Flexport reviews

3.5

65% would recommend to a friend

(1,184 total reviews)
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Ryan Petersen

80% approve of CEO

54% positive business outlook

Flexport has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 1,184 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Flexport employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Transportation & Logistics industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
5.0
Nov 8, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Extremely helpful and smart collegues, all the excitement and perks of a typical start-up in the bay area with a totally scaleable and sustainable business model, amazing outlook.

Cons

Slightly longer working hours than normal corporate life. But hey, we are a start-up!

1.0
Oct 26, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Dogs are welcome. Cool facility. Young energetic people (mostly).

Cons

Having come from a large forwarder that had "boots on the ground" everywhere makes this a tough environment for me. They sell their system but the system doesn't make ANYTHING happen ---- people do. We shy away from more complex business because we just can't handle it. Don't have the expertise or throughput. If you read the reviews clearly the company has put up a bunch of fake reviews with most of them saying something like "our biggest problem is that we're growing too fast". In my year there, we lost several quality people who were fed up with this facade that Flexport is somehow different. They aren't. They're just a forwarder with a nice looking customer interface. Big whoop.

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Flexport Response
8y
Ryan Petersen here, CEO of Flexport. First off, we never post any fake reviews, that's a lie. But it is sadly true that many people with industry experience have struggled to find success at Flexport. Their failure rate is far too high, and helping people from the traditional industry adapt to life in our culture is an important initiative for employee onboarding. Many of our brightest stars have lots of industry experience, so we know how important it is to help make those folks successful. Global logistics is hard, we need their expertise. Our culture is built around empowerment of cross-functional teams, without a lot of top-down decision making. This can feel very chaotic if you are used to working in an environment where executives give instructions and you are expected merely to execute them. Instead we prefer to show teams a problem and let them come up with their own solution, with the role of management restricted to showing why the problem matters, and helping the teams to get the resources needed to execute their solutions. We've seen that this style of work isn't for everybody, and we have work to do to train people who come from more hierarchical companies how to succeed in our environment. The results speak for themselves though. We've become a top 20 freight forwarder on the Transpacific (one of the two most important trade lanes in the world) in just 3.5 years since our first revenue. We've consistently maintained a net promoter score (NPS) in the mid-60s, with 170% negative net churn (rather than losing revenue from customers over time, we grow revenue in each cohort quarter after quarter after quarter). And perhaps the thing I'm most proud of is that we've had virtually zero undesired employee attrition since founding. We still have a lot of work to do to create an environment that makes every employee we hire successful. We are rolling out new programs about adapting to life in a startup, and working in a culture of empowerment for our 2 week "Flexport Academy" training that we do for new hires. However, even before those programs are fully implemented, I'm confident saying anybody smart, hard-working, and passionate about creating value can succeed here.
5.0
Oct 25, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Great work life balance -- There's plenty of work to do, but I've never felt the urgency of releasing anything because deadlines are understood across all parties and reasonable . - Plenty of growth opportunities -- By taking leadership opportunities, learning how to solve problems that you haven't faced before, or learning more about freight-forwarding. - A lot of autonomy -- There are many places in our product/platform that don't have concrete ownership, so there are opportunities to drive high-impact efforts if you are motivated to do so. - Many interesting technical problems all over the stack in the foreseeable future -- both in the infrastructure of the platform and on the features we build - I enjoy spending time w/ my co-workers. - Leadership is very mindful in regards to the pace of growth of the company -- Ensuring we don't outgrow ourselves, preventing quality of service loss and protecting our work life balance.

Cons

All the downsides I've seen come from growing pains of a company that has seen continuous tremendous people/financial growth. - Tech hasn't grown as quickly as product so we're kind of lagging there. We haven't fine tuned our environment to be as efficient as possible. There are a lot of efforts in improving dev productivity and stability of our product, but there's a whole lot more that needs to be done in that regard. - Young mid-level leadership -- Though we have a more seasoned C-level leadership team, mid-management experience might soon be overshadowed by the size of the team. Technical leadership faced a similar problem, and seems to now be taking more corrective action. As a result, we leaned on quantity over quality of tech work, but we should definitely think about doubling down on the foundations that we're building this product on at this stage of growth.

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Glassdoor has 1,294 Flexport reviews submitted anonymously by Flexport employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Flexport is right for you.