The Next Great Thing
An exploration into new digital products and experiences — and conversations with the people making them great. What separates a good digital product or experience from being the next great thing in our lives? It’s not just one thing, it’s lots of things — ideas, people, inspiration, distribution, longevity, luck. Host Andrew Greenstein talks with founders, CEOs, product heads, makers, producers, designers, and digital creationists about how they’re coming up with big ideas, pushing creative boundaries, and expanding what’s possible in the digital space. The Next Great Thing podcast is a production of SF AppWorks. Learn more at www.sfappworks.com.
The Next Great Thing
Dorothy Li, CTO, Convoy - Building Elastic Capacity in Freight (And Saving the Planet, Too)
Look around you. Chances are, most of what you see has, at some point, been shipped on a truck and driven around by a truck driver. Trucking is a massive, $800 billion industry in the U.S. — 80% of every dollar spent moving freight is spent on trucking. Despite its size and scale, America’s traditional freight network of brokers, shippers, and carriers is fragmented, inefficient, and antiquated. It’s also harming the planet. Nearly 35% of all trucks on the road are empty, and all those empty miles create 87M metric tons of carbon emissions a year. But trucking’s digital transformation, and zero waste mission, has begun. Dorothy Li is the Chief Technology Officer at Convoy, the nation’s leading digital freight network that uses AI, machine learning, and data analytics to optimize and automate a marketplace for matching a trucker to a shipper. Before Convoy, she spent 23 years at Amazon innovating everything from the initial launch of Amazon Prime, to Kindle, to AWS Cloud. Dorothy joins the podcast to explain how her team is creating more efficiency across — and visibility into — the freight network and expanding elastic capacity for shippers, just like cloud did for compute capacity.
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