Zipline's Keller Cliffton: The Drone Is Only 15% of the World's Largest Autonomous System

I remember being in Rwanda early days and going out and meeting with some of the doctors and lab techs that we were serving and asking for them like, you know, how's it going? What do you think? What's your feedback? Here I am kind of up-and-coming learning engineer thinking they're going to say something about the drone, but the main piece of feedback that I received was people get sick 24/7. Why are you guys only open 12 hours a day?

Yeah, exactly. And so that was a really key insight for me where it's like, man, we've found product market fit in a market where our product wasn't great yet, but it was solving a real need. Having that beachhead market where there's a real problem being solved, and when your customer is telling you that their main feedback is they want more of your service, that's a good sign.

I mean, we've always wanted to be an extremely customer obsessed company. The reality is none of our customers care at all about drones. Our goal was always to build an automated logistic system for Earth and to approximate teleportation. All the customers living on Zipline today don't care about the technology behind the curtain. What they care about is their ability to download an app, see a huge number of different brands and restaurants, click a button, and have it delivered to them five minutes later. We've always tried to focus on the experience rather than the specific technology.

In 2011. Uh, you pivoted in 2014. This is way before anything related to AI, robotics, foundation models, anything related to that.

Yeah, this was when like starting a robotics company was the dumbest thing you could possibly do. You know, talking to an investor at that time, it wasn't easy. It was particularly hard because so many of those conversations, I mean I was 23, 24, Eric joined the company around that time, and we were starting to describe this vision of an autonomous logistics system for Earth that would be 10 times as fast, half the cost, zero emission. One of the biggest problems was investors would say, 'Isn't this illegal in the US?' In fact, I think that's a question you asked me when we started talking about this.

I mean, we weren't allowed to fly at all really. The answer was yes, it's illegal. Most investors would say, 'We don't invest in illegal things.' But for weird reasons, this is what basically took Zipline down this path of well, if it's illegal in the US, then we can launch in other parts of the world where the value of the service would be extremely high. Zipline decided to launch in Rwanda in 2016 delivering blood transfusions directly to hospitals and primary care facilities. This enabled us to have a use case that was so powerful that a government would work very closely with us to make it happen.

And to make it legal, or at least make an exemption to their existing regulatory framework. When we launched in 2016, we had this really cool drone, but it was a total disaster because we learned that the cool vehicle was only 15% of the solution. We had signed a contract to serve 21 hospitals and we served one hospital for the first nine months.

What we learned during that first is that the drone is 15% of the complexity of the solution.

The physical drone, the hardware of it is only 15%.

We had to build so many auxiliary software systems, maintenance systems, how do we hold the inventory and do inventory management? How do we integrate with a national civil aviation authority? How do we integrate with a national health care system? How do we do ordering and demand management? We had to build all of these other parts of the overall logistics system. So the aircraft is like 15% of the solution required to build something that feels like magical reliable teleportation 24/7 365 to the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the service.

Speaking of 24/7, I remember being in Rwanda early days and going out and meeting with some of the doctors and lab techs that we were serving and asking for them like, how's it going? What do you think? What's your feedback? Just really being customer obsessed and wanting to optimize the product. And I'm thinking they're going to say something about the drone, but the main piece of feedback was people get sick 24/7. Why are you guys only open 12 hours a day?

Yeah. Exactly. And so that was our, you know, you got to start somewhere. So we started being open 12 hours a day and trying to expand and grow from there. That was a really key insight: we found product market fit in a market where our product wasn't great yet but it was solving a real need. When your customer is telling you that their main feedback is they want more of your service, that's a good sign.

Yeah, we were 24/7 within the first year. So we went 24/7.

We're now 24/7 365. On Christmas day I usually call all of our distribution centers to thank them and check in. There is no day when these facilities don't depend on us. We went from serving one to 20 to 500 now to 5,000 hospitals and health facilities across the world, across eight countries. It's become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth.

You know seeing the impact that system is now having across all these eight countries, University of Pennsylvania just published a study showing a 51% reduction in maternal mortality thanks to Zipline. So half as many moms losing their lives in childbirth. Across all the different use cases, some of our partners estimate that we're saving between 10 and 12,000 lives a year. And that impact is growing exponentially, especially as a result of this new partnership with the US State Department.

In December, we announced a $550 million partnership with the US State Department to expand the impact of Zipline's life-saving service across a lot of the countries where we're already operating. With US aid being shut down, the US was seeking new ways of engaging in these countries and helping save lives, but they wanted to do it in a way that would accelerate the economies and help the US economically. The new strategy they're calling commercial diplomacy: the idea is that the developing world should be built on top of US AI and robotics technology. When you talk to these countries, they are sick of low-quality aid provided by NGOs for free because these services create dependence and prevent economic growth. What they want is high-paying jobs, entrepreneurship, technology. So the US is going through a big strategic shift to incentivize these countries to adopt that kind of infrastructure, making sure that as they accelerate, they are using US robotics and AI technology. This saves lives, saves money, and secures the US lead in manufacturing and robotics over the decade to come.

Yeah. We started off delivering life-saving products. Our customers need life-saving products all the time in all weather conditions. One of the weirdest things is actually solar weather. Solar flares on the sun send radiation to the earth, mess with the ionosphere, and cause the RF signals from GPS satellites to be faster or slower than expected. That can lead to degradation and challenges in navigation systems. We didn't think this was something we would have to figure out, but we've gone pretty deep in this space. It's two things: designing our navigation system and GNSS systems to be robust to these conditions, and designing the system to have redundancy beyond GNSS so that if things get really bad, we can still safely operate.

Best practices, best practices, and then you got to figure out how to build that using components coming out of the smartphone supply chain. So you can do it for tens of dollars or hundreds of dollars. You can achieve similar levels of safety to traditional aerospace, but you can move 100 times as fast at 1/100th of the cost.

And just to give a context for scale, there are 700 unique components on the aircraft designed from scratch by Zipline. We are designing not just the flight computer from scratch, but the power distribution board, motor controllers, battery, battery management system, the pod which is the smaller robot that makes deliveries. There's an entire Nvidia GPU powered flight computer on the pod. We're building the electronics for the docking station. Even the electric motor is designed from scratch because we need a thrust-to-weight ratio not available in off-the-shelf motors. So 700 unique components, 43 major sub-assemblies, all coming together on the manufacturing line.

The easiest way to think about the trade-off was because of the use cases that Zipline started with. You should be able to count on us with your life and the lives of your loved ones as long as the sun is shining. It's just not; we developed the capability because you had to for the initial use case. Zipline would fly. In fact, for the first couple years we took a lot of risk. We would basically fly if it's a life-saving delivery. We had a civil aviation authority that was a great partner. We took a lot of risk, we learned a lot, and almost always it worked out. The worst thing that could happen was we had a parachute.

How often? It happened very often in the first few years, very rare today. To put it into perspective, our original goal was to be 10 times safer than cars. Alfred pushed in our last board meeting: 'That's a BS goal. We need to be two times safer than Waymo.' Eric reset the goal. Now Zipline's target is to be two times safer than Waymo. He's like, 'Cars, that's archaic technology.'

So our goal is to be 2x safer than Waymo. Yeah. But it's not the right comparison. You're flying. You have to be safe in the air.

I think it depends. We're substituting something that's typically going in cars. So it's debatable. But suffice it to say, we now have 140 million commercial autonomous miles and zero safety incidents.

If you were to drive 140 million miles, you would have 600 accidents, 100 injuries, and between two and six fatalities. This is why we pride ourselves on picking the right use cases. It's life-saving. We're going to be as safe as humanly possible. The outcome of all that testing is we have individual aircraft that have flown more than a million commercial autonomous miles. People think it's fragile, but these systems are already way more rugged and durable and robust than people necessarily think.

A couple big advantages. That pod has its own NVIDIA GPU running its own AI autonomy stack. It can survey and know exactly where it's delivering even at night. It's also controlling its own position in the X and Y axis. The advantage is that it's quiet. We have a team of aerodynamics and acoustics experts. Every part is designed for sound. The vehicle is no louder than gentle leaves. The main aircraft is 100 meters up, so the noise is far away. The only thing coming close to you is a cute, safe styrofoam pod.

I spent eight years, maybe six to eight years. We launched in Rwanda in 2016. The next generation home delivery service launched January last year. So almost nine years. When we got to the US, it wasn't smooth sailing. We started engaging with the FAA around 2020. It was a partnership to identify shared goals for safe and efficient airspace integration. We had experience from other countries, and the regulators had opinions. We converged over a couple of years.

We used to call them pilots, you know, because when we originally launched in the US, the first regulatory permission we got was to fly one to one. So that meant that we had one pilot sitting in an office, remote pilot in command, who was sitting in an office basically just observing an aircraft do its thing. And again, it's exceedingly rare that a human should ever have to issue any kind of a command to a vehicle, but we would have one human watching from one aircraft. Not great for unit economics. But as Zipline proved out these systems, we went from one to one to one to three, one to six, one to twenty, one to forty. We're now operating one to one hundred and have plans to go well beyond that.

And it actually says that in the FAA documentation. We say fleet commanders shall do the following. And yeah, they are overseeing a group of 100 aircraft. And to me, this is the exciting cool thing about technology. Because people think about, well, you know, what about how humans used to solve this problem? It's not, it's cool how robots enable humans to uplevel, right? The human is still getting to strategically manage the system. It's just the human is now maintaining and commanding robots rather than doing the actual work herself.

Yeah. Can I just really make that clear? So it took Zipline from 2014 when we started building the original version of the technology to 2024 to do our first million deliveries. Was it the end of 2024? Maybe it was even early 2025 that we had done a million deliveries in the cumulative history of the company. So it was almost a decade, about a decade to do a million deliveries.

Zipline is now in the very near future going to be doing a million deliveries a day. And so that is definitely humbling. It's like, wow, okay, everything about the way we've been solving the problem is going to break. The bar goes way up. One specific example: maintenance becomes really hard. The scale of the problems, the number of vehicles you're managing in the fleet, the cost of a screw up or if a certain process is operating in very inefficient ways becomes extremely high. So there's a high degree of criticality for all these systems. One interesting point, though, there are a lot of ways that these systems operate that I think people don't yet appreciate the advantages of autonomy. One good example is that the system wants to operate 24/7 and it does operate 24/7. So I think people are used to logistics generally being like, well, here are the hours when humans are driving trucks. That's not how these systems operate. They want to operate 24/7. They can be fully utilized. They can be as happily delivering at 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. delivering something ready for you on your doorstep or in your backyard when you wake up at 6 a.m. before you go to work as they are delivering at 2 p.m. They can deliver in 5 minutes. They are available 100% of the time. We are soon going to be flying vehicles straight out of our factory in South San Francisco into commercial operation. If you've seen Tesla Model 3s and Model Ys delivering themselves to customers, Zipline aircraft will fly straight from the factory into operation. It's a huge advantage from a maintenance perspective that as soon as a vehicle needs to go through some kind of proactive maintenance, it will fly itself to the maintenance depot. So the human can then quickly do whatever process necessary and then the vehicle flies itself back into operations. We can also dynamically assign capacity in a metro based on what the system is seeing. There's no set home for a vehicle. It can go to wherever it's needed.

I mean, from a scale perspective, I think the largest airline in the US is doing about 5,000 flights a day. Zipline is going to surpass that in the next month. And when we get to a million deliveries a day, Zipline will be doing somewhere between 40 and 80 times as many flights in the US in commercial airspace as all other airlines combined. So it's a completely different class of aircraft. It's a totally different kind of problem. But the reality is when you look at air traffic control, they don't make a distinction. And so there's also a huge transformation that's going to have to happen in air traffic control as we start to realize that people are really excited about electrification of vehicles. People are excited about autonomous vehicles. Reality is as those transformations occur, there are going to be 10 times as many autonomous vehicles in the air as there are using these teeny archaic constrained things that we call roads. So the sky is a big place. It makes sense to utilize it. You can give earth back to humans. You can make neighborhoods quieter, safer, less pollution, less traffic. You can make huge improvements to earth if we can more effectively utilize the sky. This is going to require huge transformation of how we think about air traffic control in the US. And it means that we need to design it with AI and autonomy in mind rather than the way it was designed, which was in 1950 using pencils and paper and notepads and a human looking out trying to watch the airplane.

And so it's obviously a different class, it's a completely different kind of problem. But the reality is when you look at air traffic control, they don't make a distinction. And so there's also a huge transformation that's going to have to happen in air traffic control as we start to realize that people are really excited about electrification of vehicles. People are excited about autonomous vehicles. Reality is as those transformations occur, there are going to be 10 times as many autonomous vehicles in the air as there are using these teeny archaic constrained things that we call roads. So the sky is a big place. It makes sense to utilize it. You can give earth back to humans. You can make neighborhoods quieter, safer, less pollution, less traffic. You can make huge improvements to earth if we can more effectively utilize the sky. This is going to require huge transformation of how we think about air traffic control in the US. And it means that we need to design it with AI and autonomy in mind rather than the way it was designed, which was in 1950 using pencils and paper and notepads and a human looking out trying to watch the airplane.

It's really yeah, I mean what needs to happen is collaborative innovation, right? It's like one company solving this problem for themselves is not going to solve the problem for the industry. And so we are heavily involved. First of all, what a key part of the solution we believe is aircraft should be talking to each other. They should be telling each other where they are. They should be automatically detecting that there's a conflict on the horizon and therefore we're going to go up and you go down, these kinds of things. And our aircraft do that. And we're working with other new entrants into the airspace with autonomous aircraft, autonomous drones to do the same thing, to make sure that our systems can talk to their systems and we can all collaborate to make sure it's efficient and safe usage of the airspace. We're also working with regulators, working with standards bodies to take some of these best practices and innovations that we and others have developed and try to make them broadly accepted and utilized so that we can all collaborate and safely and efficiently use the airspace.

Because we were when we were launching in all these other countries, we had to build something from scratch. And we built the thing from scratch. We provided all this software to the civil aviation authorities so that they could use it to monitor this entirely new class of autonomous vehicles in the airspace. Interestingly, there are multiple public companies in the United States that build air traffic control software that are worth more than 10 billion dollars, right? So it's like I often look at that. I mean, I think there are many companies inside Zipline that are likely, it's like, oh, that's like a public company inside Zipline that's just having to get built from scratch. We're building it because every part of the ecosystem we had to build from scratch to enable the overall technology to flourish. Air traffic control is an interesting, the more you learn, the more disturbing it is. We're starting to see the impact. You know, you read about a plane crashing into a helicopter in DC a few months ago. You read about two planes colliding on a taxiway in an airport. I don't remember where that was a month ago. You're like, wow, why are all these accidents happening? Turns out 50% of air traffic controllers are over the age of 45. 20% are about to retire. And nobody is going into air traffic control as a career path right now in the US. And so there's actually a huge labor crisis around these kinds of jobs. And so you have pressure coming from different angles for transformation. It is required that we cannot use a system that was designed for airspace in the 1950s. The labor isn't available to do it even if we wanted to. And also there is this giant influx of new technology, AI and autonomous vehicles that are going to require us to transform how these systems work.

Yeah. I mean, I think that interestingly, you know, doing it is such an incredible pain in the butt that you would never do it. I have this flag over my desk that says we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought that it would be easy. And this is definitely the definition of Zipline. And it's such a pain in the butt actually that it's almost, if you look at the history of all these hardware companies, they all try to not do it first. You can look at the Roadster, right? They're like, we're going to use a Lotus Elise chassis. We're going to buy the battery pack from a secondary supplier and we're just going to put the two together and it's going to be awesome. Kind of Roadster lost a lot of money and wasn't very reliable, right? But it was an important part of getting to the Model S. Zipline when we started, Eric knows well. We were buying everything from suppliers. We were paying people to design different parts of the system for us or trying to buy off-the-shelf stuff. And we crashed airplanes, I mean, at test sites. We just crashed and we crashed and we realized, wow, this stuff is super expensive and it's also totally unreliable. And so, part by part, you're like, all right, well, rip that out. We'll design the motor controller from scratch. Okay, rip that out. We're going to have to design the GPS module from scratch, navigation system. So, part by part, you sort of rip it out. And I think there's a fundamental realization, probably similar to the realization that made the Model S possible, is like, hey, if we want to build a really great specific product in this totally new area of technology, we're going to have to design every single one of these components from scratch to meet the specific requirements of this new area. You know, you might think, oh, like drones. There are already lots of drones because DJI makes plastic quadcopters and they make millions of them. And the US buys $20 million predator aircraft that can fly 100. The reality is actually both of these systems are very unreliable and nothing is at a level of reliability and safety and unit economics that would work for this new industry that Zipline was trying to pioneer. And so we realized we had to go build an automotive grade solution. It has to be super reliable and it has to be extremely cost-effective because you're competing against cars and motorcycles which are actually really cost effective and we've had a hundred years to make them reliable and cheap. So you never do it intentionally. Maybe you just slowly freak out and through desperation realize, wow, we got to tear all this out and we got to build it all from scratch. The advantage of doing it from scratch is speed and integration. And so, our offices, you guys know because you've been, but when you visit Zipline's offices, we are all absolutely packed like sardines into this small building where you have firmware engineers sitting next to mechanical engineers, sitting next to autonomy engineers, sitting next to cloud infra, sitting next to aero acoustics, guidance, navigation, controls, systems engineering, manufacturing, everything all everywhere in one place. And then our factory is a three-minute drive away. And so our team is on the factory floor working, seeing parts get integrated into the overall system. And then we have our test sites which are just a short drive away. So you can go to the test sites, watch the vehicles flying, observe how the system is performing. Combining all these things together means that stuff is always breaking, stuff's always going wrong. As Eric described, the advantage is when the thing goes wrong, we can basically go straight to the person's desk and be like, you and I are pulling an all nighter tonight. Whereas if you're Boeing and something's going wrong with the battery on the 787, you're suing a supplier and taking two years to try to figure out whose fault it is, and it's three layers deep in the rat's nest cluster of how these procurement deals and supply chains work for aerospace. That's why it's so broken.

And Eric saying that, it really makes you realize when you build these complex AI and robotic systems that combine hardware and software, you really appreciate the deep religious truth of how dumb requirements usually are. Question every requirement. That's the number one part of Elon's algorithm they talk about at SpaceX. Question every requirement is profoundly and deeply true. You must have every team question every requirement. The requirement is always stupid. You go to this team and that team. You often have to dig two levels deep to realize this is, but questioning every requirement is a fundamental part of getting through this. And then the other thing is delete the part. The most reliable part on an aircraft is the part that is not on the aircraft at all because you deleted it in the last design. That part will never fail. You know, you take a lot of inspiration from looking at the Raptor 1, Raptor 2, Raptor 3. I'm sure you've seen those engines next to each other. Actually, a lot of people who come to the factory now get to see the EV3 aircraft. You can see the EV2 aircraft, the EV1 aircraft, plus the ten different hardware versions that we built on the initial version of Zipline's technology. You just delete, delete, delete. It's really hard to delete things. It's an act of courage. No one wants to delete the thing. You look like an idiot if you delete the thing and then the system can't perform or doesn't work because you deleted the thing. But true confidence in the physics and the performance of the system enables you to start deleting things. It's a big advantage of having fully integrated control of all of these systems. It makes it possible to question every requirement. It makes it possible to delete parts.

I mean, safe, reliable, battle tested. I don't know. Seems like if we're going to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of streets, it's a pretty decent solution. Gosh, I think I agree with you.

I think a couple thoughts. One is that I think Alfred knows I'm measured in the way I answer that question because to be clear, building a new infrastructure layer for the planet that can deliver packages as efficiently as the internet moves information is going to be one of the biggest companies on earth. It's a huge opportunity and we definitely want to stay humble and paranoid about how super hard that's going to be. The level of execution for us to scale the way we want to scale over the next couple years. To put into perspective, I described this goal of getting to a million deliveries a day in the very near future. We now have many partners who are each asking to buy a million deliveries a day of capacity from Zipline in the last few months. And so our operating plan has now become our unit of sale. That's a pretty crazy realization. And it's leading us, we had originally built the factory to build 20,000 aircraft a year. That was what was required for a million a day. All of this is being thrown. We're realizing the market is way bigger. One thing, when you look at this totally hyperbolic curve that I think I showed you only a few months ago of our total daily flight volumes over the last 16 months, the level of complexity of all the different systems that are required to stay on that track is quite high. But there are five and a half billion instant deliveries being done by humans in the United States every year. And that's using a 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle. It's meant to be instant, but it's really half an hour to an hour. It's good marketing that it's called instant, but yeah, exactly. 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, a significant percentage of drivers report eating some of the food they deliver. More than 50%. There are significant safety concerns associated with these kinds of delivery. But five and a half billion instant deliveries. What we're realizing when you look, Zipline is now at massive scale in Dallas and we're launching four more metros in the next four months. When you just look at Dallas, if you were to extend the buying behavior we're observing from Zipline customers in Dallas to the rest of the United States, there would be 55 billion instant deliveries happening, not five. 55 billion. There's a huge market expansion. I think it's similar to how people looked at Uber when they were launching in San Francisco and they thought, even if Uber gets to be 33% of the taxi market in San Francisco, it's only going to be a $15 billion company. And obviously what they missed is Uber is now 10 times the size of the taxi market. If you make something more convenient and less expensive and a better product experience, people are going to consume a lot more of it. We are clearly seeing customer behavior where customers order every day rather than a couple times a month. I met a grandma the other day who's ordered 350 times from Zipline in the last year. She's 80 years old.

It makes sense. It's funny, people perceive old people as maybe being not capable of using technology. They're all living on their iPhones. They're probably doom scrolling, which is maybe not a good thing, but they are very comfortable using Apple Pay or Face ID and just ordering and having it delivered directly to them. There are definitely not enough humans in the United States to do 55 billion deliveries. The only way we're going to be able to serve this kind of demand is with automated systems. And there's definitely not enough roads. When you look at traffic in most of our major cities, you're like, can we just double the number of cars on the roads so we can do way more deliveries? It obviously doesn't work. We actually need to be taking cars off the roads if we want to enable human growth and flourishing. So I think this change is inevitable.

Zipline is now doing almost 5,000 flights a day. We're anticipating exiting this year at above 30,000 flights a day. And our goal is to get to a million flights a day as fast as humanly possible, which we expect to achieve in the very near future. All of the supply chain manufacturing capacity decisions we're making right now are designed not just to get us to a million deliveries a day but also accelerate past that. The things that are interesting to think about on the unit economics front is, whenever we meet hardware companies, you always talk about how much do you think the system is going to cost, and they're always like it's going to cost X, and you're like cool, it's going to cost 10x, just so you know. When you build it, it's going to cost 10x.

That's my advice to founders. For hardware companies, because I try to be a good seed investor and pay it forward, you're always meeting these founders and they're always like it's going to cost this much. I'm like cool, just assume it's going to cost 10 times that. Does it work, and what would you do if it cost 10 times that? And we're speaking from experience. When we launched our system in 2016, we were charging $30 a delivery to deliver a blood transfusion over 80 to 100 miles. And that was cost comparable. So we signed the contract for that. And we thought we were going to launch a system that cost about $30 a delivery. How much do you think it cost when we launched? $300. It cost $300 a delivery. And Alfred was surprisingly chill about it. And we were like, all right, we got work to do. So the next year we got it to $120. Then the next year we got it to $75. Then the next year we got it to $40. Then we got it to $28. Then we got it to $18. It's now $12. For the kind of long-range technology that we operate outside the US right now. What's happening this summer is the fully burdened unit economics of these systems is just now in the process of falling below the cost of using cars to deliver things. And so I think it is a cool moment that I think most people don't really realize. It's happening quietly. You're not reading about this in the New York Times or whatever, but this thing is happening in the next month or two that is going to have a big impact on the world and how the world looks and how most normal people even live their lives because it is now more cost effective to use a robot in logistics than it is to use a human. And that's really good news for the environment. It's really good news for neighborhoods that are going to get quieter and safer with less traffic, less pollution. And it's really good news for customers because you can get things way faster and more reliably and for less expensive. Our customers love—there are obviously so many cool things about the system that you can talk about and that you see customers taking advantage of, but no tip, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point is like a big thing. That's probably the number one comment. Customers love not having to feel guilty and being able to just have a system that they know how much it's going to cost.

Yeah,

It does also take a lot longer. I think the memo that Sean wrote here at Sequoia a few years ago is deeply true. I don't know if he'll ever publish that publicly or if it'll be allowed, but I do think it suffices to say there is an internal Sequoia memo that has had a big impact on me talking about why hardware companies are going to be some of the most impactful companies for humanity's progress over the coming decades and why it's super hard to get those companies off the ground and fundraise for them and how investors should think about funding those kinds of companies. It's interesting when you look at the world today to see how fast the world changes, because think about we spent 10 years being the freaking black sheep hardware company. No thank you. Let's invest in SaaS, let's invest in margins. That's where the whole future was, and iPhone apps, blah blah. So I guess I feel like, you know, Bane, remember Bane in Batman? What does he say? You adopted the darkness, I was born in it. We built a robotics company for 10 years before building a robotics company was a cool thing to do. But I do think it's especially important for US competitiveness and for our ability to build the future that we'd be really proud to hand to our kids and grandkids and to build the sci-fi version of the future that we were all promised. We got to get good at building stuff again. And we got to get good at building not just vehicles and hardware, but infrastructure. We're depending on the crumbling infrastructure that our grandparents built for us. I read the other day we just installed anti-suicide nets on the Golden Gate Bridge. Have you guys read about that project? It cost more to install those nets than it cost our grandparents to build that bridge. So anyway, we get really excited. We think the future is promising. We should be able to build infrastructure. We have to be interested in it. And people have to have the stomach for it. And we have to learn how to manufacture and run complex supply chains again. And we have to be bold and believe in sci-fi versions of the future if we're going to build them.

We get really excited just like we think the future like promising future is like we should be able to build infrastructure. We got to we have to be interested in it. And I think people have to have the stomach for it. And we have to learn how to manufacture and run complex supply chains again. And we have to be bold and like believe in sci-fi versions of the future if we're going to build them.

Thank you. Thanks for inviting us.