Venture Everywhere Podcast: Sumeet Trehan and Hugh Dixson
Sumeet Trehan, co-founder and CEO of Starboard chats with Hugh Dixson, founder and CEO of Switchboard.
Episode 55 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Hugh Dixson, founder and CEO of Switchboard, a platform that allows businesses to easily integrate and exchange data with any supply chain system. He chats with Sumeet Trehan, co-founder and CEO of Starboard, a virtual infrastructure company specializing in global trade. Sumeet shares insights on how Starboard leverages cutting-edge AI and ML to streamline complex operations, optimize routing, enhance transparency, and reduce costs. Hugh and Sumeet also discuss how companies like Switchboard and Starboard are revolutionizing the logistics industry with AI and advanced technologies.
In this episode, you will hear:
Starboard aims to cut freight forwarders' workloads by up to 70% with AI bots.
Challenges in digitizing an industry reliant on outdated systems and manual processes.
Starboard’s vision as a centralized hub for global trade.
How small and mid-sized players can leverage technology to compete with larger players.
Parallels between supply chain modernization and the fintech boom.
Why smaller players are adopting innovative solutions faster.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:34 Hugh: Welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. My name is Hugh Dixson. I am the founder and CEO of Switchboard. We provide a software product that integrates all the various enterprise IT systems that power global supply chains. For those in the business, that includes ERP systems, WMS, TMS, and all the other various IT systems used across the broader supply chain.
00:00:58 Hugh: I'm here today with Sumeet, the co-founder and CEO of Starboard. It's great to meet you and have you with us today, Sumeet.
00:01:05 Sumeet: Great to meet you as well. Thanks for inviting me here.
00:01:08 Hugh: We're both logistics and supply chain people, and that's obviously going to be the focus of our conversation today. So wanted to start off by hearing about how you first got into the logistics and broader supply chain industry and hearing about some of the background there and how that led you to Starboard.
00:01:24 Sumeet: It's a funny story. I started my career with Vodafone, actually, which is a telecom company. And I was there as a management trainee for one and a half years. And suddenly one day I get a call from this company called Maersk. I hadn't heard about them before this. So it was a large shipping and logistics beamer.
00:01:40 Sumeet: And they said, "Hey, we are actually recruiting for our global leadership program. Would you like to interview?" And like I said, I had no clue about shipping and logistics. I never heard about Maersk. But after the call, there were only two things which are really interesting for me.
00:01:51 Sumeet: So one, they told me during the next two years, we'll make you travel across the globe. And at that time I was 24 or 25, I had never stepped my foot outside of India. I say, okay, that's pretty attractive.
00:02:01 Sumeet: And the second thing they told me, it's a pretty competitive program, there's like 25 people across the world for that program. I have always been pretty competitive. Okay, let's try if I can actually get into it. So as I interviewed for the program, got into it, and that's how I stepped into logistics.
00:02:14 Sumeet: I had initially thought I'll do the program for two years and then leave Maersk. I ended up spending six years there, rose from frontline account executive head there, freight forwarding and logistics business for South Asia. And then, of course, you and me crossed paths. We worked together. Well, We worked at BCG.
00:02:31 Sumeet: So I worked for BCG in Europe. And then Flexport, which is a big logistics tech company based out of Silicon Valley. One day, I got invited to interview for their GM role for Canada to set up and scale their business in Canada. And that's how I ended up moving to North America to set up and scale Flexport's business for Canada for two and a half years.
00:02:49 Sumeet: And at some point, I realized that I had some insights and I thought with all the changes in AI and LLMs happening, this was the right time to build Starboard and that's how I ended up building Starboard. That's how I got into logistics and my journey in logistics so far.
00:03:04 Hugh: That's awesome. Thank you. It's funny. I realized as you were describing that, and of course, I noticed this when I was reading before as well, Maersk were an investor or are an investor in the company that brought me into supply chain too.
00:03:18 Sumeet: Oh, which one was that?
00:03:20 Hugh: It's called Ofload.
00:03:21 Sumeet: Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:03:23 Hugh: Yeah, similar to Sennder in Australia. I was very early there employee number three or four and built and ran ops there for a number of years in M&A. In the time that I was at Ofload, we did a lot of the land transport for Maersk in Australia, managed a lot of their shipments and that kind of thing. So I've also had some exposure to Maersk, it's a great business.
00:03:41 Sumeet: Yeah.
00:03:42 Hugh: As an Indian talking to an Australian now, we won't talk about cricket. For those of you who are interested, there's currently a test match being played in Australia between India and Australia. I think it's fair to say that India is on top and that doesn't please me much.
00:03:57 Sumeet: Yeah. The Australian tour for Indian team is always pretty emotional for Indians because that's the toughest country for us to play in. The pitch is so bouncy and we are practically spinners. So it's always interesting when the Indian team is touring Australia.
00:04:11 Hugh: That's right. I just love watching the Indian fast bowlers though, like Bumrah and oh my God, it is beautiful. Anyway, they're a great side. Let's get back to it though. Apologies.
00:04:22 Hugh: Perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about what you're working on at Starboard at the moment and what the impact it is that you'll hope that that's going to have.
00:04:31 Sumeet: When you think about global trade, anybody who thinks about global trade, the first thing which comes in the mind is large, huge ships, ports, aircraft carriers, aircrafts, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason being since World War II, as the world has become globally more integrated, like the global trade has gone at exponential pace post World War II, a lot of investments have been made in physical infrastructure.
00:04:53 Sumeet: So the port capacity in the world has risen exponentially. The shipping capacity has risen exponentially, but all these physical assets work individually, they're not connected to each other. And I think the need for the hour right now is to build virtual infrastructure for global trade.
00:05:08 Sumeet: So that's what we do at Starboard. And our starting point is a freight forwarder. For those who are listening, who may not know what a freight forwarder does, a freight forwarder is very similar to a travel agent in the travel world. So they buy and sell slots on shipping lines, airlines, et cetera. But there's one key difference.
00:05:23 Sumeet: Once you book an airline ticket, whether through an offline travel agent or an online travel agency, nine out of 10 times you don't call them back. It goes smoothly. In our industry, every global trade transaction involves 18 to 25 different parties involved, and then 50 to 75 contacts exchanged.
00:05:40 Sumeet: And the freight forwarder is centered at this orchestrator of this huge relay race to make sure everything happens smoothly. Now the problem is most of the freight forwarders today, they run on either '90s kind of ERP systems, or they run on emails and phone calls to make this transaction successful.
00:05:56 Sumeet: At Starboard, our first product which we have launched is an AI-enabled operating system. So as LLMs have matured, as machine learning has matured, our AI bots are today able to reduce the workload of a typical freight forward around 50 to 70%, which means they can operate much more number of shipments on our platform with much less human capacity required.
00:06:15 Sumeet: And that's our first lever. But ultimately, what we want to do is two things, unlock the power of technology and unlock the power of scale for small and mid-sized freight forwarders, which control 80 to 90% of global trade.
00:06:26 Sumeet: So we talked about how we want to unlock power of technology, but the second lever is creating a SaaS marketplace where freight forwarders can buy and sell shipping rates, warehousing space, et cetera, et cetera. So they also get the benefit of scale. That's what we are building.
00:06:40 Sumeet: To answer the impact. Let's walk maybe 10 years into the future and let's say we are successful in this quest, which you have earmarked on. And let's say you're a small mid-sized importer based out of, let's say London, and you want to import some furniture from UK and sell it on your Amazon store.
00:06:55 Sumeet: So the future is like, you would come on Starboard and we will be able to connect you with the exporters based in Vietnam. So you find the right exporter on Starboard, then you need a freight forwarder to move your goods from Vietnam to UK.
00:07:08 Sumeet: So a Starboard enabled freight forwarder offers you the lowest rates and also offers you the best service. And then you need somebody to finance the shipment. So Starboard together with partnership with its freight forwarders will be able to trade finance that shipment as well, till the time you sell it on your Amazon store.
00:07:24 Sumeet: So if you look at it, you really don't want to move out of Starboard to do global trade. And that's a big vision which we are coming towards to make Starboard the default platform where global trade takes place.
00:07:34 Hugh: Very interesting. I really like the travel agent analogy. I've worked in this industry myself for many years too. Not in shipping freight, I worked in road freight, but it's similar, of course. I haven't heard that before and I really like it. So I'm going to liberally steal that. Thank you.
00:07:49 Sumeet: I've been in the industry for 12 years and for the first few years, when somebody used to ask me, what exactly do you do? I have struggled to explain what exactly do I do? Till one day I encountered, maybe this is the easiest way to explain what I do.
00:08:00 Hugh: I really like it. I think it's great. Yeah. The process that you're describing, the '90s ERP systems, the phone calls, this was my life as well. And I had a very similar context that drove me to found Switchboard.
00:08:11 Hugh: As you can imagine, we also manage and deal with a lot of the same sorts of these old ERP systems and that kind of thing, what we do. It's very different what we do, of course, but we deal with some of the same systems.
00:08:21 Hugh: But in my freight forwarding experience, I remember when I was running an operations team, paying eight people a full-time salary to literally sit there and make phone calls and receive emails and send PDFs around and all those kinds of things.
00:08:35 Hugh: I don't think that people who are outside the industry fully appreciate the magnitude of manual handling that is taking place in supply chains in businesses from smalls and mediums all the way up to massive global whales. It's very manual and very anachronistic almost the process that's going on there, isn't it?
00:08:53 Sumeet: Absolutely. I think we have to, in some way, thank COVID to bring supply chain at the forefront of CEO mindset. Because before that, supply chain logistics was always considered like the basement function. Like, okay, you only come into limelight when things go wrong.
00:09:07 Sumeet: But with COVID, people actually realize how important critical global trade and supply chains is. The truth of our industry is supply chains are becoming more complex, there's a geopolitical war going on, supply chains are being disrupted.
00:09:19 Sumeet: They're moving out of Asia into different countries. And the complexity is increasing. And at the same time, the number of people available to do what you were describing in your earlier life, like those manual phone calls are reducing.
00:09:30 Sumeet: Our Gen Z's don't want to do that. If you ask a Gen Z who's been brought up in a life where they can order a cab in a couple of seconds, they can probably even find a date faster.
00:09:39 Hugh: It's true, it's true, yeah.
00:09:41 Sumeet: There's a huge shortage of people who want to do this job and also the amount of money you can pay for these jobs overall, which is one of the founding pieces for us at Starboard. There's a huge tailwinds moving to the future around this industry.
00:09:53 Hugh: I think you're 100% right and that's definitely my experience. And you and I both have worked in this industry both before and after COVID. And I often comment on a very marked difference between the two phases or eras, whatever you want to call it, where supply chain is much more front of mind for the general population as well as company executives.
00:10:13 Hugh: And much more complex, many more things to consider. I completely agree with you. It's a fascinating industry to work in. I think it is going to be the most interesting industry over the next couple of decades.
00:10:24 Hugh: Supply chain, in my opinion, is going to have its fintech boom over the next two decades. What we saw in fintechs in the '90s and Noughties and that kind of thing we're going to see in supply chain over the next 10, 20 years, I think.
00:10:35 Sumeet: Absolutely, and when you were saying this thing about fintech, I was just almost jumping out of my chair because I have such a strong similar hypothesis, because if you look at it, 2000s and 2010s have mostly been about two industries, e-commerce and fintech.
00:10:49 Sumeet: You were at huge ton of fintechs, which have come and tried to disrupt banks and e-commerce industries like Amazon, try to disrupt retail. And I think those low-hanging fruits have been tried to solve and they're still working on.
00:11:00 Sumeet: But I think till today, technology never existed to solve the problems of supply chain logistics. I think it is the largest industry in the world. The global trade today is around $30 trillion just in goods. And if you include oil, it's much larger than that. And all of it still runs on archaic territory.
00:11:16 Sumeet: And for the first time with AI and LLM coming, you actually have a technology which can work in an industry which is not standardized at all, which works at a very thin margins over there. So I think we have a huge opportunity ahead of us.
00:11:29 Sumeet: For the first time, technology is mature enough to solve this problem. But I'm curious as you were describing it, what do you see on daily basis as the pre and post-COVID? What changes have you seen when you are trying to build products and sell to clients in Europe and other parts of the world?
00:11:43 Hugh: Well, what I think I've seen most of all has been a real shift in attitude amongst supply chain operators and senior company executives. So similar to what we've been describing in the pre-COVID world, the supply chain industry, at least in my experience, was very set in its ways.
00:12:01 Hugh: And this is how we do things. It's always been this way. And there wasn't a lot of interest in forward thinking or disruptive technologies or potentially innovative or new ways of doing things.
00:12:11 Hugh: It's an industry that has historically been not overly technically sophisticated as we've been describing, lots of manual processes and that kind of thing, and that was tolerated in pre-COVID times.
00:12:21 Hugh: And then during COVID, it really shone a light on the fragilities and criticality of supply chain when we couldn't buy goods in supermarkets that we were very used to being able to buy with absolutely no concern.
00:12:35 Hugh: The general public and businesses at large, I think, suddenly got wise that exactly as you've put it, I really like it, that everyone's focus has been elsewhere in fintech and financing and we've allowed supply chains to dawdle.
00:12:48 Hugh: And yeah, since COVID there's been this real snap to attention and there's much more investment both from investors and from companies in modernizing supply chains and strengthening supply chains. And I think that's really positive.
00:13:04 Sumeet: Yeah. I think there are a lot of tailwinds, which is the need of the art to digitize this industry. We have global trades getting shifted out and then there's a shortage of manpower.
00:13:14 Sumeet: And like you said, for the first time, there's some kind of urgency to make changes. Because if e-commerce is shifting, the supply chain industry needs to run at the same pace as e-commerce is running as well.
00:13:24 Hugh: Absolutely, right. And that's a really important point as well. The e-commerce boom, I think, has pulled supply chains into the 21st century, kicking and screaming almost.
00:13:34 Sumeet: Absolutely.
00:13:35 Hugh: So, to talk a little more about Starboard and your experience, that very centralized piece where Starboard allows you to connect with the exporters, the forwarders, the financing, the whole process. That's a lot of parties, a lot of nuance, a lot of process to be running and managing across a lot of different geographies.
00:13:55 Hugh: What are some of the challenges that you've been facing in the business and where do you see the opportunities?
00:14:02 Sumeet: The big vision is at least five to ten years in terms of connecting everyone, but I think there are two things which you asked, what are the challenges and what are the opportunities?
00:14:10 Sumeet: I think for us, in terms of challenges, change is always difficult. It's a huge change. Like you said, supply chain as an industry, especially freight forwarding as an industry, wanted to work in a particular way.
00:14:19 Sumeet: Every freight forwarder, every logistics service provider, every shipping company have their own processes and they want to stick to it. Now as the industry digitizes and there's change on how people work on a day-to-day basis.
00:14:30 Sumeet: So I think the first thing is the change management piece of it. When we go and implement operating since the first time, the first thing is often like a question mark whether this will work. So I think ability to deliver value fast and early is super important. And you need to get the frontline users bought in.
00:14:44 Sumeet: So that's what we focus. In the first six months and even now, at least I am the first frontline customer service rep for the company. It always great when the frontline user calls you and reports a bug or reports a feature, which they want, because you want them to be bought into it as much as it's easy to sell at the top. It's we want the frontline users to buy into it. That's number one.
00:15:02 Sumeet: Second, I think there's kind of a fear around AI. We just signed a big contract, one of very large forwarders based out of China. And when we were in the early in the sales process, you could see the faces of the team that there's a fear that is AI going to take away the jobs.
00:15:15 Sumeet: And there's no many jobs being created on the other end for certain geographies. So how do you address that thing around fear? Is it going to take away jobs or is it going to create more jobs over there? So I think that's the second challenge which we faced.
00:15:28 Sumeet: I think the third thing is we've seen a huge amount of tailwind and acceptance on the small and mid-sized forwarder segment. When we come to the larger boys, who still control 10-15% of the market, it's just large shipping companies move slowly.
00:15:41 Sumeet: For them, it will take starting a couple of years to adapt to it. But we see a lot of tailwind actually. It's completely opposite what I've seen in my other industries, which I've worked in Pharma, in FinTech. You see the top layers moving fast and the smaller ones moving slowly.
00:15:55 Sumeet: When we are in this industry, what we see on the daily basis, small and mid-sized players are actually moving much faster than the larger sized players. Those are, I think the challenges. I think the opportunities is related to challenges.
00:16:06 Sumeet: I think the players who are moving fast have such a huge unfair advantage compared to others who are moving slowly. Our first design partners already have reported 40-50% OPEX advantage versus pre-using our product.
00:16:21 Sumeet: So in a commoditized industry, if you're working at a 40-50% OPEX advantage, you have a huge amount of unfair advantage. And you can buy out market share pretty easily. So I think that's the biggest opportunity which we see.
00:16:31 Sumeet: Supply chain logistics as an industry is pretty fragmented. It's pretty long tailing. There's 80,000 freight forwarders in the world who spend $1 trillion global logistics. The world does not need 80,000 freight forwarders. There's going to be a natural consolidation.
00:16:43 Sumeet: And people who adopt technologies, not maybe ours, maybe somebody else's, but those who adopt AI will be able to consolidate and buy out market share for others. So I think that's the biggest opportunity we see.
00:16:53 Sumeet: And I think the second thing is connectivity. One of the biggest challenges on industry, which I alluded earlier is there's been no single platform, no single standard for people to communicate. AI removes that barrier. Like LLMs and bots can convert unstructured data into structured data and standardize it and make it easy to connect.
00:17:09 Sumeet: So for the first time, we have an opportunity where disparaged parties like truckers, shipping lines, who were never connected to a single platform, could not agree to a single data standard, can still be connected. And that unlocks a huge amount of efficiency gains for the industry.
00:17:22 Hugh: Yeah, as you say, the 40 to 50% OPEX opportunity is very significant in what is not a very high margin industry, as you correctly pointed out. So no, it's very exciting. You've touched on two really interesting points that I'd like to dig on it for a moment.
00:17:35 Hugh: So in talking about these slow moving large players, and of course, you're right, thinking about the traditional nature of the industry, the freight forwarding and logistics industry, what are some of the strategies that you've used or ways that you think about overcoming this resistance to new technology or AI.
00:17:54 Sumeet: As a company, we are very much focused on the small and mid-sized players. We actually stay away from even selling to very large players, precisely because of the reason which you mentioned over there. But our founding thesis in our industry, small and mid-sized forwarders, these local brokerages, they know their customers the best.
00:18:11 Sumeet: If you look at it and you've been in the industry, you’ll probably appreciate this, the local and mid-sized brokers and forwarders can operationally execute much better than larger players. What they don't have is access to technology and access to scale.
00:18:23 Sumeet: So our founding thesis is like, if you give them access to technology, which is much better than what any large player has, and you can give them access to scale, which is also the same as what larger players have. Small and mid-sized businesses can actually move from being defense, at least in our industry.
00:18:39 Sumeet: Today, small and mid-sized broker always play defense against larger brokers. They can actually move from defense to offense because suddenly you have somebody who knows their customers better than larger players, who can operationally execute better than larger players.
00:18:50 Sumeet: And they have a huge cost advantage, both in OPEX and in procurement because of partnership with us or somebody like us, there's no reason why they should not buy out market share. They should target market share from the larger players.
00:19:02 Sumeet: So for us, larger players moving slowly is a great opportunity for us because we see small and mid-sized players moving fast, but I'm sure there's another startup somewhere, which is trying to focus on the larger segment and trying to solve that problem over there. But we've not even tried to solve that problem for us.
00:19:17 Hugh: So essentially you're able to find enough small and medium freight forwarders that are willing to engage with the new technology, that that side of your business is okay. Let's talk about the other side then. So presumably, you also have to engage with shippers and brands. How do you find their interest and willingness to engage with this product?
00:19:39 Sumeet: Even in terms of brands our focus is very much mid-market, upper mid-market brands, a lot of D2C brands which are emerging. A lot of these D2C brands, if you look what they're doing in their own markets, they're buying market share from existing brands.
00:19:53 Sumeet: Nowadays, I was just looking at my grocery list. Most of our brands which we buy are the ones which I would not have bought five years back. And these are the brands who are growing super fast.
00:20:01 Sumeet: And for them, one of the biggest bottlenecks is supply chain and logistics. And here we have a great opportunity because they have benefited from technologies, like their whole birth and the whole existence owes it to either e-commerce or some kind of technology, which they have adapted.
00:20:14 Sumeet: So they're pretty much willing to adapt new technologies and experiment on it. So we see a lot of buying on those segments of the market, like mid-market and upper mid-market. We haven't really tried smaller segments of the market and see what's the engagement level over there.
00:20:27 Sumeet: Anecdotally, I would say even the larger brands on the importer side, or for example, talking about larger companies. Even there's a lot of interest over there on seeing how AI will transform supply chain and logistics, but the scale is so much huge and the decisions are much more risky.
00:20:42 Sumeet: Like for a mid-market brand trying out if it doesn't work out, they don't lose that much. But for a large brand, let's say Nestle has to try it out for all their milk brands, a huge risk in the supply chain. So even if they want to, they have to just move slowly around that.
00:20:55 Hugh: Makes sense. So on both sides, the smaller players showing more willingness, moving a bit faster, potentially capitalizing on a big opportunity by moving faster than the bigger players, which will allow them to take up market share based on being able to use products like Starboard that will enable them with AI tools and more technology to power their freight forwarding and supply chain process. Is that roughly it?
00:21:20 Sumeet: What I do see is this is one of the very few opportunities in history where small and mid-sized players have again an advantage to adopt something faster than the larger players.
00:21:30 Hugh: That's right.
00:21:31 Sumeet: These opportunities don’t come pretty often. Most of the time the opportunities first come for enterprise and larger players and not for smaller and mid-sized players. So not only Starboard, but most of the startups today would probably start focusing on smaller mid-sized players because the adoption curve is much easier there rather than in larger enterprise players.
00:21:48 Hugh: That's right. We've noticed as well in our experience working in this great revolution in supply chain that we've been talking about for the past half hour or so, that these technologies will be a great level up between the big players and the small players.
00:22:00 Hugh: And a lot of these huge traditional advantages that have existed amongst the very largest businesses in supply chains will start to be eroded by the significant opportunities that these technologies provide.
00:22:11 Hugh: I'd like to ask another question about your background. In that introduction that you gave at the start of our chat, you've lived in a lot of places and worked in supply chain in a lot of places across Europe and North America, and of course, India.
00:22:24 Hugh: How do you think your international experience and all those different countries that you've operated in have shaped your perspective of logistics and perhaps how Starboard is set up.
00:22:35 Sumeet: I think there are three key things which help shaping my perspective on logistics and also helping all those insights also crucial to what we are building at Starboard today. What I realized across working in Asia, North America, Europe is logistics and supply chain is a people's business before anything else.
00:22:51 Sumeet: It's a very relationship driven business, it's a very people's business and it works the same way over there. And that's what the first insight we said like, hey, you need to get buy-in from people before you change it.
00:23:00 Sumeet: You might have the best technology and you might have the best product, but unless you can relate to people and you connect to people, it's very difficult to disrupt this industry and you have to be like a partner rather than coming and saying like, hey, actually, this is a great disruptive technology and this is going to change this.
00:23:14 Sumeet: You have to work very collaboratively in this industry, at least to change. So that was the first insight, which I had working across all the three continents.
00:23:21 Sumeet: Second is, especially when I shifted, my initial shift was from India to Europe. I could see how technology impacted this industry. I don't know if you remember, the port of Rotterdam is almost 100% automated. And you could see how it benefits, have impacting huge amount of volume.
00:23:35 Sumeet: The port can handle as compared to ports in India and other developing parts of the world. And I could also see once the technology is actually creating a dollar value impact, how people are actually adopting it pretty fast.
00:23:45 Sumeet: So that was my second realization as I moved between these different parts of the world that if your technology can create actual impact, then the adoption problem is actually solved.
00:23:54 Sumeet: And I think the third thing was our industry is very volatile. And I've seen that across all three continents. Actually, freight forwarders, brokers, shipping companies make money when there's some disruption in physical flow, political or economic disruption.
00:24:07 Sumeet: And that's what I've seen over the last 30 years in three jobs where people are making money. And that was a key realization, saying that we need to move away from disruptions to actually cut down costs from this industry to make it really profitable and sustainable.
00:24:19 Sumeet: So those are, I think are all my three insights: a people business, technology needs to create value and create value fast. Thirdly is like, you really need to reduce costs in this industry to make it sustainable.
00:24:30 Hugh: I like it. I think it makes lots of sense, a really rich perspective. We've got a few quick questions that we like ask at the end of this. So first of all, what is the book, newsletter or podcast that you recommend?
00:24:43 Sumeet: My favorite book is Jack Welch's Straight From the Gut. I've always loved reading that book, how he took very unpopular decisions, but they pushed GE in the right path in this. That's been my favorite book.
00:24:53 Sumeet: And I recommend every startup founder to at least read it once, because you've been building a business, you probably realize you need to take a lot of task calls almost on an everyday basis. And that book is a big inspiration for me on that one.
00:25:05 Hugh: I like it. That's a great one. Okay. Second, if you could live anywhere in the world, well, I mean, this is ridiculous. You've lived in most countries of the world already, but if you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:25:16 Sumeet: I would go to Budapest. That's my favorite city in the world.
00:25:19 Hugh: Oh, beautiful. I mean, it's about a hundred K’s from where I'm sitting right now. So there you go. What's your favorite productivity hack?
00:25:25 Sumeet: This has been my recent productivity hack. I was always a late night person, but I started shift to an early morning person and that initial one, one and a half hour, which I get to clear my emails and clear my thought process has been a big productivity boost for me.
00:25:39 Hugh: I am a huge early morning person. I live for it. Those first couple of hours of the day are sacred to me. I completely agree. Finally, how do you unwind when you're stressed?
00:25:49 Sumeet: Oh, my favorite unwind is go to the gym and run on the treadmill. I think my best ideas, including the concept of Starboard, came on when I was running on the treadmill.
00:25:59 Hugh: Fantastic. I love it. Well, I mean, you better have a treadmill in your apartment ready to go at all times then.
00:26:06 Sumeet: Yeah, have a walking desk.
00:26:08 Hugh: Well, that's close enough. Awesome. It's been so wonderful chatting with you. I've really enjoyed it. I think it's been a really rich and interesting conversation, Sumeet. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.
00:26:17 Sumeet: Thank you so much for chatting with you as well.
00:26:20 Hugh: Yeah, it's been great. Where can everybody find you?
00:26:23 Sumeet: I'm pretty open. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or you can just email me at sumeet@starboard.biz and I try to reply to every incoming email or message which I get.
00:26:32 Hugh: Fantastic. Awesome, Sumeet. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed learning more about Starboard and talking with you about the great supply chain revolution that's coming at the moment. And I wish you all the very best with Starboard. Thank you.
00:26:44 Sumeet: Thanks so much and wish you all the best as well. And hopefully we'll get a lot more opportunities to partner together as we try to transform this world of supply chain together.
00:26:51 Hugh: I hope so. Thank you.
00:26:53 Sumeet: Thanks so much, Hugh.
00:26:55 Scott Harley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Hugh Dixson in Founders Everywhere.
Read more from Sumeet Trehan in Founders Everywhere.