“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.”
TBPN · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
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.
Transcript
Yeah. Yeah.
…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.
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.
Yeah. Amazing.
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?
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…
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