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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

#131

Post by iLoveOncall »

anp wrote: post #85
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…

I interviewed with them in 2018 and at least at the time (much much smaller company of course) everyone there was very focused on the tech being an enabler for the logistics people. Their claim at the time was that all of the projects they pitched as possible work were driven by feedback from the front line people. Maybe that wasn’t true then, or maybe it’s changed, or maybe it’s still true but it’s not enough?

> Their claim at the time was that all of the projects they pitched as possible work were driven by feedback from the front line people.

I have worked as a software engineer in Operations in Amazon for years, and this even if this is true, it is not all positive.

What it meant for us is that instead of developing a solution we developed small disconnected projects here and there, that all required slightly different maintenance, different technology to build, etc.

This was a problem technically but also personally as there was nothing meaty enough for a promotion, and most projects were incredibly boring "I want a dashboard to show metric X".

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#132

Post by SilverBirch »

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 think this is kind of a silly thing to say. It's a high risk path to bring in senior leadership - it means you don't have anyone internal you think is good. So it's not surprising when the move fails, whether that external hire was from amazon or anywhere else.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#133

Post by surfingdino »

Logistics, freight forwarding, global shipping is as removed from the latest innovation in IT as you can imagine. I worked for a client with a fairly modern stack but we hit major problems when it came to integration with the IT stack of a global shipping incumbent. It's even worse than the banking systems. That world still runs on paper, faxes and REST APIs are generally not used there, because they are too new. XML is all the rage because it lets them stuff Word documents into CDATA. FTP is cool too. It's extremely difficult to make a dent in that world, unless we are talking about dents to the sids of the shipping container ships hitting some rock.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#134

Post by robertlagrant »

psunavy03 wrote: post #88
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that the legacy applications running on that mainframe are tightly-coupled and thus a bitch to test. They're also hard to automate and hard to scale, because design choices made in the 80s and 90s based on people using them at the speed of manually typing on keyboards fall down when you hook up APIs to them for automated testing and for connections to modern applications. And most of the people who kno…

It's easy to integrate green screens! Just write a program that maps out all of the UI interactions on the fixed-character screen and get the computer to use it!

(For those who think this is a joke: it's not only not a joke, it's one of the better ways to roboticise mainframe interactions.)

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#135

Post by hiyer »

darksaints wrote: post #43
jzb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying you’re wrong, but a bit more substance and less vitriol might be illuminating. I can’t recall hearing anything about him good or bad (This comment aside…).

I could probably write a book on him and everything he did at Amazon that was worth talking about, and I gotta admit, I didn't want to start today, but you're right that he deserves an explanation. Here's a few snippets that can be directly attributed to him: * Amazon's policy of firing people on the spot for talking about unionizing. * Their (former) policy of not operating anywhere where they would end up having to…

A person like this went on to become the #2 at Amazon. Says a lot about the company and his peers as well.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#136

Post by hef19898 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #70
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…

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…

How much do you know about zje logistics software ised by, e.g., DHL and the like?

Because I worked at Amazon, with DHL among others, and I can tell you that in some use cases, DHL has bettwr logistics software than Amazon does. And CargoWise is just a straight genious software suite to run everything from Customs over air, sea and land freight to warehousing. Guess who is using that, or something similar, in some form. Guessed, the majority of logistics companies.

No idea where this "incumbants bad, disruptive start-up so much better and easy" mentality comes from so. If you go into the field of logistics and supply chain with that attitude so, you will fail. And hard, and burn a ton of VC money while doing it. The only company that managed not to fail was Flexport, and even they fell short of theit lofty pitch goals.

Thaz being said, Dave Clark had, to my knowledge, not a lot to do with the "tech" part of Amazon, he always was an supply chain / logistics ops guy. And a good one at that. If anything, he treated it as a numbers driven thing, and definitely not a tech stack driven one. Part of the reason why he was good at his job at running ops.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#137

Post by robertlagrant »

HillRat wrote: post #41
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what's the story behind him? I heard him talk at a conference once and thought his insights were somewhat benign for someone in his position, but he didn't strike me as evil. Just uninteresting, I guess.

He's got a reputation for being particularly brutal on workers -- this is the guy who was, after all, responsible for Amazon's warehouse and logistics conditions, including working with GC Zapolsky to go after unionization and workers' rights efforts. Amazon's retail profitability pretty much rests on his ability to squeeze every cent out of employees' sweat, but the human toll has been high. (One particularly tellin…

> (One particularly telling story about Clark is that he oversaw Amazon's noncompete lawsuit against his longtime friend and best man at his wedding, logistics head Arthur Valdez, when Valdez left Amazon for Target.)

This sounds wild enough to be a Suits season arc!

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#138

Post by hef19898 »

jmye wrote: post #112
psunavy03 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

Is it me, or are you just both asking the same question from different angles, and not really disagreeing at all: Why hasn’t anyone done it? What specific things have kept Flexport and everyone else from automating more things? I think those are very interesting questions.

Very short answer, which is also a question: What makes you think those things aren't done?

Short answer to all your questions: it is a much a people business as it is process, tools and physical goods business. Legacy systems. Global customs. Auditability. Existing operations. Global compatibility of documents.

Long answer: Your local university library probably has some shelves of books on the topic.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#139

Post by hef19898 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #113
tschwimmer wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly, I think if someone could get really really good at one niche aspect of the problem and not do it in some obscure stack that's hard to integrate with a bog-standard early-2000s-at-best tech stack, they'd be snapped up in a heartbeat by one of the major players still trying to migrate. Because I can name at least two times that's happened. The big guys' main concern is being able to keep a unified view of who…

Two mistakes here in your thinking:

- The 2000s stack, honestly doesn't exist anymore. And where it does, it does so for reasons no start-up can work around. this is the field of specialist consultants.

- Doing only one thing really good is not enough anymore in that field. not even close. And the bar for good is already so much higher than seem to appreciate.

Re: Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

#140

Post by hef19898 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #105
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

if true, the answer is way to easy for an online discussion.
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