The following interview is a conversation we had with Krenar Komoni, CEO & Founder of Tive, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $82 Million Raised to Build the Future of Supply Chain Visibility
Brett
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Krenar Komoni, CEO & Founder of Tive, a supply chain visibility platform that’s raised 82 million in funding. Krenar, how are you?
Krenar Komoni
I’m doing great, Brett. Thanks for inviting me.
Brett
No problem. Super excited for our conversation. Before we dive in to talk about everything that you’re building there, let’s go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Krenar Komoni
Awesome. Yeah. My name is Krenar Komoni. I’m the Founder and CEO here at Tive. And background wise, I grew up in Kosovo. I don’t know how much relevant that is, but I came to us when I was 17. I came as a senior in high school through the exchange student program where you live with a host family. And then after high school, I went to college and my master’s. So I went to Norwich University for my undergrad, studied computer engineering and math. I did two majors there and a minor in computer science. And then at Tufts University, I did my masters in electrical engineering. But throughout the journey, I’ve been quite a bit involved in the wireless space and engineering. So I’ll kind of link the story of how I started the company and what I do today. But that’s.
Krenar Komoni
That’s a little bit about me.
Brett
What was going on inside your mind when you landed in the US there at age 17?
Krenar Komoni
Oh, man. What was going on inside my mind? I was like, oh, I’m gonna land it’s gonna be like New York City. So I landed in Boston, got picked up from a really good friend of mine, Jonathan, and he drove me to Vermont, and I went to Northfield, Vermont, and it was a little late. And I’m like, he’s like, this is the town. This is it. I’m like, it’s one pizzeria, one bank, one laundromat, one chinese restaurant. I’m like, what is this? Is this America?
Brett
Is that what they see in the movies?
Krenar Komoni
So that was what was going on in my mind, yeah.
Brett
And do you go back home often, or do you just stay in the US now?
Krenar Komoni
For the most part, I’ve been home every single year. I go there every year for a week or two or three. And now I have a team there also. So I’ve opened an office in Kosovo. We have 205 employees, and 80 are in Kosovo.
Brett
Wow. After 600 episodes, you’re the first founder that I’ve talked to from there. So thank you for being the first guest.
Krenar Komoni
That’s awesome. Great.
Brett
Well, let’s. Let’s dive deep now into everything that you’ve been building for the last couple of years. So go ahead and just give us a quick overview of what the company does.
Krenar Komoni
So the company’s called Tive Tiv. And what we do is we help companies all over the world track shipments. That’s the simplest way I can put it. And the way we do it is we make these little GPS trackers that customers just press a button, put it on top of the shipment, usually inside of a trailer, inside of a container, and we give them real time information anywhere on the globe on where that shipment is. And in addition to that, the condition of the shipment, how hot, how wet, how cold, did somebody open the trailer or container? And all of that data comes to our platform in real time using cellular connectivity. We have more than 700 customers. Think of strawberries, blueberries, servers, rocket parts. We track everything.
Brett
Take us back to 2015 and the founding of the company. I know you touched on that a little bit when you were talking about your background, but take us back to 2015. What was going on then? And what was it about this supply chain visibility problem that made you say, yep, that’s it. I’m going to go dedicate the next nine years to my life.
Krenar Komoni
Maybe more, for sure. I always been an entrepreneur. Turns out, since I was 14 years old, I just realized I wanted to play around code, start companies, try, do different things. And as I mentioned, my background is in engineering. I work for a startup called Bitwave Semiconductor. We built the world’s most one. It’s called software defined radio on a chip. So a chip that would do two g, three g, four g, all in a single chipset. And then I worked for an MIT startup where I was the first employee, and this MIT professor that I worked with at Bitwave Semiconductor invited me to join his company. And there were built the world’s most efficient base stations, those things that go on cell towers. So a lot of experience with wireless, but I’ve always worked for startups, Brett.
Krenar Komoni
I’ve never worked for a big company ever in my life. And I just have that startup bug since I was a kid. Even my mom was like an entrepreneur because I would watch her do things and like, wow, this is the way I’m going to live. But the way I stumbled into supply chain logistics is what I say, quote unquote, through marriage. My wife’s dad has a trucking company, had a trucking company. He sold it last year. And every time I would go to his house, he would be on the phone trying to figure out where his truck drivers are. And I got pretty tired of it because I was trying to have dinner with him, trying to drink a glass of wine, and he’s getting up at 10:00 p.m. 09:00 p.m. Calling drivers. I’m like, you know what?
Krenar Komoni
I’m going to make a gps tracker for fun. Put in your trucks, and then I’ll make a little app using PHP and MySQL on the phone, and you can see where the truck drivers are. And that’s how it started. And then his friend is like, oh, you can track his trucks, why don’t you track mine? I started tracking like 30, 40 trucks, but there was a lot of companies tracking trucks because you don’t need a battery. You could just plug it into the truck and you have gps data flowing into the cloud. And where I came up with this idea of putting trackers behind the truck, on the trail inside the trailer was this truck driver, Tony. He was moving lobster and moving scallops from New Bedford.
Krenar Komoni
And every time he would move, he would, they would put this temperature sensor on top of these pallets. And I asked him, how did this temperature sensor work? And he was like, well, at the end of the shipment, somebody takes a look at it, and he gave me one. I’m like, that’s crazy. Like, we need, this is 2015. We got to figure out how to make things real time. So I went on Google and tried to find GPS trackers with battery. I couldn’t find anything good. Everything I saw looked like Windows 3.1, Windows 98 type of user interface. I’m like, I’m naive. I’m going to start this company. And that’s how it all started.
Brett
We have something in common then. I also married into the supply chain industry. I’ll share some more details about that offline, but that’s very much part of my father in law’s world and my wife’s world as well. So probably a lot to talk about there.
Krenar Komoni
Oh, that’s awesome. It’s fun every day, isn’t it?
Brett
It’s fun. I’ve definitely learned a lot, and it’s very interesting. As you dive deep into supply chain and logistics, you start to uncover all of these random facts that are just mind blowing. At least that’s been my experience.
Krenar Komoni
Yeah, same here. For me, it was many years later after I started realizing that $22 trillion of global trade happen every single year in the United States. I’m like, this is not a small number. And companies spent 11 trillion in logistics. It’s crazy.
Brett
That is absolutely insane. And so crazy. It must have been interesting. During COVID I feel like supply chain became a word that every household was using, and there were people. Everyone was talking about supply chain. I have to think that our guests, that, like, that wasn’t normal. What was Covid like for you and for the company?
Krenar Komoni
Yeah. So when I. If I go back to Covid, this is March 2020, right? February 2020. Just for context, our revenue in 2019, it was like three hundred fifty k a year. And when we got into 2020, we just. In December of 2019, January of 2020, we just released the world’s first single use 5g ready tracker. And that was. I would say we hit product market fit with that because customers were using these single use trackers that go on shipments, but they were 2g, like GSM. And 2g was phasing out. T Mobile was shutting down at and t was shutting down. Verizon shut it down. So your connectivity is not that great. And then global is also pretty abysmal. And what we did, we released a 5g ready with 4g LTE, but very cost effective. And were the first in the market.
Krenar Komoni
And customers started buying more and more. And then when Covid hit, I don’t think that changed much. My company and Tyve, I would say it created more awareness in the kitchen table. And when people were eating, like you said, everybody was talking about supply chain logistics, but we really hit product market fit in January when we released the.
Brett
Product, what happened before you reached product market fit? What was that journey like for you?
Krenar Komoni
Oh, it was a lot of, I would say trial and error. That’s another one way to put it. First, we released this tracker and I thought that if I make the world’s best tracker, which we did, we’re gonna have a lot of sales and everybody’s gonna buy this tracker. But when we did it, we bought it. We made it for you. We sold it for $250 and you had to pay $50 a month for the tracker. And it was great. It had more than a year battery life. This is 20. 1720? Yeah, 2018. It’s for that time. It was pretty advanced and some customers loved it. But the challenge was they couldn’t use it a lot because they had to figure out how to, they would ship their products, could be pharmaceuticals, could be produce, could be.
Krenar Komoni
One of my first customers was Nokia, but then they would have to return these trackers back. And it was logistical difficulty because they would do everything to ship their product from a to b. Now they have to return a tracker from b to a. So as were running out of money back in 2018, I had very little left and I was going to run out of money in three months, I still remember. And I had to extend it to nine. In order to extend it to nine, I had to go and lay off half of the company. And I did that. And then what I had to do is figure out, we need to figure out how to sell more.
Krenar Komoni
So one of the biggest things, and I would say one of the advice that I give to a lot of entrepreneurs is do not be afraid to cold call customers, especially potential customers. So I started cold calling, started cold emailing like 100 and 5200 customers a week. I hired a few college grads and they started working with me. And that’s all we all do. Email, cold call, email, cold call, change, messaging, change the subject line, change how we write things and just try and try. But what happened is we got a lot of responses. We were usually doing like one proof of value a month.
Krenar Komoni
We started doing two, three per week and, but throughout that process, we learned a lot about this issue and we learned that we got to figure out how to make more cost effective trackers that could be used once and if the customer doesn’t return them, it’s okay. And that was one of the biggest lessons. And I can go into details how we did that, but that’s a, that’s one way we figured out product market. Fitzhen.
Brett
I always love when founders come on and share the stories of some of the pain that they’ve experienced in the journey. I’m sure it was not easy to do those layoffs. I’ve done a lot of cold calling, a lot of cold emailing. It’s a pain, it’s a grind. It’s not fun work, but getting that deal is fun. And you do feel good at that point at least. But always appreciate hearing those types of stories.
Krenar Komoni
Yeah. Thank you.
Brett
Now, let’s talk about, you know, the, how did you word that, you know, single use where it could be thrown away. Obviously, Elon Musk is doing that with rockets. Sounds like you’re doing that with traffic trackers. From an innovation and a technology perspective, how hard was it to get it to that point that you could have them just be thrown away like that?
Krenar Komoni
The biggest challenge was cost. So how can you make a tracker that’s sub 30, $40? So you could sell it for 40, 50, $60, right that way. Because what I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs, they say, oh, we have product market fit, people are buying it, but then they sell the product. That’s potentially losing money in the beginning. And I couldn’t afford that because I had no money left. So I had to make money first, like over the first sale. So we had to figure out how do we make very cost effective trackers. And what we did is we flew to China, myself and my vp of technology, Martin. And Martin’s amazing. We went and visited eight different manufacturing sites all over China, in Shanghai and Shenzhen and Guangdong, all over the place.
Krenar Komoni
And we figured out who can make cost effective trackers for us, but most importantly, who can listen to us, because we have the ideas, we have the way on how we want to build this, how we want to design it. What’s important, we don’t want to just buy something that doesn’t work for our customers. And we figured out that intersection between cost and I would say, empathy with the manufacturer. And were very successful to date. So I think that’s one of the things that just people think things are impossible. You just, I guess, get on a plane and go actually figure it out on your own.
Brett
Who is the ICP today? And what was that process like in that journey and the trial and error to really lock in that ICP?
Krenar Komoni
Yeah, I’ll be honest. In the beginning, I thought the VP of supply chain was our ICP. The chief supply chain officer was our ICP. And what we realized over time and after a lot of cold emails, cold calls, and people who are responding. We kept getting directed towards logistics managers, cores, transportation managers, people that are actually doing the work of moving the goods from a to b. And that’s how we figured out as far as the Persona goes. The other part was the vertical. The vertical. In the beginning, I always thought that pharma was going to be the biggest vertical for us, and we’re going to win there right immediately. But what I realized over time, and I’ve been, we’ve been trying to unlock pharma for a while.
Krenar Komoni
We finally started to, and it’s going to be very big for us in 2024 and 2025. But in 2015, I thought all pharma customers are going to line up and sign up. The challenge is with pharma, there’s so many regulatory requirements you got to pass through. There was no time for me to get that done. No team, no like, it’s just, it’s a lot of work in the beginning. And that was another shock. I thought that life science as a pharma was going to be a big customer. But what we realized, this produce market is huge because customers care to make sure that those strawberries, those blueberries, that poultry, chicken, turkey meat, bananas, asparagus, they want to make sure that those arrive in good condition at the retail store.
Krenar Komoni
And temperature is very important for those, but they also want to do it very cost effectively. And that’s where we really started to see some strides in the beginning.
Brett
One thing as a Founder that I deal with is I have an idea and I execute on it, and it’s not working. Sometimes in my head I’m telling myself, just keep going, it’ll eventually work. But the reality is sometimes you have to actually do the opposite and tell yourself that you were wrong. That’s not going to work, and you need to change. How do you approach that? And how do you know when it’s time to just keep grinding and keep pushing on pharma or life sciences, or it’s time to scale it back and reevaluate and then go a different direction.
Krenar Komoni
I’ll just use the example of pharma and life sciences. So what we realized is, okay, we’re not going to have meaningful revenue in that I have to not put too much energy on my team and myself to go after those customers because we’re not going to see revenue now. So we’re going to put it, I would say not in the back burner, but always know that when the team grows and when we grow and we’ve sold millions of trackers. We’re going to be ready for that market. And that’s what happened. We found that customers, logistics companies and food market were much eager to buy trackers today, pay us today, use them today. Whereas pharma is going to be big for us in 20. It’s already big now, but it’s going to become much bigger in 2024 and 2025.
Krenar Komoni
But this is what, nine years later.
Brett
And what was that unlock with pharma? Why is it going to be so big in the future? Can you unpack that a little bit for us?
Krenar Komoni
Yeah, for sure. One of the biggest hurdles that you have to pass on the life sciences and pharma is the regulatory requirements. So there’s these things like CFR 21, part eleven, making sure that your data is not being manipulated, making sure that all the data that customers see there is exactly what the tracker said it was on temperature side, making sure that you can generate reports for that pharma customers need. But also they want a. The device that’s been very successful in pharma is what I call a temperature logger. That’s not real time, but the temperature logger, what’s nice about it, has a screen. You can plug it into a computer at the end of the shipment and download the data so you have 100% reliability on the data.
Krenar Komoni
And on the real time tracking side, that hasn’t been fully cracked yet, there’s some companies that have done it, but pharma customers are still begging for a very reliable, real time tracker on the pharma side. And that’s something we’re working on. And we’ll release the prototype at the end of this year and we’ll start selling in large volumes in Q one.
Brett
Let’S talk about marketing philosophy and marketing strategy. How would you summarize the marketing strategy today?
Krenar Komoni
So, on strategy and philosophy, this is how I explain it to my, always, to my marketing team. I say I want two feelings to be experienced by our customers through our marketing. The number one, I want our customers to love our brand. And number two, I want the customers to trust our brand if we can achieve those two things, love and trust, which are difficult because somebody can love the brand, but they might not trust it because the product’s not good. So it’s a lot of, we have to do both at the same time, but through messaging, you can convey both of those.
Krenar Komoni
So a little bit of fun sometimes create a little bit loving feeling with the customers, and then with case studies, with use cases, with shipments that we’ve saved, with real world customers who really trust our devices, you start building more trust. But those are the two philosophy that I have around marketing.
Brett
Let’s talk about love. How do you build love with customers?
Krenar Komoni
I think it starts with employees. It starts with a culture inside the company. If we all love one another, I think the customer starts to experience that too. And one of the biggest areas where customers see that is in customer support, sales and account management. And what we have is just immediate responses, being able to show customers that we really care. That’s where love starts. It starts with care from the support team.
Brett
And I know you mentioned a few things there that you do to address the trust side of the equation. What’s like the number one most impactful thing you’ve done to really build trust with your customers?
Krenar Komoni
The number one, I would say, is transparency. That’s our number one value in the company, transparency first, so that we can operate better as a business. But when I say transparency first, I also mean with customers. So what I’ve done, there’s been, if there’s been a challenge in the market or we run into an issue, I’ve trained the team and I’ve done it myself, to immediately call the customer, email the customer, apologize to the customer, tell them about the issue before they figure out the issue. And I think that builds more trust than anything else, especially when things are not going well.
Brett
What about your market category? Is it supply chain visibility? And if so, are there buyers who are out there just thinking, oh, I need a supply chain visibility platform, or do you have to go out there, convince them they need a supply chain visibility platform, and then sell them a supply chain visibility platform?
Krenar Komoni
That’s a good question. If you look at the magic quadrant of Gartner, we’re not there. We’re not in the real time visibility platforms. We’re not in the supply chain visibility kind of category. We’re, I believe we’re defining a new category as a business. So when we sell to customers, we’re not going there and selling them a supply chain visibility platform. What we’re selling them is a peace of mind, and we’re selling them a way for them to really understand 100% of the time with 100% visibility on what’s happening with their supply chain so they can operate more efficiently. If I had to say maybe what category we’re defining, what category we’re creating, I’ve thought a lot of it. But think of IoT based supply chain visibility.
Krenar Komoni
That’s one way that I could categorize the category that we’re creating and what’s going to happen over time is, and this is something that we have to educate our customers a little bit and tell them that this we’ve have customers who reach out or we talk to them, they’re like, this is real. I can pay 45 $50 and actually get real time visibility and I don’t have to return this tracker and you guys can recycle it. I’m like, yeah, this is real. It’s happening. It’s in the world today and not many people know that. And the more people see this as a possibility, this new category is being defined and growing quite a bit. We’ve sold more than one and a half million trackers to date.
Brett
Wow. What’s the goal for this year? Can you share how many trackers you want to sell?
Krenar Komoni
Ideally, would love to do a million, but let’s see, probably we’ll do somewhere between seven hundred fifty k and a million.
Brett
We’ll bring you back on the first week of January to check in on how things are going.
Krenar Komoni
Oh, I’d love to, yes.
Brett
What about building out the marketing team? Specifically from my conversations with other founders, that’s always very hard. What’s your experience been like building a marketing team? And what have you learned from doing so?
Krenar Komoni
What I’ve learned is in the beginning, when you build out a marketing team, you want to find, I would say, hustlers in the beginning. Definitely. People who are willing to roll up this sleeve and do everything on their own, whether it’s press release, whether it’s guerrilla marketing, whether it’s understanding how Google Ads, how LinkedIn ads work, whether it’s SEO search, figuring out how do you get as many blogs out there as possible so your ranking can go up in the early stages. That’s super important. And what happens when you get to 1020 million? I would say in ARR, suddenly there’s this shift where data starts to play a huge role in marketing. And then I think that’s when a more data driven marketing approach is important. But I would say until then you got to try everything.
Brett
What about fundraising? So as I mentioned there in the intro, I see 82 million to date. At least that’s what crunchbase says. Is that right?
Krenar Komoni
80?
Brett
Yeah, 80 million. Okay. Very close at least. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey of raising $80 million?
Krenar Komoni
I’ve talked to probably somewhere between, I don’t know the exact number, 600, just 800 and different investors, whether it’s VC’s or angel investors of private equity. Throughout my journey as a Founder. And I’ve all of that, I’ve gotten total of, I think it’s somewhere between 14 and 18 term sheets. I forget the exact number, and we’ve signed five to date or six. So think of pre seed. Seed one A, one B, all of those rounds. One of the biggest things that I’ve learned is that same way as you build trust with customers, you got to build trust with the venture capital community and with the investor community. And the reason why that’s very important is because nobody will just write a check the first day that you meet them.
Krenar Komoni
And I’m sure you have this experience, but they will write the check three months, six months, nine months later, or twelve months later, sometimes 20 months, 24 months later. But one of the biggest things is you tell them what you’re ahead doing. You get advice from everyone because there’s a lot of amazing investors out there. And then you digest all of that and you say, this is what I’m going to do next, and I’ll check in with you in three months. And then three months later, you were at point a three months ago. Now you’re at point b, and they can start drawing a line. And then three months later, six months later, you’re at point c, and you’ve told them you’ll be at point c. And ideally you want to be a little bit above point, circumental with more traction.
Krenar Komoni
So then they start building this line from a to b to c and can say, wow, I can actually trust Krenar as a Founder, as an entrepreneur. If he’s telling me he’s going to do ABC, he’s going to do D all the way to IPO, I’m going to back him up. And that’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned.
Brett
Krenar, let’s imagine that a early stage Founder who’s trying to build supply chain technology comes to you and they say, okay, you’ve had this company now for almost a decade. What would be your number one piece of advice that you’d give them based on everything that you’ve learned?
Krenar Komoni
The number one piece of advice, especially in supply chain tech, that I would give them is the one that I mentioned to you around cold calling. You have to be close to customers, especially in supply chain logistics. It’s such an operational world, such a daily basis. Things change. Go and figure out. Visit warehouses, visit logistics centers, visit DC’s distribution centers, figure out a way how to get into with customers as much as possible early on so you can learn where the pain points are. There’s so much pain in supply chain tech still, Brett, it’s immense amount of pain. People. One investor told me people chew through glass to go by in this industry because there’s just so much pain and there’s so much opportunity.
Krenar Komoni
But the number one thing I would say is just get as close to the customers and learn from them and as many of them as possible.
Brett
How do you think, or why do you think that is? That there’s this massive market, there’s massive pain, and it seems like there’s just not a lot of activity or no one’s really solving the pain points apart from you and maybe a small number of other companies. But I sounds like there’s still a lot of pain. Why is that? Is it just very difficult and very complex, or what’s the reason?
Krenar Komoni
Yes, the reason is because of two. I would say there’s a lot, but just on top of my mind right now, Brett, what’s coming is fragmentation, and it’s physical. Everything that we do, everything. The microphone that I’m talking to, the microphone that you’re talking on, it’s something that got shipped to you and to me. It didn’t originate from there. Everything. Our table, the chair that we’re sitting on, it got shipped to us from somewhere, or we picked it up somewhere, they got shipped to from somewhere else. There’s so much physical movement, and physical movement always has uncertainties, and on top of that, you have a ton of fragmentation. Tens of thousands of logistics service providers touching that product, moving it from A to B, and then b to c and then c to d. And all of those working in different systems.
Krenar Komoni
Somebody works at a different transportation management system, another one at different tms, another one has a carrier that has different GPSs, and as a carrier that has other gps, it’s just so fragmented. The systems are all over the place. And on top of that, you had the physical operational complexities. It’s very difficult to say. Well, we have the one solution that solves all of it.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out. Three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like here?
Krenar Komoni
Three to five years. I believe that we’re going to be a fairly large company, somewhere in the 200 plus million dollar range on revenue, maybe even more. And the goal is to prepare ourselves to go public, and I’m very confident that we’re going to achieve that.
Brett
What’ll be the most important thing for you to really get right and really nail to make that happen.
Krenar Komoni
The most important thing I would say is, so what happens is, I’m sure you’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs. There’s plateaus on every single product in the world. Even the 2G plateaued. Right. There’s now you have to release the now we released a newer, lower cost tracker, and then there’s a new tracker that we’re releasing on life sciences to go after another vertical. And we’re going to continue to do that in our software. The biggest thing that we need to do right, is execute on the product roadmap and keep innovating there so that we can capture more and more of the market share. The market’s there. I know that for a fact. It’s execution. That’s the most important thing.
Brett
You’ll have to agree here on the spot. You will give us the first interview after you ring the bell after the IPL.
Krenar Komoni
First or second deal?
Brett
Yeah, first or second in the top five for sure. Awesome, man. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and really appreciate you taking the time to talk about everything that you’re building. Before we wrap, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Krenar Komoni
Go to time. You can also email me krinar@time.com amazing.
Brett
Krenar, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Krenar Komoni
Thank you, Brett. I really enjoyed it.
Brett
All right. That was awesome, man. Fun.
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