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This reads like there is an opportunity for a YC company to create an authenticated freight dispatching service. Sort of "uber for freight" where you sign up ow

This reads like there is an opportunity for a YC company to create an authenticated freight dispatching service. Sort of "uber for freight" where you sign up owner/operators and connect them with freight loads that need to move from one place to another. If the company does the vetting and works with an insurance company to cover liabilities both ways (o/o is at fault, shipper is at fault) it seems they could capture some value from creating a safer market.

tristor 3y ago
Unless I'm missing something, this already exists. This is basically what the entire LTL freight market is based around. Am I missing something?
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  I was struck by these two paragraphs in the article: Mr Black, who runs a freight brokering company called Freight Rate Central in Sarasota, Florida, is part of an invisible army of professionals who coordinate and marshal the fleets of trucks that criss-cross the country, carrying everything from chickens to smartphones. For this job, Bokksu would pay him about US$13,000. Mr Black got to it. He posted the job on a trucking board that is something like a Craigslist for freight. Someone named Tristan with HCH Trucking accepted the job (though he was using a Gmail account), and said he would have the shipment picked up shortly. Mr. Black here apparently doesn't have an app to connect him to legitimate truckers, instead he relies on a "job board kind of like Craigslist". My assumption was that the availability of a better executed LTL freight logistics company would put people like Mr. Black out of business. So maybe the real challenge here is connecting those better companies with people like Mr. Taing? Of course given the way the article ends up it is entirely possible that Mr. Taing is the bad guy here.
  - wlonkly 3y ago
    I think the freight-specific job board is the app here.
  - jcpst 3y ago
    The market is very competitive- capacity can get tight, which makes room for the “little guy” to grab a load. Even at the biggest companies with millions of lines of software, tons of logistics is still driven by email. Job boards are big business. They act like a 4th party logistics company, where they aggregate the available loads from multiple 3rd party logistics companies. But there’s plenty of these aggregation site that, as mentioned operate a lot more like Craigslist. More sophisticated systems are like the stock market, automated systems booking loads within one second after becoming available.
    - Rastonbury 3y ago
      In every industry there are fly by night hucksters that take business from people who have no experience procuring services and don't know how to find legitimate companies. Mr Black seems like one of these. Imagine risking 100k on a craiglist driver, I don't blame Mr Black, he has his business model and customers who take th risk on him, but surely the candy company would spend more time doing due diligence of vendors and insurance when it involves a 100k shipment. A lesson learnt I suppose
  - jprete 3y ago
    A commenter on the thread mentioned that Apple once tried to one-day-ship them a laptop via Uber Eats and the driver vanished with the laptop. Apps don’t magically make things better.
carabiner 3y ago
https://www.uberfreight.com/ https://www.uberfreight.com/ https://convoy.com/ https://convoy.com/
praseodym 3y ago
YC already invested in several companies in this domains: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?industry=Supply%20Chain%20and%20Logistics&query=freight https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?industry=Supply%20Cha...
mike_d 3y ago
According to a study from CargoNet the total theft of cargo containers in 2022 was 1,778 units for a total of about $220m. By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year. The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay a dollar more per container to deal with it.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  So your saying a container salvage company would be more profitable? :-)
  - mike_d 3y ago
    There is probably a lot more money in that. The cargo will still be an insurance loss, but recovery of loads that can cause damage to marine environments are subject to mandatory reporting and fines. If you could build a device to detect the potential for conditions leading to parametric rolling and warn crews to make adjustments I would invest in that. https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/what-is-parametric-rolling-in-container-ships/ https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/what-is-parametr...
    - ChuckMcM 3y ago
      Interesting article! This would certainly be amenable to signal processing algorithms if you could get reliable wave height/frequency data. I suspect flying a kite doing SAR above and behind the ship (looking forward) would likely be to complicated. I was thinking more along the lines of a ship that was outfitted with a container retrieval bay sailing back and forth along the trade routes.
      - mike_d 3y ago
        Retrieval is the easy part. Locating the containers (which are often not found to be missing until arriving at port) is a MH370 scale problem.
        3y ago
jcpst 3y ago
This is called 3rd party logistics, a trillion dollar industry. I work as an SE at one the larger ones.
jrockway 3y ago
> "uber for freight" A few years ago I needed an M1 machine to finalize arm64 support for the product I was working on. I asked our office manager if I could expense one, and the answer was "yes". So I went to the Apple store and ordered one with same-day delivery. It turns out that Apple's same day delivery provider is ... Uber Eats. After the order was picked up from Apple, you could see the Uber Eats tracking page. It was in transit for about 5 minutes, and then marked as "delivered", and the tracking page became unavailable for use. I emailed Apple and they gave me a refund, then I went to the store myself and acted as my own courier. That time I got a laptop. What I'm saying is, "uber for X" is exactly what already exists. Someone picks up your stuff for a small fee, and if it's good, they just keep it for themselves and re-join the platform with a new name. Incidentally, Apple no longer offers same-day delivery, at least to me.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  Ouch! My thought was that the app based model with some sort of vetting of drivers was better than a jobs board with people's names on it. Perhaps not a lot better but possibly better.
  - jprete 3y ago
    The job board has better vetting, because only actual truckers even know it exists. In the OP, at least “Tristan” was actually a trucker with a truck.

tristor 3y ago

Unless I'm missing something, this already exists. This is basically what the entire LTL freight market is based around. Am I missing something?

ChuckMcM 3y ago
I was struck by these two paragraphs in the article: Mr Black, who runs a freight brokering company called Freight Rate Central in Sarasota, Florida, is part of an invisible army of professionals who coordinate and marshal the fleets of trucks that criss-cross the country, carrying everything from chickens to smartphones. For this job, Bokksu would pay him about US$13,000. Mr Black got to it. He posted the job on a trucking board that is something like a Craigslist for freight. Someone named Tristan with HCH Trucking accepted the job (though he was using a Gmail account), and said he would have the shipment picked up shortly. Mr. Black here apparently doesn't have an app to connect him to legitimate truckers, instead he relies on a "job board kind of like Craigslist". My assumption was that the availability of a better executed LTL freight logistics company would put people like Mr. Black out of business. So maybe the real challenge here is connecting those better companies with people like Mr. Taing? Of course given the way the article ends up it is entirely possible that Mr. Taing is the bad guy here.
- wlonkly 3y ago
  I think the freight-specific job board is the app here.
- jcpst 3y ago
  The market is very competitive- capacity can get tight, which makes room for the “little guy” to grab a load. Even at the biggest companies with millions of lines of software, tons of logistics is still driven by email. Job boards are big business. They act like a 4th party logistics company, where they aggregate the available loads from multiple 3rd party logistics companies. But there’s plenty of these aggregation site that, as mentioned operate a lot more like Craigslist. More sophisticated systems are like the stock market, automated systems booking loads within one second after becoming available.
  - Rastonbury 3y ago
    In every industry there are fly by night hucksters that take business from people who have no experience procuring services and don't know how to find legitimate companies. Mr Black seems like one of these. Imagine risking 100k on a craiglist driver, I don't blame Mr Black, he has his business model and customers who take th risk on him, but surely the candy company would spend more time doing due diligence of vendors and insurance when it involves a 100k shipment. A lesson learnt I suppose
- jprete 3y ago
  A commenter on the thread mentioned that Apple once tried to one-day-ship them a laptop via Uber Eats and the driver vanished with the laptop. Apps don’t magically make things better.

carabiner 3y ago

https://www.uberfreight.com/ https://www.uberfreight.com/ https://convoy.com/ https://convoy.com/

praseodym 3y ago

YC already invested in several companies in this domains: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?industry=Supply%20Chain%20and%20Logistics&query=freight https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?industry=Supply%20Cha...

mike_d 3y ago

According to a study from CargoNet the total theft of cargo containers in 2022 was 1,778 units for a total of about $220m. By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year. The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay a dollar more per container to deal with it.

ChuckMcM 3y ago
So your saying a container salvage company would be more profitable? :-)
- mike_d 3y ago
  There is probably a lot more money in that. The cargo will still be an insurance loss, but recovery of loads that can cause damage to marine environments are subject to mandatory reporting and fines. If you could build a device to detect the potential for conditions leading to parametric rolling and warn crews to make adjustments I would invest in that. https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/what-is-parametric-rolling-in-container-ships/ https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/what-is-parametr...
  - ChuckMcM 3y ago
    Interesting article! This would certainly be amenable to signal processing algorithms if you could get reliable wave height/frequency data. I suspect flying a kite doing SAR above and behind the ship (looking forward) would likely be to complicated. I was thinking more along the lines of a ship that was outfitted with a container retrieval bay sailing back and forth along the trade routes.
    - mike_d 3y ago
      Retrieval is the easy part. Locating the containers (which are often not found to be missing until arriving at port) is a MH370 scale problem.
      - 3y ago

jcpst 3y ago

This is called 3rd party logistics, a trillion dollar industry. I work as an SE at one the larger ones.

jrockway 3y ago

> "uber for freight" A few years ago I needed an M1 machine to finalize arm64 support for the product I was working on. I asked our office manager if I could expense one, and the answer was "yes". So I went to the Apple store and ordered one with same-day delivery. It turns out that Apple's same day delivery provider is ... Uber Eats. After the order was picked up from Apple, you could see the Uber Eats tracking page. It was in transit for about 5 minutes, and then marked as "delivered", and the tracking page became unavailable for use. I emailed Apple and they gave me a refund, then I went to the store myself and acted as my own courier. That time I got a laptop. What I'm saying is, "uber for X" is exactly what already exists. Someone picks up your stuff for a small fee, and if it's good, they just keep it for themselves and re-join the platform with a new name. Incidentally, Apple no longer offers same-day delivery, at least to me.

ChuckMcM 3y ago
Ouch! My thought was that the app based model with some sort of vetting of drivers was better than a jobs board with people's names on it. Perhaps not a lot better but possibly better.
- jprete 3y ago
  The job board has better vetting, because only actual truckers even know it exists. In the OP, at least “Tristan” was actually a trucker with a truck.