Convoy (with CEO Dan Lewis)

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2019

⏱️ 99 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Coming to you live from the University of Washington, Ben and David are joined by hundreds of awesome Seattle listeners (and a few non-Seattle listeners!) to cover the meteoric rise of trucking industry disruptor and hometown hero Convoy. How did Dan and Convoy go from nervously conducting market research at truck stops on I-5 to one of the largest logistics companies and fastest-growing startups in the world in just four short years, raising over $650m (not a typo) along the way? Tune in to find out!

Special thank you to the Paul Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and to Pioneer Square Labs for generously sponsoring the show venue.

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Carveouts:

Mystery: https://mystery.sh

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, I just checked and the waveform does spike and clip when I scream like that.
0:04.5	So we'll try not to do that anymore for the sake of everyone home. Welcome to Season 5 episode 9 the home stretch of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them
0:29.4	We are coming to you live today from the University of Washington.
0:34.8	Audience, can we hear you?
0:36.5	Yeah.
0:37.5	Yeah. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal and we are your hosts. Let's talk about trucks.
0:53.0	18 wheelers, semis, the long haulers,
0:58.0	one out of every four of these that you see on the road
1:03.1	is completely empty.
1:05.5	Truckers finish a job and then pick up the phone
1:07.6	to find their next load, which could be a state or more away.
1:11.9	You might think they should be able to just have their boss or
1:14.8	co-worker figure it out across multiple trucks and coordinate, but get this, 90
1:19.4	percent of trucking companies have six or fewer trucks,
1:23.2	and 97% have fewer than 20 trucks.
1:27.2	There are over a million independent trucking
1:29.3	companies or carriers, as we'll call them tonight,
1:32.0	in the United States alone. So enter
1:34.4	convoy. Today we are going to talk about this company which has only existed
1:38.0	unbelievably for four and a half years and their ambitious plans to make it
1:42.2	easy for any truck driver to find a nearby load,
1:45.2	transparently see what they'll get paid, and do it all, as you would expect, right on their
	...

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