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.
00:33:26 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:33:26] S0: How many factories are you gonna have to build out to actually do a million deliveries? Just depends how big the factory is. I think that, I mean, this building, when you get, know, when you get [00:33:37] S1: to walk around it is is pretty serious scale, at least serious scale for the Bay Area. You know, this building was originally designed to be able to produce something like 20 to 40,000 aircraft a year, which was our initial estimate of what would be required to satisfy like a million deliveries a day. It's now clear that we need to build something like, we need to, we really need like five times that capacity or more. And so Zipline is now starting to figure out what does it mean, where are we gonna build that manufacturing capacity. You know, it's all happening in The US, but, we have some big investments to make. [00:34:06] S0: If you fast forward, like, a year or two, is there any major changes that you're making to the platform at that point that you won't make today, but you kind of already know is, like, here's something that we want to [00:34:18] S1: add or change? I mean, the way I would probably answer that question is, you know, I, we were talking with our team, we were, we were meeting with a lot of the different engineering leaders on the team, I actually showed them this thing that I had seen Jeff Bezos present in a presentation he gave a couple years ago, which was he actually showed the, a screenshot of what Amazon dot com looked like in 1994. So it's basically like in the first couple months of their operation-
00:34:18 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
[00:34:18] S1: add or change? I mean, the way I would probably answer that question is, you know, I, we were talking with our team, we were, we were meeting with a lot of the different engineering leaders on the team, I actually showed them this thing that I had seen Jeff Bezos present in a presentation he gave a couple years ago, which was he actually showed the, a screenshot of what Amazon dot com looked like in 1994. So it's basically like in the first couple months of their operation- [00:34:43] S0: It's got a little river.
00:34:44 · Keller Cliffton
[00:34:44] S1: It says like amazon.com, yeah, think it has a river, and then it's basically like these blue hyperlinks, it's just like straight up, like, a vertical list of hype- blue hyperlinks with the different kinds of books, so like sci fi, romance, fantasy, non fiction, and then you click it, and then it's just a list of all the books. And that was- and that was the website. And so I feel like it would be a bit like asking, you know, Jeff, in 1994, you're like, Oh, wow. Like, can you imagine, like, what are the changes that you could imagine making to this website? You're like, you know, I I do think, and, you know, they always emphasize, like, it's 12:01AM. I mean, when it comes to autonomous logistics, you know, this is, I think we're gonna, in the same way that I'm sure people at Amazon today look back at that screenshot, they're like, Wow, can you imagine how ghetto it was? Can you imagine, like, what humble beginnings? Like, I think that, we look at everything that we're doing right now, I mean, there are a thousand things that we want to make better about the system. You know, like you're, and you're every day by operating in the real world, you're seeing all the different ways you're like, okay, we could double the efficiency here. We could dramatically change the way we do, you know, completely change the maintenance model. You can imagine different ways of assigning capacity dynamically amongst these sites. You can imagine totally different kinds of ground infrastructure that would like triple the density of capacity that we can install on any given charging site. You can imagine more efficient ways of deploying charging sites. You can imagine different kinds of sites that we would be building. You know, right now we're mainly kind of focusing on renting little bits of parking lots, and building charging infrastructure that's sort of similar to Tesla Supercharger. We're just building different kinds of, you know, we're building chargers for aircraft rather than for cars. The closer you are to the technical implement- implementation, the more embarrassing you find it. Like, people- people look at it from outside and they're like, Wow, like, that is so impressive. That looks so sci fi. And to us, we're like, you know, I don't know.