Ryan Petersen, the founder and chief executive of the freight forwarding startup Flexport, wanted to understand the situation at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. So he rented a boat last week and took a tour of the ship-and-container logjam snarling up the U.S. supply chain.

On his cruise around San Pedro Bay, Petersen got a firsthand look at the more than 70 hulking container ships idling at anchor, their $64 billion in cargo waiting to be unloaded, and the mountains of steel boxes stacked up on the docks, waiting days on end to get picked up and shipped out. He learned the docks were too crowded to accept returns of empty containers, which meant that truckers couldn't pick up a new full container, since they were stuck with an empty one on their trailer chassis.

The following morning, Petersen tweeted this all out — and his thread became a rare viral sensation about logistics. Big thinkers from the worlds of business, politics and media shared his tweets. Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong shared it with the comment: "Bureaucracy and red tape abounds. We need to let the free market work." Charmaine Yoest, vice president of the Heritage Foundation, asked in the thread: "Where is the leadership he calls for?" Scott Adams, Dilbert cartoonist and right-wing political commentator, added that "this sounds like the only feasible solution to the supply chain bottleneck."

Then Gov. Gavin Newsom called him up.

"He said a bunch of people sent him my tweetstorm — he was getting hit with it left and right — so he felt obligated to get in touch," Petersen said. He walked the governor through the thread, and explained his policy pitch.

He had tweeted five concrete recommendations: end zoning restrictions on how high containers can stack in Long Beach and Los Angeles, call in the National Guard's spare truck chassis, make a temporary 500-acre-or-larger storage yard within 100 miles of the port, force the railroads to run shuttles to this new yard, and call on a fleet of smaller boats to clear containers off the docks.