The following interview is a conversation we had with Amir Taichman, Founder and CEO of Unity SCM, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $13 Million Raised to Power the Future of Supply Chain Operations
Amir Taichman
Hey Brad, it’s great to be here.
Brett
Super excited for our conversation. So, as I was doing research before this interview, I saw that you had spent eleven years in the IDF. So I’d love to ask a bit about that. What did you learn from your time in the IDF?
Amir Taichman
So I think the biggest thing I’ve learned from spending that time in the IDF is if you put the best people to work on even seemingly impossible goals, it’s achievable. A lot of things that seem completely insane, completely impossible. If you put together a team and make it clear to them what the objective is and give them the conditions and the freedom to go after it. A lot of things that seem impossible actually are very achievable. But it’s mostly about the people you work with.
Brett
Take us back to when you were leaving the military. What was your state of mind at that time? What were you planning to do career wise?
Amir Taichman
When I left the IDF, it was very clear that I was going to start a startup company. I started it with a really close friend of mine who also served with me. We went to Tapio together and then we served in 8200 together. And went to high school together. And so we’ve been friends for a really long time. We knew we wanted to start a company. We knew we’re going to go off, we’re going to start something together. And were looking around a lot. And then we settled on trying to solve a big problem that we ran into in our technical were both running with engineering roles in the IDF and we decided to go after a massive problem that we kept running into around version controlling and change management for databases.
Amir Taichman
And went on this crazy two year ride of building a technology that didn’t exist and to a large degree, still doesn’t exist. And we actually built a working product that created the version and control for databases, data and all. And what we found out along the way though, and this is 2011 2012, right? DevOps as a concept doesn’t even exist yet and no one’s willing to pay for developer tools. And so what we found out is that developers get super excited about the technology, get super excited about the product, but we couldn’t figure out how to make the business side of it work. And we took part of this accelerator called Upwest, which brings israeli founders to the US, which was my first incursion into Silicon Valley.
Amir Taichman
And we actually went out and we raised a seed round and we ended up giving all the money back to the investors like a week after we did it because we just couldn’t figure out how is this going to work, how is this going to scale into a really large company? And the really interesting thing about that is that making that move, which is completely untruthial at that point, built this really long term relationship with the upwest team and they ended up co leading the funding rounds for the current company that we’re running for Unity SCM. So it’s like doing the right thing kind of pays off in the long run.
Brett
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any Founder doing that. Giving the money back after just a week, that’s crazy.
Amir Taichman
So it turns out giving money back to investors is much harder than getting them to give you money in the first place.
Brett
How did you know it was time to call it quits on that company? How did you know to just give up? Because I think a lot of entrepreneurship is about the grind. It’s about pushing through, doing whatever it takes. How did you know that this one just wasn’t worth pursuing?
Amir Taichman
So I think at the end of the day, when you’re fundraising, you’re selling, right? Like, you’re selling the vision, you’re selling the plan, you’re selling the long term plan, you’re selling the team, you’re selling everything, and you have to be fully convinced and fully in there to be able to do that. And the reality is that once you get to the point of you’re like, you know, okay, this is going to happen. There’s people who want to come in, they see the vision, they see things your way. That’s the point where you can think back and say, okay, now that we’re making that next step, do we really know what we’re going to do with this? And I think for us it was, no, we didn’t know how we’re going to make that happen.
Amir Taichman
And I think were already like two years into the making of the entire process. And again, it was an environment where 2012 was very different than 2021, for example, from a startup funding perspective. And at some point you need to be 150% convinced that this is the right thing to do because you’re going to be spending the next five or seven or ten years doing this if you’re successful. And we thought, oh, we don’t know that this is going to be successful. And we said, okay, we don’t know. And we felt more comfortable going back and saying, you know what, we can’t in full conscious, like, take the money and go with it and keep going with it, not knowing how we’re going to go down this path.
Amir Taichman
And then we made the very hard decision, the series of very difficult conversations with our investors, and we did it right. And looking back, I don’t think we regretted it for one moment.
Brett
Wow, that’s fascinating. Now, I want to ask a few questions, really just to better understand a bit more about what makes you tick. First one is about founders that inspire you. So when it comes to founders that inspire you, who is the first name that comes to mind?
Amir Taichman
So if it’s okay with you, I think I have a bunch of names, but I think none of those names are like your big flashy, super famous founders. And rather they all belong to a category of people, or founders, I should say, who I really appreciate and really look up to. And that’s exactly the opposite of those high profile flashy founders. These are the people who build their companies with their own ten fingers. They do the hard things, they get the work done. They don’t look for the headlines. They’re the people who trudge away day in and day out, building 1% at a time, solving problems. They’re so focused internally on their companies that they just don’t have the bandwidth to go around doing PR. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing PR, it serves a hell of a lot of purposes.
Amir Taichman
But there is something which I really admire about the ability to just focus on the problems at hand and on solving them, and realizing that success is going to bring the results, and not focusing on the publicity as the end goal. These are people who understand that the company building is the goal in and of itself, not the fame that comes with it. And so I really appreciate these company builders, people who are so focused on building the company, they’re so focused on their own problems. And I think in the long run, these are the people who build really significant companies.
Brett
Nice I appreciate whenever a Founder comes on and doesn’t just say an obvious answer like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, I feel like those are like the easy kind of lazy answers. So appreciate you putting a lot of thought into that.
Amir Taichman
Look, I really admire both of those names. Right? But it’s easy to admire them, right? I think we admire them mostly because they’re so successful and because their story is so impressive. But they’re one in a million. One in 10 million, probably, right? And they’ve done amazing, crazy things. But it’s easy. It’s easy to admire the one in a 10 million example. And I think there’s a lot to admire about the people who are successful, and they’re not the one in a 10 million. And I think there’s a lot more to learn from them than because, look, most of them are not Elon Musk and most of them are not Jeff Bezos, and we’re not going to go through the journey that they went down. And so there isn’t that much we can learn from them, quite honestly.
Amir Taichman
There’s a lot more that we can learn from people who are closer to the types of challenges that we all face.
Brett
That’s the entire thesis of this podcast and why it exists. I believe deeply in this idea of founders learning from other founders who are like them, and maybe a bit further ahead in the journey, but that’s the entire thesis. I think that’s the best way for founders to learn, is learning from those stories of founders who are like them. I think it’s very hard to look at Musk and really learn something actionable and useful that you can apply to your business today. But listening to a Founder who’s maybe series b and you’re a series a, I think there’s a lot that you can learn from them just because it’s so much more relevant because they’re actively building in a similar stage that you’re in.
Amir Taichman
So I didn’t know that was one of the main purposes of the podcast. But it’s good to know, and I want to say one of the smartest things in that spirit that I’ve done in the past three years wasn’t my idea at all. And the credit goes to a close friend of mine, Alik, who one day reached out to me and said, how about we create this kind of a support group with a few other founders that are pretty much at the same stage. We were all like pre seed stage at the time, and we’re like, we’ll meet every other week, and we’ll share the challenges and we’ll, you know, we started out as a group of strangers that I never knew each other to a certain degree, but two of them I’ve never met before.
Amir Taichman
There was four of us, and we started meeting, I think, two and a half years ago, maybe three years ago. And one, those three people became three of my closest friends and confidants and the degree to which they serve as a support team and helped me learn. And I helped them learn. And it’s all about the fact that you’re in it together. And there is no judgment because the hardships that you’re going through at the moment, the person sitting next to you having a beer with, they either went through those hardships last month or they’re going to go through these hardships next quarter. And so it’s not about having all the answers for one another, but it’s having the space of people who know what you’re going through and can support you and can give you ideas.
Amir Taichman
They’re not going to solve your problems, let’s be honest, but they can help you figure out how to solve your problems. And so having similarly minded people in a similar stage, being in the same boat with you has been incredibly helpful, and I totally recommend that to anyone going through this journey.
Brett
Yeah, I have a group of six founders that I meet with once a month. And how I’ve described it to friends is they all have so much context about my personal life, my business. They have all of that context, and they’re able to really help me navigate big decisions because of that context. In the way that if I was meeting with a random entrepreneur who doesn’t have all that context, they just aren’t able to really be that helpful. So I’m a huge fan of those types of groups, and I’ve gotten a lot of value out of them myself.
Amir Taichman
And I think the way you described it as context is really the key thing. Right. It’s being able to describe a challenge without having to explain why is it so challenging? Why is it happening now? What happened before, what happens later? What are the 50 other things you need to take into consideration? And why is it so stressful for you as the CEO or the Founder or whatever your role is in the company? You can just talk about what the challenges are, knowing the listening people know what you’re going through and can fully appreciate the full context, like you said, of where you’re coming from.
Brett
Absolutely. Let’s switch gears now and let’s dive a bit deeper into Unity. So how we’d like to start this portion of the interview is really focusing on the problem at a high level. What problem does Unity solve?
Amir Taichman
So we’re in the supply chain space, and we build a platform to help supply chain companies operate in a data driven way. And one of the biggest challenges in the supply chain is that supply chain, which is a very mature industry, it’s very data intensive. And so there’s a lot of information that’s required to make good decisions, right? There’s demand and supplies and orders and customers and shippers and shipments and inventory and so on and so forth. And there’s a million different pieces of information that goes into any specific decision. And the problem is that the data underlying that information that’s required for the decisions is highly fragmented.
Amir Taichman
And so if you think about any transaction that’s required to get some goods, let’s say on the shelves of a supermarket, you’re working with the suppliers and the shippers and the forwarders and the brokers and the warehouses. There’s so many different parties involved, and each one of these parties has a really small portion of the full picture. And the challenge is that to make any intelligent decision, you kind of need to have all of the information in one place. And so what we do is make it really easy for any supply chain operator to get the information they need to do their everyday job. And it’s usually very mission critical information without having to rely on anyone else.
Amir Taichman
So we take care of getting the data, cleaning it up, extracting the insights, surfacing in a way that works into their workflows, into their business processes, regardless of are they supply planners or are they a logistics manager, are they inventory managers? And so we make sure that everyone has the data they need in the ways they need it to get their job done.
Brett
Take us back to August 2020. When you founded the company, what was going on and what was about this problem that made you say, yes, that’s it, I’m going to go build a company around this.
Amir Taichman
Honestly, it might be described as stubbornness. So before starting Unity, I worked at another company that worked in the supply chain visibility space. And a lot of different companies took a stab at supply chain visibility. And it’s kind of been, over the past 20 years, kind of a bit of a holy grail of supply chain operations. I mean, who doesn’t want to know what’s going on everywhere in their supply chain? And the biggest thing I took away from that experience, and I had no prior supply chain experience. Like my background is big data and big data platforms. And one of my big takeaways from the opportunity of working with, really Fortune 100 companies that run some of the most famous supply chains in the world, like Starbucks and Unilever, is that it’s a solvable problem, right.
Amir Taichman
I couldn’t walk away from the fact that I felt that everyone was going about trying to address this challenge the wrong way. And there’s a different way that you can go down that would actually make this really seemingly untenable problem solvable. And at the end of the day, what I decided to do is just go and say, okay, we’ll build a company that just takes a completely different approach than what everyone else has been doing for the past 20 years in trying to solve for supply chain data. And we’re going to focus on the data first because it’s actually a data problem, not an application problem.
Amir Taichman
And we’re going to build a company on that fundamental thesis that if you could fix, or you could figure out how to get data, the rest of the problems kind of fall into place, or they become more solvable once you have the know.
Brett
There’s a book I recently read called the Outsiders, and I heard about it from Bill Ackman, and he was talking about why he likes to back ceos who don’t come from the field because they’re able to come into the industry with a totally fresh mindset and fresh view and a fresh way to approach tackling problems. Do you consider yourself an outsider then? Because it sounds like you didn’t have this long 1020 year career in supply chain before you decided to start this. So do you view yourself as an outsider? And if so, what are some of those benefits that you’ve seen from being an outsider?
Amir Taichman
I guess it’s a complicated answer. I guess it’s yes and no. So, yes, I’m definitely an outsider. Like, I’m not a supply chain practitioner. I haven’t worked at any of the big supply chain software companies. I had never dealt with supply chain prior to 2017. And my background is data platforms, big data machine learning, all that stuff. In that sense, yes, I’m an outsider. And I think being an outsider from that perspective has given me the opportunity to say, wait, the way we’re solving this just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I mean, people are using Excel, and the business process side is kind of figured out it’s a premature operation. They know what they’re doing. They just can’t get the information they need to do it right. There’s this fundamental piece that’s missing.
Amir Taichman
And I was able to see how much effort is just put into trying to get data in the hands of the right people or get the data to do things like provide insight or God forbid, run machine learning algorithms. In that sense, it was kind of I lacked the perspective of this is the way we’ve always been doing things, right, which is common, I think, in every mature industry. But at the same time, I think by the time I started Unity, I’d already spent about three years in supply chain software. So I think to a certain degree, I spent just enough time working on supply chain challenges to understand them. And it’s a super complicated industry with super complicated business processes and relationships and a lot of nuances. Like one of the big challenges is just how nuanced every company is.
Amir Taichman
But that combination of just being just outsider enough and knowing just enough, I think, was the thing that enabled us to come in and say, okay, we have a thesis on how we can do it differently, which isn’t a completely outside looking in view, and it’s also not entirely like an insider look of like, we just need to do things more, but faster kind of look. And so I guess the answer is somewhere in the middle in that sense.
Brett
Talk to us about the first paying customers. How did you pull those deals off?
Amir Taichman
Okay, I don’t know if funny is the right word, but it makes me laugh, obviously, every time I think about it. So I’ll tell you how I remember the first customer. And this is an industrial manufacturing company. They manufacture, import and distribute materials for the construction company, right? Look, so like pipes and pressure valves and things of that nature. Mid sized company, like a billion dollar in revenue. So like a big got. My wife went to Stanford, and so went over the Stanford director of alumni to find everyone who’s in the supply chain operations role. And I’ll start by saying there are not many. Most people who go to Stanford do not end up in supply. And so one of the people we reached was the vp of inventory planning for this company. And it all started out with getting her feedback.
Amir Taichman
And so we reached out to her and we tried to understand what types of problems they have in their supply chain as a result of data challenges. And as were going through the conversations, and she was super gracious and she spent the time with us, and she’s super intelligent and she really understands the fundamental of why data is important and how it impacts her business. It was a fascinating conversation. And as the conversations evolved, we got to a point where there was a very clear use case that we can help them address a really clear problem that we can help solve for them.
Amir Taichman
So I remember calling up my cousin who was also in supply chain at the time, and he’s in sales, and I told him, I have this prospect and they really want to become a customer and they have a problem we can solve with our product. So how do I get to be a customer? And he’s like, why aren’t they signing the contract? And I told him, well, I didn’t send them a contract. And he’s like, so how are they going to sign a contract if you haven’t sent them anything? And to me the big lesson was, it’s great having conversations and like early on, it’s a really thin line between people you’re just talking to and potential customers, but at the end of the day, you need customers.
Amir Taichman
And so we made really early on the decision to not go down the path of design partnerships or giving out the product for free for betas. We said, no, we’re going to actually try the trauma of that first customer. And by the way, they became a customer. Super happy customer. To this day, I think they’re with us for over two years at this point. They’re amazing. They taught us a ton. They created new use cases with us. Really great. But the big lesson was, it’s like you don’t get what you don’t ask for. And so if you want customers, you need to ask them to be your customers. And there’s obviously a lot of things that go into that before that. It’s like they need to want what you’re making. You need to solve the real problem for them.
Amir Taichman
You need to be able to convince them that you’re providing value. But no one’s going to come up and volunteer to be your customer. They’d much rather be a design partner if they can, because it’s free. And so we made a decision to say, look, we want customers that are paying. And it made the first part harder because it created a higher bar that an opportunity needed to cross. But at the same time, it kind of forced us to be more sincere with ourselves on why people are saying no or why people are saying yes. Like, the bar for the learning process was just so much higher and it wasn’t a conventional path for sure.
Amir Taichman
But later on when we managed to say, look, here’s paying customers and this is what they’re doing with us, it made everything much more concise around what is it that we’re doing? What problems are we solving? What are people willing to pay for and what people are not willing to pay for?
Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we’ve built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Do you feel like you have product market fit today?
Amir Taichman
Oh, that’s a challenging question. So I think product market fit is a bit of an overloaded term, if I may say that, on the airwaves without having people with pitchforks and torches at my door. So I think product market is tricky, right? We have a product, there’s a market for it. It’s selling. We have more than 25 paying customers significantly. So there’s definitely a market for the product we’re selling. But there’s different definitions of product market fit. Right? Like, can you train any person in the world to sell your product, or does it sell yourself? Which seems like that’s what people imagine sometimes when you say product market fit, no, we’re not there. Can I articulate exactly what the value is that we’re creating for a customer that uses our product? Yes, very much so.
Amir Taichman
And so I think we have a product, there is a market, there is fit between them. There’s still more work to fine tune that, to get a fully repeatable, fully scalable process, which is what we do, right? I mean, what is product market like is 100% revenue growth year over year product market fit? Maybe that’s one indication. But we have a product that works for some parts of the market. We can sell it. People are buying it, people are getting value out of it. We’re very happy customers. But I think when we say product market fit, people imagine this explosive growth and these hockey curves and, like, hockey state curves and things of that nature. And I think that makes people optimize for the wrong thing. I think a lot of really solid businesses don’t just explode one day like they become.
Amir Taichman
It’s a really long journey for overnight success. So it seems from the outside looking.
Brett
In on the topic of success, one thing that I see a lot is that entrepreneurship and being a Founder is almost glamorized, or it is glamorized in the media just looks so cool and looks so fun and looks so glorious. But from my own experience and from all the founders that I’ve interviewed, that’s not the reality. Being a Founder sucks at times. It can be very difficult, and there’s a lot of lows that you have to navigate. What’s been the lowest point you’ve reached so far with Unity, and how’d you navigate that low?
Amir Taichman
That’s a challenging question. So I think I describe this to people as there’s multiple points in the lifecycle of a company where there’s kind of a phase transition. And so a phase transition in physics is when matter stops behaving in one way and starts behaving fundamentally differently, like the transition between water and ice or water and gas. And went through that twice in the life of the company. And so it almost feels like a moment after you reach the next step of success, everything stops working at the exact same time.
Amir Taichman
It’s like you sign up a bunch of customers, you’re super excited, you got funding, but based on those results, and now you can’t hire customer success enough, and the customers are really angry with you because you haven’t delivered fast enough, or there’s features that are not missing, or there’s bugs, and you can’t hire engineers fast enough. So the engineering team is struggling because there’s so many requests, and you can’t generate as much growth because there is seasonality in the market. So it feels like everything kind of comes crashing down. What seems like this one moment where all this effort is like, bam, you crashed into a wall.
Amir Taichman
And the reality is, I think, or the way I dealt with it is realizing that it’s not that you crashed into a wall, it’s more that there’s a very intricate set of relationships between the different aspects of your business. So there’s a very strong relationship between what product you built and what trade offs you made when you build that product. And so let’s say you decided not to make the product self service at all. Well, that means customer success are going to have to do a lot more handholding when you onboard customers. And that means you’re going to have to hire better customer success, people who are more expensive. So that’s going to cost you more and are harder to hire.
Amir Taichman
And it might mean that it’s harder to make customers referenceable, which means it’s going to take you longer before you can leverage them to close additional deals. And so that one decision you made on the trade off, I’m not making the product more or less self service actually has this really long set of implications. And I think at any point of the company’s lifecycle, you are trying to get to an equilibrium where all these different pieces kind of hum along effectively together, and then at some .1 of them, takes the next step. It’s like you closed the next big strategy, and that’s obviously a good problem to have, don’t get me wrong.
Amir Taichman
But you close that one big strategic customer, that’s just beyond your capacity to handle, and now everything comes crashing now because they have more needs, and you don’t have customers, enough customer success, and you don’t have engineering, and there’s tech, debt, all of those different things. And that equilibrium gets broken. And for me, realizing that it’s not that we’ve hit a wall, is that we just fell out of equilibrium, and now it’s again going to be a process. Okay, we need to start again, just like we did for the past year. To reach the previous equilibrium, we now need to go through a series of motions to get to the next equilibrium. And for me personally, I think action really helps with avoiding looking at the downsides. And like you said, it’s not glamorous.
Amir Taichman
There’s a handful of moments in your life cycle as an entrepreneur that are very glamorous. And it looks on the paper, when you fundraise or when you close a big deal, or when you go on stage in a big conference, it looks very glamorous. But in between, there’s a lot of work to try to get to that next stage equilibrium of the company and keep pushing the envelope to make it larger and bigger and better. And for me, knowing that, okay, there’s things we can do, there’s a series of steps we can do. We can figure out what we can do to push the envelope to reach that next equilibrium really helps not to wallow in, oh, my God, this isn’t working. And this isn’t working. And this isn’t working. This isn’t working.
Amir Taichman
But rather focus on we can do this to fix this, and we can do that to fix to that, and so on. And so focusing on what we can do and how that does move the needle was super helpful.
Brett
When it comes to your market category. How are you thinking about it? Is it supply chain management, is it supply chain visibility? Is it supply chain operations? Or is it something that I haven’t listed yet?
Amir Taichman
So that’s a really interesting question, because it’s one of those things that are kind of at the core of our self definition. So supply chain operations in general has two modalities, I guess, today, right? There’s a transactional modality. You handle a purchase order or a shipment or you move inventory around things of that nature. And historically, there’s transactional systems like an ERP or transportation management system and so on, that are really good at doing those things. And so the world of creating and managing transactions is pretty well understood and pretty well defined in our space. But there’s another mentality which is not quite analytics, not quite operations. It’s a mix of everything. It’s very data driven, it’s not quite planning, it’s not quite execution.
Amir Taichman
But it’s very much about if you’re fighting shortages, you’re trying to ensure that you have enough of a product in certain place, having a great plan isn’t enough, because when the plan meets reality, then things change, and you need to update your plan. And so that entire process, let’s call it supply chain operations. We call it data driven operations, right? All the operations, they kind of happen mostly in excel today. And so there’s a lot of business processes that just happen outside of what we call transactional systems of record. And the reality is that most of these processes just don’t have a system they happen in. So, planning. Sure, there’s planning systems, but most companies do their supply chain planning on Excel because it’s so flexible. And execution happens honestly, mostly in Excel.
Amir Taichman
And sure, the outcome is a set of transactions that you go into the european and perform, but there’s all these processes that happens elsewhere. And so Unity is kind of a place where you have all the data and all that ability to run the process with collaboration with your partners, with the information, with everyone looking at the same information and arriving and sharing their conclusions and actions. And so in a sense, it’s a category that complements the existing category. It’s not a transactional system of record. It’s a platform for actually running operations. And we see from our customers that’s exactly what they’re doing. And so they’re taking forms like sales and operations planning forms that they run weekly that they used to run on Excel, and they start using our system to run those processes.
Amir Taichman
Now it’s a group of people meeting in a meeting room, looking at information and making decisions on what they have to do, right? So they don’t do it inside the system, they do it with our system, and they drive the processes afterwards for resolution or for action through our system and into all the other transactional systems or their partners. And so I don’t know if it’s a new category per se, but it’s definitely a new way of managing a supply chain, a more data driven way of managing supply chain operations.
Brett
One thing that I think was interesting with COVID is this idea that supply chain almost became sexy and cool and talked about in the consumer world right around like the time or during COVID that’s where everyone started talking about supply chain. People who probably never had used the phrase supply chain, they were talking about it. And I think as that happened, there was a lot of funding that went into supply chain technologies, supply chain startups. A lot of noise in this space for you. What are you doing to rise above all of that noise and stand out from all the other supply chain tech that’s out there?
Amir Taichman
So you’re right for a hot minute there, supply chain was a really hot space. I mean, comparatively speaking, it was a super cold space in the vc world prior to Covid. And it’s slightly warmer sense, and I think it’s kind of sinking into coldness again now as Covid has kind of subsided and we forgot it ever happened. But it’s clear that the companies operating supply chains now really understand that supply chain, like, without a solid supply chain, you can really run a business effectively if you’re in the physical, real world. And so for us, the core thing behind surfacing above the noise is helping real customers solve the real problems and building on top of that.
Amir Taichman
And so we’re really hyper focused on our customers and making sure that the customers we have are really successful, because what we’ve learned, and this is, again, thanks to our platform or data platform approach or data first approach, and products first approach, is if you have happy customers using your product. For one thing, if your platform is built well, and luckily ours, I think, is, they’ll introduce you to new problems. And while every company thinks they’re a snowflake, they’re not. The same problems exist for other companies with similar characteristics. And so we manage to learn from our happy customers about new use cases that we can help solve with our platform, and then we can turn around and find other companies that have the same problems. And then we have referenceable customers who are willing to say, yes, they help us solve this problem.
Amir Taichman
This is the benefit we’ve been getting, and we get an opportunity to expand the set of problems and value. We can give our customers out of the box or almost out of the box. And that’s only really possible if you’re really focused on incrementally making the right decisions and identifying repeatable patterns. And I think if you really provide value to customers, which sounds like a bit of a cliche, because I think everyone is trying to provide value to their customers, but if you really create value and really help your customers solve a real problem, they’ll talk about it and they’ll go on record and they’ll tell their friends and they’ll be referenceable.
Amir Taichman
And so I think a lot of what characterizes us is that we’re building the company one step at a time, rather than saying, oh, we’ll build all of it and everyone will come. I don’t think the real world really works that way. You’re not really an overnight success. You need to build onto it. And so I think for us, it’s making sure that our customers are really happy and are getting real, tangible value out of our products and then capitalizing on that in the sense of finding who else has these problems and how we can help them effectively solve it.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 13 million to date. 13.2 I believe, to be exact. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Amir Taichman
So I hope what I’m going to say isn’t too much of a cliche, but the most important thing, and I fully acknowledge not everyone’s always in a position to act this way. It really is critical who you choose to be your partners along the way. We were incredibly lucky with the set of investors that we chose, and there’s a certain bias to it, right, because investors self select into investing in your company, so they need to be on board with who you are and what you do and what you’re trying to do and the way you’re going to do it. But at the end of the day, what we found is that our early investors and our later investors have been so supportive of what we do, and we feel that they’re true partners along the way.
Amir Taichman
It just takes away so much of the noise and challenges that I see with other companies who didn’t optimize for who they’re going to take this path with. And so having the right people with you along the way isn’t just about your co founders or your team. It’s also the extension of your team, which is your investors and your service providers, your lawyers, your finance people, really making sure that any person you choose to take along for this journey is there to be supportive rather than just be there for the success. Because there’s going to be a lot of problems along the way and a lot of challenges along the way, and it won’t support you want people who, beyond giving you the money, maybe they’ll give you value add.
Amir Taichman
Most of them won’t, quite honestly, because your business is your business and no one knows you as well as you, but you want people who will genuinely be committed to doing whatever they can to help you succeed. And they want you to succeed, not just because of the financial result, which is obviously their goal, which is understandable. They’re financial investors, but they’re willing to help and not just get in the way.
Brett
Let’s imagine you were starting the company again today from scratch. What would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give to yourself?
Amir Taichman
I think it would be that we started the company with a certain set of assumptions in mind and a bunch of hypotheses around why we’re doing what we’re doing, why we’re choosing this path, and the way that we’re designing our product and we’re designing the company, and we’re designing new services around it. There’s a set of fundamental assumptions or decisions or tenets around the beginning of the company. And I think my biggest advice would be to stay true to those assumptions. Always challenge them, but never forget why you’re doing things the way you’re doing. Be very intentional about doing those things, because every time that we let go of some of our assumptions without updating them based on data, we just wasted time. And time is the one thing there is no way to get back.
Amir Taichman
And so being super intentional about how you go about it and based on the base assumptions and thesis and principles, that would probably be, never forget those and be intentional about it.
Brett
Final question for you now, since we’re a little bit over on time, let’s zoom out into the future. So let’s say three to five years from today, what’s this big picture vision that you’re building?
Amir Taichman
So I often get asked by a lot of people, mostly investors, about AI and ML in supply chain. And my answer to that is that supply chain data is terrible, and anyone in supply chain will tell you that it’s fragmented, it’s low quality, has a ton of problems, and as a result, you don’t really see AI and ML. And that’s just AI and ML are just a symptom of a broader problem. You don’t see the renaissance of technology and capabilities and processes and tools that you see in other industries that are based on data, like in digital marketing, and in cybersecurity and in HR and a lot of other industries. Just don’t see that because data isn’t there.
Amir Taichman
And where I really think unit is going to make a difference is by showing the world that supply chain can be not only a data intensive industry, but really a data driven industry. That there is a way to operate a supply chain based on data from the market, like actual data with people. You don’t need to use hunches and you don’t need to argue about whose excel is the right excel. You can really run your operation the way everyone wants to, but no one’s able to almost. And then once you have access to data, there’s an endless world of opportunity that you can build on top of it. And yes, that includes AI and ML, but we’re just not there yet.
Amir Taichman
And so I think five years into the future, what you will see is that Unity serves as a platform not only for the applications that we ourselves build, but also kind of like a force, in a sense, an application. We have the data, we can make it available. If someone else can come in and drive additional value out of that data on top of our platform, by all means, come in and do it. Come join the. I don’t use an hyperbole usually, but like the revolution of data driven operations, it’s like, here’s the data, let’s see what we can make out of it. And good data attracts additional data. And I think there’s this flywheel, a data flywheel, if you will, that Unity is going to be instrumental in spinning. Amazing.
Brett
I love the vision and I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I know it’s going to be a hit with our audience, so really look forward to getting it out there before we wrap up here. If there’s any founders that are listening in and just want to follow along from a company building perspective, where should they go?
Amir Taichman
I’m mostly on LinkedIn and Twitter. I try to share as much as I can, definitely not as much as I should. That’s one of the things where I think being intentional and trying to be more vocal in helping other people and sharing your story could be helpful for other people. And I think it’s also important. Right. People can only learn by example to a large degree. And so sharing the highs and the lows is material. And so I should definitely be more intentional on doing that. But that would probably be on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Brett
Amazing. Amir, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. Really appreciate it.
Amir Taichman
Thank you. I’ve had a blast. I really appreciate you having me on.
Brett
Not a problem. Keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Samuel.
Twitter
facebook
linkedin