Office Hours at Startup School 2013 with Paul Graham and Sam Altman

Flexport is hiring engineers: [link] As an engineer starting at Flexport in a couple of weeks, here are some more interesting resources that shaped my thinking: Interview with Ryan Petersen (Flexport CEO) [link] Office hours at startup school 2013 with pg & sama ▶ this video I also happened to have recently read Zero to One. Plus, Flexport has an appealing mission. Removing friction in something as basic as shipping makes pretty much everyone in the world better off.

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I agree its really great of them, you can watch office hour sessions on youtube from the Startup School that YC runs ▶ this video

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As someone who went through YC and met PG while he was still actively running it, I can tell you that at least in our batch he was 100% spot on about who was going to do well. He had a tendency to spend his free time with the same individuals who ended up doing phenomenally well. It would be easy to be dismissive about this and say something about doubling down on his best investments, etc. But during our batch many of those companies had not yet become the clear cut winners that they are today, and instead only turned into them a year or so down the road. One of the best companies from our batch is Flexport, and PG had been super impressed by Ryan Petersen even before he was officially accepted into YC [1]. It's pretty clear in hindsight that taking note of who PG was hanging out with was a very investable strategy. In fact, one of my batchmates had some money to put into other companies in our batch, and when he asked me for my opinion of who to invest in, that's exactly what I told him. I just did some quick math and would estimate that his ROI today is somewhere in the 1,000x range. I am not the only who figured this out - while this wasn't quite as much of a factor during my batch, nowadays there is an entire cottage industry of YC-only funds who invest only during YC demo days. As you can imagine, the way they differentiate from each other is by how much insider knowledge they are able to accumulate leading up to demo day (I am not implying that the partners ever leak a

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There's a lot of money to make for the freight forwarding companies. A lot of container owners charge you fully knowing that your product may get caught up in customs and they make their money on late fees. As a user of this product, I think you probably get better visibility of where your contents are in the overall process and access to customs agents, which that in itself would help cut your overall costs down if you know that your items were categorized correctly on your customs forms, preventing the above from happening. The founder talking about it at startup school. ▶ this video

in “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2019)” · View on HN

This is a decent writeup because it defines what "an uber" is and what it means to be a business like that. How many "Uber for X" businesses label themselves that way because of interactions like this one, where customers and investors are so focused on Uber as some kind of canonical startup that there's attempts to squeeze unrelated business models into it? ▶ this video (specifically 21m56s and 24m9s) This video is four years old, so it's good to know that claims of "Uber of X" are getting long in the tooth. It'll help to start agreeing on definitions and get away from the buzzwords.

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Congrats. I remember watching Flexport get pitched to PG and Sam Altman during open 'Office Hours' at Startup School in 2013. ▶ this video

in “Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation” · View on HN