81–90 of 160 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the scariest part of the whole article “during a presentation they said took months to prepare.” This sounds like what I would expect in the federal government or IBM. Not a fast growing startup changing the world. I hope Ryan can change this part of the culture or they are dead.
Didn't Ryan hire him?
his failure to rent a canoe and solve a coastal trucking backlog through a viral twitter thread about the height of containers was simply untenable
hopefully by now companies realize parachuting in ex-AMZN employees is a recipe for disappointment, esp in terms of cost relative to work output
Depends on the intent. I don't know Flexport's situation, so I can't say this is what happened. But, it's pretty common to parachute in outsiders to do the terrible things you want to do (layoffs, big policy changes, etc) that you know will have an adverse effect on morale. Then, once it's done, you boot the outsiders and commiserate with the masses... "yeah, sorry, clearly that was a bad idea" .
This quote from Dave Clark definitely stands out - "Founders have a right to change their mind". Interesting that he's leaving I would have thought his expertise would still be immensely useful.
The old maxim of “Hire slow, fire quickly” rarely hits the C-suite it seems. It’s almost refreshing seeing it. Of course he probably has a massive parachute to cushion his landing that the rank and file usually do not.
The thing to keep in mind is that they have competitors still eating their lunch while running 40+ year-old COBOL backends which have their IS departments tearing their hair out regularly. It's as if the efficacy of a business isn't completely positively correlated with the coolness of its tech stack. I work for one of their competitors, and I'd kill for their tech stack. But ultimately their business revolves around…
I'm sure there's some juicy details behind the curtains, but people are too professional to air it publicly. Here's some fun but baseless theories: 1) Typical big-company guy fails to adapt to startup life. A year ago, Flexport's tech team was 400 people. That's minuscule compared to what Dave's used to at Amazon. He came in, insisted on a bunch of unnecessary hiring, bloated the tech team with deadwood, internal kin…
I vote for the more mundane: 3) Bored mega-millionaire wants a neat hobby to try for a year. His previous Amazon compensation for 2021 was $56 million[1], so it's not like he needs to try anymore, or make money basically ever again. 12 months later he's still bored. Maybe he quit to spend more time bathing in bathtubs full of hundred dollar bills. 1: https://fortune.com/2022/06/08/amazon-former-no-2-dave-clark...
I'm sure there's some juicy details behind the curtains, but people are too professional to air it publicly. Here's some fun but baseless theories: 1) Typical big-company guy fails to adapt to startup life. A year ago, Flexport's tech team was 400 people. That's minuscule compared to what Dave's used to at Amazon. He came in, insisted on a bunch of unnecessary hiring, bloated the tech team with deadwood, internal kin…
3) Amazon grad takes hold of a freight forwarder, and then realizes freight forwarding is not a tech company, nor is it just warehousing and distribution. And then realizes his competitors rely as much on grizzled logistics veterans and their corporate knowledge about customs brokerage and how to Get Shit Done and Get Shit From Point A to Point B as they do on a cool tech stack. And then goes "shit." Don't get me wro…
In my opinion, there is nothing about any of these processes that in aggregate be worse if they were automated, and no fundamental issue with automating them. Moving freight is about as complex as any other inter-business process in that the input is some signal (usually an email but potentially a phone call or a fax) and the output is also usually an email or a phone call. The internal logic to that process is not particularly complex either.
So there exists a massive opportunity to provide roughly the same service that existing forwarders do at a much lower cost basis. The requirement to do so is to aggressively automate operations. There's also an secondary opportunity to provide better quality of service (more transparency, more programmatic logic related to movement of goods) to customers (supply chain professionals at F500) but I think that's both harder to do and customers are less sure about how they might take advantage of that better service.
Quite frankly, I don't buy the argument that "grizzled logistics veterans" hold the secret sauce to make this work. I was told probably a dozen times that what I was doing was impossible to automate but when I dug into it, what we were trying to do was a bog-standard business process dressed up in domain-specific jargon and 'tradition' (e.g. we can't do it that way since we've always done it this way). I'm not saying that I'm some logistics savant and there's a vast amount of expertise I don't know. What I am claiming is that I've pulled back the curtain on logistics and the wizard is just a regular guy.
Source: Former Flexport employee
Earlier quoted context omitted.
3) Amazon grad takes hold of a freight forwarder, and then realizes freight forwarding is not a tech company, nor is it just warehousing and distribution. And then realizes his competitors rely as much on grizzled logistics veterans and their corporate knowledge about customs brokerage and how to Get Shit Done and Get Shit From Point A to Point B as they do on a cool tech stack. And then goes "shit." Don't get me wro…
Unsatisfied with their IBM mainframe which had a 99.99% uptime (seriously how much missed opportunity cost is that hour of downtime per year!) with a kubernetes microservice application where each of the 1000 components had an extremely impressive 99.999% uptime.
And most of the people who know how to develop for them are about to retire. When was the last time you heard of a modern CS or IT degree program offering a COBOL elective?
And they're not easy to migrate, because you have 40+ years of business logic locked up in that legacy COBOL application, many of the developers of which are retired or flat-out dead. Did they document it perfectly? LOL! And oh, we're dealing with customs brokerage around the world and also potentially accounting info for a publicly-traded company, which means if you fuck up badly enough, people potentially go to jail.
I'm sure there's some juicy details behind the curtains, but people are too professional to air it publicly. Here's some fun but baseless theories: 1) Typical big-company guy fails to adapt to startup life. A year ago, Flexport's tech team was 400 people. That's minuscule compared to what Dave's used to at Amazon. He came in, insisted on a bunch of unnecessary hiring, bloated the tech team with deadwood, internal kin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude was famous in his earlier career for being a giant narc and patrolling the warehouses for people to fire. Not sure he'd be anything but a ghoul given real power.
You're probably right of course. But, I'm not sure that differentiates him from the current batch.
Still, will be interesting to see two terrible out of touch people tear each other apart in the name of populism.