Keller Rinaudo Cliffton on Zipline's Drone Delivery Journey from Blood to Burritos

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (0:02)
We become inured to the things that just exist in the world. So, for example, we are inured to traffic. We're inured to the delivery drivers that are like barreling up and down our streets, meaning like our kids can't play in those streets anymore. We're inured to the pollution and environmental impacts of people driving a 3,000-pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human to deliver something to us that weighs like five pounds. You know, like that's, these are actually pretty crazy costs that I think we're just used to at this point. And the reality is there are ways of delivering that are totally quiet, that are way less obtrusive, that are better for the environment, that are ten times as fast and less expensive.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:04)
Hello, everyone. We are here for another edition of Core Memory. Today, we're gonna be talking with the co-founder and CEO of Zipline, Keller Rinaudo Cliffton. Zipline, you may have seen on TV or the internets, does drone delivery. We're gonna be getting our sandwiches through the air. Any day now, they're actually doing it in the United States and have a kind of surprising, fascinating track record of doing these types of deliveries for many, many years overseas. The US is kind of behind here. So I think we've got an interesting show for you. Thanks to everyone who's been listening. For our subscribers, we do put up audio versions of my stories on Substack and a lot of you have been checking those out. So as always, please support us if you choose to do so. We appreciate it. And with that, let's turn to Keller.
Keller, how are you?

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (2:14)
I'm good. A little bit tired. You know, we just launched our next generation platform last week. So the team's been working in a very hard hardcore way, but we're also very proud.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:24)
And where are you? Are you in half the day?

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (2:28)
No, I'm at Zipline HQ, which is in South San Francisco. This is where we have all of our engineering, as well as the manufacturing facility that builds the autonomous aircraft.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:38)
Okay. All right. Well, we're going to get into these aircraft. I'm going to start us off with... This might not be like my most flattering introduction, but I think we're going to get somewhere good. You know, you and I, we met for the first time, I think, about six weeks or so ago. You guys had an event.
You do have this facility at Half Moon Bay where you do some testing, and I got an invite to come out for this dinner, and the unflattering part is just going into it. I was really skeptical. I've heard about drone delivery for a long time. I've heard about Zipline for a long time. It wasn't an area that I was paying super, super close attention to, and I think I was scarred. I don't know if that's totally the right word, but by this 60 minutes piece, Amazon and Jeff Bezos had done a decade ago that told me we were going to have drone deliveries at any minute and this had taken a while. So anyway, this is all to say that my expectations were low. And then during this visit with you guys, I was really impressed. I mean, we were having dinner and I thought we'd see a couple of drones, but you guys had this nest full of dozens of them flying all around us and delivering, dropping down boxes of cookies for dessert. And anyway, I was like kind of shocked and just to see, I guess how realistic this seems like it might be now.

**Keller Rinaudo Cliffton** (4:08)
Yeah, I think seeing is believing and I think probably the vast majority of Americans have had the exact same experience you had, which is a really big company came out and made a crazy promise in 2013 that they were going to do drone delivery to every single home in the US within a couple of years. And I think it's not terribly surprising that when it comes to radical new kinds of technology, it's harder than people expect, it takes longer. And I think often the great product and innovation comes from maybe where people were less expecting it. Sometimes it's not the biggest companies in the world that come up with the most important innovations. You know, I think the reality is that probably most Americans have had the exact same experience you had, which is that they heard a big company make all kinds of promises in 2013 about how drone delivery was going to be available in two years. The reality is that with any new technology, it's a lot harder than it initially seems. There's a lot of technical detail and work to be done to design autonomous aircraft that can fly reliably in all weather 24-7 in any geography in the world.