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Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

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Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#101

Post by jeffbee »

wilsynet wrote: post #59
pottertheotter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the document factory part?

Both Amazon and Google have document writing cultures. If you want to propose an idea, you write a doc about it. The value of a doc writing culture is that writing things down encourages rigor and thoughtfulness. Docs can be widely distributed, and you can read it, think about it, and add comments. Exchanging ideas can be asynchronous rather than meeting oriented. But also it can all get a bit carried away (because t…

Doc culture is better than the alternative. 95% of docs get thrown away because half-way through writing it you realize it cannot work. In the absence of the design doc, you will instead hand-wave your way through the design phase and realize the mistake after several people have wasted time actually implementing it. It is a very, very good thing to know whether your idea solves or does not solve the given problem, at the earliest opportunity.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#102

Post by moneywoes »

pknomad wrote: post #14
scrum-treats wrote: post #2

Additional information on Dave Clark's impact: "Some Flexport insiders say layoffs and an influx of former Amazon leaders are wrecking morale."[1] '"These people do not have conversations — they make demands," one laid-off employee said. Unsatisfactory answers could be met with harsh feedback, sources said. One laid-off Flexporter said an Amazon veteran told them, "I don't believe a word you're saying," during a pres…

I've experienced something similar at Peloton where a C-level kept bringing former reports at Uber for key roles and started to push out the existing employees. It's business at the end of the day but I do think there's a graceful way of bringing people in from former companies.

Seeing the same thing first hand with an ex-amazon exec

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#103

Post by tschwimmer »

moneywoes wrote: post #97
tschwimmer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very nice sentiment but the truth is that the established forwarders operate in a way that is could be greatly optimized. Established forwarders (and Flexport) have teams of people that "move" shipments by applying an SOP (basically a written algorithm for advancing the shipment to signals that come in from a variety of sources (an origin factory various carriers like truckers, airlines and shipping lines,…

May I ask what are you doing now? Do you still see room in the space? Would love to collaborate ( have an Eng background and affinity for sales)

Huge. Gobs of opportunity. One failing of Flexport is it's trying to tackle too much at once. There's a lot of depth to each of the steps and you could build a very solid business out of automating many of them. I seriously looked at a few things in the compliance space and I still think there's a huge opportunity. Sales in the space is generally very difficult as decision makers are slow moving and conservative. But the opportunity to provide value in many places is real. I'd focus more on the supply chain guys at the big CPG companies vs the forwarders if I were to do it again.

What am I doing now? Seems like the same thing everyone else is - Working at BigCo for more money and less stress :). Not looking to change at the moment but urge folks to look into the space for sure. It's a lot of fun and very gratifying. Pure software is more boring in comparison.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#104

Post by dilyevsky »

jakarta wrote: post #29

hopefully by now companies realize parachuting in ex-AMZN employees is a recipe for disappointment, esp in terms of cost relative to work output

I’ve worked for one at Cruise who got “parachuted” like you put it and he was generally well respected as he definitely cleaned up the house there as the company scaled massively - I’d consider working for him again. That is to say it works for some companies but probably not everyone and ymmv depending on who you parachute.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#105

Post by AndrewKemendo »

whack wrote: post #33

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…

Pretty sure he just wants to run for governor which is what article said

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#106

Post by psunavy03 »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #62
psunavy03 wrote: post #38

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…

They should have just used all their funding to buy a controlling stake in Maersk instead.

Ocean freight is only one piece of the puzzle. A big one, but air is generally more lucrative. Ocean moves lots of mundane everyday predictable crap. Air moves crap that has to be there RIGHT NOW.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#107

Post by tschwimmer »

psunavy03 wrote: post #93
tschwimmer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very nice sentiment but the truth is that the established forwarders operate in a way that is could be greatly optimized. Established forwarders (and Flexport) have teams of people that "move" shipments by applying an SOP (basically a written algorithm for advancing the shipment to signals that come in from a variety of sources (an origin factory various carriers like truckers, airlines and shipping lines,…

You're not technically wrong, but it's also a much more complex and ever-changing problem set that you're giving it credit for. If it was so easy, Flexport stock would be the next Amazon. What they have going for them is a tech stack that doesn't have 40 years of accumulated crap. But your description of what goes on at the branch level smacks of someone who has a CS degree and thinks that this means they can enginee…

I sat with the Flexport logistics teams for months on end. I watched them move hundreds of shipments. Maybe they concealed all the secret sauce for when I got up to the go the bathroom but nothing I saw was particularly notable. They had rules like "make sure the ISV is filed at least 3 days before expected arrival" and "if the origin agent hasn't picked up the can after more than 2 days, call Joe at the destination warehouse and tell him that it will be late."

Designing these rules are not something that computers can handle particularly well (though Generative AI might change even that), but applying them consistently is something that computers do way better than humans (for the reasons that I mentioned in my previous comment). Yes, there will be exceptions. That's okay, we can also build in logic to handle exceptions.

The fundamental process flow we're trying to automate here is not self-driving cars. It's not cognition, perception, or reasoning. It's not even really complex decision making. The inputs (while not perfect) are actually pretty well quantized. People love to handwave and say that it's so hard and that it's naive to try and reduce it down to a computer program, but I've never had anyone compellingly explain __why_.

For what it's worth, this is not a minimization of the work done by my former colleagues and similar professionals. My colleagues were smart, hardworking, mission driven and gritty. It's just that the work that they did could be more effectively done by computers. That's all.

For what it's worth, I don't have a computer science degree. I studied one of those useless underwater basketweaving majors. That must explain the overall sense of confusion.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#109

Post by psunavy03 »

tschwimmer wrote: post #107
psunavy03 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not technically wrong, but it's also a much more complex and ever-changing problem set that you're giving it credit for. If it was so easy, Flexport stock would be the next Amazon. What they have going for them is a tech stack that doesn't have 40 years of accumulated crap. But your description of what goes on at the branch level smacks of someone who has a CS degree and thinks that this means they can enginee…

I sat with the Flexport logistics teams for months on end. I watched them move hundreds of shipments. Maybe they concealed all the secret sauce for when I got up to the go the bathroom but nothing I saw was particularly notable. They had rules like "make sure the ISV is filed at least 3 days before expected arrival" and "if the origin agent hasn't picked up the can after more than 2 days, call Joe at the destination…

Then why has it not yet been done? Has God touched Flexport on the shoulder and said "We deem Ye worthy to redeem the freight forwarding industry?"

It seems to me that if it's so easy as you describe, and yet it hasn't been done, than maybe it's not so easy after all. Perhaps not impossible. Perhaps doable. But perhaps not that easy. People who work in the industry are not stupid. They don't want to do unnecessary busywork. What are they missing? And why has Flexport not taken the industry by storm if it's so easy to automate?

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#110

Post by duxup »

pknomad wrote: post #14
scrum-treats wrote: post #2

Additional information on Dave Clark's impact: "Some Flexport insiders say layoffs and an influx of former Amazon leaders are wrecking morale."[1] '"These people do not have conversations — they make demands," one laid-off employee said. Unsatisfactory answers could be met with harsh feedback, sources said. One laid-off Flexporter said an Amazon veteran told them, "I don't believe a word you're saying," during a pres…

I've experienced something similar at Peloton where a C-level kept bringing former reports at Uber for key roles and started to push out the existing employees. It's business at the end of the day but I do think there's a graceful way of bringing people in from former companies.

I had a similar experience.

I was told “Hey they’re all from !” as if it was a positive.

I wondered “How is it everyone of these guys buddies worked there and big company didn’t keep them?”

Learned pretty fast why they left / the other company didn’t keep them… (they were all smoke and mirrors and no results).

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