Alibaba's Fake Factories
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Ryan Petersen shares a story about discovering fake factories while sourcing products in China through Alibaba.
"I was living in China and I would use Alibaba to find factories. I would show up at the factory and they weren't expecting people to just show up - it'd be a fake factory, just a middleman. One time, I did give them a couple days advance notice, but when I showed up they were very clearly faking it. It was just a bunch of guys in a warehouse with no equipment or anything.
This frustration led me to start Import Genius. Import Genius is like the organic search results, like Google. If it was all AdWords, that's kind of what Alibaba is - people paying for placement. Alibaba.com's original business was B2B searching for factories, but that's not what drives their market cap now - their market cap is driven by Taobao and Alipay and other products."
Ryan Petersen
Founder and CEO at Flexport, Partner at Founders Fund
Ryan Petersen is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Flexport, the platform for global logistics. Since founding Flexport in 2013, Ryan and his team have worked to make global trade so easy, there is more of it. Companies of all sizes--from emerging brands to Fortune 500s--use Flexport technology to move tens of billions of dollars worth of merchandise across 112 countries every year.