Flexport Is Silicon Valley’s Solution To The Supply Chain Mess—Why Do Insiders Hope It Sinks?

exits Oakland’s harbor, Flexport’s founder and CEO, Ryan Petersen, turns to watch a towering 370-foot crane hook shipping containers, one by one, onto the deck of a cargo ship. Petersen admires the neat rows of rectangles colored blue, rust red and an occasional teal, stacked on the post-Panamax-class ship bound for Yokohama, Japan.

analyzes and optimizes a customer’s supply chain, then automates it, often coming up with ways to shave days off delivery and save customers millions in late fees. Flexport’s centralized tracking and messaging cut out thousands of emails, saving clients an average of four work hours per week. For a price, Flexport will even offset their carbon footprint.

But Petersen doesn’t want to be seen as a pandemic profiteer, getting rich as his customers pay unprecedented prices. He’d rather be seen as shipping’s Mr. Fix-It. Flexport is combing through customer data trying to fill each precious container more completely . It’s rerouting lighter, higher-value products like Everlane’s popular sweaters from sea to air. It helped set up a private rail ramp in Iowa for goods coming from the West Coast to avoid Chicago congestion.

But no one can dispute Petersen’s efficacy. “Every crisis needs a hero, and Ryan Petersen positioned himself as the face of this,” concedes Craig Fuller, who runs an industry data-and-news site called FreightWaves. “He engages where a lot of executives won’t. It’s what the public wanted to see.” The gate-crashing younger Petersen made a lasting impression on Paul Graham, the accelerator’s cofounder, who had an interest in global trade. For years, Petersen had tinkered with another idea, a “TurboTax for customs paperwork,” but he needed to clear a rigorous background check to move goods across the U.S. border. Finally approved in March 2013, he pitched his startup idea, Flexport, onstage to Graham at a 2,000-person event that October.

So when Thiel announced his public support for Donald Trump, who was championing big new China tariffs during his presidential campaign, Petersen committed a startup sin. Asked onstage at a June 2016 conference if he would still take Thiel’s money knowing he’d support a politician tough on China trade, Petersen spoke from the hip. “Probably not, actually. It depends how desperate we were.” Soon he was on the phone with Thiel to explain himself. The damage control worked.

Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)

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