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Key topics discussed include:
- How the decision to stay away from venture capital and Sand Hill Road shapes the kind of business and customer relationships you can build
- The real math behind founder control and equity dilution, and why the bootstrapping vs. VC trade-off isn't always what it looks like
- What changes when you go from managing programs at Amazon's scale to personally reviewing every software spend at a startup
- The parallel Manjot draws between good consulting and good product leadership, and why having done both changes how he builds
- How AI and vibe coding have unlocked a project that would have been completely out of reach three years ago
- What Manjot sees coming for supply chain ERPs, and why customers might start rethinking how much of their platform they actually need
About the Guest:
Manjot Singh is the Founder and CEO of SummitEdge, built on 18+ years in supply chain and logistics that includes senior roles at FedEx and eight years at Amazon, where he led the launch and scaling of programs including Prime Free Same Day and Amazon Extra Large. He started SummitEdge as a bootstrapped consultancy and has since grown it into a product and services company serving freight forwarding and logistics enterprises. His work is focused on helping supply chain businesses remove the process and administrative friction that holds back real operational change.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Brian Glick: Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder, CEO at Chain.io, and on this episode, we're gonna speak with Manjot Singh. Manjot is the CEO and co-founder of SummitEdge, which is a technology company that does a combination of supply chain related products as well as consulting, for things like Salesforce and CargoWise and all sorts of other technologies that supply chain companies need to bring together.
[00:00:27] On the episode, we're gonna really get into some of the differences between working in big companies and small companies and working across venture capital and bootstrap businesses. And then at the end, we're gonna get some predictions on what all of this AI and vibe coding means, for the future of consulting and software and ERPs.
[00:00:48] So wide-ranging conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.
[00:00:52] Manjot, welcome to the show. So glad to have you here.
[00:00:57] Manjot Singh: Yeah, man. Very excited to talk to you and your team. We've worked together on various things, and very excited to continue, working together and then seeing where things go, and excited about this conversation.
[00:01:09] Brian Glick: Awesome. Let's start with the fun one. How did you get into this business, and why would you decide to stay?
[00:01:16] Manjot Singh: Yeah. If we wanna just pull back a little bit, how I got into the supply chain world in general was completely happenstance, right? I started my... At that time, it was just a college job at FedEx when I was 18. And never in my wildest dreams did I ever think this would turn into my career.
[00:01:37] I just wanted some beer money, and FedEx was hiring for part-time roles, and it worked out because I'm an early riser. So I would wake up at 1:00, 2:00 AM in the morning, go do my shift, four, four and a half hours, come back, take a nap, go to school. And so that's how I kinda worked my way through school.
[00:01:55] But immediately after, as I slowly started to understand more and more about this space, I realized I actually do thoroughly enjoy the world of supply chain. It's incredibly complex, but it's very simple at its very core, right? Like you're basically moving goods, to a customer as, within that promise that they're expecting.
[00:02:17] Then as a part of that process, I went through FedEx, senior leadership roles there, then I went to Amazon. I was there for about eight years, exceedingly, like increasingly responsible roles. And then eventually I said, "I'm doing all this cool building and product design and things for other people.
[00:02:34] Why don't I do it for myself?" And thus, SummitEdge was born. So to your point, that's what got me into it, is I've always had a bug of entrepreneurship and wanting to have something of my own and building something from the ground up. Even when I was in large organizations like Amazon, I never stayed past the initial build.
[00:02:54] Like we would take programs like Prime Free Same Day. I took it from zero to $3 billion in top-line revenue and then left, to go start another startup within Amazon called Amazon Extra Large. So when I started I had two delivery stations and one fulfillment center, and now there's 134 delivery stations and, I think over 15 or 16 worldwide fulfillment centers.
[00:03:20] So as soon as I hit critical mass, I kinda go off and wanna build something else. And so that's what SummitEdge was, right? It was my next project, my next build. And what makes me stay is the excitement of building, right? is right now I would say we're very much past our fundamental like foundational stage at SummitEdge.
[00:03:39] We are now in our growth stages.
[00:03:42] Maybe in the next two to three years I will find myself doing something else after we get out of this initial growth phase. But, but no, I, as of right now, it's still very exciting. It's really cool. Lots of changes are coming around in our neck of the world or neck of the woods.
[00:03:59] We've got so much new technology. So yeah, it's, it's exciting, so I'm staying.
[00:04:07] Brian Glick: So what-- You started in one of the biggest companies in the world, and then you went to the biggest company in the world, at least for a moment.
[00:04:14] Manjot Singh: Yeah
[00:04:15] Brian Glick: and then you said, "Okay, I'm gonna take that security blanket away," right? What was the... what did that feel like, making that decision to go, "Okay, I can..." Cause I'll tell you as an outsider, when you hear somebody from Amazon say, "I built this thing to three billion in top-line revenue," you say, "Yeah, but you attach something to a rocket ship, that's already moving in a direction.
[00:04:41] There's all that momentum." you say, "Okay, I'm gonna turn on, turn on, a new feature. I can test it with a million users today, right? And then get product feedback." And then you go and say, "Okay, now I'm gonna start something from scratch."
[00:04:54] Manjot Singh: Yeah
[00:04:55] Brian Glick: Was the... Tell me, take me through that mental process.
[00:05:00] Manjot Singh: Yeah. I always told myself, like, and I'm not saying Amazon is doing bad, but I would-- If you talk to leaders that joined right around when I did, which was, like, around 2015, right around 2021, 2022, of course there were layoffs and stuff. My team was affected, but I did-- Like, I was told that I needed to downsize my team and so it was just like the writing was on the wall in that sense, right?
[00:05:25] And at Amazon, there's this saying called, your day one mentality, right? So that day one mentality really is like that builder's mentality, where every day is day one. you're continuously improving. You're constantly looking. I feel like right around that 2021, 2022 mark, a lot of senior leaders that had that mentality, David Bozeman, who's now at CH Robinson as their CEO, Dave Clark, who now runs Augur.
[00:05:51] Like a lot of, like the core senior leadership team that was that inspirational day one mentality team, including Jeff Bezos, like that's when he stepped down into the chairman role and Jeff Wilke took over. It was a different culture. Downsizing was happening, and I'm not saying that you should always innovate and just like innovation doesn't happen by throwing people at it, but, a lot of projects that were the next kind of, I would say the next like exciting thing at Amazon were being pushed off to the side to put the business in maintenance mode basically.
[00:06:29] And so I, that was-- I told myself that was when I would find myself somewhere else, right? I, quite honestly, I did look for a few roles, outside of Amazon and I did, like Google, there were a couple roles at Meta and a few others. I was looking at the top, the Fortune Fives.
[00:06:49] But then eventually I just, and simultaneously I was doing consulting off, off to the side, for different businesses for a variety of different things. So a lot of them are like the middle mile, final mile space. And as a byproduct of that both me and my co-founder were starting to see some success with that.
[00:07:10] And so we said, "Why don't we just take a bet on ourselves? Like we have a good security blanket, from all of the stocks that we've cashed out. Why don't we just take a bet on ourselves and let's go build something of our own?" and yeah, so SummitEdge initially started off as a pure consultancy.
[00:07:26] And then we've ballooned to where we are today with partnerships with ERP systems and, our own proprietary products and services and consulting is still a big part of the business, but that's what the journey was like. And, really it was about the culture shift at Amazon.
[00:07:42] Brian Glick: So consulting and product, right, are very different animals, right? What was the-- what's it like doing both at the same time?
[00:07:57] Manjot Singh: Yeah. I mean, I feel like if I boil it back down to like what, what it is. So like if I were to take a space, like a final mile space, there's some core fundamentals that it takes for a package to go from a sortation center to a dispatch window to a driver to a customer, right? So there's some core fundamentals, and that's– I think consulting is definitely a very different skill, right?
[00:08:29] It's a, you really have to understand that specific customer's needs, that specific problem, that specific geography. When in product, you're kind of more looking at the experience, how do the tools tie in? What type of tech stacks do you put into it? But I feel like the best product leaders are really good consultants because they can go into a situation and look at, what does my customer actually want, right?
[00:09:01] And what are my customer's actual needs? And they can work from that customer backwards to help develop that product. And it's the same journey that you take somebody when you're consulting, right? If you basically sit with them. I usually do a week in their shoes, right? "Talk me through your processes.
[00:09:20] Let's work through everything. Let's leave no stone unturned." "Let's walk a mile in your shoes," type of thing. And then we start to pull back and start to give our recommendations. And I think tie-in between the two is the customer experience, right? On the consulting side, you're just basically making recommendations and providing them potential stopgaps for very high-risk things, really just giving them an idea of what to do next.
[00:09:46] Product side, you're actually doing the execution of it, right? So you're working with all your engineers and your product leaders, UI, UX, all the other things to put that, all those suggestions into action and put it into a tangible thing that people can work with, right? So yeah, it was an interesting leap, but I didn't feel out of place doing consulting.
[00:10:11] As a part of having time, I went back and did my EMBA, which has then also continued to help really solidify some of those innate principles that you just learn, being in organizations like Amazon. But it actually puts some like literature and fundamentals and some,
[00:10:31] Brian Glick: Give me an example. What's something that you feel like ... 'Cause I hear very mixed things about these EMBAs, I think everybody brings their own preconceived notion and then leaves with the same notion they came in with. But, give me an example of something that you feel like matches that pattern.
[00:10:51] Manjot Singh: Yeah, for example, like market analysis, market research, right? One framework for that is like Porter's Five Forces, right? So there's an actual science to how to dissect a market, right? You can agree or disagree that that's the best model, but these are types of things that for me fundamentally, I did not know.
[00:11:14] Like when I do market research or used to do market research, it used to be very thinking about it just innately, trying to figure it out on my own rather than having a set framework that I'm following, and dissecting it. And so in Porter's Five Forces, and forgive me, this has been a while since I've read the whole thing, but you basically...
[00:11:34] There's five segments, five forces that define an industry, right? And you then dissect your specific-- rather than trying to focus on the entirety of the industry, if we're talking about manufacturing, you wouldn't say manufacturing. You would say manufacturing in China, in this specific region, right?
[00:11:54] So then you really start to dive a little bit deeper, and then you can then tease out using this framework, you can tease out more, and you give each one a grade. And I believe if it's five, your average comes out to five, it's a grade, grades of one through five, then you don't go into that market.
[00:12:13] That is a highly competitive, high risk, very high barrier to entry type of market. You don't go there. But if you have some sort of like under three, you may wanna make a decision. So actually, coincidentally, when we started SummitEdge, how we're directionally moving into which areas, we are actually using something similar to Porter's Five Forces to make that strategic business decision on where we will make the investment next.
[00:12:39] So that's an example. But you're very right, right? I think EMBAs serve a variety of functions for me. Like a lot of people, academia is a part of it, but at least in-- different from an MBA. An EMBA, you're working with people that are 14 plus...
[00:13:00] I think our average tenure was 14 years in their industry space and at least 10 years of managerial experience, right? So these are seasoned professionals. Most of the people that that went to, were in my cohort and the cohort before and after, they were at least director level people, if not senior manager in the Fortune 5s Right?
[00:13:22] And then, or above, right? We had a couple of VPs and CFOs and things like that. So it's also a great networking tool, which is why I went. To be honest, I can't tell you the amount of people that are now in the Rolodex just from the alumni network, right? That's been very helpful.
[00:13:39] Brian Glick: Changing topics slightly, but, I'm curious, again, with this transition from a big company to being a founder and a business owner, right? What's been different about managing a team inside a company versus managing a team where you're the ultimate authority or or have the ultimate responsibility?
[00:14:00] Manjot Singh: I did. Incredibly nerve-wracking. It's like things that you don't-- you had said it, right? At Amazon, even though you're responsible for a product, right? Or you're responsible for a team, there's still like a trillion-dollar company backing you, right?
[00:14:15] So at the end of the day, you're not worried about running out of cash, or you're not worried about, P&L. You're not worried-- you are, right? For your own business unit, but it's not the same. Now we're talking about billions. Now we're talking about hundreds of thousands and millions, right?
[00:14:30] So it's, every single decision, like my VP of BizDev just came to me and was like: "I need another $2,000 a month for this tool." And I was like: "Hmm, do we really need this tool?" "Let's think about this for a second." So that's the difference, right? 'Cause at the end of the day, now you are not just responsible for, just your business unit, you're responsible for the health of the company, you're responsible for all these people that work with you.
[00:14:56] And yeah, it is a different level. Even though the size and scale is very different, it is a very different level of pressure. But I also think that's why it's not fickle, right? You can probably attest to this. It's, you have to have a backbone.
[00:15:10] You have to have fortitude and resilience and grit and all of the things in order to actually make this type of thing happen. And Brian, I don't know if you guys are bootstrapped or not, and I never asked you actually, but we are, right? So literally, like every dollar that we spent in the early days was our own.
[00:15:30] And so that slowed growth. But I very conscientiously, living here in the Bay Area, stayed away from venture money. I have friends in the venture capital space. I know a lot of the firms on Sand Hill Road, and I've very specifically stayed away because of the founder control that it relinquishes. But yeah, man. it's been a lot-
[00:15:51] Brian Glick: Explain that a little bit for people. So I've founded companies both ways, right? So I've lived on both sides. At Chain, we started in one model, we moved into venture. And I've got a broad view of this. But for people who aren't from the Bay Area, when you say founder control and you say, "Okay, we're bringing venture in," when I was a little bit more naive about it, it was, oh, somebody gives you a pile of money,
[00:16:17] Manjot Singh: Yeah,
[00:16:17] Brian Glick: and that's the end of the sentence. There's a period,
[00:16:20] Speaker 6: Yeah,
[00:16:20] Brian Glick: And then it was, so if you can get a lot of money and it de-risks you, that sounds great, right? Why would you choose not to do that?
[00:16:31] Manjot Singh: Yeah. I mean, the broad strokes of it are like-- So there's like three types of vehicles, right? There's traditional funding banking and things like that if you can secure against some sort of asset. That one, you know, there's no control. Private equity is probably, uh, is definitely another vehicle if you have some level of size and scale, you're an existing business.
[00:16:54] But yeah, for startups, you know, typically like pre-seed, seed, angels, that's where you're going before your Series A, right? And those folks, I'm not saying that they're predatory, I think that's a little harsh, but they are hedging against risk, right? So they're, they're gonna ask for a lot of equity up front, which also... Because when they're investing in your business at that early of a stage, they're basically just taking a bet, you know. And I think the success rate, last stats were even for like some of the biggest angel firms and things like that, it's like one in, I think, every 50 even makes it to A, right?
[00:17:41] So it's like they know, they know that they're gonna... Whatever pile of money they give you, it's a huge risk. It's a bet. So they're gonna, you know, bring in experts. They're gonna-- if you think about it with a silver lining side, you do get funds. You do get access to people that you wouldn't have usually gotten access to.
[00:18:01] But your direction is very set, right? Like you are laser-focused on a mission, right? And when I say relinquishing, which is also not a bad thing as a young founder, right? But when I say relinquishing founder control, or taking control away from the founder, tomorrow, if I decide that, I actually wouldn't do this, but like, I don't wanna partner with, you know, Salesforce anymore.
[00:18:33] I can say that and move along. I don't have anybody to respond to on what my revenue targets are, what my customer acquisition costs are, what my P&L should look like. And typically when you're accepting outside money, that's what the expectations are. I've seen founders on the other side of this, and I do not envy their lives at all.
[00:18:57] You spend 50% of your time building, 50% of your time working with your board and stakeholders and writing decks and trying to figure out how to raise the next round. It's this constant battle of justifying what you're doing and making sure ev- and you're setting realistic targets and, and communicating that
[00:19:23] out to these investors whilst also trying to run a business, right?
[00:19:28] But it does allow you to scale. It does allow you to move up. You do relinquish a lot of equity in the early stages, so your pre-seed, seed, angel, A. Series A is typically... I mean, typically when you start to get into Bs and Cs, a founder is down to under 10%, Right
[00:19:48] So I own 100% of my business, so even if it's not the next unicorn, I'm gonna make a good living.
[00:19:57] It's all good.
[00:19:58] Brian Glick: Well, and I think that's a really-- it's an interesting thing that... There's just a couple interesting things out of that I can just share from experience from my side, which is one is understanding that math, that if you own ten percent of a hundred million dollar-- a business-- If you sell a business for a hundred million dollars and you own ten percent, you get ten million dollars.
[00:20:16] You own a business that you sell for ten million dollars, and you own a hundred percent, you get ten million dollars. Same business, right? To you, from an outcome standpoint.
[00:20:26] Brian Glick: And I think a lot of people outside of it don't quite understand the reality of that math and that the reason you might, say-- But basically what you're saying is, "I don't think that without that outside money, I can get there," because the dynamics of this business, and really this is where it all started with tech VC, is the dynamics of the business is I need to lose money for a while to build the momentum for this business.
[00:20:57] And so when you fund a business through consulting, part of the model is I can build my product while I'm funding the business with the consulting revenue. Now I've had friends who have said that to me who are at year twenty and still haven't built the product because they get... The consulting is very time-consuming, or it becomes very easy to just keep doing that.
[00:21:22] So the VC model is, I wanna spend all of my time building the product. I don't wanna worry about the rest of these things. So if you give me a pile of money now, I can acquire market share. I can build product at a rate that is much faster because I think that my product has a long payback period.
[00:21:39] So I'm gonna spend five hundred dollars to acquire a customer, and I'm gonna get five hundred dollars. I'm gonna get ten thousand dollars from them, but it's gonna take five years to get it. I need money now to build this engine. But the thing you really do, make an agreement, it's usually not written in the documents, but it's the assumption, is you are not aiming for a ten million dollar company,
[00:22:05] Manjot Singh: No,
[00:22:06] Brian Glick: That you've made an agreement with these investors that they're giving you the money to build a billion dollar business.
[00:22:14] Manjot Singh: Absolutely
[00:22:15] Brian Glick: Right? Like that's the deal. And so I think where people sometimes are in for a surprise is they go, "Oh, we grew last year." And yeah, that's not the metric.
[00:22:27] Brian Glick: Did you triple in size again? And did you triple in size again? That's a different mentality, and there's-- I would argue it's neither better nor worse than owning your own business and saying, "If I can grow 30% a year for the next ten years, I'm a happy camper." Like both are good outcomes.
[00:22:48] Where people get into trouble is when they misalign in either direction, either think they're gonna bootstrap their way to a billion-dollar company in three years or the other way around, right? I'm gonna take this money and then use it to build a company that grows at a 20% rate.
[00:23:04] Manjot Singh: Yeah, that hockey stick model, right? That hyperscale, they used to be called unicorns, now we have decacorns and whatever else these, Anthropics of the world are now trillion-dollar businesses before they go public. Gosh, what's going on? I don't know.
[00:23:18] But in any case, Yeah, you're absolutely right. The people, especially your seed and, pre-seed and seed investors, angel investors, and definitely your Series A folks, right? When you start getting to more institutional investing, they're looking for that, 25X, 30X return, on their money, right?
[00:23:36] 'Cause they took that bet on you. And so because of that, the expectation is to triple, quadruple every single year. And so, otherwise your next round is gonna be a little bit hard, right? So yeah.
[00:23:49] Brian Glick: And the math has to hold. And the math is very simple. And if you just boil it down, say I'm a VC and I'm gonna write a $1,000 check, just to keep it simple. Write a $1,000 check to a bunch of companies, and one at-- to 50 companies, and 49 of them are gonna fail. I only break even if that one company does 50 times the value, which means I really need them to do 100 times the value,
[00:24:17] Manjot Singh: Minimum, yeah.
[00:24:17] Brian Glick: right? So when they give you the money, you say they bring in all these people, they bring in these experts and all of this stuff, the reason they're doing that is because it's not give you the money and hope you're the 100X.
[00:24:31] Manjot Singh: Yeah
[00:24:32] Brian Glick: It's trying to guide all 50 companies into being the 100X, knowing even with all of that work, it's likely that it's gonna fail.
[00:24:40] Manjot Singh: It's gonna fail, Yeah, and a lot-- the other thing is, that's why companies get acquired all the time or merged or there's people just selling it for scraps towards the end of it because, in year three or four, year five is right around the point where, if you haven't made it with venture money, kind of, kind of out of luck at that point, right?
[00:24:59] Like, 'cause you're-- If shown a path to revenue and you haven't-- then you're, by year two, and then you have, actual paying customers that towards mid to end of year two, starting to raise a lot of eyebrows. So you brought up a really good point.
[00:25:16] You have to be realistic on both sides of the table. And I think too many times people come into this... I mean, don't get me wrong, bootstrapping is just as hard. There's a lot of complexity to that process as well. And a lot of times you do find yourself looking around and saying, "Damn, if I just had another 500K or a million dollars laying around, it would be great.
[00:25:39] I could f***ing destroy the world at this point." But, this thing is, it's just something that does teach you a lot of patience. You can't just cut a check all the time. You have to be very strategic and prioritize. But on the VC side, it's not that they spend unlimited cash.
[00:25:57] You still have, whatever your funding rounds are, but there's other vehicles, right, that you can use at that time to leverage against, especially if you are anticipating a higher rate of return. You can go back to your investors. You can work on your next round. There's a lot of vehicles, but there is a higher sense of urgency to deliver, get to market quickly, work to get your first few customers, show the ARR growth, that top-line revenue growth.
[00:26:26] and you gotta, There's a lot more pressure to it, so you just gotta be realistic on both sides.
[00:26:29] Brian Glick: So bringing this back to supply chain people, one of the things I-- and I know I've had this conversation with people on this podcast before, but I think it's important to bring back is when you start-- when it comes to
[00:26:42] Manjot Singh: knowing whether-- knowing your business model is very important to how they evaluate.
[00:26:49] Brian Glick: And I think a lot of times where anyone who's buying software and services from a tech company owes it to themselves to understand these things so that you understand that if you are buying the latest, greatest whiz-bang thing from the company that didn't exist two years ago and is already in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and has raised $150 or $200 million and has all of this press out there, that you are buying into a company that has made a decision to act a certain way and to be a certain thing, and that might be great.
[00:27:26] And if you buy... Somebody comes in with the same pitch, and coming at it from a bootstrap long-term growth, they're going to treat you in a different way, and the risk profiles are different, and not even greater or worse, they're just different risk profiles, different relationships you're gonna have the vendor.
[00:27:49] So when you're out in the world and you're talking to your customers, how do you articulate who you are to them and what that relationship's gonna be? And you've sold to me before, so I know the answer, so you have to tell the truth.
[00:28:03] Manjot Singh: Yeah, I think the answer is very simple, right? I don't wanna call SummitEdge a mom and pop shop. We are obviously scaling, but I would say right now every single one of our customers is I know them personally. Every single person I've either been on calls with, they can send me emails, they can pick up the phone, they can call me.
[00:28:22] And I also feel some of the things that we sell, right now we are starting to get into the product space where people are just buying stuff online and then just, starting a subscription from some of our products. But, those are a much lesser revenue amount than some of these higher touch services.
[00:28:38] So an implementation for Salesforce, right? There's a lot of back and forth, a lot of conversation we're gonna have. An implementation for a CargoWise customer, we're gonna have a lot of conversation, a lot of back and forth because this is gonna be your fundamental ERP that you're using, for your business, right?
[00:28:54] So it's a very different world, in the bootstrap model, versus some of these venture-backed companies. Hyper-personalization and customized support is expensive, right? You can't really scale with that. And so companies yours and mine are slowly you definitely, you guys are much further along in your journey than we are.
[00:29:15] But now you have a few of these products that are self-service and things that. But some of your older customers, higher touch customers, you're still very much embedded in their business, right? So we have customers from when we started, right?
[00:29:28] And I think that's the relationship piece that gets lost when you scale, to a certain extent. And also most of these companies, they're building products and services that are repeatable, very similar, and you just have to do a couple clicks online and you can purchase it. There's a very much lesser need for a founder or the leadership team to have a personal touch with these customers.
[00:29:53] Brian Glick: So I wanna double back. To wrap us up, this might be a deep rabbit hole and I'm glad we don't have a hard cut time. But you said something earlier that's been sticking around in my head. So the business development guy comes to you and says, "Hey, I wanna spend $2,000 on this thing," right?
[00:30:08] And you go, "Ugh." And a year ago, that was a yes or no question, and now it's, there's a third option there, which is, can we just vibe code this, right? Can we do that? And, so give... Put that in your head, and now you're a company that sells this combination of products and consulting, and vibe coding fits now in this weird space in the middle of all of that 'cause you can build things for people faster, they can build for themselves faster.
[00:30:44] Maybe they don't need a thing at all. Maybe you can build the last 5% of the thing that they can buy, and that's the vibe code. Where does this new ability to build things faster fit into your world?
[00:31:00] Manjot Singh: Yeah, no, and a really solid question, and that is the next leap for SummitEdge. What we really-- like I said, we started off, we've worked in all these Fortune 5 companies, and we really just... And me and my co-founder and a few other members of our team worked at companies like FedEx, Amazon, USPS, Walmart, Target was another, yeah.
[00:31:23] So anyways, long story short, we've worked at-- we understand the supply chain world. So we actually get to what we have in our ecosystem is functional industry knowledge, right? And so what we've never had prior to this new phenomena of vibe coding is the ability to go build it ourselves, right?
[00:31:42] So, and at least enough to get it to an MVP, and so that we can say, "Okay, what else would you want in this?" Right? "Here's what we think, but what would you..." And the cost of that has been, the barrier to entry of that is pretty much gone now at this point, right? So, it has dynamically changed.
[00:31:59] A few of our customers have literally come back to us and said, "You know what?" One of our, one of my friends owns a pretty decent sized trucking company, and he's like, "Man, I've been paying Trimble, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. We know you guys are in the supply chain tech space, can you just help me build something if I just would be a design partner with you?
[00:32:20] Would you be able to build it?" And we're like, "Heck yeah, dude, let's do it." And so we've been on that project for six months, and then we're basically gonna do a full overhaul of their current process and basically install a full ERP for them, that does all of the processes of what a trucking company would need, right?
[00:32:36] Like from yard management to maintenance to transportation management and all the other things in between. And so we're building that out for them and would've never been possible. I couldn't even think about that three years ago. And now possibility, and not only is it a possibility, being executed.
[00:32:53] So, it's very much gonna change the game and people... Too many times what I, kind of vision into the future is people are gonna start to realize, your typical ERP, let's take a CargoWise, right? If I'm paying for all these features and functionality, what am I actually using, right?
[00:33:14] And people are gonna start to realize, actually, you know what? My business can actually be much more sustainable if I just-- I'm paying for 100%, but I'm only using 30%. Why don't I just build the 30% and then that will help me right-size my business. So people are gonna really be able to if they are starting to understand this space a little bit better, there's some things that you won't be able to get over the line, like CargoWise is a great example, like connections to CBP and carrier connections and things like that.
[00:33:43] But the world's getting more and more democratized when it comes to these types of things. There's companies that are building APIs that you can ping that have already all these data linked to it. So when in times past you had to be a billion-dollar business, now, I can start doing that.
[00:34:00] So, I think this is gonna be, in the next five years, we're gonna be looking at a very different model of how people think about the fundamental ERPs that they run in their business.
[00:34:12] Brian Glick: I think there are-- I think that is the foundational question right now, and I'm hearing so many different subtle answers. But what the answer I'm hearing from no one is business as usual,
[00:34:31] Manjot Singh: No, definitely
[00:34:32] Brian Glick: So is it, all of this tech and all of this new capability a reason to double down on my ERP? Is it a reason to get rid of my ERP?
[00:34:40] Is it a reason to do some third path that no one's seen yet? Is it a combination of all of the... everyone's got a vision right now, and it's gonna be... the only thing I can say after 30 years of doing this and going through a couple of these cycles, we're all wrong, but we're all wrong in unique and special ways.
[00:34:59] So it's gonna be very interesting to keep an eye on all of our companies. And I think one of the really strong opportunities that bootstrapped businesses have right now is to be able to experiment with individual companies and individual customers to find the answer in a way that large large software companies and venture-backed small companies can't do because you don't have to justify the learning on a 90-day payback cycle.
[00:35:33] You can justify the learning based on the fact that you're learning. And so that's a really big advantage.
[00:35:39] Manjot Singh: Yeah. That ability to be nimble and being able to pivot, I think is the strategic advantage into the future. You're, you can't... We're all wrong, but we're all wrong in our own unique way. But the person that can pivot and right, get on the right track quickest, that's the people that are gonna win.
[00:35:57] Brian Glick: Yes. So let's wrap up on that. Again, just a fantastic conversation, so glad that we got to do it. And we will have links to SummitEdge in the show notes and all of that stuff, and your LinkedIn. And, again, just really appreciate having you on.
[00:36:12] Manjot Singh: Yeah, man. It was so much fun. Thank you again for the opportunity and looking forward to working with you more in the future.
[00:36:18] Brian Glick: Awesome.
[00:36:19] So I'll tell you, when we went into that episode, I had some notes written, and we didn't hit any of the topics that I expected. But what an awesome conversation. Great to see someone's passion about their own business and how that relates to their experience coming up through the industry.
[00:36:35] So huge thanks again to Manjot. We'll have links to what SummitEdge is working on. I really recommend taking a look at their website. Just the way they've decided to talk about things in our industry on their website gives a real clear picture of their vision for the future. As far as Chain's vision for the future, I have an ask of everybody.
[00:36:55] Head over to Chain.io, and while you're there, if you could scroll down, we have a couple of videos that are a minute long, one for freight forwarders and one for shippers, about our Checks product. And my ask is we're trying to get as much feedback as we can about how people understand the way that we're bringing AI.
[00:37:15] If you could spend one minute watching the video that we have there, and then drop me a DM on LinkedIn with your thoughts and whether you understand what we're doing or how you feel about what we express in that one-minute video, be much appreciated, as we're learning along with everybody else how, people in the industry are, understanding the different software companies' visions of AI.
[00:37:38] So again, go to Chain.io, scroll about halfway down the page, watch the video, and drop me a DM with some feedback. other than that, I hope everyone is having a great end of summer and looking forward to peak season and the holidays. And I'm, again, Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io, and I will talk with you next time