Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…For the individual truck driver in that moment, for that shipment, but that's how you build supply. Once you get enough, then you have a healthy ecosystem where you have a lot of trucks, you get the data to where they are, you can then start to efficiently match a job to a truck better than the traditional industry player can who’s just calling around. That's the investment you make in building this. There's a dozen other things, but that's one of the investments you made. You could sacrifice. You did economics for a long time to make sure you have tons and tons of carriers, truckers that are constantly using the app, tons and tons of shippers that trust you all the time, so that at some point in the near future where you're like, “Look, the spread between that one truck and that one shipment that is amazing, [... ] economics for us, and finding that place where it's really expensive for us and we don't make much of a margin, if anything at all.” It just keeps pushing that further and further out because there's much more liquidity on the platform. That's the long-term thesis. There are a lot of nuances behind that, but that's effectively how it works. We're making a bunch of other investments. We have a big product data science engineering team, we have all these other functions that we're building to build the brand, the technology, and the infrastructure in parallel with the business. Those are all upfront investment where they can help in terms of your growth. Fundamentally, those are the primary drivers, making sure you do a great job for your customer. It's worth investing early on when you're building your reputation and your brand in traditional industry as an outsider. Screwing that up early means you don't have a chance in the future. Being able to grow your flywheel quickly and building density on your lanes is very important. We have all the data now, that shows when you do that here's what happens. The world looks better. We can justify those investments.…

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