🎣Turning Tribal Knowledge Into a Media Empire

Craig Fuller takes us through his early start in the industry and growing up around trucking legends. He also talks about the deal that reshaped Chattanooga and the journey of building his own media empire, FreightWaves.

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(PREVIEW): The Story Behind Chattanooga’s Freight Dominance

Gravel Lots & Legacy

Craig Fuller recalls growing up in a gravel lot– six years old, climbing trucks and being driven around by his father, Max, a well-known figure in the industry. Craig's grandfather, Clyde Fuller, was already a legend and one of the patriarchs of long-haul trucking.

“I wanted to learn trucking from a very early age, so my dad had me going down to the truck terminal very early. We would go to this gravel parking lot every couple of weeks when they would get a new truck. It shaped my life.”

For Craig, trucking wasn’t something he studied—it was something he absorbed. He recalls hearing industry stories growing up, what he calls 'tribal knowledge', passed down to him as a young man. Scandals, bankruptcies, niche carriers, all thanks to his father, Max Fuller.

Click to listen to our conversation with Max Fuller above.

“My dad was an encyclopedia of trucking knowledge. He imparted that on me, and I was like a sponge. That is, in many ways, the reason I was successful in building FreightWaves, because I have all of this knowledge. It's not written down. It's all tribal. “

Craig absorbed it the same way the industry was built: by being there. Watching, listening, and learning what doesn’t show up in data. That “tribal knowledge” became leverage to build FreightWaves.

The Deal That Changed Chattanooga

Craig pointed to a shift in the city in the mid 2010's that changed everything.

When UPS acquired Coyote Logistics in 2015, something broke open, and Chattanooga became a freight lab.

“That’s when a massive exodus of people left what was formerly Access America. So, you have this young talent base that’s in their 20s and 30s. They’re young enough to have seen it start from nothing to really something. I think that gave them all the desire to go create something.”

Without that transaction, Craig says, the shift might never have happened.

A new class of founders emerged: entrepreneurs and grinders in their 30s, fresh off exits and not interested in slowing down. They didn’t want to invest money in foundations—they wanted to put it back into the industry.

When Freight Wasn’t Cool

When Craig himself started FreightWaves ten years ago, the industry was very different from what we know today.

“I called on a hundred VCs before we got our first check. Freight was not cool. This was 2016, no one wanted to write a check for FreightWaves, and it’s because no one had really discovered the power of it. The large Silicon Valley firms were obsessed with digital brokerage."

At one point, he was told that if his father wasn’t writing a check, neither would the investor. So Craig had to pound the pavement.

Paul-Bernard Jaroslawski, Craig Fuller, and Reed Loustelot at FreightWaves HQ.

At the time, freight media barely existed in a modern sense. He was told that no one cared about freight news.

When he finally started, the data seemed to prove it. Early articles got little traction. But then it clicked- Craig realized the opportunity lay in writing about real-time news. There was no source at the time that covered the freight market, so FreightWaves became that source.

“Ted (Alling) called, and went, "Hey, I got this idea. I'm watching the Golf Channel and thinking, you know, you can build this freight business, media business. Why can't this be bigger? Why can't you do media and everything?"

A City That Speaks Freight

And it worked—because it was built in the right place.

In Chattanooga, freight is woven into everyday life— you hear it in passing conversations, at dinner, at the bar. Load counts, margins, wins. It’s a shared language.

“That's the way this town operates. And I think it's one of the few cities where you can have a high quality of life, but you don't have such a big city where you become sort of a background.”

In other words, it’s a place where stories don’t just exist—they circulate. Where knowledge moves. Where people grow- and that's exactly what Craig Fuller has done.

The full interview is available to FreightCaviar Magazine subscribers inside our private Circle community.

Catch the preview live on YouTube.

Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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