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Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

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Re: Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

#51

Post by caminante »

jgalt212 wrote: post #48
71a54xd wrote: post #17

Working at a startup that focuses on automating the underwriting process for freight factoring has been an incredible insight during the supply chain crisis of 2021. Something that's also interesting is the data that companies like Flexport have to work with. Freight contracts and lending adjacent to these industries are a treasure trove of early indicators of economic ups and downs for the US economy.

but not quite as good as seeing credit card transactions in real-time like Google does via gmail scraping.

Was there a smoking gun I missed?

Not sure how that's anything moved. See visa/Mastercard to take your premise further.

Re: Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

#52

Post by 0x640x6D »

pchristensen wrote: post #43
mint2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been curious why they are constantly advertising on HN, it doesn’t seem logical to need that many posts. Is the hiring process bad? Is the turn over that high? The constant advertising gives a bad impression. If they are just expanding at a good clip, it seems there are better ways.

I work at Flexport. We are growing market share in existing businesses, entering new lines of business, and building a new technology platform underneath it all. It’s like being at AWS 10 years ago. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and HN has good people.

Are y'all sunsetting Ruby completely as you break apart the monolith?

Re: Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

#53

Post by kevin_b_er »

gruez wrote: post #20
konschubert wrote: post #18

What I don’t understand: There are two ways to get empties out of a port: On a truck or on a ship. And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them. So maybe, part of the solution could be a mandate of ships to take an amount of empties?

>And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them. No, that's not the root cause. The root cause seems to be a combination of cascading events that causes a deathspiral: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p... "ships bring more containers than they take with them" is a symptom, not a cause. Mandating "ships to take an amount of empties" doesn't really fix th…

The ports only care about inbound cargo, not outbound empties. So they have no incentive to have enough space for empties.

The surge demand has suddenly depleted the free spots is removed until its a trickle. Then you get this result. The ships are stuck because the ports had no incentive to reserve space for empties.

Or, something like bufferbloat.

Re: Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

#54

Post by dijka »

blunte wrote: post #25

Flexport posts a lot of "Flexport is hiring" ads on HN. Here are my anecdotal experiences. I was contacted by a very sharp recruiter from within the company a year ago. She said they weren't actually looking for backend developers (senior or not). Why she contacted me given my senior backend developer resume is beyond me. I told her I had a previous lengthy, and ultimately confusing and unpleasant experience with Fle…

I have to say Flexport was a extremely poor hiring experience that I went through. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say I was just unlucky. Each technical interview was very condescending with no communication or feedback from the interviewer. The interviewer in my first screen even made a mistake on their own code, clearly lacking basic syntax knowledge of the language we were using, despite expecting perfect syntax answer to a basic algo question. The interviewer just struck me as very junior in their skillset, and made me a bit concerned about the hiring process overall. The other interviewer was very happy to tell me that Flexport only hires the best engineers, to be honest, it was difficult for me to keep a straight face when he said that. Now I know what hiring for a 10x rock star engineer looks like, lmao

Re: Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

#55

Post by gopher_space »

blunte wrote: post #25

Flexport posts a lot of "Flexport is hiring" ads on HN. Here are my anecdotal experiences. I was contacted by a very sharp recruiter from within the company a year ago. She said they weren't actually looking for backend developers (senior or not). Why she contacted me given my senior backend developer resume is beyond me. I told her I had a previous lengthy, and ultimately confusing and unpleasant experience with Fle…

> From the very first moment, he seemed utterly disinterested in the call. He would not look into the camera - never made eye contact... asked questions as if reading from index cards, but registered no recognition of any responses. To me it was obvious that he either did not like me (from before we said hello) or was already determined not to hire me.

Interviewed with three different logistics companies last year and the experience got less and less friendly as I made my way up the chain in each of them. All frowning at me in a "well, I don't know about that" kind of way before we even spoke. Maybe they all had gas, I have no idea what was going on.

Re: Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

#56

Post by Nasrudith »

jgalt212 wrote: post #48
71a54xd wrote: post #17

Working at a startup that focuses on automating the underwriting process for freight factoring has been an incredible insight during the supply chain crisis of 2021. Something that's also interesting is the data that companies like Flexport have to work with. Freight contracts and lending adjacent to these industries are a treasure trove of early indicators of economic ups and downs for the US economy.

but not quite as good as seeing credit card transactions in real-time like Google does via gmail scraping.

Freight observation would still be better even if that was true. Freight covers every point of sale instead of that subset and commerical spending for shipping covers all sorts of payment models. I don't have every credit card trasaction sent to me in the clear, it isn't even an option to do so. If they notify they send links which need a log in.

Re: Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

#57

Post by lkbm »

devnulll wrote: post #7

> "You can’t return empties, so you can't free up the chassis required to move full containers out of the port. And because you're not pulling the containers out of the port, you're not able to return empties to the port. I did not know that this was the case before I went down there. We only discovered it during that three-hour boat ride." It's interesting that he got this data by asking the owners of the many diffe…

On one hand, this is a bunch of coordination problems, but on the other, it feels like a rational port acting alone could have said "We'll unload your ship only if you let us load it back up with empties" rather than letting unloaded ships to zoom on back to China for the next load.

Presumably there are complexities around this, but it sounds like they want ships to take back empties and the ships aren't because it's not worth the extra time and weight. A single actor, the port, should have the authority and incentive to demand it.

Curious why that isn't the case.

Re: Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

#58

Post by sbierwagen »

blunte wrote: post #25

Flexport posts a lot of "Flexport is hiring" ads on HN. Here are my anecdotal experiences. I was contacted by a very sharp recruiter from within the company a year ago. She said they weren't actually looking for backend developers (senior or not). Why she contacted me given my senior backend developer resume is beyond me. I told her I had a previous lengthy, and ultimately confusing and unpleasant experience with Fle…

>And when I spoke to the recruiter a year ago, she told me that much of their activities were performed by humans instead of automated systems.

This is an established business play for VC backed startups.

A SAAS is always two things, the product, and sales. You absolutely must have sales, because no matter how good the product is, you don't have a business if nobody buys it. So the product is optional.

The pitch is "We're the completely automated solution for X", but internally everything is done by hand. You then try to find some customers. If you don't get product-market fit, you shut down without having to spend anything on engineering. But if you do get product-market fit, great! Time to build out the actual automation. During the gap, it doesn't matter how bad your unit economics are, you can just use infinite VC money to hire thousands of people while promising the board you'll eventually lay them all off. You will experience hypergrowth during this period because you can underbid everyone else thanks to your endless spigot of money.

Look at the careers page: https://www.flexport.com/careers/jobs/ Lots and lots and lots of openings for account managers and client solutions associates. I guarantee you these people spend 8 hours a copy and pasting stuff from one form to another, or on the phone reading the contents of text boxes to someone who enters that text into their own green screen terminal.

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