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Demystifying the conversations we're already here at RRE and with our portfolio companies. In each episode, your hosts, Will Porteous and Raju Rishi will dive deeply into topics that are shaping the future, from satellite technology to digital health, to venture investing, and much more.
Raju: Hello, listeners and viewers, welcome to another episode of RRE POV. I’m Raju Rishi. I’m joined by my partner Will Porteous, and together, we are hosting Krenar Komoni, founder and CEO of Tive and our CEO, and, more importantly, absolutely a wonderful guy and a very good friend. So welcome, Krenar.
Krenar: Hi, Raju. Hi, Will. How are you guys doing?
Will: It’s great to have you on the show, Krenar. I think Raju and I have been looking forward to this for a really long time. Tive is an incredible company, you’re an incredible founder, and I know they are going to be some great stories told in the episode coming up here.
Raju: More stories than we want to tell, actually.
All: [laugh].
Raju: Krenar and I have been out in so many good ways. So, let me give your bio first, if that’s okay, just so people can get some context on who you are. So, Krenar has a bachelor’s in computer engineering and mathematics from Norwich and a master’s in electrical engineering from Tufts. Still kind of like in the PhD program at Tufts, or just deferred it for, like, 20 years or something. I don’t know, but I know he was admitted at one point, but never wound up getting it.
His early career was focused on chip and board design or the wireless industry at BitWave Semiconductor, Eta Devices, and PhoenixRF Technologies. But for the last ten-plus years, he’s been a Tive, where it’s grown from inception to one of the world’s leading real-time tracking and visibility solutions for shipments. So, I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions that go way back, Krenar, and then we’re going to just skip to some current day stuff and maybe even some future stuff, if that’s okay. And Will, feel free to chime in anytime because Krenar are just, you know, he’s got a legacy of stories here that you know we want to share. So anyway, you’ve been an incredibly inquisitive person, and I know you learned how to program early in life, where you taught yourself 3D animation at, I think, the age of 12, which is crazy. Which was just last year, right? I mean, you’re young. So, [laugh] but you ultimately use that to work part time and support your family and parents in old Yugoslavia. Can you just tell us a little bit about that? Like, how did you discover that? How did you discover that you liked software and hardware, and you know, just the early days?
Krenar: Yeah, now it’s Kosovo [laugh]. Yeah, Yugoslavia, of course, kind of broke apart, and we declared independence here a few years ago. But in 1999 when the war happened—actually, that was when I was 16 years old in 99—but 12, you’re right. When I was 12, it was still Yugoslavia. And my dad got just, he instilled programming love with me.
Like, just, he would go to his office, and he worked for an inspection company that would inspect products coming into ex-Yugoslavia. It was called Hugo Inspect. And he had a computer, which was the 386, and on weekends, he was allowed to bring it at our house because instead of keeping in the office, he would bring it on Friday night and then bring it back there Monday morning. And he started teaching me DOS, which is Disk Operating System. And I learned all the commands on DOS, how to create folders, how to run batch files.
Raju: The three of us are probably the very few people that remember DOS.
All: [laugh].
Raju: I remember it. Yeah, but keep going, keep going.
Krenar: I fell in love with, kind of, programming there because he would teach me how to program a bat file, which is .BAT, like, which you can run a batch of executables and put, like, various config files and configurations for a particular game or a particular software. And that was it. Then I started playing, obviously, DOS games, then started learning C, C++, writing with Borland, building some applications. And then I ran into 3D Studio Max.
We would go outside—I’m actually right now in Kosovo, and there’s a big game being played outside of the stadium, and I have the jersey here because Kosovo is playing against Turkey live as we speak, and if they win, they go to the World Cup. So, it’s a very big, very, very big game. But right here outside—
Raju: You’re going to show us around the office later.
Krenar: I’ll do it in five minutes [laugh]. And right now outside in Pristina, I would go out when I was a kid, and you would buy a CD for maybe two or three Deutsche Marks, which is similar to two or three euros, which similar to two or three dollars. And it would be a bootleg 3D Studio Max. And I started learning that, how to make squares, how to make spheres. And I was 12, and from 12 to 16, I self-taught myself 3D animation and then KTV, which was a new TV station that was opening up, brand new—it was my first startup experience that I fell in love with startups there—they were launching a new TV station here in Pristina.
And this guy, a friend of mine, showed me a newspaper ad that they’re looking for a 3D.designer I applied. I was 16. The guy invites me in his office. We go there. He says, “Build this square, move it around. Make a sphere, move it around.” And he just looks at me like, who is this kid? This 16-year-old kid in my office doing this, and he’s like, “Okay, come back on Monday, you’re hired.” And I’m like, “What’s my”—I’m like, “How much am I going to get paid?” He’s like, “Paid 300 euros a month.” I’m like, “Oh, my God, that’s great.”
Raju: Oh, my God, that is fabulous. I love that story. I love it. I mean, I remember talking to you about those early days. And by the way, we’re going to come back to this [unintelligible 00:05:44] Krenar because I saw you at the last board meeting with a grin that I’ve never—well, I’ve seen it periodically. You smile a lot, but this grin was so wide because you were showing us all the stuff you’re doing with AI. Personally. You. Which we will get to. We will get to.
Because I don’t think they can take the kid out of that computer, or the computer out of the kid. I think you’re kind of still back there now. But anyway, let’s move forward just a little bit of a tick. I know that when Yugoslavia fractured and Kosovo was part of Serbia, that was a difficult stretch, lots of persecution. There was, like, tanks in the street, and your mother somehow managed to get you and some of your family to Turkey, but your father was left behind.
And that story actually meant a ton to me because I was actually without my father for a bunch of years when he came to America to sort of build a life for us, and just he had earned enough money to afford for my sister and my mom and I to come over. But I was super young. I mean, you were not very young. You were, kind of, 16, 17, 18 years—I don’t know how old you were at that stretch. You know, you got there, and I’m sure that was a difficult time period. Like, what drove you during that? Like, what was—how did you manage that? What, kind of, you drove forward? Because it’s difficult to, kind of, get displaced from your country of birth.
Krenar: Yeah, I still remember, I think it was 23rd or 24th of March when NATO moved in, obviously, to save Kosovo, and it was the day before that, my grandma, my aunt and my brother, we went on a bus and went to Turkey, and my dad stayed. And when we were at the border of—I still remember—of Yugoslavia, and I think Bulgaria there, we had to pay this person to just get across the border. And then went to Turkey. It was five months. So, three months were the summertime, so there was no school, but the two months that school was happening, we enrolled into a Turkish school.
Interesting enough, that is, I went to school for five days there, and then on the sixth day, the principal invited me to his office, and he said, “Krenar”—like, in Turkish, of course. And I knew Turkish. I started learning Turkish pretty fast when I was a kid. He said, “Listen, I like you have long hair,” and he said, “But all your friends here in Turkey have short hair, and you have to cut your hair when you come back next day, and you need to look like all your friends.” Because it was a school with uniform, but all the males had short hair.
And I told that to my mom, and my mom said, “You know what”—my mom passed away in 2019, but she was the bravest mom I’d ever know. She said, “You know what? You’re not going back to school, you’re not cutting your hair.” [laugh]. And when we’re ready, we’re going to go back to Kosovo and go back to high school where we left it off.
Will: What a brave thing for her to have said to you at that moment when there had to be so much uncertainty for your whole family, when you were going to go back, what you were going to go back to. I mean, that’s the ultimate gesture of a parent’s loyalty to their child.
Raju: It’s just kind of who you are, you know? I think part of your grit and your conviction in life is built around—I know—a lot of things that you learn from your mom and your dad. And actually, I got to be honest with you, I had the luxury of coming to Kosovo for a board meeting and meeting your father and seeing how life is over there, which is wonderful, actually. Now, it’s just unbelievably wonderful, but just a lot of really good, you know, sort of, be true to yourself kind of things, and do the right thing, kind of things. And, oh man, I appreciate that story, by the way, and I appreciate you sharing it on the pod.
But let’s move to the US, right? So, I know you came here because you were—you had the best learning institutions, and you kind of fell in love with RF and chip design. What about RF and chips, kind of like, got you excited? Because I was a Lucent guy, and I remember when you and I met for the first time, I just gelled with you, like, incredibly well because not just the wireless side, but also the cold chain side, and thinking through also nuances. But what did you fall in love with around RF and chip design?
Krenar: Junior year in Norwich University, this guy shows up and is like, “Hey, I’m going to hire two engineers,” tells the Dean of Engineering. And he’s like, “Let me interview everybody.” And picks me and another friend of mine, Patrick. He’s like, “You guys are going to come for an internship?” I’m like, “Yeah, a hundred percent.” And he was the CTO of a company called BitWave semiconductor.
And this is the summer, junior year. I go join BitWave semiconductor, and I start working directly with the systems architect and the systems engineer. And the first project he puts me is to work on MATLAB, to work on the receiver and the chain and the transmit chain, and figure out the error vector magnitude of what the transmission quality of the signal is. And there’s various, kind of, modulation schemes out there. I’m sure some people that listen [laugh] know, but there’s QAM and QPSK and various ways you can send a lot of bits through wireless.
And I learned that I could write MATLAB script, be able to simulate noise and errors and add noise of various things, and take these radio frequencies and convert them into bits, which is ones and zeros that we can read, but also convert ones and zeros into radio frequencies. And being able to figure it out in a way, that the phases are correct, the frequencies are correct, so at the end, when it goes out in the signal, it goes out in the air, the error vector magnitude is so small so that the receiver can read it and meet those specifications, and then finally, get those ones and zeros, so it’s not a distorted video or distorted data, but it’s the correct data you sent it. I just fell in love with that, partially because of the mathematics behind it, but partially because it’s so abstract, and it’s so invisible. Like, you and I and Will, we’re sitting here, we’re talking and there is no wires, like, the only wire have is the power plug [laugh]. It’s incredible.
Raju: Yeah, and it’s the origin of a lot of stuff. I mean, we’ve changed the world, right? I mean, we’ve all known of disruptions, and there’s macro disruptions, technology disruptions, like, you know, PC, internet, mobile, and AI, but there are smaller ones that are actually massive for various countries, and wireless was one of those, right? If you look at the leaps that some of the world did, the US laid down a ton of copper. We had so much copper in here, and all of a sudden you’re having bandwidth and the ability to transmit applications and voice and real time everything over wireless that’s as fast as wire, and it is absolutely stunning what sort of innovations we’ve done at that level. And I know you’re at the cornerstone of that, so I understand why you got excited.
Will: Well, I want to come back to this when we get to talk about Tive. Because I don’t think—there are very few truly full-stack entrepreneurs out there, and Krenar, I think you’re in a very rare category in being someone who’s physically rooted in the core technology that drives a lot of capability on your platform.
Raju: Absolutely. We’re going to get there very, very soon because we’re going to fast-forward to Tive. And I know this because we talked a lot early days, and you got married, by the way, to an incredibly wonderful woman who I had the chance to meet and have dinner with, along with Krenar. She’s awesome.
Krenar: Lobster. The lobsters. Oh, what’s the name of the place? No, I can’t remember right now. Crab, some things? No, I forget. Anyway.
Raju: Yeah, it was like, right, on the water in Boston.
Krenar: Seaport, Boston, yes.
Raju: Yeah, yeah. I think it was, like, the crab… The Dirty Crab? The Dirty Crab?
Will: Barking Crab. You guys went to the Barking Crab.
Krenar: Yes, yes. Oh, my god, I can’t believe—
Will: I love that place.
Raju: Yeah, yeah, we went to the Barking Crab and that’s where I met your wife. And she was awesome, man. And she’s had a lot of, like, she fills in on a lot of things at Tive when we just need somebody to do things. And that is a family that’s, like, tight, and I understand kind of a lot of where that comes from, and I appreciate it. But anyway, your wife’s father had a small trucking company, I know this, which had some challenges. Tell us about those, and then how that sort of resulted in the origin of Tive.
Krenar: Yeah, I mean, as you can see, BitWave, you got our RF. Then I jumped into this startup, which was called Eta Devices, and it got started by two MIT professors that invited me to be their first employee, when we were building the world’s most efficient base stations. And I could see where LTE was going, but I could see where the future of this connectivity was going, which was exciting. But I’m going to my father-in-law and to my wife’s house—to my wife’s parents house pretty much every weekend. We met each other in 2007, we got married in 2010. Sometimes it takes a while for things to click.
And back in 2015, I realized because this trucking company, he was growing, but also the same time, I could see him being very busy, my father-in-law. I would go to dinner, trying to have some dinner with him, trying to raise a glass of wine. We’re sitting down. We’re eating for ten minutes. 15 minutes, he gets up. What is he doing? He’s trying to figure out where his truck drivers are, figuring out if they loaded, they figured out if they unloaded.
So, I’m like, his name is [Alchi 00:15:17]. I’m like, Alchi, what are you doing? Why can’t you know where your trucks are? He’s like, “Well, these companies are coming to me, and it’s all these things I got to pay 50 bucks a month, 60 bucks a month.” I’m like, “Okay, let me just… I think I want to build a GPS tracker for fun here, but also maybe help you. And can you pay me $9.99 a month?” He’s like, “Okay, I’ll pay $9.99 a month.” I bought an evaluation kit from Sierra Wireless. It was this big, like, a big box—
Raju: I remember those, man. I remember those.
Krenar: —the eval kits and I first, like, connected to the com port USB. First thing I did, I sent an SMS with a SIM card from that big evaluation kit to my phone. When I got that SMS, it was like the whole world opened up. It was like, I would say, going in ChatGPT3.5, the experience we’ve had when we did it, getting that text message was just my brain, just I could see the future right away.
And I said, “You know what? I want to take this and make it really small.” First thing I did, I plugged it in, I built a PHP MySQL app, and then now he could see his truck drivers. And then this friend was like, “Oh, I have 15 trucks. Can you track my trucks?” I’m like, “Yes.” Then another friend, let’s track trucks. I was tracking trucks in Worcester, Massachusetts, for all Albanians. It was kind of funny. But that’s how the—this is only the first two, three months of the company, okay? And then we pivoted a little bit. [laugh].
Raju: Do you remember meeting—you remember where we met?
Krenar: Boloco, in Cambridge, right?
Raju: Yeah, Boloco, I think in Boston. I think it was in Boston.
Krenar: Yeah, yes.
Raju: And we sat down, and Krenar are showed me—and, man, this guy… like, look at the smile on his face. He has so much energy and I actually, like, love that. That’s actually an important thing.
Krenar: And it’s 9:30pm in Kosovo, so you can tell I have a lot of energy.
Raju: Yeah, no, I know. Like, you’re working all the time. I could call him any day, anytime, and he picks up, and vice versa. And I just love that. But anyway, so we meet, and he shows me this device, and he’s got this passion about it, and it was slightly larger at the time, but you’re talking about, you know, sort of like, and I’d been doing some work on cold chain at the time. I was, like, I’d known about Sensitech, and I was looking at a few other potential players that were using Bluetooth. And he rolls out this device, and it’s got, like, you know, 2G, 3G, I don’t—5G I think you had 5G at the time.
Krenar: It 2G, 3G right? No, that was 2G, yeah.
Raju: It was just 2G, 3G. No 5G at the time.
Krenar: It was global, though.
Raju: Yeah, it was global. And he had, like, a nickel metal hydride battery. There was no lithium ion at the time. And he’s just telling me about temperature, and I think you had humidity and shock. Maybe not shock—
Krenar: I did. I did. Shock, accelerometers, light, this thing was the whole thing [laugh].
Raju: Yeah. And it was, like, the best product I’d ever seen. And then, you know, we kind of went through the numbers a little bit, and I was like, “Man, I love this thing. It’s so beautiful.” And he showed me, like, prototypes of the things that were coming, and the battery and all the stuff. And I actually loved it, but you know, we looked at the numbers, and I’m like, the numbers are off. The BOM costs are too high, reclamations aren’t enough.
And I was like, “Dude, I really like your mission. I love you as a human and you know all the stories, and but we got to get there,” and I remember, like, tossing and turning and you left, and you had the most soft and elegant, sort of, like, I don’t want to say, like, nagging, [laugh]—
Krenar: [laugh].
Raju: But it was like nagging. It was like, it was so gentle, it was so beautiful. It was like, “Hey, I’m getting closer.” And you know we would meet again. And then one day you got there, and I was like, “Okay, the metrics are there, the companies—I see everything, like, ahead of us.”
And man, like, we gave you a term sheet at the time. I know you got a bunch, and we were grateful that you took ours, and we’ve been partnering ever since. That was just a wonderful, wonderful, first story. But I want to show viewers, like, we started—I’m going to show them one thing, and then I know, Will, you have a question—we started, and I think you had shipped, I don’t know, how many units—do you remember back in the day? I think it was like seven years ago.
Krenar: I’m going to say back in 2019—when we met, we was maybe 200 units. Like, it was nothing, yeah [laugh]. And then I think when you did the term sheet probably must have been a few thousand. Maybe less than a 10,000.
Raju: I’m going to show viewers this. This is what Krenar sent to me. When did you send this? This is a million trackers that were sent. I don’t know if people can see this. It was incredible, and we received it. And when did we cross a million? When do we cross? Tell the viewers when you crossed a million.
Krenar: I think it was around—I’m going to say it was in 2022, and we now already—I think we just crossed 4 million [laugh] total.
Will: [laugh].
Raju: The company is on fire. And I love it.
Will: I have to jump in here because I, being a partner at RRE, I got to hear a lot of this as it was unfolding. And you know, Krenar, I think of you as the ultimate full-stack entrepreneur, for a lot of reasons, not only because, like, you also have those soft skills, right? There are a lot of people who would have walked away from that meeting with Raju really dejected. And you knew, maybe because you’re so deeply grounded in the technology and NRF, or maybe because you just had thought through the whole value chain and you had seen customers like your father-in-law, but you knew that this was going to work and you knew that you had an engaged audience and you just were persistent in the, as Raju says, the softest, most polite way. I mean, we’re lucky that you chose us in the end.
Krenar: I’m lucky too. I’m very lucky.
Will: That’s a very rare set of skills. And I want people who are thinking about starting their own company, building their own company, to recognize that it’s his success in the fundraising game is as much about mastering the soft skills on the relationship side as being right technically. And you were right technically, it just took a little time for everything to align.
Raju: I got to tell you, Will, that was a magical meeting that we had that first one in Boloco. It really was magical because we were talking and we weren’t talking numbers, we were just talking tech, and I understood everything that was going on there. Like, I because I come from the Lucent days, and I understood chip design—
Krenar: You did. And I appreciate that a lot, actually.
Raju: Yeah, and I also understood the whole notion of, like, design, like, the design of the device and everything like that. And it was just like, but sometimes they don’t work out, right? They just don’t work out. And it was just like, one of these things where you just have this ability to do that with people, I think. So, I walked around the CES floor with Krenar are this past CES.
I think we do it annually. I think it’s like an annual pilgrimage for both of us. And, you know, just like this guy I’ve known for ten years this, I mean, Krenar is, like, introducing me, like, the heads of, like, wireless carriers. I’ve been working with him for seven years, and he just has this ability to, like, stay in touch with the people that matter in a really, really good way. So anyway, where are we with Tive right now? Tell the world about Tive, show what’s the office, some product. Maybe show us the soccer game, if we can see it from the office.
Krenar: Yeah, we’ll wait, probably in five minutes, I think the second half is going to start, so we’ll go on a [walkthrough 00:22:47].
Raju: Okay. Okay.
Krenar: But yeah.
Raju: Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, tell us about Tive right now. Because this will be a question, you know, let you kind of go general about, kind of, the state of the business, where we’re focused, what we’ve, sort of, unlocked recently, and then, you know, kind of we’ll wrap up with where we’re heading. And the floor is yours.
Krenar: Tive I mean, we’re here in Kosovo. This is where we have the board meeting, right, here in Kosovo. But this is just one of the trackers. I’ll just pull it here. And you can see what customers do, I think.
So, just visually, they take this, they place it in the shipment, usually inside of a trailer, inside of a container. They press a button, and they know exactly anywhere in the world where the shipments are. They can tell whether hot, cold, whether somebody opened the trailer container because there’s a light sensor. They can tell if it’s tilted. They can tell if somebody dropped those shipments.
So, the basics, that’s one think I want to portray here is that—and I love about the business—is we cover those basic needs that customers have. And since the investment back in to 2020, we’ve grown quite a bit. So, now we’ve raised $140 million to date total. The last round was Series C1, which we were valued more than a half a billion dollars, and we raised $20 million here in early this year, right? When we met at CES, the world has changed, obviously, CES quite a bit, which I want to say, excited to talk about.
We have 1300 customers. We are about to cross $100 million in contracted annual run rate. We did $67 million in revenue last year, growing at almost 48—almost 50% year over year, which is quite amazing. And we’re striving to do the same thing here in 2026, and I’m very confident that the team is going to do it. The one thing that we do well, and I think it’s hard to do, but it’s this basic thing of delivering a tracker to anybody in the world that needs it, on time, with the reliability where they press the button, they know that’s going to work, it’s going to turn on, it’s going to connect to the network, it’s going to give them accurate location, accurate data.
And we have Platform, which is a software platform where customers can—all of our customers use our software. I just want to—sometimes people think we’re purely hardware company. We’re definitely not. Every single customer of ours uses our software, where they configure presets, alerts, collaborators, they log in every single day to see what’s happening with their shipments. They monitor their shipments. We integrate into their workflows, into their transportation management systems.
Customers are essentially running their business with Tive, and especially around supply chains and their operations. And they don’t get to now spend a lot of their time making calls, figuring out where the shipments are, sending emails. They can see it. If there’s something wrong, they can immediately react to it and be sometimes proactive to it before something bad happens. And we’re in the job of protecting those shipments for customers. So, that’s what we do, really, really well. It sounds simple, right Raju and Will? It sounds so—it’s like—you know, thiis—[laugh]—
Raju: You make it sound simple. You make it sound simple. I know. I know. I mean, I was just, sort of—even back then.
Krenar: It’s very hard. I just want to say that it’s very hard.
Raju: No, no, it’s super hard, right? Look, anybody can claim they track a shipment, they give you all sorts of data, but to do it reliably across 4 million shipments and to, like, have this sort of like magical experience where they feel comfortable, like, it creates that level of comfort that every single company needs, especially in this climate where, like, you know, we don’t know what’s happening on a daily basis. But, like, shipments have become international. They become worldwide.
Krenar: I just had an email, by the way, from a customer that was on the—it’s a prospect, and I sent a CEO emails in the middle of deals just to c—and they replied. He replied, said, “Thanks for the email. Just want to let you know because of disruptions in the Middle East, we’re accelerating this program. We’re going to get Tive very soon.”
Will: You know, I have to jump in here and say, this is the third leg of why I think you’re the ultimate full-stack entrepreneur because it’s not just about the technology and it’s not just about the soft skills, it’s also about recognizing that it’s a full product experience that you’re delivering for customers. When you talk about what makes Tive the world-class company that it is, it begins with delivering quality and reliability and predictability for customers. It begins with, kind of, being their partner, and all of that is the values of the company that sits on top of the incredible technology platform.
Raju: And the exciting thing is, we’re going to talk a little bit about where the world’s going. And you know, everybody’s been harping about AI, and Will and I have done podcasts on this, and you know, there’s going to be a lot of—well, there’ll be some winners, and there’ll be a lot of tears in AI. The reality is, everything can’t go up and to the right just because it has the word AI associated with it. And there aren’t a lot of companies that have sustainability in this. And when I mean sustainability, I’m not talking about, like, you know, packaged good and carbon footprint. I’m talking about being able to, like, survive with some moat.
And what I love about our business is the length of time, ten years that we’ve been doing this. And you know, my—and I’ve told you this, Krenar, and you know, I’ve talked about this at length, like, great companies are built through great sequencing, and step one of that sequence was to create a product and a set of software that allowed you to, you know, create this magical experience, and get millions of them out there, and to be able to understand, you have real data around what’s happening: who’s late, who ships on time, who drops packages, what carriers do, X, Y or Z, you know, where’s more theft happening? That allows you to do so many things in the world of AI that we have a real advantage versus the rest of the world around.
And I see so much opportunity around the solution sets that we can offer to a future audience or even the current audience. You know, with 13,000-plus customers and millions of trackers out there, you can offer into your embedded base, but you also unlock a whole universe of folks that need other solutions and other capabilities around this. So, we’re going to move into the AI side of things, but when I saw you at that last board meeting, and you know, Krenar took an aside. He took, like, 15 minutes, he goes, “I want to show you something.”
And he says, he just pops. I mean, it was just—he had a smile, and he’s like a glint in his eye. He cracks open his laptop, and he’s like, “I know this is not on the board, you know, like, agenda, but I got to show you this.” And he shows us these solutions that he has hand built over, like, the holidays, I think. And he’s just, like, “I used Claude Code, I basically built all this capability.”
And then he shows us features. He’s building features in real time in the meeting. In the meeting, he’s like, building capability. And he has this smile and this, like, light in his eye. And I just think back, this is the same kid that got that 3D animation software and was kind of blown away, and you just put the world’s software capabilities into his hands.
And I was like, man, watch out. Like, really, kind of watch out because what you’re doing is you’re enabling—like, look the software time that it took to develop a piece of code, like, five years ago, three years ago, two years ago, forever, you can build it almost instantly now. And if you have the ingredients that are very difficult to get, which is a data set that, you know, transgresses ten years, it becomes pretty beautiful.
Krenar: It’s same as that feeling I got when I sent that SMS text message to my phone. It was the same as I got with 3D Studio Max when I put the CD in and I started built the first square that moved. It was the same experience when I opened Opus 4.6. And the world changed since CES. CES was in January, Raju, we met.
The world was fine. After February 5th when Opus 4.6, [laugh]“The world was fine.” Quote-unquote. But after Opus 4.6, I just—and the team built this AI hackathon here, which I’m very proud of, the software team, and what they did. I’m like, “You know what? Let me jump in, too.” And to be able to build all of that very fast was amazing.
And the other thing that—I’ll show you some other day, both you and Will—I’ll say something that was incredible on what I’ve done another two weekends later, especially in the last two weekends, we put—team has put the Salesforce data, NetSuite data, and our software data all in Snowflake. I built this tool that can go and read all the Snowflake data for Salesforce, all the Snowflake data for NetSuite. Now, I can see all the revenue, all the booking sales, reps, their analytics, who’s doing what, calls meetings, revenue, ASP. And I’m thinking, we have some software, you know, the softwares is that we use to do some analytics, and I showed it to the team, and the teams is like, “We don’t have to renew this anymore.” We’re going to save $100,000 or more in software because of tools like this. And I’m going to now hand it to the engineering and data science team so they can manage it. But it’s unbelievable where the world’s going.
Raju: Yeah. The world is different. The world is definitely different. I think you can’t go backwards on it. I have, I’m not going to share the story on the podcast, but I’ve a couple of sons that are, you know, one’s an AI robot guy, and one’s, you know, an AI guy, and they’re building things, you know, using AI that 20 years’ worth of code being replicated in two weeks, you know, better. In a better shape. Kind of crazy. So, we shall see. But would love for us, our viewers, to get a tour of the office. Maybe see some of the people. If you want. If the timing is good. I don’t know if the game has started.
Krenar: I think it started, probably. We can walk around, yeah.
Raju: Yeah, give us a little bit of a tour and show us what—
Krenar: And remember it’s nine what forty-five in the—
Raju: I understand. I understand. I understand. But the fact that people are still in the office is amazing, right? Like, at 9:30.
Krenar: This is the Kosovo office.
Will: Wow. How many people you have in Kosovo, Krenar?
Krenar: 120. 120 people.
Raju: And incredibly cost effective, I got to be honest with you.
Krenar: They’re still they’re still.
Raju: There they are. Can you see the stadium from.
Krenar: No, we are—[laugh]—
Tive Staff: [cheering and clapping].
Krenar: [laugh]. We’re watching the game here. Yeah, so [45 00:33:56] minutes.
Staff: [cheering and clapping].
Krenar: There you go. There you go. That’s amazing.
Raju: I remember taking that trip. What was the restaurant that you took us to? Oh, but don’t tell people because that place was so good.
Krenar: Yeah, it’s really good.
Raju: I don’t want people to go.
Krenar: It’s really good.
Raju: I want people to go. I want to keep that for ourselves. That was amazing.
Krenar: We see them sitting watching. They’re working because they’re monitoring shipments, they’re looking at things. It’s just the most—we have a very dedicated team.
Raju: The culture is absolutely amazing.
Krenar: But yeah, it’s still 0-0. It’s a big game. If we win, we go to World Cup.
Raju: Yeah, that’s important. That’s important. I want you to go to World Cup. I want you to.
Krenar: [laugh].
Raju: Turkey tried to take off your hair so, like, they don’t deserve to go to the World Cup, you know? [laugh].
Krenar: [laugh].
Raju: In Kosovo, we let you keep your hair. That’s key [laugh].
Krenar: That’s a good one.
Raju: Oh, my God, I do remember—I won’t go there—but I remember a Metallica t-shirt. We have that so many stories. We won’t talk about all those. I don’t have much others questions for you, but if there’s anything you want to share, or anything you want to ask, Will, or talk about, this is a good moment for it.
Krenar: AI, we’re positioned very well because we have physical products, we’re generating first-party data with companies. But I believe that there’s a lot of companies—that I talk to; I talk to a lot of customers now—and what I’m seeing is we need to be part of their AI roadmap. And I’ve heard even from some customers who say Krenar, if I put Tive trackers on every shipment, I can automate my entire supply chain. With what they see and the workflows that we can build and the AI agents that they can run, they can automate supply chains. They can automate their shipments.
And the key is this first-party data so nobody can debate about it, nobody can debate on where the shipment is. We’re making the boxes—somebody says, “You’re making all the boxes talk.” [laugh]. And AI can’t wait for that.
Raju: No, it can’t. And think about just-in-time manufacturing. It is not just in time today; it is mostly-on-time [laugh]. It is basically like, okay, one-day-lag-on-time. You know, it’s like a plus-or-minus-a-day kind of thing. You put the trackers on there, you can do just-in-time. There’s lots of really interesting things that just-in-time allows you to do with all of the data sets that Tive provides. Really exciting.
Will: Awesome. Thank you, Krenar. This was a great profile, and I think our listeners have to be captivated, not only by your story, but by the story of Tive as a company. So, thank you for being with us today. RRE POV listeners, thank you for being with us for another episode. We look forward to bringing you someone almost as good as Krenar are again soon. Take care.
Raju: Go. Kosovo.
Krenar: Thank you and thank you, Raju.