Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
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Re: Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
#2[deleted]
Re: Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
#3That doesn't seem like a lot of money, especially for a capital intensive industry with notoriously low margins.
Re: Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
#4It's basically an Uber for truckers. That's all they had to say.
Re: Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
#5That doesn't seem like a lot of money, especially for a capital intensive industry with notoriously low margins.
> notoriously low margins.
Some of those trucking companies take 10%. What are you talking about?
Re: Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
#6That doesn't seem like a lot of money, especially for a capital intensive industry with notoriously low margins.
Freight brokerages typically have margins around 15%
https://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-margins-can-non-asset-bas...
Re: Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
#7Coyote already does this. Got bought by UPS for 1.8 billion 2 years ago.
Also Amazon, and Uber are working on competing products. So that 62m might not go so far.
Re: Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
#8That doesn't seem like a lot of money, especially for a capital intensive industry with notoriously low margins.
Shipping is only capital intensive if you intend to own the trucks, trains, or ships. Convoy appears to be more of a middleman between owner-operator truckers and shippers or manufacturers.
The problem is that many (most?) of the truckers that own their own rig are middle-aged and older, and getting them to use technology like this may be an uphill battle:
“I think they’re relying too much on computers,” said Brian Larocque, a new driver based out of Connecticut.
Re: Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
#9So much hate when Billy G's name is invoked. Freight forwarding is about as low-tech as it gets. Small commodity merchants, which can range from 1 person to "huge" commodity shops of 150 people, manually dial numbers of truckers to pick this up and haul it there, all the while making sure their peanuts or cotton or soybeans are in reasonable conditions as food an agricultural products are fairly heavily regulated.
It's a hugely complex problem with Djikstra's shortest path being approximated in a distributed system of humans interfacing with phones interfacing with other humans.
I assume they are working on an uber clone for freight forwarding. And now to start working on an uber clone for freight forwarding.
Re: Convoy raises $62M from Bill Gates and other luminaries to transform trucking
#10[deleted]
Hang on, let me get my crystal ball so you can feel safe and secure in the world again.