Dave Clark, former Amazon Consumer CEO and current Flexport CEO, responds to Harry Stebbings asking if VCs lost money on last-mile delivery companies.
Assertion Supported
Clark: One-hour delivery lacks a feasible, profitable business model
“There's not a real feasible, like one hour delivery profitable model. Yeah. Despite, you know, all the efforts, you know, all the subsidized, you know, funding processes to the contrary, there's not a lot of great profitable models for that.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Clark: Unscaled last-mile delivery startups will fail, not be acquired
“And the people without scale just won't make it. They'll go away. I don't expect a lot of acquisition, because there's not a lot of value in acquisition for those.”
Opinion
Clark: Amazon culture evaluates people solely on yesterday's performance
“Amazon's a fairly intense place, you know, and it's a you know, Amazon, I think you kind of, you know, it's very, you know, you're as good as what you did yesterday kind of thing. There's not a lot of longitudinal, you know, stickiness in that way.”
Insight
Clark: Hire for the job needed three to five years out
“And I think too many people look for somebody who's going to do what they're told. Like, you know, they want somebody who's going to fill the job of the now. And what I want is somebody who's gonna fill the job that's gonna be the job three years from now, or …”
Opinion
Clark: Jeff Bezos excels at context shifting and focusing on critical 10%
“He is one of the best simplifiers, if not the best simplifiers I've ever met, which is he can context shift incredibly well. You have a meeting, you know, this hour on AWS, the next hour on the consumer business, the next hour on labor, and be perfectly in the…”
Disclosure
Clark: Amazon was late to ultra-fast shipping due to my hesitation
“Like things that we omitted, like I think we were late getting to the ultra fast shipping piece when we were at Amazon. And I think some of that was, you know, a decent amount of that was probably on me”