Flock Freight, a technology company that is reinventing freight shipping with shared truckload service, today announced the hire of Chris Pickett as chief strategy officer, former executive at Coyote Logistics and industry veteran, in addition to the opening of a new 15,000-square-foot office in Chicago to support its growing team.
With over 20 years of commercial experience operating at the intersection of global supply chain management, technology innovation, and transportation market economics, Chris brings a rare combination of industry expertise and creativity, plus a track record of leading high-growth organizations, to the Flock Freight team. After spending his early career in distribution network design and software development and implementation, he joined the early leadership team at Coyote Logistics soon after the organization’s inception in 2006. Chris was a key contributor to Coyote’s legendary rise to $2 billion in global revenue before acquisition by UPS in 2015, as well as its subsequent doubling in size to become the second-largest U.S. truckload (TL) freight broker by 2020.
As chief strategy officer over much of that period, Chris also conceived of and scaled Coyote’s Collaborative Transportation Management service offering and developed an original U.S. truckload market forecasting methodology, known to many as the Pickett Curve. This method is widely used in the industry for understanding market dynamics and projecting long-term directional spot and contract pricing behavior. Along the way, he also earned degrees in Industrial Engineering, Logistics, and Business Administration from Virginia Tech, MIT, and Georgia Tech, respectively.
Chris will work out of the new Chicago office in Fulton Market’s accelerating tech hub, which houses other leading technology companies, including Google, Instacart, and TikTok. The 15,000-square-foot space will accommodate approximately 125 employees in the near term. (Flock Freight is hiring engineering and sales team members, specifically, to match the speed of business growth.) The decision to expand the company’s footprint in Chicago came from the city’s rich freight history. Flock Freight intentionally positioned its team in Fulton Market’s tech sphere rather than a traditional trucking hub to align with the way the company brands itself in the market: at the corner of technology and freight.
Flock Freight is a San Diego-based B Corporation that’s been reinventing freight shipping since 2015. Flock Freight leverages its advanced, first-to-market algorithms that pool shipments and fill trucks at scale to create a new standard of service for shippers and increase revenue for carriers. Flock Freight’s shared truckload solution eliminates terminals and is the only carbon-neutral shipping option with all emissions accounted for through carbon offsets supporting freight-related efficiency projects. Flock Freight has garnered backing from SoftBank, SignalFire, GLP, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and several other leaders in the supply chain transformation.
