Ryan Petersen

Petersen grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, where his father owned a regulatory compliance software company and his mother started Novigen Sciences. “My dad taught me to write computer programs to generate invoices for her,” he recalled.⁠[1]

As a high school senior in the late 1990s, he teamed up with his older brother and a friend to sell gadgets and toys on eBayeBayeBay Inc. is an online marketplace company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar; it started out with person-to-person online auctions and listed on Nasdaq in 1998. As of the end of 2025, it had 135 million active buyers, and its platform’s gross merchandise volume in 2025 was nearly $80 billion.Open the full entry, a business that grew to over $5 million in annual revenue. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

Petersen moved to China for the family e-commerce business, whose flagship brand was Wasauna, studying Chinese in the mornings and sourcing products and factories in the afternoons; he later completed an MBA at Columbia Business School. In 2008, working with his brother and their friend, he collected some 380 million import documents and launched the trade data service ImportGenius, where he stayed until 2013.⁠[1]

Petersen founded Flexport, based in San Francisco, in 2013; the company was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 batch.⁠[2]

Flexport started as a freight forwarder, and its early investors included Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry, First Round CapitalFirst Round CapitalVenture capital firm.Open the full entry and Google Ventures.⁠[1]

On June 8, 2022, Flexport announced that Dave Clark, who had just resigned as chief executive of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, would take the helm at Flexport on September 1 and join its board, with Petersen planning to transition into the role of executive chairman in March 2023. Petersen said Clark had helped “scale Amazon into the technology and supply chain juggernaut it is today.”⁠[3]

On November 29, 2022, a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry published the video “Rearchitecting the Supply Chain with Ryan Petersen” on its YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel, in which a16z growth editor Das Rush talked with Petersen, then co-chief executive and founder of Flexport. Released ahead of the holiday shopping season, the episode discussed why he chose to work on improving the resiliency of the supply chain, the complexity of supply chains in the e-commerce era, changing customer expectations and how supply chains could be rearchitected to meet them, with topics including “land and expand” and the impact of e-commerce.⁠[4]

On September 6, 2023, Dave Clark announced on X that he was resigning as Flexport’s chief executive, handing leadership to founder and executive chair Petersen. Clark and Petersen had been co-chief executives from September 2022, with Clark sole chief executive from March 2023; Clark wrote that the two had discussed Petersen’s desire to return to focusing on growth in the core freight business and that Petersen was “best suited to lead the company in that direction.”⁠[5]

Petersen has since served as Flexport’s chief executive.⁠[6]

Flexport: Official website: https://www.flexport.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/typesfast (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rpetersen (opens in a new window).⁠[6]