Six years ago, before he became one of the youngest CEOs in history of a publicly traded company, Alex Rodriguez was a college student grappling with a tough decision: stay in school or drop out to build a company from scratch. Rodriguez and two of his friends at the University of Waterloo in Canada were unsure if their self-driving vehicle business idea would impress investors, so they decided to split the potential outcomes into two scenarios. Rodriguez said the possibilities were "either you learn a lot, it doesn't work out, and you go back to school. Or things go well, and you end up doing what you hope to do after school, which is starting a great business in an exciting industry."
In late 2015, with nearly $10,000 in financial assistance from their parents and a $25,000 entrepreneurship award from their school, the trio decided to drop out. They became the co-founders of Embark, a self-driving truck startup with 200 employees that went public in November through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and is now valued at over $4 billion.
### A Casual Start
In the summer of 2015, Rodriguez and his friends, Brandon Mok and Michael Skupian, the other co-founders of Embark, decided to build a self-driving golf cart in Rodriguez’s parents' garage in Calgary. Rodriguez jokingly told his friends that their future might lie in Y Combinator, the famous tech incubator in Silicon Valley, which sparked laughter among them. While studying mechatronics, a branch of mechanical, electronic, and electrical engineering, he and his friends developed a stronger understanding of technology.
With the help of their parents, who contributed money to purchase an $1,800 golf cart and an $8,000 LIDAR sensor, and with a workspace in Rodriguez's garage, the three friends worked on their design and software. Rodriguez's mentor, a former GPS technology employee, arranged for a $30,000 loan to start the business.
In July of that year, the trio entered their golf cart in the early-stage pitch competition at the University of Waterloo—and they won, receiving $25,000 in seed money from the school's venture fund. The university described their project as one of the first self-driving ventures in Canada.
The founders applied to Y Combinator's startup accelerator and were accepted into the 2016 cohort, marking a turning point from fun to reality, although they had to leave university to travel to the U.S. and focus on their project.
At Y Combinator, the co-founders shifted from building self-driving shuttles to developing software for commercial trucks to drive autonomously—an industry that investment firm Wedbush projected would attract over $750 billion in investments over the next five years, according to CNBC. Through connections from the business incubator, Embark raised $2.1 million from investors, and that funding increased in subsequent rounds, allowing the company to eventually raise over $317 million before going public last month, according to Crunchbase estimates.
Prior to that, in 2018, the company conducted its first experiment with a truck driven by Embark's software, which delivered cargo between the East and West coasts of the U.S., with a human driver in the truck's cabin throughout the journey, ready to take the wheel if necessary. A year earlier, Skupian left the startup, but Mok remained with Rodriguez as the Chief Technology Officer of Embark. Rodriguez expects the company to launch its full program without the need for a human driver behind the wheel by 2024.
Rodriguez affirmed that the decision to drop out was the best choice, believing that delaying the execution of their dream by three years would have lost them momentum, given the current competition from numerous startups and giants alike in developing self-driving technology.
