I don't know where you're sitting right now
but take a look, take an inventory of the room.
Every single object within your line of sight right now
was likely shipped.
It was likely put on a boat or plane or a truck
to get to where you are.
And yet, almost anyone who's ever imported a product
has looked at this process and said this is a nightmare.
And we felt like there should be a better way.
Our mission at Flexport is to
bring the world free trade through technology.
To reduce the cost of every single thing
that you look at in the room right now.
We want to unite the human population in
a seamless web of commerce.
Now, it's very hard.
I'm Ryan Petersen. I'm the founder and CEO of Flexport.
I inherited a curse from my mother.
When I see a problem it actually makes me mad.
And every now and then one of those problems
becomes important enough that it should be a business.
The problem that we're solving at Flexport
is all the complexity that
goes into moving products between any two places on planet earth.
I started my career buying products in China
and selling them direct to consumers in the United States.
One of the hardest parts
of running that business was getting the cargo shipped.
There's a lot of broken parts to that process.
Freight is the backbone of international trade.
And in that world there is no company that's big enough
to move a freight shipment all the way from origin
to destination.
To move a single palette of goods there are going to be
hand offs between six or seven companies
on a single product shipment.
And today it's all managed by phone
and by paper and by fax.
The transaction costs are phenomenally high.
And there's room for error every step of the way.
I knew that software had a role to play in solving this problem.
Flexport is a freight forwarder for the Internet age.
We help companies move products around the world,
get them shipped internationally,
cleared through customs,
and delivered to their customers.
We use software to automate those
transactions and provide better user experience
at a lower cost.
One of our missions here is to connect all the parties
involved on a single platform.
What we're looking at here is the Flexport app.
We give companies a dashboard
to view all their shipments in real time
as they move freight around the world.
You can click in on any one of these shipments
and see actually that's a real plane in the air right now,
we can see exactly where it is.
We are enabling startups
and new companies who have never shipped anything before
to actually participate fully in global trade.
Globalization and free trade
have gotten a really bad name.
And my own personal theory as to why that is,
is because trade is just so hard.
That only the biggest companies
have had the resources needed to participate in trade.
I've spent a lot of time in the developing world.
It's sad when you see someone's income
is so, so much lower than yours.
And then you go to buy a product in the market
and it's more expensive than back home in the United States.
They don't have access to the same products
and there are barriers to getting those products to them cheaply.
It's a lack of trade that is
largely responsible for holding back many parts of the developing world.
At Flexport, we're taking trade from
the privilege of a few to be the right of the many.
Our long-term objective is
to build the operating system for global trade.
And that means creating
a platform to connect the world
and break down the barriers that have kept people apart for millennia.
But it's an incredibly hard, incredibly hard business.
You know, the freight never stops moving
and we work across a lot of time zones.
So often, if you need to sync up with somebody in China
either they have to get up really early or you gotta stay up late.
There's not a lot of ways around it.
Yesterday was tough.
Two people cried at Flexport yesterday.
The ups and downs of startup life are very real.
But what we've now made a rule here at Flexport
is that the hard thing is the thing you have to do.
If you're the only person solving the hard problem,
the only company willing to do the hard thing...
Not only can you build a huge business,
but you can also have a huge, huge, outsized impact on the world.
We've gone, in two and a half years,
from doing no freight at all
to moving 20,000 ocean containers per year.
Do you see it?
Boom. There it is.
That's one of the biggest ships ever to
be created on planet earth.
The biggest one ever to call at a U.S. port.
Actually, some of our customers' cargo is on that ship.
If you strung all those containers from end to end,
it would stretch from here in San Francisco
all the way to Sacramento.
That takes about two hours to drive.
For us it's the chance to step back at the end of an awesome year and go "wow."
Like, one of those containers is a Flexport customer.
On some level, we can say
that trade is the essence of humanity.
There are no other species on earth
that trade with each other.
Two people exchanging something of value
across the planet.
It's hard to find something
that could be more beautiful than that connection.