Ryan Petersen: Why Velocity not Speed is Most Important in Company Building | E1081

All data comes from the same place, which is the past. But if the future looks different from the past, your data's completely useless. The biggest risk to raising too much money, is you just lose discipline. I've never seen a company successfully raise a bunch of money and not start spending it in ways that aren't actually very smart. My advice would be like, if you raise a lot of money, you should immediately, the next day do a ... (beep) The goal of a culture is to drive velocity. You gotta have trust. Which means people doing what they say, putting the issues on the table. We have an open channel in our Slack instance, where anybody can ask the leadership team a question. And I think that builds trust. We're in an interesting moment right now where globalization is in question of like whether or not we just produce everything domestically.

How do you think about the future for trade with China?

China has a few advantages that we don't have. China believes in-

Ryan, I am so excited for this. I can't believe how long it's been since our last show. I was, I was young when we last did a show. So thank you for joining me today.

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me back, man.

Not at all. But I want to start with a bit of a weird one, but I find it actually quite informative. Think back to when you were young, you and your bro growing up. What did you want to be when you were growing up, Ryan?

Oh, wow. I don't think I ever had, uh, that many ambitions. I don't remember, to be honest.

(laughs) Did you didn't have-

Did someone tell you? Did my brother tell you what I wanted to be? I don't remember.

No, I'm just always fascinated by it, but I think it's always indicative. Did you know that you would be successful?

No, I don't think so. I spent a lot of my time learning languages when I was younger and I liked adventure, you know, I wanted to get out there. My favorite, uh, kids book was always Curious George.

(laughs)

Wanted to get out there and see what's happening in the world, go on some adventures, cause some trouble. So, yeah, so I did, you know, I lived in, lived in like five countries before I was 24 or something. Uh, learned how to speak Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, little French.

(laughs)

But, uh, it was all just in the spirit of adventure. I don't think I had like longer term ambitions until I got into working for my brother and doing business.

In the spirit of adventure, that takes you to China and reselling scooters, motorbikes. How does that lead to Flexport with your bro?

20 years ago, early 2000s, we, my brother ... I started working for my brother when I graduated from college. And we built this company buying motorcycles, off-road vehicles, dirt bikes, ATVs, dune buggies, and selling them through the internet. And it was really a technology company, like we didn't market ourselves that way, but it was before Shopify and Stripe and we had to build our own inventory management systems and accounting. And it was in the browser, like in the late '90s, early 2000s, um, so, you know, we should have built like a software company and sold the software. Instead, we kind of sold these motorcycles. But we learned a ton about import/export and about how difficult it was to work with the freight forwarding and logistics companies of the world. Both because of a lack of technology, like fundamentally, I mean, 20 years ago there was just nothing. The, the trucks, trucking side, we could 20 years ago log in to platforms and get rates, uh, and we built a lot of automation around that. But the, the inbound side, the import of containers and air freight, like just nothing. We couldn't get anything. And then two, I felt like the freight forwarding industry just really didn't, it wasn't easy to work with. They didn't want to see the world through my eyes and help me as an entrepreneur to build my business. There's a lot of arcane terminology, kind of code words, acronyms, and i- i- now my working model is these are rookie detectors so they can figure out whether or not I know anything. And if I can't, they can charge me a lot of money. Um, but we wanted to build a company that kind of like makes it simple to understand import/export, helps you, and we want to make money, but we'll do that by helping you grow your business. Um, and, and using technology to make things easy. So yeah, it really came out of like a frustration as a customer of feeling like, man, these companies are like, they make a lot of money, they're good businesses, but they just aren't very easy to work with. Uh, and both tech and a culture of customer engagement can make it a lot better.