Ryan Petersen explains why he believed Flexport could work: a massive, fragmented freight-forwarding market with weak competitors and almost no technology. The business model was asset-light, he could hire better talent, and early customers ranged from large brands to small sellers. Moving cargo globally turned out harder than expected.
Chapters
What kind of gave you the conviction, you know, that you thought like Flexport would work and to take on capital?
It was, I, you know, the market's just so big, the competition's so weak in my opinion. That's just like objectively the, if you look at the top 100 freight companies, freight forwarding businesses in the United, in the world, none of them were founded after the web browser was invented. So it's just like an industry And it's capital light. You should, it's asset light. You don't need to own, this is an intermediary. You don't need to own the ships and the planes and the, in some cases you want to have warehouses, but you really don't need it to get started. And so you can, yeah, it's a very attractive industry, very fragmented, lack, no tech anywhere to be seen. I'd been a customer of these companies for a long time, so I knew how bad they were. I knew how much money we had to spend with them. I thought they all had mediocre people. I mean, that's just rude because we've hired a lot of their people, so I don't want to overstate that. But we've hired great people from the industry. There are great people in this industry, but in general, the average person that just kind of like a DHL— well, it is DHL literally, you know, call the 800 number and tell me your experience. It's not that great. And so I knew we could do better on the talent side. I knew we could do better on the tech side. I didn't have the expertise, so I had to go figure out how to actually execute. But But yeah, and then all the signups we were getting of big household names were signing up as well as like lots of small Amazon sellers and stuff like that. So it was pretty obvious from the beginning that like, if we can do the job, there will be demand. It's still, you know, a hard job to do. And like, it's become more clear if I'd known how hard it was. I mean, I think, I don't think I would've been so optimistically naive, naively optimistic about it all. Like, It's getting the— being able to move cargo around the world is not easy.
