Ryan Petersen
53 statements across 5 episodes · 9 bullish · 14 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Dec 2, 2016 by Ryan Petersen · said 50 times in 20 episodes since 2016 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Ryan Petersen's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (25), Leo Polovets (8), Trae Stephens (4), Sheel Mohnot (4), Dave Clark (3), Roy Bahat (2), David Lieb (2), Wesley Chan (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2024 12 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Trae Stephens: Why No Company is Successful Because of their VC | E1135 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Zach Perret: Why ‘Founder Mode’ is the Most Dangerous Blog Post for Founders | E1215 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Tom Hulme: Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 275x on Robinhood & Making Billions on Uber |E1150 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Delian Asparouhov: Inside the Walls of Founders Fund: What the World Does Not See | E1183 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- Dave Clark: Lessons from Leading 1M Employees w/ Jeff Bezos at Amazon to CEO of Flexport | E1036 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke: Remote Work vs In-Person; The Benefit of Setting Constraints | E997 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Roundtable #5 with Jack Altman, Auren Hoffman, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings | E1077 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- Sheel Mohnot: Lessons from Investing in Flexport and Missing on Robinhood | 20VC #917 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- David Lieb: How I Founded Google Photos & Bump; Why I Left Google | 20VC #927 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Wesley Chan: How I Created Google Analytics; The Founding Story of Gmail & Canva | 20VC #919 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2019 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC Exclusive: Roy Bahat on Bloomberg Beta's New Fund, The Truth About Valuation That Very Few VCs Will Tell You & Why Founders of Venture Backed Startups Make The Best Angels
- 20VC: Carta Founder Henry Ward on Why The Best Companies Are Not Product Led But Distribution Led, 3 Requirements Needed For A New Market/Investment To Be Exciting and Why Small Markets Are So Attractive
- 20VC: Initialized's Garry Tan on The Most Important Thing A Seed Investor Can Do For Founders, How Ownership Requirements Change With Evolution of Funds & Why There Is Not Too Much Capital Chasing Too Few Deals
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive
- 20VC: Sam Altman, Y Combinator President on What Makes Truly Great Leaders, Why We Will See A Compression of Seed Funding & The Future Scaling of YC
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 9 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
- 20VC: Investing; A Game Of Access Or Picking, Why Technical DD At Seed Is Irrelevant & Why A Contrarian Mindset Does Not Always Lead To Optimal Returns with Leo Polovets, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Susa Ventures
- 20VC: SaaStr's Jason Lemkin on The 3 Things You Want From Your LPs, Why Most VCs Do Not Add Value & Why The Best VCs Know How To Package Startups For The Next Round
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
Everything said about Ryan Petersen, oldest first
Dec 2, 2016
Dec 2, 2016 bullish
Dec 2, 2016 negative
Petersen: Startup Corporate Boards Are Dangerous and Often Lack Qualifications
“I think that boards are very dangerous because all of a sudden you've empowered these people with title and decision-making authority. Now you're, you have argument from authority, right? Like you're, because the board says it must be the right thing to do. Ev…”
Dec 2, 2016
Jun 1, 2020
Jun 1, 2020
Jun 1, 2020 neutral
Jun 1, 2020
Nov 13, 2023 negative
Petersen: Freight forwarding jargon is a rookie detector to overcharge customers
“There's a lot of arcane terminology, kind of code words, acronyms. And now my working model is these are rookie detectors so they can figure out whether or not I know anything. And if I can't, they can charge me a lot of money.”
Nov 13, 2023 negative
Petersen: Flexport is struggling to get employees back into the office
“Flexport is struggling to get team members to come back to work right now. And I, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't our focus the last few months, but it's absolutely my focus right now. I'm pretty frustrated by people at Flexport who don't want to come into our …”
Nov 13, 2023
Nov 13, 2023
Nov 13, 2023 bearish
Petersen: Remote US workers will lose jobs to offshore talent arbitrage
“By the way, I think remote work can really work, but it's not going to benefit the people who think like, it's not going to be people making 250,000 dollars a year hanging out in Jackson Hole. It's going to be geniuses in the developing world Making, you know,…”
Nov 13, 2023
Petersen: Resource allocation drives public CEO success, not private
“Over the long run, 50 year period or something, the CEOs who have the best returns in the stock market have been really good at resource allocation, meaning, meaning they really understand when their stock is overvalued or undervalued. And if it's undervalued,…”
Nov 13, 2023 positive
Petersen: Revenge drives overlooked founders to build comeback companies
“Revenge is a really powerful motivator. In life, you know, you want people who are motivated and driven, and if someone feels like they've been wronged, there's a couple benefits. One, they're gonna be incredibly driven to go solve that, you know, to go have a…”
Nov 13, 2023
Petersen: Avoid hanging out with people much richer than you
“You have to be very careful of who your role models are and who you imitate and be careful not to hang out with people who have way more money than you. Cause you'll, you'll aspire to do things that you can't afford and spend money on stuff that won't actually…”
Nov 13, 2023
Nov 13, 2023
Petersen: Effective decisions require small groups with front-line employees
“So we, what we do instead is we grab four or five, six people for whatever the topic is that we need. And we'll go deep and not just those six people who report to me, but some usually the layer down from the technology or someone from the front lines who unde…”
Nov 13, 2023 negative
Petersen: Flexport employees must focus exclusively on company mission at work
“Finding people at Flexport who are focused on anything other than making Flexport successful at work, It's like really, really frustrating. I don't care what you want to focus on outside of work at all, what your politics are, what your cause is. I think that'…”
Nov 13, 2023
Petersen: Hiring external executives is much riskier than internal promotion
“Don't hire outside people. I rather much, I don't hire senior executives. I think in almost all, I'm not, look, that's not a blanket rule. We've hired a lot of great senior executives at Flexport over the years, and a lot of them are doing amazing work for us,…”
Nov 13, 2023
Nov 13, 2023 negative
Petersen: Remote work prevents effective team formation and company culture
“I think remote work is Very, very difficult to achieve a build a company culture. I think individuals can succeed. I'm incredibly productive working in my house with there's no distraction. I'm incredibly productive individual contributor, but great things get…”
Nov 13, 2023
Nov 13, 2023 negative
Petersen: Employees complaining on anonymous social networks are cowards
“There's this anonymous social network. It's like the terrible, all the cowards go there and just talk trash. Like, You're obviously a coward until you're allowed to talk in public and ask the open question, but you're too cowardly to do it. And you post on the…”
Nov 13, 2023
Nov 13, 2023
Nov 13, 2023 negative
Nov 13, 2023
Apr 3, 2024
Jun 20, 2026 neutral
Petersen: Flexport headcount will stay flat as AI replaces manual operations
“It might be about the same. We're hiring a lot of salespeople and we're expanding a lot in new markets, but I think you're going to see like a shift from people that today do operations, kind of manual work that I was describing earlier into, okay, you've got …”
Jun 20, 2026
Jun 20, 2026 negative
Petersen: Most VCs ghosted Flexport after pitch meetings
“I had, like, a lot that seemed like they went well, and then they never invested, and the number of investors who ghosted me, by the way, after the pitch, the vast majority, I would say. Where I pitched him, it seemed great, and then it's just like, never hear…”
Jun 20, 2026 positive
Petersen: Flexport won major client after competitor laid off embedded worker
“And we had this recent, we just had this huge customer win, one of our biggest ever. And I was like, wow, this is great. But I had heard that our competitor makes their Has one of these forward deployed logisticians, like, and runs their RFP, runs their proces…”
Jun 20, 2026
Jun 20, 2026 positive
Jun 20, 2026 bullish
Jun 20, 2026 positive
Petersen: Anthropic is a better investment than OpenAI at equal valuation
“I think I'm going Anthropic. No offense, because Sam's a friend of mine, but. Yeah, the enterprise business seems great. And the team, I think there's a lot of value of like this cohesive team that's been together forever, and OpenAI's had ups and downs, and p…”
Jun 20, 2026 neutral
Jun 20, 2026 negative
Jun 20, 2026 bearish
Jun 20, 2026 neutral
Jun 20, 2026
Jun 20, 2026 bullish
Jun 20, 2026 neutral
Petersen: AI can double salesperson capacity, but sales remains relationship-driven
“And like, there's a limit to how many relationships a human can have. And I think you can probably use those to use AI and use other techniques to like double that ratio or something, but like there's some limit to how many relationships you can maintain. And …”
Jun 20, 2026
Jun 20, 2026 bearish
Jun 20, 2026 bullish
Jun 20, 2026
Jun 20, 2026 neutral
Petersen: Flexport will focus engineering on replacing labor, not SaaS
“I don't want to dedicate that much of our engineering resources to replacing SaaS. Like I want to build, I want to replace work, like expensive labor, and I want to build our product and make it way better. So I don't, I want to, like, focus on our core busine…”
Jun 20, 2026 positive
Petersen: HR leaders must represent the CEO, not act as employee union reps
“I mean, I think the thing that you cannot have is them being like union representatives of your employees. They're not. They're there to represent the company, and therefore the CEO, and so if there's, if you don't have that as a CEO, like a trusted HR Leader …”
Jun 20, 2026 neutral
Petersen: 3X Angel Returns Have Zero Impact Compared to 500X Outliers
“Once you see the world from the perspective of the angel investor, you realize that we really don't care. Even a three X, like if you take my spreadsheet and this investment made three times the money, like the founder is very proud. Like, Hey, I made you thre…”
Jun 20, 2026 bearish