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.
00:27:37 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[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. [00:27:46] S1: Exact- yeah. I think that that is how Amazon feels to people today. And obviously, there's this huge movement from all of these companies into sub thirty minute and then sub ten minute delivery. I think logistics is going to feel more and more like the Internet, where it's just like, yeah, you click around, press a button, and you can instantly get the information you need. I think that in the same way that the Internet can deliver information, you know, robotics will deliver everything else. [00:28:09] S0: One of your core values is just customer obsession. And if you wanna have a really great customer experience for every single person that's on the network, you may have to basically stop people from signing up Mhmm. As, you know, until the hardware can kinda like scale. So how have you guys kind of had to like stall growth in order to keep the customer experience the level you want it to be?
00:28:28 · Keller Cliffton
[00:28:28] S1: Yeah. I mean, someone must have given you a hint on that question because actually that is one of the weird things that we're doing right now. Yeah. Oh. Okay. So we are we are having to, you know, we built this system so that we could serve like a certain range and a certain number of homes, assuming a certain level of, like, utilization per home. And then we ended up being off by an order of magnitude in terms of the utilization. And so we've actually had to constrain the number of homes that we're serving, sort of artificially constrained, because we don't have the capacity. I mean, the system right now, you know, our charging sites are open. The system is operating from 6AM to 11PM. We will soon be 20 fourseven in a lot of these markets that we're operating. And most of our mature markets, like the system is max utilization for almost every hour of the day. And so we are now scrambling to deploy more capacity and try to catch up with that demand, but it is really hard because, you know, it's sort of like, we definitely do have our version, I don't remember if you, do remember the Twitter fail whale? It definitely feels a little like that. I mean, if you're using the Zipline app in some of these, cities, we're, often you're encountering a message that says like, demand is really high, we're struggling to meet, you know, we're struggling to meet it, we're trying to add more capacity, please try again in fifteen minutes. I mean that sucks. That's Well