At 12, Drew McElroy was in trucking. His parents ran a freight brokerage operation out of a spare bedroom in Milltown, New Jersey-connecting truck owners to companies that needed to move goods-and he helped out by working the phones. Fifteen years later, a light bulb went off. Weren't truck brokers doing the same thing that Uber and Lyft do? They match rides to vehicles, minimizing wasted miles, and use algorithms to set prices based on supply and demand. "I realized, Holy crap, no one is doing this," McElroy says. "There is a clear path to changing this entire industry that isn't that complicated." It was a smart idea. Trucking is a $700 billion market, and the bill for moving full truckloads in the U.S. runs to more than $500 billion a year. In 2013, four years after that aha moment, McElroy co-founded Transfix, an online freight marketplace that uses algorithms and machine learning to give full-load shippers better prices and truck owners better routes. The timing was good. Truckers, largely middle-aged men, had recently begun carrying smart-phones and were willing to install the Transfix app.
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