The Freight Pod
The Freight Pod is a deep dive into the journeys of the transportation and logistics industry’s brightest minds and innovators. The show is hosted by Andrew Silver, former founder and CEO of MoLo Solutions, one of the fastest-growing freight brokerages in the industry. His guests will be CEOs, founders, executives, and leaders from some of the most successful freight brokerages, trucking companies, manufacturers, and technology companies that support this great industry. Andrew will interview his guests with a focus on their life and how they got to where they are today, unlocking the key ingredients that helped them develop into the leaders they are now. He will also bring to light the fascinating stories that helped mold and shape his experiences.
The Freight Pod
Ep. #42: Ryan Joyce, CEO of GenLogs - From CIA to Freight Tech Innovator
The episode features an in-depth conversation with Ryan Joyce, the CEO of freight intelligence startup GenLogs. Ryan shares his unique background, having previously worked as an undercover CIA officer, a path he unknowingly would find himself on after a frightening situation with his father working in the Pentagon during 9/11. He discusses how that experience shaped his empathetic approach to problem-solving and his desire to make a positive impact.
Ryan explains GenLogs' mission to bring unprecedented visibility and data insights to the trucking and freight industry through a nationwide network of roadside sensors. He outlines how GenLogs' technology can help recover stolen assets, provide capacity insights to brokers, and increase overall supply chain efficiency. Ryan emphasizes GenLogs' focus on responsible growth, as the organization will only be onboarding 200 customers in the next year to ensure high service levels.
Throughout the discussion, Ryan reflects on his leadership philosophy, emphasizing the importance of vulnerability and authenticity. He shares lessons learned from his time in the CIA, where he struggled with the pressures of leadership, and his desire to apply those learnings at GenLogs. Overall, the episode provides a fascinating look at Ryan's background and the unique approach he is bringing to the freight tech space with GenLogs.
***Episode brought to you by Rapido Solutions Group. I had the pleasure of working with Danny Frisco and Roberto Icaza at Coyote, as well as being a client of theirs more recently at MoLo. Their team does a great job supplying nearshore talent to brokers, carriers, and technology providers to handle any role necessary, be it customer or carrier support, back office, or tech services.***
Follow The Freight Pod and host Andrew Silver on LinkedIn.
*** This episode is brought to you by Rapido Solutions Group. I had the pleasure of working with Danny Frisco and Roberto Icaza at Coyote, as well as being a client of theirs more recently at MoLo. Their team does a great job supplying nearshore talent to brokers, carriers, and technology providers to handle any role necessary, be it customer or carrier support, back office, or tech services. Visit gorapido.com to learn more. ***
A special thanks to our additional sponsors:
- Cargado – Cargado is the first platform that connects logistics companies and trucking companies that move freight into and out of Mexico. Visit cargado.com to learn more.
- Greenscreens.ai – Greenscreens.ai is the AI-powered pricing and market intelligence tool transforming how freight brokers price freight. Visit greenscreens.ai/freightpod today!
- Metafora – Metafora is a technology consulting firm that has delivered value for over a decade to brokers, shippers, carriers, private equity firms, and freight tech companies. Check them out at metafora.net. ***
Hey listeners, before we get started today, I want to give a quick shout out and word to our sponsor, our very first sponsor, rapido Solutions Group, danny Frisco and Roberto Acasa, two longtime friends of mine, guys I've known for 10 plus years, the CEO and COO respectively, and co-founders of Rapido Solutions Group. These guys know what they're doing. I'm excited to be partnering with them to give you a little glimpse into their business. Rapido connects logistics and supply chain organizations in North America with the best near-shore talent to scale efficiently, operate on par with US-based teams and deliver superior customer service. These guys work with businesses from all sides of the industry 3PLs, carriers, logistics, software companies, whatever it may be. They'll build out a team and support whatever roles you need, whether it's customer or carrier, sales support, back office or tech services.
Speaker 1:These guys know logistics. They know people. It's what sets them apart in this industry. They're driven by an inside knowledge of how to recruit, hire and train within the industry and a passion to build better solutions for success. In the current marketing conditions, where everyone is trying to be more efficient, do more with less near shoring is the latest and greatest tactic that companies are deploying to do so, and Rapido is a tremendous solution for you. So check them out at gorapidocom and thank you again for being a sponsor to our show, a great partner. We look forward to working with you To our listeners. That's it. Let's get the show on the road.
Speaker 3:Welcome back to another episode of Freight Pop. I'm your host, andrew Silver. I'm tired of opening the show that way. As I say that I'm joined today by a great guest, I'll think of a new way to open the show. My brain's going crazy here. But welcome back. I've got Ryan Joyce joining me today, ceo of Genlogs, and I just want to say I'm really excited for this.
Speaker 3:Your company is, I think, one of the most unique new freight tech players in the space for a number of reasons, and I think that we're going to give you ample opportunity to share with our audience why that is. But as someone who's been in the space for 18 years now and then I think it was about eight or so years ago that we started hearing the term freight tech and it created this whole new kind of group of companies that, as VC money poured into the space as everyone kind of thought okay, these archaic idiots in freight, they don't know what they're doing and everything's manual and no technology. We can all invest and make billions by taking over the space. There have been a few successful entrants. There have been a lot that have, I guess, maybe not approached the industry the right way and have burned through a lot of cash and not found that same success. But I guess there have been a number of new verticals that have emerged, and one good example would be like the API pricing vertical that now exists and you've got a couple of new players.
Speaker 3:I just interviewed Chad Olison His episode released, I guess, a week before this one will and it's cool to see those companies that are coming in and kind of making an impact. But I just think the way you guys are going about your business is something totally unique and for me, as I've seen hundreds of these companies, my initial feedback on most of them is like one of two things. It's typically either okay, this might work, it's kind of interesting. Or it's okay, this is the same old stuff I've seen, or it's being repackaged as something different and it's probably not going to work. With yours, I spent an hour with you, maybe two, three months ago as you walked me through your business and I was like this is very different than anything I've seen before, and so I'm happy to have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm happy to be here. This is awesome, so.
Speaker 3:I want to start with your background, because also as unique as the business is probably your background. So why don't you kind of walk the audience through that? Yeah, happy to Start where you want to, and I'll just kind of poke and ask questions as we go. Sure.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll say the subtitle on Genlogs is Freight Intelligence and while we are obviously in the freight space, that's not where the Genlogs founding team came from. My background in particular was from the intelligence community, u US intelligence community, where I spent years as a CIA undercover operations officer. My job was to go out and recruit maybe it's basically members of Al Qaeda to provide us information about the plans and intentions of that terrorist group and others and so that we could then thwart those attacks. Like it was all driven by me, the motivation was to never have a 9-11 happen again for the United States, and I spent years inside that agency and lived abroad. I learned Arabic, became fluent in that language so that I could do the job successfully.
Speaker 2:And at the end of the day, it was all about developing relationships, about getting information, about validating that information to make sure that we were getting truthful information and then using that to drive a result, in this case to stop the next 9-11. So that's the background. Very different, I understand. You know everyone comes to freight from somewhere. I just came to it much more recently and from a very unique path, that's for sure.
Speaker 3:So I appreciate your ability to summarize that in a minute, but I'm not going to let you get away with a one-minute conversation on the CIA background and recruiting Al-Qaeda people. So I think you're definitely the first former Al-Qaeda recruiter undercover that I've had on the show. You will probably be the last, so we're going to spend a little bit of time here. So, taking back to how'd you get to the CIA to begin with? What was the? It was the 911. The initial initial that was. Was that what sent you it truly?
Speaker 2:was yeah, I was a senior in high school at the time on September 11. My dad was actually in the Navy and he was an F-14 fighter pilot and so he had spent his career flying Tomcats. He actually flew in the movie Top Gun Super cool background but was kind of ending his career at the Pentagon. The original, the original, Literally Good Love that movie. He was a backseater, so a lot of the flights that you when you'll see the goose helmet or he's flying a lot of the times in those scenes. He was an instructor at the time back at Top Gun then, but really cool background. I respect him so much. He was in the Pentagon on September 11th and his office was right in the newly renovated wing of the Pentagon and I was sitting there as senior in high school. I mean, I went to school that day and all I could think about was getting through school so that I could play basketball in the afternoon and then flirt with girls, like you know, during lunch breaks. That's literally all I cared about then.
Speaker 3:It's a good use of a senior's time.
Speaker 2:You know, that's what. That's what I cared about at that point, and I had no direction for what I wanted to do afterwards. I you know, when I was younger, I wanted to be a baseball player. That was just never going to happen, and so I was literally in senior year, kind of directionless to an extent. And then all of a sudden, september 11th happens and I'm I remember it was like the start of second period. They flip on the TV. We see the first tower hit. All of a sudden, you see the second tower hit. Even then it seemed like really distant. You know, it was New York.
Speaker 2:I was down in Washington DC at the time, but then the they said, you know, breaking live from the Pentagon and they flashed to these scenes of this gaping hole, exactly where I knew where my dad's office was. And I just remember thinking at that point in time like he might, that might be it, he might be dead, and by the grace of God he wasn't. I mean, he was the Is this pre-cell phone? This was. The cell phones were there, but his cell phone got left in the office and then destroyed.
Speaker 2:He was actually sitting there in the Pentagon, had literally just was getting ready to have a snack as he was thinking through like all right, we might be under attack, and then, sure enough, the explosion happened and he got blown back. Fire immediately enveloped the office and he narrowly made it out before the entire floor fell into the inferno below, and because of that we had no contact with him because his cell phone was left there. All the phones were jammed in the area and couldn't really get a hold of them. Uh, and so it wasn't until hours later that he was able to, between hitchhiking and taking buses home, eventually arrive at, uh, at our house that later that evening. And, um, I mean, he walked in the door.
Speaker 3:What was that like for you when you just saw the initial you know the, the, not the. The towers was one thing, cause it wasn't. I guess I mean for all of us it was awful, but I guess it became extremely personal for you Once you saw the Pentagon was involved. What was that Do? And I'm sure you remember that. What was that like?
Speaker 2:It was such a mix of emotion that day where it was kind of euphoric in the sense that this was new. I mean, all of a sudden planes were getting hit in offices, and had that just happened up in New York, that in itself would have been shocking. But I think when I saw the Pentagon and that gaping hole I went numb. It completely brought into relief how much my father meant to me at that time, where I probably didn't appreciate it before, and then in an instant to realize like he might have been gone. I just remember there it was almost like I went through the the weirdly, the cycles of grief within like a two hour cycle where my mind went to the worst possible scenario as he was gone and then all of a sudden it was like I'm going to now have to be the man of the house with my family and then all of a sudden it was like I'm going to now have to be the man of the house with my family and all of this happened before. Then he walks in through the door and it was like he'd literally come back from the dead and it was difficult. I mean, certainly there was a lot of joy personally that he walked in the door. It was difficult because he instantly had to go back out that night and go to a few families where he knew for sure that their loved one had been killed in the Pentagon. And it was while he was out making those house calls that I went to bed that night and thought to myself I'm going to do everything in my power to learn about the history, culture, language, religion of the people that did that and really to understand why, but, most importantly, make sure it never happened again. And that's what set I mean it truly did set a completely different course for my life that night.
Speaker 2:I woke up the next day, applied to colleges, got in, went to school, ended up studying. There wasn't even an Arabic class or any courses. Where I went to college I had to pay a computer science professor that spoke Arabic to hold a night course if I could get nine other students to go, just to learn the alphabet. So I was going around on campus recruiting students to learn Arabic with me. We learned the Arabic alphabet. I then studied abroad in Egypt at the time and learned. I spent a year almost in Egypt studied political science, middle Eastern history.
Speaker 2:Arabic obviously came back, and then it was a few years later. I mean, it was kind of like getting that tap on the shoulder where, it just so happened, my dad, through his networks of being in the military, someone in his network was at the CIA and approached him and said, hey, your son, he speaks Arabic, correct, yep? And he's like, well, we need people that speak Arabic these days, as you know. And we got in contact and he kind of said hey, would you like to? Would you like to join? I said okay, and soon after I went through the, you know, there's a process to get into the agency.
Speaker 2:There's psychological testing, there's medical testing, there's polygraphs, there's everything. And then you finally get in. And it is incredible I mean I was fairly young at the time still and it's like I can't get into the exact date that I joined, the exact dates on my tenure, but still pretty young. And it is binary really, when you're at the agency, where beforehand you're on the outside and as soon as you're on the inside, it is, you now have full access to really everything that the US intelligence community is collecting and bringing to bear to do one mission and that was to destroy Al Qaeda and to find, fix, finish the terrorists out there that were trying to plan the next 9-11 and then defend the United States to make sure it never happened again. So that was my pathway in.
Speaker 3:So you made that kind of commitment. You said the next morning after the attack that you were going to learn as much as you possibly could about the people who had done this. But did you know then that the career path was CIA? Or was like, worst case, you would just join the army and go figure it out over there? Or like, how are you thinking about your long term plan with once you were going to learn all this stuff, what were you going to do with it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wouldn't say that CIA was the plan at that moment I knew that there are a few ways that absolutely you could serve your country Going in through the military. I have a brother and a brother-in-law who both served in the military and kind of went that path. But there are a lot of other ways. It could have been domestically at FBI. It literally could have been joining the State Department and they're doing some more diplomacy and type of programs I think like to actually be effective in the counterterrorism effort. It wasn't just about gathering intelligence or striking back with the military. There was a diplomacy element to this, because there were.
Speaker 2:That's when I said like I want to learn why people would do that. I just couldn't fathom. You just don't wake up and decide you're going to go fly planes in the towers. There's something that's brought you to that. There's maybe grievances or otherwise, and I really wanted to understand like I think empathy is one of the things that's probably lacking most in our society and globally and it's something that I deeply believe that the more empathetic that I could get to understanding why people would do that, the more that I would be able to maneuver into stopping it and, sure enough, fast forward through the training.
Speaker 2:And now I'm actually on the ground in these Middle Eastern countries and I'm sitting there across the table from a hardened Al Qaeda operative who I'm talking to him in his own language, using Quranic references, to kind of chat through like why he got involved in where he is, and then, but really coming at him through a point of empathy, to saying like, hey, I get it, I get that conditions are hard in your country, I get that.
Speaker 2:You know, you believe that there's been grievances caused by X, y and Z, um, and I think, even just leading with that of the, I actually understand and I've, I've spent years now living in your culture, years now studying your history, all of this Like I don't do that for no reason. I really wanted to understand, and that's where I was then able to get to those places where we developed trust over time until they finally were like, look, I actually do believe that you do want to understand why I have grievances and you do want to make this better, and that ultimately, you're kind of bringing me to a point of recognizing that killing innocent women and children, you know, is not the way to go about this. So therefore, let's, let's turn a corner. And and so there was a long pathway to kind of get there. But that's a little bit more on the background.
Speaker 3:What was it not? So I just started watching this show called Lioness. You heard of it have?
Speaker 2:yes, I haven't seen it, but it's good yeah, it's incredible.
Speaker 3:I just watched the whole first season the other day and somebody compared it and said it's like a cross of um, homeland and house of cards plus blackhawk down, and it is. It's like, it's incredible. So zoe saldana is like the runs the program, she's the recruiter of the lioness and she, she recruits the undercover operatives, but they she pulls from the U? S. And what I think was interesting is she's she sent someone to Kuwait to befriend the, the daughter of this guy, who's like the largest trader of oil like $80 billion of oil he's trading and he's basically the bank for a lot of these terrorists. But oil like $80 billion of oil he's trading and he's basically the bank for a lot of these terrorists.
Speaker 3:But you know, they want to send someone who looks like and feels like someone is part of that culture. No offense, but you're about as white as white gets, just looking at you on the screen for those of us who are just on audio here, was that? I mean, what was it like? You know, at that time, you know, a few years or in the years that followed 9-11, walking around as a white guy in this area, I mean, were there not kind of alarm signs going off for people. Is that not a concern, or was that a common thing and I'm just being ignorant?
Speaker 2:No, it wasn't a common thing, and I think there were certain places that I served where I stood out like a sore thumb and in those places I would not want to remain very long at a time and place, or I wouldn't want to continue to do the same route every day. I mean just from a perspective of keeping yourself safe. We often varied our routes, varied our times of travel, but at the end of the day, yeah, there isn't a great way to hide a very white face and a very like, maybe Arab culture. Although I was sitting there was a few months ago. I was with your brother, matt, and he asked me the same thing, and I have a single picture that I have of when I finished up my time in one of these Middle Eastern countries where I did have a lengthy beard going on, and when I got in full get up, it would be tough to tell, maybe on the streets, and you know you very like. Ideally, you're doing some of the meetings that need to happen not in broad daylight, and so I think what makes the CIA successful is, frankly, the tradecraft that we employ to actually get the job done in a way that can't be uncovered. And so, yeah, but there is no hiding.
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, as good as my Arabic ever got, people could tell it just wasn't quite local. And in those instances though, frankly, there was enough curiosity that they would have, and that gets back to the whole empathy thing. I was saying why are you here I mean, that's ultimately the end of the day why are you in our country? And uh, and my response was able to say like, look, I'm, I'm here to learn, I'm here to really understand, uh, what's happening here. I'm here to help as much as possible, and I would say the posture that I always had like where the fictional accounts of the CIA, I think, get things wrong is that it's a in a lot of these movies or TV shows, it's a lot of ruthless, you know, hunter killers out there getting assassinations and otherwise, and I would say like no, my experience with the CIA was 180 degrees from that, where it was truly the best and the brightest from the United States that we have here, but the ones that actually cared the most about learning foreign cultures and truly trying to make a difference, in a way that, at the end of the day, it was all about how are we helping make this world a better place and, yes, some of that was through recruiting foreigners to provide us information, but that was always done with the objective of ultimately bettering the relationship between the US and another country stopping an al Qaeda attack from happening, stopping, like the Iranians, from having nuclear weapons that they could use.
Speaker 2:You know, like all of this was done, that, if the CIA is fully successful, this world is a place that we all want to live in and I truly believe that during the time is fully successful. This world is a place that we all want to live in and I truly believed that during the time that I was there.
Speaker 3:And I'm curious. You talk about empathy and how you that was like the tool you use to understand and relate with these individuals who are clearly, um, have very different motive and intent than you do. Um, did you, did you ever flip it the other way around? I mean, like, was there an an attempt to get them to understand? Like, hey, the reason I'm here is because my father was maybe 10 feet from being gone out of my life forever because of those actions like, did that, did that, did that play into this and help? Did you ever get people to understand? Like, maybe this isn't the way to do?
Speaker 2:this? Yeah, absolutely. And you know those conversations were always a two year two way street. I was never dictating to them what they were going to do and I was expecting as much as I was listening to them, like I wanted them to get to understand. Yeah, why, like my heart was breaking for what was going on and how my dad, you know to think through his eyes of having to go to those families and look that wife in the eye and say, like your husband's never coming home. Or look to those kids and say, your son, your, your father's never coming home. I mean how difficult that was.
Speaker 2:Uh is exactly what I want to do in part back there too, is this is not like war is not the ideal outcome here. And uh, if you have a legitimate grievances, um, the U? S has not done everything right in our history. And you're like let's talk about that and let's see like where can we resolve some of these issues where we can get to a place for mutual understanding. You can understand why I came all the way over here and, by the way, I didn't come here to do you harm. I came here to stop harm from being done to either locally.
Speaker 2:I mean, we would often sit there in countries that suicide bombings were happening on the ground in their own countries.
Speaker 2:And that's the part of the problem too is like I remember there was one day I was actually going to meet with an individual and on the way to meet with him, a suicide bomber threw himself on the hood of that gentleman's car and detonated and killed him instantly gentleman's car and detonated and killed him instantly.
Speaker 2:And so I had no one to meet with in that case, and unfortunately, this country I was in, that was somewhat par for the course, and I think over time people realize that like hey, it is one thing to think we're going to go ahead and send people over to the US to do harm there, but when all of a sudden this is happening in our markets and in our mosques and in our places of gathering, like whoa, now time out, like how do we? This is not what we want to see. And I was able to use that to my advantage Like you see now what I'm, what I dealt with or what our country is dealing with. You're now dealing with it to help us work together to stop this, and uh, and that's ultimately what we would try to get to.
Speaker 3:How often did you fear for your life?
Speaker 2:Here's the thing, andrew. I'll be honest. Each time I was in one of these new locations especially if it was a really hot zone within the first two weeks I was pretty scared and as much as you try to put on a brave face and you're oh, I'm coming in. And I was young, I remember we were in one of these little locations. There was only a handful of us and we were living in a house out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, we were trying to blend in, but I talked about earlier varying those routes in and out.
Speaker 2:We had one route to get to this house for a solid half mile and every time I woke up and had to go down that road I would kind of tense up as I would go past a car thinking what if that's that suicide bomber to go off. But it's amazing that after two weeks of that happening I would wake up one day and that fear would be gone. There was a mission to be done and all of a sudden I got in that routine of that mission and there was almost an acceptance that that could be the price to pay to get this mission done, like it could be a fact that I might not come home. But it is still worth doing, because I know what it was like for those people not to come home to their families and I don't want that to happen again. So absolutely I was scared, but over time you settle into that rhythm and it's just go time.
Speaker 3:It's an impressive mindset.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I it was. Uh, it was tough. There was one time I came back after we would get these three weeks off our uh rest and recuperation times and I came back to spend some time with my family and really was cherishing that time with them. And then it was time to board the plane to go back to this location that I knew that I was going to be in harm's way. The work was going to be hard, the chance for something bad to go wrong was high and when I landed on the ground it was probably the first time and thankfully the only time, because I know people deal with it a lot that I like had a bout of depression.
Speaker 2:I like landed on the ground and thought to myself, like what am I doing here? I've already now had, at that point, served for a few years and really felt like we had done a good job to stop another 9-11 from happening. And I was just spending quality time with my family and had to go back and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to pop out for another three to four months and that kind of set in it weighed heavily on me and I I had to talk to someone spoke to one of the others that was working next to me and was like can I, can I talk through this Cause? It's a feeling I've never had before and it's I don't know what to do with this, and we kind of talked through it. And this CI is really good too about having psychologists on standpoint to kind of talk through it too, because people will bottle that up and I was able to talk through it, get right back in, clicked on the mission and then get to it.
Speaker 2:And I can understand why service members who've actually like I was never in combat myself, I had close calls, I had once I had a rocket detonated like a few feet from me and thank God like was okay there, but I never had was in an active like firefight, even though we were trained if we needed to. But these service members that do, and then they come back and are just expected to like, hey, right back into society, like I think it's uh, at the end of American sniper. It's such a powerful scene when Chris Kyle's in the grocery store, uh, after having dealt with all that, he dealt with um in Iraq then. And so I get, I get why, why that adjustment's pretty tough.
Speaker 3:Yeah, our country doesn't do enough to take care of its veterans. Yeah, because there's not nearly enough empathy or understanding for what the hell's really going on over there. It doesn't matter how many of these movies they make, but it would be nice for that to develop and for us to find a way to support people better, especially in light of that, couldn't agree more. Were you married or have kids at the time, while you were over there?
Speaker 2:No, and I was single throughout the time.
Speaker 2:And I think I just was so laser focused on hey, let's get this done, and I figured I didn't want to be distracted at the time, and so I wasn't really dating and so, no, I didn't have anyone that was waiting for me to come home at the end of the day, other than my parents and my brothers and sisters and some friends. It was also like a little isolating in the sense that a lot of times they didn't know where I was, and friends who I was really close with in university. I never told them that I was in. I didn't even get authorization until recently to even share that I was in the CIA. You have to actually ask for that, to get permission to say so. And so for a while I was just on these long trips doing work in the Middle East, and it was kind of nebulous. And then at the end of the day, I'll tell you an interesting anecdote which I think kind of gets into why I'm even in a startup now and why I have such high beliefs and, frankly, like love entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:Overall is this one country that I went into where I was living in a house with just a few other individuals, an attack that almost occurred on the United States. That really caused the White House to say we need to put more focus on this one country and al Qaeda's operations there. And I was tapped at the time by the head of all Middle East operations for the CIA to essentially like get on the next plane and get out there and set this up. One of my best friends at the time was also he was basically just got there a week or few, few weeks ahead of me, and so he picks me up from the airport and, uh, and I get into the car and he basically says, hey, ryan, you got. Your map is in the glove compartment, there's a bag of money under your seat, your machine guns in the back seat.
Speaker 2:And we got this big mission to go defeat, defeat Al-Qaeda. You ready to go? And I was like, yeah, let's do it. I mean it was just like, all right, here we go. And it was really limited resources, but and I always talk about it like we had manpower, just the two of us, and we had a few more people that came in. We had tools. You know, in this case it was a machine gun, it could be anything else. We had a little bit of money, so some capital there, a map like how are we going to do this, planning it out, and then just a big mission of like, let's go make it happen. And, uh, fast forward to now, like working in a startup, at gen logs, you know, a year ago that's literally what it was.
Speaker 2:it was three of us co-founders and we had manpower, a little bit of tools, some some money that we had just raised, a very small seed round um, a roadmap of where we thought we wanted to go and a huge mission that, like now we need to go do this. Um. But back in those days when I was in that country, that was the start of it. But then I had to go out and really learn that culture. And and when I stayed from the beginning, like I didn't come from freight, like I'm still a novice and I will forever probably feel that way, but I'm adopting a mindset of humility and I've encouraged everyone on my team to adopt that too of like we are not the experts and if we come in and try to tell them how they should do something, like if I come into the ground in that Middle Eastern country and said you guys are all messed up, here's how it should go, like I would have gotten nowhere. And so, similarly, here, when we decided that we were going to go all in on freight, I spent six months just talking and listening and doing exactly what I did when I was at CIA Just trying to understand pain points, trying to understand what would make life better, what would change things for you as a broker, and that, ultimately, is why Genlogs has gotten to where we are today.
Speaker 2:A lot of it, I think, is just listening. The other part, I think, is also saying we're just not going to do the same thing that everyone else has been doing for years. We're going to take a wildly different approach, and I would even say that goes back to my intelligence community days, where some of the greatest successes we had as a nation were because people sat there and thought outside the box and said this is how it's always been done. How can we do something different to have a breakthrough, technologically or otherwise? And that's why I really think that today still, despite challenges from other foreign powers, the US still stands alone in terms of our ability to bring an all source intelligence capability to bear to allow decision makers to know exactly, have all the details at their fingertips, to make the best decision possible.
Speaker 3:It's such a fascinating comparison you've just made, as I played it out in my mind and you connecting the dots between that experience over there and being at a startup. That experience over there and being at a startup, and you know the resources you have and the mission and the kind of grit, figure it out. Um, let's talk. Let's move now into the freight conversation, the general. So I guess. First, what was the impetus for you to leave the service and come home?
Speaker 2:fought at some point. You know it's been this many years and we haven't had another 9-11. I was really proud about that. I also had a family back here that I was visiting. Like when I went back I was depressed, partly because I really wanted to spend time with them, and here I was saying yes to the next assignment, next assignment. So part of it was a desire to get back, you know, and at the end of the day I also knew that there was an entrepreneurial side of me that, in as much as the CIA is forward, leaning, aggressive, allows those ideas from outside the box to foam it up and try to make those happen. It's still a bureaucracy and there were times that I tried to be innovative inside and only to kind of hit some pushback and not being able to quite accomplish what I wanted to. And I just realized that I was at the age that if I didn't leave now I probably never would. I was going to finish my career at the agency and that would be amazing. But I would always look back later and say what if I had left, could I have done it? It was almost like I've now done the CIA thing and recruited assets and collected intelligence and done really amazing things, but I haven't done the entrepreneurial thing and I don't want to be in my deathbed and regret that. So that was ultimately what pushed me.
Speaker 2:The way that freight came about is I did a short stint. One thing I knew is I didn't know enough to be a founder right off the bat, and that gets back to that humility thing. I knew I needed to learn from someone else, so I ended up joining a startup for about three years after I left that was constituted by some other agency officers, and really learned from a brilliant CEO at the time, stephen Witt, who had a dual Harvard MIT MBA and then left that to go work in the government and, do you know, work on behalf of national security. He popped out, built a company, we worked together on that and did that for about three years before the company pivoted into retail analytics using sensors and I just realized that I wasn't personally passionate about making mall operators richer. I wanted to do something that had more of a national good element to it. I think the work they're doing is incredible.
Speaker 2:For me personally, I wanted to figure out my own path, and this was Didn't fill your cup, excuse me. I said didn't fill your cup Didn't fill my cup. And I always had a rule for myself when I was at CIA that as I was selecting where I was going to go next, that country needed to be listed above the fold of a newspaper, like over and over again, because then it made news. It was supply chain, supply chain, supply chain something that I had truly never thought anything about, but it was above the fold and I was like I'm now interested, so let's think about this. Well, the more I started to dig into this, I thought it was really fascinating that you and I right now could pull up on our phones flight aware, flightradar24.com and see every plane in the sky thanks to ADS-B beacons, or we can pull up every ship's location thanks to AIS beacons.
Speaker 2:But when I started to dig into what was going on in trucking, I realized that, despite the ELD mandate, that ability to see where every truck was at any given time just wasn't there.
Speaker 2:And the more I had those six months of conversations with a bunch of folks in the industry, the more I realized that if that were to exist, that would be a huge unlock on a lot of facets and ways that we can improve, both from the fact that trucking is so fragmented, but also I was witnessing the subtext on supply chain was fraud, fraud, fraud and it was all of this was happening.
Speaker 2:We saw year over year trends going up and up and up and I think, honestly, there was just a part of me that I joined the CIA to stop bad guys from doing bad things and it just caught me. I was like I want to go stop these fraudsters and thieves from doing bad things here and hopefully be able to make a difference. Difference because I really felt like if the us supply chains were as efficient and strong as they could be, us as a nation would be stronger and oh yeah, and it's. It was like the, the dots were so connected. In fact, I'll hopefully this is not going like too far into left field here no, I love how american you are, just keep going well, I mean I thinking you know the issues we saw in the supply chain was or sorry, during COVID.
Speaker 2:there were a lot of ships off the coast of the Pacific, you know, on the West Coast, sitting there.
Speaker 2:Sitting there trying to waiting to get offloaded and then we needed to make sure we had enough capacity to move it inland. Well, I started to think like, if we're having this trouble getting stuff in through the port there, china has been pretty clear that they want to be in a position to take Taiwan by 2027. And if there's going to be conflict in the Pacific, we're going to actually need to be doing almost like reverse logistics at that point in time. We're going to need tanks, military outfits, all of this surge to the West Coast if all of a sudden conflict clicked off and then getting all of a sudden everything on the ships out. But in order to get a tank from Fort Drum or whatever it is up in New York all the way to the West Coast, you need to figure out there's some logistics involved there, rail or this and that If you're going to need a specific heavy haul equipment, what capability is there right now to find all carriers right now in the world or in the United States, let's say, that has a 13 axle extendable low boy RGN Like where do you do that?
Speaker 2:You can post on the load board maybe to ask, but there's no way to say like we have to move this stuff to the West coast right now in order to save the world, so to say. And how are we going to go find these carriers? And so I think that was like deeply there. I just knew that if we start by attacking fraud and theft and then all of a sudden continue to make our supply chains more efficient and stronger, then if and when we ever need surge capacity from a nation state conflict perspective, we will be in such a better place and I could go to sleep at night thinking like Genlog's had a supreme part in that.
Speaker 3:So that's a little bit too of the background that I haven't shared before. But yeah, it's so interesting because that's such a unique and like very, very niche situation that you've like developed in your mind. It's possible for sure that we're going to find ourselves in that spot, but it's like so like rare and unique and you you've got an entire business that's now being created, uh, kind of around that mindset. I just think that's really interesting. Yeah, so I guess walk me through kind of what, like what is gen logs? Let let's start there to give the audience a kind of overarching understanding of what you've now you know from where what was once the idea to now what it is.
Speaker 2:So what Genlogs is at the end of the day? We have deployed a nationwide network of roadside sensors that we've emplaced on the sides of interstates and highways, that are collecting 24-7 on all truck and equipment pairings as they pass by. So each one of these sensors has three HD cameras that collects on the front side and rear of all these truck and equipment pairings, and then we use AI in real time to pull out all of the identifiers or kind of data types you'd want there, from the make model the USDOT MC we'll get the VINs model the usdot mc, we'll get the vins cab numbers, and then we'll get the actual equipment types, logos, numbers as well, and we simply mark it as there at a time and place, and then we'll see it again further down the road another time and place, and then you essentially do that at scale and you get this rich tapestry of how all truck patterns on the roads and, frankly, all the equipment pairings and types, and all of that in a way that has never been able to be done before, as far as I know, and that's, at its core, is what we do. Now. There's more that we layer on top of that where, just like the US intelligence community, like my role was a human intelligence recruiter. So it's human, is what we would say back there.
Speaker 2:But that was just a small piece of the pie where, as soon as I would collect a report from an Al Qaeda operative, we would be then fusing what he said against what we're seeing from satellites and other sensors and what the NSA is collecting the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency all of that together and that's the approach that we've taken at Genlogs. Freight intelligence is taking our ground truth data you can't fake that a truck was there at a time and place and then we correlate that with a whole lot of other data sets that we are collecting and bringing in and essentially giving ubiquitous understanding of activity on the roads. It's, at its core, what we're doing.
Speaker 3:And would you say this is like a competitor to a four kites and a macro point, or is it an entirely different concept around tracking the trucks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I. Whenever a customer asks us like, hey, are you guys a tracking company or do you do tracking? I always say to them like, if they want breadcrumbs tracking, we are not the solution and they should go to a four kites, a Project 44, trucker Tools We'll refer them out somewhere else. If you literally want to know where that asset is at every few feet, we're not going to be your best fit. What we are going to be your best fit for is if you have a carrier sales team and, all of a sudden, capacity. Let's hope that capacity starts to constrict here pretty soon, because it means that the market's starting to slide back and you are now you're kind of gun shy on the load boards because maybe you've been burned there with regards to double brokering, some other issues, yet you're scrambling now to find capacity here.
Speaker 2:We are now a network where you can put an OD pairing and an equipment type and we're gonna tell you historically every carrier that has been on that lane. We're gonna prioritize it by recency and frequency of actually seeing that carrier there with the right equipment type. But then we actually have a real time API now which, when you put in that OD pairing and that equipment type. We're gonna look and tell you what is every carrier that is there or maybe it's of your carriers and your network that have assets there right now and, based on past data patterns, they're likely to be dropping within the next hour or two in that origin and likely need a backhaul to the destination. Based on what we've seen over subsequent weeks and months and so that's really where it starts Down the road with enough sensor density, there is a potential for us to get there, to the point I would say beyond potential, we'd love to get to the point that we are seeing over 90% of trucks every day two or more times on the road, so that every load is being tracked a few times by us.
Speaker 2:And if you just want to know, hey, is that load going to be on time or is it going in the wrong direction? Is potential a risk? We could tell you then, but we're never going to be a replacement for that warm and fuzzy of breadcrumbs, and that's where I think there's going to continue to be a place for both in this industry place for both in this industry.
Speaker 3:So when I guess, when I'm thinking about this, one primary function is capacity procurement, right, yep? And are you saying that you can API in maybe not yet or potentially down the road into the TMS of a provider and the same way that in my TMS I would upload where my trucks are when I talk to a carrier, these are just going to auto feed in that. Hey, carrier Johnson Trucking has three guys in Dallas that are going to Chicago. That's exactly. I mean, we're there now Going north.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're there now.
Speaker 2:We have that capability, we have customers that are integrating that API, and that is the workflow now is saving those calls that carrier sales reps might make the first few hours of their day of just calling lists and saying like, hey, where are your trucks now, what are your needs, what equipment types do you have, and especially like for prospecting for for new carriers.
Speaker 2:We're trying to save those questions and have that data at your fingertips so you can immediately get to that next part. Now I'll tell you what we're not doing is we're not replacing the human interaction and experience. You know gen logs. I'm pretty committed that like to use AI in a way that still requires that human to then have that conversation, and there might be ways that that data goes into workflows with some automation. But at the end of the day, like I do not want to erase the human element of this industry because, coming from a human intelligence officer like I, know the benefit of having those relationships, and so we're just trying to get better data so that you can stop asking for the questions but already know the answers, so then you can make those next actions.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that makes sense. I mean it. You know when I think about how, if I'm a carrier rep and my job is to cover a load from Jacksonville to Atlanta, my process is going to be something like this the first thing I'm going to do is look in my system and see historical carriers that have run this load for us, or carriers I know in my network that are based in one of those two locations. You probably start with backhauls. You know, maybe guys based, maybe guys based in Atlanta, who get to Jacksonville. You're going to call and ask them if they have capacity. You might look at load boards and see who's posted, their available capacity, and what you're saying is we can now add in another tool in the toolbox, that is, I log into GenLogs or it's API'd in and I just go search Jacksonville to Atlanta and it's going to show me the best possible matches being carriers that frequently are running that route.
Speaker 2:It's 100% what happens and we get feedback from our customers every day, where in one case, we had a broker that had been looking for dedicated capacity on a really like archaic lane for about three months and he asked us for help.
Speaker 2:And this was before he was even a customer and I just pulled a list of our carrier recommendations there and the reason I know like they're they're real is with one button I can pull up all of the images where we've seen them along that lane with the right equipment that matched, and he shot off emails to the first few and within three minutes had secured capacity on that lane, dedicated in a way that, from a carrier that was actually domiciled almost on the other side of the country, so it wouldn't have been intuitive to find them, but it was able to do it that way. And then, on the spot side, that's often what we're able to now do with our real-time API is tell you like, hey, these carriers have trucks there right now. The great part is, you know that they're real. I mean, they're on the roads and you're not kind of dealing with an issue of does this carrier even have assets? Basically, am I about to get double brokered here You're like seeing is believing, and we allow all of our customers to actually see that those trucks have been in that area.
Speaker 2:You know, the other side I'll kind of get to is that there's a lot of capacity out there that I think brokerages, because of the fraud issue, haven't fully tapped into, and over the last month we've pulled I have a list of 4,000 carriers that have never had FMCSA inspections Yet. We've seen them on the roads a ton from our sensors and we're literally watching these owner-operators trying to build their business, trying to like, and if they went up to try to get inspected at an inspection station they'd be turned away. And so they're, on the one hand, being hamstrung by brokers saying you need to explain why?
Speaker 3:why are they being turned away? Because they no longer allow you to get an inspection unless it's like something you've done something wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the word we're getting is essentially like if you're, if you're coming to ask for an inspection, they just assume you're good to go. And the problem is they want those. Fmcsa wants to get those inspections randomly. So you didn't just get one truck perfectly squared away go get inspection and now you have that, like you know, 100% driver score, you're good to go. We need it to be random so they won't give you an inspection if you come up.
Speaker 2:And now the average owner operator is stuck trying to get to their their authority to has to be a year kind of being seasoned and have multiple inspections to be able to work with some of these mid-market to larger brokerages and I think gen logs over time will be able to lower the bar on some of those that we will be able to give people enough of a warm and fuzzy on the brokerage side to know that these carriers are real running these lanes with these right equipment and those carriers are going to then get hooked up more than they. Kind of the bar is going to come lower for them to get freight.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean it has to happen. I mean the reality is because I've heard the same thing that you can no longer just show up and ask for an inspection, and I understand from the regulatory side why they would have that position. That is okay. This isn't how your truck looks every day. You brought it in on a day that it looks great. We're not going to let that be the baseline for how people evaluate the quality of your equipment. Be the baseline for how people evaluate the quality of your equipment.
Speaker 3:But the flip side of that, especially being understaffed and given the rules of the game that brokers have set, many brokers won't set up a carrier or give them business if they haven't had inspections. That's just been the lay of the land for I don't know how long, but for a number of years. But when those two things coincide together, you get left with owner-operators who are well-intended, want to build a good business for themselves, are willing to do the hard work of driving the truck around, picking up and delivering loads, and they're getting told by people you're not, I can't trust you. You're, you know, potentially shady or a double broker. And so I get how there's a problem there that needs to be solved. Something's got to give, and the likely answer is that brokers need to find a more effective way to evaluate the legitimacy of a carrier outside of inspections.
Speaker 2:Yeah, inspections will have a role, for sure. I mean, we need it, like you need to make sure these trucks are actually in working order and the right you know the owner operator that's doing their job in terms of keeping their equipment and their drivers all to standard, are going to skate through those, hopefully with flying colors. But I agree with you that there needs to be additional data sources we're bringing in to both find these carriers and then evaluate their veracity and authenticity on the roads. The other thing is, I want to make it really clear that, at the end of the day, yes, genlogs has this nationwide network of sensors, but our heart is really with the owner operators and the carriers that are out there, and we've had multiple instances speaking of fraud. It's not just the brokers that are dealing with this and actually the victims here, it's a lot of legitimate carriers that we had one instance in which a carrier that had a handful of trucks was out there in the roads and a broker called us and said I've worked with this carrier before, but they just stole a load from me and I'm trying to figure out what happened. And so we pulled, you know, typed in their DOT into our system, pulled up all the power units we had seen there and that broker called that carrier and said walk me through what power units you guys have. So he was saying I got a white Freightliner, I got this, I got that. And then, but he didn't mention this blue Volvo. And the broker said you don't have a blue Volvo. He's like, no, we do not.
Speaker 2:Well, sure enough, there was a thief out there in the road that had just stuck a placard on the side with someone else's MC and was going and stealing these loads in his name. Either it hacked the DAT account or whatever. The bottom line is he was stealing in this case it was a load of copper and that carrier had no idea that this was happening. And he also had no idea that Freight Guard and TIA Watchdog reports were about to be filed for some of these thefts. That wasn't his fault and there was also no recourse to prove like someone else was actually impersonating him and stealing it. And so Genlogs now has this Overwatch capability to also not only protect brokers but help carriers when it comes to keeping them safe from fraud, making sure no one's impersonating them, but then having actual evidence to go back and say that is not my power unit, but they were posing with my MC or whatnot to steal.
Speaker 2:So there's ways in which we really want to be viewed as a force for good here. It's something that, at the end of the day, like we are here to remove the bad actors, that the good guys can flourish, and that's what you know. We're starting with that, and we actually had a big announcement this week that I'd be happy to kind of share here. Let's do it. Yeah, well, you know the bottom line. We've been taking a lot of time, capital and otherwise to build this nationwide network and we are not by any means done with it and there's more work to be done. In fact, over the next year, we're going to be tripling the number of sensors we have out there. We're hiring more to get that done, but it has shown incredible efficiency when it comes to stopping theft or at least investigating theft.
Speaker 2:Over the last four months, we've helped recover over 400 missing assets, trailers or loads and otherwise, and so we just decided as a company that there's going to be plenty of money to be made with our freight intelligence platform down the road, with customers that want better insights into carrier patterns on the road or shipper lanes and the volumes coming out of those lanes. And so we decided, from a theft perspective, effective immediately. Genlogs will help investigate and recover all stolen and missing equipment for the entire industry for free. So I don't care if you're a shipper, carrier, 3pl, if something goes wrong and you have an asset or a load stolen, a truck, whatnot then you can come to us. You can go to genlogsio and there's literally a button that says find my asset and we will launch. Or you can email us investigations at genlogsio and we will absolutely search historically where we saw it last or put an alert so that the next time it's seen we will get an immediate notification and then we will work with you and law enforcement to track it down.
Speaker 2:And we're not going to send you a bill. I mean, I can't imagine being an owner operator and having my one drive-in stolen at a truck stop that was literally providing my livelihood. And now I'm trying to file with the insurance claims that go to the police and they're like what are we going to do to help you? And there's just no recourse. And then I would not feel right about trying to send a bill, either preemptively or after the fact, like hey, we got it for you, but here's your like $10,000 bill on the other end. We just decided look at the end of the day, uh, gem logs can help, and so we're going to do this, starting from now, for free.
Speaker 3:Okay. So that's incredible, first of all because I've been there before. I mean one of my sales guys who now he doesn't work he doesn't work at Molo anymore but he had to go himself to try to find a stolen trailer and he was like just driving around Indiana down the highway, stopping at truck stops, looking at every trailer that he passed by. And the police are not often super helpful in these situations. They have a hard time getting the information they need to take an action that moves the process forward or helps us find what we're looking for. I'm curious you said you've had 400 cases that you've been able to help solve. How quick is the process? Have been able to help solve? How quick is the process If a trailer is stolen in an area where you have sensors and I were to reach out and say, hey, man, can you help me find this trailer? How quick can you possibly find it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a tool called the asset locator tool that any of our customers get direct access to as well, and you can literally punch in. Let's say you were leasing a premier trailer. You could punch in that premier logo here's my trailer and then hit search. If we've seen it, you're going to instantly get results. I mean, it's right there at your fingertips. You're going to be able to see where it was seen, when it was seen, and if it hasn't been seen since it was stolen, you can set an alert and it's we have about a. You know, there's a lot of processing that we do at the edge and then data comes back and we do some more processing. We've been able to get that latency down to about five minutes from when a truck would pass the sensor and all of a sudden that's now available to be alerted like hey, it was here and and it's enough so that you can get that alert, turn around and actually communicate to law enforcement to say my stolen load was just, you know, is heading 95 northbound, just past Pennsylvania or or whatever it might be, philadelphia and and at least have to know where it is and have the visual evidence, like part of it is just knowing who stole it Like. All of a sudden like we maybe it was a truck came in with a papered placard on the side. They left, they peel off the placard and then now they're off. You know, to the races. We can use different identifiers to then track down like what truck was affiliated with that that trailer at that time and then to take additional action.
Speaker 2:We we had a case the other day where a broker came to us hey, we've had this leased trailer was stolen and we're trying to track it down. Who had it? Well, we punched it into our system. It was stolen about two weeks prior and within that last two weeks we had seen it twice being used by two different carriers. So I was trying to figure out what's going on here and the carriers were actually both domiciled within about 20 minutes of each other in Southern California. And when I looked at the license plates for these carriers, they were both. They had to have been issued within literally minutes or days of each other.
Speaker 2:They were almost sequential and upon digging a little bit further, finally found that both of them, at one point in the past, had shared the same phone number, and so we actually like it wasn't just one perpetrator that we we saw here. It was like two bad actors that were sharing a stolen asset and I set an alert on that. And like two days later I got an alert on that trailer and now it was being hauled by a third uh carrier at the time again based in the same area, it's just a network that they were clearly hey, it's not our trailer, but we'll use it. And so I packaged that up, told the broker and then reached out to local law enforcement there. But the difference this time, if I just told them before hey, there's been a trailer stolen there, what are they going to do? What are they?
Speaker 2:going to do A million trailers. Yeah, in this case we laid it out for them like images, here's, like the date, timestamps, all of that, and it was clear as day. And then they went ahead and took the next steps to go ahead and not only recover that, but then go high that now people realize that you're going to get caught, if not immediately, there's going to be visual evidence that you did it and it's going to trace back and you're going to be, you know, caught, arrested, shut down and so leave other people's cargo and assets in place and let's let the good guys flourish. And that's what it's all about. I mean, that's fat.
Speaker 3:It's fascinating to me and that's what it's all about. I mean, that's fat. It's fascinating to me that that's possible. I mean, we went from a place of if your stuff was stolen and gone, it was probably gone forever. You you were not likely to recover it and there was not a good way to even approach recovering it. You call the cops. You don't get a a ton. Even if you get the FBI involved, it's not likely. You're getting the answers you're looking for and now you're telling me if it happens to be in the location where the sensors are, I might know where it is 10 minutes after I start looking for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely that's insane, yeah, and look, we're not going to be perfect and we're pretty transparent with our customers. Like, you can go right into our freight intelligence platform and look where our sensor coverage areas are and we actually display where those general areas are. We don't get into exactly how many or where the sensors are, because we're not trying to give the playbook to the bad guys of how many they need to take down to be okay, but at the end of the day, we try to be transparent. Where we have strong coverage, where we're still building coverage, this will be continue to be a work in progress, but we are. When I say we are infusing millions of dollars into this, we are absolutely doing that. We've seen enough, even with a, the small number of sensors that we had earlier on this year.
Speaker 2:Like, I met a, a fortune 50 shipper, at the manifest conference this last year. I was telling what they were doing and they were like like you guys are insane, this is the craziest thing we've ever heard of. And I was like, look, I don't know the industry enough and I don't know what's crazy or not, but this is what we're doing. And uh, and we, you know, I showed him a little demo and we parted ways. Well, the next day, after the conference was over this never happens.
Speaker 2:You always, you know, know, as a vendor, you're always trying to pester the, the shipper in this case in time, the customer and they, like you know they have so many others they're not gonna respond. Well, they reached out to us saying, like we can't stop thinking about how insane you guys are since we left, and so we want to test this. Here's a. Here's a list of 10 trailers, uh, and we just want to see what you guys have on it. Well, that came into me while I was finishing up a Zoom call and I got off the call saw this email. I literally punched in the first trailer, andrew, and boom, it was a hit on 81 in Pennsylvania southbound, and I was like holy cow, it worked right away. It was our first ever live scenario. This thing works, it works exactly, and so I pulled the images and made sure I responded back to them within 10 minutes.
Speaker 2:So they knew there was no way that we could have like manually looked through all these images and you can only do it if you had, if AI was actually cataloging everything that was seen on the roads and, yeah, shot it back.
Speaker 2:And that kicked off like a conversation that has led to them now being a customer where we are helping them like literally monitor where all of their assets are around the US and anytime that they it goes, trackers go down all the time. Like these IOT devices, they're not perfect either and now we have a safety net that could kind of find like hey, it's tracker down who is with it next last. It might even be within their fleet, but we'll still help them track it down so that they can at least get that asset utilization score right back up, and that's what's been so helpful. So, beyond just the tracking down the fraud and theft, piece this every day in terms of just understanding what the asset utilization and how do we find these missing trailers, that there might be nothing nefarious about it. We just don't know where they are and we help people track that down every day.
Speaker 3:So where would you say you are on the journey to full coverage of the United States?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, if you like, full coverage is always a little question in our mind and we've kind of come up with what we would say full. So I'll tell you, the way that we're going about this is we're just taking where are the truck traffic patterns the highest in the US, and that is where we're starting, and then we're working with the next and the next. And if you essentially just look at it as a bell curve distribution of how truck traffic is on the roads, we're targeting that like middle third first and then we'll get to the outer third. We're targeting that like middle third first and then we'll get to the outer third. So by the end of this year I mean we're on track so that every single day there's better than not odds that if you put in an asset in here, you were seeing it that day like where it was on the roads, there where we want to be by the end of next year. So if you and I chat a year from now, we want to be at the fact that somewhere between 90 to 95 percent of trucks on the road every day are seen two or more times in our, in our data. There's always going to be those fringe cases where someone's taking these really weird side roads to get a 200 mile move or whatnot. But if you're, if you're doing over the road, it won't even be by this time next year. It won't even be by this time next year, like, let's say, six months from now. We should be in a place where there's a 90% likelihood that whatever pattern you took to go from point A to point B, we saw you two or more times there and we just have record that the truck was there.
Speaker 2:And I wanna also be like really clear about a few things too. We filter out all private vehicles at the edge, so we are not collecting on any personal vehicles. It has to be a commercial vehicle for us to then collect, and we've trained our classifiers on that. The second part about this is we treat every truck as if it's autonomous. I do not know if there's a driver and I frankly don't care and we've seen autonomous vehicles on the roads. All we're doing is logging that inanimate object a truck and a trailer in this case was seen at a time and place and we log it and that's it. And so there's like we're not out there to understand like who's driving from their house to the supermarket at all. It is a commercial vehicle, was on the middle mile and we were collecting that. It happened to be at those two points and if something goes wrong, we now have data to go help them.
Speaker 3:And how? How does the um? Is my brain just froze for a second? I'm sorry, um, are you able? I assume the answer to this question is no, but is there any way to tell if the trailers are loaded or not?
Speaker 2:You know this is something we were working on. The general principle with computer vision is that if you as a human let's say you're an expert in the field of knowing like I could look at a truck and tell something about the truck, if you as a human can do it, we can train a computer to recognize those indicators as well. So we're looking at some of the ways that we can both do that from the computer vision perspective. But the other part about this is we're looking at those patterns over time and what we're able to actually ascertain by blending different data sources on top of our own camera data that we're collecting. I can actually go back in time to see exactly where that truck left and then where it ended up and the methods by which we do that.
Speaker 2:I won't get into all of that here, but we know that this is true because when in the freight intelligence platform we have a quarter of a million shippers in there, all of their locations, and if you click on any one of those locations we will actually show you their lanes Visibly. You could see their lanes, both inbound and outbound trucking lanes, and you can see which one has the highest volume and whatnot. And that's purely information learned from your sensors. It's sensors plus these disparate data sets that we're bringing in, that we're fusing with our sensors to then basically have a holistic idea of what's happening out there in the roads. So this is a CRM.
Speaker 2:It would certainly feed into like it's a prospecting tool. Yeah, it's not a CRM, but this is a prospecting tool. It's a prospecting tool. You know there's some things we don't do, like our friends over at shipper crm. They're they're like the crm you want to go ahead and track down in terms of their ability to actually have the contact information all of this.
Speaker 3:That's uh, that's uh, christian gibas. Uh, I don't know his last name. Yeah, free caviar paul.
Speaker 2:Then my old co-founder will, jen yeah, just saw will jenkins got involved there.
Speaker 3:I think that's a brilliant partnership there I'm not familiar enough with the product, but you're saying, okay, I'm with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the CRM piece. That's something that we are not a CRM. We also, at this point in time, aren't going out and finding who's going to pick up the phone when you called a prospect there. But if you've done that work through Shipper CRM, let's say, then the next step is I want to call that person, but I want to have an intelligent conversation right off the bat. I want to have a hook that I can go in with that gets my foot in the door and for us to be able to tell you what their like top five lanes are in terms of and what they likely need. With regards to those those needs, we'll talk like that's a game changer. And that's where our freight intelligence platform really has three buckets that we service within a brokerage. That's the customer sales, the carrier sales and then the compliance piece, and it's our ability to kind of service all of that on one platform.
Speaker 2:That I think has been so powerful and every week we're really like the whole humility of learning from our customers has not ended with us launching this company. It continues, and we continue to meet with our customers to see what other features that they're needing and also how's it going. Is our data actually driving ROI for you. And then we write an internal update to our team, kind of capturing that about how we're doing. We're not going to be successful if our customers are not successful.
Speaker 2:But every week we get these stories of like hey, I was just able to sign a new shipper because I had backhauls for them on a really key lane and I was able to reach out and position it as like hey, I just I happen to have some excess capacity that needing backhauls in this lane. Do you guys have anything on that lane? Yeah, you already knew that when you reached out and this is why we hear all the time using the Genlogs platform, I've never been a broker. I got deep respect for them, for those that have used it. They said it's like brokering freight on cheat mode, where you just know the answers ahead of time. So now it becomes a whole lot easier.
Speaker 3:So I don't know that either of us knows the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask him anyways. What happens when every broker has signed up with you? Yeah, and everybody has access to know the true location and true lanes of all these trucks and all these shippers? Yeah, just what does that world look like in terms of procuring capacity?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Just what is that? What does that world look like in terms of procuring capacity? Here's what I think it looks like. I'll kind of preface this by saying Don Everhart, who was at Night Swift back in the day, and then Freightvana, and now it's Transflow.
Speaker 3:You know he pulled me One second before you finish that, because I just want to add this one piece of context Based on what I'm hearing, I'm not sure there's a reason why a broker wouldn't sign up. So when I say this, I'm saying it because I think we get to a future where every broker has signed up.
Speaker 2:Now go ahead. Well, all I was going to say is he did say. He said, ryan, I truly believe that five years from now there'll be two types of brokers those that are using Genlogs and those that went out of business. Because he just sees this as potentially being a shift, and that's humbling for me to hear, as someone's coming in the industry just trying to take my intelligence background to provide people better insights and tools. Here's what I think, andrew, is that I liken to what we're doing here at Genlogs very much to what happened for the residential real estate industry when the multiple listing service came online.
Speaker 2:You can make the argument that beforehand it was literally capacity was in the hands of the best realtors that were working their contacts and figuring out what houses were for sale and this and that, and you had to go to a realtor because you couldn't find what houses were for sale in certain neighborhoods certainly not remotely. And then the multiple listing service came online and you might've thought that that would have been the end for real estate brokers. In fact, all it made it is that every real estate broker now has to have that, but in having that, they're able to do their jobs more efficiently. And what it didn't do is get rid of real estate brokers. Even when Redfin or Zillow came online doing their own kind of like digital freight brokerage, so to say, examples of we're going to just sell direct and we're going to connect the buyer and seller on our platform and do away with realtors. Realtors are here to stay and it's because there's a lot of complications that people don't want to deal with about navigating, buying and selling a house, and there's that personal relationship piece of you want someone that's done this day in and day out for years to hold your hand through one of the biggest decisions you're going to make. And that's where I see this as potentially being that every freight broker eventually wants to have this.
Speaker 2:Whether they do or not is up to them, but if they do, I think it just becomes the new standard that now we have this full visibility.
Speaker 2:Now it becomes the new standard that, like now we have this full visibility, now it becomes the relationships piece and the service piece, like how good at you are actually delivering on the value.
Speaker 2:Because now that the parity in terms of information is no longer a difference, it's not like some of the bigger freight brokerages out there that have spent years building their, their carrier networks. Well, I can now deliver a two-person brokerage and we have better insights onto what the carriers are doing on the roads than those big brokerages have. And I know that to be true because the big brokerages have signed up with us and the small brokerages have signed up with us, and I can now put the parity that make data parity across the board, and and now you're competing on service and I think, at the end of the day, like that's a win for carriers, it's a win for shippers and it's a win for the best brokerages is that, if you are, you're the best at what you do with regards to delivering on service and having strong relationships, then you now have the information at your fingertips to be effective.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree. I um, I'm just so. What I'm really curious about is when we get to the place where all all the top a hundred brokers use it and we find we all hundred at the same time find out that Joe's trucking has an available truck in Chicago looking to go to Indianapolis, and they all have that load. Maybe he drives up rates on the right lanes for the right drivers a little bit, I don't know. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:I'm telling you that Joe's there, but I'm also telling you that Bob's Trucking is there and Mark's Trucking is there and it kind of goes on. And the idea is like I think some of the stats that kind of shocked me before I got into it was actually reading in 2023, uber Freight put out a study where they talked about that. A third of carrier miles are driven empty at any given time and a lot of that is like those deadheads going to or from their next load pickup. Well, if I can essentially shed light on where all of the carriers are, and we're not there yet, I also, like don't want to ever overplay the hand. It's like the those that have signed up and have been with us for the last like four or five months. They've certainly grown. They've seen like this progress playing out and this is not a silver bullet, nor will it ever be, but it's certainly a powerful tool.
Speaker 2:But ideally I want to be the point that it's not just I'm showing you Mark's trucking. That's there, that's going back, I'm showing you all of the variable carriers and if all of a sudden we can match carriers to loads there, then all of a sudden, like we do get to better efficiency we get to a better efficiency on on rates, like rates do start to become like less sporadic where you just kind of know I know all of the trucks in this market and I now know the loads in this market and I'm able to kind of get to what the rate should be because we have full data insights there I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing and I think the more we've seen like the multiple listing service going back, that for residential real estate things is a great example. Once you know what all capacity is and you know what your neighbor's house sold for today and the other one yesterday, then you now generally know what yours could sell for tomorrow and that's great for both buyers and sellers to have that understanding and insight.
Speaker 3:But the price we won't see right. There's no way Bob, like Bob's trucking, won't know that Joe's trucking just got his Chicago to Indy for 700. He won't know that right, we're not playing the pricing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, correct, our platform doesn't know. We're not in the pricing space.
Speaker 3:There's some others that I think you get a little too close to danger in that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we decided not to play in that space. We decided not to do a few things. We're not doing carrier onboarding, so we're not going to deal directly with carriers. We're not going to do pricing, but the data itself. I think there's still no one has a really good understanding of what's the load to truck ratio in certain markets. And even if you know how many trucks are in there, how many of them are headed east versus heading westbound, and that's what I'm saying over time we're going to be able to get better understanding of. There are sure there's 100 trucks trucks in this market, but only two of them are likely to head east based on the past data patterns. The other 98 are headed west and that's going to be balancing then on the or at least having pressure on the pricing yeah, you'll also arguably be able to.
Speaker 3:You could lead the initiative on market shifts. You could be the first to tell everyone when produce season starts. You're going to be the first guy to know that Florida all of a sudden has 5,000 trucks leaving every day, when last week it was 4,000. It's not pricing that you have to necessarily do, but you could be the indicator on shifts on up and down. I mean that's really interesting I haven't thought about that.
Speaker 2:We do want to be there eventually and we have some of the brightest data scientists, I think, in the world working at gen logs now because they're so excited to work. It's very rare in the field of data science you get to work with a virgin data set. That's like pristine, where all of the the stray voltage has kind of been filtered out and you're just looking at trucks and you're looking at equipment types and you're seeing where they are. Now, one thing I do want to go back to, because you asked me about, like what happens when everyone has this.
Speaker 2:Well, one thing we decided at Genlogs is I wanted to do a startup differently than other startups, and that happens in so many different ways.
Speaker 2:One of those ways is I do not want to scale too fast, that we fail, and we've decided to actually limit over the course of the next year we're only going to be bringing on 200 customers total onto the platform and it is because we've chosen that number.
Speaker 2:It allows us literally Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday for 50 weeks to bring on a customer per day, and then we reset the next week and we do it then and we give full like a full training and onboarding so that people know how to use the maximum, get the maximum benefit out of this platform. But that means that a year from now there's only going to be 200 and change people on this platform, the year after that maybe a little bit more. There's enough brokerages that those that will have it, I think, will have an advantage, no doubt. But I'm also just not trying to go too big so that we fail. And I've seen that too many times with other startups. Where it becomes a lot, things start getting missed and things fall through cracks. And in the same way that I think it's smart to responsibly scale a brokerage so that the service levels stay high, we feel the same way on the startup side. We want to give brokers the highest service possible and we can only do that if we actually constrain how many we onboard.
Speaker 3:I mean, how intuitive is it now? Like once, once I get signed up as a broker, like how often am I having to call you guys and your team, your customers? I mean, is it not? I'm in there doing my thing.
Speaker 2:You're in there doing your thing. I think the problem is we've noticed that if we just give a login people it does feel like playing a video game a little bit on our user interface. People get it, it's very intuitive, but they don't understand fully everything they can do. So I've given the platform to a brokerage before but it turns out we were only giving it to their carrier sales team, didn't ask the question ahead of time. Who's in the room who we're giving this to? And the carrier sales team is crushing it in terms of finding new carriers.
Speaker 2:And the customer sales team has no idea that their brokerage has paid for this platform in which they can have the insights on a quarter of a million shipper lanes in the US, or shippers in all of their lanes in the US. And it wasn't until months later that we circle back to kind of see an update we're seeing in the data. They're not using it. We're like, hey, we're just curious why you're not using it. Well, we didn't even know what that we had this capability. So we really have decided like it is the platform's really intuitive, but there's so much you can do that we want to make sure we're training everyone in the customer, sales carrier, sales compliance about what is possible and then setting themselves up for success. That's like when it comes to a year later for renewals. We don't want anyone not renewing because they didn't know they had a superpower. We want everyone feeling like they can't let this out of their hands. And that only happens if we do a really good job with onboarding.
Speaker 3:So 200, that's the number for next year.
Speaker 2:200 is the number for next year and we're like we we'd said a while back we did 10, we only had 10 slots for our initial pilots and we had others that came in wanting to do it and I was serious about that Like I'm a pretty serious individual when I say something, we'll follow through on it and so we ended up only taking 10 for those initial pilots. I'm really proud of the team. We ended up having 100% conversion from those pilots to contracts and now we're opening the aperture for another 200. But it is going to be constrained and we're going to be just fine as a company like to do just 200. And that's the thing is. Like I'm here for the long haul. You've done the math. Yeah, I've done the math.
Speaker 2:I'm not here to make like a quick splash, quick exit and be like I'm out, like I've actually talked about the retail industry that I was in right before coming to this. It is like there's it's dot, it's old, it's dodgy, like there's um, you got to dress to the nines like nothing about it. Suited with my cia background in terms of a fast-paced environment. You know jokes to, to, to deal with the pain of what sometimes it is like to work and then I get in this industry and it's like my people, like I really feel like it's me, hente, where I was dealing in these fast-paced environments, where I'd be sitting in the basement of our op center watching like drone screens on what was going on there. It's a little bit different. You guys are watching green screens, maybe, but at the end of the day it's like it's that fast-paced environment, it's I need it now and we we want to therefore deliver a product that people can like get it right now.
Speaker 3:But I love this industry, we're I'm planning to stay for the very, very, uh long haul and, um, yeah, it's been awesome so today the product is pretty fleshed out and I think your focus and correct me because I'm saying this with the intent of you filling in the gaps the product's pretty fleshed out and your focus largely, is just to continue to increase the area of coverage, to make it better and better. But are there? You know, I just keep thinking about your comment around the data scientists and how sexy all the clean data is and how much, and that just gets me thinking of how much you can do with it.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent. We have a never ending product roadmap. Much to the chagrin of my, my head of product and like she's amazing, heather you know every week is putting out what are we going to do the next two weeks? Sprint next two weeks, all the way out for like a few quarters. And we're we also in our platform. You can go in and see what that product roadmap looks like and you can absolutely submit a like hey, why don't you do this? And we prioritize that product roadmap, exactly what our customers are saying they need and want.
Speaker 2:I'll give you an example about one of those things is here within about another month or so, we're going to go beyond just knowing those shippers lanes, but we're going to also give you the average dwell times that each one shipper so quarter million shippers what are all the average dwell times and what days of the week do they ship? Like when are we seeing trucks going, touching and departing? And so you can like imagine thinking like when you're looking for a restaurant on Google and kind of seeing when is it most crowded and what days of the week we're essentially taking that that's what you're going to see now on all the shippers. So that's just one example of probably another 1,000 that is on our roadmap to take this data and continually offer those better insights. And the other thing we've kind of decided as a company is, when I add that insight there with our existing customers, I'm not going to come back to you and be like, hey, now you got to pay me up for this, we're just adding this and making the most powerful platform at one rate that a brokerage comes in and buys it and all of their people get access.
Speaker 2:And we had one brokerage the other day that had been using we issued about 50 logins to them during the pilot process and they came back after they came on board as a customer. They came back and asked for a thousand and now, like everyone in the organization now has this at their fingertips and we're seeing in the backend, they're using it every day and so we love to listen to our customers. And that goes right into prioritizing what exactly we're going to build next, and I think it's fun for our customers to see what comes out every two weeks. It's also fun for our team to work on something new all the time. It's never going to be a finished product and the moment it is a finished product like I'm out because I don't like, I can't, I don't want to be stagnant ever. That's awesome. Yeah, well, I got a question for you, andrew.
Speaker 2:I was at the TIA Technovations conference the other day where you filled in as a as a shark judge on the shark tank there You're a tough cookie man when it comes to uh. You know, in that instance, like I was, like I'm glad that I'm not up there presenting at that point in time. And then I like I've listened to all 41 episodes here. I even actually listened to Chad's uh episode this morning before I got released four hours ago, already, already, as soon as it hit my eye and I was listening.
Speaker 2:I knew I was coming on today, least four hours ago already. As soon as it hit my eye and I was listening, I knew I was coming on today. So I've listened to you here and, uh, I think it was episode, like you know, 40, or maybe it was a little bit earlier, just do it episode it was also like one of the most yeah, it was one of the most like, uh, vulnerable and honest and authentic conversations that I've heard, even though it was just you and I.
Speaker 2:We've actually like the, the Molo folks are actually using our platform now, so I get to talk to some of the Molo folks too and I asked them about what it was like working for Andrew, and they would talk about your weekly addresses or your company-wide addresses and also the, the empathy. I was talking to Ryan Schreiber today. He was like Andrew really cares, like he really cares about people. So I'm watching you on stage at the at shark tank, where you're like an absolute hard ass there, and then I hear the vulnerability, like, where, like, are those two sides of the same coin, or or what is it?
Speaker 3:Oh um yeah, I mean I, I wanted to be challenging on that, on that shark, that shark tank thing was tough. I mean, they didn't give us a ton of time and they were like just figure it out. And you know, I feel like it's better to ask some harder questions and make people try to think it's more engaging, it's more interesting for people, it's more interesting for the audience. I think that's part of the fun in doing this podcast is I get people for as much as 90 minutes, two hours sometimes, and I get to have whatever conversation we have.
Speaker 3:I'm not the most consistent is maybe part and Hyde before, just in terms of when I am fully and this isn't really, I guess, what you're alluding to in terms of doing something like like a company speech or like the the um, the vulnerable podcast I did a few weeks ago. Um, I could be up here, uh, when I'm like emotionally reactive, it's like chaos and uh, that's a little different, I think, than what you were asking, because I think just in that scenario, I was trying to be a good judge and trying to challenge these guys. I think that's just a fun way to do it Well from a leadership perspective.
Speaker 2:When you were at Molo, leading there, how much were you relying on the? How much were you relying kind of the carrot or the stick at the end of the day, like you know and just, I never got to work with you there, we only met recently. So just kind of like leadership style is something that I'm always interested and the authentic like one of the biggest things that I need in a leader is authenticity and whether it's been a journey for you like this podcast has been authentic, both with regards to you talking but also your guests. Like you have a way to kind of get them to share. I've never talked about having, you know, a little bout of depression when I was overseas and here I felt like this environment, but I'm assuming that if things are not going well, you could be like a hard ass. So it's just more of a from a leadership perspective.
Speaker 3:I'm not good when things aren't going well. That's the one of the biggest reasons I want to start. Another business is to write what I feel are wrongs that I'm learning I think is a product of my ADHD, where I didn't know this. I'm learning so many characteristics of ADHD that are just so clear that they are me. But ruminating on past things that we feel shame or guilt about is a massive ADHD characteristic worst moments at Molo and they all are reactive, angry, um, selfish, egotistical, like, like you know, the team wasn't doing what I wanted them to and I'd blow up at them and I think I got a lot of grace, um, some people I didn't. I mean, I think there are a lot of people who there are plenty of people who work for me who would not do it again, but there are a lot who I think would say that, like, they knew that I was coming from a place of caring.
Speaker 3:You know, what pushed me into this whole concept of vulnerability was Brene Brown, and she had a TED Talk, the Power of Vulnerability, and it materially changed my life. I mean, when I first saw it, I was literally at like one of the worst points of my life, and this was six months before we started the company. I wanted to make vulnerability one of our core values and Will and Steven and Matt were all like it's like, it sounds, like it sounds. It sounds weak, like we're vulnerable, like we don't want to say that, um, and I'm like I I I understand how it looks, but it's a, I think it's a core. You don't build trust without vulnerability. It's not possible. Um, I think like it's literally in the definition. Uh, vulnerability is taking something. Sorry, trust is no, what is it? Vulnerability is taking something that matters to you and making it I can't remember the definition now, but it's something along the lines of basically taking something that's meaningful to you and putting it in the hands of someone else without knowing how they're going to behave with that information, and I think that's how you build trust.
Speaker 3:Part of why I did that podcast I mean one was for myself and for my own kind of growth journey of what I'm trying to do, do. But two is also to open the door for others to think like maybe, maybe they can come and have that conversation with me and know that I can have empathy for whatever they're going through, and try to have a really honest conversation, an authentic conversation. I think authenticity always wins and, you know, sometimes it bites me in the ass, being, you know, just a little too honest about how I feel about something and, like the Uber thing the other day, I put that out into the world and that became a big thing and maybe bigger than I would have wanted to. I wasn't really trying to completely destroy that concept. I realized how I maybe did and how I presented it.
Speaker 3:But I can be reactive at times and when I am I'm not a good leader. If you were to ask me straight up, do you think you're a good leader? I would have a hard time saying yes. And the reason I would have a hard time saying yes is not because I haven't displayed good leadership throughout my time at Molo. Whether it was 60% or 40%, whatever percent I don't know what that number is but there's enough that I feel like I wasn't a good leader and I think that was part of being a emotionally reactive person. And that's where it is. And I'm on this very long journey to try to figure out how to kind of wrangle that and turn myself into an entirely conscious and like every decision I make I want to be a conscious decision of.
Speaker 3:I did this because this was what I knew would help me, them, us, whoever, what I knew would help me them, us, whoever versus. I just saw that we failed on another Kellogg load and I'm going to email the team at 11 o'clock on Friday night and tell them how pissed I am and how terrible we are. But I did that. I mean, I'll never forget one email I sent on a Friday night about Kellogg's because I mean, we had done so much work and the team had done such an exceptional job, but the parameters were extremely challenging and the whole thing was really hard and it was a mistake and it wasn't even really our fault, but we had had a series of them and you know. So some people get that email and and are like I'm gonna give him grace because I know he wants us to win, yeah, um.
Speaker 3:But others are like I'm tired, I just it, I'm worn down, um, yeah. So I, you know, I, I just feel like I, I don't, I don't think you gain anything by hiding it. Um, I'd rather just be honest and talk about it and I desperately want a second opportunity to build and run a business, and it's not so I can be more successful. I feel good about that part of my life. It's because I want to be a better leader. I don't want to be a more consistent leader, I want to show up in a consistent fashion. I mean, there were points where I was so frustrated where I couldn't go to work, and one of the things I will always love and appreciate about my partner, matt, is he knew how to fill in when that was going to happen. I mean, he knew how to make sure that, like, everything was going to be okay, because sometimes it's too much for me. Like, you know, if I, if I was really.
Speaker 3:You know, 2020 was a really, really hard year for for everyone. Um, I didn't deal with it well and it got even harder when we made the conscious decision to uphold all of our rates, despite, you know, an unprecedented situation in which all of our customers were probably understood if we said, hey, we're going to raise our contract rates because rates, despite an unprecedented situation in which all of our customers would have probably understood if we said, hey, we're going to raise our contract rates because this has never happened before and we're in August and the rates are three times what they were four months ago and we said we're not doing that. We committed to the idea that we weren't going to do that, so we're going to stick with it and we our margin tank, I mean down to like one percent. For that month, august or september of 2020, our margin was literally one percent and as you're looking at the math every day and looking at the bank account and looking at how many people you have, and the business is still growing like it's not we're the. We're getting more and more freight because our customers want us to take more not that they want us to take more at those low contract rates, but they appreciate we're executing, so they're giving us more of the spot freight that you can make more money on.
Speaker 3:But, like, it's just a really, really stressful thing and I didn't deal with it. Well, you know, I was 30 years old and I wish I dealt with it better. My partner was so good about that and you know he was an incredible yin to my yang, because you know I win on emotion too sometimes. You know, if those folks are talking about the speeches, it's because a lot of them, I infuse emotion and passion to elicit the needed connection and feeling that, like we're in this. We're going to do this as a group and figure it out, but it's two sides of that coin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, the second chance thing. The desire to do it again, to do it right, really resonates with me in the sense that when I was in the CIA, I ascended the ranks to the point that I was in a field leadership position. Cia ascended the ranks to the point that I was in a field leadership position and I did not do it well. Looking back, I did not do it well. It was a really. I arrived in a foreign country at a time where there was a crisis breaking out and I was the one that was on the phone every day with CIA headquarters, with the White House, sorting through this. But I really let that get to my head and it became the Ryan show at that point in time, and not the team, and it was the the me and team. And I look back is one of my exactly. It gets me to man. I look back like now and it's like one of my biggest regrets is that some of those that worked for me there would probably say it the same thing, like, yeah, ryan, let it get to his head and it was all about him in that moment. Genlogs has really been an opportunity for me to hit the reset button on that and like it is really weird for me, first of all as a former CIA officer, to even like come on a podcast and talk publicly Like I just always wanted to live in the shadows and talk publicly Like I just always wanted to live in the shadows. Um, but now the only way that I will do it is I'm like able to point to our customers, to the work our team's doing, to my Lord and savior, like to all of that is just like it is not about me, it is elsewhere that I'm going to go ahead and deflect and try to do that I also. I empathize in the sense that, uh, I think if you did say, oh, I'm a great leader, there's already a problem there. I think imposter syndrome is probably a good thing when it comes to leading, and every day I ask myself the same thing when are my blind spots? What could I be doing better? How are we coming across to customers? Are we being vulnerable and authentic and honest with them about?
Speaker 2:You've heard me say a number of times here we do not have everything figured out at GenLux, we don't have a sensor network everywhere, like this is such a work in progress and I don't want to come across that like we've already figured out, we're here to conquer Like there's so much that we are dealing with on a daily basis inside the company and to try to help the industry. Like our hearts in the right place and hopefully people see that A lot of your previous guests have become huge mentors to me in this industry, whether it's Jay Gustafson at Echo or Drew Herpich at NTG, prasad Golopally, others I have great respect for Kerry Jablonski over at Trucker Tools. I mean these people I like to pick up the phone and call them and be like what do we do here? These people are I like we'll pick up the phone and call them and be like what do we do here? Like I. That's what I found is actually this is an industry that truly wants to help each other and, yes, there's competition, but at the end of the day, people like it's one team, one fight to an extent and uh, and so I've.
Speaker 2:What I've truly believed is that gen logs is my like. Every day I'm driven by a little bit of the the shadows of the past there about like how can I do this better? How can I like point the credit back to everyone else and let it not be about me at all, let it be about the customers, let it be about my team and let it go. And so the one thing I would just make you promise me is that if you, when you do start the next company, this won't quit the podcast. Quit the podcast podcast man, like literally my entire team. That is how they've gotten current on like who's who and what people are doing in freight is by listening to the last 41 episodes. I think you're great at it. I think you need to continue.
Speaker 3:I will try to uphold that promise Sounds good. That is a reason why I'm trying to hire people to help me, because I want to get to a point where I show up and we have a conversation and then I can go back to doing what I need to do today. I have the time to do the other things. My ADHD just isn't interested in it. But I am thinking more long-term. I would love to keep doing this. Frankly, I think it could be a useful platform to have when you have a business that's running and you know if once a month I talk about the business, I think that can only help. But I'm picking up on the empathy stuff. I mean, even before we started talking about your business and you started talking about the empathy from the perspective of the CAA work, I was like this is going to play well if he's applying it in the business as well.
Speaker 3:And it's clear that you are your comments around the me. You saw me touch my chest because the email I'm talking about from the Friday night about Kellogg's. I literally wrote my reputation. I said this is my reputation. You guys are fucking up and it makes me squirm to think about that, because these people worked harder than way, harder than either, yeah, and they had put their blood, sweat and their heart and soul into this not their blood, but their heart and soul into this and it was our reputation. And my egotistical ass like got in my head and you know I was pissed. It was a Friday night and I just it was terrible and to this day I think about that and so I think I appreciate the way you're thinking about your leadership, your business, your role. I think what you're doing is pretty spectacular. Again, I said it at the top of the episode and I stand by it 99 minutes later that I think this is one of, if not the most interesting freight tech companies in our space and I'm really excited to see where this goes.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure to be on the pod man. This has been awesome, Great conversation. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:So well, with that, we're going to call it so to our listeners. Hope you enjoyed the show and listen. There's only 200 spots left for 2025 on the Gen Logs roster. If you want in, you should probably reach out to Ryan Asep Rocky.
Speaker 2:Sounds great. Take care, have a good one you.
