Augur runs the risk of repeating Flexport's biggest mistake

Auger, the mysterious pre-revenue start-up founded by Amazon + Flexport alumnus David Clark that has raised $100M without publicly disclosing much about what they do at all, runs the risk of repeating Flexport's mistake, yet they don't seem to care.

Clark has a public reputation of a being the high profile Amazon executive who came into Flexport as the new CEO at it's height when cash and profits were growing, then embarking on a hiring spree that saddled the company with costly executives and huge overhead.

Once the post-covid reversion to the mean hit, things went south very quickly, and Ryan Peterson reclaimed his role at Flexport while Clark either resigned voluntary or was forced to resign.

This story is commonplace -- startup experiences hyper growth, brings in seasoned executive from 100B dollar enterprise, and the executive is revealed to be a farmer instead of an innovator, or worse yet, someone who was better at climbing the corporate ladder (politics) than at building a business.

But rather than go back to Amazon or get into politics, Clark instead raised $100M to start Auger to....IDK.

And that's the problem. Nobody outside of Auger knows what it does. We know that it has a grand vision of solving supply chain problems, and that the solution is related to AI, but we have no details beyond that.

Several of my peers here including Anthony Miller and Grant Sernick have been rightfully sceptical about what is actually going on, but my opinion is that it's starting to not matter.

Ryan Peterson's ambitions were constantly critiqued and ridiculed by traditional and legacy forwarders, the majority of which in my opinion were and are still simply jealous or envious of Flexport's early success.

Traditional logistics executives were particularly incensed that Peterson often took punches at traditional forwarders — calling them out of date, low tech, not customer focused, and that he largely tried to build Flexport without their help, and without their approval.

This envy and jealousy played a key role in limiting Flexport's success.

By going rebel, Flexport lost industry support. The supply chain and logistics circle is small, and executives rotate in and out of LSPs and customers. As time passed, more and more decision makers were swayed by the popular consensus that Flexport was smoke and mirrors, and when the business turned south post-covid, many in the industry celebrated Flexport's woes.

And that finally takes me back to Auger.

Simply put, it's at risk of repeating that same mistake.

Every day that goes by without providing details of what it's doing, how it's doing it, all while trumpeting to the world that it's will solve all problems in supply chain that current professionals have failed solve, earns it more irk and ire from the ecosystem that it intends to serve.

The same Flexport haters already don't like Auger by association. But with every announcement from Auger about it's brand new multi-million dollar offices, or it's amazing culture that sounds like it's so-much-better-than-yours, even neutral observers like myself are starting to get annoyed.

And the longer that nobody knows what Auger actually does, the faster they will make plans to adopt solutions that ARE on the market, and the more permanent they will associate Auger with another over-hyped start-up.

Personally, I think that Auger is trying to be a Palentir for supply chain and logistics. If they are, that would make good sense as it’s a proven business model to get multi-billion dollar technology consulting contracts. But I just don’t now why it won’t come out and just say it.

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