The Remarkable SaaS Podcast #28 - Patrik Berglund, CEO of Xeneta - On the impact of transforming buying & selling dynamics of the logistics industry
The guest on my disruptive innovation podcast is Patrik Berglund, co-founder and CEO of Oslo-based Xeneta, a company that’s created a price comparison platform for containerized freight in order to transform the way the shipping and logistics industry are buying and selling.
Patrick is a logistics and tech-enthusiast and possesses a true passion for modernizing business processes related to logistics procurement and the supply chain. His experience came from working several years at Kuehne + Nagel and from his work as Co-Founder of Nordilog, a logistics consultancy firm.
Xeneta was founded in 2012 and has grown in the meantime to be the top worldwide source to compare shipping rates against the market average, market highs and lows. The way Xeneta has achieved this is through the concepts of crowd-sourcing, thereby turning negotiation powers from sellers to buyers, hence transforming the way the industry operates.
This inspired me, hence I invited Patrik to my podcast. We explore what it requires to completely turn the dynamics of a market –turning the power from the supply side to the buy side – and beyond that, giving both sides exponential value back in return. In the light of this, we discuss the role of creating momentum, the essence of data, and the impact technology can make.
Here are some of Patric’s quotes:
To make a very long, complex story short, both of us found it very tricky too, peculiar and inefficient that so many container boxes delivering 70 percent of global trade were traded, bought, and sold with almost no visibility, almost no transparency
As it became technologically possible to make it transparent, the incentives for doing so haven't been there.
It's two problems. There's a lack of transparency in the market that's highly volatile. Secondly, the way they're buying and selling is absolutely crazy inefficient.
In order to solve anything about the second problem, we have to provide visibility and transparency.
What we're doing is that we're delivering data and insights that allows them to reflect and think differently.
The biggest thing is that a lot of our customers will see now over the next couple of years, is that transition of being an online information platform, to also allowing them to change the way they buy and sell.
By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:
- How solving massive market problems can be achieved by looking in the other direction
- Why, even with the most advanced technologies available, a lack of something as simple as relevant data can break all your ambitions
- That overcoming inertia can be the biggest hurdle to introduce the most brilliant products into the market