Service with a Smile: Classmates Nick Alexander (left) and Bryan Frist with one of Yoshi’s service-on-demand vehicles. (photo by Cayce Clifford)

The first purpose-built, drive-in gas station opened in Pittsburgh in December 1913. The gleaming Gulf station finally made filling up convenient for Model T owners—and it was basically the last major innovation in gasoline retailing for more than 100 years, says Bryan Frist (MBA 2015). “The gas station was stuck in the 20th century.”

That revelation led to a question: If you can get groceries delivered directly to your home, why not gasoline delivered directly to your car? Frist and classmate Nick Alexander (MBA 2015) began to explore an answer to that while they were still at HBS, spending one cold afternoon observing hurried customer interactions at a gas station in Cambridge. “Getting gas was far from a magical experience,” says Frist. “It was ripe for innovation.”

By graduation, the pair and a third cofounder, Dan Hunter, had launched Yoshi on the streets of Palo Alto. Hunter was the mechanic; he retrofitted his old pickup truck with extra fuel tanks. Alexander was the engineer; he designed a no-frills geolocation app that allowed customers to drop a pin on a map to request fuel. And Frist was the driver; he filled gas tanks.

In that role, Frist also talked to a number of customers and curious onlookers. He’s heard the dismissive comments: “Oh, that’s lazy. What’s the world coming to?” And he’s heard the gratitude. One early customer delivered pizzas. “If you can save me 20 minutes,” he told Frist, “you are saving me money.” Yoshi estimates that it can return 30 hours a year to the average car owner.

Today, president and COO Frist, who splits his time between offices in San Francisco and Nashville, watches a digital map tracking the company’s fleet of custom-built delivery trucks as they move across 20 metropolitan areas in 14 states. Car owners can request gasoline and a host of other services, such as tire checks, car washes, and oil changes, via the Yoshi app. Field techs then receive an optimized daily route, often visiting company parking lots; businesses have been one of Yoshi’s best customers, paying the service’s monthly subscription fee as a job perk for their employees.

Yoshi’s eliminate-the-gas-station model has also attracted the attention of ExxonMobil and General Motors, both of which are investors. All of Yoshi’s delivery trucks are now co-branded with ExxonMobil logos and carry the company’s fuel. And soon, Yoshi’s app will be embedded in new General Motors cars, automatically alerting Yoshi when the gas tank needs a refill or the tire pressure is low.

But Frist and Alexander aren’t content to have reinvented gas retailing for the 2010s. “Yoshi” roughly translates as “keep moving” in Japanese, and as like-minded competitors hit the streets, the company is looking to the future. One opportunity is automation. Self-driving cars are not self-filling cars; someone will have to refuel them and do simple maintenance, like cleaning their crucial navigation sensors. Another opportunity is alternative fuels. When cars propelled by electricity or hydrogen go mainstream, someone will have to build a nationwide fuel distribution network. We could always turn back to the century-old gas station model, Frist says. Or we could turn to Yoshi.

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