- I would argue that in the last 50 years,
there is no technology
that lifted more people out of poverty
and created more economic opportunity
than the shipping container.
And yet, it's still incredibly hard to ship things
anywhere in the world.
I just couldn't rest until I'd done something about it.
- About eight years before today's supply chain crisis,
Ryan Petersen created Flexport,
a startup looking to drastically simplify the way we ship
freight around the world.
Over time, the business evolved.
- When I first started the company,
I thought we would be kind of like
TurboTax for importing;
do the paperwork, and maybe that was it.
And here we are five, six years later,
and what we've built is a technology platform
for global logistics to ship any product
anywhere on planet Earth.
- Today, Flexport ships more than 200,000 containers
a year with a team of about 2,000 people.
They are valued at over three billion dollars.
- I think on some level,
people think that it must just get easier and easier
as you get a bigger team; you get more funding,
your company's more famous,
you have more customers.
I think it gets harder and harder.
You're learning new problems
and new class of problems constantly,
and you still haven't even
solved the last problems yet.
- This isn't a story about a startup
trying to disrupt an industry.
What if you've already done that?
What do you do next?
This is a show about founders challenging the status quo.
- Global logistics is sort of like behind the scenes.
I sometimes call us a backstage pass
to the world economy.
You don't really kind of know
what's going on down there.
All you do is buy your goods at the store,
and you forget that there's
this huge amount of work
that went into getting those goods to you
from wherever they're made.
There's the company that made the goods.
There's a truck that has
to pick it up from their factory.
It's gonna bring it to a warehouse
where it's gonna be consolidated
with other cargo.
Another truck picks up the container
and brings it to the port.
A customs broker has to clear it
out of the country.
I'm at, like, six or seven companies,
and we haven't even left the origin country yet.
- The coordination of all these moving parts
has traditionally been done over spreadsheets,
emails, and paper records.
Ryan's idea was to try to modernize this process.
- We connect all of the asset owners,
the people who own ships,
planes, trucks, warehouses,
all the importers and exporters,
government agencies, and bring it all together
to make it just seamless.
- Flexport built a platform where anyone can
track shipments, get updates, communicate,
and upload documents that are required along the way.
- The end result is you actually know where your stuff is.
Like "the dirty little secret"
is the best companies in the world
have no idea where their products are.
Why Flexport didn't exist before Flexport
is a question I've thought about a lot.
Like, am I crazy?
Why am I the only one doing this?
What is wrong?
I think the answer is that it's incredibly hard.
- In all of these changes and all of this growth,
like what are some of the challenges
that you guys have had to overcome?
- In the years since Flexport was founded,
almost every single year,
there's been some external market force
that's created massive amounts of chaos.
So in our very first year,
there was a port strike
on the west coast of the United States.
All the ports were shut down for three months.
In our second year,
there was a glut of ocean freight,
and the price fell
to the lowest point in human history.
Then, of course, we had a global pandemic
shut down all the factories.
So Flexport has sort of, like, been trial by fire
every single year since we began.
We're kind of built for it at this point.
- 'Logistical nightmare.'
- 'A massive cargo ship stuck in Egypt's Suez Canal.'
- '50 ships a day normally pass through the canal
carrying 12% of the world's trade.
So the pressure is really on.'
- In March of 2021,
a cargo ship ran aground in the Suez Canal,
causing hundreds of freight forwarders
to scramble over the phone and in email
to get updates on their shipments.
Flexport's platform enabled its users to track
and reroute their shipments in real time.
- The thing about Flexport
is that our job is to solve problems
to make global trade easier for everybody.
So if there's something externally
that's making global trade harder,
all of these are opportunities for us
to step up with our expertise
to help them solve that problem.
I'm not saying it's easy.
It makes your job definitely harder,
but that's what you're here to do
is solve hard problems.
It took a certain naive optimism to start Flexport.
The belief that, 'Yeah, we can do this thing,
which is sort of almost impossible to do.'
I certainly wouldn't turn back the clock to try it again,
not because building Flexport wasn't fun—
it was the ride of a lifetime,
it was amazing.
But I think we got pretty lucky
and a lot of things went right.
- One of the benefits of things going right is influence.
Today, Ryan uses Flexport's newfound status
to push for innovation in the industry,
even lobbying legislators to fix real-time bottlenecks
in the global supply chain over Twitter.
- One of the really interesting things
about Flexport is how much the vision can evolve
when we keep learning that it can be something much bigger.
Our mission is to make global trade easy for everyone.
But I think you're realizing
that you can have a bigger impact.
It's like actually just make it so easy
that there will be more trade.
We're getting closer to the point where we're gonna
allow people to participate in trade who weren't.
I hope that, you know,
we just keep extending the vision further.
It's part of the fun thing
about working here is that it's not totally complete.
Starting a company has to be about
what you're trying to achieve,
and that this company is the best way to achieve it.
That's been a lesson for me as CEO,
is the importance of really painting
the picture where we're going;
make sure everyone knows why that's important.
And if what you're trying to achieve is important enough,
then you'll overcome all the pain.