00:00:00 Introduction of Anthony Miller and the topic
00:08:51 The real causes of enterprise software failures
00:13:50 Why bad vendors last for decades despite inefficiencies
00:19:11 Logistics tech failures that cost companies billions
00:25:20 The long-term consequences of betting on the wrong tech
00:28:30 Why companies struggle to replace legacy systems
00:31:57 Why logistics tech is mature but needs modernization
00:36:30 The hidden risks of “best practice” solutions in enterprise IT
00:39:51 The flood of venture capital into supply chain startups and its consequences
00:48:10 Reckless fundraising in logistics startups and its failures
00:58:50 The illusion of expertise in logistics tech investment
01:10:54 Why Gartner’s rankings ignore real-world vendor failures
01:21:20 Why enterprise IT often resists real process improvement
01:33:50 Why big consulting firms enable inefficient software vendors
01:41:43 What companies should do to avoid bad vendors
Summary
Conor Doherty hosts a conversation with Anthony Miller (logistics consultant and writer) and Joannes Vermorel (founder of Lokad) about the prevalence of “bad actors” in enterprise technology—particularly within logistics and supply chain software. They discuss how bloated vendor promises, massive venture capital investments, and misleading analyst reports often lead to suboptimal or failed implementations. To avoid these pitfalls, they recommend examining a vendor’s actual product depth, financial stability, leadership consistency, and the clarity of the vendor’s communications—rather than relying on superficial rankings or buzzwords.
Extended Summary
The conversation begins by defining “bad actors” not necessarily as malicious companies, but as those whose technologies or business models consistently fail to deliver meaningful returns for their customers.
Common Pitfalls and Industry Dynamics
A confluence of factors—particularly the complexity of enterprise software, enormous venture capital inflows, and technology hype—can allow subpar solutions to thrive for a surprisingly long time. Anthony points out several high-profile logistics projects where large sums of money were sunk into flawed implementations, often because vendors over-promised on capabilities that were never fully feasible. Joannes adds that early architectural decisions in a software company’s history can define its trajectory (and its limitations) decades later.
The Role of Market Analysts and Consultants
It is fair to say that Anthony and Joannes share a healthy skepticism toward certain analyst firms and consultancies. They both criticize pay-to-play models (such as expensive trade show booths or “quadrant” placements) that distort which vendors get recommended. Consulting firms, too, can have misaligned incentives—sometimes favoring solutions that require extensive and expensive consulting engagements, rather than the best fit for a client’s actual needs.
Signs of Bad and Good Actors
In identifying risky or “bad” vendors, Joannes and Anthony agree on several red flags: opaque marketing, high levels of technical and financial debt, frequent leadership turnover, and empty buzzwords on the product’s website. As for “good actors,” they highlight vendors that openly share technical details, demonstrate stable leadership, and show pride in concrete engineering accomplishments rather than just marketing slogans.
Improving Decision-Making
Anthony and Joannes both call for clearer communication and less “happy talk” within organizations. Supply chain professionals on the ground often know when software is under-delivering, but top-level executives may default to big, familiar names—especially if objective third-party guidance is lacking. Both Anthony and Joannes urge companies to trust the expertise of people doing the actual work and to perform their own due diligence by examining a vendor’s track record, financial stability, leadership consistency, and true product depth.
Increased mechanical sympathy
Towards the end, Conor presses both speakers on the usefulness of mechanical sympathy (better understanding of the software one uses) in order to increase the chances of avoiding “bad actors”. He suggests it is helpful to increase one’s internal locus of control (meaning people are in control of their actions and lives), and it is important for listeners to realize they are not powerless against bad actors.
Conor draws a comparison between software vendors and health gurus selling diet plans. If you learn a little about the basics of nutrition, you are less likely to fall for nonsense diet claims. Similarly, understanding the fundamentals of software design increases one’s immunity to false promises from vendors.
Full Transcript
Conor Doherty: Welcome back to Lokad. Today’s guest is Anthony Miller. Anthony is a popular logistics consultant, a tech writer, and a very famous voice online, particularly on LinkedIn and on his blog, Wiser LogTech. Now, Anthony joins us in the studio today, very happy about that, to discuss bad actors in tech, particularly ways for people to identify problematic vendor behavior ahead of time. Now, as always, if you like what you hear, subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on LinkedIn. And with that, I give you today’s conversation with Anthony Miller.
So, Anthony, thank you very much for joining us in the studio. Fun fact, I think you’re the first person we’ve had in the studio, and you’re only the second person I’ve ever interviewed in person. The last one was like two years ago when we had Bruno Saraiva from Worten. But, uh, great to have you here to christen the first in-person interview. And I should say, how did you get here? What are you doing in Paris?
Anthony Miller: First of all, I wasn’t aware of that. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of pressure. It is a bit of pressure, but thanks for having me. Um, yeah, so I’m here. When you work in LogTech, you do a lot of work with people from all over the world. There’s great startups and great tech companies from the US all the way to Australia. And I was working with a client who’s based out of Ireland. We needed somewhere to meet kind of in the middle, and I was a little bit reticent to travel as I’ve just had a baby.
So we decided to come to Paris to do a two-day go-to-market workshop for their logistics technology solution. So really, really interesting time. It’s actually the first time for me doing something like that in Paris as well. And, um, yeah, it’s quite an experience. Paris isn’t too bad for finding places to do business. There’s a lot of friendly people such as you guys out there, so it makes it a lot easier to do business in Paris.
Conor Doherty: Oh, good. Thank you. It was a pleasure hosting you and for this conversation. Now, how I can’t speak for Joannes, but how I first became familiar with you was through your work online. So I saw you on LinkedIn, and then that led me to your blog, Wiser LogTech. And then through a few discussions privately with Joannes, we got very interested in having a discussion with you on the idea of bad actors in tech. And it’s a very broad concept, but it’s something that you report on quite a bit. Would that be a reasonable description?
Anthony Miller: It’s actually funny you say that. A few people have turned around to me and tried to push me down a journalistic path. I absolutely hate that idea.
Conor Doherty: Why?
Anthony Miller: Unfortunately, I feel like today, if you choose to be a journalist and to report on things, you don’t really have that much of an impact. You’re an observer, and you can’t move the needle. That’s how I feel when I look at things, even outside of tech.
So what I want to do is help the great solutions out there achieve levels of success that will move that needle and have an actual impact for the shippers, so manufacturing companies, retailers, etc., but also for the freight forwarders, at least as long as we need freight forwarders and other LSPs. That’s what’s important to me, being able to move that needle and having an impact, having an influence in that way.
Although I also dislike the word influence because it’s got a lot of negativity around it, and I’m not trying to be an influencer in that traditional sense. But there’s a lot that can be achieved, having, I guess, daring to have a voice on LinkedIn. And that’s something I, when I talk to CEOs and founders, I suggest to them they should have their voice. They should talk because everyone’s got a very interesting story. They’ve all got different backgrounds. Some of them have been in the industry for 20, 25 years. Others are just fresh out of university and internships, and they’ve managed to raise a load of money, and they’re trying to figure out logistics and supply chain, and they think they can kind of solve that. But they’ve all got an interesting story to tell, and LinkedIn is an amazing platform for that. So that’s why I started communicating on there.
I guess a bit of background. I was working at WiseTech for a few years, and that was an absolute, I mean, it was formative. It was a challenge. Then COVID came around, and that kind of ended. But after that, LinkedIn was a stepping stone for me. It was a way to continue to have a voice and to observe the industry that through my M&A corporate dev roles, I’ve been observing and learning about customs compliance and international forwarding and all sorts of areas of logistics tech. And that was really important to me. I never, when I started out, it was also a bit of a marketing experiment. And my intention was never to go and turn around and start calling out, I guess is a bad terminology for it, but that is what I end up doing.
Conor Doherty: Diagnosing?
Anthony Miller: Yeah, diagnosing is not too bad. When you have an opinion on something, you’re going to upset people. You’re never going to have everyone agree with you. It’s just the way it is. And some people send me messages to review things when they’re sending out press releases or they’re looking to post something, and they’ll ask me, “Is this okay? Is this too much? Is this too violent? Am I going to upset people?” You’re always going to upset someone, but that doesn’t really matter.
That’s the point because you want debate. You want to promote and provoke original thought and discussion. And that’s what I love most about when I post something a little bit controversial on LinkedIn. I know that there’s going to be like 50, 100 comments down there of CEOs, investors, people who are actually working in logistics and supply chain, and who allow us to build this tech for them. They’re going to come in and have their opinions as well. And some of them were just like, I mean, I did a post on SAP not too long ago.
Conor Doherty: That is actually what brought you here ultimately, to be honest.
Anthony Miller: Great. I got a lot of hate mail from that one.
Conor Doherty: Really?
Anthony Miller: Yeah. Unfortunately, there were a few people in the comments who turned around and voiced their opinion in the comments, which was great because that created debate. And I had a very violent reaction to people blaming their customers and blaming change management. We can get to that.
Conor Doherty: We will definitely get to that.
Anthony Miller: I had a very violent reaction to that. But in the messages, I was also getting a lot of hate mail from mainly SAP consultants who…
Joannes Vermorel: When something goes wrong, blame the client. You know, say that as a vendor, it’s always the client’s fault, obviously.
Anthony Miller: But I don’t mind getting those messages. It’s annoying. I’d rather they post a comment because that works for the algorithm, but it also allows others to come in and say, “Well, hang on a second, we disagree.” But yeah, I think it’s important for everyone to really start sharing their voice. And I think it’s something that especially in the professional world, people are scared of doing, and companies don’t encourage it enough.
Conor Doherty: But you also have to be quite dispositionally resilient because no matter how much people say, “I really don’t care what others think,” there’s still a thrust of displeasure or like acid in the stomach when you see someone say something utterly, in your own opinion, maybe unintelligent or misinformed, and it’s directed not as a question but as essentially an insult like, “Anthony, you’re an idiot. You don’t understand. You’re a moron.”
I didn’t send that message, but I’m sure maybe somebody has, and it’s still unpleasant.
Anthony Miller: Again, it’s unpleasant, but I’m completely fine with it because at the end of the day, one of the things I do, and I find this really valuable, every time I look at a new topic or I consider talking about something or something happens in the industry that I find interesting and I want to talk about, I’m going to take a step back and approach it as if I was like, when I create content or I work with companies who are creating content, their marketing content, I always turn around to them and say, “Listen, your audience is 12 years old. Simple English or whatever the language is, but simplify it and just your benefits, and that’s it.
They need to be able to understand them. Use bullet points. The structure is really important. People skim read things anyway, and they’ve got TikTok seven-second attention spans.” When I create my content, I’ve got a similar approach where I don’t consider myself 12 years old, but I kind of forget everything. I try to forget everything and just approach it like, “Okay, this one blank canvas, let’s go. Bit of research, look into it.” And if people call me an idiot or something after I’ve done that research and I’ve posted something, it’s going to make me question it and see if I’m going to change my appreciation of the situation.
And that to me is really valuable because I’ve actually met very few people, whether it’s founders, investors, journalists, who are willing to take that step back and say, “Okay, let’s approach this complete blank canvas, remove all of my previous bias.” Because bias is a powerful thing, and that’s what I was getting with SAP consultants. And I’m not trying to name and shame SAP consultants. There are some good ones, of course. Like with everything, there’s good and bad actors.
But in this particular case, the SAP consultants, their bias was what was causing them to have this reaction because their bias was making them believe change management is the problem. If SAP is such a great tool in their mind, I’m not saying it is or isn’t, I’m not having an opinion, it can be a great tool for certain situations. But in their mind, SAP is such a great tool, it cannot fail. So the problem is the customer, their implementation, their change management. That is how they see it. So then you get all these comments, “It’s change management.”
If you’re selling a tool as complex as SAP, change management has to be a part of your process, of your sales process, and of your implementation plan. And you have to accompany your client through that, especially when you’re charging 1,500, two grand a day, whatever the rates are. You have to. You cannot not do that. And I think the number of failures that we’ve seen from SAP blamed on change management with armies of consultants kind of illustrate that point. There’s mis-selling, but there’s also a very poor appreciation of what the customer is going to need to implement the solution. And I don’t think they set the right expectations there, and that’s crucial.
Conor Doherty: Anthony, thank you. Joannes, your thoughts?
Joannes Vermorel: I think if we talk about bad actors in tech and more specifically, you know, enterprise software technologies, the way I see it is that the field has always been kind of arcane and opaque just because you have a lot of moving parts. We’re talking about big, complex pieces of software with tons of moving parts. So it’s not like a B2C app where, you know, in 10 minutes you can try and see for yourself. From the get-go, you have something that just to give a try, it’s a lengthy process. The setup will be complicated. It’s very difficult to even see the app working with another company because their settings and strategies and whatnot are so different.
Those pieces of enterprise software tend to be extremely malleable, you know, so you end up with everybody ending up with a customized version of some kind. So that creates a very high ambient level of confusion, which then paves the way for bad actors to prosper a lot longer than they should. My theory is that a bad actor is not someone who is evil or has ill intent. It is just a vendor who sells something, and then the client ends up eating a loss when they use their stuff at the price they sell.
So I sell you for $1 million a year something, let’s say, to improve or optimize your supply chain, but the savings are less than $1 million a year, so you end up at a loss. That’s what I call a bad actor. It’s someone who routinely sells stuff where the client eats a loss once there is no positive return on the solution, which doesn’t require negative intent from the vendor. It’s just incompetence or inefficiency.
Markets, generally speaking, are great filters, but they’re slow, especially if you have products that are very arcane, opaque, and complex. Then yes, the market will, in time, filter out all those bad actors, obviously, but we can talk of several decades. It can literally be, in some cases, almost half a century. So it can be really, really slow.
But what I see is that there are plenty of specific intermediaries that have responsibilities. You have vendors who became complacent and somewhat inefficient, but then you have market analysts who don’t play their role of calling out those bad situations. Normally, they should accelerate the filter mechanism of the market, but actually, in some cases, they do the exact opposite.
And then you can have consultants who are supposed to be a source of good advice, but again, when the incentives are distorted, they can also act as a mechanism for the preservation of those bad actors. Then you can have bad habits because I’m not going to blame just the vendors or third-party experts. The clients themselves can be a little bit lazy in their investigation. In reality, if they had done a little bit more vibrant investigation as opposed to just going for something…
That’s something very interesting you were discussing about, you know, those communications in companies. I think the term that I use is “happy talk.” In many companies, as they grow large, people are so afraid of offending anybody and their dog that the only communication that you can have is happy talk. Happy talk is something where you maximally make sure that you don’t offend anybody, and the only way to do that in practice is to make absolutely sure that your communication is completely devoid of any information whatsoever.
So you will have, that’s why you can have like a, whatever happens with you and a tech vendor, if you have to communicate about that, you say, “Oh, we did both a great effort. We learned so much in the process. It was such an interesting experience. The company is so much better for that,” blah, blah, blah. I mean, happy talk, happy talky talk. There is like zero information in that, and that’s a danger.
My take is that yes, we have a lot of bad actors defined as companies who are selling stuff that will generate losses, not profits. Experts are in large part not doing their job, and clients also are, I would say, when I say clients, those large corporations who are buying those enterprise software are too frequently being quite lazy and complacent with that. That’s also part of the problem for the client.
Anthony Miller: Yeah, we do see it, but there’s also some huge cases of, once again, I’m thinking of SAP. I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing against you guys. It’s just the biggest examples are in the big tech world.
In my space as well, in logistics and international forwarding, companies like DHL, Lidl, etc. It’s all in that post I made on LinkedIn. I’m not going to go back over it, but these are initiatives where, depending on who you listen to officially, you know, DHL lost over 300 million invested into a solution.
Conor Doherty: Lidl lost 500 million.
Anthony Miller: And they walked away after 300 million.
But then people would actually turn around and say, who were closer to it, you know, they publicly said this on LinkedIn in the comments and stuff, and take that for what it is. They’re turning around and saying it’s closer to a billion. And obviously, when you know the structure around what happened with DHL, when you know an army of consultants and everything trying to build a solution for something as complex as international freight forwarding, and you’ve got all sorts of moving pieces in there, there’s the compliance aspect, the actual forwarding orchestration aspect, the connectivity required, and all of these things.
It was a lot to bite off, and I do not believe that there are very few solutions out there that have self-built something that works for that. I think it was very disingenuous of a company like SAP to think that they could go in and build it as a bit of a generalist. They’ve got their strengths, but supply chain is not a strength for them. International freight forwarding, definitely not. To go in and say, “We can throw all of these consultants at this project and all of this money, and we’ll be able to build you a personalized solution that works exactly for you,” I mean, a Swiss army knife.
DB Schenker have got that solution. They built it themselves. It took decades to build and to fine-tune. There are others out there who’ve got their own technology, Kuehne + Nagel, Daxa, but they built this themselves over decades gradually, not in a sprint throwing huge budgets at it. More recently, Nippon Express tried to self-build a solution for, I think it was for air freight, and they pulled the plug after like 150 or something million spent, like 130-150 million.
They realized fairly quickly after a year and a half, two years, and sinking all that money into it, they’re not going to be able to build it, and the budget was blowing up. So I find it disingenuous, and I think it’s a bad actor to turn around and say, “We can do anything. You just need money and consultants. We can build it,” and to have all the keywords. Because you go on websites of some of these big platforms, and they’ll have all the keywords you need: logistics, supply chain, control tower, digital twin, buzzwords or keywords.
I somehow struggle to believe that, knowing how complex supply chain logistics is. I struggle to believe that. I’m not refusing to believe it. I want to believe it, and I want someone to turn around and say, “We can do everything.” But then if you take another example, where I used to work, WiseTech Global, who are the leading solution out there for international freight forwarders, it’s very well documented. They’ve got a huge customer list of the top in the within the top 25 for now anyway. No king lives forever.
I think that with technology evolving, that will change as well, and you can’t afford to get complacent. But they focused on something specific. They looked at all of those points, and they built a solution specifically for the DHLs of the world. They didn’t have to try and adapt something, and they didn’t pretend. They turned around and said, “We’re going to do this. This is what we’re doing,” and they had a roadmap and a plan, and they built it, and they delivered it.
I think there comes a point in big tech where you have to turn around and choose your battles. There’s cases, I don’t remember the exact details, but Microsoft created some content around that as well. They pulled the plug on one of their supply chain initiatives very quietly, very quietly, because it was…
Joannes Vermorel: Quite a few actually have. I think we are like the fourth major supply chain initiative that was started and then shut down by Microsoft. I mean, it’s very intriguing. I mean, it’s a big market, so they would do that every once in a while. The last one was kind of a little bit, I mean, Microsoft is generally, I think, one of the best enterprise vendors around. They have a lot of products that are working nicely, Excel for example. But let’s be honest, Excel is actually quite good. It’s not exactly innovative nowadays, but it is still a very good product with a very solid implementation. The performance of the chart, considering what you’re asking from the software, etc.
But back to the case, I think it’s, when we look at those vendors, my take is that the general public doesn’t really realize, when I say general public, I also include consultants and experts, and I say that as a vendor. They don’t realize that many decisions are taken during the first year of your existence as a software company, and they will define pretty much everything that you will have to do for literally the decades to come.
For example, if we go to examples that people know about, because obviously if I take a very arcane example, that’s going to be a little bit strange. But Microsoft did a lot of things when they started. Their very first contract was a programming language called Altair BASIC, and whatnot. Everybody forgot that, but at some point, they went in on operating systems, closing a deal with IBM. At this single point in time, the operating system that was IBM DOS became Microsoft DOS, and then it became Microsoft Windows. The OS defined everything that Microsoft did for 25 years. So this single decision ended up tainting, for good and bad, everything that they did.
For example, Excel was just a way to make the OS more sticky. If you want to have a sticky OS, then you need to have good apps. So they started a series of apps. That’s one example where you have a decision, and then it taints everything for good and bad.
If we want to take another one that is closer to enterprise software, that would be SAP. SAP went all in on a columnar database HANA in 2010, and this has been tainting everything that they do. Columnar databases are their strength mostly as a BI tool because they let you compile analytics at scale in ways that are relatively convenient. But they have a downside that they are exceedingly crappy and costly whenever you want to do anything transactional.
It means that if you have this thing, and I believe that most of the, we are talking about SAP, one of the things that they committed was back in 2010. They developed this columnar database named HANA, and they decided to go all in on that. Nowadays, we are seeing the consequence, which is a foundation that is extremely ill-suited for anything that is transactional.
I think it’s not a surprise if for logistics, where you have literally, it’s the archetype of the super transactional workload, where it works super poorly. It doesn’t matter how many consultants you throw at it and how much effort you do, your foundation has problems. I could go on.
For example, another large vendor who raised 800 million euro would be RELEX. They literally were founded on the technology that was leaning super strong on business intelligence and BI cubes. They wanted to be real-time analytics for retail. Fine, then you go for cubes. But then what happens? What happens is that a large retail network will require terabytes of RAM. If you look at how many stores times how many products times how many days, you end up with a massive cube. We’re talking terabytes of memory. Because everything that you want in your business has to go through these cubes, then you struggle like hell by design because you cannot represent conveniently things like expiration dates or promotions or cannibalization or substitutions.
This architecture, this single thing in the architecture, was a decision that was made probably in the case of RELEX, it was probably made in the first six months of the existence of the company. I don’t have insider information, that’s what I guess from their website, and I’ve been following them for over a decade. But from this single decision, it gives them some strength, which is real-time analytics, but at the expense of major problems to catch subtleties in supply chain. That’s the interesting thing. I see many of the problems of the vendors can be traced back to extremely simple root causes, but then the problems explode in hyper-complex situations. It’s just so many aspects of the same root cause magnified through tons of parties and the ambient complexity.
Conor Doherty: Oh, sorry if I could just, because not to cut you off, but I am coming back to you. I just wanted to build on that point because again, Joannes, when you describe that, and this is kind of coming back to your own working definition of bad actors, when you’re describing the difference, and I’m going to come to Anthony, the difference between a columnar and a tabular database, how much of that is just simple incompetence in terms of design versus intentional sort of bad acting?
Joannes Vermorel: Again, I really define bad as the outcome is a loss, not as an intent. The intent, I would assume, you know, I would take for granted everybody wants the best for everybody.
Conor Doherty: But then how can you differentiate between bad acting and just incompetence if it is just the result?
Joannes Vermorel: No, it’s just that I would say what I call bad would be incompetence plus fraud plus other things. It’s just that I’m not judgmental about that. But you see, the interesting thing is that as a software vendor, you make bets on the future of technology. For example, if we go to SAP 2010, they go all in on in-memory systems, just like RELEX is the same. They were founded in 2008, I believe, or 2006. They go all in on BI cubes on in-memory systems.
We are in 2010. If we go back 15 years, previous computers had, so 1995, computers had let’s say eight megabytes of memory. In 2010, they have eight gigabytes of memory. So in 15 years, the memory has increased by a factor of 1,000. So now you say, okay, as a vendor, I will make a decision, and I am betting, I’m going all in on one single thing: memory will be a thousand times cheaper 15 years from now. So now that was 2010. We are in 2025. Do we have on the shelf computers with eight terabytes of RAM? The answer is not even close. Not even close. We are at like 16 maybe, and that starts to be a little bit pricey.
So here, what I’m saying is that you can go all in on the technology, and you just expect that the hardware companies, you know, hardware computing, hardware will deliver you a thousand times improvement price-wise. Then you wake up 15 years later, and it didn’t happen. Too bad for you. So that’s why I say it’s very difficult. It’s not just sheer incompetence. Some companies, you know, they literally made huge bets on some stuff, and it didn’t turn out this way. We will see, but for example, there will be plenty in the years to come, plenty of things that people who went all in on blockchain or similar buzzwords, and it’s going to be hilarious. Let’s wait, but I’m pretty sure that the people who went all in on certain buzzwords, it’s going to blow up in their face in very interesting ways.
Anthony Miller: Just feel like saying AI agents and just leaving that there. Just saying AI agents and not another word, and then let’s, I’ll come back in, you know, 12 or 18 months or something, and we’ll see where it’s at. But yeah, that’s going to be one of them. Just to continue on what you were saying, there’s another interesting thing that I’ve been noticing. We’ve reached a point, at least in the logistics space with technology, you still get startups that come in today and say it’s an archaic space and solutions are antiquated and it needs to be digitized and everything. I mean, those are the lies that they are fed by people who do not know what they’re talking about, and those people are definitely bad actors. Some of them are founders, some of them are trying to justify a huge investment in a company, or some of them have been fed that to invest in a company.
The logistics industry isn’t just spreadsheets and writing down things on the back of a cigarette packet in a warehouse. Those are outliers now. There is still a lot of manual work, don’t get me wrong, a lot of Excel spreadsheets as well. Yes, there’s a lot of room for automation, there’s a lot of room for process improvement and to remove some of that manual work that goes into crunching data and inputting data and all of those parts. But for all intents and purposes, there are enough solutions out there today to say that there is a mature technology space for logistics. For the freight forwarding part, the only problem is it’s mature in every sense of the word. So it’s also aging, and it needs a walker to get to where it needs to go, and it’s kind of struggling, and sometimes it falls over, and then it needs to be picked back up.
Things that happened recently with COVID. Logistics was finally everyone’s. Looked at logistics and gone, “Oh, this isn’t just actually something we have to pay for. This isn’t just people playing with toy ships and planes. The world needs this, or we don’t have paracetamol from India in France. We don’t have PPE, which was a big thing. My containers are stuck in China. We actually need logistics.”
And for logistics to work, you need logistics tech to be scalable to handle the peaks as well of demand. Very interesting. And when you look at the technology landscape today, there’s a lot of legacy solutions, you know, that are 30 years old. Some of the other legacy players are, you know, 20 years old.
I’m not going to name any other names, trying not to upset too many people here, because otherwise, I’m just going to get too many letters from companies telling me to not talk about them.
Conor Doherty: Direct all mail to Anthony directly, not to me.
Anthony Miller: To me, it’s fine. I’ll be happy to process that and put it straight in the bin. But what I’m trying to get at is when you look at a company like WiseTech today, they’re at a point where they built a great solution on technology that is decades old. And they get to a point where they need to evolve and get with the times and also meet the increased demand, the increased need for performance, the increased data flows and volumes.
Everything that doesn’t make them a bad actor because they might not have had the time to think about it or do it properly or anything. I mean, they were building a great solution, but it puts them in a situation today where their performance may not be as great as it was before. And because the solution’s aging, how do they tackle that? How do they build on that, and how do they do it the right way? Do they actually do it out of the goodness of their hearts, kind of thing? It’s like, “We owe it to our customers to build a solution that works.” And yes, our solution was cutting edge and leading 15 years ago, but today it kind of needs to take, you know, a bucket load of medicine in the morning to get through the day.
And, you know, they’re in that kind of situation. I believe that there are a number of solutions in that situation. And where they become a bad actor, and I think that in this specific case, you could say that WiseTech does behave in very weird ways, and it’s a great example. They charge their customers for everything they can. They will charge them for everything they can. So they use the price level, they increase prices, they put new functionality into the core product and increase the core license price, and they will do all of these things even if it’s functionality that everyone doesn’t need. They’re still going to end up paying for it. That, for me, is a bad actor in that aspect.
But also inputting that cost of making your software meet today’s standards, and I’m not saying they’ve done this. I don’t believe they have yet, and I’m not sure if they will or how they’ll approach this. But when you’re modernizing your solutions, inputting that cost in a reasonable way onto customers who are already paying for the most expensive solution out there and functionality they don’t necessarily need, that would also be a bad actor in my opinion. I think that there’s a point where you need to pay some of the cost of your decisions and your legacy tech and not planning ahead and not, you know, building for the future in certain aspects.
So that’s going to be interesting to see with a lot of these legacy platforms how they handle that. Are they going to release brand new solutions like completely, “We’re not doing this one anymore. This is the new solution now. This is going to go into kind of hibernation. We keep it in maintenance for a couple of years, and then that’s it. It’s finished, and you’re going to have to move over.” Or are they just going to gradually upgrade the existing solution and have it running as like Frankenstein’s monster for a decade whilst every single aspect of it is actually modernized? The cost for either of those is going to be huge, and then it’ll be interesting to see how that impacts pricing. And if they make the decision to charge the customer for that, I find that wrong.
I believe that when it comes to modernizing your tech and meeting the standards required, it’s not just, you know, I’m not saying going above and beyond. You should pay for functionality. I get that. Functionality you use anyway. But for performance, so that you can use a solution that doesn’t fall over every week, a solution that isn’t sluggish and slow, and you know, every time you’re trying to look for data in your system, you’ve got time to go and make a cup of tea and watch the first half of a football match. It’s insane. Like sometimes some of these performance issues are just crazy, and they’re not up to the standards expected today. But they were great 15 years ago when tech was where it was at and when the volumes were where they were at and what we could do. But today we can do so much more, and you need that extra power. You need, and it’s not just power, it’s also design. So that’s going to be really interesting to see how all of these legacy players approach it.
I’m not sure if you’ve got anything to add on that before I go into another point.
Joannes Vermorel: Yeah, I mean, for me, the interesting thing is that something that is very important is to assess the debt of your vendor. And there are two kinds of debts, and I think you know vendors, some of them are literally sinking in debt by literally. And so what am I talking of? I mean, you have little debt is vendors. The market has been flush with venture capital over the last decade, and so you have a lot of companies who have raised crazy amounts of money.
So again, Relex 800 million euro, but I think O9 is like half a billion dollars, etc., etc. So you have like plenty of actors. I’m talking of supply chain vendors here who have raised tons of money. This money will have to be repaid, and enterprise software is not like B2C. You cannot say, “You know what, I am operating at 50% loss, but if I multiply my customer base by a factor of a thousand and I reach a billion users, I will be fine.” No, enterprise software doesn’t work like that. You’re not going to multiply your customer base by a thousand, at best by two, maybe by ten if you’re like crazy good, and that’s it. Which means that when you have tons of debt, one thing will happen. You will either disappear or pass those costs onto your existing clients. You know, it’s no options. That’s debt type number one.
Type of debt number two is the technological debt where your technology needs a massive, massive revamp, especially if you went into the wrong directions. So you bank super heavily on, let’s say, memory, and the improvement of memory is not there. That means that again, you will pass those costs onto your customers. The fact that as a vendor you’re in a dire situation, I mean, it’s kind of your fault, yes. But where I think, and that can be maybe a transition, I think that’s where for me the place of the experts in the market, the expert should be pointing out that. They should be saying, “You know what, you should probably not put too much trust in this vendor. They have like a massive solvency problem. There is this massive debt looming around.” So if you ever, and nobody really discusses the ugly side of things, which is we’re looking at tech actors who have like massive, massive amounts of debt.
Anthony Miller: I mean, so there’s two things I want to get to. The first thing on the legacy tech issue, that along with COVID, created a situation where there were failings everywhere in logistics. There’s no other way to put it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a logistics service provider or a tech company or what, everyone was just, it’s crazy. It was an insane time and one that I hope we won’t go back to anytime soon, like that kind of disruption. That really was something else.
But it created a situation where some, I don’t know if smart is the right word, but at least some very charismatic and enthusiastic individuals managed to raise a lot of money to tackle these problems and made some big promises, you know, throwing around a lot of words: digital, digitization, just all the buzzwords at the time, visibility and whatever. But that opportunity was there for them because the legacy technology providers were sluggish and they weren’t communicating well, etc.
Also, although it was a mature environment from a technology perspective, there was a lot of opportunity. So that money flooded in, and then we got all of the startups that appeared, and there were many, many, many of them. Just going on the list of unread messages in my LinkedIn inbox, many of them. And I’m sorry I didn’t get to those messages. Yeah, it’s just too many. That flood of money and startups and founders created that.
For me, that was when we saw the most bad actors in logistics because these were people who, you don’t need, you do not need to have experience in the domain. You do not need to come from logistics to start a company in logistics. Surround yourself with good people, and you can do whatever as long as you’re good at execution and building a company, that’s fine. But these are people who, for all intents and purposes, did not have a clue of what they were doing, completely misunderstood the problems that they were tackling because they were told truths that were actually assumptions or accepted within the industry but that weren’t actually factually true about digitization, about the needs and the requirements, about the value of certain aspects of things, about how they would be received by customers, about the need and the demand of these customers and what they wanted to do.
And that whole picture’s fallen over now, and those same companies who raised a lot of money and who could have kind of taken over from the legacy tech players and took market share from them completely fell on their backsides and are now in a situation where, I mean, I was reading, I guess, when there’s so one thing about me when I see sources of information, if there’s one source, it’s a rumor. Doesn’t matter who that source is, for me, it’s a rumor in the journalistic world anyway.
So it was the Information who came out saying that one of the digital forwarders, Forto, and they’re going through an M&A process. For me, that’s until it’s confirmed with other sources and stuff. But a few C-level people have stepped down in the past couple of years. Recently, the CEO stepped down, and the CTO left, was it like a year or two years ago? I believe that they’re one of those companies that’s come in, and they’ve kind of tackled the problem, and they could have done it in a great way.
I mean, digital freight forwarding could have been great if it was done right, I believe, because I love tech. I love modernization of everything. I’m really, you know, automation and making things easier. The consumer environment has evolved in such a way. I mean, I remember the way we used to consume content and the platforms we were using, Facebook and everything, vastly different to today with TikTok and video. But that evolution hasn’t really seeped into business, and there was an opportunity to have a level of disruption that could have been just as impactful. It didn’t happen, and all this money was wasted because it was based on bad information.
So are the bad actors the ones who gave the money without doing their diligence? Are the bad actors the ones who actually gave this misinformation? Or are the bad actors the founders who chose to go into this space but didn’t really execute properly and didn’t surround themselves with the right people and wasted, I mean, if you look at digital freight, it’s billions that was wasted. Billions.
Joannes Vermorel: Yeah, I mean, as an anecdote, it’s very funny. I mean, my take is that as a founder, it’s completely normal that when you start, you’re clueless. That was certainly my case. And fortunately for me, I didn’t have massive investments to waste. So I think it’s also important that when you start and you’re very, I would say, ignorant of the field, that you’re not trusted with a huge amount of money where it’s going to accelerate those critical decisions, you know, strategic decisions I was talking about.
And if you do them during the first six months just because you had millions at your disposal that you need to spend, it’s a very, very bad idea. Lokad started to do very strategic long-term technological decisions. You know, it took us like five years to do that, but we didn’t have investors, VCs at least, and that really let us give us time to mature. But for example, an anecdote I would mention is, for example, one of my recent competitors who started auger.com. That’s a very, very interesting story.
They started like a month ago, and just imagine it’s an ex-Amazon, you know, I would say high-profile executive who starts a supply chain company. And on day one, he raised $100 million. It’s just him. It’s just him. There is like nobody. It’s just him, and he says, “Okay, I’m going to use AI to revolutionize the supply chain.” And then he raises $100 million. No team, no projects, etc. So let’s pause just at this second. What if you, I would say, like seed money, you are at $100 million, you are already talking that the exit needs to be like $10 billion. That’s a lot of money to be repaid.
So I was talking about that. That is like crazy insane. And then to illustrate the problem with ignorance, it was very funny, and that’s why I’m singling out on auger.com, is that they reached out to me and all the Lokad employees because they wanted to pay them for a one-hour session to basically do, let’s call it, super aggressive competitive intelligence, which was, “What are the areas that work best? What is the best segment? What are the technologies?” I mean, you could call it industrial espionage. I would not call it that way because if they were smart, our technology is publicly documented, so they didn’t have to pay my employees to get the information.
So it was kind of more like, you know, it was just competitive intelligence executed in the most dumbest possible way. And the interesting thing is that they used multiple fronts. They had like three different consulting firms to do that. So I was consulted like three times in a row with people who were telling me, “We pay you something like $200 for an hour to answer all those questions,” which were exactly the questions they needed to know what sort of products they were going to build.
So if I go back to the initial premise, you raise $100 million, and in fact, the first thing that you spend, you probably spend $1 million on consultants so that they will do some survey of the market so that you have any clue about what you’re going to build. This is, for me, this is a very insane way to deploy capital. This is a very insane way to even try to create value, and it’s almost guaranteed that people who will go on board will incur losses. Again, I don’t think that the auger.com, the guy who is leading that is fundamentally, you know, is not evil, but it’s so misguided that again, bad actors for me is not a matter of what is your intent because I always assume that people want to do good, no problem. But the outcomes are almost for me an almost certainty that it’s going to be a complete catastrophe.
Again, we’ll see. It’s just we are like two months down their journey, but the start was, I would say, quite, how do you say, you know, quite extraordinary.
Anthony Miller: Yes, it was. It’s funny because I’ve looked at auger.com a little bit myself, and I’ve also had some interactions with Dave Clark, who you’re talking about, just some comments on some of my posts, asking questions about them. I was just as surprised as you when they turned around and said, “We raised $100 million on day one,” and I actually asked, “For what?” Didn’t really get an answer. Then I went and looked at their website, and after looking at their website, I asked again, “For what?” Still couldn’t really understand.
And then after that, he put together the team. So it’s a team, think like 10 people at the top level. Nine of them are ex-Amazon, and one of them’s ex-Microsoft, various different backgrounds after leaving Amazon and Microsoft. But logistics experience isn’t one of the dominant factors there, or supply chain experience either. So that’s quite interesting for me. Dave Clark’s got an interesting profile. He was at Flexport before, as you’re probably aware, and that didn’t go very well. I’m not saying that’s on him.
And we can also talk about another kind of bad actor subject, which is quite interesting with Flexport. That whole situation there was, I’m not sure how that happened. They obviously were doing really well during COVID, and I’ve been told they reached profitability during the heights of COVID when rates were insane and everything was absolutely mental. But since then, it’s been downhill.
Conor Doherty: For anyone who might not be as intimately familiar with the Flexport story as you are, a primer?
Anthony Miller: Flexport raised, I think it was over $2 billion. Their highest valuation was around $8 billion, if I’m not mistaken. They’re what I like to call a teenage startup. They’re getting into that age now where they should be getting to some level of maturity, I guess, but they’re just not there. They haven’t found their ICP. They haven’t really found the addressable market. They haven’t managed to build on the strengths that they kind of had during that COVID period. There’s different reasons and questions asked why.
But what happened with Dave Clark at Flexport, for me, raises a lot of questions because he was brought in as CEO, and as quickly as he was brought in, he was then asked to leave. “Asked to leave” being probably the polite way to put it. And then what I now call the rebound CEO, who is also the founder, came back in to kind of save the day. A very interesting way to run a business that’s raised that much money and is trying to position itself as the future for international freight forwarding and the original and leading digital freight forwarder.
Many copycats came after Flexport. So that whole situation, the way that was handled, and there was information leaking out of the company and people complaining, everything. It’s a very interesting kind of dynamic, and it shows just how these decisions that are made are potentially not with the best interests of the company or customers at heart.
And that’s honestly when I look at Flexport, my opinion, and this is just my opinion, so take that for what it’s worth. I think that somewhere along the line, decisions were made to benefit certain people and not the future of the company. And I’ll stand by that no matter what others will say. I stand by that. They could have built something, and they chose, I believe, certain people chose personal gain over building something.
And potentially one of my theories is bringing Dave Clark in was a very smart way to find someone to blame for certain failures and allowing them to run with something. Because when you bring a new CEO into a company like that, you go through a huge process. You know, you’re interviewing them personally as the founder and exiting CEO. And then you’ve also got the board, and you’ve also got many people who are going to sit down and talk about the strategy and what they’re implementing and what they’ve done previously, etc.
Dave Clark wasn’t necessarily the right fit either for that company. And what he was doing at Amazon was tangential at best to what he was going to do at Flexport. So I fail to believe that they brought him in and then turned around and were surprised that he spent money, that he didn’t go in the direction that was agreed or whatever they said. For me, there’s a lot of bad actors there that did not have the company’s best interest at heart. And that, for me, is part of the worst thing you can do.
Worst thing, because then you’re wasting investor money, and especially the people who work there. If you look on the side markets now to buy Flexport stock, you can see the valuations and the articles that came out talking about how it’s lost like 80 or 90% of its value and everything. It’s insane. The people who I care about the most in that situation, not the investors who have got the money to lose, because at the end of the day, investors will go and look at 50 companies and just spread across the 50. And if they hit a couple of wins, they’re in the green, they’re happy.
The ones I feel for are the people who work there because they’re signed up on sure decent salaries, but also a promise. “Give us 5 years of your life, give us 10 years of your life, and we’re going to make you rich.” That is the promise. That’s why people join companies like Flexport. They take that risk. And in this case, a lot of those people are the ones who lost out big time.
Conor Doherty: If I can follow up on that point because it’s a good transition. You gave the example of a researching company that raised $100 million in a single day. You went on their website and you couldn’t determine what it was that they actually were going to do. Similarly, and this leads to the question about how much of this could be self-inflicted. So for example, if I send you an email and I say, “Anthony, I’ve got a box of gold bars, and if you just send me €100 in Steam gift cards, I will forward it to you,” you know, maybe you are someone who believes the world is full of good actors. But how much of that is naivety on your part and that it’s sort of self-inflicted, that you’ve taken a risk, you’ve maybe made bad decisions, and then you can take that question and apply it across the board?
So again, no one in this conversation, I doubt anyone listening, questions the rapacity of companies overall. People want money, people want success. There will always be people who want to do that. But we’re not talking about people breaking into your house and stealing your money. We’re talking about people offering a product for sale and other people saying, “I’ll pay for that,” despite not being able to provide the investor thesis. You give the example of speculation, the investing. What was the thesis behind the investment in company A? If you can’t define that, you have wasted your money. That would be one perspective and one response to this. Joannes, I’ll come to you, but first, Anthony, your thoughts?
Anthony Miller: I think my biggest concern with investors throwing their money into these products is that they’re being sold the same thing, the same reasons that were used in 2010. Because back in 2010, they were talking about digitization and archaic industry and all of these needs and people using spreadsheets.
Back on what I was saying earlier, I don’t see any other reason. How did Dave turn around and say, “Hey guys, I’ve got an idea, I want $100 million”? The only way you’re going to sell that is if you’re saying this industry is absolutely ripe for the taking. Everyone needs fire, and they’re running around with sticks, trying to make fire with stones, and we’ve actually got fuel and matches.
Conor Doherty: Companies as well, not simply just investors. You invest money as a speculative gamble, so to speak. You also invest in a product, you invest time in a company, lots of different investments.
Anthony Miller: All of these decisions are made by people. For now, they could be made by AI in the future, but all of these decisions are made by people.
So with all of this, it’s just someone along, and I think it was only one company that gave him $100 million as well, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve got to really believe in what you’re selling to raise that amount of money and believe in what’s being sold to you to give that money and to join that company. But the only way you can sell something that huge on those valuations is by believing that that industry, there’s no one in the space already. You bring something completely new to the table, you’ll be able to charge whatever you want for it, and everyone’s going to line up to buy it. That can be the only thesis for that. Otherwise, the world is even less rational than I thought it was.
Joannes Vermorel: My take is it would be slightly different. I mean, with quantitative easing that you have had, plus a lot of dumb money floating around, you know, the price of oil was quite high, so you end up with some petromonarchies having hundreds of billions to deploy. And well, what do you do? And then you ended up with money was so cheap that the idea that for me, there was due to this period a lot of dumb investing with people who are having way too much money on their hands and so that we’re doing like dumb deployment is not too surprising.
And for me, the problem was compounded by the fact that there was no real pushback in the sense that the experts that would be consultants, market analysts, should be the ones calling out that. I mean, we don’t want to prevent you from investing $100 million as seed money in a one-man company. Okay, if you deploy this money, it’s on you. My concern is that people also do it because they expect that there will be, they don’t expect any pushback. They don’t expect that prominent market and firm would say, “This is bad, insane, and you should not do that. This will end badly within, let’s say, 95% confidence.”
I’ve never seen, out of the big companies, anybody just calling out saying, “This is insane, you should not do that. This story will not end well, and we will from day one strongly advise our clients.” If you’re, for example, a prominent market research firm, that’s what I would expect from them, to say, “This story will most likely not end well.” And the interesting thing is that they would do the exact opposite because, in fact, they see this newly company who has raised tons of money as a very appealing prospect who is going to most likely end up spreading their newly acquired capital on them, this market analyst firm.
And so, on the contrary, they just amplify the nonsense by creating awareness, praising people who have done nothing, created nothing yet, just successfully wasted tons of money. That’s where I see, you know, that’s that. I believe that also the problem is that investors are doing that because the reality is that the market is not really pushing back against this nonsense. There is really a lack of critical, I would say, experts who apply critical thinking and that instead of being happy talking about everything as if it was the best thing ever, who just say, “No, this is most likely a very misguided way to deploy this capital. We can say with 95% confidence it will end with massive losses for all people involved.”
So that would be investors, employees, and their clients. And their clients, and if we had this sort of pushback, then next investors would be much more careful because they would see, “Okay, that didn’t go so well, so we are maybe going to slow down.” I think, and again, it happens. People were crazy with every single buzzword. Blockchain, I have never seen any serious market analyst saying, “You don’t need a blockchain for that. This is crazy. Why do you even use that?” I am absolutely not convinced.
For AI, there was again, I’ve never seen market analysts say, “You’re just repackaging third-party LLMs. What is exactly that you’re actually adding besides being a wrapper around that?” Some people do it a little bit. I think Marc Andreessen is a little bit more critical than investors, but he’s super rare and again, he is an investor. So, I would expect that the neutral third parties to step in, not to wait for an investor to actually critique his own rivals because, again, credibility would be much higher if it wasn’t a venture capitalist talking about other venture capitalists. Obviously, there is some conflict of interest.
Normally, the idea of having third-party experts would be to have some kind of neutrality or something that is close to that, and we’re not having that.
Anthony Miller: I can’t name one neutral third party. Yes, if you ask, I could not name one. And that’s, I mean, it’s ludicrous when you think about it, but it’s just the reality. Money is the factor. It always comes down to money, and these analysts, they are expanding different services, and they’re paid. You know, we can, I mean, I can talk about Gartner until the cows come home. I’ve looked at their magic quadrants. I’ve tracked that process for a few different parts of logistics tech, especially the RTTVP one, the real-time visibility, and it’s really interesting.
Because they’re expanding solutions now, they’re offering go-to-market. So, they offer the analyst part, they offer go-to-market, and then they turn around and say, “Oh, and we’re also experts, and we can do our magic quadrants and a little bit of magic, and you’ve got leaders and you’ve got rising stars,” and all this stuff. Kind of like a high school yearbook. It’s like, you know, the king and queen and most likely to be president, most likely to succeed, and all of that stuff. But that is literally the value of it, to be honest, in my opinion. You look at a magic quadrant, that’s how you should look at it right now.
Having seen these processes and what people go through, and the real-time visibility one is a great example of what I think is not necessarily biased but definitely bad acting. And there are many reasons why, but having the same company be the leader of that quadrant since its inception, I think actually, we’re going on like four years now, maybe more. Having that set, so Project 44 is the company. Even after they’ve gone through multiple rounds of layoffs and they’ve gone through issues, people questioning the actual functionality and success rates of their product, and very, very interesting. And then different rumors of potential exits and buyouts and all sorts of stuff. Very, very interesting company to look at.
But even through all of that, they’ve remained a leader, and this year’s MQ in RTTVP will be released, I think, in April. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still a leader, and that’s after losing half their staff and doing all of this stuff. For me, that is mind-boggling because there is no way that you can actually look at that situation and actually look at these companies and look at the competitive landscape and say it is so bad and there are so few great solutions that the leader is the one who has gone through all of this kind of public issues and layoffs and everything. That speaks volumes to me on the legitimacy or lack thereof of the magic quadrant.
And then them expanding their solutions that they offer, it just all kind of makes sense. It’s like they’re offering go-to-market or marketing or whatever. They just want you to pay for that, and it’s hard to believe that they can then be unbiased. Very hard for me to believe. They can say it, and I’ll accept it because they are saying it, and it’s not my place to definitely say that’s not the case. No, it’s my opinion. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, at least for now. But there are people out there who could look into this and actually confirm it or not, but everyone chooses not to because I think everyone’s making money from the situation, and that’s what drives it.
It’s unfortunate because then you’ve got people going in and making decisions based on magic quadrants and advice from experts. I find that word, it’s a horrific word because things are always changing, and no one can be an expert in something that’s always evolving. You can be an expert in history. History doesn’t move unless you’re American, but I won’t go down that path. So, you can be an expert on history, you can be an expert on geography. You can’t really be an expert on something like logistics and supply chain technology with the landscape shifting so quickly at the moment.
So, yeah, very, very interesting, and I do wish there were some actual unbiased entities out there who can look at this and go, “Hang on a second.” I think it will reveal some great things. And just another kind of anecdote on Gartner. I wrote about this in a recent newsletter anyway, so it’s nothing new. But there was a whole thing around one of their RTTVP magic quadrants where the head analyst on that quadrant, the timing was spectacular, left Gartner and went to Project 44. And that happened in, it was announced, I think, in April of that year or something like that.
But the data gathering from all of the competitors and everyone who wants to participate in that MQ ends in February. So, up until the last moment, they can gather all that data, and they see it. Even if they don’t take it with them, they see it. They see the roadmaps, they get the numbers, they know a lot of things that are really valuable if you want to design a strategy. And it’s kind of what you said about organizations trying to get information from your customers. That stuff happens. It’s a reality, and I find that, I mean, questionable acting.
I’m not going to turn around and say that bad acting is questionable. And I find the fact that Gartner didn’t necessarily explore that further to actually figure out what happened, I find that bad though because you can look into that kind of thing and go, “That’s weird.” And I at least hope they’ve updated their contracts, their employment contracts on that to prevent that happening in the future because that kind of situation should not happen in my opinion. It shouldn’t. You shouldn’t be able to walk away with all that information.
Joannes Vermorel: I mean, my interactions with Gartner have always been kind of, let’s say, they have been all hate. For the audience, so I am a vendor, and normally a Lokad software vendor should be paying tons of money to Gartner. But so, they have been very diligent in trying to reach me out, primarily through LinkedIn but also through emails. I had at least a dozen people over the last five years making dedicated personalized outreach to me, and I took several of their calls.
And one of the first questions I asked was, “Can you guarantee to me that you will never take any Euro or dollar from a vendor because it would be deeply unethical?” And I said, “I want your confirmation on two things. First, that you will never do that, and second, do you agree with me that it will be deeply unethical?” And they said, “Yes and yes.” Perfect. We are, let’s proceed, let’s proceed.
And then 20 minutes down the road, we are, “Okay, so if you want to be a cool vendor that’s going to be this amount of money”, let’s say $100,000 if you want to be this, it’s going to be half a million if you want to be this, that’s going to be a million. Okay, so it’s literally pay to win. And the thing is that, and literally, the funny thing is that those people who were reaching out to me, they were, I think, relatively dumb. But that’s in the same call. In the same call, I get first to have the person to do an acknowledgment on two basic principles. And because they have the short-term memory of a goldfish, then 20 minutes down the road, they forgot that they actually agreed with me on the idea that charging me for anything is going to be deeply unethical.
Obviously, the spending is not framed as “we pay for the ranking.” They’re not that dumb. You would have to pay to be part of the event so that you finally get the opportunity to meet the analyst. But that’s the interesting thing, is that when you look at the price of the booth, it is widely, widely overpriced. You would pay for a booth in a trade show, a Gartner trade show, at something that would be what, 4x, 5x the price that you would pay for any other trade show. So obviously, if you have such a gap, the only explanation is that actually you’re paying for something else because it’s not obviously the trade shows that have a crowd that is truly exceptional or whatnot.
So here I do think, and then if we go to those quadrants, but again, the problem of having this pay to win is that obviously all the people who are in the quadrant are paying. And that leads me to another consequence, which is the quadrants where everybody is good. How is it possible? I mean, you have vendors who have technologies that are super aging. I mean, I had some of my peers who literally migrated only like two or three years ago toward web apps. So we are talking of companies that were stuck. That would be, you know, the case, for example, of ToolsGroup, who migrated in the last probably five years, maybe, maybe it’s toward web apps. So they were literally 20 years late to the battle.
So they were still in those sort of fat client era of the late ’90s, and it would not even be pointed out in the quadrant or in any of the analysis. So you can have like obvious technological backwardness of a technology. It’s very in your face, like just give me a 2-minute demo and that will scream at you like, “Are you stuck in the ’90s?” And yet it’s not going to be mentioned, and those people would be qualified as, I would say, a rising star or whatever. Again, I’m saying that that’s where I think in terms of problems, this is really a cause of concern.
I would say an expert who is, even if we are not shooting for absolute absence of bias, we could still strive for something where at the very least you try to make a little bit of an effort. Yeah, a bit of objectivity in your analysis, a little bit. I mean, let’s, a little bit like if you’re still using COBOL in 2025, I would not call it like state-of-the-art technology. If you’re still using, you know, fat clients from the ’90s, again, not state-of-the-art. Plenty of small things like that.
And that’s for me, that’s the thing that is very infuriating, is that again, if you don’t point out the sort of massive problems that you can have, why should I put any trust in the good things that you’re saying about any of those companies? And that’s, by the way, one of the reasons why I decided to never pay anything to Gartner, and they repaid me in kind by never mentioning Lokad. But that’s okay, that’s okay.
Anthony Miller: I think it’s important to add that although you haven’t participated in anything with Gartner, that hasn’t stopped you reaching substantial levels of success as a company. It hasn’t necessarily stunted your growth. And as we were talking about before we started recording, you end up with customers coming to you after four, five, six failed attempts with other vendors who do appear in these magic quadrants and who do appear in Gartner material. And that’s a reality that I hear as well in logistics technology. That happens where they’ll go through that process and they’ll look at the leaders, and they’ll use Gartner magic quadrant, and after 5 years they’ve ended up with someone who’s nowhere to be seen in any Gartner information, and it’s working for them.
Joannes Vermorel: Yeah, and that’s where I see, you know, again, my take. And that’s where you, as an investor, you deploy capital, you make a mistake, really well, it’s really bad. But frankly, you’re not benefiting from the situation as a firm. You try to use this money, you do mistakes, you make the wrong gamble on the technology. Again, it’s very bad, but it’s on you. Where I’m again, where I think it really gets, for me, it gets a little bit ugly is that when you have a business model that is geared toward being a magnifier of the problem, you know, where you, again, those market research firms who should be in the business of protecting the interest of the clients in general, the people who consume those technologies so that they can be properly informed of the situation.
But in fact, they not only don’t, you know, they don’t only omit to mention those weaknesses, but they literally promote things where I would say promote solutions, vendors, technological paths that are quite insane without, and disregarding completely the interest of their ultimate clients. I say the ultimate because in reality, if you look at Gartner, their clients are super dominantly vendors. Again, it’s very clear to me that the money is flowing almost exclusively from tech vendors to Gartner. But that, again, that’s a question, I think, an ethical question for Gartner’s employees to really look seriously at their employer and think for themselves, “Should I even be working for a company like that?” That’s, I think, a very, a question that they should really ask themselves.
Anthony Miller: And obviously, the questioning the, I mean, the value of something that is inherently positive with Gartner because there’s no negativity in the quadrants. They don’t, it’s hard, right? It’s so, okay, these are our 10 choices. We’ll just go through all 10 in order from leader to whatever that thing down the bottom left there is, and it doesn’t really mean much, but we’ve got 10 to try. It doesn’t really make much sense. It doesn’t, for me, there’s no real value to that.
There are other things out there that I know, like big corporates, they engage with some of the venture capital firms and everything, and they try to find solutions within their portfolio companies, and the venture capital firms try to provide value to those corporates, and that kind of works and kind of doesn’t. There are a lot of initiatives out there that they’ve all got a sense of bias, and everyone’s looking for a solution, and everyone’s looking for something that’s going to work for them, but they’re really struggling to find it because they’re struggling to find the information.
And it feels like, especially in supply chain, the people who are the most capable of making the decisions because they’ve got the experience, the knowledge, they’re either far too busy running the company supply chains and operations, or their opinion is basically made irrelevant by the time the decision-making gets to the CIO or to the CFO who will just shut something down. And that’s another problem that we’ve got in this space. You’ve got a lot of bad information, and the people consuming that information are the people who are removed from the thing that you’re trying, the problem you’re trying to solve, and they only look at the numbers and the money.
I’ve seen cases where the C-level have turned around and they’ve said, “They’re not in the Gartner material, we don’t want to use them.” I’ve actually seen that kind of situation, which is just ludicrous. And I’ve also been in situations where that supply chain leader has found the right solution for their company, and the C-level, someone like the CFO or whatever, turns around and says, “No, we only use SAP for everything, and we are not interested, and we’re not going to go through that process.” And that’s it, done. It’s such a shame.
They use it because they believe SAP can work because, again, the information out there from various sources, third party and direct from SAP, is that it can work. So it’s, “No, go and make it work.” Even if it’s more expensive, whatever, go and make it work. We don’t, we don’t. And that, for me, is stopping us from moving forward and evolving and finding those levels of technological and process changes and everything that would allow us to better handle the cyclical and also the peaks in logistics and the flows.
A very negative thing that we do that’s an accepted best practice, and I find that quite a shame. We could definitely change that and do better.
Conor Doherty: Yeah, well, what I thought that’s occurred to me a couple of times, and I’ve been waiting for an appropriate moment to bring it up, is you both have somewhat bemoaned the lack of expertise or unbiased expertise in the marketplace. And it sounds at times like it’s, well, there’s a, take the concept from psychology, there’s an external locus of control here for all people involved and certainly for companies.
Like, sorry, very, very quickly, internal locus of control: I’m in charge, I can make actions, I can affect the path and shape it in front of me. External: the universe acts upon me, I have no agency. And the way it’s sometimes described there, it almost sounds like, well, you’re kind of powerless to do anything about this because, well, they’re just bad actors.
And my question, to be more specific here, is instead of looking externally for experts to sort of save the day, how much of this could be done internally? So, for example, I know Joannes, you before have spoken at length about mechanical sympathy. So, for example, learning just a little bit about software design, just a little bit, the same way just learning a little bit about nutrition can, in fact, help you lose weight and make better diet choices. Similarly, knowing a little bit about the difference between schema and tabular database design, that can actually be sufficient to guide you away from a potentially dumb, time-wasting, and incredibly expensive decision. You don’t need to be the greatest computer software designer in the world to know that a quick Google search is sufficient for that. So my question then is, Anthony, how much of this can, how much of the damage and the carnage that you’re describing can be remedied by just learning a little bit more?
Anthony Miller: If we’re looking at the kind of enterprise-size customers at the top end, the big guys, the problem is there’s so many layers that even if the person, so if we’re talking about supply, even if the person in charge of supply chain for that company is going to go through that process, you know, the CIO and the CFO are not going to care. And if they’re involved in the decision-making process, then there’s a strong chance that…
So, it’s funny actually because during this, during the workshop I was doing over the last couple of days, we were talking about the obstacles to selling their solution. So it’s a solution that is actually sold to enterprise manufacturers. And when they go in and they talk to the people who would be using it and the people in charge of supply chain, they love it. But then it gets to the CIO or the CFO, and you have to change the pitch. You have to talk about different things, and they’re not willing. They’re not willing to take a risk on something they don’t know, and they don’t want to inform themselves and learn. Or simply, as I said, because third-party data doesn’t have them mentioned anywhere, they’re not in Gartner, they’re not in G2, they’re not on all these things. You get in a situation where they feel like they can’t go and confirm what they’re being told, and they don’t want to take a risk.
And it’s very interesting. Of course, it’s worth learning, and I believe companies need to trust, put more trust on every, has an IT department, for example, and you ask the head of IT, “Does this make sense?” The IT department can actually be a negative, and that’s the problem. So it can make sense, but it could still be a negative because they could be afraid of, “Well, actually, if we implement this, half our people are actually going to be irrelevant.” And that is a reality with tech that I see every day. And IT managers or whoever is making the decisions, they don’t want to do that. In a lot of cases, not saying all the cases, but in a lot of cases, maintaining the status quo suits because it’s comfortable and because it guarantees work for the people who are there today.
And everyone also likes to have, actually, that’s a bit of a stupid statement. Certain people like to have a sense of importance, a sense of meaning. I’m not going to say everyone, but certain people want that, especially when it comes to middle to upper management layers that have gone through a lot recently, a lot of layoffs and questioning how relevant they are, especially with work from home and everything. So now there’s even more of a desire to kind of safeguard their role and their job. If you come along with a great tech solution that ticks all the boxes, someone comes to you and says, “We want to implement this, it’s going to save us 15% on logistic spend, it’s going to be great,” they’re going to look at you and they’re going to be like, “Okay, what does this mean for us from an IT perspective?” “Oh, it integrates directly with our ERP, everything’s great, smooth as butter, and we don’t need to use SAP supply chain anymore.” That person is going to go, instead of trying to understand, they’re probably going to look at things and go, “If we stop using SAP supply chain, I’ve got three people leaving, or I’m less relevant to the company.” So there’s also those kinds of things that are happening, which are very unfortunate.
And the people at the top in companies who make decisions, the gatekeepers, there’s also a tendency to then, before making the final decision, look for external confirmation. Finding that external confirmation, they’re going to the same sources that we’ve been discussing, which, if you’ve got a solution that doesn’t require consultants, and then there’s a solution that requires consultants, and you go to one of those very consultants to confirm your decision-making, you know what the outcome’s going to be. And all of the big consulting firms, they benefit from having these solutions that require armies of consultants. And every time you want to make a change, you need to get 50 consultants in to do something. They require that. And then you’ve also got the whole outsourcing part and data entry and all of this stuff. There’s a lot of bad in these solutions. So that, for me, those are the issues that we’ve got today. And having a little bit more trust and faith in the people who would know what they’re talking about would go a long way. But there are other factors in play that prevent those kinds of outcomes.
And, you know, seen it many times with WiseTech, where, I mean, the DHL thing is just insane. You know, DHL could have gone to WiseTech before they went with SAP. They would have saved between 300 million to 1 billion, depending on who you listen to. Why didn’t they? That’s a great question. Why didn’t they? They ended up there in the end anyway. Who had an influence on that decision? Who made that decision? Why did they make it, etc.? Does it come down to external factors? Was it one person? Was it a financial decision made, or was it a group decision that wasn’t actually made by DHL Global Forwarding? It’s a huge decision within DHL Group. Is SAP actually used elsewhere, and that’s why they decided to go with it because it made sense to them? SAP upsold and said they… Many different factors at play. And that is, again, another thing that, for me, prevents great solutions being tested.
And it’s not a general rule. I know there’s some really interesting solutions that are being tested today by some big freight forwarders at the top level. But they’ll run POCs for, you know, a company can run 10 POCs with 10 top forwarders. They might be lucky if two move forward because for a POC, you don’t necessarily need that kind of group-level approval. But then when you’re talking about, “Okay, this needs to actually now be rolled out and integrated, and it makes sense for it to be globally rolled out,” you have to go and ask those questions. It can get shut down pretty quickly.
So some of the companies I prefer are those who are actually not centralized with their decision-making. There’s another big forwarder I was talking to in the US. They were looking for a TMS platform. They get to make the decision themselves in the US. They’re a global group, but they made that decision themselves. They didn’t have to go to the top. So the actual people making the decisions were those who were going to use the tech. They went through the whole process diligently, trying to find the best solution, and they chose the best solution. And they were trusted by both local management and global group management because they were given that power to make the decisions. I think if more companies start giving that power and stop then running to third parties for confirmation, they’ll probably see better results.
And it’s funny, there’s a parallel with this. I’m just in the back of my mind, I’m sitting here talking about this, and all I can see is Macron and McKinsey. Because although in France the spend is insane to keep the country functioning, it’s like 30% of the spend is just admin cost to keep the country running.
Joannes Vermorel: A bit more than that, but yeah.
Anthony Miller: Yeah, he still had that whole McKinsey thing where he wouldn’t even trust the people who he technically hired, who were working for France, who get a job for life as public servants. He was running to McKinsey, spending millions and millions and millions for what? For confirmation? For, you know, and there was one where they spent millions to find out how to save pennies. And then you’re just like, you know, this has got to stop. Whether it’s in public service running a country or running a business, I think decision makers are too quick to go to these big names because they’re experts and ask for their kind of approval almost because maybe they’re scared of losing their job if they make a bad decision. But then if someone questions them, they can say, “Well, yeah, but you know, Gartner and EY and these guys and everyone, they told us to do it, you know, they said it’s okay.”
Joannes Vermorel: So my take is that I think one of the ingredients that is most direly lacking is just blunt written communications. Again, I think one of the plagues of modern corporations is happy talk. So you don’t want to ruffle any feathers, so you have something that is phrased in a way that it doesn’t convey any information. And surprise, surprise, because you don’t convey information, people are not informed.
So what does that mean? It means that, for example, you said your experience with auger.com, you went to the website, it didn’t make any sense. I have the exact same experience. I went to this web page, said, “Okay, this doesn’t make any sense. It looks like something produced by ChatGPT. Maybe it was produced by ChatGPT, I don’t know.” But it had this vibe like, “You’ve conveyed like two pages worth of text, and I still don’t know anything about what you’re trying to say. Nothing.”
That is the sort of thing where, for example, as a client, you’re trying to look at a vendor, you go to their website, and you find that it’s almost impossible to make any sense of what they are doing. For example, they will have 20 times the AI keyword, and it’s absolutely unclear what it is, what it does, why it’s there, which sort of AI have they picked, why does it make sense. That should be a red flag, and you should put it in writing. Footnote: “I believe that vendor X is bullshitting us because, frankly, what they’re talking about AI just does not make sense. I spent an hour on the website, I still cannot make any sense of it.” That would be just an example.
Another example would be, you know, we just did a quick demo. It’s still a freaking fat client from the ’90s. I mean, it looks super aged. We need to keep that in mind. The interesting thing is that I can see when I see those companies, those very blunt pieces of information would just not circulate. Everybody is super worried about offending anybody.
And so, yes, to the defense of the CEO, I think his responsibility or her responsibility would be to create this culture of more informative communication where you don’t have a PowerPoint with 50 slides saying nothing. But instead, the sort of Amazon-style memo, you know, you get it in one to five pages, super direct, what are the most salient things. Because I think the reason people like the CEO who just said, “We’re going to go to this big vendor,” is that he gets 20 briefs that are pure happy talk. None of it is convincing in the slightest, doesn’t make any sense. And so he says, “Okay, it’s a wash, it’s a complete wash, so let’s stick with what I know, which is the big vendor that is already in.”
It’s until there is someone who will, because I don’t think that CEOs or top executives are so afraid, but when I look at the typical corporate communications, it’s a nightmare. I mean, what they’re being fed by their subordinates is just complete garbage. There are a few tiny exceptions like Amazon that has this culture of written high-quality memos. But again, Amazon is an outlier, which is an order of magnitude more profitable than pretty much anybody else. And I think it’s not completely, I would say, it’s one of those reasons, this written culture of forget the PowerPoints, get to the point in one page in English, what are the most important things, and don’t do happy talk.
It’s the sort of thing that very few companies have managed to replicate. And I believe that for software, it is very, very critical. You can succeed without this written culture in many non-software businesses just because the complexity is not as high. It’s not as conceptually complicated, which is a different thing from complex.
And so, I mean, if you look at, for example, a French champion that would be, let’s say, Michelin tires. I mean, this is a great business, great technology, but conceptually everything is kind of straightforward. The business of producing and selling tires, even a five-year-old child can kind of get it. It’s not like if you look on the contrast, if you think about a software company, let’s say Kubernetes, a five-year-old is not going to understand what Kubernetes is about. It’s not even going to comprehend why you need this freaking sort of component, what does it make, or firmware, you know, why does it make even sense.
So that’s where I think software, that’s the problem of software, is that software needs a little bit of bandwidth. But because realistically top management cannot afford to become an expert, then you need to be a little bit more blunt and you need to be extremely antagonistic toward happy talk. And that’s the sort of thing that I’m not seeing that much among the prospects I’m discussing with and some of Lokad’s clients, is this sort of very blunt communications where they don’t let problems under the radar just because you’re going to ruffle feathers. You need to mention that.
And the idea, for example, that yes, we have a problem, productivity gains mean that we have a problem because then we will have all those people, we need to tackle that upfront. Yes, that’s something that needs unfortunately to be put in writing. Otherwise, people just forget. You can’t just rely on oral tradition for these sorts of things.
Anthony Miller: Just what you were saying, thinking of some of the messages I get from time to time, and I do get founders and C-level people reach out to me, “What do you think of this solution?” I mean, who am I to provide them some insight? So you can tell that there’s definitely an appetite for great information. There’s an appetite for new sources that they’re not finding today. And I think the fact that people reach out to me to ask, “What do you think of this solution? Could it work for us? Hey, we’re a BCO, a shipper, we’re looking to change our tech. This solution is not working for us, what can you recommend?” Just like these questions coming to me, it’s interesting because they shouldn’t be coming to me. I shouldn’t be getting questions like that.
I will say on LinkedIn my thoughts and my opinions, but I’m not going through deep due diligence on independent platforms and everything. I know certain things because I’ve been in the industry and things like that, but there’s an appetite for this, and they’re clearly not getting the information that they need in any format. So yeah, it’s almost, what do they call it when there’s too much information? They’re just drowning in information, information overload, and then they get decision paralysis. And we know what happens when you get decision paralysis, you usually end up making the wrong decision. You go with the decision that’s just the default, the path of least resistance, the one that’s going to have the least intense change management, or you’re just going to try and find that comfort.
I believe today all of these information providers that work in such a way that they fund themselves through the information they provide in a very kind of obscure way, that’s doing a disservice to anyone in tech and anyone who’s looking for a tech solution. There needs to be more clarity around that so you can decide, “Is this information based on fact and good analysis, or is this just ticking some subjective boxes and criteria?” Because in essence, the magic quadrants are ticking subjective boxes and criteria, which then allows you to move to the next level, which is, as you said, paying for a booth at the event to be confirmed as a participant kind of thing.
That approach of ticking boxes doesn’t work anymore. Everything we’re talking about is far too complex to just go for a checklist. So having that source of unbiased, or at least as unbiased as possible, information that can go to an executive level and say to them within 20 minutes, “This is why and this is why not,” and it’s just facts and helping them make a decision, that’s super valuable. It doesn’t exist today. It doesn’t exist. It just does not exist. And I think that’s why they look at a magic quadrant and go, “Okay, these guys are top right. All right, we’ll try them out first.”
Conor Doherty: Well, again, you mentioned decision-making, and these are all because you’re operating in a low bandwidth environment. People will default to using heuristics. “What looks like it might help? Let’s go with that,” because time is scarce, my mental energy is scarce. We’ve talked a lot about bad actors or the tendencies and mannerisms of bad actors. In terms of some closing heuristics to help people identify potential good actors, things to look out for. So we’ve already talked about the bad signs of, “Okay, this might be a good actor in the space, be it logistics or supply chain.” I’ll go to you first because I want to give the last word to Anthony. But potential heuristics for spotting good actors in the supply chain space?
Joannes Vermorel: Yeah, I mean, first, watch out for the debt. That’s simple. If they have raised enterprise software, it’s not B2C. If they have raised tons of money, it’s a massive red flag. You know, it’s again, unless they have like an unbelievably rare success story where yes, they will recoup everything, but again, that’s like extremely, extremely rare in the enterprise space. It’s a problem.
Then look out for technological debt. Vendors, you know, the innovative companies of the enterprise space are frequently companies that are more than a decade old. I mean, people are talking about, let’s say, Palantir being a startup. Palantir has been publicly traded for a decade. They have been operating at a loss for, again, since pretty much their inception, 18 years ago or something. I mean, we’re talking of companies that are not exactly super young, and so they can have accumulated over two decades a lot of technological debt. So that would be just look for that.
And then also you need to be able to some extent forge yourself an opinion on what they are technically doing because ultimately you’re buying tech, so you should be able to forge yourself an opinion on their tech even if you’re a non-tech person. On their website, I mean, just imagine if you want to buy, let’s say, a Porsche. You can go to the Porsche website. They would give you tons of very accessible information on why a Porsche car is a beautifully engineered sort of car, and they will, you will have tons of content and closeups, and even if you’re not a car guy, you can still appreciate all the effort that they have in their mechanics and whatnot.
So you can figure out if, just think of it for a second, if you’re looking at a website selling you supposedly a supercar, but all you have is 3D renderings and at no point do they discuss anything that would be the engine, what sort of transmission they have, what sort of braking system they have, what sort of electronic assistant they may have for driving. You know, it would be only superlatives like “best car ever,” “best experience,” blah blah blah, and at no point do they give you any hint on what would make all of that come true.
If you look at, again, if you go for any of the top brands for cars, you will see that there is plenty of information, and they will go into incredible details explained in a way that is very accessible to explain why this piece of engineering is great and that justifies the extravagant price for the car. This is very good, and I’m just saying that, well, if you go for enterprise software, the same should be true. If you’re about to spend a million dollars plus a year on something, if you cannot from the website get any sense of what sort of technology there is, why it’s good, why it’s great.
Because you see, again, the ingredients are important. When you buy, let’s say, a Porsche, they will go to great lengths to say the engine is incredible, the transmission is incredible, the braking is incredible, the suspension is incredible. They will unpack all of this greatness. They won’t just say, “It’s a great car, trust us.” So again, if you go for a piece of enterprise software, yes, there is complexity. Maybe you don’t have time to look at everything, just like you’re maybe not going to spend time reading 100 pages about the supercar, but at least you can zoom in on several parts and you can see meat.
And I think that’s just a simple heuristic. If you look for debt and mechanical sympathy and this sort of, you know, people who are proud about what they’re building and it shows, I think you can already eliminate probably like 90% of the bad actors just on that. And then the rest, obviously, you will still have to do a lot of effort for the rest, but still, I think 90%, you know, eliminating 90% of the bad actors with a few heuristics should be quite a good start.
Conor Doherty: Anthony, same question.
Anthony Miller: Thank you. I think so. On top of looking at technical aspects and going beyond the marketing, something I talk about a lot, you know, the marketing spiel that everyone gives and the smoke and mirrors, and that was a big part of what I originally spoke about with Project 44. They announced a product, it was all flashy smoke and mirrors, and there was no real meat to it. Go beyond that, beyond what you’re being sold and try to understand.
And then you’ve got financial aspects for the company with the debt and everything, but try, and I always add context. Context is really important. You can find companies that have got a lot of debt, but they’re still doing some really interesting things, and it could actually be worth the risk if the implementation is not that invasive and doesn’t take too long. Because there’s another problem, right? When you’re choosing these solutions, you’re choosing them for a long period of time. You’re going to go through extensive rollouts across multiple sites, and all of that is draining, and if it goes bad, it’s really bad.
So choosing the right solution with the right context around it, and by context, I mean you want to look at something that’s really important to me, is the founder or if they’re still there. If it’s a founder company still, and we’re seeing a lot of these teenage startups like you mentioned, these kind of teenage startups where the founders are still there, it’s still very much founder-led. I mean, WiseTech’s founder, for all intents and purposes, is still around. He’s still one of the biggest shareholders. He’s not the CEO anymore, but you want to look at the context around these companies and what’s happening.
And if there’s a change going on at the C-level, if there’s been a lot of turnover there, if they’ve gone through layoffs and things like that, you really want to understand that. If they’re going through restructuring, why? Ask yourself these questions around those kinds of points and just try and go beyond what’s communicated to you through marketing material and technical specs. And also, another thing that’s crucial, trust your people. If you’re buying something for supply chain, talk to your supply chain people. Yes, you need to keep the CIO and CFO happy, completely understand that.
But trust your supply chain people and don’t use a solution that’s going to make them miserable because then your costs are going up, they’re miserable, you’re going to see turnover. And one thing that you really want to avoid is the baggage that comes with hiring new people in decision-making roles. And this is something that I’ve seen very often, a new person coming at the top level, and they turn around and say, “We’re using this solution. I used it before, it’s great,” and then it’ll be great. Don’t have that blind trust in someone coming in and doing that just because they’re saying so and it worked elsewhere.
Especially if your people who have been with you for longer and actually execute on things and orchestrate and everything turn around and say, “It may have worked there, but we’re a little bit different and this is why.” Don’t ignore that because they probably know more than someone who’s just coming in, even if that person’s being paid a lot more to do this job.
A lot of aspects there around the context of each individual person’s situation. But when you see a company that’s got a founder who has left and come back, and C-level where three people have left within a year and things like that, if there are other alternatives and it really comes down to small margins on which is better, choose the stable company. Do yourself a favor and choose the stable company because you never know what’s going to happen with the change at the top.
You know, you could see three people leave and all of a sudden the company’s for sale six months later. That’s what we saw with PHTO the other day, and that kind of situation is not good for anyone because then you’re going back to market potentially trying to find another because you don’t like the company that’s acquired that. So it’s really about the mix that works for you—the technical aspects, the financial aspects, but also the context around what’s happening with that provider. Very, very important, and it requires a bit of diligence. It really does.
You’re only best served by yourself if you can do that diligence internally. Take the time to do it. If you can’t, good luck finding someone who’s not going to be biased and who will come in and do that for you because that’s very difficult to find.
Conor Doherty: Well, thank you both. I don’t have any further questions, and we’ve been going for quite a while. So before I close, any last thoughts from either of you you wish to mention?
Anthony Miller: No, thanks for having me. That’s all I can say. It’s been really, really great, and a lot of things that I want to, you know, when I listen back on this, I’m going to take a lot of what Joannes has said, and there’s some research there that I’m going to be doing myself and some concepts that I want to learn about that both of you have introduced there. So, it’s been a pleasure. It’s really great to come in, do a podcast, and actually learn things. Absolutely brilliant, so thank you.
Conor Doherty: Well, thank you. And Joannes, thank you very much for your time. Anthony, thanks for joining us in the studio. It’s been a pleasure. Cheers, and thank you for watching. We’ll see you next time.
