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Will be at CoRL this week. Exciting to how much this ecosystem has grown.
Working on a few new projects focused on:
- Post-training to the nines of reliability for industrial work
- Deployment infrastructure for production-scale robot fleets
- Building US and allied supply chains for both research and industrial-grade hardware
If you want to work on any of these, reach out!
Working on a few new projects focused on:
- Post-training to the nines of reliability for industrial work
- Deployment infrastructure for production-scale robot fleets
- Building US and allied supply chains for both research and industrial-grade hardware
If you want to work on any of these, reach out!
Making it more possible to build in America is one of the most important meta-problems to solve. Every other aspect of national resilience and abundance is downstream of this bottleneck. Read more from Matt below on permitting reform:
In 1937, San Francisco finished the Golden Gate Bridge, initially derided as "the bridge that couldn't be built," ahead of schedule and under budget.
Nearly a century later, the same city couldn't build a single public toilet without exorbidant costs and years of delay.
Across America, communities face the same dysfunction: stalled factories, delayed energy projects, and crumbling infrastructure. We should be building faster and more safely than ever before. Instead, we struggle to deliver the basics.
The problem: our system rewards process over results. A growing bipartisan consensus offers a chance to change that.
a16z's Matt Cronin on the 5 priorities bipartisan legislation must address to get America building again: a16z.news/p/america-can-…View quoted post on X
Zipline is maybe the best example of a company that has been building at the frontier for its entire existence. Productizing a frontier technology (aerial autonomy), selling the outcome (logistics network), in frontier markets (East Africa), a decade before everyone else.
Today, Zipline raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation.
When we started Zipline, flying autonomously in the US was illegal. Which made it really hard to convince investors to give us money! But we were too naive to think that meant we shouldn’t try.
We started the company on a cow farm. We worked out of run-down construction trailers so that we could keep engineering, manufacturing, and flight test all unified and in one place. Hiring people from normal companies like Google was hard because we didn’t have a cafe or laundry service. But enough risk takers and rebels wanted to go on an insane adventure with us. They became the early team.
We decided to launch in smaller countries and focus on life-saving use cases. We hired incredible entrepreneurs and operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, and other countries. For eight years, Zipline expanded our service across Africa, serving thousands of hospitals and health facilities and reducing maternal mortality by 51%. Today, the network saves over 14k lives every year and is cash flow positive.
Last year, Zipline launched at scale in the US and the service exploded. We grew flight volumes about 100x over the last 18 months, and now make more than a million deliveries a year per metro. We’re now expanding with our partners to millions of deliveries per day. Normal families love having access to anything they need in 10-20 minutes, no matter where they live. Spend more time with loved ones and less time worrying about errands.
Zipline builds drone delivery that is silent and safe. No one wants to hear an extremely loud “swarm of bees” delivering to their backyard or their neighbor’s. Automated delivery needs to be insanely quiet, which guided the overall architecture of our technology delivering from 330 ft in the air. We are 6 times quieter than the closest competitor during delivery. Zipline also now has over 150m commercial autonomous miles (10x the rest of the industry combined) and no safety incidents. Neighborhoods should demand silent and safe delivery!
Today, Zipline is announcing two things. First, we just signed the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart, our first and biggest partner in the US. We’re starting by scaling to 300 supercenters throughout the country. Second, we’ve raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation from existing and new investors, led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer.
Zipline was a hard company to believe in for the first ten years of our history. Investors didn’t think the company was “investable”. Most people didn’t even think Zipline was an economic venture. Thanks to those who have rooted for us along the way. To all of the tens of millions of customers and families who rely on Zipline day in and day out: thank you for helping us build the future. Zipline has grown more than @ryanzip, @keenanwyrobek, I, and all others at the company could have imagined.
There is a big opportunity to build a new layer of infrastructure for humanity over the coming years. We want to approximate teleportation. We can build a logistics network that connects and serves all people on earth. We can free human flourishing from the choking constraint of traffic and roads. There are no roads where we’re going. 🚀🌎View quoted post on X
Very cool work from @rmcentush on tech trees
Last weekend, I collected 250+ real government documents on Moon bases, spy pigeons, warp drives, nuclear canals, psychics, and so much more.View quoted post on X
archivedfutures.com
Some of the craziest 🧵
