Freight forwarding and logistics company Flexport is rolling out a suite of new products and features, many of which use AI, in what the company says will be the first in a series of semi-annual announcements of this kind.
If that sounds similar to Airbnb’s approach to seasonal product announcements, that’s because it was the inspiration for Flexport’s new approach.
“Brian Chesky told me to do it,” Flexport founder Ryan Petersen said in an interview, referring to Airbnb’s CEO. “He gave this great talk that Paul Graham wrote an essay about, called ‘Founder Mode,’ I was there that day, and he gave some great advice.”
The next product release will come in “late summer,” according to Flexport.
Petersen told TechCrunch that moving to a twice-a-year “release” cadence offers two big benefits. One, he said, is “there’s nothing like the power of a deadline.” The other is more about marketing.
“We’ve developed a lot of great technology over the years, but it kind of comes out incrementally. There’s not a lot of fanfare, and buzz, and opportunity to tell the story in ways that customers can see what you’ve done, what you’ve built,” Petersen told TechCrunch.
Flexport says it is launching more than 20 different products on Monday, many of which it was already using internally, all powered by a combination of AI from OpenAI, Anthropic, and AWS. The big product promotion comes as Petersen completed his first full year back as Flexport’s CEO after firing former Amazon executive Dave Clark in late 2023 in a bid to “get [Flexport’s] house in order.”
Among the new products is Flexport Intelligence, which lets businesses get information about their shipments using natural language prompts. Another, called Control Tower, will give customers “real-time visibility and control over their entire logistics network, even on …