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. #58: Krenar Komoni, CEO & Founder of Tive
Andrew welcomes Krenar Komoni, CEO and founder of Tive, to The Freight Pod. Krenar left Kosovo at 17 years old to pursue his education in the U.S., but the aspiring entrepreneur knew he’d be back one day to create jobs in his home country.
Krenar went on to earn degrees in computer engineering, math, and electrical engineering and discovered a passion for radio frequencies and wireless communication systems. But it was his father-in-law's trucking company and the constant tracking calls — where’s the truck? Will it be on time? — that led Krenar to build him a GPS tracker. And that's how Tive started in 2015. Today, Tive supports more than 900 customers from its offices in Norway, Mexico, South Africa, Boston — and Kosovo.
In this episode, Krenar also shares:
- The early days of Tive: bootstrapping, landing the first customer, and building Tive’s innovative trackers.
- Tive's near-collapse in 2019 and the moment that turned things around.
- Building a global, remote team and culture across Tive’s offices.
- The biggest mistakes a CEO or founder can make, Krenar’s advice for founders and entrepreneurs, the journey to product-market fit, and how Tive has built a moat around its tracking capabilities.
- Krenar’s vision for the future of visibility and AI, and what’s next for Tive.
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*** 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 FreightPod listeners. Before we get started today, let's do a quick shout out to our sponsor, rapido Solutions Group. Rapido connects logistics and supply chain organizations in North America with the best near shore talent to scale efficiently and deliver superior customer service. Rapido works with businesses from all sides of the logistics industry. This includes brokers, carriers and logistics software companies. This includes brokers, carriers and logistics software companies. Rapido builds out teams with roles across customer and carrier sales and support, back office administration and technology services.
Andrew Silver:The team at Rapido knows logistics and people. It's what sets them apart. Rapido is driven by an inside knowledge of how to recruit, hire and train within the industry and a passion to build better solutions for success. The team is led by CEO Danny Frisco and COO Roberto Lacazza, two guys I've worked with from my earliest days in the industry at Coyote. I have a long history with them and I trust them. I've even been a customer of theirs at Molo and let me tell you they made our business better. In the current market, where everyone's trying to do more with less and save money, solutions like Rapido are a great place to start To learn more. Check them out at gorapidocom. That's gorapidocom. Welcome back to another episode of Freight Pod. I'm your host, andy Silver. I'm joined today by a special guest per usual, but this guy's extra special, we'll say Mr Krenar Kamoni.
Krenar Komoni:Is that how I say your last name? Yeah, definitely Krenar Kamoni. Krenar kimoni, krenar kimoni um ceo.
Andrew Silver:Founder of tithe, one of the more interesting tracking businesses in the space, definitely, from a hardware perspective, one of the few. That's like going right into the hardware, which is funny because I remember when I met you. I think we met at a conference six years ago, maybe, probably do you remember that at all?
Krenar Komoni:uh, maybe it was a matter. No, I don't think it was manifest.
Andrew Silver:No, I've never been to manifest, but we it was um, I think it was cscmp. Whatever it was, I remember me?
Andrew Silver:yeah, six years ago it was it was early in the tithe days and I remember you. You told me a little bit about your business and I remember thinking like huh, I don't really think that's gonna work. Like who's, they're really gonna put a tracker in every single trailer. Um, and here we are, six years later. Your company just raised 40 million dollars, has had a ton of success. So I was wrong. Happy to admit that, because you're a great guy and happy to see you succeeding. Why don't we start just give a quick, very quick, just understanding of what the business is? And then we're going to go way back. I think it's better to start these episodes letting the guests know what the company is. Then we're going to go way back. I just I think it's better to start these episodes letting the guests know what, what the company is that we're going to be talking about, but and then we'll go back and talk about your journey.
Krenar Komoni:Yeah, and I'll make it quick. Tive is very straightforward and I think all our customers understand it, because I love that straightforwardness from our side. What we do is we help track your shipments and monitor your shipments, and the way we do it is we ship you these trackers, you press a button and you put it inside your trailer, inside your container, usually on the last pallet, and we give you real-time data on where that shipment is and also its condition Is it hot, is it cold, is it wet? Did somebody open the trailer container? All in real time. And it's the tracker, but also our software platform that then connects to TMS and WMS and APIs and you can manage your shipments in our platform, all of it. That's it in a nutshell.
Andrew Silver:And for those that are choosing to digest this episode through audio only, he did just show us a tracker. Can you describe its size, just so people have an understanding?
Krenar Komoni:Call it like a cigarette pack. Uh sigh, you can hold in your hands. You have, there's one button, there's a light sensor. That's great. Well, what would you say?
Andrew Silver:yeah, it does look about the size of a cigarette. I don't know if I would use that as the analogy, but it does feel accurate. Not the best marketing in today's age, but but it is an accurate description.
Krenar Komoni:I mean it's marketing in today's age. But it is an accurate description. I can't say I saw it. It's hard to find a.
Andrew Silver:Credit card, big credit card, where?
Krenar Komoni:are you from Originally? I'm from Kosovo. And when did you come to the States Kosovo? I came when I was 17 years old in 2001. November 2001. It was two months after 9-11.
Andrew Silver:Really what? Okay interesting, what drove first of all. Why did you come?
Krenar Komoni:I always wanted to get better education and I knew that in Kosovo. I was in high school. Back then I told my parents I need to go figure out a way to come to America, because I know education here so much better. And then we figure out this exchange student program I think you've seen it like exchange student programs in movies and things like that and we figured out as an exchange student for senior in high school and that's how I came. And it's funny story.
Krenar Komoni:I came because my first host family was gonna be in Tulsa, oklahoma, in a mobile home. But I went to get my visa in August and I went to Albania to get my visa and the US Embassy said they, from today, everybody coming from Kosovo needs to set up an appointment and they they canceled my appointment and I had to rebook it and this guy said you're not coming, I'm not accepting you anymore, the high school's not accept you anymore. So I had to go find a new host family. It's a long story. I found it through this guy, jonathan, that I met in Kosovo for five minutes and he found a host family in Vermont and then, when I went to get my visa, I went on September 10 2001 and I got my visa 4 p.
Krenar Komoni:I went on September 10, 2001. And I got my visa at 4 pm on September 10th. Next day they shut every embassy down because of 9-11. I had a flight for September 22nd or 3rd to come to the United States, but I flew to Boston on November 3rd and then drove to. Yeah, jonathan Hoffman helped me a lot, drove me to Vermont and went to high school in Vermont, senior and then and never left no, I've gone every year back to get the next visa.
Krenar Komoni:To get the next visa. Like, I went from high school, went to Norwich University, I did my undergrad there in math and computer science and I saw math and computer engineering and, uh, then I went to back to get another visa to get my master's at tufts university, did two years at tufts and then I worked at bitwave semiconductor, a company that's sponsored me after my master's how challenging is the visa process?
Krenar Komoni:um, so that's a good question. Actually, when we were in high school, I remember it was probably like 10 of us who went to get the visa and only two or three of us got it. They rejected seven. And you do why. Maybe we had to submit everything, grades, and and the funny thing is, what I could tell is they were the questions they would ask and the way they would look at you. They really want to see your personality. Are you going to stay in US forever? Are you going to cause trouble in America? You're like this is really tough questions on the US embassy. But I a sec when I went for the second time after being canceled on the first one on appointment. I'll I've never told this story, but I'm'm gonna tell it.
Krenar Komoni:I my wife knows it's up, but I was very confident and I was very confident that I'm gonna get it. For some reason, I don't know, I really believed in myself. And there was this lady there and she. She asked me like, hey, are you gonna come back? Are you going to united? Let me, yes, definitely gonna come back. And why are you coming back? I'm like like I'm going to come back because I'm going to get good education there and that's why I'm going to come back and I'm going to give jobs back to Kosovo, which now I have 100 employees there. I never went back 100%, but and she's like okay. And I said you know what? And she looked green eyes and I really like green eyes. I said you have really beautiful eyes. She looked at me. She's like what are you talking about? She started laughing and she just handed me my documents back. She's like come back at 4 pm to get your visa. I was like at the US Embassy to be able to say. I was like wow, I uh, it was. That was.
Andrew Silver:I, I okay, so I know this is a funny little story, but I believe there's a actual lesson to be learned in that commentary and I've done this before at hotels, when I'm checking into a hotel, and it wasn't necessarily intentional at first, I think. I think at first I was just being sincere and and I complimented who I was on the other side of the table, and when I complimented them, they then gave me an upgrade.
Andrew Silver:And I wasn't looking for an upgrade. It wasn't that I was looking for it or anything, it was just in the moment. And then I realized there's something to that. Like you know, something about just being extremely kind and sincere, nice to people, that it might help you more than you might realize and I don't mean to say that in a way that someone should take advantage of it, um no, and be disingenuous. But like, people appreciate being told nice things and uh, when you're in a weird position where you know you're one of, they're going to accept two out of ten or three out of 10 people for a visa, it doesn't hurt that someone appreciates something you've said.
Krenar Komoni:Yeah, I don't think many 16, 17 year olds going to get a visa. Said that to anybody on the other side.
Andrew Silver:So was your plan? Your plan was to get a great education, and did you really want to come? Did you always want to be an entrepreneur?
Krenar Komoni:yes, that is, uh, that is a funny thing. Yes, it's always, I would say, 13, 14 years old. Um, I always hung out with folks that were a little bit older than me. I had these two other friends, three other friends that were two years, one year older than my was. We were living in the same kind of apartment complex. They were very smart kids with computers and like coding, and we started building code and writing software. We're like why don't we try and sell it, this bag, in kosovo?
Krenar Komoni:That bug of creating something out of nothing just has never left me since I was a kid, since I was like 12, 13 years old, and then I joined a startup called KTV, but it's a TV station in Kosovo. I joined them in like June. I was 16 years old. I built all their 3d animations you know when the news comes out, the 3d animation, things like that and then in September we launched it and, like, probably a million people saw my animations. I'm like, hey, like two, three days ago there was nothing here and now a million people are watching the animations that I did. I can't. I've never worked for a big company, andrew, I've never. It's just, it's been always. I need to start something. I need to build something, and I'll work with a lot of entrepreneurs, work with a lot of startups, but tithe is the first company that I 100 founded myself and built myself obviously with amazing team, but I started myself, yeah, of course.
Andrew Silver:Um. So so you studied math and computer engineering after college. Is that when you know? You were 16 when you went to ktv, so you know you finished college you didn't get your master's, you know when? I guess that would have been 2000, probably early 2000, 2006 I 2002, 2006 college. 2006 to 2008 masters okay, and then you had seven years before time. What did what? What transpired during that?
Krenar Komoni:time mostly startups. Uh, bitwave semiconductor was the first one. We built the world's first software-defined radio on a chip.
Krenar Komoni:It's a big mouthful but it's one single chip, it's one single chip that goes on a smartphone that does 2G, 3g, 4g, cdma, wi-fi, everything in one. But I worked on the actual transistors like the actual design one. But we worked on. I worked on the actual transistors like the actual design and that was just really fun because I wanted to go deep all the way to the transistor level, not down to the atom, but close enough to figure out how these things work. And I learned a lot and I fell in love with wireless there, because you and I are talking right now.
Krenar Komoni:The microphone is wireless, especially our air pods. We're on Wi-Fi together right now, transmitting, talking, and we don't we can't see it, but all that data flows around. And then, on my masters, I went deeper on this thing called the mixer that takes these high frequency waves and make some lower frequency so you can turns it into ones and zeros and now we can see each other or talk to one another. It's just a beautiful thing. And I fell in love with call it radio frequencies and wireless there. That's what I did. Then I worked with other startups, mostly in that space.
Andrew Silver:And I mean it's fascinating because it's just complete like it's Japanese to me. I mean, none of it makes any sense. I've always been just baffled by how all of this works, how the AirPod, how you and I see each other like all of it. None of it I understand. That's pretty cool that you actually understood it, fell in love with it and I guess, when then did you think about the idea of Tive, like how?
Krenar Komoni:did that come to be? So, working with companies building chipsets, working with companies with, like, indoor positioning, work with MIT startup where one professor was a MIT professor who was at bitwave my first company calls me one day I was about to do my PhD program is like, hey, you want to join my startup? Be the first employee? I'm like what, I'm about to start my PhD program in two weeks employee. I'm like what, I'm about to start my PhD program in two weeks. So I turned my PhD to part-time, joined this company out of devices and then we built the world's most efficient base stations, those things that are cell towers. Have you ever seen those white antennas? Yeah, like on roofs and places.
Krenar Komoni:So I worked on that part again, more wireless, and the way I stumbled into supply chain, logistics, transportation was really through marriage. I got married, okay, I was in and ten, but it really didn't click until 2015 to start the company, when I kept realizing that me and my father-in-law became really good of those friends. But my father-in-law had a. He was a carrier, he had a trucking trucking company. Okay, he closed it last year, he retired, but he had a trucking company and always when I would go to his house, as you can imagine when you're running trucking company.
Krenar Komoni:He doesn't have been very transparent. He only had six trucks always on the phone. Did they load? Did they unload? We're trying to have a glass of wine, trying to have dinner. He would just get up like his phone nonstop ringing, ringing.
Krenar Komoni:I'm like this is insane and most of it is what is happening. Where's the driver? Did they load? Did they stop? Did they? Did they move from the truck stop? Did they just? Are they hauling the load? Are they going to get there on time, which is the biggest thing, cause otherwise he gets fees. I'm like, how about I just make a gps tracker and put in your trucks? He's like, yeah, I have so many companies coming and asking for 30, 40, 50 bucks a month. I'm like I'll just do it for free.
Krenar Komoni:And that's where I started. I put it his trucks. And then his friend, this guy, rasim, who's uh in in worcester, massachusetts that's where I started in the basement building this thing. He's like can you track my trucks? I started tracking his trucks. He had like 20 trucks and then another guy tracked my truck. So I was starting track trucks in Worcester, but that was uh, that was.
Krenar Komoni:I realized that that's how I started, but I realized that telematics was so crowded. Samsara just started, keep Trucking just started, which is Motive now, and my vision was I got to build a really good user interface, because the old guards of telematics had shitty user interfaces. You remember, I'm like I'm just going to make it really look amazing and easy to use. But these other companies started, but one time. This is in 2015. This is like two, three months in.
Krenar Komoni:This truck driver, tony, who's albanian, so this is all albanian truck drivers. By the way, that's how I was trucks. I was tracking. He's like you know, they put these temperature sensors on the back of the truck. He was hauling seafood from new bedford mass and I'm like what is it? He's like. I'm like can you bring me one? He brings it to me and is this like box that's yellow? And I'm like how do they get the data out of this thing? He's like they don't. They just at the end of the ship when they look at it. If they have to, they have to plug into a printer and read the data.
Andrew Silver:I'm like, wow, I know what I'm gonna do.
Krenar Komoni:I wanna take that tracker, put it I'm gonna, I'm gonna take that tracker and put it in the back of the truck, put a battery and put a bunch of sensors on it and that's it. Okay, a lot of lessons from there on A lot of mistakes, a lot of failures, but that's how it all started.
Andrew Silver:Yeah. So once you realize, okay, there's a business here, what do you do next? Did you go raise money? Did you go hire people? Did you go hire people? Did you go build? What did that look like?
Krenar Komoni:I tried to raise money but Karnarkamoni was nobody. I was because when you start a company, right, when you're a founder entrepreneur with no background, never started a company before. There is no for any investor, there is no precedence for you for them to put 250, 500 000. So I talked to quite a few but realized I was getting nowhere. I worked on pitch decks, I did all of those things and I'm like you know what I think. I told them what I want to do. I got to go do it now and I just kept building.
Krenar Komoni:That was the hardest part, I would say being alone, writing firmware, going on a truck, putting a tracker, believing in this that is going to be one day millions of these are going to get sold and keeping it just keep going. But then you get one customer with a small po, um, for like 10 units, and then you get another customer for another po for 150 units, which was nokia, which was a customer, and then you go back to that investor and say, hey, remember what we talked about it. Now look what I got. And they're like, oh, now I can connect a and b and I can start trusting Karnar as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a leader? How about I invest? But I've tried quite a bit in the beginning, so I started the company in June of 2015 and the first check we got was October 2016 when did?
Andrew Silver:when was the first?
Krenar Komoni:customer. Uh, first customer was March. It was January, february 2016. First customer was my father-in-law, by the way, but I'm not counting carriers as customers, like first customers. That went on a pilot Because I pivot. We pivoted, and their carriers are not. So that's the one right where I went to the back of the truck, so I don't track the actual tractor. So they were our first customers. But after the pivot, the first customers were february, march of 2016 it seems like.
Andrew Silver:So, part of the challenge again, when I met you and we talked about it was 2018. And I think part of the reason I was looking at it through the lens of being a broker. And as a broker I'm thinking how could I use this? Okay, I buy 1000 units and I send it to my produce shipper or produce shippers. I mean, I know produce is a good product, probably for your business, but produce they don't really have like warehouses necessarily in a lot of the like where I would, I would load for onion farms out in las cruces, new mexico. So, even using them as an example, uh, I send a thousand of them to my, my guy brandon at barker produce. That's a real person actually, and he's going to put one in each truck I send him or each trailer I send him, and then I might not use that trailer again for three months.
Andrew Silver:That carrier, it just felt like a very one and done type of business, and so I think that's why I was maybe down on it as a broker when I first saw it and clearly I was wrong. But, um, I'm curious like how? How has the product evolved? Like is it a lot of one and done use cases or are are? Who are you selling to? I guess let me answer those two questions separately, kind of like yeah, is it a lot of one and done and then it is a lot of one and done, as we.
Krenar Komoni:We recycle a lot of them and we try to refurbish and recycle them for environment, but majority, I would say, is one and done. Some customers reuse them and charge them themselves or put it on a something like a trailer that's maybe charging constantly and they have it charged, but most of it is um, on and done and then, when it's done, we try and recycle it. And customers, it's primarily shippers and then it's logistic service providers. We have some brokers. We, I mean we work with the largest, like if you consider tql and ch robinson and those, they they're, they work with time, which is pretty amazing.
Andrew Silver:If I consider them what brokers? Brokers, yeah, they're the biggest brokers. Two of the biggest and best brokers out there, exactly, tql CS Robinson. Yeah.
Krenar Komoni:Then we work with a lot of 3PLs too and shipping lines a little bit too on the larger side Maersk and folks like that. But majority is shippers, direct customers who ship loads.
Andrew Silver:Are you looking to grow your brokerage? Are you struggling to land new customers in these challenging market conditions? Look within so many companies that tender you freight throughout the domestic United States also have business coming out of Mexico. A year ago I understand why you might not have seen that freight as an opportunity, but today Cargado exists and that means any load coming into or out of Mexico is now an opportunity for you to support. In just over a year I've been able to see Cargado go from ideation to launch to rapid growth.
Andrew Silver:It's amazing to see how many logistics companies have been able to use Cargado go from ideation to launch to rapid growth. It's amazing to see how many logistics companies have been able to use Cargado to expand into Mexico to grow their business. Cargado is the first platform that connects logistics companies and trucking companies who are moving freight into and out of Mexico. If you move Mexico freight or are planning to reach out to Cargado today at cargadocom, that's C-A-R-G-A-D-Ocom. At the end of the day, is it just okay that it's a one-and-done type of product? Can you get the cost low enough that it makes sense as a one-and-done product, or do you need it to become this very circular type economy where it's always getting recycled for it to make sense as a business we love it when it's recycled, obviously, uh.
Krenar Komoni:But it makes sense with msrp is call it 50 bucks and then with volume it just it. We can drive down costs quite a bit. So I'm not gonna say it on this podcast, but obviously we can drive down the cost and then if you start refurbing and recycling and sending back to us, then the cost goes even down. We give you credits Starts to make a lot of sense.
Andrew Silver:Yeah, what were some of the biggest challenges those first couple of years, as you were getting going?
Krenar Komoni:I would say the biggest challenges were Okay, I tell folks sometimes, but I think it's good for every entrepreneur to hear it you fall in love with your tech and you think your, your, your tech doesn't stink and it's the best thing out there. But try and do get on cold calls and call a lot of customers. You'll figure out how to, how, how much it stinks. And then there is competition, competition and there's other players that are out there and you think you're the only sheriff in time, but you're not. So in the beginning we built a tracker that was larger, like this big. It was 250 bucks and we would charge 50 dollars a month, so that one obviously doesn't make any sense unless you are reusing it over and over and charging it yourself. It was the longest lasting tracker. It lasted one year in battery life, but people didn't care because they had to reuse it and I didn't know that People were buying ten, a hundred, but I wanted them to buy thousands of them. So I started doing a bunch of cold calls. This was when we were struggling quite a bit, which I can talk about.
Krenar Komoni:But I hired two, three SDRs right out of college. We started just cold calling customers, starting sending 100, 200 emails a week, each SDR, always on calls with them. I would listen and the feedback I would get well, there's these. We just use passive loggers, the ones that are shared. I'm like why, well, these? We just use passive loggers, the ones that are shit. I'm like why were they like 20, 30 bucks? Like okay, what if it was real time? Well, they'll pay more, but I don't want to return it. I'm like, okay, he's like I'm shipping potatoes from a to b. You want me to return a tracker from b to a? It doesn't make any sense at all too much work I'm done too much work.
Krenar Komoni:So that was the biggest lesson. And then I flew to china with my VP of technology Like there's no way we're building this from my basement or anywhere here. Let's go to China and figure out how we can make the cheapest tracker in the world. And we went and visited eight factories. It was like it's going to the source Eight different factories who make only trackers or some kind of trackers. And we found a partner that would work with us and we built a 2g gsm 2g tracker. It was pretty cheap and we did a press release 29 2g tracker. It was a pretty big deal. I was so proud. But what was interesting is customers started buying 200, 500, a thousand. I'm like what is happening? This is real. But 2g went dead because all the people started shutting down 2g. At&t and Verizon and I think T-Mobile pretty much is about to shut it down. We said I gotta make the first 5g ready tracker in the world, or LTE tracker in the world, and we did it. We were the first single-use tracker in the world in end of December of 2019, so since then we've been growing non-stop. It's been amazing.
Krenar Komoni:But the biggest lesson is sometimes and listen to this right 2018, when you met me. That's when I'm actually in the cold. I started the company in 2015. I talked to a lot of customers for really getting with sales team on cold calls three years later because I thought, oh, I had raised money, I'm a CEO, I can other people do this, like it. Just don't let that ego get not ego. It's not ego. Don't let that get in your way or think you're too high up to make a cold call or too high up to talk to a shipper anywhere. Just since then I've been doing it nonstop and it always in that feedback loop. But some ceos sometimes step away too much and I've realized the company is big, they raise a lot of money and next thing you know, they lost touch with customers. Man, that's like the death.
Andrew Silver:To me that's the carnal sin.
Andrew Silver:It's funny because one of the, I think, best lessons I learned from my father was around the value of a CEO that can sell, and his perspective, frankly, was that you shouldn't be a CEO if you haven't sold the product that you're running.
Andrew Silver:And it's hard for me to disagree because I've seen now CEOs who come from accounting backgrounds and this and that, and it doesn't mean they can't be good in certain areas. But I think if you're not a CEO who's spent a little bit of time in front of your customers selling the product, understanding the nuance that a sales rep has to go through to get you from the first call to the final sale, and understanding what is it that a customer loves about our product, what is it that they hate about it, what are the things they're struggling with, that's information that's so valuable for driving the business forward and defining the vision and how you want your team to operate. And I just don't think that's information you want to necessarily be passed from person to person to person. I think, as a CEO, especially in the early days, get out on the phones with, get out in front of your customers and or potential customers and find out what it is that you need to do to make them happy.
Krenar Komoni:Yeah, and even now we're, I mean, pretty large company. We just raised a series C of $40 million. We're $120 million totally raised confidentially.
Krenar Komoni:Obviously you can put it there, but we're in the call it $40 to $60 million revenue range last year and we're growing very fast with almost 1,000 customers. We have 950 customers, but product roadmap was kind of getting out of control. I would say in 2022, 2023, 2020, 2023. So in 2024, myself and our new VP of product now we went and we talked to a hundred customers for three months one hour, two hour calls, just getting there, and I probably myself talked to 50 and we just like here's our using a product. What are you doing with our product? What can be better? Here's our using our product. What can we do better? What can we do better? What can we do better? What can we do better? How we can improve. We learned so much and we built a completely. We just threw the roadmap in trash. The old one, put a completely new product roadmap and I'm really proud of it and what we're doing now in 20 for the next 18 months, it's, it's um. You still got to do it.
Andrew Silver:I want to say, even at this stage, as a ceo, I'm curious what were some of the takeaways from that kind of experience of getting out in front of the customer? What were some of the things that you felt you needed to improve or they felt you could improve on your core product?
Krenar Komoni:one thing. The biggest feedback that was positive was that we honestly have the best trackers in the world and just the connectivity, the reliability when they compare it to the rest. Like that works really, really hard where we put so much effort. But then, when it came to the software side, we got a lot of uh feedback, a lot of feedback on usability. They're like we go to this map and we just see all the numbers but like I cannot do anything with this. Like I see 100 shipments, 500 shipments.
Krenar Komoni:Where are the issues? Why can't you show me icons where the issues are? Why can I see an icon where there's a light alert? Why can't I see an icon on a temperature sensor when I shipments? Can I filter my shipments based on date range? I just want to see completed, I want to see incomplete, I want to see the ones that are late, I want to see the ones that are on time. I'm like we just show a list. I mean there's such simple things, right, but we never paid a lot of attention to it. And now we do and we took all those things that they asked and then analytics and insights they want to see built all of that in our roadmap and we learned a lot. But it's the best to hear when you hear from customers.
Andrew Silver:I mean that does seem so all like fair feedback. Frankly, you know if I'm putting myself in, if I'm Nokia you mentioned as a customer and I want to not anymore, but they were yeah. So anyone, if I'm, if I'm a shipper and I'm using your trackers, I definitely could see why the software expectation would be that they can sort by load date and all that stuff. But that doesn't seem like too challenging of a challenge addition for you to plug in, right?
Krenar Komoni:no, we're, we've built it now, right, but it just wasn't there yeah, I get it.
Andrew Silver:I get it. I mean, I'm curious like, again, it's such like a simple concept, right, like a physical tracker that's going in each trailer and then you know designing software around it so that there's action that an individual can take given the data that it has been provided from the tracker.
Krenar Komoni:Like it's a pretty simple business, right it is very simple business to explain to the buyer and I love that part man, and I think that's something that probably we should get back as an advice that I sometimes like to give people.
Krenar Komoni:if you cannot explain this to your nine-year-old kid my son or my daughter is 12 now, but they were younger they would know what Tive does. Your business is very complicated. You need like consultants, you need like hours of sessions to explain it, but you cannot sit down with a buyer and say this is why we do ABC. Do you want to get started? It's hard for you to scale and I think that's one thing we've done very, very well and we kept focusing on that doing that simple thing well, and a lot of founders and entrepreneurs sometimes get too distracted from many shiny objects out there because like, oh, this is simple, but we got to build all these other things and the next thing, you know, while they're building, another thing they forgot about the basics, and the basics are what killed the company yeah, it's, it's.
Andrew Silver:I'm mentally struggling with this idea because I think there's a, I think there's a lot of truth in what you just said and I think there's like some gold to take from that, because as an outsider, you see this very simple business and it's unsexy. It's not like it doesn't seem like it's this super exciting thing that someone would want to jump in and get involved with, but so crucially necessary. I mean the ways in which we've tracked trucks for the last 5, 10, 20 years. I mean you mean no offense, but a lot of those providers.
Andrew Silver:There are a lot of flaws. There are a lot of issues in how tracking is done, whether it's tracking with the ELD, because you never know if a large or mid-sized carrier is going to have a different tractor pickup or different driver pickup below that drops it off. Same concept with the driver's cell phone tracking. That way, if you have different drivers operating the load, it's like at the end of the day, you need to track what's in the trailer and there just aren't a ton of great solutions to do that other than yours as far as I know.
Krenar Komoni:Yeah, so I guess, I don't know.
Andrew Silver:I guess I, as far as I know yeah, so I guess I don't know. I guess I guess the question is just around the simplicity of the business Is there, is there, there's gold in simplicity? I guess is is what I'm trying to get to there there.
Krenar Komoni:There is gold in simplicity and um also focusing on like. When we started we just had one skew, one product, solo 5g, and just built solo 5g, solo 5g, solo 5g, that's it like a. And we learned so much from the data we were getting on how we would display it on, how would we like put it through our data pipeline, what we would need to do to show the most accurate location to the customer Just that part of the data cleansiness and what's coming from the tracker. We learned so much that now they can trust it 100%. And if customer is turning 10,000 trackers, if one doesn't work and they just put another one, that's okay. But if they're working with a competitor and they have 1,000 and 200 are not turning on or 200 are not working, that's a problem. Right like that. That. That reliability always needs to be there. It sounds simple but it's hard to get to that 0.01 percent reliability on trackers, on hardware, and then we just keep focusing on that and keep doing the right thing and improving and improving, cutting down costs. That every time we cut down costs we bring it to the customer reduces. Like we went from solo 5g to this new one called solo light, with less features.
Krenar Komoni:Now we have more shippers using it and I believe that today I'm not going to give you the national number we shipped. It was the largest month that we shipped in january, I think you know from the press releases we shipped two million trackers already as of november. But I believe we're the largest real-time tracking company on shipments in the world. I don't think anybody else has shipped more real-time. There's more passive loggers and these usb loggers with temperature that people ship, but real-time with cellular connectivity you can see the shipment. I don't think anybody has shipped more real time trackers in the world than us and that is just growing exponentially because the just the thirst, the demand for this is so big and I think it's going to start getting.
Krenar Komoni:What I'm excited about is once it starts permeating and cross workloads and workflows with other customers and what they do and how they use it and they start putting into into the systems they try to do proof of delivery. Maybe they they try to really understand how carriers are working. They start to get our some other tertiary actions from this. I think this is going to grow a lot. But back to simplicity, like you had molo right, ship molo. What would you think was the most basic thing you had to get done right? Ship Molo, what would you think was the most basic thing you had to get done right? Because your business wasn't that sexy either. Right, it was brokerage.
Krenar Komoni:But you had to do one thing really well, we had to deliver the loads Exactly. But sometimes the brokers forget, like some startup brokerages that start, they forget about that simple thing. They start building tech and software and all these things and then the customer is like frustrated because the load didn't make it, the carrier didn't show up well, what's interesting about that?
Andrew Silver:now that I think about my own situation there is, I feel like the biggest problem a lot of brokers have is trying to stand out too much and trying to make it sound so fancy and so different and so unique that they kind of lose the plop a little bit and certainly, you know, end up investing too much in trying to build things that are different, where, like, there's still just value in delivering the freaking loads on time and, uh, you know, I think part of what I think shippers appreciated about us and certainly when I was going in to talk to shippers is like it wasn't a bunch of fluff, it was just like hey, here's the deal, you tell us what your expectations are around pickup and delivery and we're going to meet them and if there's any issues on the front end, we will let you know and communicate effectively.
Andrew Silver:Wasn't the sexiest pitch, but, um, it catered to exactly what I think a lot of them were looking for and I think that's why we were able to grow quickly is because we kind of understood their problems and brought them simple solutions yeah handled it?
Andrew Silver:I'm curious, because you have a business that's both hardware and software. Yeah, what does the team look like? Where's the org structure in a business like that? You mentioned 100 employees in Kosovo. What does the whole organization look?
Krenar Komoni:like. We have 250 total. 100 are in Kosovo, around 60, 70 probably in Boston. Here we're headquartered where I am right now, and then we have companies. That's the global scale of the business, even though the size is in tens of millions of dollars. It's quite astounding. Actually we have an office in Norway, office in Kosovo, office in Mexico, office in South Africa and in Boston. So have five offices. We have employees all over the world Switzerland, germany, south Africa, mexico, chile, you name it globally, australia and we are warehouses all over the world California, chicago, boston, mexico City, hong Kong, netherlands, rotterdam, just South Africa, kosovo. It's all over.
Krenar Komoni:It's quite complex as a business to be able to meet Because supply chain is not just domestic right. When people ship, they ship all over the world, they ship from every country to every country. So we have to be able to meet that demand. But as far as hardware, software, it was actually very small on the hardware side, quite large on software and that has stayed proportional. Maybe it's one to two, maybe even one to three, one hardware engineer per three software engineers. But that team is pretty nimble right now on product and engineering side. And sales go-to-market team is large like almost 50 people. I have 30 salespeople.
Andrew Silver:Why do you have an office in South Africa?
Krenar Komoni:We have a team there and we have quite a bit of sales there. A lot of citrus comes out of there.
Andrew Silver:Really.
Krenar Komoni:Yeah, interesting. No-transcript. Yeah, interesting.
Andrew Silver:A few million bucks a year. So is that like you've kind of followed the customers to create offices around that process?
Krenar Komoni:Yeah, well, follow customers, acquisitions, all of that. So Kosovo was obviously natural to me because I was born there and I wanted to build an office there, and cost also makes a lot of sense and we've been able to grow that team and I'm very, very proud of that, like that is a huge accomplishment. And, top of all, the servicing customers and being able to show I mean, we're looked upon as a great company back home and people really want to work for us and I love that and we're going to continue to keep that culture. But Norway Office is because we bought tag sensors. Was a company that built these tags that are the world's thinnest temperature sensor? Oh wow, south africa, because we started growing there, mexico, a lot of produce. You said yourself, don't you? Uh, for example, a lot of produce comes out of mexico. We have to have a warehouse. We have to be able to invoice from mexico just a lot of customers there in Latin America. So we built it there and then, yeah, that's it.
Andrew Silver:What have been the biggest challenges in building such an international company?
Krenar Komoni:Biggest challenges, I believe, are finding the right people, as I don't think is anything else. It's the right people to lead those departments, those countries run under them, operationally effectively, to be able to trust them on what they're doing. To be able to find people who know what they're doing. Find people who know what they're doing. They know how to bring in product in and out, they know how to run a business there. Obviously, they're all part of Tive, but that's the biggest challenge. I've tried it in Turkey, I've tried it in Brazil, I've tried it in Spain, I've tried it in other countries. They've all failed because of people, but these ones have succeeded quite a bit because of people.
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Andrew Silver:I love it. My forum is great, it's. Uh, there's six, we're adding a seven person now. But, um, anyways, me and another guy were helping a third person prepare for an exploration he was going to do and he was talking about the identity of his business and the culture of his business and how he made some changes at the executive level. Blah, blah, blah. But the reference that one of my friends made was to the book good to great, but I think Jim Collins.
Krenar Komoni:Jim Collins.
Andrew Silver:And he's like one of the first things he talks about is it's who over? What is a priority? And like getting the right people is way more important than what the hell you're building or selling or anything like that. So just kind of an ode to your commentary right there, because I think I agree with it. At the end of the day, it's like you have to have the right people on your team. When you look to your left and your right, are these people who you trust implicitly? Are these people who you know will do whatever it takes? Are these people who, like, are smart and creative and problem solvers? It just makes your life a lot easier, um, if you have a team like that.
Andrew Silver:So how have you kind of gone about building culture in this business? You mentioned culture a few minutes ago and I'm curious, like I feel like it would be really hard to. I think building culture in a remote environment in general is close to impossible to get to what you really want. But especially, you know you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're. It's got to be hard. When you're globally remote like that, with offices in South Africa, in Kosovo, in Mexico, how do you keep people connected. What does the Tide culture look like?
Krenar Komoni:Culture is a big, big piece here, and I would say every business has culture warriors and protectors, and I have a few in my company that would die to protect our culture. Otherwise it doesn't work right. It's not only me being the warrior of our culture and trying to defend it, because cultures can get destroyed by toxicity by people, by other agendas that don't make any sense and that ruins companies. So how? Communication? Making sure that those leaders are the ones who embody the values that company has? Sometimes people don't have 100% the values that are aligned to you as a human, but as far as the company's values, you want to make sure that they're aligned to those, and we have, like, our number one value is transparency, which is very important.
Krenar Komoni:I still remember when I was young, before I even started time, I read ray dalio's like principles and transparency was a huge thing. And now we build bridgewater house. I'm like one day when I build a company uh, bridgewater associates one day when I build a company, I'm gonna build it with transparency being the number one thing, and that's what we've done. But you want those folks, the leaders, to protect. And then you want to communicate.
Krenar Komoni:I have quarterly all meeting just with the kosovo team just with the norway team, just with I mean they keep in touch quite a bit with south africa's note, those teams are not as big with south africa and mexico and other employees and just get a pulse of. And then I mentioned there's a few culture warriors in my company that I can call and know exactly how the vibe is and what's happening and how everybody's kind of feeling the way the company should feel. You don't want to lose touch with that as a CEO because sometimes you just are focused on numbers and the results and trackers and product and software and selling but you want to get on the touchy-feely emotional stuff of the company and how that is affecting everybody's moods because that remotely is hard. But with those warriors I think you can keep it going.
Andrew Silver:And they don't have to be leaders by the way they can be. They have to be leaders, they don't have to be managers. Correct way.
Krenar Komoni:They can be. They have to be leaders. They don't have to be managers Correct, yeah, they have to be. You're right. They don't have to be title leaders Correct.
Andrew Silver:I'm with you there. I want to dig in on the transparency piece for just a second because I'm a big believer in transparency and I've seen the value of it in my business and there's something really special about seeing a moment in time where you like recognize how much an employee is appreciating like a very intentional thing that you're doing for your business, Like if you're intentionally overtly explaining why you did this or why you do that. There's an example where you're being very transparent and you can see how much a team appreciates that and then you see the benefit of that. So I'm curious if you have any of those examples where you kind of leaned into transparency and you actually saw the benefit of that and how your team responded to whatever that situation was yeah I mean the hardest ones.
Krenar Komoni:I think you know they're. They're layoffs sometimes. Sometimes, when you make leadership changes, those are the hardest ones to to explain, and leaders and ceos who just wash them out or brush paint them and put some fluffy words around what's happened. I think they just every employee can detect ingenuity. I mean, we're all smart people and you want to be genuine, you want to be transparent about what's happening. I think that goes a long way, but as a perfect example, honestly and I know we were a small team, but but as a perfect example, honestly and I know we were a small team, but in 2019, we were running out of money. I'd raised $5 million. Our trackers weren't selling that much. This is like that old tracker. And in 2018, I did layoffs. I went from 16 people down to eight or seven or something like that 16 to eight or 16?
Krenar Komoni:Yeah 16, one six.
Krenar Komoni:Like it's not, it was not a huge team back then Half the company Still, and then we were like kind of went down to almost six people in 2019. But July of 2019, we had $20,000 in the bank. And then in June I told the folks like guys, team, everyone, next month we have $20,000 in the bank. I am going to work day and night to raise money. But if we do not raise money, you guys will go to half pay. I will get no salary. And then I'm confident, like in a month I'll figure it out, but next two weeks and two weeks after that is going to be at least half pay just to survive because we get. We had some accounts receivable, right, but it was tiny like five thousand four thousand dollars, nothing.
Krenar Komoni:They and I told them I'll give you some stock options to stay. And I didn't get any stock options for myself, which I maybe should have, but that's okay. But I was really believing in doing the right thing. I gave stock options to the employees and they really appreciated the transparency. But those times, man, I've talked to 150 angel investors, vcs, in a matter of a few weeks and I finally raised like a hundred thousand dollars on a secured convertible note. Secured Like the guy could take the company over if I failed. And it was, the valuation was half the valuation of the previous round, but we survived. But the team stuck. And the biggest lesson I remember and I've told this to lennon he's our vps software now watching lennon and I and I've told this to the team come into the office during those two weeks. Right, this is like pretty much nothing. It's.
Krenar Komoni:It's like we're we're about to die almost yeah, and he's coming and he's watering the flowers that we have in the office. I'm like man, this is like this, is it? The guy believes everybody believes we're still keeping this thing going. I'm gonna fight every single day. And I also asked myself like, if this company goes bankrupt bankrupt, am I willing to figure out a way to buy back from investors with whatever money I have in the bank to start it again? And the answer was like yes. And if the answer is yes, I'm just going to keep going. But that's that was, I think, the pinnacle of transparency that's incredible, that's just really cool.
Andrew Silver:Just to see where you are now, nearly six years, five and a half years later, having just raised $40 million, doing that much in annual revenue from where you were then, I mean that's just exceptional. It's a cool story. What was the turnaround point? I mean there's got to be a point from there where you and these six folks like something changed what was it.
Krenar Komoni:I think I already talked about that. That's the cold calls, that's the product, that's building the single use like one and done tracker. That is like getting in the trenches with your customers and building what they are actually begging for. And that's what changed it, because that's when we started shipping thousand trackers like Helmo Logistics I remember their big 3PL in Germany. They're like wait, we got to ship stuff from Mexico to US. We need thousand trackers. I'm like what really? They were a huge believer and then Ball Logistics and a bunch of 3PL started also using us. It was that was the turning point.
Andrew Silver:What are the products that make the most sense for your product to be used for, for your trackers to be used for.
Krenar Komoni:So many Andrew, you won't believe like it's most sense Produce so high level. It's like four categories that we produce food produce, pharma, life science, high value, industrial and 3pls, right logistics companies, brokers that use us on on as far as verticals. But produce makes sense because temperature sensitivity, life science, pharma makes sense for temperature sensitive. High value makes sense because temperature sensitivity, life science, pharma makes sense for temperature sensitivity. High value makes sense because they need to know theft, all those issues and logistics companies. They're trying to provide much better value across all those verticals and also stay on top of their game by providing this to their customers.
Krenar Komoni:But what do we track? Track strawberries, raspberries, bananas, lettuce, servers, laptops, smartphones, cards, expensive cards, credit cards, expensive documents. We track spacex, space parts, rocket parts for both biggest players in the world. We track. Come on some other fun examples. Well, vaccines, astrazeneca, shipments in Australia we tried those. We try various drugs. We track. I can keep going on and on. But those are the like glucose meters that people use it. They're there, their houses and their bodies. Uh, we track those. We track um things that do ar and vr glasses that people use these days. I can keep going on and on.
Andrew Silver:Yeah, no, that's cool. What? What works like? When I think about you calling, I don't know any one of these customers trying to get in to their network as a tracking provider. I guess this isn't necessarily something they're doing today. It's like my brokerage mindset is, when I call the shipper, I was trying to replace someone. In a lot of cases it feels like you're not replacing someone, you're like a whole new investment they have to make. How challenging is that to get buy-in from decision makers? Because it seems like it's a new spend category to some extent to some, but 40 it's replace, by the way and when I say replace huh yeah, because they're putting some kind of temperature sensor.
Krenar Komoni:they have to know the temperature of that load. Maybe it's not real-time, so we're replacing passive to real-time Got it 40%. We're replacing some competitors that we have which are literally large out there. I mean it's Carrier and Emerson. Those are our competitors.
Andrew Silver:Interesting.
Krenar Komoni:So we're 40% of the time replacing, but more than half of the time like close to 60% of the time we're new and we have to show value. We have to do like a quick pilot and a trial and they see the value. They're like oh my God. Then during the pilot they're catching issues. They're seeing delays, they're seeing brokers doing things or maybe that they were not supposed to do. They're seeing sometimes theft live during a pilot and obviously then they sign up.
Krenar Komoni:But a customer that ships metal copper they used to be on phone calls nonstop with their carriers, with their brokers, with their logistics companies trying to find them with a load, and they would get back a call two, three hours later. Not ship them all, obviously, but there's like there's so many out there and they would get frustrated like you know what. I'm just gonna put this tracker on top of the load. I know where my copper is and I don't have to worry about it. If there's a delay I can see it. Now I can be proactive, send somebody to pick up a load if it fell over or something happened and save thousands and thousands of dollars.
Andrew Silver:that is um, but 60 of the time is new and is it just game over if you get to a pilot?
Krenar Komoni:nah, eight to nine out of ten, yeah, but one out of two to one to two times. Either they just can't figure out the spend, or the champion is not really fully bought in, or the key Kent, or she can't get everybody bought in the company. But I would say seven, eight, nine times out of 10, it's, we're locked in. Yeah, I mean I believe it's addictive. Imagine it's like it's, it's addictive. Why? Because if you see, do you want to unsee.
Andrew Silver:Yeah, I get it. That makes sense. Do you? I mean, do you run into? Are you competing with four kites? Macro point no, or is that a?
Krenar Komoni:whole different. It is really different. Four kites, macro point, shipio, project 44. They're not different, it's just it's. It's, I would say, different. Right now we really don't compete.
Andrew Silver:Interesting.
Krenar Komoni:It feels like it's similar enough but the best way I could say it is in a high level, without going obviously condition monitoring, temperature, shock light, they can't do Well they can't do certain things you can do for sure. Right, if you forget that and you just say location. If you are a shipper and you want to know 100%, ground truth data on what's happening with your loads not 60, not 70, not 80, not 90, but 100% you have to use Triders.
Andrew Silver:Because the alternative. Why are they? Why are the alternatives like a 60, 70, 80%?
Krenar Komoni:I mean because you're using a lot of different carriers, right? How many carriers do you work with at ShipMulti? Probably thousands, yeah thousands. They all have different telematics. And then maybe last minute, the tractor that's supposed to pick up a load, you have to bring another carrier to pick up that load, because now, good luck connecting to that LRAPI, it's too late. You put something wrong in the TMS. You don't get 100%, you just can't.
Andrew Silver:Well, yeah, I mean that was always. The challenge is a lot of the shippers used like a Forkites Forkites is a great company as a broker you could not get to that 100%. You could get 100% tracked or you could get high, 90% tracked. You could not get to 100% tracked on consistency, at least in an earnest, honest way. The consistency piece of from the point it was put on the, the freight was put on the truck until it delivered, there was no brakes in the tracking. It wasn't possible. The drivers made it impossible. So I definitely see why putting a physical tracker in the freight itself is as close to well, it is as ground truth as you're going to get.
Krenar Komoni:As ground truth as we're going to get. Yeah, how do you think about the future? How do you think about what you're going to get?
Andrew Silver:as ground truth as we're gonna get. Yet how do you think about the future? How do you think about what you're building like? Is it enough, I guess, to think of it from two perspectives. Is it enough to just keep your core product, keep updating it and keep improving the software and just sell until sell to every possible company out there and that's the path?
Krenar Komoni:Or do you need to be developing new products to go in addition to what you have today? Yeah, think of us as I know it's in the consumer space, but think of us as Apple, and Apple has the whole ecosystem.
Andrew Silver:That's a bold claim to start with. I mean just because of hardware.
Krenar Komoni:Yeah, thank you, because of hardware, software, ecosystem, right, the whole thing. It's not just software, it's not just hardware, it's the whole ecosystem and our big bet is that, as trackers become more cost effective, because one day there'll be $10, one day there'll be 10 bucks, one day there'll be five bucks and I'll tell you a story, by the way, with your father when he reached out to me and how I met him, because it has to do with low-cost trackers. One day they'll go down. I think they'll be in more and more and more shipments and it'll be more and more into workflows of brokers, shippers, carriers, so that the supply chains, right can be, be more automated, because now you have ground truth data and that software gets built up, whether it's through APIs that we build and connect to other systems, because there's a lot of systems out there. That's why there's so many TMSs, that's why so many WMSs, or the systems that we build are tools and workflows that make people's lives easier. But our bet is that this ecosystem, that being very well hooked between hardware and software, is the best way to go instead of just having hardware, that's, any kind of hardware with any kind of software, that tissue starts to break down and you don't know who to blame.
Krenar Komoni:You don't have one throat to choke as a customer. Is it the tracker that failed? Is it the platform that failed? You don't know, but where it's going. You have to build new products. We're going to build more cost-effective products. We're building a tracker now that's going to be specific for life sciences, which will announce soon. We're building we we did this one, which is a really low cost temperature tracker, which is not real time, by the way, right now, but eventually probably will turn for those on audio.
Andrew Silver:Again, he's showing us a piece of paper. Essentially it is a piece of paper, and I'm surprised that it can somehow track temperature, but it is. That is what it is. So just for those on the audio, that's what he's showing.
Krenar Komoni:It stores 5000 points of temperature. You can read it with a phone doesn't send it because there's no sim card or cellular here but it stores 5 000 points. It lasts for more than a year on a battery. It's and you can reuse it if you want to. But yeah, we got a constant, continuous innovation on hardware, continuous development of software. And why the analogy of apple? You're not using iphone 2g right now. You're not using the 3gs and the 4s and the 5s and the 6 of the 7.
Krenar Komoni:We're an iphone 15 pro, max, 15, 16 pro now and we're gonna have to be doing the same thing solo 5g, solo light and it's gonna be after that, another solo 5g and another solo light, and every year, two years, we're gonna innovate, um, and I think that builds a very big moat, is very difficult and it builds a lot of trust with our customers and I think we're we're gonna build a pretty big company yeah, that's good.
Andrew Silver:That's awesome. I'm curious, like you mentioned the moat, I'm how easy would it be for someone to just rip this off as costs get cheaper and cheaper and just create the same type of concept?
Krenar Komoni:um, it's not as easy as it looks right, because if you think of we can start, when I started the company I'm like like, oh, it's just a GPS tracker. Let me just build a GPS tracker in my basement but it took five, six years to really get to product market fit and then to really scale about almost 10 years, I would say on hardware and software, certifications and knowledge and base based. Like, even if I started a company from scratch myself with all the knowledge that I have, it would take close to two years to even get close to where we are Not with customers and everything, but maybe like somewhat close to the product. But software has evolved so much now. Trackers have evolved and knowledge that we have has evolved so much. On all the failures that we've done and all the intricacies that we've learned. You can't that's something. It's like almost a lot of trade secrets build up.
Andrew Silver:At Molo we built a great company and I'm proud of the work we did. We knew when to ask for help and sometimes that meant going outside of our own company. I'm proud we built an ecosystem of trusted partners like Metafora. When we needed differentiated industry expertise in business consulting or technology services, we looked at Peter Ryan and the team at Metafora. They've consistently delivered value in the transportation and logistics space for over a decade for mid-market and enterprise brokers, for shippers, carriers, private equity and freight tech companies. At Molo we use Metafora to solve problems we simply couldn't on our own.
Andrew Silver:Metafora is the only partner you should trust to help you win, whether that's doing ops and tech diligence, growing revenue, optimizing spend or selecting and building software. Go check them out at Metaforanet. That's M-E-T-A-F-O-R-A dot net. Yeah, do you have some kind of vision for what you think visibility looks like in supply chain over time? Like you know, in 10 years, with like AI, iot stuff, where do you see visibility going in general? I'm curious if you have any interesting or hot takes or what your perspective is as one of the main players in visibility.
Krenar Komoni:So I do, I do a lot. The infinite game that I play with myself and I think every entrepreneur should play an infinite game with their company what happens 1,000 years from now, or 100 years from now, or 50 years from now, which is close to infinity of our business, if you think of visibility, if you think of tracking, if you think of shipments. Imagine if, like even 50 years from now, every single truck, every single trailer, every single container somehow has internet of things and connected there. If I asked you, would you be able to know that those strawberries that I put in that load or those onions that I put in that load or those servers that I put in the load are 100 in that load, in that trailer, in that tractor, in that container? You can't really say 100, even if you're're connected to all the APIs in the world, which is a very difficult thing to do, like even 50 years from now. I don't think that's going to happen, but imagine if it happened. You still won't be able to say these are 100% in that trailer. But if you put some kind of Internet of Things device on top of that palette and you get ground truth data, you can almost confidently say 99.999 of the time. That that is the ground truth data, what is truly happening with that palette and that, with that infinite game?
Krenar Komoni:When I think of it that way, I believe a lot, a lot, a lot more shipments are going to get tracked using devices. Obviously the devices will get cheaper. Obviously recycling will get solved. Obviously environmental things will get cheaper. Obviously recycling will get solved. Obviously environmental things will get solved. I mean, we throw a lot of things anyways today, but all those pieces will get better and better. So that's where I see and that's the bet that I have with time and with the company or in that future. Um, and I still remember, by the way, jeff, your dad cold, sending me a message on linkedin maybe around that time, 2018, ish, 2017 about trackers and he's like how much chief, can you get this? And I really he built something special right with coyote and then with what was the previous one, american backhaul, or what was the call backhaulers.
Krenar Komoni:Yeah, yeah, and I really wanted to learn from him and I flew to meet him because his son, who plays hockey, his name is brian brian. Yeah, he was playing in north dakota, I believe, probably, and it was. He's like I'm gonna be in north dakota, I'm watching my son. If you want to meet me, come meet me. I flew to. I forgot where, to be honest, maybe it was michigan or somewhere no like another no, not another state.
Krenar Komoni:What's the next? The michiganers? I still remember I drove for like three, four, five hours. It was a long drive and I stayed where he was staying. We met and then I watched the game. But just being close to jeff uh for a few hours and listening to him, I got a lot of advice from him I uh on how he built his business, how he thinks about building the business, what he wanted to do with mastery um wanted to create like really, really large TMS to be able to satisfy the largest brokers and largest shippers in the world.
Krenar Komoni:Um and I was like this I don't think anybody else can build it on this guy, but just being in his and he's doing it, but being in his presence, I, um, I, I just he has, he has a presence and I appreciate it a lot that he took his time to and I actually flew all the way there to meet him.
Andrew Silver:That's pretty cool. I appreciate you doing it. I mean I think it's cool that you did that. Um, yeah, I mean I remember talking to him about you years ago, I think he was, I think he was there was something he was thinking about a tracker for, and I think I gave him your name and said, like you should talk to this guy, he's, he's building some trackers. I don't know if it's any good because again, remember, my perspective back then was like I don't think this business goes anywhere.
Krenar Komoni:But but he was like when is this gonna be ten dollars? When is this gonna be ten dollars? I'm like one day, jeff, one day.
Andrew Silver:It's not there yet I actually remember that was always his point back to me too is like, as he's like it's got to be cheap. Unless it's like really cheap it's, it's it can't scale. Um, but clearly you've been able to scale the thing at, uh, by finding the right customers and and finding the right fit within their business because there is a need for it, right, yeah, so, um, where do we go from here? How, like, when you think about where the company is going? I mean, you talked about this kind of infinite game mindset. You talked about building some new products, getting the software to continue to develop. Go ahead. I was just going to say hey, hey on infinites.
Krenar Komoni:I sorry man on infinite. If you think of broke, where do you think brokerage goes? Infinite does. Do you think everything gets automatic?
Andrew Silver:everything gets automated I don't think everything gets automated, but I think all these companies like you, I saw you had drum kit and happy robot and vuma and all these companies doing ai stuff yeah, I mean there's a real question around how much of this ai stuff can be embedded and accepted and become an efficient part of the process of moving loads, versus what's a bubble and what's just a hype cycle, and I don't know the answer yet because, you know, I just interviewed paul singer from fleetworks last week.
Andrew Silver:Uh, his episode, I guess, will probably come out before yours. It should, I think. Um, just based on timing, um, and like I listened to him talk about his product and it's like okay, it seems like it makes sense, like it seems like drivers are okay talking to your ai agent and therefore there's a path there. But then, as I talked to him about the future, I asked him a question. I was like so is it reasonable to think that in a few years, if you're saying that your AI agent can call every trucking company as outbound calling so not just taking inbounds but also doing outbound calls if you're saying you can do that and every broker signs up to use you, won't every single carrier be getting like hundreds of calls a day by these ai agents?
Krenar Komoni:and he's like a spam he's like, yeah, probably.
Andrew Silver:And then I asked well, I'm sure so and I know david bell told me when I interviewed him from Clone Ops, which is a similar type of business, he's just getting started and Dave has had plenty of success building Lean, staffing other companies, smith. But Dave said I'm actually building for the carriers too and in my future I see the carriers. Ai is talking to the brokers AI and they're just going back and forth and having conversations and conversations and Vlad and dispatch is sitting back at his computer just kind of looking at the conversations happening and sorry I used the name Vlad, but that's a fair dispatcher.
Krenar Komoni:That is a fair one.
Andrew Silver:So I guess my point in all of this, in explaining this stuff, is I see value in AI to alleviate a lot of the work that a broker shouldn't necessarily or a carrier shouldn't necessarily have to do with them like manually. Yes, but I still think there's kind of there's there's kind of like you're the offensive coordinator of your own team, where you're like sitting up in the booth kind of managing who's doing what, um. So I still think there's people involved, yes, but I also think I think a lot of these things merge together. Like I think the assets and brokers kind of come together. I think the shippers start getting involved in brokerage soon, like I you know it makes sense. And what happens then? What happens when the largest shippers in the world, the big retailers, from the food guys to the um, you know, like the home depots of the world, if they all decide they want to get in bed with brokerage and start doing their own stuff, what does that future look like?
Krenar Komoni:do you know why they don't do it today? Because I've thought about it right, I've seen some shippers that they manage their carriers like they have 30, 40 carriers that have really good relationships and they just manage, but kind of acting like a broker. But why would a large company like home depot not just build their own brokerage? I guess it's a different business, it's not, though I don't think.
Andrew Silver:I mean I I don't really think it is a different business. I think it's the same business they're already in. I think it's tangential, I think it's it's, it's right there, um, and they have the leverage to maximize the opportunity within their business. I mean they have the relationships with all their vendors that they can say, hey, let us manage the transportation for you. They own the freight. So they can say to carriers hey, if you haul directly for us, you don't have to worry about us losing this freight to another broker. That's one of the biggest challenges is, as a broker.
Andrew Silver:I do all this work to get a contract lane from called Home Depot Sure, and I find Vlad's trucking and Vlad agrees to be my contract carrier on Atlanta to Jackson Mississippi. We set up a great relationship. Everything's working smoothly for the whole year. They execute, they do a great job. Then bid time comes out and I lose the lane to another broker who's 10 cents cheaper. Poor Vlad, his team did a great job. Now I got to tell him I don't have the freight anymore. So you got to go find somewhere else or call whoever got it. But if you're the owner of the freight and you're doing the brokering. There's some leverage there and you can kind of lean on that and I feel like carriers would be more open to working with a broker shipper because they do know they have more confidence They'll be able to keep the freight long term more guaranteed yeah yeah, so I mean, I don't know it's, it's but it's talking about ai, right, and, and all this.
Krenar Komoni:I mean ai is hungry for one thing, man, it's just it's really really good data and for ai to start working. Some of the like said there's some tasks that people do over and over again, like maybe a check call or figuring out where the load is. Did it make it, did it not make it? Ai should be able to just pull that data from time and figure out what is really happening with that load and if somebody calls where's the load, ai responds it's right here or what's happening with the load? Any issues? Ai responds no issues, everything is on, fine, it's going to get there XYZ, based on the timeline and ETA right now. Do you want me to call the trucker? Do you want me to do something? But if there is no good data, ai sucks right Like it just can't. You can't run AI on bad data.
Andrew Silver:Yeah, and it's funny because you talk about AI with this sense of calm and, I think, a lot of business owners who aren't the ones really selling AI we don't sell AI right now, I know, but let me get there.
Andrew Silver:A lot of business owners who don't sell it the ones who sell AI, of course are hyped about it. The ones who don't, who are trying to bring it in their business. Somehow there's bit more fear and it's like can I be replaced? But you've got a sense of calm and I imagine it's because you did the point you just made, which is, without good data, ai is useless and you are kind of the center of the data, right?
Andrew Silver:yes, you nailed it so I I realized this as we're talking, because you do have a sense of calm about you as you talk about this. So like talk to me a little bit about AI, how you think about it, fearful of the infinite game that I just played with you Right, because infinite game is AI.
Krenar Komoni:It eats us all alive. I don't know you play a game differently, but AI can't. It just dies on its vine without very good data, just dies on its vine without very good data and being the primary source of data and generating that, I believe that's gonna that thirst, that hunger of AI is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and people are going to compete fiercely, ferociously, whatever the word is out there in the marketplace to build, deliver best loads, have the best customer experience and compete in that marketplace. And as that starts to get, I would say, exponentially more challenging and more demanding, demanding, I think this, the need for this data, is going to be there and that's why I think we're really good position on AI. And that's why I think we're in a really good position on AI and that's why I talk with Calm about it, because AI cannot build a tracker and AI cannot go on a load and tell the load what is, cannot tell what the load is doing without knowing exactly what the load is doing.
Krenar Komoni:But AI can call people, can probably book loads, can arrange loads, can tell you where something is, maybe can do some of the tms work can connect to, can be like a bot. I mean there's startups out there that are bots, that copy paste stuff from your tms into spreadsheet and send it over email and take it from your email put it in tms book. A low like yeah, becomes like a human, but you still need that software. But a lot of the human like mundane things are starting to be done by ai, but at 10, 20 years from now I think we're in good place in 25 years there's going to be an ai podcast with an ai agent listening.
Andrew Silver:They're going to be playing that recording of you saying ai can't build hardware. It's just gonna be laughing at you and me, as as we're both. I'm pretty sure they are.
Krenar Komoni:No, I'm sure they're gonna laugh because think about it right, if ai wants the tesla, robots are built, the optimus or whatever he calls it. And then you have figure that the bright guy that built is building figure robots. They start building things. Ai starts building. Imagine these robots build their factories. They build the factories to build bulldozers. They build bulldozers to build warehouses. They build other factories. They start building their own chips and start building and transporting their own thing, not 25 years but 200, 300, 500 years from now.
Krenar Komoni:Yeah, they'll build their own hardware.
Andrew Silver:Yeah. So one more question on AI to get serious for a second. But I'm curious does it not make sense for you to go all in on AI as someone who sells it, leveraging your own data, like incorporating it, embedding it into your business more aggressively? Or you just feel like we are the data center? So if people want to plug in their AI stuff to us, they can?
Krenar Komoni:Not yet, but I think we will. Right now we're dabbling more in data science, machine learning, trying to get that part right so that we can really provide the right insights to our customers on what's happening with their lanes, with their routes, with their carriers, with their shipments, with their products. Once we get that right, I think the next phase is starting to delve a little bit on ai. But there's a lot of good players out there that we've got to start integrating to. Uh, but not immediately, I think. Yeah, that's one thing.
Krenar Komoni:I think, um, sequencing is very important on product building and company building, and what I mean by that as an example, is if I went after pharma companies first, I don't think I would be here. But I was like I'm going to go after the most cost sensitive shipper out there, which is food produce shipper, and if I cannot meet that demand, I shouldn't exist as a company. And let's meet that demand, let's focus on that, and then sequence after that is going to be life science and pharma afterwards. But if I went the other way around, it's almost impossible to go from a really high value tracker shipper down to tracking tomatoes and potatoes. No way, with your culture, your company, everything is impossible to to reverse, but the other way around, you could do a great job at it well, the other reason that's what I would say sequencing and ai is later yeah, but the other reason that's brilliant is because you know produce is its own infinite game.
Andrew Silver:You know produce is never going anywhere. People will always be eating produce and it's and it's got a short lifespan, so it's it's. You know there's always more and more.
Krenar Komoni:You want to hear a funny one infinite game I was like what if we're one day connected to matrix? I was like, well, still, those matrix things are gonna need food to survive food's always gonna be there.
Andrew Silver:Man, food is always gonna be there it's true even in matrix I mean, yeah, we used to say that like one of the things my dad said. You know, this is all these little anecdotes. I think about things he said over the years. But early in the coyote days I remember him telling me like yeah, our business is kind of recession proof, like we do a lot of food and beverage and a lot of beer, and he's like you know the you know recession, people still got to eat. They just might eat cheaper shit, and then they certainly tend to drink even more. Um and so like. As long as we're always haul a business, even in tough times, there's still always a need for it.
Krenar Komoni:And I would say the same thing at Tyve and that's what I love about the business man. Since I don't know, six, seven years, every single quarter we've grown, and it's because it's recession-proof. People need to eat, people need drugs. Loads move, transportation moves. It's just nonstopstop. You cannot not eat, and even in like, if you think of, even in the most tragic times of the planet, right during wars, goods move, man, maybe people don't move, maybe people are stuck in borders, maybe people cannot cross countries, but trucks with food, oh, they go through. With cigarettes, with whatever people need, they will go through. And transportation always, even in the most tragic times of the world, will move.
Krenar Komoni:As we wrap up here why don't you give us some advice for any aspiring entrepreneurs that want to get into the tech or logistics space, and or and or? I would say what I said earlier just get close to the customer, talk to customers early on. I didn't do as much early on I and I paid the price for it three years, four later, but then after that I never stopped. So I just get as close to your customer as possible early on. Learn as much. Don't fall in love with your technology. Don't fall in love with your product. Constantly iterate and I think you'll succeed. Let's just know like if you just keep doing that it's impossible not to. But you gotta believe and never, ever give up great well said.
Andrew Silver:That's a great one ad any part. Should we call it there or you got anything else no, I mean, I think this was uh.
Krenar Komoni:I really enjoyed it because you're a very real andrew talking about you. Remember? We talked a little bit about transparency. I used to watch your LinkedIn videos at Shipmolo quite a bit. I got to tell you those videos were so inspiring, even during COVID times, do you remember? You're always very genuine, you're very real and I just love talking to you and I love being here. So, thank you.
Andrew Silver:Thank you, man, I appreciate it. I think you've got a similar approach and it's been fun to see. It's just cool to see you, to see you winning. So I'm happy for you and the team at Tive. You guys have built a great business and more to come, clearly. So, yes, and with that Freepod audience, we're going to call it. Thank you so much, and we'll Freepod audience, we're going to call it. Thank you so much and we'll see you next week. You
