Tariffs didn’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the US

Today, I’m talking with Evan Smith, who is cofounder and CEO of Altana, a company that develops software tools to manage big, messy supply chain networks around the world. We last had Evan on in early 2025 to talk about how Trump’s first few waves of tariffs were starting to affect global trade and what patterns Altana was seeing in all that macro-level data about shipping and trade. It was a very alarming and also very illuminating chat; Evan and I got into the existential weeds of international relations and economics almost immediately. It was a great conversation. A year and a half later, and everything is somehow even more chaotic than it was the last time Evan and I talked — and that’s true both about trade and in the business world. And, as you’ll hear, we jumped right back into the weeds yet again. Developments in agentic AI have changed what Altana can do, but like every software company, they’ve also changed how Altana can do it. You’ll hear Evan describe how AI is changing how they make software for a very demanding set of clients that manage billions in international trade — which is causing some big debates about how a software company even runs in 2026. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. And of course, what they do also needs to change more or less daily. Trade policy is changing rapidly around the world but likely nowhere faster than here in the US. Between the Trump administration’s whack-a-mole tariff policies and war in Iran, it’s very hard to keep up with the current rules. That’s where Altana comes in. All that data coming from all around the world gives Evan a really high-level view of what’s actually happening. All those tariffs, for example, were supposed to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. So I asked Evan directly: Is that actually happening? Spoiler alert — you won’t be surprised to hear him say “no.” And while it’s clear the world still relies on global supply chains, the pressure placed on economic chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz is going to get higher than ever. There’s a lot going on in this one — as you can tell, Evan and I really enjoy talking to each other. Okay: Altana CEO Evan Smith. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Evan Smith, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Altana. Welcome back to Decoder. It’s good to be here again. Thanks for having me. I was looking over our last interview from about a year and a half ago, and boy, we got straight into the existential weeds of what it means to run the global economy and what was changing. People can go back and watch, read, or listen to that interview. It’s very good. I really enjoyed it. The thing that strikes me about the past year and a half is that some of this stuff was theoretical the last time you were on the show. You founded Altana on the idea that globalization as we knew it — what you call, “globalization 1.0” — was going to come to an end, it was going to get more complicated, and the world needed software to solve it. The rubber has hit the road. It has gotten more complicated. It’s getting more complicated by the day. Even as we speak this week, it is getting more complicated. Even over the last year and a half it feels like it has gone from being a bet to being something very practical now. Is that how you see it? Completely. One of our investors described Altana as, “an index bet on global dislocation.” That’s a lot. Can I just ask you maybe a philosophical, emotional question about that? I get a lot of feedback from our audience. You have CEOs on the show and they talk about making bets in this way, and on the ground, it’s chaos. So, I get an index bet on dislocation. That sounds great on CNBC, right? I understand exactly how that plays to that audience. How do you feel about that approach to the world, especially as a software company that kind of just makes a map for people, and how it plays out for regular people? I think regular people right now are really struggling and they’re really confused. They’re very anxious. Well, trade touches virtually every part of or most of our lives. So, our mission is to fix globalization, but we’re not retreating from globalization. We’re leaning into it. But we believe that globalization needs to be fixed. It needs to be more trusted, more secure, more fair. That’s a recognition that trade will and should continue across borders. That’s the animating ethos in the company. We work with our customers who in most respects are on the front lines of all this stuff. We work with eight of the 10 biggest logistics providers. We work with the government agencies that have to scramble to enforce these laws. Then, we work with importers and their supply chains to comply with them. And the stakes are huge. Do medical devices get to the hospital? What’s the price of fuel and food? So, I couldn’t agree with you more that the dislocation ultimately has the most profound consequences for everyday people, but that’s the point, right? Trade is the lifeblood of growth. This is how we feed ourselves, sustain ourselves, and protect ourselves. So, how do you have both at the same time? How do you have more enforcement and more fracturing as geopolitics play out, but have more trade, more growth, and more economic security? I think Altana is the answer to that question. The reason I’m asking is that I’m worried that there’s too many layers of abstraction — not with you but with everyone. Building solutions for our current world. You just acquired a company called Cervo AI. Literally as we’re speaking. The press release is dated today. I’ve had a smile on my face all day, but yeah, it just hit the wire. It makes an AI platform to solve customs brokerage, which was not a problem in an earlier version of globalization. Correct. The trade was flowing and products were moving across borders. Now, all the walls are up and everyone has to do more paperwork. And here’s Altana like, “We see an opportunity. We’re buying an AI platform that literally fills that paperwork at borders.” I look at that and I’m like, “Well, that was very smart.” It feels like the right answer for one problem. It also, to me, feels like the dumbest problem. We’re now having robots fill out forms presumably for other robots to read just to get back to the trade we had before. I get it. A couple layers of abstraction away, this is the smartest bet. Then, down on the ground, I’m like, “So, it’s an AI that fills out forms that we didn’t have to fill out before.” The only rational response to that is another AI system on the other side reading the forms. What are we doing here? Just to be cheeky with you for a moment, we do have our own AI agents and AI systems on one side of the border talking to our AI systems and agents on the other side of the border. I don’t think it’s just founder bullshit to say that the future is some version of agentic orchestration of the trade network. That’s a sensible statement whether or not there’s policy volatility out there or not. The technological revolution that enables that is moving at pace, so we’re surfing that wave, we’re applying these technologies, and in some cases, we’re inventing a few. But in order to have global commerce, to have strawberries in the wintertime in the US, you have to somehow solve this border complexity problem. Your notion of if we shot ourselves in the foot is a fair question. You and I talked about this on the last episode, but I think no matter what, the US, Europe, the West, and even China in its own way, is reckoning with new geopolitical and economic security calculus. So, in a world of disequilibrium — which we’re in — where you don’t have a hyperpower that can police the entire world, all of the maritime shipping lanes, and the rest of it, there is going to be a whole lot more weight placed on economic and national security. We’re seeing the weaponization of choke points through the supply chain and global logistics network. So, it’s not theoretical. It’s happening. We’re all reading the same news. Back to the border and to customs, the question again is, “How do we have more security and more enforcement at the same time we have vibrant trade and growth?” With all that complexity, I see no other way than to solve it with artificial intelligence. I want to come back to that. I did it with you again, we immediately got into the weeds. Like I said, you were on the show about a year and a half ago. If people want to take a deep dive into Altana, I think that episode is a really good one, and I recommend it. It was a lot of fun. But just briefly here, describe what Altana is and what it does for people who need to get caught up. Altana connects the public and private sectors into a network for managing trade. It’s a shared map of the world at the underpinning. So, everyone sees the same supply chain network and the same set of facts. We actually have a collaboration layer on top of that with AI helping all the parties. That now connects government agencies like US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with eight of the world’s 10 biggest logistics providers that actually move all these goods around the world. Then, there’s Fortune 1,000 companies and their suppliers. Think about it as hooking into a shared view of the world, like Google Maps for the supply chain, and then these parties transacting with each other to manage trade. This is where the Cervo AI acquisition we were just speaking about comes in. Agents are increasingly working alongside humans in those interactions within an organization and between organizations. I want to dive into that specifically because I’m really curious about how the data works. I know you have a very unique data model for how people work with Altana. I know you have an entire thesis there. But I want to ask the Decoder questions in a bit of a lightning round so we can get there quickly. Last time we spoke, you had about 240 people. I’m assuming you’re growing. How big is Altana now and how are you structured? I think we’re actually benefiting from some of the AI we’re purveying. So, the company’s just under 300 people. We might have just broken 300 with this acquisition. How are we structured? We are trying to run more of the company through an extended leadership team these days. So, we’re covering an enormous amount of ground. I think we work with nine governments around the world. We have three product lines that serve different government users. We have this logistics vertical. We work with enterprises the world over and their suppliers. It’s incredibly broad and it’s incredibly complex. The point of saying all that is because within a 300 person company, the communication and coordination challenges are just massive. One of the things I’m trying to solve is how to get more of the leaders in the company seeing the whole playing field, having the same debates, and synthesizing the information at whole company level and not just their function. So, it’s messy and people complain that, “Oh, we had this two hour meeting. It was very expensive because we weren’t talking about my thing.” But my instinct is that it’s the least bad way to run the company these days as we gain scale and grow into the ambition of the business where we’re covering so much ground. That I think connects directly to my other Decoder question. The last time you were on the show, you actually told me your process for making decisions was rapidly evolving. You said you had moved from a consensus model in areas where you had a lot of expertise to being really decisive, particularly on product and product management, and that you were going to be more opinionated and faster there while leaving the other stuff behind. That’s kind of what you’re describing at scale now. Is that still the framework? Has it evolved more? How are you making decisions? That’s definitely stayed true. What’s happened since then is that as of March of last year, we have injected folks into the company that have really, really deep domain expertise in some of the areas we’re working in, such as trade, customs compliance, logistics, and procurement. With the advent of agentic design and agentic coding, one of the things we’re really leaning into is how to get to the right product judgments faster since it took founder-level conviction and synthesis to make some of these big bets before. That’s still true, but what’s been really cool over the last six months is that as we’ve brought in these really deep domain experts, we can take traditional product design, product management, and discovery function, and pair it with deep domain expertise to get to the right product judgment so much faster. Then, the execution of that workflow or the build-out of the modeling steps is also much faster in this new way of coding and developing. I would just say that we have to move fast because the world’s changing really fast. That is true, and it’s probably going to stay true. What’s different from a year and a half ago is that you now have this agentic product development life cycle that just gives you so much more velocity and the ability to get to the right place faster. Talk about that a little bit more. I’ve talked to CEOs of bigger companies that are much more stable and much older, and there’s an idea that there’s some kind of grand shake-up between what a product manager does, what a designer does, and what an engineer does, and that everyone’s going to get the same skills and maybe that classic trio doesn’t have to exist anymore. The bigger companies have got to manage that pretty carefully. They’re architected around those roles in very specific ways. I think it’s fair to say Altana is still a startup, right? You’re still operating it a bit like a startup. Totally. It sounds like you don’t have any of that baggage. You can just start over and say, “My domain experts are now going to be product designers in whatever way that that works.” Are the tools good enough for you to do that as a software CEO, or do you still have the other roles backstopping everything? Yeah, it’s getting pretty psychedelic. It’s all blending together. My favorite has been watching some of our engineers lean in to design. You’re seeing it in all directions, but there’s definitely a convergence of those functions where a designer can ship code and a product manager can design and prototype. A project manager can ship code and just handle tickets themselves. Engineers can get in on the design game. I’d be lying if I said we had the end state fully realized, but this is an active conversation that we’re having out loud with all the stakeholders in the company. These roles are converging, what are the new ways of working, and how are you going to expand your skillset and push into this new horizon? I think almost everybody’s been excited to be alon