DALLAS — After just more than four years in business, the Alto team is preparing to celebrate a milestone.
One million rides.
“We deliver the safest, most consistent, highest-quality rides in the market," Will Coleman, CEO and co-founder, of the Dallas-based tech start-up said.
The company prides itself on providing a ride hailing service to users through its app, owning its own fleet of vehicles and employing all of its drivers instead of using a third-party service.
"You always know what you’re going to get and who’s going to show up to pick you up," Coleman said.
His company is in a season of growth, but it's weathered the same storm that's hit the entire tech industry over the past six months.
“The macroeconomic environment has been a very tough one," Coleman said. "Interest rates are rising. Valuation rates are falling. That’s resulted in a really heightened focus on return on investment."
High interest rates, fear of a potential recession and the end of the booming surge in tech the industry saw during the pandemic have led to a number big layoffs at major tech companies in the past few weeks.
Ten thousand layoffs at Amazon.
Eleven thousand at Meta.
One thousand at Microsoft.
Thirty-seven hundred people laid off from Twitter.
“The impact has occurred quickly and required companies, including ours, to be really agile and adaptive to the macroenvironment," Coleman said.
While Alto has faced similar pressures, Coleman said the company made cuts earlier this year.
“When we started seeing the effects of the market declines in March and April, we decided to make some tough decisions to restructure parts of our organization and send more of our responsibilities out to our markets to try to ensure that those markets were operating as efficiently as possible," Coleman said.
That decision along with the company's size and location has set it up well, even as other, larger companies are cutting workforces.
“We have always had to be efficient," Coleman said. "We haven’t grown as quickly. We don’t have as many people, so we don’t have to suffer the really big numbers that maybe the other companies are now announcing. We also didn’t see the kind of growth in 2020 and 2021 that a traditional tech company did. COVID, in some ways, kind of restrained us and kept us nimble and agile."
Coleman says business cycles are inevitable, though nearly impossible to precisely predict.
"You'll be wrong for a long term before you're right," Coleman said.
But for now, as the ride counter displayed at the entrance of Alto's office steadily ticks toward 1 million, he says his company is optimistic.