Jeff Bezos, every mention

Amazon.com · Acquired Aug 16, 2022 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 38:11 David Rosenthal So David and Jeff get really excited about this, and David kind of reassigns Jeff as one of the most senior people in the firm
• ▶ 38:39 David Rosenthal And I don't know for sure, but I'm wondering if that may be the third market business that Jeff was working on might, might have like transformed into
• ▶ 39:14 David Rosenthal By Jeff and David within D.E.
• ▶ 39:20 David Rosenthal You know, I think that's like Jeff's main job is the two of them would meet every week.
• ▶ 39:28 David Rosenthal Jeff would then go off for the rest of the week and like research, you know, the feasibility of the ideas and then like work on them with employees within D.E.
• ▶ 43:14 Ben Gilbert But importantly, while Jeff is still at D.E.
• ▶ 44:01 David Rosenthal So Jeff goes off, you know, during his weekly research activities and he researches and he decides that books are the ideal category for a few reasons.
• ▶ 44:49 David Rosenthal Although Jeff was not thinking about that at the time.
• ▶ 46:30 David Rosenthal And I think David and Jeff considered music and CDs as well.
• ▶ 46:38 David Rosenthal Actually, Brad quotes Jeff in The Everything Store, quote, with that huge diversity of products, three million books in print, you could build a store online that simply could not exist in any other way.
• ▶ 47:36 Ben Gilbert And Bezos keys on this very quickly.
• ▶ 48:43 David Rosenthal So Jeff, you know, like we've been saying, like, he just keeps getting more and more excited about this the more he digs in.
• ▶ 50:02 David Rosenthal So Jeff is like, man.
• ▶ 50:15 Ben Gilbert I think the stat is that as Jeff looked at two different research reports and basically approximated the middle, what he was analyzing was basically the amount of traffic.
• ▶ 53:20 David Rosenthal You know, in Jeff's head and lived experience, this is all like happening at once.
• ▶ 53:49 David Rosenthal You know, Jeff wrestles with this decision for a little bit.
• ▶ 53:59 David Rosenthal Jeff really is kind of the heir apparent to take over D.E.
• ▶ 54:15 David Rosenthal Very reasonable that that could have been Jeff if he hadn't left.
• ▶ 54:20 David Rosenthal Jeff calls up his parents, calls up Mike and Jackie, and is like, ah, what should I do?
• ▶ 54:40 David Rosenthal And so Jeff's thinking about what to do, and he talks about
• ▶ 55:50 Ben Gilbert That's wholly un-Bezos.
• ▶ 56:49 David Rosenthal David supposedly says to Jeff, look, you got a future here.
• ▶ 57:38 David Rosenthal Well, Jeff goes to raise money for Amazon, and he doesn't raise it from David.
• ▶ 57:46 Ben Gilbert And it's not like Jeff magically had a check waiting for him.
• ▶ 57:49 Ben Gilbert 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.
• ▶ 58:16 David Rosenthal There's no doubt in my mind, nor I think should there be an anybody's, that had Jeff stayed at DE Shaw, there would be no Amazon.
• ▶ 58:23 David Rosenthal Regardless of it being worth Jeff's time or compensation, like, this is the beauty of venture capital and the American entrepreneurial system.
• ▶ 59:07 Ben Gilbert And it appealed to Jeff, or it was on Jeff's radar because Jeff is a nerd.
• ▶ 59:14 Ben Gilbert He has a CS background.
• ▶ 59:15 Ben Gilbert He was really into Star Trek.
• ▶ 59:17 Ben Gilbert He loved obscure novels.
• ▶ 59:18 Ben Gilbert He loved storytelling.
• ▶ 59:46 Ben Gilbert So this is the sort of thing that put it on Jeff's radar.
• ▶ 59:49 Ben Gilbert It's also the sort of thing that really defined who would be willing to join Jeff on this crazy adventure.
• ▶ 59:57 Ben Gilbert It wasn't that he was going and recruiting right away the very sort of best and brightest out of the top institutions with the shiniest resumes and who could really do anything.
• ▶ 1:00:27 David Rosenthal And I think this is also another reason why Jeff really struggled with it, because he loved D.E.
• ▶ 1:00:32 David Rosenthal He met his wife there.
• ▶ 1:00:34 David Rosenthal He loved those people.
• ▶ 1:00:44 Ben Gilbert To move the story along, so he decides he's doing this.
• ▶ 1:00:47 Ben Gilbert He decides, okay, I need to incorporate the company.
• ▶ 1:00:50 Ben Gilbert He picks a few candidate cities.
• ▶ 1:00:52 Ben Gilbert That he could operate the business in because Manhattan is not a wonderful place to be running a sort of bootstrapped startup at the time.
• ▶ 1:01:00 David Rosenthal By this point in time, I think he had finally figured it out that, shoot, I might actually have to take delivery of some of these books and then ship them back out to customers, and Midtown Manhattan is not a great place for that.
• ▶ 1:01:12 Ben Gilbert He starts sort of narrowing it down.
• ▶ 1:01:39 David Rosenthal But you would think, given Jeff's history, Florida or Texas would make more sense.
• ▶ 1:01:51 Ben Gilbert Microsoft was just absolutely in its heyday, and Jeff respected what Bill Gates and crew had built, and thought, you know what, opening up a business right next to Microsoft, if I'm gonna be attracting programmers, seems like a good idea.
• ▶ 1:02:11 David Rosenthal So, Shell, Jeff got introduced to, actually through a D.E.
• ▶ 1:03:39 Ben Gilbert Which is so cool because then Stuart sort of gets woven into the Amazon story and in this way, of course, but then Bezos also has reverence for the whole earth catalog and gets to spend time with Stuart Brand and a bunch of those folks…
• ▶ 1:03:59 Ben Gilbert I think it's a, uh, it was one of the earliest sort of projects that he backed when he became individually wealthy.
• ▶ 1:04:06 David Rosenthal Oh, how did Jeff become individually wealthy?
• ▶ 1:04:10 David Rosenthal Ooh, it wasn't necessarily from selling his Amazon shares.
• ▶ 1:04:16 Ben Gilbert How Jeff Bezos became a billionaire and it had nothing to do with amazon.com.
• ▶ 1:04:37 Ben Gilbert Alright, so, Jeff gets introduced to Shell.
• ▶ 1:04:46 David Rosenthal I believe the original intention was Jeff and Mackenzie were gonna move out to Santa Cruz, and they were gonna build Amazon in Silicon Valley.
• ▶ 1:05:50 David Rosenthal So Jeff finds out, reads about this, and is like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• ▶ 1:06:46 Ben Gilbert Jeff Bezos hadn't created Amazon yet, and so therefore it was a perfect place.
• ▶ 1:06:52 David Rosenthal Jeff had zero connection to Seattle.
• ▶ 1:06:55 David Rosenthal He didn't know anybody.
• ▶ 1:07:05 David Rosenthal And it was the land of opportunity for Jeff Bezos.
• ▶ 1:07:07 David Rosenthal You know, the legend is that he and Mackenzie are driving across country.
• ▶ 1:07:35 Ben Gilbert But I think the thing that did happen while Mackenzie is driving and Jeff is sort of working on the drive out is Jeff's on the phone with the lawyer.
• ▶ 1:07:43 Ben Gilbert He's like, incorporate the business.
• ▶ 1:07:52 Ben Gilbert And, you know, Jeff's like, yeah, Kadabra.
• ▶ 1:08:01 Ben Gilbert He would have a series of other potentially bad names too.
• ▶ 1:08:10 David Rosenthal Yeah, supposedly he and Mackenzie both really liked relentless.com.
• ▶ 1:08:39 Ben Gilbert Yeah, I mean, you would, you would use it to describe Jeff's personality, but it's an odd name for the business.
• ▶ 1:08:52 David Rosenthal The story goes, Jeff starts looking in the dictionary at A words.
• ▶ 1:08:56 David Rosenthal Now, I don't know if he was specifically looking at A words.
• ▶ 1:09:01 David Rosenthal If so, he was very smart because A names are names starting with the letter A.
• ▶ 1:09:05 Ben Gilbert He actually was because sites like Yahoo, like portal sites, directory sites listed alphabetically.
• ▶ 1:09:23 David Rosenthal He's looking at a names, and he's going through the list, and he sees Amazon.
• ▶ 1:09:56 Ben Gilbert He was interviewing Shell about the early days about this, you know, house that Jeff McKenzie lived in, and they have the garage retrofitted to be an office, Amazon's first office, and Shell is programming sitting in that garage.
• ▶ 1:10:27 David Rosenthal You know, Jeff and Mackenzie had done great at D Shaw.
• ▶ 1:10:45 David Rosenthal Jeff's parents, Mike and Jackie, put in another 100,000 dollars.
• ▶ 1:10:58 David Rosenthal Jeff goes and starts working on relationships with Ingram and Baker and Taylor.
• ▶ 1:11:07 David Rosenthal Jeff, this is fun.
• ▶ 1:11:45 Ben Gilbert Jeff got very lucky.
• ▶ 1:11:46 Ben Gilbert 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, but there's not really like a spec.
• ▶ 1:11:57 Ben Gilbert Jeff, I think, coded up the first HTML web page himself, that sort of white one with the A with the Amazon River running through it that predates the logo, but when he starts describing it to Shell, Shell's pretty much like, okay, cool,…
• ▶ 1:13:48 Ben Gilbert But Jeff tells Shell, hey, people are gonna wanna access this store via two different methods.
• ▶ 1:14:18 Ben Gilbert And it's a good thing that he started with web, and by the time they had sort of gotten that stood up, it was clear that Jeff had sort of lost interest in the email-based store.
• ▶ 1:14:36 David Rosenthal In Brad's book, I get the sense that that's very typical of early Jeff management style of, we gotta go do this!
• ▶ 1:17:17 Ben Gilbert And in fact, in job postings, I think Bezos put things like experience with websites would be a bonus, but not required.
• ▶ 1:17:52 David Rosenthal It was summer of 94 when Jeff and Mackenzie leave DeShaw
• ▶ 1:20:39 Ben Gilbert And Jeff's like, wait a minute, your homepage, I think a lot of people go to that.
• ▶ 1:21:56 David Rosenthal Of course, Jeff being Jeff is like,
• ▶ 1:30:32 David Rosenthal So Jeff goes out to raise that first seed round that we did the whole episode with Tom Alberg about back in early acquired days.
• ▶ 1:30:58 Ben Gilbert I mean, he was an early check in Amazon in that one million dollar on five million dollar post money round and stayed the course with Jeff all the way through the late 20 tens as a board member.
• ▶ 1:31:10 David Rosenthal Longest serving board member in Amazon history other than Jeff.
• ▶ 1:34:20 David Rosenthal And Amazon and Jeff went with John and Kleiner cause they were John and Kleiner.
• ▶ 1:34:39 David Rosenthal Jeff wasn't too happy about this.
• ▶ 1:34:43 David Rosenthal Yeah, they brainstorm, they come up with an idea, and Jeff calls John back and is like,
• ▶ 1:35:15 David Rosenthal This was such a hot deal, and Jeff was so persuasive that John made time, and I think he's probably glad that he made time to join the board.
• ▶ 1:35:27 David Rosenthal Jeff does two things.
• ▶ 1:35:41 David Rosenthal It was actually more like nine-four because the Bezos family as a whole, not just Jeff's parents, Jackie and Mike, but also his siblings put a little more money in before the Kleiner round.
• ▶ 1:36:00 Ben Gilbert Which is funny because like that's Bezos' siblings having
• ▶ 1:36:08 David Rosenthal Oh, I cannot wait to talk about how Jeff Bezos and Mackenzie got wealthy.
• ▶ 1:36:15 David Rosenthal So Jeff does two things after he raises the round from Kleiner.
• ▶ 1:36:18 David Rosenthal I didn't write down the quote, but somebody who was involved in the company at that point said something like, Jeff viewed this stamp of imprimatur from Kleiner and John Dora as like a shot of steroids into himself and the company.
• ▶ 1:36:42 David Rosenthal Jeff, I don't think is the kind of person who ever felt like he needed permission, but to the extent he did feel like he needed permission or that the right thing to do was to get big fast, which is one thing that he does that he makes…