Amazon, every mention
58 scenes (2020), the whole family · ← back to Amazon
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2020 anyone Harry Stebbings 531Rory O'Driscoll 35Jason Lemkin 27Rebecca Kaden 20Chris Degnan 18TJ Parker 17David Cahn 16Jamie Siminoff 13Des Traynor 13Everett Randle 11
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Amazon comes up
20VC: Why the Theory of Pro-Rata is Often False, How Rolling Funds Impact Both Pricing and Competition & The Biggest Lessons from Working with Jack Dorsey with Avlok Kohli, CEO @ AngelList Venture
- ▶ 6:46 Avlok Kohli Amazon, of course, writes their product memos as
20VC: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th
- ▶ 0:33 Harry Stebbings Today, Retool works with some of the biggest companies in the world, from Amazon to Volvo to Mercedes-Benz, and I'd also have to say a huge thank you to Brian at Sequoia and Henrique at Brex for some fantastic questions and suggestions…
20VC: Reid Hoffman on Investing in Airbnb and Passing on Stripe, The Different Styles of Truly Great Leaders, How To Think Through Ownership and Price in Venture & How To Ensure Venture Partnerships Always Have Trust and a Learning Mindset
- ▶ 26:50 Reid Hoffman It's not, you know, and so, you know, same thing is true for LinkedIn, same thing is true for Facebook, same thing is true for, you know, Google, same thing is true for Amazon.
20VC: Accel's Dan Levine on The Current State of Seed & Series A, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, Solo Capitalists and Multi-Stage Funds Entering Seed & Market, People and Product; What To Prioritise?
- ▶ 20:08 Daniel Levine AWS, massively this way, so that is, like, my one core thesis is software. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Sequoia's Roelof Botha on His Biggest Lessons Working Alongside Don Valentine, Mike Moritz and Doug Leone, Leading Sequoia's US Business and What Sequoia Do To Retain Their Edge at the Top & The Crucible Moments That Define Startup Success
- ▶ 34:34 Roelof Botha He's a former executive from Amazon, where he was the CISO, and then he was one of the executives at AWS
- ▶ 34:34 Roelof Botha He's a former executive from Amazon, where he was the CISO, and then he was one of the executives at AWS
20VC: CRV's George Zachary on His Relationship To Money and How it has Changed Over Time, Why The Best Founders Have Often Experienced Parental or Home Instability and The Stories Behind Investing in Unicorns; PillPack, Yammer and Udacity
- ▶ 23:03 George Zachary Now, the biggest question I had was whether he would be capable of beating the incumbents or someone with the biggest distribution, like Amazon. 2 times in the scene
20VC: The 4 Phases of Effective Decision-Making, The No 1 Quality of Good Decisions, How To Approach Effective OKR Setting, & How To Optimise and Improve Your Operating Cadence with Shishir Mehrotra, Founder & CEO @ Coda
- ▶ 11:22 Shishir Mehrotra My view, the number one quality of a good decision is a decision that sticks, and there's a now pretty famous saying from Amazon and Jeff Bezos is about one-way doors and two-way doors that I think is well-used, and so there's clearly a…
- ▶ 15:29 unnamed speaker And the inspiration came from another discussion that was happening at Google was about Amazon. 5 times in the scene
20VC: Lambda School Founder, Austen Allred on How To Assess Your Relationship To Risk and Money, Why San Francisco Is A Case Study For The Greatest Squandering of Wealth in History & Why Complexity Increases Exponentially with Scale
- ▶ 17:26 unnamed speaker Or you can centralize it more, kind of, a la Amazon, and just have everything talk to each other via API.
20VC: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta on His Lessons From The Hyper-Growth of Instacart, The Key Question To Ask When Building or Evaluating Teams & The Importance of Investing In and Detecting Slopes Rather Than Intercepts
- ▶ 31:51 Ravi Gupta We had some board meetings that really weren't terribly fun, Harry, but Michael thought we could do better, and he respected us enough and had enough pride in what we could accomplish to tell us the truth that, look, this business can do… 2 times in the scene
20VC: a16z's Angela Strange on Why Every Company Will Be A Fintech Company, How Founders Should Think About Niches and Optimal Insertion Points, How To Transition To Become The System of Record & Are We Entering A Period of Bundling Or Unbundling for Fint
- ▶ 6:17 Angela Strange Yeah, the best analogy here is Amazon Web Services, and I remember my first time in venture, and this was more than 15 years ago, there were stories of entrepreneurs going to Fry's Electronics, which is a big electronics store in Palo… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:58 Angela Strange All of these companies that were in financial services in a small way are very much expanding, like, like Amazon has done a billion dollars in S&D loans last year, or new companies that are completely entering the space.
20VC: SPACs. What Are They? Why Now? How Do They Change The Venture Landscape? Are They Better Than IPOs & Direct Listings? How Should Founders Think About Them? Kevin Hartz & Troy Steckenrider @ A*
- ▶ 10:49 Kevin Hartz If you look back at Microsoft in the 19 eighties or Amazon in the 19 nineties, one would maybe not recall that they went public at a five hundred million dollar valuation each, something that in just a few years ago would be unheard of.
- ▶ 12:42 Kevin Hartz We'd call this the Amazonification of the SPAC market.
- ▶ 14:56 Kevin Hartz We've all seen, again, this term to Amazonify a market, and this really needs to be really brought in line.
- ▶ 25:35 Kevin Hartz If you look at the Facebooks or the Amazons or others, always far too ahead in valuation.
20VC: MongoDB CEO, Dev Ittycheria on Why Sometimes You Have To Be Inefficient To Be Effective, The 2 Different Types of Decisions and How Great Leaders Respond To Each & Why Value To Overhead Ratio Is The Metric To Use When Selecting Investors
- ▶ 20:05 Harry Stebbings I'm certain to you, you said that about the licensing and I think the biggest shift that I've seen with open source is just every provider really trying to move their clients off their own, you know, AWS or whatever onto managed services.
- ▶ 21:30 Dev Ittycheria And three, we believe that it was important to support the three major cloud providers, not just run on one particular cloud, but we support Amazon, Google, and Azure.
20VC: Why The Unbundling of Fintech Will Continue, How VCs Are Propping Up The Neo-Banking Industry & Why We Need A New Framework To Value Businesses Today with Clay Wilkes, Founder & CEO @ Galileo
- ▶ 9:24 Clay Wilkes Apple, Google, Amazon, they've got massive captive audiences and adding those financial services.
- ▶ 15:38 Clay Wilkes If you look at Amazon, a great consumer business, AWS, incredible infrastructure provider. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:38 Clay Wilkes If you look at Amazon, a great consumer business, AWS, incredible infrastructure provider. 2 times in the scene
20VC: The Future of Subscription Media, Why Startups Need To Stop Blaming Facebook and Google & How Founders Should Think Through Customer Acquisition Channel Dependencies with Alex Mather, Founder & CEO @ The Athletic
- ▶ 23:31 Alex Mather We are the empire as opposed to the rebels, or the Amazon as opposed to the Shopify, right?
20VC: 8VC's Joe Lonsdale on How To Foster Contrarian Thinking Within Venture Partnerships, Why The Best VCs Are Company Builders & Why It Is Not Possible To Build Multi-Billion Dollar Companies and Have Worklife Balance
- ▶ 10:16 Joe Lonsdale We'll start with the idea that Amazon ships things 50 or 60 miles in the U.S. on average when you order it from a random place. 6 times in the scene
20VC: Andrew Wilkinson on Building The Berkshire Hathway of Tech, Sustainable vs Unsustainable Growth and The Relationship Between Money and Freedom
- ▶ 5:28 Andrew Wilkinson And eventually got Apple, Google, Walmart, Facebook, Amazon.
20VC: Elad Gil on Startup Offense and Defence in a Recession, How The Venture Landscape Has Shifted & All Things Valuations, Secondaries and Layoffs
- ▶ 1:34 Harry Stebbings Headspin began in April, 2015, when founders Manish and Breen both had painful first-hand experiences as lead engineers building mobile products at Amazon, Zynga, and Google, and so starting from a blank page, they both created a platform…
- ▶ 19:42 Elad Gil Zappos did it, for example, because they couldn't agree with Sequoia on valuation, and then later they got bought by Amazon.
- ▶ 41:15 Harry Stebbings Headspin began in April, 2015, when founders Manish and Breen both had painful first-hand experiences as lead engineers building mobile products at Amazon, Zynga, and Google.
20VC: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy: Deconstructing Economies of Scale, How To Assess True Market Size, Assessing Risk vs Uncertainty, What "Brand As Power" Really Means with Hamilton Helmer, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Offi
- ▶ 13:00 Harry Stebbings What have been your kind of lessons and observations from seeing the transition from startup without that inherent kind of pricing power of economies of scale to your Amazons of the world with inherent and incredible economies of scale… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:15 Hamilton Helmer So Amazon shopping, you know, but even that's a moving target. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:13 Hamilton Helmer Amazon is primarily scale.
- ▶ 37:38 Harry Stebbings Headspin began in April, 2015, when founders Manish and Breen both had painful first-hand experiences as lead engineers building mobile products at Amazon, Zynga, and Google, and so starting from a blank page, they both created a platform…
20VC: Floodgate's Mike Maples on 3 Key Breakthroughs Startups Experience in Success, The Rise of Angel and Operator Funds, Multi-Stage Funds Re-Entering Seed Investing and The Insight Development Framework
- ▶ 1:40 Harry Stebbings Headspin began in April, 2015, when founders Manish and Breen both had painful first-hand experiences as lead engineers building mobile products at Amazon, Zynga, and Google.
- ▶ 41:31 Harry Stebbings Headspin began in April, 2015, when founders Manish and Breen both had painful first-hand experiences as lead engineers building mobile products at Amazon, Zynga, and Google.
20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research
- ▶ 22:05 unnamed speaker Like, they'll use their Kindle highlights, and then maybe they've got some dedicated software for reading PDFs and for building mind maps of the papers that they're reading, and then using something like Figma for laying out a bunch of…
20VC: Mark Cuban on His Relationship To Wealth and Risk, Why Coming Out of The Pandemic Will Be The Best Time In The History of Mankind To Start A Business & Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Like Old Hollywood
- ▶ 1:48 Harry Stebbings Headspin began in April, 2015, when founders Manish and Breen both had painful first-hand experiences as lead engineers building mobile products at Amazon, Zynga, and Google, and so starting from a blank page, they both created a platform…
- ▶ 11:14 Mark Cuban You know, retail, retail was already struggling and had its back against the wall because of digital sales, you know, the Amazons and the Walmarts, et cetera.
- ▶ 29:28 Harry Stebbings Headspin began in April, 2015, when founders Manish and Breen both had painful first-hand experiences as lead engineers building mobile products at Amazon, Zynga, and Google, and so starting from a blank page, they both created a platform…
20VC: Airtable's Howie Liu on Potential Consolidation In The Collaboration Tools Market, The Transition From Peacetime To Wartime CEO & How To Make The Move To Remote Work Successful; The Process Beyond The Tools
- ▶ 14:55 Howie Liu And I think that the real competition for us is from the bigger companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, kind of recognizing that this is a huge
- ▶ 19:55 Howie Liu I think he does a great job of really tearing down a lot of the contemporary platforms from Apple to Shopify to Microsoft to even companies like Uber, Amazon, et cetera, that are maybe more like partly aggregators, partly platforms.
20VC: Why Venture Fund Life Cycles Do Not Align To Companies Today, Actionable Strategies To Separate Good From Great When Assessing and Hiring Multiple Candidates & Why We Need More Adventure in Venture Capital with Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO @ Boom Sup
- ▶ 0:44 Harry Stebbings Prior to changing the world of commercial flight, Blake started his career with a five-year stint at Amazon as a manager of social networks and automated advertising.
- ▶ 4:59 Harry Stebbings I do have to ask, you mentioned Groupon, you also spent time at Amazon. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:03 Blake Scholl So Jeff hired me at Amazon, coming up on 20 years ago now, straight out of school, when he was running supply chain at Amazon, and I worked for him there, I worked for him at his startup, again at Groupon, and now he's on the board at Boom. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Are VCs Still "Open For Business", How VCs Attitude To Risk Has Changed & The 2 Most Valuable Assets To Founders Today with Fred Destin, Founding Partner @ Stride VC
- ▶ 0:28 Harry Stebbings PillPack, which was acquired by Amazon for a billion dollars, and CarWow.
20VC: The Framework to Scale A Team From 20 to 190 in 24 Months, How To Structure The Perfect Investor Updates & How To Create A Culture of Distributed Ownership with Radical Transparency with Jean-Charles Samulian, Co-Founder & CEO @ Alan
- ▶ 30:55 Jean-Charles Samoulian And in terms of business book, I would say The Everything Store from Bradstone, which is about the story of Amazon, which I find just fascinating, how they dig deeper in everything.
20VC: True Ventures' Toni Schneider on How Being CEO @ Automattic (Wordpress) Made Him A Better Investor, The Biggest Lessons from Automattic on Running Successful Remote Teams and The Right Way For Investors To Show Founders They Have Their Support (Note
- ▶ 24:17 Tony Schneider Ring.com to Amazon, Duo Security to Cisco, and most recently, the Peloton IPO.
20VC: 3 Addictions Of Early-Stage Startup Founders, How Founders Should Strategically Think Through Unit Economics From Day 1 & Why Micromanagement Can Be Beneficial In The Early Days with Adena Hefets, Co-Founder @ Divvy Homes
- ▶ 10:23 unnamed speaker If you look at Amazon during the 2000, they grew by 20 to 30% a year, right? 2 times in the scene
20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
- ▶ 0:24 Harry Stebbings Prior to Twitch's exit to Amazon for a reported nine hundred and seventy million dollars, Emmett raised over
- ▶ 11:54 Emmett Shear So a good example of this might be like Amazon believing that commerce is going to go online in the nineties. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:22 unnamed speaker And then inside of Amazon, famously, the way you pitch for more resources is the narrative six page document. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:53 unnamed speaker And I think there's something about the PR FAQ process, the press release process that makes it really easy to build things, which are software mediated experiences to a thing you really want, whether it's a movie from prime video or it's…
20VC: Alexa Von Tobel on Raising NYC's Largest Ever Female Led Fund , Portfolio Construction, Compression of Fundraising Timelines, Reserves Management & Personal Branding in Venture
- ▶ 31:31 Alexa von Tobel We're here to write a main check into it, take a board seat when the entrepreneur wants that, and help people navigate it, and so I'm obviously incredibly bullish on just the ecosystem of the East Coast over the next 30 years, and I think…
20VC: Moxxie Ventures' Katie Stanton on What It Takes To Raise A First Time Fund As A Solo GP, The Entrance of Multi-Stage Funds Into Seed Rounds and The Inverse Relationship of Those That Fund Diverse Managers and Those That Say They Do
- ▶ 22:03 Harry Stebbings I might have to check that, but I believe 43% of venture dollars goes directly back to Facebook, Google, and Amazon, as a fun fact.
- ▶ 23:29 Harry Stebbings And obviously with the rise of pain, and as we said that with the rise of startup reliance on Google, Facebook, and Amazon, it's a real problem.
20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
- ▶ 28:04 Sumit Gajri Yeah, honestly, the biggest and best companies ever, you know, generational businesses today, the Cisco's, Facebook's, Apple's, Amazon's of the world, they don't rely on those channels very much. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Why Now Is The Hardest Time To Raise an Institutional Pre-Seed in the Last Decade, What To Do When The Founder and VC Interests Do Not Align & The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds with Gaurav Jain, Founder & Managing Partner @ Afore Capital
- ▶ 4:07 Gaurav Jain So I had a chance to work at BlackBerry, Amazon, Morgan Stanley.
- ▶ 11:56 Gaurav Jain I don't know exactly what that label looks like in the future, but if you look at the actual anatomy of the round, I mean, Amazon raised a million dollar round in 94.
- ▶ 12:21 Gaurav Jain So the cost saving that's come from the shift to, you know, AWS, Twilio, et cetera, it's offset by the increase in labor costs, which is why that number has stayed fairly stable, and we expect that to stay stable in the, in the future.