Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On this episode, we are going to be chatting with Juan Cora. Juan is the founder and CEO at Aquatio Software. And prior to that, spent many years in the warehouse management system industry.
Speaker: And we're going to get to talk about some of the foundational differences between delivering productized software that is easy to just drop in and more services heavy type things that you do inside of a warehouse and all of the kind of subtleties that go in around that as well as a sprinkling of a couple of dudes who built stuff in the 90s talking about how excited we are about ai so buckle in for a fun half hour and i will talk to you on the other side
Speaker: Juan, welcome to the show. Well, thanks, Brian. Appreciate it. Certainly happy to be here and looking forward to catching up with you over you know some of the different themes that I think have been a focal point here for me over the last few years. so Awesome. So, yeah, let's start from the beginning. um Tell me how you got into supply chain and software and why you stuck around.
Speaker: and That's a great question. I'm originally from Puerto Rico. And when I graduated from high school, ah ended up going to a small Christian school just north of Indianapolis.
Speaker: And I actually stepped into college as a math major that wanted to eventually study theology in grad school. which is a little odd, of course, as you can imagine. But at some point I thought I was gonna be a minister and I really love doing math. So, hey, I figured it would be a good way into the ministry.
Speaker: But second semester, my sophomore year, I took my first intro to computer science class. And that seemed to kind of, ah you know, sort of remove the scales from my eyes and had a bit of ah of ah of a Pauline moment there and realized, this is a is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Speaker: And what was it that you saw in that? You know, that's a great point. It was probably less what I saw and what it made me feel. and And the way it made me feel was like I was able to to build and create and innovate on my terms.
Speaker: And so being able to have that sort of you know excitement and you know the challenge behind it, and of course the ah yeah know the The fact that I could do anything you know when it came to to programming, you know that sort of like opened my eyes and and made me realize that there's some really cool things that you could do with programming.
Speaker: I remember it was Intro to Computer Science with Turbo Pascal. I don't know if you remember that.
Speaker: i Not many people will. i have heard of it. I never touched so At least I didn't tell you Fortran or COBOL, which I also had to actually do, but this was the intro. And honestly, I've been chasing that feeling. And there's been, you know, ever since I've been chasing that feeling, there's been a few moments in my career where I can definitely say I felt it again. And, you know, being one of the founding developers of Scale WMS for Manhattan Associates, as well as being able to found and start up Aquatio was another time that has really kind of
Speaker: you know led to those same emotions and so same feelings. So that's kind of what got me on my career here. So I do have some questions that I want to double back on or about working at a place like Manhattan and then starting a company from there and all that. But before I get to that, I saw a post maybe five minutes ago before we started recording this on LinkedIn ah about The excitement that people who have been building things for a while are feeling right now about like getting reinvigorated based on being able to use some of these new like AI-based tools that are out there to build differently or build faster.
Speaker: ah which is very different than people who have never encountered it, who were like, oh my God, I can do a thing. There's a different feeling that I've seen. like How are you feeling about the last, say, two years of being in the software industry?
Speaker: Well, I mean, it's exhilarating, right? I mean, we all have been given a front row seat to see how many of the things that we, of course, perhaps either struggled with or were challenged by or had to leverage,
Speaker: you know, a number of different onerous tools to be able to accomplish is now available to us through, you know, large language models and being able to kind of start integrating these large language models for the purposes of actually providing business functions and value.
Speaker: So I'm exhilarated and it's, it's exciting as you state, for those of us that have been in the industry now for, you know, going on 30 years to be able to see that, you know, what perhaps would have taken years to to accomplish 20 years ago is now at everybody's fingertips. It doesn't require a yeah computer science degree, doesn't require a database administration background like mine was. And within weeks, you're able to produce some really solid value to address some of the most vexing of of business challenges. So it's ah exciting that way.
Speaker: So before we got on the air, you were telling me that you recently got back from Italy with your family and you were talking to me about what you learned about concrete.
Speaker: Can you share that quickly? And then I want to use that. I want to bring that back into this conversation. Oh, yeah. It's a heck of an analogy, but I won't steal your thunder. Go ahead. You do whole thing then. No, no, no. It's okay. It's okay.
Speaker: it does It does kind of tend to to play play ah you know ah a good segue into that. It's a very good catch. ah But as we went to Italy and we you know had a chance to go and visit a number of different attractions, we you know traversed ah most of the most of the country.
Speaker: One of the things that you know was was really fascinating to to my wife and me was you know just the sheer serendipity of much of Western culture having you know its origins in in many respects in Italy and and very much being tied to you know just the invention of something like cement.
Speaker: And cement was primarily invented by the Romans in a very serendipitous manner where At some point, you had some volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius that had fallen on the beach with some water and some sand. And ultimately, some some folks started actually playing around with it, um almost like Play-Doh.
Speaker: and managed to be able to uncover that it actually you know was was something that retained its firmness ah you know pretty significantly for a good period of time and ultimately that led to coliseums and the aqueducts and you know obviously all the engineering and the archways, etc. that really built much of you know, the initial civilization that we had coming out of Europe. and And of course, you know, much of that is directly tied to what, you know, people are doing today. So let me go ahead and let you see, you know, hear about the analogy you think. Well, let's see if we have the same. So the way I've been thinking about the tools as someone who has built without them is that
Speaker: yeah You could build the Colosseum with materials that existed before, right? You could build the Colosseum with, you know, wooden joists and with, you know, but it would take forever and it was very, very painful and it's not going to last and it's,
Speaker: you know, you've got to constantly maintain it. And then what we're seeing today is not necessarily for those of us who have built before, not necessarily that we have new concepts of the things we want to build.
Speaker: It's just that it is so much faster and easier with this new building material that we have and things that like, you know This weekend, i was we were migrating from one piece of software to the other and doing that migration with a script that the AI wrote instead of having to sit there and hand code the migration or manually juggle spreadsheets was that kind of efficiency.
Speaker: It feels like a new building material to me. Yeah, no, absolutely. i mean, not not to ah you know take away from you know proper design and architecture and plenty of things like that that need to be accounted for. And and and in in many respects, you know many of those AI tools are also quite helpful in making sure that you are architecting the back end in such a manner that it's scalable and it's performance and redundant and all these things.
Speaker: But I would also say that, you know, compute and storage has gotten to be so cheap that you know there's a lot of liberties that can be taken nowadays with with developers that you know perhaps 20 years ago would result in memory leaks and the number of other things that you know now can be you know drowned out.
Speaker: you know and And so I guess I would say that, yes, you're right, it's ah it's a brand new tool. I think it leads to more of the sort of vibe coding, which I think is is pretty exciting to be able to engage more folks into the world of development and building business value.
Speaker: But I also think that it can also be, at some point, it can also be a bit of a double-edged sword. And if we're not careful, you know we can end up taking too many liberties and and seeing that apps at full load ah might actually start you know having the wheels fall off. So definitely, as with any other tool, we need to make sure that we're deploying it properly and and doing it in such a manner that, you know, would truly bring business value, regardless of the types of performance or the the volumes loads you would see.
Speaker: 100% agree. You can use any but building material to make a building that's going to collapse on you, right? If you don't design it well or if you don't know. you know And again, if I'm building a tree house and it's only got to last the weekend, that's a very different thing than building the Coliseum. And I can bring a different level of engineering to it. So those are good lessons, I think, for everyone.
Speaker: OK, let's go back, though. I'm i'm very curious. So give us the CliffsNotes version of your career journey, and then I want to do a little couple of questions in contrasting.
Speaker: so Yeah. So I graduated from, again, the school was Taylor University, just north of Indianapolis. And I graduated with a, i ended up keeping my math degree and graduated with a ah double major and double minor, math and computer science double major and minor in information systems and a minor in Spanish, which I think sort of helped my GPA a little bit.
Speaker: But started with a company called the you know Business Data Services, and they were a small consulting shop in the Northeast based out of Glastonbury, Connecticut, if you're familiar to some extent with that area in Hartford.
Speaker: And you know worked with them for you know about 11 months. The reason I ended up leaving you know even prior to the year mark is, ah frankly, I was burnt out. You know, we were doing ah averaging about 80 hour weeks and travel and, you know, doing sort of bespoke solutions for ah different projects that we would be assigned to. So ah while it was quite exciting, especially coming out of college to go and travel as much as I did and, of course, you know, make the salary that in fact and during those times was pretty novel for, you know, coming out of college.
Speaker: um You know, the reality is I got burnt out and I took a lot of lessons from that. One of them is, you know, there's more to a job, of course, than the money you're going to get paid and, you know, the amount of travel you're going to do and see.
Speaker: But at the same time, I learned how to How to work through a work-life balance in a manner that's a little bit more comprehensive and being able to understand that, hey, I can absolutely put in the 80 or 90 hour weeks while at the same time, you know, subsequent weeks, I bring it back down to, you know, 40 or 50 year.
Speaker: or maybe get an extra you know day off, et cetera, to be able to attend to personal items and that type of thing. So at that point, once I left ah ah Business Data Services, i I went off for about a month to travel in Latin America, do some backpacking in Central America and South America and Nicaragua and Costa Rica and Panama and went all the way down to do the Inca Trail in Peru.
Speaker: uh you know culminating in machu picchu and that was just an amazing time uh to really kind of settle on what it was that i wanted uh for my life uh and ultimately i you know at that time i was still single i ended up moving back to uh indiana area you know my my future wife was going to school at western michigan university so i wanted to be somewhat close to her and And I started with with a company at that time that was called Summit Group.
Speaker: Summit Group eventually had a group of folks, me included, that became a separate company that focused strictly on WMS technology as opposed to the more consulting or or broader consulting charge that Summit Group had.
Speaker: um And then eventually ah we were acquired by Manhattan Associates at the end of 2000. And so from that point forward, you know, it was part of the Manhattan family and eventually ah made a career out of it, moving from different departments, professional services, R&D, customer success, product management, et cetera.
Speaker: But eventually being able to build a career in a great company like Manhattan. So you started sort of in consulting. And then there was a product company. And then that product company goes into an organization like Manhattan. And and I will say this as someone who was a customer of Manhattan for a few years in the early 2008, 2010 timeframe.
Speaker: Big customer, but still. That's a company that, at least at the time, and you can correct me if this had had changed over the years, but was very services heavy.
Speaker: in the way that they deploy their software. You get the software and then you would have the mods next to the software. And the same thing as the way SAP was before HANA, right? Like this idea of building something. The software is really the core, but it's the consultants and the mod that make it yours.
Speaker: So you had the pure consulting, you had the software, you had this, I call it hybridized thing. And now you've started your own software company. How do you think about like in the space world and where there's a lot of variation and a lot of companies doing a lot of innovative things about the difference between like a pure, you just click and use it software and the software that our customers need and where services all plays into that.
Speaker: I mean, I think you're leading the witness here and I get it. The reality is that supply chain solutions are not one and done. And, you know, you don't just next your way through a wizard to be able to get it activated.
Speaker: You know, most supply chain solutions, you know, of course, I'd include things like WMS, TMS, OMS. even things like fleet management solutions and carrier TMSs, you know, they require a degree of of understanding of the business operations that are going to be supported.
Speaker: And of course, a keen eye on the design of the solution of the deployment is is also critical in order to be able to ensure that success. Right. I mean, we talk about how you know technology is you know such a a great enabler in in many respects to a business success. But it comes down to, of course, people, process and platform and the sort of the the balance that you make between all of those, particularly when you consider that, you know, you go into a ah warehouse. Let's just take as example.
Speaker: I mean, you have replenishment strategies, you have allocation strategies, you have direct-to-consumer versus retail, you got packing strategies. ah You, of course, may have automation, robotics, and all the integration that that would represent. You have the put-away process, and some of that is you know things like unitized inventory. and And so it can be a ah pretty complex within the four walls set of operations.
Speaker: So I would say, generally speaking, yes, supply chain solutions would be you know somewhat services heavy. And I would say that it's no coincidence that those that are innovating the most you know tend to be quite guarded about how they perhaps provide ah you know the keys to the kingdom to, say, some other partners or third parties, et cetera, to go ahead and actually implement.
Speaker: So yeah, it would make sense that you know you'd have a degree of engagement. And even you know when you look at balance sheets or you listen to the earnings call, most of these broader technology firms, you can kind of get a sense for how much is product revenue versus how much is services revenue.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, any solution that, you know of course, is a sophisticated set of configurations and parameters the way you would have with you know supply chain solutions or even if you have with something like an erp for financial purposes would require you know a degree of services engagement so tell everyone what you're doing now and why yeah no that's a great question so spent 25 years with manhattan associates it was like i said it was very much an institution education for me during those years and manhattan poured a lot of investment in talent development with me as well as many of my colleagues as i
Speaker: As I engaged with the hundreds of customers that I would visit and the projects that we would roll out, and you would see these repeated gaps, right? You'd see the consistent challenges and questions that would come from customers.
Speaker: Oftentimes, they would result in perhaps some amount of customizations, but oftentimes there were gaps that even a customization wouldn't be able to address. And many of these were related to the lack of interoperability.
Speaker: between, say, a warehouse that has their own technology and the carrier systems, ecosystems they work with, along with the end customers that they work with. So when you don't have that type of technology alignment, you end up having oftentimes different enterprises fall back on things like paper and emails and spreadsheets.
Speaker: It turns out the spreadsheets are highly interoperable and phone calls are highly interoperable, right? But the reality is they don't really do well for driving the type of extended visibility that we're after at this point.
Speaker: And so while we know that in direct to consumer, anybody can order something online and it's a closed system, so you get the link and it's a UPS or Amazon shipment or DHL, et cetera, and you can get full access to where things are and what you know potential digital documentation that it's tied to and maybe some returns, labels, et cetera.
Speaker: But on freight, It's not really the case. And it's not the case because, of course, most truck drivers and even independent owner operators that are executing much of those pickups don't really have the type of technology that you would expect. So we ultimately wanted to do something about that.
Speaker: And that's really what Aquario is here to do, is to offer up the seamless, interoperability between shippers, carriers, freight brokers, and then customers in order to be able to elevate the type of visibility that is you know really lowering costs, streamlining operations, and digitizing many of these workflows.
Speaker: So that bring that back then to this idea of products and services, right? So I'm very curious, you know given that we're in almost adjacent businesses right between Chain and what you do, you're obviously more specific to certain business processes. But like when you're dealing with a larger entity on one side of a relationship and a smaller one on the other, like how do you think about how much you have to customize for each party and how to meet everyone where they are?
Speaker: to but Actually, like how do you make it work? Yeah. I mean, i think that especially when it comes to the interoperability, I mean, the biggest lesson learned for me was recognizing what is the lowest common denominator, right? In the sense that Certainly shippers and oftentimes carriers, broadly speaking, are going to have their own set of technology, very sophisticated technology. This is why you walk into some of these warehouses with significant automation and robotics and everything else, and yet you go into the shipping office and they're just humming away at the printers while it's cranking out those bills of lading and truck manifests, etc.
Speaker: And the reason they do that again is because the truck driver that's going to potentially show up has no way of being able to just engage with their own warehousing technology. So recognizing that lowest common denominator will be that independent owner operator.
Speaker: The most you can assume that they have is simply a smartphone. ah Then much of what you design out. has to account for you know that lowest common denominator. And the way that we've done it is that instead of doing things like imposing mobile apps, which we know that truck drivers, particularly independent owner operators, are not excited about, we've simply leveraged very ubiquitous elements like text messages and QR code scans in order to be able to engage the truck driver with the shipper and with the receiver, with the client.
Speaker: In these shared workflows, that facilitates things like capture of images, if there needs to be a need to load and capture the actual count, you know if there's remarks that are required to be able to highlight the fact that, hey, this particular product didn't come in as expected. Maybe it had humidity or maybe it was damaged or what have you.
Speaker: Being able to do that in a manner that doesn't impose technology, that is done simply by seamlessly engaging in an interoperable manner, these different participants.
Speaker: I think it's ultimately the biggest lesson that we had and why we decided to approach it with Aquadio. So much of the customizations are less about what happens on the field and more about, hey, you know, the Aquadio client, maybe it's the shipper or maybe it's the freight broker.
Speaker: they would like to be able to maybe leverage a different format of the bill of lading template. Or they would like, for instance, whenever it's a Walmart shipment that's going to such and such a state or DC, I would like to make sure that there's an image capture of this particular set shipments. So being able to infuse in this solution the types of rules and customizations that are really more configurations,
Speaker: so that it behaves based on the customer's own needs and expectations. I think it may be actually difficult If you didn't grow up in our generation of building things to understand the amount of code that was thrown at if statements for if Walmart this, if, you know, if Lowe's this, if Home Depot this in these systems before people started thinking about those things as configurations and plugins. And it was a, that was a big leap forward for our industry was this idea that I'm going to separate the, I'm not going to write that logic into the core of the system anymore.
Speaker: Because I used to really pee the way. Yeah, I think it goes back to the broader extensibility ah question, which is, i of course, as a product owner, I have my ideas as to what it's going to ultimately, the value that customers are going to gain from my solution.
Speaker: But I also have to be open to the reality that Clients are going to want to actually deploy the solution differently for different theaters and different contexts. And they were going to want to actually have it behave in a different manner based on various stimuli that may potentially be defined as configurable.
Speaker: So I think a lot of times founders miss out on extensibility as being one of the key tenets of designing things out because number one, you know, perhaps we think we might know a little bit more than the client does, which is a big trap for many followers.
Speaker: but also because it also takes a certain amount of proactive design to say, okay, going to design out the architecture of this platform in such a way that it's going to have the web hooks and it's going to be infused into all the various workflows and processes.
Speaker: so that I can then go and configure and say, whenever these particular conditions are met, this is how I want the solution to behave. That takes a little bit of foresight, and it also takes a certain amount of upfront investment that founders are reluctant to pursue.
Speaker: so it's been almost three years now? Two and a half? Just turn two years. Two years. tears What surprised you the most over the last couple of years?
Speaker: I've learned a number of lessons. you know One of them is... You know, this is my baby. This is what I've staked my career on. So to me, it's like the most important thing, right? And so I'm so excited about it You see all my LinkedIn posts and I'm on social media providing some insights and lots of people have day jobs, you know? It's not the most important thing for them.
Speaker: So, you know, I'll tell you, it's a bit of a dose of humility, especially after 25 years in the career and all the contacts that I've been able to make. But we absolutely believe in the revolutionary power of our technology.
Speaker: We definitely believe that There is a huge need out there for digital documentation as well as digitized shipping workflows that don't require portals and sign-ons and mobile apps and that type of thing.
Speaker: So much of what I do is finding myself educating people on how to connect the dots that, hey, what's happening here with these printouts is actually leading to you spending a lot more money with the transportation team that's bloated, ready to you know receive all those phone calls from customers.
Speaker: And so it's it's a lot of education. But it's also, you know, being humble enough to recognize that I have to approach my outreach in a very creative manner, because even though it may seem like it's obvious to me, you know, oftentimes it takes just a little bit of helping prospects connect the dots in a creative manner to to kind of get them to fully appreciate the solution. It's a common refrain that it took me about, I would say, almost five years to figure out how to tell the chain story. And I think I'm still working on it.
Speaker: So it's not uncommon that I think those of us who kind of have a vision just assume, not that everyone will just naturally see our vision, but our vision is maybe more obvious than it is sometimes.
Speaker: So that can run right into the buzz of somebody's heard 300 pitches this week and you're number 301. Exactly. what What's got you the most excited for the future?
Speaker: You know, I do think that this is definitely a moment and it's not just a moment in technology. I definitely think this is a bit of a, it's been cliche. I said, I've always rolled my eyes when people talk about the second industrial revolution or the third industrial revolution, but I am pretty encouraged, not just with the capabilities of AI, which I think is pretty novel and impressive. And as we mentioned before, it really takes out the legwork in a lot of things.
Speaker: but just the sheer level of adoption. And a lot of times you have these technologies which are amazing and perhaps just end up in the ash heap of history because they weren't widely adopted.
Speaker: And you know history could have been a little bit differently if you had some of the major players that decided to proceed with that and drive protocols and standards and all of this stuff. And what I'm seeing here is that all the major players are fully not just wanting to toss in their own agents and things like that, but they're building schematics, they're building standards and protocols.
Speaker: They're further supporting those that are driving additional protocols as well. That encourages me simply because the biggest challenge i see, and I know that you see on the global trade side as well, is just fragmentation in supply chains.
Speaker: And so if we're able to leverage some of this cool, particularly agentic AI, technology to be able to further remove some of these gaps and allow for the type of integration in a manner that doesn't require significant development spend, then I do think that you know we're definitely in a different moment in history. and I do certainly can appreciate those that are actually talking about the sort of third industrial revolution.
Speaker: Now, I don't necessarily buy the hype of, oh, it's going to take away all the jobs, and it certainly will take away a lot of jobs. But just like just like the internet, just like mobile apps, just like everything else, right? It just adds additional, you know, sort of incentives for others to take up the torch and driving additional novel solutions, leveraging some of these tools. So I just think it's just going to drive more of an evolution of employment to to be just a little bit differently than it has been so far.
Speaker: Awesome. Well, tell everyone where they can learn more about the company, where they can find you, and then we'll take it out on that. Sure, absolutely. You can learn more about Aquadio at Aquadiosoft.com.
Speaker: You can also stay tuned to my various LinkedIn posts under Juan Cora, as well as Aquadio Software has a page on LinkedIn as well. And then you'll find plenty of resources as well as product highlights and general vision that we have for our solution and our company. so Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This has been a blast chatting and hopefully we'll get to do it again soon.
Speaker: Excellent. Thank you so much, Brian. Appreciate it.
Speaker: Well, thanks again to Juan. And we'll have links down in the show notes for both the company and his personal LinkedIn. Again, just so much fun to hear about all of these companies and these founding stories and how people can really find a journey and find, at the risk of being a little soft here, joy and happiness in building things and creating things in our space, independent of all the noise that we all go through every day. So, so nice to hear somebody with such a positive viewpoint on the journey of building in our industry.
Speaker: As always, check out the blog. We've got a lot of great stuff coming up and LinkedIn, and I will talk to you next time on Supply Chain Connections.
