How Zipline’s Drones Are Taking Off in the U.S. and Rivaling Amazon
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Hey, Tim, what would you do if teleportation existed and you could get almost anything delivered to your door in the blink of an eye? You mean I could get a burrito right now? Where do I sign up?

Sorry, man. Teleportation's still science fiction. But there's this company that's trying to do the next best thing with drones. It's already flown more than 100 million miles without human pilots and made over 1.4 million deliveries in several different countries. And its U.S. business is just growing. And a little spoiler, its name doesn't rhyme with shmamazon. That's next.

Over 1,400,000. That's how many fully autonomous deliveries DroneMaker Zipline, a company you've probably never heard of, has made. But that's because most of those deliveries are in Rwanda and neighboring countries where the company has been delivering blood, vaccines, and other critical medical supplies for years.

But now they're coming to America in a big way. This year, they're going from testing their newest delivery drones to rolling them out in Texas cities like Austin and Dallas and in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, the backyard of Walmart's world headquarters.

It took us eight years to do a million deliveries in the history of the company. Two and a half years from now, we need to be doing a million deliveries a day. So really, you know, to describe the crazy growth curve that Zipline has to navigate here, we have to figure out how to do something that took us eight years to do the first time and get to the point where we can do that every single 24-hour period.

If Zipline's origin story is saving lives, its breakout moment is going to be giving Americans more of what we love, convenience, and less of what we don't. The traffic that comes from having so many delivery drivers on our road using 3,000-pound vehicles to transport our packages and pizzas. Healthcare has always been Zipline's biggest market and was for a long time our primary focus.

but quick commerce and food just as big. Growth across these with customers like Walmart or Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic or Ohio Health, Michigan Medicine, as well as food partners like Sweetgreen, Mendocino Farms, or Chipotle, the growth is quite profound.

Zipline's story is so much bigger than one company. It's about a new way of transporting goods via flying robots and why it took so long to realize this dream.

From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Christopher Mims. And I'm Tim Higgins. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold name companies featured in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Today we ask, what took so long for us to get the airborne burritos we were first promised during the Obama administration? And what's going to keep those drones from falling out of the sky at the worst possible moment?

Keller, Rinaldo Clifton, welcome. Thanks for having me, Tim and Chris. Two things about you that our listeners should know. You were a big reader, a young man of the written word, if you will. And once you graduated from Harvard, you became something of a professional rock climber.

How does that lead to your current life as an entrepreneur on the forefront of delivery drones? Are you craving a beer on top of some mountain, I imagine? Yeah, I mean, any good idea that you see getting built today and scaling like crazy and everybody's like, wow, how did you get that idea? It's like, well, you could have just read, there are 50 science fiction books about that exact topic. I think all of the important ideas are generally covered in those kinds of books. And I just grew up

feeling like I was promised a very exciting future of robots and space travel and nuclear fusion and life extension and all of the really cool, important things. And I don't know, I think I grew up feeling like those things were imminently achievable or doable. And yeah, I mean, it's true that after college, I was rock climbing full-time

Rock climbing is interesting because it forces you to deal with failure. Like as a sport, you know, you fail 500 times on a climb before you succeed once. And then once you succeed, you move on to the next thing. And so it kind of forces you to fall in love with the process rather than fall in love with like,

you know, a specific success or outcome. And I think that that's pretty powerful for entrepreneurship as well. You know, entrepreneurship is a lot of failure, a lot of falling on your face, a lot of constant embarrassment and sometimes public humiliation. And it's very valuable to, you know, be able to manage your psychology through that and focus on just getting better and day-for-day improvement rather than needing to wake up and feel like, you know, you won every day.

So you took that drive and that ability to deal with failure and you decided to build a drone delivery company? Because aside from convenience, which is a thing that Americans probably already have in super abundance, why should anyone care about drone delivery in 2025? That's actually an extremely privileged perspective. You

The reality is logistics only does a good job of serving the golden billion humans on earth, the richest billion humans. If you're in the 7 billion who's not in that category, your access either sucks or is non-existent. And as a result of that, millions of

kids lose their lives every year due to lack of access to basic medical products. They're untold healthcare problems when we can't get what you need, where, when you need it. But even more importantly, like when you look at the US, I mean, we're using a 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle every

It's driven by a human to deliver something to you that weighs on average five pounds. And this is a rapidly scaling industry, but we're using technology that's about 100 years old. And we think it's really obvious that if we were to build new technology to solve that problem, you can actually build technology that would be 10 times as fast, half the cost and zero mission. So what's your plan for the next five years? Where do you imagine being in 2030? And what do you need to do to get there?

Ultimately, Zipline's mission is to build the first logistics system that serves everyone equally. And we think that over time, there are going to be ways of making logistics just vastly more efficient, zero emission, less expensive. To give a sense for the scale that we're trying to achieve, it took Zipline about eight years of building the company to do our first million commercial autonomous deliveries.

And the growth that we now see working with partners throughout both the U.S. and international governments, and this is really across three main verticals. Healthcare has always been Zipline's biggest market and was for a long time our primary focus. But quick commerce and food, just as big. Growth across these with customers like Walmart or Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic or Ohio Health.

Michigan Medicine, as well as food partners like Sweetgreen, Mendocino Farms, or Chipotle, the growth is quite profound. And it means that actually what we need to figure out how to do, it took us eight years to do a million deliveries in the history of the company. Two and a half years from now, we need to be doing a million deliveries a day. So really, to describe the crazy

growth curve that Zipline has to navigate here. We have to figure out how to do something that took us eight years to do the first time and get to the point where we can do that every single 24-hour period. A million a day kind of reminds me of those old McDonald's signs where you would see a million hamburgers served a day and then it was a billion. Ultimately, you want to be delivering everything by drones or is there...

There are things that you think are perfectly sized. I presume small. You're talking about medicines or food. You're not going to be delivering big screen televisions, I imagine. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know,

Logistics is very multimodal in its nature. So there's never going to be like one thing. We're only going to use ships from now on. We're only going to use airplanes from now. We're only going to use cars. That's not really how logistics works. But the reality is that the vast majority of products being delivered today quickly actually are lighter products.

than people, I think, intuitively suspect. Our next generation service carries eight pound payloads. Huge percentage of food orders being delivered. Practically 100% of all the healthcare use cases around courier delivery and instant delivery fit into these smaller payloads. And so you're never going to do like 100% of something in a logistic system. But suffice it to say, if you can do 80% or 85% of overall deliveries, that's going to be

transformational to the way that global commerce works. We just heard how Zipline plans to do a million deliveries a day. But with that many drones in the sky,

How will they avoid crashes on the regular? We design levels of redundancy into every one of these layers that is similar to the kind of redundancy you'd see in a 787 flying you across the U.S. or to Europe. We have to basically replicate those safety architectures using cell phone components and just avionics that's fundamentally less expensive. Stay with us.

In an age of unprecedented disruption and opportunity, success depends on what you do with your data and how fast you do it. This is the era of AI. This is the era of KX. KX, survival of the fastest. So you're talking about doing a million flights a day in two, three years. Obviously safety then, its importance becomes magnified. What happens when something goes wrong, right? Your drones, they weigh 55 pounds. They're about...

six feet on a side. It feels like a big deal. It's flying directly over our homes. So talk us through what kind of precautions you take in order to make the system as safe as possible.

One advantage of Zipline, by virtue of being a very full stack, like engineering-centric company, is we design every single one of these components. Our electrical engineering team designs the flight computer and all the avionics. The firmware team is writing all the low-level firmware. The software team building a lot of the different systems that run on top, whether it's guidance navigation control algorithms or multi-vehicle deconfliction or communications architecture. And we design levels of redundancy into every one of these layers that is...

similar to the kind of redundancy you'd see in a 787 flying across the US or to Europe. We have to basically replicate those safety architectures using cell phone components and just avionics that's fundamentally less expensive. But we build a lot of redundancy into the aircraft. The vehicle can have a significant failure of any battery cell and the vehicle can handle that

without having the battery go into thermal runaway and can bring itself home. We have redundant flight computers, so you can have a flight computer hang and we can hand control to a secondary flight computer. The way that we route signals inside the aircraft, you can reach into the aircraft with scissors, cut any wire, the vehicle will still fly itself home. You can have a motor failure, vehicle can still fly itself home. So you're seeing a pattern here. And then on top of all of that, if all those other levels of safety fail, the vehicle cannot make its way home, it will deploy a parachute and drift gently to the ground.

And so that's a big part of why Zipline is able to then bring that data to the FAA and get regulatory permission to operate in the U.S. at significantly increased scale. It's because, OK, like at this point, the data clearly demonstrates that this kind of system can be safe. I think that whenever you're operating in the real world, like, you know, there are so many unknowns, gnarly weather, you know, crazy weather.

one-off events that are very difficult to predict, like an animal or bird doing something very weird that you hadn't seen before in test circumstances. Nothing is perfect when you're operating in the real world. And so I think no one knows exactly what's going to be required. And I think a lot of autonomous vehicles are sort of treading the same water. And that's generally what we're building. Yeah.

I remember talking to somebody a few years ago who's in the autonomous car space and talking about autonomous flying vehicles. And he argued to me that he actually thinks maybe flying robots are in some ways a little easier than driving robots. A lot easier. He's right. Because you have to worry about kind of dropping off those packages. And your latest drone is kind of interesting. You've got the cargo hold that essentially lowers down robots.

to the recipient. So the drone remains aloft. How high up does it remain? It's 100 feet or something? It stays 100 meters. Okay. So 300 feet. And so that gives you the benefit of what? It's not as noisy? You never really want, like...

a vehicle like that coming close to someone's home in general. You just have way fewer options should something go wrong. And you're exactly right. It's also way quieter for the main vehicle to stay high up. I mean, Zipline invests a lot in acoustics just to make sure that these kinds of systems are less noisy than the cars that they compete against. I would say actually the biggest thing that we hear again and again and again is people are always like,

this looks awesome, but it's going to be so loud and annoying. And then we always just, every time we just share a video of what a delivery actually sounds like. And they're like, Oh my God, it's incredibly quiet. It's like, it's basically serene. And so I do think people's expectations are just going to have to get updated here because

by virtue of like experiencing the technology because the even the word drone evokes a very annoying noise and it's droning yeah yeah and and that's which our listeners are accustomed to listening to us drone on and on and on so wow you're laughing a little too readily at that one so okay so this thing is quiet do you think you could get this

Into really dense areas? Or is this going to remain a suburban phenomenon for a long time? I mean, you know, we already are delivering to apartment buildings and townhomes. We'll soon be delivering to rooftops for some apartment buildings where they have roof access. You know, I think people always ask about really dense areas. And when people think about that, they immediately think of like Manhattan.

Yeah. And the reality is most cities look like the city I grew up in, Phoenix, Arizona, or it looks like Denver, it looks like Houston or Dallas or Cleveland or Detroit. Like the vast majority of these cities actually are pretty much perfect for delivery in this way. We're not really focused on surveying, you know, 100 story skyscrapers like you'd find in Manhattan. And even when you're taking a city like New York, remember, you know, Manhattan is a small part of New York City, like the vast majority of New York City actually even...

that city would be relatively well set up for this in terms of where people actually live. One of the most important things about the way that we've designed the overall architecture of the system is that when we lower that package, it's held in something we call a delivery zip. And the delivery zip is actually controlling its position

in the horizontal plane. So even when it's really windy, there's a lot going on, it will deliver very quietly and super accurately to the same spot every single time for your home. This is something that customers absolutely love and just take all the anxiety out of it. And also the delivery zip is really cute, it's safe,

It feels safe. It's not scary. It's quiet. It's just a way better experience for customers than having something, you know, that when other companies are talking about using these really scary and extraordinarily loud octocopters coming within 10 feet of your home. Like, I think that's really a big reason that people are. I mean, that sounds terrifying. That would sound terrifying to me. That would not be something I would want.

Octo copter sounds like the villain in the next Marvel superhero movie, I think. I think that was a villain in a Spider-Man film.

I'm curious, who wins? I presume you think yourself, but why? It's funny. When we were starting Zipline, had we been spending a lot of time thinking about what the competition was doing, we wouldn't have even started. I think the reality is that staying focused on customers and being willing to do unfancy things, focus on the most important use cases, and just day after day, scale the operational efficiency, engineering reliability, safety, and...

So Zipline doesn't worry so much about like, Oh, what percentage of the market are we capturing? I mean, look, if we are better than cars and motorcycles, which we are, then the company is going to be extraordinarily successful. And if we aren't, then the company won't be. And so that's really what we, we more focus on getting the overall strategic vision, right. Rather than worrying about what one competitor may or may not be doing. But like, I think the most important high level thing would be to realize that it,

people really do focus on like the cool physical thing, which is like, what does the aircraft look like? And you know, what is the delivery experience? And those are important, but that is really only like 15% of the complexity of the overall solution. You know, we went through the hype cycle. We went through the,

trough of disillusionment and despair, now a lot of the hard work has been done to get regulatory approval to get these systems to operate safely. And we're now on that just solid, actual, real growth trajectory in terms of what this is going to look like. I think what has been required to get through that is a huge amount of underlying infrastructure. These things just take time. And

I think it's kind of easy to focus on, oh, like, what does the drone look like? But the reality is, I think it's probably counterintuitive the degree to which so much of the technology and infrastructure that's required to make that happen is all the really unfancy, unsexy stuff that you just wouldn't even think about. I mean, one specific example, you know, we launched with an aircraft that had 43 different kinds of fasteners in it.

Turns out it's really a pain in the butt to keep 43 different kinds of fasteners in stock at every distribution center you want to operate. You know, this led to like the next version of the vehicle had two and then multiply that by a thousand operational learnings that you can really only do by getting these kinds of systems to scale. Like that is where a lot of the competitive advantage of like actually being able to scale these kinds of systems lie. And I think it's, it's unsexy, unfancy, uh,

Sort of boring probably for most people. And yet like that's the actual hard thing that takes time to get right.

Keller just outlined for us why he thinks his competitors' drones aren't so hot. But how will his company conquer the hard problems of this space, building tens of thousands of drones? And how will the FAA make sure they can safely coexist with airplanes? There's a lot of space in the sky. And it's actually less valuable to normal people because the height at which we're generally flying is...

300 to 400 feet, it's much less likely that traffic is going to be a problem there than it is on the roads. Whereas right now, today, traffic on roads impacts our lives every single day and is extraordinarily annoying. That's next. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort.

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I think I've heard you say the word regulation several times in this conversation. I assume that is why you probably really scaled this business in a place like Rwanda to begin with. You had better regulatory environment. You could move faster. Is that the way I should look at it? When we were starting to build this, we knew that getting...

regulatory approval to deliver products autonomously in a national airspace was going to be difficult and tricky, especially when we had zero proof points and zero evidence that this could be done at all. There are some countries, I would say, that can move with more executive decision-making authority and are willing to be more aggressive in

to be at the forefront of a new area of technology. And Rwanda, you know, by virtue of partnering with the ministry of health and then also partnering with the office of the president, they really wanted to lead in this area. Uh, and they were willing to roll out the red carpet, figure out like what, what, you know, small tweaks here and there had to be made to like regulatory frameworks to at least allow the technology to kind of prove itself. And, uh,

you know, they've benefited by sort of like slingshotting themselves into the future and benefiting, obviously. And I think the good news here is that the U.S. is not far behind. The U.S. knows it doesn't want to fall behind in this area of fundamental technology. And the FAA, I think as soon as the FAA was able to see something like 50 million commercial autonomous miles with zero human safety incidents,

That was a super productive conversation where we were able to say, hey, like at this point, we know that it's safe. We want the U.S. to continue to lead in this fundamental area of technology. And the FAA has been an amazing partner on that front. But yeah, it's complicated. And these things take these things take time. These regulatory processes take time, you know, to a certain degree, they should. It's it's safety critical infrastructure. It needs to operate correctly. You know, there's big groups of people in these regulators who definitely see the future and they know where they want to get to.

And yet sometimes there are these regulations that most normal people in the US haven't heard of before that often prevent like the government itself from doing the obvious things that it wants to do that would be good for America. And so if anything, I think, you know, focusing on a lot of those regulations or statutes that actually prevent regulators from doing the obvious and right things like

That's going to be really important. That's a major way of leveling up. So I think a lot of people would be on board with what you're saying right now, regardless of their political affiliation. It's a little different, obviously, when you're talking about airspace and the FAA. I mean, they have been careful for very good reasons. There have been, unfortunately, lots of examples of why we have to be careful about that lately.

but you've already got those approvals. So is it, and you're very careful about this and because of these regulations. So is it really good when we're talking about our airspace to throw open the doors to having more freedom for drone flights here in the U S I mean, does that concern you? Right? If some fly by night drone delivery company has an accident, that's a black mark on your whole industry that could impede your growth. I think basically everybody who is involved is,

wants the same thing, which is to build like a very safe and responsible industry. I think interests are aligned on that front. You're right. Like, um, you know, something going wrong would hurt all of us. You know, it's interesting if you're successful and you're having a million and probably millions of these up in the air, there's going to be competitors presumably with theirs up there. Um,

It really becomes a little bit of a traffic jam. And I'm curious what you think about that. You know, unmanned traffic management is already, I mean, so traffic management is something that the FAA and air traffic controllers in the US have been doing. And the good news is like the airspace is, it's big. There's a lot of space in the sky. And it's actually less valuable to normal people because the height at which, you know, we're generally flying 300 to 400 feet is,

it's much less likely that traffic is going to be a problem there than it is on the road. So in general, we think like giving space back to humans, um,

And allowing software to solve the problem of deconfliction in the air should two vehicles be near each other. Like that's not one of the hardest technical problems that we have to solve. And I would just say we're a long, long, long way from that being like the primary rate limiting factor. Whereas right now today, traffic on roads impacts our lives every single day and is extraordinarily annoying. So, you know, I think there's a huge opportunity here to give time back to people, to give space back to people that they want and will benefit from.

I guess I wonder after the crash in D.C. and we see the Department of Government Efficiency taking a look at the FAA's air traffic control system, is this a moment where that system, which to your point has been out there for a long time, gets updated?

That has to happen one way or another. So, you know, there's going to be this transition from air traffic management systems to unmanned traffic management systems. These are rolling out for the first time now in the U.S. And so that future is inevitable. And for sure, it will make the U.S. a safer place if we can update the technology there.

You know, I mean, we have amazing air traffic controllers who've been doing these jobs for 30 years, are incredibly competent. They know so much about aerospace and how to regulate it. But if you saw some of the technology that some of these people are forced to use, it would blow your mind and you'd feel like you're being transported back in time 30 or 50 years. So, you know, for sure going in and doing an IT update and just modernizing these systems to be capable of handling the problems that air traffic controllers need to be addressing in this day and age is

will be really great for the overall safety and just also like economic competitiveness of the United States. So you have a manufacturing facility already where you're making your drones. And obviously there's been a lot of talk about manufacturing lately, about reshoring it, about where components come from.

Does this affect you in any way? Or are you insulated because you are so vertically integrated in terms of your manufacturing? Zipline manufactures all of these vehicles in-house at our own manufacturing facility. We're scaling that production up dramatically. I mean, every quarter we're building significantly more vehicles. The reality is even when you're building the vehicles in-house, you still have a big, complicated global supply chain.

And, you know, Zipline has partners all over the world, whether it's Japan, Malaysia, Europe, you know, Germany, Austria, Turkey, China, you know, you're sourcing parts from a lot of different parts of the world to build a complicated vehicle like this. It's similar to automotive in that sense. And, you know, I,

The reason that we want... So for sure, I mean, tariffs are going to impact that. In my perspective, the most important thing is actually having engineering next to manufacturing. Like for companies that want to build phenomenal products and move lightning fast, you need these teams to be integrated. You need engineers to be able to walk five minutes straight onto the manufacturing line and see the way their part is being integrated or assembled onto a vehicle, see the way it might be breaking, see the quality control issues we might be having, and

have an idea about a way we could redesign that part to make it way easier from a manufacturing perspective. You also could have just described Apple though. I mean, they've outsourced all their manufacturing. Tim Cook and Steve Jobs before him are insistent that if you want the kind of engineers who can do the tooling that's required to make an iPhone, you have to get it from China. There is nowhere else.

I don't think it's fair. You know, I mean, I think Steve was living in a different world. It was a different time. Right. But yeah, I think probably that could credibly be applied to Apple today in the way that Apple sees the world. I mean, I don't know, you know, do you guys, are you guys blown away by the rate of product iteration and improvement? Like I, you know, it's up to you to decide. I'm not, I won't make a public comment, but again, the companies in the world that are like iterating and inspiring the next generation of engineers and doing the impossible are

They're primarily, I would say, following this formula of you want, you know, engineering, manufacturing, and even operations like all closely combined, closely integrated, control your own destiny, move lightning fast, iterate based on customer feedback. So you're going to be the Henry Ford of this. You're going to have a rubber plantation in Florida. Yeah.

And a fully integrated factory. Raw goods in one end, drones out the other. Yeah, I don't know exactly. I'm not trying to make like a super, because I'm sure there will be examples of where things aren't true. I'm not trying to make like a categorical statement and just kind of more describing that like, I think the direction of this is you want to be more integrated over time, not less integrated.

And that's a good thing for companies separate from what tariffs are doing. Keller, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. I always learn something new no matter how many times we talk. And yeah, really appreciate your time today. It's a big honor. Thank you guys for having me. We reached out to the FAA. They said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has called for the air traffic control system to be modernized within four years.

Amazon told us its latest drone is quieter than a vacuum cleaner. And the company hasn't received any complaints from communities where it is in operation. Apple didn't respond to our request for comment. And a note, Zipline has flown more than 100 million commercial autonomous miles. An earlier version of this podcast incorrectly stated that it's flown 50 million miles without human pilots.

And that's bold names for this week. Our producer is Danny Lewis. Michael LaValle and Jessica Fenton are our sound designers. Jessica also wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Catherine Millsop. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley are the deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. For even more, check out our columns on WSJ.com.

We've linked them in the show notes. I'm Tim Higgins. And I'm Christopher Mims. Thanks for listening.