RYAN PETERSEN: We knew there would be tariffs coming, at least on China. Canada caught us by surprise. If they’re going to put tariffs on Canada, then there’s probably no safe haven.

There’s a little bit of paralysis setting in because you’re like, well, it’s changing every week. I don’t think I want to make… supply chain decisions tend to be long-term.

I tell the team sometimes a lesson I got from my father when camping as kids, that you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun those campers in that next site over. So this is a lesson for our customers too. Hey, the tariffs are probably hitting all your competitors too, so it’s how do you adapt, how do you react, what are you going to do differently in your business, that is going to define whether you win or lose. It’s not just what happens to you.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of the global shipping and logistics platform, Flexport. I wanted to talk to Ryan to better understand how tariffs and counter tariffs are remaking global trade. Ryan shares what he’s learning from clients around the world and gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how international commerce truly functions right now.

Whether you’re an exec facing supply chain panic or a concerned customer watching prices creep up, Ryan puts the so-called tariff war into context and offers insights about what to do now. He also shares why he’s texting 40 colleagues a day and is more involved in the details of the business than ever. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO of Flexport, the worldwide logistics platform. Ryan, thanks for joining us.

PETERSEN: My pleasure. Great to be here, Bob.

Handling the rapid tariff changes

SAFIAN: So we have seemingly entered a new era in global trade. Everyone knew that Donald Trump would focus on tariffs if he got a second term as U.S. president, but few expected the speed, the scale of disruption that we’ve seen, from China to Canada, now Champagne from France. Are there moments in recent weeks where you’ve gone like, what just happened?

PETERSEN: There are moments every day, it seems like. Yeah, so Flexport’s a platform for global logistics. We help companies ship cargo all over the world. We started as a customs brokerage. That was the first thing we did, was help people figure out how much do they owe and make those filings on every shipment they transact. So yeah, we’re in it. We all thought, we knew there would be tariffs coming at least on China. Canada caught us by surprise. If they’re going to put tariffs on Canada, then there’s kind of probably no safe haven.

The other one that’s really caught me by surprise — I didn’t see coming; it hasn’t actually been officially rolled out. They kind of put it as a proposal, so let’s see if it comes down the pipe — but is fees on Chinese-made ships whenever they make a port call in the U.S., and it impacts any carrier, so the companies that operate the ships, if they own a single Chinese ship anywhere in their fleet, or if they have even ordered a ship but it has not yet been delivered from a Chinese shipyard, then they’ll have to pay this fee on all of their ships every time they make a call at a U.S. port. And it’s a very high fee, about $500 on every container that they ship.

SAFIAN: When a new tariff or one of these rules gets announced or gets talked about, what’s the first thing you do? How do you keep track of what’s real and what’s not, as there’s all the back and forth about it?

PETERSEN: We try to pride ourselves on being good at rapid response, on being good at figuring out what’s happening in the world, and we create little war rooms. It’s basically a Slack channel where you get the right people involved. Most of these are open to anybody at the company, and we encourage people to come and share information. It’s okay if it’s not all perfectly true and accurate. We’re trying to synthesize it, figure out what is important, and then, importantly, have the right decision makers in there discussing this. Often there’s a Zoom call or some other way to get people coordinated, and then figure out who needs to know this information so we can make some decisions.

It’s been really tricky. The first day, I think it was the first or second day in office when Trump put out an executive order on tariffs, but he started, if I recall, with a Truth Social post, and then it went to White House Press Secretary, and then it went to an executive order, and then a week or so later it became kind of official CBP Memorandum. And in the very beginning we’re like, as soon as he tweets something, let’s send an email to everybody, and then you realize like, oh, wait a minute, people probably want a little more stability and certainty and clarity. Because often the high-level stuff from the president doesn’t have enough specifics to figure out what it really translates to, and you have to kind of wait for it to move down that pipeline before you can… You don’t want to overreact.

The role of Flexport in global trade

SAFIAN: Can you step back and, for our audiences, give them a picture of how Flexport fits in the flow of global trade? You’re not operating ships and moving containers yourself, but you’re moving a lot of information and helping people make decisions about how they’re operating shifts and moving containers.

PETERSEN: Flexport is the sort of coordinating layer. So our ocean freight business, which is our largest business — we also do air freight, trucking, some rail freight, customs, as I mentioned, some other technology-related services, but ocean freight is the core business. And in that world, the simple way to think of it is that the ships only go from port to port, but that container needs to go from a factory to a warehouse. And so our job is to coordinate that end-to-end movement and make sure the data travels in parallel, the financial flows, there’s payments that are taking place. You can think of us as running that loop.

So a company will place an order to their factories through Flexport. Factory receives those orders. They go and produce those goods, and then they place the booking saying, hey, these are ready on this date, come and pick up the container, and then we dispatch trucks, clear the customs out of the country, get it onto a contract on an ocean carrier, and then kind of mirror image on the other side, coordinate the customs clearance and delivery.

It’s an ancient industry. Freight forwarding, it’s called. It’s been around thousands of years, really. In fact, there’s evidence of long distance trade that goes back older than art, even older than the caveman paintings. So we’ve been a little bit slow to adapt to technology. You can see the kind of core technology problem there is, on one container, the ships only go port to port. You got to have all these other modes of transport. It might be a rail leg, a truck, the ports themselves.

So they’re all running different IT systems that don’t talk to each other. And so I often joke freight forwarding, it should be called freight email forwarding. It’s like our job, people coordinating this, and what we’ve done differently is build this integration pipeline to connect these various IT systems, build user interfaces for the people involved to get data or give us data, make that coordination more efficient and more reliable.

SAFIAN: When potential news comes out like, oh, certain ships, it’s going to cost you $500 more per container, you have to then build that into your system so that all of your clients, when they’re making their choices about how to optimize, that suddenly changes, right?

PETERSEN: Yeah, exactly. That one is still a big TBD, because they haven’t published, they haven’t made it official, and it’s a little unclear. Ultimately, that’s going to sit with the ocean carriers themselves, and I don’t know how they’re going to do it. My working assumption is actually, they don’t have the level of sophistication in the data required to model, was this made in China or not?

SAFIAN: They don’t even know how to answer the question if it’s asked.

PETERSEN: We’re probably just going to play some blanket average and go, all right, every container costs $500 bucks more now. But yes, it is. When tariffs change, we pride ourselves on being the first to find out, “okay, here’s all the customers that are going to be affected. This is how much it would have cost them last year.” Within an hour usually, our team is on the phone notifying customers about this new change that’s happened.

Navigating an ever-changing trade landscape

SAFIAN: And in this environment, with the tariffs rolling around, how important is it to respond immediately? How do you balance that, “I want to be on it,” versus maybe, “I want to know what’s really for sure happening”?

PETERSEN: I think we want to be on it as soon as there’s certainty and then be very, very quick. We see it as an opportunity to really differentiate from some of the slower-moving companies that are out there and just be like, “we’re going to be the ones proactively telling you about the problem.” But yeah, we do have to balance it, of making sure you’re right. I had a team down in Washington recently, a couple weeks ago, go visit CBP. Sorry, Customs and Border Protection, the regulatory agency for customs. And they told us that they’re finding out about these new things, new rules, and they’re finding out on Truth Social like the rest of us. So we’re figuring this out as we go, man. It’s pretty new.

SAFIAN: For you personally, how do you deal with all this change? Because this is not the environment you were planning on, you were hoping for. It’s different.

PETERSEN: I founded Flexport in, really, we say 2013. That’s when we got our license by Customs and Border Protection to be a licensed customs brokerage. So 2014 was a pretty chill year. I don’t think anything major happened. 2015, we had a port slowdown on the west coast, and there was three months where you really couldn’t import a container into the west coast. It was so backlogged and people were missing Christmas season and stuff. 2016, the price of ocean freight collapsed to levels never before seen in the history of humanity. You could ship a television across the Pacific Ocean in an ocean container for $2 that year. I mean, it was just like dirt. It was free. In fact, so bad that one of the ocean carriers went bankrupt. Hanjin, a big Korean carrier. We had cargo stuck on their ships and couldn’t get off.

And then Trump came in ’17, ’18, ’19, put in all these new tariffs every day, every week, whatever. Then you had Covid and the backup of container ships stuck off the port of Long Beach, the famous images. And we had war in Ukraine, Red Sea. You couldn’t ship through the Red Sea. We still can’t ship through the Suez Canal right now. And then this. So we’re kind of used to it.

I tell the team sometimes a lesson I got from my father when camping as kids, that you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun those campers in that next site over. So on some level, this is a lesson for our customers too. “Hey, the tariffs are probably hitting all your competitors too, so it’s how do you adapt, how do you react, what are you going to do differently in your business that is going to define whether you win or lose?” It’s not just what happens to you.

SAFIAN: In some ways there’s more demand for your services when trade gets messy like this. Although as you described it, it’s been messy nonstop.

PETERSEN: Yeah. No, definitely, our work becomes certainly more important. We never celebrate it. Obviously, it’s really bad for our customers. We think it’s bad for business generally, bad for the economy, and probably a lot of this stuff’s bad for America, I think. But hey, nobody cares what I think on that regard. But it can be good for us if we’re better than responding than our competition is, and if we’re able to solve problems for our customers. There’s a million ways we can add more value in this environment.

How business leaders are reacting to tariffs

SAFIAN: Among your clients, is there any consistency around how folks are responding and adjusting to the tariffs? Are business leaders angry? Are they frustrated? Are any of them excited?

PETERSEN: They’re angry and frustrated. I’ve definitely seen both of those sentiments. The frustration is both on the duties impacting their business and on the lack of certainty about what’s next and how to set things up. I think people are resigned and understand duties are higher from China. If you have an option to produce elsewhere, people have been pursuing that. By the way, for a decade or more, because Chinese labor costs are much higher than and good for China, they’re paying their people more. People are making more money. But if you’re just looking for cheap labor, China hasn’t been the go-to spot for a long time. But the tariffs are accelerating that.

So last cycle, it was mostly targeted at China, so people felt, “let me go set up in Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, Mexico, Peru.” We’ve seen it all. Now I think people are a little bit paralyzed. Maybe that’s another sentiment. There’s a little bit of paralysis setting in, because you’re like, “Well, it’s changing every week. I don’t think I want to make a…” Supply chain decisions tend to be long-term, multi-year, like you’re setting up a new factory relationship, new logistics network. A lot of people are kind of paralyzed waiting for the other shoe to drop and figure that out. It’s very interesting. Even people who voted for Trump, and then they’re like, oh, “Actually this is hitting my business pretty hard. I’m not sure I like this.” So it’s a mixed bag.

SAFIAN: There are a lot of business leaders who supported Trump, so that’s why I asked whether any folks who are excited about it, but it doesn’t sound like in your world there’s a lot of

PETERSEN: Well, nobody really likes to pay more taxes, right? And tariffs are ultimately more taxes. Probably, there’s some American manufacturers who feel like, “Hey, okay, good, this is leveling the playing field.” But a lot of them use imported components in their goods. But it might impact others more than them. And ultimately that is the game of business. You got to out-compete your competition. If you’re made in America, you’re probably feeling much better about things right now.

But the big problem, I think, why tariffs are going to be very difficult to really change, they’re trying to change the culture and the economic base of the country and move us to start making things again. I think that’s a noble cause, like you should manufacture more in America. But the fundamental problem is that the U.S. dollar is just so strong that even if you put tariffs on, it’s still cheaper to buy stuff from other countries. Unless they weaken the dollar and make it just much more expensive to import from other countries, and make our products cheaper to export to other countries, I think it’s going to be hard to transform the sort of trade imbalance.

20 years ago, for every 100 containers that were coming into the country, 80 would go back with goods in them. Today it’s 30, and 70 containers are just going back truly empty. So if you see these big container ships, you’re near a port, take a look. If it’s sailing outbound, you see all those containers, 70% of them on the way out are just empty containers. That’s a problem, honestly. We should be making more stuff. But I think as long as the dollar is the global reserve currency, and it gives you such purchasing power to go to other countries and buy stuff, then that’s what businesses are going to do. Water flows downhill.

The history of global trade trends

SAFIAN: I mean, some people are looking at the tariffs and the retaliatory tariffs and the changing environment as a pullback from globalization overall. Does it have you rethinking anything about the premise behind Flexport’s business, or how you think about global trade in the long run? Or do you think, “Hey, inevitably, global trade’s going to keep growing, and this is just going to be a bump in that?”

PETERSEN: I mean, on some level, I have to believe that it’s dependent. My business needs there to be more global trade. But I do believe it. I’m a big history buff, and if you look at the long run, we’ve seen 4% annual growth of global trade since the Mongol invasions in 1200 A.D. And you’re doing a lot of stuff that happened in the world. It was pretty ugly in that time period. And if you look at that graph, it looks like the Silicon Valley hockey stick, OpenAI growth curve. Even though it’s only 4% growth, because if you take something and you compound it 4% for 800 years, you’re just like, oh my goodness. And when you look at that graph and you zoom in, you see World War II, you’re like, “Oh, look, trade had a little stall out right there, went down even a bit.” And nothing, god willing, let’s all pray, I don’t think we’re looking at anything that looks like World War II right now.

So I assume that there will be a blip here. Trade may go down a bit. It’s out of fashion for sure, but there is something just very fundamental. Human beings want to trade. It is the foundation of civilization. We want to trade with one another. You specialize in what you’re good at. I’ll specialize in what I’m good at. We’ll trade. We’re both made better off. This is how wealth is created, how civilization advances. On the individual level within a country, two people doing trade, doing trading goods and services. And on the global level, it’s just like, there’s going to be demand for it.

SAFIAN: Ryan’s acknowledgement that some businesses are being paralyzed by the changes in uncertainty in U.S. trade policy echoes what I’m hearing from other CEOs. So what kind of actions can we take to grab more control in this uncertain moment? We’ll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Flexport’s Ryan Petersen shared how global trade is being impacted by tariff hikes and uncertainty. Now, he talks about the different tactics businesses might adopt to deal with the changes, second order impacts that are being overlooked, and how AI and machine learning could smooth out some of the bumps. Plus, why Ryan stepped down as CEO and then returned. Let’s jump back in.

How corporations are leveraging their size in tariff disputes

We’ve seen Walmart try to push back on suppliers in China to take up the cost of tariffs, which sparks resistance from the Chinese government. Do bigger organizations like Walmart have more leverage in tariff turmoil versus smaller businesses, or is everybody in the same boat? There’s no better or worse?

PETERSEN: Well, the bigger ones always have more negotiating power, in theory. A company like Walmart moves so much goods, they have more negotiating power. Where it’s actually nuanced is, there are markets, and we were in one throughout last year, where there’s more demand for container shipping than there is capacity of the shipping network to move the goods. And that was, last year, really true because of what happened with the Suez Canal and the ships having to run around Africa. That dramatically reduced the capacity, right? The same ship is moving fewer containers per year. And so you had more demand than capacity. The volume, the price went way up.

It can actually, in such a market, be an advantage to be small, counterintuitively, because you just got to squeeze. It’s hard for Walmart to find a new home for 100,000 containers and get them all moved. But if you just got one and you’re a hustler, you could probably find some slot for your one container to get on there. There’s some benefit to being small if you’re nimble, and Walmart has more professionals who are probably more connected and have certainly more negotiating power, and there’s plenty of advantage to scale, but there’s always an advantage to being nimble and entrepreneurial and having skin in the game and hustle.

The unintended consequences of tariffs

SAFIAN: Do you see any particularly creative hustling going on right now? I mean, are businesses trying to rush to ship things before more tariffs take effect? Any particular gimmicks underway?

PETERSEN: A lot of that took place earlier the year, kind of end of last year. People were moving goods in ahead of time. One of the things I heard, so Trump put in tariffs on Mexico and Canada. They relaxed the ones on Mexico, but not Canada. But when they relaxed it on Mexico, everyone assumed that Canada would get a deal done the next day, too. And so, one of the railroads told us that that day, I assume this is kind of cleared out by now, but that day there were thousands of rail cars full of goods from Canada that were meant to come to the U.S., and they got instructions just to pull over to the side of the tracks and wait. Because you don’t want to pay 25% duty today if it’s going to go away tomorrow.

And then it started to get congestion on the rail, and it backs up, and we’re currently seeing a lot of congestion in the Port of Vancouver as the railroads have backed up into the port, and they’re not able to pull goods out. So there’s all these second order effects that the government is just not… No one’s good at modeling second order effects in the world. It’s a complex system, and the government certainly just doesn’t really have the ability to figure out like, oh, we put this…

For example, that port fee that I was talking about on Chinese ships, most of these ships will make three port calls. They’ll stop in Seattle, then Oakland, and then LA. But if they’re having to pay a million dollars per port call, they’re just going to go, forget Seattle and Oakland, I’m just going to go to LA. And you could probably model that, and hopefully the government has realized, you might bankrupt the port of Oakland and the port of Seattle because people are just going to skip it. But then second is what’s going to happen in LA, and this is very hard to model. You’re just going to get these congestion bottleneck buildup. If everybody does that, it doesn’t have the throughput, and you’re going to have these crazy long supply chain delays and backups. And I highly doubt when they put in this thing that’s supposed to promote U.S. shipbuilding that they did any kind of modeling of what the medium term impact is.

But it’s really a mess for our customers. I think there are some companies that won’t make it out the other side of this, where they can’t move manufacturing, their product is maybe not a must-have, and the tariffs will require you to raise your prices. So will people keep buying that product when it’s 30% more expensive? We’ll find out.

The journey of leadership at Flexport

SAFIAN: You founded Flexport, you ran the company as CEO, and then a couple of years ago, you stepped away. You brought in an outside leader to be CEO. But then a year later, you were back as CEO. With all these headaches right now, do you wish you’d stayed away a little longer?

PETERSEN: No, no, no, not at all. I wish I’d never left at first. I never really left. I became executive chairman. But operations is all about doing the same thing you did yesterday a little bit better, and reviewing every metric and dashboard and finding metrics you’re not happy with, outliers, and looking to eliminate waste and improve processes and things. And it’s not my background. I’m an entrepreneur through and through, more of a creative product type development, new innovation.

And so I was looking for a partner that could help turn that crank, just get better and better every day. And it’s very hard to hire an outside CEO to come into a culture and learn the new industry, learn the culture. As experienced as somebody might be, every company’s different, every industry is different, and you got to… If we ever hire another CEO for Flexport, it’ll be somebody I promote from within after 10, 20 years in the company to really learn how it all works. So I never really meant to step aside. I actually just genuinely thought that the guy I hired would be better than me at the job, but I was wrong. So I got more confidence in myself now, this time around.

SAFIAN: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who’s a friend of this show, has been a guest with me many times, has talked about what he calls founders mode, which is an idea I think that you’ve endorsed. What does founders mode mean for you, and what does it look like for a company like Flexport?

PETERSEN: Man, Brian is a friend of mine as well and really influenced me a lot. I would say a couple of things. One is really focus on managing the work and not the people. That a lot of the kind of professional advice of CEOs and board members and advisors is like, you just got to hire a great executive for each department and then trust them, and don’t meddle too much in their world. They’d know what they’re doing, and just empower them. And then they’re doing the same all the way down, and you end up with nobody really taking ownership and having skin in the game and making decisions. So founders should ignore their executives whenever they want to and just go straight to the front line. Ignore all hierarchy and management. Talk to the customers, obviously, a lot. Talk to the employees writing code and the ones selling and doing the work, and not just try to manage through managers. Get into the work, make more of the decisions about what’s happening.

SAFIAN: So you don’t trust everyone who works for you the same way, or?

PETERSEN: No, I don’t. I don’t trust anybody. Trust but verify, I think is what Ronald Reagan said. There’s this notion that micromanagement is like this really bad thing. It’s a terrible, it’s like the worst word in business and management. But micromanagement is only bad if your boss is an idiot. If your boss is in tune with what you’re working on and is involved in helping you make good decisions, you’re like, this is great. And I like working like that. So it was really influential having Brian say that, because I’d already learned those lessons the hard way. I had done the ultimate of hiring a big CEO and setting him free to do whatever he thought was the right thing, and it didn’t work out for us. And now I’m like, I’m everywhere. I’m texting 30 or 40 people every day. Phone calls. People know at Flexport, you just get a random Google Meet invitation to come talk to me about what.

SAFIAN: And are they like, uh oh, oh no, Ryan’s after me now?

PETERSEN: It is become normal. They know, I’m just like, I want to learn. I’m not yelling at people, usually. Those are good. And then the other two things that Brian told me that I implemented that were just so fantastic for us is do: a, twice a year, get the top 150 people in the company together in person to really review roadmap, strategy, what are we building? So we run this internal conference, I call it the Velocity Summit, driving speed in the right direction. And that was transformational for our culture.

And then the other big one was he said, “Hey, take all your tech that you’ve built and package it up and do a big launch every six months, rather than incremental kind of soft launches that don’t get much attention.” That was really game-changing. We just did our first one three weeks ago, and it forced our marketing team to spend way more time with the tech org. In the past, I feel like our marketing team would find out we built some new tech when it went live, and then they would maybe scramble to create some collateral sales decks or something. Now they’re months ahead of time strategizing, how are we going to tell this story, et cetera. So, so many upsides. So yeah, I’ve got to thank Brian a lot.

Long-term strategies in global trade

SAFIAN: Are there any changes yet in how goods are moving around the world that you think are going to persist? Lessons or guidelines to keep in mind?

PETERSEN: Certainly, it’s good to say: what are the things that are going to be true no matter what in the world? So you know people are going to want to produce, they’re going to manufacture their good wherever they can get the highest quality at the lowest price. Okay, that’s going to be true. They’re going to want reliable transit times. They’re going to want low prices on the logistics. They’re going to want lots of choice. So those things are true. So you have to invest in those long-term cycles.

There’s always going to be some regression to the mean, so you want to hedge for that. And then you want to understand, what’s never happened before that’s now possible because of technology? And make sure you’re the one investing in making those things happen. So if you look at a transaction where you’re shipping a container around the world, for every $1,000 that a company spends on that, about $100, 10% is going to the layer that I was describing earlier of the free email forwarding, just the labor of coordination to connect all the dots and make these not the blue collar labor that’s moving the containers, driving them and sailing the ships and whatever. Just the coordination layer is 10%. We estimate 80% of that can be eliminated with technology, largely AI-based, like automation routines. So if you make everything 8% cheaper, that doesn’t matter what happens, the world’s going to want that. So we know we have to invest in that, regardless.

SAFIAN: The changes from tariffs and how they’re affecting global trade, versus how AI will be impacting global trade, it almost sounds like you feel like in the long run, the technology may have a bigger impact.

PETERSEN: It will certainly have a big, big impact. It will lower the cost, as I said. It should make things more reliable. There’s a lot of costs to eliminate. For example, we have algorithms now that play Tetris with your cartons and load the containers more full. On average, we can have people eliminate about 10% of their containers, 10-14%, depending on how poorly you optimized the stuff before we met you. So things like that. Better route planning. Technology is way better at this than human beings that just go, okay, let me pick that one. What we have is a database of every ship going everywhere and the cost, and then machine learning will pick you the cheapest one that will get you there on time. So there’s a million ways to make things more reliable, cheaper, and yeah, regardless of what happens with tariffs, everybody’s going to want that.

SAFIAN: Well, this has been a great education for me, Ryan. Thanks very much for taking the time and sharing all this with us.

PETERSEN: Yeah, my pleasure. It’s changing pretty fast, so I’m happy to come back on over time, if there’s some other new developments, which there likely will be.

SAFIAN: Listening to Ryan, I get a deeper appreciation for the complexity of global trade and how hard it is to predict where the impact of tariffs will net out. Beyond even the back and forth of which rules will and won’t be implemented, there’s a level of interdependence in the global economy that defies simple solutions.

In nearly every episode these days, I find myself returning to the adage of focusing on what you can control. That doesn’t necessarily mean every CEO should be personally texting 40 team members each day, as Ryan apparently does, but it does mean that we need to have a higher level, 30,000-foot view of the environment that we’re in, a theory about how things might play out in the long run, and then continually test that theory against the evolving, on the ground reality.

The Trump administration has created a fork in the road, in global trade and many other areas, but that doesn’t mean where the road goes from here is defined. So where do we want it to go, and what can we do to help make that happen for our businesses and for ourselves? I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.