No Priors Ep. 4 | With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

(instrumental music) Keller, welcome to No Priors.

Thanks.

Let's start with the basics. Tell us about yourself, what you were like as a kid, what you did right out of school. Have you always been working on crazy projects?

Uh, you know, I... (laughs) I feel like life is a winding path. I, uh, in college I built computers made of RNA and DNA that operate within human cells. Uh, you know, the goal was to build these molecular automata or molecular doctors that could recognize cancer on a cellular basis and, and cure it. So I was really interested in biotechnology. I also got to build a, a climbing wall in college. Uh, I was a professional rock climber right after graduating for a year and a half, and then got pretty, uh, obsessed with robotics. You know, 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, in robotics is a super boring, re- repetitive task. (laughs) And logistics-

Mm-hmm.

... is about as boring and repetitive as it gets. And then the more we learned about logistics, the more we understood that, you know, it really serves the golden billion people on Earth well, but it does a very bad job of serving the people outside of the golden billion. Uh, and for 100 years, we've been making excuses for, you know, why logistics is so unevenly distributed. We... Uh, you know, as a result of, 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, we just felt like it was neither of those things. It was like, well, if we're gonna build a new kind of logistic system that would transform logistics toward, you know, automation, zero emission, 10 times as fast, let's also build the first logistic system that serves all people equally, and that was ultimately the vision that, that created Zipline.

Uh, it's, it's an amazing vision. I wanna, uh, get to how you went from rock climbing to logistics, but, uh, for clarification first, what do you mean by golden billion?

The richest billion people on Earth.

Got it. And you got obsessed with robotics. You weren't working on logistics at the beginning. Wh- Uh, can you talk a little bit about Remotive?

Yeah, I mean, when we... You know, the, the tricky thing, and maybe this is true for more startups than you realize, the tricky thing is, like, we didn't know we were starting a company when... (laughs) You know, all, all I knew was me and my co-founders didn't have jobs and, you know, it seemed like a cool thing to do to build some robots. 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. And we ended up building those robots in, uh, the apartment of... It was, it was my apartment at the time, but I mean, it was technically really Tony Hsieh's apartment. You know, Tony was kind of a, a mentor and inspiration to me. I had just read his book. Um, he lived in the exact same dorm I did in college, just 10 years ahead of me, and so seeing, like, what he had built and... You know, I, I didn't even know building a startup was a thing that you could do, but, you know, we... He had all these apartments in Las Vegas, he gave us a bunch of them. We started building robots in those apartments and shipping them to people all over the world, and these were really simple, right? 'Cause we had no money, no credibility, we weren't that good at building robots at the time, so these were really simple. They were basically laser-cut out of acrylic and you would, could attach your phone to it and it would become a little autonomous roving platform that you could use, you know, to teach kids programming or to do telepresence. Um, it wasn't that good of an idea in retrospect (laughs) , but it was, um, you know, it was the thing that ultimately, uh, enabled us to, to actually, you know, ship something, make some money, um, and, and learn and grow the company as we went.