The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 65 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hommels: Europe cannot independently launch satellites after Ariane sold capacity
“Yeah, currently we either we get a slot in a SpaceX, yeah, with all the with all the restrictions that there are, or we have Ariane, but Ariane base lastly sold a hundred percent of the defense transport capacity to Amazon. So basically, as Europeans, we are, …”
Jordan: Amazon was the only profitable e-commerce business due to low defensibility
“Early on, I was a big proponent of that e-commerce was going to clean the clock of the department stores. I got the thesis half right. Share did shift. No one could make money other than Amazon because of there's just no defensibility, no barriers to entry.”
Amazon and Walmart lose trillions annually in inventory waste
“If you look into the inventory losses and the wastage costs of the likes of Walmart, or even an Amazon, or like normal supermarket chain, it's in the trillions of how much they're losing on a yearly basis of like food and other items that are actually being so…”
Allbirds Co-Founder: Amazon Profits Off Knockoffs Targeting Allbirds Search Terms
“If you look at how Amazon does, even when you're not selling on their channel, enough people have typed in all birds on amazon.com such that there is a lot of knockoffs and other, perhaps you would call it similar looking products. That are now sold through Am…”
Morin details profit margins across TSMC, Nvidia, and cloud providers
“Nvidia, like a TSMC sells you at 60% margin. Nvidia sells you at, you know, 90% margin. And on top of that, there's Amazon that takes, let's say a 30% margin.”
Kant: Poolside, OpenAI, and Anthropic will rival Big Tech in AI
“What I would like to see and what I think is going to happen is that it's not just Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. It's going to be, you know, an open eye, an anthropic, a poolside, and a set of companies who are able to get that massive escape velocity needed …”
Kant: Google relies on Broadcom for TPUs while Amazon works with fabs
“Because while Google has to work with Broadcom to be able to bring TPUs into the world, Amazon is working with the fabs directly.”
Ian Lee: NFT-Powered Spotify and YouTube Alternatives Will Emerge by 2024
“So good example of this is that I think that like NFT powered commerce in Web three, NFT powered digital media and various kind of social media platforms. That I knew or believed were gonna happen in 10 years or so, I think are now possible in the next two to …”
Liew: Largest e-commerce outcomes are multi-brand retailers competing with Amazon
“The biggest outcomes in the space had been in companies that were multi-brand retailers, and in some sense competing with Amazon and doing so successfully.”
Kaden: USV will not invest in startups competing directly with Amazon
“So the short answer is I don't want to invest In companies that think they're going to take down Amazon right now, because I believe it's extremely difficult, particularly at the stage we're going at.”
Loftus: Big Tech Buyer Softening Has Kept Startup Acquisition Prices Moderate
“So I haven't seen a ton of price increase, but I do think that's because in my view, even though you've seen new entrants into the market, There's been softening at the other end of the market from the Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon end.”
Chad Byers Predicts Facebook or Amazon Will Hit $1 Trillion First
“So I think it's Facebook. You know, my second answer, although this is kind of cheating, would probably be Amazon. So Facebook or Amazon, I don't think it's Apple. I don't think it's Google. I think it's going to be one of those two.”
O'Driscoll: Amazon's $20B Trainium business diverts nearly 10% of Nvidia's revenue
“But all that said, it's still twenty billion of dollars that didn't go to Nvidia that went to Amazon. So it is at the margin meaningful. It's 10% of kind of Nvidia's revenue, a little less than 10%. So it's, and so it's not a mega competitor. It's just an in-h…”
Morin: Apple purchased 100,000 Trainium AI chips from Amazon
“Let's take Amazon, for instance, with Tranium. Apple just came and said, Hey, we're going to buy a 100,000 of them.”
Barnes & Noble Sued Amazon for False Advertising During IPO Roadshow
“When we took Jeff Bezos out on the road, the first thing that happened was that Barnes and Noble sued him for false advertising because Amazon slogan at the time you may remember was earth's largest bookstore. And Barnes and Noble had no sense of humor about t…”
Eight Sleep requires all job candidates to complete homework projects
“Everyone has to do homework. Anyone who joins the company, they have to, we give them a project. They need to work on that at home and they will present to a panel. I don't care if you are the senior executive and you are the CFO of Amazon. If you want to join…”
Doerr: Amazon almost ran out of cash after going public
“That, by the way, was true also of Amazon. Amazon almost ran out of cash after it was public as well.”
Eugene Wei: Amazon adopted six-page memos to curb charismatic PowerPoint presenters
“The reason Amazon moved to the six-page memo process was in part because they felt like PowerPoint and the prevalence of PowerPoint in meetings gave too much power to charismatic speakers.”
In the early 2000s, eBay's media category surpassed Amazon's total GMV
“I think eBay's media category was bigger than Amazon's GMV. So eBay was really in those days like Amazon plus Google.”
Stebbings: 43% of venture dollars go directly to Facebook, Google, and Amazon
“I think it's 43%, according to Clearbank. 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.”
Amazon's Google AdWords spending makes customer acquisition prohibitive for upstart brands
“On frankly, Google AdWords to grow very quickly online, but now Amazon is the number one spender on Google AdWords, and frankly, they're making the cost of customer acquisition almost prohibitive for many of these new upstart brands”
Midha: Kleiner Perkins' highest IRR investment was Juniper Networks, not Google
“When I was actually studying Kleiner Perkins' returns history, when I was at the firm in the year, the nineties and the 2000, I think one of the highest IR investments that Kleiner ended up ever making was not Google. It was not Amazon. It was Juniper networks…”
Destin: PillPack Built Its Pharmacy Software With Just 50 Engineers
“I mean, PillPack is a company that got acquired by Amazon for a billion dollars. Guess how many engineers they have? 45. This is a tiny engineering team that built a pharmacy operating system, which, you know, the incumbents have supposedly spent half a billio…”
US government procurement spending is ten times Amazon's Gross Merchandise Volume
“The U.S. Government spends a trillion dollars a year on stuff. Forget about, like, missiles and submarines. I'm talking about, like, paper and pencils. It's 10 times Amazon's current GMV, just what the U.S. Government spends every year.”
Eurie Kim: Amazon is likely surpassing Macy's in US apparel sales
“They're probably surpassing Macy's now for number of dollars sold for apparel in the U.S.”
Beisel: Amazon will ship 20M to 40M Echo devices in 2017
“Somewhere between 20 to forty million are going to be Shipped in here in 2017.”
Fenton: dotCloud was subscale and unviable due to Amazon competition
“When we were in the business model of dot cloud, that wasn't happening. We were subscale. Amazon was competitive in a way that I think it was clear to some of us that the business was no longer viable.”
Ben Lerer: Legacy retail and media will heavily acquire DTC startups
“The last few weeks in retail, I mean, just look at the jet and dollar shave acquisitions. You're seeing, these are the first dominoes in what will be a bunch of dominoes falling. I believe in consolidation where the traditional guys in retail, the traditional …”
Amazon's Twitch Acquisition Exceeded $1 Billion After Employee Retention Packages
“We ended up selling to Twitch To Amazon for nine or seventy million dollars. Does that annoy you that it's not a billion? I think they specifically did that, but you know, it's after retention, it was over a billion”
Midha: Amazon's Initial Deal With Anthropic Was $4 Billion
“And that's why, you know, it resulted in deep compute and capital for equity partnership with Amazon. That was originally four billion dollars.”
O'Driscoll: All of Amazon's retail gross margin comes from ads
“Amazon ads, which has exploded from, you know, we don't talk about it because it's buried in the bigger business, but all the gross margin now comes from ads. The retail business, It's just an excuse to sell ads that makes all the margin, right? On the retail …”
Feldman: Tech giants achieved chip design success primarily through acquisitions
“Where there's been success, it has frequently been acquired. Apple got into the chip business through buying PA Semi. Amazon got into the chip business through acquiring Annapurna.”
Ohanian: NWSL signed a $60M annual media rights deal
“The, we'll pay the league sixty million dollars a year for four years. And that's a medley of Amazon, CBS, ESPN, and then.”
Amazon's Split-Adjusted $18 IPO Price Equals 7.5 Cents, a 2,200x Return
“By the way, that 18 after all of the stock splits since then is seven and a half cents versus the 170 dollars for Amazon is trading today. So, 2200 times the IPO price.”
Clark: Amazon doubled its worldwide operating footprint in 18 months during COVID
“COVID, I mean, it had to have been, I mean, I think the when I think about that, 20, 20 and 21 of Amazon, we doubled the size basically of the entire operating footprint for Amazon in like 18 months.”
Parker: PillPack achieved ~$200M revenue run rate prior to Amazon acquisition
“One, like, we were now, like, a version of scale, right? Like, a couple hundred million in run rate or something like that.”
TJ Parker: Public pharmacy stocks fell 15% upon Amazon-PillPack acquisition announcement
“All of the companies that traded in pharmacy in the public markets dropped by, like, 15% in, like, three minutes.”
Strange: Amazon issued $1 billion in small business loans in 2019
“Like Amazon has done a billion dollars in S&D loans last year”
Jeff Bezos is investing $2 billion into the early education space
“And you know, by the way, it's also investing around two billion in early education in our space, so that one's easy.”
Danny Rimer: Amazon Spends More on R&D Than Any Tech Company Historically
“I guess they're spending more on R&D than any other company in the history of technology at this point.”
Danny Rimer Maintained Buy Ratings on All 1990s Internet IPOs
“So I co-authored one of the first reports, if not shamefully the first report on the internet, And then was an internet analyst for the first wave of the internet, so from 94 to 99, and I had all buys on all my universe of stocks, so we took Amazon public, and…”
Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon all launched in seemingly small niche markets
“All of those companies look small in the beginning, you know, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, like the lists, you know, even Uber in the beginning, they all looked like they were going after something small in the beginning, Amazon just doing books.”
Brown: Consumer habit of starting product searches on Amazon will not change
“We're definitely seeing a world that's dominated by Amazon. I think that's for sure. We're definitely seeing a consumer funnel of, I start on Amazon for just about every purchase that I make, and I don't think that's going to change.”
Taussig: Amazon burned only $3 million in cash before its 1997 IPO
“When Amazon went public in 1997, up until that time, it had only consumed about three million dollars of cash, and that's about half of what it would have burned without the negative working capital effect.”
Amazon scaled phenomenally as a first-party business without network effects
“Amazon is the prime example of a large company that started off as a first party business, which had no network effects, and they've done phenomenally well as they've scaled it.”
Google and Amazon drone efforts focus primarily on internal package delivery
“Thus far, Google and Amazon have mostly been focused on how do we deliver packages with drones?”
Finkelstein: Early e-commerce forced a choice between million-dollar software and marketplaces
“And at the time in 2004, 2005, there really were two ways to sell a product online. One way was you would pay some agency a million bucks to do some sort of IBM Webster integration or some sort of Magento or, you know, some sort of Hybris integration. These bi…”