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.
00:24:13 · Ty Morse
[00:24:13] S0: You know, with Soren and Olaf, at Neuros, their product is actually a drone and like delivering a payload, whereas here, the product is actually just a thing appearing at like kind of out of thin air in a very short period of time. Does that enable you to make, like, special iterations on the actual hardware in the sense that you don't necessarily have to like sell a customer on it? Yeah. You can just make whatever decisions you want and then the thing just appears faster.
00:24:39 · Keller Cliffton
[00:24:39] S1: Yeah. I think it's a really good observation. I mean, when you look at a lot of hardware companies, look at a lot of particularly robotics companies, very easy trap to fall into, which is like you're sort of in an ivory tower or you're kind of like building in an R and D lab, and you're building like a super cool robot. You're building a really, really cool vehicle. I think the reality is, at least what Zipline discovered very early on by trying to launch in the real world, was that the vehicle was 15% of the complexity of the solution that was required. Like, when we originally launched, we were immediately getting punched in the face, as you said, by reality, and, you you know, the punch in the face is realizing like, Oh, wow, we need like all of these layers of software integration. We need a plan for maintenance. We need a plan for inventory management on-site. We need a way of providing an unmanned traffic management system to the regulators so they know where these aircraft are at any given time. We need to build a customer ordering portal. Like, all of these things had to not just be designed and then deployed but also made reliable, because at the end of the day, none of Zipline's customers want to buy a drone. I think this is this is like the fundamental realization, which was that there are so many industries that are gonna be revolutionized by robotics, but I think that it is unlikely that companies are gonna be like selling robots to these companies who are then gonna figure out how to manage the deployment and handle the integration, manage the the training, and manage the maintenance, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It's just like none of these companies wanna be operating a giant fleet of autonomous aircraft. So instead, you know, we are selling teleportation. We are selling instant delivery that is 10x as fast and less expensive and dramatically better for neighborhoods and a better customer experience. And all of- all our customers care about is, does something go from A to- point A to point B fast enough to save somebody's life or create like this new kind of commercial transaction that wasn't possible before and really delight customers. And they wanna think of us very much the way that they would think about working with any other logistics company. You pay money and the thing is transported from point a to point b.
00:26:29 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:26:29] S0: Ideally, don't even realize that it was a drone. It just kinda like flops [00:26:32] S1: out of the They don't care. I mean, if we actually had, like, teleportation technology, would they even really know the difference? Like, they wouldn't. You know? Like, we we, yeah, I I think it's kind of a powerful point and and then and then to answer the second point of your question, it does mean that Zipline, by keeping a lot of that complexity sort of behind the curtain, on one hand, I think sometimes it's probably true that Zipline's customers may not even fully appreciate the level of like engineering and manufacturing scale and regulatory challenges that are required to make this kind of a system work. It's one of the reasons, you know, one of the big questions we get from investors is they'll often ask like, well, some of the biggest companies in the world have been investing like a billion dollars a year in drone delivery, and they have very little to show for it. So like, why is that? And I think it's just that the problem is much harder than people think of on first pass. They're like, Oh, I can, I can go buy a quadcopter and duct tape a Snickers bar to the bottom of it and fly it a mile and I've just done drone delivery? And it's like, Okay, big difference from that to operating a new kind of infrastructure layer that can do millions or tens of millions of deliveries a day.
00:26:32 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
[00:26:32] S1: out of the They don't care. I mean, if we actually had, like, teleportation technology, would they even really know the difference? Like, they wouldn't. You know? Like, we we, yeah, I I think it's kind of a powerful point and and then and then to answer the second point of your question, it does mean that Zipline, by keeping a lot of that complexity sort of behind the curtain, on one hand, I think sometimes it's probably true that Zipline's customers may not even fully appreciate the level of like engineering and manufacturing scale and regulatory challenges that are required to make this kind of a system work. It's one of the reasons, you know, one of the big questions we get from investors is they'll often ask like, well, some of the biggest companies in the world have been investing like a billion dollars a year in drone delivery, and they have very little to show for it. So like, why is that? And I think it's just that the problem is much harder than people think of on first pass. They're like, Oh, I can, I can go buy a quadcopter and duct tape a Snickers bar to the bottom of it and fly it a mile and I've just done drone delivery? And it's like, Okay, big difference from that to operating a new kind of infrastructure layer that can do millions or tens of millions of deliveries a day. [00:27:37] S0: It's like the best version of Amazon is basically you just click a button on an app, you don't know anything about the infrastructure behind the scenes, and the thing just appears, you know, the next morning.