Sidehustle

Testing a long post...David Byttow learned just how much goes unsaid inside companies while he was running Secret. Blasting private information out publicly causes harassment, which led Secret to flame out and give investors back some of their money.But now Byttow is channeling his insight into a new startup called Bold, which he tells me is a “platform for writing long-form content at work. Use cases include things like engineering tutorials, product specs, memos, onboarding docs, etc.”Bold’s bots and bot platform can help you write better, a Discuss on Slack button lets posts instantly start internal conversations and you can even write in code. Polished pieces can be flipped to become publicly visible.One surprise: There’s no anonymity. Byttow tells me, “It’s incredibly important that people feel like they have a place to share their thoughts, but anonymity is not the answer because it’s polarizing and can skew toward negativity. Positivity and optimism are key, especially in growing companies. So we decided not to add anonymity as an option.”For now, Bold is in free private beta as a publishing and editing platform, but will eventually charge on a per-use, per-month basis. You can register here for early access.Byttow was originally funding Bold, but his four-person team pulled in $1 million from Index Ventures this summer. That’s despite Byttow taking $3 million cash off the table for himself during Secret’s $25 million Series B less than a year before the startup imploded. You’d think VCs would be a bit more skeptical.Secret had amassed 15 million registered users before flaming out. The problem was that with little info about them, they were tough to monetize. This time around, Byttow tells me, “we want to build a product that companies will want to pay for because it’s the best and provides functionality that nobody else is doing.”Bold will have to battle with Google Docs, Dropbox, Paper, internal WordPress installations and other places to keep company text. And if businesses want to speak to the world, they can always hop on Medium.But Byttow is betting on bots to give Bold an edge. These “Assistants” live on the otherwise clean writing canvas, and give you advice or keep you calm. He says the move was inspired by when “A long time ago, I worked on a Google Wave robot system.”Byttow writes, “The Hemingway assistant makes your sentences more concise and active by suggesting changes as you type. The Ambience assistant helps you think by playing ambient background noise, such as sounds reminiscent of sitting Café de Flore on a rainy day.” Bold is also planning a third-party platform so devs can build their own assistants, which could make the startup more defensible.Without the protection of anonymity, employees might be apprehensive to change behavior and post their thoughts instead of more quietly telling their managers.The challenge will be for Bold to prove it’s necessary. Yes, “Everyone has opinions and ideas, yet they often go unshared,” as Byttow writes. But there are plenty of good-enough ways to distribute them that don’t cost a monthly fee.Steve Jobs went ballistic when public shipping manifests leaked the existence of the iPhone 3G. That’s about the only time something exciting happened in the freight forwarding business. The circulatory system of the global economy is a trillion-dollar industry, yet no one really talks about it, or builds tech for it.That’s what makes freight such a massive disruption opportunity for a startup like Flexport.Transparency begets data, which begets efficiency. Smarter shipping shrinks the physical world the way faster internet shrinks the digital one. New businesses emerge. High bandwidth connections paved the way for Netflix. Now Flexport could make meatspace merchants as nimble as Amazon.With $26.9 million in funding, Flexport grew the volume of goods it ships by 16X this year. Y Combinator president Paul Graham says “Flexport is one of that small handful of startups that are going to change the world.” Freight might finally be getting the weight of attention it deserves.So what the hell is freight forwarding?Stick with me. Anything weighing over 150 kilos can’t be sent like a parcel through the postal service. It qualifies as freight, and can require several separately owned vehicles to deliver it across land, sea, or air from its source like a factory to a destination like a retail store.Flexport visualizationEach of these dots is a freight shipment currently on the move with Flexport. Yellow = ocean containers, Red = air freight (few because they arrive so fast), and white = truck.To get the best deal on each leg of the journey and handle the hand-offs through customs, freight forwarding services serve as an organizational logistics layer. They have direct relationships with carriers like truck owners and massive shipping container boats.But like I said, it’s an unsexy business, so until recently, freight forwarding was still being done with a jumble of Excel, email, fax, and paper manifests shipped around the world. That made it extremely tough to spot overspending or snags in supply chains.That is, until Flexport indexed all the available carriers into a searchable database in its free software for organizing and tracking shipments.Flexport Dashboard ComputerThe reason that’s not crazy is that Flexport simultaneously runs its own freight forwarding service that’s optimized thanks to all the data sucked in by its free dashboard. By analyzing all the routes, rates, speeds, and customs compliance data of shipments booked through its full-stack software and service, it can find the most efficient way to get goods from point A to points B, C, X, Y, and Z.Over time, Flexport’s routing decisions are becoming more and more automated. But it also has humans on hand to fill the gaps when necessary, like with the Chinese trucking industry that’s resistant to modernization. Meanwhile, competitors are betting on hunches about the best routes because they don’t have complete data.“We’re bringing transparency to a black box industry” says Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen. “The entire economy depends on the ability to move freight products around.”I didn’t learn what the term meant until a year into starting the business— Ryan Petersen, Flexport CEOShipping began as a side-hustle for Petersen. As teenagers, he and his brother started buying stuff from China and then selling it stateside on the web. He moved to China in 2005 and spent two years in the supply chain trenches.That’s where Petersen stumbled upon public shipping manifests as an untapped gold mine, and started the company Import Genius to index them. Soon he incurred the wrath of Steve Jobs, as import genius led press to the fact that Apple was shipping crates of the as-yet-unannounced iPhone 3G from China.