All right, I just checked and the waveform does spike and clip when I scream like that.
So we will try not to do that anymore for the sake of everyone home.
Welcome to season five, episode nine, the Home stretch of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them.
We, we are coming to you live today from the University of Washington audience.
Can we hear you?
I'm Ben Gilbert.
I'm David Rosenthal.
And we are your hosts.
Let's talk about trucks, 18 wheelers, semis, the long haul guys.
One out of every four of these that you see on the road is completely empty.
Truckers finish a job and then pick up the phone to find their next load, which could be a state or more away.
You might think they should be able to just have their boss or coworker figure it out across multiple trucks and coordinate.
But get this, 90% of trucking companies have six or fewer trucks and 97% have fewer than 20 trucks.
There are over a million independent trucking companies, or carriers as we'll call them tonight in the United States alone.
So enter Convoy.
Today we are going to talk about this company which has only existed unbelievably for four and a half years, and their ambitious plans to make it easy for any truck driver to find a nearby load transparently, see what they'll get paid, and do it all as you would expect, right on their smartphone.
We've existed for four and a half years too.
We're almost as big as Convoy.
Yeah, this was like a sick dose of perspective.
When we were doing the research, David and I realized that Convoy was started between the time that we had lunch and talked about doing the show and when we actually started the show.