Against the odds: Peak season is coming, or is it? And do carriers care?
To peak or not to peak…
For this week’s Loadstar podcast, managing editor Gavin van Marle travelled to San Francisco to interview Ryan Petersen, chief executive of start-up freight forwarder Flexport, a company at the forefront of the tech industry’s attempts to disrupt the freight forwarding and logistics business.
Since its inception in 2013, the company has raised around $94m from Silicon Valley investors who have been sold on Mr Petersen’s story of marrying a traditional freight forwarding business to a tech start-up that writes its software, and the value that this can unlock for shippers.
Customers have taken notice of that proposition: he claims in this interview that Flexport will be among the top 20 forwarders booking space on the transpacific trade by the end of 2017, while just this week it opened a new office in Atlanta.
The Loadstar gained unprecedented access to Flexport to bring you this wide-ranging interview in which Mr Petersen talks about the unique composition of his teams; how carriers as well as shippers stand to gain from the vast data sets Flexport has accumulated; and offers some alternative names the container shipping alliances could have chosen. “Axis of Seavil” anyone?
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