Came back with a bank window down yelling now money anything hey oh got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when I'm get to the back hey Got the foot on the gas pedal to the metal when the lane moving fast hey Let them all cross if they hate then let them made them make a bigger boss.
Hey 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. And that's exactly what we're going to do today. So I'm going to save the rest of the normal intro. You guys know what to do from here. I got a very special guest who's going to break all of this down. I'm really excited to have him on. So we are going to skip right into it. I got Mr. Ryan Joyce with Genlogs on the show, ladies and gentlemen. Ryan, thank you so much for joining me here.
Chris, thanks for having me, man. I was listening to some of your back episodes over the weekend and I'm amazed, like, I don't know who you haven't interviewed in the industry. So it's great to meet you. It's great to be on. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Yeah, man, it's been wild. It's coming up on five years of doing this podcast and you know, for me it's one of those things where I just, like, I keep an open mind with everything. I just love to learn. I know things are going to change. I'm not, I've been in trucking my whole life. But like, I'm not that old school. Oh, this is the way we've always done things. Like, I'm always trying to stay ahead of the curve here as I grow and scale my business out there. And you know, networking is something that I sucked at for a very long time. And what I found is, you know, through content, social media and where everything has trended it for a while now and is trending.
I, I think it's the best way to just to kind of get to know people and have them come out there.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And as someone who's new to the industry, I've really appreciated that people are super open to networking, super open to learning about new people, thoughts, ideas and technology in the industry. So it's been awesome. Thanks for having me on.
No man, absolutely. So. So Ryan, let's talk about that. You said you're relatively new to the industry. Well, how'd you get your start in freight, man? Like what brought you in here?
Yeah, you know the subtitle on Genlogs is the Freight Intelligence platform and I do not have a background in freight, so I'm actually consuming your podcast and others to get up to speed because frankly, I've never done the day in the life of a broker. I've never done carrier sales calls until recently when I started to do them to test some of what we're doing at Gen Logs. But I'm just learning all the time my background is on the intelligence side. So kind of going back in time and I'll just give you the quick synopsis. I was growing up all moving all over abroad. My father was a fighter pilot in the Navy and he ended up as his tour at the Pentagon right outside of Washington D.C.
That's where I was living as a senior in high school at the time, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when the plane literally hit right underneath his office and he was blown back, almost completely incinerated. He got out of the office just in time before the entire floor collapsed in the inferno. And I didn't really care about anything other than playing basketball and flirting with girls up until that time. And in that moment, everything changed for me. And I decided when I went to bed that night, I decided I was going to do everything in my power to learn about the history, culture, language and religion of the people that did that and make sure it never happened again. So fast forward a few years later, I ended up studying abroad in the Middle East.
I learned Arabic, and a few years later I ended up joining the US Intelligence community and specifically found myself eventually at the CIA, where I was conducting counterterrorism operations throughout the Middle east and the globe. And that's when I cut my teeth on the intelligence side. And what I my job there was to actually recruit sources inside of Al Qaeda and ISIS to give us information. But before we could truly trust that information, we had to validate it. So we would look at like, hey, they told us this. What are we seeing from other sensors, satellites, or maybe hearing from other sources? And we bring all of that together and then we'd say, can we trust this? Okay, we can, because it's what they're telling us resonates with what we're seeing elsewhere.
Then we could act to that information to stop the next 911 attack from happening. Fast forward to like I end up deciding I'm going to leave the government around 2020, this is the height of COVID and what do we see? We saw supply chains at a crisis with ships stacked off the coast of Long beach and all the above as we know now. And a lot of demand coming in, frankly, not a ton of capacity. When capacity flooded in, so did the fraudsters. And there was a, there was just a part of me observing what was happening. I started to chat with people in the industry and I was like, holy cow, I see what's happening. There's a lack of data to really understand what is fact from fiction. Does this fraudulent actor on a load board actually have assets?
Are they out there in the roads every day? And I figured, you know, I actually have the background to help solve this as well as my co founders kind of apply counterterrorism methods to what's happening on the roads. And that's what, that's how GenLogs was formed. That's the intelligent side of how we're applying two decades of the global war and terror against what's happening in terms of the fraudsters in this industry. And we're driving better insights every day so that Freight brokers, primarily 3pls can both find the right carriers, trusted carriers directly, without having to go through load boards or otherwise where they might be subjected to fraud, but then also understand more about their customers, what their lanes are, needs, backhaul opportunities that are out there. That's what GenLogs is, the freight intelligence platform.
Now a, you clearly have the most interesting background of any of the guests that I've ever had just based on everything that you just described right there. But you are in my opinion, taking angle that I have yet to see inside of there because I'm, you know, again, I've been in trucking for the overwhelming majority of my. I have heard about organized crime and transportation back since the 70s when my dad started driving trucks. Like to me nothing is a surprise with like when a lot, when I see a lot of this stuff coming out of my guys, this shit's been going on for ever here. You know, why has nobody ever brought this up and what you're talking about now?
And one thing that you see and again I'm not saying that terrorists are in trucking or anything like that, but what you're seeing now with a lot of the overseas call centers and data centers that are out there's a lot of stuff that's coming in and if you can infiltrate the supply chain. What else can you infiltrate at that time? Right? So, again, I want to be abundantly clear. I'm not saying there's terrorists in trucking, but when we're talking about global supply chains and bad actors being all over the world now, it is now a global threat.
And if you're going to sit here and tell me that people aren't looking to how to see how they can infiltrate the supply chain, you are not somebody who I want to have a conversation with, because you're clearly not using your head and thinking, because what is the first thing you do? I mean, again, I'm a history buff here. What's the first thing most people do? They cut off the supply chain. All right, that is the literal first thing you do in an act of war to suffocate people. But again, that might not be where you're going with a lot of this, Ryan. But that's just where my head goes when I hear a lot of this stuff.
You know, if I can chime in there, I agree with you fully, Chris. Like, 99% of those that are out there driving, you know, trucks on the roads are amazing humans that we really want to keep the bad actors out so the good guys can flourish. And that's really the mission at Genlogs, is for those that are doing great work every single day running, you know, those line hauls, we want to make sure that the spotlights cast on them is, hey, this is a great carrier running this lane here. Find them right directly. Instead of posting a load kind of lazily to a load board, we can give you the direct hook up there. And that's really where it comes down to is we want to keep the bad actors out so the good guys can flourish. I also agree with you, though.
I mean, we're seeing what's happening on the tariffs front with Canada and Mexico. The justification at least behind that is, hey, there's fentanyl coming into the United States. There's a flow. We need to stop it. And unfortunately, there are bad actors that are trying to, you know, bring some of that illicit substances over the. The borders as well. You know, our supply chains, they. They seem to like. I think if you're an outsider, as I was, I never stopped to think about how food got on the table, how the clothes I was wearing, how any of the furniture I was sitting on got there. And you realize just how vulnerable we could be if those supply chains are put at risk.
And so that's really, like, the background that we like to bring to the table is using data coming in from proprietary sensors that we're putting out there, a whole bunch of disparate data sources and tying it together so you can have a comprehensive and ubiquitous picture of what's actually happening on the roadways on a daily basis.
No, man, I love that. And as of like 30 minutes ago, there was breaking news that Trump removed or paused the tariffs in Mexico for 30 or 25 days or 30 days due to the fact that Mexico had agreed to send 10,000 troops to the border. So again, I'm like, that's why I don't like to talk too far in advance on a lot of like catchy headlines. Because his actions to this point, I'm not going to say that this is what the moment is our long term, but his actions to this point have been to combat just that, what you're saying. And then this pause of potential tariffs down to Mexico just proves that to that point. Right. So again, I don't put out content for headlines.
I usually like to wait for things to kind of roll out before I go out and publicly comment. But you know, a lot of what you're saying there, man, the only way to fight fraud, I have said this numerous, Thomas, on this show. The only way to fight fraud is to do what you're describing right there. And that is to utilize in network carriers that you have worked with time and time again. I also, as a freight broker, think of it as the most profitable way long term, as a freight broker to operate. Because, yeah, there's going to be some ebbs and there's going to be some flows that are out there.
But if you've ever developed a book of business in this industry, you know how hard and long it takes to build a book of business of substance with customers that you can grow and scale with long term. And why would you go out there to a load board? And I, I understand the values in load boards. I'm not here to knock on load boards. But why would you go out there every single time and risk that freight for that customer to put it out there to somebody who you've never worked with before? And that's one thing that I've done, I don't want to say every day of my career because I'm a human being and but like for the overwhelming majority of my career, that is how were trained.
Use in network carriers, call them first, get them on loads and work with them and then reuse them as a startup operation that we're doing right now. Yes, we're an agent with SPI Logistics, but it's just my business partner and I, we're trying to go out there and build and scale, but we're also trying to do it from a, you know, stay as lean as we possibly can. And that's us limiting our time going out there and sourcing capacity. We already have a carrier base built up. Why aren't you just calling them first? And it's always going to boil down to money. To me, Ryan, that's what most people want to do. They want to save 50 bucks. But what they don't realize is the amount of time you spend trying to source a carrier, have them fall off, source a new carrier.
You've already 10x that $50 that you're trying to save and it is now a 500 dol on your P and L with time spent.
Yeah, not to mention the fact that, you know, if 1 in X number of loads end up being, you know, fraudulent or stolen, then all of that, you know, has to be applied against all of the loads that you did source that way. I think one of the craziest statistics that just smacked me in the face was that 50% of carriers that are onboarded to a brokerage will only be used for one load and then it kind of trails off. I think it's like by the time you get to a carrier that's actually carried a dozen or more loads for a brokerage, it's only about 10% of carriers that have been onboarded. And that carrier utilization rate just is where there's frankly a lot of relationship. And like that's where a lot of the ROI can come over time is by developing.
And I get it, like the more I've chatted with carrier sales reps, the more I realized that yeah, but it's tough and you might spend the first few hours of your day reviewing truck lists or calling your preferred carriers, your in network carriers saying hey, where are you today? Where do you have trucks? What type of equipment do you have with the trucks? That's exactly why genlogs exists. We now have the ability to take your entire network onboard it onto our platform and then find daily where all of your carriers are and match those to the loads that you have to cover.
And so we could tell you exactly that if you got to move a load here's a carrier that's either in the area now or headed to that area, likely to be dropping soon, and give you that intelligence without you having to pull it we are pushing it towards you.
Yeah. And that is something, you know, what you're describing right there, that is something that I think is where people need to be looking. Right. It's that for me, it's like, you know, again, back to data analytics. What is that? Predictive analytics that are out there? How do we know is there going to be trucks going into that network or that area and can you get them on your freight? Because I think a lot of people, Ryan, are operating in an environment so far where it's kind of been a broker environment for the last four years now. They've never struggled to find capacity. They've never had to do what we're describing right here because there's been an abundance of trucks. Well, you know, if you went to high school, you've probably heard about economics, supply and demand.
And that is what we're about to embark upon here in the next. I don't know when it's going to happen. I'm not going to be bold and be like, oh, it's going to happen this year. Nobody actually knows when it's going to happen, but it will happen. That is the next iteration of a prototypical freight market and that's what we're going to be faced with. And there are going to be a lot of people who are now not going to know how to source capacity because they're going to hit post on that load board and no phone calls are going to come in and they're not going to know what to do.
Yeah, fully agree with you, Chris. And this is where we're trying to make the future proofed platform for brokers here that as the market inevitably will swing, you now not only have access to capacity, but know where that capacity is in a way that you have the advantage over others in the market. And you know, frankly, that's why you're bringing that service to your customers is because you're going to know that. I'll give you a statistic from the GenLog side is we looked at over the last like few months since November to the present, how many FMCSA inspections have actually gone down and over how many carriers.
And it turns out that GenLogs has not only seen twice the amount of carriers on the roads compared to what FMCSA has actually inspected, but we have 13,000 carriers that we've observed on the roads that have never had an FMCSA inspection. Many of them have had their authority for over 12, 18 months and just have never been inspected. An absolute opportunity Once the market starts to get tight and capacity is at a premium, we can bring online all of these other carriers that other tech platforms that are relying really heavily on FMCSA data aren't going to be able to even surface. And we're going to be able to actually drive potential changes in compliance for brokerages by understanding that, hey, this is a real carrier with assets.
They've been running this lane for the last, you know, two years and they've been running it for, let's say, you know, certain shippers that we are seeing with their equipment attached or whatever it might be to really get a better sense of who are these carriers, how trustworthy are they and then be able to move forward to find that capacity when it's going to be really tough soon.
Yeah, no, I mean, I personally think this is Chris Jolly's opinion only that the FMCSA is the biggest issue in what we're being faced with due to outdated technology, vetting all of that stuff that's going on out there. Because I mean, otherwise if they weren't there would. There would no, there would be no carrier or multiple carriers, let alone 800 different carriers that are able to register at the exact same address in Wyoming, California. There's a bunch of hotspots out there. We don't need to go into that. But again, I, I look at it as, you know, that is one thing that I really hope Sean Duffy is it hears the transportation community talking about because ultimately who does suffer are the carriers that you're trying to protect, Ryan, ultimately, and it's the ones who are doing the right thing.
I personally think that is why there is fluctuations in freight markets that are as large as they are at times is due to the influx of, you know, bad actors and fraudulent actors that are out there. And then to curb that with advancements of technology and everything else now you can robo dial, have an AI bot call in 900 brokers at a time. Who's not going to say that they're all going to take that and then double broker it out again? I'm not trying to say that's what's going on, but like there needs to be some steps in place here to improve the barrier to entry into this industry. And then how do we approach an environment where, hey, like these guys are legit, these are the only carriers you need to work with. They move this lane 12 months out of the year.
And that is where. That's where I'm a massive fan of where technology is heading because Ultimately, those are the ones that suffer the most. The ones who get put out of business when a air quote $5,000 revenue load never comes their way because it was a double broker. And then nobody's answering and then they don't have the cash flow to sustain another 30 days. And that happens probably more times than not. And that ultimately is who I'm looking out for. Because, you know, yeah, my dad was an owner operator. He had. But like that's 90 some percent of the industry is 10 truck or less operations. And I want to see the industry come together to protect them from that style of exposure.
Because contrary to what the Internet talks about, not every small business has the resources to even know about a lot of this. A lot. Statistically, the. I think it's like 90% of small businesses are 30 days from going out of business every single month across the board.
Yeah. And I absolutely feel as a fellow entrepreneur, for those that built their own business, owner, operators or otherwise, the fact that a, I mean we've seen this a few times, that you'll have an owner operator out there, single truck, running lanes, doing God's work, Great work. And someone else will impersonate them by slapping the DOT placard on the side to go steal the. And then all of a sudden that freight guard report goes in on that great owner operator just because someone else slapped their MC on the side and then their entire business and likelihoods at risk. And that breaks my heart. And that is exactly why GenLogs is investing millions of dollars this year to expand our sensor network along major interstates and highways so that we can differentiate the chaff from the wheat here.
We can say these are the good ones and it's clear that they're running it all the time. These are the ones that are impersonating them or otherwise don't even have assets out there and are bidding on freight. And at the core, that's what makes genlogs a little bit different is we are spending millions of dollars to put actual hardware sensors along major interstates, freight lanes and highways, collecting 24,7 on every passing truck and piece of equipment, and then using AI at the edge and back in the cloud to pull every data point that you can see, visibly observe or sense about those trucks passing by to get a really solid sense of what patterns look like over time.
So you're talking about millions of dollars of investment coming up here. Does this happen to come from the little announcement that was made this morning on that?
It certainly does, yeah. So this morning we announced that we have closed our series A funding round that was $14.6 million led by Venrock and Hoff Capital. We're super thrilled. Over the last year, the genlocks team has absolutely put in the work and done hard things. They've deployed hundreds of cameras along all of these interstates already collecting the data and we've seen enough fruit in that. We've seen, you know, double brokers prevented from being onboarded or assigned freight. We've seen stolen loads recovered. In fact, last November we announced that we would investigate and help recover all stolen and missing equipment for the entire industry for free. So if you are an owner operator, you're at a truck stop, you come out, your rig's gone, a trailer was stolen from a lot, whatever it might be, we will go track it down.
We have former intelligence officials and operatives that are our investigations team. They will go find that out in the wild, contact law enforcement, try to get it back in your hands. So you get up running and you will pay nothing. And, and so we're moving beyond that, taking more of sensors both in the US and expansion into Mexico and also closer from we used to be solely at the middle mile. Now we're going closer to first and last mile. Think intermodal ramps, ports, and just providing more data and intelligence on what's actually moving on the roads.
So how is an owner operator able to contact you via that? Right, because I'm thinking maybe they're the. Maybe their equipment didn't get stolen, Ryan, but they are the victim of a double brokered situation. How do they. And you know, in starting an investigation on that, again, like we're talking, they might not have time to sustain the loss of capital that comes along with this here. If it's just they're the victim of a double broker, are they able to contact you guys at that time to try and find out like, hey, how do we at least get a start on this?
Absolutely. We want to make sure that we have the most accurate information. And so if people have been wrongly accused, caught up in any type of double brokering situation, they can contact us through our website as well. Genlogs.I o g e n l o g s IO upper right. If you did have an asset missing, you can say, hey, I've lost an asset and you can just report that, we'll track it down. Otherwise you can send us an email, contactenlogs IO and we'll do our best to get to the bottom of the situation. If we did see someone Take a load. Impersonating you, we will see across our sensor network. Who was that?
We'll then work with law enforcement to resolve that and ideally over time be able to exonerate some of those that have lost their business or their livelihood in the short term due to some of these situations.
I think that's phenomenal and that's, you know, these are the tools that I think need to be screamed about from the mountaintop essentially is what really needs to happen here, man. Because ultimately it's about protecting, I mean for me, man, it's about protecting that American dream, right? Like there are so many people that come out here and trucking is one of those avenues in my opinion where you know what, you don't need a four year degree, you don't need to, you know, post, you know, doctorate or anything like that. You can come out and through some serious sweat equity, build up a sustainable business that is multi generational. And you know, I've had guests on the show from my, you know, that are multi generation trucking company owners.
You know, I just had a guest on my show a couple weeks back where he goes around the country, goes on site and sees these companies and interviews the family legacies that are out there. And I think like that's what a lot of individuals are trying to do is they're trying to get out there and build that up. And I love seeing this though. I love to see that there are some protections that are being put in place because again, it's easy to sit on the Internet and put posts out there thinking that, you know, everything until you're going through a lot of these situations and unfortunately, and sometimes it's too late, you know, and that's what I'm doing. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this continues to grow and scale out there, man.
And so like, what's something, you know, I know we got to be, you know, conscious of your time here and we only got a couple minutes left here, man. But like, what's something that you guys are really looking and looking forward to this year? Is it the deployment of more sensors across the United States? What is something next for you guys here?
Yeah, I'll put kind of three things out for you that we're really excited. One, you nailed it. More sensors out in the United States. More sensors first and last mile. More sensors expanding now into Mexico and Canada. That's where we're driving this year that's going to give more data. To date we've collected over a billion Data points on trucks on the roads over the last few months when FMCSA has only inspected about 136,000 unique trucks. We've done about 505,500 million trucks we've observed on the road. So like there's more data, it's gonna better insights. That's number one. Number two, we have some big partnerships that we're going to be announcing this week and over the subsequent months. One, one of your sponsors that I see up there. So I like, I won't fully reveal one of those four but we're excited about that.
We got a few sponsor partnerships that we're going to be announcing this week and then number three is we are expanding the type of insights that we're going to be able to provide to our customers over the next few months. At the end of this week we're going to be unveiling our intermodal Insights, that tool and feature in our platform. That means you can look in a specific market as you're prospecting for shippers and find every shipper that has drayage volume to and from ramps, intermodal rail ramps and understand which intermodal rail ramps at and how much of the overall truck volume coming in and out of that shipper is intermodal in nature. Soon after we're going to be expanding to ports on that front too and then flagging LTL for all of the shippers in America as well.
Who has LTL freight and what does that look like too? So those are some of the insights that we're driving soon. The end of the day any broker that's on our platform should see ROI in very short order. We had a, we had a customer that just signed at the end of their risk free 30 day trial that we offer anyone so you can come book a demo get that. They saw within 30 days they saw 150% ROI for the entire annual price that were going to charge them in that first 30 days. That's what we love to see from our customers.
Dude, let's go. Ryan, I appreciate your time man. I'm pumped up after listening to this, you know and just being here. I can tell you're passionate about your product. I interview a lot of people. You're, you're up there man. For some of the ones who are very passionate about what they're doing. How does everybody reach out to you guys to find out more about what you got going on at Genlo Logs?
Yeah, please do check out the website Genlogs G E N L O G S IO we just released a little post today about our Series A that you'll find there on our blog side. But you can also book a demo. That's really where it all starts. We will be like, it's a live demo. When I say live, we do nothing. That is canned. You can be like, hey, I want to see carriers on this lane. We'll put up for you. Now I want to see carriers that have cattle haulers. If that's what you do or you care about, we'll find you cattle haulers on that lane. Because we have so much data that can do that. We will do live demo on the spot. We'll send you the data right afterwards for free.
If you never become a customer, we're going to help you source carriers or shippers on certain lanes. But if you do want to get on our platform, you get 30 days risk free to try it out. If you walk away, so be it. To date, no one's walked away. Once they get in their hands, they never want to let it leave and they see the ROI right away.
Dude, I love it. Ryan, thank you so much for your time today. If you guys can't find Ryan or gen logs, hit me up. I will gladly put you guys in contact with them but that's going to be it for today, ladies and gentlemen. We will be back tomorrow. We got more guests coming in. As always, if you guys got value in what you heard, subscribe to the show. If you're feeling really ambitious, which you should be after hearing this, rank the show on itunes and Spotify because if you saw value, that's how your network's going to be able to see it and see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys and we'll be talking to you soon. Dude, let's go.