Episode 23: Stagnant Technology is Ineffective Technology

Hey listeners, welcome to SphereCast, a podcast all about technology, technology advice, technology inspiration, and how real entrepreneurs have used technology to build their businesses from the ground up.

If you're wondering how technology can support your business goals, rest assured our guests have been there and done that.

Rivers have currents. And if you've ever swam in a river, you know there's no such thing as staying in place. You're going in one of two directions: downstream or upstream. And technology is no different. Your market is a moving target. And if your technology isn't evolving with the needs of your consumer, you're going to get swept up in the current and forgotten. And if you don't change the course in due time, you might just hit a cliff's edge.

Hey again, it's Luke here with SphereCast, and this week Ksenia and I interview Kwaku Yeboah-Antwi, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at DIZZBO. DIZZBO is revolutionizing an industry in desperate need of disruption — logistics. And through technology, DIZZBO is allowing its customers to get connected with shipping providers through a process that takes a matter of minutes, which is a far cry from the status quo of days or even weeks. Since its founding in 2018, DIZZBO has already reached profitability. However, Kwaku would be the first to admit that their earliest technology prototypes were no match for the volume they've experienced since opening their doors. And, now, if they want to expand their footprint on the logistics industry, their technology has to evolve. They have to swim upstream.

On the podcast, Yeboah-Antwi talks through DIZZBO's entire journey, shares some advice on how to manage time, and discusses the importance of never being satisfied with your current technology. So without further ado, here's our chat with Kwaku Yeboah-Antwi.

Hi everyone, Ksenia's here. And today we're thrilled to host Kwaku from DIZZBO. Hi Kwaku, how are you?

Hi, I'm doing well. I'm really happy to be here.

We like to start with an icebreaker. Would you share with our audience something interesting about yourself that most people don't really know?

That's a difficult one. Well, I think this one a lot of people know about, not well, a lot of people around me know this, so I am an artist. I actually studied arts in school and I make music with my skin and my hair. That's I guess probably one of the weirdest things about me.

Wow, tell us more.

Yes.

You have to tell us more now.

Sure. A while back, actually growing up, I was really into biorhythms. So I'm into rhythms in general, rhythm like rhythmic music and making rhythms. And I realized your the human skin actually has some rhythms, and the skin, for example, has a lot of electricity. It's called galvanic skin response. And electricity, of course, is pulses of electrons moving back and forth.

Now, you can actually tweak it. So when your skin is oily or a bit wet, electricity is a little bit higher. When it's dry, it's a little bit lesser. When you pinch yourself or your nerves get excited, it actually also kind of changes electricity in your skin. So in college, I went to an art school, I actually decided to investigate this a little bit more, and so I built a whole full body suit that has all these sensors and now I put it on and it just records the electricity on my skin and my hair and on stage, I do different things where I pinch myself, I slap myself, I do different motions, I hit my knee with a hammer, different things. And this excites different things, and I put it into a synthesizer and some effects pedals, and you have music.

And I've been doing this for 10 years now, so I've gotten to the point where I'm really good at it, that I can like if you see me on stage, it feels like, you know, a madman just doing different actions and hear sounds around you. And I've been doing this for really quite a while now, so this is kind of I think there's a few of us in the world who do this. I've met two people two other people who do this, but it's very rare. And every time I do a concert, I get on stage, I put on my suit and people just look confused. And they always wonder who's playing, who's going to be playing, who's doing this? And I'd say that's really one of the most interesting things around about me.

So I live in Berlin where there's a lot of strange music and that kind of stuff, so here people some people know about this, but especially when I'm not in Berlin, it's always a shocker.

Wow. No pun intended there.

No pun intended.

We need to check this out. So how can we find you online? Could you could you tell our audience like where they can find your music?

Oh, now this is the difficult part. Like every you know, what's the term again, every hipster in Berlin, cassettes.

Oh wow, okay.

Cassettes. There's cassettes. I record mostly to cassettes, direct to cassette, so if anyone is somewhere close enough to me, they can get a cassette. They can buy a cassette, but there's nothing really digital. I think there's a video somewhere, a DVD somewhere, but that was from a few years ago.

And nothing on YouTube?

No, no, I think I work with computers. I'm a technical person, and so when I go home and when I kind of want to decompress, I really want to take away everything technical. So part of my suit has part of my setup has, you know, there's some computers, and some Arduinos, but in the end, I really want to avoid as much as possible doing digital, cuz it's really how I decompress.

So it's really just low-tech cassettes, recording to cassettes. I actually released VHS tapes a long time ago. I stopped doing that because it's hard to find VHS players, but yeah, it's very low-tech.

My dad might have one, you know. I need to ask him. He used to he never gave it away, so he still has that. I think it was made by a company called Akai. So A-K-A-I, so he has that VHS player, definitely. I'll give him a ring today. But

You can buy them on eBay. Yeah, you can buy all these things on eBay. No one wants them anymore. And if you buy a cassette player, then I will definitely volunteer to send whoever does, you can thank me and I will send you a few cassettes.

I want to dive into the business side of things here a little bit. So in your own words, could you tell us what is DIZZBO and how did you come to co-found this company?

So what we usually tell people is basically that DIZZBO is a startup that is trying to digitize the road logistics industry. And that's really a really fancy way of saying that we really want to make logistics in Europe as easy as online shopping.

Now, in the industry, currently it's really hard to do logistics if you're especially if you're a small player. And when I mean small player, I mean companies that make between 15 million to half a billion, so 500 million. Either you sign a contract with one of the bigger players, and so you know, there's DHL, UPS, Kuehne + Nagel, there's a lot of companies around that do this kind of stuff. So either you sign a contract with them, or you have to run a gauntlet of trying to figure out a good logistics player, kind of the trust, dealing with the legal stuff, the legal stuff including basically sending documents over to the transporter, and also even making sure that when they are transporting your goods, they're correct export licenses, so on and so forth.

And so this is this We did a bit of a survey and realized that that it took a lot of our our target customers a really long time. There was some that it takes about anywhere from two weeks to about two months to actually set up all of this. And so we realized that there was a bit of a there was a bit of a something here that we could do. And in Europe, road logistics is, let's say, the biggest form of logistics. So when you talk about moving goods from one part of Europe to another, it's all by truck. It's all by road.

And so this was kind of the impetus for DIZZBO. Now, I am actually one of the one co-founder of DIZZBO, there's four of us. So two of us, Robert, Robert Kobruner and Peter Baumgartlinger, have been working in the logistics domain for over let's say together they have over 40 years of experience in the domain. So they kind of had this idea that, yes, they've worked in the domain, they've seen all these manual processes, they've seen how long it takes, and especially with the digitization of the world, you know, we have GPS, we have all these digital technologies that is helping shed more visibility and kind of speeding up processes, we can bring this to logistics.

And so that's kind of where we decided. And we decided that, you know, the biggest problem here was that there's a lot of logistics companies, but for customers, it really just that whole process, like taking you two weeks to about two months to do set up a whole logistics run was just inappropriate. It just didn't really make any sense. So we wanted to simplify this, and we decided our goal was basically to do it so that to do a logistics order should be instantaneous to a maximum 20 minutes. It should be like online shopping. And, you know, everyone has done online shopping before. If you want to buy a shirt, you go to the website, you go to Amazon or whatever retailer it is, you pick a shirt, you pick the color, you pick the size, you pick the shipping date, or the shipping mode, and then you just you know, you click buy and that's it.

And so we really thought, hey, we can bring this process to logistics domain with digital technologies. So basically, instead of the typical you pick up a phone, you call someone, you fax them documents, you do a whole negotiation over the phone and fax machines, some people even use pagers. In Europe, yes, there's a lot of places where people use pagers. Very inoptimal. How about we just say we simplify that? You come to our platform, you sign a contract with us, you basically come in our platform and you just like online shopping, you tell us your order: 300 tons of tomatoes needs to be refrigerated, needs to be picked up here, we need an export license, so on and so forth. We take all of this, and then we find you the correct transporter. We handle all of the communication, so we can standardize things because we see the volume. So we standardize all of these things, we find you the transporter, and pretty much kind of take away all the complexity there.

So for you, the difficulty is just telling us your order. And of course, you can do that digitally. So you tell us digitally, we handle all of it, and we with with things like GPS live tracking of trucks, with you know, robotic systems that can help unload and unload trucks, so on and so forth, we just take over this. So we we pick it up, we deliver it, we take it to where it needs to be delivered, we unload it, you verify that it's done, and then that's it for you.

So that's kind of the process that we kind of we are proposing and this is kind of what DIZZBO is doing. Now, as I said, there's four of us, so the idea originally started with Robert and Peter. Robert Robert and Peter have been working in logistics for collectively over 40 years. And you know, they've been I think Robert was the head of logistics for a big company in Austria. Peter was the head of sales for another company in Austria. And so they both had been looking at this and realizing these are customer problems. So they kind of were like, okay, we could do something about this. And so then I came in as the with the technical mind and how do we actually accomplish this. And so this is kind of how the story of DIZZBO's, you know, this is what we do and this is kind of how the story started.

That's, yeah, thanks for sharing that. That's that's really interesting. So you guys picked up a problem and decided to solve it, and that's, but I'm just a bit surprised that how you could make something that takes two days to a few weeks to 20 minutes, so we can go into that business side a little bit maybe, you know, how are you guys achieving it, or if it's the, you know, if it's your secret sauce, maybe you want to skip over, so entirely up to you.

Sure. Maybe I can give you a little bit of a like a very business high-level view of this. So a lot of these complexities come because of quite a few problems. Number one is basically, you know, a lot of companies just don't have the the visibility of their own supply chains enough to actually sign a contract with a big player, the big logistics company. So there's the bigger ones, like and I mentioned DHL, which is a big one in Germany. So you don't really, you know, for a lot of companies, you know, there's strikes, it might be snowing somewhere where it needs to go, you might have a lack of raw material, so on and so forth, so you don't really have this visibility of that.

So that means that when you want to do logistics, you decide, I want to do it today, I have everything today, and then you start kind of trying to figure out how to do it. You then need to find who can do it for you. You need to find a driver. And of course, if you go for the big players, they also like they prefer signing big contracts, and it's really expensive signing a contract with them. I mean, it's cheaper if you sign a long-term contract, but a long-term contract could be multiple millions. And you, of course, you have to also pay a little bit of the contract up ahead. So if you're a small company, then you're in a Catch-22: contract is great, but you don't have the money to do it, and also it requires you actually planning ahead of time and knowing what you need to ship and when you need to ship, how frequent, so on and so forth.

So all of these kind of things like make it really difficult. That means that when you want to do something, you say, today I want to ship something, well, now you need to find a driver because you can't sign a contract, so usually in in Europe, Eastern European drivers are usually or companies are usually a bit more cheaper, so you usually want to find someone from Eastern Europe. And here, of course, the lingua franca isn't English, or German, or Spanish, or Italian, or French, it's usually Russian. So that means then you also have to find a transporter who speaks the language that you want to speak, or then you have an admin team that speaks, you know, Russian or whatever language it is.

Then you have to like engage with them, then you have to do the negotiation, and of course, you have to do some due diligence to figure out that they actually know what they're doing because you're giving them your goods, so on and so forth. So this is kind of this is really where the bulk of the the the time happens, that really it's just really hard to just get this up.

Of course, if you do this often enough, you can start working with a provider, but of course, you know, especially if you work with independent contractors, they also sometimes disappear, you know, companies fold and so pretty much you are redoing this over and over again. And so we basically kind of take away all that complexity there. So because we have standard processes, we can standardize. We have a network of carriers of transporters or carriers that we work with, that means that when you basically send us your order, you we have a standardized form, we know all the necessary information you need, you send it over to us. We've and we know the carriers, we kind of know their price points, we have a really big visibility of the market. We also have a in our network, we know which ones are trustworthy, we know what routes they take, because not every carrier does every route.

So for us, it's really much more simplistic. And also, you know, one of our really core things is we do automated supply and demand matching. We know what carriers do what routes, we know what they need, we know what is their price points. So once we have all the details about your order, it's really easy of just saying we match this to them and then we handle that communication and that, you know, bidding and having them bid on it, having multiple people bid on the order and all this. You can automate this really, really much more faster.

So that's kind of where we do things. So, I mean, when I say two weeks to two months, it really includes getting the order out, figuring the people out, selling like negotiating with them, agreeing with them, agreeing on a pickup time, all of that. We just say two minutes, 20 minutes for you to put in the order and that's your effort. That's done. That's pretty much that's done. We will handle the rest of it all.

And because we've kind of we have this relationship and we have this setup that allows this automated kind of stuff, that means that in the end, we are able to much more faster find the correct person for you and to like, you know, kind of relay all the details that they need, and they don't even have to contact you because we have all the or we have all the documents that they need. So they talk to us and so there's not a delay because, you know, they don't have to come talk to you. We have digital processes

You have that communication channel already open, so, yeah, I guess you, mhmm. You're just bringing more demand for them, so

Exactly, exactly. So they like that. And it's the communication's also digital. So it's not really that we have to pick up a phone. You know, we can send them a push notification, they can, you know, accept an order just clicking on a button on a mobile app and that's it. There's no you know, they can bid on it by even putting a number in the mobile app and we get it instantaneously. So even the bidding process is really, really, really much more simplified because it's not really phone calls, fax machines. And to be quite honest, phone calls, fax machines is really how we work in the industry.

And so if you're talking about an independent trucker who's, you know, has maybe one truck and they're driving, well, a phone call means you have to wait till they stop driving. So there's also all these little delays. They all build up. And so because we are able to just sort of do through all these digital avenues of communication, reduce all this lag, and it is lag in essence, that means everything that takes you so much time to do, including language barrier, can be just done simply within a few minutes.

And with automated supply and demand matching, that means that that can be even like, you know, two minutes is for you to put in an order, and if it's so easy and so simple, we can literally find a carrier instantaneously from our network and just immediately match it to them. And of course, we have GPS, so we actually know where trucks are. And for carriers that we work really closely with, they even let us know where their trucks are. So that means we can even figure out the truck closest truck to you instantaneously and just do that and just get them the get them the details about your order.

And do you know if if there's any availability in terms of the the cargo, you know, like if if that truck particular truck, do you do any IoT stuff there that you know if there's space in that particular one that you could be leveraging, you know, I don't I don't know if that makes sense.

Of course. Of course, we do do that, and to be fair, this is one of our biggest challenges that we're trying to really improve upon. So we have multiple avenues. There's some IoT, some ML to figure out if the truck is empty. You can do weight, you can weigh in. Also, a lot of times we work with carriers who will let us know at the beginning of the day, "This is what I'm doing."

So then with that map, we know kind of where their trucks are. And also you can evenly tell, you know, a truck that is not moving for a few hours is doesn't have a load. Either the driver is taking a break or they don't have a load. So you can, through all these different disparate data sources, you can actually build this view of the a carrier a fleet.

In addition, actually, the carriers also tell us themselves. So beginning of the morning, we a lot of carriers will tell us, okay, this is what I'm doing today. This is what I'm sending order A, B, C, D. They don't have to give us details, but we know they're driving from here to here and this is how much space is on my truck. And again, trucks are already standardized, so there's a standard pallet size, standard weight maximum and minimums that they need, so with all this information, we can infer and just kind of build up on it. But again, this is one of our biggest challenges, to be quite honest. We are trying to automate this and make this even much more like to the point where we don't need to talk to anyone to figure out if the truck is empty and if the truck is available.

Yeah, yeah. And I guess over time, you will have more data collected, and that that will make your, you know, whatever algorithms you guys will use more efficient, and more efficient results in a way that more accurately you could, you know, predict these things.

Okay, I mean this is a perfect segue into the product. So I I heard a lot, I'll go with those questions. You know, I'll follow this up, but I think Ksenia has a has a very good question here to learn more about your product. So you you, yeah, over to you, Ksenia, again.

Yeah, Kwaku, you mentioned that you're the technical mind behind the whole operation, so I want to ask you about the product architecture. What was your thought process in selecting a technology solution for DIZZBO? Could you share what solutions you considered and why did you settle on certain ones?

Sure. So to be quite honest, there's it's really boring. It actually really is boring in the sense that we when we were trying to select the solutions that we wanted to use, we had two things in mind. The first thing was basically that we needed something that would enable because our end goal is basically to kind of take away all the manual processes, to automate everything, so all the technologies that we wanted to select should should be ready to support this kind of workflow.

And the second part is basically the sense that again, we are based here in Berlin, and there's a bit of a the market Berlin is the one of the biggest tech capitals in in Europe. And of course, we did a bit of a market analysis and realized that kind of what are the the capabilities that are really popular here, what are kind of the resources that are capable here, how many people can we find here, so on and so forth. So this kind of tied in there.

So, I mean, from our product architecture point of view, technological point of view, I mean, when we talk about programming languages and so on and so forth, we just looked at it and realized, okay, it would be easier to hire, let's say, Python engineers, because Python is really one of the most languages here in industry. So Python became the thing. And of course, when you're using Python, there's Django, you know, there's kind of the standard tooling here, so there's that. So pretty much it really was a sort of thing was saying that we don't really want to reinvent the wheel. We don't really want to do any I mean, what we're doing is already hard enough. It's we're trying to digitize an whole industry, so let us make sure that our product architecture is something that is kind of simple, does the job well, we can hire people, we can grow with it really fast, and yeah, and does the job.

And of course, it's the other benefit for actually even choosing Python was basically, as you're aware, it's the premier language in machine learning for the past 10 years or so, so I think it's grown to become that. So it also meant that we can actually do all of these kind of machine learning components and we we can do with the same tech stack. Now, of course, you know, there's other languages that are better, there are other architectures that are much more better, but we figured, yeah, you know, if you want to scale up, Python microservices, that is simple, there's a lot of information in the internet, there's we can hire people to do this, you know, there's quite a lot of people who've seen other people try different things like this, we know we have all previous experiences, so this makes quite a lot of sense for us to just rely on that.

So like I said, it's really boring, but it really was just more of a very utilitarian approach of doing this.

I see. I see. I mean, there's an interesting point you made here. So, Ksenia, we never hear this from the CTOs. This is a CTO podcast, but we we don't hear the the talent bit. So you you kind of were also thinking, okay, where you guys are based, and and and you know, the location also played a part. This is a new one, so we haven't heard this before. Maybe the the other people we speak with they're just they just happen to be located in certain places. But, yeah, it's interesting that the the that was one of the the variables that you considered. Maybe nobody talked about it.

So tell me a little bit more about the the as you're enriching data and bringing more stuff in, how how has this uh can we call DIZZBO a scale-up now or are you still kind of very much, you know, in terms of serving a few customers? Where where are you guys sitting in this, let's say, the ladder of, you know, of a startup, or scale-up, or in-between? Where you guys are?

Yeah, I think we I think we'll we'll say we are a scale-up. We've achieved product-market fit. We, you know, we are at a point actually we are profitable. We're actually profitable, we've been profitable for a year now, so we kind of know what we are doing and we just really we're scaling up. So, yeah, we are a scale-up, I guess.

So since you said, you know, the company is scaling up and you've achieved the product-market fit, is there So I guess you're set for for the next few years. So with that in mind, I want to ask you what goals do you have for DIZZBO, let's say in between, you know, let's say year one to year five from from from tomorrow, let's say? What what what goals are you looking at? What are you trying to, you know, smash this year, next year, and the one after?

Sure. We have quite a lot of things on our plate. So as I said, we're a scale-up and we've achieved product-market fit, but of course it took us a little bit time to get to this point. We tried quite a lot of experiments like every startup. There were some false starts and some, you know, a lot of experiments. So our current platform, let's say, is a combination of it does a lot of things for us, but it's a combination of a lot of previous experiments. It was kind of retrofitted to fit our needs right now. So let's say right now on my plate, as of right now, is basically to just rebuild our current platform to actually scale up to actually accommodate us as we grow.

So that's pretty much really the main thing on my plate as of this year, is really just to to do this. And maybe I'll throw a little bit of terminology here that non-logistics people will not recognize, but I'll try my best not to go too too deep in depth here. So think of a transport management system as a platform that you use to manage a fleet of trucks to figure out where are they, availability, to peer into the future with them, to do the pricing, to reroute trucks, all of this kind of stuff. And for example, this is a platform that is basically core to our needs, and we have a platform like this. However, again, it wasn't really fully it kind of came about because we we started with different parts of it, we wanted to figure out what's because every company that does logistics does has a TMS, transport management system, and of course, we wanted to figure out what parts of transport management systems are crucial for a the fully automated process.

And so we started this way and of course, we tried a lot of different things, and so our current platform is just a hodgepodge of different things. And so this year for for now for this year, my goal is basically to say, let's scale it up, let's rebuild, let's actually take all the lessons that have been learned, let's actually do products from a really we now and we know what customers want, we know what customers need, we know where our USP, we know what we're doing well. Let's build on that and let's rebuild our platform to do this, and to do this really well, and to make it scalable.

So to scale up, I think right now we have a lot of customers and one of the things that we realized is again, as we were building, as we were doing, we never really thought that far in advance. We never, you know, you don't think about scalability when you're starting building your first your first MVP. So we never thought about that, so also that's one of the things that we want to now engineer as we go ahead. So for this year, it's basically, you know, we, you know, we have an internal name, Project Olympus. Project Olympus is basically to redo our TMS, our platform, and to make it to rebuild it to make it much more scalable.

Now, in the longer run, where we want to be in five years, let's say, is basically really to really complete this automated demand and supply matching with also the invoicing and the money management, the getting the customers, the sales, and all of that. We want to actually tie everything together. Our goal is really to go from, let's say, 30, 40, 50% automated demand-supply matching to 100% of all almost all of our customers. Now, that's a really hard goal. We're told, you know, the best we can get to, originally we were told 30% under the markets. Now we're we're around like 60% of the of all markets and we see it's possible. So in five years from now, 2026, we want to be 100% of all customers have this automated demand and supply matching. Now, that's a dream. So that's one of our dreams.

Secondly, we also really want to this whole machine learning and predictive analysis component is something that we really want to kind of use a lot more. So in the logistics domain, people don't really use it that much. There's a lot of well, there's a lot of new advances in the market, analog time series, all this predictive analysis that kind of gives us this. We see all these technologies and these techniques and so we think they can be applied to us. So, I mean, a really simple example is basically trying to use machine learning to figure out what is the most optimal route, and what what routes need more trucks, because that means our carriers, we can suggest this to carriers and tell them, "Hey, if you take an order that goes on this route that you don't usually do, you make much more money right now because there's no one doing it right now." So things like this, we want to do a lot more of it.

And of course, we want to vertically expand. So we're doing road logistics right now because that's kind of where our co-founders and all we we all started from. This is our base. We really want to expand into a lot of different product verticals. So, you know, there's air, there's ocean, there's rail. And in Europe, rail is really one of the big things. So we want to really expand also into that vertical and cover basically the whole European market. I mean, our goal, and this is what I tell investors, is we want to hit 1 billion plus in sales in 2026.

Okay.

So yes, I mean to sum it up, we really like it's right now just saying we we know what we're doing, so we want to scale up both from a customer-based point of view, sales point of view, and also from a tech a platform point of view.

Tech point of view as well.

Yeah, from a tech point of view. And also integrate kind of really really go really deep into this, automate everything and use machine learning to also get as much information as we can from the market and to kind of use this to make the process even more smoother and faster.

We want to show our customers that, you know, in five years from now, they shouldn't really have to like ever pick up a phone to do a logistics run ever again. It doesn't matter how big or how small you are, you really shouldn't have to do it and that's our goal.

I'm very excited. Like, this is this is quite exciting to hear. Yeah, some massive goals set. I mean, I hope Sphere people don't mind, but I mean I, you know, this is an exciting organization to to look forward to working for, I think, you know, if anything. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Ksenia, what do you think?

I think you've had a very successful journey so far, and it sounds like things have gone according to plan, maybe not. Maybe you can share with us some of the challenges that you've experienced prior to starting in DIZZBO?

Sure. So I think, to be quite honest, one of my biggest problems is always and this is something that a lot of CTOs don't really think about, is stakeholder management. Because we are, you know, from a tech point of view, I'm trying to like, you know, we have Of course on the business line, we say we want to automate everything, but it's a dream that we want to push. And so it's, you know, we coming in an industry we're coming into an industry that is very that is old as old as anything, you know. Logistics is one of the oldest industries. Moving goods around is that. So there's a lot of processes, there's a lot of things that people have done in the past, and you know, sometimes people don't even have a don't have an explanation why it's why they do it this way. It's just we always do it this way. So I think this has kind of been one of my major challenges is just basically managing this. So trying to get people excited, trying to show them that it's possible.

And of course, you know, when you talk machine learning, you talk about automation, there's always the naysayers. And and I think they're right. Of course, you know, there's been a lot of promises of what can be done. And so for me, the challenge is always that I'm not It's only, first of all, just kind of trying to convince people, yes, it can be done, and this is why we're doing it, and it's actually foolproof. Because of course, if you're a small company, you want or a big company you want to work with us, you want to be sure that this works and it's never going to fail.

So this is really my biggest challenge in all is basically just the human side. Just convincing our both internal stakeholders, the industry as a whole, our customers that this works, our carriers that this works and that they should really place their trust in us. And, you know, from a product point of view, this is the one thing my product team and I have been kind of trying to push, that idea of trust. That you can trust that what we're doing will work and that it works. And that is, like I said, it's really the biggest challenge for us.

It's not really the typical challenge for a lot of CTOs, but for me, this is that. Because from a technical point of view, what we're building is really a combination of technologies that I've personally So I I my background is in a lot of machine learning and AI. I I actually, my first I started my career doing a lot of this and I I, you know, I my education is in this domain, so for me, the technical part is it's a mix of mixing different blocks that we know works in different parts and making putting them really well and putting them together well. So that part is, let's say, also not a challenge not a not an easy thing, but it's not as much of a challenge as the people part.

I see. I see. Yeah, that's a that's a different kind of a challenge, I guess. But how how what are you doing to, you know, make manage it better, let's say? Do you have a mentor maybe, you know, that you are utilizing right now? Anyone helping you out with this?

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. So DIZZBO as a whole, we're working with a few advisors. So one of the major ones is Florian Gschwandtner. He's one of the bigger let's say VC people here in Europe. So he actually built Runtastic, the app, Adidas's app that they use for all their exercises, and so on and so forth. He built it and basically kind of sold it off to Adidas. And so he's one of our advisors, and he's been really kind of helping us in this journey: how to position ourselves, how to talk to our customers, how to convince them.

In addition, you know, well, our team is, so as I said, we have a lot of experience. So I previously was at BCG, Boston Consulting Group, where I did quite a lot of this stuff. So doing a lot of future we call the future tech. So basically future-facing technology, and also showing doing technology demonstrators. So we have I have quite a lot of experience also kind of how thinking about how to present this information to people. In addition, I have a bit of a design background, so trust, if you look me up actually, I write papers about trust in automated systems. So this is something that I've also spent quite a lot of time in from an academic point of view. So we use this a lot. And I think it also helps that convincing our clients and also stakeholders when they realize that, you know, two of our co-founders have been in the logistics industry for over 40 years. You know, when you have that kind of, you know, that kind of experience behind your back, it's a little bit easier.

But in essence, it's just really kind of showing, you know, transparency. I think that's one of the things, transparency, that people know how we do things, because then that gives them a little bit more of the trust. So even with machine learning, you know, as long as people understand what is happening and how this is happening, they kind of then it takes away a little bit of the discomfort. Because then they see it's not really, yes, it's a bit fancy, but it's not super, it's not a complete black box.

Yeah, it's that. Okay. I want to ask you something, so this is just my my, I think, you know, observation over the years, so I I find that the the technology adoption is is much more, you know, people are more open in in the States compared to the companies in Europe. They are very, you know, suspicious of any anything new like this. They're not They don't want to work with somebody who has not been in the market for many, many years because, you know, companies fold, as you said. So so how is is that one of the challenges you face right now, like the businesses when when you go and pitch, what's the what's the normal response? It It takes very long to convince people in Germany, Switzerland. I I find that as well, you know. Like if they are working with a vendor, and if we go in, it's like you have to just talk with somebody for two years to get a little piece of business from them, so yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, I completely agree. You know, I started my career back in the States, so I as and since I'm from Boston, my first job was working at Raytheon, working on DARPA projects, so I understand this, and now moving to Europe, this is one of the bigger challenges for me, was always trying to convince people on this kind of sense.

And I think for us, we are a bit lucky in the sense that on the people's side, as I mentioned, we have a lot of experience in the domain, so it's really it's it makes the conversation go a little bit more better when, you know, the people explaining to you what we can do are people who've spent, you know, 40-plus years doing this and you are aware of them, they give talks about this. So that on that end that that that makes it a little bit easier. In addition, you know, we we're transparent. We're really transparent, so we are aware where where our problems are and where what we can do and what we can cover, and we're really transparent, and people really like this.

And also the the idea of trust, you know, in So we're based in Germany, we have offices also in Austria. One of the things that I learned when I first moved here is basically an old school an old school German phrase, I'm not going to say the German, but in essence it translates to basically as good as a handshake. People want to feel that whatever you give to them is as good as a handshake, and a handshake is something that you can you shake hands on and you can rely on.

And so we make sure that there's enough transparency that you understand, you know, as good as a handshake, you know what you can expect. If problems happen, we're open about it. And we're really clear. I mean, our customers are, if you look at our customers, a lot of them are even willing to help us test out our new platform. Now, I mean, as we're building this new platform right now, I actually have a backlog of customers who say, "Yes, we want to help you with this because we're happy with the experience."

And to be quite honest, it's also the sense of just we started small and we started growing bigger and bigger. And there's also the word of mouth, because there's a word of mouth that, hey, we took over this, we took over another company's logistics, and we did it so well that they like it. And so and we've this has been a deliberate choice. We've been in a bit of in stealth, and if you look at stuff on the internet, it's a bit hard to find things about us and we're now coming out of stealth. It took us us time to just do this.

Yeah, yeah. I I I I have I worked with, you know, one of my customers I worked with were based out of Dubai, and no website, nothing, they just, you know, just the word spreads and people just get in touch with there's a queue of people wanting to work with them because they they are doing a great job with one. Everyone wants to serve their customers better, and if somebody is enabling it, they will go for it. And and this is normally, you know, these pains are discussed quite often offline and in these dinner parties and stuff when people are discussing problems, and that's where, you know, things can spread like fire, I think, you know, and people know about something. Okay, I'll I'll get in touch with these guys, make the intro. So yeah, I I I think I I was thinking that maybe they were unique, but maybe the logistics industry is you know, a bit of a closed kind of a very closed circle. And yeah, very hard to break into, but once you're in, I think once you're doing a good job, it really, you know, the business catches on, I guess. That's the message I'm getting here.

Yep, yeah, I think it's I think it's really a lot of this. But in addition, also, you know, for us, it was really a deliberate strategy. We knew like especially with when you're trying to always digitize an industry, one mistake sets you back years. So we kind of did this as a very slow, like we every step that we took was something that was very purposeful. I mean, every startup says this, but really like for us, it was really a life and death thing, that every step that we took was purposeful. Every customer that we onboarded into our system, we kind of made sure that they were happy, that we kind of took really care of them, and that we spent quite a lot of time working with them.

So my background, as I said, is a lot of artificial intelligence. At BCG, I was doing design and engineering, and one of the things that I kind of I've learned over the past, let's say, five, six years is basically that design-led organizations are do much more better, because you really brings you much more closer to what the customers do. So design, meaning product and just even really listening to customers and actually being in touch with them and making sure that you really think about them. And so this is what we've been doing. Slowly but surely kind of doing this slowly and kind of understanding and read all these pain points.

And we also knew that there was quite we're digitizing an industry, so there's a lot of pain points. We can't tackle all of them, but kind of identifying which ones have a better impact and focusing on them, then we can do this. So really like, you know, the word-of-mouth thing helps, but you know, it's kind of when you people talk about it, they go,

Solving a problem, yeah.

Yes, I was happy. Yeah, they know what we can do, they know what we can't do well, they know where we're going, they know our road map, they know they're really they're they're really with us. They know we're you know, we talk to them so often that they even, you know, they know that we we're keeping them really in mind here. And so I think that has helped us a lot.

And also, you know, in Europe, it's really we're a bit lucky. We became profitable really early. And so we kind of, you know, we we're trying to get big, grow and grow, we're doing the scale-up, and we're doing it in a very slow manner. And our customers are also aware that we're not our goal wasn't really just to acquire customers for the sake of just impressing VC, or so on and so forth. We are actually that we're doing this in essence, and so, I mean, we've been told quite often, "You guys should go for funding," and we said, "Yeah, we need to do that." But again, our customers is our goal. If we serve them well, VC will come.

And so this has kind of been that approach, is just kind of slow, methodical, making sure people like us, that word of mouth is always good word of mouth, that because if you sign one customer and word of mouth is good, they tell another customer, you show them what what is coming, you give them a chance of being part of it, they also then kind of like it, then they speak more and soon you're on a, you know, logarithmic curve of going bigger and bigger and bigger.

So, Kwaku, you're one of the most interesting guests and CTOs that we've hosted so far. I'm curious to know how do you manage your time and get so much done considering all, you know, writing, the music, and successful business? Could you describe your typical day?

Sure. I should first mention I have a great support system. Like a really, really great support system here. So you know, usually I wake up, I spend about 2 hours catching up on the news, both from from a domain point of view, so from the logistics domain, and then technical news. Every day, I read things like Hacker News, I read arXiv, I follow the papers. I really just spend quite a like 2 hours dedicating myself to just understanding what's going on in industry, what's what are the problems people are facing.

Then I take I usually travel to work by U-Bahn, so the train. So on the train, I have a list of what are the current demands and the current needs that we need to tackle. So taking me about 40 minutes, I spend 40 minutes just basically going over it. I get into the office, and then I work with my team, so I have a chief of staff/special projects person admin here in my office. And then we spend the whole morning just kind of going over what do we need to do and what what is the new information that we need to incorporate in our system, so on and so forth. So basically the whole day is just talking to people, talking to my engineers, talking to my product people, giving them some feedback, hearing customer interviews, what how have they gone, so on and so forth.

In order to do all these things, I also really realized that I needed I need to really manage my time really well. So one of the things that I do is basically having blocks where I know this is time for thinking. And I think this is one thing that, you know, as a CTO, it's really easy to just get caught in so many different things, because there's always a million things that you can do. So there needs to be some dedicated time for thinking, so I dedicate that time for thinking. And even if I, you know, I don't really have a regular working hours, which is unfortunate, but it's kind of pretty standard in, you know, when you're scaling up.

I usually dedicate some time to, you know, at least a couple of times a week, I like going rock climbing, I like doing something, playing music, reading a book, writing something, because I've also noticed that this makes me a bit more sharper. So this is the the I actually read this in a book when I was I was I think four years old, and it stuck with me for ever since. It was a Japanese surgeon who was asked every time after every long day, he'd go play tennis. And they would ask him, "But you're already tired. Why are you going to play a huge game of tennis?" And he went, "Yes, but the tennis is actually the hard work. Because once I'm playing tennis, everything else seems so easy and everything else seems so It gives me kind of the energy to go like, yep, I've done a hard thing now. Now the other thing is a little bit more easier."

And so yes, I have this same approach, that kind of having this fulfilled, like okay, I get to write, I get to do other stuff. It's really difficult, but I guess when I do it, I come back to work and it's work becomes another new challenge, that becomes another interesting thing. You know, it's just having different challenges that kind of motivate me. So, you know, music, for me, again, it's one of those things where it's a challenge of kind of trying to figure out how I want to do this, how I kind of keep relevant, how how do I, you know, share the interesting things interesting sounds in my head with other people, how do I do that? And that challenge, when I'm done with that challenge, there, you know, I come back to work and there's some synergies where, okay, I simplified this in this way. Maybe I should think of what I'm trying to do in a different way.

And to be quite honest, music and kind of music that I do really, really helps me with my work. It's just really about thinking it's experimental music, so thinking about how do I make sure the audience that I'm that'll listen to my music, for example, understands what what I'm doing, what I'm trying to do. Now, that translates well to the same thought process translates well to work. When I'm talking about writing papers, I really talk about trust. I think, actually, how would I how would this be applicable to my actual daytime work? How do I How is this applicable to that the job that I do with DIZZBO?

So I think for me, yes, they're all separate really different things, but there's so many synergies synergies there that when I do those things, it makes me more excited about my my job. Of course, it's yes, we try to be very organized, and some weeks it's really difficult, some weeks it's not. And here, you know, like I said, I have a great support system. Here at work, my co-founders, everyone else, we are I mean, we're pretty open, we meet pretty often, we have meetings on certain days where we just we just get to sit down. Sometimes there's really nothing to discuss, but it's just let's chit-chat, let's just take a pause, let's take a break.

I have a partner who lives here in Berlin who's also really supportive because she also works in a startup, works pretty much in a startup with actually the CTO of another startup, so she also understands kind of these challenges, so she she's also an artist, and so, you know, she makes sure that I'm on top of these things and that I'm, you know, kind of I'm relaxed and really like, you know, makes helps me explore all these different things. So it's really different things put together, but in essence, I I I don't see them as I'm doing different things. I really see them as the whole day is just doing all the different things that kind of in order have synergies with each other. So writing a paper has some relevance to my work. Even though it's not really I'm talking about trust in abstract, it still has some relevance in my work. When I write music, I think of explainability. I think of, you know, delivery, which also really applies to my work. When I do work, you know, like, you know, for example, I was the other day, I was thinking about how I look at the volume that we're dealing with and realize, huh, this is purely rhythmic. Huh, you can make music with this rhythm uh this kind of rhythmicness of like kind of how trucks move.

Because, you know, on a highway, trucks drive at a certain speed and there's a one truck every x seconds. So you can So like I said, there's a lot of synergy here.

You're reading rhythms and music in in most most places which other people will find, you know, like devoid of inspiration, so you know, you're you're an artist at heart, so I think that's that's that's what it is. And yeah, it's it's just amazing to to learn that. You're so lively as a person, you know. Just just speaking with you makes me feel like excited, being excited about things.

What what I learned from you already, I mean, that Japanese, you know, little few lines that you shared from the Japanese book you're you're reading, and how it kind of changed your life, I think I think that's a that's quite a fascinating way of looking at things. Quite often, I feel people think, you know, they get tired of work, they come home and it's like, ah, you know, I just need to open a beer and just like, you know, become, you know, just mope around, do nothing, and all that. But I think you're right, like if there's something harder other than your work, then obviously, work will not be the biggest mountain you have to climb every day or, you know, every week.

So I think that's a very that's an amazing way of looking at it. And I will need to find out which other mountain I've been climbing, because I'll find my work easy as well. So I need I need to figure this out really. What what what is it, you know, that's difficult in my life? Maybe it's my it's my wife maybe, you know. She makes my life I'm joking. I hope the Ben and Drew are listening to this, and they wouldn't add this to the podcast, and I'll get like, you know, a roaming with my wife. Okay, anyhow. But, yeah, it's it's quite a story that you shared. I I will really reflect upon this. I mean, there's been so many things that you said today that I will have to reflect on. So yeah, thanks for sharing.

Let's carry on, Ksenia.

Yeah. We've come to the final part of our podcast. This is where we ask tricky questions of our guests. Kwaku, what continues to be your biggest challenge from a tech perspective? And how do you wish that technology would evolve and make your business more efficient?

Sure. Biggest challenges in the technology, I think again, this is more related to the sense of use of technology. I feel like a lot of my peers and actually also previously, the previous me, 10 years ago me had the same approach of just like we know technology is there to help us do things, but we really usually divorce ourselves from our users and kind of what they want. And even if you work with companies with big product teams, it's product is just a stage. You do product, and then you then start building. And for me, I I I think that's that that really doesn't really work well. And so for me, when you yeah, I think this is like technology, I see that is as serving people, and so it's not really a I'm served, when I finish serve, I figure out how I'm serving you and that's it, I'm done. And I think that's that for me is just kind of the the the the axiom that I keep telling myself every morning when I wake up.

We're never done. Just because we're serving you right now doesn't mean we're going to be able to serve you exactly the same way tomorrow. Because and again, I like reading a lot, as I mentioned, Alice in Wonderland, she goes she Alice in Wonderland, she goes in the ground, she gets somewhere, she everyone is jogging in place. She looks around and wonders, "Why is everyone jogging in place?" And they they reply, the Red Queen replies, "What, this doesn't happen in your world? Like what happens there? Because you know, you have to jog to keep in place, and you have to run a little bit faster to go places."

And so for me, that's the same analogy with technology, with design, all of this kind of stuff, that yes, you're you have to run in place. And running in place means keeping aware of what's happening both from technological side and how you apply it. And it's not like you build a product and it's done and you just cruise control, you scale it up. You actually have to like re-tweak and figure out kind of product-market fit is never fully achieved. There's always the market is moving. That product also needs the fit needs to also move and keep up. So that's that. That's that there.

What was the second question? I forgot the last part of the second question.

The second part was how do you wish that technology would evolve to make your business more efficient?

Really? So I'd go on the machine learning part. There's quite a lot of work that's being done in machine learning, and there's quite a lot of new people getting into the domain who are kind of seeing the need for explainability. I wish this would actually get a little bit better for us, machine learning, and even software engineering in general. Because really, customers, especially when you're trying to digitize an industry like we are, yes, you tell you're digitizing the industry with technology. It's not that they don't trust you specifically as a person, it's really that the technology is so new that it's hard for them to figure out what is, you know, kind of it's hard for them to kind of believe blindly in it. For them, it's a black box. It could be just the machine learning part is a black box, or just even your technical system, how it works, as a black box.

And for a lot of startups, you really also don't want to share your secret sauce, because of course, if you share it, then your customers can, you know, rip you off and just kind of rebuild that. And so you have to balance this. And so this is explainability is one way that I I wish and I'm hoping and I really hope that this will like this will grow in technology. In ML, in machine learning, there's, you know, human-centered explainability, explainable AI, there's a whole domain kind of trying to get into that. I think that is really useful, because when we say, okay, we're dynamic pricing, or things like this, the customer can say, "Okay, I actually trust that you're not ripping me off, and this actually works well." A carrier says, "I can trust that you manage my fleet really well, because you gave me the best prices, because I understand how you're doing this."

From the software point of view, they understand kind of the flow of information through our system, they understand how it's designed. They they have, you know, you know, we talk of SLAs, that's a really simple one, but even how the system is designed to resilience, for example, is one really big thing, because no company wants their biggest logistics provider to just crash after crash when they really need it, especially on a Monday morning or on a Friday evening. So all of this. So explainability, and just giving people that peek, and just transparency, and just kind of having this, I think this is one thing that technology evolving this way will make it better.

And to be quite honest, you know, I think in our domain, we're software engineers, and so software engineering, we don't really think too much about it. We feel like we are behind a veil. We have an API gateway, and the customers see everything in front of the API gateway, and everything behind the API gateway is just kind of a black box. And I would advise a lot of my colleagues to basically understand that that black box is the reason why a lot of customers, especially in domains where you're trying to bring technology into, this is why they don't trust you. Because they see API gateway, and you think, oh, I give them nice, fancy end points, that's it, but really what is behind the gateway is really what they are afraid of. They just want to know what's going on there, at least a view of it, and they want to have the trust that you can do this and this will work well and you're not going to fail, because you know, other people have suggested we could automate things in my industry, for example. But we show them how we do it, they understand how we do it, they understand this process is, you know, yes, they set up failures where we can fail, they understand where we will succeed, they understand where we're succeeding, and this means they trust us more.

So to sum it up, explainability, transparency, open up your API gateway. And not open up and I don't mean just make it open to the public, but really give your customers a peek of how this is working, a peek of your plans, a peek of how things are engineered, and they will trust you better.

Those are very wise words from you. And I think, you know, it's it's quite easy, like when you have a B2C product, we don't question it. We'll just, you know, use the application, whatever that is, because we use the Uber app, that does a lot of dynamic pricing, Gett taxi does a lot of that. And these apps plug into each other to beat each other as well, because they are seeing what, you know, "Oh, Uber will cost so much, so I will change my price to this point." So I see a lot of that. But we never question it. We just go go with the We have all the three or four apps installed, and we go with the cheapest. We do a dynamic kind of testing, you know, on the go, and whoever is offering the cheapest rate on the day, you go with you book your ride and you go.

But B2B is a different space. We're talking multi-million dollar contracts and payouts, so and I think you DIZZBO, from what I've learned today, I think you have very good things at the heart of it. The the values that you are, you know, trying to that that are built into the foundation of your organization, they seem very genuine, very customer-focused, not just, you know, benefiting your investors, or you as founders, but you are really trying to solve a problem. And and the there the goals and the ambition is really genuine, and very heartfelt, and and yeah, I think I'm going to be following your success, and we are rooting for you. And I'm sure our paths will cross again, and we'll be doing some work together hopefully.

Thank you. That was some nice words, and thank you. Yeah, we're always looking forward to grow and yeah. Hopefully, we'll have this conversation again another time, and next time we'll have some even better insights.

We should follow this up maybe in six months' time, where you guys are at.

For sure.

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