Jason Park: So we are a technology platform for E commerce brands with perishable products. So specifically, if your product is frozen or refrigerated, think like a meal kit or a frozen box of steaks or something like that, it is prohibitively expensive and prohibitively complicated to ship to your customers, because the product spoils.
So because the product spoils, you have to constantly change how you ship based on the temperature, and the weather, on time delivery, and you have to do that while getting the lowest cost possible.
This is just so unwieldy for companies. So we've created a technology platform that automates that process across warehouses, we figure out down to the level of each individual box, how many packs of ice should you put in that box, for example. And all of that runs through a single kind of plug and play platform.
And so companies on our platform are typically saving about 15 to 50 percent cost per shipment. And we've been reducing spoilage and refunds from late shipments by about 52 percent.
So just getting started looking forward to continuing to scale this business. It's been quite the journey; we've got a great team that we've been fortunate to bring on to do that with us.
Felicia Shakiba: It's a pretty impressive problem you're taking on, it's very detailed, and it sounds like you've put a lot of work behind coming up with a working solution. I'd like to refer to an article I read by Meredith Summers.
And then her article on the three traits of an entrepreneurial mindset, it highlights the importance of being solutions oriented, adaptable, and anti fragile. Are these competencies important to you? Do they apply to your world?
Jason Park (03:21): 100%. It definitely resonates, whether it's at Coldcart, or other situations I've been in where we were creating a new business or, frankly, just solving a problem in a way that hadn't been solved before. And I think would also resonate about the article was the argument that, yes, startups definitely need this, but startups alone can't solve all the world's problems.
You need large corporations, you need government, you need NGOs, who also have an entrepreneurial mindset and can solve problems and you know when I think about it, that's a lot of people who need to have this entrepreneurial mindset.
And I think one thing that I've often thought about in this context is I think it's commonly believed that the entrepreneurial mindset is a set of innate personality traits.
It's a who you are versus something that can be taught. I think one thing that I've been really trying to do is try to think of it not necessarily in terms of personality traits or things that are innate, inalienable, but, you know, what does it look like when people who have this mindset, or how do they approach a problem?
What's distinct about that? And maybe by getting to a more framing of it, that we can kind of help more people have that kind of mindset or kind of solve problems in the way that, where I very much agree with the article, is needed in our society? Yes, it definitely resonates.
As you continue your journey, how does the definition of entrepreneurial mindset take Shape for you?
Jason Park: Our customers are trusting us with one of their most, if not the most mission critical process they have, these are fulfillment of an order and the delivery of that order to a customer. That touches every sale made. And that's a process with a lot of steps and a lot of details below the surface, and, frankly, a lot of entrenched views on how those steps should be performed.
And so from a - kind of as we were developing our product and our business, you know, our challenge is kind of twofold.
One was that because this is such a mission critical process, the bar on quote, unquote, minimum viable to use that kind of product management term, there's a very high level of minimum viability of every step of that process and a very high bar that customers are expecting you to clear for them to actually trust you with their business and their customers.
And so how that shows up at Coldcart, there are two or three things that I've observed here with a team and myself and I'm just thinking about these things, and it comes down to how do these people work? How do they approach problems? I think they're kind of three factors that I think sort of show up consistently.
One is a focus on why over what, you get a lot of information every day you talk to people, you see and hear a lot of things, but this is really about going beyond what you see and here, and really digging for underlying causes, origins, motivations, that's that level where you actually start to solve problems in ways that are different and better. But you have to be the one to dig for those types of insights they don't present themselves.
I think about, for example, every company we meet every brand we meet usually will say something at the beginning, like Oh, I want to ship through UPS. Why do you want to ship through UPS? Oh, because at discounts a UPS? OK how's your on-time delivery? I'm refunded 10% of my shipments this past month, because a lot of late deliveries. And so it's like, okay, one interpretation of that is I've got a ship them through UPS, but what if I can solve both your problems cost and on time delivery? And what if I can do that by picking a different carrier for every shipment based on what the cost or the on-time delivery is?
That should actually start to move the curve forward in terms of being able to get to not just better cost, but also better on time delivery through a different model, but you don't get through to that kind of solution, I think unless you're asking those questions. So that's one.
I think a second quality that manifests I think how people with the entrepreneurial mindset approach the work is this idea of progress before perfection.
And this is an idea that's become you know, be widely accepted over the past couple of decades with your agile product development, lean startup and things like that. It means one that you don't let unknowns stop you from moving forward, or rather, you use those unknowns as hypotheses to test and turn them into knowns. It also means being very aggressive and very precise about deciding what do we actually need to solve versus what can wait to be solved until later and that can be very difficult.
I do think this gets kind of misunderstood often as justification for lazy, sloppy works. And well, I'll just put it out there, the customers will tell us what they want. It's sure the customer is the ultimate judge.
But a customer is not going to forgive a crappy product, because Oh, we run an agile development process. You know you might try to sell that to a customer. Rigor doesn't have to be slow.
It just means that just like everything else about a startup, being resourceful and fast about using what you have available with data, whether that's hopefully after 30 minutes to think about potential failure scenarios, you're just get this idea that we are so decisive, or you are so decisive about what's important to know, and what's not. And you don't let the unknown stop you.
I think in one way that's manifested at Coldcart is we made a decision very early on in our product development to focus first on the physical shipping outcomes before we really got into optimizing and fine tuning the user experience because ultimately, what job is our customer hiring us to do? They need their boxes shipped and while we may not physically touch the boxes, they're entrusting us to make sure the right things happen with those boxes.
What matters is what happens to the shipments and that the work gets done. And a lot of us can come from environments where UX is very important. And we have a lot of passion about that and should have said sometimes and say, Alright, well we're gonna focus on that later and our standard from the lessons, it just shouldn't get in the way.
And now that we've got the foundation for the platform that the operations side of it really works and works very seamlessly in scalably that now we've really shifted to stay, Oh now let's come back to the UX and think about the day-to-day users of our product and how can we make their lives more efficient?
How can we give them better information faster, and in better ways and self-service and things like that. But there was a decision to say, one comes before the other, versus trying to solve all of it at the same time, because it's all part of the same product. And then I'd say the third...
Before you get to your third point I wanted to ask, I've seen a lot of people struggle with this point "progress over perfection," because they really are perfectionists, and they're extremely good at what they do. And they can't hold themselves to a product or the work that they do and see something either unfinished, leave their fingertips. I'm just curious, how does someone successfully deal with that type of situation?
Jason Park (10:42): It is very hard to do in practice. And, frankly, we're taught in school to be the opposite of this, right? Your job is to learn the material complete, your assignments and answers are right or wrong. And we're taught to be completionists. So we're taught to do the whole thing, and it's very binary, oh, biology is more important than social studies.
So I'm gonna focus mostly on biology and not gonna do any social studies. You can do that, right? But then you get penalized through a lower grade. We're disincentivized to do this early on in our lives. So it is challenging. I think one thing that our team has done really well is we've really built a process around ensuring we do this.
Our Head of Product here runs this great process where we get together every month, let's call it Betting Table and for product ideas, and priorities are accumulating kind of throughout the month, and then they all get reviewed, in conjunction with each other during this betting table process.
And then we allocate points across and say, Okay, well, this one's gonna get five weeks worth of engineering time versus two, etc. And then that is the work that's then done the following month, and it all launches before the end of the month.
And so what that does is you just like- what we were talking about earlier we focus on the back end versus the front end. Your user experience at first is, it forces us to prioritize, because at the end of day, everything is important. People don't just create bad product ideas for the sake of doing it. People create these ideas, because they matter and they are important.
It's what's so hard about it, but ensures that we're constantly forcing ourselves to prioritize, as well as it keeps us focused on output and ensures that we are continuing to ship features that we're continuing to not just talk about ideas, but actually publish and put things out and I think process has been one way our team is, you really come up with a good way of helping us make those decisions collectively and have that mindset, but it's very hard because even though we're taught from birth, essentially, that this is not how the world works. And all sudden you get to do your business and startups. It's like, oh, no, let's do something completely different.
Felicia Shakiba: I really like that idea, the Betting Table. Okay, so I'm gonna let you hit on your third point, go ahead.
Jason Park (12:54): The third way that I think an entrepreneurial mindset has shown up at Coldcart is people, team members really seeing ambiguity as opportunity. And what that really means is, sometimes there's a way that this is the way things are done, and it's the opposite of that. It's, oh, we don't have a way to do that yet, or there isn't a way to do that yet.
And the people who I think kind of have these traits, look at that as opportunities to take ownership, to create, to build something worthwhile. And in many ways, just like we talked about, we learned about this idea of progress over perfection, that this is also not intrinsically wired into us. Humans are biologically wired to fear ambiguity and to crave.
There's a lot of good sort of biological reasons why that makes sense. Startups are entirely ambiguity, because nothing exists yet. And so logically, startups equal fear and sharing while the idea of being in a startup and you know having a big sort of blank canvas to create all these solutions is very exciting. You know, the experience is different, and it is scary, and you don't always know what to do, or there's no clear right or wrong answer.
And a great example, or one example, I can think when this has really kind of shown itself and action is something that could have been very simple and kind of our chore, which was that, you know, we got to a point in our company where we needed a CRM system to manage all the sales lead the different, you know, sales conversations happening, and part of the answer to that is you'll find a tool.
So we went out and we decided to use HubSpot. But the other part is how you use that tool. A lot of companies will just take something like HubSpot and implement it and call it a day. Our team and it was really cool, they're gonna watch it as you get almost like 100% remote you could like see the energy kind of flowing through the virtual room so to speak, is that our really saw that as an opportunity to really build a best in class Sales Machine.
They were kind of like look, we can use this to make ourselves faster. We just hired our first full time sales hire but there was a lot of kind of just work with - alright, How do we really make this into an advantage for us? And the team in this case really saw this black space and saw that as an opportunity to not just sort of hope the gap gets filled with something off the shelf, but really to create and to define, what do we want our sales process to be like?
How can we move through these deals as fast as possible with as high close ratings as possible, and a lot of great insights and findings and discovery just even came out of the process of doing that. And so I think that's an example of when ambiguity is opportunity. And when people really see that.
Felicia Shakiba: I like that you framed it as ambiguity as opportunity. I've heard this competency shared as dealing with ambiguity, but I think you said it better.
And when I first came across this competency when I was getting certified by Korn Ferry International's 360, executive coaching report, when you get that type of certification, you're actually shown all of the statistics around each competency.
And this particular competency, I can tell you, is the most challenging for anyone to achieve. It's like one of the top five, I would say, and it's actually like one of the most desired. And so I think that there's a lot to say when someone works in a startup, because startups are always known to have this ambiguous factor. And if someone can get through that, I think it's really admirable to see that people can actually successfully view ambiguity as an opportunity, so I agree with you. I agree with all of the three points that you made, which leads me to my next question.
I want to understand because knowing how important an entrepreneurial mindset is, I'd love to learn what were the biggest hurdles you faced during the initial stages of hiring for your startup and how did you address those?
Jason Park: When you think about what a startup look like, at the very beginning, I was a guy working out of my basement, there's no business, there's no product yet. And say, hey, like, we've got a lot of great equity we can offer you and one day, this will be worth so much money, but right now, it's pieces of paper. And I think that because especially these days, people find the idea of startups are very exciting, but I think that in the hiring process, people really do self select.
And there are a lot of offers that I made before. Finally, someone decided to join who is our CTO who is still with us.
You know, despite having to work with me. When I've made offers to these people, and we're really going through the process of you know, they're going through the process of do I want to, you know, leave what I'm doing and do this startup, the amount of existential anxiety that came out in those conversations.
I mean, it's so much more than hiring for role in a more established company or something like that, that because you really we saw like, the type of risks that goes into joining a startup really gets into the sort of fundamental - who we are as people and what is an appetite for risk? And how do we sort of face challenges a lot like the entrepreneurial mindset article is describing, antifragile, things like that. But it's just a specific type of risk or challenge that you put yourself through. And it's actually I've met one person who pretty senior person in their career who deliberated for weeks on I really want to do this, but I'm just not sure.
And the thing that ended up pushing them to not do it, there's a big signal from the universe was that they had just started remodeling their house.
Felicia Shakiba: Really? Okay.
Jason Park (18:52): Yeah, the cost of the house remodel was the straw that broke the camel's back eventually. I do think this is an area where having multiple co-founders helps, because then you're not the only crazy person that someone sees, they see that there are other people who are also committed to the mission.
And in my case, even though I was the only full-time employee at Coldcart, in the beginning, I did have three co-founders who had exited startups previously and very successfully. And one of them was the founder of Blue Apron, which was the company that essentially created the perishable e Commerce Industry that we sell to now at Coldcart.
And so I think this helped give us credibility and legitimacy that help the people who joined us in the early days, kind of get over that hump, you know, strike the numbers. Even last week, I was telling our CTO, Joe, you know, as soon as you joined, you de risked this thing for everyone else by more than 50%. So now, it's not just me who they see who's crazy, there's someone else who's bought into this as well.
And so each person who joined cold cart may be just a little less crazy in the eyes of everyone else who joined afterward. And they reduce kind of the risk for the next person and the next person.
When you reflect on your experiences. Are there any insights you wish you had gained earlier, or actions you would have taken differently concerning talent, and people related challenges?
Jason Park: I think that's a question that in some ways, never reaches a final answer. Because every specific person is different, every specific situation is different. And a lot of times, you don't really know how effective something you did was in this regard, until later, but when I have tried to assess myself on the three dimensions we talked about, based on things people have told me, I've done better on versus worse on, you know, starting with this dimension of why over what this idea that you abstract away from specifics and get to another level of why root causes etc.
As someone whose Myers Briggs Personality Type is very high on the intuiting and conceptual dimension, for me, it's almost easier to use an analogy than it is to say something specific. And so I naturally get a lot of energy from this type of thinking and dialogue.
I think that a Coldcart as a team, we've been fortunate to build a team of people who are naturally curious, who are high on critical thinking and generally not content to just accept the first answer they get. If you listen to our meetings, you hear a lot of questions like, what are we really trying to solve here?
Or, you know, why does that matter? And I think these types of questions that get to or help get to the root cause of different things you're seeing and where I have to challenge myself in this regard is to not abstract so much that what I say is too open ended that it leaves too much room for people to diverge in what they take away and understand. And that makes it harder to get to alignment later, at the end of the day, 'why's' still has to turn into 'what' because we're building something and that's why we exist. So I have to find ways to check myself on whether I'm being specific enough.
You know, I always ask the people I work with to call me out if I'm not being specific enough or it's not clear what the action is.
Felicia Shakiba: It's a delicate artful balance.
Jason Park (21:51) But I think the challenge that I kind of have to give to myself and keep giving myself is that not to go so far down that dimension that it's so abstract, that everyone's got their own individual interpretation. And that makes it harder to get to alignment. To at the end of the day, why still needs to turn into what because we're still building something.
And so that's something where like, I'm always kind of looking for ways and just check myself and make sure Okay, are you being specific? And want the team to say, if it's not specific enough, just call me out. When it comes to the idea of progress over perfection, snd we talked about this. I mean, this is, it's very hard to do, right? We're taught to be the opposite.
We're brought up as humans in a way that... that's why often this idea gets sort of over interpreted as, let's just not do a lot of work. And I think that our team at Coldcart has really come up with some good ways through process that that help keep us honest, help keep us focused. I think for me, personally, I just have to remind myself to be mindful of that slippery slope.
Obviously, I value rigor, I have a lot of questions and ask those questions in a way that doesn't either slow down the process or seem like it's slower down the process. And remember, that is a slippery slope.
I think having the institutional process helps. But then also, I think, how we kind of ask those questions how we give feedback, and just kind of remembering that these things tend to get overly interpreted as too little...
I'd say even one even more than the other two are kind of more constant tug of war. And that you're sort of have to keep pulling on it to make sure you have the right balance across both. And then in terms of ambiguity as opportunities.
I'm kind of a weird person in the sense that I actually get a lot of energy from ambiguity that for me, ambiguity is actually freedom.
And I know we're talking about that kind of in a positive sense of this discussion, but really reflecting on more of as a personality flaw than I've had. But I personally, I was volunteering in a food bank in Chicago, and they give you this set of alright follow these 10 steps to pack these boxes that we're going to ship out. And without even knowing of course I'm like, I don't want to do that I want to create my own process.
I am here to help the process and I wasn't even really aware of it. And I think part of that is also like the learning or the thing that I had to constantly sort of hold myself accountable to is that remembering that I'm kind of weird in that regard, and that most people have different levels of ambiguity, tolerance. Most people have different ways they deal with things.
Some people, they respond to ambiguity with a plan or create structure. Some people just wanted to spend an hour talking through it and then that's how they kind of get comfortable with it. I think as a team, we've sort of gotten better at knowing what each other needs and incorporate that into how we work almost subconsciously at this point.
Remember, when I started out as a new consultant at Bain and Company where I used to work, they, kind of get all the new post MBA consultant students to the same hotel in Miami from all global offices every year, and they do everyone trains together, and they do this exercise where they actually use a Myers Briggs and you take your Myers Briggs as you were type is and they do this exercise where a facilitator stands up and says, Okay, we're gonna walk through now and literally walk through an example, project for a client, and they're like, Okay, and different things, milestones happen in the project, and, oh, a client just sent you one out of 10 pieces of data.
If you're an "N", the intuiting kind, take 10 steps forward. If you're an "S," someone who is more sensory and concrete, by nature, take two steps forward. And what it shows you is that different people get there in sort of their own cadence and through the way they get there. And the whole sort of moral of the exercise is that everyone handles ambiguity differently, or more importantly that we are aware of that and consider that and build that into how you work together. And I think for me too it's also someone who's very much like, well, what are the quickest numbers we can get?
Oh, that data exists, let's use that. Oh that's probably 80% correct.
And someone, others are too more like, we really need a plan, and process and seeing how they haven't managed ambiguity, and making sure I'm also learning as much as I can from them going through that exercise, the insights that come out of that, and then also just ensuring that I'm building enough of that into my own process and the way I work with others on the team.
Felicia Shakiba: I think you're really doing a fantastic job at Coldcart. Having this reflective conversation on how these apply. It's clear that this is the why you're so successful and where you're at today.
So, Jason, thank you so much for your time and for being with me today, and sharing with our listeners, how to really cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset. So thank you for being here.
Jason Park: Thank you so much, Felicia. I really enjoyed this and appreciate the chance to spend this time with you.
Felicia Shakiba: That's Jason Park, CEO and Co-founder at Coldcart.
