Delivery trucks spew a lot of CO2. Ang wants to clean up the logistics industry with his Toronto-based startup, GoBolt. To do so, Ang and his cofounder, Heindrik Bernabe, offer sustainable delivery and warehousing services for commercial customers such as IKEA. The company already has more than 100 electric trucks in operation and wants to have 90% of its deliveries made by EVs by the end of 2024. GoBolt’s proprietary AI-powered software manages the fleet, keeping tabs on when trucks need to be charged and which vehicles are best for specific routes. Revenue should top $100 million this year, with more than $200 million in funding. “We are not grappling with retiring an old fleet,” Ang says. “We are building from scratch—and have the software needed to support it.”
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Mark, it is so lovely to be here with you today.
00:06 Thanks for joining me.
00:07 - Yeah, thanks for having me.
00:08 - Of course.
00:09 So let's start off.
00:10 Tell me about exactly what GoBolt does.
00:12 - So GoBolt is a tech enabled, sustainably driven,
00:17 end-to-end logistics company,
00:18 which is a bit of a mouthful,
00:19 which basically means that we take product
00:20 into our warehouses, we move it across our network,
00:22 and we get it to shoppers.
00:24 - Who's your target customer?
00:27 - So we are increasingly working with enterprise customers.
00:29 So mostly Fortune 500 to intelligently distribute
00:33 their inventory, manage their middle mile,
00:35 and their last mile delivery.
00:36 - And how did you get the idea for this?
00:38 Tell me about the founding story here.
00:40 - Yeah, so this is an interesting one
00:41 where it's actually nothing to do with what we do today.
00:44 So we've kind of stumbled into what we are now,
00:46 so bear with me.
00:47 The business started as a company called Second Closet.
00:49 We would pick up, store, and return people's stuff.
00:51 It was a valet storage company.
00:52 We launched into the international student market
00:54 where we would store international student stuff
00:57 over the summer, bring it back to them in September,
00:59 and kind of rinse and repeat.
01:01 And we launched that business by basically breaking
01:03 into dorm room buildings and slipping business cards
01:05 under their dorm room doors and putting flyers
01:08 in front of urinals and inside of bathroom stalls.
01:09 - I love it.
01:10 - And so with 500 bucks, we built a 20K a month business
01:13 in two weeks, and we said, okay, well,
01:15 we should probably quit the job that we haven't started yet
01:17 and do this full time.
01:18 - That's really cool.
01:19 So now how did parents, friends, people in your life react
01:24 when you said, right out of college,
01:27 you're gonna just start your own company?
01:29 Was there any doubts or was it hard?
01:31 - My brother and I were on our own since I was 17,
01:33 so we were totally financially independent.
01:34 We were just living together and we had moved out.
01:36 So it was basically do or die,
01:38 and I was in the mindset of getting
01:40 like a typical corporate job
01:41 and having like a stable, stable life.
01:44 So when I was recruited into management consulting
01:45 and had this pretty amazing salary coming out of university,
01:48 I was like, okay, well, our life is now set
01:50 and we can kind of breathe a sigh of relief.
01:52 So when I told my friends that I was quitting the job
01:55 that I didn't start yet to do this
01:57 and make basically nothing and eat ramen noodles all day,
01:59 there were some people looked at me weird
02:01 and others were like,
02:02 yeah, this is totally what you should be doing.
02:03 And I convinced my co-founder, Heindrick,
02:05 to start with me and quit his job,
02:06 which was even better than mine.
02:08 And we are now building this incredible business.
02:11 - So talk to me about the scale of your company.
02:18 Can you tell me about your revenue,
02:20 how many customers you have, anything like that?
02:22 - Yeah, so the business is just over seven years old.
02:26 We are over a thousand people strong and counting.
02:29 We do nine figures plus of revenue annually
02:32 and that's growing at a pretty rapid clip
02:34 and we're really excited about what the future holds for us.
02:37 - I know a lot of under 30 community members tell me
02:40 that they feel a lot of imposter syndrome
02:42 because they're so young and they're young founders
02:45 and it's hard to speak up in a room
02:47 of older, more experienced people.
02:49 Do you ever feel like that and how do you combat that?
02:52 - I have not felt it yet.
02:54 And I think part of the reason is,
02:56 as Heindrick and I built this business,
02:57 we've always been very heads down.
02:58 So we've never used anyone else's yardstick
03:00 to measure our success.
03:01 We've never looked at competitors
03:03 to see how they're thinking about what we're doing.
03:05 We've always been very driven to serve our customer.
03:08 And so long as our customer told us
03:09 that we were doing a good job,
03:10 we would feel like we're doing a good job.
03:12 And that's all that really matters at the end of the day.
03:13 Your age, you could be 90, you could be 12,
03:15 it doesn't really matter just so long
03:17 as you're driving the right outcomes.
03:18 And so I think our yardstick is,
03:21 what does our customer tell us
03:22 and what does the shopper tell us?
03:23 And if they're telling us that we're doing a good job,
03:24 irrespective of our age,
03:26 then we think that we have the right
03:27 to be doing what we're doing.
03:30 - And one last question for you.
03:31 You said before that you were on kind of the precipice
03:34 of do you take the leap into entrepreneurship
03:37 or do you go into this stable job?
03:39 What advice would you have for people
03:41 who are kind of in between both of those worlds right now?
03:44 - The younger you are,
03:45 the less risk you have for others around you.
03:48 And I think as we've grown the business,
03:50 we have over a thousand people
03:51 that I now have to consider every single one of them
03:53 in the decisions that I make.
03:54 But at the time, it was really just myself
03:56 and a couple of people.
03:57 So I think the younger you are,
03:59 the more competitive advantage you innately have
04:01 to make financially daring decisions.
04:04 Whereas later on in life,
04:05 it's a lot harder 'cause there's more at stake.
04:07 So I think the sooner you can get into entrepreneurship,
04:09 I think that's why you see
04:10 so many brilliant young people today
04:12 do really crazy innovative things
04:13 is because they're just crazy enough to try and do it.
04:16 And there's not these life encumbrances
04:19 that they may hold them back.
04:20 At the time, we didn't know what the reward was,
04:22 but we were fully prepared to see it through.
04:24 (upbeat music)
04:27 (upbeat music)
04:30 (upbeat music)
04:32 [BLANK_AUDIO]