snowypine

https://snowingpine.com

I write about the stuff that I find interesting. Sometimes, that's a deep dive on the trucking industry, other times, it's about turning 25 and figuring out careers.

Cloud security is going to be one of the largest frontiers in cybersecurity for years to come. Excited to see more open source security solutions!

Awesome. Supply chain security is one of the most important pieces of modern security efforts. Tracking active vulnerabilities to cut through the noise is a super solid approach

Intermodal is actually a relatively small subset of trucking - probably behind generic dry van, reefer, and flatbed.

That being said, solar panels are great but what happens when they break down or get damaged. I don't think the savings are worth the hassle right now.

Never saw this article before but wow is it a great read.

Yup exactly! I'm not too sure what the early systems were running on but here's a photo of early DAT load boards - https://www.dat.com/blog/life-before-load-boards

Thanks for reading and the compliment! :)

This is another piece that I never got to talk about in my post. There's a LOT of software in trucking, the problem is that most of the software was built in a different era.

Platform Science looks pretty cool - seems like a TMS with specific improvements against legacy systems. Building a TMS is a pretty good business - massive fixed cost but once you've built the system, it's fairly hard for competitors to dislodge you.

Glad you liked it!

1 - Oh man, this was one of the questions that was asked by almost every investor. The truth is that no one really knows. My best guess is that we're a decade or more away from true self-driving. Augmented driving might be sooner but trucking is one of the biggest employers in 35 states. Truck drivers are not going to let self/augmented driving eat into their paychecks.

2 - Unfortunately, the margins are too thin for owner operators to have a vested interest in climate. I do think that an interesting distribution strategy for cleaner trucks is to sell heavily into private fleets (e.g. walmart trucking) because there's an ESG angle that the companies can buy into. As for dedicated trucking carriers, it's going to be hard to convince them unless there's some realistic return on investment.

3 - This is interesting, I haven't looked into insurance too much personally and I know the barrier to entry there is extremely high. That being said, I think the liability aspect reduces the viability of offering low-cost insurance. Most trucks are essentially houses on wheels in terms of cost and a single accident can run in the millions.

I'd imagine that if you really wanted to build an insurance company for trucking, you'd need to focus exclusively on mega-fleets (25+ truck carriers) and somehow offer them better rates than legacy insurance companies. While owner operators pay a lot in terms of insurance, the market simply isn't big enough to build a cohesive risk engine and underprice existing insurance without taking on unaccounted risk.

I'm not an expert here on water transportation but I think water is very similar to rail. Both are much more cost and energy efficient. But they require large freight volumes and sacrifice a lot of the flexibility that trucking has. Unless we change our supply chain philosophy, trucking will likely reign above all other forms of transportation.

Yeah, I had to heavily edit the piece to ensure that it wasn't a mini-novella.

So, for more context on factoring, there are two types - recourse and non-recourse. Recourse factoring means that the factoring company can come back and ask the driver for their money back. Generally, the rates for recourse factoring are lower (by 20-50 basis points only because the default rate in drivers is quite high).

Non-recourse factoring is something that the industry is transitioning to. Most of the startups offering factoring today are doing non-recourse. The problem with that approach is that fraud rates rise exponentially. Not too sure how the landscape will look even 6 months from now as easy capital goes away.

DAT's full name is "Dial a truck". They used to have these large screens in truck stops showing loads and encouraging drivers to call for loads.

So I guess these drivers mostly hung out at truck stops (they still do today), just that most truck stops aren't as clean/nice as before.

I'd say it's more market conditions over anything else. Truck drivers generally have poor credit - they're not going to be able to come up with ~400k otherwise. As a result, you get lenders that charge more.

Also, repossessing trucks across the country is kinda an issue. You might need to drive hundreds or thousands of miles to claim the truck which is a nightmare that carriers deal with on a daily basis.

Agreed with electric trucks! Here's another W22 company focusing on building electric trucks - https://www.sixwheel.com

I actually had some figures around energy impact in earlier drafts of the piece. The issue I kept running into was the range of data - trucking is more inefficient than rail. But the question is how much, it could be as little as 2x more energy or as much as 100x more energy.

It depends on factors like load weight, truck conditions, rail route, and a bunch more.

Author here - there's definitely a lot about trucking that I didn't get to cover. E.g. growth in autonomous vehicles, the issues recruiting drivers, federal regulation, and the lasting impacts of unions.

That being said, human centered design probably doesn't work in trucking. The assumption here is that people within a certain role has a fixed set of pain points. The truth is that trucking is too wide to categorize in that way. E.g. I met dispatchers that had a really hard time finding loads, but others had a really hard time getting drivers to pay them. Every person's experience and pain points in trucking are all slightly different simply due to the nature of the industry.

I think there's certainly an education component to most trucking companies failing but the root of the problem is the design of the industry.

So, the problem here is d realistically is only 12-20. As much as SBF likes people to believe that he discovered a miracle trade, the reality was that he was only early by a couple of weeks and the rest of the world caught on afterwards.

I know someone who went through the Lambda/BloomTech bootcamp. Although they weren't able to transition to a new role, the experience helped them start to code in their job at the time. And iirc, because he didn't land a swe role, he didn't have to pay Lambda based on the ISA.

Wow, after only one day of due diligence.

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Unique insight can also mean something that you deeply believe that isn't obvious on the surface. E.g. Doordash with their suburb strategy - I'm sure lots of other delivery companies heard about suburbs. None of them took it seriously enough to really invest heavily into suburbs. And, Doordash is now one of the top delivery companies.