’Just build things’

Young founder of US $5B trucking company urges Waterloo students to get their hands dirty. Alex Rodrigues and Brandon Moak, the 20-something founders of an autonomous trucking company now valued at approximately US $5 billion, don't have to look far for a reminder of their roots. Hanging inside the front doors of their San Francisco office, a photograph shows a teenaged Rodrigues giving Feridun Hamdullahpur, then president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo, a ride around the Ring Road in a self-driving golf cart. It was 2015. Rodrigues and Moak, his undergraduate classmate in the mechatronics engineering program, had built the cart - the first autonomous vehicle in Canada - in his parents' garage. "It's the first thing you see once you get in our office - where it all began," Moak said. Just six years after that photo was taken, Moak and Rodrigues have built newly named  Embark Technology Inc.