Building The Flexport Team & Hiring

I actually want to ask a question from a founder that was sending me a message, which is, you know, looking back now, you know, what were some of the early key hires for Flexport?

Oh yeah. I mean, so many. I think my very first hire was a former investment banker, but like a really young, I mean, I think he had done 2 years of investment banking outta college. He was a really, you know, maybe 24 years old or something and just worked really hard and had a good attitude and was willing to do anything to make the company successful. And so just having like that kind of jack of all trades who's smart and hardworking and will set the tone for everybody else. They're like, hey, we're going to work, we're going to put this above anything else in our life, which is harder to do for people with families and stuff like that. It's impossible. You should not do it if you have a family. But like, that's what, that's the benefit of people, young people with no families. Like they can just do that. And he put it, he put Flexport first and then that set the tone for everybody else that joined. And he could kind of offload lots of stuff to him that I didn't want to do. And he had, there was nothing not good enough for him work-wise. Early technical hires were super important to set the tone and set the bar of what types of talent you would, we would require, what skills you need to come work at Flexport from an engineering perspective. That sales hire I mentioned, Hired a great ex-consultant and friend of mine though. I don't really think that highly of the consulting firms in terms of joining companies because they just don't have enough experience doing the work. They're much more used to advising people than doing work. But I knew him for a long time and he had a lot of background in freight forwarding on the consulting side. So he could teach us like at an intellectual level how these things work that we didn't quite understand. So getting someone from the industry who's an insider that you trust, still, it, you know, I think we were too slow to hire industry expertise and especially tech people from the industry. We like just look so, look down so much on this industry that we didn't hire people out of the technology orgs. of our incumbents. That was probably a mistake. Like, I don't think you hire those people and put 'em in charge, but you want to have their voice. They know there are certain aspects of data architecture, data modeling that are industry specific that we could have avoided probably years of tech debt if we would've had more experience in modeling these transactions. We're probably too arrogant in that regard. We should have hired more. Once we hired a few people, we're like, oh, this makes tons of sense. We should, you know, set things up the wrong way in the beginning.

Yeah. And I guess, so what's the Flexport team like today?

Worldwide, we're about 2,000 people. 400 of them are software engineers. I think of that, the biggest office is in Amsterdam. And, but we're like, we don't, not by much. We have like 6 offices that have 150 people in them around the world. We started in San Francisco, but San Francisco's now like the 7th largest office in the company or something. We've just not, it's not a great place. So we've been growing everywhere else. China is our 2nd and 3rd and 4th big, 2nd and 3rd biggest offices are in China. And then it's probably some of the Dallas, Chicago, New York. So we're, we're pretty globally distributed. We're in, I think we're in 15 countries now where we have our own people, our own employees in 15 countries, something like that, 15 or 16.

Pretty incredible sense of scale you're at today.

Well, it's hard, you know, I travel 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 weeks a month plus 2 days a week on the weeks I'm not traveling. So I had to go out there. It's not a, I mean, this is amazing. Like video conferencing has made the company way, I don't know how you'd run one of these companies back before video conferencing.