Chris Pickett Email & Phone Number

Encinitas, California, Us

Flock's central thesis is that traditional trucking modes (LTL vs. FTL) are poorly suited, on their own, to power the modern supply chain where velocity, flexibility, and sustainability are paramount. Transportation unit economics are most attractive and transit times are shortest with FTL, but only if you fill the truck. When that’s not the case, you have no choice but to either pay for capacity you don't actually need or hold orders until you can fill a truck which only drives inventory carrying costs and order lead times higher. As an alternative, you can ship LTL through a traditional hub-and-spoke terminal consolidation network, but that takes longer and the risk of cargo damage and loss spikes with all of the stops and handling along the way.And it’s only going to get worse. Demand patterns are getting harder to predict and plan for. Inventory is getting pushed closer to the point of end consumption. And the cost to hold unsold or otherwise idle inventory remains high. As a result, new and replenishment order sizes, and therefore shipments, are likely to trend smaller and more frequent over time.So if there was a reliable way to ship FTL while only paying for the space you need, wouldn’t it be worth considering as an alternative transportation mode? We think so too. That is exactly what Flock is offering, and we call it Flock Direct Shared Truckload (STL). Faster more predictable transit and less damage (vs. LTL), lower cost (vs. FTL), and up to 40% lower carbon emissions just by making smarter use of the capacity that already exists in the marketplace.

Encinitas, California, Us

Encinitas, California, Us

Pickett Research, LLC was established in 2020 to fill a void in the US Truckload Freight Marketplace for analysis, forecasting, and market guidance that is both objective and credible. While there is certainly no shortage of data available and opinions offered as to their potential meaning on a near daily basis, there has been no reliable source of truth that has proven able to offer truly unbiased and consistently accurate guidance on the long-term direction of the market, the forces behind the moves, and the implications for all major market participants – or the What?, the Why?, and the So What? Our mission at Pickett Research is to fill that void by leveraging a unique market philosophy, framework, and forecasting methodology that was developed and refined over more than a decade of commercial market experience scaling one of the largest and fastest-growing truckload freight brokers and 3PLs in North America from scratch.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Fremont, California, Us

Channel19 is on a mission to reinvent the $800 billion freight trucking industry. We help trucking companies identify the most profitable relative freight opportunities for their business by simplifying the navigation, evaluation, and booking process across their increasingly digital freight marketplace - focusing first on refrigerated fleets. They can more efficiently consider their entire opportunity set of available freight, currently partitioned into disparate digital silos, to make better short-term and long-term fleet decisions with every booking. And in doing so, we also enable an entirely new digital retail channel by which both digital and non-digital Freight Brokers can engage their Carrier networks - one that only augments and amplifies their existing channels. Freight trucking is essential to the proper functioning of the US economy, but the benefits of digital transformation have been painfully slow to reach the Carrier community. Channel19 believes it is time to level the playing field.

Remote, Us

GoodShip is how shippers and carriers digitally procure, measure, and optimize contract business more easily and accurately than ever before.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to join Jeff & Marianne Silver and the early leadership team at Coyote Logistics soon after its inception in 2006, and was a key contributor to its legendary rise from $0 to $2 billion in global revenue before acquisition by UPS in 2015 - as well as its subsequent doubling in size to become the 2nd largest U.S. Truckload Freight Broker by 2020. As Chief Strategy Officer over much of that time, I was responsible for helping the Coyote leadership team develop, evolve, and execute an enterprise growth strategy geared toward leveraging Coyote’s unique operating advantages across an increasingly dynamic global market and competitive landscape. Over various periods along the way, I also held operational responsibility for all activities related to North American Sales, Marketing, Operations, Supply Chain Engineering, and Pricing Strategy. During my Coyote career, I conceived of and scaled its Collaborative Transportation Management (Managed TMS) service offering and developed an original methodology for understanding US TL market dynamics and forecasting long-term directional spot and contract TL pricing, a version of which has since been branded as the Coyote Curve. After an incredibly fulfilling 14+ year run and leaving the business in more than capable hands, I exited Coyote at the end of 2020 to create the time and space to consider my next adventure(s) somewhere at the intersection of logistics, technology innovation, and market economics. I remain incredibly proud of the organization that we built, the way in which we built it, and the industry leaders that it has produced and will continue to produce. And am grateful that I had the opportunity to play a part in its incredible growth story.

Us

Upon completing my MBA at Georgia Tech in the summer of 2005, I joined a start-up boutique management consulting firm focused primarily on business operations and ERP software implementation. During my relatively brief time with Adjoined as a Strategy Consultant, I worked within the telecom sector where I helped to architect automated DSL diagnostic tools and customer support platforms to support mass market consumer broadband products. Less than a year after joining however, the firm was acquired in February 2006 by Kanbay, an India-based Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm looking to broaden their exposure to the US market. I left Adjoined/Kanbay six months later when presented with the opportunity to move to Chicago to build a technology-based freight brokerage and logistics business with Jeff & Marianne Silver among others that were part of the early Coyote Logistics team. Almost immediately after exiting, Kanbay was subsequently acquired by Capgemini.

Alpharetta, Ga, Us

During the summer between my first and second MBA years at Georgia Tech, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to join UPS as a Corporate Strategy Intern in the Supply Chain Solutions (SCS) division working out of the Morris Road office where I focused primarily on developing a divisional growth strategy for the Japan market. I enjoyed access to UPS's broad network of operational subject matter experts across the full stack of global logistics service offerings - from ocean, air, rail, trucking, and small parcel to customs brokerage, warehousing, and contract logistics - and gained a much deeper appreciation for both the advantages and challenges of large scaled networks that operate in the real world. When I turned in my badge at the end of that summer, I would have never guessed that I would be back in brown almost exactly 11 years later when UPS acquired Coyote Logistics in August 2015.

New York, Us

After exiting Electron Economy and having missed the application deadlines for most graduate business and engineering programs for the following year, I joined Agile Software Corp. who at the time was a leading provider of Product Lifecycle Management software for the manufacturing industry (think electronic Bills of Material and design documents hosted in a way that made efficient collaboration possible for distributed stakeholders). My time there was spent as a Process and Implementation Consultant where I delivered post-sales implementation and configuration support for both new Customers and upgrades. And a majority of that time was spent on-site in Hasselt, Belgium implementing Agile for a global consumer electronics company that had elected to divest their internal printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing platform (spread across 3 continents) to form an independent contract manufacturer servicing primarily the consumer set top box market. This was my first of two European expat experiences (the second later with Coyote in France and the UK) and helped me to appreciate how truly interconnected global markets and supply chains really are. I left Agile in late summer 2002 to join the Master of Engineering in Logistics (MLOG then, now SCM) program at MIT. Agile was later acquired by Oracle in 2007.

Electron Economy (EE) was a Softbank (among others) funded technology start-up that was founded in 1999 to serve as the e-fulfillment and distribution backbone powering the increasingly democratized business-to-consumer (b2c) retail/e-commerce sector. For the first time, brick-and-mortar store networks were no longer needed to reach customers and scale businesses. Our mission was to orchestrate and optimize everything that happened after the Consumer clicked "Submit Order" - from credit card pre-authorization and settlement to pick and pack to ship and deliver to product return and ongoing customer service along the way. After some early successes for Customers that included Sony Computer Entertainment, the dot com bubble burst and the b2c e-commerce sector vaporized for the most part. After attempting to pivot the business to target b2b, Electron Economy was ultimately sold to Viewlocity in September 2001. Looking back as e-commerce has since evolved, perhaps we were only 15-20 years ahead of our time. I initially joined EE's Professional Services group (which consisted of 2-3 people at the time) where I worked directly with early Customers (including Sony) to architect systems and applications that met core business requirements yet also aligned with functionality and timelines that our engineering teams could realistically execute against. I was then also responsible for implementation and ongoing project support. I eventually transitioned to a Product Management role to more broadly scale our product offerings, then exited with the sale to Viewlocity. This was my first experience in a start-up and my time here ultimately set the stage for everything that has come after with regard to my professional and academic ambitions and my commercial philosophy in general.

Dublin 2, Ie

Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) was my first full-time salaried position after graduating from Virginia Tech with a B.S. in ISyE in 1998. I landed in their San Francisco office where I enjoyed my first glimpse of the emerging internet-driven technology revolution that ultimately led to the dot com bubble and subsequent global economic recession when it popped. After learning to code in C++ and SQL, I worked primarily as an IBM Db2 and Oracle database developer on project teams that built COBOL-based mainframe billing applications for the telecom industry. I worked with some incredibly talented people and ultimately learned what it took to develop enterprise-class software applications capable of handling increasingly heavy transaction volumes efficiently, reliably, and securely. And only left when recruited over to a technology start-up where I would have the opportunity to more directly leverage my experience and twin passions for supply chain management and software development.

M.E., Logistics (Mlog)

Mba, Finance, Strategy, & Entrepreneurship

B.S., Industrial & Systems Engineering