Before freight became an algorithm, it was dinner. In Oren Zaslansky's childhood home, the table talk ran to freight bills, flatbeds, ocean shipments, and the daily aggravations of moving other people's possessions. Both parents worked for a household-goods carrier. His mother later started a military freight-forwarding business; his father eventually did the same. Other families debated school or baseball. The Zaslanskys had bills of lading.
“I was born into freight,” he has said, with the faint embarrassment of someone who knows the line sounds polished only because life polished it first. By the time he left California State University, Long Beach, freight and entrepreneurship did not seem like separate subjects. They were the family grammar.
There had been another grammar at Long Beach State: volleyball. Zaslansky played on the men's team in 1993, 1994, and 1995 as a 6-foot-5 outside hitter. Freight would become his career, but the sporting picture is useful. A good hitter sees the open floor, commits before certainty arrives, and understands that individual force only matters inside a sequence of coordinated touches.
Seven trailers, no cushion
At 21, Zaslansky started a full-truckload carrier. The capital stack was less grand than the phrase suggests. He factored his receivables, leased seven trailers, and contracted seven owner-operators to supply the power. Over five years, the operation grew to about 125 units. This was not software observing transportation from an ergonomic chair. It was freight with diesel under its nails.
The young operator then placed a management team over the daily carrier business and moved toward project logistics. In 2001 he founded SolSource Logistics, a third-party logistics company that would coordinate complicated work for retailers, including store openings. He spent roughly the next dozen years inside the puzzles that appear when purchase orders, locations, appointments, and trucks refuse to line up politely.
One puzzle kept repeating. SolSource might have two large partial shipments for a customer, both moving between the same regions. Buying a full truck and putting the loads together could produce unusually good economics. What first looked incidental began to look systematic. The freight industry had built elaborate ways to move a shipment too small for a trailer, but its divisions also created waste. Partial loads traveled through less-than-truckload terminal networks, while other trucks rolled with unused deck space.
“All right, I'm ready to work on the industry, not in it.”Oren Zaslansky on the decision to build a different freight model
The cargo was partial. The ambition was not.
The idea that became Flock Freight can be explained at a diner: put compatible shipments on the same truck, let each shipper pay for the space used, and send the truck through several pickups and deliveries without unloading the freight at a terminal. Zaslansky called it carpooling for freight. The friendly metaphor conceals an inhospitable technical problem.
A carpool can wait until everyone agrees. A freight network has to quote a price now, before it knows exactly which other shipments will appear. It must judge whether the remaining trailer space can be sold, whether the stops fit the driver's route, whether the timing works, and whether the combined revenue covers the miles and complexity. Every new load changes the possible combinations.
In 2014 and early 2015, Zaslansky brought in co-founders, advisers, and mentors, put in early money, and built a proof-of-concept algorithm. The company opened in 2015 under the name Auptix. Zaslansky had assembled the word from automation, optimization, and optics. He was proud of it. A marketing leader later gave the name a brisk funeral.
Flock Freight was clearer and considerably less likely to be mistaken for an eye clinic. Birds gain efficiency by moving together; shipments could too. The business stayed the same. The metaphor finally caught up.
Price the seat before the carpool is full
For several years, the company had a concept without a reliable ignition point. The change came in early 2019, when Flock could guarantee a shared-truckload service at the moment of purchase rather than offer a best-effort possibility. To make that promise, its pricing engine had to sell part of a trailer while predicting the chance and value of filling the rest.
That move turned an optimization exercise into a product. Flock says its current system evaluates more than three trillion freight combinations in near real time, building routes and matching freight to the space left along them. The cargo stays on the trailer until its destination, avoiding the repeated handling of a conventional terminal network. The aim is lower cost, fewer damage opportunities, more carrier revenue, and fewer miles spent hauling absence.
Flock's 2024 study said partial truckloads left an average of 34 linear feet of deck space unused. The diagram is illustrative, not a scale model of every load.
Zaslansky's phrase for the problem is “shipping air.” It has the advantage of sounding faintly ridiculous, which helps. Trucks are physical facts. Empty space feels free until fuel, driver hours, road capacity, and emissions send the invoice.
The sustainability case is therefore attached to the unit economics rather than placed in a ceremonial paragraph at the back. Fuller trailers can spread cost over more freight and reduce the number of trucks required for the same shipments. Flock became a certified B Corporation and framed the model as a way for a for-profit logistics company to make environmental efficiency part of its operating system. In 2022, TIME included Flock among its 100 Most Influential Companies, summarizing the appeal in two words: sharing space.
“We've got to do our part to save the world.”Zaslansky, on the environmental purpose behind fuller trucks
The dashboard and the room
Zaslansky's own account of management begins with numbers. He has described opening the day by refreshing sales, orders, and revenue, then walking the office to collect the context the dashboard cannot supply. A number can report a miss. A conversation may reveal whether the cause was price, product, service, or a customer who simply went fishing.
He moves quickly once the picture is good enough. His rule is roughly 80 percent conviction: research the question, speak with trusted advisers, and act. “Bring ideas to life quickly,” he has advised. Perfect information is a handsome luxury in a market whose prices and available trucks change by the hour.
The style is direct, competitive, and openly missionary. At a UC San Diego event, his pitch for an environmentally minded technology company persuaded an engineer to seek out Flock. Zaslansky has also spoken about craving scarce blocks of solitary creative time, then returning to what he calls beating the drum: repeating the mission until a growing company can hear the same rhythm.
Growth made the drum louder. In October 2021, Flock announced a $215 million round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a $1.3 billion valuation. Zaslansky said the company was running at roughly $300 million in annualized revenue that month, up from $100 million at the end of 2020. He spoke then of building a durable platform, reaching public markets, and eventually taking the model beyond the United States. The valuation was a snapshot; the ambition was measured in decades.
A difficult road and the same destination
Freight markets are adept at humiliating forecasts. After the pandemic surge came a prolonged contraction, pressure on brokerage margins, and a reckoning across freight technology. Flock cut staff in 2022 and faced public criticism from former employees about service and leadership. The company disputed central claims and said it had a path to profitability. A mission can be sincere and execution can still be difficult. In freight, every elegant network diagram eventually meets weather, appointments, claims, and cash flow.
Flock's response was to stay with shared truckload. In May 2025, it raised a $60 million Series E led by O'Neil Strategic Capital, joined by Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, SignalFire, GLP Capital Partners, Bracket Capital, and others. The announced uses were prosaic in the reassuring sense: more technical and freight talent, more enterprise integrations, more carrier tools, better pooling. Zaslansky said the focus was finding new ways to be frictionless.
By 2026, the founder's job changed. Flock appointed Pat Dillon chief executive, and Zaslansky became founder and executive chairman. The company says he remains full time, concentrating on long-range strategy, investor and board relationships, and partnerships capable of advancing shared truckload. It is the sort of transition that asks a founder to trade daily command for leverage.
There is symmetry in it. Three decades earlier, Zaslansky placed managers over his growing carrier so he could pursue a more complicated problem. Now another operating team runs Flock while he works farther out on the horizon. The title is different. The question is stubbornly intact.
A trailer is a box with a deadline. The industry spent a century organizing itself around who owned the box, who booked it, and which terminals it visited. Zaslansky looked instead at the unoccupied feet inside. His career has been an argument that absence can be inventory, that old categories can be redrawn, and that sometimes the most valuable thing on a truck is the freight it has not found yet.