Zipline CEO Keller Cliffton on air-dropping blood to Rwandan hospitals and getting to 50,000 aircraft per year
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In how many countries today do you run your medical logistics network?
Eight.
Why is that not 80?
You sound like our board, John. You're really putting the pressure on. And then we walk out the back of the warehouse, and it's just a field of boxes as far as the eye can see. And I was like, what is this? And they're like, that's all the medicine that expired last year. What is Guinness?
Guinness is stout. Irish people would not call it beer. I don't know what the difference between stout and beer is. Keller Clifton is the cofounder and CEO of Zipline, the drone delivery company. They started out with medical deliveries in Rwanda, but they're now expanding in many countries, including The United States, and have completed more than a million autonomous flights. Cheers. Cool. Cheers. Okay. I'm very excited to talk about zipline. So you, previously, you were a professional rock climber. You studied, biochemistry and computer science in Harvard. You had a previous robotics startu
think like 110 or 120 now, yeah.
Okay, yeah. So is that the good potted Zipline summary? How would you add?
What would I add? I mean, you know, when we were starting to build Zipline in 2013, 2014, our backgrounds were in robotics and automation and software, and it really seemed to us like it should be possible to build an automated logistics system for Earth. Like, when it comes to robotics, you really want boring and repetitive. Like, that's ideal, you know, like constrained problems, boring and repetitive, and logistics is about as boring and repetitive as it gets, but, like, it's this underlying infrastructure that affects everything in the world. It affects how people get access to health care
Yes. And you've made the point that, like, what does a UPS truck weigh? Like, you know, 100,000 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. It's like we've we've taken for granted that we just have these, like, massive vehicles trundling around our suburban streets as the best answer for delivering things, and it's not obvious. It couldn't be improved from there.
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