Krenar Komoni: 0:03

The fresher it is, the better for the consumer. The fresher it is, the more margin you can charge, the more dollars you can make. The fresher it is, the consumer is going to pick that instead of anything else. So in order to get the freshest produce into the retail store, into the market, the only way you can do that is by having a very sustainable supply chain, a very sustainable end to end shipping view

Tom Raftery: 0:28

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing on sustainability and supply chains, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 37 of the sustainable supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery, and I'm excited to be here with you today. Sharing the latest insights and trends in supply chain sustainability. Before we kick off today's show. I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of our amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping this podcast going, and I'm really grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter. I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about sustainability and supply chains. Supporting the podcast is easy and affordable with options starting as low as just three euros or dollars a month. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee and your support will make a huge difference in helping keep this show going strong. To become a supporter you simply click on the support link in the show notes of this. Or any episode, or visit tiny url.com/s S C pod. In today's episode, I'm talking to Krenar Komoni from Tive and we're talking about IOT trackers. And in the upcoming episodes in the next couple of weeks, I'll be talking to Julian Harris, CEO of Robobai, Spencer Malcolm from Forsyth, Karl McDermott from Deltatrack and Joanne Flinn. From the ESG Institute. But as I said, my special guest on the show today is Krenar. Krenar, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Krenar Komoni: 2:09

Hi, Tom. Great seeing you. I'm very excited to be on this podcast. Yeah, my name is Krenar Komoni. I'm the CEO and founder of a company called Tive. And I started the company almost nine years ago. My background is in engineering. I originally come from Kosovo and I'm actually sitting in our office here where we have 85 employees as of today, which is pretty exciting. We've grown, we have more than 200 employees as a company. But I, I grew up here. I came to the United States when I was, I went to the United States when I was 17 years old studied high school there and I finished college and my master's all in computer engineering, mathematics, electrical engineering, and worked for a lot of startups. My entire life, I've never worked for a big company, but I've worked for a lot of startups. So I have a lot of startup experience. And I, I work for companies that design chipsets. We designed 2g, 3g, 4g chip all in a single die, doing all those wireless, even wifi and Bluetooth in it. And then I've worked for an MIT MIT startup where I was the first employee and we designed the world's most efficient base stations. They go on cell towers. So when you drive around and you see those antennas, those big towers, there's always a base station that is actually doing all the work to connect our phones to it. It's a lot of experience with wireless. And then I did a lot of work with consulting with companies like ViaSat, Olympus, designing chipsets for satellites and pill cams that go inside your body. A lot of wireless experience. But the way I stumbled into starting Tive, I can talk a little bit about that if you're interested.

Tom Raftery: 3:45

Please do, Yeah. I was going to say what, what was your kind of Damascene moment that made you decide to start up your own business, Tive, and why?

Krenar Komoni: 3:54

Yeah. So I, I say the reason why I started Tive is quote unquote, through marriage or because of marriage. When I got married my wife's my lovely wife's father, he's got a trucking company and every time I would go is in house he would be in the phone trying to figure out where his truck drivers are. So my father in law's trucking company actually sold it a few months ago but every time I would go to his house trying to drink wine and have a dinner with him he would get up in the middle of it, call the truck driver and figure out where they are. Did they load? Did they unload a shipment? I'm like, this is crazy. I need to just relax and spend time with you. And I decided to make a GPS tracker and put it in his trucks. So I started putting these GPS trackers in his trucks. I would go and install them at night. And then his friend who had more trucks, he's like, can you track mine? So I started tracking his friends trucks. So I started tracking trucks for everybody, almost in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is pretty cool. And I built a little application using my engineering background, use PHP, my SQL so they could see the map of truck drivers. But one of the truck drivers called Tony, he would show me these temperature sensor that would actually, people would put it on the back of the truck and he would haul lobster, scallops and fish kind of from New Bedford, Massachusetts and to a lot of locations in New England and other areas and I asked him, how does this temperature sensor work? He said, well, at the end of the shipment, somebody takes a look at it and sees whether the temperature was in range or not. I'm like, at the end of the shipment, that's a little too crazy and too late. So why don't I take the GPS tracker that I put in front of the truck, put a battery on it and put on the back of the truck and add these sensors so that I can measure what's happening on the back of the truck in real time. And that's where the whole idea of TIVE started. It's, it's just, this was since June of 2015. It's been more than nine years now.

Tom Raftery: 5:45

Nice. And of course this is the sustainable supply chain podcast. So what does that have to do with sustainability?

Krenar Komoni: 5:55

It has to do a lot. I mean, in the beginning, obviously, I didn't realize, but if you think of sustainability in general, and one of the things that is a pillar of it is the idea of not having a lot of waste. Because anything that you have to throw away, anything you have to dispose of, it's not that you're just losing revenue on that product. You have to also dispose it, which causes a lot of emissions and causes a lot of waste in the planet. It just, it's not good for our world. In order to reduce waste, the best thing to do is understand if something's about to go to waste ahead of time so you can take action and fix it. And if you think of fish, if you think of all the perishables and food and produce and pharmaceuticals, a lot of those shipments are temperature sensitive. And if a load of berries is above 40 degrees Fahrenheit for more than six, seven hours, it's pretty much gone. You have to, you have to do a lot of things to it to maybe make it into a jam, but I don't think that jam is going to be good either. So there's a lot of, it's pretty much wasted. And all of that waste, then you have to transport it somewhere else. You have to throw it away, you have to dispose of it. It just affects sustainability quite a bit. And on top of that, there's also customers like Superstar, which does a lot of produce shipments from Mexico into Texas. Companies like Alpo and Fresh, which do a lot of shipments of produce of berries and asparagus from Chile, from all the LATAM countries into the United States. They've saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on waste that could have gone by detecting temperature in real time and take an action on it. So this is one, one area that I think it's very important. What I realized also that when I started the company, Food Drug Administration, so Food and Drug Administration, FDA, They also have this thing called Food Safety Modernization Act, FSMA, Which is short, it's called FSMA. So with FSMA, there's a lot of regulations that every produce, every perishable, everything that gets transported around food needs to be tracked and needs to log temperature throughout his journey, and they need to save that temperature for more than 12 months, so that if something happens, the USDA, if there's an issue like we've had in the past with with some of the companies where avocado caused some issues with a lot of consumers, then you have salad and lettuce issues with E. coli. All relate to sometimes on hygiene in the beginning, but also most importantly, sometimes of lack of good transportation. But if you can avoid all of that because you can measure things in real time and understand what's happening in real time and take action, if temperature is rising, if a refrigerator is broken, you can avoid all those issues and you can avoid a lot of insurance claim. You can avoid and have more sustainable future for all these companies.

Tom Raftery: 8:53

Nice. And this move towards or, this view on sustainability, is this something that's coming from your customers? Is it something that's something that's coming from yourself? Is it something that's coming from investors? Is it, you know, or all of the above where, where's that pressure coming from?

Krenar Komoni: 9:17

The pressure is, I would say, multifold, but at the end it's the consumer. At the end is the consumer safety that's number one, right? And what that leads to is a more sustainable future for the growers, for shippers, for transportation. Because the consumer, when they get that produce, when they get that food that they want to eat, the fresher it is, the better for the consumer. The fresher it is, the more margin you can charge, the more dollars you can make. The fresher it is, the consumer is going to pick that instead of anything else. So in order to get the freshest produce into the retail store, into the market, the only way you can do that is by having a very sustainable supply chain, a very sustainable end to end shipping view. And because of that. Because of the consumer driven, then you have regulatory drivers, like I mentioned with FDA and FSMA, which is putting pressure quite a bit on all the shippers and retail stores to have all the records on every single shipment out there. And then you have, well, I can have the records with something that's not real time, maybe passive, but then you have the, pressures around shippers trying to be the best that in the market, have a competitive advantage. So they can meet those consumer demands of on freshness. So that's when real time comes into place. So it's a lot of drivers, but investors, I would say there is some pressure there. I want, there's a lot of investors that obviously are focused on climate and sustainability. And there's more of those firms that have popped up in the last few years than have ever before. Cause they've seen the importance that did place at the end, the consumer benefits at the end, you can charge more to the consumer side, whether it's on freshness, whether it's on organic, whether it's on sustainable supply chain. But at the end, it's the consumer and the regulators that are driving it the most, I would say.

Tom Raftery: 11:39

Okay. And in terms of the consumers, is the freshness something you're exposing to them in some way, or something that your customers are exposing to them in some way?

Krenar Komoni: 11:50

I wouldn't say that that's happening yet. But it's something that's being planned on and something that the retail stores want to expose more and more of where they can say this is the freshest product. This product has more shelf life than any other product out there. If you buy from this retail store, the shelf life is two times more than if you buy in another retail store. So that's something that's I believe going to happen in the next few years.

Tom Raftery: 12:16

Okay. Another thing we're seeing obviously in the sustainable world is the move towards circularity. Is that something that you're embracing as well?

Krenar Komoni: 12:25

Yeah, we're seeing that quite a bit on not just on food and perishables, but also on life sciences. One thing that you see there is quite a bit with reusable packaging. So there are a lot of reusable packaging happening. When shippers ship into retail stores, they're using plastic reusable containers that they can reuse over and over again instead of just cardboard that got thrown away or plastic that got thrown away. We're seeing quite a bit of that in life sciences with reusable cold, cold chain packaging. So reusable packages that have gels, obviously, that keep temperature for 24, 48, 72 hours, 2 to 8 or below 0 degrees Celsius. And there used to be packages that people threw away, but now a lot of these are being reused. A lot of consumers are working on this. A lot of customers are working this reusable and circular economy. And what we're doing on our end is doing the same thing. What we do is we have these trackers that customers just press a button, put into a shipment and they get real time information anywhere in the globe where the shipment is. And what its condition is, how hot, how cold, how wet, did somebody open a trailer, open a package, all of that data in real time. These connect to 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G connectivity all over the world. And, if you think of the trackers, we would love to reuse them as much as possible. So we push quite a bit on the customer side to reuse these and if a customer can't because they're shipping it to multiple locations, they're shipping it to locations where we cannot get these back, we work with them to recycle these. So we will call the receivers, we will create relationships with receivers through our customer and work on getting these back, cleaning them, refurbishing them recycling them, charging them again, and then using them again on the next shipment. These can go for many, many times. They're not just, they're great for one shipment, obviously, but they're also great for 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 shipments after that. And that circular economy is really important for type 2.

Tom Raftery: 14:32

Okay. I assume then they've got a built in rechargeable battery so that they can be, as you said, recharged and put out again and again.

Krenar Komoni: 14:39

Yes, absolutely. So the, both the lithium, we have both lithium and non lithium versions, and there's a rechargeable port here. You just type in USB C and you can charge it. And we moved, this is the newest tracker Solo Light, we moved from micro USBs to USB C. We've noticed, obviously, I'm sure now in your house, in my house, everywhere, in our office, everybody has a USB C. And with the push of iPhone 15, moving to USB C and Apple even embracing the future on USB C, around sustainability and, I mean, how many cables are wasted, if you think of that. This is another decision that we made around sustainability.

Tom Raftery: 15:19

Nice. And you mentioned real time tracking and the sensors sense heat. I think I heard you say humidity light and is, is that it? Heat,

Krenar Komoni: 15:35

we have two versions. We have this one also senses shock. So if something got dropped, we can also sense that. And it can also sense orientation of a shipment. So if somebody's shipping servers, if a server tilts

Tom Raftery: 15:50

over.

Krenar Komoni: 15:51

or tips over, they're really not good. They cannot use that server, so they have to do all the investigations, inspections again during shipment. And so this is something that helps with that quite a bit.

Tom Raftery: 16:02

Okay. And can you share a customer win, you know, in a specific example where real time tracking significantly reduced shipment issues?

Krenar Komoni: 16:16

Yes. I mean, just for, there's a lot of customers, we have 790 customers almost every day now, definitely multiple times a week we have issues where we very confident we've have saved shipments. I can give you a few examples. So if, if you go to our website, you can lead a lot of case studies with Alpine Fresh, which is the produce customer that I talked about. Superstar, which also does produce. And they've been able to detect temperature excursions while in transit, call the truck driver, make sure that the reefer setting is correct. Because what happens is, sometimes when they load up a truck, truck leaves, the reefer setting could be off. Could be off by 5 degrees Fahrenheit, could be off by 10 degrees Fahrenheit. But that's enough to cause an issue after 8, 24, 48 hour drive, depending on where the shipment is going. And we detect that immediately, obviously with the temperature sensor, and they can call the truck driver and make sure that the reefer setting is correct. And that's happened multiple times with those two customers. We've had customers one customer called Optimized Courier, which ships a lot of life science and pharmaceuticals, but obviously really fast. The company is called Optimized Courier, meaning they go on airplanes, they go on the fastest shipments possible. The challenge with that is sometimes a shipment can get stuck somewhere in a tarmac.

Tom Raftery: 17:42

Right.

Krenar Komoni: 17:43

And if it has to go from one plane to the next, and somehow they don't find it, the other plane has to leave, and that shipment's on the tarmac. In pharmaceuticals, this concept is called stability budget. Every drug has a budget on how much it can withstand how much time it can withstand above a certain degree Celsius. Like if it's above eight degrees Celsius from X amount of time, then you have to throw away that drug. We were able to detect this in real time, know exactly where it was. They were able to call the air carrier and move that shipment immediately so that it doesn't go to waste and still meet the stability budget of the drug. I think if you think of how many shipments like that happened for us, it's it's a lot. So the amount of savings that we do for customers on a weekly, monthly basis, it's in millions of dollars.

Tom Raftery: 18:34

Wow! Fantastic, how did feedback from customers influence the design and features of Solo Light?

Krenar Komoni: 18:43

Oh, that one I would say it's all feedback from customers. So when I started the company, when I started the company, I was very involved with customers, like I mentioned with my father in law and with other trucking companies, and then started going in the back of the truck. In the back of the truck, obviously the truck driver doesn't have much influence there? But it's mostly the shipper who's putting and loading the truck, whether it's with berries, whether it's your drugs and more and more, what I kept hearing is we need something that's single use. This was back in 2019, 2018. We want trackers that we can use once, and we don't have to think about bringing them back because we ship into so many different locations. And that's what we did in 2019, 2020. We built the solo 5g. Which has a lot of features, temperature, humidity, shock, light, orientation, GPS, very accurate GPS, Wi Fi positioning, cellular triangulation orientation of a shipment, all of that, and we made it very cost effective, which was a big reason why we've been very successful. But in order to increase the total addressable market, in order to go beyond just the highest value shipments, only the highest temperature sensitive shipments, only time sensitive shipments, and to go on to more let's call it more generic shipments. One thing that we keep hearing from our customers where can you build something lighter. Can you build something that has less features. I want to know the location, I want to know temperature, I want to know the light, I want to know if somebody opened it or not, but that's it. Humidity is okay. GPS, very, very accurate within a few feet. It's okay. It's within a hundred, 200 feet. I don't need like within one meter. I just want to know the generic, can you build something like that? Obviously we still have this one for all the customers that want something extremely more specific and feature rich. And that's why we like after listening to hundreds and hundreds of customers, what we had to do is also wait for convergence of technology to come into play. Where battery I would say electrical vehicle batteries started to ramp up quite rapidly now. I'm not sure if you're aware, but I was googling the other day. What was the most sold car ever in 2023? The most sold model was Model Y from Tesla, and I was shocked. I thought it was gonna be like a CRV or a Honda or a Toyota, which was in 2022 and 2021. But the highest sold car was Model Y of Tesla. And what that caused is a lot of other electrical vehicle batteries to scale and the cost of those batteries to go down, which has helped us. So we had to wait for that. Then we had to wait for cellular connectivity to go down a little bit on costs, and we had to wait for sensors. And we had to also wait for the radios and radio technology to get a little bit more cost effective and simpler for the, for, for the market. And all of this converged now. And we've been able to release the type Solo Light, quote unquote, lighter version as customers, but a lot of feedback from customers,

Tom Raftery: 21:50

Okay. Fantastic. And what would you say is the most surprising or unexpected thing that you've learned about the supply chain industry since starting Tive?

Krenar Komoni: 22:04

Most unexpected and surprising, and I still am surprised today because it's a little bit shocking is the lack of technology and lack of cutting edge technology in this industry. There are still companies just a few months ago I had a product and myself. We went and did close to 50 customer interviews. One by one by one talks to and I continuously talk to customers every day every week, but we did deep interviews with the 50 customers and I continue to do more. And when I realized there's companies that are running billion dollar businesses. And moving the goods using spreadsheets today in 2024 and that is mind boggling. And this is the most surprising thing that I've ever experienced. These are not 500,000 dollar companies a million dollars a year. We're talking a billion dollars of revenue per year.

Tom Raftery: 23:11

All right.

Krenar Komoni: 23:13

it's

Tom Raftery: 23:14

Spreadsheets are high tech for some people.

Krenar Komoni: 23:16

They are. And I think it's, it's, it's okay. But just the scale and the amount of labor and the amount of errors and mistakes they go through. It's a every day. It's a lot of manual work.

Tom Raftery: 23:29

Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. How do you balance innovation with practicality when developing new products like Sololite?

Krenar Komoni: 23:41

I would say practicality is. So this is what I've learned, I guess, since starting the company. I thought innovation and tech is what wins everything. What I've realized over time is practicality is more important than I would say it has a higher bar than the actual innovation and technology. Practicality and simplicity of a product is most important thing in my opinion. And then let's figure out the best technology that's available out there. The cutting edge way of doing everything that's possible to bring that simplicity into customer. That's how I, I look at it. And we want the consumer, the customer, when using the product to feel the simplicity, we want the customer to feel like this is so easy. I press a button, it light turns on, I put it on a shipment and I get real time visibility anywhere in the globe. But if you think of on the backend, all the things that have to happen, the design, the firmware connectivity, customer support, just the software, databases, connections, everything that needs to have integrations into the transportation management system. We want all of that to be almost invisible to the consumer, to the customer. So they see, feel that the word that you use, which I like, practicality is, is paramount.

Tom Raftery: 25:04

Nice. Nice. And how do you see the integration of the likes of AI, for example, which everyone is talking about these days and machine learning shaping the future of supply chain visibility?

Krenar Komoni: 25:19

I think that most important thing for AI and machine learning, in order to, the, the companies that are going to have the biggest benefit and bring the most amount of good to supply chains are the companies that have a lot of data and the companies that are the primary source generator of data into these AI and machine learning models. That's how I see the future, and I really believe that we as a company, because we are the primary source of generation of data and our data is unified. Call it standard across every single shipment. We know location. We know the sensor data on what's happening with that shipment and have millions and millions of points coming and data coming into the system using artificial intelligence and machine learning we'll be able to do a lot of interesting things for our customers in the future. And what's going to happen, I think, is you can say using artificial intelligence and large language models and also machine learning, you're going to be able to look at 10, 20, 100, 1000 shipments from the past. Look at what's happening with weather in the future. Look at what's happening with geopolitical risks. And there's a lot of data sources now around all those events that are happening through the globe. And you can ask ChatGPT or a large language model, obviously through this data and say, My shipment is in the next two weeks. What should I do? These are the plans that I have set up. I'm going to go through these ocean carriers. I'm going to do these routes. I'm going to go through these carriers on the truck side. These are the routes they're about to take. Is everything okay? And ChatGPT is going to say, well, I would recommend you do one, two and three. Ship tomorrow instead of today, ship using this carrier and tell them to use this route instead of the other route because of X, Y and Z. And this is something that I'm very confident will happen. It's not next week, but probably in the next year or two. And what's going to enable is the ultimate goal, which is almost impossible to get to, but it's the concept of the autonomous supply chain. Where demand sensing is going to be live on what consumers are consuming food, drugs, life science, perishables, vehicles, whatever, whatever consumers we consume water. And then you have the manufacturing side, the production side, and then you have the supply chain side. So you have inventory on the warehouses. You have consumption at the retail stores, the end consumer, and you have inventory all in between while in transit doing all of this autonomously is the ultimate dream, right? And that's going to have the least amount of waste and the highest sustainability with the highest efficiency for our planet. But to get there is going to be who knows, 50 years, 100 years, but AI and machine learning is going to be a big part of getting us closer to that goal.

Tom Raftery: 28:35

Okay. And what do you see as the biggest challenges in making supply chain practices more sustainable globally?

Krenar Komoni: 28:43

The biggest challenge, I think it's going to be the geopolitical risks. And I don't think there's any other challenges in my opinion. I think that's the biggest risk. If you look at the risk index, call it, of the world after World War Two. And you look at where we were with COVID, the risk index of our planet, it's probably the highest it's ever been. Because you have so many things happening with, you have the elections here, you have the Houthi, the, the, through Suez Canal, the, the, the attacks that are happening on with the rebels, you have the Hamas situation, you have the China situation, obviously with Taiwan, there's Russia and Ukraine, and you, you, I can probably keep adding to those.

Tom Raftery: 29:31

Myanmar.

Krenar Komoni: 29:33

It's never been I mean, it's been, but maybe it's been one issue and the world could deal with it. Maybe two, but never four, five, six, seven issues that are happening concurrently. And I think that's some of the why I think that's going to be the biggest risk. Because then what happens is we were going to go to electrical vehicles in 2030. We're going to go to electric vehicles in 2035, 2040, but then who's supplying all those electric vehicles? You start putting tariffs here. It's in Europe. It's United States. And then now you say, well, we're going to go more diesel and more for a longer time. You take different routes in supply chains that were very efficient, but now you've got to do a little bit more inefficient, pay a little bit more. I think geopolitical risk is the highest to, to help us get to supply chain sustainability because it is the biggest risk towards that global autonomous supply chain.

Tom Raftery: 30:29

Sure, sure, sure. And where do you see the greatest opportunities for innovation in supply chain over the next few years?

Krenar Komoni: 30:37

I'll be a little selfish, obviously, because I'm really focused on Tive and what we're doing. I believe the biggest innovations are going to be around measuring the world. And measuring getting the ground truth data around what's happening with supply chains, and that's going to be the biggest opportunity because the amount of data that we can get and generate, it's going to help us make this world more sustainable and more efficient. And the biggest innovations are going to be around driving down costs of real time connectivity throughout the globe, and there's a lot of interesting things happening around satellite connectivity around other many other areas that are outside of our control, obviously, with innovations that are going to support getting the devices to be smaller, getting devices to be more cost effective and be ubiquitous around the world on figuring out where these assets and where the shipments are. And with that data, if we measure something, then we can do something about it. That's going to be the biggest I think, opportunity to innovate, in my opinion.

Tom Raftery: 31:41

Nice. And what kind of metrics or KPIs should companies focus on to kind of measure the success of their sustainability initiatives and how can they ensure continuous improvement?

Krenar Komoni: 31:54

I would say the biggest metric and the easiest one to start with is looking at all their lane and their, their routes and their trade lanes throughout the entire supply chain, whether a big company or small company and measuring those and seeing, do they have too much buffer on those? Are they having 20 day buffer, 15 day buffer, 30 day buffer? Because the more buffer you have, the more inventory you have, the more inventory you have, the less sustainable you are as a company. And are you having areas where you're wasteful meaning even though insurance might pay for it, even though you might suffer revenue, then you still okay as a business, but still waste. Are those areas where with real time visibility, you can avoid that waste? So I would say those are the two biggest areas that they can focus on.'cause it's easy today to measure, it's easy to calculate and analyze and it's easy to take action and cut down on buffer, but at the same time reduce waste

Tom Raftery: 32:59

Okay. And kind of a left field question. What's a book or a podcast, let's say apart from this one, or a documentary that has significantly influenced your approach to business or sustainability?

Krenar Komoni: 33:17

To business or sustainability. I would say the one that really influenced me, and it's very recent it is called Beyond Zero. I don't know if you've watched the documentary and let me just remember the company's name. It's called. Oh, my God. It's a It's a really big company that makes carpets for all the carpets. If you're honest, like right now in our office, all the carpets are these square carpets. I think it's called integrate or it has an eye in front of it. But what I love about the CEO who has passed away now, there was so much waste in these carpets. And if you think of all the carpets, there's these glue, everything that you have to put into every single office in the world has these carpets, and they build them with these now they're squares. But back then, it used to be bigger, it used to glue them. So they removed the glue, they made these little squares that would just connect the four carpets, and the gravity would hold the carpets down on the floor. And then on the back of those squares. The whole, the four carpets had the recycle me phone number, everything around it, and they've been able to create, become a very sustainable company by just making carpets. That has influenced me a lot. I would encourage everybody to watch that documentary. It's called Beyond Zero, and that's something that I've also told my team. That's something that I've encouraged my team to continuously think about. What? How can we be even more creative by day to figure out how can we get more of these trackers back and how we can help our customers be more conscious around their sustainability and recyclability of product? Cause if you think of it, it just opens your mind around waste. And I think that's the, it's a really good documentary. I would highly recommend.

Tom Raftery: 35:07

I'll look out for it. I haven't seen it. So thank you for that. We're coming towards the end of the podcast. Now, Krenar, is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I had, or And the aspect of this, we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of.

Krenar Komoni: 35:22

The only thing I would I could say is the one around when I started the company on how I thought about and I envisioned kind of the future of what's gonna happen. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that, because if you think, imagine the world of we're tracking every single thing,

Tom Raftery: 35:38

Uh

Krenar Komoni: 35:38

And when I started the company, I'm like, we're gonna make these trackers. They're gonna have lithium batteries. And the more of them we make, the more lithium batteries are going to be out there. And the more shipments there are, the more waste potentially we're going to create as a company. And as I kept thinking of the future and the vision always, I, I always use a trick in my brain just called like an infinite game. What can you, if you pull time to infinity, if you grow customers to infinity, if you build everything to infinity. Is that the right thing to do? Is that a good thing?

Tom Raftery: 36:14

Hmm.

Krenar Komoni: 36:14

And if you think just making GPS trackers with lithium batteries and throwing them away obviously to infinity is a really, really bad thing for the world. So I've always pushed the team, but also ourselves. We were the first ones to introduce non lithium batteries on trackers in 2020 and we always always envision of future where trackers are reused as much as possible. And they're recycled. And there is this circular concept around economy and the percentage of that keeps growing up every single year so that the waste keeps going down percentage every single year. And that's something that since the day when I started the company, I'm like, we gotta get to data first, but in order to continuously grow and we have to have sustainability always in our mind. And that's something that I'm very proud of our team and continuously. We're going to drive here in Tive.

Tom Raftery: 37:05

Fantastic. And if people, Krenar, would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Krenar Komoni: 37:15

Tive. com. T I V E dot com. It's very easy. And they can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. Krenar Komoni. Pretty easy.

Tom Raftery: 37:26

And I never asked you, where does the name Tive come from?

Krenar Komoni: 37:29

Oh, it's a very good story. So when I started the company, I didn't want any company that was three letters. Because I thought three letters is like a law firm or an architecture firm. I didn't want a company with two names like Dropbox or Airbnb, it just, it felt like it was too much. It was exciting back then, but it felt too much this time. And I didn't want a company with five, six, seven letters. I wanted something like four, like Lego, Nike, Puma, Ford Uber, Lyft. I can keep going on, company, Dell, keep going on with companies with four letters. And the tracker I had built for my father in law was in my car and I was driving. It was just like the first prototype, and I had to incorporate the company and like next week I'm like, what does this thing do? And the words that came to my mind were active, intuitive, sensitive, quantitative, and it was TIVE, TIVE, TIVE, TIVE, but I'm like, I'm not going to call it TIVE, I'm going to call it TIVE and that's it. That's the story of the name.

Tom Raftery: 38:27

Nice. Nice. Superb Krenar, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Krenar Komoni: 38:34

Thank you so much, Tom. Really enjoyed it. Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.