Fluid Truck topped an impressive Q1 with an announcement last week that it will stay headquartered in Denver and add more than 1,500 high-paying jobs in coming years.

The commercial truck sharing platform, founded here in 2016, has grown quickly to almost 200 employees, more than 30 locations and 5,000 vehicles while partnering with huge companies like IKEA. In March, the company secured $63 million in Series A funding.

Founder and CEO James Eberhard shared his thoughts with the Denver Gazette on the company’s rapid growth, future trajectory including international growth and why they decided to stay in the Mile High City.

Denver’s Fluid Truck keeping headquarters in Colorado

Q: Why did Fluid Truck decide to stay in Denver?

A: We’re growing like crazy. In the first quarter, we added 60 people. We’re expected to get 375-400 more by year end. I’m originally from Colorado, so I moved back from Washington, D.C., to get a start-up going because of the great talent here. There’s young, smart people migrating here, vacating places like California. So we’ve had great success recruiting and getting good talent here. As we were growing bigger, different cities started to reach out with growth opportunities outside of Colorado. Some of those incentives were pretty compelling to move our HQ. I was pumped, but ideally we’d stay in Colorado. That was pretty important. We wanted to stay here, and it was hard to argue with the capital dollars we can use to grow jobs here. (Colorado’s Economic Development Commission approved up to $16,382,827 in performance-based Job Growth Incentive Tax Credits over the next eight years.) It’s so awesome we’re staying here. We love Denver and want to see other tech companies build off us.

Q: How do you handle that growth? How big is your staff in your locations outside Denver?

A: We hire from people on the ground there. We put a couple of people in market initially. But there’s a pretty minimal team on the ground in those markets. It’s all automated by technology. We’ve got local companies who do things like maintenance, oil changes, etc. We’ve automated a lot when it comes to maintenance.

Q: Where did the idea for Fluid Trucks come from?

A: The closest scenario I can give is this: 20 years ago software companies bought servers to ramp up operations. Now with things like AWS (Amazon Web Services — cloud based computing services) and Google Cloud do all that. Imagine how it was a couple of years ago trying to start a fleet of trucks. Now, you no longer have to say I’m going to the dealer to get trucks and financing. You can hop on an app, book a truck and subsidize a fleet. Many businesses have crazy peak seasons where they never have enough trucks, like the fourth quarter for moving companies. Then they have an abundance of fleet vehicles in the slow time. I was thinking “how can we connect assets off that” like you would rent party equipment. You could rent anything, like a sleeping bag or tent — why couldn’t you also rent trucks that way? If you’re a business and have to rent commercial vehicles, and you rent from traditional fleet companies, business is done from 9-5 Monday through Friday. Imagine if your experience renting a commercial truck is like renting a car at the airport, but you’re not doing it just for a vacation or business trip. You do it every day. Or you’re forced to go buy trucks, then you have to manage them and the service and insurance claims — which is a whole different skill set than your business. … Think about the rental car industry, the last innovation was “Enterprise, we’ll pick you up.” So for trucks, as opposed to a one-and-a-half hour drive to a depot, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., we’re co-located in industrial parks. So there’s rentals you can grab in a couple of minutes. It’s kind of like Uber, where the quality and service between an Uber and Taxi is day and night.

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Q: Seems the companies renting those trucks would lose a branding opportunity, and those are rolling ads for Fluid Truck.

A: We encourage companies to use magnet signs on the trucks if they want, so some companies use their logo. Sometimes it’s not always bad to not have a traditionally-branded truck, when it goes down or there’s an accident. With us, you’ll have another vehicle right out there to get the job done. We really want to partner with companies, so we go out of our way to ensure they’re successful

Q: Did the rapid growth surprise you, how quickly the platform was embraced?

A: The thing that surprised me, when we were getting going, was how many businesses would come out and rent a 15-year-old truck for the same price as a traditional rental company, and how that became a thing on the platform. We never saw that coming. It was insanely surprising to watch just how much pain the traditional truck rental industry faced with fleet vehicles. They may be used 40-50 hours a week, but other weeks is zero hours. So when it’s slow, you have assets just sitting around. … We allow businesses not to have to go out and put a ton of capital into a fleet that’s not big enough, or too big — it’s always the sweet spot. That surprised us, because we started at business-to-consumer. They could haul stuff off to the dump or move. We still have some users on that personal-use platform.

Q: Tell me about your push to electric vehicles.

A: We have more than 5,000 (total) vehicles. On the EV side, we have the largest medium-duty electric fleet in the U.S., probably in the world. We’re one of the biggest buyers of medium-duty trucks today. But our limitation is where the market is at with producing. … We’re usually the ones to buy the first vehicles and test them out. But even though it’s only about 5% of the fleet, it cut 20 percent pollution emitted from our vehicles … The EVs are going to be the way, with not having to make extra stops at gas stations and the lower level of maintenance, the reduced costs there. But the price on them has to come down, and it will. Remember when flat-screen TVs were $7,000-$10,000, but they came down. The more effectively EVs can drive down emissions, the easier and better it will be to use the right vehicle. We’re firm believers electric vehicles will take over the market.

Q: Do you have plans to expand globally?

A: Yes that’s going to come with our IKEA Retail, as we have a national deal with them. We look to expand outside the U.S., probably in the second half of the year. We’ll start with Canada.

Q: Any final thoughts?

A: The only thing I’d like to highlight is we’re looking for bad-ass engineers. We want passionate people who can build engineering-led solutions with systems and technology. We’re changing and transforming mobility for our business and assets. We’ve got an amazing team already, but need to solve some big problems so we’ll need ambitious, smart, hungry people.