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. #48: Jesse Buckingham, CEO and Cofounder of Vooma
In this episode, Andrew is joined by Jesse Buckingham, CEO and cofounder of Vooma. Jesse studied law and economics at the University of Sydney and got his MBA from Stanford. Before Vooma, he was CEO at ASG LogisTech, whose businesses included Trucker Tools, Record360, e-Courier, and PackageRoute. He was also a consultant at Bain & Company.
Now, Jesse’s leading the Vooma team in building AI tools that will automate the shipment lifecycle and help brokerage teams enhance productivity and reduce opex. Vooma recently raised $13M in Series A funding led by Craft Ventures, on top of a $3.6M seed round led by Index Ventures, with support from founders and execs at companies like Motive, Project44, Ryder, and Uber Freight.
Andrew and Jesse cover:
- How to motivate teams, lead with passion, and build trust when you’re not the founder.
- The greatest challenges around addressing and automating manual processes in logistics.
- How AI tools like Vooma will reinvent the way brokerages run their internal operations.
- The future of hiring for the skills required to thrive in an AI-driven environment.
- The artful balance of building an innovative, new business with having a newborn at home.
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. 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.
Speaker 1:That's it. Let's get the show on the road. Welcome back, welcome back. Welcome back to another episode of the Freight Pod. I'm your host, andrew Silver. I'm rocking some new headphones today for those of you who are here for the video, not just the audio. I also, if you can't tell, my eyes are a little puffy. I had a rough weekend in Mexico City, my first time visiting the capital of Mexico. That is the capital, right, jesse? Am I right there? Do you know?
Speaker 2:I think that's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if not. It's certainly the largest city, with 22 million people in the surrounding area and I think 9 million in the downtown area, which is an insane number. When I got there it was kind of hard to fathom how big the city was. I did not get to explore it the way I might have liked. I did enjoy a Michelin star restaurant M One of the best food experiences of my life an incredible tuna tostada. But the following 24 hours were quite miserable, as I spent them in a hospital dealing with a pretty ugly stomach flu or whatever virus I contracted there. It was not fun. Stomach flu or whatever virus I contracted there it was not fun. So I'm recovering, but in good shape to have a great guest today. Mr Jesse Buckingham, welcome to the show. Ceo and co-founder of Vuma. How are you doing today, man?
Speaker 2:I'm doing very well. Thanks for having me on. It's great to get to chat today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm looking forward to this one. So I got to be honest, I've been a little scared to jump into the kind of AI waters with respect to the show, because it's just so far from a core competency for myself as someone who is not even close to tech savvy. It's just it's been something that I've shied away from out of fear of, I don't know, looking like an idiot or not knowing how to have the right conversation. But, um, I'm excited to just ask the questions and and and learn as much as I can about the business you've built, how AI is starting to play a much bigger role in our space than it ever has, and, um, with, with smart people like yourself, I think there's a lot both myself and our audience can learn. So, before we jump into Vuma, take me back to so you went to school in Australia. Is that correct? Are you from Australia?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, born and raised in Australia, I spent like 10 years of my life childhood overseas in Australia. I spent like 10 years of my life childhood overseas, including like five or six of that in the U? S in the Bay area. So I think I've always like had a bit of a connection and affinity for America. I had some like formative years up from when I was like eight till I was 13. And, um, it was kind of around the like originalcom era, I think you know. So I probably like picked up on a little bit of the like Silicon Valley, like tech buzz at that point in my life. Um, and then we I moved back, went to undergrad in Australia but always kind of had a sense that I'd want to get back to the U S. Um, and so I moved, moved back out here 10 years ago Now, married an american woman here, got two little american kids now and you know I'm in the land of the free um, that's awesome, and and what kind of drew you to?
Speaker 1:was it just kind of the history that you had had here in america that made you want to eventually spend, I guess, the the adult part of your life here, or what kind of brought you back?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's interesting. Like I always, australia is an incredible country, um, and there's this like culture phenomenon that I talk about quite quite like openly in australia, called like the tall poppy syndrome, where the idea is like, if you ever get like a like a poppy that grows like taller than the rest, like it's the job of an australian to like cut the poppy down, down the size, which, like is very different than the like american kind of ethos where everything's very like you know, like hey, it's awesome, like people are kind of you know, much more like willing to say, hey, I've got like big dreams and aspirations. It's what makes like australians very like, laid back and fun to get along with. It's also like I'm a pretty like ambitious person myself and I love like you know, like I really love my career and I love building things and I love like being ambitious and like.
Speaker 2:There's always a sense where, like I love parts of Australian culture and there's a lot that I love about being in America because I think it allows me to like be like a fuller version of myself in ways that I can't always in Australia, and so I think that was like a little bit of it, but I've always been quite enamored by like technology is, you know, like for myself, I kind of think of like wanting to be able to have a scaled impact on the world, and being able to do that like through technology and through businesses that have like impact on the economy is like one of the most like I don't know rewarding things, and so to me there's like there's no bigger market and opportunity than like being in the us.
Speaker 2:I was like I gotta get, I gotta get back over here, and then, you know, there was a bunch of sort of steps in between that and like starting Vuma, which we can talk about, but that's kind of what drew me back and you know, and then I came out here where I was at Bain Company, the consulting firm, met my wife actually through that and then went to business school at Stanford and then, you know, it kind of it snowballed from there, but no, I really love it.
Speaker 1:And was there something about your? You know consulting is an interesting business for people to get into. You know, it's not always the entrepreneurial bug that that comes out of that. I'm curious was there something you saw there, or did you always have this kind of entrepreneurial bug that you wanted to one day start a business? How did Bain play into that kind of path for you?
Speaker 2:yeah, I did so.
Speaker 2:I'd always had the like startup bug.
Speaker 2:Like I lived in a in a house with five guys through college and I think every single one of them are founders now and like spent all of my like university working on like different things and bane was really like two years stint to learn like a good set of like commercial problem solving skill sets is like an initial training ground and my sort of viewers I'll do sort of two, three years there and then I thought kind of like jump into like early stage startups or start it, start a business. And then it ended up, um, going to business school at stanford really is a way, because it's like sort of I was excited about it because they focus a lot on like personal leadership development and that's something I like love just thinking about and then also just like deeply embedded in the tech ecosystem over here. So that's kind of like what drew me over to the US. But, bain, there's a lot of founders that come out of it, but really it was sort of like the training ground for being able to do other stuff.
Speaker 1:So stanford gave you that kind of double dip of being in the kind of tech ecosphere while also getting the um kind of leadership skill development. That is obviously imperative for a good founder and and a good business leader. And I'm curious, you joined from there into Alpine. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. And what did help me understand what that environment looked like? Because, from what I could tell, you've kind of led several businesses over the course of like from 2018 through 2021. How did that whole experience work?
Speaker 2:yeah. So alpine is a uh software and services private equity fund based out of the bay. When I their model, they were started by a guy who was 20, like 26 years old at stanford business school, which is why they recruit out of it and he started like buying his initial businesses basically off like credit cards and has now grown it into I think they have $17 billion under management and have a really like high-performing private equity fund and a lot of their like kind of ethos is around how do we it's like kind of talent arbitrage. It's like how do you take kind of high potential but low experience people and like throw them into like roles and in kind of like a sync or something way and you know and and kind of see what happens.
Speaker 2:And for me, like that was like really compelling because I always knew that I wanted to be like building and scaling teams and if someone was going to like throw me the keys to like drive the truck, I was, you know, and like I was like give me the, give me the keys, let's see what happens and um, and so part of part of their playbook is, you know, like they will buy in partnership with folks like myself, to like buy businesses where founders are like looking to tap out for a number of reasons.
Speaker 2:Um, in my case, the first business that I jumped into was this great fleet inspection software platform based out of um seattle, that was founded by these two guys from like enterprise car rental. One of them stayed in the business. The other one was like started a professional rugby team and wanted to, you know, sell the business and have somebody kind of scale it from there. And so for me I kind of jumped at that like because I was like this is an incredible opportunity to learn how to like build and scale teams and, you know, just get those like reps in a bat and that's kind of how it how it started coming out of uh, out of grad school.
Speaker 1:But you knew, nothing about fleet inspection correct.
Speaker 2:No, I mean candidly like I was, you know, I was 28 years old at the time. I'd had about two years of experience, uh, and then was, like you know, jumped in as the CEO of a business like founded by these two guys that were like basically you know, twice my age, um, you know, with a team. So it's like a pretty wild scenario, uh, to be thrown into.
Speaker 1:How did you give them the confidence that you were the guy to come take over their, their baby or their? You know the thing that they had put a lot of time and energy into yeah, I mean it's uh, it's hard.
Speaker 2:If I I wouldn't be, I'd be lying if I said, like the first year didn't like have me in some like fetal positions in the in the bed, like occasionally, um, but a lot of it is like kind of like trusting yourself.
Speaker 2:You know, like I sort of like I know that I, I had, I had stuff to learn, but I also like know that I had good judgment and that, like you know, you sort of take it slow at the beginning and build trust and look for like ways to put runs on the board and like understand the kind of key relationships with the team and like show that you're sort of there to like listen and not be the one who comes in. And you know it's kind of different, it's a very different dynamic to like founding a company. It's because you're jumping in and like you you don't know you haven't been there for the story that you don't carry that like natural, like genesis story. So there's a lot, a lot of trust building. But then, over time, as you start to like make judgment calls and improve things and the business starts performing like, you develop your own credibility.
Speaker 1:It really took probably a full, full year, though, and not without it's like challenges I mean that that strikes me as as such a challenge as someone who's been a founder like one of the things that a founder can always lean on is kind of their passion and energy for the business and the vision it's like, when in doubt, lean on your passion, lean on your vision and people who have been there and have trusted you along the way they lean into trusting you. But if you're coming into a business brand new that is someone else's dream, someone else's vision, someone else's passion it's way harder, I would think, to generate that initial trust, the buy-in, or you maybe screwed something up and and had to navigate, dealing with that as the 28 year old kid who kind of took over and like what did that look like for you?
Speaker 1:How did you navigate that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I mean there was like especially at the beginning, right, Because so what I ended up doing was, you know, after the year you had a really good first year and the fun strategy is kind of like put more behind people and things that are working. And so we saw this bigger opportunity. We went on to buy three more companies Um, and by that stage I'd kind of I'd like had a lot more reps and sets. And so you definitely like you just definitely improve Um and you develop more people have more confidence in you because they've kind of seen the results that you've like put on the board um before and the teams that you've built and the like cultural transformation that you've been on. But I mean, I remember like the first the foot, when it was just this first business, there was, uh, you get all this feedback from from the team and they'd be someone said like yeah, no, I don't trust him, like he hasn't been around the block, and this is, you know, granted, like I hadn't really been around the block, yeah, but those things are like they're kind of like gut punches at the time. But you also need to exude a lot of confidence as well in um, in in the way that you show up, because you know what it's like as a leader. Like that's kind of what people need often is like to have confidence, even, or being able to like navigate ambiguity well where they're like maybe we don't know, have all the answers, but this person's going to kind of lead us there. So it's like it was. It was definitely um, it was definitely hard.
Speaker 2:The other thing is like the dynamics. Like you know, the first business, one of the co-founders stayed in the in the business. He's now like a very close friend of mine and like an awesome partner. But remember, out of the gates, like you know, not a lot of trust and a lot of skepticism that his baby was going to get like driven into the, into the ground Right. Or, like you know, everyone's kind of sizing, sizing you up, and I ended up, you know, try to find like what's the right dynamic there where you like really honor their like legacy, but also like acknowledge.
Speaker 2:Like acknowledge that you know things, that things need to change and the business needs to change in certain ways is, like you know, it takes a lot of like trust building, you know, and like being in the trenches and kind of going. You know, for me it's like about directness often with people is, like you know, showing that like I care about them as individuals but I'll also kind of shoot them straight, and that, like conflict and and repairs, is part of the journey of like building that trust with founding teams. But yeah, I mean it was hard for sure. What was the name of that business? That first one was Record 360. And really like and it's. You know, I had the time of my life there, really great team. I had the time of my life there, really great team.
Speaker 1:That business actually just sold a few months ago now. When did you exit from the business? Was that part of the plan all along, just to come and be a part of the journey for a while, get it to a point and then you would come out, or how did that look?
Speaker 2:Yeah, to a point, and then you would come out, or how did that look? Yeah, so we bought, we ended up building. So I ended up like seeing this opportunity to build out a bigger like logistics and construction technology, um business, with the initial intent was to kind of integrate them all, although that ended up not making a bunch of sense. So we went on to buy two tms platforms, um, that were for final mile delivery businesses, so I think kind of like regional, like pharmaceutical and medical distribution businesses, and then went on to lead the acquisition of Trucker Tools, which I'm sure you would know, and so like. At various points it was kind of a lot of like. You know, do we integrate these businesses, do we not? Do we get leadership teams in place?
Speaker 2:But for me, like, my personal passion has always been for like building from the ground up, like I think there's like something really beautiful about like bringing things into the world that didn't exist before, and so for me, that was always kind of like my intention was to get, you know, have like put these businesses on track for really great outcomes, which, which we did and you know they'll, um, you know, really proud.
Speaker 2:Put these businesses on track for really great outcomes, which, which we did, and you know they'll, um, you know really proud of the like teams that we built and they're all like gonna gonna end up doing really well. Um, but for me, the like reward of like getting to build from the ground up. So when I was about three and a half years in and then kind of like hired tos to take over those various businesses, did a long transition and make sure you know, because obviously I cared a lot for the teams that I built there and wanted them to succeed but then sort of navigated that transition and then stepped out to build them up from there.
Speaker 1:So what would you say was the biggest lesson you learned from your first venture as a CEO?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a few, um, one of them is around, like I mean, there's a few.
Speaker 2:One of them is around like how important it is to have the right leadership in place in businesses. Like when I was was one of the mistakes that I made was trying to like implement change in, you know, in the company, like you know, getting everyone to like operate faster. But maybe, like in certain situations, I didn't have the right leaders in place and it's kind of like pushing up against a wall where, like nothing, nothing moves. And it wasn't until, like I kind of really like dealt with that and made some of the like tough people decisions that and and got the right people in place, that things actually started to move. And I think, as like a first-time ceo I mean for most people they're like sort of sometimes too slow in like acknowledging the fact that, like some people aren't always good fits in in businesses, but I think that was a big one is that like nothing matters until you get the who right, so you got to get the right right people in the right seat before you really want to start like rolling the boat, because if, if you, if you go the other way around, like things kind of break down pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:Um, and then to me there was like also a piece around this like what you described is like connecting with the vision, and the story, like as a founder of a business comes very naturally, because you've got this like just Rolodex of war stories from the early days, where you're sort of like heroed something into the world that didn't exist before.
Speaker 2:When you come in as like a operator, ceo, it's kind of different. So you got to find your own way of like telling the story of the business that like inspires. And it took me a while. Like I probably was like over intellectualized the whole thing at the beginning, where I was, you know, I know I was like very focused on the like hey, we're going to make this, you know we're going to do better X, y and Z, but really, like you know, not everyone cares about the same things that you care about, and so you've got to like it took me a while to like figure out the thread of how do I like authentically get people like fired up and connected to what we're doing here when I don't have when it's you know it won't have that like founder story.
Speaker 1:Uh, yeah, so many good comments in there. I mean just thinking about one. I mean, so the right people in the right places? Yeah, the what you're building doesn't matter if the people you have to sell it or to operate it to, you know, be the actual builders of it. If they're not the right people and I think, especially as an early ceo, a first-time ceo and I imagine it's even harder if it's not a team that you built, you know you come in and you naturally want to make it work with the people you have and it, it, it.
Speaker 1:There is something about I remember a struggle I had. I I hated firing people and and really avoided it at all costs. And I think it hurt the business in some cases because we would hold on to people longer than we should have. And maybe it's because you just have compassion, or I think that's maybe just the hardest part of the job, especially if you're someone who pours your heart into a business. It's like you ask so much of people and then sometimes it's not their fault that they're not the right fit. They just don't have the skill set needed. Sometimes it's not their fault that they're not the right fit. They just don't have the skillset needed and it just takes a kind of no BS mentality to cut when you need to cut. And I think that's just a really good point that anybody who's starting a business or coming in to lead a business should think about.
Speaker 1:Look at the people first, and it's hard to assess day one if you have the right people. You know it's one thing to look at kind of a track record of what they've done. It's another to kind of give them an opportunity to prove themselves in front of you and show that they can do the job. But you know, not holding on too long is an important skill for any leader. And to move on to kind of the second thing you said, or one of the second things you said, not everybody cares about the same things that you do as the CEO, and that is something that people don't necessarily realize until they've sat in that seat and tried to put themselves in the shoes of every individual on their team. Not everybody's paid to care about the same things that you are and it takes a really, really I think it's a skill as a CEO to get everybody rallied around the entire vision of the business, because most people in an organization are not paid to care about every aspect of the business. They're paid to care about their specific function within the business and some businesses, startups and whatnot can give equity to a lot of employees. It's rare that you're going to see it across the board and the sooner that you can understand that one of two things you either have to develop the skill where you can help people see the bigger picture and understand that if they do care about every aspect of the business, it can be better for them as individuals, even if they don't have an equity piece of the business.
Speaker 1:But if you think about it just from a brokerage standpoint, as a carrier rep, you might only care about booking as many loads as possible to get as many dollars in your pocket and that might mean you might take risks by putting carriers on loads that they might not be on time, but it's a higher margin potential for you.
Speaker 1:That might lead to somebody making decisions very much just in their own kind of reference or frame of reference of caring about their commissions.
Speaker 1:If you can help them understand that when we operate at 98% on time and we take care of every one of our customers and as a rep, that means that you need to put the carrier on the load who you know is going to give us the best chance to be on time, even if it means you might make 10 less dollars on that load or 15 less dollars on that load, but we're going to be on time.
Speaker 1:That means that customer is going to come back and give us twice as many loads next week or twice as many loads in the next bid, and it's being able to get people to kind of pivot their perspective to understand that when we all execute at the highest level, there's growth involved for all of us there's more teams that we can create, there's more promotions that we can have and, ultimately, there's more commission for everybody because there's more loads for us to book. But that is a skill and it's not something that I think every CEO even cares to think about. So I think I really appreciate you bringing that up, because it's an important thing to recognize within your business that people do not naturally just care about all the things that you, the CEO, care about. It takes you to kind of help them understand why they should care to get that out of them totally yeah, totally yeah, and it's, it is, and it's.
Speaker 2:You realize that everyone like has different like motivations for, like, why they want to show up and um, and you've got to be able to, like you know, even like interpersonally kind of read that about people to understand, like, what motivates and excites them and um, and then string it all together.
Speaker 1:It's uh, yeah, it's an art yeah, so I appreciate you kind of sharing those points and I agree with that. So, moving on from there, so, um, you mentioned you were involved in trucker tools as well. That's an interesting business. I've had carrie jabonski on the show, which will not be twice by the time that this episode airs. Talk to me about that piece. You were involved in that business for a year or so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I was leading the logistics strategy within ASG and so I was very involved in the actual acquisition of that business and then was there for it was eight or nine months, uh, post-acquisition. So, um, you know, had a close relationship and kind of getting the leadership team in place uh, post-acquisition, but that was right at the time where I was also starting to transition out to uh to build Vuma. Um, so, no, yeah, like Prasad and Murali there, well, and the team and Kara's done a really awesome job with growing the business as well. She's awesome.
Speaker 1:And what inspired Vuma? You clearly had several balls in the air as you were leading the logistic strategy for ASG. What told you that it was time to go? Why did Vuma make sense?
Speaker 2:How did Vuma come about? Yeah, I mean really the thing that I'd seen in you know, trucker Tools works with you know hundreds, like many of the top brokerages, hundreds of thousands of trucking companies, and I knew that I wanted to build in full truckloadload. Like I'd kind of had this like broad purview of the logistics ecosystem, kind of on the asset side, with the like truck and trailer inspection platform. We had the last mile piece and then when I, when I like got exposed to and like started getting into full truckload, um I kind of fell in love with it because the entrepreneurial like energy is is very different, just because like the scale of the markets and the opportunities there like I just I felt like kind of like the trucking industry in a lot of ways is like this like expression of the american dream where, like anyone with like a lot of grind and hustle can kind of come out and like build a really massive business. Like you look at the stories of even, like you know, jb hunt or a lot of the big brokerages where they all started started with like guy in a truck or like guy like a phone or a fax machine or whatever it is back in the day and then just through like a lot of like raw will have kind of like built these really massive companies like I. That was just a track. I was like I like being an entrepreneur in an industry that like has such an entrepreneurial industry like energy, was like really exciting to me. And then, like you know, we were sort of looking at like okay, so you've had this like first wave of innovation that came through like prior to, prior to like a convoy and over freight.
Speaker 2:There was obviously still technology in logistics, um, but that was probably like silicon valley's like awakening moment for it. But then, you know, trap tools in a lot of ways was a platform that was kind of building tooling that provided similar, you know, technology to the incumbents in um, in the industry, um, but everywhere I kind of looked around and I was like, despite a lot of this tooling, like it's still really manual moving freight, like it's. You know, even when we talk about visibility, um, there's still huge teams of track and trade, like even today with the fact, you know, there's still huge teams of people that are like dialing on every load or, like you know, it was kind of in the era of like digital freight matching and starting to build like carrier sales automation, and it was still the case that it was like 90 plus 60 percent, you know, of loads were just getting booked through like traditional you know ways, and so it's kind of like this is sort of dirty secret. A little bit was like the way that things are kind of working is like actually not that different than it is. There was to like you know, a number of years ago, despite and it was kind of like good reason for that, but like what I sort of saw was like okay, so like there's still a lot of like room here to improve the way that things operate, and it's like really important. I think that like we, we can build a supply chain that can work at really really high levels of efficiency with like high ratios of loads to humans, because, like that's a good thing for the economy, it's good for like having flexible and resilient supply chains in the us. It's good for like bringing down the cost of transportation so that you can have this piece of like economic infrastructure that can support entrepreneurialism in the us.
Speaker 2:Um, and it was also true that, like all of the prior forms of technology that were kind of like you know, web, saas, like software tooling, still required like people to be like executing and doing a lot of the stuff. And so when, like, this was right at the time, like pre-ChatGPT but before that it was like the GPT-3 API, where large language models were developed, where it gave gave me this like glimpse into a technology that could suddenly start to like tackle a lot of the things that were really hard about like automating process. So, like you know, logistics has been challenging to automate because one it's extremely fragmented, right, I mean, as you know, like there's 100, 200,000 shippers, there's 25,000 brokers, hundreds of thousands of trucking companies, and the industry has to work with the like lowest common denominator of technology adoption. So you're, like you know, and so then you get this like everything converges on, like email and phone calls as the like protocol for communication, and it just means like that's kind of that was impossible to like really bring technology to, and that was kind of why, like I think some of these like highly digitized brokerage offerings ended up sort of working, but maybe for the like very larger shippers where you could build a highly automated flow.
Speaker 2:But then you've got the like 200,000 shippers out there that like for whom that that's not a good offering, and so that was. It was kind of like seeing that. It was like seeing that the like the tech waves that have come through weren't really sort of addressing a lot of the issues. It was still extremely there was a lot of like just raw, you know, like tedious work that got all across the load lifecycle that was now suddenly addressable. That was the original inspiration for starting Vuma and then we ended up starting with a very focused product that we could like deliver value quickly. But that was kind of how it came about.
Speaker 1:What was the first product for Vuma?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean, the original vision for it was to be able to build, uh, you know, an ai co-worker that could go and execute a lot of the work that goes into, you know, moving freight from all the way from coding, all you know, down to the end of the life cycle at invoicing. But we actually started with order entry automation. Um, so I mean, as you know, like still the case today for a lot of big brokers that are getting 60 of the loads kind of tended over email spreadsheets et cetera, and it's you know ops or like account managers or sales reps are plugging that stuff in and error prone, causes slow pays, causes service failures, and so Vuma, like allows you to just forward an email or click a button and the AI will extract it, brings all of their tribal knowledge and how to kind of read and understand that document, and we'll build it as, uh, as shipments in the tms. And actually your uh molo was the first customer that went live on, uh, on the platform in fact.
Speaker 1:So, um, yeah, credit credit, credit to molo, credit to molo for being a pioneer in the ai space and um I. I think there was an interesting comment you made and I'm curious if, if, if, this was the why, um, but, but your comment around the lowest common denominator with, with respect to technology, um, and how you had to understand that, between all the players you had to participate in, whatever that lowest common denominator was, and in this case, email is where all of these parties live. And, yes, you have the kind of more forward-thinking companies using APIs and other tools that are more, maybe, efficient, but I like the idea of kind of focusing on or understanding that to there was an opportunity to create a solution, but you had to be mindful of the exception, almost, or the, the, the, that lowest common denominator you talk about, because if people aren't willing to move upstream to APIs, then there's no point in having a solution that's solely focused on apis, because you're not, you're going to miss, you're not going to capture a large percentage of the market and I think, to be honest, I think that's a big reason why companies like convoy weren't as successful as they could have been like I. I think today, a lot of us who understand what has come from Convoy, understand that they built some exceptional technology, but when I think about that kind of load board concept and I think about how they applied it, like I think about Tinder and I think about, like the dating apps, and my point is, as a broker, it's your job to match or execute all the loads that you commit to, and what they built was a platform that could match a lot of loads and it it made it very easy for the truckers and and the loads to get on the same app and go ahead and swipe left, swipe right, and you got a lot of matches and, where it made sense, you had a lot of good matches that could be executed well, and I saw from conversations I had with people that there were situations for companies like Niagara is a good example of a company that they did very, very well for and it was very highly automated and they had good margins and they had carriers who would take the loads and execute them, and that was a great example of how the technology worked very well because the right players were all participating together.
Speaker 1:But again, your job is to make sure all of the loads match to you, have drivers for every load and like Tinder doesn't work like that Like not everybody gets a match, and if you solely rely on that as your execution strategy, you're left with unhappy people who don't match or, in this case, loads that don't get executed and that leads to unhappy customers loads that don't get executed and that leads to unhappy customers.
Speaker 1:So my point is just that, like, I think, a lot of these companies that have come into the space and applied technology, I think they make the mistake of not focusing on the lowest common denominator and the thing that makes sure you capture as much of the market as possible to be successful. Because you know, if you're trying to execute for a broker, you have to make sure that that broker can do the whole job, not just 80% of the job. And if they are only able to do 80% of the job, you have to be very clear about that so they know the other 20% they have to figure out how to do in another way. Is what I'm saying making sense in how I'm kind of describing this?
Speaker 2:No, yeah, 100% no, and I think I agree with that. And it's like it's also true when you think about like, if you're a brokerage and you think about which customers that you work with, like going and trying to tell you know a steel fab and you know that has like a few locations, they're moving a good amount of freight but they're like you need them to be like hooked up in X way and, like you know, tend to your freight. Them to be like hooked up in x way and, like you know, tend to your freight. Like that's not really gonna work.
Speaker 2:And I think there's so much yeah, there's so much opportunity for like for brokers there where, like, the margins are really good on that freight and it's often like a type of shipper that wants to have a little bit more of a relationship and they need a little bit more hand-holding and you get to play, be a little bit more of a sort of like a strategic, like supply chain partner.
Speaker 2:And then the challenge is like how do you like, what are your operations look like? And a lot of people shy away from that because they're like well, hang on, like the way that I serve niagara needs to look very different to the like way that I serve that customer, and not every broker kind of has those two kind of like modes modes built in, but there's really like attractive um revenue on the on the customer side, and then that's obviously true on the carrier side as well, as, like you know, there are like pools of carriers that are on the apps and I think that, like, for some types of carriers, that's a really really good fit um, and then for some, like it's, it's not, and so you, you need different tooling to be able to reach them, and so that had been a lot of phone calls and emails. The thing that's changing now is that there is actually software that can move through those channels, which I think is exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's another good point you bring up, because, at the end of the day, I think the mistake people make is looking at some of these solutions and thinking that they need to be the all-encompassing solution of the problem, when the reality is, as a service provider, it's my job to make sure I have an all-encompassing solution and that all-encompassing solution could be made of many parts solution and that all-encompassing solution could be made of many parts. It might be part VUMA, with the back support of my own operations reps. It might be 14 different other things. There's a lot of conversation right now about the AI voice agents that are showing up in the space and people are the non. The anti group is saying well, no, drivers won't want to talk to them and this and that it's it's it's, it's too nuanced of a problem to simplify and and say that people just won't want to deal with it and they'll say agent, agent, agent over and over again to get to talk to a person. I've dealt with that. I've been the guy when I call United or I call my bank and I'm saying agent, agent, agent because I don't think they can solve the problem for me.
Speaker 1:And that might be true in what that technology has looked like for the past year or two, but it is improving, and it is improving at a rate that I think we all need to pay attention to.
Speaker 1:I think of it again.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go back to Convoy for a second, just because when I talked to Bill Drieger, he explained something to me about Convoy that I had not considered before, and it was the way in which Convoy opened the door for non-English speaking drivers to participate and negotiate in ways that they were severely disadvantaged before. In ways that they were severely disadvantaged before. And while I don't think many of the voice agent AI tools today are exceptional in Spanish and Polish and Russian and whatever other languages, I'm certain they're all going to get there, and when they do, they will dramatically be an improvement against what brokers are offering today to those types of carriers that want their freight. So it's not to say that the voice AI agent is going to replace 100% of carrier reps I don't think that's what anyone is arguing but it is certainly going to augment and be another tool in the toolbox for the right players who are thinking about how to execute at the highest level.
Speaker 1:What is your kind of thought on that is vooma participating in the voice ai stuff as well. Is that part of the? Yeah, we actually?
Speaker 2:announced. We just announced, uh, our voice product and that's going to be available for like general release very early next next year. So, um, we're believers that it has like a role to to play. Like the way that we kind of think of it is like it is a communication channel in the same way that email and text and others are, and so, as we kind of build up platform to allow people to build digital workers, voice is a mode that people have access to.
Speaker 2:But I think this point like is a really important one is that, like trucking is like an 800 billion dollar industry. There's like hundreds of thousands of different people with very different like preferences in there, and so, like it isn't like one size fits all. I think they're like international speakers on the carrier apps is a really good example of it. It's true on like the shipper side as well, where people talk about like all shippers wanting like a relationship, and that's true in some cases. And then there's a lot where it's just like hey, just give me a rent, you know like that's, and so you it's kind of like knowing, okay, what is the right service offering for this, um, for this individual that's going to make sense for them, um, and that you know, I I am excited about the voice applications because voice is kind of the universal API, right, like, if you think of the language that everyone speaks, and it's very like low effort.
Speaker 2:Being able to like talk is part of that, and we are so far beyond now this like hey, I want to speak to an agent, and that's always going to be available and easy, but the like level of capability and nuance that already exists and is only just going to get better is, um, I think it's it's going to unlock a lot.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I don't think people appreciate is not just like how, say, like voice can impact existing workflows, but like what are the things that you wish you could have done as a broker if you had infinite amount of resources? And it's like all of these like use cases where you never actually did them because it just would never have made sense. But now you suddenly have something that you can scale up 10, 100 times instantly, and that's what we start to like you know we're excited about right, which is like what are all of the things that like could really improve the way that logistics works if you just were putting a little bit more effort in, but instead now you can kind of have AI go and execute that.
Speaker 1:So I think just one example of this is being able to answer every inbound call that you get. This is a problem that is not talked about enough in brokerage, frankly, because I don't think brokers want to admit it's a problem. It's just like the idea that brokers don't want to admit that they use the DAT or internet truck stop to post their loads. I have a different take on those platforms. I think that brokers should be able to post on DAT and they should be able to post on truck stop, and their customers shouldn't be upset about it. This is again a nuanced topic. Do I think a customer should be upset if a broker's sole strategy for coverage is posting loads on DAT and truck stop? Yeah, I don't think that's a strategic partner you want to work with. If I think about it from the other side, if I'm a broker whose first priority is to develop relationships with carriers and reuse those carriers on as much freight as possible, while also making sure my freight is accessible from every platform possible and every means possible, I want to touch every potential carrier that's out there to see my freight, and if that means I have to post some of those loads on DAT, that shouldn't be an issue. The next question should be how do I vet the carriers that call me for opportunities or that I reach out to? It shouldn't matter whether I called them off of carrier 411, it's someone I've used 10 times in the past or it's someone who calls me off of DAT. It's a carrier nonetheless and in some cases it's somebody who's being fraudulent and trying to take advantage of me. Regardless, if I have a clear vetting process that is high quality and using kind of industry standard companies like Highway RMIS, whatever it may be, those are tools that help me make the right decision to put carriers on loads that I should be putting on the loads. The fact that I put the load on dat to begin with, all it is, is a resource for me to bring capacity into the network and someone who might be wanting using might want to haul my freight um, and so I.
Speaker 1:I just think there's a lot of nuance to that and when people do post loads, carriers call in and it is a very difficult problem to solve with just human resources. You have a limited number of human resources to answer the phone. Call it 100. Let's say you have 300 loads a day to cover and you have a three to one ratio of loads to carrier reps. I'm not saying that's a great ratio, I'm just using some round numbers here.
Speaker 1:Whether you post 20 or 50 of those loads or 75 of them, the only thing that you don't have a clear understanding of is how many people are going to call you because of the interest in those specific loads, based on who might be in that area on a specific day, based on supply and demand, of what markets are hot, which ones aren't. There's a chance there's a thousand. There's a chance there's 5,000 calls that come in, because it's just the way the equation works on a given day. And if that's the case and you only have 100 finite humans to answer the phones, there are times where the phone rings and nobody answers.
Speaker 1:And, to be clear with most brokers, I'm pretty sure have issues where at least a meaningful percentage of the call-ins that come in the calls don't get answered Right. The voice AI that you're talking about is a solution to that problem, like clear as day a solution, even if it's not to sell the load, just to make sure that someone picks up the phone, gets the carrier's information, logs that information for a human to make a decision, if that's how you want it to be, or a human to vet the carrier, if that's how you want it to be. This is a real solution we're talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, I fully agree. I mean, we, we see this consistently right, like. I mean, everyone's numbers will be different, but it could be like 30 or 40 percent of calls that are like going unanswered, and during peak periods maybe more. Um, and that's the thing that's interesting about like when you've got if you don't like teams of people just kind of have fixed capacity, um, but like everything in freight is very like volatile in terms of the amount of work that needs to be done, and so you know, the more that you can have like flexible resources, not just for calls but for other workflows, um, it allows you to like smooth out your operations, to like not get bottlenecked and back up.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, we see this all the time on the load building side, where somebody sends over like 100 tenders and then you're spending like like three hours you know doing or you're not, like you're not building those and those loads are not getting scheduled and covered, um, but it's, you know, it's true on the calls as well. Um, yeah, and you know we even see like brokers that throttle the amount that they post on DAT exactly for this reason. Like not because, you know, because they're fine to post more, but they they can't deal with the call volumes and then that's like a I mean, it's a bad experience for carriers and you know, then they're posting on your Google reviews telling you that you're like slow and never pick up. You know, people love responsiveness.
Speaker 1:You know, and and this is a way to provide that to them- yeah, so in all the people who I see, my brother's one of them, and my brother and I got into it this morning on Twitter and I saw a little bit of that, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I guess by the time this post it will be two weeks. Two weeks ago my brother and I got into it on Twitter where he posted about you know, agent, agent, agent. I want to talk to an agent. Okay, sure, but now let me frame the problem in a different way. You have two options. Either you call and nobody ever answers, or you call and a bot answers the phone who can give you all the information about the load so you can at least make a decision, if you're interested, whether or not the bot is allowed to sell you the load. That's a different problem for a different kind of situation, for the, the care, I'm sorry, the broker to kind of define within the rules of their own solution with a company like yours or another one, whatever it may be. Um, but when you look at those two options, people are picking the bot, I think, a hundred times out of a hundred, versus just calling and nobody ever answering the phone.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah, I think I think so. And you think, like, the thing that's interesting in like freight is this like crazy matching problem that's happening every day, where you've got like freight that needs to to get moved and then you've got to like then, and then there's like, how do trucks like figure out and find out what they they want to move? And the challenge with the, the direct kind of like marketplace listings, is that everyone has a bunch of questions that they want to ask. You know, there's a lot like the carriers have a ton they want to like hey, what was it hauling before it hauled this load? You know, like what's on the track. Like you know, hey, is it? You know, is it x facility or is it y facility, or it's like there's just a lot there.
Speaker 2:And then the brokers it's the same right, like you need to make sure you're working with someone that you trust that's going to move the freight, and so there's a lot of steps there. That, I think, is the thing that's interesting about like these voice AI or even like email processes, is that that process of like discovery on both sides, of whether or not this is going to be a good fit, is really really intensive right now, and I think that it's part of why we haven't seen this explosion of digital bookings. Right, because you can't ever like answer all of those questions by just like creating a like a Tinder style scenario. But if you can have AI on both sides that can help understand whether or not something's a good fit, it's actually going to drive much higher levels of productivity in that kind of matching process.
Speaker 1:Certainly when you think about the productivity for the individual people involved, because you can take a lot of that time off of their plate. Because a lot of the time you ask eight questions and the first seven you might get the answer you're looking for, but the eighth one is an answer you couldn't accept. You know it's a Monday evening delivery that you needed Monday morning or it's pork and you can't all pork, whatever it is. But having the human waste the time to go through the seven questions first is time. You don't get that time back. And I'm curious you mentioned kind of having AI on both sides. I haven't kind of envisioned that side yet from the carrier side, are you guys building tools for carriers directly that you'd be supporting today, or are you guys focused more on the brokerage?
Speaker 2:So we do sell to brokers and carriers, but the carriers that we serve are usually like slightly larger fleets, maybe like 100 trucks, where we're kind of helping them with load building, automation and other things. We don't today, like our ai product isn't representing carriers today to reach out to brokers, but I but I do think that that will get built in the in the industry um, because I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of value to to carriers like to have somebody going and representing them to go and find freight that meets their, their needs as well so, so talk to me.
Speaker 1:We've I. I Sorry I've gotten excited about this so I keep jumping and answering questions with you, but let me give you an opportunity. Just talk to me about everything that Vuma is in terms of all of the product offerings you have, what you have today and then what you're kind of building still for the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what we're building is a platform that will allow logistics companies to build multi-channel workers that can execute workflows all across the load lifecycle.
Speaker 2:We started and what we're known for in the industry and our customers are using us for today is email spot quoting, visibility and automation and load building automation, and we have now just announced a scheduling product which will be getting released soon, our voice product, which is kind of like a mode, but we'll be doing carrier inbound voice automation, track and trace automation.
Speaker 2:You can really it's a flexible framework that allows you to, like, in natural language, specify all of these kind of like nuanced workflows that capture a lot of the tribal knowledge that goes into, like moving freight, to be able to then create these workers that can go and execute as a sidekick to a person and then kick up exceptions and and and receive input when required.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, today a lot of it is on the email spot quoting and visibility, because on the email side it's interesting. It's like reps today spend, as you know, like half of their day just in their inbox receiving hundreds thousands of emails and like, if you're an executive, especially if you're like a spot-heavy brokerage, you just don't have any visibility today into like, really, what's going on in your team's inbox and that, like, you can't answer questions like how much revenue is my team seeing on what lanes from which customers? How fast are we responding? You know, where do we have better opportunities if we could get better rates on the carrier side? It's really hard to answer those questions today, and so we our AI, essentially sits there and listens on the inbox to act as like and automatically like, extracts all of that data into insights, dashboards that executives can use to like manage their teams better and make better decisions.
Speaker 1:So, as an example, you're saying steel company emails me Cleveland to St Louis spot quote and my rep replies and says $2,000. Steel company replies and says you're too high and that's the end of the exchange. In in an school brokerage, as the CEO or anybody in leadership who's trying to understand what's our missed opportunity today, I never would have known about that. And you're telling me that your tool essentially creates better lines of reporting so I can capture that information and understand there were 74 loads that you guys quoted today that you did not win for X, y, z reason. I mean it's. It's helped me understand like how, what, what I can do with this information or how it's, how it's coming about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean it's. It's exactly that, like you know, you're trying to hit your number for the year and you're like, hey, you know where are we winning or losing freight? You can't answer that question today. Or maybe you want to say, hey, like I want to see all of the opportunities that we saw this week. Like, what did we? You know, what did we bid and what did we win and what did we lose? You can't, you don't know that today because no one's recording that in the TMS. Right, it's like you mostly have to build a full load, so it's just not happening, so that's lost.
Speaker 2:Or maybe you've got like a sales rep who's like not quite hitting the number and you're trying to figure out, like, hey, what's going on here? Like, are you not seeing enough opportunities in your customer base? Are you just not responding fast enough because you're bogged down in like other manual work that's preventing? Are you just bidding everything at 40 margins and so you're never gonna win that? Or like, hey, you know we're seeing a big uptick in spot freight coming out of this shipper's facility. Like, are we having a conversation with them about, like, what's failing in their routing guide? You know, today you can't see the forest from the tree Like it's such a rich source of data when, for you know, for a lot of brokerages 60 plus percent, sometimes 100%, of their spot opportunities are coming over their email.
Speaker 1:And so not only do you have a tool that can extract information from email to build loads, I assume you can quote loads too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly so it can you know as a co-pilot or it can automatically bid for on behalf of the broker.
Speaker 1:And then, on top of that, it could be a reporting tool on steroids, relative to what brokers have historically had available to them to report on. Yeah, that's pretty exceptional. I mean, is that hard to sell, or are you walking into brokers showing them this and then they buy it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean a lot of these have been issues that have existed and people have been like searching for solutions in the industry for a while. Um, the question is always just like, hey, does it does it work? And the platform is very good and it works, and so, um, people are, yeah, very, very excited about it and get a lot of value from it.
Speaker 1:So, I probably should have like called an old employee and asked them what their experience has been like with vooma, but I did not do that. So I'm just going to ask them what their experience has been like with Vuma, but I did not do that. So I'm just going to ask the question what have been some of the challenges that you've run into with customers? Because I can't imagine at least from what I've heard about other AI tools is like none of them have been perfect, at least not from the jump, and that, whether it's challenges with exceptions or other things, just talk to me about what some of the challenges have been for your team and how you've gone about trying to address and fix them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like I can talk through on the. I mean a lot of these have been things that we've been now hard at work on solving. I mean, on the order entry side, there is wild levels of complexity in what you see from shippers. You know, some of these are like pdfs and it's great. You just rip it and it's like 100 accurate, but then you get a bunch where it's like half of it's in the body and some of it's in the email and nothing's labeled and you know half of the data points sitting in somebody's head. So you actually need to bring in data like those are much, much harder. You even get somewhere it's like hey, I got another one coming out of philly tomorrow. You know, okay, how do you build a full load off that like it's? But we can't.
Speaker 2:We actually have tools now to be like look at historical examples and we understand the like typical loads that they move and so there's a lot that we can do.
Speaker 2:So, like it's been a lot of it is is um.
Speaker 2:On the order entry side is like how do you capture the tribal knowledge that sits in somebody's head about how to read this document and what other pieces are missing, and how do you like instruct the ai so that it can actually it's not just data extraction but it's actually like really automating the task. Um, and on the the quoting the analytics side, like it's a surprisingly hard problem to get really accurate analytics in a broker's inbox when they're getting, you know, hundreds of thousands of quotes and like some of them are coming out of bid boards and sometimes the shippers forwarding it to like 13 people at the brokerage. Is that 13 quotes? It's not really, it's like one quote. And how do you strip out? And what if I don't want to see international and like LTL? So you need to like there's just wild like these are all like good ideas with like wild levels of like kind of you know, just just detail that you kind of have to wade through to get it to like a production quality system that is reliable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and am I understanding the way AI works correctly in that, in how it's trained? Is that the first time you have the exception, it's probably going to struggle to understand how to navigate it, but the second time it has the same exception, it's way more likely that it has now learned and can manage said exception and can manage said exception and then it's just a product of getting through as many of the exceptions as possible that you need kind of manual support on initially, to then get to a place where the AI understands how to do it and you get to almost the perfect state that you're looking for. Is that how that works, or am I misunderstanding?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like look, AI is refers to a bunch of stuff. I mean it's funny because we're like an ai business, but I'm I don't, you know, to me it's like more important than kind of like problems that you're solving for people. But the the current version of ai that people are talking about is large language models may respond really well to like instructions and guidance on how to perform tasks, and so, um, examples you it's often learning from examples or learning from guidance about how to perform a particular task. Like the analogy of how you would train an employee is actually a very good one, right? Like if you told somebody like day zero, they jump into the brokerage, go and build this load. They're going to look at it and they'll like be like well, I think this is that data point and I think this is that data point and I think this is that.
Speaker 2:And then you tell them like, well, hang on, we actually have got this, like you know, rate table of contract rates, and you've got to go look up the lane and then pull this reference number in and then make top it if it's, you know, x facility, and you're sort of like, oh shit, I have to tell you these things right. You're not going to like intuit them. Once you instruct the AI on like how to do those things, then the next time it performs the task it will be much better. And then you do it again and like it's not the case that you need thousands of examples legally. It's like it's learning really quickly through like two to five.
Speaker 1:That legally it's like it's it's learning really quickly through like two to five. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you clarifying because, yes, as as the novice, I'm just throwing out the term ai and kind of expecting it to no, but yeah, it is because, like there are different forms of like you know some of the like like pricing prediction models, um, out there they're a little bit different, like they benefit from a ton of data going into them, where it's like you're making predictions about what the price of freight is going to be over the next like two to 14 days, and the more data points you have the better, whereas some of the tools that you know, like the way our platform is built, based on large language models, it kind of it learns and improves in a slightly different way.
Speaker 1:Did you say that you guys are also playing in the predictive pricing world as well? Is that one of your solutions or no?
Speaker 2:We no, we do not. We partner with. You know a lot of the leading providers there. It depends a lot on what our customers use. So you know, for the big brokers we'll hook into their proprietary pricing models. If they have benchmark rates that they want to pull in, we'll help them with that. We're recording all of their bid data so we can help surface. You know like, hey, where are you winning or losing? But we do not do anything directly in that space.
Speaker 1:And I think your solution has been live now for a little over two years. Is that right we?
Speaker 2:started the business at the beginning of last year. Yeah, went live with our first customers in may last year.
Speaker 1:Okay, so a year and a half of of customers live using the product. What's been the best kind of lesson for you a year and a half in in terms of, like, how to support brokerages um in the execution of their businesses?
Speaker 2:Yeah, in terms of, I mean, I think the big, the big one for me that always stands out is like brokerage is a service business and so, like, being a technology vendor with like a service orientation, I think has like served us really well. Um, I think that that is is maybe like one of the like we really try to like bear hug our customers and do whatever we can to make them successful, um, with the, with the product, because we kind of see these as like. I mean, you know what it's like like the best partnerships are these ones where it's sort of feel it's like hey, this is a long-term partnership where, like, you're growing your business, is like me growing my business and we're gonna like help each other succeed, and so that's like that's the man that's served us really well. Now, as we like build and introduce new products, our customers are really excited to like partner with us on them because we've kind of like delivered for them.
Speaker 1:Uh, before, yeah, and and I think you're thinking about it the right way I it's. It's a problem that I've struggled to answer. This next question I'm going to ask, which is how do you keep your customers, how do you make sure like it feels like this space is getting very crowded products that your team is offering I could list probably 10 or 15 other companies that have started in the last two years who are offering the same type of product, and the other caveat to this is it doesn't seem like it takes 100 engineers to get these types of products up and running. It's typically a small team of people who haven't yet raised a bunch of money, and it's ambitious guys like yourself, and whether it's three or five or eight engineers and they go and they get a product up off the ground. Whether it's a scheduling product let's talk about scheduling because it's just a good example.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of these companies starting. My fear would be that I'm going to offer a price point of X and within six months, 10 companies are going to come. I'm going to offer a price point of x and, you know, within six months, 10 companies are going to come in and try to offer x minus 10 cents or x minus 25 cents and like how do you keep the customers is the question I I have, because it does feel like it's becoming a very crowded space yeah, well, I mean, we've we've never lost a customer and I think a lot of like.
Speaker 2:So I mean, I think a lot of it is over time, like there is a moment in time right now where you know like AI is evolving quickly and so I think there are, like you know, I know what you're saying there are a lot of folks in the space, but what I also hear from customers is that they're like looking to like partner with people for the long term.
Speaker 2:But what I also hear from customers is that they're like looking to like partner with people for the long term, and part of the decision that they're trying to make is like who are the right partners to like working with where I, you know I have confidence that one they're going to like be able to help me stay up to speed, because that's what I think a lot of our customers are like looking to us for, in a way is like how do I make sure that I can translate a lot of these like developments in AI and real business impact into my business? Um, and then not, it's, it's like it's not super trivial often to build really high quality production systems that can scale at large. You know, um, and so that that is like that is. It's not super trivial. And I think, like, over time, as you start to like you know, we sort of think about it as like, as we start to expand out into like more and more of these workflows, there's a lot of like interesting opportunities to like provide a lot of value by like stitching them together, where you suddenly have, like an AI that can build the load schedule and cover the freight in a relatively automated fashion, and so I think it's like that platform aspect ends up becoming really important.
Speaker 2:And you know, like what we're really building for folks is it is like we think that, like the future of technology is actually going to like shift pretty meaningfully, where a lot of the role is going to be people building and managing like teams of digital co-workers that are executing their tasks, and that's like a very different, that's a very different sort of platform shift. And so, like we sort of envisage the world where, like you, you know, folks start to learn how to build their digital co-workers on Vuma and those co-workers are executing all across the load lifecycle and your job is then a lot of like supervising and providing input and coaching to make these things better and that's going to become like a really important system I think in in in logistics companies over the next five years.
Speaker 1:So that's an exceptional thing for me to try to. It's just fantastic for me to just try to envision right now. I mean, I expect that one day, hopefully sooner than later, I will be back in brokerage, and whether it's two years from now or longer or shorter, whatever it is, I know it's going to be a very different space than the one that I built my company in, dating back to 2017. And one of the questions that I ask myself, that I struggle with a lot, is how do you define the roles of employees on your team when the capabilities of the technology that can support those roles is evolving seemingly every month, every quarter, and it's today.
Speaker 1:My operations rep is responsible for building loads, scheduling loads, quoting loads, managing the profitability on the account, whatever Call it those four tasks. Already, you have a tool that can do at least some of kind of all of those four things Maybe not in totality, but some of all of those four things. And so a question that maybe you don't even have the answer for, but I love your perspective, is how do brokerages manage their employees when they think about the responsibilities and even their compensation, when so many of these tools are going to continue to evolve at seemingly a rapid pace?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean I think it's the right question to be asking. With all of these tools, they never solve 100% of the problem. Initially, right, like? So we, we build all of our products with like thinking of them as extensions of the brokerage team member and not like, and I think it can be a mistake in some situations to not do that because, like, the ai needs somebody to like interact with and clarify and, um, and so I a lot of it. You'll have an operations rep that is going to need to become better at building and managing these workflows.
Speaker 2:Like a lot of this is like being able to articulate what is your SOP? Like how does your business operate? Because, like a lot of the things that like sit as tribal knowledge in people's heads, if you can actually force yourself sort of self to articulate and refine them like, that is the muscle that's going to need to become really good, to be come really good at building good like digital co-workers. It's kind of like being able to specify and embed what like, what do you actually? How should this, this thing, operate to be able to like perform, perform the task, and it is a slightly different like it's. I think that's actually more like evolved and a more like rewarding job for people.
Speaker 2:And I mean, you know, there's like I always find it fascinating that, like you know, a lot of brokerages are hiring like really smart, intelligent people out of like good colleges in the US and then like not all of their day but like a good amount of their day is like kind of punching numbers. You know, like that's the vision for like this is like how do we make this like an incredible job to come out, this like super intellectually stimulating that cuts out all of those pieces. But you're sort of still like it's almost like giving that ops person their like team of people that can support them and so they're going to have to be good at like defining workflows and providing input and um, and I think it's, you know, I think we all like I think about this a lot in my job and my business and the way that we operate. If we're not like thinking about what is like the ai first approach, somebody else is right and then like that's that's who you kind of need to be worried about.
Speaker 1:And the other piece, too, that this solves. I mean, you're 100% right that there are highly intelligent, hardworking, well-educated people who are hired into these roles and then handed fairly monotonous tasks to do repetitively. It's, it's, it's always just been a part of the job and you've just had to navigate it. The other piece of this that I think a tool like Vuma can solve is the time and this has always been a job that you can't really get away from your phone and in some cases you can't get away from your desk, for, whether you got to work 10 or 12 hours a day, if you want to be a high performing salesperson, account manager, whatever it is, you have to be ready to answer the call when your customer calls, and there's a lot of work that comes with that, and it sounds like these tools are going to help navigate that problem in a very significant way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's the vision. Even like our auto quoting product, for example, like you can set that to bid on freight after hours or on the weekend, for example, so like you know you're out and you can't get to that. Or like you know, instead of having to build a load on the weekend, you just forward it right. It's sort of it's being able to like dispatch work to somebody to do it on your behalf. Um, that I think the the vision here is to make the job much more sustainable for people yeah, let me ask you this too.
Speaker 1:I'm back to kind of envisioning the digital workers as you've described them. Let's say that I'm a manager and I've got I don't know, would I need multiple digital workers, or one digital worker can do the job of eight people? Is that like? Just before I get into the higher arching question, help me understand that piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the worker is sort of an analogy. What these will be is, you know these are workflows, you know. So you might say, hey, I'm going to a a worker that does my track and trace, for example, and here's my sop for how I want to do track and trace. I want to call two hours before pickup to make sure they're free and clear their last load. Call when they're at, you know, at the pickup and then make sure that they're kind of like, on the road and on track for an on-time delivery. And I want to. You know, I want a text message and I want to email and I want to call 20 minutes later if I don't hear back from either the driver or the dispatcher.
Speaker 2:You can build an AI that can like execute that task for you. Maybe you're moving like high value freight and you're like SOP is very different, so you're going to spin up a different worker for that use case, most likely. And so you know it's sort of like it depends a little bit, right, like if one worker can do, you should be able to scale up that worker infinitely to be able to perform that task. But you may have nuanced requirements for particular situations where you want to build something different for that scenario.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that was kind of what I was going to get to was trying to understand. I've got my own digital workflow support system AI, whatever you want to call it and then you're on a different team in the same company. You know, when I think about how I use chat GPT I've got one kind of GPT that I'm I'm talking to about my, my, my diet, and it tells me what to eat. And then, when I want to prepare for interviews, I've got another one that I talked to about my podcast, and I always go back to the same one to talk about the podcast, and I feel like it's helped me if I'm wrong, but I think it's learning and understanding more and more about the podcast, but it doesn't know anything about my diet. The one up top knows about my diet.
Speaker 1:That's kind of how that works today. Right? It's a similar concept, yes, so in that, my question then is if I've got one that I'm building for my customers and you've got one that you're kind of navigating for your customers, is there a kind of nucleus within my company or our company that's learning all of this and is kind of digesting all of it and able to deploy it all? Or is mine. Maybe if I have 10 times as many customers and I'm just better at this than you and I have better workflows and you're just kind of lazy and you don't do it very well Is mine just way better than yours? Or help me understand how that could work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean you can kind of think of it as, like you know, we think that there's you're going to want to be refining these at an organizational level to be the very best version that they can, and for that, you know, for that ai to get be learning and becoming better and better at that workflow.
Speaker 2:But you could imagine also then being able to like fork that off as as an employee if there were like nuances for your specific situation.
Speaker 2:Um, so I think it will depend, but like, yes, like I, I think you will. I think there will be a lot of like, yes, like I think you will. I think there will be a lot of like pull to like have the very best version of this at a company level, cause, like you sort of think about that's how, like SOPs work today, right, like somebody has some insight about how to do something better, and a good manager will notice that and say, hey, we should, like you know, we should take that learning and like make sure that it's getting applied across the business with consistency. And that's what part of what I think is exciting here is that you know like you can drive a lot of that like consistency and like operational excellence by like codifying it in ways that it requires so much training and reinforcement, especially when you have a lot of like turnover and roles enforcement, especially when you get a lot of like turnover and roles.
Speaker 1:It sounds like what you're telling me is if I'm envisioning what a future brokerage I might want to build. Looks like some of the skills I used to think about were grit and tenacity, hard work, communication skills, salesmanship, things like that. It sounds like one of the most important skills I need to be looking for is sop development.
Speaker 2:Is that the way I would think about. Yeah, there's a sense in which, like, you need like to be somebody who is good at using ai tools. You need to be able to like, think and decide what you want your ai to be doing for you, and that is a really important skill. I think like grit and I think like being a good salesperson, like all of those things are going to matter potentially even more because, like, I actually think today those things matter and like, but you're going to it's like the very best people are going to have this incredible leverage, and so then you're going to like it's going to matter a lot Like, how good are you at, like selling and commanding that business? I don't think this is actually like fundamentally changes the offering very much, but I do think it changes the way some of the ops and stuff get executed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it feels like, in a way, it's just fundamentally going to change the internal operations of brokerages and it's going to reduce OPEX tremendously for the ones that know how to do this very well and, in turn, will allow them to offer pricing that is just more competitive than the ones that will continue to operate the way they have for the last 10, 15 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think that exactly. I mean this is like a pretty well understood thing, but the the thing that kind of matters here in brokerage. A lot of it is like, hey, what's, what is your cost per load and therefore, what does that allow you to like price the freight at and like how many like margin dollars do you end up, you know, being able to to make, and if you can get more aggressive, you're going to end up like winning a lot more business. And I think it's like you know, whether or not it's through AI or some other mechanism, I think it's the, you know it is the brokerages that kind of like figure that out, that, um, that end up taking a lot of share and being able to grow really, really quickly.
Speaker 1:It will be very it'll be fascinating if, if I hear shippers start to ask in their vetting questions, what is your cost per load? Because that has never been a question asked before. But it is a question worth asking and one that I think for one, a lot of salespeople are not trained to. The ones that are not in the top 50 in brokerage are probably not exceptional at that, but, um, I see how that's going to become a uh a. Certainly a meaningful part of of the end result, but it could be a meaningful part of the opening of the door. Is you know if I'm looking for a certain number and if you're not below that number, I'm not. I'm not giving you a freight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. I haven't really thought about that.
Speaker 1:So let's pivot for just a second. We're not really pivot, but we're an hour and 20 minutes in and I've yet to congratulate you or even talk to you about your recent fundraising round. So let's talk about that for a second. How much did you guys raise? This was your Series A, correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we announced our seed in Series A. So we raised the $13 million Series A and announced our roughly $3.5 million seed round as well. Seed was led by Index and the Series A was led by Craft Ventures.
Speaker 1:Congrats, first and foremost.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Yeah, it's funny. There's a lot of talk about this. I think I was I think I was saying this to someone the other day where, like it's kind of like congratulating someone when they get their student loans or something you know, like there is a lot of like celebration around this. But the truth is like it's a, it is like an important milestone, because I think it's sort of like an endorsement and vote of confidence in what we're doing, like been doing, in the like impact that we've been having on our customers and, uh, you know, gives us the opportunity to like do a lot more. Um, but the you know, we we're trying to like acknowledge the milestone but like also recognize that like that's not the thing, right, it's like, um, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:I think you're thinking about it the right way. My friend, uh, mr Chad Ellison, had had, I think he put had a funny LinkedIn post calling out that this whole concept and I, I agree, I agree with both sides. I think that, um, I think everything is situational and the companies that are raising money as a result of success they've had tied to an idea they had and this is about how do you take that idea in a hundred exit, I think those are worth congratulating and knowing that you know from my old company being your first customer, to your comments around having never lost a customer there's clearly a path of success that has been you've started on, and so there's some. This is somewhat of a recognition of success you've started to have and also, I think, a belief from uh, craft and and um and everybody else who invested that you know there's more to come here. So my question is is kind of what is the plan, what is what is the more to come that you will use this money for in the coming months, years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a lot of it is.
Speaker 2:We've been quite deliberate in, like you know, holding like a big vision for what we want the Verma platform to become.
Speaker 2:But we started quite deliberately being quite focused in the products that we were building, starting with auto entry and quoting, and now a lot of what this funding enables us to do is to start to really build out the platform much more aggressively, and so we announced our voice product, we announced scheduling, we announced this Avuma Agents, which is this sort of SOP platform that allows you to build these digital workers, and there is so much more there to like be built and done.
Speaker 2:So a lot of it is like product and engineering hiring. But then, of course, like you know, we're like rapidly adding new customers to the fold and we want, like, more people in the industry to get the benefit of what we're doing. So we'll be growing, like you know, go-to-market and customer success and onboardings, et cetera to be able to like support all of the growth as well, but staying, et cetera, to be able to like support all of the the growth as well, um, but staying, you know, really focused on, on just like trying to. We've kept a pretty high bar for like what we try to deliver and build, and so, you know, just making sure that we like really stay laser focused on that as we, as we scale the business from here.
Speaker 1:How do you make sure that you stay focused when you do have to kind of spread the wings a little bit and start to take on more things? For one, you're taking on more customers, which, in a business like yours, has always got to be a little bit not scary. I'm sure it's very exciting, but it's also like hey, we can't screw this up. But you're also got to be focused on building new products and making sure those are matching the high bar that you've set. You know, how do you make sure that you keep the whole team focused to make sure all of these things happen in kind of a beautiful symphony or orchestra, that the way that you want it to?
Speaker 2:it's a beautiful symphony and that's exactly the right way that, yeah, no, it's, um, it's a, it's, it is a really like it's such an important piece of it. I mean I think a's it is a really like it's such an important piece of it. I mean I think a lot of it is like. One of the things that we've focused on in building our like early team is hiring individuals that have the capacity to like very autonomously like build products end to end for our customers, and so the engineering team that we have built are not just like very strong technically, but these are like people that have the ability to like really understand a customer's like problem and workflow and envisage what the solution looks like and then sort of like drive that through to completion and iterate on it.
Speaker 2:Because, like I think of like in company building, I think a lot of like what is the organizational capacity of your business to go and like tackle new things is not really a function of your head count, but it's a function of the like number of people that can like solve ambiguous problems and envisage solutions and drive them through to completion, and so, like that's like the most important thing that we've actually focused on is making sure that the team that we have built are people that we can say, hey, big problem area like this is yours to like own and go and solve.
Speaker 2:And so that allows us to like be a little bit more ambitious in terms of you know what we take on, but then being like what we take on, but then being like extremely disciplined around, like clearly articulating like what are we working on, like what are we not working on and what are we saying you know no to, and not letting us like be. You know, it's like we want to be aggressive because we think that there's a huge opportunity here to build out platform that ends up driving a lot of value for the industry. And so you know, know there's some sense in like which, like pace and speed really really matters, um, but at the same time, it's like making sure that when we say we're going to do something, like we deliver, because I think that's a lot of like the reputation that we've built in the in the industry so far I mean I think that's a great answer.
Speaker 1:I just want to push on one part of it. How do you make sure you're finding that person? When you're talking about someone who you think can envision that kind of overarching problem but also own it and then understand what we should be going after to solve that problem, how do you interview for that? How do you make sure, when you're looking at someone, that they have that skill?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean a lot of when we interview um, you know some some of it is evaluating people's background, but I actually put like way more on trying to design situations that give you a glimpse into that person's ability to like do the thing.
Speaker 2:So, you know, engineering hiring process is it's very rigorous and has like many, many steps, and for all of the different types of capabilities that we want, we've designed some scenario that allows us to test for those and like.
Speaker 2:So one of them is like a very ambiguous like product problem where it, like you know, you start with just like a very blanket statement of like hey, we want to build an x solution. How do you do it? And it, you know, the right answer isn't like just do this, it's like well, how do I even wrestle that problem into something that like has clarity? And then how do I translate that into like a system that actually like delivers that result? And then like what's the like the process for getting that out and figuring out if it worked, and so you can actually really get a lot of it's like trying to get a sense for like how people work through these really ambiguous problems and then looking for instances in their past where they've like demonstrated that yeah you almost don't want to see an answer right away when you ask that question.
Speaker 1:You want to see the first question they have to ask before they get to an answer yeah, because a lot of this stuff is.
Speaker 2:you're out there chopping through the wilderness right, trying to like figure out like which which way to go, and being able to deal with that ambiguity and like bringing it to like clarity and impact is, um, it's a hard skill okay, last question you just had your second child, am I right? Yes, congratulations, miles jacob william buckingham miles, jacob william, buckingham.
Speaker 1:So how do you navigate, building a business like this that is trying to be at the forefront of innovation in technology in our space while also navigating having a newborn at home? Uh, that I'm. You know. This all just jogged my memory because I think I heard one of your kids yelling you're probably the older child yelling just a second ago. Um, how do you balance that?
Speaker 2:yeah, look, it's not without its challenges, as you know. Any sort of like parent did you have? You had your?
Speaker 1:not yet I'm I just got married. I just got married earlier this year, so I'm not there yet yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I mean it's um like it's such a, such a delight and it's. It is a, it is a challenge. Um, the way that I deal with it is to be you've got to like prioritize very aggressively, um, and you've got to. You've got to like for me, it's like a lot of structuring my day so that I know exactly, like you know, what is kind of needed of me, um, but yeah, it's not not without its tensions. Uh, like, I think my wife would probably like like me to be spending more time with the family, and you know it's always hard to be.
Speaker 2:You want to make sure you're spending as much time on the on the business as well, but I think it's it's like surrounding yourself with like really awesome people.
Speaker 2:It's like being good at like understanding what is the critical thing for you to work on and push the ball forward.
Speaker 2:It's about knowing how to delegate really well to people so that they can like take on and own things, um, and and then just putting in the hours as well.
Speaker 2:I mean, I do think that there's like there's no translation for like hard work in general.
Speaker 2:I do think that like good judgment and decision making about like what to focus on is actually like the most important thing for businesses, because I think like it's very easy to like just do a lot of work without that translating if you're not working on the right stuff, and so I do spend a lot of time thinking about like what's the highest impact thing for me and for the business to be working on and making sure that we're like focused there, because I do sort of believe for most people that the biggest like time productivity really matters, but a lot of it's around like energy productivity. Like most people only have a certain amount of like high energy, good thinking hours that they can spend, and so, for myself, I think a lot about that. Like you know, I meditate a lot. I have a lot of like things that allow me to like bring my like, bring mental clarity, like on demand, so that I can make sure the time that I do spend is like is very rich. So, um, it's an ongoing journey, though, for sure.
Speaker 1:I love that answer and it has. It forces me to ask another question, because I'm someone who is I'm not good at meditating, but I've talked about it maybe seven or eight times over the course of the year. Year and a little bit that I've been on running the show. This is the best. I've talked about it, maybe seven or eight times over the course of the year and a little bit that I've been running the show. This is the best I've ever been at it, in that I've been able to habit stack it with my sauna time after the gym. I've done it probably eight of the last 11 days. Talk to me a little bit about how you got into meditating and if it was challenging for you at first or if it was just just help me understand. How do I get better at it?
Speaker 2:for you at first, or if it was just just help me understand how do I get better at it? Yeah, yeah, I mean I got into meditating because, when you're very consumed by situations, you believe that, like, whatever you're experiencing is like the full reality, and when I started to like meditate, it helped me to understand that that that's not everything. Like, even when you're in a mode where you feel very consumed by something, there's like a way to like pay attention to that feeling that separates you from it, and, like, by creating that space, it, it, it is quite calming to the mind, because you're sort of you realize that like, oh, this isn't everything. There's something else that is like peaceful and just aware and that, like by spending more time in that state, I think it helps you to feel a little bit more grounded and in control, and and to be able to like be more intentional about how you want to act, um, and so like, as I started to like practice it. That's the sort of the thing that really, um, attracted me to it.
Speaker 2:The thing that I have noticed, though, is like there's different styles of meditation. I used to do a very like form of it. It was quite intellectual and quite hard work right. Like it really felt like practice. I've also started recently doing these like non-sleep deep rest 10 to 20 minute that are much more about like focused on your kind of like nervous system and trying to like get cortisol out of your system, and so I do that like twice a day if I can, but certainly once per day, and that gives me the like, the kick in the evenings to, like you know, put my son to bed and then like get back on line, and that's been really powerful. Um, because often I get to the end of the day and it's not that I have so much motivation to do work, but my brain feels very like full and that's been like a really powerful way for me to just like clear it and get a little like like a reset. Slightly different mode to the like, very like intentional meditation.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate that answer. I mean it's, it's such, it's so motivating for me as someone, as someone who has always struggled to get control of my mind and and, like I, I've never been able to maximize my own potential because, like, there are moments where I can be really good and really dialed in and then there's times where I'm just like, as you said, kind of consumed by something and it's, it's and it becomes like too much and too challenging to kind of move forward or whatever. You know I'm trying to do. So I just I'm on the meditation journey and I'm staying on it because I see the potential and hearing you talk about it just affirms the belief I have that I need to stay on it and keep pushing.
Speaker 2:I think it's really powerful because there's another piece of it where I mean you know this as a business leader that there's all these times where there is so much ego wrapped up in a lot of this stuff and there's moments where you feel embarrassed or like let down, you know whatever it is.
Speaker 2:Um, and being able to realize that even that like sense that that like like you it is, you're actually your, your ego, like it is a sense of self that is also not who you are, right like you can even like pay attention to the feeling that you are a particular way and that helps you to realize that like, oh shit, that's just it's not me either, like I am something else than that and that allows me like to just like let things flow off the back. Like something goes wrong. Like you know, you can just be like cool, like that's okay, I don't need to like let that change my sense of self or identity, because I get to decide what that is. It's not like I don't, I don't need to like punish myself for that, for that situation or whatever it is. And I think meditation can help you observe that right Like, which is has been one of the ways in which it's been really impactful for me.
Speaker 1:Well, listen, man. I really enjoyed the 90 minutes we just spent talking about your business, talking about your journey. I don't have any more questions for you. Do you have any parting thoughts or questions yourself? Or should we call it a day?
Speaker 2:No, I think this has been a really great, wide-ranging conversation and appreciate you having me on. It was great to get to chat.
Speaker 1:All right, man. Well, with that audience, I hope you guys enjoyed it and maybe some future Vuma customers here as a result of this conversation and the interest they may have as coming out of this. So with that we'll call it a day and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 2:Thank you have a good one you.
