Flock Freight Hauls in Former Coyote Executive and Opens New Chicago Office to Leverage Technology-Driven Innovation in Freight

Chris Pickett joins as Chief Strategy Officer from newly minted Chicago office in Fulton Market

 Flock Freight, a technology company that is reinventing freight shipping with shared truckload service, 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. 

“As I have gotten to know the Flock Freight team, I’ve been blown away by the technology solution they have brought to market, the talent they have assembled across every corner of the organization, and the mission that aligns it all. I know how difficult it is to execute shared truckload at scale – both mathematically and operationally, and Flock Freight has solved it, period,” said Chris Pickett, chief strategy officer at Flock Freight. “The tech not only works, but it works better and better every day. I couldn’t be more fired up about this team and this opportunity to help create a more sustainable and more efficient transportation ecosystem for everyone.”

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.

“Attracting the likes of Chris, who could truly attain any position in the freight industry, demonstrates the trajectory of this business,” said Oren Zaslansky, CEO and founder of Flock Freight. “His experience watching the genesis of technology in freight coupled with his enthusiasm for our model will sharpen our focus on growth in the years to come.”

Flock Freight recently became the only company in San Diego to earn a spot on the CNBC Disruptor 50 list due to its industry-changing freight-pooling technology. The company has doubled its workforce in 2021 and plans to add even more engineering-focused talent in its Encinitas headquarters and new Chicago location this year. Flock Freight will place an emphasis on growing the engineering and sales teams to accelerate customer acquisition and technology advancements. Additionally, the company is now the largest employer in Encinitas, on the heels of a recent Series C funding round from SoftBank Vision Fund II.

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