Flexport's founder and on-again-off-again CEO Ryan Petersen has only been back in charge a few days, and he is already taking drastic steps to cut costs.
On Friday, Petersen announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the company is rescinding offer letters for incoming employees as part of a months-old hiring freeze. He said he did not know why the hiring freeze was not enforced or why 75 people were signed up to join, as well as the supply chain logistics company's website showing 200 open roles. Some of the new hires has been scheduled to start as soon as Monday.
This just comes a few days after Flexport let go if its previous CEO David Clark, a longtime Amazon exec that had just held the position a year and for a time ran the company as co-CEO with Petersen. Flexport is also letting go of five of Clark's hand-picked lieutenants that he brought from Amazon, according to the Information.
While Clark initially announced his departure on X, he later gave an interview with The Information, giving all the minute details of how he was forced out of the company — an unusual move for corporate executives that typically leave their departures as vague and question-inducing as possible.
“The crux is Ryan wanted to come back,” Clark told the Information. “Ryan felt he was the best person to lead the company forward, and I agreed with him.”
Clark said that his ouster boiled down to declining sales and rising costs at the company's freight logistics business, partly due to macroeconomic factors that turned on the company after a boom in growth during the pandemic.
His relationship with the board, which included Petersen, soured as he was told to make increasingly robust cost cutting plans.
“I left thinking they wanted a change in plan, not a change in leadership,” Clark said.
Now that Petersen is back in charge, the founder is being quite public about the means in which he intends to cut costs.
He even posted on X Friday a public appeal to his followers to sublease the company's "grade A" office space in San Francisco at the former Dropbox headquarters, as well as spaces in LA, New York and Dallas.
San Francisco-based Flexport was founded in 2013 and has since raised $2.49 billion in funding. The company laid off 20% of its employees or around 640 people in January of this year.
