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.
00:22:35 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:22:35] S0: Do you have to basically use like a GPS denied, like flight controller or something? [00:22:40] S1: Well, that's a whole other thing that we also worry about which is GPS denial. This is like, this is more like GPS interference. Is that [00:22:46] S0: like Link gets knocked out or something? [00:22:48] S1: Yeah, well it's just, solar weather happens in cycles, and it happens over the last year. We've been in the high- the worst part of the cycle, and it has a huge impact on, like, how you operate these kinds of systems and how you harden the systems to things like that kind of solar weather and solar radiation. And so I think the list goes on and on. Like, could talk more about all the way- weird things that humans do in the real world, like weird human behavior that you have to plan for, both like genuine mistakes as well as like people sort of trying to like hack the system and like- How [00:23:14] S0: have people tried to hack the system?
00:23:14 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:23:14] S0: have people tried to hack the system? [00:23:16] S1: I think just really simple things like, you know, all of the weird things that people might do to try to like defeat safety systems or try to get like a video of the system doing something wrong. The- the great news actually for Zipline is that because we are primarily delivering to like people's backyards, it's actually a lot easier for us from a safety perspective than it is if you imagine like scooter companies, where you're just like on a sidewalk, generally annoying people, and there's very little accountability. Like, you know, people can grab the scooter and like throw it into the ocean or something. For us, like, we know who we're delivering to. We know, you we're delivering to someone's backyard. If something, it is, A, very difficult to, like, interfere with the system because obviously the main aircraft is staying a 100 meters in the air when it's delivering to you. And B, people don't have very much incentive because, like, the thing is creating this magical experience for them, a lot of value for them. And it's like, if someone were to interfere with the system, it's like, okay, we're we're showing up on your doorstep like five minutes later asking like what happened and... So, the lack of anonymity also helps.