Amazon’s Dave Clark taking top spot at Flexport

That didn’t take very long.

Dave Clark, CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, will join logistics company Flexport as a co-CEO, effective Sept. 1.  The news comes less than a week after Amazon said Clark, a 23-year company veteran and one of the top executives at the retail and tech giant, planned to leave on July 1, to “pursue other opportunities.”

In an announcement on the company’s website, Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen said that he and Clark would be co-CEOs for six months, after which he (Petersen) will transition to the role of executive chairman. He noted that the company, which he founded in 2013,  has grown its revenue from $2 million in 2014 to $3.3 billion in 2020. Its revenue forecast for this year is close to $5 billion.  (Flexport was valued at $8 billion after raising $935 million in a Series E round in February.)

“To realize all this opportunity, Flexport must build the most productive, highest quality operation in global freight forwarding and supply chain management," Petersen said. “The art and science of making that happen is called operational excellence and it’s not what I do best. This is where Dave Clark comes in.”

Clark is widely credited as the architect of Amazon's massive warehouse and fulfillment network. He also was responsible for Amazon’s  impressive transportation network, which now includes in-house planes, trucks and delivery vans.

 “Dave taking over as CEO ensures that Flexport will live up to our potential,” Petersen said.

On his LinkedIn page, Clark said that the U.S. supply chain suffers from a “significant fragmentation of technology and process.”

“Flexport founder, Ryan Petersen, and his team have thrown themselves at this problem by brilliantly tackling the most complicated piece of the supply chain: the global cross-border movement of goods,” he said. “It is an area where few technology companies have dared to tread because of the vast array of regulatory rules, intimidating geographical distances, and siloed network of providers. Flexport has not flinched. They have built a technology platform that solves for this challenging integration of technology and the physical world by connecting the entire ecosystem of global trade.”