1 Million Drone Deliveries a Day by 2028 | Keller Cliffton, Zipline

Ti Morse (0:00)

Today, I'm sitting down with Keller Cliffton, the co-founder and CEO of Zipline. Zipline is a drone delivery startup, and I think the biggest drone delivery startup in the world.

Keller Cliffton (0:09)

Yep.

Ti Morse (0:09)

Yep. You guys have done a total of 2.8 million-ish deliveries to date, and then you just announced that you're aiming to do a million a day in two and a half years.

Keller Cliffton (0:19)

With one partner.

Ti Morse (0:20)

With one partner. And so I want to kind of start this off, I don't know if people realize how insane that number is, so I want to start this off with, what does this ramp actually look like over the next 1,000 days?

Keller Cliffton (0:30)

Well, we're here in the factory, where we're going to be producing all the aircraft that are required to make that happen. The internal perspective on how we make that happen, I mean, Zipline has been growing incredibly fast, and we obviously operated outside the US for the first eight years of the company's history.

Last year, we finally got full, this kind of unprecedented regulatory approval from the FAA. We launched in the US at scale, and the system just grew exponentially fast. And we grew 10 to 15% week over week, most of last year and this year.

That's growth in terms of flight volumes and in terms of revenue. As a result, we made an operating plan at the beginning of this year to scale the company to a million deliveries a day as fast as humanly possible. And we built this factory in order to achieve that goal.

The problem is that as we've been scaling across some of these metros in the US., some big companies have been looking at what Zipline's doing, saying, hey, that would be very valuable infrastructure for our customers. So case in point, you mentioned Uber and Dara showed up here four weeks ago, looked around the factory, talked to us about, we ran some numbers on a calculator, and he was basically like, I'll take all of it. Because a million deliveries a day was the entire capacity that the company was planning for at that point when we signed that partnership. As a result of that, Zipline needs to do a lot more than just serve Uber. We have a lot of other amazing customers. Some of the biggest companies in the United States rely on us. And so, it means that just six months after setting that plan, the plan is now being thrown in the trash, and we're now having to set a way higher target of the total number of deliveries that we need to achieve per day, two and a half or three years from now. It has a lot of implications. It means that even though this factory that we're sitting in, I mean, you've gotten to walk around, it is, you know, it's big. We're going to need to go five or ten times bigger than we were initially planning. You know, the other implications are that when you see this technology growing in the real world, it actually sort of feels, just having now two years of observing how customers use automated instant delivery, we're realizing it's totally different customer behavior than we were previously expecting or you kind of saw. How so? Well, so, I mean, first of all, keep in mind, like, this is already a huge market, right? Like, you know, there are these very big companies, the big marketplaces, as well as, you know, more traditional retailers like Walmart or, you know, Amazon.

I mean, when you look at all instant delivery in the US., there are about five and a half billion instant deliveries being done every year. And that's just instant, not including more traditional like two-day or parcel delivery. So that's a very large market, and it's not even including outside the US. But the crazy thing is that if you were to just look at the customer buying behavior that we're observing in Dallas, in Houston, in Cleveland, and, you know, these cities where Zipline initially launched, and then extend that buying behavior to the rest of the United States, there would be 55 billion instant deliveries, not five. So it's like you see customers who are, instead of ordering a couple times a month, are generally ordering every single day. And it's just a result of having access to a system that is 10 times faster, extremely reliable, totally safe, magical customer experience, and less expensive on top of that. You know, customers change their behavior. And actually, you know, interesting analog to Uber in that I remember in the early days when Uber was launching, people would say, oh, well, even if Uber is only, it grows to be 50% of the taxi market in San Francisco, it's only going to be a $20 billion company. And obviously, the thing they had wrong is today, Uber is more than 10 times the size of the taxi market in San Francisco. So you make a new kind of service that's magical in a lot of ways, customers totally change their behavior around it.