Skip to main content

Matt Silver

Co-founder & CEO of Cargado, an AI-native marketplace for US-Mexico/Canada cross-border freight; previously founded Forager (acquired by Arrive Logistics) and worked at Coyote Logistics.

Jun 10, 2026

0:56
Well, to kick us off, we'd love to get kind of the spiel on Cargado and what it is you've been building the last few years.
1:03
Sure.
1:03
So, and it might help with, I can give you a little bit of my background, what led to into this as well.
1:08
So I've been in freight my entire career, really my entire life, grew up around it and then started working at Coyote Logistics when I was 19 after spending the first couple of summers of my opportunity to work, working at grocery stores.
1:22
Because my dad basically said, you're not just going to come and work for me.
1:25
You have to go learn how to work for, work with like really challenging people.
1:30
customers actually.

12 MINS LATER

13:30
Could you tell us a bit about what that looks like?
4:10
Give us a reminder of why US-Mexico trade had been on a sort of upwards trend line because a lot of people were saying, "Well, this is actual genuine trade between the US and Mexico," and then other people would say, "Well, this is China rerouting some stuff through Mexico in order to get further away from the Trump administration's first round of tariffs back in circa 2018."
4:35
Yeah.
4:36
So going back to s- 2018, that's when Trump updated NAFTA to the USMCA, and that encouraged more manufacturing to happen in North America and less overseas.
4:46
And so you've got the pandemic that scared everybody and, and thinking that it's not such a great idea to rely on China for manufacturing.
4:54
Couple that with the general relations that the US and China have had for the last decade or so, which has been contentious, and it's not super friendly, then you've got the latest round and everything even up to the last few hours when Trump said that if China goes through with the increased tariffs that they announced, I think he said 90% would be placed on all goods coming from China.
5:16
And so things are only escalating and between the fact that, you know, Mexico is primarily on the same or similar time zones as the United States, it's only a few hours to get there, whereas it's, it's I think 14 or 15 hours to get to China.
5:30
And then the culture and language barriers are a lot simpler and easier to get through with Mexico than it is with overseas.

6 MINS LATER

11:31
So, if we were to assume that maybe things don't change from what's been declared, like, let's just assume that we don't see a bunch of deals like Trump is advocating for and these tariffs, we're stuck with them for a while, how would you expect some of your clients to actually react and maybe reorient their businesses for this new reality? What would they do?

We value your privacy

We use cookies to understand how you use our platform and to improve your experience. Click “Accept All” to consent, or “Decline non-essential” to opt out of non-essential cookies. Read our Privacy Policy.