The Exchanges

Q Convoy. And what, why didn't those guys just fix it and make a big platform for everyone to use?

A I think one is that one, to get a million trucking companies or to get on a single, single platform is a Herculean task, right? Like, it's like, how do you get so many different companies to say, trust us, come on my single platform. Two, it is a low trust industry. Right? Like people don't want to share all their information because they feel like that will be used against them for negotiation. Like I give an example to people and saying, if you're a truck driver with home base in Austin and you've been out of Austin for last three weeks and now you're in Chicago and you want to get back into Austin and you tell everybody that, hey, my home base is Austin. I've been out for three weeks. I haven't slept in my bed in three weeks. Now I'm in Chicago and I want to bid on a load that is going from Chicago to Austin. Well, if you give them all that information, they're going to give you a really bad price because they know how desperate you are.

AI assessment note: “to get a million trucking companies or to get on a single, single platform”

Q And fleets as well. And I guess a lot of these, a lot of these really top brokers, they're top people make a lot of money and you're, you're helping these people be even more productive. How does that work?

A Yeah. So I think basically what we're building is a, a teammate called Augie. Um, and, uh, people rename Augie. They've chosen all kinds of names for Augie. It's interesting. They even created pictures for it and, and, uh, personas for Augie. Uh, Augie participates in people's like weekly Town halls and monthly town halls. Uh, so it's, it's really interesting to see how, you know, an AI teammate is becoming part of a culture of an organization. Yeah. Um, but really behind the scenes, you know, Augie sort of work, first it works 24 seven. It can, it is multimodal. It can handle emails and texts and phone calls and telegram or any other means of communicating. It does actually, because there's a lot of dispatchers in this business That are in Eastern Europe, and Eastern Europeans only use Telegram, and so Augie has to use Telegram to communicate with them. Similarly, like, there's a large community of drivers that are from, like, Punjab in India, and, you know, those guys use WhatsApp, and the way to communicate to those folks is WhatsApp, so Augie has to use WhatsApp, you know. So it's multimodal, just like you would expect, you know, a teammate to be. And then, I think the other piece with, with Augie is, like, it, it can do a lot of work, and it's defined as what we call workflows, which are these written word docs No different than an SOP in a business. It can follow it relig…

AI assessment note: “works 24 seven. It can, it is multimodal. It can handle emails and texts”

Q What brought you to want to come to America?

A The opportunity to build, right? Like there is, you know, in, in the, uh, so, you know, IIT is like this engineering school in India where it's really hard to get into, you know, literally millions of kids apply, a few thousand gets in, and, and in those times in India, you know, Like in that, 96, 97, there's just not that many opportunities graduating, you know, to work for like young companies to go build. And America was this place to say like, hey, this is a place where you can go build. People will trust you. People will trust your ideas. There's sort of merit matters and merit speaks. Um, and there was this notion in people's head. And so I think I just followed that and came here for that, you know?

AI assessment note: “The opportunity to build, right?”

Q What are some of the principles you've applied to your building? Is there anything else that you've taken from there and said, like, we want to do this like Amazon does it?

A Yeah, listen, like, I think, um, culturally there's this principles of, you know, hiring owners, right? That's very important. Amazon has this principle of, like, you know, act as an owner, not You know, owners like, um, you can act as a renter or you can act as an owner, right? Owners take care of their homes. If there's a leak, they don't go and do the, you know, short route. They fix, they fix the roof the right way, uh, as opposed to patching it. Um, they think for the long term, they're willing to take short term losses for the long term gains. You know, that's a big, big value that I carry forward. Uh, you know, this bias for action is a big one. Um, I think tactically I've just really learned that this, Amazon had this culture of, like, writing things down, so they had the idea, like, hey, if you have a project or an idea in mind, take your time, write, like, several pages, sometimes five or six pages long document before you call the first meeting, share that document with everybody. Everybody comes prepared with that document before you start the meeting. What that did is, like, it forced on you to, like, really distill your thoughts, because you knew other people are going to truly read your stuff, so you don't want to be bad and, like, looking, like, stupid in front of, like, really good people. And then, by writing it a few times, it made you, like, really rethink, …

AI assessment note: “Amazon had this culture of, like, writing things down... and so we carry that forward”

Q to, To cut hundreds of billions of dollars of waste. Like today we take like same day or second day delivery for granted. We didn't have that, you know, 10 or 20 years ago. So things have already improved a lot. Like what else is coming into revolution logistics? What else should we expect to see? Why, why is this a positive thing overall if everything works that you're doing?

A Yeah, listen, like, you know, it's the, well, it's, it's, it's the cost basis for, you know, it, uh, one of the main cost basis for everything we do, right? So if you just look at, you know, the, the, the push to build more in America, to have more industrial, you know, you need very efficient supply chains to start competing. We don't, we'll never have the, the lowest labor cost, right? Like we, we can't compete on that, but what we can compete on is efficiency through data. How much inventory do I keep? And that get, then keeps getting passed on, You know, um, in, in terms of products, in terms of, uh, you know, cost to consumers and whatnot, right? The second thing is, um, like if we think today we have choice, um, for a product, um, that we can, we have access to, you go to a store, like a Whole Foods or something, and oh, we, we see all these products and we have access to this. There are probably 10 times more products that you don't have access to because logistics is so broken, right? And I think that's the exciting part to it. Which is, you know, giving businesses and consumers more access to more products because the underlying system that's supposed to make it happen, you know, is better. Like the, the, the parallels is like internet, right? Like, so when, when there was slow internet or, um, you know, sort of a restricted internet, you know, you had access to some c…

AI assessment note: “giving businesses and consumers more access to more products”

Q excited about this. It's growing. It's growing quickly. Tell us about the talent game in Silicon Valley right now. We were talking about this before the show. It's like, there's just a lot of really talented people who are, who are very sought after. And I guess you were able to attract a bunch of them. What do you have to do to, to bring in top people these days?

A Yeah. One is it's not easy. You know, as you can tell, I think there's like 1500 startups in San Francisco alone, right? Plus, you know, a lot of top talent also wants to go build because building has gotten easier, easier and easier. You know, at least building prototypes or first set of demos are getting very, very easy thanks to AI. Um, and, and, and I think the need for top talent is still very, very high, right? Like, no matter what you people say, like, hey, I can code. You still want people with systems thinking who can connect the dots and like really plan out your product for the next, next, you know, several cycles. Um, So what do you have to do? Like, what do we do? Uh, I mean, we have, we have, it's not like we have sort of solved the problem. Um, but I think you have to drive the mission. You have to get, find people who connect with your mission and who can see not the opportunity today, but see the opportunity five to 10 years from now. And you have to tell the story that, hey, we are here to transform one of the largest industries in the world where there have been many shots and why AI is the time. AI is the moment when this industry will get transformed and you will be, Even if you are the 100th engineer, you are still super early in this innings to do that. Um, and you wouldn't be part of that journey. I think too is like you're solving, I think good people a…

AI assessment note: “you have to drive the mission. You have to get, find people who connect”