Dave Morin 🦞

General Partner @OfflineVentures • Chairman @Esalen • Chairman @OpenClaw • Co-Host @MoreOrLessPod • Skier • Dad of 3

[Dave Morin 🦞 @davemorin]

Some of us did not need convincing and wrote Zipline a check on the spot @Keller! Will never forget the first time I pushed the launch button with you in June 2016 at the dronebase high above Half Moon Bay. Ever onward. 🚀

[Keller Cliffton @Keller]

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. 🚀🌎

[Vincent Koc @vincent_koc]

We are doing "massively multiplayer online AI" (MMO AI) over at @openclaw

Everyone is talking about Multiplayer AI, so so early 2026. We have 100s of users from our maintainers, community, all running on 1 server.

Watch this space as we continue to drive the future of AI.

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Built a physical simulation of a record player with WebGL2 and Web Audio. It's *shockingly* accurate: https://t.co/MBNaTfKoai.

Instead of playing a song, it works by converting it into the physical shape of a groove. Then a simulated stylus rides those walls 384,000 times a second, and you hear the voltage that motion would induce in a cartridge.

So the crackle, the pops, the wow/flutter, the dull inner grooves are natural byproducts of the simulation. You can also "DJ" the record.

(The converted songs are in the public domain or CC-licensed. Code is linked for you to remix and re-deploy.)

[Kyle Macomber @kylemacomber]

We’ve been doing a lot of work to make iOS development more amenable to running many agents in parallel. @slazarus is going to talk about the challenges and how we’re solving them in Bitrig

[Dave Morin 🦞 @davemorin]

@RobertoMandje @Keller Yes, @lessin taught me to 👅🍪

[Dave Morin 🦞 @davemorin]

Some of us did not need convincing and wrote Zipline a check on the spot @Keller! Will never forget the first time I pushed the launch button with you in June 2016 at the dronebase high above Half Moon Bay. Ever onward. 🚀

[Keller Cliffton @Keller]

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. 🚀🌎

[Dave Morin 🦞 @davemorin]

@elonmusk @tetsuoai We must be thinking about the physics wrong

[Keller Cliffton @Keller]

@davemorin That launcher was nuts 🙈. True OG

[Zipline @zipline]

Zipline just raised $1.5 billion in new funding. This money will go towards building a nationwide drone delivery network.

There’s a better, greener future on the horizon and we’re just starting to realize it.

[rahul @0interestrates]

Today we're releasing DeepFinance, the first ultra-long horizon benchmark for high finance work.

A set of 21 problems that reflect work at top PE and IB firms, DeepFinance is built using real deal data.

Problems are constructed by experts with backgrounds from top firms like Evercore, JPM and UBS, and institutions like HBS and Wharton. Problems represent work that would take human professionals 20-40 hours to complete.

Can AI really diligence a $100M+ deal? Finance benchmarks today are limited to evaluating agents on QA on financial docs or grading the numerical correctness of simple financial models. However, real world high finance work is full of assumptions and conflicting evidence. We built DeepFinance to realistically evaluate agents on those end-to-end finance workflows.

DeepFinance leaderboard: https://t.co/E3dQzOH55v

[Dave Morin 🦞 @davemorin]

More photos from that day:

[Dave Morin 🦞 @davemorin]

@apartovi @camillericketts @alexeheath @rebeccakaden I love you Ali but 2007 called and wants its social network spam back. Also all of this data is wrong.

[Bobby Goodlatte @rsg]

A small peek at the details going into our upcoming Sunflower Beta launch:

This is the blank state—when you’ve cleared out your high-signal emails

A 3D sphere coalesces from scattered points. You can play with it, rotate it, tap it

The points on the sphere are arranged in the Fibonacci sequence… which the center disc florets of a sunflower also follow

Look closely at the center of a sunflower and you’ll see this same pattern

We’ll reveal the rest of our new Home tab soon. (it’s changed how I use email) Until then: I’m damn proud of the attention to detail poured into every corner of this app

My co-founder @michaelbrooksjr is the best designer I’ve ever worked with, and @leeadkins the best engineer. We can’t wait to launch this thing 🌻

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

@davemorin’s question for @bingfish: games make effort meaningful, and AI promises to remove effort. So what part of life gets worse if an agent wins for you, and what do you deliberately leave in for the human to do?

“Friction is what makes pearls. If you don’t get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster.” He adds the qualifier most people skip: sand doesn’t always produce a pearl. It’s just necessary to one.

@brit asks what friction means here. Constraints.

And AI generates its own. “Ten other people are doing the same prompt as you. You’ve got to do something better than them.”

Which raises the bar continuously. “What we now think is great, three years from now we’re going to think of as slop.”

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

@davemorin asks @bingfish the question every dashboard hides: people who quit Farmville felt relief, while retention and revenue were still climbing. What could have told you the truth at the time?

His answer starts with a Bezos line.

“When the anecdotes and the data don’t agree, trust the anecdotes.”

The signal they had was NPS, and it moved the wrong way. People’s scores for Farmville went down afterthey quit. They stopped recommending a game they’d just spent months playing.

He’s careful about where the line sits. Being nudged into things you don’t feel like doing is how training works, and he says you sometimes need to get hacked into the gym.

“But at some point you’ve got a totalitarian dance troupe leader or coach who takes all the fun out of it.”

Reid Hoffman’s version, which Bing quotes: growth hacking works for a short time, like human growth hormone. Get addicted and you’re a cancer risk.

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

@bingfish was there at the founding of Electronic Arts in 1982, spent 18 years at Kleiner Perkins, and sat on Amazon's board for 15.

He was also on Zynga's board, which is why it lands when he says players felt relief when they quit Farmville while retention and revenue were still climbing.

So where's the line between good game design and gaming your users? His answer takes in TikTok doom scrolling, WhatsApp as the rare product nobody complains about overusing, the sponsored products Amazon still shows Prime members, and ChatGPT ending every answer with one more question.

Then @davemorin asks what the agent era keeps circling: what gets worse if your AI wins for you?

"Friction is what makes pearls. If you don't get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster." And the next frictions, he says, come from edge conditions nobody tested for.

Plus the wow/WTF scale he used to judge EA's Hall of Fame games, and the bet-your-job letter he kept in a drawer.

@brit hosts. New episode out now.

Topics:

01:02 No Lessins this week: Brit and Dave bring in Bing Gordon
02:42 Amazon's board, Prime, and 18 years at Kleiner Perkins
05:03 Disneyland inside the computer
06:51 The classroom question that led to Electronic Arts
09:44 Raising $2M in 1982, then Atari collapsed
10:56 Vision, and why people think you're stupid
11:37 Bathroom OKRs and why goals beat perfection
13:13 Word of mouth, and why coin-operated hires leave
14:44 "Can a computer make you cry?" and hiring on mission
16:53 Why games retain: where everybody knows your name
17:34 Which social network did it best?
18:36 LinkedIn endorsements and getting people to come back
20:19 Farmville: players felt relief when they quit
21:18 Growth hacking is human growth hormone
23:04 Amazon, TikTok, ChatGPT: who's gaming their users today?
24:21 What gets worse if your AI agent wins for you
25:03 Friction is what makes pearls
26:30 Hugging Face, Cruise, and the edge conditions nobody tests
29:04 Writing Everybody Wins with his daughter Chloe
32:19 The visionary and the operator
33:20 The wow/WTF scale, and how to manufacture a wow
36:08 Wow moments in games, Facebook, Instagram and Amazon
38:42 Creating wow moments as a parent
41:28 The bet your job moment
42:23 You only got fired for blaming someone else
43:19 Good risk vs bad risk
43:53 Invest and express: Twitch, chat, and kids' art on the wall
45:59 Dave's favorite Bing-ism: the airplane aisle test
47:30 The best retention hack ever made is a wedding ring
48:01 Session economics, novelty, and leveling up
51:51 How to gamify a board meeting
54:03 Why a founder who loses the board twice gets replaced
55:23 Family board meetings and the vice president of fun
56:17 Lightning round: books, heroes, best investment
58:41 Bing's p(doom): doomers are gonna doom
59:36 The three things that make a good day
1:01:59 Dave's iPhone Duo verdic

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

“Friction is what makes pearls. If you don’t get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster.”

Bing Gordon co-founded Electronic Arts in 1982 and has spent the eighteen years since at Kleiner Perkins.

@davemorin asks him the question AI keeps raising: what part of life gets worse if an agent wins for you, and what do you deliberately leave in for the human to do?

His answer is that constraints are the point, and the new frictions are already forming.

“Ten other people are doing the same prompt as you. You’ve got to do something better than them.”

On what went wrong with the last platform shift: The Facebook Effect promised that connecting would let you move mountains socially.

“But then it turned out the money was clicks. And so Facebook never measured on the server how much friendship you were building.”

@brit asks for his p(doom) by 2030. “I’m not a doomer.”

New episode out soon.