Matt Silver

Imagine you're the CFO of a Fortune 500 manufacturer who relies heavily on manufacturing in Mexico. You've bought into the nearshoring trend, or maybe even helped establish it decades ago. You just got hit with tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada and your margins are about to be torpedoed.

@ThomasWasson No carrier wants to spend time digging through private load boards that aren’t well maintained. The industry just needs a modern marketplace to actually create a more secure booking experience.

Theoretically brokers would want to migrate to their own internal loadboards. Back when I was a broker at Arrive, we would rather them book now. Would use DAT for fall offs but was frowned upon back in 2019. Was told, "we should have bought better instead of post"."

1/ Some things I've learned recently running coding agents on large-scale projects. Most of this contradicts advice from 6 months ago!

Now we're really cooking.

I think Cargado has declared Chattanooga > Chicago in their ads. Sorry Matt Silver. Checkmate.

@FreightAlley Cargado not Cardago 🤦🏻‍♂️ Also I picked those lanes!

Been busy building (just, creatively) over at Cargado lately and it’s all coming together

@maybedanielleee @grok review each of those law firms and provide a ranking based on each firm's write-up about the SCOTUS ruling and anything else you can find about them on the internet.

Should you decide to believe that the SCOTUS ruling on broker liability will not impact you, please know that there is a whole world of attorneys out there. And they are eagerly awaiting your poor decisions.

I guess I could’ve said watermelons instead of pumpkins on vented dry vans. There’s enough temp controlled freight going in both directions that produce season wouldn’t cause a surge in carriers bidding more aggressively for southbound freight. A few weeks ago, 70 B1 drivers had their visas revoked due to cabotage. The freight they’re bidding on in Cargado represents true D2D southbound freight that would keep them away from committing cabotage.

@MattSilver @FreightAlley A rising tide lifts all boats. Pretty sure van rates explode out of the Southeast during produce, while inbound rates fall. But, I could be wrong, probably wrong.

Load boards are a capacity desert this week

@ajlatrace They should shut out realtors instead. How are realtors still necessary? They care more about scratching each others backs than getting their client the best deal.

I'm going to stay up and see if MRED actually pulls the plug on Zillow at midnight. We're just 22 minutes away from the Chicago home listing doomsday.

@TMSuccessful This is why we built Cargado with all those unique details.

My biggest pet peeve: When I reach out on a posted load and all the broker will tell me is "this is the rate, can you cover it?" without providing a single load detail, its annoying. Is it tarps? What size? Is it legal? What am I hauling? When am I getting loaded and unloaded?

@BeaglTech @FreightAlley Produce goes on a reefer. This is mostly dry van capacity. This isn’t pumpkins on vented vans.

@MattSilver @FreightAlley Its also inland produce season in Mexico.

Like Guaranteed Primary, but for AI models instead of freight.

SCOTUS Montgomery v. Caribe isn’t “brokers are liable for everything.” It’s a shift from “you can’t sue me” to “show me your process.” Carrier selection now has to be defensible → more vetting + documentation, less WhatsApp-by-screenshot, and the sloppy/shady actors (brokers + carriers) get squeezed. My full take: mattsilver.ai/blog/the-scotu…

@maybedanielleee Yeah…. But what if it’s AI that raised a lot of money?

As one of my open questions in my latest article, can we blame ai?

@StephenRuhe Our marketplace is 60% spot, 40% contracted. so the bids span both and generally, spot freight doesn't have more than 2-3 days of lead time. Keep in mind cross-border capacity is more stable/consistent than your average domestic US lane.

@MattSilver So this data is carriers bidding on freight in the future or present day?

Question for those in the freight pricing arena... How much are you leaning in with AI tooling right now? Are you using Claude Code/Cowork or ChatGPT to run RFPs?

@StephenRuhe All our data is based on carrier bids, it's not stale / old / historical transaction data. It just depends on whether you use the low end or high end of that spectrum and what kind of relationships you have with carriers.

Yea, but what is it basing those increases on? Will they hold? If you turn back time to prior to the SCOTUS decision do any models predicting rates hold? To be fair, some carrier rates won't hold either if the relationships aren't on solid ground. As I'm thinking thru this I can see an argument for using both simultaneously but just relying on one or the other is going to be a problem.

@StephenRuhe I just asked Claude to look at the rate difference for Monterrey to Chattanooga and you can definitely see the rate increase over the past two months.

To much volatility. I am very selective of the lanes and go straight to the carriers to solicit rates/capacity before submitting rfps in markets like this. Historical rates are not going to be viable to project, you need live rates with solid relationships or service failures will lose your lanes.

@StephenRuhe What do you mean? Why? Because the rate data is stale?

@MattSilver Not in this market. Thats asking for a disaster