<p class="story-lead">In 2004, Ryan Petersen was a twenty-two-year-old student at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business doing something his professors almost certainly hadn't assigned: importing motorcycles from China and selling them on eBay.</p>
<p>He hadn't set out to learn freight. He had set out to make money. But the two turned out to be inseparable. Every motorcycle that shipped from Guangzhou to Oakland arrived on a river of paperwork — bills of lading, customs declarations, ISF filings, commercial invoices — all of it managed by fax machines, phone calls, and brokers who guarded their knowledge like family secrets. The system was deliberately opaque. That was the business model. Freight forwarders made money in the gap between what they knew and what you didn't.</p>