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Comment by WisNorCan | Hacker News Reader

They got caught in the same thing that happened to Flexport and others in the freight industry.

Price per shipment cratered -> Revenue cratered. (They make a % of each shipment) -> Losses spiked up. (Because they had fixed cost)

Flexport had a burn run rate of $600M a year. Convoy had less burn but also less in the bank.

https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/flexport-revenue-dr...

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So Convoy's UVP was based all on price? Wouldn't the CEO/COO have seen this before rapid expansion?

I thought Flexport was still hiring a month or two ago

They had that weird moment where they fired/rescinded a bunch of new hires after Peterson came back and basically said "oh yeah we weren't supposed to be hiring."

They were and the ceo commented on twitter that he had no idea why that was and then rescinded offers to people who were starting the next week.

The CEO who was the founder and until he came back as CEO was on the BOD, the executive, in fact.

"No idea at all!"

I've worked at 1k employee-sized companies. The CEOs definitely know what's happening, who shits on who, who's hired/fired, what each project is going through at a glance, etc. So I would attribute this 100% to either lying, incompetence and/or "faking" by trying to emulate a Steve Jobs/CEO persona.

The founder left the company and brought in a new CEO from amazon. He was still on the board. Then he saw they were hiring and complained on twitter, presumably fired the new ceo and came back to rescind the offers. I think it's believable that he was chilling on the beach or something until he saw the hiring news.

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