Keller Rinaudo Clifton thinks we’re already experiencing the technology of tomorrow, just that it’s not evenly distributed...

About a decade ago, Keller transformed his smartphone robot company into Zipline, which today orchestrates on-demand drone deliveries all over the world. Zipline got its start delivering critical medical supplies to hospitals in Rwanda: a testament to Keller’s belief that innovation is already improving lives outside the U.S.

This week on How I Built This Lab, Keller recounts the ongoing and often challenging development of Zipline’s delivery drones. Plus, how Zipline is now chasing the commercial market, and could soon be delivering packages from stores like Walmart within an hour of a customer clicking “purchase.” 




This episode was produced by Carla Esteves and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Josh Newell. 

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So most people who live in cities have relatively easy access to emergency medicine, and most hospitals in cities can get the supplies they need quickly.

But in rural areas with fewer roads or with challenging terrain, it's a different story.

In some parts of the world it can take an entire day to get medicine or blood plasma to a distant medical facility.

So a few years ago an entrepreneur named Keller Renato Clifton decided to take on this challenge.

Drones that are delivering critical supplies to hospitals in remote areas around the world.

But before Keller launched Zipline, he started another business called Remotiv, a robotics business that would eventually pivot into drones.

The company basically built an application on an iPhone that turned it into a mini robot.

The more we saw a smartphone scaling, the more we felt like, hey, a lot of the components and supply chains behind these phones are gonna enable a new kind of robotics company to be built.

And so we were asking ourselves, what would the Apple of robotics look like?

Is there an opportunity here to build really the first global robotics company?

You know, my co-founders and I, we were all unemployed, which is a, you know, great motivation for entrepreneurship.

And we started building these little, we called them smartphone robots and they literally used an iPhone as the brain of the robot.

You would connect an iPhone to the robot and it could run around on the floor and do telepresence.

And That was the first thing that we started selling as a company.

And just to describe them for people who don't know what they look like, there's sort of like a translucent plastic platform with like a motorized track wheel on each side.

But you would mount the iPhone vertically on it like you would do on 1 of those speakers that you find in hotel rooms.

And that would essentially would turn into like a little robot with a smiley face.

We didn't have product market fit figured out, I wouldn't say.

It was half a toy, half a telepresence solution, half a way of teaching kids to program.

I think we were circling around this intuition that it was a good time to be building a robotics company that knew things were possible.

Also, we needed something that we could sell in a month or 2 because, again, we had no credibility.

We needed to be able to build and sell a very simple product very fast if we wanted to keep the company alive.

That was the very first thing that we ever built.

Aaron Powell So the idea was to build this into something, of course, bigger.

I guess you got in touch with the late Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, who was on our show many years ago, an incredible person, incredible entrepreneur, but you had read his book and you got in touch with him.

You know, when I graduated from college, I didn't know what I wanted to

And frankly, school didn't do much to teach you about entrepreneurship.

It was never clear to me that that was actually an option, like something that you can do.

And when I read Delivering Happiness, Tony's book about building Zappos, it totally blew my mind.

It was also inspiring because Tony had gone to the same school and in fact had lived in the same dorm that I lived in.

And so when I was in Las Vegas, I emailed him and said, hey, I'm here.

I am deeply inspired by your book and we're building this robotics company and I wanna meet.

And I think this is 1 of the things that's special about Tony and maybe also just special about certain circles of technology entrepreneurs, which is someone like Tony was happy to meet me, even though I was a nobody.

He was so impressed with these robot iPhones or these iPhones mounted on these robotic platforms, like instantly when you showed it to him.

I don't know if anybody could have been that impressed by what we were building.

It wasn't very impressive on its face, I don't think.

Perhaps, I think maybe he believed more in us.

So I think maybe he was interested in the bigger vision of trying to build a new kind of robotics company and he was willing to take a bet on 3 nerds who had no credibility and no money.

Aaron Powell, MPH, He made it an investment and you guys, as you say, you set up shop in Las Vegas.

And the project lasted, I think, a little over about 3 years.

Did you come to a realization that maybe this wasn't going to work?

Will Sinclair That exact same company is what became Zipline.

So we actually, we didn't necessarily wind it down.

We did kind of, over the course of a year, we realized that building a new kind of robotics company meant that we had to focus on a really big, bold vision.

And I also kind of realized we did not want to focus on operating in the home.

We wanted to focus on a more controlled environment and something where automation would just be a more natural fit.

And that's sort of the reason we became obsessed with logistics.

But the crazy thing is that that same company that Tony invested in 12 years later has now become Zipline.

So initially, it started out as like, let's use the iPhone to be the brains of a little toy robot.

But what you mean, you sort of came to this, this realization that maybe you need to focus on something like as you say, like logistics, something that that could have a larger impact and where there could be a bigger market.

When you were thinking of logistics, were you initially thinking maybe we can create robots that can deliver things or that can work in a warehouse or something like that?

You know, 1 is that I met a guy named Mick who had founded a company called Kiva.

And probably most people won't know what Kiva Robotics, but they had just been acquired by Amazon and they built these amazing orange robots that could run around inside a warehouse and basically go to a shelf, pick up the shelf, and then bring it to a human packer to pack something into a box.

And if you saw 1 of those warehouses, you would see all of these autonomous orange robots just running all over the place, moving things.

And I remember seeing that thinking, wow, what an incredible company.

And somebody is gonna build that for outside the warehouse.

And whoever builds that, I just remember thinking, that is gonna be a world-changing company.

All right, so it's round 2014, and you're kind of trying to figure out what can I do in this area of logistics?

You know that you sort of have some experience with robotics.

I mean, our backgrounds when we started building Zipline were already in automation, robotics, and autonomy.

We had this sense that it was probably gonna be possible to build an automated instant logistic system for the planet.

But there were so many things standing in our way.

And to be honest, every expert that we spoke to told us that this idea was stupid.

So what was the idea that you would talk to people about?

We had this sense that if you wanted to deliver something very quickly over a distance of anywhere from, say, 10 to 50 miles, you wanted to do that with a vehicle that was 10 times as fast as traditional logistics, half the cost, and 0 emission.

And so we had a sense, just reasoning from first principles, that what you really needed was a vehicle that was electric, that was autonomous, that weighed more like 50 pounds rather than 4, 000 pounds.

And if we wanted to go really fast, we knew we probably needed to fly rather than drive.

Wow, so you're thinking like a Jetson's world.

I had grown up reading all of this great, kind of hopeful, optimistic science fiction.

The funny thing is, you know, this is totally normal in most science fiction books.

And so I think I had this sense that if technology had advanced to a point where we thought it was possible to build this product, we were pretty confident that it was something that people would want.

So you guys start to do the research into the world of logistics.

And presumably, you spent quite a lot of time just digging into this world for a while to figure out where you could kind of get in, where you could sort of start to work on something.

When we started building this, our backgrounds were not in healthcare.

And we didn't even know that much about logistics.

So a lot of investors who were looking at us, or even experts were saying, what do you guys know about this space?

You don't know what you're talking about.

The reality is I think the 1 thing that I had experienced is that graduating from school, I had been rock climbing full time for 9 months and got a chance to travel to a lot of different countries in the world.

I had seen – I at least had this sense that logistics, the kind of logistics that we take for granted in the United States is not broadly available globally.

And I think that that was a kind of important insight.

It was that logistics does a good job of serving the golden billion people on Earth.

But for the 7 billion people who don't fall into that category, your access either sucks or is non-existent.

And we've been pretending for 100 years like this problem is somehow excusable or unavoidable.

And we felt like it was not either of those things.

But how did you come across that information?

I mean, obviously, it's available to know, but where did you first hear about this issue?

Will Sinclair I was spending some time in 2013, we were already starting to think, okay, if we're going to build a new kind of logistics system, we're going to need to find a public healthcare system we can integrate with.

So that already meant we needed to be looking outside the US.

We were focused on countries where we thought this sort of technology would have a really outsized impact in terms of healthcare access.

I actually met a researcher in Tanzania who had built this really cool early warning alert system using cell phones, unsurprisingly.

And so he had several hundred primary care facilities and hospitals using the system.

And they would text into a database when they had a patient who was having a medical emergency and needed something specific in order to save their lives.

And so he had this real-time database of all of the medical emergencies that were occurring across these

And I remember seeing that database and realizing that it was basically a database of death because half of the system had been built, but they were receiving all of these emergency requests.

And it was like, OK, thanks for letting us know.

And there was no other half of the system that could deliver what was needed quickly.

So these network solutions had advanced to the point where we have the information we need.

We know that there is a medical emergency occurring and we know exactly the product that is needed to save that person's life, but logistics has not advanced enough to actually solve the problem.

We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, how Keller shifted from rolling iPhones to flying couriers.

Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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My guest today is Keller Renato Clifton, the co-founder and CEO of Zipline.

It's a company that uses drones to deliver medical supplies and other consumer goods on demand.

All right, so before the break, you had talked about how, you know, because of the infrastructure challenges, getting medical supplies to rural hospitals in Tanzania is obviously a huge challenge.

And It's interesting because it's a similar story in Africa with cell phones, right?

Like a lot of people didn't have access to telephones because there weren't telephone lines installed all over the country.

And then all of a sudden cell phones come and they essentially solve that problem.

And so sort of a similar idea, right, which is the infrastructure of roads aren't there, but you knew that if you could somehow fly, you could basically bypass that problem.

And that kind of infrastructure is often referred to as leapfrogging infrastructure.

The first people who said that they were gonna build cell phone networks in Africa were widely called idiots.

People thought that was totally unrealistic because landlines hadn't really succeeded in taking off in Africa.

And obviously now a lot of the countries we operate in have better cell service than the United States does.

You've seen this incredible leapfrogging technology where you sort of get the technology, the use case right, and it can actually grow in these developing economies faster than anybody really appreciated.

Let's now sort of break down how you did this, because you land on this idea, and there are a lot of things you've got to do.

You've got to find a country with a regulatory environment that is willing to work with you to allow you to fly these drones and deliver medication.

The other thing, you've got to build the planes, you've got to build the infrastructure, the hardware to create these safe, autonomous planes that can, I guess, drop a parachute of medical supplies?

How did you start to develop the technology?

I mean, drone technology was around, has been around for a while.

So did you start with off-the-shelf equipment?

When we initially had this idea, we started talking to a lot of different customers to try to figure out what exactly did this need to do?

Like what was the actual problem we were defining and what needed to be the specifications of the thing that we were gonna go build?

We started to understand that if you could deliver something really quickly over a range of, say, 80 to 100 kilometers, so 50 plus miles.

We would be able to serve hundreds of hospitals and health facilities from a single distribution center.

You could keep more medicine centralized.

You could send things just when it was needed, it would save a lot of lives.

And so we started building the first product in

By 2015, we were flying nonstop at our test facility, which was in Half Moon Bay.

I started spending a lot of time talking to governments, trying to find someone who would be our first customer, and that was when we ended up having this conversation with the government of Rwanda.

I actually remember in that conversation, we were saying, hey, we have this cool technology.

We can do teleportation to any hospital or health facility.

We can deliver any medical product to any hospital or health facility instantly.

And I remember the minister of health looking at us at the time, and she basically looked at us like we were goofballs and said, look, shut up, just do blood.

And as she was explaining it to us, she was someone who was a true expert in running this kind of national healthcare system.

And she was explaining that blood transfusions, 50% of them are going toward moms with postpartum hemorrhaging.

It's a total logistics nightmare because you have packed red blood cells, platelets, plasma.

Each of those has different shelf lives and different storage requirements.

Plus, you have all the different types of blood, ABAB, and O.

So getting the right thing to the right place at the right time to save someone's life was really hard and there was a lot of waste in the system.

And this was a product that was absolutely crucial for family health.

And so she ended up saying, look, just here, deliver blood to these 21 hospitals and prove that it can be done.

so we ended up signing a $200, 000 contract with the government of Rwanda to deliver blood to those 21 hospitals.

I mean, probably a lot of people are like, Rwanda, huh?

But actually, Rwanda is quite innovative around taking risks like this and trying new things, right?

A lot of people may find it surprising, but the reality is Rwanda has really modeled itself on Singapore.

It is a small, highly efficient, technocratic, fast-moving, innovative country in East Africa and run by a lot of very visionary leaders who believe in technology.

They often talk about being a proof-of-concept country.

They want to be the first adopter of new technologies and show how it works and then let other countries follow in their footsteps.

And so they're unique for a lot of reasons.

I also have to say, when we were signing that initial contract, when we were launching during that first year, we would be on constant calls with executives and government leaders Saturday, Sunday, Sunday early morning, Sunday late at night.

I just remember thinking, no US government official would be talking to us at this time.

I think that by virtue of what that country has been through over the last 30 years, it is extraordinarily entrepreneurial and willing to work hard to move the country forward.

So initially, the idea is let's figure out a way to get medical supplies to people in rural parts of Rwanda and eventually will expand beyond Rwanda.

But really you start with blood, blood supplies, right?

It has to be kept at a certain temperature.

You could do all of these things in the plane, right?

I mean, I joke because We were very naive when we were launching in 2016 in Rwanda.

We thought that we had a system that was gonna be reliable.

We thought we knew how to integrate with a national healthcare system.

We thought we knew how to work with a national airspace regulator.

We were basically wrong about all those things.

It's like a big flag, you know, like an inspirational flag and the slogan on it is, we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought that it would be easy.

And when I saw it, I was like, this is a perfect description of Zipline in 2017, like full of optimism, thinking that we had this figured out.

We had signed this contract to deliver just blood, a very narrow part of the overall health care system, to just 21 hospitals.

We'll just knock that out, and then we can expand to other things.

But for the first 9 months, we only served 1 hospital, because everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

We were really struggling to get the system to work reliably.

The technology wasn't as reliable as we thought it would be.

We didn't have a lot of the integrating software that we needed to really make the system integrate with the overall health system built.

And the team was pulling constant all-nighters, working through the weekend.

I mean, it was a really painful time, and it was not clear that the company was gonna survive those 9 months.

We were desperately, desperately trying to get it to work reliably for just 1 hospital.

And meanwhile, we were lucky that the government was patient enough to say, hey, we know this is hard.

We know you're trying to do something for the first time ever.

So figure it out for that 1 hospital, and then you can expand to the other

Will Duffield And how did you work with the hospitals?

Because these planes would be launched from, I think, a central facility in Rwanda where the blood deliveries would arrive, and then they'd be launched.

And they could travel up to what, 1, like, round trip up to...

And They could carry this payload, drop it like it would just come down, parachute down in a designated spot like outside the hospital.

When we started building the first system, it was lucky that we were talking to a lot of customers because we were considering, oh, we need more complicated versions of the technology.

We need to build a vertical takeoff and landing hybrid that can fly like an airplane but hover like a helicopter.

But the more we spoke to customers, the more we really understood, all the customers really cared about was range and price.

It was, how do we make sure we can cover the maximum number of hospitals and health facilities by having a lot of range on the system?

And how do we make sure that the cost of a delivery is as low as humanly possible?

Because it's probably not that surprising.

Working with health systems in these parts of the world, they don't have a lot of extra money sitting around.

So if you're going to solve the problem, it has to be really cost effective.

So that led us to build, we wanted to build like as simple of a system as possible.

So we built a fixed wing system that really looks like a small airplane.

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Delivering the future in drones with Keller Rinaudo Clifton of Zipline