There's something about the nature of large institutions where people are a little bit too divorced from the problem that they're the customer. The world, during the pandemic, experienced so much change so fast that institutions are not made to handle that kind of change. A port just doesn't have it, you know. And thy don't, i don't think we shold expect them to have it. But it is kind of sad that i'll give you another example. M when the pendemic hiand we saw there's not enough masks in our hospitals, i found that to be totally unacceptable. Like, at a civilization level, we owe this to our first responsers, to our
Ryan Petersen, is the CEO of Flexport, ac ompany that builds software that integrates all the different shipping vendor systems you might run into as you try to get a product from a factory in China to a consumer in Idaho: rail, sea, truck. We’ve talked about the supply chain and inventory management on Decoder with a lot of our guests — the chip shortage seems to affect every company, and sorting out how to get products made and delivered on time is a pretty universal problem. But we haven’t really talked about how products get from one place to another around the world.
So I wanted to talk to Ryan, figure out what Flexport’s role in all this is, what his bigger supply chain solutions would be, and why he’s leaving his job as CEO to be executive chairman and handing the reins to Dave Clark, who used to work at Amazon.
Links:
Dave Clark to Join Flexport As Our New CEO
Flexport Wants to Be Uber of the Oceans
At Google, Eric Schmidt Wrote the Book on Adult Supervision
The real story behind a tech founder’s ‘tweetstorm that saves Christmas’
Ryan's twitter thread
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23126062
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. And our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
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