A River of Freight; The Art of Storytelling; Defining Love
Hey there,
Here's a quick overview of this week's newsletter:
FlockFreight is a company working on building a peer-to-peer network of trucking infrastructure
Storytelling is perhaps the most valuable skill one can acquire
A passage I read on Love
A River of Freight: Introducing FlockFreight
Right now the logistics world largely operates on a hub-and-spoke model.
All end nodes (starting points and destinations) are connected to a centralized distribution center.
Each distribution center feeds into a network of other distribution centers.
This allows freight moving in the same direction to be centralized. By centralizing freight (i.e. shipping in bulk), the unit economics come down.
Simple enough right?
But it’s not super efficient if you want to send something locally. For instance,
Here, Node A and Node B are fairly close together. In a perfect world, freight wouldn’t need to go all the way to a distribution center and back. It’s more efficient, from a distance POV, to go directly.
This is what FlockFreight is trying to solve. Imagine a situation where you could ship freight between nodes, directly, while remaining cost-effective.
A peer-to-peer network of trucking, instead of the traditional hub and spoke.
Last week, I spoke to Chris Pickett (the current COO (and ex-CSO) of Flockfreight).
Chris has a legendary background in Logistics Technology. He was the Chief Strategy Office at Coyote Logistics, and a key contributor to its rise from $0 to $2 billion in global revenue, before being acquired by UPS in 2015. Presently, he is:
A Co-Founder + Advisor at Channel 19 and
A Current Advisor at GoodShip
(two wicked cool Logistics-technology companies).
He explained the incentives of building out the FlockFreight marketplace.
FlockFreight starts with engineering to build efficiency.
Creating a peer-to-peer network of trucks is a very algorithmic problem to solve. The better the backend algorithms are, the more efficiently trucking routes can be designed.
With the efficiency and cost savings created by route optimization, shippers get lower prices and faster delivery.
This incentivizes shippers to onboard onto the platform.
With more shippers on the platform, comes demand for carriers.
With additional demand for carriers comes additional trucks within the network.
An increase in the number of trucks means the network can operate more efficiently.
In a fully adopted form, you can imagine the sheer volume of trucks simulates a river. If at any point you want to ship something, you could request that the nearest truck, moving in the right direction, add your freight to its itinerary.
There could be a continuous flow of goods. People could “make and release”, that is, ship a smaller volume of goods with the same unit economics.
This could be especially useful in places like Interstate 405, where thousands of trucks move up and down California, oftentimes half-full, following the same general route.
By combining these truckloads, FlockFreight pushes toward a new world of decentralized, more efficient, shipping infrastructure.
I find it awesome.
The Power of Story Telling
Steve Jobs once said,
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”
For Jobs, storytelling became most of his persona. His ability to sell people, on his products, and his vision, are what let Apple push such novel agendas and innovate in the way that it did.
It’s a little counterintuitive:
Focusing on values, storytelling, and building incredibly well-designed products is what created the company with the highest valued company (by market cap) on the NYSE.
As opposed to the more traditional capitalistic approach of cost optimization and finding ways to minimize the bottom line.
Optimizing for money yielded less money than optimizing for narrative, values, and product.
So how does this affect my life? I decided to dig a little deeper into what exactly makes good stories. Here are the basics I found on what makes an effective storyteller:
The Three Primary Components (a quick revisit to Elementary school)
The Protagonist’s Issue: What problem or issue needs to be resolved? What is their goal?
Theme: What subtleties in the story communicate humanness, values, or life lessons?
Plot: Aka. the protagonist’s quest to reach their goal. Here we break down into an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
Emotions = Relatability: Describing how a protagonist responds to certain stimuli can help enhance the story. Ex.
Adam turned a pale blue and rushed to sit down as his stomach began to erupt. (the reader can empathize with feeling sick)
Bella stood at the edge of a lake, hurling pebbles as far as she could, to blow off steam. (the reader can empathize with frustration, anger, etc.)
Plant seeds to make the story dynamic. Prompting a listener to make a prediction and then rewarding them with the outcome, can make the story far more engaging.
ex. The tension between Voldemort and Harry potter is eluded to and referenced several times until they eventually fight.
Giving Your Character Flaws Gets people’s Attention. Having a clear “good” and “bad” can be too simple.
Ex. Batman is neither good nor bad. He is a vigilante as much as he is a hero. This makes him interesting.
Photo by Serge Kutuzov on Unsplash
At the heart of every great tale is a change in status. As humans, we are naturally highly status conscious. In some sense, it is about goal-setting. When setting goals, we tend to view ourselves as the underdog. For this reason, we cheer for those with lower status and hope that they triumph over the people on top.
ex. Jerry is far smaller than Tom (lower status), but his wits allow him to triumph.
Defining Love
I read a passage this week from a newsletter I enjoy. I thought I’d share it here as well.
What could a man do in this state, or in love, for his love? The great songs are all love songs—no wonder why! There is nothing that could match up to this, there is no drug, whether crack or ecstasy or alcohol or nicotine inhaled on a long summer day which could measure up to how this feels, which could compare to the routine malaise, monotony of every other god damned soulless day where even the most religious among us feel the deafening silence of faith. What pick up artist, what businessman, what machine among us could ever be persuaded of the human heart in such a dizzying state? The man who is not romantic is not capable of love. Full stop. The only reason he doesn’t kill himself is because he doesn’t know what he is missing out on. More than any political cause or philosophical ideal, love is the thing that makes a man commit like nothing else. Love, the romantic movement of passion. The irrational, the inspired, the poetic. A man in love would commit unspeakable atrocities to protect the woman he loves. He is the ultimate transgressive, the ultimate rebel. And why? What is it about women, about sex, that overcomes all else? Such an instinct is natural in all animals which haven’t strayed far from what they are… who would give up any eternity, any heaven, any cause which didn’t contain their lover. Such a thing… no, one cannot speak on it. The truth is only said without words, felt between a common crowd, known in conspiracy.
From:
Other Life Updates:
I joined TeamLift as a Part-Time Marketing Intern. They’re an AI-powered dashboard that syncs across productivity tools and gives greater visibility into the skillsets and knowledge that exist on ~200+ people teams.
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Talk to you next week 👋,
-Satvik