Garrett McCurrach: Envisioning the Future of Urban Logistics and Delivery

How does an autonomous underground logistics system revolutionize city delivery? What makes Pipedream’s approach fast, reliable, affordable, and remarkably emission-less? Join our live simulcast podcast of UrbanEBB, with Garrett McCurrach, CEO of Pipedream, and dive into the world of hyper-logistics.

Garrett shares his journey from mechanical engineering to developing an invisible network that could change the urban landscape. Discover how Pipedream makes deliveries seamless and efficient, transforming how we receive everything from food to daily essentials.

Don’t miss this opportunity to explore a future where city deliveries are streamlined and sustainable. Tune in for an eye-opening discussion on the next wave of urban innovation with your host, Rico Figliolini.

Timestamp:

0:00:00 – Introduction and welcome.
0:01:00 – Introduction to Pipedream as a startup.
0:01:20 – Garrett McCurrach’s entrepreneurial background and role as VP of Business Development at Martin Bionics
0:04:19 – Focus on logistics and the importance of access to delivery services.
0:06:33 – Introduction to the hub and spoke model used by Pipedream.
0:10:40 – The goal is to make delivery more efficient and cost-effective.
0:12:16 – Pipedream system working in Peachtree Corners.
0:15:40 – Challenges faced during the testing phase.
0:16:01 – How technology has evolved over the years.
0:17:52 – The evolution of Pipedream’s business over the past three years.
0:21:16 – Hiring individuals based on curiosity rather than age.
0:24:09 – Potential expansions into other industries and markets.
0:28:23 – Teaser about a new business collaboration with a test site for instant pickup in Peachtree Corners.
0:29:06 – Closing remarks

Podcast Transcript

Rico Figliolini 0:00:00

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb, a brand new podcast from Peachtree Corners Life magazine and from Southwest Gwinnett magazine, I have today a special guest with me, the CEO of Pipedream, Garrett McCurrach. Thank you, Garrett, for being with.

Garrett McCurrach 0:00:58

Absolutely. Super excited.

Rico Figliolini 0:01:00

Yeah, this is a good way for UrbanEbb to discover a bit more about what’s going on in our small cities here in Peachtree Corners. You’re a startup, actually, that’s been around for about three and a half years, and you’re based out of Oklahoma, if I got that correct.

Garrett McCurrach 0:01:15

Originally we were based out of Oklahoma City, and then I’ve moved to Austin in the last year.

Rico Figliolini 0:01:20

Oh, wow. Okay, cool. Great place, Austin, Texas. So you’ve been. You’re an entrepreneur. I’ve seen online a few things that some startups that you were involved with, you were a VP of business development at Martin Bionics. So you have a terrific entrepreneurial background, if you will, for a young person coming into this business, in a logistics business, actually, which is what pipe dream is about. Right? Hyper logistics, if you will. But tell us, before you dive into that, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background.

Garrett McCurrach 0:01:55

So I’m a mechanical engineer. That’s what I went to school for. And realized that there’s so many things just not on. Not just the engineering side, but on the business side that goes into changing how things are done. So after I got done with engineering school, I decided not to take a job right away, and I figured I needed to learn business, and so just started building apps to make rent and learned to code. Just started building things for small businesses, things that help them with their day to day and use that. Everything I learned from there, and

I was VP of Bizdev at modern bionics. I’ve always wanted to do prosthetics. It’s really what I went to engineering school for. And after that, just really kind of used that time to think about, okay, what is the one big thing that could spend the next decade of my life on something that is. I wanted to find something that was so important that even if I spend a decade on it and it doesn’t work, but something we learn helps someone else make it work, that’s ten years of my life well spent so around. And there’s not a lot of things that you can do that with. You have payment. Apps are great, but they’re not really changing the way we live. They’re not making people’s lives better. And logistics is just that thing that is so core to how we live. And it’s the thing that separates whether someone has access to something or not, just the cost of delivery. I don’t quite make enough to access some delivery things, but I can get medication delivered and groceries delivered. And if we all had access to that, if everyone had access to laundry and grocery and medication, and then even new product lines like tools and clothes and closed rental, if we can make delivery really cheap, we can just provide that access to more people. And that was just something that we were really passionate about and is going to take a lot of work over the next decade to get there and really locked into that industry as being the thing that we could really make an impact on.

Rico Figliolini 0:04:19

Interesting. I was listening to something on TikTok. You could get lost on there, right? So it was an interview with Bezo, and he was saying the reason he got into, what he got into was that he saw growth, e commerce, and he went out, he picked out categories, and he said the biggest category was books. A million books at any given time. Right? So you probably have seen the same video about. So, finding the right category, the right product. I can appreciate what you’re saying, because startups, people think, come out of the blue sometimes, and they go, they look at Shark tank and they think, wow, it’s like they’re going to be millionaires within a year. They don’t understand the suffering and the blood, sweat and tears that entrepreneurs have to go through. And years, like you said, it could be a decade, you might end up somewhere else, right? Because Instagram started as one thing, ended up as something else. Twitter started as a service to find the right podcast, ended up what it was. So different companies evolve. And I look at yours and I’ve done some work on it, and I just see, even if I don’t think about the tunnel part, everyone likes a tunnel. Elon Musk loves tunnels, I guess. But I could see where this can go, especially when you talk about delivery at restaurants or within certain areas where you have a point, because I think one of your interviews, and we’ll get into that talked about this is not going from just one single point to another point. This is going from a hub property to another hub. Because this way you have a place like Wendy’s, which you guys are working with, the point of delivery right outside the store, but also being part of this, where it’s going through a system, heading into a campus of office buildings where someone doesn’t have to leave their office building because that lunch, that whatever starts out as lunch, but I could see it being products and other things being delivered within that. So tell us, I’m talking too much, but tell us a bit about how that works exactly and where you are with.

Garrett McCurrach 0:06:33

So, you know, when you get something delivered today, we’ll use food as an example. I think food is really interesting because what Amazon did with back then, it know, three to five day delivery, they saw books as this really interesting way to start that industry because a bookstore can’t contain all the books in the world. And so you really need this big catalog of a bunch of books that you can send to people. And that was the perfect, they call it a beachhead for Amazon. And then they expanded into other categories. And then we see food as kind of being that same thing where there’s so much customer demand for having food delivered and that customer demand is already there. It doesn’t have to be created. We all love getting food delivered, and we all hate how expensive it is and how much it just seems to just add up and add up and add up as you’re adding things. And then by the time you get to your delivery, you’re like, oh, how did it get to be $50 to get my $10 cheeseburger delivered? And so it’s a great beach ad for us. So I’ll use that example. But you have a doordash driver who is dispatched. They go to a restaurant and there is 15 to 20 other orders sitting on a shelf. And they go through the orders, they grab the one that they’re going to deliver, they go all the way to your house, they drop it off, and then they go out to another restaurant that is another three, 4 miles away, pick up one other order, drive it to another house. And if you think about if we did nationwide delivery that way, delivery would be impossible. There’s no way know going back to thinking about Amazon, if you had one delivery driver go and pick up a book, travel across the country and drop it off with me, that would be impossible. And so we use this hub and spoke model where there’s a delivery driver who goes to a warehouse, picks up all the books that are being delivered that day. They drive to a hub, they drop it off, all those books disperse out to the hub that’s nearest to me, and a delivery driver goes and picks up all the books that need to be delivered that day. And then they go and they do what is called the milk run and drop it off at a bunch of different houses. And so it’s really interesting. Logistics has always kind of mirrored each other on the different scales. So global logistics has always worked how national logistics has worked, and national logistics has always worked the same way that last mile works, and they all kind of use the same truths, and the hub and spoke model being kind of that main one, but with instant delivery, like doordash and Uber eats, they’ve not followed that model. And it’s because that infrastructure doesn’t exist. And so what Pipedream is doing is creating that hub and spoke model for within cities so that they can take advantage of the same efficiencies of being able to deliver things from hub to hub while not foregoing their fast delivery time. So you need a hub and spoke model that is very fast. You can still get things delivered in under 15 minutes, but with more efficiency. Instead of. I think our children will look at food delivery today and they’ll see six pack of chicken nuggets driving in a 2000 pound car be like, that’s kind of funny that we’re using a car that huge to deliver something so small and just make everything more efficient. I think sometimes people look at us and other autonomous modalities as well and say, you’re replacing delivery drivers. And I think for a really long time, over the next decade at least, it’s just going to make them more efficient. So instead of delivering one delivery at a time, they can deliver five, six, seven deliveries at a time. And so that’s really for us, is we just want to make that delivery to you more efficient. We want to keep it on the same time schedule. We still want it dropped off at your door, but we want to make that cart. When you get to order your delivery, we want you to go, oh no, that’s really cheap. We’ll do that all the time because it’s just as cheap as going to get the food myself.

Rico Figliolini 0:10:40

Yeah, I can see that. I mean, I have a family of five in the house, right? So three of them, because of COVID and stuff, they’re all living home. And we have a Doordash subscription, right? Because otherwise too expensive if you just do it off one at a time. And I love the example that someone gave is like, the lunch you order. If it’s just for one person, you’re paying double that cost because of delivery. Now, if you’re doing five people, it’s a little different, maybe, and you also have a subscription, but it is what it is. There’s different services that also want to get into this space, right? You have drone deliveries, you have other things going on. Robotics delivery, like the autonomous mini vehicle that comes up. And I’ve seen experimented on college campuses. And of course, you leave people that have too much time on their hands, they’ll pick up that robot and they’ll put it somewhere else, maybe, or other things that can happen to that. But you’re talking about closed end system food coming from one place to another in a closed system until it gets to where it’s going. During COVID we all had issues about deliveries and problems like that. This is one reason why there are safety seals on lunch bags and items had to be done, because people are people sometimes, and things could go badly fast. The US is a closed end system. Going from like, Wendy’s or a hub, let’s say there going straight to, let’s say. I think the way this is being an experiment to going right to curiosity lab in the city of peace for corners. Right about a mile away, I think, or so.

Garrett McCurrach 0:12:16

Yeah, about a. Yeah.

Rico Figliolini 0:12:18

And you guys are all done with that’s at work now, I believe.

Garrett McCurrach 0:12:21

Yes, sir. Yeah, it’s been working for a couple of months. We’ve been working on it.

Rico Figliolini 0:12:25

Okay, so you’ve learned a lot in this process. This is the first city that you’ve done like this, I think.

Garrett McCurrach 0:12:30

Oh, yeah, we’ve learned a ton. And that was the goal. We have fallen in love with Petrie corners. It’s such an amazing city filled with just really kind people. And what I love about Petrie corners is, and the reason that we picked it was, one, it’s a tech forward city. The region that we’re doing the system in has a lot of other things as well. You have the self driving cars. You have some of those delivery. Those small delivery sidewalk robots.

Rico Figliolini 0:13:02

Right.

Garrett McCurrach 0:13:03

And that’s one and then two. It’s a really interesting environment as well. You drive around petro corners all the time, as I have too. It gets a little hilly and it’s a little windy and you all have these big, giant, gorgeous trees. And the first time I went, I was like, man, I don’t know how on earth do they grow trees that big and that green? And it’s because it rains ton. And so it’s a great water environment too, to make sure that we have the procedures and the reliability to handle extreme water conditions, the windy roads, the soil conditions. It was just a really good testing ground for us to kind of learn the hard way. We could have done a flat, very dry climate and it would have been really easy, but we wanted to really pressure test the system.

Rico Figliolini 0:13:55

Yeah, I don’t blame you see that. Because one of the thoughts that came across me was, it’s underground. How is it going to be sealed? Is it going to be healthy, if you will, safe that way? So a bunch of questions in my mind would come up like that. And also, like you said, the city has helped you with red tape and stuff as far as permitting because God knows utilities and everything else that’s involved when you’re digging into ground, because there’s been times where people have cut the power lines or cut a line they shouldn’t be cutting. So I’m sure you learned a lot. By doing that here with that and going across, because you had to go across the intersection on the street to be able to cut it. So you’re cutting through sidewalks, through land, through property. Most of it, I think right of way maybe, but still to cutting through permissions, you have to get a lot of challenges, right?

Garrett McCurrach 0:14:50

Oh, yeah, definitely. The city has been really great to work with, but I think the people, especially who work on that road and live on the road have been really patient with us too, which we really appreciate and hopefully have done right by them. But they were kind of there with us in the challenges that we faced and we’ll always appreciate that. And I think anyone who drives along that we were able to go under all roads, which is just a benefit we get from not doing this in the 60s, take advantage of the utility technology, but still by nature of it being our first one, there are definitely some challenges and really appreciate the people at Petrie corners for being patient with us through that. And I just testament to your city.

Rico Figliolini 0:15:40

So in the three years that you’ve been doing this, over three years, I guess, has the business evolved a little bit from what you started out as? How have you seen a change from day one to, let’s say, where you are now?

Garrett McCurrach 0:15:53

Great question. I wouldn’t say that it’s changed that much. We try to stay really mission focused.

Rico Figliolini 0:16:00

Right.

Garrett McCurrach 0:16:01

Our goal is to decrease the cost of delivery and expand the access that people have to getting things delivered and expanding the amount of things that can be delivered. And so that’s really been the focus. And we kind of make sure that we never fall in love with any technology or anything that we build. We really want to fall in love with the problem and solve that problem. That being said, the tech has changed a little bit. It has always been pipe based, but we’ve changed how it interacts with the pipe. And a lot of it has been the first time, the very first prototype we built was it worked and it went through, but there were a lot of smaller details that didn’t exist that exist today. So stuff like you were saying, like food safety, we want to make sure that we have higher food safety standards than even like, a doordash driver or any other way that food, we get to someone. So we make sure that the food is sealed. It is sealed within a container, and then that container is put into the robot, which then seals the container, and then the pipe that that is being sealed in is kept really clean and is sealed off from the outside world. So a lot of things like that, little details, customer experience, things have definitely evolved. I don’t know if anything has changed that dramatically. We have expanded. There were product lines that we didn’t know about when we started. We knew that they existed somewhere out there. But just by talking to customers, just understanding, okay, what are the biggest pain points? There’s some, like instant pickup and then some other products that we’re working on that take advantage of the same core system. I can solve some of those smaller pain points for customers.

Rico Figliolini 0:17:52

I can see the expansion of what. I can see college campuses, new college campuses, or even maybe the existing college campuses where you have hubs and pickup points. I can see apartment buildings taking. I could see townhome communities at 300 units. I can see active living communities that are where some of them, let’s say, in Florida right now, they have dumb waiters in the garage because they need to get the stuff upstairs, I guess. But I can see something like this in those communities doing really well if you’re working with the developer directly to build it right into rather than doing it later. So making deals with communities, with developers like that, I can even see the logistics aspect of it where this may morph and evolve into different things, like you’re doing with Wendy’s, though. But even Amazon deliveries, because they even have hub stations where there might be 20 bins with combo locks and stuff where they deliver to forget what they’re called. But it doesn’t have to be just food, right? It could be anything, really. It could be almost anything. There’s probably too many things it could be, but yeah, I can see that happening that way. Do you have those types of sessions with your team as you’re going through this, looking into the future to see what else there is out there, that not only the product that you’re developing currently today, but looking forward to say, okay, how can this evolve if we need to in a year or two? Because your mission is to reduce the cost of delivery, to work logistics in the right way so it’s not stuck in just a product like you said. Do you do that? Do you do that brainstorming?

Garrett McCurrach 0:19:48

Oh yeah. We have a long list of products that we think would be really useful, but we don’t know anything. Right. I think any company within our four walls, we could come up with anything and it may or may not be useful. And I think that is sometimes the frustration with startups is you make this thing, it’s like, okay, but who’s that for? I know that you love it, but I don’t think it’s actually going to be useful to anyone else. And so before we even ever start to make anything, we always make sure that we have at least two customers who are putting money down to buy it. And so a lot of our work with instant pickup started that way. Some other product lines, we always make sure that both it is something, it is a product that has a lot of pull from the industry. And then two, we make sure that we have partners who can help us develop it, people who really want it, and will help us find the pitfalls that otherwise we would have found down the road. But they just know their industry so much better than we could ever research our way into. And they know the problems and they know the landmines to watch out for. And so we always make sure that we have the list, but we’re validating the list with real customers, and I think it’s just a much better way. It saves you from accidentally making something that just ends up in the landfill of useless products.

Rico Figliolini 0:21:16

Yeah, totally. You don’t know what you don’t know. So having expertise of that industry, it makes sense. And also, if they’re able to even help you pre fund the development of what you’re doing, that’s even better, having a contract with them. So Wendy’s is one restaurant. Obviously you’d probably be looking at other places. I would think as see I think at one point there was something I read or something I heard where you talked about hiring experts and they said they couldn’t do it and then you decided, you know what, let’s get some young engineers to figure it out. I think that was you and one of your interviews. But do you find young people, younger people being able to brainstorm these things better to a degree because they don’t have a bias already set?

Garrett McCurrach 0:22:07

I think I know what you’re talking about. I think we try to younger me maybe, said young people as a proxy but I really don’t think it’s an age thing. You’re going to find people with biases who are 1617. You’re going to find the most curious people at 70. And I think it’s really the curiosity and it’s people who look at the problem instead of the solution and say that’s a problem worth solving. So we’re going to figure out a way to do it rather than looking at something. And you know, I think people who lack curiosity look at a problem, they fall into two buckets. They go, well that’s not really a problem worth know. Do we really need things delivered faster? Do we need it delivered cheaper? I think status quo is probably fine. A lot of people said that with Amazon they’re like things are getting delivered in a week, two weeks, really need it faster. That’s totally fine for me. I can go down to the store and buy the thing that I need and then it changed our world. That’s one bucket people fall into is like do we even need it? The second one is like okay, that’s really cool. But if it was possible someone would have already done it. And that’s kind of the second lack of curiosity trap that people fall into. And once you get stuck there it’s really hard to get out. We just really look for people who have a high degree of curiosity and you can usually find those people who, we usually look for people who have a big portfolio of just personal projects, just little things that they’ve done themselves. And the best electrical engineer we’ve ever hired was in his seventy? S and he was more curious and interested in things than any of us. So I don’t think it’s really an age thing. I think sometimes younger people have more time to be curious. Two year old, they definitely understand that. But it’s not really about age. It’s more we’re looking for that curiosity if anything, we tend to look a little older. That balance of curiosity plus the wisdom of being there is like a killer combo that you can’t find anywhere else.

Rico Figliolini 0:24:09

Fair enough. Thinking about the last three years, because we’ve all lived through Covid. The future. When I think of your system and stuff, and I think of the way we’ve changed after Covid, I say after still, people are still masking up in Europe a lot more now than they used to, actually. So it’s not like it’s gone. And there may be variations of it, but I see where people, I mean, even we. I do shopping, but I’ll use Instacart. Sometimes I’ll use doordash or grubhub or something. Some ordering in versus going out to get it, let’s say. And part of that, I think it’s just that we were trained to some degree. Now people are going out. I mean, we go to restaurants still and stuff. But do you see the future? To some degree, we may end up in another pandemic. We may end up in other things that a system like this, or logistics of this sort, where it’s bringing the cost down of delivery and touchless delivery to a degree. Right. Because that’s what this is. It’s touchless delivery. Right. I mean, granted, someone’s touching it on one end, but they’re not coming to you delivering it right to you. You’re getting a robot or an autonomous vehicle delivering it to you. Do you see your company taking advantage of that as well? Just even thinking about it? Even hospital systems could probably use a similar function where you’re delivering to hubs and stuff from a central pharmacy place or pharmacy supply place within a hub like that. Do you see yourself working into other industries, other markets that way as well?

Garrett McCurrach 0:25:48

Oh, yeah. We really see ourselves as kind of this fiber optic network. When you hop on the Internet, you don’t really know. I don’t know how my face is getting to your face by way of a whole bunch of crazy infrastructure, a bunch of different methods. I’m over wifi, and then it goes into fiber optic, then goes to a server, and then more fiber, and then up into your home. And it’s just crazy. There’s no way to tell. We’re just getting Internet. And I think we think about the same way. We just want to be part of the infrastructure that makes things faster, but it’s going to take a lot of different things, and I think that’s just an inevitable. Regardless of COVID I think people are going to look back at grocery stores. I think our grandkids are going to look at grocery stores and they’re going to be like, they used to make you work in the warehouse to get your own thing. And it’s like, yeah, I guess that kind of is what it is we’re going through and doing pick and pack ourselves, and they’re going to use their brain computer to order a carrot, and it’ll be delivered or whatever they have. But I think we should want to go to things in public, and I think that is super important. And coffee shops and restaurants, they’re amazing. It’s great to be around people and be around people in community, and restaurants are really this community asset, just like a park is. But I think you should want to go to be in community, you shouldn’t have to go because it’s the only way that you can access things. And what we want to do is make it to where you go if you want to, but you don’t have to go to these places to make your daily life work. And oftentimes, the way our cities are set up now, if you can’t get around, if you don’t have a car, if you have trouble moving, the city is not set up to get you the things that you need. And so that’s really, we need to get to a place where, regardless of where you are or who you are, you can get the things that you need. And then going out in public and being part of the community is something that you can do if you want and you have the ability to, but you don’t have to in order to just survive.

Rico Figliolini 0:27:56

Makes a lot of sense. Europe is different than here. I mean, you’re right. We’re a car society. So this is why evs and autonomous vehicles want to make it easier for us. This way we can multitask, multi screen, and do everything we want in the moment. So I can appreciate all that. Do you want to share anything else that maybe we’ve missed that I didn’t touch upon yet or that we haven’t touched upon?

Garrett McCurrach 0:28:23

I can’t think of anything. Yeah, you have a big listenership in one of our favorite cities, Peachtree Corners. And so I just want to say another thank you to anyone who lives there. We have really fallen in love with your city, and we’ll always look for ways to thank you for being location number one. There is a business that we are working with that we were actually going out to look at a test site for. I don’t think it’s not public yet, but to put an instant pickup system in Peachtree Corners just because we want to keep giving back to you all and make sure we do things there.

Rico Figliolini 0:29:06

Is it a food place?

Garrett McCurrach 0:29:09

Yeah, there’s probably about as much as we can say right now. There’s probably too much. But just because we love Peachtree Corners, I wanted to give you guys the little hint.

Rico Figliolini 0:29:21

Fair enough. I won’t push it any more than that. We’ve been speaking to Garrett, CEO of Piped Dream. Where can people find out more information about piped dream?

Garrett McCurrach 0:29:31

Yeah, like you said, we have a TikTok. It’s Garrett underscore Scott. It’s a great place if you want to just keep up with videos, and then our website is a great place to go for more information. So we have Priestreamlabs Co. And then we have a YouTube labs for other videos.

Rico Figliolini 0:29:50

Excellent. So we’ve learned a little bit more about how UrbanEbb cities are looking into hyperlocal delivery here with Garrett and how his company is moving forward to doing this in the city of Peachtree Corners. A smart city. It’s forward looking city that we are. Lots of opportunities for this type of company to come in and God knows I think we’ve seen forget how many countries we represent actually here now that have companies and startups in representation here in the city of Peachtree Corners from all over the world, from Switzerland to other cities, other countries. But thank you, Garrett. Appreciate you being with me. Hang in there for a second while I close this out. Thank you, everyone, for listening to us again. If you want to find out more about Pipedream, I’ll have links in the show notes, so check that out. There’ll be a video link as well, I think, of what the system looks like through this, and we might be able to put this within our interview on the video or video podcast version. So you might be seeing it during this time. But thank you again for being with us.