Last fall, a VC I’d run a couple of freight tech searches with called me about a company that had nothing to do with freight: an AI infrastructure startup that had just closed its Series B with no head of sales and a board meeting six weeks out. He knew plenty of tech recruiters who’d have taken that brief, and he called me anyway.
That call is the short version of why Talent Solvers is now 10 Point Partners, and why I correct anyone who still calls us the freight guys. The work I do well, finding the one leader who isn’t looking and signing them before a bad hire costs a company half a year, was never really about the industry it happened in.
Freight is just where I learned it. The money that made that corner worth my time has moved on, and I’d rather chase it than keep defending a label that’s running out of room.
The Ceiling I Stopped Pretending Wasn’t There
Let me say the part most freight recruiters won’t say out loud: the boom that built my business crested years ago.
McKinsey tells the story plainly. Venture funding for logistics startups peaked at $25.6 billion in 2021, then collapsed to $2.9 billion by 2023, a drop of nearly 90% and the lowest level since 2015. Its share of all venture dollars also fell to 0.8%, down from roughly 3% in the years before.
I’m not bitter about it. I did real work inside that pool, and the relationships I built at project44, Envoy, Highway, Happy Robot, and Optym still send business my way. But a pool that small and falling that fast has a ceiling.
I could fish it for years and do fine, and fine was never what I was after.
The New Money Didn’t Come Back to Freight
The capital that left freight didn’t disappear. It went to AI, and not quietly.
Crunchbase reported that AI companies pulled in $242 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, about 80% of every venture dollar on the planet, with four rounds (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo) taking roughly 65% of that. Fortune also had AI at about half of all venture funding in 2025.
When we sat down to map this out last spring, someone said the line that settled it for me: “You’re going to collect the freight tech money without trying. So we need to go where the new money is going to be.”
He was right. Every AI, vertical-software, and defense company catching that wave has the exact problem I solved at project44, which is building a foundational team fast without getting the most important hire wrong.
What Worked at project44 Was Never Freight Knowledge
Everyone assumes the project44 numbers came from knowing freight. But the truth is, they came from something else. I ran Global TA there, made 1,053 hires in 12 months, and rebuilt the executive team the next year.
What made that possible was how we work: a retained engagement, a real market map, a shortlist of five to eight instead of 50, and a principal who stays through the offer instead of handing it off.
That approach is built for exactly this moment. Leadership IQ found that 46% of newly hired executives fail inside 18 months, and most of those failures have nothing to do with the resume.
When a company moves at the speed this money forces, a wrong leader gets insanely expensive via a stalled roadmap, a board losing faith, and a round that slips a quarter. We pull candidates from Palantir, Salesforce, and wherever the right person sits. None of it has ever required knowing a load board.
Why the Name Had to Change
The old name was quietly costing me. A founder well outside freight, waved us off two years ago, convinced nobody in freight could move fast or think hard enough to help him. It took eight months and a check into his Series A before he let me run a search. The words "freight tech recruiter" did that, so I retired them.
The new name is the standard itself. We measure every leader we bring you against ten points, and the bar doesn't move: a ten out of ten, or we keep looking. Nobody gets waved through because a seat is on fire. The other half, Partners, is the ambition. a16z runs a hiring process drawn from thousands of executive searches and points founders to the search partners it trusts. That seat, right beside the investor, is the one we want.
Freight Was the Proof. It Was Never the Plan.
What the next decade rewards is a pattern. Wherever money piles up and a single hire decides whether the next round happens, the cost of getting it wrong is highest, and the search is hardest. Freight is where I proved we can do that work in a thin market full of skeptical buyers, and that proof carries anywhere.
At our new and improved firm, we run retained executive search for VC- and PE-backed companies across industries. I take the high-stakes searches myself, we map the market before we send a name, and we stay on the candidate through the offer. Project44, Envoy, Highway, and Optym are the receipts.
The money already knows where it’s headed. I’m going with it.
If you’re building a leadership team and a single wrong hire would cost you a milestone, reach out. Tell me the role, and I’ll show you what a real shortlist looks like.