20-Minute Leaders
“The only way for brands to win against the big guys is to almost create a coalition, an alliance of all those small guys coming together.”
Guy Bloch, CEO and board member of Bringg, talks with Michael Matias about Covid-19, coalitions, and taking on the big companies controlling the supply chain
I was born and raised in Israel. I moved to do my MBA in the US at the New York Institute of Technology. One thing led to another, and I stayed there for 20 years. I came back just five years ago with a beautiful family: a wife and three kids. I spent all my time in enterprise software working for various companies.
My last six years before I joined Bringg, I was part of Splunk. I joined Splunk when we were still a couple hundred people. I spent a couple of years leading the East Coast for Splunk. Then I moved my family to the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region. I worked there in London and in almost every country in EMEA.
Tell me about where we're at today in terms of deliveries. How are businesses adapting to this new age?
COVID changed the world. It changed all of that for us as consumers, as human beings first. During that time, we had so many lockdowns, and people would just avoid getting into crowded places to protect themselves. If you cannot go get your food, groceries, and merchandise, then it needs to come to you. Everything that we envisioned for the market all the way into 2025 happened in a few weeks.
Every consumer out there expects convenient, cost-effective, fast, and reliable delivery. You do it well, they buy from you. Customers want to control this experience. As a customer, you want to define where, how, and when you're going to get your delivery. As long as you're in control, that's where you're going to purchase. Every brand was looking for different ways to recover their revenue stream, and we saw a big move from the market into scaling up and optimizing their last mile. For us, the last couple of years were fast and furious.
In some countries, COVID is fading out or at least is getting through somehow a normal state, but consumers got wired that everything can get to them when, how, and where they want it. While we see less volume in certain areas of deliveries, we still see it much higher than what it was before COVID. In other words, consumer behavior has changed, and it's changed permanently. It was not just a short period of time to cope with COVID; this is now a top priority for every brand because the world is moving from offline to online.
Why is it so hard? Pick up the package, bring it to the door: easy.
It's a physical world, not a digital world. You're moving physical assets. You're talking about dispatchers, drivers, warehouses, stores, and customers. To digitize and connect those things so algorithms can move them: it's not an easy journey.
Imagine a brand that did deliveries in the traditional way. Imagine them now moving into shipping and delivering millions of packages with multiple fleets from warehouses, stores, and distribution centers. Some of them are on demand. To do all of that, for a brand that is not expert in logistic technology and in dealing with logistic networks, is hard. I've been in enterprise software for so many years, and this is one of the only areas when technology actually meets the real world. And that's hard.
When you look around, those that really perfected it are technology companies. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on building a technology to digitize and connect their fulfillment and delivering network. But they are also logistic companies. They have their own gig economy. When you have those two, you can perfect that. Every other brand in the world is just not in that position.
Where does Bringg come into it?
Bringg is here to give every brand the alternative to scale up and optimize so they can act, move, and play like they were a marketplace, like they were Uber, DoorDash, Deliverr, or Amazon. It means technology and access to a logistic network.
Our technology philosophy is very simple. When you digitize and connect every step of your fulfillment and delivery network or process, then the whole idea of automation, optimization, and orchestration of delivery experiences becomes a data intelligence game. That's the first thing that we bring to our customers: a control tower and orchestration platform so they can digitize and connect their internal systems.
From that point, make a decision. Do you want to do Buy Online Pickup In Store? Do you want to do curbside? Do you want to deliver to lockers and customers come and pick it up? But then, you can offer customers 30-minute delivery, or an hour, two-hour, same day, or next day. Not everything has to be delivered quickly. But to have the option for the consumer, that's what's compelling.
Then it goes into the logistics side. If you do that only with a single carrier or a couple of carriers, your hands are locked. They need to have a wide variety of options. There are regional carriers that want to do those deliveries, but they're working on very old technology. Moving them into new technology and then making them accessible for every brand, it's what we do. Some brands realize that the most efficient way to really deliver is to have your own fleet.
At the bottom of that, there is a big data lake with data that we create and they create. When all this data is in one place, the amount of insight and intelligence you can get—so you can make better decisions and always find the most efficient way to deliver and delight your customers—provides endless value to them.
What surprised you in this space, beyond the fast pace that COVID brought in?
First of all, that change in consumer behavior in a matter of months, if not weeks. Second thing, how the economy moves from a traditional way of doing things to the gig economy and offering all those models to customers. It happened so fast that it's scary to see how brands are exposed. For us, it's inspiring because that's our mission. We are here to help each and every one of the brands scale up and optimize so they can play in the game, they can compete, and they can protect their brand.
The last thing that has been inspiring is that these industries are all about economy, the basics of economy: demand and supply. For the last couple of years now, we haven't gotten to a point where we felt like it's balanced. It's up and down. We're giving all of that to the brands, so they can always find that equilibrium for themselves.
The only way, really, for the brands to win against the big guys that perfected the last mile is to almost create a coalition, an alliance of all those small guys coming together, being able to collaborate. It's happening today. Instead of one driver delivering for you, that driver on that same run can actually serve multiple retailers.
A few words that you would choose to describe yourself?
I think you can see it, passionate. When I wake up in the morning, it's for that purpose. It creates a passion for me. I'm damn determined. If I see something, no matter how hard it is, I will go through every obstacle and make it happen. Resilient. I think this is something we at Bringg take pride in: that no matter how hard it is, we're here for a purpose and we will make it, fulfilling our vision and our purpose regardless of how hard it is. Nothing will stop us.
Michael Matias, Forbes 30 Under 30, is the author of Age is Only an Int: Lessons I Learned as a Young Entrepreneur. He studies Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University, while working as a software engineer at Hippo Insurance and as a Senior Associate at J-Ventures. Matias previously served as an officer in the 8200 unit. 20MinuteLeaders is a tech entrepreneurship interview series featuring one-on-one interviews with fascinating founders, innovators and thought leaders sharing their journeys and experiences.
Contributing editors: Michael Matias, Megan Ryan
