The CEO who'd rather you didn't download another app.
CEO & Co-Founder // Vendorflow
Eric Rodriguez
He left a freight startup to fix the thing freight kept getting wrong: the conversation.
He left a freight startup to fix the thing freight kept getting wrong: the conversation.
Somewhere right now a dispatcher is texting a driver from a personal cell phone, calling a carrier on a landline, emailing a broker, and pinging a fourth person on WhatsApp - all about the same load. None of it is in the same place. None of it is searchable. When that dispatcher goes home, the conversation goes with them. Eric Rodriguez looked at that mess and saw a product.
Vendorflow, the company he co-founded and runs as CEO, takes voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and in-cab ELD messaging and pours them all into a single shared inbox that sits on top of a trucking company's existing software. The whole dispatch and operations team works the same driver and carrier conversations together, in one place, instead of in a dozen private threads. The idea is borrowed from modern support tools. The audacity is in dragging it into freight, an industry famous for running on fax machines and folklore.
The pitch is refreshingly humble for a tech founder. Logistics already has, by one count, more than 300 separate systems. Eric is not trying to replace any of them. Vendorflow is the layer that sits above the chaos and makes the talking work. The result, early customers report, is carriers responding up to 90% faster when reached on the channel they actually prefer.
It is an unglamorous problem. That is precisely why he likes it.
The logistics industry is ready to graduate beyond burdensome carrier apps and chaotic offline communications.- Eric Rodriguez, announcing Vendorflow's seed round
The route is not a straight line. Eric started his working life in the dining room of Restaurant Gary Danko, the number-one restaurant in San Francisco by Zagat at the time. Hospitality teaches you that the product is the experience and the experience is mostly communication. He has been chasing that lesson across industries ever since.
At UC Berkeley he earned two degrees at once - a B.S. in Business Administration from the Haas School and a B.A. in Economics - and graduated in 2009 cited as one of seven "high-achieving graduates" at the Haas commencement. He didn't just take the classes on offer. He invented one. His proposal for a course called "Strategic Philanthropy" won Berkeley's Curricular Innovation Contest, picked up $10,000 in annual funding from Doris Buffett's Sunshine Lady Foundation, and was taught as an upper-division class for four semesters. He pitched the idea from the TEDxBerkeley stage in 2010, to 700 people in the room and 156,000 watching the livestream.
Then came the startup decade. He co-founded Copilot Labs, a restaurant-tech outfit later acquired by OpenTable. He ran sales and product at CapLinked, a document-management SaaS, where as Director of Sales he doubled annual recurring revenue and monthly deal volume in a single year. He managed product at Science 37, in clinical research. Restaurant analytics, secure documents, telemedicine - a tour of industries that all, underneath, were really about getting the right information to the right person at the right moment.
In March 2018 he landed at NEXT Trucking in Los Angeles as a Group Product Manager. He led a ground-up rebuild of the core product and shipped an MVP in four months. More importantly, he met an engineer named Greg Bujak. Two years later the pair walked out the door together to start Vendorflow. They brought a handful of NEXT alumni with them. When you've already survived a hard rebuild beside someone, you know whether you want to do the next one together.
What he learned in freight is what made the company. Truckers do not want another app to download. Dispatchers do not want another tab to babysit. The fix was never going to be a shinier driver app. It was going to be meeting everyone on the channels they already use, and putting all of it in one inbox the whole team can see.
Starts out at Restaurant Gary Danko, San Francisco's #1 restaurant by Zagat.
Graduates UC Berkeley with degrees in Business and Economics; invents the "Strategic Philanthropy" course; speaks at TEDxBerkeley.
Co-founds Copilot Labs (acquired by OpenTable); analyst at Bloomspot (acquired by Chase Bank).
Senior Product Manager, then Director of Sales at CapLinked - doubles ARR and deal volume in a year.
Product Manager at Science 37, building for clinical research.
Group Product Manager at NEXT Trucking - ships an MVP in 4 months and meets co-founder Greg Bujak.
Co-founds Vendorflow as CEO.
Closes a $1.3M seed round led by TenOneTen Ventures.
Dispatch and operations work the same driver and carrier threads together, instead of in private texts that vanish when someone clocks out.
Voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and ELD messaging unified in one hub. Meet drivers where they already are - no new app to install.
It sits above the TMS and ELD rather than replacing them. The 300+ systems of logistics stay put; Vendorflow makes them talk.
Early adopters report carriers responding up to 90% faster when reached on their preferred channel.
Built for trucking fleets, freight brokers, drayage teams, and port operations - the unglamorous backbone of how goods move.
Connects to the tools shops already run, including ELD platforms like Samsara, so messaging rides along with the rest of the stack.
There is a difference between a backer's list and a believer's list. Vendorflow's $1.3M seed, closed in October 2021, was led by Los Angeles fund TenOneTen Ventures, with Amplify.LA alongside. TenOneTen's read was simple: the co-founders had "impressive knowledge of the space and technical ability," forged working together at NEXT Trucking before they ever pitched a slide.
But the more telling names are the operators who joined the round with their own money. Jett McCandless, CEO of project44. Oren Zaslansky, CEO of Flock Freight. Param Singh of Best Bay Logistics. Bobby Napiltonia, a veteran of Twilio, Salesforce, and NEXT Trucking. These are people who have spent careers staring at the exact problem Vendorflow is built to kill. When the folks who feel a pain the most acutely choose to fund the cure, that is a particular kind of signal.
It helps that Eric is not a tourist in this world. The shape of his career is a quiet argument for why he can pull it off. He has built product from pre-seed to Series C. He has carried a sales quota and doubled a company's recurring revenue. He has co-authored a startup's mission, vision, and values, and written quarterly OKRs that dragged an organization toward lean. Founder, operator, seller, product mind - the same person has worn each hat, which is exactly the breadth a small team needs from the one at the top.
A talk from his personal archive - the kind of thing that explains how a hospitality-and-philanthropy guy ends up obsessed with freight messaging.
Watch on YouTube ►There is a particular kind of founder who chases the flashy frontier, and another kind who hunts for the boring, expensive, everyday friction nobody else wants to touch. Eric Rodriguez is the second kind. Freight moves the physical world, and the people who move it have been stuck talking through a tangle of apps, landlines, and private text threads for decades.
His aspiration is plain and large at the same time: build the communications layer of logistics. Not a louder app. Not a system to replace the systems. A single place where the conversation finally lives - searchable, shared, and still there tomorrow. If he is right, the most important software in trucking will be the part you barely notice, quietly making sure the message gets through.
"Meet people where they already are." - a hospitality rule, applied to 18-wheelers.