Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s high-stakes test amid tariff turmoil: ‘You can’t be freaking out’
At 11 a.m. in California last Thursday, the day after President Donald Trump declared sweeping new tariffs under what he dubbed “Liberation Day,” Ryan Petersen was live on camera, fielding questions from a virtual room packed with more than 2,300 anxious customers. The founder and CEO of Flexport, a now 12-year-old global logistics and customs brokerage firm, had spent the previous night studying the fine print himself, preparing to explain a dizzying new reality for U.S. importers.
“We broke our livestreaming platform,” Petersen said half-jokingly that night at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. “We need to get a better one.”
In less than 24 hours, the world of global trade was turned upside down — and it remains. Cumulative tariffs as high as 79% will soon be applied to a range of products from China, including sofas. Direct-to-consumer shipping models, once protected by the under-$800 duty-free de minimis threshold, are now subject to new customs obligations. Meanwhile, U.S. ports are bracing for a proposed rule that could slap ocean carriers with up to $1.5 million per port call if their ships are made in China — or even if they have one on order.
“It’s horrifying for our customers,” Petersen said at the event. “For some of these companies, for a lot of our customers, [the spate of changes] will be existential kind of life-and-death decisions.”
Flexport, one of the largest customs brokerages in the U.S., has had no choice but to step up fast. Petersen had already talked to 200 customers in person earlier in the year, many of them relying heavily on Vietnam for production, thinking they had diversified away from China just in time.
But Petersen said he wasn’t surprised that Vietnam was slapped with a tariff of 46%. “I expected there to be duties pretty much everywhere, and that is what we saw.”
The real surprise, he noted, was the little-noticed announcement that the U.S. would be shutting down the de minimis program for imports globally — not just for China. The change affects the business models of e-commerce giants like Temu and Shein, as well as the thousands of Shopify-based stores that handle fulfillment from nearby Mexico.
“Over 30% of all the e-commerce brands — the large ones — have set up their fulfillment in Mexico,” Petersen explained. “So that’s all going away, or at least the duty-free aspect of it.”
Petersen — a believer in so-called founder mode who talks with up to 50 employees a day — didn’t wait to start getting the word out. “I had to go dig in and try to understand this stuff,” he told the audience. “And then when we started to feel like I had understanding, I wrote a blog post about de minimis. I had hedge fund guys texting. We were [also] the first to notice that semiconductors were carved out. I had one of the biggest investors in Nvidia saying, ‘Where are you seeing this?’ I’m like, ‘It [says it in the new law].’”
Unsurprisingly, what Flexport strove to offer in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s new tariff war wasn’t just logistics guidance, as Petersen explained it. It was steadiness. Flexport employees needed it, certainly. “Rule one in a crisis is everybody will rally around the calmest person in the room,” Petersen said. “You know, you’re the leader of a company. You can’t be freaking out, even if you are inside; your company will freak out.”
Cooler heads are something that Flexport’s customers need right now, too. With tariff tables, customs rules, and shipping costs all in flux, clients have been turning to Flexport to make sense of what feels like complete chaos.
And even more disruption looms. A pending proposal from the U.S. Trade Representative threatens to impose staggering port fees on Chinese-built ships, and even on ships owned by carriers with Chinese-made vessels in their fleet.
“They’re saying they’re gonna put in a fee … if the ship’s made in China, I think it’s a million dollars … a million and a half every time they come to the United States,” Petersen said.
The goal, according to the administration, is to stimulate American shipbuilding. The likely result, in Petersen’s view, is more widespread costs passed along to U.S. importers, and a lot of maritime workers who lose their jobs as ships look to minimize the number of stops they make.
Despite the chaos, Petersen isn’t ready to call it the end of free trade. “Likely, this is not permanent,” he said. “I did talk to one of the Cabinet members … who told me that Liberation Day will be the start and not the end of the process.”
He said he was encouraged that some countries were responding, even ahead of the Trump administration’s maneuverings. “Vietnam and Israel both came to the table and eliminated all duties on American goods this week,” Petersen noted.
That may offer a path forward: quiet negotiations, reciprocal deals, and a reshaped global supply chain. In the meantime, Petersen and his team are on their feet, answering phones, tweeting up a storm, and breaking webinar platforms to keep the supply chain moving and the panic at bay.
You can check out that full interview — Petersen also talks about AI and why he embraced founder mode — below.
