Embracing Change for More Effective Supply Chains with Ben Braverman of Flexport

Welcome to The Future of Supply Chain. Each episode, we bring together leaders across the supply chain space to discuss the role of technology and business model innovation on the future of supply chain. The Future of Supply Chain podcast is presented by Dynamo. Dynamo is a pre-seed and seed stage supply chain investor. To learn more about Dynamo and this show, head over to www.dynamo.com. Www.dynamo.vc/podcasts or subscribe on the platform of your choice. Now let's get into the show. Here's our host, Santosh Sankar.

Hey, ladies and gents, welcome back to the Future of Supply Chain Podcast. I'm your host, Santosh Sankar, and joining me today is Ben Braverman, CCO at Flexport. Welcome, Ben.

Thanks, Santosh. By the way, that is an amazing announcer voice. I did not peg you for someone who had that skill.

I, I, I have been accused of, and maybe accusation's a, uh, strong word, but I have been told in the office here that when I'm on the phone or I'm doing the podcast, my voice actually changes. So it's not a good problem, but it's, it's awesome.

It sounds like you're, you're calling a college bowl game, but it's, it's awesome to be here. Thank you for having me. Obviously, like, you can't invest in supply chain without being a fan of Dynamo, so Excited to be here, excited to get to know you better, and thank you.

Yeah, yeah, great to have you. And I also want to add to that and say big congrats on the round you all pulled the wraps off of last week. And with that, I think for many of our listeners, Flexport's a household name, but there are certainly listeners that we add every week who might not be as familiar. So it'd be great to just get the 90-second overview of what you guys are building over there and kind of spreading general awareness of the Flexport story.

Yeah, of course. I will always talk my own book and I'm happy to do it once again here. We are a freight forwarder, a customs broker, increasingly a platform for global trade where some of the largest brands in the world, most of the largest direct-to-consumer brands run their global supply chain. So it's everything from where orders come in to where their factory says, hey, we need to make a booking. We need a truck to come to our facility. It's where that container or that pallet is allocated to an airplane or container ship. It's where government documents are filed. It's where the export declaration is filed. It's where everything that has to happen to move a large volume of goods. So whether it's, you know, 10 containers of Allbirds or whether it's an airplane full of Lululemons, it's everything that it takes to move this stuff around the world safely, as inexpensively, as quickly, and as compliantly as possible. And we are like a true full-stack business, meaning that our customer, although they use our software platform and sort of the reason people, you know, think Flexport is unique is when they log in, they see a map of the world, they see all their trucks and planes and trains moving. More importantly, they see the most accurate data set on where everything is, when it's going to arrive. They're able to communicate with their team. They're able to share these insights with the rest of their organization. You know, it really sort of empowers the supply chain team. To be elevated in their organization. But we don't actually sell that platform. If you want to get it from Flexport, you've got to be moving stuff with us. And that's not because we're, you know, it's not because we're obstinate or difficult or stupid, I hope. It's because to actually do a great job with these things, to actually have superior data quality in your platform, we think the right method is just to be responsible for the cargo. And the nice thing is when you add up these, you know, 12, 14, 15, however many services it is we're doing on a given transaction, you're actually generating more revenue than you ever could from a software product. And that's good for us, obviously, but I think it's also good for the customer because we just take all this revenue that ultimately some of it drops to the bottom line and all that goes back into about $100 million a year of R&D on the software platform. So it's this very virtuous cycle of supporting customers end-to-end, moving their goods around the world, executing all the services they need, invoicing them for all the services as one simple bundle. And then investing the proceeds back into the software platform that makes it easier for them to run their supply chain and easier for us to move the goods. So that sort of is the very high-level view of what Flexport does.

So, and what's the Ben Braverman story? How did you end up getting into the wonderful world of international logistics and equally now having the role of CCO?

Yeah, so it's so interesting. Like, you know, for those of you who don't know, most of my time now is working on our various investment vehicles. One being a small accelerator that we're running with, with On Deck, primarily focused on supply chain companies. One being a very traditional strategic investment vehicle where if it's sort of 1 1 3, and that's why I stole that from Stripe, which effectively just means in the investment context, if we believe that Flexport and a company that we're investing in can actually help that company grow more quickly as a result of the investment, whether it's by selling to our customers, selling to our suppliers, or just selling to Flexport directly, or building something new on top of the Flexport platform. If any of those things are true, maybe we invest as sort of a traditional strategic investor, or we have something that's a little less traditional, which is this opportunistic fund. That's where I spend most of my time today. And I have to be so careful that I don't sort of become an expert. And what I mean by that is I knew nothing about supply chain when I decided to bet my career and at the time, my life savings on Flexport. I invested in the seed round. I begged Ryan to hire me for a year as I was working on another YC company. I'd met him at the dog park and immediately fallen in love with the story he told about an industry that was sort of in need of a visualization and potentially even some rebirth. But ultimately, I was a novice. And even though I was a novice, I could still tell that this was the opportunity of a lifetime. And I worry a little bit as an investor now that, you know, I spent the better part of a decade in transportation. I know enough to be dangerous, you know, across a few disciplines. I worry that sometimes I'm going to be too smart for my own good and just miss out on something that just because I think I know how a part of the industry works and, you know, may continue to work in the future, that I could be just dead wrong. And so I try to remember, hey, at the beginning of Flexport, we were really learning from first principles how a freight forwarder operated, how a customs brokerage operated. And we hired folks from the industry that could teach us a little bit about how to do things well. And they certainly had to stay compliant and make sure we were following the letter of the law. But otherwise, we were really figuring it all out on our own from first principles. And I think it gave us this enormous advantage where, you know, there was a lot of things that people thought were impossible in terms of automation. There was a lot of things that people thought were impossible in terms of customer service and NPS, but we just didn't know any better. And we tried, you know, we tried things that I think folks who maybe knew more about the industry wouldn't have tried. And so as I, as I now in my new role, it says CCO, I think sooner it will change to something that more accurately reflects what I'm doing now. I think a lot of, a lot of what I want to remember is just because someone isn't a domain expert, it may be the next great trucking company is not built by someone who knows anything about trucking. It may be the next great insurance company is built by someone who knows nothing about insurance, or it may be that, you know, that we're further, we're further along in the development of our, of our industry. And it is going to be experts that come in and nail the next set of problems. But yeah, I started at Flexport, you know, to answer your original question, you know, 8 years ago, leading sales and marketing. And about a year and a half ago, a guy named Will Urban, who is awesome, who I'd actually been working with as a consultant, sort of at the, in the end of my CRO era, just to try to level up and understand, okay, what do the biggest customers in the world need from us? And eventually he just came in and did that job full-time. A lot of what I've done in the last 18 months is, you know, transition those relationships, make sure that all the customers that I used to be so directly responsible for day to day were, you know, making sure they were still feeling the love, and then figured out what to build next. And what we've built is, like I said, the investment vehicles and then a really cool project called Flexport Flow that integrates Flexport more tightly with a bunch of the 3PLs in the US.

Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting, right? You're in this transition and part of this transition is you're becoming the face for Flexport as startups now turn to Flexport as kind of this grown-up venture-backed business that they all aspire to also be on the same level of. You're kind of going back and reminding yourself as to, hey, Flexport's what it is today, not because we were experts or knew about this industry, but it's because we were exposed to parts of the industry And we had just enough context to be dangerous and to rethink why certain things happen. And I think that's absolutely the common thread when you look at some of the standouts in our own portfolio. You know, Sean at Store, it's not that he has this like rich background in warehousing distribution, but he was exposed to it enough that he started to rethink it. The guys out in Berlin at Sender, very similar story as well. So can definitely relate. But I want to move along here, Ben, and I love your take on the industry. I think Flexport over the last several months has certainly been in the headlines with commentary, increasing amounts of data and granularity around the state of global international supply chains. And I'd love to kind of get a pulse of that market from you here while I have you for a sec.

Yeah, I mean, the markets continue to surge, whether it's air or ocean, we continue to see, as an example, the charter rates for an ocean vessel right now, I'm told roughly what it would cost you on a day rate. So you're effectively leasing a vessel, it's called a day rate, but you do it by month, obviously, 'cause leasing something by day would be nonsensical in this industry. But if you're leasing something at the day rate, the rate is so high that you could effectively have acquired the vessel with what you're paying in the course of 1 year. That just gives you a sense of how high these markets are right now. And obviously, folks wouldn't be paying these charter rates if they didn't think they could then turn around and pass those costs onto the shippers. So we're still living through really trying times. We're still living through a market environment that favors large companies with deep balance sheets. And I think we're going to continue to see more and more integration and more and more of an asset play going on where folks just have to commit to longer-term partnerships with the asset owners to make sure they can serve customers. And I think it's going to be harder and harder for whether it's smaller shippers or smaller forwarders. I do think that these conditions favor folks that have deeper balance sheets. You know, you can look at the fundraise we just executed and can take some bets on assets. And commitments with partners who have assets that are highly valuable in this environment, because we don't see signs of the congestion easing anytime soon. And who knows, maybe we'll all be surprised in Christmas 2022, you know, that things are back to normal at the ports. But so far, you know, Flexport, we have this index where we actually track how long it takes goods to go from factory to where their destination You can't goof with this metric the same way you can, like the number of ships at port. Obviously, if you want to get rid of the number of ships off the port, you have them sit further out to ocean, then you can't count them anymore.

Yeah.

In our case, we're actually measuring how long it takes goods to go from point A to point B, and we're still seeing the numbers going up. It's still taking longer from the time a factory in Asia says, hey, goods ready for pickup, to the time they arrive at their destination than they were even in 2021, which was already a brutal year. So it may be that there's something I'm missing and some of these investments that we're making in capacity are gonna come back to bite us. But right now it looks like the conditions aren't changing anytime soon.

[Speaker:BRIAN PRICE] So with that, it's interesting you brought up assets here. And I think as we have observed the supply chain evolved through COVID, I do think we are in agreement that as companies hit certain proof points of growth and scale, it's not about being asset light or not. It's about what is the right exposure to assets. And in some industries, some business models, we're talking about physicality here. So you need to own assets or need to have some exposure, whether it's capacity availability or frankly, in warehousing, we've also seen service levels and being able to have enough control of the environment and the actions taken in order to ensure you're not goofing it up and upsetting your largest enterprise customer. So definitely in agreement there. Is there any sense from your vantage point, like just technology adoption as you're thinking about the forwarding market here?

Yeah. I mean, we're seeing, first of all, there's a bunch of cool companies being founded that are building tech to serve forwarders. I'm surprised it took this long. It feels like a pretty obvious idea that this Flexport is the sort of doing interesting things and you want to build a new business. A lot of folks tried to build businesses that sort of went head-on with us, but at least in the US market and a lot of other markets, I think, you know, you're finding that wasn't the right approach. I think the better approach is there's already a ton of forwarders in the market. Some of them are quite good, right? I mean, not Just because Flight Support has done well doesn't mean we don't respect our competitors. Some of the folks in the market today, they employ smart people, they run good businesses, they've just been hamstrung by legacy tech. And that's not the case for all of them. You know, some of these companies I think are going to struggle in the coming generation, but there are good ones. And those companies need better tech to buy, both to run their businesses internally and probably even more importantly, to make sure their customers have a great UI. You have a great UI to experience the service. And I think we're seeing more and more companies being founded now that are building tech for forwarders rather than trying to be full stack in the way Flexport was. And I mean, even if the total opportunity may be technically smaller, I think that right now, that's the opportunity I would focus on if I were a founder. I just think there's so many big forwarders, all of whom are printing, you know, unprecedented amounts of money right now. They all have budget to invest in tech. And maybe I'm saying something against my own interest as a Flexport shareholder, but I do think you're going to see a number of interesting companies founded in that space, just trying to arm the rebels against Flexport, so to speak.

Sure. And I think you're also being intellectually honest in the sense that you're talking about a massive market, and you can have several businesses that have high valuations, strong growth, but kind of relatively low levels of penetration. And I think that's one of the great things about the industry we're in, that there's so much skin in the cat, so to speak.

Well, you mentioned, Sean, at Storit, it's a great example of, you know, who would have thought yet another fulfillment aggregation play would be what the market needed? But it turns out, A, this market is so big that, yes, the market actually wanted another one. And the market is so big that there was room for someone like Sean to be creative and build this new hybrid model and hybrid service model that seems to really be delighting people. Yeah, it's interesting that so many people can succeed. There's very few markets that it feels like, yeah, there could be 5 to 10 winners in a category and there's still opportunity. I mean, that's the story of the forwarding market, certainly. I did a call this morning, you know, I guess it's called a podcast, with Jen, the CEO of True North. And she's building an incredible business, as you know. There are a couple competitors in the space. If you look at them, they're all growing like gangbusters. Like, the truth is the category is just so ripe and the market is so supply constrained that I think anybody who helps truck drivers and owner-operators make more money and live better lives in the coming 10 years, I think there's room for 50 companies to come in and maybe not have the success that True North or CloudTrucks or some of the other folks have had, but to own other parts of the experience and build enormous businesses because the markets are just so darn big.

Yeah. Well, and another aspect, and we share this investment as well in Chorus, right, is as you're seeing these businesses merge with technology woven through them or technology first problem-solving motion weave through them, things like visibility, what Martin, of course, is looking to build, comes to realization that this is a massive opportunity. And yeah, there's something to be had here because it's not quite baked out or fully baked out market. So it's still early innings. I think we'd both agree as it comes to supply chain technology, but I'm going to move along here. In our conversation, and I'd like to kind of delve into the evolution of sales and the sales organization at Flexport. And you mentioned now you're transitioning out, you're spending more time on the investing side, but you've certainly been in this front row seat as to kind of how it started day one and, you know, got to where it is today. But, you know, how did it start? Where are we practically today in terms of kind of headcount motion And would love to use that as a jumping point to some other perhaps questions that could elicit some wisdom from you here.

Yeah, of course. I tell founders when we're investing, there's a lot of folks at Lightspeed that can teach you a lot of things. I specifically am good at go-to-market. If you want to learn about anything else, you should probably ask me for an intro elsewhere. But yeah, go-to-market, I'm always happy to talk about.

So with that, you know, how did it start? When you showed up, when Ryan said, "Sure, you're in," what were you staring at? How many people? What were the problems? What was the early days?

Yeah, it was 5 or 6 people. Ryan had done something almost impossible in retrospect, which was get a customs brokerage license. And he'd actually acquired a brokerage in Houston. And in the process of acquiring that brokerage, he transferred the license into this new entity that became Flexport. And at that point, we were only able to operate as a license broker, which for those of you who are not from the industry, that means we couldn't actually sell you the transportation. Our ability was to help you clear the US border, pay your duties, make sure you're behaving compliantly, and potentially then also contact a trucker to pick up once the goods are tendered at the port. But we were not able to actually do the ocean freight yet. And what Ryan figured out was You know, at that point, this was, you know, early 2010s. Ryan had observed there's this explosion of Amazon sellers. And, you know, there's still a lot of controversy over the exact numbers, but, you know, we estimate there's a million Amazon sellers doing over a million dollars a year in sales. A huge percentage of those folks are importers. And what Ryan had figured out was a lot of them were having problems with customs, meaning their factory would ship something Their factory had told them, oh, no problem. We know how to get this into Amazon FBA for you. You know, we'll take care of it. Just, you know, pay us for the goods and the transportation. And the factory was able to get the goods picked up. They were able to get them loaded on a vessel. These were simpler times when getting on a vessel didn't require, you know, promises of your firstborn. But they were able to get the goods moving. What they were not able to do was correctly clear customs in the US. They did not have a customs brokerage license, obviously. They did not— the partner they had used that booked the sailing, you know, typically out of China or out of India, did not have a customs broker's license. And they would find someone like Flexport by doing a Google search that said, hey, goods stuck at Port of Long Beach, or goods stuck at Port of Newark, or how do I get goods into FBA? And they would see a Flexport ad and they would click it. And so when I joined, a lot of the times when someone clicked that ad, their call phone number, it went to Ryan's cell phone. And I, you know, he was personally onboarding these folks, helping them get a customs bond, passing them to our customs brokers. Because at that point, 2 of the 5 people on the team were customs brokers. They were people who were licensed to do this work of clearing the US border. And that's what I came into. There was effectively no sales motion. And even more worrying, the transaction sizes were very small. So you probably know this, but for the folks listening who may not, customs clearance costs about $100. And if you have just raised venture capital and told the world that you're going to build, you know, one of the, you know, a generational logistics company, it's very hard to do $99 at a time. And we were charging $99 for customs clearance and we were charging a couple hundred dollars for a customs bond. But it was obvious this was going to be a long way to build a business. And what we were finding was customers weren't recurring. Once they had solved their problem, generally, you know, one, these are really small customers, so maybe they didn't have another shipment for 6 months. But even more worrying, generally, they would, you know, because you couldn't be the beginning of their transaction, you know, the beginning of the transaction is having the goods picked up at the factory and shipped. Because we weren't involved there, it just felt like even if we did a great job for someone, the chances that they would go ask someone else to ship something the next time they had it were too high. And so I went to Ryan and I implored him that we accelerate the process of becoming a freight forwarder and getting our NVOCC license, which is a license that allows you to buy and sell ocean freight legally. There's a lot of rules associated with how you price ocean freight and how you present those prices. He agreed. He worked another miracle. We were able to get it approved. Luckily, Ryan has lived a squeaky clean, exemplary life, so he passed the FBI background check yet again. And we were able to operate. Yeah, all this stuff is federally regulated. They're not messing around. Our regulators have guns. That's right. You really want to follow the rules in this industry. Ryan managed to pull it off, get the NBCC license. And that was really the moment where everything changed, where we were able to call people with this value prop. And again, like, we were so lucky that the market dynamic was if you were Expeditors or Kuehne+Nagel or any of these sort of elite legacy, you know, 100-year-old massively profitable freight forwarders, you didn't have time to serve an Amazon FBA importer. You certainly didn't have time to teach them how to do international shipping. You're too busy moving goods for the biggest companies in the world, billions of dollars a year in top-line revenue, you just can't be in this business too. And so Flexport was very fortunate. We had basically a wide-open market and we had a customer that was experiencing a ton of pain. There was a lot of first-time importers. There was this surge of venture capital going into hardware. So like this is when wearables were huge. This is when a lot of the home security systems were really popular. You know, Ring.com was one of Flexport's early halo customers. Customers. There was all this money going to direct-to-consumer brands. So you had all these first-time importers who just needed an easy button, who just needed a Flexport to come along and say, hey, we exist, we are licensed to operate, and we're going to own this problem for you. In the early days of Flexport, that's what we were selling. Like, we hadn't built any tech yet because how could you? You know, we raised the money from Google Ventures and a few other folks early. And effectively, like, we were selling within a few months. So if you're in market a few months after you raise the money, you can't have built that much tech. But what our customer needed wasn't necessarily tech in the early days, it was just a partner who could own this problem. And that was what we really built the brand on. And I think even if you look at Flexport today, again, how we, you know, now the tables have turned and now we have the same problem that our competitors used to have, which is, you know, we serve some of these really big companies. And we have these, you know, $50 million a year annual relationships where a lot of the resources go on our side. And I think there's probably an opportunity to attack Flexport in the long tail where it's just, you know, it's harder and harder for us to resource. But this, this same mentality of just owning the problem and really like that's how we ended up deciding to give away the platform and make the Flexport interface free and not be a piece of software that you had to buy. We just saw it as, look, if we own this problem for you, and you're going to pay us to do all these services along the way, then we owe it to you to give you a wonderful place to work where you have good data and you can search by SKU and everything kind of works well and as you'd expect. Our ethos, like, was always, look, we are going to own this problem. It worked when we were selling into, you know, one-person companies all the way up to the Fortune 100. And I think a lot of our ethos really is pretty unchanged.

So, you know, how have the kind of sales and CS organizations from that, you know, 5-person to Series A and now through to your Series E, how has that changed through the scaling process? Because that's something we see both founders in our portfolio as well as outside of our portfolio just kind of, I wouldn't say struggle with, but it's a meaningful point of friction in terms of growing up and understanding what grown up means.

Yeah, I think growing up in the context of a company that grows really fast, to your point, is really just about you're gonna reorg every 12 to 18 months. And there's no getting around it. What works at one level of scale and one level of knowledge is just not gonna work at the next level. And I think that the one thing we've done consistently pretty well is been okay with evolving the model. So, you know, we've had times at Flexport where we were doing really tight handoffs between sales and account management. And then over time, as we serve bigger and bigger companies, we realized, you know, you really can't do that. You kind of need salespeople that are attached to an account for life, or, you know, the equivalent of for life, that are working in partnership with an account manager. Because that account manager, they're responsible for a global supply chain. They're responsible for an enormous amount of actual work that has to get done. They're responsible for presenting this data beautifully in a QBR every quarter. They can't also be the person that has the commercial responsibility. And so that was a big evolution. We've had times where labor was totally decentralized. Like if you look at the early days of Flexport, every single squad, everybody, you know, for us, a squad is a seller, an account manager, a bunch of operations people that are, you know, doing kind of doing legwork, and then maybe a customs broker. Every squad was their own unique snowflake. And, you know, we got to a point where there was 50 squads at Flexport and there was 50 ways to move a shipment. And that was a really hard time to build great technology because, you know, you're never going to make 50 squads happy even if you build the greatest piece of software in the world. If 3 of those teams have a different workflow, you're— everybody's, you know, you're going to have 3 teams that tell you the new tech doesn't work. So I think one of the things we had to do was get way more comfortable with the idea that our customer could still experience a lot of local account management, but that more and more of the labor could be centralized. And I think like the trick for Flexport in the coming 12 to 24 months is, can we keep centralizing sort of the rote labor, you know, the stuff that happens over and over and over again and frankly doesn't require a ton of creativity? Can we standardize and centralize that? In a way that it's still a fun job, it's still a joyful job, you don't hate working at Flexport. Can we standardize that in places where the costs are a little bit lower? And then can we still keep the customer experience like it is today, which is you're dealing with people in your time zone, in your town, that know your book of business really deeply, but that maybe aren't responsible for doing quite as much button pushing or document uploading? And like, you know, I think one of the things that you and I talked about before is there are some things you can automate in global logistics and then some things you can't. Like when there is loss, when there is damage, when there's a flood, there's going to be humans involved that have to make judgment calls about what happens. You're never going to automate every workflow. So a lot of what Flexport is trying to do now is figure out, okay, what— where does labor get centralized? Where does labor get tools made that makes their jobs a lot easier and more enjoyable? And where can we automate altogether? And I think how do you organize for this period is one of the great challenges of building a late-stage company, because like the stuff that worked when you're 200 people and you're in 4 offices, it doesn't work when you're 3,000 people in 30 offices, and it certainly won't work when you're 10,000 people in 100 offices. So yeah, I think the number one thing is one of our values has always been embrace change. I think we will continue embracing change.

Yeah. Yeah, I love it. So one founder actually punted this question to me around multi-product line sales. And they have a business where there's 4, 5, 6 different things that can be sold. And how one kind of approaches training, quota attainment. Have you seen this? Do you face it? How might you kind of put forth the framework to problem solve this?

Yes, I won't claim that we have the perfect solution, but I will share what we've done. So there's really two ways you can do this. You can either have product experts that partner with a salesperson and account manager, or you can have 15 different salespeople/account managers. And different companies have decided different things over the years. If you look back at sort of like the old-school software businesses, They chose a model where each product had its own sales organization, and you as the customer to buy, you know, 3 different products from like a 1990s version of Oracle, you would work with 3 totally different organizations in some cases. We chose not to build that way. What we figured out was, look, our job is to be this single source of truth. Our job is for our account teams to be the human embodiment of a single source of truth, where if you ask them a question, they always know what's going on. What's going on with your business. They know what, you know, they, and therefore they also kind of know what to sell you because if they know your business that deeply, they know what you need. And so we chose for a model where seller and account manager, and right now I'm speaking in global key accounts, which is led by a woman named Julie Harris. Amazing. A lot of this was, is her working with the functional leaders of Lightsword to figure this out. If you're a key account sales leader on Julie's team. You have a book of business. Let's say your book of business is, you know, Tesla and Home Depot, hypothetically. Your book of business, you, you are responsible for everything Flexport does or says with that customer. You are where the buck stops. If that customer ever feels like something is imperfect in their relationship with Flexport, they call that, that sales leader assigned to that account. Um, the, that sales leader though they could never know everything that a Tesla or a Home Depot or a company of this incredible sophistication is going to need to know. They're going to have to rely on Flexport's global tax team, Flexport's global customs team, Flexport's air freight leaders, ocean freight leaders. There's all these people they need to deliver their service well. And so what we've done is we've put people on those teams who have a quota. Effectively, they are bonused by supporting our salespeople in these accounts. And if you're Angel Rodriguez, one of our amazing sellers in Julie's organization who manages some of the biggest accounts in Flexport's orbit, if you're Angel and you know you have a meeting with one of your clients coming up and you know they want to talk about global tax optimization, you're going to, in advance of that meeting, go to the Flexport tax organization. You know, for one of Angel's clients, which are, you know, of the scale, you know, as big as it gets, you know, most likely the person who leads global tax will will come to the meeting with Angel. They'll go through with the client all the, all the options under the sun. Angel is the quarterback. He's the one who knew who to call in. He's the one who knew the client had the need. He's the one who knew who at Flexport was the exact right fit to solve that need. And ultimately, he's responsible for making sure that Flexport delivers on whatever we promised in that meeting. But he is not a global tax expert. Like, we are not saying, Angel, hey, go take night classes and get a JD in global tax. His job is to be the quarterback. It's not to be an expert in everything, although in Angel's case he may be. Most people can never be. They're always going to need that support from those domain experts. The number one thing that we figured out was if you design the incentive structure so that you're never splitting the baby, it never feels like by calling in a domain expert, one of our sellers is going to make less money. By the other token, one of our domain experts can never earn more quota credit by selling something on their own. You know, they always benefit the most by just working together and understanding an opportunity and just working in concert. That model has worked really well for us. There's a gentleman named Robin Corlett who leads it on the ocean team. There's a few folks on the air team who serve this function, but effectively it's like, you know, the quarterback is able to call in whatever resources they need and the customer then gets everything they want and need but they never have to ask, oh, who's responsible for this? Like, if I don't get what I need from FlightSport, where do I go? Do I go to the product team or do I go to my account team? They know, like, no, no, my account team is responsible no matter what.

Yeah. So kind of shifting gears a little bit around expansion, is there a kind of approach that you have, approaches perhaps you've also seen around kind of the post-land winning a customer And then the account expansion, like who's responsible? Are there certain tactics? Are there incentives and comp considerations?

Yep. So we have a totally different worldview at the bottom of our, of our market versus the top of the market. At the bottom of the market, we believe in a pretty tight handoff, and we believe that most of expansion will come from doing two things. Number one, delivering impeccable service and keeping the prices low. And number 2, consistently asking for business if we're not getting it when we expect. In a context where a customer is going to ship, call it 5 to 20 times a year, there's no need to overinvest in a quote-unquote sales motion. Most of your sales motion is getting the customer in the door in the first place and getting them on board the FlexBoard, getting their first few quotes processed through the system, getting them to book and experience our service. And then getting them assigned to an accounts team. It's a really tight handoff where our sellers in SMB, once an account is onboarded, you know, they're really able to focus primarily on new account acquisition. Upmarket, you know, if I'm talking— we're talking about Angel Rodriguez again. In Angel's world, you know, he is partnered so tightly with the account team and they are compensated in partnership. And so effectively, it's very similar to the way we think about bringing in a product line specialist. We want to make sure that it's always win-win. That if Angel and one of his account teams, and I think Angel's book is so big, there are multiple account managers that are partnered with him. But if he wants to, if he's going to sell something, he knows he'll never sell anything without the support of one of those account leaders, because they're the ones that actually have to deliver the service that he sold. So they together are responsible for the expansion. They together are, you know, they're really compensated in a way that's very consistent with how each other want to be compensated. And they're going to win or they're going to lose together as a seller and an account leader. The number one thing you have to remember if you're a sales leader and you have these sales, whether it has a lot of product lines or you have a sale that has a lot of expansion, is you just never want it to feel like the pie is limited. One of the pieces of advice that we got early on, which I'm so glad we mostly followed, is the more folks that are supporting a deal, just increase the pool that goes to bonus. As long as the deal is doing an economic positive, it's still profitable for the company. If there were a lot of folks required to sell and serve something well, increase the bonus pool, make sure that everybody wins. Never have it feel like you have to make the decision between do we assign the resource, or, you know, which might actually serve the customer really well, but it might reduce our bonus. If that's ever a consideration your teams are having to make, it means you, you did something that's sort of wonky in your incentive structure. It should always be, hey, if I do this thing that serves the customer the best, I'm gonna make the most money. And I know that.

Mm. I love that. I love that customer centricity. And it's, it's so true. And incentives ultimately drive behavior. And, and, and that's really the kind of underlying lesson. Behind that advice. But Ben, you know, I want to kind of move in and wrap up here, but give our audience a little more of your personal side. And I'm going to kind of get into this kind of rapid fire, if you would, where kind of 10-15 second answers to 3 different statements or questions. And with that, I'm going to start off with what's your favorite book?

My favorite book is probably Designing the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Okay. I read it at a very impressionable where the lesson I needed was that the journey is the destination kind of thing. I was so obsessed with outcomes as a kid and obsessed with getting to a certain place or achieving a certain thing or status, whatever you want to call it, that I wasn't enjoying anything. The whole purpose, the whole point of that book is just like, no, no, there is a certain zen in maintaining this motorcycle. There is a certain joy in hearing the engine run. Applying that to my own life, I think it has made it a lot more enjoyable. I can't say that about every book. And the book I'm reading right now that I also recommend everybody is Cable Cowboys of the US Cable System, which it really, they were cowboys. These are people who were operating largely in defiance of local regulations when they built these cable networks. It's a pretty amazing story.

Next up, your most important daily habit.

My most important daily habit. So a friend of mine named Ian Roncoroni, who kind of looks like Hercules, shout out to Ian Roncoroni and Hercules, sent me this email about 5 years ago that had his way to live. It's a way to live, it's nutrition, it's a mindset, but also it's a very hardcore push-pull-legs workout routine that I started doing during COVID I had this email in my inbox for 3 years. About 18 months ago, I started religiously doing this workout. Much to my dismay, I still do not look like Ian Roncarone, but it has made my life a lot better.

And finally, what is the thing you believe in or believe in general that most people would disagree with?

Man, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what other people think. What is the one thing I believe most people disagree with? I think that my most unpopular belief is probably that luck and destiny play a much greater role in our outcomes than any of us would care to admit. You know, I met Ryan at the dog park. I literally met him because my dog had to take a shit one day, and I saw this guy across the dog park, and for whatever reason, I had some inclination to go talk to him. I don't approach strange men at the dog park very often. I don't think I've made another adult male friend since, but for some reason, I was like, I have got to be friends with this human right now. And I'll never be able to explain that really. And so, I just have to be super grateful. And I think the only thing I believe is there's more destiny at play in our lives than we care to admit. And I'm trying to embrace that.

That's awesome. Well, with that, Ben, you dropped quite a bit of knowledge on us. Appreciate you spending the time here and equally look forward to seeing some more of the investments you and the team are making out of that new fund. Cheers.

Yeah. Yeah. Santosh, please invite me into more of your deals. You guys are amazing. And I look forward to sleeping on your couch and chatting You good?

Always welcome. Always welcome. Cheers.

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