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?
00:18:02 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
[00:18:02] S1: I, you know, my my first reaction to your question is actually hardware companies generally don't really have that luxury. I think software companies do have that luxury. You're like trying, you know, you deploy an app, oh, it's not good, like, let's learn from it. Hardware companies, honestly, I mean, at least for the first, you know, three or four major platforms, which will probably take the first ten or fifteen years of the company's life, every new product is a complete existential bet for the company. If it doesn't work, the company is certainly dead. You know, it's not like if Tesla, on deploying the Model S, it turned out the Model S wasn't a very good car. I mean, Tesla doesn't survive. Company's dead. If the Model three winds up not being a very good car, even though Model S had been a profitable program, Tesla's probably dead at that point because of, you know, the crazy amount of debt that the company had taken on building the Gigafactory and, you know, scaling up that production line. So there's this obvious sort of goal of like you find your beachhead, the use case where you can find customers will actually put up with a surprisingly bad customer experience. I mean, that that is kind of a thing. Right? If you look at the Roadster, and the Roadster was like a Lotus Elise chassis and then they put like a battery designed by a different company, into the trunk of the Roadster and it's like... [00:19:15] S0: I think there was like hundreds of separate suppliers.
00:19:17 · Keller Cliffton
[00:19:17] S1: Yeah. Oh, the car... I mean, was incredibly unreliable. They lost a lot of money on each car that they sold. And yet, you know, they were able to show that there are customers out there who are willing to buy an electric car, which I think at that time was a totally counterintuitive idea. Yeah. And, in the same way, you know, Zipline focusing on blood transfusions for the first four or five years of the company's history, had we found this teeny little narrow beachhead where we knew the service wasn't gonna be perfect, we knew we were gonna have to get these unprecedented regulatory approvals, we knew we needed a customer who'd put up with just a lot of like iteration and imperfection, but we had con- you know, it was kind of clear, it's like, but every flight is saving someone's life. So the customer will probably kind of partner with us on this. And we were right about that. And so I think- and then you go from there, you know, you can look at the, you know, parallels for either company, for Zipline going from that to like getting platform one to the point where today it serves 5,000 hospitals and health facilities and serves- saves 17,000 lives a year. And then, you know, we had a lot of big companies in The US, like Walmart and Chipotle and, Cleveland Clinic and many others, saying, We would use that. Like, we think this would be fundamental infrastructure in The United States that we could build our businesses on top of. That gave us a fair amount of conviction. Like, there's something here. If you could automate delivery from any building directly to any home, that would be a really big important system and layer of infrastructure. But when we were launching Platform two, I mean, if it didn't succeed, the company would have died, for sure. And you have no idea if you're gonna have product market fit.
00:20:52 · Ty Morse
[00:20:52] S0: What have been the strangest challenges that you run into?
00:20:56 · Keller Cliffton
[00:20:56] S1: I mean, are a lot of weird things that happen in the real world, you know, like we worry about nesting, you know, which you can imagine like that as an engineering term or a software development term. No, we're talking about like critters, like bugs and little animals, like nesting in infrastructure that you build in the real world. You know, we- we worry about actual bugs and raccoons and birds, so we're gonna be like nesting in some of this hardware. You know, you worry about the level of crazy weather that you encounter if you're operating across many different countries 20 fourseven, three sixty five, and you've kind of told customers like, we're always gonna be available to you. It's not very compelling to say like, oh yeah, Zipline is this life saving service. You can totally depend on us with your life and the lives of your loved ones when it's sunny out. Not very compelling. Like, you basically have to fly all the time, that people are gonna depend on you in that way. And- and so, you know, I have a lot of healthy, much healthier respect for like, what does it mean to fly in a hailstorm? What does it mean to fly in a lightning storm? What does it mean to fly in insane dust and rain and, you know, up to 40 degrees Celsius and down to negative 20 degrees Celsius? Not only that, you don't only have to worry about, terrestrial weather. When you're building these kinds of systems, also have to worry about solar weather. So that's a good example of something weird because it turns out that weather on the surface of the sun causes really intense electromagnetic interference with things like GPS systems on Earth. And so you have a lot of this radiation that can basically interfere with the signal that's being passed from a GPS satellite to a GPS unit on an aircraft, and we rely on something called dual band RTK differential GPS. It's basically like military grade GPS that only became commercial a few years ago.