Ryan Petersen

Oh, outside of construction too?

Yeah, so he's got that company built in, but he has a few other businesses.

Like how does that work?

We use Freedom of Information Act to access them from Customs and Border Protection.

You get access to the data.

They make no effort whatsoever to make it useful.

You don't have to do paper digitization, but they just give like data dumps and they won't give you past data.

Oh, interesting.

And that's just custom.

That's just U.S.

We have data sets for Latin America, mostly Latin America, a couple other countries, India.

No, we'd already gotten licensed.

And that was the thing.

Like, we had the idea.

There was a debate between me and my brother and our other partner who had the idea for Flexport.

We all claim it.

But first email that I can find like discussing this was like in 2008 or nine, but it took a long time to get licensed by Customs and Border Protection.

Had to go through an FBI background check, had to do a whole bunch of, yeah, it just takes two years.

So it was when we got the license from CBP that I left, stepped down and started Flexport.

And that was about six months before YC started.