Embark Trucks' (W16) road to IPO

Sure. So I'm Brandon. I'm the CTO and cofounder of Embark, and we're working on commercializing the first self driving trucks.

And I'm Alex. I'm the CEO. Maybe I'll give a little bit of background on on us since Brandon decided to be somewhat vague.

Yeah. And maybe, like like, that's like, we're commercializing self driving trucks. My gosh. Like, maybe dig in like, give us a little color on that because that sounds pretty huge.

Sure. Yeah. So we're Brandon and I met. As as you mentioned, we both went to Waterloo. We met studying mechatronics engineering together. We did a little over a little over two years of Waterloo before we dropped out and came down to San Francisco, well, to Los Altos at the time to do IC and to take the self driving golf cart that we built. That was the first self driving vehicle in Canada.

That was kinda what got us in. We had we had a video of this golf cart that we submitted to you guys as part of the as part of the the initial package. And people I've shown it to a few people, and they ask, like, why is the video quality so terrible? Because it's, like, it's bouncing around, and you can't you can't really see anything.

And I'm like, well, see, imagine that we were three college students, and there wasn't a company. There was just a golf cart and a bunch of software, and then we had to fake a video. Well, that's exactly what happened. That's why it looks so terrible. But but it was good. We came down. We did YC. Embark is now 200 people, a little bit over.

We operate trucks across The US Sunbelt. And yeah. That that's, like, the the past piece. I mean, I'll let Brandon kinda tell a little bit about, you know, what the the vision is and the the product that we're gonna bring out.

Yeah. And so looking forward from here, Embark is 200 engineers and we're looking due to our very first commercial freight operation without a driver in 2023. Obviously we still have a ton of work to do to get to that point.

Everything from safety engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and robotics engineering but I think in 2023 the way I'm thinking about it is this will be the inflection point for the business.

This will be honest to God the very first time that we'll have our trucks moving freight in a real commercial application and it'll just be the first step in a long journey for what the company will become. So 2023 is the very first freight run we'll do.

Twenty twenty four, we start looking to commercialize and that's expansion across the Sunbelt and eventually up north from where we're from in Canada to tackle interest interesting scenarios like like snow and in more the complex areas.

So I have I have so many questions to ask about self driving and and the current status of the company and where you're going to to elaborate on some of those things. It's it's super exciting. I remember taking a drive in your truck a few years ago when you know, sitting back with all like, there were, like it seemed like there were 4,000,000 blinking lights and 27 computers back there.

It was was it was in in the back of the cab of the truck. But maybe we can roll back just a little bit. Alex kinda threw in that you guys were studying mechatronics engineering, which I guess is a fancy couple of Canadian words for, like, robotics. Is that right? More or less? Like Yeah. It means kinda robotics. So you guys were, like okay.

So you're, like, 19 and 20 years old or something like that. And and you're studying robotics. And, like, tell us how did the what's the founding story of Varden Labs, which is what you were called back then. Right? What how did that come about? And and maybe we can roll forward from there.

I was gonna say, maybe before we even dive into some of the story there, I think a lot of this for us was driven out of a passion of just robotics in general. Alex and I had met at the University of Waterloo in our robotics program and I think we came together through a love of just building technology, robotics, spinning LED displays.

Our friendship I think was built upon that and I think the journey that we were about to embark on, pun intended, you know, it was just a natural evolution of of how we acted and interacted in in the earliest days.

Did you guys know you were gonna start a I mean, I love the fact I always tell, like, kids at school, like, oh, like, what do what do I do? I say build stuff, and I love the fact that you guys resonated around building stuff. It was always you know, that's why we liked your video. We don't care if it's jumping. You built a freaking self driving golf cart. Amazing.

So but but how did, like, this passion for building stuff evolve into let's start a company, which is an interesting leap?

Well, I'll I'll let you in a a bit of a secret here, Jeff, which is that we didn't really intend to try to start a company at first. We we started building stuff. We built, like, here's some of the early stuff. You'd be like, yeah. There's no commercial application for these products.

We had a we had a n 64 controller that we're really irritated about because the the the joystick was too much too much backlash to replace the joystick with a Xbox three sixty joystick, but it's still inside the n 64 controller. It's great. No business for that, but it was nice and it did help me win a lot of games of Super Smash Bros. So that was good.

Brandon Brandon and I and and worked on that together with our friend Mike. And then we built a Brandon mentioned, like, a spinning LED screen. So it's like a single line of LEDs. You put it on a motor, you spin it really fast, and you change the LEDs fast enough, and it it's kinda like a two d screen.

And so you could show, like, stuff on this as long as you spun it really fast, which is kinda cool. And then kind of the next thing that happened was this golf cart, and it was a golf cart that drove itself. That was the premise. And we we kinda had some idea of how it might be a business, but really, I think we were working on the technology because we thought it was incredibly interesting.

And so I I almost think the first two years or so of our relationship and of, you know, what would eventually become Varden Labs was really us and our friends in Velocity, Velocity being Waterloo's entrepreneurship residence. Basically, it was, like, us and our friends building fun engineering stuff and having some vague idea that we wanted it to to be useful to people.

But, you know, we didn't that wasn't like it wasn't like we were trying to build a business. We were trying to build stuff that we thought was cool, that we thought was interesting, we thought might someday be useful. And then, you know, once we get into IC, you really start to to hear more of the transition to actually, you know, be turning it into a business. Yeah.

I even remember joking back then in the earliest days that we were sort of fooling the world in that we were telling them that we were gonna build a business out of this so we could win pitch competitions and and get the like pre seed funding we needed to build our cool projects.

And it wasn't until we honestly got into YC where we were like, okay, Well, we've gotta make make something real here because Jeff has some expectations.

Right. I I just have to say it. So but you so you guys were, like, in the entrepreneurial residence anyway. So you guys, like, you know, we're thinking entrepreneurship startup companies. You made the leap to apply to y c with an idea for a company. So you must have kind of been thinking, yeah, maybe there's maybe there's potential for something here.

And you you guys let let let's actually go back to that. How how is it that you applied to YC? And why don't you, you know, recall for everyone what exactly the idea was with which you applied? Because it wasn't really Embark trucks or it wasn't trucks at all, really. Right?

Yeah. The so the the original y c pitch was we were gonna take the self driving golf cart, and we were going to build an electric sort of bigger electric version of it that could shuttle people around campuses. And so it was gonna be this campus shuttle for universities and for for military bases and for other sort of closed areas. And you can kinda see this.

This is like the first attempt of us really struggling with the I think the inherent tension that defines embark, which is that on the one hand, we're doing this really, really, really hard technical problem in building self driving. And on the and we would like as much as possible to narrow the focus of that problem to something that that can be done in in a tractable way. Right?

We're we're really against boiling the ocean. At the same time, we need to build a business that can actually be useful to somebody. As you can see this sort of tension, like, well, in a private campus, it could be really simple to drive and maybe people would use it. And that was kind of the original thesis that we we sort of applied to to YC.

But then actually what we did all through YC was go through we built a second vehicle. We built it in a ridiculous amount of time. It was, like, six weeks or something that we from, like, getting the vehicle to maybe it was eight weeks to to it actually running. The trucks are taking a little longer, aren't they? It's just not it's not quite as fast to spin it up, you know, these days.

But but the trucks work a heck of a lot better. So, you know, it's.

Yeah. Well, they also I I mean, you sort of you sort of implied this. I mean, there was your original idea, instead of boiling the ocean, was let's find a tractable tractable problem on, you know, where there's sort of limited traffic, where it's really constrained. There's a constrained solution that will help us do it.

And I remember even, you know, from the very beginning, you guys have the idea in mind. Let's actually build something that people really want and can use early on as opposed to in, you know, forever. And I think that the I think that sort of that idea infused Embark.

and all of its predecessors as you guys went along. And then I think even through YC, there was a lot of really important learnings, at least on my side on the technical front. I think YC's mentality of just get it in the hands of users and see what sticks. I think we we tried to follow that as best as we could as a hardware company. Right?

Building hardware, putting in the hands of university campuses. And I think that kind of the two key takeaways ended up being two of the most important values that ended up refining our business strategy moving forward.

The first was, you know, as we went to different university campuses throughout California, we really got slapped in the face with just what what these places look like from a technology solutions perspective.

So we'd go to Sacramento State and if you've ever been there they pride themselves in having like one of every species of tree in the world roughly and our localization system was heavily based on GPS at the time and so there's these massive overhangs over the the walkways and all of a sudden our localization system didn't work.

But we'd go to Fresno State and they'd have clear skies but their paths would have hundreds of students on it and then our planning system wouldn't be able to figure out a path forward. And very quickly you know going to six or seven of these places, you realize like the more complex your domain is, the harder it is to solve this problem which translates to the harder it is to build the technology.

And so to the degree that you can, you want to simplify and focus building your technology solutions. And the other thing we learned going to have we had all of these university campuses essentially do paid pilots. So we'd shuttle students from engineering buildings to the center of campus.

And the idea was there to, in our seed round, and to to make YC happy, show that you know, we're we're building a real product. And I think to some degree we proved the opposite which was actually a good thing for us in the long run. But you know, students were perfectly capable at walking themselves to class.

There wasn't like a desperate infrastructure problem that the universities had that we need to increase students in classrooms and the only way to do it is through efficient automated self driving technology like that just wasn't the case is what we found surprisingly.

But I think when we took the next step forward, we knew that we had to find a problem that was well scoped and a problem that needed to be solved, and had a great business case behind it.

Was more about your your problems. Like, what you really found was, you know, it kinda be nice to have self driving shuttles in campuses, but, you know, it's not it's it's not like life or death. I.

have to say though, shout out to Mike Reed who managed to convince a large number of universities to pay us money to shuttle students around their campus over the course of, like, the same eight weeks we were building the shuttle when, as Brandon said, they really didn't have a problem.

So it was it's quite an impressive sales exercise to manage to get all those files that You guys making real progress when when I remember.

sort of mid batch, we started to talk about, like, construction sites in Australia or something weird where there's gonna be self driving trucks. And I'm like, what? Self driving trucks in Australia? And it seems like why don't you talk a little bit about your transition from the Varden Labs and and self driving college shuttles to embark in self driving trucks?

It's kind of an interesting story in of itself.

So this story actually starts early on with the golf cart. And, like, it was probably I think it was probably, like, a a week or two after we initially ran the golf cart at Waterloo, and there was a bunch of press coverage. This is, like, the first time that a driver's truck had run-in Canada or sorry.

A a driver's vehicle had run-in Canada, and and there was tons of tons of press people thought it was cool. And I got a cold email from this mine in Australia, and they sent me photos of these road trains, which are basically, like, one truck with three or four trailers all filled with all filled with rock that they're moving around. And, hey.

You know, we saw you guys making this self driving shuttle work. You think that that technology would work on these vehicles? And I looked at it, and I thought that it would. That was one of the first observations because it was also very limited. It was it was, like, closed access. The GPS solution we were using probably would have been been good enough with some sort of SLAM augmentation.

So it probably would've worked. But we're we, like, we had a thing. We were working on it, so we kind of ignored them. And then as we went through YC, I've been I I think I've been talking with them a little bit over the course of the fall.

And then as as we started to struggle a little bit with, yeah, we're able to get these pilots, but we're not really sure that that need is gonna be such a strong and compelling need that people are really gonna move mountains for it. We started to talk to a few more of the the sort of similar mining truck places.

And I think the conversation we had with you, Jeff, was one of them offered us some amount of money to do a vehicle for them. Like, we're gonna give you I I don't know. At this point, I can go look it up, but it was, you know, some some modest, but, you know, as a y c company, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, something that was exciting to do one vehicle. Right?

And we're like, oh, this that's what it looks like when someone really wants your product. Right? They're like, contact you from across the world about the press release, and they're, like, offering you hundreds of thousands of dollars with no demo, no nothing. Right? And so our question was, you know, we don't have that right now.

How do we think about this in the context of YC, and then how do we think about in the context of finding a great use case for the technology? I think the decision we made on the I think the decision we made makes a ton of sense. The two decisions were one from from a YC perspective, people wanna see that we're able to accomplish things.

And so we aren't just gonna, like, give up on this thing we've been working on for the the first two thirds of the batch and go do something different. Because if you did that, you'd come out at the end with nothing to show for it. So let's let's finish executing and prove that we're that the tech works, that the team is good, that our sales motion is good.

But afterwards, let's take a real good long hard look at the business case and make sure that if we're gonna spend the decade of our lives working on something, that it's something that people really desperately want that that meets the standard of that guy who reached out from across the world and offered us hundreds of thousands of dollars to build build him a truck.

And so we we did exactly that. Right? That's that's sort of how we we played it out. And, ultimately, we didn't decide to do mining trucks because I think that was still too small of a business. But but I think that really was the first thing that that sort of catalyzed us to start thinking, how can we find somebody who this is gonna make a real difference for?

Okay. I I really wanna hear about Domo Day, but just before we do that, I'm just interested. Do you guys remember your YC interview?

It was a blur. I just remember it being really quick. Just like chop chop chop. There wasn't much, like, feedback. It was very just question answer, question answer. We left the room and we were like, I don't know how that went. And then then we were told that we had to go talk to Sam or another group. That's right.

I remember that. I wish Sam was a part of And we were we didn't know either if that was a good thing or not. Turns out, in retrospect, I think it made sense because Sam had been really excited about self driving vehicles. But then again, it was just another one of those. And so I think we were unsure. At least that's what my my position was leaving it. It was it was very unclear. Do.

you remember being stressed by the interview? Or was it were you guys was it kind of more of a lark for you guys? Because what's interesting, again, I think if I have this right, you know, I might have the the ears a little off. But, Alex, you were 19 at the time, and Brandon, you were 20. Is that right? Yeah. It's right. Something like that?

It's right. Around that time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're just you're undergraduates. You're coming in. You're talking to YC about wanting to join YC, and, you know, you might figure that a lot of venture capitalists would be a little bit skeptical about a couple of Canadian coming in and saying they're gonna build self driving anything.

I think we had the baseline understanding that Silicon Valley, you know, culturally accepted the young founder story. And so I think we had felt comfort from that angle. But to give you a sense, think we had done so much prep for the YC interview process. We looked up all the prep questions on TechCrunch. We ran through who was gonna answer what and when and how and spent hours on that.

So we came into the interview and I know that you guys asked us anything that we hadn't been asked before via the prep material. So to say we were stressed and nervous, probably. But I don't know if the at least in my mind, the the young founder story really played into that.

And so, so you so you go through the batch. You you make progress on your shuttle. Mike gets you some sales. You're you're the the the third partner third founder at the time.

And and you come into demo day, and and I think, Alex, you said you you chose to focus not on these opportunities that were sitting out there in the ether in Australia, wherever, but on on the the focus that you've made and the progress you've made on self driving your shuttles. How did Demo Day go? How how did what was your experience there?

Yeah. So demo day demo day went I would say it went went really well. And it was certainly helped along by the fact that Cruise got acquired maybe fourteen days before demo day. Mhmm. So I remember waking up, and this is the beginning of something that would happen to me lots of times throughout our the history of embark.

I feel like I wait every six months, I'll wake up and I'll look at, like, the news, and I'm like, oh my god. I didn't expect that. Right? And this was the first one. It was when when Cruise got acquired. And we're like, Cruise got acquired for a billion dollars. Wow. And so that that really blew me away, and we didn't expect it.

But it really helped us because where, you know, one day before self driving was there's no way clear way to make money. Like, how how could these companies be valuable? Now Cruise got Cruise was, I think, the time, the biggest acquisition in the history of YC. And conveniently, lot of the people at demo day had invested in Cruise.

And so there were a lot of people who saw Embark and were, I think, much more excited to invest in Embark because now they had the the taste of how this could actually work. And I think we actually share investors with Cruise for that for that reason. And I'll just say for the for the sake of listeners,.

Cruise was a as I said, a YC company that was that was also building self driving vehicles, but self driving cars, which was purchased by General Motors in 2016.

And if you recall, Jeff, and I don't know if this was on purpose, but we were second to present into open demo day. You guys had played Cruise's demo day pitch from two years prior. So it was Cruise, they got acquired, another company, and then Embark. And so I think you really teed it up for us there.

Well, I actually don't remember if we were thinking, oh, this is gonna get those embarked guys. We're sort of like, oh, wow. This just happened. We might as well this is, like, a cool thing to do. But but it's certainly, that was that was a happy happy timing for you guys.

Yeah. We found so I would say coming out of demo day, we either the seed round was pretty straightforward to raise. I would it was, I don't know, probably a couple of weeks, and we'd already closed the seed round. And it was at at a price we were, like, super excited about back then. Today, it will be considered horribly low because that's how the venture ecosystem has evolved.

But Do want do wanna disclose.

what you raised at and how much you raised? You don't have to if you don't want to. We raised, like, 2,000,000,.

and the I would say the bulk of it came in at less than a 10,000,000 valuation.

Still pretty good. Right? Especially, you know, in the broad scope of things where where people used to raise it 2 or $3,000,000 evaluations. And they evaluations have come up as they seem to always do as there's more there's more cash and more competition. But, you know, it seemed like it was a really successful trajectory for you guys to be on.

Yeah. We were extremely excited about it.

Before we move on to to life post y c, if if you guys reflect and Brandon did a little bit of this reflecting on what happened during y c. What do you guys think was were the the the one or two or three things that were most trans transformative for Barden Labs and to embark and for the company as you went through the the the the batch program?

For me, personally, I I think it would be May maybe I'll pick three. Right? So I think one of them was really forcing us out into the market and forcing us to actually have the experience of trying to sell this product to somebody and see what do they think and would they pay for it. And I think, you know, as a hard tech company, we were very different than our batch mates.

But but we still learned a lot even though we were we had to go out with a much earlier product one that, you know, couldn't have been sold at scale, but we still still doing that same exercise to learn from users was was very, useful for us. The second one was I think there's a huge amount of value to us from getting access to a network.

You know, people ask, like, what are the big value props for YC? And I think for us, the biggest one was we were coming from Canada. We were two university kids. We didn't know anybody in the valley, and yet we were able to access this whole network of people. Many of whom are still big allies of the company.

People that invested in the seed round and embark are still people that I'll call up and ask questions to. And so getting access to that network and being able to raise money when we had no prior reputation was really powerful. And I think the third thing was it was really powerful for me to have people believe in us.

I think it it's sort of implausible when I look back on it, right, that we would be able to build this into a huge company. We're, like, two two kids who didn't know anything. We didn't know enough to know that it was implausible.

And so I think the fact that that, you know, y c as certainly sitting from Canada reading reading y combinator news, we would feel that this is, like, the pinnacle of the valley. And so just having somebody who we knew had seen companies succeed, who had, you know, backed Cruise, who had backed Instacart, who had backed, like, great companies before us.

That was really validating, and I think gave gave us some of the confidence to be able to keep pushing forward when, you know, self driving is obviously hard and the the it's not a foregone conclusion when you're a team of four that this was a reasonable challenge to be tackling.

Yeah. Like, one of the things I I believe strongly about YC and about one of the most important things that we can do for a company is to help a company actually believe, really, deeply, truly believe that the implausible and it's always somewhat implausible.

Maybe it was more for you guys and more implausible than than your runner with the mill implausibility that you'd build a gigantic company out of your two person start up.

But it's always implausible, and getting that extra, you know, just core strong belief that you guys might just be the ones that do it, that build the next whatever, the next Instacart, Coinbase, Airbnb, now, of course, Embark is is actually a key exit value for OIC as you go off into, you know, the the crazy world of actually getting to the next step and and building your product and delivering it to customers.

So you guys you you you're dangerous and that you have a couple million dollars in the bank, and you're you have the the Australians probably calling you up from time to time saying, where's our truck? And and you have, you know, some college campuses on the hook now.

What happened to to create the version of Embark that or, you know, the what was the genesis of the version of Embark that we see today after after you finished y c?

So, yeah, exiting y c, kinda to set the stage again, you know, I think we had a little bit of a sour taste in our mouth after the entire, you know, campus program. We knew that we had built something really awesome, but we knew that nobody wanted it.

And that was that was, you know, maybe the first and only time we had felt that in the company's history but it it I can tell you very honestly, didn't feel great, right, having spent weeks on end not sleeping building the shuttle program and knowing that you know, no matter how much more I put into it, it wouldn't go any further.

And so we looked across all of the different domains that we could conceive of in the self driving landscape from taxis Okay. Through shuttles and an iterate an iterated version of that to the small speed low speed delivery robots to deliver food all the way through Australia. And kind of indexing on those two key values like simple problem, great business.

And almost looking at that lens at every single application and trucking just really stood out for that reason.

When you look at how we're scoping the the trucking problem, we want to do this hub to hub model, this hub and spoke model where humans will do the first and last mile of the journey and then our automated trucks will go from one hub to another hub and that allows us to avoid city street driving and focus on solving the simple long range problem of the middle mile and that kind of checked off the box of you know, it's not easy but it's simpler and that's really important.

And then on the business side, you look at the trucking industry and it's under immense pressure and that's one thing that it was I was personally surprised by. You know, there's 60,000, 80 thousand truck drivers short. You get a new report out every single week. You look at you know, the Port Of LA right now and there's freight ships lined up to get into port.

There's huge problems in logistics that that exist today and then you look at the scale of the industry, 708 hundred billion dollars and it's just this massive opportunity that that's ripe for innovation and we're well positioned to take that on. And so for us it was almost the obvious choice in some way.

It was it was a nervous choice but an obvious one that this was the the way we had to go forward.

And I think over the last six years we've had the benefit of being one of very few companies that have been able to pick such a clear vision and a clear perspective on how this industry should take shape, and really put our heads down into it for for such a long time and I think that, in all honesty is one of one of the reasons why we're one of the greatest companies working on self driving trucks today because we from very, very early on, we were able to find that perspective.

Yeah. For what it's worth, the I found it immensely impressive how you guys kept focus on the core thing that you were building.

And even if the core changed from shuttles, which I thought you were incredibly thoughtful about I mean, I'm sure it was a little depressing there, but you were really thoughtful about whether and how you're gonna deliver value with this core idea and then the next step you took. And and then we're incredibly focused on this is the right solution for the technology we've built.

So I thought I mean, I think I think the result of that is, you know, led directly to the success Embark has had. One of the things I'd say we were almost a little bit surprised about, happily.

surprised about was, you know, we finished our seed round and less than a month later, we tell all of investors, hey. We've got this new mission. Here we go. And I, you know, I don't know if it's a product of the ecosystem overall but nobody was really upset about that. They're like, alright, let's go. What's the plan?

Was sort of the sentiment and for us the plan forward was okay, well, let's buy a truck.

Let's figure out if we can control it with a computer, let's by early next year control the the truck system, get it on a track, make it work like our golf cart did and take the first step forward and and that was a really exciting opportunity to iterate on the platform, get our hands deep in really what the automotive industry presented challenges to.

You know automotive tier ones didn't really want to work with a couple of college dropouts that claimed to have self driving tech. We didn't think or see the world the way that they did at the time.

So we had to do all of these like crazy things like reverse engineer how the braking system worked and work work our way around the cryptographic hashes in some of the systems there just to get the system online. And and those are the the crazy and fun things we did out of necessity in the earliest days. And I think, you know, a little bit of our ingenuity got us got us through that.

I feel like we can talk for a really long time here, but I I I wanna transition for a little bit just to sort of the next phase of the company. You went from, you know, few people to, you know, a few dozen people to a couple hundred. It there's there's a whole challenging task of company building there. You have to you have to hire. You have to fundraise more.

You have to think about building a culture and a management team and all that stuff. What you know, I just think that for kids right out of school, that probably was some of the most daunting stuff. And maybe, Alex, you're better positioned to to to comment on this all.

I I assume both of I'm sure both of you have a lot of you know, had to go through a lot of pain and learning as you as the company has grown. Tell us a little about about how that's happened, how the story maybe what I mean, it must have been just hard just hiring, you know, people who are experienced when, you know, you have to have, you know, people with gray hair like me reporting to a kid.

I mean, you have to that real literally is what has to happen. They have to have the confidence in you guys to to wanna join up with a company like Embark. So talk a little bit about that.

I I'm honestly still a little shocked that some of Embarkers' early employees decided to come work for us. But because we've we've hired a world class team. I think one one of the things that one of the things that's maybe a little different again about Embark versus some of the other sort of software only startups is when we came out, we're like, alright.

There's absolutely no way we can just hire a bunch of other Waterloo Software Engineers and get this done. We're gonna need to hire real experts. We're gonna need to hire robotics experts. We hired our first software engineering hire was a ran, like, one of the research programs at Volkswagen and built the first planner to run on an OEM self driving car on public roads.

And, yeah, he decided to come work at what was then Varden Labs. And our first we had to pretty quickly after that. We had to hire head of recruiting. We hired, like, Shopify head of technical recruiting. Tech. Let me interrupt. Do you know why? Like, why did that person make that decision?

Do you ever ask them what, like, what are thinking? I honestly, I've never, like, asked really seriously. Like, I know I know that, like, they were really excited about the guy. His name is Sumudra. Sumudra is really excited about startups. He he wanted to someday get into startups. He thought that the the the pragmatism we brought to the problem was refreshing.

He'd been working on self driving for a long time, and so he had sort of that that context. And think part of what convinced him is we had dinner with him, and we just laughed about how self driving was, and we felt we had a lot of the same values. And he sat in the golf cart. So ironically, the golf cart was a big part of how we did recruiting even after we weren't working on a golf cart anymore.

Because it was like, come see what we built. And.

to generalize that last point a little bit, cause I think you're you're getting at a theme here, Jeff, which is like, how as young founders with no credibility did did we accomplish anything? And it was honestly always through building something and then putting it in the hands of people so that they could not deny the fact that we had built that thing.

And it was almost in a lot of ways the contrast that looked really exciting which was, you know, there's a team of three people here and they have a self driving golf cart like how the hell did that happen? I've been on Volkswagen Steen for you know, a year and we've got 30 people and we've accomplished less.

And I think that that story really resonated with people because you they knew you could do great things with small teams. And so when looking at hires, investors, anything, even even to this day, our primary mode of exciting people about the business is put them in the vehicle and show them that it can do great things.

The I think the the point is, Wes, how do young founder do it? How does any founder do this? Any founder does this by recruiting people to come to their crazy, implausible idea by telling an incredible story about the future. And you guys the the the toys you guys built, the the awesome, cool product that you built made your story more plausible. It made you guys credible.

It made the whole venture credible in my view. It made it too credible to to YC, and in the end, it made it credible to the people that you brought on board. So and, Alex, you were saying when I interrupted.

Oh, I was just saying so so, you know, Sumudra, our first software engineer, is not the only really high quality person that joined the the leadership team. We hired a head of policy who previously worked at the White House and then had worked in the the automated vehicle industry. We hired the technical recruiter who is Shopify's head of technical recruiting. That yeah.

There's a funny story there, but we'll we'll we'll we don't have time for it.

We hired, like Next video. Really.

excellent people. That's right. Next video can just be, like, funny stories from Embark. And I think, yeah, one part of it was was the story, and one part of it was the vehicle. One part of it was getting to know us and feeling like we were people that got along, you know, that we had similar values.

And I think that's the three things that that brought the people together, and I'm incredibly proud that all those people still work in Embark today.

And so we we have a really great group of of people both, you know, people who are been here with many years and people who joined the last few years, but that's certainly the the most enjoyable thing day to day is is, like, the group of people that that believe in this mission with us now.

So in every start up and nearly every start up, there comes, like, pretty low moments that you have to fight your way through. If you guys had to pick out, like, the lowest of the low moment and talk about how you fought through that, can you does anything immediately come to mind?

I mean, I think the the obvious spot where we really had to to change and handle a lot of adversity, which I don't know that we ever felt terrible about it in the moment, but was, like, you know, a pretty scary spot for the business was when we had to pick a new business. Alright. Self driving shuttle isn't gonna work. What do we do now? And it was a very structured process.

It wasn't it didn't just happen. We we sorta had we very specifically said, okay. We're gonna finish doing what we set out to do because we wanna prove that we can. Then we're gonna take a step back, and we're gonna think really hard. We spend, you know, a few months getting to know all the opportunities that exist, and then we're gonna make a decision.

And I think I always say start ups are kind of kinda like three things that keep them going. It's it's a a really exciting vision. It's having resources in the bank, it's having people you enjoy working with. I think if you have two of the three, you can survive not having the third.

And so at the time, we had, you know, we had the resource and we had the people, and we didn't know what the vision was gonna be. But we we like, we were a smaller team. We like working together. We like what we were working on. We knew that we thought it could be valuable. And so the that that sort of rotation wasn't it wasn't scary, but it was certainly disorienting.

Yeah. I'm kind of intrigued just along the lines of of building the company. If if you guys have a way of describing what it's like to work at Embark, what's the culture like? What is it? I mean, I I just sort of imagine there's a couple hundred tinkerers there all, like, die you know, dying to get on the trucks and build them and and improve them. What what is it what does it feel like to you?

Do you guys have a way of articulating how you think about the company you're building?

I think I think we've got a lot more problems to solve than we have people. It's the first thing I'd say. And I think as a result, we naturally index on people that you know, take a high degree of ownership and and pride in the work that they do.

And so I think the coolest thing at least personally for me about working at Embark is I I I honestly just feel like a sponge because there's so many different facets of this business. Know, we have experts in control systems and AI and robotics and how to think about the marketplace and finance etcetera.

And we're still small enough today where you can go talk to that person who's you know the honest to god expert in their field and you know through one way or another over the last five years, I think we've built one of the most high performing teams and and that's just really exciting and so I think to be in this environment in a lot of ways it's motivating, in a lot of ways it's stressful and challenging just because we have so much to do and we're always resource constrained but I think at the end of the day it's the people.

I think between Alex and I I think one of the things I'm most proud of is just the culture of humility that we have and that's you know at the personal level but also humility and respect for the challenge that we have ahead of us and and that's really awesome too. We're not too headstrong on as individuals within the organization.

I've always been super impressed with the way you guys have always been really clear headed about how hard the problem you were solving was and that you were going to solve it, which was always super impressive. So there's some exciting stuff coming up for Embark in the near future.

Can you guys talk a little bit about sort of you you you jumped ahead a little bit, Brandon, to '23, '20 '4, but in in '21 or '22, '20 '3, and '24. In '21, something pretty exciting is going on. Maybe maybe discuss that, and we can wrap up in just a few minutes and let you guys get back to building the self driving trucks of the future.

Yeah. So '21 has been a crazy year. Twenty twenty and 2021 were both crazy years, I would say. Right? There was the pandemic. We had just to figure out how to be remote. There was a period where it wasn't clear if the bottom was gonna drop out of the venture market. And then all of a sudden, everything came roaring back.

Suddenly, people were asking, you know, the opposite question, you know, how can you how can you go faster? How can we how can we really bring this to market in the the most accelerated way? And we spent some time really looking at, you know, what's the what's the next step.

Because at the same time through that that piece of the pandemic, we had solved a lot of really important problems and positioned the technology to a spot where we felt like we knew what the road map needed to look like. And so we had a level of clarity after five years. Of we solved the hard a lot of the hard problems. We have construction working.

We have the ability to operate in adverse weather conditions up and operating. We have something called vision map fusion, which allows us to operate where where the map has changed. And so we had a lot of these fundamentals, and now we have to think about how do we get that onto the road into production.

And so in June, we announced a SPAC transaction where we're merging with a company called Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp two. They have amazing Canadian founders of the of the SPAC, actually, who we're really excited about. And, hopefully, by the time this is posted, we will have gone through the the final couple of weeks of the process.

So we're sitting here today a couple of weeks out from the end, and we'll post this. I think the intention is once Embark is is trading under its own ticker. And so the last step here is basically to go through, close that merger, which will result in up to $600,000,000 ending up on Embark's balance sheet and Embark becoming a public company.

Wow. Well, that's pretty amazing. I well, I'll just say I'm I'm super excited for you guys. It feels to me like this is sort of a story of of college kids who are who who like to play with building things and just kept on building bigger and bigger and cooler things until you got to, like, building trucks, which are you know, it's hard to get too much bigger than that.

I guess maybe I'd love to lead you guys with the last word here. You're you're building, you know, just some of the hardest of the hard tech that you can build self driving, you know, 18 wheelers. That's pretty awesome. Do you have any words of wisdom that you wanna leave for future hard tech? Any any kind of founders.

And especially, I I guess, like, you know, people who are who are your profile, who are whether whether they're your age or older, who are who are builders, who are excited about new technology.

I'll I'll go first. I think my my sort of one liner for for Embark, kind of how we run the company and always have, is we would look at a problem, and the first question is, well, why won't this work? Right? And we think about that for a bit, and we try to understand why it wouldn't work. And in some cases, we just didn't know enough, and then we're like, okay. We're just gonna ignore that problem.

Probably won't work. But there's some problems where we think about it, and we think about it, and we think about it. And we get through all the questions of why it wouldn't work, and at the end, we'd be like, well, I can't see why it wouldn't work. And then we just go out and do it. And I think that I can't see why it wouldn't work has been sort of the guiding light for us in in many directions.

And I think you can get to that point in a business, you know, I I don't know why it wouldn't work. Maybe the answer is just because no one's done it yet done it yet.

And I think I think for me, you know, it's it's really hard to look at where we are now and answer the question, how did we get here given where we started?

But I think the reality of of startups and exponential growth in general is that every step of the way is just one step forward and this whole journey has been just a series of incremental steps and some of them have been in the right direction, some of them have been completely in the wrong direction, but most of them are generally aligned with where we need to go.

And when looking forward it's always this kind of not so steep slope to take one more step forward but when you look backwards you've already climbed a mountain and that's sort of what this this journey has been in a lot of ways.

And so I don't think there's a simple piece of advice where you can where that I can give that says how do you take one big step from where you are to where we are today but very much you know a series of small steps ends up accumulating into something great and large if you spend enough time on it.

Well, thank you guys for taking the time out of preparing for your IPO and building your trucks and building your company to do this video with us. It's been an incredible pleasure and honor for me to get a chance to work with you guys over the last five years, and I'm looking forward to many more years of that. And good luck with everything coming up. Great to see you guys.

Thanks, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. Bye.