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Comment by spcelzrd | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't seem like a lot of money, especially for a capital intensive industry with notoriously low margins.

Shipping is only capital intensive if you intend to own the trucks, trains, or ships. Convoy appears to be more of a middleman between owner-operator truckers and shippers or manufacturers.

The problem is that many (most?) of the truckers that own their own rig are middle-aged and older, and getting them to use technology like this may be an uphill battle:

“I think they’re relying too much on computers,” said Brian Larocque, a new driver based out of Connecticut.

Yes on both. I work in tech that services the trucking industry. Getting drivers, (and dispatchers, actually), to truly trust a computer is difficult. They use a lot of apps, but trucking's got a strong culture of self-reliance, and people working in trucking probably care more about single points-of-failure than DevOps do, relying on Convoy would be a pretty big single point of failure, so they'll have to prove themselves worthy of the trust.

However, 82 million should get them there. That's a ton of money to build a business with no capital costs. The big risk for them is the incumbents deciding to move quickly - most of them have the cash, so if they realize their business model is threatened by Convoy, they'll move quickly, and be supported by their existing cash flow.

Freight brokerages typically have margins around 15%

https://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-margins-can-non-asset-bas...

> notoriously low margins.

Some of those trucking companies take 10%. What are you talking about?

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