A Chat with Tive Founder & CEO Krenar Komoni

Krenar Komoni is a visionary and entrepreneur driven by an insatiable curiosity. He came on his own to the United States from his native Kosovo in 2001 as an exchange student to get a better education. In the two decades since, he has worked for several startups, including Tive, the company he founded in 2015. In joining host Joe Lynch for a recent episode of The Logistics of Logistics Podcast, Krenar discussed his life and his entrepreneurial journey at Tive, a company that is re-imagining supply chain visibility with sensor-driven awareness and analysis tools of in-transit goods, from start to finish.

Education Sets Stage for Success

Krenar finished high school and attended Norwich University, where he graduated with degrees in computer engineering and mathematics (double major) and a minor in computer science. He then went on to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Tufts University. Krenar says he always wanted to get deeper into how things work—for example, streaming megabits and gigabits of data. “How do you harness these signals that are in the air and turn them into something that you can consume as a user? Wireless connectivity…it’s abstract, but it’s beautiful,” Krenar says.

The Tive Story

Krenar started Tive in June 2015 after watching his father-in-law spend hours on the phone trying to track down the status of shipments. He was determined to help shippers and logistics service providers get in-transit, real-time visibility into their shipments. Nearly seven years later, Tive offers a robust proprietary sensor and software solution that delivers real-time data and configurable alerts that help shipping and logistics professionals manage their shipments and eliminate preventable delays and damage. The trackers are a bit smaller than a deck of playing cards. “Press a button, put it on a shipment. Customers get real-time condition updates—how hot, how wet, how cold, did someone open the trailer, Contextual information, in real time, and a lot of other insights,” Krenar says. In addition to its home base in Boston, Tive now has offices in New York, Australia, Germany, and South Africa.

The Not-So-Secret to Success

“We have an amazing culture based on values, with transparency being one of them,” Krenar says. “One of the main reasons we have been successful is that we have been very, very transparent with one another. Two, we're not afraid. And the reason we are not afraid is because of the transparency. We look at things exactly the way they are. We're going to deal with it and move on to live another day.”

An Eye on the Future

Krenar thinks of this world, the entire planet, as one giant startup company. “We are all working together to try and make it better; the supply chain is a big, connected system that needs to get better. The first thing to do is to start measuring things,” Krenar says. “We need more digitization, more data to measure more and understand exactly where cargo is.”

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