#92 - Ryan Petersen

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Ryan Petersen. Ryan is the founder and CEO of Flexport. Flexport is a freight forwarder built around an online dashboard. They were part of the YC Winter 2014 batch. You can find Ryan on Twitter at TypesFast.
All right, here we go.
Ryan Petersen, thanks for coming in for the podcast. Let's start with a brief explanation of what Flexport is, because many people might not know what a freight forwarder is.

**Ryan Petersen** (0:31)
Yeah, so, well, Flexport is a freight forwarder, first and foremost, and that means we help businesses ship cargo around the world. We're also a technology company, so we use technology to give companies more visibility and control over their freight and at a lower price. We use technology to automate a lot of the labor. Freight forwarding is really interesting. We're all used to, the analogy that people want to go towards is like a FedEx or a UPS, which are parcel shippers. And the difference between parcel and freight is actually a very simple one. It's like, is the product too heavy for the driver to lift up and put in the truck? And the moment it is, now it's freight.
And it needs a whole different network to move it. It can't go through those same trucks. The conveyor belts are too narrow for freight, for pallets.
And what fundamentally happens that's different is in the parcel business, it's from end to end one company. And therefore they can have like scanners at each mode, they can at each node in the network, they can give you that nice user experience with the milestones telling you where your stuff is.
In the freight world, because of the size, there's no company big enough to keep it in their own network from door to door.
You would actually have to be the biggest company in the world by far. You'd have to have a port leaving every port, going to every other port every day. You'd have to have a ship rather, leaving every port, going to every other port. You would need the same for airplanes. And then when that ship arrives, remember that these big container ships now, you need 10,000 trucks to meet the ship. So you would need 10,000 trucks in every port every day. You just couldn't do it. It would be too big. So what the freight forwarder does in the freight network is you're moving this freight as a relay race, being handed off from a trucking company in China to the warehouse, to another trucking company, to a port, to an ocean carrier, right door, and then the mirror image on the other side, door to door. That process looks like a bunch of unstructured data being handed off in a relay race.
And so what's different about Flexport is we're taking all that data, structuring it, creating a platform so that each of those parties can get what they need to do their job or give us what we need to pass to the next party in the chain.

**Craig Cannon** (2:31)
What's an example customer? So to kind of contextualize this for someone.

**Ryan Petersen** (2:36)
One of our bigger customers is Georgia Pacific.
We also have Sonos as a customer, so we ship all the speakers. Georgia Pacific is the biggest paper company in the world. But we also, I think, are the best way to ship stuff to Amazon. So we have about 2,000 merchants that sell on Amazon that use us.

**Craig Cannon** (2:53)
And they're going directly to Amazon warehouses, or what are they doing?

**Ryan Petersen** (2:56)
Yeah, so probably about 10% of Flexport shipments get delivered to an Amazon warehouse. Yep, and we have small companies doing that, as well as big companies that sell through Amazon.

**Craig Cannon** (3:05)
And you were selling through Amazon 10 years ago, 15 years ago?

**Ryan Petersen** (3:09)
Yeah, 10, 15 years ago. Actually, back in my day, eBay was the bigger platform than Amazon. Amazon introduced the third-party seller. I remember I was one of the first people to sign up for it. And I thought it was amazing that for 40 bucks a month, I could become an Amazon merchant and add products to their catalog.

**Craig Cannon** (3:26)
Just full on.

**Ryan Petersen** (3:27)
You could just add-

**Craig Cannon** (3:28)
Add with the photos, everything.

**Ryan Petersen** (3:29)
I don't know if you can still do that, but I could just, yeah, I could make up. I'm sure you can still do that.

**Craig Cannon** (3:32)
I mean, that's how we sell the book.