KC

Keller Cliffton

Things Keller Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Keller Cliffton has been a guest on This Week in Startups (2 times) , Cheeky Pint , The Driverless Digest , TBPN , Crucible Moments and In Depth .

Recently: “AI Boom Reality Check, Jobs Boom, Cybertruck Scrapped | Praveer Melwani, Keller Cliffton, Rahul Sonwalkar, Max Siegelman, D.A. Wallach” on TBPN (November 2026); “Making Autonomous Drone Delivery Work with Zipline CEO Keller Cliffton” on The Driverless Digest (November 2026); “The Drone Company Everyone Thought Was Illegal (Now Worth $4B+) | E2265” on This Week in Startups (March 2026); “Building Zipline: From launch disaster to drone-delivery giant | Keller Cliffton (Co-founder, CEO)” on In Depth (March 2026); “From Blood Transfusions to Burritos, How Zipline is Automating Delivery | E2238” on This Week in Startups (January 2026); “Zipline ft Keller Cliffton - Reinventing Delivery with Instant Drone Transport” on Crucible Moments (October 2025).

What They Said

“There were companies with trillions of dollars of capital trying to build this for the last thirteen years, and I do think that the technology wound up being harder than people were expecting. Any safety critical, highly regulated market that involves hardware and weather and safety and all the necessary testing, it takes time.” — Keller Cliffton, TBPN

Asked why Zipline is so open about showing how it works, its CEO says the difficulty of drone delivery is itself the moat. He compares it to autonomous cars, which also proved harder than investors expected.

TBPN · 2026-11-06 Permalink → Listen →
TBPN Around 49:22 into the episode
John Coogan

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi Hays

…future and yet like I love how open you are with it because it doesn't seem like you're work... You're like, yeah, go... You can try to copy us or or do what we do. But it seems like it's so hard, you're just not really that worried about giving people a little inside look at at the business.

Keller Cliffton

Well, mean, you know, there were companies with like, you know, trillions of dollars of capital trying to build this for the last thirteen years and, you know, I do think that the technology wound up being harder than people were expecting. Mhmm. You know, any safety critical, highly regulated market that involves like hardware and weather and safety and, you know, all the necessary testing, it takes time. It takes a really dedicated focused team. And like autonomous cars, I think it wound up being harder than maybe investors were thinking. And, yeah. So I I think we... You know, we've always kind of thought that the competitive advantage of the company is that is the team focus, our ability to be practical and get into the real world quickly and learn by doing. So yeah. You know, we've we've tried to generally build in the open.

Jordi Hays

Yeah. Amazing.

John Coogan

I mean, the partnership with Uber makes a lot of sense. Walk me through the Salesforce partnership. Is this... Are we gonna be able to deploy champagne when deals close autonomously? Send send another business partner a steak dinner so we can do business together. How'd that come together?

Keller Cliffton

Well, with with Uber, you know, we announced a cool thing. So I was actually just giving this tour that I'm showing you guys around. I was giving this tour to to Dara a couple weeks ago. And agreeing to them, basically forming this vision to do a million deliveries a day together, that's a quarter…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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