Dallas
Hogensen

Dallas Hogensen spends his days inside an industry that still runs on faxes, handshakes, and phone calls placed to men who have been selling the same coil of steel for thirty years. His job is to drag all of it online. Felux, the company he co-founded and runs as CEO from Cleveland’s Midtown, is a digital marketplace and operating platform for steel and metals - a sector worth roughly $2 trillion a year and almost entirely allergic to software.

The pitch sounds absurd until you watch it work. Felux has moved more than $500 million in transactions across its platform, signed up somewhere between 700 and 800 manufacturers - Tesla and Schneider Electric among them - and raised north of $24 million from investors who normally wouldn’t take a meeting about rebar. The company’s rallying cry is a hashtag: #makingsteelsexy. It is meant earnestly.

What makes Dallas worth a profile is the distance between where he started and where he ended up. This is a man who scaled Lyft Business toward a billion dollars in revenue, then voluntarily chose an industry where nobody under fifty wanted to work. He could have done another consumer app. He picked the coldest, least-glamorous corner of the economy and decided that was exactly the point.

Dallas grew up on a ranch in Oregon and played college football at Oregon State until an injury rerouted him. He started out aiming at finance. What actually lit the fuse was building a fraternity from scratch on campus - the first time he watched something get created out of belief and a handful of people willing to show up. He has been chasing that feeling ever since.

His early career was a clinic in unglamorous repetition. At Rocket Lawyer he was VP of Growth, making 80 to 100 cold dials a day and learning, the hard way, that sales is mostly empathy in disguise. At iCracked - the “Uber for iPhone repair” - he took his first VP title and helped push the company from seed to a Series A backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Then he co-founded Liveli, a marketplace for restaurant staffing, which was acquired in 2016.

At Lyft, Dallas led the Business division and built the first rideshare platform stitched directly into corporate travel management, helping push that line toward $1 billion in revenue. By any normal scorecard, he had arrived. He kept building anyway, bootstrapping Signal HQ - an intent-data platform - and selling it to Bombora in 2020.

Two exits, a billion-dollar revenue line, and a comfortable life in Denver. Most people stop there. Dallas had decided, methodically, that his next move should be a fragmented, low-satisfaction market with terrible Net Promoter Scores and no software - the kind of industry where one company could verticalize the whole thing. He just didn’t know which one.

The answer arrived sideways. A poker friend was in the steel business. His aunt had spent 40 years in steel. Between them, they painted a picture of an enormous industry running on duct tape and relationships. An executive recruiter closed the loop, introducing Dallas to Todd Leebow, CEO of Majestic Steel. Together with Chris Day, a former Majestic technology lead, they founded Felux in 2019, with Dallas joining as CEO in 2020.

He didn’t pretend to know steel. He still says he reads it at a “third-grade level,” and he means it as a compliment to the trade. What he brought instead was a conviction that owning the supply side and earning the industry’s trust - things Todd already had after decades inside it - mattered more than any clever piece of code.

The decision cost him a move. To take the job, Dallas packed up his family and relocated from Colorado to Cleveland in the middle of COVID. His wife’s response to betting their future on a steel marketplace was blunt and unprintable in full: “You better f***ing be right.” He thought he was. The numbers eventually agreed: Felux’s platform volume jumped from $64.9 million in 2020 to $454 million in 2021, then past half a billion.

The early bet didn’t land the way they planned, though. Felux first chased suppliers, and it didn’t click. The real unlock came from the other end of the chain - enterprise procurement teams at Fortune 500 manufacturers who were drowning in complex sourcing and had no historical market data to lean on. Once Felux pointed itself at the buyers, the platform pulled the suppliers along with it.

Rather than fight the industry’s grey-suited image, Dallas leaned the opposite way. Felux behaves like the antithesis of a steel company: cigar rollers at the trade-show booth, loud branded merchandise (some of the earliest revenue literally came from selling t-shirts), and a culture engineered so that customers refer to Felux employees by name instead of the company. The empathy was the strategy. As he puts it, the team stopped talking about itself and started building the customer’s story instead.

Underneath the swagger is a fairly serious thesis about culture as a moat. Dallas treats trust - built through vulnerability and a willingness to fail early - as the actual product holding the company together. Weekly Monday priorities, autonomy with sharp accountability, stretch goals that keep people on high-impact work. He is quick to say he is “not the smartest guy in the room,” and just as quick to say that’s why he hires people who are.

There is a second ambition stacked on top of the first. Dallas wants Cleveland - and the broader Midwest - to be taken seriously as a home for industrial-technology companies. He points out that US Steel, the first billion-dollar company in American history, traces its roots to this region. He sees a deep pool of talent that simply hasn’t been organized, and he’d like Felux to be the flagship proof that a serious venture can scale from Northeast Ohio.

The long-range numbers he talks about are deliberately outsized: 300 to 500 employees within a decade, $30 to $100 billion in annual transactions, an IPO he’s content to wait six or seven years for. He’s allergic to vanity metrics and hyper-focused on unit-level profitability. The goal, stated plainly and more than once, is to have “a piece of every single piece of metal that’s ever moved in the world.”

It’s an audacious line for a guy who reads steel at a third-grade level. Then again, audacity from outsiders is how most stubborn industries finally get rebuilt. Dallas Hogensen moved his family across the country to find out if he’s right. So far, the steel is moving online.