YouSaid · the spoken record

Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

lines on the record: 58
first: 2023-02-20
most recent: 2023-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Or 2012 And they had designed these orange robots that would run all over the warehouse. They'd basically go and lift up a bunch of shelves and bring the shelves to a human where the human could then grab things off the shelf and pack them. And so it was a way of automating warehouses, moving things around inside warehouses. And I remember seeing that thinking, wow, someone is going to design Kiva for outside the warehouse. And that's going to be like a world-changing company because if you could just move things back and forth outside, that would change the way the world looks. And so a simple idea turns out complex in execution. So I guess the last thing is that during that first year or two, it became clear that if we were going to make this work, like we'd have to commit our lives to it for 10 plus years. And so we started asking ourselves, like, what problem would be important enough that we would be very excited to spend a decade? By the way, a decade has ended up in underestimate because we're now 10 years in and we're just getting started. Yeah, we're like 1% of the way there.”
2023-02-20 · No Priors · Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building robots that would operate inside house and interact with people. And it didn't really work very well. Like in the first year, people were buying them, but they ended up going on a shelf after like a month or two. And so I had this sense that, okay, we could continue investing money here and building this and even potentially selling the product, but I didn't think it was going to be a very sticky product in the long run. And as I mentioned, what you really want is like very boring, very repetitive tasks in controlled environments. And the home is not a controlled environment and there aren't very many like really boring, repetitive tasks. It's all like a bunch of one-off tasks. Like people always ask, why can't you design a robot to fold my clothes? And if you think about like all the tasks that are required to fold clothes, that's not repetitive at all. It's really actually a really hard thing to get a robot to do well. And around the same time, I actually remember meeting the founder of a company called Kiva, which was sold to Amazon, I think, in 2011.”
2023-02-20 · No Priors · Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had just read his book. He lived in the exact same dorm I did in college just 10 years ahead of me. And so seeing what he had built and I didn't even know building a startup was a thing that you could do.”
2023-02-20 · No Priors · Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe this is true for more startups than you realize. The tricky thing is, we didn't know we were starting a company. All I knew was me and my co-founders didn't have jobs, but it seemed like a cool thing to do to build some robots. We started building robots and shipping them to people all over the world. And these were really simple, right? They were basically laser cut out of acrylic and you could attach your phone to it and it would become a little autonomous roving platform that you could use to teach kids programming or to do telepresence. It wasn't that good of an idea in retrospect, but it was the thing that ultimately enabled us to actually ship something, make some money and learn and grow the company as we went. We put something on Kickstarter. We ended up selling $150,000 worth of robots on Kickstarter, which was a huge amount of money to us at the time. We ended up building those robots in the apartment of, it was technically really Tony Shea's apartment. Tony was a mentor and inspiration to me.”
2023-02-20 · No Priors · Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boring repetitive task. And logistics is about as boring and repetitive as it gets. And then the more we learned about logistics, the more we understood that it really serves the golden billion people on Earth, the richest billion people. But it does a very bad job of serving the people outside of the Golden Billion. And for a hundred years, we've been making excuses for why logistics is so unevenly distributed. We, as a result of that five and a half million kids lose their lives every year due to lack of access to basic medical products. And we pretend like this problem is unavoidable or somehow excusable. And we just felt like it was neither of those things. It was like, if we're going to build a new kind of logistics system, it would transform logistics toward automation, zero emission, 10 times as fast. Let's also build the first logistics system that serves all people equally. And that was ultimately the vision that created Zipline.”
2023-02-20 · No Priors · Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like life is a winding path. In college, I built computers made of RNA and DNA that operate within human cells. The goal was to build these molecular automata or molecular doctors that could recognize cancer on a cellular basis and cure it. So I was really interested in biotechnology. I also got to build a climbing wall in college. I was a professional rock climber right after graduating for a year and a half. And then got pretty obsessed with robotics. It felt like there was it felt like there was a lot of really cool technology coming out of academic labs and no one was really making that technology work in the real world in a way that would be reliable enough that millions or tens of millions of people could really depend on it. And so the more we learned about robotics and automation, the more we got excited about logistics. It seemed like what you really want in robotics is a super.”
2023-02-20 · No Priors · Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had fooled ourselves into thinking, well, we've had this awesome vehicle, it's going to work great, like we can just launch. And it turns out that the vehicle is only like 15% of the complexity of the solution here. This is, by the way, a realization that I think most robotics and autonomy companies have not yet had. You don't really realize it until you start trying to serve customers and suddenly have this really rude awakening that the customer does not care how cool the robot is or even how capable it is for our customers the only thing that matters is does the product go from a to b ultra fast reliably 24-7 and fast enough to save someone's life”
2023-02-20 · No Priors · Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about what we do as teleportation. It really means they can basically teleport a product directly to their GPS coordinates. That's the vision. It should feel like magical teleportation. It should be nearly instantaneous. And it needs to be reliable.”
2023-02-20 · No Priors · Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source