YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Lewis

lines on the record: 30
first: 2018-03-23
most recent: 2018-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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 innovation trucking. You're going to see small trucking companies and drivers having huge benefits, having more control over their future and a completely different level of visibility and data for companies that are shipping. So I think it's going to be dramatic where we right at the center of building all that.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Several times, I think, in my life, people have really pushed me to see the value of options. As a kid, it's kind of easy to ignore that. I didn't, oh, I don't want to put the time into prepare and to do this thing that might lead to future options. But I had three or four people, you know, my uncle, my parents, one of my teachers really push on me to say what matters is having more options in the future. And I remember at Yale, my dean said specifically, you know, between these two jobs you're looking at, pick the one that lets you do the other one in the future too. One was more of a one-way door, one was a two-way door. And I think that option value mindset was probably the most influential in terms of the decisions I've made in my life that have led me to have more and more options.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably an oldie, but kind of a goodie, is you only get one chance to make a first impression. I think every impression that somebody makes can be the difference between many or a few options in their life going forward. And so it's never worth it just kind of phone it in, making a great first impression leads to many, many opportunities.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if you want to read this one. The book that burned, honestly, my favorite book whenever I think about this question, it burned impression on me was The Stranger by Albert Camus. It was actually the first time I read a book. I read it back in junior high about a completely broken person. It wasn't just a fun story with a happy ending. It made me think at that time I was like, wow, life's way more complicated than I've experienced. And it kind of opened my mind to that. And I think the Goldfinch is kind of a similar book now. And then I also read Lord of the Rings, you know, Game of Thrones series before movies and the shows came out. Never really gotten to the Game of Thrones show after reading it because I thought it was so fantastic in the book and I couldn't really have the experience of the show, but that kind of got me hooked on fantasy novels. So those are two of my favorites and, you know, classics.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hold myself to the same standard, which is if I couldn't hire the people to take over these roles that I'm doing better than I'm doing them, then I might not be the right CEO. That's kind of the, I think about that across the board now.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, everyone that joins Convoy, I think the world of, and I want them to be successful. And we hire a lot of very ambitious people so everyone wants more and more responsibility. And the question often comes up is, how do I get to the next level? What is the next opportunity for me? And am I ready to take on a bigger level of responsibility? And the one thing I found 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 comfortable saying, I'm going to bring in someone who does my job and lets me step up and do a different job? And can they attract and hire that person at that caliber who can replace them essentially? And when I people can kind of cross that chasm, maybe it's uncomfortable bringing someone to do what you're doing, but really see it that way, hire one or two people that are as good or better than they are and prove they can bring those people into the company. That is the clearest evidence that they're ready to kind of step up and take on the next level. And I think about that for myself too.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there were two specific things one was just the initial fear of am I even going to be good at this? Wow, being a CEO startup founding this company, a lot of people are taking a risk and putting their livelihood in my hands or taking, you know, I have a lot of responsibility for them. So I think part of it was really proving to myself that this was going to be the right fit. I think that it felt pretty natural. It actually felt like it fit well. And I credit that to the fact that in my history, I've done a ton of different jobs. I never went deep on any one thing, which bothered me for a really long time. I always ask myself, I wish I could just go deep. Wouldn't it be easier if I just picked one thing and did that? But I tend to do a lot of different things. And then now in this job, I'm like, oh, well, that all turned out well because that's actually exactly what I needed for this job. So that was kind of partialization of this is the thing I should be doing. And I'm going to just go full steam into getting everybody fired up about this. The second part that's been challenging as we've scaled the company is really knowing who else is scaling and who else needs to develop more and isn't ready yet. And that's really hard.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about it a lot. It's extremely important. We've gone fast. So our company is not even three years old yet. We've been able to scale to over 200 people. We've raised image of $80 million. We have hundreds of customers who are doing a lot of business. What we've done has happened really fast from the moment we incorporated this company. And so I feel like I've lived four or five startups this point within Convoy thinking about what my role is. Early on, I am the chief recruiter and the chief fundraiser and the chief visionary because without getting people on board, there is no product, there is nothing to go build. And then my job became chief product officer and I was doing a lot of product work early on to get V1 out the door. And then I became chief salesman and I had to go out and convince a bunch of customers that this was something they were really excited about and go talk to truck drivers and really understand them and figure out how we can be helpful and then build for them. And that cycle doesn't stop. And it's about just stepping back and asking yourself, where can I be the most helpful? What can I do?”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd say one thing is an experiment never goes wrong. An experiment has an outcome and we learn from it. And the outcome could be the thing we thought was going to work worked, or it could be the thing we thought was going to work, didn't work. But in either case, we now have more data and information and we can go make a smarter decision or we can run a better experiment. And so I think that's first and foremost having a culture where there's no such thing as a failed experiment. There's just different levels of data. 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 the three different things we're going to test and we'll ask people to vote on which one they think is going to win and then they can win like a gift card, you know, like we have like prizes and stuff.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to hire people, though, that really believe in it coming in because you're right, it is risky. And if they're not viewing it as valuable, they're actually nervous about it. They're just going to naturally not do it. And as you scale, you can't manage everything closely, so you just won't do it.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that so, what does culture really reflect? Culture reflects the values that have advanced, but also reflects the people you hire. You can say a whole lot of things, but if you hire people that don't reflect the cultural values that you believe in, you won't have that culture. 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 can be both the type of person from where they come, like the company they come from, but also the type of person that they are. And so investing more heavily in folks with a data background, a data science background is extremely valuable. And so we were able to do that early on bringing folks with a data background. We've only since improved and beefed that up and then hiring people that came out of pretty strong product management cultures where experimentation was very valued and that were in very data centric organizations like Amazon, for example. And so I think, you know, one, talking about it a lot, saying that we value it, making it part of the process, step one, that”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot easier at least to get our foot in the door because people would make referrals for us, or we could point to other examples of where we'd had success. But the first ones are always really challenging in this business.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 purchasing this for a long time in a way that's less efficient and we can give you more value. And so that means they already have a status quo and they have to trust us to change what already works for them. And so getting the first few customers to make that decision is really critical. And so we did everything from thinking about how to build credibility with investors, how to really understand and go deep on individual customer needs to figure out what would work for them and then putting a lot of time and sort of just building personal trust to lead into some of those first deliveries. And, you know, it's great, the first customer we ever had, they shipped one pallet, actually back before we were doing full truck, we were just getting started. We want to test the technology and they videotaped it and they thought it was great. They were excited about it. They were excited to kind of be the first company to use it. So that was really kind of a cool experience. And again, then we got a first few, we got it rolling a little bit. And then it actually became”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quickly into our relationship with them has done so many proactive things to kind of help us. The Gia who runs recruiting over there is fantastic. She's been very hands on a couple of major recruiting efforts we've had. They've put together councils to advise us on different things and have given us access to a lot of the YC resources. So I felt like we got the best of both worlds. Growth experience and network as well as that culture of support and resources for startups.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one, Anu and Ali are fantastic. Two, I think we felt like there was a really good opportunity to get kind of the best of two worlds. There's a growth fund those partners as well as the organization general has very, very deep ties into many of the growth stage companies across Silicon Valley and across the world. And so we would be able to get a lot of great experience and insights from those companies through the YC network. The partners have a lot of experience scaling and building so they could help us understand that. So we feel like we got that benefit, which is what we needed entry kind of a growth phase. But the DNA of YC is about deeply helping companies succeed. And it's a service mindset and sort of, as I mentioned, I want to lean into the resources. I want to lean into the investors that we're working with. So we can get the most out of them and give our company the best chance at growing. As you mentioned, it's an efficient way of doing it because it's already a group we're working with. And so I felt like because of that DNA that YC has as an incubator and its founding, that we could feel that. And I have never worked with a group that this quickly was, you know,”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that it did. I think that generally my DNA is very frugal and I try to be very efficient with spending money personally and in this business. And we've always had a sense of we have to earn it. I mean, one of our core values is earning the results. We're not entitled to say, look at all this money we have. Now we can relax and spend less efficiently. We think about it as now we have a chance to go do something bigger. So I certainly don't think it's changed our mindset around efficiency. Potentially we've been able to take more risk in terms of things we can go test and experiment. But those are just additions to the budget and we want to run them all efficiently.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that and around pace, I think everyone, it's kind of been faster, super fast, right? There's kind of some variations around like, well, how should we think about different geographies and how should we think about different services and how much do we need to know before we accelerate and kind of where is that exact line? And that's where the debates and discussions usually come out. This is a massive industry. It's an $800 billion market in the United States alone. It's a two-sided marketplace with businesses on both sides. The minimum viable footprint for launching this brokerage, this marketplace, is across multiple cities, multiple lanes, and with a couple of different truck types we found. So we needed to raise a lot of money because kind of the footprint for building this sort of large scale transportation business with a high average sale price per job and everything like that required kind of a lot of structure and a lot of people initially to develop the two sides of the marketplace, both from an engineering perspective, but also from sales and relationship management and then also from operations and support as we're building this up.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And from time to time, someone will suggest something that just would be really distracting. It's like, hey, why don't you go into, maybe, what about this market or I think at one point the board was pretty convinced we really needed to go into working with the ports doing container drainage and things like that. And that was all part of us becoming more educated about this business. And just like me, they're getting educated about the business as we're growing it. And they're going to have reactions that are incorrect or maybe they're lacking the right level of visibility or information. So in those cases, I mean, especially a couple of the different categories we didn't go into, that was me and other people at Convoy saying, we hear you, not the right time would be too distracting. Or we hear you. Here are the four other variables as to why that would actually take us off the rails. I think it's about having confidence that you have to believe what you're doing and you can't just go on the whims of people that are advising you. You can't live that down.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say a couple things is on that key point there, I think, is the advice on that, it's your decision. At the end of the day, you have to make the decision and only 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 in you or has had more success to date in their career, that what they say is what you should do and that if you don't do it and you go back and you're not successful, then they're going to hold over your head. I think that the opposite is actually true, which is, A, they're probably really busy, so they might not remember what they said. They're saying it off the cuff. They're saying it based on a lot of experience, but they're not seeing everything that you're seeing. And whatever outcome happens is your responsibility. They're not going to say, well, you know, I did give you that advice. So therefore, when it didn't work, it's definitely on me. It's your decision. So you just need to always remember that you have to live with it. So you need to make the decision and they're seeing this part-time. You're seeing this full-time. In terms of the decisions and some things, we've had some pretty significant discussions about PACE, the types of categories we go in.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are the board composition came very much down to people that we felt would be really, really valuable for building a business. And that was how we also chose the investors that we had. Fortunately, and I'd say we didn't probably plan this as well as maybe we should have, the chemistry of the board is super important. I think we have a great board chemistry. I think people really respect each other and get along within the board. And so it ends up being really healthy.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we wanted, I think some people kind of lean in to their investors and their board and think, okay, I'm going to approach this, I'm going to get a lot of value, I'm going to work with these people really closely, and I want to have a great relationship and I want to use their experience to get a lot for my company. And some people kind of lean out and say, this is a necessary evil of building a company. And I was much more in the first camp. That's why we ended up having quite a few investors. I received some advice early on. Dan, you have to choose. Are you going to lean in and is this going to be something you nurture and develop? Getting a lot of value from this over time. If you're not going to, don't worry about having as many people. But if you're going to lean in and get that value, then consider everyone that's investing as a resource and really play into that. So the board was the same where we really wanted to have people around the table who had seen a lot of different things, who had built companies who had gone through this journey before and who were really well connected and networked so that across many dimensions of this from the quick question of, hey, when you built your company, what happened here to, hey, we're scaling at this point, who else do you know that's done that? We would get a lot of really high quality answers.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 created and developed eBay or built up Starbucks, these brands that people can definitely recognize outside of tech gave them the confidence that people who understood other businesses were bullish on Convoy. And that really helped us get customers early on. So I think the beginning of the strategy was investors can help us earn credibility with customers. And then since then, it's really paid off in terms of many, many dozens of customer introductions and business deals that we've been able to get via introductions and credibility that began with our investors and then also being able to hire and attract additional talent.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, if I go back to the beginning, I think as most early entrepreneurs would say, especially this was my first startup. And so first and foremost was just getting investors, you know, building a story that was compelling to somebody that would give us money. I think once we quickly realized the type of business we were going after was different than a lot of other tech companies in that our customers aren't tech companies for the most part. And so they're not aware of or even influenced by many of the notable tech investors and tech names. And so what we found when we're going to, let's say, you know, it could be the middle America, it could be eastern Washington or an area where someone's building a manufacturing plant, we need to build credibility with them. They need to trust us because they're going to start, you know, they're going to give us the product of their labor and they're going to trust the experience that their customers have receiving their products in the trucks that we're sending over. And so there's a lot of trust that had to be built up. And we actually thought about our investors as a way to build that trust. And so when we were able to get investors that had built significant companies.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really, really good question. Someone I used to work with is described to me as surfing. He's like, you can go out there and paddle really hard, but if you're”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the best of both worlds is what's going to fit us because I always came from a background of if I'm going to work really hard, you know, the work ethic is going to help define and differentiate me. And so there's an advantage in going after a linear business where that hard work pays off. But the economics and building a tech business, you want that to become nonlinear at some point where it starts to grow more on its own with less energy put in. I think convoy is that business, one of those businesses. Initially getting us off the ground, it's about putting in hard work, going out and meeting customers and earning more and more of their business by delivering a great service to them. But then we iterate and we learn more. And as the network starts to get bigger, because transportation has a strong network effect, which we're already seeing kick in in certain markets, it can become nonlinear. And because we can build more trust and kind of have a more liquid marketplace, it can start to have stronger network effects and get stronger and stronger as it scale scale effects as well that benefit us. And so I think trucking is a tradition of linear business, and we're going to be able to make it into a nonlinear business that grows.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think a nonlinear business tends to have a nonlinear or a binary outcome. Either it works or doesn't work. The businesses maybe aren't interesting at a small scale. So they could take years to take off, waiting for a lucky break. And then, but they tend to have strong network effects. So when they do take off, they accelerate quickly. And examples might include hit-driven businesses like video games, music, social networks, some pure marketplaces like eBay and some other ones, maybe like Instagram or Pinterest, which took a few years and then kind of hit and took off. And a linear business, on the other hand, can have a variety of outcomes, can be successful at different scale, different levels of scale. And second can be things like medical device sales or real estate or even SaaS products that are created and sold. And the way those work is, the more energy and time you put into selling this item or creating and selling it, the more business you create. And oftentimes it's a B2B type of business. And so it ends up being fairly linear at first. You put an extra day or effort, an extra 100 calls in, you're going to get some number of customers that buy. And so you can kind of scale the business through hard work. And what we kind of thought”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think different things stood out to me from each of those, and I learned from each of those, and ultimately that's made me, I think, better at building.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learned from all of them, they've all spent a lot of time figuring out how to build a really successful business, but they're all very different. And so I think the one that certainly influenced me the most primarily because I was doing it right before I started Convoy was Amazon and some things I took away from there were being very deep into the metrics and details of each of the businesses and each of the teams, even as the company grows, creating a structure to do that, having a set of core values that you don't just use to talk about the business to recruits, but that you 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. Those are a couple things I took away from there. I think early on when I was at Microsoft and Google, there were different sort of focuses on how do you launch a product? Microsoft spent a lot of time thinking about, hey, how do you take a product to market and launch it? And Google thought a lot about obsessing over a customer experience and always trying to be creative and clever and innovative around what you can give somebody that's better than what they've done before from a product or kind of a software experience perspective.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they can manage inventory costs, get things to the right person at the right time as quickly as people expect, which is pretty fast these days. So we dove in because we thought we could be part of that change. A lot of companies grew in last mile delivery. So we looked upstream and said, well, maybe the middle miles are really good option. And I spent a lot of time actually with Hadi Partovi and Ali Partovi exploring some of these ideas early. My co-founder, Gran Goodale. And then we kind of came up with the right business model in addition to four or five other ones that we looked at that weren't good.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was little, I appreciated supply chain because it paid me $10 an hour during the summer. My family had a mom and pop kind of often supply distribution business around the Northwest. And so I worked in the warehouse. I'd pull boxes down from shelves. I'd load vans and small trucks and then even started doing some driving when I was later in my tangiers and in college. But that was more to get paid during the summer set up money for clothes and going on dates and things like that. Did not think that was going to be my career, but later on did a bunch of things in transportation actually did some work with the Panama Canal, did some work related to manufacturing and maintenance programs for airlines related to their partial distribution and maintenance. And then ultimately I was at Amazon actually before I started Convoy and you were asking kind of how did this come about? Honestly, a witness pretty powerful supply chain transformation happening via Amazon and how that can change an industry and consumer expectations are going up. Businesses have to react, increasing the flexibility of their supply chain.”
2018-03-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source