Ep. #11: Bill Driegert

Obviously , I'm very thankful for my family and everything that they've given to me this year , but I want to call out two very specific people in my life , and those are my grandparents , my grandfathers in particular .

This podcast feels like a convergence of some skills that I got from each one of them , and so something I'll share and part of my logistics background is one of my grandfathers on my mom's side grew up as a basically produce picker in Central California , picking lettuce , picking tomatoes and got fired from that job for eating the produce , and so he did not last

long in that space but , you know , went through Forklift driver .

He was actually a big , rigged driver , drove semis , flatbeds actually , so would be in hot demand at these days , right , and then kind of spent the next 15 years as a mechanic on big rigs , and so I kind of had this in my blood , didn't know that when I was getting into logistics and transportation space , but that was something that I think about a lot now

and all along the way he was building his little empire you know residential real estate and it's something that I aspire towards and something I look up to .

On the other side , my dad's dad , grandpa Fred , he was a professional piano player , he was an extra in a few movies , he recorded an album , and so I think that's where I get this urge for the podcast entertainment phase .

So I just feel like this , the world , the universe , has combined these two components of my life together , and this is kind of like an ode , a thanks to what they did and how they help set me up for success . So how about you , andrew ? Where are you at ? That was good , thank you , spent a lot of time on that .

Writing these emails until you know midnight in some cases , and it was a really just an enjoyable , almost therapeutic thing for me to feel like that was my way of giving back to my team . I don't have that team anymore , so I don't think I'll be sending any emails this week , but we're on a team .

But you know , I think first and foremost I'm grateful beyond measure for my fiancee , who has , you know , rode this journey with me from , you know , obviously getting fired from from the business I was a part of building and the depression that followed and has just kind of pulled me out of that and really just pushed me and pushed me , and this podcast won't

exist if it weren't for her . She has been just the catalyst for , for my drive to get out of that . So I'm extremely grateful for her . My family , my parents , especially my dad , marianne I mean they've , they've just been phenomenal support system for me and pushed me all along the way . My brothers , my sister , my older brothers especially .

I mean just my whole family . So and finally , my dog Bandit . I mean I've learned more about unconditional love from him than anything else and when you don't have a job and you spend a lot of time , I have this job that I spend a few hours a week doing , but I'm just with him all the time .

He's sitting behind me right now and it's like I love him and I love my family and just everything . So I'm grateful , I'm appreciative and it's going to be great Thanksgiving . Thankfully , the bears don't play , so I don't have to watch them lose .

We should be doing this year round , every week , every day . I think sometimes in our day to day lives we kind of forget about those sorts of things . So let's be deliberate about it and let's have a good holiday and let's get into it . Who do we have today , andrew ?

So , having bought Convoy's Tech and with all of that , I mean we could have spent a week talking a little about this stuff and maybe wouldn't have even gotten to the depth that we want to . So we did our best here and I hope you all enjoy it . It's a great episode , I think , and without further ado , let's get it going .

He eventually joined PepsiCo as a solutions architect , where it was for five years , and I think he spent some time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while there , which is a very interesting part of his story we'll dive into . He then joined a company that at the time was very small .

He was the fourth member of Coyote Logistics , where he spent nine years , eventually being the chief innovation officer . From there , he joined the team at Amazon as director of planning and innovation for two years , before a brief stint at a company called Pillow Homes , which I have a little bit of familiarity with .

He spent some time as an advisor at Otto before coming on early at Uber Freight as head of operations and a co-founder . You spent seven years there before his most recent endeavor , joining Flexport as EVP and head of North America . So an illustrious , long career at some very interesting companies in the space . We're going to do our best to tackle all of it .

Welcome to the Freight pod , bill . Thanks for having me .

How did you fall into that ? How did that come about ?

The other notable alumnus was Chris Pickett , who also went on to Coyote , and I do think Jeff , while there already had in mind that he was going to start another company , he talked about it , but also that he was there to do some recruiting because he definitely was convincing us as to why Brokerage was an interesting space .

And he actually brought in John Weehoff from CH Robinson at one point , I think Chad Lindblum as well , and they gave a presentation on CH Robinson and I think the entire purpose of that for Jeff was to convince us why Brokerage is so backwards and why there's so much opportunity and why we should get into Brokerage .

Because afterwards he was like see , see how much opportunity there is , isn't this interesting ? It's like OK , so at the time , jeff , it's like my non-compete runs out in 2006 . Give me a call , I'll probably start something

up . At that point and through that whole period Jeff had actually been working on the . He had this slide deck . It was like an 80-page slide deck of Bazooka . It was like all of the screens of Bazooka . He'd been just working this idea the whole time that he was in his non-compete .

So I had kept in touch with Jeff and I happened to be commuting into Chicago for Pepsi at the time and we had kind of kept infrequent contact . But April 2006 , I reached out and said are you still planning on doing this thing , coyote ? And he said , yeah , we're going to start a software company , we're going to build this platform , bazooka .

He sent me to hold this deck . I still have it . It's amazing because it's like it is . It's probably 70% accurate how Bazooka ended up in terms of the screens . He said , yeah , we're going to start this company , we're going to build a software platform for Brokers . And he had hired three developers .

It was Joe Calode , john Nowak and Preddrag , and Joe's actually still at Coyote , longest-tenured employer there . And I came on and originally I was coding because my background I'd actually been in a technical role at Pepsi and do some coding . And so Gainan did some coding and then went with Jeff .

We did some sales and then also tried to learn the brokerage business . So he had me actually sit down with Ben Green at Strive because that was one of the early customers we were talking to to potentially sell Bazooka , and I sat down on the floor and started just trying to book freight , and that was my introduction to Frey Brokerage .

But the vision of being just a software company it's actually interesting how Jeff's kind of come full circle with Mastery , because Mastery is closer to that original vision of what he wanted to do with Bazooka .

I think at the time , though , the market wasn't quite ready or mature enough for it , because there just wasn't going to be enough time for how Jeff was thinking about this product . I also think , if you look at it in retrospect , the Chicago model had yet really seeded the whole market .

It's really like Coyote and Command kind of put the stamp on it that this is the model in terms of how you build a broker . And so Jeff had really he had that idea and grained in Bazooka , but it really it wasn't . There wasn't a lot of receptive , there weren't that many brokers that actually most of them are still Cradle Grave .

So I remember going talking to some of these brokers and they were kind of just they wanted to cradle the Grave solution . They didn't really want the carrier account management split . So we spent about four months going down that path before Jeff pivoted and said you know what , we should just build a broker behind this .

And I think the spark of that was actually we installed , there was a deal with a company called E-Globe Logistics in France . Jeff went over there and we actually that was the first implementation of Bazooka was this company in France which we eventually acquired came Coyote Logistics Europe . That was the spark of like you know what I really just I'm a broker .

It was , and it was onwards from up , upwards from there and we brought in Mark Ford and we brought in Chris Pickett around the same time and that was that . But yeah , it was , jeff pulled me into logistics and it gives context Like my role at Pepsi was probably closer to like what you would call a data scientist today , like they don't have that today .

So I was going from a very technical role and I remember my manager being like you really want to go into trucking , like truckload is what you want to do .

I'd have to go back and look , but I think it was only the third year that they had offered this program and back then it was called the masters of logistics . Today it's the masters of supply chain management and it's under the center for transportation and logistics and that's Chris Kaplus runs that center for transportation logistics and he came in .

He wasn't there when we were there , he came in a little bit after .

What was it like to convince people outside of the industry with a different type of caliber of education to come into it , and how did that give you an advantage going into starting the Coyote brokerage ?

Regardless of where it was and I think you're right , it was not a sexy space and that was the perception externally and I think what made it ultimately interesting is just the size of the opportunity and the complexity of the problems .

For me , I think my whole career in the space has really been just the interest in the problems because they're so unique and it's distinct .

I've always been , I think , motivated by problems in the physical world , where you're dealing with real things but you can solve it through technology , and also the fact that this was an industry that there just hadn't been a lot of technology investment and I think that's what really blew up through this last investment cycle was just , I think , more and more

people realizing okay , this space , the technology is just not advanced . I do think one of the realizations that we're seeing now is also that this industry can only absorb technology so fast as well , it's a fairly conservative industry but yeah , I think it's just the size and the opportunity that I think ultimately pulled people into the space .

I can't imagine how many slide decks there are . Talking about $800 billion industry or $900 billion like you see different numbers in everyone . $900 billion industry with high fragmentation and brokers are making I've seen decks ever from my 18% to 30% margins . That's the opportunity . I think it's not hard to see that there is an opportunity .

I think what's hard is just okay , but it's such a big space it's not like a consumer space where you can build better . Technology just takes off . This industry takes a while to absorb new ideas and I think that's the limiting factor

.

You're employee number four at Coyote , so can you give us or illustrate for us exactly what it's like in those early days in terms of the complexity and the challenges and wearing multiple hats , and just what it's like that first year ?

So I got I remember getting on the phone at Uber for grade or at Coyote early in the day Jeff made everybody do everything . So I definitely did a lot of . I spent several months just booking freight and just getting loads of the board .

But yeah , the first load I ever booked was I booked a flat bed on a van load off of a truck stop . That's the classic mistake .

What was the product ? I don't actually remember .

What was just so interesting on day one was just like getting the like understanding that from the ground floor that you just pick up the phone , negotiate with you , find the paper company , negotiate , get the rates , start calling the carriers you booked the freight . On that level it was so simple .

But on the other side it was so complicated because I think also from day one it was like okay , well , operationally it's not truckload , it's probably one of the easier modes in logistics , it's A to B right , it's not like you're not doing multi stops , like it's not forwarding where you have multiple modes . It's pretty straightforward .

But pricing and the negotiation and just the like , how to streamline that ? Because even in day one it's like why is it so labor intensive to do this , which should be a simple transaction ?

I think that even from day one it was clear that there was an opportunity to make this whole thing more efficient if we just built better tech and that early focus on tech right out of the gate , jeff , I think , knew in the early vision there was a lot of this matching right .

So later , I think when digital brokers came out , there's a lot of like oh , we've been doing digital matching for years . It's true . Like that piece of it , I think was in the early vision , even a bazooka , like the truck entry screen put in a truck . You see the matches like , you see the prior prices .

All that was it was clear , okay , like we can do the matches , but how can we take this a little farther ? Like how could this be automated over time ? So I think for me that it was clear very early that there was an opportunity to take this three levels farther in terms of automating and streamlining and putting more technology behind it .

And then just to scale the problem right Because back to the like , it is this massive industry and it's such a fragmented industry and there's such a variance in terms of like technology . I think all of those things are very fascinating if you're just coming in like why is it like this ?

And even today , you know , 17 years later , like it still asks the same questions like why is it still like this ? Why has like there is better tech , there are better ways . Why is it not kind of permeated the industry ? I think it's back to that . The industry can only absorb technology so fast . I think it's a slow moving industry .

I think it's fairly conservative .

I think that most buyers you know it's a treat it like a cost center and so if you're treating it like a cost center , you're only allocating so many resources to managing it so you don't have , you can't make big investments in tech and you're also it's a job if you're on the buyer side , if you're on the shipper side , that it's a lot easier to get fired

for than promoted for Meaning it's just . It's easier to make the wrong decision to do something . So it breeds a certain level of , I think , conservatism and approach right Going with what's known and there's also so many unknowns like meaning . It's still . There's still a lot of space for building relationships because there's so many unknowns .

You have to build a certain amount of trust with somebody and a company over time and if you build that over time it's hard to you know you're unwilling to kind of break that relationship to try something new . So it's just , there's a lot of factors that I think in the industry that just make it hard to quickly move , even if you've got a better solution .

I think the other part of that is that better solutions often they're not 2x better , they're like 5% better and if it's 5% better it's . It's hard to you know there's not enough motivation to make a change .

So that's one component and then two Shippers or any company really typically has a limited IT infrastructure and personnel that actually can help do this , and so there's these conflicting priorities that are going on .

It's like I can only complete so many things in a year and , to your point , it's like if , if , I don't see the value there , and not only that , but some of the the costs of these things , but having to go to the executives that are saying , well , I don't really deal too much in transportation , I'm looking either at the broader supply chain picture or what

have you , and so it's been really , really difficult . But I'm curious from your perspective . Do you see that changing today Is there ? Is there more adoption today ? How has that evolved over the last decade or so ? There is more adoption .

So one , the TMS vendors enable that because ultimately your oracles , your blue yanders , your , these companies , if they're implementing new ideas into their software , then that creates a channel for shippers , because then it just eases that technology budget and then just becomes part of the platform . And that's one channel .

And then what we saw in the pandemic was certain tech that was clearly just more advantageous and I think that accelerated certain channels . So things like real time pricing you saw the advantage of that .

That's probably the best example of where we've seen that adoption increase over the years .

And then 2020 , it all started to take off and a lot of vendors will come into market with their own versions of that .

So , on the shippers side , I do think that TMS channel is big because that's that's your trusted advisor , but more so that I think that from a shipper perspective , the buyers on the TMS side and that's more of a channel for innovation than coming up from the carrier side .

I think that those two things can be in the middle , because carriers are engaging directly with the TMS vendors , but it's hard to again , for the same reasons noted , it's hard to kind of sell that up from the bottom because you're one carrier among many , but if it's your one TMS vendor , then it becomes a channel . Do you recall ?

It was probably 2012 or so that really we built out our app , Coyote Go , and that was something that I was gung-ho about . I wanted this to be . I wanted Coyote Go to be like an Uber for freight type product .

I wanted to be able to book loads on there , have upfront pricing and in parallel , for a long time at Coyote I've been working on pricing engines and this is one area where Jeff vehemently disagreed in terms of did not want upfront pricing brokers' roles to broker . Ultimately I think this was very early on very much the debate .

If you put a price up front , you're losing all your negotiating leverage . Ultimately , the broker should get a better rate if you can just negotiate that with a carrier .

I think that was the core debate at that point and I kept trying to convince Jeff that this pricing engine is more accurate , can give better prices , let's use this automated engine , and so one of the ways I tried to convince him was by building a man-versed-machine test . The test was it would .

It had a little dialog box that would pop up in the morning and it would give you a load and it would say what price do you think this is going to execute at ? And then , on the other backend , we would estimate a price as well .

And then we had several expert users use this tool , and the point was I was going to show Jeff , like , okay , we beat people on average , you could beat the man , we beat the man and we did , in fact , beat most experts , but the one expert that we could never beat was Andrew . Actually , wow .

You know , you built the machine and I was just meant to just say hey , what do I think the prices are going to be the freight , the freight prodigy beat the price .

Can you talk about your process or your approach to solving that problem ? What are the different inputs that you had to solve for to make it as accurate as possible ?

amount of data . I think the core problem with pricing and there's there's several problems around pricing and truckload One is you're dealing with geographic data , so it's hard to do a like a simple regression because you have to have some way of kind of grouping that geographic data together .

And if you looked at how like DAT did this early on , they were just a lot of people do it by regions or they say you know they try to do region to region . That's one way to just get all the data where you can just average it . That's the simplest way to do it .

One step above that is to take data and then weight it based on how well it matches to what you're trying to do . And this was what we did as as a first cut at Coyote and you're trying to . You you're still doing a regression , but you're taking the data that matches most closely to what .

If you're trying to do Topeka to Atlanta , you know you may find a Kansas city to you know wherever Atlanta or Kansas city to Savannah and you kind of you find the ones that match most closely based on time and distance . And then you do a regression where you have a weighting against that and it's called a geographically weighted regression .

And that's that's what we did at Coyote and that was the model that Andrew could beat consistently , but it was pretty accurate Since then and then we didn't . We would also then correct it based because the other problem you have is you deal with geographic data . You're also dealing with sparse data .

There's a lot of lanes where you just don't have any information , even at like a state to state level at Coyote scale . There's some lanes that you just didn't run in a given year . You know , maybe Wyoming to Florida , right ? So there's just certain lanes that are sparse and so you don't have data .

That's the geographically weighted regression solves for that a little bit Cause . Maybe then you're pulling you know , similar information from Bozeman instead of , like Gillette Wyoming and it's more accurate than just you know , trying to do a Wyoming to Florida region .

So the geographic weighted regression solves for that , but you still have like weird things that might happen in there . So you typically also cause then you also have problems where you know it's the 80 20 rule where you tend to get dominated by certain shippers . And so those shippers cost , then dominate the model and you have to correct .

If you're doing a bunch of loads out of there , that's going to skew any other loads that ship out of that same area , given , you know , negative 20 degree ice cream or whatever .

And it may vary , yeah , you're , scheduling method may change the price and , of course , like the company , different shippers , if it's heavier light , right , accounting for those . All those , the small , those attributes that have impact on price . Other models now use , you know , machine learning models .

There's some more , there's more kind of black box models and there's also more external data sources that you can use . Because what we would do was we would try to adjust so we'd pull in back .

Then it was DAT , we'd pull in DAT data , we had chain analytics data which is typically backwards looking at the time , there's like benchmark data , and then we would also , we would kind of triangulate , so we'd have our model , dat and chain analytics , and you'd pick , maybe the .

You remove one outlier and average the other two or just some simple methods to kind of come up with a reasonable price . And the other problem too you get into is like future prediction . Now you have to take in seasonality and holidays and all that stuff and build a forecasting model that's . That's a whole nother follow wax .

A lot of the newer models use more sophisticated machine learning tools , which is a little more black box , but they ultimately are doing the same thing and that they're trying to identify attributes that are by lane , by quote , that are relevant to predicting the price , and you also now have more external data sources .

So green screens is a good example where I think they're serving the need of your long tail of providers who maybe don't have the resources of an Uber freight or you know a convoy would have had to build these sophisticated models .

But they can support , you know , smaller brokers that are coming in , which I think is an interesting evolution in the market , because these are expensive . You need expensive data scientists , you've got to run these expensive ML models .

Like a lot of the new tooling behind the pricing algorithms is gets pretty expensive just to you know to flip a switch and turn it on , because you've got a lot of computing resources driving , driving those .

So I'm curious , though how do you think about , as vendors like green screens come in and say , hey , we'll make the investment on our end to make sure that data is available and you can still have the tools to have relevant , you know , automated pricing against the Uber Frates of the world ? Where do you see you know in , say , five years ?

Where do you see , like the , how do you see the pricing world looking in general for all these brokers , where there's just going to be so much data available to everyone ? Where's that differentiation going to lie within pricing itself ?

Or is it just going to be pretty , pretty obvious that you know the lane Chicago to Dallas should be running at 2,300 bucks or whatever ?

? And I think there's two high level thesis for how the market evolves . One , it continues to consolidate in those companies with the most resources will have an ongoing advantage . Or two , that you'll have these players like green screens which will empower the long tail .

And it was actually I found what I found interesting about Cam in that conversation last week was how that agency model and how that's like how they're having success with his agency model , which kind of speaks to the same thing , that if you have platforms in the back end that can empower the front end , the operators and the sellers , right , and the hustlers

that can actually build businesses on top of it , that's an interesting model as well . I do think there's a where it starts to differentiate is that you definitely do get certain benefits to scale and consolidating the network If you have more carriers on your platform , as an example , because it's not just the price .

The pricing actually is very tied to your own supply bases . You know , like , who's actually in your portfolio and the lanes that you're managing and kind of those . There's a type of overlap of those things .

There's a J curve in most lanes , most markets , where you make an investment , you get density , you get the cares and platform and then you have a better buy side .

So there's you know you can't always pull , there's no just like market price in the sense that every provider has a slightly different price based on the common , the freight that they have and their ability to buy . You still need the capacity , yeah , you still need the capacity , and so that scale still provides an advantage because then you have much .

The bigger you are , the more you understand how to execute any load in any given market and you know like what that supply curve looks like more intimately . There's also benefits to just how you buy on the other side .

In terms of that , this is where , like some of the technical that convoy builds , actually is very interesting , because they're bidding mechanisms and just how , how you kind of manage the buy side and how you can drive value to the carriers by consolidating loads and providing you know different ways of going to market .

Like those things become harder to replicate , I think at if you don't have the scale .

But I also do think that in this market again , so much of it is still just the hustle and how well you can sell in , and there's such a large like mid market where it does matter if you're the , if you're just down the street , right , and you can just go to the shipper , and so it's hard to predict exactly how this market will evolve , because you do

have these competing forces where there are definitely benefits to the tech , absolutely Like I've seen it , I've been in the middle of it but there's still so much space for just salesmanship , and if companies can step in to provide more of that foundational tech , there's always that space for the savvy entrepreneur .

I think what's going to be harder and harder , though , is for is to create like a hundred million dollar broker where you're doing all the tech yourself . I think that is going to be harder to do .

I think , if you could , if you're a hundred million dollar broker and you've got the right partners in those , in those there's companies stepping in to fill the space like .

That's a different game , but there's a lot of hundred million dollar brokers that are just founded on the strength of one super seller , right , who's happens to be CEO , like you probably name a few , right , and I think those companies , though , if they've got the right partners in the back , we'll still have a space in the market .

So we're going to get really good at that and we're just going to keep buying stuff off . You know , as these vendors come in and keep building and making it better and better , we'll just buy from them and apply it and leverage the relationships we've built .

Yeah , you know , I just found that it's just interesting because you could go at it from both sides and the opportunity is there to be successful . It certainly speaks to how large the industry is and how , how , how big the opportunity is .

I . What I said earlier was there's seems to be more fragmentation happening in the tech space , and there was an article that came out that said once a brokerage works , reaches a certain revenue point , it becomes more of a build versus buy scenario , and so you've got more TMSs being built , more of this , more of that being built .

Do you see a world in which we get back to a more centralized model where there's more data flowing through , more centralized model that allows the industry as a whole to make better informed and more intelligent decisions ?

From what you can see so far , does it appear as though I mean , obviously they were able to do okay without it . But was that almost a case study in you can be okay without using a third party index .

What we'll see is some of these larger companies that are self-contained networks , the penetration rate of like a convoy or uberfrade or CH Robinson , like having their app and driver's hands , is exceptionally hot . There's a significant percent of the market or drivers , particularly owner operators , are going to have those apps on their phone .

So you already have access . And then do you really need any other aggregator ? But it's hard . There is definitely a threshold under which you just don't have that scope or that leverage .

So there's going to be the high end , where you have , I think , private networks or self-contained models , where you have enough scope that you really don't need to rely on any third parties . But there's some boundary below which you aggregate and that's where I think these other parties stepping in will be able to provide .

If they can provide the right tooling and they can provide the same level of capability that those large providers are bringing to market , then it really empowers that middle tier .

Nobody likes it , though Not nobody likes DAT but nobody wants to be using debt , and a big reason for that is there's a ton of skepticism around the quality of the carriers that you're going to find on the debt and especially the quality of the relationship you'll have with them .

Because for I think , the carrier , if I put myself in their mind , it's like I'm working with this tool here and I'm going to take advantage of the tool to the best of my ability . I don't have a relationship to the tool . I don't care if the tool hates me or not . There are plenty of other brokers on the tool .

I'll just pick a different one if I get in trouble with one . And I'm curious , thinking about a convoy or an Uber freight or any of the more app-based brokers that are trying to aggregate capacity there .

That same challenge in my mind would seem to exist where those carriers don't feel as connected to the company itself or connected to the individual , and it creates a bigger risk for quality . Was that an experience that you saw or have seen between convoy and Uber , where it became challenging to have real loyalty among carriers ?

You know , it's a different , more kind of digitally enabled , digitally native user , and we also know that there are certain drivers that they just want to work on the app . They don't want to talk to anybody and they just want to do their loads and XU's their loads . The other thing we found , too , is you get a lot of drivers that use .

There's a lot of drivers for which English is not the first language and maybe they don't want to get on the phone and have that conversation and they maybe feel that they've been taken advantage of if they do , or they're just not getting a good result out of that process , and for them too , I think the app is a democratizing technology .

So I think there's both sides because , yes , there are drivers , absolutely , it's just , you know , drivers all have different personalities and I think if you're an introverted driver that just would rather just drive a load and , you know , book your freight , then the app is perfect for you and if you're more digitally native and you just familiar , like that's how

you interact with the world is through technology and that's how you've been brought up , I think for that there's also the app's always going to be just an easier way to do business . That's why the apps will continue to subsume the market . It is an easier way of engaging and if you do want to talk to somebody , that option is always there .

But ultimately , this is like it's a different , it's a new way of going to market that just didn't exist and I think it serves a certain segment . Right . It served a certain segment right out of the gate for which this is a better way of engaging .

Your point is valid and I think it was Ted that on his podcast that actually made a comment about like he's got a guy that he could call today and book a load because he just has such a good relationship . Certainly , those don't go away , but you've just got to look at it like a spectrum of adoption and drivers .

I think that also gets back to why is it hard to push this into the market so fast . Well , people have a way of operating and , again , same on the carrier side . You have a way of operating and some carriers just they've got their relationships and they want to .

They trust those relationships and they've done them well over time , and so why would they not trust those relationships ?

Right , there are , you know , the language thing definitely makes sense to me and that if English wasn't native to them , that you know they could feel taken advantage of , or that it's harder to really grasp in a you know , one-on-one phone conversation versus , hey , the app shows me everything I need to see .

You know , within that , so you're always maybe going to have people who prefer the relational I want to be talking to my broker and that'll exist and then you'll have the others on the other side . I'm curious did you see a specific type of carrier that this really took off ?

With my understanding at least , if I were to think about it from you know logic or from my understanding with relationships with carriers , it feels like the mid-sized carrier that's got 7,500 , 150 trucks wouldn't be as maybe bought into this , but the owner or operator might really love something like this . Is that ? Was there some of that .

Did you experience that ?

I would say that as we , you know , evolve the tech and as these things kind of played out , my own thinking on this has also gotten a little less dogmatic .

If you went back to the early days of Uber Freight or even Coyote , I think I would have said , yeah , you know , this is going to subsume the market Like , eventually , every it's you know 10 years , we'll all frame it digitally .

And I think what I found very quickly is , you know , like there's a sub , there's definitely a subset for which this is the primary way of engaging . That provides extreme value . And , yeah , owner operator is being the most common users of the application . Why ? Because they're fully empowered to do it . And also , just again , the value proposition .

If I was an owner operator 10 or 15 years ago right , I'm just calling brokers off DAT it's not a good experience . And today , now I have options , I had better information , because that's the other part of it is . Now I have like I don't have to use the app , but I've got a load with a price .

That is an option , and maybe I'd then call a Coyote or CH on another load and try to negotiate . But now I at least have something right . I have more options than I had 10 years ago and it's a real option . I can hit a button and book it and be done , and maybe I think I can get better price elsewhere . But now I have this option .

But your midsize carers I think that's continues to be where brokers are going to have ongoing success . But also think about , like how to efficiently run a broker versus how to efficiently run a digital marketplace . If I'm a broker I'm I get more leverage by calling those midsize brokers than I do . Owner operators , too .

Carriers yeah , the midsize , midsize carriers . Oftentimes you do build relationships with certain owner operators that you keep running , but really that your bread and butter as a broker is going to be to call those midsize carriers , be able to book multiple loads on one call . It's just a more efficient process .

I had gold country truck in Minnesota who did a lot of stuff for us in the Midwest . I could book them on three , four , five loads a day , and then the vast majority of the remainder of my portfolio was about 15 to 20 owner operators , to the point where I got known as the owner operator guy and I loved these guys . We had very close relationships .

I booked each of them on one load a day . They took up a lot of my time though . I mean to the point where Coyote built an owner operator once I went back to college . They took my group and my carriers and made an owner opt team out of it . But you're absolutely right , it was not an efficient operation .

I was running , you know I was booking maybe 30 loads a day . 15 of those were from two carriers . The other 15 were from 15 carriers . And you know every time I booked them I had to have a 20 , 30 minute conversation because you know we were friends and you know they they're out in the road driving and you know they're not .

They don't have a bunch of other people they're talking to . So I definitely could speak to that efficiency problem . At the owner operator level , within within brokers they're great . There are hundreds of thousands of really really high quality owner operators . It is tough to manage as an individual building a book of business that way .

That is because of these digital platforms because an owner operator can build , they have better information , they more access to freight , because again , it's easier to start a business today and just start moving freight than it would have been 10 years ago .

And it's also you have better information so you can make better choices about the type of freight you're moving and you can enter next to the market . I think with better information , with that , like you know what , where prices are , you just make better decisions . So I do think having access to these tools for owner operators has made it more sustainable .

And if you're super savvy , you know individual business owner , you can make better decisions and manage your business more effectively just because you've got better access to freight and better access to information .

And I think it's interesting and there's a lot of commentary about the fact that there's the market is still over capacity because we have too many registrant , too many carriers in the market , and I think the other side of that is a lot of those carriers are owner operators and I think that will persist .

I think that we've now seen a secular shift in a higher percentage of owner operators and I don't think that will slow down and I do think if I'm entering the market today , considering being an owner operator , that decision is just easier than it would have been 15 years ago .

That seems to make sense when everybody's making more money and and it's like , look at how easy this is . You know I'm making all this money . Why would I let my ? Why would I be a company driver and let you know whoever take down most of that revenue ? I'm going to do it on my own .

Okay , now you see the other side of that market , and if it persists long enough at this level , I wonder if not that owner operators will all leave , but if that a lot of them will be like maybe I'm not so great at running my own business , I should have just stuck with being a company driver . I wonder if some of that may be true too .

But I also think the capacity is more flexible and that it's easier as an owner operator to sell their truck or park their truck and do another job , versus for a carrier to have to , you know , shut down or start up Like there's a lot more friction in that than there is for a single owner operator to enter or exit the market .

And so I do think that you've got now more people engaged that have been an owner operator or maybe you know , and I'm guessing some of these people are parking their trucks or doing something else . Maybe they're selling their trucks because they can't cover the least payment with their other job , but they still have more . It's that's a more flexible capacity .

It's more marginal , but it's also more flexible . And again , I do think having those options meaning that if , much like you know I don't want to use the Uber analogy too much , but much like if I just wanted to go drive for Uber today , I could do that all I have to have as a car .

If I want to go move a load today , I can just download Uber freight or it could have download convoy . We'll be able to download or use convoy again just download that those apps and start moving freight right , which is just a different . That option didn't exist before .

What was the impetus for that decision ? How did how did that all come about ? Give us a little bit of that background .

I kind of want to get into the startup scene because they really I want to get back into an early stage startup and just build more Got down here and got introduced to the team at auto trucking , which was an autonomous trucking

startup . It was started by Anthony Levandowski and Leo Ron , and I had a mutual connection with Anthony Levandowski . There was a writer named Chunkamu Mui who I had actually brought in at Coyote to do some consulting work way back in like 2012 .

And he had written this like long six part piece for Forbes about autonomy and how it was going to revolutionize the world , and this was in 2013 .

So he was it was probably that he was a very early writer who was paying attention to this space and in the process of doing that , he had met Anthony Levandowski and I had actually had long conversations with him about autonomy , and I don't know if you would call that Coyote . We brought in a company called Peloton which was very early in the space .

He was doing kind of convoys where they had trucks where they would have an autonomous truck behind another truck . They're no longer around but they had a bit of a run back in like the early 2010s .

They had these autonomous Volvo , they had this big machine shop Like they had all these mechanical engineers and electrical engineers and I'm kind of a car guy and actually when I went in there was this old like Hime Kuda that somebody's working on like building parts for in the machine shop . It's like , oh , this is cool , like I can hang out here some more .

So I started advising auto and in the process of that we initially started talking about an operating system for the AVs and there was a thesis that we need to be able to manage the freight first . We need to have the back end and AVs are going to take time to get to market but you want to be able to build some density .

It would be great to be able to deploy these AVs within a network , like what about building a brokerage or an Uber for freight ? And so that idea was seeded and we started . Between we were wrong . There was another . There was a product manager called Eric Medinus , who's still there . Myself , we started drafting up a business plan what that could look like .

And then I actually started referring candidates to Lear . It was like people that could run this and build it up , and he talked to a few people and then the Uber acquisition came through . And it came through on a Wednesday and I had no idea this was coming through .

So the fact that we were talking about an Uber for freight , they knew it was coming through , but clearly like , okay , I get it now . Acquisition came through on a Wednesday , thursday , lear called and said , hey , like really you should be the one to run this and I was five months into Pillow . So Pillow was a good company .

They ended up exiting to Expedia . It was a great product . I really enjoyed working with that team . But the opportunity to build Uber for freight at Uber was one that I just couldn't say no to . And so , yeah , then joined Uber and started and actually negotiated .

So dragged Clay Strauner , another coyote that we all know well and had dragged him across country to be part Pillow to run kind of analytics and part of the opposite and Pillow .

So I got a pre-negotiated deal for him to come over as well , because I was like I can't be a total dick and just like , leave him at Pillow , after just dragging him across the country .

And we , actually we brought in everybody to San Francisco , which didn't last too long , because it's very hard to build operations in San Francisco . So then we made an early acquisition of a company called Forefront , which was an ex command team members in Chicago , and then kind of was onwards , upwards from there . We started scaling our Chicago office .

Yeah , you had the name . Right , there was . I had heard about some of these names that you're talking about and just the stable of talent that was being collected . We've talked a lot about talent , so this is debatable , but I saw some of the big names going over there . I'm like , what is going on over here ?

Right , they got the name , they got these people . Like , yeah , you don't have to sell me anything . Like give me the paperwork , like let's get this thing off the ground . Right , and I saw the vision early on . If these guys can do what they are setting out to do , it's going to completely change the game . And I won in on the ground floor , right .

So I was there early on . Yeah , saw that evolution . But to me and that was something where I mean I was extremely excited . I mean like to the point where I'm going home talking to my family that knows nothing about Framley . Hey , you know this taxi ride service and this , they're doing this in freight and it's exciting , I mean .

So I rarely get excited about things and to me I was like this is something huge here . I'm assuming you on your side and your team felt the same way . But I mean , what was the vision early on in terms of what you wanted to accomplish ?

I don't think people quite understood what that was , and what I mean by that is it's not just the matching side of it , it's not just the pricing , it's really the whole experience . It's like why is Uber so distinct ? It's that and why do you trust somebody to show up and pick you up ? Because there's a credible transparency .

You have this whole experience of you see the price up front , right , the book , you can see the driver and where they're coming . The payment is automated , right . You don't have to hand them the credit card , right . There's so many elements of that that just make the whole experience better .

And so , as we went to market , we really we were laser focused on the carrier out of the gate . We really wanted to provide that Uber-like experience for the carrier , which is why it was always going to be price up front . We wanted to pay quickly , we wanted to provide more information than anybody else provided .

We wanted to push that boundary of transparency or visibility in the sense of just giving both the shipper and the carrier more . But we were very focused on the carrier out of the gate and we actually didn't build any shipper-facing technology for the first couple of years .

We almost exclusively focused on the carrier and how to improve that experience , because we also knew that was going to be closer to that Uber-like experience Because ultimately the shippers are going to work through their TMS and other platforms . It's going to take longer to build those capabilities .

But yeah , the other part of that was that being in Uber was such a tailwind . When we initially started we were like , oh , we're just going to call plastics companies in Texas and go do the broker hustle and just get the papers and plastic company we did . We started calling them .

Our first freight was with a plastic company out of Houston , but we quickly had the Niagara's and the AB's ?

I know Brian and Charlie and Brian's gone on and started ISO , but I think they also . I want to give them credit in the process because it was so much of a vision sale early on where you could just go and tell people , like we're building the Uber for freight , and they're like great , sign me up .

Yeah , sign me up , but between them and then just the overall order . Yeah , we had so much such a talent because we had and I remember going to this MIT roundtable one month in and at that MIT roundtable we had Niagara . We had let me call it was Niagara .

We had chat palettes , we had a B , we had , I think , pepsi with a whole like slew of customers that all within like six months were on the platform . And it was again just like oh , like we're coming to the markets Uber freight . Yeah , there was just .

I don't think any startup in the space has ever had that much of a tailwind from just brand equity and being able to , because the other thing that happened is every startup in the space have been calling themselves Uber for freight and then overnight they were all digital freight brokers and like even convoy had either even convo on their website or had had Uber

for freight in their in their marketing materials , and all that just change overnight .

You know how to leverage whatever you can to get an opportunity in front of a shipper , because in a lot of ways as a broker , the hardest part is just getting that meeting , is just getting someone to respond to that email and say , yeah , I'll meet with you .

And I just remember thinking , huh , if I could send an email and say I am Uber freight , like , will you meet with me ? It's got to be 99 out of 100 that will say yes , yeah .

But I remember walking through that floor and just being introduced to different pods that had roles and titles that I had never heard of at a quote unquote brokerage right . So yeah , that was really fascinating .

And obviously we just talked a big vision and things like that , but what still needs to happen in that space for it to become like a real , long term , viable solution ?

I think that undoubtedly the technology provides an advantage . I've been in it and I've seen it .

I can verify that the technology can buy at a lower cost , it has lower OPEX , it can provide better service and in fact that's a lot of the conversations I've been having with customers of late is to that like , particularly with this Convoy transition customers saying hey , I saw the value , it's real , I was getting better service , like you guys were .

You know that product had been executing , that team had been executing .

But on top of that , if you look at both Uber Freight in Convoy like they're both born in an environment and a lot of other startups as well of zero interest rate , right , a lot of availability of capital , you do make different decisions in that context and it's easy to kind of like second guess some of that after the fact , looking at it from 10,000 feet

and I think , from a traditional broker , it's also hard to understand how those companies made decisions when most brokers are start a bootstrapped . They're started super scrappy . They're focusing on , you know , every load being profitable , like you can't just throw money at problems and you can't make these long big .

You know these big bets that take huge capital investment because you just don't have the resources to do that . So I think from a traditional broker it's very hard to , I think , conceptualize that because it's just such a different operating environment .

But ultimately these companies are making you're making bets on tech that you think will play out over time and you're also , you know , you're betting on conditions that you expect to persist over certain you know years , right , versus it's not , it's not . So load by load , right , it's making . And I think it was really Amazon that set this template .

And if you look at the history of Amazon , right , they they lost money from many years . They continue to reinvest in operations and eventually they just got such size and scale and leverage that it became like an unstoppable force . And I think in operating models like a , like a brokerage , you do get these leverage of scale .

So there's certain impetus to try to drive scale and if you have access to capital , you're trying to accelerate that drive to scale and you're also making these massive investments in technology to make that work , though ultimately you've got to , like you know you got to get the efficiencies , you got to get the leverage out of scale .

Like on paper it all works , but if the market works against you right , it can turn very quickly , and I think that's what happened with COVID is like everything's kind of tracking on pace .

You see you're hitting the numbers , like you're getting the efficiency , you're getting the leverage that you think you're going to get , and then COVID hits and everybody's got to act fast .

And then you've got to quickly switch into like survival mode and making hard decisions , and at the core of all these businesses that are there are strong businesses at the core . I mean that's the one thing with Freight is like there's a business there , but it's . Can you run that business with this tech overhead ? Can you continue to make investments ?

Where do you need to pair back ? Where do you need to rethink your product strategy ? Like that's what every company has to kind of work through , and I think everybody's just doing it in a slightly different way and kind of you got to reset the baseline .

I think it's a Meris just made this massive layoff and the CEO statement was like this is not like we basically we're resetting the baseline , like the business is , just we're resetting where we are , and I think that's just the hard thing . It's hard , no matter what , to kind of totally reset your baseline and just kind of where you are .

And it's even harder when you have all this kind of , I think , legacy or you're managing a cap table right and in some cases , as we know , some of these businesses , like the , their market valuation will be low where the preferred stack is right , particularly some of , I think , the second tier , particularly once you get outside of the largest companies in the

space , once you move to like that second tier of startups , I think there's just a lot of challenges and how to manage through that , and so , at the core , though , I'm absolutely 100% a believer that there's a business there and there's incredible tech and it will , like it's just everybody's been a little bit of readjustment and survival mode right now and trying

to rebalance in that context .

I did start to speak to some folks about it and I think it's not necessarily a fair comparison to domestic truckload , given the players in the ocean market and how vast I mean . They were , charging 25,000 bucks a slot now and now it's 1500 , like no , that's way more drastic .

So I'm hopeful that that's not necessarily fully indicative of what we'll see in the truckload market . But I do want to kind of go back here . Uber Freight . You know the idea and the investment seemed to have made a ton of sense early on and you had all the traction in the world , as Paul said , every shipper wanted to talk to you .

Uber Freight also became the villain in the industry , like the undisputed villain of the industry . And you know I want to talk about that from two lenses . One from the brokerage lens . Why do you feel like the business was met with so much scrutiny and frustration from brokers .

Let's start there .

They worked their way up , they built their business based on service and relationships , and they have not had , you know , with some exceptions , of course , but if you look at particularly midsize , the smaller brokers like these are bootstrap operations that are built on the top of relationships and salesmanship and they're focused on profitability from day one .

And so you have to be super selective in the loads that you take , you have to be very thoughtful about pricing and you have to be , you know , just hustle and put in the effort and kind of earn your stripes through that process . And so I think there's two things that happen with Uber .

One , it's just massive capital right being thrown at this right which drives its own expectations , but also , like you can drive , in many ways it doesn't give you as much motivation to drive that discipline right from day one , because you're focused on the big picture .

You're focused on making these big bets , these big investments and kind of driving towards a , you know , two to five year vision that's going to pay off on a longer horizon .

Also , it has been , I think , disruptive from like the pricing . Visibility is another one where we got a lot of I got a lot of pushback on that and I got a lot of negative inbound emails , honestly , from people that were like , why would you do this ?

Because , like broker type people from broker people , yeah , because I think from a carrier perspective , it's clearly better , which is what we're focused on . I still think it's the right answer .

I think it's where the market has to go , but from a broker perspective , now you have , now carriers have an alternate price source , right , and there's , I think the other thing we've seen is just , I do think over time , your spreads compress as you drive more visibility and more transparency and kind of more real time execution and pricing , because people have

better information , right , and that's not a new , afraid thing . I think that's just how markets evolve over time . But but certainly you accelerate it if you start putting prices up front and carriers have more visibility . Ultimately , like I said , it's a better experience for the carriers .

The carriers are more attached , but it does kind of change the dynamics in the industry . So I think that's another carrier where we got a little bit of pushback is this idea that prices would be visible up front . And again , I think it's like the Craigslist versus the Amazon example that I always like to give .

It's like just being able to have that button hit it , hit the button and execute , and it is a better experience for the carriers .

And then I think it's just because we had all that momentum , like we came in as Uber and it's easy to not like the company that seems to be getting it all handed to them because of this brand momentum , versus as a broker , having to kind of build it up scrappily from the ground up .

So I think all those things definitely create a hurdle to get over in terms of perception .

It's interesting though , because I think it's audience by audience , because from a carrier perspective , we're always very carrier centric and certainly the owner operators and small carriers consistently gave us like top marks and best and best in business , and I think that's for us , that was always the focus .

On the back end though , on the operational aspect , the kind of thought was for a lot of brokers was that in a lot of cases a carrier would take a load and the operational follow through wasn't as strong , not having a rep necessarily tied to you If an issue came up . How was exception management ? That was understood to be a challenge among the DFMs ?

Did you experience that ? Did that make the experience more challenging for the carriers to a bit to an extent ?

Yeah , and I'll say some of my learnings in this process and I think every company that's gone down this path has learned is that you can only automate so much .

So , as you can imagine , as a tech company too , you're coming in and you're thinking we're going to automate every part of this transaction , and then you quickly learn that there's limits On the carrier side . You can push very far .

You get to that point where there's only a small number of exceptions , an example and you're like , okay , well , and the carriers some carriers never call , they're doing everything on the app , and that's your focus is okay , I'm going to work down this list of exceptions , I'm going to try to push as much as that , as that I can kind of into the app or

automate or streamline or do whatever I can around that . And then you end up with this like tail of exceptions and you say , oh , why don't I just outsource that and lower the cost and push into Manila and then carries it up having a terrible experience when they call in , because they call and so he doesn't know anything about their load .

And you've got , you know , yeah , I listen . So we did go down that path . I listened to some of those calls and some of those calls were just just just terrible , right , and you're like , okay , this is not the answer . And so what's happened ?

What happened , I think , with every company that participated in this space , is they either you know the different timing , made that decision and then kind of reeled it back . Because if you think about it internally , what you end up is with is a carrier operation that is like 10x as efficient as a traditional broker .

You just don't need the same headcount to run it because people are booking the freight and oftentimes you know you have , you can have carriers that download the app , sign themselves up and start booking freight without having to ever talk to anybody , and in that scenario , you just don't need a deep carrier team to manage that .

And so you start thinking about , okay , well , where do I , you know , for that remaining work ? How do I manage that ? Where do I place that ? And it's a scale model , no matter what , meaning that maybe you've got 300 carriers assigned to one person .

But you know , maybe you know some of them call regularly and some of them never call , but it's you're not dealing with a carrier calling every day , which is back to the relationship piece , right , they're kind of working through the app and so there's different ways of solving that . One is to like outsource it , try to lower the cost through a BPO .

The other is to build a domestic team or somebody where you've got a direct allocation . So there's definitely some back and forth and finding the right model there and I think that's a fair statement .

I think that every company in the space is just trying to inventing a new operating model , so a lot of the standard ways of approaching it just don't work and you've got to think through that .

I think on the shippers side is where I firmly believe that you have to have dedicated relationships Shippers just the dynamic in this market in general , shippers have more leverage . It's shippers have higher expectations , as it is , and you've got to . It's very . It's much harder to just like disrupt and automate on that side and you can pick away at the edges .

You can automate scheduling , you can automate certain tracking right , you can automate parts of that , but at the core you need a team that's going to be responsive to the shippers needs .

And I think every , every company in the space has gone through their cycles of how they try to like parse that work out and kind of pull it back and think about how to allocate that efficiently . And everybody's kind of chasing the same goal , particularly if you're making big investments in tech .

Part of that goal is how do I , how do I streamline , how to make this , this thing , more efficient ? And what's been proven to happen in all these models is the carrier side , you can push much farther on that , down that path .

On the shippers side , it's much harder and ultimately you don't want to compromise the experience by fine slicing it or not allowing kind of people to own that experience , or or , if I do have to call that , I'm talking to somebody that can actually solve my problem . Yeah , like all those are . Like you know , you got it .

Ultimately you're serving people and you got to make sure that they have a good experience at each touch point , and that's that's critical .

It became the the talk of the town for a number of years . From what I could tell , it's polarizing . I think there are a lot of shippers that absolutely love the experience they got from Uber , but there also were a ton that felt at some point burned , and I don't know why , but I do want to hear both of that .

So why do you think a lot of shippers loved Uber and I want Paul's perspective here too after , because I know he he got to experience that too .

In terms of loving Uber , I think it's because and to be honest , I think similar with Convoy and others that into the space is that you've got highly innovative companies , a lot of smart people trying to solve problems , come up with innovative solutions in a space that historically just haven't had that level of innovation .

And we also we had a lot of great account teams . Can they continue to have a lot of great and there's a lot of excellent account oriented , sales oriented people and teams and operators at all these companies .

And I think that , just like any company there's , you know there's some that work better than others and you know there's always like you have to take it case by case , but I think , by and large , if I'm looking for themes , I think that customers that are looking to innovate , looking to automate , looking for the next thing , and love having these conversations

and love working with partners that are kind of going to push the frontier forward , and I think that always will be true Right , and so there's certain partners that are just going to step in , that are going are able to make those investments , that have the resources , that are kind of curious , able to push those new solutions that will work with their shippers

to drive that . And I think there's also then , just like the carriers we talked about , there's a spectrum of carriers , is a spectrum of shippers as well . And if I look at the early provide , like early partners at an Uber and in my new role at Flexport , I look at the companies that really good value out of it .

They oftentimes it's those that are a little more innovative , a little more the front of the curve , like the early adopters or early majority that are willing to try new things and are just curious .

I think a good example was , you know , anheuser-busch is famous for , I think , launching a million startups , but it's a company that I think always had a certain investment or has always had an approach to innovation where they wanted to try new things .

And so for those companies , like somebody like an Uber freight or or a Flexport or a convoy that's making massive investments in tech and really pushing the ball forward , like that's very compelling . And particularly , you know , usually you've got executives that are in those companies that are forward thinking .

You know they're the ones going to the conferences , they're the ones looking for new ideas , they're the ones trying to kind of drive to that next plateau of innovation within their own company , and I think that's always , always compelling and you've always got that population . I think on the other side right , it's the .

You do have customers that need high personal touch , that really want that like hands on service , that really want to know that every load is being watched and that it's not just going into some black box and disappearing , and I think that would probably be like the counter .

Balance on the other side is that where a you know , a much more high touch , personal touch , like service oriented pitch was going to have more traction , because I think that was the and I'm curious , andrew , to , because you countersold right and so this was like the this is the man versus machine pitch , and I don't think it was always like .

I think you really , when you look at it , you're dealing with a Venn diagram and shades of grade , because all these companies are shipper centric and you've got you do focus on the customer and you want to make sure you do right by the customer .

Like there's nobody out , there's nobody in this business who's trying to like I think that's successful of any scale is trying to do wrong by the customer . We're all trying to like you know to do the right thing and come up with the right answer .

But you know , it is this like okay , one on one side you got the black box and one side is people all the way down , and so , like that is a different .

There are people that will , you know , position that slightly differently and ultimately , I'm a believer that , like it's tech plus people and you've got to be able to find the right combination of each and different companies will , again , will have different profiles and how much they can use the tech or how much they really want to just know that they've got an

army behind them , kind of manning the manning the ship .

So , you know , I was spending as much time as possible out in front of customers and asking them about the experience and also asking them about the experience that they were having with companies like Uber and combo and the likes .

And again , like I said , a lot would say , hey , we love those guys , they do a great job for us , but others said we hate them , we used them , they burned us , for whatever reason .

I'm out on that concept and that was true of some , you know , small , midsize , and it was also true of the largest shipper that I was working with and I guess it didn't feel like to me . It felt like my perspective and that could be wrong here , but it felt like you guys were trying to solve a lot of these problems for shippers .

But we're kind of unconcerned about the collateral damage of testing these things and the impact that it had if you tried something new and 15 shippers got burned . Oh , we made a commitment to this project but realize the automated pricing completely botched it , so just throw it back in their lap .

My perspective was I would never let a shipper feel that pain of my mistake and so we ate a lot of those . And it just felt like that wasn't necessarily the case with Uber and some of those other companies , and that's why you could still get super big and be super successful .

But there was this wake of companies that were burned along the way that maybe would never come back to it . Tell me if I could be wrong . I mean , it's my perspective .

I don't think that's totally fair in that I think if you talk to any , if you talk to any set of 100 shippers , they'll have different opinions on any given care .

I think it does come like case by case and kind of what's the specific situation is , and I'm sure like you spent tons of time diagnosing like why particular customer churned or what was the reason , and I would say it's a small subset where it's like an acute thing , and then you have a lot where it's you know it's pricing or just lack of fit or whatever .

I do think that when you've got a pure labor driven model without tech , you have a little more flexibility .

If there's a Big issues to throw bodies or some other issue like in , just rally around it , and I think that's probably fair , meaning that there's certain times where you may just have something blow up and Something blows up and you and you have a model with no people right , it's much harder to react . But I'm talking in generalities . I think it's hard to .

It's hard to address your specific point because I , without knowing the customer or the particular feedback , but I do , I mean it's , I think it's just an obvious point to say that , yeah , you're going to have some customers 11 , some don't , and so we're going to have good experiences and bad and ultimately , like , the model will continue to grow based on the

balance of those two things and how well it comes to market . And I think every company has a certain amount of growing pains as they go through that kind of hit a threshold . I think , with any account to you have like a certain maturity , right and you know , advanced make came in .

You have different leadership , come in at the shipper or you have , you know , with a very different mindset and I've seen this quite a few times .

Some of the bigger shippers recently , where you have a whole new leader , is more conservative Maybe doesn't , you know , put as much weight on the like , the innovative or the new approach , and more focused on like traditional ways of going to market or maybe more relationship driven Right . And we've both been this business long enough .

You know you kind of lose some , you win some and things go up and down .

So it's hard outside of general generalities it's hard to address , but I can say that certainly there was never , like you know , the company was always focused on trying to do right by the , by the shipper and I think that the tech does ultimately deliver for the shippers a better capability , particularly when , like this , you mentioned pricing , with API pricing

that's . That's an area where there is , like , this challenge of like Some of these tools can like when you first turn them on . So API pricing is a good example where , if you just let it , if you put it in uncapped and you put the wrong price in there , and all of a sudden you get 700 loads Like what do you do ?

Right , that situation , you know there's different . Like from our end we would always just try to cover those that freight , but sometimes you just you know , like anything you get squeezed . So yeah , but in the end everybody's trying to do right by their , by their shipper .

might as well . We've got someone here , paul your own experience with Uber why don't we talk about that and kind of how you felt through the years you worked with them ?

Do you have a common vision for what you're trying to accomplish with the partnership ? So that's step one , right . That foundation isn't there . Doesn't matter who the company name is , it's not going to work . And so you know , from my perspective , I learned that early on .

And so , when we talk about these companies , I've had fantastic experiences with them , but it's because I set those clear and common expectations early on . And then to , you know , finding the people that you want to work with .

You know , I think you know , as it relates to Uber again , or any company , I tend to gravitate towards the people that I know can get stuff done . And then , whether they're an account manager , whether they're sales , whether they're an engineer , didn't really matter , just like , hey , I want this person to be my owner , oh , but they don't do that .

I don't really care , because this is the person that responds to my emails , that follows up on my request . That is doing everything that I'm asking them to do . So , you know , I think that's an opportunity and maybe , you know , because I was a larger shipper , I had I could do things like that .

But yeah , I mean , I took ownership for those things and that's why I was able to have success with all these different types of relationships .

You got to be able to solution and kind of work together on what the ideal configuration , and as long as you've got an open dialogue and everybody's honest , you look at a company like an Uber for eight and you've got just incredible resources behind the scenes .

I can't overstate just how many kind of strong operators , strong team members and , as long as everybody's pointed the right direction , you've got open communication . I do think on the other side of it , like , the best shippers are the ones that provide the most feedback , that like have the most honest , honest dialogue , that like do hold you accountable .

That's right . Right , it's harder , like , if you're not having that direct back and forth , it's harder to adapt and tune .

I think the more challenging ones are where it's kind of anecdotal or it feels a little arbitrary or you don't know , like what happened in that particular situation , right , and I think that's where , like a Niagara , there's other shippers that are very just , open , right , and those , to me , are also the ones where you know it's easiest to over deliver .

I would also say that like if the fundamental model is better , more efficient . Those are where the shippers that are most like scorecard driven and most like you know we're just we're going to give you open feedback and we're going to have an ongoing conversation . That's also where the model tends to you'll most benefit .

What were the thoughts there and what was the vision for that ?

Uber freight built what I believe is the most efficient execution platform and method of going to market for just a freight execution and procurement , and that's where I , like I will continue to bang on that drum .

That fundamental I think the tech is , yields huge advantages just in the ability to source capacity , price execute like a lot of just core procurement execution .

On the other side you have a Transplace who was the market leader in terms of transportation management and has a lot of just blue chip customers in the portfolio and is very focused on how to drive value for those shippers and just improve their core transportation management execution .

So in that context , you're bringing what is some of the best execution technology and plugging that in behind this engine that already supports the transportation management procurement of these blue chip customers and there's clear just synergies you can yield out of that . That's where a lot of the logic is OK . It's because there wasn't . They didn't directly compete .

Now Transplace had a brokerage , a more traditional brokerage , for which you know that's kind of tacked on and so it was clear OK , well , we can up level the capabilities of this brokerage through the technology on the other side got this tech driven business but for which they hadn't made that same level of tech investment and for which , plugging Uber in with the

Uber tech stack and Uber freight engineering team , there's just a ton of opportunity to up level that tech stack . Now I you know I can't speak to the future plans or what how they're planning to keep building that out in that deal played out during what is proven to be a pretty difficult market time .

But fundamentally I think it's a it's a very logical combination . And the other thing about Transplace is they really came into the market , is they were a tech leader and they have been very tech driven from the beginning . They're a more mature company .

They've gone through a couple private equity handoffs and transitions and I think they've been managed very professionally to get just a functioning , you know , profitable business out of the other side and to be able to now up level the technology , bring some new ideas going to bring that kind of automated procurement .

Movement .

And when he came on board I think one of the things he recognized quite quickly within Flexport was just that there was an opportunity to invest in their trucking and up level that trucking capability . And because we had worked together , one of the things I'd done on Amazon was pitch the idea of Amazon freight .

The Amazon freight exchange became the brokerage which eventually evolved to Amazon . Freight had launched that product . So he already kind of knew and then , you know , I'd gone down to freight kind of knew where our thinking was somewhat aligned and how we should think about the market and build out capabilities , and so he reached out .

You know he had a very compelling vision .

He had built an incredible executive team , many of whom are still at Flexport , and it just seemed like for me I think I'm career wise , I've always sought new things , new challenges I really liked the idea of getting into this boarding space , being able to take all this momentum of Flexport and build on top of that .

The other thing I saw is that Flexport is where Uber freight . When we launched that , we started with a carrier and then moved to the shipper .

Flexport has built this incredible suite of shipper technology and really simplified for boarding , for shippers end to end and it's , you know , a great experience for largely like enterprise to mid market shippers , shippers who wouldn't be serviced by big steamship lines .

That to go through an in view and really it is within the space like this is still not another company that competes on that level in terms of just simplifying the experience and providing full suite of services .

So and then the other thing I'll just say on the customer side , actually , with what's interesting comparing to brokers with Flexport is that you tend to get all like you have a lot of single source shippers . It's all or nothing . Like the shippers are using your platform , they're interacting like on your front end .

So in the shippers like rely much more on Flexport to just execute their business .

Is where you know you're not competing , you're not on a routing guide with 30 other in VOCC , is it's like it's you or nothing or maybe one other provider that helps having access to the customer , yeah , and being able to provide into institutions like you clearly an opportunity to add capabilities and one of those missing capabilities has just been deaf on trucking

and dredge and those capabilities and truckload . So all of that was very , very compelling . And then came on and of course you know changes . A lot of things have evolved from the time that I've been there now five months . It's been a lot going on it's yeah , a lot going on .

It's been good and of course Ryan came back in and Ryan brings just incredible founder energy and he's just like on . It's been like really motivating to be able to work with him and to see that play out . And I had been so since coming on board .

We've really just investing in core capabilities and up leveling our trucking and just trying to get closer to the ground , like in terms of I would say that historically that there hadn't been as much investment on the trucking side and it hasn't really been developed as a unique capability in terms of our ability to go to market and kind of manage , like go to

the ground with the carriers and be able to manage kind of frontline execution . So building out a lot of those capabilities and investing in the tech and then , of course , most recently with the convoy acquisition which we can talk through . But the the opportunities is massive .

Right , we currently we do hundreds and millions of dollars and trucking revenue through Draige and LTL cartage and we do have a sizable chunk of just current truckload business which we've serviced through those customers because we have this integrated platform .

Product release have come out , product release have come out . We're in a lot of the same customers fall . I know you're intimately familiar with I am convoy .

Yeah , so when that kind of news came out , it's like , oh man , I think everybody reacted in their own way , but , having like , known Dan for a long time , it was like , oh man , somebody's got to do something with this , this tech . It just it'd be a tragedy if there wasn't a next step or next chapter in this story .

Because , again , I do think that uber freight and convoy and others right , because now a lot of other companies have stepped into this space , have changed the market or reset expectations and have kind of innovated , particularly in this digital booking . You know , you download an app , you book a load right for our operators .

And I also think that , from a carrier perspective , you have a now whole ecosystem of carriers that are just operating and like and depending on this , these capabilities , so that , plus , I just knew convoy had built amazing technology , having had some exposure to it and , of course , having competed with them head to head , and if you look at how many companies

entered the space , for convoy to have gotten as far as they they have , it's like credit to the team and credit to Dan , because there have been probably you know , 50 plus companies that have come in to try to be the uber freight , build this model and to build the digital broker model , and so for convoy to get that far and be that leader and then for

this to just like for the story to end just like it would be a tragedy . There's just so much good technology there . So Ryan and I both had prior relationships with Dan , so , you know , reached out , kind of kicked off those conversations and we're able to reach a deal and it's a .

You know , it's a very unique situation because we're getting we're getting all the technology and we've been hiring some of the team back into help restart this , but the operations effectively stopped right .

So there's no ongoing operations and so it's a little bit like buying a broken race car and trying to kick it back in the gear and we've got to now go through that process .

But what I did , what we do with the process , one of the things I did is reach out to customers , just understand , like , did they get value ? And or , to your point , or like , did the customers get value out of the tech ? Was it like what was it just transactional ? Or like , how do they view this ?

Well , I would say every customer I talked to said yes , they got , they saw the value of the tech , they saw the service . But these , of course , were taught .

I'm talking about their top customers and I think they're taught for a reason because clearly they were getting value out of the product and all very blue chip customers and that was very validating as we were going through the process . It was just , yes , like the tech clearly drove value .

Many told me that Convoy service was like up here and the second was , you know , there was a gap to second , particularly for things like just on time percentage , but also just tracking , visibility , and that there's nobody else in the market that really compared . And then just going to the tech .

So , as this process , just seeing all the things that convoy built , because it's not just the marketplace platform , it's also convoy from brokers , which is a product that's getting a lot of traction . They had a TMS product .

They had the convoy go product , which is asset management product , which was there's just some brilliant thinking that went into all these products and so that's the trailer piece that was the trailer piece .

Yeah , yeah , that was what I always thought was really interesting and , yeah , curious to see how that goes it is super fascinating now , like I think there's a lot of potential to also just think about how we can package this technology in ways in different ways or go to market in slightly different ways . One thing at a high level I do .

My thinking has changed quite a bit in a lot of these pieces , and then I don't think it's an everything solution .

I think that you've got to use the tech where it makes the most sense , and I think it makes the most sense with his owner operative population , like they get a ton of value to a short haul where brokers typically like there's certain spaces where it clearly has an advantage , others where it's not yet proven , and I think part of this opportunity is for us to

, you know , reset a bit and make sure that we're doing this in a very thoughtful way and finding the most value out of the tech .

I think convoy from brokers , as an example , is a very interesting platform because it gets back to that like empowering the small brokers and empowering this ability to just for hustlers and you know , people that want to build their own business to do that while plugging into a digitally enabled network and having access to this like base of carriers that is just

logging in to the app every day , and so , as we , as we've gone through this process , I think that the first takeaway is just like , oh , wow , this is an incredible stack , is also like incredible people that built this . Like , how can we pull these things back together quickly ? And then second step is okay , we want to go back to market .

There's customers that clearly got value out of this . Let's , let's try , let's engage with them and figure out how we can turn that back on . And also , then , how else can we bring this product back to market in different ways that can provide value and maybe not do the same channels before ?

Maybe it's not just the shippers , maybe it's also to brokers or other providers . Right , how can we be a little more open with how we think about it ? Because I do think that there are areas where it just makes more sense to build platforms that other providers can build on top and to just try to like build a self-contained universe .

Or , you know , you have a totally isolated private network and that's also where is I . There's a lot of ways this can go is the market balls , but yeah , we're very early into the process now and spend a lot of time with the team and just getting everybody back at the speed and try to figure out how we can streamline this .

Turn the keys back , turn the key to restart it and take it from there . But already got a lot of interest from prior shippers , which is very motivating .

What do you envision that process looking like ? I assume the game will be in play anymore . Are you planning to keep that ?

You know it is very carrier and so it's a very different product in the sense of like individual and operators got a ton of value out of it , and so it's . We're still thinking through that , that piece in terms of turning it back on .

A lot of that is just like rewiring it on the back end and make sure that , because we've got to make sure that we've got all the contracts in the back and just for minutes , it's a complicated system , right .

So there's a lot of like you know , you got your AWS stack , you've got all your other like all the data feeds that feed into it , all those pieces that you've got to migrate and turn back on . So there's a technical challenge there which we got the team like zeroing in on that and charging through that and then beyond that , it's .

It's yeah , how do you get carriers back on the platform , how do you get shippers back on the platform ? How do you get brokers back on the platform ?

And we found there is a ton of interest and we're so early into it now it's hard to predict exactly how that will play out , but I can say that all it's very encouraging in terms of having had those conversations with with people into those segments , right it's there's a lot of interest , but I can't . I can't predict how quickly that will will scale .

So I'm really curious to get your perspective on your level of excitement on that and how you some of the different things that you anticipate doing Tell , make sure that it's it's a success on the second go around .

In terms of what I touched a little bit on , like just what is different this time and I think part of this was as we were going through the journey to Uber Freight . We learned a lot of stuff and we touched on some of this already in terms of like the shippersaw never goes , like you've got to get out , be shippers .

There's no company in the space that has been successful that doesn't do two things One , obsessed about the shipper , the hyper shipper centric and sales oriented , and two like obsessive about the bottom , one right and meaning building a business the right way from day one to make sure that it's profitable and thoughtful about .

Like both those two things just have to be true and it's just fundamental like laws of physics type stuff , right .

And so in that context , like on the shipper side internally at Flexport , one of the things that I love about Flexport again is that it's always been a very sales centric , shipper centric culture and we're spending a lot of time ensuring that we kind of are fully aligned around shipper needs and expectations and we've got this great channel on super loyal shippers ,

and so Flexport has always been super shipper centric On that . As far as how we integrate that into the convoy world . Well , like now , we have new services we can serve up to them and as we bring on new shippers and bring on some of the old convoy shippers , we just gotta make sure that we're servicing them correctly .

So that you know , spencer's on board , it was a great hire like we gotta make sure we got the right team . We gotta make sure that we're maintaining those

relationships . Like that piece is pretty straightforward and that's an area too where , like I think if you had asked me 10 years ago , I would have been much more focused on how do you drive efficiency there ? How do you invest in tech to make it streamlined ?

Like we've got some of those pieces , we'll have scheduling automation , like all that pretty straightforward . On the other side , we've just gotta be super mindful again about how we turn pieces back on that really provide advantage to our shippers and try not to overstretch and invest in areas where the tech is not yet proven .

And convoy had a lot of products right and some of them , I think , definitely drove value . Some of them like if not as clear what the business model is and how we would build that out , and so we've just gotta be very mindful about those pieces , and I touched on this a little bit earlier .

But I do think that if you really want to scale capabilities , you've got to think about where the perfect fit is , and the digital model works very well with owner operators . It works very well in like short regional halls , which for Flexport is very interesting because Dre-Edge is also a lot of short regional halls right .

So there's a lot of like overlap just in terms of network topology there , which is very interesting . It works less well when you get to long haul .

I think over time these things I think the model can subsume and there's definitely spaces where it can compete there , but that's where you typically still need some you know some broke to traditional brokerage approach to make it work . And so , as we're thinking about relaunching and I just I want to be very thoughtful about not trying to overstretch the model .

I want to be very thoughtful about where does it add the most value for shippers and particularly those you know areas where it was clear that , like Convoy just built a better model , but not trying to turn on all the pieces that , like it was less clear , that just wasn't traction with the product market fit .

I do think one of the burdens of a new freight or a Convoy through this whole process . Is this expectation of growth and back to like the market can only like .

Some of these spaces are only so big and you've got to be mindful of that , like not trying to force , like grow out , grow beyond what the market can actually absorb or where the market for that particular product is , and so trying to be very mindful of that as we go back to market too , where we don't overstretch ourselves .

We're growing and again , that's still a huge market , but growing in a very thoughtful way where we're not trying to do too many things and be all things to all people and really just zeroing in on where the tech provides .

Advantage , which the most clear advantage is to me is like owner operator , regional , local hall , the certain markets where it just was clear that other I don't think anybody else could compete with how Convoy was going to market and actually how well they were able to buy all the density and the opportunities they were , because it's really gets back to the owner

operators they were able to keep those owner operators moving and drive efficiencies with owner operators that others just couldn't match .

You just get to take the best parts of that and then also tangentially , having spent seven years of your own learning about being in that world and you made a point about the two fundamental things one , being obsessed with the customer and two , building a real business focusing on the bottom line I don't know if I would agree that Uber did the ladder there ,

but you certainly have the opportunity to have learned that lesson and apply it here . So if you screw this one up , I'm just kidding .

Like I have a privileged , I have a very privileged view , certainly having had both those experiences and now having the opportunity to restart this , and with the team too .

I mean , like I think everybody on that , everybody that's coming over from that convoy team , has no other desire than to prove that like this technology works , that it drives value , that it can , like it is the future right Again , they built an amazing stack of stuff and I think they'll all come to the table with their own lessons too , which is why this is ,

you know , it's very engaging for my I'm very compelling and motivating is that , like being able to have these conversations with this team that just went through this process and just struggled through this for eight years and built some amazing stuff along the way and also learned all of these lessons right that they're taking to the table , like that is super

compelling too , because if we can't , together , figure that out , then yeah to your point like what are we doing ? Right ?

It is that I do think there's there was a bit of first mover disadvantage there as well because of the market , because of zero interest rate , but at the same time , like that's where you got to look back and say , but look , how far they got , like it kind of it was maybe an inglorious like end how this all wound down .

But there's very few , you know , I think they can still , I think , be proud of like just how far they got . And now it's an opportunity to just hit the reset button , take all those lessons and just be super focused on how we build it going forward , which , yeah , there are definitely a lot of lessons . But it is like I have a privilege for you .

Like I say , if I look at the numbers , like there's there's real gold there . It's just maybe not the same business .

It was , maybe it's not the same scale and we got to be mindful of that piece , but there's absolutely like a unique , innovative business that can be built there and we just got to pull the pieces back together and then just be thoughtful about how we put that up , because , yeah , I mean to that point about like Uber has gone through its own journey on that

front as well . Right , and I think one of the that's probably one of the most exciting stories coming out of that whole epoch or era is that Uber is now a profitable company and growing cash flows

. Right , and it took a lot of . You know , dara has done an amazing job getting it there because , having come into Uber , yeah , there was a lot of waste and people were not focused on I mean , it was all growth oriented . It was just we're taking over the world trying to get it to just drive on that pipeline . All cost ? It was yeah , it was not .

There was a lot of inefficiencies and it takes . You know some companies can make that flip and some companies can't , and for you know it can be driven by all different factors . I think in Convoy's case there was also the like or like . That story will be written later . I'm not gonna get into that . But yeah , you know it's unfortunate how it all unwound .

But I think it was also just a unique scenario , unique set of circumstances too , and if I know , if Dan had another run at it and if I know if the team had another run at it , they probably would have approached it differently , right ? And so the opportunity to now just do this from scratch , right yeah ?

Are there big changes or it's just incremental little things getting better here and there ? How does Flexport play in all that ?

That there's been a bit of this year is a bit of a reset , and I think that you know , with this convoy news and like others , like there's a lot of shakeups happening in the space right now , and I think there was a wave of innovation and investment and there will be future waves of innovation and investment . We're already seeing some like .

We're seeing new names on that list that you know I wasn't familiar with , but bringing new ideas to market , and I do think that what we're going to see is a couple of things . So one , you know , ai has obviously driven a whole wave of new investment and we're seeing a lot of those startups .

There was already the wave of startups for automation or AV , right starting with auto but then expanding . You've got Wabi and Kodiak and Plus , who was on who's second on that list and others .

There's continues to be investment in autonomous trucks and autonomous vehicles although if you had asked me in 2016 , I would have been hyper optimistic and said that we'd have them on the road by now and , you know , have the trucks and my AVs , and it's one of those types of tech where you still say , okay , it's seven , 10 years out , so I don't think we're

going to , I don't think we're going to see AVs take over the roads in the next five years and maybe even in 10 years . I do think it's the future . It's one of those things where you know it's the future , you just , you just win .

I think AI has obviously got a huge , huge hype and it's I think we're now kind of over the peak of the hype curve and getting maybe to that , that trophid disillusionment . Where is it practical ? Yeah , where's the practical ? Where can we actually use it ?

I think there was a lot of excitement around the idea of like agents , right , or they could actually make calls . And then , in practice , though it has , and there were a lot of great demos we , you know I've seen a lot of demos that blow your mind . You're like , oh , this is the future we're going to be .

What are we calling carriers with AI bots here in just a year ? And then you realize the practical constraints of that and then just can't , you know , you still need a person in the middle there . And then I think a lot of the apps that are now becoming actually practical , are really more like super charged chatbots in practice and so .

But I say that also knowing that there's a lot of other very kind of innovative . I do think there's going to be ideas that we just aren't thinking about right now in that space and that that will kind of drive ongoing change .

But I also think that maybe got a little bit overhyped because we had a , you know , through the transformers and the LLM models , it was all of a sudden we had this new channel that was just , I think , blew everybody's mind right , and I still use chat GPT probably every day for something , but I don't use it as a core part of my business and I think

that's still where . Okay , how do I actually ? You know , like , where does it ?

It'll drive incremental automation improvements , I think , very quickly you'll do things like you know looking at contracts and you know parsing through contracts with AI bots and things like that , where I think it just it will drive some immediate value and you get some productivity benefits there . But is it going to revolutionize the space in the next five years ?

I don't know . I would . I would probably get 50 , you know , 50-50 that we see something that's truly revolutionary out of that in the next five years .

I do think you know I'm very biased , but I do think that the digital model , like we'll continue to gain traction and kind of chip away and that we will see more owner operators and more kind of disintermediated plays .

I also , you know after that last episode I do it , just my wheels have been spinning that there's got to be some Asian based models or more . I do think you're going to have more companies step in that are going to provide platforms and different types of tech .

There was a wave of startups of last couple of years , too , that are trying to provide better tooling for brokers and of course , you know Mastery was going down this path as well , in terms of just building about brokerage platforms at a very high price point . But I think there's others that will come in that'll do that more incrementally .

We can start to bundle together like packages of solutions via green screens or whatnot , where you get the pricing right , maybe you get the app tooling , you get the booking platform right , and I think that you'll see more companies filling that space , and there already are quite a few startups that are getting traction there , and I think that's what will be

interesting to see how things play out , because they also , as we're thinking about what to do with the convoy tech , like I said , one of those is which parts of this can we maybe open up or repackage or provide as a platform for others to build on top of ? And I think that's going to be very interesting .

I think because , again , there are just new capabilities that have been brought to market , like I always use API pricing as an example , but the other one , of course , just being carried , being able to book freight , like those are new capabilities that didn't exist , that people haven't fully figured out how to use them On the shipper side as an example .

Real time pricing , I think , is step one . Step two is then okay , now I can price real time , how do I now change how I plan and change my tactics ?

Because once you're able to execute and price and procure with nobody in the middle and instantly , then you can start to plug those capabilities upstream , meaning that if you're making a decision around where you're going to place your distribution center or which manufacturing facility is going to make Cherry Pepsi , all those decisions take pricing as an input and those ,

all those decisions results in mini bids or RFPs downstream and procurement exercises . There's no reason .

If you can't do that real time , they start to compress some of those processes and just integrate that into the planning process where you hit a button and you decide that Cherry Pepsi is going to be made in Atlanta and at the same time you go to market and procure with your five providers and nobody had to put a bid together and all that is just like a

seamless process . I think that's the next evolution of like on the shipper side of all these automated capabilities is being able to automate a lot of the planning and integrate it more upstream . Again , I think it's the TMS vendors that will have to drive those chains , because the TMS vendor isn't the ERP vendors . But I think that change will .

That's going to be a longer cycle change as the capabilities come to market . But I think one of my favorite quotes is the future is already here . It's just not evenly distributed .

I think that's very true in the transportation space , where you can kind of look at the technologies that are available today , that are starting to get traction , and then just play that tape forward 10 to 20 years . That's things like real time pricing , things like again , avs are doing loads .

They're just yeah , it's just , it's still probably 10 , 20 years out .

Three you never know when you're going to get a second chance at solving a problem , but when you do take it , what'd I miss Bill ?