Veho is a super weird software company
Veho is a logistics startup that structurally shouldn't exist, where being a cost-center engineer doesn't suck, and where we ship an absurd amount of software anyway.
(This post is not about AI)
If I’m going to make this claim I feel the need to establish my credibility in evaluating corporate and workplace deviance. If you’re feeling credulous, you can skip this curious credentialing cruft and jump right into the bits about Veho.
When people ask what I do, I typically pantomime typing, mumble something about software and say it is not interesting. If they ask a followup question, I say that people pay me to make computers do things for them. This evasiveness is a gift! I am giving them a chance to get out psychically unharmed. I am a deeply boring and prolix communicator, and the nature of my day to day software work leads me to have very strong opinions about things like the best UUID format (type prefixed UUID7) and the ideal operating force for keyboard switches (55cN).
Those who choose to persist in the conversation find that my career trajectory at various startups has been more “fruit fly flight path” than “up and to the right.” I have worked on federal fraud litigation, live UFC fight statistics, high-traffic mobile app infrastructure, materials science AI platforms and feature definition formats, and now e-commerce logistics. I’ve worked nights in an ice-cold broadcast trailer behind the MGM Grand fixing bugs in the punch-and-kick-counting algorithm in an Adobe Flash app. I’ve physically deprecated python code in a paper shredder to ensure the correct version was provided during discovery. I’ve spent hours with charming nerds from NIST debating whether humidity is a “measured parameter” or a “calculated condition” of an industrial process (we settled on: “it depends”). I was once remoted into one of those ipad-on-a-segway telepresence robots and suddenly warned that I needed to stop threatening people. Someone (not me, I was 3,000 miles away) had taped an open pocketknife to the iPad the day before and I had been unwittingly stabbing office plants on my way to a conference room. And yet, Veho is the weirdest company I’ve worked for and it’s not particularly close.
Econ 101: Veho shouldn’t exist
The first weird thing about being a software engineer at Veho is that the company exists. Industries with huge fixed costs and outsize returns to scale are what economists refer to as natural monopolies. Logistics networks tick nearly every box. To run a shipping company at scale, you need: huge amounts of warehouse space broadly distributed across a large geographic area, thousands of drivers, and hundreds of trucks running 24/7. You also need enough clients shipping packages to fill daily truck lanes running long haul from LA to Atlanta but also short ones from Philadelphia to Newark — if you can’t fill the trucks then you either deliver late or lose money running them half-full. Adding last mile delivery makes the math even worse. The unit economics work great if you have so many packages that you are dropping 20 on each block, but if there are 3 miles between stops you’re just burning cash.
Veho is a startup that runs a coast-to-coast logistics network across 33 states while offering last mile delivery to a majority of people in the US. We deliver to people’s doorsteps faster and more reliably than companies two or three orders of magnitude larger, and we compete with them on price. Just structurally, it shouldn’t be possible for this company to exist. The returns to scale from running huge, busy networks consisting of bought-and-paid-for real estate should allow our competitors to trivially undercut us on price, speed, and reliability. This shouldn’t be working, but every year I’ve been here we’ve grown margins, the network, and the number of packages we ship.
Working here doesn’t suck as much as it should
The second weird thing about being a software engineer at Veho is that the job doesn’t totally suck. There’s a sort of an unwritten rule that if you are a software engineer working in a cost center — if the company doesn’t sell a digital product you make — your job will suck. You’ll have impossible amounts of work, be compensated terribly, and leadership’s general opinion of what you do will oscillate from delusional optimism to frustrated confusion to disappointment and layoffs. Your best case scenario is that some powerpoint wielding hero convinces a “real” VP to accept the necessary evil of giving you a COLA after some software you write saves the company 10x your total compensation. I don’t make the rules! I just work here.
I think the main reason Veho operates this way is empathy? The people who work here have a lot in common with the folks whose stuff we are delivering. We shop online! We do not like it when our stuff arrives late. We know that a late truck carrying a meal kit can mean that a family’s dinner isn’t on the table. As a result, folks are shockingly grateful for new internal apps that improve outcomes on the road. My theory is that when the impact of merging a PR can be seen in metrics and SLAs but also felt in the orbitofrontal cortex of other Veho employees, we work together more closely and it sucks less.
It’s also possible that since the rules say that the company shouldn’t exist in the first place, Fred and Ita just channelled Meek and YT and threw out the “abuse the devs” rule, too. Either way, there is a connection between this and the next point:
We write and ship a ton of software
The third weird thing about being a software engineer here is that Veho doesn’t sell any digital products. We get paid to move millions of boxes and polybags. We deliver them by running a huge physical distributed system that sorts, ships, and delivers packages to people’s doors. Growing, monitoring, debugging, and optimizing that physical distributed system is the whole job — it’s what everyone in the company is doing, every day. A system of this size forces our hand. We are too big to try to do anything manually, and too small to afford the cash-wasting inefficiencies of buying and integrating siloed, not-quite-right off the shelf software from existing logistics vendors.
So at Veho, the default approach to solving problems is writing and shipping software ourselves. We have no shortage of problems, so we ship a ton of software. As of this writing we have 770 Github repositories. Non-engineers have shipped hundreds more vibe-coded apps since we built our own internal no-code app platform. We run three completely different mobile apps, our own driver marketplace, and dozens of internal and external APIs and database systems. We integrate with Twilio to notify folks when their packages will arrive. We collect proprietary data on the “last 100 feet” to ensure packages land on time, exactly where people want them. We have a custom warehouse management system tracking the status of every package, pallet, and dock door throughout the network. We’ve got dozens of different ML systems in production doing everything from creating new, optimized delivery routes every day to pinging freight brokers in slack asking for late-arriving truck ETAs. We have hundreds of data mart tables providing everyone in the company access to every piece of data we can think of to measure or monitor.
This is not normal behavior! It is not normal for people to obsess over how to shave seconds off the amount of time it takes to deliver a package by reducing latency and crash rate on seven-year-old underpowered Android phones. It is not normal to spend hours revising metrics to identify the impact of a reduced crash rate and ensure the resulting benefit persists over time. We aren’t selling this software to anyone! Nobody outside the company will ever even know we did all this!
Unless… should we start an eng blog?