FedEx

“I think the other thing that's under discussed Lenny is, you know, how many problems are truly intelligence bound? Like if you add a, you know, a data center of PhDs working at FedEx or Domino's pizza, are they going to be like exponentially dominating supply …”

“The founder of FedEx, Fred Smith, he had payroll coming on Monday in the early days of FedEx and he couldn't make me poor payroll. He knew he couldn't meet it. He went to Vegas. Okay. Played blackjack. Won at Blackjack and made payroll on Monday, ok?”

“One of my Shark Tank companies is Rebel Cheese. And they added a direct to consumer business. And they created an agent that compares the weight that comes off the scale for what they're saying, or the box type, and what they were invoiced by UPS or FedEx, and…”

“The professor gave it a C.”

“The lesson he took away from his time is that loyalty is earned through shared sacrifice, not money.”

“Years later, when FedEx nearly died, employees would work without pay to save it. They'd use personal credit cards to fuel planes, not because they had to, but because Fred Smith had learned from Sergeant Jack how to earn that kind of loyalty.”

“Zapmail burned through hundreds of millions before Smith would admit defeat.”

“While FedEx built its satellite network, fax machine prices crashed to 300 dollars.”

“At one point, he seriously investigated using giant cargo blimps. His executives thought he was joking, but he commissioned actual studies. The economics kind of made sense. They could carry 250 tons at about a hundred miles an hour using cheap natural gas.”

“By 1991, FedEx posted its first quarterly loss since going public. One hundred and five million dollars. International operations lost six hundred and twenty nine million over three years.”

“FedEx sold his European ground operations, fired 6600 employees, and took a two hundred and fifty-four million dollar charge.”

“Revenue exploded from 7.8 billion in 1992 to nearly thirty billion by 2005.”

“Under new leadership, FedEx finally merged express and ground operations, something that Smith had resisted for decades.”

“Fred Smith died on June, 21st, 25 at the age of 80. By then, FedEx operated in over 220 countries, employed half a million people, and moved seventeen million packages daily.”

“This one policy created more accountability inside FedEx than a thousand meetings ever could. It turned every employee into an owner because failure hit the bottom line immediately.”

“When UPS went on strike in 1997, FedEx employees voluntarily worked 16 hours a day to handle nearly 800,000 extra packages a day.”

“When UPS came back, FedEx kept 15% of those emergency customers permanently.”

“The idea for Raising Cane's was a a paper in business school at LSU and he got the worst grade in class, which is funny because FedEx, Fred Smith got a bad grade. Phil Knight, Nike, bad grade.”

“These founders write a business plan in business school about their idea and they get terrible grades. So like Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, C minus Todd Graves, lowest grade in the class Phil Knight for Nike, same thing, bad grade”

“One example, many multi-million dollar FedEx budget that 90% of it converted to email instead.”

“Likewise for FedEx, which is best thought of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes, and distribution hubs attached.”

“Just this year, we got our, like, we got FedEx to agree to this kind of account structure. So it's really, it's literally taken us like eight to nine years with certain shipping providers to get them comfortable with that.”

“So today we haul goods for a number of our partners. And so there's an Aurora tractor with a FedEx trailer or a Hirschback trailer or a Warner or Schneider trailer. And, you know, we do this with a person in the cab monitoring the driver, but we're being paid …”

“So some of our biggest clients, we power the city of New York's initiative to help veterans connect with jobs, both on the global process with civilian positions, but also within the city for some civil service positions within the city. So really working with…”

“At the end of 2020, Amazon was already up to 25% market share which put them ahead of both FedEx and UPS.”

“And FedEx has seen their market share decline for the past eight or nine years now.”

“Because instead of paying people by hour, where their incentive is to stay longer, to get paid more because they're paid by the hour, now, as long as they get something done, if it takes only a minute, but they got it done in a quick and quality way, they'll g…”

“Tony's whole notion was not just food delivery, right? He wanted to build the FedEx, his initial pitch was the FedEx of local, and he wanted to deliver almost everything, but he was going to start out in food, because if you can deliver a pizza before it gets …”

“I don't personally think we're going to see another parcel carrier. Parcel would be like FedEx UPS start ground up like ever. I think what we'll see is, is Amazon come in and build the largest parcel carrier in the world, sort of from the side door or top down…”

“Amazon is basically a database. Like you go and you type in the database, you ask what you want, they plug it in. Amazon is like a, it's a combination between database and a super specialized version of FedEx. You know what you want. They ship it to you. Done.”

“So that's about 50%. It goes straight out to the carriers.”

“Yeah, I think if you look at the long, long term, I actually would be short on FedEx and UPS. You know, like, rather than having to ship things around the world on airplanes, it wouldn't be great just to download the design and print it out, you know, right wh…”

“So on the first piece we would, you know, do deliveries for services like Domino's or FedEx, and we would learn, well, how, how does deliveries actually work?”

“We screwed up everything you could possibly screw up. In the first 10 watches we had a lot of problems, but we had a problem with RF. We couldn't get the signal out of the watch, because it's like a Faraday cage sitting on your wrist. And so we said, well, may…”

“We are now, we last month we passed FedEx and panel Pina, which are, we're now number 17. Oh, out of about 20,000 freight forwarders in the world in four years.”

“Blue Apron is a bit different because they don't really do their deliveries locally. They actually ship using FedEx and perhaps other carriers, but our focus is on companies that are delivering goods locally.”

“Here, what we're talking about is that we really try to be carrier agnostic. So we don't want to be owned by the UPS or FedEx or USPS. We want to work with all different shipping providers. That's the power of the platform.”