Founder Interview
How Xeneta Reached 85 Employees and $30M Raised Bringing Freight Rate Transparency to a $200B Industry (Interview with CEO & Co-founder Patrik Berglund)
- Interview Date
- March 19, 2019
- Interviewee
- Patrik BerglundCEO & Co-founder
Company Metrics at Interview Time
Total Funding Raised
$30M
Team Size (2019)
85
CAC Payback Period (2019)
About 15 months
Year Founded
2012
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Patrik Berglund during the interview recorded in March 2019 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Xeneta’s current numbers.
Key Takeaways
- 01Xeneta was founded in 2012 and had raised $30M in total funding as of March 2019.
- 02The team stood at 85 people across Oslo, Hamburg, New York, and several remote locations.
- 03Pricing ran from $20K to $25K a year per customer at the low end up to nearly $400K a year.
- 04Gross revenue churn over the prior twelve months was 10% to 15%, with net churn below 5%.
- 05CAC payback period was approximately 15 months, which Patrik described as something he was not happy with.
- 06Customer acquisition was almost entirely outbound, typically aimed at global heads of supply chain and logistics procurement.
- 07Patrik aimed to reach a position in Q1 2020 where Xeneta could choose whether to raise or scale organically.
- 08The company was burning approximately $300K to $400K per month in cash.
- 09Brands shown publicly on Xeneta's site at the time included Nestle, Unilever, Lenovo, and Electrolux.
- 10Patrik targeted 100% year-over-year growth for 2019, consistent with prior years of near-SaaS-benchmark growth.
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Year Founded | 2012 | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| Total Funding Raised | $30M | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| Team Size (2019) | 85 | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| Oslo Office Headcount (2019) | About 50 | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| Hamburg Office Headcount (2019) | About 15 | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| New York Office Headcount (2019) | About 6 | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| Pricing Per Customer (low end) (2019) | $20K to $25K per year | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| Pricing Per Customer (high end) (2019) | Nearly $400K per year | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| Gross Revenue Churn (past twelve months, as of March 2019) | 10% to 15% | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| Monthly Cash Burn (2019) | $300K to $400K | Founder interview, March 2019 |
| CAC Payback Period (2019) | About 15 months | Founder interview, March 2019 |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue
Patrik did not give a revenue figure. His growth number was a target, not a result: "We're aiming at doubling and doing 100% this year." Of earlier years he said only that Xeneta had done "quite close to the SaaS benchmarks", without putting a number on it.
Customers
Patrik put Xeneta's customer count at a few hundred at the time of the interview. Brands shown publicly on its site included Nestle, Unilever, Lenovo and Electrolux. Early on Xeneta sold to anybody who reached out, without an ideal customer profile, and it later bled out many of the smaller-volume players it should never have targeted.
Team
The team totalled 85 people, with roughly 50 in Oslo, about 15 in Hamburg, and about 6 in New York, plus remote employees in cities including Frankfurt, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Montreal.
Funding and Burn
Xeneta had raised $30M in total funding as of the interview. The company was burning approximately $300K to $400K per month, which Patrik called fine, because he expected Xeneta to be in a position to decide whether to raise again in Q1 2020.
Growth Strategy
Outbound Cold Outreach
Patrik described Xeneta's customer acquisition engine as almost entirely outbound. Its targets were typically global heads of supply chain and global heads of logistics procurement, a group that was hard to find and expensive to acquire: the buyer was usually a consortium of people in Asia, the US and Europe, so Xeneta had to find the champion and then engage all of them.
Enterprise Focus and Ideal Customer Profile
Early on, Xeneta sold to anybody who reached out, from some of the world's biggest financial institutions to renowned consultancies and well-known brands. Patrik said it should not have sold to everybody, because not every buyer had an organization that could use the data from a procurement point of view to extract the value. Churn among qualified customers was very healthy, but Xeneta bled out a lot of smaller-volume players it should never have targeted, and it was also working on a value proposition for more of the long tail.
Expansion Revenue Within Existing Accounts
Patrik identified expansion as a key priority for 2019, noting that customers spend enormous sums on ocean freight relative to what they pay Xeneta. That year Xeneta was launching initiatives to expand much more on its existing user base, with the goal of taking net revenue retention above 100%.
API and Data Access Upsells
Beyond seats, Xeneta did API deals that gave customers more access to its data, which Patrik described as customers "basically buying our assets". Those deals came at a higher price.
Granular Market Intelligence as a Premium Tier
For some high-volume buyers, Patrik said, Xeneta could provide more granular information, potentially aggregating the data per carrier to show how each shipping line's long-term contract rates spread on a lane. A buyer negotiating with its carriers with that intelligence, he said, would have "incredible leverage".
Best Quotes
“Container shipping provides 70% of global trade. It's a $200,000,000,000 industry where they buy and sell the actual transportation, not the cargo value inside, right? But these companies, they buy and sell something that looks like a commodity, but is missing proper transparency of price development, right?”
“Nike can never know what Adidas is paying nor that I'm saying anybody's using the platform, right? But I can show you the spread of the market and the average, and then I can show your own.”
“Well, anything from $20,000, $25,000 a year to almost say $400,000 a year.”
“We're 85 people. All in. All in. So about 50 in Oslo, 50 ish. Then we have offices in Hamburg and New York, smallest team in New York, about six people working on scaling that, 15 or so in Hamburg, but then we also have some people sitting in remote like Frankfurt, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, Montreal, and so forth.”
“Yeah. 10, 15 gross revenue, but then below five net.”
“What I'm happy about in terms of payback period, I don't think I am happy about payback period. What is it today? High customer acquisition cost, I think it's fifteen months or something like that.”
“Not a lot of inside sales. Our entire engine is outbound, right? ... We get very small portions of business inbound. ... It's very difficult to reach them and hit them.”
“No, we're burning more than that. We're burning, I'd say we burn $300K, $400K maybe a month.”
“You got to be patient with people.”
What Happened Next
At the time of this interview in March 2019, Xeneta had raised $30M in total, employed 85 people, and was targeting 100% year-over-year growth with a plan to reach a fundraising decision point by Q1 2020. These figures reflect what Patrik Berglund reported during the conversation and are a point-in-time snapshot. Visit the Xeneta company profile on GetLatka for current metrics and funding history.
View Xeneta’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and Company Overview
- 0:22What Xeneta Does and the Market Opportunity
- 1:42Data Collection and the Chicken-and-Egg Problem
- 2:16Confidentiality and How Benchmarking Works
- 3:06Shipping Container Costs and Trade Lane Pricing
- 6:00Pricing Model and Seat-Based Upsells
- 7:56Founding Story and Background at Kuehne + Nagel
- 9:35Funding, Team Size, and Office Locations
- 11:11Revenue Growth Rate and SaaS Benchmarks
- 11:37Churn, Ideal Customer Profile, and Net Retention
- 14:12CAC Payback Period and Outbound Sales Engine
- 16:32Cash Burn and Path to Fundraising Decision
- 17:53Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions
Introduction and Company Overview
Nathan Latka
00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Patrik Berglund. He's the CEO and cofounder of Oslo based Xeneta, the leading price comparison platform for containerized freight, transforming the shipping and logistics industry with data analytics. He is a logistics and tech enthusiast who possesses a true passion for modernizing business processes related to logistics procurement and the supply chain. Patrik, you're ready to take us to the top?
Patrik Berglund
00:21Yes.
Nathan Latka
00:21Beautiful.
What Xeneta Does and the Market Opportunity
Nathan Latka
00:22Alright. So tell us about this company. And and, this is one of those things which I love because people might call it an unsexy area, which means there's a lot of opportunity. So paint a picture for us. What does this tool actually do?
Patrik Berglund
00:33Well, hey, come on. Container shipping provides 70% of global trade. It's a $200,000,000,000 industry where they buy and sell the actual transportation, not the cargo value inside, right? But these companies, they buy and sell something that looks like a commodity, but is missing proper transparency of price development, right? So imagine you were buying something that prices shifted all the time, up and down. One time you paid 1,000, the other day 3,500. So very volatile, and you
01:07bought a whole lot, you bought for, let's say, dollars 10,000,000 or $100,000,000 and you were always questioning, Do I have a good rate? Do I have a good price? Is this the right spend? This is what companies are facing, whether it's automotive companies, chemical companies, FMCG, whatever industry, they all move their product in these Lego boxes and it influences all of us. And the big question these big spenders have is, is this a justified price? And
01:35the way we come at this is that, Hey, let's just collect everybody's price. And then we aggregate it and they can see how they perform.
Data Collection and the Chicken-and-Egg Problem
Nathan Latka
01:42Yep. So first off, what's the incentive? And by the way, are you a pure play SaaS company? Is it a SaaS model?
Patrik Berglund
01:42Yes.
Nathan Latka
01:42Okay. So wanna get in that second, but first, how can you convince all the people that are doing all the shipping to give you all their data? There must be some incentive structure you've set up.
Patrik Berglund
01:56Yeah. Well, you have the initial chicken and egg problem.
Nathan Latka
01:56Yeah.
Patrik Berglund
01:56Because giving proprietary contract away to a third party like us in the beginning makes no sense. But as soon as you know that this third party have all the other contracts that will make me smart in my negotiations with my suppliers, then that's the incentive.
Confidentiality and How Benchmarking Works
Nathan Latka
02:16I understand that. Again, if you told me, Nathan, I have all your competitors' data, now I need your own, you're basically saying if I give you mine, you'll also give me my competitors'?
Patrik Berglund
02:26No, I don't give you your competitors'. What you're questioning questioning is, is
02:31that $50,000,000 spend competitive? Are they justified? Is it plus market 20% or is it minus market 20%? You don't know. I know because I've collected all the pricing from everybody else so that I've aggregated that and said, Here's the average.
Nathan Latka
02:46Oh, okay. You're giving averages. You're not saying you're cheaper or less than company Y or Z?
Patrik Berglund
02:52Precisely, because that's proprietary confidential information.
Nathan Latka
02:55Got it.
Patrik Berglund
02:56Nike can never know what Adidas is paying nor that I'm saying anybody's using the platform, right? But I can show you the spread of the market and the average, and then I can show your own.
Shipping Container Costs and Trade Lane Pricing
Nathan Latka
03:06Yeah, interesting. Okay, I imagine my audience is very numbers driven. Educate us real quick. I mean, they see these shipping containers, and we're in this trade war, and so this is, like, top of people's minds right now. Like, what what does it cost? I mean, on average, to take one of those shipping containers, give me the size dimensions, like, go from, like, New York City to Paris.
Patrik Berglund
03:24Yeah, that's not a very high density trade.
Nathan Latka
03:28Give me a high trade.
Patrik Berglund
03:29Yeah, let me give you an example. So a 40 foot container is like a semi trailer in terms of volume, so it's a lot of cargo that goes into one of these boxes. One vessel might carry anything from 10,000 to 20,000 of those boxes, so they're massive. Now, for The US, Trans Pacific would be the biggest trade, right? So they would go from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tianjin, or whatever port in Far East into West Coast and
03:52East Coast Of US. So Shanghai to Long Beach would be a very big trade, right? And due to the trade tariffs, spot market rates going skyrocket high because companies want to rush the cargo in before the tariffs comes into play. So capacity gets scarce and moving a box from, let's say, China main ports is one from, let's say, dollars 1,500 to $2,500, $3,000 dollars for one box. And then there's several vessels every week going fully loaded on
04:23that trade, more or less. It could be at some spare capacity and so forth.
Nathan Latka
04:28Do you get volume discounts if I say, Okay, I'm gonna ship 10,000 on the thing, can I get my cost down to like 1,000 per container?
Patrik Berglund
04:36That's what makes this market so interesting from my point of view, right? Because let's say Walmart moves a million boxes here, just to give you some numbers, right? While Target moves 250,000, who knows, right? They have different procurement power. Now, the cool thing about this is that you can find a big volume company that expects to have the best rates in the market to have a mediocre price because they went to market at a point of
05:01time when the market was high, and this smaller guy nailed it and went to market when the market was down. So it's sort of non comparable because of the volatility of the market, and this is what makes it consistently relevant to have this data available for these businesses.
Nathan Latka
05:17Interesting. This is almost like Uber, right? But you're getting fares updated real time based off supply demand.
Patrik Berglund
05:25Well, not fully because this is really where it becomes different. I'm not offering the actual booking or the actual trip.
Nathan Latka
05:35Just the data.
Patrik Berglund
05:36Just the data from a procurement point of view, because you got to understand the cargo doesn't go from port to port, it goes from door to door.
Nathan Latka
05:36Yeah.
Patrik Berglund
05:36Putting that together is like a 16 stakeholder on average orchestration in order to have the cargo moving. I'm just saying there's a very volatile component on the deep sea here in the middle that we provide pricing transparency on.
Pricing Model and Seat-Based Upsells
Nathan Latka
06:00Got it. Okay, let's dive into your model here. I want get more of your story, Patrik. I get the product now, I get the market, it makes perfect sense to me. What do people pay you for this? Again, we won't say yes or no in terms of if Nike is a customer of yours, but let's say as an example, they are, what would a company like Nike pay you?
Patrik Berglund
06:14Well, anything
06:17from $20,000, $25,000 a year to almost say $400,000 a year.
Nathan Latka
06:24And why would someone be on the cheap side of that versus the expensive side? What do you price against?
Patrik Berglund
06:28So different products, different market intel, and the amount of users, amount of seats, right?
Nathan Latka
06:34Okay. So I'm really interested in the data based upselling. So number of seats is one of them. Are there any other kind of number based things like number of data points you're giving them or things like that?
Patrik Berglund
06:46Yeah, so we can provide more granular information and insights that relatively speaking are more valuable for some of the high volume buyers.
Nathan Latka
06:57An example is-
Patrik Berglund
06:59Let's say that you want to look at the market average development between Sean and Pamperi, that's fine. But I could also potentially aggregate all the data per carrier, saying that this shipping line has this spread between A to B, whereas this other shipping line has this spread in their long term contracts. And imagine if you buy for $200,000,000 a year sitting with that intel while sitting and negotiating on the other side of the table with your
07:25suppliers, you have incredible leverage because you know how they perform relative to their competition, right?
Nathan Latka
07:32Yeah, and you know the season where you get better prices is the fall, so you'll wait to negotiate until the fall when you know you have leverage or something like that.
Patrik Berglund
07:40Yes, for instance. Now there's also other things. We do API deals and stuff like that where we can offer them more access to our data, which they're basically buying our assets if you set up an API, right? So that comes at a higher price ticket as well.
Founding Story and Background at Kuehne + Nagel
Nathan Latka
07:56Okay, put this on a timeline for me. When did you launch? What year?
Patrik Berglund
08:01Launched in 2012, I'd say.
Nathan Latka
08:05Okay, 2012. And then from 2012 to today, how many customers have you scaled to?
Patrik Berglund
08:10A few 100.
Nathan Latka
08:11Okay. Couple of... Can we say north of 200, but South of five?
Patrik Berglund
08:14Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Latka
08:15Okay. Good. And how did... I mean, where was your head in 2012? I mean, what what possesses a guy like you to go, you know what? I wanna go try and get 16 people from door out to door or door in to door out to all agree and get the data and jump in. What were you doing?
Patrik Berglund
08:28I used to work for a freight forwarding business called Kuehne + Nagel. You're probably more familiar with UPS or FedEx.
Nathan Latka
08:28Sure.
Patrik Berglund
08:28Kuehne + Nagel has 70,000 people employed and they're the world's market leader when it comes to ocean freight shipping. It's a massive company, and one of the things that annoyed me is that I kept on selling to my clients at very different prices all the time, and they always ask me, is this a good price? How do
08:54you justify your price? And, you know, think about other commodities, coal, grains, soybeans, coffee beans, gold, silver, electricity, you'll find indices shows you the price development, and you can then relatively say that, Here's my price and this is the market. This industry had no transparency, and that's why I'm so flabbergasted. As I mentioned, 70% of global trade, and it's $200,000,000,000 worth plus minus that they buy and sell for every year without any proper transparency. And that's
09:24what we really wanted to solve initially.
Nathan Latka
09:26Yep. And coming to the industry, that's very easy to see, I think, but it's a massive chicken and egg problem that you're dealing with for the first few years.
Funding, Team Size, and Office Locations
Nathan Latka
09:35Patrik, have you bootstrapped the company or raised?
Patrik Berglund
09:38We raised $30,000,000 up until now, and
09:43probably gonna need some more down the line.
Nathan Latka
09:45What is the next right amount for you to raise, would you say?
Patrik Berglund
09:48Oh, it really depends on how the company develops and how the market develops. Those go sort of hand in hand, right? Is it right for taking the way it looks like now? Did we get the right traction? But next probably would be around probably twenty, dollars thirty million.
Nathan Latka
10:05And what would you try and aim at in terms of like a pre money value? You're talking like $80, $90, $100,000,000, something like that?
Patrik Berglund
10:11On the next round should be north of a 100.
Nathan Latka
10:15Okay. Want to get north of... You think you feel good about getting north of a 100,000,000 pre money value?
Patrik Berglund
10:20Yeah. If the company is growing quickly enough from a proper revenue base, then yes, that shouldn't be.
Nathan Latka
10:26And you think this is like a Q4 kind of thing or a Q1 twenty twenty?
Patrik Berglund
10:30I think for the first time ever, we're probably gonna be in that situation Q1 twenty twenty where we can choose whether to raise or whether to, you know, scale organically.
Nathan Latka
10:38Yeah. No. That's that's obviously a good position to be in. Help me understand a little bit more. So raise $30,000,000. What's the team size today? How many people?
Patrik Berglund
10:46We're 85 people. All in. All in. So about 50 in Oslo, 50 ish. Then we have offices in Hamburg and New York, smallest team in New York, about six people working on scaling that,
11:0215 or so in Hamburg, but then we also have some people sitting in remote like Frankfurt, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, Montreal, and so forth.
Nathan Latka
11:02Very good,
Revenue Growth Rate and SaaS Benchmarks
Nathan Latka
11:11and you mentioned that his team has been able to drive healthy revenue growth. Mean, you still able to do 100% year over year, or where are you today, would you say?
Patrik Berglund
11:19We're aiming at doubling and doing 100% this year.
Nathan Latka
11:22Did you do that historically from 2018 to 2019?
Patrik Berglund
11:25Yeah, we've done quite close to the SaaS benchmarks numbers of what are
Nathan Latka
11:323x, talking 3x, 2x, 2x, 2x?
Patrik Berglund
11:35Quite close to that.
Nathan Latka
11:36That's helpful.
Churn, Ideal Customer Profile, and Net Retention
Nathan Latka
11:37That's good. Fair enough. All right, talk to me here. Churn can kill a SaaS company, right? So how do you think about churn and where are you at today?
Patrik Berglund
11:45Well, yeah, this is what we learned as well. In the beginning, we sold to everybody.
11:51Yeah, and it's not an an ideal customer profile even, right? So we sold to anybody who reached out. Have deals with financial institutions, some of the biggest ones in the world, have some of the most renowned consultancy businesses, and you can see some of the brands that are public like Nestle, Unilever, Lenovo, so Electrolux and so forth on our site. So we work with a lot of brands that are well known, but we shouldn't have sold
12:14to everybody because not everybody has an organization that allows you to leverage this kind of data from a procurement point of view to extract the value.
Nathan Latka
12:14Yeah.
Patrik Berglund
12:14So, what we see now is that we have very healthy churn numbers on what's supposed to be qualified good customers, but we bled out a lot of these smaller volume players that we should never have targeted with our initial value proposition. We're also developing value proposition networks for more of
12:40the long tail.
Nathan Latka
12:43Yeah, by the way, that's fine. That's why people will measure revenue churn versus logo churn. So revenue churn is better if you're churning out lower ARPU customers. So over the past twelve months, what would you say your gross revenue churn was?
12:56Or a range is fine if you don't know exactly.
Patrik Berglund
12:59Yeah. 10, 15 gross revenue, but then below five net.
Nathan Latka
13:04Okay. So what do mean below five net? Meaning you're adding 10% back in expansion?
Patrik Berglund
13:09Yes.
Nathan Latka
13:09Okay. So your net revenue retention annually is somewhere around 95%.
Patrik Berglund
13:09Right.
Nathan Latka
13:09That's great. God, man, you're so close. How do you get it over a 100?
Patrik Berglund
13:19Yes, we're to do it this year. We're launching initiatives that's going to be so good this year that it will be able to expand much more on our existing user base. These companies, they buy Ocean Freight for enormous amounts of money, we're there to extract this.
Nathan Latka
13:36I was just going to say that if you said, Nathan, want you to leave my next strategy meeting, I'd walk in the room and say, Guys, we are not allowed to add any more customers. The only way we're driving growth is expansion. I want us to think about how we're driving expansion because you have a price point relative to what they're paying for this stuff is so little.
Patrik Berglund
13:36Yes.
13:52I fully agree. And that message is vividly clear for all of us this year.
Nathan Latka
13:57Yeah. Good. So I get one person on the company. Right?
14:02I'm kidding. I'm kidding, Patrik.
Patrik Berglund
14:04You dropped off, sorry?
Nathan Latka
14:05I was joking. I said good. So I get 1% of the company, right?
Patrik Berglund
14:11You're beautiful.
CAC Payback Period and Outbound Sales Engine
Nathan Latka
14:12No, I'm kidding. All right. Talk to me real quick here. I know we just talked about expansion, but in terms of adding new customers, what are you happy at in terms of payback period right now?
Patrik Berglund
14:24What I'm happy about in terms of payback period, I don't think I am happy about payback period. What is it today? High customer acquisition cost, I think it's fifteen
14:36months or something like that.
Nathan Latka
14:37And you're not happy with that. Why?
Patrik Berglund
14:42Because I think we should be able to pull in more at a cheaper cost, period, full stop. I think we're wasting resources, wasting money as well in how we acquire customers. But I do care more about the evolution of things than actually where we are, same as with churn, which
15:03direction is it developing relative to the initiatives we're putting in place. That is much more important to me than where we are at now, right?
Nathan Latka
15:13Sure. It's trending, payback period is trending in the right direction. Let's say you said earlier, your accounts are, call it, minimum $25,000 ACV. So if you're going to spend $30K for a fifteen month payback to get that $25K in ACV, where are you spending that $30K? Is it inside sales commissions or what?
Patrik Berglund
15:29Not a lot of inside sales. Our entire engine is outbound, right?
Nathan Latka
15:29Okay.
Patrik Berglund
15:29We get very small portions of business inbound. The average, let's say, global head of logistics wouldn't even Google concept that's ours. It's very difficult to reach them and hit them. We've spanned so many of them without even having
Nathan Latka
15:29What's
15:53the title you're targeting? When you search on LinkedIn Navigator, what's the title?
Patrik Berglund
15:57Yeah, that typically would be global head of supply chain, global head of logistics procurement, stuff like that. It's a nice target group to go at, but it's very difficult to find the right ones. And usually it's a consortium of multiple people in multiple locations like Asia, US, and Europe doing a collective initiative, right? So that is also why it's expensive to acquire them because you've got to find the champion and then you've to get engaged with
16:26all of them. And usually they have a global consortium once or twice That's a where you have your opportunity, right?
Cash Burn and Path to Fundraising Decision
Nathan Latka
16:32Yep, to strike. Very good. Last question here on aggressiveness, right? So you obviously raised a bunch of capital. I assume you're burning cash, right, to drive growth?
Patrik Berglund
16:40Yes.
Nathan Latka
16:41I was gonna say, a CEO, how aggressive are you being with that? Mean, are you talking like negative, like $100K a month in terms of net burn or where are you at?
Patrik Berglund
16:50No, we're burning more than that. We're burning, I'd say we burn $300K, $400K maybe a month.
Nathan Latka
16:56And in your opinion, is that kind of good or bad?
Patrik Berglund
16:59It's fine, it's fine. What I care about is like, what's the end of the lifeline sort of looking like? As I think we'll be in a position to decide whether to raise or not when we go out to Q1 2020, then I think it's in a healthy direction on the burn as well,
Nathan Latka
17:16And just to round all this stuff out, right? So $25,000 minimum ACVs and call it north of 200 customers. That means you guys are doing north of kind of $410,000 per month right now at this point, right?
Patrik Berglund
17:28Repeat that.
Nathan Latka
17:28Yeah, no problem. You said earlier you had a couple 100 customers, 200 at a minimum and you said earlier also your minimum ACV was $25,000 so 200 times $25,000 would mean you're doing about $416,000 per month or a $5,000,000 run rate.
Patrik Berglund
17:43Yeah. You're quite quite close.
Nathan Latka
17:45Okay. Right around there and that means about a year ago you're about 2,500,000 run rate?
Patrik Berglund
17:49Doing a bit more just to be honest.
Nathan Latka
17:51Okay.
Patrik Berglund
17:52And you're not too far off.
Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions
Nathan Latka
17:53Okay. Very good. Well, by by the way, it's always good if my estimates a little lower because then when people call you, you say actually, we're doing more than what I said on Nathan's podcast. Right? So that's good. Alright. Let's wrap up, Patrik, with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Patrik Berglund
18:07At the moment, I'd say The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Nathan Latka
18:11Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Patrik Berglund
18:14Several, but I'd say actually lately have leaned to some of my industry peers.
Nathan Latka
18:14Name one?
Patrik Berglund
18:14Yeah, well, my former boss Inverud is absolutely exceptional in his thinking about the industry and how to deal
Nathan Latka
18:14He's with CEO of which company?
Patrik Berglund
18:14Well, that's actually true. He's the global head of air freight for Kuehne + Nagel.
Nathan Latka
18:14Okay.
Patrik Berglund
18:14Yeah.
Nathan Latka
18:38Okay. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your company?
Patrik Berglund
18:46InsightSquared maybe, but it's... Yeah.
Nathan Latka
18:49Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?
Patrik Berglund
18:51Sorry?
Nathan Latka
18:52How many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Patrik Berglund
18:56Five to seven.
Nathan Latka
18:57Okay. And what's your situation, Patrik? Married, single kiddos?
Patrik Berglund
19:00Married, two kids, And three
Nathan Latka
19:02how old are you?
Patrik Berglund
19:04I'm 37.
Nathan Latka
19:05Last question. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew?
Patrik Berglund
19:09You
19:11got to be patient with people.
Nathan Latka
19:14Guys, be patient with people. Again, launched Xeneta back in 2012. It was now serving north of 200 customers, doing north of $5,000,000 in ARR. They help bring transparency to shipping rates, which drastically go up and down a ton ranging from going from China to California might be between $1,500 and $3,000 per 40 foot shipping container, but that again changes by season. He's bringing transparency up to the markets people can make smarter decisions. They're putting hundreds of
19:41millions of dollars through this channel each year, so it makes a lot of sense. Burning call it 400,000 per month in cash, 30,000,000 raised, team of 85 in Oslo, New York and remote locations, 95% net revenue retention, hoping to get that over a 100% with some expansion stuff this year, fifteen month payback period as they look to continue to scale. Patrik, thank you for taking us to the top.
Patrik Berglund
20:00Thanks a lot, Adrian. I appreciate that. Very good summary.