The Critical Mile with Saad Shahzad
Saad Shahzad and Joe Lynch discuss the critical mile. Saad is the Chief Revenue Officer at Airspace, a company that utilizes a technology-driven platform – backed by machine learning and AI – to deliver time-critical shipments including organs for transplant, medical specimens, airplane parts, and more.
About Saad Shahzad
Saad Shahzad is the Chief Revenue Officer, Airspace. He is a go-to-market leader who has built and managed world-class teams at several high-growth companies. With over a decade of experience in senior leadership roles at startups with a combined market value of $8 billion, Saad knows what drives great people, processes and products. Prior to Airspace, Saad was GM of Clutter’s Third-party Logistics business and Vice President of its Sales and Customer Service teams following his role as Head of Sales at Gusto and Vice President of Sales at dinCloud. In addition to his experience helping to build companies, Saad is a former venture capitalist who invested in early-stage companies at Norwest Venture Partners ($9 billion in capital under management). He started his career in investment banking where he worked at Goldman Sachs and Jefferies. Saad holds a B.S. in Finance from the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business.
About Airspace
From life-saving organs to essential machinery components, Airspace is trusted to move the most time-critical shipments on time, every time. The company’s proprietary AI-powered platform completely automates routing, dispatch, and delivery. Awarded and protected by multiple patents, Airspace technology provides unrivaled speed, reliability, and transparency in time-critical logistics. With its exclusive courier network, 24/7/365 support, and AirTrace™ tracking and reporting solution, the company is rapidly scaling into new markets and industries while continuing to innovate and maximize value for its customers.
Key Takeaways: The Critical Mile
- Saad Shahzad is the Chief Revenue Officer at Airspace, a company that focuses on time-critical shipments.
- In the podcast interview, Saad explained that the critical mile can be the first, middle, or last mile – what makes it critical is that there is a high likelihood of failure or delays. For time-critical shipments like transplant organs, life-saving drugs, or parts delaying a huge manufacturing operation, failure is not an option.
- Traditionally, expediting companies were smaller operations with less emphasis on technology, which might explain why the expediting process is typically very manual, lacks shipment visibility and pricing transparency.
- Airspace ships anything from organs for transplant to aircraft parts that could cause delays across the nation.
- Airspace built an industry-first automated platform that provides complete visibility from the moment the order is placed to the moment it is delivered. The Airspace platform was created to eliminate the transparency issues and challenges that are so prevalent in the logistics industry today.
- Using the Airspace platform, Airspace customers can track the exact location, temperature, humidity, shock, and light exposure of their most critical shipments in real-time.