David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…We weren’t sure exactly which category to this. We were taking several different. Because there are a bunch of categories in trucking, of different types of loads, then there's also geography. Then you guys had to make a decision about scaling. If you use the analogy of a consumer market place like Yelp or an Uber, you have one city that was working. Then there's the economical question like, “Well, what do you do next? Do you expand nationwide? Do you go to one other city? Do you do another?” For you guys, the question was, “Do we expand to other types of products of trucking, or do we expand nationwide?” You eventually made a decision to expand nationwide, pretty, pretty early. How did you think through that? It wasn't obvious. You could say, “Expand nationwide. That means we need to have supply nationwide of all these trucks that need to serve our shippers, really, really well. ” How did you do that so quickly? The marketplace works on a lane level. A lane in our world is either a metro—it's like the greater Seattle area, where a shipment were picked up and dropped off in the same location, and the drivers’ at home that night—or it's a point-to-point—Seattle to Sacramento, Sacramento to Phoenix, for example. The marketplace did all to that level. One of the challenges we encountered early on was, we had to decide, are we going to be super local-focused? There's a category for very local. They actually don't drive more than a couple of hundred miles in one direction because they want to get home every night.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.