00:04:08 · Ty Morse
[00:04:08] S0: I was watching one of the interviews of Travis probably like three or four days ago, and he was talking about the user behavior of Uber. And he's like, people, when they have a car available at their fingertips, they kind of change their behavior in how they interact with the city. And so he was like, we can't even predict exactly how much each user is going to use our product because they keep on using more and more over time. And this almost feels like the exact same analogy again, where someone uses the, you know, like instant delivery and then suddenly they use it like twice next week and three times. Like last week I bought multiple things on DoorDash in the, you know, in the same like two hour period in two separate deliveries, and I was like, this is exactly the use case for Zipline.
00:04:49 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
[00:04:49] S1: Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, Travis was very, you know, farsighted in that prediction. You look at, like, what happened with Uber, I mean, he was exactly right. Like, all of these new- I mean, people now commute in Ubers, You never would've done that with, like, the traditional taxi industry. And so that's obviously like a giant market expansion that was kind of unlocked. And in this exact same way, mean, Zipline, you know, when you- when- when I'm spending time with customers in these different markets, I mean, you meet a dad who has like five kids and he's ordering from Zipline, a couple times a day, they'll order multiple things, like, even over the course of an afternoon or evening. You know, 80 year old grandma who's ordered from Zipline three fifty times, in the last year. I, you know, just posted on X yesterday this funny video I saw of, like, it's basically a rooftop, like an apartment rooftop frat party that's happening in a I saw this. Yeah. It's like the 7th Floor rooftop pool deck of like all these kids just hanging out listening to loud music in their swimsuits, and they're ordering Zipline, and Zipline is delivering directly next to the pool on the 7th Floor of the apartment building. And so you kinda realize like, woah, these are just totally new kinds of, like, different ways of engaging with delivery. [00:06:00] S0: Something that I also loved about that video was there's like very few products where everyone just kind of is astounded by, oh, this thing actually exists. [00:06:09] S1: Yeah. What the hell Yeah. Am I looking
00:06:09 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
[00:06:09] S1: Yeah. What the hell Yeah. Am I looking [00:06:10] S0: On that video, every single person had stopped what they were doing whether they were in the pool or like sitting on the side to just look up at the drone delivering some package. And my bet is that has like a very strong emotional reaction, suddenly they wanna go, you know, use the service themselves. [00:06:22] S1: Yeah. I mean, a lot of the, you know, one of the reasons we've been seeing this crazy growth, I mean, you know, a lot of these different, you know, we're, we're sort of launching like neighborhood by neighborhood in these cities, and a lot of these neighborhoods, I mean, you know, take a guess, like there's a, I mean, some of these cities, we have more than 50% of all homes ordering from Zipline. There's just like insane levels of customer adoption in just six to eight months, and you kinda ask, like, how is that happening? And the reality is, it's a very visual product. People love, like, people are using it when they're at soccer practice, and, like, one of the moms will be like, I'm gonna order, you know, whatever, Gatorade and oranges, and then have it delivered right here, and, like, the entire, like, you know, you have a 100 people, like, what am I seeing? And, you know, and then they can download the app and use it themselves and get their first delivery that night at home. You see, you know, birthday parties, like, it's, you know, it's a hit. You're delivering to people's backyards. I think that, yeah, the- the- the product is inherently viral, I guess, is the short version.
00:06:22 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
[00:06:22] S1: Yeah. I mean, a lot of the, you know, one of the reasons we've been seeing this crazy growth, I mean, you know, a lot of these different, you know, we're, we're sort of launching like neighborhood by neighborhood in these cities, and a lot of these neighborhoods, I mean, you know, take a guess, like there's a, I mean, some of these cities, we have more than 50% of all homes ordering from Zipline. There's just like insane levels of customer adoption in just six to eight months, and you kinda ask, like, how is that happening? And the reality is, it's a very visual product. People love, like, people are using it when they're at soccer practice, and, like, one of the moms will be like, I'm gonna order, you know, whatever, Gatorade and oranges, and then have it delivered right here, and, like, the entire, like, you know, you have a 100 people, like, what am I seeing? And, you know, and then they can download the app and use it themselves and get their first delivery that night at home. You see, you know, birthday parties, like, it's, you know, it's a hit. You're delivering to people's backyards. I think that, yeah, the- the- the product is inherently viral, I guess, is the short version. [00:07:20] S0: I love this line, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Mhmm. [00:07:24] S1: And
00:07:24 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
[00:07:24] S1: And [00:07:24] S0: I feel like if you look back eighteen months at the beginning of last year, I don't think it's almost possible to predict, you know, 15 to 20% week over week growth for an entire year or entire eighteen month period. And so I gotta imagine that the plan eighteen months ago was completely different than it was like twelve months ago, six months ago, and today, you know, one customer walks in and they take your entire supply that you were planning to build for maybe multiple years. How has that plan kind of shifted in the past like two years, and how are you kind of planning going forward to basically predict for unpredictable demand?
00:07:55 · Keller Cliffton
[00:07:55] S1: I think that, you know, the reality... People people say hardware companies are hard. The reality is that the challenge with hardware companies is you have, I mean, you have- you have 30 different disciplines, right? You have everything from electrical engineering, the teams that are building the actual flight computers and the avionics and power distribution board and the battery management system. You have the firmware teams who are writing the low level software that runs on those, on those boards. You have the powertrain team, which is designing the electric motors and the batteries, and then all of the, you know, bus bars in the aircraft to actually transfer energy throughout the aircraft. And then you have the mechanical engineering team, is designing the 43 major sub assemblies on the aircraft. You have aerodynamics, aeroacoustics, guidance navigation controls. You have all the different software teams owning everything from communications architecture to multi vehicle deconfliction to, you know, detect and avoid, like computer vision based detect and avoid. You have, the customer ordering application, and that's just engineering. Then you also have to be really good at operations, you have to be good at logistics, you have to be really good at manufacturing, you have to be really good at supply chain. And so you can just imagine all these things as like a really long chain, and you are as good as the weakest link in the chain. So you can imagine, you can be really good at 29 of the 30 things. You're like, Oh man, we nailed it on 29 things. Manufacturing, we just didn't nail it. So cool, the company's a zero. You don't have vehicles. Any one of those things is a zero, the company is a zero. They're all multiplied by each other, and I think this is the reason that maybe it's like only the paranoid survive, or, you know, if you weren't, if you didn't have, like, psychological problems before starting the hardware company, you definitely will afterward, you know, because I think it breeds like a very healthy degree of skepticism, paranoia, and humility. It is really hard, and especially once those kind of companies enter hyper scale, you're now in a mode where you have like hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of commitments in a supply chain, and those are like hard and fast financial commitments.