Unicorn Founder on Unseen Arbitrages, the Paradox of Wealth + Charlie Munger Wisdom ft. Ryan Petersen

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, today we're talking to Ryan Petersen. Ryan's an interesting guy, because he started out working at a pizza shop, bootstrapping his own company to millions of dollars. And now he runs Flexport, which is a multi-billion dollar company. So he's kind of done both sides, the big Silicon Valley game, as well as the bootstrap, make something out of nothing form of entrepreneurship. And we talk about three things. The one big lesson he learned when he became friends with Charlie Munger, what Charlie Munger really taught him. Number two is a masterclass in negotiation. So things that he learned about negotiation back when he was in business school, that still help him today. And the paradox of wealth. So why chasing money? Well, money is great and you want to make money. And he says money is great too. But how instead of chasing money directly, you should do something else instead. He calls this the paradox of wealth. So enjoy this episode with Ryan Petersen.
Okay, today you have the Silicon Valley success story. So you've got Flexport, this like behemoth of a company, multi-billion dollar company, went through YC. You did the Silicon Valley. You won the Silicon Valley game, which is great. And I live in Silicon Valley. I like, I spent 10 years trying to win that game. The other side of it, though, that's I think a lot more relatable is you were, you know, working at Domino's Pizza as a teen. You flipped scooters from, you know, on eBay. You then built ImportGenius, which is a bootstrap company that I think had kind of like real EBITDA. Like I think you were making millions in EBITDA along the way, right?

**Ryan Petersen** (1:27)
Still am, still am. It's still a good business.

**Shaan Puri** (1:29)
Exactly. So you've done both, right? You've done the bootstrapper game, you've done the flipper game, and then now you've done the big, you know, Silicon Valley disruptive game. And so I think that's cool that you did them and not just that you did all those things, but one sort of led to the other. Is that right? Like the scooters led to ImportGenius, which led to ultimately Flexport?

**Ryan Petersen** (1:48)
Yeah, I think that definitely drawing the lines backwards, you can make that pattern really easily that really the scooters. I was working for my older brother and his business partner, Michael Canko, and we had a lot of frustration with freight forwarders and customs brokers. And we had a lot of frustration with finding good factories. Those were kind of the two big problems that we saw.

**Shaan Puri** (2:12)
I have this e-comm business that has overla- I started it kind of right before, or right during COVID, basically we launched right after COVID. And we've now done over, I don't know, 50 million in revenue. But I would not have found my factory had I not used ImportGenius. And I remember, I was like, I'm kind of like a shortcut taker in general. So I was like, okay, either I can go on Alibaba and I could try every single supplier on here, try to find a good one. Or I could go to whoever I think has the best quality and just try to reverse engineer, who is their factory, who is their supplier.
And actually, I remember like buying the $99 or $199. I don't remember what it was, like ImportGenius subscription. And then actually there was somebody in your chat team that did the search for me because it wasn't showing up initially. And they went back like further in the records 12 months, 15 months ago, and they found one manifest. And so people don't know how this works. What you guys did was basically you took public data about the shipping manifest, and then you organized and structured it so you could see for any business who's their supplier, and for any supplier who are all the businesses they work with. Is that right? Is that the right way of describing it?

**Ryan Petersen** (3:18)
Yeah, that's what ImportGenius does. It's still, we haven't raised prices much either. It's still about the same as you said, 99 or 199 We might raise it a tiny bit, but importgenius.com is the business that I started. And if I even mention Alibaba, because I started that business out of frustration. I was living in China for a while, and I would use Alibaba to find a factory. I would show up at the factory, and they weren't expecting people to just show up. And it would be like fake factory, like he's just a middle man.
Or like one time I did give them a couple of the advanced names, but I showed up and they were very clearly faking it. This was not a bunch of guys in a warehouse with no equipment or anything. So yeah, it was frustration for that. I think ImportGenius kind of like that organic search results like Google. If it was all ad words, that's kind of like what Alibaba is, like people paying for pricing and et cetera. alibaba.com is of course, the original business was B2B searching for factories, but that's not what drives their market cap. Their market cap is driven by Taobao and Alipay and all these other products. But yeah, the original business is like finding factories. I think ImportGenius is a much better way to do that. I do think that my brand is around seeing problems that somehow other people just take for granted, and they're blind to in some way that they just accept it as that's just reality, and then actually getting really curious about it and looking at what could you do to solve it. That's where ImportGenius came from, that's where Flexport came from, and that's that same problem. It's annoying. I'm annoying in that way. When I go to a restaurant, I'm doing bottleneck analysis on the cashier. What would I do to get the traffic flowing faster through this place? But yeah, I can't help it.