The Drone That Delivers to Your Backyard in Minutes | Zipline

When I think about what we're trying to do at Zipline, we're just trying to approximate teleportation. I grew up watching science fiction. Logistics should feel like teleportation. It should be that magical.

The implication of Zipline is access to everything for everyone. I'm Keller Rinaudo. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Zipline. We had this really simple, naive idea, which was that somebody is going to build that for outside the warehouse. That vision wound up being a lot more complicated than we were expecting. It also wound up being illegal for the first decade of our existence. We had to operate outside the US doing life-saving use cases before we were able to bring the technology finally and start serving Americans. I think it only really became real when we signed our first customer meeting the Minister of Health in Rwanda at the time. We were saying we'll deliver medical products to every single hospital and health facility in the country and she basically said shut up just do blood. So we actually focused the first contract we signed was for 21 hospitals to deliver just blood transfusions. And the reason this is important is that it turns out 50% of blood transfusions are going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging. 30% are going to our kids under the age of five. And so it's a super important product for family health. You know, when we launched in 2016, we were super naive. We really didn't know what we were doing. And in fact, for the first 9 months, we only delivered blood to one hospital as we were trying to just prove that the technology could work reliably. Seeing the first delivery happen for the first customer in a way that was like, wow, there's so much we have to figure out, but we just saved that person's life. I think that's where it felt really real and it felt like there was a moral imperative to scale this to every other human on Earth. Yeah.

Platform 2 is designed for home delivery. And a home delivery opens up a whole bunch of new significant technological challenges. Not only do we have to fly in 100% of weather, but we need a system that can hover when it's docking, as well as when it's delivering. We need a system that can deliver in a super super accurate way. We typically want to be able to deliver with like dinner plate level accuracy to somebody's home. Additionally, we need it to be incredibly quiet cuz we're now flying in like really really busy neighborhoods where we want to be quieter than a car delivering a similar package. Package delivery in the US is one of the most competitive markets on Earth. It's not like you get to build a product that is super duper expensive that customers are willing to pay, you know, $100 a delivery for and you're actually competing against cars and human beings and systems that are at massive scale. Platform 2 had to find its way to this intersection of like product experience, safety, unit economics. If the internet automated moving information around and reduced the cost to zero, what would it mean if a logistics system automated delivery and reduced the cost to near zero, you fundamentally change the way that you live your life. And in fact, that's what we're seeing with so many of these customers in Dallas where it's like reconfiguring how they think about ordering, how they think about grocery shopping, how they think about food and cooking at home, how they think about how they get their prescription or how they engage with a healthcare system. All these things are going to change if you actually build autonomous delivery.

So, recently we hit 2 million flights. The amount that we've accomplished in 2 years is amazing. And I think it speaks to what an amazing company that Zipline is and the people who we have working here who are so empowered to be able to solve problems and get through first principles engineering. Like what do what problems do we need to solve? How do we keep building? How do we keep learning? We ultimately over the next couple years expect to grow to a million deliveries a day. That's kind of like the next thing that we're targeting. But at a million deliveries a day, you're still only serving a tiny percentage of the overall market. When you have a system that customers can just get things delivered in just a matter of minutes and it's very, very affordable and it's safe and it's predictable, customers consume a lot more of that service. We actually see a lot of customers throughout Dallas are ordering every single day from Zipline. The big realization is man there are 5 and a half billion instant deliveries happening in the US every year right now just you know traditional delivery platforms and if you were to extend the customer behavior that we're observing in Dallas right now to the rest of the US there would be 50 billion instant deliveries happening the only way we're going to get that kind of scale and that kind of efficiency is through AI and robotics but the good news is those kinds of services are not just going to save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. You're also going to save people huge amounts of time. You're going to save people money, give people time back to spend with their families, their loved ones, do the things that really matter in life as opposed to being like stuck in traffic or walking back and forth in stores.

For any problem or in any industry in the world, there are like a thousand reasons something will not work and a thousand reasons to not even try. In fact, the more you're an expert in the thing, the better you understand all the reasons that the thing won't work. You have to both be naive because you have to have a poor understanding of all the reasons a thing won't work because those things will discourage you from doing it. You also have to be contrarian enough that you'll ignore all the experts who tell you you're a complete idiot and you're wasting your time and you shouldn't try. So I think you know the more important the problem, the more experts will tell you with complete conviction that you are going down the wrong path and it will not work for all these different reasons, whatever it is. Zipline was a pretty big vision. This idea of building an automated logistics system for Earth that would serve all people equally. There were a thousand reasons it wouldn't work. We kind of had to be willing to to some degree we had to be naive of all the things that were hard about it that wound up being really hard. And we also had to be contrarian enough to ignore all the global experts who were telling us we shouldn't even try. And what's really been exciting is this last year we were looking really at the the zero to one, right? Like can we make this happen? We had so much customer demand when we actually went we knew like we had something. So now looking at this next year we're going from one to thousands, right? Like orders of magnitude jump. We're now thinking about how do we change our systems to not just be the scrappy things you experiment at the beginning but systems that can actually scale.

This has always been our culture. I think as the company grows, our objective is to like you try to avoid the bureaucracy. You avoid the consensus decision-making. You avoid the kind of like risk off legalistic posture of like let's just make sure we don't screw up. It's like that's not the goal. The goal is to build products that are extraordinary and that requires risk. It requires failure. You have to believe in people who are early in their careers. You have to give irresponsible levels of responsibility to a lot of different teams and then trust them to keep trying until they ultimately build something great. Crazy is that over nine years of partnering with the government going from that very first contract just serving one hospital we've now expanded to 50 then to 100 then a thousand today's zipline serves almost 5,000 hospitals and health facilities day in and day out 24/7 365 we also just announced our new national scale partnership in Rwanda not only do we now serve every hospital and primary care facility in the country and we deliver every essentially the entire medical public healthcare supply chain is delivered autonomously We're also now adding many new use cases and we're bringing platform 2, the next generation technology to Rwanda for the first time. So 9 years in and the partnership is still growing exponentially fast, adding new use cases and essentially just becoming national scale infrastructure in today's age now where AI is just improving more and more. We're bringing AI more into developer workflows, into our products to be able to really just move so much faster and really like solve these problems so much faster. And so I say it it is so exciting where we are now because I think these next few years are going to be they're going to be pretty crazy and I'm actually not sure what to expect. But being able to bring all of that to Zipline and for what we can enable here, I think that's a future I'm really excited for.