The following interview is a conversation we had with Matt LeDucq, CEO & Co-Founder of Forum Mobility, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $423 Million Raised to Power the Future of Zero-Emission Trucking
Matt LeDucq
Brett, thanks for having me here.
Brett
Not a problem. Let’s go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Matt LeDucq
Yeah, I’ve started my career over 20 years ago in renewables. I’ve spent my whole career in renewables and now what people are calling energy transition. I actually started off in the trades, I come from a family of tradesmen and start off installing solar panels out in the East Bay. And I worked my way through the industry, through the construction side and ended up on what’s called the independent power producing side where you own operate power generation facilities. And that kind of led me to starting for mobility three years ago.
Brett
I feel like everyone’s talking about renewable energy. Obviously that’s a big topic right now, but I have to imagine that 10, 15, 20 years ago, it wasn’t as big of a discussion. How have you seen that conversation and that discussion evolved since you got started in the industry?
Matt LeDucq
Yeah, I mean, I think that the parallels between what we’re doing at four, mobility and talking about the zero emission heavy duty trucking in our case is like unfathomably familiar to me because it’s the exact same way that people talked about solar in 2005 and six. Just how much nay saying was being said about that. Solar isn’t a bonafide generation source. It’s intermittent. It’s got all these functional problems. But if you look today, there is $2 billion of solar being put in the ground in the United States every single day. Its not even close. In terms of new capacity additions to our country’s grid, solar is far and away the biggest capacity addition that we see. And I see that in our space too. In zero emission, theres a lot of pushback, theres a lot of to and fro happening about zero emission trucking?
Matt LeDucq
I think a lot of it is justified because they said it is new. But you can see the future. You can see the future of clean trucking. And I think that we’re going to have the same outcome. And what we do is what we saw in solar as it’s just become this ubiquitous form of generation. We’re going to see that on transportation, too.
Brett
What are the critics say about zero emission trucking? Like, why do they not believe or like, what’s their kind of, like, point of attack? What are they going after there? Why don’t they believe that it is.
Matt LeDucq
Going to be massive again? I think there’s so many parallels to wind, to solar, to this. I mean, like, a lot of the critics say it’s too expensive and then it needs subsidy. A lot of the critics say that it’s operationally a lot different. You can fill a gas tank on a diesel truck in 20 minutes, 15 minutes, and all of a sudden you have five, 6700 miles of range in that truck, maybe more. And you can go to a gas station anywhere you want and do that. And they’re all over the place. And for us, charging a heavy duty truck takes a couple hours in a lot of cases.
Matt LeDucq
But when you look at where we’re going to be in ten years and where we are now, I think it’s going to be a very similar discussion that we had in the renewable space, that the future of this is going to look unbelievably good. It’s going to be clean. It’s going to be quiet. I think you’re going to want to raise your kids and your family in communities that have clean transportation in ways that doesn’t exist now. Ill give you a perfect example, Brett. If you live next to the port of Long beach, you have a 98% higher likelihood of contracting cancer because you have 23,000 trucks a day that drive by. I think five or ten years from now, you’re going to have the vast majority of those being clean trucks, and you’re going to have cleaner community.
Matt LeDucq
So the naysayers say the same thing they said about renewables and a lot of different shades of gray. But the future of what we are going to do in zero emission is going to be pretty awesome.
Brett
Does it ever get exhausting having to defend it? Or do you view that as just an opportunity for you to kind of be the thought leader and to really evangelize this idea?
Matt LeDucq
It doesn’t get exhausting. I mean, I think that as you get older, maybe you just get less emotionally attached to other people’s opinions. I believe in my bones that this is going to be the way my kids and their kids get around, is going to be in quiet zero emission vehicles, and that this is the way it’s going to shake out. And I’ve seen a lot of people naysay things and it doesn’t stop them from happening and doesn’t stop them from adopting them in the future and really loving them, too. So it doesn’t get exhausting. I think that I would never start a company that I didn’t have that belief deep down inside of me. And I know that this is the way it’s going to shake out.
Matt LeDucq
It’s going to be twists and turns to get there, but it doesn’t really get under my skin when people may say it.
Brett
Take us back to mid 2021 when you were first founding the company. What were those early days like? What was that aha for you? Or that key moment that made you say, okay, this is it, im going to go and raise 400 plus million bucks and go build this company?
Matt LeDucq
Clay, I wish I could say it was 2021. It was actually long before that when I had the aha moment. Before this, I worked at a company called Nextera Energy, and NextEra is one of those companies that its the largest utility in the world. Nobodys ever heard of it. And I was in charge of a very specific type of asset, one that was on the distribution grid, solar on roofs and stuff. That would be a distribution asset. Like many things in energy, you look at policy, and California had implemented some policies that were going to make anything but zero emission transportation nearly impossible as time marched on. And when we looked at the market opportunity from a capital investment perspective, that was the AHA moment.
Matt LeDucq
It was such an AHA moment, and this was probably 2018 or 2019, that we had to run the numbers a few times because hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure has to be installed, overhauled, and put onto the grid just to satiate the bands of our regulations. And it kicked around in my head so long that eventually I knew I was at a point in my life I had just turned 40. I was either going to do something and get in on the front end of something, or I was going to watch it go by from the seat of an employee. I was lucky to find some incredible partners that helped also do as much and more to a big extent, to help start this business as I did.
Matt LeDucq
And we kind of took that thesis and put it into practice with form mobility in 21.
Brett
Where do you even begin? I talk with a lot of cybersecurity founders, a lot of founders who are building dev tools, like our e commerce tools, it makes sense where they begin for something like we’re talking about here with form mobility, like what’s step one?
Matt LeDucq
What we do is not that dissimilar from any type of development opportunity. And whether it’s developing a renewables project in Kern county or Texas, or wind farm in Oklahoma, or a housing development in downtown San Francisco, like, you got to start with understanding your market. You got to understand your capital costs, your operating costs, how to raise that capital, and what people are going to pay for it. And so for us, where did we start? We knew it had to happen. We knew, unlike a lot of the stuff that you maybe look at, like the fintech and the cybersecurity, I mean, to some extent it’s regulated, but this is mandated. Like, this is things that have to happen. This is infrastructure that has to exist, and it has to be built by private companies. We are uniquely skilled in that.
Matt LeDucq
We’re all just from the building finance asset management world. And so for us, it starts with a piece of their he just build a model, you build a business case, but then you truly have to find a piece of land to anchor your business around. And that’s what we do. We acquire pieces of land that are very uniquely situated to do what we need to do. And we started that. We start very small, and then you prove that, and then you can raise more money, you get more pieces, and it grows that way in the infrastructure world.
Brett
And can you help us just visualize what this is? So is it a charging station? Is it a charging station and you’re selling the trucks? Is it both? What does the full property look like?
Matt LeDucq
Think about a three or four acre field. Well, in this case, parking lot that is covered with somewhere between 51 hundred charging dispensers. The highest power charging dispensers you could possibly think of. Obviously, for the heavy duty industry, each one of those parking lots has more power going to it than your average sports stadium goes to it. And what we do for our customers is we will provide them charging as a service, and then we’re a little bit unique. And we provide trucks and charging for a service. And we do that very specifically because of the market we serve. We think that an off balance sheet solution is really necessary. And so we give people a truck that’s fully charged with a parking spot and a secure lot staff for a fixed price per month that’s competitive with the price of diesel.
Matt LeDucq
That’s kind of our shtick, and that’s what we do. And again, there’s tens and tens of thousands of trucks that have to do this in the next few years alone in California. So there’s a lot of opportunity for us.
Brett
Do you ever worry about, like death by regulation, where some new form of policy does come out that has a major impact on you?
Matt LeDucq
If you are at all involved with energy and you turn a blind eye to policy, you’re going to be sol unfortunately, that there is opportunity, and then you have to follow it and you have to understand it. You also have to understand politics as part of that. States like California do not backtrack on things like renewables and zero emission. They double down on them. You go to other places that are more purple or red, and you do run a higher risk of policy being thrown back in your face. I mean, you have Wyoming, for example, who is aiming to ban electric cars because they aren’t combustion. Right. California would go the exact opposite way of that. So there’s places that you want to focus. That’s why we focus on California. That’s why we like the state of Washington as our next market.
Matt LeDucq
There’s a time and place to move out of more politically aligned places. But for now, you’ve got to follow the policy and find the spots that work.
Brett
Trey? I had an interview with a Founder a couple of months ago, and she was building something in the EV charging space, but she was selling to Hoas, to apartment buildings, things like that. And she said her first hire was essentially a lobbyist or someone to lead the charge there. Do you have to engage with lobbyists? Do you have lobbyists on payroll? Like, what does that look like? Just from like a team perspective so that you can try to be on top of, and I guess if needed, guide some of this policy.
Matt LeDucq
Yeah. Our first independent board member was a gentleman by the name of Adam Browning. He started one of the most effective and impactful trade groups called vote solar 20 years ago. He helped guide us at the beginning, and then he became our executive vice president. Policy as we got ourselves funded. And to that, to your .1 of the very first hires was a high power policy person. In addition to that, we have ex legislature on advisor roles for us in other states. We have lobbyists in Sacramento, we work with the governor’s office. It is one of those things where the venture investors cringe at it, but you have to be in the weeds and you have to be in the room to get a jump on the markets. You cannot be second because if you’re not in the room.
Matt LeDucq
You don’t know where the bucks going to go, so to speak. And so its been one of the very first things we’ve invested in. Its continues to be something we invest in. And its just so critical in an energy business, especially an energy business that at its infancy, which in our case like the heavy duty, zero emission transportation world is out.
Brett
How many stations do you have today?
Matt LeDucq
We have one up and running, and were going to be putting about $30 million of assets in the ground this year. This is a big year. We got our pilot project in the ground about a year ago. As maybe some folks who listen know, getting things permitted and interconnected in a state like California doesn’t exactly happen quickly. So were fortunate to get a project in the ground over a year ago. And the projects that are coming online this year for us are going to be ones that started back in late 21, early 22. For us on the development side, as.
Brett
You think ahead for this year, whats keeping you up at night? Whats top of mind?
Matt LeDucq
Top of mind is that when you’re in a market like ours, we don’t control a lot of what goes in and out of our products, namely the manufacturing of trucks, for example, is something that keeps me up a lot. Right now, there are not a lot of zero emission class eight trucks being made. You have Acgar, which is the Kenworth Mac Peterbilt brand. You have the Volvo. You have a company called BYD. You have Daimler Navistar. You put them all together. Theres just a couple thousand trucks being made. And three years ago, we thought there was going to be a lot more being made. Right now theres some regulations that are forcing that, forcing them to make them. But the supply chain is not keeping up with the regulations for us. I think that we can build the greatest depots in the world.
Matt LeDucq
We can have them optimized and financed and all that. But we need trucks to show up every day. Right now its in near term concern of mine. It wont be a long term, but right now its the trucks. And the affordability of those trucks is whats keeping me up at night.
Brett
From a go to market perspective, how do you even sell something like this? What does that buying journey look like?
Matt LeDucq
Yeah, the go to market. And I give a lot of credit to not only Adam, but Will Mitchell and our sales team, Rob Kelly and Ron Hunt. The go to market is you go to Brett Stapper trucking and say you’ve got 50 trucks. You know that ten of them are going to expire. And you’re going to have to go zero emission because in the state of California, I should say theres some rules. In order to enter a port, your truck starting this year needs to be a model engine, 2013 or older. You need to have less than 800,000 miles on it. And if your truck leaves the registry, which is managed by the air resource board, it must be replaced by a zero emission truck. So we can go to a customer and say your fleet has a good chunk of expiring trucks.
Matt LeDucq
Do you want to deal with that yourself and go get a personal loan and understand what low carbon fuel standard credits are and how to apply for grants? Or do you just want to come over and use our service down the road from you? So that’s been the go to market strategy. It’s pretty simple when you talk to a trucker, and it’s been received extremely well. This show is brought to you by.
Brett
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Matt LeDucq
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Matt LeDucq
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Brett
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Brett
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Brett
Now back today’s episode. If a company or a trucker is saying no, what’s the reason? Why are they saying no?
Matt LeDucq
I mean, I think that there’s a lot of justifiable concern. I mean, right now there’s 200 trucks, I think, on the port registry. And by the way, just to back up a little bit about how big of a thing port trucking is, in the state of California alone, like 33,000 trucks in the state of California travel about a billion miles a year moving containers from the port to the Amazon warehouse. It is an unfathomably huge, I mean, hundreds of millions of gallons of diesel, billions of pounds of carbon, et cetera. And if you’re a trucker, your life is made on your cost per mile and the reliability of that truck. And I think that a lot of truckers are saying there’s only a couple hundred of these things out there. Does it work? Like, yeah, it’s great.
Matt LeDucq
I’ll do it, especially if my customers want me to be zero emission, which is a real thing. But I think that a lot of the truckers are saying, like, I’ve been running diesels for 30 years. I’m nervous. I heard these break down a lot. I heard the batteries don’t work. They hear. They read things on whatever news source their algorithm feeds them, and they get apprehensive. And I appreciate that. Right. Their business is a low margin game, in all honesty. Like, they’re. They’re spending a lot to make a little on a service basis. And not having a truck run because some batteries get recalled could just be punishing to, you know, and by the way, of those billion miles run every year, about 80% of those miles are run by fleets of five trucks or less.
Matt LeDucq
These are small businesses that run the backbone of our port trucking, what’s called drainage industry. And so, like, their apprehension is, like, I get it. It’s scary. It’s a scary transition.
Brett
Growing up, my stepdad was actually a truck driver, and I’m just picturing him in my mind, like, good luck convincing that guy that he should make any change in his life whatsoever. Very stubborn, very, like, stuck in his ways. And I would have to imagine that’s probably, like, a standardized Persona across a lot of that industry, at least. So the question there, I guess, is, like, how do you get people to change? Like, what do you say to them to, like, convince them to change? Or are you not really trying to convince people to change? Are you really going after, like, the kind of next generation of truckers and trying to convince the people that aren’t already, like, set in their ways?
Matt LeDucq
What I’ve communicated with our sales team is, like, we are not in the changing people’s minds business, and nor do we pitch ourselves as a green technology company. We’re a service provider. And I think that, from our perspective, we provide a service. We’re good operators. We’re good builders. We’re good engineers and constructors. We’re good asset managers and all these things that we are there to provide a service. And I think that, from our perspective, is when people decide that this is something that they need to do, whether it’s because that’s where they want their business to go or it’s where they want their customers want their business to go, we’re a service provider for them. I think that if somebody doesn’t want to do this, that’s their right.
Matt LeDucq
And I think that they can do what they want to do, and they can run their truck as long as it’s allowed to run in the state. And if they want to give it a go sometime, go for it. I will tell them, like, I will say when I do run into the naysayer from dining time, I’d say, do yourself a favor and just go call our customer or go call other customers, a company like ours, and ask them what it’s like. Because as apprehensive as people are, I could tell you, like, the drivers absolutely love it. If you were ever in. Was it your grandfather’s truck that. Yeah, it is a loud, busy day for like, you know, it rattles, it groans. Older trucks, it’s hard to listen to the radio.
Matt LeDucq
And when you get in a quiet truck, especially if you’re a port trucker and you spend a lot of your day in line waiting and you’re turning your truck on and off and on and off, like, they just love it. Our customers love it. It becomes a retention tool for drivers, especially, like you’re saying, some of the younger drivers, the next generation drivers. And so if somebody does want an ac was like, absolutely, do your thing. I’m not going to change your mind. I would encourage you to talk to people who do it and see how it’s affecting their business positively or negatively, because I know that when they pick up the phone, it’s going to be a positive message.
Brett
If we look ahead to the future, is there a plan at some point to have autonomous trucks here? Or like, what are your views when it comes to that whole conversation around robot trucks?
Matt LeDucq
Yeah, that’s a tough. I think that autonomous trucks are exciting and they’re terrifying. Again, I’m not unlike maybe some of the other folks you have on the show. I’m not really a futurist. I think it would be really cool to have inductive charging, which is non plug in charging, and autonomous trucks. I also know firsthand that there are 33,000 truckers that move goods in and out ports. 80% of them are mom and pops. The vast majority of those are, like I said, small business and a significant portion are immigrant businesses. I know that the people that drive the trucks have a remarkable story and I get to interact with them. Having autonomous vehicles and electrification is an unfathomably efficient marriage because charging times no longer become downtime for employees.
Matt LeDucq
But I think it’s one of those things where in the future it could be a real boon to the industry. And I think in the near term, even with drivers in the trucks, it’s going to be a net positive.
Brett
Cause it’s probably far away if it ever does happen. Not going to happen anytime soon, right? If we just look at a policy level, was it Cruz that had that issue where it kind of ran someone over but, like, didn’t really run someone over and like, it didn’t matter. Like at the end of the day, they got shut down. And like, I think they’re no longer operating anymore, if I remember. I think they’re almost done, right?
Matt LeDucq
Yeah. You would maybe know better than I do know that one of our investors, obvious ventures, has what’s called obvious champions, and one of them is a professor at MIT, a gentleman who is in charge of autonomous vehicles for MIT. And I had a chance to talk to him at an event. He said, guess when we put our first autonomous vehicle on the road and I smiled, I said, just tell me. He said, it was like, I don’t know the exact date, but it was like 1988 or something like that. Hes like, this has been going on a long time, and hes like, I think his comment is its exciting. Its what he does.
Matt LeDucq
I think his view is its a little ways before we have 80,000 pounds of cargo running down the freeway at 60 miles an hour with nobody behind the wheel, because thats what, heavy duty trucks, too. And so I’ll be curious how it shakes out. Like I said, for our business, it would present an opportunity, I think, for our customers. It’s a tough one to swallow.
Brett
From a competitive landscape perspective, do you view other zero emission fleet providers as competitors, or is the competitor really just the traditional gas or diesel truck?
Matt LeDucq
I can’t tell you how big of an opportunity is. No, certainly there’s some competitive juices with anything, right? I mean, you can’t help but to have that. But we work together a lot more than we work against each other, especially when were saying a lot of us infrastructure providers, we will jointly lobby together. So in our case, theres a good handful of firms with a few billion dollars of committed capital. We spend a lot more time figuring out how we can get things done together, whether its in DC or Sacramento or elsewhere, than we do working apart. And drayage alone, I mean just drayage alone in the next ten years, theres $25 billion of capital that has to get spent in there as part of this energy transition. So definitely competitive nature. I don’t ever want to lose.
Matt LeDucq
I don’t ever want to see anybody get in front of the port market first. But theres a lot of blue sky out there for us to all get after.
Brett
Preston, we had the Founder of g two on the podcast a while back, and were talking about category creation and g two. They create the software categories. And I was asking him, whats the number one piece of advice that you give if someone wants to create a category. And he said exactly what you just said. He said, go and partner and go work with your competitors and drive the industry forward together. And I’ve tried to tell founders that and every Founder I’ve told that to says like, sounds nice on paper, zero chance am I working with my competitors in any way whatsoever. How do you approach that? How do you think about you’re collaborating and partnering and working with people who are like, I guess on paper at least their competitors?
Matt LeDucq
Well, again, I mean, the infrastructure world, it has some old schoolness to it. And I think in a really cool way, like I know the CEO’s of our competitors fairly well. They’re good people, they know what they’re doing. They’ve all built billions of dollars of infrastructure too. And so for me it’s like pick up the phone and I call them. And, you know, I think that in a policy driven world like we live in, it’s a lot easier to get together in a market driven world. I could see where there would be some apprehension about people maybe stealing ideas or just some general just like kind of paranoia about that. But for us, I know who runs the other companies. I’ve known them for years in my life.
Matt LeDucq
And it’s really easy to just pick up the phone and say, hey, yeah, this type of policy is going to negatively affect the incentive amount or the mandate amount. Can you sign on to this letter with me? And by the way, can you come to Sacramento? And we need to push this with the speaker or the head of ARB or whatever it is.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 420 million to date. What would you say you’ve learned about fundraising throughout this entire journey?
Matt LeDucq
I feel like there’s two types of founders out there. There’s ones who just like, they love fundraising and then there’s ones that really can’t wait for it to be over. I was absolutely the latter. I was happy to be done with it for a few years. I could also say that in our case, there is a lot of non dilutive money out there. So we’ve raised 420 plus million dollars. The vast majority of that is actually non dilutive. We also have some structured capital in there. We also have some debt mixed into this. So I think that if you are in a space like ours, you just don’t have to continue to dilute yourself to raise capital.
Matt LeDucq
And if you can really think about that and really think about different pools of capital and what they need in terms of risk profile, I think there’s more than just doing seed a, b, c, d, e. I think theres a lot more out there for the right kind of businesses. And so weve been really creative with the way weve capitalized the company, in part with dilution and in part with non dilution.
Brett
Where did you learn how to do that and that type of financial engineering?
Matt LeDucq
Honestly, we kind of learned it as went with infrastructure. Its really popular to take a lot of money at once, build and create two classes of shares. And this gets into the weeds of how to finance an infrastructure company, but the private equity or the infrastructure investor gets a pref on the cash flows and the management team gets some sort of class b share. We just didn’t think that our business was mature enough to warrant that type. We thought we could create a lot of value in the enterprise and just knowing how to build a network of zero emission charging facilities. And we didn’t want to accept that were going to essentially work for a fund. We thought that we could control that a little bit more, and we wanted to preserve that.
Matt LeDucq
So when we first started the business, we saw what would be more traditional infrastructure structures for more mature markets. And when we saw those structures, it wasn’t right for us. If we wanted to be employees, we would have stayed in our jobs. We went and got some really good advice for some really smart people, and we got some really good advice along the way from founders, from bankers, from friends. And we kind of knew that there was a different way to do it, and that’s how ultimately we capitalized for mobility.
Brett
Final question for you, and I know we’ve touched on this a little bit, but just want to paint very clear picture. What’s the next three to five years going to look like? What is that big picture vision?
Matt LeDucq
Big picture vision is we get $100 million of assets in the ground in the next 24 months. And that sets us, and we operate those flawlessly. When I say flawlessly, we provide an incredible customer experience and we will define ourselves as the operator of choice for heavy duty trucking, and then we will have a pipeline at that place at that point to put billions of dollars in the ground. And so we’re already accumulating the property to do that. We’ve got the property to do the first goal in the next 24 months. So for us, it’s all about execution, right? We just got to build, we got to build them right. We got to operate them better and provide an unbelievable customer experience and get a lot of infrastructure in the ground.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and I love the approach, and I really love this conversation. We are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in, they feel inspired. They want to follow along with the journey. Where do they go?
Matt LeDucq
Look me up on LinkedIn. I’m there. I’m accessible. I’m available. We also have forum Zev on Twitter, which I think is called X now. But hit me up if anything I’ve said is intriguing or I can give any advice. I developed some scars and I’m happy to share them. Amazing.
Brett
Matt, thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
Matt LeDucq
Thanks, boys.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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