YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan Petersen

lines on the record: 128
first: 2025-08-05
most recent: 2025-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think it's an Arabic word. It goes back a long time. Governments have always had tariffs thousands of years. Control their borders and make money. It used to be the primary source of revenue for most countries is the tariff. In the United States, I was for sure true. The income tax wasn't introduced until Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War. And it's a percent of the value of the goods that are imported that you have to pay to the U.S. Treasury. Primary reason for it, I guess there's a few. Revenue is real. In fact, Trump's chief economic advisor right now, the chairman of the Council, I don't know if he's his chief advisor, but the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors is a guy named Stephen Moran. And he in his current administration, he said that in the Trump one first term that the tariffs on China paid for one third of the tax cuts that Trump did is pretty meaningful. I mean, it's an interesting alternative.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a very addictive industry. It turns out it's always on, always different, every day is unique. You got a front row seat, you backstage pass, you see what's happening in the world in an insane degree. There's infinite problems to solve, ours and our customers and our vendors. Like, I mean, it's just like a crazy landscape of problems to solve. So, yeah, it's a pretty awesome industry. And I think one of the things that we've done well is show people that actually this thing that looks boring, you don't think about it, actually a really interesting place to build a career.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Monthly, there's about 2016 that do an MBR, a monthly business review, the six pager. And then that's just like, it doesn't, I think we cap it at six, but the six isn't that important. Mostly, honestly, I actually think the six pager is sort of maybe wrong. I'm not sure, but it's more how much time it takes to read. You know, what's Twain say? It's harder to write a six page than it is to write a 12-page. A lot of businesses, and so you're like, if you had more empathy for the people who are working hard, you'd let them write the 12 pager and spend more time reading it. But it turns out that six pages seems fine. So we have, I think, 25 or 26 teams that write those monthly. And then they do an annual plan, two-year rolling, but once a year update. I don't know if that's secret, but I haven't moved to that yet.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not that secretive, but just like it's not part of the structure is like they don't disseminate. So I was just realizing like no one else has such incredible things happening at this company, but nobody knows about it or like not enough people know. So we started, I'm trying to work on that problem more. It was kind of to overcome this telephone problem. It's like I just realized, oh, like no one else has the access I do.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get to go learning about, and our business is super interesting geographically. We're in all the different countries and almost all the countries, different modes of transport, different technologies. There's like, it's actually an incredible thing. So if you give people agency, so we trying to do that to overcome this problem of I just realized we have a really, I think we're a pretty well-run company. We have everybody writing teams like write these documents of what their strategy is, what happened this month, like these six page are kind of, we took this from Amazon years ago before we ever heard Dave Clark, the six pagers that you would write updates. Well, I read them all. I get access to all of them, but no one else. A couple other people on the team.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they lean it like leaning way more than I realized into communications and enablement training. We've been doing the last year. Huge amount of like strategy sessions and teaching and like traveling the world and doing these like little almost like little music festival it's the wrong analogy but like you know music festival give you like multiple tracks that you could you know you go to see different acts like we have that we'll come to different offices and have different tracks like learn about different things i think it's very important that the people have agency you just show up in an office and you're like okay we're gonna do a half a day of training you have to sit through like four talks in a row you lose your mind but if i give you a menu and you're like hey there's like four talks happening right now and there's 16 talks right for the next four hours you can just choose your own adventure which talk you want to go to people all of a sudden like this is amazing”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“together with my exact set. And if people have a problem, thus far they haven't, but if someone had a problem with that, I'd be like, well, it's probably not a fix. This is my company. I'm going to talk to anyone I want in this company.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish it was recorded. He went on and rant like four, three hours, just like, he's a very intense guy. I took like four or five pages of notes. I was definitely like enthralled in the back and like a lot of stuff deeply resonated. But I don't remember any, yeah, I've shared already some of the specific things. A lot of it is like, yeah, just be way more involved in the day-to-day. And if the people don't and do a lot more skip levels, like meet the people who report, don't trust the managers. Not a bad way. Like, you know, I'm here to help. Like, actually, when I go skip level, meaning like go talk to the people who work for, I talk to anyone. I've talked to 40 or 50 people every day on Slack or text or phone. At Flexport. And if I talk to somebody who works for you, I'm not trying to undermine you. I'm going to come back to you and be like, here's what they said. Like, here's what I think we need to do. And if the person asked me to keep it confidential, I'll do my best. But ultimately, I try to solve problems.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“PG wrote about that in standard mode things. Like, well, if you're a professional manager. Your mindset is that you can run any companies, how you go in and in that world, you shouldn't be too involved in all the things because like, yeah, you know, you don't know about that particular domain, that industry. So just trust the people that are already there. Your job is But that's not like founder mode as they come to be called is like, you should know all the stuff, like more or less.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was perfect, honestly. And he even told me, maybe I should have done more time because I remember he told me at like day 88. Know you told me day 91 that if I had told him 80 days he would have made different decisions than he made in like even those last 10 days there was still like learning and taking things in you have to approach startups if you're an executive and you're joining a company you have to approach it with extreme humility like these are smart really smart people like some of the smartest people I've ever met have worked to come through the doors of Flexpoor still work at Flexport and we've been obsessed with the problems that we're working on for a decade and like the idea that some big shots could have come in here this is no knock on any particular person it's just like a classic like what are the odds that anyone could come in and know you know of day one do figure out problems that we couldn't think of or solutions that we couldn't think of it's why like no investor ever gives me useful advice really because like not sure they can't about people and some high level stuff for sure or capital markets but like business”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just like only promote from within, except for very rare cases where just like really can't find the person. And then I spend a lot more time with New York. I've only had one person actually from external in the last couple of years. And I spent just like loads of time with him. And I told him he's not allowed to make any decisions for 90 days.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nice ideal. It doesn't work at my company. We're liking all these different countries and all these different modes of transport that like one person can't actually keep it all in their head. But I try my hardest.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Micromanagement and attention to detail, two words for the same thing, right? Attention to detail is great. Like your boss is involved in your stuff. Like that's only a problem if your boss is an idiot and out of touch and making bad decisions. But if your boss genuinely cares about your work is involved in tune, knows what you're doing, has good judgment. Like, why would you not want them looking over your shoulder and participating with you and what you're doing? Flashboard is a much, I don't know, I don't know. I've never worked at another company really, but it's compared to other businesses, I think, far more complex. So it's hard, it's really actually quite hard for me to live up to Chesky's ideal of like, I think he says, like, if the company should only do as many things as the founder can be personally involved in.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, Chesky's like way more hardcore, I think. I try. But I didn't have as many frameworks for it. I was just like, oh, I got to do what I have to do. And there was a lot of stuff that I really didn't understand about the company. I had way too much committed all these sins of just like, okay, there's a problem in some department, hire a big exec. Let them and then don't get in their way. Like that is the kind of the corporate way that most people teach or like most people expect. Like this is how companies should be run. Micromanagement's a bad word. Toby's the first person I ever heard that from that like it's not a bad it's like a great thing get involved you know why would you ever want”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to debate it. I want to hear from them. But like at the end of the day. I know I'm going to still work at Flexboard in 10 years, and I don't know if that's true about anyone else. That's how they heard from Chesky. That was like, you know, it's like, it's probably true. I hope that my team stays and I got the team for 10 years, but I'm positive that I'll be here. And so if they really don't like the way I want to do something, like, okay, no problem, but it's my company. And like, they can move on. Like, that's a level of confidence that I didn't have prior.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the number one thing I think is learned from Toby from Shopify and Brian Chesky, who have been good advisors for me. Micromanagement is not a bad word. It's a good word. You got to stay involved in all the details. That's very hard in my company. We're like big and sprawling and do a lot of stuff, but need to be way more hands-on. lots of skip levels, don't trust, don't like higher big executives and then just trust them, like treat them like a black box. Like I had, when I heard him say this, I was like, oh my God, he's committed this sin at the highest possible level, right? But don't do that at any level. It's all my company audit everything, inspect everything. You can't just give people too much leash to run things their way. And if they disagree with me, like.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would be better at that. And Paul had this amazing line. He said, that's like saying this other guy would be a better husband for your wife. Might be true, but like, don't act on it. Like, this is your company. You need to stay in there. I thought that was super hilarious. And he then told me, okay, if he's better than you at these things, and he asked me, is this your life work? He heard you say that earlier. Is this your life's work? Is life support your life's work? I was like, yeah, it is. Well, then you need to figure out all the things that he's better than you at and go learn them. Go learn them from him, learn them from other people, like figure out what are these things that you think he's better than you say you can be the next CEO after he steps back like Larry Page did after he came back he hired Eric Schmidt for a decade and then came back he's like you need to go learn those skill sets but it happened much faster than”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't tell him until later. I forget when, but like after I was the chairman, so I think I was already at Founders Fund. He was pissed because he thought I should go be a partner at Y Combinator instead of Founders Fun, first off. But I went for a walk with him when he came back to Palo Alto one time and he She asked me why I did it, why I stepped down. I said, Well, I thought Dave's going to be better at the job than I am. Those are genuinely true. That's why I did it.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had grown. It's a really hard business because it's so global. Like, we ship to and from 147 countries. We have people all over the world. And so the board kind of looked at this problem and said, this is a problem for the founder of the business. You need to come back. Nothing against Dave per se, but it was like very clear, like, okay, you're going to cut people and tell them you care about the culture and tell them I need you to work harder to solve like customer problems and do a giant reorg back to the way we'd always been organized that led to all the growth, which was operator would take a shipment end to end and own all the tasks, own that. And just like the board was like, Ryan, we need, you know, you got to come back and step in and do this. And I had already taken a job at Founders Fund as a partner. So it's still embarrassing for me. Like, I'm like, I just took this job and I got to go back. I got, what am I doing? I got to follow through on my commitments. But it was obviously like an honor bounded.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in logistics, like all the costs come from you making a mistake. Like if you file a customs entry You get the wrong classification code. You're going to spend weeks on doing that with the customs agencies. And like you might have license issues or regulatory problems like. I had to learn that the hard way our customer NPS really started to suffer. So the board was looking at it and going like, okay, you're burning too much money. You're going to have to cut costs. And that means cutting headcount. Like that's where most of the costs at. So you got to cut costs and you got to improve your quality as a kind of a hard. thing to do and our culture had been suffering. We brought in all these new leaders and like the Cori Corps people that built the business were like lead.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really good lesson in business. And I think most businesses like actually quality costs less. It's very counterintuitive.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“background and flexbort background really came at conflict actually because they break it apart into simple tasks and have the same person do it over and over again and like kind of robot human robots almost like or literal robots and and forwarding it's much more of a service business there's a lot more exceptions that can go wrong you're out there in a messy world you don't own all the assets you don't control all the things that are happening you need to like oversee these things and oh the trucker didn't pick it up like better call a different trucker like oh they're not responding on the api okay pick up the phone you know go there lost the cargo all right drive to the airport like you know i mean it's a service business for and it's b2b you spend a lot of time with a customer so but especially that that piece um the quality really started to suffer”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That workflow system I was describing, where you have like all these tasks that have to get completed, and we had taken this idea of efficiency way too seriously to where an operator would just do like one or two of these tasks. and do those over and over and over again like a robot almost. What will happen? Then you have like 50 different people collaborating on one shipment. That's how fulfillment works. If you go to a fulfillment center, it's the only way it could work. You're not going to have the same person unload the truck, put away the goods, take the good bout, put it in a box. You break it into stages, right? And so that's where the Amazon.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And go hire a bunch of engineers. I think we added 900 software engineers in like 12 months. Turned out all in the US or almost all in the US, Seattle, mostly it was like very expensive people at a lot of senior execs. So we just like overinvested in the business. And at the same moment, like the freight markets were collapsing and capital markets got ugly. It became clear like, hey, you're not going to go raise. We'd already raised too much money. Like, we don't need to raise, can't raise more money. And so it was just like kind of a perfect storm of bad decisions of which I was like, you know, sign off on all of them, so I don't blame Dave for that. But it became clear we got to change courses here, change course here. And our customer, one of the mistakes that we made during that period was we took”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are a lot of things. It was building up. I mean, it was the P&L at the end of the day. Like, we just started burning too much money. Some of that was market forces turned against us. We overhired. I approved all those hires. Like, we wanted to go big on tech and just dominate. We kind of read the market. It was just like trying to be contrary to something. We had a really strong balance sheet. I had like 1.6 billion in the bank and everybody was cutting tech hiring in 23. And we felt like let's go lean in.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I feel a lot more confident now. Having seen a much better job in the last 18 months than we ever did before. So yeah, Dave, he was with us for years, CEO. We were co-CEOs and then CEO by himself for six months while I became chairman of the board. Didn't work out. Think these hires are really hard hindsight.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's kind of an orderly transition when we hired him. It was like, let's have a path for you to become the CEO. It became pretty clear that, I don't know, it's hard for me to picture what am I going to be better at today because we're on this big company in.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a lot of people I hired from Amazon, we'd hired a lot of great people who still have a lot of good people who worked at Amazon, logistics and tech. Like, they're probably the best. I think we're the best now, but I think they. I don't think I could always say that. I think we keep getting better. But yeah, Amazon Logistics and Tech, that's what they're known for, right? So it seemed like a perfect fit.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to hire COO and Met Dave Clark. He was the CEO of Amazon.com. He'd run Amazon's logistics and supply chain for many years. So it seemed like great fit tech and logistics. It was actually in many ways.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, same for all of our peers and other freight forwarders. Everyone was kind of in the same boat, but that's not how that's not an excuse. We want to be the best. And we didn't feel like we were winning for a period there operationally and like how we serve customers. Our net promoter score was always in the 70s. So had a lot of operational problems, and I'm much more of a creative type. Then I am, and operators do the same thing every single day and a little bit better, measure every detail. And that's not like, I've gotten good at that, but that's not like naturally who I am, what my background is. I'm more just like a free-wheeling entrepreneur. So we're looking for a partner to kind of take that on for me and help Flexborough mature and grow. So yeah, that was been in 2022 when we really like kind of.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so COVID did some interesting things for us. It made us kind of famous and Park has the hospital stuff and some other things that we did during that time when supply chains got dislocated. But it helped the business and the profile of the business. It financially returned profitable, but it really exposed some flaws in our operations. And we were remote for way too long work from home, which just doesn't work in our industry, maybe in the industry, but certainly not in logistics. You need to be like in-person collaborating, partnering on with the assets, et cetera. Really expose some flaws. Like when you were just prior to COVID, just send a truck to the port, pick up the container. Yeah. And you take it for granted. But during that time, you couldn't get appointments. You couldn't get trailers. The chassis to go to all the containers. There's not enough capacity. It was like the operation was really failing in a lot of ways.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, if the customer's cargo needs to go to a different airport, you'll try to convince them to fly it where your plane is going and then truck it a long distance. You know, it's like, all right, you just wait three days. The plane's leaving in three days instead of going, hey, let me find you a different option. So you have to overcome that culturally. Like if you're an asset owner, it's pretty hard to be customer-centric because your job is like fill the asset or you don't make money, which is”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it really helped us during those few years of COVID when there was tight capacity. We could serve people and no one else could, really, an education about asset ownership in logistics in that it kind of turns you against your customers in some ways that can be unhealthy. You have to really overcome that inner that because your job when you have a plane or a ship is to fill the plane or the ship. It's not to serve the customer anymore.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has just bought their stock because they were public company and they were in these public, these indices for airlines. And those tanked. But the cargo airline, the price should have gone to the roof because they're still the price that air freight's going to go crazy. I think I haven't really talked to them about why they signed the deal with us, but we got a good deal as a result of that moment where there was this dislocation. I assume that their stock price going down was like part of their anxiety to like get these things signed off with us. So we got a good deal, but it did kind of turn Flexport into a cargo airline. And we've had those planes ever since. So it's not our, it was more of a tactic than a strategy. Like our goal is to be an asset light technology platform for freight forwarding and work be like more neutral and agnostic and move the car going into planes. But we saw that.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, if anyone's ever flown private, that would be like a dreamliner. I mean, there's many millions of dollars probably around trips, couple, like a million probably 500K. I'm not sure. So he gave us a great deal. We saw lots of things like that, but it wasn't sustainable for the business side of things. Now, and we had a lot of ongoing demand for air freight, but all the passenger planes are grounded. So we signed a long-term deal for 3747 from Atlas Airlines, the biggest cargo airline in the world. dedicated to Flexport. And it was in that response to that like, hey, the passenger plane, we had this vision, this view, this perspective that air freights can be very expensive because all the capacities grounded and stuff still needs to move. People still need to ship stuff. So we signed a deal with the airline, with that airline at a great rate. And I think they were their stock, Atlas, was in these airline indices. Because actually, if we were smarter.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In April of 2020, Same problem statement. The passenger planes weren't very economic. They were giving us great deals because we were serving hospitals. It was all kind of pro bono, not-for-profit work. They were giving us great deals. It was, I remember once of the planes, the one I remember was a dreamliner. One charge us $200,000 to fly a dreamliner to China and back.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was crazy. It was like one of the most meaningful parts of my career and everyone at Flexborough. It was great because we were like not in it, none of us in the world was in a good place, but it all of a sudden totally distracted us from whatever problems. Trade fell off a cliff. It was really bad for business in the first month or two. We're like, who cares? Like, we get a hospital's like there's civilizational collapse if the hospitals don't show if the doctors don't show up for work and became friendly friends with the guy who runs UCSF, Sam Hog, Chancellor of UCSF, our local hospital. And remember, years later, I met his wife dinner and she was like, it was when I saw this Zoom call of you talking to Sam was the first moment when I realized everything's going to be okay. It really touched me. He was like, I saw you guys are highly compensated people are going to get mass delivered, you know, the day before they run out. Now, another thing that came out of that was.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, well, all of the passenger planes are grounded, so we can't ship any mask. We're like, wait, the passenger planes are all grounded. And so with some of our connections, we got in touch with all the major passenger airlines and we got 80 plane or 80 passenger aircraft and flew them to China. Because cargo planes are allowed to travel internet. Well, passenger planes could travel too, just not with passengers. Right. So we got the airplane, the airlines to give us great deals because otherwise the planes are just idle. Sitting there in the desert and stuff and just sitting at the airport. So we got all this. We got 80. We did 88, I think it was 87, 88.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in the belly of passenger planes. And those all got grounded because of COVID. There was no reason to, you know, I think they were actually grounded legally. And so we saw, we were at the heart of kind of bringing masks, bringing PPE generally in for U.S. hospital networks from mostly produced in China. And so we saw this insane demand for air freight and there were no ships and no planes to move it. And the ships were too slow. Like hospitals were running out of masks. So we saw that and got pretty active. Like, well, you can kind of see the solution to that problem is in the process.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“January even, yeah, I mean, it was in the newspaper, but we have a group called Flexport.org. We do shipping for humanitarian causes, like refugee camps and hospitals, nonprofits at cost, sometimes below cost. We had been partnering with a lot of great groups like International Aid groups and things like this. And COVID, it was in the newspaper, would have hit in Wuhan. And we actually got a ton of demand to ship masks to China for the doctors in China. And so in January of that year, we shipped about 300,000 and 95s from the US to China, which then like two months later when there were no N95s masks in the US, we're like, whoops So yeah, we saw that pretty early. And then the other thing that came out in that period was people about 50% of the world's air freight travel, we do air freighting on socio-freight and about 50% of the world's air freight flies.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2019, we got the funding from South Bank and then we did. I hired a CTO that year. Really upgrade to co-invest in our tech. We hired a CTO from Amazon Logistics and he helped us build some of that workflow software that I just described. It was like kind of an architect for that. And then COVID hit. And that's where I saved FlySport looked really great. Like we were, we turned profitable in 2022. Our revenue peaked at 3.8 billion because the price of freight was so high.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm sure we will. But in 2016, it's kind of the opposite. There was so much capacity. It was so cheap. You could ship a container from China, the US for our costs were like $600. Normal long run average about $2,000 today. I didn't check the price this morning. It was probably four or five thousand right now. And the peak COVID was, you know, famously got to like 20,000. But it was 600 bucks that year. And that was an early year. We did YC in 2014. And in 2016, we took those cheap prices and just pass them through to customers. And it led to crazy growth for us. Good lesson, actually. We want to be able to play that strategy, pass through low costs, and you'll grow really fast.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that was even before Hanjeen was the big ocean carrier. They went bankrupt in 2016. 2016 was a very interesting year for freight forwarding that everyone's forgotten about because we all keep talking about expensive freight and all the chaos and problems in supply chain nanotariffs but COVID, a whole bunch of other things the Red Sea crisis like wars but a whole”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People picking up the phone and sending a free email forwarding, I call it. But that's the way every other freight forwarder in the world does it too. So we're like, okay, build a better interface for the customer, drive demand. And have this we are not satisfied with the way the industry works. What are we going to do to structural? In fact, in many cases, the car cost be higher because if you don't structure the data, You just forward the email, the PDF. Like, that could be cheaper than being like, oh, I got to structure that, put it into our database. And so your cost can be higher, especially if you're just doing one shipment one time. Why bother structuring the data? The whole point is that the second time you ship the same thing, your costs are really low because you just go, yeah, do that again.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were doing a lot of stuff manually. We're still open to do we do a lot with people But with Not satisfied with that, we're like constantly Figuring out, okay, we'll just do it. That's the secret to our success. We're willing to do what the customer needs with humans as needed, but constantly say this is not good. What are we going to do software-wise to take this and structure the workflow and put it into an automation? So we're now on like a freight, just a standard plain vanilla ocean container for many port in Asia to anywhere in the US, inland all the way to destination. We break it down about 108 steps that have to be completed and 92% of those are done either by software or automation or sent out to like a third party BPO processing entity. So that gets our cost down and the quality is really good because everything's measurable and precise. So we've got that piece is like really took us a long time to build. It wasn't like that in the beginning. In the beginning, people.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like the math says we grew faster than they did. I don't know how they did their math, but they were wrong. We should have been number one that year. It wasn't weighted. I don't remember who it was. But we should, anyways, we were very fast growing company. And a lot of times, yeah, that can kind of like cover up a lot of problems that we had.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. There were no APIs, still very few APIs. A lot of manual work, a lot of, we've built automation and software interfaces and wherever there are systems, like a lot of integration layers into different IT systems of all the vendors. Yeah, we opened up a can of worms. Like we got unlimited demand, but like problems much harder and hard to keep up. And that's why I say it's been like this race to like build the capabilities tech people, geographic footprint infrastructure around the world to match the demand. But we went from the metrics at the moment of the first softbank investment, but one point ink magazine rated flexport the second fastest growing company in the world they do seen the ink 5000 we were we were second place but the first place company was started before us and was smaller than us”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are much more likely to have a single customs broker and many forwarders. And when we only did customs, we were not getting the legitimate companies that we wanted to build a business around. So that was the first kind of, not really a pivot. We always knew we'd go into freight, but we went there much faster than we wanted to. And the moment we did that, it was, again, like back to Couldn't keep up with the demand. And it became a much harder problem. Like customs, like, okay, cool. This is a contained environment here. I got to collect the data. Got to transmit it to US customs. Freight forwarding all of a sudden, I'm like unconstrained. I'm out here in the freaking wild giant round world.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT