KELLER CLIFFTON: Zipline builds the largest drone delivery system on earth. We can be accurate within about a centimeter. Most people don’t know that GPS can even get that accurate. Whether you’re administrative of health or whether you’re Walmart, everyone wants to have a better experience for customers or for patients.

Zipline has now flown about a 100 million commercial autonomous miles. To put that number into perspective, that is going from the earth to the moon and back 200 times, or that is the equivalent of driving every single road in the United States 24 times. So although people still, in the U.S., think drone delivery might be impossible, or “oh was promised to us by this big tech company and they didn’t deliver,” the reality is actually the technology is working, and it’s working at scale.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Keller Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline. I wanted to talk to Keller to better understand how autonomous drones are changing our world. Recently, news coverage of drones is focused on military uses, but as Keller explains, the impacts are far broader. Zipline started out using drones to transport blood for life-saving transfusions across Rwanda. The business then expanded into retail delivery and across eight countries. Zipline recently inked a deal with Walmart for deliveries in Texas, to go along with U.S. partners like Chipotle, Panera, and even Mayo Clinic. Both the company’s do-good health efforts and its commercial deliveries are all part of Keller’s vision for wholly different transportation network. As we look to understand the societal impacts of AI and autonomy, Zipline is a case study in what’s possible. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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SAFIAN: I am Bob Safian. I’m here with Keller Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline. Keller, thanks for joining us.

CLIFFTON: Thank you for having me.

Inside Zipline’s commercial expansion

SAFIAN: So I have to say, I’ve been watching Zipline’s evolution over the years with fascination. You first popped up on my radar for using drones to deliver medicines in hard-to-reach places in Africa, and then I saw a similarly named company doing drone delivery for restaurants and retailers that I thought like, is this the same place? And then of course it is. You recently announced an expanded partnership with Walmart to provide deliveries in Texas, in the Dallas area. How different is it to do business with a Walmart versus, say, a hospital in Rwanda?

CLIFFTON: When we started Zipline our backgrounds were in automation and robotics, and it seemed to us like it should be possible to build an automated logistics system for earth. We were seeing all of these logistics failures. I mean, first of all, logistics really only serves the golden billion people on earth. If you’re in the 7 billion people who aren’t in the golden billion, your access either sucks or is non-existent. And as a result of that, about five and a half million kids lose their lives every year due to lack of access to basic medical products.

So we felt that it really should be possible to use robotics and autonomy to solve logistics in an entirely new way that would both save lives, save time, save money. You’re right that we actually spent the first eight years of the company’s history operating exclusively in Africa. In 2016 when we launched commercially, we were 20 people. Nobody believed that this was going to work. Everybody thought it was a stupid idea. And investors assured us that there was no chance we were going to get regulatory approval to do what we wanted to do, which was to fly autonomously and quickly and deliver things over large distances.

It was obvious to us that we needed to find a use case that was so incredibly important that even a conservative regulator would sort of roll out the red carpet and work with us as a partnership to make it happen. And that first partner was the Ministry of Health in Rwanda, and that’s how it all started. We started delivering blood transfusions to 21 hospitals across the country of Rwanda.

SAFIAN: And now when you think about what the Zipline is, how much is social impact? How much is business impact, environmental impact?

CLIFFTON: Well, interestingly, those three things were core parts of our mission from day one. Saving lives was a big part of what we were doing for the first three, four years, but also saving government’s money was a big part of what we were doing, and always we had this underlying mission of transitioning logistics to a zero emission future. It was taking products that were traveling in cars or motorcycles or trucks to a future that was fully electric and far more efficient. Today we deliver 75% of the national blood supply of Rwanda fully autonomously outside the capital city. We’ve delivered about 22 million doses of vaccine in the last 18 months. And then expanded to all medical products. Then it expanded to animal healthcare products and animal vaccines. Then it expanded to quick commerce products and delivering things to hotels and homes. Now we’re building a new national postal service on top of it.

SAFIAN: People could have the impression that, okay, you started with this high stakes life-saving stuff and now you’ve added sort of convenience, whatever, getting your lunch delivered. But really it’s all about funding the socially-minded work. Is the retail business there to fund the socially-minded work? And if I hear you right, you always wanted to go broader and that this was a more systemic effort, that the social part of it was a way to get to that.

CLIFFTON: Well, I mean, we think that people deserve access to life-saving medical products. They also deserve access to economic opportunity. I mean, these things are important. If you’re trying to start a business and you live in a rural part of a country, if you don’t have access to logistics, you can’t start your business. If you’re trying to buy products for your family, you have a right to buy the best products or the cheapest products available rather than just what might happen to be available at the store right next to you.

So I think logistics plays a bigger role in our lives than we realize. Logistics should serve all people on earth equally, and that really is the promise of bringing autonomy and robotics to bear in logistics. Bringing down logistics costs dramatically, making delivery faster, but more universally available is that you can save lives, you can also save people money and time. I mean, they’re all important. It’s true that probably nothing will compare to delivering a blood transfusion to a mom with postpartum hemorrhaging, which is what we did for the first four years of the company’s history. But our customers have really led us here.

How Zipline can make healthcare more convenient & impactful in the U.S

SAFIAN: You work with hospitals here in the U.S., like Cleveland Clinic. Delivery infrastructure is much more built up here in the U.S. So what is it that you’re offering to someplace like Cleveland Clinic?

CLIFFTON: Yeah, it’s always interesting talking to Americans about this disparity because I think sometimes Americans we might think we’re a little further ahead than we are. The reality is a lot of the problems that Zipline focused on solving in Africa, we have a lot of those same problems in the U.S. We were really focused on maternal mortality, for example, in those countries. The U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality in rural areas of any developed country. We were really focused on rural health care, U.S. has rural access hospitals closing at a record rate. So I wouldn’t say the problems, I’m not saying they’re the same, but these problems are global problems. They’re not specific to any one country, and the U.S. has plenty of work to do on most of these fronts.

I would say the really big driver of this was COVID. You saw a gigantic rise in telepresence visits, for example. Everybody was talking to their doctor over their smartphone. And teleportation is just the other half of telepresence. The doctor can talk to you and then she can say, “Great, Bob, I actually think I know what you have. I’m going to have that prescription on your doorstep in five minutes.” You don’t have to get out of bed. You don’t have to inconvenience yourself by driving to a pharmacy. And keep in mind, 50% of all prescriptions in the U.S. go unfilled. So this is like making healthcare more convenient, will have a dramatic impact on just adherence for basic things.

So we work with partners like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, OhioHealth, Michigan Medicine, Intermountain, many, many other hospital systems across the U.S. to automate their healthcare supply chains so that they can deliver things quickly and efficiently in zero emission ways directly to patient homes. Most of these health systems spend tens of millions of dollars each on, we call it, hot shot delivery or courier delivery, and they’re typically moving something that weighs less than two pounds with a car that weighs 4,000 pounds. It’s super expensive for these health systems. It’s super bad for the environment. A lot of times it’s actually quite impractical or inconvenient for patients. And so we just think there’s a way better way of doing this.

And we show up and install onto the wall of any building, any hospital or primary care facility once installed, we’re enabling super fast, you could call it instant delivery, sometimes we describe it as teleportation. Any team member now for Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic or any of the other hospital systems we work with can put something in a box, walk to the portal in the wall, pass it through. It’s automatically delivered directly to the home that it needs to go to.

SAFIAN: Is this any different in the commercial sphere like with a Walmart or a Panera store? It’s the same except they’re delivering food or commerce products as opposed to medical care.

CLIFFTON: Same product, same regulatory paradigm, same operations and maintenance, same software. Yeah, it’s really, Zipline builds one product, and that’s just automated logistics. And turns out that if you can design a way of delivering things directly to people’s homes that is 10 times as fast and half the cost and zero emission, it has a lot of important use cases. The demand for instant delivery has increased dramatically. I mean, it’s now become an expectation for consumers, not just in the U.S. but internationally as well. We’re using technology that’s 100 years old to serve that demand. And so we actually think it’s not surprising that the way that we’re solving the problem today is really inefficient and bad for the environment and expensive. With a new market, you want to build new technology that can serve that market.

The technology behind Zipline’s drone system

SAFIAN: And your drones are autonomous, so there’s no one remotely manipulating a joystick to move them around and guide them. How are they getting from, whatever, from the Panera to me and my home?

CLIFFTON: So Zipline builds the largest drone delivery system on earth. We are a robotics company that designs every part of the system, whether it is the drone or the aircraft, it’s about 60 pounds, 8 foot wingspan. We deliver 8 pound payloads. These vehicles can fly anywhere from 25 miles to 150 miles depending on what version of the system we’re talking about. Zipline builds all the software, all the regulatory software, the customer ordering app that consumers can use. We design the flight control algorithms, multi-vehicle deconfliction, communications architecture. The reality is it just took a long time to build all these different parts of the stack to make the technology available, reliable, capable of operating in all kinds of weather.

Zipline has now flown about 100 million commercial autonomous miles. That means that we’re the largest commercial autonomous system on earth. To put that number into perspective, that is going from the earth to the moon and back 200 times, or that is the equivalent of driving every single road in the United States 24 times. So although people still in the U.S. think drone delivery might be impossible, or “oh was promised to us by this big tech company and they didn’t deliver,” the reality is actually the technology is working and it’s working at scale.

Lessons in transitioning from healthcare to retail deliveries

SAFIAN: You work with hospitals in Rwanda and then you, I don’t want to say transition, but you add on by working with Panera, Walmart, Chipotle, others. For other leaders, other business leaders, who are listening to this, do you have lessons about how you think about and manage that transition? You think of it as one business where you’re applying the same thing, but there have to be things about it that feel different that you had to approach in a different kind of way.

CLIFFTON: I think that the disparity may be a lot less than it appears from the outside. Because, again, all of these companies, all of these partners, first of all, the commercial needs of these partners are the same. Everybody wants to save money. Everybody wants to do something more efficiently. Whether you’re a ministry of health or whether you’re Walmart, everyone wants to save money. Everybody wants to do something faster. Everyone wants to have a better experience for customers or for patients.

The reality is when we started building Zipline we wanted to build an automated logistic system for earth, and we wanted to build the first logistic system that would serve all people equally. That’s a pretty crazy broad vision. Had I gone and said, “We’re going to do that on day one,” I’m sure the company would’ve failed. Had Zipline tried to go and do everything we’re doing today on day one we for sure would’ve failed.

So I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this idea of finding your beachhead. You got to go find the customer who is, I guess, crossing the chasm, that concept, and you have your visionaries. That’s like this tiny group of people who are willing to take a near irresponsible level of risk with you as a company in the early days because their problem is so critical. They have a problem that is so critical that they want solved so badly that they’ll work with a team that doesn’t know what they’re doing, AKA us, when we were getting started or any start-up to solve it, and they’ll actually partner with you to figure out the problem together. And so I think that Zipline had that big vision of automated logistic system, but we were very lucky.

And the last important point on this is that we weren’t smart enough to identify that beachhead. Our customers, our partners identified that beachhead for us. When I walked into the Ministry of Health in Rwanda, which was our first customer, I was talking about, oh, delivering all medical products to every primary care facility in the hospital in the country, and the Minister Binagwaho, she looked at me and was like, “Keller, shut up. Just do blood.” And she explained to me why 50% of blood transfusions were going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging. 30% were going to our kids under the age of five. It’s a total logistics nightmare because you have packed red blood cells, platelets, plasma, cryoprecipitates, different blood types, which is really hard to get the right thing to the right place at the right time.

So we said, “Great, let’s focus on that.” And so we started in this ultra narrow specific thing. Can we just deliver blood transfusions to 22 hospitals? And guess what, for the first year, we totally failed at that because the system wasn’t reliable enough. We were pulling all miters and working through weekends to just try to figure out how to frankly serve one hospital. For months we were trying to get it to just work correctly for one hospital. So I was extremely lucky that we listened. They helped us identify what that beachhead was, what the area of maximum need and willingness to pay was, and we listened to customers on that front. We focused on that. And I think ultimately, even once we were then doing that really well, they were the ones who then guided. They were like, “Great, now let’s do all healthcare products. Great, now let’s add 2,000 health posts. Great, now let’s add quick commerce products and start delivering all these different products for different businesses throughout the country. Now let’s focus on national postal service.”

I think we always just stayed humble and very open-minded, we knew what the big vision was. But how you get there, how you navigate the maze to the big vision is pretty tricky. And I think it’s a good idea to listen very carefully to what customers are telling you.

SAFIAN: I want to double click on what Keller’s saying about starting any venture with a focus goal. Before you can bring a big mission to life, you have to start by practically getting something specific done. So what happens when you’re practically using drones to deliver both blood and burritos? But everyone’s talking about drones that deliver bombs. We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Zipline’s Keller Cliffton talked about the company’s drone service expanding from delivering blood in Rwanda to dropping off groceries and lunch orders in the U.S. Now Keller explains how military drone use distorts the wider potential of the technology, plus what it realistically looks like to get your lunch delivered by Zipline. Let’s get back to it.

The logistics of delivering both lunch and medical products

So take me through, I order something from Panera. What is the experience like for someone working in the Panera fulfilling that order, and then what is my experience like receiving that order compared to the traditional way it would’ve happened?

CLIFFTON: Technically, it’s pretty simple. Any team member at that Panera can walk something to… There are a number of different ways that we integrate. We typically just integrate with a portal, so you can think of it as a simple hole in the wall. They’re just walking up, they’re loading something into the portal. And as soon as it’s loaded into the portal, that product is then retracted into the aircraft, and then we fly directly to the home that we need to deliver to. When we arrive at that home, the main aircraft stays 100 meters in the air, so 300 feet up. Our goal is to design a very serene experience when we’re delivering. People always think, “Oh, this is going to be loud, it’s going to be annoying.” The number one thing we hear from customers is like, “Wow, we didn’t hear it at all.” In fact, sometimes customers miss the delivery, and they’re annoyed by that because they really wanted to see how it works.

But we lower something that we call a delivery Zip. It’s a really cute looking little robot that can control its position horizontally as it’s being lowered, even in very strong wind, and that is lowered 300 feet down, and we can deliver with dinner plate level precision in any weather to either your backyard, front doorstep, driveway, side table. It’s highly, highly reliable, highly consistent, and it’s fully automated.

So once the vehicle is delivered, we retract the delivery Zip back into the main aircraft, fly back to the business, and then start the cycle all over again. And each vehicle can do about two deliveries an hour.

Why Zipline’s value lies beyond the physical drones

SAFIAN: And Zipline is a service. So it’s not that the specific business owns that drone, right? I mean, that drone could go to a different business if you had a Zipline service there and a different drone would go to the one you left from?

CLIFFTON: I think it’s a good question, and there are two really important intuitions I think mainly people don’t necessarily get when they look at Zipline. The first is that none of our customers would want to buy drones. None of our customers care at all about drones. That’s really important. Whether it’s Walmart or Sweetgreen or Panera or Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, none of these customers are going out there thinking we want to buy some drones and deal with all the complexity of autonomous aircraft. What they want is teleportation. They want something to go from point A to point B fast enough to save someone’s life or create an important economic opportunity for the business and save money or save time for customers.

All of the technology that Zipline is having to build we’re generally sort of keeping behind a curtain so that our partners, those that I just mentioned, can really just think of Zipline the same way they would think about UPS or FedEx. It’s just an automated version of that. And the second then counterintuitive thing, which is that the drone, the aircraft is about 15% of the complexity of the solution to really make this kind of a system or network work at scale in a way that customers can really depend on.

I think the right way to think about this from an intuitive perspective is to say, imagine I came to you, Bob, and I was like wanting you to invest in my company. I’m like, “Hey, Bob, I have this great idea. I want to compete against UPS, so I bought a brown truck, and I’m going to start tomorrow, and now I’m ready to crush them.” It’s kind of obvious that the value of UPS isn’t necessarily the brown truck. There’s a lot of complexity in these logistics networks when it comes to planning and software and infrastructure and backend systems and network effects and all of those things, Zipline has had to build similar versions just for an automated system rather than a manned system.

The original “dumb, naive idea” that led to Zipline

SAFIAN: The focus on drones as the, whatever, as the casing, as the brown truck, as the vehicle was, some of that because they were available? What about that sort of appeal to you as like, “Oh, this is where we’re going to focus this on?”

CLIFFTON: I had the chance in 2012, there’s this company, Kiva Robotics, they were acquired by Amazon — I think it was acquired in maybe 2008 or 2009 — and I got to go and see some of their systems, and they built these orange robots that would actually move around inside warehouses, and they would go to a shelf, and they’d pick up the whole shelf, and then they’d bring it across the warehouse to a human picker, and the human could then pick the item and put it in a box and ship it. I remember just seeing this big warehouse that had been automated, and you see these orange hockey puck robots going back and forth. I was just thinking, man, someone’s going to build that for outside the warehouse. If they could do it inside the warehouse, they could do it outside the warehouse. I remember thinking, someone’s going to do that for outside the warehouse, and that’s going to be one of the biggest companies on earth, that’s going to be totally groundbreaking.

And it’s funny that that thought, obviously very naive and simple in its formulation. We have a flag upstairs near my desk that I saw online, we ended up buying it. It says, “We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought that it would be easy.” And this is the perfect definition probably of all start-ups. You need to be naive and slightly stupid to be dumb enough to believe that this is going to be possible.

So anyway, that was the dumb naive idea originally. And I think as we started to understand logistics, the main, I think, realization, the main insight, was that all logistics is heading toward instant delivery. Again, 5.5 billion instant deliveries done in the U.S. every year, and that number is growing super fast. We knew that if you want to deliver these lighter packages fast, you probably want a vehicle that weighs about 50 pounds and is electric and autonomous. And once you’ve realized that, then I think the path is much more obvious. I mean, then you could say like, “Well, but could we design a 50-pound ground-based vehicle?” I mean, you could, but autonomy is way harder on the ground than it is in the air. You also have to deal with traffic. And frankly, you’re taking space away from humans, which we think is a bad strategy. We think that future versions of logistics technology should actually be giving space back to humans. We should be reducing traffic in your neighborhood. We should be reducing pollution. We should be giving the sidewalks back to you.

So this is what really led us to thinking that this whole layer of logistics is going to move into the sky, and it’s going to happen in a way that is zero emission and quiet and less expensive and 10 times as fast.

SAFIAN: I ask you in part about the drones because I feel like in the last couple of years, it’s like the military’s use of drones, it’s almost like, “Oh, suddenly we stumbled on this thing,” and “Oh, it’s much better than what we were doing before.” And I just didn’t know whether some version of that was part of what got you guys in that space.

CLIFFTON: I think that both the innovation that you see on the military side and the innovation you see on the commercial side, it’s blossoming from just the general advancement of technology. There have been improvements in IMUs, improvements in GPS. It means that we can be accurate to within about a centimeter. Most people don’t know that GPS can even get that accurate. It was military technology that was confidential for several decades and then was commercialized, I think, in 2015, just a year before we launched commercially. So there are a lot of these enabling discoveries or innovations that then create obviously sort of a revolution in how warfare works, and we see that playing out in places like Ukraine, but also a revolution in how global logistics works.

Overcoming the stigma surrounding drone technology

SAFIAN: Does the coverage of military drones, that cultural relevance and acceptance, does that make it any easier for you to make deals with retailers and brands? Does it give more credibility to the space?

CLIFFTON: I think it makes it much harder, actually. I mean, the U.S. has been using drones to kill people for many decades now. I mean, even all the way back to 2000, you see the rise of Predator drones and Global Hawk and these kinds of vehicles. So it’s not like that general area of technology had a great brand or something. You know what I mean?

I think what’s unfortunate is most technology is agnostic. It can be used for different kinds of use cases, and Zipline has really focused on showing that technology, yeah, it can be a weapon, it can also be a way of saving lives.

SAFIAN: And it’s kind of the other way around that there’s wariness about drones as a technology maybe that they have a sort of dystopian vibe, these machines buzzing and filling the skies and that you’re trying to change that.

CLIFFTON: This is a bit of a debate. Internally, I mean, we don’t even call these vehicles drones. I mean, when people think of drones, they think of a plastic quadcopter that sounds super annoying, and it has to be controlled by a human, as you were asking about earlier. So I think it’s just tricky because that word has all kinds of connotations that actually don’t really apply. So what we really need people to do is just experience this new kind of technology for themselves without preconceived notions, and that is what’s been happening. For example, we just launched a service in Dallas, and I was visiting a 75-year-old woman who has ordered 300 times from Zipline, and she was emphasizing she grocery shops once a week, and then she orders from Zipline three to four times a week, and it saves her three to five hours every single week. She was saying, “Look, when the weather is bad, I don’t want to risk going out and breaking my hip.”

So I think these families, whether it’s moms who don’t want to leave a kid at home or don’t want to have to buckle the kid and drive all the way to the store to get something, the service becomes hugely valuable in terms of not just getting access to your prescriptions when you need them, but also just access to whatever you might need in a way that saves time, that you can spend time on family or the people you love or work. I mean, there are more important things for you to do with your time.

How people react to seeing Zipline drones

SAFIAN: How much do you go out on-site as you’re telling the story to assess how deliveries are doing? Are you making trips this year to be able to do that?

CLIFFTON: I mean, that is the biggest part of my job. We’ve always just felt like, look, Zipline, we’re not the fanciest company. We were extremely scrappy. And we never assumed that we were the smartest, we had everything figured out. But we always knew that we would be willing to do things that other teams wouldn’t be willing to do. We’d be willing to go parts of the world. We’d be willing to pull all-nighters. We’d be willing to work on the weekends. And we would solve these really scrappy, hard problems. You just learn so much seeing these deliveries happening.

I have to say the biggest thing that you see, which is so interesting, even going all the way back to 2017, 2018 when we were really starting to expand aggressively in Africa, we would go visit these new hospitals and say, “Oh yeah, we’re just adding you to the network now. So now instead of you needing to drive three hours and then wait in line at the regional blood transfusion facility to get the blood that you need and then drive it back and then transfuse it to a patient, now you just press a button on a phone. It’ll be delivered 15 minutes later to you by an autonomous aircraft.” You can understand the credulity that you might face when you’re describing this to someone who’s living in, say, rural Ghana or rural Nigeria.

And so we’d always do the first delivery and people act like, I mean, one person said, “Jesus Christ himself is delivering blood from the sky.” And then what’s amazing. You have about seven days of science fiction amazement. And then on day eight, people are completely bored of it, and they totally don’t care.

SAFIAN: They just take it for granted.

CLIFFTON: Totally for granted. I had one technician, I was sitting there, walk out. She was just scrolling on her phone the whole time as the delivery was happening, and she looked at her watch and said, “It’s 30 seconds late.” So it’s amazing how fast people’s expectations — I think this concept is called hedonic adaptation. Humans will immediately just adapt to the new normal very quickly, and then it’s annoying to them if something is slightly off.

So basically, we have this joke internally that humans go from science fiction amazement to entitlement in approximately seven days. And after seven days, technology just seems totally normal, it’s completely integrated in people’s lives, and they can’t imagine a world where they would live without it.

Why manufacturing needs to become a “core” focus for the U.S

SAFIAN: Well, so I have to ask you, with all the logistics that you’re part of, the logistics world right now it’s very hard for people to get comfortable with all the trade and tariff disruptions. Is that good for your business? Is it bad for your business?

CLIFFTON: I think tariffs are just emblematic of a really bigger and broader idea, which is that what happened in the U.S. over the last 20 or 30 years, I think we are suddenly waking up in a new kind of world with different kinds of geopolitical threats. I mean, obviously the pandemic was a really good example of this. We woke up and realized, whoa, we can’t manufacture a lot of the core healthcare infrastructure products that we require to meet the demands of this pandemic. Or you hear about the difference in shipbuilding capacity between China and the U.S., it’s like in a thousand-fold difference. I mean, so I think what we’re realizing is that we need to reignite a manufacturing base in the U.S. if we want to build the future of American dynamism and industrial might. I mean, these things are important.

Zipline, it doesn’t even have as much to do with tariffs. It’s actually more about the velocity of innovation and engineering improvements that we need, manufacturing and engineering and flight operations all closely situated. So I’m actually sitting on the original manufacturing line for Platform 1, that’s where I’m standing right now. Our new manufacturing facility is just a third of a mile away also here in south San Francisco, and we’ll build 55,000 aircraft a year at scale from that facility.

I think there are a lot of companies, whether it’s SpaceX or Anduril, Zipline, Tesla, and then there are a lot of other companies coming along behind us that are having this realization that these companies need to be close to manufacturing. You can’t just send the hard part of manufacturing to another country and expect them to figure it out for you. We need to figure it out for ourselves. And I think integrating manufacturing and engineering is a core part of building super innovative hardware companies that can solve these huge problems that we want to solve over the next couple of decades.

SAFIAN: And for you in 2025, with all the disruption or uncertainty, are your plans any different? Are there things you’re having to rapidly respond to right now?

CLIFFTON: Yeah, there are. I mean, Zipline, despite the fact that we do all manufacturing here in the U.S., we still have a complicated global supply chain. Zipline is building every component of this aircraft from scratch. There are 700-plus unique components in the aircraft, almost all of which are designed by Zipline. Obviously, the back and forth with tariffs creates uncertainty. In an ideal world, we end up in a world with more free trade rather than less. I think, honestly, it seems like everybody is aligned on this idea that what we actually want is reciprocal free trade.

I think the reality is for a company like Zipline, there’s never a world where supply chain isn’t a challenge. It was a challenge before 2025. It’ll be a challenge after 2025. Maybe it’s a little bit more exciting and uncertain this year, but supply chain is always hard for hardware companies. There’s always a factories burning down somewhere random in the world, and our quality isn’t good enough here, we need to move that part to another partner. Supply chain is always hard. And so, I think that really the key is that you just have to be nimble and you also have to be able to in-source where necessary, and you have to have the manufacturing, engineering, and supplier, industrialization, engineering expertise to know how to move these things around and get things built in a world that is always evolving.

I mean, 2025, yeah, more uncertain than 2024. But again, supply chains are always changing and evolving, and you have to know how to respond quickly.

SAFIAN: Keller, this has been great. Thanks so much for doing it. I really appreciate it.

CLIFFTON: It’s an honor. Bob, thank you for having me.

SAFIAN: I love Keller’s comment that people start a business, not because it’s easy, but because they think it will be easy. You might say the same thing about changing global trade patterns or manufacturing patterns, or, yes, transportation patterns. For all the disruption we’ve seen in 2025, there’s no clarity on what will stick and what won’t. It’s a reminder for all of us to stay patient and focus on what you can tangibly do today that will lead towards steady incremental impact tomorrow. That’s certainly what Zipline’s done. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.