The founder’s journey: Pivot until it works and stand by your convictions

BIOS: Prior to founding project44, McCandless was a principal at GlobalTranz and built companies including Metafora. Prior to founding FreightWaves, Fuller was the founder and CEO of TransCard and founded and managed the Xpress Direct division of U.S. Xpress Enterprises.

KEY QUOTES FROM FULLER

“It’s a pretty transformative time for the world at large but also for our industry, because it’s an opportunity for the industry to step up. Trade is certainly changing and visibility is far more important.”

“Ultimately, you have to get out there and try something, and if it doesn’t work, you just continue to pivot until you find something that actually does work. When you do that, you want to make the experiments such that they don’t kill the business. So, you do a lot of low-risk experiments until you find what actually works. Then you go all-in.”

“Every successful business has a crisis at some point and that’s when you really find out who’s on your side at the board level. When it’s easy and things are going well, you don’t really need your board. It’s when things are really difficult — and you can call on someone on the board and they roll up their sleeves and figure it out with you — that it means so much.”

“It’s not our intention to move the market. It’s our intention to provide observations and information, and the markets will do what the markets will do. If people are invested in the long term, these are just waves that happen. If you’ve been in freight, these are just normal waves. We say what we believe and what we have conviction in. It’s not to drive clicks. It’s to drive the credibility of the data. We’ve had critics who have different opinions. And what we told our team is something one of our board members told me: He said that if you do have conviction, then don’t respond to the critics. Because when you’re right, all the folks who’ve criticized your call will be on the wrong side of history.”