71–80 of 111 posts
Next up, they will hit up on the idea of dedicated roads for truck convoys; also, a single engine to pull them all; and finally, the creation of roads with steel rails to put the trucks on.
I've seen UPS and FedEx semis pulling 3 short trailers on interstates. I assume they're only limited by current regulations on weight and length.
Speaking as the son of a trucker who spent a summer helping my dad negotiate and optimize his freight rates and schedules, the freight brokerage business is not one I would consider getting into. There is also a ton of competition in the freight brokerage space and the problems associated with shipping are due to poor warehouse management and unreliable truck drivers. Unlike hailing rides in a taxi, manufacturing and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of tangential to the discussion here, but Walmart's threats are empty. Amazon is currently constrained by trucking capacity, and would gladly swallow up more.
I have said it before, and I think it applies here, Amazon is becoming Walmart far quicker than Walmart is becoming Amazon.
(Perhaps a link to or c/p of a previous post would suffice)
Speaking as the son of a trucker who spent a summer helping my dad negotiate and optimize his freight rates and schedules, the freight brokerage business is not one I would consider getting into. There is also a ton of competition in the freight brokerage space and the problems associated with shipping are due to poor warehouse management and unreliable truck drivers. Unlike hailing rides in a taxi, manufacturing and…
I feel that for most companies playing in this space, freight brokering is just a transitional step. It can't work long-term, just like Uber can't be viable without self-driving cars. However, it's the best way to understand how the industry operates - if you're serious about disrupting it.
Speaking as the son of a trucker who spent a summer helping my dad negotiate and optimize his freight rates and schedules, the freight brokerage business is not one I would consider getting into. There is also a ton of competition in the freight brokerage space and the problems associated with shipping are due to poor warehouse management and unreliable truck drivers. Unlike hailing rides in a taxi, manufacturing and…
What's the cause of "unreliable truckers"? Is it that their ability to be on time is unreliable because of uncertainty in the travel time and traffic, or that the humans themselves do their job unreliably?
Yes, similar systems do exist. My team made one of them: https://cargofone.com/en/ In some ways, it's more challenging than building "an Uber", once you get into different cargo and body types, document management, insurance, etc. We launched in Russia first, and not being able to do electronic signatures added a set of challenges. In any event, glad these investments are happening. Trucking is badly broken, especial…
> Trucking is badly broken, especially in the US. I'd like to see this supported, particularly the "especially" part, given the extraordinary scale of hauling going on in the US via trucking. The economic facts on the ground in the US overwhelmingly disagree with you. If it's so broken, and the US economy relies so much on it, how is the US GDP per capita so high? Both can't be true. It's either functioning well, lea…
YC companies beware. YC "Continuity" will come talk to you to learn the ins and outs of your business and then go fund a non-YC competitor. The whole idea of the fund was to use it to support YC companies at the next stage but now they're funding companies like Convoy that compete with YC companies like Flexport, while using their access to the YC businesses to do diligence. That's fine, normal investor behavior, but…
YC companies beware. YC "Continuity" will come talk to you to learn the ins and outs of your business and then go fund a non-YC competitor. The whole idea of the fund was to use it to support YC companies at the next stage but now they're funding companies like Convoy that compete with YC companies like Flexport, while using their access to the YC businesses to do diligence. That's fine, normal investor behavior, but…
Do these companies really compete? It doesn’t seem like Convoy is focused on international trade. It also doesn’t seem reasonable that if YC funds one company in transportation (or healthcare or some other big sector), they can never fund another one in that sector.