Unicorn Founder on Unseen Arbitrages, the Paradox of Wealth + Charlie Munger Wisdom
Bootstrapping, Venture Capital, and Charlie Munger's Wisdom - November 11, 2024 (over 1 year ago) • 57:34
Transcript
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Shaan Puri | Today we're talking to **Ryan Peterson**. Ryan's an interesting guy because he started out working at a pizza shop, bootstrapped his own company to $1,000,000, and now he runs **Flexport**, which is a multi-$1 billion 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.
We talk about three things. First, the one big lesson he learned when he became friends with Charlie Munger—what Charlie Munger really taught him. Second, a master class in negotiation: things he learned about negotiation back when he was in business school that still help him today. Third, the "paradox of wealth"—why chasing money directly isn't the best approach. He says money is great and you should want to make money, but instead of chasing money directly you should do something else; he calls this the paradox of wealth.
Enjoy this episode with Ryan Peterson.
Okay, today you have the Silicon Valley success story: Flexport, this behemoth, a multibillion-dollar company that went through Y Combinator (YC). You did the Silicon Valley thing—you won that game, which is great. I live in Silicon Valley; I spent 10 years trying to win that game.
The other side of it, which I think is a lot more relatable, is you were working at Domino's Pizza as a team member, flipping scooters on eBay, then building **Import Genius**, which is a bootstrap company that I think had real EBITDA. I think you were making $1,000,000 in EBITDA along the way, right? | |
Ryan Petersen | so you're no still am still am it's still a good business | |
Shaan Puri | Exactly. So you've done both, right? You've done the *bootstrapper* game, you've done the *flipper* game, and now you've done the big *Silicon Valley disruptive* game. 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 Tape Board Genius, which led, ultimately, to Flex Sport. | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah, I think that definitely—drawing the lines backwards—you can make that pattern really easily. [unclear: "that really the scooter's"] I was working for my older brother and his business partner, Michael Kanko. 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 | I have this e‑commerce business that has done over 50,000,000 in revenue. I started it kind of right before—or right during—COVID. We launched right after COVID.
I would not have found my factory had I not used **Import Genius**. I remember I was kind of a shortcut-taker in general, so I thought: either I can go on **Alibaba** and try every single supplier to find a good one, or I can go to whoever I think has the best quality and try to reverse-engineer who their factory or supplier is.
I also remember buying the subscription—either $99 or $199, I don't remember which. Then someone on your chat team did the search for me because it wasn't showing up initially. They went back further in the records—12 months, 15 months ago—and they found one manifest.
If people don't know how this works: you took public data about the shipping manifest and then organized and structured it so you could see, for any business, who their supplier is, and for any supplier, which businesses they work with. Is that the right way of describing it? | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah. That's what *ImportGenius* does. It's still—it's still the same. We haven't raised the price as much either. It's still about the same, as you said: $99 or $199. We might have raised it a tiny bit, but ImportGenius.com is the business that I started.
I only 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, show up at the factory, and they weren't expecting people to just show up. It would be a fake factory—like he's just a middleman. One time I did give them a couple of days' advance notice, but I showed up and they were very clearly faking it. This was not a bunch of guys in a warehouse with equipment or anything. So yeah, it was frustration from that.
I think ImportGenius is kind of like the organic search results—like Google. If it was all AdWords, that's kind of what Alibaba is: people paying for placement, etc. Alibaba.com is, of course, the original business—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 finding factories. I think ImportGenius is a much better way to do that.
I do think my brand is about seeing problems that other people just kind of take for granted and are blind to in some way. They just sort of accept it as, "oh, that's just reality," and then actually getting really curious about it and looking at what you could do to solve it. That's where ImportGenius came from. That's where much more came from, and that's sort of that same problem. It's annoying—I’m kind of annoying in that way. | |
Shaan Puri | like when | |
Ryan Petersen | I go to a restaurant and I'm doing **bottleneck analysis** on the cashier. I'm thinking, "What would I do to, you know, get the traffic flowing faster through this place?" But yeah, I can't help it. | |
Shaan Puri | what what is paul graham's worth for this schlep schlep blindness right | |
Ryan Petersen | Is that *schlep blindness*?
Yeah. I usually... People refer to an essay by Paul Graham called "Schlep Blindness," which is the idea that you're kind of blind to the biggest problems in the world. | |
Shaan Puri | Paul has a good quote about you I found in my research. This is the *"make you blush"* section.
It says: Paul Graham [founder of Y Combinator] says, "Ryan is what I call an **armor-piercing shell** — a founder who keeps going through obstacles that would make other people give up."
**a)** Do you think it's true?
**b)** Why do you think Paul thinks that about you? | |
Ryan Petersen | I don't know if it's true. We—well, I *do* work really hard and don't give up easily. Paul and I have had a great relationship for a long time; he's seen me since the very early days.
I met Paul before I had started Flexport—barely. My brother did Y Combinator the year before me.
We were renting a house, actually. It used to be Max Levchin's house because we used to get his mail. I don't know how long before— it wasn't a long time before—because it wasn't very nice. It was like a little apartment… [unfinished]
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | paypal house | |
Ryan Petersen | It was like before he got rich. We were renting this apartment that was near a dog park where **Paul** would take his kid, **George** — who's now older, but when he was [young] we would take my dog there to play. So we would just run into **Paul**.
My brother was in **YC** at the time, so we struck up a conversation. **Paul** has seen me since **Flexport** was just an idea. Basically, he's been a great adviser for us and has said nice things to a lot of people. | |
Shaan Puri | What did *Paul Graham* help you with? I've asked people this a couple of times, and I feel like everybody's got a great Paul Graham story. There are these crucible moments in every startup—moments of uncertainty—and Paul either brings a certain level of confidence or clarity, asks a question, or offers a bit of advice that was helpful early on. Do you feel like there was one of those for you? | |
Ryan Petersen | I think Paul's got his **superpower**: he only sees what's possible—how valuable or how big something could be if everything works—and he ignores every other possible outcome.
That is probably the right way to do seed investing. He always saw that if **Flexport** really worked, the outcome would be outsized and enormous given the industry's size and importance. He could then help us sell that story to other investors and to candidates.
In the early days he would send emails to top engineers saying really great things about us—quotes like the one you've mentioned—and to various members of the press.
He's also been a really big supporter of **flexport.org** [our humanitarian relief logistics division, which helps nonprofits with refugee camp logistics and other disaster recovery logistics]. He donated $1,000,000 to us there and helped us get the word out about all that work. So he's a huge supporter of Flexport. | |
Shaan Puri | That's amazing. Yeah, I always think about the *first believer*. I think everybody has this person who believes in you more than you believe in yourself for a time. It's sort of like—it's like a *short-term loan*, a short-term loan of conviction, and it's very helpful to an entrepreneur.
It's actually very helpful to be that person. Especially once you have a little bit of success as an entrepreneur, you can lend a bit of conviction to other people you believe in when they don't really have it. | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah, I mean, Paul's job is hard. Well, he's retired now, but the job of being a **YC** partner—or leader of YC—is just super hard.
There's a lot... most of those people are going to fail. So you have to kind of **delude yourself** if you really want to say, "only focus on what could happen." Well, it's probably not what's going to happen in most cases.
But that's very hard psychologically, I'm sure. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, maybe he needs another essay that's like *"schlep blindness"* but it's on the *investor side*. It's like... *"fail fail blindness"* — the ability to easily forget. | |
Sam Parr | Alright. So when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like **2 million subscribers**. We made money through advertising, and we didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter—because advertising, in general, is kind of a **crappy business model**.
I remember sitting down and thinking, "What are all the different ways that I can make money from The Hustle that aren't advertising?" So, to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me, and the HubSpot team went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. We put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research. We very appropriately called it the **"Business Monetization Playbook."**
Go to the description of this episode and you'll see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free—you just click the link and you can see it back in the episode. | |
Shaan Puri | With *Import Genius*, you took publicly available data, structured it, and made it into a useful business that generates $1,000,000 a year in profit.
It seems your brother also did that same business model, but in a different space with *BuildZoom*. Can you explain, maybe, what the underlying framework is — how to think about business ideas like that that might succeed? It seems like there's a pattern, that there are multiple ideas like that. | |
Ryan Petersen | That, yeah, **BuildZoom** was born out of the frustration of finding a contractor. **BuildZoom** is my older brother David's company—one of his companies—and he was my cofounder on **ImportGenius** and my boss for a while. He was sort of my mentor in the startup world.
Underlying BuildZoom is this *public dataset* of building permits. Building permits are largely public record but hard to access, and we had a lot of experience doing that with ImportGenius. So we built a search engine on building permits. Once you look up any house, anywhere, you can see who the contractors were that worked on it, which is pretty useful as a homeowner.
As a tool, you can see who built the property. If you have a problem, go find that person—they probably can help you with it. Being able to talk to the actual homeowners who worked with a contractor and making sure that the reviews are actually from people who hired this contractor is valuable. There's a great dataset out there, and they built a nice little business on top of that dataset.
I think *government data is a big opportunity*. The government has tons of public records on all kinds of stuff and no real incentive to organize it in ways that are particularly useful. That makes it hard to build defensibility for businesses that rely on public records, because other people can access the same data. So you have to get distribution or build some kind of network effect on top of it.
In BuildZoom's case, it's the reviews you layer onto the data. And brand is always the ultimate network effect you can build. But I think people overthink defensibility a little bit. How could you have defensibility if you're a startup? If it were already defensible, how could you possibly have done it yourself? | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, then we did an episode recently. I was like, "I found this app that's called *Oasis*." It's a water-quality-tracking app—basically it shows how much, you know, *forever chemicals* are in your water.
This kid did the same thing. He lived in Minnesota where they had clean water and drank tap all the time. He moved to LA, started drinking tap water, it tasted funny, and he got a little bit sick. He was like, "Oh man, I wish I could figure this out."
Turns out every city has its own testing data that's publicly available. You can request reports from every bottled-water company as well. So he created an app that presents that data to the consumer.
Then he goes viral on TikTok with these kind of fear-based posts like:
> "Did you know that... blah blah blah? But you can check this using this app."
He's built a thriving business on it. I think he's at about $50k MRR, and he's just a kid in his twenties. Nice. It's not the most defensible... you gotta | |
Ryan Petersen | get this to rfk jr man he'll be the one you're in | |
Shaan Puri | "I know that's right, but I think it's kind of *amazing* that you could do this—taking public data and making that happen."
</FormattedResponse> | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah — *brand and network effect*, distribution, getting users, getting people loyal to it, and executing with high velocity.
I remember I got in a fight on Twitter about five years ago with some guy talking about moats. I was just making a play on words, saying, "Well, you know, the moat turned out to be not that useful once someone invented artillery." Right? We don't use moats — like, you don't put alligators to defend your business.
I was saying, actually, you don't really want to hide behind walls. Ever since the Blitzkrieg in 1939 or 1940 — whatever — we learned that high-velocity attack is the way to win, not sitting behind defensive walls. I don't know, some investor got really upset with me that I didn't believe in moats. Of course, you know, I'm just making a play on words.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | Right. Well, you wrote in here something that I found pretty interesting—I didn't know you were friends with **Charlie Munger**. And speaking of moats, **Buffett** and **Munger** famously talked about how defensibility and moats are super important. Can you tell the story? How did you become friends with **Charlie Munger**? | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah—RIP. What? Oh—what. I'm friendly with Charlie Munger, let's say. I had dinner at his house seven or eight times before he passed. I went to his 99th birthday party last year. Actually, I'm a huge fan of his.
He has this essay which I think every person—especially young people trying to figure their way through the world—should read. It's called *The Art of Worldly Wisdom*. If you search "worldly wisdom Charlie Munger" you'll find it. I actually found it on Paul Grims' website. I believe PG published it to the Y Combinator website at some point.
I had read it when I was young and feeling uninspired or trying to figure things out—what should I do with my life? The essay basically argues that in every discipline—biology, chemistry, whatever—you can define a number of disciplines however you want; it's somewhat arbitrary. Say there are a few hundred disciplines in the world. In each one there are two or three big ideas that carry about 80% of the freight. If you know those two or three big ideas, you'll get roughly 80% of that whole discipline.
In biology it's probably Darwinian evolution and something to do with genetics, which are obviously related. When you learn those two or three big ideas, you'll have enough biology to be dangerous. You can learn these ideas by going to read the textbook.
So if there are only 300 disciplines and 2 or 3 ideas each, you're like, okay—I've got to learn about 600 to 1,000 ideas. If I could learn them, I'd be what Munger calls "worldly wise." It's an interesting concept that set me off on a journey; I probably read hundreds of books as a result of that. | |
Shaan Puri | searching for the big ideas in every space | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah, I'm like, "What are these disciplines?" I like disciplines. I don't really—well, I found that boring. Like, okay, whatever; I'll just go find them and still learn the top ideas from it.
No, I'm not saying I've succeeded. There are some disciplines I just can't bring myself to. | |
Shaan Puri | By the way, his essay isn't just saying there are these ideas — he actually lists a bunch of them. For example:
> "Things gravitate towards *winner-take-all*; therefore it pays to be number one or number two, or just be out."
Then he gives examples. The essay isn't just the concept that these ideas exist; he provides a bunch of examples that, yeah, illustrate them. | |
Ryan Petersen | He calls them *mental models*. If you build these mental models from one discipline, they are often applicable in another. That's where a lot of good ideas come from. A lot of innovation comes from applying an idea across fields.
Richard Feynman is a great example. This famous physicist spent two years as a biologist and did some groundbreaking work in biology just because he took ideas from physics—frameworks people hadn't really thought of—and applied them to biology.
I was very inspired by Munger for many decades. Similarly, I was at a party at one of my investors' houses. I was talking to this older guy; neither of us knew many people there. He asked me what my favorite book was, and I started talking about *Poor Charlie's Almanack*, which is a great book that Stripe just reprinted, by the way. I told him that book was my favorite and started explaining why.
I told the story of *Worldly Wisdom* and how I was living in China and was bored out of my mind sometimes. So I bought all these books and read for hours a day, every day. He let me talk for a long time before he said, "Yeah, I know that book really well. I wrote that book." | |
Shaan Puri | and | |
Ryan Petersen | It turned out the guy I was talking to was a guy named **Peter Kaufman**, who wrote the book *Poor Charlie's Almanack*. He's one of **Charlie Munger**'s best friends. He got such a kick out of me telling him how great his book was that he brought me to Charlie's house for dinner many times. I became friends with a few of Charlie's other friends and was invited to lots of dinners.
I remember when I first told Charlie about what **Flightsport** does. He said, "Oh, this is — that's great. You have a great business, because the key to success is dumb competition." He then started ranting about his experience working with freight companies.
I also think that's a great little tagline. When you're trying to think of what business to do — all these guys doing AI startups — I think applying AI to some old‑school, frozen industry is a great idea. But just going straight head‑to‑head against other AI geniuses is a recipe... who wants to compete with people that smart? I'd rather compete with knuckleheads wherever you can. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly. That's a very simple principle. In poker, **table selection** is probably the most important decision you make.
Everyone thinks poker is about the bluffs and the advanced betting strategies, but a huge amount of your success comes down to which table you choose to sit at. If you choose to sit at the "fish" table, you're going to do pretty well. That one decision can be the most important decision you could make.
If you sit down with all the sharks—well, good luck. It doesn't matter how good you are; you're probably just going to bash your head against the wall for a while. | |
Ryan Petersen | that's why I don't play poker | |
Shaan Puri | When you met this guy, I—I like how you said you were at a party and you're like, "Well, Bill didn't know anybody." There's this alliance of the outcasts that happens.
I don't know if you've heard the story about Ben & Jerry's, but they asked Ben, "How'd you meet Jerry?" and he goes:
> "They go, 'Were you guys friends immediately?' Because they've been friends for a long time. He goes, 'No. We just were in the same P.E. class and we had to run the mile, and both of us hated running, so we were the only two guys walking. Eventually, if you're just walking at the back with one other guy, eventually you'll start talking.'"
He's like, "That was the foundation of Ben & Jerry's."
Also, I want to ask you about this—you said you moved to China. What was the thought process that got you there, and what did you get out of doing that? | |
Ryan Petersen | It was 2005. It was clearly booming — it seemed like the future.
At that time I was working for my brother. We had this scooter company: buying dirt bikes and road—what we called scooters—but also off‑road vehicles, buggies, and all kinds of cool motorsports products. We were buying everything from China, but not just ordering off the internet; no one had been to China yet.
During college I lived in South America — in Chile and Brazil — and I learned to speak **Spanish** and **Portuguese**. I thought, if anyone can learn Chinese, I probably could. | |
Shaan Puri | learn chinese | |
Ryan Petersen | I learned these other two languages, which was very naive. So I saved up a little money and just moved there. | |
Shaan Puri | Did you plan to be there for a while? Did you buy a *one-way ticket*? What—what did you tell yourself going in? Uh...</FormattedResponse> | |
Ryan Petersen | "I don't know. I didn't have an exit plan. I was just going to learn Chinese and learn about Chinese culture, history, economics, and what's going on in" | |
Shaan Puri | "The boom — what's your tip if somebody's in their twenties and they're kind of intrigued by this, like the *'adventure path'*? What would you tell them? How would you tell them to think about this now that you've..." | |
Ryan Petersen | Done it. I think it's really about your values — you know, really introspecting. You can select your values, too. A lot of people just kind of go through life without thinking about this.
I did, and my value, without knowing it consciously, my number one value in life until I was about 25 or 26 was *adventure*. I just wanted to try all kinds of things and go all over the world. Remember, this was *pre-iPhone*, so it was pretty adventurous: I didn't have GPS in my pocket or translation apps. I just had to figure stuff out, walking around asking people for directions and hoping they'd be nice to me — which they were — but it was definitely an adventure.
At that time, chasing *adventure* was my value. That's not for everybody, but if it is, it's pretty easy to achieve: go to cheap places. It's a lot less adventurous these days. Now you go to China, you call Uber or Didi, you've got Google Translate, Maps, translation apps — it's a little too easy.
I once rode my bicycle from China to Vietnam with no map. The map we had was all wrong, which is almost worse than no map, and we just had to figure it out. We slept at people's houses at times; it was like old-school adventures. | |
Shaan Puri | I think back to my question about why **Paul Graham** called you "an armor‑piercing shell who just… figures things out."
I think this is where you get the *reps* in, right? The problem‑solving and the confidence—*“I'm gonna figure things out”*—doesn't just start the day you incorporate your startup in **Delaware**. It starts by getting a bunch of reps earlier in life, maybe. | |
Ryan Petersen | I think learning a foreign language in that country is... it's not a good **ROI** [financial return]. You probably won't make any money off of this, especially now with **ChatGPT**. It's incredible—I can do live translation in every app and every language.
But the *humility* of it... people thought I was a freaking idiot. I couldn't speak, and bus drivers thought I was an idiot. Having that happen over and over every day is pretty good for your ego and your humility, and also for relating to other people in your country. | |
Shaan Puri | And when you went there, you were like, "I'm gonna go, I'm gonna learn the language, I'm gonna travel, eat..." But you're a *business junkie*. I saw something in the research where you said, "You know, I was like, 'Oh, this guy's my kind of people.' You go, 'My form of entertainment is making a landing page one night and sending some traffic and seeing if people click to buy,'" right?
So, were you kind of scheming and dreaming about business while you were there? What were you doing on the business side while you...?
</FormattedResponse> | |
Ryan Petersen | We were there, so we were sourcing all of our products from **China**. I would go to factories—to find them, evaluate quality, and manage shipments. I did a lot of everything: made websites, did marketing, and handled customer service. | |
Shaan Puri | was that was that scooter business any good did you make any money doing that or what was the result | |
Ryan Petersen | It was pretty good. You made a salary — like a W-2 level income — that was above all of our friends at the time, but not a *change-your-life* kind of income. | |
Shaan Puri | Right. You know, this podcast — the title of it is called **My First Million** — and one of the things at the beginning, the premise of the podcast was always going to be: let me bring people on, ask them, "How did you make your first million?" That's where it started.
I ended up pivoting to something else and kept the name, because when something gets popular, changing the name is a little risky. But I still like the question of, when you did make your first million, what changed?
I view money as a tool to improve the quality of your life, and I think it's very easy to slip into thinking of money as this kind of measuring stick or just something you accumulate over time. So I'm curious for you: once you kind of had a win — probably during the **Import Genius** days — and you made some real money that freed up your time, how did you use it? How did it feel? What was your mindset during that time? Can you share anything like that? I think that's where a lot of people want to get to, and I think that'll be pretty relatable to those who listen. | |
Ryan Petersen | for them | |
Shaan Puri | the first year I | |
Ryan Petersen | What I did when I started making money was **pay off all my student debt**. That felt great.
I **invested it wisely**: I put a lot in the Wealthfront index fund and bought a couple of cash-generating real estate properties. I made some stupid decisions too. I once invested in a nightclub that failed — that was stupid, but it didn't change much.
Well, first off, people will tell you that money's not important or won't... I don't believe these studies that say, "oh, you stop..." | |
Shaan Puri | at 75 | |
Ryan Petersen | Years improving your life at a certain point. I'm certain that can't be replicated.
You know, most of these psychology studies turn out not to replicate. There's a **replication crisis in psychology**, and I'm certain that this is one.
And, you know, the idea that money is great—because the more people have, the more they want—must be great, right? | |
Shaan Puri | must be amazing | |
Ryan Petersen | can't get enough of it | |
Shaan Puri | Wait — can you say more about this *paradox of wealth*? I saw you write down this idea. I want to read you a line from it and just hear you talk about it.
Here's what you wrote. You wrote:
> "Paradox of all: focusing on making money will cause you to make less money. Nobody wants to give money to people who are too focused on money. They perceive them as greedy and self-interested and try to avoid them. They give money to people who add value for them. It is fine to want money — it's great. In fact, money is one of the best things in the world. But it's a paradox: the more of it you want, the less of it you get. So hack your brain into instead focusing on the things that are upstream of making money. What's upstream of making money?"
What's upstream of making money? | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah, I think *upstream* — making money is solving problems for people at the end of the day. That means learning: you gotta build your skill set so you can learn.
*Upstream* of that is learning what the problems are and developing a set of skills and capabilities to let you solve them.
Salespeople can suffer from this, or they can be great. Great salespeople are really consultative — good at asking questions, good at diagnosing problems, and understanding what their product or their firm can do to solve that problem. When you bring those together, you win. Yeah, everybody wins — creating win-wins, but the perception of... | |
Shaan Puri | A salesperson is a *pusher*: "I'm going to make you — I'm going to try to get you to buy something you don't want, or pay." | |
Ryan Petersen | oh there's a lot of bad salespeople that are on it | |
Shaan Puri | a bad salesperson yeah | |
Ryan Petersen | Poorly. That's the image that most people have when they think of salespeople. And, you know, this is true because we can't even call people "salespeople" — "account executives, account executives" — because **sales** is such a bad word. | |
Shaan Puri | yeah we had to rebrand it we had to go aioli instead of mayo | |
Ryan Petersen | There's only a couple of—this may have changed; I think it did, in fact. A few years ago, when I looked into it, there were only three universities in the United States that offered a major in **sales**.
Wow. It's part of everybody's job. It's probably 10% of all the jobs in the whole world that are explicitly **sales**, and then everybody has to sell their ideas.
We've kind of been wrongly scapegoated, as though this were a terrible profession. In fact, salespeople are the **key driver** of every company, even tech companies. So many good tech companies fail with good technology because they can't learn how to sell it and get customers. And then there are companies where the tech isn't even strong—they're just good at selling. | |
Shaan Puri | so right | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah. I think *hacking the brain*. I used to say things are correlated with money, but I think it's better to go upstream and actually cause the generation of wealth. The more you can study that, the more wealth you'll get.
I don't think it's bad to want money, but you have to realize it might cause you to get less. It's a bit like love, by the way: if someone's obsessed with finding a girlfriend or husband, it gets kind of creepy. **Work on yourself instead.** | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, that's a great one. There's a great story about **Warren Buffett** — I don't know if you heard this one — where he goes to a classroom and there's a bunch of kids sitting there.
He says, "Alright, let's play a game," and he basically says, "I want you to pick one person in this classroom — you can choose any classmate, not yourself — and you get 10% of their earnings for the rest of their life. Write down on a piece of paper the name of the person you're picking and why."
So, have you heard this story before? I don't want to bore you. | |
Ryan Petersen | I not yeah but maybe it's not gonna | |
Shaan Puri | Surprise you, but it's interesting. At first, I think it makes the—well, so he... Everybody writes down the name, and then he brings it up. He's like, "You know, okay." | |
Ryan Petersen | who here just raise your hand | |
Shaan Puri | Did you pick the person with the best grades? Nobody raised their hands. Already that tells you something about school and what we think is valuable versus what everybody intuitively in their gut knew was valuable.
He asked, "Did you just pick the person with the highest IQ?" A couple of people raised their hands. "Did you pick the guy who could throw the football the farthest?" Nobody raised their hand.
He then started asking, "What qualities did you pick?" Basically, it came down to some version of the following characteristics that **Buffett** ultimately used for picking people. He talks about:
- **Energy** — People who are really obsessed with things. They get into something, and when they put their mind to a project they just never stop. They never give up. They have an endless energy toward something.
- **Integrity** — If this person is going to act out of bounds, owning 10% of their future isn't going to do me much good. I need somebody who is going to play by the rules and by the law, who knows what rules to break and what rules not to break.
- **Intelligence** — Someone who is good at figuring things out specifically. Not your grades or just raw IQ, but somebody who tends to figure things out.
He said, "Great — now you have the formula of what you need to be." If that's what you would pick in others, that's what you need to be.
That sort of reminds me of the paradox of wealth: if you put one hundred people together and ask, "Who is going to be the wealthiest?" intuitively we would know it's not the person who only chases money and tries to extract as much as possible from the system. It's probably not going to work as well as somebody who does the things you talked about. | |
Ryan Petersen | Speaking of school, I took a *negotiations class* once. It was **one of my favorite classes**. Everyone—everyone should try to get into one of these, because the way you do it at work is... [unintelligible]. | |
Shaan Puri | always wanted to take this I kinda wanna go to business school but I'd love to take a negotiation class yeah | |
Ryan Petersen | You're given a case study in which both parties read the same document. Each party has slightly different rules to follow, and then you negotiate with each other under those conditions.
What's amazing is that in a class there are 30 other pairs — if there are 60 people in your class, there are 30 other pairs (or 15, whatever) — however many people are doing the exact same thing. You can compare how you did against other people in the same seat as you.
That was almost 20 years ago, and it's very interesting because I've stayed in touch with a lot of these people. You can track the people who are the best negotiators in a classroom environment — or not the most successful — because they're very good at extracting too much in a *one-off negotiation*, but that's not how life works.
In life, there are *repeat games*: you have to "let the other guy win." If you just take advantage of someone, they're never going to want to do business with you again. Guess what — you're not going to do that well.
So it's kind of an interesting, light, long-term longitudinal study that someone could do on these things. | |
Shaan Puri | I worked with my dad for about nine months. Working with your dad is an interesting experience in a bunch of different ways, but one of the things you actually get to see is your dad in a new context. I got to see my dad at work.
One of the things I asked other people at work was, "What's my dad good at? What's his strength?" They all said, "He's a good negotiator—he's a great negotiator, but he's a little too tough." I thought that was interesting because when I asked about strength and weakness, they kind of said the same thing.
I got into a situation that was a high-stakes negotiation—basically, the future of the company was kind of up for grabs. Somebody had leverage, somebody else had leverage. We all sat down at this table and my dad did one thing really great. He said, "We don't really like the options on the table," and then he said, "Oh, okay, cool. I'll always go with the third option." I was like, "No, what—what's your counter?" He said, "No counter. No."
He's, you know, basically in a negotiation... I was like, "Well, how are you going to explain this?" He's like, "Oh, it's not about explaining. In a negotiation, the more irrational person tends to win. The more stubborn party wins because the other person will just realize this person's irrational, so I just have to play by their rules."
So he was *super stubborn*, and he won. At the end they took a break—just kind of, "Okay, let's go break before we come back and finalize." I asked this other guy who was kind of the arbitrator sitting there, "What do you think?" He goes, "I think you took too much." My dad kind of smiled. He took that as a... | |
Shaan Puri | Out of pride, I sort of was like, "Well, what do you mean by that?"
He said, "You were at a poker table and you tilted the table and all the chips went towards you. There's no way this deal gets done—eventually it gets done, right—because they have nothing to gain. You've taken everything away from them, so they have nothing to gain out of this transaction. Today they feel forced, but soon they'll just realize, 'Ah, this is not even— I don't have to do that. I'd rather not.'"
That's exactly how it played out. I learned a lesson, sort of at my dad's expense, about negotiation: you *sort of* need both sides to leave a little wanting. Or even if you take too much, you need to give back at the end in order for something to be sustainable—especially if you're playing a repeat game.
Where have you had negotiation in your life since then? Right, because negotiation is not an everyday thing; it's a once-in-a-while thing. | |
Ryan Petersen | Oh man, we run a **global logistics company** where we have to procure ocean freight and air freight, and then we have to sell air freight and ocean freight. | |
Shaan Puri | I mean it's a standard thing for you | |
Ryan Petersen | Trucking, customs services—everything else that we do on an end-to-end basis. There's a huge amount of negotiation.
I think one of the big opportunities we have in this industry is that the industry is very short-term focused and transactional—almost mercenary. Some of these things you have to go with the industry; you can't change everything about the industry at once. But being able to play the **long game** and say, "hey, we're going to win; we're going to make tons of money by building trust with people and showing them where the profit pools are," and not taking too much of it, and figuring out how we create the right **win‑win** scenario—that's important.
I think it's a good framework actually for evaluating any company. There are **six stakeholders** at the table for every company: you have your customers, you have your vendors (which in some cases don't matter that much, but for us they matter a lot), you've got your employees, your investors, your regulators, and the communities where you live and operate.
You've got these six stakeholders and you have to create a win‑win. It's a very simple way: each of them needs to win in an ideal scenario. You can go through almost any company and say, okay, let's score them "A" through "F" for each one of those things. It's very rare to find a company where every single party is winning—somebody's usually, you know, not. | |
Shaan Puri | so so what's the goal is it mostly as and but nothing below a c what's the whole | |
Ryan Petersen | Be as... but where you have something that's bad—like you've got a lot of risk—that's no good. It could all come to a stop, especially if the regulators are not happy or communities start protesting and try to run you out of town.
I think **Airbnb** [short-term rental platform] is a good example. It's a great company. Guests pretty much love it. Homeowners definitely love it—they're making free cash off an unused asset. **Investors** have done really well, and the employees seem happy there. But the regulators are not thrilled in some cases. They're right to be concerned; sometimes cities manage it because it generates tax revenue. Communities, on the other hand... I don't want people throwing a party in the house next door to mine.
That's an area for them to address. As they use this **framework**—*Where should we emphasize? What are we doing?*—they look at these issues and take action. I don't know the exact framework they use, but they certainly go, "Okay, let's 'ban partying.' What else can we do to make neighbors like us more?" It's a pretty simple framework.
I think someone looking for a job at a company should definitely take the time to score each company they're considering on this framework. **Investors** should do the same. If everybody's not winning, the business might not be sustainable for the long term. All the good returns as an investor come from holding for a very long time and letting the **compounding machine** run. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, the risk accumulates. It may not be a problem right now, but it's accumulating. Eventually, that's a *powder keg*.
You are also a partner. | |
Ryan Petersen | at founders fund right yeah a venture partner | |
Shaan Puri | A venture partner at **Founders Fund** — your LinkedIn says: "looking for a generational company to back." How's that going? | |
Ryan Petersen | I mean, **Founders Fund** — I've been a very loyal part of the Founders Fund network for a while. They were our first Series A investor. They led our A and our B and participated, I think, in every other round we've done.
When they asked me to join, it was kind of a no-brainer for me. I mean, it took me a little while; I said no a bunch of times — I shouldn't say "no-brainer" — but they're the only firm I could consider joining because I think they're really unique in their refusal to follow the herd and their willingness to think for themselves.
I actually joined full-time as a general partner, and then I came back to **Flexport**. I took about six months where I was the chair — executive chairman — and then I realized I had to come back and be the CEO again at Flexport. So I kind of scaled my role way back at Founders Fund, but I'm still part of the team. | |
Shaan Puri | You said they're *unique* in how they do things. I've interacted with them a bunch, and I felt that too.
But I'm always interested: what's the cause of that effect? What is an example of something they do differently on the *input* side that leads to the *output* of being, you know, **independent thinkers**, **contrarian**, or willing to make bets that others don't? | |
Ryan Petersen | Well, a lot of it just comes from **Peter** being... refusing. He's just like—that's his whole life thesis:
> "People are *mimetic* and they will chase the same outcome, the same goal, the same object, the same mimetic desire. Everybody wants the same thing."
If you can avoid that, that is a huge arbitrage opportunity. If you can go look where other people aren't looking, you can find advantage.
A lot of it, I would say, probably is just from Peter, but they've really trained it into the team.
How does that manifest itself? It's a very high-paying job. FoundersOne actually has a better compensation structure — it's almost all tied to outcomes and performance. But a lot of VCs just make super huge... you'd be surprised how high the salaries are at many other VCs. They make a lot of money for a job that can't really be measured except on a 10-year time horizon. | |
Shaan Puri | and even on that | |
Ryan Petersen | It could be *luck*. You don't have an overseeing boss breathing down your neck — you can do it from anywhere. Every time I email a VC, they seem to be in France. It's a job that's kind of a dream.
So what's the incentive structure there? It's basically: don't get fired. It's hard to fire you for performance because it takes a long time for these things to mature, and, again, it could be *luck*. The way you get fired is by everyone reaching a *consensus* that you're doing dumb things. It's not just by doing dumb things — it's by having a consensus form that "this guy's making dumb decisions; we gotta fire him."
There are a lot of cases where funds fired someone who, a few years later, turned out to have been their best person, but they didn't know it at the time. Therefore, the way to avoid getting fired in VC — again, this is not "Founders Fund" (that's what I like about them; they're very different) — is to double-check everything you do with other VCs. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Ryan Petersen | To make sure everybody agrees, and you don't want to do it internally because then you look like you have no opinions—you can't operate. So you do it with all your buddies at all the other VCs [venture capitalists]. It's just a collusion... massive collusion racket.
The incentives are restructured such that everybody's talking to everybody to double-check and make sure. That leads to regression, herd mentality, regression to the mean. It leads to people not wanting to take a lot of risk, which is just lame. Venture capital is supposed to be about risk-taking, but it's not often.
I think Founders Fund is very good at not participating in those things. They don't really go to conferences. The conference they do do is called "Hereticon." It's literally about heretical ideas that... you know how to | |
Shaan Puri | "Say out loud: 'That's probably the most unique conference. Most people probably don't know what it is. Can you explain what **Hereticon** is, and then maybe some examples of what a talk at **Hereticon** might be about?'"
</FormattedResponse> | |
Ryan Petersen | **Hereticon is an idea**, but at most conferences, people on stage can't say anything that doesn't fit the mainstream narrative. The concept of "heretical" is that you come on stage and say something that would get you canceled—or some heretical idea.
I don't think they publish the talks online because of the nature of it all. I'm working on it. I'm going to do a talk—if I can make it. Maybe next year I'll try to do a talk. I have no ideas. | |
Shaan Puri | **"Heretic":** a person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted.
I texted a bunch of friends who went. I said, "Hey, what was the best thing?" They were like, "Well, you know—somebody gave this talk." Like, "My belief in the probability that aliens exist has actually meaningfully changed based on [X]'s talk." Or, "This person gave a talk about, you know, the conspiracy around X, Y, Z, and it just sounds fascinating."
Sounds like one of the few conferences where I would get there early and stay late. Yeah — it would just, like, the market would be great again. | |
Ryan Petersen | Like one brand, right? **Don't—don't just follow the herd.** They're not trying to just reference-check every deal. They'll put their neck out there and make some crazy bets.
What's amazing—and I haven't yet figured it out—is how they have such an amazing track record, because I don't think it's just *YOLO-ing* it. They're very good at picking founders, I think. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Ryan Petersen | There's no formula for it because people are unique. It is really interesting: they're writing — they're very big funds these days, and they write large checks with conviction.
They do this without being like "spreadsheet monkeys" who are just... you know, it's not all spreadsheets. And, of course, they do due diligence and analysis, but they're much more built on *who the founder is* and *what they're all about*, right? | |
Shaan Puri | Before you came on, I sent this doc to every guest. One of the questions I asked was: **What are three strong opinions or life philosophies you live by?**
One is related to what we're talking about. You have this quote from Emerson. It says:
> "The great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
You had some examples under this. Can you talk about that—what that means to you and what some examples are? | |
Ryan Petersen | Well, there's some great, very practical examples you can use in your life, and you'll be able to see that this is true. It's literally related to crowds.
Next time you are entering a stadium, watch: your brain will want to just follow the people mindlessly into the stadium. But if you can **snap out of that** and say, "Wait—let me think for myself," remember most of these people have no idea. Most of them have never been to this stadium before; they don't know where the entrance is. There's almost always another entrance that nobody's lined up for, and you can just walk right in.
Or take parking. I'm a big skier. Whenever you go to a ski resort there are guys—parking attendants—waving. Their job is to park all the cars, but their job is *not* to park your car as close to the mountain as you could be. There aren't 1,000 spaces right next to the chairlift, so they're going to direct everybody to where there are 1,000 car spaces, which, for sure, means you're going to have to take some kind of shuttle. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Ryan Petersen | It'll take you an hour to get to the ski lift. But if you just ignore that guy— I mean, I don't want to be rude, so figure out a way to do this. It's not like breaking the rules or whatever. **Go straight to the front**, and there'll be a spot right next to the chairlift because somebody's always leaving.
So yeah, you can apply this at a very practical level: like moving your own body around when there's large groups of people and watching the **herd mentality** play out. It's very difficult often for people to do. People are terrified of public speaking for good reason: for thousands or tens of thousands of years, if you were standing in front of a large group of other humans, they were probably about to kill you. You're either their leader or they were going to kill you. | |
Shaan Puri | something bad's going to happen | |
Ryan Petersen | This is, of course, **terrifying**. Learning how to become their leader is not instinctual.
I think it may be for certain [people], you know—certainly not for me. It took me a long time to practice: to some degree I had to practice not feeling terrified in front of groups and then learn to enjoy it.
I don't think leaders are terrified; they *love* the crowd. Even Bruce Springsteen says he still gets nervous when he goes and plays, and he has to "hack his brain" to believe that that's energy he can harness to give the fans what they want. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah — you mentioned a couple of things: Bruce Springsteen, the idea of *mindset*, and "hacking your mind." Are you big into mindset? | |
Ryan Petersen | I think any founder—it's very hard for people to understand what an *emotional roller coaster* it is and how painful it can be. The lows are pretty low, and the high and the low can come in the same day.
You get punched in the face constantly, and, yeah, you can get pretty down. You need to have **release mechanisms and hacks** and ways to get yourself back up, because it's certainly not for everybody. | |
Shaan Puri | Can I tell you a little hack I do that may be useful for anybody out there? I have a Slack channel called **"literally highs and lows."** I post any high or low there.
The beautiful thing about it is that because it's a Slack channel, you can just scroll up and realize—three months ago you thought something "felt like kind of the end of the world" and it felt really bad. Now you don't; it's like a stubbed toe. Do you remember how your last stubbed toe felt? | |
Ryan Petersen | like is this like a private channel is this for yourself | |
Shaan Puri | It's me and my co‑founder, so we do this. I do this across every business I have.
Whether it's a high, I go back and get humbled immediately by a low. I'm like, *"Okay, don't get too high on your own supply here."* Or if it's a low currently, I'm like, "Well, I've already gone through—if you just scroll up—I've already conquered a bunch of mountains like this before. I've dealt with this; I'll be fine."
It's an immediate perspective machine. It's not even someone else's perspective—it's that I was in the same channel three months ago saying the same thing, crying wolf basically about this high or this low. Neither are as good or as bad as they seem in the moment. | |
Ryan Petersen | It's... I like that; I might try that. But it's very hard for another *non-founder* to appreciate how difficult that is. My wife is a former journalist, a tech reporter in fact. | |
Shaan Puri | oh nice | |
Ryan Petersen | And her watching my ride firsthand—"watching" is the wrong word; *participating* in it has really kind of... I hope she's like, "Man, I wish I had known this side of things when I was writing about tech companies," you know?
I think tech reporters—like all reporters—play a very important function of holding the powerful accountable. But founders are not that powerful; we're kind of suffering through... | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Ryan Petersen | You know, we're up against some very powerful forces in the world. We feel like we're the ones trying to *speak truth to power* and fight for the lower guy.
Meanwhile, the narrative within the media has been, "Oh, the tech... the founders are the ones that we have to hold accountable." We're like, what about this multibillion—almost-trillion—mega‑corporation, this company worth tens of billions of dollars [$1,000,000,000 = $1 billion], that I... | |
Shaan Puri | compete with like I'm right | |
Ryan Petersen | I'm kinda *pathetic* sometimes. I mean, we beat them every day, but sometimes they're better than us at certain things. We're trying to get better. We get better at what's faster than they do, but we're not always the best. We're starting out, especially as an *early-stage founder*. | |
Shaan Puri | You have another one of the life philosophies that was simple — it had no extra words. I kind of want to hear your explanation of it. You said, **"You can just do things."** What does that motto do for you? | |
Ryan Petersen | Oh, I don't know. I think there's this idea that you need somebody's *permission* to... I mean, you should have it. That's why, by the way, a law class is useful for people. If you're in undergrad, try to get into a basic class. | |
Shaan Puri | a law class | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah, look — don't break the law, but you should have an understanding of what's legal and what's not. **ChatGPT** is pretty amazing for this. But in general, it's not illegal; you can just do it, and there are a lot of things that people expect.
We come up through this education system where everything's gated: you can't get to 12th-grade math until you finish 11th-grade math, and you don't get to go to college unless you get these grades. Within the institutions of the world, yeah, you can't just do things — you have to follow the rules. But in the real world, that's not how it works. There's no boss waiting to tell you what you can do.
A lot of people believe that they have to raise **venture capital (VC)** to start a company, for example. We're like, "Well, maybe you should think of a different idea that doesn't need any money and just do it." That's what we did, and we raised VC after 10 years of doing companies without [venture capital]. | |
Shaan Puri | Right. Yeah — you don't need to have the victim mindset. On the YC (Y Combinator) application there's this question that... I mean, the application is not long either, so if the question's on there it must have some value. There are only about seven questions on the whole application.
It was: **"What's an example of a real-world system that you've hacked?"** Meaning—finding the side door into something, not following the crowd; you could just do things differently.
I asked my friend Shiel, who I think invested in Flexport early on, "Hey, I got Ryan on the podcast today—what's a good Ryan story from the early days?" He said, "Oh, there's a bunch," and then gave me one:
"He bought AdWords for the keyword 'Uber promo' and just put his own promo code there and got a bunch of cheap Uber rides for himself that way."
Is that true? Did you do that? | |
Ryan Petersen | I became Uber's best customer—lifetime, probably—because I got like $10,000 in Uber credits by doing that. I treated Uber like it was *free* because it was free for me for a while. I've probably netted out to spending... I bet you I spent way too much.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | much uber | |
Ryan Petersen | As a result, yeah, that was a *good hack*. I didn't come up with that; I copied it from a friend, but... | |
Shaan Puri | you know what's funny is I had 2 friends that did that and I never | |
Ryan Petersen | it never occurred to me | |
Shaan Puri | To also do that, right? I just *assumed* it was done because other people had done it... and I don't know. | |
Ryan Petersen | "They kind of shut it down. *I'm not sure*—I'm not sure it was even bad. I think I paid for *Google's AdWords* campaign for them, or *Uber's AdWords* campaign for them, so." | |
Shaan Puri | We had this dude call into the podcast once. He's a guy in **India**, and what he was doing was he realized there was an *arbitrage* where **Uber** had this credit system — kind of a "give credits to somebody and you'll get credits" model. It was the PayPal "give $10, get $10" type of model, but what they didn't do was account for geographic differences at the time.
So he would get a bunch of people in India to sign up. He'd give them, you know, $10 of Uber credits, which is a big deal there, and they would sign up and take a ride. A ride in India is really cheap, and he would get $10 of credits and then sell them to Americans.
I bought $1,000 of credits off this guy and I rode really, really cheap because you could buy like $5 of credits for like $1,000 [sic] because this guy was farming them in India basically. This worked for years.
He called into the podcast and he was literally in a small apartment in rural India. He said:
> "I make, you know..."
and I forgot what it was, like $15,000 a month, which is more than my entire village makes basically doing this. He goes, "I don't know how long it'll last; that's why I'm still living here — I'm just saving it up for now. Eventually they'll close this loophole and when they do, you know, that'll be a sad day."
But it was amazing to see that loophole, that hack. | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah, I definitely sped through the credits pretty quickly and then just became *Uber's* biggest customer for a long time.
Now I'm mostly riding my bike, and I stopped riding Uber to work. | |
Shaan Puri | One thing I find fascinating is you have a **side hustle**. I find this interesting when entrepreneurs have these side things that just work right off the bat. You did this one about *phone booths* — like phone booths and companies. Could you just quickly tell this story? I think it's kind of inspiring. | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah. Well, *unfortunately*, it closed down. They sold the company, and I didn't make any money. I think it was kind of mismanaged, to be honest.</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | okay fair enough | |
Ryan Petersen | It started at **Flexport**. We never had enough conference rooms, so I hired carpenters on **Craigslist** to make a couple of phone booths out of wood. I built a phone booth in our office at Flexport and put a lot of foam padding in there to make it somewhat soundproof.
They were terrible—the ones I made myself via Craigslist—because ventilation was insufficient. We put a fan, but not enough ventilation, so you'd come out of it dripping in sweat. Yet people were in there nonstop using it. I thought, if the product's this bad and everybody still wants to use it, there's something here.
My friend **Henrich**, who's the founder of **AirHelp**, really ran with this idea. I should give him all the credit—he built it into a company. I kept talking about it. This is another thing to do: talk about your business ideas at parties and stuff. Every time I talked about this idea with founders, they'd say, "I want to buy five of them," or, "Oh man, I should just start this company — I've got a waiting list to buy this stuff."
So we made these really nice Swedish-design booths. Now that the company's failed or been sold, I can tell you the IP—the secret here, the intellectual property—was that we put **three fans** in that thing. | |
Shaan Puri | the genius the genius hack | |
Ryan Petersen | so he's doing like $50,000,000 in sales | |
Shaan Puri | 50 yeah | |
Ryan Petersen | we sold 1,000 of them and somehow he couldn't make money I was very frustrated | |
Shaan Puri | we hired a ceo just the unit economics wrong or the overhead yeah | |
Ryan Petersen | They had too many people on the team spending money on ps [unclear what "ps" refers to]. I'm not sure what happened.
I'm a little pissed about it because it's like, "Dude, you're selling for **$59** over the phone." But you should make at least **$10,000,000** profit—the high margin.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | alright somebody should reboot this idea and just do it without the mismanagement | |
Ryan Petersen | I believe so. Now, it might have become a very competitive space—there were a lot of people. At the time, there was no good, cheap phone booth out there. We were trying to make one. I think we sold one for about $3, but you can make a phone booth for $1,000. *Come on* — it's not... | |
Shaan Puri | That’s hard. So, yeah— I think, in the *"you could just do things"* category, I'm going to put this in there. I think somebody can just do this again. Yeah. | |
Ryan Petersen | Yeah, feel free to run with that one, because that company didn't work. They sold to somebody, but I think the founder had ambition to be a *$1,000,000,000 unicorn company* instead of, like, "Dude, let's sell this thing to Staples for $50,000,000 and be happy," right? | |
Shaan Puri | Exactly, Ryan—thanks for coming on, man. This has been fun.
I'm a user of **Flexport**; I use it for my e‑com biz. You've helped me forward a bunch of freight. Here's how I know you've helped me: I still don't know what freight forwarding really is, and we've done tens of millions a year in revenue. That's the beauty of it — I don't have to know. I just know that our shit gets taken care of. It's low-priced and the easiest-to-use tool. So, thank you for making that happen.
Thank you for **Import Genius** also, because I would have never found my supplier had I not used that. Where should people follow you and find out more? | |
Ryan Petersen | I'm on Twitter — my handle on X.com is *x.com/typesfast*. Go to *flex4.com* if you're an e‑commerce business or you run any kind of logistics and you need to ship things from anywhere to anywhere.
We started in freight forwarding, which — well, I joke it should be called "freight email forwarding." Sean is like passing emails around the world to get a container or some air freight moved.
But last year we acquired Shopify Logistics and now we do *direct-to-consumer fulfillment* all the way to the door, as well as distribution into Amazon FBA — handling that problem with getting appointments and managing all of that.
Helping brands solve problems in their supply chain is what we're all about. | |
Shaan Puri | There we go. By the way, your handle is "typesfast," and I love it. Your brother's is "typesfaster" — an ultimate big-brother move for him to do that. It was true.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Ryan Petersen | he does type faster than me so he does | |
Shaan Puri | alright ryan thanks so much man | |
Ryan Petersen | thank you |