text stringlengths 0 2.68k |
|---|
**Jerod Santo:** Today, we're joined by Keenan Wyrobek, founder and CTO of Zipline, a company I'm very, very interested in. Welcome to the show, Keenan. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** It's a pleasure to be here. |
**Jerod Santo:** Pleasure to have you. Autonomous flying machines, all kinds of deliveries happening... I saw Zipline and I thought, "You know what, this one makes sense." There's a lot of people trying to do delivery... Of course, you have autonomous cars upcoming, you have people that are doing tunneling, they're try... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. So we started almost 12 years ago now, and we started in a niche of a niche, of delivering blood to hospitals in Rwanda. That's where we started. |
**Jerod Santo:** Why there? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah... So really, Rwanda earned this for -- we knew we wanted to start in health. At the very beginning of this we started exploring this space based on really just stories from family and friends. My wife's an epidemiologist, and she would tell me these stories about health intervention campaigns ... |
And blood, of course... Why blood? It's just this rare commodity everywhere. There's never enough of it... It's actually very expensive. We think of it as free, because we donate it, but the cost of the collection, the testing, the transportation is very expensive. Hundreds of dollars a unit; even in places like Rwanda... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What was the tactical nature of that when you went to Rwanda? Was it discovery first, and then tech later? How did you come to a technical solution? How did you think about it before you built something? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. I mean, we had built nothing. I literally called a friend of mine who was good at drawing, and he drew pencil sketches, and made a slide deck of the concept... And we were using that to talk to people. In the early days, it was just talking to the operators in these health systems, that actual... |
**Jerod Santo:** Was there a point that you and your co-founders looked at each other -- you had saved countless lives with delivering blood around Africa, and thought "Burritos. Burritos are next." Or was that from the start? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** It was both there and not there. In a lot of the countries we operate around the world, we start with health systems. That's how we started in the United States. We started with health deliveries during COVID, and then expanded from there. |
In the islands of Southeastern Japan we deliver healthcare supplies and bento boxes. In a lot of places in Africa we operate we started in human health and then expanded into various agricultural use cases, things like genetic diversity for milk cows; huge impact, but super-obscure. We've just been layering on other us... |
\[07:55\] What's compelling -- when you think about Zipline, we talk a lot about the impact on health, which is really exciting. We started with the impact of blood. It's a super-visceral, high-impact, but very rare problem. Most of us don't need blood transfusions in our life, but when you need it, you really need it.... |
One of the things that's really magical about this, as we step into new things like auto parts delivery - you know, what limits the mechanic's ability to service cars is usually how fast they can get the parts. The way I think about it is basically for life, in the home or professionally, we're in the mission of gettin... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, even -- I live here in Texas, and we have a lot of wind farms, because here in Texas we have multiple ways... Probably like Nebraska, Jerod - you've got multiple ways you're getting electricity. I'm not so much a fan of them; they're big and crazy, but I hear people get upset with the bird iss... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, they kill lots of birds. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And maybe to the environmental aspect of it, that there's still so much of a cost to produce even wind energy that it's almost not worth it when you compare to how you talk about your efficiencies. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. I care a lot about birds, so I pay a lot of attention to it... We estimate that when we displace delivery by car, we reduce bird injuries by something like -- somewhere between 10x and 100x lower rate. We study that a lot. There's a lot of aspects to why we do what we do, and why we're excited... |
**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about the design of the drone itself, because we mentioned the tactical approach coming out of the need of delivering these things in Rwanda... When I saw your guys' design, I was very surprised by it. There's kind of a more typical quadcopter, larger quadcopter-looking thing; almost like an... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. That's sort of a double drone; a drone inside of a drone design. It came from just an obsession of figuring out what would actually work for our customers. Our first platform, that does long range delivery, has a lot of great attributes, but it requires about two parking spots worth of space t... |
\[12:14\] So really, those two things - helping us be really quiet, and be super-precise; we can get into a really tight space with that little drone that comes to the ground, while the big drone stays up high, that does the heavy lifting. It's literally there to carry the weight, the distance. And yeah, that's why we ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It reminds me of how you see things happen in space, when you see a little jettison engine pushing it, nudging it... I'm a sci-fi guy, so I see these films all the time, and I'm like -- |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's kind of like little slight adjustments, but you just have -- is it one single large propeller, or is it multiple on the, I guess... What do you call the mini drone? What is that name for that guy? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah, internally we call it the droid delivery zip. We don't have a great name for it. I like delivery zip, but... Anyway, this little thing that comes to the ground - yeah, it's actually got three little thrusters, very similar in concept to what you're saying. It's got one big thruster in the back... |
**Jerod Santo:** Because that thing can't spill your coffee. I mean, sure, it can flip a burrito, no problem, but if you're lowering a coffee down - it has to stay oriented very well. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Oh, absolutely. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** I assume - blood, they probably want that stuff spinning, or something, but there are certain fragile items that can't go... So on the software side then -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Certain fragile items..." \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Like coffee. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Coffee's fragile. |
**Jerod Santo:** It is. On the software side, are those two divergent operating systems then? Because it seems like they have perhaps different concerns, but they probably have a lot of overlap as well. How did you tackle the software side of these two different drones? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Oh yeah, they're very different control problems. Yeah, the drone that's up high - you're right, it has a wing, so to fly a fixed wing on the wing really efficiently it can hover in place for takeoff/landing, and while it's doing deliveries. Yeah, it's a long story, the controls approach, and really... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I also think about updating the software... I mean, you mentioned the test facilities, so I imagine you do a lot of iteration there; you're constantly deploying potentially over the air updates... I have no idea how you accomplish that mission, but... Divergent operating systems, and also a truly di... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** \[15:55\] Yeah, absolutely. When we think about software and software deployment, there's two worlds for us. One we call flight software, and then cloud software. Flight software is all the pieces, a few parts of the cloud, but mostly things on the actual aircraft that we consider flight-critical. T... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's cool. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Plus, of course, software in the loop simulation, where you're doing millions of flight tests. And yeah, that whole journey takes us about six weeks to get to the point where we're like "Yup, this new software release is good to go." Then we release it, and then we have an over the air update system... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How many of these problems are novel to you? I know that the defense systems that we have here in the US probably have these problems and maybe have solved a lot of this, but maybe you don't have access to the DOD's tech platform, or maybe lack thereof... How much of this is invented here and how mu... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Way more of this is done in-house than I would have ever thought we would have to do. Actually, when we started Zipline, I was like "Great, I'm going to go find somebody who has a drone, buy it from them, modify it a little bit for deliveries and start serving our first customer." And the best quote... |
Yeah, we do a lot in-house... And a lot of that's because we fly in conditions that no one else flies in. Stormy weather, near the ground, or over mountains, stuff like that - no one flies in that. So we've had to learn a lot of this stuff ourselves, and build our own datasets and experience and simulation approaches t... |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you know how many drones are in your fleet roughly, worldwide, to give us an idea of the scale you're currently at? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yes, it's a couple of hundred. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. And you've just started in the United States recently. 2021, I think, was the first non-medical flights... This is what I've been told by Ian behind the scenes. And now you are in Dallas, and rolling out -- I just saw a video from your CEO and co-founder, that there's a whole bunch of drones gett... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** I think it's close to 400 or so. It's about 300 outside of our first generation, and well over 100, but I don't think 200 yet, of our precision delivery, the drone-in-the-drone system. |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So how much of your software is orchestration? I assume that's the cloud side that you referenced, the control of the cloud. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** I guess maybe tell us more about the cloud side and what all that entails. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** \[19:48\] Oh, there's a lot to it. There's obviously the pieces for people to place their orders... Every partner we have, we have basically systems to integrate with our partner's data systems. Then we have our basically dispatch... I literally think of this as like there's cloud autonomy, or fleet... |
And some of it is stuff that -- other cloud stuff for us is weather forecasting. We do our own weather forecasting. We can talk about that, it's a really fun problem. Also, basically, we have to design our own highways. If you think about autonomous vehicles, you take for granted that if you want an autonomous vehicle ... |
**Jerod Santo:** And they generally fly at 300 meters, is that what you said? |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.