April 2021 - getPGH

Road Warrior

One man had a vision to help these road warriors with an app that would empower them with the tools to plan, manage and analyze their operations to maximize revenues. His name is Ryan Green, co-founder and CEO of Gridwise. Ryan should know a thing or two about mobility, as he’s lived in twelve states before landing in Pittsburgh. But more importantly, he was a road warrior himself. “When I was an active duty Naval Officer I was playing around with some ideas. I was living in Pensacola and this new concept came into our city called Uber. I was really intrigued by the model so I started driving for Uber to make some extra money and gain perspective of the new platform.”

A US veteran, Ryan moved to Pittsburgh after leaving the military for a trading job at PNC. But in the back of his mind he had 25 startup ideas up his sleeve with the goal of having a fully validated new venture by year one and actually launched by the end of year three. One of those ideas was Gridwise. “I was taking rides with Uber and Lyft and hearing drivers complain about the same pain points that we all experienced and the light bulb lit up! So I put together a landing page of what I thought Gridwise could be, aggregating all the important data to help drivers make better operating decisions and make more money.” He put it online and pushed it to Facebook groups across the US without an actual product. He had 500 people sign up for free in a week and over 100 insightful questionnaires where drivers “spilled their guts about their pain points, proposed solutions, etc. At that point I thought I was really on to something there.” In a networking event he met co-founder and CTO Brian Finamore, then at YinzCam, joined forces, pitched AlphaLab and got them to invest. “That was the catalyst that enabled us both to leave our jobs and start Gridwise. That all happened in year one, a lot faster than the three years I had projected.”

Today Gridwise is a utility for gig drivers across the entire driver journey, no pun intended. Before the ride, it is a planning tool to help them plan the next few hours or next few days to maximize their revenues. As they hit the road it provides them with real-time contextual data like alerts of events or airport passenger traffic which help them make real-time decisions. And after they park, it provides the insights and analytics on their performance to compare themselves to other drivers or previous periods. As drivers are turning apps on and off to do one type of delivery or another their data is completely fragmented across all the services they are driving for; Gridwise aggregates and provides data for all the services they are using, currently supporting 25 services providers.

We asked industry pundit and influencer The Rideshare Guy what the biggest pain point for drivers is. “Right now, it’s earnings! Drivers are hesitant to get on the road for low pay, especially during the pandemic. However, companies are announcing new bonuses to bring them back. It’s a delicate balancing act, but in general, gig workers would like to see more money/higher earnings.” And this is Gridwise’s sweet spot – helping drivers make more money. The Rideshare Guy continues “Gridwise is actually one of our favorite mileage tracking apps – it’s free, which is a big plus for rideshare and gig workers. In addition to tracking mileage, it also links with Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and other major services to provide localized event, airport and other demand information, making it a step above the rest.”

So how do they monetize the platform? The business model is dual. “B2C revenue comes through a premium version of the free app with deeper analytics and an ad-free experience plus a marketplace of value added white-labeled services like Gridwise Protection or Gridwise Gas. B2B revenue comes from advertising and sponsorships from companies like Google, AAA, Bosch or Synchrony Bank. Plus we recently launched Gridwise Analytics, the only platform that can provide ground-truth insights into how people and goods are moving across ride hail and delivery services, shedding light on the supply and demand patterns across the different service providers and helping answer key operational questions that stakeholders may have in the mobility space, real estate, retail, financial services, and a multitude of services.”

And where does all that data come from? “The data sources come from a multitude of third-party sources, but the other source is drivers themselves. Location data, ride-hail or delivery, earnings from different service providers, etc. But what’s unique to us is the combined data the platform obtains and the insights it is able to share back to the drivers.”

The platform is currently fully supported in 80 metropolitan areas in the US plus there is a limited version open nationwide. It has empowered over 200,000 drivers in the last year, aggregated more than 40 million trips, revenue is growing at 24% per month and is approaching the billion mark on driver miles tracked. Pretty impressive for a team of 16, but plenty of room to grow with 6 million gig drivers in the US expected to hit 11 million by 2025.

Ryan’s vision is “to become the hub of gig mobility solutions. Where we are empowering the workers that are moving us and our goods between point A and point B. We are the go-to source for analytics in this space. And we are the lead provider of last-mile fleet solutions with a large network of gig drivers. As we build out an even larger network of gig drivers, we open up that network to existing service providers and retail and restaurant groups, and last mile providers who are looking to tap into our driver network. This feeds jobs into our system and enables us all to work together in building a more efficient and seamless mobility ecosystem as we become the repository of our supply activity in the space.”

Interestingly, Gridwise was born in the hub of autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars, trucks, drones, helicopters, you name it. How will this affect the gig economy or Gridwise’s platform and business model? Ryan feels confident that “autonomous vehicles are not a threat, but an opportunity. They are leveraging Gridwise for analytics related to gig mobility, to enhance go-to-market strategy. In fleet solutions, it’s inevitable that these vehicles are going to be a part of this ecosystem, so we’ll continue to empower workers, but we’ll start to bring autonomous vehicles into our networks. So when the jobs come into Gridwise, those are going to be fed out to human drivers or to autonomous vehicles based on the types of jobs they are.” And which jobs could be more appropriate for human drivers? The Rideshare Guy offers a few examples like “locating your intoxicated passenger at the end of a pro sporting event.” It may take a lot of AI to figure that one out.

Pittsburgh’s been kind to Ryan, among other things allowing him to deliver a three year plan in year one, and he attributes much of that to the ease and value of networking in a smaller town with the opportunity to make a bigger impact in the tech ecosystem. But he does see a shortcoming in the access to capital. “There is a lot of capital in Pittsburgh, but I’d like to see it invested in more ways. I am a little biased towards the tech ecosystem, where we’re seeing so many companies fail or having to sell because they don’t have the financial resources to accelerate their businesses more.”

On a personal note, he appreciates a “small city with a big city feel. You get the sky scrappers, the restaurants, but the city is relatively small and you get a lot out of it. It’s also very easy to get around and very bike friendly.” It turns biking is his primary mode of transportation, coming from a guy running a company serving drivers. And while he apologizes for almost coming through as a party animal, he would appreciate “a better night life for people that are over 30 years old, more and better lounges with modern music. Also the wonky hours from restaurants and businesses, some of them are closed on Mondays, some of them are closed on Tuesdays, sometimes I want to get a cocktail and then Cinderland’s closes at 11 pm. And I’m just getting started here!” he comments breaking into laughter.

While many of us get a kick out of finding holes in the wall around town, he’s made a hobby of it. “One evening a friend and I were looking for a restaurant in a residential area in East Liberty and called out to some ladies sitting on their front porch and asked them if they knew about the Jamaican restaurant Mama Rose and she waves at me ‘It’s right here honey, come to the back of the house,’” he voices in his best Caribbean accent. “Hopefully I don’t get her in trouble by overly promoting her here.” Well the little hole in the wall is likely already on its way to GrubHub, UberEats, DoorDash and eventually, Gridwise.

See career opportunities at Gridwise >>

The Fishmonger of Pittsburgh

A fishmonger, if you’ve ever seen one, Henry is the co-owner of the Penn Avenue Fish Co. When you go there, you’ll see him surrounded by hundreds of pounds of tuna, halibut, salmon or sea bass where he and his crew are cutting and slicing 80-pound fish with the craft and delicacy of an origami paper cutter.

Penn Avenue Fish Co. has a lot of fans in the tech community and is a must-stop in a Strip District shopping spree. You enter the space and feel like you just got off a pirate ship somewhere in Florida and walked into the local fish joint. A huge marlin, marine murals, a pink flamingo, and a mermaid statue decorate the place inhabited by fishmongers in trade apparel who look like they just got off the boat with the catch of the day. Enough to make Jack Sparrow feel right at home. “I’m a Florida boy,” explains Henry, “so I try to make my place like Florida style, when you walk in I want you to feel like you’re in Florida.”

As you wander through the space past the oyster shucking area, the seafood gumbos, the octopuses and make it to the fish section you immediately realize you’re in no ordinary fish store. On to the left is the restaurant and sushi bar, who many consider the best in town. Sure you’ll find the staples: tuna, swordfish, salmon, but Henry goes beyond into black cod or turbot. “People that know what they’re cooking, know what they’re eating. We always try to have one or two or three items that are super exciting that people never had. We had 20 pounds of John Dory in the house today and it’s completely gone. You just have to keep it exciting.”

We’ve found excitement at New York’s Citarella or the fish markets in Madrid and Barcelona, but they’re no match for the combined quality, variety and artistry you see here. “The strongest cog in the operation is building relationships with the best purveyors and paying your bills on time so when I want a number one tuna they give it to me.” Then you have to move the inventory fast, as the fish doesn’t get any younger. “ It’s like riding a bike, it’s easy to ride a bike fast but it’s really hard to ride a bike slow; you’ll be shooting flies away from the fish all day long.”

The final touch is the treatment of the raw material to put restaurant grade fish in your kitchen, and this is where the fishmongers come in. “We have this thing that when we cut a fish we try and have that be the best fish that we’ve ever cut. It’s a constant improvement. We all cut fish the same way, the way that I cut it. If some guy gets abducted by an alien and he’s in the middle of cutting fish, someone else can step in and finish it and know exactly where the other guy left off. There’s different styles of fish, like the salmon, trout, arctic char, you cut them all the same, all of their skeletal structures are the same. The young guys are really eager and they love learning how to cut fish.”

Henry carved his teeth in the restaurant industry, starting as a dishwasher, moving on to cook, and eventually executive chef. Along the journey an innovative chef advised him to “worry about all your technique and knowledge before you worry about money as that will eventually come.” So he kept perfecting his craft and found a job at Benkovitz Seafood until the day it closed. As serendipity would have it, while doing some internal brainstorming on opening up his own fish market, he ran into his friend Angela Earley, a pescatarian who had just graduated from college and was tinkering with the very same idea. They had met years earlier at the Déjà Vu lounge, where Angela was managing the bar and Henry running the sushi bar and built a strong relationship thereafter. “Angela does everything I can’t do and I do everything she can’t do, I always try to find someone that is the opposite of me and that seems to be a good recipe for a successful partnership.”

Pittsburgh has turned into a foodie’s playground in the past decade and Henry certainly played a role in the seafood department. “I feel like I’m a little bit part of that because if I wasn’t here and people want to make miso-glazed black cod they’d have a hard time even finding it. So many people come here and they do restaurant quality stuff at home. If you take that piece of tuna home you won’t have to do anything to it and it’ll be as good or better than restaurant quality.”

So what’s in store for the Penn Avenue Fish Co. in the new normal? “The pandemic caught us by surprise. I remember that Sunday I didn’t know what to do and we didn’t order any fish and we got completely wiped out. Everyone just came in and bought every piece of fish they could. It’s been head-spinning busy. We build a great level of trust with our customers so they’d give us their credit cards and we just bring it out to their car. Right now the dust is starting to settle and we’ll bring the oyster happy hour back. We strived to do the highest quality possible and the customers really appreciate that. We have the nicest customers ever, they bring us baked goods and if they see us out at a restaurant they’ll buy us drinks.”

In his free time, you’re unlikely to find Henry at a bar, not his thing. Instead, he’s probably playing guitar and bass with a local garage band. When in the kitchen, he enjoys his favorite fish. “My number one favorite fish is the French turbot. You can go pretty fancy with it, it’s like a nice firm Halibut with a metallic ocean flavor that’s very French.”

Henry calls himself a Florida boy with a retro attitude. He has no time to waste on social media and his use of technology is limited to a tablet, an iPhone and a delivery account with Ritual.co. His raw, no-nonsense style seems both contrasting and complementary with the pride, care and artistry he puts into his work. But don’t let that softness fool you, if he met Jaws at mid sea he’d have him for breakfast.

A Love for Robotics

While at NREC, Tom was working alongside some 150 robotics research engineers in the aforementioned project for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) who do all the research for the DoD. “We worked there for three or four years and got a lot of confidence in our progress. We figured there’s gotta be some low hanging fruit in industry where autonomous manipulation can be really interesting technology and have applications for some industry problems.” And it would be an Amazon acquisition that would give him the final push. Around 2012 they bought out a company called Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), a warehouse robotics company for almost $800 million. “Wow, this was huge in robotics! So we started looking into ecommerce and warehousing and talking with warehousing operators and fulfillment centers and CEOs of logistics companies. They said ‘if you guys can build a robot that could drive around my warehouse and find objects and pick them up and collect them to get ready for shipping, that would be a no-brainer for us because that’s a huge labor sink. We can’t find enough people to do that kind of work, especially on the third shift.’”

This was the Eureka moment for the business opportunity. “Having a robot that could do that would be really amazing. We looked at some business cases, we looked at costs, what the robot would need to do, and we started pitching some folks in 2013. We approached Innovation Works, one of the local seed organizations, and they gave us some funding. It took six months of pitching but we eventually proved to them that we had enough of a business case and interest from the market and they gave us funding to build a prototype robot. So we did, and that was the start of IAM Robotics.”

The robotics market is still relatively young. Market size estimates vary widely in the tens of billion dollars depending on the source as do growth projections in the double-digit CAGR range, but what is clear is that it has gotten big and will be getting a lot bigger. IAM Robotics is in the materials handling segment, one of the fastest growing areas. These machines often replace older equipment like static conveyor belts with the benefit of mobility, flexibility and lower costs. “For a lot of the work we’re doing right now, robots are not doing the work of people, they’re doing the work of conveyor systems. Customers are looking to augment their conveyor systems to have more flexible operations. They don’t want to install this big conveyor in the warehouse and that’s why they come to us; they’re looking for mobile robots that can replace that conveyor so they can have more open floor space and lower maintenance and installation costs. Rarely do we see a case where a company is going to take a purely manual moving process and augment it with robots, it’s more about looking to replace their existing conveyor lines or building a new facility and they need to move objects from point A to point B on a regular basis. And sometimes they don’t want to have to do it with people so they look at robots to be able to transport the goods.”

Tom and Co. are busy with new game-changing products and strategic partnerships; this week they introduced their new flagship product, Bolt, an autonomous mobile robot that offers unparalleled flexibility, safety and power designed to retrofit custom tops and equipped with 360 vision and high-power swap batteries. And in late March the company announced a partnership with Tompkins Robotics in an effort to deliver human-free automated sortation. Standard sortation systems require humans to sort items, this new xChange system completely automates the order fulfillment exit process reducing costs and labor requirements.

There are a lot of competitors in this market, about fifty mobile robot companies worldwide, and they’re all gaining traction because there’s a huge number of incumbent warehouse automation companies that are used to selling conveyor or fixed robot arms and they have no experience or skills set in autonomous robots. So they’re relying on the new technology from startups to be able to help provide customers with the flexibility and the solutions that the robots are bringing to market. “Customers are just dying to get their hands on autonomous robots because of their flexibility, because they can’t find enough people, because it offers a quicker solution to automate them than conveyor systems.”

Today IAM Robotics employs 70 people and is expected to hire another 30 by year end. An internship program brings a lot of strong, smart engineers from CMU and other schools across the country to feed a pipeline of future hires. Tom feels fortunate about the talent pool in town across disciplines and is pleased to see that progress is being made in bringing commercialization talent away from New York and Silicon Valley. “The capital influx in town has helped with the big bucks coming into the driverless car companies and they’re able to recruit some real commercial talent.”

Tom was born and raised in Buffalo, NY, moved to Florida to attend college and grad school and landed his first robotics job at Harris in that state. There he joined a number of industry groups, where he met his wife, who was working at the Penn State Electro Optics Center. “We met and eventually got married and we wanted to have kids and be closer to family. I’m in robotics and Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh had been reinventing themselves in the world of robotics, so I thought there’s tons of great opportunities in robotics in Pittsburgh.” He reached out to some friends at CMU and eventually got the job at NREC “an amazing and unbelievable place to work. I learned so much from so many talented people. And that’s how I ended up in Pittsburgh; my wife’s from the area, we got married and it really allowed me to continue to grow my career in robotics.”

But there’s a big leap between growing your career in robotics in Pittsburgh and launching your own company here. “The pluses are very clear: great quality of life, great accessibility to talent and resources, easy to get around geographically, cost is reasonable, salaries are reasonable. From all those perspectives, very good and second to none! I would say we’ve done a lot better on access to seed capital in town, but there’s just no comparison for Pittsburgh to, say Silicon Valley or Boston. On the positive front I’ve seen certain investors that have strategically decided that they’re going to focus more on Pittsburgh because of those factors and it’s less competitive to find deals, but that’s still a minority.”

On a personal front, Tom loves the secret treasures this city keeps surprising us with. “There are so many hidden gems in this town and you’re always discovering something new. Some new place to eat, some new park, some new place to shop that you’ve never heard of before. Everyone seems to know about it but it took me like a year and a half,” he laughs. “It would be great to know about those things faster in a centralized place.” And what is his favorite hidden gem? “My wife and I love sushi and we’ve searched around for many years for the best sushi restaurant in Pittsburgh, and by far I have to say that Slippery Mermaid in Sewickley is amazing. They fly the fish fresh every week and the quality was really high, we were impressed. If you’re a sushi fan there’s actually really good sushi in Pittsburgh at Slippery Mermaid.” Nuff said, we’re adding it to our Pitt Stops.

Upon concluding our conversation, we couldn’t help but ask Tom, a Buffalo native who started a new life in town, is he a Bills fan or a Steelers fan? “I share my time between the Bills and the Steelers, I’m very happy for the Bills when they win and I’m happy for the Steelers when they win. And if they play each other I’m like meh… whatever.”

S ee career opportunities at IAM Robotics >>