I: When Convoy collapsed, the Uber for trucking left behind collateral damage

One morning last October, Dan Lewis appeared on Zoom, looking wan and sleepless in his company-branded hoodie, and prepared to address the staff of his soon-to-be shuttered startup, Convoy, for the last time.

Squirming in his seat, his voice intermittently catching in his throat, Lewis told the team of hundreds how he’d hoped this day would never come — couldn’t even fathom it, really. Eight years earlier he and a colleague named Grant Goodale had left Amazon with big dreams of disrupting the freight industry with an Uber-like app that would allow thousands of small trucking companies to bid on and book loads from shippers like Unilever and Procter & Gamble. The app would empower independent truckers to grow their businesses and modernize the arcane freight brokerage industry, which still largely ran on fax machines and phone calls, golf dates, and back scratches. It stood to make trucking more efficient too, by enabling truckers to pick up nearby loads after dropping their last one off, leading to fewer empty miles and less waste.

Billionaires and rock stars invested. Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff. Bill Gates and Bono. They wanted a piece of what soon came to be described as Uber for trucking. Truckers got on board too, drawn in by the app’s ease of use. By April 2022, the Seattle startup had raised more than $1 billion at a $3.8 billion valuation.

But the year and a half that followed wasn’t kind to Convoy or the two industries it straddled: tech and trucking. As pandemic-era shopping sprees and home improvement projects slowed, the freight industry went into freefall. Meanwhile, global venture capital investments fell by more than a third, as rising interest rates made investors more wary of placing big bets on unproven ideas. That included Convoy, which, for all its hype, still hadn’t turned a profit. Now, it never would…

The full post is here.