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Navigating innovation, integration, and investment in logistics with Erez Agamoni
48 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, Erez Agmoni Co-Founder and General Partner at Interwoven Ventures, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:
- Why innovation inside large logistics organizations requires more than just tech
- The integration pitfalls startups face when selling into enterprise supply chains
- How politics, change management, and culture impact transformation
- What startups and VCs often get wrong—and how to fix it
- The rise of digital twins and why small wins beat moonshots
- Why tariff disruptions actually drive demand for supply chain technology
- What makes supply chain a career worth sticking with for decades
Erez shares insights from both sides of the table—as a global logistics operator and now as an investor guiding the next generation of supply chain startups. He brings over 20 years of global experience across airlines, logistics, 3PL, and IT. He has held leadership roles including Chief Commercial Officer, Managing Director, and Head of Regional Airfreight and Supply Chain Development in both Asia and the Americas.
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Transcript
Introduction to Supply Chain Connections
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On this episode, we are going to be speaking with Erez Agmoni.
Erez Agmoni's Career Journey
00:00:11
Speaker
Erez is currently a venture capitalist at Interwoven Ventures.
00:00:16
Speaker
He's recently joined there after a long and distinguished career with Maersk in innovation and operations. And we're going spend some time really talking about practical tips for companies startups and large organizations and how those two very different worlds can come together to create innovation, to create success.
Personal Stories and Industry Insights
00:00:36
Speaker
As always, we're going to focus on personal side of stories and how the interplay of politics and technology come together inside large organizations to actually get things done.
00:00:47
Speaker
So I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:51
Speaker
Erez, welcome to the show. Thank you for having
Erez's Entry into Supply Chain
00:00:54
Speaker
me, Brian. I'm excited to be here. Well, let's dive right in. always like to start with how did you get into the industry? And more importantly, why did you stay?
00:01:05
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's a loaded question. But all right, that takes me way back when I started probably 30 years ago. First job in the industry was actually at the airline. I worked for the passenger side. They hired me to help over there.
00:01:23
Speaker
And after a year, I was about to quit. I said, ah, that's not for me, really. But the bottom line was that I was ready to quit. And they said, no, but we're about to promote you.
00:01:34
Speaker
I said, I'm willing to take the promotion, but I want to move to the cargo. I said, I'll try something else, you know. And basically, they gave me the post in the cargo side, which was, I liked it. It was definitely something new, something unique.
00:01:50
Speaker
I remember they sent me to do training in New York. They sent me from Thailand to New York to do my training. And at that time, I was my bachelor degree studying computer
Post-COVID Recognition of Supply Chain
00:02:02
Speaker
engineering. And somebody here during the training told me, if you'll be good, you might be developing a career in this industry. And I thought to myself, i don't want to develop a career in this industry. I want to be a computer engineer.
00:02:14
Speaker
It's not that this is better than others, but I'm doing something totally different. end up 30 years later, I'm still in the industry. The real reason I'm still here is it's fascinating industry. I had a computer career as well. I had a an IT company in which I sold and I'm doing stuff with technology all my life, but I found it fascinating industry. There is a lot of different problems to solve. I love problems. I love to see how things are being
00:02:47
Speaker
evolve from the old-fashioned way to something new. It's of course an industry that without it, nothing will be existing and nobody will have their goods. So of course, nobody knows what it is. Before COVID, you say you're working in supply chain. They're what?
00:03:04
Speaker
So what are you doing? I said, I'm working for Maersk. At that time was working for Maersk. Oh, so you are captain on the ship? I said, no. So you are a driver on a truck? I said, no. like So what is supply chain other than these two roles? You know, people didn't even have a clue what could it be. But after COVID, of course, suddenly the spotlight came and people understand what is this
Transition to Innovation at Maersk
00:03:26
Speaker
supply chain. So but this has kind of kept me enjoying the roles, the different roles that I have about it all my life. It's funny, you and I have a similar journey in that I ended up in the industry because I got a job fixing computers and it was in the neighborhood I wanted to live in.
00:03:44
Speaker
And I said, I'm going to do this for three months until I find something more interesting. 30 years later, yet to find something more interesting. Exactly.
00:03:55
Speaker
But if I find something more interesting tomorrow, I'm out. Yeah, absolutely. So you made a transition, you know, about five, six years ago from being in that operational side of cargo and helping to get things moved to innovation.
00:04:10
Speaker
And not a lot of us have the opportunity to see inside of a very large organization what the word innovation means and how that works there. But can you um shed a little light on why you made that transition and what that role, what that meant?
Challenges in Innovation Presentation
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's all started when I got the role of heading North America warehousing and distribution role at Maersk. I've been asked by the CEO at that time, hey, there is a role here. We need somebody that's willing to change things. And will you be able to take it? And I'm like,
00:04:48
Speaker
At that time, i was heading a supply chain design and development, which is kind of looking at supply chain of our customers and try to improve that. And I said, you know what?
00:04:59
Speaker
That sounds like an interesting role, warehousing, distribution. It's definitely something that I feel fun. And in my first week, I asked the different teams. So I had multiple teams doing different things. And the first thing that I met with was the commercial team. And I'm like, can you show me what are we presenting
Budgeting for Innovation in Large Organizations
00:05:16
Speaker
to our customers? Like PowerPoints, presentations, like because we wanted to grow ourselves. I wanted to see what we're presenting. it And I was a little bit puzzled to see the first...
00:05:28
Speaker
Page of that presentation was a person holding card and pushing it by hand, card full of boxes. And down the road of the presentation, maybe two slides after that, there was a person holding a folder with a pencil, not even a pen, with a pencil, trying pretending that they're writing something when the background there is a forklift driving, kind of.
00:05:51
Speaker
And I was like, wow, this cannot be what we're really proud of to show to our customers. It was close to 2020. It was not 2020 yet. It was like three years to 2020. So it's like advanced time. you know There are technology out there already.
00:06:09
Speaker
Why would it be what we are so proud of? And I asked back, like, are you sure that this is what we want to present? They say, of course, nobody else can do that. It's so labor intense and difficult to do. So nobody else really can do it. And I'm like, yeah, but that's not sustainable.
00:06:27
Speaker
Those people might not want to do this job. It's not really a fun job to do. What else can we show the customers better than that? And really very fast, I understood that this is an industry wide problem.
00:06:41
Speaker
It's not just at Maersk. It's really a everywhere. People used to do certain things in certain ways and very difficult for them to change.
00:06:52
Speaker
So we started with small automat automation during that time, kind of project of 20 something million here and there. I call it small because it was one location only. but Small on the scale of Maersk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not small money-wise, of course, but we did really, we did an amazing job there. I have to say the team did a great job there.
00:07:12
Speaker
Something that was supposed to be a return investment of about six years, because we were modest in our assumptions and definitely the market condition was improving towards when we actually used it, we returned our investment less than two years, basically.
00:07:29
Speaker
It was an amazing. That's where I started to push small other projects into that. And I then suggested the company, hey, if we see that all those things are working, why don't you allow me to build an innovation team that this is really doing it at their focus, not an abide away kind
Technology Integration Challenges
00:07:49
Speaker
of. Let's do it as this is the mission of this team that they go and look at all the different things that happen in supply chain and try to improve that. So they gave me the mandate, started as North America, and then it became a global mandate. So it was basically heading globally the innovation of Maersk at that time.
00:08:10
Speaker
So I want to dig into something there that I think is... You were kind of talking around it, but let's go right at it. the Getting a budget approved for an innovation is not... When I was younger, I thought that the way you did that was you collected a number a bunch of facts, you put those facts in a list, you handed that list to somebody, and because of the way that logic and math works, you got it approved.
00:08:38
Speaker
What's your advice four companies that want to work with large organizations about how, what do you actually have to do to get something through a large organization and get, ah you know, a startup approved to work inside of a big company?
00:08:54
Speaker
yeah that's That's fantastic question because a lot of people don't get the politics and dynamic of large organizations. And putting the numbers and showing it's all great, good luck with that. You'll never be able to be. That's never going to be. It's a very small element, important element, but you still need to do so many other things. and One thing that I see multiple times with...
00:09:21
Speaker
startups or companies that trying to sell technology corporations. And I got it again and again. It's like they misunderstand.
00:09:32
Speaker
They pretend to and they misunderstand the complication of integration. And I think this is a point that everybody that trying to work with large organizations needs to always remember. You cannot come to a large organization tell them, don't worry, I will integrate with you in a week.
00:09:49
Speaker
It never is going to happen, never going to happen. People will laugh at you and won't trust that you know what you're doing. So first of all, you need to understand, even if you can integrate with a week, the large company cannot.
00:10:02
Speaker
That's normally where the problem, they don't have the resource, the time and the interest to get those integration. Those, there multiple teams that you need to bring on board. You know, it's the team that is your sponsor and you need to always find the sponsor because if you don't,
00:10:19
Speaker
Forget about it altogether. So you need to find either an operator or a sponsor or innovation team sponsor, one of those things. Now, after you got the sponsor, you need to bring the other teams on board as well. The operator, if your innovation is your sponsor, now go get...
00:10:36
Speaker
the winning of the operator, because you want operators to put thumbs up and say, yes, we feel that this is going to be working. Let's do a proof of concept. You want to start there. And you want the IT to not put sticks in the wheel and tell you, no, no, no, no no this is...
00:10:52
Speaker
We don't have budget or time to do those things. So normally your sponsors and your other stakeholders within the organization, of course, supposed to help you, but you don't want to be 100% dependent on them. You want to develop some of those connections by yourself so you get more stakeholders that are convinced that they want to do that, they want to work with you on that. So that I think the politics and the dynamic of that is the number one important, and only then it's What are you selling and how much ROI do you have and all those type of things.
00:11:26
Speaker
yeah So obviously we spend a lot of time in chain thinking about innovation or in innovation and integration because they're both what we do. One of the things that I've noticed when it comes to integration is not just the computer integration, it's also the business process change and the
Building Products with Client Insights
00:11:45
Speaker
stakeholder management. We had a project that failed very early in the life cycle of this company where we were helping a software company who was going to be foundationally changing the way that an entire global sales organization was quoting freight.
00:12:02
Speaker
And What they saw it as was, here's a database and we're going to have a database and the price is going be in the database and therefore everything's fine and there's a website and a screen and we don't even need an integration.
00:12:15
Speaker
And then they went to country two. ah So country one was in Southeast Asia, country two was in Southern Europe. And they realized that the culture might be a little bit different in Southern Europe than it is in Southeast Asia.
00:12:28
Speaker
And they're just walking and into an office in Madrid or an office in Milan and saying, you're going to do it this way tomorrow doesn't exactly work. And I think that's a big thing that a lot of tech companies miss. is If you're doing something important, you're probably changing it the way an organization and people work.
00:12:45
Speaker
And that needs to be in that planet is ah right next to the computer integration. Absolutely. This is a crucial point. And I think you definitely should not trust the organization to do it for you.
00:12:59
Speaker
Normally, the organization doesn't have the capacity nor the people to help you with change management. Sometimes you will you might get something like this in certain organizations. That's excellent. If they have that, jump on that capabilities and ask them to help.
00:13:14
Speaker
Otherwise, you have to plan for resource cost. travel probably, education, all those type of things to help them with the change management.
00:13:26
Speaker
I can give you an excellent example about many times we ran proof of concept. So we had three categories of proof of concepts in the Innovation Center. One was automation autonomous. The second was digital, where we have AI, computer vision, digital twin.
00:13:42
Speaker
And the third was product innovation, where we tried to solve problems of our customers. So many of our proof of concept with automation, we just ran proof of concept and then we tried to deploy that. So nobody involved besides us and and the company that designed the robot. but We saw that a lot of the time, you know, the first location is great, the second location is maybe okay. Suddenly you have another location where know why we need it. And then you need to start to rethink, what did I do wrong here and didn't do before? Why is it working here? Why is it not working there?
00:14:17
Speaker
So one of the use cases that we wanted to develop was a digital twin. And I knew that if we do it internally, it will take us seven years and nothing will come up. So we said, forget about it. We're not going to do it internally.
00:14:31
Speaker
But also if we do it externally, if we bring a startups that trying to help us or a company, an IT company that will start to help us with digital twin, they'll be great with the technology, but it will be...
00:14:45
Speaker
We did it on the tracking operation. So we wanted to divide it into three phases. Phase number one, create the visibility instead of going to 15 systems to get where the trucks, where the chassis, where the container, where is the driver and what's the appointments.
00:15:01
Speaker
Now bring it into on the map with aging and understand exactly. Phase two is optimization of all these. And phase three is really the what if scenario simulation, the real digital twin.
00:15:12
Speaker
To do something like this is a huge change management on the team. And we knew that we don't have the resources. Startups normally don't have that capabilities.
00:15:23
Speaker
We decided to go with a consultancy company that have the knowledge that created it for themselves because they also have other type of business beyond consultancy.
00:15:33
Speaker
And they have the IT capability to build stuff like this. So they helped us really in a perfect way to manage the change management organization of that. So to really meet with the people on a weekly basis and explain them and show them and really hold hands to be sure that they are actually moving the right way. So sometimes it's worth to do something like this, to bring some help if you don't have it internally, in order to make sure that really the team is understanding and buying in into the
Guidance for Startups
00:16:07
Speaker
solution. Because
00:16:08
Speaker
If you bring the be us the best solution and nobody using it, you failed. right so You need that kind of combination of good solution and good understanding by the people. So you've made a transition now into the the venture side of the world, and the investing side.
00:16:28
Speaker
Yes. And I know you and I had a little bit of a conversation in the prep about you know, what's unique about coming at it with your background versus just sort of a generic financial investment model. But um going back to what we were just talking about for a second, one of the things that a lot of startups will hear from their investors is, no, no, no, don't do all that services. You want to be a pure play software company. The financials are cleaner. The you know first question I always got asked when we were raising our money was, you know what's all of this services revenue?
00:17:04
Speaker
right And I had to explain back that there was we I used to call it good services and bad services. And good service good services was services that was supporting us onboarding our software. And bad services was if I was going to go you know do a speaking engagement, get paid for it, that's not enhancing the product. right But that subtlety gets lost. And what's some of the other things that you're excited about being able to guide people that you think generic investors might miss?
00:17:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for that. I think one thing that I saw heading the innovation is talking to startups, a a lot of the time, they are amazing knowledge about the technology, but not about the business that they're trying to solve for.
00:17:52
Speaker
So our business was supply chain, you know, sometimes it's this portion of it, sometimes in that portion. So people always come up with nice stories, the startups especially. Oh, my father had this company and he tried to bring goods and it failed, so I decided to do something about it.
00:18:11
Speaker
Or another one is, oh, I had a company and I saw that the service is so lame and I'm Great. This is great stories, but that doesn't give you the understanding of the field, the depth of knowledge that you need. So you have to get somebody that really explain you what is the problem.
00:18:31
Speaker
Some startups choose design partners, but maybe those design partners are normally friends and not in the right size of problem to help them.
00:18:42
Speaker
So I saw often that people are not that far from solving the problem, but they're a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right. And when I reached out to them or to their VC that connected me to them and i say, hey, let me guide them to this problem or ask them, can I help you to go and solve this problem? and I'll be your customer.
00:19:04
Speaker
And trust me, if Maersk is becoming your customer, I'm sure that many others will become your customer as well because we have similar problems and ah as others.
Transition to Venture Capital
00:19:12
Speaker
It's not that everybody just follow, but it's they have the same problem.
00:19:17
Speaker
And I got resistance again and again Of course, there were a few people that were open-minded and they got nice business after that. But some of those resistance came be because of the venture capitals behind them. They no, we're already going in certain direction. we have to focus, focus, focus. That's kind of a repeated element.
00:19:37
Speaker
Do not spread out. I said, this is not spreading out. This is... really focusing on the right problem, not on what you think is the problem that does not exist. And when you see that the VCs are afraid that they need to invest more, that's where you started to raise a question to yourself, who they are serving, basically.
00:19:57
Speaker
Are they really helping the startups? Are they really helping them to grow? Are they really helping their investors that want better returns on those investments? or they're just stubborn because they don't understand as well and they think this is the problem and they already invested certain money, so they don't want to shift. So that's what I saw kind of that I was not happy in the industry.
00:20:19
Speaker
And I worked with many venture capitals before as part of the ecosystem that we built and the guys that I basically joined as their partner, They were very open to that type of approach. So Interwoven is the company I'm part of right now.
00:20:35
Speaker
And there were they come from the industry of investment on their life, but they were very consultancy investors. So they're still very supportive, kind of looking into how to... ah be on the board even as a kind of observer if you and's it's not a board seat, just to be able to help the startups to go to where they want.
00:20:57
Speaker
Now, when I join, I see also some of those startups coming and, hey, it's so great that we have your knowledge, come and help us. So this is really, I think, an element that is missing in the startups world, in in the venture capital world, is that combination between people that investing all their life and people that run operations and large corporations coming together and guide them even better to hit the goals at the end of the day.
Developing Robust Products with Diverse Clients
00:21:22
Speaker
So when I started my first company, I knew that Ralph Lauren needed a very special piece of customs tariff classification software. And actually, this software still exists inside of Maersk today after a whole bunch of acquisitions.
00:21:35
Speaker
Oh, wow. It's used by Maersk customs, but they needed this very particular... Doing customs for apparel and clothing is really hard and has a whole bunch of different dynamics that I kind of knew from working inside a customs broker, but...
00:21:50
Speaker
When I started that company, essentially the way I did it was i just called the head of trade compliance, from Ralph Lauren, who was my customer for many years and we had a good relationship. i said, tell me what you need and I'll build it Right. As long as you're willing to buy it. Right. And she said on the phone, she'd be in my office in three weeks with the prototype.
00:22:09
Speaker
And then we built the prototype and the rest was history. But one of the things I learned though, was the product really took off when we got Ann Taylor added to the mix, who was our second kind of big apparel customer, because it was when we had two, like the first one was so important to get a prototype built.
00:22:29
Speaker
The second one was so important to make sure that we didn't build a thing that was so specific to one giant, you know, one of the giants of fashion, but you could be so precise, right? Like they had very particular things because they did so many different and product lines and had done so many acquisitions that we had like very unique things.
00:22:52
Speaker
And then as soon as we brought in Taylor in, who was a very different style retailer, you know, it was kind of just one product line and it kind of a straight thing. We were able to then use two pieces of input to take the prototype and turn it into a genuine product.
00:23:06
Speaker
And I think that is an an area that A lot of startups I've seen you need that kind of take a little advice from everybody, but have that one big one to drive you forward.
Balancing Insider and Outsider Perspectives
00:23:18
Speaker
Because Ann Taylor would have never signed up if we didn't have Ralph Lauren. But if we had only had Ralph Lauren in four tiny companies, we'd have built a thing that was so specific to this large organization that we wouldn't have seen the pattern.
00:23:29
Speaker
um so So that was a very interesting cycle to go through. Yeah, it's it's a must to have multiple opinions and understandings because everybody has their own slight different problems that they need. And sometimes it could be a big difference.
00:23:44
Speaker
But as you said, you need somebody to really take you on board and guide you. And you don't get it that often. Your relationship with Ralph Lauren was probably unique that they were willing to do that because otherwise, you know, that's normally the struggle of those young companies to get it.
00:24:00
Speaker
It's funny. It was a very unique relationship, but this gets to this whole thing of industry insiders versus outsiders. And as an investor, where do you place your bets, right? On somebody who has been inside of it or somebody who's outside? And the advantage that I had was I spent you know more than 10 years working inside of a customs broker and a freight forwarder and had run infrastructure and distribution and global IT for the international trade side. So I had built this personal relationship and that
00:24:33
Speaker
was the value driver. This person trusted me because over a 10-year period, she knew me when I was a programmer, right? And I had come up through the ranks and she knew that whatever I said I was going to do got delivered.
00:24:46
Speaker
Even if the team wasn't going to get it done, i was not going to walk in her office as the person who owned the account without the thing delivered for 10 years. Then you get permission to do something like that.
00:24:58
Speaker
And I think that a lot of We'll say impatient people will come into an industry and expect people to give them that level of trust instead of that. That took a lot of effort to earn that. I took a lot of beatings along the way.
00:25:12
Speaker
I'm sure with it did. But listen, and i really like the way you phrase it, the insider outsider. And I would say here that combination, you can't be just insider. You can't be just outsider.
00:25:24
Speaker
You need to have that combination either in one person that understand how to look at this from inside and take himself or herself out and look at it from the
Diversity in Innovation Teams
00:25:35
Speaker
outside. Or somebody that it can be two people that bring and complete each other.
00:25:42
Speaker
And I think the importance here is that sometimes if you're too much inside the organization, you just, you blind yourself to the way that it's been done in certain way and you say, oh, there's no other way to do it, right? So you need a little bit of outside sometimes to visualize, no, it can be done different.
00:25:59
Speaker
The way I always did it, I was always from inside the organization, but I've always looked at other organization and other verticals and say, how they do things? Can I copy paste it to this world? Because you can use so many other great examples from other worlds and just say, okay, if I have that technology in this logistics world, what would happen?
00:26:22
Speaker
What does the imagination take you with that? You can think about those. So it's great to have the inside knowledge, but you can't just look inside all the time. You have to look outside and see what else is there.
00:26:33
Speaker
to bring it inside your organization. But without that insider knowledge, you probably won't make it because you will never know what's the real problem ah and you won't have the connection, as you mentioned. So it's a great point. One of the mistakes that I made when we started Chain, I was biased towards that insider to a degree that everyone we brought in was an insider.
00:26:56
Speaker
No. It was the point where we started hiring some people on the leadership team who had enough familiarity with the adjacent industries So like we brought in somebody who worked in mobile, but they had worked in mobile for ELDs and trucking. So they were not necessarily in what we're doing, but they also weren't completely foreign.
00:27:17
Speaker
And now our leadership team is about half and a half of like people who grew up inside operations and people who did not. And that interplay is much healthier than being all one way or all the other.
00:27:29
Speaker
So I think diversity is super important when you want to create new thing.
Excitement for Technological Advancements
00:27:34
Speaker
You want to have different and diversity in all means. You know, my team, the innovation team at Maersk was close to 20 people.
00:27:42
Speaker
We had 51 or 52% female versus 49, 48 male. We had from that 20 people, 12 different nationalities. So it's like early you had...
00:27:55
Speaker
Similar more than two people. and We had people that come in from project management, and from technology, from operation, from administration, from really all over the place. And everybody comes with, from inside and outside, knowledge that really kind of helps the others to understand things that otherwise...
00:28:16
Speaker
you you might not get it. So I think what you said is building a team that is has outsider, insider, different knowledge, that kind of knowledge is super important. So we're coming up on time here. There's a lot going on in the world, lots of things going on in the trade world and the supply chain world and the AI world and all of these things.
00:28:36
Speaker
Tell me something you're enthusiastic about, something you're excited about that you've seen recently or a trend. Listen, there is a lot of robotics, a lot of AI solution out there today that are really can change the game. i think it is very difficult many times to deploy those things just because of what we spoke about before. you know There's so many projects and companies and corporations that it's not really moving fast.
00:29:03
Speaker
But those that managed to do that, and I think one element that I'm really excited about is the digital twin of things. it's really starting to become from an idea more into a tool. And I will again suggest to people if you really want to go there, don't try to build the whole thing at once.
00:29:23
Speaker
Divide into small elements that each of them bring you some interest and some returns. So you don't just go and go wild and, hey, it'll take now three years to build and hopefully it will work.
00:29:36
Speaker
no build small things, return that investment, make sure that people are understanding how to use it and move on. and Those elements definitely i see and I get very excited.
00:29:47
Speaker
Stuff that I'm not excited about, I know that you didn't ask, but I want to share about this. But I'm not also worried so much from that perspective is the tariff war today. I know that this could be a political discussion and I'm not going that direction. i think that A lot of people believe or feel that that tariff war will create a huge problem for the supply chain and the supporters or technology supporters.
00:30:14
Speaker
I think the opposite. It might be creating a hardship on us as consumers at the end of the day, because if the price goes up, we're all going to pay more. But if you look backwards, anytime there was some kind of a disaster or some kind of disruption for supply chain,
00:30:32
Speaker
The beneficiary of that was supply chain companies and whoever bring technology to those companies. So if you are building technology for supply chain, definitely keep going.
Opportunities in Supply Chain Complexity
00:30:45
Speaker
They will need you. And they'll need you more than ever because every time there is a problem, somebody needs solutions and the faster solution out there, making the best year. So look back at COVID time.
00:30:57
Speaker
Everybody thought it's going to be a nightmare for everybody. It was the best year ever for everyone in the industry. Look about two years ago, last year actually. oh no, the Suez Canal is closed, this Houthis, Israel, all this craziness in the Middle East will be a disaster.
00:31:15
Speaker
It's end up as one of the best years for supply chain in general, you know, because every time there is some disaster, they cash on it. They know how to build solution and get something out of that. So technologies company that support those guys keep going and you will be in a fantastic position.
00:31:32
Speaker
If everything was easy, nobody would need us. Exactly. as know and When I worked inside the customs brokers and we were never proud that this was a statement we would make, but every time there was a new trade agreement, every time there was a new regulation, we go, oh, great, we're going to make more money this year.
00:31:49
Speaker
Right. So complexity creates opportunity. And it's certainly not the thing that any freight forward or customs broker puts on their website, but it is 100 percent a good way to be. not those opportunities, things will not move. So what is that? you know if If everything was easy, we would all ship everything parcel and that would be the end of the day.
Conclusion and Future Episodes
00:32:09
Speaker
so ah now All right. Well, again, thank you so much for being on. It was is great chatting with you. We'll put a link to Interwoven down in the show notes and your LinkedIn as well so that everybody knows how to get in touch. And again, thanks for being here.
00:32:22
Speaker
Thank you very much, Brian. I enjoy being on the show.
00:32:30
Speaker
Thanks so much, Teres, for just all of that insight. Again, it's very rare that we have the opportunity to really get the view from inside of large organizations with someone who also understands what happens with the smaller organizations that work with them.
00:32:46
Speaker
We'll have links in the show notes, as I mentioned. And if you were intrigued by some of that end of the episode commentary around tariffs and complexity, make sure that you don't miss the next episode where we're going to have a very frank conversation about change management through the adversity of all of these things that are going on in the world with customs and the like. With Scott Case, who was actually our first guest on the show, he's coming back many, many years later. so Make sure to keep an eye on ChainIO LinkedIn so that you see when that's coming out, as well as obviously by subscribing to the podcast.
00:33:23
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder CEO of ChainIO.