Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen explains why your initial vision for your company is probably wrong

Has the Flexport vision changed at all?

I'd be lying if I said, like, oh, I dreamed all of this from day one, that you would have this, like, utility scale infrastructure where everybody can just place orders and it all just flows in the beginning. Honestly, my vision when I applied to Y Combinator was I want to be TurboTax for Customs and make it super simple to clear a product through U.S. customs. And the more you learn and the more customers you talk to, and the more vendors you talk to, the more you realize, like, how kind of screwed up the world is in this space. Then you're like, oh, actually, we can do bigger and bigger and it keeps expanding.

I think that's really common. I mean, there's a misconception that you sort of, you know, wake up from a haze and you're like, this is it and this is the vision. And then generally the story is actually, oh, well, here's this thing that I know that I can solve. And then once you solve it and people really like it, it sort of expands and expands.

Yeah. And like, probably if a founder is too certain of exactly what the vision is and what the product's going to look like and how it's all going to work, they're probably wrong. Like, the world is super messy.