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#CountDown: 3 Days to #TNYSCM04 – Supply Chain & Artificial Intelligence

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A cross-section of the audience at #TNYSCM #02, January 2018.

We’re now less than a week from The New York Supply Chain Meetup’s fourth gathering. The purpose of this post is to outline our plans for that event, and preview what we expect to do between now and June 2018 . . . We’re still in the early days of building this community, so much of this is subject to change, especially as we go through the process of recruiting sponsors.

Our Mission

To nurture and grow the world’s foremost open, global, multidisciplinary community of people devoted to building the supply chain networks of the future – starting in NYC.

Become a coporate sponsor. Email me at: brian@tnyscm.com for more details about our vision, and the team that’s working behind the scenes to build this community.

The New York Supply Chain Meetup is powered by Particle Ventures, a seed-stage fund based in NYC that invests in Supply Chain & Industrial Intelligence. Particle is built by the same team that launched KEC Ventures.

Logistical Details: #TNYSCM #04

  • Date: Thursday, March 15, 2018.
  • Time: 17:30–20:30
  • Location: SAP America, 10 Hudson Yards - 48th Floor, New York, NY. An organizer will be downstairs, at the security counter.

#TNYSCM #04 combines a Lightning Talk, a "Fire-Side" Chat, and a Showcase. It is sponsored by SAP.iO and co-hosted by The New York Supply Chain Meetup and the New York City Bots and Artificial Intelligence Meetup.

SAP.iO helps innovators inside and outside of SAP build products, find customers, and change industries.

REGISTER HERE!

Agenda

5:30 PM - 5:55 PM: Pre-event Networking
5:55 PM - 6:00 PM: Welcome Remarks (#TNYSCM, NYCBAI, SAP.iO)
6:00 PM - 6:30 PM: Lightning Talk (15 Minutes), Q&A (15 Minutes)
6:30 PM - 6:50 PM: "Fire-Side" Chat (15 Minutes), Q&A (15 Minutes)
7:00 PM - 8:00 PM: Showcase (10 Minutes, with 5 Minutes of Q&A, each)
8:00 PM - 8:30 PM: Closing Remarks, Post-event Networking

Lightning Talk: Evolution & Use Cases of Artificial Intelligence in Supply Chain, From An Industry And SAP Point of View

David Judge (@DHJudge) is Vice President of Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning products at SAP. He guides product strategy and drives increased market awareness for SAP Leonardo.

Geoff Maxwell (@geofflm) is Global Head of Business Strategy and Execution Analytics and SAP Leonardo. He is responsible for go to market strategy for SAP’s portfolio of Leonardo solutions.

Fireside Chat: The Future of AI-Driven Transformation in Retail Supply Chains, and in Government Agencies.

José P. Chan is VP Business Development for Celect, a predictive analytics firm founded out of MIT, which helps retailers optimize their inventory portfolios in stores and across the supply chain. Previously, he worked internationally in retail for over two decades with LVMH, Richemont and Roberto Cavalli. José has held senior management positions and has extensive experience in buying, marketing, merchandising, planning, and has run retail store networks. He holds an SM from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MBA from University of Rochester, a BS from Cornell University and an AAS from the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Sameer Anand is a Partner with A.T. Kearney’s operations practice with over 16 years of experience in management consulting. He advises clients on large scale transformations to drive step changes in productivity with an underpinning of analytics and digital across CPG, retail, industrial products, and high tech industries. His areas of expertise include consumer products, manufacturing, supply chain planning, sourcing, bracket pricing, logistics, and advanced analytics. Prior to joining A.T. Kearney, Sameer worked at Deloitte and American Airlines.

REGISTER HERE!

Showcase Presentations

At #TNYSCM #04 we'll have 3 startups talk about the artificial intelligence-driven products they are building for the supply chain logistics industry. They will appear in the following order;

ClearMetal (@ClearMetalInc): Founded in 2014, and based in San Francisco, CA, ClearMetal provides predictive data and analytics for the supply chain logistics industry, enabling its customers to unlock increased efficiencies in global trade as ClearMetal enables them to solve complex problems using a data-driven approach. According to CrunchBase and CBInsights ClearMetal has raised $12M over two rounds of financing, most recently raising $9.0M in its Series A financing which was led by Innovation Endeavors. SAP.iO is an investor in ClearMetal.

Wise Systems (@goWiseSystems): Founded in 2014, and based in Cambridge, MA,  Wise Systems develops route-optimization software that schedules last-mile delivery truck drivers while considering multiple constraints like customer time windows, traffic, and service time. Wise automatically dispatches schedules to drivers and the software recalculates and updates schedules in real-time as things change in real-time. According to CrunchBase and CBInsights, Wise Systems has raised $1.1M in seed capital. Dynamo Accelerator is an investor in Wise Systems. Santosh Sankar, a co-organizer of The New York Supply Chain Meetup, is also a co-founder & director of Dynamo.

Optimal Dynamics: Based in Princeton, NJ, Optimal Dynamics brings AI to the trucking industry based on over 30 years of academic research and development centered on the use of Computational Stochastic Optimization and Learning in solving problems related to dynamic assignment problems in transportation and logistics. Optimal Dynamics recently raised an undisclosed amount in pre-seed funding.

REGISTER HERE!

Preview — #TNYSCM  in April, May, June

Here is what our team of organizers is working on, between now and June.

  • April 26: A panel discussion and keynote presentation, focused on the issues that have kept blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies in the lab and out of the real world. The keynote presentation is by Silvio Micali, he will talk about his work creating Algorand. THIS IS GOING TO BE BIG!
  • May 24: A showcase of startups in Fashion, Apparel, and Retail supply chain. THIS IS GOING TO BE BIG!
  • June 21: A Sourcing 101 workshop for startups building physical products.

Other "Upcoming" Supply Chain Events

  • TPM2018: Is now behind us. It was awesome. Read my blog post about it here: #TPM2018: The Woodstock Of International Container Shipping & Logistics
  • Maritime Global Technologies: Reverse Pitch on March 15, 2018 from 09:30–12:30. MGTIC is an initiative of SUNY Maritime College to build a global maritime technology innovation hub by bringing together all that the New York City metro-region has to offer entrepreneurs building software for the global shipping and maritime logistics market. I’m a member of the advisory board and have previously blogged about it here and here. I will be there. Say hello, if we've never met before
  • Transparency18: This is the flagship event series started by the founders of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance. It follows BiTA’s Spring Symposium, a members only event that occurs on May 21, 2018. I will attend both days of Transparency 18 May 22 and May 23.

#CountDown: 11 Days to The New York Supply Chain Meetup #02

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The New York #SupplyChain Meetup #01 – The Minimum Viable Launch
Photo Credit: Andrew Williams (@aswilliams73)

We’re now about two weeks from The New York Supply Chain Meetup’s second event. The purpose of this post is to outline our plans for that event, and preview what we expect to do over the course of the first six months of 2018 . . . We’re still in the early days of building this community, so much of this is subject to change,especially as we go through the process of recruiting sponsors.

Our Mission

To nurture and grow the world’s foremost multidisciplinary community of people devoted to building the supply chain networks of the future — starting in NYC.

Become a sponsor. Email me at: brian@tnyscm.com for more details about our vision, and the team that’s working behind the scenes to build this community.

Logistical Details: #TNYSCM #02

  • Date: Thursday, January 25, 2018.
  • Time: 17:30 – 20:30
  • Location: SAP America, 10 Hudson Yards, New York, NY.

This event will combine a Keynote Presentation, a Panel Discussion, and a Mini-Showcase. Our MC for this event is Lisa Morales-Hellebo (@lisahellebo), a member of our team of organizers.

Agenda

  • 17:30 – 17:55: Pre-event Networking
  • 17:55 – 18:00 Welcome Remarks
  • 18:00 – 18:40: Keynote Presentation, Q&A
  • 18:45 – 19:40: Panel Discussion, Q&A
  • 19:45 – 20:00: Mini-Showcase
  • 20:00 – 20:30: Post-event Community Announcements and Networking

Preview – Keynote: A Friendly Introduction to Decentralized Economic Systems, Blockchain and Other Distributed Ledgers, Cryptocurrencies, Networked Communities, and Supply Chains.

The keynote presentation will be delivered by Dr. Michael Zargham (@mZargham). Michael is the founder of BlockScience, a research consultancy that helps legacy business and industry learn about, understand, and interact with the emerging decentralized economic order. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College, and a Ph.D in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests span decentralized optimization and control, network science, and operations research. BlockScience is an advisor to;

  • Sweetbridge, as it develops blockchain-based economic protocols to transform high-friction global supply chains into more liquid value networks.
  • ODEM.io, a blockchain platform that allows qualified and trusted members of the education industry to create customized curriculum and experiences and offer them directly to the market.
  • Fr8 Network, a set of decentralized applications designed to connect the freight trucking industry’s key stakeholders in order to reduce high costs and increase economic value.

The keynote presentation will last 30 minutes, with 10 minutes of audience Q&A to follow.

Preview – Panel Discussion: What Problems Are Big Companies Trying To Solve With Blockchain and Other Distributed Ledger Technologies?

Building on the keynote presentation, our panelists will explore the problems large supply chain management software vendors and large supply chain logistics providers are trying to solve, with blockchain and other distributed ledger technology, for themselves and for their customers.

Daniel James (@daniel_r_james), a member of The New York Supply Chain Meetup’s team of organizers, will moderate the panel which will last 45 minutes, with 10 minutes for Q&A from the audience.

Our panelists are;

  • Nataliya Stanetsky, manager, IT Application Security, L’Oreal. She is also a co-organizer of Women in Blockchain. Nataliya is passionate about blockchain technologies in various applications including supply chain management, identity management, and financial services. As co-organizer of Women in Blockchain she connects technologists and other professionals to share knowledge and experience about blockchain technology and its applications.
  • Kange Kaneene, director, business development, SAP Ariba, where she focuses on identifying merger and acquisition targets, establishing partnerships, and articulating SAP Ariba’s medium term strategy. During her tenure at SAP she has been in several strategic and operational roles including the office of the President for Global Customer Operations. Prior to SAP Kange was a supply chain consultant at Manhattan Associates. Kange holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, and a Masters of Business Administration from New York University Stern School of Business. She loves international travel, cooking, dancing and spending time with friends and family.
  • Mahesh Sahasranaman, principal architect, UPS Supply Chain Solutions.
  • Rob Bailey, CEO & Co-founder, MState – a growth lab for enterprise blockchain companies. MState is backed by IBM, Comcast Ventures and Boldstart Ventures and invests in early stage blockchain companies that sell to the enterprise.
  • David Bergonzo, VP, Corporate Strategy for Blockchain/DLT, SAP.

Preview – Mini-Showcase

To wrap things up, we’ll hear from Ryan Robinson, a recent graduate of MIT who is trying to develop a cheaper, decentralized, cloud computing platform through his startup, Conduit.

The mini-showcase will last 7 – 10 minutes, with 3 – 5 minutes Q&A from the audience.

Testing – Community Announcements

People who attended the launch on November 16, 2017 say they’d like to hear from other people in the audience, so at this event we plan to test a “Community Announcements” segment before we wrap things up. This is an experiment, so . . . . We’ll see how it goes and iterate based on feedback from the audience.

Sponsor

This event is sponsored by SAP.io.

SAP.io helps innovators inside and outside of SAP build products, find customers, and change industries through;

  • The SAP.io Fund, a $35 million early stage fund that invests in startups that can leverage SAP’s data, APIs, and technologies to create value for their customers, and
  • SAP.io Foundries, in Berlin, New York, San Francisco, and Tel Aviv.

Preview – The Next 6 Months

Here is what the team of organizers is working on, between now and June.

  • February: A workshop focused on the tactics that non-sales business-to-business startup founders can use to go from zero to their first million dollars of sales.
  • March: A showcase of startups applying artificial intelligence to supply chain. Co-hosted with NYC Bots and Artificial Intelligence Meetup.
  • April: A panel discussion and showcase, focused on the issues that have kept blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies in the lab and out of the real world.
  • May: A showcase of startups in Fashion, Apparel, and Retail supply chain.
  • June: A Sourcing 101 workshop for startups building physical products.

Other Upcoming Supply Chain Events

  • TPM2018: TPM, part of IHS Markit is the world’s largest container shipping and logistics conference, 18 years old this year having attracted 2,300 in 2017 representing cargo owners, container carriers, forwarders/3PLs, railroads, ports, marine terminals, equipment lessors and various others. It is one of the three main annual regional container logistics organized by JOC including the Container Trade Europe event in Hamburg and TPM Asia in Shenzhen China. The programs are developed with editorial independence by the JOC team of veteran transportation journalists. I’m attending for the first time this year to moderate the Innovation Jam on Tuesday, March 6.
  • Maritime Global Technologies: Reverse Pitch on March 15, 2018 from 09:30 – 12:30. MGTIC is an initiative of SUNY Maritime College to build a global maritime technology innovation hub by bringing together all that the New York City metro-region has to offer entrepreneurs building software for the global shipping and maritime logistics market. I’m a member of the advisory board and have previously blogged about it here and here.
  • Transparency18: This is the flagship event series started by the founders of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance. It follows BiTA’s Spring Symposium, a members only event that occurs on May 21, 2018.

Update #01: January 15, 2018 at 13:21 EST to include Kange Kaneene’s bio, and preview of next 6 months.

Update #02: January 15, 2018 at 16:40 EST to include #TNYSCM Mission, and contact information for potential sponsors.

Update #03: January 18, 2018 at 22:50 EST to include SAP.io sponsorship of this event. Edit agenda to include welcome remarks.

Update #04: January 20, 2018 at 19:10 EST to include new panelists – Rob Bailey and David Bergonzo.

 

Update #01 | Towards A MaritimeTech Innovation Hub in New York City

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Maritime Global Technologies Innovation Center (MGTIC) to be hosted at SUNY Maritime College. Image Credit: SUNY Maritime College.

Note: This post updates #UnderConstruction | Towards A MarineTech Innovation Hub in New York City.

The group that met on Friday, October 6, 2017 met again for a follow up on Friday, November 10, 2017. This blog is a summary of the discussion at took place at that meeting, and the resulting outcome.

The Bottomline: Dr. Christopher Clott, ABS Chair of Marine Transportation and Logistics at SUNY Maritime College and Dr. Richard Burke, ABS Professor of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering have announced the formation of the Maritime Global Technologies Innovation Center (MGTIC) to be hosted at SUNY Maritime College.

The people for whom this post will be most relevant are founders building software for the ocean freight shipping industry, for whom relevant resources are often sorely lacking. It will also be relevant for early-stage investors like me, who want to engage more fully with the shipping industry as we assess startups serving the maritime market.

Please note that the following descriptions are based on my interpretation of the conversations we’ve had over the course of the meetings in which I was a participant. I could be wrong. Ultimately, SUNY Maritime College and Drs. Clott and Burke will determine what will work best and I am happy to support them in bringing their vision to life.

What is the Maritime Global Technologies Innovation Center? Think of MGTIC as a hybrid between a startup incubator, a startup accelerator, and an early-stage venture fund. Obviously, these elements do not yet all exist today. The goal is to have each of these elements in place in the near future.

  • Startup ideas that originate from faculty, staff, and students of the SUNY system will be incubated at the center.
  • Startups whose founders have no ties to the SUNY system will benefit from the center’s ability to help them accelerate customer development as they search for a repeatable, profitable and scalable business model. I expect that such startups might also find employees from the SUNY Maritime College community.
  • As the center matures, we expect that it will establish a venture fund to complement its activities. Ideally, this fund will invest alongside other early stage investors in startups that have been incubated at MGTIC as well as in startups that have been accelerated at the center. Details on this will be hammered out later. For now, we think the center should replicate one of the following existing models; MIT’s The Engine, or the Iowa Global Insurance Accelerator, or Texas Capital Factory. Perhaps, MGTIC will take the best elements of each of those models and combine them into something wholly unique.

What will The Maritime Global Technologies Innovation Center do? SUNY Maritime College is an educational institution, so that characteristic forms the foundation on which MGTIC exists. That said, the global maritime industry confronts numerous headwinds such as; artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, increasing issues around regulatory compliance, offshore sources of renewable energy, safety, connected devices, cloud-computing, cybersecurity, and blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies present challenges the shipping industry must grapple with sooner or later. Maritime Global Innovation Center’s goal is to lead the effort towards turning these perceived challenges into profitable opportunities for incumbent players in the industry AND for technology startups developing innovations that the industry can adopt. As an early-stage investor who has been studying startups building software for the maritime market, I can’t express how excited I am to be able to collaborate with an entity like MGTIC.

Nice! What’s Next? At our meeting on November 10, we agreed to plan a kick-off event on Thursday, March 15, 2018 at SUNY Maritime College. If maritime technology holds any interest for you, please save that date. We hope to convene a group that represents each of the stakeholder communities that MGTIC is being established to serve. It will coincide with the Connecticut Maritime Association’s Annual Conference and Exhibition. We’ll have more specific details about the kick-off later.

For more info:

  • You can email the crew at SUNY Maritime College that’s working directly on this via the MGTIC’s website – see link above.
  • If you’re an early stage VC interested in staying abreast of how things are progressing, you can reach me via email/Twitter/LinkedIn, and I’d be happy to answer any questions you have about this – to the best of my ability. I’m also looking for angel investors and VCs with whom we can co-invest.
  • If you’re a startup founder who wants to hear what other founders think about this “thing” – Brian Wilson from Duro UAS, Fauad Shariff and Petere Miner from CoLoadX have attended both meetings so far and can give you their take about where they feel things are heading.

Other initiatives focused on maritime technology, or supply chain technology more broadly – Leonardo Zangrando of Startup Wharf has a more complete listing here;

Last, I’m gonna plug related work I have been doing with a team of 7 other supply chain enthusiasts in New York City; We launched The New York Supply Chain Meetup with a minimum viable launch on Thursday, November 16, 2017 at Work-Bench. We hope to do much more in 2018, and we hope you will decide to join us, after all “The world is a supply chain.” and as a result, there are things to discuss.

 

Update #01: White Paper | Towards A Supply Chain Operating System

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This update identifies areas of supply chain technology that will be sufficiently well served by existing relational database management systems, and enterprise resource planning systems. It also outlines areas of supply chain that distributed databases or ledgers are more suited for.

Lastly, to avoid confusion Nahum Goldmann’s contact information is provided at the end. I have been helping him think about this, but as I explained in the original post I am not personally an investor in DLTArray, nor is KEC Ventures an investor in DLTArray.

The update is based on feedback received from people who read the earlier version of the white paper.

Link to updated white paper: DLTSupplyChainPlatformWhitePaper20171017

This is an update to: White Paper | Towards A Supply Chain Operating System. That post has more background related to this.

Link to Nahum Goldmann bio: NGbio

Update #1: Tuesday, October 24, 2017 at 15:40 EST.

  • Rearrange links to reduce confusion about what people should read first, etc.

 

 

#UnderConstruction | Towards A MarineTech Innovation Hub in New York City

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SUNY Maritime’s 55-acre campus is near the Throgs Neck Bridge, where the East River meets the Long Island Sound.

On Friday, October 6, 2017, a small group of about 20 people got together at the American Bureau of Shipping in Manhattan, New York. The group was convened by Christopher Clott, Ph.D. He is the ABS Chair of Marine Transportation and Logistics in the Global Business & Transportation Department at SUNY – Maritime College. The group represented a healthy mix of perspectives – investors, community organizers, startup founders, academics, service providers, students, shipping industry professionals, regulators, etc. etc.

Chris convened the meeting to discuss a joint-initiative by SUNY Maritime and EEX Maritime to create a maritime technology center in New York City. This center will benefit from the central position that SUNY Maritime occupies in the global shipping industry, the network and knowhow that EEX Maritime is building as a connector between technology startups and the shipping industry, and the prominent role that New York City occupies in the global supply chain market.

About SUNY Maritime: SUNY Maritime College is one of six state maritime academies in the United States. Located 30 minutes from mid-town Manhattan, Maritime College educates dynamic leaders for the global maritime industry. 1Source: http://www.sunymaritime.edu/

About EEX Maritime: EEX Maritime is a joint-venture between MarineCycles and EEX. EEX Maritime helps startups gain access to the global shipping market through its hubs of activity in Helsinki, New York, and Singapore.

As one would expect with a meeting of this nature . . . We left with many more unanswered questions than we had at the outset.

Basically, the aim of this center will be 3 fold;

  1. To aggregate the knowledge that exists in New York City in the areas of supply chain and technology. The initial emphasis is on shipping given the coordinating role that SUNY Maritime, EEX Maritime, and the ABS are playing in getting things started.
  2. To foster the growth of technology startups building products for the global supply chain market, focusing especially at the outset on those building products for the shipping market, by enabling them to connect with potential early customers, and helping them obtain hard-to-access input from the industry.
  3. To foster investments in the startups described above through accelerator and incubator programs that utilize the resources that are uniquely available to participants in such programs because of SUNY Maritime’s history.

The immediate challenge is to get things going by doing small, easy to accomplish things that start an ascending spiral of positive feedback loops to help this initiative gain momentum. While we are doing that, we’ll work on trying to figure out answers to the bigger questions which will require more time to answer.

Here are a few of the questions we are currently thinking about;

  1. What is the best model to accomplish this?
  2. What funding sources are available for an initiative like this beyond the sources available through SUNY Maritime?
  3. Which startups, and which entrepreneurs might be interested in an initiative like this? What would such startups want to get out of an initiative like this? What can this group do for such startups right now, while these plans are being developed further?
  4. Where should such a center be physically located in order to give it the best chance of succeeding? How does its location affect how easily it can become an established part of the tech community in New York City?
  5. What priorities should an advisory council focus on over the next 3, 6, 9, and 12 months?

In keeping with my habit of biting off far more than I can chew, I have volunteered to join the advisory council, and to act as a liaison between the early-stage venture capital community and the team that will be doing the day-to-day work that is required to get this center off-the-ground. Ultimately, we believe the maritime center should focus on 3Cs; Connections, Customers, and Capital.

If you would like to help make this happen, or if you just want to stay in the know about progress on this initiative, you can email me at brian@kecventures.com. I am also very easy to find on Twitter and/or LinkedIn.

If it makes sense to do so, I will introduce you to Chris and his colleagues at SUNY Maritime who can discuss their plans and the things they need some help with more comprehensively. Otherwise, I will pass your contact information along so that you can be added to any mailing lists we set up for this purpose.

Lastly; I would be irresponsible if I did not include these plugs;

  1. The New York Supply Chain Meetup is a community of practice for people developing solutions to supply chain problems at startups, large corporations, academic institutions, and everything in between. The focus is primarily on the application of cutting-edge technologies to global supply chain innovation. Join us for our first event at Workbench on November 16, 2017. I am working with a few other volunteers to get it off the ground.
  2. My “unnecessarily long” blog posts on startups building software for the shipping industry;

Update #1: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 at 00:48

  • Added “About SUNY Maritime” and “About EEX Maritime.

References

Updates – Industry Study: Freight Trucking (#Startups)

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Brick by brick . . . Solve it one step at a time.

Note: John Azubuike (@jnazubuike) and I are currently conducting research on software startups in the ocean freight shipping market. We expect to publish that towards the end of January 2017.

Our blog post about freight trucking startups opened the door to numerous conversations that we may never have had, with people who know more about the freight trucking market than we do. This update is my attempt to augment our original article with some of what we learned from those conversations. If it comes across as somewhat unpolished, that’s because I decided arbitrarily that I should not let 2016 end without this update being published.

So without further ado . . .

  1. The barriers to success for startups pursuing the “Uber for freight-trucking” business model is even more fraught with danger than we were able to convey in our article. It is even more clear to us that brokers do a lot more than field a couple of phone calls, and that assuming it will be easy to cut them completely out of the picture is probably a dangerous assumption. We heard numerous anecdotes about the difficulties freight trucking services marketplace startups are facing . . . Yes, that including some that have been lionized by the tech press. Presumably, many are running on borrowed time.
  2. Compliance is as acute a problem as we have imagined. In fact, Walmart Transportation was hit with a $55 million settlement only 5 days after we published our article. Many settlements and fines do not attract the attention of the news media. If Walmart is stumbling, imagine how tough it must be for less sophisticated trucking companies to stay abreast of the complex state and Federal regulations. Compliance software that is easy to deploy, and easy for fleet managers and truck drivers to use is a necessity. A number of new entrants into the market are taking that path. Notable among them; San Diego, CA-based Platform Science whose co-founders previously ran OmniTracs, the fleet management software division of Qualcomm that was sold to Vista Equity partners for $800 million . . . in cash.
  3. Ty Findley, a member of the GE Ventures team covering Advanced Manufacturing, Logistics, and Supply Chain pointed us to the 2015 patent lawsuit between Fourkites and Macropoint, two developers of Fleet Management Software that enables fleet operators to track and trace the activities of individual trucks. In this lawsuit Macropoint accused Fourkites of violating patents held by Macropoint. The court ruled in favor of Fourkites; dismissing the Macropoint patents as invalid under the United States Supreme Court’s Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank Int’l ruling of 2014. It will be interesting to see what forms of intellectual property prove most valuable in this market. If you have an interest you can read my work on Economic Moats in order to understand how we think about these issues.
  4. Based on her years of experience with technology innovation in the freight trucking market Debra T. Johnson of Eco-Edge discusses what she calls the “invisible barriers to innovation” that impede the success of startups in this market. She groups them under; Product, Customer, and Sales. Overcoming all of these invisible barriers to innovation requires founding teams that have; strong technical experience in order to build a product that works for this market, AND sufficient industry experience in order to build trust, and win credibility with potential customers.
  5. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher of Starsky Robotics sent me the following comments by email – modified, and paraphrased for clarity. Starsky is a Y Combinator startup.
    • The huge inconsistencies in data about the industry are really frustrating. It would help to know what the most authoritative sources of industry data are.
      • I agree. We generally relied on data from industry associations, and then we extrapolated to fill in the gaps we wanted estimations for. Our estimations could be wrong. We relied mainly on: OODIA Foundation, and American Trucking Association. Data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics is more difficult to parse if one is in a hurry. We did not have access to proprietary sources of data on the industry, but some times I wonder if they are any more accurate than data that is available from public sources.
    • The market map was a bit odd in terms of how you classified some of the startups, some of the startups may have been misclassified.
      • I agree. We expected this to be the case, since the way an investor thinks about a market is often not entirely congruent with how others see it. Our market map was only an approximation about how we think of the market – for example, we would group “truck automation” together with “automated cars” . . . Since the way we see it the key outcome is “automated land transportation” which can then be applied to trucks and cars – by the same startup/company, with adequate modifications to account for the structural differences between a truck and a car. Think smart-phones versus tablet computers; iPhone versus iPad. Or, think laptop computers versus tablet computers; MacBook Air versus iPad. That being said, we’ll take another look at the market map when we feel it makes sense to give it a major update. There are many startups we did not know about when we put it together.
  6. Craig Fuller, CEO/Managing Director of TransVix stopped by our office to tell us about what they are doing to solve the dynamic assignment problem using the contract theory approach by building a derivatives market for trucking, rail, and containers. If you believe their estimates, this could be a $1.4 trillion opportunity in the United States, and possibly an $8.0 trillion opportunity globally. Yes, you read that right. Trillion, with a “capital tee”. Craig shed further light on some aspects of the trucking industry that we did not fully understand. He also laughed at me when I told him I had developed a headache as we were trying to unravel some of the mysteries of the maritime freight shipping market. He gave us some good ideas for paths along which we might conduct some research.
  7. We also heard directly from startups based outside the United States that are building software for domestic freight trucking markets in; Israel, Brazil, Germany, India. We heard anecdotes about startups in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
  8. These news reports caught our attention in the days and weeks after we published;
  9. Daniel Burrows, founder and ceo of XStream Trucking, a seed-stage tech startup – thinks about the problems in the freight trucking problem from the fuel efficiency side of the profitability equation. Fuel costs account for as much as a third of the operating expenses of a truck fleet. The team at XStream reports that its technology can generate fuel savings of between 2.5% and 8%. You can see the potential for those savings to add up to something significant for the industry when you consider that, according to the American Trucking Associations; 1Source: http://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Energy.aspx. Accessed on Jan. 03, 2017.
    • Trucks consumed 52.3 billion gallons of fuel for business purposes in 2011; 37.2 billion of that in diesel fuel and 14.8 billion in gasoline,
    • The industry spent $143.4 billion buying diesel fuel in 2011

This seems to be a market that will remain active for sometime to come, and we are eager to see what new developments occur as time progresses.

We’re studying startups building technology for the ocean freight shipping market. We expect to have made enough progress to publish it in a few weeks. Stay tuned. Better yet . . . Send us ideas; @brianlaungaoaeh and/or @jnazubuike.

Update: January 3, 2017 at 17:30 to include insights from Daniel Burrows at XStream Trucking.

References