Looking Ahead - Dave Clark to Join Flexport As Our New CEO

By Ryan Petersen, Flexport

June 8, 2022

I'm thrilled that we can share with you and the world that Dave Clark will be Flexport’s next CEO.

Dave starts on September 1, 2022 to become the CEO of Flexport and a member of our board. We will be co-CEOs for six months after he joins. I'll then step into an Executive Chairman role, and Dave will continue to be Flexport’s CEO.

There is a lot to unpack here.

When a company grows at the speed that we do, it’s important to take a step back to think about how we can capitalize on the opportunities in front of us (remember, we want velocity, not just speed!). Just look at where we are today vs when we first started:

We're already the best way for companies to place orders to their factories and get those goods delivered by air freight, ocean freight, truck or rail to more than 112 countries, in addition to providing a complete suite of tech-enabled global trade services.

We grew our revenue from $2M in 2014 to $3.3B in 2021. Our revenue forecast for this year is close to $5B. That’s ~2500X growth in 8 years! And unlike most venture-backed companies, we're profitable.

We have a great team who work hard day in and day out to build the tech-enabled future of global trade and logistics. You, Flexporters, are the reason why we’re pushing the envelope every day.

So why am I transitioning to Executive Chairman when things are going so well? It’s simple: Every day the scale of the opportunity for Flexport grows bigger. We know that even when we hit $5B in revenue, we’ll still hold less than 1% market share in all of our markets. And we’ve got customers asking us to add more products and services every day.

To realize all this opportunity, Flexport must build the most productive, highest quality operation in global freight forwarding and supply chain management. The art and science of making that happen is called operational excellence and it’s not what I do best.

This is where Dave Clark comes in. He comes to us as CEO of Worldwide Consumer at Amazon, the division that owns the technology and the customer experience for Amazon.com. He joined Amazon in 1999 and during his 23-year tenure at Amazon, he worked his way from their MBA program all the way to CEO of Worldwide Consumer. In the process, he and his teams built much of their legendary fulfillment, logistics, and transportation network. Dave taking over as CEO ensures that Flexport will live up to our potential.

What impressed me about Dave is not just his leadership track record – he’s an entrepreneur at heart. Like me, he grew up in an entrepreneurial household; his family ran a small rug store in Orange Park, Florida. His passion for logistics goes as far back as loading and unloading trucks for that family business. He’ll fit right in here at Flexport – he’s a builder and a supply chain geek like so many of us (and a talented baritone sax and tuba player to boot).

Now, what about me?

The fact there are so many problems left to solve in global trade means that I’m not going anywhere. I love Flexport. I plan to work here the rest of my life. There will never be a better platform for me to work on solving humanity's biggest problems and that’s what I do best: build our long-term strategy, work on crisis response and humanitarian relief operations, and inspire people with the Flexport vision.

Flexport has always been about the long game. I can’t wait to see what we’ll do together next.