He looked at the way FedEx, UPS, and USPS made developers integrate shipping and decided it should take one line of code instead of a week of pain.
Jarrett Streebin: makes shipping boring on purpose.
FILED FROM LEHI, UTAH · EASYPOST HQ
Jarrett Streebin runs EasyPost, the company that quietly sits between online stores and the carriers that move their packages. When a merchant prints a label, verifies an address, buys insurance, or tracks a parcel across more than a hundred carriers, there is a decent chance EasyPost's API is doing the work in the background. The company serves more than 200 countries, employs over 450 people, and has shipped billions of packages. It has been reported at a $1.5 billion valuation.
The pitch that started it was four words: a Stripe for shipping. Before EasyPost, developers who wanted to add postage to an app had to wrestle with the SOAP and XML systems that the big carriers offered - the kind of APIs most engineers would call a nightmare to work with. Streebin's bet was that a single, clean RESTful interface could hide all of that and give any small retailer the kind of shipping muscle people associated with Amazon.
He did not arrive at this from inside the logistics world. He found the problem the way a lot of good founders do: by bumping into it on the weekend and being unable to let it go.
A great idea is wonderful, but activating and scaling it takes a village.- Jarrett Streebin
Before EasyPost, Streebin worked as an analyst - time spent at The 451 Group and a family office, looking at companies from the investor's side of the table. On weekends he built things. One of those weekend builds kept running into the same wall: the carriers' shipping integrations were ancient and miserable. FedEx, UPS, and USPS each had their own labyrinth, and stitching them together was a job nobody wanted.
That irritation became the company. Streebin, originally from Oklahoma and a UC Berkeley graduate, started EasyPost in 2012 with a simple premise - shipping should be a developer feature, not a developer ordeal. By June 2013 the company had raised $850,000 and was doubling transactions every month, with SV Angel, CrunchFund, and Y Combinator backing the early bet.
THE 451 GROUP · FAMILY OFFICE
Streebin worked as a venture analyst, evaluating other people's startups - then went and built one out of a problem he kept hitting on the weekend.
EasyPost applied to Y Combinator for the Winter batch and got an interview. The team felt good about it - they had a strong Show HN, SV Angel money, solid references. They were confident. They did not get in.
Six months later they applied for the Summer 2013 class with a different story to tell. They had gone from signups to a working product with paying customers. This time they got in. Streebin later wrote up the lesson on the company blog: the YC interview is not really an interview at all.
It's not an interview, it's a presentation - you present your case piece by piece and answer questions as they come.- Jarrett Streebin, on the YC interview
Works at The 451 Group and a family office; tinkers with shipping integrations on the weekend and finds the carriers' APIs unbearable.
Founds EasyPost to build the first RESTful API for shipping - a clean interface over a messy industry.
Gets into Y Combinator's Summer batch on the second attempt and raises $850K from YC, SV Angel, and CrunchFund while doubling transactions monthly.
The team lands the premium easypost.com domain and writes up how they pulled it off.
Raises a $25M round as the API quietly becomes plumbing for tens of thousands of businesses.
EasyPost is reported at a $1.5 billion valuation.
450+ employees, 200+ countries, billions of packages - with Streebin still at the helm.
An early riser who exercises and reads the news before work, and guards his sleep enough to go to bed early - unusual discipline for a startup CEO.
Can drop $100+ in a single bookstore run, keeps stacks going, and happily abandons a book that doesn't grab him. Recent reads: Chip War.
Unwinds over golf and backgammon, and counts Killers of the Flower Moon among recent favorites.
Self-aware about a natural pull toward procrastination - and a deliberate habit of tackling the hard task first anyway.
Believes execution and scaling beat lone-genius ideas: the company exists to serve customers and make their businesses run better.
Be bold yet open-minded, stay close to friends despite the calendar, and if you make money, give generously while you can.
There is something fitting about a company whose entire job is to disappear. A shopper clicks buy and never thinks about which carrier moved the box, how the rate was chosen, or whether the address was real. A developer adds shipping in an afternoon instead of a quarter. The whole point of EasyPost is that nobody has to think about it - which is exactly why most people have never heard of the company moving billions of their packages.
Streebin's instinct was to take an ugly, fragmented corner of commerce and make it feel like a single button. That is harder than it sounds, and it is the kind of work that only pays off if you are patient enough to sit in the plumbing for a decade. He has been.
Pitched EasyPost as “a Stripe for shipping” before that analogy became standard startup shorthand.
Originally from Oklahoma; headed west to UC Berkeley.
The company chronicled the saga of buying the premium easypost.com domain in a public blog post.
Plays golf and backgammon - and reads enough to abandon books mid-chapter without guilt.
Got into Y Combinator only after a first rejection, then turned the experience into a how-to guide for other founders.
Guards his sleep and goes to bed early - a quiet rebellion against startup all-nighter culture.