How did you create trust like that in the beginning? Because I mean, it's not just these legacy customers working with legacy providers. It's across the whole this whole industry is kind of arcane. And so we would get yes, if from, and we would always get a yes, but yeah, 99, 95 to 99% of the time it was something you could do or didn't, wouldn't do. We had we had smart people, great early sales, entrepreneurial sales, and on every entrepreneur Neil needs an entrepreneurial sales person,. Usually it's the entrepreneur themselves. But you got to have that.
Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport.
Flexport is a global freight forwarder powered by software and analytics. They are making international trade easier for over 10,000 companies in 70 countries. They were part of the YC Winter 2014 batch.
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Topics
0:23 - What is a freight forwarder?
3:08 - Selling electric scooters on eBay 15 years ago
5:53 - Ryan’s business school experience
10:23 - Amazon competing with their vendors
13:23 - Matt Susk asks - What were the most important takeaways from Columbia Business School? Would you encourage entrepreneurs to pursue a MBA?
17:03 - Tyler Hogge asks - How did you get your first three clients at Flexport?
20:03 - Being a solo founder
23:08 - Varun Khurana asks - What's your strategy for rapidly hiring the best talent in so many different global hubs?
25:53 - Challenges of scaling Flexport
27:38 - Some of Ryan’s favorite books
29:43 - Scaling culture
34:23 - Jassim Ali asks - How has the Trump policy on foreign trade affected your business so far?
39:23 - PowerDecal asks - How do you poach clients from legacy providers?
46:23 - Automation in freight forwarding
49:23 - Jason Yannos asks - If you weren't operating Flexport and had to source a new idea to work on, where would you start?
53:23 - Derisking product ideas
56:53 - Biggest lessons learned at Flexport