Convoy Trucking Startup, Backed By Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, Is Closing Operation With No Buyer (forbes.com) 23
Ty Roush reports via Forbes: Convoy, a Seattle-based digital freight booker with investors that include billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, announced Thursday it would be shutting down, according to Bloomberg, after the company failed to find a buyer amid a "massive freight recession." Convoy's founder and chief executive Dan Lewis notified employees in an internal memo Thursday that "today is your last day at the company," noting the company is "exploring and evaluating strategic options for what might come next," Bloomberg reported.
Lewis said the company had evaluated potential suitors to acquire it, though "none of the options ultimately materialized into anything sufficient to keep the company going in its then current form." Convoy was in "the middle of a massive freight recession and a contraction in the capital markets," according to Lewis, who added "this combination ultimately crushed our progress" and likely swayed potential suitors away from acquiring the firm. "Following an exhaustive process, spanning many, many months during which we explored all viable strategic options for the business, the result is where we are today," Lewis wrote. Convoy was founded in 2015 in an effort to prevent trucks from driving "empty miles" without loads. The idea was to use technology to make freight more efficient by connecting truck drivers with freight companies -- reducing shippers' costs, increasing carriers' earnings, and eliminating carbon emissions in the process.
Lewis said the company had evaluated potential suitors to acquire it, though "none of the options ultimately materialized into anything sufficient to keep the company going in its then current form." Convoy was in "the middle of a massive freight recession and a contraction in the capital markets," according to Lewis, who added "this combination ultimately crushed our progress" and likely swayed potential suitors away from acquiring the firm. "Following an exhaustive process, spanning many, many months during which we explored all viable strategic options for the business, the result is where we are today," Lewis wrote. Convoy was founded in 2015 in an effort to prevent trucks from driving "empty miles" without loads. The idea was to use technology to make freight more efficient by connecting truck drivers with freight companies -- reducing shippers' costs, increasing carriers' earnings, and eliminating carbon emissions in the process.
Sure, blame the "recession" (Score:2)
I guess they'll pivot to just sitting on their trivial software patent to recoup their "losses" if anyone else tries to do something similar. Win-win.
Re: Sure, blame the "recession" (Score:2)
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I'm sure they'll be fine as long as they don't block roads and endanger lives. You do know the difference between legal behavior and illegal behavior?
Sure I do:
1) Legal: What Trudeau agrees with.
2) Illegal: What Trudeau disagrees with.
He had to invoke special war time measures for Pete's sake to allow him to barely legally do what he did otherwise it would have been illegal. He called the truckers Nazis but he invites Nazis and applaud them in the parliament house. He finds it funny to paint his face black and make fun of black people at parties as well but he'll call you racist for less. He is the spoiled kid of a former premier and he is used to do wha
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Re: Sure, blame the "recession" (Score:2)
Re: Sure, blame the "recession" (Score:2)
And they wonder why we hate them (Score:2)
Dan Lewis notified employees in an internal memo Thursday that "today is your last day at the company..."
Anybody want to bet this prick played the aggrieved victim if even one employee left without giving two weeks notice, accompanied by a grovelling offer to train a replacement and stay on call for a few months of uncompensated hand-holding afterward?
What did Convoy actually bring to the table? (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, even the companies with the widest footprint and market penetration have to run deadhead sometimes. No service in the world can make loads appear out of thin air. And trucks have to have homeward bound legs on a regular basis or you'll lose drivers. (you might even run afoul of DOT regs) You can't just keep taking loads to wherever on the grounds that going to B on a paid basis is always better than going to C deadhead so the driver can see his family and get his laundry done.
That said, there probably are some inefficiencies there. There is a place for a universal "one stop shop" for shippers, carriers and receivers. But it would have to be huge, with almost complete market share for it to be effective. But that gets into monopolies.
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Like any other industry, once it is hammered into a perfectly efficient form, is becomes an intolerable industry to work in.
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DATS is probably about as close to this as you'll get in the US.
Looks Easy, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Breaker, Breaker, this here's the Rubber Duck (Score:5, Funny)
Pig Pen, what's your twenty?
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Re: Breaker, Breaker, this here's the Rubber Duck (Score:3, Interesting)
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Guess they won't keep on truckin' [etsystatic.com]
Business? (Score:2)
If they go belly-up because they are not acquired, doesn't that mean they have no actual business that makes money and can stand on its own?
Because CONVOY was just another brokerage (Score:3)
It would be 'an Uber for freight' they claimed.
Because tech bros are so smart, they can solve everyone else's problems. I guess the rest of us are just not as clever as you guys with the fleece vests, eh?
In reality, domestic freight is a monumentally complicated business, Vastly more complicated than the concept of uber - at least originally - where people driving places have empty seats anyway, and could fill them with people who happen to be needing to go approximately the same place.
Trucks are expensive to own and operate. This is why the companies that run them work actually pretty hard at making sure they're being used all the time to their highest reasonable efficiencies.
There are already dozens of brokerage companies in the US that truck owners can contact to look for deadhead loads. These brokerage companies have always been pretty sophisticated in their use of gps, web assets, integration, and web-systems to simplify, cheapen, and speed up the process.
Convoy brought NOTHING NEW to an already-pretty-saturated market.
"Massive frieght recession" (Score:2)
Really?
Or maybe between Amazon running its own shipping line, and the railroads taking back what they should never have lost, long distance freight, they could sell enough to satisfy their backers.