Flexport founder Ryan Peterson on getting “ramen profitable”

The downside of it is it's sort of like a really time bound, pressure cooking situation. You got 90 days and then if you don't raise money, you're kind of like, I don't know, you might die or you fail. And even if you do raise money, there's an expectation that's put on you that you're going to like go hire a bunch of people and have 18 months of Runway. And then if you don't achieve it in 18 months, you're dead. I never really liked that approach that much. For me, I was like, I kind of like Paul Graham's original teaching, which is like, be a cockroach, stay alive. Nobody can kill you. On some timeframe, you'll succeed totally, but the timeframe is super uncertain. So how do you set your life up a way that you can't fail? I mean, you had to grow as much as possible before you ever started your company. Yeah, I started businesses and ran companies for 11 years and my brother for even longer than that. 11 years before I ever raised any venture capital and started some successful businesses that generate millions of free cash flow every year. It's like, how do you design your life in a way where it's kind of like be rom and profitable, but in life instead of in your company? So for example, the company that I started that is called ImportGenius.com, this is what I did right before Flexport and right before I joined Y Combinator. I was running this business that is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, provider of data to the import export industry and global logistics industry. We sell data on shipping manifests. And when we were starting that business, I didn't know if it was going to be successful. I had never really heard of venture capital or been involved in that world. It was very much. Well, we figured out how to get this data. We wrote software to create an interface where we could sell the data. And I didn't know if it was going to work, if anyone would buy it. So I found ways to make money. I wrote business school case studies for Columbia Business School. Really? In fact, yeah. I wrote the first ever business school case study about an African business. I went to Nigeria and I was making like 40 bucks an hour or something, but I had income. What year was that? That was in 2008. Oh, wow. Yeah, so that was like a job that I got, but it was part time, it was flexible, so I could do that while working on my startup. And what was the other one I had teaching the GMAT which is the business school entry class. I had, like a very high GMAT score, so that qualified me to teach that class. I just, like, find. Oh, and I had a third one doing consulting to help people with their website, generate more traffic from Google. And so I had three different flexible. I could work any time of day on those jobs. You're ahead of the curve then. And then. And then that gave me, like, freedom to on any time horizon. I wanted be successful because I couldn't die. My expenses were low. I was paying down my debt. My number one advice for people who want to be entrepreneurs is get rid of your student debt. And then, yeah, it took me a number of years before we found success, but success was certain because, like, we didn't have this, like, time horizon that it had to happen in 18 months or else we were all going to go bankrupt and everyone's going to be mad at us. We never had investors, we just executed. Actually, it had success pretty quickly. So I didn't do those things for very long. I kind of prefer that setup than the pressure of, like, you've raised money now, everybody. You have to succeed in 18 months or it's over.