This is my voice. It can tell you a lot about me and I'm not changing it for anyone. In NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, you'll find a collection of NPR episodes centered on the Black Experience. Search NPR Black Stories, Black Truths, wherever you get podcasts. Angie's List is now Angie and we've heard a lot of theories about why. I thought it was an eco-moo. For your worst, less paper. It was so you could say it faster. No way. It's to be more iconic. Must be a tech thing.
But those aren't quite right. It's because now you can compare up front prices, book a service instantly, and even get your project handled from start to finish. Sounds easy. It is and it makes us so much more than just a list. Get started at Angie.com. That's ANGI, or download the app today. Welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross. So most people who live in cities have relatively easy access to emergency medicine and most hospitals in cities can get the supplies they need quickly.
But in rural areas with fewer roads or with challenging terrain, it's a different story. In some parts of the world, it can take an entire day to get medicine or blood plasma to a distant medical facility. So a few years ago, an entrepreneur named Keller Renato Clifton decided to take on this challenge and he's doing it with drones. Drones that are delivering critical supplies to hospitals and remote areas around the world.
But before Keller launched his pipeline, he started another business called Remotive, a robotics business that would eventually pivot into drones. The company basically built an application on an iPhone that turned it into a mini robot. The more we saw a smartphone scaling, the more we felt like, hey, a lot of the components and supply chains behind these phones are going to enable a new kind of robotics company to be built.
And so we were asking ourselves, what would the Apple of robotics look like? Is there an opportunity here to build really the first global robotics company? And so we didn't have much money. My co-founders and I were all unemployed, which is a great motivation for entrepreneurship. And we started building these little, we called them smartphone robots and they literally used an iPhone as the brain of the robot.
You would connect an iPhone to the robot and it could run around on the floor and do telepresence. And that was the first thing that we started selling as a company. And just to describe them for people who don't know what they look like. There's sort of like a translucent plastic platform with like a motorized track wheel on each side. So it looks like a toy. But you would mount the iPhone vertically on it, like you would do on one of those speakers that you find in hotel rooms.
And that would essentially would turn into like a little robot with a smiley face. Yeah, on the screen, on the iPhone screen. Yeah, exactly. We started selling them. We didn't have product market fit figured out, I wouldn't say. It was half a toy, half a telepresence solution, half a way of teaching kids to program. I think we were circling around this intuition that it was a good time to be building a robotics company that knew things were possible.
And also we needed something that we could sell in a month or two. Because again, we had no credibility, no investor was going to give us money. And so we needed to be able to build and sell a very simple product very fast if we wanted to get the company alive. And so that was the very first thing that we ever built. All right. So the idea was to build this into something, of course, bigger.
And I guess you got in touch with the late Tony Shay, the founder of Zappos, who's on our show many years ago. An incredible person, incredible entrepreneur, but you had read his book and you got in touch with him. Why? Tony was someone who super inspired me. When I graduated from college, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And frankly, school didn't do much to teach you about entrepreneurship.
It wasn't even really, it was never clear to me that that was actually an option, like something that you can do. And when I read Delivering Happiness, Tony's book about building Zappos, I had totally blew my mind. It was also inspiring because Tony had gone to the same school and in fact, had lived in the same dorm that I lived in. And so it was just 10 years ahead of me. And so when I was in Las Vegas, I emailed him and said, hey, I'm here.
I am deeply inspired by your book and we're building this robotics company and I want to meet. And I think this is one of the things that's special about Tony and maybe also just special about certain circles of technology entrepreneurs, which is someone like Tony was happy to meet me, even though I was a nobody. He was so impressed with these robot iPhones or these iPhones mounted on these robotic platforms, like instantly when you shorted to them.
I don't know if anybody could have been that impressed by what we were building. It wasn't very impressive on its face, I don't think. Perhaps, I think maybe he believed more in us. We were very nerdy, we were very hopeful, we were certainly very naive. So I think maybe he was interested in the bigger vision of trying to build a new kind of robotics company. And he was willing to take a bet on three nerds who had no credibility and no money.
He made it an investment and you guys, as you say, you set up shop in Las Vegas. And the project lasted, I think, a little over about three years. And I guess you wound it down. What happened? Did you come to a realization that maybe this wasn't going to work? That exact same company is what became Zipline. We didn't necessarily wind it down. We did over the course of a year, we realized that building a new kind of robotics company meant that we had to focus on a really big, bold vision.
And I also realized we did not want to focus on operating in the home. We wanted to focus on a more controlled environment and something where automation would just be a more natural fit. And that's sort of the reason we became obsessed with logistics. But the crazy thing is that same company that Tony invested in 12 years later has now become Zipline. Yeah. So, all right. So initially it started out as like, let's use the iPhone to be the brains of a little toy robot.
But what you can sort of came to this realization that maybe you need to focus on something like, as you say, like logistics, something that could have a larger impact and where there could be a bigger market. And when you were thinking of logistics, were you initially thinking maybe we can create robots that can deliver things or that can work in a warehouse or something like that?
I think there were a couple of aha moments. One is that I met a guy named Mick who had founded a company called Kiva. And probably most people won't know what Kiva Robotics, but they had just been acquired by Amazon and they built these amazing orange robots that could run around inside a warehouse. And basically go to a shelf, pick up the shelf, and then bring it to a human pack or to pack something into a box.
And if you saw one of those warehouses, you would see all of these autonomous orange robots just running all over the place, moving things. And I remember seeing that thinking, wow, what an incredible company. And somebody is going to build that for outside the warehouse. And whoever builds that, I just remember thinking that is going to be a world changing company. All right. So it's around 2014 and you're kind of trying to figure out what is, what can I do in this area of logistics?
You know that you sort of have some experience with robotics. How did you get to drones, to aircraft? I mean, our backgrounds when we started building Zipline were already in automation, robotics, and autonomy. We had this sense that it was probably going to be possible to build an automated instant logistics system for the planet. But there were so many things standing in our way. And to be honest, like every expert that we spoke to told us that this idea was stupid, it was never going to work.
We were wasting our time. So what was the idea that you would talk to people about? We had this sense that if you wanted to deliver something very quickly over a distance of anywhere from, you know, say 10 to 50 miles, you wanted to do that with a vehicle that was 10 times as fast as traditional logistics, half the cost, and zero mission.
And so we had a sense just raising from first principles that what you really needed was a vehicle that was electric, that was autonomous, that weighed more like 50 pounds rather than 4,000 pounds. And if we wanted to go really fast, we knew we probably needed to fly rather than drive. Wow. So you're thinking like a Jetsons world.
I had grown up reading all of this great, kind of hopeful, optimistic science fiction. And the funny thing is, you know, this is totally normal in most science fiction books. And so I think I had this sense that if technology had advanced to a point where we thought it was possible to build this product, we were pretty confident that it was something that people would want.
So you guys start to do the research into the world of logistics. And presumably you spent quite a lot of time just digging into this world for a while to figure out where you could kind of get in, where you could sort of start to work on something. I mean, it's totally fair when we started building this, our backgrounds were not in healthcare. They were not in aerospace.
And we didn't even know that much about logistics. So a lot of investors who were looking at us, or even experts were saying, what do you guys know about this space? You're totally clueless. You don't know what you're talking about. The reality is I think the one thing that I had experience is that, you know, graduating from school, I had been rock climbing full time for nine months and got a chance to travel to a lot of different countries in the world.
I had seen, I at least had this sense that logistics, the kind of logistics that we take for granted in the United States is not broadly available globally. And I think that that was a kind of important insight. It was that logistics does a good job of serving the golden billion people on earth. But for the seven billion people who don't fall into that category, your access either sucks or is non-existent.
And we've been pretending for a hundred years like this problem is somehow excusable or unavoidable. And we felt like it was not either of those things. But how did you how did you come across that that information or real I mean, it's obviously it's available to know, but where did you first hear about this issue?
I was spending some time, you know, in 2013, we were already starting to think, okay, if we're going to build a new kind of logistics system, we're going to need to find a public healthcare system we can integrate with. So that already meant we needed to be looking outside the US. We were focused on countries where we thought this sort of technology would have a really outsized impact in terms of healthcare access.
And so I was in Tanzania. I actually met a researcher in Tanzania who had built this really cool early warning alert system using cell phones unsurprisingly. And so he had several hundred primary care facilities and hospitals using the system, each of them had a cell phone. And they would text into a database when they had a patient who was having a medical emergency and needed something specific in order to save their lives.
And so he had this real time database of all of the medical emergencies that were occurring across these 300 health facilities and hospitals. And I remember seeing that database and realizing that it was a basically a database of death because half of the system had been built, but you know, they were receiving all of these emergency requests. And it was like, okay, thanks for letting us know. Good luck.
And there was no other half of the system that could deliver what was needed quickly. So these network solutions at advanced the point where we have the information we need. We know that there is a medical emergency occurring and we know exactly the product that is needed to save that person's life. But logistics has not advanced enough to actually solve the problem.
We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how Keller shifted from rolling iPhones to flying careers. Stay with us. I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. In the first part of the 20th century, the Hilton family had a lock on the hotel industry by offering upscaled service at a modest price. The company was expanding fast and buying up iconic properties across the country like the Plaza and the Waldorf Astoria.
But their unchallenged rise wouldn't last. An ambitious Mormon named JW Marriott decides to pivot from restaurants to hospitality. And he's after Hilton's business, developing modern hotels across the world. But both the Hilton and Marriott families will have to contend with their share of drama in finding a successor. While also fighting to stay solvent in a high stakes business.
Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery Show Business Wars. We go deep into some of the biggest corporate rivalries of all time. In our latest season, Hilton and Marriott are in a race to expand globally and secure the loyalty of fickle customers. Make sure to follow business wars wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.
One more thing before we get back to the show, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. It's usually just at the top of the app. And it's totally free. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross. My guest today is Keller Renato Clifton, the co-founder and CEO of Zipline. It's a company that uses drones to deliver medical supplies and other consumer goods on demand.
So before the break, you talked about how, you know, because the infrastructure challenges getting medical supplies to rural hospitals and Tanzania's obviously huge challenge. And it's interesting because it's a similar story in Africa with cell phones, right? Like a lot of people didn't have access to telephones because there weren't telephone lines installed all over the country. And then all of a sudden cell phones come and they essentially solve that problem.
And so it's sort of a similar idea, right? Which is the infrastructure of roads aren't there. But you knew that if you could somehow fly, you could basically bypass that problem. Exactly. And that kind of infrastructure is often referred to as leapfrogging infrastructure. You know, the first people who said that they were going to build cell phone networks in Africa were widely called idiots.
People thought that was totally unrealistic because line lines hadn't really succeeded in taking off in Africa. Right. And obviously now, a lot of the countries we operate in have better cell service than the United States does. You've seen this incredible leapfrogging technology where you sort of get the technology, the use case right, and it can actually grow in these developing economies faster than anybody really appreciated.
Let's now sort of break down how you did this because you land on this idea. There are a lot of things you've got to do. You've got to find a country with a regulatory environment that is willing to work with you to allow you to fly these drones and deliver medication. The other thing is you've got to build the planes. You've got to build the infrastructure, the hardware, to create these safe autonomous planes that can, I guess, drop a parachute of medical supplies. So let's start with that.
How did you start to develop the technology? I mean, drone technology was around, has been around for a while. So was it, did you start with off the shelf equipment? When we initially had this idea, we started talking to a lot of different customers to try to figure out what exactly did this need to do? Like, what was the actual problem we were defining and what needed to be the specifications of the thing that we were going to go build?
We started to understand that if you could deliver something really quickly over a range of, say, 80 to 100 kilometers, so 50 plus miles, that could have a massive impact. We would be able to serve hundreds of hospitals and health facilities from a single distribution center. You could keep more medicine centralized. You could send things just when it was needed. It would save a lot of lives. This is what we were hearing.
And so we started building the first product in 2013. By 2015, we were flying nonstop at our test facility, which was in Half Moon Bay. And around that time, we were about 15 people. I started spending a lot of time talking to governments trying to find someone who'd be our first customer. And that was when we ended up having this conversation with the government of Rwanda. And I actually remember, in that conversation, we were saying, hey, we have this cool technology.
We can do teleportation to any hospital or health facility. We can deliver any medical product to any hospital or health facility instantly. And I remember the minister of health looking at this at us at the time. And she basically looked at us like we were goofballs and said, look, shut up. Just do blood. And as she was explaining it to us, she was someone who was a true expert in running this kind of national health care system.
And she was explaining that blood transfusions, 50% of them are going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging, 30% are going toward kids. It's a total logistics nightmare because you have packed red blood cells, platelets, plasma. Each of those has different shelf lives and different storage requirements. Plus you have all the different types of blood, A, B, A, B, and O. So getting the right thing to the right place at the right time to save someone's life was really hard.
And there was a lot of waste in the system. And this was a product that was absolutely crucial for family health. And so she ended up saying, look, just here, deliver blood to these 21 hospitals and prove that it can be done. And so we ended up signing a $200,000 contract with the government of Rwanda to deliver blood to those 21 hospitals. And that was how we got started. Wow. A while Rwanda. I mean, I'm just curious. I mean, probably a lot of people are like Rwanda, huh?
But actually Rwanda is quite innovative around taking risks like this and trying new things, right? A lot of people may find it surprising, but the reality is Rwanda is really modeled itself on Singapore. It is a small, highly efficient, technocratic, fast-moving, innovative country in East Africa. And run by a lot of very visionary leaders who believe in technology. And they often talk about being a proof of concept country.
They want to be the first adopter of new technologies and show how it works and then let other countries follow in their footsteps. And so they're unique for a lot of reasons. I also have to say, when we were signing that initial contract, when we were launching during that first year, we would be on constant calls with executives and government leaders, Saturday, Sunday, you know, Sunday early mornings, Sunday late at night.
And I just remember thinking no US government official would be talking to us at this time. I think that by virtue of what that country has been through over the last 30 years, it is extraordinarily entrepreneurial and willing to work hard to move the country forward. All right, so the idea is, let's figure out a way to get medical supplies to people in rural parts of Rwanda and eventually will expand beyond Rwanda.
But really you start with blood supplies, right? And blood, you know, has to be refrigerated, right? It has to be kept at a certain temperature. It has to be delivered fairly quickly. You could do all of these things in the plane, right? Well, we thought we could, but we were wrong. I mean, I, you know, I joke because we were, we were very naive when we were launching in 2016 in Rwanda.
We thought that we had a system that was going to be reliable. We thought we had it figured out. We thought we knew how to integrate with a national healthcare system. We thought we knew how to work with a national airspace regulator. We were basically wrong about all those things. We had no idea what we were doing.
Honestly, it reminds me, I saw this flag in a gymnasium recently. It's like a big flag, you know, like an inspirational flag. And the slogan on it is, we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought that it would be easy. And when I saw it as like, this is a perfect description of zip line in 2017, you know, like full of optimism thinking that we had this figured out, we had signed this contract to deliver just blood, right?
A very narrow part of the overall healthcare system to just 21 hospitals. And we thought, oh, that's great. We'll just knock that out and then we can expand to other things. But for the first nine months, we only served one hospital because everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. We were really struggling to get the system to work reliably.
The technology wasn't as reliable as we thought it would be. We didn't have a lot of the integrating software that we needed to really make the system integrate with the overall health system built. So we had to be building that.
And the team was pulling constant all nighters working through the weekend. I mean, it was a really painful time and it was not clear that the company was going to survive those nine months. We were desperately, desperately trying to get it to work reliably for just one hospital.
And meanwhile, we were lucky that the government was patient enough to say, hey, we know this is hard. We know you're trying to do something for the first time ever. So, you know, figure it out for that one hospital and then you can expand to the other 20. And how did you, I mean, how did you work with the hospitals because I mean, these planes would would be launched right from a, I think, a central facility in Rwanda.
Where, you know, the blood deliveries would arrive and then they'd be launched and they could travel up to what one like round trip up to about 300 kilometers, 300 kilometers. That's a long distance. And they could carry that this payload.
Drop it, like, it would just come down parachute down in a designated spot, like outside the hospital. Yeah, we, we had, when we started building the first system, it was lucky that we were talking to a lot of customers because we were, we were considering, oh, we need more complicated versions of the technology. We need, you know, to build a vertical takeoff and landing hybrid that can fly like an airplane, but hover like a helicopter. We need different ways of delivering.
But the more we spoke to customers, the more we really understood all the customers really cared about was range and price. It was, you know, how do we make sure we can cover the maximum number of hospitals and health facilities by having a lot of range on the system.
And how do we make sure that the cost of a delivery is as low as humanly possible because probably not that surprising, you know, working with health systems in these parts of the world, they don't have a lot of extra money sitting around. So if you're going to solve the problem, it has to be really cost effective. So that led us to build, we wanted to build like as simple of a system as possible. So we built a fixed wing system that really looks like a small airplane.
It's a small electric airplane that has a wingspan of about 10 feet. And we started building these distribution centers where we would launch the aircraft and recover the aircraft and where we held inventory. We loaded that inventory into into a zip, which is what we call the vehicles loaded into a zip when we receive an order launch it, the vehicle would fly out to that maximum.
We guarantee a service radius of 100 kilometers around our distribution centers and the vehicle can fly 300 kilometers on a single battery charge because we have to go there and back.
But you know, from there, each distribution center was capable of serving anywhere from 200 to 400 primary care facilities and hospitals. And it really was meant to just be that other half of the system we were talking about earlier, you know, we said, hey, if telepresence is working, then teleportation is the other half of that system. If we know that a patient needs something, we should be able to have a doctor or a nurse at that hospital press a button on a phone.
And we can teleport the product that's needed to save that patient's life in just a few minutes to the GPS coordinates of that phone. You are obviously in Rwanda and have expanded to Ghana and several other countries in Africa, Cote de Valle, every coast, Kenya, Nigeria and even have some operations here in the US. But initially this was about delivering medical supply. So essentially to presumably to medical facilities.
But earlier in this year in 2023, you announced a new, I guess it's a platform, but it's a new aircraft or plane that drone that can deliver to homes essentially to, you know, to you and me. And it would not just medical supplies, but like could deliver food or packages. Could you tell me about about that sort of, I mean, is it was that part of the plan originally. Over the first year, we actually ended up serving all 21 of those original hospitals that the government had asked us to serve.
And we ended up expanding from that to about 300, 50, 400 hospitals and primary care facilities throughout the country. Then we expanded from just blood to all medical products today. We've delivered two million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, five million plus doses of traditional vaccine. We deliver 75% of the national blood supply of Rwanda outside of Kigali fully autonomously.
Well, and then we went from about 400 hospitals and health facilities in Rwanda to well over 3000 today across seven different countries. The system grew a lot. We've now crossed 40 million commercial autonomous miles. It's become the largest commercial autonomous system of any kind, ground or air on earth. So we definitely never really expected it growing in that way.
One of the most interesting things that we've heard from customers again and again and again, both healthcare customers, but also a lot of the governments we work with, is that home delivery is really the holy grail. So many of these health systems want to be able to deliver directly to a patient at home because there are a lot of cases where you can actually keep someone at home.
It's much better for the patient and it's more cost effective for the health system if the patient doesn't have to come into a hospital. And so a lot of the health systems that we started working with in the US, for example, that are betting on ZIPLINE are adopting ZIPLINE's next generation technology, which you were just mentioning, which is really our home delivery service.
And so we heard from so many of these different customers that ultimately what's needed is teleportation from a central point, from any hospital or store or warehouse directly to a home. We're going to take another short break, but only come back how drones could eventually deliver everything. Stay with us. You're listening to how I built this lab. Welcome back to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Roz. Here's more of my conversation with Keller Bernardo Clifton, co-founder and CEO of ZIPLINE.
All right, let's talk about how this would work in the United States because obviously it's a different regulatory environment. The FAA oversees airspace. And first of all, these planes would fly at fairly low altitudes, like below a thousand feet. Across all of our global operations, we always fly under 500 feet. That's basically the commercial aviation floor in most countries. And so it's a way of us just fully de-conflicting from commercial aviation.
Right. Okay, so they fly low. And what kind of hurdles do you have to get past before you can start to deploy these in the United States? Well, we launched in the US in 2021. And the pandemic was really the thing. I think they drove a lot of the urgency around that. We were seeing a lot of healthcare logistics systems struggle in the US during that time.
People weren't showing up to work or humans weren't allowed to show up to work. And so a lot of logistics systems that were depending on large numbers of humans weren't working the way we hoped they would. We launched with the VAT healthcare in Charlotte under emergency circumstances. But once we started flying in Charlotte, the FAA started looking through a lot of the data that Zipline had.
We had tens of millions of commercial autonomous miles with zero human safety incidents. And so I think that was really this moment where the US started to realize that this was a key area of economic and technology growth where we didn't want the country to fly. Fundamentally behind the rest of the world. And so we've worked closely with the FAA over the last four years.
The neat thing is, you know, today's Zipline operates three distribution centers in the US that's expanding dramatically this year and next year. So the good news is, you know, although the US has been a bit of a fast follower here, the US isn't falling far behind. And if you live in some of the cities that we serve today.
You know, homes are already receiving deliveries day in and day out via this autonomous delivery service. I think it reminds me sometimes when people talk about science fiction, they say, you know, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. I think that a lot of people who hear about this sort of thing say, oh, well, it must not be working because it isn't serving me in San Francisco or in Manhattan.
And the reality is, it's almost twofold. One is, well, it didn't start in the US. It started in, you know, rural parts of developing economies. And two, now that it's coming to the US, it's starting in places like Bentonville, not San Francisco.
Obviously, Amazon, you know, sort of famously Jeff Bezos went on 60 minutes a couple years ago to talk about this idea, this dream of delivering packages by drones, right? And he makes this point too, which is that huge percent 80, 85% of their deliveries are under five pounds, which is great for drone to be able to deliver by parachute to somebody's home. But that still hasn't happened.
It's been a tough nut to crack. Well, why do you think so? Why do you think that that's the case? I think like a lot of fundamentally new and disruptive technology. The idea is easy and the execution is hard. I think, you know, we always knew, I mean, Zipline, we were a much smaller team. We were not the best funded team. You know, these big companies had been investing billions of dollars in drone delivery trying to make it work.
And we never even necessarily thought of ourselves as the smartest team, but we were definitely by far the most practical. That was in our DNA. We were practical problem solvers. We were willing to go anywhere in the world where we could scale a service where we could get regulatory permission and where we could operate a service that would have a fundamentally positive impact in the world where it could save a lot of lives.
But I would point out, I mean, the first four years of operating at scale were incredibly painful. The technology was way harder than when we realized. I think a fundamental realization was that we were very obsessed with building a good vehicle, building a good drone. It turns out the drone is 15% of the complexity of the problem.
There is so much auxiliary software and systems that have to be built around it because none of our customers care about drones. All our customers care about is teleportation. They want something to go from point A to point B fast enough to save someone's life or create a really big economic opportunity.
And there's a lot of software and systems that have to be built in the background, whether that's communications architecture or data logging or air traffic control software or even just the software that we use to run our little mini fulfillment centers. Customer ordering interfaces, all of this had to be built out. And I think it's a little easy probably to look at the problem and discount how challenging it is to build essentially that whole new kind of logistics system from scratch.
And so that's what was really hard about the first four or five years of operation for Zipline. But luckily we weren't sitting in an ivory tower. We weren't just working, you know, doing research and development in a fancy lab trying to build the perfect version of the product. We assumed that the first version of the product we built wasn't going to be very good.
And that assumption was correct. And the team had to spend four years desperately iterating and working nights and weekends in order to improve the product over time. So hopefully that gives other small groups of nerds without a lot of money and a lot of resources. Some hope because the reality is if you think that these big ultra wealthy technology corporations are going to build the thing.
I mean, had we been worried about what they were doing, we never would have started Zipline. And so I really think it shows, you know, money is not the right limiting factor with these kinds of new technologies. I actually think that practical problem solving, you know, unfancyness and, you know, willingness to ship product quickly and learn from customers is actually the right limiting factor.
So telling about this new drone, I mean, it basically is a also an electric drone, but it has like a rover drone inside that then is sent off to complete the delivery. We sort of build on everything that we've perfected over the last seven years with regard to our enterprise service, which sometimes we call internally platform one. The next generation product, we knew that we needed to be able to deliver with dinner plate level accuracy and deliver silently to a home.
That's really what we think is required to unlock automated delivery for homes across the world. Dinner plate accuracy means it could land on a dinner plate. Yeah, it means like if you give us a dinner plate, we can deliver a package onto that dinner plate every single time. So that means that we can deliver to a front door step. It means we can deliver to a table on the side of your house. We can deliver to a driveway for apartment buildings.
We can either deliver to a little shared space right out the front door. We can even for apartments that have roof access. We can deliver onto the roof. But we know we need to be hyper precise and we think that their sound is incredibly important when it comes to these kinds of systems. I mean, anybody who's heard a drone knows it sounds incredibly annoying.
We think it's going to be important for this overall deliver experience to be essentially silent for you as well as for your neighbors when we're making a delivery. We've invested a huge amount of time, effort, money in designing new kinds of hardware that essentially enable that kind of a delivery experience that will be very magical for someone ordering something at home. So when I mean, I know you've partnered with Walmart, for example, let's just talk about Walmart for a moment.
I mean, tell me what that could mean in, I don't know, let's say 10 years from now. Walmart or Amazon or whatever.
A lot of those things are coming to us via trucks. And many of those trucks are electric. And many of them, and there are many companies as you know, some who we featured on the show, who are developing autonomous technology to essentially develop, you know, these autonomous electric delivery vehicles that will efficiently, you know, make their way through the streets of our cities and towns.
But in 10 years from now, is there a world where their Walmart distribution fulfillment centers that are just like sending your drones out to make deliveries like every 30 seconds? Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is again, even with that question, that's already happening in the US in certain towns.
You know, one of the, to even give a little more context to your question, one of the most interesting things we've found is that a lot of the earliest customers that we work with are already kind of going on this journey. So if you look at Rwanda, for example, we started by delivering just blood. Then we expanded to deliver essentially all medical products to every hospital in the health facility in the country.
And then the government immediately started saying, okay, what about our other national priorities? What about agriculture and agricultural productivity? Can you deliver animal health care products? Can you deliver artificial insemination for cattle?
It's like, okay, we'll do that. So you know, now ZipLine does deliver a lot of agricultural products. And it was like, can we do childhood malnutrition products? Now we do that. And it's like, okay, what about economic growth? Can we start delivering e-commerce products? Can we build a new national postal service on top of the system?
Now ZipLine's in the process of doing that. And so similarly in the US, you know, a lot of our early customers in the US were big health care systems like Intermountain or Multicare. But as we've grown, you know, folks like Walmart have looked at the technology and said, hey, this is going to be really, really strategic.
You know, having the ability to build a magical portal in the wall of any store where we can now just pass products through the magical portal and teleport them directly to a home in a way that is 10 times as fast, half the cost and zero emission compared to how instant delivery works today is pretty strategic.
And so we launched with them about a year and a half ago. And interestingly for the, you know, for the homes that ZipLine serves day in and day out, I mean, the service went from being like sci-fi to totally boring in about seven days.
So it turns out people really love teleportation. And once they have access to it, they use it a lot. And so I think that, you know, the question of how long is it going to take to expand from the, you know, thousands of homes that are served today to the hundreds of millions of homes that we ultimately need to serve.
I think that that process will probably take something like five years. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. Well, hopefully it'll come sooner rather than later because I look forward to just clicking a button and watching a drone. I drop my lunch or my salad or my burger off. Yeah, I might do a plate or, or, or you know, something that your kid, you know, if your kids sick in the middle of the night, you need something can be delivered in five minutes to your, you know, to your front doorstep.
And keep in mind, like we think we've seen this massive acceleration of instant delivery. It's clear that the demand is there, right during the pandemic. A lot of these instant delivery companies grew by an order of magnitude, but using three to four thousand pound gas combustion vehicles to deliver something that weighs five pounds is really bad for the planet.
So we think that we kind of convinced ourselves that we were innovating while in fact, we were using technology that's like a hundred years old, which is a human driving a car. Yeah. And the reality is, you know, new kinds of technology can solve these problems in ways that are good for the planet. 10 times as fast, less expensive and a way better customer experience to boot. Keller, thank you so much. Of course, thanks for having me.
That's Keller, Renato Clifton, co-founder and CEO of Zibline. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast apps so you never miss a new episode of the show and it's totally free.
This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arabliui. Our audio engineer was Josh Newell. Our production team and how I built this includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Malayn Coats, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson and Carrie Thompson. Eva Grant is our supervising editor, Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Roz and you've been listening to How I Built This. you
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