Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #92 - Ryan Petersen

Episode Date: August 30, 2018

Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport.Flexport is a global freight forwarder powered by software and analytics. They are making international trade easier for over 10,000 companies in 70 countries. They were part of the YC Winter 2014 batch.***Topics0:23 - What is a freight forwarder?3:08 - Selling electric scooters on eBay 15 years ago5:53 - Ryan’s business school experience10:23 - Amazon competing with their vendors13:23 - Matt Susk asks - What were the most important takeaways from Columbia Business School? Would you encourage entrepreneurs to pursue a MBA?17:03 - Tyler Hogge asks - How did you get your first three clients at Flexport?20:03 - Being a solo founder23:08 - Varun Khurana asks - What's your strategy for rapidly hiring the best talent in so many different global hubs?25:53 - Challenges of scaling Flexport27:38 - Some of Ryan’s favorite books29:43 - Scaling culture34:23 - Jassim Ali asks - How has the Trump policy on foreign trade affected your business so far?39:23 - PowerDecal asks - How do you poach clients from legacy providers?46:23 - Automation in freight forwarding49:23 - Jason Yannos asks - If you weren't operating Flexport and had to source a new idea to work on, where would you start?53:23 - Derisking product ideas56:53 - Biggest lessons learned at Flexport

Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Ryan Peterson. Ryan is the founder and CEO of Flexport. Flexport is a freight forwarder built around an online dashboard. They were part of the YC Winner 2014 batch. You can find Ryan on Twitter at Types Fast. All right, here we go. Ryan Peterson, thanks for coming in for the podcast. Let's start with a brief explanation of what Flexport is, because many people might not know what a freight forwarder is. Yeah. So, well, Flexport is a freight forwarder first and foremost. And that means we help businesses ship cargo around the world. We're also a technology company. So we use technology to give companies more visibility and control over their freight.

And at a lower price. We use technology to automate a lot of the labor. Freight foring is really interesting. We, we're all used to, the analogy that people want to go towards is like a FedEx or a UPS, which are parcel shippers. And the difference in parcel and freight is actually a very simple one. it's like is the product too heavy for the driver to lift up and put in the truck? And the moment it is, now it's freight. Yeah. And it needs a whole different network to move it. It can't go through those same trucks.

The conveyor belts are too narrow for freight, for pallets. And what fundamentally happens that's different is in the parcel business, it's from end to end one company. And therefore, they can have like scanners at each mode, they can at each node in the network. They can give you that nice user experience with the milestones telling you where your stuff is. in the freight world because of the size, there's no company big enough to keep it in their own network from door to door. You would actually have to be the biggest company in the world by far.

You'd have to have a port leaving every port going to every other port every day. Right. You'd have to have a ship, rather, leaving every port going to every other port. You would need the same for airplanes. And then when that ship arrives, remember that these big container ships now, you need 10,000 trucks to meet the ship. So you would need 10,000 trucks in every port every day.

You just couldn't do it. It would be too big. So what a freight forwarder does when in the freight network is you're moving this freight as a relay race being handed off from a trucking company in China to the warehouse to another trucking company to a port to an ocean carrier right door and then the mirror image on the other side door to door. That process is a looks like a bunch of unstructured data being handed off in a relay race. And so what's different about flexport is we're taking all that data structuring it, creating a platform so that each of those parties can get what they need to do their job or get. of us what we need to pass to the next party in the chain. What's an example customer? So to kind of contextualize this for someone.

One of our bigger customers is Georgia Pacific. We also have Sonos as a customer. So we ship all the speakers. Georgia Pacific is the biggest paper company in the world. But we also, I think, are the best way to ship stuff to Amazon. So we have about 2,000 merchants that sell on Amazon that use us. And they're going directly to Amazon warehouses? Or what are they doing?

Yeah. So probably about 10% of flexport. shipments get delivered to an Amazon warehouse. Yep. And we have small companies doing that as well as big companies that sell through Amazon. And you were selling through Amazon 10 years ago, 15 years ago? Yeah, 10, 15 years ago. Actually, back in my day, eBay was a bigger platform than Amazon.

Amazon introduced the third-party seller. I remember I was one of the first people to sign up for it. And I thought it was amazing that for 40 bucks a month, I could become an Amazon merchant and add products to their catalog. Just full on. You could just add with the photos, everything. I don't know if you can still do that, but I could just, yeah, I could make up, I'm sure you can still do that. I mean, that's how we sell the book.

Yeah, but I would just make up my own brand name and create it. I thought it was amazing. Like, oh, wow, I'm on Amazon. This is live. It's legit. So were the margins the same back then? I think they were higher. You used to do capitalism works and sort of people see someone making profit where they shouldn't

and then other people pile in until the profits are gone. And that was probably, that was the problem. So our business was importing motorbikes from China as well as electric scooters. We, we, the scooter mania that's happening now is so fascinating for me because 15 years ago, my brother and I and our other business partner, Michael Kenko, we were importing electric scooters. Almost the same form factor, similar price point. And in fact, I saw one for sale on eBay, Mexico like a month ago, just checking out to see what happened to our old brand that we invented. Yeah.

And there's a one for sale for 125 bucks on eBay in Mexico, which maybe these things hold value better than we thought they would. I mean, this is like a classic Silicon Valley story, right, where like people find something that's good, but not until the market is ready for it, will it really take off? Like, it also obviously required a smartphone. I think you needed the smartphone. And so, you know, I even tweeted about this. I'm like, if only I would have invented the iPhone, I could be rich with the scooter business I had.

And so, so obviously the scooter thing didn't work out or just kind of was fading. You decided to do something else, right? It was a tough business. So I lived in China for a couple of years. It was actually a good business. It went along for a while. We never considered it a startup. We were never trying to, like, change the world.

It was, like, a couple of guys trying to earn a living. We, I moved to China. I lived there for two years running supply chain for that business. And then kind of used my story as an entrepreneur with international experience. I speak five languages and told that story to get into business school. I wasn't making a lot of money. In fact, the year before business school, I only made $17,000, which I'm almost certain was the lowest of anyone who was trying to make money. that year. I'm sure that some business school students weren't trying, but I was trying hard and

not succeeding. And I thought business school would be a path for me to at least have some sort of backup plan in life and I could get a job. Yeah. I never really had a job in my whole life. I've worked for Domino's pizza making pizza when I was 15 and that's more or less. Yeah. Did you graduate with that? I did. Yeah. Do you feel that that affected your decisions? I mean, obviously, you're working for yourself now, but it, I didn't let it. I didn't let it. it did affect my decisions, but I was determined. So I went to business school. I graduated about $140,000 in debt.

I was pretty determined. I knew that, like, I looked at my classmates and I could tell that I was a little bit different than them. Like, I've never had a job. I'm an entrepreneur. And I looked at the recruiting cycles and processes and the types of jobs that were available to MBAs. And I just knew I'd be bad at them.

Like, is Columbia kind of, it wasn't that too good for them. It was like, I'm not good enough. I would, you would fire me if you hired me to do this management job. Like I'm not, that's not, I'm not cut out for it. Yep. And so what I did to manage the debt was actually I got a bunch of part-time jobs. So I, one of them was writing case studies for, for Columbia. Yeah.

So I wrote, I wrote the first published business school case study about an African company. So I went to Nigeria and wrote a case study about a tech company in Africa. And that was paying me like 40 bucks an hour. and it was quite flexible, so I could, like, work a few hours a day on that. I also had a job teaching the G-MAT, which pays $100 an hour. And then I had a job, like, I started a little SEO consulting firm to help businesses with their search engine presence. So I had three totally flexible on my schedule jobs. So, okay.

So I've been in experiences like this before. How do you manage your time such that you give your best energy to your business that you want to start rather than like letting all of these other projects consume all of your time and energy? Well, so I didn't know what business exactly I was going to do. And so I just needed to make sure I had some money and then free up, make sure I have, I'm kind of obsessive. So I'll have, I'll make time for for hacking on things and creating things. But I would, I had three or four different businesses going at the same time, ideas plus my. And what's a business? It was just a website.

And I'm trying to drive traffic and see if anyone signs up. Okay. So it was mostly just like landing pages for ideas. Yeah, that's what I would do is create landing pages and then see if anybody buys. What were the ideas? Well, a couple of them have merged. So one of them was an ERP for importers that would manage your inventory. And then we'd sell you freight, which is actually kind of what Flexport's becoming.

One of them was online customs brokerage and freight forwarder that became Flexport. We've had so many dumb ideas. They're not really worth talking about. Not because I'm embarrassed, but I don't even remember any important ones. But I had a few. And, you know, and flexport, what became flexport. And actually, by the way, this is years and years. I'm always doing this.

I still have some random projects like sockbankruptcy.com. So if you run out of socks, you just declare sock bankruptcy and we'll send you 50 packs of socks. That's great. That's so good. I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I'm, I think I'm gonna do the same thing. I, um, so all the T-shirts I wear, I had custom made, but there's, like, uh, I basically tricked the company that made them the first time into ordering me, like, a test run, and I only ordered, like, 10 or 20, and I'm gonna eventually wear all of them out. So I'm gonna, eventually wear all of them out. So I think I'm just gonna do a bulk order and have, like, mediumgray t-shirt.com or something. Just, just, like, sell them all them all of. Um, um. Um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, Yeah, so I, you know, I think there's a misconception that entrepreneurs are just like huge risk takers, but I see myself quite the opposite. It's like I wanted to see that there's real traction. People want the thing that I'm going to do.

And in fact, that was many years later. My first business out of after business school is called import genius.com. And it's a search engine for shipping manifests. Helping anytime you import something, the shipping manifest is a public record. It tells you who imported the product, who sold it. So you can look up any company and see all their factories. You can look up any factory, see all their customers. used by hedge funds, but it's really used by importers, Amazon merchants who are trying to

research factories overseas. Yeah. Well, isn't that the concern if Amazon starts paying attention to where people are making stuff and they just make their own? Amazon's doing that relentlessly, right? Yeah. As they get into shipping, right? Well, yeah, they already just do it.

That's how they look at their sales data and then be like, which product should we clone and go make an Amazon basics version of that product. They have like 400 different brands now that you don't even realize your Amazon. Yeah. Competing with your platform, I think platforms should be neutral. And so the idea that you compete with your vendors, to me, you've got a business is to keep all of its major stakeholders happy. Yeah. And your vendors are one of your key stakeholders.

If you don't treat them, like, you have to be the counterparty of choice for your vendors. And Amazon doesn't, that's the one mistake I would say that they make. Like, it's the company I respect the most in the world. But they don't seem to respect their vendors. And that, to me, it's not. sustainable unless you keep your six stakeholders as a business or your customers or you pay you money your vendors your employees your investors your regulators and then the communities where you operate and you have so you have six stakeholders and if you can keep all six of those you've got to be

the counterparty of choice for all six you got to get yourself in their head and be like what do those companies those partners want you keep all six happy that's the definition of winning nobody loses it's like and it's like you're playing poker you've got and you know everybody's hand because you can see through their eyes. You won't lose. And so when you see a business that's like failing on one of those, often it's the regulator or the community or the employees, etc. But your vendors are too important to alienate them.

That's an interesting point. So would you bet against Amazon at this point? No. And I, so what do you think happens? Well, I think that they can be, they're already enormously successful. Now, as for like their stock, whether it's overvalue or not,

I don't have an opinion. I sold my Amazon stock. two years ago when I bought a house. And I literally, I was crying out, maybe not literally, but I was like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever done. Why am I selling this stock? My house is up 10% and my Amazon, Amazon's up like 4X. So obviously I was right. I wouldn't bet against the company.

I do think, however, if Amazon wins and they seem to be winning, then there's only one global megacorp that makes everything. And like, we all have two choices. You want the black version or the white version of your product. Yep. And that is exactly what a philosopher in Germany in the 1860s predicted would come to be, is that there's one global megacorp and the proletarian must overthrow it and take it back. And I don't want to live in that world.

So I think there's, I see a big part of Flexports role as enabling, empowering all the other brands in the world, all the other great makers and creators to make products and have the infrastructure to compete and thrive in an Amazon world. Yeah, I have been seeing a lot of friends start these. I mean, they're not necessarily small-scale companies, but they're all kind of going for that premium angle, right? So they're like not selling on Amazon. They're selling through their own e-commerce site. Are you seeing more of that on Flexport?

About 10% of our shipments are bound to Amazon. And probably more than that are sold via Amazon because some people do fulfillment, not using Amazon's fulfillment, even though they're sold on Amazon. I don't know that trends, if anything, Amazon's taking more and more. market share from from from from the world you know,

of e-commerce. Let's, uh, let's do an MBA question before we go further into flex part. Uh, so Matt Sussk asked, uh, what are your important takeaways from,

uh, Columbia business school? And would you encourage other entrepreneurs to do the same? Yeah. And so I think here in Silicon Valley, we have a bias. Not we. I do not have this bias.

I love MBAs. We've hired a lot of great. Yeah. People with MBAs. Um, but there's a bias certainly in the founding, founder venture community against like, founders and you think MBAs don't make great founders or something. And it's probably true,

but it's a sample bias. Like the average person going to MBA to do a business school degree is not a great founder. They're meant to be a middle manager. But if you take someone who's a good founder and they spent two years studying business full time, like surely that would make you better at business. Like hopefully. So it's, but it's that the average person going in is not cut out for that. But it doesn't mean that there's nothing to do with the business school degree. Yeah. I think if you, having a business school degree has helped me immensely in understanding the principles of accounting and revenue recognition and all, you know, like real basic fundamentals, finance, cap tables. Yeah. Discount rating, discounted cash flow.

These are like core principles of a modern business person to let you thrive and help me tremendously. Not worth the $140K in debt that I graduated with? Probably not. So I tend to recommend business school to people who are rich. and like your family's going to pay for it. So that's a great experience. But like if you're going to graduate the 140K in debt, it's pretty brutal.

It'll really limit your future opportunities. And I hate to see people make life choices because they're in debt. Yeah. And they need to make, you know, it's like kind of, I don't like to live with permission from other people, much less like some bank that I have to decide what job I'm going to get

based on some anonymous financial institution and let me money. That's kind of crappy. Yeah. I mean, if you need to kick in two or three grand a month, like a lot of people can't start. company. That's a huge amount of money, right?

And so, especially, yeah, after tech. So I think it's, I think it's very important for people to have a pretty good plan. Like, I, I didn't have a great plan, but I worked one out. And I've written an article about this if you Google like MBA debt, Ryan Peterson, it's on the internet somewhere about how to what I did, which was find these part-time jobs and generate some income while I was so that I could. I don't know timeframes. Like even Flexport.

I don't know what time frame will be successful, but I know that if we stay in the fight, we'll win. Yeah. And you just want to make sure you set yourself up in a way that you can't lose because you're in the fight in perpetuity. And you'll just keep finding new hacks. So I didn't know what business I was going to make successful, but I knew that I would do it.

And as long as I could make those debt payments, make my rent and like afford some food, then I buy myself an indefinite period of time to experiment. Right. And so what was the point at which, because the idea of Flexport kind of was in a holding pattern for like three years, I think you said, until you were approved for a certain license. At what point did you commit to doing Flexport? When did you know it was going to happen? So March 31st of 2013 is when we were granted the license by U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection.

And so I started working on the idea in like 2010. Flexport for the, there was three years. there's there waiting for the government to approve FBI background check. Any income at that point, no revenue. And you were you getting any? It was not a business yet. I was still working on my previous business. Okay.

And Flexport was a side project. And then after three years finally got granted the license and made it full-time job like basically the next day. Right on. So there is a question then about your first. So this is from Tyler Hodge. He asked, how did you get your first three clients? The earliest customers for Flexport we got via Google AdWords and SEO and just signups, people just finding us on the internet signing up for the service.

Really? Yeah. In fact, pre-launch, so when I was still experimenting, and I built the landing page for the service that is now, that is now Flexport. And we had not yet launched anything. We hadn't received the license yet. I was just figuring out, like, would people buy the service if it's, it existed. It was just a marketing page website. And we got Foxcon signed up. It makes the iPhone. Cargill signed up, like one of the biggest ad companies in the world. And then one day,

Saudi Aramco signed up. The national oil company of Saudi Arabia signed up for my fake website. I'm like, oh, man, this is going to be a big company. I need to get this license. Oh, man, that's so strange. Did you jump the gun and just start emailing them? No, I didn't because I wasn't a license. I was just like an experimental thing. Like, I don't know. I didn't know how to do the business. I was just seeing would people buy the service if it exists. Again, I don't think I'm not a big risk taker. It was just like, I don't want to start this hard business unless I know people are going to want it. Yeah. And so how did you, how did you verify that people actually wanted it? I mean, they're giving you their email, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to pay you.

Well, I, I knew. So I, Flexport emerged out of, yeah, I had this business selling shipping manifest data, but that actually evolved and emerged out of a business that my brother and I and our same business partner, Michael Kanko, ran buying scooters and buying products in China. And so I had felt the pain firsthand of freight forwarding that there's this information asymmetry and the forwarder, global trade is kind of a black box and the freight forwarder knows how it works and you don't. And they use that against you. They use that to make money off you. And so I had felt the pain firsthand of this whole industry back in early 2000s when I was still selling stuff on eBay and Amazon and stuff. So I knew from first principles from having experience that it was a good idea.

I didn't know that big companies had the same problem. Right. So when they started signing up, I was like, oh, this is even bigger than I thought. Yeah. But I already kind of knew just from first firsthand experience that this was an ugly industry and that software could make it better. It was kind of like the only real principle that I had. I didn't know that much about the underlying problems. I'd never been a freight forwarder. So I'd only seen the tip of the iceberg, like what's customer facing as a problem. I didn't know why the reasons why the forwarders acted the way they did and the other

parties involved. So I, but it was enough to set us off in the track and say, hey, let's go. My hypothesis is simply like software could teach the importer more about this. But documents are needed, et cetera. Totally. But at that point, so you're, are you a competent programmer? Because you're a solo founder, right? Yeah.

So what did the product even look like? So three years, you get your license. What do you do? Three years, got the license, immediately hired three Rails developers. And so I had made money in previous business and was able to hire some programmers. And I was kind of the first PM and had some programmers working for me. Yep. And so you just built it out from there.

Were you thinking about bringing in your brother or a separate business partner? partner to be co-founders? So my brother actually, and I really like sort of biological analogies in business. I think that I think of business as a, you know, each business is kind of an organism and an ecosystem and a competitive environment around it and needs to buy and sell from its vendors, just like an organism needs to find sources of nutrients out there in the wild, right? And so in the evolutionary tree of Flexport, it kind of goes back to importgenius.com, which is this data service for global trade.

And before that, the importing business that we ran together. And I think at the import genius stage, which is taking public record, making them searchable and selling subscriptions, the tree kind of forked. And so my brother, who was my co-founder there, left before me even and started a company taking public data. So we had found this public data and found interesting ways to make it useful and make money off it. He said, what other public data is out there and found the building permit for every

remodeling project and every construction project in the United States is a public record. And so are the permit. So are the licenses for the contractors. And so he built this search engine for contractors that shows you dynamic profiles of their work and went to YC and got into YC with that. So he actually did YC before me one year prior. It's called BuildZoom. It's kind of the flex board of remodeling.

And so he had left to do that. I tagged along with him, came to Palo Alto. He was in YC. I lived in the apartment. It was helping him. I snuck into YC a couple of times in Saul speak. And I was like, I want to do YC. And so kind of following in my brother's footsteps, as I always have, I came and did it.

But we were kind of spiritual with co-founders helping each other with our businesses one of the way. Okay. And so at what point do you guys, are you based in New York at that point? Or are you full on moved to California? I moved to California to start Flexport. And I think that was one of the better things I've done. Import Genius, I started in New York and then moved to it. Arizona when we put a call center and our sales service center in place.

And I didn't want Flexport. I didn't think that we could stand out. We don't want to be a freight forwarder. We're a technology company that's making freight better with technology. And I thought that story would be hard to recruit the talent and the capital in Arizona. Yeah. But in Silicon Valley, as part of YC, it makes sense. So I think Flexport could only be founded in Silicon Valley.

We'll see if that's true in 10 years from now, but I think that's still true today. Do you hire most of your engineers here? All of them, yeah. All of them. Okay. Because there were a bunch of questions about you guys being all over the world. Yep. So just one is Varun Kuhuranah asks, what's your strategy for rapidly hiring the best talent in so many different global hubs?

Because you guys have five offices? No, we're in 11 offices. We're all over the world. We're in two offices in Europe, Hamburg, and Amsterdam. Okay. We're in Xinjiang and Hong Kong in China. and then kind of five offices plus warehouses in the U.S. We have three warehouses.

We have a 747. We have our own plane. Our strategy for hiring talent is, well, what we look for, we like Flexport has my, my CEO, my business partner calls it, um, insecure overachievers is our, is our profile. We want people who are like really hungry, but, but humble. And they want to prove something to the world and they're super smart, but they don't necessarily realize. how great they are.

And that that's been a great formula for us. It's hard to identify, but this, I've heard this on multiple occasions from people who are saying, like, the kind of like the state school mentality versus like, you know, going to Columbia, for example. Yeah. Like, you find the smartest kid from, like, UMass. And they don't even know that they're a diamond in the rough. Yeah.

I mean, we're happy to hire. You can find these people at the top schools, too. Around the world, you know, I, you know, I. I don't know how different it is in, in everywhere. We do hire local recruiter, recruiting people. We don't, we like to have a very decentralized work structure. I think it's very entrepreneurial. I think entrepreneurs get more done and are better.

So rather than having one recruiting team here that's totally specialized in expert in each function, I'd rather have a generalist recruiting reporting to the head of that office in tag team. That like that would be better than even the best. recruiter who's totally specialized in one function like sales sitting in one place. I'd rather have an entrepreneur with a recruiter paired up will do better than like a totally specialized recruiting organization. So that's the way we tried to organize. And I think that's true for most functions.

And then culture wise, do you bring a few people over to start a new office? Yeah. Yeah. We'll always send now we try to send eight people to a new office and launch it and get them to actually move there. Oh, wow. For a year for wherever. Hopefully forever.

don't think there is forever in the modern world. We get people, we really encourage generalists and that requires rotations, whether it's geographic rotation moving to a new office or rotation to a new function within the org. So we love to encourage people that move, try different jobs. And yeah, part of that is launching new offices. What have been some challenges in scaling? Because you said you were 400 and SF. 400 and SF.

How many? 850 worldwide. Man. Yeah. What have been the challenge? challenges and scaling to almost a thousand people. The, the core challenges of Flexport and they never go away today. So we've had epic product market fit since before we even launched, right?

Like Saudi Aramcoe signing up. That's crazy. Fleshport has never had a problem with demand. People want what we do. We're creating a better way and cheaper way to ship freight, which is a trillion dollar industry. It's literally logistics is 12% of global GDP. 12% of every dollar made by every person on planet Earth is going

into logistics. And it's, I think, much of the back pressure against the rest of the economy is the fact that this industry, which is the circulatory system for global trade, is inefficient. And so all the other companies are therefore made inefficient because their circulatory system's got a lot of cholesterol in it. And so we've never had a problem with demand. We have a problem fulfilling that demand, actually doing a good job. Like operations is hard. Logistics is tough. And so it's getting, so product market is epic. That gives you, the market demands that you respond that you hire enough talent to do it that you um and and the people will come because they're attracted to that growth and the product market fit so the remaining problems are all almost all culture

closely related as compliance following all this very regulated industry a lot of people not from the industry we have to teach them all the rules make sure you have good checklist and processes to to avoid ever breaking them um and and then just the complexity of the network the business that we're building. Like how do you make sure that we can keep things simple defined decisions? It's all culture related. Yeah. Defining decision rights. How do you keep people out of each other's way? How do you resolve conflicts in the company? Have you been just, you know, talking to other entrepreneurs, reading books? Like what's been the most influential thing for you in terms of books? I read books. I read a book every week at least. What's good? Well, my favorite book in the world is called Origin of

wealth, which is about the evolution and biology and business. I actually think this will be controversial in some circles here in Silicon Valley, but one of my favorite business books in the last five years is Good Profit by Charles Coat. Okay. The Koch brother, Coke Industries. Yeah, of course. But it's an incredible book about the role of business and society and how to define culture within a company and define decision rights and allow people to make, to move fast and be what

he calls up principled entrepreneurs. They get all your employees to have principles and be entrepreneurial. But yeah, culture is our biggest challenge as a company. My definition of culture, of good culture, is that you have engaged team members, like that everybody there is engaged with their work. And what engagement means is you're getting more out of your job than you're putting in. It's very high bar to clear. Yeah.

But to do it, it's compensation, of course, but you get pretty quickly, we're all on the hedonic treadmill and get used to that. Yeah. So then it's, do you feel like you're creating value at work? Do you like the people that you're working with? Are you learning? Do you, do you see a career path? Are there, there are opportunities for you to grow?

Um, and I'm sure there's some intangible things too. Like what's your office environment? Is it comfortable, et cetera? But those, those, those tend to matter less too. I did see those, uh, room phone boxes that you, uh, did you help start that? Or you like, you just owned one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I started, um, a company to make, uh, I, I, I helped to start a company that makes phone

business for offices called get room. Although I named it phoneboost.com and bought the domain for the company, which we also own, but they, they like, oh, it's too generic. They needed a fancier name, but I really like the funbooth.com. Just keep it simple. But yeah, I think offices are too loud. I 100% agree. And so every office needs a phone booth where you can go and make a quiet phone call. So we made those, and we sell them on that website. Nice. How are you actually measuring this? What was a metric? You didn't say engagement. but it's like getting more out of your job than you put in yeah how do you measure that well it's this is why culture is so hard to scale because it's done it's not a formula and it's done through

conversation it's done through great management great you know leadership but management like talking to the people caring about them listening to their challenges and you can't do that for 800 i can't do that for 850 people so you've got to have great managers up and down the chain is a lot of training yeah a lot of what understanding people what do they want what are they trying to get are they getting it. And that's why culture is really hard to scale because the more people you have, the more equations you have to keep track up. How many direct reports do you recommend having for an average person? Average person should not have any reports. Just chill. For the average manager, I don't know, maybe eight. You want to be able to meet with each of your reports for an

hour a week in a one-on-one. And beyond, if you're doing more than eight hours, that's 20% of your time right there for a week. And so more than that is probably not good. Okay. Scaling that culture is just like the key challenge of any business once you get product market fit, the world of demanded of you. And I think one of the things I've been, I've been fortunate at Flexport in that I had never been a freight forwarder.

So there was a never a moment at Flexport where I could tell everyone what to do. Yeah. I never knew like, you should do this, you should do that. And so at no point did the company ever depend on what Ryan told people to do. I knew that global trade is an incredibly important thing in the world. In fact, I think it's the trade is the thing that separates us from the animal kingdom. That we figured out how to trade and therefore all the collective learning that goes into that. If I make a product, I know all the ideas that go into that product, I'm exchanging with you.

So I'm giving you my ideas. This is what allowed humans to defeat all the other hominid species because we could work together effectively and specialize. and they couldn't. Yeah. So it's really in the human experience, it's intricately related to the rise of humanity. And nothing in the last 50 years lifted more people out of poverty than the opening of adoption of free market economic policies

in the East, in particular in China and India and other places. And yet trade is still too hard. You're talking about possibly the most important trend in the world economy. And anyone who's tried to do it will tell you it's a nightmare. And so that was my guiding principle. It was like, here's something incredibly important to humanity that's way too hard. Let's attract a bunch of super smart people, show them the problem. Help them organize themselves and let them make the decisions.

And that's really helped us. Now, it took five years from the first time I had the idea to the first dollar of revenue was five years, four years of which it was just me and no other employees. And so had I known everything about legit? and I'd been afraid for it. I think we'd have had revenue in the first year. We'd have got licensed right away. We would have gotten to some scale much faster. Yeah.

But it would have depended on me and stop scaling because it would have been like, you know, the director trying to tell everyone what to do instead of like the grandpa saying like, well, let's see if I can help us organize and, you know, like teach you the lessons of my career instead of. And that's a much better place for a company to try to scale long term to build a culture. Right. Is like a leader like that. So I think my naivete around forwarding actually turned out to be a good thing in the long run because I can focus on culture, on recruiting, on org design instead of on telling people what to do.

Right. Yeah. I mean, you could, if you were coming from the industry, have all these preconceived notions that may have set you up for failure if you didn't realize. But are many of your employees freight industry veterans? About 20%. We try to hire one out of every five or six. people from the industry. We think we need that expertise.

My principle is five or six people because most teams should have five or six people on it. And I want one person in the room who's done it before, but not two because then they'll gang up and, you know, you want one to make sure you're not doing really stupid decisions, but you don't want two because then they'll form a coalition and convince people that they must do it that way. And it's like rather just like hear the voice. They're often right, but not always. Okay.

Cool. You want to challenge those assumptions. Let's do some Twitter questions. You have a ton. I mean, you were the first podcast guest to proactively answer all of them. Oh, I didn't ruin that. No, no, no, no. We got some good stuff.

So I'm curious about this last one on the first page. Jaseem Ali asks, how is the Trump policy on foreign trade affected your business so far? Yeah. It's tough to see our customers get wrapped up in it. We've had a lot of, it was only about 2% of our shipments were affected by the first round of tariffs. by commercial invoice value. So about 2% of our total shipments got slapped a 25% tariff on them. So it's not really material for us yet as a business.

And yet if you're one of those 2%, it's super material. Yeah. We've had a company makes an air purifier, great company, female entrepreneurs, have been to our office, hang out with us, done like, you know, sessions teaching our team about their business and stuff that got hit with this. And it's like, oh, it's brutal. You know, you're like millions of dollars of extra charges that they're totally out of their control. And these supply chains, especially for electronics, can't move.

Like South China is where you're going to produce that stuff. There's not infrastructure and subcontractors and other vendors to make consumer electronics outside of the Shenjin Guangdong province. It's just not. And you can't go to another country. Yeah. So that's brutal. I hate anything bad for our customers. I hate.

on Flex Sports perspective, I think one, we've got to be the best. And I think we are in responding to that because we have a database within five minutes and one SQL query, we're able to tell every customer exactly who's affected, how much, what is this going to do to you? I think it lets us differentiate from our competition and then help them plan around it. Right now, our business, it's August. Our business grew 50% in the last two weeks, which is crazy because we're a big business already.

But right, and we're not getting too excited because we think a lot of that, there are new tariffs coming. And we think a lot of that business we're seeing now, this is a huge surge for August, is not supposed to be a time of year when your business goes on fire. Usually it's closer to the holiday season. But we think a lot of businesses are actually pulling their imports forward to import the stuff before the tariff gets slapped on it. So we'll see how it plays out.

We're not getting too excited about the growth. This is sort of a tangential question, but I heard you mentioned on another podcast. the holidays and shipping prices. Can you go over that because I was fascinated? You said it was like at some point there's a 10x increase on freight? Air freight in particular. Okay. Well, it's, I, the, one of the reasons I love this industry is because it is so tied.

Trade is so deep into economics. Yeah. And you have, you have supply and demand balances on all these things. And air freight in particular is a fascinating one because an airplane, people don't realize, but 50% of all the air cargo in the world has actually moved on passenger planes in the belly of the passenger plane. This is why they have a luggage fee because they actually have an opportunity cost. They put someone else's cargo in there if they don't put your bag in. And that's a really interesting situation that you don't often see where the supply for the market of air freight is actually totally disconnected from the demand.

It's connected to the demand for passenger tickets. Yeah. And so that's going to always lead to fundamentally imbalances in the air freight markets. And what will happen, air freight is quite a seasonal business. It's run, the economy runs on Christmas. Air freight, on average, about five times more expensive than ocean freight. So right before Christmas season is you want to bring everything in and get it in and sell it. And if you don't get it in in those two week period, you might never sell it.

So it's worth it to fly over, even if it's five times more expensive. Okay. Now, the moment that that plane is full, which happens every November and every October, really, the planes get full. Now the price goes to whoever's got the highest marginal value out of that last kilo of space. Yeah. Which tends to be, you can probably guess which company is making the most for rectangle about this size. And they're willing to, you know, if you make 600 bucks on an iPhone, I think their margin. I've seen the breakdowns.

They make like $400 or something according to that I supply company. And it costs a buck to ship it. Do you really care if it costs $5 to ship it? So all of a sudden the price can go crazy. Yeah. And the price, this is classic economic theory. The price set in the market goes to the marginal value of the last person, whoever's willing to pay the most.

So air freight market will spike every kind of Q4. It just goes out of control. So that growth that you guys are seeing right now, Are these pre-existing customers? These are new customers signing up. Is it everything? It's pre-existing. Pre-existing.

New customers for us. Our customer base is so big now that a new customer's, it's not really material in any given period. It takes a long time to build up a base. We have like about 3,000 paying customers now. Okay. Yeah, because we were talking before recording about your outbound sales. And there was another related question.

So Power DeKal asks, how do you poach clients from legacy providers? providers. And just in general, in terms of your revenue, like, I'm curious about how the sales cycle works for you, how it happens. Yeah, so Flexport got to $200 million in revenue without having a marketing team. And that was dumb. That was a great lesson for me because I consider myself a growth hacker and a marketer. And that was the one area of the business where I didn't go out and hire people better than me soon enough to do the job. I thought, because you were just blogging, right? Like kind of like blogging, a lot of SEO. Really, I didn't do much.

I just thought that I knew this space. And so I didn't invest. It's really silly. It's a good lesson for you as an entrepreneur. You got to like take yourself out of the things. Yeah. And that was the last one I removed myself from. So Flexport is a 98% outbound sales.

Maybe it's 95% outbound sales model. Like we build lists of companies importing things. It happens that I started the business that has all the list of people to import things. And we call them and we show them. them our value proposition. And so how we coach customers from legacy clients is show them, we're going to give you more visibility and control over your freight, of your international freight at the same price point.

And so at some point, as long as you trust that we're not scammers. Yeah. At some point, that becomes irrational, not if it's better servicing price. And eventually we will be better and cheaper. We often are, but not always. It's irrational not to move your business. As long as you can trust us on, there's a lot of compliance involved. these are complex processes.

You're running a supply chain. You are turning over your circulatory system to a new provider. So it's not without risk and the sales cycle is not easy by any means. But if we can, you know, prove that we're not going to totally screw up your business and you'll get more visibility. Where's my stuff? When is it going to arrive? More data. Yeah.

What you've shipped. We're the single best view into all the economic activity inside your own company. Yeah. How did you create trust like that in the beginning? because I could, I mean, it's not just these legacy customers working with legacy providers. It's across this whole industry. It's kind of arcane. How did you, I mean, I guess you had this license, but how did you project that confidence to say like, oh, you can trust us.

We'll make it happen. I don't know. We had smart people, great early sales, entrepreneurial sales. And every entrepreneur needs an entrepreneurial salesperson. Usually it's the entrepreneur themselves. But you've got to have that. And a lot of it's underrated. I'll think a lot in Silicon Valley where we think it's just about engineering talent and who's the best engineer.

And they forget that you've got to have someone. What entrepreneurial sales is very different than regular sales. Regular sales, you want to get to know as fast as you can. So you stop wasting your time and get to the next person who will say yes. You want to get to know within five minutes, ideally. Yeah. That's great if someone hangs up on you. Cool.

I can go to the next one. Totally. Entrepreneurial sales is the opposite. You want to get to yes. If you're saying, And yes, I will ship with you if. And then what's that if statement? And you don't promise it.

You just get, now you can bring that back to your product and engineering teams and say, these guys will ship with us if we can. Yeah. And 95% of the time it'll be absurd and you can't do it. Well, this is a huge challenge that breaks a lot of businesses. They end up building all these like custom features for every, you know, quote, big client. But all of a sudden the big client is now like your tiny client.

Yeah. And it just eats them up. Totally. And so we would get yes if from and we would always get a yes. But 99, 95 to 99% of the time it was something either couldn't do or didn't, wouldn't do. Right. So you got a real discipline of what you're going to do and make sure it's something that yes, this makes sense. This will make sense for lots of our customers.

This is on our roadmap anyways. Let's pull it forward. And so we did that for the head of supply chain for a major watchmaker. Okay. And we went down, whiteboarded it with him, showed him. He whiteboarded it for us. This is what I want from my dashboard. I want to see all my shipments.

Anything that's going to be late by at least 24 hours, I want it to turn red, and I want to know why. And if there's any action I need to take, I want that to be elevated in the system. Show me what I need to do to fix it. We're like, that's brilliant. That's cool.

A month later, we came back, and this was when I knew we had a good company because I was on vacation. And usually when I go on vacation, I neurotically check my email the whole time. But on this vacation, I was in a Caribbean island with no service. And I just was like, I'm out.

I came back and they had built this. They'd gone down there, talked to this guy, built the map, built what he wanted. Yeah. And I came back and I'm like, our whole user interface was different. I was like, that is a good company. They're like willing to just change the whole product when the CEO's out, knowing this is the right thing to do. And we went back down to meet the client again and he said, you all turned me into a computer programmer. I've got to ship some freight with you.

So then he said, yes, if, I will ship with you if you can get me this price. And at that time, that price was half of what we were paying. So we couldn't do it. But we now had a target and we could go back to the ocean carriers and say, I will bring you the world's, you know, one of the world's largest watchmakers as a customer, if you can get me this price, which is a market price. We just weren't paying market pricing. Because you were too small.

We were too small and didn't know people and didn't have relationships. But now we're like, oh, okay, yeah, I'll give you the market price. And so it took a couple of months. We went back and won his business. And then it's kind of like lots and lots. to those cycles. We won't build custom software for anybody, but if your idea is normal, is like something that we would want to build, reasonable, and it's good, and it makes good for all of our customers will do it. Right. And so because you guys still compared to like the biggest freight

forwarders, what's your relative size? We are now, we last month, we passed FedEx and Panopina, which are, we're now number 17 out of about 20,000 freight forwarders in the world. Well, in four years. So, and that's we are still one-fifth of the largest on the Trans-Pacific, which is Asia to U.S. Now, the largest in the world only has 2% market share. So it's not enough to be number one. I think then we don't want to get to number one and then stall out like they did. Our goal is to get to 20% or 40% market share. If you do that, you're the biggest company on planet Earth.

Yeah. Like full stop. than Saudi a ramp cow. You figure they stalled out. Why? Lack of technology. That it's all people. You know,

the biggest has 2% share in 60,000 employees. And so if they want to go to 20% share and they don't have any technology driving scale and efficiency, what do you end up with is 600,000 employees. And these are knowledge workers. These are not, these are troubleshooting consultants. They're not Foxconn factory workers following instructions.

Yeah. So they just reach the limits of what a human organization can scale to. Where do you see automation in the next? You know, like, obviously, like, I know it most directly from container ports. But where do you see automation having the largest effect in your business? For us, automation is often about delegation. It's about getting the work to the right person to do it. So the forwarder is kind of the coordinating layer in this relay race of unstructured data.

And their job today, and our team's job is up to go out and get the data and then put it into our system. What you need to do is build interfaces so all those companies can directly pass it to you, whether it's through our API or on our web interface. Okay. And so it's delegating that task instead of our team doing it, let's have the customer do it give us. Right now our customer calls the, our employee might have to call a customer, ask for some document, then put it into our system. Right. I don't want to create automation tools to make them. better at calling customers, right?

I want to create a great interface so that customer just automatically just uploads it themselves and makes it more pain-free. So that's like pretty specific to our industry, which is this relay race of unstructured data. There's a great paper that I read about industries that are most susceptible to automation. And freight forwarding was the number one on the list. It was like 99% of the work should be, that would be better done by software. in this like academic paper.

Do you agree? I don't know. It's pretty hard. There's a lot of human intelligence and tribal knowledge and things. But even that should be unlocked, right? Like our competitors know more things than us. They have 60,000 employees, like, have tons of expertise.

The biggest one was found in 1890. Somewhere in that building, they know how to ship cargo using telegrams and steamships. Vacuum tubes. You know, yeah, it's impressive. And but you need to unlock that. It's living in people's. heads.

Yeah. And what you want to do is put it into databases and make it instantly queryable so your customer can get the answer to whatever question they want instantly. Yeah. Instead of like having to find the right expert and talk to them on the phone. So do you, when you talk about like all of these entrepreneurial ideas you have on the side, do you have other ideas boiling in your head all the time? Of course.

Okay. Yeah. I'm always recruiting founders. And if great, we've had a few great people leave Flexport. Not too many. Most people stayed forever. But we've got a few great people leave. and I'm always trying to convince them to like do one of my ideas with me on the side.

Dude, yeah, this is like, I don't have time. I spend a maximum, like the phone boost company, they hate me to kick me off the board because I, really hate me,

but they kick me off the board because I have no time to spend on it. I'm all in on flex board. Oh, okay. But, yeah, I have a lot of good business ideas, most of which it will work. I'm now,

I now know from the phone booths.com is like crushing it. They make so much revenue. Even though YCE rejected them, but it happens. I'll have to read the notes. Because, yeah, this is a question that,

that I love. I mean, so many people at YC do the same thing that to the extent that I think it should be like a page on your bookface profile, the network where it's like these are Ryan's like white whale ideas. Like if he tries to convince you to like pivot your company into this like you are forewarned. But yeah, someone else asked, Jason Yanis asked if you weren't operating flexport and had to source a new idea to work on where would you start? Yeah. I, um, I always start with what are pains that you experience? Again, in that schlep blindness article,

Paul Graham, schlep blindness is a, a schlep is a Yiddish word for an arduish journey. And so a schlep blindness is where your conscious brain won't actually allow you to think about a problem. It's like, there's no possible way I could solve this problem. It's too big of a problem.

I'm not going to go there. And that training yourself to allow, let yourself get annoyed by the annoying things in life. Yeah. Like, that's something, I'm,

people who know me will know, I just, like, complain about bullshit all the time. Like, what the hell is, why does this company hate money so bad? Like,

you see that all the time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I'm, I'm someone who lets myself get frustrated by that and then keeps lists of like,

wow, I could make a ton of money if I just solve this problem. And so what's the question that Paul asked in that. It's one of PG's essay is called Schlep blindness. I highly recommend it.

And the question that he says is, rather than asking what problem should I solve, what company should start you should say what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me and then that's probably a good idea if there's enough people like you then that's a good idea so that I would ask that question what are the problem and so example of the the office phone booths I think offices are way too loud and I get really annoyed by all the people talking and I want a quiet place and I also like privacy when I talk on the phone yeah so I wanted a quiet room I hired guys on Craigslist to make phone boost for me they were terrible they were hot you would sweat They were dark. It was like kind of creepy in there. And yet at Flexport, we had people in those boosts all day,

every day. They would come out sweaty. It was, people would make fun of it. And yet it was used all day. I'm like, if the product is this bad. Yeah.

And people are still using it. This is a good thing. So got, I pulled together some team members, so the founders of that company and said, hey, let's make this thing super cheap, flat pack so you can assemble it.

Cool. So it's not too hot, like cool temperature wise. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And boom, these guys are selling millions of dollars with the booths. So it's, it's fine, that annoyance in your life. And for Flexport, it's, well, most of the good businesses that I have today will just be offshoots of Flexport.

Cargo insurance is a great new business. We now have a business that makes loans to our customers, trade finance. Loans for any, anything? To buy inventory. To buy inventory. Okay. Which we secure with the inventory that's that they already, yeah. If you don't pay us back, I'll just sell your stuff on eBay.

It's very credible threat. That's where I started my career. So, yeah, but it's always about finding what, you know, if it's not something that's annoying you, you got to really talk to your customers and what's annoying you. Talk to potential customers. Right. And yeah, just another like, because, yeah, you've done all these lending pages. How are you talking to your customers at the time?

And, you know, like, were you putting money down on, you know, like AdWords, Facebook ads at the time? And then just emailing them to see if they're really interested. you're just good at like creating a landing page um 10 years ago when I first started doing these landing pages for flexport or eight years ago I was SEO was different and easier I think and I would like I knew how it worked and now I don't know that much about how to rank and Google for things but we were pretty good at ranking for for keywords um and we get traffic that way our first customers for flexport were all um Google AdWords customers but that was like once I had a product to sell

okay um because I think this is like such a common challenge for people where they're like Oh, man. Say they are particularly attuned to the problems in their lives. Then it's like, how do I like launch in a way where I can validate and like derisk this venture, whatever it might be? And you know, you can only do it to such an extent. But I'm just wondering if you have pro tips. I, it takes some sense. Like some people have, you got to not believe your own BS. Yeah.

And make sure that other people agree with you that this is good. And like, so the phone booth thing, for example, I had that idea and I'd seen it. I'd built some really crappy ones like with a carpenter I hired on Craigslist like I told you about. So I knew it was a good idea and I just talked about it all the freaking time at parties. Okay. And everybody I ever talked to was like, yeah, I will buy five of those.

I mean, I could, I'd probably sell five boost to YC right now if I walk out. We have ones and they're terrible. They smell weird. They're hot. Totally. So everyone I've ever talked to who has a startup would buy one of these. And so there's only so long you can go before you're like, everybody wants to buy this product.

Right. And eventually one of my friends who I did YC with was like, Ryan, let's do that business. I want to do it. I'm like, okay, I'll put in money. I will spend a maximum of five hours total because I have a really big important company to run. Yeah. But, and, yeah, success compounds too. Like I don't think I could have just spun that up on the side if I wasn't.

Yeah, of course. Flexport similarly, like when you were getting started, like you had the cash around to hire developers. Yeah, which came from my previous business. Exactly. And I think I actually spoke once on a fundraising panel at YC, and they've never invited me back because I think I was too real. And I was like, look, if no investors want to invest in your business, that's your fault. You should do a different business.

Like there's lots of businesses that don't need any investor money. Yeah. Do that. And then earn the credibility, success compounds, like build up, you know, or use your own money to fund it. And there's plenty of businesses. Like, go start a consulting firm to help people with SEO. I promise you, people will pay you to do that if you, you know, or like, go find a way to make money in this world and not, don't wait for investors to give

you permission to start a business. It's kind of a lame way to live. And I hate that when founders are like, oh, if only this investor would give me money, then I would make it my full-time job. I'm like, just pick a different idea. Totally. It's one of the biggest downsides of the VC industry as, as exists right now. It's created all of these like thought leaders around businesses that have, that require venture capital funding. And it's like pigeonholed people to create businesses that need it and therefore if they can't figure out how to be the darling in the startup VC mind, their business will never work. Yeah.

And success compounds. You know, I did startups and we never called them startups. We were just trying to make money for 10 years before I raised my first venture capital dollar. And I didn't know what the first thing about venture capital until I got into YC and even then, you know. And so I think that that is a, it's a bit toxic. Now, I know that people NYC should raise money and go do that. So I know why my advice is controversial to people.

But at the same time, it's like, also investors want to invest in things where they're like, this guy's going to do it with or without me. Totally. Like, she's got this. I better invest now before she runs off and makes it, you know, and leaves me behind. That's the best case scenario where there's so much fomo. They're like, listen, like, Ryan's making money hand over fist. Like, he doesn't need me at all.

Yeah. Therefore, that's the best possible investment because they're trying to de-risk. Right, right. Now, you don't want to be a faker, but like on some level, you've got to believe that you're going to do this with or without the investors. And then all of a sudden, the investors will line up. Totally. All right. We're almost out of time.

But you've now been doing flexport for quite a while. We have a lot of early founders that listen to this podcast. What would you tell yourself at the beginning? What are the biggest lessons learned? You know, one of the most interesting lessons learned, and I used to say this wasn't useful. but but I think more and more I think it is is the degree to which success compounds and the reason I say that I used to think that's not useful because like well what does it say you just be more successful and you are going to do that anyways but as I've reflected more on it I actually think it's an extremely important lesson because if success compounds well we know the nature of compound interest and it means you should save small amounts of money and put it in your bank account and let it compound and that that speaks very much to agile development methodology customer development, getting that yes-if, getting the little wins that they matter much more than it seems because they're going to compound on themselves. And that, you know, the way it looked in Flexports case is like a decade of small wins and successes that got us into Wycombinator.

Why Combinator got us Google Ventures to invest, which got us our CTO, which got a, you know, sort of like this, which got built the product. They got the customers. And it's just this, eventually you can unlock these crazy Lollapalooza effects of, of compounding. success. Yeah. But it does speak to like being agile, getting small wins, celebrating them as you go. Instead of trying to make this master plan for the future, let it evolve. Let it go with like little wins at a time that the humanity could not have existed at the big bang. We would have been killed under the pressure. Right. And like you need to like sort of slowly evolve the thing and eventually you'll get where you want to be. Also de-risk things. Like venture capital is quite

risky. These people need to return. Never take debt unless you're profitable, right? Like, these are, uh, you, you got to live up to your expectations of all those six times, kinds of stakeholders. And if your investors are getting screwed by something you're doing, that is not going to work. So don't raise more money than you need to like, make sure everybody's winning in the process. Yeah. Except your competitors. And then you're, you're golden. Golden. All right. If people, uh, want to follow you online, where should they go? Uh, well, I, I don't know that's a good idea. My Twitter is types fast. Yep. Cool. All right. Thanks, man. Okay. Thanks a lot. Thanks for for listening. All right. Thanks for listening. So as always, you can find the transcript and the video at

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