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.
00:36:30 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
You- you- the closer you are, the more obvious it is, all the, you know, the 50 different ways, the thousand different ways that we would want to make it better. And then it's just prioritizing your list, and you're like, Okay, well, we can focus on, you know, 15 or 20 things in the next quarter, so like, let's do these 15 or 20 things. So every, I mean, the, I guess the simple answer is just like, there's a long way to go. Like these kinds of hardware platforms, I mean, imagine, you know, the iPhone one and then all the way to, what is the number we're at today, I actually don't know, you know, every year there are like extraordinary gains, and I think these gains compound in ways that humans, sometimes have a hard time imagining. We're just not that good at imagining exponential curves. [00:37:07] S0: I watched a video probably like a couple years ago on, like, parking lots and how many parking lots there are around The United States. And it's kind of funny to me that at the same time that autonomous vehicles are taking off, you also have the instant logistics taking off. And it seems like maybe this is kinda like this magical serendipity where you can just suddenly take a bunch of the parking lot space, convert it into instant delivery locations or something.
00:37:07 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:37:07] S0: I watched a video probably like a couple years ago on, like, parking lots and how many parking lots there are around The United States. And it's kind of funny to me that at the same time that autonomous vehicles are taking off, you also have the instant logistics taking off. And it seems like maybe this is kinda like this magical serendipity where you can just suddenly take a bunch of the parking lot space, convert it into instant delivery locations or something. [00:37:33] S1: I think that that's totally a thing, and to me, you know, and I also this tells you something about like, think the technologies that are gonna win versus not win, and you can also see this with, with data centers. So I think there are all kinds of interesting parallels, but in my opinion, you know, we gotta be heading toward a future where we are giving the earth back to humans. And so there are lots of examples, I think maybe scooters fell into that category, I think in the way we do instant delivery today, kind of falls into that category where you're causing like more and more traffic on roads just to deliver something to you. [00:38:03] S0: I think Like unhappiness of the human whole world.
00:38:03 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:38:03] S0: I think Like unhappiness of the human whole world. [00:38:05] S1: Yeah. Think sidewalk robots fall into this category of it's like, okay, well, we've already caused like max congestion on the roads, now let's like also take over the sidewalks, like the last little public space that was meant to be reserved for humans, let's also like take over that with robots and force the humans to like jump into the bushes. I think that we gotta be, you know, technologies have to be scaling in a way that makes neighborhoods like more beautiful, quieter, safer, less pollution, less traffic. I think that putting data centers into space, like, is an interesting example. I think that, there are lots of different ways that robotics and autonomy can kind of contribute to that. Zipline has always really been of the opinion that like, yeah, you want to build a kind of delivery that gives the earth back to humans, give fundamental, you know, whether it's parking lots or roads or sidewalks, like all of that is for humans. You know, we can use, you know, we can transit in ways that are hard to see, very difficult to hear, totally unobtrusive, and you're just sort of moving logistics or, like, other commercial applications into a different plane, you can make cities and neighborhoods way more magical and way more human centric by doing so.