Freight startup Flexport soars from ‘unsexy’ to $800M valuation

Instead value of a company is the perpetual value of the cash flows to the buyer. The problem is for startups we have very little idea what their cash flows will be in the future. Their revenues could be anywhere, we have no idea what their costs will be (how many sales people do you need, how much R&D, etc.), etc. So because of that valuation becomes a very imprecise art.

Outside of the cash flow approach, another approach for valuing a company is to consider future buyers. Suppose you have a magic bean that returns 50 cents each year in perpetuity. However, the magic bean is called MagicBeanAI and since AI is hot you know you can sell that bean for $50 to someone else. In this case you would be willing to buy it for <$50 regardless of MagicBeanAI's cash flows. This is what happens when markets start to behave irrationally. Eventually people realize they don't have any more suckers to sell to and their MagicBeanAIs value goes to almost nothing. This is essentially a market crashl; google "tulip mania" for more examples.

from the article: Petersen told Forbes he expects revenue of $500 million this year, yet that still makes Flexport an underdog. “There are 25 freight forwarders that each do more than $1 billion in revenue a year,” he said.

Not refuting your point in the least, but that plot line made me cringe for an entirely different reason--it characterized people who use spaces as though they actually pressed the spacebar once for each space instead of letting the editor handle the work.

That said, I think it was a good decision since the majority of the audience (based on my super scientific study where I asked my wife and friend if they knew what was weird about that scene) has no idea how text editors work and it did help to drive home the point.

By the time Amazon becomes a large percentage of global trade, Alibaba will already be in double digits.

And remember who has more shipping data to run algos on. In addition, Alibaba already owns an own 3PL operation, and an "Order a container shipment in 1 minute" from 1688

Where ships have an advantage is in mass, not volume.

We will take aptitude over experience. In particular, a commitment to master the craft. Mastery has many parts to it: understanding the domain area with its parts and participants, understanding what our company can and should offer to the ecosystem, seeking out the best way you can contribute to that offering (and to the customers), studying the elemental parts that factor into decisions to be made. We don't expect you to come in like that, we do expect that you will commit to getting there.

This job I would say is 80% coding and 20% "research". So coding is a major part, but I can take the skill growth velocity over the skill itself.

For example, one way to understand the domain is to take "Supply Chain Management" course from MIT [1]. I am taking it now (first assignment dropped two days ago), not sure yet if it's any good though.

[1] http://scm.mit.edu/micromasters

Our stack is React & Rails, though we don't require any specific experience. All you need is an ability to chew through difficult software problems and an interest in having real-world impact with your code. Contact me via my profile if you're interested, or apply directly at the link below.

https://www.flexport.com/careers/job/221999

If someone tasked me to come up with a replacement word, I might suggest "integralist". As in "holistic approach" -> "integralist approach", etc.

Is it really the same word? holistic comes from Greek ὅλος, whereas whole is a word of Germanic origin.

Of course that doesn't mean they aren't from the same Indo-European root — after all, whole certainly has cognates in many languages with the same meaning, such as Russian целый. But Wiktionary tells me that whole is from Proto-Indo-European ٭kóylos, whereas holistic is from PIE ٭solh₂wós.

In any case, the initial w in whole is an innovation in Early Modern English without etymological justification, so a more logical choice to emphasize the similarity would be to revert to the spelling hole.