Amazon, every mention
64 scenes (2024), the whole family · ← back to Amazon
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2024 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
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.