The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
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The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
Ep. 101 - From CIA to Supply Chain: Ryan Joyce's Mission to Secure America's Highways
What happens when you apply CIA intelligence-gathering methods to America's trucking industry?
Ryan Joyce, former intelligence operative turned freight tech entrepreneur, has created something extraordinary with GenLogs—a nationwide network of roadside cameras that's revolutionizing how companies track, validate, and secure freight transportation.
The system is disarmingly simple yet profoundly impactful. Cameras placed along major highways from Pennsylvania to California capture images of every commercial vehicle that passes by.
Advanced AI extracts identifying information in real-time, enabling passive tracking of truck movements across the country without requiring driver participation or specialized equipment.
The results are transformative: missing trailers found in seconds, fraud schemes exposed, and unsafe carriers identified before they can cause accidents.
The statistics are sobering. One insurance provider reported that 43% of their claims now involve fraud or theft, costs that ripple throughout the entire supply chain. GenLogs offers a powerful countermeasure by providing objective validation of carrier identities and movements.
In one compelling example shared during the interview, Joyce described how his team uncovered a carrier that continued operating a truck four hours after being placed out of service for dangerous brake issues—the same violation that had tragically killed Joyce's own grandfather years earlier.
Beyond security, GenLogs provides unprecedented lane intelligence, helping shippers identify qualified carriers they never knew operated on their lanes. This expanded competition drives better rates and service levels. T
he platform even allows users to examine carriers' equipment quality and strap work for flatbeds, offering insights that were previously impossible to obtain without physical inspections.
"GenLogs 2.0" will enhance capabilities from fleet-level to VIN-level data, unlocking even more granular insights about carrier compliance and safety. For shippers concerned about potential liability from carrier violations, this intelligence could prevent the next $100 million lawsuit from a preventable accident.
Ready to transform your transportation visibility? Visit GenLogs.io today to find lost assets (free for up to three recovery attempts) or book a demo to experience this groundbreaking technology firsthand.
Welcome to the Doing Business in Bentonville podcast with the Whiskered Warehouse Warriors Josh Safran and Harvey Williams from Plug and Play. Harvey, how are you today?
Speaker 2:Doing lovely. I'm fired up because my home team, the Dallas Stars, round two of the playoffs. First of all, they had a glorious game seven. Oh my God, it was fantastic. What a time. What a time to be a fan of the Dallas Stars. So I'm feeling good.
Speaker 1:Game one's tomorrow, but, more importantly, forget hockey. Look how good your beard's looking for the Whisker Warehouse Warriors today. And Ryan's about to join us and we didn't even give him the heads up. It doesn't look like he shaved today, so he was kind of in theme with the Whisker Warehouse Warriors version of the podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I have to be man. You got to let it grow for a few days before you get on here.
Speaker 1:Well, you're looking good, my friend, you're looking good. My friend, harvey, can you do the warmest of introductions to Mr Ryan, because you will do it so much better than I would, since you and he are such dear friends for such a long period of time. So I'm going to oh, dear friends for such a long period of time.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to wax poetically. All right, ladies and gentlemen, to our thousands, tens of thousands of fans out there. I am delighted to introduce you're right, I'm sorry, I try to undershoot a little bit Delighted to introduce Ryan Joyce, founder and CEO of Genlogs, probably the fastest growing, definitely the sexiest freight tech startup in the market today. Very delighted to have you on, ryan. Thank you for joining us and welcome to Doing Business in Daytonville.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks for having me today, guys. I wasn't cool enough to flash the W, but uh, maybe someday you'll have me on and I could be one, you can try.
Speaker 2:Yeah, boom, so you're, you're cool, you got to figure it out for all our warriors fans out there. You know, go dabs too, yeah there we go well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's great to be with you guys. Uh, ryan joy, ceo at gem logs, and uh, man, it's been a wild ride the last few years. Uh, known plug and play and the team over there since the beginning, literally. I think you guys were one of the first calls we had when we started what we're doing at Gemlogs. I'm happy to get into a little bit more of the background what we're doing, if that's helpful, but I'll let you guys kind of guide it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd love to know what you're doing, because when Harvey opens up a podcast and says sexy and fast growing like, the audience is sitting there like tell us more, tell us more. So what is so sexy and fast growing about you and your amazing company.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, let me tell you what we're not. We're not just another TMS, we're not another AI agentic, ai kind of just handling a lot of the automations we talk about. A lot of what's going on in this space is all bits and bytes, it's just data or, I guess, software. Genlogs took a little bit of a different approach to trying to tackle a few key issues that are happening in the space, one being visibility, and that's really visibility, so that we can tackle some of the fraud and theft going on in the industry. But then also drive efficiency, drive the ability to push margin, all the above. And so what Genlogs does is we've built a nationwide network of roadside cameras along all major interstates, freight lanes, highways I'm talking coast to coast. We're up in Pennsylvania and New York, all the way down to your California Inland Empire. We're at the Laredo border, we just got installed at the Port of Miami and pretty much everywhere in between.
Speaker 3:We have a team literally that's installing up in the Dakotas this week, and these sensors sit on the sides of roads. Each one of them has three cameras that allows us to collect on the front side and rear of every piece of truck and equipment pairing that goes by. So, whether it's an 18-wheeler, it could be a box truck, it could be anything that's commercial in nature, we are collecting images and then from those images, using AI in real time, to extract out data or identifiers about that truck and equipment pairing, such as the make model. We could get the US Department of Transportation motor carrier numbers, we'll get the equipment type and that's really important as well as any logos and numbers on that equipment, and then we passively monitor how they're moving across our sensors and then we correlate those movements with other third-party data sets. So we will go out and suck up anonymized telematics, connected vehicle data, electronic logging device data and we'll be able to actually build this tapestry of when this truck is seen moving across our own cameras.
Speaker 3:We observe these other identifiers and these data sets moving across those same areas. We can correlate the two as the same truck and then track origin to destination without that truck driver or company needing to do anything. So we get the hey where did they come from, where are they going, what was the equipment type and what, therefore, is that lane? And we're able to even tie that back to the shipper itself to get a really rich understanding of who are the suppliers of certain companies and what are the transportation needs of those companies. But then also, looking at the inverse, well, who's also shipping in the other direction that needs the exact same equipment.
Speaker 3:And hey, could we actually pair this shipper on the, let's say, in Dallas with this shipper in Chicago that have the inverse lanes, to make those backhauls more efficient and to drive the transportation costs down, because you're kind of using those closed networks, could be using four higher carriers, but doing in such a way that could reduce transportation costs overall. So I know that was a mouthful. That's what Genlogs is doing at its core. We've spent millions of dollars, a lot of blood, sweat and tears, to put these cameras coast to coast and then we can get in all the fun use cases from there.
Speaker 1:Well, I have a million questions for you, but the first one is your background is also super interesting and fascinating, right Anytime we get you in a room and we tell people where you are and where you started all this tech from. Can you share that? Is that publicly shareable?
Speaker 3:information. I have received permission to share some details. I spent some time in the US intelligence community. It specifically did time in the Central Intelligence Agency. I was an operations officer there. I was deployed overseas, spent a lot of time in the Middle East and North Africa. I'm an Arabic speaker by trade. My job, day in, day out, was to be out there speaking a foreign language and recruiting the sources in these countries oftentimes penetrations of Al-Qaeda or ISIS to give us information to stop the next 9-11 from happening.
Speaker 3:Now, in doing that, I got really good at not only getting the information, but then we had to validate that what that source was telling us was true, so that we weren't dealing with a double agent. And that is where we took data coming from sensors, satellites or even what we were hearing from other sources, brought that all together. It's called an all-source analysis. We would use that to validate our own sources, and it was just fast forward a decade later.
Speaker 3:And here I found myself in the transportation space where we have this big issue going on now called double brokering or fraud, and it's leading to a lot of theft and it really comes down to someone claiming that they are a truck carrier that has assets or operating on certain lanes, but not real and to date there's been no real way to validate that.
Speaker 3:You're just kind of taking someone at their word or you're looking at their digital footprint and kind of shrugging and saying, all right, I'm going to pray that they're not going to steal what we have on the roads now, and I saw the parallels from what I was doing at CIA and the validation of sources, with now the ability to validate carriers, and it came down from using data coming from satellite sensors or what we're hearing from other sources, that all source intelligence approach. That's what we are leveraging now to apply to the transportation industry domestically to look at hey, what is being claimed digitally? Is it matching what is being observed physically on the roads? And ensuring that those two match in order to tender loads and do so with a high degree of confidence that you're not going to have issues with that fraud or theft.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to ask one more layup of a question and then I give Harvey all the harder questions because to me I'm more layman than Harvey, harvey's more technical than me, and so when I was trying to understand you guys early on, one of the first stories I heard was you were in a meeting with a carrier and again, tell me the truth, or what level of truth the story is, and they're like I can't find this truck. We've been looking for it for forever. And you said give me the license number, give me the truck number. And you pulled it up and you found it within 30 seconds. You were able to tell them where they were and they were like what? They couldn't find this asset for forever and within minutes you knew exactly where it was, where it had been. You must have blown people's minds in that meeting 100%.
Speaker 3:In fact, this happened so early in Genlog's genesis that we only had three of our cameras out there in the roads. Now we were lucky that one of them was on I-81 in Pennsylvania, one of the highest corridor traffic for trucks in the nation, and so, when it was actually a shipper that has their own private fleet, came to us and said, hey, we have this trailer. In fact, here's a list of trailers. We have no idea where they've been. You're telling us that you might be able to track it, prove it. And of course, I'm sitting there thinking, well, we only have three out there in the road. There's no way.
Speaker 3:And I took the very first trailer that was on that list, plugged it in, hit, enter and boom, we got an immediate hit and I was able to turn around within 30 seconds later and say, hey, here's the first trailer. I haven't even searched the others, but we already got a hit. This is the truck that it was attached to the daytime. We had seen the actual images and they were hooked right away. They've been a great customer ever since. We've since expanded to 80 other customers that have had similar issues that are looking for help. Either they're wanting to find their own assets out there in the road that are missing, or ensure that they're working with responsible asset carriers on the roads that can actually run those lanes without causing them problems.
Speaker 1:So super easy for them to catch the ROI immediately with you guys.
Speaker 3:Absolutely A $40,000 trailer that was missing and this was actually a lease trailer for them that was accruing month over month expenses and they were trying to scrambling to find it. That was going to continue for years to come or they're going to have to pay that full $40,000 off. We found it for right away. They recovered it in less than a day.
Speaker 3:We've had some crazy stories like that happen throughout the last year for us where these trailers that have been missing one was missing for six years and we actually had an alert for a few months, because that's the great thing about our system you can actually set alerts for equipment out there. And I had set this alert months ago and it must've been just sitting in a lot somewhere until someone hooked to it went out on the roads and I got that instantaneous alert. Hey, that thing you were looking for three months ago, we just saw it today and I shot it immediately to the asset owner, who then called the carrier that was seen with it and it turns out that it was a total mix up. But look, they found their asset that they never would have otherwise and it was all due to this network that we have since built from three to now. Hundreds boarding on thousands of these sensors everywhere, watching 24-7 to find what's going on in the roads. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:I love the early pitch, the early tagline At least I can remember it, I think it was. We used to track terrorists and now we track trucks. And it's so hard to sell technology as a startup into this industry. It is Buyer behavior is a challenge, and I think that tagline is, and it raised some people's eyebrows and they're like, okay, let's see what Ryan can do here. And it opened up the door to have really, really interesting conversations. And then the value proposition is so compelling, it's so immediate, and people's eyebrows start to climb their forehead and they start to think about the possibilities of what can I do with this data. And then they start to have fun conversations internally about what can I do with my competitor's data. We'll get to that in a second. So if I can summarize one, it's fraud, it's combating theft. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing for law enforcement agencies as well, because I know that that's a free service that you guys are continuing to provide to law enforcement here in the US.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we actually have a team of SAMR, either US Army Intelligence, special Forces or US Intelligence Community. There's three of them that are now working together, that are using our data to now be the action arm of law enforcement. In fact, just the other day we saw out there was posted on social media posts by a law enforcement agency in kind of the Pacific Northwest or Midwest territory. There was a hit and run. Unfortunately that resulted in the death, so you had a homicide here, where a truck had hit this fellow truck driver and then just kept driving and all they had was a really grainy image of the side of this truck and we saw it out there, took that in and looked at what we could tell from the name of this truck we were able to put in. There was a lot of variants of what this truck could have been based on this grainy image, but we got a hit. We were able to then look up and find that this specific truck had been in the area of that hit and run that day and they'd go back in time and piece together where that truck driver had been prior. We turned it over to the law enforcement agency and they said look, we got to be honest, when we posted that grainy picture, we thought there was no way we were ever going to solve this. And for you guys out of the blue to just come in and say, hey, we found it and now we can actually get to the bottom so that a grieving family can figure out and at least have some justice in this. It was just a really neat way that all elements of what Genlogs does come together from our field deployment teams that are out there actually putting these sensors in the road, the sensor deployment teams that are finding where they should go, the engineering team that are making sure that data gets back, and then now the product team that's able to work with our public sector team to provide that support.
Speaker 3:At the end of the day, one thing I've realized is it's not like law enforcement doesn't want to get to the bottom of this fraud and theft out there. It's just often reported to them and they have no evidence to actually do anything about it. And that's now changing with Genlogs is, every week we work with law enforcement to plug in a suspicious motor carrier number or specific truck that has been reported to have been involved in theft and actually track those trucks passively, so that they can use their interdiction methods to actually stop these bad actors on the roads and remove them from the roads that the good actors can flourish. And at the end of the day, that's what it's all about. And I even had some trepidation early on, thinking, hey, what are the truck carriers going to think about this? We're now looking at them all over. Is it going to be Big Brother? And a lot of pushback.
Speaker 3:And we've gone about this in every which way that we can enable privacy up front. So, first of all, we do not collect on any private vehicles out in the road. It has to be a commercial motor vehicle, a truck, box truck, something like that. So that's what we're only collecting. That's the only data we actually collect at the edge and bring back. Beyond that, we treat every truck as if it's autonomous, which means we don't know if there's a driver and we don't care if there's a driver. It's not about the who. It was, about this inanimate object we know as a truck being there to place in time. But when you do that enough, you're able to actually derive.
Speaker 3:Hey, what are some of the issues that are out there on the roads?
Speaker 3:And I was shocked to find that some of the biggest truck carriers out there are now not only our customers but our biggest advocates, because they are seeing that their insurance premiums are going up.
Speaker 3:Whenever these bad actors are either involved in fraud, theft or hit and runs or whatever it might be that's influencing the whole industry. Or you have these visa violations, with sometimes drivers coming in from Canada or Mexico or whatnot that are supposed to be doing a specific drop, coming in and leaving, and then we've now found evidence that some of these drivers are taking intra-US loads and they're doing so at dirt bottom rates and guess what? That's harming American truck drivers out there, and so we're piecing that all together and working with law enforcement to make sure that that doesn't happen. In the end, that benefits those that are actually playing it by the book and doing what they should be. They're keeping their trucks safe and keeping them in service instead of out of service. We're going about legitimate trucking, which is like 99% of truck drivers out there on the road. It's the 1% involved in the fraud and theft or visa violations or out of service violations, hours of service violations, all of that. That's what we'll get to the bottom of, so that the good guys can flourish.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it. I think that's such a cool part of the mission. As you guys are building the company and building momentum in the commercial sector, you're making sure that that's a big part of the company culture internally and that shows, I think, okay. The next topic I want to get to really quick is the idea that you are helping some of your customers a lot of your customers sourcing capacity, because now they understand, hey, I can identify the carriers that operate certain lanes that I didn't know before and you can also connect them with the backhaul. You can connect them with other third-party providers. How are you guys playing that role and how have you seen that take off since you started to really put that in motion?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think one of the things that shocked me early on was that this wasn't a solved problem and I guess, not being in the transportation industry, I just thought that there would be a white pages for any lane out there. Hey, you need to find a carrier going from Dallas to Chicago. Here's every single one. And what I ended up finding out is everyone listening to this podcast already knows is that is in all these fragmented places, it might be posted on a load board on one load board here and another carrier is posting on another load board over there, or it is stuck within one shipper's TMS on this side, but this other shipper that has the inverse lanes has no idea that those carriers are out there. And the biggest issue is probably that the long tail of the market is turning over so much that it's an evergreen problem. In fact, I spoke to a factoring company out the other day that deals with smaller carriers. They said that since COVID, their entire book of business has turned over three times. So you have these carriers coming in, they're spending 12 to 18 months in the industry and then rates are tough out there on the roads, as everyone knows, and then they're going out of business and someone else is coming in, and it's this constant cycle. And so to understand, hey, where is this long tail of the market? Where do they operate? That has been why these large intermediaries, freight brokers, 3pls, have popped up is because they will hire armies of people to carry sales reps, to pick up the phone every day and ask carriers these four basic questions hey, what kind of trucks do you have? Where are your trucks now, what kind of lanes and what's available?
Speaker 3:And so what we just decided is hey, if we can blanket the entire US with our cameras and capture those patterns over time, then you can actually query, hey, who runs reefers from Dallas to Chicago? And we'd be able to tell you every single truck carrier out in the road that does that, and then sort by frequency and then look at the volume that they're actually out there on the roads so that you can really dial in to say, hey, let's maybe go beyond the same 10 carriers that we've invited to our RFP process for the last five years. Who else is out there that might be able to do this for us with having better service and better rates? And then you can go to Genlogs. You can query that lane we're going to give you all the carriers. You can sort by their out-of-service scores. You could sort by their fleet sizes. You could sort by their authority age. You can really dial it in to get exactly what you want. And it's always current and we literally, in our platform, will show you dots where they've been seeing the last 24 hours. So you know this wasn't a carrier that was running this lane six months ago but then, frankly, maybe went out of business and someone else bought their motor carrier number is now about to defraud you. You know that they are not only running that lane as of yesterday, but with one button you can click and actually see all of their trucks that were running that lane yesterday.
Speaker 3:You can examine the equipment. If you're a flatbed carrier, you can literally look at their strap work and say how are they tarping? What's their strap work? Are they the type of carrier we want to invite to this RFP process? If it is boom, you reach out, you bring them in and with more competition you are inevitably going to get better rates and better certs. That's capitalism 101. Before you were just hamstrung by not having the data to know who to invite to that RFP process. Now you can't. And so if you are a CPG company delivering to a Walmart there and you're worried about your on-time in full and hey, you want to know that these carriers are going to be great for OTIF and all the above, well, we're going to have a lot of data about them. It's like the regularity that they're running the lanes. How fast are they going between point A to point B? Are they reckless or are they just going to consistently get your goods there on time? That's the type of that data that we're collecting.
Speaker 1:Ryan, I want to ask you a two-part question and it's going to be long-winded, so bear with me. I've had a chance to see your team at Action. Alex Craley, you have a great team. You're not just a one-man show and you guys are solving so many things. When you're talking to company A, who is the right person? Because there's the asset conversation, there's the trucking and transportation and lanes conversation, so who is the right person to talk to? And then, when I'm in meetings with your team, we're discovering so many new use cases. How are you prioritizing and streamlining the workflow that you guys are working on? Josh?
Speaker 3:it's been one of the I would say problems up front that I thought was going to be a problem. It's actually been a blessing in disguise, because the platform is extremely variable. So trying to figure out is who is the one person that we're going to talk to. That's kind of been an issue, because someone will hear about us on the asset, the trailer management side, and they'll come to us and say we heard you guys are tracking down trailers. We have a list of them. Can we work with you? Absolutely, and we'll often start with whoever comes inbound to us first. And I'll be honest, we have yet to build our outbound sales motion because it's almost all been word of mouth right now and it's been awesome and we're going to change that over time. We just brought in Chris Kobus, came most recently from Project 44, really knows the shipper space and really knows the visibility space. He's going to work wonders for developing that outbound motion.
Speaker 3:But for those coming in, we were getting hit from various folks and we really focused on freight brokerages for a long time and so it was often the carrier sales, vp of carrier sales or sometimes it was to be the VP of customer sales, because we also have the lane data for about a quarter of a million shippers around the US. So we would field, kind of wherever the inbound came from us. We would tailor a demo to that individual. Then we say, look, this is a platform that can do so much more, so can we invite let's say it was the trailer management or the asset management teams and they came to us first we'd say, hey, but next time we deal with you, let's bring in the VP of carrier sales as well. And then we kind of build this consensus based on whoever came to us first. And that's been really exciting. Now, in terms of all the use cases that we can attack, one of the things that we realized for the last year we've been what I will call USDOT or fleet level data. So we're looking at, hey, this Walmart truck just flew by and we're capturing that as a Walmart truck. And then we kind of look at the footprints of Walmart on the roads, or maybe Werner on the roads or whatever it might be. What we are building towards, and we're releasing this in mid-July, is what we are calling GenLogs 2.0. And that is when we drill down from the fleet level to truly the VIN or the truck level data and man that unlocks so much more. And I'll give you a great example.
Speaker 3:The other day there was a lawsuit that was brought against a major US shipper. It was a lawsuit that was dropped because there was a car accident or a truck accident that occurred that killed a handful of people very tragically. But this lawsuit hinges upon the hours of service that the driver was driving at the time and that the potential violations that occurred there. So I went into our data, looked up this shipper and said, well, who else is hauling for them out in the roads? And we found one of the carriers that hauls for them. Because we could search this shipper's logo of their trailers and see every carrier that actually hauls for them in the roads, we just choose one at random and started to dig into this specific carrier. They had seven trucks on the roads. They've had a few violations, but from the fleet level you'd say, hey, they're out there, it doesn't seem to be an issue. Let's move on to the next case. They're good to go and in fact in every vetting and compliance tool out there they literally have green checks as they're validated. They're good to go, there's nothing to miss there.
Speaker 3:But when you actually go from the fleet level down to the truck or bin level. That's where some of those skeletons in the closet start to reveal themselves. So I looked back and saw that one of the trucks had been placed out of service last year and it was placed out of service for an airbrake issue and also for a fuel leak issue. Now I haven't talked about it publicly much, but my grandfather was actually killed by a truck driver who was driving on an out-of-service violation for air brakes.
Speaker 3:This hit really close to home that I was seeing that they had been placed out of service in an inspection. Well, immediately that carrier should be taking that truck to go get service to make sure it's safe before they continue to operate. But when we looked in our data four hours later after this out of service violation, we saw them four hours up the road. Wow, they just kept driving after the inspection. And then we dug in and looked at what mileage are they actually claiming out there? Because they've had some hours of service violations. In fact they had a violation for concealing their hours and attempting to hide their hours of service. So we took a look at this one truck and we watched it in a five-day period go from Pennsylvania to Indiana, to Arizona, to California, turn around and go California to Texas, back to Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2:That's crazy, come on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it drove 4,500 miles, 70 hours within five days. There's just no way to do that without having some violations. Now, at the USDOT level, everything would seem fine, but at the truck level, that shipper now has another ticking time bomb at its hands and another $100 million lawsuit that can be coming down the pike. So what we're revealing in July is really going to now unlock a whole lot of more use cases for shippers. Oh yeah, the good news is it's all on the same platform and there's not like, hey, we're trying to sell you this completely different platform, that it's the same platform we've had. We're just diving down deeper into the data and now unveiling all of this new insights that can help you get ahead of the compliance issues up front. Or, if there's a fraud or theft issue in the back end, we can now help recover that. And in the middle, we can now get a whole lot more targeted about what carriers you're actually inviting your RFP process to ensure that you are protecting yourselves and your freight.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned insurance kind of at the beginning. How are you helping your customers with those conversations? Because for the insurance companies I can imagine a lot of this is going to be a little bit newer for them.
Speaker 3:And trying to get up to speed as well, we took a random sampling of our data the other day and we have this API that essentially merges what Genlogs is seeing out in the roads with what the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is seeing. It's all kind of together, but in terms of how much of that data is actually Genlogs data? It's over 97% of that data, so we are seeing over 30 times the amount of data that FMCSA is seeing on the roads on trucks. We are seeing them in all these different states, which then just gives you a more robust picture. Well, when it comes to insurance, literally for the last 70 years, the only data that insurers have really had to do their underwriting has been the inspection data from the Federal Motor Safety Administration. And then, when it comes to the actual claims, they've kind of been out of luck. There just hasn't been a really round truth that they can rely on to say, hey, was this damage here a week ago Before you claim that it happened? And hey, when the carrier claims that you sideswipe or that you had damage that you are now faulting a shipper for, was that damage actually there prior or are you just trying to pin it on someone else? And the bad apples absolutely have tried to pin it on someone else. What's crazy when it comes to the insurance space?
Speaker 3:I was speaking with an insurer the other day. They told me that 43% of the claims that they process now have to do with fraud or theft. So, as that continues to grow, the claims that they're having to deal with is now fraud and theft, and all of that cost is being passed along to the market writ large, and so what we're really excited about is now being able to put a tool into an insurer's hands that's going to allow them to do better underwriting upfront so that they can really dial in. Let's not apply these premiums to everyone in the market. Let's apply it to those that are more problematic and those that are doing right. Then they can pay lower premiums on the whole. So that's really how this is going to help on the process overall.
Speaker 3:The other thing we're working with insurers is to say, hey, if you have a shipper that is either using Genlogs or requiring their brokers to use Genlogs, then looking at ways to reduce their insurance overall, because it is absolutely unequivocally like we have the data to prove this that when you are using gem logs and using it well, that your risk of fraud and theft drops to near zero and for the little bit that actually could happen, that you now have a tool to actually initiate that recovery process. So in terms of the risk that the insurers are taking on when they are insuring a Gemlogs customer or a shipper that's requiring their brokers to use Gemlogs, then their risk just plummeted and we can actually therefore lower those premiums as well. So that's where we get really excited in the insurance side is to both give the insurance industry better data but also allow them to give rebates or discounts to customers using GenLogs.
Speaker 1:Ryan. So I want to go back to the supplier CPG side, because that will be a broad portion of the audience here. So I am supplier CPG, supply chain person A, and I'm hooked. This sounds super cool. What does a contract look like? Do I get access to the platform and I get everything in the platform? Or are are different layers of data that I get at different price tiers? And will that change with GenLogs 2.0? Walk me through a little bit around how, as a customer, I'd be able to interact with you, at what type of pricing levels.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what I can say is what we've been doing historically. We're kind of reviewing this process now to say, hey, do we break this out to make it frankly more attractive for people to get on a lower pricing tier early on and then, as they want to add in new capabilities, they can come up. Historically, what we've just done is one enterprise price. That's for unlimited seats, unlimited use cases. You get it all, so you can source carriers on lanes, you can investigate and set alerts on certain assets. You could do that all for one monthly price, and that was it. You could bring as many people on as possible.
Speaker 3:What we found is that we're not the cheapest solution in the market. We're also the best. I'm confident of that when you actually see what we're able to do. But there were some folks that said, look, we don't need all of the bells and whistles right now. Can we start out? This is the one use case we're trying to address now, and so we're looking. Okay, can we unbundle this enterprise pricing so that we can tackle hey, you just need to track down missing assets. Great, we can work with you on that until your transportation team wants to now look at what are the carriers operating in certain lanes during RFP season to look to and to invite. Then we can expand the aperture there.
Speaker 1:So you can mask the other data above and beyond that. So you could say you're going to pay for the assets and asset tracking only and I'm going to mask everything else and this is the price you're going to pay. But when you're sold on that, I can open up more data at a higher price point.
Speaker 3:That's what we're looking to do is to provide flexibility there.
Speaker 3:A higher price point that's what we're looking to do is to provide flexibility there, which includes there are some enterprise customers that they love the UI that we've developed and it's extremely intuitive and it gets you exactly what you need.
Speaker 3:For some, they've said that's all we need. Others have said, hey, we want to have direct access to your data as much as possible via API to integrate into everything we do, so we can find literally what is the truck to load ratio in Dallas right now. Well, if you look in Dallas, we have every major ingress and egress highway in and out of Dallas completely ringed with our camera systems, which means you will know exactly how many flatbed trucks are in Dallas right now, or exactly how many refurts and what that can do with driving pricing or dialing in pricing. There's some customers that say we want that and we'll work with customers to make sure we can get them exactly what they need. But we are kind of readdressing the, not forcing you to eat the whole elephant, so to say we can have you eat certain bites of the elephant over time. We love that.
Speaker 2:The competitive dynamic. I do want to touch on for Josh Crack's joke that he's been sitting on probably for 10 minutes.
Speaker 3:How are you?
Speaker 2:guys handling that right now? You have a customer, or maybe you have two customers, and they are in direct competition with one another, and maybe you let them reach the conclusion that if they ask nicely, they could get some data on their competitor. And maybe you let them reach the conclusion that if they asked nicely, they could get some data on their competitor. How are you guys handling that as a company?
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is a I'll be very candid that we haven't fully solved what we're going to do about this in the long. So, hey, if you're listening and you got some ideas about it, please reach out. I'd love to have a chat, because we really started this. We're calling this the truck intelligence platform and we're trying to really differentiate that from competitive intelligence platform. Now, the way that we've handled this to date is, essentially, we will show you the lanes that a carrier runs, but we'll show it obfuscated to kind of a 20 mile hexagon out there saying, hey, they're delivering to some shipper in here and they're picking up from some shipper in here. So shipper-receiver pairing, so to say. That has been incredible. It's worked for us thus far.
Speaker 3:About a few months ago, we flipped on what's known as our intermodal insights. This now actually goes a layer beyond that, which allows you to look at every intermodal rail ramp in America, click on it and seeing every shipper or receiver that has freight to and from that ramp. So we look at the drayage trucks and look at their origins destinations. That's how we're able to do that. Now that we've actually deployed our own sensors at a major US port and have a few others coming on. We're going to be doing that same insights for the port operators themselves and some of their stakeholders to say what are the beneficial cargo owners that actually specifically received the freight coming in and out of this port.
Speaker 3:There's been demand, therefore, because we have gone, we've kind of almost pierced the veil of this hexagon kind of masked approach to say, well, can you just show me that if Acme widget company, where exactly we know their lanes, but who exactly are they delivering to and what is the volume? How many truckloads a week are they doing there? That would be really helpful. We're kind of in this process of like, if I have Coca-Cola as a customer, well, how's Pepsi going to feel if they're also a customer? And that could put us kind of in a bind.
Speaker 3:So, candidly, we're debating internally, we're talking with stakeholders, we're talking with our customers to say what is the line that you would feel comfortable people knowing about your operations, that, therefore, you would feel comfortable knowing about someone else's operations A little bit of this do unto others as they would have them do to you. I think, ultimately, the market's just going to sort that out if we really feel that sucking sound, and a lot of this can be derived through piecemeal, through a lot of other observations of data. Potentially, genlogs is just the platform that brings it all together and just makes it visible. It's not fully decided, but if you're listening and you're like, well, I kind of want to know what's happening, then we'd love to engage because we do want to hear how, how you would feel and how others would feel agreed because then gen logs can become the standard that everybody knows.
Speaker 2:We're going to abide by these rules, these best practices, like the Zelle when all the major banks got on the same page in the technology. So I think that is cool. That is a cool conversation. If you have thoughts, please ping us, ping Ryan, let him know. I think the hexagon approach is a nice stopgap.
Speaker 3:The one thing we're looking at Arby is allowing each customer to see their suppliers and where their suppliers receive their supplies from, so essentially looking at their supply chain. Going back in time and early on we did this where we isolated this shipper in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I gave my team no other data about this other than it was Western Container Corporation and I just said pull me the outbound lanes for this shipper. And so they did, and there was a big line that went down in New Orleans, a big line that went up to Indianapolis area, and when we actually looked at where all of those trucks were going down in New Orleans, they were going to Coca-Cola bottle. And then we went up to someplace in Missouri and then they were going to Coca-Cola bottling there. And then we looked over at even, like in Orlando, they were going to Coca-Cola bottle. So we saw that, oh, this is a supplier for Coca-Cola bottle.
Speaker 3:My team had no knowledge of that, but the data led us to that conclusion. Well, what was really cool then is to take Western Container Corporation and say, okay, what are their inbound links? Essentially, who is supplying them? Well, if you're Coca-Cola and Western Container Corporation is making the bottles for you, you want to know if there's risk, from where Western Container Corporation is actually getting their supplies, because maybe they were getting their supplies from China.
Speaker 3:There we go and all of a sudden, now we got tariffs coming up, that's going to be passed along to you. We can actually go source that all the way back and provide you this kind of hey. You have a risk here where the containers have stopped coming out of this port in China and they're not going to get to them and they're not going to therefore become this whether it's a cocoa bottle or some other widget that your business depends on and be able to trace that back and have full supply chain visibility. That is something that it's not a competitive intelligence, it's your own supply chain intelligence, and that's something we will be doing and that's something that's currently available in our platform. Right now, we could just say, hey, I need to see this supplier, not down to the hexagon level, but down to the actual where are they getting their supplies from, so that we know if we're at risk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been in a couple of meetings with you guys. It's interesting. The light bulb clicks for people like wait, wait, I could see other people's stuff. Hold on, that means they could see my stuff as well. It's like uh-huh, have you figured out a software Like uh-uh, because we don't write, and I think you're playing it the right way, like this is not a transactional. I want somebody to write me a check and share this with. I mean, you guys are really thinking and taking a mindful approach as to how you want to do this. Do this the right way, the ethical way, make sure that it's a level playing field. And I commend you guys for thinking through this, because you guys could just be going right and I think the way you're doing it is the smart way.
Speaker 3:You know I learned this, josh, from my time in the US intelligence community. We have great intelligence relationships with a lot of other intelligence agencies from a lot of other countries. What we don't do is give all of their intelligence to every other country and we try to develop those truly decades-long partnerships hopefully centuries-long partnerships in terms of the intelligence liaison relationships that we have. It's very similar where Genlogs is right now.
Speaker 3:We're trying to find what is the balance to make sure that customers don't feel exposed. It doesn't feel dirty, like they're getting what they need and they're able to say, hey, I got better transportation on this lane than potentially my competitor because I'm using gen logs. But at the end of the day, they don't feel exposed themselves, with everyone else being able to look at what's going on in their operations. So it's going to be a delicate balance. We're trying to find it. That's why we're listening here. We want to hear from folks to say I don't really feel comfortable about that being exposed, but I don't mind that. The carriers that are out there running our trailers that's just kind of like. If you can see it with the naked eye on the road, it's tough to say you got to suppress it in our data.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Ryan, I have the tough job of being timekeeper here. I know you, Harvey and I, over a beer, could go for four or five hours because I think what you're doing is so cool and we have such a long standing relationship with you. What's the best way for folks to connect with you? Email address, website, if you want to give me your Instagram or anything else fun. Obviously LinkedIn access. But how do people get in touch with you if you're looking for more information other than going through Harvey and myself?
Speaker 3:of course, yeah, let me just start by saying please go check out the websites. It's genlogsio G-E-N-L-O-G-Sio. Upper right-hand corner. We have two buttons and this is really important One. We have a find lost assets button. We will help anyone out there in the industry up to three times find their lost or stolen equipment for free. We're not going to send you If you never need more than three times the help, boom, it's free for all your life. But that button's up there Right beside it is the book, a demo button. Hit that That'll connect with our team who would love to reach out and show you. I'm on LinkedIn. You can search me, ryan Joyce. That's a great way to connect with me there. That's the primary platform. I wish I was cool enough to have an Instagram or even an active Twitter account. But yeah, ryan Joyce, on LinkedIn or genlogs G-E-N-L-O-G-Sio Harvey parting shots.
Speaker 1:Final words from you.
Speaker 2:Well, before we wrap, I wanted to kind of come back to the founder journey, right, and the mission, the team and all that stuff which we spent so much time talking about. The product, because the product can speak for itself. But, Ryan, I do want to wrap up with just hearing from you what has it been like building this company, building this team, keeping them on mission, staying focused and growing this fast?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it's not been easy. And growing this fast yeah, yeah, it's not been easy. One thing that I it's kind of my cheat code that I would give to any other founder that was coming in there is communication, and transparency is so key to make sure that everyone's growing in the same direction. We made a decision early on so that we could hire the best talent anywhere. We were not going to be requiring everyone to come into the office, so it was a very remote work first environment. As a result, we needed to make sure that we were always giving the where are we going and the why, and so I spend eight to 10 hours every weekend putting together a message that goes out to my team at 7am every Monday morning Schedules to send.
Speaker 3:Boom. It heads out. It gives them a where what did we do the last week, where are we going this week and how does it fit in the overall strategy? And we just do it over and over again, and that is the drumbeat that causes us to all row in the same direction. That has been my cheat code. Also, hiring the best people. Obviously, that speaks for itself, but, like Josh said, he's met some folks on our team Alex, chris. There's a host of others that I would love to promote more as time goes on, because they're doing fantastic work and they're going to go be the future founders that Plug and Play should definitely invest in and have them at conferences in the future as well.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Your company is amazing To your point. Alex, chris, the team I've worked with is fantastic. Everybody always wants to talk to you and I'm like, well, if Ryan's unavailable. The other guys are pretty darn good as well and I've seen them in front of customers and clients and leads and they do a great job. I'm excited that you've trusted Plug Play to help lead the journey with you guys and for you guys and some of the stuff that we've worked on together and it's only the beginning. I mean, you guys are a rocket ship that's about to just take off and we're just excited to be associated with you and team. So thank you for the time today. Much appreciated Any last words.
Speaker 3:Well, what I'll say is you guys have been phenomenal. So, Josh, harvey can't thank you enough, and Harvey, I hate to say it, but man go Caps.