Senior Manager of Engineering
VORTO, United States
Job Description
About Vorto
Vorto is the only AI-driven automated supply chain platform in the world. Our mission is to enable businesses to be more economically and environmentally sustainable by digitally transforming the B2B supply chain, essentially creating a B2B Amazon.
Note from the CEO to the candidate:
Vorto was founded in 2015 and was called ShaleApps. The vision of the company at the time was to bring visibility into logistics and assist with paperless billing.
- Sector Headwinds: Our target Supply Chain industry is massive in size ($3 trillion), but a very antiquated B2B industry where users and buyers don't like to change from their old ways. To make matters worse there are tons of competitors (over 500) trying to digitize the industry.
- Divergent Company Culture amp; Strategy: These headwinds led ShaleApps to hire tons of people in technology, operations and BD. Like the majority of software companies, the company was plagued with product, engineering, operations and sales all heading in 4 different directions, with different speed and vision in each department.
- Business Failure: By early 2018, other than our one anchor customer, every other customer had refused to adopt the product, refused to pay after the POC, or fired us during the POC.
- Pivot to a new Strategy in 2018: In 2018 we reviewed this combined dynamic of a tough B2B industry that does not want to change, with intense commoditization in the competitor space, and divergent company culture - Vorto had no chance of recouping the investment of investors.
Over the last 15 years, four of the five B2B technology businesses that I had previously inherited had the exact same characteristics. To pivot each of them to success I used an approach I call 10x. The idea here is to not release any product that isn't 10 times more valuable to customers than competing products in the sector, and to release them 10 times faster than competitors. This creates a one-two punch in accelerating adoption due to the paradigm shift in value for the customers, and completely kills the competitors as they don't find it sustainable to run at this speed 7 days a week.
When I joined the company in 2018, we followed the exact same strategy by shutting the company down soon after I joined. The pivot entailed:
- Pivoting the Business. We shrunk the company to very few people so we could build a new culture across product, technology, operations and sales.
- Mission: Build the B2B Amazon. In researching what was 10x value in Supply Chain, I noticed no one had ever built the Amazon of the B2B sector. Hence our vision was to automate supply chain end-to-end and develop a platform across consumers, suppliers and logistics providers.
- 10x Speed. We built the product in 6 months at 10x speed.
- 70+% Market Share. We launched in Q4 of 2018, and achieved $2.3b gross spend on the platform in less than one year, making us the largest supply chain automation platform in the Oil amp; Gas industry with over 70% market share of consumers, and over 90% market share of truckers and suppliers.
- Positive Contracted Cashflow. We achieved positive cash flow within 6 months of launch and, today, have several 4-year contracts.
- Competitor Valuations. Other comparable companies in the logistics platform space that have (i) much lower gross spend, (ii) negative cash flow and (iii) have burned several hundred million dollars were valued at over $2b, implying our valuation is likely larger.
While we have become very successful, we are now focused on expanding this platform to other industries like food processing, commodities, etc and becoming the Amazon of the entire B2B sector.
The role below is tailored to lead the engineering team with the above playbook. Your role will be very instrumental in maintaining 10x speed of engineering while we enter new industries. We have a blog post on the website that explains our company culture.
If our mission, culture and playbook aligns with your purpose and beliefs, we would love to have you on our team to change the world.
About the Role
We are looking for a Senior Manager of Engineering to help us bring AI to supply chains in the world’s largest companies. You'd have the ability to start a satellite office in Boston and grow your engineering team. This role has 5 key accountabilities:
- Accelerate Speed of Innovation Accelerate delivery of key products and features. We are already very fast amp; ship multiple times per day across many products. However, as our success is almost wholly dependent on our speed of innovation, we are always pushing to move faster. This is the most important accountability of this role
- Engineering Leadership Drive a culture of continuous improvement, and leverage Vorto's unique culture to build a world class, differentiated,