How Zipline Scaled to 2 Million Drone Deliveries | Keller Cliffton

The places that have the most access to technology are the places that appreciate it the least. 99% of the world isn't that. They're dying for innovation, dying for a tech startup to show up and help them solve problems in a really innovative way. That's kind of been the story of Zipline. It's like we went to parts of the world that people ignore. Normal delivery platforms actually have net promoter scores of like -10, -20. The service right now has a net promoter score of 95. We would deliver to apartments. We would deliver to town homes to hotels. We even deliver to public parks. We are hitting new record numbers of deliveries practically every day. This is something that is going to grow a lot.

Sure. The simplest way to think about Zipline is that starting about 13 years ago, it seemed to us pretty obvious that someone was going to build an automated logistic system for Earth. Especially when you look at the way that instant delivery works in the world, whether for an emergency medical situation or for something that you want delivered quickly to your home, we're generally using technology that's like 100 years old, which is a human driving a 3 to 4,000lb gas combustion vehicle to deliver something that weighs on average about 5 lbs. And so we always thought this was bizarre. If you think about it from first principles, that is not the best way to solve that problem. You don't have to be a physicist to realize that using a 4,000lb vehicle driven by a human to deliver something that weighs 5 lbs is not very efficient. So we always felt like it should be possible to design a robotic system that would do that 10 times as fast, dramatically less expensive, zero emission, just an overall better, safer, more reliable product experience. I always envisioned it a little like the way the internet moves information around. We used to pay people to carry letters on horseback, now we send an email, and I think a similar thing is going to happen with packages and I think you also see it happening with people right now. That's the promise of autonomy. It's a global network that gives everybody a totally different level of access to things like healthcare but also to economic opportunity, packages, products.

Well, before we went to Rwanda, we started in a trailer park, which is what we have behind us. On a hill. We call this place Nezero. We were five people. We had this idea about building this new kind of logistics system, but we needed a lot of space to test it. No one thought that this was going to work. People thought that it was kind of preposterous. So we needed a place where we could fly and test and learn. And so we ended up on this farm. This is an active cattle ranch. The owners here were incredibly gracious. 12 years ago.

We didn't know them. They've owned this land, I think, for like a hundred years or something like that. The family has and they've been ranching cattle on it for a hundred years. We met them through a mutual acquaintance and they put up with us. We ended up signing this little lease with them. I think the original lease was like $3,000 a month, which was a lot to us at the time. We actually moved ourselves out here. Some of us were sleeping in these little construction trailers. I would often sleep on the couch. The advantage of being out here is that we had hundreds of acres to design, build and fly. So we would design all the different fundamental components. We had our little manufacturing area here and then we would just be flying every single day. When you walked outside, there was always going to be an aircraft flying around. And if something went wrong, if an aircraft had a problem and basically crashed itself on the bluff out here, we would go out and pick up the pieces and people would be crying while we were picking up the pieces, because it was not clear that the company was going to survive.

The cows honestly don't really mind us. They mainly break in and eat our stuff. They eat our rope and our hardware. So the fences are mainly to keep the cows out. But being out here wound up being this interesting forcing function for even the kinds of people that Zipline could hire. In the early days, the idea of hiring an engineer from Google was like the best thing you could imagine, which is amazing how far we've come. We'd have a lot of people out here but you could tell normal people were so put off by the idea of working out of these construction trailers and driving all the way out to the middle of nowhere every day. Everything we were doing was very scrappy and unfancy, just make it work in the real world as fast as possible, and the company was running out of money every month. So I think that attracted a special kind of person. We attracted people who wanted an epic adventure, wanted something different, were willing to take a lot of risk, knew how to get their hands dirty, and operate in actual real weather and real world conditions. Those traits are kind of rare in software companies, but they are required for the survival of a hardware company. So that's the background on Nest Zero and how we came to be here.

There are a million. Early on when we were designing the first generation of our system, we wanted to test how we would recover these aircraft. It's a fixed wing aircraft that doesn't have landing gear and we didn't have runways where we were operating. So the idea of how to get the aircraft out of the air is not an easy thing. We eventually decided we were going to prototype a solution that kind of looked at how aircraft carriers arrest planes out of the air. My co-founder went to Walmart and bought these two deep sea fishing poles, then basically built this metal hinge and bolted that into the ground, strung a line between these deep sea fishing poles, set the tension, and then we flew the aircraft at those fishing poles and it worked. People were pretty shocked because that was a very ghetto way of rapidly prototyping and showing if this would work or not. We found out that it did work, and then we ended up building a much more advanced version of that which we call Snapcatch. Snapcatch is still in use today in distribution centers all over the world. It's recovered probably 1.8 million aircraft reliably. There were a million things that we had to do out here that looked totally crazy. When we started building this, everybody thought it was so obviously a bad idea, so obviously not going to work.

It's not ideal. You could see the writing on the wall. And I was like, well, it isn't over. We're going and doing this, we're doing that. We're launching in Rwanda. We think that they're going to let us deliver these blood transfusions. We had this grand ambition. The idea was preposterous. Designing a fully autonomous system that would operate in the real world had never been done before. Even to this day, you only see the first system starting to scale now, 10 years later. The idea of starting in Africa was kind of preposterous. Everybody thinks that the best technology is going to start in the US and then trickle its way out to developing countries, rather than the other way around. The technology is extremely complicated and I don't think people thought that a team of 15 or 25 people could field early versions of this technology in a way that would be useful for people. To a certain degree, I think that they were kind of right.

Exactly. This is the definition of Zipline.

Yeah. A certain amount of naivety is 100% required. If you knew how hard it was going to be when you are starting the thing, you probably would not try at all. There are a million things, whether it's the sewage tanks literally never worked here. So we have a truck that comes and pumps these tanks. We had 50 people working out here. We definitely reached the breaking point for Nezero at some point where we had too many people here every day and we would have to pump the tanks every single day and everyone would be sitting trying to write code and smelling this incredibly nasty smell. It was exactly nobody who was coming from the Google Plex, living in the lap of luxury.

Yeah. And you'll smell while you're writing code every day. Suffice it to say, it was definitely a rag tag team of adventurers, and that really set the culture of the company for a long time. People who wanted to put up with that and who wanted to operate in these kinds of conditions. That was a small subset.

I think it's way easier if you don't have a lot of other awesome options to worry about. Previously to starting the company, I was rock climbing full-time. I was a professional rock climber for a year, which is way less fancy than it sounds. I was basically living out of my Honda Fit, driving all over the US and traveling the world. I made about $3,000 that year, and I had a blast. I got to see the world and go to all these inspiring places. I think that was empowering in a way because I realized I don't need a lot to be happy. I didn't have a lot else going on in my life, no real obligations. It seemed to us like it should be possible to do something like this. The idea inspired us as we started spending more and more time looking at problems that we felt would be inspiring to solve, especially in terms of healthcare logistics. We always felt, okay, no one is going to give us regulatory permission. No country is going to give us the ability to fly at scale unless the use case is so incredibly compelling and clear.

Yeah. Lives being saved that we could kind of force it through. So we had this thought that we needed to focus on a small country. We wanted a public health care system. So obviously that kind of eliminated the US. That first country was Rwanda. We were talking to a couple different countries at the time. But I remember this conversation with the Minister of Health of Rwanda where I was going in, totally clueless. I show up in a hoodie as an engineer from Silicon Valley saying, 'Hey, we'll build these autonomous aircraft and we can deliver every medical product in the public healthcare supply chain, deliver it 10 times as fast in a way that's going to save all these lives.' And she kind of looked at me and was like, 'Keller, shut up. Just do blood.' As she was explaining it to me, she was like, '50% of transfusions are going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging, 30% are going toward kids under the age of five. It's this incredibly important use case.' And it was very narrow. I actually didn't find out until 10 years later, or eight or nine years later. I was on a panel just a year ago with this minister. Her name is Agnes Binagwaho. I was on a panel with her at UN General Assembly in New York and she told the other half of this story. She had heard me say this and I didn't know this, but basically that morning before I met her, a tragedy had happened where a mom was giving birth in a hospital in Rwanda and she had postpartum hemorrhage. There was this cascading chain of failures where they were supposed to have blood in the hospital, but they didn't. They placed an order for blood, but it couldn't be delivered. Someone from the hospital got into a car and drove to get the blood, but there was traffic and they couldn't get there fast enough. They got to the center for blood transfusion and it took an hour once they got there. By the time they got back to the hospital, this mom had lost her life. There was this big email chain inside the Ministry of Health on how the heck did this happen. She was reading that email chain and then I happened to walk into the office 20 minutes later. So you realize getting any progress in these kinds of startups definitely relies on an element of luck. There was probably more luck involved there than even I appreciate because we walked in with this idea that seemed totally preposterous, totally stupid. There were a hundred reasons for her to tell us no.

But I think she felt frustrated, like how could this have happened? And sort of beside herself enough to be like, 'Yeah, we'll try something crazy.'

I think there was less than zero data. We had not fielded a system commercially in the real world. We were a small team of 15 people who knew nothing about healthcare or aviation. So there was every reason to believe that there was no chance we could do this. We did not yet have regulatory permission, which seemed like a pretty big consideration, and we didn't know how to integrate with a national health care system or with a national airspace regulator. So there were a lot of reasons to say no. And yet this minister basically said shut up, just do blood, and she gave us 21 hospitals and said if you could deliver blood transfusions to these 21 hospitals in a way that is 10 or 100 times as fast, that would save a lot of lives. The president of the country was also deeply involved in the contract. He had a lot of vision. He is a kind of extraordinary technocratic leader. I think he also knew that Rwanda doesn't have a lot of natural resources. So if they want to win, their natural resources are their people and technology and innovation. They've kind of modeled the scrappiness of a startup.

Yeah. The reality was that that country felt like it was a startup in its own way. The modern version of that country is 30 years old and they are moving incredibly fast and ultra scrappy. I could always at 8, 9, 10 p.m. on a Saturday get on the phone with any of the ministers or with the regulator, and we were able to move lightning fast in a way that would not have happened in a bigger, more complicated market like the United States.

Yeah. Genius and talent and entrepreneurship is evenly distributed in the world. Opportunity is not. So I do think people probably underestimate the degree to which a lot of this cutting edge AI and robotics technology could transform major parts of the world. We can build new kinds of infrastructure that can save money and save lives. We're still largely technology is still serving more tactical or rich white people problems in the US. We're focused on these better understood markets, even if in reality they're not necessarily the largest.

I don't think there was any... I mean, we lived there. We lived there for months and years on end. We would travel back and forth between headquarters here in San Francisco and Rwanda.