Halbardier, who followed up her education at Dallas’s prestigious Hockaday School with an undergraduate degree from Princeton and an MBA from New York University, offered a lengthy résumé of work in the travel and hospitality sectors.
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Together, he says, they decided to “create a third player in the mobility space in the U.S.” Alto raised $14.5 million in seed funding, the bulk of which came from Road Ventures, and Coleman approached Halbardier, a friend who worked at a rival consulting firm in Dallas, to see if she might be interested in signing on. In 2018, when he came up with the idea for Alto, he was working on transportation projects with Road Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Geneva. Upon graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, in 2007, he spent more than a decade as a consultant at the global management firm McKinsey. The trade-offs are that customers wait a little longer for their rides and pay more for them-about double the economy “UberX” rate and comparable to the higher-end “Uber Select” price.Ĭoleman looks the part of a tech start-up founder-tall, white, with an affinity for wearing company T-shirts. It also offers amenities such as curated playlists and a custom scent that the company developed for its vehicles. Though the service is similar to the other apps, the company emphasizes safety and customer service, in part by carefully screening its drivers. Instead of relying on gig workers who drive their own vehicles and get paid by the ride, Alto directly employs its drivers, pays them a decent wage (starting at $13 an hour), offers benefits such as health insurance, and provides the Buick Enclave SUV that picks up each passenger.
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When Uber began selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange, in May, its disclosures included a warning to potential investors that the company “may not achieve profitability.”Ĭompared to its rivals, Alto’s business model is based on slower growth, higher prices, early profitability, and a gentler relationship with its employees and customers. (At the time of its IPO, Uber was losing an average of 58 cents on each ride.) In the first three quarters of 2019, Uber posted total losses of more than $7 billion, while Lyft shed more than $2.2 billion. Instead, the two tech darlings have burned through heaps of investor cash, using venture capital backing to keep the price of each trip artificially low. Even as ride hailing has revolutionized urban transportation, neither Uber nor Lyft has ever come close to turning a profit. Profitability would certainly distinguish Alto from the competition. Coleman and Halbardier’s bet is that if Alto can make a profit in Dallas, the company can make one just about anywhere. “If you asked Uber, ‘Is Dallas a good market?’ they’d be like, ‘You know, it’s not bad,’ ” says Alex Halbardier, who joined Alto as its chief customer officer in the company’s early days.
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He’s referring mostly to key factors that ride-hailing companies take into account when considering a market, like traffic congestion, customer demographics, distance to airports, and the number of students in the area. “People from Dallas don’t love to hear this,” Coleman says, “but Dallas is very average.” But there was another reason why he picked a city that, despite its burgeoning tech scene, has never produced the sort of sexy start-up “unicorn” he aspired to create. Instead, he started searching for office space in Dallas. When Will Coleman was deciding where he would stage his bid to compete with Uber and Lyft, he never seriously considered Silicon Valley.