How A 26-Year-Old Became The Youngest CEO Of A Public Company
In 2013, then-19-year-old University of Waterloo sophomore Alex Rodrigues and his buddy Brandon Moak wired together Canada’s first autonomous vehicle: a golf cart the duo nicknamed Marvin.
Soon after, the two won Thiel Fellowships and dropped out of college with a singular goal: to make autonomous trucking, well, regular trucking.
As their company, Embark, doubles in headcount and revenue every year, it’s safe to say they’ve been successful in that pursuit. This fall saw Embark merge with blank check company Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II, making Rodrigues, who is now 26, the youngest CEO of a publicly traded company and giving him a net worth of $500 million.
“I’m certainly excited about the growth of the company and the commercialization of the product, but one of the things I’m most excited to see is a lot of Embark trucks driving on the highway,” says Rodrigues.
Embark-enabled vehicles, however, are not the 18-wheeler spaceships one might conjure in visualizing “autonomous trucks.” Rather, companies like DHL, HP and Anheuser-Busch pay for Embark software to be manufactured into their Peterbilt trucks; then, when their drivers want to go autonomous, they pay Embark on a per-mile subscription basis. Though there’s much competition from companies like similarly public TuSimple and Plus as well as Alphabet-backed Waymo, Rodrigues is confident Embark will stay at the top. “We try not to pay too much attention to the competition,” he says. “The most important thing for us is to focus on delivering the technology we promised our partners.”
ALEX RODRIGUES
COFOUNDER & CEO, EMBARK
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Originally from Clermont-Ferrand, France, Default forewent a liberal arts education to head straight for entrepreneur-oriented business school. She ended up at calendar upshot Sunrise, and when that company was acquired by Microsoft in 2015, Default was embedded in the Outlook team.
She and co-workers Christophe Lamperti and Pierre-Elie Fauché became frustrated by the limitations of technology in achieving maximum productivity and decided to start their own executive assistant company, which connects a vetted network of contract-based executive assistants (EAs) with corporate leadership teams. Today that company is Double, and it employs 22 people and just closed a $8.5 million series A, bringing total funding to $14.5 million from investors like Index, Daphni and FJ Labs.
“We match people who are spending way too much time on valueless tasks with experienced EAs,” says Default. “And then we empower them with the best tools to work together.”
By providing the tech platform, EA matching service and network, Double made $5 million in 2021 so far (a 400% increase from 2020), pairing executives at companies like Hungryroot, Daring and Klarna with EAs employed on a contractual basis.
Default’s ultimate goal: to democratize executive assistance. “Nine years ago, no one ever thought about having someone just come and pick you up and drop you off exactly where you wanted. Now, with Uber, it’s completely normal for you to rely on a private driver,” says Default. “We’re doing the same thing with executive assistants; it’ll be completely normal to get this type of support.”
ALICE DEFAULT
COFOUNDER & CEO, DOUBLE