The Physical Economy Has No Index
One of the largest industrial problems of our time is slowly killing our economy and most have no idea it exists. It touches every physical thing around you and charges a tax you don’t get a benefit for.
The American industrial sector is operating at around half of its productive efficiency, irrespective of economic conditions. .1 That might sound like a shock, but it’s by design of the vehicles moving everything around: the trucks. This trillion-dollar industry acts as an artery of the physical economy and doesn’t have a mechanism to know how truly inefficient it is. Because of the lack of a reliable big nervous system, trucks depart warehouses with only one-third to half of their capacity filled and cannot utilize their empty space even when there is high demand.2 Warehouses sit idle,machines wait for work that is already needed three states away, robots cannot fix it, and you the consumer pay the cost.
America is flying blind through the heart of its own economy, paying a tax it doesn’t even know exists. Fixing it would unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity in America alone.
And the pieces have now fallen into place to do it. In fact, we have already solved this problem once.
The Internet of Real Things
The internet indexed humanity's collective data, search made it query-able. Limitless, effectively free information enabled us to find and match novel wasted supply to demand instantly at almost no cost.3 It took historically binary decisions and split them into countless new outcomes. The payoff was trillions of dollars in value and a generation of asset-light companies that we now use as utilities, all built on one simple idea: if you can see everything and match it for the right use case instantly, historical waste turns into value.
This same pattern is beginning to fall into place again. Over decades, companies have started connecting their factories, vehicles, and robots to the internet, and the sensors on these devices are transmitting new, novel information we’ve never seen before. Unfortunately, the physical economy is still stuck in behavioral gridlock. The industrial economy, which is the overwhelming majority of what humans actually produce and the entirety of our survival (food, medicine, materials, every object sitting around you), still gets orchestrated roughly the way it did in the 1980s. Binary, simple decisions because we physically cannot do better relative to the time and information available. And so far, we have accepted that as the best it can be. The bill for that acceptance is not abstract: moving goods through the US economy now costs $2.6 trillion a year, 8.7 percent of GDP.4
We are missing a layer.
The Index Layer
The physical economy needs its own index. A live matrix of what productive capacity exists, where it is, what it costs, and what is actually moving through it. This index has to be neutral, akin to how the index of the internet belongs to no single website. Neutral rails that everyone can use without handing their business to a competitor. Once that index exists, three things happen almost instantly. Matching becomes instant. Waste becomes visible. Prices will equilibrate. All because there finally exists a physical source of truth.5
I started working on this problem with my team, beginning where the physical economy is most broken and most legible at the same time: the supply chain. Specifically, we believe the empty space in trucks can create a structurally new category of moving goods. We are building an index of live, empty carrier capacity, and treating it as a real-time measure of how inefficient the economy actually is. We operate this network with AI that reads the index and decides what should go where, filling capacity that would otherwise have driven empty.
A wave of startups tried to fix our supply chain. Most of them died trying. It is worth being precise about why. They digitized the broker, not the market: apps layered over phone calls, marketplaces competing on price. And behind every load? A human still doing the actual coordination. The cost of coordinating never fell, so they inherited the same thin margins as the industry they set out to replace.6 None of them built the index; matching without an index is just guessing faster. And the coordination itself could not be automated, because software could not yet read context. That constraint has expired. We do not need more logistics companies doing the old thing slightly faster. We need the neutral coordination layer the physical economy was never given, and indexing trucks is only the first surface.
This is also why the index has to be built as infrastructure from day one, not retrofitted later. Every load coordinated through it becomes structured data: what moved, where, when, at what price, and what capacity was left behind. Compounded over years, that becomes the ground truth of the physical economy, a data backend designed to be read not just by people but by machines. An autonomous truck does not need an app. It needs an API to the economy: what to carry, where to go, what the trip is worth. A dark factory needs to know what to build before anyone asks. Autonomy without context is a fleet of brilliant machines with no nervous system. We are designing the index as that backend now, so that when the machines arrive, the world they need to read already exists. We will not build the trucks or the factories or the robots. We are building the thing they will all have to plug into.
Neutrality = Trust, Trust = Scale
An index this powerful only works if it is trusted, because the heart of the industrial economy also houses its most sensitive information on private business behavior. Who ships what, to whom, when, and at what cost is some of the most sacred information companies have. Markets with hidden information do not merely leak value; they unravel entirely when participants cannot trust what they cannot verify.7 A neutral coordination layer must abstract specifics away by design, not as a feature bolted on later.
The index has to surface the match without exposing the participants. It has to give every player its full benefit without forcing them to surrender position or leverage to access it. The index itself should ultimately be open, a reference anyone can build on. And what compounds into that reference is the aggregate, never the participant: the shape of the economy becomes shared knowledge while every individual position stays private. That is the deal, and it only works one way. Neutrality and privacy are not constraints on this idea. They are what makes the rails usable by everyone at once. You earn the right to coordinate the economy only by being the party that everyone can plug into without fear.
Raising Ships
The part that matters beyond efficiency is what this index does for everyone globally. Coordination is deflationary in the best possible sense of the word. Every idle machine, every empty mile, every shipment that sits and waits is a cost, and that cost does not vanish. It is passed on to you.8 The waste of the physical economy is a hidden variable in your rent, your groceries, your medicine, and every object around you. You pay for the disorder of a system you cannot even see.
Minimize the waste in coordination and you lower the cost of physical existence itself. Then add the machines. When they plug into a layer that already knows what the world needs and where, the cost of moving and making things falls toward the cost of the energy and intelligence required to do it. That is the difference between a century of material abundance and a century of stagnation: affordability not as a slogan but as a direct consequence of letting intelligence act on a world it can finally read.
Building the REST
There is a larger clock running. America has decided to reindustrialize: new factories, new fabs, new energy, new defense capacity, hundreds of billions in steel and silicon going into the ground. But we are attempting to rebuild an industrial base on top of a coordination layer from the 1980s. Every new plant inherits the same darkness: the phone calls, the guesswork, the waste. Reindustrialization without an index is pouring concrete into a blind system. The nations that win this century will not be the ones with the most machines. They will be the ones whose physical economies are legible enough for machines to run. Some will coordinate their industry by mandate. We will do it by market. That is the challenge of our generation, and it is winnable.
Now is the time for founders who look at the physical world the way the last generation looked at information and simply refuse to accept that it has to stay dark, fragmented, and dumb. We need coordination layers for energy, materials, manufacturing, and verticals that do not even exist yet. The people who successfully build them will be among the most important builders of the century, not because they optimized a niche, but because they are giving the physical economy the nervous system it was never born with.
The future everyone keeps promising, the self-driving everything and the robotics that build and the abundance that follows, does not arrive on the back of better hardware alone. It arrives the moment the physical world becomes legible, coordinated, and trustworthy enough for intelligence to act on it.
Someone has to build that layer.
We are building a part of it. Come build the rest.
Notes and References
1. In manufacturing, Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), the standard measure of realized output against productive potential (Nakajima, S., 1988, Introduction to TPM, Productivity Press), averages roughly 60 percent across industry benchmark surveys, with 40 to 60 percent typical of most operations and 85 percent considered world class. Peer-reviewed studies of road freight measure the same shape: average vehicle load factors at or below half of capacity (e.g., Transportation Research Part E, 2021; European Environment Agency load factor methodology, 2001).
2. In US trucking, empty (deadhead) miles averaged 16.7 percent of all miles driven in 2024, per the American Transportation Research Institute (2025), An Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking; ATRI is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization. American Trucking Associations fleet data has shown average Class 8 payloads of roughly 29,000 pounds against rated capacities of 60,000 to 90,000 pounds (Trucking Trends), a pattern that has persisted across decades and cycles.
3. Rochet, J.-C., and Tirole, J. (2003). “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets.” Journal of the European Economic Association, 1(4), 990-1029.
4. Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals and Kearney (2025). Annual State of Logistics Report. US business logistics costs totaled $2.6 trillion, 8.7 percent of GDP.
5. Hayek, F. A. (1945). “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review, 35(4), 519-530.
6. Coase, R. H. (1937). “The Nature of the Firm.” Economica, 4(16), 386-405.
7. Akerlof, G. A. (1970). “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488-500.
8. The American Transportation Research Institute (2025) puts the average marginal cost of operating a truck at $2.26 per mile in 2024. Every one of the industry’s empty miles incurs this cost while generating no value, an expense ultimately embedded in consumer prices.
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