"World of DaaS"

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen: Global Shipping and Logistics

• Word of DaaS with Auren Hoffman • Episode 140

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Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, a unicorn international freight forwarding business. He’s also a Venture Partner at Founders Fund.

In this episode of World of DaaS, Ryan and Auren discuss: 

  • Supply chain breakdowns 
  • Geopolitics of commercial shipping
  • Scaling freight forwarding businesses 10X
  • Deglobalization vs international trade
  • Returning to Flexport after stepping down as CEO
  • Why good CEOs micromanage


World of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph & Flex Capital. For more episodes, visit worldofdaas.buzzsprout.com, and follow us @WorldOfDaaS. 

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Ryan on X at @typesfast.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)


Auren Hoffman:

Welcome to World of DaaS. A show for data enthusiasts. I'm your host, Auren Hoffman, ceo of SafeGraph and GP of Flex Capital. For more conversations, videos and transcripts visit safegraph. com slash podcasts. Hello fellow data nerds, my guest today is Ryan Petersen. Ryan is the founder and CEO of Flexport and a partner at Founders Fund. Ryan, welcome to World of DaaS.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, great to be here.

Auren Hoffman:

Excited. Now there's a Dave Berkus quote I've heard from you many times, I love, and something like where there's mystery, there's margin. Can you help us demystify the freight forwarding business a bit? Wait, where does that?

Ryan Petersen:

quote come from Dave Berkus. I didn't know the source of that quote. I heard my friend say it once and I stole it, so that's good to know.

Auren Hoffman:

Can you help us demystify the freight forwarding business about? It seems from the outside are super opaque.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, and you sort of get to that just by the fact that George Costanza, when he's trying to be the man of mystery in Seinfeld, what does he do? Vandelay Industries, the import-export. The reason that's funny is because the idea of George being mysterious undercover, understanding this mysterious world is very funny. Fundamentally, freight forwarding is. The problem that you're trying to solve is that a container or a pallet of cargo needs to move across the world. We call freight forwarding international shipping logistics and the problem is that the pallet needs to move across the world but any given company's assets probably only can carry the goods for some leg of that journey.

Auren Hoffman:

Because there's a ship, and then there's a train, and then there's trucking on all sides, and then there's a last mile.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, the ship only goes from port to port but the container's got to go from door to door so someone has to coordinate the trucks on both sides. The customs clearance Often if it's a full container load, that's pretty straightforward, although there's also going to be a bank involved because there's a payment getting made. And when does the cargo change title? There's an escrow process involved. In that there's cargo insurance. So even on a simple full container load of cargo you're going to have five or six vendors plus government, plus banks et cetera. And then a more complex one where it's a pallet that's getting consolidated with other pallets to fill that container, or air freight is always consolidated with other cargo. You just get a lot of vendors in the chain and so you need somebody to coordinate.

Ryan Petersen:

That complexity and fundamentally that is a role of the freight forwarder should be. In an ideal, correctly run business and asset light you don't need to own the assets. You're the coordinating layer and therefore really susceptible to software fundamentally. But the problem is that all these companies run different IT systems, so how do you integrate with all of them? How do you give them interfaces to give and receive data about what's happening? At the end of the day. It's a communication problem to move the data in parallel to the goods.

Auren Hoffman:

I assume there's some things where there are data standards but some things where there's completely no standard and you have to create your own join keys and other types of things to do all these integrations.

Ryan Petersen:

Very few standards. The standards that do exist are EDI standards, which are pretty ancient. Yeah, it's fine, it works, but it's interesting how difficult it is to get alignment when each customer needs to be integrated in a different form, different ERP systems to connect and what we found is actually on the supply side of our business. So, like trucking companies, warehouses, etc. There was very little software to even integrate with In the forwarding business, and the drayage is what we call port trucking, where you're moving a container out of a port.

Ryan Petersen:

It's such a small market that has unique requirements in terms of it's different from regular trucking because you're handling a container. You got to go pick up a trailer, you got to return an empty container to the port. There's enough nuance to it that normal trucking software doesn't work for it, and so what we found was there's no good Dredge software out there. Similar with these warehouses there's a lot of great warehouse management systems, but they're always in our experience and we've studied the market in a lot of depth they're all made for picking an item and shipping it out to a customer. There's very few that are made for hey, you're operating a freight forwarder, you got goods coming in, you need to consolidate it with other goods and ship it back out, and so our approach to the market has been all right.

Ryan Petersen:

Obviously, we want to integrate with other people's software. That's what we do. But in a few of these areas that are core to what we do, we found there wasn't good software to integrate with, and so we went and built software for the supply side. So we've got warehouse management system, trucking TMS is called transportation management system for these trucking companies, so they can dispatch trucks and drivers have a mobile app that helps them manage the container return and the picking up of a chassis, et cetera. All of that in an effort to get accurate data about what's happening and give the customers the end customer, the company that's shipping cargo with us visibility, control, the two keywords where's my stuff? When is it going to arrive? How can I make a change? If I need to and allow the data to flow in parallel.

Auren Hoffman:

I remember in COVID there were oftentimes lines of trucks waiting at a port and sometimes they'd be waiting for days and stuff, which doesn't make any sense to me. Either the container is available to them or it's not. And wouldn't they know it's available? Wouldn't there be like a ping hey, it's available, Come pick it up in the next three-hour window or something? Why were they all waiting there?

Ryan Petersen:

They get these one-hour appointment slots at the port to go pick up the container. Most ports in the US have one hour appointment window and you've got to show up. And if there's a traffic jam you've been places where you've been more than an hour late in your life probably. It sucks and you get these positive feedback loops. So because there's a traffic jam vicious cycle I should call it it's not a positive thing Because there's a traffic jam, they miss their window and now their container they were supposed to pick up is sitting in the front blocking all the other containers. And you had this compound feedback loop of because of the traffic jams, there's more traffic jams.

Ryan Petersen:

And then what happened was there was not enough chassis. Chassis are what we call the trailer that you use to haul the container out the wheels on it and there weren't enough chassis. And we dove deep into this and figured out that what happened was there were so many containers. It was really caused by a surge in demand that people who were locked down or weren't spending money on services and restaurants and stuff were just spending so much more money on goods.

Ryan Petersen:

We had this huge increase in the imported containers and what was happening then was the containers were sitting in yards at the truck yards and they had a regulation and they still have a regulation in Southern California that you can't stack the containers more than too high in a truck yard. And so the moment you hit too high in the truck yard, the trailer couldn't be unloaded for that third container and so they would just leave it on the trailer. And then we ran out of trailers in Southern California to go pick up more, and then the truckers are missing their appointments and leading to these terrible traffic jams and really broken system. Now all because of a 20% increase in container flow. And it's a good reminder for those of us who just work in software and data where, yeah, you can increase 20%.

Auren Hoffman:

Yeah, no problem, just throw a few more servers on AWS.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, but a 20% increase in the physical world can just cause everything to break. It shouldn't, but the systems are pretty inefficient, Frankly. There's a solution here, which Flexport has the technology for, so it is a solve that's very doable, which is, instead of having an appointment system, just have the truck driver show up with a mobile app that we have and then just give them whatever container that's available and it'll tell them where to take it. You don't need to worry about appointments.

Auren Hoffman:

Oh, good point. If they're willing to go anywhere in the country, or basically they may have certain constraints, okay, I'm only willing to go on the eastern part of the country, or whatever.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, you can set parameters for it, and so most of these containers move locally, because if they're going long haul it will transfer anyways to a dry van. You don't want to send a container all the way across the country. You have to drive it all the way across the country. They have to drive it all the way back. So if it's going long haul it gets called a transload. You'll unload it onto a regular truck and ship it out. Again, the complexity of freight forwarding.

Auren Hoffman:

Ah, okay, got it. I thought I've seen containers on trucks before, but you're saying, mostly that doesn't happen, mostly they actually get put inside a truck.

Ryan Petersen:

You'll see them on trucks, but if they're going long of that backhaul because the empty container coming back is just not efficient. It's a huge inefficiency for the world that the containers are set to the wrong standards. Speaking of standards, the FMC, the federal government, set the standards for ocean containers. I forget, like in this 1970 something, and they set it at the 40 foot, but it's the wrong length because trucks are 53 foot long. You're losing. What is that? 33%, 13 over 40. For every truck, you could get 30% more space.

Auren Hoffman:

Was it already the wrong length when they set the thing, or has the trucks gotten bigger since then?

Ryan Petersen:

I think trucks were 53 foot already at that time. It's possible they got bigger since then. I don't know the history, but the container should be 53 foot long because that's the length of trucks.

Auren Hoffman:

That's true all over the world. There were trucks in the US bigger than trucks in France, or something.

Ryan Petersen:

It's the right question. It depends on the country. I know New Zealand only uses 40-foot trucks. If it could be 53-foot in the US, it could be 53-foot everywhere. It should be as big as it possibly can be and be safe. Maybe our roads are better, I don't know.

Auren Hoffman:

Yeah, I can imagine a third-world country where you need to maneuver more. You need smaller trucks or something.

Ryan Petersen:

Tight curves. Look, you have different standards. You can have 20 foot as well, but the base case 53 foot. You're losing a lot of efficiency there. That's the reason why you want to transload to a longer truck. You move more cargo for one driver.

Auren Hoffman:

There's been also a lot of talk about just the US infrastructure in general, how we're underinvesting From your perspective, from the shipping logistics. Are there things we could be doing better and vis-a-vis let's say other countries, and if so, what should we be doing?

Ryan Petersen:

For sure. The ports are really underinvested In the United States. Our ports are owned by the local city that they're in. The port of Oakland is owned by the city of Oakland.

Auren Hoffman:

Yeah, which is weird because a lot of things in the US are very capitalistic, but the ports are still more government-controlled.

Ryan Petersen:

They lease it to private companies who operate the port, but at the end of the day, that private company doesn't own the port. They don't own the terminal. How much capex are they really going to want to put in to upgrading it? In other countries, the ports are considered a national strategic asset. By the way, this morning the US government announced billions of dollars to invest in new cranes at our ports, because our cranes are all made by this Chinese company and they don't like it. But again, it's just so silly. You don't need to replace the crane, just replace the software.

Ryan Petersen:

The steel is fine. Steel is not hackable, but I'm sure somebody got a nice contract for their cousins. Some steel company is very happy right now. Yeah, we do need investment. I shouldn't knock on it, but I'm not convinced they'll be that smart about it. Actually, the bigger problem that I see in US port infrastructure is there's something wrong with the way the union interoperates with the management. I don't want to point fingers at the union I'm biased there but I just generally think there's unions in other countries and they don't have this problem. So it's something about the relationship between management and unions in the US ports in that it's completely insane. So the port, every day on the West Coast at least they say here's how many workers I need tomorrow and the union just furnishes that many workers, but different people every day and then they're totally new. There's no, hey, we're a team and we come every day together and, yeah, we're union year management, but it's the same people every day, trying to get better.

Auren Hoffman:

One day I could be in a pod with seven people I don't even know, and then another day I could be in a pod with another seven people.

Ryan Petersen:

At a different terminal, something like 30 terminals at the Port of LA and Long Beach.

Auren Hoffman:

So I don't always work with the same group of folks. We build camaraderie. You never do Complete randomness, yeah that's not fun for the worker.

Ryan Petersen:

It's super dangerous. You're operating heavy equipment in an area that you haven't been to before, with blind corners, there's all kinds of accidents. It's extremely dangerous and just it's completely insane, and so it's very hard Job. One of running a team is let's have some metrics, let's understand how did we do yesterday, what did we learn? How are we going to do better tomorrow? Basic one-on-one management stuff they can't do, and I don't think this is inherent in union. It's not about something around the contracts, clearly, but it's also just. You can have a union and represent workers' rights while also being a team. I'm sure of it.

Auren Hoffman:

It seems like the public perception, like if you ever watch a movie or TV show and there's a port involved in it, it's always negative, it's never a positive type of thing, and one of my favorites is the Wire. I love the Wire and I love that season with the port and everything. It's not a positive portrayal.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, I don't know. You don't see a lot of positive stuff coming in media in general, so it's hard to say. But yeah, there's definitely some flaws out there. We should have been able to handle that 20% increase in volume, given the inefficiency that we see, I assume Amsterdam had a 20% increase as well.

Auren Hoffman:

How did they handle it? It was a US problem.

Ryan Petersen:

There were some problems worldwide, but not to the extent that we saw in the US. One way you can judge for this for yourselves, viewers at home is next time you drive by a port those of you who live by a coast and you see a container port you have there's cranes. They look exactly like the AT-AT walkers from Star Wars, because that's what George Lucas apparently based it on was the Port of Oakland. You can see if the crane is facing up at this angle, a 45 degree angle upward, it is not unloading any ships. If it's down, it may be unloading a ship. You have to look a little closer to see if there's containers moving. But if it's up it's definitely not unloading ships.

Ryan Petersen:

Next time you drive by a port, just count how many of them are up versus down. They only seem to be up. I don't know You'd want to be like, hey, we're running a tight operation here, southwest Airlines turning around the plane in 30 minutes, let's go. But I'm sitting here as a complete outsider to the port industry. I've never worked in a port, never managed it. I'm sure I get criticized by people who have saying I don't know what the hell I'm talking about in their right, but as a layman looking from the outside, it seems like it could be done better.

Auren Hoffman:

Now, these ships that move these containers have historically just been getting bigger and bigger. When you look at them on the seas, they just look like giant floating cities, almost. You have a tweet asking will these ships keep getting bigger or is the future going to be smaller, maybe faster, more diversified ships? Where do you fall out on that question?

Ryan Petersen:

I'm really open. I don't know how it's going to play out. One interesting thing I didn't understand until fairly recently is that actually in naval what do we call this? Like naval architecture a smaller ship actually goes slower the bigger the ship is. There's something about hydrodynamics, like it's longer than the wavelength, or something. Wait, really, yeah, it starts to explain how these big ships can go faster than a little speedboat. They're going like 25 miles an hour.

Auren Hoffman:

Just because on a master diameter ratio or something like that.

Ryan Petersen:

It's something about the length of the wave displacement, and if you're long enough to get across the length of the wave, you can go faster. I'm not smart enough to understand the physics I haven't studied it enough but that is counterintuitive, so that the bigger ones are actually faster ships. Now, the reason that a smaller ship can get a shorter transit time is because they'll make fewer stops, load and unload faster. Look, if you have a container ship that's only holding 3,000 containers, it's actually reasonably possible to say, hey, I could move 3,000 containers just between Shanghai and Long Beach. But once you get to one of these 10,000 container ships, you can't on a single day find 10,000 containers that need to move, so you're going to end up making stops.

Auren Hoffman:

A typical big ship is making multiple stops along the way. They'll stop in Santiago, chile, and then LA, and then Seattle or something.

Ryan Petersen:

Well, yeah, these are called strings. You can look them up. They're pretty cool. One is the Japanese ocean carrier the word one, one and they have a nice thing on their website where you can see all their maps of their strings and see where all of them stop Most of these carriers do, but they have nice PDFs of it and you can see they'll make stops. So it's called a string and they'll stop. They'll go Shanghai, busan, korea, maybe they stop in Japan, prince Rupert, up in Canada, vancouver, seattle, oakland, long Beach and then loop back in a string Whatever. That's a made up one. It's like an interesting loop, yeah, and so the bigger you get, the harder it is to move that much volume between any just two ports. The other problem is that the infra again coming to US infra problems Our container ports aren't big enough to handle the biggest ships in the world. Even LA could only handle a ship about two-thirds the size of what Shenzhen, shanghai, rotterdam can handle.

Auren Hoffman:

What's the use of those big ships if they can't go to the US they?

Ryan Petersen:

just go Asia to Europe. They don't come to the US right now.

Auren Hoffman:

Okay, got it. So they're just making these long journeys. Now, speaking of Asia to Europe, all the stuff that's been going on with the Houthis and Yemen and stuff like that. The transit time has been longer because people can't go necessarily through the Suez Canal or it's more dangerous, so more folks are routing around. How does that affect global trade?

Ryan Petersen:

90% of the container ships are routing around. The French ones are still going through, being protected by the French Navy, and some other smaller companies are just taking the risk and going through. More than 90% are routing around.

Auren Hoffman:

How do you protect? Back in the day in Somalia, there were these pirates that come with boats and they'd board your plane.

Ryan Petersen:

But if it's just like a missile, I think they could shoot them down or they just take their chance. One of the interesting things, these missiles they hit these ships and then the ships seem fine. They're like, yeah, a hole in the ship, whatever, Keep going.

Auren Hoffman:

They're not super destructive missiles. They cause little damage.

Ryan Petersen:

Haven't been sinking the ships. I'm sure they go into repair. I'm sure it's a bigger deal, but they're not sinking the ships and many of them just continue on their way. It's crazy to sail through that and take that risk when you've got sailors on there. Someone was shooting missiles. Work from home. They're routing around. It takes about 20% longer, which is a big deal for supply chains. Some of the manufacturers have had to shut down their lines.

Auren Hoffman:

And 20% longer. Is that an extra week, an extra few days? What is that?

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, it's 10 days longer. 10 to 15 days longer depending on that port. It's enough to cause real disruption in the moment of the change. The bigger problem has been that creates chaos Our data systems. We're tracking ships based on satellite data. First thing the container ships did was turn off their satellite transponders so that the bhuttis can't hit them with a missile and make them harder to find. The moment you need this data the most is the moment the data stops flowing to the system. It created a chaotic weekend for us where we had to then refactor the algorithms to factor in. Okay, if they turn off the transponder within this geofence area, then that's a signal that it's being diverted or that something has happened here, and is that the only way really to track ships?

Auren Hoffman:

If they turn off their transponder, it's just too hard to find them.

Ryan Petersen:

It's the only way to track them in an automated fashion. The other way to track them is to pick up the telephone and call the company that owns it and go hey where's your ship. When's it going to arrive, which is what we do. We get updates by email, by phone Every once in a while.

Ryan Petersen:

they just call in the coordinates or something we try to track in at least what's the new route, where's it headed, what's the arrival date. They'll publish these schedules as Excel files and PDFs and stuff. And it is a differentiator for Flexport is that we're a technology company but we also were a logistic service provider and we're not afraid to pick up the phone and add human updates and manually track these things and push updates to the clients. But that was only in the very beginning when they turned off the satellites if they were really right in the region. What we're able to do and we still had to update the algorithms for this we want to be able to track the containers that are being diverted, the ships that are being diverted, so we can notify customers new ETA, new transit time, new port, perhaps where it's being dispatched to because the whole string had to change and we then had to go and build like detection algorithms or geofencing areas and say, hey, if the ship is supposed to go, we expected the ship to go this way and now it's headed south around the southern tip of Africa. It's non-trivial to go do that. We had to have our data science team really go work nights and weekends to go build new algorithms. We never really had that in our system before it followed the string. You didn't have to think about that, and so that was a good example for us of core value prop being put at risk overnight and having to work nights and weekends for three, four days.

Ryan Petersen:

Old school startup style. Get the update out, and we updated our app that our customers use and where it changes. Any ship that's been diverted because of the Suez incidents that are happening right now turns orange in the system and then provide data communication to the customer. Each and every container on those ships has to get replanned. When is this thing going to arrive? What trucking company is going to pick it up? How's it going to clear customs? Many of them are getting trans-shipped.

Ryan Petersen:

It'll bring a container to one port, unload it and then put it on a different ship that's going onward and all those journeys had to get replanned. A lot of chaos. Back to the original point where there's mystery. There's margin. Price of freight went up 5x in the last two months as a result of all that. 5x Per agent to Europe yeah, five times per agent to Europe.

Auren Hoffman:

yeah, five times, Holy mack, 400% increase.

Ryan Petersen:

By the way, it was very cheap ahead of time. It was like too cheap. You can ship a container end of last year November. You can ship a container from China to Europe for $800, $1,000. A whole container.

Auren Hoffman:

That's a very good value. Okay, so 5X. There was some slack in the system.

Ryan Petersen:

It was too low, it's gone way up. It some slack in the system. It was too low, it's gone way up, it'll come back down. There's a lot of excess capacity coming online. When you look at the data of new builds, of new ships that have been on order and that are getting delivered throughout the rest of this year, there's 10% increase in the container shipping capacity of the world coming online in 2024.

Auren Hoffman:

Is that one of the big constraints? I assume the workers on the ship is not as big of a constraint. The big constraint is the ships themselves.

Ryan Petersen:

I think generally workers there's enough unemployment out there in the world that those jobs are reasonably good jobs for people. It tends to be a lot of people in the developing world that become sailors.

Auren Hoffman:

On these huge ships. Sometimes, you see, there's only a few people in the whole ship moving around.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, it'd be like 20 people on a 10,000 container vessel.

Auren Hoffman:

What around? Yeah, it'd be like 20 people on a 10,000 container vessel. What do they do, I assume, when they port they've got some things to do logistically, but during the transit Maintenance, maintaining the engines, painting.

Ryan Petersen:

I wanted to do a blog post about it because people are always talking about the self-driving ship. I'm like there's only one guy driving 20,000 containers. Focus on the truck. You need 20,000 truck drivers when they arrive, but the truck is one guy's driving. The rest of them are painting. So I wanted to do a April Fool's post about the self-painting ship. What are they painting? Painting over the rust, making sure it doesn't rust.

Auren Hoffman:

Oh, so there's this constant maintenance on the ship.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, so I was going to do a blog post about the self-painting ship, just to mess with all these companies trying to do the self-driving ship.

Auren Hoffman:

Be great actually. Yeah, I didn't know if they were watching Netflix, I didn't know what was going on there. And then the mega ships can they go through the Suez Canal or are they constrained?

Ryan Petersen:

anyway they can go through the Suez. The Panama has been narrower but they widened it to allow bigger ships. I think the biggest ships in the world still can't go through the Panama. It's possible that the biggest ships in the world can't make it through the Suez. The container ships are designed to be able to go through. I think there's some big oil tankers that don't.

Auren Hoffman:

I'm not in the oil shipping business so I don't know enough about it, speaking of tracking ships, with all the sanctions against Russia and Iran and other things. There's a lot of people who are trying to avoid sanctions, so they've got their own fleet of dark ships that are moving around, that are doing things, especially with oil and other types of goods. How does that all work? These ships are huge. I don't understand how you can evade detection when you're that big. Yeah, no, I don't know anything about that.

Ryan Petersen:

It always interests me the US government coming out with stealth ships and stuff. You're like all I need to do is put a satellite up there and just have a guy watch you all day.

Auren Hoffman:

Is it disguised as a big whale or something?

Ryan Petersen:

Oh.

Auren Hoffman:

I just see a whale. You can go into a cloud and hope that they lose track of you during the storm or something I don't know. Yeah, exactly, but I assume with other things besides visuals a lighter and other types of spectrums you should be able to still track it. There are people like Peter Zahan who basically say the world is de-globalizing. How do you expect global shipping will continue to grow? Where do you think that's going?

Ryan Petersen:

I wish Peter Zahan was less right all the time. He makes a lot of predictions, so he probably makes a lot of wrong predictions too. I appreciate his willingness to make bold predictions. He has had quite a few wins under his belt lately, including this latest Red Sea thing.

Ryan Petersen:

It is an interesting question and his perspective is until World War II, all of the world's shipping was basically done by colonial powers and were protecting their own ships with their own navies to ensure safe transit, and after World War II the US Navy took that on and created freedom of navigation. Anybody can go anywhere. You don't have to worry about pirates and basically, as long as you're part of the World Trade Organization, your ships and what is it called? The United Nations has a maritime organization too. If you're part of that, you're good to go. You can sail anywhere. We're starting to see that maybe that's not the case, that now France is having to protect its own ships going through the Red Sea, and if you don't have a Navy, then you're going around.

Ryan Petersen:

It's a challenge to the global order, and I think we take for granted how impactful and powerful the global order has been the idea that companies can go global easily, find customers, find suppliers, employ people in other countries, make it cheap and get all this cheap stuff shipped anywhere. But the reality is that ocean freight is so efficient and cheap that even with these changes, it's still cheaper to ship a container from Shanghai to Long Beach than it is to drive a truck from a factory in the middle of Mexico to the middle of the US. Trucking is just very inefficient and expensive. Mexico has crappy roads. Sailing on the ocean is very efficient. You can visualize this A horse can carry 300 or 400 pounds of stuff on its back, but a horse that's pulling a barge in a canal can pull 40,000 pounds of stuff on its back. But a horse that's pulling a barge in a canal can pull 40,000 pounds of stuff Way more efficient on water than it is driving or pulling things. It's just a fundamental physics that makes ocean freight very hard to compete with.

Auren Hoffman:

Some of the things that the US Navy has been protecting is China shipping to Europe. It's not like we're necessarily protecting goods that are coming into the US or goods coming out of the US or US goods. It's not like the China Navy is out there protecting their own stuff. They get to benefit. So where do you come down? Should China have its own Navy protecting or should the US be more constrained?

Ryan Petersen:

This is Zai Han's whole thing. It's worth. If you haven't watched one of his talks, it's worth Googling and watching. He's got a lot of YouTube talks. There's plenty of them. They're all similar. They're all great.

Ryan Petersen:

His point of view is that the US created this order not for our own economic benefit, but to create a coalition of allies against the Soviets, and that you only got to participate in this nice global trading order if you agreed to join our forces and create a counter to the Iron Curtain. That no longer mattered after the end of the Cold War and therefore we continue to do this, even though it's not to our benefit, and that we're going to stop, that. The United States Navy is going to stop patrolling. That's his point of view. I think that it's a zero-sum worldview and I think that the US does benefit from global prosperity and trade and our companies are the world's best companies and are the ones that are benefiting. Us companies ship tons of stuff from China to Europe and sell. We're very big. All over the world we have global corporations that dominate almost every industry, Even if we're not involved in the trade at all.

Ryan Petersen:

Trade benefits both parties and everybody's made better off when that happens, so I don't know how to think about it. I don't know what the political will is to do it, but right now in the old world, US or used to be the British Empire would invade Yemen, send in ground troops and put a stop to this. Nobody wants that anymore. He's right in that sense. Nobody wants to see the United States invade another Middle Eastern country and impose our will, even if they are insane people shooting missiles at civilian ships, committing acts of terrorism. War on terror is gone for too long. People are sick of it.

Auren Hoffman:

Over the last decade. Obviously, we saw the rise of Flexport, which you lead, but there was a lot of other companies that got a lot of funding broadly in this space. There's Convoy, there's Uber Freight, there's a lot of other stuff that was around, some of which maybe did okay, some of which did not have a good return for their investors. Obviously, it's a very attractive landscape because it's so big, so you have a huge TAM to invest in, but I imagine it turns out to be a much harder problem than people anticipated.

Ryan Petersen:

I just got back. Two weeks ago in Las Vegas there's a newer conference. I think this was the third year of it. It's called Manifest. It's like a logistics tech conference. I'd never been before I logistics conferences. People would look at us like a bunch of idiot young kids. What's going on with these people? Who are they? Why are they not Bunch of old white guys? What's happening with this company? Why should we care? So definitely been a huge change in that. From an investor standpoint, I think it's just very hard industry to make big change. In First off, software only tends to come up short for some of the reasons I was describing earlier. Where software fails, you need to have humans go in and fill that gap.

Auren Hoffman:

It doesn't seem as an investor. If I would have looked at it 10 years ago, I would have thought oh, asset-light, you can come in, you can do some things, but you guys raised over a billion dollars. It takes a lot of money to do some of these things. It turns out.

Ryan Petersen:

You should be able to build asset-like businesses in this space that aren't as capital intensive. We raised a lot of money. I don't think we were that efficient in deploying it. We definitely wasted money in areas that we didn't need to. But it was a huge advantage for us and I think there was a window there, with the capital markets being what they were for the last decade, where we were able to raise a lot of capital and deploy that. Use it for growth, use it to build durable, defensible. I think the return on capital will be there for our investors. But it was a moment in time that now you're not going to be able to raise that kind of capital again.

Ryan Petersen:

I think Flexport benefits from the fact that we raised it. Most of the money is still in the bank. We now have a dominant position, at least vis-a-vis startups, and we're chipping away at market share, and we're the third largest freight freight forwarding company in the US, with aims to be number one in the next few years. But you shouldn't have to need that much capital, I think to do exactly what we do you would need. But there's a lot of angles out there to build compelling software businesses. But the fundamental problem I tend to find is that the software only can't often solve the problem.

Auren Hoffman:

Why is the freight forwarding business to have so many players in it? It doesn't seem like there's much concentration. I don't know the percentage market share that the number one have or the number two have, but it doesn't seem like it's super high. It seems like it's incredibly diverse and scattered. Is that just something historical, or is there some sort of good reason that it has to be that way?

Ryan Petersen:

I asked myself that question many times over the last decade. I have two hypotheses. One is better for Flexport's narrative than the other. The first is, and the good one would be, lack of technology. And so the number one player, Brokers yeah, and it's just very hard to drive scale into that without just hiring lots more people and training them and have a lot of expertise. And so when you get to that point, you're like I'd rather take a higher take rate rather than try to go for more market share. And so the largest players have almost 100,000 employees with their 4% 5% market share. And so you're like okay, let's 10x the business, go for 30% market share. Now you got a million people and they're knowledge workers. They're not Amazon pickpack workers, they're not Walmart store associates.

Auren Hoffman:

What do these 100,000 people do? Are they just on the phones? What do you need 100,000 people for do Are they just on the phones.

Ryan Petersen:

What do you need 100,000 people for? We call it freight forwarding. I sometimes joke it should be called freight email forwarding. There's a lot of compliance, a lot of coordination dispatching trucks, coordinating with the factory to arrange the pickup, setting an appointment with the warehouse to coordinate delivery. So it's like a babysitter in a way. Absolutely, it's babysitting the freight and coordinating it all, making sure it moves to the next forwards along the journey and getting the data in parallel, communicating with the customer, sales, a lot of salespeople, etc.

Ryan Petersen:

Think we're on the cusp of some real breakaways here, where you have taken a shipment, let's say a container that needs to move from door to door, and broken it down into a series of well-defined tasks that are now structured in a way that actually lends itself to automation.

Ryan Petersen:

Because if I told you, hey, ship this container from here to here, openai, chatgpt is going to hallucinate some weird response. But if I say, hey, move this data from this spreadsheet into this database, it actually turns out to be pretty good at that, and so we're seeing a lot of potential to take those tasks that have been made into these structured atomic tasks and have a software do them. So that's the positive narrative that's good for Flexport. The other narrative that's maybe less positive for a company like ours. Why is it so fragmented? Is that the ocean carriers, airlines, governments of the world don't want to have one big player that's dominating market share and would prefer to have a fragmented industry on this coordinating layer on top. We're very conscious of that and saying okay, how can we make sure that these carriers see us as a great ally for them, that we're reducing their transaction costs? We're willing to pay them more than the competition.

Auren Hoffman:

There's a lot of pre-forwarders. They feel like maybe they have a leverage over them. They don't want you to have leverage over shippers.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, you don't want to have one customer representing all your volumes, you'd rather have hundreds of small ones. There's a lot we can do with data to be a better partner for them. So we've dramatically reduced the cancellation rates. One of the biggest problems in ocean freight forwarding is that 30% of all the containers that are booked get canceled. Customers are constantly changing the production dates for the cargo when it's ready.

Auren Hoffman:

I assume that you get a better price if you lock it in, you guarantee it or something like that.

Ryan Petersen:

There's not a lot of guarantees in the industry and the contracts are done on the annual basis, not on a given sailing on a given day. But what we've done is say okay. And this is a great case of machine learning actually is that if we get a cancellation, we get 1600 a week containers that get canceled on average in recent couple of weeks. If we get that cancellation, instead of canceling to the ocean carrier we'll find another customer whose cargo is ready and pull it forward. This is an ML model that we launched at Q3 of last year. It improves the transit times by 20% because we're pulling other customers forward onto these canceled slots and the ML is searching for the cheapest contract available that will hit the transit time that the customer is targeting. So it improved our net revenue by 2% and it reduced our cancellations with the ocean carrier. So they're happier with us.

Ryan Petersen:

And then the other one is just generally, we have a nice trade finance business Flexport Capital, it's called where we provide inventory financing to our customers. So if I can make money on other things besides ocean freight, ocean freight is kind of a commodity at the end of the day. So if we can make money on insurance, customs financing. Then I've got a bigger margin pool. I should be able to pay the carriers more and not be in such a zero-sum game, and they all, in theory, will be happier to have Flexport grow. But we're very conscious of the idea that you have to make it clear in their interest for us to become big. They don't necessarily want someone to be much bigger than the existing guys. Now we benefit. We're still only about one-tenth the size of the number one player. They would like us to be bigger than we are, but longer term I'd like to be 10 times bigger than the number one player. So how do you make?

Auren Hoffman:

that possible? I know that you really like this Paul Graham piece called schlep blindness. And what are some other super schleppy industries that you think folks should be paying more attention to?

Ryan Petersen:

Well, it's probably anything that's very human intensive. One framework I have for this is to look at human intensive things. People tend not to want to do that. It sucks. But another way to look at it is take the global GDP graph by industry. You could divide each slice of the pie chart by the number of hours of computer programming that have been applied to that industry and just be like all right, this one is like huge industry. Not a lot of tech has been applied to this yet. There's probably opportunity in that framework. It's a pretty simple framework but it's very tough. Markets are pretty efficient. I go back and forth on this between existing companies are amazing. Look how profitable they are. And every existing company is run by bozos and they're terrible. I completely went on this twice a day.

Ryan Petersen:

The hardest thing is now that I'm working part-time, although I'm mostly just 110% at Flexport, but I am on the team at Founders Fund as well. It's very hard to be contrarian and right. It's almost like doing that consistently long-term seems impossible almost by definition.

Auren Hoffman:

Well, there's degrees of contrarianism, right? You could just say something's underpriced. Maybe people all believe it's going to be good, but you say it's underpriced or something. Right, it's like buying NVIDIA a year ago. It's like somewhat contrarian to buy NVIDIA. Everyone liked NVIDIA. You just said, oh, I just think it's underpriced or something.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, fair enough, but to be consistently right about that stuff is very impressive to see what some of these public market investors have done, and Peter Thiel and other great VCs wow, peter Thiel and other great VCs wow, they find a way to do it. I'm unconvinced that I'm personally capable of doing that.

Auren Hoffman:

At some point you replaced yourself as CEO, you brought in Dave Clark, who has a great resume from Amazon, and then you came back as CEO. Walk us through that journey In retrospect what happened, what goes on and what advice would you give to other founders thinking about those things?

Ryan Petersen:

I was looking for a partner to help with operational efficiency and operations meaning doing the same thing over and over again. A little bit better every time. Those 1% improvements that's the name of the game for us. And I was looking for more of a COO. One of my recruiting hacks is on Flexport at our stage has a lot of interest from investment banks. They'd like to take us public someday. So if I'm trying to recruit an executive, I ask the investment banks. They tend to know a lot of people. Okay. So I asked the head of an investment bank tech investment banking practice hey, I'm looking for the COO. Give him the profile. He's like you know what you should hire, Dave Clark and he introduced us. It became apparent Dave's in logistics tech. It's hard to imagine someone with a better profile than that and so it became apparent that there weren't a lot of jobs that I thought I would do better than him at Flexport. Okay, I'll become executive chairman and make Dave the CEO. So that's what we did, I think, lesson learned.

Ryan Petersen:

And then, six months later, our board we missed earnings pretty bad. Our board was like clear, we need to get back to growth and rein in costs and get on a track to profitability. David had been very aggressive towards hiring and building the future and going all in, but the growth wasn't there and the costs were going up. So the board asked me to come back. I'm on the board, so it was part of that process. Obviously I would say, yeah, lesson learned.

Ryan Petersen:

Well, one is Frey. Forty is super different. B2b startups are very different. We are capital constrained and it's all about growth and I think that's just a different landscape than Amazon, another company and the B2B is very different than e-com, where it's really about sales.

Ryan Petersen:

I have to spend probably 50-60% of my time helping with the sales process, with customers, meeting people, driving deal volume. It's not this automatic flywheel where we just have to build the infrastructure and the demand will follow. We've got to get out there and sell and bring customers in. That's the nature of startups. You're capital constrained, You're completely focused on growing the business as the CEO, and I think that was just a different landscape where it wasn't planned out, Our costs were too high and our growth wasn't there. So I came back five months ago. We've improved our EBIT by almost $600 million in the last five months, while growing market share. I actually think we've increased our velocity on tech, even though part of that we reduced the size of our tech team quite a bit back to where it was before I left, before I became the chairman. We look like idiots on some level. We went all the way up in hiring and then let most of those people go. I feel bad about it.

Auren Hoffman:

A lot of companies are just doing a weight on my shoulders.

Ryan Petersen:

That was of having to let people go Now with the P&L, back to where it needs to be the company's on track. We're growing market share back to focus on the customers, on quality, and reforming the tech org to be more narrowly focused on a smaller number of priorities. I think the velocity actually seems higher. Objectively, we're executing better because we are not trying to do so many things Fewer people, but more focused, and actually it's a good recipe for success. Just be way more focused on a smaller number of things, most CEO transitions, at least of startups.

Auren Hoffman:

They just don't seem to work very well. Occasionally you see ones that do work. Frank Slootman, coming into Snowflake, accelerated the business when Reid Hoffman transferred the CEO to Jeff of LinkedIn. That seemed to be good, but he had done a CEO transition a few years earlier at LinkedIn and didn't work and he had to come back. So he clearly was looking for someone and the second time around it worked. They're really hard to do and they often fail. The default is that they fail.

Ryan Petersen:

Almost everybody congratulated me when I hired Dave. Only two people One of them. They're both famous CEOs. I shouldn't call them out, but both of them have had drama with their boards and stuff. It was private conversations, I don't know what to say. Their names, but famous CEOs. One of them said 50% chance you're coming back next year.

Ryan Petersen:

Everyone else was congratulating me. Hey, cat out of the bag. He was like 50%, you're coming back. First thing he said to me I said fuck. And then the other one called me and he goes who did this to you? Ready to go to war for me?

Ryan Petersen:

I think it's a good lesson, just in general, for entrepreneurs out there. It's like having self-confidence. Your team is better than you think they are. You're better than you think you are. There's not some executives out there. There's no saviors. You got to solve your problem, your team. You're so much better promoting from within.

Ryan Petersen:

Spend more time with your customers and in the presence of your team so you can see who's awesome in front of customers. Spend more time with the frontline, like people writing code. Your job as a CEO is to find hidden talent within your company and develop them and promote them and put them into leadership positions. I was very inspired. Founders Fund invested in Neuralink Elon's company and they've got just young geniuses running that show. Elon's just really good at finding these people and putting them in charge of big things and next thing you know, 24-year-olds are at a product or like crushing it. Got to meet a couple of those folks and just so impressed. It definitely inspired me to come back and go. Man, I need to spend more time with the folks at Flexport so I can promote from within and not have to feel like you're hired from outside. It's a habit that I think comes through anxiety and fear.

Auren Hoffman:

The VCs are pushing it, though A lot of VCs are like oh, you need to hire this type of salesperson or this type of product person too, or no?

Ryan Petersen:

They may. They like it when you do. Although my VCs was definitely like I got a lot of it because it was purely driven by me to hire Dave, I got a lot of really, what are you sure this is risky, but they were supportive, but I wouldn't say they pushed it. I don't think the VCs know that much about building a business. By the way, lending on them is a little dangerous. They should be the first to tell you that. Even the ones who have done it before, they're probably the most humble about it all.

Ryan Petersen:

It is risky to hire from outside. I think a lot of it's driven in my experience not spending enough time really intimately familiar with the P&L and that if you're deep in the P&L, you know what you need to achieve. You probably need to be cutting costs to go get profitable. But if you're not, you're like, hey, the way I'm going to get profitable is I'm going to hit these crazy growth targets and go massive, go big. Oh man, that seems really daunting. I better hire a big time head of sales to do that If you're living a little bit more peacefully, with less anxiety imposed by insane goals that aren't actually achievable or that on the timelines you feel less inclined to have to go out and get help from outside, or the opposite happens.

Ryan Petersen:

Man, our company was runaway success over the years One of the fastest growing companies in the world for a decade. It's pretty hard to find internal people that can scale like that. And for you to have confidence in your team you have to spend a lot more time with the team and trust them and recognize that, yeah, the grass is not greener. Your team. Maybe they're a junior, maybe they don't have that much experience, but they're loyal, they're hungry, they want to make it happen. Trust them more. A lot of lessons can be learned the hard way, the Speaking Founders Fund.

Auren Hoffman:

You and I are both big admirers of Peter Thiel. What have you learned from him since you joined and started working with him more regularly?

Ryan Petersen:

I just love the way he thinks very differently than anybody else. It's remarkable, his ability to distill ideas and distill wisdom out of the ether. I don't know if he's right, but his track record seems to imply that he is, so you have to take it seriously. But the AI phenomenon right now watching him think about distribution how are these guys going to have competitive advantages? Why Dynastone's a big investor not big in the scale of what OpenAI has raised, but they? Watching him think about distribution how are these guys going to have competitive advantages? Why Dynastone's a big investor not big in the scale of what OpenAI has raised, but they've invested in OpenAI what I think is a large amount of money. But he does think that his views on AI are interesting where they're kind of a feeding frenzy within VC land to invest in everything AI and Peter's allergic to whenever he sees that kind of behavior of everybody chasing after something no-transcript. It's very intriguing and very hard to recreate because the rest of us are going to get picked up in the mania of something.

Auren Hoffman:

It's very against human nature. Humans like things that other humans like, essentially.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah. So his whole theory of memetics from Girard is super interesting and got me very excited, but it's been like an eye-opening new perspective of the world. Zero to One book is basically Rene Girard, philosopher applied to startups.

Auren Hoffman:

It's the best business book there is because it's short and it's just very easy to understand. There's a few core messages. It's super well written.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, it's great. There's a great book called Wanting which is about the philosophy of Rene Girard more broadly. If you read that and then go reread Zero to One, you'll see the underlying Girardian influence of Zero to One A couple of personal questions.

Auren Hoffman:

You come from a family of entrepreneurs. I think you're like mom's a biochemist, your dad's an engineer, but you and your brothers founded multiple businesses together. Was there something in the water about how you were raised?

Ryan Petersen:

Seems to be. Yeah, I don't know if they did it on purpose or not, but my mom, to pay my allowance, I had to deliver sodas to her office. I think she was getting a tax discount on my allowance or something. And then my dad taught me to write software to generate invoices that I could send to my mom's company. So I'd charge them. He would take me to Safeway and I would buy the sodas for four bucks a case and then sell them to her for nine. When I was in middle school I would sell blow pops, lollipops. I did that in middle school too. Most entrepreneurs had some kind of candy-related hustle in middle school. 25 cents a blow pop. That made me a lot of money. It starts two for 25 cents. I was wrecking that market.

Auren Hoffman:

Oh man, you would have undercutted me. Okay, I'm glad you weren't in my middle school.

Ryan Petersen:

The other guys hated me. There was another guy selling them for 25 cents at the school and he hated me. But yeah, they'd take me to Costco and buy them in bulk, sell them around schools. I always had some kind of hustle. My brother that was probably the bigger influence for me to become an entrepreneur. He's a few years older than me and he was a computer programmer, and when he was like 14, before the World Wide Web came out he had this online game. They used to call them MUDs multi-user door. It was all text-based. It was basically a text-based version of World of Warcraft and he had like 200,000 users Holy mackerel Dialing into this little like modem bank that he created.

Ryan Petersen:

My parents had no idea what he was doing. He had the worst grades. He almost failed out of high school. He was up all night programming this and they didn't realize that he was this phenom that had built all this crazy tech in the early 90s, and so he became an entrepreneur after he was still in college. I was in high school. I started working together. When I graduated from college I joined him at his company. We're buying stuff and selling it on the internet Early eCommerce company. It was in my roots. I really only have one real job. I used to make pizza at Domino's when I was in high school but basically been an entrepreneur ever since that.

Auren Hoffman:

You learned a lot from those jobs. For sure, I served ice cream at TCBUI when I was 14. You learned a lot from those things.

Ryan Petersen:

You learned some work ethic and dealing with a diverse and interesting team of delivery drivers from around the world. It always felt less risky to me to go make money on the internet than to get a job. I felt that if I got a job somewhere I'd be miserable and I'd get fired, and whereas working for myself, being an entrepreneur, never seen that risky I saw my parents do it, I saw my brother do it Something just didn't seem that risky to me.

Auren Hoffman:

All right, two last questions that we ask everybody. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Ryan Petersen:

Oh my, God, I don't think Wikipedia is user-generated. You think it's a bot-generated. No, I assume that there's intelligence agencies writing all this stuff.

Auren Hoffman:

Oh, okay, got it. So it's like a corporate or actual governments that are interfering on it, or something like that. Yeah, okay.

Ryan Petersen:

Special interests. I don't think there's one giant conspiracy to run Wikipedia, but I definitely have people come to me sell me services.

Auren Hoffman:

Oh, I can move Wikipedia in certain directions. I'm like I don't know if I want to participate in that. So there's definitely people out there at least selling. I don't know if it's actually works or not.

Ryan Petersen:

Okay, my other one, the ultimate conspiracy theory. Is the origins of the word conspiracy theory in the first place? Well, conspiracy is just a group of people who are scheming to do something. I'm involved in all kinds of conspiracy. My executive team is a conspiracy, working on stuff all the time.

Ryan Petersen:

Where did that get associated with crazy people? Why is it that if you believe in a conspiracy, you're crazy? That happens with the JFK assassination. Was that the idea that there was a conspiracy, that there are multiple people involved in the JFK assassination? If you believe that, you must be crazy. Wait a minute, how did that become associated with craziness? Flexport has a big office in Dallas. It's not very far from Dealey Plaza where JFK was assassinated. So I got to go check it out when I'm in Dallas a couple of years ago and there's a guy conspiracy theorist camped out right on the spot where he got assassinated and I think he's there every day. He was there when I went there. He got like his lawn chair and his rainbow umbrella that he's sitting under. He's selling magazines that he made about the assassination. If you're in Dallas, you got to go down there and talk to this guy.

Auren Hoffman:

I already know exactly how he looks. I can picture it in my mind. He's a little overweight.

Ryan Petersen:

He's wearing sweatpants white, white beard. You definitely want to go talk to this guy, so if you're in dallas, out there, I highly recommend hopefully he's there when you go again I think he's there every day give him 20 bucks for his magazine and he will spend as long as you want walking you around telling you there's a guy hiding behind this fence and there's some guys over here like.

Ryan Petersen:

I highly recommend that conspiracy tour of jfk. And, by the way, it's no longer crazy to believe that there was a conspiracy because the official CIA historian is on the record official, saying that the CIA covered up what happened that day. I had no idea. That's now official, on the record. Cia there was a cover-up. They did not participate in the Warren Commission's investigation fully. They did not share all of their information in the Warren Commission's investigation fully. They did not share all of their information. They didn't say what happened, but they said that there was a cover-up. So that's official. Now you're crazy if you don't believe that something else happened than what they're telling you Okay, got it.

Auren Hoffman:

There's this whole thing with Woody Harrelson's father. Oh, forgot about that. His father actually went to jail for killing a federal judge and at some point he insinuated he was involved in the JFK assassination and it becomes this whole thing. There's this whole other conspiracy that Woody Harrelson's father is also Matthew McGonaghy's father. It's a very interesting thing going on.

Ryan Petersen:

Trump accused Ted Cruz's father, I believe. Oh no, that was the Zodiac Killer. Never mind Exactly.

Auren Hoffman:

All right. Last question we ask all of our guests what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Ryan Petersen:

I think there's a conventional wisdom idea that micromanagement is really bad, and I'm of the view that actually it's pretty good that you should get really involved in all the details of what people are doing and try to understand everything.

Auren Hoffman:

That is very interesting. That has come up a few times on this. Multiple people have said exactly what you've said. Sorry to be so conventional. It's actually not conventional because I would have never heard that just a few years ago. Something post-COVID maybe shifted people micromanagement sounds like a bad word, but into this direction where you got to get involved in the details.

Ryan Petersen:

I wonder if it's just a zeitgeist shift of what used to be just growth at all costs and don't worry that much about the underlying details and cost profile of the growth and everything, and now you're like wait, I need to cut costs. The only way to do that successfully not screwing up the business is get very detailed. Get involved in really what we're spending money on, what everybody's doing. Show me the ROI of everything.

Auren Hoffman:

When you read biographies whether it's John D Rockefeller, henry, andrew Carnegie or even Steve Jobs, elon Musk they're involved in the most weirdest minutest detail really zoned in. These guys are all serious micromanagers.

Ryan Petersen:

Well, it's very hard to do because the more senior you get in an organization you're the CEO of the organization the bigger it gets. How can you be involved in all this stuff? It's really challenging. So I do think a lot of frontline employees think that oh, managers just get to chill and don't have to do much because everybody else is doing the work. But the reality is, if you're running a good company, the people at the top have to work so hard to keep track of what everybody's doing.

Auren Hoffman:

Make sure they're doing a good job, and you don't want to be a bottleneck either, so you got to move things really fast as well. All right, this has been amazing.

Ryan Petersen:

Yeah, man, this is great, my pleasure. Didn't expect to publicly espouse my JFK theories.

Auren Hoffman:

We got everything going on. World of DAS.

Ryan Petersen:

By the way I follow you.

Auren Hoffman:

You have a great Twitter handle, so I follow you at Typefast. I love that Twitter handle and I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun.

Ryan Petersen:

Thanks, man. Yeah, it was great to see you. Hope everybody has a great week out there.

Auren Hoffman:

If you're a super data nerd, go to worldofdascom that's D-A-A-S. Worldofdascom and sign up for our weekly data as a service roundup newsletter. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, consider reading this podcast and leaving a review. For more World of Das and Das is D-A-A-S, you can subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts, and also check out YouTube for videos. You can find me at Twitter at at Oren. That's A-U-R-E-N. Oren, and we'd love to hear from you. World of DAS is brought to you by Safegraph. Safegraph is geospatial data for physical places. Check it out at safegraphcom. And by Flex Capital. Flex Capital invests in data companies like those we talk about at World of Das. Check it out at flexcapitalcom.