Bravery & Adaptability with Marina Brown

We're sharing stories of founders and companies that don't always get a lot of attention , and our whole point here is to help promote their companies and grow some brand awareness for them , but also to dig deeper and unpack their personal stories and their backgrounds on why they chose this path that is not easy and what they hope to accomplish and make an impact

in the world . So this week I'm particularly excited because I think we've got a lot to talk about with Marina Brown , who is the founder of Moniva and has perhaps one of the most interesting personal backgrounds of anybody I think we've had on the show . But first , marina , welcome to the Bootstrapers Guide to Logistics . We're super glad to have you .

I know that this show is obviously for logistics folks and so everyone knows third party logistics companies and brokers . But one of the biggest issues that those companies face is invoice exceptions . What happens when you contract with a carrier for a specific price , unplanned expenses arise during transportation .

The approval of these expenses today is very manual , time consuming and poorly documented .

And when a carrier finally submits their invoice with the unplanned charges , that invoice now doesn't match what's in the transportation system records for the broker and it's sent out into an exception queue and from there handled manually with accounts pay about the broker and the carrier , oftentimes souring the carrier relationship , time consuming for the broker , carrier

doesn't get paid on time and cash flow for the brokerage company is strained . So we're looking to fix that by putting the right tools in the carrier stands to enable them super easy to submit their unplanned expenses for approval .

And on the other side for the brokers to get the right information on the expenses , review them , approve them and then we update all of the important systems with the new pricing information . So when the carrier expense or the carrier invoice comes in , it now matches what's in the system and it's processed straight through .

Carrier gets paid on time , no one waste their time from the broker side and they can bill the next client in the chain that same day .

In the transportation company I worked for , you could just feel the pain and frustration oftentimes of folks who does not their job to deal with payment issues and invoicing on all loans that do not make them any money but they have to because there's no other way .

So I personally feel the pain and have had lots of friends that struggle with it , so we're hoping to give them some relief .

Then I see , sometimes early stage founders have an idea in their head and they go off and they start spending lots of money to build software and then they take that software solution to a potential customer and the customer says something to the effect of well , that's great , but it doesn't exactly solve my problem . So how do you approach building an MVP ?

I was going to track all payment events , from the time a piece of good got manufactured all the way through its final destination at the distributor . I had conversations with few folks to present my idea . One of them told me oh my gosh , this is so complicated my head hurts .

The other people were like Marina , you are not making money with this venture in the next couple of years . This is a 20 year adventure . You're going to require the cooperation of many people in the supply chain who normally don't like to collaborate with each other . Go for something smaller .

I ultimately enrolled in a customer discovery workshop that Nebraska actually offers as one of their advancements in promoting entrepreneurship . That helped me have conversations with a lot of potential customers . Slowly but surely , this giant idea narrowed down to what we are starting with from an MVP perspective .

I think ultimately , we're just going to do a V start with the grand idea , go down to build a small MVP and ultimately continue to build back up to that original idea that we had , because I think the idea is great but it is massive to achieve From an MVP perspective .

Our goal is we just actually finished our first development cycle to put that product in the hands of our customers . We're lucky . We just enrolled our first pilot customer . We're about to work with a second potential pilot customer .

Get the product in the hands of these folks and have them use it , because you learn so much just from the pure behavior of the brokers , the carriers , features and functionality or behaviors that you never thought that they would exhibit in ways they will use your product .

Then you monopolize on that knowledge and that helps you feed your backlog and your future roadmap to ultimately deliver a product that people really want to use and rave about .

I think that's a much better approach than if you just close yourself in a room , develop product for six to 10 months , come out with it and then figure out that that was really not the right solution for the market .

That if we were to take a very , very small organism , maybe even just a couple of cells , and you put it into an environment and there's stimuli and response happening all around it and it's trying to fight for its own life , some of those cells are going to find resources and then double in size and triple in size and other parts of the organism or other

organisms might die off . Rather than having this , we're going to build an intelligent life form from scratch . You start with a very small , tiny thing and it goes off in experiments and finds what works and does more of that and ignores what doesn't work .

It's this real-time feedback loop that prevents these massive pivots that you see software companies go through of doing that 10 , 12-month development cycle and realizing nobody cares 100% .

A lot of people just want to jump on . Hey , I have an idea I need to start building and totally jump over the phase of actually talking to the people that will be using the product , finding out that that idea you had originally might not necessarily be the right approach to handle it .

I would highly recommend anyone starting a company to not forget about the customer discovery portion .

It's a utopian view of how business gets done and they're building . If you're familiar with the vitamin versus painkiller marketing principle , people love the idea of building vitamins that make everything better and that they prevent all of these problems from happening . But we all know we should take vitamins , but very few people do .

But we're all willing to take a painkiller if our back hurts .

It's a miracle to me sometimes that it actually functions as efficiently as it does so because , like you said , we wish it did things for the vitamin's sake , but oftentimes it does it for the painkiller .

And people are cooperating with each other because they need to cooperate with each other now , because they absolutely want , and I think because of that there's a lot of lack of trust in the system . That lack of trust is there for a variety of reasons .

It also helps sustain the system itself because it helps people make money along different parts of the step process of the supply chain . I would say that one of the things that is impressive to me is having a product that you don't have to push people to use . Rather , they pull you to use that product .

They don't have to feel like they're cooperating with each other . They do it naturally because the product itself stimulates that need and makes it so easy and intuitive and gives them the right reasons to cooperate with each other , and I think that's like the best product for an organism like a supply chain .

You try to build a business where your product ultimately fits in because you have to make people to use it . It's probably not going to be successful in an industry like supply chain . So just to give you an example , my idea originally of connecting multiple entities from supply chain to work together .

It was grand , but I would have had to have the cooperation of a lot of people that likely weren't going to cooperate , but at the same time , starting with just the relationship between the carrier and the broker and helping the preapproval of these expenses .

And then you find out that the same preapproval process that exists between a carrier and a broker also exists between a broker and a shipper , and the same problem that exists in the first relationship is also present on the second relationship . So now you're starting to connect the dots . You want to derisk the broker approving an expense for the carrier .

Well , how do you now connect those three parties , saving them time , helping them plow their cash flow effectively , without them ever having to truly cooperate as a three-party system ?

They take for granted that there's a bottle of shampoo on the shelf at Target because it's just always been there . Then one day it's not because there's a supply chain shortage .

The lights begin to come on for people of wow , I've taken this entire industry for granted , and yet it is perhaps the most complex set of human activities working collectively , even if they're unaware of each other , than anywhere else in the world .

You can't outstrip the knowledge of this industry , which is why it attracts such intelligent people like yourself to go off and tackle a problem that you know is a pain point for so many people . So I want to shift gears , though , and understand how you reached that place . So can we go back to your childhood ? What was it like and what is your background ?

And then three months later , because of changes in monetary policies , for example , there was nothing on the shelves of the stores but you had a lot of money . I actually ended up graduating with a master's degree in economics later on and a lot of the things that were happening in the country at that time started to make a lot of sense later .

But it was just like for a lot of other people . It was just hard living there as a child Oftentimes .

You know some of my not necessarily favorite , but I think brave moments was when I would have to get up at like five o'clock in the morning to go to the grocery store because there was a limited supply of milk , for example , and if I wanted my younger brother to have milk that day , then I would have to go and wait in line in the snow and make sure

that I'm one of the first people that can get in that store . Oftentimes , you know , having to like shove older people around so I can sneak in .

This builds a lot of our , you know , bravery and resistance and confidence , ultimately to give you that emotional stability and also need to change and ability to change , which ultimately , as an entrepreneur , one definitely needs right . But anyways , the Berlin Wall fell down and I we started to get a lot of exposure to Western education .

I really wanted to learn more about countries like England and the United States . I ended up as an exchange student in Texas for a year , then afterwards came to Omaha and all women's college , which was one of the seven left in the United States at that time .

I ended up graduating with a technology degree , left to study artificial intelligence and then came back to Nebraska for my master's . I feel like all of this journey's kind of led me , you know , followed by my then 20 year degree or experience in corporate world in product management . All of this kind of led me to the pivotal point of deciding .

I think I'm going to follow in my parents steps . Actually , my parents are entrepreneurs . After the Berlin Wall fell down , my dad started his own company he actually does pharmaceutical testing and my mom was a dentist so she set up her own practice . I watched them be entrepreneurs themselves .

I think all this time I wanted to kind of follow in their footsteps but to an extent you know , especially as a female and having to raise family and children and maintain stability in your income just didn't feel right .

But now my kids are grown , they know sustain themselves well enough , and so it felt like the right time to get a jump on entrepreneurial career .

Part of your story reminds me of Michael Malikov , who we had on the show last year and he was born in the Republic of Georgia and he came to the US at age 14 after the fall of the Soviet Union , and there are some parallels there .

Obviously , I'm not going to equivocate your experiences , but there are some commonalities there that the resilience that you've developed and the fearlessness only comes from having been tested . To me that's remarkable , because so often people resist those difficult things , then they never develop that inner strength that they can do this .

. When I was young and you get put into positions where you do this to survive or you don't survive , and so through those types of experiences , you learn to push forward .

One of my things has always been this is something that people hear a lot In your bravery sometimes you just like one step away from being successful when you get to determine , hey , you want to do something new . It's scary , always scary .

I always tell myself , like I just need to take this one step right , just take the very next step , and then don't worry about anything else . And then you take that one step and then afterwards it's one more step forward . Before you know it You're on that journey .

I would say it's easier to develop this sense of being strong , being able to push for what you want , what you need , when you've been in position to do that with no choice I got . Look at my kids , for example .

These days I would say they live a fairly comfortable life , and sometimes I look at them and I say , gosh , who would you be if you had gotten through my own experiences , you know , at the same time , I'd rather them not , because those weren't necessarily always Positive and they do impact your mental state and physical health as well .

Let's be honest , how have you navigated each of those , both being a woman and a mother ?

In general , I feel like women don't necessarily become entrepreneurs because they feel obligated to take care of their families , to have stable income and all that . And in fact I was on a webinar for the Small Business Association Government-sponsored organization and they were saying that they have . I'm gonna quote some numbers .

I don't know if they're truly accurate , but five percent of their budget is directly allocated to go to female entrepreneurs and every year they cannot actually spend that budget because they cannot find the female Entrepreneurs to give the money to .

I Think it's an area where we as a society definitely need to Spend more time and be more progressive , because I'll tell you a lot of the industry and just in general , our country has the perception of these 2324 567 year-old males being your typical Entrepreneur right right out of college no family obligations , doesn't have problems slipping on mom's couch , and so

they create businesses in hustle .

But I think what we often forget is that there's a sense of immaturity and when it comes to Working with female founders who have had the opportunity to raise kids , to go through , you know , full-time jobs and spend a good amount of time in professional careers , but there's a lot of experience there that now help us create economically savvy companies , make positive

Decisions that are focused on long-term , you know , ultimately creating great Organizations that end up hiring people , creating business and financial value and creating value for the industry as well .

Honestly , from a both supply chain industry but also from a government standpoint , I think more efforts are really required to help people in this category Make a step towards entrepreneurship , and not to dwell on it but like at the same time . Moms need flexibility and I think entrepreneurship is an opportunity for them to have that Flexibility .

Yes , sometimes you work all the time , but it's not an eight to five job when you have to feel that you have to report to someone or ask constantly for permission Just to go and see your kids soccer game or make the next performance . I think it's a great spot for women to be .

We just need to get them to be brave about it and we need to create appropriate policies to encourage them to get to that position .

I think that that number is now up to three percent , and it brings to mind a bunch of questions that I have on .

Not only do our female founders Disproportionately not represented in the industry , but they also disproportionately don't receive investment dollars and Are not always included in in a certain types of programming or even given a seat at the table to share their perspective .

Yet the data Overwhelmingly suggests that , because of some of the challenges that you've just described , female founders are often more equipped to deal with the challenges of entrepreneurship because of their life experiences and that when they create organizations that speak to the collective experience of all of their employees , having a female founder or a female CEO or

someone at the executive leadership table changes everything from HR policies around parental leave to recruiting efforts , and then you actually draw in a more diverse employee base . I always shake my head and wonder why , if the data suggests it so strongly , why are others so resistant to get on board ?

There is a difference in how men and women operate , including in how they make business decisions and how they lead their organizations , and sometimes most of these , especially larger companies , led by male CEOs who then hire more male executive leadership and then just create that problem . You're absolutely right .

In my experience , like I would say , that women in executive positions bring a different approach to how executive leadership teams work .

With the right people in the mix , your company does end up being more successful because you now have different backgrounds , different experiences , and that reflects on the choices that you make as a company , including as being entrepreneur . My goal is ultimately to create a very diverse company . That doesn't mean I'm going to hire all female employees .

I will always look for the best talent , but the best talent can come from many different places and backgrounds and I think keeping that in mind is hugely important .

Six or eight , maybe even 10 of them that I know would be able to share some insights into their journey and perhaps you could help each other . It's also not that I'm on a soapbox today , but it's also not women's responsibility to change the dynamics . It is all of our responsibilities and those of us .

I'm a white male in my 40s , well educated and from a middle class family , so I step into every arena that I step into with a massive array of privileges , and it's our jobs to shift those dynamics in an industry that is not necessarily known for taking those kinds of stances .

And that might cost me some listeners , because I imagine there's a few folks listening that are this is not what I tuned in for , and to those folks I would say please stick around , not because of I want to increase our podcast stats , but because those hard things are good , that challenge our perspectives and our paradigms and that's how we actually grow .

And so if you're encountering ideas that you're resistant to , those are actually how you develop strength . When you're exercising , it is the weight that provides the resistance that you have to fight against and that's how you grow stronger .

I used to lead large teams where I would put in front of myself a certain set of KPIs and I would say I need my team to be , you know , as close to a 50-50 split between male and female , and I would set goals for myself that I would hire people with foreign backgrounds .

I will hire people from diverse backgrounds because I needed that diversity on my teams . At that time , I will tell you we've created we ultimately created some amazing products for the transportation industry , and we did that because a lot of these people relied on experiences that other people in the room did not have , because they didn't have that background .

We were all in this to create better supply chain and we do that by contributing a variety of different ideas that create amazing products .

I think it's a brilliant name . I don't know what it means , but it's really attractive .

So merging those two together helped us basically create the current and the future state of our company , where today we help companies pay each other and tomorrow we will help pay those companies .

So our website is Moniva , which is spelled M-O-N-E-I-V-A dot com , and then you can contact us there as well , and you can probably read a little bit more about all the benefits that the company brings to the supply chain as well .

You're in the first minute of the first quarter and the future is totally wide open for you , and you're in the middle of it right now . So I'm honored that you put yourself out there that way . Just know that we're all rooting for you , and I want to follow up in six months and 12 months and find out where you're at on your journey .

And I always compare myself to the stories that I read in the Wall Street Journal about these companies with hundreds and thousands of customers and it's so embarrassing to say , oh , I just signed my very first pilot customer , I have my first integration with the transportation system and it just seems so small .

But I also keep in mind the big picture that one day this company is going to have a lot of customers and we'll be doing some really amazing things , and that helps me be right . Yes , thanks , Nate , for taking the chance on me .

If you're a founder who has been in a similar place , would love it if you'd connect , offer her some encouragement . If you're a company that needs support in that FinTech and you know freight audit and pay space , please check

her out . She's looking for pilot customers and possibly some investors , and we've got both of those that listen to the show . Maybe we can offer you support that way as well . So , marina , take care and we will follow up in six months .

And , of course , thank you to all the founders who trust us to share their stories .