What Breaks When You Scale 10x? | Zipline’s Keller Cliffton

Today's episode comes from our recommended listening series, where we feature standout conversations from people across our broader network. This one comes from The Method, where Sofia Du visits Zipline's South San Francisco factory to sit down with co founder and CEO Keller Clifton. When Keller started Zipline, autonomous flight was illegal in US airspace. So the company launched in Rwanda, delivering blood to hospitals. Today, it has completed more than 3,000,000 deliveries and is expanding across The US. They discuss why every 10x in scale forces the company to reinvent itself, how Zipline structures teams to operate independently, and Keller's case for a future with 50,000,000,000 instant deliveries a year in The US. Teleportation sounds like science fiction, but in some parts of the world, something close to it is already happening. Zipline started in the most remote environments that are not typically thinking about robotics and AI. And you'd say, oh, you know how you used to have to drive hours and you could never get the product you needed and it was often out of stock? Now you just send a text message and an autonomous vehicle is gonna deliver it ten or fifteen minutes later. People are looking at you like you're totally crazy. And then, you know, usually that day we would have them place an order and receive an order. And one doctor told me it's seriously like a miracle. What is amazing to me is that by day seven, are 100 bored of it. People can adapt to anything, and it actually happens really fast. Once you experience this kind of a service, you're like, oh yeah, that's normal, and there's no way you're going back to the old way of doing things. I'm Sophia Du, and this is The Method. Ten years ago, a startup called Zipline started delivering blood to hospitals in Rwanda by drone. A decade later, Zipline has made more than 3,000,000 deliveries and is now valued at $21,500,000,000 Hello. Keller, great to see you again. Great to see you. Excited to have you. Its co founder and CEO, Keller Clifton, has called it the closest thing to teleportation ever created. I joined him in South San Francisco to understand what it takes to bring science fiction into the real world. Most people probably Zipline as the company that does the instant drone deliveries, but it didn't always start out that way. You guys started off in Rwanda. Can you take me back to that moment when you first launched and how did you decide to launch there? When we started the company in 2013, we thought that it was pretty obvious that someone was going to build a robotics company focused on logistics. We thought that it should be possible to build an automated logistics system that would serve all people equally. I would say we were extremely naive. I mean, the biggest problem was that it was illegal in The US at that time to operate autonomously …