12 ms·

Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company

193 points by chef-steph 3y ago

razzjazztazz 3y ago
[flagged]
scrum-treats 3y ago
Additional information on Dave Clark's impact: "Some Flexport insiders say layoffs and an influx of former Amazon leaders are wrecking morale."[1] '"These people do not have conversations — they make demands," one laid-off employee said. Unsatisfactory answers could be met with harsh feedback, sources said. One laid-off Flexporter said an Amazon veteran told them, "I don't believe a word you're saying," during a presentation they said took months to prepare. Clark was asked at Tuesday's conference whether his Amazon hires meant he wanted to change Flexport's culture. "The only place I've really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn't get out much. And I worked in supply chain so most of the people I know are Amazon people," he said. "Turns out Amazon's pretty good at moving stuff around."' See also, the Dave Clark effect at Amazon: "Amazon generally delivers later than competitors. That can be terrifying for some of its drivers"[2]. [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/flexport-layoffs-amazon-leaders-change-culture-dave-clark-2023-3?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/flexport-layoffs-amazon-lead... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/tech/amazon-delivery-night/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/tech/amazon-delivery-night/in...
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  “The only place I've really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn't get out much.” Hard pass.
  - TX81Z 3y ago
    So many people in leadership at top companies just won the start-up lottery as a junior employee and had the internal drive to get promo at all costs to gradually get to the top. As soon as they leave the bubble it’s clear how few real skills they possess. Likewise, the degree to which Director+ jobs just hire based on current title at a competitor alone is bonkers. I’ve worked under people who are utterly clueless but managed to make VP at the place up the street. So they just get to be a VP at the next place.
    - wombat-man 3y ago
      Sounds rad as hell if you're a VP
    - mkii 3y ago
      This is indeed all too common but sadly not unbelievable. Most mid-to-higher manager roles are not to be effective with a mission necessarily (which would require "real skills"), but instead to hold responsibility over a particular function. If the proverbial storm hits the fan, these Directors/VPs can migrate to another company, bringing all their previous cronies with a nice title/pay bump.
    - tyingq 3y ago
      The key milestones for VP often are - Luck landed them in a leadership spot on a project that was already successful or headed that way - They didn't do anything to abruptly change that course - They are skilled at managing up with the right words, phrases, actions Then, they move up in the chain they are already in, where everything is very familiar. Goes well enough until they move outside that bubble.
    - throwboatyface 3y ago
      Yup. If you got your foot in the door at the right place and people in leadership liked you, you're on the track to be a director in 6-8 years. Usually the people who promoted you were themselves early employees with no experience being executives, who just peter-principled into senior director/VP roles. I've watched these failsons get promoted to senior director/VP, leave before they were ever accountable for their bad decisions, and then bring all their cronies over to the new place at the same levels.
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        If I could go back to the 70s and re-do my character creation, I'd put all my skill points into Charisma and would have been a CEO by now. Why bother with Comp Eng and business degrees if I could have instead just "be liked".
    - jahewson 3y ago
- WisNorCan 3y ago
  This is the scariest part of the whole article “during a presentation they said took months to prepare.” This sounds like what I would expect in the federal government or IBM. Not a fast growing startup changing the world. I hope Ryan can change this part of the culture or they are dead.
  - mhb 3y ago
    Didn't Ryan hire him?
    - WisNorCan 3y ago
      Steve Jobs hired John Sculley III. And then came back to rebuild the company.
  - jerglingu 3y ago
    Lines up with the sentiment about Flexport being a tech retirement home
    - psunavy03 3y ago
      Pretty provincial attitude probably propagated by some overpaid MAANG bro who doesn't realize that there's an entire industry of tech folks out there who aren't making $300K/yr TC. So if you are making that . . . a little humility is in order.
      - jerglingu 3y ago
        I indeed was a former “MAANG bro”, but this is sentiment gleaned from both a cohort of former coworkers who had stints there, along with general Flexporter attitude on Blind (which, for its imperfections and distortions, gives pretty good signal on company morale and culture).
        psunavy03 3y ago
        I'm saying for what you call a "retirement colony," there are dozens of businesses in which the vast majority of the tech industry actually work. Blind is where spoiled rich people complain about being rich in the wrong way.
- pknomad 3y ago
  I've experienced something similar at Peloton where a C-level kept bringing former reports at Uber for key roles and started to push out the existing employees. It's business at the end of the day but I do think there's a graceful way of bringing people in from former companies.
  - dave78 3y ago
    Same thing at my company, only it was a former Microsoft employee who brought along all his buddies. They screwed up a bunch of stuff because they didn't understand our market or customers, and then all slowly got let go before having to contend with the full consequences of their bad decisions. We're now in a multi year recovery process.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      You don't happen to work at Nokia do you? ;)
    - tsunamifury 3y ago
      This hits so hard and so painfully. Had a VP from Amazon come into google Cloud and he seemed to have no clue about the ladder or discipline he was executive over. We had to explain his job to him several times. He was an absolute incompetent in every sense of the word and fired high quality workers the entire time until he himself was fired.
    - tortue0 3y ago
      Felt this too with MSFT folks. I never want to hear "rhythm of the business" again.
    - fuzztester 3y ago
      This practice of bringing in former reports or buddies is very common in the industry, both in startups and established companies. You just have to look at the About us / Management/ Leadership page on the company web site and correlate a few names, current positions and positions in former companies, to get it.
- gausswho 3y ago
  I don't like to look askance at alumni of particular employers, but I have had one too many a poor experience from ex-Amazon hired into leadership roles. The above matches my experience. For me, the worst casualty as various lackeys followed arrival (also ex-Amazon) was the choking out of candidness. Second worst was turning the company into a document factory.
  - mrbonner 3y ago
    You have me at “document factory “. Writing a doc is good to convey your intentions. Revising a doc for the fucking 20 times because of unsettled sentences, paragraphs are a waste of time.
  - pottertheotter 3y ago
    Can you elaborate on the document factory part?
    - chef-steph 3y ago
      Not OP, but have worked in a similar situation run by ex-Amazon leadership. Project leaders focus mainly on writing docs on their "ideas". These docs are then spread around to other project and org leaders. Most of their time is spent reading or commenting on these and planning meetings for feedback. Typically the last people to read these documents are engineers who then have to make sense of and build whatever was laid out in the documents. Many times after all this is done the project is then shelved or engineering shuts it down so it was a waste of time. Project managers can then point to these documents as promotion material and take credit for "leadership". Obviously I'm being a bit harsh here and that in no way represents the average - but it is something I've seen too often.
    - wilsynet 3y ago
      Both Amazon and Google have document writing cultures. If you want to propose an idea, you write a doc about it. The value of a doc writing culture is that writing things down encourages rigor and thoughtfulness. Docs can be widely distributed, and you can read it, think about it, and add comments. Exchanging ideas can be asynchronous rather than meeting oriented. But also it can all get a bit carried away (because these artifacts become an important component to promotion). I work at Google, which is a doc culture. But I worked most of my career at startups where we never wrote anything down. Overall, I prefer doc cultures. But yes, left to it’s own devices it can seem like you are working at a doc factory.
chef-steph 3y ago
This quote from Dave Clark definitely stands out - "Founders have a right to change their mind". Interesting that he's leaving I would have thought his expertise would still be immensely useful.
- mikeryan 3y ago
  I appreciate the candor there. I also appreciate a founder “changing his mind” The old maxim of “Hire slow, fire quickly” rarely hits the C-suite it seems. It’s almost refreshing seeing it. Of course he probably has a massive parachute to cushion his landing that the rank and file usually do not.
thenipper 3y ago
I have friends that have gone Shopify->Deliverr->Flexport. It’s been a real roller coaster for them. Hopefully it settles down a bit.
- nickff 3y ago
  >"It’s been a real roller coaster for them. Hopefully it settles down a bit." I don't quite understand what you mean; were they forced to switch each time, was each company 'poaching' from the prior one, did a whole team get up and move twice, or did they get laid off twice?
  - thenipper 3y ago
    Forced to switch. When Shopify acquired deliverr they were forced into deliverr’s org. When deliverr was sold to Flexport they had to go with it.
    - tough 3y ago
      Sounds like a funny movie Acquisitionstrucked
iLoveOncall 3y ago
"resigns" Even in the letter he shared himself he said the founder didn't see eye to eye with him, he 100% got fired. This is also the typical process at Amazon when directors and about are fired, they all "choose to leave to refocus on family".
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  At this level and in this industry there is really no difference unless you’re basically retiring
- robbiet480 3y ago
  > Clark has hired political consultants to advise him on a potential 2026 run for governor of Texas, where he resides, according to people familiar with the matter. Greg Abbott, a Texas Republican, is currently serving a third term as governor. https://www.wsj.com/articles/dave-clark-resigns-as-flexport-ceo-b55fe73e https://www.wsj.com/articles/dave-clark-resigns-as-flexport-...
  - andrewem 3y ago
    It’s weird that the Wall Street Journal doesn’t say what party he’s considering running as. People who know he hired political consultants would also know who they are and thus if those consultants are Republicans or Democrats.
    - kn0where 3y ago
      If he runs, it’s definitely as an R.
    - HillRat 3y ago
      The article characterizes him as a "moderate Republican," which is an endangered political class in the state. His core constituency is probably your median "social moderate/fiscal conservative/anti-labor" CxO residing in the ultra-moneyed enclave of Highland Park, where he moved to last year. Take his show on the road to any major blue city or the deep-red GOP bastions in the west and he'd quickly discover just how unloved he'd be.
darksaints 3y ago
Good for them. Dave Clark is a stain on humanity. Horrible horrible human.
- jzb 3y ago
  Not saying you’re wrong, but a bit more substance and less vitriol might be illuminating. I can’t recall hearing anything about him good or bad (This comment aside…).
  - darksaints 3y ago
    I could probably write a book on him and everything he did at Amazon that was worth talking about, and I gotta admit, I didn't want to start today, but you're right that he deserves an explanation. Here's a few snippets that can be directly attributed to him: * Amazon's policy of firing people on the spot for talking about unionizing. * Their (former) policy of not operating anywhere where they would end up having to pay taxes * Their policy of dropping prices through the floor as a negotiation tactic to get competitors to fold or get bought out * Their policy of abandoning entire towns once they had already hired and fired everybody once * Their policy of inventory co-mingling, and the deflection of blame to random merchants when they couldn't prove who had sent fakes. * Their policy of always documenting anything that could even be remotely construed as a fireable offense, just in case he ever fired someone on the spot, as he commonly did. Outside of official policies: * The way he enforced a cult of personality, only hiring people who would constantly praise him, and fire people the moment they said anything that questioned his authority. He would even hold petty grudges against people that disagreed with him, using amazon's ridiculous non-competes to harass them after they left the company. * The way he went to managers of pregnant women the moment they started to show, telling them to find any bullshit but legal means to fire them. (I actually overheard him say this, talking about one of my co-workers the moment she left the room). * The way he bought a robotics company without any due diligence or even a product demo, forced adoption of the robots throughout his network, only to find out they had fundamental problems that prevented scaling to amazon's scale. Instead of writing off his shitty investment, he came in and micromanaged out every last person from the original company due to unrealistic and impossible demands. * The way he unintentionally forced operations managers to completely change their operations every time he visited, so they wouldn't get fired for not listening to him, only to have to change it back the moment he left so they could actually be productive enough to not get fired. * The way he would kick people out of elevators when he would get in, because he had to talk about "confidential stuff", and it couldn't wait til he got to his office. (First hand experience here, lol). * BTW, he was never actually good at his job. For the entire time he was in charge of Amazon's retail business, they had progressively worse inventory turns, logistics costs, gross profit margins, returns on advertising, employee retention rates, etc. If you wanna see a hilarious accounting time lapse, you can literally take a zip file full of their public financial statements, skip to the parts about the Amazon retail business, and watch him waste trillions of dollars while constantly shifting blame to anything but himself. In the words of a former US Army Major General (I went through first week training with him), when he quit after just 6 months on the job as a regional director: "Amazon is the most disfunctional organization I have ever seen, and I did my PhD on the Soviet military [1]. Also, that guy is a fucking psychopath." [1] (the subtext of this joke was that the Soviet military was even more disfunctional than the US military, which he was always ranting about, but Amazon easily takes the cake)
terminatornet 3y ago
oh, flexport is hiring!
jakarta 3y ago
hopefully by now companies realize parachuting in ex-AMZN employees is a recipe for disappointment, esp in terms of cost relative to work output
- tyingq 3y ago
  Depends on the intent. I don't know Flexport's situation, so I can't say this is what happened. But, it's pretty common to parachute in outsiders to do the terrible things you want to do (layoffs, big policy changes, etc) that you know will have an adverse effect on morale. Then, once it's done, you boot the outsiders and commiserate with the masses..."yeah, sorry, clearly that was a bad idea".
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    -> And don't roll any of it back.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  I’ve worked for one at Cruise who got “parachuted” like you put it and he was generally well respected as he definitely cleaned up the house there as the company scaled massively - I’d consider working for him again. That is to say it works for some companies but probably not everyone and ymmv depending on who you parachute.
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    Was he from Amazon or from Zoox? Slight difference in expectations depending
    - dilyevsky 3y ago
      That was before zoox was even acquired
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    I guess it depends on whether the company owners want to parachute someone in who has outside expertise/experience and can help out, or just someone who's a fall guy.
RetiredRichard 3y ago
I mean he did his job, Mass layoffs and terrorizing employees, while being the fallguy for a terrible plan to "solve the last mile problem so it's profitable", which Amazon haven't been able to solve
whack 3y ago
I'm sure there's some juicy details behind the curtains, but people are too professional to air it publicly. Here's some fun but baseless theories: 1) Typical big-company guy fails to adapt to startup life. A year ago, Flexport's tech team was 400 people. That's minuscule compared to what Dave's used to at Amazon. He came in, insisted on a bunch of unnecessary hiring, bloated the tech team with deadwood, internal kingdoms and politics, and a "move slow and don't break anything" mentality. Founder got fed up and showed him the door, though presumably they were gracious enough to let him hit his 1-year cliff 2) Almost-CEO-of-Amazon tries to build the next Amazon. Makes a bunch of wildly risky investments into random moonshots, because he doesn't want to settle for a single-digit-billion company. Founder is initially taken in by bigshot's vision. But after 1 year of minimal progress and changing market conditions, founder tells CEO to get back to basics and focus on freight logistics. CEO decides that's not sexy enough for him. Waits for his 1-year cliff, then resigns Exited to hear more wild theories from others.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hitekker 3y ago
  Both your scenarios blame the new CEO instead of the old CEO. I'd wager the old CEO created a huge mess that the new one couldn't clean up.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I vote for the more mundane: 3) Bored mega-millionaire wants a neat hobby to try for a year. His previous Amazon compensation for 2021 was $56 million[1], so it's not like he needs to try anymore, or make money basically ever again. 12 months later he's still bored. Maybe he quit to spend more time bathing in bathtubs full of hundred dollar bills. 1: https://fortune.com/2022/06/08/amazon-former-no-2-dave-clark-co-ceo-flexport/# https://fortune.com/2022/06/08/amazon-former-no-2-dave-clark...
  - infecto 3y ago
    Probably not but who knows. My own experience is usually these type of people keep going for quite a while. It’s how they make it to where they are.
seasighting 3y ago
[flagged]
psunavy03 3y ago
The thing to keep in mind is that they have competitors still eating their lunch while running 40+ year-old COBOL backends which have their IS departments tearing their hair out regularly. It's as if the efficacy of a business isn't completely positively correlated with the coolness of its tech stack. I work for one of their competitors, and I'd kill for their tech stack. But ultimately their business revolves around a bunch of professional logisticians and customs brokers being able to execute reliably and effectively, and all tech can do is enable this. I wonder if they realize this.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  They should have just used all their funding to buy a controlling stake in Maersk instead.
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    Ocean freight is only one piece of the puzzle. A big one, but air is generally more lucrative. Ocean moves lots of mundane everyday predictable crap. Air moves crap that has to be there RIGHT NOW.
- anp 3y ago
  I interviewed with them in 2018 and at least at the time (much much smaller company of course) everyone there was very focused on the tech being an enabler for the logistics people. Their claim at the time was that all of the projects they pitched as possible work were driven by feedback from the front line people. Maybe that wasn’t true then, or maybe it’s changed, or maybe it’s still true but it’s not enough?
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    The problem IMO is scaling the logistics side of the house. No one cares how cool your tech is unless/until you can move shit from Point A to Point B at scale, and handle the same big problems as, an Expeditors, UPS Global Logistics, DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, or DSV Panalpina.
  - 3y ago
ChuckMcM 3y ago
Sounds a bit like the very common story, "We hired this STAR EMPLOYEE from BIGCORP to do BIG things and it was a DISASTER! Help!" I have often thought about this throughout my career, both being in the reporting chain of said star, and once being that star. The fundamental thing is that a persons performance in a role is much less under their own control than even they often expect. So why is that? Especially in management roles? People have a reputation that permeates the organization they lead. It will have plusses and minuses, fans and haters, but generally there is a tremendous amount of context about how they lead and how to interpret their actions. There is also a tremendous amount of history about their choices and how they have dealt with both good and bad outcomes from their choices. Additionally, people who have been in an organization a "long time" (years) and especially if they have "grown up" through that organization, have a really solid network of other folks they can turn to who both know what they can do, and understand what they are asking. When you change jobs there is a "honeymoon" period where what you do, or don't do, can always be ascribed to "they are new here." It is imperative that new leaders use this period to "course correct" to get to a point where they can effectively lead the new organization they are leading. This is the most important thing they need to do in their first 100 days. Even if you are dropped into a complete dumpster fire, understanding how to "wield" your organization is critical if you want to actually address the fires. On at least one occasion I watched a VP Eng parachute into an org and flame out horribly (even though they had the chops to get the job done) because they focused on "getting things back on track" before "getting to know the organization." If you work for someone who is new and "previously experienced" (which is to say they got their experience somewhere else). Helping them learn the ins and outs of the organization will benefit both you and them. You because you won't be subjected to obviously stupid decisions which are only obvious if you know how the organization works, and the "new guy" (assuming they aren't a sociopath) will appreciate your efforts and look favorably on your future inputs.
- vpribish 3y ago
  That’s some hard won wisdom there. Thanks for sharing
awinter-py 3y ago
his failure to rent a canoe and solve a coastal trucking backlog through a viral twitter thread about the height of containers was simply untenable
- olalonde 3y ago
  What are you referring to?
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    probably the time flexport's founder went on a twitter rant about how the port of LA was effectively shut down
PedroBatista 3y ago
Isn't Flexport the company that was on HN's top page pretty much every week for like 2-3 years? Always hiring? Having a general idea of how logistics work ( it's an huge complex and many times insane monster sometimes devourer of men ), something's was "off" with this whole Flexport signaling. Not saying it's a time bomb or a WeWork because I don't have any information about that, but I always had the general feeling to stay away. About the CEO thing, who knows.. CEO's are to blame but we tend to forget founders and "the board" are most of the times the biggest offenders. Their "visions" and key objectives many times lead to an absolute mad-house inside companies and ruined lives.
- squirrel6 3y ago
  Sometimes the board is to blame. You never know.
- ec109685 3y ago
  They're back: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs?next=37238976 https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs?next=37238976
  - jaypinho 3y ago
    Are they though? https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1700092765798048093 https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1700092765798048093
    - ec109685 3y ago
      Can’t trust everything you read on ycombinator’s job board, clearly.
- danjac 3y ago
  "Always hiring" could mean rapid growth: for 2-3 years though that may mean a lot of chaos as you are constantly square-bashing new hires into teams. On the other hand, it could mean high turnover. Looking at their Glassdoor reviews and filtering out their HR-generated fakes, it paints a picture of both scenarios: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Flexport-Reviews-E1011163.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Flexport-Reviews-E1011163....
npalli 3y ago
Looks like he is running for Governor in Texas. https://x.com/davehclark/status/1699574686848352532?s=46&t=BBEvy3cvqJ6LT35SuLG75w https://x.com/davehclark/status/1699574686848352532?s=46&t=B...
- ec109685 3y ago
  Saving face by running for governor, clearly :)
- dralley 3y ago
  As much as I despise the trend of tech execs used to thinking that the're mini-gods who can do anything running for office, Texas can hardly do worse than the current government.
  - Sebguer 3y ago
    Dude was famous in his earlier career for being a giant narc and patrolling the warehouses for people to fire. Not sure he'd be anything but a ghoul given real power.
    - dralley 3y ago
      You're probably right of course. But, I'm not sure that differentiates him from the current batch.
      - Sebguer 3y ago
        Yeah, Abbott is awful. This comment from someone who worked near Clark though suggests that he is not even capable of pretending to not be a complete piece of shit, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37413442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37413442 Still, will be interesting to see two terrible out of touch people tear each other apart in the name of populism.
    - DarkCrusader2 3y ago
      From what I heard during my time there, it wasn't just patrolling, he used to hide in the shadows out of sight waiting for someone to mess up then jump out and fire them right there publicly, which imo is much worse. He used to have nickname of Sniper Dave or something of that sort.
krmboya 3y ago
Some of us have to keep our CVs up to date, but others have it so good that the media maintains their CV in the public for free!
foota 3y ago
I always thought it looked like a really neat company, but looking at glassdoor and seeing employees complain about new people wanting to get paid well turned me off of them.
mtillman 3y ago
The highest valuation for a freight forwarder is 0.96x revenue last I checked. (K&N) Just not a very exciting business from a late stage/public investor standpoint. Lots of ways to make money in the space but not a straightforward path to IPO. https://finbox.com/SWX:KNIN/models/revenue-multiples/ https://finbox.com/SWX:KNIN/models/revenue-multiples/
surfingdino 3y ago
Logistics, freight forwarding, global shipping is as removed from the latest innovation in IT as you can imagine. I worked for a client with a fairly modern stack but we hit major problems when it came to integration with the IT stack of a global shipping incumbent. It's even worse than the banking systems. That world still runs on paper, faxes and REST APIs are generally not used there, because they are too new. XML is all the rage because it lets them stuff Word documents into CDATA. FTP is cool too. It's extremely difficult to make a dent in that world, unless we are talking about dents to the sids of the shipping container ships hitting some rock.
rideontime 3y ago
Happy to see bad things happen to The Sniper :)

193 points by chef-steph 3y ago

[flagged]

Additional information on Dave Clark's impact: "Some Flexport insiders say layoffs and an influx of former Amazon leaders are wrecking morale."[1] '"These people do not have conversations — they make demands," one laid-off employee said. Unsatisfactory answers could be met with harsh feedback, sources said. One laid-off Flexporter said an Amazon veteran told them, "I don't believe a word you're saying," during a presentation they said took months to prepare. Clark was asked at Tuesday's conference whether his Amazon hires meant he wanted to change Flexport's culture. "The only place I've really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn't get out much. And I worked in supply chain so most of the people I know are Amazon people," he said. "Turns out Amazon's pretty good at moving stuff around."' See also, the Dave Clark effect at Amazon: "Amazon generally delivers later than competitors. That can be terrifying for some of its drivers"[2]. [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/flexport-layoffs-amazon-leaders-change-culture-dave-clark-2023-3?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/flexport-layoffs-amazon-lead... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/tech/amazon-delivery-night/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/tech/amazon-delivery-night/in...

throwaway5959 3y ago
“The only place I've really worked in my life is Amazon. And so I didn't get out much.” Hard pass.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  So many people in leadership at top companies just won the start-up lottery as a junior employee and had the internal drive to get promo at all costs to gradually get to the top. As soon as they leave the bubble it’s clear how few real skills they possess. Likewise, the degree to which Director+ jobs just hire based on current title at a competitor alone is bonkers. I’ve worked under people who are utterly clueless but managed to make VP at the place up the street. So they just get to be a VP at the next place.
  - wombat-man 3y ago
    Sounds rad as hell if you're a VP
  - mkii 3y ago
    This is indeed all too common but sadly not unbelievable. Most mid-to-higher manager roles are not to be effective with a mission necessarily (which would require "real skills"), but instead to hold responsibility over a particular function. If the proverbial storm hits the fan, these Directors/VPs can migrate to another company, bringing all their previous cronies with a nice title/pay bump.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    The key milestones for VP often are - Luck landed them in a leadership spot on a project that was already successful or headed that way - They didn't do anything to abruptly change that course - They are skilled at managing up with the right words, phrases, actions Then, they move up in the chain they are already in, where everything is very familiar. Goes well enough until they move outside that bubble.
  - throwboatyface 3y ago
    Yup. If you got your foot in the door at the right place and people in leadership liked you, you're on the track to be a director in 6-8 years. Usually the people who promoted you were themselves early employees with no experience being executives, who just peter-principled into senior director/VP roles. I've watched these failsons get promoted to senior director/VP, leave before they were ever accountable for their bad decisions, and then bring all their cronies over to the new place at the same levels.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      If I could go back to the 70s and re-do my character creation, I'd put all my skill points into Charisma and would have been a CEO by now. Why bother with Comp Eng and business degrees if I could have instead just "be liked".
  - jahewson 3y ago
WisNorCan 3y ago
This is the scariest part of the whole article “during a presentation they said took months to prepare.” This sounds like what I would expect in the federal government or IBM. Not a fast growing startup changing the world. I hope Ryan can change this part of the culture or they are dead.
- mhb 3y ago
  Didn't Ryan hire him?
  - WisNorCan 3y ago
    Steve Jobs hired John Sculley III. And then came back to rebuild the company.
- jerglingu 3y ago
  Lines up with the sentiment about Flexport being a tech retirement home
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    Pretty provincial attitude probably propagated by some overpaid MAANG bro who doesn't realize that there's an entire industry of tech folks out there who aren't making $300K/yr TC. So if you are making that . . . a little humility is in order.
    - jerglingu 3y ago
      I indeed was a former “MAANG bro”, but this is sentiment gleaned from both a cohort of former coworkers who had stints there, along with general Flexporter attitude on Blind (which, for its imperfections and distortions, gives pretty good signal on company morale and culture).
      - psunavy03 3y ago
        I'm saying for what you call a "retirement colony," there are dozens of businesses in which the vast majority of the tech industry actually work. Blind is where spoiled rich people complain about being rich in the wrong way.
pknomad 3y ago
I've experienced something similar at Peloton where a C-level kept bringing former reports at Uber for key roles and started to push out the existing employees. It's business at the end of the day but I do think there's a graceful way of bringing people in from former companies.
- dave78 3y ago
  Same thing at my company, only it was a former Microsoft employee who brought along all his buddies. They screwed up a bunch of stuff because they didn't understand our market or customers, and then all slowly got let go before having to contend with the full consequences of their bad decisions. We're now in a multi year recovery process.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    You don't happen to work at Nokia do you? ;)
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    This hits so hard and so painfully. Had a VP from Amazon come into google Cloud and he seemed to have no clue about the ladder or discipline he was executive over. We had to explain his job to him several times. He was an absolute incompetent in every sense of the word and fired high quality workers the entire time until he himself was fired.
  - tortue0 3y ago
    Felt this too with MSFT folks. I never want to hear "rhythm of the business" again.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    This practice of bringing in former reports or buddies is very common in the industry, both in startups and established companies. You just have to look at the About us / Management/ Leadership page on the company web site and correlate a few names, current positions and positions in former companies, to get it.
gausswho 3y ago
I don't like to look askance at alumni of particular employers, but I have had one too many a poor experience from ex-Amazon hired into leadership roles. The above matches my experience. For me, the worst casualty as various lackeys followed arrival (also ex-Amazon) was the choking out of candidness. Second worst was turning the company into a document factory.
- mrbonner 3y ago
  You have me at “document factory “. Writing a doc is good to convey your intentions. Revising a doc for the fucking 20 times because of unsettled sentences, paragraphs are a waste of time.
- pottertheotter 3y ago
  Can you elaborate on the document factory part?
  - chef-steph 3y ago
    Not OP, but have worked in a similar situation run by ex-Amazon leadership. Project leaders focus mainly on writing docs on their "ideas". These docs are then spread around to other project and org leaders. Most of their time is spent reading or commenting on these and planning meetings for feedback. Typically the last people to read these documents are engineers who then have to make sense of and build whatever was laid out in the documents. Many times after all this is done the project is then shelved or engineering shuts it down so it was a waste of time. Project managers can then point to these documents as promotion material and take credit for "leadership". Obviously I'm being a bit harsh here and that in no way represents the average - but it is something I've seen too often.
  - wilsynet 3y ago
    Both Amazon and Google have document writing cultures. If you want to propose an idea, you write a doc about it. The value of a doc writing culture is that writing things down encourages rigor and thoughtfulness. Docs can be widely distributed, and you can read it, think about it, and add comments. Exchanging ideas can be asynchronous rather than meeting oriented. But also it can all get a bit carried away (because these artifacts become an important component to promotion). I work at Google, which is a doc culture. But I worked most of my career at startups where we never wrote anything down. Overall, I prefer doc cultures. But yes, left to it’s own devices it can seem like you are working at a doc factory.

chef-steph 3y ago

This quote from Dave Clark definitely stands out - "Founders have a right to change their mind". Interesting that he's leaving I would have thought his expertise would still be immensely useful.

mikeryan 3y ago
I appreciate the candor there. I also appreciate a founder “changing his mind” The old maxim of “Hire slow, fire quickly” rarely hits the C-suite it seems. It’s almost refreshing seeing it. Of course he probably has a massive parachute to cushion his landing that the rank and file usually do not.

thenipper 3y ago

I have friends that have gone Shopify->Deliverr->Flexport. It’s been a real roller coaster for them. Hopefully it settles down a bit.

nickff 3y ago
>"It’s been a real roller coaster for them. Hopefully it settles down a bit." I don't quite understand what you mean; were they forced to switch each time, was each company 'poaching' from the prior one, did a whole team get up and move twice, or did they get laid off twice?
- thenipper 3y ago
  Forced to switch. When Shopify acquired deliverr they were forced into deliverr’s org. When deliverr was sold to Flexport they had to go with it.
  - tough 3y ago
    Sounds like a funny movie Acquisitionstrucked

iLoveOncall 3y ago

"resigns" Even in the letter he shared himself he said the founder didn't see eye to eye with him, he 100% got fired. This is also the typical process at Amazon when directors and about are fired, they all "choose to leave to refocus on family".

dilyevsky 3y ago
At this level and in this industry there is really no difference unless you’re basically retiring
robbiet480 3y ago
> Clark has hired political consultants to advise him on a potential 2026 run for governor of Texas, where he resides, according to people familiar with the matter. Greg Abbott, a Texas Republican, is currently serving a third term as governor. https://www.wsj.com/articles/dave-clark-resigns-as-flexport-ceo-b55fe73e https://www.wsj.com/articles/dave-clark-resigns-as-flexport-...
- andrewem 3y ago
  It’s weird that the Wall Street Journal doesn’t say what party he’s considering running as. People who know he hired political consultants would also know who they are and thus if those consultants are Republicans or Democrats.
  - kn0where 3y ago
    If he runs, it’s definitely as an R.
  - HillRat 3y ago
    The article characterizes him as a "moderate Republican," which is an endangered political class in the state. His core constituency is probably your median "social moderate/fiscal conservative/anti-labor" CxO residing in the ultra-moneyed enclave of Highland Park, where he moved to last year. Take his show on the road to any major blue city or the deep-red GOP bastions in the west and he'd quickly discover just how unloved he'd be.

darksaints 3y ago

Good for them. Dave Clark is a stain on humanity. Horrible horrible human.

jzb 3y ago
Not saying you’re wrong, but a bit more substance and less vitriol might be illuminating. I can’t recall hearing anything about him good or bad (This comment aside…).
- darksaints 3y ago
  I could probably write a book on him and everything he did at Amazon that was worth talking about, and I gotta admit, I didn't want to start today, but you're right that he deserves an explanation. Here's a few snippets that can be directly attributed to him: * Amazon's policy of firing people on the spot for talking about unionizing. * Their (former) policy of not operating anywhere where they would end up having to pay taxes * Their policy of dropping prices through the floor as a negotiation tactic to get competitors to fold or get bought out * Their policy of abandoning entire towns once they had already hired and fired everybody once * Their policy of inventory co-mingling, and the deflection of blame to random merchants when they couldn't prove who had sent fakes. * Their policy of always documenting anything that could even be remotely construed as a fireable offense, just in case he ever fired someone on the spot, as he commonly did. Outside of official policies: * The way he enforced a cult of personality, only hiring people who would constantly praise him, and fire people the moment they said anything that questioned his authority. He would even hold petty grudges against people that disagreed with him, using amazon's ridiculous non-competes to harass them after they left the company. * The way he went to managers of pregnant women the moment they started to show, telling them to find any bullshit but legal means to fire them. (I actually overheard him say this, talking about one of my co-workers the moment she left the room). * The way he bought a robotics company without any due diligence or even a product demo, forced adoption of the robots throughout his network, only to find out they had fundamental problems that prevented scaling to amazon's scale. Instead of writing off his shitty investment, he came in and micromanaged out every last person from the original company due to unrealistic and impossible demands. * The way he unintentionally forced operations managers to completely change their operations every time he visited, so they wouldn't get fired for not listening to him, only to have to change it back the moment he left so they could actually be productive enough to not get fired. * The way he would kick people out of elevators when he would get in, because he had to talk about "confidential stuff", and it couldn't wait til he got to his office. (First hand experience here, lol). * BTW, he was never actually good at his job. For the entire time he was in charge of Amazon's retail business, they had progressively worse inventory turns, logistics costs, gross profit margins, returns on advertising, employee retention rates, etc. If you wanna see a hilarious accounting time lapse, you can literally take a zip file full of their public financial statements, skip to the parts about the Amazon retail business, and watch him waste trillions of dollars while constantly shifting blame to anything but himself. In the words of a former US Army Major General (I went through first week training with him), when he quit after just 6 months on the job as a regional director: "Amazon is the most disfunctional organization I have ever seen, and I did my PhD on the Soviet military [1]. Also, that guy is a fucking psychopath." [1] (the subtext of this joke was that the Soviet military was even more disfunctional than the US military, which he was always ranting about, but Amazon easily takes the cake)

terminatornet 3y ago

oh, flexport is hiring!

jakarta 3y ago

hopefully by now companies realize parachuting in ex-AMZN employees is a recipe for disappointment, esp in terms of cost relative to work output

tyingq 3y ago
Depends on the intent. I don't know Flexport's situation, so I can't say this is what happened. But, it's pretty common to parachute in outsiders to do the terrible things you want to do (layoffs, big policy changes, etc) that you know will have an adverse effect on morale. Then, once it's done, you boot the outsiders and commiserate with the masses..."yeah, sorry, clearly that was a bad idea".
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  -> And don't roll any of it back.
dilyevsky 3y ago
I’ve worked for one at Cruise who got “parachuted” like you put it and he was generally well respected as he definitely cleaned up the house there as the company scaled massively - I’d consider working for him again. That is to say it works for some companies but probably not everyone and ymmv depending on who you parachute.
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  Was he from Amazon or from Zoox? Slight difference in expectations depending
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    That was before zoox was even acquired
- midoridensha 3y ago
  I guess it depends on whether the company owners want to parachute someone in who has outside expertise/experience and can help out, or just someone who's a fall guy.

RetiredRichard 3y ago

I mean he did his job, Mass layoffs and terrorizing employees, while being the fallguy for a terrible plan to "solve the last mile problem so it's profitable", which Amazon haven't been able to solve

whack 3y ago

I'm sure there's some juicy details behind the curtains, but people are too professional to air it publicly. Here's some fun but baseless theories: 1) Typical big-company guy fails to adapt to startup life. A year ago, Flexport's tech team was 400 people. That's minuscule compared to what Dave's used to at Amazon. He came in, insisted on a bunch of unnecessary hiring, bloated the tech team with deadwood, internal kingdoms and politics, and a "move slow and don't break anything" mentality. Founder got fed up and showed him the door, though presumably they were gracious enough to let him hit his 1-year cliff 2) Almost-CEO-of-Amazon tries to build the next Amazon. Makes a bunch of wildly risky investments into random moonshots, because he doesn't want to settle for a single-digit-billion company. Founder is initially taken in by bigshot's vision. But after 1 year of minimal progress and changing market conditions, founder tells CEO to get back to basics and focus on freight logistics. CEO decides that's not sexy enough for him. Waits for his 1-year cliff, then resigns Exited to hear more wild theories from others.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hitekker 3y ago
Both your scenarios blame the new CEO instead of the old CEO. I'd wager the old CEO created a huge mess that the new one couldn't clean up.
ryandrake 3y ago
I vote for the more mundane: 3) Bored mega-millionaire wants a neat hobby to try for a year. His previous Amazon compensation for 2021 was $56 million[1], so it's not like he needs to try anymore, or make money basically ever again. 12 months later he's still bored. Maybe he quit to spend more time bathing in bathtubs full of hundred dollar bills. 1: https://fortune.com/2022/06/08/amazon-former-no-2-dave-clark-co-ceo-flexport/# https://fortune.com/2022/06/08/amazon-former-no-2-dave-clark...
- infecto 3y ago
  Probably not but who knows. My own experience is usually these type of people keep going for quite a while. It’s how they make it to where they are.

seasighting 3y ago

[flagged]

psunavy03 3y ago

The thing to keep in mind is that they have competitors still eating their lunch while running 40+ year-old COBOL backends which have their IS departments tearing their hair out regularly. It's as if the efficacy of a business isn't completely positively correlated with the coolness of its tech stack. I work for one of their competitors, and I'd kill for their tech stack. But ultimately their business revolves around a bunch of professional logisticians and customs brokers being able to execute reliably and effectively, and all tech can do is enable this. I wonder if they realize this.

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
They should have just used all their funding to buy a controlling stake in Maersk instead.
- psunavy03 3y ago
  Ocean freight is only one piece of the puzzle. A big one, but air is generally more lucrative. Ocean moves lots of mundane everyday predictable crap. Air moves crap that has to be there RIGHT NOW.
anp 3y ago
I interviewed with them in 2018 and at least at the time (much much smaller company of course) everyone there was very focused on the tech being an enabler for the logistics people. Their claim at the time was that all of the projects they pitched as possible work were driven by feedback from the front line people. Maybe that wasn’t true then, or maybe it’s changed, or maybe it’s still true but it’s not enough?
- psunavy03 3y ago
  The problem IMO is scaling the logistics side of the house. No one cares how cool your tech is unless/until you can move shit from Point A to Point B at scale, and handle the same big problems as, an Expeditors, UPS Global Logistics, DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, or DSV Panalpina.
- 3y ago

ChuckMcM 3y ago

Sounds a bit like the very common story, "We hired this STAR EMPLOYEE from BIGCORP to do BIG things and it was a DISASTER! Help!" I have often thought about this throughout my career, both being in the reporting chain of said star, and once being that star. The fundamental thing is that a persons performance in a role is much less under their own control than even they often expect. So why is that? Especially in management roles? People have a reputation that permeates the organization they lead. It will have plusses and minuses, fans and haters, but generally there is a tremendous amount of context about how they lead and how to interpret their actions. There is also a tremendous amount of history about their choices and how they have dealt with both good and bad outcomes from their choices. Additionally, people who have been in an organization a "long time" (years) and especially if they have "grown up" through that organization, have a really solid network of other folks they can turn to who both know what they can do, and understand what they are asking. When you change jobs there is a "honeymoon" period where what you do, or don't do, can always be ascribed to "they are new here." It is imperative that new leaders use this period to "course correct" to get to a point where they can effectively lead the new organization they are leading. This is the most important thing they need to do in their first 100 days. Even if you are dropped into a complete dumpster fire, understanding how to "wield" your organization is critical if you want to actually address the fires. On at least one occasion I watched a VP Eng parachute into an org and flame out horribly (even though they had the chops to get the job done) because they focused on "getting things back on track" before "getting to know the organization." If you work for someone who is new and "previously experienced" (which is to say they got their experience somewhere else). Helping them learn the ins and outs of the organization will benefit both you and them. You because you won't be subjected to obviously stupid decisions which are only obvious if you know how the organization works, and the "new guy" (assuming they aren't a sociopath) will appreciate your efforts and look favorably on your future inputs.

vpribish 3y ago
That’s some hard won wisdom there. Thanks for sharing

awinter-py 3y ago

his failure to rent a canoe and solve a coastal trucking backlog through a viral twitter thread about the height of containers was simply untenable

olalonde 3y ago
What are you referring to?
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  probably the time flexport's founder went on a twitter rant about how the port of LA was effectively shut down

PedroBatista 3y ago

Isn't Flexport the company that was on HN's top page pretty much every week for like 2-3 years? Always hiring? Having a general idea of how logistics work ( it's an huge complex and many times insane monster sometimes devourer of men ), something's was "off" with this whole Flexport signaling. Not saying it's a time bomb or a WeWork because I don't have any information about that, but I always had the general feeling to stay away. About the CEO thing, who knows.. CEO's are to blame but we tend to forget founders and "the board" are most of the times the biggest offenders. Their "visions" and key objectives many times lead to an absolute mad-house inside companies and ruined lives.

squirrel6 3y ago
Sometimes the board is to blame. You never know.
ec109685 3y ago
They're back: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs?next=37238976 https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs?next=37238976
- jaypinho 3y ago
  Are they though? https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1700092765798048093 https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1700092765798048093
  - ec109685 3y ago
    Can’t trust everything you read on ycombinator’s job board, clearly.
danjac 3y ago
"Always hiring" could mean rapid growth: for 2-3 years though that may mean a lot of chaos as you are constantly square-bashing new hires into teams. On the other hand, it could mean high turnover. Looking at their Glassdoor reviews and filtering out their HR-generated fakes, it paints a picture of both scenarios: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Flexport-Reviews-E1011163.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Flexport-Reviews-E1011163....

npalli 3y ago

Looks like he is running for Governor in Texas. https://x.com/davehclark/status/1699574686848352532?s=46&t=BBEvy3cvqJ6LT35SuLG75w https://x.com/davehclark/status/1699574686848352532?s=46&t=B...

ec109685 3y ago
Saving face by running for governor, clearly :)
dralley 3y ago
As much as I despise the trend of tech execs used to thinking that the're mini-gods who can do anything running for office, Texas can hardly do worse than the current government.
- Sebguer 3y ago
  Dude was famous in his earlier career for being a giant narc and patrolling the warehouses for people to fire. Not sure he'd be anything but a ghoul given real power.
  - dralley 3y ago
    You're probably right of course. But, I'm not sure that differentiates him from the current batch.
    - Sebguer 3y ago
      Yeah, Abbott is awful. This comment from someone who worked near Clark though suggests that he is not even capable of pretending to not be a complete piece of shit, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37413442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37413442 Still, will be interesting to see two terrible out of touch people tear each other apart in the name of populism.
  - DarkCrusader2 3y ago
    From what I heard during my time there, it wasn't just patrolling, he used to hide in the shadows out of sight waiting for someone to mess up then jump out and fire them right there publicly, which imo is much worse. He used to have nickname of Sniper Dave or something of that sort.

krmboya 3y ago

Some of us have to keep our CVs up to date, but others have it so good that the media maintains their CV in the public for free!

foota 3y ago

I always thought it looked like a really neat company, but looking at glassdoor and seeing employees complain about new people wanting to get paid well turned me off of them.

mtillman 3y ago

The highest valuation for a freight forwarder is 0.96x revenue last I checked. (K&N) Just not a very exciting business from a late stage/public investor standpoint. Lots of ways to make money in the space but not a straightforward path to IPO. https://finbox.com/SWX:KNIN/models/revenue-multiples/ https://finbox.com/SWX:KNIN/models/revenue-multiples/

surfingdino 3y ago

Logistics, freight forwarding, global shipping is as removed from the latest innovation in IT as you can imagine. I worked for a client with a fairly modern stack but we hit major problems when it came to integration with the IT stack of a global shipping incumbent. It's even worse than the banking systems. That world still runs on paper, faxes and REST APIs are generally not used there, because they are too new. XML is all the rage because it lets them stuff Word documents into CDATA. FTP is cool too. It's extremely difficult to make a dent in that world, unless we are talking about dents to the sids of the shipping container ships hitting some rock.

rideontime 3y ago

Happy to see bad things happen to The Sniper :)