And Now For The Hockey Sticks

Or some such title. Agree, sounds boring. But every day planes, trains and automobiles travel throughout Europe with a common cargo: nothing. Now, one could really get upset about the environmental impact of all that carbon but if you know me you know that that’s not my primary concern. What I do care about deeply is that it’s hugely inefficient not to try and aggregate capacities through a central, transparent marketplace. I hate when people waste money by not communicating.

So I don’t have figures on flows of goods geographically nor the percentage of cargo transports going empty, but I am sure it is a LOT. The idea is to create a common super-national database for all logistics providers to post spare capacity. Best of course to start with some of the large national trains or air freight providers for initial liquidity - but get the little folks on board quickly because they’ll benefit most. Offer an API (or if all else fails, parsing of emails/manual entries) to shippers to track who of them has capacity when and where. Then, become the standard “first check” for folks who need to send cargo on the cheap and don’t necessarily sit on the Paris-London axis where full round trips are the norm. Take a 10%+ cut of the incremental revenue the carrier makes.

You’ll become the kid that the entire schoolyard wants to beat up - but who in an industry where margins are tight is everyone’s secret crush.