From Blood Transfusions to Burritos, How Zipline is Automating Delivery | E2238
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.2 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
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Today’s show:
On today’s TWIST episode, Alex interviews two of the top startup co-founders: Keller Cliffton of Zipline and Anastasis Germanidis of Runway.
Zipline announced its $600 million raise at a $7.6 BILLION valuation. Kellers breaks down the origins, economics, and future of Zipline’s contrarian bet in drone delivery. What was science fiction a decade ago is now a regular part of life for many. In fact, Zipline operates more flights than United!
Zipline is set to leapfrog the car delivery apps AND self driving cars with the superior economics of drone delivery. It is much cheaper to transport your burrito in a lightweight drone than a 6,000 pound self driving car!
Then, Alex is joined by Anastasis Germanidis, the CTO and co-founder of Runway, to explain why the next frontier of generative AI is world models! Runway is looking to build a universal simulation, which will unlock massive gains in robotics, autonomy, and simulations. The world model would be able to simulate rare edge cases that could take years to find naturally!
Check out how this cutting edge AI startup’s NYU Tisch School of Art’s origins
Then, See Jason’s answer to the question: “When should founders pivot or give up?”
Timestamps:
(00:00) The Drone revolution is here!
(02:46) Inside Zipline’s factory to build 20K drones a year
(04:40) American dynamism Vs. Chinese manufacturing dominance
(09:00) How Zipline is growing 75% month on month
(9:50) Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist
(11:15) Zipline teleports food and goods to your house
(21:54) Crusoe Cloud: Crusoe is the AI factory company. Reliable infrastructure and expert support. Visit https://crusoe.ai/savings to reserve your capacity for the latest GPUs today.
(23:02) Is it affordable to use a drone to deliver a burrito?
(29:18) Zipline DOUBLES United’s flight numbers
(31:11) LinkedIn Jobs - post your job for free at http://linkedIn.com/twist then promote it to get access to LinkedIn Jobs new AI assistant.
(32:21) Anastasis break’s down Runway’s AI modeling
(35:24) Runway’s Gen 4.5 and the world model
(40:57) Why do robotics companies need a world model?
(43:04) Using AI to simulate robot laundry folding
(52:37) Runway’s origins at NYU’s art school
(55:46) Founder Q/A: When to pivot or give up on your startup
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Literally the way we describe this to our customers is we are showing up and we're installing a magical portal in the wall of your building. |
| 0:06.8 | Like it's like Rick and Morty or Stargate. |
| 0:08.6 | And now anybody in that building, whether it's a hospital or a primary care facility or a Walmart or a restaurant, just walk directly to the wall, you know, put something in a box, pass it through the magical portal. |
| 0:55.2 | And it's teleported directly to the home that it needs to go to in a way that is ultra-fast, great for the environment, an amazing customer experience. It's designed to be able to serve 99.9% of homes in a way that is quiet, magical, works in all weather, can operate 24-7. We're now delivering to public areas, so it's not just delivering to people's homes. Like you can be at a little league game and you can be like, oh, you know what? I want to get like cupcakes for the kids because we won. And people will just like place the order. And five minutes later, the product is being delivered to the GPS coordinates of your phone. It's really magical. And getting something delivered in, you know, three to five minutes or, you know, |
| 1:01.9 | 15 minutes rather than like 45 minutes or an hour, it feels like teleportation to people. And it opens up a ton of new use cases. This weekend startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com |
| 1:14.3 | slash twist, then promote it to get access to LinkedIn Jobs new AI assistant. Cruceau Cloud. |
| 1:20.4 | Crusoe is the AI factory company, reliable infrastructure and expert support. Visit crusoe. |
| 1:26.2 | orgia.a slash savings to reserve your capacity for the latest GPUs today. |
| 1:30.6 | Northwest Registered Agent. |
| 1:32.4 | Get more when you start your business with Northwest. |
| 1:34.9 | In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business |
| 1:39.0 | identity. |
| 1:39.9 | Learn more at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash Twist. |
| 1:45.2 | Hey, everybody. welcome back to Twist. |
| 1:47.4 | This is Alex. |
| 1:48.5 | Now, there are some technologies out there in the world that take a very, very long time to arrive, |
| 1:53.4 | even if we always thought that they were going to. |
| 1:55.6 | And then when they finally make it into our lives, it feels like they've always been there. |
| 1:59.4 | My favorite example of this is self-driving cars. A long-time pipe dream. Will it ever work? Will we pull it off? Well, the answer is |
| 2:05.9 | yeah. And now in the Bay Area, my friends are busy zipping around in way modes day in, day out. It's |
| 2:10.6 | become absolutely part of life. I think drone deliveries are going to fit into that category as well. |
| 2:15.9 | And so quietly, in the background, well, we've all been worried about AI and self-driving. Drone deliveries have become quite commonplace, quite safe, and quite popular. To help us understand how that happened and where we're going next, please welcome to the show. It's Keller Clifton, the co-founder and CEO of Zipline. How you doing? Great. Thanks, Alex. I said co-founder there. I should just double-check myself, solo founder or co-founding team? Part of the co-founding team. Zipline, you know, Zipline's a, yeah, a big awesome team that's been working on this problem together for almost 12 years now. I've got it and screw that up. Now, you are right now, as I talk to you on the factory floor. So why don't you tell me where is this factory and what do I see being |
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