Having just taken over from former Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO Dave Clark, returning CEO Petersen said via X that Flexport had “had a hiring freeze for months” and that he had “no ideas why more than 75 people were signed to join”.
Petersen added that he was “deeply sorry to those people who were expecting to join our company” and described the situation “as messed up”.
“A Flexport team member will reach out to each of you personally asap to explain the move. I hope you will forgive us someday and even consider coming to work here again once we get our house in order. But now would not be a good time to add more people and expenses to the company,” wrote Petersen, on X.
The returning Flexport CEO then went on to say that 7 different VC funds that have invested in Flexport have offered to help candidates fast track connections with their portfolio companies.
In a separate tweet, Petersen claimed that Flexport had also created a “pretty generous stipend for candidates whose accepted offers we’ve rescinded.”
Regarding the apparent criticism of the move, Petersen had the following to say:
“I’m taking a lot of criticism for making this decision to rescind offers and even more so for it doing it out in the open like this. But this will be one of the easier decisions that I have to make right now to get Flexport back to profitability.”
In between those tweets, Petersen also took took to X to describe Flexport’s new products for e-commerce sellers as “sooo sick”, adding that he was “excited” to show them to the world this week.
Photo: Aero Icarus / Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 (image cropped and edited)