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
00:29:40 · Ty Morse
[00:29:40] S0: this is what the, like, the cybercap feels like. Every single time I open the Tesla Robocab at, like, taxi app, it's And not I'm like, okay, the fifteenth time you do that, you're kinda like, I'm just gonna open
00:29:51 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
[00:29:51] S1: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, we worry about that. And, I mean, the crazy thing is Zipline is deploying giant amounts of capacity into the real world as fast as we possibly can. We're running this factory at ever increasing scale, and we still can't keep up. I I mean, I think, I think the reality is, you know, on the demand side, you know, when Dara was here a couple days ago, he mentioned, he's like, look, the thing that Uber's always known about demand is that, especially demand for instant delivery, is that it is insatiable. I thought, yeah, I it's true. It's a good word. And the reality is it sort of feels like, you know, you've accidentally put a straw into the Pacific Ocean. Sort of have this sense of like, woah, this is gonna take, like, we gotta think bigger and this is gonna take a long time to actually satisfy that scale. Especially given that instant delivery is a very big market today, and it's going to grow by another 10x in order to serve this. And by the way, on the 10x piece, I think the thing that should be obvious and also exciting is that, I mean, we are already hiring millions of humans to drive 3,000 pound gas combustion vehicles to deliver something to you that weighs like an average of three to five pounds. And that is obviously very expensive. It's slow. Sometimes it's unsafe. Sometimes there are reliability challenges. [00:31:05] S0: Road congestion.
00:31:05 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:31:05] S0: Road congestion. [00:31:06] S1: Yeah, you cause traffic, you cause pollution for neighborhoods, like all of these things. I mean, the reality is actually you don't even necessarily replace that. It's just that I don't think it's going to be possible to scale that by another 10x. I think that that's a really important intuition here, which is that like, there are not nearly enough humans or cars or like capacity on streets in our neighborhoods and cities, which is a limited- is truly like a hard and fast constraint. There's- we cannot scale 10x the way we're currently doing things. The only way to do it is through, you know, robotics, physical AI, and using new kinds of infrastructure. [00:31:46] S0: When I was talking with Denton off camera earlier, he was mentioning that you guys could increase the like area that a given, you know, drone or Zip, right? [00:31:55] S1: Yeah. [00:31:56] S0: Yeah, that a given Zip can, you know, access or maneuver in, but it's not actually necessarily beneficial because it's already being utilized like a 100% in that small area. And so is there kind of like any trade offs that you're making on deciding to not necessarily like improve the platform to just scale faster and like get more out there because you know that even if it's a small zone, it'll just automatically get a 100% utilized?
00:32:19 · Keller Cliffton
[00:32:19] S1: Yeah, I mean that, you know, it's just, again, you're you're attacking the bottleneck. Right now the bottleneck is not demand, so we're not rushing to add more, like, you know, we we get so many customers who are like, why, you know, why is my home not enabled yet? I mean, Zipline just, like, this week enabled a record new number of homes. So every week, we're adding more and more homes. We're basically taking homes off the wait list and adding them to the service. But right now the challenge is capacity because customers are ordering way more than we were expecting, and so we're just- we're having to deploy more and more capacity in order to be able to serve the homes. What we don't wanna do is be in a mode where, like, 70% of the time you come to the app where, like, demand is too high, we can't serve you. So we're really trying to, like, yeah, you're just trying to catch up. And so right now the constraint is capacity, and that's the reason that we are, mean, I even while you and I are sitting here, like, is the main aircraft line that we're sitting on. This week, it is getting disassembled and moved into the next manufacturing bay over, because we are doubling the size again. So we're just moving as fast as it can be possibly. I mean, if you come back in thirty days, this is all completely... You wouldn't recognize the building. So, yeah, just moving as fast as we possibly can to try to attack the constraint of the month.