Flexport Blog

Flexport (YC W14) | San Francisco, Amsterdam, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Chicago | Onsite, VISA | https://www.flexport.com Flexport’s mission is to make global trade easy for everyone. We are revolutionizing a huge industry that touches every country on the planet, which means solving complex challenges. We are looking for makers who love learning, are passionate about collaborating, and desire to see the global impact of the solutions they build. To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/flexport View all of our jobs here: https://grnh.se/c0d6caef1 Tech Stack: Frontend: React, Relay, Flow, Jest, Enzyme Mobile: React Native, Apollo Backend: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, GraphQL, Python, RSpec CI: GitHub, Buildkite Infrastructure: AWS, Python

Flexport (YC W14) | San Francisco, CA and Chicago, IL | Onsite | https://www.flexport.com Flexport’s mission is to make global trade easy for everyone. We are revolutionizing a huge industry that touches every country on the planet, which means solving complex challenges. We are looking for makers who love learning, are passionate about collaborating, and desire to see the global impact of the solutions they build. To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/flexport View all of our jobs here: https://grnh.se/c0d6caef1 Tech Stack: Frontend: React, Relay, Flow, Jest, Enzyme Mobile: React Native, Apollo Backend: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, GraphQL, Python, RSpec CI: GitHub, Buildkite Infrastructure: AWS, Python

Flexport (YC W14) | San Francisco, Amsterdam, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Chicago | Onsite, VISA | https://www.flexport.com Flexport’s mission is to make global trade easy for everyone. We are revolutionizing a huge industry that touches every country on the planet, which means solving complex challenges. We are looking for makers who love learning, are passionate about collaborating, and desire to see the global impact of the solutions they build. To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/flexport View all of our jobs here: https://grnh.se/c0d6caef1 Tech Stack: Frontend: React, Relay, Flow, Jest, Enzyme Mobile: React Native, Apollo Backend: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, GraphQL, Python, RSpec CI: GitHub, Buildkite Infrastructure: AWS, Python

Flexport (YC W14) | San Francisco, CA - Chicago, IL - Bellevue, WA | Onsite | https://www.flexport.com Flexport’s mission is to make global trade easy for everyone. We are revolutionizing a huge industry that touches every country on the planet, which means solving complex challenges. We are looking for makers who love learning, are passionate about collaborating, and desire to see the global impact of the solutions they build. To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/flexport View all of our jobs here: https://grnh.se/c0d6caef1 Tech Stack: * Frontend: React, Relay, Flow, Jest, Enzyme * Mobile: React Native, Apollo * Backend: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, GraphQL, Python, RSpec * CI: GitHub, Buildkite *Infrastructure: AWS, Python

Flexport (YC W14) | San Francisco, CA and Chicago, IL | Onsite | https://www.flexport.com Flexport’s mission is to make global trade easy for everyone. We are revolutionizing a huge industry that touches every country on the planet, which means solving complex challenges. We are looking for makers who love learning, are passionate about collaborating, and desire to see the global impact of the solutions they build. To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/flexport View all of our jobs here: https://grnh.se/c0d6caef1 Tech Stack: Frontend: React, Relay, Flow, Jest, Enzyme Mobile: React Native, Apollo Backend: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, GraphQL, Python, RSpec CI: GitHub, Buildkite Infrastructure: AWS, Python

Have no idea if you've looked at these folks but I hear great things about https://www.flexport.com/ May be worth your time in reaching out.

Flexport - https://www.flexport.com - San Francisco, CA - Engineering Flexport is a platform for global trade. We make it easier for companies to ship products between any two places in the world. Paul Graham says, "Flexport is one of those rare startups that will not merely satisfy its market, but grow it. There will be more international trade because of Flexport, and international trade is a very big thing for there to be more of." We have a tight-knit team of 7 engineers lead by our CTO Amos Elliston, who was previously co-founder of Geni, where he helped lead the engineering team that built and spun out Yammer. Our business is working: We grew revenues 94x in the last 12-months, including 115% from March over February of this year. We're looking for a senior front-end engineer to help create great user experiences for our clients, for our team and for our logistics partners around the world. Check out our job posting for more information on the tech stack and engineering culture: https://www.flexport.com/careers And please email [email protected] with your resume to apply. Thanks!

Not at all an expert in the space, but Flexport comes to mind. https://www.flexport.com

I work in this space and online blogs are incredibly sparse. Would love to know as well. Here's an article I found interesting about air cargo software (my dad learned on this at Swiss Air in the 70s-80s) https://retool.com/blog/air-travel-software/ Another one about supply chain of bananas. Flexport writes about interesting stuff once in a while: https://www.flexport.com/blog/supply-chain-of-the-banana/

The Flexport folks published a blog post last year on the coming banana apocalypse: https://www.flexport.com/blog/supply-chain-of-the-banana/ It's really worth reading. (There's lots of great stuff on the Flexport blog.)

If any SoundClouders are reading this thread, consider Flexport! Flexport is a freight forwarder, which is a really old industry. We're bringing it to the information era. (It turns out computers are really good at solving information problems.) Flexport is growing the engineering team of ~35 in our downtown SF office. It's a great time to join: we have 20% MoM growth and we're about to enter the peak season where retailers are getting ready for the holidays. There's lots of opportunity for personal growth because we still have tonnes of stuff to build. Our stack is React, Rails, Postgres, AWS. We're experimenting with GraphQL & Relay too. We're hiring across the stack. Check out our careers page below. If you're interested in frontend, contact me directly! (email is in my profile). https://www.flexport.com/careers/department/engineering

> $25 million for parts... I suspect global shipping and installation isn't cheap. Shipping via ocean freight (I will avoid the obvious pun) is exceptionally cheap; for example consider the following article from 2016: > https://www.flexport.com/blog/why-are-ocean-freight-rates-so-low/

Is the upper end getting much higher with aggressive automation efforts like those in Rotterdam? (https://www.flexport.com/blog/port-automation-oakland-rotterdam/) Smaller vessels can be cleared out inside a day, but the larger ones are still a project for all but the best equipped ports.

Flexport did a great blog post on the situation: https://www.flexport.com/blog/on-hanjin/ Also of interest, they also did a game theory analysis of ocean liners: https://www.flexport.com/blog/game-theory-ocean-carrier-competition/

Oh sure. Software eats fulfillment, basically. Currently FBA (http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.htm) is a 3B$ business without any competitors. There are good reasons for that: it's capital-intensive, technically/operationally/managerially challenging, and can only really be learned by doing. I've just finished architecting & implementing a 30k package/day distribution system from scratch, I know I can do better. FBA is a surprisingly low bar to clear (they're mathematically/structurally constrained), and the industry hasn't really improved since the 90's. And with the right structuring it can be mostly funded through debt & advance receipts. Basically, I'm going to pick up where FlexPort (https://www.flexport.com/) leaves off (literally! Ha, logistics joke!) Except in an even less sexy vertical. :)

I am in a very similar situation, working for a mid-sized logistics (300 employees with small offices around the globe, 400-500M annual revenue), but with a completely different side, we do practically everything in-house with a very old software that does everything, (Multivalue D3). My experience on your points: >We're having to resort to a separate low-code platform to fill in the gaps. Our business operates in a specific niche and there are no other providers who cater specifically to our industry. We also use low-code applications like Talend and TIBCO, to fill some gaps, the older folks that don't want to deal with our ERP prefer using them this way for example. Have you tried taking a look to https://www.flexport.com/ or https://www.shipbob.com/? Afaik, these are 2 of the most overrall used in the logistics industry. We are very slowly migrating our system in different departments to more modern solutions, but always keep in mind that as soon as you start migrating, you will need to keep both systems up for a long period of time while this happens, and that means money and workers. >On the other hand, while our current solution seems like a straightforward CRUD app, I fear the devil is in the details. Will we get stuck at 80% completion? We do a lot of data exchange via EDIFACT, for instance, with various government institutions all over Europe. This feels like a quagmire in which development can quickly stall. Europe is slowly moving outside of the EDIFACT…

>And when I spoke to the recruiter a year ago, she told me that much of their activities were performed by humans instead of automated systems. This is an established business play for VC backed startups. A SAAS is always two things, the product, and sales. You absolutely must have sales, because no matter how good the product is, you don't have a business if nobody buys it. So the product is optional. The pitch is "We're the completely automated solution for X", but internally everything is done by hand. You then try to find some customers. If you don't get product-market fit, you shut down without having to spend anything on engineering. But if you do get product-market fit, great! Time to build out the actual automation. During the gap, it doesn't matter how bad your unit economics are, you can just use infinite VC money to hire thousands of people while promising the board you'll eventually lay them all off. You will experience hypergrowth during this period because you can underbid everyone else thanks to your endless spigot of money. Look at the careers page: https://www.flexport.com/careers/jobs/ Lots and lots and lots of openings for account managers and client solutions associates. I guarantee you these people spend 8 hours a copy and pasting stuff from one form to another, or on the phone reading the contents of text boxes to someone who enters that text into their own green screen terminal.

I'm an industrial engineer, more manufacturing focused than specifically logistics. From what I've seen and heard from talking with other IE's at other companies, we're probably looking at a couple years before things are "normal" again, and they'll continue to be a mess in a way that's transparent to the consumer longer than that. As long as there are areas of the world with significant trade that are being hit hard by COVID there will be disruptions. In the last few weeks, Southeast Asia has had reduced port capacity due to a COVID surge. Heck, even in US production it's tough to get production and warehouse employees right now! Weird times for sure, even if you're paying a strong wage. If you're curious about general global shipping, in 2017 Flexport put out a great podcast about cargo ships. I really wish they would do an additional podcast about the current happenings, though their blog posts are quite interesting. https://www.flexport.com/blog/alexis-madrigal-containers-podcast/ Odd Lots (a Bloomberg podcast) also had a great interview from earlier this month. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-02/gene-seroka-on-the-…

Link: http://www.flexport.com

(Even though "legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States.") At least the customs requirement has been resolved: https://www.flexport.com/blog/apollo-11-astronauts-cleared-moon-custom…

Flexport news is wild. How often do you see 20% layoff less than a week after raising $260M? https://www.flexport.com/blog/Flexport-Fundraise-2023/

You might prefer this: https://www.flexport.com/blog/global-ocean-carriers-halt-red-sea-trans…

It adds 7-10 days to a trip that would normally take 30-40 days: https://www.flexport.com/blog/global-ocean-carriers-halt-red-sea-trans… Air cargo rates are 10-20x ocean, so it’s unlikely an extra week of travel would justify the expense for most cases.

The letter sent to employees is at https://www.flexport.com/blog/flexport-ceos-note-to-employees/

Ouch, after a prior 20% cut in January. https://www.flexport.com/blog/flexport-co-ceos-note-to-employees/ Layoffs suck, they drain the moral when things are already hard and negative feeling. This is why it's critical to celebrate wins as often as being transparent about disappointing news.

flexport has an inventory management system https://www.flexport.com/products/order-management/

This article quotes the letter sent to employees, which is published here: https://www.flexport.com/blog/flexport-co-ceos-note-to-employees/

The original source seems to be posted at https://www.flexport.com/blog/flexport-co-ceos-note-to-employees/

Flexport is hiring lots of people for lots of roles in SF, Bellevue WA, Chicago, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Shenzhen. ONSITE - Employees must be associated with one of these offices and come to office 2 days per week. Flexport’s mission is to make global trade easy for everyone. Our solutions are powered by innovative technology and exceptional people. We’re shaping the future of a $8.6T industry by reimagining how brands move goods— fast, with confidence, and at scale. Want to tackle global challenges that have an impact on business, society, and the environment? Come join us. https://www.flexport.com/careers/jobs/