Marcus Middleton has always moved fast. Growing up in Stoughton, Massachusetts, he played football and basketball at WPI — the kind of schedule that teaches you, early, that time is the only resource you can't get back. He became an engineer. Then he traveled the world for it.
Over the course of his career, Marcus worked across four continents — Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Qatar, Spain, France, Italy, Colombia, and beyond. He learned to read cities the way engineers read systems: what's working, what's inefficient, where the friction is, and what would happen if you removed it. He developed a pattern of noticing things that locals had stopped seeing — infrastructure gaps that had been normalized for so long that no one thought to question them anymore.
He came home to Massachusetts and looked for it. It didn't exist. What existed was what had always existed. The same stations he'd been stopping at since he got his license. The morning detours that turned a 30-minute commute into 45. The winter morning he drove into Brockton on one mile of range left in the tank — not reckless, just a rational trade: being late was not an option, and the math said go. The times he'd watched friends get robbed, felt the ambient threat of a poorly lit station at midnight.
The gas station has been a fixture of American life for over a century. It has also been, for most of that century, one of the most dangerous, inconvenient, and time-consuming stops in anyone's day — so normalized that people stopped realizing it was a choice. Marcus realized it wasn't. And he built the alternative.