Ryan Petersen

The kind of dogma in startups is like, be really good at one thing.

Really focus.

You've written about this, like the need to focus.

We also, the other dogma is talk, you know, Y Combinator, talk to users and make something people want.

And when we were just doing customs, we get customers, but like we get the worst kind.

We get a lot of rough types of customers.

One of the first things we ever imported was a tuk-tuk, which is like from Cambodia.

Some guy went to Cambodia and bought one of those little jeepney kind of scooters with the seats in the back.

A Berkeley professor wanted it for the nudist parade in Berkeley.

He was only going to do one of those in his life.

Not a great customer.

So we had like a lot, a lot of customers for customs brokerage, but like rough customers doing things that they were amateurs.

They know what they were doing.

They weren't probably going to recur.

Some guy bought like a bouncy house for his kid's birthday party in China because he was too cheap to buy one locally, like stuff like that.

Exactly.

And so like when, whenever we talk to real companies that were doing repeat transactions, they're like, we didn't want to separate customs from the freight.

And if they did, they were going to give the customs to like the best customs brokerage in the world with the best reputation for compliance.

And like, we were not to the startup.

Now we actually have a lot of big companies that use Flexport for customs only because we've built our brand and our reputation and our technology systems to actually, we can say, Hey, we're the best.