AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
- Flexport's ex-boss Dave Clark moved his time at the company from "experience" to "education" on LinkedIn.
- Clark joined the company from Amazon in 2022, but last only a year before founder Ryan Petersen returned as boss.
- After Petersen took over from Clark as CEO he immediately rescinded a number of job offers.
Former Flexport CEO Dave Clark has removed the startup from his LinkedIn job history, less than two weeks after his shock resignation.
The former Amazon executive moved his year of working at Flexport from "experience" to "education" on his LinkedIn profile.
It is unclear when Clark made the changes, though it was first reported by The Logistics Report, a newsletter about logistics, on September 14 that Clark had removed Flexport from his LinkedIn resumé.
His time at Flexport now features alongside his undergraduate degree from Auburn University, and an MBA from the University of Tennessee in the education section of his profile.
At the beginning of September, Clark left Flexport in a shock departure, with reports suggesting he was told to resign or be fired by founder Ryan Petersen.
Clark announced his resignation in a statement on X, writing that "founders have the right to change their mind."
"Today, Ryan and I discussed his desire to return to focusing on growth in the core freight business," he said. "In light of that, I feel that he is best suited to lead the company in that direction. As such, I will be resigning from my position at Flexport."
I just shared this internally with the teams @flexport. Wishing the team nothing but success on the journey! pic.twitter.com/mIfhdBb7QG
— Dave Clark (@davehclark) September 6, 2023
Shipping startup Flexport has had a rapid rise over the past few years, and was valued at $8 billion in 2022. Founder and CEO Ryan Petersen hired Clark, the then-worldwide consumer CEO at Amazon, in June 2022 with the aim of expanding the company.
12 months on, that vision has not turned out as planned, with Clark departing at the start of September and a war of words breaking out between the outgoing CEO and the man who hired him.
Two days after Clark resigned, Petersen, who has returned as CEO, wrote his own post on X announcing that Flexport would be rescinding offer letters from new starters whilst the company "gets its house in order."
Flexport is rescinding a bunch of signed offer letters for people who were starting as soon as this Monday. I am deeply sorry to those people who were expecting to join our company and won't be able to at this time. It's messed up. But no way around it, we have had a hiring…
— Ryan Petersen (@typesfast) September 8, 2023
In an apparent dig at Clark, he wrote that Flexport has "had a hiring freeze for months," and that he had "no idea why more than 75 people were signed to join, or why we had over 200 open roles on our website."
Neither Flexport nor Clark immediately replied to requests for comment, sent outside regular US working hours.