Pod Insights a16z Podcast Ryan Petersen on Rearchitecting the Supply Chain About this episode In today’s episode, we have a special treat. Flexport’s co-CEO and Founder, Ryan Petersen, chats with a16z Growth Editor Das Rush. They start with the question of why Ryan has chosen – of all the problem spaces to work on – improving the resiliency of the supply chain. They cover just how complex the supply chain is in the era of ecommerce, evolving customer expectations, and ultimately how we can rearchitect our supply chain to meet them. Given the holiday shopping coming up, you won’t want to miss this.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 The brands were in control. Those who could afford mass media were in control. Now with the internet, there's just like a million choices.
0:08 Steph Smith? In today's episode, we have a special treat. Flexport CEO and founder Ryan Peterson sits down with A16Z Growth Editor Das Rush. They start with the question of why Ryan has chosen, of all the problem spaces out there, improving the resiliency of the supply chain. They also cover just how complex the supply chain is, especially in the era of e-commerce, evolving customer expectations, and ultimately, how we can re-architect the supply chain to meet them. Given the holiday shopping coming up, you won't want to miss this. If you like this episode, I have a feeling you'll also like our recently published and first ever American Dynamism 50 list, a list of 50 companies building in the national interests that embody the ethos of American dynamism. You can find it at our homepage at a16z.com or at a16z.com/american-dynamism-50.
0:55 Speaker 02 The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
1:24 Speaker 03 So I kind of want to start at the beginning because you've really chosen to dedicate a lot of your adult life to this mission of improving supply chain and global trade. Why? Why that mission and that problem space?
1:38 Speaker 00 Yeah. Well, thanks for having me here. It's a, I think, there's a couple of angles that I approach this from. One is, you know, you kind of look at the pie chart of GDP of like, where is all the money spent? Where are all the activity in the economy? And if you were to divide each of those slices by the number of hours of computer programming that have been applied, I think you would see that logistics is one of the highest, biggest opportunities in the world of like, there's just, this is like an incredibly important space. Trade is 47% of GDP. And yet, anyone who's ever tried to do it? Actually actively, and when I used to run a business importing products from Asia, motorcycles from Asia and selling them on the internet back in the early 2000s, late 90s.
2:22 Speaker 00 And it was just a nightmare. And so you're like, wait, here's something that's really important. I mean, you can measure its importance by the number of dollars that are spent and the size, you know, relative to GDP, but also just like, it has been the backbone of the world economy. It's the circulatory system of the world economy. And on, on many levels, it's, I, I might argue that the shipping container was the most important invention of the 20th century. I think we've reduced the cost of shipping things by like 99%. We used to have to load these ships back, breaking labor, hand carrying stuff onto the ships. And yet the shipping container was invented in the 60s and deployed in the 70s and really hasn't changed much since then. Um, almost no innovation. And, and again, anyone who's tried to do it, tried to actively ship something across borders
3:06 Speaker 00 will, will tell you it's a nightmare. And most small businesses never can do it. They, only 3% of companies are buying and selling goods across borders right now. Uh, and what are the odds that every other company has all their best vendors locally?
3:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
3:21 Speaker 00 So you see there's something that's this important and this hard. It's like a good heat map for, and, and this many dollars being spent, right? Um, good heat map for where to apply yourself. And, and so I started doing that 20 years ago.
3:31 Speaker 03 I mean, it's interesting because you, you use this metaphor of like the circulatory system and, and kind of all the pain points, which I think explains why people haven't really tackled it before. It's one of the hardest, most complex things, uh, or spaces to be in with the supply chain. So knowing that kind of going in, how did you decide where to start? And then how have you thought about kind of when and where to expand?
3:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, so, um, we benefit a lot from my own naivete and that kind of naive optimism, I like to call it. I was like, I didn't understand all the, I never worked in the industry. I was a customer of the industry, bought shipping motorcycles, uh, and later selling data to the industry in another company I started. And so we, I knew enough to be dangerous. I knew what the customer experience should be. I wanted this dashboard to give me visibility over all my freight, tell me what, what it was going to cost, when things were going to arrive, what all these weird terms mean. I mean, the industry still uses Viking English. We say bill of lading, uh, instead of loading.
4:30 Speaker 03 I didn't know that.
4:31 Speaker 00 There's a lot of like acronyms and code words and stuff. So I wanted a simple dashboard to teach me what all this stuff means, make it, you might call it like TurboTax for importing. And the place that we started was kind of TurboTax-like, it was customs, which is where you pay your taxes to enter into the country. This was, I felt, where most of the complicated paperwork lives, where the data lives. Because if you want to clear a good through US customs, you have to provide the commercial invoice with a bill of lading, packing list, all this incredible, rich documentation, and ultimately structured data that now lets you understand, okay, what is this company doing? What other services would they want to buy? So we started as a customs brokerage. It's the stickiness. We say in the industry, you date your freight forwarder,
5:16 Speaker 00 but you marry your customs broker. And it's a compliance service. It's not where you're trying to cut costs. Like freight is kind of a commodity, and everyone wants to go with the cheapest freight provider they can find. But customs, you're not trying to save money. You're trying to make sure you're compliant. You're not breaking any rules. You want it to be your system of record, where you're tracking everything for future audits, etc. So started as a customs broker and then kind of have expanded from there. What we found pretty early, to my dismay, was that we had to do it all much sooner. I thought we'd just hang out as a customs broker for many years, be the world's best, most dialed-in customs broker. We found out as a startup customs brokerage, nobody really trusted us in the beginning. We had to build our brand.
5:59 Speaker 00 And so we were getting all the problem cases of people who like didn't, they were, other freight forwarders didn't want to do their customs. It's a red flag, right? You're like, wait, why is this person doing customs with me and freight with somebody else?
6:14 Speaker 00 So we had a lot of problem cases in the beginning. Quickly had to expand to offer freight services. Now we sell insurance, cargo insurance. We offer financing for the goods. And probably the most important product we have is our order management product. So this is where you place orders to your factories, convert those to shipments. And then now we've got that transaction running through our rails, and we can offer you all the other services on top of that.
6:37 Speaker 03 Wow. Okay. So you know, kind of from that initial expansion, you've kind of reached this point now where you are like a global logistics company. And I've heard you refer to Amazon as kind of, you know, this company you really admire for how they handle the complexity of logistics. And in fact, you have kind of right now is your co-CEO, Dave Clark, who came over and was formerly CEO of Worldwide Consumer at Amazon. Can you talk a little bit about that decision? Like how and why you brought Dave in?
7:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I think Amazon's the most interesting, important company in the world, frankly. They have figured out a lot around how to be entrepreneurial at scale. And I think a lot of it comes from operating in relatively low margin businesses that you don't have the luxury of just like hiring lots of people and hoping that they do something interesting someday, like some of the other tech, you know, the big tech companies. They got to keep executing constantly and delivering innovation. And it's pretty rare to see like a big giant corporation that's figured out how to really be a team of small companies, small business units. And it's, for me, it's like a wrinkle in the law of large numbers. The law of large numbers says, oh, you get really big, you can only grow, you know, your growth rate slows down.
7:50 Speaker 00 But if in fact, all you are is an agglomeration of small companies, well, each one of those small units can grow really fast. And then all of a sudden, the whole thing can grow really fast. I've been a big fan of Amazon for one time, studying them from the outside. And it's not like, I'm, I'm, I'm learning about this. I really enjoy the, the process. I think it's intellectually stimulating. How do you drive efficiency from a workforce? Studying things like the Toyota Production System or W E Deming. There's like a lot of great, kind of almost deeply philosophical work about how do you get operational excellence and drive quality. But I'm like learning on the job, which is kind of, there's no excuse for that, given our industry, like we need more experience. So I was looking for a strong number two.
8:33 Speaker 00 That could immediately upgrade our ability to like run really high quality and highly efficient operations for our, on behalf of our customers. And naturally, Amazon's the place I'm looking and I, one of my secrets for recruiting, first of all, I do it myself. When I'm doing exec recruiting, I don't rely on outside search firms and build my own list and track that in Google Sheets, no, nothing fancy, but I just go through my own network and ask everybody in my network to, who they would introduce just to learn from. And say, look, non-attachment outcomes, I just want to learn. And if each of those people gives me three people and each of those people give me three people, you have kind of this cancerous growth that eventually you get to.
9:09 Speaker 03 I was gonna say talent supply chain. You know, I wanna, I wanna circle back to, I think, this idea of like what it's gonna take to become that, you know, world best operational company. But I wanna actually step back first and talk a little bit more generally about the supply chain. You know, you've mentioned like the, the admiration that you have for Amazon. And really, you know, nobody epitomizes the rise of like e-commerce more. What have you seen as the impact really of e-commerce and the internet on, on the supply chain and how it works?
9:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, I think you want to start with the, with the customers, with all of us. And the internet has really put us, us, you and me and everybody else out there in charge in a way that we've never seen before, that the world, you know, in the, in the era of mass media, companies only would run a television ad for whatever product they were selling. And then they would just kind of pump that down your throat and they only needed to have a limited number of SKUs, whatever was on television, basically. Customers didn't have a lot of choice. They could buy this, you know, the Energizer or the Duracell. And there were two choices for what battery and they were, happened to be in the stores and you, and so you, the brands were in control. Those who could afford mass media were in control. Now with the internet, there's just
10:24 Speaker 00 like a million choices. You have every kind of possible brand of battery that's out there. Battery is probably a weird case, but still, for, for every product category, there's a million choices. Everybody's unique. You can get the thing that matches your own personal taste. You were in charge as well in that they better have that product now. You're not willing to wait a week. Like in the Sears catalog era, you could order and you get it in three weeks. Well, you're going to go out of business if you can't deliver. You know, it's becoming two hour delivery, like if you can't deliver two hours. And so that is a very different supply chain. And what's happened is companies that haven't been able to run a supply chain that's that responsive,
11:04 Speaker 00 that can have many, a wider assortment of choices, because we're all unique and we want our choices. And, and, and have it sort of edge cached to use an internet analogy, like a CDN. Like you want to have these goods like close to the customer so that it can get there really, really fast. The old world, you could have one distribution center in the middle of the United States and distribute out to your store network from there. But it didn't have to be like super responsive to customer demand. Customer demand was pretty predictable, kind of always bought the same number of these batteries or whatever product. And, and it was, it didn't have to be very agile. The modern world, all of a sudden, there's this proliferation of brands and it all has to be stored close to the edges.
11:47 Speaker 00 So custom, so brands need to have multiple fulfillment centers. You need about five fulfillment centers to get two day delivery nationwide. And you need probably to do next day, it's more like 16 fulfillment centers. And you want to do same day, well, you need one in almost every zip code, right? Uh, if you want to have two hour delivery. So that's a really, really different configuration of supply chain. And now you want to be able to get to that world where you're doing same day or next day delivery, you now need to load balance your inventory. Cause if you put too much inventory out there and it doesn't sell, you're going to go bankrupt. Right? You're sitting on all this working capital as inventory that's not earning a return. Too little and you lose the customer and they'll never come back, right? They buy your competitor's brand. And so that's the fundamental problem.
12:32 Speaker 00 And these logistics teams don't even really, at, at, at the typical brand, don't even really know that that's the problem they're solving. They're, they're just still used to a world where all they care about is the price of freight.
12:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:44 Speaker 00 Uh, and they want to buy the cheapest freight and that's what they think their job is when their job has become, how do I ensure a customer experience? How do I enable our sales and marketing to have the product in stock? So that they can win those customers, be a growth engine and a customer experience engine. And then how do they empower their CFO?
13:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:04 Speaker 00 To not sit on too much inventory. And, and so it's a really different proposition. And frankly, most of the companies it, it that, that we grew up with, these iconic brands have been going bankrupt left and right. If you Google retail apocalypse, just look like the number of companies that have failed, that are iconic brands that we grew up with. It's really sad, actually. Um, and I, I don't think it has to be that way. So one of our, we kind of have dual purpose here. One is help the new age of brands rise up and not need to hire this big logistics supply chain team, who just pushes paper and, you know, just all they care about is the price of freight, but actually is empowered to solve these problems without hiring a big team. Cause you don't need it anymore. You've kind of outsourced that to the cloud. That's, that's one aspect of what we do.
13:49 Speaker 00 Help these small businesses grow really fast without the bureaucracy. The other is how do you help these enterprise brands, these famous companies, transform themselves for a world of e-commerce and not die. And I think that both of these are really important missions for us.
14:01 Speaker 03 And in some sense, the second one, I think can almost be harder. And I've heard you say kind of in the past that like one of your goals is to make the supply chain like as resilient and reliable as the power grid.
14:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:12 Speaker 03 You know, and it's like one thing to do that, you know, in the, in normal times. It's another thing to do it as you kind of have like a pandemic occurring. You know, you now have like a war in Ukraine that are creating these kinds of delays and disruptions and shortages that we, that we read about. How, like, what will it take to get the supply chain kind of to that point? And in particular, kind of, cause you're talking about an architectural shift really in the supply chain.
14:37 Speaker 03 What will it take to help those legacy players get there?
14:41 Speaker 00 Well, the fundamental problem in supply chain is that it is that word chain. That there's, there's many companies, in fact, on a typical transaction where we're moving, let's say a pallet of goods, cubic meter of goods from a factory in, pick a, pick a city in Hangzhou, China.
14:59 Speaker 00 To St. Louis, Missouri. If you, on a transaction like that, you'll have as at least 12 companies that either touch the goods physically or are involved providing capital, like a trade finance or a letter of credit, cargo insurance, kind of bank payments, 12, at least 12 and as many as 20 companies involved in that transaction. And so you get information bottlenecks. The goods bottlenecks are famous and we see the ships waiting offshore and all the problems. But what's happening in parallel is that the good, the data is not flowing, that people at each stage are having to rekey data into a system we're not bothering. Forwarding PDFs, we, we call it freight forwarding.
15:44 Speaker 00 I often joke it should be called freight email forwarding because you're just emailing attachments between all these different companies and trying to wrangle it. And so it leads to, you know, suboptimal decision making. If you don't, if you had perfect information, you would be able to make sure that that truck is waiting at the airport when the plane lands or at the seaport when the container shows up. And you would get it all dialed in and, you know, every truck would be scheduled appropriately and you would be replanning every five minutes. So that if there's any delay, you're like automatically generating a new plan and reallocating containers. Almost none of that can happen because there's not a system. It's, it's 12 different companies, each running their own IT system or many cases,
16:27 Speaker 00 guys with clipboards in warehouses, like no IT system at all on paper. And so what, there's two possible solutions to this. One is a giant mega corporation owns all the assets door to door and creates one IT backbone for everybody. The other is use machine learning and data science and make it in the interest of these asset owners to participate, to come onto the platform. Almost like data is the new kind of killer asset. It, it, it should be, and you should be able to really generate insights. The more transactions that are flowing, the smarter you get. How do we, how are we going to route this container? Yeah. Know in advance, oh, you know what? There's actually a bottleneck in LA right now. Let's route it through Oakland. Yeah. Things like this that, you know, the industry hasn't been that good at.
17:11 Speaker 00 It was really interesting to watch last year. We had a hundred container ships waiting off the port of LA and only five waiting off the coast of Oakland here in the bay. You're like, why don't, it's, it's, you have to go past Oakland to get to LA. Why don't they stop? You know, just unload the stuff. And it's hard. They don't have the data. They're not able to communicate in real time, make agile decisions, et cetera. So, but that's going to be the future is actually like using tech, using data to route assets in a smarter way.
17:39 Speaker 03 Yeah. Well, I know I could easily stay and talk all day about supply chain, but I know that we are at time now. So I want to thank you so much, Ryan, for coming in and talking to us today.
17:50 Speaker 00 My pleasure, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
17:52 Steph Smith? Thanks for listening to the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at youtube.com/A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.
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