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

“Exactly. And so, like, whenever we talk to real companies that were doing repeat transactions, they're like, we didn't want to separate customs from the freight. And if they did, they were going to give the customs to like the best customs brokerage in the world with the best reputation for compliance. And like we were not to the startup. Now we actually have a lot of big companies that use Flexport for customs only because we've built our brand and our reputation and our technology systems to actually we can say, hey, we're the best. If you want to separate your customs from freight and there are good reasons to do so like it's a hub for your compliance data. You don't want to shop it out and have all these compliance records living in 10 different freight forwarder systems.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A took took, which is like from Cambodia. Some guy went to Cambodia and bought like one of those little jeepney kind of scooters with the seats in the back. Berkeley professor wanted it for the nudest parade in Berkeley. He was only going to do one of those in his life. Not a great customer. So we had like a lot, a lot of customers for customs brokerage, but like rough customers doing things that they were amateurs. They know what they were doing. They weren't probably going to recur. Some guy bought like a bouncy house for his kid's birthday party in China because he was too cheap to buy one locally. Like stuff like that.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyways, that was very early days. Many things happened. I would say the summary of it all is we had product market fit just like insane from the get-go to the point of it being a problem, like more demand and we could keep up with asking us to do more things than we were capable of doing, just sort of run away. It was almost successful. Lots of mistakes and bumps in the road, but I guess the big, a couple of big milestones on there. One is we started out when we went through why Combinator Flexport was just a customs brokerage. We didn't do freight forwarding. And we said, hey, we're going to do freight forwarding someday, but we wanted to just focus the kind of dogma in startups to be really good at one thing. Really focus. You've written about this, like need to focus. We also, the other dogma is talking, you know, why accommodate talk to users and make something people want. And when we were just doing customs, we get customers, but like we get the worst kind, we get a lot of rough types of customers. One of the first things we ever imported was a...”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customs wouldn't accept that they wanted the license and the printer problem, I don't know what the IT problem was, they wouldn't accept a letter on city letterhead saying yes, this company has a license on file with us. They wanted to see the actual license. It was kind of like Kafka S. At some point we just weren't going to be able to operate in San Francisco. We were like operating remotely in Houston and it just wasn't going to work. And customs was kind of clear. Like you need to you can only transmit entries physically sitting in Houston. So I told Ron Conway about this situation and he emailed the late Ed Lee who was our mayor. And Ron was like one of his big donors and friends. And we got the license within six hours. They like went down. I don't know what happened at City Hall. They got the license printed and we sent it to customs and all got moved. But like there was a moment there where like Flexborg was not going to be able to operate in San Francisco.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aren't totally efficient, but kind of. And okay, so we had this license, but it was in Houston and we wanted to be in San Francisco after YC. And in order to transfer it, it's just an administrative process, but you have to have a business license from the city of San Francisco. Simple, it's just a business license. Well, the city of San Francisco had an IT problem and was unable to issue business licenses. And this was in 2014. They had not been issuing business licenses for several years. They could issue a letter that says you have a business license.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot. Actually, one of the funniest things one of our other investors is Ron Conway, and he was, he saved Flexport at one point. I don't know if I've ever told this story, but we had a license from customs and border protection, but it was issued oddly enough in the port of Houston, which is like a whole story, but it was like, that's where we got our license for. And it's fine. You have a national license. One of the things that made Flexport possible was that in 2007, I think it was, the customs will change the rules to allow for electronic filing of customs entries. And it used to be that you had to have a license at each port where you wanted to clear goods. So a startup could not possibly enter unless you were just like a little mom and pop help the local companies, but like there's no point in doing an internet company to serve one port. And so that changed in 2007. We started applying for licenses in like 09 or something.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over and over again all day. So there's a queue. So if you pitch and you want to do it again to come back and try again, you've got to wait like three hours for your turn. So like three or four hours go by. My friend goes back up and presents the pitch and he says exactly word for word everything that PG told him to say. And then PG was like, that's perfect. That's the best bitch I've ever heard. He totally forgot because he's doing too many pitches in a row. He totally forgot that that was like, dude, you wrote that bitch. That was amazing. I learned a lot from all his essays and stuff too. It's hard to. Remember what I learned from him personally versus reading all of his stuff.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is proprietary secret. I'm going to let you in on. You should tighten the aspect ratio on your graph. and it'll make it the curve look steeper. I feel like he told everybody that just scratch your grass and watch how your startup looks hotter. There's something to that you got to appeal to investors greed. I don't know if he taught me that or someone else, but it's kind of the same thing. There's a feeling that goes to it. Really simplifying things. I mean, one of the things that PG is really good at if you read his writing and stuff is just like very simple language. You won't read like a PG sentence when you're like, what is that word? I don't understand. He's like, very simple. It's easy to understand. My favorite PG moment from that period was one of my friends had us in the batch did a presentation and PG was like, this is terrible. This is not good. And he rewrote the whole thing for me. He was like, you should say this, this, and this. And like, he just said all the things. And my friend just took down perfect notes. Probably does like, you pitch for two minutes, then he gives you like 10 minutes of feedback, and then the next group comes. And he just does that.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Best deals have done for them. Again, I was really lucky because we were in his last batch. And he announced like halfway through the badge that he was stepping down and Sam was taking over, but he kept running the badge the whole way. So then when it came to demo day, the preparation for demo day for when you go pitch the investors, I barely worked on my pitch. In fact, my pitch was pretty bad, I think. I'm like not very good at reading a script, and they only give you two minutes. So you kind of have to have a script if you're going to do a two-minute pitch. But also, I was kind of back because I didn't practice very much. I had the opportunity to sit there. I'm in Picasso's studio, you know, watch Picasso paint. You know he's about to retire. So I got to sit there and watch PG critique other people's pitches instead of going, I don't want to sit there and paint. Like, let me just watch Picasso paint, you know. So I sat next to him for 12 hours a day for like three days in a row watching him critique everyone else's pitch.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His main thing is not he doesn't look at the downside and what could go wrong. He only looks at what could go right and like how big and awesome could this be in the best case scenario and what should you do to make that happen? And that's like for a seed investor, the obviously correct way because the losers don't matter. All that matters is you get the power law winners that do $100,000.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of controversial, OYC partners. I think they're a little better about him now than they used to be, but they would kind of choose favorites. And, hey, that's the game. You know, it's business. It's not a socialist project. We're here to like find the best businesses and back them. But it is, I try to tell every founder, like, you're going to go into YC. It's not, you're not there to have fun. You're trying to be the best. And it is a competition. Sure, make friends with them. I'm sure Michael Phelps is friends with the other swimmers too. But like you're trying to beat them on some level”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies. I think it's very important to be a top company if you're going to do Y Combinator. It is a bit of a competition. A lot of people don't realize that. It's like at the end of the day, there's only so many hot companies that can come out each year. And you want to be, if you're one of those, then it's tremendously valuable for you. Because fundraising, I could have raised money. I'd built a successful, profitable SaaS business. I'm sure I could have raised money. But I literally tried at one point to raise money. And I showed up in Silicon Valley on Sandhill Road wearing a suit and tie. I just didn't know. I think people just were like, who's this guy? You know, and tried to raise money for it. I didn't try that hard. I did a couple pitches and they went nowhere. And then with YC, it was a feeding frenzy. It turned it from an outbound sale, which is hard doing outbound kind of cold calling to an inbound sale where everybody was like eager to invest. They heard about Flexport, PG himself really liked and likes Flexford and was telling investors you should invest in this company.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But for me it was amazing because I'm not from, I hadn't been living in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. I didn't have connections and the Evernote CEO Phil Libby. He was hilarious. Chesky Brancheski. Yeah, kind of like somewhat eminent founders and investors. But they just come and give a talk for a couple hours, do Q&A. So nothing amazing, but the real benefit of YC, I think, is the friends that I made. Like as an outsider, fair to call myself that back then, like I didn't have a lot of entrepreneur friends. They were trying to find them online and stuff. So this like all of a sudden I had all these peers who were also building businesses. And like, that's, I don't know, that's just super valuable from a life experience standpoint. I don't know how much it helped a business, but it just like made my life better. And then it also, I guess that kind of understates like why see if you're one of the top.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm really lucky that not only was the last batch, but he announced a mid batch, so he didn't take it for granted that you were getting this time with Paul.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It may have changed. This was already 10 years ago. Do a Tuesday dinner. To cook it, I think it would be really bad for it.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we'd already got licensed. And that was the thing we had the idea. Between me and my brother and our other partner who had the idea for full export. We all claim it. But first email that I can find like discussing this was like in 2008 or 9. But it took a long time to get licensed by a customs of border protection. I had to go through an FBI background check. Had to do a whole bunch of, yeah, it just takes years. So it was when we got the license from CBP that I left, stepped down and started Flexport. And that was about six months before YC started. I forgot the timeline of the application, but about six months before. So we had, but we didn't maybe one customer. We really didn't have any customers, but we had a V1 of the software app, had to license, like how a bit of a strategy for what we were going to go do.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least Freedom Information Act to access them from all the customs and border protection and you get access to the data. They make no effort whatsoever to make it useful. You don't have to do paper digitization, but they just get like data dumps and they won't give you past data.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business is very much limited by your churn rate. If you have any turn at all, you have like a cap on how big you can be unless you're increasing the number of customers you're getting or the size of those customers. It's pretty simple math. I teach a lot at Flexport. It's like how important it is to retain customers.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hedge funds and analysts like Wall Street types that want to see what's going on, they'll pay and they'll pay, they're not that price sensitive and they'll keep paying every month. But we weren't that sophisticated and our signups were always pretty good relatively consistent forget the numbers, but we would sign up a few hundred customers every month, but eventually, you know, the size of your business is just simply the number of new signups that you get divided by your churn rate and you'll churn rate. And that tells you how many customers you're going to get at equilibrium. Because those two lines will cross. And we got to that point. And then from there, I tried everything I could to tried everything we could wasn't just me to bend that arc, either make the signups go up or the retention change. And like we ended up just adding a lot of costs to the business without, we did some stuff that works, but really your scale of your business.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most important one is the user retention company's great and the data set's extremely valuable, but for a lot of users you don't need to keep paying for it on an ongoing basis. You can get the data, run your search, find the factory that you're looking for or the data, and you don't need to keep subscribing. So we had a relatively high churn rate. Certain types, we've eventually figured out which types of customers would pay every single month, tended to be actually a freight, a lot of freight forwarding companies. You use it at Flexboard is for list construction, lead gen, like finding who's importing. They have my sales team call them, talk to them about their freight.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying, hey, we just talked to Steve Jobs that he's really pissed about this. You need to explain where you got this data, sort of like threatening to show some like, so I showed him the letter, we showed him the letter of the law explaining why this is public record and it's public record. And then he said does a letter and email later saying, hey, thank you so much. I had to explain, I shared that with Apple's team. Thank you for taking the pressure off of us. But it was a bit of the early days of like, you know, how do you get attention and traffic for a new product that's pretty cool. It's kind of like a really viral marketing type thing, even though it was hindsight kind of.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New product they'd never imported before called an electric computer, which is very interesting. All computers are electric. It was like a silly name. And it was a perfect storm, perfect moment. Everybody knew it was already being rumored that the 3G iPhone was arriving. I don't even know if it was right. I just put out this blog post being like, Apple has this new thing. Maybe it's the 3G iPhone. And it went very viral. We got within a week we were doing like $50,000 in monthly revenue like all the, you know, from zero to $50,000 in a couple of weeks. And I got a call from US Customs.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So back in one of the early, we had Bill in Port Genius. It's a great data set. It's really powerful. And you can look up companies and see what they're shipping or who they're buying from and stuff. And at that time, I guess still, the big thing was once the new iPhone going to come out, I think we were just on that. There was the 3G iPhone. Forget, I think that's just like the second iPhone ever. It was kind of crazy. Where are we on 5G now? But it was the 3G iPhone. We had built this product and we had like no users for it. It was a great example of like if you build it, they will not come. You have to go get customer. We had a couple customers, but not really. So I knew we needed to get some attention. People needed to know that this data is out here. And we had such interesting data by companies. And so I was searching in the data set for Apple shipments and saw, it's public record. You can look it up, saw that they were importing.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally sleeping in the air mattress in our little apartment. And I would just go, Y Combinator at that time did not have great security. So I would just go with him to all the Y combinator sessions and just said I like acted like I was part of his company even though it kind of was. And then that inspired me to go. I'd been working on my own thing, which became Flexborough, inspired me to apply to the Y Combinator and go through it as well.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He would have been 2013. And then I saw that. I got jealous. I mean, I'm like, oh, you're moving from Arizona. I moved to Arizona. I'm not from there. I moved there for. KPX after China, actually. No, after China, excuse me, both before and after. So I had moved there for this business, for these businesses. And then I saw him leave to go to the Bay Area where I went to college at Berkeley to do Waiter. I was like jealous. I followed him.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Keep drawing, actually, but it was not being a rocket show. We had like a few years of runaway growth and it kind of reached its place in the ecosystem. And it's been like a steady compounder for the last decade, but not wasn't enough for me to stay engaged as I should have been. And I came back to this idea of be an online platform to help you with logistics, especially your customs clearances, coming back to our motorcycle days of like, man, it's way too important to be this hard and this lack of tech. My brother had gone in this different direction, which was his is like what other public data sets are out there that we could build valuable data sets and sell subscriptions or provide access to. And so he started a company called Build Zoom in constructing construction data. So your building permits are public record in most places. And building rich profiles of contractors, or you can look up any building and see who remodeled it, et cetera. So it's kind of like both similar origin starting points, but very different businesses.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you could look up any product type and see who the factories are or look up any importers, see who their factories are, etc. So we built a search engine for that data called ImportGenius.com. Still a great business. Still own it. So we started that business, sell subscriptions. And that was like, again, bootstrap, not Silicon Valley. We started it in Arizona where the motorcycle business was, but we very much like got into tech. Like it was a SaaS business. It started following like trying to learn about SaaS. I wish we knew more. The blogging, the podcast world. You can learn so much more about AI, whatever. You can learn so much more now than you could back 15 years ago about how to run a SaaS business. But that's what really got us into tech scene. We were still outsiders for sure. And then both my brother and I both started new companies. At some point, that business, great business, but it's kind of like hit its.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you can get the shipping manifest data. So it tells you kind of like your plane ticket, your boat ticket for your cargo. So it tells you which factory, who made the product, where's it from, who bought it, who sold it, the dates, the ports, a lot of interesting data. And so we realized this data was incredibly useful for us in sourcing products for that company. We were always adding new products to the line.”
2025-08-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Ryan Petersen: Building Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT