[makestuff]

My roommate worked at a freight forwarder, but from what he told me, the entire thing is a mess of excel spreadsheets and highly inefficient.

I think the pitch of flexport is what if we modernize the technology and make it more efficient by reducing or removing the need of all of these people managing the forwarding via excel.

[kyllo]

I think part of the problem with that pitch is that the cost of an IT integration in this industry could pay for a lot of people in Asia to manage a forwarding operation in Excel. Ocean carriers don't have like, APIs. It's all custom integrations with EDI, SOAP, or CSV-over-FTP and you have to have a lot of tedious meetings with them to figure out how to map out and interpret the data they can send and receive.

[makestuff]

Yeah they also don't really have an incentive to integrate with flexport because even though it is a PITA you really only have a few options to ship freight across the ocean.

[gdulli]

If you asked me whether I've seen more net inefficiency in my life resulting from underengineering with Excel-like workflows vs. overengineering through the "best" software engineering practices at a given time I really don't know if I could say.

[makestuff]

Flexport's success/failure will be a good datapoint into this.