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At 11 a.m. in California last Thursday, the day after President Donald Trump declared sweeping new tariffs under what he dubbed \u201cLiberation Day,\u201d Ryan Petersen was live on camera, fielding questions from a virtual room packed with more than 2,300 anxious customers. The founder and CEO of Flexport<\/a>, a now 12-year-old global logistics and customs brokerage firm, had spent the previous night studying the fine print himself, preparing to explain a dizzying new reality for U.S. importers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe broke our livestreaming platform,\u201d Petersen said half-jokingly that night at TechCrunch\u2019s StrictlyVC event<\/a> in San Francisco. \u201cWe need to get a better one.\u201d<\/p>\n In less than 24 hours, the world of global trade was turned upside down. Cumulative tariffs as high as 79% will soon be applied to a range of products from China, including sofas. Direct-to-consumer shipping models, once protected by the under-$800 duty-free de minimis threshold, are now subject to new customs obligations. Meanwhile, U.S. ports are bracing for a proposed rule that could slap ocean carriers with up to $1.5 million per port call if their ships are made in China \u2014 or even if they have one on order.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s horrifying for our customers,\u201d Petersen said at the event. \u201cFor some of these companies, for a lot of our customers, [the spate of changes] will be existential kind of life-and-death decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n Flexport, one of the largest customs brokerages in the U.S., has had no choice but to step up fast. Already this year, Petersen said he has talked in person to 200 customers, many of them relying heavily on Vietnam for production, thinking they\u2019d diversified away from China just in time.<\/p>\n But Petersen said he wasn\u2019t surprised that Vietnam was slapped with a tariff of 46%. \u201cI expected there to be duties pretty much everywhere, and that is what we saw.\u201d<\/p>\n The real surprise, he noted, was the little-noticed announcement that the U.S. would be shutting down the de minimis program for imports globally. The change affects the business models of e-commerce giants like Temu and Shein, as well as the thousands of Shopify-based stores that handle fulfillment from nearby Mexico.<\/p>\n \u201cOver 30% of all the e-commerce brands \u2014 the large ones \u2014 have set up their fulfillment in Mexico,\u201d Petersen explained. \u201cSo that\u2019s all going away, or at least the duty-free aspect of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Petersen \u2014 a believer in so-called founder mode<\/a> who talks with up to 50 employees a day \u2014 didn\u2019t wait to start getting the word out. \u201cI had to go dig in and try to understand this stuff,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cAnd then when we started to feel like I had understanding, I wrote a blog post about de minimis. I had hedge fund guys texting. We were [also] the first to notice that semiconductors were carved out<\/a>. I had one of the biggest investors in Nvidia saying, \u2018Where are you seeing this?\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018It [says it in the new law].\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, what Flexport strove to offer in the immediate aftermath of Trump\u2019s new tariff war wasn\u2019t just logistics guidance, as Petersen explained it. It was steadiness. Flexport employees needed it, certainly. \u201cRule one in a crisis is everybody will rally around the calmest person in the room,\u201d Petersen said. \u201cYou know, you\u2019re the leader of a company. You can\u2019t be freaking out, even if you are inside; your company will freak out.\u201d<\/p>\n Cooler heads are something that Flexport\u2019s customers need right now, too. With tariff tables, customs rules, and shipping costs all in flux, clients have been turning to Flexport to make sense of what feels like complete chaos.<\/p>\n And even more disruption looms. A pending proposal from the U.S. Trade Representative threatens to impose staggering port fees on Chinese-built ships, and even on ships owned by carriers with Chinese-made vessels in their fleet.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re saying they\u2019re gonna put in a fee\u00a0\u2026 if the ship\u2019s made in China, I think it\u2019s a million dollars\u00a0\u2026 a million and a half every time they come to the United States,\u201d Petersen said.<\/p>\n The goal, according to the administration, is to stimulate American shipbuilding. The likely result, in Petersen\u2019s view, is more widespread costs passed along to U.S. importers, and a lot of maritime workers who lose their jobs as ships look to minimize the number of stops they make.<\/p>\n Despite all the havoc, Petersen isn\u2019t ready to call it the end of free trade. \u201cLikely, this is not permanent,\u201d he said. \u201cI did talk to one of the Cabinet members\u00a0\u2026 who told me that Liberation Day will be the start and not the end of the process.\u201d<\/p>\n He said he was encouraged that some countries were responding, even ahead of the Trump administration\u2019s maneuverings. \u201cVietnam and Israel both came to the table and eliminated all duties on American goods this week,\u201d Petersen noted.<\/p>\n That may offer a path forward: quiet negotiations, reciprocal deals, and a reshaped global supply chain. In the meantime, Petersen and his team are answering phones, tweeting up a storm, and breaking webinar platforms to keep the supply chain moving \u2014 and to keep the freakouts at bay.<\/p>\n You can check out that full interview \u2014 Petersen also talks about AI and why he embraced founder mode \u2014\u00a0 below.<\/em><\/p>\n