Parallel Entrepreneur with Mark Cleveland

Mark Cleveland (00:00)
Welcome, everybody, to the Parallel Entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host, Mark Cleveland. And today, I'm thrilled to introduce Craig Fuller. He's a true pioneer in the world of transportation and logistics and media. Craig has entrepreneurship in his DNA. He's the founder of FreightWaves. They're revolutionizing global logistics, providing real-time information and market intelligence through innovative platforms like SONAR. We're going to explore his journey today, because with a vision reminiscent of Bloomberg's impact on financial markets, Craig has brought transparency, pricing data to the freight and shipping sectors, which is bridging the universe of blue-collar trucking and white-collar finance. We've been friends for a number of years, and I've been watching him found ventures and scale them for so many years. I just want to jump right into it because Craig's story is a testament of resilience, innovation and the relentless drive to build an impactful business.

I'm wanting to focus on this this word legacy in transportation. It's just so interesting. There's been nothing but transportation from a global historic perspective. And you're you're revolutionizing transportation. Tell us how and why it matters.

Craig Fuller (01:14)
Yeah, I don't know that the word revolutionizing is the right term because effectively, I mean, end of the day, transportation is 12% of global GDP. It's a massive industry. What we're doing is bringing information and transparency to a very opaque market. And so if you think of what Bloomberg does in the financial economy, we aspire to do in the physical goods economy, which is provide real-time information, news, analytics, and intelligence about what's moving at what price it's moving at, where it's going and how does this impact all the participants of the market.

Mark Cleveland (01:48)
And customers do business with you by subscribing, by... Let's explore the business model.

Craig Fuller (01:54)
Yeah, so we have really two parts of business. Most people would identify as a media company. So we have editorial news that we put out about the market, providing context of what's happening. So that's how, if you ask someone on the street that would know of FreightWaves, they would tell you that we're a media company, we're a news company. And that's, you know, a part of our business. It's a large part of our business. But the other part that we're really, our venture capital investors get most excited about is the recurring SaaS business that we built, which is often described as a Bloomberg terminal for the freight and logistics industries. We bring in anonymized, aggregated high frequency data that helps companies and market participants understand where the market's at and where it's likely to go. So think of it as benchmarking, analytics, monitoring and forecasting of global supply chain trends, pricing, data, really about what's happening in the market.

Mark Cleveland (02:49)
So the audience for Parallel Entrepreneur is people who've done it more than once are continuing to do it multiple times at the same time. And then we all have a startup history. We have all got a pivot experience. And I just hate the word pivot, but it is so effective here. Talk about how you got started, because I don't think where you are today is exactly, weren't you trying to get involved in putting together financial hedging opportunities?

Craig Fuller (03:14)
Futures, yeah. So Mark, the original idea, and you and I have a shared history, I've known you for I think 20 some odd years, you were at a company called DAT, which is owned by Roper Corporation, a very large company. So essentially what we set out to do is to create a futures market. If you think of trading coffee, trading oil, trading gold, these are commodities where people can buy contracts to either hedge or speculate on the direction of price.

Mark Cleveland (03:15)
Yeah, futures.

Craig Fuller (03:41)
And we decided to do the same thing in trucking, actually partnered initially with DAT was our partner in that journey and created and listed the first futures contracts based on trucking. But here's the interesting thing about that is that product never took off. Like it was, it never gained what they call liquidity, which is trading volume that takes place across the market. But what we realized really quickly was that the market, what they wanted was more transparency.

This is one of the largest, if not the largest, fragmented market on the planet. There are hundreds of thousands of trucking companies. There's millions of shippers or companies that buy shipping services. There's even about 80,000 intermediary freight brokers that exist in the middle that essentially make the market. And the issue is because of that fragmented nature that exists, no single business actually understands what's happening on the ground at any moment in time. And so we realized really quickly that the bigger opportunity was not in developing futures, but was to actually solve the lack of transparency and understanding what the market's headed through the use of data and news. And so before we came along, the news cycle that existed in freight were companies that were publishing news articles about the freight market or the freight economy or the US economy that were months old. And they were basically talking about what had happened six months ago or a year ago.

Even earnings reports in our industry, the news media that existed before we came along would talk about some company's public earnings, a week or a month after it took place. Like this is what happened. And if you grew up and I grew up in days of sort of digital media, the internet was sort of coming of age when I was in college, CNBC, Bloomberg, even ESPN is a good analogy where information is flowing so much quicker.

No one treated freight and logistics that way. What we realized is that freight is a commodity. It's not the commodity you store in a barrel or a tank, but it is a commodity. Price determines who gets what freight. If we could develop an information news service inspired after Bloomberg, we could create a really big business. And that was what we set out to do and we're glad to say that we're successful doing that.

We become the largest news media operator in global supply chains and we're also a major contributor to real-time data that exists and we're the leading provider in market analytics intelligence, particularly high-frequency intelligence across global supply chain.

Mark Cleveland (06:10)
And so you're entering a market you know really well. You come from transportation. I mean, you couldn't know the market any better than you do. And you solve a problem that, it's interesting because international freight, international businesses, they'll hedge currency. Lots of people will hedge another form of commodity. And obviously in fuel and transportation, I was at Jubitz Corporation for 10 years. We were hedging fuel,

Craig Fuller (06:12)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Cleveland (06:34)
Fleets are hedging fuel. And you're trying to hedge shipping costs and it's a it's a home run idea and like what did you run into?

Craig Fuller (06:41)
So the product that we were solving was the wrong product. The problem was a lack of awareness and information in the market. And so the idea was that futures markets take oil as an example. People know, you and I can agree what the price of oil is based on the WTI index.

West Texas Intermediate, or if you're in trucking, what is OPUS saying the price of diesel is? So ultimately, what matters is the information itself. The futures market is a price discovery game and it's a way to de-risk it. But what really, companies that are physical participants, companies that are in the market really they want to know is what's happening. Because the speculation side is interesting to financial traders and speculators.

Mark Cleveland (07:05)
All right.

Craig Fuller (07:26)
And maybe hedgers, people that are trying to hedge the cost of something. But ultimately, if you're in the market every day, you want to know if I'm a trucking company, what do I charge? Like, am I getting a fair price or am I quoting too high and I'm going to miss out on opportunities or I'm quoting too low and I'm missing out on revenue? The same thing with buyers of commodity services want to know that they're not being overcharged or perhaps, hey, this is a fair market rate and this is what the market is going at today at this very moment that perhaps has changed. And so what we learned really quickly was that the market, what they wanted was information. And what you find in commodity markets is that news is actually a very big, important piece of it. I mean, reason people watch CNBC or read financial news is because they want to know what's moving today. What has impacted the market? Is there a news event? Is it a weather event if you're in oil? Is it an economic

Mark Cleveland (08:21)
If you're in the airlines.

Craig Fuller (08:22)
policy, all of this stuff is driving price discovery and volatility in a market. And that's ultimately what the market's about. I had a friend of mine, so I had this business plan to roll out futures and we were sort of that way. And a friend of mine dropped off Michael Bloomberg's biography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, which was a biography about Bloomberg. And I remember reading it and thinking to myself, what we're trying to do is exactly what Michael Bloomberg did with Bloomberg Media and Bloomberg, this, you know, hundred billion dollar valued company. But we're doing it, rather than doing it financial services or bonds or currencies or whatever, you know, we define as Bloomberg's business. We're doing it in the physical goods, the movement of the physical main street part of the economy. And that is ultimately our mission. And so I took Michael Bloomberg's book and applied it directly to FreightWaves which is ...

What's interesting about Bloomberg is unlike almost every other technology company of any sufficient scale, Bloomberg didn't spend a lot of money on advertising and marketing. What he did was he went out and bought a radio station and a TV station and created his own media network because he couldn't get the Bloomberg news or the Bloomberg data through other, Dow Jones would not cover the Bloomberg data inside their media property.

So Michael Bloomberg realized out of necessity that he needed to build his own marketing channel through his own news product. Ultimately, he was selling data, but the data was being impacted by news. And if you could link those two up, you could have a very, very, very successful business. And that was what Michael Bloomberg did. I remember early on in my journey, I sat in a presentation. It was the chief marketing officer of Bloomberg. And she told this story that Bloomberg had gotten to $8 billion in recurring revenue, ARR as we like to call it in SaaS world without hiring. They had a marketing people of three people. And she's like, this isn't a marketing department. We prepare PowerPoint presentations. When she walked in, she was the CMO of IBM, if I'm not mistaken. And she tells the story about how Bloomberg had figured out that they could take a media business and create top of funnel for their data business. And that was really my journey into becoming a media executive.

It was not because I wanted to be a media executive or realized I would be good at it. It was because there was an opportunity to create a business by emulating another business that I admired, which was Bloomberg, which I wanted to build the Bloomberg terminal and realized that the playbook, how Michael Bloomberg did build his business was using news to drive top of funnel to data. And that was really the inspiration for FreightWaves to really break out and create a, you know, a really market distinctive business.

Mark Cleveland (11:04)
So I'm learning how you identify opportunities and decide which ones are worth pursuing here. And I'm curious, this lesson, these patterns that have resulted in this spectacularly successful company and an index. You can talk a little bit about that, but how did you now decide to get into aviation? Because this is where the parallel thing comes in. People are like, how did you decide to do that? Which it doesn't sound obvious, but it is obvious once you understand the energy.

Craig Fuller (11:22)
Yeah.

So, Mark, this was, so FreightWaves is a venture-backed company. We raised $90 million in equity and a little bit of debt on top of that. So we've raised a lot of money through Silicon Valley VCs and have built a very successful business that's worth multiples of that. And you find as a founder that you're not really good at many things. You're kind of the jack of all trades. I was the first janitor. I was the first guy to help

Mark Cleveland (11:54)
Bye.

Craig Fuller (11:55)
computer person, I was helping make payroll. I when I started the business, it was a credit card. Bank of America loaned me $50,000 through a credit card that had zero APR. I had a credit limit of 50,000 and zero APR for six months. That was my venture capital firm. Eventually I got real money behind it, but that was how I started the business. And you find as you're a founder, you're doing all these jobs and you're really good at none of them or most of them.

Mark Cleveland (12:19)
Haha

Craig Fuller (12:19)
But one of the things about a founder is you're authentic, and the one thing you should be good at is figuring out how to raise capital and evangelize the business in the investment community if you're raising capital. And at some point the business had become successful enough that I didn't need to raise capital anymore. And this is middle of COVID. I'm a pilot. and I took a hiatus. I started flying at 13. I stopped flying at age 20. So seven years of having this, you know, flying a couple of hundred hours and being a pilot as a... sort of a young teenager and I just stopped. As many pilots do, you become rusty. It's sort of like working out. If you don't work out on regular basis, you sort of, and you know, one thing, you go into the gym, it's painful to come back, right? We all know that feeling. Like, this sucks for the first couple of weeks. Yeah, don't take a break. It's just easier to stay in it. It's the same thing in aviation, except you can die in aviation. If you're a bad pilot and you're rusty, if you don't get, keep your skills current, and this happens a lot,

Mark Cleveland (12:59)
Don't take a break.

Craig Fuller (13:12)
pilots end up in accidents and end up dying. You can't make, this is like a life and death thing. So I never wanted to take it up because I never had time to go do the lessons, but COVID afforded me that opportunity to get back in the airplane and I did. And I remember reading a bunch of aviation media. And again, at this point I've learned through FreightWaves that I have a knack. We have about maybe 15 journalists that are providing news.

And I'm learning the power of that top of funnel, what I call negative CAC, which is the idea that my media business is making profit on subscriptions and advertising. And we're making enough profit to basically fund the marketing. We're really trying to sell our data business. And I'm learning that I've created a profitable marketing channel through a term that I call negative CAC, negative Customer Acquisition Cost. And so I decide I'm going to go, I'm reading this FLYING Magazine and decide that I want to go buy it. And it was a side hustle. And I thought maybe I'll get FreightWaves to buy it. And I took it to my board and they're like, look, we don't want to buy a magazine. That's not what we do. We're not investing in magazines. But if you want to go do this, knock yourself out. And the business FreightWaves is super successful, so like my board is just happy to like keep me happy and engaged in stuff. And so they give me the opportunity to go buy it. And the reason I bought it was because I was like, I can do a better job than the cats that are running it right now can. And so I reached out to the owner and they said, Hey, it's not for sale, but we'll sell it you. So I bought it. And I wanted to try this theory that I could take any media business that had an audience and apply it in any other business. And the magic that I had learned at FreightWaves, which was media can create top of funnel for some other product in that case was data

Mark Cleveland (14:35)
You

Craig Fuller (14:57)
could apply to anything else. And that's what we try. And so I bought FLYING Magazine and then bought 1500 acres in East Tennessee, a town called Dunlap, and decided we're going to build a flying community for pilots. And we announced that in our magazine and did no other outside advertising. And within four months, we had $28 million of reservation and deposits. And what I realized is, it works. This magic of owning your own audience and driving top of funnel absolutely works in real estate. And now fast forward three years later, I own 50 different publications and have bought, we've done 20 different M&A transactions.

And we, what we do is we go out and buy legacy magazines that have been around for oftentimes 10, 20, actually most of them are at least 50 years old. We're buying these legacy magazines that are still around that have advertisers and paid subscribers a part of them. And we look, we're really buying the audiences in those communities. And what we're doing is we're buying them on traditional multiples, three to five times EBITDA, sort of the standard media multiple in magazine world. And we're looking at it and saying, the opportunity is certainly there for these businesses to grow and generate cashflow, but the real magic is, can we then attach this audience to some other business. And what we've learned is it works in aircraft finance. We bought an aircraft finance business. That business grew up by 12 in a year grew by 1200%.

We've done it in e-commerce. We've, one of our most successful e-commerce transaction grew by 8X in the first year. And again, what we find is we're able to A, manage the unit economics because so many of these businesses that we're buying are subscale and the owner is either spending an enormous amount of money relative to revenue on advertising to drive sales or because of lack of funding or lack of sort of scale isn't able to do that. They have really good product offerings and we're able to take that into our community, into our audience platform and just drive so much top of funnel to it that it makes these businesses incredibly successful. And that is the model that I've realized is magic for me.

It's my sort of secret playbook, or not even secret, it's my playbook of taking a legacy audience and a media business and generating profit out of it and then driving top of funnel. Now I could have gone and started a FLYING Magazine or an aviation magazine, but I can tell you cold starting a software, cold starting a media business was a lot of work. And I prefer to not have to go start it cold.

I prefer to go buy something that already exists because I benefit from all the social credibility and audience that has been tied to this community for oftentimes many decades.

Mark Cleveland (17:52)
Yeah, community is an important word. You know, it's we all want to be a part of one. We all want to contribute to one. That's I think the Parallel Entrepreneur is reaching out and finding and enabling the people who are looking for that next acquisition strategy or that next inspiration, getting permission to go do something. I liked how you described your board said, yeah, you're killing it. Let's go. Let's let's keep him happy. And you just keep on creating value.

How do you share that value with your team? How do you motivate people? Because your empire gets larger and you're not doing the janitor job anymore. We talked a little bit about what's your superpower when it comes to people.

Craig Fuller (18:32)
So fundamentally, so when you're, when you work for a venture back company, I I'm a founder of one, but you know, my employees would say they, they work there. They typically with VC back companies, equity incentives, stock options are a core part of the, the performance package. And so our cap table, our incentive package looks a lot like other Silicon Valley, I wouldn't say base companies, but Silicon Valley oriented companies where you're rewarding your team with equity. And what the team is building for is an ultimate liquidity event. It could be an IPO, it could be an exit to a strategic, it could be a private equity recap, but that's what they're all focused on. And you're motivated on, you know, salaries, but most of your sort of upside for those businesses is in the equity of the business. And that is how FreightWaves, particularly our data business is built.

When I started Firecrown, which is my data conglomerate, which was FLYING Media, now it's Firecrown where we bought all these media businesses. It's a little different because this is a buy and hold type business model for me, where I don't know where the liquidity event will end up. I mean, we certainly are thinking about potentially IPOing at some point. There are opportunities and if we come down to that road where we do that, we'll certainly provide opportunities for the employees through some type of a some type of equity package or sort of performance package, but we tend to at Firecrown, it's a cash flowing business. It generates about 20% EBITDA margins.

We think we can get a 30% EBITDA margins, but it is mostly about cash compensation and bonuses because ultimately with a business that generates a lot of cash flow, employees are frankly probably better off being paid in cash than they are in stock that they may never see liquidity out of. And so, for us, I would rather over index to cash compensation on the Firecrown side and on the venture-backed data side, you're over indexing to equity.

Mark Cleveland (20:27)
Craig, I love your energy. It's just so much fun to be talking about business challenges. How do you get inspired when you get depleted? And then what do you do to address that state?

Craig Fuller (20:39)
So I run two businesses. know, one, like I said, is my FreightWaves business, my SONAR as we call it now, you know, it's a full-time job. And then I have Firecrown, which is also in many ways a full-time job. I get asked often, how do I divide my time? That's the question that everybody wants to know is like, how do you divide? So I didn't think anything of it because I never really accounted for my time. So I started in October of this past year monitoring every hour of the day that I would work. And I put it into a spreadsheet. What I realized is I'm working minimum 91 hours a week to I think the biggest was 119 hours or something like that was my number one week.

Like that's what I'm putting in in work. And what I find is that I don't care. People are like, my gosh, that's a lot of work. It isn't work to me. as an entrepreneur, none of this stuff feels like work. It feels like I'm playing a game where I had better than average odds of winning. And for me, it's just a constant stimulation, dopamine hits for successes and challenges. And I think entrepreneurs, particularly ones that go out and start businesses versus that buy them, tend to be somewhat broken mentally. Like we're kind of like broken, the fact that the odds are stacked up against us and we sort of believe that we can be successful. It takes a special kind of person to do that, a special kind of mental illness.

And what I have found is that to me, it's the constant dopamine hits. I've also found that the more successful a business becomes, the less interesting it is for me, unless I'm doing something new. So I'll give you an example. FreightWaves SONAR is a super successful business. And look, right now when the freight market's soft, it's had some challenges, things aren't perfect.

But there was a moment when we were winning. This is actually when I decided to buy FLYING Magazine where it was boring because, I got burned out, I thought. And I remember hearing about founder burnout because founders will burn themselves out. I'm like, I'm there. And what I realized was I was actually bored. The game in that business had become easy enough because I had surrounded myself with a great management team. And like I said, I had fired myself from every job. I didn't have anything to do.

And I found myself becoming incredibly depressed because I missed the days of like not making payroll or thinking we're not going to make payroll. And the days of like one little thing could put us out of business. I missed the, the like the, the fire drills and the near death experiences that sort of drive founders to be wartime CEOs. And I also realized that my board who's made of professional investors and my team does not want fire drill Craig inside the business. And so I had to exit a lot of the day to day opportunities so that there could be some stability in the business. And I found that outlet in my Firecrown business by going out and buying all these other businesses.

And what I would say is, when you're doing a "whole co strategy," or you're buying a business, that business may have been around for many years, and most of our businesses have, that still is a new startup to you. When you're buying that business, you're effectively learning every nuance of that business, every nuance of that market, every nuance of the employee dynamics, the culture, every deal's a startup. And I don't care if the deal's $10,000, which I've done a deal that's that small, to a deal that's, you know, $30 million, it's all the same game. A lot of deal people say, well, small deals take the same amount of time as big deals. That's bullshit. Like, whoever said that is so, is such a lunatic.

Mark Cleveland (24:05)
I'm so glad you said that.

You're kidding me. It's either a good deal or it's not a good deal in the size. It's accretive and it's strategic. What are you talking about?

Craig Fuller (24:10)
It's.

But the deal is if you screw up, this is an asymmetric risk game that is common in Silicon Valley, which is like, I bought a business $10,000, a company called Aeroswag. I bought it actually with my 16 year old son. We bought it together and it was doing $6,000 revenue. We paid $10,000. We bought it on a deal listing website. It was a cool deal. He's like, hey, I want to start a business. And I found this little thing. I was like, this is a perfect print on demand selling services to pilots. And so we'll play this game. We'll go buy this small e-commerce business. You can help a run it with me and it worked out. You know, $100,000 revenue type business today.

Like we got the benefit of our media business driving top of funnel. And what I found is that if that business failed, I was out $10,000. Like let's think about that. If you do a $30 million deal and it fails, that is a lot of pain. And so the idea that buying a small business is the same amount of time as a big business is the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard because who cares if you're $10,000 business? We've done deals that we paid $50,000 and those businesses have floundered. I don't think anything out of them. You look at it as a portfolio approach and like, okay, it went to zero or like it's just floundered, who cares? I'm moving on to the next transaction. I can't do that on a $20, $30, even a $5 million deal would be a little painful. So that's just how I approach it.

Mark Cleveland (25:38)
You said earlier that there was this moment in time in which, you know, FreightWaves was killing it and the transportation industry, you know, I'm sure prices, this was probably before this legendary crash in transportation service provider revenues, because now the price of moving freight is just historically low after a historic high. How do you view the market today? I mean, this this is three years now into this

Craig Fuller (25:49)
Yeah

Mark Cleveland (26:04)
process, you've got this information, you even have a global perspective, I think, that's added media perspective here that's been added with your movement into other marketplaces where you're communicating other kinds of trends and influences. What is happening in the transportation space?

Craig Fuller (26:20)
So we were very early in this sort of like, so the great freight recession as we've coined it started in March of 2022. And our high frequency data was, it was very clear to us at the time that the market was, was, was in real trouble is that our freight recession was imminent. In fact, I wrote an article about this and I got a lot of vitriol. In fact, from your former employer, I got a lot of like heat about how wrong we were.

It turned out to be, we were right that this freight recession was starting and the downturn of the market was actually much worse than even at the time we expected it would be. I mean this is the largest downturn in history. In fact, you talk to a lot of seasoned executives that have been around the industry for 40 to 50 years. They will tell you this is the worst downturn they've ever seen. And what's strange about that is you talk to people in equity markets or on Wall Street or just normal everyday people like economy's good.

The freight market has had its own recession that is so drastically bad. And it's not because of demand in the economy. It's because of supply, is the freight market was such an attractive place for people to add trucks, lot of new truckers came into the market, a lot of trucks, trucking companies that had a few trucks expanded rapidly. And we have this massive expansion that's in place during COVID from 2020 to 2021, 28% more trucking companies came into the market during that period than existed pre-COVID. And what happened is the market got way over served. And this happens in any commodity market. You see it in oil, where when oil is really good, all these people jump into the market and it's sort of causes, it's a boom and bust right? And so freight has been busting, not busting at the seams, but busting bad.

Mark Cleveland (28:00)
Pumpin' it, pumpin'

Craig Fuller (28:07)
Really for the last couple of years, but what we've seen since November is very similar to what we saw in a change in the market, a change in the direction of the guard, if you will, where what we saw back in '22 is very similar, but in the opposite direction of what we're seeing now, is the green shoots that we're seeing now in freight are actually encouraging us and giving us a lot of confidence that freight is, the freight market is coming back, that 2025 is gonna be a much better year than 2024. And there's a lot more optimism in the freight market than pre-existed to really November when we call the sort of recession over with.

Mark Cleveland (28:50)
So the perspective of a transportation service provider would be, we've been starving for three years. We didn't see this coming. Or maybe from the shippers perspective, now freight's finally priced the way it should be, right? And there's this tug of war between the shipping community and the transportation services provider community. It doesn't really matter if it's trucking or rail or short sea shipping, which we had in that phase of the...

Craig Fuller (29:15)
Mark and I had spent some time in the short sea market.

Mark Cleveland (29:18)
I was acting like a trucker on the high seas. It was a lot of fun. What are the points of preparation, the points of vision that an operator today in the transportation service provider marketplace needs to focus on? Because if it's going to snap back and the pricing will change and it's going to be rich times once again, or is it going to be a slow return to some form of equilibrium? Is this a new market compared to what we've experienced in the past?

Craig Fuller (29:49)
I think ultimately history tends to repeat itself in these markets. Look, what goes up must come down. I mean, laws of gravity apply. And I remember during COVID and I would be on these calls of these large, some of the largest shippers in the world. And I remember it was a big logistic - I won't rat who the company was because I don't want to embarrass the people that were in there in this room - but a very large, this was middle of COVID. It was all over Zoom, a very large logistics, what they call managed trans operator, brought a bunch of logistics executives shippers together to this meeting room. And I remember the Zoom room and I remember talking to these seasoned executives that kept arguing that this time is different, that the freight market has never been tighter and the employment picture was never harder and that this was gonna be so different that they'd never seen something like the conditions that we're in right now. And we're headed to a super cycle.

And that trucking was going to be good for a decade. This was gonna be the best decade in history. This would have been late 2021, early 2022. And I remember telling them, you may be right, but history would suggest otherwise. That the market, when I was younger, I would always hear from my father, my father started a very successful trucking company. And I grew up sort of immersing myself in trucking.

And I remember my father occasionally would come, "This time is different" - and it never was! Ultimately, gravity took over and gravity, when market was good, would pull it back and the pendulum would swing towards the shippers, the people who buy transportation services. And a bunch of trucking companies would go out of business and the market would get back into balance and equilibrium. And we'd start that process over again. And then near the top, as things are getting good, you would hear, "this time is different" what we've learned, what we've learned is that their market is cyclical. Now what happened during COVID was you had so much government stimulus, an unprecedented amount of money entered the economy and unprecedented amount of loans that were very favorable to small operators

Mark Cleveland (31:44)
Yeah, let's buy some trucks.

Craig Fuller (32:05)
entered the economy that made a lot of the normal cycles where self-correcting behavior in the freight market would have taken over had it not been for so much money that entered the economy that enabled some of the really extremes to exist. The good news is that currently is not happening. A lot of that government stimulus has largely been deployed. And so, the market is now going back to what I would say is a more normal cycle, which means the market's improving and you can expect most trucking cycles are three years, maybe four. You can expect that to take place probably for at least the next 18 to 24 months. You've got a really good part of the market where things are getting better and things are improving and things will feel better as we go through this part of the economy because it always operates that way. And that is going to happen out as long as I've been in this business or been around it. That is the way the market operates. You do have periodic episodic things that change the timeline for that, but it ultimately follows a very specific curve line.

Mark Cleveland (33:12)
So if we're talking about episodic things that change markets, let's pivot for a second into AI. You're a media company. Marketing and media companies are some of the earlier wreckage in AI's revolution, at least the storytelling that we're hearing, right? How are you applying AI? How are you leveraging AI? And are you finding that there's great values in your growth by acquisition strategy?

Craig Fuller (33:23)
Yeah.

Mark Cleveland (33:35)
Because of that gap in capability and leveraging it? What is the story with AI in the places you play?

Craig Fuller (33:41)
So it's funny, Mark, because I operate a lot in trucking, right? Which is a really depressed hard market. And then I listen to media executives whine about media and I'm like, you guys have no idea how hard business is. If you think media is hard, let me introduce you to the trucking industry. It is funny how oftentimes a new technology is brought and how oftentimes media ends up taking the brunt of it in some way in terms of like, whether it's the internet, or, you know, hot thing a couple of years ago was affiliate marketing and, and Google's SEO algorithms and all this stuff. And ultimately media companies tend to get kind of caught up in this mix, but there's still businesses that operate with 20% EBITDA margins or 10 to 15% EBITDA margins. Trucking operates if they're lucky, 2 to 3%. look, AI is, is, a very exciting technology for both media operators and freight operators for different reasons. What AI does, think about this from the perspective of, and I like to use Taylor Swift as a good example. So Taylor Swift produces records. And almost every, a mediocre song for Taylor Swift in terms of financial performance is going to be better than 99.999 % of musical artist's best top hit, just is. And if you're a record producer and you're sitting around the table and you're saying, we want to really drive revenues this year. I think Taylor Swift was something like 8% of record sales like last year. Like it was astounding. If she was a genre, I read this article, she would be like the fourth or fifth genre. Her record sales are bigger than many genres of music. Just astounding.

But if you're a record executive and you're sitting around the table and you're asking, how do I grow revenues? Let's imagine Taylor Swift's on your label. The question isn't, how do I create more content or more music? It's how do get Taylor Swift to release more albums? And I think that's where the magic of AI really matters is what AI has enabled us to do in some of our properties is not organically create junk content.

But it's an enablement factor for your best writers. And it's true in media that a good writer will outperform 10 mediocre writers. I can have a good writer, I can have a great writer, it's a 100X return. It's no different than movies, it's no different than music, it's no different than venture capital. It is the power law that someone who's a ringer is gonna way outperform your sort of mid or your mediocre folks. And if you wanna drive content and engagement, then getting your best performers to do that is far more important than having more weak performers. And so the way I look at AI is that it makes things so much quicker to create content. Now, taking content and having AI created it is a massive mistake, but taking AI to help your best performers create more and copy edit quicker, get faster ideas, do research on topics, can really accelerate the amount of content that those Taylor Swift of FreightWaves, the Taylor Swift are, not that I have Taylor Swift on staff, but if I did, my outliers, I can help drive so much more success out of them, which means I don't have to hire as many journalists to cover a beat. It minimizes the amount of money that I have to spend.

I can produce, I can take my top writers and they can cover more types of stories that they wouldn't have the time or bandwidth to do. And that's the power of AI. It's not actually creating the content, original content that matters. It's helping your best subject matter experts accelerate the amount of content or the types of topics. And really, it's no different than an accountant. When Excel first came out or spreadsheets first came out, the belief was that it's gonna put accountants out of business. I don't know if you've ever met an accountant that does not live in Excel. Like we've created, Excel has created exponentially more accountants than the pre-Excel days. And I think the same thing is true of AI is AI is not going to replace journalists or editorial teams. It's gonna make the good ones so much better and it's gonna create more opportunity for people who are mediocre writers but

Mark Cleveland (37:47)
Yeah.

Craig Fuller (38:08)
really good subject matter experts actually have a voice because now they can write in a way that we can all understand.

Mark Cleveland (38:14)
I'm curious there's the word voice, the customer voice, something that we've explored here on the podcast with Anya Rodriguez in episode two. And we're talking about using AI and some examples to do customer acquisition. We're talking about using AI to improve the product. I'm curious about how we can use AI to improve our capacity to listen to customers.

Craig Fuller (38:39)
I mean, AI is a tool that ultimately is about taking large data sets and extracting the important information and interpreting the outcome. If you wanted to really make a use case of AI in a customer service model, it is basically figuring out, what is the customer's patterns and behavior in response to some stimulus or input or good experience, bad experience that I can build upon. And that's where the power of AI comes in is it can create a much better experience for the customer because you can program to it and much more consistent experience too. I mean, let's be honest, calling into a call center is a miserable experience most times, but they're following scripts.

Mark Cleveland (39:20)
Yeah, they're falling, but just getting a human to answer the phone these days.

Craig Fuller (39:24)
But if I could, I don't care if I'm talking to a machine, as long as it can act like it's a person, I can get an answer. And I think that's what AI is is will enable if not already. And you're seeing it in logistics. A lot of freight brokers are implementing AI bots to do freight matching because they've realized that drivers do want to talk to somebody on the phone, you know, and that enables them to use an AI bot to essentially take those voice inflections and information and apply it in some outcome.

Because 95% of the reasons people call into call centers is to ask the same set of questions. And if you train an AI bot on the multitude of questions, 95% of those answers can be given by a computer faster, quicker, more consistently than you can do through a human.

Mark Cleveland (40:10)
So your perspective, the perspective you have on marketplaces, things that you decide not to do, I'm curious, when do you decide to investigate an opportunity and how do you decide to say no?

Craig Fuller (40:25)
I'm always in the market. So I probably look at a deal a day and that's not an exaggeration. I mean, a lot of times you get a SIM and you're like, eh, nope. I scout a lot of the deal sites, like, and there's dozens of deal sites out there that brokers go in list businesses or owners go in list businesses. It's my weekend hobby is like looking at deal sites because I'm just curious what's out there.

A lot of it's just opportunity. And I asked myself, do I have an audience or can I create an audience or is there a media business I can attach to this? So let's say that, I'm just going to make up something. Let's say that I found an e-commerce business on a deal listing website that was focused on pickleball. The next question I would ask myself is, this is my playbook.

What is the media property that I can either acquire or go build that will serve that audience? And so now I need to go find pickleball media. So now I gotta go figure out how to create a media business or go buy a media business that's based on pickleball. And that is sort of the deal framework, because I wanna know, and I learned this in a business, I was in payments at a company called Transcard, which is a fuel fleet card business, and we also did bank processing.

Mark, you and I spent some time when I was in that business. And from 2005 to 2010, we had a bank processing business and we signed up two banks. And for five years, we kept thinking, if our technology gets better, they'll show up, they'll come. And then we did a deal with the American Bankers Association. And we did this deal and four years later, we signed up 400 banks. And that was my first realization that distribution is everything in business.

I can build the best technology and this is the problem with Silicon Valley is it gets so caught up - what you'll find is a lot of engineering founders don't understand marketing. They sort view it beneath them or not something that they sort of specialize in. And they end up getting replaced when the company goes to scale because the institutional money in the room is like, wait a second, we gotta have a marketer and sales person drive the stage of the business. Product is important, but not as important as that is.

And what I learned in that business is if you own distribution, you can solve 99% of your business problems. You can increase price. If you buy a business that's under priced, you can increase product. You know, ultimately in business, there's only three ways to make money in business. You can cut cost. That's one way to make money in business that has diminishing returns at some point, because at some point it can get any lower. You can increase the number of customers that are buying the existing product.

Or you can sell more dollars per company. That's either new product introductions or higher price. That's how you make money in business. And if you sort of boil it down, if you own distribution, own your audience, then it's very easy to pull on at least two, if not three of those verticals. So if I own my audience, I can cut out my advertising costs. Well, that immediately hits my unit economics bottom line Number two,

I can increase the price because I'm able to add more customers, engage more customers, get them really excited about what we're doing and create this connection to them. And then number three, and if I lose some of them, if some of them churn, so be it, can bring new top of funnel. Number three, I can bring new customers in. And then number four, I can introduce new products to that audience. And that's ultimately the magic of owning distribution and media.

And so for what I'm always doing is looking, okay, if I go buy this e-commerce business, right, go buy this media business, if I'm buying a media business, the calculus next is what would I sell them? And I actually will buy the media business oftentimes before knowing what to sell them. Cause I'll be like, I'll figure this out. But if I'm buying a commerce business, the next thing I'm immediately asking is what am I going to, what media business is going to drive top of the funnel? And that is my framework for doing deals. I'll give you a very specific example.

So I founded a deal listing website on a deal listing website, something called the Space Store. So this is the largest space merch collectible business in the world. It's been around since 1996. One of the first companies on the internet selling space collectibles, like patches and models, posters, and stuff that had been into space and all this stuff. So I buy this business, paying, you know, it's a...

Mark Cleveland (44:41)
posters.

Craig Fuller (44:49)
So I buy this business and the reason I bought it was I'm like, aviation. The aviation nerds and the space nerds is a nice Venn diagram that they coexist. I'm like, I could take the space e-commerce business and for the say 30% of aviation nerds, pilots and aviation nerds, that is enough of an adjacent audience that I can drive top of funnel to the space store. And it worked. The next question I asked as soon as I owned the Space Store is how to get more space nerds.

So then the thing I went out and did was found some space websites and magazines and came across astronomy.com and Astronomy Magazine. And it was a part of a portfolio. So I reached out to the company and said, hey, would you sell us Astronomy? And they said, hey, we're about to run a process on all of our business, which happened in model railroading, astronomy, on trains.com and all this stuff. And I'm like, I'll take a look at the book.

I'm like, this is perfect. I'm a transportation guy. I should own Trains.com and Trains Magazine. And so we bought that business called Kalmbach for Astronomy so that I could drive top of funnel to the space store. And then out of it, I got Model Railroad, a bunch of model railroad magazines and train magazines. And now we've dipped in, we've created a model e-commerce business for selling, we're the largest book publisher for...

Mark Cleveland (45:42)
It's made straight.

Craig Fuller (46:05)
trains, we're also moving into hobby selling trains. And then I just bought a museum two weeks ago. It's the largest indoor railroad museum in the world. And it's sort of an amusement park museum. I'm in Cincinnati, I'm moving to Chattanooga. So this is the model. It's like, use these either commerce businesses or media businesses as beachheads. And then I'm fanning out to go create businesses or buy businesses that exist in these verticals. And I just bring a team in, I'm like, hey, you're responsible for this e-commerce business, you're responsible for this railroad media business, this is your vertical. And we look for adjacent verticals, and that's the way my business model works.

Mark Cleveland (46:42)
With all this wisdom, you're looking back in the time machine and you're saying, man, what would I have told myself to do differently? Or what should I be celebrating now that I thought was a big mistake back then and now I should just go back and pat myself on the back for taking that risk? What are those stories?

Craig Fuller (46:48)
Yeah.

It's all about asymmetric risk. And this is what is driven. There's a really informative book, gosh, I think it's called The Power Law. And it's written by a venture capitalist that talks about the secret. So VCs, a typical VC would do in a portfolio, do 10 checks, maybe 50. Obviously, if you're doing 10 or 50 checks, know some of those deals are gonna go to zero. And they have this view of asymmetric risk, which is like when they write the check once, they could lose 100% of their investment.

But if they find the next Google, Facebook, the next winner, it could be a thousand X return. So maybe they had a $10 million fund and they deployed a million dollars into 10 companies. And one of those companies became Uber or Google. And all of a sudden that million dollar investment is worth a billion dollars. And that's the way the venture capital model works. It's the idea of more shots on goal, asymmetric bets.

And the thing that's driven my philosophy so much is the idea of more shots on goal, asymmetric bets. And so when I look at a business acquisition, the reason I call bullshit on the whole idea that small deals shouldn't do small deals is ridiculous because if I can do more small deals, I can do more small deals with the same amount of capital. And if I'm solving distribution problems and customer acquisition problems by buying products, then ultimately, these businesses that are small today could be very big in the future. And that is the philosophy that I think more shots on goal asymmetric outcomes is the secret to winning in business. That's how you build something big, is you say, what can I afford to lose today and not get so caught up? And we've done deals where we did a deal that probably the worst deal we ever did was a $2 million deal. Hindsight probably shouldn't have bought it.

It's got mediocre outcomes right now, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it because I'm focused on all the other deals that actually did work out. That's, like, you can't, that's the problem. A $30 million deal would really be painful. You can do a couple of $2 million deals and lose those in my portfolio, whatever relative valuation is. And it's just about making more shots on goal. But I think a lot of people... when one deal goes south, they get so caught up in regretting that they did this deal when instinctively they probably knew better than to buy the deal to begin with, but they don't take another shot. Like history is written, successful founders and businesses and athletes and musicians is written because the successful ones were at bat more often. And the successful ones are showing up. That's why that 10,000 rule thing actually works.

Because they show up more often and have more chance of success.

Mark Cleveland (49:39)
The 10,000 hours, the Malcolm Gladwell.

Craig Fuller (49:42)
Yeah, exactly. And look, it's been debunked, but it's also been - what isn't stated in that is someone doing something for 10,000 hours likely would have given up if it wasn't be successful. That is, I mean, that is part of the whole thing.

Mark Cleveland (49:54)
I love to figure out what parallel entrepreneurs are reading because you're feeding your library. So now I've got a couple of what is on your reading and what's on your nightstand.

Craig Fuller (50:04)
man, I...

Yeah, so I have a, by the way, I don't know if you have ever seen the Kindle Scribe, which is the Amazon thing. I absolutely love it. is, you can write in it and the new version, you can actually make note in the books, which is pretty cool. So I'm gonna give you a couple of titles that I'm reading right now. One is called Range which is a why generalist triumph in a specialized world. So basically the idea is that education is all about like becoming a specialist, but the most successful people tend to be generalist. Steve Jobs is great example of that.

Steve Jobs learning calligraphy and being creative inspired him to think differently about computers. He was a computer nerd, but he was even more importantly a marketer and he had this aesthetic to him. Elon Musk, same thing, like rockets and The Boring Company and cars. I mean, X.

Mark Cleveland (50:53)
Sun power, power systems, batteries. Yeah.

Craig Fuller (50:57)
Politics, think that's easy. Another one is called The Rational Optimist. I just read that one, really good book. This goes into something I call the Lindy effect, which is the longer something's been around, the more likely it is to be around. And I use this framework for magazines. And so if a magazine, and some of our magazines around for, 50 or 100 years, if that thing has been survived multiple recessions, world wars, depressions, all that, and they're still getting subscribers, because everyone's like, magazines are dead. I'm like, look, these magazines have been here for 100 years, they're still subscribers, and they're still advertisers buying this stuff.

Chances are it's gonna be around another 10, 20, 30 years. And The Rational Optimist talks just about the fact that like, it goes through this whole process of the Lindy effect, which is the longer something been around, the more likely it is to be around. But also the more tested something is, the more often we test something - like American democracy is a great example of this. As everyone's like, this is the end of democracy. And I don't care whether you're talking Democrat version of that or the Republican version of that or a libertarian version of that or anarchist version of that. Everyone says the end of democracy.

Chances are that American democracy will survive because it gets tested all the time. And that is the thing that I think oftentimes is really, if you look at the most innovative companies and the most innovative founders is, and really the companies that are most likely to succeed in the market, it's the ones that are actually tested the most.

The more someone gets tested, the more someone actually is able to survive these near death experiences, the more likely they are to be successful. And that's the stuff that I think is encouraging. Cause like, that's the reason you should take more bets. Because like, as long as you don't die, as long as your character is not dead or bankrupt, you get the opportunity to play again. And so what if you screw up one, go to the next one.

Mark Cleveland (52:56)
And in entrepreneurship, this idea that we're doing one and then another, which is serial. And then what we're exploring is how do we do it in parallel multiple times? It's not just that we're standing at bat and taking a swing. We're really managing a field of pitchers and a field of batters and trying to figure out, can I improve the bat?

Can I improve the ball? Can I get a greater audience to watch this? I find that the way that people go about problem solving and innovation, and this is what I'm trying to discover through conversations like this, that this is really all by itself a superpower and it's fun.

Craig Fuller (53:20)
Absolutely.

It is fun and I think the thing, know, it's interesting because there's this whole thing about focus and you'll see there's a lot written in venture capital world, like you gotta be focused. I think what is missing from that story is that by having a whole share, and this is that book Range I'm talking about, a whole set of shared experiences of having experience over so many different verticals, over so much different kind of different experience. Take Elon Musk, because I think everyone sort of knows his background is,

No, he was a PayPal guy. He was an early innovator in payments. He then moved on to fund a lot of companies. He bought into Tesla, sort of re-engineers himself as the founder, but we'll give him that. He's founded the new version of Tesla. You know, he's doing The Boring Company. He's landing spaceships and now he's bought X and every single one of those times you're like, he's out. This is gonna kill him. And what we find is that

Mark Cleveland (54:19)
He's got some marketing skills.

Craig Fuller (54:34)
he is actually able to draw on his shared experience and identify inefficiencies. When he walked into X and bought Twitter at the time and walked in to basically and fired like two thirds of the staff, I'm a pretty prolific X user or Twitter user. It was pretty bad for like a year. Like the bots accelerated, the experience was bad, the system kept crashing. There were so many problems. Today it's the best experience that I've ever dealt with on social media.

I'm talking actually the user experience, the stability of the platform, the value that I get from it. Content aside, just as a social platform is far better than it ever was. But what Musk realized is he could fire two thirds of the management class of that business and it didn't matter. And I think the reason he was uniquely qualified to do that is because he had been tested and learned so many of these other experiences along his journey that all of a sudden he applied that same rule to walk it into there. We'll see if he can pull it off in government, but I think that's the reason that founders should be doing more and entrepreneurs should be exploring more because frankly, the experience in one business you can easily apply to the next. And it should get easier because those lessons that you pay a hard price for in that business that you completely screwed up the first time you did it, hopefully the second and third and fourth time it just gets easier.

Mark Cleveland (56:02)
So I found in my migration, we talked a little bit about SeaBridge and I went into this business with absolutely no experience in maritime transportation whatsoever. And I said we were acting like truckers on the high seas. Most maritime operations have one customer and they want that barge to be filled with all corn or all, you they just don't want to take any risks. They don't want to diversify. They don't want to have a hundred customers on that barge instead of one. And we just went in working with you and other people in the transportation industry, created a brand new highway. But it was what I did not know that I could not do that was my superpower. I went from one industry to a brand new industry and then just applied, well, how do I treat my customers and what are my mission, vision and values? And what have I learned in freight transportation and in fuel networks and in satellite communications and in software development? I just didn't have those preconceived notions about what I couldn't do either. I wonder how that's inspired some of your experiences.

Craig Fuller (57:06)
But Mark, I think a lot of it is, and I don't know if you've ever had a low in your business career or personal life that you just like, at the moment you had that, and I think this happens for, it certainly happened in my business life, it's happened in personal life, but the moment where you're just at the lowest moment you could ever imagine and you end up in this situation and somehow you survive it, like whatever it was you survived, and you come out better informed, more confident, you come out, and the next time, that small thing or big thing happens to you again, as painful as that was, you realize that you came out of it and you never could have imagined you would. And I think that testing, like you talk about, prepares you so much better for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And that is the reason I actually believe running multiple businesses is a superpower in itself because what... any business that I'm running gets, gets exponentially more value in me having these shared experiences across different business verticals.

Now I had to be really good at hiring people that work in these businesses because like if they're dependent upon me, it's going to fail. But if I can hire the right teams to run these things. And I think what you talked about was short sea shipping, the concept that both of us sort of got sort of pulled into because of our trucking experiences. It's very similar to that. We were applying trucking successes and failures and logistics understanding into this really strange part of logistics that we were able to understand how this potentially could work.

Mark Cleveland (58:40)
Yeah, designing for an opportunity and going ahead and letting it become an opportunity.

Craig Fuller (58:46)
Yeah, exactly. mean, like, it's one of those ideas that looks good on paper, but when you get into the execution of it, but look, there's nothing wrong. I don't regret the time I spent chasing short sea shipping. I learned a lot. It was cool.

Mark Cleveland (58:59)
Yeah, and I think that that whole business model is going to come back. You wait and see. Absolutely. Well, this is really the world of global shipping, the world of global possibility identifying. And I think maybe what I think neither one of us would ever want to overstep when we're looking at our success history is the people along the way that

Craig Fuller (59:03)
I think so. Container on barge, I'm all for it. So it's cool.

Mark Cleveland (59:21)
I had to, like you just said, had to recruit some great people in order, because if it's counting on me alone, it's going to fail. None of us accomplish anything alone. It takes a team. Somebody said, I get asked this question a lot. Is it the journey or is it the destination?

Craig Fuller (59:30)
No.

The journey. It's always the journey. For me, Mark, the journey is where the action takes place. As a founder, early days FreightWaves, where we were at near death experiences, and I can remember multiple times where things seemed so like they're gonna kill us, days we couldn't make payroll and stuff. I don't miss those, I I shouldn't say, I miss those moments oftentimes because... the consequences are so big for that dream. And the fact we survived it, think is, that's part of the journey. If you got to the destination, like, FreightWaves SONAR is a very successful business. If I'm being completely frank, much greater than I ever would have imagined what it has become.

It isn't as rewarding - the dopamine hits that I get now when things happen that are crazy to me that this would even be possible don't have the same meaning as the very first meeting I took with a big client or the very first big hire when somebody believed in my dream or that very first venture capital, that first investment that went in.

Mark Cleveland (1:00:39)
They gave you a break. Somebody recognized your character, your vision.

Craig Fuller (1:00:42)
Yeah.

And now, and I'm not trying to be dismissive to those moments, but now it takes so much more to drive the same outcome. I'm convinced that's why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos shoot off rockets because the stakes are so high and so fraught with failure that, you know, Jeff Bezos getting involved in another retail business is just like boring.

And for Elon Musk, once you've reached a certain level of success, you want to be challenged and stressed. And I think for me, I want the stakes to continue to be higher because that's what keeps the dopamine. It's like, I can't believe this is actually happening. And I remember thinking so many times, I don't deserve to be here. I actually don't deserve to be here and I can't believe this has happened to me in a good way. I mean, good things.

And I think back to myself 10 years ago, I like, I never could have imagined it, those are the moments where you're like, this is unreal. And that's the stuff that I think is pretty cool.

Mark Cleveland (1:01:45)
So when you've got this journey or destination question, I think there's another answer. But that was binary, right? I think it's the companionship. Because when we're moving through that journey, where either celebrations shared are multiplied or burdens shared are divided, right? We're experiencing that with our investors. The wins, the loss, how we disengage, how we move forward.

Craig Fuller (1:01:55)
true.

Absolutely.

Mark Cleveland (1:02:14)
actual shared experience is, think, as you asked me earlier, Mark, you had some lows and highs and we all have personally and professionally, but the ones where we survive, I'm not sure it's the dopamine as much as it might be looking back on our survival of that moment, our transcendence of that.

Craig Fuller (1:02:37)
That's a great, I'm so glad you brought that up. It is interesting. And this is the part that I think is tough as a founder, when you have to let an early employee go. Someone who is on that journey, this happens in every business of scale. Like as you get to scale, there's something happens where you're going in one direction, they're going in another and it becomes inevitable.

Mark Cleveland (1:02:59)
Well, you build for a particular moment in time and then the time moves on. The business is different. It's a living organization. So you're going to look for a different fit. It's not a bad reflection, but it's a tough moment, isn't it?

Craig Fuller (1:03:06)
It is.

It's incredibly tough or they leave the business because they found their opportunity and they're no longer on that journey. It's usually better if they leave the business because hopefully you can be friends, you left on good terms. You let them go, it's a different situation because now all those memories, that person that was in there in the pits with you and maybe the business has moved beyond their abilities to sort of step up or maybe they become really disenfranchised with some other people you brought in, maybe the people you brought in are are frankly really good, but the person's not sort of getting there. They found other ambitions. That's the part that creates real sadness for me. Because it's like, I'm like, the moments where you were in the trenches together, and I'm a very active founder. I like to be in the trenches. I enjoy it. It's those moments of shared interest, particularly on the early stage of the business where you do survive something big and you're like, I can't believe we built this. And you sort of laugh about how much fun you're having together.

Losing that you lose part of yourself. And I think it's like, it's oftentimes like a relationship. In fact, you could say that many cases for startups, especially for young companies, you spend more time with that person in the trenches than you likely spend with your spouse. And when that goes away and that person's not on the journey anymore, whether it's their decision or yours, you lose a little bit of yourself along the way. And I think that's, that's the journey, the people that make it possible are incredibly important.

The shared journey is incredibly important, but there's also the downside as a human, these experiences and these relationships that you come to at times are not the same.

Mark Cleveland (1:04:43)
You know, I know you to be a good leader and a fantastic business decision maker. And I just would offer, as I heard you say, you learn, you lose a little bit of something along the way. And I have had that same sense. So I recognize that, but I want to flip it around for our audience and people that are considering this topic. I gain every time. This is a constant gain, constant growth, constant expansion. That's why we're excited about many, many more things.

Craig Fuller (1:05:05)
Absolutely.

Mark Cleveland (1:05:12)
And those relationships that I've invested in, and I've actually found on occasion, I'll get a call from somebody back in the day, back at TripPak or back at DAT or back at Jubitz. And then they may be some of the greatest rewards that I've experienced, period. Nobody's saying, you know, you are a son of a #%$&, and,

Craig Fuller (1:05:31)
Absolutely.

Yeah.

Mark Cleveland (1:05:35)
And then I went on and I had these experiences and I pulled out from my library something I learned from you. These are maybe the greatest compliments ever. I didn't actually lose that relationship. It was accretive and eventually we're all circling back to something in creation.

These are investments you've made that continue into the future. There are ripples that never stop, Craig.

Craig Fuller (1:06:03)
Life is cumulative, right? Like we accumulate knowledge, experiences, journeys, stories, we communicate with, we accumulate with other people. Life is, it's cumulative and you gain these and it's exponentially cumulative as you grow. Business is the same way. And these experiences do prepare you in so many ways. And to your point, just like relationships, is you may, like I'm married and love my wife and we have a fantastic relationship and she's the best thing that's ever happened to me. But I also had relationships in the past where at that moment those experiences are gone. Like the journey, the shared journey, we split. And it is interesting because I'm so much better today and my journey with my wife is so much more magical with my family than it ever was in the past.

But I gained something through those experiences that I was able to take forward. It's the same thing with business, I think.

Mark Cleveland (1:06:55)
Well, this has been a tremendous catch up, a tremendous conversation. I honor the incredible track record that you've laid out and the story that you've shared with people that makes parallel entrepreneurship so obvious in a world where, at least in my experience, people usually think that we're completely nuts, but it's not.

Craig Fuller (1:07:16)
You're not compound. They compound what you already are good at. Like we are nuts, but like it's also the secret to compounding wealth and opportunities is to be at bat more often.

Mark Cleveland (1:07:20)
We're slightly nuts, but you know.

I love it. Well everybody let's go to bat more often. Craig, we live in a parallel universe. I'll see you again shortly.

Craig Fuller (1:07:36)
Appreciate it, Mark.