Dan Lewis
Co-founder & CEO, Stealth AI Startup. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@daniellewis ↗LinkedIn ↗
Dan Lewis is the co-founder and former CEO of Convoy, a digital freight marketplace that reached a $3.8 billion valuation before shutting down in 2023. Following Convoy's acquisition by Flexport, he served as a product executive at Microsoft before founding an AI stealth venture.
2shows
2appearances
26statements
4resolved
2supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
5said about them ↓ Everything Dan Lewis said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Trucking platforms face lower supply acquisition costs than Uber and Lyft
“They said, let's take people that don't do this as their full-time job and get them to come become drivers and build up a new supply of drivers. So if you're trying to get someone to leave their old job or whatever they were doing to make money before and star…”
Dan Lewis: Convoy rejected board advice to expand into port drayage
“I think at one point the board was pretty convinced we really needed to go into, you know, working with the ports, doing container dredge and things like that. And, you know, that was all part of us becoming more educated about this business. And just like me,…”
Dan Lewis: Freight marketplaces require immediate multi-city scale unlike consumer apps
“The best comparison there is a lot of times when a consumer marketplace is forming, it can form in a neighborhood, right? You can have a service that forms within one specific neighborhood, food delivery service, or something, or you can have one that forms wi…”
Dan Lewis: The best indicator of scaling is hiring your own replacement
“That is the best indicator as to whether someone's ready to scale with the company and step up and take on a bigger role and more responsibility is, are they able to step back and recognize that they need to hire someone to do their own job? Can they be comfor…”
Convoy lowers prices by reducing broker costs and using matching technology
“It does. And over time it allows us to drive the price down even more. We can take out some of the operating costs of running a brokerage, which makes it so we can run a little bit more efficiently. We can also find more convenient trucks because we can see al…”
Convoy operates healthily below the industry standard 18% to 20% take rate
“Our business model can be healthy at a lower percentage.”
Amazon receives no data or operational learnings from Convoy
“Yeah, I can't comment on Amazon's plans, but it's certainly not the case where they're learning or getting data from Convoy. There's no relationship like that.”
Convoy generates millions of dollars in revenue every week
“And we're doing, you know, millions of dollars in revenue every week.”
Dan Lewis: Core values must drive daily meetings, not just recruiting
“Having a set of core values that you don't just use to talk about the business to recruits, but they use every single day in meetings and in reviews and in hiring and these values, you kind of go back and back, you know, you go back to over and over again.”
Dan Lewis: Convoy used famous founder investors to win traditional customers
“And so when we were able to get investors that had built significant companies to come be a part of Convoy, that lent a lot of credibility and trust to our customers where they could say, okay, the founder of Amazon or the person who, you know, created and dev…”
Dan Lewis: Founders must own decisions rather than blindly following boards
“Take the decision and own the outcome of the decision. Your board is giving you advice. It probably sometimes feels like because everyone on the board is often more experienced than you or has had more success to date in their career, that what they say is wha…”
Dan Lewis: Selling to traditional industries requires disrupting established workflows
“Trucking is a pretty traditional industry, and folks that work in the supply chain industry have been doing this for a while. We're not bringing them something they've never purchased before and saying, here's this thing you need. We're saying, you've been pur…”
Dan Lewis: Building an experimental culture requires hiring from data-centric companies
“And so one of the ways you create a culture of experimentation is you hire a lot of People who have been part of organizations and companies that do a lot of experiments. And then that, that can be both the type of person from where they come, like the company…”
Dan Lewis predicted in 2018 that trucking would transform by 2023
“Logistics and trucking today are about where industries like retail, music, travel, et cetera, were a decade ago. A lot of early progress, but things are just starting to get interesting. I think that over the next five years, you're going to see incredible in…”
Convoy's key operational metrics: volume, market density, and automation percentage
“The key metrics for us are thinking about how much freight we're moving how much for removing in each of our markets, because we want to build healthy, you know, dense networks as we build this business out. And what percentage of the time is the work is the f…”
Convoy primarily partners with small fleets of one to four trucks
“The relationships that we have are with the, you know, small trucking companies. Many of them own their own trucks. So it's one, two, three, four trucks in a small business. And that's who we serve. And that's who we partner with.”
Convoy automatically generates round trips and multi-stop tours for drivers
“We actually have things that automatically generate round trips and back hauls for them. So if they have a freight going one way from convoy, we'll automatically find freight going back the other way. We'll create tours, multiple stop jobs things like that tha…”
Traditional freight brokerage industry take rate averages 18% to 20%
“I can tell you that the industry rate today is about 20%, 18 to 20%.”
Convoy has 5,000 to 10,000 active trucking companies on platform monthly
“We have you know, five, 10,000 active trucking companies in our platform every month.”
Dan Lewis: Truck driver smartphone adoption in 2014 enabled Convoy's model
“With Convoy, timing was crucial, and the reason it's working really well is on the trucking side, in 2014, approximately 2015, drivers started getting smartphones with a data plan and GPS. And, you know, most of the U.S.-based phone carriers started offering t…”
Dan Lewis: Convoy gamifies experiments by having employees vote on outcomes
“One thing we do that's fun, though, is when we do different types of experiments, especially ones that have more UI or more, we can frame them more clearly to the employees. We put them up on a wall in our office, and we'll have, like, the three treatments, or…”
Average US small trucking company operates two to three trucks
“The average one has two, three trucks.”
Reid Hoffman excels at refocusing Convoy's board on major long-term outcomes
“You know, I think what he's been really good at is I'll call it breaking through a conversation where we're kind of focusing in on something, right? Maybe debating some nuances of something, exactly how much we should raise, when we should raise again you know…”
The other half of the tape: Dan Lewis's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 5 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4Anu Hariharan 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 5
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R
- 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward
- 20VC: Finding VC Partners That Look Beyond The Numbers, The Black Box of VC Secrets That Needs To Be Shared & The 1,000 Reasons A VC Won't Invest In You When It Has Nothing To Do With You with Leah Busque, General Partner @ Fuel Capital
- 20VC: Why, How and When To Think About Growth Teams, The Right Way To Think About Network Effects & Scaling from Phase 1 To Phase 2 of Startup Life with Anu Hariharan, Partner @ YC Continuity Fund
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Stealth AI Startup | 1 | 13 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Stealth AI Startup | 1 | 13 | 33% 1/3 | full record on Top Founders → |