Ep. #68: Sean Henry, CEO & Founder, Stord

This week, Andrew is joined by Sean Henry, CEO and founder of Stord, a major player in omnichannel fulfillment and supply chain technology. In this episode, Sean shares his incredible entrepreneurial journey, which started by selling Christmas presents on eBay at age seven to launching Stord in 2015 as a student at Georgia Tech. In this episode, he reflects on the company’s early days, turning points, and what’s next following Stord’s recent $200 million fundraise and major acquisition of Ware2Go from UPS.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Sean on:

• How a few Christmas sales on eBay, plus a few other ventures, sparked his entrepreneurial drive and how mentors like Ted Alling shaped his approach to leadership.
• The founding premise of Stord: helping brands compete with Amazon-level logistics by offering flexible, tech-powered fulfillment solutions.
• How Stord evolved from an asset-light model to owning facilities and building a robust software platform to deliver a Prime-like experience to companies of all sizes.
• What it takes to make big business decisions, including how he thinks through market shifts, customer obsession, and staying committed to a long-term vision.
• His advice for entrepreneurs: don’t be afraid to ask, learn from people one step ahead, and “just start.” Iteration and momentum are everything.

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. ***

Chapters

• 0:00 Sponsor Introduction: Rapido Solutions
• 2:15 The influence of early mentors
• 7:59 Selling on eBay at 7 years old and other early ventures
• 11:30 Pre-college: lean management and the seeds of Stord
• 14:27 Decisions: get a degree or grow the business?
• 20:28 The original idea for Stord and problems solved
• 29:34 Selling the dream early on
• 35:17 Stord’s evolution and strategic pivots
• 46:36 Big decisions that didn’t pan out
• 53:42 The process of making big business decisions
• 59:45 Sean’s personal growth and challenges
• 1:09:55 The $200M fundraise and Ware2Go acquisition
• 1:27:24 Advice for the young, aspiring entrepreneur

Transcript

Andrew Silver: 0:00

Hey Freight Pod 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: 0:33

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 gorapido. com. That's gorapido. com.

Andrew Silver: 1:16

Welcome back to another episode of The Freight Pod.

Andrew Silver: 1:32

I'm your host, andrew Silver, joined today by, as usual, another special guest. They're all special. This one's maybe especially special, I don't know. These guys are coming off a couple big announcements between a large fundraise and an acquisition. Call him a prodigy. This kid was building businesses when he was like seven, or at least trying to. This is Sean Henry. I'm joined by today, the CEO and founder of Stord. Welcome to the show, sean. How are you doing?

Sean Henry: 2:00

Great to be here. Thanks for having me, man. Great to be here.

Andrew Silver: 2:04

Thanks for having me, man. So you know, your name first came across my purview, I guess, through Ted Alling, and Ted was one of my first guests and he's a mentor and an inspiration. He's just one of those guys that you look at and you're like man, I want to live my life like him. So I want to start there. He's so high on you and has said such great things about you, said I should get you on the show and so I'm just curious talk to me a little bit about your relationship to Ted and how you met him.

Sean Henry: 2:35

Yeah, absolutely. He is such an important part of our story as a mentor to me and an early believer in Stored and met us at the time more when you nailed it at the beginning of more trying to start businesses, not necessarily having major successes. I think it's easy to look at Stored, look at my age and assume a one-hit wonder you try something and you make it kind of thing, but you're spot on. I mean, I sold my first product on eBay in 2003 and then I had dozens of failed attempts at things or not necessarily failed, just never made it far and kept pivoting to the next thing, the next thing, until finally landing on Stored. And so I met Ted, very happenstance, in the earliest days of the company, while I was a student at Georgia Tech, my freshman year spring break, I was trying to use that week to go extra hard in the business and one of the things I was doing at the time was trying to reach out to founders, maybe like one stage ahead of me in a similar industry, to learn from and just say hey, I'm a young founder, I'm a student at Georgia Tech, I'm trying to build this business. I'd love to learn from you, specifically for X reason and through that I met Stephen Vlahos, one of the co-founders of Bellhops in Chattanooga, and he was basically like hey, you should come up to Chattanooga one day this week if you have time. I want to introduce you to a few folks and just kind of show you the lay of the land.

Sean Henry: 3:56

Ended up going to their office, walking down to what at the time was the Lamp Post Group office, now Dynamoo, which was kind of like ted barry allen's kind of family office area.

Sean Henry: 4:06

They were incubating businesses, trying new things, and um ted through, steven took the meeting and uh, uh, very fortunate that he believed in me and uh, loved the not necessarily the vision, because we were still very, uh, early stage, pivoting around, thinking through some ideas, but but maybe the experience and kind of upbringing and some of the kind of early education I had I did homeschool for two years.

Sean Henry: 4:32

It's an area I was able to spend more time on the computer and building some early businesses and that's something he was doing with his kids, and so he really just hit it off and bonded and he was like you should stay an extra day. I want to show you X, y Z, introduce you to these people. And at the end he said by the way, I'm about to launch this program called Dynamo, where we're going to start as an accelerator program, incubate businesses, invest a small amount of capital to help businesses get off the ground, move to Chattanooga for a little bit. I'd love for you to move to Chattanooga. And I was like man, this guy's just trying to sell me to move to chattanooga because he's obsessed with this city.

Andrew Silver: 5:04

Uh he's like the unofficial. He's like the unofficial mayor of chattanooga. I've never seen someone higher on their own city than than ted exactly.

Sean Henry: 5:12

We used to walk around and joke like if only I had a shirt that says I know ted all like you could get in anywhere in chattanooga, you could do anything. Um, and it came just out over the next few months like, no, this guy's not just obsessed with Chattanooga, like they are building something special, he cares deeply about us. There are real reasons to go there and we ended up in the program and I'll just kind of put a pin in it with while obviously since then we've raised a lot of money, have a lot of investors, board members, advisors, et cetera, ted has always been one of those kind of personal, deep friends as much as business friends, the person that checks in on you at family events, holidays, reaches out when he knows something's wrong. And I was telling a story I think it was a different maybe it was a podcast I was talking about this recently but I hadn't thought about it a while which is he really leads from the front lines and I think that's what's so special about him.

Sean Henry: 6:03

And someone was asking me how did you get early sales success at store?

Sean Henry: 6:08

And I said we actually did a lot of cold calling and cold emailing early on and part of it was because of the Dynamo connection where they had started a freight brokerage prior and it was very much a smile and dial, cold calling oriented culture.

Sean Henry: 6:21

And I remembered I hadn't thought about it in a while. There was a day in the Dynamo Accelerator program where Ted just paired himself off hour by hour with each business and said I'm just going to sit down with you and make cold calls. He doesn't even know these companies, he doesn't necessarily know what they do as well as the founders, he definitely doesn't know how to sell it as well, but he knows people and he wanted to show kind of that fearlessness, just be willing to call, be willing to ask who, what department should I talk to? I want to talk about X, y, z and just put yourself out there. And I think that was really special because it opened Jacob and I's eyes early on to the importance of kind of outbound sales, cold calling, cold emailing and more, but more importantly, the culture building of showing your team you're willing to do anything you're asking them to do.

Andrew Silver: 7:05

Yeah, I think you nailed it. I think that's one of the things that Ted just does so well, that concept of leading from the front. He's so facey and what I mean by that is you see him at the front of his business doing whatever it takes, and I think that kind of willingness to get your hands dirty on the hardest jobs, showing your team members that you're willing to do it and how to do it, is a lesson I took from him too that I think anyone in our industry can learn from and benefit from. So I appreciate you kind of just walking through that connection to Ted. So you mentioned earlier that you sold your first product when you were seven or something on eBay. Talk to me a little bit about, like, what was going on there and then a little bit of your just kind of upbringing that had such an entrepreneurial itch and what that was like.

Sean Henry: 8:00

Yeah, for sure. I always joke to people it sounds fake, but thankfully I still have the same eBay account and so I can still see the. Oh, you can't see it here, but it says member since 2003 up at the top there. It's real.

Sean Henry: 8:15

I was seven years old and so I wouldn't say it was an intentional journey, but I got a few critical presents that I was not perfectly satisfied with, and my reaction was well, I've stumbled upon eBay. I've bought a few things there. I should try selling something there, and so I listed these products just pulled like stock images off. Google sold them for maybe like 25% the retail value and I'm like it's free money to me. I didn't purchase these things and then ask my parents hey, can you drive me to the UPS or the post office and help me ship these? And hey, I don't have a bank account or any digital wallet. If you pay me some cash, can you transfer this out to your bank and you can give me some conversion ratio and save some money? And they were pissed. Who are you interacting with on the internet? It was a lot less trusted, I feel like in the early 2000s. You're going to get kidnapped. What are you doing? We bought you these presents they were worth a lot more than this, but thankfully they've always been very supportive in terms of, like we want to enable our kids to follow their passions, learn from the front lines, experiential learning and things like that and so they kind of leaned into it and I think at the time it was just a function of I'm very kind of like math, engineering oriented. I love everything kind of mechanical.

Sean Henry: 9:33

I've always been breaking apart cars, car engines, car parts, phones, all sorts of things. My favorite show growing up was how it's Made, and so I was always trying to, like, get involved in building things, manufacturing things, and so I kind of started selling on eBay just whatever I had around, whatever I could convince friends and family like, oh, I'll consign that for you essentially. And I basically started quite literally the boring business of putting up those flyers that are like we'll buy junk electronics and phones, computers and phones, and I was just breaking them down for parts and selling the parts on eBay, liquidating them, repairing some and selling them as working devices, because I was in middle school now at that point and I wanted to buy a nice phone, a nice computer, and that was my way to do it? Fast forward to high school. I wanted to buy my first car and so I kind of pivoted to automotive parts and, hey, maybe if I get involved in this kind of value chain I can learn more about it and eventually afford this. I actually bought my first car off eBay in the eighth grade, way before I could drive, just using the few thousand dollars I had accumulated, telling my parents like I'm going to repair this and restore this in our garage for the next few years until it works for me to drive. It was an old Toyota. Thankfully it did. They ended up making me sell it because they were like wait a second, do we really want our 16-year-old driving a car he just fixed himself in our garage and airbags and all sorts of things? But I'm going a little too detailed.

Sean Henry: 10:59

I think the point is I was trying a lot. I was trying to build apps. In high school. I had tried to source so many different products. I was doing drop shipping on different websites. I had my own website selling specialty Porsche, mercedes and Audi's parts, and all these were just kind of fun hobbies on the side of school and really, as I was getting towards college, I was buying a lot of automotive parts.

Sean Henry: 11:22

That was my main business in high school and I approached this one company. I was buying a lot of automotive parts, that was my main business in high school and, uh, I approached this one company I was buying from, huoco, and just said, hey, I'd love to meet your, your CEO, I'd love to get to know the business. I met their founder, or sorry, their CEO, chris, who, uh, was from Germany but happened to be moving to Atlanta. They had a factory in Mableton, georgia, and his kids were going into I think it was middle school and he wanted to give them some international experience. And they said he's actually going to come out to the US in a few months. You should meet him at the factory. I think he laughed me out of the office almost that I was their youngest and smallest customer and basically, what is this? But, like Ted, I'm very thankful that he believed in me and leaned in and I basically said for two years after that I'll do anything at this business. I want to work for you for free, I want to learn how you built this empire and just teach me your ways, so to speak.

Sean Henry: 12:09

And it was kind of weeks before my summer, before college. I got like 13, I think it was, or maybe it was more plane tickets in my inbox out of nowhere and I was just like what is going on here? He was like, all right, your job starts next week, you're going to fly to Germany for two months, then you're going to go do this and this and this. And so it was Germany, france, mexico, canada, enterprise, alabama, mableton, georgia. They had 23 factories or 21 factories in 19 countries. And I had to call him and be like you know, I have class starting in two months. I can't actually do this whole schedule, but let's figure it out, let's move some of the flights, let's do it.

Sean Henry: 12:48

And that was an incredible experience. It was basically lean management in factories, trying to figure out how to reduce cycle time for the machines, how to reduce the amount of steps workers were taking, how to improve the throughput, how to reduce the maintenance for the machines, but really more. Hey, germany is our kind of like global standard. Go figure out a process playbook and kind of budget to get each other facility operating at that standard. Because there was a lot of acquired facilities in that business.

Sean Henry: 13:16

And so I mean, I literally my first week of class at Georgia Tech took a one-day flight back to Germany to do a presentation to their board, explain one of the budgets for the facilities and come back and I was joking to them like don't you know about online meetings?

Sean Henry: 13:30

And it was just not part of their culture. My point in sharing all of this depth is I was trying so much, I felt like I had so much work experience, but also I was at the front line and it was just very hard to go back, sitting exclusively in class and not working on anything kind of as you and I were just talking about, and saying you know what? I'm just going to start building something, and I didn't necessarily start store to say this is going to be a massive startup. I'm going to raise venture dollars and so on and so forth, just like the dozens of things I had tried prior was more. Here's a problem. Here's how, in a very capital efficient way, I can kind of insert myself in the value chain and get involved and it started to grow from there.

Andrew Silver: 14:10

I mean it's fascinating, I don't even. So. Was it pretty clear to you then, almost from day one at college, that this was not going to be your path and that you know you were meant to be kind of in the thick of in the arena, kind of building and fixing and and doing things. I mean, how, like, how did you think about the kind of traditional path of going to school, given that you know you've been homeschooled in the past and you know within a week of getting on campus you're planning day trips to germany?

Sean Henry: 14:43

yeah, I think, uh, he definitely screwed me up when it came to college. I think that really threw a wrench in it. But I was very fortunate that I'd gotten into some great schools, some very expensive schools, an Ivy League or two, and I was looking at that more like, wow, is this really the culture I want to go to? Do I want to go be in this college town so isolated away from kind of the city, the vibrant environment? Frankly, connections I had made like Chris at that point and saying I'm going to go reset somewhere. So I was incredibly fortunate that I had both the in-state and then the Dean's Scholarship at Georgia Tech, so it was free for me and I even had some capital from that scholarship. That was helpful for housing and off-campus things like that too. And so that was very much my initial like okay, I'm going to college for free, it's an incredible school. I'm not going to say I don't like college, I'm not going to go.

Sean Henry: 15:36

But once it started to be, the trade-off of the business was growing. I started at first semester freshman year. I started it first semester freshman year. I took my summer off and my first semester sophomore year off just to work on the business. So I only completed, I think, three actual class semesters at Georgia Tech. But by that third one, when I wrapped up and I was actually starting a fourth, the business now was a few million in revenue. We were raising our $2.5 million seed round. I had employees at an office I was going back and forth to multiple times a day and I just felt a little bit like an analogy, maybe like an athlete, where I'm like, am I really going to not take my offer to go pro because I really just want to round out my degree first.

Sean Henry: 16:21

Like the switching cost or trade-off cost of not pursuing this opportunity right now when I've already grown it as much as I can, while doing both is going to be something I regret and I've always loved the kind of regret minimization framework of like go to your 80 90 on your deathbed. Which of these two would you regret more? And I was like I will definitely regret not going all in on the business and, uh, my simple statement to myself and to Georgia Tech, who was incredibly gracious about it. I mean, since then I've given the commencement speech, I'm on the board, they just invested in the business, they've been incredibly close to us and I'm very thankful for that.

Sean Henry: 17:01

What I said to them was this is not at all that I don't believe you're a great school. It's simply opportunity cost and I can either do two things okay with part of my ability, or I can go all in on one thing, and I think we all know going all in on one thing is really the way you get alpha and maximum outcome for it. So let me do this now, and I'd love to come back if anything doesn't work. Thankfully it started working and we were growing rapidly. But it's kind of funny because I did get the Thiel Fellowship, which is the kind of Peter Thiel pay you to drop out of college for at least two years, et cetera. But I did get it after I was already been dropped out of college for two years. I was kind of like sure I'll take the capital in the network, but I kind of already stepped out on my own.

Andrew Silver: 17:47

I mean, I was going to ask what it was like trying to convince your parents, family, that you know this was the move, but you just so eloquently explained the kind of pros and cons that I feel like it probably wasn't that hard for you.

Sean Henry: 18:01

I think I had to give everything I just said plus a little bit more. I promise I'll go back if it doesn't work, Don't worry, this will just be a one or two semesters, We'll see what happens. But I think that it was right around that $2.5 million seed round, which was incredibly validating to them and my whole family, and again, they were supportive from day one. And by the time I think that it would have been necessary to maybe consider what's next. We were raising our Series A, which ended up $12.5 million.

Sean Henry: 18:29

A great firm Kleiner Perkins and even my parents had heard of it from kind of decades of being around and maybe seeing it on the news or things like that, and so I think all those proof points just continued to make them say amazing. But even that statement sounds like there was some hesitance for them. I would give them all the credit in the world that it's all back to that kind of like experiential lifelong learning. They were very much like we don't want to spend our money on like your frivolous, flashy, fancy, fun type stuff. We want to spend it on education and you get a hands-on and experiencing things for yourselves, making money for yourselves and so on, and so I think that so long as they knew I had the right intention and a good path, they weren't overly fearful of leaving school.

Andrew Silver: 19:15

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. 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. So take me to the kind of original idea for Stored and how it came about.

Sean Henry: 20:20

Yeah, so one of our core values today is learn and iterate, and it very much comes from this, exactly that We've always said we're very solution sorry, exact opposite. We've always said we're very problem obsessed, meaning we want to make sure we're fixing this problem and we're happy to be flexible about the solution and the details. And so we've taken a winding path over the years and if you kind of snapshot stored at any given time, we look somewhat like a different business. And so my kind of starting insight was I was working at this automotive manufacturer after having done multiple e-commerce businesses myself. The automotive manufacturer was mostly like in-facility process improvement, but they did ask a final project towards the end, which was how do we reduce our inventory on hand globally? And I started to dig into okay, we got these 23 factories, I think it was. Two of them have their own warehouse on site, but the rest of them are raw goods in Lansing and machining lines all the way through and staging to put it on trucks to go out Meanwhile, while we do sell to small and mid-size customers and wholesalers. A lot of their customers were very big automotive OEMs and so a lot of them had safety, stock requirements and more, and so we had all these warehouses, 3pls, holding so much inventory. And so I started to dig in and say, okay, well, we have dozens of global 3PLs they're all different companies, from Kuninagal and Expeditors and GXO and to local 3PLs in different markets and all of them are on different warehouse management systems that none of them are really integrated back into our net suite. And so we have plant managers sending emails back and forth with them every day to coordinate truckloads, to coordinate inventory levels, and how am I supposed to reduce inventory on hand if we don't even know really what inventory we have, where we have a maybe twice a year accurate view, and we do these kind of bank walkthroughs and audits and cycle counts and then every day after it starts to creep and slip to inaccurate again. And so the founding premise was basically okay.

Sean Henry: 22:24

The problem here is that, whether I was a small merchant myself or this large business, everybody is trying to keep up with Amazon-like supply chains, meaning rapid deliveries, good tracking and visibility to the customer, simple returns and low costs, and that premise is now driving so much of the consumer behavior. I think back to my days of eBay and Amazon and my own websites, and probably 60% of my reviews were about shipping experience, and I'm like I'm just dropping this off at this post office like everybody else. Why am I getting so much reviews based on this? And it's because over the last two decades, these giants like Amazon have realized. Consumers used to walk into a retail store, you swipe your credit card and you walk out with your product. You know where you're going to go return it and you trust it. Well, today you're walking out of that storefront online, swiping your credit card and walking out with nothing besides trust, and your trust is entirely. Am I going to get this product when I thought? Is it going to be what I thought, undamaged, the right quantities, the right size, so on? Am I going to have the easiest visibility through that process and the simplest returns if anything goes wrong?

Sean Henry: 23:39

And these companies like Amazon, walmart, target and more are investing tens of billions of dollars in solving that. Yet it's creating this massively uneven playing field for everybody else, where, as a small to mid-sized to even large merchant, you just don't have the economies of scale and the volume to offer rapid deliveries at that cost and build out all this integrated tech. And so you go out to the internet and you either run into Amazon saying, order this now, get it by 8 am tomorrow. Or you run into the majority of websites saying $7 for five to 10 day delivery. Hope that's good enough for you. And so we kind of looked at that problem and said well, what's really preventing it and are preventing brands of all sizes from having prime, like logistics?

Sean Henry: 24:22

And our premise was really it's two or three problems. One, they don't have the scale. So how can we combine the scale of many merchants to offer the package volume necessary to get Amazon, like speeds and costs? Two, they don't have the network. Typically these companies are dealing with one or two different 3PLs. They have one warehouse on the East Coast, maybe the same one on the West Coast, but they don't actually have a flexible self-healing network that they can keep moving inventory across nimbly to actually stock inventory in, let's say, five to 10 points even closer to customers.

Sean Henry: 24:57

And then three, technology. All of that network is typically on disparate warehouse management systems, but a brand doesn't really operate off a warehouse management system. They're operating out of their Shopify or their ERP or their QuickBooks. And then they're trying to figure out how do I integrate all this down into all these logistics systems that hopefully I can stay out of as much as possible. And I would just note that these brands we're dealing with and e-commerce fulfillment is a lot different than, let's say, a factory manager, a manufacturing manager or even a trucking manager at one of these brands who is used to constantly dealing with their different trucking companies, and they have the time to coordinate each load. You don't have time to coordinate every single one of the five 10,000 e-commerce packages. You're getting a day. You need a platform and an automated solution. But, long story short, they don't even live in the WMS. And so what are they even integrating all those systems back to Shopify directly? Random data lake they're making and trying to create rules about when to send it to the East Coast warehouse versus the West Coast warehouse.

Sean Henry: 26:01

So what if we build the vertically integrated system, the WMS that runs the fulfillment centers, the TMS that runs the parcel last mile, the OMS that orchestrates that network to do inventory planning, order planning, routing, parcel selection, trying to make sure you always have your inventory in the cheapest and most optimized points we're always routing orders to the cheapest and most optimized points and then, finally, the consumer experience layer, which is once we have this, we can actually talk to the customer more like Amazon and in the cart power, that delivery promise, those shipping options, the post-purchase tracking emails and the full stack returns portals. And so we really combine those three pillars to provide Prime-like logistics to brands of all sizes. And our pitch is very much hey, don't go set up a data center, tap into the cloud, tap into AWS, azure, gcp or other. Don't go piece together your 3PLs, your different pieces of e-commerce technology and OMS and more. Just tap into us as an infrastructure, as a service, to get the fastest, cheapest, most optimized deliveries.

Sean Henry: 27:07

I know it's a super long answer, but I would really just round out, as we had to pair that how do we compete with Amazon delivery with? Well, we're two 18-year-olds, we have no capital and we don't have billions of dollars to go build a prime-like network and we don't have all the scale necessary to get that package volume and speed and cost we want. And so we kind of had to step dramatically back from that whole mission and say, well, what's like the smallest thing we can do to start. And we had a strategic perspective that, out of this kind of end-to-end Amazon-like value chain, what is it that makes them so much better than everyone else. It's the fulfillment centers and that is where they control the speed and cost the most in terms of the journey. They can't really change where the product's manufactured, they can't really change where the consumer is, but how optimized that facility location is does speak to speed, cost and distance the most.

Sean Henry: 28:02

So if we start there, not only is it a market that not a lot of people have tapped, so we were looking at the time saying, well, you have networks and technology in freight brokers and freight companies.

Sean Henry: 28:12

Who is the kind of warehouse network and broker out there?

Sean Henry: 28:15

There isn't really one. So what if we build a network of facilities, build the tech into them to standardize their operations, the inventory, reporting and more? And from there it began to grow out from just partner warehouses to warehouses and last mile to warehouses, last mile and inbound trucking, to launching our own fulfillment centers, to building this top to bottom tech. And it gave us the ability to kind of have a wedge to start and keep expanding and growing from there. But as a result we're very much kind of like a company of different building blocks or chess pieces. We're constantly trying to move, saying we didn't really even reach our initial vision and value prop to customers, probably until 2022 or 2023 after starting in 2015. And over the last two, three years since then, that's why we've been growing even faster, enhancing our unit economics even faster and winning even more in the market. Because once you have this kind of moat of scale, technology and network and the value prop you want, it's very hard to compete with for the traditional, let's say, fulfillment 3PL.

Andrew Silver: 29:20

So that's so fascinating to me. I mean I think it's so interesting how you were able to kind of digest and understand the end goal at such an early stage and yet know that as two 18 year olds or however old you were at this point like you were so far away from that end goal. Like I'm just curious about the idea of kind of taking bite sizes at a time, focusing on the fulfillment early, seeing that that was where you could wedge yourself in, like what was the experience of kind of navigating, selling the dream to potential customers while only having 5, 10% of that kind of product developed? My understanding in selling software is when you're selling an unfinished product is extremely challenging. Nobody wants to be the guinea pig of some big, expensive software or just big software in general. So I'm curious, what was that experience like, those early days of trying to land customers? How hard was it, given that you were kind of committed to a dream that was very far away?

Sean Henry: 30:26

yeah, and I think two other important points in that are uh, one principle we agree with a lot which is a lot like that kind of like regret minimization, um, and we we steal a lot of these. Then we're not making these up. Amazon has some great leadership principles that we we try to learn from um. Another one is they do these kind of PR FAQs, go to the end, write the press release of, like, what this dream product looks like, write some happy customer quotes, et cetera, and then build a plan of working backwards from that. How do you get there, instead of standing here and say how do you work forward, what's the next thing? The next thing, the next thing. And I think that's a little bit of how we said, okay, well, this is the vision, but we can't actually provide this. What can we provide today?

Sean Henry: 31:07

And the second point would be I think that was the most kind of crucible moment for us because, frankly, at the time there was and I think you and I could have some fun debating this topic or we might be on the same page there was a lot of pressure on well, there's all this excitement around this digital freight broker or this digital freight forwarder, and why aren't you doing these segments? And we were kind of scratching our heads saying, well, we already know, especially being part of Dynamo, we already know some very successful freight brokers and we're pretty sure a lot of them use technology. And my point in that is more, we really thought about the kind of value and ROI of what's your right to win, depending on where you start and when. You want to make this argument of we're going to be this very tech enabled business. When you're in freight, let's say and we still move freight today when you're in freight, let's say, ocean, you may be talking about $5,000 Shenzhen to LA and if you have, let's say, 10,000 units on that boat, you're spending 50 cents per unit. And when your average brand has 92 days of inventory on hand and you can't really use tech to say I'm going to make the boat go faster, it's very hard to actually kind of charge more or get even better pricing power or so on just because you have a little bit more technology for that ocean movement.

Sean Henry: 32:36

What it can help with is decreasing the cost to manage the load, which is internal enablement, which is great, but it's not as much customer facing, let's say, and similarly on trucking, when you're going to then take that from the LA port to your warehouse in Las Vegas, you may be spending $500 on that truck or a thousand dollars. You may be spending five, 10 cents per unit at that point. And then when you go to ship it to a consumer's house which is really more our kind of core you may be spending $7 to $10 shipping that single individual unit. And you're not talking about, hey, I can't really change the speed of that boat or truck. You're talking about hey, I can really change the speed of that package delivery from seven days to one or two days on average. And hey, that $7 is actually like 15% of your economics as a business, of your margin, of your total revenue is spent on that last mile fulfillment and returns, and so I can really enhance your gross margins. And so when delivery speed is so much of your CAC with a consumer, so much of your margin with the order and so much of your lifetime value and repeat shopper rate and you can actually impact the outcome that was our whole argument early on of, like we got to start in the warehouses it feels like the place to go and thankfully, five, ten years later it really proved, I believe to be, uh, the right approach in comparison, where you can be an incredible freighter ocean company.

Sean Henry: 33:59

Those are incredible services and we work with a lot of uh partners, but the kind of here's how it's going to be transformed with technology pitch, I think we can both acknowledge, struggled in some of them to really get where they wanted, and so I kind of deviated heavily from your actual question.

Sean Henry: 34:17

But we had to be very introspective at the time and, frankly, we were getting a lot of flack of like why aren't you growing as fast as that digital freight broker? Why aren't you growing as fast as that company? And we're like well, we're growing a lot faster than our incumbent peers and than a lot of our direct competitors, but we're not really quite as much selling a commodity which you can throttle based on pricing. And so that was interesting early on, because I do think that as a founder, you get tested a lot where it's like how much conviction do you really have in what you're saying right now? Because I, as an investor or so on, I'm going to pass on you or push you harder on this and tell you you're wrong, until only time will tell over the next few years who is actually right so I haven't thought about it the way you just described it and it's it's.

Andrew Silver: 35:08

It's a fascinating thing to recognize like you kind of saw everyone going one direction and thought I don't really think it makes sense to go that direction. And you know, the proof is in the pudding. I mean, here we are 10 years later and, um, everybody's gung-ho about your business, with, with everything you just you know your recent announcement, the fundraiser, and then talk about digital freight brokers. You hear that term more often used in a graveyard than you do on podcasts these days. So I just think that's really interesting. Now, if I remember correctly, the business initially was kind of like an asset-light warehousing network essentially, and that was early days and now you've, as you mentioned, pivoted, but I think we're really more evolved. Um, is is the right way to think about it where you own facilities, you license out the software, if I'm correct. Can you talk about kind of the evolution of the business and, um, kind of some of the evolution of the business and kind of some of the bigger changes you've made over time strategically and like why those changes were made?

Sean Henry: 36:13

Absolutely. I think that, going back and kind of combining with your prior question, it was a function of like, well, what building blocks can we solve? And I had a great friend, another early mentor, one of those people. I reached out to Andrew McConnell in Atlanta and he walked me through a story of his business, which was an online platform for rentals, and he basically said we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at a web development and software development agency to build our initial MVP. We put it out there. We got zero transactions through that platform after a year.

Sean Henry: 36:55

Then we made a Google spreadsheet and started listing all the properties and rentals we knew of and inviting people to collaborate and we got to millions of dollars of transactions in a matter of months. Why? We made it simple. We learned the user behavior, we learned what they cared about. We didn't have a brand that people trusted to go to this website and book, but they trusted us, kind of hand to hand, talking to them, and from there we built a website, we built the platform, designed it around that flow and grew it dramatically.

Sean Henry: 37:23

And so that was very kind of stuck in my head, because when we started, you're spot on. Well, actually, I would even acknowledge a little even more naivety, which is I don't even think we knew what to build. We said, okay, we got to build this software, this kind of order management layer in the middle. But like what, do the brands even care about Inventory orders? Okay, that seems obvious. What else? And so we actually started day one let's contact warehouse partners, cause again to be a prime like network. I'd say like at minimum you need uh, uh upwards of like six facilities If you want a really rapid delivery, be able to position inventory correctly and if you want to estimate that on the low end, each facilities maybe $5 million and a high end maybe 25 plus million dollars. We definitely couldn't go open six facilities. So we said we're going to do this asset light, we're going to partner with existing operators. And day one became like let's cold call fulfillment centers and warehouses and we kind of thought we were giving them this Airbnb, uber-like pitch of like hey, we want to pull you onto a network, we want to kind of manage the customer service, manage the payments. We learned a lot of kind of the pitching to them from kind of that freight broker background of we'll manage the insurance, the payment flow, the customer service, you just manage the capacity, provide us good service and we'll keep you happy. And it wasn't very Airbnb and Uber like, because Airbnb or Uber are calling you saying use your home or your car for the first time to do this. We're calling businesses who are set up to do this. So they're like, of course, sure, bring me customers, I'll talk to you when you bring me a customer. We're like okay, we don't have as much to convince there, we just got to bring them demand, that's all they care about.

Sean Henry: 39:30

No-transcript document website that tracks all the import records into the U S. We got tens of thousands of phone numbers and emails. We started blasting them, calling them all the time. We were getting crazy responses like this is a military base, how did you get this email address? We were getting some funny ones, but our pitch was basically hey, we haven't built technology yet, but we have a network of now I think it was maybe 25, 50 warehousing partners that have agreed to our terms of service, insurance et cetera. We're managing the network. We can make you flexible across them. So we had a pitch also of like 56% of warehousing contracts are three plus year agreements. All of these are going to be month to month. We've negotiated entire flexibility for you.

Sean Henry: 40:16

And so our first customers were actually a lot of Chinese based importers into the US who started saying, oh great Cause, I have no idea geographically where I should be in the US, what the good prices are, I don't want to manage the time zone difference, you manage this for me. And we said, okay, well, we're going to build technology around you. And they said, that's fine, I'm just doing it over email with my 3PL warehouses today. So if you can just do it over email and spreadsheets, I'm happy. If you can just kind of starting volume. We went way more B2B at first because we said it's a lot easier to manage pallets in and pallets out of a warehouse on spreadsheets and emails than when you're in the thousands of orders a day per brand and every minute counts and getting that package out the door you just can't. And so let's start very B2B, let's just get volume flowing. And if the only value prop we can have today is a flexible network, fine.

Sean Henry: 41:07

And then we started building the tech and from kind of end of 2015, early 2016 through really end of 2018, that's all we were. We were just a network of partner warehouses getting that initial volume, getting trust from brands, and we got to our kind of series A in 2019. And we were maybe 10 to 20 million of revenue. Maybe 10 million of revenue. We had some real customers, but we were still just holding pallets of goods everywhere.

Sean Henry: 41:38

We said, all right, it's time to do two things. We want to one, go heavily into e-commerce. We have enough of the technology now where we can manage a higher order volume. And then, two, we don't want to just be go heavily into e-commerce. We have enough of the technology now where we can manage a higher order volume. And then, two, we don't want to just be the dots on the map, all these warehouses. If we want to be the prime like network, we have to be the dots, but also the connecting points. And so we got to be able to rebalance inventory between facilities. So we got to open a trucking division and we got to be able to do the last mile out. And that's really the big part. If we think about stored transportation, trucking is a very small part of our business because it's more hey, we're happy to move inventory between facilities, but if you want to get an inbound, your international forwarder, your customs, your freight broker can probably handle it. If you need us to do the drayage, we're happy to, but a huge part of our business is that last mile.

Sean Henry: 42:26

And so over those next few years it became okay, we're going to build the trucking volume, we're going to build the asset light network. But as we started to get into this high velocity e-commerce segment, we want a customer. One of our first high volume e-commerce customers was doing over 10,000 orders a day, which is a pretty big customer. That customer, frankly, we did not perform well for in our kind of asset light partner facilities because all we were was this order management software integrating down into the existing WMS of these partners, whatever their processes were and so on. And we really realized, okay, if we want that Amazon-like value prop of fastest, cheapest, best in the world, we got to be willing to do this ourselves.

Sean Henry: 43:12

Kind of back to that Ted Alling comment of if we're going to go to our partners and say you got to re-layout your facility, you got to use our WMS. We want to build now, not just let us integrate into your WMS and you're going to listen to us about how to run the facility, how to staff the facility, the SLAs that matter. Who are we to tell you that when we're just in an office in Midtown, we've never run a warehouse in our life, and so that was our initial pitch to our investors. Hey, we're breaking the asset light model. We're going to go open our own one facility and we're going to use it to build our own WMS, to figure out the best in class engineered processes, layouts and more, and use it to build trust with all of our other partners. So if you go look at that press release years ago, it was like stored launches it's only innovation center in Atlanta and quickly customers just fell in love with it, and so did we. They love the value of weight. I have some dedicated stored nodes where I'm guaranteed the capacity, the quality, the standards. But then you have the network where you can be flexible and you can push me to the edge and you can cross-stock for me in this.

Sean Henry: 44:13

That the other, the WMS we built, was starting to enable us to just watch the cost per unit, to go down and down and down Still today, every month and quarter. It's better, faster, cheaper, and so we just said well, let's double down on this. Just because we started saying asset light doesn't mean we have to stay that way forever. And it's funny because even today we still get to like aren't you guys asset light? Why do you have these facilities? We're like we are asset right is the joke.

Sean Henry: 44:38

Whatever our customers want and whatever best serves the business, that's what we want to be. We don't want to be like well, we're either this or this and we're not going to touch the other. And that same thing goes to we're very software plus fulfillment. We have actual software, arr as part of our revenue, but then actually all of our revenue is driven by our software. That's another one where it's like investors want you to be one or the other and we're like if this is the customer, they're happy with what we're providing them. That's all we care about. And you can see that in the results of our business.

Andrew Silver: 45:08

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Andrew Silver: 46:06

So AssetRight is as good of a joke about asset as I've ever heard. I've heard some good ones before when people are like oh, you have assets and they're like my assets are my people, things like that, but AssetRight I've never heard and that was really good. So what, I'm kind of trying to put myself in your shoes and a big difference in the business I built, or my team built, was like we kind of knew our path from the onset. We just knew if we keep doing what we're doing, it will work. What I'm really curious and fascinated by is you had this kind of flexible storage business that seemed to be working to some extent. I mean, you had $10 million in revenue-ish and such a massive change in your strategy in investing heavily and building out this other technology and then going and getting your own space.

Andrew Silver: 47:02

I'm just curious how you think about such significant decisions. Was there any part of you that was a little more risk averse that thought, hey, you know, this is kind of working. Maybe we should just stick on this path of flexible warehousing and get it to 30 and then 50 and 100 million. So was? Was there any part of that? Also, are there any big decisions you've made over the years that just you weren't right and invested heavily in something that didn't work? And what was that process like? So two separate questions, but kind of tangential.

Sean Henry: 47:37

Yeah, really good one, and I think it also speaks to just me as an entrepreneur and I don't mean that in a good way, I just mean that for right or wrong, in my style, I think I'm very impatient, unfortunately, and a little distracted sometimes. Just very. I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this, and so I'm kind of always stacking more value on top. The thing I've always reiterated, though, is, as long as we're in the same mission, in the same customer, that's where I'm comfortable. If we start to deviate and say, well, we could launch this division, or we could start serving this other customer, or so on, that's where I get very uncomfortable, because I'm like we understand this customer and we understand this problem. That's what we can keep kind of iterating and pivoting behind.

Sean Henry: 48:20

But you're spot on where not all these have played out perfectly, and there's been a lot of things we've shut down and stopped doing, and or a lot of times where we got a lot of flack, for is this the right strategy? Why are you going that way? And we had to just lean in with that conviction. A few examples, so, like from the asset to our first facility perspective. That was a huge debate. There were a lot of our investors, partners and more who were like this is your worst idea, yet You're ruining the whole foundation of why you're different, what you've built and so on, and we just had to say you might be right, but we at least have to try this based on all these other qualities, and if it doesn't work, we'll figure that out and we'll undo it. And there's other examples of that, too, where the opposite has occurred. So I talked about trucking and said we're not the biggest in trucking. We'll do any in-network moves, so we'll do rebalancing between facilities, we'll do direct injection to our parcel partners, we'll do zone skipping, we'll do some drainage if customers want, but it's just not really our focus because it's not as tied to our kind of e-commerce fulfillment, where we really focus with these brands and there's incredible companies that that's all they do.

Sean Henry: 49:29

But when we got into trucking in 2019, um, or uh, uh, at the end coming into 2020, uh, there was a time when anyone wanted any capacity anyone could offer, and so our trucking brokerage went to almost a hundred million in revenue in 12, 18 months and we're like, oh well, this is amazing, this is exciting, great, this is easy, the easiest business in the world. What is Andrew talking about all the time? I'm just teasing, you're good, but if we really step back, we'd look at it and say like, wow, the margins we had were horrible because we don't know what we're doing. The customer experience we're offering is not really better than others. It's just people need capacity right now and so even still when that division was pretty large, we were looking at it and going through like, well, this is what we want to be when we grow up from a value prop to customers. Up here I'm literally thinking about our board slide. This is the value prop we wanted to have for customers and these are the financial qualities we want to have to equal the kind of long-term outcome we're hoping for. And here's why trucking as a big business is incongruent with that. It's not our kind of margin profile. We typically sign three to five-year contracts. Now it's all kind of day-to-day bidding. We don't plan to invest any of our R&D team behind building software for our trucking brokerage. So we're falling behind all these companies that that's all they're doing and they're so dedicated and focused to this.

Sean Henry: 50:53

Long story short and something that I had personally fought for. Our board and investors, like we're going to open a trucking division, we're going to go do this Every day was looking at our load boards, looking at our volume, looking at all the metrics, talking to brands. I ended up, when it was maybe now down, maybe like 50 million, shutting it down and just saying, hey, we're going to start directing customers to a partner, but instead it's not for us, we'll do the moves we have the right to win, not let's just go be everyone's freight broker. And so that was a hard one, but it was also a really powerful one, because it showed the team like we're willing to undo decisions that weren't right and we're willing to stay focused. And the amount of focus we got after that was just so dramatic.

Sean Henry: 51:35

There's one other one where I commented on it a little bit, where I said I don't like selling differently, and at one point we said, well, let's go sell all of our tech to other 3PLs. That'd be a great idea, and it's not that it's a bad idea, but it all of a sudden created this division internally of well, these are the people talking to 3PLs and warehouse operators and owners, and they know how to sell to them, they know how to customer service them, they know how to build products for them, and it's entirely different than our core 90% of the business or more customer. And so, same thing. We shut it down and said, well, it's working, people are liking it, it's growing, but it's creating so much tension and division internally that maybe this is when we're just so so massive, one day we'll do this.

Sean Henry: 52:18

But I really think that my kind of principle is, as long as we're operating in a mission, we know, with a customer, we know and we're very thoughtfully making very light bets, and when they work, growing them rapidly, we'll do it. And so we're very kind of even still we're trying to create playbooks for, like, how do we launch new products and divisions internally? Because, it's true, we have our partner network of warehouses, we have our own fulfillment centers, we have last mile delivery, we have returns, we have some trucking, we have packaging, we have value-add services like embroidery, cleaning, all sorts of things. We have different softwares, like our OMS, our consumer experience software, our ship and protection, which is an insurance that a consumer can purchase in the cart. There's a lot and so it is a lot to keep track of and even just right before this it's a meeting going through kind of product adoption, engagement and success metrics across all of those for basically like, how's the investment, how's the bet, how's the adoption? Going across the whole base.

Andrew Silver: 53:27

That's incredible, I mean. So thank you for sharing the level of depth you did around some of those decisions. I completely see you know on the trucking example why that is kind of doesn't jive with the rest of your business, or at least the profile you're trying to build out for your business. What's the process for making a decision like that in general, if you're thinking about, I mean, you just laid out I don't know 15 different service offerings or value offerings, how do you decide what the next one's going to be? If there is going to be a next one, what does that kind of look like?

Sean Henry: 54:08

Yeah, it's a good question Because part of it is throwing darts at the wall and vision of here's what we think the market wants. But then we've gotten more disciplined over time to say we have all these thoughts written down, but let's only really lean in when customers say something. I think that, if I can credit stored with anything, I do think we're incredibly customer obsessed. We try to just stay so focused on let's put our blinders on, stop listening to anything external from investors, competitors, the market, whatever. Let's just listen to them and as long as we're serving them we'll be okay. And there's again another great Bezos Amazon quote of as far as I know, my competitors have never paid my bills, only my customers. So that's who I'm going to listen to.

Sean Henry: 55:01

And so today it's much more of a discovery process of kind of back to that. What do we have the right to win? And that's probably where we focus the most and say like, okay, if we look at the kind of tech stack we are for the customer and the value chain we offer, what else are they leveraging around that? And that was a little bit of the thesis of well, if we're the kind of OMS in all the fulfillment, we have all their inventory data, all their order data, all their consumer data, all their sales data. There's so many products, particularly digital products, software, built off those core elements. So if we can really win the OMS and the fulfillment network, we can start selling all these modules up here off the OMS or similarly in fulfillment, like starting with our network and going into our own. We can start winning all sorts of things off that, like the inbound drayage, the last mile, the returns, the value add services and the packaging. And so I think that for us, we try to think through and we have a long list we try to think through. Are we actively hearing this from customers that they're looking for a solution? Are we hearing a repeated solution where everyone's clearly adopting something in the market like they need it? Does it fit again, that kind of value prop we want and metrics we want to live into in terms of the qualities of our business we want? And then, frankly, do we have the time and the capacity and that's probably the hardest one, which is it is really hard to carve out people to go figure out a new business and instill that kind of entrepreneurialness in them of, well, here's how you start this new division. Here's how we're going to make measured bets and test your success and watch you in days and weeks, not in months and quarters like the broad business. And that's probably my biggest challenge always as a leader is I want to keep injecting new kind of products and new next phases of what we can become. And even today we have a whole in like our board decks, in our investor decks and in our internal memos for the company. We have like it's probably four acts for stored and building the prime, like fulfillment network, which all of this fits in is really only act one. We have other thoughts after that and how we keep adding more value and more value, and that's what I love.

Sean Henry: 57:18

I think that a lot of entrepreneurs I talk to kind of like we were just talking before this. You kind of get in that like well, what do I want to do next? And sometimes there's this like I want to go launch a business, get out of it, launch a business, get out of it, launch a business. And I'm also think that's an exciting path and something I could be passionate about. But what gets me really passionate is also the compound businesses.

Sean Henry: 57:41

Back to my favorite I'm going to sound annoying Amazon that start with one thing and then just keep adding more and more and more into perpetuity and you kind of get to be an entrepreneur at scale where you don't have to do everything yourself to get something started.

Sean Henry: 57:57

You don't have to unless what you don't have to, what you're enabled with, is a great team, capital and customers to go test and iterate things off of. But again, there's a lot of pluses and minuses, because if you do it wrong, you can quickly start to distract, you can quickly start to fragment your team and in some ways to your question of like well, what if you just kept doing that partner asset-light network forever? You can start to kind of give up the golden goose of like what made you so successful? What got you here? What is the core value? You can start to kind of give up the golden goose of like what made you so successful? What got you here? What is the core value? You can't stop focusing on it and get distracted by these other things. And so definitely pluses and minuses.

Andrew Silver: 58:38

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Andrew Silver: 59:30

I'm curious about your own evolution. You know, 10 years ago or however long ago, you were 18 and you raised two and a half million bucks and you and a partner and whoever else but like you went out and started building you personally. You, here we are this week. You just raised $200 million, which we're going to talk about, how you're going to deploy that. You talk about building out new products and having trust in people to go build it and that process and how that's challenging. I just think about the 10-year journey from where you were at 18 to where you are today. What has your personal evolution looked like? What are you kind of most proud of in terms of your personal development, and then what have been the most challenging things for you to grow into in this role you're in today?

Sean Henry: 1:00:23

Yeah, I think that an investor said it well, I think it was Founders Fund in our Series B which was the number one indicator of success in a founder or executive we've ever seen is just pace of learning and how fast can you kind of see the next chapter and adapt to the next chapter? Because the opposite statement you often hear in Silicon Valley is building a team which could include the founder is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge by the time you make it to one side, turn around and start over, because everyone is not going to be ready for the next chapter and you're going to need different leaders for that next phase of growth. And so I think the thing I'm most proud about is making it through those phases of growth. And, frankly, I just did a chat with Kleiner Perkins, one of our investors, in their podcast a few weeks ago I think it's probably a few months out from releasing and Ilya from Kleiner actually brought up that one time. I called him in 2022, maybe and said am I the right CEO for this business? Do you believe that? Should we talk about it? And that's not me thinking I'm not. It was more a function of like. I want to make sure that we're iterating together, learning together. I'm keeping up with the pace. I don't want to be the bottleneck for this company and so, if I go back, I definitely was not the leader and individual I am or aspire to be today.

Sean Henry: 1:01:48

Back when we started the business, I mean I was more the like walk in and start to stutter, You're nervous about the pitch, nervous about saying something wrong. And frankly, back to Ted and Dynamo like they helped beat that out of you for sure. I mean they literally made us go stop I think it was 25 people in a day on the street and just start giving them our pitch and have them sign something that we gave it to them. And they made us go in pairs and find the busiest area we could and just start giving our pitch at the top of our lungs to everyone who would listen. And so you definitely get more confident or comfortable with public speaking and all those things.

Sean Henry: 1:02:27

But long story short, I think if you go through the chapters, the hardest thing when we started was to actually hire great people. We had incredible first employees and that's not what I mean. But those are the early mid-20s who are willing to take that bet on these two 18-year-old crazies willing to take the salary cuts to a lot, Getting to real leaders and employees who had faced real chapters and challenges at businesses for five, 10 years. Hiring our first leaders. That was incredibly hard because we barely had any money. This was maybe before or right coinciding with that seed round.

Sean Henry: 1:03:04

We didn't have a lot of credibility, we didn't have a lot of experience and, frankly, I mean I literally got on an interview with someone who was supposed to be a sales leader interview once. This was back when we just had a free office. There was like four of us and he literally just said I just want to stop the call before we start. I just read an article as I was prepping for this. Are you 19 years old? Are you kidding me that I'm going to work for you? And he hung up. I remember it. I was like, okay, wow, I should go phone my guy today.

Sean Henry: 1:03:31

But that's where finding the first leader, our first VP of engineering and then our VP of supply chain, who today is our COO, were so incredibly transformative because they brought Amazon experience or a company called BetterCloud and CloudSherpa's in Atlanta experience. So incredible engineering leader, incredible operations leader and it really started that snowball of hiring. But one thing I'm proud of is keeping up with that learning curve over time. But also some of our leaders. One of our first employees, our second employee, Alex Kett, still with the business, Steve Swan, who we hired as our VP of supply chain, coached him from Amazon. I almost dropped my phone when he told me what he was making at Amazon, saying yeah right, we can get this guy. And thankfully he went all in on equity and wanted to build something. And I've only found out recently that he had an offer from one of our direct competitors who was bigger than us at the time or better, capitalized. We've now crushed since then and he chose us just because he believed in the team, believed in how we were executing that much more.

Sean Henry: 1:04:38

So those are some of the things I'm proud of, but I think, as you really fast and still being here today as such a big leader in the business, same with my co-founder, Jacob. But I think, if you really fast and still being here today as such a big leader in the business, same with my co-founder, Jacob but I think, if you really fast forward, the chapters change right and like, the hardest period for me was probably the 2022 to 2023 period where what got us here isn't going to get us there, Meaning we started the business 2015 to 2021 as kind of grow at all costs, just build, build, build. Who cares about margin or bottom line? We have all these venture dollars, Everything's great, and the market changed dramatically and it was hey, those ridiculous multiples no longer exist and people really want to see the proof point in the unit economics and the bottom line. And a lot of people won't make it to the other side.

Sean Henry: 1:05:26

And so that's where, as a leader, you kind of have to really no-transcript. You say here's the five or six things we got to do over the next few years, but you also don't even know are they right? You believe they're right, but you could be deeply wrong. And you have to be that convicted over multiple years saying trust me, we're still charging through them. We're in the middle of turning the ship and, yeah, as we're turning, we're going to be pressing against turbulent water. It's not going to feel great, but we're getting on the right path. And if you fast forward from 2021, we were less than 50 million in revenue to today, we're over 10 times that and from a pretty red bottom line to profitable and real sustainable margins and customers and growing 70% a year and all these qualities we can really zoom out and say that was the right approach.

Sean Henry: 1:06:23

And so I think that that chapter is the hardest, because you have to go from this like I'm just this optimistic founder. Everything I'm doing is just more and more and more. I can go sell to customers and so on, but I'm not going to deal with a lot of these problems too. All I'm going to deal with is the problems and all I'm going to deal with is the midline, the bottom line every headcount, every customer decision, every pricing decision, every product decision and trust and empower my team, but also get incredibly in the details and in the weeds. And I think that there's a kind of joke out there that during a hard time at Facebook early on, Mark Zuckerberg said every day for the next year, I'm coming in a suit, and I think he did. It's a show like we're serious and we definitely didn't do that. There's a lot of rituals like that, from being in the office constantly to being all in the details of customers, spend, headcount approvals and more and back to like showing the team. If this is the hard work we're going to have to go through. I'm not sitting in some ivory tower telling you good luck. I'm in it with you, having as hard of a time with you and helping personally try to rebuild each team and each function until we get to this place of greatness.

Sean Henry: 1:07:33

And it kind of coincides simply with our product evolution too, which is, I think, inherently. Since day one, we wanted a flywheel, we wanted this mode. We wanted to say, okay, there's some reason that as we get bigger, we get better and we get faster, but you don't have a flywheel. Day one and we were saying it's going to be more package volume equals lower prices, faster speeds and more trust between brands and consumers who have recognized or seen a delivery from store. And for the first seven years that was nothing. None of those were clicking and we were just like, oh well, I hope eventually it started working. And then now we can actually just watch them. I mean, we can look from 2021 to today and say, from a few million packages in 2021, maybe 2 million or a few million to this year, we should be over 50 million packages, approaching 60 million packages. To cost, we're about 60% cheaper per order compared to that period in terms of our actual last mile and in building, picking and packing to speed from five plus days to two-ish days on average, and that includes all international weekend, et cetera, or two to three days if you include all those with our best metros being next day.

Sean Henry: 1:08:49

And then finally, trust we delivered to 12% of US households last year unique US households. We delivered about 1% of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We won 41% of all new deals and customers we met last year because they had talked to another brand that uses storage and had heard great things, and so we saw this start to click and so kind of muddying the waters of the few topics. But I think a lot of this just comes down to leadership and company building is having all these ideas and not knowing for years if they're actually working and clicking and paying off. And I think this, this round, this acquisition and more, is really just kind of the, the crucible moment where over a few quarters all of our investments in a lot of the markets saw oh wow, it is really paying off and what stored said they were going to do is is working.

Andrew Silver: 1:09:45

It's incredible, it's very impressive, and you know that chapter you talked about being the most challenging, the one where you kind of go from this environment where grow at all costs and you're a hero as long as that revenue dollar keeps going up and everyone wants to give you money to the whole world, kind of saying, yeah, maybe that doesn't make so much sense, now I want to see profit. It's a really hard pivot to navigate within a business that has historically raised quite a bit of money or done multiple rounds, especially because it's a delicate dance to do it in a way that allows your next fundraise or decision, financial decision to be one that you know doesn't look like a big down round or have challenging circumstances tied to it. So, you know, incredibly impressive for you to take the business to where it is today. I guess what I'm curious about is like how did you so you?

Andrew Silver: 1:10:44

You just this week or last week announced the $200 million raise plus the acquisition. I have a feeling those kind of were done hand in hand and one maybe wouldn't have happened without the other. But I am curious specifically about raising money coming out of the environment we were in or, as the chapter has, as you move from one chapter to the next. Can you talk about just the thought process of how you got to the decision point to raise money? And if it is tied into the acquisition, then let's talk about that as well as kind of one thought process.

Sean Henry: 1:11:19

Yeah, I think you nailed it. It which is it's also an incredibly isolating time, right, like when you're going from the market or all these people telling you everything's amazing to everything's terrible and, uh, what you've built is amazing, what you've built is terrible. You're like what just happened yesterday, um, and it's. It's an interesting self-reflective period and I think that over the kind of coming years after that, we really sat down and back to the working backwards. We quite literally so. When we did our seed round, chad Byers from SUSE gave me really good advice, which was call every investor in this round on one call and say what is the metric we all agree on will lead to our series A, and that's the only metric we should all talk about and focus on. Of course, there's a million metrics under it, but that should be the headline of every investor update. That is what we care about. Are we all aligned? I think that was good advice. It's a lot like that working backwards one where, similarly so, 2022 happened. The market changed, we had just raised capital and I think a lot of investors were confused because we called all of them and said, hey, we want to get your alignment because we know you just invested off of this plan and so on. But if you're watching the headlines, like us, the whole world has changed and that plan is going to have a very bad outcome for us next time. We're going to burn through all our money in the next 12 months and hope there's more. That's a little bit of a hyperbole. But my point is that what we're going to get rewarded for has changed. And so I want to bring us all together and say, before we pivot our operating, let's agree on what we're working backwards from.

Sean Henry: 1:12:59

And so I kind of went introspective, worked with some bankers, worked internally and just said, like what is the comp for us? What do we want to look like when we grow up again? That's where we really created those two buckets of that value prop we want and that those financial metrics that should match and kind of prove the value prop. And that's things like what's the level of GMV we want to power, meaning the merchant volume we're supporting. What's the level of revenue we want? What's the level of gross margin we want? What's the growth rate we want? What's the product attachment across customers we want? How many products on average per customer? What's the contract length we want to prove? This is a real sticky solution. What's the profitability we want, what's the kind of like rule of 40 thereby we want?

Sean Henry: 1:13:45

And like, bluntly, we laid all those out and said here are the metrics that we believe if we hit, we'll have a good next round. And if you look at where our metrics were compared to the ones we were putting out, it was like, oh, we're screwed Good, nowhere near it, nowhere near it. Again, we said in that, we said 500 plus million of revenue. We were less than 50, all these things. And it was like good luck, okay, uh, very silent meeting, uh, frankly, and um, uh, I think, just over a multi-year period, we just kept charging and finally hit those qualities and uh, had a really good roadmap to do so and said here's kind of strategically, 2022, 2023, 2024, what we're gonna do year by year to get there and bringing everyone along for the ride.

Sean Henry: 1:14:28

Frankly, while having a lot of debates with people, is that the right path? Is that the right path? And I don't think those debates stopped until maybe halfway through and starting to see, oh wait, it is really clicking and is really getting to where we thought it was, and so I think then the decision to raise more money really came from a perspective of we said let's use the capital we've raised. It's the last dollars that will ever come into the business and we have to stay alive forever. We have to get the profit off the dollars we have and we did three different layoffs. Those were incredibly painful. It was very hard for our team to understand. Wait, we just raised $100 million. Why are we doing a layoff?

Sean Henry: 1:15:03

Less than six months later, the plans changed what we're trying to execute. Just because you have dollars, if you're spending at a certain rate, doesn't mean you have them forever. And so the thought process was okay, we started to get profitable in the middle of 2024. We said, okay, let's go just build the forever balance sheet now with that profit, meaning let's go raise the right debt that can help us for working capital, as we're now seeing large payment in APR volume and so on. Let's go raise the right debt that could either help us with acquisitions in the future, help us with working capital. We don't know if the equity market is there yet and we kicked that process off and ended up closing a $120 million debt facility and during that time, which is a line of credit, it's not really burdening us. We can tap it for capacity as needed and in that process we created our materials.

Sean Henry: 1:15:57

We're talking to the market. A lot of investors started to re-approach us again and say like, hey, we keep hearing good things about stored. Everything we're seeing coming out of you seems like you guys are launching new products, winning all these customers. We've talked to some of your peers and we're curious about you and it kind of naturally kicked off. We had been saying, okay, in the middle of 2025, we'll probably raise our next round if the market's there as just like the permanent balance sheet, not because we need it but because it gives us massive durability.

Sean Henry: 1:16:26

And it ended up that we signed a term sheet in January with Strike Capital as they were excited about what we're doing and seeing all that progress, as we started to share materials and got super excited. And I think in that it was a really interesting conversation because it was twofold from a capital need and evaluation. From a capital need, it was a little bit of a. We don't necessarily need these dollars to survive, but if we want to build the lasting, generational, potentially public company and win this mission and really separate ourselves from our peers and keep being aggressive when others are being conservative. That'll help us get the kind of permanent balance sheet.

Sean Henry: 1:17:03

And then, secondarily, from a valuation perspective, we actually started higher, in the conversation with many of them and others, than the 1.5 billion that we landed on, and the logic was well, we don't want to create any overhang again. We don't want to feel like we're growing into something and there's an existential crisis if we don't get there. We want to figure out what is kind of the right value from a capped downside, uncapped upside perspective that all of our shareholders in this round will make a lot of money if we're very successful with our plan and we kind of outlined to them like, okay, we've raised X, that means our liquidation preference is Y, our revenue is Z, and so even in our worst industry multiples, we should clear the amount of capital we've raised. At our current valuation, current revenue, profitability and growth rate least get your money back. In our bad case, our upside is really uncapped because we're growing 70 plus percent.

Sean Henry: 1:18:03

We have this foundational platform that we think has a moat of capabilities, price and quality. We're winning so many customers. We have a strong product market fit that's driving that growth and we're still so small in the market we could serve, even being over half a billion in revenue we can be so, so much bigger and margins. We've gone from this to this, but we still want to get to this and that's even more alpha for you. So my point is we actually want new investors to either potentially get some day one value or actually participate in multiple expansion as we round out these last one or two financial qualities we want to be.

Sean Henry: 1:18:40

I think that's what yielded a great round for both the investors and us, and I think we're incredibly proud, both by the lead and getting our existing investors, like Kleiner, perkins and Founders Fund and Bond in. What I'd really say we're proud of is also some of the very public investors, not like Franklin Templeton, who was already existing, but let's say, bally Gifford, who's basically like a Franklin Templeton of the UK massive public asset manager and really driving intense underwriting processes, really believing over two months maybe, or plus most of these firms and getting to the conviction and I'm way more proud of that than I am of the one day rounds that occur in 2021 where it's oh, business is growing. What should we value at? Here's a term sheet. Take some cash. Yeah, feels fine, but it doesn't necessarily feel like we earned this, and that's where I think we are today.

Andrew Silver: 1:19:29

Yeah, this one feels much more validating. And where did where to go come up in this process? Was that tied into this or it just happened at the same time simultaneously?

Sean Henry: 1:19:43

Yeah. So actually totally unrelated to the capital raises, which is a strange timing on the announcement, but if a lot's going to happen, it's the whatever Murphy's law or whatever the right one would be, for it's all going to happen at once, basically, and I think that for us it's a story of patience and it's also a story of David versus Goliath. We're incredibly close with UPS, the corporate, but in many ways when to Go was launched because there were companies like Stored starting to grow and say let's compete with that and so, of course, when it happened and we knew UPS at the time but they said we can't really be close anymore because we're actually doing this ourselves we were terrified as maybe 20 year olds at that time with a lot less capital. And I think when you fast forward and we became multiple times the size, growing much faster all these other qualities we have now been relatively acquisitive. We've bought three fulfillment businesses before where to go been relatively acquisitive. We've bought three fulfillment businesses before where to go now being our fourth, and in all of them it's well, if we look at those pillars of scale, network and technology, we're really buying more network and more technology and more scale and bringing our technology and, for example, we bought a company called ProPack in Q2 of last year and the revenue, the EBITDA, the customer happiness just wish I could share the metrics just through the roof. And that's been really the playbook for each acquisition dropping in our consumer experience, oms, wms to run the business.

Sean Henry: 1:21:14

And so we were kind of open-minded. But we were growing so fast. We beat our last four quarters of sales targets. In the most recent quarter we did two and a half X our target for the quarter. We were incredibly excited and our board and us actually said we're not going to do any acquisitions in 2025. We're growing so fast. Let's just keep our head down.

Sean Henry: 1:21:33

But having known where to go since the day they started seven years ago and having been in touch with the UPS leadership team over the last 24 months, saying hey, I think this could be a good idea for both of us. I think we could combine scale, combine network, bring our technology and be the best in the industry together. It coincided with when it made sense for them. Ups has been focused on their core and ultimately not back to what we said. Not distracting with separate missions or customer bases is a big thing for companies like them as much as it is for companies like us, and so we just determined we could be stronger together.

Sean Henry: 1:22:09

And so, to go from existential crisis and I'm talking like literally a family group chat where someone's like has everyone seen this company launched by UPS, should we all be worried about Sean? To hey, we actually own that company now and UPS is a great partner and a strategic partner now of ours moving forward. That's a proud one too, and I've used proud a lot on this, which I don't feel like I lean into as much, but it's more just when there's something so uncertain and you decide to see it through and it pays off. That's the moment that feels the best, I think 100%.

Andrew Silver: 1:22:45

I mean because only you, only you can look at like a moment, can take a moment and look at the five years or eight years of work that got you there.

Andrew Silver: 1:22:57

And people often focus on the work itself, like the time and energy put into doing something, and not as much time is thought about the uncertainty and the stress and the risk and the concern that you feel as the one responsible for the decision, as the one pushing the decision on everyone, and you believe in it, but you don't know for sure it's going to work, and so like to be able to sit in a moment and say like I see, like to see all the time that went on. But all that worry, the concern, the risk, the, the stress, no one feels or understands that, the way that you do. So that's, I think, one of the reasons that you can be so proud of seeing something come to fruition like that. It's hard to even put into words the years of feelings that come with that, but I understand it, so I you know you know it as well as anyone.

Sean Henry: 1:23:52

But no, I totally agree and I think you did say it. Well, it's just. I was talking to someone about that the other day. It's like why do founders have asymmetric outcomes in terms of if it goes well, it can go really well for them and I'd like to think I work very hard. It's more that, like the constant existentialism the constant will I fail tomorrow? The constant I have thousands of people whose families rely on me. The constant I'm telling them all here's why we're making this decision and do they believe it? It's all that uncertainty, risk and more that you have to live with every day, which you have to have like a little screw loose to want to live with it.

Sean Henry: 1:24:43

Maybe and it's hard and it goes back to that period was challenging anything with what it means for our customers to actually really live into the vision, to where we are providing them the product or service we set out to. But we could not at first. And hearing that back from them and hearing that feedback, watching that NPS and the value for customers just keep going up year after year, watching that win rate go from single digits to teens, to 20s, to 40 last year, which I think is incredibly high. I'm hopeful we can maintain, but it's hard. The customers validating us always feels 10 times better to me than the investor validating, because that's who's going to keep paying my bills forever if I don't ever go tap that investor again, I feel like investors' pride.

Andrew Silver: 1:25:40

getting kudos from an investor feeds the ego, but getting it from a customer, that feeds the soul, because that's where you really do the work, and so when you see it and hear it from a customer, you're like holy cow, this symphony I'm orchestrating is really working. The time and energy, everybody's really doing a good job. We're actually catering to the people we're trying to. When the investor does it, I think it feeds the ego more. Maybe this was just a me thing, but it just felt like that. Those two different styles, in my mind at least, I've never heard it said, but I think you nailed it.

Sean Henry: 1:26:19

The second you said it I was like, yeah, I think that's exactly it. You feel like, oh, yeah, I'm cool when the investor says it. And then when the customer says it, you're like, oh, we did it. That's amazing. I was telling one of my team members. I was like my happiest moment of this fundraise and announcements was actually that I got an inbound email from all of our top five customers, Just congrats. This is incredible Good for you. Here's why we are supportive and happy to be included in it as a logo etc. Just randomly, all five of them sent me different emails over three days, just saying congrats, and I was like that feels good, Because if they were saying we're worried, crop or blank or so on, this is not what we're feeling or we're not happy or whatever. It's just so different. And so that was a happy moment.

Andrew Silver: 1:27:11

So we're coming up on time here and I, just before we finish. You know you're wise beyond your years. Clearly, you've built an incredible business. To this point you're still very young and there are plenty of aspiring entrepreneurs like yourself. Hopefully, some of them will listen to this, and my question to you is what? What advice can you give to the young aspiring entrepreneur that you can take from your experience, from your learnings?

Sean Henry: 1:27:43

that you can take from your experience, from your learnings? Yeah, it's a good question, and I go back to that uh, uh, founders fund. Uh uh, kind of memo and talk I had when they did rb. Uh, because, uh, part of it was not just, oh, I'm young, pace of learning, whatever they actually put in their memo that we believe, by the time Stored goes public, sean will be roughly 30 years old, which will give him an incredible runway of another 20, 30 years as a public CEO, and I was like, wow, you're really signing me up for a very long tenure here in this note, but it seems like from a timeline perspective, they might not have been far off, but I was very privileged to do the commencement speech at Georgia Tech in 2022, which is actually back to this conversation.

Sean Henry: 1:28:30

It was hard for me to do because I was like I don't feel good right now, but if the world thinks I look good and they want me to do this, okay, and they want me to do this Okay, and my kind of theme or title was basically like why not you? Because I don't particularly believe I have any sort of special skills or insights or brain or anything. I just try and fail a lot and a few of the principles I tried to lay out in there of, like, what has helped me the most are things like don't be afraid to ask. From the earliest days, my parents were helping me write letters to business people that I wanted to learn from, to ask them if they would mentor me to all sorts of things. Like that Just put yourself out there. The worst thing you can get is a no. That Like just put yourself out there, the worst thing you can get is a no. Another one was there's a great kind of Steve Jobs quote that had always influenced me since I heard it when I was young, which was basically like when you're growing up, you're always told that the world around you is the way it is and your job is to make a little money, save it, have a family, not bump into the walls too much. But the second you realize that everything around you that you call life was just made up by other people and you can mold it and change it and influence it and be part of it. Your whole life changes and honestly, I think my life changed when I heard that and I was just just like wow, like from literally the chair I'm sitting in to.

Sean Henry: 1:30:03

Everything I see is just something someone out there made up and was passionate about and, uh, there's no kind of like preordained answer. It's all just people trying. Why not try? And why not put yourself out there?

Sean Henry: 1:30:15

Um two, I think my final one would just be like, just start and just try. I tried to make a joke like I've always teased my team that I don't love Nike's just do it in the sense of it's so hard to accomplish these things. But if it was just started, I think very passionately about just get moving, go try, go start and make a tiny bit of progress every day. And then the very last one in this tile together would be something about like back to like, don't be afraid to ask, but use mentors. And I think that it's not the cheesy like oh, go, be part of every professional development group out there and go have a personal board of mentors and things like that. It's like just try to find people that, on whatever vector of advice you need, are where you want to be. With that advice, I'm very much the like don't take the workout advice from the person that's not in the shape you want to be. Like, find whatever specific piece, who is the best at that where you want to be and go ask them. Try to find someone one step ahead of you. If you're trying to start working out, maybe you shouldn't go ask a professional bodybuilder. Maybe you should ask somebody who is two years into their journey and has made insane progress. Find that person.

Sean Henry: 1:31:36

When I was a Georgia Tech founder, I was trying to find seed stage founders series, a stage founders I wasn't going to who's pre-IPO or a public CEO founder and can they give me all the advice and ask a lot of questions, because I think, at least personally, I'm sure you feel the same. Giving back those experiences is a source of good feeling. You want to help enable that next generation of an entrepreneur and say I didn't have anyone telling me these, or fortunately I had some with some of those mentors. The hardest thing about being a young founder is the unknown, unknowns. What don't I even know that I'm supposed to know? Sorry, if I need to know how to do something, but I don't even know that I need to know how to do something. How do I get through both of those rapidly? And the more you can just shorten those cycles by leaning in with someone that one phase ahead you've always found so much value.

Sean Henry: 1:32:29

But sorry to go deep on a list, I just think that a lot of it is just putting yourself out there, trying and being willing to not always look the brightest when you fail.

Andrew Silver: 1:32:41

The second one was so true, just the idea that everything was done by someone at some point who didn't know what they were doing, but they were willing to try. And it's so disarming because, whether it's imposter syndrome or just the constant doubting of ourselves that we have, it's very grounding to hear and realize that everything was created by someone who didn't know what the heck they were doing at one point. So why not you? I really like that.

Sean Henry: 1:33:13

So I couldn't agree more and I would only round it out with I still tell people today I probably don't know what I'm doing. I'm just trying my best every single day and I think when you're a founder, especially when you've had an incredible exit and success, like you guys, everyone looks at you like oh, you must have some answers that we don't know, and you're like I don't know anything unique, I'm just trying.

Andrew Silver: 1:33:35

You almost can develop more imposter syndrome after the success, because now it's expected that you have answers and you're still the same kid who 10 years ago didn't have the answers and was maybe scared to admit that. So I think you know being willing to just try being unafraid of being the one who doesn't know the answer. I think those are great points and I really appreciate you coming on the show today Tell me your story and to end and learn more about Stored.

Sean Henry: 1:34:01

It's an incredible business you've built and continue to build, so yeah, it means a ton, andrew, it's been a lot of fun to hang out with you. I feel like we've known each other from afar and bumped into each other a lot over the years, but it's really fun to go deep and share a little bit more about the story and really appreciate you having me on.

Andrew Silver: 1:34:21

Thanks, man, with everyone else, we'll see you next week you.