Shoaib Makani, CEO and co-founder of Motive (formerly KeepTruckin), discusses applying the company's core value of 'less but better' to strategic business line decisions.
“We started a new marketplace business. And it was very high potential. It fit our founding narrative. It was the right story. And it actually scaled pretty rapidly to north of a hundred million dollar run rate. In something like 18 months. But we realized actually that it was consuming an incredible amount of organizational energy and capital to continue to scale it and that was coming at, you know, the expense of our core business which actually, you know, is very high margin compounds at a very high rate, incredibly high very durable revenue stream and had lots of potential still to be realized. And so we made the very hard decision actually of shutting that business down completely. You know, going from a hundred million dollar run rate to zero on, on that product line, on that business line.”
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Disclosure
Makani: The name KeepTruckin became a constraint on the business
“The company's name used to be Keep Truckin'. It was perfect at the time we started the company. It became a constraint pretty quickly thereafter and we knew we needed to change the name.”
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