The following interview is a conversation we had with Damien Hutchins, Co-Founder of Rollzi, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $8 Million Raised to Build the Full Truckload Carrier of the Future
Brett
Front Lines building it.
Damien Hutchins
Absolutely. It’s my pleasure, Brett.
Brett
Yeah, so before begin talking about what you’re building there, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and maybe a bit more about your background?
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, absolutely. I live in Seattle, Washington, and most of my background has been in tech. I always joke that I’m a non tech guy. I’ve worked in lots of operational roles and executive leadership roles. And I do understand I can read some coding and understand product management. But yeah, I’m not a technologist by trade. I’ve worked in various industries, but most recently, I actually was at a technology broker, a digital freight broker in Seattle. And that’s where I kind of learned a little bit more about the trucking business and really how I formulated my vision for Rollzi.
Brett
And what is it about the trucking business that excites you, would you say?
Damien Hutchins
I think probably one of the things I like the most I’d say it’s twofold, and I’ll start with the second one. The second one is just that it’s a pure supply and demand marketplace. I think that’s really fascinating. You have all these trucks out there that are operating, sometimes rationally and sometimes irrationally, and then you have all of these shippers that make up the demand that have very rapidly changing quite volatile volumes of goods that need to be moved. And watching that marketplace take place and watching the supply move to different parts of the market, I think it’s fascinating. And then the other thing is just the fractured nature of the market, which probably is the reason why it can be such a pure supply demand play. The long tail of trucking companies is very long, with many trucking companies only having one truck and the majority having fewer than five trucks.
Brett
Super interesting. And two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. As a Founder and as an entrepreneur, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Damien Hutchins
That’s a great question. I was thinking through some of the greatest CEOs, and I was hoping to think through some that had very few flaws. It was hard to think of them. This isn’t a CEO. This is a Founder, though. So hopefully this answers your question, but I really admire the late Paul Allen. Being from Seattle, I see a lot of impact that he’s had beyond just Microsoft and beyond the company that he co-founded. He left a legacy, but it also wasn’t purely virtue signaling. It was a lot of he called it his toys. He bought some sports teams and he bought a theater. But through those things, he actually made the community stronger and the community better. And I think that we’ll be able to see the impact of Paul Allen for many years to come.
Brett
And speaking of community, could you just give us a high level overview of what the tech community looks like in Seattle today and just what that tech ecosystem looks like up there?
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, absolutely. There’s the old guard Microsoft over there, and even some smaller companies that have been around for a really long time, like real networks. And a lot of tech companies that have a presence but maybe aren’t headquartered over there like Adobe or even small players like, Allreciipes.com is over in Seattle. But Amazon really changed the game, I think, when they came to Seattle, because they really did sort of spin off this entire ecosystem. There’s a lot of founders in Seattle that came from Amazon. In fact, the founders of the digital trucking brokerage that I came from actually came from Amazon, and there’s a lot of Amazon talent there and from that digital trucking brokerage. Now there’s a lot of new companies in trucking that came from the company that I was at before at Convoy. So it really is super interesting to watch how you sort of have this main trunk with all these branches coming up.
Damien Hutchins
Then each of these new tech companies that are born sometimes start to create more tech companies. So it’s just really fun to watch.
Brett
Nice. That’s awesome. And going back to you personally, what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And I always say this can be a business book or it could be a personal book as well.
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, boy, that’s a tough one. I love reading, and sometimes I feel like I’m wasting time if I’m not reading a book that’s making me better at my company. I think probably the one that stands out the most to me, though, is Creativity, Inc. A Story of Pixar. And it was a great book because it sort of touched a little bit on multiple founders and multiple management styles. But at the end of the day, it seemed like Pixar had a really great culture, and that culture drove their success despite a lot of the headwinds that they faced. So, yeah, I think Creativity, Inc. Is sort of on my must read list, and I’ve read it multiple times.
Brett
Nice. That’s awesome. That’s always a good indicator if you go back to the book and read it again. Yeah. And isn’t the Pixar story. Crazy, isn’t it? Something that’s, like, George Lucas was having a divorce, so he had to sell it, and then Steve jobs bought it? Is it something like that? Yeah.
Damien Hutchins
They were looking for a buyer for a really long time. Steve jobs came into the picture, and it actually took a really long time to get the deal done, but because it was actually sort of the perfect convergence of events, where Steve jobs then had some of his own personal turmoil, and he sort of went back to pixar and said, okay, I’m going to show these guys. It was almost like a vengeance by. And it happened to work out. And it probably wouldn’t have happened if not for multiple things happening at the same time to multiple people. It never would have come about. We wouldn’t have toy story today without some bad things happening in people’s personal lives.
Brett
That’s funny. That’s crazy. Nice. Well, let’s switch gears here, and let’s dive deeper into the company. So tell us about rolesy and maybe let’s just start with the origin story, and then if you can just give the high level overview of the pitch that you make to customers.
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, absolutely. So back to the origin. I recognized that there was a problem in the marketplace with carriers, trucking companies, and that was that they were operating the same way they had been operating since the 80s, when we had deregulation, and they were able to actually start operating with less regulation in the US. My job, the broker, was to find trucks at a low price. And the problem was, I had very little control over that price. And the market was so fragmented that there weren’t really any major players that you’d go to say, hey, let’s work on the cost structure. And I thought, well, if I was a carrier, how would I work on the cost structure? What would I do? In the last decade, we’ve seen a ton of new investment and products come into the market, into the trucking industry. And I thought, okay, would I leverage those?
Damien Hutchins
And if yes, how would I do it? And then what would my strategy be to really exploit all that technology as much as possible? So that’s how I came up with the idea of Rollzi and sort of refined it from there. So I started with looking at the whole tech stack, understanding what are the tools that we could use, and then what would we need to do to supplement? And then went to the strategy and said, okay, now that we have all this efficiency from all these great tools, now what can we do to fix the strategy? And the problem that I’m trying to solve is cost. Back office cost is one bucket. Utilization of the truck, increasing that to sort of decrease the operational overhead is my second bucket. And then my third bucket is drivers. How do I stop this 110% churn rate that most of the industry sees because that’s a huge source of recruiting costs, training costs, higher insurance, and all kinds of other problems that come along with having this really high churn rate.
Damien Hutchins
So that’s kind of where I started with rolly.
Brett
Super interesting. And can you tell me about the trucks? So are you specifically changing something about the trucks then, or are you just buying trucks that fit the criteria? What does that look like?
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, I’m not changing the trucks, but I am sort of looking into the future to understand how do I create a strategy that lets me bring in different types of trucks. So our strategy, I call it the single lane relay strategy. And so normally the way a truck operates for over the road trucking is it starts in one place, let’s say Seattle, and it drives its load to its destination, let’s say Los Angeles, California. Along the way, it has to stop to let the driver sleep. I find that super inefficient the driver sleeping with a load sitting in a truck stop means that they are not advancing that load and that load is being delayed. I’m paying for the insurance on the truck while it sits. I’m taking on the depreciation of the truck. And so my strategy is, if I stay one very dense lane and strategically place my drivers along that route, can I break that load into segments and have my drivers hand the load off all the way down?
Damien Hutchins
That route so that they all return to their own terminal every night and another driver can get in their truck and do the same segment again, thus increasing my utilization of the truck while advancing each of the loads at double the speed. So increasing the utilization, increasing the velocity of the freight. That’s really what I’m focused on. But because now I have these segments on the lane, I do have the opportunity for different types of trucks if the truck is only going 500 miles per segment before it returns to its terminal. Well, now you have some interesting things you can do, maybe with hydrogen or with electricity. You maybe have some interesting things you could do with autonomy because you can now say, well, maybe autonomy is not great for this whole load from Seattle to La. But the Bakersfield, California to Los Angeles segment is actually perfect.
Damien Hutchins
So maybe we can use that portion to test some autonomy and maybe remove the driver from that portion. So to answer your question, not changing the trucks today, but definitely have an eye on that for the future.
Brett
And do you see that the quality of life is just much better with the truck drivers? Because from what I’ve read in previous conversations I’ve had, typically truck drivers have really gnarly schedules, right? Like, they’ll go out on the road for a week, be away from their families, come home for a few days, then go back and repeat the same thing. It sounds like with your drivers they don’t have to do that. Is that correct? Yeah, that’s right.
Damien Hutchins
And I should caveat that with we do not have perfect relays today. That’s something that we’re striving towards. And the way I look at it is I’m trying to remove one night at a time. But you’re absolutely right, the drivers do have a higher quality of life. And more than that, I think that we’re able now to attract lots more drivers. When you remove the idea of sleeping in a truck for a week or multiple weeks at a time, you remove the idea of showering at a gas station, there’s a lot of problems that are solved when the job is now driving a truck out and then back to a terminal and you go home at night. So absolutely, our churn rate for the drivers that are on our test lane is only a 6%, whereas the industry standard is over 100%. So we’re seeing much more stickiness with our drivers.
Damien Hutchins
And I’d say the only downside is they do get a little bit bored and sometimes they jump at the opportunities to go outside of the lane if we have one come up.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And can you give us an idea of the types of customers and the market that you’re seeing really adopt and embrace this?
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, this is a great question and probably I might even call this kind of our first pivot. I thought when I got into this that we would increase freight velocity and we would decrease cost, thus passing on those costs to shippers and they would be more than willing to give us all of their freight that lands on the lane that we operate on. That turned out to not be the case because a lot of shippers don’t want to give you freight that is just going from one location, maybe in Los Angeles back up to Seattle. They say, well no, I have an outbound warehouse and I’d rather just manage one trucking company and so I need you to take all of that freight. But that breaks our model, obviously. So we actually found that working with brokers or third parties that are aggregating lots of freight from shippers is actually better for us, even though the broker is making money on the spread.
Damien Hutchins
The idea that they have incentives that are aligned a little bit more with what we’re trying to accomplish actually works out really well. And they’re more than happy to just give us freight on a single lane that they can make money on because of our lower cost. And it works out a lot better for everybody. The processes are a little bit cleaner, the relationship is easier to manage because we don’t need to manage each shipper individually. So we find a lot of value in some of these newer tech brokers that are emerging and can you share.
Brett
Any numbers that just highlight some of the growth that you’re seeing right now?
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, I can say obviously we’re still private, but I can say that we started with three trucks two years ago. We have 22 trucks running now and so we are increasing. And the cool thing about that is you almost get this network effect. We’re adding each truck to the network actually has much higher upside than just one additional node in the network, if you will. So we’re growing very rapidly and it’s been really fun and obviously difficult at times too, but it’s been really exciting to watch that growth happen.
Brett
Nice, that’s awesome. And in terms of finding product market fit, are you there now, do you think? And can you share any other insights from your journey as you work towards finding product market fit?
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, I will say that this is probably one of the toughest markets I’ve experienced, definitely. But as I talk to other players in the marketplace, this is probably the toughest market maybe ever. The Pandemic obviously is kind of a one off event and that is actually it has slowed us down a little bit, but it’s also forced us to sort of look at the model and say, okay, we really want to be innovators. Innovation is expensive though, so how can we innovate while still making money and still bringing in revenue? And so we’ve had to go a little bit outside of our core strategy and say, is there something else that we can do to bring in that revenue? And so that thing is we said, okay, maybe we start a second lane. That isn’t exactly where we would want to go, but we have to be a little bit more nimble than we had planned on being before.
Damien Hutchins
So I would say no, we probably haven’t achieved full product market fit, but I think we’re becoming a stronger company as we work towards it.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And what about the competitive landscape? So were talking in the pre interview, we had interviewed a European focused company called Trucksters that seemed like they were doing something similar. So how is what you’re doing different from them based on what you know about them? And then just in the US. What’s that competitive landscape look like?
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, so I actually think that they are doing something really interesting and I love watching what they’re doing. They’re taking a little bit of a different approach. They’re taking a software only approach where they are more like a broker than a carrier. So they create the segments and they do all of the calculations and the logistics for breaking the load into segments and then they go find independent carriers to take those segments. I believe I should say I don’t have any first hand knowledge of exactly how they work, but this is what I’ve gathered just from a little bit of limited research we actually own the assets and we think that’s actually really important because of data and control. So we have W, two drivers, owned trailers, owned trucks, and that gives us a lot more control over exactly how we dispatch. So we never have a problem where a driver says, I don’t really want to go to Bakersfield today.
Damien Hutchins
They just go where we need them to go based on the demand. So I think that’s probably the biggest difference. The second difference is that they have to go across borders over there, which adds a layer of complexity. We only have to go across state lines, which is much easier in the United States. So I think that it’s actually probably going to be a little bit easier to create an entire relay network throughout the United States than it will be in Europe. And as far as competitors, we are starting to see the emergence of some, I’ll call them tech first carriers, where they are doubling down on technology. And there are carriers that are using a lot of interesting technology to solve problems or make decisions using some machine learning or dispatching or to tell them if they should increase or decrease the size of their fleet.
Damien Hutchins
So there are these companies that are emerging old and new, but as far as marrying that technology and that decision making power with a strategy that says, hey, we’re going to make a lot of trade offs, but we think that those trade offs are going to increase our utilization and thus decrease our cost structure. We haven’t seen another carrier that’s doing that in the US. Yet.
Brett
And if we just look at the entire market, it sounds like there’s some disruptors there. But is the majority of it controlled and really dominated by, I guess we call them the legacy carriers?
Damien Hutchins
Yeah, definitely. There’s probably a pretty big barrier to entry to really compete with some of those guys because we’re talking 5000 to 10,000 power units or trucks for some of those carriers. And trucks are very expensive. And so a lot of those carriers, yes, they’ve been around since the 1980s and so really cracking the top 5% of carriers is difficult. But I do think that there’s three or four carriers that are in the hundreds of trucks that are, I think, quickly going to become disruptors in the space.
Brett
What’s an example of a legacy carrier? Is it like rider? Yeah.
Damien Hutchins
Ryder, I think is probably more of a three PL, but they do have assets. I would probably compare maybe a Night Swift or a Schneider or even a Western Express or something like that. Probably more than I would writer got it.
Brett
Super interesting.
Damien Hutchins
All right, last couple of questions here for you.
Brett
What excites you most about the work you get to do every day?
Damien Hutchins
I love that I’m solving lots of problems across lots of disciplines. Sometimes context switching is difficult, but it still excites me. I love that. One moment I can be thinking about how I’m going to solve a problem with a bearing seal on a wheel, on a tractor, and the next moment I’m thinking about where the input is going to be for this decision making algorithm to understand when the availability of a driver is. So that’s really exciting to me that I get to do both. And I think that also leads into sort of purpose. I come from tech, I did a lot of advertising tech, and it was always harder at the end of the day to know what you accomplished when the goal was to have a tracking pixel show up on a screen. But in Trucking, I know that I moved 40,000 pounds of water from one city to another for people that needed to buy water.
Damien Hutchins
And so it’s that tangibility and sort of that, hey, I’m really doing something to move the economy forward, really gets me excited every morning.
Brett
Nice. Love that. And let’s zoom out into the future. What would you say is the three year vision for Rosie?
Damien Hutchins
I think we would love to get closer to a full relay, maybe removing the 34 hours reset and let’s say three nights every week from the route or from the trip. And maybe using some machine learning for some of the really simple decision making that we’re doing, just to start dabbling with that instead of the calculated algorithms that we’re using today.
Brett
Nice. Love it. Damien unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap up. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Damien Hutchins
Check out Role with Rollzi and that’s across multiple platforms on Instagram, on and YouTube, on Twitter. Roll with Rollzi is the place to go.
Brett
Awesome. Damien thank you so much for taking time to chat, talk about what were building and share this vision. This is all super exciting and hope to have you back on sometime in the future to talk about how everything’s gone.
Damien Hutchins
Appreciate the time. Brett all right, keep in touch. Our.
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