Lightning like Steve McQueen? I'm in a fast lane when the light turns green. And I built tough Find nothing but grit? Cause I made rugged blood, sweat and spit? Yeah, like a horse I fly for a bumpy ride? I like to play hard but I work harder And I weather the storm Because I'm built stronger.
What is up, ladies and gentlemen? We are back. We are live. It is a Freight Coach podcast, the top podcast in transportation coming to you guys every single weekday, 8:30am Pacific, 10:30 Central, to break down some industry headlines. But most importantly, you guys provide some actual insight into what you can do with all of this information. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. This is the real side of freight, ladies and gentlemen. And I say that before every single show. And what I mean by that is I only speak with transportation professionals, you guys, because at the end of the day, I want to talk to the right individuals who have done what you're looking to do or who are currently doing what you're trying to achieve.
So you can take that information, apply it, utilize it, and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life. Corey Bukin, it is Happy Halloween, everybody out there. I. I don't dress up. My wife celebrates Halloween enough for the both of us, so that's kind of where that balancing act comes in. But I got a very special guest for you guys here today. I had the pleasure of meeting them a couple weeks back at Technovations out in Jacksonville, Florida. And he said something that struck me, and it was almost, it was the only one, the only AI company out there that has actually openly said this. And I thought, I gotta get you to come on the show. I got to get you to talk about what you're doing over there. So I have one of the co founders over from Drum Kit.
I got my man Dhruv on the show. So, Dhruv, thank you so much for joining me.
I love to be here. Chris, thanks so much for having me.
No, dude, it's a pleasure. And you know, I actually have a drum kit hat right out in my. In my office here. Mutual friend Adam Robinson sent. Had you send one over to me. And I got a coffee cup as well from you guys. So as somebody who is a massive coffee connoisseur, I really appreciate all of that, man. And I appreciate you taking the time to jump on and speak with me. So, dude, like, what's your background, man? Like, how did you get to today? Like, what brought you into all of this?
Yeah, totally. First of all, thanks again for having me, Chris. This is so much fun. I, I love listening to the pod whenever I can catch it. But yeah, my background is honestly I was, we moved around a decent amount when I was younger and so I, I was that kid who was, you know, thinking about trains, thinking about trucks growing up. And so I went to college. I went to Harvard and Boston to study computer science and transportation planning from like a political science perspective. I then have been in and around startups for the last few years, took some of the research that I was doing in college, try to flip it into a couple of different projects. But we've been building what's now called drum kit over the last two years with a really, you know, focus on freight and trucking.
I have the pleasure to work with one of my research advisors from college. He's a Gin zhang, has a PhD in data privacy from Harvard and so just had the pleasure of been working together for the last several years and just grateful to be building in a space that I'm really, I just really care about and want to make sure we have an impact on.
No, dude, I love that. And so like why transportation? Like what was it about the transportation space that you guys decided to really niche down and focus in on?
Yeah, I, I think throughout, when I was younger I couldn't like articulate this, but throughout college I think I developed this personal thesis. That one, it's just cool. Like that's just awesome. Like I love it. But also there's like a fundamental thesis around like the way the economy runs. The global population saw this in real time when supply chain gets hitches, whether it's Covid, whether it's, you know, a ship getting stuck in the Red Sea or whatever it is, but there's this, you know, idea that if you live somewhere where you don't have access to resources, the only way to get access to those resources is through someone figuring out the logistics. Whether that's whether that's trucking, whether that's rail, whether that's ocean, whether it's even just public transportation for those people.
And so I developed this thesis that if you want to make the world a better place, infrastructure and transportation is the place to start and everything else stems out from those fundamentals. And you know, so we wanted to build something for folks in that space.
No, I, I agree with that wholeheartedly, man. Like, I feel like I. Obviously nothing is like recession proof or anything like that, but like this Industry, I feel like, offers, at least from my perspective, like, yeah, I have some family history and I come from a family of truck drivers and everything. This is all I've ever done. But I feel like from a job security standpoint, this is something that I can always have a job in, no matter what. Right. Like, obviously, I'm going to be doing it for myself, but ultimately this is something that, you know, I look at it, if freight stops moving, we're screwed as a society. So it really doesn't matter. At that point, we're going to go like, I just actually finished up the Walking Dead.
So, like, I'm very much like, well, you know, I could survive in that. In that category because I'll figure it out. Right. Like, I actually know all the roads. I know the geography of it. We'll be fine. But no, man. So it's like, I think now what I love the most about where we are as an industry, especially from a technology perspective, I feel like we're finally starting to make strides into where the rest of the tech world is. Because transportation's historically at least a decade behind. You have the Amazon effect, where you essentially know when your driver sneezes. And then you have it down to where it's like, we don't even know where our truck is right now. It's like bringing that and kind of starting to piece those th. Put that puzzle together. There, ultimately is what I'm the most excited about.
And you know, what you had said at Technovations, I'm just going to come out here and say, and this is the thing that stuck out to me the most, because you are the only AI based company that I have personally spoken with that has taken this stance. And you said, we don't want AI to replace people. Why have you guys chosen to take that stance as opposed to the 99.9% of the other companies out there who are, like, actively marketing? We're here to replace everybody.
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for. Thanks for that. Shout out. Here's the way we think about it. AI isn't. You know, you hear this buzzword a lot like, oh, AI is going to automate our jobs. It's going to do this or it's going to do that. Don't get me wrong. It genuinely feels magical when it works. But I think if someone's trying to sell you a product that you wouldn't buy without the phrase AI, you probably shouldn't buy it. Like, it's a. It's a valuable tool. It's a valuable. You know, resource. But that's not your goal, right? Your goal is not AI automates my job. Your goal is I can make this task that's really annoying for me or really hard for me easier.
And I think when people start to think about, you know, whether AI is going to automate their jobs away, you should have, you should basically think about, can AI make the decisions that a human makes and then take liability for those decisions? There's a reason why a shipper hires a broker. It's not because they can't find carriers themselves. It's also not because people haven't tried to build carrier marketplaces and whatnot.
Yeah.
It's because if hits the fan, your ass is on the line, that's why. And they trust you, not some sort of algorithm or whatever to, you know, solve the problem. And you know, I have no doubt that maybe 15 years from now, 20 years from now, I might reach some sort of singularity and we might be, it might get smarter than us and make better decisions. But you hire people because you trust people and you work with certain people because you have a good relationship with them, because they work well with you. And so as soon as someone starts saying, I'm going to replace the decision maker, I'm going to replace the relationship builder, I feel like that person's not serious.
It's one thing to say, hey, I'm gonna, you know, streamline operations, I'm going to make this particular task a lot easier for you so you spend less time on that. Totally different from saying, I'm going to replace your job.
Yeah, no, I'm right there with you. Right. And I look at it as, you know, like where I see the most value in tech in AI is more of like freeing up my time to focus on revenue generating activities. Right. To kind of help automate some of those steps that might bog down my day to day. But then most importantly though, it's to help remove my emotions from some decision making. And you know, because ultimately you, when you're out there making decisions in your business, you look at it from a personal standpoint. You don't necessarily look at it from a dollars and cents or a pure data driven decision, human element always comes into effect. So like, that's where I personally like a lot of that stuff because I really shoot from the hip on a lot of stuff, man. Like that.
That's just how I am, that's how I operate. But that's not how I need to approach every single situation and every single decision that I need to make because ultimately I'm going to make the wrong decision if I only go off of how I feel as opposed to what actually needs to be done to move the business forward.
Yeah, I mean that's like, that's really well said. At the end of the day, the emotion is actually why you make better decisions, right? That, that's the whole part of it. You can be empathetic, it's not dollars and cents and you can't really train it, at least not today. Thankfully not today. You can't really train an AI model to make, you know, to have empathy or to make empathetic decisions. You can give it heuristics like, you know what, I don't want that driver to be stuck there for six hours or you know, I want to make sure that they, you know, they get, you know, their payment on time and whatnot. But you can't, you know, those decisions are often case by case, those decisions are often based on the relationships that you've had, that you have built.
You don't work with people that are a holes on purpose. Right. Like those types of things, like you can't train a model to do. And that's the fundamentals around freight brokerage and around logistics in general is people work with good people, make the right decisions and make sure that, you know, when exceptions happen, when problems happen, someone is there to handle it.
Yeah, no, and I think that's exactly it, right, is ultimately you need somebody to, you know, I also look at it as like, it's that comfort that comes in when you know that somebody's there. Like I, I'll use airplanes as an example. They've essentially been flying themselves for 30 years, right through a lot of automation. But I'm never stepping on an airplane if there aren't two pilots in the cockpit, like ever in the entirety of my life. I just, and I feel like that is where a lot of things going to kind of come into play here. And I look at, you know, I had some conversations, I was just at the NMFDA Cyber Security conference on Monday and Tuesday this week.
And you know, I was talking to somebody about they work in the autonomous space and were talking about the full adoption of autonomous trucks out there and how like, I think it, you know, me personally, Chris Jolly thinks it's a long ways away because like, who's at fault when the technology fails and that autonomous vehicle hits and kills a family of four, right? And you know, and it's like, and it's also Removing the driver from the driver's seat, having them there as that in the event that technology fails. And this is where I feel like, you know, the proper leverage of technology comes in, where I feel like we're at a place in society where, you know, again, if a load's late or something like that, or there's an actual issue that happens, somebody needs to call somebody, right?
Like, they still want that interaction to come along with it. You can automate everything up until that point. But that's where like I'm always going to have that hard line in the sand in my companies is I'm never going to automate the customer experience or the carrier experience. And, and shippers and carriers and drivers, in my opinion, are customers of mine as a freight broker. So it's like I always want them to know that, hey, ultimately this is what, you know, you have that person to reach out to, but you know, driver details, all of that stuff. It is already technically automated. As soon as somebody sends you an email with driver information, phone number, everything else, you didn't have to physically call them.
So I feel like we've already adopted it a lot more, but I feel like it's more about curating your messaging around. Like, hey, this is actually to enhance the human's ability to do more because that, you know, as a Bootstrap founder myself, Dhruv, I need to turn $1 of revenue into $15 of return, right? Like, be able to make this work. And how do I amplify my capabilities in, you know, it's not always in the startup phase, but it's also, I look long term and I'm not going to be perfect. I'm going to make mistakes, I'm going to do all of that. But I also look like, how do I grow smart?
How do I know that if I'm going to hire 10 people, I'm hiring 10 people because I need 10 people, not I'm hiring 10 with the anticipation of laying off 50% of them if they don't work out, right? Like, I want to give my people the right tools to amplify their output. Because like, this is in. I've said this on record before. I'm going to continue to say this on record. I will never have cap commissions inside of my organization because I want my people, if they want to make $1 million a year, I want to give them the ability to make $1 million a year and not think, well, I made too much money. Now the company is going to claw back some of that. And I'm going to have to work more for less.
What you described, I think, is. Is exactly the way to start to think about AI just as another tool that empowers your, you know, your team to be as good as possible. Because when your team is successful, you're successful as a business owner. We think of drum kit as autopilot for your job. That doesn't mean you're hands off. Right. It means that you manage by exception. You can set it and forget it until you know something goes wrong. There's a reason why, despite us having pilots for. Or, excuse me, autopilot for 30 years, exactly as you said, you still have the pilot on the plane. And the pilot always takes the wheel when there's turbulence, pilot always takes the wheel when you know something's going on. And they also always, you know, take the.
Take the wheel when you have to land and take off. Because those are really critical decision points. And so I think. I think that's like the way we think about it. Give your team the tools, give your team the process. Give your teams, you know, the playbook, make it easier for them to execute on those. And then instead of handling 10 loads, they can handle 20 loads. And that's a lot more valuable to you than you basically trying to say, okay, I'm going to, you know, rip out my entire team and put in this AI model and it's just going to run its course and we'll see what happens. It's not. That's just not the point.
So how does this work, man? Are you guys integrating inside of a tms or are you guys, like, agnostic in the sense of, like, you can just be in any operating system, whether you use Outlook or Gmail. Kind of walk me through how does this go in there and how does that system actually operate?
Yeah, totally. We want to meet you where you are. And so at our core, we're actually an integrations company. We'll sit in your Outlook, your Gmail, even your front account, and pull in all of the information from different tools that you might use, whether it's a TMS like TI, Turbo, McLeod, whatever, whether it's a rating engine like green Screens, whether it's even an authentic carry identity tool like my carrier portal or Highway. We'll pull that information in right into that sidebar in your email so you never have to leave the real core operating system that you have, which is your inbox. That's where you get all your work done, and then everything syncs back with your system of Record, which is your tms. So all of that information goes back and forth with your tms.
We make sure that database is always up to date. That's really important because you use your TMS not necessarily to trigger and do all the workflows, but rather to manage your team, look at reports, figure out what's going on with all your shipments, P and L. All of that stuff often happens in your tms. So we want to make sure that if you're taking any actions that's in your inbox and if you're looking at any reporting, any metrics, that's, you know, that's in your tms. But at the end of the day I, you know, I want to as much as possible keep you where the action is, which is in your inbox, so that you can trigger everything through your, you know, the drum kit sidebar, whether that's quoting, load building, scheduling, or even tracking.
Okay, so is it more of like, it's just kind of, I don't want to call it an assistant, but it's just something behind the scenes that's helping you kind of manage your workflow to where you're like staying on top of your tasks. Right? Because I feel like that's a spot where a lot of people drove really bog themselves down is they spend too much time on menial tasks that don't necessarily move the needle forward or worst case scenario, they miss something, right? They miss a request from a customer or they miss an update on a load. Is that kind of, you know, in an add on with something like drum kit where it almost helps you stay on task. Right?
Because like dude, I, I write stuff down like I have some critical tasks that I have to follow every single day that might be, you know, meet with, you know, Christian who handles all of my media stuff, who, you know, it's that and then it's make sales calls. And so I do that. Is that kind of like what that looks like is it really helps with your workflow optimization as well?
Yeah, that's exactly right. Right. You didn't hire your team because they're good at typing things into a form, right? Like, or they know how to click on Retalix's, you know, whatever old looking, you know, scheduling portal. No offense, but like you hired them because they can make the decision on whether or not you can cover that freight effectively. And then when stuff goes wrong, they can, you know, figure out the solution. And so we want to take all of that kind of Stuff off your task. You know, I wouldn't even call it menial. Right. It's. It's just not needle moving and it's tedious and it's often boring. But it's important, it's critical. And if you drop the ball on any of that stuff, you can, you know, f up the entire load. And we really don't want to, you know.
You don't want to be in that position.
Yeah, no, I'm. I'm right there with you, man. Is. Is There's. There's a lot of stuff that I do throughout my. Throughout my week or my month or whatever that looks like. There's a lot of stuff that I do that is, like, it is the boring stuff to me. It's a lot of the stuff where I'm just like, I need to do it. Like, obviously I need to get paid and stuff like that. But it's like creating, sending, talking with my bookkeeper about invoices. And it's just a lot of collaboration with people that are involved in my organization. And to me, it's necessary, but I'm also like, shit, what can I do to automate some of this stuff out there? But then ultimately, though, it is to keep me focused on what I want to do the most. I love selling freight.
Like, ultimately, I love getting in with new business. I love develop. I love the build more than probably anything, man. I love that. Zero to. Hey, holy. We started this on a laptop, and now look what we got. And then, you know, same thing with some of those relationships with customers. I like really getting in and finding where we can really add value and kind of help their organization. That's what I love the most. Because, like, yeah, trucks showing up on time, delivering on time, all of that stuff's cool, right? Like, don't get me wrong, but I really love to just sink my hands into somebody else's operation and then use what I feel like I do best. And that's assess it, find out like, hey, this is where we can work best together.
And then I like to, like, toss it off, right, like that in the sense of, like, have an account manager run it. And that's where I'm like, looking forward to that kind of. That next step in business is like, I'm always going to be involved in the sales process, at least for the foreseeable future. And then that business development phase, and then kind of figure out all the kinks and then toss it to operations and then have an account manager run it, because I feel like I I did my part. That's the stuff that I love the most. And I don't know, man, like, that's just what. What gets me going every day.
I mean, you're. You're kicking. You're, you know, you're pointing out something really critical, which is that to run a good business, you need a good process. We were talking about this a little bit earlier, too, right? And process building is often the fun part, but keeping that process, like setting a good process, means making it simple, straightforward, and obvious what the next tasks are. It's really hard to do that if step one bogs you down and then you don't have time for step two, or you forget about step two or whatever it is. And so that's, I think, where having a tool like ours really helps you set those processes, really helps you say, okay, cool, like, first I got to do this, then I got to do that, then I got to fill out this form.
And none of those things take a long time. All of it is really easy to do. And so I can just kind of stay in the rhythm of, you know, doing my work as opposed to, you know, getting stuck in just doing a task. So I, like, I think as a business owner myself, like, we think of it as if I can build a process and get the right sets of tools around that process, then I don't have to think about it anymore because I can just set it and forget it, and someone else can take it off my plate, learn it quickly, and just run it. And that's. It's hard to do, man. It's really hard to do.
Yeah. And I. I mean, honestly, man, I'm glad you brought up processes, because as somebody who doesn't write down, like, I don't write anything down. This is where I see a tool like drum kit or, you know, AI out there helping other individuals like me who are in that growth stage, we'll call it that zero to $2 million a year revenue, where you're kind of figuring things out, right? Because contrary to what the Internet says, there isn't a playbook in systems and processes just developed because you started a business, right? Like, you have to document all of this on your own. And I think tools now out there help you expedite that, right? Where you're not taking nights and weekends and trying to write processes down. Now it's like, so like, we use. We use a transcriber for our. For the podcast, right?
So it goes in there. It strips out everything you and I are saying right now as soon as this is done, we transcribe the entire episode and we put show notes out there and everything for everything to follow. We've also done something like that for a lot of our training and stuff like that internally inside of our freight brokerage, where, dude, we could hire 10 people tomorrow. If the revenue was there, we could hire 10 people tomorrow. And we already have their first two weeks of training documented. And we have processes that they can follow inside of their business. And ultimately, if you're, you know, whatever somebody wants to do in their company long term, ultimately that's what people are actually buying, right?
Yes, they're buying your product, but they are buying your systems and processes that they can take and scale it up even higher.
Yep. At the end of the day, they're buying your service. And your service quality is contingent either on, you know, one individual person being really good at their job or collectively you being really good at your job. And the only way for you to collectively be good at your job is everybody has the right process and place. Yeah, and it's hard, man. Like, it's very easy for one, you know, one chain to break. And you're always. You're always as strong as your weakest link. Whether that's part of process or whether that's. Someone didn't get trained properly, doesn't understand what's going on. It can go both ways. And I think, you know, it's. It's not just our tool. There's a lot of. There's a lot of tools out there that have started to smooth that process out. Like, AI is. What is AI?
Like, AI is basically just like matrix math that calculates out correlations between different data sets. If it sees this, then it's probably associated with this. It's just a big probability problem. It's just statistics at the end of the day. And it's kind of the same way that we make correlations in our head. Like, we're always pattern matching to try to figure out what's going on next and how do. Okay, if I'm in this situation where, I don't know, someone got into an accident or something like that, what have I done in the past? What is experience in the past to do that? Most people, especially when they're starting off or even someone experienced, might come across a problem they've never seen before. And in those situations, that's where you lean on the process. That's where you lean on. Okay, cool.
Like, as company policy, if there's an accident, then, you know, first I got to Call Chris to let him know. And then, you know, I got to document it somewhere, and then I got to call the driver or whatever you have to do, right? That's. That's crucial, man. And it's really hard. It's really hard to document and set those up. But a lot of these big companies, like, honestly, some of them have really good services and processes, and a lot of them delegate them out to different teams or they don't have anything at all, and they've just gotten lucky. And so I think, you know, as a small business owner, if you're, you know, trying to figure it all out, like, people in the largest. At the largest companies have not figured it out either, so don't beat yourself up for that.
I. I look at it like this, Drew. I was actually talking to a buddy of mine this morning, and I. I said, there's two types of people in this world. There's the people who will openly admit that they don't know what the hell that they're doing, and they're just trying to figure it out every day. And then there's the people who are lying, because ultimately, that's what it boils down to, man. Nobody actually knows what they're doing. We think we do, and we're just trying to figure it out every single day. But ultimately, though, I feel like that, like, as AI and other tools advance out there, it helps you operate with a little bit more calm, I'll call it. Right.
Because, you know, once you go through a shitty situation in business, because ultimately it's gonna happen, if it hasn't happened yet, you're not trying. You're gonna go through a shitty situation. And then what you can do is look at it as. This is a way for you to know what to do next time. You can learn from it, document it, and then you have a process to follow when it happens again or if it happens in a different iteration. And, you know, I was actually. I was speaking at datcon last week, and I was talking about building a, you know, a successful sales team. And I asked a question. I'm like, how many people in this room right now have a fear of taking a vacation? Because you don't think the people backing you up know what to do?
Literally almost everybody in that room raised their hand, and I'm like, you can literally do this now with a tool. And I use the. The transcriber tool that I had talked about. I'm like, just record yourself for a day. That gives them notes to follow and everything else. And that's what it is, man, is people. You, you have those fears that you don't know if people are going to know what to do because you don't document anything because there isn't an actual process. You're going off of that tribal knowledge, which is great. Don't get me wrong. Tribal knowledge is phenomenal, but it's not if it's only inside of your head and nobody else knows what to do.
In certain situations, ultimately it all comes down to trust. Do I trust my team? Do I trust myself in a given situation? Do I trust the tools that I have? And I think what you described is. It's a sad, it's the sad reality that we don't. We don't invest in trust building because we're so bogged down by the day to day. We're so bogged down by the work that we have to do all day. We don't invest in trust. And I'm guilty of this as much as the next guy, right? Like, if I were to take a day off tomorrow, like. But we had set up processes on. Okay, cool. Like, if, you know, we have this engineering challenge, then this person's responsible and, you know, it's got to be, here's all the documentation on how to fix that.
Or, you know, if we have this customer reach out for these questions, we want to reach out to a prospect. Here's what you got to do. You have those playbooks set out and you have the right people to own those relationships. I should be able to take a day off. But because we haven't invested in those processes or because we don't trust that we've done that ourselves, it's hard to do it. And so you got to invest in that trust building process. And I'm just as guilty as the next dude.
I love it. Dhruv. That. That's going to be it. Man. This flew by. I knew it was going to fly by, man, because you're just, you're really easy to talk to and you're, you know what it is you're talking about. And you're clearly articulating everything that you guys are doing at Drum Kit. And that's what stuck out to me since, like the first time we met a couple weeks back. But how does anybody reach out to you to find out more about maybe AI Drum Kit or anything you got going on?
Yeah, easiest place to find me is LinkedIn or hi @Drum Kit. AI Chris. This has been so fun. I didn't even realize it's been 30 minutes.
No, it's all good, man. And if for some reason you guys can't find Dhruv, hit me up. I will gladly put you guys in contact with them. But that's going to be it for today. Tomorrow we got a guest coming on. We're doing our financial Friday monthly segment that we got with my friends over at Denim, you guys. But that's going to be it. As always, if you guys got value in what you heard, subscribe to the show. You guys share it out there to your network. Because if you see value, your network's going to see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys. And we'll be talking to you soon. See, I could use.