Opinion
Amazon made a critical error by competing against its third-party vendors
“I think platforms should be neutral. And so the idea that you compete with your vendors, to me, you've got a business needs to keep its, All of its major stakeholders happy. Yeah. And your vendors are one of your key stakeholders. If you don't treat them like …”
Insight
Limit industry veterans to one per team to prevent anti-innovation coalitions
“About 20%. We try to hire one out of every five or six people From the industry. We think we need that expertise. My principle is five or six people. Cause like most teams should have five or six people on it. And I want one person in the room has done it befo…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Consumer electronics cannot be manufactured outside of Shenzhen and Guangdong
“There's not infrastructure and subcontractors and other vendors to make consumer electronics outside of the Shenzhen, Guangdong province. There's just not in, you can't go to another country.”
Insight
Entrepreneurial sales seeks conditional 'yes' answers to inform product roadmaps
“What entrepreneurial sales is very different than regular sales. You want to get to know as fast as you can. So you stop wasting your time and get to the next Yes. You want to get to know within five minutes ideally. Yeah. That's great if someone hangs up on y…”
Assertion Contradicted
Capturing 20% of global freight makes a company bigger than Saudi Aramco
“Our goal is to get to 20 or 40% market share. If you do that, you're the biggest company on planet earth. Like full stop, like bigger than Saudi Aramco.”
Insight
Business school is likely not worth $140,000 in student debt
“I think if you, having a business school degree has helped me immensely in understanding the principles of accounting and revenue recognition and all, you know, like real basic fundamentals, finance cap tables, discount rating, discounted cash flow. These are …”
Insight
Traditional freight forwarders exploit information asymmetry to overcharge their customers
“There's this information asymmetry and the forwarder global trade's kind of a black box and the freight forwarder knows how it works and you don't. And they use that against you. They use that to make money off you.”
Opinion
Petersen: Flexport could only have been founded in Silicon Valley
“I think we, Flexport could only be founded in Silicon Valley. We'll see if that's true in 10 years from now, but I think that's still true today.”
Insight
Flexport's ideal hiring profile targets 'insecure overachievers'
“What we look for, we like Flexport has my COO, my business partner calls it insecure overachievers is our profile. We want people who are like really hungry, but humble and they want to prove something to the world and they're super smart, but they don't neces…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Flexport reached $200 million in revenue without a marketing team
“Flexport got to two hundred million dollars in revenue without having a marketing team.”
Assertion Contradicted
Flexport surpassed FedEx to become the 17th largest global freight forwarder
“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.”
Insight
High user retention on terrible products proves strong underlying market demand
“If the product is this bad, and people are still using it, this is a good thing.”
Insight
Petersen: Founders rejected by investors should pivot to self-funding businesses
“Look, if no investors want to invest in your business, that's your fault. You should do a different business. Like, there's lots of businesses that don't need any investor money. Do that and then earn the credibility success compounds, like build up, you know,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Petersen: Flexport is first licensed US customs brokerage with modern web app
“We're the first licensed U.S. Customs brokerage built around a modern web application.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Petersen: The world's largest oil company joined Flexport's waitlist
“The biggest oil company in the world signed up.”
Insight
Petersen: Customs brokerage provides full supply chain visibility to upsell logistics
“The brokerage is just the way that we enter the much larger logistics space, because once I'm your customs broker, I know everything about your supply chain.”
Insight
Petersen: No single company is large enough to own end-to-end freight
“In the freight world, because of the size, there's no company big enough to keep it in their own network from door to door. You would actually have to be the biggest company in the world by far.”
Assertion Supported
Petersen: Amazon operates roughly 400 undisclosed private-label brands
“They have like 400 different brands now that you don't even realize are Amazon.”
Insight
Petersen: Businesses must be the counterparty of choice across six stakeholders
“Your six stakeholders as a business or your customers who you pay you money, your vendors, your employees, your investors, Regulators and then the communities where you operate and you have, so you have six stakeholders and if you can keep all six of those, yo…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Foxconn and Saudi Aramco signed up on Flexport's pre-launch prototype site
“And we got Foxconn signed up, makes, makes the iPhone, Cargill signed up like one of the biggest ad companies in the world. And then one day Saudi Aramco signed up the, National oil company of Saudi Arabia signed up for my fake website.”
Insight
Petersen: Decentralized recruiter pairings outperform specialized centralized recruiting teams
“I'd rather have an entrepreneur with a recruiter Paired up. We'll do better than like a totally specialized recruiting organization.”
Assertion Supported
Half of all global air cargo moves on passenger planes
“50% of all the air cargo in the world is actually moved on passenger planes in the belly of the passenger plane.”
Assertion Supported
Petersen: Academic research ranked freight forwarding as most susceptible to automation
“There's a great paper that I read about industries that are most susceptible to automation. And freight forwarding was the number one on the list. It was like, 99% of the work should be, that would be better done by software in this, like, academic paper.”
Disclosure
Petersen: Flexport offers trade finance loans secured by customer inventory
“We now have a business that makes loans to our customers trade finance Loans for any, anything? To buy inventory. Which we secure with the inventory.”
Ryan Petersen