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?
00:12:33 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:12:33] S0: Nobody knows. Know, [00:12:36] S1: if I knew we would be focusing on it today. [00:12:38] S0: Brian Chesky has this interesting idea of you basically as the leader of a company have to be scaling faster than your company is, or else you're kind of like falling behind and you're kind of becoming the limiting factor. For something like this where the growth is just getting pulled forward like crazy and the expectations are rising insanely fast, how do you kind of stay ahead mentally? [00:12:58] S1: You know, the reality is I think it usually feels like you're sort of like holding on for dear life, you know, by your fingernails. I think that the way I've thought about it for myself is that I'm learning as fast as I possibly can. I'm being humble and curious, in any given year. And usually I'm totally failing and having to figure things out, you know, and, and maybe by the end of the year, feel like, oh wow, I finally feel like you're Neo, you're seeing the ones and the zeros in the matrix, you see how it all works, you're like, I can- [00:13:29] S0: But then the game changes
00:13:29 · Ty Morse, Keller Cliffton
[00:13:29] S0: But then the game changes [00:13:30] S1: and And then, yeah, and then a week later the company doubles in scale and you're instantly back to being useless and unprepared. And I think the key thing is being humble enough to listen to the people around you who can tell you when you're being stupid, who can point out like all the things that you're doing wrong. You know, I- and then also, I think it requires like a certain degree of shamelessness, you know, like so much of Zipline is felt like, I'm saying, Oh, let's just, you know, this is the answer, this is the direction we're going in, everybody follow me. And then a month later it's like, Whoops, that is not a good idea at all, everybody back. Like, let's go in the complete opposite direction, you know, this isn't working, we need to do something totally different. And I think you can, like, beat yourself up for bad decisions. You can look backwards. You can be like, oh my god, I look like an idiot. Why would people even trust me? You know, I think it's better to not look backwards, and you just, you know, practical problem solving, be low ego, and try to figure out on any given day, like, what are the things that are not working and then how do we how do we fix it as fast as possible?
00:14:31 · Ty Morse
[00:14:31] S0: I think when you kind of go through this hyper growth phase, the company has to radically change how it operates and how it's like structured generally. Like, you may need to increase your manufacturing capacity by like 10 x over a year, and that's a completely new function that you've never really done before. So how is the company changing over the next like twelve to twenty four months?