Taking a Company Public at 26 | Brandon Moak

We ended up taking the company public at a $5 billion valuation, and Alex and I ended up becoming like the youngest executives of a public company. The day we went public, somebody had asked my sister if they had expected that this is what would have happened in my life. And my sister was like, no, of course not. I was just a kid that liked playing Xbox and playing hockey. I didn't know how to code till I was, you know, summer before college. We record our YC video. In our golf cart while it's self-driving. About a week after we ended up closing our seed round, we actually pivoted the business, which is kind of crazy, and we landed on the truck idea. Trucking industry makes between $700 and $800 billion in revenue per year. That's twice enterprise SaaS. 2021 through summer of '23, the markets were down. We stopped manufacturing, we stopped shipping. All of our money disappears and we're like, we're competing against Google. They wanna solve the full self-driving problem. How are we going to compete? In parallel to that, we had been approached for an M&A process, but like 11th hour, they pulled out. I've flown literally to the corner of the earth to find an answer, and it wasn't there. One of my friends, he told me like, "On the other side, no matter what happens, all the things that matter will still be there. Your family will still love you. Your friends will still wanna be friends with you." In that moment, I didn't really believe him. Now on the other side of it, feeling and seeing those things be more true than I believed they would be was like really cool.

Hi friends, welcome to the Maker Podcast. My name is Matt Carley. I'm one of the co-founders of Maker.

And I'm Max Hellerstein, the other co-founder of Maker.

And on this show, we just have really honest conversations with some of the top young founders that are under 35 with over a million in funding or revenue, and just hear their life stories, how they built what they built, and the highs and lows along the way. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy.

Thank you.

Brandon Moak, welcome to the Maker Podcast. We are very excited to have you.

Welcome, Brandon. This is awesome. We are so excited to not only do this conversation, but you've been so open and shared so much with the Maker community that the ability to share it through this medium is like really exciting for us.

And I think also just to like give the audience some context on how we met. I was running the community previously that you were a part of, and I was still in school at the time. I was also kind of on the side, like, figuring out, you know, what it is that I would want to build eventually. And at the time, you were one of the youngest people in the world, if not the youngest, to be running a public company. So you were insanely busy.

Yeah.

And the thing that I appreciated the most was that you always picked up the phone call or always responded to my texts about, like, the simplest you know, small trivial thing about how to find my first engineer, you know, whatever it was. And I just appreciated that so much. And then fast forward to today, I mean, you've been a part of the Maker community now for a few years, and it's just been so awesome having you. And I also remember at the Austin retreat, you gave like one of the most inspiring talks about your whole company journey. And so Max and I really wanted to like have a formal conversation and be able to share this with the world, because I just think your story is amazing, and I think it'll inspire a lot of people. So thanks for coming on.

I really appreciate it. I'm excited to share this story, not to just a close community, but it's not something that I've shared very publicly before. And I'm really— I think give the space and the opportunity that this story deserves.

Yeah, when we were doing some research before this, we looked up Embark and you, and all the videos were just about the company and Embark, and it was not about you and your life and your story.

And so I really excited to be able to share with the world your story. Yeah, really appreciate that.

I would love to kind of just kind of paint the picture for the audience and for us, just like what was early childhood for Brendan like? We'll get into all the company stuff, but we'd love to hear.

I grew up in a small province in Canada called Nova Scotia. And in the best way, it's like disconnected from the rest of the world, especially when I was growing up. Like I biked to my friend's house every day. I wasn't really into academics, although in some places I did do well.

Where'd you do well?

I was particularly good at like maths and physics, but you couldn't like put a gun to my head and get me to write an English essay well. Like I was getting C's in those courses. I loved playing video games and like Call of Duty. I'd go home and just do that rather than do my homework. Yeah. And I'd say probably through half of 11th grade, my parents might have been a little bit worried about me. Like, yeah, he's smart, but he's not really applying himself.

Are you the youngest, oldest?

I'm one of four.

One of four.

So it's pretty chaotic. Okay. Household a little bit.

Nice.

What did your parents do or what was their situation?

Yeah, my parents, they ran a small business while I was growing up building like training software. They'd make 3D models for like aircraft landing gears, and then they'd turn that into like this, like coursework to train like tradespeople how to like reassemble and maintain that. And they'd use that with like 3D software to make it a little bit more visual. So through that, I got a little bit of lens into like technology and advanced software, but it was still a little bit at arm's length. I didn't really know what my parents did other than like they they worked with computers and they worked a lot.

Was it important that you did well in school or that you were focused on school, or was it sort of like, it's just something to do?

I would say the bar for performance in school was set by my sister. She worked incredibly hard. She's probably one of the hardest working people I know in my life. Wow. And so she got like straight A's, 90s. And I was like, what's the least amount of work that I can do that makes it such that I'm close enough so that my parents don't get mad at me?

A passing grade.

A passing grade. And she set the bar.

So childhood is mostly you playing video games. You're just kind of trying to like coast by, just do the least amount of work to get the passing grade. And then where does life take you?

Yeah, from there, grade 11 through 12, you have to make a decision on what you want to do with the rest of your life. At least that's what it feels like at the time. I figured I was going to university, and ever since I was very young, I was told that I was going to be an engineer. And long before I even knew what an engineer was, like, I remember Googling like what is an engineer.

Where did that come from? Why did you think that?

Largely just the people around me told me that, like aunts and uncles. And then, you know, in retrospect, it was probably because I spent so much time like building, playing with Legos and little K'Nex blocks, and, you know, little things I did on the computer. And so the question for me to be— to answer, like, what should I be when I grow up, was kind of largely answered. And you you know, very true to like who I am, which is really great. Like, I know a lot of people struggle with that, but I think from a very early age I've just been the builder by nature, um, and engineering was the perfect thing for that. So I applied to a couple universities across Canada, and I picked Waterloo for a number of reasons, but not for the reasons that I think I should have. First was I got into the mechatronics engineering program and it just sounded cool, like mechatronics, robots. That sounds fun, but I've never really worked with a robot in my life. Second was the co-op program. I didn't understand the strength of the co-op program and what it would give to me at the time. It just seemed like a good way to finance the degree, right? Like, I want to be financially independent, pay for it, get through it. So if I can work while I'm studying, then that'll you know, make the ends meet and I'll be pretty happy.

Is that how that works? Most of the kids will study and work, and then that work, the dollars they earn from that will be what pays for the school and sort of—

Yeah, most people graduating out of Waterloo, at least in the engineering program, graduate without any student debt. Wow. Which is absolutely incredible.

It's a cool way to do it if you think about it, where you like do schooling but then you have to go work to pay for the school. It's an interesting—

And I'd say it's a very sink or swim ecosystem. Like to just to paint the picture, right? I'm graduating high school with no skills whatsoever. Like I was like professionally, the most I had done was coached kids aged 13 to kayak, right? That's not applicable as an engineer.

I'm pretty good at Call of Duty as well.

Probably pretty good. Yeah, for sure. My first semester, you you know, I'm studying linear algebra, which I'd never seen before, calculus, some physics, some programming work, um, chemistry, whatever. We're going through our first midterms. It's hard. It's really hard. Like, I have never studied as much before. I never even learned how to study in my high school career because that just wasn't like of interest to me. And then you're applying to jobs for the first time, and you're competing against fifth years who've already worked at Google and Facebook, and you're all applying and competing against the same jobs. And so I just remember that being really hard in that moment of like, I'm not competing with the job market in any meaningful way and academics is slamming me. Like, I'm living away from home for the first time. And, you know, this is the moment where you decide if you can make it at Waterloo or not. Like, you make it through this. If you do, you know, you're successful. And if you don't, then, you know, there's a pretty high dropout rate. The second year, they label the semesters 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B. Everybody would say, um, 2B or not to be. That was like the inflection point.

Wow.

And then I think in my journey in going to Waterloo too, there's, I think, one moment that I wanted to call out that I think changed the trajectory of my life in a pretty meaningful way. When I was applying to Waterloo, I got connected to this guy named Kyle, who's a friend of my older brother's who had gone through the Waterloo program a number of years before me. He heavily edited my application to get in, which was super helpful. And then the other thing he said is like, if I'm going to give you one piece of advice, it's going to be to teach yourself how to code. And this is the pre-ChatGPT days, right? 10 years ago. And so I just spent that summer teaching myself how to code. I found this YouTube series around game development, which I thought it was cool. And I don't remember much about the game that I did make, but I remember that you had to learn how to like design graphics and low-level systems code and just put it all together end to end. And that was really my first exposure to designing systems.

Was this fun for you?

It was a ton of fun. Yeah, it's been many— like my job through the summer again was be a coach for young kids learning how to kayak, and I'd come home exhausted and then just like play on the computer and teach myself how to code. Cool.

So you're getting to the end of, I guess, are you entering Waterloo at this point?

Or when at the time he gave me the advice, I was probably 3 months until getting out to Waterloo.

Getting out like you're heading there?

Going to Waterloo. Gotcha.

Okay, cool. And so you learn how to program in one summer.

Yeah, and I wouldn't say it was good. Yeah, but that was like the start of the journey. But, you know, to paint the picture, in 3 months taught myself a little bit how to code. Month and a half after that, I'm applying to jobs to write software.

Is this like an internship that you're trying to get, or is it like a full-blown—

Yeah, it's, it's an internship. So like for 4 months work, get paid to work, and for the degree at Waterloo, you actually have to land 5 of 6 possible internships to graduate. It's a part of the degree. So if you don't get the job, you don't pass. I didn't really talk about this much earlier, but the— like, when I got to Waterloo, I very much felt out of place. I come from a region and a place where my grades get inflated, and so I'm entering an environment where all of the people around me have won academic competitions. They've won, you know, they're world champion roboticists like my co-founder Alex. And so I get into this room and like, I'm just, I'm just a guy, right? I've been playing Call of Duty all summer. I've been kayaking and I kind of taught myself how to code and everybody's like, look at all these amazing things. Like I interned for a software company last—

Was that intimidating for you?

Incredibly intimidating. I I didn't think I was going to make it. Like, I didn't feel like there was many people there that, you know, came from a place like I did, and I just felt behind. And that's like, that was my starting point. And then with all this stuff ahead of me to try to achieve, it's— it was very difficult.

And if that moment, was Brandon thinking like, look, I just want to get a job, or was Brandon like, I want to start a company? Like, where was your head at in terms of your future?

Yeah, nowhere near the company thing. It was just like I just want to not fail. And I really just had to prove it to myself. And I think that was the fire I needed lighted under my ass to work hard, right? I ended up doing very well academically that term, much to my surprise, because I just worked my ass off because I didn't feel like I belonged. Wow.

And then where— what happened then?

I did manage to get a job, which was great. It was this really cool engineering firm just outside of Toronto. I was working on this biomedical device. I was a test specialist, so I wasn't doing any design work or anything fancy, but my job was to test this device that would rehabilitate stroke patients. And that was cool.

And then you're there for 4 months?

4 months, and then back to school in the summer right after that.

Cool, cool. And then what does life start to look like towards the end of Waterloo?

It was a fun journey. So after my first term, at Waterloo, I learned about this Velocity program. And at Waterloo, Velocity is this incubator for the ecosystem of startups. They've got a bunch of different branches. One of them was called the Velocity Residence. And in the Velocity Residence, you had to apply to get in, and then you would just effectively live in residence with students who wanted to be entrepreneurs. And that sounded exciting to me.

That sounds awesome.

I didn't have any particular idea, but given a little bit of my upbringing and having seen some of the things around me at Waterloo, I was like, this seems like a cool place. And, you know, a few of my friends were going to as well. So I was like a last minute, like co-op term was ending. I just applied. I was late to apply and they just had one spot open up because somebody dropped out and then I got in. I was like, awesome. Towards like my middle of time at Waterloo is where I met Alex at the Velocity residence. And I guess we just ended up coming together through our shared love of building. We were actually in the same cohort, same class in mechatronics, but we were never like close friends. But we were both in the residence. We both spent all of our time in the dev lab and we just started hacking away on projects.

And then for those listening, who is Alex?

Yeah, Alex, Alex Rodriguez. He's my co-founder. Probably the smartest person I know. He was the CEO of Embark, and when we get to that story, I'm sure we will share more. But he came from Calgary. Um, before he got to Waterloo, he was a world robotics champion. Um, so super sharp.

Yeah, it's like a child prodigy.

Child prodigy. Like, great.

It's like when robots like fight each other. Remember, they would make those like battle robots? Or not?

He didn't do BattleBots. Um, FIRST Robotics is what he did.

Different kind of thing.

Different kind of thing. And it's, it's massive in, in some communities. Um, okay, so you and Alex are working at this lab together? Yeah, we're just hacking away on like random projects, building dynamometers and like LED screens and stuff, just for the love of building.

Sweet. What is like the first real project you guys do?

This other guy, Mike, who had brought us together, and we had kind of 3 collectively been working on a number of projects. I remember doing a hackathon project with us 3, and this is maybe a little bit hard to describe, but we built this thing, it was called a persistence of vision display. Effectively, it was, one LED strip, maybe like 15 pixels long, and you spin it around really fast, and while you're spinning it, you flash the lights, and as it flashes, it kind of paints a picture.

And when you were doing this work, were you like, this is my calling, this is the kind of stuff I want to be doing?

Did this feel— It was just fun. I think if you take a step back and you observe me through my life, you'd be like, this is his calling. Like, he likes, he's gonna do things like this. In the moment, it's just like, why not? Yeah, sure.

It's obvious looking backwards.

Yeah. And I think that's how I've approached largely my entire life. Like, I've never had a 5-year plan, never had a 10-year plan. It was just—

I do think that there is something magnetic, right? That there is something calling you there. It's just not as intentional or not as like for my career or whatever. You're like, I want to be doing this.

Yeah, it just feels right. Um, and I love doing it. And it just so happened to be like a place where the skills are valued incredibly highly. And I got lucky.

That's great. So you guys ultimately end up building this like golf cart.

Yeah.

How do we get there?

3 of us working on the project at the time. Alex and Mike took the original lead on this project of the golf cart. But I remember this was probably our 3rd semester at Waterloo. We probably had 3 weeks of debate around was it possible to build a self-driving golf cart? Like, could we do it? From 2008 through 2013. I joined Waterloo in 2013. Google had been working on their project. The industry and a lot of the research on the algorithmic side had progressed, and they're actually starting to have their vehicles drive. And we're starting to notice, like, this is the coolest project. You have to imagine, we're spending all of our days thinking about robots in this mechatronics program, and like, this is the pinnacle. Like, it's going to be the coolest, most transformational technology. Of our entire generation, and we just want to be a part of it. And remember, we're co-op students, right? Our goal in life is to get a good co-op job. That's it.

You're not even trying to start a company. It's like, how can we just become—

We just want to be engineers at Waymo. And we had heard about Cruise, who had gone through YC, but they were still in stealth. We're just like, we just want to work there. And so how do you do that? Just build a self-driving car. It's easy, right?

Very simple.

So they spend most of the summer kicking off this project. Buy a golf cart, the sensors, the actuators, the reverse engineer, put in like an embedded system. And very much like both of those guys were competitive roboticists, 6-week build, you know, it's not going to work for much longer than that, but get it together, make it work. They spent a bunch of time just standing that up, and they got it largely to a point where it was working. Towards the end of that build sprint, they brought me on the team. At that point we had the self-driving golf cart being able to drive itself and it wasn't super capable. Think about it as a train that drove on tracks and if you jumped in front of it, it would stop. That's effectively what we had built.

But if you map out a golf course, it's pretty simple, right? You can have this fixed area, it's where the holes are, you know everything's at. So was it able to do that well?

There wasn't a business backdrop behind it, so we weren't actually wanting to automate it for golf per se. It was just like the vehicle platform we had to put it on.

And a golf cart's simple.

And a golf cart's simple.

Low cost to get in.

Low cost, you can buy it, you can open it up and hack it. It's pretty lightweight. And so we were mostly just driving it on fields. And then it works pretty well, film a bunch of videos, start getting a little bit of media attention, which is pretty cool. And we ended up driving it on, the University of Waterloo is fully enclosed by what's called Ring Road. So it's a road that wraps around the entire campus. And the university let us, it's like a public/private road. The university let us drive our golf cart on that road. And then our claim to fame at the time was that we had built Canada's first self-driving vehicle to drive on a public road, which is pretty cool. So we had the president of the university in the golf cart, Alex there explaining to him how it worked, and it just did a whole loop around. And that was pretty cool. That was like, we did it. We had written a bunch of blog posts about the build journey.

You guys famous on campus at this point, or?

Yeah, like people are like, what, looking at that, like what's going on? We're definitely famous in our robotics class. Like, holy shit, what did you guys just did that?

And what happened to the golf cart?

We ended up applying to YC, and in our YC video, I think this is probably online, it's a little bit embarrassing, but we record our YC video, in our golf cart while it's self-driving, which was pretty cute. So like, we just like pitch who we were, what we were building. At the time, we were going to build low-speed shuttles for closed campuses. So I think university campuses, like, you know, pretty much every university student builds a company for like university students and they can't think of—

Mostly party campuses.

Exactly. We did the same thing, right? Just with a little bit more advanced technology. Or retirement communities. We thought that that was like the best place and Again, our whole thesis, how we were going to compete in this space, first was just acknowledge who we were. We're like 19, 20 years old. We're competing against Google. They're a pretty serious team with a lot of money. They want to solve the full self-driving problem. How are we going to compete? Well, the answer is we're just going to solve a smaller problem. And we're like, if we're just more thoughtful about how we build it, then we can actually compete in this space where people are solving the biggest problem and just throwing a bunch of money at it. And we never thought that they were eventually going to be successful. They've proved us wrong. And thankfully, like, their vehicles are awesome. But that was our wedge. Like, nobody believed that we could do it, so we're just going to be smarter about where we deploy. And self-driving shuttles was our thesis for that, and that's what we applied to YC with. Cool.

Okay, you apply to YC, what happens?

And we get in. Oh my gosh, surprise. Yeah.

Wow.

We did like 2 rounds of interviews. I remember being so nervous and honestly, in the interview is just a blur, right?

Really?

You go in, it's like snap, snap, snap, snap, snap. Just so pointed with so many questions and you've got to be on your, on your toes.

Is it like a standard job interview? Like how for the folks that haven't applied to YC?

Absolutely not. Really?

Okay. What's it like?

I feel like for job interviews, it's a lot more warm and like a lot more personable, right? Like, let's just like feel each other out. YC was like, you get in the room and we're just going to rapid fire questions. We expect rapid fire responses. And then 15 minutes is going to go by and you're going to leave and you're going to be like, we didn't talk about anything. And that's how it felt.

Remember any question that if you look back on, you're like, oh, that was a really elegant question that—

I don't remember anything in the room.

Just blacked out.

So we were at, I remember post-YC, we had grabbed a couple beers and we'd gone to this pizza restaurant.

Did you hear back pretty, pretty immediately?

They call you the same day.

The same day.

Wow. End of the day. So we were just sitting down eating pizza with a beer. Alex gets a call on his phone and they just said we got in. Nice.

Is it just like a, hey guys, you're in, like meet us at this place at this date, or?

Yeah, I was on the phone call and I don't remember much other than we got in.

But you're still blacked out of the story.

Still blacked out of the story. But that was pretty cool. So back to the co-op program for a second, alternating school, work, school, work. Winter of 2016 lines up with a co-op program with us, but before we go interview for YC, we have to decide, are we going to go apply for a job or are we just going to go work on this? So before we even knew, and we decided, let's just go work on this YC or not, right? And we're going to apply to YC and hopefully we get in. Thankfully we got in because otherwise we'd just been like twiddling our thumbs for 4 months instead of like working and making money. But yeah, then we got in and 2 months later YC starts.

And what is that like?

The period of YC is probably the period of my life where I've worked the hardest. And I'd eat dinner and I'd fall asleep at 8:00 PM. From 8:00 PM till noon, I'd be asleep and then I'd just wake up in the middle of the night and I'd code from, with nobody awake, which was great, from midnight till 6:00 AM and then I'd fall asleep again till noon. And that was like day in, day out, just doing that. And to paint the picture of what we were trying to accomplish in YC. So YC at the end has the Demo Day. And YC today, I think, is a little bit different in that most companies try to raise their rounds before Demo Day even happens. Back when I went through YC, that was very much not the case and very uncommon. You would be doing incredible if you had raised before YC. So there's this Demo Day. And you stand up in front of 300 of the top investors in Silicon Valley, and you pitch your business. Deep tech companies weren't as popular back then. And most of the companies there were your typical, like, you build an app or some form of enterprise SaaS. There's like a nice template for if you're growing 5 to 7% week over week through your journey at YC, and you've got this nice up into the right graph, and you're going to get funded at the end of it. For us, it's like, okay, well, we've got a self-driving golf cart that's not a product, and we have an industry that doesn't know how to buy this product, but we don't know if they want it, and we've got 6 weeks to figure this out. So what do we do? We like talk to our advisors, NYC beforehand, we just kind of laid out our plan of like, well, we need to be on a different vehicle platform and we should probably just demo it at a couple university campuses. And they're like, yeah, that seems good. And this is funny because at least as a university student, when you're looking ahead to like these industry titans, you think like they know everything. They're just going to give you the plan. And then you're just gonna follow it and you're gonna be successful. We had just pitched them our plan for the business through YC, and the only feedback we got is, yeah, that looks good. And we're like, great to be validated, but also like—

Not super constructive.

Not even that much. It's like either like, we didn't believe that we had it all figured out, and like they didn't have any advice for how we win. Beyond just like do what seems reasonable. And we're like, does anybody know what, how to do this? It was a little bit of a destabilizing moment, but we had the plan and we executed on it. So our goal was to demo. We managed to sign up Fresno State to do our very first demo in the like couple weeks from Christmas to our demo for Fresno State, we had to buy a new vehicle, put our technology on top of it, rewrite a bunch of algorithms. And yeah, there was like a 4-week build period there where I just like was only thinking about code and we barely made that timeline. Like, I remember finishing the code like the night before we're driving it out. To Fresno State, and then we're on the campus like recording the paths. And then the vehicle breaks before the demo, like on site. And then like we hack it together and we fix it. And then we run it for the day and a half. And then like an hour after the demo, it breaks again. Like, it was crazy. Oh man. But yeah, just like so much, so much pressure, so intense. But we pulled it off, which was really cool. And then we threw the rest to YC. We Things got a little bit smoother. We were mostly just demoing at different university campuses across California, and then Demo Day comes and like we're pitching the business. What came through when we were doing these demos was that this business sucked. Why? The short answer is students are fully capable of walking themselves to class and they have no money. And they have no money.

And they have no money.

It's like not a desperate infrastructure problem. Like, the dean of the university isn't like, oh my God, the students aren't getting to class, how do we improve this, right? Like, we're a novelty, we're marketing material, and we're expensive marketing material. And that came through. So externally, we were able to paint this picture like we're building really cool technology, it's working, like you can sit in it, there's this market demand, we've got universities lined up, they need it, they want it, students love it. And then internally, we're like, this isn't working. And that's just a weird place to be. But anyway, we pitched the company at Demo Day as a self-driving shuttle company. And we got to give a shout out to Cruise because one week before Demo Day, Cruise gets acquired by GM for for $1 billion. And 2 years before, they stood up on the stage at Demo Day and pitched a self-driving vehicle company. And that was just so helpful, like a gift given from the heavens.

They created the wave for you guys.

Yeah. And then—

Great market data point.

At Demo Day, before, so we're the second team to present. Before the ceremonies start, they show the video of Kyle's pitch of Cruise to all the investors. Like— Oh, shit.

This is teed up for you.

This is like, on a platter, right? Like, here's this visionary self-driving vehicle company that most of you didn't invest in because you didn't think it was possible. They just got acquired for $1 billion. Here's Embark.

Have you heard of Embark?

The next best thing. It was really fun to demonstrate. The other thing we did, which was, I think, really clever, because we had a hardware product, it's very visual and people can see it and feel it. So the demos used to be done at the Computer History Museum. Or what we did was we set up a demo to drive in circles around the parking lot. And as investors were coming in to demo day, we'd be like, do you want to ride in our vehicle? And they'd sit in it, they'd drive, and we'd get like 20 seconds of FaceTime just to introduce ourselves, introduce the company. And that was awesome. I remember Sam Altman had his McLaren and we were driving around and he intentionally cuts us off. He's coming to the parking lot, cuts us off. Vehicle stops. Like, I'm tense. Like, I'm in the back. Like, thank God. Like, if we would have hit Sam Altman's McLaren.

Would have been a good story though.

It would have been hilarious. We might not have— that might have been the end of the company at that point. But it was really cool. Like, vehicle stopped. It worked. Like, thank God. And yeah, Demo Day goes well, largely for that, for Cruise acquisition and just showing what we had built and putting it in their face.

Did anybody tell you maybe kind of right after Demo Day that like maybe shuttles weren't the right business? You said before that you kind of knew that, but like, was there anybody who was like, no, you guys should do something, a different modality for transportation?

I don't think we got that external feedback. Certainly we got challenged, but I think at the seed level there wasn't a lot of rigor in like specific market dynamics. I think they saw that we could build, they saw the vision for what self-driving was, and they understood like if you can build it, there's something you can do in this. I don't think we understood that that's the way a lot of investors thought about it at the time, but about a week after we ended up closing our seed round, we actually pivoted the business, which is kind of crazy. A week after? About a week, maybe 2 weeks after.

So you raised the funding and then you tell investors, actually, we're changing the whole business.

Yeah, and this was after, maybe it was a little bit longer than that because Alex, We did like a whole market exploration, right? We raised the funding, we did some market exploration. Alex flew to the middle of the outback in Australia because there's mining trucks out there that might want self-driving. We thought about competing directly against Google and we landed on the truck idea because it still had a lot of the themes that we cared about, which is like, it's going to be hard to compete directly against Google, so let's find a niche. Trucks on highways intuitively feels more constrained. So let's go for that. But the market for trucks on highways is much better than the market for shuttling students to class, and that's great. So that's why we picked it. And then, yeah, a couple weeks after we closed our seed round, we're like, hey guys, remember this great vision we just had about closed campuses and retirement communities? It's not a good one. We've got a better idea. And we did offer investors their money back if they wanted it.

Really? A weekend? Holy cow.

And nobody took it back. They're just like, this sounds great, go for it. And that blew our minds. Felt like we'd sold them on a vision that we knew wasn't in our hearts very true, so we felt a little bit guilty about that, and then when everybody was like, this just makes sense, go for it, we're like, oh. This type of risk capital doesn't exist in a lot of parts of the world, and I think that's what makes Silicon Valley special. If you were in Canada and you had raised money for startup capital and then you pivoted 3 weeks after, they probably would have tried to sue you. Yeah. Right? It's the flexibility that is rare. It's the flexibility. They bet on the team, they bet on the market, and this just sounded like a better idea. So go for it, guys. Right. And then we go. And one of the things I I appreciate Alex the most about is he's very diligent, very framework-driven. So at the beginning of this pivot, he sends an email to all of our investors that says, we're going to launch as trucks and here's our 10-month plan to go do it. It's actually 8 months at that time. It's April and he says, by end of year, we're going to build a self-driving truck and we're going to launch.

And how old are you at the time?

So I was 19 turning 20 at this time. Yeah. And the team was 4 people and were tasked with building a self-driving truck. And largely our first goal, build a self-driving truck and drive it on private closed road in the middle of Nevada is where it ends up being, but not in a public context at first. We just want to transfer the code that we did have that could drive in a private setting, but to a much larger vehicle. So going from a vehicle that was probably 2 to 300 pounds to a semi-truck that's 15,000 pounds. And when we set out on this journey, it wasn't super clear we could get computer control of it, right? And that's like the number one goal to build a self-driving truck, at least to get started. So the tasks were like Mike on our team had to get a commercial driver's license because none of us were licensed to drive a semi-truck. Let alone the United States, buy a truck, find an office that can fit a truck. Like there's just so many more logistical challenges.

Nuances to this business.

Yeah. And so his 8-month plan that he outlined for investors were just like bullet by bullet, like get commercial driver's license, find office, get license to drive it, get insurance because like who's going to insure something like this? Like you're tearing apart a truck and then you're going to drive it on a road. What do you mean? Nobody. There's no framework for this. And then also build. The self-driving vehicle. So 8 months go by and we hire 3 to 4 engineers along the way and we do it. We were off by maybe a month, month and a half, but we got computer control. We spent a lot of time on the test track just recording all of the internal signals and like hacking it and spoofing it to get control of the throttle, the brakes, the steering. And October of that year, we were driving in circles on a test track for the very first time controlling the truck, and that was such a cool moment of like, we might be able to do this. From there, the goal was let's put this on a road, and so we went out to, there's this small town in Nevada called, I think it's called Beatty, I don't know the exact pronunciation, but middle of nowhere effectively, and in the winter they close down this road that goes from that kind of goes into Death Valley, middle of nowhere Nevada, say into Death Valley. The road gets closed because in the Sierra Nevadas, there's just too much snow to go through. On the Nevada side, it's just a road that is there that nobody will ever drive on. We work with the state of Nevada to close that, to get a license to drive on it with our truck, and we record our launch video there. And a lot of the videos you see of Embark.

Governing bodies, are they generally supportive and they want this, or are they sort of skeptical?

Yeah, it's a great question. So self-driving, especially in the early days, there was a lot of ambiguity around its legality. And we took public policy very seriously. I think our 9th hire in the business, 9th or 10th hire, was a head of public policy for this reason. You'd see a pretty wide range, county by county, state by state, on what people thought. It is legal to modify your own vehicle. Like, you can just go hack away on it and you're kind of self-insuring and self-certifying that this is safe to do. The bounds in which we operated in were very much within that.

So you guys do this, this test drive, you film these videos, you're starting to become like a real company now.

Yeah, at least that was our goal, is to present like that. You know, we're a team of 5 engineers at this point, probably 10 total, and we launched the business publicly, and we do that alongside our Series A. So the demonstrations that we did that like we We can control a vehicle, we can drive it, we can do lane detection, we can do lane changes, like minimal capabilities was what we wanted to present for a Series A. And we were pretty successful in that being enough to raise. So this demonstration was the fuel to go into our Series A. We raised a $15 million Series A. And then these videos plus the Series A was our public announcement to the world that we were competing in this.

So you guys are doing like a full public launch, you're posting on social, like people start to know about Embark.

Yeah, we like big sexy video. Nice. Yeah, we changed the name to Embark and like, this is who we are now. We're going after this and we're gonna win this.

Awesome, and how are you feeling internally at this point? Are you feeling confident? Are you still feeling like a lot of imposter syndrome?

Yeah, I'd say on a personal level, things were just like surprisingly working. I think that was like the theme for the first 5 years, 4 or 5 years of this journey was like, you know, each step you took felt like a step in the right direction. And then you look backwards and it's just like this exponential trajectory and you're like, holy shit, we've come so far. And so I think in the moment it was very much just incremental thinking and it wasn't thinking too much about the big picture, but it was very exciting to have the capital to be like, you know what, let's just go build a team and try it. And the industry's getting really hot in self-driving. A lot of startups are getting funded. Let's go compete. I don't think I had the answer at that time for how you build a safety-critical system. I know I didn't, but maybe the hope was we could build a team around us that did.

Cool, so you guys raised $15 million.

Yeah, and so Series A plan effectively is like, okay, well, we have this truck that can drive in a closed context in the middle of nowhere. But if you look at any of the serious programs in self-driving, like especially at that time, testing in the real world at some level of scale was super important to be able to validate and develop your algorithms. All right, I guess maybe the main goal that we set out to do in the Series A was like, first drive it in the public road context, which is a big deal, right? Like, up until that point, our shuttles were a couple hundred pounds and driving 5 to 10 miles an hour. There's only so much damage you can do. Closed roads, there's only so much damage you can do. Driving on public roads in a testing capacity. So test on public roads was one major goal, right? We had to get there. There's some precedent for how to get there. And then two is like start building the system to do what it needs to do. Like largely what we did was like drive in a straight line and make a lane change for our launch video. But if you think about everything that's required to build a self-driving vehicle, It's got to see all the other cars, navigate lane change, do merges, take exits, start.

Not to mention it's the biggest thing on the road.

It's the biggest thing on the road. It's not a golf cart. Yeah. And it doesn't, like, it can get moving pretty quick, but it's not going 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. I promise you that. I mean, it takes like a minute.

But if you figured it out, there was clearly a business model there, right?

Absolutely. And that was the underpinning to our entire business, right? Like, if we could just build at a velocity faster than anybody else, then the market's already justified. Everybody understands that the need for the technology is there from the industry directly. And then just the scale of it. It's— this trucking industry makes between $700 and $800 billion in revenue per year. That's twice enterprise SaaS. And so back to why, like, this is an exciting idea and why venture understood it is if you can build it, there's just this massive pool of opportunity there that the industry needs and and if you can make a meaningful contribution, you could even run your trucks at the cost of current labor, uh, and you'd have a very compelling and competitive business.

I guess from, from Series A, you guys are, uh, you know, still figuring out a lot of like core components of the business. You guys are wanting to eventually test on roads, public roads, not, you know, private roads where no one else is driving. Um, do you guys eventually do that? What, what ends up happening?

Yeah, so we go through this whole process to— it's called ISO 26262. This process to design your system such that it can operate in a safety or critical context. And what this results in is building a bunch of redundancy. Our thesis was that we had a driver in the seat that was kind of monitoring, observing, ready to take back the vehicle control if anything did go wrong. And so from a safety case perspective, what does that mean? We've got to hand back control to the driver at moment's notice when they want it, every time. And we've got to make sure that the vehicle won't do anything that surprises them, which means like limit how fast you can turn, limit how fast you can brake and accelerate. So that's kind of the underpinning. Those are major safety goals. And then we design the technology stack beneath that to achieve those goals. We test that in a bunch of different capacities, like on the bench unit tests and software test track pretty rigorous, like all the failure modes up until the point that we feel confident that our system will achieve those safety goals and we're ready to start testing in, in the real world. And then once we get there, my development philosophy was like, drive the truck in software, record where it does things wrong, and then give that back to the engineering team and say, fix it. In the most like lowest energy, highest impact way possible, like fix that problem and rinse and repeat over and over and just chase that and make the truck drive as smooth, as safe, and as capable as possible. And so in this process, in the Series A to Series B, we were really just developing these new novel capabilities, like make the vehicle come alive and do it. And we had this one loop in San Francisco. It was, The 101, 80, 280, 92 were the 4 highways that connected this one loop. It was about an hour, hour and a half, and we would just drive that over and over and over again every single day. I'd be sitting in that truck running the most recent version of the software that was ready to go, watching how the truck drove. End of the day, would write up a report. It'd be the next day's work for the team.

So you'd be sitting in this truck doing this?

I'd be sitting in the truck, me and then Jeff. Who was our first truck driver on the team. We just, we got pretty close.

You guys probably had a lot of time in the truck.

We had a lot of time in the truck together. I really spent more time with Jeff than he did with his wife. Oh wow, that's awesome. Yeah, so it was pretty cool. So that was kind of what we had accomplished in this, the Series A, and then we go into our Series B funding process with like, look, we've got a truck that can do all these fun capabilities. It can do lane changes, it can take exits, it can do merges. And we just hoped that that was enough to raise our next funding round.

Do you want to talk about the Series B, kind of that process?

Yeah, so Series B, I think the first thing to paint was this industry backdrop where things were getting a lot more serious. We were no longer, before we had launched in trucks, there was one company that started and then eventually got sold 10 months later to do trucks. And then around this time, many self-driving vehicle startups had just come out of the woodwork. And, you know, we're still this, like, ragtag, young, like, we shouldn't be here group of kids effectively, right? And to talk about, like, who you would expect to be building this business, self-driving comes from the robotics academia industry, right? Heavily pedigreed, like the people who write the papers are the ones that are famous, that are ones running the most serious programs, right? They've written the book on how you localize a vehicle with lidars and cameras without a GPS system. That's who you would expect. Then you've got the trucking industry and the automotive industry, which is, you know, old boys club, right? Like, we've been around the block, you know, risk-averse. We're not going to trust anybody who hasn't been building and working in our industry for 30 years to do anything. We're just kind of outside of these spheres in a very meaningful way, and VCs understood that too. So although like internally, and if you look at the story in retrospect, it looked like everything was up and to the right, but at every single stage it was really just a fight to prove that we should even be here in the first place. So did the Series B go well? Yes and no. We ended up getting funded by Sequoia, which is like any startup's dream, right? And from the outside, that looks so cool. Internally, we had pitched all of our top VCs, and pretty quickly we got nos from all of them.

Every single one?

Every single one except Sequoia. And our Series A lead had said something to us along the lines of, In my 30 years of investing in Silicon Valley, I've never seen a company only get a term sheet from Sequoia. Wow. So we're going to take this. We're not going to negotiate it, and then we're never going to talk about this again.

Why did that happen? What did Sequoia see? Why were these people saying no?

Yeah, you know, they took a bet on us. A couple of things happened. One, agnostic of Embark, 4 or 5 months before, they had done a whole research on the industry. Lots of bets were being made, and Sequoia didn't have a play yet. And so they mapped out the entire industry, they thought about different verticals, and they were like, trucking is the place that we want to invest our capital. And then we show up. Sequoia I think one of the best things about them is they bet on founders. Of course, they bet on good businesses at the same time, but in a big way, they bet on founders. And I think that's what separated them from everybody else, because if you looked at just the summary of all of the facts, we're probably not an investible venture at that time. But if you sit in our vehicle and you look at how well it drove, and then you sat in our competitor's vehicle and you look at how well it drove, we were better or as good as everybody else. And then you look at who we were, right? 2021 at this point, like, never done anything else in my life kind of thing. Alex is a world robotics champion, but for effectively toy competitive robots. We shouldn't be doing this. I think that contrast of like, these founders have figured something out. Right? The vehicle drives super well. We don't exactly know what's going on. Either it's just fraud or something's going on here. And then you look at the team behind us and like we're starting to have credible people work for us and they see the vehicle drive with their own eyes. For some reason, like that resonated with them better than everybody else.

How much you guys raised from them?

Our Series B was $30 million. And of course they're probably about half of that.

So how much money have you guys raised at this point in total?

At this point, so seed was $2 million, Series A was $15, this is on the order of $30. So we're getting up there in like the $50 million range. And then our goal from Series B to Series C was like build and put this vehicle in context, right? And the way we've composed the problem, remember back to how we thought we were going to compete in the first place is like, how do we just simplify the problem as much as possible? This is one of our core company values. Like every employee heard this line when they joined the business. So how do we simplify the trucking problem? We don't drive in cities. We're just driving on highways. We're gonna put depots on the outskirts of major hubs. Humans will do the first and last mile. We'll do the shuttling in the middle. That allows us to just do the two-lane driving in the middle of nowhere. And this is 400, 500, 600-mile stretches. And it gets a bit, a little bit busy sometimes, but we're not driving through the San Francisco city streets where things are going crazy. That was the intuition for why we could build and compete in this space. But we're driving the Bay Area, which looks nothing like where we want to be. So let's get our system operating in the end-to-end context with a hub on highways, not near our engineers. And make this system work end to end, start proving out like core components of the business is what we wanted to do with our Series B capital. And that came with a lot of mixed results. I'd say one thing about building technology that hasn't been built before, or even just robots in general, is like progress is very nonlinear. It's so exciting at the beginning. Like when you do your first lane change, it's actually not hard to make it do one lane change. What is hard is making it do a lane change 99.999% of the time, and when it does fail, it's not going to kill somebody. So that's the new task we're challenged with. It's like it's got the core basic capabilities. Now it just needs to do them all better. And it needs to do them in context.

What's the mission?

The mission is to get our truck driving from LA to Phoenix for the first time.

Wow. And you guys are all in the truck, or is it just a few of you?

No, in the truck, there's only 2 people. The safety driver and then one engineer or one operator who was like taking notes.

You guys have like a watch party, like you all just cheering each other on.

Yeah. So we had on the TV, we didn't have much in the way of like data streaming working at that point. We were able to upload data if we asked for it, but it wasn't streaming live. That came a little bit later.

Did you guys hit any, any cars or were there any car accidents from this whole journey?

No. In a testing capacity, we drove north of a million miles. And we did not get into one accident in autonomous mode. Amazing. Yeah. Wow. And statistically, we should have. Yeah.

So you've got this whole testing thing going on. It's a huge milestone to be able to drive 300 miles autonomously. What's going on in your personal life? Like, are you, are you like super clear and dialed in the business? Are you like dealing with some other stuff? What's going on?

The first part of like making the vehicle drive end to end was like super exciting. The engineering team was still hitting. After this sprint, the team was super burned out. Like, the best way to burn out your team is to put them all in a house for 6 weeks and then just say work super hard and then you hit a milestone and then all of a sudden like, yeah, it drove once, but it's going to drive all the time, right? And so we still have a mountain work ahead of us. Like goals are unclear from this point other than like make it incrementally better. Like my development philosophy, just There wasn't a framework for how to go about it yet, and really just started to feel like loss of confidence in myself. Like, team was super burned out. They didn't want to work very hard, and like, I genuinely pushed them too hard in these sprints that we did. So that, like, first of all, took its toll. I think in the first 2 years of running the business, like, the team that I ran, the engineering team that I had ran, was like pretty cohesive. Nobody had quit the team. This is around the time when I had my first employee quit from the team, and I took that as a big failure. We weren't approaching development in the way that we should have been to build a super robust, scalable system. I can say that pretty confidently in retrospect. Lots of things I could and would have changed. Yeah, just to make sure burnout, things on the personal side and that. So.

But that was kind of a data point for you that was something Something like that.

Yeah, and even leading up to that, I just knew and felt that things were off, right? And then on the personal side, like my girlfriend at the time had dumped me, and like I was trying to deal with that.

And that's starting to affect you at work. Person's quitting, girlfriend dumps you.

Yeah, I remember this is like my top engineer, one of my best friends, had like said to me at the end of that summer, like, he just like had a heart-to-heart, like asked me if like I'm still in this anymore, right? And that was a little bit of a wake-up call. Like, I definitely was, but I was just kind of losing a little bit of control of the situation, control of like my emotions in this role.

It's so amazing. It's like, think about what most 23, 24-year-olds are experiencing at this.

Yeah, I mean, even from 19 to just the leap from you being 19 to 24, like the amount that got done in that time is crazy.

Yeah, just the amount of responsibility, pressure. You raised nearly $50 million.

Yeah, it's very unconventional. It's quite the slope. This is the— yeah, I think this is the year that I, I, you know, win 30 Under 30, and there's just kind of this contrast of like not really being confident.

Are you— on the, on the topic of family, are you sharing with your family like a lot of the emotional stuff that's going on? Are you kind of bottling all the, all of it up?

Mostly bottling it in. Yeah. And like sheltered, like from even just like friends around me and co-founder, like pretty just like managing my emotions on my own while still trying to come to work and showing up as the optimistic leader. And obviously at that point it just wasn't really working for me.

At any point did you think about quitting? Maybe.

Just maybe once or twice in this period. It wasn't necessarily quitting, it was more like, am I the right person? I want to be a part of it. I know in my heart I'm the number one contributor to this codebase even till this point. I'm an important piece to building this, but I don't have all the answers. So you were very self-aware of that. I'm very self-aware of that. And like, the team's aware of this, right? And I'm starting to feel this, and I don't know how much of this is in my head versus in their heads.

I'm curious to just, I guess, talk about the road from Series C to now, like, aiming for a proper IPO.

Yeah, so we get through the summer and then COVID hits, which like isn't helpful, right? We are a business that operates in the real world. We build real hardware, we have real-world operations. And so while a lot of my peers at software companies were sending everybody home and like, oh, we can work from home, it's no big deal.

How many people at the company?

Going into COVID, probably 50 to 75 at this point. And going out of COVID we nearly doubled the team. So a pretty meaningful growth while we're there. I remember like the early days of COVID having to make the decision to send everybody home, right? Alex and I were kind of joking, like we were, we sent everybody home before the whole world shut down and we're like, oh, it's just gonna be like 2 weeks. Like it'll be fun, right? It's a cute little adventure. Everybody's gonna need like a little bit of time to relax. We'll come back to the office and get back to work. I don't think I've ever been more wrong in my life. It was actually like, a good cultural moment. Like, the team really came together, you know, designing like new protocols for how like the team could still operate in the trucks. Like, we designed the air system in our trucks to be more akin to airplanes, how they filter the air and they have a positive pressure. So we did that inside our truck so that our truck drivers would be safe. We put a bunch of protocols in our offices such that like we controlled the number of people, we did daily testing. We never had one transfer of COVID tracked back to a person being in our office, which is super impressive. But through the entirety of the pandemic, we just did a great job at designing all those.

You're like, the secret was we never let them leave.

No, the secret was we worked with a virologist from Stanford who's super smart on the matter. We thought about all our protocols. We were pretty methodical about it, and it worked out pretty well. Some of the things we did were a little bit crazy, didn't work. A lot of things we did, did work. But what this did mean on the other side of the equation was like there's a huge pullback, especially in growth-stage capital and especially in our category. Nobody knows where the world's going at this point, and we're a company that just spends money. Like if you just take a step back, like we spend money and we drive trucks and we pay engineers.

Right, because there's not really I mean, there is a business model, but you guys aren't actually generating.

We're funded on the future promise.

Like the R&D.

It's, but it is like pretty heavy R&D. And we get into the summer during COVID and there's just layoffs happening left, right, and center. We're pretty comfortable from a runway perspective. We froze hiring pretty early, but we don't think this is gonna end anytime soon. And certainly the numbers didn't look like they were, right? And nobody could predict where it was going. So venture was pretty scared about funding businesses like ours. And we get to the summer and Alex and I have a pretty meaningful decision to make. Like, progress is still mixed. Like, we haven't fully solved our problems from the summer before. COVID has made the job less fun, for lack of a better word.

How are you feeling mentally at this point?

We're just trying to get through it, right?

But it almost like there's a bigger problem to deal with now, right? Kind of like the company becomes the crosshair.

Yeah, for sure.

And then there's just like no funding landscape. And so like, we explore the idea of selling off the business. That doesn't get super far. And just like the weirdest thing happened towards the end of 2020. And I think, you know, maybe economists will be able to write this story in a more accurate way. But, you know, the distribution of capital to every single American and like the market starting to go crazy because are now just a little bit more liquid. And all these meme stocks started happening. After that wave, a bunch of companies just started going public much earlier in their journey, especially the ones in deep tech. And I think that's a mixture of lack of capital in the private markets. And then there's just this willing to take these risk-on bets in the public markets that had never been seen, at least in 20, 25 years. And so we're sitting here, like, understanding that we've got to raise a funding round, but the private markets won't have it. And we're starting to see companies that are less mature than ours go public pretty successfully. And not only go public, but go public with hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. And that's the key for us, right? Because we've got a very expensive business to build. We make the decision, like, let's just go for it. It seems like the only path forward. One of the core problems we were having as a business is like our competitors were spending money. Like at this time, Google is probably spending $2 billion a year on their program.

Is that your direct competitor?

I think—

Closest thing?

There were 2 or 3 startups, similar stage to ours, that had similar funding. Google expanded to working on more than just cars, trucking being one component of it. But I put this number out there as a measure for what does it cost to build this technology? And again, our thesis is simpler. So maybe discount that a little bit. But they're spending $2 billion a year. We've raised $50 million total, right? There's a big gap, right? What does it mean to build a safety-critical system? Like you build all of these subsystems, individually, you put a lot of rigor and testing into them, and you scale your testing to a meaningful degree. And we're just not able to operate that way. And just lack of capital is one reason for why we can't do that, right? We can be as smart as we want, but at some point, the self-driving industry is a game of lowering the cost of your capital and having almost unlimited access to it. And we knew that. So the decision to go through the go public process was primarily motivated by there's no other option except for pack it up and go home. And so let's just take the swing.

Was that scary for you?

Yeah, I think when you like look at all the series of events that had happened in my life over a 4 or 5 year span, everything was crazy. And so this was just like another incremental crazy thing. Like, whatever.

You're numb. You're numb to pain at this point.

Yeah, it's just like it's really hard to calibrate.

Did people around you guys encourage you? Like, this sounds like a good idea, you should do this.

Our internal monologue between Alex and I went from like, this is a joke to this is real over the course of 30 days. And we had a few people poke in and be like, hey, we're hearing about these processes, we think they're going to be successful. I think you would have more success in this. You should take that seriously. And we're like, haha, no, we're not a business that's ready for this type of thing. Like, we're very much like, stick the course and do the right thing. And then at some point, we couldn't ignore it. Like, there's hundreds of millions of dollars available. Like, we have to try.

And then you guys decide to set your sights for an IPO.

Yeah.

What do you do from there? What is it like?

Yeah, Alex and I, we make the decision to go for it. You know, Alex, at least in the way I've told the story before, hasn't appeared much, but he deserves obviously so much credit. This is another moment in Embark's journey where there's just something that's seemingly impossible to surmount. How do you take a company like ours public through this very complex SPAC process? We don't have a team that's ready to operate a public business. Sits down, puts together a 12-month roadmap. This is how we're going to go do it and does a bunch of reading, reads a up on the law, talks to the right people, and just like figures out how we're going to navigate this as a business. So he constructs that with his chief of staff, Henry, who's brilliant. And then largely this is a financial process, but it's a pretty extended one. It took us from the decision we made to do it in December of 2020 to actually going public in November '21, an 11-month process to do with major hurdles along the way, which involves hiring like the legal and financial team to do it. Quick 101 on SPACs. There's this treasury company. They're really easy to find because what they want to do is just bring that treasury. They're already a public company and their whole goal is just merge with a company. So they're like soliciting everybody like, hey, do you want to merge with me? So they're easy to find and they're like, they're like harassing everybody. And then there's like you merge with them And then you pitch to the public company investors to validate a transaction. Like, if you've got your credible blue-chip investors say, this is a real company that should be in the markets, we're going to invest in this in a private company. And then when it goes public, that's going to validate the price, it's going to validate the business. So you've got to do this maneuver of first sign up with them, make the pitch, make the full story, then pitch to the public company investors, have them invest in it. And there's a bunch of conditions you have to meet.

And the reason you would do a SPAC versus like a traditional IPO is, is why?

You know, I don't think I've fully answered that. For us, like it was the vehicle that was the fastest, the thing to do for a company that looked like ours.

From my understanding, it just seems like a faster and more cost-efficient way to go public.

I don't even know if all of that is necessarily true. Yeah. Yeah. But it was the vehicle that was like pretty popular at the time. Cool. And so we chose that over— like, one of our competitors went public through a regular IPO at the same time. We probably could have gone down that path too. It just kind of had this own label to it at the time. So we did that, and in that journey of going public, super stressful, a lot of moments along the way where we didn't think it was going to work out. Like, going public you hear these things, but you don't really feel it until you're in the moment. But there's market windows, right? I think, I'm sure you've all heard of the notion of that, when it's like a good time to go public and not a good time to go public. And those are largely nothing to do with your company, right? They have to do with the federal interest rate, what wars are going on, what's the price of oil, just like moments of time. We were at the tail end of the window for going public. And towards the end of the process, we just felt that the window was closing week by week, right? Investors are getting more spooked, SPACs are doing less well in the markets. And we kind of just squeaked through. But it was a great day. Like, in mid-November, we ended up taking the company public at a $5 billion valuation.

And $5 billion.

Alex and I ended up becoming like the youngest executives of a public company, not ever, but at the time, which was super cool.

Wow.

Okay, so tell me what that experience is like. You guys go public. Like, what are your friends and family saying? What are your investors saying? Like, bring me to that day.

It's pretty crazy. So with SPACs, it's kind of in two parts because you have to announce that the transaction is going to happen because it's a merger, not a go public. And then there's the actual day where the merger closes and like you ring the bell. So day of like announcement was like super exciting, right? Like everybody who's been following the journey is like, wow, this is gonna happen. Like, this is super cool. This is real, right? This is when you two found out about it. You know, getting 300, 400 messages on an iMessage like, holy shit, like this is so cool, congrats, congrats. Guys.

From every girl that ever dumped you.

Take that. And that was super fun. And like, that— the summer of 2020 or '21 leading up to that was, was super energizing. We made— because we had this capital coming, like, the thesis was like, we're going to become a serious business now. Like, we're— we've got the scale of capital that we can compete for real in this business, and we're going to change how we do things. We're going to hire more engineers. And largely we did succeed in doing that, which was really good. And so that all started to click. The company's got a ton of momentum. It's much easier to hire. We're bringing in some great talent and things are just moving quick. COVID's ending. I'm in New York City. I can go to a bar again.

The Canuck.

To the Canuck, yeah. It's just a great time. And then we squeak through the go-public process. We ring the bell. That's really cool.

I remember when you gave a talk at the Maker Retreat, you were talking about what the bell was like.

Yeah.

Was there something unexpected?

Yeah, there's the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. We went public on the NASDAQ and they just have this like plastic button that you press and it was like, kind of feels flimsy. And Alex and I, we joked about this, like this is one of the most meaningful like moments of not just ours, but many people's careers when they finally take a company public.

It's just like this shitty button that was like something you'd click at like Chuck E. Cheese or something.

Yeah, like it barely worked. Like we had to press it. And we joked with the NASDAQ team after, we're like, we'll just build you like a new one. Like we've got 3D printers and we'll just make you like a nice feel like—

There you go. I wonder if they still have it.

Yeah, they probably do. That whole journey being a public company is a very interesting one for a lot of reasons, which we'll talk about. But in my head, it was just this mixture of excitement and just like a lot of unknown, like now we're going to be judged in real time by— up until this point, you've got private investors and really venture investors who understand that most of their investments fail. And so they care about you. They care about you taking big swings because if you have a mediocre outcome, is not going to return the fund. And so they're just like really aligned with our mentality. You step into the public markets, second by second, millisecond by millisecond, people are trying to make a dollar, right? And they make money if you go up or if you go down, depending on who they are, right? And so it's just a completely different frame of who you have to be, how you have to communicate. And again, this is mostly on Alex rather than me. I have to build the technology still. But that's now the new challenge for the business that we have to do. And again, we're a little bit young for a company in public markets, right? We've got still the same story, right? If we build on this technology and we still got an incredible pace on a relative basis, there's an exciting vision at the end of this. But we're competing against Facebook and Google and everybody else for capital now. Like, you can just put your dollar in and you can take it out. In the moment. And so everybody's asking the question, where should, where should you put it? And we have to have a story that makes sense.

I remember you also shared at the retreat that, um, being public, being a public company is comparable to, uh, fundraising as a private company, except instead of there being a period where you're doing it, you were always doing it. Can you tell more about that?

Being a public company and being a deep tech public company, it's like riding a roller coaster, and then if you were on that roller coaster, there was another roller coaster. Yeah, like, you've got quarterly earnings that go out every single quarter. You've got investors calling you all the time. You've got Reddit threads, like, conspiring about Alex, like, who he is, and like, you know, his afro, like, is that— is he still in it, right? Like, there's just a constant image that you have to build and a lot more rigor in the plans and the projections that you make such that, like, you know, and there's, there's real reason for it, right? Like, people are investing their capital, like retirement funds are going into your business, right? You've got a real fiduciary duty to represent your asset, which is your business, to the markets, um, and do that in like a very thoughtful way. So that means that we've got to build an entire financial team to manage this and, and make sense of all that.

And your own personal net worth is swinging while it's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Oh, it's in real time.

And I would say it didn't affect me as much as it affected the team because everyone's compensation was also tied to the stock price.

So they're hitting the refresh button on the—

It's so distracting. Yeah. So distracting, right? And as much as you tell people don't look at it, one day the stock price will shoot up 10% and you're like, "Why did this happen?" It had nothing to do with the code you pushed today, right? Before, I was able to control, like, if we ship XYZ and truck gets better to this point, we think on a risk-adjusted basis, this will make the business better. Now it's like, I'm writing code, I'm not writing code, it's all over the place.

Yeah, the incentives are now different, right? It's getting things out of your control.

And the storytelling and the internal management of that is completely different. And we went public. On the day that the S&P 500 was the highest point it was in like a 2-year local max. So the end— the economy started to take a turn, which is why the window was closing. But from like 2021 through summer of '23, approximately, the markets were down. And so not only the markets were down, but a bunch of like geopolitical things started happening and the COVID hangover finally started to catch up to everybody, right? We went through a zero interest rate environment from 2016, 2017, approximately all the way through 2022. In that the entire world shut down, we stopped manufacturing, we stopped shipping, and we didn't really feel the repercussions for that. And what came next was that. And now we're a company that's value is in the future, not in today. And so Russia invades Ukraine, oil prices start to skyrocket, inflation starts to become a real problem for a number of different reasons. Again, I'm not an economist, and I can't tell you exactly why, but it certainly did. And we knew that was coming, and we knew that if your risk-free rate was higher than zero, it's hard to make a bet on a business like us in that time. And so just the premise in which we were operating the public markets shifted entirely beneath us, and we had to figure out what, what do we need to do as a business? And we explored a lot of different things, but the main goal was, you know, how do we find revenue faster, right? Similar to the theme that we started the business with, like, let's find a place that the context in which we operate is simpler. So the system is easier to design and we can deploy it and at least we can build from there. We went through this whole process thinking about deploying our trucks in a different context, in a more closed setting. So still in a truck format, but maybe on mine sites in the US or in other regions. And so I spent a bunch of time exploring the world and being on different mine sites, talking to miners and stuff like that. But really the goal for Alex and I is like, how do we find the place to go? We get through this process and we figure like, given all that, there's still a problem that we need to solve. Like, when we simplify the problem, we also constrain the market more. And is this story going to make sense? And ultimately we decided probably not. And that's when we knew we had to make some pretty big changes internally.

So talk about some of those changes.

What had to change? Yeah, so we did like a pretty meaningful exploration for if we're going to make a pivot into something that's more constrained but revenue generating and nearer term, we're going to need a smaller team to do this because the market's not as big and we're going to need to extend runway in a very meaningful way. So we still have a lot of cash in the bank. We froze hiring the moment we saw that this was coming. But we just knew we needed a real plan, and that's like the next moment where Alex was tasked with like, I need to come up with a plan to like navigate this business. Our first best idea, and this is something we explored very early on, I mentioned that Alex had gone to the outback of Australia. I spent, you know, the better part of a month in the outback of Australia exploring if we could deploy our technology as soon as possible there and come up with a whole plan to see if we could actually make that happen. In parallel to that, we had been approached for an M&A process at the same time, which seemed pretty attractive. Like, you know, the name of the game in self-driving is big pool of capital that's low cost. And, you know, somebody showed up and said, maybe you want to explore this acquisition. Ultimately, we went in the direction of like, let's explore both paths at the same time. Our net outcome for the Australia project was it probably isn't big enough. Like, we'd be better off starting a new company, moving to Australia, starting from scratch, capitalizing the business that way than just all the baggage, right? It costs millions of dollars a year to operate as a public company. And there's just a lot of overhead and information management. And so if you want that to be successful standalone, like, us moving into that vertical isn't gonna be. And then this acquisition started to like really mature for us and getting more exciting. We kind of read in the team, but like 11th hour they pulled out. Like we had the whole executive team read in like on Monday, we're gonna announce to the world that like this acquisition's gonna go through. We're gonna still operate the business, but it's gonna look a little bit different.

This is like your saving grace. You're like really banking on this to happen.

Yeah.

How did that feel?

Horrible. Yeah, this was like, I remember, and just to paint the picture, it's Friday, right? We're going to announce on Monday. We're writing the comms for this acquisition. Things started to slow down on the legal side in this diligence process, and not— there's always negotiation on terms, but things just started to get a little more sticky, and it just like started to make—

you could feel something was wrong.

Yeah, they're not like pushing them, they're not getting through them like Yeah, we can see why you might be worried about this, but big picture here, like, why aren't we getting through these? And then all of a sudden they pull out. And I remember—

they call you directly?

No. Yeah, not great. They had their lawyers tell our lawyers.

Wow. The night— the night before?

The— this was probably 2 days before we were supposed to announce. They eventually pulled out and, yeah, didn't have the balls to tell us directly.

Oh my gosh.

Which kind of sucked. But that aside.

And this would have been a great outcome for you guys.

Great outcome. Only outcome too. Like, we're going to Australia or we're doing this.

You put all your eggs in one basket.

Yeah, and, or like we diversified them, but like this is where—

Yeah, it was like the Australia path or the—

Exactly. And so we were kind of left with like a feeling in our hearts, Alex and I, like there's probably not many places to go from here. We're burning cash, we've got a team, we haven't done a layoff yet.

Do you remember how much cash you guys are burning at this point?

Hard to say. I mean, it's public information, but probably like $25 million a quarter, maybe double that. Wow. Wow. In that range. No, $25 million a quarter sounds about right.

And it sounds like in the story, for the most part, whenever there's been a problem, you've always had an answer. So this is probably one of the first times in the company where you're like, we actually don't know what to do.

We've, you know, I've flown literally to the corner of the earth to find an answer, and it wasn't there, right?

Not even Kangaroo Jack.

Yeah, not even Kangaroo Jack. And so this is the first moment where we're like, it might not work, and we don't know what the path is, right? So we kind of take a day, but I remember just like, just going for a walk and not having a solution, right? And we knew that we had to make some pretty big changes internally, like that we couldn't justify the burn rate we had given the context of the markets and the company that we were. And so 7 days later, we had to lay off about half the team, which was super tough. So going from that decision, telling the executive team that the deal didn't happen and that we don't know what's next, and then doing the layoff was like bang, bang, bang. And then we did the layoff in connection with that. Like we announced to the public markets, because you have to tell everybody everything all the time, which is super fun, that we're exploring an acquisition or other ways to land the business. And we had already gone through a little bit of the acquisition process, so we kind of knew what needed to change if we were going to get it done, but did the layoff, which was the hardest thing for me because it was both the layoff but also telling the team and everybody who was excited about me 2 years before. Now I have to tell them all things have changed. But honestly, just telling the team that was the hardest part. Yeah.

Just like the, were they phone calls? How did you do this?

Yeah, well, again, because you're a public company, you can't have information leak, otherwise people can trade on it. So if you're gonna tell people, it has to be after hours, and then you have to announce things at the appropriate times. For the early employees, we did call them and that was really hard. Just like one by one. Oh man. Just telling them like what's going to happen. For the bulk of the team, they didn't have that benefit, right? We're 300, 350 people at this time. You can't make 350 phone calls in a night.

Right.

But that layoff, like in the best way possible, was like super, like the team really came together. In that moment, right? People understand. Some did, some didn't. If you were looking around, like, the backdrop here is everybody's doing layoffs, right? So we're just one of many at this point. And of course, my experience is very, like, visceral and I feel it. But if you just take a step back, everybody did meaningful layoffs in the order of thousands at this time. So not, not that big a deal that we were doing it too, but felt pretty meaningful to the team. Like, we had spent so much— like, Embark was a very, like, kind place to work. We actually, like, that year had won, like, the best workplace award in San Francisco or something like that. One of our corporate values was, like, to be very collegial, just, like, treat your employees with kindness. So although it was, like, a high-intensity place to build. Like, we just wanted to have fun doing it, and that was just like Alex and I's like vibe and mojo. So in that moment when we laid people off, we were scared going into that, and we were met with just like a lot of people that were grateful. Cool.

Wow. So they understood?

Yeah, at least they understood that like Alex and I cared so much that we wouldn't be able to do this unless we had had to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was, that was a hard day.

So can you, can you bring me back to like specific moments during those layoffs that were like really difficult for you?

Like the evening before the layoff, I called my parents and I called the early employees. Telling the parents wasn't too bad, right? They'd seen me through this entire journey and it was just like another like update, like this is what you're going to see tomorrow. And like, we'll kind of talk about it after. And they're like, you know, okay. Didn't— I don't remember much from that conversation other than it like kind of not being a big deal. And I remember mostly just dreading the next series of conversations where calling like each individual early employee and telling them like, you know, the company that we were building as you know it is no longer going to exist as it is. And that was tough. I remember like just like locking myself in the closet, kind of dimly lit, just one by one calling like all these people that had followed me for 6, 8 years and telling them. And again, they were all still pretty like grateful. Emotions ranged from like not wanting to open up on the call to like, you know, like, well, it was a good run, wasn't it? And but that was, that was particularly hard. Yeah.

And then what is your— what is your family thinking about this the whole time? Like their child who is again in his 20s is running a like, you know, $5 billion public company at this time. Like, you know, this is really your first real job. What are they thinking?

Yeah.

What's it like at home?

I remember the day we went public, somebody had asked my sister, I think it was our head of HR, Payal, I could be wrong, if they had expected that this is what would have happened, like, in my life. And my sister was like, no, of course not. Right? Like, take me back to just, I was just a kid that liked playing Xbox and playing hockey. I didn't know how to code till I was, you know, summer before college. Like, I wasn't on this trajectory until I was like steeped in the ecosystem. So I imagine they're pretty shocked about it all. Right. And I think in a similar way that I did, just kind of get numb to all the new and excitement and the ups and downs. They probably did as well at that point. But yeah. And then the other thing I'll say that I remember is around the time that we went public, my mom had told me that she was glad that she bit her tongue when I told her that I was going to drop out. And I also remember that moment, which was really funny. So I'm going back home for the holidays and parents were asking me like what I was going to do the next term and like how it was going to work. And I roughly told them that we were going to like try building this business. And I tell them that like Yeah, we're going to go try to build a self-driving vehicle company. And if it works out, we're not going back to school. And my dad was like, okay, that sounds cool. Like, go for it. And my mom didn't say much. She's pretty soft-spoken. She was— all she said was like, what's plan B? I was like, I don't know. And then to like, you know, 7 years later, hear her say, I'm glad I didn't say anything when we did go public. It was nice to hear.

Do you think if she had put her foot down and said no, like you're going to go to school and etc., you would listen?

I probably still would have gone to YC and seen that out. We had a quick path to validating that this was like a good way to go about it. So I think we would have gone through the co-op term no matter what, trying to build this. The decision after may have gotten dicey. In my head though, I had no risk dropping out at this point. I had a couple co-ops, they wanted me to come back, I could get paid at some level to be a junior level, entry-level engineer without finishing my degree no matter what. So like baseline, I'm okay, right? I don't have debt because I managed to pay some of this off. And so although it might not be the most ideal trajectory, like I built a safety net in the 2 years to like give myself the continued to go do this.

And then after the layoffs, what happens?

Yeah, after the layoffs, 7 days later, uh, SVB goes under, which was almost hilarious at this point.

Like, what else could happen?

Like, acquisition gets pulled out, layoffs, and all of our money disappears, and we're like, what's going on, right? Like, it's comical at this point. Like, we had already gone through 2 things that were objectively worse than SUV going under, maybe not, but it was comical, right? Our headspace at this point is just like almost relief. Like we told the employees, we told the world that like something's going to change. The hardest part is actually the time leading up to that. Like knowing decision has to be made, knowing you have to do the thing, that's what weighs on you. Doing the thing afterwards, not that bad. It can be annoying. It's definitely hard. But at this point, you're just turning the crank and we know how to do that. We're like, we can operate the business, we can execute. So we're gearing ourselves up for round 2 of this acquisition process, which ultimately ends up being successful. And we end up selling the company to Applied Intuition and they're a great partner. Kassar, who was a YC partner when we went through YC back in 2016, early investor in the company, They build simulation software, at least at the time. They've expanded their products from there, but they build simulation software for self-driving vehicles. We were one of their early customers. So we were with them along the journey. And I don't know how much I can share publicly about it, but a number of the stuff that we had built was useful to their business and the direction that they wanted to go. So we ended up making that acquisition come together after a long process and just genuinely pretty happy. We managed to land it in a place where the technology is still used, some of the team got to go across.

And how are you feeling at this point? Some sense of relief, disappointment? Where is Brandon at in this moment?

It's really hard to describe. There's kind of this balance of relief, some feeling of failure. I wanted to build the business we were set up to build. Some excitement for what could be next, right? Like you work on something for 7, 8 years, you get a little bit tired of it, right? There's a lot of exciting things, but there's a whole world of opportunity out there that doesn't involve building 15,000-pound vehicles, driving them every single day and trying to make that work. It's an incredibly hard and exciting problem, but maybe there's other things that will call me. So kind of this balance of like, all of those things come together and, you know, spending 8 months in the state of mind that I was where like we're looking for answers and not finding them, it was just really nice to have an answer and just take that next step.

Who was there for you during this time?

Who did you lean on? You know, Alex was probably like the only person in the world that understood me and what we were going through. So that was like pretty meaningful. One of my friends, Ben, I caught up with almost just randomly. He told me like when we were going into this process, like I shared with him just like, don't know what's gonna happen. Probably gave me some of the best advice, like competitive with Kyle's advice in the early days to learn how to code. But going through this process, he was like, you know, on the other side, no matter what happens, like all the things that matter will still be there. Like, your family will still love you. Your friends will still want to be friends with you. Your employees will still respect you and want to work for you. The majority of your investors that have backed you will still want to back you again. So, like, if you think about what are you scared of when things don't work out exactly as you planned, you know, it's probably that list of things. And, you know, in that moment, I didn't really believe him when he told me, but it was nice to hear. That like these things will be true. And then now on the other side of it, like feeling and seeing those things be more true than I believed they would be was like really cool.

Wow, that is so powerful.

Yeah.

I think that a lot of people should hear that. So I think like this whole journey that you've gone through is very exciting, also very scary. You had to do a lot of really hard things. And I think to hear that even, you know, when it doesn't work out exactly how you intend, that, um, yeah, those things are still true.

Sometimes it's like easy to forget all the things you do accomplish, right? Like, we built a self-driving truck, it drove on the road. Like, we employed hundreds of people and they enjoyed their time there. Like, we moved the industry forward in meaningful ways, and the technology still lives on. And like, we did that, right? And that's super cool. And, you know, part of me is like, I wish we could have like done more. But yeah, it was really cool.

Yeah, to do in your 20s. Yeah, as your first like real job.

Yeah, for sure.

What are you gonna do now, Brandon?

It's— who knows. I, I remember talking to my friend shortly after, or actually in the closing of the acquisition process, he asked me like, what's next? I was like, I don't know, but it's got to matter.

What did you do after acquisition? Like immediately after, did you travel? Did you do something fun?

Like what was One of the coolest things in this whole journey is just like my relationship to Alex and how that's changed and whatnot. We kind of finished off this journey by traveling together. So we spent 6 months traveling around the world. The goal was to do all 7 continents together. And we did that. Went to Antarctica, climbed some mountains, laid on the beach, had some fun. And really just decompress from the experience we just had. And it was really cool just to do that together.

And then take me, I also want to go to the travel piece. So company is bought.

Yeah.

You and Alex take how many months off to travel? Well, we're still traveling.

We don't know. The thing is, we don't know what's next. There's no script for building and selling a public company. And then what do you do next after this? Through this process, we've got enough time to personally explore ourselves, explore the world. But we know that we're still pretty young and we want to do something next, but there's just no way to evaluate all of those opportunities. So in our heads, we knew that we didn't want to do this for the rest of of our lives. But at the same time, there were no constraints on the problem. Like, let's just go. And we roughly knew we wanted to go to all the continents. You know, we had some trips and birthdays that we wanted to string together as a path around the world that we wanted to do. But yeah, there was like weirdly unconstrained. And for us two having been like incredibly constrained in our time and what we want to work on and where energy should be for so long. It was just a really weird contrast to just be like— I remember having a moment maybe one month after realizing nobody had asked me a question of substance in like 60 days. It's like, that's weird. Like, I was just like effectively ChatGPT. Like, people would ask me questions and I just like spew what I thought. And now like people are asking me questions.

It went away.

Yeah, it just kind of went away. I was like, huh? Like slowly I started to like de-stress and decompress.

Was travel what you really needed?

No, absolutely not. Okay.

What do you mean?

Yeah, I don't think I knew and I don't think I know even to this day, like what exactly I needed. But what I didn't need was like while my career was completely changing all at once, letting go of my San Francisco apartment and not having like a place to call home or be near my friends every single day. And just like separating myself not from just like one meaningful part of my life, but from every meaningful part of my life, just to go like enjoy other things probably wasn't what I needed. Now, don't get me wrong, like seeing the world is one of the most incredible things you can ever do. But it's definitely not exactly what I needed in that moment.

Looking back on this conversation now, and just for people listening, like, if there was one thing that you wanted them to take away from this conversation, what would it be?

Yeah, I think the thing that I just mentioned, like, there's some pretty scary moments when building a company, and you should be scared of them. Like, things happen and things will change and you can't get them back. But the things that do really matter, like, will remain to be true. I do genuinely believe that. And hopefully, in the understanding that, like, that gives you a little bit more freedom to just operate and be the leader that you want to be.

You never texted me back.

I never texted you back. Yeah, I had a little bit going on. And for context, for the people listening, when we made the announcement that we're doing the layoff, a number of people did reach out. Max was one of the people that reached out to say, like, I don't exactly remember the right— the words, but it was a thoughtful, heartfelt message. Heartfelt message just to acknowledge the position I was in. And, uh, I didn't respond, and I'm regretful for that.

So if you hear nothing else in this interview, it was just that.

That's the takeaway.

It's actually why we had you on.

It's just that is the full circle on that.

Yeah.

Um, no, that was great, Brendan.

Thank you. Yeah, awesome.

Brendan, thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, we really appreciate it. This is an awesome conversation, and, um, just We're so lucky to have heard your story before, but be able to actually just tell it and walk through it together over this session was just really wonderful. So thank you.

Yeah, I think that this is going to inspire a lot of founders and friends of ours. And I'm just so grateful you're willing to share and be vulnerable and talk about like the honest truth of what happened. So yeah, it was a blast having you on.

It's an incredible journey. And one of the things I've always been wanting to do is just like find the right medium to capture, just everything that did happen and appreciate all the people that, that came along with it. So my hope is that this, this can do that. Awesome.