Amazon, every mention
1,450 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Amazon
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 735Ben Gilbert 591Ben Thompson 24Steve Ballmer 10Andrew Marks 10Packy McCormick 7David Senra 6Jason Calacanis 5Daniel Ek 5Sam Bankman-Fried 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Amazon comes up
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 1:25:25 Steve Ballmer It's not like, you know, Amazon was an enterprise company at the time.
- ▶ 1:25:29 Steve Ballmer It was mostly for startups and you know, that that's who was using AWS at the time.
- ▶ 1:33:25 Steve Ballmer Amazon's two-tricker.
- ▶ 1:33:28 Steve Ballmer AWS and, and the store, they're two-tricker.
- ▶ 1:34:25 Steve Ballmer But not uncorrelated, the way that AWS and, and I get the sense, and I think Mac, Mac versus everything iOS is also uncorrelated.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:03:24 Ben Gilbert I mean, it wasn't 1994 like Amazon, but the fact that, yeah, to your point, the medical record thing was being surfaced on the web.
- ▶ 1:59:40 Ben Gilbert There is a Jeff Bezos quote, and I just thought of it, I don't have it in my notes, but it's something about in the long run, there is no difference between what the customer wants and what Amazon wants.
- ▶ 2:56:18 Ben Gilbert Some are on-prem at hospitals, some are in our cloud, some are on AWS, some are on Azure, but either way, there's all this interesting structured patient data that
- ▶ 3:03:53 David Rosenthal It's kind of like the Jeff Bezos quote about AWS in the early days that he wanted to be like an irrational and irresponsible decision not to use AWS.
- ▶ 3:07:57 David Rosenthal Another thought exercise to kind of come at this question is if in some alternate universe, Microsoft or Google or Amazon, or I don't know, maybe even Berkshire Hathaway, maybe Apple, if they could acquire this company,
- ▶ 3:20:03 Ben Gilbert If you compare this to Athena Health, a competitor, that's 10%, or Oracle all up is 23%, or if you look outside this industry, it's actually equivalent to Apple at 36% of their operating expenses of R&D, Amazon's 28%, so 35% is quite…
Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:17:16 Ben Gilbert So you got ESPN, ABC, Disney's deal, Fox's deal, CBS's deal, NBC's deal, Amazon's deal, Google's deal with YouTube, Netflix's deal, Peacock's deal, and the NFL Network.
Rolex (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:57:02 Ben Gilbert There's no Kindles or anything available.
TSMC founder Morris Chang · Acquired
- ▶ 2:30:00 David Rosenthal I mean, the backpacks that I saw on the plane, like, there's a Google backpack, there's an Amazon backpack, there's an Arm backpack, there's a Marvell backpack.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 0:47 Ben Gilbert They make the chips for a whole bunch of other fabless companies like Qualcomm, AMD, Broadcom, and hyperscalers like AWS.
- ▶ 3:18 Ben Gilbert If you're excited at all about Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, or even any of the chips that Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple are making,
- ▶ 47:55 David Rosenthal People used to hammer on Amazon, I guess, for being like a low gross margin business in the, like, 40%, like, you know.
- ▶ 1:17:56 David Rosenthal It's like the AWS for chip companies.
- ▶ 1:35:46 David Rosenthal X-AVI, you're putting CPUs in the cloud, Amazon's buying lots of...
- ▶ 1:49:21 David Rosenthal You think that Google and Amazon are going to be like, now we're good.
- ▶ 1:58:31 David Rosenthal If there were like an AWS moment, which is funny because TSMC is the AWS equivalent, but
- ▶ 2:15:42 David Rosenthal You know, the Jeff Bezos quote about AWS.
- ▶ 2:19:22 Ben Gilbert I probably wouldn't say it is above Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, in terms of pure value creation in the world.
Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 38:11 David Rosenthal They're like the AWS of the chocolate business.
- ▶ 1:01:07 David Rosenthal I mean, I think the right way to think about Hershey at this point in time is like Amazon.
- ▶ 1:01:12 David Rosenthal They are both amazon.com and they are AWS.
- ▶ 1:01:12 David Rosenthal They are both amazon.com and they are AWS.
- ▶ 1:28:29 Ben Gilbert It's like the Amazon leadership principles.
- ▶ 1:35:28 Ben Gilbert It's just a very boring, drop-ceiling, fluorescent-lit, cheap office, and the real estate that it's on is like near an Amazon fulfillment center.
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:19:28 Ben Gilbert I mean, it's the Amazon play, right?
- ▶ 2:47:44 Ben Gilbert Target, Amazon, Wayfair, but then you start to get quickly into, like, more expensive CB-II, Pottery Barn.
- ▶ 2:52:34 Ben Gilbert Maybe Amazon would be the most credible, because they have the scale, if they were to make a real run at it.
- ▶ 2:52:40 Ben Gilbert I assume there's an Amazon basics line of furniture.
- ▶ 2:52:43 David Rosenthal Yep, Amazon definitely has furniture.
- ▶ 2:52:50 David Rosenthal It's funny, I'm thinking through that now, like, yes, Amazon definitely has furniture.
- ▶ 2:52:54 David Rosenthal Amazon is more or less global, more so every day, but there's a supply-side scale economies moat here for Ikea, which is how on earth, if you're Amazon, even if you're just a retailer, you're not designing or sourcing any of this furniture…
- ▶ 3:11:44 David Rosenthal Amazon is an N of one company, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
- ▶ 3:21:15 Ben Gilbert Anyway, if you like this episode, go check out our episodes on Costco, on Walmart, or on Amazon.
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 5:27:29 Ben Gilbert You know, you think AWS, Azure, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.
- ▶ 6:10:52 Ben Gilbert They're a AWS scale technology company, but they don't take outside customers, so they only have to build for their own internal use cases.
- ▶ 6:11:14 Ben Gilbert If you have good communication between the customers or the app team or the backend service and the designers of that data center, this is completely the opposite of Amazon.
- ▶ 6:11:24 Ben Gilbert Amazon uses interface so teams don't have to talk to each other.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 16:53 David Rosenthal Then, and this sort of exponential growth theme, the very next month, in February, 1994, Bill's technical assistant slash shadow, which is a legendary role at Microsoft, now exists at Amazon, too, a man named Steven Sinofsky goes on a…
- ▶ 2:27:41 David Rosenthal They go down the street to Amazon and then Brian ends up leading the entire engineering platform team for amazon.com.
- ▶ 2:27:52 David Rosenthal He went to Amazon.
- ▶ 2:27:53 David Rosenthal He was like a named top senior level executive at Amazon for a long time.
- ▶ 2:35:41 David Rosenthal And he goes and spends two years getting Vista out the door and then goes to Amazon.
- ▶ 2:37:23 Ben Gilbert So back to Pilot, and speaking of Bill, we talk all the time on Acquired about one of his Seattle neighbors, Jeff Bezos, and the AWS-inspired axiom that startups should focus on what makes your beer taste better.
- ▶ 3:21:14 David Rosenthal Yeah, Amazon can go from e-commerce to AWS.
- ▶ 3:21:14 David Rosenthal Yeah, Amazon can go from e-commerce to AWS.
- ▶ 3:21:17 Ben Gilbert Amazon can go anywhere, but for Microsoft, you know, you're selling software licenses.
- ▶ 3:42:27 David Rosenthal He had experience both in the enterprise server and tools products, and Amitabh was also a big part of getting Vista out the door with Brian Valentine before Brian left for Amazon.
- ▶ 3:45:49 unnamed speaker AWS.
- ▶ 3:46:03 Ben Gilbert We are platform as a service, which was distinctly different than AWS, which was we are infrastructure as a service.
- ▶ 3:50:01 David Rosenthal On the other hand, the counterargument to that is, this is actually Microsoft's competitive advantage versus AWS.
- ▶ 3:50:58 David Rosenthal So every consumer service that is not owned by Microsoft or Meta or Google or Amazon runs on one of their clouds.
- ▶ 4:20:16 David Rosenthal Actually, I would say they had some of it in the development of Azure, because they could say to Fortune 500, we will do hybrid cloud with you, and we can be your trusted partner in a way that AWS couldn't.
- ▶ 4:20:30 Ben Gilbert Counterposition against AWS.
- ▶ 4:22:04 Ben Gilbert Yeah, the question is, did they become more trusted by the enterprise, where if you're offered the exact same service from Microsoft and AWS, are you more willing to pay Microsoft for it?
- ▶ 4:37:43 Ben Gilbert The counterfactual is Amazon.
- ▶ 4:37:53 Ben Gilbert Amazon has failed at so many things.
- ▶ 4:38:03 Ben Gilbert People are like, what a beautiful thing that Jeff Bezos has imbued into this company.
- ▶ 4:38:19 David Rosenthal I mean, at this point, I feel like standing here today, we can say Alexa,
- ▶ 4:38:35 Ben Gilbert There's grocery, Amazon Go, local.
- ▶ 4:38:41 David Rosenthal And yet the narrative about Amazon is, ah, what a beautiful thing.
- ▶ 4:38:45 David Rosenthal Jeff imbued in the company.
- ▶ 4:50:01 Ben Gilbert Well, with that, you should check out our previous episode, Microsoft Volume One, if you've already heard that, check out our AWS episode.
Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:13:22 David Rosenthal And that, you know, led to so many things, Amazon Prime among them.
- ▶ 2:03:54 Ben Gilbert Uh, you know, the Amazon has this.
- ▶ 2:08:58 David Rosenthal We talk all the time on Acquired about Jeff Bezos' AWS-inspired axiom that startups should focus on what makes your beer taste better.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 22:02 David Rosenthal There is a local startup coming out of the University of Washington called the Computer Center Corporation, or C-Cubed, and the business plan behind C-Cubed was that they were gonna get a bunch of decks, a bunch of PDP, eights, tens, 11,…
- ▶ 2:24:39 Ben Gilbert Well, back to Pilot, and speaking of incredibly successful Seattle business people, we talk all the time on Acquired about Jeff Bezos' AWS-inspired axiom that startups should focus on what makes their beer taste better, i.e. only spend…
- ▶ 3:39:02 Ben Gilbert And the only thing I can think of that is comparable is Amazon with the growth of the internet, sort of powering their early growth.
Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:00:24 David Rosenthal Like Citadel can say the exact same things, just the same as like Walmart and Amazon can say, we too have large-scale supplier relationships that we leverage to provide low prices to customers, just like Costco.
- ▶ 2:20:02 Ben Gilbert What does it cost to run one Amazon data center?
Hermès (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 26:31 Ben Gilbert This actually reminds me a bit of our episode on Amazon and AWS on how companies can take
- ▶ 26:31 Ben Gilbert This actually reminds me a bit of our episode on Amazon and AWS on how companies can take
- ▶ 2:50:20 David Rosenthal This is AWS.
- ▶ 2:50:24 David Rosenthal They were Amazon, and they added AWS.
- ▶ 2:50:24 David Rosenthal They were Amazon, and they added AWS.
- ▶ 2:50:27 David Rosenthal And they are adding AWS.
- ▶ 2:54:11 David Rosenthal You know, the Amazon comparison is so apt here.
- ▶ 2:54:22 David Rosenthal An Amazon flywheel.
Novo Nordisk (Ozempic) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:22:36 David Rosenthal And like, yes, you can build a big company on top of, or underneath Microsoft or Oracle or Amazon or Salesforce or Google, but they're the ones with the infrastructure.
- ▶ 3:00:55 Ben Gilbert So if, you know, Jeff Bezos decided to put his, what does he have, like, nine percent of Amazon, decided to put that into a foundation and call it charitable suddenly, that would be the most charitable foundation, or, you know, up there.
- ▶ 3:42:42 David Rosenthal Yeah, PillPack, super cool company that got acquired by Amazon a few years back, right, for over a billion dollars?
- ▶ 3:42:48 Ben Gilbert It became Amazon Pharmacy, which I actually know some people that use and rave about it.
Holiday Special 2023 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 33:17 David Rosenthal At this rate, they're going to need to call up Andy Jassy and talk about some of those AWS bills.
- ▶ 1:26:00 David Rosenthal Watch your Amazon deliveries.
- ▶ 1:26:05 Ben Gilbert Three times a day from Amazon right now.
Visa (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:38:48 David Rosenthal And I guess at the absolute very highest levels of scale, you have something like the Amazon and JPMorgan Chase relationship where JPMorgan Chase is the merchant bank and
- ▶ 2:39:01 David Rosenthal JPMorgan Chase is one of the largest issuing banks for cards in the world, and so the Amazon Chase credit card that I have and I do all my shopping on Amazon with and all my shopping at Whole Foods with is able to give me five percent cash…
- ▶ 2:39:17 David Rosenthal So Amazon or JPMorgan, and in this case the two of them working together, represent three of the five parties in this transaction.
- ▶ 2:51:33 David Rosenthal I mean, you hear about AWS going down more frequently than you hear about Visa going down.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang · Acquired
- ▶ 48:42 David Rosenthal Amazon, BMW.
- ▶ 59:32 unnamed speaker Apple, Amazon.
- ▶ 59:34 David Rosenthal Well, I guess with AWS, that's how AWS started.
Doug Demuro on Analyzing the Car Industry, Creator-Led Businesses, and Porsche Follow Up (Raw Video) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:04 Ben Gilbert So listeners, we wanted to do this immediately following the Porsche episode, but like, after a seven hour day, and sitting in a pretty hot garage with, ah, a lot of, like, particulate in the air from all these, ah, Amazon moving blankets…
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 8:40 Ben Gilbert And David, you were telling me it's the largest ever use of Mechanical Turk up to that point was to label the ImageNet dataset?
- ▶ 8:55 David Rosenthal So thousands of people on Mechanical Turk got paid however much two bucks an hour to label these images.