Damien Hutchins hatched the idea for his startup while working at Convoy, a Seattle-based freight network company. He directed brokerage operations at Convoy, which allows trucking carriers to find and bid on loads through an app. Convoy has the goal of reducing the number of empty miles truck drivers spend on the road, but Hutchins saw the problem from a different perspective.
“You kind of need to have some carriers on board with that goal as well,” Hutchins said. “I thought if somebody created a trucking company that has the same efficiency goals in mind as all these brokers and tech companies that are really trying to make the logistics industry more efficient, then they could really start to take some market share.”
With his new mission, Hutchins in 2020 co-founded Rollzi, where he also serves as CEO. Rollzi, based out of Puyallup, focuses on a trucking “single-lane relay strategy,” in which the company focuses on a single interstate. Rollzi’s initial lane is Interstate 5 from Los Angeles to Seattle, and the company’s technology pulls from data like driver location, weather and time in service to coordinate the relay.
The aim is more efficient shipping that keeps drivers closer to home. Investors are starting to take note, as Rollzi raised $8 million in seed equity and credit financing in June.
The Business Journal sat down with Hutchins to talk about his pitch to drivers, his background and how a video game has helped guide his company.
Damien Hutchins, co-founder and CEO of Rollzi
Age: 42
Hometown: Seattle
Current residence: West Seattle
Education: Olympic College
Interests outside of work: Motorcycle camping
What about your experience with Convoy helped prepare you to start your own company? Convoy was really good at helping their employees see the big picture. In a startup, you always start with more generalists. Sometimes that transition from a big team of generalists to a team of people that are a lot more specialized and have a lot more specialized knowledge can be a little bit painful. Convoy really masterfully made that transition though.
What was it like getting your company off the ground? Trucking is heavily regulated, and I’ve been used to working in tech my entire career. Convoy even had a value called, “Have a sense of urgency.” I was used to moving very quickly and being able to make major changes in the business by changing lines of code. When you’re working with federal, state and city governments, that is not the case. That was probably one of the more frustrating things to do. Just the speed at which the governments work, getting permits and getting authorizations for our trucks.
How do you pitch drivers to join Rollzi? I had to iterate on my pitch to drivers over and over again because they were kind of suspicious. “There’s no way it can be that good. There’s no way I’m going to get to be home every week and you’re going to pay me as much as you’re saying you’re going to pay me.”
How did you overcome that? I was actually overselling. I needed to actually step back. Instead of trying to talk about the future and what we’re going to do, all the tech and why it’s better than the industry, the drivers really wanted to hear, “Here is what you’ll be doing, day in and day out. Here is what you’re going to get for doing that.” I really just trimmed that pitch down.
Why is trucking such an opaque industry despite being something we see every day? Fragmentation. There’s so many carriers out there. Most of them are really small. It’s confusing and it’s not transparent to the public. Even if you see an Amazon trailer going down the road, you might think “OK, that’s an Amazon trailer, so it’s an Amazon driver with an Amazon truck pulling it.” But that’s almost never the case. Even if the truck is also Amazon, it’s probably a contractor driving the truck. If it’s not an Amazon truck, it’s probably another company or another carrier like Rollzi.
How do you compete for talent as a emerging company? For drivers, it hasn’t been that difficult for me. There’s not a ton of carriers that are doing my strategy and are offering drivers the same thing, the full package we are. Once we are able to communicate what that package looks like, it becomes very easy to recruit. ... There’s a lot of tech talent in the Seattle market. A lot of them have been working at big tech companies like Google or Amazon. Some of them have worked at startups, closer to a Convoy or another one of the startups here. There’s a feeling among a lot of the people I’ve been talking to, and I don’t know how to phrase it, but maybe some idea that they want to work at a company that is doing something a little more tangible.
What is one thing your employees don’t know about you? One thing that sometimes I hesitate to say because it makes me sound really nerdy is a lot of the formations for my ideas came from playing a video game. I have the most ridiculous trucking simulator setup that you’ll ever see. I’m actually sitting at it right now, but I have it on work mode.
How does that work? It’s three, ultrawide curved monitors wrapped around me. I can move my desk away and put a steering wheel in here. I can take these fake loads in this fake simulation, which is also kind of a business simulation. There’s something really therapeutic about driving on this highway simulator.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
