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**Adam Stacoviak:** Have you -- I imagine you probably have, but have you imagined a world where Zipline's at scale, and you don't have a couple hundred in production, you have, I don't know, half a million; I don't know, a lot. Just an astronomical number that you don't even consider today. How the world changes, mayb... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. I mean, I'm super-excited about it. This is part of the reason we spend so much time on things like making the system silent, is -- one of the things we know is I don't want to notice these things. Just like a bird flying over your house. How many birds flew over your house today? You have no ... |
\[01:05:49.24\] So there's certain things like that that we spent a lot of time on, to make sure that when this scales, it's a world we actually want to live in. And then, of course, the net effects of this kind of instant delivery... I live in a small town here in California, and - yeah there's, there's two bakeries..... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes, I was just thinking about that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Timely deliveries. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Exactly. And there's so many things on the personal life side like that, like getting fresh bread delivered, there's so many things on the work side... There's so many jobs that just require stuff. Obviously, doctors, medicines - it's so obvious. And auto mechanics - it's so obvious. Just yesterday,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you deliver it? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** No, we don't serve that area yet with HVAC parts. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, that would have been so cool. If you're like "Hey, I've got a solution for this. Hang on. There's no delay. I got the part." |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. Even just talking to him about his business. This is an independent guy, who does a lot of these kinds of HVAC repairs, and fixing heaters and stuff... And his customers, they hate it when he charges for these visits just to figure out what he needs. If he could just fix it there on the spot, ... |
I'll tell you one fun story from Dallas. This summer we were looking at our usage data, and most people would either order at one address, or order to maybe two addresses. But we saw this one person who was ordering to a different address almost every single day. Like, what is this? What's going on here? And so we send... |
**Jerod Santo:** What about gifting? It's a great way to gift. It's just like "Hey." Call somebody up, "Go outside." "Why?" "There's a delivery coming for you." And this thing just drops a gift out of the sky. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Oh, we did this. So we did a really fun thing for Easter this year, where we basically loaded up the little delivery zip with a bunch of Easter eggs; no packaging, just Easter eggs. And by the way, one cool thing about what we do is it doesn't require packaging. That's another part of the future I'm... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my gosh... Save me. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** And so we put a bunch of Easter eggs in there, and it was really interesting to see how many -- we had grandparents in other States, outside of Dallas (we were just delivering in Dallas) place orders for their grandkids to deliver this pile of Easter eggs into the yard. And the kids loved it, and th... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** And there's so many things like this, that I can't wait to try. |
**Jerod Santo:** There's so many places you can go with eight pounds, but at a certain point that becomes your limit; I don't think you guys are anywhere near that point. And we all know that. But at some point, have you thought "Okay, what's the next -- where's the zip line jumbo? What's the weight that we need to go ... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** \[01:09:49.14\] It's a great question. Eight pounds gets us really far, as you're alluding to. Something like 80% plus of Amazon packages are less than eight pounds. So many of the use cases that we are really focused on... A meal for a family of four, from almost any restaurant, is less than eight ... |
It'll be interesting to see how it evolves. If I was a betting person, I think we will increase our payload over time beyond eight pounds. There's a good chance it won't go a ton past that. Maybe 10, maybe 12 pounds... And really, what it comes down to is what doesn't fit. Once we get to that scale, we can deliver a ve... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I was thinking about the TV, honestly. I was like "Can you bring the TV to me?" I'm just kidding, I was not thinking that. That's cool. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. We've been looking at the car -- the partner will be launching within Dallas, and we can deliver something like 90% of their car parts... But obviously, 10% we can't do. And yeah, we think about that. Zipline has always just kind of been like customer-first. So once we get the data, once enoug... |
**Jerod Santo:** Is anybody else doing this? Like, who's the Southwest to your United? I know that Amazon announced the thing, like you said, years ago, about drone deliveries, and then that got canceled, or sidelined, or whatever; maybe it's happening, but... I hope there's other people that are tackling the same prob... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah, so Amazon has started doing some deliveries, quite limited as far as I understand. Google has a project called Wing. I admire a lot of how they're thinking about the problem, and we collaborate with them a lot on some of the projects with the FAA. I really like how they think about some of som... |
There's a fair bit out there... I'll be honest, I don't think a lot about the competition. For us, it's just about the customer, and just "What can we do? How can we do better every day?" and really measure ourselves on our own velocity towards delighting those customers. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. What's 2026 going to be about? Scale? Other things? What's it going to look like? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** It's a lot about scale. Our long range platform is scaling around the world, so that will continue in 2026... And yeah, this precision delivery platform is scaling... Yeah, it is scaling really fast. So a lot of what 2026 is about is building up the supply chain capability to manufacture faster, bui... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** How do you pick your next city, and why is it going to be Omaha? \[laughter\] |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** It's going to be Omaha, because the -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes...! |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Yeah..." I love that. \[laughter\] |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** \[01:13:50.14\] It's really about the testing and validation story. So I can't announce the next city, but we'll be launching our next cities in the first half of 2026. Part of how we choose those cities is they're very similar to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Similar in terms of weather, similar in t... |
Yeah, it's really fun. We have a test site up in the Cascades, where we're doing a lot of testing to validate the system for metros that aren't at all like Dallas and Fort Worth, but... Yeah, it'll be Sunbelt metros first, and then we'll keep going from there. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. You've solved a ton of technical problems to get here, and now you're trying to take it in lots of places. What are the big technical problems that are ahead of you? If you had a checklist as CTO, like "Here's the things we need to solve." What's unsolved for Zipline? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Almost every front, there's more work to do. I've been thinking a lot recently about weather forecasting... So we spend a lot of time to validate the system for certain weather. But then when you operate, you've got to know how -- like, how do you not go in that weather you can't go in? And that's h... |
Another good example is lightning conditions. We are currently chasing lightning with our mobile test rigs right now, to really understand how does lightning interact with the system. We think it won't based on analysis, but lightning is one of those things where you don't trust the analysis. You've got to go in the re... |
So there's a lot of work, both on the capability side, to expand the kind of weather we can fly in, and on the weather forecasting side. There's a lot of work there. There's a lot of work in the airspace side, of just "How do you manage this fleet at scale?" You were talking about going from one charging point to a del... |
**Jerod Santo:** Like a beehive. They're swarming. They're going somewhere else. Oh, no...! |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Exactly. So you've got to manage that carefully, to make sure you can keep delivering for people. So there's a lot of -- almost every front of what we do at Zipline, there's a reimagining happening for the scale, for new capabilities. We've talked about some of healthcare use cases... There's a lot ... |
**Jerod Santo:** I love it, man. I'm excited. I love that one of your teams is like a group of storm chasers, and they're just like "Our job is to find lightning in the world, and then go fly these drones up into it and see what happens." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "What do you do for work?" "That's what I do." |
**Jerod Santo:** Storm chaser for Zipline. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "That's my job." That'd be a rad job. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** It's a badass team. And they're hardcore too, because chasing storms when you have basically a big old trailer, we have these docks mounted to a trailer that they use... And obviously, with the storms, it's just hard to get around in these places... It's really cool, how they work and their dedicati... |
**Jerod Santo:** Is there a manual override on those things that you could just take over if you needed to, or no? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** \[01:17:50.26\] Yeah, but it's very high level. You basically have three buttons. A button to tell it to go back and dock, a button to tell it to loiter right where it is, like stay put, and a button to deploy that whole aircraft parachute and land where it is. That third button we've never pushed, ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I was actually just watching a video from Mark Rober, and it was a goalie. It was an AI goalie, essentially. And I forget the soccer player's name, because I'm not a soccer fan to that level where I know the person's name, but I imagine it's probably like Messi, somebody who's super-famous. And they... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. |
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