Who you are defines how you build.

This is the Entrepreneurals Thought Leaders series.

Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.

On this episode we have Ryan Peterson, the founder and CEO of Flexport, a freight forwarding company utilizing a blend of technology and logistics infrastructure to modernize the global trade industry.

Before founding Flexport, Ryan founded ImportGenius.com. Here's Ryan.

You all know that every single time you see these big ocean containers,

container ships out here in the bay.

And do you know that every single time you ship a container,

there's a piece of paper that's actually flown across the ocean

to serve as title to the goods.

Think about this for a moment. It's madness that there's actually, because every time you ship

a container, there's a new owner on the other end of the ocean. And we're actually flying pieces

of paper around the world to serve as title. Still, thankfully, we're starting to change some

of that, of Flexport and others in the industry. We're making it possible to use the internet for what it was made for is to do commerce across the world

and fulfilling the original purpose of the internet. I first discovered that when I graduated from Cal,

I couldn't find a job. it was 2002. I didn't

really know what a job or a company was at that time, although it was the middle of this

dot-com boom. My interests were much more around global trade and economics and why some

countries are poor and some countries are rich,

some people are poor and some people are rich. And that, there's not a lot of jobs in that space.

There should be more, but there are not a lot at that time, at least. And so I got a job working

for my older brother. Actually, my first job out of school was my older brother ran this business buying

...