September 4, 2025 • 45 mins
In today’s fractured trade environment, agility can’t come at the cost of reliability. When tariffs shift overnight, supplier networks change fast. Procurement leaders need more than spreadsheets and site visits to keep up. Building trust at scale is no longer just a compliance challenge—it is a growth strategy.
This week, host Ellen Wood speaks with Sid Malladi, CEO and Founder of Nuvo, about how supply chain teams are using digital identity, data-rich profiles, and verified risk signals to build trust with new suppliers faster, without sacrificing rigor. Sid explains how platforms like Nuvo are collapsing weeks of vetting into minutes, giving teams a competitive edge when speed, clarity, and credibility are essential.
In this episode:
This week, host Ellen Wood speaks with Sid Malladi, CEO and Founder of Nuvo, about how supply chain teams are using digital identity, data-rich profiles, and verified risk signals to build trust with new suppliers faster, without sacrificing rigor. Sid explains how platforms like Nuvo are collapsing weeks of vetting into minutes, giving teams a competitive edge when speed, clarity, and credibility are essential.
In this episode:
- How procurement pros are using digital trust to unlock new markets
- Why traditional supplier onboarding is slowing down global sourcing
- What a “trust profile” means and how it travels across borders
- How real-time risk data turns volatility into strategic advantage
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Going from I want to work with this business to
either source from them or sell to them too. I
am ready to trade with them. It's a very long,
manual and unclear process, and that entire process introduces drop off,
it introduces operational overhead on both sides of the relationship,
(00:21):
and it's very unclear what the true data driven risk
profiles that either party are.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hello and welcome to Speaking of Supply Chain, where we
explore trends, current events, and innovations impacting the logistics and
supply chain industries. I'm your host, Ellen Wood. In today's
global economy, one tariff can shift entire supply chains overnight.
If you're responsible for operational resilience, procurement strategy, or supplier performance,
this conversation is for you. We're diving into how companies
(00:53):
are rethinking sourcing strategies, validating vendors at lightning speed, and
building trust in a world where agility isn't optional, it's essential.
Our guest today is Sid Malaate, CEO and founder of Nouveau,
a platform that's changing the game from modern supply chain resilience.
Welcome Sid, Thanks for having me, Yllen. Great to have
(01:14):
you on. Let's get to our icebreaker really quick for today,
and our question is what is the most interesting thing
most people don't know about you?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Well, I'm not sure if this is most interesting, but
certainly a fun fact about myself is that I have
gone down deep rabbit holes in the art of cartography,
and I have plastered various forms of maps of the
world and various geographies throughout my home. I like digging into,
(01:45):
you know, the world as it's organized by political lines,
you know, topographic lines, and in many other ways. So
I'll just spend time to decompress staring into those maps
and kind of being the composition of the world that
is around us. And that that's I guess a unique
(02:06):
way that I like to spend on my downtime.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
That is interesting. I was I was actually at an
antique mall about two weeks ago, and they had a really,
really old globe and it was cool to look at
the older you know, countries and lines and divisions and
you know, the way the world looked then at the time.
I myself, my kids have a globe that's almost as
(02:31):
old as I am, so it's not a new one,
and they laugh at it a little bit. They're like
that's not the name of that country anymore. I'm like, no,
that's what happens. That's why you need to learn history.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
That's funny you have you looked into getting one of
those like three D globes that kind of have the
peaks and troughs with the mountains and the valleys across
the world. Those are those are fun to spin around.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
I mean the one I have has a little bit
of topography on it, a little bit of like relief,
but not much. It's not one of it like, it's
not to scale certainly. So I'm trying to think the
most interesting thing most people don't know about me. So
I've talked about some of my career early career. I've
(03:13):
had a varied career path. I've done many things, and
one thing that I've talked about is my scuba diving career.
I was a scuba diving instructor for a while, which
is an odd thing to be in Indiana. But before that,
I actually started as a lifeguard and swim instructor. And
we're getting into sumheer. We've got the heat wave of
(03:35):
going right now, and I keep thinking about it, and
I'm talking to my sixteen year old I'm like, go
get your life guarding certificate. You will you will have jobs.
You will have some teenage job security if you have
some sort of certification. So that's been that's been on
my mind recently, and it's a pretty interesting fact that
most people don't know about me. I cannot sit next
to a pool and relax. I am watching everything all
(03:57):
the time on alert.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
That's really cool, if I may recommend. I got my
Patty openwater certification a few years ago, and I've really
enjoyed going on dives in the Monterey Bay area in California.
It's if you ever out there, they have they have
some really good, like you know, underwater kind of topography.
(04:19):
Once it goes so far as to say like you know,
corals or anything to explore, but a very verse, you know,
very diverse out of sights to see down there. I
did have a mini shark encounter, which I think was
my favorite. It's memorable underwater diving experience. But yeah, certainly
a very different world down there.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, it's it's a very diverse ecosystem down there. I
have not been to that area, but I also saw
an eight foot nurse shark on my first open water
dive in the ocean, and that was that was pretty
exciting for fourteen year old me.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Oh, I'm sure you freaked out. Hope you had a
dive knife on you.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
No, actually I didn't. Okay, this might be the most
interesting thing people don't know about me. Then. So I
was diving with my father and we were in the
Bahamas in Freeport at Unexso and we were diving and
we got off the boat and he was my dive
buddy and he had one of those This was a
long time ago, almost thirty years ago. So it was
(05:16):
a camera casing that you put one of the disposable
cameras in and then it was just a waterproof casing
that you could take down there and it was the
shark was on the ground between two coral heads that
were I don't know, six feet tall, and it was
just laying there. It's a nurse shark. They don't do anything.
They can only open their mouths two inches. It's not
a scary shark. And I message my dad. I was like, Dad,
(05:38):
go down and take a picture. And so he's at
the top but he takes a picture and I said no, no, no, no, no,
go down. He said no, give me a camera. You
wouldn't let me have it. So that was that was
a memorable experience, but clear that I was more adventurous
underwater than he was. I was ready to go after
(05:59):
the wild life and he was just happy to observe
it from afar.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
That's funny. You're definitely at your bravest on your first
first go round at it.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yes, but we're not talking about scuba diving today. We
are going to be talking about trust in procurement. And
this is so big a topic right now with all
of the changes that are taking place politically around the globe,
but especially in the Americas right now when we're dealing
(06:31):
with these these tariffs and it's causing all kinds of disruption,
and suppliers are questioning what they're going to do, how
they're going to get around it, how they're going to
manage their business when they have to pivot so frequently
based on whatever the administration has decided is going to
go through or whatever is you know currently in discussions. So,
(06:54):
how have some of these recent trade policies either accelerated
the need for companies to rethink they're sourcing or can
you walk us how you're helping them transition from some
of these I mean, it is really reactionary the way
that they're having to do this into a more strategic
sourcing even though we know that they're going to have
(07:14):
to react.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, so maybe taking a step back, I think to
put ourselves into the shoes of a lot of these
operators in the supply chain world. What most people find
interesting or surprising about how businesses in the supply chain
work are that for every given business, the nature of
(07:37):
trade partnerships with your vendors, suppliers, and also your customers
on the other side of the supply chain. These are
very direct trade partnerships that don't have any intermediaries. So
unlike the consumer commerce environment where people are buying a
lot of things on marketplaces or they're putting a lot
of their spend on credit cards, you essentially have these
middlemen that serve as trust brokers to allow for both
(08:00):
sides of the equation to kind of scale. How many
you know, vendors or customers you're able to transact with
or partner with. In the case of B to B
supply chains, that doesn't really exist. So if you're let's
say wholesale business, you might have one hundred different suppliers
or brands that you procure various goods from, and you
might have one thousand, five thousand, ten thousand retail customers
(08:23):
that you sell too. And across each of these supplier
and customer relationships, the business is responsible for all of
the operational overhead and risk that exists on each of
these relationships. Right, So, by virtue of let's say this
wholesale business having thousands of supplier and customer relationships, you're
(08:45):
responsible for onboarding them, verifying their legitimacy, understanding their fraud
and credit risk, understanding financial volatility of these trade partners,
recognizing how trade you know, patterns and activities between your
business and each of you your partners is shifting, especially
you know the tear regien beconn example, where you might
start seeing cost surplus on some of these cross border
(09:07):
trade partners that you might be interacting with, and you're
responsible for managing all of that complexity fully internally. So
oftentimes what ends up happening is that the complexity and
the overhead is so high that it kind of gets
you stuck. It gets you clogged up, and makes it
very difficult to pivot or be agile in an environment
(09:30):
where a volatility is running a muck, and I view tarriffs's,
you know, just one other vector of volatility. I mean,
we just a couple of years ago, business is felt
volatility in a very different dimension when we had, you know,
the supply chained shocks in the advent of the pandemic.
So the question becomes, how do you how do you
(09:52):
pivot your sourcing and your revenue strategy to adapt to that? Right,
So I'll give you a couple of examples of what
we're seeing in the ecosystem and how we think that
technology can play a very meaningful role in powering some
of this dynamism that I think is extremely critical. So,
in the advent of tariffs, a supplier, let's say, who
(10:16):
sells into what they considered a stable base of customers
that we're ordering a predictable volume of goods from them,
paying predictable sum of revenue. Now that supplier is asking
themselves a question, for reasons that are external to them tariffs,
how is demand, price and cost going to fluctuate against
(10:39):
my current customers? And how do I ensure that a
possible fifty percent drop in customer demand from existing partners
that I've been working with for the last five ten
plus years, doesn't you know, doesn't you know destroy my business? Right,
So that's a question that they ask, and you know,
the answer from that point of view is more is
(11:02):
always better. You know, you want to have more customers,
more diverse customers, not just geographically, but you know, different
customer segments that you're able to ship your your goods
to and sell your goods to. So I think the
level of stability of saying I have a predictable volume
of customers who I've known on handshake agreements for the
last X number of years that no longer applies. You're
(11:26):
always in this kind of inquisitive motion of trying to
hedge your bets across as many revenue channels as possible. Now,
if you if you flip that over to the sourcing side,
very similar dynamic, a business that had been buying, you know,
twenty dollars per unit of lumber as an example, if
(11:46):
that lumber suddenly becomes thirty, thirty five to forty dollars
because you're procuring that lumber from you know, Canada, is
a very generic example. I think I think lumbers actually
exempt from from the tariff REGIAM, but I just wanted
to use it as an indicative example. You have your
maybe general contractor jobs that have already been quoted. You've
already priced those jobs, so you have a finite amount
(12:10):
of revenue that's coming in. But then suddenly your cost
basis has doubled or tripled and you don't really know
what to do about it. How are these businesses thinking about,
you know, enhancing accelerating their strategy around sourcing in procurement. Well,
they're thinking about two problems. First is, in the advent
of all of this volatility, will my existing vendors make
(12:31):
it through the other side in a secure way? Or
you know, you're starting to see a ton of supplier
risk that is emerging, where you know, if your supplier
shuts down shop, your business moves at the pace of
your least lucky or least competent supplier. So you want
to sure that your existing partnerships are healthy. But then
you also want to make sure that you have a
(12:53):
diversity of trade partnerships so that maybe you're sourcing some
of your lumber from domestic distributors. You might want to
source some lower cost lumber, but more high kind of
price volatility risk lumber from like that Canadian sorcer. So
having having a diverse, hedged strategy, I think is like
(13:14):
the wisest way that any business can be prepared for
these sort of shifts, so that you can pivot very
organically whenever you need to, instead of being unprepared when
a certain unpredictable shock hits.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Sure, so what are the challenges that they're facing when
they're looking for these new qualified suppliers from either direction?
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Yeah, so I think I think there are a few
ways that we can break this down. First and foremost
is just discovery. Knowing who's out there in the market,
you know, like who are the options that you should explore?
I think, you know, there have been a variety of
ways that discovery has gotten easier, faster, and cheaper today
than it was before. You know, most businesses have some
(13:59):
type of an online Internet presence. So if you if
you are to look up you know, who's selling lumber,
who's selling liquor, you know, whatever it is that you're
trying to procure or source, you have a better shot
of being able to discover a you know, top of
funnel opportunities for new trade partnerships better than you have
in the past. But I think an area that we've
(14:20):
been able to influence the most from NUVO's point of view,
is once you've discovered a possible new trade partnership that
you'd like to activate, going from I want to work
with this business to either source from them or sell
to them, to I am ready to trade with them.
It's it's a very long, manual and unclear process in
(14:44):
many ways. So I'll give you I'll give you a
very simple example. Let's say that you're you're a restaurant
owner and you're trying to source your fresh vegetables from, uh,
you know, a different vendor because the one that you've
partnered with so far has been prone to some kind
of risk shock or you know, their price volatility, something
(15:06):
that doesn't work with your economics as a restaurant operator.
If you find an alternative food service distributor, activating that
new relationship involves you submitting new onboarding paperwork. It requires
a one to two week process of that new food
service distributor putting you through a rigorous due diligence process
trying to verify your legitimacy as a business. Because fraud
(15:29):
rates are blowing through the roof, especially in the advent
of AI, so they need to make sure that you're legitimate.
They're running you through many different verification checks. They have
to evaluate you for trade risk because you know, in
many of these cases, sellers are extending trade credit off
their own balance sheets, where you know they're parting ways
with their goods but getting paid for them thirty sixty
(15:49):
ninety days later. So you want to make sure that
there is good credit history associated with your counter party.
And that entire process introduces off It introduces operational overhead
on both sides of the relationship, and it's very unclear
(16:10):
what the true data driven risk profiles that either party are.
So again you're waiting two weeks, and once you start
that relationship, that new food service distributor might say, let's
see how it goes for the first six months. I'm
not gonna give you any credit. You're gonna have to
pay me at the time of delivery fulfillment. That's not
very good for your cash flow. Maybe they cap your
(16:32):
credit limit or your purchasing limit to an amount that
is less than what your true procurement needs are because
they don't know any better about your business. So you're
slow rolling this like six to twelve month on ramp
with every new trade relationship for it to be truly
activated to the extent that you need it to be.
And I think the complexity and the overhead cost is
(16:57):
something that largely prevents business is from saying, hey, I
want that N plus one trade partnership to activate, because
I just don't want to deal with that complexity. Unless
there is a forcing function that becomes existential for my business,
then I'll do whatever it takes to sweat it out
and do the unglamorous work pivoting. But the cost I've
(17:21):
viewed as a tax, the tax of a bit associated
with the business pivoting their trade relationships across their supply
chain relationships is so high that they don't want to
do it if they can help it.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Sure, And I mean I love your example just because
I used to be a restaurant manager and so I
relate to that infinitely. But I mean that's such a
small scale and what you're saying is absolutely factual. I mean,
that's how long it takes. These are the risks that
you run into. This is the slog that you have
to go through to you know, to switch suppliers and
(17:57):
you know, bring on a new vendor. But when we're
talking talking about the economies of scale and looking at
distributors and companies and enterprises, it's that much bigger an
issue because it's not you know, a couple thousand dollars
in produce every week. It's millions of dollars of product
that we're talking about, and that's a huge risk for
(18:19):
these companies to take on and extend credit to. So
what does this vetting process look like? You're you're telling
me it's it's periodic, it's it's clunky, and it's manual.
And obviously the digital age has changed that a little bit.
So when that speed, when that reliability, when that risk
(18:40):
mitigation all has to be balanced, what is what does
that look like now?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yeah, so we're just to introduce, like what our long
term mission is with NUVAU. We're trying to build the
digital infrastructure to power physical goods trade and really accelerate
that as much as possible. So what we see ourselves
as is almost this handshake layer that makes it faster, easier,
(19:09):
cheaper for businesses to activate new trade partnerships with their
suppliers and their customers in a way that could have
been possible in a pennant paper plus manual review era.
That makes connectivity very very difficult and painful, frankly to accomplish.
So on Nuva, let's go back to this restaurant operator
(19:30):
working with a food service distributor example. With Nuvo, we're
building this verified business identity network where once that food
service distributor decides that they want to do business with
Ellen's restaurant as an example, they can send you an
(19:51):
invitation to connect with them on the Neuvau network, and
by virtue of you replacing your typical onboarding paperwork with
completing your new vote profile and committing to sharing your
new vote profile with that food service distributor, what the
platform helps accomplish is deep sets of legitimacy verification. So
(20:12):
are you who you say you are and are you
authoritatively you know trustworthy business. We pull in signals from
many dozens of authoritative databases like government registries, the IRS,
social Security Administration, fraud databases, credit risk databases like the bureaus.
We pull information from the banks to demonstrate cash flow
(20:34):
history and health. So once you kind of put out
this request that you want to be a customer with
that new food service distributor, that supplier, and now has
all of the contexts that they need to validate trust
and activate that new trade relationship with you, you know,
in minutes, right, so so much faster. It's faster, it's easier.
(20:58):
Levels of visibility and trust are that much higher. And
as a direct consequence, like if you think about the
second and third order effects of doing this, now the
food service distributor is able to double their customer base
without necessarily having to double their operational overhead. So they're
now motivated to do more and grow their business in
(21:19):
a way that they just didn't have the infrastructure to
do before. The second order of implication of that is now,
as Ellen's restaurant, you now have a greater desire to
expand your trade relationships with other vendors and suppliers. And
instead of maybe only having the capacity to have five
food suppliers that you're procuring from, now maybe you have
(21:39):
twenty five. Right, you have greater optionality. You're able to
purchase you know, fresh Italian food ingredients from a specialty
Italian food service vendor. You're able to get the best
fresh produce from someone who specializes in that and you're
able to kind of stock up on inventory that differentiates
you as a business and a restaurant operator because you
(22:00):
might be able to expand the items on your menu.
There's so many ways that you can think about how
this is advantageous to your business. And beyond that, you
now have more choice around which suppliers are most cost competitive,
where do you want to buy certain supplies from. Maybe
you don't kind of put all your eggs in one basket,
and you can start to run these optimization functions, and
(22:22):
the next time you want to partner with that next
food service distributor, you can reuse your Neuvaux profile to
build that next connection instead of having to yet again
fill out onboarding paperwork yet again go through a two
week long due diligence process. It's kind of like a
trust profile that follows you as you do more and
more across your trade network, and that next supplier can
(22:43):
see that, Okay, you're a vetted participant in the Nuvou network.
You've partnered with other vendors and suppliers in the past
and built healthier trade relationships with them, so they're going
to be that much faster and more confident in activating
that relationship. So the larger of participants on Nuva's trade
network becomes, the more each participant benefits over time because
(23:07):
we're making it progressively easier, faster, and higher trust to
activate that next relationship on our platform.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
So it sounds like NUVO's just the concierge that just
brings everybody together and says, you know, okay, this is
my friend, they're great, this this is the this is
the other guy. They're great. You guys talk to your thing.
But so what does that look like when we're we're
looking at across borders, like right now we're talking about tariffs,
(23:36):
and we know that some of these things are completely
out of the suppliers or the vendors control. When they're
looking for that diversification in their in their supplier portfolio,
you know, are they are they able to look into
different geographies? Are they able to look at you know,
maybe this one is going to have, you know, a
(23:57):
tariff implication, this one is not, or this one's going
to be able to deliver in three days because of
their proximity, whereas this one will take seven to ten.
You know, what are some of those How does that
work within within the NUVA platform.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, so that all happens at the discovery layer. So
Nuva doesn't really powered discovery of new you know, supplier
or customer relationships, but post discovery, when you've decided that
you do want to partner with the business, we make
it that much easier to actually activate that intention. So
going back to your example, we do support the cross
border use case, by the way, but just to give
(24:34):
you a worked example of why cross border starts to
increase complexity even further, if you're doing business with someone domestically,
maybe you establish a standard operating procedure internally saying here's
how we're going to verify our trade partners. We're going
to go to a government registry, maybe check a Secretary
of State report, go and pull a credit bureau file,
(24:56):
maybe conduct a certain due diligence process that's enforceable in
the US, and you have a predictable process around saying
I want to, you know, activate that next trade relationship,
but using the same process that I've activated my previous
trade relationship. But now the moment you move cross border,
you're now comparing apples and oranges. The way that's the
(25:17):
WENS is different it's completely different. The way that you
validate a business internationally, let's say in Brazil, is not
the same way that you would validate a trade partner
who's down the street domestically in the US. Right, So
you have to run through a completely new set of validations, verifications,
fraud mitigations, risk checks to essentially model out what needs
(25:42):
to happen in order for us to be able to
buy from or sell to this cross border business. And
that's again high complexity, high operational overhead. And we've already
established that even in the domestic, in the purely domestic scenario,
the complexity and overhead scales linearly or super linearly with
(26:04):
every new trade relationship that you want to activate. The
moment you start going cross border, it's not only that
you go from having five customers to ten customers, like
you're going from five customers to ten customers, but from
one country to four countries, you've like quadrupled the level
of complexity that you had to kind of run through
your diligence check process. And you don't you find it
(26:25):
very difficult to benchmark and compare. So one of the
areas that we're driving impact is by creating like a
standardization layer on every profile that businesses create, so it
doesn't matter if you're in Brazil or in the US.
NUVAU will connect to the authoritative government registries, the bank accounts,
the credit bureau scores, et cetera. And for someone in
(26:49):
the US to look at a trade partner domestically versus internationally.
On Nouveau, we kind of like reduce the variance and
complexity associated with the variance in that process and say, hey,
we actually make it closer to doing an apples to
apples analysis on who you want to buy from or
sell to, because the underlying complexity has been kind of
abstracted away by the power of technology on our platform.
(27:12):
And I think that's an area where we're spending a
lot of time digging into and investing in because we
see we see an opportunity where if you didn't really
have to think about what is the incremental complexity of
doing business with someone in Mexico, or doing business with
someone in Canada, or doing someone in business with someone
(27:33):
in Brazil, it was just taken care of for you.
Then you can focus on the business value of what
are the products that I'm selling in the relationships that
I'm nurturing. Today you have to worry about products that
you sell and buy, relationships that you nurture, and eighty
percent of all of the kind of operational headache associated
with those business decisions which dilute those business decisions because
(27:55):
you want to reduce the overhead in the first place, right,
So it's like give give businesses back the time and
the creativity to design their own destinies and let the
complexity kind of fade away, Like that's that's the dream state.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Well, and I have to think that with this type
of situation where you can reduce that time, where you
can be looking at these these suppliers in a more
neutral format, or you know, across the board you're looking
at the same things and you're able to make some
very quick decisions. That builds agility into the conversation. So
(28:37):
as you said this, you know, this process used to
take a lot more time. It used to take a
lot more effort. And we know that when it comes
to things like tariffs, you know they may be there now,
but they might not be there in four years. These
things come and go very quickly as governments change, as
politicians change, tactics in the middle of their you know,
(29:01):
of their sentence in the middle of their of their reign,
and so having that agility has got to be a
huge differentiator to say, yes, this is the case now,
this is my situation now. But in two months when
this might change, or you know, they might negotiate a
new deal on this particular tariff, then I can maybe
(29:23):
go back to my original vendor, or I can go
back to another vendor that that you know, would have
been excluded. I think that that agility is going to
help them with their operational execution. Is that accurate? Is
that what you're seeing?
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Absolutely?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
So having more connections between more businesses is a good
thing because it essentially extends you optionality as a business owner, right,
And I think more optionality around designing your strategy for
growth under certain constraints and circumstance gives you more degrees
(30:02):
of freedom. You know, if if a certain you know,
if and I don't of view TERRAFFTS is like you know,
it's not it's it causes risk and shock, but it
also opens up opportunity. Right, like another country that you know,
maybe you wanted to ship your mangoes to before, but
(30:22):
they were subject to two hundred percent tariffs. If there's
a new trade deal lot that's done in that two
hundred percent tariff becomes a ten percent import tax. Be
selling your mangoes in that country, you know.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Yeah, it works both ways.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
It works both ways. Yeah, So using it as a
driver to quickly action on new opportunities that emergeon, arise,
and pull back when risks outweigh the benefit. It does
work both ways. But kind of keeping those options open,
having visibility into what the economics will be like under
(30:58):
various different terraff regimes and being able to you know,
competitively react. I mean, like the other topic on supply
chains is just like it's a heavily competitive environment, especially
in the commodities market, seeking about like food, beverage, construction,
building materials, other commodities, just like you know, steel, rubber, aluminium. Yeah, yeah,
(31:19):
I mean I think steel came up as like a
pretty recent example of making big efforts to insource US
steel production. These are cutthroat competitive markets where your ability
to move faster than the competition allows you to capitalize
on opportunities and use that as leveraged to drive growth.
(31:41):
So I view this as like, how how much can
we tighten feedback loops. And if you think about you know,
if you think about the businesses of the economy that
have really generated outsized profits and returns, think about like
high frequency trading companies on Wall Street. They have these
algorithms that are looking at real time changes in the
data and committing buy and sell trades in the stock market,
(32:05):
and that's primarily how they earn all their profit, not
necessarily by an analyst sitting there kind of reacting to
changes over a multi week long period, because by that
point the market has already shifted and it's it's been
done right. And supply chains are like the polar opposite
of that currently as it stands, because so much of
(32:25):
this is not like tight feedback loops driven. It's not
data and technology driven, where if a new change occurs,
it's like, Okay, there's a certain period of panic, a
little bit period of shock, you know, then you know,
reports start coming out, Then reports start getting translated into
boardroom strategy conversations. Those need to trickle down into the
(32:46):
actual operational changes that are made, and that can take
many months. And yeah, exactly exactly, So I think typening
of these feedback loops is extremely important, not just to
generate like great you know, outcomes for these individual businesses
from like a revenue growth or profitability perspective, but imagine
(33:09):
what that means for the broader economy and like even
the consumer landscape, right, Like you don't necessarily need to
see PPE at the time of peak COVID go from
like fifty cents a mask to twenty five dollars a
mask because you know, the supply chains were not able
to react adequately quickly enough, and now everybody feels gouged.
(33:30):
Nobody feels very good about it. But ultimately it's like
market economics, it makes sense, But how do you how
do you not allow that to happen or you know,
avoid that to the best extent possible. I think it's
a worthy question that affects everyone's daily lives.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Yeah, now that now that we've seen it happen, we've
all lived through it, and it's not a question of
if it's when when are we going to experience that
kind of disruption again? And it's it doesn't have to
be a pandemic, but something that is that disruptive and
that influential on the way that we operate in supply chain.
(34:11):
So where do you see. I mean we've talked about,
of course, trade policy and tariffs. That's on everyone's mind
at the moment, so it's topical. But what are some
of those supplier engagements going to look like in the future.
I mean, you're talking about making it easier just to
make the connection in the first place and build that
(34:34):
initial trust. But in that world where you can make
a decision very quickly and move on to the next supplier,
that doesn't feel like a great supplier relationship. So what's
really going to be building those relationships that are more
lasting or more mutually beneficial in the long run as
(34:57):
opposed to just transactional.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Yeah, the nature of B to B relationships, they are
fundamentally relationship driven. I don't think we're going to create
a world that becomes transactional whatsoever. If you think about it,
what does expansion of trade partnerships enable? From a very
fundamental questioning perspective. By increasing the number of vendors and
(35:20):
suppliers that you work with, you're able to expand the
total pool of goods and services that are accessible to
your business to procure, and that will enable you to
create better products and services that you can sell to
your end customers right like today. For example, if you
wanted to start a hardware company, you have access to
(35:40):
globally diverse supply chains. You can get chips from one place,
screens from another place. You know, actuators from a different place.
Like to start to build a robot or you know,
mass produce robots. Today, let's say in the US, it's
easier than it was, you know, maybe thirty or forty
years ago, when the total pool of suppliers that you
could tell into was more limited. That constrain what you
(36:02):
could do as a business in terms of the goods
and services you could create. So I think what will
happen is that we will start to dramatically increase the quantity, quality,
and variety of goods and services that are available in
the global economy by virtue expanding supplier and vendor relationships,
(36:22):
and on the flip side, by virtue of having access
to globally accessible customers that buyer products. There are two benefits.
The most easy and obvious one is that you have
new vectors to drive growth in your business. You don't
need to sell your avocados only within some small corner
territory of California. You can ship your avocados to Asia
(36:44):
and you know, explore new business growth opportunities that would
have otherwise been difficult to accomplish. If two businesses on
either side of the world, we're not able to connect
and activate their relationship with each other. But if you
think about what is the implication of being able to
have of a globally accessible uh set of customers that
you could sell into, I think the second order implications
(37:07):
are even more interesting because it will allow you to
create and distribute goods and services that are more specialized
and niche. Whereas maybe there maybe there wasn't a sufficient
market for you know, a specially type a special type
of spicy avocado that you had concocted with your own
(37:28):
creativity because within your kind of regional constraints there weren't
enough buyers for it. But a globally accessible customer base,
maybe there's an interesting enough niche market where this product
exists and can thrive in this new world. Right, So
it's really interesting to think about how we can get
(37:48):
increasingly and progressively specialized in our global supply chains, where
we'll see an explosion of available goods and services, deeper
personalization of whatever it is that you want or you need.
You don't need to go and get that generic part.
You have a more specialized part that is accessible somewhere
at a cost effective price point for you to procure
(38:10):
and use to build whatever it is that you're going
to build and pass through in the next level down
of the supply chain. I think that's a very interesting world,
and it's far far from being one that is purely transactional.
I think there will be more like a higher volume
of deep relationships instead of kind of a higher volume
of progressively more shallow relationships.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Okay, So which types of companies And I'll use the
word companies very loosely because they could be on either
side of this equation for you, So, we've either got
a supplier or we've got a consumer, and maybe they're
don't I don't even know. Perhaps a company could be
(38:52):
on both sides of that, depending on what it is
that they're doing. If they're taking a product, making something
and then selling it to someone else, you know, they
could potentially be on both sides of that equation. But
what companies are really making the most use and getting
the most value out of this platform, what what industries
are they in what size, you know, what which customers,
(39:15):
which listeners of mine should be most interested in your platform.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah. Well, if you're a business that is selling B
to B physical goods to a high volume of customers,
onboarding a high volume of them every single year, exploring
new channels for growth like e commerce channels and digital
storefronts to acquire new customers, and you have an existing
(39:41):
customer onboarding and perhaps a credit process in place, benuvo
is something that you should absolutely explore. We've successfully partnered
with businesses across a variety of industries like food and beverage.
If you're you know, liquor wholesaler selling to you know,
five thousand bars, bodegas, restaurants, and small retail stores, you
(40:03):
need to have a scaled customer onboarding and risk management
process in place where you can scale your efforts using
the introduction of better technology to drive that process. If
you're selling building materials or construction products to you know,
many thousands of general contractors who are also businesses that
(40:24):
are trading goods with you, then you also need a
scaled onboarding and risk management process. So those are just
an examples of industries where we've gotten really strong market pull.
But you know, we also work across you know, steel, glass,
(40:45):
auto parts, tires, medical equipment. You know, the variety of
products and subcategories of products of goods moving through the
supply chain is large and diverse. And as long as
you're doing business with a high enough volume of trade
partners and you're trying to expand your pool of trade
(41:07):
partners that you were selling into or buying from, Nouveau
would be a good fit to help you scale those
trade relationships in time.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
All right, So I'm gonna I'm gonna take this back
to our to our icebreaker. What is the most interesting
product that you have seen a supplier bring to your platform?
Speaker 1 (41:26):
The most interesting product that a supplier has brought. That's
that's an interesting question because I.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Mean, we've talked about We've talked about building materials. We've
talked about food. We talked about some you know, perhaps
niche food ingredients or anything like that. We've talked about medical,
medical ppe and medical devices. I'm trying to think there's
there's got to be something bizarre that you've seen walk
through the door.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
It's not necessarily some maybe it's not bizarre, but one
of the one of the areas where I was like, wow,
this is really cool is we've been seeing a lot
of solar product moving through the new VAU ecosystem where
some of the largest solar panel manufacturing and distribution businesses
are on our platform working with solar installers. One of
(42:17):
the really cool things about this is that it allows
us to visualize the changing and evolving nature of the
supply chain world. Where ten years ago, twenty years ago,
there are not very many solar installers in the US economy,
there are a lot today growing every single month. So
(42:37):
to be able to visualize the growth of solar like
wholesale buyers and the explosion of net new demand for
you know, sustainable energy technologies to flow through the supply chain,
it's one of those like exponentially accelerating end markets where
(42:57):
you know, maybe other markets are like relatively stable, people
are eating about the same amount of food, drinking the
same amount of wine, But you know, the volume of
solar moving through a platform year over year is just
it's breathtaking, and I think testament to how when new
products are brought to market and their strong demand and
customer adoption. Being able to see the inner workings of
(43:18):
the supply chains kind of like reworking themselves. It almost
looks like, you know, the brains neurons like reconfiguring themselves
to fire and like unique paths based on things that
you discover, and you like, we're seeing that kind of
like interesting dynamic pattern within the supply chain ecosystem also emerged.
So I thought that was a really cool inner workings
(43:39):
of the world that we have visibility into.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
No, that's true. You probably have some very unique insights
into customer buying patterns right now.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
Yeah, Yeah, it's cool. The future is bright. Based on
the data that I see flowing through our platform, it is.
I think we are heading towards a world of supply
chain abundance, which emerges from you know, more businesses existing
in our economy than ever before, more interconnectivity between those businesses,
(44:11):
a higher volume of goods and services. The pace of
growth of new industries like solar being an example, is
accelerating with every new macro trend. We haven't quite yet
sold into kind of like the AI chips world, but
I'm sure that world is going through some utterly crazy
(44:32):
exponential growth of supply chain constraints as demand has blown
through the roof so it's the future looks really bright.
So I look at our data and it fills me
with optimism seeing seeing what's possible and where the world
is heading.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Well, and for all of those solar suppliers and installers,
I hope the future is bright well. Thank you so much,
Sid for joining us today and sharing a little bit
more about Nuveau.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Thanks for having me Ellen so when the.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Rules of trade change fast, trust, speed and clarity aren't luxuries,
they're your competitive edge. Thank you so much for sharing
your insights today, and to our listeners, if you've found
today's episode valuable, be sure to hit that subscribe button
so you never miss an episode. And if you're interested
in being a guest on our show, you can reach
me at podcast at mebok dot com at any time
Going from I want to work with this business to
either source from them or sell to them too. I
am ready to trade with them. It's a very long,
manual and unclear process, and that entire process introduces drop off,
it introduces operational overhead on both sides of the relationship,
(00:21):
and it's very unclear what the true data driven risk
profiles that either party are.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hello and welcome to Speaking of Supply Chain, where we
explore trends, current events, and innovations impacting the logistics and
supply chain industries. I'm your host, Ellen Wood. In today's
global economy, one tariff can shift entire supply chains overnight.
If you're responsible for operational resilience, procurement strategy, or supplier performance,
this conversation is for you. We're diving into how companies
(00:53):
are rethinking sourcing strategies, validating vendors at lightning speed, and
building trust in a world where agility isn't optional, it's essential.
Our guest today is Sid Malaate, CEO and founder of Nouveau,
a platform that's changing the game from modern supply chain resilience.
Welcome Sid, Thanks for having me, Yllen. Great to have
(01:14):
you on. Let's get to our icebreaker really quick for today,
and our question is what is the most interesting thing
most people don't know about you?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Well, I'm not sure if this is most interesting, but
certainly a fun fact about myself is that I have
gone down deep rabbit holes in the art of cartography,
and I have plastered various forms of maps of the
world and various geographies throughout my home. I like digging into,
(01:45):
you know, the world as it's organized by political lines,
you know, topographic lines, and in many other ways. So
I'll just spend time to decompress staring into those maps
and kind of being the composition of the world that
is around us. And that that's I guess a unique
(02:06):
way that I like to spend on my downtime.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
That is interesting. I was I was actually at an
antique mall about two weeks ago, and they had a really,
really old globe and it was cool to look at
the older you know, countries and lines and divisions and
you know, the way the world looked then at the time.
I myself, my kids have a globe that's almost as
(02:31):
old as I am, so it's not a new one,
and they laugh at it a little bit. They're like
that's not the name of that country anymore. I'm like, no,
that's what happens. That's why you need to learn history.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
That's funny you have you looked into getting one of
those like three D globes that kind of have the
peaks and troughs with the mountains and the valleys across
the world. Those are those are fun to spin around.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
I mean the one I have has a little bit
of topography on it, a little bit of like relief,
but not much. It's not one of it like, it's
not to scale certainly. So I'm trying to think the
most interesting thing most people don't know about me. So
I've talked about some of my career early career. I've
(03:13):
had a varied career path. I've done many things, and
one thing that I've talked about is my scuba diving career.
I was a scuba diving instructor for a while, which
is an odd thing to be in Indiana. But before that,
I actually started as a lifeguard and swim instructor. And
we're getting into sumheer. We've got the heat wave of
(03:35):
going right now, and I keep thinking about it, and
I'm talking to my sixteen year old I'm like, go
get your life guarding certificate. You will you will have jobs.
You will have some teenage job security if you have
some sort of certification. So that's been that's been on
my mind recently, and it's a pretty interesting fact that
most people don't know about me. I cannot sit next
to a pool and relax. I am watching everything all
(03:57):
the time on alert.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
That's really cool, if I may recommend. I got my
Patty openwater certification a few years ago, and I've really
enjoyed going on dives in the Monterey Bay area in California.
It's if you ever out there, they have they have
some really good, like you know, underwater kind of topography.
(04:19):
Once it goes so far as to say like you know,
corals or anything to explore, but a very verse, you know,
very diverse out of sights to see down there. I
did have a mini shark encounter, which I think was
my favorite. It's memorable underwater diving experience. But yeah, certainly
a very different world down there.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, it's it's a very diverse ecosystem down there. I
have not been to that area, but I also saw
an eight foot nurse shark on my first open water
dive in the ocean, and that was that was pretty
exciting for fourteen year old me.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Oh, I'm sure you freaked out. Hope you had a
dive knife on you.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
No, actually I didn't. Okay, this might be the most
interesting thing people don't know about me. Then. So I
was diving with my father and we were in the
Bahamas in Freeport at Unexso and we were diving and
we got off the boat and he was my dive
buddy and he had one of those This was a
long time ago, almost thirty years ago. So it was
(05:16):
a camera casing that you put one of the disposable
cameras in and then it was just a waterproof casing
that you could take down there and it was the
shark was on the ground between two coral heads that
were I don't know, six feet tall, and it was
just laying there. It's a nurse shark. They don't do anything.
They can only open their mouths two inches. It's not
a scary shark. And I message my dad. I was like, Dad,
(05:38):
go down and take a picture. And so he's at
the top but he takes a picture and I said no, no, no, no, no,
go down. He said no, give me a camera. You
wouldn't let me have it. So that was that was
a memorable experience, but clear that I was more adventurous
underwater than he was. I was ready to go after
(05:59):
the wild life and he was just happy to observe
it from afar.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
That's funny. You're definitely at your bravest on your first
first go round at it.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yes, but we're not talking about scuba diving today. We
are going to be talking about trust in procurement. And
this is so big a topic right now with all
of the changes that are taking place politically around the globe,
but especially in the Americas right now when we're dealing
(06:31):
with these these tariffs and it's causing all kinds of disruption,
and suppliers are questioning what they're going to do, how
they're going to get around it, how they're going to
manage their business when they have to pivot so frequently
based on whatever the administration has decided is going to
go through or whatever is you know currently in discussions. So,
(06:54):
how have some of these recent trade policies either accelerated
the need for companies to rethink they're sourcing or can
you walk us how you're helping them transition from some
of these I mean, it is really reactionary the way
that they're having to do this into a more strategic
sourcing even though we know that they're going to have
(07:14):
to react.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, so maybe taking a step back, I think to
put ourselves into the shoes of a lot of these
operators in the supply chain world. What most people find
interesting or surprising about how businesses in the supply chain
work are that for every given business, the nature of
(07:37):
trade partnerships with your vendors, suppliers, and also your customers
on the other side of the supply chain. These are
very direct trade partnerships that don't have any intermediaries. So
unlike the consumer commerce environment where people are buying a
lot of things on marketplaces or they're putting a lot
of their spend on credit cards, you essentially have these
middlemen that serve as trust brokers to allow for both
(08:00):
sides of the equation to kind of scale. How many
you know, vendors or customers you're able to transact with
or partner with. In the case of B to B
supply chains, that doesn't really exist. So if you're let's
say wholesale business, you might have one hundred different suppliers
or brands that you procure various goods from, and you
might have one thousand, five thousand, ten thousand retail customers
(08:23):
that you sell too. And across each of these supplier
and customer relationships, the business is responsible for all of
the operational overhead and risk that exists on each of
these relationships. Right, So, by virtue of let's say this
wholesale business having thousands of supplier and customer relationships, you're
(08:45):
responsible for onboarding them, verifying their legitimacy, understanding their fraud
and credit risk, understanding financial volatility of these trade partners,
recognizing how trade you know, patterns and activities between your
business and each of you your partners is shifting, especially
you know the tear regien beconn example, where you might
start seeing cost surplus on some of these cross border
(09:07):
trade partners that you might be interacting with, and you're
responsible for managing all of that complexity fully internally. So
oftentimes what ends up happening is that the complexity and
the overhead is so high that it kind of gets
you stuck. It gets you clogged up, and makes it
very difficult to pivot or be agile in an environment
(09:30):
where a volatility is running a muck, and I view tarriffs's,
you know, just one other vector of volatility. I mean,
we just a couple of years ago, business is felt
volatility in a very different dimension when we had, you know,
the supply chained shocks in the advent of the pandemic.
So the question becomes, how do you how do you
(09:52):
pivot your sourcing and your revenue strategy to adapt to that? Right,
So I'll give you a couple of examples of what
we're seeing in the ecosystem and how we think that
technology can play a very meaningful role in powering some
of this dynamism that I think is extremely critical. So,
in the advent of tariffs, a supplier, let's say, who
(10:16):
sells into what they considered a stable base of customers
that we're ordering a predictable volume of goods from them,
paying predictable sum of revenue. Now that supplier is asking
themselves a question, for reasons that are external to them tariffs,
how is demand, price and cost going to fluctuate against
(10:39):
my current customers? And how do I ensure that a
possible fifty percent drop in customer demand from existing partners
that I've been working with for the last five ten
plus years, doesn't you know, doesn't you know destroy my business? Right,
So that's a question that they ask, and you know,
the answer from that point of view is more is
(11:02):
always better. You know, you want to have more customers,
more diverse customers, not just geographically, but you know, different
customer segments that you're able to ship your your goods
to and sell your goods to. So I think the
level of stability of saying I have a predictable volume
of customers who I've known on handshake agreements for the
last X number of years that no longer applies. You're
(11:26):
always in this kind of inquisitive motion of trying to
hedge your bets across as many revenue channels as possible. Now,
if you if you flip that over to the sourcing side,
very similar dynamic, a business that had been buying, you know,
twenty dollars per unit of lumber as an example, if
(11:46):
that lumber suddenly becomes thirty, thirty five to forty dollars
because you're procuring that lumber from you know, Canada, is
a very generic example. I think I think lumbers actually
exempt from from the tariff REGIAM, but I just wanted
to use it as an indicative example. You have your
maybe general contractor jobs that have already been quoted. You've
already priced those jobs, so you have a finite amount
(12:10):
of revenue that's coming in. But then suddenly your cost
basis has doubled or tripled and you don't really know
what to do about it. How are these businesses thinking about,
you know, enhancing accelerating their strategy around sourcing in procurement. Well,
they're thinking about two problems. First is, in the advent
of all of this volatility, will my existing vendors make
(12:31):
it through the other side in a secure way? Or
you know, you're starting to see a ton of supplier
risk that is emerging, where you know, if your supplier
shuts down shop, your business moves at the pace of
your least lucky or least competent supplier. So you want
to sure that your existing partnerships are healthy. But then
you also want to make sure that you have a
(12:53):
diversity of trade partnerships so that maybe you're sourcing some
of your lumber from domestic distributors. You might want to
source some lower cost lumber, but more high kind of
price volatility risk lumber from like that Canadian sorcer. So
having having a diverse, hedged strategy, I think is like
(13:14):
the wisest way that any business can be prepared for
these sort of shifts, so that you can pivot very
organically whenever you need to, instead of being unprepared when
a certain unpredictable shock hits.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Sure, so what are the challenges that they're facing when
they're looking for these new qualified suppliers from either direction?
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Yeah, so I think I think there are a few
ways that we can break this down. First and foremost
is just discovery. Knowing who's out there in the market,
you know, like who are the options that you should explore?
I think, you know, there have been a variety of
ways that discovery has gotten easier, faster, and cheaper today
than it was before. You know, most businesses have some
(13:59):
type of an online Internet presence. So if you if
you are to look up you know, who's selling lumber,
who's selling liquor, you know, whatever it is that you're
trying to procure or source, you have a better shot
of being able to discover a you know, top of
funnel opportunities for new trade partnerships better than you have
in the past. But I think an area that we've
(14:20):
been able to influence the most from NUVO's point of view,
is once you've discovered a possible new trade partnership that
you'd like to activate, going from I want to work
with this business to either source from them or sell
to them, to I am ready to trade with them.
It's it's a very long, manual and unclear process in
(14:44):
many ways. So I'll give you I'll give you a
very simple example. Let's say that you're you're a restaurant
owner and you're trying to source your fresh vegetables from, uh,
you know, a different vendor because the one that you've
partnered with so far has been prone to some kind
of risk shock or you know, their price volatility, something
(15:06):
that doesn't work with your economics as a restaurant operator.
If you find an alternative food service distributor, activating that
new relationship involves you submitting new onboarding paperwork. It requires
a one to two week process of that new food
service distributor putting you through a rigorous due diligence process
trying to verify your legitimacy as a business. Because fraud
(15:29):
rates are blowing through the roof, especially in the advent
of AI, so they need to make sure that you're legitimate.
They're running you through many different verification checks. They have
to evaluate you for trade risk because you know, in
many of these cases, sellers are extending trade credit off
their own balance sheets, where you know they're parting ways
with their goods but getting paid for them thirty sixty
(15:49):
ninety days later. So you want to make sure that
there is good credit history associated with your counter party.
And that entire process introduces off It introduces operational overhead
on both sides of the relationship, and it's very unclear
(16:10):
what the true data driven risk profiles that either party are.
So again you're waiting two weeks, and once you start
that relationship, that new food service distributor might say, let's
see how it goes for the first six months. I'm
not gonna give you any credit. You're gonna have to
pay me at the time of delivery fulfillment. That's not
very good for your cash flow. Maybe they cap your
(16:32):
credit limit or your purchasing limit to an amount that
is less than what your true procurement needs are because
they don't know any better about your business. So you're
slow rolling this like six to twelve month on ramp
with every new trade relationship for it to be truly
activated to the extent that you need it to be.
And I think the complexity and the overhead cost is
(16:57):
something that largely prevents business is from saying, hey, I
want that N plus one trade partnership to activate, because
I just don't want to deal with that complexity. Unless
there is a forcing function that becomes existential for my business,
then I'll do whatever it takes to sweat it out
and do the unglamorous work pivoting. But the cost I've
(17:21):
viewed as a tax, the tax of a bit associated
with the business pivoting their trade relationships across their supply
chain relationships is so high that they don't want to
do it if they can help it.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Sure, And I mean I love your example just because
I used to be a restaurant manager and so I
relate to that infinitely. But I mean that's such a
small scale and what you're saying is absolutely factual. I mean,
that's how long it takes. These are the risks that
you run into. This is the slog that you have
to go through to you know, to switch suppliers and
(17:57):
you know, bring on a new vendor. But when we're
talking talking about the economies of scale and looking at
distributors and companies and enterprises, it's that much bigger an
issue because it's not you know, a couple thousand dollars
in produce every week. It's millions of dollars of product
that we're talking about, and that's a huge risk for
(18:19):
these companies to take on and extend credit to. So
what does this vetting process look like? You're you're telling
me it's it's periodic, it's it's clunky, and it's manual.
And obviously the digital age has changed that a little bit.
So when that speed, when that reliability, when that risk
(18:40):
mitigation all has to be balanced, what is what does
that look like now?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yeah, so we're just to introduce, like what our long
term mission is with NUVAU. We're trying to build the
digital infrastructure to power physical goods trade and really accelerate
that as much as possible. So what we see ourselves
as is almost this handshake layer that makes it faster, easier,
(19:09):
cheaper for businesses to activate new trade partnerships with their
suppliers and their customers in a way that could have
been possible in a pennant paper plus manual review era.
That makes connectivity very very difficult and painful, frankly to accomplish.
So on Nuva, let's go back to this restaurant operator
(19:30):
working with a food service distributor example. With Nuvo, we're
building this verified business identity network where once that food
service distributor decides that they want to do business with
Ellen's restaurant as an example, they can send you an
(19:51):
invitation to connect with them on the Neuvau network, and
by virtue of you replacing your typical onboarding paperwork with
completing your new vote profile and committing to sharing your
new vote profile with that food service distributor, what the
platform helps accomplish is deep sets of legitimacy verification. So
(20:12):
are you who you say you are and are you
authoritatively you know trustworthy business. We pull in signals from
many dozens of authoritative databases like government registries, the IRS,
social Security Administration, fraud databases, credit risk databases like the bureaus.
We pull information from the banks to demonstrate cash flow
(20:34):
history and health. So once you kind of put out
this request that you want to be a customer with
that new food service distributor, that supplier, and now has
all of the contexts that they need to validate trust
and activate that new trade relationship with you, you know,
in minutes, right, so so much faster. It's faster, it's easier.
(20:58):
Levels of visibility and trust are that much higher. And
as a direct consequence, like if you think about the
second and third order effects of doing this, now the
food service distributor is able to double their customer base
without necessarily having to double their operational overhead. So they're
now motivated to do more and grow their business in
(21:19):
a way that they just didn't have the infrastructure to
do before. The second order of implication of that is now,
as Ellen's restaurant, you now have a greater desire to
expand your trade relationships with other vendors and suppliers. And
instead of maybe only having the capacity to have five
food suppliers that you're procuring from, now maybe you have
(21:39):
twenty five. Right, you have greater optionality. You're able to
purchase you know, fresh Italian food ingredients from a specialty
Italian food service vendor. You're able to get the best
fresh produce from someone who specializes in that and you're
able to kind of stock up on inventory that differentiates
you as a business and a restaurant operator because you
(22:00):
might be able to expand the items on your menu.
There's so many ways that you can think about how
this is advantageous to your business. And beyond that, you
now have more choice around which suppliers are most cost competitive,
where do you want to buy certain supplies from. Maybe
you don't kind of put all your eggs in one basket,
and you can start to run these optimization functions, and
(22:22):
the next time you want to partner with that next
food service distributor, you can reuse your Neuvaux profile to
build that next connection instead of having to yet again
fill out onboarding paperwork yet again go through a two
week long due diligence process. It's kind of like a
trust profile that follows you as you do more and
more across your trade network, and that next supplier can
(22:43):
see that, Okay, you're a vetted participant in the Nuvou network.
You've partnered with other vendors and suppliers in the past
and built healthier trade relationships with them, so they're going
to be that much faster and more confident in activating
that relationship. So the larger of participants on Nuva's trade
network becomes, the more each participant benefits over time because
(23:07):
we're making it progressively easier, faster, and higher trust to
activate that next relationship on our platform.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
So it sounds like NUVO's just the concierge that just
brings everybody together and says, you know, okay, this is
my friend, they're great, this this is the this is
the other guy. They're great. You guys talk to your thing.
But so what does that look like when we're we're
looking at across borders, like right now we're talking about tariffs,
(23:36):
and we know that some of these things are completely
out of the suppliers or the vendors control. When they're
looking for that diversification in their in their supplier portfolio,
you know, are they are they able to look into
different geographies? Are they able to look at you know,
maybe this one is going to have, you know, a
(23:57):
tariff implication, this one is not, or this one's going
to be able to deliver in three days because of
their proximity, whereas this one will take seven to ten.
You know, what are some of those How does that
work within within the NUVA platform.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, so that all happens at the discovery layer. So
Nuva doesn't really powered discovery of new you know, supplier
or customer relationships, but post discovery, when you've decided that
you do want to partner with the business, we make
it that much easier to actually activate that intention. So
going back to your example, we do support the cross
border use case, by the way, but just to give
(24:34):
you a worked example of why cross border starts to
increase complexity even further, if you're doing business with someone domestically,
maybe you establish a standard operating procedure internally saying here's
how we're going to verify our trade partners. We're going
to go to a government registry, maybe check a Secretary
of State report, go and pull a credit bureau file,
(24:56):
maybe conduct a certain due diligence process that's enforceable in
the US, and you have a predictable process around saying
I want to, you know, activate that next trade relationship,
but using the same process that I've activated my previous
trade relationship. But now the moment you move cross border,
you're now comparing apples and oranges. The way that's the
(25:17):
WENS is different it's completely different. The way that you
validate a business internationally, let's say in Brazil, is not
the same way that you would validate a trade partner
who's down the street domestically in the US. Right, So
you have to run through a completely new set of validations, verifications,
fraud mitigations, risk checks to essentially model out what needs
(25:42):
to happen in order for us to be able to
buy from or sell to this cross border business. And
that's again high complexity, high operational overhead. And we've already
established that even in the domestic, in the purely domestic scenario,
the complexity and overhead scales linearly or super linearly with
(26:04):
every new trade relationship that you want to activate. The
moment you start going cross border, it's not only that
you go from having five customers to ten customers, like
you're going from five customers to ten customers, but from
one country to four countries, you've like quadrupled the level
of complexity that you had to kind of run through
your diligence check process. And you don't you find it
(26:25):
very difficult to benchmark and compare. So one of the
areas that we're driving impact is by creating like a
standardization layer on every profile that businesses create, so it
doesn't matter if you're in Brazil or in the US.
NUVAU will connect to the authoritative government registries, the bank accounts,
the credit bureau scores, et cetera. And for someone in
(26:49):
the US to look at a trade partner domestically versus internationally.
On Nouveau, we kind of like reduce the variance and
complexity associated with the variance in that process and say, hey,
we actually make it closer to doing an apples to
apples analysis on who you want to buy from or
sell to, because the underlying complexity has been kind of
abstracted away by the power of technology on our platform.
(27:12):
And I think that's an area where we're spending a
lot of time digging into and investing in because we
see we see an opportunity where if you didn't really
have to think about what is the incremental complexity of
doing business with someone in Mexico, or doing business with
someone in Canada, or doing someone in business with someone
(27:33):
in Brazil, it was just taken care of for you.
Then you can focus on the business value of what
are the products that I'm selling in the relationships that
I'm nurturing. Today you have to worry about products that
you sell and buy, relationships that you nurture, and eighty
percent of all of the kind of operational headache associated
with those business decisions which dilute those business decisions because
(27:55):
you want to reduce the overhead in the first place, right,
So it's like give give businesses back the time and
the creativity to design their own destinies and let the
complexity kind of fade away, Like that's that's the dream state.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Well, and I have to think that with this type
of situation where you can reduce that time, where you
can be looking at these these suppliers in a more
neutral format, or you know, across the board you're looking
at the same things and you're able to make some
very quick decisions. That builds agility into the conversation. So
(28:37):
as you said this, you know, this process used to
take a lot more time. It used to take a
lot more effort. And we know that when it comes
to things like tariffs, you know they may be there now,
but they might not be there in four years. These
things come and go very quickly as governments change, as
politicians change, tactics in the middle of their you know,
(29:01):
of their sentence in the middle of their of their reign,
and so having that agility has got to be a
huge differentiator to say, yes, this is the case now,
this is my situation now. But in two months when
this might change, or you know, they might negotiate a
new deal on this particular tariff, then I can maybe
(29:23):
go back to my original vendor, or I can go
back to another vendor that that you know, would have
been excluded. I think that that agility is going to
help them with their operational execution. Is that accurate? Is
that what you're seeing?
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Absolutely?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
So having more connections between more businesses is a good
thing because it essentially extends you optionality as a business owner, right,
And I think more optionality around designing your strategy for
growth under certain constraints and circumstance gives you more degrees
(30:02):
of freedom. You know, if if a certain you know,
if and I don't of view TERRAFFTS is like you know,
it's not it's it causes risk and shock, but it
also opens up opportunity. Right, like another country that you know,
maybe you wanted to ship your mangoes to before, but
(30:22):
they were subject to two hundred percent tariffs. If there's
a new trade deal lot that's done in that two
hundred percent tariff becomes a ten percent import tax. Be
selling your mangoes in that country, you know.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Yeah, it works both ways.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
It works both ways. Yeah, So using it as a
driver to quickly action on new opportunities that emergeon, arise,
and pull back when risks outweigh the benefit. It does
work both ways. But kind of keeping those options open,
having visibility into what the economics will be like under
(30:58):
various different terraff regimes and being able to you know,
competitively react. I mean, like the other topic on supply
chains is just like it's a heavily competitive environment, especially
in the commodities market, seeking about like food, beverage, construction,
building materials, other commodities, just like you know, steel, rubber, aluminium. Yeah, yeah,
(31:19):
I mean I think steel came up as like a
pretty recent example of making big efforts to insource US
steel production. These are cutthroat competitive markets where your ability
to move faster than the competition allows you to capitalize
on opportunities and use that as leveraged to drive growth.
(31:41):
So I view this as like, how how much can
we tighten feedback loops. And if you think about you know,
if you think about the businesses of the economy that
have really generated outsized profits and returns, think about like
high frequency trading companies on Wall Street. They have these
algorithms that are looking at real time changes in the
data and committing buy and sell trades in the stock market,
(32:05):
and that's primarily how they earn all their profit, not
necessarily by an analyst sitting there kind of reacting to
changes over a multi week long period, because by that
point the market has already shifted and it's it's been
done right. And supply chains are like the polar opposite
of that currently as it stands, because so much of
(32:25):
this is not like tight feedback loops driven. It's not
data and technology driven, where if a new change occurs,
it's like, Okay, there's a certain period of panic, a
little bit period of shock, you know, then you know,
reports start coming out, Then reports start getting translated into
boardroom strategy conversations. Those need to trickle down into the
(32:46):
actual operational changes that are made, and that can take
many months. And yeah, exactly exactly, So I think typening
of these feedback loops is extremely important, not just to
generate like great you know, outcomes for these individual businesses
from like a revenue growth or profitability perspective, but imagine
(33:09):
what that means for the broader economy and like even
the consumer landscape, right, Like you don't necessarily need to
see PPE at the time of peak COVID go from
like fifty cents a mask to twenty five dollars a
mask because you know, the supply chains were not able
to react adequately quickly enough, and now everybody feels gouged.
(33:30):
Nobody feels very good about it. But ultimately it's like
market economics, it makes sense, But how do you how
do you not allow that to happen or you know,
avoid that to the best extent possible. I think it's
a worthy question that affects everyone's daily lives.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Yeah, now that now that we've seen it happen, we've
all lived through it, and it's not a question of
if it's when when are we going to experience that
kind of disruption again? And it's it doesn't have to
be a pandemic, but something that is that disruptive and
that influential on the way that we operate in supply chain.
(34:11):
So where do you see. I mean we've talked about,
of course, trade policy and tariffs. That's on everyone's mind
at the moment, so it's topical. But what are some
of those supplier engagements going to look like in the future.
I mean, you're talking about making it easier just to
make the connection in the first place and build that
(34:34):
initial trust. But in that world where you can make
a decision very quickly and move on to the next supplier,
that doesn't feel like a great supplier relationship. So what's
really going to be building those relationships that are more
lasting or more mutually beneficial in the long run as
(34:57):
opposed to just transactional.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Yeah, the nature of B to B relationships, they are
fundamentally relationship driven. I don't think we're going to create
a world that becomes transactional whatsoever. If you think about it,
what does expansion of trade partnerships enable? From a very
fundamental questioning perspective. By increasing the number of vendors and
(35:20):
suppliers that you work with, you're able to expand the
total pool of goods and services that are accessible to
your business to procure, and that will enable you to
create better products and services that you can sell to
your end customers right like today. For example, if you
wanted to start a hardware company, you have access to
(35:40):
globally diverse supply chains. You can get chips from one place,
screens from another place. You know, actuators from a different place.
Like to start to build a robot or you know,
mass produce robots. Today, let's say in the US, it's
easier than it was, you know, maybe thirty or forty
years ago, when the total pool of suppliers that you
could tell into was more limited. That constrain what you
(36:02):
could do as a business in terms of the goods
and services you could create. So I think what will
happen is that we will start to dramatically increase the quantity, quality,
and variety of goods and services that are available in
the global economy by virtue expanding supplier and vendor relationships,
(36:22):
and on the flip side, by virtue of having access
to globally accessible customers that buyer products. There are two benefits.
The most easy and obvious one is that you have
new vectors to drive growth in your business. You don't
need to sell your avocados only within some small corner
territory of California. You can ship your avocados to Asia
(36:44):
and you know, explore new business growth opportunities that would
have otherwise been difficult to accomplish. If two businesses on
either side of the world, we're not able to connect
and activate their relationship with each other. But if you
think about what is the implication of being able to
have of a globally accessible uh set of customers that
you could sell into, I think the second order implications
(37:07):
are even more interesting because it will allow you to
create and distribute goods and services that are more specialized
and niche. Whereas maybe there maybe there wasn't a sufficient
market for you know, a specially type a special type
of spicy avocado that you had concocted with your own
(37:28):
creativity because within your kind of regional constraints there weren't
enough buyers for it. But a globally accessible customer base,
maybe there's an interesting enough niche market where this product
exists and can thrive in this new world. Right, So
it's really interesting to think about how we can get
(37:48):
increasingly and progressively specialized in our global supply chains, where
we'll see an explosion of available goods and services, deeper
personalization of whatever it is that you want or you need.
You don't need to go and get that generic part.
You have a more specialized part that is accessible somewhere
at a cost effective price point for you to procure
(38:10):
and use to build whatever it is that you're going
to build and pass through in the next level down
of the supply chain. I think that's a very interesting world,
and it's far far from being one that is purely transactional.
I think there will be more like a higher volume
of deep relationships instead of kind of a higher volume
of progressively more shallow relationships.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Okay, So which types of companies And I'll use the
word companies very loosely because they could be on either
side of this equation for you, So, we've either got
a supplier or we've got a consumer, and maybe they're
don't I don't even know. Perhaps a company could be
(38:52):
on both sides of that, depending on what it is
that they're doing. If they're taking a product, making something
and then selling it to someone else, you know, they
could potentially be on both sides of that equation. But
what companies are really making the most use and getting
the most value out of this platform, what what industries
are they in what size, you know, what which customers,
(39:15):
which listeners of mine should be most interested in your platform.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah. Well, if you're a business that is selling B
to B physical goods to a high volume of customers,
onboarding a high volume of them every single year, exploring
new channels for growth like e commerce channels and digital
storefronts to acquire new customers, and you have an existing
(39:41):
customer onboarding and perhaps a credit process in place, benuvo
is something that you should absolutely explore. We've successfully partnered
with businesses across a variety of industries like food and beverage.
If you're you know, liquor wholesaler selling to you know,
five thousand bars, bodegas, restaurants, and small retail stores, you
(40:03):
need to have a scaled customer onboarding and risk management
process in place where you can scale your efforts using
the introduction of better technology to drive that process. If
you're selling building materials or construction products to you know,
many thousands of general contractors who are also businesses that
(40:24):
are trading goods with you, then you also need a
scaled onboarding and risk management process. So those are just
an examples of industries where we've gotten really strong market pull.
But you know, we also work across you know, steel, glass,
(40:45):
auto parts, tires, medical equipment. You know, the variety of
products and subcategories of products of goods moving through the
supply chain is large and diverse. And as long as
you're doing business with a high enough volume of trade
partners and you're trying to expand your pool of trade
(41:07):
partners that you were selling into or buying from, Nouveau
would be a good fit to help you scale those
trade relationships in time.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
All right, So I'm gonna I'm gonna take this back
to our to our icebreaker. What is the most interesting
product that you have seen a supplier bring to your platform?
Speaker 1 (41:26):
The most interesting product that a supplier has brought. That's
that's an interesting question because I.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Mean, we've talked about We've talked about building materials. We've
talked about food. We talked about some you know, perhaps
niche food ingredients or anything like that. We've talked about medical,
medical ppe and medical devices. I'm trying to think there's
there's got to be something bizarre that you've seen walk
through the door.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
It's not necessarily some maybe it's not bizarre, but one
of the one of the areas where I was like, wow,
this is really cool is we've been seeing a lot
of solar product moving through the new VAU ecosystem where
some of the largest solar panel manufacturing and distribution businesses
are on our platform working with solar installers. One of
(42:17):
the really cool things about this is that it allows
us to visualize the changing and evolving nature of the
supply chain world. Where ten years ago, twenty years ago,
there are not very many solar installers in the US economy,
there are a lot today growing every single month. So
(42:37):
to be able to visualize the growth of solar like
wholesale buyers and the explosion of net new demand for
you know, sustainable energy technologies to flow through the supply chain,
it's one of those like exponentially accelerating end markets where
(42:57):
you know, maybe other markets are like relatively stable, people
are eating about the same amount of food, drinking the
same amount of wine, But you know, the volume of
solar moving through a platform year over year is just
it's breathtaking, and I think testament to how when new
products are brought to market and their strong demand and
customer adoption. Being able to see the inner workings of
(43:18):
the supply chains kind of like reworking themselves. It almost
looks like, you know, the brains neurons like reconfiguring themselves
to fire and like unique paths based on things that
you discover, and you like, we're seeing that kind of
like interesting dynamic pattern within the supply chain ecosystem also emerged.
So I thought that was a really cool inner workings
(43:39):
of the world that we have visibility into.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
No, that's true. You probably have some very unique insights
into customer buying patterns right now.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
Yeah, Yeah, it's cool. The future is bright. Based on
the data that I see flowing through our platform, it is.
I think we are heading towards a world of supply
chain abundance, which emerges from you know, more businesses existing
in our economy than ever before, more interconnectivity between those businesses,
(44:11):
a higher volume of goods and services. The pace of
growth of new industries like solar being an example, is
accelerating with every new macro trend. We haven't quite yet
sold into kind of like the AI chips world, but
I'm sure that world is going through some utterly crazy
(44:32):
exponential growth of supply chain constraints as demand has blown
through the roof so it's the future looks really bright.
So I look at our data and it fills me
with optimism seeing seeing what's possible and where the world
is heading.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Well, and for all of those solar suppliers and installers,
I hope the future is bright well. Thank you so much,
Sid for joining us today and sharing a little bit
more about Nuveau.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Thanks for having me Ellen so when the.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Rules of trade change fast, trust, speed and clarity aren't luxuries,
they're your competitive edge. Thank you so much for sharing
your insights today, and to our listeners, if you've found
today's episode valuable, be sure to hit that subscribe button
so you never miss an episode. And if you're interested
in being a guest on our show, you can reach
me at podcast at mebok dot com at any time
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