A letter of thanks.

This week is all about gratitude, and I have a lot to be thankful for this year.?

As a founder, the best you can do is have the start of a good idea. When you start something new, one of the hardest things you have to do is to convince people to come along. And with each new person who joins the team, your idea gets a little bit more real. I owe so much to the people who were willing to come along and take a risk on the chance to be part of something bigger.

There are hundreds of people who get credit for Roadie’s success, in a million ways, big and small. There are too many stories to tell, and honestly there are countless stories I don’t even know about. But I do know some of them, and I can’t let this season of thanks pass by without sharing them.?

I have never been accused of brevity, so settle in.

First, the Roadie team.

• Dennis Moon and Mary Frances Jones were the first two people I called back in February of 2014 when I got back from that fateful trip to Perdido Key to replace my bathroom tile.?
• Dennis earned the nickname “The Wolf” because there’s nothing he can’t do, no crisis he can’t handle, no mess he can’t clean up, any time of the day or night. He’s the single best operator I’ve ever seen and his commitment and loyalty are unsurpassed. There’s truly no one I’d rather have in my foxhole. And he does so much work to take care of each and every one of us that a lot of people never get to see.
• I was told by every start-up founder in town that Mary Frances wasn’t get-able. But she actually left her business to come help me run mine. She incubated this idea from the first venture pitch to the design and launch of our first product. If she hadn’t made it feel real before it really was, those early investors, team members, customers, rappers and wrestlers would have never signed up for the ride. I couldn’t have asked for a better fire starter.
• Valerie Metzker moved here from Philly when we were working from a conference table at my brother’s airplane hangar at PDK, before we even had an office. She grew from running a field marketing program in the early days to leading our enterprise sales team today. She went toe-to-toe with the C-suites of Walmart, Best Buy, Tractor Supply and too many others to name. She got the deals signed, and she helped them grow. Then and now, she’s fearless, and the first to run head-on at any problem.?
• Joel Baxter came from a big four consulting background to a fledgling start-up that barely had a server. He turned out to be just what we needed — he was unflappable in the face of every problem we threw at him, whether it was setting up a new printer, getting attacked by a bot army, or leading the migration of our infrastructure to AWS.??
• To say Matt Finger never knew what he was getting himself into is an understatement. I called him for a reference and ended up hiring him to build our customer experience team instead. In the 6 years since, he’s been the one cashing all the checks I write. It’s an impossible job made possible only by his commitment and sheer force of will. When we need to make it work, somehow, some way, Matt is human duct tape.

But it’s not just the OGs. Each new class of Roadies is somehow smarter than the one before.

• Wei Wang. In 2015, not long after Wei graduated from Mississippi State, he sent an email to our general inbox asking about a job as an Android dev. Today he’s leading our front-end mobile teams. Wei is a great example of someone who sees the value in committing, grinding it out in one place and not just looking for the next thing. It pays off.
• Zach Powell and Luna Searles came to us by way of Apple, where they were doing customer support, technical support and backoffice operations for Apple stores. And now they’re running anything and everything it takes to keep our drivers and senders happy, and doing such a good job at it that it’s hard to imagine what we’d do without them. Anybody who’s ever worked with Zach knows what a positive, helpful guy he is. And Luna’s had to find time to star in all of our explainer videos around her actual job. Beyond her work, Luna is my pal and very kindly and sang at my mom’s funeral. ??
• Brian Dunlap came in as a junior backend developer who had a background in marketing. He was so shy I was told not to speak to him at first. Now he’s a Product Owner for our enterprise platform and works with our largest customers — most of them huge global enterprises — to get them integrated, often in a matter of weeks. Brian has an open seat on any startup journey I take.?
• Annie Bauer came in as a junior sales person, selling Roadie to small businesses back when we could barely keep drivers from eating the cupcakes. Gradually she figured out she cared less about selling and more about building relationships, so she moved over to Account Management. Since then, she’s transformed from a shy, quiet person standing on a balance board, hidden behind her monitor, to a total badass boss, running our biggest accounts like she’s been doing it for 30 years. Talk about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It’s been a privilege and honor to watch.
• Jeff Darby is The Mayor. He shakes hands, kisses babies, knows everybody by name, fills potholes, rallies the troops, gets his hands dirty, motivates and inspires his teams, and does whatever is needed to keep things running smoothly. In our most important pilots this year, he made it happen and did it with a smile, all day and all night if necessary. My man.
• Wes Sills is the Judge and Jury. After kicking ass in Support, he was a one-man band handling User Relations and doing psychotherapy on all of our drivers, and always with the gentlest and kindest of approaches. He’s a drama vampire — constantly sucking it out of every situation. Now he's helping to build a real Trust & Safety department as we continue to grow. I can’t tell you how great it feels knowing that we can throw literally any issue at him and he’ll get it handled, no matter what.
• Kate Babington was actually a commercial salmon fisherwoman before she joined Roadie. She’s the only person that could launch Delta in Alaska and come home with a packed cooler of fresh caught salmon in the same week. True story. She’s been key with growing our airline business in particular — and she was just promoted last month to Account Manager Lead. Congratulations, Kate.
• Justin Ratcliffe. When JR started with us, he didn’t like dealing with mess. But he’s learned to be patient, to embrace chaos as a necessary part of the process, and it’s made him unstoppable. He grew from a UX Designer to our Design Lead to a Product Owner and now to our Product Lead. Today, he’s so invested in our products, they’re his, even more than they are mine.
• James Delmerico inherited a car that someone else built. It was a solid Toyota Camry but it had 200,000 miles on it with a smoking engine and just 3 wheels left. Not only did he keep it out of a ditch, but he rebuilt it while it was racing down the road at 100mph, gradually swapping out all the parts like he was at Talladega until he’d turned that Camry into a Ferrari. Honestly, he’s one of the first senior tech people I've ever met whose first instinct is to try to figure out how to do something rather than just telling me he can't.
• Will Walker and Zack Venero. When these guys joined our marketing team, we were spending more money on our I-85 billboard than on our entire customer acquisition playbook. But they both jumped into the deep end to help us scale, even when they didn’t have the data or resources they thought they needed to be successful. They’re putting the puzzle together even with a few pieces missing from the box, and I’m excited to see them grow Roadie even more under the UPS umbrella.
• Rachel Zarach. When Rachel joined us in 2018, she was our first biz dev person not named Marc or Val. She’s beat her sales targets every quarter since then and every year she posts 5-10X revenue vs. the year before. But more than that, she embodies the Roadie ethos. She has a great attitude, she’s collaborative, and she knows her shit in and out. Then and now, she sets the bar for what sales success looks like and the kind of team we want to build.
• Dave Martinez. When we interviewed and hired Matt Campbell, we asked him if he could name one person that had been the most impactful on his career. He told us about Dave. Dave is a builder, a fixer and the guy you want in the room if anything is going wrong. He will do whatever it takes to get it done, day or night, which we’ve battle-tested on a few occasions.
• There was Kim Hart #1, who got our anchor tenant Delta up and running two years before she had a momentary lapse in judgement and joined a competitor before returning to become the Kim Hart #2 we know and love today. Whenever we have a dragon to slay or a rat's nest to untangle, we give it to Kim. She has a PhD in Figuring It Out.
• Heather Hughes joined us six months before the Covid shutdown and instantly elevated all of our communications and PR. One of Heather’s superpowers is that she can juggle cats with one hand and tame lions with the other. And she does it all with grace and wit.?All of my words sound better because Heather has added her talents to them.?
• Rachel Scobey joined us early this year and all of our lives changed for the better. She has octopus arms to deal with 25 things at a time and helps me and Roadie beyond measure. What’s so great is that she is always thinking five steps ahead, seeing around corners. Roadie is a better place because she chose to hitch her star to us.?
• Kayla Duperreault. Once Kayla came on board, I never had to worry about anything HR-related ever again. It used to be a pain in my ass and Dennis', and Kayla just took it and ran with it. She built structure and removed problems, and made it easier to do my job. It’s the highest compliment I can give.
• Jack Bordoni and Alex Ryan. Alex approached Mary Frances after a talk she gave at Ga Tech and straight up asked for an internship. He became our first intern and now he is kicking ass as the product owner for all of our internal applications. Jack has an amazing pedigree from Stanford and Ga Tech but we were his very first job out of grad school. Jack chose not to go back to Silicon Valley and has crammed a decade of a career into three years and we’re thrilled we’ve been able to benefit so hugely from his talents. Separately, these two had a longstanding ping-pong tournament in the office. It’s a good thing we closed it, or we’d have lost two valuable employees to the Olympic team by now.
• Nancy Bauer didn't have technology or start-up experience and was in a different place in her career than most folks are when they join Roadie. But she knew MFJ, knew Luna, and had this mindset that was all about coming along for the ride and helping to figure things out. Long before we had the tech to pick the right drivers, Nancy was that tech. And then as those thoughts in her head became our initial version to auto accept drivers, we lovingly named it the Nancy Bot. We made stickers of the Nancy Bot, a sweet caricature of Nancy as a robot. I still have mine.?
• Cieaira Lenon and Nykole Smith are the two-headed monster slayer that has been wrangling some of our biggest customers and for the most part, kicking ass and taking names, for the past couple years. They both had brief stops in Customer Support before moving over to Account Management to help enable some of our largest and most complex customers. So grateful to have these awesome women on our team.
• Stephanie Millet met me for cheesesteaks in 2014 and agreed to work for basically more cheesesteaks until we could get Roadie off the ground. She’s looked at every agreement we’ve ever done at Roadie and at this point, I won’t sign a check without her looking at it first. She's a badass warrior, calls herself my forever lawyer and I’m holding her to it.
• Thomas Angst joined us to help us grow our small business efforts. Coming from OpenTable, he was a real get for our team and our long term strategy of growing small business. In spite of a Covid gut punch, he and his team have recovered in the most awesome way and driving small business to lead our future.

But it’s not just those guys who have made Roadie successful. It’s every single person on the Roadie team.

• It’s the Support team, who serves as our front line of defense. They set out every day to do the impossible, which is to make every person who uses Roadie or drives with Roadie happy. They know it’s impossible, but they still get up every day and help our drivers and senders out, calm people down and clear up problems. And the end result is damn good customer service with a small team.
• It’s our Technology & Product teams, without which Roadie just wouldn’t exist. It turns out you can’t sell an app-based technology to one of the world’s biggest logistics companies without world class tech. It doesn’t happen by magic, it happens with brains and sweat, and we have some of the best engineers in the business.
• It’s our Sales teams, who are always hustling to keep the money coming in. They’re so good at it that you have to wonder if they just get up every day and give themselves the “Coffee is for closers” speech in front of the mirror.
• Accounts makes sure that once we have those customers, we keep them. Even if a customer has ordered a half ton of lumber that’s somehow expected to fit in the back of a pickup. They just figure it out, make our big customers happy and protect Roadie’s interests.
• And without the smart folks in Marketing, there would be no customers or drivers. They figured out how to keep this incredibly delicate two-sided marketplace in balance. They know how to find the right people in the right places and to make our ideas stick. And they built a brand that made us look legit long before we really were.

But Roadie is a community, and not all of that community comes to work in our (metaphorical) four walls every day.

Behind every successful startup, there’s a community of advisors, investors, helpers and real-talkers: visionaries who see your startup for what it could be early on and give you the tools to bring that vision to life.?

We certainly have one at Roadie. There’s a whole tribe of people who helped us take Roadie from a tiny startup meeting in my brother’s airplane hangar to a subsidiary of one of the biggest shipping and logistics companies in the world.?

• To the best entrepreneur and salesman I’ve ever known, Steve Gorlin. When I graduated from UGA, my Dad said, “Marc, don’t find a job, find a deal.”?
• Warren Stephens, my partner, investor and friend for almost 25 years. I’ve moved faster than most founders could dream because he trusted me.
• Frank Blake is the mentor I wish I’d had my entire business career. I’m a better leader because he chose to spend time with me.
• Ludacris went to the dance with us well before we deserved it, and answers my calls no matter what area code he’s in.
• Walt Ehmer and Pat Warner for knowing the value of community early on. They gave our app users free waffles back when our drivers were outnumbered by Waffle House locations by 2:1.
• Scott Thompson, Alan Schwartz, Jim McKelvey and Jon Ziglar for investing time and money early when they had way bigger plates to spin; and to David Bonderman who not only invested, but helped us land Delta as our first anchor tenant.
• To Ed Bastian, Gil West and Bill Lentch at Delta for taking a risk and understanding that innovation is messy before its not. But it’s worth it.?
• To my brother Jarrett Gorlin for letting us take over his airplane hangar at PDK when we didn’t have an office, and turning a blind eye when we filled the ladies restroom wall to wall with boxes of Roadie t-shirts and koozies.
• To friends and advisors Peter Astiz, Peter Conlon, Mary Jane Credeur, Monroe Laboisse, Victoria Treyger and Amy Zimmerman, who showed up when we needed them and lended their expertise across nearly every part of the business. They never once sent me an invoice, even when they should have.?
• To my former co-founders Rob Frohwein, Kathryn Petralia, Gregg Freishtat, Palaniswamy Rajan and Phil Zimmermann for helping me turn all those mistakes along the way into lessons that made a difference this time around. My humble thanks to each of you for sharing those journeys with me. When I started Roadie, Gregg told me it was too big and too hard. (You were right, man.)

And last but not least, thank you.

If you’re a customer, a driver, or just a cheerleader, thank you for your support, this year and every year. Words cannot express my gratitude.?

Happy Thanksgiving.

—Marc