Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (0:07)
We talk about what we do as teleportation. It really means they can basically teleport a product directly to their GPS coordinates. That's the vision. It should feel like magical teleportation. It should be nearly instantaneous, and it needs to be reliable.
We had fooled ourselves into thinking, well, we've had this awesome vehicle. It's gonna work great. Like, we can just launch.
And it turns out that the vehicle is only like 15% of the complexity of the solution here. This is, by the way, a realization that I think most robotics and autonomy companies have not yet had. You don't really realize it until you start trying to serve customers and suddenly have this really rude awakening that the customer does not care how cool the robot is or even how capable it is. For our customers, the only thing that matters is does this product go from A to B ultra fast, reliably 24-7 and fast enough to save someone's life.

**Sarah Guo** (1:05)
This is the No Priors podcast. I'm Sarah Guo.

**Elad Gil** (1:08)
I'm Elad Gil.

**Sarah Guo** (1:09)
We invest in, advise and help start technology companies.

**Elad Gil** (1:12)
In this podcast, we're talking with the leading founders and researchers in AI about the biggest questions.

**Sarah Guo** (1:25)
I'm thrilled to have Keller Rinaudo Cliffton as today's guest. He's the incredible co-founder and CEO of Zipline, a company that's pioneering instant delivery. Zipline flies blood, vaccines, and other medical products to hospitals, doctors, and people in need around the world. It makes these critical deliveries all through autonomous, safe, and sustainable drones, which we'll discuss in detail.
It sounds like science fiction, but Zipline's drones are operating and scaling up. They've already put Rwanda's 11 million citizens within a 30-minute delivery range of blood and other medical supplies, and today deliver 75% of the blood outside the nation's capital.
They've done 50 million autonomous miles of delivery. Keller, welcome to No Priors.

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (2:04)
Thanks.

**Sarah Guo** (2:05)
Let's start with the basics. Tell us about yourself, what you were like as a kid, what you did right out of school. Have you always been working on crazy projects?

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (2:13)
I feel like life is a winding path. In college, I built computers made of RNA and DNA that operate within human cells. The goal was to build these molecular automata or molecular doctors that could recognize cancer on a cellular basis and cure it. So I was really interested in biotechnology. I also got to build a climbing wall in college. I was a professional rock climber right after graduating for a year and a half, and then got pretty obsessed with robotics. It felt like there was a lot of really cool technology coming out of academic labs, and no one was really making that technology work in the real world in a way that would be reliable enough that millions or tens of millions of people could really depend on it.
And so the more we learned about robotics and automation, the more we got excited about logistics. It seemed like what you really want in robotics is a super boring, repetitive task, and logistics is about as boring and repetitive as it gets.
And then the more we learned about logistics, the more we understood that it really serves the golden billion people on Earth, the richest billion people. But it does a very bad job of serving the people outside of the golden billion. And for 100 years, we've been making excuses for why logistics is so unevenly distributed.
We, as a result of that, five and a half million kids lose their lives every year due to lack of access to basic medical products. And we pretend like this problem is unavoidable or somehow excusable. And we just felt like it was neither of those things. It was like, if we're gonna build a new kind of logistics system, that would transform logistics toward automation, zero emission, 10 times as fast. Let's also build the first logistics system that serves all people equally. And that was ultimately the vision that created Zipline.

**Sarah Guo** (4:02)
Got it. And you got obsessed with robotics. You weren't working on logistics at the beginning. Can you talk a little bit about Romotive?

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (4:10)
Maybe this is true for more startups than you realize.
The tricky thing is we didn't know we were starting a company.
All I knew was me and my co-founders didn't have jobs.
And it seemed like a cool thing to do to build some robots. We started building robots and shipping them to people all over the world. And these were really simple, right? They were basically laser cut out of acrylic and you could attach your phone to it and it would become a little autonomous roving platform that you could use to teach kids programming or to do telepresence. It wasn't that good of an idea in retrospect, but it was the thing that ultimately enabled us to actually ship something, make some money and learn and grow the company as we went. We put something on Kickstarter, we ended up selling $150,000 worth of robots on Kickstarter, which was a huge amount of money to us at the time. We ended up building those robots in the apartment. It was technically really Tony Hsieh's apartment. Tony was a mentor and inspiration to me. I had just read his book. He lived in the exact same dorm I did in college, just 10 years ahead of me. So seeing what he had built, then I didn't even know building a startup was a thing that you could do.