The air conditioning was set to a crisp 69 degrees, but I was sweating. Not from the heat, but from the sheer force of the presentation. A young man with a perfectly rehearsed tremor in his voice was walking us through a deck that promised nothing short of the complete reinvention of global logistics. The graphics were stunning. Lines of light, representing container ships, zipped across digital oceans, their paths untangling into beautiful, efficient patterns. Their platform, he said, was the ‘nervous system’ for global trade. He used the word ‘disruption’ 19 times in 29 minutes.

And I believed him. Or, a part of me did. The part that wants to believe that a few brilliant minds and a clean user interface can solve problems that are fundamentally about rust, diesel, and port union negotiations. The part that forgets that software can’t lift a 40-foot container.

The Cargo Cult of Modern Logistics

This is the cargo cult of the modern supply chain. During World War II, islanders in the Pacific saw military cargo planes land, bringing unimaginable wealth-canned food, steel tools, medicine. When the war ended and the planes left, some of them built replicas. They carved wooden headsets, built bamboo control towers, and waved landing signals at an empty sky, performing the rituals of logistics without understanding the underlying engine. They mistook the symbols for the substance.

Today’s logistics startups are doing the same. They build beautiful bamboo control towers-sleek dashboards, predictive AI models, blockchain-powered ledgers. They perform the rituals of disruption, using the right language and showing hockey-stick growth charts based on user sign-ups or API calls. But they aren’t landing the planes. They aren’t moving the boxes.

I was talking to an archaeological illustrator last week, Anna L.M. I looked her up afterwards, and her work is breathtaking in its honesty. She draws pottery shards, corroded bronze fixtures, the fragmented remains of a forgotten world. Her job isn’t to invent a better pot; it’s to render the existing pot with such fidelity that a scholar, 99 years from now, can understand its form, its function, its reality. She told me the most difficult part of her job is drawing the negative space-reconstructing the missing pieces based on the hard evidence of what remains. You can’t just draw a beautiful handle where there’s no evidence one existed. You must honor the truth of the artifact. Her pencil doesn’t get to have an opinion.

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Her job isn’t to invent a better pot; it’s to render the existing pot with such fidelity that a scholar, 99 years from now, can understand its form, its function, its reality.

This seems like a wild tangent, but it’s the entire point. In the world of physical goods, you are either the pot, or you are a drawing of the pot. And for too long, we’ve been mesmerized by increasingly beautiful drawings. We celebrate the Series B funding round of a company that has a brilliant app for tracking containers, but we never ask the only question that matters: how many containers are they *actually moving*?

The Hard Truth: A Personal Confession

I’m going to make a confession that I probably shouldn’t. A few years ago, I championed a company that was going to ‘Uberize’ drayage. Their app was flawless. Their pitch was electric. I told anyone who would listen that they were the future. I was so caught up in the narrative, in the sheer sexiness of their tech stack, that I forgot to check the artifact. When I finally dug into the numbers, I found they were handling a grand total of 49 trucks in the port of Long Beach. Not 49 fleets. 49 individual trucks. The incumbents they were ‘disrupting’ had contracts with over 9,999. My brilliant disruptor was a rounding error. A beautifully drawn pottery sherd claiming to be the entire vase.

We have to stop listening to the pitch decks and start counting the boxes.

This isn’t some esoteric, hidden knowledge. It’s right there. Every time a container enters the country, it leaves a record. You can see who shipped it, what was in it, and who received it. The data is vast and messy, but it’s the ground truth. You can see, clear as day, if Startup X, despite its $49 million in funding, is actually taking market share from Maersk, or if they’re just making a lot of noise. The story of who is winning and losing in the physical world is written in boring, repetitive, glorious data. It’s all there in the customs ledgers, and the best way to get a clear picture is by looking at aggregated us import data. It’s the ultimate bullshit detector for an industry drowning in it. It’s the difference between a photograph of a plane and the plane itself.

Software has a vital role to play, of course. It can be the nervous system. It can make the existing flow of goods more efficient, less opaque, and more responsive. It can add immense value. But it is not, in itself, the flow. A better map is not the territory. A company that helps you manage your 199 containers more effectively is a fantastic tool company. A company that takes 9,999 containers from an industry giant is a disruptor. We have to relearn the difference.

I can’t help but think of Anna’s illustrations again. Her commitment is to the physical truth. A chip in a vase isn’t an imperfection to be airbrushed out; it’s a piece of the story, a data point that speaks to its journey. She draws the cracks with the same care she draws the painted figures. The logistics industry is full of cracks. It’s messy, inefficient, and stubbornly analog in places. The cargo cultists see these cracks and promise a perfect, seamless, digitally-rendered replacement. They present us with a flawless 3D model of a vase that never existed.

The real work is messier. It’s about understanding the cracks. It’s about building something that respects the clumsy, heavy, beautiful reality of a 29-ton box being lifted onto a truck. It’s about building a better crane, not a better drawing of one. It’s about landing real planes, full of real cargo, for real people. The rest is just waving at an empty sky.