Grant Goodale: Innovating Deliberately [Built in Seattle Ep. #30]

Convoy Co-Founder & CTO, Grant Goodale talks about facing complexity, thinking bigger, and innovating deliberately.

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In just over 5 years since their founding, Convoy has reached a $2.75B valuation, 1,000+ employees, and $665M raised to change the big and very complex trucking industry.

Even with the incredible growth, Convoy has a reputation for being a well-run business with a strong startup culture.

What's made that growth possible?

Grant shares his lessons on this episode of The Built in Seattle Podcast.

Episode Highlights

• How Grant scaled himself by being humble and asking for help.
• Why title shouldn't define your work as a founder.
• How getting into the weeds outside his function helped hire the right executives.
• Why "innovate deliberately" rather than innovate everywhere.
• How to use values for decision-making and avoid "refrigerator values."
• The importance of "prevalence and repetition."
• How Amazon's leadership principles influenced Convoy.
• Learning trucking from top-down and bottom-up
• How multiple forces converged at the right time to make Convoy possible.
• Why "starting small" beat the emotional hurdles of complexity.
• How they attracted A-list investors.
• How early investors helped the founders think bigger.

Grant Goodale Bio

Grant Goodale is the CTO and Co-Founder at Convoy. Additionally, Grant Goodale has had 7 past jobs including CEO at Massively Fun. Grant is an experienced engineering leader with a deep technical background and a passion for well-thought-out, scalable, highly reliable code. He is proven to bridge the gap between product and engineering requirements and have successfully managed large engineering teams around the globe using agile methodologies.