#62 - Dan Lewis, CEO of Convoy, on the Future of Freight

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Dan Lewis and Anu Hariharan.
Dan's the CEO of Convoy, and Anu's a partner here at YC. So Convoy matches shippers with freight carriers. That helps the trucking industry run more efficiently because currently over 40% of the trucks on the road are empty.
And if you'd like to read the transcript of this episode, you can find it on the YC blog. All right, here we go.

**Anu Hariharan** (0:27)
Thank you so much, Dan, for joining us on the podcast today. So Dan Lewis is the CEO and founder of Convoy.
We're really excited to have him here. Dan, I wanted to start with your sort of background, primarily because now you're building a trucking marketplace. And so I was curious, how did, you know, what did you do and how did you arrive at this idea?

**Dan Lewis** (0:50)
Yeah, so it really comes back to a combination of, you know, background supply chain and technology.
My family run a mom and pop off supply company, you know, distributing off supplies all around the Puget Sound in Washington. And every summer, my job was to drive big Sprinter vans delivering stuff. So I learned a lot about the idea of warehouse operations and delivering, but it wasn't really something that I thought, man, I'm going to go build a company and do this. You know, I was pretty young. And then after school, I ended up doing a lot of work in transportation and technology. I worked for the Panama Canal for a while. I ended up living in Spain doing management consulting, thinking a lot about outsourcing of maintenance and parts distribution, did similar work with some airlines and companies in the United States, and then shifted over and started working in tech. Actually, my job in college was building websites for the Yale Athletics Department, which was a great job. It was super flexible. You know, I got 10 bucks an hour and I could work for my dorm room. But that kind of led to an interest in technology.
And then after college and after doing some consulting, I was at Microsoft for a while and a handful of other technology startups and bigger technology companies. And so then I ended up at Amazon. And one of the things that I saw at Amazon that kind of inspired me was I realized that when I was growing up, we used to go to the store to buy stuff.
And we would buy it the same day that we wanted it. And that was option value.
I call it option value. You can decide the day you want it, if you want to get it or not. And then online shopping came around, and you had to choose, do I want to go to the store and get it today, or do I want to buy it seven days in advance? And then it was five days, and then three days, and then two, and then one. And Amazon really took hold and started lowering or raising the bar for delivery and making it faster and faster. And all of a sudden, with Prime, the decision between do I want it really soon and do I want to buy it online wasn't a conflict anymore. And Amazon really started taking over in retail, and it was really that that caused me to think, okay, so the supply chain is winning. It wasn't, you know, it's not the location of the store, it's not the ambiance, how nice the sales staff is, how easy the parking is, all that stuff. It's the fact that I can get it really fast. And that was driving massive shift in behavior. And we looked at a lot of different companies out there. I started looking at, I was looking to a startup in general, and I decided to leave Amazon and go pursue this.
Looked, and when I was looking at transportation, a lot of the companies were last mile. So delivering Instacart or Postmates or DoorDash or Uber Rush or Google Shopping Express, all these different companies that were doing that, there were not a lot of companies focusing on the middle mile, getting everything in the right place so that you could do that same day delivery. And that was the initial kind of, this is my background, but kind of the inspiration that led to thinking about, let's go build a logistics company.

**Anu Hariharan** (3:49)
And one of the things I know, like having talked before, is you actually worked on even flushing the idea out a lot more before you started building it. Can you talk about that process and like, you know, what work did you do to really understand, okay, this seems interesting, but is this real?