Episode 19: RunBuggy CEO, Kevin Malik

For our 19th episode of Full Throttle, we are joined by Kevin Malik, CEO of RunBuggy. Topics of discussion include how the idea for RunBuggy came about, whether or not RunBuggy is a revolutionary idea, where RunBuggy will go from here, and much more. Subscribe and don't miss our upcoming automotive industry interviews! 

0:00 Intro 
3:00 Kevin's Background and Experience
6:30 The Problem that RunBuggy Has Fixed 
10:31 The Largest Challenge in Kevin's Role 
16:12 How is RunBuggy Embracing AI 
19:33 What's Next for RunBuggy

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Transcript

This is episode 19 of Full Throttle the Presidio Group's automotive industry podcast. I'm your host, Jason Stein, managing director. On a regular basis Full Throttle serves as the industry's meeting point for great conversations with leaders across the automotive world. 

We're well, we're talking about kind of consumer deliveries and last mile, right? That same thinking same technology goes for some of the largest organizations in the world, right? We're exclusive with a couple of captives. And it's, you know, you think about this, Jason, they're spending 10s, if not hundreds of million dollars on their technology stack, modernizing it, secure cybersecurity, cloud computing, Reporting Analytics, well why doesn't that transition all the way into the cars that they move? 

And now today we talk about the last mile, could the business of buying and shipping cars be easier? Could the logistics of the commercial transaction be a little more seamless, perhaps not as painful, and definitely a little more e-commerce than non e-commerce. Kevin Malik thought so. Every problem within society faces the opportunity of an entrepreneur who wants to create a better experience. And when Kevin joined a company called RunBuggy as its CEO, the opportunity was present. How to make a transaction more seamless. Kevin, a mechanical engineer had a few ideas. In a fragmented industry RunBuggy is looking for simpler solutions, testing the boundaries of the cloud, artificial intelligence and a constant desire to reinvent itself as an alternative with a dose of E-Commerce, RunBuggy is investing growing its pipeline and tying technology together to create a more transparent digital experience. As Kevin admits, there's a lot of timing involved in running a good startup. And he feels they're hitting the timing dead on having expanded into 13 states all in a remote environment, and all about making the process better in the shipping business. Today. We talked the last mile, dealer expansion, partnerships with OEMs and a lot of opportunity in one phase of the car process that few people talk about, but that is so important. RunBuggy's mission is simple. It wants to revolutionize and modernize the car transportation industry, taking the best people and technology and making car transportation as fast and as easy as possible. RunBuggy is our guest on full throttle.

Hi, I'm Kevin Malik. I'm the CEO of Run Buggy. And this is Presidio's Podcast Full Throttle.

Well, I haven't seen our next guest in a little while in person, goes back to last fall, but it is good to see him again and it's great to have Kevin on the program to also talk about Run Buggy. Welcome in Kevin. 

Thanks, Jason. Great to be here and excited to kind of catch up with you and chat for a few minutes about Run Buggy.

So let's catch up and allow our audience to understand a little bit more about run buggy. And we'll start off with maybe the background and experience that you brought to the table as Run Buggy was underway. And then as you took the helm of CEO,

No, that's great. No, I've spent most of my career last 25 years in the in the tech space, really in the corporate world, focusing on large systems, cloud computing, data centers, things of that nature, always been a really big, you know, car guy, but not from the automotive industry, per se. And one of the things I always was interested in doing is helping to make it easier to buy ship cars. And I came across this opportunity with Run Buggy and was able to leverage my background in venture capital, technology, scale, really understand how to build a team and tackle the the opportunity from an engineering perspective.

Let's talk a little bit about that background, though. You mentioned VC as well as technology, where were you prior to Run Buggy?

You know, I started my career, you know, dating myself here back in the in the mid 90s. But I spent about 10 years with a company called Starwood Hotels, where I, you know, helped grow the global IT systems and helped build them and watched the company evolve through acquisitions, everything from buying Westin and Sheraton to launching new brands and post that I joined a data center company that raised quite a bit of capital and that's where I got my exposure to it, being the CIO there, and then continued that that period with doing a lot of venture partner work. Right. So helping venture firms do analysis on startups, helping them make investments, reviewing decks, making investments myself, and, you know, learning really through trial and error at that point. So I think that combination of kind of the corporate world, corporate IT, Fortune 500 leadership, plus diving down into helping founders that had just recently funded and getting their company off the ground, it's a unique kind of background that I was able to bring to Run Buggy understanding both ends of the spectrum.

And what was the appeal of Run Buggy?

You know, it's as simple as saying is, you know, my background, really through school and anything with mechanical engineering. For the last, you know, again, dating myself here, since I was 10 years old, 40 years, it's been cars, I'm fascinated with all the automotive, everything from tinkering to racing to, you know, the engineering that goes behind them, the evolution of the automotive, and I had tried to buy a car online, you know, through the traditional channels a little bit through, bring a trailer, some through, you know, and what you see as  Car Commerce and Cars Gurus, and it was really hard to get it shipped to me. And it was like, hey, we'll be 700 to $1,000 pay the guy when he comes, you don't know where it is. And I realized that this is a problem, right? This is not fun. People are always interested in getting the car they want. But it was difficult to get it to you, which didn't make sense, especially as you know, 10 in the last 10 years or so everything comes to your house and everything is tracked and everything is one click, why can't you buy your car that way? I don't mean that it's not like going into the dealership but even if you find a car at a dealership that's 1000 miles away, you should should be able to get it to you in a seamless fashion. So that's really the genesis of bringing this all together. 

What was broken in the existing vehicle logistics ecosystem?

You know, I think we still hear this today and we've got a long ways to go as an industry. But if you go and you go look to ship a car, right? It is usually Google search. It is a individual talking to another individual. It's non digital, it's like hey, wait to get us you a quote. Or we'll have another guy call you. You don't know when it's coming. And if you think about that, Jason and everything else you do, if you're ordering some electronics, you're ordering clothing, you're ordering stuff for your homes, it's usually an instant price and a delivery time. And that's just the way it's expected. And it's usually mobile enabled. If you go back and look at car shipping, it is not anything like that. It is maybe sometimes a flat fee. Maybe it's a service charge and It's 14 to 21 days, depending on how far you are. And so that takes a lot of, you know, courage for most people to believe that their car is going to get there with a reasonable cost, reasonable time. So it's really a fragmented industry. And it's really difficult. I think, you know, the thing that is also unique about automotive shipping versus traditional freight is, I'm gonna go from your house, Jason, possibly to my house, right. And that makes it really difficult. No one wants their car waiting at a distribution center, they want it as soon as possible. I don't think that the hundreds of 1000s of cars we've shipped, anyone's like, Oh, I'm not excited about getting my car. It's like, my spouse is going to be there. My friends are going to be there. We're going to we're expecting it Friday. We're expecting it Saturday, especially, you know, as you get into these home deliveries, it's it's a it's a big moment. Right? It's the second most expensive thing people buy. So you have this heightened expectation, right. And it should be above and beyond what happens with traditional  e-commerce, but traditionally is below it. Right? So even though we're all digital, Jason, we still run seven days a week, 12 hours a day, we handle about 30,000 calls a month of "Where's my car?" It's all digital, but people want to talk to you about it, talk to you about the process, because you're not buying something for $29.

Yeah, Is the world ready for what you're offering is? I mean, I'm sure you've identified the enormous need. But given the history in this space, it's a little revolutionary, isn't it?

You know, I think it is. But you know, we're well, we're talking about kind of consumer deliveries and last mile, right? That same thinking same technology goes for some of the largest organizations in the world, right? We're exclusive with a couple of captives. And it's, you know, you think about this, Jason, they're spending 10s, if not hundreds of million dollars on their technology stack modernizing it, secure, cybersecurity, cloud computing, reporting analytics. Why doesn't that transition all the way into the cars that they move? Right? Why does it stop? Right? And so what we're seeing is, you know, we're incredibly excited about 2024 and beyond. Our pipeline, our growth has never been stronger, because we're able to tie technology together. So you have trance, the transparency that you and I expect, is also expected by the captives, by the fleet's, the auctions, like, why can't we just have this digitally seamless? We're running Salesforce over here, and we're running SAP, running all these systems, but at the end of the day, the assett that we own, no one's digitized that price process. So I think it's there. I think it's a unique time with a lot of lessons learned during the pandemic, I think, I think, I think, you know, there's a lot of timing involved in running a good startup. And I think we're hitting the timing dead on. 

What's been the largest challenge, Kevin, that you faced, in your role. And maybe was that more difficult than you expected?

Start backwards, it's been way more difficult than we expected. I think the largest challenge Jason has been getting in front of people, right? We're not just another pay, we're just going to do it for $5 cheaper, or we're going to promise you a half day, better delivery time. I think it's really getting the time and the intention for people to say, hey, spend some time with us take a look at the technology, take a look at what we're doing with it, take a look at the UI UX, and spend time. And when we get to that point, we usually get a nod, hey, let's do a pilot, that that contracting phase for some of these large companies might be lengthy. But once we get them to take a look, then I think we've got a fantastic chance of being a long term partner with them. Right. So that's been really difficult. I think it was a little bit exacerbated by the pandemic, where for a couple years, no conferences, didn't really get to meet anyone. They're like, we already have a great partner. We're not changing anything right now. So you know, we've been doing this for about five years. And in the middle of that, right. 2019 is when we really got our feet going 2020 21 Little bit of 22 was the pandemic. We didn't meet anyone. It was a tough sell. And in the last seven, eight months, the kind of adoption has been explosive for us. As we get to get in front of people, we get to show them the product. We get to shake their hands, right? Develop that relationship. It's never been better.

How are you building the Run Buggy team and maybe how are you attracting talent?

That's that's actually a good thing. A little bit of as, you know, forced design, right, so we're talking about when we, when we started and how we grew. So we're present in 13 states in terms of employees, we got a predominant number of people in Arizona and southern California. But as we grew during the pandemic, you know, we're 100% remote. So all of our tools, all of our technology was built like that day one, right. And this allowed us to find the right kind of people, whether it's tech, customer service, operations, customer success, wherever in the United States, you know, and as we grow, we've onboarded, you know, half a dozen sales executives this year, already in the first first two months, you know, it's a little bit, you know, hey, we'd be great to have a person to region here and here, but it is still finding the right person for the role. Right? There's 20,000 plus dealerships, there's 30 Plus OEMs, there's hundreds of fleets and auction companies. So regions aren't too important for us just yet. But it's really finding the right talent. Right. And that is, I think, number one, my number one job, it should be the number one job of any CEO of a startup.

Yeah, I would even venture to say that you're you're not even considered a startup anymore, given the velocity and the and the, and the pace that you're working at. Right, Kevin?

You know, I think if you look at it from a pure definition standpoint, we're not but actually, it's a really good question, Jason. And one of the things I endeavor to do, and I say this, when we're meeting people, we keep adding and changing on a weekly basis, monthly basis, the technology, the processes, I find if you rest, and you just kind of say, Hey, we're doing the same thing, and you change your UI a little bit UX a little bit, it doesn't, you tend to lose that edge. Right? We release code, we have a fantastic head of data science and fantastic CTO release code. Not we don't even say every two weeks, we don't even say when it's ready. You know, we will put things into production for a customer within a week or two weeks. And if you join us, and one of the things we talk about when you're joining Run Buggy, if you don't like that constant change, it might not be the right fit. We're not going to rest on what we built six months ago, or a year ago, one of the things that we announced recently was something called Run Bot. We've been working on it since June, all of the Open AI libraries we pulled in house, right? We use that automate sourcing, grouping, drive down emissions, find the right kind of drivers with the right kind of equipment across the United States. It's every month, there's almost like a new set of tools or capability that we push out. So in that respect, I think we're going to always act like a startup. But are we large enough and big enough to captus? Maybe we're not a traditional, you know, 10 person startup anymore?

That launch was done to NADAn Correct? 

It was right. And we've already showcased it several times and I think, you know, we have one large dealer group, in particular that has taken a look at it. And it's become there is becoming their own little assistant. Right, it's far beyond a chat bot a chat bot is usually just like a decision tree or some basic intelligence. This is like any kind of question, you can talk to it using large language model. Right? That's, that's kind of the the advantageous point right now, is they interact with it and get data about their moves and their dealers and who's doing what and the pricing and the route. So think about it as is really intelligence that is in the hands of the customer. Also. 

Yeah, I was gonna ask you the effect of artificial intelligence and how run buggies really embracing AI? How do you and a lot of conversation, obviously, in the industry right now about AI. How will AI change what you do?

So I think, you know, one of the first things that we have to think about this is AI, you know, this isn't like we're going external and using external chat GPT 4 tools. This is everything that will be brought in house. And the first step in that Jason is you have to have access to all of your data in a format that you can that enables this right. And so that means you have to have the right kind of architecture, the right kind of tools, you can't be running something legacy systems and tech enablements. Luckily, we started as a cloud native platform so everything was at our at our fingertips, right? We invested into the data science team, several PhDs that have this background. I think the thing that's unique about it is you know, it's it's one thing to say oh, we can move a car, from your house to my house or anywhere. It's another thing to find the optimal pricing for the shipper, the transporter instantly, not, it's 50 cents a mile, a dollar a mile. That's fine. That works. But that's not how you drive efficiency. There's no shortage of drivers. There's a shortage of filling their trucks to and from backhaul to. And how do you do that across the entire United States? Right, every corner, Alaska and Hawaii included, by hand? You can't. You just can't, you just spend time on the phone, you look how to cut costs down on your people. But if you have a software that saying this is where this driver has driven in the past, this is where they're going, it notifies them in the app 50 miles to your right, is two more cars. On your way back. We you're gonna go this way, would you like it? We We can't keep hiring people to do that. One of our largest captives that will exclusive with more than you know, more than 1000 dealerships, they look at it simply from an emission saving point keeping trucks full, right? The way to do that is through AI. And I think what's unique Jason is you also have is the language model, right? You we interact with it through slack, actually. Right? And through the system. So you can just type a question, anything you would like, show me cars going from, you know, where Jason lives to Kevin Lynch, and they'll talk to you about it. Tell me which drivers the best who's the best app who has the best kind of equipment? How many cars is did I move for this OEM in the last 30 days, whatever you can think of is there now. And this is just scratching the surface, right? Getting more and more automation through it. And I think the key to remember here, it's also we're enabling our teams, we're upskilling them, they enjoy it, they get to do more value added work with a customer rather than just spending time looking up data. So I think this is phenomenal. I think this is a huge opportunity for the industry. I think you'll see a lot of adoption in the next couple years.

So where does run buggy go from here? What's next in terms of product development? And I guess, related to that, how will that affect the dealer space? 

Yeah, I think so one of the things that we always focusing on on product development is ease of use, right? I think, you know, what we're seeing is through, you know, EV sales through a little bit more bespoke production, right? People are ordering cars more like they want them to be, buying what they are, so we're going to continue to refine our capabilities, we're going to continue to drive shipping cost, and be more economical, more real-time. I think you're gonna see there, but most of our investment is going to be around automation, right? Is getting the hands of the right driver to the right place anywhere in the United States. Anytime. That's it's a tall order. It's tough, right? Because unlike if you think about traditional marketplaces, or Uber or Lyft, or things of that nature, you're really city constrained, for the most part. We have cars that, you know, we're shipping to Alaska, we have cars that are going from the southern tip of Florida all the way to Seattle, you know? How do you do that effectively? So for us, it's really automation is keeping trucks full. It's it's driving efficiency is really where we're going to spend, you know, our time. And the other thing, I think, is this market. And one of the things that we agree upon with, you know, our competitors and people that are in the space on this markets bigger than anyone thinks right I think it's about a $27 billion TAM, it's growing. There are more bespoke moves, more or less truck pulls, there's more models, there's more OEMs there's more home shipping, there's more pickup. It is growing in every single facet. Right? So I think it is going to be a challenge for the industry to do that effectively over the next four or five years.

You're a long way from your Bring A Trailer example that you talked about the outset.

Yeah. You know, Bring A Trailer, you know, even though, Jason, they continue to grow every year, Randy the CEO over there's phenomenal if you think about where they are in, you know, well over probably a billion dollars in sales this year. I mean, people don't think that right, and they're growing their challenge is going to be how do you list everything in a way that people can see it effectively?

Yeah, no kidding. Kevin, what a pleasure. Thank you for explaining the Run Buggy story to us here today. And we'll be watching with great interest. 

Thanks again to my guest, Kevin Malik, CEO of RunBuggy, and thanks for listening to Full Throttle. Come back to us later in the month for our next interview on this platform. You can email me with suggestions, J.Stein@thepresidiogroup.com or go to the website, thePresidiogroup.com. Follow us on LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening to the program. We'll see you next time.