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Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

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81–90 of 136 posts

Re: Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

#81
post #75

Interesting that Ryan has an MBA from Columbia business school, contrary to the typical founder in the valley.

Can you expand on what you mean? What does the typical founder have? Is this better? Worse?

Much of SV is wary of MBAs. But I don't think that view extrapolates to founders since they are a different breed than employees.

Re: Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

#82

Interesting that Ryan has an MBA from Columbia business school, contrary to the typical founder in the valley.

I guess it depends on how you define typical.

30% of unicorns are founded by an MBA and 80% of unicorns have an mba on their exec team: https://qz.com/176063/most-mbas-dont-found-billion-dollar-st...

Re: Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

#83
post #25

"And while investors were happily offering it a valuation of $1 billion or more, Petersen didn’t want to get in over his head and risk a down-round later if the market stumbled." This is straight out of Silicon Valley (the show)... why wouldn't you take the best valuation for your company?

A host of reasons one of them being that a lower valuation is more attractive to employees looking for equity upside.

Re: Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

#84
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that is fair. I probably didn't word it correctly. I mean if you keep repeating that it is "unsexy" people will probably believe it to be true. Why choose to send that message instead of hey we are this sexy logistics company? It's a minor detail, so I don't mean to make too big of a deal out of it. Just seems odd.

It's because tons of unsexy companies had tried doing it the other way, to the point where so many companies have done it that it's started to leave a bad taste in peoples mouth. People are starting to get into the whole, we aren't sexy but we are solving meaningful problems thing lately.

I think there's also a certain amount of marketing. You don't want everything to be "sexy"; you want some things to be boring, unnoticed, and just work. Saying you're making shipping sexy is just saying "we're going to ignore the core logistics of reliably getting your stuff where it's going as quickly as possible", which is going to scare away customers.

Re: Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

#85
How is the article so off on "revenue" ("expects revenue of $500 million this year")? According to Forbes they do 7,000 shipments per month averaging $2k in value of which Flexport takes 15%. That's $2.1m/month ($25m annual run rate). Possibly they meant some sort of Gross Shipping Costs.

Re: Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

#86
post #79
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's where the market is being irrational in my opinion. I would bet that in 10 years Flexport dwarfs Slack in revenue and in growth potential.

I'd take that bet. Slack is more like Facebook meets LinkedIn.

Oh, I will take the other side of this bet.

Re: Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

#89
post #70
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here we have a business that is going after a huge existing market. For some perspective, Slack is valued at > 5 Billion

Here's where the market is being irrational in my opinion. I would bet that in 10 years Flexport dwarfs Slack in revenue and in growth potential.

Once Flexport expands outside just the USA this company will just become massive.

Re: Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

#90
post #17

I am a customer. They are my favorite to use, but I don't use them for everything because they don't get me 100% end to end with Amazon. Other companies do. I just talked with someone about this, and I hope that they get into it, even if it's just white labelled through their interface. I had no idea their founder also was involved in Import Genius, but that makes total sense. Huzzah Flexport!

I didn't know about them being related to import genius I used both flexport and import genius too
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