Standing Out: A Podcast About Sales, Marketing and Leadership
Standing Out is a show created to help individuals and companies improve their sales & marketing outcomes, as well as their leadership development. Each episode we have an expert who has a unique perspective on sales, marketing and/or leadership providing insights from his or her experiences. And we throw in a few laughs from time to time. Be sure to hit Subscribe wherever you listen to our podcasts.
Standing Out: A Podcast About Sales, Marketing and Leadership
Transforming Delivery and Discovering Stars: A Unique Path
Ever wondered how technology is transforming the logistics industry? In this episode, we sit down with Aaron Peck, co-founder and CEO of Mothership, to uncover the secrets behind innovative first and last mile delivery solutions. Aaron takes us through his fascinating journey from working in the family business, to revolutionizing logistics with cutting-edge tech. Gain insights into the complexities of the freight sector and learn how Mothership is setting new standards for same-day delivery.
Thank you to our sponsor, Salesdash CRM – A CRM for Freight Logistics. Salesdash CRM is built for freight broker & agent sales teams. Manage your shipper prospecting and follow-ups. Organize your carriers and the lanes they run. Learn more at www.betaconsultinggroup.com/standing-out
Standing Out is a sales, marketing & leadership podcast powered by BETA Consulting Group, created to highlight best practices from industry leaders with incredible experience and insights! The goal is to entertain, educate & inspire individuals & companies to improve their sales, marketing & leadership development outcomes.
Hey everybody, Welcome to Standing Out a podcast about sales, marketing and leadership. So excited that you're here. I'm Trey Griggs, your host, Glad to have you with us today. We've got a great show in store. But before we get to that, first of all we want to thank our sponsor, Sales-CRM. Good friend over there, Josh Liles, Listen, if you are doing any type of sales work at all, you have to have a CRM, and not all CRMs are created equal, especially when most CRMs are not built with your freight brokerage in mind.
Speaker 1:Sales-crm is built by freight brokers, exclusively for freight brokers. So be sure to visit our website, betaconsultinggroupcom forward slash standing dash out. It's our show page. On there you can fill out a form to request a demo and see the difference in sales-serum. We thank them for their support.
Speaker 1:Also I can't believe this we are five weeks away from the next Broker Carrier Summit in Fort Worth, Texas, October 23 through 25. It is coming like a train and if you are not on that train, make sure that you register today for that event. It's going to be October 23 through 25 in Fort Worth Texas. You can learn more about it and sign up at BrokerCarrierSummitcom. Be sure to use the coupon code BETA B-E-T-A for 10% off. And don't forget, we have the best golf tournament in the industry the Post and Pre Classic. Make sure you sign up for that and we will see you down in Fort Worth in just a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1:Can't believe that's coming so, so fast. All right, listen, we got a great show today. I'm excited to bring my guest on today. He's going to be talking to us a little bit about technology and about what they do over at mothership, so please welcome the co-founder and ceo of mothership, aaron peck. Dude, this is, this is a jam right here. Man, that's right. Let's go feel like we've got to let this play out. I mean, this is.
Speaker 1:You might not want to let it play too long.
Speaker 2:It says a couple things.
Speaker 1:Man, that's a great song. This is one thing I love about our guests is they always get to pick their walk-up song and I never know what they're going to pick, and so it's just like a little jam session and it's just nice to Now.
Speaker 2:old school song, dude you know, I don't know, man, that song really gets me going, like whenever I'm in anything that's competitive or I'm trying to get in the zone that. Just listen to that. Like you know, that intro just slowly come on and then it breaks yeah yeah, a line, and then when the drums finally come into me, I love that song so good.
Speaker 1:I don't know how old you are, but it takes me back in the 80s because I used to ride around on my dad's truck. He drove a a local straight truck like a big 26 foot box truck around kansas city and the summers I'd ride with him, man, and we would listen to the 80s tunes and that song just takes me right back to that seat and that whole experience. Man, what a, what a great song, man what a great.
Speaker 2:yeah, I, I'm probably not old enough to be like officially repping that song, so I'm a little bit of a buzzer. I was born in 84, but uh, but like I, I'm rooted in that generation.
Speaker 1:That's close. It was later eighties, so you could have been like a five-year-old rocking out, you know, or something. You know. That's awesome, I love it. Well, take a moment here and tell our audience a little bit about yourself and what you're doing over at Mothership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm the CEO of Mothership. Yeah, so Mothership focuses on first and last mile logistics exclusively. So actually, like most of the trucks that are on our platform, are those 26 foot box trucks with lip gates? It's almost exclusively those. Yeah, we've had over a hundred thousand drivers sign up for our platform.
Speaker 2:That space is incredibly fragmented. Unlike a lot of the other spaces in freight, it's super fragmented and there's no one kind of low. So to efficiently do it it's really hard to do with people, and so Mothership introduced really the technology layer for us to get that done Right, similar to what Uber did with ride sharing. We have done now in that last mile space with freight, and we do it at scale and we do it at high volume, and that allows us, without you know, tons of human capital. It allows us to use technology to do this really fast and really affordably. So in every market that mothership operates today, which I believe is 24, today we do same day delivery, same day pickup and same day delivery. So someone books on mothership a customer, you might be shipping apparel, beverages, whatever. You'd book that today, we'd pick it up today. You'd book that today.
Speaker 1:We'd pick it up today, we'd deliver it today. My dad would have loved that. I'm just thinking about when I was driving the truck. He'd have these short deliveries. He had Southwestern Bell back in the day of their little box deliveries that they would have. He would also pick up a VHS tape from the airport and take it to the news station because it had something to do with the game that played that day. And there's the highlights like this is back in the day, man, like crazy stuff. So I remember it's all same day.
Speaker 2:Stuff, pickup, delivery, all that kind of stuff so he's functioning as like a carrier and a courier right, because he's had a little bit of both.
Speaker 1:He had both, yeah, yeah yeah, because for a while before he, before he got in the 28 foot box truck, he actually drove his own little truck around. He had a truck with a bed on the back, a camper on the back and he did Southwest Bell deliveries which are little boxes. So he did those and then when he moved up to the big truck it was more of the two, three pallets moving around the city kind of thing. The farthest he goes, like Dodge City, kansas. We took a couple trips out there. But other than that and it was I remember the dispatcher. I mean back in the day and probably even as recently as maybe five, 10 years ago, a local company would call a dispatch company tell them what they needed. The dispatcher would radio in the truck they have to go pick it up. And it had a lot of human capital involved. You know had a lot of human processes involved.
Speaker 2:So for you trucking is is rooted in. Like your, your first kind of experiences in trucking and your emotional connection to it are rooted in those times with your father.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2:That's true for me too, so that's actually quite interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what's weird is I didn't plan to be in transportation. I found my way in much later in life. But it's weird because those are some of my fondest memories as a kid was driving around to the warehouses. They had big concrete walls. I'd have my racquetball and my baseball glove and I'm throwing it against the wall while he's waiting for them to unload or load. And just some good memories, good experiences from that walking around seeing these big warehouses that were smelly and the big fans trying to cool things down. Yeah, those are some pretty foundational memories for me. Did your dad do some type of thing? Was he a local truck driver?
Speaker 2:No, so he wasn't. So my dad ran packaging and shipping at my grandfather's company. My grandfather invented Maglite, the flashlight company.
Speaker 1:Really Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very cool, he still operates it today, right, he's 94 today and he's at work right now guaranteed Wow.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:He'll be there until six or seven tonight.
Speaker 1:He's not collecting seashells on the coast, playing golf. Every day he's working.
Speaker 2:He'll drive himself home tonight, so everyone on the 91 freeway watch out make sure you have your seat belt on, um, but yeah, no.
Speaker 2:So my dad ran packaging and shipping there and I just thought it was the coolest thing. Um, my mom would take me there, drop me off after school sometimes and I would kind of like do my homework, whatever, and when I finished all that up, I just have the run of the place right, because it's not only with my dad like running packaging shipping is my grandfather's place. So people let me do what I want and similar to you like are using the concrete wall. I would use like the pallet jacks as like a razor scooter and just go up and down. Yeah, I'd ride on the conveyor belt and boxes. I'd get on the pallet wrap, the spinner. It's been like, oh man, it was good times. But but you know, it wasn't just all fun. Eventually, like I'd get sick of all that.
Speaker 2:I'd go sit at my dad's desk with him and back then everything was still pretty much processed by paper and he would walk through everything it took to get a shipment done Right. So he was teaching me, you know NMFC codes and what classes the different flashlights were Right and and and all the different carriers, and they had a routing guide and then they'd have the, the, the price matrix for that particular carrier. So he taught me how to look that up or whatever, and so I would actually fill out the bill of ladings. I would select the carrier based on the routing guide. I would do all this. So when the carriers would show up you know those LTL carriers very often, so they're used to seeing they'd be like Aaron and I would hand them the BOL, they'd sign it, we'd do the whole thing. That's where my love of trucking, or my just a interest and emotional connection to it, really locked in, so similar and I was seven or eight at this time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm thinking kids in third grade are learning state abbreviation codes and you're learning NMSC codes, Right? I?
Speaker 2:mean everyone else had it all wrong. Apparently, it pays off to know your freight classes, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, we want to talk more about that in just a minute, but we've got to pause for a second because I learned a little fun fact about you. This is pretty cool, so I didn't know you were. You were signed by Interscope Records. I want to hear more about that. But also that you helped discover Post Malone. Yeah, I got to hear that story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so right after the music career. I mean, I've always loved tech. You know. The part that I didn't talk about, you know, before I got in the freight or whatever, is that I was always very interested in computers. So I only learned how to play drums initially because I was like, well, at that time it didn't seem like girls are very interested in guys that are just like in the room screwing with a computer.
Speaker 1:So I picked up the drums like, oh, they're going to love this because it wasn't great at football or anything, and then I really got into the drums, really got into music but I never lost my love of technology and computers.
Speaker 2:So in the background I was always doing that kind of stuff and eventually I put those two things together and we started a company called B-Tech, and the intent for that company was to moneyball music. Essentially, back at this time when we started it, you could get data. You could essentially get fire hoses of data from social media networks at that time, right? So this means like you could just siphon off all of the data you want about what's happening on something like Twitter. You just had to pay for it. And and so we noticed that there were certain things that were happening. There was essentially an algorithm on artists blowing up at that time based on social media, and certain things would start to happen that would clue us to that.
Speaker 2:And so we we talked to the labels some of the people that were from my past, like warner, universal, etc. Um, and they were like, look, you know, this is our biggest problem like we want to essentially pre anr, right, we want to know, before someone sees the set, like a lot of these artists are getting signed, like bieber, for example, like people are getting signed before social media or, sorry, before they played even their first like public set. So theRs weren't able to see them. So we were essentially bringing this data to them in a dashboard and trying to show them this, and one of the artists that came across our radar was Post Malone before he was Post Malone, and so we went out, spent some time with him up in Encino and there was a producer that was working with him and they were producing the demos.
Speaker 2:That would be that first record, and we spent a bunch of time together and it became super obvious the guy was going to be a hit, and so I introduced him to a variety of labels. He took meetings with all of them. He ultimately didn't sign with any of them. They offered him great deals, but I assume he got a better one later on down the road, like we stayed connected. And later on down the road in my, my next company, he actually was a beta tester and he would like beta test the app and give us insights, whatever. So as nice of a guy as he seems like in all the interviews you've ever seen, he's exactly that guy. Hasn't changed at all Like he's. He's.
Speaker 1:Yeah, can we get a private Post Malone concert for mothership clients, with me being the MC? Can we make this work? We can do something. Get Post Malone up there. Let's make this happen.
Speaker 2:Well, let me tell you something that's interesting this is probably a violation of privacy, but I don't think he would care, so I'll say it which is the other day. We had a delivery going to someone's house and when our support team tried to work through was working through why the person wasn't answering the phone to accept the delivery as a residential delivery and it was in Utah and so you know, like so, on and so forth. Eventually, the support team manager reaches out to me and goes hey, can you reach out to this customer of ours? We have a delivery for some stuff for him, but he's not answering the phone. It's Post Malone and we ended up completing that delivery, but we delivered some stuff to his house. So what a wild way to get like that.
Speaker 1:That's wild man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's wild. I think a lot of people that have had some of those experiences like you have had have a connection to somebody that has become famous. Those stories are always fun. I've got one with Teron Liu. He's a basketball player. He won a championship with kobe. He got stepped over by alan iverson back in the day in 2001 and I played against him in high school. Uh, so I got to know him really well. Just a good dude, just one best player I've ever seen. But those experiences are really fun when you can look back and go man, I knew that guy before it was anything you know it's. Those are fun experience all. Let's turn our attention to Mothership a little bit, and specifically the technology, because I want to dig in. You're a technologist. You're enthusiastic about that, obviously, and as well with with final mile delivery. But let's talk a little bit about you know the difference between founders and funders. I'd like to hear a perspective on this. There was a recent Paul Graham viral post that was out there.
Speaker 2:I'd love to hear your perspective on this. Are you talking about? What post are you talking about? Are you talking about founder mode? Founder mode with incredibly viral post from Paul Graham?
Speaker 2:Look, I think that there was this. There had been a trend for a very long time where it was very easy to raise venture capital, um, for tech startups, right, and in fact, there was even some really smart folks I would just say savvy folks who realized that and didn't have any business being in the tech business. They weren't a designer, they weren't an engineer, they didn't know how any of this stuff worked, but they attached like tech to their business and then went out and raised the tech valuations and and a lot of that really happened in freight as well. I mean, freight became a darling of the VC industry for several years there and you know, I would say now it is absolutely not right.
Speaker 2:Like I would say, vcs today are totally disenchanted with the way that a lot of those freight investments worked out. Disenchanted with the way that a lot of those freight investments worked out. I think the reason is is because, ultimately, at the end of the day, they saw a lot of these businesses that were essentially just human driven brokerages and they were generating a lot of like gross sales, but ultimately like and you know, and they said hey, you know, we have this incredible website, we have this management software on the back end or we have this carrier app. But if you filled all that back, you'd say, okay, well then why do you have like a thousand operations?
Speaker 2:people right, like I thought you had all the technology, like why does it seem like everything is happening with people if you have all this technology? It was like, oh well, technology is really hard in this space, it doesn't all really work. And and I think that they thought that the consumer on their you know, on the freight side, you know these decision makers on the freight side would be accepting of just like hey, we're going to make X Y, z easier with technology. And they didn't really bring it to them. And so I think, look to crack an industry this difficult, and I mean man. Freight is difficult and complex and folks are entrenched in their thinking, their habits. You know they do want to do better, they do want to increase productivity, they do want to lower prices, et cetera. But they also have this underlying fear that if it isn't broken, don't fix it, because not delivering could cause them to lose their job. Right, because at the end of the day, it's like mission critical. The criticality in the freight business is just so much higher than so many other businesses right, it's like not only does your business rely on what you're shipping but also the
Speaker 2:recipient probably is relying on receiving that, and so there's just so much downstream criticality that it's like it's hard for them, I think, to just say look, I want to go out the decision maker anyways at any one of these companies that would buy this technology or buy freight from any of these companies. It's hard for them to go out on a limb and say I'm willing to take these risks and put my name on the line to use this new thing that could increase our speed or our productivity or anything by 10 X, because I just I could lose my job over this, and so could other people. And so I think, um, yeah, it was assumed that they would come around a lot easier, and so venture capital was thrown at this industry and a lot of people raised a ton of money without actually having the chops to build any of this stuff or really go get into the nitty gritty and get what the customer really needs and where the true problems are. And so they became these people that were just really good at raising funds.
Speaker 1:But they didn't know how to build anything.
Speaker 2:And that burned a lot of bridges for a lot of up and coming folks and I think it'll take a while for VCs to really want to reinvest in this industry.
Speaker 2:So they killed, I think, the next two, three waves of startups after them, because there's not a lot of belief that venture capital return on investment went really far in logistics or in in logistics.
Speaker 2:And I have to say, like I completely agree, like I completely agree with so I understand where they come from and so I think to be successful in this space and look, we have a long way to go and it's like TBD, whether we'll be a, you know, a company that's around in 50 years. We certainly hope so and goes public right, we certainly hope so. So I can't stand on the mountain entirely, but I will tell you that our philosophy is about building and focusing on getting to real problems around real technical solutions, not just hiring a bunch of people generating a ton of gross sales and then saying look what we've done. So we kept the team small, we kept the burn small. We are mostly engineers and designers and I think that's a tell as to what Mothership is doing, the volume of freight that we move against the number of people we have working for our company is, you know, I ain't probably 10x more efficient than the next business that does our volume.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's impressive and you know it's interesting. You talk about the people that can just raise money but don't know how to build a company. I've sold tech in the space for a long time and I remember telling people, when you evaluate a technology, one of the most important things you need to do is evaluate the founder. Who's driving this technology, who's actually leading this ship? No, no pun intended. Who's actually leading this along? Because that that matters.
Speaker 1:You know the people who are driving the technology and who are the vision casters, but also understand it. Man, they have to be top-notch and if they are, then you can trust. It's easier to trust that the technology is going to go in the right direction, they're going to handle it the right way. But, man, if they're just somebody who's really good at selling a vision, that doesn't always mean the technology works out. In fact, I've seen a lot of these technology companies where they had trouble with customer adoption because they didn't have a plan for that or they didn't really think through the UI.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of those things and just to reference, there's one for a digital freight brokerage early on in Truckload that had 3000 employees in Chicago. It's almost like the user interface was the technology. That's it. Everything behind it was just people turning the wheels as fast as they could, you know, but they were still. I mean that that happens so much, and I think you're right. Unfortunately, I'm sad about that because I do think that some uh, you know, venture capitalists feel burned like man. We, we invested in this and didn't go.
Speaker 2:it's, you know, the true answer here is, yeah, there's a lot of people that squander a lot of money, I think, by saying they were doing one thing but truly actually operationally doing another. But then there's the whole other thing that this is actually just real hard and, um, you know, the amount of money that was originally invested in most of these companies probably isn't enough. It probably needs to be three, four or five times that. And if you think about the size of the industry, the total addressable market, I mean it's worth it. It's worth it to go after it.
Speaker 2:I would just say that it's there's a big question mark as to whether the decision maker is going to be willing to adopt technology or whether it is still. And this is what people say. This isn't me saying this right, but this is generally thought in the freight industry, like the good old boys network that's just gonna make the same old decisions they always make, and like that hasn't been my experience, I ran into a bunch of people that I think are super forward thinking, and so how do we bridge that gap is what we're trying to figure out. I think all the next companies obviously need to figure out. I do think there was a time there where a lot of people really savvy people were able to raise a ton of money. I think those days are done. The future is for the builders.
Speaker 1:I agree with that assessment.
Speaker 2:If you're not ready to build and you don't have the experience doing it. Stay far away from this industry. Maybe the next hardest thing is like launching rockets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I don't know if it's quite that complex, but it might be close, it might be close, it might be close. So I want to ask you about this too before I get to talking about AI, because I want to. I want to visit your thoughts on AI in the future. But came from other industries. Obviously you grew up in transportation, but you really got your start as a tech founder in other industries with Beatdex, and I think you had another company, I believe it was Skirt. You had that going on too, so you had a couple of runs of this in different industries and then now you're into the freight space.
Speaker 1:One thing I've noticed is that there's two schools of thought on technology in the space, and that is one. In the past was that outside technology, people coming in didn't know the game well enough to do it. Now you have some background. That certainly helps out, but we've seen other people who truly didn't know the game that much be very successful. I mean, I think Chad Olson at AVRL has been very successful with what he's done. He's an outsider.
Speaker 1:So that's one school of thought is that outsiders may not be the best, but I feel like that's not true. The other one is I'm seeing a lot of operators move into technology Like they sat in the brokerage chair, they sat in the dispatcher chair and they're not moving in to help build technology. I feel like that is that can also be a winning strategy. What are your thoughts when you think about forming a team? Being a little bit of an outsider, having a little background, like you do? What are your thoughts in terms of how to build the best team to build the best product that's going to actually work for the customers who are sitting in those seats day in and day out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I'm probably biased because I would view myself more as the outsider, even though I kind of grew up in it right, but I wasn't buying in. I didn't have that like operational professional experience. The reason I'm biased to the outsider is because the outsider has no kind of preconceived notions of how things should work. So they're going to question everything and there's going to be a lot of things where you can't do that and the outsider is going to go well, why not? I just did it. Watch, I'm going to do it, I did it. Don't touch that button.
Speaker 1:Well, I just did.
Speaker 2:I admire so many of these folks that I meet in freight, that have been in it for a long time and the things that they know.
Speaker 2:And I have run into those folks that have an incredibly open mind and they're kind of sick of how things work and they're willing to do things differently. But more often I run into those folks that they, I think, are worried about technology. They're worried about the day that it kind of maybe replaces some of what they do and so they reject it right, and they're worried about the day that it kind of maybe replaces some of what they do and so they reject it Right, and they're kind of like this is never going to work. It won't work for X, y, z reason. I'm like, well, you know, if you could come around, like the future needs you and all of your expertise, like this stuff needs to be turned into technology and that means you need to advise the entire time and by the way, not all of it turns into technology right away and so like there is absolutely a fit for all that experience and that knowledge, I think, if someone is willing to participate.
Speaker 2:But I do see sometimes and I don't think this should exist, but I could understand it there's a little bit of fear of the technology like it's going to replace what I do whatever. Fear of the technology like it's is it going to replace what I do whatever. I don't think that's the case. Like I think anyone who's working now today in logistics shouldn't worry about being displaced by technology. They should be trying to adopt it as much as they possibly can now. If they were like, well, I still have the same job in 50 years, the answer is like no, if you were still trying to do this in 50 years, you would be displaced. Good news you're not going to be doing this in 50 years. Right, like all together, we're going to be doing something else and it will move slowly that direction and everyone will find their fit and do something a little more meaningful. And so it's like you know, when the internet came around, it wasn't like oh no, who's going to do all the typewriter?
Speaker 1:Like you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:It's like who's going to send the faxes.
Speaker 2:Now, you know, eventually you get to a place where, where you just move up to to more meaningful work, right and and it becomes a little bit more knowledge-based work.
Speaker 2:But, man, yeah, I, I am constantly, uh, you know, um, just taken aback by some of the long-term knowledge that some of these folks have, historical knowledge. I learned so much all the time when I talked to these folks and I do, like I said, run into a lot of people with a really open mind that said there's still always a tinge of the but tech's never going to work in this space, and to me that's like saying you know the people that said, like you know, it's the same thing about music, it's the same thing about newspapers, the same thing about Netflix, you know streaming media, all of this, like tech does eventually win. It might not win in the timeframe that you know the entrepreneur is saying right, I think the entrepreneurs are always like the founders are always like way ahead, they're like we're going to change this all by tomorrow, and the other people are like you're never going to change the truth is it is going to change.
Speaker 2:It's going to change somewhere in the middle Right and everyone's going to be better for it. Like, everyone's going to win, and so I don't think anyone should be concerned. But if I had to say, like, if I'm a venture capitalist right now I'm investing my money behind someone that's going to jump into the space and try and do something, I'm 100 percent in on the outsider that has the technical chops, that's willing to go, I don't believe that there's any rules and so I'm gonna go find all of the new, I'm gonna find all of the edges, I'm gonna bump into the rules and then I might even break them and get those rules changed right. Like, if you think about what Travis at Uber did right, there was no rails for ride sharing before they showed up. Right, the laws really changed around with these.
Speaker 2:So when people say, well, you can't do that, you're like well, there's rules that say you can't do that. Well, did you know? If you do something at enough scale and enough people want it, those rules can be changed right. They were made by people once upon a time. They can be changed by people. That's right, that's right. So if someone has enough, you know, forward momentum and they are hell bent on going after this industry. I put my money behind the outsider, but I under no circumstance do I doubt the insiders and the expertise and the knowledge that these folks have, and I and I love trying to absorb it and spending as much time with them as I can, and I would encourage them to come along with us, hang out with us and be part of it with us, because we we would like to do it together.
Speaker 1:I think from all that, what I got out of it was that rules are made by humans and they can be changed, and I love that because I consider myself a rule evaluator in life, not a rule follower.
Speaker 1:I always say that every rule is made up by a person, just like you and me. So we need to evaluate and make sure it's a good rule. But I think that's a great idea, like you and me. So we need to evaluate and make sure it's a good rule. But no, I think that's a great idea and I'm bending more in that direction, because when you're an outsider, you also bring in technologies and tactics and strategies that are just not here. We kind of get claustrophobic a little bit as an industry and we don't know about what's working on the outside and banking and fintech and other industries. You bring that in and then we get to experience the benefit of that. That just you know an operator wouldn't pull that because the operator would just try to build technology based on what they're doing today. So I'm leaning more towards that direction of that actually makes a ton of sense to have outsiders building tech, as long as, like you said, they're willing to sit down with the operators and learn the business operators and learn the business.
Speaker 2:That's really critical. You have to be willing to learn. You have to be willing to learn a hundred percent and you and you have to spend time with people that have been doing it. There's just no other way. Okay, Last question but that you know you need to spend that time.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. Last question, before we have a little bit of fun, is I want to talk about the future and about AI, and this goes to almost a little bit of a marketing question. I see so many technology companies talking about how their technology has AI in it, but based on AI and I'm thinking to myself. I feel like the largest tech companies in the world are struggling to figure out AI. Do I believe that these small freight tech startups are really using AI? Is it just a marketing ploy? Are they? And I don't know about it. I'm curious your take on all this, especially the future, where we're headed.
Speaker 2:Okay, employ, are they? And I don't know about it. I'm curious your take on all this, especially the future where we're headed? Okay, so the answer is going to be really hard to decipher, right? Because the answer is absolutely yes and absolutely no. So it really is, it depends. It is just like that funding scenario that I explained to you right, where people were saying they're throwing tech on top of their freight brokerages and then saying, like we're a tech company, we're not a freight brokerage, trust me, give me 100 million at a billion dollar valuation. The VCs were, like seems legit, and it gave them the check. Well, now the new game is that you just attach AI to everything and you do the same.
Speaker 2:Right and it's working pretty well. But to your question around, look, there's going to be a lot of companies that go bust around this stuff, no doubt about it. Like, this is the same thing that I just explained to you, which is like the hot funding environment of, like you know, three, four years ago, or zero interest rate times, right, so there's a lot of companies don't deserve to have any attached to it. In fact, you're correct in that their definition around AI is so incredibly loose, like it's unbelievable, right. You're like, well, what there is AI? And it turns out like there's no AI there. There's no large language model at play. We're talking about machine learning technology that's been around for ages and that's actually what you're dealing with, right? Or something like pre-fills text and like this was pre-filled with AI. You're like, no, it wasn't. There's no ai there, right, but if you're outside of tech, you don't know the business and someone tells you it's ai and they're a tech company, who are you to question that if they are not? You're like you know that maybe that's what ai does. It pre-fills, like fields for me, with information. I guess that doesn't sound like the groundbreaking technology the news has been talking about, but it's happening right.
Speaker 2:But then to your question around the biggest companies in the world are struggling to deploy AI. How could I ever believe that the smallest companies in the world are actually, or these small tech startups are, doing it and actually, in fact, you can actually more believe that the small companies are doing it and that the big companies are actually struggling to do. And the reason is is it goes back to you know, if you're a sales force or someone and you have this, this massive customer base, all these folks with huge contracts, they rely on you for business critical stuff and you're operating at the enterprise. When you introduce these features, these new things, you have to do it so slowly. It'd be very careful. It all has to be opt in and you can't really test it. It like all has to be opt in and you can't really test it. It like all has to work a hundred percent of the time and it has to. You know like there's no, there's no margin of error, and so they do take a long time.
Speaker 2:You can actually never bet on the big incumbent to be able to deploy the stuff faster than small companies versus us or some other company like us. You know you might have a company that's just funded. They have 50 customers there and they're sitting on 50 million dollars of venture capital and they're like well, actually we're going to roll out a new version tonight that might destroy the whole business, but we only have 50 customers, we'll just go get another 50 customers. So they are really. When they're like, yeah, we're AI, they're like fully AI. They're to the point where they'll let it make mistakes and cause you to leave, but they are actually using the For us.
Speaker 2:I would say that we are still. I'd like to think of us as a pretty sizable business, but relative to where we're going, we're still so small in my mind. When we say we're deploying AI, we really are. We are going back to the models. We are working on the models. That's totally different than just saying like, hey, we're going to use some machine learning to pull this off. We use machine learning too, but for totally other things, like for routing and dispatch and all that. That stuff works really well.
Speaker 2:But like I'll give an example of using AI Like if you were just to give me a blob of shipment information that was totally unstructured and you sent it to me and just said like, okay, book this shipment for me. That's a really good use case for you or AI, because AI would just say, okay, like I think that this is an address and this is an address and I think these are dimensions. Actually, this looks like a shipment. Is this a shipment? I think it is Okay. These are the dimensions. This looks like the weight Is this all correct? And you're like, wow, actually book that, right.
Speaker 2:And it's like, if this is all correct, this is $197. Right. And you're like, okay, so that's a really good use case for AI amongst a bunch of other things. But that's an example of like, where we and other companies like us can use AI to really cut down on the amount of time people are spending doing just like this copy paste operation, this kind of stuff. So I would lean towards the younger, smaller companies are definitely going to adopt it 10 or even maybe 100x faster than the big guys. Yeah, and it's in a more extreme way too. It's going to do a hell of a lot more. But just be ready. Be ready for the errors when it starts telling you some crazy stuff, because it will, and the small companies will take that risk.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense how you're saying that, and it almost makes me think that the companies that are going to rise up in the next three or four years might be companies that don't exist yet today, because they're going to be able to accelerate even faster if they know how to use it correctly. Because I feel like when people put AI as a part of their pitch, I feel like it stands for algorithm included. It's not artificial intelligence, they're just running some sort of bot or some sort. It's not the real thing, but that's an interesting perspective. So you think the smaller companies actually have a better chance of winning, and this makes sense from a TMS perspective, because I always used to think like the McLeods of the world, for example, the big beast TMS is. It's hard for them to even like build a web-based platform, but the small TMSs can make changes really fast and be much more present. So so that that makes a lot of sense. I think you've convinced me in that regard, so that's uh, that's good to know.
Speaker 2:That's awesome one of the analogies that I'd use, and I think you'd appreciate it, is just you know, you know.
Speaker 2:Think of these big companies like mcleod as being a cruise liner and think of these small companies as being on like a small little sailboat right, or like a little small racing sailboat, and you know, they decide, they want to make a turn, and it takes like forever and the little sailboat decides and it's off, it's gone yeah, it's exactly, and it can do whatever it wants, and so that's really what happens in technology and it's really good, um, it's really really good for our industry and for all industries really, because it it allows, um, the incumbents to be disrupted like on a regular cadence, and it just it ultimately equals, like you know, better, better quality products, efficiency, speed, lower prices, everything, and it's like every 10 years you just get like a whole new batch of leaders right and then, and then they're going to be disrupted and so like, if you want to stay around on in this space, you almost have, to like in tech in general, you almost have to rebuild your company, like as a startup, like every like four or five years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I imagine it's only going to keep accelerating. I mean, I think to, I think back to, just like what we've lived through in our life. We lived through I mean there were cassette tapes when I was growing up and now like CDs have already gone and you know, like owning your own digital music, so like these things have already come and gone in just 30 years. I mean it's just accelerating so fast and how it's working.
Speaker 1:I think that's only kind of the way it's going to be you have kids, I do, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Have you asked them ever to like look at a tape or a CD and just go what's that? Or like a regular phone or like a regular phone? Have you ever said like tell me what that is?
Speaker 1:Cassette tapes, for sure. So we do a little bit of antique shopping when we go explore small towns around us on weekends and we've gone into several antique stores and it's funny watching my kids see stuff that I grew up with. Like I think of antiques is like a hundred years ago, but literally a phone that connects to the wall. They're like Whoa, look at this thing. It's spinning around like they're just having fun with it, like it was a big thing, a rotary dial phone, and I'm like man, that's crazy. But yeah, like cassette tape. They're like what is this, you know? And I have to show them how you can rewind it if it got pulled out and you can record over it. Yes, right, pretty wild, pretty wild for sure.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's have a little fun here, all right, random question of the day. Now, listen these questions. Sometimes they're serious, sometimes they're funny, sometimes they're great, sometimes they're done. I don't know. Let's see what it is. Random question of the day today is oh, this one was dude. She made this one just for you. What band today would you want to play drums for? Because you play drums, right? Is that what he said? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So so is there a band today that you're like man, I would love to play drums for them wow, you know, my favorite band who's still brewing that I'd love to play drums for is is the deftones. Um, but but most recently, like I've just admired how I don't know how fun it seems to maybe be like one of these a little bit more poppy, like country drummers, like they just are having so much, like all these country bands of later, just just having so much fun that that might actually like maybe just be like Morgan Wallen's drummer or like even Joe.
Speaker 1:Malone, look you got. You got a connection man, maybe he could sit in. I think I got. You know, I got.
Speaker 2:I'm a little busy for it, but maybe. Yeah, you know I'm not a drummer.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I'm not a drummer like you. I do actually play drums, but not not. I've never been trained in any of that, but I would want to be chad smith. Red hot chili peppers man, that's who I'd want to play drums for man. That would be so much. By the way, have you seen the skit with chad smith and will ferrell? Have you seen that? Dude, that is like that's unbelievable. You have to double take like wait, which one is, wait, which one is which? That's, I have a little funny story about chad smith.
Speaker 2:My, my brother-in-law, was a professional hockey player on the anaheim ducks and he and chad smith were friends and I and I was. I was never like a super fan of his and I didn't appreciate his drumming, I think till I got a little bit older and now you could just I mean, everyone appreciates it, right, but I remember him telling me he me. He's like hey, chad, my buddy, do you want to? Would you like to go hang out with Chad, maybe play some drums? And I was like, no, I'm okay.
Speaker 2:I passed on it and he reminded me. Like five years later he's like remember when you said no to playing drums with Chad Smith.
Speaker 1:And I was like, yeah, that was be just so sick. I mean like again. I think of like, whenever I get a chance to, I've got a couple of friends on the pga tour and I've had a chance to play a couple rounds with them and it's like watch, I mean it's a different game. I one story for me and then we're going to call it because we could talk forever. I was playing golf, my buddy jared wolf, down at tpc sawgrass and, uh, hole 11 through 16, so six holes. I was one over. I felt great. I mean I was playing great right, I lost six shots and I was one over. Like it's just like a whole. It's a different game. It's a different game.
Speaker 1:We got to 16, the par five there at sawgrass and I said what's the shortest club? You fit into this part five. He's like I think it's six iron. I was like a six iron. I was kind of razzed him. I'm like, dude, just jambo's hitting a nine iron in, what are you talking about? So this dude, this dude turns a little bit further left and swings out of his shoes and just belts it over the the trees and he had an eight iron and he made eagle and I'm like, okay, all right, fair enough fair enough, all right yeah, it's absolutely incredible.
Speaker 1:Wait a man. It's great having you on the show. Thanks for coming by and sharing your story, what you guys are doing at Mothership, and just some great stories to tell. You're going to have to come back on, man. I think you need to be kind of a regular on the show. Man Got to get you back. Let's do it. Awesome, man, appreciate you. We'll see you real soon.
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