Listen to this articleFlexport is on the mission to simplify global trade and make it more affordable and accessible for everyone. The company is leveraging software and industry expertise to provide more visibility and control, along with lower transaction cost and cheaper prices in order to create the new operating system for global trade. Flexport announced a $65 Million series B funding round led by Founders Fund, earlier this year.
Below is our interview with Ryan Petersen, CEO at Flexport:
Q: Ryan, tell us something more about the Flexport and your history?
A: Freight forwarding and international logistics are often overlooked as important industries, in part because all the work goes on behind the scenes. Yet look around: It’s likely that, no matter where you are sitting right now, every item in your line of sight was at some point transported by a plane, truck, ship, or train. How did all those objects get from where they were made to where they are now? That is the story of international freight forwarding.
Over $1.1 trillion is spent every year on international freight forwarding services. Freight forwarders provide the coordinating layer of global logistics: they manage all the complexity of moving cargo between any two points on the planet, using the best mix of ocean freight, air freight, drayage (trucking), and rail transport providers for that particular shipment.
We’re taking that a step further, by leveraging software and industry expertise to provide more visibility and control, along with lower transaction cost and cheaper prices in order to create the new operating system for global trade. As a tech-enabled freight forwarder, we’ve increased the volume of goods shipped by 16X year over year, and the company just crossed $1 billion in merchandise moved this year. Those goods would be worth $2.5 billion at retail.
To put this in perspective, check out Flexport.com/now to see a visual map of all of Flexport’s air cargo, ocean freight, and trucking containers around the world right now.
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Q: Could you please give us more insights into your shipping web-based app?
A: Our free, web-based software application enables efficiency in an otherwise very disjointed system. For the first time, companies who place orders for large-scale goods can ship, track and manage all of their freight in a single online dashboard without spending millions on software and implementation. And by automating quoting, booking, and shipment tracking, we’ve reduced transaction costs and made our logistics experts more efficient than those at even the largest freight forwarders.
Q: What are the biggest benefits for the users?
A: Flexport’s customers receive an unparalleled level of customer support that they wouldn’t see elsewhere.
While our web API and app provide easy visibility into our customers shipments, the biggest asset in choosing Flexport as their freight forwarder is their direct access to our experts. Most of our competitors silo their customer support teams, but we operate in autonomous squads; multi-disciplinary units (sales, account management, operations, and customs compliance) that own their client relationships end-to-end. Each unit is empowered to make decisions about what is best for the customer, the business, and their team without needing to appeal to a higher authority. This means fewer rules and less direction needed from management, ultimately putting our customer front and center each and every day.
Our goal is to create a support organization that behaves like an immune system that sees a problem and attacks without waiting for a central authority. This model has allowed us scale quickly, without becoming plagued with the problems that larger companies tend to have.
Q: You’ve recently announced a $65 million Series B funding round; what are your plans?
A: The funding will help us hire and retain more smart, driven people to tackle the many challenges we face. And it will also let us continue our rapid international expansion. Unlike many high growth Silicon Valley companies, Flexport has been a global company from day one. Our employees speak more than 35 languages, and helping companies go global is at the very heart of our mission of making free trade accessible through technology.
In 2016 we opened offices in Amsterdam, New York, and Hong Kong, and already we have more than 30 people working in those locations. Our rapid growth in these countries will mirror that of our San Francisco headquarters, and we expect to open offices in additional countries so our sales and operations squads can be closer to customers and supply chain partners.
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Q: What is the Flexport’s main influence on the market?
A: Flexport represents a massive disruption opportunity. Logistics is 12% of global GDP, and companies spend $1.1 trillion dollars on freight forwarding alone. There are few markets in the world that are this large, and probably none as untouched by the Internet and its accompanying technologies.
We are investing hard in our technology and service to be the best freight forwarder in the world. As a result, our logistics experts are enabled to relentlessly ensure each shipment (e.g., air cargo, full container load shipments, less than container load shipments, drayage) is delivered as smoothly as possible.
Q: You were founder and CEO of ImportGenius.com before Flexport. What is the most important thing that you learned from that experience?
A: Before Import Genius, when I was a teenager, my brother and I started buying stuff from China and then selling it stateside on the web. I moved to China in 2005 and spent two years in the supply chain trenches. That’s where I realized that public shipping manifests were an untapped gold mine, and Import Genius was born. That’s when I had my biggest “ah-hah” moment: Global trade was hard, and there was no software to manage it. I thought there was no software for SMBs. What I discovered is that there’s NO software. One of the biggest industries in the world was still run on rolodexes and fax machines, completely untapped by technology.
Q: What’s been the most challenging part of starting your company?
A: Flexport is growing quickly and we have very high standards for hiring. It’s resulted in a culture full of very smart and talented employees that believe in our mission. I want to maintain that high standard of hiring while we continue to grow as a company, especially in our international locations like Amsterdam and Hong Kong.
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Q: What advice would you give to future entrepreneurs?
A: Create a set of values that you, your management team and your employees can all live by. Flexport’s cultural tenets are to empower the client, fill the gap by adding value to each interaction, practice candor, and to play the long game. We remind ourselves of these values each week during our all-hands meetings, and make sure that all decisions we make fit into these ideals.
Last Updated on November 17, 2016
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