Why Zipline hires “heat-seeking missiles for pain” | Keller Cliffton (Co-founder, CEO)

So, what are the chances this is going to work? I said it's about 1%.

He was like, do you know when the right time to fire someone is? I said no, but I was kind of expecting him to say something very like cliche. He ended up saying the first time the thought crosses your mind.

I think that, you know, one thing that we've learned the hard way again and again and again at Zipline is just that like it's very easy in any hiring process to focus on specific experience. And the reality is whenever we do that, we end up we almost always wind up regretting it because especially for a startup like in the early phases, you're always by the time you actually recruit someone and onboard them and have them like up and running, the job has changed. You know, there's a different priority inside the company. And we're like, 'Oh, actually, never mind. This thing we hired you to do is no longer relevant. We actually really need you to go own this thing over here.' And we just ended up realizing that it's much more powerful to hire for innate characteristics almost always. And there's like exceptions to every rule, but in general, if we could focus on these innate characteristics that would be like indicative of someone growing super fast at the company, we'd almost always win. And so the four innate characteristics that Zipline focuses on are practical problem solvers, fast learners, low ego, mission-driven. If we can find people who have those four things, these are the four things we think are pretty hard to teach people. So I guess to the nature nurture point like these things are probably a lot more nature than nurture. Particularly practical problem solver might sound like an obvious thing. It's totally not. I would say this is present in less than 10% of humans but people who are like predator natural practical problem solvers. People who can like simplify a problem down, realize, well, these are the only two things that are going to like drive the solution and then as quickly as possible build initial versions of that thing, get it working, learn by doing in the real world, and then iterate their way to something like extraordinarily good. We had no idea what it looked like in its end state. There was no good role models to use from a regulatory or business model perspective. So, we were figuring everything out from scratch. And that meant that we had to be really humble and curious and just like get something into the real world extremely fast. It would be super scrappy and we would just learn by doing.

The thing that I could speak to with confidence is that like hardware companies super super struggle with this. I mean, Zipline, you know, has been we've been building the company for the last 12 years, and we've seen many different kind of like super cycles where these companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars and then they quickly burn through that money and then they go bankrupt. There's a real especially in robotics for example, there's a real predilection to just go and sit in a bunker and build something super cool and kind of convince yourself that like the metrics you're looking at are what matters or you're kind of building really cool hardware and you're like the use cases will come and Zipline was always just way more paranoid. We were like, we have to build the simplest possible thing in less than a year and get people to pay us for it. And then once we're in the real world iterating and operating, we will learn by doing. And if we can get customers to pay us more money for certain things, that'll be a good sign. You know, if there are maintenance problems or reliability problems, we'll have to solve them day in and day out. Just getting as quickly as possible into that mode of like rubber meeting the road is really hard for hardware companies to do. It's much easier for these companies to sort of like continually do these like update videos on X where you show the hardware doing something really cool once and that can be very impressive looking and in fact I think a lot of investors can be like oh wow this is really working but of course like I would say the dark truth about robotics is like anybody can make a video of the robot doing a thing once. The challenge is always like, can you solve the reliability and generalizability problem so you can put the thing in the real world and have it do what it's supposed to do day in and day out in a way that's reliable and useful for customers?

I guess my opinion is probably that like and I you know I have three kids at home three under three kids under four years old. So, I'm certainly struck watching them that like all kids are born with this like incredible curiosity and like joy of learning and ability to just go and play and do stuff and see what happens and kind of like you know probe the physical world in that way and learn about stuff. I would say in general we feel like we're working against like how much of the educational system is trying to kill that in kids or you know teach them not to do that teach them not to take risk not to play to kill the curiosity I guess I'm just speaking for myself like I don't you know my educational you know background especially through middle school and high school I felt like it was teaching me none of the things that would have been useful to me in my career what I ended up Like I learned way more working making, you know, I made seven bucks an hour working in a restaurant for 40 hours a week all through high school. And I learned way more in that job that's relevant to my job today than I did in high school. When Zipline is interviewing for people, we really don't care about their grades or where they go to college or, you know, what like extracurricular clubs they're a part of. We're super super focused on what are the extracurricular things that they're doing. So, you know, I remember when we hire there's a mechanical engineer on the team who's very near and dear to my heart. He's been at Zipline for almost a decade. And I remember interviewing him being like, 'What did you do?' You know, he was coming from the University of Washington. He was like, 'Oh, I built a submarine.' I was like, 'Oh, okay. Like, what do you mean you built a submarine?' He's like, 'Well, you know, we figured out all, you know, the different kind of, you know, major design considerations and we had to design the seals and figure out, you know, all the different subsystems.' And I was like, 'So, what did you do with it?' He's like, 'I got into it and I took it down to 50 ft in Lake Washington.' I was like, 'You're hired.' It's like literally submarines are so dangerous. I don't know, you know, I don't know that much, but I know that submarines are incredibly dangerous and the engineering behind like the pressures even at 50 ft are pretty extreme in terms of how you design stuff like that. The fact that this like 20-year-old totally risked his own life based on the strength of his own engineering to go down to 50 ft on Lake Washington, you know? So, we're always looking for those kinds of extracurriculars. It's like did someone participate in design build fly? These are kind of specific very hands-on first robotics solar car. There's some like kind of F1 college programs. You know in high school a lot of folks are you know applying to Zipline and they have like insane garage projects that they're doing as 15 or 16-year-old kids. Those I guess that's whatever that is is the thing that Zipline is typically interested in and is most predictive of success. You know, we hire a lot of folks out of high school these days. We've hired some kids who are 15 or 16 years old as full-time employees.

I mean I remember like you know there was someone who joined Zipline when he was 15. He applied who was clearly like prodigy level robotics talent. His parents were kind of helping I think him manage some of like the implications with school and so he started as an intern for three months and then COVID hit and so like schools were shut down and so we kind of decided hey just like work with us full-time and so he actually worked full-time and then he got into Stanford early admission and calling his mom and saying hey we're going to offer him a job for you know $180,000 to lead a team of mechanical engineers at Zipline and she was like sounds good to me so then he actually just ended up joining us full-time delayed matriculating to college for a year. He ended up going for a year and then dropping out to start his own company which is now funded by Sequoia called Reflect Orbital. They build space mirrors. So in general, I would say Zipline is having more and more luck hiring like earlier and earlier. We can teach people most of what they need to know.

Yeah, we find it to be wrong. I think people again not all 17-year-olds, but the 17-year-olds who are really self motivated and really excited and like wanting to be part of this future, I think a lot of them also have this feeling that like the future is going to play out over the next four years. And if they go to college 4 years from now, too much of this will have happened. There are lots of people in Zipline, by the way, who I'm thinking of who like kind of fall into this category. And then yeah the other thing is just that like I think it's a knowledge probably on their behalfs that like you know a lot of the universities these days are not teaching them the things that they would actually need that would make them like super valuable at a small scale startup. Like the best way to get those skills is to go do you know and then the flip side is that a lot of times these are like the hardest working most maniacal insane people at the company who just want to you know be part of like really hardcore teams operating in hardcore ways moving lightning fast. They're usually like blown away that Zipline will give them almost like crazy levels of responsibility with regard to a new product and that's kind of how we've designed the entire company.

They find us. Yeah. I mean, we don't we just are typically getting emails with, you know, and the first thing we're always asking is just like, what have you built? Like, what have you built? What what have you built in the garage? What cool projects have you worked on with your friends? What most inspires you? Some of the answers are insane. Like, you know, the submarine or, you know, someone who joined Zipline recently when he was 16 had designed a full GPS visual inertial odometry system for a quadcopter that he had 3D printed using Nvidia GPUs running on board. He did this while he was at a boarding school. And it's like you're hired, you know, like I mean it's so anyway, I don't know. I guess the high level thing is that like I think success in startups extremely important nature and nurture but like I think the nurturing is only happening by doing. I think this attitude that like kids are learning the right things in college or in grad school is largely incorrect. I think the only way to develop those skills is to go and build things. You can do that in your garage. You can do that with a small team at a startup.

No I think you can and that's the you know I mean for or like we want as much of the interview process as possible to just be applied. So with this software...

Could be anything. You know, when we're hiring technicians, we're going to like build a test jig with them for a specific piece of hardware and we're going to give them, you know, we're going to show them the machine shop and say like go for it. Like let's build this test jig together over the next day. For a software engineer, it's like pair programming with them. For a mechanical engineer, we might be going through, you know, like a design review for a specific part or subsystem and asking them to, you know, design something on a whiteboard with us or think through how to do a lot of different calculations to figure out if something's going to fail in a critical way. But yeah, for sure, I think we just want as much of it to be applied as possible. Zipline is very like non-traditional in terms of the way that we like we're willing to break every rule in recruiting. I think a lot of people have this sense of like there's one default way you should do it. You know, we do all kinds of things that are probably maybe look kind of crazy to certain candidates, but we're happy, for example, to be like, hey, do you just want to come and work with us for a week or just come work with us for two weeks or like, well, you know, we can get someone to start with us for a month. And it's like there's no degree to which we can't just like, hey, let's just work together quickly and learn by doing. People will figure out pretty quickly if this is their life's work and this is where they want to be versus not.

I think experience in leadership and experience in terms of how to like lead small special forces teams in very hardcore ways is extremely valuable, but a lot of other kinds of experience are probably becoming a lot less valuable just because like the pace of technological change is so fast. I mean, you know, hiring someone it's like, oh well, they have a, you know, PhD in simultaneous localization mapping from CMU 5 years ago. That was a hot area of robotics 5 years ago. It's not as relevant today. There's like new approaches and so I think that it's really there are certain things that are really hard to train from a leadership and management perspective but when it comes to technology I think there's like no replacing just people who are like at the forefront and doing the work themselves. It's the reason that like when we look at leaders throughout Zipline you know there are a number of different things that we hold leaders accountable for and like how we judge the performance of leaders but one of the things is still technical depth and like we do not want any middle managers at the company. I think middle managers would be way too quickly. Every aspect of the company is changing so fast that the only way you can keep your priors up to date is by doing the work yourself. And so, you know, the leaders of our recruiting team are doing are running like large recruiting searches themselves. Like any leader at the company is spending a significant percentage of doing the actual IC work.

Yeah, I don't know. We find it to be the opposite. It's interesting.

Yeah. Than some of the human problems for sure. And Zipline is definitely and maybe it's just Zipline's perspective, but like we're in a mode where we have like a lot of extraordinarily brilliant people who are early in their careers growing exponentially fast. So it's usually not like our growth is usually not constrained by people who are like really brilliant and able to tackle hard technical problems. A lot more of our growth is constrained by like do we have people who know how to be like world-class hiring managers or do we know how to have people do we know who people who can be strong enough leaders that they kind of know how to play every note on the piano you know they can be like extremely positive but also like radically candid and tell someone when it isn't good enough and someone who knows how to fire people fast enough like that skill set is far more rare.

Well, definitely one of them is like really bad behaviors that they learn at big companies, which is kind of like related to what we've been talking about. I, you know, this is the I definitely think a lot of big companies are actively training people on the exact wrong behaviors for them to succeed. And that's like generic bureaucracy, political nonsense, things that have nothing to do with accomplishing work.

I think that's a big one. I think you know a lack of like knowledge about how it feels to operate in desperate circumstances. I think a lot of people are trained on how to not lose rather than on how to win. You know, if you're like in a big company like Apple and I mean Apple has already won. So the main goal for people is to not lose. I think we're, you know, and then when it comes to like how do you do HR for a team like the main goal is like let's just not get sued by, you know, and so that leads to a number of behaviors from an HR perspective that work for a huge company at that scale or maybe not, but depending on your argument, but for a startup like a small startup where the goal is like we are default dead. The only way this works is if we can like shoot this incredibly thin, you know, this incredibly narrow gap and get to this like extraordinarily revolutionary product. And the chances of you achieving that are not that good in the best of scenarios. But it's like we have to basically it's hard to describe. It's basically like playing to win versus playing not to lose. Like, you know, I think that if you're playing to win, you're like, 'All right, well, we're going to have to take a lot of different risks across the board in order to get to a scenario where we can actually do this impossible thing.' But it means that like we're not making decisions about how to, you know, how do we like reduce risk for the company in every possible way? How do we like just make sure that something doesn't go terribly wrong? It's like in fact, we will fail nine times before we can figure out how to do it the 10th time. A friend of mine sent out this email the other day talking about like talent that really succeeds at startups that I think was profound. He called them heat-seeking missiles for pain. Like that is the perfect definition of people who really succeed at startups. These are people who, you know, are customer obsessed that they kind of always have their antenna up and they have like really good spidey senses for like something feels really screwed up over here. They can then like instantly zero in on it and like ask enough stupid questions to figure out okay yeah like this process is broken inside our company or this product is not working correctly and then they can basically like pull together whatever resources are necessary and be like let's work through the weekend and fix this in like a maniacal way and then like instantly get into the real world and start learning by doing and iterating and figuring out what parts of the hypothesis were correct and not and they can just do that in every part of the company again and again incrementally it's a very very hard thing like it's risky to do a lot of times it's not your job. So, you need someone whose attitude is it's not my job, which is something we say at Zipline all the time. Someone who's willing to like crack some eggs. The person who's doing that might piss off some co-workers cuz they're like, why are you in my, you know, why are you all up in my business? Like, I'm supposed to be owning this. But yeah, those heat-seeking missiles for pain are worth their weight in gold for small startups. And I think generally that's just not what we're teaching at bigger companies.

I think all the above. Yeah. I mean speaking of references I mean you know Zipline one thing that Zipline does that just always amazes me. I mean we still do blind references for every single person who joins the company. I think this now maybe seems like out of date or I've heard from certain people that they think, 'Oh, that's like not something you're supposed to do from a recruiting perspective.'

Sounds insane to me, but you know, blind references are hard. It actually takes a lot of time. You got to like go network your way to people who've worked with this person in the past, and they obviously can't be provided references. Like, a provided reference is a paid reference as far as I'm concerned. Like, they're just going to tell you what you want to hear. Whereas, like getting to a blind reference and actually having an honest conversation about someone... And like nine out of 10 times they're like, 'This person is incredible. Like, I didn't know they were on the market. I want to hire them myself.' I'm often asking like, you know, if you were going to go start your own thing today, would this be one of the first five people you would hire? If the answer is yes, we've just learned something so strong and positive in terms of conviction that this person is as special as we thought. Maybe 10% of the time you realize like the person is like leaving a trail of destruction behind them in their career. And that's a very valuable thing to know about people. That can sometimes be hard. There are some people who interview incredibly well and just leave a trail of destruction behind. And there are people at Zipline, you know, I mean, Zipline has extremely strong tenure. Like there are so many people who have been at the company 8, 9, 10 years have been building day in and day out with me as we've kind of like learned and grown together. You know, there are also people who totally didn't do the right thing and didn't succeed and also maybe didn't leave under very good circumstances either where we have to like remove them in painful ways that are damaging to the company. And then I'll see those people get hired by, you know, a competitor or by another startup and nobody called me. So, it's always like I just know that like there are lots of companies that don't do blind references. It always surprises me.

I mean it depends like if we're talking about an IC who's joining us out of you know college or even out of high school or if we're talking about someone who we're managing to lead a 100 person company like the interview is going to look really different you know on like leadership hiring we spend a lot of time actually like going through LinkedIn specifically with the person looking at all the people they've hired in the past. So, we're like, 'Oh, great. Like, you led this team.' So, like, let's talk about who are the three best people you hired and the three worst people you hired. And it's like, let's actually pull up their names and look at them on LinkedIn, and let's think through, would we have hired those same people? Would we have been as impressed by them as they would have been? Do they have the ability to admit where they screwed up? Like, as crazy as this sounds, for a lot of startups, there are some people who are so jumpy that they never have to deal with the consequences of their own stupid decisions. This is one of the reasons I love meeting people who have like you know oh yeah this person you know started when this company was 20 people and it grew to a thousand people and then they stayed with it all the way until bankruptcy.

And then are people who are like, man, you know, they went through like multiple really hard up and down cycles at a startup. Like those people are so incredibly valuable. They, you know, that they will like stick with it when things get tough, which always happens with any ambitious idea. And especially when it comes to leaders, there are certain people who are like who have kind of gone in these leadership tracks, but they've been bouncing between roles at different companies. Two years here, two years here, two years here. And you ask them, they're like, 'Oh yeah, you know, I grew this team from 20 to 80 people and then I took this other role at this other company.' And you realize probably half the people they hired weren't good, but they didn't have to suffer the consequences of that. Anybody who's had to grow a team really fast, like 4x the size of a team over a year, they spend the next year realizing all the stupid cleaning up, you know, and so it's like very valuable to have a sense for like not only did someone hire world-class talent, which is one of the main things we're trying to evaluate, but also have they had to realize their own mistakes and then clean up their own mistakes. So having someone who's like, 'Oh yeah, I tripled the size of the team this year, but then I realized like all these cultural problems and like you know, a quarter of the people I hired were toxic and didn't work out and I had to like figure out how to remove them from the team and fix it, turn around the culture.' That's one of the things that we interview very carefully and it's very very valuable on the world-class talent side. A lot of the things you often want to know is like great so like what did those people go on to do? You know, Zipline was just hiring a senior operations leader a year ago and I remember talking to him you know he was coming from this big team at Tesla and he had done a lot of hiring on that team and I think it was about a 100 person team when he was kind of leading a big chunk of it and he was like oh yeah I had to hire like the first mechanical engineer onto the team. I was like great. So, what does that mechanical engineer do now? He's like, 'Oh, the mechanical engineer got promoted five times. Now he leads the entire division and he has 5,000 people reporting to him.' Done. Like, that's the information we need to just get a sense for like, you know, does this person know how to identify and then recruit and then retain like world-class talent, people who are going to grow super fast in their own careers.

I think I mean yeah you always obviously have a balance But I mean a couple of things we've already talked about, you know, one is you make sure to hire people with low ego. I think like that's kind of a necessary precondition for this sort of a thing to work. You want people who are ambitious but who put the needs of the team above their own needs, you know, and we believe very strongly. I mean, one of Zipline's cultural values, especially for leadership, is this idea of servant leadership. So it's just like, you know, there's no fancy versions of anything for anyone in the company. People always find it weird like they come in and like spend time in our offices and I sit amongst the electrical engineering team. I get confused for I mean I had an intern sit down at like the desk next to me a couple months ago and she was like oh like what's your job here? I said oh like I clean the toilets and do whatever else is required of me. And she must have thought it was weird cuz she must have gone and asked someone else like why does he have this weird answer? And then she came over like an hour later and was kind of embarrassed but like I get she thought I was an intern. Anyway like we all sit together and work together. I just think there's a very powerful feeling of like servant leadership. Like we, you know, we want leaders who will constantly are willing to do shit work themselves. Nothing is beneath a leader at Zipline. We're willing to plunge the toilets, be down on our hands and knees cleaning shit up in, you know, either at the test sites or in the office, the most unfancy work like we are all willing to do. And we're constantly willing to put like the needs of the team come above everything else, including the ego of the leader. It's a rare thing. It's a hard thing to find. And I think especially in the Bay Area, you have a lot more people who have learned opposite behaviors of that in order to get ahead at other kinds of companies.

I think that you have to think, you know, you have to basically be really clear that we want to divide the company into small special forces teams that have very clear goals and are operating with high levels of agency but also accountability. So, we were definitely inspired. You know, Netflix talks about this idea of like freedom and responsibility. I think that's a really powerful concept and Zipline definitely has kind of like stolen it and adopted it.

It's not perfect. I mean Zipline you know a year and a half ago Zipline was in like incredibly scary position. I mean the company was possibly you know was running out of money. We were six months behind launching this next generation technology that was really really important for the company's future. And you know we have this joke I mean I'd heard them talk about I've heard SpaceX talks about itself in this way which is that we specialize in turning the impossible into the merely late but Zipline was definitely fully in that mode. We're desperately trying to get this product launched. We didn't hit the cost targets and we didn't hit the timeline. At the end of November, just a couple months ago, Zipline has now like launched this next generation product and it came in like exactly on target on time. Just getting better at this as we go. Both like accelerating the timelines, but like lining up the goals and accountability across a program so that each of these teams can operate in a highly entrepreneurial way, but you make sure that at the end of the day, everything adds up to like the full product that you need.

Yeah, you know, I don't I guess we may as well talk about this publicly. I've never talked about that publicly. Actually, you know, I ended up it's new. We have only started thinking about it more carefully and it's because I think like I started thinking more carefully about what did I need in executives at Zipline and I found myself having like the same conversation again and again and again with different leaders trying to describe like what were the different failure modes and where were we seeing excellence and then as soon as we wrote it down for executives we kind of realized like oh wow it's like really practical we should totally do this for everybody the five things we look for are strong magnet for world-class talent does someone we've talked about it, but does someone really know what it takes at every layer to hire someone who's like top 1% in their field and then recruit them and retain them? It's not an easy or trivial thing. The second thing is they know how to challenge teams to greatness. And by that we kind of the way that we talk about that we mean like both positive and negative. Leaders that are great at challenging to greatness, they have to know how to really like rally and inspire a team. And you know, people on that team will be like, 'Oh man, I would follow that person to the moon.' But at the same time, there's like a strong degree of like radical candor, direct feedback, and telling someone when something isn't good enough. You just have to be able to be like, 'This doesn't meet the bar. It's not good enough. I'll work with you this weekend to fix it, but like we must fix it.' And fast. So leaders who can, you know, play every note on the piano is kind of how we think about it. Like you got to be able to be on the really positive, optimistic side, like you did absolutely amazing. You know, this is world class work. Really inspiring and rallying, but also like this is not nearly good enough. We have to fix it immediately. And then the third thing is just like being great at performance management and removing people from the team fast if necessary. Fourth thing is technical depth, which we talked about a little bit. And then the fifth thing is entrepreneurial drive and ownership mindset.

I think it's like heat-seeking missile for pain, which we kind of talked about. It's like I think it's a deep sense of like you act in every possible sense like it is your company. It obviously is for people at Zipline. I mean we all have ownership in this thing that we're building together. But does like the person behave truly like an owner of the thing that we're building together. Do they have this attitude of like you spend every dollar as though it's coming out of your own pocket? And then do you also have this sense of like kind of maniacal urgency like way better to do the thing tonight than to wait till tomorrow or wait until Monday. And you know even more than that I think there's this sense of like it's not my job. You know if something needs to be fixed we will fix it. It doesn't matter whose title says what.

I mean I think there's lots of like small tactical stuff right where it's like okay this role isn't right or the scope isn't right or like the overall work setup isn't right and one of the biggest things that we found is that you know especially there have been periods of Zipline where we've hired too many people early in their careers who were not in the office 5 days a week and we've now stopped doing that because especially for people early in their careers I mean really for everybody I mean Zipline is like a very very in-person culture we have to be we're building hardware there's so much like complicated multi-disciplinary integration that we have to do on a daily day-to-day basis but yeah I think all of that stuff can be fixed if you're just honest about it and you're addressing it every single day you know Zipline has an attitude just that like it's way better don't wait for like some, you know, performance cycle to give someone feedback, give them the feedback that day. It's, you know, if we walk out of a meeting and I, as a leader think something wasn't quite good enough, immediately just grab that leader and be like, 'Hey, that didn't go the way I was hoping. Here's why. Can we do better tomorrow? Let's do an iteration tonight.' Treat people like adults, not like children, which I think is something that tech companies actually struggle with, especially over the last 3 or 4 years. And you know people want direct feedback and I think giving it fast makes it way more likely that the person can actually improve and all of those things I just described those are different than the innate characteristics right which I think are way harder to teach but those things can be fixed very quickly and should be able to be fixed on like an hourly or daily basis shouldn't have to wait a month or a quarter to go through like a performance eval cycle and like get the person that feedback.

Zipline has gotten better at this as we have matured as leaders and we've gotten better as a company. You know, something that Alfred Lin, our partner from board member and our partner from Sequoia, told me very early on was I'm kind of having this conversation about whether, you know, I should make some difficult decision or something. He was like, 'Keller, do you know when the right time to fire someone is?' I said, 'No, but I was kind of expecting him to say something very like cliche.' He ended up saying, 'The first time the thought crosses your mind.' Which when I heard that, I was like, 'That is the most sociopathic thing I have ever heard. Like, there is no chance that that is true.' Every year that has passed since he told me that 10 years ago, I have realized there is more truth to that statement than I realized.

Because you never ever ever end up, you know, when you're kind of hemming and hawing. Oh, it's, you know, it's me, not them. It's the role, you know, we got off to the wrong start, like we didn't get the onboarding right, you know, something is, you know, there are a million excuses that you'll make to not have to kind of engage with the hard truth that this is not the right person for the role. And I think the reality is for the people who are going to be at the company who are like clearly A and A+ and who are going to be at the company for the next 5, 10 years who are going to have like completely exponential impact on the company's mission. The thought never crosses your mind. That's like kind of I think that's the intuition here is that like spending a bunch of time debating in your mind, oh is this person a C minus or are they actually a C+ or are they actually, you know, it's just not that good of a use of time.

I would say very little. I mean, we were, you know, 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.' Have you seen that flag? It's so true for Zipline. It's crazy. I mean, when we got started, what we were proposing to do was illegal in the United States. So, I remember talking to, you know, some early investors and everybody's like, 'Well, it's illegal. Why? I'm not going to invest in something that's illegal.' And so, you know, there's this really I mean, I think we had this like high-level vision for what this could be at scale. It felt like someone should build an automated logistics system for Earth, you know, and we had seen all of these robots running around inside warehouses that could like pick up a shelf, move it to a human picker who would like pick something off the shelf, put it into a box, and ship it. But we just remember seeing all those systems thinking like, man, someone's going to build that for outside the warehouse. And that would be one of the most important companies on Earth if you could build that kind of like teleportation system that would kind of operate like the internet, but could actually move things in the physical world. And we had that idea in 2013. It was an extremely naive idea. We had no idea what the hell we were talking about. I mean, we're talking to, you know, Alfred, our partner from Sequoia at the time, and Alfred's like, 'Okay, Keller, you know nothing about aviation, you know nothing about logistics, and you know nothing about healthcare, which is where we were proposing to start.' He's like, 'What makes you think this is going to go well?' You know, the simple reality is that it's hard to say. I guess like, you know, we were focusing on this area that we had instincts of like, 'Oh, this feels like it's going to be important 5 to 10 years from now.' And so I think we were willing to go and do whatever weird scrappy things we had to do to just get started quickly in order to learn by doing and sort of like build up momentum, build experience. But so the rough shape of what the product is today was not outlined as like the end state.

I mean what did we have? We had nothing. We were unemployed. We had nothing better to do with our time. And as you mentioned, like I, you know, we had raised this small seed round and then we had raised a series A on this idea of like building robots for the home. But the more I looked at it, it seemed like that was not going to be a good, I mean, in 2013, the world was not ready for that. That was not going to be a good market. We were competing directly against like iPhones for people's attention from an entertainment perspective. It just didn't feel like it was going to be possible.

I think it's a combination of things. I mean one, you know, we started the company when I was 23. This was like the first idea we had. We had built a couple prototypes. It was helpful that I could see there were a couple companies that were like farther along on that path than we were. These companies that people haven't heard of, but like Sparro or Ani, these companies had raised like hundreds of millions of dollars. And I could look at the products that they were building and be like, I just don't think that that's going to be that valuable. And I think we could kind of tell that they weren't they were selling a lot of the product, but they weren't being used by customers nearly enough. And so we kind of ended up I just had this sense of like man, you know, if I'm going to spend the next 10 years of my life working on something like we should find something that is insanely valuable and inspiring. I want to work on something that's big enough that it would be worth a decade of my life. And so I think that we knew we were interested in robotics. We had a team of like five people who I thought the world of. And so I think we just we were still in search of like the problem that would really inspire us. And we had nothing else to do with ourselves.