Amazon, every mention
100 scenes (2023), the whole family · ← back to Amazon
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2023 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 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.
- ▶ 25:19 David Rosenthal It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure.
- ▶ 1:12:15 David Rosenthal This is AWS.
- ▶ 1:15:30 David Rosenthal That's what they're selling to Amazon and Google and Facebook.
- ▶ 1:22:19 Ben Gilbert I think Azure and AWS were where I looked.
- ▶ 1:22:24 Ben Gilbert That's eight A 100 for about 30 bucks an hour, or you can go over to AWS and get a P five dot 48 X large instance, which is eight H 100, which I believe is an HGX server for about a hundred dollars an hour.
- ▶ 1:23:22 Ben Gilbert Yeah, and of course you could rent these instances from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, but like- You're not getting that full integrated solution.
- ▶ 1:24:00 Ben Gilbert To load some models in from a trusted source that you can easily pair with your data and just click run and not have to worry about any of the complexity of managing a cloud application that's in Amazon or Microsoft or something a little…
- ▶ 1:26:02 David Rosenthal And even more for Nvidia, more important longer term, for enterprises that buy this, Nvidia now has a direct sales relationship with those companies, not necessarily intermediated by sales through Azure or Google or AWS, even though
- ▶ 1:58:44 Ben Gilbert They're the closest direct comp, but it's Amazon building Tranium and Inferentia.
- ▶ 2:10:40 David Rosenthal But obviously Google is not going to be in AWS and Azure and Oracle and all the new cloud providers.
- ▶ 2:21:30 Ben Gilbert So think back to our AWS episode.
- ▶ 2:21:33 Ben Gilbert We talked a lot about how AWS is just locked in.
- ▶ 2:21:52 Ben Gilbert There's this sort of interesting question of will winning cloud one point oh for all these Google, Microsoft, Amazon, will that toehold actually enable them to win in the cloud AI era?
- ▶ 2:23:26 David Rosenthal Yeah, there is a mile of distance, metaphorically, between like an Equinix and a AWS.
- ▶ 2:25:12 Ben Gilbert Amazon's put tens of billions of dollars into devices, which
- ▶ 2:25:17 Ben Gilbert How is Echo paying anything back?
- ▶ 2:25:23 David Rosenthal I have standardized my house on the Echo ecosystem, and it keeps getting dumber.
- ▶ 2:25:27 David Rosenthal How in this world of incredibly accelerating AI capabilities are my Echoes getting dumber?
- ▶ 2:25:34 Ben Gilbert Well, they need to trinium and inferentia a little bit harder.
- ▶ 2:25:47 Ben Gilbert These are ludicrously profitable monopolies, except Amazon's not that profitable.
- ▶ 2:25:51 David Rosenthal AWS is.
- ▶ 2:45:22 Ben Gilbert Let's say you could design GPU chips that are just as good, which arguably AMD, Google, and Amazon are doing.
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 35:39 Ben Gilbert One common thread from all the retail companies that we've talked about, Walmart, Amazon, and now Costco, is their obsession with making decisions based on data, even decades ago.
- ▶ 35:53 Ben Gilbert Remember Amazon's early Oracle database, or that Sam Walton built out a private satellite network to get real-time sales data?
- ▶ 1:24:09 David Rosenthal Otherwise, they would just go shop at Amazon or Walmart or wherever.
- ▶ 1:29:11 David Rosenthal At the time, this is 2001, Amazon stock was in the dumps.
- ▶ 1:29:18 David Rosenthal Jeff and the organization were embarking on a campaign of raising prices on amazon.com to get profitable, and they had just started this rolling out.
- ▶ 1:29:50 David Rosenthal Henceforth, as of today, Amazon is a company that works hard to charge its customers less, and that is directly from Gin Senegal.
- ▶ 1:39:44 Ben Gilbert Crusoe is a cloud infrastructure provider, just like AWS and Azure, that is 100% purpose-built for AI training and inference.
- ▶ 1:52:46 David Rosenthal It's like Amazon and AWS versus Amazon retail.
- ▶ 1:52:46 David Rosenthal It's like Amazon and AWS versus Amazon retail.
- ▶ 1:57:25 David Rosenthal And you can really see the fingerprints of this DNA in Amazon Prime.
- ▶ 1:57:33 David Rosenthal Now, obviously the whole thing is inspired by the Costco membership writ large, but these same dynamics definitely play out for Prime members at Amazon of order more frequently, much more likely to renew, access a whole suite of services.
- ▶ 1:57:33 David Rosenthal Now, obviously the whole thing is inspired by the Costco membership writ large, but these same dynamics definitely play out for Prime members at Amazon of order more frequently, much more likely to renew, access a whole suite of services.
- ▶ 1:57:49 Ben Gilbert It keeps you in the Amazon ecosystem and it makes sure that you're buying more stuff.
- ▶ 1:57:54 Ben Gilbert Amazon makes money on the stuff.
- ▶ 2:02:22 Ben Gilbert And you're the third biggest player in the largest market, you know, America, behind Amazon and Walmart.
- ▶ 2:03:49 David Rosenthal I believe Amazon has well over a million.
- ▶ 2:12:50 Ben Gilbert In fact, it's what Jeff Bezos meant when he said, your margin is my opportunity, but Costco just runs the playbook so consistently, and when you look at their overhead, the fact that Costco runs at 10, 11% overhead, and Amazon runs closer…
- ▶ 2:14:01 David Rosenthal They probably had some counter-positioning in other ways, but today I think they have huge counter-positioning versus Amazon and e-commerce.
- ▶ 2:14:29 David Rosenthal Amazon's whole reason for being, which is convenience.
- ▶ 2:14:33 David Rosenthal Certainly, if price is no object, it is way more convenient to just click, click, click in the shopping cart in Amazon and have it show up at your door.
- ▶ 2:15:50 David Rosenthal And Amazon today has really become something else from what Jeff wanted it to be after his coffee with Jim Sinigal.
- ▶ 2:16:02 David Rosenthal You are very much paying for the convenience of shopping on Amazon.
- ▶ 2:16:09 Ben Gilbert Very often I will buy something that's a little bit more expensive on Amazon because I'm like, well, it's gonna be easy to return.
- ▶ 2:22:53 David Rosenthal And then in boom times, I think people migrate out of Walmart into shopping on Amazon, shopping at Costco.
- ▶ 2:26:37 Ben Gilbert They won't even sell on Amazon.
- ▶ 2:34:09 Ben Gilbert I will say, too, that there's this famous quote about Amazon being a charity that's run for the benefit of customers.
- ▶ 2:37:46 Ben Gilbert And we talked about most of it, but there's a thing that we haven't really discussed yet, which is Amazon's overhead is like 30%
- ▶ 2:38:20 Ben Gilbert And structurally, Costco can provide things at a far lower cost than Amazon, but at the end of the day, like, there really is no way that Costco can do e-commerce like these other companies.
- ▶ 2:38:33 Ben Gilbert Walmart is as good for most use cases as Amazon, but they're paying the price.
- ▶ 2:38:48 Ben Gilbert What Costco is doing that is Costco-flavored e-commerce instead of Amazon-flavored e-commerce, but I will save that for my bull case.
- ▶ 2:41:55 David Rosenthal Maybe part of that is because Walmart has just been placing their resources elsewhere, particularly in the e-commerce fight against Amazon.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:53 David Rosenthal Oh my god, I think Amazon owes a thank you note to acquired LPs, because I bought every Nike book out there.
- ▶ 1:07:40 David Rosenthal So just like AWS and Azure,
- ▶ 1:07:46 David Rosenthal So just like Phil Knight had the crazy idea of taking on Adidas with Blue Ribbon, Crusoe and its founders, Chase and Cully, had the crazy idea a few years ago that they could take on AWS and Azure.
- ▶ 1:09:34 David Rosenthal Was that Amazon and Microsoft and Google's data centers have to be physically located close to where the quote unquote internet happens, i.e. where internet usage is.
- ▶ 3:18:59 David Rosenthal Ooh, maybe this actually all comes back to scale economies, because it's kind of the same thing with Amazon, right, or Netflix.
- ▶ 3:19:16 David Rosenthal Amazon, with Prime, can offer way more value than anybody else.
- ▶ 3:19:16 David Rosenthal Amazon, with Prime, can offer way more value than anybody else.
Porsche (with Doug DeMuro) · Acquired
- ▶ 25:28 Ben Gilbert And so it's not like there's audio books and Kindle books that we could do our normal amount of research on.
- ▶ 2:09:56 Ben Gilbert It's like buying Amazon in 2001 or two, when things looked the absolute bleakest.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi · Acquired
- ▶ 58:26 Dara Khosrowshahi Isn't in our marketplace because they're Walmart, they have an incredible brand, et cetera, but they use our fulfillment services and more and more that our vision is we essentially want the local grocer to out Amazon, Amazon, like every…
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 10:44 David Rosenthal Uh, this one, I think I only paid like 40 bucks for on Amazon.
- ▶ 46:24 Ben Gilbert If you're curious, listeners, there's this great, uh, documentary on Amazon called Secrets in the Sky, the Untold Story of Skunk Works that has a bunch of footage of all of this.
- ▶ 1:24:07 David Rosenthal I think a lot of this work was done out of Sandia, which we talked about on the Amazon episode.
- ▶ 2:26:59 David Rosenthal You know, it's like the Amazon, like, oh, the empty seat for the customer in the room.
- ▶ 3:12:40 Ben Gilbert It's also important to Amazon.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired
- ▶ 1:28:42 Daniel Ek And then you had like an Amazon kind of, uh, model where on the one end it was incredibly longterm, but also maybe a little bit more bottoms up innovation than top down.
- ▶ 1:29:21 Daniel Ek But we kept talking about all these other companies, and we're like, well, we like this thing that Amazon's doing, so we should copy that.
- ▶ 1:33:40 Daniel Ek And I think this is like really key because if you think about the, the ones we talk about as iconic companies, the Apples, the Amazons of the world, we all tend to forget a few things, but one is that many of them are quite old at this…
- ▶ 1:34:06 Daniel Ek And Amazon, sure, there was Microsoft, but they started an internet company in Seattle, right?
- ▶ 1:36:21 Daniel Ek The more interesting thing is, um, the true culture of what makes Google, Google or, um, an Amazon, Amazon, et cetera.
Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast) · Acquired
- ▶ 11:17 David Rosenthal I think both an advantage that, like, we have, all three of us, and, like, kind of a secret that we have, which is that, like, we wanted, we did Walmart because we wanted to do Amazon, and so we were like, how do we do Amazon, right?
- ▶ 40:03 Ben Gilbert 40,000 more people have listened to that episode than the next highest, which was amazon.com.
- ▶ 40:10 Ben Gilbert I was like, David, no one's gonna listen to Amazon because everyone already knows this story, which was super wrong, but I, I either thought, like, no one will listen to this one, or like, this will be our most successful episode.
- ▶ 52:03 David Senra You're like, oh, is anyone going to listen to our, like, no one's going to listen to our Amazon episode.
- ▶ 52:54 David Senra Just go and like, let's search David Ogilvie on Amazon.
- ▶ 1:01:49 David Senra Do you ever, if you ever watched the old Jeff Bezos interviews when he's like first starting Amazon, he's like skinny and bald, like one that's like in that field outside the conference.
- ▶ 1:35:09 David Senra You mentioned, I heard you on one of your podcasts where you're like, you went to the Amazon Go store just as like, uh, like pure curiosity.
- ▶ 2:33:47 Ben Gilbert He built Amazon in a pretty different
- ▶ 2:34:04 Ben Gilbert But like, you know, that while it would have been stupid for Amazon to spend a hundred million dollars on something, on, on like crazy marketing activities,
- ▶ 2:38:56 David Senra as “Kindle”
- ▶ 3:08:15 David Senra The Kindle and the audiobook.
- ▶ 3:08:19 Ben Gilbert By the way, I own the audiobook and the Kindle of almost every book that I own.
- ▶ 3:08:26 Ben Gilbert I don't own that many Kindle books.
- ▶ 3:08:46 Ben Gilbert And then I go back in the Kindle and I search for the actual quote and like pull out the data to be able to use it in the episodes.