We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Petere Pamela Miner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Petere Pamela thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?
Over $10 trillion is spent a year on logistics and shipping. That’s 11% of the global GDP! Everything around you came to you on a truck, a ship, an airplane, a drone, a delivery bicycle. From the “first mile” where something is made to the “last mile” when it gets to your door. And yet it’s the least understood and appreciated industry – well that was until the pandemic made everyone painfully aware of what was not being delivered to them. I fell in love with Logistics and Shipping when I got a job as a warehouse manager at HP. I came to HP as an electrical engineer, and when I started running the warehouse I realized that the lowest paid people in the company were the ones that had the last experience with a product before it was delivered to the customer. And I also realized that I could bridge my 2 passions of technology+logistics and have an impact on the customer’s experience, without being in sales! It’s an industry that, up until now, was not able to adopt technology. Not because we are a bunch of dinosaurs, but because logistics is a highly complex network of service providers connected together physically but not digitally. Now with the ubiquitous access to the internet, the Cloud, blockchain, machine learning, and IoT, etc. etc., logistics is the perfect nail looking for a technology hammer. I’m living the dream starting a tech company serving the logistics industry. It’s like my whole career brought me to this point.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’ve been on the founding team of several logistics and supply chain tech startups. Always focused on the application of technology to reduce the risk of things getting delayed and reducing costs by taking out unnecessary steps with digitization. My most recent startup is CoLoadX which is an online marketplace for freight. Like Travelocity or Kayak, we provide a platform for those companies behind the scenes who are getting that new table from somewhere in the world where it is made to your doorstep. Freight buyers go to the marketplace and search for a rate, from example from Mundra, India to New York. Sellers pre-populate their rates on the marketplace so when a buyer searches, the results are instant. And there’s more, we are adding now the ability to track your shipment from door to door using satellite and cellular networks for location, and if interested we can include sensors tracking light, humidity, temperature, etc. A marketplace like CoLoadX is a community where buyers and sellers can find other services they need to help serve their customers. For that we have partners who provide receivables financing, digital trade documents, and soon blockchain based payments. And to foster a true end-to-end network, we will connect logistics providers on-call ready to take on any shipping challenge large or small.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
My grandmother was the first women to pass the bar exam for the state of Minnesota. When I was a kid, I would visit her in the summers and she would take me into court with her. She and my grandfather and uncle had a law firm in Minneapolis. And my grandmother worked in that office every day of her adult life, even up to the day she passed away. We never had a conversation about this. What I got from my grandmother was that you just do what you want to do and love to do. So what if you look different from everyone else around you. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. When I decided to go into engineering, my Physics professor said that I couldn’t be an engineer because I was a girl. I loved Math so an engineer I became. At engineering school, there were a handful of female students in my Electrical Engineering class. I got a job as an engineer at HP and moved from Illinois to Silicon Valley. I even met Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard not long after I started. I remember at one division event Bill Hewlett came over and sat next to me and asked what it was like to be a female engineer at HP. I hadn’t thought about it much before, and my answer was that the reason I picked HP from all the other job offers was that HP just treated me like an engineer. Then leaving HP to help start a supply chain tech company, starting a couple of my own logistics tech companies. Talking to investors. Operating in the logistics industry. I haven’t looked much like the others around me. Gratefully things are changing now. I’ve had my demons and doubts and joys and triumphs. I’m just glad I kept doing what I loved. And maybe made a little bit of a difference along the way.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
My dad had made a duck decoy when he was a kid. My stepmother is the only woman I personally know who successfully started and sold a company – she’s shared lots of stories of her experience and has been an advocate and investor in CoLoadX. One day my stepmother gave me one of those duck decoys and said “hey this is your CoLo-“duck”. When I got back to our New York office, our summer intern helped set up a social media presence for CoLoadX using #CoLoaduck. It was a lot of fun. Took pictures of #CoLoaduck all around New York, sharing experiences about customers and the challenges of a tech startup. My tact was always to share something interesting, be a little vulnerable, and hopefully provide a bit of humor. Later on I started a podcast called ShipHappens! egged-on by an entertainment producer I met in New York. We continue on with those podcasts, and have used them to get people thinking more about how that cell phone, or box of strawberries got to your door step. And of course we talk about how digitization and data are going to transform the industry and transform how we get stuff moved from here to there. While this was just being me, what I’ve found that because of social media, being seen as a thought leader, and avoiding self-promotion while being proud of what we are doing, continues to get followers and customers signing up for CoLoadX.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://coloadx.com/
- Facebook: CoLoadX
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-coloadx-corporation/
- Twitter: @coloadx
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCURaw8LeCAfl-Ki9pieoYoQ
- Podcast: ShipHappens! https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ship-happens