Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: The amount of power that we are bringing to sites, especially, you know, sites that revolve around fast charging, is typically the amount of power that you would need to power a skyscraper.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: This is Dare to Disrupt, a podcast about Penn State alumni who are innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders, and the stories behind their success. I'm your host, Ryan Newman, and on the show today is Paul Sooi. Paul is the chief operating officer and co founder of Revel, where he drives the company's mission to accelerate electric vehicle adoption in U.S. cities by focusing on fast charging infrastructure. Before co founding Revel in 2018, Paul worked for Gerson Lerman Group in New York City and ExxonMobil in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He graduated with honors in chemical engineering from the Penn State College of Engineering and the Schreyer honors college in 2014.
Paul, I'd like to welcome you to the Dare to Disrupt podcast. This is a first for us. You are our first guest who built an EV ride sharing service, and we're excited to talk to you about your story today.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Ryan, good to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Well, Paul, I'd like to start as we always do, which is at the beginning. Can you share with our listeners where you spent your time growing up and what your early formative years were like? Well, before Penn State?
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Yeah, sure thing. So I have the unique pleasure of being a townie. So I grew up in State College, grew up in Happy Valley, grew up around the campus. Honestly, at this point, it's hard to imagine having grown up anywhere else. And I think growing up in that lifestyle made it so that it was kind of impossible to go anywhere else. So the way that I like to describe it is, you know, I went through early education, high school, and then I kind of just blinked and I ended up at Penn State. It was just the natural next step. It's what I knew, it's what I liked, and thankfully, I had an awesome experience when I was there.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Amazing. So I assume you went to State College High for high school?
[00:01:59] Speaker A: I did for the first two years. I actually went to a boarding school as well in Southern Pennsylvania at Mercersburg Academy. So at that time it was a really small school, the type of school where you're living with your teachers, you're living with your coaches, your classes are 10 people around a roundtable instead of 35 kids. So just that sort of unique opportunity. I, at the time, I've always been a glorified nerd at that stage. You have been able to have that type of intimate education, be challenged to do new Things, I just took a chance. I remember the first time when we showed up there when I was at preseason football camp. I remember being in my dorm room at this boarding school thinking, what the hell did I just do to myself?
So I took a chance. I definitely didn't know that it would work out, but I'm grateful for the experience.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: In the spirit of taking chances and also glorified nerdom, let's talk about even those earlier years. Was school something that you always enjoy? Did it come easy to you? How did you think about your time in school? You know, elementary school, middle school.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: I've always enjoyed school. I think if I had to go back to school now, I would not enjoy it. Somehow I convinced myself to care, to enjoy it. And I really think that it comes from. I'm a competitive person. So for some reason, I kind of took a mentality that I had with sports and took it to school where no matter what it was, it's a quiz, it's an exam, it's a project. I was just a high achiever from the standpoint of wanting to win. And you can call that good, you can call that bad, it just is what it is. But that was definitely something that was an intrinsic motivator that gave me a lot of passion for no matter what I was doing, whether it was engineering or English or what, the class was very cool.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: So now you're back to this boarding school. You're out of the state college orbit for a little while, and you're in classes with only 10 people in your room in your class. I mean, it's a pretty intimate environment.
What was it about that that made you want to be excited to return to a place like Penn State with 40,000 students and classes in the hundreds?
[00:04:02] Speaker A: I think there's definitely an element of coming back home. There's an element of familiarity. And at that time, I think there's a sense of opportunity. Like most people, when I went to college, I wasn't really clear on exactly what I wanted to do. So for me, what was more important was keeping the doors open and at a bigger school, for better or worse, in my opinion, there's more at your disposal in terms of clubs to get involved in, majors, professors, research.
And at that time, I think that the bigness of the next step was actually an attractive. So it's kind of funny, you think about the yin and yang of going to something smaller, to going to something bigger and having both of those experiences.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: So you arrive at Penn State. You know, I usually ask folks what Was it like you're arriving on campus for the first time? For you it's like old hat. You're just back to being home. But there is something very different about living in State College versus living on campus. Right. At least for those first years. Can you talk about what it was like now, being a student in the dorms and experience and eating in the, in the cafeteria and the dining halls and what that experience was like versus being an outsider looking in. Now you're an insider looking out.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: I remember I was in east halls in Stone, so I remember just being in that dorm room, you know, trying to figure out major, trying to figure out classes, trying to figure out friends, trying to figure out clubs. But that's also the unique thing about coming from boarding school is I was also kind of used to that. So I came from a environment in which I was already living with someone. I, I already had distractions. There was already a dining hall, so that was already like a small intro to what that kind of college experience was like. So I think the transition for me with that background was maybe a little bit easier or the newness of it wasn't as crazy for maybe what some kids were going through.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: And Paul, how did you think about your major? What did you decide to study in and how did you come to that decision?
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so I ended up studying chemical engineering. Came to that decision because I knew I wanted to do engineering. Part of that was I was just interested inherently someone that gravitated towards math and science. I also had an older brother who did mechanical engineering at Penn State. I had an older sister that did civil engineering. So there was an element of engineering in my immediate family. I also back to the sense of trying to keep doors open. I had this general belief, whether that belief is right or wrong, that if you did engineering, there's an element of proving that you can do something hard. And then that opening doors and opportunities, whether that's directly in engineering, it's a tangential field. So I kind of viewed it as something that would allow me to open doors. And then within engineering, I was kind of deciding between mechanical, electrical, chemical. And I was someone that of all the math and science classes, I always gravitated towards chemistry. And then I started thinking about where could this career take you. And thinking about potentially going the energy route was something that I was interested in. Interested in enough to at least, you know, commit to it as, as a major. So those were some of the factors that kind of led to that decision.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Well, and back to your competitive instincts, you know, People often refer to chemical engineering as the hardest among the the engineering specialties. So I'm sure that was not by accident either.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Paul? Yeah, you, you pick up quickly. I honestly, I think that's probably a big thing. Like a lot of people will choose, like what is the easiest major that I can do to float by where my, like I'm someone where if I'm going to sign up for a race, I'm going to sign up for the full distance. Not the. That's just. I just gravitated towards the hard thing. Part of that reputation of the major attracted me as well.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Gravitating towards the hard thing. Were there any other aspects of your gravitational pull in that direction while you were at Penn State outside the classroom that you also tried to pursue?
[00:07:45] Speaker A: At the time when I was in school was the early days of special interest organizations forming around the Penn State Dance marathon. And the easy thing at that time would have been to just join one of the existing organizations. But for whatever reason, I had a small contingent of friends and we decided to start our own club with its own identity, with its own sort of unique flair. That's kind of another example of maybe being at Penn State and doing something that was kind of unnecessary but also ended up being great for me as well.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Very cool. We talked about this interest in energy. Did you end up pursuing that after school or how did you think about as you approach graduation, where you wanted to go post Penn State?
[00:08:23] Speaker A: I did. So I ended up having two internships at a pharmaceutical company, at a manufacturing facility in rural Virginia, and then at a kind of R and D facility outside of New York City and New Jersey. So from that I learned I didn't want to do that. So I had an experience where I remember looking at the people, any job I've had, people have been great, people have been smart, very nice. But I remember thinking, you've been doing this for 30 years. I cannot imagine. I don't know what I want to do, but it's not this. So that was sort of a great experience because you learn what you don't want to do. And then I ended up taking my first full time role outside of school at ExxonMobil. So that was my foray into the energy sector and that's where I had an interest in college. But you only have so much time and that's where I had more time to in my free time, read books, podcasts, really get into the sector and the space. And I've been in love with it ever since. So definitely something where I still spend my free time learning about it. If there's. If I'm reading a newspaper, that's a section I go to. So it continues to be a passion for me.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: And within the. I mean, energy is a broad term, right? You've got the different sectors of the energy market, you've got alternative energies. Where were you naturally drawn to initially and where are you drawn to today? What was it about the energy sector that appealed to you and where were you initially drawn when you were at ExxonMobil?
[00:09:42] Speaker A: I think the thing that appealed to me the most is how important the sector is to all aspects of life and how underappreciated or misunderstood it is. So that's really the basic concept, understanding the history of the energy sector, the impact that it has had on human lives, how important it is, how difficult it is to deliver at scale. One of the things that has always attracted me to it is how complex it is that you have these geopolitical forces. You have the way that it impacts the macroeconomy, and then you have all the way down to understanding the technical details of how to split an atom. So from that standpoint, there's never a shortage of things to learn about from the technical side, from the political side to the economic side. There wasn't necessarily something where I was only interested in this one aspect or this one thing or this one energy source or this thing happening. It's kind of the topic that keeps on giving because there's so much to it.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: And would you say, when you say misunderstood, anything you would want to elaborate.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: On that maybe a way that I would put it is for better or worse. I think a lot of people think that electricity comes from a light switch, meaning that if you actually spend the time to understand the complexity of what it takes to deliver energy at scale, whether electricity, whether for transportation, whether for chemicals, I think there's maybe a lot of misconceptions on how easy that is and how easy it is to transition to different fuels. Some of that comes from my experience of working at ExxonMobil to being kind of open to the oil and gas diet as well, because I think that industry can be unfairly demonized. It's kind of interesting. I have that background, I have that unique appreciation. But here I am, I'm still working on EV charging. That's the company I lead now and what I focus on. So I kind of have that perspective too.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Let's talk about the path from ExxonMobil to EV charging. So what was it at Exxon Mobil you were doing. And how did your role evolve over time as well as your perspective?
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Yeah, so I started in the downstream headquarters. At that time in ExxonMobil, was in Washington, D.C. that was in downstream research and engineering in a process design role. The group that I worked on, we would take large capital projects that impacted the company over a certain dollar threshold. I was a part of a whole corporate reshuffling that got moved down to Houston. So that entire office moved to Houston. And then eventually I went and worked at a refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When I was there, I definitely spent a lot of time just talking to people, just asking different people within the company about their career, their perspective. Why do you work here? What do you like? What do you not like? One of the things that was super interesting, no matter who I talked to, if they were later on in their career, they had 15 different careers. So that's the advantage you have at the big company. There's just so much opportunity to move around. And so you have this really diverse opportunity and for the most part, some job security. But I was kind of a pinball in this giant corporate machine where I think I just wanted, honestly, less certainty, was ready to take on more risk. Didn't know exactly what I wanted, but I think always kind of knew I'd do something a little bit smaller. I had a good friend of mine that was working for GE outside of New York City. A recruiter reached out to him for a role, said he wasn't interested, but he had a friend down in Louisiana this might be a good fit for. Took that call and ended up transitioning to my next job in New York.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: Well, you mentioned you were focused on downstream. You had three sectors. Upstream, midstream, downstream. So people talk about upstream being exploration, midstream being transportation, and downstream being refinery and delivery. What was it specifically about the downstream sector that you actually found to be most interesting?
[00:13:18] Speaker A: One of the things that at least I personally found most interesting is the opportunity to be in a large manufacturing facility. So I was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at a refinery. And just the scale of the operations, the scale of the input, the scale of the products produced, the amount of engineering and complexity that goes into day in and day out, 24, 7, 365 days of the year of producing product. And just the scale of that was pretty awesome.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: So, Paul, you go from a large company, ExxonMobil, Fortune 50 company, to then a small boutique, GLG. Can you explain what that business was and what the cause for the transition was from One business to the other.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: GLG was a very interesting firm where I was part of their energy and industrials practice. And it was in a small team where we would organize small intimate conversations, whether teleconferences or webinars or lunches or dinners between industry executives and institutional investors. I would moderate those conversations, understand what institutional investors would want to learn about. Based off of that, recruit consultants, executives, professors, industry experts, and then lead that conversation at Exxon. You're solving really in the weeds problems here. You're talking about industry trends and macro dynamics and bigger picture things. So that was kind of a nice shift to have that experience too.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: So you went from being as you described as a pinball in a massive business to being more kind of macro and thematic in more of a smaller boutique type operation. And what came next?
[00:14:52] Speaker A: The thing that I really narrowed in on was the importance of battery technology.
And one of the experiences that I had is I ended up hosting a couple of pretty in the weeds seminars where I was hosting PhD professors that were educating institutional investors on a number of different topics. It was very clear to me that the person that had a really strong technical background but could explain, you know, things in a really easy to understand way to investors attracted me. But I actually applied to get a PhD. I convinced myself to take the GRE to write a personal statement. I kind of had this thing where I don't know if I actually want to go, but let me just put in the effort to apply and see if I get in. So I got in, but then I ended up starting Revel instead.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: Amazing. So talk about taking that big leap from going into a PhD program, which is arguably one of the most career secure types routes because you do a PhD and then you get potentially associate professorship and then ultimately tenure, where you have job security for life, in theory, of course. So talk about that versus taking the entrepreneurial leap of actually starting your own company.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. So I got in in the fall of 2017 and we ended up starting Revel in January the next year. So I was kind of making the decision all at the same time. I think what it comes down to it for me is I just have such an appreciation for that process for really going deep into one subject, to really focusing, to becoming an expert. But I also quickly learned that it's something that I think I like the idea of it more than how much I would actually enjoy it. I was able to apply, think about it, convince myself that I wanted to do it. But when I actually started visiting schools When I actually started talking to professors, talking to students, I think I don't have the patience. I learned that about myself where when you're leading a startup or starting a company, you're just moving so quickly, things are just happening where with the PhD, your years of effort takes a certain personality to be able to do that. And I think I learned that maybe it wasn't a fit for me.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Very introspective of you. So what is the problem that Revel is out to solve?
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Big overarching theme of Revel company that I co founded is urban electrification. Our general mission and everything ladders up to this kind of core point is electrifying urban mobility and the biggest markets in the us New York City, Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston. That's what we're trying to do. And within that really where we have found our niche and what we're really focused on is electrifying ride share, ride, hail taxi, whatever you want to call that.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: And when you say electrify ride sharing, can you give us more detail, give us a look under the hood, so to speak.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: That means, you know, transitioning from cars driven on an internal combustion engine to electric propulsion vehicles, going from a Toyota Camry to a Tesla Model Y, a Ford Mach E, you know, things of that nature that requires. And this is kind of where I have evolved my core focus within the company. Charging infrastructure. Charging just doesn't exist in cities or it's very small. So in order to do this it requires just building out and developing a strategy and executing on putting EV charging infrastructure in the ground in places that are very difficult to develop.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Initially you talked about the conversion of electrifying just public transport. And of course if you talk about Tesla and all of those types of businesses or all those companies that actually result in that product, I mean, that could be very asset intensive. So it sounds like you've picked a less asset intensive way of doing this by focusing on charging stations. Having said that, charging stations aren't without complexity and capital expenditure requirements either. Can you talk about some of the challenges of being that business or how you've structured your business model to allow for the capital intensive nature of EV charging?
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Yeah, it's definitely capital intensive and it's been interesting too because the way in which we have been kind of funding the business sourcing capital has evolved and changed over time. As the business has evolved and changed over time. My co founder and I, when we kind of raised funds throughout the history of the company, we've kind of evolved from very traditional venture capital route that tends to push you in that asset light direction. And that's what they want, that's what they're used to, that's what they're attracted to. So it's hard to bring in capital if you're doing something that isn't within that kind of software first model. As we've transitioned, we brought in capital from the types of funds and firms that look for that, that look for infrastructure investment, that look for things that are asset heavy. Firms like BlackRock is a kind of leading investor in Revel, Toyota is a big strategic investor. Both sit on our board. We've kind of evolved to just align our investment partners with how the business itself has evolved. And we've also just changed things where now we can bring in capital for different aspects of the business. So capital that is specifically intended to build charging infrastructure versus the capital that is intended to pay for corporate overhead and the HQ team that we have and salaries and marketing costs. So we can kind of separate out that capital for who the right partner is.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: So is it basically like a project based financing model as opposed to a company based financing model that you're pursuing?
[00:19:58] Speaker A: If you ask me that right now, yes. So that's kind of where things have evolved to. It hasn't been like that for the past couple of years. But as we've proven ourselves, as we've launched more sites and projects now we can fund some of our charging infrastructure on a project by project, side by side basis.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: So what do you have to do Paul, to get to the point where you actually earn the trust of investors to be able to evolve to the project financing model? You talked about how you've had to evolve. I mean, how were you able to get the initial confidence of investors early on when you were really trying to figure things out and really the evolution then took hold.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: It can be frustrating because it's very chicken or the egg, especially when you're a first time founder because you're, you're trying, the biggest thing that you can have is proof points or a track record. So you're trying to bring in capital to do something but you, in order to bring in a capital you need to have done something to get people excited to give you capital. So you're kind of like what do you do first? And you know, maybe the thing that we, I think did well is we always have proven an ability to execute and move quickly and show momentum. Starting a company, especially at the early days is there's a lot that goes into it. But if I were to oversimplify it. It's fundamentally a game about momentum. So one of the things that we did, if you go back to the early stages of the company, we went from idea in 2018 to mopeds in the street, which I can talk about. Mopeds is different than what we do now in July of 2018 in New York City of all places. So I think that gives you an example of we moved quickly, we proved an ability to execute, we showed momentum and then that brings in interest, it gives investors confidence, you have more proof points. So you're really trying to do everything at once. You're trying to show that you can do things, have proof points, bring in capital. Believe me, it's not without headaches and risk.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Well, I was going to say, given that frenzied production schedule, what was your sleep and diet like during that period of time?
[00:21:57] Speaker A: Yeah, everything was all mixed together. It's kind of like school in a way. When you're doing engineering and you're doing clubs where you don't really have a 9 to 5 lifestyle, it's like you're just constantly working and at that point too, you're constantly thinking about it. So you can have conversations, you're talking to your significant other or your friend and your eyes are just glazed over because you have this other thing that you have this investor call the next day or this problem you're trying to solve, or there's just not a shortage of things to think about, which can be definitely energizing at that time, but can be draining for sure.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: Well, you mentioned scooters. And scooters are definitely very different from EV charging stations. So we'd love to give our listeners insight into the evolution from scooters to EV charging stations. If you can start with the scooter story.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: First of all, maybe just definition of words here for a second because I think people will think different things. Do I say moped or scooter? Scooter, if I was talking to a European, but I'm talking about a street legal motor vehicle, so it has a license plate and we launched a shared service of electric scooters. So think of a Vespa, but it's just fully electric. So at that time, my co founder and I, we were both heavy bike share users, heavy car share users. And then we both had our own kind of unique experience around being around a Vespa style vehicle and had this general belief where it's the best way to get around a city. And it's all across the world except for the US and It's only a matter of time before it comes here in full force. That was the initial inception or idea of we need to have a shared system of electric mopeds and let's make it happen, because if we don't, someone else will. But what ended up happening was as we continued to grow the company, maybe two things happened at the same time. We were successful in New York City and we expanded that service to Washington, DC, Miami, Austin, Texas, Oakland. We were expanding pretty gangbusters. And then Covid happened. So at that time, the business that you don't want to be in is a shared mobility service where you're sharing helmets. So that was just like, oh crap, what do we do? But that was happening at the same time where we were thinking about and I in particular started shifting my focus away from the day to day operations of running that service to what's next for the company. And we kind of had this bifurcation of what we were thinking about was do we take this shared moped service and get better and better at it and expand it into more and more markets, which would probably require us going international, going to Europe, because within the US you're starting to get into smaller and smaller cities where just the density of the population didn't really justify or could support service like this. Now you have Covid, that kind of makes it harder to expand. And we had this general sense that what if we just focus on the biggest markets and go horizontally into different product lines instead of taking this existing service and go into more and more markets. So that's when we started thinking about next steps. We actually piloted it and tested an electric e bike rental service that we were doing a couple of different things. Maybe one of the core insights of how we ended up transitioning to where we are today. When we were running the moped service, we would go into to a market and we would lease out a warehouse that would have the space to do light maintenance and the power to do charging. And even finding a small amount of power to charge electric mopeds was very difficult.
So you kind of have that and you think about, everyone's talking about electrify everything by this date and rideshare going electric. Where are you going to get the power? That became something where, hey, there's a first mover opportunity here. There's something here. So that was kind of the insight that led to the next step for the company.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: Fascinating. So really it was the pain point that you were experiencing in your ability to really recharge the mopeds. That caused you to think about the shifting business model, because ultimately you felt like that was a bigger market you could address.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: And would you say, Paul, the total addressable market for EV charging stations in urban rich areas is actually larger than the rideshare market of the moped space, or is it not necessarily a larger trail addressable market, just more of pressing need?
[00:26:01] Speaker A: I think that's part of it, too. Naturally, when you're bringing in venture capital, you're thinking about how big is the market. And so when you're focused on the moped service itself, I mean, it's kind of common sense. You think about how many people have a driver's license, how many people are confident on a motor vehicle that can go 30 miles per hour, training required, the safety required. It's just. It's harder than just riding a bike. And then you think about that compared to EV charging, the number of vehicles that compared to rideshare with cars, the addressable market there, it just naturally was a much bigger market and opportunity. But a lot of the skills and relationships and foundations that we had formed as a company were directly transferable and very important to the company that we've evolved into.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: So, speaking about the company you've evolved into today, when you think about the EV infrastructure in dense, populated areas, where there's clearly no real estate available and limited resources, limited space, how are you addressing this massive challenge? And what are some of the innovative steps you've taken to actually deploy these EV charging solutions and infrastructure into a urban, dense environment?
[00:27:10] Speaker A: It's maybe back to the point of just doing hard things. So it's just hard. There's no way around it.
I think one of the things that's challenging about it is it's very novel in the fact that no one's done it before. So inherently, there are going to be hiccups and challenges in doing something that hasn't been done before. The amount of power that we are bringing to sites, especially sites that revolve around fast charging, is typically the amount of power that you would need to power a skyscraper. But you're working with utility that's used to a project that's five to seven years. And so they just don't have to operate under that time frame because they're not the bottleneck of the project getting done. And now we're trying to develop this piece of land where this is the fundamental bottleneck of what we're trying to do. So you kind of have to work with the utility under a whole new paradigm of Working quickly, doing anything in an urban environment and the utility coordination and relationship and interconnection is just one aspect of things. It just requires a lot of blocking and tackling with relationship, talking to the utility, understanding their process back and forth. Permanent authorities. Developing anything in an urban environment is going to require that level of local coordination and relationship building to get something done.
[00:28:30] Speaker B: So given all those inherent costs, is there a model here which allows for a premium pricing relative to. If you're building EV charging stations in a rural area where you're not space.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: Constrained, it's very market dependent when you look at the economics, because, you know, ultimately if you're simplifying the business, it's what does it cost to develop and then what's the throughput at the station? So that's one of the reasons why there is so little urban charging. I used to make the joke a couple years ago, and it's definitely not the case anymore. You'd be better off digging a hole and putting money in it and lighting it on fire than building urban fast charging. Because real estate's expensive, the charging is expensive, the electricity is expensive, and then you do all of that and then no one has an ev, so no one uses it. So a couple things have happened all at the same time. We've just found ourselves in the exact right place at the exact right time, which makes us super excited about where we are as a company. Where you have a lot of just EV adoption, picking up just naturally cars, getting better consumer awareness going up, that's just happening. You had a lot of policy incentives that were pushing for the electrification of vehicles. So you have a lot of just influx of vehicles happening all at the same time over the past five years in rideshare in particular. And then we had a lot of support programs from utilities to incentivize this transition and try to at least kickstart things from a standstill. That would reduce development costs. They have development costs going down. That allows us to build quickly. We had incentives on the operating side and you had more EVs coming into the market. That's like a temporary thing. We don't build our business around incentives by any means, but it allowed us to take advantage of the opportunity, move quickly, start to develop our reputation, bring in more capital, start to build more, more charging infrastructure, at least more EVs. And I think we're at the early stages of a natural snowball effect.
[00:30:11] Speaker B: Feels like a flywheel in the making for sure, the way you've just described it.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: Paul. Yeah, that's the Hope so.
[00:30:16] Speaker B: What it also speaks to is that you could have the best idea, but if the environment is not supportive of it, and if the forces outside of your control are not trending in the right direction, it really could be a dead end. Much like what the pivot you had to do from mopeds into EV charging has really resulted in.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that's why anyone that you talk to, no matter how long your company has lasted, whether you won't belly up in six months or in 15 years, there's so much luck involved. I just so grateful for where we are today as a company. There's so many times where things could have just gone completely sideways sometimes. Part of it is understanding the macro environment, understanding trends, and kind of setting your scale to flow with that. Sometimes you have to be kind of counter to what the prevailing narrative is. And pretty often you got to get a little lucky, too.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: So if we look out into the future and we're coming into New York City or another major metro city area that you are providing your services in the next five years, what might we see or what might we be surprised to see as a result of Revel's impact on those urban environments?
[00:31:21] Speaker A: You'll see a lot of blue. So that's one thing that we definitely like is the. You know, Revel has a very distinctive brand color that we really leaned into. But one way that I would describe it is I think we are trying to have the impact on urban environments that maybe Tesla has had on the EV industry, where I think you can give that company, obviously, a lot of credit of you really being the first mover in EVs that has really pushed the other OEMs to go that direction. I think what we can do and how quickly we can move in urban environments, you can say, hey, Revel had a big part in just driving EV adoption in urban environments, and without this company, that wouldn't have happened. That's one thing from just a mission standpoint of what I think we can accomplish, but also there's just going to be a lot of charging. You're going to see more charging stations, you're going to see that Revel collar. I think what's important for us is really just ubiquity of the service and of the brand. Because one of the things that we're trying to do as a company is just if you are a rideshare taxi driver in any of these markets, you can completely rely on Revel infrastructure for all of your charging needs. And the only way that we're going to do that is to build a crap ton of charging.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: Well, thank you Paul for taking the time to share your entrepreneurial journey with me. I'd now like to hand things over to a current Penn State student, Michael Slusserevich. Michael is a first year mechanical engineering student and the founder of Shadeshift, an electrically controlled variable tint film for vehicles. He recently participated in Happy Valley launchbox, powered by PNC Bank Idea Test Lab and is a member of the Penn State Car Club. Michael, I'll now hand the interview over to you.
[00:33:01] Speaker C: Thank you, Ryan. Paul. So I have. I'm not in a very similar market to you obviously, but you started out with mopeds and now you have entire like fleets of Teslas and also the charging stations. So I wanted to ask how did you break into like such a large lockdown rideshare market? It seems I only really see Ubers and Lyfts out there, but I am from New York City so I have seen rebels out and about. It's been kind of like on an increase. So how did you initially get people to start using Revel?
[00:33:31] Speaker A: Yeah, great question. I think within rideshare there's always two things that you have to think about. You have to understand what is the value proposition to the driver and then what is the value proposition to the consumer or the rider. And you have to do both at the same time. So because of that, the way that we had started the rideshare business is with W2 full time employee drivers. So that was a unique value proposition. And what's interesting about the larger markets is the vast majority of drivers that deliver rides do so full time to make a living, which might be a little bit different than the ride share drivers you have in State College and Happy Valley that kind of do it part time, you're trying to make a little extra cash. So we were able to understand that kind of market dynamic of these drivers are driving consistent full time hours anyways and then offer a unique setting or a unique kind of employment opportunity compared to what they would have with Uber and Lyft. That was one aspect of it. The second one was on the rider side. As the rideshare service has scaled and expanded the consistency of the product and the experience has been all over the place. So in owning and operating our own fleet, that allowed us to have really high touch in terms of safety, cleanliness and consistency of the experience. But that was the value prop on the rider side. And those two things kind of allowed us to break into the market and Create some demand.
[00:34:52] Speaker C: So it was basically like, you people try it out and they're like, oh, this is on time, it's fast. I get everything I want and more compared to Uber and Lyft.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: Yeah. And that was definitely a challenge too, of expanding the service, raising awareness especially. There was, there was a good and bad thing in New York City because we had scaled our moped service. People knew the Revel brand, but they associated us with mopeds. So it took a little bit of a consumer education to, hey, what's this moped company doing with cars? Do I rent those cars? Do I call the car like an Uber? That was a little bit of a barrier from an adoption standpoint. We found a lot of success in friend referrals. So we really leaned into that as our kind of growth channel to expand the service and educate even existing people that had already downloaded our app for mopeds that there was this new product offering that they could take advantage of.
[00:35:40] Speaker C: You talked a little bit about the charging stations and how that's also a service you offer. Are the charging stations more of like a priority than the rideshare service or is it like more which one's on top right now?
[00:35:51] Speaker A: It's a million dollar question. It depends on who you ask. But I would say of strategic importance, yes. That's where a lot of capital is coming into the company. I think the long term value in what we're doing is really building out this network of EV charging in dense urban environments. From a revenue standpoint, a lot of our revenue right now comes from the rideshare service. But we expect that to change over time as we continue to scale our infrastructure business.
[00:36:15] Speaker C: Do you have plans of trying to be the go to rideshare service? Like, do you want to overtake the Ubers and Lyfts and try and be that one service that everyone calls? Or is it kind of like you're happy where you are right now? It's kind of more of a niche want that the consumer has. But you also have the charging stations to kind of supplement that, I think.
[00:36:32] Speaker A: Naturally, with this business, what we're doing. Look at the how do you compete with Uber question more often than not. And I think it's something where we view them also maybe even more as a customer than a competitor. So the rideshare market is so big, a lot of people don't realize this. In New York City alone, you're doing the rideshare taxi market is easily a million trips a day easy. So you multiply that by your Average price per ride, you can get a sense of how big the market is. So there's plenty of market for us to occupy this more niche segment. But as we build out our service, in order to do so, we have to build out charging infrastructure to kind of power our rideshare service. But as we build our charging infrastructure, we're going to bring more demand to that infrastructure via Uber and Lyft EV drivers. I think there's definitely a rising tide raises all ships component here of viewing Uber both as a competitor, but also as a very important partner and customer.
[00:37:30] Speaker C: On the infrastructure side, way back to when you were talking about initially having the mopeds as Revel's main thing, was that more of a personal investment between the two founders or did you guys get investment for that? Because I know for where you are right, right now, you showed that you guys have had this in the past. Like you had the mopeds, you have some charging stations. But before that, how did you basically get the money for the venture? How did you fund that and where did it come from?
[00:37:57] Speaker A: To launch the initial pilot with 68 electric mopeds, we raised a million dollars from 57 different people. Process was we are not former founders, both of us. You know, I come from engineering. A co founder, he was a professional chef that we just happened to meet at this previous company, glg. The first thing was, is we put all of our savings in, so we invested all of our money and then we knew we would run out of personal money and we weren't taking a salary. We run out of money in six months. So we kind of like that was our investment. So that was our way of showing, hey, when we talk to friends and family and family offices and things like that, we're fully invested to give people some confidence. So the early money that we were bringing in from friends, family, friends of friends, friends of family, you know, people that had no idea what we were doing. They didn't understand the business model, they didn't look at any financial models, but they liked us, they believed in us, they thought we would figure it out. So you're kind of betting on the team at that time. You're betting on the people from there that allowed us to get kickstarted to start the service. And then we just put a lot of time and effort into starting to raise venture capital. And one of the challenges that we ran into, coincidentally at that time in California, you had this boom in kick scooter sharing. So bird and lime was really taking off. So we had this Educational problem of venture capitalists were used to that market and they kept seeing pitches for that. And then here are these two random guys come in from New York City that are doing electric mopeds, which is they cost more, they're harder to operate, consumer adoption is difficult. So we were just running into challenges. We were doing a lot of one on one education where people were asking, what's a moped? How is it different? And it's like, oh my God, how many times do I have to explain this? So my co founder, he literally googled top 10 mobility focused venture capital firms. So reached out to all of them or made sure we had conversations and eventually we found a seed round, a mobility focused venture capital firm. He literally reached out to them on their website. One of their analysts reached out the next day, had a conversation with him. Analysts liked him. And this fund is actually from Israel. Their managing partner happened to be traveling through New York City and had a layover. We went and met him at a Starbucks, of all places, and the relationship went from there. So that's the one that ended up working. Just timing. He happened to be traveling through New York City. He liked what we were doing, liked what we had to say, gave us a shot. And that has honestly been one of the best relationships that we've maintained ever since still on our board. And that was the initial starting point. From a funding perspective, that's a pretty cool story.
[00:40:32] Speaker C: So would you say that the whole blue scheme of having all the blue Teslas is really kind of significant versus just the Ubers or the Lyfts, having that little placard in the window for sure.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: I think the first rule of marketing is you can't be remembered if you don't stand out. And that was actually something that we evolved as a company because when we first started, one of the key things about the moped service was it's not street litter. You don't have a bunch of scooters that are at least perceived as litter. Where you have, they're all on a sidewalk and they're fallen over, they're parked in between cars in dead space on the street, not taking up parking. And so when we first launched, we actually had black as our primary brand color and blue was an accent color because we were under the initial impression that we should be trying to blend in and not stick out like a sore thumb. But as we evolved from mopeds, our next iteration of mopeds, to infrastructure to cars, we've actually evolved the kind of brand and product positioning to really lean into that blue color.
[00:41:28] Speaker C: That was really cool. Paul, I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for answering all my questions. It was really helpful.
[00:41:33] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Michael. Good to talk to you.
[00:41:38] Speaker B: That was Paul Sui, co founder and COO of Revel. This episode was produced and edited by our executive producer, Katie DeFiore. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Dare to Disrupt wherever you listen to podcasts and look out for next month's episode. Thanks for listening.
