In the year before business school, Ryan Petersen made about $17,000. He told a Y Combinator interviewer in 2018 that he picked Columbia partly as a backup plan. He left in 2008 owing about $140,000.
Born around 1980 in Bethesda, Maryland, he had a government economist for a father and a biochemist mother who ran her own business. At 17 he and his brother David were already buying goods from China to sell on eBay. After an economics degree at UC Berkeley he moved to China in 2005 and spent about two years running a supply chain for imported motorbikes and electric scooters. He has called it a couple of guys trying to earn a living, never a startup.
Before it came, companies including Foxconn and Saudi Aramco signed up through a marketing page for a service that did not yet exist.
Then came the debt. To pay it down he stitched together flexible work: a Columbia case study on a Nigerian tech company, teaching the GMAT, a small SEO consulting firm. He knew, he said, he would be bad at ordinary MBA jobs. He now tells people to avoid business school if it means borrowing that much.
What almost nobody connects to Flexport is how long he waited. The idea began as a side project with no revenue. He needed a licence from US Customs and Border Protection, and it took about three years to arrive: March 31, 2013. Before it came, companies including Foxconn and Saudi Aramco signed up through a marketing page for a service that did not yet exist. By his count it took about five years from first idea to first dollar, four of them as a solo founder. He recalled selling his Amazon stock to buy a house and then watching the stock keep climbing, calling it the dumbest thing he had ever done. Debt payments, rent and food, he said, are what kept him experimenting.
Flexport joined Y Combinator in 2014. By early 2022 it raised $935 million at an $8 billion valuation, and revenue reached $2.1 billion in 2024.
The price came later. In 2022 he handed the CEO job to former Amazon executive Dave Clark. Clark resigned abruptly in September 2023, and Petersen took the job back and withdrew dozens of job offers. In early 2025 he warned that 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports could bankrupt many small American importers, the kind of customer he once was.
A first-time founder can take one thing from the licence. He did not wait for permission to learn whether anyone wanted the product, and behind those three years of waiting sat a debt, a rent bill and a landing page.