Interview with Dana von der Heide, Founder of Parcel Perform

Welcome to ChainTech, the show and podcast focusing on the latest trends in supply chain, procurement, and logistics technology. My name is Max Henry from the Global Supply Chain Council, and together with my co-host and special guest, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in supply chain. From early stage to unicorns, And from cutting-edge technology to the people using it to help drive more innovative, agile, and resilient supply chains around the world. This is ChainTech. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of ChainTech. My name is again Max Henry from the Global Supply Chain Council, and I'm very, very pleased to have all of you today. Thanks again for joining on this new episode of the show as we continue to host some of the most exciting Chaintech founders and discuss the rapid rise of supply chain logistics and procurement technology across the APAC region. As we jump into, you know, today's guest and conversation, I want to again to remind you of the Chaintech platform that we recently launched. You can check it out at chaintech.net. And you can also find the previous episode of the show and all the interviews that we had in the past on gentech.show. So today I'm joined by Dana van der Heijden, who is a co-founder and chief commercial officer of Parcel Perform. Hi, Dana, how are you?

Very good, Max. Thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be here.

Okay, so let's get started with the interview. And we always, as you know, start with a little bit of kind of background and where you come from. So maybe take us on your own personal background, where you were born and, you know, the type of studies you had before, you know, entering your career. But let's focus on the early part of your life first.

Yeah, absolutely, with pleasure. So yeah, probably by now if someone hears me talking, they can realize I'm not from Asia. I'm German, really hard to hide the accent. So I grew up in northern Germany. And yeah, actually studied in Berlin. A little bit unusual for the path that I took in my career. I studied politics and psychology. So no finance, no supply chain background on my end. But yeah, while I was studying, I actually got in contact with DHL and was quite fortunate to kind of join them back then as a trainee, actually in the corporate head office. And people are still kind of surprised DHL is actually a German company together with Deutsche Post. So I'm moved from Berlin to Bonn and worked at DHL in various roles. I think my highlight still is working in corporate strategy back then. DHL was formulating their strategy for 2020, so it's been a while, but I helped them to kind of form a new e-commerce division called DHL eCommerce by now. And yeah, DHL also brought me to Asia for the first time, very exciting. In 2012, for the first time, I landed in Singapore back then working for DHL Supply chain and the technology sector. And yeah, I stayed in DHL for a few more years, also working on the e-commerce strategy and the regional rollout in APAC. So a lot of exciting markets. Of course, Singapore has almost become my home. I in the end lived there for 8 years and just recently moved back to Europe. But then yeah, I left the corporate side to start Passive Perform, which I'm sure we're going to talk about a bit in your podcast today.

So, how many years did you stay with DHL before founding your own company?

So, I was there 5 and a half years in DHL, yeah.

Okay. So, what was the trigger point for you to actually start, you know, Parcel Perform?

Yeah, that's a very good question. I always used to say I have a bit of yellow blood in my veins because I really like working for DHL and it gave me an immense learning opportunity. I really appreciated the culture there. But, you know, looking at it, all these big logistics logistics players. I think they're happy to admit they're a bit of a tanker. So decision makings are a little slower, you know, especially when it comes to their IT roadmap. Obviously there's a lot of exciting ideas. There's so much one can do in the logistics space to bring innovative solutions to customers. And I just felt it's probably easier to disrupt the market from the outside in than trying to develop this in DHL. So eventually, despite really loving my job and kind of the role in Singapore, which was very exciting and still is to see their growth. I thought, okay, let's take the plunge and be brave. I was quite young back then. It's now also 7 years ago. So luckily naive enough to say, okay, let's start my own business together with my co-founder Arne, who was also based in Singapore, and we worked at DHL together. So we both took the step, the leap of faith, and started Passer Perform now 7 years ago in Singapore.

So what was the idea when you guys both started the company?

Yeah, you know, if you look at the space, and I'm now talking specifically last mile, so all the parcel businesses out there, many companies including DHL, when they deliver a parcel domestically or internationally, they usually work with multiple providers. And if you look at Southeast Asia specifically, you obviously order something in Singapore as an end consumer, there's a high chance that it comes from somewhere else, right? May it be China, it be Vietnam, it may be anywhere. So there's usually like a kind of a first leg of delivery kind of happening at destination that is done by a different carrier or someone out of network. But then there's always a visibility problem, right? So it starts from an end consumer point of view. I started having this feeling together with Arne to say, hey, why do I get all these Chinese events? I don't understand them, right? Like, I get that they have to be in English or German in my case, if we would really personalize the delivery experience. But There's been so much complexity when it comes to transparency of parcel delivery specifically in the e-commerce space. And we just realized all these e-commerce merchants, they're trying so hard, rightfully so, to give a very good experience when you shop with them. And then you check out and you create an order and you pay your well-earned money. But then you get sent away to a carrier website and worst case, they don't even have all the information because they only have basically destination information, not the stuff at origin. So it really started also from our personal experience of, you know, obviously being an avid shopper in e-commerce, especially in Singapore where there are so many options. And then we realized, you know, let's streamline this and, you know, let's give end consumers a consistent experience that is hosted on the pages of e-commerce. And that's where we started, where we said, look, let's give a better e-commerce customer experience. But then we also very quickly realized, of course, that it's not just the consumers that are struggling with visibility. Even more importantly, it's also anyone that ships parcels that has very limited visibility because all these carriers have nice tracking pages. But let's be honest, you barely ship with only one carrier, right? From a risk perspective, from a capability perspective. So there was this massive gap in the market of a visibility solution that has all the data from all these carriers in a streamlined way. Because only if you standardize it, you can actually analyze it. And the more we looked into it, we uncovered, you know, there's no global standard, there's no single data gateway. Everyone is having these challenges on the e-commerce side and it's stopping them from growing. So back then we said that there's got to be a solution. And despite starting in Singapore, we always said we want to be a global company offering a solution that works across all Asia and by now, of course, worldwide. So that was sort of the inciting point for us to start the business.

So in one sentence, tell us what your company is doing.

Yeah, so we developed a global standard for parcel tracking that we rolled out across more than 1,000 carriers. And by streamlining this data, we are able to give end consumers a personalized, integrated, and fully e-commerce branded experience. But we also give visibility to all the merchants to manage their carrier operations, reduce cost on customer service. to really enable them to grow. That's the ultimate objective.

Okay. So your solution, you have 2 sides of the business. You have more a platform which is more B2C focused, right? For the end consumer and another one which is more for B2B. Can you explain maybe the differences here?

Yeah. Thanks for bringing this up. So Parcel Perform is of course our software business where we work with the merchants that then indirectly give a better customer experience to their end consumers. So it's a white-labeled service. But as we were growing the business, we also realized next to helping the merchant to give a fully branded experience, there's heaps of end consumers and actually logistics professionals that also need support. And that's why we also started Parcel Monitor, which is a community that we launched, which grew rapidly in times of COVID when no one could meet, but everyone wanted to learn about best practices in logistics, get a better overview of which carriers are available, what are standard transit times. So we wanted to make sure that this data-driven decision-making that we give to the brands and the merchants and marketplaces and also the carriers, we also equally give to e-commerce logistics professionals and end consumers. And that's why we operate both services, Parcel Perform as a SaaS business, and then our Parcel Monitor community also globally to allow every end consumer to very, very quickly access all tracking information, but also to access all information on the logistics space for logistics professionals as well.

Okay. How big is this market of parcel tracking? Can you— do you have an idea of the size of the market?

Yeah, there's always different numbers out there. I think it all starts with a discussion on how many carriers do we actually have in the market. And you know, when we started Plusperform, we said we want to cover every single parcel carrier and even beyond that for our merchants. So we give this 100% guarantee. We're now at about 1,200 different carriers and we have a team that's dedicated to integrate new solutions. So we are kind of slowly growing that. So I think there's probably about 1,500, 2,000 kind of relevant carriers out there, but we also see the market fragmenting even more. And then the question is how much parcel volume do we have and what is attributable to us? Initially when we started Parcelform, we thought we only work with the merchants, but then we briefly learned that actually the carriers have a visibility problem as well, specifically specifically if they work with service partners. So we're now also aggregating this volume. And yeah, it's fast growing. The interesting thing about the parcel market is that it's growing faster than e-commerce. So the underlying parcel market, the absolute parcel volume is growing faster than the e-commerce market per se, because people order more, it's coming from different warehouses. So one order also sometimes creates multiple shipments. So lucky for us, we picked a very high growth market it's still on the rise.

So can you share with us what is your revenue model? Because you're obviously, we know, working with both merchants and carriers. Are you charging the same fees? And you mentioned you are a SaaS company. So how does that work?

Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, our Parcel Monitor community is absolutely free to use for everyone. But for Parcel Perform, we operate the SaaS model, which is basically transaction-based. So our customers commit to generally an annual volume, a parcel volume that they want us to track, which is our core service. And then they decide whether they want to add additional modules, whether you want to send email or S-notification, whether you want to measure the compliance of your carriers. Or we recently launched a prediction module which allows us to predict the estimated delivery date very accurately across our carriers and our returns platform. So in the end, it depends on kind of how much depth of service do you want from us and the annual parcel volume that you're ready to commit. And then it's a license-based model.

Okay. So you mentioned earlier that you're spending more time in Europe now. And so if you, you know, is the problem as big in Europe as it is in Asia, or it's a little bit better in a place like Europe?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Actually, the variance in carriers, so how many carriers are involved in a delivery, is obviously a lot higher in Southeast Asia. Which luckily for us, this is where we started to develop our solution. So we learned that's probably the most complex setup we can have, right? Different time zones, a lot of cross-border, a lot of different languages, a lot of different origin and destination carriers, and something in the middle in the linehaul sometimes as well, different modules and modes of transportation that we're seeing. So when it comes to complexity, Southeast Asia still has the highest complexity that we see in the market with the sheer amount of different carriers involved. Obviously, when we look at volume attribution, then if you look at markets like Europe, assigning a customer that is even shipping with just one country often has a very high volume and it's easy to ship throughout entire Europe. So your addressable market immediately becomes or often becomes entire, at least Central Western Europe. And then you look at the US, which is also a market that we launched a couple of years back, which has an even higher volume consolidation. But interestingly enough, a lot less carriers involved. But also the brands care a lot more. They're a lot more mature often in their e-commerce setup. So they care a lot more about their branding, about really granular and sophisticated compliance measurements of their carriers. So every market has a different challenge. And then we also learned quite interesting, I feel, if you look at South America where we also now operating, there's a lot of similarities with Asia again. So you have a high fragmentation. Mexico alone has 3 different time zones. So the complexity is quite similar and obviously the maturity of e-commerce is very different to the other markets as well.

And you have also Africa. Is this a market that you're looking at as well?

Yeah, so we can track carriers in Africa, but we obviously generally see a little less demand in the African region for now. But the good thing about parcel tracking for us, it works all the same, right? We just have to have a scalable environment to integrate additional carriers, which is what we built. But for us, it's very easy to also serve clients in Africa. Another super interesting market is Middle East. Obviously, there you have one very interesting challenge, like it writes the other way around, right, if you look at Arabic. So that's from like a programming and front-end interface an interesting challenge that our developers and our front-end team is currently tackling. But the cool thing really about the business model that we entered is tracking worldwide follows the same principle. It's a tracking number, it's carrier with very messy event updates, location updates, different languages, different time zones, and so on. So the engine that we built to fundamentally streamline this data and then give it back to everyone works the same globally.

Okay. So I keep thinking that with your background at DHL, what you have created and developed over the last few years should be something that DHL has. So is DHL using the system? Are they interested in your solutions? Is DHL a customer?

Yeah, they are. They are among a lot of different carriers. So it's actually interesting. I had the same thought when we started. And I said, hey, the carriers should really know where all their parcels are. But there's like various challenges to it, right? The carriers know this if they operate it in their own network. If they work with service partners, if you look at postal carriers, for example, that's kind of governed by the UPU, but there's only very limited data exchange and they usually use some legacy systems, EDI files and so on to exchange this data. So they have a very incomplete, non-standardized and obviously like high latency data exchange, which then limits the visibility that they get from their service partners. Plus, if you look at carriers, you know, they kind of acquire new businesses, they expand, and they tend to— they have a tendency to have like different systems in every market. The tracking portals, even though they look the same to the end consumers, have a lot of different data sources where they also struggle to then unify this, right? Even if they integrate all the data sources, if the description of events is not standardized in a similar manner. If they can't do the time zone standardization correctly, then they're going to create a mess. And that's why I think as an end consumer, sometimes we get funny events, right? Something was delivered and then it's in transit again, even though we hold the parcel in our hands. That's a very standard use case of getting the time zones wrong and then messing up the order of events. And yeah, we really want to make this more intuitive. So So carriers on the last mile, brokers, a lot of fulfillment houses over time, they also became our customers because they can really add value to the end consumers with having the data. But even more importantly, it helps them to operate their service a lot more efficiently because they can then identify where the gaps are, where are delays, where have there been no update for 24 hours. That's usually a good indication something went wrong in your sorting center or in the warehouse as well.

Okay. So I want to go back a little bit on your journey as an entrepreneur. And when you started the business, how did you actually, you know, finance it? Did you bootstrap, you know, the company for— at the beginning? Did you actually raise capital right away? What— and what is your current funding stage as well?

Yeah, a very good one. So it was an interesting setup. Arne and I, we are both Germans that decided to start the business in Singapore. So we didn't necessarily have, you you know, we worked in logistics for most of our lives, so we didn't necessarily have like the huge access to like funding. We didn't know all the investors, even though I think we all know there is a lot of capital in Asia to source from. And we wanted to make sure that we showcase to the investors that we have so-called skin in the game, right? So we bootstrapped the business for quite a while, put all my savings in this business. They still are in there because we see the immense potential that this business has. So for the first 1.5 half years, we mainly bootstrapped the business, um, building a product that is more than just a few slides to go to an investor, having our first few customers. So that was our initial journey. Then we obviously did a seed round, um, kind of had some family and friends, so to say, like you always call it, some industry veterans that invested in us. And Wavemaker and Partners, our, our first kind of VC, came on board and invested in us. And since then, we matured. We did a Series A now 1.5 years ago. And we were very fortunate to bring 2 very important investors on board. One, of course, was SoftBank that came and invested in us, but more importantly, our lead investor Cambridge Capital, their US-based fund that came on board. And they really mainly invest in kind of scalable logistics businesses that they believe in. So that obviously then helped us with our US expansion as well. And I'm sure you're gonna ask our Series A fundraise was a $20 million round, um, that, uh, yeah, we were very lucky to get obviously at the right time for us to really invest in our growth and our international expansion as well.

Okay, so that was a year and a half ago, right, with Series A?

Yeah.

Okay, so you have probably have enough cash to last for some time, right?

Yeah, and I think the important and exciting thing about what we're doing is we managed to also in the last fund raise to be a profitable business. I think, uh, given the current funding environment, that's obviously something that people look at, and that's a trajectory we are bringing the business on again. And we are very, um, kind of positive that we will be able to reach profitability this year again. So that's always a good notion for investors to then have confidence that it's a business that's worthwhile investing into the further scaling as well.

Okay, tell us a little bit more about your team. How many employees do you have? And also, if you could talk about, you know, your engineering team or development team?

Yeah, absolutely. So we are a Singapore-headquartered company. This is very important for us. I think it has been so vital for our growth to have like a good place to start from with an ecosystem that has been incredibly supportive. So Singapore continues to be our HQ. That's where we have most of our kind of core staff. Staff, you know, our product development teams, our global marketing teams, of course our APAC sales and go-to-market teams, um, as well as our central functions such as finance. We, um, when we started the business, quickly decided that we obviously need to find a scalable pool of developers, and we didn't want to work outsourced. We wanted to make sure that we have internal in-house capabilities So our past performance tech hub is in Vietnam, which was a very good move for us. We are based in Ho Chi Minh. We always had our own office there. Our CTO Kang is based in Ho Chi Minh as well. So a very substantial part of our business, I think about 80-90 people, our developers, which are the backbone of what we're doing. We're data business. We need to manage all these carrier integrations. We build a lot of features on top in Vietnam, which allows allow us to scale and really gave us a differentiation in the market because we didn't just manage to have kind of the biggest data pool, but it also allowed us to very quickly ramp up services. And, and this is important for our enterprise customers, to also be able to customize our solution— single sign-on, additional reports. And for that, we're very grateful to have our development team there. And then as we were internationalizing, we obviously also learned we got to be close to our customers. So our Asia go-to-market operation is also based in Singapore. But then as we're expanding into Europe and the US, we now have multiple offices. I'm in Berlin at the moment, although traveling to most of the offices on a regular basis. We have an office in Amsterdam, and we now also have our operations in the US out of Austin with our VP in Austin as well.

So today, who are your biggest customers?

So we generally kind of work with multiple industry verticals. One big customer for us, of course, the brands. So if we, if we look at Southeast Asia, you know, well-known brands like Decathlon that are working with us, Love, Bonito. But we also work with really big international brands, Nespresso, for example. We are live with them all over the world, right from Thailand to Australia to Hong Kong to Central Europe. Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Canada. So really nice to be able to support these very global brands on a global scale. So that's key for us. Then we obviously work with a lot of marketplaces. They have a particular challenge, right, because they are not the direct shippers. So for them, it's even harder to identify which is the carrier behind it, kind of get the visibility, but also update customers in their own branding. So really big marketplaces like the Catch Group in Australia, like Zalando and Wayfair here in Europe, like the Shop app in North America, but they are also obviously tracking worldwide that we are working with. And then carriers, I think you mentioned a few, DHL, UBSend, a big broker in Europe that we're working with, but also a lot of the fulfillment houses, which is super exciting because they can combine visibility on what happens in the warehouse with what happens basically on the last mile. And then with the help of our return module, we can now basically tie it all together and really give end-to-end integrated visibility. But those are the key customer groups. We also have some B2B customers, but mainly high-volume shippers that have increased complexity and want to have visibility that we're working with.

Okay, we have that question which always comes back to our interviews because it's about, you know, the pandemic. We've come out from this after 3 years. What has been the biggest lesson for you from those last 3 years of, you know, going through the pandemic for your business?

Yeah, so obviously the pandemic hit a lot of people hard, and for us also in the first few months, you know, there was quite a lot of uncertainty, especially for all of our customers. I have to say though, for Parsifal Forum, the pandemic had a bit of a silver lining because obviously ecommerce parcel volumes went through the roof and a lot of people really had to invest into differentiating a good customer experience and customers also got a lot more demanding, right? I'm at home, I'm not going to go anywhere, you better deliver this parcel to me and let me know when you will be there. So this whole rise in customer demand and having high accuracy when it comes to prediction of delivery dates, to also have it very early on, like obviously Amazon has been growing in a lot of markets and they taught everyone that at checkout you exactly know when your parcel is going to be delivered. And that has been a huge kind of trend in the market. So for us, we saw a huge growth in parcel volumes. We saw an increase in basically customer demands, but obviously supply chains also got really messy, stuck in canals to barely having anyone in the warehouse. So for everyone in operations, it was even more important to also have full visibility. You can hear I'm in Berlin, sorry about that. But yeah, in the pandemic we also really got to see that all the operations people needed a lot more visibility, alerts, proactively know where there was no update.

So it really strengthened our value proposition and we managed to launch a lot of new features such as the accurate delivery date predictions As an entrepreneur, co-founder of a company, what have you learned from that difficult time as well in terms of managing and growing your business? Because obviously, you know, a lot of changes have happened. You know, we learned to work remotely and deal with customers and partners in a very different way, right?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that's something that also for me personally was a kind of important learning, right? I was in Singapore at the height of the pandemic and we all there was very limited flexibility to basically go to the office, right? So we had to also switch a lot of our kind of work, regular meetings. You know, we used to do a town hall on-site. We have this thing called stand-up that we do every morning, and we literally stand up and we all join a call. We have retro, which is fun, and we have some drinks. And all of a sudden, we had to find like digital formats to kind of still keep the team spirit together, to get to see everyone. Even more important, to also take care of like mental well-being for our employees. Many of them were stuck in like difficult situations with kids at home, living with their parents. So we had to really invest in finding new digital formats, but also our team really came together. So we're obviously in very different offices, sometimes different time zones, but being 100% digital also allowed us to even connect our offices more because they could all join. You know, it wasn't wasn't an on-site meeting, and we're now obviously super excited to be back in offices, but we learned remote work is something that is a given. We also learned to find new innovative digital formats. We made sure that we have wellness check-ins with our staff, but also that they really want to learn. So one thing that we did next to doing a regular monthly town hall is we also launched a program called PassPerform Academy, To make sure that despite the learning on the job, that's obviously very important, we also learn about other stuff that team members maybe also for personal reasons are really excited about and want to share with their fellow colleagues. So we really launched a lot of digital formats as well.

Okay. Parcel Perform, I think you mentioned the company has been running for what, 6, 7 years already?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. So, after 7 years running the same business can be challenging, you know, what do you know, what do you say about that? You know, how do you keep that excitement, that energy, that passion after 7 years? It's not always easy, right? I mean, creating a business, launching a business can be super fun and really exciting, challenging, but also very exciting. After 7 years, there's a routine and, you know, it's hard to kind of continue being on top of the game. So as an entrepreneur, so is this, is this a challenge for you?

Yeah, so obviously running a business is always a bit of a roller coaster. And, you know, let us— when you start, when you do fundraising rounds, then COVID hit. And I'm a, I'm a person that needs energy from the people around me. Being stuck at home was definitely also a challenge. The interesting thing is that it's never the same. So, um, basically whenever we get comfortable as a founder and think, oh, now we figured this out, there's the next growth curve. And that's probably what I love most about my job, right? There's not a day that is the same as the other. We are constantly kind of developing new products together with our customers. So as much as initially I thought, okay, Dana, you do parcel tracking, how long can you be excited about telling everyone where their parcels are? We realized also, thanks to the feedback from our customers, there's so much kind of adjacent opportunities to help them, right? The end consumer side, the internal side. Now everyone came to us and said like returns are a real mess and I don't want to buy like a standalone return portal and send my customer somewhere else. You have all outbound, please also give me returns and alert my warehouse when the stuff is coming back. And you know, in Europe everyone wants a QR code because they need sustainable solutions. So it's really keeping me on my toes, so to say, to kind of have new market demands. And then the feedback from our customers, and, you know, we're growing together with them, they have new challenges. Being able also to see them now helps me personally. So I spend a lot of time going to conferences, understanding what the market needs and how we can support also with our community that we launched in the heights of COVID and that we can now bring from a very digitally focused environment, which is of course important, to physical events events, to meet customers, to show them our reports. Yeah, it keeps being exciting. So, we are by far not bored yet or done with what we want to do.

Okay. So, keep innovating and adding new features that your customers want. But what would be your biggest struggle right now as a co-founder? Your biggest headache, something that, you know, really drives you nuts?

Yeah, there's of course a few, but I think for us as a business, the biggest headache is to really find the right people to join our teams, right? So we've been scaling in times of COVID without actually being able to meet most of the employees, so there's a lot of catch-up you have to play afterwards, making sure that the culture is consistent across all the different offices. But we are obviously in an environment for us as a business where we're still very actively hiring across the offices, really doubling down on our sales teams. But at the same time, in a market environment where people are a little bit more cautious, right? We often see, hey, if you have a stable job right now, you rather don't move, right? You wait this one out, see what happens to the market. So for us, and this is also where we spend a lot of time on as founders personally, is to find the right people, make sure they're as excited as we are about the product, but also kind of to fit into the culture. So even though they work remotely, we need to keep the energy levels up. We need to make sure that we push diversity. When I started the business, also coming from corporate, one thing that I was personally extremely passionate about is there's got to be a way to show that we can run highly diverse log tech businesses, right, or supply chain tech businesses. And a lot of people said, Dana, you're going to have a very hard time to keep up to this promise. Well, I'm happy to report, you know, we are like 50%, so it works. We have 70 different nationalities. But obviously, if you kind of want to make sure that you're truly diverse, same to kind of our customer portfolio, that you speak all their languages. You sometimes got to wait a little bit longer on the hiring process to find the right talent, and that continues to be a challenge for us as well.

Yeah. And obviously, I mean, Singapore is a tough market, right? It's very competitive, employees are expensive, loyalty can be questionable as well when you have so much investment and things going on. So, are you— today when you find candidates, are you okay in just getting someone remote? Are you ready to hire someone remote and maybe prefer someone, a better person which is remote versus someone who's in Singapore which might be more expensive, for example? I don't know. I'm trying to understand what's your strategy here.

Yeah. So it of course depends on the roles, right? Let's, if we look at, for example, go-to-market and like anyone in like like sales or key account management, we believe it's more important that they're close to our customer and that they speak the right language, they're in the time zone, which then means that we absolutely have to, um, kind of be able to hire remotely. Then there are other functions where we feel it's extremely important to come together to brainstorm, to problem solve, to truly have workshops that are not just digital. And development for us is one thing, right? We do like peer programming. We really want them to be able to come together, have a super cool office in Vietnam. So I— we also feel for our employees to feel belonging, to be able to invest their career into a company. They actually like coming to the office, so we want to make this available. And similarly in Singapore. So generally, um, most of our staff comes to the office, um, very regularly, as long as basically regulations allow, of course. But we have a very, very lively office culture That for us is quite important wherever we can. But of course, I don't think there should be a company out there that claims that remote work doesn't work, because unless you have like a function that requires you to be in a warehouse or something, we have to accept and we need to find paths to also enable remote work as well.

Okay. So how do you see your company in 5 years now? You've been doing this for 7 years. So how long do you give yourself and how do you see the company? Let's say in 5 years?

Yeah, so, uh, who knows, right? I mean, one thing that we learned is it's really hard to plan, but obviously you do it as a founder, and we see so much potential. So for us, one thing is we obviously already operate a global business, but there's so much more opportunity to scale. You mentioned new markets earlier that we could expand in that are also fast-growing when it comes to e-commerce. So that's something that we're really excited about, but we're mainly also really looking at product, right? And if we look at the market a few years back, a lot of people bought a lot of different kind of standalone solutions when it comes to, oh, I need a little bit of marketing here, I want an email provider for this, I have a separate returns portal. But the trend that we are seeing in the market is you want integrated solutions, not just from like a data security standpoint, otherwise you give all your customer data to so many different different tools, but mainly also for visibility, consistency, to manage performance, to see what's performing better. Is my notification in kind of order confirmation, out for delivery, returns, or prediction the ones that has the highest opening rates? Well, guess what? If you want to really compare this, you need to have one integrated solution that gives you full visibility across everything and that makes it also intuitive to your customers. So the way we see the market is we want to make sure that even though we started from kind of outbound parcel tracking data and we're able to do returns, we are now adding a lot of facilitation topics. And things that we are super excited about is returns, to kind of fully integrate this, and we have this fully rolled out. The other thing that we're really investing in as a company, and I truly believe we're only scratching the surface here, is machine learning and AI, right? We saw it with ChatGPT, see how much automation you can achieve. But the fundament is data again, right? So you've got to have the right data. What we can do with predictions at the moment, we predict the day of arrival at checkout, which is great because it increases your checkout conversion rate. But I'm very sure there's a ton of other things that we can predict that also make it a more sustainable service offering, which probably from our standpoint, you know, like we go downstream and upstream in the integration of data points into making it more intuitive for users. But we also, I think, as a business have to think about how we can offer more sustainable solutions. And that's something as a business that over the next few years we will continue to invest in as well.

Okay. What would be your advice, your final advice to someone who wants to start a company in the field of supply chain or logistics today in 2023? What would be your, you know, best advice?

I think the first thing is, we always say this, with hustle and heart everything is possible, and I stand by it, right? There's been a lot of people that told me, oh, that's a bad idea to leave your corporate career, or, you know, how you're gonna run like a global business. I believe if you're truly passionate about what you want to achieve, you should go for it, even though we all know this is a difficult market environment. So the other thing I would advise on is find a testing ground. Spend your personal time while you might be still running your job on validating that this could work. Talk to as many people as possible. You know, they might not yet be your customers, but they are your future customers if you make it. So make sure you validate this is what they need. And don't forget about commercialization. I think we see a lot of people building amazing products, but you also need to find a commercial pathway to make it attractive as an investment to people that would then help you to grow the business as well.

Okay, thanks. It makes— all makes sense. I've got some quick questions for you just to wrap up this interview. Just tell me what you prefer, cats or dogs?

Dogs.

Window or aisle?

A window for sure.

Any movie that you've seen recently that you really like?

I'm actually really terrible on movies. Uh, that's sort of not my thing, so I barely watch anything. I love to listen to podcasts, so, uh, that's probably more up my alley, and I can do it on the move when I'm in planes going to conferences. Okay, what's your favorite If I'm in Singapore, I'm going to go for laksa at Nasi Lemak. I'm still craving it, so can't wait to have it again.

Okay. What's your most used app on the phone, the app that you always open?

Oh God, it's bad to say it, but it's probably Slack. It's our main internal communication tool.

Okay. Well, I wanted to ask you, what's your favorite tool to build your company? So it's going to be Slack again, right?

Yeah, Slack has been very efficient for us. Yeah, it's working really well.

Describe the rest of your life, you know, when you get really old, like 70, 80 plus, you know, where do you see yourself? I know, and, you know, what do you think you're going to be doing?

Hopefully still something that I'm really, really passionate about. And you can probably tell that's really my nature. I need to find something that I'm excited about and I chanced on logistics and I really like it. Do I still do it with 70? Probably, hopefully handling my own logistics with a few grandchildren. But let's see.

Okay. Thank you very much, Dana. It was great having you for this interview and hearing what you guys are doing, understanding your business, which I think was Very fascinating, the challenge that you face and, you know, how you go forward, you know, after 7 years of running Parcel Perform. This was Dana van der Heijden, who is a co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Parcel Perform. Thank you, Dana. We'll see you next time.

Thank you so much for having me.