Ryan Petersen

“Well, I got, I say it's white collar fraud.”

“I think selling SaaS to tech companies is gonna be the toughest, because we can build stuff for ourselves.”

“Revenge and patriotism is a great investment thesis.”

“There's a lot of collusion in VC. Like, I have a feeling that most VCs actually collude more with competitors than with their own partners.”

“My first Excel my first and only financial model that I made for myself for the business got to one million of revenue, right? Like, we did over two billion last year, so.”

“Yeah, I mean, I haven't been that motivated by money. I'm more into, like power. I want to do big things.”

“There's a realistic scenario that they decide the compute that they have is more valuable for training super intelligence than it is for letting customers use it. And they stop, you know, just cut us off.”

“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 …”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“In enterprise marketing. The moment something works, it stops working because the competitors will copy it.”

“And it's expensive as a feature in enterprise marketing. Cause it's like, you wouldn't spend a lot of money on something promoting something if it wasn't good. So it must be good.”

“B to B marketing is events marketing to some extent, and like, that, that's like plain vanilla, but by the way, you don't need an exec, you don't need to go hire a CMO to run events.”

“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 …”

“I think you get like 20% out of almost everybody.”

“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…”

“It wasn't obvious who was great. It was obvious who was terrible, though, and I think if you can eliminate the bottom half, like, you're doing pretty well inside of a YC batch.”

“I was the first investor in Rippling. Put a big check into that. Did really well.”

“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…”

“Sam was one of our early, earliest investors”

“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…”

“And when I write a check as an angel investor, I would just mark it to zero. I don't care. I just assume that it's a zero. And then that way I don't worry if it fails.”

“I don't need to raise any money ever again.”

“I think the last I heard from Ryan is their warehouses are full. They're adding more capacity. It's a pretty meaningful business now.”

“Like if we'd have been smart, like Toby was, we had to sell subscriptions to our little platform and maybe could have been Shopify, but instead we just like bought motorcycles and sold them on eBay motors and Actually through live car auctions, our own website…”

“Y Combinator at that time did not have great security, so I would just go with him to all the Y Combinator Sessions and just said, like, acted like I was part of his company, even though I kind of was.”

“We got within a week, we were doing like 50,000 dollars in monthly revenue. Like all of a sudden, you know, from zero to 50,000 in a couple of weeks.”

“Yeah, really lucky that I, not only was the last batch, but he announced it mid-batch, so you didn't take it for granted that you were getting this time with Paul.”

“I thought, I think Dave's going to be better at the job than I am. That was genuinely true. That's why I did it. It wasn't because I was burnt out or something. I just thought he would be better for the company. I thought we needed to mature and be better at o…”

“He said that's like saying this other guy would be a better husband for your wife. Might be true, but like, don't act on it. Like, this is your company. You need to stay in there.”

“Like micromanagement and attention to detail, same, two words for the same thing, right? Attention to detail is great. Like your boss is involved in your stuff. Like that's only a problem if your boss is an idiot and out of touch and making bad decisions. But …”

“I think he says like, if the company should only do as many things as the founder can be personally involved in, it's a nice ideal. It doesn't work at my company. We're like in all these different countries and all these different modes of transport that like …”

“I've only hired one person, actually, from external in the last couple years, and I spent just, like, loads of time with him. And I told him he's not allowed to make any decisions for 90 days.”

“It's why, like, no investor ever gives me useful advice, really. Because like, I'm not, sure, they can about people and some high-level stuff, for sure, or capital markets, but like, Business, like, strategy? Like, how could they ever know my business better t…”

“There's about 26 teams that do an MBR, a monthly business review, and a six pager, and then that's just like, it doesn't, I think we cap it at six, but it's, the six isn't that important... So we have, I think, 25 or 26 teams that write those monthly, and then…”

“I haven't met anyone who said, oh, because of these tariffs, I'm gonna start doing production in the U.S. I've read some headlines on it, and they've done some White House announcements and things, but like, those aren't my customer base. And my customer base …”

“There's a lot of weirdness in lately in this tariffs data that is just like, I don't know if that means, you want to know what the consumers are doing ultimately. What are they buying and selling? And a lot of, there's just a huge amount of noise. Like they di…”

“I know how hard it is to get accurate data out of my own company, so the idea of the government economists getting accurate data about all of the companies, I'm like always very skeptical on these things. I was so skeptical on like big government data sets.”

“I always say that to people who are like building AI companies. It's just like, what a nightmare. Your competitors are literally AI geniuses. Like you should find a way to apply AI in some other domain. So you're not competing with the smartest people on plane…”

“We're only about .one percent of global trade in the containerized, in the world, in the domain in which we play.”

“Actually, I think we can lower the cost of shipping anything by five to 10%.”

“Bicycles can be imported duty free, but bicycle components cannot. so they've decided after a decade of manufacturing in the U.S. That they now have to produce overseas because they can import the finished goods and not pay duty, but if they import the compon…”

“I've seen a dozen examples in the last few months of companies that are, were producing in the U.S. And decided to stop.”

“Humans are just so dexterous and intelligent and not that expensive that, like, you know, it's a very high bar to clear for these robots because humans are really good at the job.”

“Humanoid actually doesn't solve a lot of problems because you don't get more density out of your warehouse. You want real estate density. You want to be able to stack the goods all the way to the ceiling, jam them in. So it's more, the form factor is not going…”

“At least at Flexport, we're so, we have minimal robots in our fulfillment centers. We're mostly people.”

“Yeah, it's a little bit, so like, so you've had a 60% decline in bookings of ocean freight from China to the US. That's resulted in a 25% decline of sailings.”

“I think it's 60% of all the sellers on Amazon are these Chinese registered. They're not registered in the United States at all, just Chinese companies selling.”

“Six years ago in a hackathon, we got to like, 70% accuracy. We're now in high nineties accuracy versus what a human trained expert will get to.”

“I'm very firmly anti-tariff. It's bad for my business.”

“Short term is going to be a lot, a goods recession for sure. I mean, there'll be less goods sold because prices will be higher.”

“We committed to Ryan on the phone. It's the only time we've ever done that in SUSE history. We committed to the deal on the phone call.”

“The way to get people to work on nights and weekends is not to ask them to work nights and weekends. It's just give them a deadline that can only be met if they work on nights and weekends.”

“Still am. Still am. It's still a good business.”

“I had dinner at his house seven or eight times before he passed. I went to his 99th birthday party last year, actually.”

“I think learning a foreign language in that country is extremely, it's not a good ROI from like, you probably won't make any money off of this, especially now with chat GPT.”

“I don't believe these studies that say like, oh, like, you know, you stop. ... Stop improving your life at a certain point. I'm certain that that can't be replicated. You know, most, most of these psychology studies turn out to be not, there's a replication cr…”

“You can track the people who are the best negotiators in a classroom environment or not the most successful because they're very good at extracting too much in a one-off negotiation, but that's not how life works. In life, there's repeat games. Like you gotta …”

“All reporters play a very important function of like holding the powerful accountable, but like founders, you're not that power, but we're kind of suffering through like, you know, we're up against some very powerful forces in the world. Like we feel like we'r…”