Mr.Chad

Zipline Founder & CEO Keller Cliffton explains how they had to launch in Rwanda because drone delivery was illegal in the US "I was 23, 24, and we were starting to describe this vision of an autonomous logistics system for Earth that would be 10 times as fast, half the cost, zero emissions." "One of the biggest problems when we were trying to raise money was investors would say, 'Isn't this illegal in the US?'" "We weren't allowed to fly beyond visual line of sight. I mean, we weren't allowed to fly at all really. So the answer was: yes, it's illegal. And then most investors would be like, 'Well, we don't invest in illegal things, so we're not going to invest.'" "But for weird reasons, this is what basically took Zipline down this path of, well, if it's illegal in the US, then we can launch in other parts of the world where the value of the service would be extremely high." "Zipline decided to launch in Rwanda in 2016, delivering blood transfusions directly to hospitals and primary care facilities. This enabled us to have a use case that was so powerful that a government would work very closely with us to make it happen."