When Doug Waggoner became the CEO of Echo Global Logistics in 2006, the company was a small startup with just 30 employees. Today, Echo is an industry leader, employing nearly 3,000 people and working with over 50,000 carriers.
Echo started its life with venture capital as a true startup, spent several years as a publicly-traded organization, and is now privately owned again and still growing.
Reflecting on the environment in which Echo was founded, Waggoner says there was a transition period between the dot-com boom and the more established model of today. At the time, tech-based 3PLs were a new phenomenon in the freight industry, but they quickly grew to shape an ever-growing market.
“We did it the old-fashioned way,” Waggoner said. “The founders each put in a couple hundred thousand dollars of their own money, and that was it. They brought me in with my industry experience, we built a prototype technology, and then we raised $7 million in …