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Building Tech For Supply Chains With Jenna Brown
134 Plays4 years ago
Our guest this episode is JENNA BROWN, CEO & Co-founder of Shipamax. Shipamax is a full service solution that takes care of data entry automation, so you can focus on your core business. Shipment volumes have exploded over the last decade - and it's set to continue, with the 2020 pandemic accelerating consumer trends and placing them on an irreversible path. However, the fundamental processes and documentation that sits behind the delivery of goods from A to B remains the same. These were never designed with today's scale of shipments in mind.
The Shipamax platform is purpose built to overcome the challenges logistics organizations face. Specialized data extraction, logistics-specific business rules, purpose built user interfaces and deep integrations enable you to accelerate automation delivery with a system that works from day one.
TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
- How / Why Jenna decided start a tech company that would benefit the logistics space
- Jenna’s career path and business have both undergone many evolutions and changes, so we discuss what Jenna wishes she had known before those evolutions began to unfold
- What Jenna and Brian both think about working in the office vs. remotely
- What the next set of challenges are that we as a group of technologists in Supply Chain need to work on together
- Where Shipamax is headed
“Getting back to that North Star concept, here’s what we need to get done— How can we ASSEMBLE this solution (as opposed to ‘How can we build this solution’)— …Using a different word at the beginning of the process can change the whole mindset [around how the next steps play out] …”
EPISODE LINKS:
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Take care, and until next time,
Brian Glick
Recommended
Transcript
Sustainability in Global Deliveries
00:00:02
Speaker
I think the biggest thing and I don't even know where to start on this challenge is global warming. So I think we just hit like a billion packages worldwide. I think it's set to double in the next four years. I don't know how we're going to do that sustainably.
Introduction to 'Profiles by Chain.io'
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to Profiles by Chain.io. I'm Brian Glick, Chain.io's founder and CEO.
00:00:28
Speaker
Over the coming weeks and years, we'll feature the partners and customers who make up the Chanayon network. We'll focus on learning about the individuals within these companies and how they've helped build the organizations that drive our network. Together, we'll learn what drew them to the industry, why they made it such a big part of their lives, and where they see us all going in the future.
Meet Jenna Brown: Logistics Innovator
00:00:52
Speaker
Today, we have with us Jenna Brown.
00:00:54
Speaker
Jenna is the CEO and co-founder of Shipamax. Shipamax is a really cool company that's on the Chainio network that is helping freight forwarders and carriers automate the data collection from those customers that are still sending you documents and PDFs. So they are ensuring compliance and workflows that are far beyond what many of us have experienced over the years with normal scanning and OCR.
00:01:22
Speaker
and have really, really stepped up from that to a more comprehensive solution. Jenna comes from the trading and commodity world, which we're going to learn about a little bit in the episode, and it was certainly new to me. So we hope you enjoy the episode, and here we go.
From Trading to Logistics: Jenna's Journey
00:01:40
Speaker
Hi, Jenna. Thanks so much for being here today. Thank you. So why don't we start with tell me a little bit about how you got into
00:01:50
Speaker
technology and supply chain technology specifically? I guess supply chain, I get this question a lot because it's not obvious. About 10 years or so ago, I used to work in a physical commodity trading house. Obviously, when you're trading physical commodities, you need to actually move them from A to B. I think that was my first foray into the logistics world. That's an interesting topic that I think a lot of us don't know about.
00:02:20
Speaker
When you're trading these commodities, you actually become responsible for the delivery of them and the logistics behind all of that? Yes, exactly. Take me back. Obviously, you've got commodities trading at least. You have your physical markets and then your paper markets. In the physical markets, you are essentially
00:02:43
Speaker
Yeah, just moving things around the world. Like, you know, getting coal from, you know, X mine to to the power plant or whatever it is. And you can do that for a real need or you can do it. You can go long on shipments, you can go short on shipments. And yes, if you don't do the right thing, you might get a pile of coal getting delivered when you do not want it to be delivered.
00:03:11
Speaker
imagine that's a bad thing. Okay, so how did you go from that to running a tech company?
The Complexity and Impact of Logistics
00:03:17
Speaker
Yeah, so I didn't stay in that industry for a super long time. I realized I was spending a lot of time at the weekends, really getting kind of obsessed with what was going on in the startup world. And I basically just applied for a job at this kind of very small company at the time, and then ended up going completely different direction into the startup world instead.
00:03:41
Speaker
What was it about this industry, I guess the supply chain side of it, that you were like, okay, I want to build a life around solving problems here? I think I wanted to start a company for a very long time. I never really found exactly what I wanted to do. I think what struck me about logistics is
00:04:03
Speaker
I think I just really enjoy the complexity. I think it is the largest, furthest-reaching optimization problem you can work on. There are all these moving parts across the globe and it really has an impact on every single
00:04:21
Speaker
living person. And I guess it's like, what's not to kind of love about that? It's just super incredible. It's I'm laughing because I agree with you. But I had my first boss in the industry said to me, we were I was in charge of just setting up the it wasn't even PCs, it was dumb terminals. And he said, you know, don't put too much effort into any of these setups, because we were a customs broker and
00:04:47
Speaker
after lunch for the employee's first day, if they come back, we're going to have them for their whole lives. But a lot of them don't come back from lunch once they see the problem. They go, oh my God, this is terrifying. So those of us who love it get it, but I don't think we could explain it to somebody who doesn't. So who are some of your big influences along your journey to get to this point?
00:05:11
Speaker
I have had a lot of really, really good mentors, but I think actually, honestly, with respect to my career, I've pretty much gone against several surprise. I think sometimes it's more important to figure out what you're obsessed with and then go for that. Hence, when I realize I'm spending all this time at the weekend just looking at this thing that was in financial markets,
00:05:39
Speaker
And I can't remember exactly when I joined startups, like 2012 or something like that. But like back then, certainly in the UK, that wasn't the accepted thing to do. That wasn't cool. It was very much like, what, what are you doing?
Shipamax's Evolution and Business Model
00:05:55
Speaker
So yeah, I think, yeah, I'm not sure there was there was one kind of guiding light there. So narrowing down even further, kind of
00:06:04
Speaker
What was interesting to you about this whole idea? Well, I actually explained what Shipmax does because we should probably give everyone else the context and then why. Yeah. The easiest way of explaining it is we make it easy or simple for any kind of a logistics company to automate their back office processes, usually starting with data entry. Now, why did I start that? Actually, when we started, it wasn't that.
00:06:34
Speaker
We had definitely a few pivots along the way. When we started out, the company was originated because we had seen, so my kind of co-founder and I, we had seen the process for booking bulk ships for moving bulk commodities was just woeful. And we wanted to almost create an online brokerage to solve that, like kind of, you know, the flex board of the bulk world, if you like.
00:07:03
Speaker
and we kind of went into that and realised it was a really horrible idea. That was pretty painful. Fortunately, in doing so, we had created a piece of technology because in the bulk shipping market, it's different from what I call the normal logistics market where I think
00:07:27
Speaker
Normal logistics is like booking a seat on a bus. There are all these kind of routes and you can kind of, you know, book slots. I know that's a bit of a sweeping statement, but broadly speaking, that's the way it works. In bulk logistics, you're booking an entire ship.
00:07:43
Speaker
you know, it's much more akin to this trading environment. And what happens every day is they email each other like this massive, like, oh, I need this ship, this ship's available, and you get like 3000 emails a day of just like supply and demand. So we put the tool to kind of extract all data from that and structure it and extract the meaning so you could actually use it.
00:08:07
Speaker
And we then kind of flipped our company to start selling that data structure and understanding to that bulk shipping market. So that's when we kind of really started to evolve as a company to where we are today. And then we had maybe another bit better half to that on who we sold that technology to. Yeah, well, I think one of the things that more of us founders should talk about more is that very few of us
Startups: Strategy vs. Tactics
00:08:37
Speaker
run the company that we intended to start. And I would say certainly for us at Chain, the North Star of making it easier for companies to work together hasn't changed. But the entire going in premise of our company was creating a central data model where we would have a picture of the current state of the entire global supply chain and all of the data in this kind of data store.
00:09:06
Speaker
And what we ended up with was actually the 180 degree opposite, which was looking at all the data moving, but never looking at that whole picture. And it's the ability to kind of say, hey, we're solving the problem, but the tactics are going to be completely different is admirable. And I think that's a thing that not a lot of startup world people talk about enough is the difference between that.
00:09:34
Speaker
North Star strategy and the tactics that she used to get there. Yeah, definitely.
The Role of Senior Team Members
00:09:38
Speaker
It's really interesting how things evolve. So what do you wish that you knew at the beginning like that? So as you've gone through all these evolutions, like what has, what are you like, man, I wish I could tell myself X years ago. I guess there are a lot of things, but I think the thing more recently that really hit me is
00:09:59
Speaker
I wish I would have hired in more senior people early. It makes such a big difference, like this is loaded, lifted off you because you're kind of sharing this burden of everything with people who are kind of wildly more competent than you. So yeah, I wish I would have done that a long time ago.
00:10:22
Speaker
And then you and I just get to sit around having chats and talking on podcasts while everyone else is doing a better job than we would have done in the first place, right? Exactly, the work from home, right? Yeah. I don't think work from home means quite what it used to. So what do you think is tough for people who might be coming into this today, either from the tech startup space or especially in logistics? Is there kind of advice you would give?
Office vs. Remote Work Debate
00:10:51
Speaker
So I think, and actually I'm curious to get your thoughts on this because I think you have very different views on this. I know you're a big distributed team fan. I'm definitely more old school. And I think the pandemic really tested some of my assumptions and thoughts there. I do think that, or I kind of worry about
00:11:19
Speaker
you know, when new people come into whether it's this industry, the tech industry, whatever. And, and, you know, you're looking for that kind of fast progression, you're trying to absorb everything. Like, how does that work when people are not there? Well, so what do you like about being in the office?
00:11:42
Speaker
Like everything, everything. I love, I don't know, the serendipity. I love that it forces discipline. By the way, I love, like, one thing I did find was very funny, like...
00:11:58
Speaker
at the start of the pandemic of people were like, yeah, I want to work from home because I'm going to go for this run and I'm going to do this stuff and be like, let's be honest, we all kind of just got fat during this thing. So I don't know. Yeah, I just think it drives that, I don't know, serendipity, the drive to get things done. I think you learn
00:12:20
Speaker
I think you just hear all these things going on around you so that you can chip in and actually resolve them. I just find the communication so much easier. Yeah, I don't know. You kind of sit on the other side of the table to this. I do. And it's having this conversation with a couple of CEOs here in Philadelphia last week about, and one of them is fully back in the office, and they have a team about the same size as ours.
00:12:48
Speaker
for him kind of same points. And one of the interesting things that came up was he said that almost every job applicant that he's talking to wants to be in the office. He's like, it's a hundred percent of people want to be back in the office. And I said, well, almost every job applicant we're talking to wants to be full time remote. And I said, it's I think that there's people are
00:13:13
Speaker
Not to get Harry Potter on this, but they're shorting right into the right houses for themselves. Right. And, you know, for for me, and this was always a big thing, was having the space to work the way that I feel is best for me. Yeah. And that for me, like I actually go to the office every day, but I'm the only one in our entire company who goes to the office every day.
00:13:42
Speaker
And everyone else, people come in every once in a while, but we're able to draw from such a wider talent pool because we can recruit globally. And even just here in the US in the last year, we've hired people in every time zone, 14 states or something, just this year. So that talent pool,
00:14:09
Speaker
And anything we're losing from not being in the office, I feel like we're gaining from getting people from, you know, and where I am is not a big logistics hub in Philadelphia. So the size of the talent pool we're drawing from is just amazing. And I think that, I think it's worth, yeah, I mean, there's definitely benefits to people getting together and face to face conversations and the like, but I don't think for us, especially because our customers are so global, right? It's not like we're,
00:14:39
Speaker
interacting with them in, you know, we're doing implementation right now with a free company where the project team is spread across three or four cities in Europe and the west coast of Canada. And it's like, so where would we be anyway? But I think that I don't think there's a right answer. I think there's every company, you know, and I actually learned this probably more from being married than from
00:15:08
Speaker
running a company but like there's things you do inside your own relationships that seem weird to other people like how you you know they used to have this I don't know if it was just in the US but they just in the 90s just badger you know families that eat dinner together at six o'clock every night or the families that are successful and they created all this like like that's what you had to do and my family doesn't run that way and we're great right so I think companies can be the same way we can all have different personalities and different lifestyles and
00:15:37
Speaker
There's no right answer. There's just what works. Yeah. That's interesting. That's interesting. So I have a very relativistic view, I guess, of that. And we wouldn't get to work with you guys if we weren't so broad based and international in all of those fun things. So kind of going from that, like we know we've had this challenge of the pandemic.
Logistics Challenges: Global Warming & Sustainability
00:16:03
Speaker
We've had the challenges of
00:16:06
Speaker
an industry that is 30 or 40 years behind a lot of other industries. But what are the next set of challenges? What do we as a group of technologists in the supply chain have to work on together? I think the biggest thing, and I don't even know where to start on this challenge, is global warming. So I think we just hit a billion packages worldwide. I think it sets a double in the next four years.
00:16:35
Speaker
I don't know how we're going to do that sustainably. And I think it's also, if you think about logistics, again, that fragmented world, that kind of global fragmented world, and that kind of amplifies the tragedy of the commons effect. And I'm just like, I don't know. I don't know how this is going to work out. No, I entirely agree. And I give a lot of thought to
00:17:05
Speaker
I'll be honest, like even being in this industry, like are you perpetuating the problem? Are you helping to solve it? Right. And I think ultimately not being too easy on us. Like if, if you're not like 8 billion people need things, right. And they need things to be places. And so it's not that fundamentally our industry is bad, but you know, I think there's a question a lot of times of alignment and
00:17:35
Speaker
Right now, everything's aligned to giving the consumer whatever they want, whenever they want it. Yeah. Right. And almost no matter what the cost. Yeah. And that that doesn't seem healthy to me. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and how can we, you know, I think a number of years ago worked with some companies on, you know, just carbon footprint reporting, but it was internal reporting or board reporting or is investor reporting. But it wasn't a driving
00:18:05
Speaker
trying to drive their customer behavior to moving things slower just consumes less energy. Air consumes more energy than ocean. And how do we educate people that, do you really need that thing tomorrow? Are you going to use it tomorrow? Or are you just choosing tomorrow because tomorrow costs the same as six days from now? And why is that?
00:18:34
Speaker
caught myself using Amazon Prime and going, Oh, you know, I probably don't need this as a Prime shipment. They can, cause they'll give us one. They have a day of week delivery option, at least here in the U S where you can say, look, just send me at anything I order. Just give it to me on Tuesday. So it's one shipment. And, uh, yeah, that's kind of a cool thing, but it, it at least makes you take that moment to go. Hey, do I really need the carbon impact of them accelerating this product through their supply chain?
Shipamax's Scalable Solutions
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah, I start to feel really bad. I obviously do a lot of Amazon orders as well. And just like the amount of Amazon cardboard boxes I have, it's like, this can't be great for anyone. Cool. So what are you guys working on now? What's the next stuff for Ship of Max? Yeah. So actually, I was thinking about it. It's something you are almost helping us with actually. So we,
00:19:31
Speaker
For the past two years, yes, I guess when we've been selling to the kind of forwarding or broader 3PL, 4PL, et cetera, industry, we've sold our products more often than not as a kind of pre-packaged product.
00:19:47
Speaker
and so you get your kind of data extraction elements you get this intelligent process automation kind of wrapped around it and then the integrations and what we're starting to do now is we're at a point where we are able as an organization to break some of those services out.
00:20:06
Speaker
which just makes us much more scalable and extendable and all that kind of stuff. Obviously, one of those components is the integration parts where we're working on at the moment for a couple of companies. This is probably one of the big things that I'm allowed to talk about. Maybe just to dig into that a little bit more, I think what I'm hearing is
00:20:32
Speaker
There are people who need data extraction from data sources. There are people who need business process automation. But sometimes if you're a larger organization, say, I already have business process or automation. I just need data extraction. Or I really kind of am already getting structured data, but I don't know how to deal with it.
00:20:51
Speaker
before it gets into my TM answer or what have you? Yeah, it's a good question. The starting point is the data extraction. So I don't think, for example, we would do the integrations or the process automation without that load. But it's more that, yeah, you're right. Sometimes the processes people want to automate are not within our use cases.
00:21:15
Speaker
And it's like, well, you could just take the API and build your own use case. And kind of the example we've been working on is like, they have the data extraction need, they have the use case need, but
00:21:29
Speaker
we didn't support the ERP. So then we kind of got you guys in to help build that out. So it's just making it a little bit more flexible and allowing different use cases. There's some really interesting applications of the use case, especially in very large organizations that have in-house development teams. And they're working on something very, very different that we might not just prepackage for everyone.
00:21:57
Speaker
And that enables them to start working with us as well. So do you think this is a market segment thing? Because I see this all over the place, but that mid market and smaller companies want a turnkey solution and the big companies want to buy pieces to be more a la carte? Is that a reasonable way to think about it?
00:22:20
Speaker
In part, I think we still see large companies, if the automation app exists, if you like, they'll use it. But what we're just seeing is we're turning away companies at the moment because we didn't have that explicit use case rebuilt out and we're actually
00:22:43
Speaker
You guys have your own really good development team. It's probably not an app, if you like, that we're going to build out. Why not just take the IPI and then feed that into your own stack. Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. And I think there's that this layer of, it's funny how IT and systems inside of companies have changed from internal developers
00:23:09
Speaker
building applications to now the internal developers, almost acting like citizen integrators and bringing together solutions that they're buying from at on a SaaS basis. Yeah. Right. And becoming everybody's an integration company at some point, which is scary for me to say as an integration company, but but it is I think it's a big shift in the industry. Yeah, in fact, I think one of the use cases we might also be
00:23:37
Speaker
I think there's three companies involved and I think you're one of them. It's like basically pre-packaging all the different parts for actually a very different use case than from what we usually do. I think it's something actually that executives inside of 3PLs may not be asking the question yet the right way of their IT departments, which is like here's
Leveraging SaaS in Solutions
00:24:02
Speaker
getting back to that North Star concept, like here's what we need to get done. Yes. How can we assemble this solution as opposed to how can we build the solution? They both involve writing code. Yes. But using the different word at the beginning of the process can change the whole mindset of, OK, let's go get ship a max evolve. Let's go get a channel involved. Let's go get, you know, somebody like, you know, you know,
00:24:30
Speaker
I don't know, to cart containers involved for like when things have to come in through the web, because what we really are worried about here is order ingestion. And how do we assemble order ingestion from in an omnichannel way, right, which might be getting PDFs in from some customers and having some on our website and having some of them send an API and assemble a bunch of SaaS solutions that then feed into that back end big heavy ERP pipeline is
00:24:56
Speaker
If you ask the question as an executive the right way, you're going to get a very different answer than if you go to your team and say, we need to build this because they will presuppose that starting from zero at a blank code
00:25:06
Speaker
a blank code screen is the place to start. That's not the way of SaaS. I think that's also maybe just a journey of tech maturity. For example, in both our respective domains, using a provider is still new because they're still newish technologies. Whereas, let's say, hosting
00:25:30
Speaker
One would hope that when someone says, hey, we're going to migrate to cloud, people don't spin up their own kind of Amazon or Azure nowadays, maybe they do.
The SaaS Evolution in Logistics
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think hopefully we'll get there where people realize actually they can just piece all these things together. I am old enough to have made the argument to a CFO that we should move stuff out of our data center and lost the argument.
00:25:54
Speaker
So into into very early stage cloud hosting. And they're like, no, we have to physically have it here or nothing's going to work. So so I remember that. But yeah, I think that that sass of evolution. I think there's other industries where it's probably moved a little faster. And I think it's probably some of the more cross cutting ones like marketing automation and and the like where the whole idea of the problems are solving are net new. Yeah.
00:26:22
Speaker
There wasn't 50 years of tech for marketing automation to this place, but since we're doing that, it's harder for us than it is for spaces like that. That's why Salesforce was such a great starting solution for SaaS because there really was nothing good. I remember using things like ACT back in the 90s that were just desktop CRMs. They created a space and we're trying to modernize against
00:26:52
Speaker
legacy environment. So it's a lot more resistance, I think. Yeah, that's actually an interesting type. Well, hopefully soon we're going to get to do these face-to-face live recordings instead over the internet. Thanks so much for being here. This was a lot of fun. Thank you very much.