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
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 1:02:02 David Rosenthal Like it's a venture capital firm versus like Amazon.
- ▶ 1:02:04 David Rosenthal Everybody cares about Amazon.
- ▶ 1:45:35 David Rosenthal I use a Kindle Oasis that I use for reading fiction at home, but when I travel, I no longer bring the Kindle Oasis, and I use this as a Kindle.
- ▶ 1:45:45 Ben Gilbert I find, like, for, uh, for outdoor stuff, you can't beat the Kindle.
- ▶ 1:45:58 David Rosenthal When going to the beach, I'll still bring the Kindle.
- ▶ 1:46:15 Ben Gilbert As a college graduation gift, my uncle got me the 70 dollar Kindle.
- ▶ 1:46:21 Ben Gilbert And that is still the Kindle that I use and take on vacation.
- ▶ 1:46:43 Ben Gilbert My Kindle is actually worthless in bed, because you need to light it with a.
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 19:31 Ben Thompson So the book publishers, Amazon, Kindle, things along those lines, I was responsible for lifestyle.
- ▶ 19:31 Ben Thompson So the book publishers, Amazon, Kindle, things along those lines, I was responsible for lifestyle.
- ▶ 25:23 Ben Gilbert Shaw when Bezos was there before Amazon.
- ▶ 1:19:07 Ben Thompson I'm still surprised there's not someone that writes about Amazon every day.
- ▶ 1:40:25 Ben Gilbert Okay, last one, Amazon.
- ▶ 1:40:26 Ben Gilbert David and I did seven hours of Amazon.com and then a big AWS episode, and our, I mean, at least my big takeaway was, it is day two, and day two is about becoming a profitable company where the big sell story of tomorrow is realized today,…
- ▶ 1:40:26 Ben Gilbert David and I did seven hours of Amazon.com and then a big AWS episode, and our, I mean, at least my big takeaway was, it is day two, and day two is about becoming a profitable company where the big sell story of tomorrow is realized today,…
- ▶ 1:40:51 Ben Gilbert Is Amazon a day two company?
- ▶ 1:41:36 Ben Thompson I wrote about from day two to one day or something about Amazon when Bezos sort of like reasserted control a few years ago was like, no, we're gonna do one day delivery.
- ▶ 1:41:46 Ben Thompson And there's been too much time spent.
- ▶ 1:41:51 Ben Thompson And no, we need to get back to this.
- ▶ 1:41:52 Ben Thompson And in retrospect, that was the seed of Amazon's kind of disastrous last few years, which was they dramatically over invested in their logistics network.
- ▶ 1:42:02 Ben Thompson Their cost structure got completely out of control.
- ▶ 1:42:04 Ben Thompson They over hired, and it's probably a good example.
- ▶ 1:42:20 Ben Thompson So I agree with you broadly with that bit about Amazon.
- ▶ 1:42:24 David Rosenthal Do you think that applies to AWS too, or is that different?
- ▶ 1:42:28 Ben Thompson Realistically, the challenge for AWS is number one, what's going to happen with the real dry up in startup formation and easy money in that space.
- ▶ 1:42:38 Ben Thompson A lot of which went to Amazon.
- ▶ 1:42:40 Ben Thompson They're sort of the default choice for startups.
- ▶ 1:43:20 Ben Thompson And I think from Amazon,
- ▶ 1:43:23 Ben Thompson Building up the support capabilities and rationalizing their offerings.
- ▶ 1:43:27 Ben Thompson I mean, it's weird because Amazon benefits because they have so many features, right?
- ▶ 1:43:30 Ben Thompson AWS is the Microsoft word of cloud providers in that they have an absolute absurd number of features and the interface is pretty terrible, but every single customer is completely dependent on one of those features.
- ▶ 1:43:47 Ben Thompson And that actually ends up being their modes.
- ▶ 1:43:49 Ben Gilbert We were researching the episode and we were talking to long-time AWS veterans to sort of understand the mental framework to talk about them today, and that became very clear that AWS doesn't deprecate features.
- ▶ 1:44:00 Ben Gilbert Amazon will kill stuff, kill a Fire Phone, kill local delivery for food, they'll kill all kinds of stuff, but in AWS land, if a customer is depending on something, AWS's long-term enterprise value is determined by customers believing that…
- ▶ 1:44:00 Ben Gilbert Amazon will kill stuff, kill a Fire Phone, kill local delivery for food, they'll kill all kinds of stuff, but in AWS land, if a customer is depending on something, AWS's long-term enterprise value is determined by customers believing that…
- ▶ 1:44:16 Ben Gilbert They don't deprecate services, even when those services end up flipping upside down on the unit economics, and they have to, like, maintain a costly service that they never figured out how to optimize.
- ▶ 1:44:26 Ben Thompson Right, and every time a customer does something custom for AWS, it's a lock-in, right?
- ▶ 1:44:57 Ben Thompson Well, Passport's not moving off AWS.
- ▶ 1:45:03 Ben Thompson Amazon has a lot of old Microsoft people in it.
- ▶ 1:45:31 Ben Thompson And Amazon doesn't WS obviously Microsoft is doing that with Azure and the Silicon Valley companies are just very, very bad at that.
- ▶ 1:45:31 Ben Thompson And Amazon doesn't WS obviously Microsoft is doing that with Azure and the Silicon Valley companies are just very, very bad at that.
- ▶ 1:46:21 Ben Thompson They didn't want to work for Amazon.
- ▶ 1:54:49 Ben Gilbert We've got market size unconstrained with the original AWS logo.
Enron · Acquired
- ▶ 3:31:11 Ben Gilbert You can get a market size unconstrained shirt in two different variations with the original AWS logo inspired design.
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 6:23 Ben Gilbert There's no Kindle.
- ▶ 26:07 David Rosenthal Uh, you can buy it on Amazon.
- ▶ 35:26 Ben Gilbert I mean, until Amazon, basically.
- ▶ 2:24:38 David Rosenthal Like we did the AWS episode.
- ▶ 2:24:43 David Rosenthal We talked about on the AWS episode, like snowball and snowmobile and like getting data to and from the cloud.
Benchmark Part II: The Dinner · Acquired
- ▶ 1:12:32 Ben Gilbert That's what it's like whenever you meet with someone who's worked at Amazon for a long time.
- ▶ 1:42:15 Miles Grimshaw Amazon, Microsoft, Shopify, Adobe, Square, like they're all crossover.
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 54:31 Jason Calacanis Like, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren attacking Bezos endlessly, and then Amazon starts paying 22 an hour, gives you benefits, and pays for your college.
- ▶ 54:49 Jason Calacanis And he enacted it inside of Amazon.
- ▶ 54:57 Jason Calacanis You wanted free college and couldn't get it done, he gave it to Amazon employees.
- ▶ 55:15 Jason Calacanis Definitely, it is literally him showing, like, uh, as the Amazon crew showing, like, let the free markets work.
- ▶ 55:22 Jason Calacanis Like, the DoorDash, Uber, Amazon, Starbucks, absolute, um, uh, race and, and battle to just hire entry-level employees and make it delightful for them is what has driven, um,
- ▶ 1:59:41 Ben Gilbert So there's that, but there's also, like, I think Amazon is the best venture firm of all time.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 4:35 Ben Miller So the year Amazon went public in, like, 97, they had 250 employees, and they had sixteen million in revenue the previous year.
- ▶ 8:55 David Rosenthal Here in the 19 nineties, I mean, John Doerr, we've talked about him this season on the Amazon episode.
- ▶ 10:07 David Rosenthal He did Amazon, as we talked about.
- ▶ 12:01 David Rosenthal So that led to plenty of situations like we talked about on the amazon.com episode of he called Tom Alberg's wife.
- ▶ 12:59 David Rosenthal It wasn't like you could just have an idea for a company, spin something up on AWS, put it on the internet, get distribution for free on social.
- ▶ 13:54 David Rosenthal And when your portfolio companies include Netscape and Amazon and Excite, these would be quite valuable deals, both for Excite and for the young startups.
- ▶ 32:25 Ben Gilbert This is the same time Bezos is driving across the country and starting Amazon.
- ▶ 50:55 David Rosenthal Those were the years when Amazon, as we talked about, got done.
- ▶ 51:02 David Rosenthal And like, would benchmark have beaten John Doerr to do Amazon?
- ▶ 1:03:27 Ben Gilbert We probably hit it on Walmart and Amazon.
- ▶ 1:03:50 David Rosenthal Amazon, what Amazon is today.
- ▶ 1:03:52 David Rosenthal He wanted to build amazon.com, uh, the modern amazon.com.
- ▶ 1:04:17 Ben Gilbert Whereas Amazon, they're like, yeah, we'll get it to you, and it might take two weeks.
- ▶ 1:04:21 Ben Gilbert And of course, then they get to Prime, and they get to Prime now, and now they're trying to do one day Prime, and all sorts of things can happen the same day if you're spoiled like me and live in Seattle.
- ▶ 1:04:56 Ben Gilbert Do we have to compete with everything Amazon is doing right away?
- ▶ 1:11:03 David Rosenthal So June of 1997, actually well before June, Pierre Omidyar, who we talked about on the amazon.com episode, had been working a few years prior at a little pen computing company called
- ▶ 1:13:54 David Rosenthal So we're telling all this history because A, it's awesome to tell eBay history, especially having done Amazon earlier this season, but kind of painting the picture here of like, Pierre's this like engineer, this is a side project.
- ▶ 1:15:55 David Rosenthal And we chronicled so much of this on the amazon.com episode, but
- ▶ 1:19:10 David Rosenthal It's like the AWS episode and the like multiple origins of AWS.
- ▶ 1:28:01 David Rosenthal They call up Amazon.
- ▶ 1:28:05 David Rosenthal And we talked about this on the amazon.com episode, but, uh, fortuitously for them and for Benchmark, Amazon was starting to think about competing directly with eBay and launching Amazon auctions.
- ▶ 1:28:23 David Rosenthal One hundred and seventy-five million dollars of Amazon stock.
- ▶ 1:28:25 David Rosenthal So Benchmark gets some Amazon stock.
- ▶ 1:29:02 David Rosenthal Ah, so fun, such a fun sidebar and fun to tell it now from the eBay and benchmark side of things as we, you know, we told it from the Amazon side a little bit ago.
- ▶ 1:33:30 David Rosenthal And right about, what is that, like, one-fiftieth of Amazon's market cap?
- ▶ 1:33:36 Ben Gilbert It's still astonishing to me that in the long run Amazon ended up beating eBay.
- ▶ 1:33:47 Ben Gilbert Customer experience and shareholder value and customers get a much better experience from Amazon holding inventory and Amazon doing all this really hard, low margin thread the needle stuff in order to create this great user experience, but…
- ▶ 1:34:19 David Rosenthal Speaking of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, I think we should talk about our next sponsor of this episode, the one and only Pilot.com.
- ▶ 1:35:27 David Rosenthal The Jeff Bezos mega theme that we talk about all the time that we dove deep in the last episode on AWS of, you know, focus on what makes your beer taste better.
- ▶ 1:38:50 David Rosenthal And there's downstream impacts of that to portfolio companies, to winning deals, but also to then working with portfolio companies, you know, John and Kleiner almost lost the Amazon deal when he tried to hand off the board seat.
- ▶ 2:07:59 David Rosenthal So, you know, we told the story elsewhere, he bid on Wall Street, he then to work for Frank Quattrone in Silicon Valley, did the Amazon IPO with Frank.
- ▶ 2:10:27 David Rosenthal There was no AWS yet.
- ▶ 2:17:30 David Rosenthal But now the interesting, there is this interregnum period, like it wasn't until after AWS that all this became possible, which wasn't until the mid 2000.
- ▶ 2:42:01 David Rosenthal And he also got all of these new folks and Bill got what AWS meant for the industry and Series A investing and the difference between formation stage and seed investing and investing in data and traction.
- ▶ 2:43:12 David Rosenthal That all of a sudden became true at that moment in time, thanks to AWS, thanks to the Facebook platform, and where you could now do these series A's, these still early stage quote unquote investments, where there was no product risk, there…
- ▶ 3:47:21 David Rosenthal I mentioned Ursula Le Guin on the, I think it was on the amazon.com episode, uh, where I'd started the Earthsea
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 0:00 David Rosenthal People, turns out, love the Amazon.com episode.
- ▶ 1:33 David Rosenthal So you're telling me I'm amazon.com in the fourth quarter of 2001, which is actually where we're gonna start our story.
- ▶ 2:41 Ben Gilbert Well, listeners, of course, on our last episode, we talked about Amazon's retail business, and today we are talking about Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing pioneer, and those margin percentages that I just used are the real ones for…
- ▶ 2:41 Ben Gilbert Well, listeners, of course, on our last episode, we talked about Amazon's retail business, and today we are talking about Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing pioneer, and those margin percentages that I just used are the real ones for…
- ▶ 2:57 Ben Gilbert AWS's revenue is only about 15% the size of Amazon's massive retail business, but their profits, or the operating income, to be specific, from AWS
- ▶ 2:57 Ben Gilbert AWS's revenue is only about 15% the size of Amazon's massive retail business, but their profits, or the operating income, to be specific, from AWS
- ▶ 3:13 Ben Gilbert I think it's the case that every year since 2015, when they started breaking out AWS's financials, the total operating income from AWS has actually been bigger than the retail business.