Ep. #85: Ryan Soskin, Founder & CEO, GoodShip

Freight procurement is still stuck in a world of portals, spreadsheets, and three-month RFP cycles, even though the freight market can flip in weeks. I’m joined by Ryan Soskin, CEO and founder of GoodShip, to unpack why that gap creates expensive surprises for shippers and impossible commitments for brokers and carriers. Ryan’s career arc from Coyote Logistics to Convoy gives him a rare view of both execution on the ground and what it takes to build automation that actually works at scale. 

We get specific about what breaks contract freight pricing: most bids share only origin, destination, volume, and equipment type, while real truckload economics depend on lead time, seasonality, days of week, facility hours, and constraints that never make it into the RFP. That missing context fuels winner’s curse, fragile routing guides, tender rejection spikes, and more spot market exposure. From there, we connect procurement to performance management and the need for a shared source of truth, so QBRs stop turning into arguments about on-time definitions and start turning into decisions. 

Ryan also introduces the idea of network drift: even a “perfect” annual routing guide drifts away from optimal as rates, volumes, and carrier performance change. GoodShip positions itself as a TMS-agnostic system of action that unifies transportation data and recommends corrective moves, including mini-bids and routing guide adjustments. We close with Laney, GoodShip’s AI transportation analyst, and where proactive, always-on logistics analytics can take freight network optimization next. 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

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Meet Ryan Soskin Of GoodShip

SPEAKER_00 1:52

I'm your host, Andy Silver. Joined today by Mr. Ryan Soskin, the CEO and founder of GoodShip, also a friend of mine, someone who I've worked with, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, uh back when we were barely more than children, uh young adults, I should say. Uh welcome to the show, Ryan. How are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited. You know, your business, GoodShip, I think, is one of the most interesting freight tech companies in the space. Um, you know, I feel like most freight tech these days is in pursuit of their customer base, tends to be the broker or the carrier. And uh that feels like easier business to build. Uh you know, maybe that's not the right way to put it, but um guys like me, freight brokers, like not that we're easy to sell to, but if there's a product that uh you've got that helps our business, we answer the phone pretty quickly. And um I don't know that that's true on the shipper side, uh, especially at the enterprise level. And that's the that's the kind of deep end of the pool that you and your team have jumped into. Uh so I'm really excited today to get into good ship. But we're not gonna start there because you've had a very interesting career. Uh, worked at several companies. I think on your LinkedIn it says like three-time unicorn uh or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

But you you have it used to say three-time unicorn corner one, but I uh I took that off.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

You did? Okay, good. I didn't like that. I'm just kidding. But you uh you you did start your career at Coyote um and then moved on to Convoy and then stored before eventually starting um Good ships. So I I think spending a little bit of time talking about each of those companies um I think will be great for our audience and listeners uh who are just generally very interested in our industry, and those are three companies that have made their mark in our industry uh for a variety of reasons. So let's start with how you got into the industry.

From Finance To Coyote Logistics

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Like how did you get into freight and and why coyote? And let's start there.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah, for sure. So um, yeah, I you know I graduated from Miami to Ohio with a business degree. I thought I was gonna go into finance, wealth management of some kind. I had a great internship the year before my senior year, and I came out in 08, and for obvious reasons it was hard to find your footing in finance in 2008. And so I wore a suit and tie for, I don't know, 18 months or so and didn't really enjoy what I was doing. And had some buddies that went to Miami that were working at a little-known freight brokerage at the time called Coyote Logistics up in Lake Forest, and I would meet them for a beer after work, and they were telling me how much they loved what they were doing, and they're wearing a hoodie and a backwards hat, and I'm wearing a suit and tie, and I'm like, what am I doing? These guys sound like they're having so much more, you know, so much more fun than I'm having. And so uh hung up the suit, interviewed at Coyote, got the job, and honestly, I didn't even really completely understand what freight brokerage was until I got in seat and started doing it. But um, yeah, that was kind of the start of it. So I was I think I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to join Coyote when it was maybe a hundred, some odd people up in Lake Forest. We were expanding quickly. We were in the arc, you know, when I started, we were my group was in the arcade, early reefer carrier reps. Um, but it felt like we were kind of like expanding. There was like six or seven different offices along Deer Path in downtown Lake Forest, and it was uh it was fun, it was exciting. We were scrappy and growing and um yeah, had a great experience there. I spent five and a half years there, probably two of those years up in Lake Forest, and then obviously we made the move down to the Green Exchange downtown. And um, so I was there from like early 2010 through late 2015, so about five and a half years through some acquisitions, through the UPS uh ultimate uh exit. And so yeah, I think we were, I don't know, well over 2,000 people by the time we got acquired. And so I thought I learned the industry, um, grew up on the carrier side, reefer, uh, after 18 months of being a reefer carrier rep, managed a team. Ford promoted me uh to do that. So I was kind of Midwest, we called it Big Ten East Reefer. So you know, one of the Midwest Reefer teams. And um yeah, at the end of that, I kind of felt like I was looking around for the next opportunity. It was a great experience, but I learned that I loved earlier stage kind of scrappiness. And by that, you know, by the time we got acquired, we were so big that I felt like I didn't even know hardly anybody at the company where it was just so so big that you kind of get lost in the shuffle and kind of loses some of that early camaraderie and excitement. And so um around that time I heard about Convoy, they had raised their seed round, and so I met Dan Lewis and basically let me pause you.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Let me pause you because you were gonna, I I don't think if I stopped you, you would I think you would have given me a 45 minute your whole career. So it's like I got eight questions off of just the coyote stuff in the movie on the goblet. So uh taking back to the early days, you know, you mentioned the arcade, and and to give context for for the listeners who aren't as familiar, Coyote did start uh in in a small north suburban town about an hour north of Chicago, the city, in like forest, um at a small little office. Um and as Coyote grew, they continued to find different small little offices around the town. Uh, and the arcade being one of them was just the name of it. It was not an actual arcade. I don't think I don't even know why it was called that. Maybe you know that answer. Do you know why it was called that? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

No idea.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Yeah, I have no idea either. But um, take me back to those early

The Scrappy Coyote Culture

SPEAKER_00 7:34

days. Like you were there before anyone knew what coyote would become. What did the place feel like in those early days?

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Yeah, I mean, it was it was super scrappy. It was a bunch of young kids like right out of college, um, slinging freight. It felt very much like how I imagined a stock trading floor probably felt like back in the day. It was loud. I mean, coyote Fridays, people were tapping kegs, or I guess in the early days we were just, you know, cracking, you know, bottles or cans of beer at four o'clock on Friday. But it was just work hard, play hard. Coyotes would like go out together in the city and stuff on the weekends or at night. And um I don't know, it was like it was cool to be successful. And so people worked really hard because being successful was just obviously financially great, but also it was just cool to be to be successful. And so we we all kind of busted our butts. And um, for me on the carrier side, on the reefer carrier side, I think when I came out of the training, uh, my training class was some of the first reefer carrier up. So they coyote had been doing reefer freight before that, but it was just regionalized. They had like a mid, you know, Midwest team that was doing all Midwest freight, not broken down by equipment type, and it got it was getting big enough at that point that I guess leadership decided we should have a reefer Midwest team and a dry-van Midwest team, for example. And so I think I was the first Northeast Reefer carrier rep. And then a week later there was another person, and then another person, and um, that was R7, Northeast Reefer.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

I reported to John Perkovich early on, uh who's now a CEO in the industry. Yeah, I believe. Or he's the president, he's the president or CEO at RPM. Perks Perks. There are there are a lot of there are a lot of C-level people who started within a year of you as 22, 23-year-old kids out of college.

Why Coyote Produced So Many Leaders

SPEAKER_00 9:27

And let me ask you the question there. Why do you think that is? So why do you think you know that batch of the first 100, 200 coyotes, all of whom were just kids hired out of college with you know finance degrees, they couldn't get a good finance job, whatever it was, why do you think those people 10, 15 years later, are now such like significant leaders? I mean, there are at least 30, maybe, maybe at least 15 CEOs, presidents, but at least 40 or 50 that are C level at like large successful organizations in our industry.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Yeah, no question. There's there were that early group produced a ton of great operators who are in very senior leadership roles throughout the industry. Um I don't know why that is. I I you know I have to credit Jeff and Marianne for the culture that they built, but I don't know. I think just something about that early experience, being scrappy, figuring stuff out before there were you know really heavily defined processes maybe had something to do with it being part of that story and uh feeling some ownership over the success and the scale. I don't I don't have the exact answer, but it it I also think about that. There's so many people that from those early days are now in very prominent roles.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

So it's pretty well let me ask a different way that maybe gives a little more context just into your own success or your own journey as you look at how you run good ship today, and and I don't want this to be us moving into good ship for the next 20 minutes because we're gonna spend a lot of time there, but not yet. But like, are there things that you intentionally take or took from your coyote days that you apply in your business today that that help you run a good business?

SPEAKER_01 11:18

It's a good question. I haven't thought explicitly about that. You know, I I think certainly like the scrappiness and the grit and the hustle it comes to mind. Um I think beyond that, it's not even it's not about applying lessons as much as it's just like I think the folks that were at Coyote at any point, but especially earlier folks at Coyote, just kind of learn the industry the right way and just are like very authentic, credible industry operators that understand pain points, whether it's with brokers and carriers or in our case, uh oftentimes with shippers. I think it's just like a very credible group that kind of came up in the industry the right way and really gets it.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Let me ask this then like what do you think, in your opinion, was the playbook that really drove success for Coyote? Because I've heard everyone's got their own take on this. Um I'm just curious what yours is.

The Real Meaning Of No Excuses

SPEAKER_01 12:17

You know, I don't know. I mean, I I think it's again it comes back to leadership and culture, and like, you know, obviously no excuses was kind of the the motto and the mindset all over the swag that we used to wear, and I think we actually lived it. A lot of companies have cultural values or things that they say that may or may not actually um be the way they operate the business or really truly be part of the culture, and I think that was very much a real thing there. And you know, the the example you always think of is early on, we would say like all the other big freight brokerages out here will roll a load and make up an excuse to the shipper to just not lose money. And we wouldn't do that. We would find a way to win. If we had to lose money, we would do it. We try to minimize our losses, but we would just we would just do the best we could to get the job done and just you know do what we say we were gonna do. And so I think that probably has something to do with it.

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SPEAKER_00 13:08

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The Nuance Behind Moving Every Load

SPEAKER_00 13:58

I think one of the biggest misses for the companies that have tried to replicate the coyote model of no excuses, no give backs, no rolling loads to not lose money. Um I think a lot of companies make the mistake of thinking it's just that. In that if you just never roll a load and you just move every load you commit to, that like magic happens and you become this like multi-billion dollar successful brokerage. It's just not true. Um, it's one piece, um, but it's such a nuanced strategy that takes a really deep relationship that you have to develop, which is way easier to do if you follow through on your commitments to your customers. Because your customers are way more open to having conversations with you about how to grow together and how to win together if you can follow through on your commitments. Because, yeah, not everyone does it. But it's not just so simple as doing that. Because if you just do that, as a company, you likely lose money. You have to be able to do it in a way where you can have strategic enough conversations, but then as you as your business grows with a customer, you start to get more selective about the freight you commit to. Like you have to get really good about learning your network and developing your network. It's not just we take every load and we move every load. It's we learn every day about the decisions we made yesterday. We learn the lanes that we continue to take and continue to lose money on because we just for whatever we can't develop the right network there on that specific lane. It's being more intentional about having reps pursue a specific lane and developing capacity on that lane because you're losing money on it. Uh, and eventually knowing in the next bid, this is not a lane for us. And it's okay to tell a customer this is not a lane for us. The right way to do it is not in the middle of a contract that you've started moving and it's now losing more money because produce season started. It's following through and executing through the contract. Then at the end of the contract, being able to say, hey, listen, we tried our best here, we serviced it for you for a year. It doesn't work for us unless we can raise our rate now in this next bid. And if you've got people who are cheaper that can do it, great. Let them have it. But offset us and help us grow in other areas. And if you followed through on your commitments and executed it, whatever the percentage on time was that was expected of you, they want to grow with you. So maybe they're switching the lanes, whatever. But I think I think that piece of nuance is has always been missed, not always, but but often been missed. Because I remember one of the reasons that I would thought a lot of coyote people ended up in leadership roles, and some of them were not the right ones, uh, was because they just thought they could be brought into a place and people would say, hey, go do what you did before. And those people didn't necessarily understand it well enough. And so all of a sudden these companies are just losing money hand over fist, not really uh we had that example. I I can't I I had an example like that with someone who was brought into a leadership role at a place that I I got to see what it was like, how they operated, and they were working with with with Wally World and uh losing money hand over fist, but also not servicing the prank, just taking it all, and then they weren't even capable of covering it all. Uh, and so they were failing. And I'm like, this is not winning. Like, we're trying to make an impression. I'm like, you're making an impression, it's just not a very good one. Uh for sure. Yeah, there's a lot more.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

I didn't know there's a lot more to it than just moving the load, right? There's a lot, a lot that happens behind the scenes. That's maybe the thing that's most visible to the shipper. Um, but you have to make smart decisions, you have to price accurately, you have to uh, you know, you have to be improving every day. Um so not only honoring your word, but making the right decisions and um continuously making, you know, improving along the way.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

So you you did five and a half years, you cut your teeth in the industry at Coyote, you learned a lot, you got your first management experience. Um you really were a very excellent uh carrier guy. Uh there are someone's blowing bubbles outside my window. Massive bubbles are just floating. I'm I'm in a I'm on the 11th floor or 10th floor in downtown Chicago in West Loop, and I turn my head to the left, and there are just bubbles everywhere, like large bubbles. I'm sorry. That was a distraction for my ADHD as I was walking through your coyote

Why Ryan Joined Convoy

SPEAKER_00 18:20

career. So um you spent five and a half years and eventually made the decision to leave. Um you mentioned the company had gotten big, so I get that. Um what was pulling you to Convoy? Uh you you know, I cut you off before I well, I I I stopped you before I could let you go on about Dan, but let's go into that now. Um, what was it that brought you to Convoy?

SPEAKER_01 18:42

You know, it I guess it was a few things. One, there was nothing driving me away from Coyote. I had a great experience there, and I was grateful for my time, and I feel like I learned a ton, but I also felt like I kind of hit a ceiling where I'd been, you know, I was a successful carrier rep for a year and a half, then I managed carrier reps for four years and enjoyed that, but I just didn't see where I was gonna go from there, and I wanted to continue growing. I've always been very um, yeah, I don't, you know, I just I always want to continue to grow and get better and and uh advance. And so I just I didn't see how that was gonna happen uh at that company at that point. And so when I heard about Convoy, and you know, this is back 2015, I had you know, the the article I read was it was like A-list investors invest $2.5 million seed money in Convoy. And it talks about Uber for trucking and automating the matching process, and so that really hitting on two things that really resonated for me. One was, you know, having been a carrier rep and a manager of carrier reps, knowing that it's a very manual process to pick up the phone, call carriers, ask where their trucks are, haggle over the rate, finding a way to automate that made a lot of sense. And then also, as kind of a young professional living in the city of Chicago, having experienced the magic of like riding in Ubers for the first time in like a year, the recent couple years before that, those two things made sense. That application, applying it to freight, just completely it felt like that should work. That just seemed like a thing that could happen. And so I saw that as an opportunity to go grow. I had no exposure to technology outside of bazooka, which was a fantastic proprietary brokerage TMS, but I had no experience to or exposure to working with product and technology folks. And um I don't know, it just it just felt like an interesting opportunity that I could potentially get in on the ground floor. And so that led me to find a way to get introduced to Dan Lewis, which I did, which kicked off a series of uh interviews, culminating in them flying me out to Seattle to meet the team. And at this time, the team was like 14 people in one room. Um, so one thing led to another, and I ended up joining the company, moving out to Seattle. My wife and I picked up and moved across the country as newlyweds, and I was the 15th employee at convoy, first person from a freight brokerage background. Uh, and you could say I was definitely a fish out of water in the early days, like freight broker in the room with a bunch of tech people. It was uh it was interesting early on.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Talk to me about that. What was that energy like being the fish out of water, but also just being in a room with like 14, 15 like really smart tech people uh supported by some of the you know top investors in the world?

Teaching Software How Brokerage Works

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Yeah, I mean it was um in in some ways I was kind of going back to my roots because you know we were broker, we were starting to take loads and starting to commercialize and you know, you know, actually execute freight in the business, and we didn't have the matching application like up and running and actually automating any of the matching. And so I kind of rewound my career a few years, and I was manually brokering freight. Um, during you know, by day brokering loads, calling calling, I was actually setting appointments too, I was doing all kinds of operational work. Work, which would be like kind of account manager type work as well as carrier rep type type of work to sort of bridge the gap while we were building the technology. And then once the loads were covered, I was in a small conference room on a whiteboard with various folks on the team, explaining how I knew which carriers to call, what things I was explaining to them, like what makes a carrier, a certain carrier or a certain truck interested in a certain load. What are the characteristics that matter? Kind of talking early relevance uh signals that would then help the algorithm kind of develop to know which loads to offer to which carriers at what price. So that was kind of the early days. And actually, one of the earliest engineers there is my now co-founder in GoodShip, David Sai, who was like one of the principal engineers that built the matching technology that now lives on it at DAT, the convoy platform. So that was kind of the early days, like trying to figure out how to apply uh traditional freight brokerage tactics and best practices, uh, and then bring the kind of bring the technology piece into it.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

Was there friction in the kind of tech mindset of building this matching application with the kind of brokerage execution model that you knew would work? Was there a friction there that you know was other healthy or problematic?

SPEAKER_01 23:30

I think in the beginning it was fine. I mean, oh, you know, generally I would say no. For the most part, it was it was healthy, it was good, you know, it was good pressure testing and trying to. I think Convoy definitely wanted to push the boundaries of what was possible with technology, as they should. Oftentimes I was the one in the room saying, well, this is how it actually works, and I don't think that that's gonna work. And so a lot of times I kind of sounded like a naysayer. Obviously, I had joined a tech company thinking we're gonna automate all of it. So I believed in the mission, but there were certain things along the way. Honestly, I can't even think of which things off the top of my head at the moment, but um, there were things along the way where I kind of felt like this might not, this is not realistic, this is not the way to do this right now. I think the industry has a line on this thing as the best practice. If that's not the core technology that we're like how we're adding value, then why don't we just do the best practice and kind of focus on automating the thing that is kind of the main thing? So there were there were friction points along the way, but by and large, I had an amazing experience at Convoy. I learned a ton, met so many great people, and obviously I wouldn't be you know building good ship without without that experience.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

So yeah, of course. I'm not trying to bait you into saying anything negative too. I just one of the things that I felt has been a knock on that kind of model was for various companies, not Convoy specifically, but uh several of the kind of digital freight companies, was that there was always a challenge between the the tech mines driving the ship with at the at the expense of the freight execution mines and that you know, almost like that concept of companies that want to iterate and innovate, and it was to some points at the expense of the customer because and the customer could have been the driver, it could have been the shipper, um, because you know, wanting to move their business or the industry forward with things that you know were unproven. Um, and and you know, when you try new things, like if they don't work, like who who pays that price? Um, and and you know, and it felt like it was oftentimes either the the driver or carrier or the or the shipper. So that's kind of what I'm curious about is like how well Convoy kind of brought your opinion to the table to say, like, oh yeah, like we do want to build this and automate it, but we have to keep in mind that XYZ will lead to these issues.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Yeah, that's helpful framing. I I think on the carrier side, uh, you know, earl the earliest days, obviously carriers were you know, we had to make we made them jump through hoops. I was brokering loads manually. The team was brokering loads manually to them and saying, okay, we're gonna send you this load. And it was a soft market in early 2016, but we're gonna send you this load, but you need to download this app, and then you need like we were kind of making them jump through hoops so that hopefully the next load that they took could be automated. Um, so you know, there was a little bit of friction there, but I think overall, especially in a soft market, they were willing to do that. And I think carriers by and large had a very positive experience with convoy. They were getting quick paid for free if they were using the app properly. They were able to go in there and self-serve, you know, grab loads and negotiate freight. So I think overall the carriers really did well on convoy uh throughout the whole company's journey.

Scaling Pain Points With Enterprise Shippers

SPEAKER_01 26:54

I would say later on, as we started working with large enterprise shippers, that there was more friction. Um, you know, I think we there were some things that, you know, this is maybe where some of the best practices weren't followed. Like in my mind, the people that are doing the operations, supporting the customer, setting the appointments, you know, all the things that go into it, should be sitting with the account managers. Now, obviously, there's different structures and different ways of dividing those types of responsibilities in different freight models or brokerage models, but um, there was a long period of time where we had an operations team that was not dedicated to a specific customer or customer group. They were sort of just taking the next task off the top of the list to set an appointment or track a load or just do kind of those more mundane tasks. Uh, I always thought that even if you're gonna separate those into separate teams, they should still be organized around a basket of accounts so that they gain familiarity. They're not asking the same question over and over again. I remember that there were certain customers. I had a brief stint where I was managing a group of account managers later on in my time there, where I was going and seeing food and bev shippers in person for QBRs and stuff. And a lot of the times they were saying things to me like, why do we keep making the same mistakes? Or why do they keep asking us the same questions over and over again? I I never talked to the same person besides the account manager. The operations people are always a different person. They never remember what we told them last time. We answer the same question every every week. And so that was that felt like a miss to me, but I think at that time they were thinking, how do we scale this? Unit economics, which which makes sense, but I think that some of the trade-offs that were made there were probably not the right ones. So that that was a good example of friction that comes to mind.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

That's a fascinating example because there's not a freight person in the world that would look at that and think that's a good idea. Like every freight person would look at that and say, that is a non-starter. Like you gotta change that immediately. And it just feels like that's an example where the tail's wagging the dog or the dog's wagging. I don't know what the saying is, but but where it's in the wrong way for sure. Like yeah, like you know, you you you got you're building this excellent technology. Clearly, you know, you talk about the experience for the carriers. Um, like clearly they found a way to win and or do things well or better than than some of us maybe were doing them, but like that's one where it just that's a mind-boggling uh kind of decision. That you know, I guess that's that's like you live and learn. It's so interesting to me because you can come at this problem of solving moving freight for shippers a million different ways, you know? And and there's a there's a lot of ways to be successful, and there's a lot of ways to fail. Um and combo is just a fascinating business. Uh obviously, it's insane growth and a lot of money raised and a lot of technology built that lives on. Um, but at the end of the day, the business itself couldn't survive. And you know, I think that's just one example of of maybe a reason why. Um my last question for you on Convoy, and then we'll move on. Um I feel like you know, Convoy failed. I see, I don't even know if that's well, I guess it did. Convoy didn't six didn't live. Convoy failed. And and a lot of great people came out of that business. Um certainly great technology that eventually was bought for 200 or something million dollars by DAT through Flexport. Uh but I guess you know there was a lot of pitchforking around Convoy from the traditional brokers, guys like myself. Um, you call me a pitchforker. Um and I'm curious from your perspective, like what's something that the market was wrong about with respect to Convoy? Like something that today, like, you know, not that people still really talk about it a bunch, but like it's mostly negative stuff about Convoy that you'll hear. And as someone who actually lived it and was part of that team, what's something that we were just wrong about that? Like a convoy actually did really well or or was really something that you were impressed by in building that business.

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SPEAKER_01 31:54

Yeah,

What Convoy Got Right

SPEAKER_01 31:55

it's hard to it's hard to pick one thing. Obviously, there were flaws in the business. And I was on uh, you know, I was one of several guests on the convoy episode early on in the freight pod journey. We talked about some of that stuff, but I don't know. I I think a lot of people said digital freight matching is not new, like this is already happening. A lot of brokerages have apps, which was true, but to actually be matching at scale like 98-99% of the loads at like a good market clearing rate to carriers that can service it, like that was a first. Like there were there were things where you know we we did it at Coyote, other brokerages had apps, but it was very, I think you probably would agree, it was a very distant, very distant second mechanism for matching loads. Whereas at Convoy, matching a load manually or having to have a human get involved was a very you know slim exception to the rule. So I think that's one thing that some of the pitchforkers got wrong is like that we've been doing this for years. Like yes and no, not anything kind of not comparable to what Convoy did. That's one. Um I mean, I think carriers had an amazing experience, as I mentioned. I think the the customers had a decent experience. They had some bumps in the road, and I think we were too slow to fix those things. But the example I gave about kind of that shared work, take a task from the top of the list, that eventually did get improved or fixed. Uh, probably took too long to fix it. Um but another, you know, one other thing that was kind of cool that we were able to provide to shippers that I don't think anyone else was able to do is because we had the mobile app, drivers were giving star ratings at each pickup and drop-offs. They would say, like, how is your they would have to answer it, how is your experience at this pickup facility scored out of five stars? And then there was a free form feedback opportunity. And so we'd have the in-and-out times from breaking the geofense with the with the phone, we'd have the facility ratings, we'd have free form feedback. And so one of the things that was kind of cool going into a QBR or a customer meeting is we'd be able to say, hey, here's all the data from all the carriers that we work with that have gone in and out of these facilities. Across our whole network, Houston on average has a 4.6 star rating. Your Houston facility, for whatever reason, is a 2.6. Here's some of the free form feedback. And so it was kind of a unique way to be able to give feedback about maybe what's working, maybe what's not working. Uh, and ultimately, if the carriers don't like going there, that's going to be reflected in the price, as we all know. And so that was kind of a cool thing we were able to do. Like the analytics, the data. Um, we were able to put together some pretty cool stuff that was pretty differentiated from other capacity providers in a QBR or customer meeting setting.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

Yeah, that's that's next level. I mean, that is um I I remember hearing that about you guys and hearing that about I think Uber did something similar. Um, and I think that's just that is taking it a step further in terms of getting like real raw feedback directly from the drivers and like quantifiable market comparisons. Um that's that's good stuff. So I I appreciate that. Um all right, let's move off with Convoy. So I don't want to spend a ton of time on Stored because I want to spend most of the I want to spend the rest of our time really on Good Chip, but just kind of talk me just quickly about like the decision to leap Convoy and and on just why Stored and kind of just a brief kind of maybe two minutes on what you were doing there before you started Good Chip.

Stored And Scaling A Brokerage Fast

SPEAKER_01 35:28

Yeah, for sure. So um a lot of learnings at Convoy. You know, I spent I we didn't talk about this, but I spent three of my five years at Convoy building out the contract pricing team. And so I had a lot of learnings about how broken contract freight freight is and the procurement process and some other things that in my mind I felt like there was an opportunity to build a business, but I didn't quite have line of sight into what that was, nor did I have really the confidence that I'd be able to go out and raise money to go start something. And so while I had these ideas kind of bouncing around in the back of my head for, you know, on the back burner basically, um, I think Sean Henry had reached out to me at one point, and you know, I'd been there five years at Convoy. I was ready to do something else. As I mentioned earlier, I really like early days. Convoy, I was the 15th employee, it was like 12 or 1,300 people five years later. Symptom mostly of success, but again, like the camaraderie and kind of the energy was not as fun or exciting as early days, similar to early coyote days. And so I was kind of ready to go back to building early uh and kind of take that next step. And so I looked into Stored, I saw what they were doing. They had just raised their Series A from Kleiner Perkins, which is a very prominent, prestigious uh VC. And so I reached back out to Sean and said, hey, you know, I'm definitely interested in exploring more and you know, learning what you guys are up to. And um, so that kicked off a series of conversations. It turned out that they had just bought a small freight brokerage in Missouri and they were looking for someone to lead that brokerage and sort of modernize it. And so uh the role was head of freight that they offered me, and so uh I had just moved back from Seattle to Nashville. Uh this is like the beginning of very beginning of COVID, so it was a weird time, but uh I joined Stored, which was Atlanta-based, working remotely from Nashville, and commuting to Springfield, Missouri, where this small brokerage was that they had bought. And so the role was head of freight, and yeah, I had a had a fun 18 months there, basically scaling it up from something like 13 million, sorry, 13 people, 8 million run rate when I joined, uh, when you know, was what this legacy company was doing. And they had some great customers, like Dollar General was like a uh an outlier massive company that they worked with, which is, as we know, pretty unusual for a kind of a smaller freight brokerage operation to have that kind of a relationship. And um, yeah, we scaled it from uh from 8 million run rate to over 80 million run rate in 18 months. And I think on the back of some of that growth, uh Stored ended up going out and raising several more rounds of venture, uh, putting quite a bit of money in the bank, and also significantly increasing their valuation. So it was a really fun ride. This is a different time and era, 2020, 2021, like low interest rates, rewarding growth at all costs. And so that's what we were doing, which was which was fun. Um I think the the big takeaway for me or or the value add for me was I had been in leadership roles managing teams, you know, relatively small teams, and this was kind of my first opportunity, kind of managing the entire business unit. And at first it was 13 people, but over time it was you know 70 people that I was managing. Um and so that was I think that was a good confidence builder for me to be able to go take the next step and maybe build my own company. So that was an important stepping stone, and Stored is doing great. I think they've I think they've divested from full truckload freight, and they're obviously more known for e-commerce fulfillment, both warehousing. And Sean and team are doing a great job. They I think they just raised a Series F at a huge valuation. So certainly rooting for those guys. They're they're doing awesome work.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

So time for good ship. How did this come? How did this let's start with you and David?

Finding The Right Co-Founder

SPEAKER_00 39:08

How did you guys decide to partner? Why was David the guy to be your co-founder?

SPEAKER_01 39:14

So David was the first person I reached out to. So this is this is now going back to Q4 2021. I'm starting to more seriously think about these ideas, these problems that I'll talk about in a minute of why procurement is broken and there's no shared source of truth. Um, and it's just like the system's broke. These, these, you know, it's not working. And I saw these opportunities. And so I'm starting to put together a pitch deck. I'm not even necessarily positive I'm gonna go out and be able to raise money, but I'm sort of like trying to like pressure test the idea and like get more ideas on paper and just sort of poke holes in it. And the more time I spent building out this pitch deck, the more convicted I got that this was something that we could do and would be valuable in the industry. And so once I got to the point where I had conviction, I was thinking through who would be a good technical co-founder. And of course, the engineers that I worked most closely with were early days convoy. And David sat next to me when I was brokering loads in the early days, trying to figure out how do we automate this thing that Ryan and the team are doing. And I always had a huge respect for David, just incredibly humble, uh intelligent guy, like really, really talented, builds super fast. He had founded a and bootstrapped a company that exited successfully before he joined Convoy. So he's just great business acumen, super sharp, humble, and we just got along great. And so the first thing was reaching out to him and saying, hey, we'd love to catch up. It's been a while. I've got this idea, would love to get your feedback. And 30-minute call, I think, went like 90 minutes. And at the end of it, I'm like, okay, David's fired up. I think he's gonna want to do this with me. And so at the end of the call, I'm like, so do you wanna do you wanna make a run of this with me? And he's like, Oh, you know, I I don't think I have enough gas left in the tank. You don't want me to be your co-founder, like I'm you know, I'm I'm tired from convoy. And I was like, David, like let's do this. And uh anyway, three or four weeks went by. I came back to him and said, Hey, I've got investors offering me terms, I've got a first shipper partner that's actually sending me data to go build early dashboards. Like, who else should I talk to if it's not you? And at that point, he's like, actually, I've been thinking about this for the last three, four weeks. If you'll still have me, I'd love to throw my name in the hat. And so that's kind of the backstory, the fun story of David telling me no and then um me being a little bit persistent and getting him to come along. And um, and yeah, and and why David's so great and why he was the right co-founder.

SPEAKER_00 41:38

Any idea what it was that uh changed his mind over that three, three, three or four-week period?

SPEAKER_01 41:44

You know, I'm I'm not sure I should ask him that. I think he just had been thinking about the conversation we had and the opportunity, and I think the more he thought about it, the more excited he he became. Um he had already left Convoy at that point. He was kind of doing a side project with uh his former co-founder, knew he wasn't gonna stay. It was like crypto related or NFT related, he wasn't gonna do it long term, and um I think he just thought about the ideas that we talked about and got he just came around to it, thankfully.

SPEAKER_00 42:11

Yeah. So so what were the ideas? What was what was the original idea for what good ship would be?

Why Freight RFPs Are Broken

SPEAKER_01 42:21

The original idea, or like maybe the two problems that I observed initially, were that one, procurement was broken. And what I mean by that is it takes three to four months for a big enterprise shipper to run a network-wide RFP. We all know why, but just to maybe say it quickly, even if you're using a generic procurement tool like a Jager or a Coupa, you're still uploading and downloading spreadsheets from a portal. And with these big shippers, there's five, six, ten thousand rows. Each row is obviously a lane that they're putting out to bid. And so multiple rounds of going line by line through thousands of rows and saying, which lane do we like? What price can we do it for? How much volume or capacity can we commit to? You spend a month doing this exercise, you submit it, you wait several weeks for the shipper to do a bunch of analysis and cross-reference the responses, then they send it back and it's round two, and they say, sharpen the pencil and get more competitive where you can. And there's two or three rounds of this. And so no wonder why it takes forever and it's so antiquated. And so having seen the matching technology we were able to build, and then doing this exercise, it just seemed to me there was certainly something we could build that would make this better and more streamlined. And then the second part of why procurement was broken, and this is maybe like the biggest genesis of good chip, is as the guy that was pricing out the RFPs for Convoy for three years, all you find out is the origin, the destination, estimated annual volume, and truck type. And as we know, there's so much more that goes into a price than that kind of very basic table stakes information. Things like seasonality, uh lead time. How much lead time will I get if I'm if I win this lane? What days of the week are loads picking and dropping? What are the shipping and receiving hours of? These facilities, like stuff that you need to know to know if you can even service it, and much less what the price would be to be able to service it. And so, like, everyone's making these assumptions, 50 or 100 carriers and brokers are bidding in these events. It's a race to the bottom. And so a lot of times, you know, we talk about winners' curse. Like the if you end up winning a ton of freight, and initially you're like, oh, sweet, this is awesome. We won all this business. And then you realize, what did we get wrong? Like, why did we win so much? Like this maybe is not a good thing. And so carriers are bidding without nearly enough information. So those are sort of the problems around procurement. Like the process takes forever. Carriers don't have enough information to bid accurately. And I think that doesn't that leads to non-durable routing guides when people don't know what they're signing up for, the price, the economics don't make sense when you start running the loads. Like that, that was like the first problem that led to good ship. The second problem was around data accuracy and having

The Missing Inputs That Break Pricing

SPEAKER_01 44:57

a shared source of truth. Shippers all measure a lot of the same things on-time service, tender acceptance, a bunch of other stuff. But the logic they use to measure it varies from one shipper to the next. So like I always use on-time service as an example. Some shippers measure on-time to the appointment, down to the minute. Some use a buffer, two hours, three hours, plus or minus to the appointment, and you're good. Some it's binary. Did you show up on the right day or not? So when you're a broker or carrier supporting dozens of shippers and they all measure things a little bit differently, it makes it virtually impossible to be talking apples to apples when you get into a meeting or a QBR with a customer. You show up with your self-reported data, and then you're like, here's my on-time service, and here's this, and here's that. And they're like, that's not what we have. And then you spend the whole time sort of arm wrestling and litigating instead of having a constructive conversation about we all agree this is what's happening. What do we do to improve it? Or where do we lean into what's working? And so these two problems kind of kept coming up over and over in my career in the industry. And the more I thought about it, I realized that these are connected problems. And what I mean by that is procurement, when you run the annual bid, is like setting the plan for the year and getting you off, hopefully, on the right foot if you do a good job with procurement. But then having a shared source of truth and unifying all the data and like allowing brokers and carriers to see the same information or the relevant information that the shipper is looking at as it relates to their performance, allows people to make improvements along the way and sort of iterate and continuously optimize the network. And so I'll stop talking after this.

Network Drift And Why It Matters

SPEAKER_01 46:32

The last thing I'll say, I'll take a pause, is I sort of landed on this concept of network drift. This is kind of like a new thing I've been talking about, which is basically that even if you have the best procurement event and you it looks perfect as soon as you award it out and it starts going and it's working perfectly. Probably that doesn't happen. But even if it was, this is such a dynamic market. Carrier performance changes, uh, market rates change, volumes change. Everything is changing all the time. And so the network is always drifting away from optimal. And so you need to be able to have line of sight to what's happening and the ability to take corrective actions on an ongoing basis to keep things optimized throughout the year. You can't set it, forget it, and then come back in a year and fix it.

SPEAKER_00 47:17

So network drift exists because the market is dynamic, but a procurement event typically is not. Right? Like, so you're saying like over time the market adjusts, whether it's because some government thing is changing the amount of capacity in the market, or a carrier's been awarded new lanes that they took on without telling you, and they now are giving you a few of their trucks, or rates go up because of produce, or uh there's a limited time offer on Coca-Cola at Walmart, and so they're for a month gonna have three times the volume, whatever it is. But those things change. Uh they're dynamic. But the you know, a shipper historically runs a annual procurement event and sets the network, and the network is not intended to be dynamic in in that sense. Um so the drift is a product of a dynamic going against the static and leading to drift.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Exactly right. It's a you the procurement event assumes everything is static. You set it for the year, the rates are static, you know, the capacity commitments are static. But then, as we all know, those are all estimates and things are changing. Rates are changing, capacity is changing, service changing, volume's changing, business priorities are changing. That doesn't mean that carriers aren't going to honor their commitment and shippers aren't going to honor their commitment, but not all of them do. So you get little hotspots that sort of start to flare up in different parts of the network. And so having the ability for shippers to see all that data and understand where things are happening, proactively address it, nip it in the bud before it kind of spirals is important. And for the carriers to be able to self-serve access and see how this shipper viewing me? What are the goalposts I'm being measured on, and what can I do between now and my next QB, you know, quarterly business review or meeting with this customer to get in good standing with them across all the metrics they care about. And so those things compound each other, bad procurement and an inability to kind of correct it. It's kind of like becomes a uh a cycle that things sort of what ends up happening is there's you know, a shipper finds out from a facility or for somebody that something is on fire, and they go do some ad hoc analysis, knee-jerk reaction, figure out that it's not working, and then they go run a mini-bid or they go have a conversation and fix it. But there's already been a significant service issue, cost loss, like something bad things have already happened to the point that it's been escalated to you. The idea with GoodShip is procure better, be transparent with carriers about what they're setting up for so they can bid it more accurately, make for more durable routing guides, but then also have the shared view where you know exactly what's happening in your mark, in your in your network, pinpoint opportunities that you know maybe starting to uh develop, and take a corrective action before it becomes a big uh a big hotspot in the network.

What GoodShip Actually Is

SPEAKER_00 50:18

So for for those that are unaware, like what is good ship then? Is it a TMS? It sounds kind of like what a TMS should be.

SPEAKER_01 50:27

We call GoodShip the AI engine powering modern freight networks. That's kind of like the tagline that we've we've adopted recently. Um we're not a TMS. We are TMS agnostic, we're very much neutral. We've had certain customers ask us to start building certain capabilities that would make us a TMS. We very intentionally will not do that. Um, I guess if you think about the tech stack or the you know, let's start with the shipper, because that's kind of where we started our business. The shipper tech stack has, you know, going back 20 or 30 years, the TMS kind of became you know, the system of record where you're recording the transaction, the appointment times, uh, the routing guides, et cetera. That was kind of like that, that was the thing 20 or 30 years ago. That's still critical. The last 10 years I would characterize as heavy investment in visibility and answering the question, like billions of dollars were poured into the answering the question, where's my load or where's my truck? I think that was helpful. But knowing where there's a problem doesn't get you to a solution. And so where good ship comes in is we kind of sit on top of the stack and we unify data, we help pinpoint opportunities, and it's really more of a system, a system of action and decisions. So you know not only what's going on, but have recommendations on exactly what to do, and then you can take those corresponding corrective actions directly from GoodShip, whether that means running a mini-bid, running a network bid, renegotiating a rate, adjusting your routing guide logic. And so we sit in the middle, we play nice with all the different TMSs. We have companies and customers from representing every TMS using GoodShip. And so we pull in that data from them, from the visibility providers, from all the big market rate benchmarks are all partners of ours. We we bring all that in. So we're our ethos is meeting customers where they are, regardless of their tech stack. We bring it all together, give them the single pane of glass to see exactly what's going on. And then we layer in Laney, our new AI transportation analyst, who will proactively find the opportunities, pinpoint stuff, and make recommendations on what to do. And over time that'll become those actions can become more automated as we build it up.

Why Staying TMS Neutral Wins

SPEAKER_00 52:41

Got it. So I'm just curious, like you said neutral platform. Or use the word neutral. I don't know if you it is a platform. So neutral platform. Why is neutral the path versus getting into the TMS space or um something else?

SPEAKER_01 53:04

That's a good question. Um I don't know. I just I think selling TMS is, I mean, it just sounds extremely difficult, right? Like I think TMS is so ingrained in a business, especially for a shipper, that ripping and replacing the TMS is such a huge decision. It's a huge lift, it's a huge risk, it's a huge expense, you need to time it right. And so I think we're the way I think about Good Chip is good chip represents the upside and benefit of adopting a new TMS. If there was some new, modern, amazing TMS out there, I don't know that there is one that's kind of on that does the things that we're thinking about, but if one existed, good chip represents the upside of adopting it without the downside risk and expense of ripping and replacing and potentially losing sight of your metrics and what's important in your business. So you can kind of just adopt good ship, bring all the data together and get that benefit without um without the downside.

SPEAKER_00 54:04

What does that implementation look like?

A Three Week Implementation Reality

SPEAKER_00 54:07

Is it you know a long period? Is it quick? Like what does that kind of lift look like to take good ship and and put it into XYZ company?

SPEAKER_01 54:17

It's extremely, extremely fast. That's a good point. It's nothing like a TMS implementation, it's a matter of three or four weeks. Um, you know, we're pulling together your your data, pulling in different reports, and you know, we've got all about a lot of the pre-built integrations already with a lot of these data sources that we're gonna be pulling in. And so we pull it in, we map the data fields, and we basically want to understand, you know, there's a vanilla out-of-the-box version of the metrics that we can offer for different shippers or brokers or carriers, whoever the customer is, but um obviously everyone likes to look at their business a little bit differently, and so you know, a lot of the work is just working with their team to understand what are the most important metrics, what would you what do you wish you had visibility into today that you don't, and then building all the views that they want. And so it's again, it's like a three or four-week process, it's a really light lift, doesn't typically require IT from our customers. And so the nice thing is the transportation and procurement teams themselves can push this project forward. They don't have reliance on um on internal technology or IT teams. So time to value is very much compressed. They can kind of get this up and running, and especially in a tight market like this, a lot of customers are coming to us and saying, How fast can we do this? We feel like we're burning millions of dollars a month because of tender rejection and uh the spot market, etc.

SPEAKER_00 55:33

Who are some of the early customers that adopted Good Ship that you're allowed to, I guess, mention?

Early Customers And Renewal Proof

SPEAKER_01 55:40

Yeah, there are uh there are a bunch of good ones. I can mention a handful. Um, some of our earliest ones are WK Kellogg and Kelanova, so both of the former legacy Kellogg companies are fantastic. Robert Morris and Matt Rose have been awesome partners to us. They've been on the platform over two years. Uh, my very first shipper customer was Nicole at Resource Fine Foods, a former Coyote. So she was the shipper sending us data as a design partner before I even got David on board. So, in some ways, Nicole's kind of like uh an honorary co-founder of the company. So Resource has been a great partner. Um you know, one of our really big early customers was KBX Logistics. So that's Coke, Coke, Inc., Coke with a K. Um, and they're really an interesting company. They have massive spend. Some people think of them as a carrier, but really they're they're almost like a managed transportation company for the internal uh Coke operating company. So like Georgia Pacific being probably their largest uh internal shipper there. So we manage, they manage all of that business on top of good ship. So those are a handful. I mean, we work with Tropicana and yeah, I mean, there's dozens and dozens of major shippers. We we definitely skew up market. We've got a number of mid-market great customers as well, but we are largely um working with like the biggest, the biggest enterprise shippers out there.

SPEAKER_00 57:05

And and what's been the the feedback for I mean, these are real significant players you're talking about that are trusting you to manage or support their procurement efforts and manage their transportation alongside them or as a tool to manage their transportation. Like what has been the feedback?

SPEAKER_01 57:24

After they adopt?

SPEAKER_00 57:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:27

Yeah, I mean it's it's it's very positive. I'm I'm proud to say that we've had virtually no churn uh in the business. So we've had a number of customers start with one-year contracts and kind of try it out and they've all renewed, and now our contracts are typically two and three years long. We've had some customers that did multiple one-year contracts in a row. They're already on their third contract, and they've now done a longer term. Um so the feedback is super positive. I mean, it's um you know, it's about savings, it's about efficiency, it's about freeing people up to not do manual analysis, but actually do higher order strategic work, whatever that might mean in their in their organization. Um, and then of course, spending way less time running procurement events. You can just click a few buttons and add lanes to a procurement event, run a mini-bid in a matter of minutes, like saving people tons of time, procuring better, giving them better tools, helping them look good to their boss and be able to report up the organization about exactly what's driving deviations from plan, whether that's from budget or from service standpoint. So I think it's just um yeah, it's it uh at the end of the day, everything comes back to service and and and cost. And I think we're we've been able to help um on both of those dimensions pretty significantly.

What Unifying Data Looks Like

SPEAKER_00 58:38

I'm curious about unifying the data, because that's like I feel like that's a term we hear all the time in our industry. And like what does that actually mean operationally for a shipper with respect to how you're coordinating with them?

SPEAKER_01 58:53

Sorry, sorry, say that again. What does what mean? So unifying the data. Okay, so unifying the data. What that means to us is we're you know taking stuff out of Power BI or Snowflake, or you know, today shippers and transportation teams have marker rate benchmarks, they've got real-time visibility providers, they've got uh obviously load and tender data from the TMS, they've got fuel schedules, NASA source schedules, and uh all kinds of different stuff that they're looking at. And pre-good ship, they're either building kind of static, inflexible dashboards and Power BI and Tableau, or they're kind of flying blind and just kind of clicking around and cross-referencing different reports and trying to figure stuff out. But usually those reports are backwards looking. And so it's kind of like a retroactive, what did we miss and how can we improve later? With GoodShip, we're bringing all the data together in a modern system where they can slice and dice and have dynamic conversations, know what's happening in real time, and make decisions on the fly before it's too late. Know what to do next rather than looking backwards and saying, what did we get wrong and how can we improve later? Make the right decision instead of making the wrong decision and then trying to analyze it later.

When Market Volatility Boosts Demand

SPEAKER_00 1:00:09

Does the market have any impact on on your ability to land customers? Like I'm curious, because it's an interesting business. I get like I get in, you know, some technology that's expensive when you know if you're selling to brokers in the last three years, it would have been really hard to sell new technology that's that cost money because they were all struggling to make money. But like for you, you're selling to shippers who I guess for the last three years were saving a lot of money on their transportation spend. Does that make it easier to sell to them? And now, like, as the market tightens, it becomes more challenging. Or conversely, does it get easier to sell to shippers when the market's challenging? Because that's when their Tokyo network drift is the most significant.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:00

I think it's the latter. What's funny is we started the business in January of 2022. The market was extremely tight coming out of COVID. I think Freight Wave was reporting tender rejections at like 35% or something. And so it was like, okay, we need to build like the earliest thing was like, let's build dashboards with scorecards to bring the shippers and their carriers together to hold each other accountable to tender acceptance, to service, honoring commitments, etc. And by the time we actually raised the first round of capital and built the dashboards, the market basically completely flipped. And as we all know, has been completely soft for four years up until a few months ago. And so thankfully, we've been able to have pretty good success over the last four and a half years, despite it being a super soft market. I kind of joke that we've had our, you know, one hand tied behind our back, fighting an uphill battle. Like obviously, we're adding a lot of value for our customers. That's why they're renewing. That's why we're you know landing customers. But in a soft market, you can kind of get away with a lot. Like, no, no one's breathing down the transportation director's neck saying, why are you spending all this money? Why is like everything's going well. At the end of the day, for a shipper, we help with improving spend, improving service, you know, minimizing spot exposure or maximizing contract adherence. Those things have never been less painful over the last four years, at least in my time in the industry. And so if the biggest value prop is helping with those things, like it's not really that mission critical if you think of it that way. Obviously, it you know, having real-time data and knowing what's going on, being able to collaborate with your carriers, there's a lot more value, which is why we've been able to be successful. But I think with the reason that things have gotten accelerated significantly over the last several months, I think is you know, obviously we've come a long way, we've built credibility, we've got a big roster of enterprise shippers that we can reference that certainly helps with proof points. But I think the market is a is a huge tailwind for us because before we were adding value, but they weren't feeling a lot of pain. Now shippers are feeling pain. And frankly, brokers and carriers too, there's a lot of volatility. It's probably a better market for carriers and brokers than it was, but there's still a lot of volatility, and in volatility, that's where you need real-time data to make better decisions. And then, of course, our AI layering in and taking it a step further and making recommendations. This is kind of our time to shine where we're really mission critical. Uh, and I think the way that we've been growing over the last several months uh reflects that. I'm sure the market has is certainly a big part of it.

Expanding To Brokers And Carriers

SPEAKER_00 1:03:30

And you you mentioned brokers and carriers. Initially, GoodShip was a tool for shippers. Have you has there been, I don't want to say shift, but an added layer or added tool where you you are prospecting and working with brokers and carriers directly?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:47

Yeah, so it's interesting. We um definitely not a pivot. We've we've expanded to include brokers and carriers. And that was frankly at based on the pull from the market. So brokers and carriers have always been in good ship, right? So we we would sell, you know, land a new shipper, and as part of onboarding the shipper, we would onboard all their brokers and carriers. Of course, they need to be able to bid in the procurement events, right? Mini bids and RFPs. So they need to be on the platform for that. But then, as we talked about, they also have self-serve access to see their scorecard, you know, as it relates to that shipper. So they can they've always been on the platform, they've always been using it. We've always gotten really positive feedback from carriers, probably because I came from the broker carrier side of the market. And so, like, I'm thinking from that mindset. Um, and so, you know, how can we make this valuable to them so they can be better partners and win more business, etc.? And so we've always gotten great feedback. And along the way over the years, many large brokers and carriers have have said to us, like, hey, we're enjoying the platform. This is the best procurement tool we've ever used. We love seeing more information before we bid, like, this is great. Have you thought about building a version of goodship for us? Unify our data, help us lean into our strengths, help us pinpoint opportunities. Um, and so we've thought for many years that that was something we would do. But we also want to be very intentional about not spreading ourselves too thin and just running to the next revenue dollar. And so when we raised our Series B a year ago, we felt like you know, we had the resources to scale the team up and to kind of approach that the right way without taking our eye off the ball on the shipper side. I think you mentioned that not many companies go after the shippers. I think it's a harder nut to crack. And so we certainly don't want to move away from that. That's kind of our bread and butter. But as we've had these opportunities and thought through the value that we could drive for brokers and carriers, um, we've started moving in that direction. So as recently as, or as early as Q4 of last year, we onboarded our first handful of capacity providers onto the platform as direct customers to have orchestration and be able to pinpoint opportunities and help them with analytics and AI. Um, and then we announced it a couple months ago when we when we signed Prime Inc., which obviously is one of the largest trucking companies in the country, the largest reefer carrier. One of the best carriers in the industry. It's an amazing group. I've been out to Missouri several times to see them. We're huge fans of them. And what's interesting about them, or you know, what's interesting about our relationship with them is we started building the broker carri product as orchestration, which is unifying data, pinpointing opportunities, analytics, AI, et cetera. Obviously, brokers and carriers don't have as much of a use for procurement as a shipper does because they're running the bids and procuring the rates. Brokers and carriers can use procurement to maybe solicit bids and get rate in hand and stuff like that, but it's not like a core use case. What makes more sense for brokers and carriers that Prime sort of convinced us of is that they need the inverse of a procurement tool. They need an RFP

Prime And The RFP Response Engine

SPEAKER_01 1:06:42

pricing engine. And so we've got all these brokers and carriers up and running on the orchestration side with Laney and all the AI and analytics. But what we're building with Prime now is the RFP response tool to help them streamline and automate and be more thoughtful about some of the things that they're responding to. And not to say they're not already doing an amazing job because they are, but it's highly manual. And there's certain factors that are just hard to bring into account when you're bidding and doing it manually. And so we're able to use technology to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:11

Yeah, you know, one of the things I've thought about, and this is probably only true for scaled brokers that are over 300, maybe 500 million in revenue. Like as we got bigger at Molo, I we we try to ingrain the idea in our teams' heads on the capacity side that we wanted to act like a shipper for our carriers. And what I meant by that was like we were a heavy contract business, like half of our freight was contract when I was running the business. Sometimes 60%, sometimes 40%, depending on the market and contracts we won. But that's a it's a meaningful chunk of change. It's a meaningful amount of revenue and volume that you're you're committing to on contract. And that contract business should be like insurance. Like you don't want to be moving it in the spot market all the time. Um ideally, you're locking in your own set of routing guide carriers. And so we did that. And we'd have you know, Chicago to Dallas that we were committed to take uh call it five a week. Um, and we would go try to create a routing guide with two to three carriers that would commit to take a few a week and and set up automated tendering through the TMS. Um and so I'm curious if like that's kind of how you think or one avenue that the tool could be used for um in kind of creating routing guides as a broker for your capacity for your asset carriers, um, and then managing it the same way that shippers manage relationships with brokers, where you're talking through the the product, which I always thought was one of the coolest things uh when I saw the tool was the fact that the broker and shipper are are engaging in conversation in the tool. And so you're not losing, it's not like there's an issue on a lane and you got to email the ops person, or maybe you're emailing an ops like a convoy ops person who's only the ops person today, and then you gotta email someone else tomorrow. Sorry, joke there, but my point is like there's there's one place where all the communication happens, and so you can always see it. You can go in there and see exactly what's going on. Yeah. So I'm curious, like, is that does that make sense? Is that how brokers could be using the tool, or is that kind of not? It's more RFP engine type stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:17

No, it's definitely full life cycle. It's it the obviously the capability exists because the or you know, the platform was built for shippers, and so that's how shippers use it. That we basically copy and pasted it and then made some modifications to make it make more sense for brokers and carriers. And frankly, the broker version and the carrier version also are not the same, right? For example, the brokers, both brokers and carriers are gonna have scorecards of themselves for their shippers, but then the carriers will not have this. The brokers will have scorecards going down to their underlying carriers that they're you know, brokering the freight to. So all three versions are a little bit different, but though that functionality exists in all of them, and we can turn it on for anyone that wants to use it. So it's a great point. And as we think about the RFP pricing engine, it's really about streamlining the responses, but then also managing the commitments to hold the shippers accountable to make sure they're actually sending you the volume they're supposed to, but holding yourself accountable to honoring your commitments, taking the loads you're supposed to take, and then helping you decide, you know, maybe I'm supposed to take 10 loads a week, you know, on this given lane. If I get offered the 11th load, do I still want it? And helping you be one, a good partner, but two, also optimize your your decision making in your business while still uh you know being a good partner. So it's it's full life cycle. And to your point, I don't know that um everyone is using it this way, but it the functionality does exist. If the brokers wanted to create routing guides for underlying cares that they're using to have more of a dedicated uh motion, that that functionality certainly exists. Obviously, brokers all operate differently, and you're right, you have to have pretty significant scale for that to be relevant for for you.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:55

Yeah.

Laney The AI Transportation Analyst

SPEAKER_00 1:10:56

Talk to me about Laney. You mentioned uh the AI transportation analyst named Laney. What is that and and how does that work or what does it do?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:08

Yeah, for sure. So in the most simplified way to explain it, I'm sure everyone listening has used Chat GPT or or Claude. Laney is basically like in her earliest form today, she's basically like a ChatGPT uh module inside of your instance of good ship. And so she has access to all the source system data and she can basically answer anything you ask in a matter of seconds. It's kind of like having a brilliant analyst riding shotgun with you 24-7, where you can basically ask, hey, you know, for for a shipper, like I'll just give a couple examples of prompts that they've used that that we're seeing pretty regularly that are pretty powerful. Uh it could be um where is short lead time resulting in poor on-time service or high spot exposure? Boom. Matter of like 10 seconds, 20 seconds, Laney spits out here are the top 10 lanes where giving less than 48 hours of lead time. And you can you can go back and forth in the area. Well, only show me the stuff where we're giving less than 24 hours lead time. And so she'll give you instant answers. She can build charts and reports, executive ready ready summaries that you can share and export. Um, you know, some brokers and carers are saying things like, or even shippers are saying, hey, I've got a QBR coming up with Walmart. Help me prepare for that. And it's like, okay, here's your footprint with this customer, here's where things are going well, here's where things are maybe not going well, here's things you should be asking them to do better, here's where you need to acknowledge that you're not doing a good job and need to improve. Like stuff that would take hours, if not days, to prepare for. It's like 30 seconds, and Laney spits out the answers for you. Um, and so that's kind of the early iteration of Laney is like instant answers, better than GPT or some generic large model, because it has all of the proprietary uh context and transportation data and everything else. Where it's going really quickly, based on overwhelming positive feedback, is we're adding a ton of new capabilities to Laney. So, like one is um giving her access to the outside world, understanding what weather patterns are doing, understanding what the market broadly is doing outside of this one shipper's instance of good ship, like giving her access to more context outside of the platform to sort of incorporate into her thinking and responses. Uh, another one is what we're calling 24-7, like proactive always on laney. So today you have to ad hoc ask a question and get an answer. But if there are things that are happening in the network overnight, you it would be better if she could just tell you those things when you open your laptop. And so in the next few weeks, we're gonna launch uh our first, you know, our first version of kind of like always on laney, where she knows who you are, she knows what your priorities are in the business. And when you open up your laptop in the morning, she's gonna say, Here are the things that have happened in the data overnight. Go look into this lane, go look into this thing. Like, so you don't need to prompt it, it will just kind of come to you. And then there's a bunch more. One one more example I'll give is um people have said, Hey, we we've been able to prompt Laney to give us these great charts or tables or visuals. I don't want to have to remember to ask her for that every time I want to see it. Can I just make that permanently part of my, you know, vision, you know, make that part of the part of my UI at all times. And so what we're launching here in the next few weeks is the ability to pin things that you create with Laney. So if it's a chart or a dashboard or a whatever it is, you can actually pin that to your workspace. Or if it's relevant to your whole organization, you can elect to uh propose to uh you know, put it in everybody's instance in your organization. So those are just some of the kind of like V2 versions of Laney that are coming out here pretty soon. But I think over time there's so much more we can do, like automating some of the long-running mundane tasks that people are doing. Um Laney over time will be able to do those things for people and kind of free them up to do the higher order strategic work.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:08

That's awesome. That's really interesting and cool. Always on Laney, AOL. You're relaunching AOL.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:15

I don't know if Always On Laney is like the official name, but I guess call her AOL. AOL Laney.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:22

That's awesome. Uh AOL's back and better than ever. Better than ever. No dialogue. Um dialogue. No, no, no. Two seconds for answers. This is really good stuff.

The Hard Part Of Selling Software

SPEAKER_00 1:15:32

What has been the most challenging part of building this business?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:36

Hmm. Most challenging part of building the business. Uh, you know, knock on wood, we've had a pretty good road. It's been, you know, fairly smooth sailing as far as uh, you know, all things considered. But I don't know. I obviously I've understood the industry from different vantage points over the years prior to good ship. I've obviously spent a lot more time with shippers the last four and a half years because that was our primary customer, is our primary customer. Um, maybe one thing that's a learning or or challenging that we're getting better at navigating is like the contract process is so much more difficult. Like when you're selling capacity, it's very transactional, right? Like if you're talking to a shipper, give me a load and like here's a rate, like you get you get a load, right? Like opening a door is much easier when you're brokering loads or offering capacity. And when you're trying to um get a massive organization to adopt technology that costs six figures, that is a very different motion. And so we've gotten better and better at that. I think you know what's what's fun about Goodship is like when we give the demo the first time, people see and they're like, wow. Like they have this like amazing reaction a lot of the time where they're like, this makes a ton of sense. This is way cooler than anything I thought you were gonna show me today. But even getting the commercial users and the business users excited, even at like the director and VP level, you think that like that means we're gonna work together. Like, that is just the beginning. Like getting budget approved, getting finance approved, convincing people that this like new category of technology is necessary. Like, we're getting better and better at that. We're helping teams build business cases, like we're obviously we're overcoming that, but that has been very new to me as someone that came from freight and not from software sales or software background. So um, yeah, that would be would be one that was just very different from my background previously.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:33

Yeah, it's interesting. You talk about your background, uh it's rare. I feel like maybe it's not rare, but it's it's interesting to me that your career has perfectly positioned you to do the job you're doing today. Um from the earliest days in freight where you were learning from what is probably inarguably one of the top places to learn how to broker freight, a coyote, to then going to one of the largest VC-backed companies, which you're now VC backed, two VC-backed companies that saw unicorn level growth, um, but specifically at Convoy, talking about like spending years building an RFP pricing tool or executing on procurement events. Um just it it all sets you up to be sitting exactly where you are now. And and I think the one thing I'm gonna finish with is you know, I asked you at the beginning of this about like why there are two questions. One about like why there are so many people who grew up at Coyote when you did that are now CEOs or executives at companies, and also like what was part of the secret sauce at Coyote? And I think the answer is kind of the same here. You know, we talked about no excuses, and and we talked about it specifically around the context of moving loads. Um, but you you could you could you could pull out a little further and talk about just solving problems. Like, that's what was we were taught was like you just if there's a problem in front of you, solve it, figure it out. Um, and I think that is such an exceptional skill to learn and develop that is like there's really nothing you can't solve if you're willing to put everything you have on the table to figure it out in this industry. And this industry is just full of right problems left and right. And your career brought you to a place where you saw these

No Excuses As A Builder Mindset

SPEAKER_00 1:19:29

large problems around procurement and just said, screw it, I'm gonna figure it out, I'm gonna solve them. And here we are, you know, five years later, and like you're you're running one of what I believe is like the most successful startup freight tech companies, and the proof is in the damn pudding. Like it's in all of these enterprise companies that you mentioned who have signed multi-year contracts or multiple contracts over and over. That's as proof as you need that uh what you're building works. Um, so it's cool as someone who kind of grew up, you know, as a young adult next to you, just like banging our heads, booking loads. This is where you are, you know, 15 years later. Um it's it's awesome to see the journey you've built, you've been on. And uh I'm I'm cheering for you guys uh because you've you've got a great team and a great product, and uh I appreciate you coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:19

Yeah, I mean I I really appreciate the kind words. It's been uh I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunities I had. Like I said, like Coyote was right place, right time. Freight brokerage was not in my vocabulary, and um that you know I kind of fell into the industry like a lot of folks do, and um, yeah, one thing led to another. And you know, looking back, I you're right. I'm very fortunate to have had the experiences that I've had. But uh yeah, it's it's been a great journey, and a lot of great people along the way have made it possible. And you're right, I think that early culture of no excuses and applying it more broadly than just covering loads is is certainly still part of my DNA. And being able to kind of bring the greatest hits of people I've worked with along the way from Coyote, from Convoy, from Stored, bringing in the right pieces, but keeping that uh keeping that kind of a mindset and culture has been you know definitely a big part of our secret sauce.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:13

Well, thank you for coming on. Uh that's all we got for today.

Final Takeaways And Closing

SPEAKER_00 1:21:17

To any you know, shippers or brokers or carriers listening, uh if you want to figure out how to move your freight better, uh call Ryan, check out Good Ship, uh, they could probably help you. Awesome. Thanks. That's all we got. Good to see you, man. See you next time.