Scott Hempy was riding in the car with his wife a few months back when realized he was running low on gas. He joked that it would be great if there was a way to refuel while he was driving, the same way Air Force jets do during long flights. The two had a laugh about it and then resumed driving. But this being Silicon Valley in an era of irrational exuberance, what seemed at first like a trivial inconvenience soon became the basis for a brand new startup, Filld.

Gas without the station

"Given all the on-demand services out there today, I just figured something like this must already exist," Hempy said. But research turned up nothing. "Then I thought maybe there were some laws that would prevent it from working." With some more digging, he found no regulatory obstacles. So he decided to leave his job at a venture capital firm and try his hand as an entrepreneur. "What if we could get you your gas but without the gas station?"

You download the app, put in some info about your vehicle, and give it your address. Enter a window of time for delivery and a truck is dispatched to your location. You still have do the hard work of making sure the gas cap is unlocked, but I’m sure there will be a drone to solve this problem in the future. For a $7 surcharge, you can avoid the indignity of having to stand upright for several minutes and pump your gas by hand like some 20th century serf.

"Something that will capture users when they are in a pinch."

Filld currently has one fuel truck operating in the affluent neighborhoods of southern Silicon Valley: Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Redwood City. So far he says business has been booming, but remember this is a demographic of early adopters, startup billionaires, and other venture capitalists, people keen to maximize their every moment and living in perpetual fear of missing the next big thing. "We see it as something that will capture users when they are in a pinch," says Hempy. "Cutting that 15 minutes out of my life every 10 days is a lot of value."

While I felt certain at first blush that this business deserved a fair helping of snark, I found myself last night attempting to drive to an event in Manhattan with two crying babies in the backseat. When the warning light on the dash popped on to indicate I was out of gas, and I realized I had to reroute and delay by at least 15 minutes to fill up, I would gladly have paid an even higher surcharge than Filld is currently asking for a full tank of gas delivered while I was busy eating my dinner of crow and humble pie. How often would this perfect storm of factors even come together? Once or twice a year, maybe?

I asked Hempy how it could possibly be efficient to pay a driver to burn gas going from house to house filling up individual cars. He says the company buys fuel wholesale and charges market rate per gallon. "We cut out the brick-and-mortar costs of owning a station." That leaves plenty of margin, even if Filld isn't selling slushies and slim jims. "No corner real estate, no utility bills."

I noted that even if the margins make sense, this sounded like an environmental catastrophe. "It seems, at first glance, like not the most environmental," Hempy agreed. "But what if you cut out all the cars taking a detour for the gas station versus one truck going directly to each car?"

"There is an exhaustion around the amount of Ubers."

There is no point in arguing with people like Hempy. For every question, the answer is simply that the startup is more efficient, all it has to do is reach truly massive scale. That’s probably why, when I made a comparison to Uber, he waved it off. "There is an exhaustion around the amount of Ubers," Hempey said. "This is more like Amazon. Who needs a physical store? What they did for books, we can do for gas."