00:11:05 · Keller Cliffton
[00:11:05] S1: It's a different thing every month. I think, you know, to my exact point, like, there's no, you know, you're- you're- you're- you're like combating this insane fire that will for sure kill the company if it cannot be fixed quickly. And then, you know, you're- you're attacking that thing with total focused, ruthless, you know, energy, and then two weeks later, it's to something completely different. That is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is here. Now we gotta go focus on that. So, we needed to launch platform two, then there was a huge amount of just like integration work we had to do to kind of like shake the rocks out of the gears, actually get the system operating reliably last year. Then the system started to scale exponentially fast in terms of flight volumes. We had to figure out aircraft utilization and a lot of, there's a huge amount of improvement we had to do to kind of like the customer facing app and how we integrate with all these different partners throughout a metro. Then, you know, tariffs were announced and this caused like, you know, some pretty significant disruptions in the supply chain. Then we were having a problem manufacturing enough aircraft. Then you get all the aircraft into the field and you realize like, Oh my God, gotta maintain all these aircraft. And so Zipline has had like multiple existential maintenance crises over the last year. Fleet health today is the best it ever has been. A month ago it was the worst it had ever been. So it's just giving you a sense for like, you know, it feels like you're living in this heightened state of- it's- it's just like incredible sensitivity to timelines and having to like attack these problems one at a time. So, and what will be the existential crisis for Zipline a month from now?
00:12:33 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:12:33] S0: Nobody knows. Know, [00:12:36] S1: if I knew we would be focusing on it today. [00:12:38] S0: Brian Chesky has this interesting idea of you basically as the leader of a company have to be scaling faster than your company is, or else you're kind of like falling behind and you're kind of becoming the limiting factor. For something like this where the growth is just getting pulled forward like crazy and the expectations are rising insanely fast, how do you kind of stay ahead mentally? [00:12:58] S1: You know, the reality is I think it usually feels like you're sort of like holding on for dear life, you know, by your fingernails. I think that the way I've thought about it for myself is that I'm learning as fast as I possibly can. I'm being humble and curious, in any given year. And usually I'm totally failing and having to figure things out, you know, and, and maybe by the end of the year, feel like, oh wow, I finally feel like you're Neo, you're seeing the ones and the zeros in the matrix, you see how it all works, you're like, I can- [00:13:29] S0: But then the game changes
00:13:29 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:13:29] S0: But then the game changes [00:13:30] S1: and And then, yeah, and then a week later the company doubles in scale and you're instantly back to being useless and unprepared. And I think the key thing is being humble enough to listen to the people around you who can tell you when you're being stupid, who can point out like all the things that you're doing wrong. You know, I- and then also, I think it requires like a certain degree of shamelessness, you know, like so much of Zipline is felt like, I'm saying, Oh, let's just, you know, this is the answer, this is the direction we're going in, everybody follow me. And then a month later it's like, Whoops, that is not a good idea at all, everybody back. Like, let's go in the complete opposite direction, you know, this isn't working, we need to do something totally different. And I think you can, like, beat yourself up for bad decisions. You can look backwards. You can be like, oh my god, I look like an idiot. Why would people even trust me? You know, I think it's better to not look backwards, and you just, you know, practical problem solving, be low ego, and try to figure out on any given day, like, what are the things that are not working and then how do we how do we fix it as fast as possible?
00:14:31 · Ty Morse
[00:14:31] S0: I think when you kind of go through this hyper growth phase, the company has to radically change how it operates and how it's like structured generally. Like, you may need to increase your manufacturing capacity by like 10 x over a year, and that's a completely new function that you've never really done before. So how is the company changing over the next like twelve to twenty four months?
00:14:50 · Keller Cliffton
[00:14:50] S1: I think that, you know, are certain things that Zipline focuses on that are not changing, like the culture of the company, focusing on practical problem solving, focusing on hiring people who are hungry, low ego, practical problem solvers, mission driven, fast learners. Like, we never fail when we hire people like that. In general, we've tried to set the company up to be small special forces teams that are moving with high degrees of freedom and responsibility. We believe in having as little, like, middle management, basically like no middle management. I just think, especially in a world where velocity determines the success of the company more than anything else, and in a world with AI tooling, and in a world with, frankly, just better communication tools like email and Slack and other solutions, the idea of having middle managers who need to like pass information up and down the chain is is useless. And so we prefer to have small teams led by entrepreneurial leaders who have a huge amount of responsibility and operate like, you know, with CEO level responsibility with regard to the thing that they are owning. That isn't really changing. I think that, you know, as the, as projects become more and more complex, you do have to like, you don't get to be a shit show startup with like all these teams running in totally different directions. And so I think, know, you have to try to get really disciplined in terms of how do you like set clear goals and then think about those goals across these teams. So like assuming that they all get, they, they all add up to one unified coherent vision that results in a complicated product launching into the real world, is also particularly critical for things like safety and reliability. Like, those are cross program requirements, that we have to, on every day that we're going and serving customers, we are attesting to our regulator and, more importantly, like, to the communities that we serve, that this system is gonna be safe. And it means that Zipline's had to build a huge amount of infrastructure. And I think this is one of the ways that the company really had to level up in the last few years.
00:16:41 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
Built a huge amount of infrastructure, some of it is actually here in this building, huge amount of testing that we do, component level testing, aircraft level testing, you know, we can, we have chambers here where we can make it rain, where we can make it snow, where we, you know, simulate intense heat and humidity. And then we go from there to our three large test sites that we operate in the real world 20, three sixty five. These test sites are a huge part of the way that we can move very fast from a hardware and software development perspective while then validating the overall system to an, to an ever increasing safety bar. You know, like, it used to be enough to be able to say, oh yeah, like, something's only gonna go wrong one in 10,000 flights, and then you gotta get to one in a 100,000 flights, then you gotta get to one in a million, one in 10,000,000. You're looking for increasingly rare problems and it requires increasingly clever or extreme ways of testing systems to their limits so that we know how it's gonna perform when we put it into the real world. [00:17:37] S0: When you first came back to The US, like from Rwanda, and you started doing deliveries here, I imagine that that product experience was completely different than the thing that exists today. And you also don't necessarily want to scale something up a bunch if it's like not super great. What was kind of the flip in your mind for this is like good enough that we do, you know, it's like a nine out of 10 or 9.5 out of 10 customer experience and this is what we wanna scale?