Amazon, every mention
84 scenes (2025), the whole family · ← back to Amazon
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2025 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
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 28:44 David Rosenthal AWS and JP Morgan payments.
- ▶ 29:04 Ben Gilbert Also, very funny to interview Matt Garman from AWS at his own event.
- ▶ 1:05:46 Ben Gilbert and I look it up in the Kindle book and I figure out like how I want to explain the connection that I just learned on air.
- ▶ 1:06:23 David Rosenthal Yeah, garages were, were a little more popular back in the day with HP or Apple or in the nineties with Google and Amazon, all founded in garages.
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 8:23 David Rosenthal No, their market cap is about thirty billion dollars, so like a small fraction of Walmart and Costco and Amazon, etc.
- ▶ 33:13 Ben Gilbert And listeners, for anyone going to AWS reInvent, we will be there with the JP Morgan payments team.
- ▶ 33:18 Ben Gilbert We're doing a big interview on stage with AWS CEO Matt Garman and more.
- ▶ 1:46:25 Ben Gilbert Are Amazon Basics batteries differentiated?
- ▶ 1:46:30 Ben Gilbert Also, it's kind of interesting that Walmart has great value, Target has Good & Gather, Amazon has Basics, Costco has Kirkland Signature, Trader Joe's has Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 1:46:30 Ben Gilbert Also, it's kind of interesting that Walmart has great value, Target has Good & Gather, Amazon has Basics, Costco has Kirkland Signature, Trader Joe's has Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 3:00:25 David Rosenthal Costco, Amazon, Walmart.
- ▶ 3:08:43 Ben Gilbert And I look on Amazon now, mind you, this is like a three dollar product and someone's selling it for 19 dollars.
- ▶ 3:27:02 Ben Gilbert Perhaps Amazon Part One also may be of interest, since this is effectively the anti-Amazon.
- ▶ 3:27:17 David Rosenthal The day that Amazon bought the company.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 48:05 David Rosenthal Famously, she used Mechanical Turk on Amazon, I think, to get them all hand-labeled.
- ▶ 48:05 David Rosenthal Famously, she used Mechanical Turk on Amazon, I think, to get them all hand-labeled.
- ▶ 1:06:43 David Rosenthal For lots of reasons, but even more so than any other given startup in the 2010 era, it's not like they can just go spin up an AWS instance and like build an app and deploy it to the app store.
- ▶ 2:12:29 Ben Gilbert I wonder if they did talk to AWS at all about it.
- ▶ 2:12:34 Ben Gilbert I hesitate to say it out loud, but I think AWS was actually in the very first investment with Elon in open AI.
- ▶ 2:12:49 Ben Gilbert That AWS actually was in that nonprofit round.
- ▶ 3:19:27 Ben Gilbert So they're very much playing offense in the way that Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are in deploying that capex.
- ▶ 3:24:03 Ben Gilbert Super different than what AWS was doing at the time and what they're still doing today, which the whole world eventually realized was right, which is cloud should be infrastructure as a service.
- ▶ 3:26:25 David Rosenthal So we can offer this tool a kind of counterposition against AWS and Azure.
- ▶ 3:26:38 Ben Gilbert So this kind of becomes one of the pillars of their strategy is you want multi-cloud?
- ▶ 3:29:55 Ben Gilbert You look at Amazon.
- ▶ 3:29:56 Ben Gilbert Infrastructure, they have application, maybe, I don't actually know if amazon.com, I'm sure it benefits from LLMs in a bunch of ways.
- ▶ 3:31:04 David Rosenthal The only way that external companies, users, developers, model researchers could use TPUs would be if Google had a cloud to deliver them, because there's no way in hell that Amazon or Microsoft are going to put TPUs from Google in their…
- ▶ 3:32:03 David Rosenthal Maybe there will be TPUs in AWS or Azure someday, but I don't think they would have been able to start there.
- ▶ 3:32:19 David Rosenthal Would Amazon or Microsoft be like, eh, you know, all right, Google, we'll take some of your TPUs, even though no developer out there uses them.
- ▶ 3:57:22 Ben Gilbert It's 416 dollars on Amazon right now.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 22:44 David Rosenthal You can't just launch on AWS.
- ▶ 22:46 David Rosenthal There is no AWS.
- ▶ 3:30:30 David Rosenthal And Google had the wrong strategy in cloud for many years, and as a result, that's why their cloud business is way behind Amazon and Microsoft.
- ▶ 3:47:35 Ben Gilbert I continue to spend on Google because they have all the high intent users for products other than, you know, Amazon.
- ▶ 3:57:59 David Rosenthal Amazon doesn't have any billion user products.
The Jamie Dimon Interview: How JP Morgan Became an $800 Billion Bank · Acquired
- ▶ 10:14 Ben Gilbert And you, you took a call about running Amazon, right?
- ▶ 10:17 Ben Gilbert You took a call about running Amazon, didn't you?
- ▶ 25:37 Ben Gilbert So for the past decade, they've been on a mission to democratize the lessons of the giants, companies like Google and Amazon and Meta.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 16:49 David Rosenthal Shaw and I gotta build Amazon.
- ▶ 45:49 Ben Gilbert And longtime Acquired listeners will recognize this name from our Amazon episode.
- ▶ 45:55 David Rosenthal Rom had left Netscape and joined a startup called Jungly that Amazon.com then acquired, and so Rom had a little bit of liquidity.
- ▶ 46:18 Ben Gilbert You think about Amazon and Google as kind of equally old companies.
- ▶ 46:27 Ben Gilbert Amazon just went public the year before.
- ▶ 47:18 Ben Gilbert You know, we knew about this in the past because we talked about it on the Amazon episode, but whenever I heard someone reference Jeff Bezos was an angel investor in Google, I always thought, well, yeah, but you look at any of these…
- ▶ 48:02 David Rosenthal And Amazon stock was probably in the dumpster when Google went public.
- ▶ 1:28:59 David Rosenthal Well, what about Amazon affiliate links?
- ▶ 1:29:02 Ben Gilbert We know a guy at Amazon.
- ▶ 1:29:03 David Rosenthal We know a guy at Amazon who happens to own a good chunk of this company.
- ▶ 1:29:08 David Rosenthal So Google goes and signs up as an Amazon affiliate.
- ▶ 1:29:14 Ben Gilbert The Google business model was validated, like doing customer development, you know, startup idea validation using Amazon affiliates as the mechanism.
- ▶ 1:29:33 David Rosenthal Any book in the Amazon library catalog, Google will dynamically generate a text ad saying, go buy this book at Amazon, insert an Amazon affiliate link, and drive traffic over to Amazon.
- ▶ 1:29:51 David Rosenthal Now, whatever the Amazon affiliate commission, you know, if it's four percent or five percent of the revenue of a 10 dollar book, obviously is not going to change Google's fortune in the amount of money that they'll generate from this.
- ▶ 1:30:47 Ben Gilbert But what they also know, because it was an Amazon affiliate links, is they know the down funnel number too.
- ▶ 1:30:53 Ben Gilbert They know conversion is actually higher from this traffic because we got to know how many books on Amazon were sold from the number of impressions that we served.
- ▶ 3:12:04 David Rosenthal Amazon's PE is 35, Microsoft is 37, Nvidia is 46, Apple is 30, and Meta is 27, and Google Alphabet is down at 20.
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 51:58 Steve Ballmer I mean, people say that they might mean Azure, AWS, or in the old days, Windows, or Windows Server, or Unix, uh, then Linux.
- ▶ 1:09:48 Ben Gilbert And you got Google and Amazon.
- ▶ 1:10:31 Steve Ballmer I mean, I was listening to you guys talk about Amazon and how they, okay, we're gonna try small things, but they also put in small cost structure.
- ▶ 1:17:58 Steve Ballmer Uh, AWS has a little lift off.
- ▶ 1:18:00 Steve Ballmer I think AWS comes to market in what?
- ▶ 1:18:22 Steve Ballmer Ooh, there's AWS.
- ▶ 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.