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Part 1: Building Supply Chain Tech with Ami Daniel
54 Plays11 months ago
In this episode, Ami Daniel, Co-Founder and CEO of Windward, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:
- His journey from Naval Officer to Founder
- Entrepreneurship, purpose, and resilience in turbulent times
- Building company culture and learning from failures
- Taking Windward public and lessons learned
Ami is the co-Founder and CEO of Windward, a maritime data and analytics company bringing visibility to the maritime domain.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. Today, we are going to have a conversation with Ami Daniels, who is the founder and CEO of Windward. Ami is also a former naval officer, and we had so much fun chatting that we're going to split this one into two episodes.
Focus: Running a Public Company
00:00:24
Speaker
So this is part one, but we are going to hear all about
00:00:28
Speaker
what it's like to run a publicly traded company. We're going to talk about his, his journey and the culture of learning that he's trying to create within his company. Really, really, really cool stuff. So I hope you enjoy the episode and come back for episode two.
Ami Daniels' Background and Family Values
00:00:55
Speaker
Welcome to the show.
00:00:57
Speaker
Thank you. It's great to be here. Tell me a little bit about yourself and why you ended up with Windward. My name is Ami. I'm 39. I'm married to a Dean. We have two kids, 10 and 8, God and Tovol. I've learned, by the way, that very little people introduce themselves, first with their children in mind. I actually think that your family is what defines you as a person. That makes sense to you. Not just your professional expertise. How did I get here?
Journey from Volunteering to Building NGOs
00:01:26
Speaker
Well,
00:01:27
Speaker
I wanted to be the best at something. I studied in gifted student class. Somebody thought I was gifted. They were obviously wrong. And I wanted to be the best at something and people were better at me than math or physics. So I ended up volunteering a lot. During the 10th grade, I think I volunteered about 1200 hours.
00:01:43
Speaker
So when I was in high school, I ended up building this Jewish ultra-orthodox community center in my hometown, won multiple awards. Then I joined the Navy and then I built another NGO. This is how I hit up my wife. Hey, do you want to build an NGO together? You know, sounds good. Can I buy you a beer?
00:01:58
Speaker
I served the Navy for a while and my ship got hit by a missile. I just love the ocean and I felt this is something which was then looked pretty niche to me, doesn't look niche to me anymore. I could be the best at and could contribute to the world. I think it's about focus and excellence plus purpose, if that makes sense. I want to dig on something there.
Impact of Entrepreneurship on Family Life
00:02:22
Speaker
As a fellow founder,
00:02:24
Speaker
Being a founder can have a hell of an impact on family life. Good and bad. How does that work in your head? I would think being a founder is your choice. I think it's your family's choice. So the way I look at life, I look at it as a partnership between you and your partner. And I think we try to take all decisions together and we're going on the same path together and on the same journey together. And being a founder is part of it.
00:02:50
Speaker
with its upsides and downsides, and hopefully they're both. I could say the same on everything we do, which is how to raise kids or a bunch of the things we've been doing here in Israel since the war started on October 7th. My wife and I built multiple national projects together, still are. So the long and the short of it is I think it's about partnership and trust. And if you can hold these two things, then I think it makes sense. And if you can't, don't even try. That's very reasonable.
Windward's 12-Year Journey and Mission
00:03:17
Speaker
So you guys have been,
00:03:19
Speaker
Pretty successful as a company. Sometimes it's hard for us as founders. We see all the problems and we see all the warts, but you're doing something, right? We're here, right? Yeah, we're here. What's the journey been to that? What's it felt like? First of all, it feels like a lifetime. The company is 12 years old, soon to be 13.
00:03:37
Speaker
When we started, I knew nothing about building a company, like absolutely nothing. I had no clue about, you know, building a product or AI or engineering. You know, I was a Navy officer. My co-founders also was a Navy officer. You know, I studied law, not exactly your first choice, I guess. My mother was happy there for a while. That's got to count something, you know, for a Jewish mom. I didn't end up being a lawyer. She told me, listen, you need to do something safe. Go be a lawyer.
00:04:02
Speaker
I want to be a lawyer or a doctor. That's it. That's your two choices. Those are the two options. That's the two options. Either lawyer or doctor. Otherwise you're a failure. Failure. We can talk about Jewish moms later. Anyway, so when we built the company, I think on one hand, way ahead of our time. On the other hand, I think it's a question of perspective. I think we're right in time. I think how do you judge a decision with a perspective of time and patience, I think. So we circled around looking for a need. I think our vision was to bring visibility to the oceans.
00:04:31
Speaker
I know in supply chain visibility means one thing, but that's not what we meant. We didn't mean knowing where containers are. We meant knowing what's the impact of what's happening in the oceans of the world. And we tried to reciprocate that or translate that into business applications, products, values to customers. And we landed in the beginning on governments and illegal fishing because we were Navy officers. That's what we knew. You know, it's much easier to do something you're really good at, like Navy stuff. I was young and I didn't understand a lot of things.
00:05:01
Speaker
We failed doing a lot of things, so I'm sure you only succeed in everything you do and everything you touch, because that's you.
Vision for Windward's Future Post-IPO
00:05:08
Speaker
But me, I don't succeed all the time. So we failed in building an oil flow product, which I think companies like Kepler and Vortex are doing a great job in. Well done to them. We had a great business plan, but we couldn't execute on it. Life's tough. Then we went into marine insurance. We still have about 15 marine insurance customers, but it's not a huge market. But that led us to sanctions compliance and
00:05:31
Speaker
working with tankers and oil majors, which is a great product now, which led us also to building stuff for supply chain, which I think now we're consolidating into a vision. And I actually think that once we've IPO'd the company in the UK, we can talk about it, then I think we're building the vision for the next 10 years, which I'm super excited about because I think you have no right to exist if you don't have a vision as a founder. You're just another guy selling stuff. I don't know if that makes sense. It does.
Building a Learning Culture from Failures
00:05:57
Speaker
So I have a question about maybe
00:06:02
Speaker
How do you give the people on your team who are not founders the courage to fail like that? We signed up for it, right? But employee 10 didn't. Yep. So first of all, I got to say I was really bad at it once. Those are always the best lessons are from the people who had to learn it. I can tell you why. The reason I sucked at it, because like I came from the Navy, like seven years in Navy and the Navy,
00:06:29
Speaker
The organizational culture is a captain. Oh, captain, my captain, right? There's a captain that he calls the shots. He's the guy who knows the most. He's been the most at sea. You know, he did all the roles, yada, yada, yada. He sees everything first. So that was the culture I came from, which in hindsight was stupid. And I think I took another stab at it. I think post IPO, I really kind of.
00:06:51
Speaker
I look at every single thing I do, every single interaction, how I speak, how I write, how I interact, how I work with my customers, how I run the company, every single thing. Because for me, it was kind of a gateway to the next level, which hopefully is, I think, panning out well. And we've built a process, which I like to share with everybody, because I think it's a really good tip that I wish somebody told me. So we've built a process.
00:07:11
Speaker
focused on learning. So the number one element in organization psychology to answer your question is called psychological safety. Psychological safety is the ability for somebody to feel comfortable to fail and said, Oh my God, I failed. I suck. And we're doing is top down for management is first of all, I'm making everybody right. What did I learn everywhere and say, what did I learn? And I said, Oh, well I made that mistake.
00:07:39
Speaker
So that's the first thing. The second thing is we've built a process looking at every one of our business lines, which is a hands-on process I run personally, which I think everybody should adopt. I think it's a great process that looks, everybody who's involved in every business line looks at every couple of weeks for an hour and a half, 90 minutes, super intense. Top of the funnel, sales rights, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, product development, product marketing, digital marketing, customer success, business development alliances,
00:08:09
Speaker
Maybe I forgot something. And action items from last week and momentum. That's a 10 action, 10 items. And everybody prewrites everything and talks about only about what they learned, not about what succeeded or what failed. We assume everybody has read everything and you get like two minutes each, every guy to say, Oh, you know, on top of the formula, I learned that I should target these and these people and these and these emails work and so forth and same in product, everything else. And I think that is leading the culture.
00:08:37
Speaker
Intensively over the last year who is learning learning learning learning equals I can make mistakes because if I make mistakes I don't get bad on the head I get oh my god. What did you learn? Thank you for sharing that makes sense. It makes perfect sense I mean we're big subscribers here started with a dev ops team but it kind of expands to on using the blameless postmortem framework which is where when things go wrong.
Blameless Postmortem Framework
00:09:01
Speaker
You basically say, how did the company fail? Not how did an individual fail for the same thing. So you can learn from it. So you create that space. So I'm going to write that down the bullet. Yeah, that's a really cool thing. Maybe we can find some links for the show notes, but it came out of the development environments of saying, okay, if we talk about who failed, people are not willing to share. If we talk about how did the company fail the person, you know,
00:09:27
Speaker
The example I always use is you have a big red button on the wall at the data center and nobody's supposed to press the big red button. And somebody leans on the wall and hits the big red button and the whole data center shut down. This literally happened to me in my career. This is not a beat up story. Okay. And so were you the guys leaning in? But there will be people listening who were in that room in the Navy, they would have killed him. So it happened to me once, you know, in an operation.
00:09:54
Speaker
where one of the officers was learning to be, like, you know, for some training, and he ended up shutting all the electricity down. Right. For all the ship in the middle of the sea. So that was not the blameless port of the framework. It was like, let's kill him, framework. We think it makes a big difference. Right. So the lesson is, if you get that person in the room and you get everybody in the room and you say, why did you screw up? Now you've got a defensive person. If you say, what did we do that put you in the position? Nice.
00:10:21
Speaker
to fail. And in the case of that situation, it was two things. One, should have been a cover on the button. And two, that person's job did not require them to be in that room. And we didn't establish the right procedures to prevent that person who didn't know what they were doing from because it was like a facilities person, but not a data center person. So those were the learnings we took out of having a safe space to talk about it. Nice.
Reasons for Going Public
00:10:45
Speaker
One of the big risks to make an awkward segue here,
00:10:48
Speaker
that you guys have taken is going public. I lived a segue. I lived a segue. Well, there you go. It was going public, though. So kind of like talk me through the why there and how it's changed the company. Yeah. So
00:11:02
Speaker
First of all, I like to say to all the listeners many ways to skin a cat. And I don't think there's one way to build a company. And I think oftentimes when you raise money from VCs, they tell you there's only one way to build a company. I actually disagree with that. I think I'm living proof that there isn't one way to build a company. There's no one way, one type of investors, one type of product, one type of culture. There's many ways to get to the same point. And when we looked at it, I think it was a couple, two and a half years ago,
00:11:30
Speaker
We saw like we had a bunch of proposals from private equity. Everybody was discounting our future. They were like, yeah, growing this. How do we know you succeed? By the way, we didn't get any crazy valuations. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I think actually, I think it's a good thing because I know companies who raised 500 million and are selling less than 10 million and like 50 people. And I was like, what are you going to do now? You need to recapitalize on a cap table.
00:11:51
Speaker
But anyway, so we had a bunch of options for private equities and VCs for term sheets. But a lot of them wanted like 30%, 40%. How do we get close to control? How do we tell you what to do? And I didn't think any of them shared my vision or our vision and didn't get the business. Then this dude just showed up and says, wait, why did you go public? And I said, OK, in the US, we're too small. I said, no, there are other options. So the more I looked at it, I think there are a few very, very good benefits. I think number one, we raise cash in good terms.
Leadership and Accountability in a Public Company
00:12:20
Speaker
Number two, you retain control as a founding team. So you don't get a private equity to own 50% or 49% of the business tell you, what do you have for lunch? What do you have for dinner? Like, why is that so expensive? Can't you turn around and fire somebody and have less expensive dinner, right? So that's number two. Number three, we thought, and I still think it's better for the brand. So customers evidently feel much better to sign five to seven year contracts with us, which I've never seen in my life.
00:12:47
Speaker
They're not like, oh yes, 12 months contract. It's like, okay, how about 60, 60 months? Cool. So I think it's good for the brand, for the customers, because they don't really know that they don't really care about all the rest. They just want to know you're there, you're sustainable. I think it also, there's financial benefits, which you get some liquidity for employees and investors. You get common shares, not preferred shares. I think there's that's also benefit some of the employees, obviously potentially. So I think these are like the straightforward benefits, but I think, you know,
00:13:15
Speaker
I'm sure there's a saying about this. If you put something in the light, it becomes like brighter, clearer, I'm sure there's a saying about this. So you get to more scrutiny as a CEO of a public company. It's annoying in the beginning, but actually, if you have to defend over and over again, everything you do, and you look at parameters like margin, you know, I've never looked at radiate margin before when public, I'm sorry to say I'm to apologize.
00:13:36
Speaker
or every bit of expense, every dollar you spend on everything, everything, tell me everything, right? So you need to be very thoughtful because you're in the limelight. And I think it makes you a better CEO. We also retain the very good board. We have a great chairman, Lord John Brown with CLBP. So he's my mentor. I'm really, really privileged to have him because you get a level of coaching and understanding you don't get otherwise.
00:13:59
Speaker
And I think it's just a matter of how you look at it. I look at going public as step number one. Previously we said number zero. Now you're step number one. There's 99 steps to go, which I think is the right way to think about it. I don't think about it as, Oh my God, I'm done. Bye-bye. Give me a Jack. I'm under the age of video. I don't really want a Jack. I think, I think I want to build and make a difference. Does that make sense? It does. But it's a risk. Yeah. Yeah. So well, how does it affect your willingness to take risks, right?
Challenges of Risk-taking as a Public Company
00:14:24
Speaker
Knowing that again, like we talked a little bit about failure, but like,
00:14:27
Speaker
you know, the potential for failure is much more transparent, right? So a hundred percent. First of all, I think it took me a while to know how to run the public, like part of the public markets, right? I don't run the public markets, obviously, but how to do that, how to communicate, how the forecast work. I think it took me like a year to get through that. I think it adds limitations. It costs, you know, money costs about a million bucks to be a year to be public in the UK. I think you get more limitations on
00:14:55
Speaker
spend, I think, and burn, although I would argue that also private companies get a lot of, you know, burn regarding burn right now. Oh, sure. I run one of them. Yes. Yeah, you know, we've just started burn by 75% this year. Oh, wow. Big deal. So yeah, that was we're pushing hard for profitability. And I obviously expect a very good news. I think it's going in the right direction. But theoretically, if I were private, I would have less, a million dollars of spend, and nobody would have known if I would, you know,
00:15:25
Speaker
lost $2 million more, as long as it makes sense. So I think it reduces your flexibility. It does allow you to make acquisitions more easily if you want to. But there's a number at the end of the day. And everybody look at the number and say, today you're successful. There was a great Jeff Bezos quote, which I loved. So after we went public, the stock went up to like $228. We went public at $150 or $155. And it was $80 this week, right? So Jeff Bezos said,
00:15:53
Speaker
Don't feel you're 30% smarter if your stock goes up 30%. Because when it goes down 30%, you wouldn't want to feel 30% more stupid. So I think if you play, especially as a founder or CEO, if you play the long game and you know you're going to deliver, everything's going to be fine. As long as you think about it as I'm building a business, I'm not building an exit. I'm not building a liquidation event. I'm building a big business that's going to make an impact on the world and be, you know, infinitely successful forever.
00:16:22
Speaker
If I was going to draw a really obscenely large generalization here, then this gets to something we talked about in our prep that there are founders who the fantasy for them or the mission is to found the company and it doesn't matter what the company does because it's the IPO is the goal, right? Or the Jag is the goal. And then there are founders who are
00:16:47
Speaker
Whether the mission is altruistic or the mission is just a problem that they saw in the world or a thing they just think is a great idea, they want to see that thing happen. I think there's a really big distinction in how you run your business. As things get harder and money gets more expensive, those of us, I'll stake this position, but those of us who are doing this because it's either we don't have a choice or because we want to,
00:17:13
Speaker
Versus like we wouldn't care if we were just selling t-shirts if it made us the same return on investment. I think we're the ones that are lasting through these down times. And because it doesn't matter as much to us, it's not as, okay, my valuation's down this year.
Purpose Beyond Financial Gains
00:17:28
Speaker
Who gives a shit? I'm still building my vision, right? Yeah. First of all, I want to say, especially like what's been happening in Israel in the last 52 days, I think I'm tremendously privileged to be having this conversation with you today. And I don't think I take it for granted. There are people who, you know,
00:17:43
Speaker
lost their lives or lost their loved ones, and they will never come back. So I don't really think of myself as a guy who cares about money, I have to say. Saturday, nobody likes to live like, you know, for life, but I don't do anything for money. I would never give up my values for money. No matter how much money you offer me, I will never ever do anything they don't believe in. Never. You can say I'm stupid, by the way, and that's okay. I walked away from multiple opportunities where I could make much more money.
00:18:09
Speaker
And I know people who are much richer than I am, and they took different moral decisions. And I wrote that on LinkedIn a couple of days ago. I think always live a life you'll be proud to tell your kids about. So I think for me, it's absolutely about the purpose and the vision. I think accelerating global trade. I think it's a very unstable time in the world today. I think the world is becoming even more unstable. The world will become more unstable.
00:18:32
Speaker
I think stability and trade and reducing friction is something that makes a big difference. I think understanding the supply chains for illegal fishing and running efficient supply chains allows people to actually get the stuff in time because I remember the fact that there wasn't any toilet paper. If you look at what's happening with Russia and the price gap on oil, which we're obviously deeply involved in because our customers do due diligence with our products,
00:19:00
Speaker
I think that makes a difference. I think if you do something that makes a difference in the world, you're more resilient to what's happening with valuation going up or down because you have a northern star. I know a very budding entrepreneur that calls me once a couple of days and says, I want to be this rich, I'm going to sell this much money. I always tell him, listen, I don't think it's the right approach. Maybe that's an outcome, but that can't be the reason for going for the journey.
Teaser for Next Episode on AI and Capital Markets
00:19:27
Speaker
So we try to keep these things down to bite-sized bits for everybody's commute. We've been having so much fun on this episode, though, that we're going to keep it going with another one. So I hope everybody joins us for episode two. As always, make sure that you're checking out our blog. And I think there's some links that we'll get into these show notes based on the first half of this conversation. And you want to come back on the second half where we'll be talking a lot about generative AI and
00:19:53
Speaker
some realistic views on where that fits as well as the capital markets and just some really, really interesting stuff. So, so excited for you to join us on episode two.