MARK BUFFINGTON was stunned by the purity of the pitch. And even more so by the kid making it—a student presenting at Georgia Tech’s Create-X program for aspiring entrepreneurs. The managing partner of Panoramic Ventures in Atlanta, Buffington had heard a million pitches during his career as an investor.
This one was special. “Simplicity is really hard to obtain,” he explains, “and the way he articulated the solution was so elegant I thought, ‘This is going to be a massive winner.’” Buffington knew immediately that he wanted in.
That Georgia Tech student was named Sean Henry. And what he outlined that day in 2016 was the concept behind Stord: a cloud-based distributed logistics platform designed to connect companies in real time to the hundreds of thousands of nodes that constitute the nation’s supply chain. That includes disparate and disconnected manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, third-party logistics providers, freight forwarders, warehouse operators, freight brokerages, truck drivers, and ultimately you, the customer.
With his co-founder and CTO, Jacob Boudreau, what Henry envisioned wasn’t so much a supply chain company as it was a supply change company–a single distributed network that would allow customers of all sizes to shape-shift, to expand or contract their warehouses on demand, for example, without having to build their own or enter into long-term contracts with third-party logistics companies. Essentially, Stord can form an orchestra from scattered soloists.
In many industries, disrupters compete against the established order. Such order didn’t exist in the logistics
