Matt Salefski, an entrepreneur who grew up in the Springfield area, recently launched Rectangle, a freight cargo logistics communications company. He reached out to Illini Angels as part of his quest for early-stage venture capital.
"When you look around your home, or at store shelves, probably everything you see moved through a global supply chain at one point. It takes a series of miracles for that to happen," Salefski said.
After graduating from University of Illinois in 2006, Salefski spent a few years working at mutual fund investment company NuVeen in Chicago, eventually moving to Ann Arbor to obtain an MBA from University of Michigan. From there, it was on to Seattle, working closely with tech engineering teams in the Kindle division at Amazon.
"I felt like I did my tour of duty there, because it's a very hard place to work," said Salefski. "When I started at Amazon, they said, 'We know you've been to business school, but you need to forget everything you learned there.' That helped me think about the world in a different way."
After Amazon, Salefski was on to New York City where he joined a startup called Betterment in its very early stages, a time he characterizes as crazy. "You're just making it up along the way," he said.
"When I entered my logistics phase and moved to a different startup – also based in New York City – and began to focus on over-the-road trucking, that's when I realized how chaotic everything is," he said.
Salefski said that better coordination is what's needed for effective cargo movement around the world, whether it's by road transit, air freight or ocean shipping, which requires dealing with customs, export rules and legal regulations, plus different languages, time zones and cultures. "Globally, logistics has become difficult, like third order of magnitude more challenging," Salefski said.
His experience led to the development of Rectangle, a platform to optimize and streamline communication in the freight transport space, where things can go wrong constantly, such as weather, equipment failure or other unforeseen events. Destruction of a bridge in Baltimore, piracy on the Suez Canal or drought on the Mississippi River can wreak havoc. According to Salefski, the logistical operations processes and documentation systems currently in use are essentially built on clunky technology and often use trade rules invented a millennium ago.
Finding success as an entrepreneur has involved trial and error and seeking seed capital. When making presentations to venture capital firms and recently, pitching to Illini Angels, his basic message is that Rectangle's global platform can meet the current needs of the freight industry by integrating communications and email systems that often don't align but continue to be used, largely out of habit.
A former Google designer and engineer recently joined with Salefski to help build and commercialize the platform. This month, Salefski is heading to an Intermodal Association of Chicago event to build relationships and then meeting with potential customers in Olive Branch, Mississippi, then going to California in May to attend an annual retreat for CEOs in Napa Valley.
"We have found that meeting face-to-face – meeting people where they are – is vital in the world of supply-chain logistics," he said.
Salesfski said it's also important to talk with investors about the benefits of taking risks.
"We're lucky to have a lead investor who believes in us, a market of potential future customers and the benefit of Illini Angels' mentoring and expertise," he said. Salesfski noted that all the investor agreements he signs are the same, "whether it's someone giving me $1,000 or $1 million."
After working in New York and on the west coast, Salefski has become tuned in to the importance of understanding the culture.
"Looking at the skyline in Chicago, it is the freight hub of the country. But when I'm there, I look up at the Sears Tower, the Tribune Tower, the Hancock building: iconic structures built by people who developed amazing companies in the Midwest. It's a huge risk, but I'd love to find a way to reignite that kind of spirit right here in the center of the global freight world."
