Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley, and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the problems they face, the products they build in an effort to transform industries. I'm excited to have with us today Akshay Dodeja, co-founder and CEO of Terminal 49. Akshay, welcome to the show.
Akshay Dodeja: Hey Jake, good to be on the show.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, I'm excited to have you. And for the listeners, you're in for a real treat here. Today, we'll be diving deep into the intricate world of global trade and how technology is revolutionizing the way we track containers and manage shipments. If you've ever wondered how those containers get from point A to point B, or if you face the frustrations of supply chain visibility, you're in for a real treat. We have a truly exceptional guest with us today, a visionary leader who's dedicated to simplifying the complexities of logistics. He's someone who has been in the tech space for many years and is a Y Combinator alum. He's built and launched products for Live Nation and has a deep understanding of how software can solve complex problems. Akshay, excited to talk about you and your story. Before we do, where are you joining us from today?
Akshay Dodeja: Uh, I'm in, I'm in Berkeley, California, in our office in downtown Berkeley.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: When I started this podcast, I had this vision to go behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder in Silicon Valley, where I'm born and raised. And weekly, we dive deep in the trenches to find the wins, the losses, and the lessons learned with the hopes that it helps you run a better startup. But here's the thing. If you've gotten any value out of these conversations or been inspired at all, hit the subscribe button. And I get it. Your podcast feed's probably overflowing. But to stay up to date what's going on in Silicon Valley, stick with us because at the end of the day, we're all just trying to build something that matters and we're better when we do it together. So, hit that subscribe button and follow us wherever you find your podcasts. Now, let's get back to the show.
Really cool. Well, I'm from the Bay Area, as we know, and I, I love that area. I get up to SF quite a bit and get up to Berkeley when I can as well. Are you originally from that area?
Akshay Dodeja: I, I was actually born in India and then when I was 13 I moved to Cupertino with my family. So went to high school there, lived in Portland, Oregon for a little bit, and then back to the Bay Area in 2011.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. Give us a little bit about your, your, your backstory here before we jump into your company. How, how did you get into technology? How did you get into wanting to be an innovator and a startup founder?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah. So, you know, as I said, I, I grew up in India and my dad is in the, in the tech space as well. So, he was working for an IT company in India when I was growing up and he would bring home like computers and you know 386 machines and start building them, put... installing Windows 95 with 25 floppies. So just watching him kind of build things, take things apart and put them back together like really fascinated with me. And early, you know, when I was, when I even, when I was 8, 9 years old, I started getting into writing code, P-BASIC.
And the thing that I remember most is like, for some reason I decided... one of my good, close family friends was a dentist. And you know, I one day I'm like, "Okay, hey, I'm going to use Visual Studio, Visual Basic to build you a software because you're moving paper around." I didn't really have, I didn't want to start a company or anything. I was like, "I think you need software."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Akshay Dodeja: And so I got, I think like reflecting back you know, there was kind of this itch of building something. And I was, I was you know, big fan of Bill Gates and Microsoft growing up. And so I think there was some, some of that, kind of looking up to those, to those folks.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's always good when you have a parent who's in an industry you eventually get into because they can kind of show you the way or at least inspire you to, to try and do what they're doing. Is your dad also an entrepreneur?
Akshay Dodeja: He's not an entrepreneur. Yeah, he's a, he's a, he's a geek. He's, he likes to build things, but he's been an architect. Worked for Intel for over 15 years now in the US. But yeah, the, the entrepreneurial side is not, not what's, what, where, where I got that from. But I don't know where I got that from.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Oh, really cool. You must have a, a tolerance for risk. Is this your first startup?
Akshay Dodeja: No, this is my third one. Yeah. I started my first one in college and basically dropped out, which was in the music space. And then you know, always just wanting to build things.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Really cool. We'll jump into your current company Terminal 49. Walk us through kind of the origin of how, what problem did you see that you wanted to try and solve and where did you make a pivot if at all to end up where you're at now?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah, you know, I, I initially had no intention of starting a company in the logistics space, let alone having any experience being an operator in supply chain or moving containers or what have you. But in 2015, a friend of mine was exploring the trucking market in United States, like specifically the domestic trucking market, big dry vans you see on the interstate highways. And you know, one thing that when he pitched me the idea was like, "Okay, really large market, you know, if you look at it in North America, there's hundreds of billions of cargo that moves just in, in US. And truckers back then—things have improved—but back then were emailing documents, mailing it, and they exchange the same set of documents many times: insurance paperwork, DOT, they're moving new loads from different origins and destinations."
And so we kind of like, "Hey, there's an opportunity here, let's build kind of a Dropbox for truckers, like a simple mobile app exchange." And then we didn't know any truckers. We opened up Google Maps back there or maybe MapQuest in 2015, Google Maps, and we just typed in "trucking company" and drove to trucking companies' offices under the 880 freeway in Oakland, and turns out they were moving shipping containers. As we talked to an operator, you know, I would call like Bill Aboudi, the sheriff of trucking. He would, he was a geek himself and we had a 4-hour long conversation and got even more fascinated with the, with the operations of moving a shipping container. Way more complicated, time bounded.
And that's where you know, we fell in love with "Okay, we got to build, we got to automate some of his back office. We got to give him better tools." So that's where I would say the first two years of the company was really an MBA degree in like, just understanding the business, understanding the players. What is this game? And you know, fast forward we were selling software to trucking companies. We had a hard time selling software to trucking companies. Then I realized that if we want to build software for this space, we have to own, we have to have some skin in the game. We got to feel the problem.
So we built our own trucking company. We took those truckers, gave them business, and we built the software for us to pick up and deliver containers around the Oakland area. And that's where we raised our seed round. You know, we moved, we moved over 3 to 5,000 containers in a, in a period of two years and eliminated a lot of issues. But for me, the business was always about how do we build kind of a SaaS business here? And we learned the ins and outs of moving a container, built confidence around it. And that's, you know, there's the bigger pivot happened, but I'll pause there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, to build a trucking company, how challenging is that? I mean, it's different than building a software company where you're actually, you know, just coding and, and working through that. But, you know, you're talking about people and trucks and payroll and hiring, you know, people. Like what's, what was that like?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah. So, we, we, we, we, we built a managed brokerage really where we worked with trucking companies that already exist and gave them business. So, while we looked like a trucking company to small importers in the Bay Area, we didn't have any of the asset liabilities that you know, what it takes to really run a trucking company. So we cheated a little bit, but the goal was to build a service and we built that and not necessarily run the, you know, the trucks or drive the trucks themselves, but we, you know, sat in the trucking company's office while we operated this brokerage. So we were, I would say, we were very close to what it takes to, to operate a trucking company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Really cool. And just curious, was there good revenue in that? I mean, to shut it down, sometimes it's hard to shut down a revenue stream.
Akshay Dodeja: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, to move a container, let's say, you know, within a 100-mile radius, like Oakland to Napa, can cost 700 to $1,000. So, our take rate was about a hundred to $200 per container. So, we were making... that was, that's our gross profit over there. And, you know, we were doing 500 to 800 containers a month. So, it was a pretty, pretty large business. And it was a team of like three people when we were starting off. So, but it is a commodity business.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Akshay Dodeja: Right. It doesn't look like a subscription SaaS retention business. So it does, we operated it for a while as we were starting to run out of our money, but then you know, we kind of fell into even a bigger gold mine as we pivoted the company after that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Gotcha. So let's dive into that. What was the bigger gold mine that you pivoted into?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah. So in 2019 we started to... "Okay, hey, we're in Oakland. It's not the biggest market. You know, you look at LA, Long Beach, New York, New Jersey. It's like half the volume of United States." Believe it or not, every... half the contain-, half the stuff that's around you is either coming in New York, New Jersey or LA, Long Beach.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's crazy.
Akshay Dodeja: So we, we wanted to expand, go into other markets. And you know, there's a, there's a lot of moving parts to man- doing a brokerage business, partnering with truckers, a lot of... and we also started going up-market, more volume, "Let's go over 100, 200, 300 container customer." And as we pitched them our pro-, business, our software and our service, they liked our service, sorry, software a lot. And they're like, "Hey, we, we don't want your service in every port, but can we use your software in other ports?" So, that's where really kind of, you know, we, we're like, "Okay, can we actually just sell the software to these folks? What does that look like instead of operating their containers?"
And it was pulling teeth. It took a... because everybody's like, "Okay, hey, you, it's a chicken and egg problem. Turn on the software in this port before I use it." And we're like, "Why don't you use it and then I'll turn it on?" Right? Because we were only in... integrated in one port. Now we're integrating 65 ports inter- sorry 65 terminals in United States and Canada. 2020 hits, COVID happens, so all these kind of prospect conversations that are happening dry up. Nobody wants to think... talk about like green field software, investing in it. And then summer of 2020 kind of hits the fan, right? Nobody knows where their containers are, as you might know, there's imbalance in supply chain. Ports are shutting in China, ports are shutting in LA, Long Beach. Containers are piling up, vessels are delayed. And we had, by, by that time we had actually wired up most of the integrations in North America. And wow, then we started to, we basically fast forward we scaled from zero to $2 million in SaaS revenue in about 18 months because we just had the right product for the market at that time to deal with the supply chain disruptions that were happening.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. Well, I look out my office windows today and it's overlooking Laguna Beach, but it's in the ocean. And we remember seeing like just lines and lines of ships trying to get into Long Beach and for weeks just stuck out there. So in a nutshell, what specifically does Terminal 49 do when it comes to tracking containers?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah. Yeah. So we work with companies that are moving volume, right? And there are two types of companies we work with. One is people who import stuff. Those are companies like Target, IKEA, Wayfair. And then there's service providers. These are the brokers, the middlemen that orchestrate the movements, paperwork. They work with truckers. They're called freight forwarders and customs brokers. So both of these players, you know, in the market, they care about, "Hey, what's happening with my container at different points of the journey?" So every day millions of containers will move globally. You know, it has a whole life cycle of events like 20 different milestones from origin in China, let's say, to in LA to maybe even Chicago via rail. We provide what's happened with a container, what's happening, and what might be the issues.
Now, if you're a Wayfair and you have 60,000 containers annually, you don't care about all containers at all times. You want to know out of thousands of active containers moving into different ports, which ones have issues, are getting delayed, which ones need to get picked up. So, we provide really "containers at risk." What do I need to work on as an operator in the morning? What should I care about? Instead of manually tracking containers on 30 different websites, putting that into a spreadsheet, and then building my to-do list, we just give you the to-do list. So, these large, medium to large freight forwarders and cargo owners, they use our product not only to automate global container tracking, but to operate and move those containers forward more efficiently.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So, you're actually selling to the operators and the freight forwarders.
Akshay Dodeja: Yep.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Got it. Okay, cool.
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Now, you said you're in 65 ports or maybe more. What, who are you selling to there? And why do the ports have to integrate it versus... I mean, I'm just trying to understand.
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the, the thing with the shipping container is it's kind of like... move a human moving through borders, right? It has to go... a trucker has to go pick up an empty container, get it loaded, and they have to pick it up from a terminal. How do they know which container to pick up? They have to log into the terminal website and, and, and make an appointment. Then they have to bring it back and they got to bring it back before the vessel leaves. Kind of like you got to be at the bus stop before the bus leaves. How do I know when the bus leaves? That data is at the terminal. Okay, now the vessel container is on a ship. Where is the ship? That data is like, the satellites are tracking that ship. Okay, it's moving to another ship. What is the routing? Where is it going?
So the data for a shipping container comes from many different sources. One is ocean carriers, kind of like airlines. They know the schedules. Then there is satellite tracking for every vessel. Then when it's at the terminal, terminal is a source of truth of like, is it at the terminal? Is it on, is it available for pickup? Can you make an appointment? Then there's customs. The US government is like, have you paid me everything? Is the paperwork good? And then when it goes over rail, that's another system.
So what we do, I would say we're plumbers and sanit-, sanitators. We take data from many different sources. We pull it, we standardize it, we clean it up, and then we push it. We give like a really nice picture to our customers. So they don't have to go figure out where... they don't have to log into a terminal website, an ocean carrier website, or a rail website, or go on Map finder, VesselFinder to go track the vessel. They get a one-stop shop to track their container whether it's on rail or ocean or terminal. That's what I meant by we are connected to all the terminals in US. Every, every ship that comes into the US, we're, we can track it. And all rail journeys that are happening within United States for the six major rail carriers, we're connected to that, and we can tell the full story of a container journey.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. I mean, it's pretty normal these days where you order something online through Amazon or wherever and you know, you see, "Okay, the truck's, you know, four stops away and, you know, you'll see it in 2 hours," or whatever it happens to be. But transparency of logistics is like expected now.
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Right. So, like it's, in some ways it's cool to see it's happening, but it's almost shocking that it hasn't happened before this.
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Why do you think, why do you think that is?
Akshay Dodeja: Well, it's been happening. The only difference is it was doing, it was very manual, right? People who used to track containers, they had less visibility and forecast of what's going to happen. I'll give you an example. You might have ordered a sofa at one time and like if it's getting shipped overseas you kind of are in, it's fuzzy when it's going to come, right? Until it's on a truck. So that's what the real problem is when, because there's so many different modes and so many parties involved. There's no coher-, coherency in what's happening. And now I think what we've done is we move, we're moving that workflow from a spreadsheet to a real-time visibility dashboard. And that creates a lot more opportunities to automate workflows, to optimize logistics, to improve demand planning, to improve labor planning at the warehouse. How many people do I need? How, based on how many containers are coming in? And doing that manually was happening. So all, all we have done is integrated technology into this workflow.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Is it an old school mindset where technology still needs to catch up in that industry or is it...
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah. Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So you're doing a lot of education to people in the space.
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah. Companies are still transforming, right? Letting go. And, and why that is because to your point, you know, containers were always moving. So people built really good processes internally. They kind of looked similar, but it involved a lot of people. And so the nice thing about a shipping container is it's a standard. Whether you're a Wayfair or Target, it looks, the process of importing the container, it looks similar. So that's where the opportunity is to standardize the workflows and you know provide, provide a single tool that can work across different companies. But yeah, it is a lot of older folks that are transforming their business, right? And you know it's like unlearning an, an old tool or an old process and learning a new one. So that does require a lot of education in the market and there's still a ton of green field opportunity. You would be surprised how many large companies still do this thing, stuff manually.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I could imagine. I mean, as we talked about a few weeks back, I was in the trucking space, just happened to fall into that in college and, you know, it was like a truck only for students, college students. And it was very manual. It was like pencil and paper and you're going to go from, you know, this plant to that field and drive and pick up tomatoes and when you see the tree on the left, move, go to the right. And I mean it's like very, in some ways, archaic. This is quite a while back, but it's good to see the trans-, transformation of technology really helping solve a problem there. How do you guys make money?
Akshay Dodeja: We charge per container. So depending on the volume an importer or a freight forwarder tracks, you know, they kind of pay us for the entire year because there's seasonality. Sometimes people pay us monthly, but yeah, we charge $3 to $5 a container to track containers, manage it, and that's where the value is. It's very much value-based pricing.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. That sounds like it's definitely worth it. What's the competition like in that space?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah, the you know, this, the space is heating up. Clearly there is a need to build great tools, right, and, and give more leverage to people. Whether it's last mile trucking, which has become, which is I would say very mature space, there are companies like project44, FourKites that are the newer players. And then there's incumbents in the space too, right? ERP companies. Most of these large companies I'm talking about, they use a Oracle OTM or SAP or NetSuite as their source of truth, but the data is being inputted manually. So the opportunity is to automate the data ingestion and procurement, and, and so it's a mix of like empowering the incumb-, enriching the experience in your incumbent tools, but also there's new players like Terminal 49 that you know, there's about half a dozen players that we compete with.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Gotcha. You know they say growth in a business is about sales and innovation. How are you getting to your target audience? How are you continuing to grow and sell? And like what's worked for you to, to, to generate, you know, large clients and more revenue?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah. You know, because it's a, it's, it is a very relationship based business. So, we have to go develop a relationship, but there is intent here. People want these tools. And so early in the days of the company, we actually ranked number one and two for "container tracking API" and "container tracking dashboard." And so 80% of our business is still very much inbound. But you know, very similar to other, other tech companies, we are leveraging content to build more brand presence, more education, like this podcast, that "hey, let's build better tools."
And then one of the core tenets of our company is like building trust, right? So you can actually go and sign up and start using the product without talking to a salesperson, and then we kind of bring in consultative sales and, and walk you through a buying experience. And that seemed to be working pretty well. But yeah, it is, there's a lot of noise and we have to peer through the noise and get attention of our operators because they're really busy. So that's a challenge, scaling the business and continually growing at this, at you know, from a venture, venture scale is, is, is a big challenge.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I hear you. Aside from what you just shared, I mean, I guess maybe that is the big challenge for the company is just kind of the growth and to continue to build the clientele base.
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah, I would say, you know, the COVID era, we, we really had differentiation in our product. And I think you can't lose it. You always have to work in being differentiated in the market. And you know, you ask good questions about the competition. And I would say we're less differentiated right now and maybe a lot of the value that we provide are table stakes. So we are really trying to figure out like, how do we level the company up from a product and innovation standpoint and find that differentiation again in the market that's going to help you know grow the business? So that's kind of the internal challenge that I'm working through right now in the business is to redis-, refound-, refind the company and be creative about it. The problems are there, is how we're going to solve them and like how do we position the company to, to, to win.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. I, I think it's absolutely imperative to continually think about innovation because you know if you stop, your competition might just kind of pass you or you know provide exactly what you're doing. So that's really cool that you're thinking along those lines. As a company, you went, you raised capital, 8 million or so, a little over that. And you've got 20, 25 employees. How's the company structured? How's it set up? Is it local? Is it distributed?
Akshay Dodeja: COVID was kind of hit every company differently, like yeah, we were fully distributed at first. Now we are more hybrid. I've been trying to build a team... we, a third of the company now is in the Bay Area, we come into the office Tuesdays and Thursdays. But you know, we still pretty much operate like a distributed company and we'll continue to do that as much as I like to work with people in, in, in a box.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I hear you. Really cool. You know, every company has breakthroughs technology-wise or operational-wise, but also as a leader, people have breakthroughs. Before you started the company and where you're at today, what breakthrough have you gone through personally as a leader that is different than when you started?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah. I mean, I, I, I spend a lot of time working on myself, right? And so I think the couple of breakthroughs have happened is, one is how do I go from a product founder to a sales founder? How do I sell? Right? And so I didn't have a lot of experience doing SaaS sales, let alone enterprise sales. So you know, that was kind of, that was a challenge in the early days. And now it feels good. Now I love selling, maybe even more. Maybe not as much as building products, but very close. That was one breakthrough.
And I think the other one is, you know, I, I didn't think, I didn't realize how much work I have to do, not just mentally, but physically staying fit, because I think like being a founder is as close to being a professional athlete. So the, I wouldn't say, I think internalizing that concept maybe is the breakthrough, but it's, it's a work in progress to uplevel myself and how I work with the team. How do I inspire them? How do I build a process to drive momentum? You know, what is the bar around communication? How do I like to communicate? Every founder has a different style. So that, those are kind of small breakthroughs that are happening to basically execute, run the company more efficiently. You can always hire more people, but can you, can you do more with less, is kind of what I try to focus on.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, it's so, it's so important to really, I, I like what you said, the analogy of it's like a professional athlete being a founder, because you know really, business is 80% psychological and 20% mechanics or execution. And there's a lot of ups and downs in a startup. And where's your state of mind as a leader? You know, are you up and down with the company or are you able to kind of use tools or tech-, techniques to kind of stay positive in moments where your employees are looking at you and your energy and you-, your guidance, and being able to really use ways to be a leader? And I think that so often, we talk to so many companies that that's a challenge. You know, when things are bad, you still have to be a leader. And it's not always, not always easy. So, it's good that you shared that part of it, because working on yourself and your mindset is, we think, is critical to actually successfully staying positive as a company leader, but also growth for the company. So, that's, that's cool. It is a long game. It's definitely not a, not a sprint. As you look into 2025, we're already in February, what are you excited about on the road map for the company?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah, you know, as I said, we, we are, especially with this AI and LLMs, I think we are actually at an inflection point where we can realize some of the, the bigger, the, the bigger vision of companies to automate global trade. And really what that means is like to provide more leverage and better tools to people, right? And so going from this read-only experience to taking actions on behalf of our customers: scheduling, generating documents automatically. You know, "Hey, there's a proof of delivery. What's the time stamp?" So a lot of micro improvements in the product that if you kind of zoom out, it starts to automate a lot of the work that people are doing. They spend a lot of time in the email. Can we just do a lot of that work for them? So that's the high-level roadmap is leveraging a lot of this innovation that's happening in the market and implementing it not like, "Hey, this is an AI focused product," but it's like, we are focused on workflows and okay, we, we're leveraging that AI to do it. So that's the plan.
On the data side, it's to expand more globally. We are really good in the US market on the import side. Mexico is becoming a really large market, becoming a huge trading partner of US. And so going beyond the US, going into Mexico, wiring up all the terminals in Europe, Latin America. So we want to go wider and wider globally because it's a global trade. Um, and but also focus, start focusing on the workflows that people, people spend a lot of time doing manually.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. Well, it's fascinating. I love what you're building and the space you're in. I know that there's always a need for that because people always need products and there always need to be shipping those products. So, the business isn't going away. It's just a question of how does your technology help improve the experience of people in the space. So, really, really cool to hear your story. If anybody wants to find Terminal 49, where do they go?
Akshay Dodeja: Yeah, terminal49.com. They can find us on the website. We are also on LinkedIn and Twitter or X. And yeah, those are, those are the places. Or if you want to reach me, you can reach me at akshay@terminal49.com.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool, Akshay. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story. Really appreciate it. And for the listeners for listening, it means a lot to me. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, a world, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.
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