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 198 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 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
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.”
Tisch: Tech industry criticism of Amazon ignores core consumer value
“I think that the big companies get punished and shit on by our industry just to sort of feel good. There are total negatives that The big companies are contributing to, but in reality, if you ask a normal consumer, do they love Amazon? Amazon will bring them w…”
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…”
Danny Rimer: Amazon Is Poorly Positioned to Capture Niche Consumer Markets
“As much as Amazon is fantastic on the mainstream, we think that when it comes to niches, Amazon is not particularly well positioned to go after it.”
Offline retailers will prefer Instacart over Amazon as a partner
“Offline retailers need Instacart to work. Amazon is too much of a threat. Instacart is closer to a partner.”
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.”
Kaden: Amazon dominates functional shopping but leaves room for emotional discovery
“My view is that Amazon is dominating, but it's a specific tactical and emotional piece of the commerce puzzle, and it's largely functional. They're the best at logistics. They're the best at assortment. They're the best at speed. They're somewhat the best at v…”
Maveron keeps investments unannounced due to competition from Amazon
“You know, my last three core investments still haven't been announced, largely out of fear of competition, both from Amazon.”
Every Maveron portfolio Series B faces questions about Amazon
“Every single Series B that our portfolio companies raise, the question raised is, what's Amazon going to do?”
Gil: Google, Apple, and Amazon prove public companies stay innovative
“The most innovative companies in technology are actually the big public ones, right? I would argue that Google and Apple and, you know, Amazon are the most innovative companies in the world, and they do that as public companies.”
Elad Gil: Amazon's Low-Margin Playbook Fails for Most Tech Companies
“I think that in Silicon Valley, too many people are stuck on Amazon as the primary model for what will succeed as a company, and Amazon is actually the exception versus the rule. In other words, Amazon is a company that went for very high market share with ver…”
Zappacosta: Marketplaces do not inherently sacrifice NPS on one side
“I think that's bogus. I think that's definitely not true of Amazon. It's definitely not true of Airbnb, and it shouldn't be true of a service marketplace either.”
Zappacosta: Forming a founding team before finding an idea is valid
“So we kind of did what you're not supposed to do, which is decide to start a business and then go hunt for an idea. However, I think that actually gets a very bad rap here in the
And it's a very tried and true method. You know, Amazon did that. Microsoft did t…”
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.”
Davis: Amazon won multi-brand e-commerce; new entrants must build single brands
“My thesis around e-commerce investing was that multi-brand e-commerce had already been won by Amazon, which was true then. It's even truer today. And if you wanted to play in e-commerce, you had to go the branded route.”
Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent exert more market dominance than US giants
“The top three exert An almost disproportionate influence on the market relative to even Amazon or Google in the US.”
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.”
Gautam Gupta: Most large CPG companies lack a real e-commerce strategy
“Most of the large CPG companies Don't really have an e-commerce strategy. Their e-commerce strategy is, yeah, we'll sell some stuff on Amazon. I mean, that's not really a strategy, right?”
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 …”
Low margins and Amazon competition make giant e-commerce exits rare
“A lot of investors don't love e-commerce for a number of reasons. It's, it tends, it can be a low margin business. It tends to have low multiples. Amazon is ever present and can compete with you in many, many categories on price and convenience, so it's pretty…”
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”
Amazon is structurally ineffective for niche product discovery
“Amazon's actually really bad for that, especially for discovering new products, because Amazon services, you know, the best hairbrush, not the best hairbrush for Shetland ponies, right?”
Morton: Amazon has struggled in emotional commerce due to distinct rules
“Amazon being the undisputed heavyweights of commodity commerce, I think haven't made as much headway into emotional commerce as you might expect, because it's a different set of rules.”
Hornik: Big tech giants are slowly morphing into the same company
“I think that if you look at what Amazon is doing, what Google is doing, what Facebook is doing, they all are slowly but surely, and in many ways Apple, they're all slowly but surely morphing into the same company.”
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 …”
Randle: AWS would be worth $1 trillion if spun out of Amazon
“Which is why it's such an unbelievably large business, probably a trillion dollar business if it was spun out of Amazon.”
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.”
Alex Schultz: Tech employees naturally build products for power users
“The general company, in my experience, every company, whether you talk Amazon, whether you talk Google, whether you talk Meta, whether you talk Airbnb, they, as employees, tend to be power users of the product, and they, by nature, optimize for people like the…”
Deeter: Amazon, Google, and AMD chipsets are challenging Nvidia's market dominance
“I do think that we're also getting many more hardware approaches and solutions out there. So that it's not as wonderful as NVIDIA is. It's not just an NVIDIA world anymore. And the chip sets from Amazon and Google and AMD and others are becoming quite capable.”
Garcia: Amazon is an incredibly analogous business to Carvana
“I think we've studied Amazon like forever as just kind of like, it's an incredibly analogous business to our business. There's a lot of like moving things. There's a lot of very similar problems that you face.”
Feldman: AI inference speed will unlock new industries like broadband did
“If you remember Blockbuster, right. First, I mean, let's look at the history of that. You're exactly right. First, we used to drive to Blockbuster to get a DVD, right, or a video. Then Netflix was mailing them to us, right? And then we got broadband. And there…”
Östberg: Amazon stock gains will come solely from business growth, not multiple expansion
“I'm still a big fan of Amazon, but of course the valuation of those companies have gone up a lot. So you cannot count on margin expansion or multiple expansion. Sorry. So, so the growth in those stocks will only be, or the value growth in those stocks would ba…”
Hoffman: Nvidia will remain strong despite tech giants building rival chips
“So both, NVIDIA's business will continue to go very strongly because they have an amazing Lead, currently, in amazing chips, and there is you know, massive demand for their chips for doing compute, and many players, Google, Amazon, others, including AMD, are b…”
Malik: MBAs make sense primarily for entering structured corporate paths
“I think MBAs make a lot of sense for people who are trying to break into a specific industry. Like if you are trying to break into private equity or you want to be a PM at Amazon or go into McKinsey, then MBAs have like your preset path and you just follow you…”
Eiso Kant: NVIDIA, Google, and Amazon Lead AI Hardware Volume
“The reason I mentioned those three specifically is that they are all building extremely large volume of chips. And constantly iterating on faster and better and better generations of chips for training and for inference. They're, for me, the three primary play…”
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.”
Nikesh Arora: Technology adoption rarely yields enterprise transformation like Amazon
“Adopting the internet is one thing. Being able to accelerate your business and use that as a competitive advantage is another thing. Every brick and mortar business by now has adopted the internet. But none of them used it to become Amazon.”
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.”
Eight Sleep uses Amazon's 'disagree and commit' framework for product decisions
“We use the thing that comes from Amazon that is disagree and commit, and I do sometimes in product, right? Not always, but sometimes I decide to disagree, but I raise my hand and I say I disagree and commit, but I'm disagreeing.”
Clark: Public perception of Jeff Bezos as a top-down dictator is wrong
“I think the world tends to think of Jeff as like, you know, it's like Moses coming down from the mountain with the 10 Commandments and is like, Shazam, here is what we shall, and it's not like that.”
Clark: Global supply chains need multi-tenant logistics platforms
“What I saw was the power of multi-tenant, you know, the power of you know, multiple companies being able to benefit from the scale of the total, and the rest of the world needs that, you know, the rest of the world needs that for the environment to pull carbon…”
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.”
Clark: True customer centricity requires sacrificing short-term revenue
“You really only know if you're customer-centric in a very, very hard moment where you're faced with doing something that the customer would like, but it's going to cost you a lot of money that you really, really, really don't want to spend.”
Clark: Rapidly scaling companies need external hires to teach internal teams
“But in fast growth environments, like I was at Amazon and like we're in it flexed work you often have to intersperse more senior external talent because the business, the people who grew up internally, they haven't, don't have exposure to the business you're b…”