New Flexport CEO resigns
Dave Clark (ex-Amazon) resigned as CEO. The new CEO is the old CEO (founder Ryan Petersen). What’s going on at Flexport? Tap the photo to read the entire email. Blind cropped the screenshot. It sounds like Ryan wanted to come back. Didn’t he leave to become a VC? Did he get fired as a VC?
After Dave destroyed the culture .. another “faang” cancer ruining companies
Based CEO
The Shopify + Amazon deal was probably the final nail in the coffin — he got played.
Ootl how does that deal affect Flexport? I thought Flexport is a forwarder and not a competitor to Amazon logistics.
Shopify sold Flexport their logistics division that is focused on SMB (small and medium business), but then they signed that deal with Amazon that lets Shopify merchants use FBA. This basically undercuts Flexport’s offering. Shopify actually owns part of Flexport, but Shopify’s CEO is excellent at making shitty decisions.
High burn rate, buying deliverr followed by Amazon and Shopify partnership sealed the deal.
Rumor is Jassy fired him for having no cost control and somehow Ryan still decided to hire him at Flexport. Baffling. Incinerated money on that Deliverr deal.
But it was an all equity deal?
He was really bad at Amazon. So much of the delivery network management at Amazon was still manual because he didn't invest in the tech, causing huge cost increases everytime market conditions change and that's why he got fired.
There are a lot of startups with leaders like this unfortunately. Was hoping the impending recession would flush them out but not looking too likely :(
One just got flushed out right? So it may be working
He was just bad. Kept hiring arrogant executives who treated their team like s**t. Just caused attrition
Dave was almost universally disliked at both Amazon and Flexport. He brought the worst of Amazon culture to Flexport and all his cronies that didn’t know anything about freight. Ryan needs to come back to save the day. I hope it’s not too late
This ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼
The product vp AJ he brought over from amazon was a real b word at least as of a few years ago when me and my team crossed her path at amazon. My mgr and skip both said she was one of the worst people they’ve ever dealt with professionally.
Classy email
Not at all. He just scared the shiz out of every employee. Trashy email.
I mean it's probably written by someone in PR and pre approved by a committee, so it's not exactly his words but yeah a 1 year tenure followed by the old founder / CEO coming back is not a good look for a fledgling company