This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Supply Chain Meets FinTech event on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Steely determination: Lessons learned in moving the sale of 1.68 billion metric tons of steel online.
DETAILS: Bryzos founder and CEO Shep Hickey chats with Pymnts CEO Karen Webster about what it’s like to develop an online platform to facilitate the buying and selling of steel between would-be buyers and suppliers.
SPEAKER: Shep Hickey, Bryzos founder and CEO.
BIO: Hickey founded Bryzos, an online metals marketplace that pioneered buy-now, pay-later payments infrastructure for industrial applications. Bryzos is a full-stack market network that addresses traditional supply chain and financial inefficiencies.
Hickey boasts 12 years of experience operating within the metals, logistics and payments industries. Before launching Bryzos, he served as COO of American Piping Products.
KEY QUOTES FROM HICKEY:
“The incentive [for purchasing steel online for industrial uses] is that … you’re being arguably more efficient with your time. You’re getting better options and doing a better job controlling your costs. That would be an incentive to do it. … That purchase literally goes to the bottom line of your business.”
“My intent when sitting down to solve for a marketplace [was that] there were a lot of things that had to be addressed. And it wasn’t as simple as you throw a Craigslist [together], which is great, but for industrial products, it’s just not that straightforward. You have to first decide what kind of marketplace you’re going to be. Are you going to be a facilitating marketplace … [where] you have all this support needed to make sure the transaction is successful … [or] is it going to be more of like a straight brokerage marketplace, which is [when] the buyer and seller on either side of the marketplace may not ever know who one another are. … Part of the whole thing is deciding how are you even going to address this? What does the marketplace mean to me, and what do I think it should mean to others?”
“Finding data for buyers to make decisions is the easy part of this whole thing. … [To develop software that addresses all the other issues] first, you have to ask, what am I after — a digital analog of how it works, or do I want to create something that no one’s ever heard of? You kind of have to [start] somewhere in the middle.”
