Ben Jared, PGA Tour via Getty Images
Earlier this year, Richard Smith, the president and CEO of airline and international at FedEx, joined PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, Rory McIlroy and NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin in Charlotte, North Carolina, for an evening celebrating the delivery company’s 50th anniversary and the launch of its Founder’s Fund, which benefits entrepreneurial veterans.
During the event, held at the golf-themed nightspot Puttery in which McIlroy is an investor, Smith – the son of company founder Fred Smith – offered a short synopsis of how far FedEx, which he called “a scrappy little company” when it was born in 1973, has come since its creation.
FedEx began, Smith said, with “a few hundred employees, 186 packages on the first night, service to 25 cities in 14 aircraft. Today we move 16 million shipments (daily). We have more than 530,000 team members around the world. We have more than 700 aircraft, service to 2...