Introducing Bryce Bennett, Co-founder and CEO of Solo
Sara:
I'm Sara Lindquist from FUSE. We're an early-stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest, and just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more: more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability - more of everything. And we aim to deliver. Join me as I introduce each of our portfolio companies in the FUSE family to date.
Today, you'll be hearing from Bryce Bennett, Co-founder and CEO of Solo. Join us as Bryce discusses his prior experience at Uber and Convoy, how it led to building Solo, and why their product will be key in empowering the future of the gig workforce.
Let's get started!
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Sara:
Bryce, thank you for being here today.
Bryce:
Thanks so much for having me, Sara.
Sara:
Well, it's awesome to be with you as always, and we appreciate you taking the time to share a bit about your story.
Bryce:
Well, I appreciate that. It's super exciting to share more about what the team and my co-founder and I, Keith, are working on here at Solo.
Sara:
So, to get things started, why don't you share a quick overview of what Solo is and how it aims to serve customers.
Bryce:
Solo is a software platform for app-based gig workers to optimize time, guarantee income, and provide tools to manage where, when, and what jobs to work. We're setting out to really rethink the gig economy space with a worker-first mentality, and we do this by ingesting actual work history and data from workers across multiple platforms to provide city-level pay and performance benchmarks including hour-by-hour pay predictions and guarantees. We're confident enough in what we predict for these workers now that we actually guarantee those dynamic income floors on an hour-by-hour and day-by-day, company-by-company basis.
Bryce:
We're really tackling the most pressing issue that we hear about from gig workers, which is the lack of financial security. There's 60 million people that actually engage in some sort of frontline gig work every single year, and we're hoping that with this kind of tool, with this data and information, we can help them ultimately bring a lot more stability and certainty to their life as well as help them manage their entire business, and as we get a little further along here.
Today we're focused on the income and expenses and tax side of things, but we believe more and more frontline workers are embracing flexibility, and Solo's going to be the platform putting them in the driver's seat while creating a transparent marketplace for their time.
Sara:
Awesome. Bryce, when did you first have the light bulb moment where you thought, okay, I got to go build this? Tell us a little bit about that.
Bryce:
It really started 10 years ago. My co-founder and I were both early at Uber and specifically here in Seattle, not San Francisco. My job in the very beginning was to work out of a little basement office in Capitol Hill and literally open the doors every day to talk, work with, support, onboard new drivers for the Uber platform, which was just ride-sharing at the time. Keith and I's experience really started face-to-face, working directly with workers and, over time, progressed into more of a regulatory role in the policy making side. We got to know the people that were attempting to lend more resources to this new kind of work.
But, overall, we just always felt that workers were kind of getting left behind either by the companies or by policy makers or things just weren't moving fast enough. About two years ago, actually - when we were working at Convoy, working directly with truckers, a similar kind of system - we said, hey, we got to do something about this. We got to set out and ultimately step in the middle here between these different parties and offer a service that really is made for the gig worker and really made to solve the problems they face every day.
Sara:
It totally makes sense. My next question is about your team and why you are so uniquely situated to do this. Obviously, given your experience at Uber and Convoy, a lot of those pieces make sense, but what else would you say is the secret sauce in your team that really positions you as the people to go do this and tackle this problem?
Bryce:
I think, for us, we not only have lived it within the companies, we've worked with the policy makers. Obviously, we spent a lot of time directly with the workers, but on top of that, it is, in a lot of ways, a marketplace. Our experience at Uber and Convoy, more on the logistics side of marketplaces, but in this case, we're thinking a lot about people's time and how they think about developing a more transparent market rate and choosing the best job, and ultimately bringing some of those really core, efficient marketplace kind of characteristics to part of the labor force that hasn't had that before. We really spent a lot of time over the last 10 years, not only getting to know the worker, the end user in our case, but also how really efficient and effective and large-scale marketplaces work best. We think a combination of those experiences puts us in the best position to build a great product for these workers.
Sara:
What's one word you think best describes your team culture?
Bryce:
This is a tough one because we have a set of about eight or nine different words and values that we try to live up to. I think, though, the most pertinent or all-encompassing is "curious". We try to strive to be pretty empathetic, but humble and principled in our problem solving. When we are setting out to solve problems for workers from a variety of different backgrounds and thinking about how we make a real impact in their day-to-day lives, we try to make sure that we don't over-bias on our own viewpoints, and that we use the feedback from workers directly, and we listen to the problems without over-indexing on what we think might be the solution. We try to really bring curiosity and embrace the reality that when being curious, sometimes you have to work through really hard problems to ultimately get to the end goal. I think that's something our team does really well and embraces even at a small stage of about eight people right now, but we really lean into that.
Sara:
Oh, I love that, Bryce. It actually segues really well into the next question I was going to ask you, which is about the startup journey at large. I mean, this certainly is not your first rodeo. You've experienced it at Uber and at Convoy, and it's hard work, and it comes with a particular set of challenges. I'm curious, in the midst of all that, what keeps you going, perhaps when there are moments where others would call it quits, what really keeps you on the track?
Bryce:
It's a tough journey. I think it's talked about a lot, but going through it is a whole other thing. Uber and Convoy were amazing experiences in terms of setting up the kind of framework for working through ambiguity, things moving very quickly, having to take a lot of ownership. I think what gets me through it is a couple things. One, I think having a strong co-founder that you trust, that you've worked with before, that you have that relationship with is really critical because it gives you that sounding board, that bit of an extra data point when you're questioning things or “are we on the right path?”, to bounce things off of each other and be like, okay, are we moving down the right direction here or do we need to rethink things? I think that's a big part of it.
Then the second part is we really, truly do believe in the mission. For us, it's personal in a lot of ways in terms of how we want to help workers in this space become more empowered, be able to really embrace the flexibility that the gig economy can offer people, but doing so in a way that doesn't bring all the anxiety and the uncertainty and the feelings of distrust they have towards companies and how the whole system works. What gets us excited is we believe we're building a new and third way of working really, one that embraces the flexibility that frontline workers want, but also empowers them with the stability and the tools and the data that, up until now, they just haven't had.
Sara:
Well, kudos to you for forging ahead and rallying this awesome team around you to solve a big problem. We're certainly grateful to be along for the ride and help support in any way. In closing here, one final question for you: what is the best way that listeners can get involved or help? What do you need more of right now?
Bryce:
Well, we're in the Seattle area, and so our office is right up here, actually in Capitol Hill. We're looking continuously for more people to join the group and the team and help us accomplish our mission. We're hiring in a couple different roles right now on the marketing side, but also on the technical and engineering side. We hope that people get excited by this mission and being able to impact real people's lives with data and tech that really, we believe, is going to make a big difference, not just in the United States, but potentially across the world someday is exciting for folks. If you're interested, please reach out to us. I'm at bryce@worksolo.com or we're also available at worksolo.com, our website.
Sara:
Awesome. Bryce, thank you so much. It was so great having you here.
Bryce:
Thanks, Sara. I appreciate it.
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Sara:
If you're interested in getting involved with Bryce and the Solo team on their mission to empower the gig workforce, be sure to check out their website or reach out directly. Otherwise, be sure to check out our next interview on the FUSE blog page. Thanks for listening!