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. #49: Brad Perling, CEO and Cofounder of Bitfreighter
In this episode, Andrew talks to Brad Perling, CEO and co-founder of Bitfreighter. Brad was an aerospace major waiting to get into air traffic control school when he became an early employee at Calvary Logistics. He says that’s where he got his freight MBA, working up from carrier rep to general manager. Frustrated by the lack of options when it came to EDI technology, this former broker is now building another cost-saving option for integration technology in Bitfreighter, named to FreightWaves’ 2024 FreightTech 25 awards.
Andrew and Brad cover:
- When brokerages should invest in building their own tech versus buying it
- If you can build truly differentiated technology without prior brokerage experience
- Is EDI dying? Its role in modern logistics and the role Bitfreighter is playing
- Fostering company culture in a remote working environment
- The challenges of bootstrapping a tech business
Follow The Freight Pod and host Andrew Silver on LinkedIn.
*** This episode is brought to you by Rapido Solutions Group. I had the pleasure of working with Danny Frisco and Roberto Icaza at Coyote, as well as being a client of theirs more recently at MoLo. Their team does a great job supplying nearshore talent to brokers, carriers, and technology providers to handle any role necessary, be it customer or carrier support, back office, or tech services. Visit gorapido.com to learn more. ***
A special thanks to our additional sponsors:
- Cargado – Cargado is the first platform that connects logistics companies and trucking companies that move freight into and out of Mexico. Visit cargado.com to learn more.
- Greenscreens.ai – Greenscreens.ai is the AI-powered pricing and market intelligence tool transforming how freight brokers price freight. Visit greenscreens.ai/freightpod today!
- Metafora – Metafora is a technology consulting firm that has delivered value for over a decade to brokers, shippers, carriers, private equity firms, and freight tech companies. Check them out at metafora.net. ***
Hey listeners, before we get started today, I want to give a quick shout out and word to our sponsor, our very first sponsor, rapido Solutions Group, danny Frisco and Roberto Acasa, two longtime friends of mine, guys I've known for 10 plus years, the CEO and COO respectively, and co-founders of Rapido Solutions Group. These guys know what they're doing. I'm excited to be partnering with them to give you a little glimpse into their business. Rapido connects logistics and supply chain organizations in North America with the best near-shore talent to scale efficiently, operate on par with US-based teams and deliver superior customer service. These guys work with businesses from all sides of the industry 3PLs, carriers, logistics, software companies, whatever it may be. They'll build out a team and support whatever roles you need, whether it's customer or carrier, sales support, back office or tech services.
Speaker 1:These guys know logistics. They know people. It's what sets them apart in this industry. They're driven by an inside knowledge of how to recruit, hire and train within the industry and a passion to build better solutions for success. In the current marketing conditions, where everyone is trying to be more efficient, do more with less near shoring is the latest and greatest tactic that companies are deploying to do so, and Rapido is a tremendous solution for you. So check them out at gorapidocom and thank you again for being a sponsor to our show, a great partner. We look forward to working with you To our listeners. That's it. Let's get the show on the road.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to another episode of the Freight Pod. I'm your host, andrew Silver, joined today by a wonderful guest. There are always wonderful guests, at least thus far, and I don't think Brad will be breaking that trend, so I'm joined by Brad Perling, ceo and co-founder of Bitfreighter. We're going to be talking data today. We're going to be talking all things building a business from the ground up, and it's cool to see a freight tech business run by a freight person. That's not often the case, but that's what we got today. Brad, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:Thanks, Andrew, Appreciate you having me on. I'm excited to be here. You've had a ton of big names on the show and I'm happy to be a part of that.
Speaker 2:Well, you're a big name names on the show and I'm happy to be a part of that. Well, you're a big name. You're becoming one in the industry. It's part of the cool thing about building a business that creates value in the space and you get customers that want to hear more about who you are as a person and the business you're building. So we're going to do that today. So why don't we start with your background? How'd you find yourself? How'd you get into the freight industry?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. That's our go-to icebreaker for everybody I meet. Everybody has a story on how they got into the industry, and mine started with Craigslist. My roommate from college that we moved into a house in Nashville we all were serving tables needed jobs and he found a job on Craigslist at a local freight brokerage and he started there as a logistics coordinator. His name is Danny Ray and he loved it. He would come home and tell me about how they're drinking beers on Fridays and the culture, and I could really relate to that, loved it. He would come home and tell me about how they're drinking beers on Fridays and the culture, and I could really relate to that. And so we had a party at the house.
Speaker 3:His manager came over and he recruited me a couple of different tries and finally said okay, I'll give it a shot, and threw my resume in the hat and got an opportunity at Calvary Logistics and did not know I was starting at a company of people that have like a very long lineage in freight and I just got super lucky I talk about that word a lot luck.
Speaker 3:And it was something that I didn't know at the time because I was an aerospace major and I was waiting on the air traffic control school to call me. So I said, oh yeah, I'll do this for a couple of years and see how it goes. And I got to start dispatching trucks right when I started, because that's where everybody started, uh, learning it from the ground up. And uh, I was, I think, employee number 17 or 18, there were days where it was just me and another guy booking freight over there in 2010. And we grew to that company to 350 people and I like to say that I got my MBA in freight from Bob King, jj, norm and B-Roy those guys they really poured into all of us guys and a lot of us went on to start other freight brokerages and I know you know one of those guys pretty well. So, yeah, super lucky to have landed at that company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean I've got some ties into Calvary from hiring Ryan Dent, who was one of the most valuable hires, I think. My company definitely not. I don't think Dent was one of the most valuable hires we made at Molo and still to this day is helping run that business and keep it afloat. So there is a good lineage there and I'm curious talk to me a little bit about what it was like for you coming into that business. What role were you participating in and did you see yourself as a lifer in freight at that point? Or did you know you wanted to one day start your own company? Like, help me understand kind of your thought process as you work through your time there.
Speaker 3:So in college I wanted to start a company. I wrote a ton of business plans but I never knew it was going to be in freight and I never really knew when it was going to be in freight and I never really knew when that was going to be. I was just, you know, a hundred percent bought in drinking the Kool-Aid. Um, not, from day one, I mean I. It took me a couple of years to really to buy into to the brokerage thing, but I loved it from day one. I was so interested.
Speaker 3:Every day was a different challenge, every day was a different problem. I'd come home and tell my parents about it, like there was a huge ice storm in 2010. And I was like, how are all these trucks going to deliver their freight coming in? And when I was talking to drivers, and from there, you know, after three months of dispatching trucks, I got my opportunity to start booking freight, and it was a split model, a Chicago model. So I was building a carrier base, building relationships and, um, I worked my way up to being the top broker booking the most loads every week. Um, and from there, you know, they really pick people to grow as leaders from, uh, the the effort that you put in to the business. So I kept getting more opportunities to continue to grow within the company and so I ended up getting to do pretty much every role at Calgary.
Speaker 3:I started their inside sales making cold calls in Bob King's office for six months, right in front of him. That was definitely challenging and grew a ton get learning. They basically just said here's the list, make the calls and figure it out. So but the thing that Calvary did really well and the thing that I learned from them and that's kind of where my tech background came from is they built all of their own tech All of the tech that you're seeing on the market today they had in 2011 and 2012. They were really forward thinkers.
Speaker 3:We had engineers on staff and I got to see them build that thing from the ground up and Bob always had a vision for what they wanted Calvary to be and what their tech stack was supposed to be, and it really like, after 10 years of building that company, they I think they really uh, came through with the vision of their tech stack and that's really where I learned um about how tech can play a huge role in brokerage.
Speaker 3:But it really comes back to the relationships and building strong relationships on the carrier side, and then getting to go start an inside sales team and then from there I ended up getting to start what they called the optimized division, which was all of our small customers, and then we kind of sum those up into three divisions optimize, refer and flatbed and I ended up getting to help run as a general manager all three divisions. So I got to experience a lot of different things at Calvary which allowed me to grow as a manager, as a young like I was young, they kept giving me more opportunities and I just ran with it. I didn't have a family, I didn't really have a girlfriend. My focus was on the business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think that's one of the cool things about freight brokerage in general is, once you find a recipe that works and you start to land like you know, it's a rinse and repeat methodology too so you know, if you did well with one customer, you have the infrastructure typically in place to do well with a hundred customers or a thousand customers, and that that allows for fast growth.
Speaker 2:And in a lot of cases companies do what Brad did I'm sorry, what what Bob did and you know, look for the hardest working, best talent that exists within their system today and elevate them and give them opportunities to take on more and more. That was something that like for me at Molo was always I was always proud of, is that we could continue to promote from within and give people new opportunities that, like they previously didn't have and the business had earned it and they had earned it. So I want to ask you, though I was unaware that you were a top carrier rep. I don't know that I've had a ton of guests on here who have had kind of that level of success on the carrier side, but I do know that there are a lot of listeners who you know work in that world. What's a piece of advice you can give from your own experience for how to be a really successful carrier up?
Speaker 3:relationships. I really focused on um building relationships with specific companies and I called them every day and I really got to know them. I went and saw a few companies and one of them was Kimbrel Farms in Shelbyville, tennessee. He actually had a load of tiles on his truck. When I went to go see him he showed it to me, which is really neat. But they had seven trucks and they would call me all the time and ask me where's their next load, and really matching those relationships up to the lanes that we ran and and um, it's not hard but it's. You have to focus on it and you have to know where their trucks are and you have to know who, um what, the best trucking companies are for your freight and really focus in on them. And from there, uh, you can continue to build, build upon your network of trucking companies and really start tendering out.
Speaker 3:What I would do is I'll come in on Mondays and have 50 loads booked immediately, and that was not through technology, that was 100% what was in my brain and knowing who to call and who to send the loads to, and that's really what my focus was. I mean, it was really stressful, the loads too, and that's really what my focus was. I mean, it was really stressful. Um, I only did that job for 10 months and then moved on to sales. So, um, I you know we. We had a scorecard at Calvary and I'm very um motivated to win Um and I always wanted to be on top. So it was stressful. I didn't want to be number two, and so once you get on top, you don't want to lose that position, and so that was. Another thing that really motivated me was ensuring that I was the top rep and seeing my name at the top.
Speaker 2:And you mentioned kind of an ode to B-Roy Brian Roy, who I've gotten to know a little bit Great guy and clearly very, very intelligent and the idea that he and his team built all of the technology that Cavalry was using.
Speaker 2:I'm curious from your perspective, how should brokerages, especially kind of upstarts, the bootstrap types that start with a couple guys and gals and they go from five employees to 10 to 20.
Speaker 2:Typically they don't have a ton of resources day one, so they can't just be building everything from the ground up, but there are points where they've had success or maybe they've raised a little bit of money. I'm just curious how do you think about, or how do you think brokerages should think about, and even asset, asset-based carriers, the notion of build versus buy as pertains to technology in general? So there are certain things, maybe a TMS that you think should be built versus bought, or some of the partners like your own company. How should someone know if they should build their own van versus leveraging the tools of a company like yours? And I don't necessarily want you to sell your own business right now. I'm just think bigger, because we will have plenty of time to talk about Bitfreighter and EDI specifically. But I'm more curious about the general concept of build versus buy as pertains to technology in our space for brokers.
Speaker 3:Well, back then they had no choice, right. Like they, they, there weren't very many third-party freight tech companies out there that were doing it better than they could build it. So I think you know understanding what your strengths are and understanding if you have the manpower to build tech, and what you're going to focus on and what you're going to be great at, because, ultimately, where you focus is where your strengths are going to be. And I failed at building because it takes a lot of time, energy and money to build tech. And so, after my tenure at Calvary, I ended up um partnering with a buddy of mine to build another logistics company, uh, that had already been in business for a couple of years, and we worked on building our own tech for years, um, and we ultimately ended up scrapping that project because it took so much money and so much time, and uh ended up buying tech.
Speaker 3:So, um, you know, you want to work with the best tech and if you can build it better than you can buy it, then maybe you should build it.
Speaker 3:But, um, it takes a lot of time, energy, resources and money to build tech, and it takes great people to do it for years upon years. So, like you know, I've seen people build tech that have um worked on it and had to, like, get different teams on it, which ends up creating problems on the backend of tech. So, um, you really have to be willing to invest not only money but time and energy into building it. So, um, I don't know I I it's a. It's a hard question to answer and my my I think what I would say is it depends on what you want to build um and where where you think you should focus your energy, because I've seen people um build tech, and what Calvary did really well was they focused on different pieces of tech and they bolted it on. So they would focus on the CRM on the carrier side and then the sales side and then different things that would allow them to build it together. Rather than taking a holistic approach, it was very focused on specific problems.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my perspective is, from what I've heard and I'm not a tech guy and I think that was an important strength for myself, Vogrich and the rest of our team to realize early at Molo was we didn't have that tech know-how or strength within the business. It was not something. I mean we had my younger brother who's a savant but like you know he was a one-man show largely. I mean he had a couple of people helping him who were great, but like we had not made a commitment to invest in building our own technology and it didn't seem to make sense to me. And from what I've come to understand from conversations with my father who builds technology at Mastery, and from conversations with other folks in the tech space, is when you're building technology, everything takes longer than you think it will and it costs more than you think it will. Like those two things scare me. As someone who's a freight broker at heart and understands A plus B equals C for how to execute, I know what specific things I need to do well and my team needs to do well for us to serve customers and win business. It's not super complicated when it comes to technology. It seems like it's the opposite, where, whatever expectations you have, there generally will be bumps along the road that you didn't see coming. That will cost more in terms of time and money, and to me that's a risk.
Speaker 2:Where there are people like yourself out there and other companies who have made it their sole focus to build a specific piece of technology for brokers, why not let them make all the mistakes? Why not let them deal with all the roadblocks and the extra time and money it takes to build something and I can just show up once it's done and determine if it's going to add value to my business? To me, that's always been the way I've thought about this, and it's why I think that brokers in general should be buying a lot of the technology that they utilize. If they have a already very successful business that has a bunch of money that they're throwing off that they can use to invest in developing technology and really think that there is something missing in the current market that, by building it themselves, will give them this differentiating factor. Okay, fine, but I've yet to see truly differentiated technology in the space that has independently built by the brokerage that has taken them from here to here.
Speaker 2:And for those who are just listening, I'm just saying from one point to a much better point or a higher point or a more successful point. I just haven't seen it. And the other piece of this that seems to be really relevant now in the AI conversation is the rate of change and the rate of improvement in the models and the fact that seemingly every six months there's going to be newer and better technology available to build off of, and that's just reinvesting over and over again, whereas as a brokerage that's not my core competency. Why would I want to be putting myself in a position to have to continually rebuild with the latest and greatest technology at my fingertips? It just seems like I'd rather be buying on the open market from whoever has the best tech available.
Speaker 3:So when you were building Molo, you guys drew a pretty hard line in the sand and I'm sure it was a tough thing and there was probably a debate about whether you guys should build your own tech, maybe, and you guys really focused in on being the best logistics sales organization you could, rather than spreading your time between building tech and developing what you guys were which is one of the best logistics organizations that you guys could deliver and all the promises that you guys made, so that you weren't spending. You weren't stretched thin between building tech and delivering on your promises.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean a hundred percent. You know, I don't know that. It was like drawing a line in the sand, it just was. We had the conversation numerous times. Vobrich and I would sit down and say what if we were to build this? What if we hired someone to build this? And there was just so many unknowns around that concept and it's like what we do know is we have a model that works and our customers are very happy with the way we support them with our current technology. We had concerns in terms of our ability to scale with our initial TMS.
Speaker 2:That was definitely a conversation we had where it was like how big can we get with this? Because the carrier procurement side was really messy and it wasn't the best for building long-term. It wasn't easy to manage a carrier relationship and thinking about getting to a place where we'd have hundreds of carrier reps and needing to have as much of an automated workflow as possible in the execution part, where we could create a routing guide and just send the tenders to the carriers and they'd accept them if they could take them and if not, it would go to the next carrier and they could accept it. That piece wasn't built out at the time the way. I don't know if it is better today. So I'm not trying to trash by any means, because we got where we got to because of, you know, rebinova initially and ultimately it was mastery that we felt could take us from where we were to be a multi-billion dollar organization. But it definitely was a conversation that, when we would have it, we just constantly found ourselves considering unknowns and it didn't seem right to think like let's make big investment in the unknown when what we're doing today is largely working and if we just continue to stay super focused on what we're currently good at, there's no reason we would stop growing. That was the thought that just kept us more singularly focused on being a great service and execution platform and organization, versus saying let's venture into being a tech company.
Speaker 2:And the challenge and I think this is the challenge that a lot of brokerages think about is it's really hard to differentiate when you're living in the service and execution world, and that's why I think there are maybe it's hundreds now, but there are certainly tens and quite a few examples of companies that ventured into the tech space because they thought that was how they would differentiate and they thought, well, we're going to be a tech company, and if we're a tech company one, we'll get higher multiples in terms of the valuation of the business from potential buyers and suitors or investors, but also shippers will look at us differently and we'll be able to get more business because we're a tech company.
Speaker 2:Well, what I've seen from 90% of the tech companies that also move freight is, at the core, they're freight brokerages and eventually the shippers find out they're freight brokerages as kind of the core of who they are, and their challenge is they went and spent a ton of money trying to be differentiated as a tech company and it doesn't end well. There are very few that have come out the other side either as like a very successful tech company or as anything more than a brokerage that had spent a lot of money trying to be a tech company.
Speaker 3:Well, I think at the end of the day, you're a business and the goal is to get to profitability right. So if you're building tech, it's very expensive to build it off the profit margins of a brokerage, and if you can build in your cost with buying tech and really focus on delivering the best service, I mean, obviously, you guys are a clear example of it working really well and you know, I think I will say this if you're going to build tech, you need somebody on staff, a VP of technology, that understands tech but also understands freight, understands brokerage, understands being in the trenches, understands booking loads, the whole life cycle of what it takes to actually book freight, um, and you can hand it off to them and really trust them to build you what you're wanting, your vision for your tech, rather than trying to do it to go alone building tech 100%.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned having kind of spent your early years, or formative years at Calvary, and then you made the switch to join another brokerage for a few years. Let's move into the Bitfreighter era. So talk to me about when you decided to start a company, why a EDI and data integration management company was like the path. Walk me through that early part of the journey.
Speaker 3:Well, the single, one of the single best things I ever saw from an efficiency play was implementing EDI. With the last brokerage I was at, we implemented EDI for a shipper that was moving between 100 to 200 loads a week. We had to have an extra load coordinator to build all the loads, schedule, the appointments, order, entry, all of the things that it takes to manage 150 loads a week Went from that person that being a full-time job to implementing EDI and removing hours of their day so that they could focus on exceptions. And, on top of that, removing all of the duplicate loads that were built, all the loads that were missed from being built, all the things that come with it not being seamlessly integrated, with your shipper Loads being canceled by their shipper in the middle of the night and you're waking up and they're still on your board. All of those things. I thought that it was the single best thing that we'd done for our business and I had to figure out a way to scale it to 100% of all of our enterprise clients. That was really my mission. Obviously, a lot of brokers talk about automating the life cycle of a load, from booking all the way to um, you know, integrating with their shippers and how do they do that. But I think EDI um was one of the best things that we did.
Speaker 3:However, what I was frustrated about was my TMS could only give me one option to purchase EDI from, and I couldn't under. There's two things. I couldn't understand why there wasn't a list of providers like TMS providers Like why am I stuck with this one company that was, um able to just charge whatever they wanted and um they set the price? There was a monopoly on it. I felt like, come to find out there were more than you know one provider, but I didn't even really know how to spell EDI when I was purchasing it. So um I.
Speaker 1:You know it was hard, hard word to spell.
Speaker 2:You know, it was.
Speaker 3:It was really, um, an eyeopening experience. So, um, I ended up. I ended up working with them for a few months and then felt like I could do it better myself, found a tool, put it on my server. It wasn't a very scalable tool, but one of the things that I love about building companies and building business is just asking why and trying to figure things out on my own. So I shut the door for a couple of months. You know, building companies and building businesses, just asking why and and uh, trying to figure things out on my own. So I shut the door for a couple of months to try to figure out how to tackle this EDI thing on my own at that previous company. And you know, the thing is I, um, we did it for a couple of years and then COVID hit. We sent everybody home. This is the first time I'm working from home and I had a lot of time on my hands.
Speaker 3:I'm not somebody that can just sit and do nothing, um, and so, all of a sudden, like all of these ideas were coming to mind and, um, I felt like there was a ton of money in EDI that was like a huge gap, um, of people that were spending too much on EDI. So like it was an opportunity for us to come in and potentially help people. And you know, with my background in brokerage for 10 years, I, like my heart is with the people that are moving the freight and I felt like we could go and save people, like you know, maybe 50% on their EDI bill and that was really my. I guess my thesis for wanting to start Bitfreighter is like I saw how, how it helped me in my business and then how, how could I go help other people? And I was. I felt like there were other people that needed help, just like I did. So, um, I had actually worked with my co-founder on building some apps, brandon Joyce.
Speaker 3:Um, one of the smartest people, and not only smartest people, but his work ethic probably competes with anybody I've ever met Like he, this man, he just is any. So when I was originally working with him building apps Hryder, bitfreter I would call him randomly and he would always answer and like we'd just talk about whatever the problem was, whatever the feature was that we were building, and then we went on to build other integrations, a bunch of different things that I threw at him, and he was always able to really turn it around and and provide whatever it is that I threw at him and he was always able to really turn it around and provide whatever it is that I was trying to accomplish from a technology perspective. And so I pitched him on the idea. And software engineers, by the way, get a ton of pitches like, hey, you know, some random person calls you up and said I have this idea for an app or I have this idea for the software. You know it happens every day. And, um, it happens to him a lot.
Speaker 3:He had like 20 years of experience, uh, prior to starting Bitfreighter in the technology space building, um, building software for many very large companies. And uh, he said, let me think about it. And like the next day he called me back and he said well, this is perfect timing because I'm I got a side hustle and it's kind of rolling down and I can pick this up for a few months and see how it goes. It was basically our little pet project for eight months to see if we could make it happen. And I kind of gave him the thesis on how much people were spending, what was EDI, how it helped people, and so we got to work on it early in 2020 and spent nine months building the original platform.
Speaker 3:The MVP I heard in your previous show talking about the airplane, getting the airplane ready to take off. So, uh, we um built the airplane in about nine months, um, and in December of December 15th of 2020, went live with just a backend product, uh, for that brokerage and, anyways, we, it was working, it worked great and we landed our first commercial client in May of 21. So that continued to work on the product and everything was bootstrapped. It still is. We have no institutional money behind Bitfreighter. I focused on landing customers, not getting VC money. So that's what we've done and it worked out really well. But, yeah, I mean, it really started with the idea of helping other brokerages that were in the same place. I was in and you know we, when we went and turned on the marketing, it was amazing to see how many people were willing to just take a flyer and sign up and hear what we were doing and the the mission really resonated with a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's resonating with me right now. I don't know a ton about your business, but I'm getting a little excited because I just like the idea. The bootstrap idea I love. And when you pair it with this kind of buy brokers for brokers I was a freight broker I saw a problem. I was frustrated by the problem, so I tried to figure out how to solve the problem and in solving the problem I saw a way to that I could help a lot of other people along the way, because EDI is something that was always like this necessary evil.
Speaker 2:There's no doubt, as you know, molo was a heavy enterprise business. Over 50% of our business was enterprise and if you're not set up with EDI, you are wasting so much time and money manually building orders, missing orders, that you forget to build or double build. The things that you said were problems that we ran into on a very regular basis. But then there was the idea. I mean we used Kleinschmidt for a while and we had him at Coyote and I always was like, what's the deal? They can just charge us whatever they want. And people like, well, yeah, they kind of just own the market. And it's like, well, why?
Speaker 1:that was just kind of the frustrating.
Speaker 2:It's like we're going to charge you x per character and it's you know, you just deal with it, and in some cases that's hundreds of thousands or even potentially a seven figure number if you're doing enough business that you're spending just to get the information. So I'm picking up what you're putting down and I guess, my first question I've got a number of them now that we've been talking here, but let's start with what are both the challenges and benefits of going the route you did, of being bootstrapped from day one, and you know, just start there.
Speaker 3:That's a great question because it's really hard. We just got to profitability last month, which is, you know, four and a half years, and what I mean by that is we are now profitable through our subscriptions and a lot of tech companies can't say that we had this vision of getting there. And it was really hard and we had to make a lot of sacrifices. Every single person Bitfreighter we like to say that Bitfreighters are bit baby and everybody's, you know, taking care of the bit baby. So everybody that's at Bitfreighter is very invested and you know everybody's made sacrifices to come and help us build Bitfreighter. But also, I think you know we have a lot of, I would say, bitfreighter. But also um, I think you know we have a lot of uh, I would say, bitfreighter customer ambassadors that really believe in what we're doing. So, instead of um taking on money and um, you know, going really fast, in the beginning it took us. It was more about being patient and getting there a little bit slower. Most tech companies want to blow up in overnight you know, 18 months, and it's taken us four and a half years to get to a very, very strong spot as a company, and you know it's. You know a lot of companies.
Speaker 3:Switching EDI over to a startup is scary because we are, and it's funny because EDI is like the last thing anybody wants to talk about, but it's the first thing that you're going to bring up if it's broken, and it is the thing that is the connective tissue to you and your customer, and so it better work and it better not go down.
Speaker 3:And we understand how important we are to our customers' business and so, yeah, I mean we went slow, like the first year we only landed seven customers. But as we continue to pick up steam, as people started to understand where our focus was and our mission and who we were as a company, we've really started to start to own the integration market and we've grown into a full-service connectivity platform between logistics companies and shippers. And it's not just edi and edi, by the way, is not dead and it's not going away and it's transforming. It's, it's a construct, it's, it's something that, um, we will always rely on as the format to exchange messages. But Bitfreighter, by the way, has started the first open API EDI standard and we have a lot of commercial TMSs that have picked us because of our open API standard.
Speaker 2:So we've actually we're no longer transmitting EDI through SFTP and AS2 connectivity, where I appreciate you smiling because you are recognizing that you're talking to an audience of people who largely don't understand this stuff the way that you do, which means it's my job to stop you and say, hey, it's not a problem to get in the weeds, it's okay to be in the weeds. It's just important that we clear the weeds a little bit and explain. So let's start with just you made a comment that EDI is not dead, it's not going anywhere, and that is something that if someone understands EDI and the framework for a lot of the conversation around it, maybe they understand why you'd say that. But talk a little bit about what you mean by that and talk a little bit about the difference between EDI and API and why this is even a conversation that people are having.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I mean, edi can be frustrating because it's it can be finicky and there's it seems to be like always something that you have to fix. But the nice thing about EDI is that it's a standard, it's a state. I mean, for the most part it's a standard format that everybody can rely on to exchange messaging, from your load tender to your status updates, to your tracking and then to your invoicing. It's a really nice construct that we've built into an API documentation that allows for modern TMSs to integrate with us and not have to create the standard. We've created the messaging standard on both sides the broker side and the shipper side, so we have an open API for both sides to use Bitfreighter as the middleware to exchange the messages.
Speaker 2:And if you didn't do that, what would be the problem for shippers and brokers Like? Help me understand that.
Speaker 3:The problem with API and all right, I'm a freight guy and I've learned all of the tech stuff from Brandon and all the folks that I work with. So if you're a tech person listening to this, all the folks that I work with so if you're a tech person listening to this, you know and I've screwed this up. I'm sorry, I'm trying to, you know. Hopefully I'm still speaking in layman's terms, hearing how it works. But basically, from what I've understood is APIs can be created by anyone with any standard, and so when you go to integrate with it, it's whatever standard that TMS has created, and the thing that we offer is we've offered a very well documented EDI standard for transportation that allows people to stand that up very fast, because one of the hardest parts about engineering is understanding what to do. It's not actually engineering the problem, it's actually understanding how to do it, and so we already have all the documentation. That's done and it's proven and it works really well. So that's really the advantage of using our open APIs, really well.
Speaker 2:So that's really the advantage of using our open APIs. So you've set it up in a way where any shipper that comes to the table or any broker that comes to the table knows, kind of, I don't know why I'm using a table. Let's say we're eating dinner. They know what fork and knife to use. It's not like the food is sat down. This analogy probably doesn't make sense, but you've set it up in a way that both sides can more easily talk to one another or enjoy their meal together without needing Google translator to. You know, help them in between, or you are the kind of the Google translator that's making things more clear for them.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and it reduces the time that it takes to engineer the integration, because there's a lot of money involved. When you're talking about API integrations, because you have to have an, you know you have to have a software engineer to do that work, and so if you're going to have an engineer do that work, you'd rather have them do the work on something that's already proven out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that seems to be a big challenge that is coming up for a lot of the tech vendors in the space, as you see, you know, especially with the age of AI coming into the fold, it's like there are going to be more and more of these startups who want to participate in this space, more and more of these startups who want to participate in this space, and there's a cost to doing so, and there's a cost to integration that it needs to be worth it. And so what I've seen is a broker might want something. They might want their tech vendor that they're interested in to be integrated into the TMS, but if the TMS has to spend money to do that, they might say no and they might be like you're the only broker who wants this. Why would we spend hundreds of thousands or however many dollars to make that connection happen when we've got a thousand brokers on our platform and you're the only one looking at this? We need to use something that everybody else is using. Is that kind of-?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's always a concern. You want to make sure that, wherever you're focusing your energy as an engineering team, you're doing that. If you're building a platform like a TMS, one of the first questions is how many people will this affect? Or what is the ROI when you're building a feature or a platform or an integration, and that's the first thing that a lot of people look at when they're looking to do those types of integrations. And so when you choose Bitfreighter, there's a huge network behind us that comes with that.
Speaker 2:So have you become? I guess how many competitors are there in the EDI space? You mentioned there was kind of this monopoly, and then you learned there were some others. I was not super familiar with the others that were available, but I do know there are some. Now what does the competitive landscape look like?
Speaker 3:like. So we are focused on the full automation lifecycle of a load, meaning between a logistics company and a shipper. So what we're doing is from quoting all the way to invoicing quoting, tendering, tracking and updates and invoicing. That's really where our focus is. So, as an EDI company, we have competitors. On the EDI side, I'd say there's like three main competitors, and then on our quoting side, there's two main competitors, but there's only one platform that does all all of the um four components that I talked about, which is quoting, um tendering, updates and invoicing, and that's Bitfreighter. So I think that's our big competitive advantage. Uh, when we look at like what, where we're focused is like we're really focused in on the integrations between a logistics company and a shipper and all of those are intertwined.
Speaker 3:There's a synergy between quoting and tendering. You have to quote the load to get the load, and we've seen a very big national shipper that is using EDI to quote freight. Two years ago I heard about this and I laughed about it because I said, well, that will go away. No, because I said, well, that will go away. No, they've just dug in deeper. So we are the only platform that's positioned to do that really well Because we have our live quote product that we can route our EDI, essentially tender the 204s that come in that ask for a quote, route it to our live quote automated quoting product and then send back out a 990, which is how they're sending out the quotes, which is an acceptance. But on that 990, it's actually just a quote. So we obviously didn't plan to do that, it just happened and it kind of fell into our lap that we are very well positioned to do anything to do with EDI or API or quoting and the integrations between logistics, logistics companies and shippers.
Speaker 2:So that's a really interesting point and when I kind of imagine how all of this comes together.
Speaker 2:You know, we just talked about the challenges of integrating with a TMS provider whether it's your own TMS or the TMS of the shipper, whatever it may be and how it's not easy to get, as a vendor, to get approved to be integrated. So, keeping that in mind, aside from that, we were talking about how your business initially was focused on just the initial EDI functions and it sounds like over the last two years you've embedded the quoting aspect to it as well. I mean, I think that's just really an interesting thing to think about is, if I know that I maybe if I'm a vendor or if I'm a broker and I want to pick a vendor and I don't know necessarily who's going to be approved to integrate with which companies you theoretically want to limit the number of vendors you're having to partner with to reduce that risk, and having a company like yours that can do all of the things you need the full life cycle of the load I think that's an interesting advantage you probably have in the market. Is that how that's played out for you?
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, user adoption is a real thing, getting people to use technology. It's not easy, and so, if you can limit the amount of different places that your people have to go log in to go work in a platform and you point them to Bitfreighter because we allow them to do the entire connectivity with their shippers, um, it's also, um, the single point of truth for any problems that might be happening, that they're limiting the amount of places where they have to go find and be able to check out the errors that are happening. I don't know why I couldn't think of that. The thing is that if you have a team that's working in a platform, you want to be able to quickly diagnose problems, and I mean with any tech, there are going to be errors that you have to solve, and having to go to multiple different places can be challenging.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean to me this is where my brain is just going back to the idea that I've always thought that some of the biggest challenges some of the digital freight matchers had was their companies were largely run by tech people and decisions were made by tech people not necessarily freight people who understood where all the bodies typically need to be or are buried in a freight brokerage or in a freight execution.
Speaker 2:And by bodies buried I just mean where the problems continually come up, or where, if you create a tech solution, there will be problems that will come up Because ultimately, I think a lot of these companies weren't as successful as they could have been because they didn't understand the importance of accountability end to end and they built innovative technology that shippers liked for certain functions of the business, but when they couldn't execute and be accountable end-to-end, they couldn't grow with customers in a profitable way.
Speaker 2:And so I naturally get inclined to I don't know support or like companies that are in any part of our space, that are run by people who have moved loads before, who understand the challenges and nuance that exists in building a brokerage and executing within a brokerage. So my point in saying all this is like, as a tech company, building a tech solution, having people who have actually done the job being the ones making decisions. Yeah, it might mean that you're not as nuanced on talking about the technology at the deepest levels, but it means, if you have the right partners supporting you, who can do that and know how to build that, but you're there to be like, wait a second. These are important errors we need to be able to solve quickly because, if not, our customers are going to fail and if our customers fail, we won't have customers or they won't come back to us. They'll go to other providers. I mean my guess and I don't know this but what percent of your customers have left over the time to use other platforms versus sticking with yours?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a. That's a cool stat. We have less than 1% churn over four and a half years. That's not a problem we have Typically. Once you pick Bitfreighter, you're really happy with the platform. I think the churn that we've had is people losing business with their shippers. It hasn't been from a service or a platform perspective.
Speaker 3:But there's two thoughts I have about founders of freight tech companies that are building freight tech that haven't done the job. If they go sit with their customers and learn the business, they can build freight tech, there's no doubt. But they have to go spend that time. There's time and energy. You have to trade that time that you would be building the company to go learn how to solve the problem.
Speaker 3:There were nights where I was sitting in bed at 10, 11 o'clock at night. My wife's like it's time to go to bed. I'm like I got to cover this load. I've been there, I've lived it. I know what it's like to miss freight, have to call the shipper the next day and tell them you'll get a truck on it, and those things happen.
Speaker 3:So my heart is with our companies, our customers, the people that, and that's why I think that's really where it resonates with a lot of the people that we're helping in this space is you know what are. It goes back to our mission and also, I think all of the business people at Bitfreighter have a freight background. They've either worked at a brokerage, worked at a shipper. So our business people are customer solutions managers, our sales people, our account executives. They all have empathy for the people that are working with their customers and understand what it's like to move freight, and I think that's a big part of who we are as a company is. We're really focused in on helping people and I think that's a common theme at Bitfreighter. You ask for help and there's like five people raising their hand, jumping in to solve a problem. So it's really cool.
Speaker 2:So two thoughts. One is I appreciate you calling out the first thing you said, which you know. My point about founders of tech companies being freight people was not meant to say that companies that tech companies led by non-freight founders are doomed to fail, because I've interviewed some of them and they have great businesses and they're doing well. I just more meant to say there's more risk and it's easier to feel confident in a solution when you know that the person sitting across the table has done the very job that you're trying to do. But I do appreciate you calling that up.
Speaker 2:The second thing I want to speak to is culture, and I say it only because what you just described of having a team of people who, when someone needs help, five people are going to raise their hand you're defining culture. So talk to me about what the Bitfreighter company culture looks like. What are the things that you feel you as a leader have done to define that culture by design and what are the things that maybe just happened as a result of osmosis and the way the team worked?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you know, big props to my co-founder, brandon. He's one of the best in the business. People love working with him. He is a 10X engineer and if you know what that means, like that, not every engineer can solve problems as fast as he can or just really think through things.
Speaker 3:And I think culture really starts with, like and especially, we're a hundred percent remote. We have people in 10 States in Europe, um, in all the time zones, so, um, it's uh, it can be tough, but culture starts with being intentional about, um, meeting with people and our beliefs from the top down and really doing right by people and and empowering people and giving them the ownership that people want to do their jobs. And I think that's like the core belief. If you hire somebody, you need to believe in them and what they're capable of doing, and I think that's a big part of our Bitfreder culture being 100% remote. You have to trust people. You have to trust that they're doing what they say they're going to do and they have to trust us. And that's why, at the core of one of our core values is trust, and I know that sounds like probably everybody's core value, but it really resonates with us because we are 100% remote. It really resonates with us because we are 100% remote and there's a lot of trust factor in a lot of companies that, honestly, just don't believe in being 100% remote and, for whatever reason, like it may not just work for their business.
Speaker 3:I know brokerage it's much easier to learn by sitting next to somebody and listening to them, book calls and just feeling the culture in the office, but what we're doing it allows us to have so much more coverage across our business. And also, I think one of the biggest parts of our culture is picking the best people for the job, because we're not limited or handcuffed to a certain city. We've been able to pick some of the best people I've ever worked with, some of the smartest people I've ever worked with, and we allow them to go do their thing and that's a big part of who we are at Bitfreighter and I think, um, you know, uh, we've built in a phenomenal team and all our entire team has come from within. Everybody has come from the. It like stem from the brad and brandon bubble of people that we've known and that's really how our team has grown and, uh, I'm really proud of that like being able to, just from our own network grow Bitfreighter.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the remote thing scares me. So I'm someone who was so pro remote early and for me, my perspective had been that the team had quote and Vogel gives me crap for saying this he says too often but that my perspective was. You know, initially we were all forced into a remote environment, right, and you didn't really have a choice. March of 2020, everyone had to go home. You couldn't stay in your office. As a very heavy food and beverage and retail heavy brokerage on the enterprise side, we saw a massive bump the first few months and the panic buying. We saw our volumes nearly double across the board, with the same amount of people and everyone working remote. Our team executed and they executed phenomenally well. I then had the idea in my mind that our team had earned the right to stay remote and if that was the preference of people, they had the right to continue to do that because at our most trying time, when it was most difficult, in the most unfamiliar new environment, our team showed up and executed. So who was I to say you had to come back and be in office. That was my thought.
Speaker 2:That thought has changed and the reason my thought on that has changed is because over time. You have to keep hiring new people and some people leave. You have turnover. That's just natural in brokerage and it is way harder to build culture, I think, remotely than it is to maintain it. Maybe this is mostly true in brokerage and not so much in a tech space, but I still think it's really hard.
Speaker 2:And what ends up happening is your culture gets changed if you're not intentional enough. When you're mostly remote, things just aren't the same when, all of a sudden, a team of what was initially a team of 300 people that had all started together in an office becomes a team of 600 people, 300 of which have never met the other 300 because it's all remote. That's a different business. And the things that you learn osmotically if that's a word but the things you learn through osmosis of sitting next to someone and seeing what's good and what's bad and being able to catch people not catch people, but like hearing when someone's doing something they shouldn't and correcting it on the spot that goes away in a remote environment, and so I don't think I would ever build another business and offer the level of remote that I did the first time around.
Speaker 3:I think it depends on the business right, like brokerage. I a hundred percent agree with you. Um, I don't know if I, uh, I I would do, if you know, our, our remote culture gives us so much flexibility. And, um, you know, I talked about we. One of the the things that we wanted to do this year was have four meetups, um, and I think those meetups are interesting because when we see each other, it's so much different than seeing, like working together on a daily basis. It's it's almost like a party, like we're so excited to see each other because we never get to see each other. So it's like it's a whole different look and feeling when we have these meetups.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, I think you know you have to be intentional. You have to make sure that you're doing the right things every single day. Having meetings you know the meetings are. You know I spend a lot of time calling people on my cell phone, calling randomly calling people. I have a one of our, the first engineer that worked with us. He likes to give me crap about cold calling him Like dude, I'm not cold calling you Because you just call him out of the blue.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll just call him. And he's gotten used to it. Like four years after work, I'm a caller, I like to talk to people. So yeah, he's gotten used to it. But in the beginning he's like can you give me a heads up? No, I can't, I'm going to call you and be ready.
Speaker 2:So what do you when you call him? You just want to chat, or it's because you're thinking about an idea like help me, you know, for the audience that's curious about this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, uh. So when I'm calling him what he's, he was our first engineer building our live quote product. So a lot of times we were just talking about product ideas Um, maybe I had a question about it, but just random stuff that, uh, I I'd rather just talk it out and over the phone or on a slack message than rather than, uh, you know, going back and forth over uh text.
Speaker 2:so and you mentioned the live quote product a number of times. We didn't get into that enough. I don't think um, is that, is that essentially a product that allows for, you know, in the age of api, automated or dynamic pricing tools like that's what that is yeah, so we were.
Speaker 3:So we were approached really early on by a very large shipper, tms, that was ended up being acquired um in 2022, um or in 20, uh, the years are starting to run together, but I think it was 21. Uh, we got to work on it in 22. So what we? What we did, what they asked us to roll out their, their real-time rating API, Um, and so we ended up made sense to us, um, because it really synergized with our EDI product. You have to quote the load to get the load.
Speaker 3:So we have built a rules engine that allows customers to build out whatever is in their head from a quoting perspective into a rules engine per shipper, and so we have 20 plus APIs. We have an open API for shippers and an open API for pricing engines so that anybody can integrate with us. And we have many shippers now actually writing to our open API for quoting, so that we're talking to a Fortune 100 shipper right now that wants to move all of their logistics companies over. Can't talk about who it is quite yet, but it's a. It's a big deal for us because our open APIs, our integrations, make it really seamless for P, for shippers and brokers to work together from a quoting perspective. And then we also have the tool itself that allows brokers to set up all of the possibilities, all those conditions that you would think about when you're trying to price a load or quote a load.
Speaker 3:And we spent months talking about all the ways that I used to quote freight and designing this product as the MVP. Now it's a. You know, looking back over the last two and a half years building this live quote tool, it's, it's completely transformed into this beautiful thing that I never really even envisioned it being. But you know, part of it is that we've really listened to our customers and allowed our customers to build it for what they want. I knew what I wanted, but really it came down to what our customers wanted.
Speaker 2:Okay, I mean you're speaking my language Just in those last few comments around allowing a product. So I've never built a product the way that you're talking about as a brokerage. You're not building a product in that sense, but you are crafting solutions, and what I mean by that is you have to design your playbook, how you operate, what role each person on the team is going to do you craft that. That's kind of the secret sauce to an extent within a brokerage. Am I going to have one person do quoting for a customer and another person do the customer service, or is one person going to handle everything for a customer? Everybody can do that a little bit differently, and ultimately, my perspective always was let me understand what the customer thinks and then get back to my team on how we should design something as a result of what the customer thinks. So that is, in my opinion, the best way to think about building anything, and so I credit you for that last comment about like you started with how you thought it should be, which is fair as a starting point, but you ended with, ultimately, what your customers needed and wanted within their business, because that's what's going to drive if customers are going to keep coming on and using it.
Speaker 2:So what I'm curious, though, is you've mentioned spending two and a half years building this. Now I'm thinking again about being a bootstrapped company, versus raising a bunch of capital and going and building 10 things at once, or building one thing really quickly Now that your company is kind of four years in, you just reached profitability, which congratulations. By the way, I didn't get a chance to congratulate you on that comment. You said a lot after it, so I kind of forgot, but that is quite a feat for a tech vendor in our space to be profitable. It's not often the case. How do you think about the future now? Does it make sense to go raise some capital and build more faster? Do you feel like you've got this product, this end-to-end solution that's fully baked and now it's just about getting it in front of the right customers? Or is there more to build that you have on your roadmap now? Talk to me about how you think about all of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. I mean, obviously, having more money in the bank would help us build it faster, hire more engineers, but it also, being strategic, it makes companies be more focused on what they can actually accomplish rather than getting too far out in front of their skis. And when you take on money, there's always day zero and you better know what that day is. So I think we found that our secret sauce is really focused on partnering with customers to continue to build out the product and build it out the way they want it. You know, there's a fine line between building a bunch of features for random customers and then aggregating that across all of our customers and making sure that we're building features that everybody wants.
Speaker 3:But ensuring that you know we can grow and we can have the runway to continue to enhance the products is obviously something that we've thought about. And now that we're at profitability like what is next steps look like and I think you know, partnering with the right financial institutions and I'm not saying VCs or financial money, I'm just talking about financially like making sure that we have the right banks or the right people to continue to fund Bitfreighter for the foreseeable future is definitely part of the conversation. But I think that where we're at today, we're quickly gaining ground in the top 100. I was just looking at it. I think we have 15 of the top 100s.
Speaker 2:On the broker side or shipper.
Speaker 3:Broker side, okay, between EDI and live quote, and I think we're seeing a lot more of the top 100 starting to take a look at our products and, um you know, making plans for the uh as the market flips because, honestly, it's hard to sell a live uh, a spot freight tool uh when there's no spot when there's no spot freight, when that 98 of the freight's being accepted.
Speaker 3:So, uh, I think people are starting to really look at it and prepare for 2025. And we're really starting to see a lot of customers starting, or a lot of people that we've been talking to over the last six to 12 months, starting to sign up and dip their toes into what this means for their business. So I think we've you know, timing is everything, but I think we're ready for a lot of these companies to come on board to really start seeing the full power of spot freight automation.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that, despite the horrible interview tactic I just deployed of asking three very kind of different questions at the same time, which is not how you're supposed to interview someone. You're supposed to ask a question, let them answer and then you can ask the next one. And I asked you three. I appreciate that you were able to actually answer all three at once, thank you. So my understanding it sounds like what you're saying is, for one like, you appreciate the disciplinary approach, the disciplined approach you've been able to take as the more bootstrap nature, and that if you find the right money to put into the business that takes you further, you would consider it. But you're not just going to go out and raise a bunch of money out of fear that it might lead to a less disciplined approach.
Speaker 2:Um, and then you basically you're starting to finally reap the rewards of the work your team has done over the last four years. In terms of customers, the right brokers are seeing this as a potential solution that makes sense for them. So you're getting more of those conversations started and it's just a matter of getting in front of more of them to get this product in front of them. And then I guess the next question I would ask is like you said, you've gotten kind of the full life cycle of the load with respect to EDI API in terms of a solution. What is next? What is the next kind of big thing that you're thinking about? That maybe you're not building it today, but you're thinking about that makes sense to build within your business?
Speaker 3:I think we sit on top of a lot of data that our customers want and we have some reporting that we've started to roll out, but I think Bitfreighter insights from an AI perspective would help.
Speaker 3:We want to empower our customers to not be reactive but proactive with how they build relationships with their shippers and, to be honest, like we have all the data that their shippers are scorecarding them on and there's some really cool things that we're talking about doing from not just being like an integration platform that just sends messages back and forth, but like how do we take what we've built and give our customers more tools to see how they're actually doing, what they're actually transmitting, so that they can be proactive in their approach and having the right conversations with their shippers, rather than getting a scorecard quarterly that says that your on-time percentages are low and that you need to go fix it.
Speaker 3:So, from that perspective, that's one thing that we're talking about. But on the live quote side, we're also talking about more quoting insights, more ability to see how the market's doing so that they can see to make better decisions, to make better quoting decisions. So really giving them insights into their own data is really what we're trying to accomplish, and I think that will empower our customers to do more with our product.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you sharing that. I think that makes sense as a kind of evolutionary next step for you in the business. I want to just quick pivot before we close here to talk about your own kind of leadership journey. You were a guy who grew up in freight brokerage from bartending to being a carrier rep, to a sales rep, to GMing a few regions to eventually helping lead another brokerage. Now you've been a CEO for four years. Like what have you learned through building a business from scratch as the CEO face of the business? What are the lessons that other people who want to start businesses can take from your own?
Speaker 1:experience.
Speaker 3:Well, look, it's not easy, um, being a face of an organization. Um, it's very uncomfortable for me, to be honest, um, I uh it's it's not easy to come on this podcast and talk about myself or bit freighter or any of this. So, um, those are things that I've had to grow into. Um, I'm I'm lucky that at Calvary we, as all the managers, had to get up and like give speeches and public speak and that was all. These are things that I was very uncomfortable with doing. So, um, but I'm also um something that you know I don't talk about very often, but um, I spent all of my youth in scouts and ultimately became an Eagle scout, and I I really rely on and I know scouting has like kind of a bad look these days but um, and I really rely a lot on what I learned through my leadership and I spent four years on staff at a scout camp in college, like giving back to the scouts and um, you know, just learning how to lead people in scouts and um, I really rely on a lot of that.
Speaker 3:Um, you know, learnings in my youth and um, you know, being the CEO of Bitfreighter means that I've gotten to surround myself with some of the best people, and I think that's ultimately what you need to do as a leader is pick the best people to be on your leadership team, and I couldn't be more proud of the people that have chosen to come work with us and help us build Bitfreighter, because every decision made at Bitfreighter is a unanimous decision. Even though I'm the CEO, I don't make any decisions. Our team makes the decisions, and I think that's a big part of who we are as a company and getting the buy-in in order to continue to move the needle forward. So, yeah, I mean, it's not easy being the face, and you know I embrace it, and that's why I came on here today.
Speaker 3:I wanted to talk about Bitfreighter. I was excited about it, about coming on here, and, before we conclude, I did have a question for you what would you say the common theme across all of the people? I think I'm like number 47 or 48 that you've interviewed or, you know, had on the on the freight pod what's like the common theme of all these successful people, um, and their like their success, or the common theme behind their success that you've heard across all the people that you've interviewed?
Speaker 2:Drive. I think it's drive. I think it's like seeing something and wanting to create it and wanting to, like, put everything you have into it. Like most of the people who I've interviewed were founders, and like the idea of creating something from nothing is not easy and there's got to be this level of discomfort you're comfortable with or push yourself through, and it takes drive to do it.
Speaker 2:I can tell you're not a natural public speaker. I don't mean that as an insult whatsoever, but one of the things that I appreciate about you and I don't know you very well, but I know you well enough through going to your golf outing this past year and what I saw when you invited me to go to your dinner the night before, where some of your customers were, and you stood up and spoke in front of everyone and I remember thinking to myself this guy's not the best public speaker I've seen, but man does he lean into how much he cares? And when you lean into how much you care and you put that on, you wear it on your sleeve like that. It's such a naturally gravitating thing. People want to work with founders and CEOs who care more than and and will put everything they have into something into building something great, and it's clear how much you care about your team. It's clear how much you care about the product you're making and how much you care about the the customers that you're serving. I mean, it's like you might not be the most polished speaker, but I bet you're pretty effective because the way in which you do it so, um, yeah, I mean that that's my takeaway from you know, the limited time I've spent with you and I appreciate you saying what you did around like not being super comfortable as the face, um, but like having the drive to kind of push through discomfort is the essence of building any business, you know, and for me, as I think about my own journey, it's like this podcast was. I mean, I'm comfortable talking, I'm comfortable being a face. I got a big freaking ego. I like I enjoy it and it's something I'm working on the ego part, but I do enjoy like being in a conversation like this and putting myself out there like that.
Speaker 2:But for me, like starting the podcast took so long and it took so long because I was not willing to push through the discomfort. I just like sat with it for a long time and was like I don't know if I want to do it, like will it be good or will I make a fool of myself, do three episodes and then quit? Like the nature of building a business successfully is understanding that you're starting something that doesn't exist today. And once you do, there are going to be a lot of mistakes you make along the way, and those mistakes often feel like failure. And if you let the failure consume you, it's really hard to push through. You have to let the failure kind of wipe off your back or whatever like slide off your shoulder. I don't know what the hell the saying is I'm trying to say, but like you have to be able to just let it go and move on to the next thing.
Speaker 2:I've spent now the last few months for my own kind of, as I've looked at this podcast, thinking how do I make it bigger, how do I go beyond what I'm doing today? How do I get a bigger reach? How do I impact more people? How do I create more value for people? And I think it's not through the podcast, I think it's through an extension with a newsletter slash website concept that I've been toying with. And, frankly, you and I are having this conversation in the few days that have followed the Trucker Tools DAT acquisition. It won't release until three or four weeks from now, but just for the audience understanding of how I'm thinking about this like watching the FreightWave's response to the DAT acquisition and how they kind of shredded it has created some ideas in my head for a business and for an opportunity I think there is to create a community in a different way than I had been thinking about before. So I'm actually grateful to have seen that play out the way it did. But like I've spent so much time sitting and deliberating on how do I do more, how do I do more, how do I do more, and like worried about if I try this it could fail, if I try that it might not not go well, and what I'm learning is you just got to push through. You just got to make the effort, commit to it, see the results and then iterate and change however your customers deem the change should happen.
Speaker 2:So my goal in creating this podcast was to create value for the key stakeholders in our industry, which are people like yourself, your employees, your customers, the brokers, the shippers, the carriers out there. I wanted to create some level of value for them, leverage my network, to bring people like yourself on here and share your stories, to help uplift them, uplift your business and also give people ideas on how they can themselves create businesses or how they can see. This is why I ask you what are the lessons you've learned? I may be rambling here, but I'm seeing that the successful people who I've had on the show, once they commit to something, they go all in and it's their drive that, I think, takes them from A to B to C to eventually, a successful product. And it's their drive that prevents them from quitting when they screw it up or when their customers say this was a mistake and you need to try again. So that's my answer.
Speaker 3:Well, I think, andrew, you have the golden touch here with this podcast and I love listening. I've listened to a lot of the episodes not all of them, but I've tried to. There's some lengthy ones out there them, but I've I've tried to there there. There's some lengthy ones out there, but I'm trying to find some time to to listen to a lot of them and and learn from fellow peers and leadership roles, I mean. And then, of course, your time at Molo and building such a fast growing company and your ability to do that. So you know I really appreciate what you're doing. It's been uh an incredible, uh you know time to get to, to talk with you about Bitfreighter and uh, obviously really appreciate you having me on. I know you have a huge reach and a very big following with your audience and and the people that are listening. So, um again, I really appreciate you having me on. Thanks, man.
Speaker 2:If there's one thing I'll just add to that comment around, these episodes can be lengthy and I understand that, and that's part of the nature of long form is it gives the opportunity to really get to know and to dig deep and dive into something. But part of the solution I'm now trying to create is how do I provide value to people in short form in a two minute article or a two minute blog you know like? So that's the kind of evolution or pivot that I'm thinking about and hopefully by the time this airs I think it'll be earlier mid January, we will there will be some news from the FreightPod ecosystem of an evolution there. So anyways, I appreciate you coming on the show. It's been great getting to know you a little bit more, getting to know more about your business. I'm hopeful that this helps bring some new customers to the table and to our listeners. Hope you enjoyed the episode and we'll see you next week. Thanks for having me, thanks.
