Episode 2: Blood From The Sky Male Voice 1: 00:03 Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills. Female Voice 1: 00:06 It is a very difficult country in terms of typography and many areas are hard to reach. Male Voice 1: 00:12 The time to order and get the supplies by truck is just too late. Female Voice 2: 00:18 There's no way that we can overcome the time that it takes to get anywhere during the rainy season. Male Voice 1: 00:24 The best case scenario, it would take at least four hours. Mick Ebeling: 00:26 These are Rwandan officials and they're national experts talking about a problem that's severe in Rwanda, but prevalent throughout the world. How do you get life saving supplies to remote places? Mick Ebeling: 00:38 Now this would be a challenge anyway if we were talking about food or water or medicine, but in this case we're talking about blood, and it's blood that is desperately needed by mothers who are dying from hemorrhaging after childbirth. And that's one of the main causes of death among women in Rwanda. And the thing is, it's not a problem of supply. It's a problem of delivery. The roads in Rwanda are horrible. The blood isn't that far away. I mean it's so close it's as if you could hear the doctors pleading for it, but you're helpless to do anything about it. But someone did hear the bleeding of those doctors and they did try to do something about, even though the challenge seemed impossible. I'm Mick Abilene and this is not impossible. Mick Ebeling: 01:34 This is a podcast about people solving the hardest, most mind boggling problems in some of the most creative and unimaginable ways. This podcast is brought to you by Avnet, a company dedicated to helping creators of all types find whatever they need to get from idea to product and then to get their product to market anywhere in the world. Mick Ebeling: 01:55 Today, we're gonna visit with some people who challenge the very nature of what's impossible, but we also want to explore one really key question in the middle of all of this. The question is why? I mean, who are these people who throw everything away to chase these impossible dreams? Who are these donkey hoe days and what? What motivates them to go tilting at windmills? I mean, are they crazy? Mick Ebeling: 02:20 Case and point, Keller Rinaudo, he was this guy who had everything going for him. He started this company called Remotive. Keller: 02:29 I started the company when I was 23 in 2011, and we didn't ... We weren't really even intentionally creating a company. We were just selling these little robots you could plug your iPhone into. Mick Ebeling: 02:38 The robot was called Roma. It looked like an eight inch long tank with a slot on top of it for your iPhone to sit in and before Keller knew it, his robot was a huge hit. Keller: 02:49 You put it on Kickstarters, sold a bunch of robots and then I ended up ... We created this little assembly line in my apartment, and we ended up mailing robots to people all over the world and we actually sold more than a million dollars worth of robots in the first year, which kind of blew my mind and it was like, Whoa, okay. Suddenly it was a company. Mick Ebeling: 03:05 Romo is cute. When you turn him on, his goofy face appears on the screen when Keller introduces him during a Ted Talk. Keller: 03:11 When Romo wakes up, he's in creature mode so he's actually using the video camera on the device. Mick Ebeling: 03:18 You hear Romo making funny little noises in the background, and he immediately wins over the crowd. Keller: 03:23 If I come over here, he'll turn to follow me. If I come over here. He's smart. Thanks little guy. Mick Ebeling: 03:33 Things were going well, his robot was a big hit, money was good. And it was just at this moment of success that Keller said he felt empty. Keller: 03:43 And I think the big realization for me was that people would pay for it, and they were really excited by the idea, but people didn't really use those robots much more than a week. Like they would buy it and use it a little bit and then get tired of it and put it on the shelf and not come back to it. And so for me, that kind of made me realize, man, if I'm gonna invest my whole life in a project, the most important thing to me, it's not can I sell it for a lot of money? It's not can the company be profitable? It was more just are we building something that people really, really love and use all the time? And so that was actually for me, this realization that I kind of want to give up on that product. Mick Ebeling: 04:23 And you just one day said, "I got to do more." Keller: 04:27 Yeah, it was really, I mean, for me it just came down to life is short and if we're going to build something, we don't just want to build something that can make money. We want to build something that will have a huge impact on people's lives. And when we really started approaching the problem from that direction, we were like, "Let's build something that would literally save lives. Let's build something that the world thinks is impossible." Mick Ebeling: 04:48 And this may get at the idea of why people do these impossible things. For Keller, it's not just the challenge of building amazing things, he wants a bigger challenge. There's something in this that's both altruistic but also kind of chemical. This is this guy whose comfort zone is being outside of his comfort zone. He needs the challenge as much as he wants to aim that need in a positive direction. And is that ego, is that brilliance? Is it altruism? I think there's a mix, and I think that's at the heart of why people take on these impossible challenges. Whatever it was, he knew he couldn't do it alone. He would need a strong team and he found the perfect partner. Female Voice: 05:31 Patty the parrot says a letter sound. Female Voice: 05:35 Say the sound for this letter into my microphone. Mick Ebeling: 05:40 This is Bam Boomerang, a reading app that's still popular today. It was created by an engineer named Keenan Wyrobek. Keenan: 05:48 Bam Boomerang is an app for kids to learn to read. It was basically a mission to bring the stickiness of physics based games like Angry Birds that sort of get kids hooked to a learn to read app. So kids play games, they read out loud and volunteers over the cloud, listen and give feedback through sort of a push button interface. Keenan: 06:16 Pretty much everything I've done is some version of taking some really important problem and intent, take technology and make it magically solve the problem so people don't even know the technology is really behind the solution. Mick Ebeling: 06:29 But Keenan was also on the hunt for a bigger challenge. Keenan: 06:32 I have a hard time waking up in the morning unless what I'm doing is really exciting, literally. And finding something like this that really matters directly in terms of saving lives and just improving, just empowering doctors. It's just so meaningful to me. Mick Ebeling: 06:51 That something turned out to be an idea called Zip Line. Keenan and Keller set out to completely change the way blood and medical supplies get to people who need them in places that can be hard to reach. It makes those deliveries using drones, and Keller says at the beginning, connecting healthcare and drones was a really tough sell. Keller: 07:14 I mean in 2014 when I started talking a lot saying, "Hey, we really want to build instant delivery for healthcare. We think we could use drone delivery to deliver medicine to people who are dying." A lot of people looked at me funny because the assumption was that's technologically impossible. Nobody's going to pay for it. You won't be able to do it at scale. Maybe you can do one flight, but it's not going to be nearly reliable enough. The planes are going to crash. You'll only be able to do a couple flights. So we had so many layers of skepticism. Keenan: 07:45 I was hoping that some place in your office, you had some of those cheap little army men that you grabbed their parachutes in the army men. You through them up in the air and they parachute down. And I was hoping that there was one day you were out there sitting on a bluff throwing it up in the air and throwing it down and throwing it up in the air and catching it. And that was the, Oh my God, we could do this with blood. This is incredible. But it sounds like it was more of these realizations of you wanting to push and do a little bit more. Keller: 08:13 We really had a sense for we had this, we had a special team, we knew we could build something hard, and we wanted to go work on something that we'd be really proud to work on for the next 20 years of our lives. And so we wanted to make sure that we were tackling a problem that was kind of so audacious or so difficult that it would take a long time to solve and when we really started approaching the problem from that direction, we were like, let's build something that would literally save lives. Let's build something that the world thinks is impossible. And that, and that really was what led us towards Zip Line. Mick Ebeling: 08:49 And Zip Line leads us to Rwanda. Most of us became focused on Rwanda back in '94 when conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis and the country resulted in genocide. 800,000 people died. Reporter: 09:03 UN officials say they have never seen anything like it in just the last 24 hours more than a quarter of a million people have fled Rwanda and it's terror. Mick Ebeling: 09:13 If you stopped paying attention after that, you wouldn't recognize the country now. It has a bustling tourist trade that attracts nearly a million visitors a year. It's considered a safe place to visit, and it's in the middle of a domestic tourism program called Remarkable Rwanda. Mick Ebeling: 09:32 But one thing hasn't changed in the country that's called a land of a thousand hills, and that is the roads that cross those hills. Jean-Philbert: 09:39 Well, in some of the roads in rural areas, they are not paved. They are not tarmacked. So the rainy season they can't get remedy. Mick Ebeling: 09:47 This is Jean-Philbert Nsengimana. They call him minister Phil. As much as anyone, he's the symbol of the new emerging Rwanda. He was the country's Minister of Youth until that was combined with it's Ministry of ICT, Information and Communication Technology. Youth and technology put him in the middle of this problem of how to deliver blood to young mothers in these rural hospitals. Our Skype connection from Rwanda was a little shaky, but what he had to say was really clear. Jean-Philbert: 10:19 It takes sometimes four hours to be able to get something that is uniquely available in a certain location to the location where it is needed and as we all know, in a case of emergency four hour, even one minute can be the difference between life or death. Mick Ebeling: 10:38 And just by chance, this is where Keenan and Keller came into the picture. Keller: 10:42 We were getting really interested in logistics and spending a lot of time looking at places in the world where logistics tends to break down. Keller: 10:49 Keller Ronaldo. Keller: 10:50 And so I naturally began to look at places that don't have great roads and was spending time in different parts of East Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and eventually Rwanda. And in Rwanda, in talking with the Ministry of Health, we started to learn a lot about how blood logistics works and why it's so super challenging. They deliver about 65,000 units of blood a year. 50% of that is going toward moms who are suffering from postpartum hemorrhaging right after giving birth. But the challenge with blood is that it doesn't last very long. It has all these complicated storage requirements and thermal requirements. Keller: 11:22 And so when you're trying to get it out to all these different rural places, it's basically an unsolved supply chain problem. And so the way that they were operating the system was asking doctors when a mom is in trouble, for example, having a doctor get into a car and drive to a blood bank, and that can take several hours to get there and then wait at the blood bank, get the blood and then drive several hours back. And so what we realized talking with the Ministry of Health was we could solve that problem in a much more efficient way. Mick Ebeling: 11:52 Minister Phil was thrilled when he heard the idea. Jean-Philbert: 11:55 It's also an issue of mindset. I think that here in Rwanda we've got a mindset which is we've lost enough lives in this country. We've lost enough time in our development. If we see something that has a promise to help us move very fast where we want to get, we go for it. And when we put our heads and minds and hearts to something, we tend to give it our best. Mick Ebeling: 12:28 But governments are governments and bureaucracy is bureaucracy. And so to cut through it, Keller had to rely on a principle that we had not impossible like to fall back on. Just keep moving forward because it's always easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. Keller: 12:46 Never ask for permission because the answer will always be no. At no point in my life have I ever asked for permission and not had the answer be no. Because whoever you're asking for permission from will always ... There's nothing in it for them to say yes generally, and it's always much better to say no. So we really more take the perspective of we go to people who need to be informed of what we're doing or who are ultimately going to need to give us regulatory sign off and we say, "This is what we're going to do and this is why it's extremely safe." Mick Ebeling: 13:20 And in the back of your head you're like, oh shit, I sure hope this works. But they're coming in with that level of confidence. Obviously you do your homework, you do your research, you do your prototyping, your testing, but come in with that level of confidence gives everybody else confidence. Everyone wants it to work as opposed to trying to prove that it doesn't work. Mick Ebeling: 13:37 So I couldn't, I could not agree more that people are wired to say no if you give them that option to. But if you take that option away, they're wired to say yes. So it's really in terms of how you deliver it. Keller: 13:49 Yeah. Yep. Totally. And that's exactly what we've seen in when we initially went to Rwanda. It was not coming from a permission ... It was not coming from a state of going to the government and saying, hey, we have this awesome idea. We want to do this. It was more learning about their problems. And then they were the ones who basically insisted to us. I mean we went in and said here are a bunch of ways we could help. And they were like, shut up. We don't want any of that. Just do blood. Mick Ebeling: 14:18 Just do blood. But how? We'll tackle that one after the break. Mick Ebeling: 14:28 Okay, let's face it. This is a podcast dedicated to technology for the sake of humanity, but it's also about the people behind that technology. If that's you, Avnet can help no matter what you build. Why? Because they are the first company ever to offer true end to end solutions for product development in house. That way creators in any corner of the world can take an idea from prototype through to mass production. Are you a startup and established OEM? Do you need help designing your product or organizing your workflow or just getting your stuff to market? Avnet's got your back. Mick Ebeling: 15:03 Your world is one that's always changing. That's why Avnet is here to help you reach further, and we want to give a special shout out to Avnet's engineering communities Hoxter and Element 14. They help creators vet and invent the technology of tomorrow. Mick Ebeling: 15:22 Want to do something more than just listen to this podcast? Maybe something like, I dunno, taking on the next non impossible challenge? Go to podcastnotimpossible.com to find info for you and for anyone who wants to take their project one step further. Mick Ebeling: 15:41 You, yes you, are invited to the 2019 Not Impossible Awards. Join us on June~` 1st in downtown Los Angeles to celebrate the inspiring work of people and companies who share in Not Impossible's mission of creating innovative technology to improve the wellbeing of others. For tickets and information go to notimpossible.com/awards. Mick Ebeling: 16:07 So Keenan and Keller set out to deliver blood by drones in Rwanda, and it was just as difficult as it sounds, but I like to think that every problem leads to another solution. And as it turns out, Keller thinks the same way. Mick Ebeling: 16:21 So one of the principles that we have is this fail, fail, fail, succeed, repeat as necessary, right? Walk us through some of those crazy problems or those deadlines or those things where you're just like, ah, head in your hand, 17th coffee, trying to figure it out. Describe a couple of those if you could. Keller: 16:40 Yeah, I mean there are so many. When we originally kind of decided, okay, well this ... What we're generally gonna do is we're gonna use a small robotic aircraft to deliver these crucial medical products in places that don't have roads. So we can get there 20 times as fast. Every flight will potentially save a human life. And it seems simple because, A, we're gonna be able to buy lots of off the shelf components. B, we'll design some kind of recovery system so we don't need a runway and therefore we can get rid of the ... We can get rid of the landing gear that you'd have to have on the plane. We'll design a launcher. We'll just put off the shelf battery packs in these planes so they can fly there and back easily. Keller: 17:26 I'm mentioning all these things because these are all things that turned out to be wrong. Okay. When we got started, turns out that in the world of unmanned aerial vehicles, you can buy a $20 million Predator drone that only the US military can afford. Or there's an $100 consumer drone that is super unreliable and made of plastic and falls out of the sky every 10th flight. And there's nothing in the middle. There's no enterprise grade, commercial, reasonable price, but really reliable. There's nothing there. And so we started by saying, well, we're gonna use all these components. Turns out that's wrong. You're going to have to build it all from scratch. Mick Ebeling: 18:07 And that's just what they did. They created flight computers and wrote software. They designed the wings and anything that goes into creating a drone, they created themselves. Keller: 18:18 Building a first version of something, you're always going to be wrong about half of your design assumptions and you won't know which half that is until you're actually serving customers and putting products in people's hands, at which point you'll realize, wow, we wasted half of our time. Keller: 18:32 And the other thing is that everything is always 10 times harder than you think it's going to be. And I remember this conversation with my co-founder Keenan and we were kind of like, well you know what, let's bang out the airplane. That'll be so easy. Let's just do that first. Let's get that done in a couple months and then we'll focus on something more complicated and thank God we decided that because it turned out that that was so much harder and there was so much complexity and nuance in that problem that we thought was very easy that had we chosen the more complicated thing, the company would probably have died because we would have run out of money before we had something to show or something that we could actually put in people's hands. Mick Ebeling: 19:12 And so they kept working, and everything kept going wrong, and so they kept working. Keller: 19:19 I'm happy to talk about all of the crazy problems that we've had that have been really vaxing and you know, caused us to work crazy hours and through the weekends and implement crazy solutions. But I guess what I'm saying is that none of those super difficult challenges led us to think like, ah, let's give up. And the reason was that we had this very clear need that we were hearing from these governments that we're working with saying people are dying every day as a result of not getting access to these basic medical products. Keller: 19:53 So when you know the need that well, there's no option. Giving up isn't really an option. You're like come hell or high water. We're going to figure this out. Mick Ebeling: 20:02 And there was so much to figure out. Maybe you're thinking, well I've seen drones, what's the big deal? Or maybe you have one. That drone is not this drone. Keller: 20:13 If you look at Amazon or Google, these other companies that are talking about drone delivery, they're using quad copters. Mick Ebeling: 20:18 Those quad copters that you see everywhere, they don't go very far. These guys needed to build something that can travel long distances. So their drone actually looks a bit more like a plane with fixed wings. Keller: 20:32 We have about 20 times the range of a quad copter. And when you have 20 times the range, that means you can serve 400 times the area cause Pi R squared. Mick Ebeling: 20:41 The next problem that seems simple and turned out not to be was how do you power the thing? Keller: 20:47 Turns out you can't just take an off the shelf battery because the battery gets too hot when you're flying. Now this isn't really an issue with quad copters 'cause quad copters only fly for like 15 minutes. But to go and make deliveries to people who live pretty far away to serve the maximum service radius. So no one's really solved this problem of how do you thermally manage a battery to make sure that it stays cool when you're using that battery to power an airplane? And by the way, this is exactly the same problem Tesla had to solve with electric cars and now we're having to solve it for the first time with electric airplanes. And that turns out to be a really, really hard problem that requires all kinds of new solutions. Mick Ebeling: 21:24 The next problem was how do you land the thing? Keller: 21:27 It actually just drops the product from about 30 feet in the air, which means that we don't have to have a runway or any kind of landing system or even verify that people aren't going to touch the plane and get hurt or the plane's not going to get damaged when it lands. Mick Ebeling: 21:42 So the plane didn't land where it drops off the blood, but it still had to land when it got back to home base. Keller: 21:48 It turns out to be a really zany solution where the plane is flying at about 80 kilometers an hour and it catches a wire and then the wire decelerates it and basically plops it onto a pad. But the cool thing about this solution is it allows us to recover planes in a really small amount of space very, very gently when the plane's moving really, really fast. Keller: 22:08 Well, ironically that's exactly how aircraft carriers solve that problem too. When a plane comes and lands on an aircraft carrier, it basically is touching down on the deck. It has a hook that catches the wire and then the wire decelerates the plane. Mick Ebeling: 22:20 So after only about oh two years or so, they've got a working prototype. They call it the Zip. It weighs about 20 pounds, has a wingspan equal to a human wingspan, about six or seven feet, and it's powered by a battery and it looks and works like a little cargo plane. Keller: 22:41 It has a payload bay, which are these two little doors on its underbelly that can open up. When those doors open, we load the package and the package is basically a shoe box. It's like a big shoe box that we can hold any different kind of medical product in. And it also has basically the cushioning required to deliver that medical product safely. Keller: 22:59 So that shoe box gets loaded into the vehicle, the doors get closed, and then one of our flight operators will pick that airplane up and walk it to a launcher. And a launcher is really, it kind of looks like a catapult. It's a small catapult that will essentially accelerate the vehicle along a rail for about 12 feet. And when the vehicle leaves the end of that rail, it's completely autonomous and it's flying. Mick Ebeling: 23:24 And there's one more concept you need to understand, a concept that guided the process all the way along. It's something Keenan told us is called fault tolerance. Keenan: 23:34 Fault tolerance is sort of a design principle of making basically planes like this that just always fly. And what it means is that when something has a failure or a fault and stops working, the system is tolerant to it. It doesn't care. It doesn't say, oh, okay, I lost that sensor so I'm going to start going out of control and crashing. No, it deals with that fault, detects the fault, and then does the right thing to handle it in a safe way. Mick Ebeling: 24:01 And that turned out to be the crucial ingredient because after all this time, they had a plane that would work in theory. And when they took it out for its first test, it failed. Mick Ebeling: 24:17 But it failed in the the best way possible. Keenan: 24:23 We hadn't yet tested it in the air. And we had the team of investors from Sequoia, which is one of the biggest and most prestigious investment firms in the world coming to decide if they were going to invest in us. And live in front of them, we had one of the control surfaces, right? One of the little surfaces that flies the plane just full on fail and the plane flew beautifully, landed beautifully and they didn't even know the failure had happened. That was a sweet moment because when we think about what we're doing that really no one else has done, it's really achieving that level of reliability required to do this and where people live and do it responsibly. Mick Ebeling: 25:20 And so then it was time to put Zip to the true test. Keenan: 25:24 I think probably the most satisfying moment was our first delivery in Rwanda. Keenan: 25:32 Three, two, one. Mick Ebeling: 25:37 You're listening to a drone launch. Keenan: 25:39 The satisfaction of doing that first delivery, having this team that has been working incredibly hard for two, at the time, about two years. Just pouring everything into this and being able to sit there on my iPad and connect to what we call the the controller user interface, the controller interface where I can see it and oversee planes and just getting to watch that plane while watching video from our distribution center there in Rwanda, that plane just fly away, go out, make that delivery, fly back, land and be ready for the next delivery was ... That was a magical moment. Keenan: 26:25 It all of a sudden everything became incredibly real in a way that only existed in our imagination for so long. Mick Ebeling: 26:33 And suddenly they're making dozens of deliveries every day. All a doctor in Rwanda needs now to get blood is a cell phone. Keller: 26:40 If there's a mom who is at any one of these 21 hospitals that are within range of our distribution center in Rwanda and she's suffering from postpartum hemorrhaging, the doctor can immediately say if it will basically get her blood type and then he can immediately send a text message saying, "We need three units of AB negative blood," say. Keller: 27:03 That order is received at the Zip Line distribution center. We immediately pull that blood out of refrigerators that we have on site. It's loaded into a plane that's already passed preflight checks, the plane launches, and then it flies at about a hundred kilometers an hour in a straight line, not dependent on roads or any other kind of access. We basically fly in a straight line to the GPS coordinates of that hospital and then the doors on the plane open, the package is deployed, and we use a super simple little paper parachute that means that this package, instead of coming down fast, it actually comes down in a really gentle, magical way, basically straight into the hands of the doctor. Keller: 27:43 And then the doctor can immediately transfuse that blood into the patient and save her life. So it's super simple. It really is like send a text message, get what you need in 15 minutes later, save the patient. Mick Ebeling: 27:55 And it's as easy as that. Jean-Philbert: 27:56 Well, I've lost one myself. Mick Ebeling: 27:58 This is Minister Phil again. Jean-Philbert: 27:59 The countdown, and then you press on a button. Then the drone goes in the air. Jean-Philbert: 28:06 But I want to tell you that the deliveries are happening as we speak. So imagine today, all you have to do is to take your smartphone. You got your app, you place the order, you specify which product you want. And in a matter of 15 to 20 or 30 minutes, you see the Zip dropping their product. It's like a miracle. So initially the really the wow effect was, wow, is it possible? It's miraculous. Mick Ebeling: 28:35 And there's no telling how far this could spread. How many countries, how many lives, how many impossible challenges this could overcome. So miracles do happen, but they don't happen the way we used to think miracles happen. Mick Ebeling: 28:48 They happened in this case because of a concept we believe in at Not Impossible. We call it beautiful, limitless naivete. If these guys had any idea how complicated this was going to be, they never would have gotten into it. Not knowing what you don't know can seem like a daunting prospect. It can seem cavalier, but if you let it, it can launch you like a catapult launches a drone. Mick Ebeling: 29:20 So that's our Not Impossible podcast for today. Thanks again to our sponsor, Avnet, a company that provides true end to end technology solutions to help people who make anything, anywhere in the world reach further. And I want to invite you to check out their communities. Hackster, the world's fastest growing developer community for learning, programming and building hardware, and Element 14 the biggest designer engineer community on the planet. Mick Ebeling: 29:47 You could find links to their websites on ours. Go to podcastnotimpossible.com to find info for you and for anyone who wants to take their project one step further. That's our podcast for today. Our senior producer for this episode was Jocelyn Frank, our development director, Erin Sullivan. Joe Babarsky is our director of partnerships Barking Owl Studios did our final mix. Vicki Schairer, our associate producer. Huge thanks to the team at Not Impossible, and our executive producers are Phil Lerman and me. I'm Mick Ebeling. Mick Ebeling: 30:25 Thanks for listening to Not Impossible. And until next time, remember, commit and then figure it out. Sounds crazy, right? Maybe, but it's not impossible.