There are some really profound misunderstandings of how bankruptcy and credit work in this thread.
Creditors are ranked by seniority and get paid out in order by seniority. Equity is below every creditor and has been completely wiped out. Companies are not allowed to take cash or sell the furniture to pay out employees. That money is legally owed to creditors and attempting to stiff them is theft. I'm sorry to those affected at Convoy, but that is the reality of working at a startup that goes through a hasty liquidation. Convoy is not being "cheap" about this, as some are suggesting. Any "retention bonuses" are to keep executives around for long enough to unwind the company in an orderly fashion. Nobody is getting rich off failure; if everyone were to walk away there'd be nothing left and therefore nothing to recover and distribute. It's bad for everyone, but the alternative is worse.
As for the larger situation: Convoy were a digital freight brokerage. They acted as intermediaries between shippers and carriers and make money on the spread between the two. They got into trouble because the entire freight sector has been suffering a double whammy of cost increases due to inflation (ie. diesel costs) and a slowdown in demand. This has caused a number of carriers and brokerages to go bust. Freight brokerage has some other properties that make Convoy's situation particularly serious. In particular, carriers typically securitize their accounts receivable. In freight, this is known as "factoring." Convoy got stuck holding the bag after their partner carriers went under, having already paid them for their service, but still waiting for payment from the shipper.
Worst of all, Convoy had no exits because their only potential acquirers are in the same industry and are also getting completely crushed.
While in general what you are saying is true, employees owed wages are the highest seniority of creditor. As long as you were selling furniture for reasonable prices to make payroll, you should be fine.
Wages are fourth priority, but only up to $12,850 per person (one month's salary at ~150k a year).
The three priorities above wages are child support (not really applicable to corporate bankruptcy i assume), liquidator's expenses, and some mildly complex case i don't really understand. Taxes are eighth, two behind grain farmers and fishermen (lol America).
All official information mentions “shutting doors” and “winding down” and not necessarily a bankruptcy. For instance, in the same space, Shone just returned part of the equity to the investors, paid comp to the execs for a full year, and us, employees, got jackshit.
IDK if Shone did things the most intelligent way, but the general story is not uncommon.
Shareholders/creditors have a mess if the CEO and CFO walk out the door for their new job; it is financially beneficial for them to liquidate assets and shut the door.
Shareholders/creditors don't have a mess when the engineer and a product manager walk out the door to their new job.
There’s no obligation to run a company into the ground. If a company reaches a point where the end of its runway is in sight, and the company decides to let employees know that the company will be out of money in 2 months, to give employees time to start looking for options… that’s allowable and not some sort of theft from creditors.
Many companies are open with employees about the state of the business.
If you have less than 3 months runway and little prospect of any fundraising, tell your employees. You don’t need to steal money from creditors (?) to pay severance, you just gotta do your best to not blindside people who have rent to pay.
> Convoy had no exits because their only potential acquirers are in the same industry and are also getting completely crushed.
Some great insights here and you clearly know the business. I’m curious about this last statement however. Just how badly are other players doing?
Uber Freight just announced a major overhaul on a foundation apparently provided by their acquisition of Transplace [1]. There seem to be a number of synergies between Convoy and Uber Freight although I may be naive about that. In any case, I’m curious about your view on Uber Freight and whether they are viable or simply playing the long game based on deep capital reserves, and why you think they didn’t acquire Convoy (if that even makes sense as a possibility).
Uberfreight is also doing very poorly. From my understanding the Transplace acquisition was somewhat of a merger/UF trying to get out of only the 3PL business and Uber is just trying to get UF's losses off their books. There are not as many synergies as you might think due to the way freight brokerages and their deals with shippers+carriers work. One reason UF didn't acquire Convoy: it only makes sense for a brokerage to acquire another brokerage if they can get more customers (shippers) from that acquisition. But most customers of UF are also customers of Convoy, and are splitting their loads amongst multiple brokers to diversify risk and commoditize brokerages. So if you're a shipper giving 20% of your business to Convoy and 20% to Uber Freight, you won't turn around and give 40% of your business to UF now that they've acquired Convoy, you'll just go find another broker to give your business to.
Just to clarify your point about paying out employees... in what sense do you mean that? Some quick googling says that when a company goes into Chapter 7, employees become creditors for their unpaid wages, which means that they are at least in the same boat as other creditors (although it seems like they might sometimes be prioritized).
Your source is talking about unpaid wages (legally mandatory), but severance is additional (legally optional) payments the company chooses to make to support former employees.
"Convoy got stuck holding the bag after their partner carriers went under, having already paid them for their service, but still waiting for payment from the shipper."
This doesn't make any sense. What you're describing is normal course of business. Shipper pay terms are usually longer than when the carrier get's paid from broker. "Carrier's went under", doesn't make any difference. If the shipper doesn't pay, than that's a problem. But to say paying carriers that "went under" contributed to Convoy going out of business just isn't accurate.
They paid their carriers before being paid by their clients? That is pretty bad cash flow management, and risk management. And it is decidedely not what forwarders I know do. Forwarders, e.g. DHL freight, rarely own their trucks and subcontract that out, much like a broker does. And those subcontracted carriers are usually the last to get paid in that line.
Unless, of course, Convoy had to because all their carriers insisted on upfront payments for reasons. In which case Convoy was propably already screwed any way.
What you are saying is true, but that doesn't mean a lot of underhanded "games" aren't played.
"Nobody is getting rich off failure; if everyone were to walk away there'd be nothing left and therefore nothing to recover and distribute. It's bad for everyone, but the alternative is worse."
Here's one such game. Executives, who enjoy information asymetry, and leverage can parlay this into one final earning event. Threaten to leave the company in disarray, unless they're paid. Coordinated, it's hard to say no to.
Imagine if the top 5-10 execs at an otherwise ok startup coordinated a demand to double their pay/stock or everyone walks tomorrow. They time the move using inside knowledge of cash flow, making the demand irresistible.
I'm not suggesting an alternative, but that doesn't mean a corpse isnt a feast for some.
Unless the law has changed, in California back pay is senior to everything except tax debt. And the company officers are personally liable for it.
It should work that way everywhere. Executives need to be incentivized to do layoffs while there’s still cash for it. Defrauding employees is a terrible evil.
> Companies are not allowed to take cash or sell the furniture to pay out employees...Any "retention bonuses" are to keep executives around for long enough to unwind the company in an orderly fashion.
Could you help me understand where the line is drawn?
(Ex-)Convoy engineer here. No mystery as to why this happened, sudden tight market and low available capital demolished us. External reasons given in the article were the same we knew and couldn't do anything about considering that none of the M&A options materialized.
Detailed the shutdown on a call at 8:30am Pacific this morning. CEO said there'll be no severance or healthcare.
Lot of talented folks in Seattle and beyond who'll be looking for new gigs.
> Dang, no severance or healthcare is really brutal
When NCC Group fired me, they gave me zero days notice and no severance.
They did emphasize that my healthcare would stay good through the end of the month, but they didn't seem to have realized that I would be unlikely to find that useful after being fired on October 31.
Given that you were in the company and presumably have an idea of how the company functions: where did the funding go? $260M gone in 1 year?
"Convoy, which raised $260 million in a funding round last year that valued the business at $3.8 billion, on Wednesday told employees in an email that it would stop accepting shipments until further notice and that it was rescheduling or canceling existing loads." (wsj)
>1,000 employees means a burn rate in the hundreds of millions per year just on the costs of having employees, $260m burned in a year sounds about right for a company of that size.
According to Bloomberg they had a headcount of 1500 at their peak, so assuming that USD 1000000 gets you 5 employees for a year, USD 26000000 would get you 1300 employees for a year. (That’s a lot of hand waving on my part but overall the amount of money burned doesn’t seem mysterious)
So many variables, but it's easy to spend $260M in 18 months at a decently sized company. If they have 1200 employees, that's about $12k per employee per month. So you could easily spend that much just on salary + benefits for software developers in Seattle.
I used to work for an IoT startup several years ago. We were a small team and focused on attracting big clients for big money. I realized the danger in that once I learned one of our long-standing clients had been paying us for years for a solution that wasn't in operation.
No one else thought it important to try and get developers using our product to reduce our reliance on big players and well, here we are. My last check was paid out from the CEO's personal bank account.
Certain spaces are exciting to work in because you can clearly see a need but sometimes the stars don't align for you. I hope the Convoy team (sans leadership) lands on their feet. Q4 is the worst time to find jobs.
Obviously it didn't pan out, but you could think of Convoy as an aggregator of small carriers. A big shipper doesn't want to deal with 1,000 small carriers but they can deal with Convoy, and Convoy deals with the small carriers.
Convoy could interface with large companies as though they had a large fleet of drivers and trucks. That "fleet" wouldn't require paying for benefits to employees, maintenance or fuel on the truck, and could scale up or down based on demand.
I would have guessed that the network effects of getting this kind of marketplace going would be the hard part. It makes me think that a big mistake in leadership was made.
Everyone in startup world wants to come in and "hack" 3PL until they realize 3PL is a weird, complicated thing even if it's got a bunch of legacy players on legacy software. It's more or less like this: https://xkcd.com/1831/
What makes you think the executives are making anything from this? It's a startup, it ran out of money, it failed, there is nothing left. Joining a startup is risky.
How much are the executives making from a shutdown? They're probably losing all the value of their options. If they're founders they're losing everything they didn't sell in secondary which means they're taking the biggest hit to their net worth.
Any insights on how effective the CEO and the executives were? I'm very curious how successful executives from big companies like Amazon function in a startup.
COBRA isn't employer-paid healthcare, its an ex-employee option to pay for the previously-employer-offered plan, while the employer offers a plan to current employees.
If there are no more company operations and no current employees, there is also no plan and no COBRA.
This could also be an issue if a company restructured so it didn't have to offer employees health care because of size or everyone being part time or whatever: COBRA doesn't guarantee that there is a plan from your former employer, it just gives you a right to pay for it yourself if there is, for a certain period of time.
Classy. Learning a lot about how certain people treat their employees during these last couple of admittedly insane years. Good for future reference, I guess - though not much solace now. I feel for the employees.
Edit: Wow, more responses than I thought! I admit that the tone of my comment was too reactionary, but my opinion stands. I won't modify the original comment but instead will add this quote from Dalton Caldwell, YC Partner:
"So what happens if you have less than three months of cash? It's important to face the issue head on and account for your liabilities and the scenario of shutting down your company.
In many cases, <2 months is the point of no return. If you are in this state it is immediately necessary to lay off your employees and give them severance, pay down your obligations, and use your remaining cash for shutdown costs. If you don't do this and instead end up with zero cash and outstanding payroll, tax or other obligations, things will get Very Bad." [1]
Convoy raised $1.1b including a $260mm Series E almost exactly a year ago.
Severance is basically marketing for future hires. You hope, as a company, you will be around in a few years and will be hiring again. If all the employees laid off during tough times get severance, then the company can say "even if we hit tough times, we have a track record of doing the right thing", which is attractive to future employees they are attempting to attract. Since the company is dead, their reputation doesn't matter.
In the 2001 DotCom downturn a friend worked at a company where they were informed that the paycheck they had received the prior month was the last payment they'd get. So not only no severance, etc but they also worked a few weeks gratis.
My favorite start up, with regard to cashflow, was where the CEO would tell us at every company meeting how many months of cash we had in the bank at our current burn. They pissed me off in other ways, though, and I never heard how they treated people when they finally shut their doors.
The other reason we'll see it in these businesses first is it's entirely measurable - did you get the shipment where it needed to go without destroying it?
Nothing else matters beyond that and the price. And it's entirely fungible - nobody cares if it's UPS or FedEx or some random truck that delivers stuff to Walmart or whatever.
The only way they had a chance was getting their APIs so ingrained in companies they couldn't switch, and companies are rightly suspicious of that.
From a friend: Everyone was laid off with no severance or benefits. The CEO put all the blame on a lender in order to explain why there were no severance packages. This sucks because they took it upon themselves to offer staff retention bonuses earlier this year to keep people around after the earlier layoff.
regardless, C-level salaries were probably high enough that they can skate by a while without a salary for a bit and pay for marketplace healthcare coverage if absolutely necessary
I work for one of their competitors and I can empathize with them. My thoughts goes to all the employees and their families.
The Freight business is collapsing after an unrealistic high during the pandemic. Since April 2022, revenue per load has decreased to about 70%, this means less ways to generate a profit under the same headcount.
We also saw a decrease in volume as companies overstocked and consumer spending has shrunk to less than 50% of what it used to be. Just add it all up and you see why so many companies are collapsing, carriers and brokers alike.
But what we saw during the peak was crazy, and some investors and execs thought it would last.
At least in regards to what pertains FTL freight, we saw a drop of tougjly 50% in volumes as consumer spending is down when compared to pandemic height. I am pretry sure there will be a seasonal trend upwards, but no where in the way it was before.
If you are in the industry, you can easily check how much cargo is moving around. Maybe by November-December it will be less than a 50% drop, but expect it to return by kid January-February.
This just made me realize that things are back in stock regularly again. I suppose it happened slowly so I didn't notice, but shortages seem to be totally gone and things are back to 2019 stock levels.
Part of the reason being that workers have been ordered back to offices, meaning a significant portion of their income is spent on commute and eating out. Crazy how damaging rto is to everything around us.
Most of the reason is that asset prices (and thus wealth has shrunk), inflation is higher, so people are buying less and there's no Fed dropping money from helicopters.
It's weird since prices haven't really changed for customers. I thought freight going down by 70% would have an impact on pricing but I guess it was a smaller part of the total price than I originally would've believed?
What would a buyer have even been purchasing in this scenario?
A bunch of talented employees? Cool, they are all on the market anyway.
A bunch of tiny commodity contracts? Why?
A pile of code? Is it particularly hard to recreate?
Valuations are having a big wake-up call across the industry. While a company can be more than the sum of its parts, VC-backed tech companies have really struggled in industries where unit-economics rule.
Another example industry where you can see this well is manufacturing with Protolabs, Xometry sucking wind for the last several years. Surprising, you would have thought that large amounts of capital and economies of scale would beat out competition (they were planning on grinding incumbents into the dirt by now). Are we seeing a case where innovation is not restricted to automation and software?
Incumbents are also leveraging decades (or centuries) of investment in land, people, technologies to win in some cases.
Great deep dive into how drastically the freight market has shifted the last 12 months and the likelihood that Convoy will be the first of many more to fall in coming months.
Fascinating explainer of a market I didn’t know much about, especially the terms (covenants) laid out by banks that float the money on shipping accounts receivables.
Readit News
Creditors are ranked by seniority and get paid out in order by seniority. Equity is below every creditor and has been completely wiped out. Companies are not allowed to take cash or sell the furniture to pay out employees. That money is legally owed to creditors and attempting to stiff them is theft. I'm sorry to those affected at Convoy, but that is the reality of working at a startup that goes through a hasty liquidation. Convoy is not being "cheap" about this, as some are suggesting. Any "retention bonuses" are to keep executives around for long enough to unwind the company in an orderly fashion. Nobody is getting rich off failure; if everyone were to walk away there'd be nothing left and therefore nothing to recover and distribute. It's bad for everyone, but the alternative is worse.
As for the larger situation: Convoy were a digital freight brokerage. They acted as intermediaries between shippers and carriers and make money on the spread between the two. They got into trouble because the entire freight sector has been suffering a double whammy of cost increases due to inflation (ie. diesel costs) and a slowdown in demand. This has caused a number of carriers and brokerages to go bust. Freight brokerage has some other properties that make Convoy's situation particularly serious. In particular, carriers typically securitize their accounts receivable. In freight, this is known as "factoring." Convoy got stuck holding the bag after their partner carriers went under, having already paid them for their service, but still waiting for payment from the shipper.
Worst of all, Convoy had no exits because their only potential acquirers are in the same industry and are also getting completely crushed.
https://usbankruptcycode.org/chapter-5-creditors-the-debtor-...
Wages are fourth priority, but only up to $12,850 per person (one month's salary at ~150k a year).
The three priorities above wages are child support (not really applicable to corporate bankruptcy i assume), liquidator's expenses, and some mildly complex case i don't really understand. Taxes are eighth, two behind grain farmers and fishermen (lol America).
IDK if Shone did things the most intelligent way, but the general story is not uncommon.
Shareholders/creditors have a mess if the CEO and CFO walk out the door for their new job; it is financially beneficial for them to liquidate assets and shut the door.
Shareholders/creditors don't have a mess when the engineer and a product manager walk out the door to their new job.
That's how the logic works.
Many companies are open with employees about the state of the business.
If you have less than 3 months runway and little prospect of any fundraising, tell your employees. You don’t need to steal money from creditors (?) to pay severance, you just gotta do your best to not blindside people who have rent to pay.
Some great insights here and you clearly know the business. I’m curious about this last statement however. Just how badly are other players doing?
Uber Freight just announced a major overhaul on a foundation apparently provided by their acquisition of Transplace [1]. There seem to be a number of synergies between Convoy and Uber Freight although I may be naive about that. In any case, I’m curious about your view on Uber Freight and whether they are viable or simply playing the long game based on deep capital reserves, and why you think they didn’t acquire Convoy (if that even makes sense as a possibility).
1: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/uber-freights-new-solution...
Unfortunately I had to learn this the hard way (as in I was lied to and assumed they were still going to pay us, and then the payroll money went poof)
This doesn't make any sense. What you're describing is normal course of business. Shipper pay terms are usually longer than when the carrier get's paid from broker. "Carrier's went under", doesn't make any difference. If the shipper doesn't pay, than that's a problem. But to say paying carriers that "went under" contributed to Convoy going out of business just isn't accurate.
Correct.
I can only assume "companies are not allowed to pay out employees" refers to suggestions of severance, health care, etc. in this thread.
Not earned wages, which have high legal priority.
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Unless, of course, Convoy had to because all their carriers insisted on upfront payments for reasons. In which case Convoy was propably already screwed any way.
"Nobody is getting rich off failure; if everyone were to walk away there'd be nothing left and therefore nothing to recover and distribute. It's bad for everyone, but the alternative is worse."
Here's one such game. Executives, who enjoy information asymetry, and leverage can parlay this into one final earning event. Threaten to leave the company in disarray, unless they're paid. Coordinated, it's hard to say no to.
Imagine if the top 5-10 execs at an otherwise ok startup coordinated a demand to double their pay/stock or everyone walks tomorrow. They time the move using inside knowledge of cash flow, making the demand irresistible.
I'm not suggesting an alternative, but that doesn't mean a corpse isnt a feast for some.
It should work that way everywhere. Executives need to be incentivized to do layoffs while there’s still cash for it. Defrauding employees is a terrible evil.
Most (good) employers do that when employees quit but they don’t have to.
Could you help me understand where the line is drawn?
The US staff had to just go. I got my last month's pay + about 6 to 8 weeks.
Yes, what happens in an acquisition vs a insolvency are different.
Detailed the shutdown on a call at 8:30am Pacific this morning. CEO said there'll be no severance or healthcare.
Lot of talented folks in Seattle and beyond who'll be looking for new gigs.
When NCC Group fired me, they gave me zero days notice and no severance.
They did emphasize that my healthcare would stay good through the end of the month, but they didn't seem to have realized that I would be unlikely to find that useful after being fired on October 31.
I would hope most employees know that is a significant risk of working at a startup?!
But yes, harsh, regardless of how predictable.
"Convoy, which raised $260 million in a funding round last year that valued the business at $3.8 billion, on Wednesday told employees in an email that it would stop accepting shipments until further notice and that it was rescheduling or canceling existing loads." (wsj)
Price per shipment cratered -> Revenue cratered. (They make a % of each shipment) -> Losses spiked up. (Because they had fixed cost)
Flexport had a burn run rate of $600M a year. Convoy had less burn but also less in the bank.
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/flexport-revenue-dr...No one else thought it important to try and get developers using our product to reduce our reliance on big players and well, here we are. My last check was paid out from the CEO's personal bank account.
Certain spaces are exciting to work in because you can clearly see a need but sometimes the stars don't align for you. I hope the Convoy team (sans leadership) lands on their feet. Q4 is the worst time to find jobs.
Was it largely spot rates, a bid board, and lots of small carriers?
Customers easily could just get rates / carriers elsewhere and walk from Convoy?
No other services making income keeping customers around?
Rates are pretty fluid in logistics, very strange that they would rely on that alone if that was the case.
Convoy could interface with large companies as though they had a large fleet of drivers and trucks. That "fleet" wouldn't require paying for benefits to employees, maintenance or fuel on the truck, and could scale up or down based on demand.
I would have guessed that the network effects of getting this kind of marketplace going would be the hard part. It makes me think that a big mistake in leadership was made.
Just not enough to offer any severance or healthcare. #TruckYeah!
That should be illegal.
How much are the executives making from this?
I'm really sorry you're in the middle of this. I hope you can find a better job soon.
If there are no more company operations and no current employees, there is also no plan and no COBRA.
This could also be an issue if a company restructured so it didn't have to offer employees health care because of size or everyone being part time or whatever: COBRA doesn't guarantee that there is a plan from your former employer, it just gives you a right to pay for it yourself if there is, for a certain period of time.
…if the company still exists (see comments above and below)
Classy. Learning a lot about how certain people treat their employees during these last couple of admittedly insane years. Good for future reference, I guess - though not much solace now. I feel for the employees.
Edit: Wow, more responses than I thought! I admit that the tone of my comment was too reactionary, but my opinion stands. I won't modify the original comment but instead will add this quote from Dalton Caldwell, YC Partner:
"So what happens if you have less than three months of cash? It's important to face the issue head on and account for your liabilities and the scenario of shutting down your company.
In many cases, <2 months is the point of no return. If you are in this state it is immediately necessary to lay off your employees and give them severance, pay down your obligations, and use your remaining cash for shutdown costs. If you don't do this and instead end up with zero cash and outstanding payroll, tax or other obligations, things will get Very Bad." [1]
Convoy raised $1.1b including a $260mm Series E almost exactly a year ago.
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3Z-advice-for-companies-...
If you want to be coddled and showered with benefits, go join a Fortune 500. Startups are not for you.
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1. the entire ecomm supply chain got way ahead of their skis during the pandemic thinking boom times would never end
2. no matter how good your software is, supply chain is cutthroat — a motivated low-tech salesperson can always undercut you
3. margins are razor thin, so if you're subsidizing prices with VC money to buy growth you can easily rug yourself
4. when the storm comes to supply chain, the ones who stay alive are those with the biggest balance sheet and diversified business (e.g. Amazon)
Nothing else matters beyond that and the price. And it's entirely fungible - nobody cares if it's UPS or FedEx or some random truck that delivers stuff to Walmart or whatever.
The only way they had a chance was getting their APIs so ingrained in companies they couldn't switch, and companies are rightly suspicious of that.
The company is shutting down. I'd bet you a lot of money nobody gets anything.
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Even Elon Musk famously claims that Tesla got dangerously low at times.
I've been through two acquisitions that could have gone this way. (But didn't.) It's really "par for the course" in the startup world.
The Freight business is collapsing after an unrealistic high during the pandemic. Since April 2022, revenue per load has decreased to about 70%, this means less ways to generate a profit under the same headcount.
We also saw a decrease in volume as companies overstocked and consumer spending has shrunk to less than 50% of what it used to be. Just add it all up and you see why so many companies are collapsing, carriers and brokers alike.
Though market.
and you're in a position to be concerned with the accuracy of your numbers, i assume.
CNN Tuesday: "US retail sales rose in September for the sixth-straight month"
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/17/economy/retail-sales-septembe...
... id be interested in your thoughts on the apparent conflict of viewpoint there.
During the pandemic and boom consumer spending was at X ("what it used to be")
Then it dropped a ton, though in recent months it's been increasing month over month. In fact, it's all the way back up to 50% of what it used to be!
But what we saw during the peak was crazy, and some investors and execs thought it would last.
At least in regards to what pertains FTL freight, we saw a drop of tougjly 50% in volumes as consumer spending is down when compared to pandemic height. I am pretry sure there will be a seasonal trend upwards, but no where in the way it was before.
If you are in the industry, you can easily check how much cargo is moving around. Maybe by November-December it will be less than a 50% drop, but expect it to return by kid January-February.
Especially hybrid or PHEV
Part of the reason being that workers have been ordered back to offices, meaning a significant portion of their income is spent on commute and eating out. Crazy how damaging rto is to everything around us.
A bunch of talented employees? Cool, they are all on the market anyway.
A bunch of tiny commodity contracts? Why?
A pile of code? Is it particularly hard to recreate?
Valuations are having a big wake-up call across the industry. While a company can be more than the sum of its parts, VC-backed tech companies have really struggled in industries where unit-economics rule.
> A pile of code? Is it particularly hard to recreate?
I think you are buying time. Yes, code could be written, but would probably take at least a year.
Additionally, money-wise what matters is net, even if something is overpriced, all that matters in the end, can you make more than you've spent.
p.s. thanks for the interesting question to ponder and discuss
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Incumbents are also leveraging decades (or centuries) of investment in land, people, technologies to win in some cases.
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https://www.freightwaves.com/news/freight-brokerage-bubble-b...
Great deep dive into how drastically the freight market has shifted the last 12 months and the likelihood that Convoy will be the first of many more to fall in coming months.
Fascinating explainer of a market I didn’t know much about, especially the terms (covenants) laid out by banks that float the money on shipping accounts receivables.