This fireside chat recap is from day 2 of FreightWaves’ F3 Virtual Experience. F3 runs continues today through Thursday and includes keynote speakers, fireside chats, live interviews, product demos and award presentations.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Ryder + Smarthop: Investing in the future of small fleets
DETAILS: In today’s fast-paced market, small fleet owners need to truck smarter, not harder. Kendra Phillips and Guillermo Garcia discuss building a FreightTech startup tailored to the way the market is moving.
SPEAKERS: Kendra Phillips, Ryder System’s CTO and VP for new products, and Guillermo Garcia, CEO and co-founder of SmartHop
BIOS: At Ryder System, Phillips is responsible for overseeing the evaluation, development and deployment of new technologies and digital products. Garcia founded SmartHop in 2016. SmartHop is a dispatch technology that helps smaller over-the-road truckers compete with larger carriers through tech-powered freight dispatch, load booking and other services.
KEY QUOTES FROM GARCIA
“SmartHop is a business-in-a-box platform that empowers various small trucking companies and owner-operators to earn more. We help our customers … through booking technology; it’s an autonomous dispatcher that automates the decision-making process when booking a load.”
“That saying of hard work pays off, that is not necessarily true in [the freight] industry. You see over and over and over again, people working day in and day out coming back not having enough to pay their bills. That really should not happen and we want to change that. We are changing that right now.”
“We want to be able to provide in one place all the tools and all the resources that they need to really operate as if they were a mega-carrier. We want to give them the right foundations and technology for them to decide how to compete. This is a very unbalanced and unfair competition. We want to up-level their game so they can compete head to head.”
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