• September 30 - October 2, 2024
  • Inland Distribution
  • September 29 - October 1, 2025 | The Westin Chicago River North

Robert Nathan

Value Chain Ventures

Founder

Robert Nathan is the Founder of Value Chain Ventures, an investment fund based in Boulder, Colorado. Previously, Robert was the Chief Supply Chain Officer at Capstone Logistics. He started his Entreprenurial career as the co-founder and CEO of LoadDelivered, a third-party logistics (3PL) and Logistical Labs, a supply chain software startup. Both companies were acquired by Capstone Logistics.

Sessions With Robert Nathan

Wednesday, 2 October

  • 01:50pm - 02:30pm (CST) / 02/oct/2024 06:50 pm - 02/oct/2024 07:30 pm

    One-on-One: Why “Uber for Freight” Never Clicked: A Conversation with Robert Nathan
    Seven years ago, Robert Nathan, then CEO of a broker called LoadDelivered, wrote a column for CIO Review titled “The 5 Lies the Ubers of Trucking May Tell You.” The article came just as a slew of startup technology providers, mostly tech-focused intermediaries and marketplaces, came on the truckload scene promising to upend the business as we knew it. Many fell into an “uber for trucking” bucket, at least insofar as it mattered to investors looking for something for which these startups could be compared. Then Uber Freight itself emerged. Nathan’s piece attempted to lay bare some facts about what would and wouldn’t work in freight brokerage, including why he believed open marketplaces don’t benefit small shippers and carriers, why relationships aren’t secondary to tech, and why asset sharing wasn’t necessarily “disruptive.” Now a supply chain-focused investor after having sold LoadDelivered in 2018, Nathan joins #Inland24 to revisit that piece, diving into what has and hasn’t worked for the Uber for Trucking model, and where it goes from here.  
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