It’s one of those stories that gets trotted out at graduation speeches and business conferences: A young Fred Smith, armed with little more than ambition and a middling grade on a Yale term paper, dared to imagine the impossible and ended up founding a global delivery titan worth over $54 billion.
But here’s what most retellings miss: that “C” grade? It wasn’t the insult you think. In fact, it was par for the course. Smith wasn’t just underestimated by academia he was outright dismissed by investors. Most didn’t even bother listening to his pitch. The few who did likely walked away muttering “impossible.”
And yet, decades later, Smith’s gamble has rewritten the rules of modern commerce.
Betting Big on the Impossible
Fred Smith’s genius wasn’t in dreaming of overnight delivery; many people had that dream. His breakthrough was figuring out how to make it profitable. When the world said it couldn’t be done, Smith didn’t flinch. He just built it.
Investors said no. The market rolled its eyes. But Smith saw a future no one else dared to envision: an interconnected world where documents, packages, and goods could leap across continents in hours, not days.
That clarity of vision became the cornerstone of FedEx a logistics model so revolutionary it left competitors scrambling to catch up.
Meanwhile, Smith’s billions and FedEx’s market cap today are proof not of luck, but of relentless execution and uncommon foresight.
Outpacing Obsolescence
It wasn’t long before technology came gunning for FedEx.
Fax machines. Email. PDFs. Hyperlinks. DocuSign. One innovation after another threatened to make overnight delivery feel as dated as dial-up internet.
Any lesser entrepreneur might’ve cashed out or folded. But Smith? He doubled down.
As Ed Crane, co-founder of the libertarian Cato Institute (on whose board Smith served), once noted, the FedEx founder was “a free thinker to the core.” And Smith knew something others didn’t that technological progress wouldn’t destroy FedEx, it would strengthen it.
“A world increasingly connected by split-second technology,” Crane observed/
“would be a prosperous one.” And prosperous consumers, Smith reasoned, don’t just want things they want them fast.
FedEx’s Evolution: From Documents to Domination
In many ways, documents were just the beta test. As the tech tide rolled in, FedEx pivoted from being a document-delivery business to a high-speed logistics empire.
Books were to Amazon what legal briefs were to FedEx: merely the launchpad.
Ironically, the very forces that threatened to make FedEx irrelevant, instantaneous communication, digital contracts, and virtual meetings, became the engines that made its services indispensable to global trade.
What Trump Could Learn From Smith
Smith’s career is a living rebuttal to anti-trade rhetoric, including that of Donald Trump.
“At least rhetorically, Trump sees interconnectivity as impoverishing. That’s too bad.”
While some frame globalization as a threat, Smith saw it as an open door. The real risk wasn’t in a borderless economy, but in failing to adapt to it.
“The free, rapid movement of people and communications was only existential for Smith and FedEx insofar as he was unwilling to pivot,” the article notes. Smith didn’t flinch from change. He ran toward it and emerged stronger.
FedEx thrived not in spite of globalization, but because of it. “The free trade that Smith venerated didn’t victimize him or, for that matter, any entrepreneur capable of seeing that prosperity born out of open trade frequently creates even better lines for businesses to expand into.”
And therein lies the heart of Smith’s legacy not just surviving creative destruction, but harnessing it.
A Masterclass in Creative Destruction
Smith’s story reads like a textbook on economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction,” the relentless churn by which old models are replaced by new, better ones.
“Stasis is death in business,” Schumpeter argued. Smith lived by that rule.
He didn’t fight disruption; he weaponized it. When tech came to his business, he reimagined it. When the old model started to fade, he built a better one on top of it.
In the end, Smith didn’t just outmaneuver creative destruction, he turned it into a launchpad.
