Welcome to episode 210 of the Business Development Podcast.

And on today's expert guest interview, we are chatting with Malcolm Adams, a former oil and gas executive who is looking to turn commuting on its head with his revolutionary platform Choreo Commute.

He is looking to make choreograph commuting a household name across Canada.

Stick with us.

This is an episode you are not going to want to miss.

The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years.

Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal.

And we couldn't agree more.

This is the Business Development Podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and broadcasting to the world.

You'll get expert business development advice, tips and experiences and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, CEOs and business development reps.

You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business.

Brought to you by Capital Business Development capitalbd ca.

Let's do it.

Welcome to the Business Development Podcast.

And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Hello.

Welcome to episode 210 of the Business Development Podcast and today I have an absolute rockstar expert guest for you in the rideshare services industry.

Today I'm bringing you Malcolm Adams.

Malcolm is a distinguished entrepreneur and former senior executive with over 28 years of experience in the Canadian energy sector.

As a professional engineer, P.

Eng and a corporate director, ICDD, Malcolm has led and supported 11 energy companies, bringing his extensive expertise in team building, leadership, corporate strategy, business and technical and financial evaluation to every opportunity.

His career spanned significant roles at notable firms such as Shell Ark Financial Corp.

And Surge Energy Inc.

Where he was instrumental in driving growth, optimizing operations and executing strategic acquisitions.

Malcolm's tenure at Black Crane Energy Corp.

As President and CEO exemplifies his ability to found and scale companies with a keen focus on sustainability and longevity, underscoring his commitment to responsible and innovative energy practices.

Now, as the CEO and founder of Choreo Commute, Malcolm is revolutionizing the daily commute with real time choreographed carpooling solutions aimed at reducing driving costs, vehicle emissions and commuter stress.

Choreo Commute, formerly known as Tango Ride, is set to launch in Calgary in late 2024 and it promises a reliable, convenient and eco friendly alternative for commuters.

Malcolm's vision for Corio is not just about enhancing transportation, it's about transforming lives by making commutes more affordable and sustainable.

With his unwavering dedication to climate change mitigation and sustainable transport, Malcolm Adams continues to pave the way for a greener and more efficient future, making him a formidable force in both the energy and transportation sectors.

Malcolm, it's an.

An absolute honor to have you on the show today.

Thank you for having me, Kelly.

Pleasure to be here, dude.

You do so much, and I'm really excited.

We've had a few conversations ahead of this show, and I'm really excited to chat with you.

You're my very first rideshare company, and so it's fun.

It's a fun one to chat about.

And that industry is challenging and changing all the time.

And you have an interesting.

An interesting outlook on it, an interesting offering on it.

But first, before we get into that, Malcolm, how did you end up on this path, dude?

Energy sector to ride share.

That is an interesting transition.

Absolutely, I agree.

And.

And just to clarify one thing, I, I would say, you know, we are very different than rideshare, so we are.

Are.

We are share the cost commuting and share the cost carpooling.

So we.

We don't want to be lumped in with the Ubers of the world and.

And that kind of thing.

So on a sustainable transportation kind of focus.

So how did I get here?

Yeah, that's the first question that usually pops up when folks.

When they hear that I've got an oil and gas background.

So I'd say it comes from three sources.

One, my dad.

My dad was an entrepreneur, ran his own business for many years.

My brother and I were from very young age, supporting the business.

Essentially, he had a lighting business.

So we helped with deliveries and carrying a lot of boxes, and he ran it out of the house.

And my mom was like, cfo.

So I grew up in sort of an entrepreneurial environment, to say the least.

And his favorite line was, it's a lot easier to save a dollar than to make a dollar.

And carpooling and saving money.

In this tough time of affordability issues for folks, most people don't realize that private transportation is our second highest household expense.

And number one is shelter, number three is food.

And a lot of people can't help you with items one or three.

But we're here to help families save between three and $5,000 a year per household.

So that's some of the background of, you know.

And I'm also an engineer.

I hate waste.

I hate inefficiency to my core.

And there's no greater inefficiency in the world right now than solo commuters.

That we could be increasing our mobility density, helping people save money, reducing emissions, and building stronger communities.

It's it's awesome.

And I'm really, really excited to chat with you about that because you're launching it, you know, in our backyard, right in Calgary.

For you, at home.

For us, it's our backyard.

I'm in Edmonton.

But yes, you know, like, even before this show, we were supposed to record this show yesterday and my Internet went completely, completely down and, like, went down.

We've lived here for over a year and we have not had like an Internet outage.

And so I'm checking a matalis and I'm like, where is our Internet?

What happened?

And they're like, look, somebody has cut out and stolen all the wires out of the box.

It's going to be a minute.

And I was like, are you kidding me?

And we talked briefly before this show, but I really think it does speak to the current situation of our economy and the current situation with inflation.

There are a lot of people hurting and we need alternatives to help people out.

Absolutely.

And like I said, yeah, I mentioned that I was also in the oil and gas industry and theft in the, in the, in the oil fields, we'd had wells go down because someone cut out the copper.

So there are a lot of desperate people right now.

And this is going on several years and nothing's really getting that easier.

Inflation is down, but it's still inflation.

And so you can look at vehicle prices and I've done all the stats and you can appreciate that I'm an engineer, so I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to data.

And the average vehicle price in Alberta has gone up by 28% in the last five years.

Holy cow.

Used car prices have gone up by more than 50%.

Fuel prices are up substantially.

I don't think anybody's salary has gone up by that amount in the last.

Five years and definitely not.

Yeah, it's, it's really, it's tough out there.

I've been blessed, like I said, to work in the oil and gas industry for some amazing firms.

And this is my opportunity to give back in a way.

You know, it's one thing to run an oil and gas company.

It's another thing to help people change their lives and open up opportunities.

And to.

When people say, you know, why did you start this?

It actually came from a point of anger, which a lot of people, And I know CEOs have said that before, that either you start a business for one of two passions, love or hate.

And so in my case, it was anger because, you know, we, our previous company, Black Crane, we'd raised over 75 million in an equity line from private equity.

And partway through our business, you know, we think we were drawn about 12 or 14 million into that business in organic growth model.

And then we lost our funding primarily because big endowments backed those private equity players.

And they, you know, had pressure from students and others saying no more supporting fossil fuel companies.

And the angry priest for me was most people don't know where emissions come from.

From a barrel of oil.

At the end of the day, the largest source of emissions is actually the tailpipe of vehicles.

It's about 81% of the emissions.

And upstream oil and gas is about 12.

So if you want to make a difference, the biggest lever, it's about seven times bigger.

It's to address the vehicle emissions at the end of it.

And that's what's exciting.

So we lost our funding, we sold that company and then I wanted to transition to where I can have a major impact.

We've got 114 million people solo commuting in North America every day, spending about $2 billion per day on parking fuel depreciation and repairs.

And that's, you know, that's where I want to make a difference.

I can see why that would be, why that might be a point of contention.

My gosh.

And you know, I was looking at when you launched Black Crane and like for those of you, you know, we're talking to people in the us we're talking to people around the world, but Let' say that 2015, 2016 was a damn hard time for the oil and gas industry in Alberta.

My gosh, what was it like launching a company based in oil and gas in 2016?

Let's talk about that for a second.

That couldn't have been easy.

Yeah, so it's, it's something I've always wanted to do.

I'm 52 now.

I, I left Arc Financial in 2010 when I was 38, thinking I was ready to start my own on gas company.

I wasn't.

So, you know, by 2015, I definitely had identified the team that I'd like to put together.

After working at both Surge Energy and Annapolis Capital for a bit and realizing that the buy and exploit model in oil and gas wasn't there for junior oil and gas companies anymore.

So it was really the organic growth opportunity that was out there and having 10 plus years in private equity, there's no such thing as blind pool capital anymore.

You needed to come forward with a business plan with the assets and, and everything, you know, teed up, ready to go if you wanted to get funding.

And so, yeah, with a blank piece of paper in January 2016, when oil was what, 25, 25 bucks a barrel, I looked at that going, well, there's no better opportunity than to potentially do farming deals and put together a big land base.

So geologists identified a play that was a bypass Ellersley oil play northeast of Airdrie.

And.

But no one had ever really captured it because it's a checkerboard of ExxonMobil and Prairie Skyland and some crown land.

And with, you know, the advances in oil in horizontal drilling and directional drilling, it's a thin zone.

We now have these gamma bit tools that could drill thin zones.

And so we approached ExxonMobil.

I approached Exxon at that time going, listen, I haven't raised any capital yet.

Half my team, I can't disclose who they are yet because they're working other places.

And would you like to do a farming deal with us?

And the guy said, you know, you're the first company that's approached us in two and a half years that's not trying to steal our production.

We'd love to do a farming deal because these aren't lands that we're going to drill.

We'd happy to be with the royalty.

So now we had half the checkerboard and with crown land and then a deal with Prairie sky, we now had 70 sections of contiguous land, 200 plus drilling locations.

Now we could go to private equity with a business plan, we raised about one and a half million friends and family.

And then we could go to private equity and say, hey, we've tied up the play.

Here's how we can scale it.

And we need funding.

So that process, even the private equity guys, they call it sort of just in time funding, they had delays in their own funding.

We originally were supposed to be closed by February 2017, so, you know, raising 70, 50, 50 million plus in 13 months in that environment.

I was pretty, pretty excited about that.

They had some delays in funding, so we had to bootstrap it through to October of, of 20, 2017 before we actually got going.

And so we did get the funding and we drilled our well the next day, which was a vertical, which, which worked out great.

But the challenge going forward for us in that environment, as you can recall, is now the best rigs, the best tools were all going stateside.

And yeah, and so it became very challenging for us to drill horizontal wells in that thin zone because the best, best tools and gamma bit tools five meters back were now Stateside, so we had to pivot to another play.

So we did that.

We also did some bitcoin in there.

That's where we enhanced tech.

So we did bitcoin.

We had an advisor, but, you know, we own the miners.

We order our own miners.

And we had.

It was a really cool play.

We.

We tripled the value between buying the miners and actually getting going.

The.

The miners tripled in value.

And we paid out that project in less than six months once we got.

Wow.

And that was pretty exciting.

I didn't want to bet our entire company on bitcoin because I just don't understand where the heck it's going.

And.

And it did.

It did crater a lot.

It's now bounced back.

But there are some neat synergies in the oil and gas industry with bitcoin mining.

My gosh, that's so exciting.

And so that's kind of led you, like, really.

I kind of see it as the path.

Right.

I kind of feel like the bitcoin kind of led you.

Hold on.

Maybe we could do something a little more modern, a little more rideshare or.

Exactly, yeah.

Like APP based.

Right.

You know, at ARC Financial, when I worked there, you know, we did some really interesting things.

I used to be in the non conventional group, non conventional energy group.

And so we were sort of a bit more on the VC side in some of those investments where we did an LNG project from scratch and sold out in 18 months.

We were doing heavy oil, oil sands, biomass gasification tech company, which was really cool.

And then this stuff called CBM and shale gas that came along.

So really on the front lines of.

So I enjoy learning new things.

I enjoy taking things that are complicated and sort of breaking it down into something, you know, simple.

And.

And I love solving problems.

Absolutely.

Definitely through and through.

Engineer.

Yeah, I've.

I've had the pleasure of speaking to both Ian McGregor and Sean Collins on this show.

And, you know, I mean, I.

They speak just the same as you.

And I look at, like, some of the things they've done and it's been so varied.

And, you know, I always looked at business and kind of thought like, stick to your lane.

Stick to what?

You know, before this show, okay, that was very much my idea, was like, if you're good at something, stick to that thing.

Because in my experience at that point, what I'd seen is when people ventured off and started to try new things or new things that were outside of their area of expertise per se, that it didn't tend to go well.

But my gosh, I've spoken to so many people on this show now who have went in completely different directions, but had the know how and just brought that experience with them and, and had great success just like you.

And it has definitely changed my view.

I think, I think entrepreneurs are capable of a lot more than, than we think or that we give ourselves credit for.

Yeah, I, I agree with that.

And they don't always work.

And you got to be, you got to be comfortable with that, you know, taking calculated risks.

I think, you know, when I was at ARC Financial, I got to know, you know, and we were supporting Pat Carlson.

If you've, if you've known Pat, Pat's.

Wow.

He's.

He's had multiple, multiple successes.

He's a serial entrepreneur, built, you know, huge companies.

North American oil sands.

Then he did seven generation, which was another massive one.

He now runs a public oil and gas company.

But he's so, so innovative and inventive.

And Pat gave me a book, so I was probably 36 at the time, and he gave me the book the five secrets you must discover before you die.

I don't know if you've heard of that one.

It's a pretty.

I have not, but now that's on my reading list.

It's got a catchy title.

It's not brief.

Anyway, the, the author in there, he, he did something really cool.

He went around and he didn't interview, but he asked about, you know, a ton of people, like 3,000 people.

Who's the, you know, Kelly, who's the smartest person that you know, the wisest person you know, that I could interview, that's still live, that I could interview.

And you'd be like, oh, that's my, that's my grandfather.

Here's his number, blah, blah.

Or it's my barber or my pastor, whatever.

And so he got a bunch of those names.

Then he narrowed it down to, you had to be minimum 70 years old, even though there were some people that were clearly wise, let's say in their 40s.

But he interviewed all these people and asked them that question, the same question.

Everybody said, if you could go back and tell yourself, tell yourself something in your 20s, what would that one piece of advice be?

Okay.

And then he wrote the book around the top five answers because he found, you know, a big cluster.

And the number one on the list of those five was take more risk.

And, and that was really resonated for me.

And then they had, you know, different stories, some positive, some negative.

And these were people that either took the risk and it worked out.

There's people that were still in their 70s regretting never taking that risk, but once it's a calculated risk.

And so for me at that time, you know, venturing out from ARC and doing something else was around taking, taking more risk.

And, and part of that comes from my DNA and my dad who, who started his own business as well.

Yeah, I always like to, I always like to ask entrepreneurs like you, what was your catalyst like?

For me it was, it was Covid.

Like I'd worked, I'd worked at an inspection firm for the better part of a decade.

You know, I knew business development, I knew account management.

I'd done that for a very long time for that organization from from infancy all the way up to.

It was a six million dollar company by the time, you know, we did, we went from about 300,000 to 6 million in two years and really just kind of sustained that throughout.

But obviously oil and gas turned and inspection industry took a pretty big nosedive.

And you know, my, my boss at the time kind of came in and said, Kelly, you know, like, I'm not sure what the next few years look like.

Do you have, and do you have another plan?

Do you have something else you could do?

And I was like, yeah, you know, like he didn't know it, but at the time I'd already been thinking about going out on my own and doing business development on my own, starting my own firm.

And that was the kick in the butt.

That was the kick in the butt that I needed.

And I always find that like we all need that catalyst.

We all need that kick in the butt.

Right.

And I guess I wanted to know, for you, obviously you were incredibly successful.

What, what was it, what was the kick in the butt for you that was like, okay, I need to do something on my own.

Yeah.

Oh, to leave arc, you're talking about back event.

Yeah, like it's always scary to leave that.

You know, you were probably incredibly well paid.

You know, it's scary to leave that like cushion and go out and have to do it on your own.

Yeah, well, like I said, I didn't do it in isolation.

I obviously have many chats with my wife before then.

We had three young kids at the time.

So that was 2010.

So yeah, we had a four year old, a three year old and a one year old.

Seems like a crazy time to do that.

Part of it for me is at that time is I wasn't learning and growing anymore.

And yes, I was comfortable.

Arc Financial is one of the most amazing places you can work, you know, largest private equity firm in, in Canada.

But I just didn't feel I was learning and growing anymore.

And at that time I was sitting on six different boards, Chairman of one board, you know, chair of comp committees and audit committees, on other boards, both public and private.

And for me, here I am advising CEOs and trying to help them build their company.

I've never done that.

So, so part of it for me was, if you want to call it.

A fraud type feeling, bit of an imposter syndrome.

Yeah.

And, and so I, I saw that, you know, the value I could, I, I tried to add as much value as I could, but I'd never been in that seat.

Right.

And so for me, getting back to the operating side, getting to build out my own team, all of that, you know, you've got to go do it and experience it.

So that was really the catalyst financially, we were in a place to be able that and my wife was super supportive of, of that decision because she saw that.

Yeah, I, I, I, I wasn't energized, I guess.

And so yeah, nothing like jumping into a new startup to energize you.

Yeah, no kidding, no kidding.

You know, and I wanted to chat a little bit about it.

Black Crane, did you, did you guys end up shutting it down or did you end up selling?

We ended up selling, yeah.

And we, we timed the market really well and exit oil was 120 bucks a barrel.

Wow.

We had, we had like, we ran a sales process.

I think we had seven bids, one that looked like it was clearly the best offer for us.

All cash, not subject to finance or anything like that.

And they were really interested in our assets.

We had a really good lmr.

They were really interested in our bitcoin operation as well.

They were interested in our people.

So really good fit to, to exit at that time.

So yeah, bigger fish took us out.

Amazing.

One of the things that I wanted to ask you was, was it hard on you personally when it was time to walk away from that?

The reason I ask is I actually interviewed Mike Fada a while ago who sold his company, Manitoba Harvest Hemp Foods for $419 million to Tilray in 2019.

And he said like, obviously there were more things to this.

He'd ended up losing his marriage.

His mother had recently passed away.

Like it was all in a eight week window.

A lot of things happened.

But he mentioned that he had to grieve the loss of his company.

Even though he walked away an extremely Rich man.

Right.

It was very hard on him because you tie so much of yourself to your organization.

There's so much of you in any organization that you found, started, and build.

Did you experience any of that when.

When you sold Black Crane?

I think the biggest grieving process, because, yeah, you put.

You put so much of your.

Your identity and yourself into it.

You know, we'd been stuck, you know, without.

Without fresh capital for a while.

So we.

We'd been grinding, you know, over that.

That previous year, and we did some really good things, like I said, on the bitcoin side, to increase value.

The biggest piece.

I love the team that I had, and to wrap up that piece of it, I'm still obviously close to.

We were a small team, six of us.

What's been really cool is three of those individuals have been able to move on, and now geologist Landman and VP Ops are together again at another company, and they're thriving.

So I think that, that that's great in terms of helping with the grieving process, if you will, on that front.

Yeah.

But, yeah, you learn a lot through.

Through doing your own.

Your own startup on that piece.

And, you know, private equity was the only source of capital at that time.

And.

And when they are, you know, the three of five directors, you know, what they say goes.

So you.

You.

And I know, I know the game.

You lose a little bit of your control, obviously, as an entrepreneur when you.

When you do that.

But we.

You need access to capital to grow.

So I guess in terms of the grieving process, for me, you know, that was.

We closed by June 2022.

I didn't have a long grieving process because, you know, I got introduced to Vish and Tangle Ride during COVID and.

And I was, you know, mentally stimulated to research how big this problem was and how it.

How it could be solved.

So, you know, shortly thereafter, I probably took a month off and then really jumped into Tango Ride, you know, finalizing a recapitalization acquisition with my partner Tom, with.

With the original founders and brought everything to Canada, and we incorporated in November of 2022.

Okay, so.

So you didn't have a long.

You didn't have a long break.

You kind of.

You just coped by starting another company.

There you go.

Okay.

Okay.

And this part is the part that I want to spend a lot of time on, because this is a really, really interesting jump choreograph, commuting.

You said it right in the beginning.

We are not Uber.

We are very different.

But, you know, take me into it.

You came from oil and gas.

What the heck?

What.

What was in your brain that's like, okay, Nope, nope.

There's a huge problem here and we need to fix this.

And I know I don't have experience, but I'm going to figure it out.

Walk me through this one.

Yeah, totally.

So the catalyst moment, if you will, the spark, was November 2019.

And as, as you know, I was probably a little bit late, but, you know, the ritual in October, November is you go get your winter tires on.

And so, and, and you know, full disclosure, I've been like, like 80% of North Americans.

I've been a solo commuter my entire career.

Yeah, there's a couple years I did transit, but once we moved out into the suburbs of Calgary, you know, solo driving.

So I was heading north on 14th street to go drop the vehicle off to get the winter tires on, and that's a pretty busy road that south goes into, into downtown.

And the city had taken out the left turn signal where I needed to turn, and I was 10th in line.

And I'm not the most patient person.

And because they took out the turn signal, only one car could turn left at the end of the red light.

So I sat there for half an hour, inching forward.

Oh, my gosh.

And I got to watch a thousand cars.

So instead of being one of the salmon in the flow, I was going the other way.

I got to watch a thousand plus cars go by on morning commute at 7am and 95% plus were solo drivers.

Yeah.

And so that was the catalyst moment.

When I'm sitting there as an engineer going, this is insane.

How many people are doing this?

How much money are we spending?

Every one of those people is going.

If they're going Downtown is paying $25, $15 plus to $25 a day for parking.

Here we are as oil and gas executives and companies being demonized by the world from people that don't understand where our emissions ultimately come from.

I wonder how much we're spending a day in Calgary.

I wonder how much we're spending a year in Alberta, Canada, North America, on this specific activity.

And so that launched me into research mode.

I won.

And sitting there going, there's got to be an app, you know, that sort of takes some of the pickup experience of an Uber.

And, you know, that, that, that piece of the puzzle with ma, almost like a matching service or a dating service piece that puts it together that but, you know, not dating, but, but essentially coordinates a commute for people and connects people in their community.

That and, and I lived in the burbs and I knew very few of my neighbors because, you know, you open up your garage door at minus 30 and drive out and you go to work, do the same thing.

You don't meet your neighbors unless you have young kids.

We didn't at the time.

And you're coaching Timbit soccer or hockey.

So, you know, I, I get why people do what they do, but the numbers were staggering.

And so that's where I looked at it and, and started searching apps to see there's got to be an app out there.

Came across Tango Ride.

Vish was the founder in and lives in Melbourne, Australia, originally from India.

And so I reached out to him on LinkedIn and said, hey, I'm the CEO of an oil and gas company in Calgary.

What you're doing looks really interesting.

Love to hear more about it.

And, and so we, you know, had a zoom call, I think that was about February of 2020.

And that's when he said, he said, yeah, we've done some pilot work, we've built the app.

He had an angel investor out of the uk, they'd done some marketing testing in the uk.

And he said, yeah, we're about to launch our first pilot project in Aberdeen, Scotland in March of 2020.

And of course that never happened.

Covid.

Yes, something happened in that time.

Yeah.

So that's where we sort of stayed in touch over, over that period of time, I started building more models.

Tom McGinnis, who's a good friend of mine, Tom was the head of investment banking at national bank and before that a founder of Tristone, one of the smartest guys I know.

He's also a great black hatter.

So, you know, went to Tom, actually called Tom that morning when I was stuck in traffic swearing about, you know, having to sit here for half an hour and how ridiculous this is.

And, and he, he remembers that call vividly.

And so but as we got together and started looking at the business plan, I kept going back to Tom and saying, tell me why this won't work.

Because he's a great black hatter.

And we keep going through in identifying issues or how to solve those issues and essentially we couldn't kill it.

And the reality is a company in the States called Scoop commute had started.

Two brothers had started something in San Francisco in 2015.

They also got punched in the face really hard by Covid, but they were doing this in San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.

So they only got to three cities, but had north of 350,000 users just before COVID Hit them.

And they were, they had a great gross margin on what?

On their business.

Had big clients like Microsoft and Amazon and then, you know, so there's a model out there that this will work.

They never came to Canada for a lot of reasons.

You know, the US Guys don't normally come to Canada.

But the problem in Canada is actually worse from, you know, from affordability issues.

You know, our, our fuel prices set a 60 cents a liter equivalent in the U.S.

you know, obviously we're like a buck 50, a buck 60.

Your vehicle prices are in Canadian dollars.

Like, everything's just more expensive up here.

Not to mention that people don't like taking transit at minus 30.

Well, and, you know, we chatted about this earlier, but like, the cost of vehicles here is astronomical, right?

Like, I remember shopping for, you know, I mean, I've always had a work truck and you know, call it what you will, the Alberta way, whatever you want to call it.

I've had to go to Calgary whether it's a blizzard or whether it is beautiful and sunny outside.

And as a business development specialist for a lot of years, you know, I prided myself on being able to get where I needed to go regardless of the scenario.

And so for me, that meant.

That meant a truck.

And when I started my company, I wanted a work truck.

I wanted a specific truck that was mine and that I could take back and forth.

And I remember, like, this was like 2021, I want to say 2021 or 2022.

When I bought my.

When I bought my truck.

And I remember, man, like, shopping around, trying to find the best possible deal.

I think I ended up settling for a truck.

It was $57,000.

And that was a great deal for what I got at that point.

I think an average new truck at that point was around 80 to $90,000.

So just to give, like, people around the world an idea of the cost of vehicles in Canada, it is astronomical.

It's.

It's pretty high.

And like I said, I think the average Alberta and most our trucks that are sold in Alberta, the average Alberta vehicle in 2019 was about 48,000.

And now it's over 62,000 for the average.

We, we hit a new record for new vehicle sales in Alberta in April of 2024, which is $1.27 billion.

Just.

Just in the month of April.

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

And so you're right, like, if you factor in, you know, an average payment for a vehicle, I think most people are probably spending anywhere between 600 and 1000 bucks a month for their vehicle payment.

I think that's pretty fair.

Probably across the, across the country.

If not just across Alberta, if not more like let's get real.

If you're buying a brand new truck, you're well over $1,000 at this point.

And it works out to.

From what I've read stats Canada stuff, it's about $1,200 per month is what the average Canadian is, is spending on parking insurance, vehicle.

If they finance the vehicle, that kind of thing.

Yeah, it's.

Yeah.

And fuel.

Yeah, it's, it's a big number.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

And, and okay.

So, so why, why choreograph commuting?

Right.

We have Uber.

Right.

People around here in Edmonton have been using Uber for a long time.

I think for me like that's the one that I hear about.

I feel any type of app based service they are using Uber.

That's been my experience.

But talk to me a little bit about the challenge.

Obviously we're driving to work, traffic's crazy.

We're paying astronomical amounts of money for both our vehicles.

Gas, fixing them.

Insurance.

Like insurance literally.

I saw a thing the other day that said insurance companies are pulling out of Alberta because of the cost to.

The cost to ensure they're not making any money.

Right.

We're, we're paying out, you know, astronomical amounts of money.

You know, you, you're a, you're a statistician.

What is, what is it?

How much are we spending, you know, on average in this, in this country on just driving to work?

So right now in Canada the number, it's about $56 billion a year for just solo drivers.

Okay.

And in, in, in north america It's about $530 billion a year.

And that's just for the solo commuters.

And that's the biggest component.

And that, that assumes about a parking average parking cost of like 10 bucks which is tough to quantify that but in that realm.

And so it's about 30% parking, 30% vehicle depreciation.

And then you get into you know, sort of equal components of fuel and, and maintenance and repairs kind of thing.

So yeah, it's about $2 billion a day.

Calgary per year is about 1.8 billion.

Edmonton solo commuters are spending about 1.5 billion,000 per year.

Yeah, like the numbers are.

Okay, okay, the, the numbers are wacky.

But back, back to your first comment about Uber.

So I mean people don't typically commute to work with Uber.

Right.

Like okay, use Uber for we're going out to the bars or restaurant or sporting event maybe and going to be have some pops and, and, and don't want to drink and drive people from like.

And this is all Stats can stuff.

And the in the best example to show is like Airdrie.

Okay, so Airdrie is one of the fastest growing cities in Canada.

Has been for the last five, six years.

I think there's almost 90,000 people there now.

10,000 of those residents work in Calgary.

And, and this is 2021 Stats Canada data.

So it's probably grown since.

But of the, of the 10,000 people that work in Calgary, 95% solo drive to work, 1% take transit.

And then your other remainder in there is some people that are taking Uber or they bike or walk or something.

So we don't compete with Uber because we're not doing, you know, Uber's not focused on what we do at all.

What we're focused on is the 95% trying to help those solo commuters find a match and find a carpooling partner that they can safely and reliably go with.

And the concept here is I call it car trooping, not carpooling.

So and it comes from a friend who she, her kids dance.

Okay?

So think of a, think of a dance troupe for example.

We're the choreographer, okay.

And so in that dance troupe of like 25 people, Kelly, your best partner is Sarah.

And that's who you usually, you know, let's say tango.

That's who you usually dance with on stage.

But you know, if Sarah sprains her ankle the night before in rehearsals, then because you're part of a troop, then Jane can step in and be your, your partner on stage.

So that's what we want to create and why we call it Choreograph Carpooling Choreograph Commuting is, you know, Sarah might be your neighbor that lives three doors down from you and you both work at national bank, so it makes a ton of sense to carpool together.

But if you know in your community that there's also another 30 people that commute from your neighborhood to downtown Calgary, downtown Edmonton, whatever, you know, before you leave the house that if something happens to Sarah, or in your case you drove to Sarah to work in the morning, but you have to stay late that night and you can't drive Sarah home, we automatically rematch Sarah with one of those other people in your troop.

So she does get home.

And so that's why historically like over 40% of the people we interviewed have tried carpooling in Calgary, but only about 7% practically do it.

And that's because two people in a network is technically a network.

It's just not stable.

So if, you know, once every four commutes, your schedule changes and you can't get Sarah home.

Well, she has a 25% failure rate of getting home.

That's completely unacceptable.

But in a 12 person troop where you have eight drivers and four passengers, even with a 25% individual failure rate, those passengers get home, it fails once every 12 years.

Not once per week.

With, with those.

Wow.

It's kind of like Yahtzee, you know?

You know, hey, Kelly, like throw eight dice, right?

And, and have six sixes come up.

Like, it doesn't happen very often.

No, you'd have, you'd have to get to seven.

So even at six, six sixes, it's, the network is still stable.

Where the network would fail was, hey, throw eight dice and have seven sixes come up.

Okay.

The chances of that is like 1 in 2 million.

Like, it's really, really a small number.

So that's the kind of network we want to create.

It takes sort of critical mass, but you don't need a hundred people or anything like that.

You need like a dozen.

And you can create this super stable choreograph commuting network.

Yeah.

And it's really interesting because, you know, we talked about it before, but like, you're right.

Like we.

I know my neighbor to my left and I know my neighbor to the right.

I do not know the neighbor across the street.

I do not know where he works, what he does, or any of those things.

Right.

But for all I know, he works at the building across the street from one of my clients.

Yeah.

And in big companies like a Cinerel or Synovus or others downtown, they might work in.

They actually might work in your company.

And you've never met them because you're the engineer and you're on floor seven and they're the accountant on floor 15.

Because they always keep accounts and engineers pretty far apart.

Or they might even work in your same building, just at a different company.

And so for us, and this is how Scoop and another company in Europe started, this is to alleviate any kind of stranger danger piece.

You build this out with bigger companies for coworkers.

And so the second part of this is we've developed a SaaS product.

We just launched that in November.

And it really just helps us minimize our costs.

It's called Emma, and it's the employee Mobility Management application.

And we can disguise the data so people aren't worried about privacy issues or anything like that.

But we don't want employee names.

We don't want employee phone numbers, we don't want employee emails, we don't want any of that.

We don't want their complete home addresses, like none of that specific info.

What we can, what we want either is the first three letters of their postal code or the full postal code, but just replace the last number with a 1 to disguise it, and we can find the clusters.

You know, you have 5,000 employees, we can find all in a matter of seconds.

We can geocode that and find the clusters of carpoolers in your organization for those 5,000 people.

And we can identify how many of those people could be carpooling together and saving between three and $5,000 a year.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's huge.

And especially for a company, you know, cnrl, Suncore, any of these big office towers downtown, you know, how many thousand people work in those buildings?

And then how many of those are paying for parking or how many are the companies paying for their parking?

Or how many.

You know, like you said, it's, it starts to become a bigger challenge than just carpooling because, you know, right now we're post Covid, sure, but we've also gotten pretty used to working from home.

And I think a lot of companies are like, hey, you know, like, obviously we're working from home.

We like this, but it's not easy for everyone.

Not everyone is a, is great at working from home.

And they're trying to get, you know, even if it's just back to the office for two to three days a week, companies are trying to get people to come back to the office.

But, you know, it's like they've given them this work from home thing and made it work.

And people are reluctant.

And so now if you're asking them to come back to the office, plus now you're gonna have to pay for parking, plus you have to pay this gas fees and get a vehicle.

It's a lot to ask of these people.

And they're fighting back.

They are.

And so, yeah, so the genie's sort of out of the bottle on that.

And what we found, you know, there's different groups.

So for, let's say oil and gas companies, it's, it's paramount to have your creative people together.

There's, you know, senior l saw that in the data right out of the gate.

So, you know, they, they push people back to five days a week, I think in like April of 2021, you know, when, when Sort of COVID released.

They like, get back to the office.

Everybody has to wear a mask.

And lots of oil and gas companies are five days a week.

When you look at, we'll call it more sort of liberal, flexible organizations, accounting firms, legal firms that I've talked to, they have struggled to try and get their people back.

And.

And absolutely big hand in the face saying, I don't like transit.

It's not safe or safe enough or clean enough.

I met one, one individual.

He has what he calls bus pants.

And I'm like, the hell are bus pants?

And he literally wears them on the bus and he gets to work and then he changes out of the bus pants into good pants because he doesn't want to get stuff on.

On his other pants.

And I was like, wow, wow.

And, yeah, they've.

They've struggled.

I think the city of Calgary's pushed their people back to four days a week.

There was a lot of obviously pushback to that.

And it's like, yeah, you're not paying my parking.

Parking expensive.

Transit's inconvenient.

Transit, I don't feel safe on or clean.

That's a lot of pushback.

So to be able to bring a new solution to the table that says, hey, we can get you to work for a lot less than the solo cost.

You know, up to 60% cheaper than your solo cost.

Plus in some cases, your employer might cover part of that cost to get you back to the office because, you know, the productivity level is so much better for the company.

And then there's a whole bunch of, you know, cultural things where, yeah, you've now got an inch.

And we've interviewed those people that.

People that carpool together that work at the same company.

They end up talking about work and they've joked about it saying, you know, we should actually charge for our time when we're commuting home because we end up solving problems for the company in the car.

Yeah.

Like, we talk about some work stuff.

So you get those kind of collisions, which are interesting.

A lot of young people.

One accounting firm I talked to is recruiting people to come work for them.

Has become more difficult because a lot of young people don't drive.

Yeah.

And.

And they can't get to work efficiently enough with, you know, transit can't keep up.

You know, almost every North American city after World War I, to the exclusion of, let's say New York, Boston and San Francisco, which were originally walking cities.

Every other city in North America is an automobile city.

And we were.

We were built around the Automobile as it took off and our freeways and everything else.

And you know, the pop.

The, the.

And I've geeked out on this stuff too.

The population density of our North American Cities is about 1:6 the population density of Paris.

So Calgary has 1:6 the population density of paris.

We have 1 50th the transit coverage on LRT or metro compared to Paris.

Wow.

So trying to design our city and so we have 1/6 the people to pay for it and we have 1/50 the coverage of Paris for walking distance to get to a metro.

We can't use the same strategy to develop our city that way.

We are an automobile city.

We need to figure out how to increase mobility density.

And building a green line is one way of increasing mobility density.

It's also the most expensive.

And cost overruns, I'm pretty worried about those.

Our solution of mobility density has no infrastructure cost.

It's more of a behavioral change step change here.

And we want to be the carrot to do that, not the stick.

It's super interesting that it just happened June 4th in New York.

If you've ever, if this is part of the whole stable commuting piece is New York was going to put a toll of somewhere between $15 and $23 a day for vehicles to come into Manhattan.

Okay, so, so if it's a car, I think it was 15 bucks.

If it was a truck, a big truck, it was like $23.

They've been working on it for 10 years and everybody had supported it and it was about to be implemented.

And on June 4, it just got approved in like April.

And on June it was going to raise a billion dollars a year for New York's public transit system to increase, you know, to subsidize the repairs and everything else that's needed to enhance the public the transit system.

And because of the pushback from people, because that is a stick we see in Canada with like a carbon tax.

The governor of New York canceled that on June 4th and.

Wow.

And so because the governor wants to stay in power, obviously, of course.

And people don't like more taxes.

And so but if you, from the pure logic and engineer, if you ran all the numbers and the math, it is the right thing to do for, for society to do that, to increase.

But without an alternative like Corio commute for people to be able to carpool together efficiently and now you're, you're forcing people to jump all the way and have to take in inconvenient transit, people will revolt.

And so yeah.

That's why we have to find a solution between affordability and convenience that is practical and that's what we're trying to develop and launch here.

And what's encouraging is, you know, like I said, scoop, scoop got there, right?

Like they, they got the, you know, north of 10 million a year in revenue just before COVID punched in the face and they'd only gotten to three cities.

So the opportunity, and then that's circa 2019.

And like you said, everything's gotten more expensive from that time.

So our number one focus here is to help people with affordability.

But it's really cool that in some ways we're a clean tech company because we literally take cars off the road, reduce emissions and we also help build community and can have social impact.

In the social impact piece for me was a big surprise.

I mentioned when I first started this, it was out of anger.

It's now evolving to the other side of man.

We can do something super cool here that no one else can do.

And this area I call the gift of time.

Okay.

And this was after doing a bunch of customer discovery work.

We were at the Airdrie home show meeting people had a booth talking about what we're doing because I said those 9,500 people in Airdrie that work in Calgary are spending about $50 million a year of their after tax salary to get to work.

Okay.

Like that's huge.

That's the number they're all.

And, and if you've ever been on the Deerfoot and well, they're expanding the Deerfoot again right now.

If you've been on the Deerfoot, it's, it's brutal because there's so many people that solo drive.

So as we discovered that and talked to those people, talked to some students, I had no clue that if you live in Airdrie and you need to take public transit to get to UC as a student, it's two hours one way.

Wow.

Two hour commute.

So there's people either that are doing that and spending four hours a day on trains and connecting northeast and getting on a C train and getting another connection and get up to the university or they don't go to university because the other alternative is you need a car, right?

Yeah.

And so even for sait, even to get to SAIT is a two hour commute.

So when I saw part of that, I was like, we have a solution that can enable people to actually upskill go to university.

And then the ultimate one we came across, which really shocked me as well.

And Like I said, I lived in my oil and gas world and bubble and oil and gas people are extremely generous, united way and getting involved in different causes.

I was involved with the Tom Baker Cancer center for many years but I had no clue when I saw this new report out, what was it?

Ly chamber.

But it'll come to me in a second.

They talked about people that earn $60,000 a year or less are in.

You know the percentage of those people going to food banks is, is like crazy high.

Like they're, they're skipping meals to feed their kids and, and everything else.

Well, most of those people don't live in the core of the cities.

They live in the suburbs where they can afford their first house.

And when you look at the stats, there's over half a million single moms earning 60,000 a year or less.

The biggest dropouts in high school are kids from single parents.

And so there's a video I came across called Bus Stop Jobs.

It was produced in the U.S.

showing mom that gets, gets up at, what is it, 5am with her, with her like 7 year old little boy.

And she works at a bank.

But because her, the only way she can get to that bank is through transit.

Her son leaves with her at 5am he's dropped off at a school and hangs out with a janitor for an hour and a half before his bus is ready to go to school.

She commutes all day.

So what we found for example in Airdrie was there's the single mom that has to leave at 5:45 in the morning to get on the one bus that's an express bus to get, let's say downtown Calgary to get to her job.

And she could be an EA making you know, whatever, 70,000 a year.

She doesn't get home till like 6:45 at night.

Meanwhile there's 9,500 people on the road and a good chunk of those are going to downtown Calgary.

What's her kid doing at 5:45 in the morning?

If a neighbor could pick her up at 7am and give her a lift home and she could get what I call the gift of time.

She could gain somewhere between, you know, an hour to two hours a day of nurturing time with her kids or just time to sleep, you know, some extra sleep because she's exhausted.

The cost to subsidize that to get her down to her bus ticket price is about $3,000.

Sorry, it's about $2,000 a year.

Okay.

And that would give her back more than 300 hours a year of nurturing time with her child.

Wow.

$6 and whatever, 6.67 changes her life.

Right?

Uber doesn't do that.

A one way Uber to downtown Calgary is like 80 bucks during rush hour.

Yes.

So, yeah, that's coming back to it.

We don't play in the Uber field whatsoever.

We play in the field of, of truly helping people share the expense and, and lower their commuting costs materially.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, we are going to spend a little bit of time on this because I know we have a lot of people listening.

They're like, this sounds super, super interesting, but how does it work?

So walk me through how it works, Malcolm.

How do we.

Like obviously we talked about one of the biggest challenges that you face is the fact that we've done things one way for a long time.

And changing people's minds on that is tough.

Right.

Like I think, I think the hardest challenge in anything like this is going to be to convince the people who do drive daily and can afford, afford it or, or feel they can afford it even if they can't.

There's a lot of us like that who are like, you know what, I like to drive myself.

I want that freedom to make the choice to leave.

Exactly.

I think that's the hardest point in this.

But I think that it also makes a lot of sense.

And we are wasting so much time sitting in traffic, paying for parking.

Like we're just wasting a lot of time and money in the grand scheme of things.

And if we can reframe that to how much life could we be having back here?

How much, how much more enjoyment with our kids?

How much more time could we be productive if we are entrepreneurs looking for solutions for more time?

Because I know me and you, we're always looking for more time to get the work done that we need to be getting done.

And most of the time we're stealing it from the morning.

Yeah.

And so I'll answer the first piece which is like, so how does this work?

How does it work?

And, and then secondly, yeah, it's going to take more than just what we offer.

At the end of the day.

There's, there's other ways to enhance and motivate people to do this.

For example, I don't, I can't think of one in, in Calgary at all.

And, and I'm curious if you can think of one off the top of your head in Edmonton.

Do you have any HOV lanes?

Because I don't think nobody.

No, we don't.

No.

No.

So, so, so right there where people value their time that much and with an efficient carpool solution, and now you can get in an HOV lane.

So this is where, once again, that's not a big infrastructure cost, but that's where, you know, municipal or provincial governments can support.

What we're doing is implementing HOV liens, which are obviously, you know, almost every city in North America has them.

We just don't have them in Alberta right now.

So how it worked exactly is we batch match and this is how Scoop, you know, did their piece.

But so we will batch match you with other writers the evening before our commute.

So 8:30 at night is the cutoff where you can submit what you would like to do for commuting the next day.

Okay.

And so at 8:30 you get a response back saying, hey, and you can put yourself in as saying, I want to be a passenger.

I want to be a driver only.

Or I'm good to be either.

I don't care.

I just, I just want to save money.

Okay.

Yeah, but I, I'm going to be a passenger only if, if the network is big enough and stable.

So at 8:30, and this is what I'll call phase one of what we're doing, Kelly, is the choreographed carpooling.

Eventually we're going to integrate this with parking app companies so we can choreograph your tire commute.

But I'll explain that later.

The night before a commute, you can either set in just, just your request for the next day or you can set like on a Sunday, you could set your request for the week.

Like I, I commute Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

And the thing if you're, if you're a hybrid worker.

And so what we do, we have a cutoff at 8:30 at night.

And that's when we do a single batch match to find your morning commute and your afternoon commute.

And then at 3 o'clock the next day, we will reaffirm that return commute to make sure it's still valid.

And it's usually the commute home is where things get screwed up.

People have to stay late.

You got free Oilers tickets and you're not going home now, you know, what have you.

So you'd get a notice, let's say after you've put in your request to be a driver, you can be a driver, passenger, or either.

And so let's say you put in a request as a driver and you get matched at E30 saying, hey, Kelly, you're picking up Sarah tomorrow.

She lives, you know, 300 meters away.

From you.

You both work in the same building and you're going to, it's a 30 kilometer commute, so you're going to recover like $11.

Sarah pays 13.

Our app makes 2 bucks in that.

So, and so we handle connecting people, we handle the transaction for you within that so you don't have to negotiate anything around the fees or anything like that.

It's all made to be fair.

And we, we set that up.

So in that case, you're both saving about 40%.

And you know, you go to bed knowing that that's all set up.

Okay.

And so like I said, it's, and it's now the afternoon.

It's almost like you get a push message like your physio appointments coming up in two hours.

You know, just a reminder.

We will send you a reminder before 3:00 saying, hey, Kelly, you're set to give Sarah a ride home at 5.

Are you still good?

And you're like, yep, I'm good.

And so we'll reaffirm that, that situation.

If it's a no, then we will batch match Sarah with someone else at that time.

Okay.

Our symbol, the choreo symbol, we use that, that's the trooping symbol.

That's two green people and two blue people.

Driver, passenger.

And in that when you get matched on a Sunday night, you'll not only just get matched with Sarah, it'll have a little circle that says like 12.

Okay.

And what that means is Sarah was your best match, but there's 12 other people in your troop that live within a kilometer of your house, that work within 600 meters of your office.

That's your troop.

You can click on that and open up and see people that are in your community.

And what we found is, you know, 75% of the time, Sarah is probably your best match.

You also have your own favorites list.

So we will priority match people.

No one else needs to know who your favorites are.

That sort of favorites list is in there.

Those are a couple of the ways we do that.

Eventually, once we integrate with APIs, with parking apps that are there.

One example is like Park Champ in Calgary.

They're in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, expanding to Toronto.

They're doing well, even though they had to battle hard through Covid, we can now create what I call the choreographed commute.

So it'll now be like, hey, Kelly, at 8:30 on Sunday night, your match was Sarah.

You're going to recover $11 from Sarah.

Plus, because we're integrated with Bark Champ, we have reserved spot number 1, 2, 7 in the ampersand building.

400, like in your building.

We've got a reserved parking spot for you for $24 on the return trip.

Sarah and Dave are giving.

You're going to give.

Sarah and Dave are going to meet you.

This is the other part, this is not Uber is because we can't inconvenience the driver.

Sarah and Dave are going to meet you at your preferred meeting spot, which is, let's say the lobby of your building.

Okay.

Yeah.

You're not picking them up like an Uber picks up somebody.

They're coming to you, which is easy for them to walk and meet.

So you meet in the lobby of that or by the Tim Hortons in your, you know, you, you pick the preferred meeting spot.

And that's really where the journey starts on the way home.

And so on that return journey, you're going to recover $15 on the return journey.

So over the entire day you recover 26 bucks.

Okay.

Your parking was 24.

You've got all the other normal costs.

You're not making money.

This is all about cost recovery.

You're not a, you're not a choreo paid driver.

Yeah.

Like you're not an Uber driver.

Right.

So this is pure cost recovery.

And we make sure it's always below the CRA limit for cost recovery, which is about 62 cents a kilometer.

You're gonna recover probably around 30 cents a kilometer.

Okay.

So that's more the process.

And then of course, you drive home safety wise, which is massive for us, of course.

And that's why, you know, the stranger danger is, is, is much less obviously with coworkers.

But in our existing first MVP app, if you're female and you only want to drive with a female, you can specify that you'd never be matched with a male.

However, one of the really cool things we think is important is, I asked my wife about that, is if you start specifying female only, you collapse the size of the network and now you get something that's less reliable.

So what we want to do is create Trios.

So I was like, well, what if you went with two people in a car?

And my wife's like, well, that'd be fine.

I don't, I wouldn't find that weird at all.

And so trios allows the network to stay more stable.

It allows people to save 60%, not 40% and never any kind of weird one on one between a guy and a girl that, you know, Uber had all these same kind of concerns initially.

Right.

The key thing here is you're commuting with co workers and you're commuting with neighbors.

It's.

They're going to become your friends, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like you said about, like, the community building, like, how many of us even know our neighbors?

Right?

Like, think about that from like a standpoint.

If, if you now know 12, 15, 20 people from your community, you're going to be better off just frankly, for knowing that many more people who live right next to you.

Yeah.

Really tough to quantify all the social impact that has.

I've had friends, you know, that they ended up commuting and carpooling for their kids for sports.

Well, now they go, they go on vacations together now and stuff.

Like, they, they become the best of best friends.

Those are some of the, the outcomes that are, are really cool.

But, and, and so at some point, the stories that can come along with the impact we're having is really neat.

You don't do that with Uber, right?

It's like, oh, I had this amazing Uber ride and we, we, we became best friends.

We're gonna hang out now, right?

Yeah, like, it's, it's.

Well, it's very different from that perspective.

Yeah.

Well.

And, you know, I don't know about you, but being.

Making new friends as an adult feels almost like an impossible task sometimes.

Right?

Especially as families.

Right.

Especially when it's outside of work and you just want to meet new people.

Like, I see this as being an amazing opportunity to both put money back in your pocket and introduce you to people that you would have never met who could change your world.

Yep.

Yeah, we thought about, like, said not in the MVP right now, but sort of icebreaker questions or, or things that people like, you know, if they need that.

There's, yeah, there's.

That's the power of tech.

I mean, look at, you know, look at dating apps like Tinder, right?

They, they, they.

And, and I'm not saying we're anything like Tinder, but here's people that would never meet each other, but all sudden they seem comfortable meeting each other because there's the, the picture of them on the app, I guess.

And whatever information that's added, I personally don't use it, so I don't know the rest.

But TED talks, there's a really neat TED Talk which talked about both Tinder and Uber, which once.

Or not.

Not Tinder, sorry.

Airbnb.

So Airbnb and Uber, for example, like, like the stranger danger thing for Airbnb blows me away where it's like, yeah, I've got A spare room in my apartment.

And I'm going to rent that out to a complete stranger.

Yeah.

Who could kill me in my sleep.

Right.

Well, they found at Airbnb and Uber that as soon as someone has 10 rides, you know, the number, magic number is 10.

This trust leap is complete once someone sees that someone has done 10 rides or had 10 Airbnb bookings.

Just 10.

Right.

Yeah.

So those are some of these interesting social dynamics.

Back to your question of like, hey, I like riding alone.

I get it.

And so that's why when we were doing who's our ideal customer.

Okay.

It's.

It's not necessarily me.

Like, it's not a guy that's 52 that can afford the parking.

And you know, so it's not for execs of companies, per se.

Although I think it's kind of cool.

Once again, on a collision basis, when does an executive ever have time to spend time with a junior person at a company in a bit of a mentoring role?

Like we're.

And.

And if you did actually give a junior person a ride once in a while and have a junior person having one on one time with an executive, how super cool and valuable that could be, right?

Very cool.

But to the other point of that, we were looking at it going, and you have to be 18 + to use the app.

You have to be an adult.

We're not doing this nothing to do with kids stuff.

There's other people that do that.

But we thought our ideal customer profile was 18 to 40.

You know, they're tech savvy, they're interested in, you know, tech.

They, they've used Discord before Slack or something else.

And, and obviously my kids use whatever it is, Snapchat all the time.

Like they know where every one of their friends are at all times.

Pretty crazy.

That's right.

So what we found though, as we.

We did customer discovery work, particularly in Airdrie, we had women in age up to 55 that were super interested in what we're doing because they're budget conscious.

Like, they're like, I need to find ways to save money, period.

Yes.

Full stop.

Right.

And so it came back to the G.

And they didn't, most of them, like, almost all of them didn't bring up the fact that, you know, I was thinking, well, I need to go as a safety trio and what's the background checks, some of these things, because maybe someone's, you know, serial killer.

And.

And I'm like, they were really just super focused on I need to find ways to Save money.

And this could really help me out.

The serial killer one's kind of interesting because, like, we started.

If you're starting with neighbors and co workers, if, if, if your serial killer hasn't exposed themselves into your neighborhood or working environment, then I think you're okay.

I think there's a really.

But fair comment.

Go as a trio if you've got that.

But we've got all kinds of safety features built into.

You can, you can set, for example, before a ride starts, you can set a quick text message to a spouse or to.

To your mom or whoever else saying, hey, I just got in the car with Kelly.

Here's his license plate number.

Yeah, you can never hear from me again.

Yeah.

Please follow up.

This is where you start looking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so you have to think about things like what's cool about Scoop is, you know, Scoop got up to 15,000 rides a day and didn't have issues like that.

So once again, I'm not overly concerned about it, but we will design as as much safety as possible in, in the app.

Of course.

Yeah.

And so for the listeners, like, you know, essentially what Malcolm's saying is this model isn't necessarily reinventing the wheel.

Like there, There have been existing examples of this that were incredibly successful.

Covid was a tough situation for everybody.

But this, this isn't just could work.

It's going to work.

Like, this is amazing.

It has worked in other markets.

Northwest US.

Exactly.

And there's no reason it can't work in Canada.

It just never was brought to Canada.

So.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, obviously you're launching in Calgary, so that's super exciting.

At this point, it's actually launched.

It's live in Calgary and I'm, I'm very excited to see what's happening.

We're actually recording this on July 6th 16th, so we're a little ahead of launch in the recording, but by the time you're hearing this, it's out, it's happening.

What is the rollout plan like?

Obviously Edmonton could use something like this.

I'm sure Vancouver wouldn't complain and neither would Toronto.

You know, what's the plans for the future?

100%.

Yeah.

And so the business model we have is not pure B2C.

I say that for a couple reasons.

It's honestly not pure B2C because the marketing budget around that would be insane.

And, you know, dollars are important to us, obviously, in minimizing the.

The burn.

We're really a B2B2C rollout.

And what's Cool about.

So we, yes, we have to, we have to get a beachhead.

We have to get, you know, you know, we've got this pilot set for 2024 and doing that with sort of larger corporations.

Super excited to hopefully get something going with the University of Calgary, come to Edmonton with U of A, for example, like students, when it comes to the affordability issues on students is, you know, that's another level of pain that's out there.

So the rollout plan is that plus what's kind of cool about what we do is we can provide, get more people back to the office.

So the property managers we've talked to, you know, the Aspens, the Brookfields, the Colliers, the Oxfords out there, of course they want to see more butts and seats back in their office more days a week.

Yes, right.

And so if we get the formula right here in Calgary and are showing benefits to businesses, benefits to property managers, benefits obviously to employees, benefits to the city, we now have, you know, the mayor of Calgary endorsing us to the mayor of Toronto, to the mayor of Vancouver.

We have the guys at Aspen Properties or Oxford introducing us, those property managers introducing us to the property managers in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton.

And so we can leverage off of those pathways to spread.

And yeah, and what I think we found when we looked at some, what Scoop did, for example, they got some, you know, big anchor clients.

I mean, kudos to them.

But you know, the Amazons, the Microsofts, the world and all of a sudden it's like, well, if they're doing it, we're doing it kind of thing.

Yeah.

So that's, that's the way we see it.

We definitely want to get down to the US as well, where there's, you know, you know, it's 10 times, 14 times the market, a little bigger market.

But Toronto is a hot mess.

You know, the Ottawa transit system, they put in their new C train, LRT thing is not worked out.

Well, my brother lives there.

Yeah, there's, there's lots of places.

And of course, you know, the cost, the affordability costs of commuting in Vancouver versus Calgary is, is even more pain.

So that, that's really the, the rollout.

And then in each of those cities we'll essentially have like, you know, a CEO.

That's how Uber does it.

They essentially have like a regional or a city manager that's in charge of that market.

Right.

And so in Calgary we'll have the team built out to support, you know, essentially those regional managers or military wise, a forward operating base.

If you will that have their own P Ls that are in charge of, of building out those markets.

Yeah, okay.

No, this sounds awesome dude.

And I know there's a lot of executives listening right now probably from a Calgary office thinking this would be awesome for our company.

I can already see the benefits if we could integrate something like this with our company.

There might be like a compensation share package or something like that, which I think makes a lot of sense for this.

Especially if you have a large building or you're a large corporation, say 500 to 5,000 employees.

This makes a lot of sense.

Talk to me.

How do they get a hold of you?

What's the best way to get a hold of you to set up a meeting?

Yeah, absolutely.

I can give you phone number and email that.

Yeah, my, My cell is 403-354-3833.

Email is malcomgocorio.com M A L C O L M and yeah, happy to, happy to come down and explain what we can do for for corpse in particular.

There's a, there's a host of different benefits.

One of the neat synergies.

It's, it's not going to be out day one obviously Kelly.

There's so many, you know, given my background, oil and gas carbon credits as well because we have all the data that, that showed you know, you picked up Kelly in your Tesla or your, your F1 Ford Lightning, I guess you like trucks and she didn't drive her F150 gas guzzler.

And we have the data that you picked her up on this date.

You drove here during rush hour, it took this long.

We can calculate, you know, how much that how much emissions were avoided by literally taking per vehicle off the road during that time.

And so one of the cool things and we'll partner with someone on the carbon credit side of it in terms of, of developing that tech and integrating what we do because there's a bunch of folks working on that that are more experienced and smarter than me.

But where we want to partner with, let's say, you know, Cinerel or Synovus for example just to put some numbers around it is, you know, eventually we could sell those credits at a you know, fraction of the cost of what they would be paying in carbon credits for their emissions to make it a win win for them.

And as an example, I think Synovus is about 25 megatons a year is their scope one emissions.

If we eventually convert one out of 20 solo drivers to passenger we would generate in North America.

We would generate around 16 megatons of carbon credits each year.

Wow.

So we could help Synovus offset 60% of their carbon credits without an infrastructure investment to do so.

So that's why, you know, partnering with Synovus or Cinerel or some of the big companies in Calgary to start the pilots.

That's really the focus of fall 2024 is the pilots.

And then we can launch that to any size business outside of that.

It's really the focus for Calgary.

We're hoping to have 2,500 passengers on the application by call it September of 2025.

And then continuing to grow there and moving into other cities.

The ultimate market is massive.

There's 114 million solo commuters in North America and partnering with universities, partnering with corporations, partnering with municipalities.

Uber doesn't do this.

That's why people say, well Uber does this.

I'm like, Uber does not do this.

It's not there.

Uber was created initially to find a way to connect rich guys with limo drivers and then they went down market to as far as people would pay for that sort of enhanced taxi service.

Yeah.

We are specifically to and from work for rush hour or to and from school for rush hour commuters.

We.

We only do this twice a day.

Yeah, yeah.

So in like you're not competing against ride share.

What you're really competing against is public transit.

Public transit.

And.

And solo driving.

Solo driving is really what we're competing against.

Yeah, yeah.

Because.

But I still see this being better than public transit.

80% of the people are solo drivers.

That they've already voted.

Like I'm not here to crap on transit in any way.

They've already voted that transit is not their preferred method.

Transit is about 7 to 10% of how people get to work without sticks like New York charging more for road tolls.

The.

The only end.

And maybe over time we can talk a bit about that too.

I've got lots of opinions on it.

Carbon tax.

So the federal carbon tax, it's like us right now.

It's like boiling a frog.

Right?

Like it's such a slow low number that's creeping up.

The frog's never hopping out of the pot.

Okay.

If you need to.

If you need to make the frog hop out of the pot, the carbon tax number needs to be a lot bigger before someone's going to change the behavior.

I've also done the math.

Like for example, if you make 100 grand a year and you live in Airdrie and you work in downtown Calgary, the.

And you value that at $100 an hour.

And most people value their time at more than what they make.

But at $100 an hour, sorry, $100,000 a year salary means your, your free time to you is worth about $50 an hour.

Okay.

So when you look at the cost to drive to downtown Calgary, parking, everything included as a solo driver versus the, the real cost and the time cost of taking inconvenience, slow public transit, the break even point for choosing to take transit over parking and, and driving is $65 a day for parking.

Okay.

That's the break even point.

So at 25 a day, people will not change their behavior.

Yeah, yeah.

And so the carbon tax and downtown parking costs are.

And if the city of Calgary came out and said, hey, we're now making parking $65 a day downtown, the world would revolt and the city councils would be all replaced.

So, so that's the gap.

So that I get why there's a carbon tax.

It's, it's to try and push people to consume less.

But when the cost of it is so low, people really don't change.

You know, a small fraction of people are changing their behavior, not enough to make a real big difference.

So yeah, our approach is, and that's so we'd love to work with the federal government, love to work with provincial government, municipal governments, you know, HOV lanes.

Ooh, that saves me time.

My time's worth $50 an hour.

Cool.

Plus I can save time.

Plus I can see materials real savings by using the Choreo commute app.

Plus I go to bed at night knowing my entire commute is planned out for me.

I know where my parking spot is.

I know my parking costs.

I know exactly how much I'm going to recover from the passengers that I took to offset some of my costs.

I know all that before I go to bed.

That's worth something too.

Yeah.

This is amazing, Malcolm.

And I'm really, you know what I'm really looking forward to?

I'm looking forward to having this conversation with you again in like three years.

Yeah, because I think, I think at the end of that three years, Alberta, maybe even a lot of Canada is going to be a very different place once Choreo Commute is available.

And I, I've talked a bit about this before because people, the irony is not lost on me at all that, hey, you're an oil and gas guy for a long period of time now you're technically, like I said, you're, you're technically doing something that is lowering oil and gas Demand, like why would you ever do that?

Because a lot of people think we're somehow evil.

You know, we're all about profit and we just.

We're evil.

Yeah.

A lot of engineers, like I said, love to solve problems.

We don't want to hurt the earth, oil and gas.

You know, I've always said this before.

If you lower demand for the product, then they'll produce less of it.

That's the problem, is we're car crazy in the earth.

And I'll give you a couple other crazy numbers, and I'll ask you this question first.

Kelly, have you ever seen a going at a business sale at a car dealership?

Not once.

I've never seen it.

And I'm originally from Fredericton, New Brunswick, and I looked it up because my grandfather was a mechanic for Clark Chevrolet, which I knew is a very old dealership.

I just looked it up for a call.

Clark established that business in 1883.

Okay.

Wow.

And really.

And then they became a Chevy dealer, I think, in 1905.

They just sold the business to someone else here a couple years ago, but they were in business for 136 years.

Valentine Volvo in Calgary.

Been around decades, like I think 40 years or something like that.

So car business don't go to out of business.

And that's because from 1920 to 1980, there were.

The number of vehicles on the road grew to 400 million.

That's in the world.

Wow.

And from 19.

So 400 million.

It took 60 years to put 400 million vehicles on the road by 1980 to 2020, 2021.

There's now 1.4 billion vehicles on the road.

Okay.

So it took 60 years to put 400 on the road.

It took 40 years to put another billion on.

And we're supposed to hit 2 billion vehicles on the road by 2030.

Holy cow.

Okay.

So that's why car dealerships don't go out of business.

And we get back to all the things about.

So new car sales.

Yeah.

In 2023.

And we can jump on this topic if you like, because I'm an engineer and I love problems is.

And my brother's in the military and we talk a bit about obviously NATO commitments and, you know, Canada, we can't meet our 2% and all these types of things that the, the shortfall for right now for, for meeting our goal to NATO is about $13 billion a year.

We're supposed to be around 40, and we're.

We're shy of that, obviously around 27.

So we're 13 billion short.

And we can't come up with the money to pay for that.

However, we just spent $91 billion in Canada last year on new vehicles.

And between vehicles, new vehicles, old vehicles, repairs, maintenance, gas, we spent $300 billion last year.

We can't come up with 13 to meet our NATO commitment, but we can spend.

But, you know, we can help drive people there in our new cars to the front line.

So anyway, this is some of the craziness around.

You know, vehicles are the worst investment we can make other than buying a lotto ticket.

But when there's no alternative, we see it as a necessity.

It's a necessity that I get to work.

Right.

So it's a necessity that I can get to work conveniently and on time.

So I have no other choice but to solo drive right now.

And that's what we're trying to create, is give people a new choice that can materially help people save money.

Yeah, and so that's the emission savings, the dollar saving, $1.8 billion a year of solo spending costs in Calgary.

We convert one in 20 people, that's 90 billion.

Sorry, $90 million that would stay in the Calgary market.

That's $90 million to go towards mortgages, food, supporting local businesses, you name it.

The cumulative effects of this are insane.

And that's, that's why I call it the solo commuting fiasco.

At this point, anything that benefits Albertans and Canadians as a whole, dude, I am on board.

You know, like, I'm right there with all, all of our listeners.

Right.

It's not an easy time to be Canadian.

It really isn't.

It's more expensive than ever.

It's been more challenging to keep up with, build commitments than ever.

I get it.

I feel you guys.

And so, dude, I'm on board.

This is amazing.

And you know, it's an honor to be able to interview you ahead of this because I already know this is going to be huge.

And so thanks for your time today, Malcolm.

It was great chatting with you.

Thank you, Kelly.

Really appreciate the opportunity and this has been a lot of fun.

Thanks.

Until next time, this has been episode 210 of the Business Development podcast and we will catch you on the flip side.

This has been the business Development podcast with Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your business development specialists for more, we invite you to the website at www.capitalbd.ca.

see you next time on the Business Development podcast.