How Freightos CEO Zvi Schreiber grew to $15.4M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is v schreiber he's the founder and ceo of freitas freitas is the digital platform of the booking platform for the half trillion dollar international freight industry the company connects airlines ocean miners freight boarders manufacturers and retailers to make international shipping digital and smooth previously he was the ceo of light tech fired by ge and founder and ceo of unicorn acquired by ibm and other tech startups he's spoken widely and written many articles including many patents as a phd in computer sciences the author of fizz which tells the history of physics as a novel soon to be published money going out of style and there's soon to be published money going out of style v you're ready to take to the top let's go patents books great logistics you do everything huh yeah like i always uh say i just cut you know just have a problem sitting still so so i do stuff yeah yeah well hey this is great listen quick quick update for folks that may have missed our first interview which is back i think in 2018 um help people understand can you give a real life example you know there is a uh there's an e-commerce brand in new york that sources a thousand shoes per month from china where do you fit into their ecosystem yeah so so we're a platform that connects all the players in international freight so and there's two main layers actually so if you're an importer you're importing some stuff from china then you need you need to arrange shipping uh and typically you'd source that from a freight forwarder freight forward as like a like a travel agent for for cargo right um and so but in the past and even today most times that would be done offline you'd phone them up you'd email them you'd get an answer after two days so we provide a modern you know website where you can get prices from multiple freight forwarders instantly choose and book online so it's bringing you know in passenger travel we've had this for 25 years but we're bringing the same convenience the same digitalization to shipping to allow the allow the importers and the exporters to transparently choose and book freight forwarding now there's another layer once you book with the freight forwarder um they need to book with the airline with the ocean liner as well as customs brokerage and trucking and trains and all of that but the main leg would be either ocean or air for for international and so we we also provide uh we have um the second part of our company is called web cargo and that will connect like web web cargo yeah web cargo it's a company we acquired five years ago now uh it's a you know important part of our business and that will connect the freight forwarders to the airlines and the ocean liners and in particular where we're seeing a lot of growth that's connecting the freight forwarders to the airlines believe it or not until a couple of years ago that didn't happen cargo was always booked on airlines manually till very recently but we've been able to digitalize that and that is growing super fast it's grown like a thousand percent in the last year so it's been a very very exciting ride web cargo okay great and what you make that acquisition in uh 2016. you know it's coming up to five years yeah it was a great company based in barcelona spain founded out of founded by two guys manila and enrique out of their college dorm about 12 years ago that built it up purely organically um to the point where they had about a thousand freight forwarders using their software now since we merged it's at least 2000 and um you know with our backing we've been able to transition that from being just a software business to being a real transactional platform which is growing very very fast so that's that's been a fun ride so we can't obviously skip over the last year and a half kobud was sort of introducing when it first hit what was going through your head what was happening inside at fredo's well it was yeah it was quite a roller coaster um as it's hard to remember now but in april you know this march april of last year suddenly became clear that covert was a big deal and things happened very quickly china shut its borders after chinese new year the factories didn't come back there was nothing shipping out of china and china was half of our business you know um and then the airlines worldwide got grounded so there was virtually no air cargo uh all of that happened very quickly it was a scary time we actually went through the sad process of downsizing our team a bit because we didn't know what was going to happen um having said that how many employees were you and then how did you have to let go unfortunately we went down at the time from about um roughly 240 to 200. okay um so it wasn't a huge proportion of the team but it's always very sad when you have to do that we lost some good people but we've actually now bigger than 240 and in fact in a couple of cases the same people came back and worked with us again which is great um so yeah so that was the flip side you know by the time august came around last year um retail people started shopping just as much as before in fact more than before albeit more e-commerce and less um you know high street obviously less you know uh malls but so that's good for us e-commerce is a good sector for us so um suddenly shipping volumes were actually up and breaking records and that's continued till today i mean shipping shipping is breaking new records of volumes and prices as we speak uh we track that we also provide the data feed for daily shipping prices it's called the fbx index and that's been quoted a lot in the press at the moment because the those prices are up 200 and depending on the routes 250 or more year on year um so funnily enough um as um as things recovered this has actually been a great time for shipping and a great time for our business help me understand this real quick so on fbx.freightos.com right now it says current fbx 5926 dollars up nine percent what's that mean um so that is the if you're looking at the headline i'm just pulling it up as well if you're looking at the headline figure yeah that is the average price across all trade lanes um the average price for shipping a 40-foot container on any long haul so it could be china to america china to uh europe transatlantic and then we break it down by trade lanes but that's just the average price um you know worldwide for for shipping a 44 container which is the most common size uh to give you an idea a year ago that was a thousand three hundred dollars um so so that's like triples um more than tripled i'm trying to go back to pre-cover the first thing go back in your chart is june 2019 which is 13 17. um which i guess that was pre-coded right i guess that was yeah it wasn't yeah yeah um exactly so so even kobe didn't really make a blip in these prices when i look at the 2020 time period on here they sort of fluctuate between 1400 and sort of 2200 what's driven the massive increase in in the cost of this you know really in the last six months january 2021 to the day well first of all to be fair that that's more than a blip you know going up from 1400 to 200 is in itself a very nice increase of almost 50 percent so so covid um you know the second half of lost you did have a positive impact it did drive prices up uh but as you say not nearly as dramatically as we've had in the last half year it's interesting there's been a combination of factors first of all retail remains strong even as people spend less money on restaurants and services they're spending more money on goods so retail remains strong and then you've had these these various events you had the sewers canal blockage that created a lot of stress on a system which was already at full capacity uh just in the last couple of weeks you've had a major covert outbreak at the yantean port in south china uh 25 of the goods that shipped from china to the us ship out of yantian and that port is down its capacity is down 70 because there was an outbreak of cobit and staff got sent home and and there's a lot of ripple effects because the whole the ships were full anyway and then you get the sewers canal uh blockage you get your anti-gan outbreak um and then the ripple effects because there are something like 70 ships roughly anchored outside to come into port uh that means that you've got thousands of i mean tens of thousands of containers which are out of circulation so now there's a shortage of physical containers there the metal boxes um so the whole system is very um full and then when you have more disruptions um they just can't recover and the prices skyrocket and and as you're seeing uh fbx.com is is really where the industry tracks all of that price because we have more data than anyone else about what's happening in the pricing and this will impact uh just to be clear to your listeners this is a big increase big enough that it will impact the the price of goods you know on the shelf this summer i was going to say is this a leading indicator of what we're going to see with inflation and price increases and decrease in purchasing power i mean would you argue this is the leading indicator of that yes it is yeah this is definitely a factor of inflation normally you know on average um shipping is about five percent of the price of imported good when you buy a product in the shop most of them are imported and on average uh shipping is about five percent now of course if you buy a really big cheap toy um then shipping would be a much bigger proportion if you buy an iphone or some jewelry which is small and valuable then the shipping is a smaller proportion so it does depend on the product but if we take an average it's about five percent and therefore if shipping goes up ten twenty percent it doesn't make a big difference but when shipping goes up 200 or more then that's 10 on the price of the good yeah now the retailer may eat some of that they may absorb some of that but yeah you're going to see a significant impact on prices and and likewise this may not last you know there may be a couple more ships coming to come into the uh into use and maybe the prices crash and then you know that can that can make prices cheaper so it could be that some of the inflation we're seeing right now in the us may be transitory related shipping costs which will eventually come back down and how does all impact freight as a business your ability to grow your revenue when you go from 1500 fbx up to what it you know it's almost 6 000 today over the course of 12 months do you guys make more money on that how do you price we do actually yeah because you know our revenue is a percentage of the of the transactions that we bring in um and so when when the prices are higher then uh we're making more revenue having said that i don't like growing that way because yeah the problem with that is it can go both ways right so you get all excited your revenues gone up and up and up and then suddenly the prices crashed back down so i don't like uh growing that way i much prefer the growth that comes from doing more transactions which we're seeing as well um the other thing that helps us is the volatility you know when things are stable then a lot of importers get lazy they do a long-term contract you know they use the same freight forwarder in the same route um and when things are volatile the prices are changing and the sales canal is blocked or or the trump tariffs or things are changing a lot that's good for us because then people need quick data that makes a lot of sense if we take that um total transaction volume number in 2019 pre-covered what did you guys do through your platform we were the total value of our transactions um i don't remember the exact number in 2019 oh yes i do it was about um load let's say i won't give an exact number 20 a little over 20 million and this year should be well over 200 million that's okay and what was it during covert uh curve it was up a bit it was sort of close closer to 30 million okay wow okay so sir i mean serious gains between 2020 and 2021 it's effective things are reopening but also prices are increasing drastically so yeah but but also um to be fair also because there's a real change in the airlines becoming digital so we were getting very little transactions with the airlines directly uh going into a year ago we only had like three airline groups who were able to connect to us digitally and so at the same time as as prices going up like you said volatility going up but there's also been a revolution which we call digital air cargo and that's been a big part of our growth as well i see and is this your number this is your only revenue stream it's percent of sales through your platform are there other ways you monetize so that is the main revenue stream uh but we also provide software as a service tool sas tools to help the freight forwarders we have two thousand two thousand freight forwarders around the world who are using our software to help manage their their buy rates and their sell rates um and we also make a very small amount of revenue from the data itself you just you took a look at nathan at the fbx website so a lot of that we give away for free but some people do pay us for uh more detailed data as well i want to get more into that in a second um but but first so on these 2000 freight forwarders that are using you for buying sell side uh uh instrumentation in the sas product i think last time they came on the show you told me that on average they were paying caught like a grand per month so like twelve thousand dollars sort of acvs is that sort of still in line with what you're seeing today um let me just check yeah no the average um your question was the average revenue per freight forwarder per month on the sas product yeah on the sass product it's less than that it's a few i won't give an exact number but it's several hundred dollars and now it varies it varies uh greatly because you've got some freight forwarders using the free version not paying us anything but driving bookings which is our main business yeah you've got big freight forwarders who pay you know many thousands of dollars if not even tens of thousands of dollars per month so there's a huge range this v if we take that 2 000 times a couple hundred i'll just say i'm putting words in your mouth now but i'll say 300 right that's like 600 grand a month in revenue just on your sas product do you think you can grow just your sas product into more than a million dollars per month in the next 12 months so more than a 10 million run rate it's growing the whole time but the sas is not you know it's really an enabler for us we're not trying to build a big class business um so yes the answer is yes but but also um we don't particularly care um in the sense that our biggest growth by far and our future is as a transactional business yeah i was really happy to agree to come on because when i was looking at your funding history once you're on the vc track you know this you're on the vc track and your last race was back in 2018 and i'm going man if v doesn't come out with an announcement in the next couple months like i hope his cash position is good and i hope we got through covet okay it sounds like you're killing it but how did you manage that many people would look at your funding history and go something's going on here they haven't raised recently what's happening well the sun we don't announce everything that we do but we're well funded so have you have you raised some time over the past two years and you just didn't announce it well if i chose not to announce it i'm not going to tell you but yeah did you use an alternative capital source like debt for example or something besides traditional equity um i'm choosing not to answer that okay one more where you're strongly funded great and so let me go back now as we wrap up to the um the the media business so sas companies today if you can build a media brand my gosh that's arbitrage on cap because everyone comes to you as a source of truth whose idea was it to launch the fbx what year did you launch it and true or false are you able to get customers cheaper than your competitors because everyone comes to you as the trusted source so true first of all yes and believe it or not the traffic because of all the volatility and the prices traffic to the fbx website is growing like 10x or more i think uh just in in the last few weeks even so that's a fantastic way of acquiring customers so so that's very perceptive and that's correct uh we first launched that under a different name before we partnered with the be the baltic exchange uh we launched it about four years ago i think i don't remember the exact date um and the traffic to that side has been growing and uh but but now in the last week it's been such a big issue and and the last few weeks you mentioned inflation so it's been picked up in reuters and wall street journal and you know all the major newspapers are quoting the fbx index which is which is exciting interesting ad up obviously you have all your revenue streams you're bringing back from the employees you had to lay off uncovered which is great it was a great comeback story what do you anticipate you'll grow as a business this year in terms of you know percentage year over year growth um well in terms of um if i look at the gross bookings just a quick calculation so i don't get it wrong uh yeah we should grow 800 in the bookings the 800 percent okay 800 on bookings which you you've been taking for your revenue yeah correct now some of our revenue is growing i'm not going to give you the exact worth of the revenue um but some of the revenue is growing you know absolutely linearly with uh you know growing 800 you know with that 800 other revenue there's parts of the growth which we're not fully monetizing yet so some of those bookings are growing but but we're in growth mode and some of it is monetized so the the growth of the actual net revenue will not be as high as that but it will be very high would you ever go out you know this year and sort of use some of the money you're making from all the stores and go acquire a you know media brand fbx has worked well for you you could double down and go acquire something like freight waves for example would you ever go do that i doubt we'd buy no plans in buying a media brand um but because we're already you know we're already doing well on our own in that but on the platform side you know we have made acquisitions in the past twice so webcargo is the biggest one um and yes we may well do that again we're always keeping an eye out for good good businesses which enhance our transactional business all right z let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book besides your own um yeah i think i think i told you last time i don't think it's changed crossing the chasm old classic yeah it's a really good one jeffrey moore number two is there a ceo you're following or studying [Music] no number three yep no that's okay you don't have to have one number three favorite on the online tool for building kratos favorite online tool well i've got a few um but one which i'm enjoying working with very much at the moment is google data studio and we use domo as well but at the moment i'm finding google google data studio very very powerful for creating business intelligence both internally and for our customers number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i sleep well i'll have to sleep seven hours or so that's great and z minus your situation married single kids uh i am married and i've got kids and grandkids how many kids four kids and my daughter and my daughter has three kids holy mack busy guy okay married how old am i i'm 52. okay happy late birthday thank you what's something you wishing you when you were 20 no i don't know um i think it was fun discovering things for myself i wouldn't have wanted any shortcuts guys there you have it fredo's launched many years ago they survived covert in 2019 they helped process over 20 million dollars of transaction volume through their platform uh in 2020 they saw a slight increase of 30 million now in 2021 on track to break 200 million because they're getting a lot more traction with airline groups the world's opening back up the fbx sort of average rate went from 1500 bucks you know shipped from china to the west coast of the americas up to like six thousand which obviously helps drive spiritual revenue but they have other revenue streams their sas tools used by over 2 000 freight forwarders to manage buy and sell rates they pay several hundred bucks a month for that and he looks to continue to scale really on the back of his media media and data business at fbx.com v thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan it was fun one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sass we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private 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just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is v schreiber he is the founder and ceo of freitas the digital backbone for the trillion dollar international freight industry previously he was ceo at light tech which is acquired by gen founder and ceo of unicorn which is acquired by ibm along with many other successful exits he has a phd in computer science and his author of fizz which tells the history of physics as a novels v you ready to take us to the top yup the history of physics as a novel that sounds like hell well for me for me right for me for you it sounds like this might be great so first of all why write them people are interested in the universe you know they may like it and it sounds like you weren't what does it mean though through a novel lens i mean could a non-technical reader like me that does not have a phd in computer science read it and enjoy it yes if you're interested in science then you don't need any background it's a it's a story about a girl who time travels and has a chats with galileo and newton and einstein so you learn about how uh you know how over the centuries we started to understand the universe in a in a pretty informal way um but you've got to be interested in in the matter but it's it's totally non-technical interesting okay good well no i'm very interested in the matter but i've read i've tried to read some of these very technical books and i go oh my gosh this is very difficult to read i know not very technical although once you know once you get onto relativity and quantum mechanics the concepts are a little bit tricky but there's no formulae nothing at all technically all right for those of uh those folks that missed our first interview back in may of 2017 together what does fredo's do and what's the revenue model how do you make money yeah i mean fredos does a couple of things which are all related to making international shipping just way easier um the model in a way is passenger travel we want to make it just as easy to ship a container from china to the us as it is to book a flight from china to the us so we're all about making a freight air and ocean international freight uh really easy using modern digital techniques and in order to do that we have to do a few things we have to help to get data about rates and capacity from the carriers to the freight forwarders and from the freight borders to the importers and exporters in the end it'll it all funnels through to freightos.com which is a public website a little bit like booking.com or expedia but for international shipping so in the end we give you the modern digital experience there's quite a lot of infrastructure behind that to to actually get the data and the prices and the roots so what is the equivalent of like delta and american air in your world well delta and american air both they both do a lot of cargo um so they are uh they have cargo departments uh you know below the you're familiar with the upper deck where the passenger sip on the lower deck is not only your luggage but also cargo and both of those are companies we have a relationship with of course but the other equivalents of course are um in in ocean musk line and cma cgm and costco uh so so you may not you may not know those companies but they're for ocean there are there are big carriers who you would not be familiar with um and then what typically happens is you typically don't work directly with the delta or american or mask line uh typically you work with a with a freight forwarder who's a bit like a travel agent but they're taking care of the whole door-to-door so that they um move your stuff you know all the way uh companies like did they take a cut is there a middleman is there a middleman tax there they are yes they're a middleman uh they certainly take a cut for arranging the whole thing door store for making sure that the truck connects with the ship or with a plane uh they also typically get it through the u.s customs uh which has become more complicated with all the tariffs that keep changing at the moment so are you putting them out of business are you disintermediating them or they you need them no we're giving them a digital platform um so we're not disintermediating them uh but we're making sure sometimes there's two or three free forwarders involved we make sure that there's um you know no more than you need and in certain cases you could work with the carrier directly but in most cases we're enabling the the freight forwarders uh some company i mean some the companies you know you know fedex and ups also have freight forwarding divisions and then other big companies you may not have heard may not have heard of like um c.h robinson and hellman and panalpina these are very big freak orders yeah when you and your executive team sit down at the end of the year what's like the big value usage based metric you track is it kind of tonnage shipped number of freight forwarders that put at least a dollar through your platform like what is the metric yeah so it's it's sort of both it's actual dollars through our platform how much was spent on our um on our platform but but that also sort of depends on prices which we can't control so as you correctly guess we look at tonnage for air freight and number of containers for ocean freight tonnage for air freight a number of containers uh for ocean and is the reason that you measure it based off uh the tonnage for air but number of containers for ocean is because the number of containers are standardized it's always the same tonnage per container uh well just because that's the way the ocean industry works there these standardized containers which you see you know going up and down the highways 20 foot or 40 foot um so it's very easy to count uh air freight doesn't go in a standard container it goes in loose in most cases so we measure it in kilos or tons i see interesting okay so the company was founded in 2012. do you know the information the the life of the company what were those metrics tonnage of air freight number of containers production how much have gone through your platform well fundamentally enough we only started our platform in 2016. and the reason for that is that before yeah but the reason is you know actually we mentioned sort of expedia so if you think about the history when expedia launched uh i think around 97 um the data for air travel was all collected by companies like sabre and amadeus had been around for decades actually and so they had all the the backbone of the data and they could start marketing in our industry there was no such thing so we had to spend the first four years building the equivalent of sabre and amadeus getting all the data from the freight forwarders the the data the rules the uh in order to have automated pricing because if you call up a freight forwarder you do not get a price instantly you get it after two or three days so we had to create that infrastructure first in a way we had to be like a saber or an amadeus who collects all the data why people give it to you early on before you had scale what leverage did you have to convince them to give you the data so we actually provide them you know sas software as a service to help them automate their own pricing so these big companies like hellman and palapina ch robbins and they're using our technology in-house so you call them up to get a price quote it actually comes back powered by freightos so so they're using our technology in-house to make their price quoting much more efficient um and then secondarily that then enables them to sell online both on their own websites if they have but but especially on freightos.com yep okay that makes sense so 2012 to 2016 so you were doing revenue and that that wasn't all pre-revenue you were doing revenue on the sas model we're doing revenue and that sas model is continuing to grow um and then since 2016 we have the actual the public platform which is like a marketplace where you can uh where you can compare we don't we don't publish um the actual volumes on that but it's growing very rapidly it's growing you know at least 100 a year if not more on all of the things total dollars for the platform air freight tonnage and number of ocean containers yes typically i mean this year the prices have been a bit soft so the for example in air the tonnage has grown more than the than the dollars but yes they're all growing rapidly yeah that's interesting can just because i'm totally uneducated in the space and i don't know what's good or bad i don't know if a hundred tons or 100 you know billion tons is is big or small i mean can you give me a general range be as big as you want uh well i can tell you that the world market i was just looking at that today the world market is 30 million tons a year in air or ocean yeah and in ocean i forget how much it is but it's um tens of millions of containers okay um and yeah i'm not going to say how much we do but i will say that we're the biggest online so we do more we're still a tiny proportion of the world market um but we do more on the web than anyone else based up by some measure yeah i mean look your penetration of what you think the total market value is is obviously you know the smaller it is that you know you could argue the larger area and room you have for growth i mean so would you quantify yourself and say you're you right now less than five percent of the market you still have 95 percent that you can go tackle oh yeah i can tell you that we're less than one percent of the market oh good okay good um and but that's not because someone else is bigger that's because 99 is still done offline um there's another area behind the scenes i mentioned that we're also doing the the the rate management and so in there in air we're particularly strong we were just getting i just got an update today actually so air freight forwarders 30 percent of the world market is using our platform so we have an amazing market share there uh very few companies of 30 of the world market thirty percent of the freight forwarders that do everything the air freight forwarders yeah yeah exactly the freight forwarders who do aero using um web cargo either the web cargo is the name of our platform for freight forwarders how many total do do the whole market like how many are there total um so there are about ten thousand air freight forwarders there's about a hundred thousand fruit floaters in total um and we we don't have that we don't have three thousand we have about a thousand five hundred but we have most of the big ones so although it may sound like we have 15 of the market by volume we have 30 percent okay volume 30 interesting that's really good okay so 1500 meaningful ones that you have uh and and you said they make up the uh the majority the 30 of the market you mentioned the air freight market was 30 tons per year so you're basically 30 million tons so you're basically saying you're basically saying those 1500 freight forward air freight forwarders that use you represent about 10 million in tons per year in the air yeah oh interest okay i mean that's that's pretty significant market share now what one they want to understand about kind of what you're building because um this is a business model right i'm gonna turn away from your industry and more into sas in general but marketplace plus sas there's a lot of companies really killing it doing this you started it sounds like with sas and use it as leverage to launch a marketplace model before i ask more questions here i'd like to understand the significance of each so you know to the extent you can in the last 12 months what percent of your total revenue would you attribute to the sas model versus the marketplace cut you take right and by the way those are closely related you know the reason you're quite right this combination of a sas enabled marketplace is a model which people are pursuing and they're doing that because it helps to solve the whole chicken and egg uh problem of the marketplace so in our case uh and you referenced this before uh correctly nathan you know by getting by sending sas to the sellers on the marketplace we were able to engage with the sellers even before we had liquidity in the marketplace yeah the buyers the buy side the sell side actually the freight forwarders are typically selling um so in our case a lot of a lot of companies use this strategy to engage the buy side but we actually used it uh sas to engage the sell side and have the freight forwarders ready to sell on our marketplace when we launched it um in terms of revenue so sas is still in well what we do in marketplace is we don't we have our gross bookings or our gmv uh we don't book that as revenue we back up book only the net so if you look at the gross then the marketplace is a lot bigger you know just in there that sas is still bigger than marketplace in terms of our net revenue okay i mean why are we talking like sas is 80 percent and net revenue on marketplace is 20 uh yeah a little more than 20 now okay fair enough yeah okay 25 net uh that's interesting and you sorry which one do you say is growing faster the marketplace is growing faster it's interesting you know selling staff to freight forwarders is a great business it's growing at a good clip um but we already have significant market share especially in air so it gets once you're 30 of the of the world market it gets a little harder to grow fast um and you know 200 growth will have got the whole world market so we're starting to um starting to slow down a little there just because we're so big already uh marketplace like i said with less than one percent of the world market so uh that's growing very rapidly have you passed a billion dollars in gmb through your platform yet yeah you're twisting my arm here and not going to go into any more specifics actually well i'm curious when you you gave me earlier numbers of containers and numbers of things i'm curious you can give me the total what you think the total market is right so on the 30 million tons of the year that go through the air and the 10k or sorry and the other the 20 million containers that go through oceans what's the total gmv on that as a market the total gmv of the wild market yes so let's just be specific number of containers for ocean is 20 million containers right uh annually oh that was a rough number i need to look that up and there i have the number at the top of my head order magnitude tens of millions yeah well the the total market is about um at the carrier level um both air and ocean are each at about 100 billion order of magnitude and then when you add the freight forwarders they resell it then that gives you another 300 billion or so yeah so just to be the total sorry let me make sure i understand that so you you think there's about 400 billion in other words if you processed 100 of air freight right shipping you think that's a 400 billion dollar gmv business no air on its own is about order of magnitude 100 billion to be more accurate it's probably 70 to 80 billion order of magnitude ocean is a little bigger but maybe 120 billion um these numbers are not 100 accurate because there are different estimates but but they're definitely order of magnitude yeah well you're you're playing direct carry yeah go ahead sorry go ahead direct carriers 80. direct carriers air and ocean together would be about 200 billion and then the freight forwarders who resell that at about 300 billion yep okay yeah interesting well um and then again are you is it as simple as you taking a percent of gm3 through your platform or is that your marketplace model different than that it is yeah we we have slightly distinguished we take a slightly higher percentage for um ocean for air slightly lower percentage for air for ocean so there's a little bit of nuances but basically it's a percentage uh of the gmv yeah now i'm not going to push here because i'm certain it differs based off volume and who your partner is but just so i can get some kind of range is it between zero and ten percent or yeah well that i can tell you actually we're quite open about percentages okay just a little more discreet about the total volumes um so we take uh it basically comes to from the sellers we take two percent in ocean and four percent in air okay and from the buyers we take three percent mainly to cover the financial fee so the credit or the credit card three percent on ocean and air okay got it because that's not really to do with error ocean that's really to do that's not the cost of sale that's really the financial cost that costs the credit card that covers credit card processing or credit if they if they want to pay later so so on one cargo what's by the way what's it cost to ship one car container from hong kong to la um order of magnitude depending if it's door-to-door or not so let's say two thousand dollars is an average okay so two thousand dollars with an average order on our marketplace so if you set up that two thousand dollars what you're saying is you'll take because it's ocean you'll take about two percent right so that is uh four four uh forty dollars on the seller side and then you'll take three percent right about sixty dollars on the buy side so you're making essentially 100 bucks per cargo container shipped correct interesting okay very cool um last few questions i got deep into this and then missed some other macro stuff the last time you were on you said you raised about 50 million bucks still at 50 or have you raised more now we've raised more we've raised 95 million in total now jesus that's a lot of dilution why'd you have to raise so much well we're going after a big big market here so uh you know we have people around the world we have customers around the world it's a big market so i'm not worried about dilution so much i want to make sure that we're capturing the you know capturing the industry yep team size today how many people uh we're um creeping up on 300 okay how many engineers um about yeah the best part of half of that maybe a hundred and twenty hundred and thirty okay and any quota carrying sales reps if so how many uh we do have yes um we have you know both on the buy side on the south side um order of magnitude um 15 15. okay so not actually not a ton relative to to what i imagine your scale is um okay good so fifteen folks and then look at this there's a lot of digital marketing as well right it's they're backed up by the direct sales um and for the big forwarders we need direct sales but but a lot of our marketing is digital yep and when i if i asked you how many customers do you serve today how would you answer that well we serve a thousand five hundred trade forwarders so like i mentioned earlier we sir and then with the buyers on our marketplaces is thousands uh i don't remember even exactly the number but it's uh quite a few thousand yeah but you the reason i asked it so you consider the freight forwarders your customers um both but yeah technically the freight forwarders are our customers yep you when you when you last came on i'm i'm gonna guess this number one up when you came on back in 2017 you said on average these freight forwarders you had about a thousand back then i think you said and they put about twelve thousand dollars in terms of what they paid you per year on average uh when you add up kind of total volume they put through you has that increased well it's probably decreased because we now have a free offering for freight forwarders so some of them pass nothing yeah um at the top and yes we have more guys who pay us you know six digits we have guys who pay us two three four hundred thousand a year and we have more of those but then we also have more at the lower ends so i'm not sure the average has gone up interesting so just be clear over the past two years the trend has been you have gotten way more value from your top five percent of your customers right in terms of more volume to your platform but you've also opened up top of funnel as well even more with your free tier so there's more people coming in and getting started yeah very good all right zv let's wrap up with a famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh my goodness i haven't uh actually read a book i read sort of you know bits and pieces i've read a book for a long time um i still like the um the classic innovators dilemma yeah you gave crossing the chasm last time yeah and i still like that as well i haven't forgotten many years ago number two is there a ceo you're following or studying no not really number four what's your favorite online tool for building your company what was number three oh sorry no that was number three favorite online tools favorite online tool for building the company yep um well we use uh you know i'm not sure if this is your question we use tools like salesforce.com we use segments um and actually maybe our favorite tool is domo we use domo a lot for business intelligence okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i sleep well seven hours okay and situation married single kids uh married kids and and two grandkids now ooh exciting how many kids yeah four kids four kids two grandkids uh my big daughter had uh baby girls yeah how exciting that's very exciting all right and how old are you i'm 50. 50. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew wow now nothing yeah you know i think it's fun to learn as you go along i wouldn't want to spoil any of the learning experiences for my 20 20 year old stuff guys there you have it from zv working with over 1500 freight forwarders creating an expedia-like experience for uh both air uh and cargo containers uh on on oceans believes a total market there on the air side is called 80 billion in terms of gmv they've got thirty percent right of this market share uh fifteen hundred of those freight forwarders using them but they're the ones that do do it a lot right there's ten thousand total but those fifteen hundred that they've got do it a lot a lot a lot on the ocean side twenty million containers or caught tens of millions of containers uh per year they believe they have less than one percent of the market so lots of room to grow and over 90 million dollars raised to continue to grow this again they make money by on the sas platform 75 of the revenue comes for that about 25 comes from their marketplace but that is growing drastically as they take four percent or two to two to four percent on the seller side three percent on the buyers side on both ocean and air v thank you for taking us to the top thanks nathan these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now