In a conversation with Ryan Nolan, managing director in the TMT group and global co-head of Software in Goldman Sachs Investment Banking, Keller Cliffton, CEO and co-founder of Zipline, talks about the company’s mission to reimagine worldwide logistics, the complexities of scaling new hardware systems, and why they launched Zipline’s services in Rwanda first.
On the mission of Zipline: “Zipline is trying to build a new logistics system for Earth that approximates teleportation. So we use small, light, fast, electric, autonomous vehicles to deliver things in a way that is 10 times as fast as traditional logistics, half the cost and fully zero emission. The more we learned about logistics, the more we got focused on healthcare logistics because five and a half million kids lose their lives every year due to lack of access to basic medical products. And we’ve been pretending for a hundred years like that’s somehow unavoidable or excusable. We felt like it was neither of those things. So we were pretty determined. We felt like there was a chance to build a radically new kind of logistics system for Earth. We wanted to build the first logistics system that would serve all people equally.”
On being comfortable with failure: “You have to get pretty comfortable with failure because basically, if you’re trying to do something really hard, you might spend a month or you might spend a year just trying again and again and again and failing again and again and again and again… So it really has to be more about the process. You have to derive the fulfillment from the process, not from the success.”
This episode was recorded on May 8, 2023
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