Symbol Credit: Eclipse
Lately, Kaitlyn Glancy, who has spent greater than 8 years with the logistics corporate Flexport — the final 4 of them because the outfit’s vice chairman of North The us — is saying that she has joined the arena of VC as the latest spouse on the mission company Eclipse.
On its face, apparently to be a perfect have compatibility. 8-year-old Eclipse, founded in Palo Alto, has from its founding seemed to fund startups which can be modernizing legacy industries, and because the international realized all through the pandemic, the delivery trade stays extremely challenged, even whilst it turns into extra computerized. In the meantime, Glancy has critical operational chops. She oversaw a group of more or less 400 folks spanning 10 places of work in her earlier position and is professional in creating gross sales groups.
To be informed extra about Glancy and the forms of startups that she’s more likely to be spending probably the most time with — no less than on the outset — we talked together with her the day past morning.
TC: Possibly, you’ve observed sufficient at Flexport to grasp the ache issues that more youthful startups may take on. The place do you notice probably the most alternative?
KC: Flexport nowadays makes a speciality of the freight forwarding customs brokerage industry — so truly at the world industry, [including] air, ocean, after which the extension of trucking. With the Flexport acquisition of Deliverr [the logistics business that Shopify just sold to Flexport], they’re going to be shifting into success and ultimate mile distribution. If you are taking what they’re doing for example, what consumers need is a extra end-to-end answer and a extra tech-enabled answer. That changed into for me abundantly transparent within the top of COVID when there have been supply-chain crunches all over and you purchased a brand new sofa and had no concept the place it used to be for 6 to 8 months. The largest theme we noticed used to be resiliency, this feeling of: how are we able to react temporarily and take no matter comes our means? So I’m truly excited to seem into the entire suite of startups and gamers within the delivery chain house.
There’s a large number of fascinating traits to be accomplished at the home piece [in particular], whether or not that’s beef up infrastructure, rail infrastructure, trucking infrastructure, enabling your frontline operators in warehouses to paintings extra successfully, getting items from the warehouse to the tip buyer sooner. There’s simply such a lot house to play in.
Eclipse simply raised some huge cash. Is your position to seek out undiscovered gem stones or assist the company to get in the back of corporations which can be gaining momentum?
Eclipse is concerned with seed via Collection D; early degree and early expansion are our candy spots. I’ll be focusing a lot of my time on that seed and Collection An area. I feel what’s fascinating is over the past a number of years, you have got observed an emphasis on delivery chain visibility and but it’s nonetheless a problem as a result of shipment passes via such a lot of other fingers, whether or not it’s an ocean or airline service or it’s in the true bodily port, then the rail, then the truck. With all of the ones handoffs, there’s at all times the chance to lose observe of the shipment and for me at Flexport, that used to be at all times probably the most painful a part of the client revel in, in order that for me is the primary buyer ache level, so I’ll wish to spend some extra time digging into corporations which can be truly having a look to crack distinctive techniques of doing that — monitoring visibility. Perhaps it’s predictive analytics via AI.
Eclipse every now and then incubates corporations. Are you interested by serving to to create one thing from scratch within the company?
I’m hoping so. That may be a laugh to do in the future. Presently, I feel I’ve were given to get my toes underneath me a bit bit.
At Flexport, you had a particular center of attention on gross sales and account control and go-to-market technique. What do you assume startups get incorrect on the subject of creating this muscle?
Particularly in case you’re a product- or engineering-based founder, there has a tendency to be a need to best possible the product prior to bringing it to marketplace. What we realized at Flexport used to be that you just don’t want to have a wholly best possible product; you want to have a minimal viable product you’ll be able to take to marketplace. One of the crucial good things we did at Flexport used to be take an MVP to marketplace that wasn’t utterly best possible and we began promoting it and we began finding out from our consumers after which incorporating their comments into our product and in truth, we ended up making an excellent higher product consequently as a result of we had loads of shopper comments issues.
You probably have a just right a just right baseline product, consumers wish to assist remedy [these issues] with you. Then they are able to will let you construct for the wishes in their industry.
