Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

What was the single biggest mistake you ever made in starting and growing Copia?

Today.

I mean yeah I make mistakes every day I mean you're taking you're making hundreds of decisions so yeah there's gonna be a few mistakes. I don't know my biggest? Probably the biggest is always people-oriented. Right, keeping someone a little too long.

I think at the other one which you know we learned pretty quickly from was when we first started off Copia we were hiring our own drivers, so we're hiring them, we're insuring them, we're emotionally supporting them, which is a very costly process and the thinking was you know why are we trying to build an Uber while we build Copia? Why not piggyback off of this pre-existing logistics infrastructure that exists not only all over the country but all over the world.

And so that's what we've done we've partnered with two of the largest food logistics companies in North America which are Doordash and Postmates and we've done essentially a webhook integration that allows us to tap into 500,000 drivers across 4,000 cities. So this essentially makes us geographically agnostic and so what I learned through that is that you don't have to do everything in-house and not every expertise needs to be your own. In fact, you can build upon what other people have already achieved and what are other people's that they've spent billions of dollars and trying to become world experts at and we can piggyback off of that instead of having to build our own logistics network in-house.

And on the flip side, what was the smartest thing you did?

Probably that too. No, the smartest thing to become a for-profit business. That's, it took a while to decide between nonprofit and for-profit and yeah I will never look back on that because I think that that was the, that I think I know that that was the right move for us.

Because it allowed you to scale?

Because it allowed us to scale.