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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ALICE DEFAULT
COFOUNDER & CEO, DOUBLE
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