Summary
Today, I’m talking with Evan Smith, who is cofounder and CEO of Altana, a company that develops software tools to manage big, messy supply chain networks around the world. Tariffs didn’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the US Altana CEO Evan Smith on the new normal of global trade. We last had Evan on in early 2025 to talk about how Trump’s first few waves of tariffs were starting to affect global trade and what patterns Altana was seeing in all that macro-level data about shipping and trade. It was a very alarming and also very illuminating chat; Evan and I got into the existential weeds of international relations and economics almost immediately. It was a great conversation. A year and a half later, and everything is somehow even more chaotic than it was the last time Evan and I talked — and that’s true both about trade and in the business world. And, as you’ll hear, we jumped right back into the weeds yet again. Developments in agentic AI have changed what Altana can do, but like every software company, they’ve also changed how Altana can do it. You’ll hear Evan describe how AI is changing how they make software for a very demanding set of clients that manage billions in international trade — which is causing some big debates about how a software company even runs in 2026. And of course, what they do also needs to change more or less daily. Trade policy is changing rapidly around the world but likely nowhere faster than here in the US. Between the Trump administration’s whack-a-mole tariff policies and war in Iran, it’s very hard to keep up with the current rules. That’s where Altana comes in. All that data coming from all around the world gives Evan a really high-level view of what’s actually happening. All those tariffs, for example, were supposed to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. So I asked Evan directly: Is that actually happening? Spoiler alert — you won’t be surprised to hear him say “no.” And while it’s clear the world still relies on global supply chains, the pressure placed on economic chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz is going to get higher than ever. There’s a lot going on in this one — as you can tell, Evan and I really enjoy talking to each other. Okay: Altana CEO Evan Smith. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Evan Smith, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Altana. Welcome back to Decoder. It’s good to be here again. Thanks for having me. I was looking over our last interview from about a year and a half ago, and boy, we got straight into the existential weeds of what it means to run the global economy and what was changing. People can go back and watch, read, or listen to that interview. It’s very good. I really enjoyed it. The thing that strikes me about the past year and a half is that some of this stuff was theoretical the last time you were on the show. You founded Altana on the idea that globalization as we knew it — what you call, “globalization 1.0” — was going to come to an end, it was going to get more complicated, and the world needed software to solve it. The rubber has hit the road. It has gotten more complicated. It’s getting more complicated by the day. Even as we speak this week, it is getting more complicated. Even over the last year and a half it feels like it has gone from being a bet to being something very practical now. Is that how you see it? Completely. One of our investors described Altana as, “an index bet on global dislocation.” That’s a lot. Can I just ask you maybe a philosophical, emotional question about that? I get a lot of feedback from our audience. You have CEOs on the show and they talk about making bets in this way, and on the ground, it’s chaos. So, I get an index bet on dislocation. That sounds great on CNBC, right? I understand exactly how that plays to that audience. How do you feel about that approach to the world, especially as a software company that kind of just makes a map for people, and how it plays out for regular people? I think regular people right now are really struggling and they’re really confused. They’re very anxious. Well, trade touches virtually every part of or most of our lives. So, our mission is to fix globalization, but we’re not retreating from globalization. We’re leaning into it. But we believe that globalization needs to be fixed. It needs to be more trusted, more secure, more fair. That’s a recognition that trade will and should continue across borders. That’s the animating ethos in the company. We work with our customers who in most respects are on the front lines of all this stuff. We work with eight of the 10 biggest logistics providers. We work with the government agencies that have to scramble to enforce these laws. Then, we work with importers and their supply chains to comply with them. And the stakes are huge. Do medical devices get to the hospital? What’s the price of fuel and food? So, I couldn’t agree with you more that the dislocation ultimately has the most profound consequences for everyday people, but that’s the point, right? Trade is the lifeblood of growth. This is how we feed ourselves, sustain ourselves, and protect ourselves. So, how do you have both at the same time? How do you have more enforcement and more fracturing as geopolitics play out, but have more trade, more growth, and more economic security? I think Altana is the answer to that question. The reason I’m asking is that I’m worried that there’s too many layers of abstraction — not with you but with everyone. Building solutions for our current world. You just acquired a company called Cervo AI. Literally as we’re speaking. The press release is dated today. I’ve had a smile on my face all day, but yeah, it just hit the wire. It makes an AI platform to solve customs brokerage, which was not a problem in an earlier version of globalization. Correct. The trade was flowing and products were moving across borders. Now, all the walls are up and everyone has to do more paperwork. And here’s Altana like, “We see an opportunity. We’re buying an AI platform that literally fills that paperwork at borders.” I look at that and I’m like, “Well, that was very smart.” It feels like the right answer for one problem. It also, to me, feels like the dumbest problem. We’re now having robots fill out forms presumably for other robots to read just to get back to the trade we had before. I get it. A couple layers of abstraction away, this is the smartest bet. Then, down on the ground, I’m like, “So, it’s an AI that fills out forms that we didn’t have to fill out before.” The only rational response to that is another AI system on the other side reading the forms. What are we doing here? Just to be cheeky with you for a moment, we do have our own AI agents and AI systems on one side of the border talking to our AI systems and agents on the other side of the border. I don’t think it’s just founder bullshit to say that the future is some version of agentic orchestration of the trade network. That’s a sensible statement whether or not there’s policy volatility out there or not. The technological revolution that enables that is moving at pace, so we’re surfing that wave, we’re applying these technologies, and in some cases, we’re inventing a few. But in order to have global commerce, to have strawberries in the wintertime in the US, you have to somehow solve this border complexity problem. Your notion of if we shot ourselves in the foot is a fair question. You and I talked about this on the last episode, but I think no matter what, the US, Europe, the West, and even China in its own way, is reckoning with new geopolitical and economic security calculus. So, in a world of disequilibrium — which we’re in — where you don’t have a hyperpower that can police the entire world, all of the maritime shipping lanes, and the rest of it, there is going to be a whole lot more weight placed on economic and national security. We’re seeing the weaponization of choke points through the supply chain and global logistics network. So, it’s not theoretical. It’s happening. We’re all reading the same news. Back to the border and to customs, the question again is, “How do we have more security and more enforcement at the same time we have vibrant trade and growth?” With all that complexity, I see no other way than to solve it with artificial intelligence. I want to come back to that. I did it with you again, we immediately got into the weeds. Like I said, you were on the show about a year and a half ago. If people want to take a deep dive into Altana, I think that episode is a really good one, and I recommend it. It was a lot of fun. But just briefly here, describe what Altana is and what it does for people who need to get caught up. Altana connects the public and private sectors into a network for managing trade. It’s a shared map of the world at the underpinning. So, everyone sees the same supply chain network and the same set of facts. We actually have a collaboration layer on top of that with AI helping all the parties. That now connects government agencies like US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with eight of the world’s 10 biggest logistics providers that actually move all these goods around the world. Then, there’s Fortune 1,000 companies and their suppliers. Think about it as hooking into a shared view of the world, like Google Maps for the supply chain, and then these parties transacting with each other to manage trade. This is where the Cervo AI acquisition we were just speaking about comes in. Agents are increasingly working alongside humans in those interactions within an organization and between organizations. I want to dive into that specifically because I’m really curious about how the data works. I know you have a very unique data model for how people work with Altana. I know you have an entire thesis there. But I want to ask the Decoder questions in a bit of a lightning round so we can get there quickly. Last time we spoke, you had about 240 people. I’m assuming you’re growing. How big is Altana now and how are you structured? I think we’re actually benefiting from some of the AI we’re purveying. So, the company’s just under 300 people. We might have just broken 300 with this acquisition. How are we structured? We are trying to run more of the company through an extended leadership team these days. So, we’re covering an enormous amount of ground. I think we work with nine governments around the world. We have three product lines that serve different government users. We have this logistics vertical. We work with enterprises the world over and their suppliers. It’s incredibly broad and it’s incredibly complex. The point of saying all that is because within a 300 person company, the communication and coordination challenges are just massive. One of the things I’m trying to solve is how to get more of the leaders in the company seeing the whole playing field, having the same debates, and synthesizing the information at whole company level and not just their function. So, it’s messy and people complain that, “Oh, we had this two hour meeting. It was very expensive because we weren’t talking about my thing.” But my instinct is that it’s the least bad way to run the company these days as we gain scale and grow into the ambition of the business where we’re covering so much ground. That I think connects directly to my other Decoder question. The last time you were on the show, you actually told me your process for making decisions was rapidly evolving. You said you had moved from a consensus model in areas where you had a lot of expertise to being really decisive, particularly on product and product management, and that you were going to be more opinionated and faster there while leaving the other stuff behind. That’s kind of what you’re describing at scale now. Is that still the framework? Has it evolved more? How are you making decisions? That’s definitely stayed true. What’s happened since then is that as of March of last year, we have injected folks into the company that have really, really deep domain expertise in some of the areas we’re working in, such as trade, customs compliance, logistics, and procurement. With the advent of agentic design and agentic coding, one of the things we’re really leaning into is how to get to the right product judgments faster since it took founder-level conviction and synthesis to make some of these big bets before. That’s still true, but what’s been really cool over the last six months is that as we’ve brought in these really deep domain experts, we can take traditional product design, product management, and discovery function, and pair it with deep domain expertise to get to the right product judgment so much faster. Then, the execution of that workflow or the build-out of the modeling steps is also much faster in this new way of coding and developing. I would just say that we have to move fast because the world’s changing really fast. That is true, and it’s probably going to stay true. What’s different from a year and a half ago is that you now have this agentic product development life cycle that just gives you so much more velocity and the ability to get to the right place faster. Talk about that a little bit more. I’ve talked to CEOs of bigger companies that are much more stable and much older, and there’s an idea that there’s some kind of grand shake-up between what a product manager does, what a designer does, and what an engineer does, and that everyone’s going to get the same skills and maybe that classic trio doesn’t have to exist anymore. The bigger companies have got to manage that pretty carefully. They’re architected around those roles in very specific ways. I think it’s fair to say Altana is still a startup, right? You’re still operating it a bit like a startup. Totally. It sounds like you don’t have any of that baggage. You can just start over and say, “My domain experts are now going to be product designers in whatever way that that works.” Are the tools good enough for you to do that as a software CEO, or do you still have the other roles backstopping everything? Yeah, it’s getting pretty psychedelic. It’s all blending together. My favorite has been watching some of our engineers lean in to design. You’re seeing it in all directions, but there’s definitely a convergence of those functions where a designer can ship code and a product manager can design and prototype. A project manager can ship code and just handle tickets themselves. Engineers can get in on the design game. I’d be lying if I said we had the end state fully realized, but this is an active conversation that we’re having out loud with all the stakeholders in the company. These roles are converging, what are the new ways of working, and how are you going to expand your skillset and push into this new horizon? I think almost everybody’s been excited to be along for that ride and try to surf the wave, but it does threaten certain egos. If you’ve come up as a close-to-the-metal engineer, this is threatening. If you’ve come up as a really principled user experience researcher and product designer, this can be threatening. So, just like anything else, change is hard and you got to manage it through a cultural transformation of the organization. Altana is not that old. How much transformation are we talking about here? Plenty. We’re coming up on eight years now. I would say the difference is that we’ve got a team that’s pretty mature for a tech company because of the scale, ambition, and complexity of what we’ve taken on. We tend to hire people later in careers. Obviously, there’s a spectrum, but especially on the engineering side especially, we’ve got some really, really seasoned people. The same is true in commercial. So, it’s not just about how old is the organization. It’s about how long have folks built mastery in these domains. I was going to ask you about that. Your clients are not lax customers. They have opinions. As you said, the stakes are very high. You’re not building productivity software, right? How do you manage the stakes of building that software against the pull to re-architect how the software is built? I know you could manage the stakes with the old way. Those old ways are proven and tested. You have a lot of people at your company. It sounds like they know those ways. You’re far less tested with the pull to build companies around new ways of making software. You’re probably putting your finger on the raw nerve between me and our engineering team. Look, it’s getting incredibly easy to prototype and get an MVP out there. It’s still hard to get highly functional, highly performant, at-scale software deployed with service-level agreements (SLA) that include 99.999 percent uptime for workloads at some of the most important organizations in the world. So, it’s a tension. We certainly haven’t solved it. We’re starting to chip away at the edges of some of these things. I’m sure you’ve heard of and had conversations around harnesses? Mm-hmm. So, putting real scaffolding around the code base and knowing how these systems interact with each other, follow rules, and test themselves. That’s getting better and better, and it’s getting more degrees of freedom to ship quickly, to run those tests, and make sure things aren’t breaking. But it’s not a panacea, and we’re not in the promised land with infinite coding and infinite roadmaps as much as the hype would say otherwise. Boy, does the hype say otherwise. There’s the global economy you and I are going to talk about, and there’s the global economy right next to it that is entirely built on some of that hype. You have a bunch of talented people who know what they’re doing. Then, there’s your customers, and I’m guessing your customers are very conscious of their margins, right? I’m guessing they push you on cost because you’re just an added cost to getting the goods to the end user and selling it for whatever money you’re going to sell it for. How are you managing your token costs? The idea that you’re going to burn a lot of tokens inside these harnesses to get to some good outcome might increase your costs more than hiring people. This is the dynamic that we’ve heard about so much. I’m guessing your customers are not like, “Wait, you cost more money because you’re burning more tokens inside of your harness?” Well, let’s have the conversation first about internal costs. In my observation, every tech company and everybody in the tech industry is having the same AI conversation at the same time. It’s funny, as soon as I heard it on a podcast, we started internally saying, “You know, some of these frontier model costs per token are just getting crazy, and what are we going to do to get observability and controls? Should we flip the permissioning model where you have to get permissioned into Claude Fable and not the other way around?” Everyone’s having that conversation at the same time. But it’s like 50 bucks, 1 million tokens. So, the economics are kind of forcing the conversation. That being said, we haven’t really seen token spend impact our bottom line in a material way. Sure, has it gone up on the margin? Yes, but I think we’re shipping faster, we’re being more productive, so it’s a no-brainer ROI. It hasn’t even gotten to my consciousness except for, like I said, a few weeks ago with Fable. In terms of flowing through cost to customers, we have different sets of products. Some of them are scaling on the dimension of the products under management — the physical goods under management. So, if you’re on the Altana network, you’re managing your products, their parts, and the value chain networks associated with them. You can share those product passports with your customers, your freight forwarder, or your regulator. So, that’s the network we built. The more products or physical goods that you manage on the Altana network, the more we charge you. That’s one dimension of it. That doesn’t necessarily scale with AI compute. It does in a little way, but not from our pricing standpoint. What we’re now reckoning with with this Cervo acquisition and some of our agentic workflows that we built ourselves is having agents do work. Agents can run up a lot of compute. So, that is a gross margin question that you have to manage carefully. Then, you get into pricing dynamics with customers where it’s like, “Well, what’s the value of the work?” Charging for tokens is kind of silly. We’re going towards charging for outcomes and for units of work where there’s some alignment around the value of work. To bring it back to the acquisition we’re announcing, in customs brokerage, you have an existing pricing model where these logistics providers are charging the businesses whose goods they move on a per customs declaration basis. It’s anywhere from 250 on the high end for more complex customs entries. You do that day after day after day, shipment after shipment after shipment, and it kind of runs the cash register. With agentic AI being able to do most of that work now, it puts you in some really interesting places, both as Altana and as a global logistics provider to experiment with pricing. Does it make sense to have a 800. There was no customs declaration owed. In order to exploit that, you had those Mexican and Canadian distribution centers where containers full of stuff were coming in, but then being drop-shipped one by one across the border to US consumers. So, the same has been true in Europe and the UK, and they too just ended their de minimis exemptions. So, it’s not just the United States adding all this complexity and friction to businesses and end consumers, this happening everywhere. Just this week, President Trump announced new tariffs on Canada. Maybe because he’s mad about wildfire smoke, maybe because he’s mad that Spain won the World Cup. It’s unclear exactly what happened to provoke a new round of tariffs. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer just did an interview with The New York Times and he’s like, “We’re going to run it back on tariffs. We got smacked down at the Supreme Court, but we take that as an invitation to find a new legal mechanism to do tariffs the way the administration wants, the way that President Trump wants.” It is unclear to me what legal foundation the new tariffs against Canada are resting on and whether they will be upheld. Just based on what we have been talking about here — politics and policy outcomes aside — it feels like the tariffs broadly did not do the things the administration wanted. There are some things that worked better, particularly plowing capital into markets and picking winners and losers, which is not a thing that people generally love when the United States government does it but it has worked in some cases. Yet, we’re going to do tariffs again. I’m curious for your view on how trade with Canada will change now that we’ve announced some tariffs that may or may not exist, that may or may not get rebated over time. More particularly, with your view of the network, how do you see the network adapting to them? Here’s my take on Canada. The Canadians have not come to the table on renegotiating the trading relationship with the United States. I know that from some of the behind-the-scenes stuff I’m exposed to but also because it’s reported. Whereas, Mexico and the United States have been very constructively working on what will become the new rules of the USMCA, in particular supply chain traceability, which is kind of the linchpin of the United States’ new framework. I’ve got to steer clear of the politics, but the way I see this latest round of Canadian tariffs… so this is Section 338, which I admittedly hadn’t heard of until a couple of days ago. With 48 hours to consider it, I actually think 338 has a really strong legal foundation for the specific complaint in this case. So, 338 gives the president the authority to implement counteractive measures when a trading partner is selectively biasing or penalizing US trade relative to other countries. And the Canadians did just that over the last year and a half on autos, on dairy products, and on alcohol. There’s no US alcohol on the same shelves where there’s European alcohol. There’s plenty of legal authority for the claims themselves. Where it’s going to get interesting is the remedy. Section 338 says that the remedies have to be proportionate to the damages. So, were the tariffs, the 50 percent across this peanut butter of Canadian imports, proportionate to the three or four industries that were called out? Probably not, butt how long is it going to take to adjudicate that? It’s going to be a long time. In the meantime, everyone’s working to put something new in place for the USMCA since the US opted out of the agreement and now there’s kind of a shock clock to get some new rules. So, I kind of see the whole thing in the context of them trying to force the Canadians to the table around the USMCA renegotiation. I can see that in the abstract of, we’re doing geopolitics and having a good time. We’re all playing Risk together. But from a policy perspective, Liberation Day happened. You’re saying it may or may not have had the numeric effects we wanted it to have. Some other policies had good effects. Then, we ended up paying a lot of rebates because the legal foundation wasn’t solid. Donald Trump and John Roberts are going to be in a fight that’ll be very interesting to legal academics 100 years from now. But right now on the ground, we’re about to have that fight again, and we might rebate all those tariffs again. That happened with the Liberation Day tariffs at higher rates. It certainly could play out that way. You run the software to manage all this administrative and bureaucratic complexity. How do you see the tariff rebates playing out inside your system? Does that tell us anything about how companies and markets might react to this new round of tariffs? We’re certainly helping our customers with the rebates. We can calculate duties at any point during the time of the then-applicable law and do that over a bunch of complexity, like you said. I think this is the new normal. Again, it’s not just the United States. The Chinese have put in place the mirror image of the United States from an export licensing standpoint. They’re compelling the private sector to get certificates,permits, and permission from the Chinese to take critical minerals, battery technologies, a whole set of things, and they can trace those all the way through the end uses and end markets through a big global network. The Europeans are doing the same thing. The Europeans just gave themselves the legal authority to do a whole lot more from the trade barrier and trade enforcement standpoint as a unified customs authority. So, I don’t see the world going any other way than with unilateral behavior where geoeconomics is part and parcel with geopolitics and it’s getting expressed mostly as these trade policies but as economic security more broadly. I think that brings us, sort of inexorably, to the next turn, which is the warfare turn. We can see it playing out today in the Strait of Hormuz, right? The United States launch an attack on Iran, Iran shuts down the Strait. We’ve basically brought global shipping in that area to a dead halt. We’re now maybe in a much longer war about who will control the strait and what those tolls will be. Altana has a role to play there, too. You can watch goods move around there, and you can reroute the goods. Put that into context for us. That is the next turn. It feels like we can play a lot of economic games and a lot of policy games, but when we start firing bullets, everything changes in very dramatic ways that are hard to deescalate. Describe what you’re seeing there and what the pathways out of it might be. That’s a big question. I think the lesson that everyone’s learning in Hormuz is that economic choke points can and will be wielded against adversaries, and that they can and will lead to live, physical warfare outcomes. It’s no longer theoretical. It’s no longer, “Hey, I’m sanctioning these banks,” which is kind of what you and I grew up with. It’s any of these economic and supply chain choke points, especially if they’re asymmetric — meaning it’s more painful for you when I turn you off than it is for me to lose you. A great example of this involves rare earths and critical minerals in China. The dollars that US end markets generate for Chinese critical minerals providers are a rounding error. Nobody cares. But when they turn those off, they can shut down the United States’ ability to make a weapon. So, it’s highly asymmetric, and those can and will be exploited. And those can and will turn kinetic. I think that’s the world we’re entering. Literally, last time on the show, you and I talked about John Mearsheimer, who spent his entire career predicting that we would go to war with China. He was my professor at the University of Chicago in the late ‘90s. Do you think that’s inevitable? The promise of Altana is, “We’re going to fix globalization. We’re going to make trade easier.” And the promise of trade, particularly global trade, is you’ll have so many economic interdependencies that war will be unprofitable. I think the extent to which you can de-lever to those asymmetric choke points and economic weapons impacts whether there will be peace. For example, if the US and the EU can make semiconductors and have supply chain and economic security with advanced electronics in the event of a Chinese blockade in Taiwan, then there’s a much lower probability of war. I think you can kind of apply that same argument across all these choke points. So, yeah, I think supply chain resilience and redundancy, having the network capability to see and manage through that, and simulating and designing more resilient systems is the best path short of controlling the switch yourself as a president. That’s the best path to creating a world that’s more likely to be peaceful. The Strait of Hormuz, in particular, is fascinating because it is oil. We can see what’s happening to energy prices around the country and world as that conflict waxes and wanes in ways. Well, it only appears to be waxing. There are moments of waning. It’s like one of those iPhone charts. Cumulative sales always go up. That’s what appears to be happening there. Do you see that energy prices are affected by the number of ships day to day in the data, or is the system responding to the shock? Both are true. What’s so cool about Altana is that you get so many layers beyond the headline. How is the shock to the helium supply out of the Gulf cascading through semiconductor value chains and pushing on costs there? We can actually give you numerical answers to that, and we can show you the dependencies and the pathways. I think in general, we — and when I say “we,” it’s the pundits, the policymakers, and the people who play Risk — tend to both over and underestimate the substitutability of goods. That’s been super interesting because it’s like, “Oh gee whiz, these things are going to turn off.” Then, there are lots of examples where they were much more substitutable than folks knew and/or the trade routes could lengthen and you add 40 days to a voyage but supply chains still flow. In other cases, you’re learning about choke points that are not at all substitutable. Those Achilles’ heels reveal themselves. Altana has kind of a bingo board of these things, but what I’m really interested in is, how can we get to a world where you’re not discovering those the hard way? How do you get to a world where you can detect them, you can simulate them, and you can build scenarios that actually shape either policy or capital allocation? We have a whole product, R&D area, and the way to think about it is that we’re enabling policymakers and firms to simulate these things, build those plans, and do the long-range network architecture. I want to end here because I know you have a lot of thoughts about network architecture and federating data, which is maybe the most pure Decoder bait of all. Altana is a system. It works best if everyone participates in the system. You obviously spend a lot of time convincing people to participate in the system. That means they have to offer you some data. They obviously have to get some data out of the system in return to be valuable. You’ve talked about AI quite a bit in this conversation. There’s a lot of concern about AI just hoovering up all of the data and using it for whatever purposes the labs have, eating businesses like yours or maybe not even protecting that data at a base level. That is the architecture of your product, right? You gave a keynote presentation about federating data. I want you to end by just talking about that. There was a version of the world you and I grew up in which multipolar, multi-party organizations across the world would just show up and share data and make everything easy. They were geared towards cooperation. You have been describing unipolar actions over and over again in this conversation, and Altana is supposed to make that a little bit easier, right? It’s a system that will connect a bunch of individual rational actors, and the data has to connect in a way that everyone is comfortable with. That seems very hard. Can you just describe how you are getting everyone to participate in this? Because it feels like a software solution to a politics problem. It is a software solution. The other way I’d describe it is it’s a market making solution. So, a lot of our calories are spent from government affairs or sales standpoint bringing parties together that have aligned interests in these novel ways of working to solve a network shape problem. So at the highest level, Altana is a network. You join a network and you benefit from what the network provides. So that’s the connectivity to other parties in the network and the intelligence and visibility that’s revealed in the network. As you connect to the network, you are contributing to that network. What we are not doing is sharing everybody’s data with each other, and that was the point. There’s no world… there certainly wasn’t back when we started the company, and it’s becoming even more true now. You’re not going to reach this nirvana data commons where everyone’s just pooling data in one place. So, how do you have shared visibility? How do you have interoperability across global commerce in a world where sovereignty is ever increasingly important? Our answer to that is federation. You have to put the software and the data in control of the actors that require it. It’s non-negotiable, especially at the scale of working with a customs agency or a defense agency. So, we are architected in this kind of hub-and-spoke model where the spokes are the customers with very large sensitive data sets that need us behind a firewall. They might even need us even in front of a firewall but with kill switches, corporate governance, and so on. What we’re doing is we’re bringing the platform to their data. We have very specific rights to the learnings. As we connect to the data and process it, we have the rights to build out the supply chain network view. So we’re not taking pricing. We’re not taking a detailed bill of materials. The supply chain connections themselves are revealed from the data as we connect this supply chain graph. Then, the other bucket of rights are around learning with pre-trained models. What we can’t do is memorize our customer’s data. What we can do is take a pre-trained model and, for example, we have systems that detect risky shipments in global trade or we predict the valuation or customs classification of goods. Those models are pre-trained. They’re learning across the network, and as we learn from any given customer’s data, those model weights and configurations can be lifted off for the benefit of the network. That is the quid pro quo. You give a little and you get a lot. Like I said, the go-to-market and government affairs is increasingly about putting together these parties at the highest level. I’ll tell you a couple vignettes. We’re very proud of our platform in the UK. We provide the underlying infrastructure for what they call the Global Supply Chains Intelligence Program. It’s this whole UK government supply chain and economic security control tower. I think there are 10 agencies that are a part of this. They’re pouring their data into the platform. We bring the global picture. We bring the software and the models. They’re reaching these supply chain resilience and economic security policy outcomes that I think are world leading, and they’re doing this on this intelligence platform that underpins it. We’ve been putting them in the room with senior folks in the United States, Australia, and the Netherlands, and we’re helping them learn from each other on the art of the possible. We’re helping them imagine ways of potentially coordinating policy responses across these agencies and collaborating on some of the actual interventions in the supply chain. Like, what if we all collaborated on traceability in the critical minerals context? I don’t think it’s unnatural for these parties to join the platform. I do think it’s novel for them to imagine some of these new ways of working, and that’s kind of the friction in the sale. I’m proud of the progress we’re making. It’s like any other network business. The more mass it builds, the more inevitable and more valuable it becomes. Let’s end by just zooming out a little bit. We’ve described a world in which we inevitably move towards more war. We’re just going to go to war against China because there are choke points and people are going to squeeze them. Then, there’s your vision. We’re going to imagine new ways of working together in which maybe we’re not part of big NGO organizations that manage trade globally, but everyone’s acting in their rational interest. We have a view of the network that makes it easier to imagine new ways of working with all kinds of supply chain traceability. Tell me where we are in the journey of those two things. End there. Make it not abstract. Bring it all the way down to people on the ground who are feeling anxious about the state of the world today. Which way is it going? Which way do people want? I think we’re going toward a world that is more economically secure and, therefore, more physically secure. By knowing the provenance of goods; by designing supply chain networks and actually cutting through the fog to make these decisions proactively; by helping the public and private sectors engage with each other constructively and collaboratively on these dimensions; the arc of history is moving toward more economic security. Therefore, there will be less motivation to go to outright war in the event that those economic dependencies are weaponized. Will there be flashpoints? Of course there will. Is there going to be a world of friction? Of course there will. I think at the end of the day, everyone wants to be safe. They want their kids to be safe. They want their wealth to grow. They want to spend time with people they care about and not have to sweat this stuff. In a world that’s transitioning from one equilibrium to the next, I’m optimistic about the direction of travel here, even though it’s going to be messy. Evan, it is always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. Anytime. Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email! Most Popular
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