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.
00:09:49 · Keller Cliffton, Ty Morse
You have a factory that you have bought or are renting at, you know, usually factories aren't cheap. The factory has to operate at extreme scale in order to make sense from a unit economics perspective. You know, I think it's all hard, and then, yeah, as you mentioned, you also are sort of engaging with the real world, is you're sort of suddenly realizing, oops, our plan was off by five x, plan was off by 10 x, we actually have to do five times more than this. [00:10:11] S0: Or like your timeline is completely off. Like you thought that you had five years to scale and you actually have only have like Yeah. Five hundred days [00:10:17] S1: Yeah. I think all of those things are true. And so, I think it's the reason, you know, people talk about like hard filters and soft filters and the Fermi Paradox. I don't if you, you know, talk to anybody about that, but like, yeah, I think you could think of it as like the filters- [00:10:30] S0: The Fermi Paradox, are the companies?
00:10:30 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:10:30] S0: The Fermi Paradox, are the companies? [00:10:32] S1: Where are all the hardware companies? Like, why did they all die? You know, oh, they died because there was a- there- like, there are multiple hard filters, and getting these companies to scale is hard and capital intensive and also requires a lot of luck, I think. But, the reality is when you then look at a lot of the most valuable companies on earth or the companies that are playing the biggest role in moving humanity forward, a lot of these companies have giant hardware components if not, are primarily hardware companies. And so, I think that it's not for the faint of heart, but it's also important for humanity. [00:11:01] S0: What is the thing that has caused you the most stress in the last twelve months?
00:11:05 · Keller Cliffton
[00:11:05] S1: It's a different thing every month. I think, you know, to my exact point, like, there's no, you know, you're- you're- you're- you're like combating this insane fire that will for sure kill the company if it cannot be fixed quickly. And then, you know, you're- you're attacking that thing with total focused, ruthless, you know, energy, and then two weeks later, it's to something completely different. That is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is here. Now we gotta go focus on that. So, we needed to launch platform two, then there was a huge amount of just like integration work we had to do to kind of like shake the rocks out of the gears, actually get the system operating reliably last year. Then the system started to scale exponentially fast in terms of flight volumes. We had to figure out aircraft utilization and a lot of, there's a huge amount of improvement we had to do to kind of like the customer facing app and how we integrate with all these different partners throughout a metro. Then, you know, tariffs were announced and this caused like, you know, some pretty significant disruptions in the supply chain. Then we were having a problem manufacturing enough aircraft. Then you get all the aircraft into the field and you realize like, Oh my God, gotta maintain all these aircraft. And so Zipline has had like multiple existential maintenance crises over the last year. Fleet health today is the best it ever has been. A month ago it was the worst it had ever been. So it's just giving you a sense for like, you know, it feels like you're living in this heightened state of- it's- it's just like incredible sensitivity to timelines and having to like attack these problems one at a time. So, and what will be the existential crisis for Zipline a month from now?