On the morning of April 8, with little fanfare, the website of a new freight tech startup went live. Upon clicking through to the ‘Founders' section, though, a visitor would immediately see a widely speculated-upon rumor in the transportation and logistics industry confirmed – Paul Loeb and Jeff Silver are back at it again.

Loeb founded American Backhaulers in 1981, a pioneering freight brokerage that Jeff Silver joined in 1984. In 1999, C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc. (NASDAQ:CHRW) acquired American Backhaulers. In 2005, Loeb founded Command Transportation, which was sold to Echo Global Logistics in 2015, while in 2006, Silver and his wife Marianne founded Coyote Logistics, which UPS (NYSE:UPS) bought in 2015.

Now the two freight executives – whose exploits are now legendary – have teamed up to tackle the hard problems in freight that have persisted despite multiple waves of innovation in logistics over the past 20 years.

The new company, Mastery Logistics Systems, promises "to reduce waste across the entire freight logistics industry." Waste is one of the ‘hard problems' in logistics and transportation – fragmented supply chains, manual communications processes, poor asset utilization and inefficient facilities contribute to friction and waste at all points in the shipment cycle. Ultimately, waste in freight causes transportation and logistics costs to rise as a proportion of overall GDP and become a drag on economic growth.

Jeff Silver spoke to FreightWaves about Mastery by phone. FreightWaves wanted to know why Silver and Loeb decided to build a software company rather than a third-party logistics (3PL) company.

"The decision isn't about getting into software, it's more about trying to solve real problems in a different than anyone has attempted so far," Silver said. "If you look at what Mastery's trying to do, it's very different than what other people are trying to do."

Silver emphasized that both he and Loeb had deep experience in building technology to drive efficiencies in logistics processes.

"I've been involved in the industry since 1984, and Paul [Loeb] before that, and to the extent that technology was ready to do it, we were trying to eliminate waste out of every step we took," Silver said.

Silver said that Mastery is now building technology to focus on three of the biggest issues in transportation and logistics that have not yet been solved– appointment-making, track-and-trace and paper bills-of-lading.

"The right way is to track the freight, not the truck," Silver said. Although he did not elaborate on the kind of hardware that Mastery would use, Silver said that artificially intelligent processes could connect the track-and-trace technology to automated appointments, and make adjustments to schedules based on real-time information without human intervention.

Paperwork transmitted by mail, fax and email attachment are still prevalent and subject to loss and mishandling. Manually processing these documents introduces human error and slows down transactions.

Image sourced from Pixabay

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