribution center at 7 a .m. and it would just battle through, and it's like trying to turn gears that have rocks in them. And it doesn't feel good. There's so many engineering challenges. We've made a lot of mistakes in the design of the system. We also had definitely underestimated the importance of all the auxiliary software systems around the actual aircraft.

34:14Can you talk to that one second? Because someone naively looking at what you did, would think building the plane, building the drone would be the hard part. Yeah. Yeah, that was what we thought and that wound up being wrong. What was the hard part? The hard part was designing a service that felt like teleportation for our customers that would be reliable. And what it, I think we like probably most, maybe nerds were trying to build hardware or trying to build a product. It's very easy to get obsessed with the cool thing in front of you, whether that's an autonomous aircraft or a rocket or an autonomous vehicle or anything.

34:58But I think what we realized is the aircraft itself is about 15 % of the complexity of the solution. We had to build all of this, none of our customers give a damn about drones. That was like a core thing for us to realize. All our customers care about is can they move a crucial product from point A to point B, fast enough to save someone's life or fast enough to create a really important economic opportunity. And so designing a logistics service and experience that would feel magical and feel like teleportation and always be there whenever you needed it and be reliable 24, 7, 365 wound up depending 15 % on the vehicle but 85 % on all of the auxiliary systems you have to build.

35:47So things like multi -vehicle deconfliction algorithms, data logging, pre -flight checks, the software that we use to control our distribution centers, make sure that we pack the right thing into the right box and it goes into the right aircraft on man -travel management systems that we provided to our regulators. So they knew where we were at any given time and we could get access to the airspace at all. The way we integrated with the national health care systems that we were partnering with, all the way down to customer ordering interfaces, all of these things had to be really good for the service to be useful and life -saving for customers.

36:24How many near -death experiences did you have along the way?

36:32I would say for the first nine months, it felt like every day was a near -death experience. I think like the team was under no illusions. There were between 25 and 40 of us probably during that period. And some of us were living in Rwanda in person with, you know, and keep in mind, Zipline is half American, half African. So it is fully integrated team. So, you know, there were some of us living in Rwanda working at those distribution centers working all day long. And then, you know, if you were in the US, you'd work on engineering problems all day long, you'd go home, have dinner, and then because of the time difference, around the time you're going to sleep, was the time that the Rwanda distribution center was turning on, and usually we get woken up at like 1 a .m., 2 a .m., 3 a .m., something's wrong, we need to dig in to figure out how to unblock the distribution center and get aircraft flying.

37:25And it was like that for nine straight months. And it was never clear, the challenge in engineering with engineering problems is, you can never see all of the engineering challenges ahead of you. You can pretty much only see the one that is currently blocking you. So I can be kind of demoralizing because you fight like heck to solve this problem and then you're immediately moving engine and you're into the next problem. And so it was just this incredibly difficult grind with the team being very sleep deprived and cranky and having no idea if we had, you know, two more months of hell or 12 more months of hell ahead of us.

38:02I think the thing that really kept the team going through that period was that A, we knew how important the impact of the service would be if we could get it to work. And B, our partner, the government of Rwanda, was super understanding and patient during that period, realizing we were trying to do something for the first time in the world ever, and they kind of gave us the time and space that we needed to work through problems and get the system to the point where it was reliable. You know, I talk a lot about abundance, my book and my abundance summit, and I see Zipline as an abundance enabling company.

38:42How do you think about that? I mean, I read your book. I think it was in like 2011 or 2012, it was right before we built Zipline. And as you know, I'm a big Trekkie. I believe very deeply in that vision. And I think that we stand at this interesting, I think we stand at like a very interesting kind of precipice or crossroads, depending on how you think about it. Because it feels like when you look at what technology is doing and what has become possible, I mean, we're living in the wealthiest, healthiest, happiest, most democratic world that any human has ever lived in. And I also think simultaneously, we're living in a world where people are more negative about the future more hopeless, I think the world is going in the wrong direction.

39:30And broadly, I think we just don't, we have to a certain degree lost like these clear optimistic visions for how the future can be better. Yes. And so I guess that's how I think about it. It seems both paths are available to humanity. And I think that it's almost like whatever vision we believe is the one we're going to manifest. Either we're going to manifest, or either we're going to say, we can build a better world, and here's the path to do so, where we're going to believe more of like, you know, the Hollywood, I think the Hollywood vision for the future of like science, bad, technology, bad, you know, world becoming worse every year, and everybody's out to get you and everybody's your enemy.

40:12And that's, seems crazy that that plays such a big role in, you know, politics and people's world views and people's attitude on how humanity is doing today, but it seems really important. Yeah, I think you, Blake Byers and Brian Armstrong and I are having that conversation. We need new stories that paint the positive vision so people can believe. You know, Star Trek was amazing in that regard. And we need a resurgence of those positive non -destopian visions of the future. I'm just so tired of the Crisis News Network and Hollywood's destruction of our hopeful future. And so - I mean, I think the incentives are all wrong.

40:56Like, all of the - there's this amazing book, Factfulness, which I soon read. And just as a beautiful job of illustrating through this 13 question quiz that should be easy, And people do terribly on like people do worse than monkeys. So it would have been better if they just guess at random We're biased. Yes, and these are basic Yeah, these are basic questions about how humanity is doing and You know, he gives this quiz even to groups of like Nobel Prize winning scientists and they get it wrong He gives it to global health experts These are people who definitely should know the answers to these questions and they do worse than random It really makes you realize we are not uninformed We are actively misinformed about how the world is doing.

41:37And I think that's, you know, it's just super important to have access to the data about how humanity is doing in an objective way because the enlightenment is working. The reason science, progress, and humanism are worthwhile missions. And we should stay on track and continue believing in those things. Yeah, I'm pushing data -driven optimism a lot because you can drive optimism with the data, right? So proof of abundance, proof that the world is getting better, not in every parameter, but on almost all parameters, increasing access to energy, literacy, healthcare, you know, communications, intelligence.

42:21And yet people on the average, like you said, feel like the world is getting worse and And it's a bloody shame because as we're getting faster and faster in the world, we can't go back to our default scarcity and pessimistic mindsets that's the wrong place for us to face the future from. Yeah, exactly. I mean, please. You know, it does feel like so many shows that you watch on TV today are rooted in this like very negative dark cynical sarcastic. I mean, but you know, succession, which I watch and thought was hilarious. But it's like all about people who are terrible to each other and don't like themselves and have no real mission.

43:12I just, I think like the new Star Trek that just came out, I think it's called New Frontiers. I watched the first couple episodes and man, I cried after the first episode. And it's so nerdy to say this, but I cried after the first episode because I'm like, wow, there's such a great team. You know what I mean? I know that that sounds really dorky, but there's honestly, like we need positive examples of people who are like earnest and positive about the future and can work together and trust each other to build important things. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA.

44:02Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called full body intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spitting stool, and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700 ,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members' critical health guidance like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights.

44:38And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. As reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine after just six months of following Viom's recommendations, members reported the following, a 36 % reduction in depression, a 40 % reduction in anxiety, a 30 % reduction in diabetes, and a 48 % reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viom for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. best of all, Vyom is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to Vyom .com slash Peter.

45:17I've asked Navin Jane, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Vyom to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at Vyom .com slash Peter. I'm gonna deviate from what's been going on in Africa a second to talk about.

45:34Building things that matter. So one of the things I'm like, you know, on the podium and shouting from the rooftop is we don't need another photo sharing app. You know, talking to entrepreneurs, you know, build something that matters. The world's biggest problems or the world's biggest business opportunities. You want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. Can you speak to that? Because I mean, you've obviously, and you know, hardware is hard and you dove go in and incredible what you've built. What's your inspiration for entrepreneurs who are trying to decide where do they invest their time, their resources?

46:14Yeah, I think that I never want to necessarily be negative for things that maybe would be viewed as like more iterative or less impactful. I think there are a lot of important companies we built. I think it depends what you want to build. I think one of the shames though is that you do see so much of the top talent from engineering schools across the United States. Think being lured by either like resume building instincts or compensation to go like let's try to figure out I get this search engine to make .0001 % more revenue every year. And I think, and then the crazy thing is that a lot of the industries that clearly really matter like energy or education or healthcare or global healthcare or, you know, I mean, the list goes on and on.

47:13I think you just don't, in fact, I mean, global public healthcare, there's like basically no engineering talent. And sorry, I mean, it's maybe perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration, but not that much. Like, I think there's. You're totally speaking, yes. Yeah. And that's kind of crazy to think about. You're like, well, what's the most important problem for humanity to solve today? I mean, for sure, one of those problems is that over the next 10 or 15 years, we have an opportunity to end childhood malnutrition globally, and child brain stunting, and probably end extreme poverty. globally, if not, and poverty.

47:56Like these are - I mean the trend lines - The trend lines are all in the right direction, but every year that they're not accelerated is millions of lives. Exactly, and the weird thing to think about is that today you could be like, wow, that seems like a real important problem. Who's working on that? It's like, oh, these nonprofits over here that are funded by USAID and other kind of sovereign, and funders and it's like, there's very little technology, very little engineering, very little entrepreneurship. And like that is really sad for humanity, that's bad for humanity. And so I think that one of the things that is clear as to me is there are so many industries out there that are incredibly ossified and where people just don't think that's a place where you could build a startup, or that's not a place where like really talented engineers should focus.

48:55I think often those are the most exciting places where engineers can have a massive, can find a massive lover to move the world and save lives, make the world a better place. Where did you get your capital from early on? Because this is a crazy, audacious project. How did you fund it in the first year? Was it individuals? Was it venture capital? Yeah, I mean, for the first year building Zipline, it was super scary and difficult. It, you know, the idea just basically seems stupid, I think. And a lot, you know, people are like, okay, you're, you know, trying to build robots and you think you're gonna go launch these robots in Sub -Zehre in Africa and you're going to get governments to pay you, which by the way governments make terrible customers, most investors don't like.

49:50I agree. Everything's stack government revenue. Yeah, so I did just seem so stupid. And I think that we talked to a lot of investors to raise a couple million dollars. And every step along the way, it felt like it could all fall apart at any moment. It was so desperate. I remember getting a call from this one angel investor who was going to invest $50 ,000, but I remember this other bigger investor had kind of told me, well, we'll invest if so -and -so invest. So I get on the phone with so -and -so, I'm talking to him, he's like, well, I've been thinking about it, and I decided this could be really important for the world if it actually works.

50:33So I'll invest. And I remember being like, cool, thanks, buy and hanging up on it because I had started to cry. You know, it's pretty raw and pretty desperate and I don't know if I would like wish that on my worst enemy. I think that I Think we just didn't give up. I just think I think that message is so critically important. You know, I talk about Having a massive transformative purpose, something that keeps you going at 3 a .m. in the morning wakes you up next morning and it's just, it is going to keep you from giving up because that's really, I mean, I'm sure you had so many excuses and so many reasons that you could have just hung it up.

51:14All right. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I mean, but it helps like, one of the problems with startups is you get, you know, you get, you get committed. Like, that's why I know it's important. You get so committed and you're like, Oh, oh God, we've gone too far to go back. Now we have to go forward. And that is kind of one of the feelings, you know, because at some point you're just committed. I remember, you know, 2016 when we're launching and now we have hospitals that are depending on us. And at that point we're like, okay, well, there's no going back now. Only way forward, only way, only direction is forward and we're gonna have to figure out all these problems.

51:53And that's basically what we spent the last eight years doing. I love it. So let's bring it from the first hospital you served to today. So let's talk about Africa first. What are some of the numbers of the scale of your operations in Africa? Yeah, I mean, today, you know, we operate in five countries in Africa, three outside of Africa, including the U .S. We deliver 75 % of the national blood supply of Rwanda outside the capital city fully autonomous And by delivering blood in this way, we've been able to reduce blood waste by about 66 % while increasing access to rare blood products by 75%. So it turns out, and it's just enabling instant delivery, particularly in healthcare, can be super impactful because it can reduce waste while increasing access.

52:46Normally those things are, you know, they don't move in lockstep. normally they they're in tension with one another because if you want to increase access, you send a lot more products to the last mile and then more stuff gets wasted. In Ghana, we, Ghana was the first country where began delivering vaccines at scale. Over the last two years we've delivered over 16 million doses of vaccine, including two million doses of COVID -19 vaccine. When it comes to vaccine, delivering in this way is it's much more cost -effective. of, you can reduce misvaccinations by 42%, you've been able to reduce vaccine waste by 60%.

53:29And in fact, in Ghana, we were able to reduce zero dose children. These are kids who never received their first vaccine by 23 percentage points across all the regions that we serve. So yeah, I don't know, I think based on all of these research studies that have been done across all these countries where we operate, I think the estimate is something like 22 ,000 lives saved directly by this technology over the last two and a half years. And I think it's very hard for us as humans to conceptualize that number. It's much easier to meet someone who's alive, like a single person who's alive. You're like, wow, you know, that is a, that is someone who is a lot because of this technology and it's pretty powerful and you just have to multiply that by 22 ,000.

54:18by a football stadium. So you make a decision to enter the US. How do you do that? And so you're operational in Rwanda, and Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya. Things are going well. The system is working. It's scaling. And you make a decision, OK, it's time to come back to the US. But you've got a whole new regulatory structure. and I know the FDA, I dealt with them on, you know, private space flight with the X Prize and on zero G. And my old saying with the FAA was, they're not happy till you're not happy. And it's that they're, you know, I remember years ago when they said we want to have zero deaths as our objective in the FAA, which means, oh, you get theirs, but it's just not flying.

55:10It's a tough structure. FDA and FAA are both very difficult. You enter, how did you enter the US and talk a little about platform two? Yeah, in around about 2021, so middle of the pandemic, I think there were several things that were going to all happening at once. One thing was that the service was scaling very fast in Africa. It was, I think we had gone from this moment of like, oh, that's an interesting experiment to, whoa, that's now becoming global infrastructure very, very quickly. And a lot of big health systems like Inter -Mountain Healthcare, Multi -Care, Cleveland Clinic, many others were seeing that the technology was doing that, saying we have the exact same challenges here in the US.

56:02We want access to that technology. I think when the pandemic hit, that created a, is a permission for innovation in some of these health systems otherwise would have maybe moved a little slower. I think it kind of felt like, wow, things are changing so fast. All of this is transitioning over to telepresence. Telepresence, if you're keeping patients at home, dramatically increases the need for these kinds of logistic services. And so I think there was just a willingness to try new things that was part of that period. But in the end, if I could, just for entrepreneurs listening, you get Uber and Airbnb starting in 2008 during the financial crisis, then never let a disaster go to waste.

56:48I think is the important lesson here. During the time when there's a shake up, there's opportunities for entrepreneurs to come in. And that's what I think would happen as you're describing in 2021. one. Definitely. I think we saw, it was like, oh wow, there's tons of demand. We could launch immediately, we ended up launching with the Vant, the Vant Health System in North Carolina, delivering COVID products. We got special FAA permissioned because of the pandemic. And so, it was just, it was this unique moment. And then I think the third thing was that, you know, Zipline at that time was probably passing 25, 30 million commercial autonomous miles as I mentioned today were over 80, but we were getting to a level of flight data, you know, tens of millions of commercial autonomous miles and zero human safety incidents, who was very valuable in terms of convincing the FAA, whose technology was ready for prime time.

57:41Yeah. Yeah, we can talk a little bit more about the relationship with the FAA and how that change over time, helpful. So, I mean, it's interesting for me that health was the entry point as well in the United States versus getting your Slurpee or your slice of pizza because everybody sort of thinks of the large consumer market, but it was saving lives and I didn't realize that the challenges in the US were at the same level in scale that you saw in distribution in Africa. Yeah, and I don't mean to be, I don't mean to say that these health systems are identical. Obviously, the US has like private healthcare, so all of these kind of like fragmented healthcare systems all over the country.

58:28Africa, primarily public healthcare systems run by ministries of health. But I think the difference is much less than the average person thinks. When you ask them kind of how these systems work, you know, really important to realize that a lot of the same challenges you have in Africa. It's like, oh, maternal mortality, really big problem in Rwanda. Guess where else it's a problem? In the United States, the US has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any developed country on Earth. So, you know, I think it's just really important for us to not sometimes when we talk to people, people sort of make assumptions about the US healthcare system that aren't true.

59:05There are really significant challenges. And we have critical access hospitals in rural areas closing at a record rate. people who live in certain rural parts of the US over the last decade, their life expectancy has actually declined. Whereas life expectancy has obviously increased on average for Americans. And so I think that we face many of the same challenges. And a lot of the health systems that we work with in the US are ambitious and forward -looking and excited to use new technology to address those inequalities and those problems. I want to talk about platform two. Mark Rope, we did a beautiful video show on on, you know, teleportation, so to speak with, with, with platform two, and it looks magical.

59:54So platform one, just to describe it there, but again, fixed wing, it launches on a catapult. It's flying how fast? To get about 110 kilometers an hour. And it's flying over a GPS location. And it's sort of like just like we were kids, we'd throw something up in the air with a little parachute. And it drops a parachute in somebody's field or somebody's parking lot in Africa. And it gets it there. And people are waiting for it, assume, are they tracking it on a phone on platform one? Yeah, I mean, exactly. You basically send a text message or you order via our app. We receive it, we confirm the order, we tell you when the thing's going to be delivered.

1:00:36We can usually tell you within a couple minutes or a 60 second period when it'll be delivered. It's then the vehicle arrives, makes the delivery, turns around, heads back to the distribution center to get loaded with another package. And by the way, when it launches on the catapult, when it comes back, how does it land? Yeah, that is probably the hardest part to describe of all of this. We use a system that was inspired by aircraft carriers. we have a one centimeter tailhook. In fact, it's a little hard to see but it's right here on this aircraft. One centimeter tailhook on the back of the aircraft.

1:01:12As the aircraft's basically flying through the distribution center, we have an actively controlled line that we basically waiting for the aircraft in the air. It's like an aircraft carrier. And so it's an arresting line. The line is controlling to the aircraft. The aircraft is controlling to the line. and basically catch that hook, decelerate the aircraft, it swings into space, our operators can go take the vehicle, put it back on the launcher, put a new battery and put a new package and have it launch a couple minutes later. How many flights per day can a platform one do on a quarter of an attitude?

1:01:45I mean, I'd have to go check. I think today on busy days, we're exceeding 2 ,000 flights a day. Wow, that's amazing. It's amazing. Okay, so that's platform one, but the accuracy of the parachute landing is what like 5, 10 meters, 20 meters. Yeah, you can kind of think about like three or four parking spaces. I mean, it works great for hospitals and primary care facilities and some kind of enterprise customers or sites that we're serving. But the thing that we heard for the first six years that we operated this service was now what about home delivery? What about home delivery? It's every customer we talk to, it was so obvious.

1:02:22It really, the holy grail in this space was enabling teleportation from any building, whether it's a hospital, a premier care facility, or a store, or a warehouse, or a restaurant. We really wanted to do was just enable teleportation from any pre -existing building directly to homes, in a way that was 10 times as fast, half the cost, and zero mission. and that was really the vision that led to us to start building platform two about three and a half years ago, four now, six weeks away from launching platform two with our first customer in the US. Amazing. And describe platform two. And I encourage people to check out a link below for some video of it, but help us envision it because it's pretty magical.

1:03:12And talk about, let's actually start with, I'm a vendor. I'm either a Walmart store or I'm a 7 -11 or someone who I want to be. Cleveland Clinic. Cleveland Clinic. So someone who wants to get something, what does it look like on my side? And how does the system work? So I've got something in my hand. How heavy is it? How big is it? And how does it get to the person's home? Yeah, so, you know, say you're like a large health system in the U .S. and you say, hey, you know, we've seen telepresence visits increase 100 X during the pandemic and after the pandemic. So we're just doing, you know, we're treating way, way more patients at home, home healthcare and hospital at home are massive kind of growing trends, especially in U .S.

1:03:59healthcare. And you know, you might say, oh, wow, I mean, what we really need is the other half of the equation, which is you can talk to a doctor, then that doctor can write you a prescription and she can tell you that prescription is going to be on your doorstep in five minutes. Or the health system can make a delivery to a community health care nurse, who might, a home health care nurse who might be at your house trying to help you solve a problem without needing you to get admitted to a hospital. All of these kind of logistics use cases, the idea, the way we talk to customers is just that we will show up and install a magical sci -fi portal in the wall of your building.

1:04:37And so if you're like a Rick and Morty fan or a Stargate fan, like these are shows that I love and so we really have this idea of just an actual magical portal in the wall so that any team member, any Cleveland Clinic team member, as you said, any Walmart team member, a sweet green team member, these are all partners of Zipline in the US. They can get something loaded into a box. It's a pretty big box. I think of it as a a large -ish Amazon box, you can put up to eight pounds inside. You walk up and you just pass the box through the magical portal in the wall. In fact, we show and we call this the portal.

1:05:13We design it. It's part of the hardware of the system. We actually, once the package basically goes through the portal, it's then automatically loaded into an aircraft. That aircraft can then automatically launch from the side of a building, fly out to the home where it needs to make a delivery and then fly back. And so, the goal here is really to design a system that is there are no humans in the loop other than the human who's loading the package. And when we show this loading experience to people at, for example, some of these leading health systems, they're often like, oh, we totally get it.

1:05:49It's just like our pneumatic tube systems in the hospital. Except now instead of shooting it somewhere else in the building, now we're teleporting it directly to the customer on a patient's home. And it's like, yeah, that's a great way of thinking about it. So really, you know, there's a lot of technology that goes into the, a lot of technology on the back end, necessary to make all of this work. But we want the customer experience to be very, very simple. So platform two, unlike platform platform one was fixed wing alone. And it was had to fly at velocity forward in order to stay aloft. It was using the lift of the wings.

1:06:21Platform two is using wings and it's also using electric, horizontal, lift motors in order to hover. So give me a sense of the altitude it's hovering at and how it delivers that, as you call it, dinner plate accuracy. And that's a great description, right? It's accurately within the radius of a dinner plate. Yeah. To build that overall customer experience, you're right. We needed to move away from a system that was a pure, fixed -wing vehicle because the fixed -wing vehicle required us to build big distribution centers that were pretty expensive. And you don't always have room to do that. What we really wanted was a system that can just install onto the wall of any pre -existing building.

1:07:05So to do that, we build docs that are just sort of, you can almost think of it like an EV charger, except instead of for a car, this is the Navy charger for an aircraft. The vehicle can come and dock onto the side of a building, and the platform to aircraft is a hybrid. Sometimes they're called electric vertical takeoff and landing hybrids, which means that you hover like a helicopter and fly like an airplane. So the vehicle can detach from the dock, hover up to altitude, fly on a fixed wing in a more efficient mode out to the GPS coordinates where it wants to make a delivery. When it arrives there, they actually hover at a relatively high altitude and very, very quietly.

1:07:42And then we lower something that we call a droid. And the droid is basically being winched up and down by the main vehicle. But the cool thing about a droid is that it enables us to, the droid is controlling its position on X and Y axis using computer vision and small thrusters. And so that enables us no matter what the weather, no matter where we're delivering, we can always deliver with dinner plate level accuracy. So the neat thing for the end customer relative to how we experience it in St. Deliver today is that we can deliver to your front yard, to your back yard, for apartment buildings we may even deliver to a rooftop, we can deliver hyper reliably and very consistently.

1:08:20We tell you the 60 second window that it's going to be delivered and it will always show up in that 60 second window. Actually, it also operates 24 .7. There are just a bunch of things actually about automated logistics that are going to be way that customers are really going to love. And I think we don't yet fully appreciate actually how much anxiety and annoyance and lack of reliability that we have to put up with. It's kind of clued together. So you're going to spoil people for autonomous delivers. I see you went with the Star Wars metaphor and sort of the Star Trek metaphor on the droid. You didn't consider fuel craft time.

1:08:58You didn't consider fuel craft time. You're looking for. Yeah. So you're coming in at what altitude you're typically hovering above a home that you're delivering to. The vehicle hover is at 100 meters. It's a three or a few hundred meters. And you have probably zero sound impact on the neighborhood at that point. Yeah, what's really cool, you know, Zipline has, I mean, today Zipline's now over 400 engineers who own every part of the system from, you know, the electrical engineering, so building the flight computer and all the avionics that runs on the aircraft to firmware team that's writing all the low -level code that runs that avionics, our mechanical engineering team, building all the different structures and mechanisms that are required for the vehicle to fly, the aircraft itself, plus all the ground equipment, docs, infrastructure, software owning everything from flight control algorithms, so their low level to unmanned traffic management systems, multi -vehicle de -confliction, data logging, communications architecture, customer ordering interfaces, But we also have a really extraordinary aerodynamics team and a very specific aerocoustics team.

1:10:06Zipline has a world class engineers who have been focused for five plus years on just designing systems that can be quiet. We think that it's not good enough to just be ten times faster than half the cost in zero emission. If you really annoy the crap out of people based on the way that it sounds, it has to be basically better in every way. And so we do think that sound and the arrow acoustic profile of these kinds of vehicles are super important. The way drones sound are terrible, like everybody hits the sound of a quad conquer. It's really grating and terrible. And so there's a huge amount of work that goes into designing vehicles that are actually, they're generally very, very quiet and have different kinds of harmonics and arrow acoustic profiles so that you basically can't hear them.

1:11:00And they're, you know, and they just basically fade into the environment. So it's, and then obviously the other advantage is just staying far away from the homes that we're delivering to. Yeah, so you're at 100 meters above, you drop the droid on a line. It is coming down and even if there's a crosswind, it's correcting for that crosswind. It's coming in using image pattern recognition. I assume that the consumer has selected some place on a digital map that is clear that zip lines are approved. Yes, your backyard looks like a good place we can land it or your rooftop or whatever. Yeah, it's really cool.

1:11:37It's really simple. When you're signing up for the service, you just type in your address. We show you a satellite image of your home and then you just click where you want your mailbox to be. And if in fact, you know, the household dog or the three -year -old kid grabs on to the zip line, the droid gets released and gets recovered in some other fashion or the consumer gets charged for that. Yeah, I mean, the droid will act pretty shy. It has cameras pointing at the ground. So if there's someone, if there's like a kid waiting there to grab it and grapple it, the droid is just going to be shy and get a notification.

1:12:15The app saying, please give us some room. We're a kid. Yeah, but yeah, in the worst case scenario of someone were to like, you know, someone were to try to be tampering with the system and like try to come out of nowhere and grab it. And we can always leave a droid behind. It's not ideal. But unfortunately, that just means we can't like deliver to that location again. So I don't actually think it's going to be much. I don't think so either. about them just, you know, you got to ask it, skieries. One of the things you did, which I found amazing, was using acoustics to identify aircraft, right? So people think that, you know, it's gonna be hard to, you know, there's traffic up there, other airplanes and so forth, but you've done something brilliant.

1:13:00Can you explain it? Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the key, one of the key kind of holy grail regulatory milestones that we needed to get was the ability to fly beyond visual and a site, particularly in the US. And flying beyond visual and a site means you need to have a detect and avoid technology that gives the FAA confidence that we are going to de -conflict from other airplanes in the airspace, make sure we're not going to hit things, other things that are in the air. And Zipline ended up basically having to build from scratch many different layers of technology that kind of all stack up stack on top of each other to achieve the overall level of safety that we need to achieve.

1:13:41So we have cameras on the vehicle. We have a microphone array that connects to a powerful neural net so that it can actually passively listen for other aircraft and avoid them that way. We provide unmanned charge management systems to regulators so they can track where we are. We also have ADSB transponders. This is kind of a very specific kind of sensor that most airplanes have that are basically constantly communicating to other aircraft in the airspace where you are and where they are. And then finally, we have other kind of deconfliction layers. One of the big things is that we fly below the commercial aviation floor in the United States.

1:14:21So there is zero chance that zipline is flying in an air. If you're flying on a commercial jet, for example, There's zero chances if we don't interact with it's completely segregated airspace, so you don't have to worry On that front like you know we worry more about crop dusters hot air balloons You know Pilots flying cessinus Suicidly low to the ground and where they shouldn't be like those are more of the things They're kind of concerns for us and for the FAA real quick. I've been getting the most unusual Complement lately on my skin truth is I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin.

1:14:58It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a syndolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Walmart and your current hospital systems, your operational now with platform one. Yeah, we launched platform one in the US in Bentonville and in Salt Lake City about two years ago. And it's been quite shocking to see the level of customer demand and customer excitement.

1:15:44Without going into details, I mean, customers are ordering more often and then Amazon Prime subscribers use Amazon Prime. So it's like, I mean, it's quite shocking. And I thought, well, maybe people will order for the first few weeks because it's really cool in sci -fi, but then you'll see a tape ring off or something. We've seen the opposite of that. Once people experience logistics that works around their schedule rather than vice versa, the constantly expecting people to inconvenience themselves or be home at this specific time, or like you come home to the annoying FedEx sticker on your door, like sorry we missed you, call this phone number and stay on hold for 30 minutes and then we won't have your package anyway.

1:16:28It's just, you know, it's pretty profound seeing I mean when people can experience a logistics system that is super reliable, super fast and where you don't have the guilt, you know, it's like zero emission, people use it a lot, like a lot, a lot. In fact, the data that we've seen over the last two years would kind of indicate that so this year there will be about four and a half billion instant deliveries done in the US. That's just instant deliveries. That's just using a 4 ,000 pound gas combustion vehicle to deliver a package to a home that weighs on average five pounds. Of course, that vehicle is driven by a human.

1:17:01I think what we're realizing is that if you can design a logistics system that is ten times faster and half the cost and zero emission, customer demand is actually probably more than and 10 times that. I agree with you. And because you need something in the moment and you don't want it tomorrow, you want it in the moment. So I mean, here's the question, right? So Amazon, I remember Bezos announcing Amazon Prime Air. And so why isn't Amazon and FedEx and Uber and everybody else just trying to buy you right now? I mean, it would seem like you're the next, you are Netflix to blockbuster. I mean, you really are.

1:17:45You're your package switched packages. You know, I think, I mean, Zipline doesn't spend a ton of time thinking, I mean, you know, had we, when we started building Zipline in 2013, Jeff Bezos was on 60 minutes saying that AmberCon was gonna be doing drone delivery to every home in the next two or three years. So had we spent a lot of time thinking about what our customers, what our competitors were saying or doing, we probably would have been freaked out and we never would have tried at all. And today's pipeline is something like 10 or 20 times the scale of the entire rest of the industry combined.

1:18:26So I think my takeaway was it was just really us spending a lot of time worrying about what other companies were working on wasn't nearly as important as us just spending time figuring out who were customers who we could create a ton of value for. How could we get something into the real world as quickly as possible and then just iterate by doing. And I think that a lot of other companies have tried to build drone delivery and so obviously a lot of them have not had the same success. And I think a big part of it was just willing to be unfancy and scrappy and operate in the real world as fast as possible and learn by doing.

1:19:01Can we take this home for again someone who's wanting to do something big and bold, they got the message that an entrepreneur today, and this is for me one of the most important messages, I call it 10 to the 9th plus thinking, that a single individual or team can build something that can possibly impact lives with a billion people. It never was possible. If you're the king of the queen or the robber of Aaron before, the best you could do was millions of people, you know, and but today you can. You can really do something at scale. What I heard you say, and I just want to just count these off because I think they're really important key points.

1:19:43Number one, going after something big and bold, you need to have the passion that's going to keep you through those just constant near -death experiences. How about the people you employ to be part of that journey with you? How do you find the right people who are willing to take that 5 % chance of journey with you? That's got to be somewhat difficult. I think, you know, before you've been talking about a team, I do think that there is some good news or just something I've been thinking about over the last couple of weeks, which is I was kind of reflecting on when I moved to the Bay Area after college and we were building zip lines.

1:20:25This is like 2011, 2012, 2013. I remember having this very distinct feeling when I moved to the Bay Area, which was there was this one company that was by far, like the most exciting company in Silicon Valley. It had all of the best engineers. They had amazing talent. They had grown super fast. They had all the best investors. It was in my I understand the pinnacle of what you could achieve. It was Dropbox. Dropbox. Yeah, which in reflection, I mean, and obviously Dropbox is an incredible company. In reflection, it's like a file sharing company. And when you look just 12 years later, it is quite amazing to think.

1:21:11We are now building Starship to make life multplanetary. You know, you and I met at an event, you know, for a new limit. It's an amazing company working on extending human life fans. Epic genetic programming. Yeah. And people are building DNA computers. People are building nuclear fusion reactors. Humanized robots. Automated logistics for Earth. I mean, the list goes on. You know, you're working on asteroid money. I think that OpenAI, the scope and scale of human ambition in just a single decade, has expanded by several orders of magnitude. And I think that's like quite profound and very exciting for humanity.

1:21:50And when it comes to the team, I mean, we made every mistake in the book, but I think that we needed to hire people who deeply believed in the vision and the mission, and we're willing to go through tons and tons of pain and payoffs and crap for many years to really get the system working at all. I guess the last thought I'll just share on team is that like the biggest lesson we learned over the last decade is that it's always you know, emphasize innate characteristics over specific experience. Like whenever we hired for a very specific experience without someone that had something cool on their resume, we have to end up regretting it.

1:22:32Whereas whenever we really focus on innate characteristics, which in zip lines cases, we look for practical problem solvers, fast learners, low ego mission driven. If we can just find people who have those four things, it's like almost impossible for them to fail inside the company. You know, when you were just saying what you were saying, the first, the chapter one of the book I'm writing was Stephen Kotler, which is the follow -on to abundance called Age of Abundance. And the chapter is titled, or ancestors, which would be us as gods. Right? I mean, it really truly, I mean, what we have and what we do today is God -like, you know, with a small G compared to, you know, the century or centuries ago.

1:23:15Another lesson I heard you talk about was going for early revenue. And that's, I think that's one of the most important things and one of the big mistakes people go, they just say, we're going to be raising, raising, raising and fund it and eventually we'll get to a revenue product. Yeah, I mean, I think that maybe, you know, this one's pretty simple. I think sales is an important function of a company. And I think maybe we got a little too fancy and especially during, you know, 2021, during that kind of craziness, people started to think that sales and revenue weren't that important and even for hard tech companies.

1:23:55I think it's super important to be figuring out what can you sell today is not that useful to ask customers what they want. if customers aren't putting money on the table. If they aren't putting money on the table, then you can't really trust what they're saying, in my opinion. If they're like, oh, I love the product, it's really cool. You're like, oh, great. I mean, they said it's really cool. You're like, okay, will you pay me a million dollars for it? Well, I don't think it's really in our budget. It's like, they're in lies the learning. What would have to change about the budget to get someone to buy it?

1:24:23And so it's like the reason that sales was so super important, even from year one, we knew we needed to build a world class engineering team, but we never wanted to underestimate the importance from a sales perspective of learning from customers and getting a lot of doors signed in our face so that we could really iterate the value proposition of the product that we were building. It was very, very important learning. Next one for me was build shit and break it. right, getting learning by doing, right? I mean, that seemed like a really important growth curve for you. Yeah, I mean, it was so important that we moved out, we had this little office in this like motorcycle dealership in San Francisco and we ended up closing that office and moving the entire team to a construction trailer on a farm in Happen Bay, whereas Zipline still operates today by the way.

1:25:20And the reason that was important is that it gave us the ability to do engineering, manufacturing, and flight operations all in the same place. So we would build something. We wouldn't try to guess what would work. We would just say, great, if we're pretty confident, let's go fly it. I think it's very similar to the way that you see SpaceX iterating on SmartShift today. It's like, it actually takes leadership. There are a lot of reasons. and say, no, no, no, no, don't fly it yet, don't fly it. Like we need more time, we need to perfect it. But it kind of takes a very determined leader and engineering mindset to be like, we're going to go fly it.

1:25:58And sometimes under test circumstances on that farm, we would crash. And that was really hard for the team. And we got to go up, pick up the pieces, root cause it, go back into try to make whatever engineering changes were necessary, make those modifications to the fleet and the manufacturing site, and then go launch an aircraft the next day. and it's like that iterative, kind of rubber meeting the road, engaging with reality process, that in my opinion, it's a core part of world -class engineering teams. Yeah, I just always visited the same day. I think I visited you. I went to go see Brett Adcock at figure.

1:26:35And again, same thing, just test, build, break, over and over and over again. And I saw that at your San Francisco site. You had that netted air in the backyard where you were doing testing. So I think the proximity of all those elements together, the next thing I heard you say and was core to your startup was the geographic arbitrage finding a permissive environment. And I think a lot of technologies, whether it's biomedical and crypto and, you know, humanoid robots and all of these things, If you find the right geography, you can accelerate your learning very quickly. Yeah, in fact, I think a lot of the most important ideas, and maybe the most important ideas that people haven't touched yet or built yet, are in regulatory, in regulated areas.

1:27:33And you know, and possibly in highly regulated areas in the US, like health care, or like aerospace or like education. And I think it was a very powerful approach to say, we don't need every country to approve this. We only need a single country to approve this. And then once we have that country, then we only need the next country to approve this. It's like taking that step like one by one was very powerful because countries are gonna move at different speeds and also countries have different kind of balances between like risk tolerance and desire to be an innovator and a leader in an industry.

1:28:13And so, you know, we were able to achieve significant international scale, which then got us to the point where we had the necessary flight data to then come back and launch in bigger economies like the United States. And I think that that's that's pretty natural and there are a lot of other instances whether it's energy or education or health care. I think we're going to see this in I think we're going to see this in the longevity world. I think there's going to be risky pro longevity health span extending treatments that are going to be a while to get to the FDA. And we already see medical tourism and if it's approved in some nation and You are fully disclosed and want to take the risk, right?

1:29:02I think that is another area, but I agree with you because a lot of companies use Regulation as their shield for competition against competition. That is a subject that we could talk about for a long time That I have strong opinions on you know, I do think that perhaps Americans in general We spend so much time in politics, for example, or so much of the country is focused on these kind of political hot button issues without realizing how many of our challenges can be traced back to regulation. There are, just as an example, the NEPA, for example, so the environmental protection, or the Environmental Protection Act, which I think was passed under Reagan, or no, sorry, I think it was passed under Nixon, has become this regulatory body.

1:30:02It has prevented, there are something like $20 billion worth of green energy projects in the United States. They cannot be built, because they are stuck in the courts, because it takes 10 years for us to approve something like a solar farm or a wind farm. It's kind of a really sad statement on how you know we have certain intentions when we pass regulations but there's actually no like checking function as to whether the regulation is being used to achieve the outcome that the politician wanted and there are many examples where sadly the exact opposite of the desired effect is achieved. I think another example is, you know, people look at a lot of the safety problems that Boeing has had over the last couple years.

1:30:50And, you know, so much of that stems to like, well, where is the competition for Boeing? Like, why do we get ourselves into a position where it is literally a monopoly in the United States? And that has a lot to do with regulatory frameworks that make it It's so incredibly expensive that startups cannot compete or build new products. And by the way, you want to know how this works. For I think something like 60 years, Boeing's headquarters were in Everett, Washington, which is where our engineering was located. I might get these dates a little bit wrong. I think in something like 1990, Boeing's headquarters moves to Chicago because the company gets really focused on financial engineering.

1:31:32And then I think it was like around 2010 that Boeing actually moved its headquarters to Washington, DC. And so, you know, it's actually pretty clear. Yes, where is the innovation occurring? Well, that's your answer to life. Innovation is occurring in Washington, DC, around creating new regulation that's going to favoring companies and prevent startups and get more like little tech from creating, you know, safer products, more reliable products, less expensive products. That is insane. Is there another core learning in your mind for the person who wants to do something extraordinary? I do believe having a massive transformative purpose and a moonshot, like providing instant access to healthcare at scale globally.

1:32:24is so it's been your driving emotional energy. Yeah, I mean, it has been, and even to this day, no one at Zipline is breathing, aside of relief. In fact, I mean, the team is working, possibly in a more hardcore mode than ever. We have a huge number of customer contracts for this next generation product, and that ranges from governments in Africa that are relying on us to a lot of the leading healthcare institutions in the U .S. like Cleveland Clinic and Intermountain of Healthcare, Memorial Herman, Michigan Medicine, many, many others, and then some of the biggest countries, companies in the world like Walmart, who are also relying on us.

1:33:06And so I guess one you know one thought is like it only gets harder and even at this scale no one at Zipline assumes that we will be successful or feels like we're on the downhill. I think that I'm trying to think about the lessons about that wouldn't sound right. Because I think a lot of the trade things are true, which is that you have to choose a mission that is important enough that you'll be willing to chew glass for a long time. Because a lot of it is way less fun than it sounds. It is not fancy. It's often very painful. everything that can go wrong will go wrong. You know, let's talk in a branch, has Kit Airbnb?

1:33:52And he once told me this thing, I was asking him advice about like, you know, hiring and promoting leaders and he told me, everyone you love will leave you. That was his advice. Which I can't say was super inspiring advice to get from someone who's, you know, four or five years ahead of you. And I don't know. So, you know, it's very painful and often very dark And so I think it means you got to be working on something that is worth it. And lonely. There are many times at 3 a .m. in the morning, we have to look yourself in the mirror and pick yourself up off the ground and remember why you're doing this.

1:34:28And unless you've got that deep emotional drive, right, that I call it my massive transformative purpose as my north star that when everything gets really cloudy and difficult, I can remember that and pick it up the next day. But I can say, I guess, like one, you know, one corollary is that, and I've gotten to, you know, see the things that Zipline has gone through and also, you know, been gotten to be an observer to many other startup efforts over the last decade. And I do think it's surprising the degree to which the cause of death is usually just giving up. Yeah, I agree. It's probably 80%.

1:35:06And so it is kind of, like if someone is just so freaking stubborn and messed up in the head, that they actually just won't give up no matter how painful it is, and no matter how dark it seems. And again, like there was a moment where, you know, in Zipline's history where I went and met with our, you know, senior most board member and he said, so is this how you thought it would end? Like he had fully written off Zipline. He was like, it's definitely dead.

1:35:38And you have to hold on to that memory. You have to hold on to that memory. That memory is cool. That's my memory. Cool. Yeah, I'll never forget it. And I think, you know, or there are other, I mean, people, it's like co -founder drama or like the team falls apart or people give up or people lose hope. Yeah, I think it's like, it's very surprising. I think stubbornness and hardheadedness are important. And if you just actually will not allow, you will not allow the company to give up, you will not allow the team to give up. It's kind of amazing. You will eventually iterate your way, and you're listening to customers, because again, I guess the other danger is like, which is in the middle, building something actually doesn't make sense or isn't useful.

1:36:22And you have the right smart people on the team to actually implement what the customers are saying. Bill Gross did an interesting study once, which he looked at, 50 companies that succeeded didn't, 50 companies that failed and what was the attribute of success over the failure. And timing was one of them, right? You were there at the right time. SpaceX was there after the space shuttle was shut down and it got a contract just on the edge of Elon out of money. And I think good luck comes from lasting long enough to intercept. Yeah. You just, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think a lot of it is like the other thing, I guess the other thing that sometimes I think about is that, you know, if you're graduating from college today, you're 22 years old, I mean, when I was 22, I was completely clueless, you know, and so I would not have had a very good chance going and competing with people, this is my logic, like I wouldn't have a very good chance of going and competing with people who are already experts at doing something that was well understood.

1:37:25So instead, I kind of had this thought of like, well, you know, if we're all living in this little city, I will leave the city and go out onto the frontier and find land that I think will be valuable in the future and I'll spend a lot of time becoming an expert in something that people don't know anything about. I think that's like a really powerful model for young, you know, engineering talent or entrepreneurial talent or thinking about new things. If all you do is like run to whatever the hype train is focused on that month, you're always way, way, way behind. That's just not a good way of building something valuable.

1:38:01I think the key is you've got to have your own unique vision for the future and have your own conviction in an idea or technology or a kind of product that would be valuable. And it's actually way better if you can go out and have a couple of years on your own becoming an actual expert and creating value and technology and creating a team. and then you kind of want the world to catch up to you, you know, two, four, five years later. And obviously, you know, one of the challenges is people chasing hype and just constantly working on something two years or five years too late. The other thing is like, you go out into the middle of nowhere and work on something that winds up not being important.

1:38:39And like the world never comes to where you are. Or you're just 10 years too early or five years too early, right? This is bad as being too late. It really is, it is timing. And you iterate closer in on timing by listening to the customer. Yes, exactly. What you said. And again, the number of entrepreneurs who have been extraordinary successful in disrupting an industry that had no background in the industry because they didn't know what they couldn't do. I love that story. I think it's required. Yeah. Very rare that you find someone who works in an industry for 20 years and then goes and starts to start up the distrust of the industry.

1:39:21It happens, but it gets less common. Amazing. Keller, I have to say I love what you're doing. Love the energy of your team. God bless. You're having impact on a scale that few entrepreneurs have known. And thank you for doing it. If you're interested, by the way, you You can go to flyzipline .com to get information if you want to sign up early for their platform to service. Go to flyzipline .com slash get hyphen delivery. I'm gonna do it. I'm in LA. Hopefully you'll be here at not too distant future. I just came back from a week in India. God knows they can use you there. But I think it's hard to compete with Bicycle Delivery, but it's needed everywhere.

1:40:21Any place else they should look for you? Where are you on social media at, Keller? Yeah, I think you follow Zipline on X. That's a really cool way to just kind of follow day by day engineering progress. And we try to share a lot of raw information on there. So if an engineering, if a test flight works, you'll see it, if a test flight doesn't work, you'll see that too. So it's a great way to just follow along. And yeah, I mean, thanks for having us on. It's an honor and much work for me. Thank you, buddy. I'm excited to come visit you again and to learn more. Moreover!

From the publisher

In this episode, Keller and Peter discuss the future of drone delivery, how to use geographic arbitrage as an entrepreneur, and the story behind Zipline.   

Recorded on July 23rd, 2024
Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice.

02:47 | Zipline's Journey to $4 Billion

23:06 | Revolutionizing Blood Logistics in Rwanda

59:42 | Revolutionary Teleportation Technology Near Completion

Keller Clifton is a leading robotics entrepreneur and co-founder of Zipline, a drone delivery company with the most significant autonomous logistics and delivery system at half the costs with zero emissions. The company's impact has been global with over 1 million autonomous deliveries and a $4.2 billion valuation. Under Clifton’s leadership, the company has raised $330 million in Series F funding and received the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration authorization for commercial deliveries beyond visual lines of sight without visual observers.

Get your deliveries with Zipline: https://www.flyzipline.com/get-delivery 
Follow on X: https://x.com/zipline 
Follow Keller: https://x.com/KellerRinaudo 
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