The reason why we consider shipping to be a simple and solved problem is that in 1956 McLean had a brilliant idea that to ship efficiently and well everything imaginable would be put into identical containers with no variations.
That's why it is possible to have a container ship with a crew of 5-6 people pilot the load. Containers aren't sort of identical. They are completely identical and completely standard ( several standard sizes ). They have the weight distributed in a specific way and they are stacked on a ship in a specific way depending on the weight of every container.
The startup equivalent of a container ship in simplicity is a startup sorting a pile containing A4 paper, standard business envelopes and hang folders at a daily rate of 500 items.
