I am a university dropout that now directs Stord, a unicorn logistics company

This also told test is based on a conversation with Sean Henry, the founder of the trade activation platform, Stor. It has been changed for duration and clarity.

When I think back to my life now, at 28, I can easily see that I have always been an entrepreneur.

The points generally connect with hindsight. But for the moment, being an entrepreneur often seems a bit as if you were in a perpetual existential crisis. You always wonder what you are supposed to do next.

I grew up in a farm in Woodstock, Georgia. My father grew up in a trailer in Columbia, in South Carolina. He was a field engineer in Bellsouth, a telecommunications company, and stayed there for almost 40 years.

You might think that someone would be quite opposed to the risk. But the best thing that my two parents have given me is the conviction that I can do everything. You can also see him in my brothers and sisters – there is an actress, a nurse, a lawyer and an English teacher at the high school among us.

My founding story started in primary school. When I was 7 years old, I sold items on eBay and Craigslist. I would publish panels in local neighborhoods that said things like “we are going to buy unwanted electronics” or “I can repair phones and computers”. I bought everything, broken phones and computers with used but working devices, then I cleaned them, repaired them or broken them for parts – batteries, magazines, shavings – and reinvest them.

In college, I also started selling phone cases. In high school, I had entered car parts, in part, because I could afford my own car by then. I remember that my teachers were angry with me because I was still on my phone in class to answer emails and customer service messages.

I tried to reinvest the $ 30,000 in savings that I had accumulated in other efforts. I tried to create an application that allows spectators in sports arenas sends messages to people in the sections of the opposing team. It didn’t really take off. I was exchanging actions with my father on the side. At one point, I even tried to be a youtuber by making videos on electronic commerce.

How I found myself in logistics

In one way or another, I came back to the customer delivery experience.

In summer before entering the university at Georgia Tech in 2015, I did an internship in Huehoco, the German giant of metal transformation. I worked in several of their factories over time, including five abroad in Germany, Mexico and Canada.

I noticed that this massive global company with 14 factories from around the world spent too much for each shipment.

I launched Stor the year I started university to improve the delivery experience of brands and consumers. I wanted to level the fields of electronic commerce so that it was not only controlled by Amazon, Walmart and Target.

As a consumer, you probably see more than you think. When you see this delivery promise, the maritime insurance offer or when you get this post -purchase destination page – that’s all stor.

We have a software orchestration layer that helps manage, transport and execute the network. Then we execute a physical execution network with 10 of our own execution centers and also associate with more than 50 realization centers.

There is a question that I always ask myself

I went everything to build Stor while I was with Tech. I hired new employees, we have collected a $ 2.5 million seed round – in addition to the checks of accelerators and providential investors. I abandoned before my fourth semester. Six months later, I won the Thiel scholarship. It is a two -year agreement that forces you to abandon the university.

We talk a lot about the value of the college these days, especially for young entrepreneurs. I am a dropout and I gave my family an analogy to explain my case. Entrepreneurship is like professional sports. If you had an NBA offer, I don’t think you should go to university and delay the NBA simply because you want the diploma first.

Stor is now evaluated at $ 1.3 billion. Last year, we delivered 30 to 35 million packages to 11.5% of unique American households. This year, we plan to send nearly 50 million packages to almost 20% of American households.

We exist in the EU, United Kingdom and Canada markets and plan to launch a few others. In light of the prices, we have seen an influx of interest in the electronic commerce brands that seek to move the inventory to our locations in the United States and Canada. In recent months, we have helped brands divert millions of units. In the short term, I suspect that we will see many brands with more inventory closer to their primary markets.

There is a simple question that I ask myself that led me where I am today: why not you? Once you realize that everything in life has been composed by someone either intelligent than you, everything changes. You think: “If I give all my energy, why could I not transform this industry?”