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All right, I just checked and the waveform does spike and clip when I scream like that So we will try not to do that anymore for the sake of everyone home Welcome to season 5 episode 9 the home stretch of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them We are coming to you live today from the University of Washington audience Can we hear you? I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rezenthal and we are your hosts Let's talk about trucks 18 wheelers semis the long haul guys One out of every four of these that you see on the road is completely empty Truckers finish a job and then pick up the phone to find their next load which could be a state or more away You might think they should be able to just have their boss or coworker figure it out across multiple trucks and coordinate But get this 90% of trucking companies have six or fewer trucks and 97% have fewer than 20 trucks They're over a million independent trucking companies or carriers as we'll call them tonight in the United States alone So enter convoy today We are going to talk about this company which has only existed unbelievably for four and a half years and their ambitious plans to make it easy for any truck driver to Find a nearby load Transparence see what they'll get paid and do it all as you would expect right on their smartphone We've existed for four and a half years too We're almost as big as convoy. Yeah, this is this was like a sick dose of perspective We were doing the research David and I realized that the convoy was started between the time that we had lunch and talked about doing the show And when we actually started the show it's freaky to see you know close to a thousand person company and acquired Well on his way Our presenting sponsor for this episode is not a sponsor but another podcast that we love and want to recommend called the founders Podcast we have seen dozens of tweets that say something like my favorite podcast is acquired and founder So we knew there's a natural fit. We know the host of founders well David Senra. Hi David. Hey, Ben. Hey, David Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me I like how they group us together and then they say it's like the best curriculum for founders and executives Erilie as we use your show for research a lot I listened to your episode of the story of akyo marita before we did our Sony episodes this incredible primer You know, he's actually a good example of why people listen to founders into acquired because all of history's greatest entrepreneurs and investors They had deep historical knowledge about the work that came before them. So like the founder of Sony Who did he influence Steve Jobs talked about him over and over again if you do the research of him But I think this is one of the reasons why people love both of our shows and there's such good Complements is on acquired we focus on company histories You tell the histories of the individual people you're the people version of acquired and where the company version of founders Listeners the other fun thing to note is David will hit a topic from a bunch of different angles So I just listened to an episode on Edwin land from a biography that David did David it was the third fourth time you've done Polaroid I've read five biographies of Edwin land and I think I've made eight episodes of them because in my opinion the greatest Such a printer to ever do it my favorite entrepreneur personally is Steve Jobs and if you go back and listen to like a 20 year old Steve Jobs He's talking about Edwin lands my hero So the reason I did that is because I want to find out like I have my heroes who were their heroes and the beauty of this is The people may die, but the ideas never do and so Edwin land had passed away way before The apex of apple, but Steve was still able to use those ideas and now he's gone and we can use those ideas And so I think what acquires doing what a founder trying to do as well is find the best ideas in history and push them down to generations Make sure they're not lost history. I love that Well listeners go check out the founders podcast after this episode you can search for it in any podcast player Lots of companies that David covers that we have yet to dive into here on acquired So for more indulgence on companies and founders go check it out Now listeners if you want to go deeper on company building topics or you just want to support the show You should become an acquired limited partner We have a second show where we get into the nitty-gritty with expert operators and investors like the CEO of web flow and partners at benchmark Emergence in other great venture firms you can become an LP by going to glow.fm slash acquired or by clicking the link in the show notes And all new listeners get a seven day free trial Of course there are tons of ways to be involved with the show you can join the slack available at acquired.fm Raid us on iTunes and we always appreciate any shout outs anybody wants to give on Twitter or the social media platform of your choice Or in person or in person This is like really crazy doing the show and like looking up and seeing people and like You're gonna hear all the parts where we say um which we always cut you're gonna hear like you know When when I look at David and like that didn't make any sense can we delete that in post and Anyway with all that on to convoy Woo on to convoy hang on dead So when Ben and I Started thinking about doing this crazy thing and planning for our first Independent live show here in Seattle. This is actually our second live show our first was thanks to our friends at Geekwire There was only one company and one entrepreneur that we wanted on the show and that was convoy and its founder and see co-founder and CEO Dan Lewis Not only because as min mentioned it is I think as we speak the highest value to start up in the Pacific Northwest Having raised a whopping six hundred and sixty-eight million dollars in total capital But more so um because I think its story illustrates a really important new theme and tech that we haven't talked as much yet about on the show But I think it's gonna shape many of the next generation of great technology companies And that's taking all the lessons in tech from previous generation companies like amazon where Dan worked Airbnb Uber DoorDash all of them that were focused on consumer driven businesses and using that same tech to disrupt super large Super old school B2B industries So obviously convoy is at the vanguard of this, but they're not alone. There's flex port out there which folks might have heard of uh, rig up and oil and gas even our own portfolio company outweave Quotapro which does this in the scrap metal industry and I think we're gonna see a lot more of this in the coming years So we are super super excited to have Dan Lewis co-founder and CEO of convoy Gupta join us come on up, Dan Hello hi, I'm on perfect I Before we dive into the typical acquired history and fax and go back to 10 years before your birth and all that I want to ask first you can tell me about that We'll actually start a hundred years before your birth, but can you give us a quick high level overview to set the stage for our audience of There are many companies in the tracking space. What exactly does convoy do you connect Existing truckers not autonomous truckers people who are driving rigs today with people that want to ship stuff That's right. So convoy is a digital freight network and if you think about how trucking works As we mentioned earlier, it's extremely fragmented the average trucking company has three trucks So you have a bunch of mom and pop trucking companies on one side and a bunch of companies that want to ship freight on the other side The mom pop companies don't have a way to go source that business directly They don't have a sales and marketing team and operations team. So they work through middlemen typically brokers or large asset-based carriers that also run a brokerage on the side That's extremely fragmented the participants in the middle are trying to as individuals maintain relationships with truck drivers and Shippers and connect the dots. So any individual person only sees a minuscule piece of the pie Can't really identify all the opportunities optimize the system and figure out what's going on So what convoy does is we're replacing the traditional broker's model We're aggregating that long tail and we're getting them all onto the same platform all into the same technology stack So that we can learn about them know where they are and then optimize their routes Keep them efficient keep them productive fewer empty miles Reduces a ton of waste in the system Helps shippers get trucks more flexibly and faster helps truck drivers get jobs that are more convenient to where they're located What they want to do and effectively like just creates a more productive trucking system So to your point about you know Not just building software kind of replacing the system. That's what we're doing with technology. Yeah So okay to rewind you grew up here in Seattle birthplace of Amazon Long before Amazon was built. What was your family like you know? What what what was your journey that ended up in this? David we are going deep All right. Yeah, so my family is born and raised in this area my dad went to UW We I grew I lived actually when we were building a house in Northgate. I lived in Ravenna for like a year as a kid So I was very local my grandfather started a mom and pop kind of office supplies distribution company out of his garage in Ravenna My dad and uncle worked with that for a while still doing that kind of stuff today So kind of small business family, but not really a tech family I have relatives in Seattle that you know did biology for the Washington for Washington state I have other ones that work for the ferry department a cousin of mine You know manages one of the fire stations in Seattle You know a lot of kind of different local jobs, but not so much directly in the tech industry growing up I just happened to grow up at a time when it it was flourishing and Microsoft was coming on the stage It kind of got me interested in tech early on. Yeah, so you went to Yale You were liberal arts major at Yale and then importantly for the story you join a consulting firm after graduation What were some of the like projects you worked on you're at Oliver Wyman, right? Yeah, it's all running An Oliver Wyman does a lot of work with logistics-based industries Airlines and the lake like you know What did you learn there both in terms of exposure to some industries that would come in helpful later for Conboy But also The skills that you learned yeah, so I did learn a lot about supply chain logistics when I was working there I worked for the Panama Canal for a little while I lived in Spain and I worked for Welling Airlines and we did a a bunch of other projects with airlines some projects with Boeing actually So there are a lot of different logistics problems that we were working on In terms of skills I think the thing that was the most impactful for me in consulting and it's something that kind of bugged me For a long time in my life to be honest I remember even in high school and junior high like I did a lot of different things. I was always the kid that did Like seven different activities, you know sports student government tried this hobby tried that hobby wanted to learn this thing And I never really went deep and I remember thinking at one point Kind of jealous of the person that found that one thing that they really love and they're like super deep in it And I kind of was wondering maybe I could just pick something and I never was able to just settle on one thing So consulting really fit me I did 26 projects probably over you know four years or so And but I kept wondering when am I going to figure out that thing that I really love and I bounced around I did lots of different things marketing product management engineering related work And it wasn't until I started a company That I realized the thing that I was actually really good at and that I had trained myself to do over and over Was to very rapidly understand new spaces And be able to start things and kick things off and like very quickly get something off the ground And that was a skill I think that I I came from consulting initially Then did you find that you were great at that but not as operational as you would like like the knock on people that Starting consulting or spend too much time in consulting as always like oh yeah, they're the smartest person in the room Like they can definitely tell you how to solve your problem But like when it comes to doing it it doesn't work like was that your experience or yeah, it's a really really good question When I first started I don't think I recognized but that that actually was the case in consulting Like I thought that I understood things and then I realized I was just doing the strategy portion Is he went right from consulting to a startup right well the latter half of consulting that was all operations So actually like when I was in Spain I was I was Running a procurement Project for seven months and it was end-to-end designing all of the specs for how we're gonna do maintenance for aircraft engines APUs working with 30 different vendors on a six month procurement process and getting in all the details of finance and operations and logistics So that's when I realized that I was learning that for the first time in a lot of other stuff of strategies I feel like I had the benefit towards a latter part of my consulting career Of really getting into the weeds and working on some really neat and potatoes kind of projects operationally minded. I then went pretty far away from that though to be honest after consulting in the tech And I didn't do that again for a while After four years of this you come back to Seattle Which is now so what year are we in now when you join Skydeck When I joined Skydeck 2007 okay, so Tech is a thing you know calmly hasn't been started yet But so that Seattle startup market isn't quite what it is today What prompted you other than perhaps wanting to come home to You know you're working in logistics at airports I'm gonna go back into the tech world and join a join a crazy new startup And and to for people who aren't from Seattle the way to think about this is Amazon is in one building at this point Yeah, yeah, so Skydeck was in the Bay Area I actually didn't leave right away what I what I did and and this is something about how I just got into startups I always wanted to do something in tech like when I was 10 my dad worked for US West or you know the local phone company. He brought home like an IBM XT. I remember You know really kind of you know DOS 3.0 and I just I just kind of learned how to use it It became I taught myself a bunch of things on there. I started with basic and just taught myself a bunch of really simple things You know wanted to figure out how to optimize the computer so I could play more video games and got online You know very early on to like the library system and started teaching myself all that stuff work So I kind of was really interested in tech early on Got away from it a while, but that's how I made money in college like I made money building websites for the athletic department I did a lot of IT support and help people Back then did make you know 10 15 bucks an hour just to have some money in college So it was sort of something I developed early and then when I was consulting I was like I want to go back into tech I kind of had this bug and I didn't know how to quite get back in there because most tech companies and startups looking consultants You know and aren't that interested at least back then I mean especially in Silicon Valley a lot of the early stage ones. We're looking for more technology experience So I just really was part of you know in a lot of ways You guys today at Conway share a lot of heritage with Uber and I think it was it was them that really were like Oh, yeah, no, we're gonna hire a bunch of people from Goldman We're gonna hire a bunch of people from McKinsey and bring that Operational you know know how into into the startup world But yeah back then that was that was like not cool. It was definitely not normal and I hustled like I I remember Taking vacation from Oliver Wyman for like a week and a half and all I did was network I just wrote a list of everyone I wanted to meet and then found ways to meet them And then would ask them who else they knew in the space and I started working on a startup ideas I would just take time off to work on startup ideas and I had this idea for location-based services like data research company and and surveys company So I started diving really far into that wrote a whole business plan that may be 40 or 50 people And never decided to do it But I realized really quickly the power of networking and information I would have lists of people that I would write down and and all my notes in my meetings with them And then I realized after 10 or 20 meetings Every meeting I went into I knew more about the space in the person I was talking to And I could introduce them to all these new companies So it became like this information broker role I finally networked my way into Skydeck It should have been an associated of engine capital fair But yeah, I tried early and that didn't work out But I that's how I met pound Skydeck So I actually like networked my way in while trying to start my own thing Met this group they had founded a company in New York called Vindigo Which is the early like Mobile app developer for brew handsets running on Verizon had really had some had some success doing that moved at Silicon Valley to build this new company I was compelling and and like basically Somehow convinced them to hire me like they were all engineers and they're like why would we hire you? You're this you're this consultant. What's Skydeck also focused on like brew handsets? No, not that time it was pre iOS I just came out right until 2007. I started this company in May 2007 So they were thinking about how do we you know social networks and the social graph was the big thing back then and mobile like location-based services things on our very early So they were thinking hey, you have all this data in the phone bill It's like someone's social graph Can we let you unlock that and combine that with like your email and context and start to records all your text messages and phone records and start to To and combine your your contacts So obviously you can see your real social graph and is there a way to monetize that or or to plug that into other systems that are being built at that time And the big reveal is this company ends up becoming higher, right? I mean it went through a whole bunch of Not there Which is a spam call blocking service now. Yeah, and they actually did that Yeah, how to call systems specifically designed to help you identify if someone was calling that you didn't want to pick up Um, they built it they had a they got it pretty far actually and that a partnership with Google and then um, Google Are kind of shut it down and built it they basically said you can't do this anymore in Android You can't get access to the phone records So we shut that down and then they they add something to work them up You have the startup experience with these crazy pivots You end up coming back to Seattle then Our fault for not realizing it was was guided but um coming back to Microsoft. Yeah So your first journey now you gone from consulting started up big tech company What did you learn in Microsoft and I was very lucky to get a job Microsoft at the time it was 2008 I got back to Seattle. I Left my job in the summer of 2008 Went on around the world trip. Wow. Um, good time back in October 2008 while I was gone Wash to mutual and out of business so my bank and out of business I had left a bunch of stock, you know I'd most of my money in stock at the time and or socks and I wasn't really paying very close attention to it Um, so most of that was gone I didn't have a job because I'd quit my job. I thought I was gonna start Working with some of the partners from the management consulting for my binat as a contractor But to get my feet under me when I got back to Seattle That was no longer available when I got back So I remember meeting a friend of mine at black bottle in Belltown got him Fritz Landman Yeah, I got into college with and he was at Microsoft at the time and I was like hey what should I do like It's kind of looks pretty bad out there. He's like I don't know I any like had a text message from somebody pretty high up it all at Microsoft saying we are hiring no more consultants Like starting next month. So I was like I guess that's not gonna be an option I just did the thing I did back when I was looking at Scottick I just hustled again and did a meeting every you know five or six meetings a day Networked created my list tried to find a job got no interviews couldn't get an interview from Amazon couldn't interview from anybody at the time um because the market was such a rocky state And fortunately I knew some people at Microsoft through Fritz Who gave me a shot at an interview and I got a product manager job there so And you hadn't been a product manager at Skydeck, okay? I had not been a product manager at Skydeck But I basically was because we were so early. I just thought like one So I was able to get through the interview. I want to give that context because like That was a point where you imagine you know I grew up in Seattle, you know, went to go more local school Somehow like ended up at Yale. There's a story around that Um worked really hard for five years was really frugal saved And then in 2008 like made that one decision was kind of offline for a few months And came back to Seattle basically with nothing no job no money um and didn't place a live So Like I have seen that side of it and you know, I didn't panic. I just knew I could work hard and find a job But I think I have a lot of respect going through seeing 2000. I graduated in 2003 So I went through the 2001 there were very few jobs and I was graduating again really struggled to get that first job Works really hard a lot of friends of mine took a long time to get those jobs 2008 so I feel like I've been through a couple of these really hard periods which I think Made me really um value the opportunities that I've had and so when I got that job of Microsoft I was like very proud of it and very excited about the company I grew up in Seattle, you know looking at Seattle times reading about Microsoft group I remember looking at their stock price when it was like printed in the newspaper like so intrigued by this growing company as a kid So it was like a dream for me to get a job there Which this this is a unique Seattle thing so I didn't grow up here and like nowhere in the US Has reverence for Microsoft like Seattle does. I mean if you grow up here It is like there's so much giving back to the community It created so much wealth for the community It puts Seattle in the map in a lot of ways and like you know, hi, oh, you know, I was like oh well Yeah, those are the bad computers. Yeah Yeah, I didn't of course you ended up working for Microsoft for many years so you know, hey But you're right that was that was kind of the foray into Seattle for me And so I was you know, I I didn't take anything for granted because I realized There weren't a world of plenty right now. We were just talking about how much capital is available Convoys been able to raise a lot of money You know, everyone that's graduated in the last 10 years has only lived in an environment where everything's up into the right effectively And I've lived through two other cycles now and one I was again, you know, just out of college was later But I think that's just It's made me never take for granted anything we're doing and I I Don't rest and feel like we're there like I'm just like we got to build a really healthy sustainable business and Hurray and we're taking a big swing So the more money you raise and the bigger the opportunity you go after The more challenges you you face in terms of getting there So Microsoft then you're like I'm gonna go back do the startup thing again Wavy Another startup we were investors when I was at Moderna Great product idea didn't end up realizing its vision gets acquired by Google And then you were head of product there is that right? Yeah, I was I was head of product. I mean it was a pretty small side of a lot of I did a lot of stuff like marketing products Planning like a bunch of different things sort of jack-of-all trades. I think that that in that experience So how long did you stay at Google and then and then was it that because the team Adrian moved down to mountain view right? And then did you stay in Seattle and is that how you ended up at Amazon? That's right So the company was acquired in 2011 or 2010 2011 and ultimately the entire team moved down to the Bay area to join the machine intelligence group And I learned I learned an incredible amount at Wavy. I decided I didn't want to move the Bay area And so I was working remotely for Google for a while I was looking at several options in Seattle to join some of the teams here and I just decided I didn't want to be part of a remote office at that time I think Google's actually scaled pretty significantly since then, but I remember going down the Bay area wants to meet some of the Leadership of the team that I may have been joining there were two or three options in Seattle And I distinctly remember sitting down with them and the I won't say the person's name But I remember they were like, you know, we just have a love hate relationship with our remote offices I was like, oh, what's the hate part? Oh, okay, he's like, yeah, you know We like to keep a lot of the planning and a lot of the Figuring things out down here and then we have some satellite teams up there that kind of execute on specific pieces I was like that sounds fine if you're in maybe engineering what I wanted to do was very different than that So that was actually the thing that caused me to not stay at Google I was like I don't really want to have that experience where I'm Kind of supporting a remote office. I want to be in the thick of it I looked at several different companies at that time someone I had Networked with early on when I was doing Wavy I reconnected with them They were at Amazon and and was really inspired by the team. They built the organization they're building so I went That's what went to Amazon Dan if you ever had a job that you applied for that you like you apply and they're like I hope they get back to me without like having a relationship with someone there Have I ever gotten a job or have any of the jobs that you've ever held have been from like a job portal? I think so there are two actually My freshman year internship the internship I had after freshman year I I think I applied to an online posting. I joined a company called PR.com in Seattle The domain which is acquired by Wagner. It's from and so very 1999 name PR.com we did PR for tech companies Uh I didn't even really know how to be an intern I think I just like went on vacation once for a week and they were like just tell us it's like oh, okay Like I was I was And then The other time was I applied to some Um, uh, not a job or but companies came to Yale looking for candidates and they were like, you know Some companies on campus recruiting so I went that channel But after that no after that it's always been Through the relationships that I built and I very often hire if you know I reach out to a lot of people and I do a lot of personal sourcing And that's always been a big part of my my thinking It's great. I have sent out a lot of applications where I didn't get anything. Oh yeah You and me both I was trained like I got that job I mentioned out of out of at a Yale. I think I got that in the spring I sent a lot of resumes out and applied to a lot of places I had taken my junior year off and went to Chile So I became fluent in Spanish and I and this summer before and after I worked for my family's delivery business So I didn't have like the post sophomore post junior year strong Interships and coming out in 2003 again tight job market. I didn't have like I could do it But I didn't have the story so the traditional channel didn't really work for me Mm-hmm. And then back again in 2000 and you know Over time applied to different roles and again 2008 when I was applying like I just didn't work at all So I've I think I've mostly been looking for roles I've been in situations where that just didn't work and that's why I've kind of trained myself to not really Go down that path. Yeah All right, so Wavy happens you end up at Amazon I want to ask one question on Amazon before moving on to the founding of of Well you founding companies and then we'll get to Convoy Recently Amazon has sort of been dubbed the CEO factory and we've seen data of all these great CEOs at big fast growing companies Then have come out of Amazon. What is it in your mind that creates that? there are A lot of other companies do that I think that do a good job of responding CEOs I think one thing that Amazon does is that it expects a lot of ownership from the people that are in the role and it kind of has a culture of assigning You know a single threaded leader or a person who's ultimately responsible for the outcome of the thing at least in my experience and and that design puts you in a position where you feel responsibility across multiple functions even if you don't own all those functions And I think that that sort of cross-functional leadership at many levels of the company and strong Push towards ownership is really important And I think you see that both in the business side and on the technology side Mm-hmm when I was at wavy we tended to bias towards hiring a lot of engineers from Amazon And of course there's great engineers at every company both the experience we had was that they had been expected to own more Of the end-to-end aspect of their system versus just one piece And I think I saw the same thing on the product and business side as well I think that probably attracts people that want that and then trains people and how to think that way Yeah So then you know you can slot into those those opportunities is there a pro activity and a hustle that doesn't exist at other bigger companies Is that is that part of it or is that sort of overly mythologized? You know I have I've only worked at several and I didn't spend as much time at Google But I have been at Microsoft now there's and I think there that's definitely there is a distinction that's that's true on that and So I'll give you the example when I got to Amazon And this is not maybe the typical role, but I didn't have a team. They just said look you're a person who's gonna build a team Go do some research in this general scope of the world figure out what Amazon should be doing and why and I wrote five six pages in my first two and a half months I pitched them to the leader six pages of course being the canonical Amazon document which I know power point six pages right a doc So I wrote five or six you know four or five docs actually that were each different business ideas And I pitched them and I got funding for three of them and then over the next you know two or three months I went out and hired the teams and who are you reporting to at the time? Gunning Michael Dordy and then his skip level of Sebastian Gunning him who was actually on the That list as well the CEO of actually list for because now the co-CEO of we work which is a whole different Strategy Old different thing But he was creating this in this area for this to happen So that was really The fact that that can exist in a company is pretty inspiring and then what I realized after I'd been there for a while was The planning process encourages people to come up with new ideas And pitch those ideas and if they get the pitch if they're able to build consensus and a storyline around it and demonstrate some early value They can go build a team around it and data win So if you're if you want to remember there's an example to buy you know ask a question get an answer on Amazon That's a feature that exists on Amazon You can ask a question on a product page and other people other customers or manufacturers will answer that That product was developed by someone else in the same organization that was part of and I kind of was Works on that a little bit, but it wasn't you know, I didn't directly develop that That was originally Given the thumbs down by leadership But the team said okay fine We're gonna figure it out and they went email the bunch of customers ask them questions and came back and said actually If you email customers and you ask them questions they will answer them at this rate And then the the person who had said no is like oh I thought they wouldn't turns out they will go do it right? So someone just said I don't agree with you I'm gonna go show you the data and I got it. They got a team out of it and they built it And so that that sort of internal culture of funding good ideas and and if people do the research and put the hustling to figure it out funding that Has created obviously a very broad range of businesses and products that Amazon has created And a culture of kind of starting new things So I think that's probably unique actually the range of things are doing So you leave Amazon to start a company are you writing six pages and was convoy originally a six-pager? Was that the format and what you thought about new businesses? We didn't do it that way and convoy is a A combination of influence from many different companies actually I wouldn't I wouldn't say just Amazon there are a couple things we took from Amazon that we thought were really important But we've we've taken from a lot of experience we've had Convoy the original experience coming out of Amazon Was a lot of research I wrote a document, but I wrote I wrote like I didn't think about it. It's like different forms of documents to capture and structure my thoughts But it was again I need to talk to a lot of people Like let's find the problem and I didn't really know exactly where the problem was gonna be I was like logistics seems really interesting and and one of the things was You know, I kind of this moment of Amazon was like it looks like the supply chain just won And the feeling was okay When online shot I told the story maybe once before but not very often When online shopping started you had to decide am I gonna go to the store and buy it last minute Which means I get to procrastinate which people love to procrastinate or I have to buy it online five to seven days in advance before I need it Which means I can be lazy but I can't procrastinate so you have to be lazy or procrastinate And that's like too really strong human condition Really want to do and this goes back to my cognitive science. I'll You know people like our tic-tac episode But what those things right and you had to decide and then Amazon Prime comes out and also in its two days Saw the sudden I can order it online Be lazy and I can be procrastinating in order the last minute And so what happened was people changed their behavior You started waiting to order two days in advance if you're a prime customer because you could and once you waited They'll two or three days left where else are you gonna buy it? No one else delivers in that time frame So the secret was being faster than everyone else and creating that rhythm It wasn't about the exact two days. It's two days was faster than everybody so you'd wait And then you would order because everybody procrastinate so you always wait So we would wait to the last minute once that kicked in Massive in shift of business to Amazon especially for prime customer effectively a monopoly over like the The purchasing in that time frame When I saw the data and kind of understood the impact of that I was like wow the supply chain just dominated Like that is why people are shifting their behavior They can't see it. They can't touch it. It's not about the location of the store the parking It's about two day delivery making me procrastinated by online from Amazon right super powerful All these other businesses started reacting to that And and I was like okay, I got to figure out something in supply chain I talked to other investors in Seattle hotie part of you with somebody I spent some time with early on who wanted me to kind of look into in the Trucking specifically in supply chain. I was looking at several parts of supply chain I then took direction started diving into supply chain the trucking aspect a lot more and there are three or four interesting businesses and trucking I uncovered But that was just through talking to people. Yeah, you know, just hustling and getting out there to truck stops and and Well this way so I think all of these threads of your background kind of come together here with convoy So even before you land on you know, you talked to hobby hotie and you land on trucking within logistics and in the specific marketplace idea within trucking One thing you guys did that I never see any other companies do is you recruited your team before you had the company So you and grand grand you yeah your co-founder did you guys meet at amazon? Grand was not my team at amazon. Yeah, but you had five engineers that were part of your team even before you had landed on the idea for convoy Right and talk us through how you thought about that I learned about this back when I was trying to get the job at skydek I wasn't and I have a strong technical background I and I know a lot about developing software now, but I'm not a software engineer And so I realized at least in my perspective and and some of the investors in here can can decide if this is right or wrong But as it trying to get seed funding what I learned and felt early on was you kind of have to check three boxes You have to have you have to have an idea that they can at least understand and believe this compelling and believe it has the right dynamics that it could return on the Yeah, you could return on the investment right can be that kind of an idea The second is you have to be a personality an individual that is compelling to them Because and I think a big part of that is A, they want to believe that you're going to do the work You're going to hustle you're going to commit to it you're going to get it done You're going to be smart and thoughtful about your approach And you have to convince hundreds of other people over the next few years That what you're doing is worth it. Yeah, so you've been really persuasive. I've heard you talk about this before Many entrepreneurs can check boxes one and two exactly. I couldn't check box three of Build it yeah, I couldn't build it myself And I didn't believe that I could go outsource that to like a contractor to build my idea I knew enough about the the ecosystem that I wasn't going to be able to track the investors that I wanted And the supporters if I was that was my strategy for Development so like I need to get the best engineers around the table Otherwise, I might not build a race seed funding and as much risk as I wanted to take in as you take doing a startup I actually want to minimize my risk and getting this thing going and so I what I did is I I had a sense of some of the ideas that I wanted I knew I needed a strong technical co-founder who knew how to build a startup So I spent time trying to find that person and then that was grand right so grand and I Decided to do this then I went back to the team. I'd worked with wavy some of the people there and some people I'd worked with an Amazon who were who some of them were there and some of them weren't there anymore And I started just planting the seeds and the ideas and I got a few of them to say I'll do it And actually a few of them said I'll do it Independent of the idea like there's two or three ideas which ever one let's do it That's incredible And so then I was like okay, and I'm pretty confident And that was what I needed and then I put together the pitch deck and said there were and we started kind of building it on the side We started Setting up kind of the development environment getting deciding what we're gonna build kind of building some of the building blocks Have actually getting an app developed things like that getting somebody's in structured and organized and started doing a bunch of research And then that brought some of the engineers in you dub actually Was where we started the company Uh the table I've heard you talk about the table was the table here at you double was here you done wow so tech stars Has their office here at you dub in the old law school library and or you know that's where that's where was so Uh Chris DeVore let us sit at one of the tables actually to go all the way back So we started there. I guess I should say like that's where we actually kind of like once we knew we were gonna do this We went there before that to be totally Seattle to give all the context like maveron reached out to me and said Hey, we heard you're gonna do this. We want to give you an office to work at it And so I went down and worked at a maveron for a while and I knew some of the maveron partners And they were really they kind of gave me that access and and let me kind of get my feet on the ground Hugging me a place to start working in some infrastructure. So I did all my research there And then I went to them and said I'm sorry. I'm doing a B2B idea Because they only invested in the team right yeah, and they were like oh okay, and I was like so I'm gonna You get you out I should probably leave um, but they were they were great. They're really supportive um And so then I and then Chris was like well you guys can just use one of our tables because we're not using our tables We're between classes So we sat at the table and that in that library and was it was so perfect because what ended up happening is we're in this fun Dynamic environment a lot of energy in that room a lot of people were you know We're coming in now and it had this great feeling it had to start up feeling before we started So I had three of the five at that point They wanted to do it and what we did is we we just invited other people to come work with us Because we had other people this is such a great. They were like gonna do a company hack It was on my team at Amazon had quit. He's like I'm gonna start my own like gaming related thing Yeah, sure you and it was great. No, I mean the acuids fun. He was here. He laughed at that because I was like great idea come work on it Sitting next to us at this table So he just started hanging out there and then we just started adding people to this table And then we would kind of get to know them and then and then ultimately they we got some little attraction like oh This is interesting. We kind of recruited the other two folks from there Not everyone joined you know some people decided not to and a lot of people were interested at the time um But that was kind of how we got it going and and that was the beginning and then once we got funding then we went and got our own spot Were you so Seattle? I would just say just to be really clear like the ecosystem in Seattle helped like we didn't have funding in those first two locations And they gave us a chance to kind of get our feet on the ground in a great environment, which was compelling That's awesome Did it did it did it? Did it occur to you that like It yeah, it's gonna help us raise money like yeah, it's gonna help me feel more confident about this enterprise I'm starting but like holy crap. We're hiring five engineers and we don't yet know like we Not not pre product market fit like we haven't gotten any signal from customers that we're building anything remotely right Uh, that's true Well, when you put it that way partially cuz I didn't know ex so I had I as I mentioned I went out and talked to a lot of other brokers I went on talked to a lot of shippers. Yeah, you notoriously a lot of truck stops a lot of truck stops I did all that stuff so and those were fun. I remember I told this story but you know The first shipper I walked into I walked in Panics asked where the bathroom was because it like gave me a warehouse bad way to the bathroom where I was left Like I didn't know what to say. I was like okay, that didn't work And maybe you just not see your material The first truck stuff I went into same kind of thing I went in there and I looked at all the people sitting at their You know having lunch individually to table by themselves everyone turns it looks me when I walk and I'm dressed not And went back to my car and thought about it again So I you know my clipboard and Starbucks gift cards were effective but not in that moment Um, but I but I learned a lot and some of the companies along the way what I found was most ideas I'd ever had in my life including the Location-based services like data research one and maybe ten others. I had some really bad two enabled diapers Really bad ideas some all sorts of stuff. You know this one actually Every time I shared it with somebody from the industry They were excited about it and felt like it was necessary Hmm, so I got really strong positive feedback from the industry that I had never experienced before and I never thought about something else So I didn't know but I knew there was a problem like I was really sure there was a problem people were hungry for something to be better I didn't know how to solve it And so that that was where we kind of started and we brought in um Those folks The best part is we did all this without ever incorporating So we were just we like we knew that was important But we were very much let's avoid the trappings of a startup. Let's just start building it We had to kind of maybe there's legal reasons not to do that probably But we had we were like working out of these different offices We were kind of getting people to sign up to work with us We built our you know we built our pitch deck. We were out pitching investors You know we were working on the code with with folks part time at that at that time And then we started the company once someone told us they wanted to fund And then we needed a bank account So we're like oh we have to have a bank account that you can fund because I can't just give them my I use my phone number my home address When we're first starting which was a bad idea Really bad idea? Um, do you still get a lot of mail like for I get a lot of phone calls to I need to change the phone number I do a lot of Customer support when I take out for truck drivers or if they're looking at someone's like I didn't get paid yet I'm like okay. I'm working on it But yeah, so that was like that was the origin But it was really funny so drew housed in from Dropbox I think I've ever told him this was the first one like every but we were gonna close and it was like over a day And he was like oh, we got it we got close And I think that we we've set we know so our first bank had a Silicon Valley bank We realized we had to incorporate so we got you know we actually Our remember was like I'll turn one into invest that was the he was gonna invest Well, he was ready to wire like before everybody else like can I wire? I was like oh hold on like we have in some bank issues let me get back to you And I remember Sorry, I didn't mean to throw you into the bus on that one But um issues being we've reached out to them. Yeah The air cover uh the issue being we haven't said the account um, but what we did is we uh We reached out to an attorney. I won't mention who it was like on a Monday And they were like great. We'll do it. And it was I had an attorney that I knew pretty well But my co-founder reached out and he was taking care of that so I didn't even thought about it We were running so fast that week and and I was like oh who'd you reach out to me? So I was like okay sounds good. Let's get this started and set up and then the person just didn't call us back for like they were just Quiet for like two days and then we called him like oh, yeah, I'm on it. I'm on it I'm like no, you said you do it tomorrow. Okay, we're done like two-day contract. We're not working anymore I called um Someone I'd worked with actually at wavia neek from oric who was the only attorney I'd ever worked with in this context who I really liked And he got it turned around like 24 hours and then we opened a bank account and got her money I think the learning from that is like don't worry about getting all the Trappings of the startup I would say like all the things that kind of on paper designated that there's the startup Just spend all your energy on is this the right business Right because none of that stuff really matters unless you have the right business Right the startup isn't the legal entity in the payroll system and I IP assignment like it's having a thing that exists in the world That didn't exist before that customers won someone's interested in or that someone's willing to fund to figure out if people will be interested in it Yeah, this business that you're triangulating on that becomes convoy of a marketplace of truckers and shippers How did you Get the initial liquidity for this to happen right because like it's one thing say like oh, hey Join my marketplace as a shipper you can ship stuff and it'll be great And I promise to get there on time and you've got one trucker that's like a hundred miles away How did you like bootstrap this yeah, and there are people I think there are people in the audience that have more Long-term first-hand knowledge of this and I didn't so the way we originally bootstrapped it was well We made a mistake we thought truck drivers would be compelled by our amazing vision You know we thought the the great like Design of our app and the vision of our ability to help them would compel them to download and use our app We worked really fast So we raised money in May and then we raised again in July or seed round And then we launched at the end of August how much did you raise in May in July? I think it was like a million in A million and many like a million half in July something like that. Okay. We built the app just for Android initially Our web experience and a pricing model and matching model and then we went to market So it's the basic bare bones right of an experience And we took this app we went and showed a bunch of truck drivers I remember going to about back to the truck stops and and Completely safe about this But everybody in the company when they saw a truck would take a picture of the side of the truck and put it on a slack channel So we like this slack channel the side of trucks because everybody has their like MC number and DOT number and you can go look up this truck look up who are these local truck drivers all these smokes We didn't like even know where to find them even though there are online directories We discovered later and there's lots of there way more official ways to do this Like driving down the road Thank you pictures of trucks you're driving by and then posting the slack is not safe But we felt like it was important so we like let's just went to like warehouse and took pictures of trucks coming in or truck stops Just we didn't and we were just talking people and so we we developed this local network of maybe you know Some trucks to call and then we switch trucks of NASA and nobody was interested we completely bombed and I remember this was a big part of the Women I meant to cover earlier, but a huge part of the thesis that I imagine is you're building up this business plan And ultimately is it well the truck drivers these but the truck drivers have smartphones now Like these are the days when you know this 2015 Everybody has a smartphone truck drivers. They were never gonna touch software They were never gonna install a desktop in their trucks like but now they have a smartphone. They have a computer They were just getting smartphones then yeah, right then they're thinking about which completely rightfully so I want to get some work We were realizing brokers are not Love hate relationship. I also heard that from truck drivers about brokers, right? There are a lot of Kind of shady fly-by-night brokers. There are a lot of very respectable great ones But people like here's a thing that'll happen. This is you know, we'll have some will create a brokerage They will go to a shipper and say hey, I'm a broker. I can do your work for you The shipper says great here are these 25 loads to do and is it hard to get a broker's license like is this is a big hurdle? Hard to get a broker's license. This is why there's a million Well, there's a broker's just 158,000 brokers in the US. Yeah, so you can go get a broker's license And there you know most brokers are totally legitimate do a great job But sometimes a broker will do this They'll go get work from a shipper Maybe the shipper pays is gonna pay them for 20 loads right 20 grand in total revenue They go get trucks to do the job the trucks complete the job the shipper pays the broker the broker disappears Right never pays the truck drivers that that happens and or they don't pay them what they're deserved So the the whole idea of this middle man that kind of controls payments on both sides and it's kind of it's a zero-sum game Where they're trying to pay the broke the carriers little is possible to make the maximum front of every job The truck drivers don't always love that right? So coming in as a new broker Well, and that's the that's the worst case scenario But even in a good scenario you're in the individual broker you're a human right you're thinking how many trucks do I know How many shippers do I know you're trying to coordinate those trucks and then you've got the payment issue right like you're getting paid by the shippers But you're not getting that money right away and then the truck driver like Here she is driving the load right and then they're like well, I just worked like I need my money I need to get paid and the brokers like well, I haven't gotten paid yet exactly that also happens So there's a lot of discrepancies around how much how much you actually want to pay them? It's complicated So basically that's a situation where the truck driver doesn't always trust the broker a brand new broker on the scene that says they have this app That's magically going to give you freight when you open it It's not fully believable by someone who Who is used to load boards which are effectively Craigslist and brokers say I have a load the broker doesn't actually have the load They just post it so truck drivers will call them and say yeah, I want the load. Oh great. How much are you willing to do it for? It in her box. Oh great. Oh, let me just double check to make sure it's still available Hey shipper I can do it for 950 Right like is there any of the load yet? So they're kind of playing both sides. This is this happens and so then Truck drivers don't always assume that when they see a load post on these traditional loads boards. It's a real load Could be a phantom load, right? So that's the environment you're walking into you're we're discovering this we realize the truck drivers don't fully trust this notion We're brand new our MC number are our official like motor carrier numbers are brokers a day old So like who are you? So it was hard to get them on So what happened was nobody would go on and then we said okay, we realized that tactics the flywheel will not start spinning if we start with supply So we went to the and the orthodoxy is your building marketplace kind of start with supply That's right exact as we thought so and we're like you got to supply ready for the demand Because uber's model was they had to have a car ready because you're gonna need the car in five minutes, right? What we realized was We could get afraid from the shipper and it doesn't pick up for 24 to 48 hours So maybe 72 hours so the what we actually figured out was the best way to build the flywheel was not to go start with supply It was to get demand Take each individual shipment go to the supply and say I have a shipment for you. Do you want it? Yes real shipment. I'm in great. It's waiting for you in the app So then you go from a 0% conversion to like 95% conversion where if the truck driver wants that job They're gonna download the app to get it right and so that ended up flipping it and making it Go fast. So then what the secret sauce the success factor for convoy was about how rapidly we could onboard and and evaluate a new carrier So it's about speed of carrier onboarding became the most important thing Because effectively the clock's ticking once you take the job from the shipper We had to go get a new carrier into our platform Sign them up train them to use the app get them to download it do the paperwork You know get them to sign our agreement and do the job in 24 to 48 hours That became the like secret sauce for building the brokerage and that's when we got the flywheel going Well, I think that's what's so cool about you guys and these B2B marketplaces is Again, you think about the consumer driven companies. It's about how can I satisfy the product need of the consumer as quickly as possible In these B2B marketplaces, it's about money. It's like I have money like I have a job And I will get you the money as soon as possible like that can drive and so the other thing that you guys did pretty It was pretty early on right as you institute we will pay you within a day Of delivering the load right that's right. How did you make that happen? So that idea came out of Again the flywheel works in our world. Not only do you need the driver to do the job They need to download the app and use the app And so a lot of work has gone into make that app as simple as possible But we need them to use it and one of the best ways to get them to use it was to say If you use it throughout the job and you upload the paperwork to the app then we can pay you really fast And so it created an incentive for them to use the technology Yeah, which then reduced our costs and gave us the data we need to run our business. So effectively If I could pay the carrier 30 days before they're used to getting paid The cost for me to to finance that is a lot less than the benefit that I get from a carrier using my technology platform From the data that I collect the operational efficiencies that come from that the visibility and the network that I built and so that was a Effectively a cost of growing the network faster. There's this interesting sort of famous venture capital question that is why now You know what people have tried this business before and people specifically have tried building a digital Freightbroke bridge before and so why now and it is such a clear and present answer of of course smartphones came out in 2007 but like the broad adoption by everyone who drives a truck wasn't until the 2014-2015 era and once that happened Not only could you get them to upload this stuff, but like you could passively collect location data and just know like hey Where are the loads like do I don't have to we don't have people calling and saying like have it gotten there yet like you just know That's right. Yeah, and that's why it's important that they use the app I think that's what's cool like but that it's not enough You're just like oh all the pieces are there their companies out there that are like basically installing smartphone Guts on trailers at this point right like you can sell software and try to be like oh yeah Like it's better like the industry should do this or you could you could You know create incentives like you guys did to make it economically better for participants in the ecosystem to do that And the way you do that is you actually create a full stack company, right? That's right. Yeah exactly. That was the You could build software and we could have built this software and sold it to brokerages We kind of thought about that there were two big reasons we didn't do that one is We really wanted to do something transformative And it's very hard to change an industry by selling a software product to the person running the industry Maybe that will drive their behavior, but it's probably not going to really drive Massive behavior change and they're going to dictate what they want from you So you'll kind of build to their expectations the needs they ultimately own it the analogy is those flywheel Apps in taxis. Yeah, you know like that. That wasn't what took over the world. Yeah, that's right Um, and we wanted to be in that position We wanted to be the principal and the transaction we want to have the relationship with both sides So we could not only improve the efficiency of the marketplace We could go upstream into each of their businesses and solve their problems Because ultimately that leads to a bigger total business opportunity And we don't think this ends with truckload freight, right? We're we're thinking now about it. We've already built a transpiration management system A TMS software solution for medium Shippers to use That they can run all of their freight on so they can actually book their loads on convoy And book their loads on any other trucking company via convoy's platform And that starts to give us a bunch of other minutes We do the same thing understand so you can build out now by owning that relationship And that's free, right? That trucking management system software Yeah, it's free for medium and for medium and small shippers So that serves as your top of funnel for the The shipper side where hey you may not be using convoy today in the traditional way that everyone else uses it Here's some free software You know it'll provide all these benefits to you. Is that how you think about that? Yes, it's it's still early But there are a lot of actually larger companies using it too We have companies you know doing 15 20,000 loads a year that are using it Is the right analogy here Amazon marketplace This is it could move in that direction at some point That would be Effectively really creating like a marketplace for other brokers as well Today we're not doing that it when when a company is using that that TMS It's a shipper. It's a shipper. It's a company that's shipping freight right the company that's actually purchasing the shipping service All right, so Dan I want to take us in a little bit of a different direction and kind of Not catch us up all the way to today, but talk about some of these milestones in the company Convoy has grown absurdly fast like in revenue in fundraising and headcount and every observable metric like it is outpacing the Traditional startup. I mean what you're four and a half years in so Can you talk about some of the points where you made the decision to put the foot on the gas and Sorry for the Anyway How you made those decisions the trade-offs involved in making those decisions it just fascinates me that it is so aggressive You know, I think from the very beginning of the company we believe that speed was a feature of a company Like there's a we thought a lot about our values who we want to be as a company um, you know, how do you create foundational values that lead to the experience you want to have as a business and Speed was always one of them We believe that as you said 2014 2015 was when truck drivers Started getting smartphones and prior to that this isn't possible because you can't mail a truck driver A piece of hardware that they're gonna install on their cab Four states away when the job picks up in a day or two right. It's just not a feasible thing When we felt like the window opened We realized it was a really good idea there were other people looking at the space And we wanted to move really quickly So we did decide early on that this was going to be a feature of the company and we were gonna try to push ourselves So in year one. I mean, I'll just walk you through the year one time from which was very fast We you know started hacking on it in March Incorporate the company April first not on purpose, but like it's it's been fun There's a couple things that we've now built around that We again, you know raise raise the money in kind of April this time frame and kind of chill I think a little bit and then um So I guess it would have been April me incorporated we raised money and then we built it like I said launch it in in August In a private kind of bayonet environment 20 or 30 customers Announced to the world in October and then raised our series a in November and closed in December so it was very fast first year And that's who say was a 16 million dollar round from graylock That's correct, which now like oh 16 million dollars series a seems reasonable. That was like that was pretty very very And very fast. Yeah, it's a very large and again that came back to the theory of we're gonna try to go fast We need to align around the capital that will allow us to go fast because we we felt like it we've seen so many smart And this was also in the earlier days of many of these shared economy and like and like other sort of ride-charing type services where People saw how speed mattered and the first mover was able to get into very advantageous position It's not exactly the same in B2B and in this in in in hindsight, but at the time we're like no We're not sure but we need to go fast We don't want to find out too late that this act that speed was really important So we built that we built it quickly and we Determined that was going to be a big factor. And is that because you thought okay competitors are gonna see this Contenders out. It's gonna do it. We thought people are gonna get into it and we felt like we we um it was Yeah, these obrits don't come along very often a technology changed That unlocked the potential to build this business Um and drivers adopted that at this time so there really it was it was an open window for this massive business to be disrupted There have been a lot of companies coyote logistics is a very innovative company that came along in 2006 Several others have attempted to do innovative things as well. They just didn't have the smartphone And it turns out with a transportation service and location where location is so critical You couldn't completely disrupt it without that and so that was why we're like hey speed's gonna matter So we really worked really hard made it one of our values is always have a sense of urgency We made a bunch of decisions along the way to do that even in the code If one of our engineers was gonna build something and was gonna do it in a relatively hacky unsustainable way But it was for speed early They would comment it out with CTFU which was catch the f up Which was um which was the way we thought about it like we're we just said We're behind we don't know who we're behind right now, but we're think we assume we're behind. Let's go fast We we wanted to do that and in hindsight. I think it was the right call We were able to kind of help design the industry in the category Were of the independent startups. I would say the most notable brand We were able to have More options when it came to fundraising because there weren't others that it were ahead of us that already raised from these investors And we were able to build a strong Brand in relationship with shippers carriers ecosystem partners the industry etc Or right now I still think we're a long ways away from you know from success But we have the opportunity now to be the company that really disrupts this yeah And we wouldn't have had that if we would have gone slower Now we need it like now. It's really important. You can't keep the same Uh mindset forever you have to shift and evolve based on the conditions of the business and the environment you're in But that was the right mindset for the environment We're in the business we were going after for those first four years I love that that first few milestones give us some more along the lifetime of the company Whatever you're willing to share whether it's employees or customers or revenue or whatever But like help us understand sort of the exponential nature of those next few years For the first like I think eight quarters or so we were doubling Volume every or every quarter approximately and that's like gmv like the amount of The number of shipments we're doing we looked at his shipments shipments number of loads That was Probably not exactly that but it was we doubled for quite a while What doubled me not doing that right now sort of we reached the size but that's very that'd be very very difficult You know, but we've grown we've more than doubled over the last couple years each year And so that has been very aggressive and It's challenging because as you if you're trying to grow your business at that scale And you're trying to maintain your culture and your identity and you're trying to hire efficiently and maintain the same kind of bar It's very difficult to do it that at that speed And then I've just said this before but I you know it feels like we're a four-year-old That looks like an eight-year-old Because the outside world often looks at us and people that joined from other companies in like well You're this company that has a pretty notable name now you've raised a lot of money You've grown to be pretty significant you have a national presence you have all these big customers relying on you You know, we're the biggest trucking company for Several name brand, you know fortune 100 companies now in the country. So we've really gone to be way beyond niche But internally before years old and so to build this in four years in the infrastructure in the systems They're just not all there and sometimes we I think we hold ourselves to an unreasonable bar in that respect And I actually encourage our team sometimes to To not ex not even push us to get there like you actually want to be sometimes a little bit less developed because you can move faster Be more flexible you don't want to look like a 10-year-old company when you're four years old You want to be four years old and so that's that's something that's really important There's two I think really important strategic decisions in this that feed into this mindset of Grow and scale fast That I want to ask you about the first one is Back in the early days in the seed round leading up to the series a you were operating only in one corridor right one Product one type of trucking in one corridor in the Pacific Northwest right more more less Whatever trucking we could get Yeah, exactly we weren't sure exactly which category to just we were taking several different because there are a bunch of categories in trucking Of different types of loads and then there's also geography and then you guys had to make a a decision about scaling It was kind of like you know if you use the analogy of like a like a consumer marketplace like a yelper a new But you had like one city that was working and then there's the canonical question of like well What do you do next do you expand nationwide? Do you go to one other city? Do you do another and like for you guys? I think the question was do we expand to other types of products of trucking or do we expand nationwide? And you eventually made the decision to expand nationwide right pretty pretty early How did you think through that because it wasn't obvious right you could say like Expandation wide but never means we need to have supply nationwide of all these trucks and we can need to serve our shippers really really well How did you do that so quickly? so It's it's the marketplace works on a lane level so a lane is either a metro We call a lane in our world is either a metro It's like this greater Seattle area where a shipment would pick up and drop off in the same location the drivers home that night Or it's a point-to-point Seattle the Sacramento Sacramento Phoenix for example and so the marketplace develops to that level And one of the challenges we encountered early on was we kind of had to decide are we going to be super local focused And there's a categoric factor of it's very local They actually don't drive more than a couple hundred miles in one direction because they want to get home every night They sleep at home every night sleep at home every night and so we could have focused specifically on local And we did that for a while Then we started realizing that you know most of the dollars most of the companies that are really in need of help Have more complicated supply chains than just shipping locally So some of the shippers that we were working with locally are like this is helpful But what's really painful for me are these shipments? I have to go between different geographies Hmm, and I need your help there And we start talking to some bigger companies and they're like well I really need your help in this part of the country around these lanes right And so it was important to be very disciplined about what we did and didn't do early on But we kind of let the customer lead us a little bit early to understand what the opportunity was And as soon as you start thinking about we're going to support this lane now You need a truck driver that's willing to drive a little bit further outside of that local area And when the truck driver is in that next location If you want to think about how you keep them engaged with your platform, well you might need another job for them Otherwise, they're going to exit your platform and getting them back's hard They're going to get to St. Louis and they're like all right, we'll go back to my traditional broker San Francisco or you know Oakland or something from Seattle And so you know we did local for a while, but we started to have opportunities outside of that and we realized We we had to kind of have a controlled slide So we couldn't just go national at first, but we hadn't really think about corridors and parts of the country where we could develop that flywheel Um, but you had once you went beyond local you had a National network effect right because these truckers once you went beyond local they were the carriers They operate nationally right so like you winning a bunch of carriers helps you with shippers in St. Louis and helps you as just shippers in Boston and helps you as shippers in big carriers Operate locally, but if you're bringing on these three to five truck carriers do they Operate I'm sorry nationally like that Uh, there's all of them do all of this There's there's ratios like all of them go all those things so there's regional carriers too Maybe they're out for a week, right? Yeah, and so you can kind of start putting that so you're right What we had to do is say we're not going to have no like we're not some leakage like a carrier will come into our network And maybe they'll leave the high five corridor and that's okay We're not going to chase them. We're not going to go develop those other markets enough of them will stay there We can't do supply and demand nationally at the same time So we we focused on the northwest and then we actually went kind of some west coast and then we went to Texas There's a story on that where Unilever reached out and said hey, we're doing this um pilot with some of the new companies and you guys just announced yourselves We were about to start with these other two do you guys want to try it too And I remember I wanted to answer that question That's an amazing thing to start up to get. Yes, I was really confused That's why they call this because we were doing very local like hyper Seattle shipments kind of up and in them Just in that area at the time and I remember I remember you guys announcing this deal I mean, yeah, I was sitting across from this kind of Lauren Seeks who's been at convoy from the beginning I remember just literally doing a hill marry past in the room. I was like okay here we go And I was like I'm gonna say it and so I didn't know what to say to the to to Unilever because I was like well I think I said something like we would be willing to work with you guys, but we need all your freight on the west coast Whoa Just because I don't know I'm gonna You got nothing to lose like I let that's pilot that And I and the person thought like I think I was probably half serious But they like could not even rationally believe I may have been serious, so they just laughed and thought it was funny Um, and then I was like oh, I like yeah, that's where where do you guys want us been like really? but okay And so I was still learning at that point Um and they said okay, we'll just we'll get back to a location, but maybe it'll be California, maybe Texas And they ultimately asked us to start off in Texas. I'm like okay, this is interesting Texas is a very heavy local freight market, so kind of fit our Emote a little bit and we went down there and we started with them in Texas because they ship from city in Texas to other cities and we told them We're only gonna do local So one of the hard things we had to do and this is very important again for a startup know who you want to be in your and how to sequence and so we We said We're only gonna do Drive-in at the time it was only flat-ped and drive-in, but we really were only doing drive-in so for them We're only gonna drive in shipments. We're only gonna do local drive-in shipments And we're only gonna do shipments that are not like that are within this time frame Like you have to give us this much notice and we kind of said if you want to work with us We're not gonna extend ourselves into something we don't know how to do yet And we're building this network and the way we thought about our network someone very you know wise early on said Built when you're building a marketplace or network You want every single piece of demand that comes in that marketplace to apply to all of your supply Like the ideal world is that every demand opportunity could be serviced by all of your supply That is the least fragmented marketplace So you will in the most quick the fast-minute or possible reach liquidity in that marketplace So we looked at it and said what are all the dimensions that split supply and because you have carriers that are local regional long haul Those are different there's some bleed over between regional local and regional long hub, but effectively. Those are different Carrier segments. Yeah, and because you have different equipment types because you think so we said to to to you know leave or another We're only gonna operate in this bucket He draw the buckets up there rolling through this and we can't break that because if we do We won't be able to give you the experience you're looking for And every other broker in the country goes to them and says I can handle you nationwide tomorrow Because what they're doing is picking up the phone and calling a bunch of trucking companies and not requiring them to use technology Not even to build a network just saying what you do the job Whereas we required we had to get the driver to use the tech and to build this flywheel and try to have this automated matching So we had to really concentrate early on that was a very important lesson in not going to broaden All right, so one more scale question that I have for you or scaling question that I promise I'm done So we're in this interesting time in in startups in the capital ecosystem where people are starting to to favor you to economics over growth and I'm curious your perspective on that general transition But as it applies to convoy. I'm curious about over the last four years What are the ways that what are the ways in which you've said? Okay, this is a good time to give on you to economics so that we can grow and what levers did you use to do that? So the two probably prominent reasons why we've done that is We have a customer that customer wants to ramp in a time frame that we could not reasonably do with the support services that we have today and therefore we have to We have to expand the team like all dimensions of the team could be building capacity with truck drivers could be providing customer service could be account management We have to scale those faster and ahead of the growth and train and get the people into the company and ensure that we offer like an a plus level of service We're a tech broker from Seattle with a very little very short track record If someone's going to make a bet on us, they're looking for us to fail on the non technical aspects like service and support And really making sure it works and 10 and providing that account management and the support right so we need to be great at that Because they're going to assume that's going to be our weak spot So one was over investing I would say or investing heavily in that at different periods and when things started to Like like crack we might grow too fast and rose we're not doing that slow it down and then reinvest in that So that was one the second is Developing the flywheel and the way freight works is there's no such thing as the price of the there's no known price of the truck So for a job from Seattle to Portland You might have one truck that's willing to that job tomorrow for four hundred dollars and one truck that's willing to do it for $900 you know Maybe maybe even less and more for very different reasons one really doesn't want to do it when really wants to do it So the market's kind of made every day If I take five shipments today and I have five trucks in my network already I can probably service all those shipments with the right economics and Pretty efficiently because I already have the trucks in my network But if I want to grow my network, I'm going to say to the ship or give me 10 I only have five trucks. I need to go get five more trucks that are less convenient located that I don't know yet And I'm probably going to have to pay more to get them on my platform But that's the way to get them on the platform And so in order to drive density into our lanes and build the marketplace We would bring on more demand that we had supply to cover and then use that demand to bring in more supply In each of the It's getting to the reverse of the traditional marketplace like oh you're going to invest like let's onboard a bunch of supply And then when the demand you know we'll run adwords for the demand for you guys you're like Let's use sales to onboard a bunch of demand And then that'll attract the supply That's right and there's you know there's different balances as the the market shifts back and forth But so we in those shipments for example, we would not have great unit economics But it's actually the number it's ironic them. It's like not you don't get a bulk discount on truck And you get like a bulk surplus because the more jobs you take any broker The more jobs they take on a given lane on a given day spends more per average to cover them Because you're buying a variable cost product that goes up with the amount you use If you have 10 trucks Those trucks are going to be imagine those trucks in order for cheapest and most expensive. Yeah Oh, you're going to try to get the cheapest truck first So if I take one job and I get the cheapest truck in my network for that job I have covered it at the maximum spread But every additional job I take the next best truck would be less efficient for that job It's effectively a worse and worse product market fit for that individual job for the individual truck driver in that moment for that shipment But that's how you build supply and then once you get enough then you have a healthy ecosystem where you have a lot of trucks You get the data to where they are you can then start to efficiently match a job to a truck Better than the traditional industry player can who's just calling around And so that's the investment you make in building this right there's a dozen other things But that's one of the investments we made So you could you could sacrifice you to economics for a long time to make sure you have like tons and tons of Carriers truckers that are constantly using the app tons and tons of shippers that trust you all the time So that at some point in the near future where you're like look the spread between That one truck and that one shipment that has amazing you cannot unit economics for us and finding that place where It's really expensive for us and we don't make much of a margin if anything at all It just keeps pushing that further and further out because there's much more liquidity on the platform Exactly like that's like the long-term thesis and there's a lot of It's a lot of nuance behind that but I'm sure that's effectively how it works And you know we're making a bunch of other investments We have a big product data science engineering team. We have all these other Functions that we're building to kind of build the brand and the technology and the infrastructure in parallel with the business And those are all upfront investments where you kind of they give you They can help in terms of your growth But fundamentally that's those are the primary drivers Making sure you do a great job for your customer It's worth investing early on when you're building your reputation and your brand in a traditional industry as an outsider screwing that up early Yeah, means you don't have a chance in the future And then being able to grow your flywheel quickly and and and building density on your lanes It's very important for and we have all the data now that shows when you do that here's what happens Like the world looks better so we can justify those investments Thank you David do you want to move right into tech themes? Do we want to like catch us up to today in some capacity? Well so Today Where would you say you guys rank in terms of brokerages within the industry to obviously you were a tech-enabled brokerage but give us a sense of scale for Where you're at within the industry and how Pena traded you guys think you are this far We're still a fraction of the total trucking market the truckload market is you know about $600 billion a year in the US and that includes private fleets and for hire but we're kind of we can compete with all that The largest broker in the country Largest truckload kind of freight brokerage is doing about ten billion dollars a year in truckload freight And then there's another Five to ten that are between three maybe two two three and ten billion dollars So that's the ecosystem of pure brokers. There's a lot of large carriers and also run brokerages We would probably be in about the top 20 you know top top Maybe 15 well, so we're we're pretty significant in that's pretty trend I mean point and all these other companies are decades old. Yeah, yeah, cool For folks who are new to the show we do a section after this history in facts called what would have happened otherwise Where if this is a traditional acquired episode and we're talking about a transaction that happened It's usually what if that transaction didn't happen what if big code didn't buy little code I think it's interesting here to dive in a little bit of like what if you guys grew at a like normal startup pace and like Where you would be today? What if that risk didn't pay off You told us a lot about it, but the way that I would kind of describe it is like Like number one there's numerous people who could have beat you to the punch on having a whole bunch of supply and a whole bunch of demand truckers and shippers I'm curious if there's like a data mode here beyond just the marketplace liquidity like have you By sort of rushing into this and being an early player What other things has it allowed you to do that otherwise if if you were you know say 300 people today or something and able to service the amount of of volume on your platform that that amount would give you Then you know, what would you be giving up? Let's say that we had grown slower. We hadn't really gone national We wouldn't have a chance to write the story about what's gonna happen And the reason is that you can't really It's you we wouldn't be able to define the future unless the major players in the industry viewed us very credibly and we're using our service So the largest shippers in the country many of them are now using convoy a lot of the biggest ecosystem partners The events and sort of influencers within the industry are looking to convoy for What's the future and we're we're kind of defining it like we're creating a category digital right now We're describing what that is we're telling that story and I think that Like you had to make a bet to be in a position Where you you were at scale you mattered in the industry And you were one of the first to do that if you're not one of the first No one's gonna look to you for the story about what's happening And so it's it's it's a lot harder for the folks that are a few below To influence what's going on and in a big way These sales there, you know, you're making sales on both sides You're you're selling the shippers on your platform and you're selling the the truckers on you know being a part of it On taking the loads like There's an amendment of trust there like you you're convincing them Ahead of actually demonstrating value so it's sort of like you need to You need to have you need to be busy in this particular instance because you need them to to be very receptive to working with you That's right and we were again, you know When we first started I remember going to a dinner with a bunch of traditional industry trucking companies And I have a lot of respect for the companies are doing this a very very difficult industry It's a hard job being a truck driver's hard running a trucking business is hard It's a thin margin complicated business And it's hard to differentiate and do it as a traditional broker carrier But there was definitely a sense early on of Yeah, convoy's doing this but it's not really different No one's going to really take it that seriously And I remember early on being told by our customers and by analysts in the industry that our competitors were basically saying You know, convoy just gets the fright that nobody else wants You know, I remember those narratives, yeah, I almost kind of picking up some of the scraps out there And you know, I remember hearing you know sitting and listening in and people didn't necessarily know I was there Comfortably those yeah, some computers don't match freight, you know people match right right it just doesn't happen And ironically computers matching freight is like an amazing use of computers. It's a very good use of it And again, I don't I don't think that they didn't recognize totally coming But it's sort of what you want to say because it's the right thing and they don't have it yet And there are some just really big challenges for them to get there so I think you know being in the position When we were gave us a chance to To kind of write the rules a little bit and be the first to come up with some of the models like the free quick pay model The guaranteed detention model the idea of providing data and insights back to your customer So collecting data about what's happening Every time a truck shows up at a location when did they show up? How long did they wait? How long did it take to get loaded? How did they rate the facility? What was their experience? That particular shipment. How was it tended to us? We can correlate data across all these experiences and go back to our customers and say You know this particular facility is underperforming other facilities in the region from your competitors that are competing for trucks And this facility in this city is is doing better during this shift than that one Right, and you should be changing your tendering practices because when you tinder in the morning the trucks are more expensive and like They never had data like this before Like and so we kind of started that and we've we started a lot of things and the idea of an instant price You can instantly get a price that is committed to and you can see what capacity is through an API Right, it's not going to get haggled on the phone like this is the price so it's sort of You know you start to get to say this is what the future should look like And that's when the ad vanishing early and you know others can quickly mimic that and we have an invented all of the things But actually we have been very inventive and we've been the leader in in new design And I think it gives us a chance You know our shippers and folks that are making kind of the the calls in the industry and and influence it matters Like perception is reality in a lot of these things where If you're at a conference in the conference organizers are a famous freight analyst or you know And a transition analyst from a big bank. It's up and says you know We really think digital freight works for the future for this reason That starts to Make it kind of a reality Yeah, it comes to self-filling prophecy because then all the shippers like oh Well, then we should probably start buying into this you need that perception momentum early on And if you don't go fast and you don't get there quickly You don't really get to contribute to that as much Yeah, and David we're full blown in playbook now But this is like totally one of mine is like in startups in a lot of ways perception is reality with with the market with your customers I think I've said this on the show before but one of the best Definitions of a startup is from one of my my colleagues at Pioneer Square Labs my galgon He pointed out to me that a startup is very frequently just like Getting and scrapping and biting to something that it doesn't yet deserve whether it's a hire whether it's a customer You know revenue like you you're not there yet But like you're really trying to create the perception that you're there And it's this interesting self-affilling prophecy flywheel of like once you actually do get that resource and that person joins your team that customer commits to you Then like you kind of are there and then you can leverage that to the next rung and it I mean it sounds like you guys Have codified this in the the convoy flywheel, but like that that is the business for you guys and it is every decision you make so early on You're talking about a job and like well I don't know if it's gonna work should I join like I'm like I don't know like if you join your half the company So like it'll be up to you It's not like you're joining a thing that's some good jujitsu as a potential Right, I mean and it was hard to hire early on like convincing someone to leave a job that the biggest except for the five people that followed you independent of whatever your idea was That's right. I mean that was Well, no, I mean, you know we talked about some of this go, but you're right that we had some but that's also that was hard That was trust built up over a year totally right? I remember trying to convince a lot of people to join convoy And it was interesting we'd use the in any tactic and the tactic of like well you get to build this and all these different things But but the economy was has been doing really well So a lot of big companies have also had very strong stock value appreciation over the last 10 years And so oftentimes the pitch to the startup has is like you know that we're gonna have we'll have faster appreciation But when Amazon is double You know every year than it's like that's that's like you got to move faster than as well Your stock price has to appreciate faster than it was that stock price. Yes, it definitely has but that's cooled off too So like but during certain phases it gets harder and easier based on how well like the alternative is growing And I remember talking to somebody that I was trying to convince to join I turn remember who this person was exactly Um, but I remember I was like well here's how much we think your convoy stock would be worth And and they were like well, I'm doing the math and I think Amazon will be worth eight trillion dollars in three years And I was like Seattle problems why And then like well if you look at the last couple years of like their stock price appreciation or whatever it was the time for they were using it was like The exact right time they're like you have to start working back from GDP. Yeah, I know but I was kind of like I was like I just I felt so compelled to convince this person that's sort of physically impossible And you can't apply like a growth rate to a company that scale that's like that It happened for like that rate happened for maybe last year did you convince the person did you make the hire? This is a wild I'm sure remember if that person if that exact conversation turns into the higher I believe they did But that was I mean, I need a better answer for that But I should remember I remember the conversation so vividly and it was over the phone So it wasn't like an easy like one to land But I was like no, no, you can't please don't do this Please don't make this decision believing this will be an eight trillion dollar company like that's not a thing Yeah, and so How's it but it was hard and that just emblemized like um the the issue of That perception right so so what I did early on was there were a lot of taxes We used to try to convince them to do it but early on before that was a thing I remember drawing what I would do is I'd take a piece of paper And I would and the x-axis was someone's career and I'd be like year zero and I was like how many years do you think you want to work? And like no one really knows they just say something 30 40 or even more like we last and and I'm like okay great So and here's your earnings that's like the y-axis and I'm gonna draw a curve that shows how much money You'll be making every year and like your total wealth accumulation from your salary here like what you expect to make here And you know beginning you're making about this much I'll probably go out pretty steeply at some point that'll kind of flatten off a little bit. It's generally like a you know salary curve And if you add up that 30 the the area under the curve is your is your earnings in your life And I'm like I'm actually really like a farmer consultant here So I know it's like if you integrate your salary you will get exactly But it worked and I was like look I was like just this one year It's gonna come down a little bit And then they'll go back up if we don't like if it doesn't work out and you're you left for a year because this didn't didn't work for you Like then that's the area of your job. We were talking to you're coming to grab this morning preparation And he was like you're worried for working in a failed startup in this environment is you get a better job Yeah, yeah So that was exactly right. So if you take that little dip you either get like the bump from convoy working Or you have this really interesting compelling experience and you get then your your line goes up a little bit Yeah, you get a higher level of Amazon when you go back. Yeah, and so yeah, I mean it was a lot of It's I mean hurry's hard. We've had success, but man. It is everybody knows. It's hard to hire effectively. Yeah All right, David anything else for the playbook yet. Well, real quick my playbook what I'd love to do I mean we'll work on this in future episodes But because of this B2B marketplace is so different and new and you guys are at the Vanguard I tried to codify like what are some principles of curious view like not say yes If you agree or no, but to drive success in a B2B marketplace like I think we get a great David is Demand drives supply if you're bringing the money you can create you can align incentives in a market and get people to adopt A new technology that otherwise would be really hard like a G-Wiz feature isn't gonna compel a trucker to download an app That's one two timing is super important like I think what you guys did with getting truckers paid to use the app Within a day like that's game-changing for the industry and so if you can change cash flow timing And we're seeing this in other companies that can be a huge driver of growth So that's two three I really like what you said about those early days when people were haters were talking about compoy and they're like You guys only take the jobs that nobody wants Well, it's like if you take those jobs that nobody wants you can you can take the scraps from the industry But because you're building a technology company in a holistic marketplace You can then aggregate the supply out of that and then get to a point where really really quickly You have a better cost structure for the jobs that everybody wants right And the companies will take you seriously. You drop running at scale on the lanes that they care about So you can use you can use whatever you get to kind of get the carrier base going And then translate that into a virtual network and because we plug all the trucks and do our technology platform As we scale We effectively have this this you know partnerships that lead to this virtual fleet Which we have visibility into and a direct connection with Which gives us capabilities that feel like like it's a it's a more like first party network for the shipper It's that's a really powerful combination Yeah And then the last one which we can have time to get into today But I also find it really interesting in these markets is you're saying like price is not Set it's not these are not efficient markets and so ultimately like your big Goal is like if you guys can be efficiently setting price in a way that nobody else can Well, then you've just like completely aggregated the industry so that's my that's my last one That's a really good transition into grading So again on a traditional acquired episode we would grade if big co buying little co was like The right use of capital and in some cases you've got Instagram and oh my god You couldn't have parked capital anywhere better and in other cases, you know Lots of other great options to to invest that capital in these ones where Either it's a near-term acquisition or like there's no transaction that happened with convoy You know going public or or or selling or anything like that the the way that I think we're gonna do this is Grade what the a plus sort of future scenario is for the company like what are the things that have to be true in order for Convoy to create and capture a ton of value in the world and what's the scenario where it's a lower grade You know, I think David put in here. What's the scenario where it could be a c-minus where Those things don't come true and what are the factors there? Dan you home to in on something Earlier that was this this concept that I really didn't understand before about Every single in an inefficient marketplace with low demand and low supply on it There really is only like maybe one truck and one shipper for which You can be profitable on a transaction or maybe and then like you grow to two or three or four And if you have all the trucks and everyone who's shipping freight on your platform then like my gosh You can handle a ton of volume and be profitable on on those transactions and for me to take it to an a plus I think only after like reading a bunch about your business for the last you know month and then talking to you today I think it's gonna be can you widen that gap Faster than your company consumes capital. It's basically like can you create enough slots enough matches between trucker and freight Where each one of those transactions is above some certain bar of how profitable they need to be and do all the volume Before some you know run run on a money like the endgame for every startup Am I am I capturing it well like do you is that how you think about it and is that how you think about like Here's the spread of scenarios in our future. Yeah, and so a big part of it is getting all the trucks on board And it's it's really about making those truck drivers more productive That's actually this comes down to you so it's it's the empty miles we talked about so convoc can Significantly reduce empty miles. Yeah, well, and that's why price is hard right because it's worth different At same job is worth different things different people we launched something this year called batching You can take two or three jobs together our system will Identify these jobs and look at all the possible combinations and automatically stitch together multiple jobs And then offer it to carriers with ideal locations to maybe a triangle or a round trip Um with the ideal appointment times and we found that carriers will take that job For a significantly lower price than they would have taken each of the jobs in combination be I them up as individual And that's because we're creating efficiencies and making that carrier more productive So that's the kind of stuff we have to figure out and when we do that and we actually saw the carriers that do that Run empty about 19% of the time that are you know If they're really plugged in the common doing the the batching system today with our current density of batching The ones that don't run empty about 35 36% of time well, and so just when you look at like the impact on the environment You're reducing emissions from using batches by about 45% like you're reducing empty mile emissions about 40% Which is massive that directly also translate into lower costs for the truck The actual small truck company spends less money to do the jobs because they're driving fewer empty miles You know trying to reduce weight times all these things. So we view it as let's knock down the waste Let's go after empty miles unnecessary weight times you know loading and unloading times and just find ways to reduce those and if we can do that quickly Plus add more volume into that like lower the waste and add more volume Then we're creating a better cost structure and then we're in an advantageous position and we have options and getting that in place at scale With the capital we have is is the key Awesome David anything else dad. I think that's right Wow listeners. Thank you for going on this journey with us for folks who listen to a lot of episodes I think you'll you'll be like oh yes about how long it usually takes for folks who came tonight expecting a Commute to work podcast. It's been longer than that Thank you for bearing with us. Yeah, do you want to do carve outs? I have one I want to do okay come on Yeah, and we haven't done carve outs in a bunch of episodes because we've been jammed for time and Mine is a very cool app that is based here in Seattle that David and I used last night for the acquired annual holiday party That is former convoy alum So Vincent Shane from mystery have created something incredibly cool. I think it's mystery dot sh for anyone who wants to try it out and you basically can Set a time say some of your preferences of the things you like to do and the things you might want to do that day or night And then random things happen to you and like let's show up and they take you places and you get fed and then like you don't know With people that you choose the people you do it. You do they don't like send random people to you correct So we chose to do this with each other correct So David and I like went fencing last night who would have thought we'd go fencing but it was super awesome It was amazing So if you're looking for like new things to do in your life. I highly recommend mystery Lakebys it was blast Awesome listeners, thank you so much. We hope you you enjoyed the episode if you haven't subscribed you can at acquire.fm Or in the podcast player of your choice if you'd like to become an acquired limited partner That is a glow.fm slash acquired Thank you so much to Dan and all of you here live with us. This has been Yeah such a new and awesome experience for us. So thank you