U2 Won’t Save Your Trucking Startup

You have to enjoy a certain level of self-confidence to start a business, particularly if you’re asking other people to help fund it. Too often, though, entrepreneurs have way too much confidence for their own good. Take the people behind Convoy, the trucking startup that fell off a cliff this week, after months spent trying to find a buyer or some new cash to keep the business going. As demonstrated by our deep dive into what went wrong, published today, Convoy was an example of hubris on the part of the founders and blindness on the part of its investors, who include such luminaries as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff.

As the story says, Convoy was started by two people with no experience in trucking who decided that automation using a slick app was the way to disrupt the industry incumbents. Nothing sums up their lack of self-awareness better than a note written by co-founder and CEO Dan Lewis—announcing an investment made by rock legends Bono and The Edge in the company—and saying that the two stars of U2 “know more about trucking than you might think.” Well, yes, U2’s musical equipment gets trucked about while they’re on tour so they surely know what a truck looks like. Perhaps they knew more than Lewis and his co-founder, who apparently weren’t too up to speed on the industry, as our story makes clear.