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00:02 - Mark, it is so lovely to be here with you today.
00:06 Thanks for joining me.
00:07 - Yeah, thanks for having me.
00:08 - Of course.
00:09 So let's start off.
00:10 Tell me about exactly what GoBolt does.
00:12 - So GoBolt is a tech enabled, sustainably driven,
00:17 end-to-end logistics company,
00:18 which is a bit of a mouthful,
00:19 which basically means that we take product
00:20 into our warehouses, we move it across our network,
00:22 and we get it to shoppers.
00:24 - Who's your target customer?
00:27 - So we are increasingly working with enterprise customers.
00:29 So mostly Fortune 500 to intelligently distribute
00:33 their inventory, manage their middle mile,
00:35 and their last mile delivery.
00:36 - And how did you get the idea for this?
00:38 Tell me about the founding story here.
00:40 - Yeah, so this is an interesting one
00:41 where it's actually nothing to do with what we do today.
00:44 So we've kind of stumbled into what we are now,
00:46 so bear with me.
00:47 The business started as a company called Second Closet.
00:49 We would pick up, store, and return people's stuff.
00:51 It was a valet storage company.
00:52 We launched into the international student market
00:54 where we would store international student stuff
00:57 over the summer, bring it back to them in September,
00:59 and kind of rinse and repeat.
01:01 And we launched that business by basically breaking
01:03 into dorm room buildings and slipping business cards
01:05 under their dorm room doors and putting flyers
01:08 in front of urinals and inside of bathroom stalls.
01:09 - I love it.
01:10 - And so with 500 bucks, we built a 20K a month business
01:13 in two weeks, and we said, okay, well,
01:15 we should probably quit the job that we haven't started yet
01:17 and do this full time.
01:18 - That's really cool.
01:19 So now how did parents, friends, people in your life react
01:24 when you said, right out of college,
01:27 you're gonna just start your own company?
01:29 Was there any doubts or was it hard?
01:31 - My brother and I were on our own since I was 17,
01:33 so we were totally financially independent.
01:34 We were just living together and we had moved out.
01:36 So it was basically do or die,
01:38 and I was in the mindset of getting
01:40 like a typical corporate job
01:41 and having like a stable, stable life.
01:44 So when I was recruited into management consulting
01:45 and had this pretty amazing salary coming out of university,
01:48 I was like, okay, well, our life is now set
01:50 and we can kind of breathe a sigh of relief.
01:52 So when I told my friends that I was quitting the job
01:55 that I didn't start yet to do this
01:57 and make basically nothing and eat ramen noodles all day,
01:59 there were some people looked at me weird
02:01 and others were like,
02:02 yeah, this is totally what you should be doing.
02:03 And I convinced my co-founder, Heindrick,
02:05 to start with me and quit his job,
02:06 which was even better than mine.
02:08 And we are now building this incredible business.
02:11 - So talk to me about the scale of your company.
02:18 Can you tell me about your revenue,
02:20 how many customers you have, anything like that?
02:22 - Yeah, so the business is just over seven years old.
02:26 We are over a thousand people strong and counting.
02:29 We do nine figures plus of revenue annually
02:32 and that's growing at a pretty rapid clip
02:34 and we're really excited about what the future holds for us.
02:37 - I know a lot of under 30 community members tell me
02:40 that they feel a lot of imposter syndrome
02:42 because they're so young and they're young founders
02:45 and it's hard to speak up in a room
02:47 of older, more experienced people.
02:49 Do you ever feel like that and how do you combat that?
02:52 - I have not felt it yet.
02:54 And I think part of the reason is,
02:56 as Heindrick and I built this business,
02:57 we've always been very heads down.
02:58 So we've never used anyone else's yardstick
03:00 to measure our success.
03:01 We've never looked at competitors
03:03 to see how they're thinking about what we're doing.
03:05 We've always been very driven to serve our customer.
03:08 And so long as our customer told us
03:09 that we were doing a good job,
03:10 we would feel like we're doing a good job.
03:12 And that's all that really matters at the end of the day.
03:13 Your age, you could be 90, you could be 12,
03:15 it doesn't really matter just so long
03:17 as you're driving the right outcomes.
03:18 And so I think our yardstick is,
03:21 what does our customer tell us
03:22 and what does the shopper tell us?
03:23 And if they're telling us that we're doing a good job,
03:24 irrespective of our age,
03:26 then we think that we have the right
03:27 to be doing what we're doing.
03:30 - And one last question for you.
03:31 You said before that you were on kind of the precipice
03:34 of do you take the leap into entrepreneurship
03:37 or do you go into this stable job?
03:39 What advice would you have for people
03:41 who are kind of in between both of those worlds right now?
03:44 - The younger you are,
03:45 the less risk you have for others around you.
03:48 And I think as we've grown the business,
03:50 we have over a thousand people
03:51 that I now have to consider every single one of them
03:53 in the decisions that I make.
03:54 But at the time, it was really just myself
03:56 and a couple of people.
03:57 So I think the younger you are,
03:59 the more competitive advantage you innately have
04:01 to make financially daring decisions.
04:04 Whereas later on in life,
04:05 it's a lot harder 'cause there's more at stake.
04:07 So I think the sooner you can get into entrepreneurship,
04:09 I think that's why you see
04:10 so many brilliant young people today
04:12 do really crazy innovative things
04:13 is because they're just crazy enough to try and do it.
04:16 And there's not these life encumbrances
04:19 that they may hold them back.
04:20 At the time, we didn't know what the reward was,
04:22 but we were fully prepared to see it through.
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