Inside Zipline's Autonomous System: 140M Miles, Zero Incidents

**Eric Watson** (0:00)
I remember being in Rwanda early days and going out and meeting with some of the doctors and lab techs that we were serving and asking for them, like, how's it going? What do you think? What's your feedback? Here I am kind of an up and coming learning engineer thinking they're gonna say something about the drone or some of these things. And the main piece of feedback that I received was, people get sick 24-7, why are you guys only open 12 hours a day, right?

**Alfred Lin** (0:24)
Especially when you're delivering life-saving blood.

**Eric Watson** (0:26)
Yeah, exactly. And so that was a really key insight for me where it's like, man, we have found product market fit in a market where, yeah, our product wasn't great yet, but it was solving a real need. And so having that really beachhead market where there's a real problem being solved, and when your customer is telling you that their main feedback is they want more of your service, it's like, that's a good sign.

**Alfred Lin** (1:04)
Welcome, Keller and Eric, to the show. You guys have been working at Zipline for a long period of time. Keller is the co-founder, and Eric, you are in charge of systems engineering and safety. And we got lots of things to talk about in this whole world of drones, drone systems, and how you guys started in this hardware space before LLMs even started. So we have lots of questions.

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (1:26)
Awesome.

**Alfred Lin** (1:27)
But you don't like Zipline being described as a drone company, even though you're probably the largest autonomous drone company in the world right now.

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (1:36)
I mean, we've always wanted to be an extremely customer-obsessed company, and the reality is none of our customers care at all about drones.
Our goal was always to build an automated logistics system for Earth and to approximate teleportation. And all the customers who are living on Zipline today, they really don't care about the technology operating behind the curtain. What they care about is their ability to download an app, open it up, see a huge number of different brands and amazing restaurants that they want to shop with, and then click a button and have it delivered to them five minutes later. So we've always really tried to focus on the experience rather than on the specific technology.

**Alfred Lin** (2:19)
Well, this show is about technology.

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (2:22)
We're excited about that.

**Alfred Lin** (2:23)
This podcast is about technology. What is the underlying technology behind Zipline? You started in 2011, you pivoted in 2014
This is way before anything related to AI robotics, foundation models, anything related to that. But you were before all of that, and you were riding the wave of all of the things that have come afterward as well.

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (2:47)
Yeah, this was when starting a robotics company was the dumbest thing you could possibly do. Like why, you're talking to an investor in that time about... I mean, it wasn't easy, and it was particularly hard because so many of those conversations... I was 23, 24, Eric joined the company around that time, and we were starting to describe this vision of an autonomous logistics system for Earth that would be 10 times as fast, half the cost, zero emission.
One of the biggest problems when we were trying to raise money for that vision was investors would say, isn't this illegal in the US? In fact, I think that that's a question you asked me when we started talking about this.

**Alfred Lin** (3:24)
We weren't allowed to fly beyond a visual light of sight.

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (3:27)
We weren't allowed to fly at all, really, but yeah. And so the answer was, yes, it's illegal. And then most investors would be like, well, we don't invest in illegal things, so we're not going to invest. But for weird reasons, this is what basically took Zipline down this path of, well, if it's illegal in the US, then we can launch in other parts of the world where the value of the service would be extremely high. Zipline decided to launch in Rwanda in 2016, delivering blood transfusions directly to hospitals and primary care facilities.
This enabled us to have a use case that was so powerful that a government would work very closely with us to make it happen.

**Eric Watson** (4:03)
Make it legal.

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (4:03)
And to make it legal, or at least make an exemption to their existing kind of regulatory framework.
And then the other thing, when it comes to how to think about Zipline as a company, when we launched in 2016, we were like, we have this really cool drone. We put all this work into designing this really cool aircraft. And it has all these great fundamental features. And when we launched, it was a total disaster. Because the reality, what we learned in that first year, for the first, we had signed a contract to serve 21 hospitals. And we served one hospital for the first nine months. And Eric, in particular, like, how much did you sleep during those?