From Vermont to $80M: Tive’s Unconventional Path to Building a Global Supply Chain Platform

From Vermont to $80M: Tive’s Unconventional Path to Building a Global Supply Chain Platform

Krenar Komoni landed in Boston at 17 expecting skyscrapers and yellow cabs. Instead, his friend Jonathan drove him north to Northfield, Vermont—population 6,000. “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?”

That culture shock moment—the gap between expectation and reality—would become Krenar’s superpower as a founder. Twenty years later, that immigrant kid from Kosovo who landed in rural Vermont has built Tive, a supply chain visibility platform that’s raised $80 million, shipped over 1.5 million trackers, and is preparing for an IPO. His outsider perspective didn’t just shape his journey—it became his competitive advantage.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Krenar shared how growing up between worlds gave him the ability to see obvious problems that industry insiders had learned to ignore.

The Entrepreneurial DNA From Kosovo

The startup bug infected Krenar early. “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,” he recalls. Growing up in Kosovo in the 1990s and early 2000s meant watching entrepreneurship as survival, not choice.

His mother ran businesses out of necessity, and Krenar absorbed the lesson: you build things yourself. “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,” he says. That formative experience created a founder who never considered the corporate track as an option.

“I’ve always worked for startups, Brett. I’ve never worked for a big company ever in my life. And I just have that startup bug since I was a kid,” Krenar explains. From Kosovo to Vermont to Boston, he carried an immigrant’s willingness to bet on himself rather than institutional stability.

Learning to See Problems Fresh

Krenar’s path through American higher education took him through Norwich University for computer engineering and math, then Tufts for a master’s in electrical engineering. But his real education came from working at startups in wireless technology—first at Bitwave Semiconductor building software-defined radio on a chip, then as the first employee at an MIT startup building base stations for cell towers.

These experiences gave him deep technical expertise in wireless connectivity. But they didn’t teach him about supply chain logistics. That knowledge came from an unlikely source: family dinners.

“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 PM, 09:00 PM calling drivers,” Krenar recalls about his father-in-law’s trucking company.

An industry veteran might have seen those frantic phone calls as normal—just part of the trucking business. Krenar saw them as absurd. In 2015, with GPS technology and cellular networks everywhere, why was anyone calling drivers to ask their location? “I’m like, you know what? 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.”

The Outsider’s Advantage in Product Design

Being new to supply chain logistics meant Krenar didn’t know what was “impossible.” When truck driver Tony showed him the temperature sensors used for lobster and scallop shipments, Krenar’s reaction was pure outsider confusion.

“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,” he explains.

Industry insiders had accepted these delayed-data temperature loggers as standard practice. Krenar, coming from wireless technology, couldn’t understand why real-time data wasn’t table stakes. “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.”

That self-described naivety—the willingness to question accepted industry practices—is what industry veterans would call fresh eyes. Krenar just called it common sense applied to an obvious problem.

Building Globally From Day One

Krenar’s immigrant background shaped not just what he built but how he built it. Today, Tive has 205 employees, with 80 based in Kosovo. That’s not offshoring for cost savings—it’s building where talent exists and creating opportunity in the place that shaped him.

“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,” Krenar shares. The decision to build substantial operations in his home country reflects an immigrant founder’s understanding that talent and innovation aren’t confined to Silicon Valley.

This global perspective also influenced Tive’s manufacturing strategy. When the company needed to make disposable trackers economically viable, Krenar didn’t just email Chinese manufacturers—he flew there with his VP of technology and visited eight different facilities across Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangdong.

“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,” he explains. An outsider’s perspective made him comfortable operating across borders and cultures in ways that might intimidate founders who’ve never left their home country.

The Immigrant’s Relationship With Risk

When Tive was down to three months of runway in 2018, Krenar made a decision that would paralyze many founders: he laid off half the company. “In order to extend it to nine, I had to go and lay off half of the company. And I did that,” he says matter-of-factly.

That ability to make hard choices quickly may connect to the immigrant experience of navigating uncertainty. When you’ve already left everything familiar to rebuild in a new country, pivoting a business model or cutting staff to survive seems less catastrophic. The alternative—giving up—simply isn’t in the vocabulary.

The bet paid off. Those six extra months of runway, combined with aggressive cold calling to 150-200 prospects weekly, revealed the fatal flaw in their business model and pointed toward disposable trackers. By January 2020, Tive released the world’s first single-use 5G-ready tracker and finally hit product-market fit.

From One Pizzeria to Global Scale

Today, Tive tracks shipments of strawberries, rocket parts, pharmaceuticals, and everything in between for 700 customers globally. The company aims to hit $200 million in revenue within three to five years and is preparing for an IPO.

Looking back at that 17-year-old who stepped off the plane expecting New York City and got rural Vermont instead, the journey makes sense. “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,” Krenar reflects.

That small town with one pizzeria taught an immigrant kid that America looked different than the movies suggested. That lesson—that reality differs from expectation, and you need to see things as they are—became the foundation for building a company that questions industry assumptions and solves obvious problems everyone else had stopped seeing.

Sometimes the best qualification for innovation isn’t deep industry experience. Sometimes it’s the fresh perspective of someone who just arrived and hasn’t learned what’s supposed to be impossible yet.