We’ve spent a lot of money digitizing clinical data, but so far, we haven’t really gotten a return on our investment.

One main reason, lack of trust in the data.

For last 5-10 years, we’ve been stuck talking about data formats. Questions like: Is the data correct? Complete? Plausible? Fit for my use case? have been an afterthought.

The lack of trust between parties is one of the major barriers to the adoption of #valuebased contracts. If parties can’t agree on whats happening in the data, it’s impossible to tie financials to that data.

Moving towards a value based business model requires trust.

FHIR provides part of the solution, but schema conformance alone does not ensure the completeness, plausibility, or fitness for use of the data.

At this year's NCQA Innovation Summit, we shared how a functional version of data quality assessment would allow real-time scoring of “fitness for use” without requiring exchange of the data, which can help facilitate trust between parties.

If you're like Marlow 🐶 and Me, you love a multiple monitor workspace. Getting the orientation just right make us feel like we're flying in our own custom cockpit.

But docking to multiple monitors, and hoping your laptop remembers the right configuration is a long shot.

Luckily, there's a nifty utility out there called displayplacer by a developer name Jake Hillborn.

Now, whenever my displays get wonky, no more futzing with the settings, I can set them in five key strokes: d-i-s-p RETURN

Here's how:

Display docking happiness in 5 steps

1. Visit https://github.com/jakehilborn/displayplacer and install (via brew)
2. Get your monitor ids and current orientation with `$ displayplacer list`
3. Copy desired config to shell script (e.g. `set_displays.sh`)
4. Create alias in `.zshrc` (e.g. `alias disp="sh ~/set_displays.sh"`)
5. Then whenever you dock your laptop...just open terminal and type `disp`

And there you have it. Happy docking!

# install displayplacer
$ brew tap jakehilborn/jakehilborn && brew install displayplacer

# get your monitor ids
$ displayplace list

# set_displays.sh
displayplacer "id:YOUR-DISPLAY-ID-1 origin:(-1080,-228) degree:270" 

displayplacer "id:YOUR-DISPLAY-ID-2 origin:(0,0) degree:0"

# .zshrc or .bashrc
alias disp="sh ~/Development/utilities/set_displays.sh"

# then whenever you need a refresh
$ disp

Whether I'm working on products, projects, user stories, or dev tasks, I've found the leverage these four frameworks.

Setting priorities

Identify opportunities along the way

Perfect is the enemy of the great

Chances are you've heard this one before, and for good reason. This ones a favorite of economics, business leaders, and technologists, and it's a great rule of thumb across industries.

One thing I've found in software is that that 80/20 rule can easily turn into the 90/10 rule or even the 99/1 rule... where that last 1% percent of polish takes 99% of the effort.

Calling the shot

“I never make a decision with less than 40% of the information available, but I never wait for more than 70% of the information.” - Colin Powell

You may also appreciate the Teddy Roosevelt's version: "In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing."

This Mavic Mini is far and away my favorite birthday present of all time. And Austin, is my favorite city of all time. Enjoying exploring!

The last few months have been a unique opportunity for me to slow down and sharpen the axe. So while "it's not about the tool, it's what you do with it"... who doesn't love tools!

Here's what's currently going on in my tool belt:

👋🏻There's some new friends on the list like Notion, Neo4j, #VsCode, Plaid, and #Pandas.

😍There's some all-time favorites like #MindNode, Sketch, #iMessage, and #Python.

🔧And you can't forget old faithfuls like Dropbox, Gmail, and the O.G. of structured-ish data, Microsoft Excel.

😢Finally, you can't move on without being willing to kill your darlings. Thanks for our time together, Evernote, Atom, and Ruby. I'll think of you fondly.

What's your tool belt looking like these days?

Thoughts, recommendations, and questions welcome!

While there is often the right tool for the job, there's definitely no such thing as the perfect tool. As we all know, there are tradeoffs to everything. The only way that you can go wrong in my book, is being entrenched in one particular stack. Sometimes you just need to scrap your stack and get uncomfortable.

Current Favorites

Python

My most recent love affair is the modern python stack. While I had prior exposure to python and simple ML techniques like KNN at my last company, I've always needed a greenfield project for a new stack to really sync in. And that side project for learning python is a microframework for analyzing my personal finances. I'm using flask, the Plaid API for bank data, pandas for analysis, and a Twilio bot "front-end" for interaction. The project uses a NaiveBayes Classifier and the NLTK NLP framework to analyze bank transaction descriptions and learn my preferred categories like Utilities, Food, Rent, etc.

Additionally, I'm just starting to wrap my head around neural nets with this Neural Nets and Deep Learning Coursera course, as well as playing keras and tensorflow to detect cats (aka the hello world of deep learning). If you're learning as well I'd recommend perusing the Jupyter Notebooks on Kaggle.

Current sentiment:😍😍😍

Javascript

My last company was a fullstack Javascript shop (other than python for analysis). We built our workflow automation platform with Postgres -> Node -> GraphQL -> React.

For external interactions, we built an omnichannel bot framework that extended DialogueFlow and communicated with our customers
on top of Twilio,Gmail, and Aircall APIs.

We used Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch datastores hosted with GCP,
and deployed with tools and tech including CircleCI, Docker, and Heroku.

Full disclosure, I was the CEO at CoLane, so while I stayed involved with the engineering team, after the first two years I was not writing any production code at all.

Other JS frameworks that I've enjoyed include Angular and NextJS. O and this site is a Ghost CMS backend with handlebars on the front.

Current sentiment: Love/hate relationship with JS, but it is the native language of the internet, and it's arguably the obvious choice for web application development.

Ruby on Rails

One of my favorite things about Ruby is that is holds a guiding principle of "the happiness of the developer". Ahhhhh. What a beautiful goal. I like to be happy! Also, can we all agree that ActiveRecord is the GOAT of ORMs?

While Ruby is still my sharpest tool — with thousands of hours building, studying, and teaching under my belt — it's been a while since I've rails new app_named. The transition started in 2015 when I was implementing an Angular front-end with a JSON API in Rails, and the constant context switching from Ruby to js became a drag.

Rails was also the platform for my favorite project of my career — my All College Storage platform. Over 5 year period, I built a two-sided platform that automated a huge chunk of my business. One of my favorite features wa a rake task that initiated a Twilio SMS to prompt customers to update payment information through a tokenized link, that would process through Stripe. It was a simple bot that used state-machines and and simple string matching on responses, but it saved me and my customer service team weeks of their lives trying to chase down customers.

I also got really into web scraping with Typheous and Nokogiri and did some questionable mining of campus directories with an ML enabled bot. We then then used Mailchimp for email campaigns, and the Lob API to send physical postcards to campus mailrooms, to get people into our funnel. It was fun, and ridiculously effective, but yea - probably shouldn't have done that.

Current sentiment: Rails - I miss you. You were great. Do you ever think about me? I think about you.

Archive:

eHighlighter: .NET, objective-c
AllCollege v1: LAMP stack, Drupal
College/HS: java, VBA, BASIC

Quick Tangent - Design Tools

I love Sketch! Do you love Sketch? You should use Sketch.

Wrapping Up

Want to talk or nerd out about any of this? Need engineering consulting at your company? Please get in touch, and we'll start the conversation.

While the customers, industries, and products have all varied, everything I've built falls into the intersection of workflow-automation and granting people superpowers. I'm always looking for opportunities to outsource routine tasks to technology, and free up people to do the things we're great at – creativity and relationships.  

My Development Principles

Here's some guiding principles that I've accumulated over the years while developing products and APIs:

1. Humans first.
2. Simple is better than clever.
3. Anything is possible, except everything.
4. The 80/20 rule should stay top of mind.
5. Preemptive optimization is the root of all evil.
6. It's not about the tool, it's about what you do with it.
7. The hard thing is not adding things, it's taking them away.
8. Consider that an alternative solution may exist.
9. Good process is the opposite of bureaucracy.
10. Bias for action.

Certainly an incomplete list, but it feels 80% of the way there.  😉

All College Platform

As we began to scale the All College Storage business, we ran into the core question — how do we provide a consistent experience at scale? Especially with a labor force was comprised of 19 year olds - not exactly a demographic known for their consistency. And on the customer side, we had parents and school administrators who expected a flawless experience. And that's where our platform allowed us to take off.

This was my biggest engineering lift, and is perhaps the professional experience that I am most proud of.

Customer Experience

Customers had a web portal, but we leveraged text-message bots to nurture leads and schedule appointments.

The nurture-bot helped us to convert  64% of users who started the checkout process. When the company that ultimately acquired our business compared that to their internal metric of 27%, the deal was all but closed on the spot.

Employee Experience

The core business objective for the platform was to increase the productivity of my workforce - scheduling, customer service, and accounting tasks all took a serious customer service lift.

The web, mobile, and bot platform we developed ended up increasing our labor productivity by 20x – in 2013 one customer service rep could schedule 20 orders per day; by 2016 one rep could schedule 400 orders per day.

Product & Engineering

The first version of the site was developed by a contractor starting in 2008 and built on  Drupal , a LAMP stack framework. After taking over developing and switching over to a modern stack  in 2013, we were able to make an astronomical amount of progress.  Some of the core stack included

Rails, Postgres, Redis, Angular, and ElasticSearch. We used a combination of Twilio and Mailgun for omni-channel messaging and built a custom e-commerce engine with a lot of credit due to the Stripe API.

This was really the hay-day in the Rails world, and everything from the developer community to the beautiful APIs from folks like Stripe and Twilio made development a joy.

CoLane

CoLane, formerly Fraight AI, was an AI-enabled freight brokerage. We built all our tools around the philosophy of "platform agnostic automation" and omni-channel AI.

If you want to learn more about our approach, products, and company feel free to check out this archived version of our pitch deck.

Employee Experience

We viewed our internal brokerage operations team as our primary customer. The view you'll see in the following video are examples of what those team members would be looking at.

If you want to see some of what Archie could do, check out our "Best in Show" demo from our appearance at the FreightWaves conference!

Customer & Trucker Experience

Instead of trying to force new technology on our customers, we communicated entirely through email and SMS.

Product & Engineering

I was the CEO at CoLane, so while I stayed involved with the engineering team, after the first two years I was not writing any production code for our main app.

CoLane was a fullstack Javascript shop (other than Python for analysis). We built our workflow automation platform with Postgres -> Node -> GraphQL -> React.

For external interactions, we built an omnichannel bot framework that extended DialogueFlow and communicated with our customers
on top of Twilio,Gmail, and Aircall APIs. We used Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch datastores hosted with GCP, and deployed with tools and tech including CircleCI, Docker, and Heroku.

eHighlighter

I loved building this product, and had accumulated some happy users. But, good products don't always make good businesses, and after a 4 year run on the app store it was put out to pasture.

User Experience

The goal of eHighlighter was to "take great notes, 90% faster." It allowed you to snap a picture of a page, highlight a sentence or paragraph, and have that instantly transcribed to then search, sort, or export.

Product & Engineering

Today is the start of an amazing new mission, one that I could not be more excited to join, or grateful to be a part of. Today I start as the VP of Engineering at Remedy in my new hometown of Austin, TX.

Remedy is at the forefront of providing convenient, accessible, low-cost healthcare that patients love.

As I was doing my homework on the business, I called my friend Ricky, a local VC, to ask him what he knew about Remedy. At the mention of their name he exclaimed: "O my gosh I love Remedy! I actually used them last night, and I got an antibody test this morning."

When have you ever heard someone get that excited about a doctors visit?

Ricky's enthusiasm echoed the excitement of the team members I met during my process, the mentors I asked for perspective, and my gut as well.

I believe that their our approach to healthcare is spot on. We can start with a video chat, and if necessary, we can dispatch someone to see you in person. With this type of at-your-fingertips door-to-door service, patients can trust they're getting the level of care they need.

You can probably tell by now that I'm through-the-moon-excited about joining such an impactful team, at an unbelievable time, and in an exciting role.

How did I get there? Well, I thought about it like an engineer, and had three simple steps:

1. Define success
2. Create a process
3. Run the process

Step 1: Define Success

Success follows doing what you want to do. There is no other way to be successful. - Malcolm Forbes

Anything is possible, except everything. While one of the hardest parts of the process, narrowing the aperture on what you're looking for needs to lead the way.

For me, success looked like this:

• Focus on what you love
• Work for a Gifted Boss
• In place you call home
• On a mission that matters

Focus on what you love

While I am incredibly grateful for the wide-ranging list of things I was able to encounter and accomplish as a CEO, there was one thing I was never able to do. With responsibilities from doing the dishes, to payroll, to investor relations, focus was never a luxury I experienced while sitting in that chair. And after twelve years and 4 companies, I've learned time and again that success starts by focusing on your strengths, and not your weaknesses. If you're doing something you love, you'll always find ways to improve; and if you're always improving, you're on your way to an incredible result.

And well, I just absolutely love building, automating, and improving systems. It's certainly in my blood as a 3rd generation engineer. Other than connecting with folks in my new hometown, my happiest days this year included automating my personal finances with the Plaid API, playing with graph databases, and diving head first into AWS.

Tools of the trade

While its not about the tool, gotta have some sharp tools!

Parker HolcombHi I'm Parker

Work for a Gifted Boss

Like many things in my professional (and personal) life, it took someone else saying it before I finally believed what my Dad had been telling me for years.

During my time in Chicago, I had the privilege of connecting with arguably the top technology exec in the city. Whenever I have the opportunity to connect hyper-success, I ask them what to they attribute their success. Was it luck? Smarts? Persistence?

At the top of Mike's list was him time working for a "gifted boss" (although I'm not sure he used this exact phrase).

Mike shared that he began his career not by searching for a role, or a company, but searching for a boss. And when he found that person, and I'm paraphrasing, Mike said "I told him that I am going to work for you, and I'm not going to let title or compensation get in the way."

(@Mike - feel free to correct me on any of that!)

I am going to work for you, and I'm not going to let title or compensation get in the way.
- Mike, to his first boss

One person I admire sharing their framework is an observation, but two is a pattern. I always do my best to listen to patterns.

And so during this search, I had a chance to read The Gifted Boss, not as a guide to be a boss, but as a framework to help me find one.

I could not be more glad that I did.

After I first spoke with the Remedy Founder and CEO, Dr. Jeremy Gabrysch, I immediately called my Dad and told him "we've got one on the line". Over the next few weeks I continued to meet the team, and learn more about his business.

I was already convinced of the fit from a tech & business perspective, and while doing my homework learned about their podcast Doctor / Not a Doctor. I went for a drive and put it on. When I heard the warm, kind, intelligent banter between the two Founders, I felt my heart do a full smile.

Doctor / Not a Doctor - Episode 5 - Coronavirus Immunity, Reopening & Murder Hornets

Did the coronavirus come from a lab? Is that drug you heard they’re studying going to save us? And if it can’t, could John Cusack as James Bond help? Jeremy (MD) and Justin discuss what regional reopenings could foreshadow, and why we still need more testing. Also, murder hornets.

Doctor / Not a DoctorGoogle Podcasts

In a place you call home

I have long known that Austin was going to be my home, and since before we were married, Maggie and I had been talking about "Austin 2020". We were excited to be among the open air, the tacos, the heat, the access to nature, the proximity to family, and most importantly, the people.

When my family moved to Texas from Upstate New York in February of 2001, I immediately noticed two things. First we we're in love with the blooming flowers and the 75° temp.  We're not in Buffalo anymore, Todo! 🌻☀️😎

The next takeaway was: wow, southern hospitality is a real thing — these people are kind, warm, and welcoming! It immediately felt like home.

When my wife Maggie and I moved here this January, we quickly had that similar feeling - we are home.

On a mission that matters

Maggie and I share many things in common, and one of them is our nature to dive-in head first. "Anything worth being done is worth being overdone". In or out. 0 or 100.

And while finding a middle-gear is a #squadgoal for both of us, after Maggie led the way finding and starting an impact-focused job as the Brand Manager of an emotional health non-profit, I knew that I wanted to follow her lead.

So in January I started putting my energy towards finding a “mission that matters”. I wasn’t sure exactly where that would take me, but I knew that the health and well-being of others was the place to look.

✅ Step 1. Define Success

Step 2: Create a process

This one's a lot easier:

1. Do your homework
2. Connect with people
3. Help people
4. Repeat

Do your homework

Connection is the goal, and preparation makes it happen. While open-ended conversations can be a joy, it might not go down that way. Coming into the conversation having done your homework with a focused "ask" makes it easy for someone to help you. And they're helping you after all, you might as well make it as easy as possible for them. A virtuous cycle.

Connect with people

Perhaps my favorite business book of the last decade — Creativity, Inc. — centers around the story of Pixar. Throughout the book, Pixar Founder Ed Catmull raises and explores a central question: "What is more important: good ideas or good people?"

Ed and his team come to a definitive answer: ideas come from people, and therefore people are what's most important.

“Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.” ― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.

And just like your teammates are the most important factor in your success of your company, your friends, mentors, mentees, peers, and advocates are the most important factor in the success of your search process.

Help people

"How can I help?" is one of the most powerful phrases attitudes out there. I would have never been able to get where I am today without the help of o-so-many people. That inertia started with my parents, it continued with my educators, and it soared with my peers and mentors.

No matter where you are in your career cycle, you can find someone you can clear the way for.

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we've cleared the way. - Michelle Obama

Repeat

GOTO: Do your homework

✅ Step 2: Create a process

Step 3: Run the process

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzy

And you have to take a lot of shots.

(if you're in this graph and would rather not be, just let me know!)

I first knew that Austin was going to my home after I spent a month here back in 2014. I was graciously invited to work out of the TechStars' office on Congress and 4th. Somewhere between the morning commute passed Pueblo Viejo, the Houndstooth coffee, and the view of the Capitol, I new that this place was something special.

While the tacos, office, coffee, and sunshine laid a beautiful foundation, it was the people I met that sealed the deal. I was quickly welcomed into circles, introduced to friends, and treated as a "we".

While the city has changed a lot over the last 6 years, I'm glad to confirm that same neighborly attitude is alive and well. While I had no doubts that Austin was the right place for me to be, the help that I received from the members of this business community confirmed that we had made the right move.

Wrapping it up

First off, I want to say a huge huge thank you and note of gratitude to everyone who helped me get to this happiest of launch days. I can't wait to give you a high-five 👋 and a cheers 🍻in person. Wait, actually I don't think we can do high fives anymore? Ok well you get the point.

To my future team and boss, thank you for giving me a seat on the mission. I can't wait to see where we'll go.

With gratitude, excitement, hope, and passion,

Parker

Over my lifetime love of technology, I've fallen in love with a lot of tools. From my Palm Pilot to my TI-89, from Javascript to Python, I can't help myself from finding ways to automate and enhance my workflow.

Since my freshman year of college, I’ve channelled that love of technology into building a series of tech-enabled businesses. These entrepreneurial experiences have given me a wide lens on the business lifecycle, from incubation, to scaling teams, to buying and selling businesses.

After twelve years and 4 companies, I've learned time and again that success starts by focusing on your strengths, and not your weaknesses. If you're doing something you love, you'll always find ways to improve; and if you're always improving, you're on your way to an incredible result.

I love to focus on tech. The only thing that I love more than a day of writing code is empowering others on their own technical journey.

If you're interested in an entrepreneurial approach to accelerating your technology roadmap, I'm here to chat.

Let's focus on building something together.

Cheers,

Parker

Engineering & Product Development

Whether it's a greenfield product, rescuing an offshore hiccup, or accelerating your current team, I'd love to get my hands on a keyboard and dive in.

Example projects:

• Data pipeline for normalizing, analyzing, categorizing financial transactions
• Analyze competitors social-graph to identify target users
• Scheduling and matching platform for on-demand marketplace

Currently prioritizing data-first projects. Here are some technologies I could dive in with right away:

Tech Stack

There is often the right tool for the job, but there’s definitely no such thing as the *perfect* tool. As we all know, there are tradeoffs to everything. The only way that you can go wrong in my book, is being entrenched in one particular stack.

Parker HolcombHi I'm Parker

Business Development

I work with: Business-first CEOs on product, engineering, and technical hiring; Technical-first CEOs on go-to market and business operations; and all types on hiring, culture, and fundraising.

With M&A experiences on both sides of the table (sold two, bought one), I can help Founders navigate the technical and emotional process from courtship, to diligence, closing, and integration.

Example projects:

• Interview engineering candidates for non-technical founder
• Built fundraising deck for direct-to-consumer startup
• Coaching CEO through responses to acquirer interest
• Cap-table and dilution management model

Relevant Experiences

• Technology & Innovation
• Supply Chain
• Procurement
• Engineering
• Data Warehousing
• Workflow Automation
• Offshore Development
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Applied AI
• Team building/Hiring/Firing
• Fundraising
• Financial Modeling
• M&A

Get in Touch

During my senior year of college, my new lacrosse coach arrived with an approach he called “leadership from the front.” For one of his many lessons on the topic, he brought in a former Marine who spoke of the need to experience the roles of the people he was leading.

“If I’ve never shot a machine gun before, how in the world can I lead my gunners to success?” he asked. “If they go down, I need to be able to jump into their role.”

It took me three years to understand the value of this advice.

I had just hired a new CTO for my second startup and tasked him with taking over development from the offshore engineering team. He had an incredible work ethic, but it soon became clear that he was in over his head and that the one computer science course I had taken in college wasn't going to be enough to pull us out.

Although the offshore developers had delivered a well-crafted product, one that attracted thousands of users, their code was far from clean. As I now intimately know, transitioning ownership of an offshored codebase without any process or direction can be a daunting task for even the most senior of engineers.

I had set my CTO up to fail. We were unable to deploy even the smallest improvements, and meetings about the future of the product slipped from hourly to daily to weekly as he struggled with the technical complexity in front of him. I knew he was trying his best, but there was no way for me to help or truly monitor progress. I didn’t even know where, or whether, he was saving his work.

I knew things were bad when he stopped returning my phone calls and emails. I knew things were really bad when he unfriended me on Facebook. I don’t blame him. I was unable to lead from the front.

During this rocky period, I had the good fortune to land a lunch with the cofounder and CEO of a well-known software company. For some youthful and naive reason, I had visions of this lunch ending with an acquisition offer.

Instead, it ended with an admonition: “How many more times are you going to walk into the room and say, ‘I’m not the tech guy’?”

The CEO straightened me out on tech acquisitions really quickly. Successful software companies don’t usually buy users — even hundreds of thousands of them — and a 12-month-old codebase. They usually buy technical teams and leaders, who, when brought into the mothership, can increase product velocity.

I’m paraphrasing his advice, as it has been six years since our lunch, but he then said something like this: "The world is programmed, and if you want to change the world, you need to know how the world works. But most importantly, if you want to run a billion-dollar company someday, culture and hiring are all that matter. And if you want to stay in technology, which it sounds like you do, in order to attract and lead the best technical people, it’s not enough to have taken a computer science class and ‘kinda’ read code. You need to be able to argue with them about their refactoring philosophy.”

In other words, if your CTO unfriends you and the servers go down, you need to be able to jump in and turn them back on.

So I spent the next three years of my life studying code, developing systems and ultimately paying it forward by teaching students to write code and, of course, lead from the front. And as the CEO I had lunch with suggested, the greatest benefit of leading from the front isn’t the skill itself, but the relationships that can emerge from the technical knowledge.

One day I was coding in a bagel shop when I spotted someone else hacking away. I walked over and struck up a conversation with “Hey, are you a JavaScript guy?” Four years later, that JavaScript guy is now the cofounder and CTO of my third startup.

Leading from the front is about more than surface familiarity with your team’s responsibilities — it’s about an authentic understanding of the role that you're asking them to perform. If you're managing a sales team and have never closed a deal, get out there and keep failing until you do. If you run a logistics company and have never seen a warehouse, go schlep some boxes. And if you run a tech company but have never fixed a software bug before, then I hope my experiences and failures can point you in the right direction.

Data Supply chain is how you intake, structure, and leverage your data. It's not about "how big" or "how much data" you have, it's about the relationships between the information, or the in other words: it's about the context.

Here's the best example I've got. Let's compare Wal-mart, who clearly has the most sales data at $400B, compared to Amazon and its $200B in sales.

But think about the granularity of the data.

Imagine a customer at Wal-Mart walking down the aisle, glancing at products. They pick up three boxes, put two back, and take one to the checkout. Sure, Wal-Mart get's the "success data" about what that customer bought, but Wal-Mart does not know the relationships between the boxes that were glanced at, picked up, or taken to checkout. Wal-Mart is unable to leverage that data to make a more personalized experience for their customers the next time they walk that aisle.

Now think about a customer checking out on Amazon. They spend 30 seconds on one page, 30 seconds on another page, and then 10 seconds on the last one where they click "Buy Now". Well, Amazon was just able to figure out that that customer is Gluten-Free, and can now prioritize Gluten-Free products in their future search results.

It's not about how much data you have, its about what you (can) do with it.

freight lane (n.) - a transportation route routinely serviced by a carrier. For example: "We run the Chicago to Dallas lane three times a week"

Today we're excited to announce our new brand, CoLane! We love our new name because it's simple and exactly what we do - collaborate with our customers on freight lanes.

Collaboration and co-creation is at the heart of our business. Zeke and I started this company with a core principle of co-locating engineering with operations. Beautiful things happen when you combine diverse backgrounds and perspectives and point them towards solving the same problem.

CoLane brings this principle to the forefront.

"But Fraight was a great name!"

We loved the name Fraight - it was playful and punny. And it treated us well for over two years. But it had to go. Like all parts of the business, you have to listen to feedback, keep an open mind, and be willing to kill your darlings.

Reason #1 - It's not about the tool

Business is not about the tool you are using, it's about what you do with it. Having an "A.I." pun in our name brought too much attention to the tool.  I'm quite positive that J.P. Morgan has never sold a customer by talking about their Microsoft Excel skills.

A final nail in Fraight's coffin was a Jeff Bezos interview from 1999. The reporter is drilling him about whether Amazon is "a pure internet company" and Bezo's gives the perfect response "internet schminternet...we're a customer-first company".

I love it.

Reason #2 - Simple is better than clever

Fraight was also just too confusing.

No, no its freight with an "AI"...F-R-A-I-G-H-T

For comparison, imagine we started a business that competes with the US Postal Service, and called the company “mail”, but spelled it wrong.

Was CoLane your first choice?

Far from it, the first one was a big fail... literally.

Once we agreed we needed to sunset "Fraight AI" my immediate thought was to just shorten our name to FAI. There's plenty of successful acronyms in our industry - UPS, XPO, TQL to just name a few.

I knew FAI.com would be taken, so I went to GoDaddy and...

I took it as a sign to slow down, and find something we love.

Got it. So where did you get CoLane?

We love the idea of working together and being our customers' wingman. We think of our virtual assistant, Archie, as our "co-pilot". He takes over for the easy, boring stuff, and handing over the controls for the more important tasks. In fact we almost called the company CoPilot.

But the problem with using a real word, like CoPilot, is that everyone already has an attached meanings and assumptions about that word. For instance, when I say CoPilot, you might think of Goose from TopGun, or assume that we specialize in air freight. We're not in the business of telling people their assumptions are wrong, so we were convinced that we should just make something up.

Since we focus on recurring lanes (as opposed to the one-off spot market), I was pretty set on finding an option using the word "lane". I spent a couple weeks going through LaneShip, LaneTrue, OneLane, LanePilot...

Around that time, Torie and I were sitting in a meeting with a corporate partner, my mind was racing on "Lane" names, when someone said the word "co-create". And then boom. CoLane.

📚 Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
📚 Good to Great by Jim Collins
📚 Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
📚 Hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz
📚 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey
📚 How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
📚 The Gifted Boss by Dale Dauton
📚 The Lean Startup by Eric Reis
📚 Superintelligence by Nick Boston
🎧 a16z Podcast by Andreeson Horowitz
🎧 How I Built This by Guy Raz

Other

📚 Ready Player One by Ernest Climb
📚  The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller
📚 Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
✍️ The Illusion of Beauty by Nicolas Humphrey
✍️ Social Function of Intellect by Nicolas Humphrey
📹 A Darwinian theory of Beauty by Dennis Dutton
📹 Principles of economics, translated by The Standup Economist
📹 Want to be happy? Be Grateful by David Steindl-Rast
🎧 Radiolab by Jad Abumrad
🎧 The Moth Podcast