Jeff Bezos

“And he's right. He's totally right. Just like you know, Jeff Bezos would probably say the same thing today or with Amazon or the like.”

“This idea that you can't innovate in the public markets is nonsense, right? Jeff Bezos innovated plenty in the public markets, Facebook in the public markets. You know, look at what Marc Benioff has done in the public markets. And so I think that that the publ…”

“There is zero chance that they would have been able to execute the strategy that they did if it weren't for their ability to be loud and proud about their intentions.”

“While Jeff is studying computer science at Princeton, Brooke Shields, Michelle Obama, and Jeff Wilkie is also there at the same time.”

“And what he's describing is the most perfect, vivid example of scale economies, where once they get all these customers, and once they acquire them all to prime, so they are all loyal, subscribed, guaranteed to shop here customers, then you can amortize every …”

“In the fall of 2000, Meg Whitman and Jeff Jordan fly up to Seattle and they pitch Bezos on the opposite idea. EBay takes over the failed Amazon auctions and all of third party sellings.”

“So Rahm goes to bath for him, and he convinces Larry and Sergey to take another 250,000 dollars of Jeff and Mackenzie's personal money at the seed price.”

“He actually not only worked at Sandia, he was the head of Sandia. Oh, wow. He ran the U.S. Nuclear weapons program. And before that, he was one of the original members of DARPA.”

“And of course, as we talk about Amazon, really the playbook of how they got big, we'll talk a lot about Them reinvesting every single dollar of profit they had to plow it back in to grow the business. That is, of course, attributable to Jeff, but is in large p…”

“I don't think Amazon would exist today if it weren't for Shell, and I think that's sort of a widely acknowledged thing among the early team, including Jeff”

“Jeff is absolutely laser focused on not gross margin percentage, but the absolute dollar amount of margin dollars over a full customer lifetime that you can sort of get.”

“It grew 2300 X from January first 1993 to January first 1994.”

“So he announces internal company goal that he announces to the whole company, part of the get our house in order mantra that they will be profitable by the fourth quarter of 2001.”

“Even though it's called Amazon, at least for a very long time, call it its first decade, it really is just Jeff Bezos at scale.”

“Jeff and Mackenzie had done great at D Shaw. So they put in 95,000 dollars to start. Shell himself puts in 5000 dollars. This takes me back to the Walmart episode and gosh, so smart of like having your employees Actually invest dollars in the business. Jeff's …”

“Basically points out if you can do something in the old paradigm, you should. And when there's a new paradigm like the internet, you basically want to find things that you could not do any other way. In order to really exploit the power of the new paradigm.”

“Jeff ended up taking the better part of a year to raise one measly million dollars over 60 meetings ultimately from 22 different investors to sell 20% of the company in order to raise that first million.”

“He becomes friends with a guy named Halsey Miner, which listeners probably, a bunch of bells are going off, and they almost start a startup together at this point in time. The idea was it was going to be a financial newsletter idea, but they become buddies. Th…”

“Tom was the longest serving Amazon board member other than Jeff himself. I believe, 23 years was the lead independent director and had a huge impact on the company”

“He just gets capital allocation, and that's why I think Amazon is effectively the highest performing venture returns in history. AWS is a venture bet in their portfolio that they own 100% of.”

“And then, 2002 1001 dot com crash. Amazon acts as the whole marketing department. Cause you know, we're not doing ads anymore. We gotta get profitable. And Jassy was gonna get laid off with the whole department, but Jeff liked him. And so Jeff said, I'm gonna …”

“He aggressively came in to try and court the deal, win the deal, and then he would try and pass off the board seat to a junior partner. And Jeff, of course, didn't let that happen, but many entrepreneurs did.”

“On Monday nights after the partner meeting, they do these dinners. They invite somebody, you know, Bezos comes every year. Like, this is crazy. Public company CEOs. Yeah. So Michael Lewis, you know, blah, blah, blah. You know, part of that I'm sure is just fun…”

“He took the platform that you could never actually enact. And he enacted it inside of Amazon. If it's not perfectly clear what just happened, literally he's dunking on you. You wanted free college and couldn't get it done, he gave it to Amazon employees. You w…”

“You can't understand Jeff Bezos until you study Sam Walton. You can't understand Sam Walton. So you understand JC Penney and sole price.”

“The low cost structure thing, that's not, that's a Walton thing. That's a sole price thing. That's a Jeff Bezos thing. That's a Rockefeller thing. That's the most common theme in the history of entrepreneurship.”

“Jeff has this coffee with Jim, and Jim explains this philosophy to Jeff. Jeff comes back to Amazon HQ the next day and is like, I'm reversing the policy, and says exactly what you just said. There are two types of companies in this world. Companies that work h…”

“Do you know where Jeff Bezos and Jim Senegal met for the first time? Not in a Costco, in the Starbucks, in the Barnes and Noble, in Bellevue.”

“And so all in, they end up raising a million dollars, had a ten million dollar post-money valuation, and yes, Jeff Bezos does a quarter of Google's seed round.”

“Jeff has never said whether he sold any of his Google shares along the way, but by my math, if he didn't, that stake is worth about twenty billion dollars today.”

“I went to visit Jeff Bezos, who was looking for a president at the time. He and I hit it off. We've been friends ever since. He's an exceptional human being.”