My forties crisis

I’m in my forties now. Right in the middle of it. I’m told this is the age where you buy a motorbike or start training for an Ironman. I already did the Ironman in my thirties, so that one was taken.

My version seems to be working very hard on making importers’ lives a little easier. Containers, bills of lading, packing lists, free time at the port. I didn’t see that one coming either.

But there’s a reason it feels right, and it’s about timing.

I grew up as the internet arrived. I started my career around 2005 and launched WebTranslateIt in 2008, at a time when a single person with a laptop could build a business and sell it to the whole world. That was the first big technology shift of my life, and I got to build on it for almost twenty years.

Now there’s a second one. To me, AI is even more important than the internet was. The internet connected information. AI can actually read it, understand it and do something useful with it. A packing list in a PDF attached to an email from a shipper on the other side of the world used to need a human to make sense of it. Now it doesn’t.

The interesting part is not the technology itself. It’s what it makes possible for industries that the first wave mostly skipped. Fresh produce still runs on email, phone calls and spreadsheets. Not because people in the trade are behind, but because until now the software couldn’t cope with how messy the real work is. Every shipper sends a different document. Every shipping line has a different website. Every customer has their own way of doing things.

That messiness is exactly what AI is good at handling. Not to replace the people doing the job, but to stop them wasting their days on the parts a machine can now do.

“Thank you for building this”

Earlier this month I was at Fruit Attraction in Madrid, and I met a lot of importers. I showed them Trackberry on my iPad, between stands and over coffee.

A couple of times, I could see the cogs turning. They’d look at the screen, think about their own containers, their own inbox, and then: “Holy shit, thank you for building this!”

I’ve been working really hard for the past ten months, and it’s quite something to hear that.

I’ve been writing commercial software for twenty years. People have paid for it, renewed it, recommended it, complained about it. But this was the first time I heard a thank you that came from the bottom of the heart. Not polite, not a sales conversation. Just someone who has spent years chasing containers and copying numbers out of PDFs, seeing that they might not have to anymore.

That’s something I love about this industry. People in fresh produce are simple and down to earth. Buying and selling fruit and vegetables is one of the oldest trades in the world, and it still runs on handshakes, phone calls and trust. Nobody is impressed by buzzwords.

But let’s be fair: it has become a lot more complicated recently. Peru alone has turned into a giant orchard for the world, shipping citrus, blueberries, avocados, asparagus and grapes. What used to be a simple trade now means, for some importers, keeping an eye on 100 containers a week, at the mercy of carriers, port congestion, geopolitics and climate change. The people are still simple. The job isn’t anymore. That’s where good tools earn their place.

Time to be an optimist

There’s a lot of noise about AI right now. Some of it is hype, some of it is fear. I understand both.

But from where I sit, talking to importers every week and watching what the software can now do with their documents, I mostly feel lucky. I get to live through two of the biggest technology shifts in history. The first time, I was learning as I went. This time, I have twenty years of building and selling software behind me, and I know how to turn the new technology into something people actually use. And I get to spend it solving real, boring, useful problems for people I like working with.

What a great time to be alive. I’m choosing to be an optimist.

Málaga, 16 October 2026.