As she darted out of the Ralphs parking lot, with an order for a vape in hand, Duffl racer Lucy McHenry experienced what all scooter-riding students in Westwood dread – she was hit by a car.
In the collision, the handlebars of her Duffl-issued scooter flipped, and McHenry, a rising fourth-year ethnomusicology student, landed hard on her back and shoulder as she crashed to the ground.
Despite the pain, McHenry shook off the fall, exchanged information with the driver and walked the broken scooter back to the Duffl store in Westwood. But she had to walk because her back and ribs were in pain.
Although she was still on shift, she decided to clock out and took an Uber to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center to get an X-ray. She said she was fortunate enough not to have suffered any serious fractures or a concussion from the accident – she only pulled a muscle in her back.
What may have seemed a near disaster to the average UCLA student was, to McHenry, a natural part of working as a Duffl racer.
“That’s kind of a risk you assume when you take the job,” she said.
Duffl, which was founded at UCLA in 2018, is a delivery service company that exclusively serves college students. When co-founder and CEO David Lin first established the company, Duffl consisted of a simple online interface for order placement, inventory stockpiles in the corner of Lin’s apartment and an electric skateboard for order deliveries. By October 2019, Duffl was bringing in $30,000 per month in revenue and had a position in UCLA’s entrepreneurial program, Startup UCLA, providing increased opportunities for expansion.
Duffl, which operated at seven different universities as of last spring, promises to deliver snacks and more, all within 10 minutes. Its delivery employees, known as “racers,” rely on electric scooters to accomplish such swift deliveries to UCLA students.
However, a Daily Bruin investigation – which included speaking with 16 current and former Duffl employees – revealed that a number of company policies and practices encourage racers to prioritize rapid delivery speed over their own safety, making accidents like McHenry’s a common experience in the life of a Duffl racer.
The promise of speedy delivery has been ingrained in Duffl’s culture from the beginning and is what has always differentiated Duffl from other delivery services, Lin said.
When Duffl moved its headquarters to Covel Commons, the close proximity to its customer base – which was, at the time, students residing on or near the Hill – allowed Lin and his four co-founders to deliver orders in rapid time, sometimes in two minutes or less.
“It was magical,” Lin said. “Somebody would order in Rieber Hall, and we get there in two minutes, and they’re like, ‘What is going on? Where are you coming from?’”
Even though Duffl’s customer base has now expanded beyond the Hill and its Westwood headquarters have moved to Gayley Avenue, the legacy of this founding promise lives on in the company’s 10-minute limit for deliveries.
In combination with two fundamental company practices – a shift-by-shift log of all late deliveries and a public leaderboard highlighting the racers with the fastest delivery times – the 10-minute delivery promise has long encouraged racers to complete their deliveries as fast as possible.
Marie Godderis, a racer and packer at Duffl, said the Duffl app records how many of her deliveries were outside the 10-minute limit at the end of every shift.
For the rising fourth-year design media arts student, this persistent accountability measure motivates her to deliver orders as fast as possible. When she first started working for Duffl, she said she felt pressure to speed on her scooter, especially during busy nights. It was only after a few minor falls that she became more aware of the risks of scootering and slowed her pace.
Duffl racer Mattea Leone, who has worked as a racer since February 2023, said she still challenges herself to meet that limit.
“It’s like I’m playing a game,” said Leone, a rising fourth-year communication student.
The leaderboard, too, which generated stats based on a racer’s average delivery time and their number of orders, encourages natural competition among racers who want to rise to the top, said Rob Dong, Duffl’s first marketing manager. Excelling on the leaderboard provides an avenue for racers to demonstrate their dedication to the company, possibly earning the title of “Racer of the Month,” Dong added.
This March, Duffl added yet another incentive for speedy delivery – if the racers working under a Duffl team leader are able to complete 30 orders in an hour, then the team leader’s pay is boosted from minimum wage up to $31 for the hour, said Denisse Andersen, a 2024 alumnus and racer and team leader at Duffl.
While Duffl still uses racer leaderboards, Duffl racers are now identified anonymously by their Duffl ID number. The reports include information about every racer employed by the company at UCLA, including how often racers made late deliveries and areas of improvement for each racer.
No matter the method by which Duffl tracks speed, however, the high level of monitoring and scrutiny creates a stressful environment, said Melissa Knorr, a former Duffl racer.
Although Duffl managers would tell the racers to be safe while scootering and to follow all traffic rules, they were told they had to go faster when their delivery times were too slow, she said.
“There was a lot of big pressure on it,” added Knorr, an alumnus who graduated in 2024.
But despite the many incentives to be the fastest Duffl racer, UCLA’s Duffl community was a tight-knit group from the start, and Godderis said she views the work environment as collaborative.
Dong, who eventually left the company in 2023 after seeing a lack of personal growth with Duffl and its recurring problems, said he leveraged his connections to UCLA Greek life as a then-member of Sigma Phi Epsilon to recruit racers and customers. Brotherhood within Greek life soon extended to a community within the company.
Even today, many students learn about openings at Duffl through their friends.
“I don’t want to say it’s a requirement to know someone, but a lot of people recommend their friends,” Andersen said. “And it’s just friend groups that end up working there.”
Godderis, however, challenged the narrative that competition has dominated the working culture at Duffl. She said although racers aim for speedy times and feel motivated to become faster, the overall environment is positive.
However, McHenry, who characterized the company culture as laid back, said there were downsides to this work setting.
“It’s a really fun place to work, and it’s a little bit unserious, but the trade-off is that it’s not just the employees who are young and stupid and having fun,” McHenry said. “Even some of the HQ people didn’t know what’s going on, aka David Lin.”
The application and training processes, too, are relatively informal, despite the high expectations placed on racers to meet the 10-minute delivery standard.
Andersen said her process began with the submission of a written and video application. Then, just minutes later, she was offered an interview.
“The interview was a scooter ride around Westwood,” Andersen said. “And then they do a culture interview … to see if you’d be a good fit, which as long as you’re chill, I’m pretty sure you’re a good fit.”
New Duffl employees are taught the safest scooter routes in Westwood and ride alongside veteran Duffl workers making deliveries, Andersen said. What follows is their first shift.
“You’re just thrown into it,” Godderis said.
Sam Schlenker, a Duffl racer and 2024 alumnus, said avoiding falls is a learning process that requires racers to get accustomed to the many divots, potholes and bumps of the Westwood streets and the challenges of riding a scooter. However, a few falls are a part of the learning process, Schlenker said.
The use of scooters as a vehicle for delivery makes the position of Duffl racer a dangerous job, Dong said.
A UCLA study discovered a high prevalence of injuries among e-scooter riders, with the rate of injuries per million trips surpassing the national rates for motorcycle, bicycle, car and walking trips. The researchers conducted a retrospective review of patients in the outpatient clinics and two hospitals associated with UCLA Health from January 2014 to May 2020. Injuries were found to potentially stem from the inexperience of riders, the lack of safety regulations and the challenges of enforcing safety equipment use.
“People have a false sense of security on the scooters,” said Dr. Joann Elmore, one of the researchers on the study. “They feel like, ‘Oh, you’re standing. You’re not going that fast.’ But you can really hurt yourself.”
Elmore, who is also a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine, said scooter riders need to be more cautious while riding and Los Angeles drivers more aware of their presence on the road to help decrease the injury rate.
Dong said the Duffl racers have a running joke that getting hit is their initiation to the team because accidents are so frequent on the job.
Most Duffl racers get hit by a car or fall off their scooter at some point, Leone said.
“It’s kind of a rite of passage to get into some kind of accident,” she added.
However, the post-accident procedures often do not run smoothly for racers. After McHenry was hit in the Ralphs parking lot, for example, she said she had difficulties working with the company’s human resources department.
When she filed for workers’ compensation, the HR department delayed her process – causing it to take several months – and pushed for an unofficial reimbursement route as an alternative. Although she was eventually given workers’ compensation, she said the HR department was inexperienced and difficult to work with.
Dong said in the event of hospitalizations due to on-the-job injuries, Duffl would cover the medical expenses.
McHenry said her experience was reflective of a larger pattern at Duffl – a general lack of proper procedures and preparation. Several Duffl workers echoed these concerns, claiming they received insubstantial safety briefings and were not mandated to carry health insurance prior to becoming a racer.
“The brakes were horrible,” Knorr said. “Sometimes I would have to physically use my feet to solve it because I realized, ‘Oh, I’m about to go off into the road.’”
An anonymous Duffl racer, who worked for the company from April 2022 to May 2023, also said communal company equipment was unsanitary, which created health problems for workers.
“I got a really bad ear infection on one of my piercings because I think it rubbed against one of the nasty helmets, and I had to go to the emergency room and get my piercing removed,” the racer said. “Everyone’s wearing the same three helmets.”
Lin, despite expressing regret that the racer received an ear infection, said the company was not responsible for the issue.
“We would maintain those scooters like crazy,” Lin said. “But the reality was when you have 30, 40 people all treating it like it’s some sort of public commodity, like a Spin or Bird scooter on the road, it’s bound to have problems because no one takes care of it like it was theirs. No one took ownership.”
He added that he would have cleaned everything himself if he had the capacity.
“If I, personally, was there 24/7, I would have cleaned the helmets. I would have scrubbed the toilets,” Lin said. “But I didn’t because I wasn’t there. I had hundreds of employees across multiple states who demanded my attention.”
As Duffl has continued to grow, additional problems have emerged.
With the influence of newly partnered venture capitalist firms, Duffl’s corporate employees quickly became disconnected from the experiences of average Duffl racers, causing store-level employees to feel that their perspectives were being overlooked, Dong said.
“It honestly broke my heart to see the way that Duffl evolved throughout the years,” Dong said.
The company’s future is now unclear.
On May 12, McHenry said, the manager of Duffl’s UCLA location informed the employees that the store was set to close permanently that same night. The only word from Lin came the next day when he sent the team a link to his YouTube video announcing the closure, she added.
However, when a Daily Bruin reporter spoke with him a few days later, he backtracked the announcement.
“There’s been a lot of confusion going around, so I’m really grateful for this opportunity to clarify,” Lin said. “For the record, Duffl is not closing or shutting down in any way, shape or form.”
He said that the company is now preparing for a major transition that will set it up for success in the future, but he could not say anything more about what the changes would look like.
“We’re excited to come back bigger and better,” Lin said.
