What’s 400,000 times around the world, or a back and forth trip from the Earth to Pluto? As of recently, that was Zendrive!
10-billion miles. That’s the amount of driving safety we’d measured and analyzed. That’s all those laps around the planet and that roundtrip to the farthest reaches of our solar system. That’s a lot of data, and we had to find a fun way to celebrate!
So, what does any ambitious and self-respecting Silicon Valley team do to ring in a major accomplishment? Get a drone and shoot a cool video, of course!
But, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, reality sometimes doesn’t agree with plans…In the process of editing the video, we watched our mileage tracker click up and up and up and…Before we knew it, we were rounding the corner on 15-billion miles, or 600,000 times around the world (and yes, another trip to Pluto)…So we decided to scrap the 10-billion clip and quickly grabbed the drone to reshoot a 15-billion version…
We hustled the team, inflated the balloons, and came up with a cool choreography routine, which we practiced again and again…But then, again, life happened, and we learned another lesson from the startup playbook: things don’t always go according to plan and not all surprises are pleasant ones…On the afternoon of the 15-billion shoot, we assembled in the park, balloons and all, and the drone wouldn’t start!
We’ll, we couldn’t just stand there and not record the occasion for posterity. So we did anyhow.
Fortunately, one of our resourceful Zendrivers knows a few things about tree-climbing and smartphone videography. In the blink of an eye, Dane scaled up 30-feet on a majestic oak tree for a bird’s eye (or drone’s eye) perspective to record our celebration.
And, here you have it — it might not be a pixel-perfect drone-powered video, but we’re proud of it and had a lot of fun making it:
If you want to catch-up on how others noted the 15-billion miles accomplishment, and a little about why it’s meaningful, here are a few clips from CNBC, Forbes and Frost & Sullivan.
