I Deliver Packages, Bringing a Little Tech Shock to North America | Starting Up with You Lan

Chinese entrepreneurs are expanding their commercial reach across the globe. What adventures and obstacles await them in different markets?

One market undergoing rapid transformation has caught our attention — North America, where the spread of e-commerce is driving fascinating changes across this massive market. A particularly revealing lens for observing these shifts is logistics: the arteries and capillaries alike, spanning transoceanic freight and last-mile delivery, weaving together the fabric of e-commerce. What changes can technology bring to this ancient industry?

We've invited two industry guests to explore this question. One serves consumers — the buyers; the other serves e-commerce sellers. These multiple perspectives promise a richer picture.

This time, BlueRun Ventures will explore this with you in podcast form. What's So Blue About Starting Up? is BlueRun Ventures' first tech and business podcast. In each episode, we reveal a truth about entrepreneurship and technology. With curiosity, how hard can starting up be?

UniUni operates a DiDi-style crowdsourced service model, providing last-mile delivery in Canada and across North America for leading cross-border e-commerce platforms including Amazon, Walmart, and Shein.

Surpath offers supply chain logistics digitization solutions for cross-border e-commerce, dedicated to helping cross-border brands achieve more efficient supply chain management through visualized tracking and SKU-level cost analysis.

This episode's host, John (Fu Qiang), leads BlueRun's investment team for China-based companies expanding globally. His team is continuously searching for a new generation of global navigators — if that's you, come meet them at BlueRun.

We also spoke with our two guests about how Chinese entrepreneurs build international companies abroad. Peter has lived and worked in Canada for years; Jim spent years in multinational corporations before founding his own company. Today, both UniUni and Surpath feature diverse faces from different ethnic backgrounds. Who hustles harder, Chinese or Indian employees? How do you get a laid-back Black colleague to stop being so careless? How do workers from different countries collaborate? They brought some unexpected answers.

North American logistics has been dominated by four giants — UPS, FedEx, DHL, and USPS — for decades. But with the pandemic, domestic e-commerce penetration surged dramatically, while cross-border e-commerce giants like Shein, Temu, TikTok, and AliExpress experienced explosive growth. The traditional carriers simply couldn't keep up with the workload or service expectations.

Periodic strikes, benefits, and pension subsidies keep delivery costs persistently high. Moreover, these companies still operate on traditional models, investing heavily in depot infrastructure and vehicle fleets. Yet e-commerce volumes can fluctuate five- to tenfold between peak and off-peak seasons, creating severe resource waste. Vehicles are never enough during peak season, while fleets sit idle during slow periods.

Even worse, these traditional carriers offer minimal customization. For instance, an e-commerce client requested that drivers take two photos upon delivery — showing the package's exact placement and the house number, making it easier for customers to locate their items. Even this simple request took the traditional carriers over two years to implement. For cross-border clients accustomed to China's hyper-efficient logistics, this level of service is simply unacceptable.

Supply chain problems are actually cash flow problems, and cash flow problems are actually the boss's wife's problems. The boss's wife always asks: where did the money go?

Cross-border e-commerce sellers often have a deep understanding of the 80/20 rule — that 20% of products generate 80% of profits — yet many only realize which SKUs drove most of their profits three months later.

There are only two ways cross-border e-commerce sellers fail: either products don't sell well and the business dies before it can scale, or the cash flow breaks. Surpath's goal is to help sellers master supply chain inventory management. First, cash flow management; second, maintaining continuous stock with minimal inventory. That's genuinely impressive.

Previously, North American last-mile delivery drivers often spent hours picking up packages and doing extensive unpaid prep work. Drivers manually sorted parcels, entered addresses into computers, used Google Maps to plan routes, and manually input information into Excel spreadsheets — the entire process was painfully cumbersome.

Through UniUni's design and route optimization, delivery efficiency increased from fewer than 10 stops per hour to 25-30 stops now. On the evening after packages are pre-alerted, computers and trained large-scale optimization models automatically plan routes for over 100 stops.

For drivers, the operation became radically simple: they don't need to know computers, just have a smartphone and follow the on-screen instructions to deliver in sequence. Even drivers unfamiliar with local terrain can complete deliveries smoothly by following the prompts.

Globalization is profoundly meaningful — it connects people across the world. Logistics connects goods, and global business connects people of different nations and ethnicities. When a Cambodian woman and a Black man have together chased down a Black warehouse manager for an urgent order, they'll no longer believe that people from different countries are incomprehensible or impossible to communicate with.