August 2021
I think there needs to be an open Internet protocol, like HTTP, but for conveying freight information between various international parties. Sort of like the ISO or how shipping containers are standardized. A bill of lading, for instance, would be sent via this protocol instead of PDFs via email. The de facto communication protocol today is email. I have seen freight brokers get so many PDFs that they have to print them out and sort them in physical folders, and then rescan them when they want to email the PDF to someone else. This is not good.
It is clear to me that we could unlock a lot of productivity by implementing such a protocol. The big barrier to getting this protocol used is that the vast majority of shipping companies lack software development capabilities to upgrade their systems. There needs to be a network effect. You would need a big whale to introduce the new protocol, and then maybe get a couple other whales on board, and then that would have enough momentum to get the industry to change. It would be some sort of consortium among Flexport, Maersk, etc., then you would add various port authorities, big rail companies. Then all the software companies that serve the smaller players in the industry (the industry is very, very fragmented) would be compelled to join the protocol standard, and that would get everyone on board.
The alternative would be to use a GPT-3-like agent to send emails, and so there would be a gradual transition (differentiable curve) instead of a step function of the industry toward effectively doing the same thing. But keeping email as the protocol layer. Basically have your own business as a freight broker but have your bot send emails to other humans, so there is no disruption to how the industry currently operates. The reason this would work is because the emails are fairly simplistic ("please forward me this document" "please sign this" "what is the rate?" "what is the update on the status?"), so you don't need very sophisticated language processing, and pairing of language processing is with routine actions. At some point, economics would compel other firms to adopt bots as well. A world like this would basically be the sci-fi scenario where droids are emailing other droids about freight shipments. And yet that is more likely to be our absurd reality than a clean Internet protocol.
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In the summer of 2019, I sent some emails to small freight companies in SoCal pretending to do a "student research project on freight." I thought this would be a good way to get some ideas for starting a software business in freight. I was allowed to visit 2 of those businesses and study their workflow.
From March-April 2020 there was a bit of downtime from the pandemic, so I tried being a freight broker for a domestic freight company. I was stuck at my desk trying to answer emails as quickly as possible.
For these 3 businesses in total I was exposed to, it was clear that an employee received hundreds of emails a day and sent at least 100-200 per day. I asked someone how they possibly handled so many emails, and what tools they used. The answer I received was "I learned to type faster."